The MeatEater PodcastEp. 564: De-extinction: Can We Make a Mammoth, and Why Should We?
Steven Rinella talks with Matt James of Colossal Biosciences, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, and Randall Williams.
Topics discussed: Explaining de-extinction; bringing back the woolly mammoth, dodo bird, and Tasmanian tiger; bringing back Mingus, or Mingus 2.0; watch our Bull Boat race video between Steve and Cal; gene editing with CRISPR; how do you manage habitat for an animal that hasn’t been around for 400 years?; nature-based solutions for restoring ecosystems; developing technologies to create artificial wombs; eradication; and more.
Connect with Steve, MeatEater, and The MeatEater Podcast Network
This is the Meeater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't predict anything. The meat Eater podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com, f I R S T L I t E dot com. Hey guys, if you like watching the podcasts from the Meteater podcast Network on YouTube, you need to get your little butt over to the meat Eater Podcast Network, which is a whole new channel on YouTube different from the normal me Eater YouTube channel. You need to take action here. Go to the meat Eater podcas Cast network on YouTube and subscribe. Keep your subscription to the other thing. You'll be subscribed to both and you'll get all of our podcast videos there. Going forward, they will not be where they used to live. Go to the new place. Thank you, Brody. They're gonna do. We've talked about this in the past. It's looking more and more likely that Colorado will have a wolverine reintroduction.
It's in the works for sure. At the same time, this whole ESA thing is going on. Colorado has approved a reintroduction. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight, but it's the plans are in the works. They got to go through some hoops to get it done. And like you said, you know they belong there. It's a native species, right.
Yeah, I'd like to see it happen. I don't, like, I'm not a fan of who's doing it, but i'd like to see it happen. Look, if someone you don't like give you five hundred bucks is still five hundred bucks.
So how's that fall online with your uh, with your feelings on them being listed.
I don't think that they I just don't see that they should have been listed.
Here because there's never a lot of them in the first place.
Yeah, it's like that, there's just not a lot of historic data of what they were going on. They're largely going on some you know, they're largely going on some findings from BC extrapolating that that will happen here. It's like a future it's like a future listing. It's like, well, I could see there being problems in the future based on gut Therefore, and then I just I also know how to be leveraged, Like I already know how to be leveraged. Yeah, well I think it's it's a I think it's a proxy fight.
Yeah, And that leverage is the same concern I have, Like I'm all for the reintroduction in Colorado.
Where are they pulling wolverines from? Like where did they so robust?
Right?
Because it can't be a penri.
They probably haven't even thought about that.
Yeah, I don't think they've gotten that far. They didn't put a lot of thought into the wolf reintruction.
But they eventually got them.
Yeah, they got them.
They'll get them.
But the leverage you're worried about is the same leverage I'm worried about with an administration like the Polis administration, like leveraging that against hunting, against trapping, being like, oh, this area is closed now, you can't go in there.
It's a refuge for an endangered species, which means we're going to prohibit uh, human travel or whatever, trapping or anything that could conceivably harm that species.
Yeah, I mean that administration has made it clear that that's their angle.
So yeah, I think it'll be It's like I fear that it'll become a proxy thing where they're they're like, what's happening here is they're kind of talking about wolverines, but they're kind of not Yeah, they're talking about backcountry travel yep, right to talk about snowmobile use trapping restrictions.
Yeah, I mean it's kind of like, like you've talked about it before, the Lynx thing here, Like there's links up in northwestern Montana, but down here in southwestern Montana where there's not really like there's this low elevation habitat that's like potential links habitat where you can't trap bobcats. Like I could see some version of that happening down in Colorado.
I don't know.
Yeah, they drew it with a they drew the lines. What's the thing I'm looking for? Like, uh, not surgically right, like the Lynx recovery area including a lot of stuff that never had, never has had, and never will have a links But I think there's probably there's work on that being done. I don't know if it'll be applied right, But.
For the wolverines are like those boundary lines of wolverine habitat, right, it should be like pretty close proximity to like permanent snowfields, glacial areas.
A convenience store, and Wahhington State downtown.
You know, yeah, yeah.
What spurred a lot is I recently got a trail cam photo of a I got a trail camp photo of a wolverine, which is sweet. You haven't seen that, No, No, I got a magic I got. I got a camera hanging on one tree. Put a set right there by the camera. I got a camera hanging on a tree. And on that camera, I've gotten gray wolves, Kyo, red fox, bobcat, mountain lion, black bear, now wolverine, Martin, longtail weasel, A lot of predators. Man, I wait, I don't know. I'm waiting for a grizzly and I'm waiting for a grizzly and linkstone.
What's amazing?
All all the same freaking tree.
That's really cool.
They like that tree?
Yea, I had that, and that wolverine came through. So I posted that picture and generated a lot of discussion. I posted a picture and used that occasion to gripe about use that occasion to gripe about the move to threatened and how the State of Montana is suing against it. And then and then you know, people guy wrote A guy wrote in what I thought was gonna be a well A guy wrote in where he starts out pretty good attacking my position, but then he lost all credibility with me because in the end he uses discreete population segment when in fact it's a distinct population segment. And I'm like, this guy, have andy what he's talking about. He even capitalized it, so he doesn't know what a DPS is.
So change your email before you ran back in it was.
Out the door with what he thinks. No, a lot of people are griping about that, but I'm not giving an inch, dude. I'm not giving an inch on it.
Stick to your guns man, like.
I don't uh. I'm a big time wilderness advocate, big time yep, I pointed out in this thing like I have come out all the time, like you know, continued protections for anwar in opposition to Ambler Road. We just did a podcast celebrating the heal the wilderness area and the creation of the Wilderness system, which we've done a bunch of times, and it's like, don't come at me about it from that angle. In this case, I just think I think the wolverine thing is bullshit.
Well, obviously we have a big issue with wildlife populations. Right when we talk about scientific management, which is a conversation we have all the time, right, it's like it can be used for good and bad. From my perspective, where it's like, well, we don't know how many animals there are, so we need to figure that out, but then we can set our regulations. It's like, but we never do know how many animals there are, Like we never, we never will.
Yeah. When they started doing the population work on wolverines and and when it started the population work on wolverines in Idaho, Montana wholming, the biggest takeaway was Jesus wolvernes all over the place, and al a sudden out of that came this. I just don't I think it's I don't think it's a good use of time.
Well, and there's there's always a focus on did it exists?
I haven't introduced you yet.
I'm just gonna jump in because.
We're you're gonna talk for two hours.
I didn't know we had such formal rules here.
Please just started.
There's always this.
Focus on what where had it existed in there? And there's usually little focus on what what did it perform for the ecosystem? What good does it do back to the ecosystem? And I think that's where the narrative needs to be going, not historically where did it range? And because we're usually taking snapshots that could be yeah, completely out of context for why the animals were pushed into a certain area. But we need to be focused on how do we bring species back into ecosystems that perform specific functions to improve biodiversity, to improve ecosystem health, and be less focused on did it exist there? One day two hundred and fifty years ago.
Mwown somebody up in Lewistown, Montana one day.
Yeah, convenience store in Washington. Right, somebody's like, oh, look look at the data.
I mean it arranged in the dairy aisle. So we got to put it back. That would be a daytime? Is that?
Ladies, gentlemen you here, you just heard the voice of Matt James from Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences Company. This don't I don't want to. I don't want to trivialize, Okay, I don't. I'm going to titillate people without trivializing what you do, okay.
Should be interesting.
This is this is this is the company, These are these, these are the people leading the charge, uh with you know, the most likely path forward on this idea which you discussed before, cloning a wooly mammoth, of resurrecting the Tasmanian tiger, of perhaps one day putting Dodo birds back on the landscape.
What was their island, Mauritius, Mauritius.
So we're going to talk about de extinction. And again when I said, don't want to trivialize it, because we're also going to talk about preventing extinction exactly. So a lot of emphasis in this world gets put on in the news. It always gets like cloning a mammoth, cloning a man with cloning a mammoth. But out of that work and it's almost become shorthand for a collection of it's become shorthand for like this, a collection of technological advancements that are applicable around biodiversity and applicable around preventing extinction. And then and then if need to be de extinction exactly.
The extinction is sort of the intersection of this amazing set of technologies that are all emerging at a similar time, and we sit at that intersection today, which has given us the ability to not exactly clone a wily mammoth. We know we cannot do that. I think you had Best Shapiro on years ago, and she talked about this problem exactly, but to be able to engineer genomes to begin to mirror extinct species and bring that species back in a way that is as representative of the extinct animal as it could be, and what.
We talked about last night. Maybe I'm gonna have you start with this real quick. This is not going to be the focus of our conversation. But let's say a fella had a once in a lifetime hunting dog.
Let's say that.
