#2301 - Ben Lamm

Ben Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects. Colossal’s mission includes bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and advancing conservation efforts through cutting-edge biotechnology. www.colossal.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  What's up, Ben?

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks so much for having me.

• 0:15Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man. So, why don't you, instead of me, why don't you explain to people what you do?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  So, I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

• 0:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and that is a wild thing. I mean, this is essentially, literally wild. This is essentially real-life Jurassic Park.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally, like, believe it or not.

• 0:44Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I gotta drop my hydrogen tablet in here.

• 0:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you do those, the Gary Breckle ones, right?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I'm all in.

• 0:50Joe Rogan?

  Those are great. Yeah, I love those.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I just didn't want you to think it was, we're going a different direction.

• 0:55Joe Rogan?

  How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  So, I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan, I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park, I'm super stoked, I love animals, I want to go work on this. I'm just a weirdly curious person. So, there's this guy named George Church. If you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biology, he's at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy, he's just the best, right? So, if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just, he's the absolute best. He's a genius. And I thought, my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so, I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better. Like, how do we do directed evolution? And how that can apply to, like, crops and animals and all kinds of stuff.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  So, I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions. He answers them in like six seconds, because he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab. In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things. I was like, wait, wait, what? And I was like, if you had one project, what, is it this mammoth project? And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human Healthcare and I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that like the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke. Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George and there was this weird mammoth through line, whether he was in 60 Minutes or, you know,

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Stephen Colbert, whatever he's in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths and everyone kind of wanted him to do this. So I called him back the next day. Seven days later, I'm in his lab and we were off to the races on, okay, we're going to try to go build a company to bring back extinct species.

• 2:39Joe Rogan?

  So how do you decide what to start with?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So we started with the mammoth first, right? Cause George, you know, had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. There were some ecological modeling that had been done to show that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. And so that was an easy place to start. After we launched the company and went crazy viral and all these other folks from the extinction research started calling us, like folks from like the Thylacine or Tasman Tiger, which looks like a mythical creature. It's awesome. The best up here with the dodo, everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding, you know, our, our entire set.

• 3:22Joe Rogan?

  So how does one do this? It's like, let's, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing. Before that, how does one do this? Like, from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me walk through the whole process. So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate. So we definitely need to find a lot of samples. So we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome. But it's also fragmented. It's like, it's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is and someone's stolen part of the puzzle. And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So there's all kinds of problems with that. So this is really an AI and compute problem. It's not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first. Then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths. They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.

• 4:35Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, which always blows people's mind. That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids, or aliens, or whoever was building the pyramids. Like, like, literally, like, humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this, like, weird, like, prehistoric, like, 65 million years old dinosaur.

• 4:54Joe Rogan?

  When, when, when did they go extinct?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Uh, so the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago.

• 4:59Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  On Wrangell Island, yeah.

• 5:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  So they've been a while, they were around for a long time.

• 5:03Joe Rogan?

  4,000 years ago?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I know, they weren't, I mean, now, they appeared about 2 and 1/2 million years ago, as far as we understand, and the, they were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed. They existed all the way up until they had this, like, small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.

• 5:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow, and where's Wrangell Island?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Uh, it's northeast of Siberia.

• 5:27Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. And they just, was it a small island? They just ran out of resources there? Like, what happened?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's a couple of different theories, right? One of the theories, uh, with Wrangell Island is that they actually, uh, uh, there's lots of inbreeding, so there's lots of, like, genetic bottleneck which happened because there's not a different species there.

• 5:46Joe Rogan?

  How large is Wrangell Island?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I'm not quite sure.

• 5:49Joe Rogan?

  Can you give me a photo again, Jamie? Okay.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And, so essentially, though, um, Wrangell Island and then, um, uh, there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and, and the United, and, uh, Russia, also is where they were. Those are kind of the last two places that, that we know mammoths existed today.

• 6:07Joe Rogan?

  And they died out 4,000 years ago.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and now, now, some actually-

• 6:10Joe Rogan?

  It's fairly small.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  There is actually a, uh, another working hypothesis that-

• 6:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  They actually ran out of water. They ran out of access to fresh water on the island.

• 6:17Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  So, some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.

• 6:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow, 4,000 years is so recent.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I know, it's, it's crazy recent, right?

• 6:27Joe Rogan?

  Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus a African elephant?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And they're actually mammoths, because there's a, you know-

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Mammoths themselves, yeah. Mammoths themselves are closely related to the Asian elephant.

• 6:43Joe Rogan?

  Which is on the left?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium, they have the small ears, they have a little bit of a hump structure. You know, mammoths, because they have these massive, massive tusks, right? And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world. They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly, they had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that. But one of the things that's awesome also about the Asian elephants is some Asian elephants, some of the ones that are born actually have, they look, they're not mammoth-like, but they have a lot of fur on them and they kind of lose it over time.

• 7:18Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, and Thailand and then parts of, uh, different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent.

• 7:29Joe Rogan?

  I actually rode one of those once with my family.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Oh, did you go to?

• 7:31Joe Rogan?

  I don't recommend it.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Did you go to one of those places that you like take care of them?

• 7:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. You have to like get a relationship with them. So you feed them sugarcane and you wash them and you, you know, you play nice with them for like a while.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Joe Rogan?

  A couple of hours. It was like at least an hour. You're just hanging out with them, petting them and, and then once they decide you're cool.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Then they'll let you hang.

• 7:51Joe Rogan?

  They'll let you ride them.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:53Joe Rogan?

  But my whole family rode them and I was like totally opposed to it. I was like, I'm doing it just because you guys want to do it. I would just want to feed them.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:01Joe Rogan?

  I just want to hang out with them.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Hang out with them, yeah.

• 8:03Joe Rogan?

  It just felt weird. My daughter fell off, I think twice. One of, my youngest daughter fell off once at least. And I was like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Joe Rogan?

  You know what I mean? It's kind of a weird thing.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  It's a weird thing, right?

• 8:16Joe Rogan?

  And then afterwards you get in the water and you wash them.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:19Joe Rogan?

  And everything and I just kind of hung out with them.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I'd be cool.

• 8:22Joe Rogan?

  They're very sweet.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I don't think I'd want to ride one. I would just, I like being, you know, around them.

• 8:27Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a video on my Instagram of it. Yeah, there is, there definitely is, because she was eating a log. I was like, why are you eating a log?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:36Joe Rogan?

  It's just weird. They're, they're so enormous, but they're really like peaceful and chill.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  And incredibly smart and they have incredible pack dynamics, right? So they live in a herd. They've even had all these different examples where they also adopt other animals. I don't know if you've seen any of these videos, but...

• 8:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, so here it is. This is a few years ago in Thailand. And this is a, an Asian elephant, just chilling with this elephant.

• 9:02Joe Rogan?

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• 11:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, 2018. Okay. There it is. It was really cool.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 11:38Joe Rogan?

  It's just, it's, it's just cool to be around them. They're just a fascinating animal. Just the biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists is enormous.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  This enormous thing with this like robotic potential. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 11:52Joe Rogan?

  As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they sense it, right? I mean, we see that nature with a lot of animals, right? If you sense it and they don't feel like they're, you know, being backed into a corner or fearful, then they're not going to be around that. So some of our animals I've been around and they're starting to get quite large, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point.

• 12:08Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  That, yeah, at some point, though, you're still kind of like, they are wild animals. So you have to maintain some level of healthy distance.

• 12:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So let's just get right to it.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Wait, wait. Do you want to finish the process?

• 12:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  So, okay, so we have the ancient, ancient genomes. So you have to collect and assemble.

• 12:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And that's, a lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab. But that's like some Indiana Jones shit. Like, we're literally going into the permafrost and like collecting dead samples from the permafrost, which, you know, you've had, you know, John Rees on here. It's disgusting.

• 12:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  It smells like death. It literally, I mean, I guess it is death. It's just over time piled up death.

• 12:47Joe Rogan?

  Have you visited John?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I visited John.

• 12:50Joe Rogan?

  You went to the boneyard?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went to the boneyard.

• 12:51Joe Rogan?

  What's it like there?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  It's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect. I didn't know John. So I'm on the Board of Trustees of the Explorers Club. So we take these expeditions. We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval. And then we're also doing some cultural studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoths. Like, do you want mammoths back? Is this a good idea, right? Because we try to be pretty inclusive. And they're like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John. And I was like, okay, great. I'm excited. So go meet him. We pull up. He's in a different car. And he's like, and I think he wanted us to follow him. He's like, get in. I was like. Okay, and he's a big dude.

• 13:27Joe Rogan?

  He's enormous.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I'm not that big of a dude, right?

• 13:30Joe Rogan?

  No, John's a giant.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me, I'm a smaller dude, right? And so, like, I literally get in, I get in the car, there's a bunch of stickers and there's one that has butterflies on it that says, "Give zero fucks." And I was like, and then there's, and he's like, "Just move the gun over." So I moved the gun over and he goes, "Listen." And this is the first words out of his mouth to me. "If I stop short, you hand me that gun." And I was like, I didn't even ask a follow-up question, because like, "What do you do when you get in the car with John?" And he says, "You hand me that gun. If I stop quick and I say, 'Hand me that gun,' you hand me that gun." I was like, "That's awesome." And he showed me around the-

• 14:04Joe Rogan?

  What kind of gun was it?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Uh, it was just some type of rifle.

• 14:06Joe Rogan?

  So it was grizzlies?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I assume it was for grizzlies, yeah. Or bears or, you know, something large.

• 14:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  But then he showed me around the bone yard and showed me his collection and he was completely, I mean, he didn't know us from anybody. He just opened up everything to us, right? And he's like, "Let me show you all this." Showed us his skull. He actually has a warehouse, I don't know if he ever discloses where it is, but he has a warehouse where he has some of the greatest specimens ever. So, it's cool, you should go, it's cool.

• 14:32Joe Rogan?

  I do want to go, he's an amazing guy.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he's a cool, and he's a cool guy. And then, you know, being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, "Oh, we'd love to, we'd love to, you know, take, use some of your samples, can we take them?" And he's like, "No." And he was very honest and he told us, and that's like before your podcast with him, we kind of learned that story, right? And so, that's what sucks is how like some people can ruin it for everybody.

• 14:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  You know, because he's, you know, outside of Fairbanks, it's not the easiest place to build a, you know, bio-containment level three lab.

• 15:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  But he's like, but he is open, he's like, "You build a lab here, you can use whatever you want." But he's like, "The bones stay here." So, he is very consistent with his messaging.

• 15:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know, the whole deal with the Museum of Natural History, right?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And I totally believe it, I totally believe-

• 15:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's a fact now, they've found these bones in the East River, exactly where they told them to drop it off. They have step bison fragments-

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen it.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  Woolly mammoth fragments, so they know that they're there.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and well, I mean, you, you've built a relationship with John, he's just a normal, no bullshit kind of guy.

• 15:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  He's like, "You stole this stuff, give it back."

• 15:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Or he's also like, "Hey-" If you want to come work on it, come on. Like, he's very collaborative.

• 15:38Joe Rogan?

  It's also, it's like, what do you guys have? Like, why are you keeping that shit in a basement? Like, what is that?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I mean, when we do work, you know, outside of the expeditions of collecting ancient DNA, when we do work, we also work with museums, right? And so, we go to like the catacombs of the museums. And it's exactly what you think of as like the Vatican Archives, right? You go down to like Subbasement 4 of the Smithsonian, and it's just rows and rows and rows of taxidermy ammels that you've never seen. It's got like the little drawers and boxes, and they're like, "Oh, uh, this is giant sloth poop." And I was like, "I didn't know there was giant sloth poop." They're like, "Yes, and we think there's DNA." And I was like, "Well, this is like, you know, the card catalog of like all, of all like dead species, but it's not on display for the public. It's just in a basement."

• 16:23Joe Rogan?

  And is it extensively archived? They know where everything is? Or is there some stuff down there that they don't know what it is?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say that they are the, at least any museum, they have, I think they have a lot more than they know. I don't see it in like massive computer systems, because we ask for inventory lists and, you know, like, what's the shopping list?

• 16:41Joe Rogan?

  It's been over 100 years they've been doing this, so people have come and gone.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Oh, they'll pull out, yeah, and they'll pull out drawers that have like Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.

• 16:48Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I mean, that's how we did the thylacine. We actually found, in a cup about this size, we actually found what's called, we called the miracle pup, where they shot the mother, they took the three joeys, the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde, and we got a 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup.

• 17:08Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  But they didn't even know they had it. They also, uh, on the thylacine, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later, they also found, uh, a head in a bucket. They didn't even, it was the mom's head. So we actually knew, we could actually look at the genetic, uh, relation between the two. And they actually found, they didn't know they had the head in the bucket. They just had a head in a bucket. They opened it up, it was marked thylacine, they opened it up, and there was a full thylacine skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything. And we used that to get to a 99.9% complete genome, because we also had the ancestry of the two, of the, uh, pup and mother.

• 17:41Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's, there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being, you know, fully utilized.

• 17:48Joe Rogan?

  So, if you have 98%, or you have 99%, what's the process of going from that?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's the head, there's the head in the bucket. So Andrew Pasque, who leads our, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And yeah, that's the head and bucket. I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrous bones, which we'll talk about.

• 18:10Joe Rogan?

  Do you buy into any of these sightings?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  No, I did. So Andrew Pasque, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing. He's awesome. He's been working on, on like a shoestring budget. And that's part of the problem with the extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now. And he'd been working on it for 15 years and he's had people send him, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years. He just sent it to him. And then he loves the thylacine so much, he just sequences it. And he's like, no, it's a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks. I mean, it's demoralizing. But like, when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with them. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than the Australian government. We made the largest investment in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we

• 18:56Speaker 01

  do this. And then you get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? You start reading, I start reading all the books on the thylacine. I want to be, I get obsessive about projects. And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now. And so got super deep in it. And then I started calling Pasque. I was like, hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos. And I kind of think they're still there. And Pasque's like, no, no, stop it. Don't go down that rabbit hole. So I don't believe.

• 19:21Joe Rogan?

  But why did he say that?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years, all over Tasmania, right? So not just Southern Australia, but all over Tasmania.

• 19:28Joe Rogan?

  So samples, poop.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Samples, just everything, using camera traps. And nobody's, I think that they officially say that the thylacine went extinct in 1936. But probably into the late 40s and early 50s, they still existed. But I mean, I think you, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists. It'd make our lives a lot easier.

• 19:48Joe Rogan?

  Forrest really believes in it.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  He does. He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.

• 19:53Joe Rogan?

  And because of sightings.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said, he thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea, in the mountains.

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  And also incredibly remote.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:01Joe Rogan?

  Very difficult.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  And, and the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea, um, uh, singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator prey, uh, from where the Thylacine sightings were.

• 20:14Joe Rogan?

  What's a singing dog?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, it's just another large canine that has a unique howl.

• 20:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  So, it still exists. Well, I, I mean, I'm sure Jamie can find the, a video.

• 20:24Joe Rogan?

  I want to hear that. I've never heard of this.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:25Joe Rogan?

  Singing dog.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Papua New Guinea, any singing dogs?

• 20:28Joe Rogan?

  By the way, folks, this is, we're teasing you because we, there's a, this is not just theoretical.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we'll.

• 20:34Joe Rogan?

  This is what's gonna get crazy.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gonna get weird.

• 20:37Joe Rogan?

  This podcast is gonna blow your fucking mind. Go ahead, Jamie.

• 20:42Joe Rogan?

  Opera singers love. That's what they sound like?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  These rare animals have a knack for holding a tune even to an exact key.

• 20:52Joe Rogan?

  Opera singers love these. Oh, they're so cute.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:56Joe Rogan?

  They're so cute. Do people keep them as pets? That looks like a dog dog.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that looks like a dog dog.

• 21:00Joe Rogan?

  That looks like a dog that would be at the park.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  They're wild, they're wild dogs in, in Papua New Guinea, but I'm sure people have domesticated them.

• 21:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Pretty fucking cool dogs. And hanging out with a fox.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  So, once you have enough of that DNA, right, from all these different samples, and you can assemble it, you then have to build comparative genomic models to its closest living relatives, in the case of the mammoth, the, the Asian elephant. But I'm from software, so I just assume there's like the, you know, Google Cloud of DNA, like, we backed, like, we've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt, right? So, we should assume that, I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of like the 23andMe of all species.

• 21:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  That doesn't exist.

• 21:39Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Which is insane. So, there's like, there's no back, there's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life, like, kinda like the seed vaults. That doesn't exist. And so, we're actually petitioning the US government to help put a massive project together to help biobank, it's starting with just American megafauna and keystone species. So, that doesn't exist at all. And so, so then you, so then Colossus had to go out and go build the reference genomes for all the. The species like the closest living relatives for all the species that we're working on.

• 22:06Joe Rogan?

  So this is the question. If you have, say, let's go to woolly mammoth. So if you have woolly mammoth, you have 99%. How do you bridge that gap? How do you, how do you create?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  That's synthetic biology. So you never have to get to 100%, right? You need to get to probably-

• 22:20Joe Rogan?

  Synthetic biology.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools. Probably you've heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is, it knock out, it breaks the DNA. It's not the, always the best tool. We can now actually make individual edits to, when you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like, that's how precise we can be. We can say at spot, you know, 4,008, I need to change that letter. And so you change that letter. And then other times, you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in, in, in the Asian elephant, there's a difference. And if it's in these certain like coat, protein coding regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes

• 23:06Speaker 01

  or physical like attributes, like, you know, curved tusk, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer. And, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right? Because you're only looking, you're only really looking at that 0.4% difference, right? It's still a lot of numbers. But you're only looking at that. And so the better you can be at software, and the better you can be using AI and the, and computer models, the less edits you have to make, right? Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.

• 23:35Joe Rogan?

  Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they're, they're larger than-

• 23:38Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a, so mammoths were about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants. So there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made. And so there were 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different, in different ways. And some of them were larger. But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing, that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of a Asian elephant.

• 24:07Joe Rogan?

  And-

• 24:09Speaker 01

  But there, to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes. We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well.

• 24:18Joe Rogan?

  And so there's specific characteristics that these animals have, one of them being the big furry coats. That you guys, what did you do with mice?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  We, we made woolly mice.

• 24:31Joe Rogan?

  See if we can find that.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  The only unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck. People lost their minds, right? Like, we're, there's, I was on the phone recently with a moderately aggressive journalist, and it was going quite poorly as some calls go.

• 24:50Joe Rogan?

  Moderately aggressive? They were being aggressive in what way? Like, why are you doing this?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Some people, yeah, they, everyone likes to try it.

• 24:56Joe Rogan?

  Look how cute! My daughter actually found this online and wants one.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we get that a lot from kids.

• 25:02Joe Rogan?

  She wants a woolly mouse.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  So every week, every week, I don't have my laptop, I should run it in here.

• 25:07Joe Rogan?

  Look how cute!

• 25:08Speaker 01

  But every week.

• 25:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god, they're adorable.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  So these woolly mice aren't just adorable. We basically said, "Look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a mammoth, from an Asian elephant to a mammoth?" And then because we want to do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants, we didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens. So we looked for the mouse equivalent, right? So we looked for, like, all of us have similar genes, and so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth, so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them, right? Or that may not even be compatible with life, right?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  So we tried to be really, really thoughtful about, and the woolly mice went insane. There's people that are making t-shirts as a meme coin. And so we made 36 mice, they're all healthy, there's 36 mice that we made.

• 26:05Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And what was crazy about it is, we're excited about it because it shows that the end-to-end process of taking data from an ancient DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with 100% efficiency, and that's really important and really hard, so we did it with 100% efficiency. Yeah, that's the...

• 26:25Joe Rogan?

  Look at the difference.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Well, so the mouse...

• 26:27Joe Rogan?

  One of them, if it was in a trap, you'd be so sad.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:30Joe Rogan?

  Like, the little guy on the left, if he was in a trap, I'd be like, "Oh, look at we killed." Isn't that funny? Just a little bit of fur.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:36Joe Rogan?

  Makes you love them.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And that's the color that we think most mammoths were.

• 26:39Joe Rogan?

  Really? They were like a blonde.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  They were like a golden brown color, right? Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time. But if you see very fresh mammoths like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakutsk and other places in northern Siberia that they actually have pretty, pretty well preserved mammoths, they actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur.

• 27:02Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And so we did that, and now there's people that are making t-shirts that aren't us, and pillows that are like legalized woolly mice. I'm like, they're not illegal. And then there's a meme account for the guy that did the, like, the CRISPR babies, you know, that went to in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China.

• 27:19Joe Rogan?

