Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)

Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, serial technology entrepreneur, and pioneer in de-extinction. Ben joins Armchair Expert to discuss being raised by his mom and grandparents in Texas, starting his first company while at Baylor, and why a conversation with geneticist George Church changed the course of his life. Ben and Dax talk about building a team to engineer a mammoth from scratch, creating woolly mice in 30 days, and turning 73,000-year-old DNA into dire wolf puppies. Ben explains why de-extinction is really about developing new technologies, how humans should take responsibility for species we’ve eradicated, and why inspiring people about science is as important as the animals themselves. Start your 2 month free trial today: https://youtube.com/premium . Terms Apply. Cancel Anytime. Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ Take printer ink off your to-do list with HP Smart Tank | http://www.hp.com/SmartTank See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:05Dax Shepard?

  Um, what a thrilling and exciting topic we have today. We have Ben Lamm, who is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. And what are they doing? Well, they're bringing back and have the dire wolf.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:19Dax Shepard?

  Uh, you know, they're focused heavily on a woolly mammoth.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yes, they have woolly mouse.

• 0:25Dax Shepard?

  They've created woolly mice.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:28Dax Shepard?

  And the list goes on.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:30Dax Shepard?

  This is impossible. This is where we're at.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Really wild episode.

• 0:34Dax Shepard?

  This is mind blowing.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  It feels sci-fi, but we're living it.

• 0:37Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it's present day sci-fi. Uh, please enjoy Ben Lamm. We get support from Quince.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.

• 0:53Dax Shepard?

  I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a T-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking a hundred percent Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  $60, $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 1:34Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 1:44Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 2:02Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is presented by YouTube Premium. YouTube was already great, but premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Now let's get into today's episode.

• 2:59Dax Shepard?

  Hi there.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Hey, good to meet you.

• 3:00Dax Shepard?

  Ben?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01Dax Shepard?

  Great to meet you.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  We met briefly.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yes, we did.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Brought you guys colossal shirts.

• 3:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  You, your kids, anybody, friends, grandparents.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  We love shirts.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Anybody you want to give away to?

• 3:15Dax Shepard?

  Can you imagine if I still had grandparents? That would be lovely.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I have one grandma.

• 3:19Dax Shepard?

  You do? How old is she?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  She's 96.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Good for her.

• 3:22Dax Shepard?

  Let's map her.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  No, she's amazing. She's my Gigi. She like helped raise me.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  She's the best.

• 3:28Dax Shepard?

  Hold on, don't tell me. I know I have friends who call their grandma Gigi. I'm trying to think what ethnicity.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Greece.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  No, it's just like weird Texan.

• 3:38Dax Shepard?

  It's a Texan.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. I think I just couldn't say, so like my son can't say dad, dad yet. I mean, I have young kids, so he calls me Gaga.

• 3:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, nice.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was like, maybe like, like it's genetic. Did I like not be able to say grandmother? So I said, Gigi, like, I don't know.

• 3:54Dax Shepard?

  Gaga.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  They all have fun names, grandparents.

• 3:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, our kids call all of their grandparents Gaga.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 4:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's universal.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I went to the library a couple of weeks ago with my wife and my two kids and I was just taking like.

• 4:05Dax Shepard?

  The bathroom or?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  No, just to hang out at the library, right? And so like we do that in Texas. So I was like playing with these fake fish and it's like fake frying pan with him. He's two and a half, so he's at this stage where he's saying things that you're like, where did you learn this?

• 4:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  And so he like ran over to this other mom in the library and he was like, oh Gaga. He like points back at me and like, when did you learn that? That's a weird, that's an interesting, funny interaction where he's like making fun of me to this other parent.

• 4:33Dax Shepard?

  Wow, he's already backstabbing.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, yeah, right. Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  He's already embarrassed by his dad.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Oh, Gaga. He's like rolling his eyes. It was amazing.

• 4:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, creating new alliances with the other people.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Well, you gotta practice early.

• 4:44Dax Shepard?

  But let's be honest, you just said it like you're always at the library. You have a two and a half year old. The shit I was doing, I was at Travel Town every week, the miniature train.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:53Dax Shepard?

  I haven't been back since they were six.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're just trying to pass the minutes. The library is a babysitter's friend. I would always circulate between the park and the library. For some reason, the minutes just would not pass.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I couldn't understand time.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes like the bath time, I'm like, I was like, you've had bath time for two hours. Like, he loves it.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Just give it.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  He's in it. He's happy.

• 5:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, anything that they're happy doing, you'll do until they're no longer happy. How many do you have?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Two, a two and a half and a eight month old.

• 5:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, Lord.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  So I'm in it.

• 5:27Dax Shepard?

  And are you originally from Texas? I know you went to Baylor.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, born in Austin, one of the rare people that was actually born there.

• 5:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay. And did your parents move there?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  So my parents lived there when they had me. They got divorced when I was very young.

• 5:39Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And then I left Austin when I was five. Then later in my life, I made it back for a few years and I went to Dallas and I kind of bounced all over. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents, right?

• 5:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  So I'm not close to that.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Gigi.

• 5:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, same.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  By Gigi, yeah. So by Gigi and my grandfather, Poppy, who's no longer with us.

• 5:56Dax Shepard?

  You know, my brother just kind of reframed our childhood in the most beautiful way, which was he said, you know, thank God dad was an addict. Because otherwise we would have never had every single weekend with Papa and Grandma. And then the summers with Papa and Grandma. And they were who you'd want to be raised as. They had the time and the resources.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I'm an only child. My wife is the youngest of five. Only girl, all the rest are boys.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  And they're from Nebraska, so they're like Omaha, like hardcore. Five o'clock, they're like watching sports, drinking Budweiser and the whole nine. They're the best.

• 6:28Dax Shepard?

  Salt of the earth.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  They sound fun.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So we did the same thing. They retired, we just got them to move down to Dallas to be near us.

• 6:36Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Because I grew up with my grandparents. They had a farm outside of Dallas and so I'd go and like catch frogs. I did the whole super small town thing as a kid. I loved it and I really wanted that for my kids. And so now that they're here, it was funny. I came back from a trip two weeks ago and my father-in-law was there with my son. And my son kept saying hop, hop. And I was like, what are you talking about? And they had caught a frog and put it in like a little baby pool and swam around. I was like, I used to catch frogs with my grandpa. It was cool. I feel very blessed about the childhood I had. I want our kids to be around their grandparents. It's so important.

• 7:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, being around, yeah, multi-generational is really cool. A lot of wisdom to observe. Now, really quick, did you listen to Dr. Death?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:19Dax Shepard?

  Best podcast of all time. And it was about a Baylor educated surgeon who then practiced at Baylor. And he was completely incompetent and he decapitated many people, including one of his friends. He was a raging addict.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I was in the business school, so I didn't learn.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Too bad.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  That skillset was mine bestowed upon me.

• 7:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  But he was like your friend.

• 7:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it would have been exciting if you knew who that guy was. I think at that time, he was the first doctor to ever be convicted and sent to prison for crimes committed in the operating room.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Cause he was drunk and stuff.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Let's hope my story is slightly different. That'd be great.

• 7:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And probably Baylor's like, God damn it, stop talking about that guy.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay. So but by the time you're a senior at Baylor, you already start a company. What was the first one?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Uh, Simply Interactive.

• 8:05Dax Shepard?

  It was e-learning?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  E-learning, yeah.

• 8:06Dax Shepard?

  What does that even mean?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  My uncle was on the board of Baylor. He was amazing. And he's like, look, you go to school and you pick a major that I agree with so that we believe you'll have a job. I don't think he ever really realized I was massively unemployable.

• 8:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Over time, I think you probably realized that. He's like, you do these things, you take out loans and then I'll pay for your college, right? And so it's like, it's amazing, right? Like single parent, like it's an amazing gift that was given to me. And so I was a finance and accounting major because that was one of the checkmarks in my arrangement with my uncle. And then I had this great teacher, Dr. James Moschinsky, who just happened to be in Waco, Texas of all places, one of the world's top cognitive psychologists.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And he had built a lot of the fundamental models for instructional design to help people, like how will people learn on computers? Just to, I guess, kind of date me in my time. This is when the internet was moving with this thing called flash, macromedia flash. If you remember those days of the internet where everything was like dancing around.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I learned that, just kind of self-taught myself that and partnered with Dr. Moschinsky and started an e-learning company. Cause at the time, all of these corporations were trying to take training online. It was more e-reading than e-learning and you were just like flipping the pages. And we wanted to add games and unification.

• 9:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, multimedia.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, yeah, it's just like, if you're doing something with industrial wastewater disposal, that's boring. It sounds boring. We did it for Genentech, a big biotech in the South City, San Francisco. So if you go take photos of Marin and you build this emotional connection to the content.

• 9:34Dax Shepard?

  A video game.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you could play, if you could make it more interactive and emotional where it's like, hey, if you throw this water away the wrong way, it's going to ruin this park you play with your kids.

• 9:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And if you can make it like hyper-localized and emotional, that's kind of our thesis. And we grew the company.

• 9:48Dax Shepard?

  What year was that?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  That was 2004.

• 9:51Dax Shepard?

  22 years ago. Okay. So you exited that thing and then I'm just going to speed through. You created and sold five or so companies from gaming to there's all kinds of.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  We made a lot of shitty games. We made one good game.

• 10:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that's all it takes is one good game.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we made like 11 shitty games and then the last one was pretty good.

• 10:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. How do you end up meeting or approaching George Church? And then let's just talk about who George Church is.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  So George is amazing.

• 10:18Dax Shepard?

  He's somebody I'm shocked we haven't had on.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  You should have him. You should have him. He is, look, you could say, oh, you're biased, but he is the most interesting person in the world. He's six, seven.

• 10:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he is?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's huge.

• 10:29Dax Shepard?

  Massive beard.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Looks like Santa Claus, has narcolepsy.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And so, but he literally, he'll talk about a superpower where he'll fall asleep and his brain, like the RAM, the random access memory, it's still working. And so he'll fall asleep and like totally like muppet out. But then he'll like jump back in and be like, well, the solution's X, Y, Z. And you're like, what just happened? It's like, it's incredible. And he thinks that it's like you're getting into a save state, like in a video game, like when you're sleeping. And then it comes back. He's awesome. So George has got a very prolific lab. He's seen as like the father of synthetic biology, using directed evolution and genetic engineering and computational biology to engineer life in a direction that we want, right? Like that's what his lab is like prolific for, right?

• 11:14Dax Shepard?

  Did we say he's a professor at Harvard?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a professor at Harvard.

• 11:16Dax Shepard?

  Professor at Harvard, he's a geneticist, he's a molecular engineer, he's a chemist.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  If we have him on, I hope he falls asleep in the.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Oh, he will.

• 11:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, this is comfy. I always try to keep him uncomfortable when I'm around.

• 11:30Dax Shepard?

  I'll have robbed him the lights slowly.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. But and he was also somehow involved early with CRISPR, no?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So he, in Walter Isaacson's book, right? Walter's amazing, who wrote a book about Jennifer Doudna, who's also equally amazing. George is actually a supporting character throughout it. And those CRISPR wars were so interesting between the Broad and Berkeley and nothing ever really seems to ever get solved. But George is actually one of the first people to use genetic and CRISPR specifically in mammals. So he was using it in mammal and human cells and publishing it before anyone.

• 12:02Dax Shepard?

  What were the first things?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I don't know what the first edits were that he did, but and this is what you'll love about George is that he truly believes in like open source software. He's like, how do we democratize these things so that everyone's genome should be sequenced, not just the super rich?

• 12:16Dax Shepard?

  Or if you sequence the genome for a woolly mammoth, he wants that accessible to anyone who would be studying.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Anyone. So we very much saw, like in our first meeting, which I'll get to, it was very clear how aligned we were, like philosophically. I personally am biased, but I think that George should have gotten a lot more credit on some of the CRISPR Nobel Prize type work. But George is like, they're amazing. They really did the right. He is the most like, I just want to work with everybody. I just want to collaborate. I want to share information. We as humanity need to go faster. We're not going to go faster by holding stuff in. And I was running another company of mine and we were at this moment where it looked like we were going to be bought. It was a defense company, a big defense contractor was going to buy us. It was right before COVID. Spoiler, they ended up not buying us.

• 13:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I'm sorry. Sounds like it would have been lucrative. I'm sorry.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Well, it ended up getting bought later, so it was funny. It all, it all worked out the way it was supposed to. So I reached out to George because I was really interested in synthetic biology. And my thesis when I called him was a myriad of these tools exist for genome engineering. DNA synthesis, being able to synthesize DNA, cloning was getting better from an efficiency perspective. Where will AI, access to compute, and then eventually technologies like quantum be able to take our ability to use software to program life? Like, how do we go from 90% discovery in academia to 90% engineering and 10% discovery? Because so much can be done through simulations and whatnot on a computer. So I was really fascinated with that. George is a genius. So he answered that question like seven seconds on the call. And he was like, you know, this is where I think the opportunity is going. I was like, oh, it's awesome. Amazing.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And then I'm like stupid level curious and I'm like, what else you got? What is going on in this weird lab of yours? And he started telling me about all these crazy things that was so technical, so over my head. And I just asked him, I was like, okay, with all this stuff, if you had one project with unlimited capital, what would you do? Cause you have a lot going on in your lab, 100 postdocs and all this crazy stuff. And it was like a mic drop moment. He's like, I would just work to bring back the woolly mammoth. I'd reintroduce it back into the tundra and I'd use those technologies to help conservation and also apply them to human healthcare. I have to go to my next meeting now.

• 14:21Dax Shepard?

  I have to take a six minute nap and then go to my next.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the call was over and I was like, is that real?

• 14:27Dax Shepard?

  And what year is this?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  2019.

• 14:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay, it's 2019. So by 2019, I had already read this compelling article in Nature, something that they had found. Some woolly mammoths in the permafrost in Siberia and that they were optimistic that there was sperm in the testicles that could be harvested and potentially bred with the Asian FEMA elephant, which you can breed an African and an Asian female, but not an Asian male and African female.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  But very few people know that what you just said.

• 14:56Dax Shepard?

  That's where I bailed out and I was very excited about this notion of impregnating an Asian female with the sperm of a found woolly mammoth in the permafrost. So what happened with that?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  I know about that thing. So George, pre us having our first call and then I was in his lab a week later for a meeting. Before all of that, that was 2019, since 2008, journalists and others had, there are these discoveries on fully mummified baby mammoths. There are all of these discoveries are happening as people are.

• 15:24Dax Shepard?

  As climate.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, as the permafrost melted and which is really bad.

• 15:28Dax Shepard?

  One of the very few silver lining.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the only one. So as that's happening, they just keep coming back to George and saying, can you do it? And George is like a mathematical guy. He's like, well, there are no scientific gates. There's engineering challenges, but we kind of have everything we need to put this together to make this happen, right?

• 15:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  And so it was amazing. He blames journalists in the community for why he's working on the mammoth. But on the cover of his book, his only book, There's a Mammoth. So I don't know if I totally buy that. So he was aware of that. They never actually did find sperm. They found a lot of tissues. And what happens is when they go into this tissue that starts to be like emulsified and like leaky and stuff like that, they think that there's viable cells there. There are no viable cells there.

• 16:09Dax Shepard?

  Really? Even when they have the full carcass?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, even when they have the full carcass, because DNA degrades at such a crazy rate.

• 16:17Dax Shepard?

  Cause it's in the nucleus of the cell.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It's in the nucleus of the cell and you'll get some mitochondrial DNA. You'll get pieces of the DNA from the cells, but you're not going to get a living cell. So if you wanted to impregnate through sperm, you're going to need living sperm, which they did not have. Or you're going to need, if you're going to clone it, a lot of times people are like, get on with it with you guys, right? Why are you guys taking so long? Cause they just think that we could just clone a cell, right? But there are no living cells. We have about 104 mammoth genomes across 1.3 million years of genetic divergence. And they're all massively fragmented. They're all super broken DNA pieces because they degrade over time.

• 16:53Dax Shepard?

  If you had to assign percentages, each of these samples is what? Is it 2% of the DNA?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So I think we have now assembled a fully complete woolly mammoth genome at this point.