Okay, let's say this Yanni has a beloved dog and it fell off a cliff recently.
It's fine, that's a real story, that's true. I'm sorry.
Let's say that Yannie's dog had fallen off that cliff and wasn't okay, can you walk through, how quickly walked through how he might wind up with in the It's possible, now, it's expensive, but possible. How he might wind up with that dog all over again?
Well, I mean this kind of goes back to the late nineties when we talked about Dolly the Sheep and cloning. Right, this is just basic cloning technology and the extension is an advancement thereof. But so for this example, we're really talking about cloning. So, whether you had a living dog or a dog that you know, unfortunately just passed away, you fresh dead, yeah, unfortunately, I hate to say it that way, but you need a fresh dead animal or a living animal, and you can extract living cells either from skin tissue, where there's even some novel technologies that might include being able to do this from blood. And what you do is you take those cells or those tissues and you put them into a petri dish essentially, right, You're going to culture this and you find out what are the culture conditions so that we can begin to take that one tissue and proliferate into this living cell line. And then we go and select very specific cells. We're going to look for things like epithelial cells, and we can make something called the fiber blast line. You have that we just freeze it, you put it on liquid nitrogen. It will live forever in a biobank.
Excuse me, and.
So Mingus is in a biobank.
Now Migus is on ice in a biobank, and one day you say, you know, I really want to see Mingus again. We have the ability to be able to go back to Mingus, take his cells, put them into the o site or the egg of a dog, and fertilize an embryo culture that embryo in vitro and then eventually transferred into a surrogate dog.
That surrogate would just state sixty.
Five days later, you know, little day zero, Mingus is born and it is an exact living replica of the dog or whatever animal you were looking for. Now, obviously there's.
There's with a crazy blood lust.
Right, There's one thing that I think is always important with cloning is we have to talk about nature versus nurture.
Right, your dog.
Might not end up being you know, Mingus two dot oh might not be Mgus one dot oh because the way you raised the two might vary, and that plays a big role, especially in hunting dogs. As you guys know well better than I do, that that training that happens really early on, that sort of life experience is as important as genetics often.
Well dog wise, right, like, the way I was able to train a dog ten years ago is a lot different than the way I was able to train a dog two years ago. So like that may be changed because I changed, Am I improved as a trainer? Change?
Right?
No, I'm way busier now, you're actually way way worse.
Yeah that on that thing, like uh, the nature versus nurture thing, but on this idea that pretty soon you would be able to just get your you know, get your best hunting dogs cloned, and instead of just going back to the same sire, the same bitch and getting another dog out of that litter, you're gonna wind up with something closer, right.
You're gonna be because right every time you breed, you're sort of shuffling genetics, and you know, the sire and the bitches DNA will mix and you'll get a different you know, set of phenotypes. Then you might have just from the original, just like you might have siblings that are not exactly the same as you.
It's because it was.
A reshuffling of the genomic information by cloning, and you're actually taking that full genome and just doing it again.
Like how okay, how much would it look? Like? How much would mingus two point zero look like mingos are.
The spots in the same place, So yeah, if it's a spotted dog.
So this is a great question because there are several things that control the way that our genes are expressed into phenotypes.
Right.
So one of them is obviously the genetics are what are the genetics telling the cells to make? But the other is a is a process called epigenetics. So basically, what are the environmental forces and around the expression of those genes, there's regulatory pathways. Maybe you know, say you were supposed to be six foot four, but you were undernourished as a child, You're not going to grow to be six foot four. That's an epigenetic effect, right. So you could clone three minguses right now and each of them would show up and look very very similar, but those those spots might end up in slightly different sizes or areas, and and sometimes you see that drift, you know, there's uh, they've been cloning in race and not racehorses, sorry, but like polo horses and dressage and horses like that. And you can go into a barn and you can see, you know a lot of these sort of brown horses with a nice white spot on their on their face, and it's slightly different on each one. It's the trickiest thing you've ever seen. Yeah, but from afar they are identical animals.
How much do you think you capture? It's it's let's say you take Mngus okay, and you give Mingus a stimuli, okay, Like like Mingus is And I don't know if it's true or not, but Mingus is the sort of do that that if he gets up on the table okay and eats leftovers off the table when you're you know, out of the room. He's the kind of dog that man you tell him one time that ain't good, he ain't gonna do it again, right, Like, if that's a response to stimuli, what would you expect to see about the cloned dog's response to stimuli?
Well, it just depends on how it was raised. I would expect you know that that's really operant conditioning, right when we talk about sort of how can you uh show a stimuli and then get a required behavior and provide a consequence. Sometimes it's positive, like you fed the dog, you know, you gave him a treat because they did what you wanted. And other times to maybe yelled at the dog and the dog ran off, so negative conditioning there, right. If they were raised the same way, I bet it'd be identical. But if one was raised by a really great dog trainer, in the other by somebody who just let his dog feet off the table, those two manuses would probably behave very different directions.
Is there another version of this where you can like put add ons into mingus two point.
Oh, Like, let's say, are getting into what we're doing?
Yeah, strong, Yeah, we're.
Not enhancing that. You know, we would call those like genetic enhancements or something. We're not really doing that for dogs or for things. We're focused on the conservation side. But you know, to that point, yes, you could say we want to confer a specific disease resistance to this animal. Right, Distemper in dogs is an issue and they found you know.
Like with wolves.
If you see a black wolf, that's actually a sign that there's been dogs that have integressed into that dog's genetic line. But it also is closely correlated with a resistance to distemper, which dogs stand.
Is that right?
Yeah, so if you see a black wolf, now it has to be a header. As I guess you're.
Looking at old dog DNA.
You're looking at old dog dna. Yeah, wolves did not evolve the black yeah.
Uh.
And but it also is highly correlated with distemper resistance. So you could identify that gene and finding that doesn't have it and using genetic editing tools, you know, the most famous being crisper. You could drop that in there and then you know reasonably when the doug's born, it will be resistant to distemper.
All right, can can we move on from the pet project? Oh?
No, that was that was a warm Yeah. We're gonna do a couple of things that we're gonna get into that. We're gonna get into all the big all the big crazy stuff.
Yeah, that's like your boutique making money on the side spin off.
We're not even doing it, but it's I think it's an easy example for people to understand.
Okay, let's close that conversation out with with this. When you crystal ball it, do you picture in ten years, do you picture that becoming kind of how we're producing hunting dogs, how we're producing specialty dogs, how we're producing drug sniffing dogs. Where you have these like you know, one and one hundred attributes.
Yeah, I think, you know, maybe ten years or too soon, just because there's some social acceptance. But in the working dog class, especially honey dogs and you know, say police dogs, Yeah, absolutely.
Like the military is like, no, I want that. Why would you want a bunch of those? Yeah? If this is a business, I don't want to go through thousands of dogs to find that exactly.
You know, if this is a business, fore you're gonna find a way how can we most efficiently produce that, you know, reliably reproduce that phenotype. Absolutely, And the science is there today and it will just in ten your time be so scalable and cheaper that I think it'll be widely accepted.
I asked you yesterday to throw me a ballpark on what this Mingus project? Are you comfortable doing this?
Sure?
Yeah, I said, like give me a ballpark. Like Yanni wants a new Mingus. What's he looking at? If you just put at fair market.
You know, seventy five K I think just because you know, and that's a number I just kind of pulled out a roundabout number when we were talking about Now you're.
Talking about cost. That's that's a cost that's not retail markup.
No, because there's there's just so many. Yeah, there are so.
Many retail markum Sky's the limit. Yeah, I mean just looking at the duck hunting world, like what guys will pay for a finished Labrador Retriever or a German short hair pointer that somebody else has gone through the raising of with a good background, And that good background typically just means everybody thinks that the dogs coming out of this candel are the best.
Yep.
I mean you can put whatever price tag you want, but what are some numbers you heard that people are paying for them? Basically anything under a quarter of a million? Wow, for the right person.
Yeah, man, I'm in an awkward position. Oh great, Yeah, I want to clarify this is not what you do. Correct, it's not what your company does.
But I'm starting to get an idea it's.
Your company does. I like layout, like, just take a wild ass guess. Take a wild ass guess. Let's put it into this case, like the military. You know they have dogs they use in combat operations whatever, and they want to order like a whole bunch of these dogs.
Uh Like what would that be? Wild ass guests? I mean you just think you don't discoverment spending. I think you could go north of a million or two million on them the right animal, right, Yeah.
Think of the falconry and racing pigeon world like sultans of Like, yeah, we're into we're into money than like I mean, we're dancing around races.
Let's we're gonna talk about what mad actually does.
What everything before just now, that's just gonna be the prices for animals.