  In China?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. A meme account.

• 27:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow. So that's mammoth fur.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on, on X that, that these are a bioweapon, and that colossals made a bioweapon. So the, the weirdness of the woolly mouse went crazy viral. What we were trying to show is that we used our multi, multiplex editing tools, meaning that we edited all of those genes at the same time. Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live. From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations. We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time, all over the genome, get exactly what we want, and then we have this what's called monoclonal screening, where we're screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds

• 28:05Speaker 01

  like overkill, but then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off-target effects in the, in the genome, so that we know the mice that we then do cloning with, we know that they'll be healthy.

• 28:15Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  And so, so we try to spend a lot of time, you know, on that because we're certified by American Humane Society. It's the oldest humane organization in the world. And if you've seen the film, it's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film, that's those guys. So, so we've ended up, so, so we really care about kind of not just the de-extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out. And so, the woolly mouse was a really interesting proof of concept. It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right, and we're getting exactly what we predicted.

• 28:48Joe Rogan?

  Is there any plans to sell those?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  No, everyone keeps asking us that. You know what, museums actually are now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice? They're like, it'll drive so much value, it'll teach people about genetics and whatnot. So, you know, it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy.

• 29:09Joe Rogan?

  Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone even at a zoo, who decides, I want more of these?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we ever, if we ever put them, I think more likely we'd put them in a museum for, that needs to be free, like the Smithsonian or something like that, from an education perspective, versus something that's more attraction-based, I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.

• 29:30Joe Rogan?

  Do you plan on keeping this batch alive?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're gonna live out their normal lives, and-

• 29:34Joe Rogan?

  But you're not gonna make new ones?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  We may make new ones with new-

• 29:37Joe Rogan?

  What if they breed?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  These won't, they're all separated, they're all separated by sex. So, we're not gonna have like a Jurassic Park moment where they change. They're all separated by sex. But if you, if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live, they live a couple of years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice, that live in like, a small little cage and all on top of each other. They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them. They're all, yeah, like, we spared no expense.

• 30:06Joe Rogan?

  Cool little house?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're big, and we, you know, we put fun stuff in them to play with, like this, and what's been crazy is, we only named two of them, and we named them Chip and Dale, because we, people were asking what the names were, and I was like, uh, Chip is the only thing that I could think of at the moment. And now, even on X, people are like, we need pictures of Chip. Where is Chip? We've only seen pictures of Dale, and there's like, these incredible internet sleuths that are like, that's not Chip, that's Dale, we need a picture of Chip.

• 30:33Joe Rogan?

  You can't get involved.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've just, yeah-

• 30:35Joe Rogan?

  Don't, don't get involved with those people.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  We've not, we've not leaned in, yeah.

• 30:39Joe Rogan?

  You cannot.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  We're excited, they're excited, but we just can't. Yeah. Yeah, we're busy.

• 30:42Joe Rogan?

  So, so this is a new thing, the woolly mouse is a new thing. Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So it's more of a proof of technology. I think that the mouse model, because it's a 20-day gestation versus 22 months in elephants, it's a great way to test phenotypes. Because with, you know, with a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right. One, you can do molecular tests, you can do DNA sequencing to see if it worked. Two, I guess there's four, two, you could grow a mammoth and see if it looks like it, but that's a lot of work in 22 months, like a lot of gestational time, a lot of money. I think there's a lot of risk in that. The third, and this is a little weird, we created what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. So we created cells that you can then turn into any type of tissue. So we actually do have mammoth hair follicles growing in a

• 31:32Speaker 01

  lab. So we have hair growing in Petri dishes in the lab, which is pretty cool. If you come see the lab, you'll get the whole Willy Wonka tour, which is pretty cool. And then the fourth way is mice, right? Because it's like, if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately, within 20 days, if the edits were working, if there were any unintended consequences that would be detrimental to the animal.

• 31:53Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So we'll probably make more iterations of the Willy mice. The Thylacine's closest living relative is the Fatel Dunart, which is a mouse-sized marsupial. And it actually gestates in 13 and a half days versus 20 days. So there's no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model species.

• 32:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:10Joe Rogan?

  Okay. So how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  So we're working on the mammoth, the Tasman tiger, and the dodo for different reasons. We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and indigenous people groups. And a project that we announced through our colossal foundation about two and a half years ago is doing a population genomics map. We talked about biobanking a little bit. So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity, what's been lost, you know, what's the number of inbreeding? So we go through this whole process to try to understand. And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox, it's one of the largest indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we're giving them a report out on this. We went to their nation, wanted to share this, and then, you know, we're

• 33:01Speaker 01

  So we said, what other projects would you work on if that you that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison? And they said that they that we need to help with wolf conservation. And they brought up that. They said that we needed to help with more bison conservation. They said if we do stuff around eagles and fish. And so we kind of got that feedback. And when Chairman Fox is walking me through their their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf. And he said, you know, that's the great wolf. And he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost and how many people believed that it could have even been a dire wolf. And I was like, from Game of Thrones? That's cool. I love the show. That's interesting. So I did that. We talked about that.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, the red wolf program came up. I don't know if you know anything about the red wolf, but it's kind of a disaster. You know, it's the only endemic wolf to America. It's only endemic to America. It's a red wolf. It's beautiful. And there's like 15 left in the wild with massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation? We can't save our own? When you think of like the American West, right? You think of wolves, you think of like, you know, eagle soaring, you think of like trout bears catching trout, you know, you think of bison.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like we were like, we have to do something about this. We have to figure something out. And so we put that kind of on the list. And then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years and teachers and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths or dodos or tiles. Things like we get like boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So we're going to make a colossal kids' corner at our new labs. And in that, we've had all this, some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business, they're just excited about it. Most of them learned about it through their kids, kind of like with the woolly mouse with you. And so everyone's excited about it. And then we talked again to MHA Nation, they brought up the dire wolf again. And so.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  We thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species because dire wolves were only found in the US, a little in North America, but predominantly in the United States, coastal United States. And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also help wolf conservation and bring people from like sci-fi fantasy and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation. We thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off.

• 35:41Joe Rogan?

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• 36:23Joe Rogan?

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• 37:04Joe Rogan?

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• 37:21Joe Rogan?

  Alert you to threats and if your identity is stolen, LifeLock will step in to fix it guaranteed or your money back. Dedicated US-based identity restoration specialists will work with you until your identity is restored, backed by the million dollar protection package with up to three million in coverage for eligible losses and expenses. Visit lifelock.com and save up to 30% your first year with the promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE or go to lifelock.com/jre for 30% off. Terms apply. Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  No, most of the dire wolf skulls out there, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tar Prince. So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall, but because of heat and acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like, there's nothing you can get from that. But about six years ago, a group, including Beth Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right? And in that tooth, they actually found a, they actually got 0.15x or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15% of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10x, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times, so that even if there are gaps, you understand enough of

• 38:46Speaker 01

  the core kind of coding regions that you could bring back that animal.

• 38:51Joe Rogan?

  Is this done by AI?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  It's done by AI and software, yeah. So we built, part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than, you know, just solving them for, you know, existing species, open sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out. So our first computational analysis company was called Form Bio and we actually spun it out of the business.

• 39:14Joe Rogan?

  So you have this tooth, you have 1.5?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, 1.5, so 15% of the genome. And so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, could you re-sample the tooth? And she's like, it's like, you know, half an inch long. She's like, it's destructive sampling, like, it's going to ruin us. We scour the other museums and see if it's even possible. So we lucked out and that tooth is 13,000 years old. The skull itself is 72, 73,000 years old, not exactly sure. But it was found in a riverbed and it wasn't found in a riverbed at the mouth of a cave. So it wasn't found like in the permafrost, but it also wasn't found in like heat and acidification. So there's a bone in all of us called the petris bone, which is insanely dense and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  It's a great DNA storage, better than teeth, better than anything. It's on the, it's like in the inner ear kind of head area. And so we got permission from the museum to very carefully drill into the back of the underside of the skull and remove the petris bone to see if we could get DNA. And we got really lucky between resampling the first and the skull. We ended up getting about 13 to 14x coverage. So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the dire wolves.

• 40:32Joe Rogan?

  And then what'd you do?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Well, and then, then we got a knock on the door and it was CIA. No, so we took that DNA.

• 40:40Joe Rogan?

  Can I ask you before we even start with this?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:42Joe Rogan?

  The aggressive reporters are, is it you're playing God? How do you have the right to do this?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  So it's been a journey. Okay. So the journey that we've had is when we started the business, we didn't have any scientists. We just didn't, right? They're like, this is tech bros wanting to see cool animals. And oh, they've only got $16 million in funding and they don't have any scientists. Ha ha. So that was, that was phase one. And then we're like, oh, well, you know, as an entrepreneur, my job is to hire much smarter people than me.

• 41:10Joe Rogan?

  Do you smoke cigars?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I do not. Gary's got me on quite a kick. So.

• 41:15Joe Rogan?

  Health kick?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean.

• 41:17Joe Rogan?

  Cigars aren't bad for you.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not saying they're bad for you. I'm just saying that I.

• 41:20Joe Rogan?

  Allegedly.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:21Joe Rogan?

  I, I don't care. I'll take, this is the last of the things that I partake in that are probably bad for you.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you gotta, you gotta do what you gotta do. Everyone's got their vice.

• 41:30Joe Rogan?

  I like a little cigar.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  So.

• 41:33Joe Rogan?

  My question, if I was gonna grill you, if I was a reporter, it'd be like, what right do you have to invade the natural process of nature and to inject your curiosity and your ability to create new life?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I think that we've become the apex part around this planet, and we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean, we overhunt something. In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right? And every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we drink hydrogenated water, we are, you know, playing God on some level, right? Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.

• 42:16Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Now, the good news is, is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be. And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand, you know, one of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back into Yellowstone.

• 42:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed. Like, it changed the shape of rivers, you know, because the elk population were just, you know, they were getting fat, they were getting lazy, they weren't migrating, the sick and the old and the weak weren't getting killed off.

• 42:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  They were spreading disease, they were eating all of the willows and everything along the banks, so therefore the beavers went away. Beavers are like the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist, because they make wetlands, they make, they cause the rivers and ponds to get deeper, so it allows different types of fish and different types of animals. So you have this thing called tropic downgrading, and you have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce these species.

• 43:16Joe Rogan?

  That documentary's fascinating.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  It's so fascinating.

• 43:18Joe Rogan?

  How Wolves Change Rivers.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I know people that lived in Montana before the wolf reintroduction, and a lot of people don't like that the wolves are there, and but most of them are elk hunters that were used to something that's just outrageously overpopulated. That's the reality of it.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:34Joe Rogan?

  But they were telling me that there was, they had so many elk that were living, they had such a large population. Versus the actual resources that were available. They had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter like you can hunt cows in the snow. So in the middle of the winter where they can't move good, you can just pick them off in the snow. Because they were just trying to cull the population. They were trying to diminish them.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  And that's and that's not good for the elk population.

• 44:02Joe Rogan?

  No, no, it's not.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Not good for the ecosystem, but it's not good for the elk population itself.

• 44:05Joe Rogan?

  Right. I have a good friend who lives in Colorado. He has a ranch in Colorado and we were at his place. Approximately two weeks after they reintroduced wolves. They actually reintroduced wolves on his property.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:20Joe Rogan?

  And he didn't know it was gonna happen before it happened and all the people around there are ranchers.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:25Joe Rogan?

  So already these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said, have killed over a dozen cows and calves. So the problem is, they've killed elk as well. In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:39Joe Rogan?

  That the wolves had killed. I'm not a big fan of people getting to vote on whether or not you should do something with wildlife. I'm a big fan on having real wildlife biologists assess situations. And in the case of Colorado, Colorado obviously borders Wyoming and Wyoming has wolves. Wolves were making their way into Colorado already and they are protected. The problem with reintroducing them is you're essentially asking a wolf that doesn't know the territory to start killing things in that territory.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, or to stop at a imaginary border. It doesn't exist.

• 45:12Joe Rogan?

  There's no border. They go hundreds and hundreds of wolves.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:14Joe Rogan?

  But the idea that you're doing this and you're doing this where there's ranches is crazy. And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:28Joe Rogan?

  So they they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they started killing wildlife. Yeah, but they're killing, excuse me, I'm saying wildlife. What I really meant to say was animals, agriculture. They're killing domesticated cows. They're killing these calves and, you know, they're having a real fucking problem with that.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And it is something that needs to be continually monitored, that shouldn't just be on some random vote of how you feel about it, right?

• 45:58Joe Rogan?

  You just can't let people vote on that. It's just too many people live in these high population areas.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more, right? And so like, we as humanity, like if you look at the third leading cause of death of elephants, it's human elephant conflict, right? Like, we have to figure these things out. We also, we don't want to degrade ecosystems, we don't want to lose species, but you have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way, right? Like with Yellowstone, they're like, this is a big enough ecological preserve, we're tagging the animals, we're gonna walk and measure it. I don't think that it's safe or smart to put any, you know, not just predators, but also like large herbivores in these heavy population dense areas. We can just, we have to understand that some of these areas, not are lost, but have already been changed for a different reason.

• 46:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes, and they've achieved homostasis, homeostasis. They've achieved balance, right? Which is the big issue with Colorado right now. And it's going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce an animal that used to be there and is no longer there. And I think in the case of Montana, I think you're right, and I think that there is an argument that maybe the wolves being there is better. Obviously not if you're a rancher.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Well, the Colorado, so the Colorado stuff is completely gonna destroy all of the stats. So, pre Colorado, right? So I'm talking about reintroduction into Montana, reintroduction into parts of Canada, reintroduction into Yellowstone, the red wolf, which is a very small population in North Carolina. There's been less than five confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last 100 years.

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  You mean humans?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Humans, humans.

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, and are most of them in Alaska?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Most of them are in Alaska or in Canada. And then, and then it's before Colorado, so not saying, I don't know if the data has, I don't think it has the latest from Colorado, but it represents 0.02% of deaths associated with wolves and cattle and livestock, right? And all livestock, not just cattle. And so, the problem is when you go out there and you have a maintained balance that people Can understand and governments actually give subsidies to the ranchers when they get killed by when they get killed by the by wolves. So that I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching. But the problem is when you're not as thoughtful with a rewilding program and you don't and you're not as measured as like what they did in Yellowstone and they start encroaching in

• 48:19Speaker 01

  these areas, then the stats are going to go crazy. And when the stats goes crazy, then you're going to start looking to the animals that are the problem. But it's not the animals that are the problem. It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision.

• 48:32Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. The problem is people just have these ideas like wolves are beautiful. They're amazing. We all love wolves. It's an incredible animal. I'm so happy it exists. Don't put it near where there's a ranch.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:43Joe Rogan?

  You can't vote on that if you live in Denver. That's crazy.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it doesn't affect your livelihood, if it doesn't affect your the risk to your animals or your family. Yeah, you have to be mindful of that.

• 48:52Joe Rogan?

  There's also they're getting a very skewed perspective because the governor's really interested in it and his husband is really interested in it. His husband apparently is the one who really wanted it to happen. And, you know, you have a mandate, so you have to get wolves out by a certain time. And when you're doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill livestock. And so you're like, fuck it.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just not it's just it's you have in the a lot of so the project that we'll probably eventually talk about is we brought in a lot of the teams, so many people that have been on your show that know how to do the rewilding the right way over time.

• 49:29Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so this is what we'll just get to it. You made a fucking dire wolf.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I didn't.

• 49:33Joe Rogan?

  You guys.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Our team, our incredible team, made three dire wolves so far.

• 49:39Joe Rogan?

  Let's see the photos. Jamie bust out some photos. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself because this is truly fucking crazy.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Joe Rogan?

  That's the pup.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is so that's actually Romulus as so we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, fathers of Rome. And then and then we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl. So this is Romulus and Remus. So funny, funny story about this. So Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings was actually one of our investors and he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props and he's like, I was sitting in Peter's house with he and his partner Fran and I was like, you know, I showed him the video of them howling, he started tearing up, he goes, this is the first time I've heard a dire wolf, or anyone's heard a dire wolf in 10,000 years, started,

• 50:31Speaker 01

  well, he like, he like physically, emotionally got chills and started crying. And then he's like, well, you know, I do have the throne. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, I bought the throne last week at auction, at a private auction from like Sotheby's or someone, right? And so, so he did, and it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup. Like, talk about cosmic coincidence, incredible, right?

• 50:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And so, you know, what you don't see in this photo is you don't see the fact that we have American Humane Society there, we have three veterinary people, we had six people from our animal care team.

• 51:01Joe Rogan?

  When you say checkup, you don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  They do get, because of viruses from, that they can get from the soil, at eight weeks, they do get basic virus, they do get basic vaccines.

• 51:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you're just...

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these are staying on, you know, like, these are not going back into the wild, right?

• 51:23Joe Rogan?

  Right, not yet.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Right now, they're on a 2,000 acre, secure expansive ecological preserve with 24/7 care. We have an animal hospital that we built.

• 51:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  People always like, you guys raised so much money. And I was like, well, because we didn't just spend it on the labs, you have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities and whatnot.

• 51:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, let's see the photo of the actual grown ones, because they're fucking nuts.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is Ramus and Remus playing in the snow on the preserve when they are three months old.

• 51:55Joe Rogan?

  So, three months, how big are they?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Three months, they were north of 45 pounds.

• 52:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  So...

• 52:03Joe Rogan?

  Look at that face, god, they're so beautiful.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Oh, they just get, they just get, as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.

• 52:10Joe Rogan?

  So, let's go to the adults, because the adults have crazy characteristics. You were saying that you didn't even know they were going to have...

• 52:16Speaker 01

  We didn't know, right? And so, we ended up getting a...

• 52:21Joe Rogan?

  Is this a full grown one?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  No, they're still five months old. So, they're 80 pounds at five months. So, wolves typically grow 12 to 14 months. So, they're not full grown yet.

• 52:30Joe Rogan?

  Wow, and how big is it already?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  80 pounds, about five and a half feet.

• 52:36Joe Rogan?

  And the mane.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so a couple of things about the wolves, Jamie, if you go about, yeah. So we didn't know this, right? We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf. We knew that they existed and went extinct about 12,000 years ago. When a lot of megafauna went extinct, like during kind of that younger dry, that younger dryas kind of cooling period. They went, they went extinct as well, right? And we knew, all we know, because all we have is, we don't have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples. We literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25% larger. They were stockier. They probably weren't as fast, based on kind of their, their body weight, as a normal wolf would be. But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium and whatnot. And we assumed that they're, they're

• 53:22Speaker 01

  and we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool, that they're white. Because there's like this misconception for a while that they were red, because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they are red, so they get their paper.

• 53:32Joe Rogan?

  Doesn't it make sense for natural selection?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:34Joe Rogan?

  They're an Arctic hunting animal.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they have this beautiful, we didn't know this, they have this beautiful, like, mane-like quality to them. And when they're babies, you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It's crazy.

• 53:44Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  It's so.

• 53:45Joe Rogan?

  Is it like polar bears and it's hollow, or is it not?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  It's not. It's like typical wolves. But it's incredibly thick. It grows in kind of these, these clumps. But then as they've, as they've grown in, they've started to get this kind of like mane to them, which is incredible.

• 54:00Joe Rogan?

  The females as well?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Well, the female, she's only six weeks old, so it's too small. So if you keep going through a couple of other photos. Yeah, I mean, they're just, they're just beautiful. And I mean, it's funny, someone actually said, they, on our team, was like, they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point, right?

• 54:15Joe Rogan?

  Right. There's something, they're so stocky.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  They're stocky, they're thicker.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  They are, I mean, they're, they're absolutely beautiful. That, so this is Khaleesi, so who looks like a baby. And we nailed it. We, we named her.

• 54:32Joe Rogan?

  Can we hear it? Let me hear.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  We named Khaleesi for George R.R. Martin, obviously.

• 54:39Joe Rogan?

  Obviously.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Who's an investor in Colossal.

• 54:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 54:46Joe Rogan?

  Aww.

• 54:52Joe Rogan?

  Nature's cute little murderers.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Well, everything in nature murders something, right?

• 54:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Like, we were...

• 54:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, cows murder grass.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants, like, scream now.

• 55:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they scream.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  So, I guess we all are bad.

• 55:08Joe Rogan?

  Life eats life.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:09Joe Rogan?

  This is, I mean, that's the reason why plants have chemicals to dissuade us from eating them. What are they eating there?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Uh, so, they love to chew on horns in this state. So, we have a different phases of, we built 145-page animal guide. These are actually, um, different horns from different elk and other species that we're putting out there.