• 17:03Dax Shepard?

  By piecing together all these different samples over a 1.2 million year horizon.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  And aligning it to the Asian elephant, which is the closest genetic match, right?

• 17:12Dax Shepard?

  99.4.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  It's 99.6. It actually depends technically on how you measure it. 99.6, it can be as low as 99.2 because there's a mass variety.

• 17:21Dax Shepard?

  99 plus.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Are they smaller?

• 17:23Dax Shepard?

  They are.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Most people think that mammoths were like these giant things, but they're actually woolly mammoths, which we're focused on, are about the same size as Asian elephants, which are a little bit smaller than African elephants. You did have straight test elephants. You had some other stuff that was like quite big. They're still very large. They're just not, sometimes people think them was like the size of like buildings.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think I knew they were even as big as elephants.

• 17:48Dax Shepard?

  You thought they were smaller?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  There's pygmy one.

• 17:50Dax Shepard?

  Pygmy on Channel Islands.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Channel Islands, yeah.

• 17:52Dax Shepard?

  That's what I want replicated is the pygmy one, so I can have one in my house.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  You're not alone. That request comes in more often than you would think.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  I bet.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Everybody wants a pygmy. I was like, let's get to ah mammoth, right? And so George is getting all of this data over the years. He'd got a $100,000 gift from Peter Thiel, who is not an investor in our business, but he'd given a $100,000 grant to the Church Lab to work on the mammoth. And George stretched that out over like six years, right? He's like spending $12,000 a year just keeping it alive. And this ended up being this project where people knew that George was working on it, but it wasn't like funded to the way of like one of his big sponsored.

• 18:32Dax Shepard?

  And it's not on the front burner for him.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. I'd say it's probably the front of his mind.

• 18:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, not allocation of lab time and resources.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  How old is he?

• 18:39Dax Shepard?

  72.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  72 now.

• 18:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I know. Hurry.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  No, he's the best.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  It scares me.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  He just had a birthday. He's the best.

• 18:46Dax Shepard?

  He's taking his nap.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Great. He should just, you know, maybe like.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  You would never, he is so.

• 18:50Dax Shepard?

  He's going to pass GG.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  He's going to pass GG.

• 18:53Dax Shepard?

  Not to mention if anyone's going to get the epigenome anti-aging, that'll be the first dialogue.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  He's definitely working on all of the anti-aging stuff. So he's great. So he had been working on it for a long time. That's not why I called him. But then I hung up the phone and I went through this like weird introspection. You've talked to other tech CEOs. If they say they didn't say this, they're just completely lying. Every tech CEO and founder I ever know has talked about, oh, I'm doing this one to make an impact, want to change the world. But most companies, they fail. They get bought, they go public. I don't know how many of them really put a dent in the universe. Like Steve would always talk about, yeah, they put like really a change. I left the call really inspired and I left the call thinking, is this an opportunity that's being presented to me by the universe? And if I don't take it, I can say I'm building this company. It's going to create a lot of shareholder value.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  It's going to make money and it's going to provide jobs and services function. But I don't think I could ever hear myself say, and I think this is going to leave an impact on the world.

• 19:52Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Like, I really felt this was like, hey, do you want?

• 19:55Dax Shepard?

  This is your once in a lifetime swing.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  That's how I viewed it. And I was like, look, I'd built and sold six software companies. And I was like, if it all fails, I could just go do that. There's no risk.

• 20:04Dax Shepard?

  How's the call back go? So what's the second call?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  The next day. I literally called it the next day. I stayed up all night. I was at my house in Austin, stayed up all night. Couldn't figure out, there was this mammoth through line. You could hear this different inflection in his voice, how passionate he was about it. So I called him back the next night and literally I talked to him, I was like, I, I think I just need to come see you. Which if I were him, I'd be like, this guy's weird. I talked to him yesterday. So I went up there a week later, within a week I was in his lab, spent the whole day with him. We couldn't be more philosophically aligned. And it was funny, I was in his little office, he came in, he's like standing, I was like, I'm not gonna sit down because I may fall asleep, and I was like, I didn't know some of these attributes about him at the time. So I was like, is that because he's just like, is this one of those like power plays where it's like, I'm gonna bail if I'm not interested?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  It's just easier for me to walk out. Like, I didn't know what I was working with here.

• 20:55Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  I brought one of my lawyers at the time to see what are the requirements of doing a deal like this? And how do we work with Harvard? And then I brought a scientist and we went in, talked about it, we talked more philosophically, like how we think about things. I left that meeting 400 times more excited than going into it.

• 21:12Dax Shepard?

  And you must have told him, I have the capacity to bring to you quite a bit of funding.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  We actually ended the meeting with, I was like, I think there's no one less qualified than me to do this. So it makes perfect sense that I should go do this.

• 21:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking, what, from his point of view, what are you offering that he's even interested?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  I said, look, I'm very good at building teams of people that are much smarter than me. Your science teams are much smarter than me, number one. Number two, if you have a plan that you believe we can get there and you think these are engineering challenges, I know how to solve engineering challenges, I know how to hire builders to solve engineering challenges, and I know how to raise capital towards it, right? Our first investor deck was quite shitty though, and so it wasn't a great deck. It's like, we have no deal with Harvard, we have no IP, we have no scientists. This guy thinks he can bring back a mammoth, and we had no monetization models at that time.

• 22:00Dax Shepard?

  Well, I was gonna say, you have to-

• 22:01Speaker 02

  So we're like, put money in.

• 22:02Dax Shepard?

  You have to have some monetization scheme. Otherwise, what are we doing? Like, how are we funding this? You know, there's no money in bringing back the mammoth unless you have a theme park, I guess.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  He should have sent it to Dax, his debt.

• 22:15Dax Shepard?

  Well, many celebrities are his first round investors.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Okay, I was gonna say.

• 22:18Dax Shepard?

  Chris Hemsworth, Peter Jackson, Paris Hilton.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Because they want the piggyback.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  But they came to us, which is crazy. We've been very fortunate, in the early days, we went to investors, some of which I'd worked with in the past, some of which just had our long-term views. And our original pitch was, hey, look, this is a systems model, no different than building software. It's a systems model, no different than building space hardware. If we are going to bring back a mammoth, we are going to engineer solutions and technologies along the way to build a synthetic biology platform that the same platform that can make you a mammoth can make you a bunch of other species, but it can also create disease-resistant cattle or drought-resistant plants, or we will advance the technologies to do this, the number of edits that we have to make,

• 23:02Speaker 02

  we will advance all of the genome engineering and DNA synthesis tools to the point that it's now viable for humans. So if we are successful-

• 23:11Dax Shepard?

  It feels like the product's the mammoth, but really the product is the tools that can get you the mammoth.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  It's the techno, it's that end-to-end kind of developmental biology, genetic engineering and cellular engineering and computational biology stack. It is that infrastructure and then the innovations and inventions that come along that path.

• 23:29Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was thinking of the perfect parallel model is really in the automotive space, which is you race on Sunday, there's no reason to race. It's a huge money loss for all the manufacturers. But the tech discovered through racing funnels down into the production car, and they always justify racing to stockholders as like, what we learn on Sunday, we put in the car on Monday.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:52Dax Shepard?

  And that's kind of the model, really.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I didn't know that. We would talk to investors early on about like Apollo. It's like, hey, a lot of stuff came out of humanity going to the stars. We believe that here, and we believe that the total addressable market for programmable life, being able to engineer life the way we want will have a massive ripple effect for the world. And in agriculture, food security, environmental cleanup, human healthcare. And so that market and those opportunities actually are significantly larger than we initially anticipated.

• 24:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so walk me through from 2021, when you formed the company, what are the baby steps and accomplishments along the way, kind of in order? Like, what's the first thing you guys were successful at doing?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Pre-launch, the first thing that I think we were pretty successful on was we hired a chief animal officer. We were four days out from launching the company, and a buddy of mine that had bought one of my previous companies was like, hey, do you have anyone that's ever raised an elephant on your team? You know, you have these moments where people say something to you that you're like, wait. I called George, I was like, hey, we should hire someone that's like birthed an elephant and like knows like what they eat.

• 24:59Dax Shepard?

  What they need to survive.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Not just survive, but to thrive. And George was like, oh, that's a really good idea, we should. He's very thoughtful and he's very hilarious, he was like, we should think about this. I was like, no, I got a guy. And so one of the first things we did was, I think we've been smarter enough to know and listen to feedback. You'll see this theme, I think, through all of Colossal, we've got a lot of feedback. And a lot of feedback's been really helpful, like someone saying, do you have someone on the team that's ever raised an elephant? We're like, no, I gotta go, because I gotta find that person, right? And we got a great guy doing that now. But since the launch of the company, the most important thing is we have built, and you should come see the labs, and you should bring your kids if you want.

• 25:35Dax Shepard?

  They're in Dallas?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're in Dallas.

• 25:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  So we have a lab in Melbourne, Australia, but the one in Dallas is cooler, but you can go to both if you want. We have built a team of 260 scientists and a collaboration with 17 of the top academic universities around the world, and we fund 80 post-docs in academia, and then we have about 75 conservation partners around the world. So I would say that before we get into like scientific or any major milestones, the thing I'm big is it's the team, right? It's unfair, right? Like, if you look at your alternative for genome engineers or synthetic biologists, it's you go into academia, which has a lot of brokenness to it right now, right? It's underfunded, it's highly competitive.

• 26:12Dax Shepard?

  You have to publish.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  It's papers, not progress, right?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  You know, we had this argument a lot with people where it's like, why don't you publish papers more? And I was like, well, we'd have to do 10 papers for every press release we do. I'd have to hire 200 people just writing papers.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And if I stack up a bunch of papers, that's not gonna make it dodo, right? And so that's one. And then two, they can go into like biopharma or work on yeast models. If I'm like, hey, come with us and I need you to go to the Arctic with me, and we're gonna extract DNA like Indiana Jones style. And then we're gonna go to like the basement and like sub-basement forest Smithsonian and get ancient DNA, and then you're gonna help build the AI models to do all the comparative genomics and work with mammoth cells.

• 26:53Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna be the Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  That's so much better, that's so much better. It's great, and you can see the product out of it. And when we really start to talk to our recruits as scientists, we always talk about its value creation for our shareholders and the impact from our conservation issues, but inspiration. And we're like, we want to do this in a way that gets people stoked about science again.

• 27:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Because I think we've lost that in America, and it's a big passion of mine now with my young kids. And so it gives us an unfair recruiting advantage for kids. Like, I got Beth Shapiro, who was our chief science officer, who literally wrote a book saying, how to clone a mammoth, and it ends with, you can't. And so I was like, she's perfect.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Because she's thought about all this, right? And so when I sat down with Beth, she's like, you read my book? I was like, no, but I know how to, and so we're good. And I was like, you cannot clone a mammoth, but you can engineer one from scratch.

• 27:44Dax Shepard?

  Quickly, why did she say you can't clone one?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Well, because there are no living cells, right? So you can't just do an exact duplicate of what existed.

• 27:52Dax Shepard?

  And even theoretically, there's no mammoth that's been frozen perfectly.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 27:56Dax Shepard?

  In Jurassic Park, they use the MacGuffin, the device of the mosquito frozen in amber who has sucked the blood from a dinosaur.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  And by the way, I don't want to break hearts, but there is most likely, George and I don't like to say impossible, but most likely there's no dinosaur DNA, because it's about 65 million years old. There's been lots of very warm periods of time between now and then. And amber forms is very porous, so it's not a great DNA store, not that we've tried. It forms in hot, wet places, DNA likes cold, dry places, right? And so that's the best preservation. So if something could like die in like the perfect cave, that's what's best for us.

• 28:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, okay. So you've got the team, that's the first thing you're happy about. Now, what are the incremental?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Big milestones are, from an editing perspective, we're now doing about 300 edits at a time all over the genome. Just to put that in perspective, the two most genetically modified multicellular organisms in the world, like animals, are woolly mice, which are objectively the cutest mice on the planet, if you haven't seen them.

• 28:55Dax Shepard?

  They look like little hamsters, Monica, they have kind of the woolly mammoth hair.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 28:59Dax Shepard?

  But they're on a mouse, you would like it, even you.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  We like mouse, mice here, so.

• 29:03Dax Shepard?

  We like mouse, not mice. Mice means infestation, mouse is a friend, yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but mouse are great. And so we identified the core colors, the hair texture, the length, the density, and it was about eight genes that we put all into a mouse. There's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between a mouse and an elephant. We have a huge animal welfare team, we spend a lot of time with American Humane Society and others. And so we're not gonna go take, do anything super weird. So we're not gonna take an elephant gene and stick it into a mouse because we know it's probably not compatible with life because there's too much genetic divergence. This is what's so amazing about the Woolly Mouse Project, besides their objective cuteness, is that we did it all in 30 days. So we took our mammoth edits, right, which we're editing into an Asian elephant cell, because it's the genetic donor that we work with, and I'm sure we'll talk about the process at some point.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  We took those edits, found the functional equivalence in mice, right? So we're putting mice edits into mice that are the equivalent of the mammoth edits in elephants.

• 30:01Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, is this where now AI has very helpful in this?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  And we had to build all this bespoke. At the time, like OpenAI and Claude were like great at like helping kids cheat on term papers. Incestral state reconstruction models was not on the menu. And so we had to build all these comparative workflows and comparative genomics models. And so we took that, made the prediction, made the edits. 30 days later, the mice were born, and 100% they were healthy. 100% had exactly the phenotype or physical attribute that was expressed from the genes, meaning that it looked exactly as we predicted, and it worked within 30, like we didn't have to do lots of trials and errors.

• 30:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and not to get bogged down in biology, but yeah, you can be genotypically something and then phenotypically something else. So there are steps between what the recipe says and what comes out of the oven.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  And what actually comes out of like, when it gets expressed.

• 30:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's now interacting with the epigenome and all these other things that it could not produce the phenotype you were looking for.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  100%.

• 30:55Dax Shepard?

  You can only get half excited when you have the genotype figured out.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I know, exactly.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 31:06Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your teeth before walking into a meeting? You smiled at six people in the hallway confidently, full teeth? You felt great about it until you caught your reflection and realized you'd been carrying a piece of spinach like an accessory since lunch. Yeah, checking first is a good idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We get support from our presenting sponsor, YouTube Premium. Now, you already know I'm a big YouTube person.

• 31:48Dax Shepard?

  It's incredible on its own, but Premium makes the whole experience feel enhanced. Like you don't realize how much better it can get until you try it. The biggest game changer for me, background play. I love long two-hour deep dives, you name it, motorcycles, travel, cars.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Cooking shows for me.

• 32:07Dax Shepard?

  Cooking. Listen, with Premium, you don't have to keep the screen open. So I can lock my phone, slide it into my pocket, and listen to a podcast while I'm folding laundry or working out. It's also completely ad-free, meaning when a narrator is building up to the climax of an insane story, there's zero interruption. And for travel, offline download saves the day. I love this one. Relying on airplane Wi-Fi can be a gamble, so I just download my favorite videos before takeoff. And with smart downloads, Premium will automatically download new videos from channels you actually follow without having to lift a finger. I'm covered if I forget to download a video I want to watch, or even if there's no service. And the home run for me is that YouTube Premium remembers exactly where I left off

• 32:49Dax Shepard?

  and lets me continue watching on another device from right where I stopped. So I can start a video on my TV while brushing my teeth and pick it right back up on my phone on my morning walk. So yeah, YouTube was already great, but Premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. We get support from Superhuman. I'm someone who wants to do big, meaningful work, but the small stuff eats up my day before I even get to it. The endless emails, docs, scheduling, follow-ups that pile up. By the time all that's cleared, there's no energy left for the ambitious stuff. Most AI tools promise to fix that, but they require opening a new tab,

• 33:33Dax Shepard?

  re-explaining everything from scratch every single time. A week later, it's just another thing collecting dust in the browser. Superhuman, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already embedded inside the tools people are using, email, docs, browser. It's not waiting to be found. It's already there, working alongside, clearing what's in the way, so the focus stays on what's actually worth doing. A thought partner that's already up to speed, no catching it up. It knows the style, the workflows, and it backs people up without getting in the way. At your service, not after your job. That's the difference. Give it a try for yourself. Start streamlining your workflows with Superhuman. Try today at superhuman.com.