Okay, because what they're actually doing is fascinating. We're go getting what they're actually doing in just one in just one second, I was just little. That was just a little warm up. The kids podcast, we keep talking about, starts July fifth, right on this podcast feed. We've said it a bunch of times. How many are we making?
Five?
We're making five kids podcasts. Whether we make number six depends on if your kids like it. Yeah, I can't say any plane or net. Each episode of the kids podcast goes like this, They're quick, how long are they? What are they? Where are they coming to? Net? Phil twenty fifteen to twenty Okay, it's a three x structure. There's why it's the way it is, where we explain why something is the way it is. It could be Why are teddy bears called teddy bears? It could be what is an anadamous fish? It could be when you say nocturnal, what's the opposite? And is there a middle ground?
I like it asking the question.
Yeah, there is. It's called crepuscular. Okay. Other Wise the way it is is that we're doing Oh what exactly did Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett do for a living? Why it's the way it is? What exactly were they up to? Why does everybody know about those guys? What did they do for a living? Can you think of more? Why it's the way it is? We just do them all. I think you just listed all of them. Okay, So why it's the way it is? I host Why it is the way it is? I tell your kid, why is the way it is? What's my credential? I've been telling my kids why is the way it is? For fourteen years and everyone else? So that's why I took That's why that's my job. And then there's Guess that Critter. Guess that Critter, which Krinn works on, but it's hosted by my lovely wife who hosts. She just she does the read and guess that critter where we do wild we come up. We use animals to have the craziest vocalizations, the most varied, craziest vocalizations, and we play vocalizations and then we start providing a bed of clues. Uh. The earlier kid gets it. The smarter kid is.
You'll be able to take that score to your Montsori.
School and you'll also know whether you want to pull blood from that kid and send it to me.
Uh.
Then the final thing is kids trivia, and we bring in a bunch of actual live kids. They record trivia, not.
Tell us heavily.
Heavily staff familiar and some neighbors, straight neighborhood kids we've brought in. We brought in my primary care providers kids. Didn't we just bringing some stray kids. They played trivia, but they play trivia this way, you know, keeping hollering kids these days, there's no winners and losers. They're all winners. So what the kids do is they build a pot of money for conservation. Meaning it's our normal, it's a trivia show for kids. But every time any of the kids gets to like every right answer generates more revenue into the pot, which goes to a conservation organization that that's a kid's focused conservation group where kids focus charity and so they they're building the pot. Meaning when you ask all ten them a question, it's not that some of them win and lose. It's that the right answers build a pot of money. So their cooperative effort.
There are weak links in the chain that I'm sure.
Well in terms of the nature versus nurture host Spencer Newharth definitely has found some personality similarities between uh are our colleagues and their children, and he chooses to point them out each time, like like these.
Kids just quietly have the right answer.
Yeah, I mean he definitely. He definitely picked on Mabel, one of Yanni's daughters, for having a similar trait of seeing if anyone, but that was.
Only because Mabel called him out, and I think that he was embarrassed by.
The video component is there's a tube that shoots out a marshmallow to the person with the right answer, And that's where it really cranks up visually.
You don't feel like you know us well already from listening to us for hours every week. Now you'll you'll get like a another layer of who we are because you're going to get to like study who are kids are?
And those of us without children will remain mysterious.
That's right, which was the point the whole time.
June twenty seventh, tune in on YouTube for our latest experiment. Not latest, We don't do that many. Yeah, I guess we've done a few experiments. Yesterda two days ago we went out and made bullboats. So we went and got a bull boat, as you know, or maybe you don't, is a temporary use water craft that can be made using nothing but the hide off of a buffalo. It's called a bullboat because you need a pretty good sized critter to make it. We used a couple thousand pound roughly thousand pound bulls, I mean a three year old three year olds. We have a friend at North Bridger Bison, Matt Skogland, North Bridger Bison, who does he does all? He has a bison ranch. He's explaining me before His animals are born on his ranch and they die on his ranch, all grass fed, field harvested. And what you do is when you want to buy from him, you buy the animal, right, it's custom slaughter. You buy the animal, buying the meat on the animal. You don't go on a website and buy a cut of this, a cut of that. You go in and buy a portion of percentage of an animal that's currently living on his ranch. He field harvests the animal. It's custom cut to your specifications. Anyhow, we got hides from him and made boats, and we made boats using nothing but native materials. So we went into a willow patch and used willow bark, which I didn't love, used willow bark, braided buffalo hair, which I didn't love, and cuts of raw hide thong not thongs of strips of strips of yeah, strips of raw hide for rope. So willows, willow bark, buffalo hair, buffalo strips of buffalo hide as rope and crafted bull boats.
I think it's important to point out too, and raised them are raw hide in this context means it is a fresh hide, not like your raw hide dog juice. It's the same thing, it's just at a different stage.
Of This was fresh, green, slicker and snot wet, hard to work with hide.
I was actually very impressed with the bark because when if the stuff that dried, when it was tied and wrapped, it.
Tough. It was real tough, braided hair is a bitch. If you got like a dog with long hair, try to tie her hair in a knot like try to throw a granny into your daughter's hair. He kars hair. It doesn't doesn't, it doesn't hold it out. So I braided all I took all my time braiding all this hair up, giving myself an arth You want to talk about an arthritick egg braiden big along strands of hair together and then you go throw a granny in It just unravels in front of your eyes. But but there's a thing I read. But if you the picture, you take a picture, you take a deer hide, just a few listeners out there, take a deer hide and start so lay the deer hide out. Ideally you'd scrape the hair off, lay the deer hide out, and start a cut in and start cutting a quarter inch thick strap parallel to the edge. And imagine you go in concentric circles, take one hundred go around, keep going quarter inch all the whole periphery, and then come in and do concentric circles. You gonna you could stretch that. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it go to the moon.
Remember We had a guy right in and said that he used to do that with squirrel leather. And he said that you use that for shoe laces and it would outlast the boots.
No way.
He did take a squirrel hide and make leather laces out of squirrel hide. And I'll tell you what, anybody's ever try to clean a squirrel will.
In that's right up your eye.
Leave the hair on there al or shoes.
Made me a couple of thin pieces for dental floss. Bro because what I've been using lately is not work that popcorn yesterday?
Would you leave the hair on for the dental floss to get a little It's.
A brush, brush and floss at the same time.
And we raised them. We raised them. It wasn't like we raised them.
I Uh, people got to watch.
You gotta watch.
But this comes out after the don't get it all the way. Yeah, this comes after the deal. But people still need to need to watch. But it was it was a group learning effort with a race at the end.
How's that highlight of my day? Is? All day I kept think we're gonna find morels because where we were I walked around a lot looking, well, here's what happened to me on the way out. On the way I'm sitting in the back of a truck. I look over just plain as day is a morele it grew wild. No, we hadn't gone in that driven by. Yeah, Chili thought someone fell out and got hit. Stop stop, he jumps out. He thought someone got rolled over. Like there's a morale. He's like, oh my god, you guys give me a heart attack. We'll talk about breeding meal deer later. Oh, we use one thousand pound animals. And then in the historic record people talk about a bull boat that's eight feet in diameter. But Matt Skoglan was talking about, you know, if you really let him go. We were using hides off three year old animals. You know, if you let them go, you could get a you know, there's such a thing as a close to a one ton bowl.
Yeah.
If you look at like old beef balls, old beef balls get to a point that they can't really be managers. They can't. They get so big and dangerous that they kind of just do what they want. So if you see an old beef bawl out there on the range, they just they do They just get bigger and bigger, sorry.
Magic are around.
Yeah, the muscle bulk and everything is next get enormous and yeah.
Uh. The last thing I'll point out is my boat, my personal vessel was Uh no, in fact, it's no, it's got all it's I meant to grab some of that hide for a thing I want to make, and I had some, Matt and uh, Matt and uh Brady go back out and they cut a chunk of hide off the boat. So as you find laying on the bank, it's got a hole in it now, But no, I'm still sitting there right. It's just sitting in a willow patch right now, like it would be back in the day. Apparently with a hole in it. Oh, it was so stable you could cast a fly route out of it floating down the river. Worked very well. All right, Matt, Uh, let's let's dig into Colossal biosciences. Talk about how you got started in Zoo. You were you manage Zoo's.
Yeah, so I before walk us through the career real quick, before Colossal started, I was. I had studied biology and chemistry, ecology. I went I went to a master's program in South Carolina studying wetland ecology, and when I finished up there, I sort of realized what about wetland ecology so specifically, so it was sort of marine and wetland ecology.
I was more on the marine side.
So I was studying sea turtle nesting in South Carolina in Atistowe Beach of sea turtle those are loggerheads. Yeah, and uh it was great. You know, as a twenty two year old grad student. I was living on a beach for a week or two in a tent with my one hundred and forty pound Saint Bernard, and uh, you know, just trying to walk the beach every morning and see where sea turtles were crawling, mark their nests, and study basically thermal dynamics.