• 55:29Joe Rogan?

  And they chew on, like, chew toys.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  They just love...

• 55:31Joe Rogan?

  Like a dog does.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Like a dog does, right?

• 55:32Joe Rogan?

  So, are you letting these animals kill things? Or are you feeding them...

• 55:35Speaker 01

  So, we're feeding them still. So, they had a combination of bison meat, horse meat, and some...

• 55:40Joe Rogan?

  Do you plan on letting them kill things eventually?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  So, we're just about to introduce carcasses to them. So, giving them part of a carcass, letting them feed, building in that dynamic between the two brothers for now. And then, um, and they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.

• 55:55Joe Rogan?

  Are you gonna let them hunt?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  I mean, they're on, they are on a seemingly wild 2,000-acre preserve with just them. So, they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve. But they're not doing it yet. They're starting to exhibit the original, the kind of the first inklings that it will trend toward that. But we want them to live. We want them, and we're gonna probably make two or three more. We want a solid little social pack that we can monitor, that can live a seemingly wild life, that we can understand more about them.

• 56:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  It's cool. But the other thing that's equally cool to it, going back to the red bull story, um, can you...

• 56:28Joe Rogan?

  Which is crazy to me that you have reignited these 10,000-year-old hunting genes.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:34Joe Rogan?

  That they're starting to exhibit...

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Including size. Including size. We understand more about, like...

• 56:38Joe Rogan?

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• 58:45Speaker 01

  We, you know, we looked at what genes made really a dire wolf a dire wolf. Like what was separated? And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000 year old tooth and a 73,000 year old skull. So we could actually understand the genetic distance, with that much genetic distance between them, we could actually understand, you know, what truly was fixed and conserved in the dire wolf genome and what wasn't just population genetics, right? If there's, if you and I are 50,000 years apart, we, you know, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period. But if we can then really say, okay, you know, what made Ben Ben and what made Joe Joe? Oh, here's the overlaps. It allowed us to really understand that, which would be awesome.

• 59:22Joe Rogan?

  It's just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are kind of baked into those genes.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  They're baked in, yeah.

• 59:27Joe Rogan?

  And they just were dormant for 10,000 years. And now these Things are waking up.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  And so I was, I was like, so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed Romulus. And, and Romulus was partly raised with me. I could go out to the preserve. I'd, I'd check on him quite, quite frequently. It's in the northern United States where we don't say where it is, but mainly because we're, we're for not just the animals' health, but for human health. We, ever since we launched the woolly mouse, we've had very excited people just show up at our, our labs are not open to the public. And we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice. And so showing people too much of the preserve, we're always very, very nervous about. We scrub all the videos and want to ensure that no one can pick it out because we, we assume people will be moderately excited.

• 1:00:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, the, the internet sleuths will try to find you.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've, we've done, I'm not trying to challenge them, but we've been, we've done everything we can to protect it.

• 1:00:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I understand. I mean, you have to. Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:25Joe Rogan?

  Somebody wants a dire wolf.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  We get a lot of, we already, we already get a lot, we already get a lot of weird calls, but the, the other, the other thing though is.

• 1:00:32Joe Rogan?

  Someone with deep pockets?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Oh, we get, we get.

• 1:00:34Joe Rogan?

  Make me a dire wolf, my friend. I have everything in my collection.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  We get a lot of weird calls.

• 1:00:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, from people that are like.

• 1:00:43Joe Rogan?

  Those people that have private zoos.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like enormous.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  In, like in India.

• 1:00:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. They have, that family has like the largest private zoo and preserve.

• 1:00:53Joe Rogan?

  It's just so wild.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  It's so crazy.

• 1:00:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, you know, Texas is history with animals, right?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Joe Rogan?

  There's more tigers in captivity and private collections in Texas.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  In Texas than in the wild.

• 1:01:03Joe Rogan?

  Than in the wild of the world. Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. But I was, I was in the, I was in, so we, of the 2,000 acres, we have a subset, subsection of it that's about six and a half acres. We have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter. We have a, a couple of natural dens that we've built for them as well as an animal husbandry area. So that, that way, when we want to take photos of them or videos of them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly more contained area. And it's funny, two weeks ago, I was up there and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of those pictures and Remus came, Romulus, who I spent the most amount of time. Remus came up, came pretty close, and I was able to touch him again, but I thought at that moment, and he kind of skittish'd away, I was like, that's the last time I'm touching

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Remus, like, what am I doing? And I mean, don't get me wrong, I had our animal. Yeah, I have animal care teams there and everything, and they have been some, there's some level of habituation between the care team, they really know and love the care team, but they're still wild animals, right?

• 1:02:03Joe Rogan?

  And they probably hunted humans.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't, we don't know, right? But the rise of kind of going back to their extinction, the rise of the change in kind of this Younger Dryas period, and the change, the massive, I don't know, the, some of the stuff that, there's like several different prevailing theories, one of which is human predation, right? That like the rise of humans led to the extinction of the megafauna, that's kind of, you know, I think, I think the answer is probably a combination. Could have there been an, you know, astrological event? There's starting to be more and more data around that.

• 1:02:37Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure you've seen Randall Carlson talk about it.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it, Graham Hancock talk about it, and they've just got the shit beat out of them.

• 1:02:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but not anymore. The Younger Dryas impact theory is well respected now.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it

• 1:02:50Joe Rogan?

  It happened.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right? Because you see different, which, which also tracks to the theory, right? So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but, you know, there was also a massive glacial lake, and, and, and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied, that then dumped in the ocean, that also changed ocean pattern. So you went from a period, you know, in that, that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of insanely accelerated cooling.

• 1:03:24Joe Rogan?

  Do you know how Randall came up with that idea? Before it was brought to, like, his idea is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps, some sort of immense cosmic event, and millions and millions of, trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ran through the land and just carved deep gouges into the earth. He was on acid. He was on acid and this idea came to him.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Some weird idea.

• 1:03:53Joe Rogan?

  He was looking out over a ridge. He was looking at this enormous gorge and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed. And then he started noticing that there's these huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere that were just moved by this immense amount of water. And then the way the ground, the features of the ground looks like the features that you see on sandy beaches when the tide rolls in and out. And it's like, this is cra- and it all tracks. It tracks all over the world.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like those, it reminds me of those stories where they show people like the side of the Sphinx. And they're like, oh, man, that's a lot of water erosion. And then they like flip the photo and then you see the head of things like, that's not water erosion.

• 1:04:37Joe Rogan?

  It's Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University. He, I've interviewed him. He was the first guy to propose this. He's like, this is thousands of years of rainfall and we know that the last time there was rainfall like that in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Joe Rogan?

  So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of like, what is the timeline that this stuff was actually built? And are we just assuming because we've decided that it's 2,500 B.C. that that's it forever and no one wants to let that go?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Well, that, that, I'm not a scientist, but that's, and I don't come from academia. I'm just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me and I find cool shit interesting and I try to work on it, right? And what, what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non-academic, I'm sure I'll get crucified for this, but I don't read the comments.

• 1:05:23Joe Rogan?

  Don't read the comments. Let's go, Ben.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  I don't, trust me, I don't read the comments. It doesn't.

• 1:05:27Joe Rogan?

  Good for you.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I sleep quite well.

• 1:05:29Joe Rogan?

  Nice.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  The, uh, but, but, you know, the academics, we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot. We've got, we fund 17 academic universities, right? All over the world. We fund 40 post-docs, right? Uh, all over the world, right? And that they're, they're doing this. So we're very integrated with, with different ideas from, from academia and these scholars. And our top people that were colossal came from academia. So I think we try to be very academically friendly, but they live in this world, this super kind of like fortune and glory world. Where it's like, it's a popularity contest. If someone has a paper, because their entire motivation is publish or perish. So, one of the other things that people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for every single thing you do. It's like, we're not an academic university. We're not a lab.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with the community, right? But we get this feedback of like, if we wrote a scientific paper for every single thing that we did that went through peer review, like, we would have 3,000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever, right? Because we'd just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.

• 1:06:32Joe Rogan?

  This is interesting because they want to impose their idea of what you're supposed to and not supposed to do.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Well, they want to impose their idea that they've already established in any change to that establishment. So, in addition, the public, 95 scientific advisors, and these are some of the top women and men in the world, right? That fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there. They, we have another probably 40 advisors. They're like, we love you. You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me. If I submit a paper, they're, and we totally agree with you and will help you, but we submit a paper, they judge my paper, it gets rejected, then I don't get my grant, so then I can't continue my research, I have to fire my postdocs. So, it's a complete scam of a system, right? And so, we went through this phase where it's like, we didn't have enough scientists, we didn't have labs, we didn't have money, we weren't doing anything for conservation.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  So, we went through this whole like philosophical of these, like, all these things that people threw at us from the scientific community. And some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding.

• 1:07:34Joe Rogan?

  Of course. Well, the problem is not the scientific community, the problem is weak men. It's this, what you see in these squabbles, these like ultra-personal squabbles, where like horrible vitriolic statements made about people.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  They're just not happy people.

• 1:07:54Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. It's the same problem with all of life. It's these bitchy little people, these bitchy little monsters, and they have taken over something that's incredibly important, and their work, their work, these bitchy little people, their work. Is incredibly important.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:11Joe Rogan?

  But at the core of their being, they're a bitchy little person.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  And they can, and that's why, and that is why we don't have flying cars, we don't have mammoths. And until Elon, we were not going to live on Mars, right? And so, like, we didn't have, like, I think-

• 1:08:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, it takes time.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  It, yeah, but it, it doesn't come, but also academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right? So if you want to go to Mars, or you want to bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system, and you have to innovate across everything.

• 1:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Whereas in academia, you're, you are only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved.

• 1:08:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, you're, you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and, and given to these institutions, along with a whole ideology. Like, it's not just as simple as, let's follow data. It's all got to be attached to this very left-leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects ideology.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Joe Rogan?

  And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  You should, you should just follow the scientific method.

• 1:09:14Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I'm not a scientist, but we should just, and guess what? When new data shows up that, uh, you know, changes your old data, you shouldn't get mad about that, you should celebrate it.

• 1:09:22Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data, you know? Like, I don't want to get into this, but like, if you, you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers, who are telling you that a man can be a woman, and which is fine in terms of like, who you are. But now, when you're having them compete with women in sports, you've entered into nonsense land, and you're the person we're counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject. You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  I just wish we could get philosophy, we separate, like, philosophical perspectives from science. We do, one of the, one of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because it's like, once we got the scientists, and once we got the money, and once we proved that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once Incutel, which is a, uh, the funding arm of the CIA and other governments- Started investing in colossal because of our technologies. And once we started proof points, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical ones, right? They're like, it's not a mammoth.

• 1:10:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  It's not a dire wolf. And it's like, this concept of speciation is a human construct that we are trying to impose on nature that flows more like a river than a rock.

• 1:10:38Joe Rogan?

  So are they saying that it's not because it didn't come straight from nature? It's something that you've recreated by piecing this together with that? Like, what are the genes that you had to use to create a dire wolf? We didn't totally explain this.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Joe Rogan?

  So you have CRISPR, you have these gene editing tools, you have a good sample of DNA. How do you turn that into a wolf?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  So you map them next to it. And there was a study that came out about, and once again, this goes back to the status quo of scientists, of academic scientists. There was a paper that came out a few years ago, because they didn't have much data. They said that dire wolves were closer related, weren't closer related to wolves. They were closer related to jackals. And that's because at the time, they only had 0.15% of the genome, right? They just didn't have all the data. This is not a negative, they just didn't have all the data. Now we know that they actually were closer related to wolves because we have more data.

• 1:11:29Joe Rogan?

  Which wolves?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Gray wolves, or the precursor to gray wolves, right? So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group. And so what we found is, so once you do that, we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what the difference is. And we start to see that in certain parts of the genome that are responsible for size, for muscle, for cranial facial, that there's differences, right? So we can start to map and say, okay, where are the differences between gray wolves? And where are the differences between gray wolves and dire wolves? And then with those, we have a lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the dire wolves in a gray wolf cell line. And so, and then once you do that process, we didn't talk about this earlier, you do the same process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively cloning, where

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  you take the nucleus of one cell, you put that into another egg cell, and then you take that embryo and you insert it into a surrogate.

• 1:12:25Joe Rogan?

  And is this a 100% dire wolf, or is this a new thing?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  So this is, so this goes into the philosophical thing.

• 1:12:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically, the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species. So you've got certain people that'll say, well, if a species is dictated by something that can't breed. That's literally a definition, like, if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species. Then you have other people, you have the paleontologists, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lakhavara, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world that loves us. But then you have other paleontologists that just hate us, and they do it based solely on tooth morphology, because they argue that's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time. And I asked a paleontologist recently that hates us, I said, if I made a mammoth with like, that was giant, with like, pink curly fur, and it had the right tooth morphology,

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  you're saying that, based on your scientific papers, that you would say that's a mammoth? And she's like, yes, but that doesn't matter. And I'm like, well, do it.

• 1:13:23Joe Rogan?

  Why does she hate you guys?

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Because, why does anyone, you know, anytime you do anything in this world now, that's like, moderately bold or polarizing, people give you pushback.

• 1:13:34Joe Rogan?

  But this is heavily bold. I wouldn't say this is moderately bold. You made three fucking dire wolves. That's not moderately bold. It's really kind of one of the craziest things that a human being's ever done.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  It's definitely in the realm.

• 1:13:46Joe Rogan?

  This is right up there with inventing the internet.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when you see, well, and we have more stuff to come that I think will be equally interesting.

• 1:13:54Joe Rogan?

  There's people out there, did you worry that someone is gonna get, you know, because this falls into religious realms.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's, there's philosophical and religious, and so like, back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species.

• 1:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  But they mate and produce viable offspring all the time, and a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a aquatic-adapted, cold-adapted bear, right? And so I always ask people that.

• 1:14:22Joe Rogan?

  Their offspring are, they can have children, right?

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Joe Rogan?

  So it's not like a donkey.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So there's different ways to characterize it.

• 1:14:31Joe Rogan?

  Making a mule, rather.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  But there's different ways to say something is something, right? And so, you know, we are not the same, right? If, I don't know what percent, you probably, from 23andMe or something, have some percentage Neanderthal. You don't say that you're an admixture or a hybrid, you just say you're a human, you don't, you don't really.

• 1:14:45Joe Rogan?

  But that's a good point, though, because Neanderthal, if you want to talk about us different species, just because they could breed with us, god, they're so different.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  But that's it, but there, like I said, there's six different ways. There's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographics. And there's a funny paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through, and the same toads live on both, on two sides of the street, and they're different species. And they're the same fucking toad.

• 1:15:11Joe Rogan?

  Just because there's a road.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Just because, because we as humans changed, it's called geographic isolation of speciation. So it's just crazy. And so, so the only arguments that we now have is, but is it a mammoth? And it's like, well, then don't call it a mammoth. You, I was like, I asked people, I was like, did you see Jurassic Park? And they're like, yeah. And I was like, what was Jurassic Park, what was Jurassic, to your question, what do you think, what was Jurassic Park about to you?

• 1:15:33Joe Rogan?

  To me?

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're like, if you're gonna take your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about?

• 1:15:37Joe Rogan?

  Dinosaurs.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Is it? Because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff. Are they dinosaurs? Or are they, or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs? Genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or are they dinosaurs? If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de-extinction. If they serve the ecological function and they have the lost biodiversity and phenotypes that made that animal unique, like the polar and a bear and a bear, they're just that animal. So these goes into, this starts the whole religious and philosophical debates, where it's funny, because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates, when they don't like what you're doing, that's where they go to.

• 1:16:16Joe Rogan?

  So what was the argument? How did they? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, it's good to prepare for the future, but when you start over-analyzing what's happening around you, dreaming up every hypothetical situation of what could happen, that's when it gets dangerous. You can start to hyper-fixate and stress out and all over things that haven't even happened. That's no good for current you or future you. If you're struggling to stay in the present and out of your head, try talking with a quality therapist from BetterHelp. They have psychologists, family therapists, marriage counselors, social workers, and more.

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• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  She's like, it's by their own definition, they're like, well, it doesn't have enough DNA. So I was like, so if I said, but the second dire wolf that we have, or the second genome that we have from the tooth has is has less of the same DNA than the skull. Does that mean that it wasn't a dire wolf? And it just turns into an, you're missing the point conversation.

• 1:18:28Joe Rogan?

  I would like to know the point, though. What is her point? What is she? What is her overall argument?

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  The general point of the people is that they want to pick one speciation definition and adhere us to that. And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species, right? It's just people that are using the framework that they set that doesn't isn't consistent kind of against the there are based on the argument that they want to make.

• 1:18:54Joe Rogan?

  Interesting. So species is just something.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  It's a human construct. It's not.

• 1:18:58Joe Rogan?

  And it's just a thing if it can breed with another thing?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that is one definition. There is another definition saying that it's only a species if it can't breed with another thing. So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves, does that mean they're now they're on species? It just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct.

• 1:19:17Joe Rogan?

  Right, but as a person who studies biology, which this person is, right, I could kind of understand her perspective where she was like, "What are you doing? Like, what are you doing? How is this group of people with a bunch of money and a bunch of eggheads, how are these geniuses allowed to get together, splice some genes up, and serve up a dire wolf?" I could see it from her perspective.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  100%, right? But I think that if we don't do big, bold things, it's important. You know, one of the things that we should definitely show is the red-

• 1:19:47Joe Rogan?

  This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  But we should-

• 1:19:50Joe Rogan?

  This is basically the same conversation.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but John Hammond-

• 1:19:53Joe Rogan?

  Don't worry.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that, you know, didn't make it the final cut. We actually are-

• 1:20:02Joe Rogan?

  No, they just wanted to make an attraction.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if we could show the red wolf, I think that'd be amazing because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back the dire wolf, we, one, make available to conservation.

• 1:20:12Joe Rogan?

  Will this explain the red wolf to people? Because you were saying before, I didn't even know how few of them there are.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you go to the, one more, yeah. So this is a red wolf. That's Hope. That's the world's first cloned red wolf. So I've actually made more red wolves than I've made dire wolves. So I've made four red wolves, one female-

• 1:20:30Joe Rogan?

  Are you just releasing these fuckers?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  No, no, they're in an ecological preserve as well. And so, but you're gonna, you're gonna die when you hear what I went through on this. So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project, outside of making all of our technology for free, right? Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals. They don't pay us a dime. It's all open source, it's all free. We have 48 conservation partners. The team that's running the Northern White Rhino Project, we're their exclusive genetic rescue partner. It doesn't, we're working with elephants in Botswana, working elephants in Kenya. So anybody can use our technologies for free, right? We're working on Ketrin, a terrible fungus in Australia. And so, so if that's not enough, I found out that, you

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  know, that there's only 15 of those red wolves back in the wild, in North Carolina. So I met with the upcoming governor.

• 1:21:22Joe Rogan?

  Are they in other states as well?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  No, no, we'll get to that, we'll get to that. So they're only recognized by US Fish and Wildlife there. But this incredible woman from Princeton, you know, top of her field, she's one of the wolf, top wolf genesis in the world, Bridgette Von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have red wolf-like characteristics. So she started darting them, taking samples. And what she found is they actually have more quote-unquote "red wolf" in them than the red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina.

• 1:21:53Joe Rogan?

  And is it part of the problem they're inbreeding with coyotes?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they've all been, like, these guys, like, the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes. All the red wolves have some coyote in them because...

• 1:22:02Joe Rogan?

  They look like coyotes.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Well, because every, well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes.

• 1:22:08Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the reality is every single species is what's called an admixture. They're all, we are, everything is inbreeding with everything on some level, right? And so everything in life is an admixture. Nothing, it goes back to the Neanderthal.

• 1:22:21Joe Rogan?