• 34:16Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Which is a fair question.

• 34:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts, and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 35:01Dax Shepard?

  Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.

• 35:20Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  You have to do the protein modeling to figure out what the protein is. Most people, when they think of DNA, they think of that twisted ladder, which is great, right? Like Jurassic Park did a great job for us, and people understand these things.

• 35:44Dax Shepard?

  The double helix.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  The double helix, right? But people are like, oh, that's what it looks like. So take that double helix and then just compress it with like the force of God down into this crazy ball. And then you have proteins that come off. It's very complicated. The folding of it and where you actually have connection points, all of those things matter in epigenetic expression. There's a project we haven't announced yet, and I was walking one of our government friends through it. And I was showing them the progress on this thing, and I was showing them the edits. And they were like, oh, that's great. Yeah, but let me show you what we actually had to do. And then there was like down to the organic chemistry level of like, this is the compound that we had to figure out how to produce. We had to then go do an analysis on all these other species to figure out how they produce those.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  What are the common genes? How can those be activated? And then how do we model that, engineer that, including engineering the binding sites and the activation to get the expression?

• 36:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Crazy. Like, people sometimes are like, can't they, you're just taking like a mammoth gene. You found the mammoth gene. Like, oh, that's a mammoth gene. You just stick it in.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:48Dax Shepard?

  Control C, control V.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Are we cutting and copying?

• 36:53Dax Shepard?

  And again, back to the AI, for you to have compared all the other animals.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Fifty-plus years.

• 36:59Dax Shepard?

  Right, yeah, for humans to go through, or even look at the speed that they mapped the first human genome. And that was like a 25-year project or something.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, billions of dollars.

• 37:08Dax Shepard?

  You've mapped this woolly mammoth in a few years with shitty scraps.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  With very shitty, broken DNA, not like taken hours like fresh out of the kitchen, right?

• 37:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  And then we have multiple species going on, and then we have a lot of research species going on. So there's a ton that we are constantly mapping.

• 37:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's talk about the dire wolf.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  We had the mice. I was sitting, getting interviewed at South by. People were losing their mind on it. The mice were on Saturday Night Live. The mice were on, the mice were on Johnson. They were everywhere.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I wish you brought one.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Nah, sorry.

• 37:37Dax Shepard?

  They're in a pretty controlled, like these wolves are good luck finding.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:41Dax Shepard?

  Do you know about these geolocators? Someone was just telling me about this, that there's these contests. They show people like a five-second snippet of a live feed cam from somewhere. And these geolocators will figure out. It's insane.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna challenge them. We have taken very thoughtful measures to the point of like planting non-indigenous trees.

• 38:04Dax Shepard?

  Flora?

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've been pretty thoughtful about it. No one will find our stuff.

• 38:08Dax Shepard?

  There's red herrings everywhere. Okay.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  But I'm sitting there, and everyone's losing their mind, and I'm like, well, the dire wolf project's gonna be interesting, because at this moment, we had dire wolves. We had the first, most genetically modified multicellular organism in the world is the dire wolf with 20 items. So we're sitting there like, we thought people were gonna like be excited about the woolly mouse.

• 38:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  The dire wolf, I remember being on South by, being interviewed, kind of zoning out for a second, saying, what is gonna happen in three weeks when we announce this?

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  And that fear was massively realized three weeks later.

• 38:39Dax Shepard?

  It was just three weeks later, you announced the dire wolf?

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:41Dax Shepard?

  So tell Monica about the dire wolf.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, other than what I know from Game of Thrones.

• 38:45Dax Shepard?

  Wow, that's for everyone.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we recognize that. And so we have this multi-dimensional model of how we think about why to bring back species. What does the indigenous people groups care about? Why did they go extinct? Can they survive today? What's their environmental impact? Can any of the technologies that are developed on the path to the extinction of that species help existing species, right? And the dire wolf checked pretty much, the dire wolf was not on our initial list, right? It was like mammoth, thylus, Tasman tiger, and that's why the hims works got involved, because they heard they were working on the Tasman tiger.

• 39:15Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And for us, dire wolf just wasn't on the list. It just wasn't the top thing. Because people had sampled La Brea tar pits, got zero DNA due to heat and acidification. So nothing they could find. We started this process. We started having conversations with indigenous people groups here in the US, a few others. And we were with Chairman Fox of MHA Nation up in North Dakota, and he told us this whole story. We were on his land, and they were walking us through everything, told us the story about the great wolf. And he's like, you know, they were dire wolves. And like you said, with high conviction. I was like, really? And so we started talking all about it. He goes, yeah, we as tribes always think that our ancestors communed with the dire wolf. And it was this big white wolf. And I was like, maybe we should bring back the dire wolf.

• 39:54Dax Shepard?

  They died off like 10,000 years ago?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

• 39:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  And they're just much bigger than a wolf.

• 40:00Dax Shepard?

  Six feet, nose to tail, and 150 pounds. So fucking big.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so about 30% bigger than a normal wolf.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  And we knew all of what Dax said from the fossil record. What we didn't know is there are certain things, like there were specific gene variants that we could tell that made them white. So we had two dire wolf samples that produced viable DNA. A tooth that was about 13,000-ish years old, 12,000 years old, and then a skull that was 73,000 years old.

• 40:26Dax Shepard?

  And just an ear bone in the skull. That's 72,000 years old.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  We had 60,000 years of genetic diver- I mean, think about that for a second.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  There's more genetic divergence between those two samples than our most recent sample and wolves today.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Right?

• 40:42Dax Shepard?

  Also, their fecundity rate and how long they live, the amount of generations within that 60,000 would be the equivalent of probably 300,000 human years of evolution.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  So much data from that.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  That's insane. Okay.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  So we took that data and we mapped it. At the time, people believed that dire wolves were closer related to jackals, because it's Game of Thrones people wanted to study. And they only got about a fraction of the DNA. The fragments that they got aligned mostly to jackal. Because we had about 500 times more DNA than anyone ever seen on dire wolves, we actually found like, oh. They actually map closer to wolves, gray wolves specifically, which is what you would think. There were things we didn't know, like one thing we didn't know is we knew the fur was white. We knew the specific genes, but we didn't know exactly what the texture was gonna be like. They had this like mane to them, which I know sounds crazy. Take like a lion and then take like a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog and it's somewhere in between.

• 41:35Dax Shepard?

  Or chows even have that kind of a bit of a mane.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Crazy. At the end of the day, we took a 73,000 year old skull and a 12,000 year old tooth and made puppies. And before we announced them to the world.

• 41:45Dax Shepard?

  Romulus and Remus.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Romulus and Remus were the first two.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  How small were they?

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Oh, they look like little pandas. They were small, but they were pretty big at the time.

• 41:53Dax Shepard?

  At six months old, they were already 80 pounds.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Ah, oh my god.

• 41:57Dax Shepard?

  The photos I've seen are from when you allow time to look at them. I didn't see that mane. Has that mane come in?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  It's Kevin Moore, yeah.

• 42:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Are there more recent photos?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, we put them out online. Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  So when was this? How old were they?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  We showed them to the world when they were about seven months old.

• 42:14Dax Shepard?

  And the little girl was two months old, so we couldn't see her. She's Khaleesi.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Oh my.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Which by the way, we got a lot, so we got a lot of feedback where they were like, well, you know Khaleesi was not was a Targaryen, not House Stark. And I was like, no, we are not that dumb. We do understand that, but we were trying to be like.

• 42:34Dax Shepard?

  It sounds cooler than Ned Stark for a girl.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  No, but it could have been Arya.

• 42:38Dax Shepard?

  Ooh, that would have been nice.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yes, we got, we already felt so.

• 42:41Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you already fucked up.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  No, but our thought process was, we actually had a thought process. Our thought process was on this, was that, hey, we already have dire wolves. So the Stark lovers will already be in this. Let's give something for the Targaryens. So we were trying to be thoughtful about this.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Okay, you might need to do dragons for them.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  So Peter Jackson is one of our investors. This is a crazy stat. This is actually one of the things I'm most proud of about this company. 30% of our investors come to us from their kids.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I bet. Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Their kids see it, their kids get excited about it, they tell them, right? And they reach out to us. So Peter reached out to us and basically my first call with Peter and his partner Fran, he basically cussed me out because I was not working on the Moa, which he, as a Kiwi, felt very strongly that I was not working on the Moa.

• 43:29Dax Shepard?

  12 foot tall bird.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no wings. When I say no wings, not like little stubs or flightless, no wings. The feathers are almost like hair like.

• 43:38Dax Shepard?

  When you're thinking of the ethics of this, we know for certain that humans caused the extinction of the megafauna. Like they were thriving in the Americas, the Homo sapiens arrived.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  There is a inverse relationship you can track pretty much one to one.

• 43:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and same with the arrival of people in Australia. They killed off all this megafauna. We killed off the giant sloth here. So humans got rid of all these animals that, we don't know, maybe they would have made it, maybe they wouldn't have. But certainly we caused the extinction of so many of these animals.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  So many of these things. And then recent extinctions, like with the Tasmanian tiger and thylacine. We, the Australian government, I don't say we, because people are like, wait, colossal killed off the thylacine, they bring it back. The Australian government actually put a bounty on the head of killing Tasmanian tigers. So they were paying people to eradicate this species.

• 44:27Dax Shepard?

  This is like the buffalo here. Get them out of the way for the railroads.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Why?

• 44:31Dax Shepard?

  They were probably eating something.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  No, they believed that they were killing sheep and eating sheep.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  There's no data. Go talk to all the Tasmanian tiger experts. There's no data they ever did that. What was happening is they were stealing each other's sheep and then blaming it on the Tasmanian tigers, right?

• 44:46Dax Shepard?

  Also, they had now had canines probably involved.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had the dingoes and other stuff that came in, right? And so you have this movement across the world. And so as colossal has grown in our technologies capabilities, as well as financial support from our investors, we've broadened the horizons. Now we're working on the Tasmanian tiger, the Moa, thanks to Peter Jackson and a handful of other species. But when I was with Peter, going back to dire wolf, when I was with Peter in his house in Auckland, I was like, hey, I want to show you something. I plugged in the computer to his little HDMI thing and showed him the first howl. It's not a highly produced clip, right? It's kind of just like with an iPhone.

• 45:23Dax Shepard?

  The first what?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  It was the first howl from the dire wolves, when they were puppies.

• 45:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  And we played it for him and he's like, this is what you need to lead with. He's like, oh, we're gonna do this big production. He's like, no, no. This is what you show. Trust me. I was like, I think you should probably trust Peter Jackson.

• 45:36Dax Shepard?

  Storytelling.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's moderately good at this. And then he's like, have you shown this to George R. Martin? So I said earlier, I guess slightly incorrect, the only person we did pursue in the celebrity world was we reached out directly to George R. Martin because Peter introduced us. And Peter told him, he's like, you just need to get on Zoom with this guy. So he got on Zoom, I shared my screen, George R. Martin cried on the call. He's like, is that what I think it is? So I was like, yes. Very few people have seen them. I was like, you made these popular for the world. And I was like, do you want to? And he's like, can I invest? Can I be involved? I was like, sure, sure. I was like, we'd like for you to come see them at an undisclosed location. So he and his wife, Paris. They flew out, they flew out and they held them when they were babies. And he was like, he told me, like, one of the best days of his life.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  We have more dire wolf puppies that we've talked about that will be born in the near future. We are working on the next litter. And he texted me, he's like, are they born yet? Can I come see them?

• 46:29Dax Shepard?

  So I do need to point out at this point that you have critics and you have a lot of people saying, you know, these aren't dire wolves. And Beth Shapiro, your head scientist, has stated pretty clearly, these are gray wolves with 20 edits.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:43Dax Shepard?

  Right?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:44Dax Shepard?

  It's a bit semantical.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  We are very clear on this and sometimes this frustrates our critics, just being transparent about it. We believe in freedom of speech and choice, right? And so like, if you want to say our mammoth is a woolly mammoth, great. And if you want to say our mammoth is a cold tolerant Asian elephant with 200 edits across 1.4 million years of genetic divergence, of alleles that are then activated epigenetically to produce the phenotypes that are cold tolerant to serving ecological function that wants mammoths and mastodons to. You can say that too.

• 47:18Dax Shepard?

  But don't you think, so one of the definitions of a species.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  One of the 36.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a lot of definitions.

• 47:25Dax Shepard?

  One of the 36, I didn't know there were 36, but one of them is that they can produce a fertile offspring, which is why a, I don't know, a mule, whatever you cross a doggy and a horse, it's not its own species because it can't have its own children. So don't you think the debate ends when you create the woolly mammoth and it then starts having fertile offspring? Now it is its own species, no?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  I don't, because if you go talk to a paleontologist that will not agree with that definition of speciation, the problem is we as humans like to put things in boxes. We're very good at categorizing. We like this box and this box and this box. You're like, that doesn't fit in a box. I don't understand what to do. We're very robotic in our models, right? And so I don't think that that debate will go away. But for me, I think that's okay. So for us, a gray wolf is just a genetically modified dire wolf. It just is. Like there's over 3 million edits between you and me and you and me. Like we're different by 3 million edits. For us, going from a software lens, we're gonna make the edits that matter that we know drove the core phenotype. So if you look at our 104 mammoth genomes, can't clone them

• 48:27Speaker 02

  because I don't have those living cells, but magically if I could clone them, which one do I clone? Which one's a mammoth? Of those 104, over 1.3 million years. Here's what I can tell you. We were all born reasonably around the same time, right? And there's 3 million answers. When you go over 1.3 million years, there's a lot of difference. But they all shared those core phenotypic expressions that gave them these like shaggy coats, fat deposits, curved tusks.

• 48:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they have 10 centimeters of fat on them.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  And what's interesting though, is that it's really not the sum of the parts that make something the way we acknowledge you are you or you are you. It really is the unique parts. It's not the sum of the parts. You show a kid a polar bear and a brown bear, you say, are they bears? A child's gonna be like, yes, like, are they the same? And they're gonna say, no. But polar bears and brown bears can intermix and produce viable offspring. By that definition, they should be the same species. But one is a giant carnivore, one is an omnivore, one's Arctic adopted and white. They're just different.

• 49:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  I do have one more fun thing I always say. The people that want to argue on, is it a mammoth? I'm like, what do you tell your kids Jurassic Park's about? Is Jurassic Park a movie about dinosaurs?

• 49:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Then our mammoths are mammoths. Or are they genetically modified frog birds?

• 49:45Dax Shepard?

  Which is in the movie how the.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  That's how they're made, yeah.

• 49:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. How big are Romulus and Remus now?

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Romulus right now is like 140. Remus is like, I think, 137, 138.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  And sorry, how old are they now? When did that happen?

• 49:58Speaker 02

  I guess they're two years old.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Okay, two years old.

• 50:01Dax Shepard?

  14 and dog years.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're 14.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Sorry, there are about to be two. There are gonna be two in November. Terrible dad, like I should know that.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  It's hard to keep it on.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  I have biological human children, so.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna have to take precedent.

• 50:14Dax Shepard?

  Good, cuz we found out one of the red flags of a sociopath is if you ask them their children's birthdays, they don't know. We interviewed a confirmed sociopath who's also a psychologist. Fascinating. She could detect when there's other sociopaths present by all these different things. And one of them is if you ask them when their child's birthday is, they won't know. Keep knowing it.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:34Dax Shepard?

  Um, okay. You have, though, declared that you're gonna have a woolly mammoth calf by 2028.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  So, we will not have a calf by 2028. That was our original target date.

• 50:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  We actually just did a big story with Time on this. We spent a ton of time with Time Magazine. And our scope has significantly grown. So, we've gone from one mammoth, one cell line, about 65 edits, to 14 cell lines. And we've already done 130 edits today, so double what we anticipated. And that's cuz we have better access to data. We've also had two governments that have reached out to us saying, "We do not want you to make a mammoth. We want you to make viable herds of mammoths," to your interbreeding comment. That's what they want.