Well, you painted a very sandy tent picture.
Ye came humid, slobbery, and then there was a dog, you know.
But it was great. I loved it.
But I realized quickly that most of the people in my sort of path, we're going to work for DNR fishing game or something like that. And as you know, when I was a kid, that was appealing. But by that point I thought, well, you know, I want to do something a little bit more that I own, that I that I can manage and literally took a runner on a Craigslist ad and move up and moved to Miami, Florida and started working with bottlenosed dolphins and California sea lions and working and studying animal behavior. And so I started doing that, and that eventually led to a job working with elephants in Tampa, Florida, trying to help change the way that we manage elephants in human care. Right because we look at the wild, we understand that a lot of these species are facing some level of extinction, and elephants have had a massive decline over the last hundred years. So one of the solutions to prevent extinction is to create captive breeding populations. And so if you're going to create a captive breeding population, you need to figure out how do you manage these animals, how do you take care of them? And so I sort of had a job doing that at a zoo and we were focused on that for years, and I just sort of worked my way up through the zoo system and managing animal care and conservation at Ze's in Miami and then most recently in Dallas, Texas. And about that time has when that's you know, I started there in twenty eighteen in Dallas, and by twenty twenty, COVID hit and sort of made you really sort of start to question everything. You know, you're locked at your house, You're you're wondering what's happening, You're trying to really had a lot of self reflection in twenty twenty, and for me, I realize, you know, it's one thing to sort of put your finger in the in the dam and try to prevent a leak of a species extinction. It's another thing to try to refill that well. And so I was really looking for ways that I could personally be more impactful to the biodiversity crisis. And about that time, my phone rang and this lunatic Ben Lamb, who's our ce, who's absolute genius, you know, serial entrepreneur, tons of success. He met a He met an amazing guy named George Church who worked at Harvard Medical School as and he runs the genetics lab there, really famous for creating, you know, next generation genomic sequence technologies. An he's sort of a legend in the genetics world, and they they've had this George has had this idea around restoring Willie mammoths to the Arctic for years and ben Is, being the business minded one, was sort of able to formulate a business plan around that.
And twenty twenty one.
Colossal Bioscience is launched and they called me to come on and help with animal care, animal management, welfare, and wildlife conservation. It was the pitch, like the mammoth project, that was it at that point. That's all we had, just make a mammoth. Yeah, we need If we were to make a mammoth, how do you do that? Well, there's a lot of work that requires, you know, before the mammoth is restored, and then tons of work after the mammoths restored.
How do you take care of them?
How do you eventually create sustainable populations that could go back into the Arctic somewhere, And all of those require different skills in animal management with care and welfare, but also you know, conservation planning. How do you go and prepare an ecosystem for species that hasn't existed in four thousand years? How do you go and figure out how to do this ethically legally, right, you know, hand in hand with regulators, things like that. So it's been my last two and a half years it's just really been off to the races. And meanwhile to that, we've quickly expanded from Willie mammos to also Tasmani tigers who went extinct off the island at Tasmania in nineteen thirty six, and the Dodo, which is sort of, you know, the world's most iconic extinction event in sixteen hundreds. The Dodo was discovered in eighty years later was extinct due to Dutch sailors that were introducing predators and invasive species into Mauritius. So all of those have different levels of challenges on the the extinction side, and then I have a lot of challenges on the conservation side for how do we prepare habitats and do a lot of that that prep work.
Ahead, but also on the why side, Right, Yeah, it's like that's a big one. You're not just doing it because you can.
It's not enough school now the right we're facing this enormous biodiversity crisis and we're missing species. I think the Tasmani tigers such a great example of this. And sitting here in Montana, you know, on the doorstuff Yellowstone, you could sort of draw some parallels to to wolf recovery and Yellowstone. The loss of an apex predator led to you know, certain imbalances in Tasmania, things like wildlife disease are running rampant today, things like like predator or sorry prey population overpopulation is happening, and you know there's you know, wallabies and brush tail possums in Tasmania aren't really fun to hunt, so nobody's really regulating those populations, and so they need this predator that can come in and provide ecosystem stability. It can help remove sick and injured animals that might.
Be spreading wildlife disease.
Like if you've ever heard of Tasmani devils are on the brink of extinction because of this facial tumor disease. It's literally a contagious cancer. So when they bite each other, which is very much in their social network is how they communicate, they spread this contagious cancer that ends up creating these massive tumors in their face and they eventually starve to death and die. That would have with the right predator present, would as that animal got sick, it would have been predated and would not have had the chance to pass on that disease. And so you know, finding solutions nature based solutions for how we can restore ecosystems is really the focus of what the company's doing, and we're doing it in a really fun, flashy way like Willie Mammoths, Like what we came out of the gate so hot and got a lot of attention, is really fun. But I think now you know, I'm running around trying to help spread the word on really here's the why, because sometimes the what is so distracting that that we don't get to the why and and and that's that's been a great part of the last two and a half years.
So I feel like in the case of the mammoth, the why is an after effect, like the why is searching for a why after the inception of the idea. Well, there's I don't think that, Like, I don't think it's fair to say that. I mean, let's be frank. I mean the race to do a mammoth is because it be super cool to make a mammoth.
I think it's sort of yeah, there's sort of two fronts to that, or you know, the first one is that moonshot idea of this really amazing attractive project that's brought tons of investment right in three years we've raised two hundred twenty five million dollars for conservation technology in my fifteen years.
Prior we probably raised five million dollars.
You know, So the scale has been really helpful because of the moonshot aspect, and then also along the way of this amazing project, we're developing technologies and innovations that are applicable every single day to currently imperiled species, and so it really becomes this engine of innovation and investment for in danger speceis conservation. The other side is there is really strong evidence that shows that restoring megavertebrates to some of these areas in the Arctic, like what's happening in Siberia at Plesising Park, is using mega vertebrates to try to re engineer an ecosystem and an ecosystem that's better at insulating permafrost. And so that's sort of the big idea. The scale in which to make, you know, for that to happen in the Arctic and be this massive global solution to climb change would be you know, really untenable. But but I think that's the idea is that we can find you know, targeted areas where we can help impact those things.
Uh, you laid out how you'd make a mingus. Yeah, completely different path on a mammoth.
Cloning as compared to the extinction is easy, right, And I think that's why a lot of people came out of the gates with the mammoth. Idea was always that we should clone it. And you know, same same, same idea with the mangus example.
But because we have mammoth flesh and DNA.
And exactly, but we don't have living flesh and DNA, and you can't clone a dead cell.
You just can't. That's the unfortunate reality.
But what we can do is we can use genetic editing and engineering tools to basically replicate. So the process for the extinction sort of starts with palaeogenomics. So what best Shapiro probably talked about on her when she when she appeared years ago.
I got to interrupt you from it because as you do this, keep this in mind. We're talking about what's that, what's that marine mammal, the very small sea of Cortes, the wikida. Yeah, okay, it's headed to extinction, correct, But you guys are devising a plan by which you'll capture living tissue of things you could capture living tissue of things, and down the road de extinction would be entirely different because you'd have captured living tissue in the biobank. Yeah, so let's yeah, so let's and talking about de extinction. There's cases where you could take a different path to de extinction if you had the foresight to capture living tissue of white rhinos whatever, right, it'd be different. So we're talking right now about soft where there's no without a time machine, there's no way to capture living tissue.
Exactly with living tissue in biobank. So one of our biggest focuses right now is to improve biobanking throughout the world. So that means we want to go go out and collect living tissues of critically endangered species. We want to create cell lines of those in freezoes down and that is sort of the assurance insurance POPU policy against extinction in the future, because that gives us an ability to go back and do cloning, which is much easier than this the extinction pathway. So a great example of just that is what's happening with northern white rhinos. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but northern white rhinos are, you know, native to East Africa sort of Uganda car DRC area. And you know, back in nineteen hundred they're about two thousand and three thousand of them in the world. By the sixties at number was pretty stable, and by nineteen seventy five they were only five hundred of them. In two thousand and eight, the last ones went extinct in Groamba National Park, but luckily there were a few left in human care. So there's this amazing zoo in the Czech Republic that had had four animals. They sent them to Kenya in this last ditch attempt to try to breed the last remaining Northern white rhinos, and unfortunately it turns out, whether because there was the genetics of those animals were bad or they were too far down the path, they weren't able to breed. So now there is this effort using all those biobanked Northern white rhino tissues to create embryos and then use Southern white surrogates to make more Northern white rhinosp And actually just this last month we announced so we're part of this international consortium called Biorescue that's leading this charge. Last month we announced the first ever successful in vitro fertilization of a rhino species. So this was a Southern white embryo into a Southern white female. But that was the sort of proof point we needed to say, Okay, now we can use the really valuable tissues. So the next step is we're going to put Northern white embryos into Southern white females and make more Northern white phinos. So that's sort of the conservation.