  So this binary idea that we have is silly.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  It's, no, it's a human-caused construct, right? And they, it's insane. So I went to some folks from the last administration, right? And I took some data with me. And I said, "Hey, we really want to help this red wolf program. We don't need any money. We open source all of our technologies. And we've used a technology that's non-invasive for cloning, where we actually take a vial of blood, we isolate what's called endothelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right? Because there's no nucleus in blood cells. So we catch those. And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right? Which is amazing, because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective,

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal, you have to take ear punches, skin biopsies. It's actually pretty, it's a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning. We can simply do it. Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot. We give blood all the time. And so it's a very non-invasive, it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right? And so we found a way, which we're open sourcing on Tuesday, is open sourcing this model of how you go clone from blood, which is a game changer for bio banking, because now you don't have to go herd an animal, take pieces of the animal, anesthetize the animal. We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using this thing. So I went out to Washington.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  With my team, I showed them, showed them hope as a baby in little videos of, and you may have videos of, of, of hope, Jamie, I, I don't know if it's in the folder. I showed them videos of hope and I said, hey, you know, there's, there's only a handful of, uh, we made these four wolves from three different genetic lines. Um, we made these from, we made these from three different genetic lines, right? So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves than what's alive in the population. And we said, we'd like for you to help protect the work, uh, that's being done in Louisiana. And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead? And we'll just give them to you. There's no cost. Here was the feedback. We need to

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  spend five to six years on an internal study and spend 22 million dollars to see if it's possible to clone wolves. And I was, I was blown away. I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. I wasn't very clear. This is a cloned wolf. Like here is you can fly with me to the preserve. You have signed an IDA, but you fly with me, sir. And they're like, we need to spend five to six years and 20 plus million dollars to go, to go understand this, to understand this. We'll give you all of the technology. And if you tell me you want a hundred wolves, I'll just make you a hundred wolves and we'll even, we'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you. And the response was, we'll get back to you. We went to, we tried to have three other meetings, no showed and canceled every time. When we were there. I just got back from a meeting with Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife rolls,

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  rolls up to, and they're very, very focused on, you know, innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing. That's great. And immediately they said, we celebrate, and Doug Burgum, the, the Secretary of Interior there, who we met with, said, we celebrate, he's a huge conservationist, huge Teddy Roosevelt guy, member of the Explorers Club. And he's like, that we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list. Only about 3% ever come off and we're really good at putting them on and we celebrate putting them on. So we have to do something about this. And if you're saying that we could productionize species and as long as we have the right support to rewild them, people can use your technologies for free to make more of these different species that are critically endangered while also biobanking

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  the samples along the way. He's like, why wouldn't we do this? And I was like, ...white mouthed previous folks and they said that we need, you know, five years and 20 million. That they, they were going to spend it internally. They weren't going to ask us to do the feasibility. So they were going to spend it internally on this and we're like, we'll just do it for free. And he's like, we will completely support the initiative and we're going to help get you plugged in. So you can help biobank our species and also help us support, you know, red wolf conservation.

• 1:26:23Joe Rogan?

  So when will you start reintroducing these?

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  So we just had that meeting last week.

• 1:26:26Joe Rogan?

  Soulless red wolves from hell.

• 1:26:30Joe Rogan?

  You've created a lab. They're going to start eating people.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  And so we're gonna, we just met with them last week, so.

• 1:26:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's, it's, they're beautiful. God, they're so beautiful.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's just, it's like, why, we shouldn't be afraid of innovation, right?

• 1:26:42Joe Rogan?

  No, but you know, the real question is, where do you stop?

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Joe Rogan?

  Because 90, what percent of all animals that have ever existed, all species are extinct?

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Joe Rogan?

  Like, are we gonna?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  I think you focus on the, the species that are critically endangered and are keystone species, meaning the environment needs them.

• 1:27:00Joe Rogan?

  Right, but you're bringing them back.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  But the ones that we drove to extinction, right?

• 1:27:05Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  So that's where I think you start.

• 1:27:06Joe Rogan?

  So it's debatable whether or not we drove dire wolves to extinction. We don't really know what happened 10,000 years ago. I'm inclined to think that when you see the, the death of 65% of North American megafauna, that happened really quickly.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Really quickly.

• 1:27:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a comet impact are correct.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  I think, I think it's a, I think it's a, most likely it's a combination. We do know that when early, that anthropologic effects from humans, that when early man went onto, onto a landmass at scale, that, that, you know, we start to see that. We see that in Australia and other places. But it's, but to your point, it's much slower. It's much, much slower.

• 1:27:43Joe Rogan?

  This is a different thing.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Joe Rogan?

  Are you gonna bring back saber-toothed tigers?

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  We, so we get, everyone seems to have their favorite animal for us to save, right?

• 1:27:51Joe Rogan?

  Dire wolf should be my favorite. That would be my favorite.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, dire wolves, you gotta come, maybe at some point you see them, but.

• 1:27:57Joe Rogan?

  I want to.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  They're amazing. I mean, they're, they're, they're just beautiful animals.

• 1:28:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Um, so, uh, we, they're, they're, so saber, saber-toothed tiger is a class. We put that as a class. Most commonly, people think of the smile. Smilodon as the saber-toothed tiger. There's not, to date, been a really great Smilodon DNA. There is great Homo therium DNA, which is another type of saber-toothed cat.

• 1:28:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I didn't know there was more than one type of saber-toothed. How many are there?

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  They classify them differently, you know, based on it.

• 1:28:27Joe Rogan?

  Obviously, you've been studying this, so you're thinking about doing it.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  I'm not. I mean, we like to study ancient DNA, right? Like, you know, one of the things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is 100% right is, people say there were no saber-toothed tigers in Alaska. That's just an incorrect statement. There were no, there were probably no Smiladons there, but there are Homo theriums, which are a saber-toothed cat.

• 1:28:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he's found things that were not supposed to be there.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  I've held things in his, I've held a direwolf skull in his, I hope he's fine if he's saying that, in his facility.

• 1:29:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think he's talked about that.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:06Joe Rogan?

  But they've found cave bears, short-faced bears. Wow, look at that.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Homo therium is still a saber-toothed cat, but what happens is, this goes back to that philosophical,

• 1:29:16Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  that philosophical perspective. They think that only, so if you look up Smilodon in comparison.

• 1:29:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still. Can you give me that CGI image of it again, Jamie on the left? That's so fucking cool.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't think there's any-

• 1:29:30Joe Rogan?

  I don't think you should bring something like that back, but if you do, I'm gonna visit it.

• 1:29:35Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I wanna see that thing take down a bite. Look at his paws, man.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  There was a, I mean, wait till you see the direwolf paws.

• 1:29:41Joe Rogan?

  Bro, but that would be so crazy. Now, all of a sudden, I want you to do it. Give me another large picture of it, Jamie. There's some other pictures of those. So Smilodon's the one that has the largest teeth?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  It has the largest known teeth, but when people think of saber-toothed tiger, this is what, or saber-toothed cat.

• 1:29:59Joe Rogan?

  That's a crazy-

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  This is what they think of.

• 1:30:00Joe Rogan?

  Those are crazy. I wonder how, why nature wanted you to have that.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides and others that are quite thick.

• 1:30:07Joe Rogan?

  It has to be, right? Something where you, there's a genetic advantage.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  And their jaw hinges-

• 1:30:11Joe Rogan?

  Look at that one on the right, lower right, Jamie. Below that, to, below that to the right, to the right?

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 1:30:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right there. Click on that. Look at that, man. CGI is so incredible.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  I love, because we don't, you know what's amazing? We don't have the DNA from it, so we have no idea what the color pattern is, which you can see here, right? It's like, it's got a short tail, it's got a long tail, it's got leopard, it's got stripes, right?

• 1:30:33Joe Rogan?

  Right. We don't even know if they had long tails or short tails.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  They could've been white.

• 1:30:36Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That would be wild.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  So we do have, there have been some really well preserved pups and others of, in the permafrost of Homo therium.

• 1:30:48Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. And Homo therium we know has that kind of coloration to it?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  We don't, I don't want to say we do or don't. We have not done the analysis on that, on the Homo therium.

• 1:30:58Joe Rogan?

  Look at that little guy.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  We do, we do have the genome of it though.

• 1:31:02Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Not that we're gonna work on it.

• 1:31:03Joe Rogan?

  So that has brown hair.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Have you seen the, have you seen the American short-faced bear?

• 1:31:08Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  That's something I'm probably the most scared of.

• 1:31:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you can't bring that back.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Seventeen or eighteen foot giant bear.

• 1:31:15Joe Rogan?

  You can't bring that back.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  We're not working on it, I'm just saying.

• 1:31:17Joe Rogan?

  But somebody might, that's the problem. There might be some fucking crackhead out there that's got forty billion dollars, it's out of his mind.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Well, I also think that-

• 1:31:24Joe Rogan?

  Like some crazy dude who's just got the resources.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 1:31:29Joe Rogan?

  Look at that, you know?

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  That is, that to me is megalodon scary.

• 1:31:31Joe Rogan?

  Made a lot of money.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  That's a man, that's a land megalodon.

• 1:31:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, that, yeah, that is an enormous animal. And they think that's one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the Bering Strait. Um, more-

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  I've read that, yeah.

• 1:31:44Joe Rogan?

  It was, it's a theory, but it's a prop, pretty good one.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you knew that, if you knew there was a lineage of like, super, you know, polar bears were out there, I wouldn't go near it.

• 1:31:53Joe Rogan?

  And it is essentially a super polar bear. Which is really scary, cause polar bears are-

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Are terrifying.

• 1:31:58Joe Rogan?

  And completely carnivorous.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  And they don't care. They'll just walk right up to you and kill you.

• 1:32:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, there's a great video of these guys that are behind a fence.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Joe Rogan?

  That was, somebody sent it to me yesterday. Oh, fuck. I'll find it. I know where it is. Someone sent it to me yesterday of these guys that are right behind a fence where this polar bear's trying to get through the fence. There's three of them. And they're, you know, they're talking to them like, "Hey, big guy, you can't come in here. Hey, fella."

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  And it's just calmly walking towards like, "I'm gonna get in there."

• 1:32:28Joe Rogan?

  Exactly, yeah. It's-

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, polar bears scare me.

• 1:32:30Joe Rogan?

  Very spooky. Well, they're spooky because they don't eat anything but meat. So we're on the menu.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Joe Rogan?

  All humans are on the menu. Anything that walks and breathes is on the menu. I got it here, where is it? Shit. It'll take me a few minutes. Sorry. Jamie, pause for a second. Let me find this, cause it's good. Okay, I just sent it to you. So, um, it looks like they're in, I don't know where they are. I think it'll say on the video. So these guys, here, give me some volume. Polar bears, that's an oil rig.

• 1:33:03Joe Rogan?

  So it's probably Canada. Look at these guys.

• 1:33:09Joe Rogan?

  That's sound.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Joe Rogan?

  They're just trying to eat you.

• 1:33:16Joe Rogan?

  Look at this.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  I have two more behind it.

• 1:33:19Joe Rogan?

  Yep. Hey.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 1:33:25Joe Rogan?

  Go on.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Probably not gonna work.

• 1:33:28Joe Rogan?

  They're just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you. Hey sweetheart. Hey.

• 1:33:34Joe Rogan?

  Sweetheart. Sweetheart wants to rip your liver out. Hey.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 1:33:41Joe Rogan?

  They're so beautiful.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  They are beautiful.

• 1:33:43Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting that they're the most dangerous ones because they're the ones we use for Coca-Cola and Klondike bars.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that wild though?

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  You have them just like playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying.

• 1:33:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you were saying about the younger gyrus is really interesting. It's very, very interesting. Because it's a fairly new theory and explains a lot and especially when you look at the mass extinction that did take place during that time. I would love to have seen what it looked like when all those animals were around. Like what was a, you know, we kind of have a sense of what, because of safaris and videos, we know what it looks like when lions are interacting with wildebeest in Africa. Like, what did it look like in Kansas?

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Like a, yeah, like a plesistine.

• 1:34:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like what was it like?

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  You know, there's a extinct bison species that is the bison latifrons. Have you seen those guys?

• 1:34:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like, they're like eight foot long Texas longhorns.

• 1:34:35Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  On like, you know, uh, super HGH like bison.

• 1:34:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, our bison are small compared to the extinct bison, right? Were they the largest of the North American bison?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the bison latifrons was.

• 1:34:49Joe Rogan?

  See if you can get a photo of that. Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  They're, they're amazing.

• 1:34:52Joe Rogan?

  I didn't know about them until a few years ago.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Joe Rogan?

  I didn't even know that was a thing. It's, I mean, there were so many different things. Giant sloths. There's the saber-toothed tiger, the American lion, which is bigger than the African lion.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Yes. The American cheetah is, you know, we have, we actually have a full genome of it. And then there was a, uh, there was also one of my favorite animals, which is kind of a weird one probably on the list since we're talking about dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers. Uh, have you seen the stellar sea cow?

• 1:35:17Joe Rogan?

  No. What is that?

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Think of like a manatee or dugong, right? That's the size of like a large whale.

• 1:35:24Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the sad thing is it died, it actually died off before, it died off and yeah.

• 1:35:30Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  It died off though, within a hundred years of its discovery.

• 1:35:34Joe Rogan?

  When was that?

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:35:37Joe Rogan?

  We killed them all, huh?

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we killed them.

• 1:35:38Joe Rogan?

  They probably turned them into candles or something.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Joe Rogan?

  Lipstick.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Burn their fat, yeah.

• 1:35:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  So, but it was actually really important.

• 1:35:45Joe Rogan?

  Largest Cerynian to ever exist, was hunted to extinction only thirty years after being described in the eighteenth century.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, and it was, and we actually have. We have a full genome of this too, which is pretty cool.

• 1:35:58Joe Rogan?

  You gonna bring it back?

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  We can't just, I would bring this back in a heartbeat. It was hugely important to the kelp forests of the Pacific Northwest. It was great, it's a great, it's not scary, it's huge, it's like.

• 1:36:08Joe Rogan?

  Right, but then, if you bring that back, why wouldn't you bring back a megalodon?

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  There is no megalodon DNA.

• 1:36:14Joe Rogan?

  There's none?

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  No. I will say that the CEO of the largest, the president and CEO of the largest free museum in America, really wants me to do megalodon, but he's like, I can never say it publicly. I think he just outed him. Yeah, but there's a lot of museums, I could be wrong on the size, yeah, whatever, he's great though, but there is, there is no DNA.

• 1:36:40Joe Rogan?

  It would have to eat a lot, and we've already killed everything in the ocean, unfortunately.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  So, one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal, because if you want to get to this world where you could productionize endangered species, like northern white rhinos, instead of having to use surrogates for an animal welfare perspective, you know, if you can get to the point that you can engineer genetic diversity into two hundred northern white rhinos, grow them in labs and bags, and then work with, and then you can control that population very, very well, you could then reintroduce them, you know, with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts, right? And so, we were really not focusing on the, we would kind of rely on third parties on the rewilding modeling, and all of our, you know, our forty-eight conservation partners, we were really just kind of focused on the, kind of the core science that supports their initiatives.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  But if, if we are successful with our artificial wombs, and we are quite, we are quite far on that project, that, you know, I would not be surprised if eventually you see a, we have to get a mouse first, but if a mouse was.

• 1:37:40Joe Rogan?

  Have you guys had these conversations where you sit down? And you go, how does this scale outward? What does this look like? This technology in 100 years? Did we just fuck up?

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think that if you look at the birthing crisis that we're in and kind of population decline crisis, I think that you look at global, like, people having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people freezing their embryos, all of that's massively on the, you know, on the increase. It's all going up to the right, right? And we also know that, like, globally, like, sperm and fertility and others is going down to the right, right? So it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general. And so I think, though, you know, especially, and then we also have philosophical and we have religious, you have philosophical, and then you have social, socio issues, right?

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  That people have different perspectives on, like, having kids, having kids, same-sex couples, all these things. So we at Colossal have kind of made this mandate that we're not going to work on humans, right? Because it's just, it gets too weird. We get asked the Neanderthal and the dinosaur question every fucking day. So we're just not going to, like, bridge that gap. What we'll do is spin out those technologies. But I do think, I do think it is harder to grow a rhino in a artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human. Not ethically or through an FDA process, but it is scientifically harder to gestate some of the animals we're trying to gestate ex-utero. So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population.

• 1:39:13Joe Rogan?

  But that's where it gets really weird, right? You could create a child with no mother or father.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  I do think that, I think it's about optionality, right? I think that there are certain situations where that would be a blessing. You know, I just had my first kid, so we, you know, we did not grow in an artificial womb.

• 1:39:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, the people that are skeptical about this stuff, this is what they point to. It's like, what, what is involved in the creation of life? Well, it's been people having sex, and then a sperm fertilizes the egg, a child is born, they raise the child, they get some of their behavior characteristics, it gets the genetics, and then we integrate it into a community, and there's, but if you could just make life without any of that, like, what is that? That's, where is that? You know what I'm saying, like?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  No, it's a good, it's a great philosophy.

• 1:40:06Joe Rogan?

  How much of the child's development is taking place while it's in the mother?

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  And getting those-

• 1:40:11Joe Rogan?

  Sharing-

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  That shared experience, the hormonal cues and whatnot.

• 1:40:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  I wouldn't have a child that way.

• 1:40:17Joe Rogan?

  Right, what if you're making a sociopath? Like, what if you're making a completely unempathetic-

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Because there's no-

• 1:40:23Joe Rogan?

  No empathy.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  There's no connection.

• 1:40:24Joe Rogan?

  No connection to people. They come out, out of the gate, Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up. Like, really?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  No, it's a fair, it's a fair point, you know?

• 1:40:31Joe Rogan?

  We don't know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman's body.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  And there's people that are working on this technology specifically for humans. Like, right now, we're focusing on it for extinct species and endangered animals.

• 1:40:43Joe Rogan?

  What I, the question was, when this scales out?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Joe Rogan?

  When you scale out 100 years from now, like, what did you just do?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if, if we had a world where we, like, if, if colossal gets ultimate success, I'd say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat. We've revi- revitalized these mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including, you know, your, your picture of what did the Arctic look like-

• 1:41:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Back in the day, like, how do we have that? Because that was actually a crazy, if you look at the work that's been done in Pleistocene Park by Sergey and Nikita Zimov, they've actually shown that rewilding northern Siberia with cold-tolerant megafauna actually can revitalize the ecosystem. It can add more biodiversity. It can actually keep the ground temperatures cold during the winters, so it sequesters more carbon. So, I think this eco, this idea of nature-based and living with nature in a ecological, in an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at. And I hope that, you know, colossal's also successful at, you know, removing animals from the, the endangered species list.

• 1:41:50Joe Rogan?

  So, what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoths specifically, this study that showed that it would help.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  But they've already done it with, like, musk ox, horses, and a few other species up there. So, they're doing it, they're doing it right now. There's, they've been doing it for over 20 years.

• 1:42:05Joe Rogan?

  And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was one of the, that was something that Larry, or that Sergey and Nikita Zimov wanted to do.

• 1:42:20Joe Rogan?

  How long before some Russian oligarch hunts a mammoth?

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, given the geopolitical, you know, we see, going back to your wolf example, we see boundaries and geopolitical lines, right? The animals don't, right? And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoth in Siberia for many reasons.

• 1:42:38Joe Rogan?

  But you think you will rewild a mammoth?

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at colossal.com forward slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around, like, everyone from academia to private landowners, to indigenous people groups, governments, to understand, like, we don't have a thylacine. I think we'll have a thylacine in the next eight years. I really do. I think based on where we are, current course and speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a fat-tailed dunard, which is like a mouse-sized marsupial, and a wolf and this, right? But we actually, if you just kind of scroll through into the people.

• 1:43:19Joe Rogan?

  So it's a wolf-like marsupial?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Joe Rogan?

  Does it actually have a pouch?

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  It does. It actually also has a backward pouch. So most pouches, other than like the wombat, are forward-facing. It has a backwards one because it was, they think because it was a burrowing animal.

• 1:43:35Joe Rogan?

  Ah, so to protect the babies.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, absolutely sub扇 them.

• 1:43:38Joe Rogan?

  God, nature's fascinating.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, and just like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines. We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacine with, and one of the groups that we have involved in it is the logging commission. Going back to your, you know, how does, how do we live with nature, kind of like with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers? Well, the biggest economic driver right now in Tasmania is actually the logging commission. So if you think that you're going to re- reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a into the forest, without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  the world. And so we going back like the thylacine and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups in ahead of time so that people can get excited about, you know, what are the challenges? What are the unintended consequences? And that's not our job to persuade them. It's just our job to kind of listen to them and then figure it out. And, you know, that that approach of like listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities has helped us, I think, dramatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.

• 1:44:53Joe Rogan?

  So when you have a rewilding strategy, what experts do you bring in to have this discussion of what kind of an impact this could be? I mean, you haven't done any rewilding, let's be clear to everybody.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:04Joe Rogan?

  They're not releasing dire wolves.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  And the woolly mice are not getting released.

• 1:45:08Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right. So this is all theoretically.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:10Joe Rogan?

  But if you do have one, what would be the, what would you look at specifically? How do you take into account all the different species? The, do you take into account, like with the thylacine particularly because it's a large predator, the amount of animals it's going to eat?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:26Joe Rogan?