• 51:18Dax Shepard?

  Is it top secret who those countries are?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Top secret is a classification, right? And we do work with the government. It's not a classified thing. But these are governments' choices of when they wanna talk about their programs.

• 51:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  And we have larger partners in the program now.

• 51:34Dax Shepard?

  You can see where suspicion and scrutiny would arise when we don't know what countries are funding these things?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Well, ours is, right?

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Yes. To our government, we're very transparent with our investors. We don't have any secret investors. We've had state governments in the United States invest in us.

• 51:47Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  We've had the federal government invest in us. We've had the UAE invest in us. Those are the only government entities.

• 51:54Dax Shepard?

  I can't imagine the UAE is a great place for a mammoth.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  The UAE is not one of our partners on the mammoth project.

• 52:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you're no longer saying 2028. Is there some timeframe?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Our goal is to have births and announce the births. I don't know if we will announce the births, kinda how like the dire wolves were a little bit older and there were multiple. I think that's a more likely strategy.

• 52:18Dax Shepard?

  This is similar to like, you don't wanna tell anyone you're pregnant.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  In case something happens.

• 52:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and the first act. So, it's like, yeah, if you get these mamas out and the whole world knows, and now they want updates. And then they have like three extra trunks.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  We spend so much time, and one of the things that I think we do a really good job in our pipeline, is we do genetic screening and computational analysis in full genome sequencing after every editing pass and embryo pass. So, we don't take anything to even potential term that has an off-target effect, meaning an unintended consequence in the genome, or could have any effects that are negative for the animal welfare. So, we have IACU protocols. We work with USDA. One of the things that most people think about when they think about colossal, like, oh, those are the guys that are like doing mammoth stuff, and dire wolves and dodos. But they don't realize that like the lab work that we do is half of it, right?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  We consult indigenous people groups, private landowners, FDA, USDA, all regulatory bodies, the intelligence community here in the US. We spend a lot of time with a lot of these folks.

• 53:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now, let's get into some of the, I'm gonna call them off-label discoveries that you've amassed along the way in pursuit of these, what's the term, de-extinction?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  I think it's highly likely you're gonna see more species. I think you're gonna see more woolly mouse type moments in the near future around things that prove out phenotypes in model species, like mice are. And I think you're also gonna see other extinct species, some of which we've mentioned. And then I think maybe you'll have more dire wolf-like moments of stuff we haven't told anybody.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:51Dax Shepard?

  If we get a saber tooth.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  That's what you want? I'm trying to think what I want.

• 53:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, I want a lot of things.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  What is the wish list? And I'll tell you how it compares to the general wish list.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  What's yours?

• 53:59Dax Shepard?

  Australopithecus giganticus.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  So, for the layman.

• 54:03Dax Shepard?

  So, you call it the Gigantopithecus.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  You will not get that from us because we have drawn a line in the sand with colossal that we do not work and non-human primates are over.

• 54:13Dax Shepard?

  Right, so I was an anthropology major, so of course I want to see how big the Australopithecus giganticus is in real life. I would love to see that. Of all the hominids.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  It might kill us.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  I would love to see that, too.

• 54:25Dax Shepard?

  But what do you do with them? That's the ethical thing. It's like now you got something that's cognitively.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  We spin out technologies and build hold companies and license out our technologies for human healthcare. But even at colossal, we do not do things with human healthcare. Because it's like the last thing you want is like, they're already doing stuff. There's already enough weird conspiracies. We don't wanna push the bounds to the point there. So, we just said, "Hey, we're not doing anything non-human primates or anything in humans."

• 54:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's probably.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  We get the Neanderthal question quite a bit.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  I bet.

• 54:52Dax Shepard?

  But they're already here. They're with us. We've absorbed them. So, they're present in your DNA.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:57Dax Shepard?

  But I wanna see the elephant bird very badly.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  I do, too. We're not working on it.

• 55:01Dax Shepard?

  Saber-toothed tiger, of course.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Not working on it, but I'd like to see it.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  I don't know enough of that.

• 55:04Dax Shepard?

  Have you ever been to the La Brea Tar Pits or the Natural History Museum and you see the skeleton of the giant sloth?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  That would be.

• 55:11Dax Shepard?

  It's bonkers. I think they're like 1,500 pounds.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  To do an extinct species, depending on the level of engineering, you've gotta have a viable genetic donor. So, something close enough genetically that you could edit from, like Asian elephant for mammoth. You've gotta have a way to gestate it. We are now working on artificial wombs. We kinda broke the internet again this year when it showed off the artificial egg this year, which was like straight out of a movie.

• 55:32Dax Shepard?

  That's one of my three like offshoot things you've discovered along the way.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  But there are species, like right now, we have an academic partner that's got 30x coverage. You need about a minimum of 10x coverage. We have about 30x coverage, so well within the capabilities of three different lineages of giant sloth. So, I would love to put giant sloth on there. I'd love to put a stellar sea cow on there. It's one of my favorites.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  A sea cow?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Well, so think of like a dugong or a manatee that's bigger than a whale.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  What?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  It's amazing. It's super.

• 56:02Dax Shepard?

  So, it's a mammal?

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's amazing. It was killed off, to your point.

• 56:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, good.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Killed off within like 30 years of discovery, right? We just can't gestate those things yet, so there's things that aren't on the list.

• 56:12Dax Shepard?

  You need a womb. You need another animal.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  We are working on artificial wombs. We have three artificial wombs projects. We're not there yet, but we're making progress.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Wild.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  What's on your list?

• 56:22Speaker 03

  I need to like look up the list. I don't know enough. Like, I didn't know about a sea cow.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:26Dax Shepard?

  This just goes to show my bias for things that are huge cuz it's all the megafauna. That's what I'm most interested in.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  I love the megafauna.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want miniatures.

• 56:34Dax Shepard?

  Right, right.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  I want little things.

• 56:36Dax Shepard?

  Got a lot of pygmies we could work with. Again, I would love, the pygmy hippo would be so fun. This is like a pig, but it looks like a. But they're puck bastards, too, those eptomai. They're aggressive.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Wait, have the woolly mice mated?

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're on gen three.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. And so then what's the ethics around people having them?

• 56:55Speaker 02

  So, we don't sell anything. We've been asked, like, the Smithsonian reached out to us and they're like, "Mice don't live forever. We could taxiderm them and have them here." We've had museums and zoos call us, asking us to have them. It's just not our model.

• 57:06Dax Shepard?

  Are you watching Monsters of God?

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 57:08Dax Shepard?

  You must. It's by Eric Good, the guy who made Tiger King and Chimp Crazy. And now it's about the illegal reptile trade. But a lot of the things you're talking about are very present in that. And the ethics behind all of it.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have bioethics. We spend a lot of time on that. We're trying to do this in a very collaborative, communal way.

• 57:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're trying to build as much consensus as possible, probably knowing you will never have full consensus. You've got the guy from Columbia who's quite mad about a lot of the stuff.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we do.

• 57:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, let's talk about some of the fun things that you've discovered along the way. And I know one of them's a company spun off called Breaking, but tell me about X32.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  This is amazing. And this kinda goes back to taking away de-extinction in species preservation. And I'd like to talk about the species preservation part cuz no one talks about it as much as they should. That should be like what everyone's talking about because we're losing so many species. But the same platform that can do directed evolution and accelerated evolution through genome engineering can be applied in a lot of other categories. This incredible team at the VES Institute discovered a microbe, or they thought it was a microbe, we'll get to that in a second, that works very slow, that breaks the chemical bonds of plastics. And so, it doesn't make smaller plastics, right? A lot of these plastic degradation solutions that you see pop up in the news occasionally from a scientific paper,

• 58:26Speaker 02

  they either require preheating, pre-treatment, and the chemicals a lot of times are worse than even plastic. They're actually a lot of times making microplastics. They're making smaller plastics, which is not what we want.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:35Dax Shepard?

  Stuff that'll penetrate your cell membrane.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are adjusting like a credit card size of microplastics every week.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  It's disgusting.

• 58:42Dax Shepard?

  I don't believe that. I've heard you say that. Where did you get that?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  The interwebs.

• 58:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  You can fact it. You guys should.

• 58:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:49Dax Shepard?

  I think that's extreme.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  I hear that consistently.

• 58:51Dax Shepard?

  I know. There's a lot of moral panic about it all, and I think this, to me, reeks.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  That is the stat that's out there, right?

• 58:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanna know where it originated. I don't know that that's actually.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:01Dax Shepard?

  Figure-out-able.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  I hope it's a fraction of that, but we know it's a fraction of it. We know for a fact that people are getting tested and it's showing up everywhere in the body and in embryos and in sexual organs. It's getting passed on. Like, we know for a fact.

• 59:17Dax Shepard?

  It's in us.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  That microplastics is in all three of us.

• 59:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  And everyone listening to this.

• 59:21Dax Shepard?

  I don't doubt that. Just to push back on the panic about it, it's like, A, I don't know about how they came to that figure.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:26Dax Shepard?

  B, they are observed. We don't know that they're bad yet.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  They're starting to do tests. There are published peer-reviewed tests where they do believe that they have higher issues of cancer rates and other things. So, that is coming, and that is out there. There are some studies about it.

• 59:42Dax Shepard?

  Immediately can see the impossibility of figuring it out, which is, what is your control?

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, your control can't be this.

• 59:48Dax Shepard?

  We're all on planet Earth eating the plastics, so you're gonna say, "What, I'm gonna compare this person's cancer rate to whose?" There's no control.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  It's a really, really good point.

• 59:56Dax Shepard?

  It's like saying, "What does oxygen do to the human body?"

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Different variables, right?

• 1:00:01Dax Shepard?

  I don't want plastics on Earth regardless of what I'm saying. Let me make it clear. I want them out of the ocean.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  I think that any conflict disclosures need to happen on this cuz it's very apparent that tax is very invested in a plastic company.

• 1:00:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I own a petroleum refinement facility that's making polyurethane as we speak.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so now that we have disclaimed our affiliates, but look, plastics is a big issue, right? So, they discovered this thing, incredible scientist, Hukanya.

• 1:00:25Dax Shepard?

  And it just leaves them borrowing carbon and some biomass.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Some biomass, right? And so, they came to us. They didn't know what to do with it. We took it into our system. We have a very robust AI and computational biology core to understand it. What we found is it's actually a concert of microbes making this enzyme.

• 1:00:43Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  But when you modify the individual microbes, they can produce more or less of the enzyme.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  Which can then break down different plastics.

• 1:00:54Dax Shepard?

  Twenty months?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  It was much further than that. We've now got it down to 20 months. But things that take never to 800 years to 20 months.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  That's out. Now, we are working on applications to broader use cases other than industrial wastewater and textiles and composting.

• 1:01:11Dax Shepard?

  You're focusing on textiles, right?

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  So we were focusing initially on textiles, water treatment and composting are now things. Cause you go to like Whole Foods and they'll have like wrapped lettuce. They can't just go throw that in the composter, right? And so they have to separate it or a lot of times, a lot of food waste is being thrown because of plastic contamination, not microplastics because it's wrapped in plastic. They'll just throw it away, which leads to methane and all these other things. So composting is now a use case. We are looking, we have nothing yet to announce yet, but that team, that company is deeply looking into humans and how it could be helped.

• 1:01:43Dax Shepard?

  Releasing the enzyme in the humans somehow?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  I don't think the enzyme would work in the humans. I think you get quite sick from it.

• 1:01:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  But.

• 1:01:49Dax Shepard?

  Some other.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's the power of synthetic biology, right? It's like scientific discovery, still takes hundreds of years. What do I do with it? We put it through a pipeline. We one, understand it and then we figure out how we edit it and regulate it.

• 1:02:02Dax Shepard?

  So this does remind me, and I listened to some great piece on it. I wish I could remember and credit them, but it was really about the issue of whether or not we can give patents to genomes, right? And it was driven by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And there was an engineered organism that they created to eat the oil.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Dax Shepard?

  What was that biological engineering versus what you're doing? Do you know that case?

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  I don't know that case. I saw another case that was a naturally occurring enzyme that was discovered, that was being used for a river cleanup, different, but similar.

• 1:02:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  And the current landscape of our regulatory framework with USPTO, which we work very closely with, is around intentionally genetically modified organisms.

• 1:02:47Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  So if you discover something in nature, in my view, and you sequence it, you should give that to the world.

• 1:02:53Dax Shepard?

  Totally agree. Someone can't own the genome of a chimpanzee. Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  You can't protect that.

• 1:02:57Dax Shepard?

  Or a human. The first people, if they had patented that.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  There were companies that tried to. I think originally they thought there was like a million genes. And then they found out there's 25,000 genes. Like, fuck these companies, own half of them. No, no, you can't do that, right?

• 1:03:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  You can't patent those genes. Now, if you go spend money and time and effort to understand, if I take this microbe and I supercharge it, you can't take the microbe and patent it. But that supercharged microbe that you've invested time and used your technologies to make, that does not naturally occur in nature, you can't patent or lease out the technology.

• 1:03:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So that's a really cool thing. And then tell me about germ line editing.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  There's a general moratorium on it.

• 1:03:34Dax Shepard?

  Moratorium meaning there's a pause right now.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  There's a global consistent, well, I wouldn't argue it's consistent. There is a public facing global moratorium saying there's a pause on germ line editing. Meaning that you will not do edits in a human that will be passed on into the general population pool, right?

• 1:03:55Dax Shepard?

  Isn't this most prescient in the mosquito debate right now?

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  So that gets into gene drives, which we'll talk about. But on germ line editing in humans. So when you make an edit, let's say that you have sickle cell anemia and we could make an edit that then gets passed on to your offspring so that your offspring doesn't have a germ line. Now that's different than you doing IVF and having full genome sequencing with someone like Orchid or one of these other companies to test. And then you choose not to choose an embryo that has that mutation in there.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Like I did that. I went through, we went through IVF, we used Orchid.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  There were certain things that I had that we didn't want to pass on. Germ line editing, when you edit it and it gets passed on to the broader pool. And I think the fear of that is like super intelligent, very eugenicsy.

• 1:04:37Dax Shepard?

  Eugenics.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Physically.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like I only want my kids to be this tall. So there is that. I still think that there is a category that everyone can agree on that if we can eradicate.

• 1:04:47Dax Shepard?

  Sickle cell, Tay-Sachs.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. If we can eradicate these specific diseases from the gene pool, all of humanity benefits. And I think we'll get there. I think we as humanity will get there. The problem is, is that you have these rogue nation states like China where they're like, we made edits to make these kids immune to HIV. We didn't tell anybody, we as China, not us or America. And then, you know, like they do in China, if they don't like things, they locked them up. But he only was like locked up for like a handful of months. So it doesn't feel like everyone was that really mad at him for doing it. But the technologies are here. The technologies exist today. The work that Colossal is doing is significantly harder than solving those problems.

• 1:05:29Dax Shepard?

  Well, if I could get on my soapbox for half a second, I was just having a conversation with a couple that did very extensive embryo selection. And I said, my issue with it is simply, if you were evaluating me as an embryo, you'd have seen like dyslexic, ADHD addicts, name the shit.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Well, some of those are environmental.

• 1:05:47Dax Shepard?

  Let's say you find the gene for the ADHD or you find the genes for this. There are other people that didn't have those things. There are a lot of people that you would have bet on a different embryo. And like, I turned out pretty good. We know all of the downside of a lot of these things, but we've really yet to understand, well, what is the huge upside? The dyslexia thing, growing up, I always learned you're twice as likely to be incarcerated. Well, then as I got older, I learned you're four times as likely to be a CEO. So how do we?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like I'm dyslexic and I have ADD.

• 1:06:14Dax Shepard?

  There you go. And you got all kinds of money and you're changing the world. But someone might've selected.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Dax Shepard?

  I just don't think we know actually.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Maybe too personal, but it's true.

• 1:06:22Dax Shepard?

  I want to hear.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  With our kids, we did, because you can do the testing, the morphologic. We actually had a miscarriage. My wife just didn't want to go through it again.