That's the Mingus model, that's the Megus model. Now let's talk about the model of shit that died ten thousand years ago.
Well, even unfortunately things like nineteen thirty six when extinct, right, we don't have living tissues of that. There were no biobanks back there. So what we do there is we go and find the extinct species, whether it's a mammoth or a thiglyasine or dodo, and we use high quality the highest quality reference genome thi scene is a tas Madie entire tesmany tiger, yes, sorry. And what we do is we sequence the genome of this lost species and then we use, you know, some comparative analysis to under try to determine who's the current closest living.
Relative to that species.
So in the case of the Tasmanian tiger, that's this little mouse art mouse sized marstupile called the fat tail dinnert or in the case of a mammoth, that's an Asian elephant or the.
Dodo with the nick of our pigeon. Really yeah, yeah.
So what we can do then is we take that genome of the living animal. We design editing targets as using the genomic analysis tool, so you sort of lay them over each other, see where is one genome different than the other, and we create editing tools to begin to edit the living species into the loss speed different.
I don't know how you express it. What percent different is a wooly mammoth from an Indian elephant?
This is this is a really common question, is really challenging to answer because you and I are both human and our genomic difference is somewhere around ninety nine point eight percent, right or similar similarity. We are about ninety nine point six percent related to a chimpanzee an Asian elephant.
I heard someone say we're about seventy seven percent related to a carrot.
Yeah, exactly, Because there's a lot of stuff in there.
We have a lot a lot of Neanderthal in our genome as well, right, because we all have these common genes that might be responsible for the basis of life. But a wooly mammoth to an Asian elephant is ninety nine point six percent similar. So there's only a point four percent difference between the two.
Okay, what about the what about the thile a scene to the mouse.
To that that one is mouse, but to the yeah, to the fat tail dinner, that one, I can't recall the exact person, but it is much more distantly related.
So it's not in the ninety nine.
It's not in the ninety nine now, So when we talk about editing for for willy mammoths, we're really looking at, you know, several hundred edits, which really, in the grand scheme of things, is not massive.
And then okay, let's take this Indian elephant in the mammoth. If you just took a someone who's somewhat well informed about animals and laid the two of them out, they're a look and they're going to point to probably the size of the ear.
Yeah, smaller ears on a mammoth, toss length, big curved tusk on a on a mammoth as well.
The pellage, the hair very hairy. What else are they seeing?
They have a brown fat, so they need to have these sort of cold tolerant feed up types.
They lived in a much.
Colder I got cut into.
Yeah, so there's this brown added post layer that you put in in sort of like if you thought about blubberd would be similar to that. And then there's also things like, you know, physiological changes that you need. So one of the things that you have to do to live in extreme old temperatures you have to be much better at oxygen transfer, so you need to target things that provide those adaptations. Then we have all those targeted and the edits are happening today in a lab. Meanwhile to that, we're doing all the reproductive sides. So when the moment we have our edited mammoth cells, we'll pull the nucleus out of that and we'll put it into that into the egg of an Asian elephant. That Asian elephant egg then is fertilized and becomes a wooly mammoth embryo, and then from there you use artificial reproduction, not too dissimilar to things like IVF and artificial and artificial insemination. Those are the basest basic tools that we start, and then we go to somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is cloning, and we clone that embryo and transfer it into an Asian elephant, or when you really want to get to the real sci fi stuff, that we're doing an artificial womb. So we're building technologies to develop artificial wombs for these species as well, because if you're ever going to scale a population, you'll always be most limited by how many females are in that population. So if we wanted to make five hundred Northern white rhinos, we would need five hundred Southern white rhino females. But if we had artificial bombs, the sky's the limit.
With his diagram, Well, I got asked to and I can see this argument coming from a guy who's sitting immediately to my life pushback because it's not the same, right, Oh, you want to de extinction, Well the animal is not the same.
Well you'd be able to be like, that's what it looked like.
Right, But it's not it, right absolutely, But I guess my question would be, you know, let's talk about pumas are a good example. Yep, right, what makes a puma, puma.
We'll talk about the Florida pan a Florida panther.
If I go to if I go to South Florida and I find a Florida panther, where I come up here and I find a cougar, they're the same species, but they are completely different.
Well, were well because.
Because they well, okay, is this supplement.
I'm glad you brought this up. Yeah, the Florida panther, they got down to less.
Than fifty and they had extreme genetic bottlenecking issues.
And some folks said, well, let's bring in some other ones. And the argument was, well, no, because we're gonna lose that little special something that makes them the Florida panther. And it says, you know, what you're gonna lose is the whole thing. Right, you can hang on to something by bringing in new animals, but if you take the path of you know, if you take your current path, they're just gonna blink out and be on.
And it's one of my favorite examples because I think conservation for a long time has stood in its own way with this idea of perfection ahead of good. Right, this whole perfection is.
The enemy of good.
They're the idealism that we should have exactly what was represented in that range, which is a false narrative because we don't even know truly we can guess really well. But when I think the Florida Panther Genetic Rescue Project is an amazing example that you don't have to have exactly the same thing. You need very specific phenotypes that make that help it perform that ecosystem function that helps improve the health of the ecosystem and helps restore population, and then the environmental factors that still exist in these ranges will push that animal back into more of what you might consider one hundred percent of pure of that species.
Yeah. And in the meanwhile, it's eating what they ate. Yep, it's using.
Going to do the same job.
Well, isn't that true that like the bison you guys were work the hides you were working on those bison aren't one?
Yeah? Right, Like that's a case where was the expression you used? Perfection is the idea of good? Yeah, that whole discussion about I think this whole discussion about cattle intro aggression into bison as being where it becomes like an obstacle to bison restoration. I think it's such a distraction. It is, and you can line up a thousand humans and be like, what is that animal buffalo? You're like, Nope, yeah, it's a it's zero point two cattle. You know.
It's in our chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, who you know, she has for a long time studied bison genetics and she's got this amazing grad student Jonas, who they are just published a paper that shows the cattle integression narrative is completely false. If you go back historically and you look at bison before the presence of domestic cattle, they had the same level of representation of what we think today is cattle in them, but it's just because it's a they evolved from a similar release. Yeah, so there is actually very good evidence to suggest that Bfalow is kind of bs.
Yeah, I've talked to her about that.
Yeah, because there's actually a reproductive block for future generations once you hybridize the two species. So it's really interesting. We don't fully understand it, but Jonas's research shows that if you go back in time, you can see that the same representation at cattle in their genome that you today.
With from like the base of the exactly tree.
Yeah, they sort of evolved from a similar ancestor, so they'd have similar DNA.
Yeah, I guess to be similar with how you know, all everybody of Western European descent has some trace element of Neanderthal exactly.
But that doesn't mean we hybridized with neanderthalogists, we had a common answer.
So it doesn't mean we're still doing it.
Yeah, I've seen a few examples.
So let's talk about that. Though, I want to go back to this, the set of the steps you do. The most obvious question is, uh, what's your what's your guess? When does this thing hit? When does the first one hit the ground?
Science is so hard and I hate to put pressure on our scientists, and but I can because I'm not in the lab doing this, right, I'm just the stupid animal guy that talks about this stuff. Uh, you know, we're really moving forward quickly. We just had this amazing announcement that we've been the first people to ever achieve this plary ponent stem cell line of elephants that's never been done, which is sort of an integral step along the way. So we're looking, you know, twenty twenty eight is what we're targeting right now. I would say we have to also acknowledge that there's two year gestation for these so you know, I would always put plus or minuses on these things. But we're you know, I think this is much sooner than people expect. There's so many challenges ahead that you know, one step could could delay us. But that's the course so far. That's what we painted and we're on target.
And when it does, sorry Brodie, real quick, is it a multi step process or does the first one that hit the ground be like, that's what you're aiming for?
We don't, I would I would say we're always going to be improving, right, It's not that this is an iterative process that requires multiple steps, but it is likely that you learn something that changes the next sequence of events. Right, So as we see the first one, we say, oh, actually, you know, maybe this phenotype needed to be tweaked, or maybe we have a better understanding of what we call genotype of phenotype relationships, and then that would that would inform a different type of editing strategy.
Who do you guys?
You guys answer to as far as like legality, I mean, there's like obviously like ethical and moral questions that some people are going to have about this whole thing, but like, where's the where's the oversight, like, because you guys are like international, right, like or is it just us?
No?