  These animals are not conditioned, they haven't evolved to be around this thing. It's been almost 100 years since the last one was there.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  So on the evolve part, this is actually kind of weird. So you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land. So you have to work with these kind of big working groups. We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing. And this, you know, the old school, like Looney Tunes, like Wile E. Coyote where he's like, and he like goes through a wall and there's like a hole, or the Kool-Aid Man, right? Well, if you had that cut out, we made a, we made cutouts and painted them of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and other things, and wolves and other things. And we put them out near camera traps in central Tasmania. And when we reviewed the data, you'll have like a quoll or a wombat or one of these animals

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  kind of walking through, or even a wallaby kind of walking through, and they'll see a cat, they'll see a cat and they'll kind of look at it. When they see, and remember, to your point, this hundreds, this is, for them, is multiple generations, right? Because these animals don't live hundreds of years. And so when they see the cutout in shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze, they absolutely freak out.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have, we've been collecting this data for 18 months and we're publishing a paper on it.

• 1:46:44Joe Rogan?

  That is so cool.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  There's like generational trauma.

• 1:46:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  That is baked in to their DNA, to avoid a thylacine.

• 1:46:53Joe Rogan?

  It's the only way they survive. I mean, without a language to pass down information, how, what?

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Joe Rogan?

  You know, it makes you wonder like, how much of that is in us? Like, when people have a phidophobia, you know, or arachnophobia, fear of snakes and spiders, like, what is that from? Like, because it's crippling. I've seen people that have crippling fear of spiders, where it doesn't even make any sense. Well, they probably, somebody got almost killed by a spider. And that's inside of them.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:20Joe Rogan?

  You know, those genes passed on. And then you see a spider, you just, they freak out, man. When I was doing Fear Factor, we had, if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what?

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  That was on the show.

• 1:47:33Joe Rogan?

  That's on the show.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like me in Heights. It's like every episode you had back in the day of Heights.

• 1:47:37Joe Rogan?

  That's because you're smart.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like fucking terrifying. I'm like, yeah.

• 1:47:41Joe Rogan?

  Whenever I'm in a fucking hotel and I'm on like the 50th floor, I'm like, why?

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Why? Yeah.

• 1:47:45Joe Rogan?

  Why?

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  So I don't have like road noise. I'm like, it's gonna be really hard to get out of here.

• 1:47:49Joe Rogan?

  This is so sketchy. It's so scary. It's just like the building moves a little bit when it's windy.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Joe Rogan?

  Fuck all this. I saw my toilet water shaking the other day. Fuck that!

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  No, here?

• 1:47:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Jamie, he lives way up high. Jamie sends me pictures from his house. I freak out. Like, no.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  No, I can't.

• 1:48:05Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. I wouldn't, I just, I like to be on the ground. I like to be on the ground.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Well, I hate flying too, which sucks because I fly, I fly all the time.

• 1:48:14Joe Rogan?

  Just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit?

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like, the worst is like when you're sitting there, and there's now been like these renders of planes that have like glass or plexiglass. I'm like, I don't want to see that. I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don't shut the windows. I was like, I don't, I'm in the ball, I'm in the tube.

• 1:48:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, just close your eyes.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  I just, I just want to go. Yeah, I get, because if you think about the point where you're sitting in a chair and then you look down, and you have a floor, you're like, that, that's not, there's not that much, there's like 10,000 feet, you know, 3,000 feet below me.

• 1:48:45Joe Rogan?

  When you see something like the one that happened in Canada where the plane flipped upside down too, you're just like, you can't get that one out of your head.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  A Delta Airlines flight. It wasn't like

• 1:48:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, whoopsies.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  crazy airline you'd never heard of.

• 1:48:56Joe Rogan?

  It was a person who was not that good at flying and kind of recent.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Joe Rogan?

  Like, hey.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Joe Rogan?

  Hire someone better.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I go to DC a decent amount, and so like the whole DC thing like absolutely freaked me out.

• 1:49:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz I sometimes I stay at some of those hotels that are right on the river and you see the choppers fly. You see the choppers fly, you see the choppers fly.

• 1:49:15Joe Rogan?

  That's during a earthquake, but look how much the water's shaking at this pool. Oh, yeah. Did you see the one in Thailand? This is where it was. Oh, did you see the water that's flying off the roofs in Thailand?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the, uh, in the...

• 1:49:25Joe Rogan?

  Flying off the roofs where you see like from the ground, it looks like it's raining. It's crazy. Anyways. Yeah, well, that is, that would be the last day I would spend in that fucking room.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're out.

• 1:49:37Joe Rogan?

  Like, that's it, done, bye-bye.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  If I saw a ghost, I'm like, alright, I'm moving.

• 1:49:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, bye-bye. Maybe, maybe the ghost is cool. I'm not totally scared of ghosts cuz I don't think ghosts have ever killed anybody. You know, I'm scared of tyrosines.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  I'm not scared of tyrosines. They start off the size of a grain of rice. It's gonna be really nice to them.

• 1:49:56Joe Rogan?

  It's totally everything.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  It's kinda like AI, you gotta be really nice to it.

• 1:49:58Joe Rogan?

  Yes, um, I, I, I...

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  I saw a great gift, I saw this, this great image on, on X the other day that is like, it's got all the robots lining up to kill humans and it's like, no, not this one. It said, "Thank you" in its request.

• 1:50:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  So I was like, I'm gonna be very nice on all of my requests on Croc.

• 1:50:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, I have a weird situation going on at my house cuz I have chickens, but I eat chicken.

• 1:50:21Joe Rogan?

  And I don't eat the chickens that I have, I eat their eggs.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Joe Rogan?

  But they're cute. I'm like, hey, girls, what's up, ladies?

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:26Joe Rogan?

  Like, I have no desire to harm them. I try to protect them. If I'm driving on the driveway and one of them is in the middle of the drive, I have to be very slow and let her cross and... But I eat chicken.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Did you see that study that, that came out, um, a couple of weeks ago that having two eggs, uh, I, I'm gonna get the numbers wrong, but you have two eggs, if you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%.

• 1:50:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It turns out Alzheimer's connected to a lot of stuff that's in her diet.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Inflammation, yeah.

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Joe Rogan?

  Unfortunately.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  They're saying that, uh, Gary said it was, um, uh, I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was like, and it's now becoming a more popular belief that it's diabetes type 3.

• 1:51:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've heard that, which is really weird to think of it that way. But it's just so much. I mean, obviously, you know this now because you're on a health path.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Joe Rogan?

  You know, and you feel much better.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  I feel incredible. I mean, I did.

• 1:51:20Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it nuts? How many people are just running around out there feeling like shit?

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Well, I was. I was. I mean, part of the reason I started colossal, I mean, I told you the story about how I got with George. But before that, I built a handful of different technology companies. My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it. And this was in early, late 2019, early 2020. I had to be in Tokyo and I had to be in Shanghai. So I came back. I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in Vegas. Saw everyone in the world, right, that's there because it's stupid big. A week and a half later, I'm in NASA Marshall with the director there because we're doing some work for NASA at the time at my last company. And I was with one of my number two, my number two at the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  He was coughing, he wasn't feeling well. We both were kind of feeling like shit. I was like, oh, we've been on the road a lot. We've been drinking. We came back on a Friday, a Friday night, we had, we were going back on Slack around talking about aliens and shit. And then the next day, I got a call from his wife that he had a sudden cardiac event.

• 1:52:20Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  And so that for me was a big wake up call because I got really sick during COVID. Like I was on that early strain of COVID. And there's definitely multiple strains. I don't care what anyone tells you. There was definitely multiple things that came out of the thing. And, and so I got super, super sick. And, you know, I now rarely drink. I rarely have caffeine. You know, I've kind of tried to cut out stuff, exercise regularly. And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light. I do that every day now.

• 1:52:54Joe Rogan?

  Every day.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 1:52:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's beautiful. That's awesome, man. You're lifting weights too?

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, lifting weights on a regimen, everything.

• 1:53:00Joe Rogan?

  That's so important.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Joe Rogan?

  So important. And I tell people, it's not even a vanity thing. Don't do it because you want big muscles. Preserve your tissue.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08Joe Rogan?

  Preserve your bone mass.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to be like, I now have a nine month old son, right? And he like wants to hang out and, you know, he's going to get bigger. And if I can't pick him up, that's a sad day, you know? And I've kind of gotten this mindset of like, you know, I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can't walk. It's like, it's kind of a blessing to walk.

• 1:53:28Joe Rogan?

  It is.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  So like, why, why would I squander that blessing? Why would I not like lean into it and make sure that when I'm 90, I can walk?

• 1:53:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's a blessing to be healthy. It's a blessing. I mean, it's just, we're, we're so concerned about our day to day existence that we lose track of this big picture. You have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn't possible, you would wish it was possible. And that is get healthier. Like, if it wasn't possible, if we just existed in a state, and whatever that state was, there's no medicine that could fix it. There's no exercise that could fix it. Diet doesn't change it. This is just who you are as a being, and it goes away. But that's not even remotely true. It's actually the opposite. There's, there's friends that I have that are my age, and they look like they're my dad.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Joe Rogan?

  And that's, that's because they've been drinking and smoking and, and sleeping late and fucking off their whole life and no exercise at all. And your body deteriorates.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm, I'm not, like, I'm on the journey. I'm not at the end, right? It is a constant journey.

• 1:54:27Joe Rogan?

  I'm on the journey. We're all on the journey.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  But like, since I started working with Gary, like, I did, have you, have you seen this function test? Have you done the function test?

• 1:54:34Joe Rogan?

  What is the function test?

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  It's like function health. It's like a, it's just a suit. It's just all, if you go to your doctor, like, I do quarterly blood work. But then I also then do this, uh, the function test, which is massively all encompassing type of blood. It's like two tests twice a year. And, um, and so I, I do that test. And, uh, after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my, my biological age, or my actual age is, is 43. My, uh, my biological age is 35.

• 1:55:01Joe Rogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And it's just been working for a year with, with Gary, taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients. You know, I buy, and you can actually taste the difference, right? Like, if you go to the store and get a steak or chicken, you, and, and you, even if it's like free range and all that shit, it tastes great. It, it tastes better than like something that you buy, just that's, that's terrible at a, at a store. But when you order from some of these like true like Amish places and, and places that have actually like grown the food like completely natural, that is, doesn't have just a fake, pre-purchased, certified organic. You can taste the difference in the nutrient density. It's insane.

• 1:55:39Joe Rogan?

  Have you had a lot of wild game?

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's what I order now. So I order a bunch. So I do elk steaks. I do. I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary recommended to me. It's just great.

• 1:55:51Joe Rogan?

  Is it bison? Do they have bison?

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  They do have bison too. Yeah, it's Parker Pastures. They're just like when I have a steak from these guys, like it's been like you can taste it. And I've had like my brother in law and my father, I had friends. I was like, no, no, we're gonna try these steaks out of the freezer. And I was like, we're not just gonna buy something.

• 1:56:07Joe Rogan?

  It looks different.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  It looks different. Yeah, it looks different.

• 1:56:10Joe Rogan?

  You get a pink steak from the grocery store, which is fine. You cook it, it tastes great. But if you get a grass fed, grass finished steak.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Grass finished, 100%.

• 1:56:19Joe Rogan?

  A lot of ranches out here, you know, there's Texas is a great place. And there's a lot of ranches out here that use regenerative agriculture and they sell the animals that they kill and it's like a dark red meat.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks completely different, but the taste.

• 1:56:32Joe Rogan?

  Tastes different.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  The taste, you want to eat more of it. Like I feel full, but I want to finish it. And I also feel like I'm like, my body likes this because it's getting shit that it hasn't been getting.

• 1:56:42Joe Rogan?

  You feel better when you eat it. Like you literally feel energized. You know, I've given people elk before. And one of the things I say is like, dude, I have so much energy. I'm like, yeah, welcome to my world.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  It's awesome. It is. It is so great. But that was in the early days of colossal. That was one of the things that we got asked by like heads of state, like not, not by like, you know, just random people, random people on the internet too. Mostly like some people at large, at different locations. They're like, can we eat them? Can we eat a mammoth? What's it taste like? That was like, that question came up faster than we thought. And this was in the, I know, that was in the first.

• 1:57:18Joe Rogan?

  So weird.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  They like, they just don't.

• 1:57:20Joe Rogan?

  Imagine wanting to eat something that's been extinct for 10,000 years. You just bring it back. Not even yet.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was the first question.

• 1:57:27Joe Rogan?

  Can I eat this?

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Joe Rogan?

  I want woolly mammoth steak, my friend.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  It was also domestic. The question happened domestically.

• 1:57:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, domestic.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like people, people in very big states.

• 1:57:36Joe Rogan?

  They have too much money.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:38Joe Rogan?

  Fucking psychos.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's been, it's.

• 1:57:41Joe Rogan?

  Go buy a car, you retards.

• 1:57:44Joe Rogan?

  I want to eat a mammoth. That's so crazy.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  We get the din- we get that. We get, we get so many weird questions. We get the dinosaur question. The probably the number one question we get is, uh, is the dinosaur question.

• 1:57:55Joe Rogan?

  Do you think if they brought, if Jurassic Park, if Spielberg did it today, they'd have feathers?

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Uh, we know that some dinosaurs had feathers. We know some had hair, like hair, like kind of precursative feathers. And we know some that were just scaly. We, we have preserves of them. We, we can see in the fossil record whether they had it, right?

• 1:58:14Joe Rogan?

  Have you seen the one that's in the Montana University? There's a university in Bozeman, uh, that has, um, a museum. Isn't the university, it might just be a museum. Um, but when I was visiting there a few years back, they have a, like a raptor. And one side of the raptor is feathered and the other side is like Jurassic Park, like scaly. And you know, you look at it, you go, oh, it's just like, oh, that's a fucking, it's a bird. Like now it makes sense. Like it makes more sense with its little stupid arms. Like makes more sense. It's a bird.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  Have you seen the Watson?

• 1:58:47Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Can we, can we pull up a Watson? So this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon and it, it is, it's called a, or Hootzen. I think it's called, I don't know how you spell it, but it's like H O A T Z E N or something like that. We, we can find it. Yeah. Apparently it also smells terrible, but if you click, if you type in, uh, uh, oh yeah, it's, it's a Hootzen. And then if you click in, uh, and find a baby picture, it's got these little creepy hands. It looks like a, it looks like kind of like a bird, like dinosaur. We, we did the genome on this for fun. So, oh yeah, you can see it. It's like, it, it climbs. So before it ever flies, it actually climbs up everything.

• 1:59:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, when you look at an eagle's talon, you're like, what the hell is that?

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  And then it evolves, like if you, uh, the, uh, the first kind of like quote unquote dinosaur bird out there. Um, it actually, uh, yeah, it crawls. It crawls like, it doesn't fly. You know, most birds just sit there with their little like wing nubs and just don't do anything. These guys actually climb.

• 1:59:47Joe Rogan?

  What about terror birds?

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Those are scary.

• 1:59:50Joe Rogan?

  That's a crazy animal. Like what the hell was that thing? And that was, what was that? How many years ago did those things go extinct?

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Oh, those were millions.

• 1:59:58Joe Rogan?

  Millions, right?

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the oldest DNA that we have is about 1.5 million years old.

• 2:00:03Joe Rogan?

  That's it?

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:04Joe Rogan?

  So dinosaurs are out of the picture.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  So, so you can. A guy I should talk to about not that, but that's interesting is Kenneth Lacavara. He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including Dreadnaughtis, which is just, it's the craziest thing ever.

• 2:00:18Joe Rogan?

  Dreadnaught.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Dreadnaughtis. And going back to the issues that...

• 2:00:22Joe Rogan?

  What is Dreadnaughtis?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Oh Dreadnaughtis is amazing. So, I don't know if it looks like that.

• 2:00:28Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. What, imagine it did.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, go to that.

• 2:00:31Joe Rogan?

  What cool colors?

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Joe Rogan?

  So it's a planeter?

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a planeter that's size of a 737. But going back...

• 2:00:38Joe Rogan?

  It's almost as big as a 737. That's so crazy.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he found it in Argentina. And he, like, he's ama- Kenneth Lacavara, he's amazing. He found it in Argentina, discovered the species, named the species, and he brought it, he brought it to New Jersey to do all the modeling and all that. The government changed and they yanked it back. You know the old school, like, the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That's where it is. It's basically in a warehouse. So it's on display for people in a museum. It's literally, this goes back to some of these governments and these museums. It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in western Argentina.

• 2:01:24Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like the coolest thing ever. This is, yeah, so, yeah, that's Lacavara's lab. And so, but it's truly, truly amazing.

• 2:01:33Joe Rogan?

  So with these, like, that's one of the things about dinosaurs and museums, right? Like, a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Fill in a lot of the blanks. Sometimes they'll get like a jawbone and they're like, and here's the reconstruction.

• 2:01:47Joe Rogan?

  Right. It's weird because you go to see it and you think you're going to see a dinosaur bone.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  And it's only a percentage complete.

• 2:01:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And sometimes they're real clever and sometimes they're not. Like, sometimes they'll, it'll be different colors for the real bone.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:00Joe Rogan?

  Versus, and you're like, how much of this do you have?

• 2:02:02Speaker 01

  And they're like, 4%.

• 2:02:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. How did you guess what it looked like? Like... And a lot of the images like of like the soft tissue overlay like when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it like. Have you ever seen like what like rabbits look like if you take away there's.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did this with like whales and stuff and they look absolutely if you look at that they look like the scariest things ever and then you put a whale on there and you're like, oh, that's not the worst thing.

• 2:02:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for whales, you you see them and you look at them, you're like, oh, they're sweet.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:29Joe Rogan?

  Woo, just chilling in the water. But if you see them with the teeth and everything and just the skeleton.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  It looks like it looks like an alien monster.

• 2:02:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like an alien monster. So I wonder what we were looking at.

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  There was a, there was a, uh, one species that we don't have DNA for that would be amazing to bring back because the ecological benefit is there was a giant beaver.

• 2:02:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid.

• 2:02:52Joe Rogan?

  When did that thing die off?

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  I don't know, it'd probably have to be, it it would probably be in the late Pleistocene.

• 2:02:58Joe Rogan?

  One of the things that I learned through Rinella is that, uh, at the founding of this country in the early days, the richest man in the world was selling beaver pelts.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:03:08Joe Rogan?

  And it was the richest guy in the world.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Joe Rogan?

  Here at the Pleistocene.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Well, on the dinosaur bones.

• 2:03:13Joe Rogan?

  This beaver, giant beaver, enormous, bear-sized beaver that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Wow. So when did these die off? What year? What was the Pleistocene officially?

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  So about thirteen thousand years ago.

• 2:03:29Joe Rogan?

  Could have been the same thing.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Twelve thousand years ago.

• 2:03:30Joe Rogan?

  So it probably died off with.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  During that same.

• 2:03:33Joe Rogan?

  American lion and all that other stuff. And you know, the the pronghorn, you know, the whole story about that. Yeah, that's why they're so fast.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  Oh, for because of the American lion?

• 2:03:42Joe Rogan?

  No, American cheetah.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  American cheetah.

• 2:03:44Joe Rogan?

  Like they're the last of these animal. They're a bizarre animal. Have you ever seen one in real life?

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  I've never seen one in real life.

• 2:03:49Joe Rogan?

  I've only seen it through binoculars. I've never seen one, you know, uh, on the ground real close. I've only seen it from a few hundred yards away, but. When you look at images of them, they have insane eyesight. They have almost three hundred and sixty degree vision. Their eyes are on the side of their heads.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen the pictures.

• 2:04:06Joe Rogan?

  And they can run fifty-five miles an hour. And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don't exist anymore.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Joe Rogan?

  So the cheetahs died off in the Younger Dryas impact period or whatever happened. But these pronghorn antelopes remain and they are.

• 2:04:22Joe Rogan?

  There's nothing like them in terms of speed.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 2:04:25Joe Rogan?

  Like, it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:28Joe Rogan?

  Where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone, they remain.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so can anything catch them now?

• 2:04:34Joe Rogan?

  Nothing. Once they're done, like, once they're grown, good fucking luck. They have insane eyesight. But you know one of the ways that people hunt them? They're really dumb. One of the ways people hunt them is on horsebacks. Like, that dog has zero chance. But the cheetah, the cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down. So it's like another, you know, different kind of antelope.

• 2:04:57Joe Rogan?

  But a super fast, they're quite a bit faster, I bet, than these antelope. They're crazy fast. There's like nothing like them in North America.

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  It's awesome.

• 2:05:04Joe Rogan?

  But the vision that these things have, give me a photo of one of their heads, pronghorn's eyes. They're so weird looking. They look archaic. Like, if you, if you see their face, they don't look like, it looks like they're from another time.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  It looks like from a Star Wars movie.