• 1:06:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  I didn't want to go through it, didn't want her to go through it. So we went through IVF, went through the process of selecting embryos. There's certain morphological grading and testing, and there's only so much the IVF clinic will do.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  But then you can go to this next step. We hired a company and use a service of a company called Orchid. Full disclosure, I ended up investing in the company only because I was so happy.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  George Church was involved, so we recommended them. And they do full genome testing. To your point, I have a mutation on my Titan gene. I got really sick during COVID because of. So I wanted to screen for that because it is a mutation that creates a truncated protein for your heart. So I did not want to pass that on. So I wanted to make that decision, right? My wife and I rooted on that. Secondly, though, to your point, they do a very good job because it's a bell curve. And they give you this distributed score. There are some things like schizophrenia and others that we know, you have a low disposition to it. And so you're probably not going to be schizophrenic. You have high creativity markers. Like they've seen that in populations.

• 1:07:23Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's a dopamine dysregulation disorder.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  What we did is said, hey, this is all really interesting. We are going to make a first round of selections based on if it's compatible with life, A. And then B, if it doesn't have this particular mutation that we don't want to pass on. And then C, we're going to look at the data and we looked at things like Alzheimer runs in my wife's family. So we looked at that one, right? And we said, that's a pretty big, so we weighted that in our score and how we came up with it. But some of the other ones that have high environmental factors, we didn't factor those in. Now, once again, you get the burden of knowledge, right?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  We're getting all these knowledge. I will make the argument that by the time my kids are old enough to have a disposition to have Alzheimer's, more than likely that will be cured. But we made some decisions from there.

• 1:08:09Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  But to your point, if we would've done all that, we wouldn't have had any kids.

• 1:08:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  There was no like perfect model out there. So it is an interesting question as it relates to germ line editing. But I think that over time, the world will agree that there are certain things that we should use our powers for good to eradicate, that all, you know, ethnicities, all genders and all religious affiliations would agree on. I think there are some of those.

• 1:08:40Dax Shepard?

  Of course. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  I would hope so.

• 1:08:41Dax Shepard?

  As we said, sickle cell.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  I don't know why anyone would be against being able to edit out sickle cell.

• 1:08:46Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  So I think that's coming.

• 1:08:50Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:08:57Dax Shepard?

  We get support by Peloton. You know that feeling when you're spiraling over a problem and you just can't figure it out? When that happens to me, I need a change of pace and I've found that running is the best way. It takes my brain out of the driver's seat and I come back with a fresh perspective. Running can be freeing and cathartic and Peloton helps you feel all of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's movable and foldable, designed to fit your life. So next time you feel stuck, you can go for a run literally anywhere, whether that's in your office, living room, or even the attic. Plus they have classes with expert instructors and programs to meet you at any level and keep you moving. Let yourself run. Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com.

• 1:09:45Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but you don't need a day on the calendar to give yourself permission to talk to someone. I've been in therapy for a long time and the stuff rattling around in my head always just quiets down the second I say it out loud. And it doesn't have to be some big life crisis. Maybe it's a work thing that's taking up too much space or hard relationship moment, or just a feeling that something's off. That's enough. That's worth talking about.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

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• 1:10:34Dax Shepard?

  You know, I was just talking to a friend who has just started it. And I said, one of the most powerful elements of it is just hearing yourself say out loud, the thing that's been ruminating in your head and how different it sounds once it's out into the world. You gain perspective immediately just by hearing yourself say it.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do.

• 1:10:50Dax Shepard?

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• 1:11:33Dax Shepard?

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• 1:11:44Speaker 05

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• 1:12:29Speaker 05

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• 1:12:41Dax Shepard?

  This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skillset, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point you're ready to put it out there and that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from, I've been working on this to here it is, come find me.

• 1:13:26Dax Shepard?

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• 1:13:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me then about gene drives.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  So I'm very pro gene drives, but I'm only for them for invasive species. So the most famous example is using a genetically modified insect. They also work for vertebrates, which we'll get into. Using a genetically modified insect to then put a gene that then gets distributed through the population for population suppression and control.

• 1:14:12Dax Shepard?

  The mosquitoes, the big example.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  The mosquito example was there's this thesis of like in Africa, you get malaria, you get all these disease states, that's bad. Everyone agrees that it's bad. With that said, they didn't actually use a gene drive. They actually used a form of, kind of got marketed as a gene drive. It was more irradiated mosquitoes that lowered the populations. But the problem is in Africa, mosquitoes are a part of the food web. They are not an invasive species. I totally agree that there's badness that comes from, from the spreading of disease and mosquitoes are a major spreader of disease. In other cases where you have invasive species, where they are eradicating other species and having an effect on the landscape or on food production, that their removal only benefits the land, I'm pro that.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  But how do we know? Like the other one that said the extinct one was eating all the sheep, they would say that was an invasive species.

• 1:15:02Dax Shepard?

  Well, it was indigenous to Tasmania. This is more like when you bring in the brown trout to this stream and this places all their fish.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  So you have Asian carp in the Great Lakes and it's destroying the Great Lakes ecosystem. The U.S. government has a $3 billion environmental remediation program that will not kill them. We're dealing with invasive species right now in Texas, pretty bad. There's this thing that came in from Panama because global warming, it's gotten hotter. And then also we as humans are just translocating more and more and more, right? So we have actually brought in the screw worm, which is this fly that lays larvae that literally screws down and spreads disease, kills cattle. It multiplies like crazy in hot weather. Texas is like 104 when I was there the other day.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Not great.

• 1:15:44Dax Shepard?

  Uh, New Zealand, it's either the possum.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's bushel possums.

• 1:15:48Dax Shepard?

  They're not supposed to be there. They come over on ships and cargo holds, they get into the population or someone brings one as a pet. And like everywhere in New Zealand, it's like, if you see one call, they gotta get rid of these fuckers.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Same thing for cats in Australia, right? I'm not anti cats.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  I am, so it's fine.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:16:03Dax Shepard?

  Let Monica take the hit on this one.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Sort of anti cats, but in Australia, people are poisoning cats because the largest mammalian extinction rates that are occurring in the world are in Australia of unique species of marsupials because of cats. Cats are great predators. No one followed Bob Barker and like spayed neutered them. They just released them out there, right? And so people are actually shooting, and that's an animal welfare disaster.

• 1:16:29Dax Shepard?

  And also we have this history of it too, Monica. It's like the snakes got into Ireland, so then they bring in mongoose to kill the snake. Now the mongoose is like, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  So the idea with gene drives is you can introduce a gene. It's not going to jump species. We spent a lot of time with this administration, educating them on genetic engineering and showing that like with your choice on the screw worm, you have three choices. You can release tons of irradiated flies that will slow the population and they're spending a billion five right now in Texas of doing that. Not efficient, not going to solve the problem, will slow it, and then they're going to have to do it again and again. Like this is a repeat thing forever.

• 1:17:08Dax Shepard?

  It's like the war on drugs.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, or you can inoculate the cows. Nobody wants to do that.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  You can accept higher beef prices because you're going to have less cows, start to import beef, which they're doing, and you're seeing the feedback on that. Or you can use a gene drive that eradicates just the species from where it's not supposed to be.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  And it's eight months to eradicate species versus 12 years.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:17:31Dax Shepard?

  Eight months. Are there any pilot programs where this is happening?

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Ours.

• 1:17:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And it's going to be for this worm?

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  We're trying. We have gotten approval from different groups within the intelligence community and in the defense.

• 1:17:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Are mosquitoes part of the food web here?

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I hate them so much.

• 1:17:49Dax Shepard?

  Well, bats are chowing down on them. Spiders are eating them.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Mosquitoes are absolutely key to most food webs, except in certain island states like Hawaii. Avian malaria is being spread by mosquitoes and killing a lot of these amazing, like the Hawaiian honey, a lot of these amazing birds. So you could eradicate mosquitoes. You could eradicate them on certain islands. So if you do everything right from a conservation perspective and you don't eradicate invasive species, you're like, we're not going to drill over here, we're not going to produce over here, you're going to protect all these lands, you're protecting all these species, and you don't get rid of invasive species, you don't even make a dent in environmental remediation. Like invasive species are the biggest threat to disease spread, environmental collapse, and environmental remediation efforts.

• 1:18:35Dax Shepard?

  And again, we're responsible for bringing these.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we move all this stuff around.

• 1:18:40Dax Shepard?

  We've caused it.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Or change the climate for them.

• 1:18:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay, let's talk about artificial eggs, the synthetic womb, and just synthetic biology in general. Like what's happening there?

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  We have three artificial womb projects. We have a marsupial roller culture system. So all of the pursuit of these is how do we grow animals fully outside of needing a surrogate? So we have that. We also have a second project, which is a placental interface.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Which sounds weird. We're making uterine walls. The way it works is the embryo hatches and then we actually have a placenta that invades into the uterine wall. It's pretty amazing. It's like right out of a sci-fi movie. That's how biology works. So we're making a synthetic uterine wall so that we can make a synthetic uterine sac that you can grow them to turn in. And we've had successful invasions. So you, you track these on, there's this thing called the Carnegie sale of development. And we've tracked them through it and we're pretty close on both of those. And then we had a third one for the avian because there's no bird big enough that can grow, definitely an elephant bird, but definitely a South Island giant moa. So what we did, because we're working with the Naitahu people, working with Peter Jackson and the Maori, the eggs are still eight times bigger than that of an emu.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  So you're going to have to birth it through an emu, then transfer it into an artificial egg.

• 1:19:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh wow.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we birthed the world's first birds fully ex-uterine using this repeat artificial egg process. It looks like a more fun version of avian.

• 1:20:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, sure. What is the actual synthetic, like what is the cell made of? Is it made of carbon?

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we take the cells from the chickens and we put them into this matrix.

• 1:20:13Dax Shepard?

  It's like a little infrastructure that it grows around?

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  And then we actually had to develop a polymer, it just looks like plastic when you watch the video, where it allows the right level of permeability of oxygen and whatnot. And so people had tried to grow chickens and other birds outside of an egg or womb and they would plug in oxygen. They do all these sets that were developmentally lethal, right? The eggs actually pour, the eggs actually breathe. How do you recreate that? But also then, if you're going to recreate it, how do you re-engineer it so you can do more? So artificial eggs, you can hook up to microscopes. We actually created a visible and non-visible spectrum lighting system. So you can put it in a cradle and truly understand it and have different lights. But if you point directional, even these high-frequency lights into the developing embryo, it can destroy the embryo.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  So we actually had to create channels and refractive mirrors so that you dissipate the light.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  So a lot went into it. And then eggs actually, based on the shape and the pressure and gravity, help form the developing chicken.

• 1:21:14Dax Shepard?

  So the actual cells are derived from chickens?

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:18Dax Shepard?

  And across all, even if you were doing like a mammal womb?

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no. Those are just for that.

• 1:21:23Dax Shepard?

  How do you get the mammal cell?

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  So the mammal cells are whoever the genetic donor is. It's the Fatel Dunart for the thylacine. It's a respective genetic donor. It's the gray wolf or the dire wolf. It's the Rhone antelope for the blue buck. Making sure I don't say anything that we haven't said.

• 1:21:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, no, you said blue buck.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Cause these are the closest matches.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the closest genetic matches.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Cause we're not just doing somatic cell nuclear transfer for serocity, the cloning step, we're doing interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is crazy. You have mitochondrial rejection. There's a lot of things that go into the engineering of this.

• 1:21:57Dax Shepard?

  Well, also, I just know this from humans, right? That 50% of all pregnancies self-terminate.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Dax Shepard?

  Because 50% of the time during meiosis, there's like disjunction. There's so many errors that happen that the body's great at detecting, screening, and then aborting.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:22:14Dax Shepard?

  And so if our own average is 50%.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  And we're pretty good at it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:18Dax Shepard?

  We've been evolving for this long.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Cloning efficiencies are somewhere between 2 and 4%. We bought a company called Viagen last year that most famously cloned a bunch of celebrities' dogs, including Tom Brady's dog, which like broke the internet.

• 1:22:30Dax Shepard?

  Celine Dion was the first.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  No, Barbra Streisand.

• 1:22:33Dax Shepard?

  I'm sorry, Barbra Streisand. Yeah, sorry, sorry, Celine.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  That was a big deal.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  She did that before we acquired them. They do horses, cats, and dogs.

• 1:22:40Dax Shepard?

  Did they do this, I saw a great 60 Minutes on the world's most famous polo player. I think he's from Argentina.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did their horses too.

• 1:22:46Dax Shepard?

  And he's got eight of the same horses, Monica? The horse he won the most on, they just made eight of?

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  That is their business. Yeah, we bought them because there's another like 18 species that have ever been cloned.

• 1:22:58Dax Shepard?

  They're at 78%. We didn't say that. Yeah, versus 2%.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one of the reasons we bought them. We support their consumer business. People were worried, we actually got a lot of emails where people were like, are you going to not allow them to clone the dogs? I was like, no, you keep doing that. We're using their tech for in-natured species production. Cause I do think that we can productionize in-natured species.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, because people's moral issue with cloning the animals is interesting because we've discussed this, I think, on here as well. It doesn't come at a real ethical cost, but for some reason it does strike people, I think.

• 1:23:28Dax Shepard?

  There's two common pushbacks. One is legitimate, which is like all the people that are in the rescue a dog. It's like, if you want a dog, there's all these dogs that need a home, go get one of those. So that's, that's bulletproof. That's a good criticism.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  People have asked me, I have two dogs, Barbie and Ken, before the movie came out. They're much older.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  But if you're like before the dolls.

• 1:23:45Dax Shepard?

  They're 95 years old.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  They're quite old dogs.

• 1:23:48Dax Shepard?

  They're not cloned, but we have.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  We have, we have super.

• 1:23:50Dax Shepard?

  We have ended their censuses.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  But they're both rescues and they're amazing, right? So I'm very pro-rescue. We work with the American Humane Society around it. But at the same time, I could see the other argument, right? So people ask me, would you clone your dogs? And I'm like, I don't know. If my kid was like, I would just go adopt another dog, cause I love to your point. But if my kid's like, I don't know, I'm not in that position yet.

• 1:24:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, the other criticism is you're playing God. So if the argument is somehow first, you're required to believe.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  I don't agree with that.

• 1:24:19Dax Shepard?

  No, I know. I'm just saying, if the prerequisite for the argument is you must first believe in God, I'm already out. But then secondly, guess what, y'all? We've already been playing God by fucking eradicating.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  You're playing God when you take cholesterol medication.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  On yourself. Or when you eradicate the dodos, or when you cut down the rainforest.

• 1:24:38Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  Or overfish the oceans. Like, we play God every day.

• 1:24:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so why don't we play God for some good?

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  But part of it is like, okay, so if your kid is like, it has to be Barbie. Are we then?

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Teaching them the right lesson.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  How will they process grief?

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  Like, I understand, our dogs are like a part of our family. And I think some people take that even further. I don't know, it's a good question.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  It's tricky.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  I have not cloned my dog yet.

• 1:25:02Dax Shepard?

  Here's the other issue is like, just because I want to do something, I don't understand why I think that should apply to everyone. So no, I think the beauty of dogs is what you teach the kids is that they don't live that long. It's a crazy endeavor. Come fall in love with this thing and in nine years you'll be heartbroken.

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  I don't want one.

• 1:25:19Dax Shepard?

  But that's a great experience for people to have. And then low and behold, they get another dog and do it again. There is a beautiful life, wasn't there? It is worth the pain to experience a love.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  I do not, I do not disagree with that at all.

• 1:25:31Dax Shepard?

  But I don't need that to apply to everyone else, cause that's what I think my kids should learn.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  But they're not going to experience the pain if they just have the same dog again.

• 1:25:39Dax Shepard?

  That's my point. Like, it wouldn't be for me, because we all miss Lola. If ever there was a dog we would have cloned, it would have been Lola.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  That's part of human life.

• 1:25:46Dax Shepard?