Well, the operation is US base. We also have some partners in Australia, so there's some of that as well. But uh, it's with anything, especially in the US regulatory environment, it's a mess, right, It's there's there's so many competing forces for jurisdictional power that we don't really have all the answers yet. What we are doing today is we're working to help support the ic N if you're familiar with to the right, So we're supporting the ic N Species Survival Commission to really start to drive forward policy statements and really begin to build that roadmap. So we want to help facilitate those things, but in a third party independent fashion, so that these groups can help say this is the exact pathway that has legal, regulatory and ethical considerations already baked into it, and then that's sort of the gold standard that most governments are looking to to help inform their domestic regulation. Here in the US, we're certainly subjected to things like USDA, which and APHIS, which has oversight over animals and human care, especially mammals, right, and then US fish and wildlife because we're talking about endangered species. Some siety is listed some of USA listed species. And then we have things like FDA when you're intentionally altering the genome of an animal, technically there are aspects of that that could fall under FDA jurisdiction. But what's really interesting is there's groups that have been going through this same process on the AG site already, So there are some guardrails in place if we just want to be the subject matter expert to provide responsible regulation and move forward to yeather. But I think uh Awkway advantage salmon if you had had you guys ever seen that the genetically engineered line of salmon that are meant to be healthier in farm raise scenarios. They were given genetic editing tools to essentially help them heal faster because there's so much trauma in farm farm raise fishing. And that took twenty years to get approved.
So and is it is it approved for human consumption?
It's just last year it received a thumbs up.
Really yeah?
Is that off Atlantic salmon?
I actually don't know which salmon. They based it on it's got to be it, Yeah, I would think.
So all right, let me ask you this. This is the thing we've talked about in private conversation. We've discussed this. Why if you look at why the mammoth and why the Philo scene, what the Thilo scene, you could kind of look and be like one, it just happened. It just went extinct. Some people argue, not entirely crazy. People argue that it didn't go extinct. True, and it did for a while, have a Lazarus. It was regarded as a Lazarus species, referencing Lazarus from the Bible, where it was like they thought they were gone and they weren't. Another really famous Lazarus species of the blackfooted ferret. It was people thought they were gone, but they weren't so used to it's so fresh, there's people thinking that one might turn up. Okay, So here you have like an ecosystem that's ready to receive it. You have you can point to why it went extinct. The prey base is there, right, so you could you could put it back and it's and it's like it's it just it just wound up missing a beat like that to me, seems so constructive. It would be so it would enjoy such book support. Well, the Mammoth's like there's some argument that this ship has sailed.
It's like, uh, it's like Brooks and shash Ank redemption. The world just got so damn fast.
It was like Clay at the end of the live tour. Yeah, He's like, you know, I was gone with the world kept going. He couldn't reintegrate. Uh yeah. So like you know when when they were around, like have you seen all this stuff that's come out of that where they were able to look at stable isotopes and the mammoth tusk and he realized how much this, I mean, how much this mammoth in Alaska is moving during its lifetime. I mean some bitches like in the Yukon he's south of the Brooks Range. He's north of the Brooks Range. He basically traveled the length of California in a life that was he died at what twenty twenty years old or something like that. So it's like that ain't there anymore, do you know what I mean? So, how do you begin dealing with that? Like, how do you begin dealing with that? You want up with the sort of world's most lonely animal.
Well, hopefully it won't be lonely because they'll be in a population.
Right.
This is not a one off novelty where you just have one of these. The focus is really create sustainable populations with the idea of re engineering what today is a tundry ecosystem that doesn't support a lot of biodiversity your life. Looking at what the Zimovs achieved with Plessing Park where they rewilded you know, large vertebrates like muskox and wild horses and even bisen.
How many acres is that?
It's small?
I don't want to give you the wrong number, but it's not. It's not massive, something like eighty or eight hundred hector or something like that.
How do you get around the argument though, that the animals that are on the tundra now are the ones that belong there now?
Well, I think what we're what we find is that and this is there's a lot of evidence that shows us in West Africa forest elephants, is that the presence of a large mammal like that of Probsidian actually opens up moreological niches. So it's not really displacing species, it's creating more niches to bring more biodiversity. The Mamma step grassland ecosystem that existed four thousand years ago was as biodiverse as the African savannah, and today it is, you know, sort of a Martian landscape.
Right, It's really bare.
And so this idea that we could create more habital, habitable ecosystem for more biodiversity is really compelling in a time when we're facing the world's largest biodiversity crisis. We talk about climate change all the time, and people can debate that to their blue in the face. What you can't debate is that the extinction rates we see across the world are only accelerating. You know, by twenty fifty there are some people that estimate we could lose up to fifty percent of all mammal species. Right, we need to find solutions. We need to begin to say how can we support nature to be more resilient because nature, given time, space opportunity, will evolve and it's showing us that that's why we have the amazing ecosis since we have today, That's why we have yellows in National Park.
Right.
His nature has provided something amazing. But when we continue to layer pressure upon pressure upon pressure. We're really paining nature into a corner in a place where now it cannot respond fasten us. Evolution cannot keep up, and so what we're looking to do is to provide engineering solutions to accelerate evolution, to provide nature a chance to keep up with humanity, which is really difficult. But you know, I think restoring ecosystems is the start of that. Removing evasive predators, right, We're using technologies like genetic biocontrols to remove an invasive predator from say Mauritius, so that it can prepare prepare an ecosystem for the Dodo is amazing. I think everybody agreed that rats, cats and monkeys don't belong on mauritious and.
A genetic biocontrol would be making everybody mail.
Yeah, that would be one form of a genetic biocontrol. Gene drives is another form, right, So we sort of have these multiple ways that you can create a deleterious allele within an animal's genome but also give them a biological fitness advantage. They go into an ecosystem, they spread that allele that gene throughout the population, and that helps suppress the population or in some case completely exterminate it. So you know, there are these amazing opportunities, they're just emerging technologies that don't have the regulatory guardrails yet, that don't have the social understanding to really support those And so that's one of the things is we want to help socialize those ideas and help bring these debates to the forefront, because for us, it's important that people that we acknowledge we don't have all the answers.
We have some amazingly.
Powerful tools, but we need to have debates about these things because the fact of the matter is the status quo is losing. We're falling behind every year, and we need to do something maybe a little more drastic, and that's what Colossal's providing right now.
So with the case of the mammoth, like the road map, right, so Steve just talked about this one individual that enjoyed this giant historic range is just not going to have those types of freedoms, so you would try to find a suitable habitat with a lot of controls, right exactly. And also that first mammoth is going to be uh, pretty valuable. I'm gonna have quite the price tag attached to it, right.
You know, I think what they ought to do, and I've said this, we need to make nice with Russia again. I'm not saying I'm not talking about I'm not waiting into geopolitics. Let's say there's a world in which we made nice with Russia again and we went to Wrangle Island, which was the last place they existed. They didn't blink out till four thousand years ago.
On Wrangle Island, the Great Pyramids of Gaza were under construction when the will of Mammoth went extinct. Like, I think that a lot of people don't have that context at time, right, They feel like this is such an ancient thing, you know, No, the Egyptians were a highly civilized group at the same time that Mammot swalk this earth.
Remember Trump was some about buying Iceland. No, He's like, well buy Greenland, yeah, which people tease him about. But I thought I was like, that's a good idea. Maybe we can buy Wrangle Island.
Absolutely, but yeah, like a situation like that, right, it's got its own fence.
I think that's how you pilot these things, right, These have to be this a very thoughtful, stagegated process of rewilding. You cannot just make a lily mammoth and say godspeed.
It's similar happened to that thing.
No, we have to talk about, like, you know where, how does it start in a highly managed situation with caretakers, and then generationally that that level of care is decreased and that ecosystems are broader and broader, and eventually we'll get to a point of what we would call a soft release, which is sort of this vast ecosystems probably fenced or has some sort of physical barrier that allows us to say, okay, here is the experimental condition that people need to understand what's happening, and then one day you would open that gate and truly rewild and then.
Just a crazy amount of consistent data on what's happening to the landscape because.
Of And that's so exciting is there's all these sort of things that have to happen in ten twenty third years for this to happen, and today we're building technologies to answer those questions.
So, and you also have the eis with the the environmental impact statement.
Oh yeah, that's why we should do rub it.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's like doing an environmental impact statement on it is going to be arduous.
Absolutely, But I think there's a lot of opportunity in many of these efforts because there's emerging economies around conservation that help drive and support, you know, sustained effort. If you were able to improve biodiversity in area that currently has a low baseline of diversity, and you could create this African savannah like diversity in the Arctic, you could you know, eventually begin to apply for things like biodiversity and carbon credits. That becomes sustainable ways to protect nature, and it's investing in the preservation restoration in nature rather than extracting resources from nature.
Let's let's take another example and and talk about the the Ivory built woodpecker. Yeah, okay, the Ivy built woodpecker went extinct.