• 2:05:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. They look like they're from another time.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:24Joe Rogan?

  And they are.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  They're literally on the side there.

• 2:05:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. They, this is what would have been so amazing to like, look at what the Earth looked like, you know, 12,000 years ago.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  It is, it is cool, like.

• 2:05:33Joe Rogan?

  America.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Like, to, to your point, when you travel and you go to these different places where you have, that are truly more remote, right? And I'm not just talking about like Yellowstone, but, you know, like, when you've said, like, going to Kruger National Park or looking at some of these places in Africa. When you go to central Tasmania, it's almost like a weird Disney movie. Like, like, at dusk, you've got, like, echidnas running around and you've got wallabies jumping, jumping through. And they all just come through and you're like, it's like that scene in like Ace Ventura, right? Where he sings and like, everything fucking comes to him. And I, and like, I remember the first, I was like, this isn't real. Like, are these animatronic, like, there's no way there's this much life and biodiversity. And it's all, and it was all just like, you know, the echidnas are running, the wallabies are, are jumping.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  You've got like, uh, wombats, like, kind of, uh, like, kind of scurrying along and you're just like, there's all these weird dumb animals that are just excited. You know, they're so strange to us, right? In terms of like, how we think about them, because you never see them. But then there's just like this insane plethora of them. They're just so many. It's crazy.

• 2:06:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, I wonder what would be different had the thylacine survived.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  So they say that-

• 2:06:36Joe Rogan?

  Because that was kind of the only thing that was-

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  It was the only apex predator for Tasmania and lower Australia. And have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person?

• 2:06:45Joe Rogan?

  Not in person.

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  They're awesome.

• 2:06:46Joe Rogan?

  They look cool as shit.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  They're cool as shit. They're awesome. They're packed. They eat in these little packs. And the reason why they call them Tasmanian devils is because they make the weirdest... I mean, they make sa- if I heard the sounds that they make, if you're out in the woods and you hear that sound, you're like, "This is Sasquatch. This is crazy."

• 2:07:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're crazy. See if you can hear some-

• 2:07:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, cute face.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  If you find them eating, they just sound terrible.

• 2:07:13Joe Rogan?

  Find Tasmanian tiger noises.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  I don't think you know what they make.

• 2:07:18Joe Rogan?

  Or, excuse me, Tasmanian devil noises, sorry. Sorry, not-

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Have you seen this video, though?

• 2:07:24Joe Rogan?

  I have, yeah. We can go to that in a second, too. I just want to hear this.

• 2:07:30Joe Rogan?

  Look at that fucker. Look at his face.

• 2:07:37Joe Rogan?

  So cool.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  And so they, so they're, they're part of the reason why they're... But that, isn't that terrifying?

• 2:07:42Joe Rogan?

  You know they give each other cancer?

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:07:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  And many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think that if the thylacine was there, because this is where people give wolves and thylacines and predators bad... But they go after the sa- there's an energy expenditure ratio, right? They're not just sitting there grazing. They're not getting sedentary. They have to go make the kill. They have to decide, "I'm gonna go kill stuff." So they kill the young, so they're thinning out the weakest. They, they kill the old, then they kill the sick. A, an environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.

• 2:08:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate kind of that mezzanine level of marsupials. And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not, if you've seen, it's a, it's, I don't know if you saw it, it's disgusting.

• 2:08:31Joe Rogan?

  It's really gross.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:33Joe Rogan?

  What is that? What are we looking at here? I'm in here starting- Oh, feeding frenzy? It's like a frenzy we're in 360. Give me some volume. It's doing it right in front of people, too, which is crazy.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  I fed them like this. It's crazy.

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  Here they go.

• 2:08:44Joe Rogan?

  They're just not scared.

• 2:08:45Speaker 04

  Watch how fast they are capable of consuming-

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  They're like piranhas in the world.

• 2:08:50Speaker 04

  These are Tasmanian devils, the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera. And next to Tasmanian-

• 2:08:58Joe Rogan?

  It's so cool that they're not even remotely scared of people.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't even notice you're there. It's crazy. So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of a wall of these-

• 2:09:09Joe Rogan?

  Whose video was this, Jimmy?

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Uh, Coyote Peterson's.

• 2:09:11Joe Rogan?

  Brave Wilderness, that's the channel. Look at these little fuckers go.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights, and that fighting-

• 2:09:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, their fight aren't that-

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  That's when they, uh, do the transmission.

• 2:09:23Speaker 04

  Oh, right in the middle of the devil fight!

• 2:09:25Joe Rogan?

  No, I mean like- Wow.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  But they literally, uh, scratch and bite each other, and then they, uh, they transmit this- It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of. So then it, it latches onto the next face through biting, and, and the thi- And if you see an animal with a, a Tasmanian devil with the facial tumor disease, and you see them, like, they, they can't walk well, they can't really see well, those are the animals that would be picked off by predators first.

• 2:09:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  And so, they, so there's, uh, a big movement within Tasmania and, in lower Austro- uh, southern Australia, that if we could reintroduce a predator, being the thylacine, it would eat-

• 2:10:00Joe Rogan?

  Ugh.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I can't even look, it-

• 2:10:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh god, we're, we're looking, for people listening, we're looking at tumors on Tasmanian devils faces.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is terrible.

• 2:10:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, that was a perfect, uh, inspiration for a comic book character, or for a cartoon character, rather, the Tasmanian devil.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tasmanian devil, yeah. I mean, they're, they're like, they'll be sitting there, not making those sounds, they start eating, or they get threatened, and they make those death sounds. You're, you're, it is a terr- because, if, if you've never heard it before in person, it just catches you by surprise, and it like blows you away. So I was, it was a pretty weird experience personally, that.

• 2:10:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'd imagine. They're, they're, that's such a cool little animal. So, the idea of ultimately eventually releasing thylacines, how would that be done, and what kind of study would have to be done? Cause you're, you're talking about all these animals that come out, look at all the animals! That probably won't be the case, if you reintroduce thylacines.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:10:53Joe Rogan?

  They'll start-

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  They will start-

• 2:10:54Joe Rogan?

  Finning it out, and it'll-

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  They'll fining, they'll separate.

• 2:10:56Joe Rogan?

  Achieve a balance.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll achieve a balance.

• 2:10:57Joe Rogan?

  So they've done a lot, let's just like keep people up to date on Australia. Most people don't know that they've introduced cats, so house cats. Uh, you want some water?

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 2:11:07Joe Rogan?

  Um, they introduced house cats, like just feral house cats in Australia, to combat certain species.

• 2:11:14Joe Rogan?

  And they start decimating all the other species.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  It's literally the worst, it's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate is in Australia.

• 2:11:22Joe Rogan?

  Right, and it's because it's an invasive species. Would that be a problem that would be, would there be a similar problem if you reintroduced the Tasmanian tiger? Would there be, potentially, would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct?

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  So the good, the good news about the Tasmanian in the southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right? Hopefully they'd eat the cats, if you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats outside of the cats that they actually own.

• 2:11:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials. They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats.

• 2:12:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, people hunt them.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, people hunt them.

• 2:12:02Joe Rogan?

  Like you have, I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Green Tree, and they have this magazine, it's like a bow hunter magazine in Australia. And he gave me a copy of it, I was reading on a plane, and this guy's holding up a dead cat he shot with a bow in it, I'm like, hey, man, like, what the fuck?

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  You know, they, they, it is.

• 2:12:16Joe Rogan?

  They hold them up like trophies.

• 2:12:17Speaker 01

  Well, because it's a huge problem, right? It goes back to the invasive species. One of the projects that we're working on with the Thylacine, because we like to pair every de-extinction with a species preservation, is, have you ever seen a northern quoll?

• 2:12:30Joe Rogan?

  No, what is that?

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  Northern quoll, it, it, it kind of looks like a mink or like a ferret, but way prettier, it's amazing.

• 2:12:35Joe Rogan?

  How do you spell it?

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Uh, Q U O L L.

• 2:12:38Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  I mean, they're, they're absolutely beautiful, they're absolutely, I mean, their coats are beautiful, but they're another type of carnivorous marsupial. But, you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity, introduced cane toads. Have you ever seen a cane toad? It's like the Jabba the Hutt, I mean, it looks fucking evil, right?

• 2:12:57Joe Rogan?

  They're monsters.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  And so, we introduced, we as humanity, introduced cane toads into Australia. And, and they have a neurotoxin. Well, guess what most quolls and small marsupials love to eat? Frogs and toads. And so, this is actually, I think, about our work. This actually is about our work. And so, no, this may be, no, actually, I think this is part of our work. And what, what we've done is, if you go back to, to your point about co-evolve. If you go back to South America where cane toads evolved along snakes and mice and other small mammals, they, cane toads, all day long. And they don't die of the neurotoxin. They don't like completely like stroke out and die, which is what happens in Northern Australia.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  And so the cane toads are, they reproduce in an insane rate. They're having like thousands of babies. There's making more and more of them. So guess what? More and more coals and others are eating these cane toads and dying. So what we did is we actually did a study where we understood what are the genes in the mammals and snakes even in South America that make them cane toad toxin resistant? And here's what we found. This is amazing. One letter in three and a half billion base pairs. So one letter, a one-letter change conferred, had no other deteriorates, had no other effects that were negative. And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad.

• 2:14:25Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  So because, you know, coals are endangered and we don't want to work in endangered species first, you want to start with a more model species. We worked in the fat-tailed dunart, which is our model species for the thylacine. And we engineered dunarts that, and dunart cells and dunarts that can eat cane toad tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them. And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to enter, we like to engineer in this one edit into coals. Because if coals would have, would have most likely through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put the coal next to the cane toad, they would have co-evolved together, they probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature.

• 2:15:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:11Speaker 01

  And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation. And so then you could like make these super coals that eat the cane toads. And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this, and help the population of the coals, but it also has a halo effect to all these other marsupials that we don't know how many are dying from eating cane toads.

• 2:15:33Joe Rogan?

  I hope you don't have to bring. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I know how chaotic things get this time of the year between all the holidays, trying to train, and last-minute projects at work.

• 2:16:18Joe Rogan?

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• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

  Go to drinkag1.com/joe and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of Omega 3 Fish Oil and Vitamin D tossed in with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro, backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's drinkag1.com/joe. Being big toads to eat the coals.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Have you seen those toads and frogs that latch out and they'll eat anything in front of them?

• 2:17:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're terrifying.

• 2:17:36Joe Rogan?

  I've seen the ones that eat.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  There was a giant, one of those toads back in, like, I don't know, thousands of years ago.

• 2:17:42Joe Rogan?

  How big was it?

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  I don't know. I've seen a 3D render of it and it grabs deers and stuff. It's crazy.

• 2:17:49Joe Rogan?

  Whoa, we've played videos of toads eating mice. I had no idea.

• 2:17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:17:58Joe Rogan?

  So they put them in this bin with a bunch of mice and this toad is just going ham, just snatching mice up and swallowing.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  And you'd think that they're sitting there docile and then they just absolutely, they throw their whole bodies at it.

• 2:18:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, they sit there. They have the creepiest dead eyes. They're just machines to eat. Ever seen them fight with each other? That's pretty wild, too. They bite each other's heads and they throw each other through the air.

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen them toss each other.

• 2:18:20Joe Rogan?

  Imagine you're fighting with a dude and he literally bites half your torso and throws you through the air and they don't even look like it bothered him.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just part of the fight. That's totally within the rules.

• 2:18:32Joe Rogan?

  That's what creeps me out about reptiles. There's this lack of emotions. Like, at least a wolf has emotions. You know, it's like there's something going on there. There's an intelligence. There's something really creepy about getting eaten by something stupid.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Like a crocodile.

• 2:18:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like a crocodile or like a toad. There was a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting, but it turns out to not be true. That they would lie on their back and put their arms in the air to simulate drowning.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw that video.

• 2:19:00Joe Rogan?

  Apparently that's not what they're doing. Apparently that's a normal characteristic that they do.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  But from a natural selection perspective, stupid people are like, I have to save them.

• 2:19:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I gotta go save that dude.

• 2:19:11Speaker 01

  And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart, but in reality, it just got a free meal.

• 2:19:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, you would think, though, if they have gotten those meals before, that that would be a learned behavior. I mean, it just makes sense. They do have some learned behavior. I have a friend, his name is Jim Shockey. He's a professional hunter and he was actually hired to go into Africa and hunt crocodiles that were killing all these people in this village. Like, they're actively targeting people in this village. And when he went to the village, everybody was like, missing a foot, a chunk taken out of their leg. And while he was there, a crocodile took a woman who was washing clothes. So what they had done was... They'd set up this area by the water where they had driven these stakes in the ground that would prevent the crocodiles from getting in the water and getting really close to the edge, you know, because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out

• 2:20:00Joe Rogan?

  and snatch you up.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:01Joe Rogan?

  These fucking crocodiles went around the fence. They walked around the fence and slid into the water.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  I believe it.

• 2:20:08Joe Rogan?

  So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to. So they, they hunt people.

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they absolutely do. And it's, it's weird how some of those, um, it, it, it's very strange as we start to study, cause like, one of the things that Colossal is doing is we're studying a lot of what's called non-model species. So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know. There's some things that are known, like in ele, like elephants get cancer a fraction of what they should due to an over-expression of a gene called P53. So there's this thing called Pedo's Paradox where based on age and body weight, both blue whales and, uh, elephants get cancer a fraction of, of what they probably should based on how old they get and what their body size is. And they actually, that actually makes our lives very difficult and that's why we had to create, um, stem cells for elephants. Because anytime we try to, we had to figure out how to regulate P53 because anytime you

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

  go to edit that one, uh, cell, it just says, "Looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell." Right? It's like programmed in. So we had to be able to, we had to be able to turn that down, cause we're in the editing phase on the Maneth Project, right? So there's about 85 genes.

• 2:21:11Joe Rogan?

  But if you turn that down, does that, that make them more susceptible to cancer?

• 2:21:14Speaker 01

  And so you gotta turn it back up after you make the edits.

• 2:21:16Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so, so these are the things that you just, that we are learning about.

• 2:21:20Joe Rogan?

  I'm with that lady doctor, that lady scientist. You guys are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  No, we're learning about things, right? We're learning about things, right?

• 2:21:26Joe Rogan?

  I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding. If I was her, I would probably have the same opinion.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:30Joe Rogan?

  I'd probably say, especially if I found out you guys weren't really scientists, like, "What are you doing?"

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Joe Rogan?

  "Why are you doing this?"

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, I mean, the good news is about Colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and, and our 95 scientific advisors, 90% of the company's scientists. There's very few, like I, like I fall in the very few.

• 2:21:46Joe Rogan?

  I'm kinda kidding about you're not scientists, but I'm not, I'm not kidding about the technology getting into someone else's hands.

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:52Joe Rogan?

  And this is where it gets weird, like China, Russia, some other.

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  And it is, it's, it is. Getting weird like CRISPR and these genome engineering tools are outside of the are they're out it's it's like the genie out of the bottle, right? It's like it's out there. You can't put it back in. I think that more and more people in other countries are going to be doing things with these two these technologies for humans. That's why colossal just said, we will never do anything for humans. If someone else wants to use our technologies for humans, we'll evaluate it.

• 2:22:19Joe Rogan?

  But that gets so weird, right? Like the China story. You can't explain to people what what they did. They they said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they actually were engineering. They were engineering babies in in editing their embryos to confer a resistance to HIV. Now, still to this day, so they they were cloning them, and then they were genetically modifying them. And so they're doing lots of things that are there's a general moratorium in the world on some of these things around humans, anything that's considered a germ line edit. So anything that could be passed on to the next generation, right? So things. So if you if you if you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, you know, from a germ line. So any all your cells in your body are somatic cells, except for your like egg or sperm, those are germ cells. So anything that could be affected into the germ line, so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be like,

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  you know, umbrella corporation type moment, right? We don't want that.

• 2:23:17Joe Rogan?

  The scary thing was, they didn't just do that. They also edited something that would allow the child to have much higher intelligence.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  Well, so that part's like, that part's quoted under under debate. There's people that say that happened. There's people that say it doesn't happen. If you look at BGI, or Beijing Genomics Institute, right? They did this thing that from an affairs perspective was brilliant. From an affairs perspective is also terrifying. During COVID, they're like, we'll do all the COVID testing for you free. We'll do all this COVID testing for you for free. No worries. Just send us your data. We'll do it all for you. You just want to help the world, right? We'll work with the World Health Organization. Just send us all your samples from all your countries, everything. And publicly, the CEO of BGI has said, which is funded by the CCP, has said that

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  They would, that they are looking at genes with humans. They are looking at what makes humans more intelligent. They don't shy away from this. This is not like some, you know, conspiracy, like they're like, is it a Sasquatch? Or is it just a man and an ape suit? This is something that is very real. They are openly saying, we are sequencing as much as we can of the world population, looking for genes for intelligence, and we will act on that. Like, that's not a hidden thing. So that is the problem.

• 2:24:34Joe Rogan?

  But they supposedly did with these children. How old are these kids now?

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, that would have, when did that happen? It was, yeah, so they've been like six or seven?

• 2:24:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, and are they already winning chess championships?

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm not.

• 2:24:46Joe Rogan?

  We should find out.

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:47Joe Rogan?

  We should find out where these kids are probably in a lab somewhere with a headset on.

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:51Joe Rogan?

  Teaching them how to be psychic.

• 2:24:53Speaker 01

  I don't know how public it's like, it was also one of those weird things that was like, he's in trouble, he's going to jail.

• 2:25:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  And then he's like.

• 2:25:02Joe Rogan?

  And then he got out.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  And then he's out.

• 2:25:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:05Speaker 01

  All is forgiven.

• 2:25:06Joe Rogan?

  He's a good guy. But meanwhile, if you go to jail in China, you fucking vanish.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  Forever.

• 2:25:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, except for this guy.

• 2:25:11Joe Rogan?

  You're making iPhones until you drop dead of starvation.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, it is, it's 100% true.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  And so it is weird that like, he got in trouble for a few months.

• 2:25:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, and he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  Well, they funded his lab. His lab was, his lab was funded by the.

• 2:25:29Joe Rogan?

  And this is what we found out about. I guarantee you, there's some shit that they're doing somewhere that we haven't found out about yet. And if you were gonna do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that Russia.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's what separates us.

• 2:25:42Joe Rogan?

  You know what Russia was attempting to do during, was it World War I or World War II? They were trying to make a chimpanzee-human hybrid for war.

• 2:25:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I saw that. I read about that.

• 2:25:51Joe Rogan?

  For war.

• 2:25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:52Joe Rogan?

  A chimp-human hybrid for war.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Well, there's been a recent publication out of Japan where they're allowing Japanese soldier, or Japanese scientists to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes.

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  With other mammalian genes.

• 2:26:09Joe Rogan?

  Like what kind of genes? Like woolly mammoth genes in a person?

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  No, we are not doing that. People ask us if we could solve hair loss with woolly mammoths.

• 2:26:18Joe Rogan?

  That would be the first thing people want. Hair loss, next thing, bigger dicks.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  These are consistent questions.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, you can't engineer once a person's already born, right? With the current technology.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  With the current technology, like, so being able to send stuff to gene therapies and targeting of being able to deliver specifically to cells is an area that we're getting better at. Like, I think one of the, probably the most, I think that one of the projects that's the furthest along is around like sickle cell anemia. It's a single CRISPR knockout, right? So it's a single knockout, it's not multiplex editing, and now it's about can you target that in all of the tissue types that are the most affected? And then over time, how do you deliver that gene therapy to everything?

• 2:26:59Joe Rogan?

  And you could do that to a person who's already born?

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  To someone that's already born. It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage.

• 2:27:04Joe Rogan?

  Could you envision a world where the gene editing technology becomes so powerful that you could do it to a person who is already fully formed?

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:27:14Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:15Joe Rogan?

  This is what I predicted. Everyone's gonna look like Thor. It's gonna be a bunch of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Momoa's and no more people look like you and me.

• 2:27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wait.

• 2:27:24Joe Rogan?

  It's over, bro.

• 2:27:25Speaker 01

  So Chris is one of our investors and I always think we look just like each other.

• 2:27:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  So he invited, Luke invited me to go to Byron.

• 2:27:31Joe Rogan?

  If I was from another planet, I think you're different specieses.

• 2:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they invited me to go up to Byron Bay and go surfing with them. And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go take my shirt off next to you nerds. That's exactly what's never gonna happen. And I just made up an excuse of why I couldn't go because they were like, we wanna go surfing. And I was like, ah, yeah.