  That's right. And it teaches them, it's still worth it to put yourself out there for these other dogs.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I say this about Viagen, like my goal is, you know, where we're standing up outside of the de-extinction work and the technologies that can be applied to humans and some of the other stuff we talked about, we open source all of our technologies for conservation, right? And so we have a foundation, we raised a hundred million dollars for our foundation. And we just say, use our technologies for free for conservation, right? And we've been standing up these like Noah's Ark 2.0 bio vaults all around the world because we're eradicating species so fast as humanity, we've got to have a backup plan because conservation doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating these species. And so why I bought Viagen was I think people should have those conversations. I told you, I don't know what I would do. And I own Viagen, I don't know if I would clone my dog. But that's just me being transparent about it. I'm very interested because not just that cloning efficiency, but of the like 18 species

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  that have ever been cloned, like 16 of them were done by Viagen, right? Black-footed ferret, Sivorsky's horse, we worked with them on some of our work on the red wolves. And so when you start to go talk to these governments, if you can have those capabilities and you have genetic engineering where you can engineer and lost genetic diversity, so you don't have bottleneck and you have these bio vaults, that one plus one plus one isn't three, that is a key backup model for life. Now, that doesn't mean we should go hunt things and kill things off, but we are in a spot where we are losing species. And some of these national pride species, ecological function species, these keystone species, or if they're important to indigenous people groups, we should do everything to accelerate their recovery.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  And the current recovery models, they're just not working. We are slowing an inevitable end. And that's why I bought Viagen, because one of the things we've been educating this administration on is like, hey, let us go back everything up. We're not going to ask any money from this administration or taxpayers. We'll do it on our dime and we'll give all of that data to the world. We're not keeping any secret data. And then the next thing we're going to ask them to do is like, can we pick a couple species and can we clone them for you? So that we can like build a population where they actually can survive on their own, not in a captive managed model. That's where I think that the cross-functional integration of these technologies through the lens of synthetic biology gives us so much more than just a mammoth.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Wow, so fascinating.

• 1:28:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, my last question, y'all, hey, you are a business at the end of the day. And you've raised, I think, $600 million and you're valued at $10 billion.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Ish.

• 1:28:12Dax Shepard?

  Those are rough numbers we can agree on. What's the big revenue stream? Why is it worth $10 billion? Where is money being made?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  So right now, we're not focused on revenue. The technologies for us are key to the revenue. And so in the short term, we've produced viable spin-out businesses. Our drug discovery platform company, Formbio, is worth over $100 million. Our plastic degradation company is worth over $100 million. Astromech, which is our computational biology, ancestral reconstruction business, we just raised a $3.8 billion valuation, right? Is one of our spinoffs. We have two other spinoffs we haven't announced yet that we're very excited about.

• 1:28:48Dax Shepard?

  But I guess my curiosity is, do you think ultimately you'll be licensing or performing procedures?

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  I think we'll be doing four things. I think we will spin off and license technologies for new businesses, which we've gotten pretty good at in a very short period of time. We've only been around for four and a half years.

• 1:29:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  It's kind of insane. We are the number one genome engineering company by at least a decade in four and a half years. So I think that's quite interesting. So we've proven the license and spinout model of the technologies for new sectors. Licensing the technologies directly into human healthcare stuff is kind of another phase of it. Invasive species is a $6 trillion global economic impact.

• 1:29:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's huge. We are the only company in the world that has invertebrate and vertebrate gene drives that can work cross-species.

• 1:29:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so that's a big.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  So government will be another vertical. And then I do think there will be a component, which I say all the time, around working with governments in ecotourism and carbon credit models. Like, if we can restore ecosystems in the Arctic by putting mammoths back in there, we will get annuitized carbon and nature credits from that.

• 1:29:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Fucking fascinating, man. I mean, talk about being on the brink of all this.

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:29:57Dax Shepard?

  Biology AI.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  It's fun.

• 1:29:58Dax Shepard?

  This conference of all the things that are exciting. This was very, very fascinating.

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Thanks for coming. This was great.

• 1:30:04Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Mugs.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  That's just me.

• 1:30:29Dax Shepard?

  Magnets as a kid?

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if, well, I mean, if my mom would let me buy it, like if we're on vacation or something.

• 1:30:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I liked doing that and keychains.

• 1:30:40Dax Shepard?

  Keychains as well.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  I love collecting.

• 1:30:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're a collector.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  I'm a, what do we call it? A magpie, not a hoarder. Fuck you and thank you.

• 1:30:51Dax Shepard?

  What do we call, what do you call it? A hoarder.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  I think it's called a magpie.

• 1:30:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, a magpie collects little trinkets.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  I think I'm a magpie.

• 1:31:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:31:02Dax Shepard?

  Do you know there's, it's a huge industry. I've just been educated on this. I had no idea.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Pretty.

• 1:31:08Dax Shepard?

  Magpies? Oh, sure.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:31:10Dax Shepard?

  And they're very smart, I believe.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 1:31:12Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says highly intelligent, long-tailed birds.

• 1:31:16Dax Shepard?

  You gotta be intelligent to wanna collect stuff, I guess.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my god. Magpies rank among the world's smartest animals.

• 1:31:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy. Maybe you need a magpie tattoo, like my crow tattoo.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  That would, that's actually cute, but you know, I'm not getting a tattoo.

• 1:31:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Where would you get a tattoo if you were gonna get one?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, head, a tattoo.

• 1:31:41Dax Shepard?

  Forehead.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  What if I got one and so you never saw it? Cause it was on my head. My hair was covering it.

• 1:31:47Dax Shepard?

  Well, you'd first have to shave your head.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Ouch, I'm not doing that. Um, I would get one probably here commonplace that for the listener, this is my forearm, but like.

• 1:31:58Dax Shepard?

  Right in the crook of your elbow there?

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Below.

• 1:32:01Dax Shepard?

  Just below. Like when you're playing the game with your eyes closed and someone's running their finger up, where you think it. Yeah, right? When you think it's there, but it's not.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  When you say, stop, but you're not there yet. It'd be there.

• 1:32:13Dax Shepard?

  You know what's fun about that game is you already know that you're gonna say stop too early.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:32:17Dax Shepard?

  And, and so you do let it go further than you think and then still it's not there. What a game.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  What a game. Universal game. Or like here, it would be, I think, on my arm. I'm not getting one though.

• 1:32:35Dax Shepard?

  No. What would be the price?

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Oh, god. But I could still get whatever I wanted or what's the price for like a bad tattoo?

• 1:32:45Dax Shepard?

  Dick on your neck or something. No, it's a magpie on your crook of your elbow there. One million dollars?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  No, this is a bad game. Cause then if people, whatever I say, people will get mad at me.

• 1:32:57Dax Shepard?

  Dollars.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Look.

• 1:33:00Dax Shepard?

  Like David Sedaris's thing. Remember he's, he's talking about COVID and people yelling at other people? And if you were just to write like, I, um, the sun was on my face and it made me smile that I. Oh, it must be nice. I don't even have a face.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Dax Shepard?

  I don't even have a face. Boy, it really, that parasocial thing is I, it is as bad as, you know, when people say like a constantly bringing up this podcast or that podcast. That is me, almost anything anyone says, it triggers a Sedaris story.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:33Dax Shepard?

  And then they gotta hear it.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Well, luckily, his stories are fantastic, so they're good ones to bring up, I, I would say.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  That's true.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Well, you just told it on an episode, so maybe you don't want to, but I was gonna say, do you wanna talk about your hosting? Cause you did bring up that you were gonna host, not host, sorry, you were gonna present at the Prop Master Awards.

• 1:33:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, I did on Saturday. Yeah, yeah, I can tell that.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:34:01Dax Shepard?

  First, I have to say that, um, Jeffrey Johnson is.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Shout out.

• 1:34:05Dax Shepard?

  Is, is one of the greatest human beings in all of show business of all the different crew members I've ever worked with. I just, I love him like you can't imagine. He was the prop master on Parenthood for six years.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  And Chips.

• 1:34:17Dax Shepard?

  And then he did Chips and I think he had another job and I think he was, he really did me a favor by doing Chips. He's incredible and we had so much fun. And so at any rate, they have an award show on Emmy weekend and for themselves, which is warranted and adorable.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Dax Shepard?

  Um, they get to have a glitzy night like all the other departments and, uh, so each year I present. And we, he and I usually do some kind of a bit and he always thinks of it. So it was, I think, last year, cause you know, your, your prop person has. A bag with all your props in it. They've got your watch, they've got, you know, all the bullshit you gotta wear. And they come up to you before the scene and they put your watch on you and they hand you your ring and all this crap.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:00Dax Shepard?

  And so he had the speak and I stood next to him last year and had his prop bag. And I was constantly doing things to him and putting stuff on and blah, blah, blah. So anyways, this year, his idea was that I would carry him across the stage. Set him on the other side, then come back to the microphone to do my presenting of the category.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:19Dax Shepard?

  And it was last minute idea and he said, you know, and then you come back to the mic, say, you know, prop department always carries the actors on their shoulders. Thought I could return the favor. So it didn't go as planned.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:29Dax Shepard?

  Um, I was like, yeah, that's no problem. I can definitely carry you across the stage. I do nothing but train. And for god knows what, this is it.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Dax Shepard?

  So I pick him up, I'm holding him, waiting for them to go through the, uh, whatever they call that when they are saying. He's a podcaster and an actor.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  Oh, he, they're introducing you.

• 1:35:49Dax Shepard?

  The introduction, right?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Dax Shepard?

  And again, I'm holding him and I'm like, skip the heck, you know, whatever, just get to one thing. It's too many things, cause I'm holding him. And then I walk across the stage and then the stage is longer than I think it is.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Big stage.

• 1:36:02Dax Shepard?

  And slash, I haven't carried a man like a baby. Ever? I just assume, yeah, I can live away.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  So anyways, it's a pretty long walk across the stage. I think people get a little chuckle out of it.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:15Dax Shepard?

  They know Jeffrey's being carried like a baby.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:36:17Dax Shepard?

  I set him down and now I'm hyper aware of like, I gotta run back to the microphone, cause it's like, they're now waiting for a while. They had to watch me carry him. So then I run back to the microphone and then when I get to the microphone, it is starting to occur to me like. I need to really kinda bend over and breathe. Like I've just done twenty squats.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:36Dax Shepard?

  I'm like, I'm like, yeah, yeah. The category of, you know, and I'm, I start reading and I'm like. Oh, my god, I'm so out of breath, yet I'm having to read. It's getting so bad that I can, I'm getting blasts of light in my eyesight.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Dax Shepard?

  You know, like little sparklers are going off in my aurora.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Dax Shepard?

  And to the point where I have to, I have to acknowledge it. Like I can't carry on. It's like three pages, this, this, this category intro. Maybe more. And so finally I go, oh, okay, gang, I'm just gonna acknowledge, I'm gonna admit that I am, I am winded. Okay, I, I shouldn't be, but I, I've really lost my breath.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Dax Shepard?

  And so laughing, laughing, laughing.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Funny.

• 1:37:17Dax Shepard?

  And then I somehow thought that got me the breaths I needed, but really I needed to sit there and.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  But you.

• 1:37:23Dax Shepard?

  I needed, I needed to breathe for about ten or fifteen seconds of silence.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Dax Shepard?

  I wasn't gonna do that.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Dax Shepard?

  I just acknowledged the thing and then I went back into it and then I was proceeding through and then there was some hard names to read.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 1:37:38Dax Shepard?

  Really hard. I feel so ashamed that I, I know I butchered this name. I, I'm hopeful the person wasn't actually there.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Okay, fingers.

• 1:37:46Dax Shepard?

  Cause I said, I'm, I'm butchering this. I acknowledge it. I'm so sorry. It's.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 1:37:52Dax Shepard?

  Like offering like.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Is this televised?

• 1:37:54Dax Shepard?

  Uh, no.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:56Dax Shepard?

  Thank goodness. Although it is being recorded, so god knows where.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:59Dax Shepard?

  This exists. But all to say, I really was teetering on consciousness by the end of it.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:38:07Dax Shepard?

  Trying to hold in tight my, make my talking voice normal while hyperventilating.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's hard. Did you have an identity crisis? Because you're like, and did you also think people were watching and like. How is he having a hard time carrying? He's so big.

• 1:38:23Dax Shepard?

  Exactly. If I were them, I'd be like, what's, what's all this about? If you can't carry a guy across the stage and then talk.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, then like.

• 1:38:29Dax Shepard?

  I'm having the same feeling.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. Did you have a crisis?

• 1:38:32Dax Shepard?

  But I do urge someone to carry a hundred and ninety pound man, you know, a couple hundred feet.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  What it's like for me to try to get your body off the train tracks, okay? It's not as easy as you think.

• 1:38:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that's.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  But superhuman strength will come in.

• 1:38:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Don't worry.

• 1:38:48Dax Shepard?

  Um, no, I had a very healthy response, which is like, that didn't go well. I didn't do a good job presenting. I didn't do a good job reading. I fucked up some names.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Dax Shepard?

  And, um, on the ride home, which in the past I would have really been lashing myself over. I was like, Jeff still knows.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Dax Shepard?

  I love him.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:11Dax Shepard?

  And that I'm always around if he calls.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  You showed up.

• 1:39:14Dax Shepard?

  And that was the goal.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:16Dax Shepard?

  The goal wasn't to be spectacular.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:39:18Dax Shepard?

  Or to have perfect cardiovascular training.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  I know, it's.

• 1:39:22Dax Shepard?

  I'd like to see if anyone could really do what I did and not be out of breath. I think even if you train.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  I think if like, um, who's the.

• 1:39:29Dax Shepard?

  Lance Armstrong could probably do it. He had the best cardio probably of anyone.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  But he might not have the strength.

• 1:39:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's all.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Both.

• 1:39:36Dax Shepard?

  I need something on him.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  I think John Cena could do it.

• 1:39:39Dax Shepard?

  Well, that would be a good challenge.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  I'd like to challenge him.

• 1:39:43Dax Shepard?

  Like, um, you know that old show they used to have on NBC? It was like, um, Contest of the Stars or whatever. And then, and they'd have TV stars competing against athletes.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:39:53Dax Shepard?

  Do you know that famous show? It would be like on a Saturday. This would be a good show. So you have, it's like, it's a game show and you have to carry someone across the stage and then you have to come back and you have to make some kind of speech. And then that's somehow evaluated and that's how you win or lose. And it'd basically just be John Cena and I guess competing.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Um, no, we could, no, there's other people like, um, Alan Richson.

• 1:40:14Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, he would be great.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  I mean, for old times sake. Schwarzenegger. Well, but we don't know what he's capable of.

• 1:40:23Dax Shepard?

  I don't like to dabble in gossip, but I will say I did see a little headline that Catherine Schwarzenegger had posted some pictures of summer. And there was a picture of Maria and him together. Having a lovely time. And it made me very happy because I had seen that doc of him and I was very sad. He seemed really lonely. In the doc, I could, I felt the heartbreak that he had, you know, wasn't with this woman.

• 1:40:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think he very much would like to have stayed with his, that's my guess. I have no inside information. But to see that they were enjoying each other's company. I don't know, it gave me an abnormal amount of happiness.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  That's good. Yeah, I think, uh, families, if they can. I mean, your mom and dad were around each other. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people strive for that if they can. It's hard.

• 1:41:19Dax Shepard?

  I tip my hat to Dave Barton, my stepdad.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Did Arnold cheat?

• 1:41:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, very publicly, he had a child with the housekeeper.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, I'm really out of the loop.

• 1:41:29Dax Shepard?

  Who is now competing in bodybuilding competitions. Son, his son. That was a beautiful part of the doc. He's like, this is a great embarrassment to me, but I would never deny my son. I want to be proud of the fact, this is my son. His name is such and such. I would never hide from that as much as this is painful. I want the world to know I couldn't be more proud to have him as a son. And now he's a, he's a bodybuilder. He just competed in a, like a natural bodybuilding, uh, contest. Which if you want to see the difference between using steroids and not, look at one of these natural bodybuilding shows versus the steroid ones. It's not even the same. It's crazy.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad he, that would be really horrible if he like, didn't want anything to do with them. So I'm, I'm glad that like, he brought this person into this world who has no choice, you know, so like, I'm very glad to hear.

• 1:42:22Dax Shepard?