Maybe another Lasar instagrat.
I'm talking to your Yeah, it's.
Gone something everybody this season in c I.
Think that's for Louisiana, right, that was the last one always affiliated woodpecker.
Yeah, there's the thing of Ivory built woodpecker. People see it. It's affiliated pilated woodpecker. And then I went and held the Ivory build woodpecker. Remember at Cornell, who's there you guys. Yeah, but I felt I used to kind of like, in my mind tease people who screwed mixed them up. And when I held it, I'm like, Okay, I'm never gonna tease anyone again for mixing.
Not blurry bigfoot footage.
No, it's just like not. When I picked up the Ivy built woodpecker, I was thinking i'd be picking up like a like a do you know what I mean, like like, and it was just it was kind of like, oh, it's a delicate Yeah, it's got a different bill, but I mean it's like it's it's not this. I just in my mind I had them just enormous, you know, I had them like like a I don't know, man, I just pictured him like giants and you see appiliated woodpecker. It's a good sized bird, but it's not that. And then I held one and I'm like, okay, I see it now, I see how you screwed this up. Like I wasn't. I was under no discredit to the Ivy built woodpecker. What I'm trying to say is I was underwhelmed by his size and felt sympathetic toward people that screwed up when they see appiliated woodpecker. But point being, it went it went extinct during for many of you listening, It's true of me, it went stinc extinct during your parents' lifetime. We know we could, someone could take you out and show you the tree where they were last known to exist. The singer you heard of, singer sewing Machines YEP. Singer had a forest that they held, a forest it had ivybuild woodpeckers on it. They went to do a timber cut. People begged them not to. They did the timber cut. They actually cut a tree that ivybuild woodpeckers were using. They saw them fly out as the tree was I'm not joking, and then they were extinct. The biggest problem they have is just needing large old girl trees with cavities.
Yeah, and it's a really challenging one because it is a reliant on that old growth hardwood.
And I brought it up to you being like, let's focus on that, and you talked about how birds are pain in the ass.
Yeah, birds are really.
Why is that? Why are birds of pain in the ass.
Obviously we're focusing on birds because we have this DODO project right forty pound flightless pigeon essentially from Murcius. What's amazing about that is it's also this sort of engine that's driving an investment into avian conservation science that that that hasn't really been there so far. In the late nineties we figured out cloning with Dolly the sheep, and now we've improved it vastly in mammals. But mammal reproduction is very different as you could would imagine from avian reproduction. So typically we would, like like I mentioned with mammalian cloning, we would take a skin cell and pull the nucleus out and put it into an egg. Well, you can't just drop a nucleus into a bird egg because it's a calcified egg and.
You need to fertilize it while it's still in the body. So what you can do.
What you can do is when you have, say in the case of the Dodo and Nicobar pigeon egg, that is you know, within about three days of fertilization, so early incubation stage, we can actually window the egg and really using really small tools, you can pull a couple of micro leaders of blood out. And what's really unique about avian reproduction and development is that they're sorts the cells that pre date sperm and egg on primordi oalderam cells. They're floating around freely in the in the bloodstream, and then they migrate to the gonads and that's where they begin to make you know, adult sperm and egg. While they're still floating within the within the bloodstream, we can pull those microleader to a blood out and culture those we call PGCs primarial dram cells, and.
Use those to edit.
And then we take those edited PGCs that are now not making chicken or pigeon, they're making Dodo sperm and egg, and put them back into the surrogate egg of a of a sterilized like say chicken or pigeon line. And then there those cells will migrate into their gonads and suddenly have this nicobar pigeon that's actually creating Dodo sperm or egg. The two pigeons will mate and they'll make a Dodo.
Oh my goodness, how are they making it?
Yeah?
I was picturing the vent.
So this is why, you know, one of one of the things we talk about is, you know, pigeons, probably our pigeons will be the genomic donner. The actual animal serga would be a large hen chicken. Yeah, it's not even that big. I mean there are there are domestic breeds of chickens way too. Yeah, you don't need that big now, So so we could so we could use it that chicken.
Line, domestic chicken that could handle a egg like that. Uh.
It just dawned on me that you have got to be spending as much time, if not more, on eradicating species, Yeah, as opposed to creating. Because I think of the big island of Hawaii. You're gonna have to get rid of introduced mongoose. You're gonna have to get which they've proven that they can't. Right, You're gonna have to get rid of mosquitoes, right, You're gonna have to get rid rid of snakes. You're gonna have to get rid of feral cats, which people are gonna love my crowd is at least. I mean, all of that has got to get done before you put this new experimental species back on the ground.
Right.
Well, they're developing tools that As they're developing tools, it could be helpful for that, right, Yeah, which are also subject to all kinds of scrutiny biocontrols.
Yeah, you know, and I would say we regionally are targeted eradications. Right, just to be clear, you know, we don't want to just make all any mangoo species but poof off the face of the earth.
Right, it needs to be in Hawaii.
And so the habitat remediation work that has to occurb ahead of rewilding your species reintroduction is as important as the extinction. And that's why you know, we have such a large conservation focus of the company. That's why a big part of the job that me and my team have been tasked with is is going in forming partnerships with local stakeholders, local NGOs and governments and international NGOs so we can begin to pair habitats. You know, in a three weeks time, I'm jumping on a plane and flaming into Mauritius. I'm going to go there to meet with our partners at Marsian Wildlife Foundation to talk just about this. What are the islands around surrounding Mauritius that currently have invasive species that we would need to remove. And it's not just animals, it's also plants. Plant invasives are as bad as you you know, you could imagine.
I mean, in order to begin grooming the landscape for dodos.
Yeah, you can't.
There's no sense in putting a dodo, which is a ground dwelling, ground nesting bird, in a place that the macaque was it, which was introduced by the Dutch. Is that monkey is still present where it's going to raid the nests and eat the eggs. We need to remove the macacus before we introduce the dodo. So those are sort of the issues. But also the dodo had specific dietary requirements and native plants are important, but you know, there's been a lot of introduced plant life there, so we have to also work with the amazing work that Marcian Wildlife Foundation has been doing to date. We're just trying to provide more tools, more funding, more more resources so that we can really make a difference before our doto, because the worst thing we could do is sit there with the dodo and not have a place to put it right. Then that's a that's as much of a failure as missing the target altogether.
Well, the flip side of that is in some way having that Dodo ready to go incentivizes that work in a way that there isn't currently maybe as strong an impetus to take those stuffs.
Yeah, I'm happy you called that out because I think one of the really amazing things about the Dodo in particular, but all the species that we're working on, is this idea that they become these shining lights of inspiration and to really help focus efforts back into habitat remediation and invasive removals and things like that. So you know, people say, well, what ecosystem function did the dodo provide? Well, it's not as critical as say an apex predator like the Tasmani tiger, but it does bring interest to a biodiversity hotspot to help bring funding, to help bring attention to repairing those ecosystems and preparing and preparing them for a Dodo means also improving life for so many other endemic species of the island immercies.
Well, I mean just think of the eco tourism dollars right, Like, so there's incentive there, but there's also going to be the battle of like, uh, we can't build a hotel right there.
Yeah, what's funny about the eco tourism aspect of it is, uh, you know, kids trip out about dinosaurs. They were so drastic. Part well, yeah, but you'd be like, but but you know what, man, the biggest animal to ever exist on Earth exists right now, ye, And why are you not eager to go look at that? It's there right now? Because it's the animal to ever exist on Earth is alive right now. And everyone wants to tell me how big dinosaurs were as that not as big as a blue whale?
Right, Yeah, you've kind of gotten at this a little bit. But why why instead of Tasmanian tigers and dodos, instead of making them, why not make a bunch of California condors and Siberian tiger like now to help them? Now you know, obviously it's not like right now, but.
Yeah, I would say it's not an either or proposition for us. It is use these these really compelling case studies to help drive the research, drive the investment to be able to apply it immediately to California condor.
We've been meeting with, you know, we have.
We'll be making this big announcement about some of our focus on North American species coming up here probably about the time this podcast drops. And one of those is also to work with Native American tribes and work in Indian country where they're already doing amazing conservation and and what's happening with California condor, and now there's reintroduction efforts that are being focused on in Idaho and as person, and I think that's where we want to begin to focus.
So we have these toolkits.
And there are already amazing groups working on California condor. There's so much attention on tigers, right, we can focus other places that great tools that then begin to bleed over and can be optimized back to those other species. So we're creating open source tools that are free to the conservation world. As we unlocked primordial germs, hell derivation and editing, we'll just give that to the California contour people or will help support it ourselves.
When I'm having when when I'm talking about with with friends about colossal uh, I never use this term, but in explaining it immediately everybody says, oh, Jurrassic Park. Yeah.