• 2:27:47Joe Rogan?

  Sure you do.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not going surfing with you two.

• 2:27:50Joe Rogan?

  Measure cocks too?

• 2:27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, I'm going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible.

• 2:27:54Joe Rogan?

  But you gotta imagine if that becomes a reality, like, what we're doing today just with plastic surgery.

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Joe Rogan?

  Right? Like, let's take South Korea for example. Yeah, GLP-1, but that's. That's achievable, right? What GLP-1s are doing is achievable through hard work.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28:13Joe Rogan?

  But like what they're doing in South Korea with eye surgery, like it's ubiquitous. Like so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these K-pop eyes.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:22Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a strange thing.

• 2:28:24Joe Rogan?

  It's a strange thing. And if, that's just primitive cutting and sewing tissue artistically, right? But if people can decide what they're going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a eugenics world.

• 2:28:37Joe Rogan?

  Now we're really playing God.

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  No, that's playing God to another level, right? And that's like, that's this eugenics world where we know, right? Like, I just had a child and, you know, typically, I'd say if you go through the IVF process, which we went through, you typically can test for certain types of issues like along the pregnancy, right? And when they put the embryo in, they look at kind of the morphological grade. Well, now there's new tests, new companies out there, one of which I use, which after I used it, I was impressed, I invested in it called Orchid Health. And they actually take cells from the developing embryo on the very outer derm, right? On this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development. They culture those cells and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right? And so we had a handful of embryos and so not selecting, they don't let you just select for like eye color or height or anything.

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue or is it compatible with life? Which is what most people test for, you can now, you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things, right? So like, you know, if diabetes or cancer, certain types of cancers or Alzheimer's relatives in your family, you can now get, a lot of that's environmental, but you can still get a distribution score to it. So you can understand, are there genetic factors in that? So that's today. So that's not like 20 years in the future. That's not Gattaca. That's today.

• 2:29:57Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:29:58Speaker 01

  And I mean, we did that. We did that because I have a, I have a, I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation which affects the Titan gene and I created truncated protein. So I have, I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID that was a lab leak that in, that attacked my heart. And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on. So we screened for that, right? But that's not a standard thing. So but that's a today thing like, like, you know, two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.

• 2:30:28Joe Rogan?

  So you understand the technology better than most conceivably. What could be done that would, in the future, allow people to change their very shape? And it literally like change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything?

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  I think it starts with, you know, neuro enhancers. And I think, and this is the biological perspective. This is not even the computer brain interfaces merging with AI, that whole world, which I think that world has a lot of traction and is scarily getting a lot of traction pretty quickly. But I think it starts with things like health span where it's like the very vain stuff. So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that, eye color. I think all of that is changeable and not in like, there's a company right now. I forgot the name of it that spun out of Harvard that is making patches using micro needling patches that you can't even feel the needles, right?

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help like replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin. And so so you can have 30 year old looking skin when you're 85 years old.

• 2:31:38Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 2:31:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So and the same thing for hair, right? The reason why our hair.

• 2:31:43Joe Rogan?

  That's gonna be real soon?

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, that's the speed of which the I think the biggest, I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process and not the not the technology. I think it'll be a process problem. We saw that with Operation Warp Drive, right? We saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to. So I think that's number one. And I think that you're going to have the ethical pushbacks on this.

• 2:32:11Joe Rogan?

  So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles. But right now, the technology exists.

• 2:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of for the folks that are deep in longevity, their biggest, they'll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it's not currently classified as a disease state.

• 2:32:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  It's just, and so they're not getting NIH funding.

• 2:32:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  They're getting, all that funding is going to other random stuff. You know, but people aren't focusing on longevity. That's why you've got, like, you've seen anything like Bob Nelson's done. Bob started Arch Ventures and he's like arguably the number one biotech in the world. And he's working on epigenetic resets, or resetting your clocks at a cellular level. That's what Jeff Bezos and them have, they're doing it at Alto's Labs. George Church has another company called Rejuvenate Bio. They're doing the same things. And they're smart. They did it in dogs first because people love dogs. And they can also collect a lot of data that then they can then apply to clinical trials.

• 2:33:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people cloning their dogs now.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's people that are cloning their dogs. They can do it even easier now with, with this.

• 2:33:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I didn't bring Marshall to the studio.

• 2:33:09Speaker 01

  We did, we did clone one person's dog.

• 2:33:11Joe Rogan?

  I couldn't do it. I love him too much. I couldn't do it. I would, I would feel so weird around this fake Marshall.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:18Joe Rogan?

  I wouldn't want to do that.

• 2:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and that's how people feel about it. Some people-

• 2:33:22Joe Rogan?

  Dogs are unique little creatures. They have their own little personalities.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  I know, I've got two and they're amazing. And, you know, I did, my wife is closer to one. And so I did, I did, full disclosure, I did, we did do a blood sample on that one. Just because I don't, I don't-

• 2:33:37Joe Rogan?

  Just in case?

• 2:33:38Speaker 01

  I just don't know what the meltdown could look like. So, but, but, but the other one, we haven't. And so, because you're right, you have, you have environmental factors, you have personalities. We don't understand all of that.

• 2:33:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  But I, I, I won't say who it is, but someone that's very well known in the world. When I was showing him some of our dire wolf and red wolf tech, his kids were devastated because his dog was dying. And they didn't want to, they didn't want to put her in any harm. They didn't want to go to one of these dog cloning companies and do like ear, they didn't want to put it to sleep. They didn't think she'd wake back up. So we did a drug, a blood draw. He called me over Christmas, or before Christmas last year, and told me that, you know, that they think the dog's got weeks, days to weeks to live. Could we, could we do it for her?

• 2:34:23Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:34:24Speaker 01

  And we, and we, and we did it for him. Um, we're not in that business. That's not our, our business. But he was just happy because his choice wasn't, he didn't want this other dog. Or he didn't want another dog. His biggest issue was they want, they, they, they couldn't let go of that dog, number one. And number two, but they didn't want that dog to suffer. They didn't want to, to say for our selfish means.

• 2:34:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  You're already suffering. We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken out like Frankenstein pieces of you. And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice. We took the blood draw. It was like totally awake, just sitting right there while we did it. And, you know, he was happy with that. So I think these are the.

• 2:34:58Joe Rogan?

  What if that dog is going to be reincarnated into a higher level of existence? You stop it and put it on this like.

• 2:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's not exactly our business. So.

• 2:35:07Joe Rogan?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:35:08Speaker 01

  I do, I do. It's all weird.

• 2:35:09Joe Rogan?

  We don't really exactly know what life is.

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  No, we don't. We definitely don't know a life. And here's one things that his, his assistant told, uh, my chief of staff. He said to her, he's like, you know, it's weird. I didn't think it was the same dog at all. And I, it's definitely not the same dog. But he's like, it goes and sits in the same place, which isn't like, it's not like in front of a window on its bed, right? I, I don't know the exact place, but he would always go sit in the exact same place the other dogs had. So there's weird stuff. We, we don't understand this.

• 2:35:35Joe Rogan?

  I, that would creep me out.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  It'd creep me out too.

• 2:35:36Joe Rogan?

  Cause Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps.

• 2:35:39Speaker 01

  And if that happens, yeah.

• 2:35:40Joe Rogan?

  It would creep me out.

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 2:35:42Joe Rogan?

  Cause other, I've had other, other dogs stay at my house. And my older daughter's dog stay at my house and that dog didn't go to that same spot. It's not like this is one spot that's warmer or cooler.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like it's the same thing. I was like, my dog Ken, he, if he like gets on, like he only wants to sleep on my feet. If, if I fall asleep on the couch, he's cool. He won't sleep on my feet. He just wants to sleep on me. And that's not comfortable for him. Cause I'm like kicking him and everything, but that's just where he wants to sleep.

• 2:36:05Joe Rogan?

  They want to be in contact with you. My dog watches TV with me.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I taught, we.

• 2:36:10Joe Rogan?

  They're the best.

• 2:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we didn't even teach it this, but, but when we say security at our house, our, our dogs just lose it. Like Ken just loses his mind and he just.

• 2:36:17Joe Rogan?

  Starts barking.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  He just runs to the door. He runs to the front door, runs to the back doors, runs to the side doors. Yeah.

• 2:36:21Joe Rogan?

  What kind of dog?

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  Uh, they're just mutts. So I have Barbie and Ken. They're just two little weird mutts. But we named them before the movie.

• 2:36:28Joe Rogan?

  It's just a weird thing to take that dog. And I think also for kids, like the thing is like kids, the loss is so devastating.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's also good to teach them those things.

• 2:36:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think loss is important. I think loss is important.

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  I don't wanna, you know, I only, I'm new to this whole father thing. But, you know, I think it's important that they understand that there's real, there's real things and there's consequences to decisions. And we're gonna age and we've got a limited time. I think that in his lifetime, it will be massively accelerated. But I think that's important. And, you know, that is one of the things, though, I think having a kid, you know, and also all of these kids and parents that have been sending us pictures of mammoths and thylacines and dodos, and hopefully now dire wolves, is something that's exciting because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right? So like on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or whatever, and we get, or an experiment doesn't work or whatever bad happens,

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  and you look at this pile of kids' photos and teachers, like, we have this, this, there was a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter and literally like 40 pictures of mammoths. And in that letter, she goes, "My kids won't be quiet. We're in this like attention war with everything. My kids won't be quiet. I start talking about Colossal, I show the Willie Mouse stuff, they all wanna just talk about it. They just zone in."

• 2:37:46Joe Rogan?

  Right, because it's interesting.

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  It's interesting. And kids, and so I think this is a time that we can use technologies for human healthcare for good. We can use technologies for conservation for good. And we can help ecosystem with bringing back extinct species. But I think that we can also like inspire the next generation, like, don't we wanna preach hope? We're on this 24/7 psycho news cycle, right? Like, that wasn't around when I was a kid or when my-

• 2:38:10Joe Rogan?

  Do you know C.S. Lewis first started talking about this? Like, what year was C.S. Lewis alive? But he had a quote about, I might have saved it. He had a quote about the, just getting all the dire information of the world-

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 2:38:28Joe Rogan?

  Sent to you all the time, which at his time, back then, that was very new. That was a completely new thing.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  And this idea of these 24 hour news cycles, right? You know, like, there's actually a law in the UK, you'll, this is, this blew my mind. There's a law in the UK that they cannot tell, they cannot report on a piece if it has any degree of social impact that they don't tell the negative side. I was like, so what happens if it's like, so if there's, someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to give the dog's perspective? Like, and they're like, yes. And they're dead serious.

• 2:39:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's so ridiculous.

• 2:39:03Speaker 01

  So it's like, it's like, there can be stories that are just negative and there can be stories that are just positive. That's okay.

• 2:39:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think you're gonna have very lively debate. That's always going to happen with something that's so groundbreaking, like what you're doing, but I also think it's inevitable. I think human beings have this inescapable desire for innovation.

• 2:39:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:39:24Joe Rogan?

  And it's going to apply to biology, just like it applies to electronics and you can't do anything about it. You can have debates about it and we should, we should have, you should, you know, what you guys are doing is great. You've got the dire wolves fenced off and you're very careful, you're monitoring them. It's great. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. And at least you're transparent about it.

• 2:39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:43Joe Rogan?

  Like, at least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans.

• 2:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they, and they train, and they, and they train them with DNA to only eat Americans.

• 2:39:52Joe Rogan?

  But that's probably gonna happen too. This is just, we're going to face unique problems, no matter what we do, because technology's allowing people to do things that are unprecedented, including change what it means to be an actual person.

• 2:40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute AI and synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer life. I think that we are at the doorstep of, you know, everyone's very, very worried about AI, but I do think that synthetic biology is in that camp. I think it's, it's like discovering fire.

• 2:40:24Joe Rogan?

  It's the God camp. It's all, it's all falling into the same thing. And then when you add to that incredible computing power that's going to be available with quantum computing.

• 2:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:34Joe Rogan?

  And then you have new technologies that are going to emerge from AI using quantum computing.

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  And then the, and then the interface at all, like the neuralink stuff and everything. It's just going to get, you know.

• 2:40:44Joe Rogan?

  The interfaces are crazy because we had that gentleman Noah, the first guy who got it. And he said he has an aimbot in his head. So like when he plays games, he's, he's like got a crazy advantage because where he looks is where the cursor goes.

• 2:40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:56Joe Rogan?

  Like instantaneously, so he could shoot things like he's not going to miss.

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we are living in a weird time.

• 2:41:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's the weirdest time. It's the weirdest time that people have ever been through and we're at the door. We haven't even gone into.

• 2:41:09Speaker 01

  No, no, that's why I say.

• 2:41:10Joe Rogan?

  The great wild.

• 2:41:11Speaker 01

  That's what I say about synthetic biology, right? So like.

• 2:41:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  The ability to like engineer drought resistant crops or a vaccine or regrow our hair or, you know, make mammoths. That's today. We can't even think about what's tomorrow. We spun out a company from a colossal called Breaking last year. And this incredible group at the V S Institute discovered an enzyme in, from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to. And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical, that's why I named it Breaking. It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing. Well, guess, you know, so it takes things that have broken down never and has got it down into years.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  We have used now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it. So now that it's in, you know, 22 months. And I think that we can get it down to two weeks. And so that will be huge for the plastic problem because we can all say that we're going to change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics, but we still have the existing plastics here. We have to do something about it. So, so I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, if someone said, we give you a magic, a magic microbe that can, you can put in a vat and you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw, you know, salads and other stuff there and it won't even touch it, you know, that would have sounded like science fiction.

• 2:42:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Speaker 01

  10, 10 years ago.

• 2:42:35Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy. And so now it's, you said it's down to a couple of months?

• 2:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's 20, it's 22 months right now. So, and we're talking about like, not just like, your-

• 2:42:44Joe Rogan?

  Water bottle.

• 2:42:45Speaker 01

  Your water bottle, but you're also talking about things that are like, industrial defense plastics that are like, you know, radiation hardened and whatnot for space. Like, we're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.

• 2:42:54Joe Rogan?

  What about those stupid fucking windmills that they have to change every few years?

• 2:42:59Speaker 01

  Oh, they actually have a-

• 2:43:00Joe Rogan?

  Landfill for windmills.

• 2:43:01Speaker 01

  And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make, yeah.

• 2:43:05Joe Rogan?

  And they don't barely make any electricity.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They kill livestock, or they kill animals, kill birds. They disrupt-

• 2:43:11Joe Rogan?

  Whales.

• 2:43:12Speaker 01

  They also disrupt migratory patterns of birds.

• 2:43:14Joe Rogan?

  Of course they do. Yeah, you can't fly into that.

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're all made with plastic, and plastic polymers.

• 2:43:20Joe Rogan?

  And then they have to get rid of them. And then, the only place to put them is in a landfill.

• 2:43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, that's why we started breaking, so.

• 2:43:28Joe Rogan?

  Wow, so these microbes would be able to break that down?

• 2:43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we haven't tested on that specific, but like, one of the biggest ones that we tested on was nylon, just because there's so much, if you look at like, what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from discarded fishing nets.

• 2:43:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  So, we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases, and then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others. So, if we get to the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right? Because all that's passing through right now, like in our drinking water and everything, that's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like, the three-layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water. You've got to do, Gary got me a new water machine. So, but you have to do those types of things because the microplastics and then the chlorine and other stuff still passes through a lot of the existing materials.

• 2:44:17Joe Rogan?

  So, when you're doing this, is this something that you could release, like, in the ocean itself? Or would you have to worry then about the effect, like, bringing the house cats to Australia?

• 2:44:25Speaker 01

  No, it dies. It only eats this, like-

• 2:44:28Joe Rogan?

  This is what they always say, right before it fucks up. Oh, don't worry about it.

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  But with the distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA. There's a lot of testing that you have to do, right?

• 2:44:39Joe Rogan?

  But you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

• 2:44:43Speaker 01

  So I don't know, based on heat and salinity and whatnot, right now it's working in bio-reactor. So I don't want to overpromise and say we could just go sprinkle it and call it today. But that's the long-term goal, right?

• 2:44:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:44:54Speaker 01

  So, but that's the power of, you know, we used AI and computational analysis of this microbe that's found in nature, and then we said, let's supercharge it, just like supercharging the coals, right? And so, but that's, but the process of using it outside of contained systems like a bio-reactor has to be done very thoughtfully and measured, just like rewilding, right? Like, this is where some of those people get confused about like the Yeltsin stuff. They didn't just open the gate and throw some wolves in there. I mean, it sounds like they did more of that in Colorado. But they, there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through, right? Because there's intended consequences, which you get excited about, but then there's a shit-ton of unintended consequences if you're not careful.

• 2:45:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:36Speaker 01

  But synthetic biology is that, is that, it's an AI-level thing that we need to be worried about.

• 2:45:42Joe Rogan?

  And how many different nations are working on this stuff?

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  So, I think that the US is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective. It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and bio-banking, because they're bio-banking. We, we do not have a nationalized bio-banking process here. That's one of the things I, I was meeting in Washington about. But China does. China is going, like, we see them in Africa where they'll make donations to a university or a school and say, oh, but we're going to take blood samples from all of your animals around here. You guys are cool, right? So they are doing this, right? So they're looking for insights in animals, they're looking for that data, they're also trying to build like today's Noah's Ark. And so China is for sure. There's some countries it's harder, like the European Union's harder to do anything

• 2:46:28Speaker 01

  because they, they've kind of put a moratorium on GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. But, you know, we've been making GMOs for a long time. Like, have you ever seen a pug? Like, we've just done it pretty inefficiently, right? We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences now through AI and software.

• 2:46:46Joe Rogan?

  Bro, people are going to have dire wolves guarding their house.

• 2:46:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:46:49Joe Rogan?

  In 100 years?

• 2:46:50Speaker 01

  They're not open to the public.

• 2:46:51Joe Rogan?

  100%. They're going to get your technology. They're gonna sell it and people are gonna be eating woolly mammoth steaks while the dire wolves guard their house.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not the future that I that I hope for. I'm more of an optimist, so I kind of believe in the general good of humanity.

• 2:47:05Joe Rogan?

  Of course, it's your company. Your company is fucking the whole world up. You have to think that way. I'm just kidding.

• 2:47:09Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:47:09Joe Rogan?

  But it is weird. It's a it's a weird venture.

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:13Joe Rogan?

  I mean, you're going down a very bizarre path, but it's so fascinating. I'm so glad you're doing it because it's it's so interesting.

• 2:47:19Speaker 01

  And we're learning a lot, right? And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right?

• 2:47:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

  And I think that.

• 2:47:25Joe Rogan?

  Do you think there could ever be a time? Well, there's no DNA from the dinosaurs, right? So would it be possible that with future technology, there would be some way to get around that?

• 2:47:34Speaker 01

  So I so you there the closest you could get from a dino DNA perspective is that there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids. So like the smallest building blocks possible, you don't know where they go, right? I think that it's not possible to de-extinct a dinosaur. I do think at some point you could use AI and software to do an ancestral state reconstruction, looking at kind of what we know about birds, what we know about reptiles and kind of where they branch.

• 2:48:02Joe Rogan?

  So you could make one.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  I think you'd.

• 2:48:05Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't that one of the things they did in Jurassic Park?

• 2:48:06Speaker 01

  That's what they all did.

• 2:48:07Joe Rogan?

  They made a dinosaur that didn't exist before, the big giant one?

• 2:48:09Speaker 01

  Uh, the, uh, the, uh, a dominus rex, yeah.

• 2:48:12Joe Rogan?

  Right. That was something they created.

• 2:48:14Speaker 01

  That's something they they created, right? And so I think from a genome engineer, from a technology and genome engineering perspective, that is eventually possible.

• 2:48:22Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, so they could easily make a T. rex without hap- not easily.

• 2:48:27Speaker 01

  Easily, yeah, but.

• 2:48:27Joe Rogan?

  But they could potentially.

• 2:48:29Speaker 01

  Future state. At some future state, I think we'll have like, you know, the CAD software biology where you can engineer almost anything.

• 2:48:35Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right? The better and you said it best when you brought up quantum, it, you know, quantum's only two years away every two years, I hear. But eventually, when it works and works at scale, and you have that coupled with, you know, where some of these companies like X dot AI and and others are taking it. I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff. And it will be in, and look, it will be in nefarious hands. Like, let's just be real. Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right?