  It's shrouded in a lot of public embarrassment.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Sure, again, that this person's born into. Like, and they themselves are now a part of this narrative that they didn't choose. So on top of it, if your parent was like, I don't want anything to do with you because you're reminding me of this, that's.

• 1:42:40Dax Shepard?

  Or I don't want to talk about it. That would be an understandable thing.

• 1:42:46Dax Shepard?

  For him to go, I don't want to talk about this in public. So I think it is an, an act of integrity to go like, yeah, I don't want to talk about this, but of course I am going to talk about this. Cause I am very proud to be his father.

• 1:43:00Dax Shepard?

  I think it's nice.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's definitely nice.

• 1:43:03Dax Shepard?

  A lot of people just go like, I don't want to talk about this.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, yes, they would. And I guess I'm saying like, for that other person. Actually, for both the other people involved, the mother and the son, that's like horrible. So I'm glad, I, I'm happy to hear that. And I think, um, the ki, I wonder if the kids hang out. All of the, his children.

• 1:43:30Dax Shepard?

  I don't know that, but I think so. I feel like I've seen photos.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  I mean, again, it's like.

• 1:43:35Dax Shepard?

  They're a lovely family. Like I, again, I was lucky enough to be around that family 20 years ago. They're lovely, lovely folks. I love Maria. Yeah, she's radical.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  I think you could be lovely and still be like, ah. I don't know, but I, again, well, I guess we don't know for sure, but my hope is that they've embraced this person.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Maybe they all have Thanksgiving.

• 1:44:02Dax Shepard?

  Perhaps.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  All have Thanksgiving together.

• 1:44:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I can't put too fine a point on how much I love Maria. She's so smart and fun to talk to. She's a great debater.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  She could be part of it. Carrying the, in the competition show.

• 1:44:19Dax Shepard?

  Do you think Maria Shriver could be a part of carrying?

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 1:44:23Dax Shepard?

  Of all of her many virtues, which there are probably too many to list. Carrying a hundred ninety pound man across the stage might not be what she could do.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  Okay, do you think she could lift you off the tracks?

• 1:44:34Dax Shepard?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  We just don't know.

• 1:44:36Dax Shepard?

  We don't know. I don't know how she feels about me. I don't know if the, um, adrenaline, you know, you know, like, the superpowers might not hit her.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know until we're in this position. None of us know. As we know, practice doesn't make perfect in this case.

• 1:44:53Dax Shepard?

  But I do have a hunch you are capable of more if you care about the person a lot. Yeah, so I just don't know how I rank out of ten. How much I would enact her super.

• 1:45:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I care about Jeff a ton, so I could carry him for virtues. I can't make a speech afterwards.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Gosh, do you think, do you think you'd risk your life?

• 1:45:18Dax Shepard?

  For who?

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  For a stranger? If a stranger was on the tracks? This is really hard question, like.

• 1:45:26Dax Shepard?

  It's almost a useless question because there's what you think you would do and then there's what you do. I will say my track record shows that when I see stuff that I think I can change, I, I act very instinctually to, to get involved. In the past, I have. Again, do I want to run into the apartment of my neighbor who's getting beat by this guy who's twice my size? If I think about that, no.

• 1:45:53Dax Shepard?

  But I did. You know?

• 1:45:57Dax Shepard?

  And I didn't know her well. I just was more like, said hi to her on the sidewalk occasionally, you know? But yeah, I hear a woman screaming and. Go, I, I'll go.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  I feel bad because I just don't want to go.

• 1:46:14Dax Shepard?

  You don't want to have to go into the apartment?

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Go, but I'll call nine one one.

• 1:46:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's Bree handled the nine one one of it all. While I ran up the staircase and they came tumbling down the staircase.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know.

• 1:46:41Dax Shepard?

  This episode is brought to you by Service Now. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks. I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts, the stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where Service Now's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:47:24Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  But I'll, you know what I'll do? I'll have a, I'll have a hard conversation with anyone, you know? When those people are in jail. They're handcuffed so they can't hurt me.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  This guy was straight out of a Guy Ritchie film. He had a head the size of a microwave shaved, thick, thick fucking Cockney accent. Looked like a rugby player.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  Did he go to jail?

• 1:48:01Dax Shepard?

  I have no idea. He, well, he was not arrested in that moment. No, I came, you know. We got into a wrestling match in the top of the stairwell. My elbow went through the, um, uh, the fire extinguisher. You know, it's got the glass break, so my elbow went through that. And then now all of a sudden we're like, we're tumbling down this very tall staircase. And she then locks, deadbolts her door. So she's now good.

• 1:48:34Dax Shepard?

  We separate enough, he runs back up the stairs to her. He's pounding on the door, but it's now deadbolted. I am now at the bottom of the stairs, just making sure he can't get in. I'm like, I gotta fucking, please don't get in this. Go back up. And then as he starts coming down the stairwells, when he finally realizes, and I, and I'm yelling, dude, the fucking cops are on their way. So I'm like, let him know the cops are on the way. He recognizes he's not going to get in there. And as he starts coming down the stairs, I now, um, come down the sidewalk. To my stairwell, which is the next one over, Bree's standing there with the cordless phone on one nine one one. And then she takes a few steps up. I stand between her and him.

• 1:49:14Dax Shepard?

  So I don't know what's next. And then he walks by and he does not want round two with me. And he goes, you wouldn't understand, she's a fucking cunt. Yeah, that was his last words. And then he disappeared and I never saw him again.

• 1:49:33Dax Shepard?

  She did, we were, I was doing laundry at one point, a week later, and I was coming out of the little shared laundry room and she thanked me.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  It would be if like, two days later, you saw him back in there.

• 1:49:47Dax Shepard?

  I mean, that's the pattern sadly, yeah.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  I know. So good for her.

• 1:49:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he not, she did not invite him back over.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Life is so hard.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  It really is. It really is hard.

• 1:50:06Dax Shepard?

  I gotta tell you, that was an action-packed apartment building.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:11Dax Shepard?

  There was something happening. Once a month, something happened there.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:15Dax Shepard?

  You know, watched the one neighbor OD right below her apartment.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Dax Shepard?

  Uh, yeah, it was fucking action-packed.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  You got out of there.

• 1:50:25Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm. Bree was there for another.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  By herself.

• 1:50:29Dax Shepard?

  Year and a half or so. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  That's, she's, she is tough. Like, she could definitely, she could definitely play in the competition.

• 1:50:41Dax Shepard?

  She was pretty comfortable in chaos.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  But that's different, like, yeah, I guess. But physical violence is different than, like,

• 1:50:52Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Chaos.

• 1:50:53Dax Shepard?

  But at that point in our relationship, she had already witnessed a pretty good deal of it. I mean, you know, one of the, we're just, like, we weren't even really dating. I had a girlfriend, she had a boyfriend. Carrie was in town. We went over to her house to hang with her. We all got drunk.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Dax Shepard?

  And this is when the roommate is, I'm in a conversation with the roommate.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Who's roommate?

• 1:51:19Dax Shepard?

  Bree's.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Oh, Bree's.

• 1:51:20Dax Shepard?

  Uh, Carrie's visiting from Michigan.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. You go over to Bree's house.

• 1:51:24Dax Shepard?

  Go over to Bree's house. She lived with like four people.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:27Dax Shepard?

  One of the dudes and I are talking. Apparently, we're in a, a, a fight, but I don't, I truly don't recognize that. Tim Lovsted's there, too.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:51:37Dax Shepard?

  And I'm sitting cross-legged on my hand, sitting on my hands, leaning against a dresser, in the middle of like, I think we're just having like kind of a friendly debate.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:51:46Dax Shepard?

  And he stands up, and then I'm like, oh, this guy's leaving the room over this? And as he crosses me, he just starts fucking punching me in the face. And this is when I got my nose broken.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:51:57Dax Shepard?

  And I like, I can't use my hands to get up, because I gotta use my hands to cover my face. And then he runs out of the room, and it's like someone poured a gallon of milk on her. It's the most blood I've ever seen. It came out of my nose during this.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:11Dax Shepard?

  And then I get up and I run to his room. He's deadbolted the room. Then I hear his side door open. Then I hear his car drive down the driveway. Bree's pretty alarmed. There's a lot of blood.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:52:22Dax Shepard?

  And Carrie, Carrie's there, and she says to Bree, she goes, this is nothing. This is nothing. This is fine. Like, she's.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  She's like, don't even.

• 1:52:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this is, this is not, this is standard B's. This is nothing.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  And she's still, you know, she still dated you after that for nine years. I wonder what, not to do, sorry.

• 1:52:47Dax Shepard?

  Go ahead.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  I just wonder, I wanna know what the conver, the debate was. I wanna know what led to that. Like, I know, because in your head, you're like, what, we're just, but obviously.

• 1:52:59Dax Shepard?

  It was about his girlfriend.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:01Dax Shepard?

  And, um, yeah.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And I told you, he broke every bone in his wrist. He ended up having surgery.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sucks.

• 1:53:10Dax Shepard?

  And he was supposed to leave to go on tour with his band.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 1:53:13Dax Shepard?

  It was a big loss for everyone, and I had that commercial I had booked.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:17Dax Shepard?

  We both lost jobs over it. Well, I was 21. Like, that story's from when I was 21.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  I can't even like, yeah, 21, so young. Isn't it weird to think about, you took such a left turn?

• 1:53:34Dax Shepard?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  In life?

• 1:53:35Dax Shepard?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  Like, really? You're so different. Your life is so different than it was.

• 1:53:41Dax Shepard?

  My life is so different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, not you're so different necessarily, but your life is like completely different. You live in.

• 1:53:49Dax Shepard?

  A nice house.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  A beautiful, nice house.

• 1:53:51Dax Shepard?

  Beautiful children.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Incredible children and like a, like, a wife who's like America's sweetheart. Like, that is so different.

• 1:54:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:54:00Dax Shepard?

  Suffice to say, if I got my nose broken in the living room, no, um, Kristen would not be like, ah, it's not.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:07Dax Shepard?

  This is, this is.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  No, but you're not getting your nose broken in the living room. That's my whole point. Like, you're not doing that anymore.

• 1:54:13Dax Shepard?

  I'm not. I'm an old man now.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I, I wonder if it's interesting for people who were around you back then to see this, to see this version of you. I hope they are happy for you, but.

• 1:54:28Dax Shepard?

  Well, you gotta also, you, you, you have to, um, paint a full picture. So that's happening.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Dax Shepard?

  Sure, these things are happening on the weekends.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Dax Shepard?

  Um, I'm also doing incredible in college.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:54:39Dax Shepard?

  I'm going through the groundlings. I'm doing well. Like, I'm still the, like, very ambitious, motivated, dependable person.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Dax Shepard?

  And then, yeah, I'm getting wild on the weekends.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, but that's a big part of it. That's a big part of it. Like.

• 1:54:57Dax Shepard?

  It is, it is. But I guess, what I'm pointing out is, I don't think anyone would be like, I'm shocked he's made it. He was such a fuck-up. That's not the vibe.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  That's not what I mean.

• 1:55:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  I guess I mean, like.

• 1:55:11Dax Shepard?

  There was so much chaos in my life.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And now there's not much.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  And partying and like being so chill. Like, there's just a lot. Like, now your life just looks very different. You're a 51-year-old man with a family.

• 1:55:21Dax Shepard?

  I never leave this house. I work at the house. I, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a much, much different existence. And I, I just, I.

• 1:55:30Dax Shepard?

  That's why that wedding was so fun. Because I got to be my kind of wild, crazy self, but in a very safe-now way.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:41Dax Shepard?

  But I got to tap into like that, um, energy source I used to have at my disposal all the time, which is like, yeah, let's go to that thing, and let's, let's drive to Mexico tonight, and let's, you know, all that stuff that I used to be, uh, game for.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think too many people, I mean, I'm sure a lot of addicts have this similar story, but if you're not one, I don't think you have that kind of life-changing, I, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm wrong. I just feel like the, the shift is much bigger.

• 1:56:21Dax Shepard?

  Seismic. You know, the great thing is, is, um, we could ask Tim Lovsted, right? Because he was there the whole time, and he's still here.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't mean people wouldn't be around anymore.

• 1:56:31Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, no, I don't, I know. But you were saying, like, I wonder what the people then think now of this domesticated life you have.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:38Dax Shepard?

  And like, Tim would be an easy person for us to ask, because he was present that night and present during a lot of the stuff.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:46Dax Shepard?

  Or some of it. Tim was a good boy, so he wasn't present during.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:51Dax Shepard?

  There's also like a whole other.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  There's versions.

• 1:56:53Dax Shepard?

  There is, and there's, there's levels. Because then, if I, when I was in Detroit with Aaron, then it was like, this stuff that was happening in Hollywood is like, uh, child's play.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:57:02Dax Shepard?

  To what Aaron and I were seeking out at all times.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, funny.

• 1:57:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  You're an interesting person.

• 1:57:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, thank you. I was trying to become one.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are. I think if anyone, myself included, this is weird to say, but I remember, um, I watched you on Punk'd, and I was like, Punk'd is so funny, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:57:26Dax Shepard?

  That guy's crazy.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of them are crazy. Um, and then when I moved here and we had the same circle, but I hadn't met you yet.

• 1:57:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  And I remember some friends saying something about you, and I was like, huh, like you were, that you were in a conversation about blah, blah, and I was like, oh, and they're like, he's really smart.

• 1:57:50Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, that's nice.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  And I was like, really? I did, I was like, oh, I had no idea. Why would, how could anyone have had any idea?

• 1:58:02Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  You were on Punk'd and baby mama and playing dumb, but I was definitely like, oh, he is? Oh, okay.

• 1:58:13Dax Shepard?

  Unexpected.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  I was unexpected. And then I met you, and I was like, he is.

• 1:58:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  Wow. This is all a big surprise. Oh, funny. Speaking of being smart.

• 1:58:24Dax Shepard?

  He is.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Let's do some facts.

• 1:58:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  This is for Ben. Very interesting.

• 1:58:29Dax Shepard?

  No, it couldn't get more interesting.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  I can't believe this is happening.

• 1:58:32Dax Shepard?

  I know.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Really crazy.

• 1:58:34Dax Shepard?

  I can't wait to have a pygmy mastodon.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Where are you gonna keep it?

• 1:58:39Dax Shepard?

  In my bedroom.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Where?

• 1:58:41Dax Shepard?

  On my bed.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  He's gonna live there?

• 1:58:44Dax Shepard?

  It was huge tusks.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  How big will he be? Yeah.

• 1:58:48Dax Shepard?

  I think even a pygmy one, like I think the pygmy mastodons on the Channel Islands were about the size of cows.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  Oh, that won't fit in your room.

• 1:58:58Dax Shepard?

  Well, it would, but it'd be, it'd be make things tight for sure. I've worked with cows a lot.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:04Dax Shepard?

  On TV when I was on the ranch.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:07Dax Shepard?

  And I gotta tell you, they're so sweet. I am blessed as mess. But I was really close on, um, the ranch because it's a small stage and there's a cow. And you're right there and their eyeballs are so sweet.

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  That's nice. You can like.

• 1:59:22Dax Shepard?

  You can look in them. They're like, um, like whales, you know, when you see a whales, I'm like, yeah, there's a person in there.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's sad.

• 1:59:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but it's.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  Cause people are, I know, but like people are mean to them and kill them.

• 1:59:35Dax Shepard?

  Cows, I'm part of the problem. Yeah. What would you think the ethics are? It could, if Ben could figure out how to grow a cow with no brain? Like no head.

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  Oh, and then we eat those?

• 1:59:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, cause there's like, there's not, all it is is this meat producer.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  There's just some.

• 1:59:51Dax Shepard?

  I bet people would be mad about it, even though that would make no sense.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Well, there's something about engineering. I mean, there is just something about engineering a new being.

• 1:59:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, aside from that, I think even the people would think it was cruel to kill something that's not even sentient.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Oh, that.

• 2:00:07Dax Shepard?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  You do. Remember Coco?

• 2:00:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, Coco's got a big face and a smile.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Sentient.

• 2:00:14Dax Shepard?

  Well, it kind of, he can get around town.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  He's not sentient.

• 2:00:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  So will that, that cow be able to get around?