• 2:49:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:06Speaker 01

  Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right? And so, this is nuclear weapons. And I think that you have to be, just because it exists, we can't put our head in the sand and say, oh, we just can't let it be, because it does exist. And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like, it's like five years, no, no longer than that, it was like seven years ago. People in China, companies in China and the government in China, were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right? Of a certain subset of race, right? And they were, they were doing bad things with facial rec. Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of, where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said, not, not, not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says,

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  "We will not at all support any technology. We're going to ban investing in facial rec technology." Well, that's just dumb, right? Because we now know there's things like deep fakes and all this stuff. But it's like, that's setting American innovation back, because someone's doing something bad with it, right? That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns, we should never develop guns, right? Like, it's just, it's a, it's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology. And so, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology. The world is, currently the United States is the leader in synthetic biology. And we've got national treasures like George Church, my co-founder and others. And, and I hope that we continue to be the world's leader. But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do, and they will experiment on kids.

• 2:50:30Joe Rogan?

  But it's interesting also that you're a company. You're, this isn't the government, this is just a group of people and investors that have decided to do this. And you've been able to do it here in America. But do you know what is going on in other countries? Or is this a tightly guarded secret?

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  So, I mean, we know it's-

• 2:50:50Joe Rogan?

  Obviously, you're, you have people, I'm sorry to interrupt you-

• 2:50:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no, go for it.

• 2:50:54Joe Rogan?

  You have people in your company as well. And I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing.

• 2:51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:00Joe Rogan?

  So, it's, it's, you must be being studied by other countries.

• 2:51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we definitely, and we have investment by Incutel, right? So, I'm sure that makes us more of a target.

• 2:51:11Joe Rogan?

  So, yeah.

• 2:51:12Speaker 01

  So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and ICE frequently.

• 2:51:16Joe Rogan?

  It's just, when you think about it 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now, when you scale this out, it's, there's no limit to what could be done with life. That's so strange.

• 2:51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26Joe Rogan?

  It's so strange to think that for four-plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern.

• 2:51:33Speaker 01

  On rails.

• 2:51:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and then one day.

• 2:51:36Speaker 01

  And now we say we can take the rail where we want.

• 2:51:38Joe Rogan?

  Whoo, boy, and you know, that's the grandest of all conspiracy theories is that that's how humans were created.

• 2:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the panspermia.

• 2:51:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, either panspermia or...

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  Or that we were engineered in place.

• 2:51:50Joe Rogan?

  The great one is the Anunnaki, right?

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:51:53Joe Rogan?

  Sumerian tech stuff.

• 2:51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I will say that if you look at, you know, not to get too weird, but if you do look at the, it's like Kukulkan and folks and, and if you, if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, there's a lot of weird similar, I mean, you can't, you can't objectively, it's like the guy with the pyramid, with the, with the Sphinx, right? Was, it's like, yep, that's water, I'm, I'm an expert on erosion, that is water. And then they're like, head of the Sphinx, like, that's not water, right?

• 2:52:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:20Speaker 01

  It's the same thing as this, you cannot look at some of the stuff and say, that's not weird, right? You got, you can't look at like, you know, the, the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seem to now, there's like more and more discoveries, and then they get silenced out of you, it's like, you, you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more. Especially the stuff around, if you look at Mayans and then you look at, you know, stuff in the Middle East and how it looks exactly the same.

• 2:52:47Joe Rogan?

  It's very weird.

• 2:52:48Speaker 01

  It looks exactly the same. Have you been to Peru?

• 2:52:50Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:52:51Speaker 01

  So that, I would put, you know, because I...

• 2:52:53Joe Rogan?

  Machu Picchu?

• 2:52:54Speaker 01

  I do not want to take you away from going and visiting the Boneyards, so you totally do that. But you should also go to Peru. Peru, if you, like, you can see Peru and you could, it's like standing in the Grand Canyon versus seeing it on Google Maps, right? If you go to like, Alentambo, Alentambo or whatever it's called, and you see these blocks that you can't, like, put a piece of paper between. You know, you can't see, and you, and you see it, and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw. Oh, and by the way, they came from... Type of rock in a quarry that's 2,000 miles from here, or whatever, how many thousands of miles from here. You can't sit there and say, "Well, that's weird." If you don't say that's weird, then it's like, you're like one of those, like, you know, people that are just like, huh.

• 2:53:32Joe Rogan?

  You're a denier.

• 2:53:33Speaker 01

  You can't say it's not weird.

• 2:53:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, to say it's not weird is actually denying science.

• 2:53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the weird, so you should put Peru on your, because when you see it, there's nothing like it. I've been fortunate and been able to travel all over the world. You see it and you're just like, "That just doesn't make sense."

• 2:53:50Joe Rogan?

  The coolest thing I've ever seen is Chichen Itza.

• 2:53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:53Joe Rogan?

  I went to Chichen Itza. And you go there and you're like, "What did you do? What'd you do? How'd you do this?

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:59Joe Rogan?

  How'd you guys do this?"

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  You know what's crazy about Chichen Itza? They don't let you go there anymore. But, I don't know where, but you know, you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chichen Itza. Well, there's, in the jungles there, on the Yucatan Peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids. But the carvings that they have on Chichen Itza and the carvings they have there, they're actually, the older ones have more precise carvings. But now, guess what? It's not open to the public. I've seen that, I've been there.

• 2:54:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's so frustrating.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  But it is such a weird world, right?

• 2:54:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm talking to you about like hardcore genetic science, but then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, it is, we don't know a lot.

• 2:54:40Joe Rogan?

  A lot, yeah, and there's no way you can know a lot.

• 2:54:43Speaker 01

  And anytime you suggest something new, you get, you know, shit for it.

• 2:54:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you get a rash of shit and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Graham Hancock.

• 2:54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:52Joe Rogan?

  But...

• 2:54:53Speaker 01

  I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if they're, you know, kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real.

• 2:55:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:07Speaker 01

  I don't think they were just like playing around and like, "Oh, we're gonna write something that's gonna be in history as a joke forever."

• 2:55:11Joe Rogan?

  You've seen the Reichshut structure?

• 2:55:13Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 2:55:13Joe Rogan?

  You ever seen that?

• 2:55:14Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 2:55:14Joe Rogan?

  This is what, there's a lot of people like Jimmy Corsetti, who's this famous YouTube, I guess you'd call him... I guess he'd be like an

• 2:55:23Speaker 01

  Can we pull up the structure?

• 2:55:24Joe Rogan?

  Sure. He'd be like an ancient history enthusiast. He's a guy who's like studies these things and does YouTube videos on them. But the Reichshardt structure is essentially Atlantis.

• 2:55:33Speaker 01

  Oh, this is in the desert?

• 2:55:34Joe Rogan?

  Yes. It looks like Atlantis. There's salt all around it.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  It has the rings that Plato described.

• 2:55:40Joe Rogan?

  And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean. I mean, it literally looks like Atlantis and people dispute it.

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  Have people gone and studied it there?

• 2:55:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's a very difficult place to get to and it's also very dangerous. Um, so people have studied it, but there's, there hasn't been like large scale archaeological digs there. Or, and the whole Sub-Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating. They find whales there. You know, I mean, they know that there, it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.

• 2:56:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:08Joe Rogan?

  And there hasn't been like a large scale exploration of what's in that ground.

• 2:56:14Speaker 01

  And there are

• 2:56:14Joe Rogan?

  And it's immense.

• 2:56:15Speaker 01

  I do think that the Younger Dryas stuff is also, um, a combination of, I think generally speaking, if you break in, break down the, the Younger Dryas period into that rapid cooling, I think the vast majority of people will say some of it, some of the destruction or some of the destruction around Megafauna was, was anthropologic, which I'll give it some percentage. Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.

• 2:56:40Joe Rogan?

  Anthropologic meaning human beings killed them.

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  Yes, that humans had some impact on, on it, right? Uh, I think that, that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred. Uh, and that was a, could have been a global level flood with sea rising, uh, with rushing waters and sea rising, uh, whatnot. And then you've got, you know, what caused that flood, most likely meteor, you know, astrological or meteorological.

• 2:57:06Joe Rogan?

  And then they combine that with core samples that show large levels of iridium.

• 2:57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain, at, and it's, it's like that, it's like that, uh, nuclear glass or whatever they find in the desert.

• 2:57:18Joe Rogan?

  Iridium is actually different. Iridium is actually very common in space, but very rare on Earth.

• 2:57:22Speaker 01

  That's this And there's a layer. Yeah, there's a silto. That's right.

• 2:57:25Joe Rogan?

  The micro diamonds is what you're talking about.

• 2:57:27Speaker 01

  But they have those too as well.

• 2:57:28Joe Rogan?

  Trinitite.

• 2:57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, trinitite. That's what it is.

• 2:57:30Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's the stuff from the Trinity explosion, they discovered it there. Yeah, they find these little micro, there's 100% there was impacts.

• 2:57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:38Joe Rogan?

  That's a fact. And they also know like when the meteor shower, and this is the thing that they study, like when we go through this comet shower. And that that's.

• 2:57:46Speaker 01

  But you remember like probably 10, 20 years ago, people, if you, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian, can't talk to you ever again.

• 2:57:55Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:57:55Speaker 01

  Right? Oh, water canopy, you're weird. Don't talk to me again.

• 2:57:58Joe Rogan?

  I know.

• 2:57:58Speaker 01

  And then, and now it's like, well, maybe there was a giant flood. Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right? May, or maybe it was done by impacts of comets, right?

• 2:58:07Joe Rogan?

  That's what brings me to the weird ones. When you go back to like the, the Vedic texts. And you're like, what was the Vaymanas? What were these flying vehicles that they had? What was Ezekiel talking about in the Bible?

• 2:58:20Speaker 01

  Have you, have you seen that stuff? When, have you seen those videos in the last, um, that have come out in the last year when there was the, the most recent UAP, um, uh, craze? And they'd show it and it looked like crazy ball lightning. It almost looked like those things that you used to put your, you'd put your hands on your hair and stand up, right? And then they'd compare some of those to paintings, uh, from like, you know, from like 500, 700 years.

• 2:58:43Joe Rogan?

  Let me stop you there because a lot of those crazy balls of light.

• 2:58:46Speaker 01

  We're all fake.

• 2:58:47Joe Rogan?

  No, you can just zoom in on Venus.

• 2:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:51Joe Rogan?

  And that's what you get.

• 2:58:52Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 2:58:52Joe Rogan?

  You zoom in on stars and you get this sort of bizarre distorted image. Have you seen those? Go find, uh, zoomed in stars. I think they did it with the North Star. They've done it with several stars. But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth. You can get that sort of distorted weird effect.

• 2:59:16Speaker 01

  But so.

• 2:59:17Joe Rogan?

  Cause you're looking through the.

• 2:59:18Speaker 01

  I, I have, I've always seen this stuff on the internet until I was in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was with Peter. Peter, his, his house in Wellington is like on a, a body of water, ones I wear. And, uh, and we were talking, of course, like the conversation went to ghosts and UFOs, cause like.

• 2:59:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you've seen them?

• 2:59:34Speaker 01

  Why not? No, I haven't seen them in person. I've seen them on his iPhone. Like these are, this wasn't like a telescopic lens. This is an iPhone and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom-ins.

• 2:59:45Joe Rogan?

  But that's the thing about zooming in. See, is the thing is, like, these are planets that people have zoomed in on.

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:53Joe Rogan?

  But there's weirder ones where like there's video of it and so it looks like it's moving.

• 3:00:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, here we go. Like, look at that.

• 3:00:03Speaker 01

  I'll have to see.

• 3:00:04Joe Rogan?

  But you see what I'm saying?

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Joe Rogan?

  Like, this is a perfect example.

• 3:00:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:00:07Joe Rogan?

  So this is a star in the night sky with a Nikon P900. So is that 900X, Jamie? No. What is that? That's the model number. Can you talk into the mic? It's just the model number. I have no idea what that means. So what would you think that the amount of, um... 10x100X? I have no idea. Okay, so, so, but do you see how they're having a hard time zooming in on it?

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  Because they're barely hanging.

• 3:00:29Joe Rogan?

  It's a handheld, I think. But look how weird it is.

• 3:00:31Speaker 01

  Looks so weird.

• 3:00:32Joe Rogan?

  It's how it's moving around like you say, "Oh my god, you found a UFO!" But it's not. It's just a star.

• 3:00:36Speaker 01

  Well, I do, I do hate that every UFO video is, is blurry.

• 3:00:40Joe Rogan?

  Well...

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  Or a star.

• 3:00:41Joe Rogan?

  You know, I mean, that could be, if you want to get into the whole Hal Puthoff, uh, perspective, who's this brilliant physicist.

• 3:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's on a lot of papers.

• 3:00:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he explained it to me. He thinks there's some sort of gravity distortion that's around it. So this is the camera.

• 3:00:56Speaker 01

  Well, isn't that, isn't that the...

• 3:00:57Joe Rogan?

  This is that particular camera. So this is, is this not a very, um... No, it's like a hand...

• 3:01:01Speaker 01

  But isn't that...

• 3:01:02Joe Rogan?

  So it's a 749-dollar camera on Amazon. 83X optical.

• 3:01:08Speaker 01

  I'll see if Peter will give me that, his, I'm sure he would, and I'll send it to you, because it's just weird to see.

• 3:01:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're weird. No, I'm not saying that they're not real.

• 3:01:14Speaker 01

  This was like, not zoomed in, his wife's next to him, and it's just weird stuff.

• 3:01:18Joe Rogan?

  I am not denying that people are seeing things, and I'm not denying that they're real. What I'm saying is, that kind of evidence of that, that star, if you didn't know any better, and someone sent it to you, "Oh my god, they found a UFO!", you'd be like, "Holy fucking shit, it's real. Look at that, it's undeniable. Look at the energy around it."

• 3:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:35Joe Rogan?

  What Hal Puthoff believes is that there's some sort of distortion around these things that's allowing them to be transmedium, to go through the ocean.

• 3:01:43Speaker 01

  That's all the, uh, yeah, that's, that's all their, like, zero-point energy and...

• 3:01:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:01:49Speaker 01

  And moving, and, uh, in gravitational wave type stuff.

• 3:01:52Joe Rogan?

  Do you go deep on this?

• 3:01:53Speaker 01

  I get, I get bored. I get a little bored.

• 3:01:55Joe Rogan?

  It gets boring because there's no real resolution.

• 3:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:58Joe Rogan?

  You could lose your mind, but I had dinner with Jacques Vallée and Hal Puthoff once, and a couple other gentlemen, and they were explaining the state of the technology, like, what they think is currently available. And what they think these things are using.

• 3:02:12Speaker 01

  I did.

• 3:02:12Joe Rogan?

  These guys.

• 3:02:13Speaker 01

  I did a call with, I did a call with, I got into that crowd for a while. And before I started colossal and, you know, I, I knew a bunch of those folks. So I talked to Lou, I talked to Hal, I did a zoom with Hal.

• 3:02:26Joe Rogan?

  If you imagine what we are now, where we are, what you're describing in terms of technology that's emerging right now.

• 3:02:33Speaker 01

  And we have dire wolves today in 2025.

• 3:02:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes. And now imagine this 5,000 years advanced. And you're probably looking at that. If, if we are being visited, that's what you're probably looking at.

• 3:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not, and if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve, it's, it's not that far.

• 3:02:49Joe Rogan?

  Now, imagine the monkeying that you guys have done with dire wolves.

• 3:02:53Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say it's monkeying.

• 3:02:54Joe Rogan?

  It's a little monkey.

• 3:02:55Speaker 01

  The selective precision genome engineering.

• 3:02:57Joe Rogan?

  Amazing stuff you've done with dire wolves. I'm just being silly. But imagine doing that to primitive hominids. Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is. And you're a million years more advanced than human beings. And you come down here and you see Australia Pithecus, you know, trying to figure out how to make a spear.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Joe Rogan?

  And you say, listen, let's, uh, put a little bit of this, add a little bit of that.

• 3:03:24Speaker 01

  I told you one edit makes, yeah, one edit makes 5,000, you know, confirms 5,000 resistance to neurotoxin. So it's like a couple of little edits here does a lot.

• 3:03:33Joe Rogan?

  And then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from the future. And if you think about what's happening to human beings, we're becoming less and less stout and muscular. And we're becoming more and more, less and less reliant on muscle.

• 3:03:45Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 3:03:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And our heads are getting bigger.

• 3:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:48Joe Rogan?

  That's them.

• 3:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read that, I read that theory too.

• 3:03:51Joe Rogan?

  It's a bizarre archetype, right? It's a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again. It's very weird that there's a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see.

• 3:04:03Speaker 01

  No, I go, I go down those rabbit holes because I mean, I just think, once again, going back to like the stuff of like Kukulkan and, and Anunnaki. And all like this, all this stuff.

• 3:04:13Joe Rogan?

  The Anunnaki stuff, the most interesting.

• 3:04:15Speaker 01

  So strange.

• 3:04:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:17Speaker 01

  And how, and how you have certain things that are. Line to celestial, they, and you're like, yeah, but they could have picked a lot of constellations.

• 3:04:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:24Speaker 01

  Why did they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is, right?

• 3:04:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  Why did they do that?

• 3:04:28Joe Rogan?

  And also, how did the fucking ancient Sumerians have a detailed map of the solar system?

• 3:04:33Speaker 01

  Insanely detailed.

• 3:04:34Joe Rogan?

  From 6,000 years ago?

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:37Joe Rogan?

  How?

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space.

• 3:04:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps.

• 3:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:47Joe Rogan?

  Like, what are you saying?

• 3:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's weird, the cool thing about this, but think, take a step back. Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, like, and we get ridiculed even for the actual science that, that we're doing and proving every day. The, at the end of the day, it is still cool and it's interesting. Like, I, I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out. Every day is amazing and we're figuring out amazing things.

• 3:05:14Joe Rogan?

  Well, unlike you, I don't have the burden of being taken seriously. And that's great for discussing ridic-

• 3:05:23Speaker 01

  Well, you can go explore, but that's awesome.

• 3:05:25Joe Rogan?

  It is great. I love it.

• 3:05:26Speaker 01

  It's super interesting, but I think, I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcast is because one minute you'll talk to a comedian and a UFC fighter and the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about like the ancient flood than anyone in the world. And that's cool.

• 3:05:39Joe Rogan?

  It is cool.

• 3:05:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:40Joe Rogan?

  It's very fascinating.

• 3:05:42Speaker 01

  Because we should have conversations.

• 3:05:43Joe Rogan?

  Yes, and the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time.

• 3:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:48Joe Rogan?

  And it's almost, I mean, and you can get lost, like we were talking about with the C.S. Lewis quote. Did you ever find that?

• 3:05:56Joe Rogan?

  He talked about getting the news. What, what year was C.S. Lewis alive?

• 3:05:59Speaker 01

  Uh, 1898, like, so to speak. I started tracking down, like, there's a bunch of misquoted C.S. Lewis quotes.

• 3:06:06Joe Rogan?

  Uh, it could be one of those. It could be one of those. But we're being inundated by the worst news of the day because that's the news that's gonna ensure that you watch it. And there's so many cool things that are happening at the same time. And I think it gives people a distorted perception of the hope that we have for mankind. You hear about wars, like, oh, my god, but most people aren't going to war. Most people are cool with each other. Most interactions between human beings are positive. And they're fascinating. And human beings are a fascinating creature. And we're so lucky to be alive at this time where the innovation is reaching this bizarre tipping point where we're, you know.

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I love it. I'm working more hours than I've ever worked in my life. And I've been fortunate before this business. And I will just tell you, I just love it. Every day I wake up, it's awesome.

• 3:06:56Joe Rogan?

  That's so cool.

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  It's the coolest thing in the world.

• 3:06:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm glad you're doing it, man. I really appreciate you. And thank you so much for coming in here and showing people the dire wolves and the red wolves. And I hope more.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll keep you up to date on fun stuff.

• 3:07:12Joe Rogan?

  And I want to go see them. I want to see them.

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  All right, we'll talk offline.

• 3:07:14Joe Rogan?

  Okay, we'll talk offline. Thank you very much. If people want to find more information, find more about you.

• 3:07:21Speaker 01

  It's just we're colossal.com. We're colossal.com and we're It Is Colossal on YouTube and X and we're at Colossal on X.

• 3:07:29Joe Rogan?

  So fucking cool. Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow. I can't wait to see that one day.

• 3:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. And I mean, look, the cool thing about colossal is we have so many people that, you know, we have 170 people over 135 scientists just that wake up and they work 24/7. Like, we've got four labs. People are just, you know, in love with it.

• 3:07:50Joe Rogan?

  That's cool. It's amazing. Thank you very much.

• 3:07:52Speaker 01

  You gotta come see the lab.

• 3:07:53Joe Rogan?

  I will. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.