• 2:00:22Dax Shepard?

  I don't know if it will.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 2:00:23Dax Shepard?

  Don't you need a brain to tell it to move? This is kind of a computer chip that tells all the organs to work.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  It'll have a chip that also makes it walk around.

• 2:00:31Dax Shepard?

  Probably to get exercise.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  Muscle and get, yeah.

• 2:00:33Dax Shepard?

  Get yummier. Can you imagine seeing a field full of cows with no heads?

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  See, that's what irks me. That's very scary. Yeah, it's sci fi. It's, it's, um, M. Night Shyamalan. And, um, I don't want that.

• 2:00:48Dax Shepard?

  Wes Craven.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  It's a little more M. Night Shyamalan to me.

• 2:00:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  Um, he would definitely make a movie where there's all these cows with no heads that someone engineered.

• 2:00:58Dax Shepard?

  But you wouldn't see it to the last frame of the movie.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  No, what you see is, okay, in the last frame, you.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Okay, in the last frame.

• 2:01:08Dax Shepard?

  Paint the picture for me.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  He walks into the basement.

• 2:01:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they're in the basement.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  Joaquin Phoenix.

• 2:01:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay, oh, Joaquin Phoenix walks into.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  And he sees a little like crack in the ground. And he gets his, um, tool and he's like, oh, oh, the floor, the floorboard is loose.

• 2:01:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. It's a wooden floor.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  And then he lifts it and he's like, oh, what's that smell?

• 2:01:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. Pungent.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  And then he sees on the back of the floorboard, there's blood.

• 2:01:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Then he looks and it's the heads of all the cows. They weren't engineered headless. They were real cows.

• 2:01:50Dax Shepard?

  Decapitated?

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Yeah, that's a bummer.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  That's a sad ending.

• 2:01:55Dax Shepard?

  I want just, I want him to just be able to grow ribeyes with no suffering.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Speaking of, um, the movie I just wrote, uh, I watched a scary movie with Adam Scott on, um.

• 2:02:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he was in it?

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  He's in it.

• 2:02:08Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  It's him, Michelle Monahan, Robert De Niro. Ever heard of him?

• 2:02:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I have.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  And it is good.

• 2:02:18Dax Shepard?

  What's it called?

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  It's called The Whisper Man. It's scary.

• 2:02:22Dax Shepard?

  Is it on Netflix?

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  I think it is on Netflix. It's a movie.

• 2:02:25Dax Shepard?

  It's a film.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  And it's not too long.

• 2:02:29Dax Shepard?

  Great. You, that's your new criteria.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Pass my test.

• 2:02:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  And, um.

• 2:02:33Dax Shepard?

  Anything above ninety gets, you're in trouble. You better have a great film.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  But it was good. I, I enjoyed it. Okay, so I looked up, uh, the words for grandma, grandpa in other cultures.

• 2:02:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. Babushka?

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, for Russian, uh, babushka and dadushka.

• 2:02:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, dog daddy is a dadushka?

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  Grandpa. Uh, Spanish. Spanish abuela, abuelo.

• 2:02:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we love that.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  We know that. Italian, nona.

• 2:03:03Dax Shepard?

  Mama mia.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:03:04Dax Shepard?

  Nona and.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Nona and no-no.

• 2:03:07Dax Shepard?

  Nona and no-no. I don't think I knew no-no.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  German is orna.

• 2:03:14Dax Shepard?

  Wow, orna is.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:03:16Dax Shepard?

  Her name is grandma? Okay.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Okay. It's oma.

• 2:03:20Dax Shepard?

  Oma.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  See, now do you see what happened? The M to me was an R and an N.

• 2:03:24Dax Shepard?

  That makes sense. Cause you're bad. I say.

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  Oma and opa.

• 2:03:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, no, that's cute.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Greek is ya ya. Maybe it's ya ya.

• 2:03:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's what Peggy calls her grandma. Her ya ya.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  Okay, cause it's, but it's Y I A. So I do think it's ya ya, but that's.

• 2:03:41Dax Shepard?

  I do too.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  Interesting spelling. And then papu.

• 2:03:45Dax Shepard?

  Hmm, poo poo.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  Papu. French, ooh.

• 2:03:49Dax Shepard?

  Mimi and Pippi.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, sure.

• 2:03:51Dax Shepard?

  It's supposed to be. That's what I was taught to call my French grandparents.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Grand mare. Oh, I love it.

• 2:03:57Dax Shepard?

  Be official.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Grand mare is grandma and grandpaire is grandpa. I love it.

• 2:04:04Dax Shepard?

  I just wanna know where Mimi and Pippi went.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  Irish is.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Ooh, my me, I, Irish is hard.

• 2:04:13Dax Shepard?

  It's Gaelic or something?

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  My mayo, may may?

• 2:04:18Dax Shepard?

  Memaw.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  May meo? I don't know. Um.

• 2:04:21Dax Shepard?

  Memaw is like a southern thing sometimes.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Memaw, yeah. I know a lot of friends who have memaws.

• 2:04:26Dax Shepard?

  Memaws, yeah.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's true. Memaw and papa.

• 2:04:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  A lot of people have pawpaws. My dad might go by Ashi.

• 2:04:36Dax Shepard?

  Oh, is that grandpa in?

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  Nope, it's just since his name is Ashok.

• 2:04:40Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Well, we're gonna try.

• 2:04:42Dax Shepard?

  It's really close to, um, not Ashi, but who is the Bogwan? What did he become? He became?

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  No, that he became ah, oh.

• 2:04:51Dax Shepard?

  Osha.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  Osha. Osha.

• 2:04:53Dax Shepard?

  Osha, tough titties, Osha.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Yep. Um, I think we're gonna, he's gonna try to push for that, but you know, Memphis gets to decide ultimately.

• 2:05:01Dax Shepard?

  He, yeah.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  Um, that's the first born gets to decide what the grandparents are called.

• 2:05:07Dax Shepard?

  That's why my Papa Bob was Papa Bob.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Cause of David.

• 2:05:11Dax Shepard?

  My brother David.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  But were there any other grandkids?

• 2:05:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, but they all came after David and I.

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  They did. Okay.

• 2:05:18Dax Shepard?

  Jamie and Jason are like two years and four years respectively younger.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Okay, got it. So David was the first born grandchild.

• 2:05:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, he sure was. He was the belle of the ball for five whole years. He got to be doted on.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  So cool.

• 2:05:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  It sucks when the, the other one comes, you.

• 2:05:35Dax Shepard?

  When Dax arrives. He's deaf and colicky. He grunts.

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  Do you think that's why Delta wants to learn sign language? Cause my dad was deaf.

• 2:05:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Oh, there's, okay, there's a lot, um, this says in India, in Hindi specifically though, so my parents don't speak that. Yeah, so I don't know, but it says Nani and Nana.

• 2:05:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, I like that. Oh, this is funny cause I always say they're close to Italians.

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:04Dax Shepard?

  That's my observation.

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  Oh, well, okay. It's specific for maternal grandma, maternal grandpa.

• 2:06:11Dax Shepard?

  Too complex.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  No, we're smart. Paternal grandma.

• 2:06:15Dax Shepard?

  It reeks of the caste system.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Has that too.

• 2:06:17Dax Shepard?

  It's part of the caste system.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  God. Okay. Oh, and Swahili, it's Bibi and Babu.

• 2:06:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I love it. Bibi and Babu.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Actually.

• 2:06:27Dax Shepard?

  These are clearly set up for babies to be able to say. Like you notice the pattern here? They're all like baby talk.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. In Hawaiian, tutu.

• 2:06:35Dax Shepard?

  There you go. Kid, baby could say that.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  Okay, Doctor Death. Baylor, yeah. Um, he held surgical privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, starting in two thousand eleven. Um, and then two thousand twelve is when he was suspended and then resigned.

• 2:06:57Dax Shepard?

  Well, he wreaked havoc in a short amount of time.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Ugh. His name is Christopher Dunch.

• 2:07:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  First physician in United States history to be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for criminal acts and gross malpractice committed directly inside the operating room during surgery.

• 2:07:12Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  You also, look at him. He kinda looks familiar though.

• 2:07:17Dax Shepard?

  He's a big lug, right? He's a football player, but he wasn't as.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Oh, like, ooh.

• 2:07:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he looks like a, he looks like Fred Flintstone. Oh, fuck me. Look at that photo. I mean, you shouldn't, you shouldn't ever judge a book by its cover, but I'm telling you, if I shook my surgeon's hand and that's what he looked like, I'd be like, I'm gonna pass.

• 2:07:40Speaker 01

  But remember he, people call him Doctor Swagger?

• 2:07:43Dax Shepard?

  They did?

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  I'm just reading that.

• 2:07:45Dax Shepard?

  I don't remember that detail.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Cause I, well, I do remember them saying at first, like, he was really cool. Like everyone like thought he was cool. It turned.

• 2:07:53Dax Shepard?

  Cause he partied.

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so I just was looking up the extinct animals because I'm just not well-versed.

• 2:08:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Well, if you're said, I'm just not convinced.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. What a, whoa, that'd be crazy.

• 2:08:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what a revelation.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm just gonna read some that we, these are kinda obvious, I guess. Well, dodo is.

• 2:08:18Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  The dodo, flightless bird. Um, stellar sea cow. He mentioned the sea cow.

• 2:08:25Dax Shepard?

  He's, I'll have to bring that one back.

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, there's the quaga.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  It's a South African subspecies of the plain zebra hunted for meat and skin, but it, it looks like that, but that kinda looks like a regular zebra.

• 2:08:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  So I don't care about, I'm just kidding. I care.

• 2:08:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Passenger pigeon. That's cool, cause.

• 2:08:47Dax Shepard?

  Well, we lost it though, right?

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if we could bring it back.

• 2:08:50Dax Shepard?

  This is like an immoratorium at the Oscars for animals.

• 2:08:56Dax Shepard?

  Like there should be music playing and then you just read, the dodo bird.

• 2:09:01Dax Shepard?

  The Shishwan pony mule.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  The passenger pigeon. And then you hear, oh.

• 2:09:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I love the passenger. The passenger pigeons was, made me wanna get into animals.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  Uh, Tasmanian tiger.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I do want one of those.

• 2:09:22Dax Shepard?

  Do you?

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Actually, no, they look kinda ugly, cause they look kinda like coyotes. I saw two coyotes yesterday. Okay, Chinese paddlefish. Ew. I think the problem is I just don't like animals very much.

• 2:09:37Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:09:39Dax Shepard?

  That's gonna pose a problem when asked to be sympathetic probably.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sad. I don't think animals. Animals should be extinct.

• 2:09:47Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  But.

• 2:09:48Dax Shepard?

  But you don't need to see them other than that.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, except there's a Pinta Pinta or Pinta Island tortoise. Two thousand twelve it went extinct. No, two thousand fifteen, kind of recent.

• 2:10:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, the plow, the one that's a big part of Monsters of God, ding ding ding, is the plow something?

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:08Dax Shepard?

  Tortoise from Madagascar, and they're now extinct in the wild. They still exist, but only in captive breeding situations.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then, of course, we got the woolly mammoth. We got the saber tooth cat.

• 2:10:21Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they don't want to call it a tiger anymore?

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  I guess. It's called a smelodon.

• 2:10:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  Um, oroaks. Now, this is a type of cattle. Uh, the moa, the great auk, also a flightless seabird. Okay.

• 2:10:36Dax Shepard?

  All right, that's a.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  I was just thinking about who I'd want to bring back.

• 2:10:40Dax Shepard?

  Hmm hmm.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  There's Irish elk, which was a gigantic deer from the Pleistocene.

• 2:10:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I want to see anything that's gigantic.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:48Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm drawn to. The megafauna.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  I want to. Yeah, elephant bird.

• 2:10:53Dax Shepard?

  Thousand pounds.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  A thousand pounds.

• 2:10:55Dax Shepard?

  Madagascar.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 2:10:58Dax Shepard?

  Home of the pygmy hippo.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Woolly rhinoceros.

• 2:11:01Dax Shepard?

  Ooh, that sounds fun.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  Hold on, the Caspian tiger. I want to look at this.

• 2:11:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  It looks regular.

• 2:11:10Dax Shepard?

  You're like a six year old. You're learning about animals right now, real time. You're like leafing through a National Geographic book.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  This reminds me. Okay, the game that I taught you guys about, imposter.

• 2:11:19Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Um, when we were playing, the word was clownfish. And so someone said Nemo and then whatever. Uh, Jess said, he said circus. He said circus, okay? And then Anthony, once we were done, Anthony was like, it's Jess circus. And I was like, no, it was like, that makes sense.

• 2:11:44Dax Shepard?

  Clowns are at circuses.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like, that makes sense. And then Jess was like, well, I don't know what this is.

• 2:11:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay, all right.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  And then Anthony was like, oh, it's definitely Jess. Like, who wouldn't know what that is? And I was like, some of us don't know animals that well. I was like, he's from Sweden.

• 2:12:02Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're from India.

• 2:12:04Dax Shepard?

  But he did spend some time in Sweden.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  India. He was born in France and he lived in Sweden for a long time. When you're learning about animals.

• 2:12:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  Okay, and if you're, if you're from Sweden, you don't know clownfish. If you're from India. India.

• 2:12:18Dax Shepard?

  If you're.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  If you're from India, you don't know seahorses.

• 2:12:22Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm going to make a collective list.

• 2:12:25Dax Shepard?

  Of your observations.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  Of, yeah, of the holes in animal learning.

• 2:12:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  According to cultures.

• 2:12:32Dax Shepard?

  It'd be fascinating if you had some real data that proves that.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Real.

• 2:12:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Remember I asked that other Indian man and he didn't know about seahorses?

• 2:12:40Dax Shepard?

  Part of like, do you think it's a, it's a product of great wealth? That like, you have the free time. There's like less pressing issues. It's like you just have, you know, you're in a house and you have all this free time and you have this, you have books and all these. National, I learned all these at my Papa and Grandma's house because they had the whole.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:02Dax Shepard?

  Encyclopedia of Animals for me, the National Geographic, and I just looked at them endlessly.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Dax Shepard?

  Like, do you think it could be some reflection or related to wealth?

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:12Dax Shepard?

  Wealth of nations.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  It could.

• 2:13:13Dax Shepard?

  Adam Smith.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, what other cultures have like aquariums in their house? Do we think that's common?

• 2:13:20Dax Shepard?

  I doubt in like Sub-Saharan Africa, there's a lot of aquariums.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Or an Asian, maybe because like at Chinese restaurants.

• 2:13:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay, let's just slow down before we get into trouble.

• 2:13:30Speaker 01

  In the south, in the south of the United States, in the Chinese restaurants.

• 2:13:36Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  There are aquariums.

• 2:13:38Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Anyway, okay, well, that's.

• 2:13:41Dax Shepard?

  That's everything.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I guess I still don't know. Oh, okay, maybe I want to bring back the bar, bar, Barbary lion.

• 2:13:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, tell me about that one.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  A majestic North African lion subspecies that vanished from the wild in the mid twentieth century. I like that it said majestic.

• 2:13:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what if it was called the majestic rat? Would you be interested in that?

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  Well, I am part mouse, so I have to like, I can't hate rats that much.

• 2:14:09Dax Shepard?

  You can't sell out your species so quickly.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:14:12Dax Shepard?

  Sister species.

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  I look forward to you getting, um.

• 2:14:15Dax Shepard?

  A pygmy woolly mammoth or mastodon.

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  I look forward for you.

• 2:14:21Dax Shepard?

  I wouldn't want a pygmy giant sloth because then that would just be a sloth. Be a three toed sloth, right?

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:14:28Dax Shepard?

  So we already have that, that's kind of interesting.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Actually, this rhino does look cool.

• 2:14:34Dax Shepard?

  Oh, hell, yeah.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, big old fucking horn.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  Really big horn.

• 2:14:39Dax Shepard?

  Big, big, girthy horn.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  I mean, really, I would love to see like one dinosaur.

• 2:14:44Dax Shepard?

  Yes, of course, we all would.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:47Dax Shepard?

  All right.

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:14:48Dax Shepard?

  Love you.