The fact that we're an hour into this and this is the first time it came up might be a world I've.
Been holding my tongue and I'm not bringing it up to have that conversation, but I am bringing up to do this. We We talked about mingus. Oh, did you want to say more about holding your tongue? No, No, I I just been wanting to say that word.
I can Trassic park.
Well, I'm gonna all right. Please please If you don't like my approach, no, I am not to answer it.
I'm I'm I'm following along. I thought we were just going to dig in.
No, we're going We're going right now. I'm following a part of it. We talked about mingus, where we go pluck blood from mingus. We talked about a marine mammal, an imperiled marine mammal, where you go and just shoot it, get a plug out of it, like some kind of little surgical thing that you fire from a blowgun or a drone or whatever, and get a little thing plug, a hide off them, and you got that so living. We talked about what we have when we find a frozen you know, come thawing out of the permafrost, A mammoth that may be froze within hours of death or within days of death, has been frozen ever since, right, and we get it, and you'd still see like blood clots where something bit it, and you see what it ate last and it's still got vegetation in its teeth, right, But what happens when we get back to the t rex? Like what don't you have and what is the likelihood you'd ever find it?
Well, the first thing we don't have is an interest in dinosaurs.
Just okay, I mean I don't mean you, I don't mean a collective week what would stop somebody.
Just like a big donor comes down?
Okay, Yeah, I just be like, yeah, human understanding of course, like what is not don't I know something's not there? But what is not there?
We don't have DNA okay, and just don't.
So even if you know, typically most of the dinosaur specimens we would uncover our fossils.
So those are rocks that took the place.
Of a bone, right, So there's no DNA in that rock, so you can't even sequence it if you were to find a very well preserved sixty five million year old specimen.
Time is still an enemy UV and.
Temperature and bacteria contamination is still an enemy to DNA integrity. So even if when we talk about nineteen thirty six, we talked about highly degraded DNA, it takes incredible amounts of genomic sequencing, and so much brute force to sequence that over and over. If you think about over time, DNA starts as a single strand, just as an oversimplification starts as a single strand over time, it just cuts in half once, cuts in half twice, and it just that process repeats.
So you go from maybe in.
Nineteen thirty six we had a five hundred piece puzzle that we had to use artificial intelligence and computational biology to put back in order to.
Make that puzzle.
If you go back sixty five million years ago, it might be a five trillion piece puzzle.
You just have dust.
Yeah, it's so hard. The other side of it is we don't actually have a reference gam so you'll hear us talk about reference genomes a lot of a living relative. One of the ways that we solve those puzzles when we have these highly degraded DNA samples is we find something that's closely related and we go, oh, so it's sort of like a cheat sheet. You know what the puzzle should look like. So you know, oh, well the green sections up here, so I'm going to put this over here. And that's what the AI is doing, and the computational biologist they're working on with dinosaur is that just doesn't doesn't exist.
So this is not acknowledging that this is not your area of folks. I mean, this is not a thing that's good. This is not a problem that's going to be overcome.
No, not not.
Tried looking for dino blood in mosquitoes preserved amber and then using the DNA of a West African tree frog to splice it in.
And what was that?
A loosing uh you know, you give them a loosinge dependency.
Doctor Henry Wu figured all that out under the tutelage of John Hammond.
I think Beth Shapiro from our team has actually shown that ambers are really poor.
To good actually looked.
Into it, which is amazing. I think that's why she's so so cool.
But so people can put that out of their minds.
Take it out of your mind in.
The case.
It's you know, they're that the plight of that little marine mammal is tied to fishing practices.
Well do you know about this thing?
Yeah?
I was so embarrassed you showed me pic. I never even heard of the son of a Bitch. I looked at the picture and I've never seen it.
Oh, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of Yeah, that's what a lot of people can't say, eat, live, and breathe, but they live and breathe. That animal I've never heard of. It's clocks ticks.
The world's most dandered mareen mammal, and it is, you know, like anime level charisma. Right, It's one of the cutest things you'll ever see in your life.
But you know, like if if I were in your shoes and you're like, okay, we have it in the in the bank, what there's no point in bringing it back right now until these fishing practices change.
No, But that's the beauty of biobanking, is the idea is we need to take snapshots today, what is the biodiversity that exists, and not just the Noah's ark of one by one.
We don't need one male and one female.
We need the largest population representation we can get. Unfortunately, with this species of akida, there's only thirteen. But ideally somebody could go out and get thirteen, all thirteen biobanked, and that would give us the opportunity that if in ten twenty one hundred, one thousand years we finally figured out all of the you know, socio political pressures that are driving the extinction of the species, then it could be resored, which is amazing.
But the human the conundrum right is like if you have that approach of like, okay, we got on biobanked, these people aren't going to change, We'll wait till it changes. Will it change with the absence of that animal?
I think similar to what we're talking about the DOTO, it actually provides an inspiration to accelerate the change and push you know, we talked about the moral hazard a lot, which is this idea that if we have a technology that can mean extinction is not forever, will people care less about extinction?
Oh yeah, I we'll get to you later.
Yeah yeah.
But my argument is they're already doing that, right. The level of care about the biodiversity loss is shockingly low. So we need to figure out tools to make sure that we can begin to reverse extinctions because nobody else cares.
And I know that's a.
Very broad statement, but to be fair, the amount of investment that goes into conservation is just we should all be ashamed. You know, the Pulse And Institute did this amazing research study into conservation, spending a couple of years back and what they found is that on average, annually, between philanthropy and government spending on the conservation of endangered species the globe globally, we spend about one hundred and seventy five billion dollars a year. They also did an estimate of what would the investment take to stop the biodiversity crisis or reverse it, and that's nine hundred billion dollars a year, which really, if you think about defense spending or some other you know, you can find another way to contextualize that.
It's not a ton of money.
You know.
Stefano on my team gave me this amazing quote that every year the globe spends four hundred and eighty billion dollars on soda.
What would you rather have?
Yeah, that's that's not that's not to acknowledge maybe all the downstream health care cost right and things like that. So it just shows you that unfortunately, the level of interest and investment is so low today that I don't think the moral hazard is a real value, valid valid argument because people do not care enough today.
If you had, I was gonna say, if you want to get hunters interested, you need to look into the Irish Elk put that on your list.
So I've got to get bod get behind that one. I've got just to get a look at one.
I've got this dream list going and yeah, if you could do anything in the world for me, it's not dinosaurs, it is it's ungulates. That's where I found my passion for for conservation, primarily in Africa. But you know Irish elk Is, you know you look at a twelve foot span of vantler, right, like just insane, so tall and so big that when the force started growing and they they that's what was pushing them out of their habite because they couldn't even fit between trees, like just an amazing.
The shed hunting world would just poof.
They let me hit you with the one here, uh, because we would Brody mentioned like, why not go focus on Siberian tigers? Okay, so let's talk about Siberian tigers from it. How many are there? Roughly less than a thousand?
Correct, Yeah, it's easily.
So let's say you did cultivate a population and you and you worked up where you got a dozen of them cloned Siberian tigers. Could you ever get so comfortable with what you'd created that you would not as that you would cut them loose and let them integrate into that population in breeding. Yes, you could. You could get so you could get comfortable that you weren't having some reticence that like, dude, I don't know, maybe there's something I'm not seeing and this is going to be the final death knell.
And relatedly, are you able to fiddle around enough that you don't have concerns about genetic bottlenecks if you're bringing twelve tigers out of a lab, like you're going in there and kind of buzzing around the edges.
Yeah, because if they're all gone, you know, you talked about like like de extinction. If they're all gone, there becomes like a what's to lose? Like, you know, if if you do the dodo and you want to find in appropriate habitat, you do all the work, you put dodos out and yeah, like there's a thing you hadn't thought of which is totally possible, and it didn't work, you'd be like, oh, we didn't have them before, we don't have them now, what can we try? But in the case, it's like with this question about the Siberian tiger, it's like, well, what's to lose. Is we don't know yet that there remains a chain ants, so by helping it, what's the risk.
Of Yeah, and I think that risk has to be put in context of what is the current risk of extinction?
Right?
Just because it is still present doesn't mean it will be president in your time. So I think that is an important comparison. But not only am I comfortable with it, I mean that's my dream, That's why I work here.
I want to go and find.
These amazing programs where we can go make a difference in that way. But it's also important to note that that you know, this is such a thoughtful and long process that it's not just like I said earlier, you don't just make them and let them lose. We'd have to work in concert with NGOs, with government agencies to figure out how can we build a reintroduction program that allows us to answer all these sort of risk mitigation questions before we get to that release point. But yes, one hundred percent, my goal in life is that before I die, I want to see an endangered species saved by this technology.
Not save, not de extinct, but preventing extinction.
No, I mean for us, it's both you know, we view the extinction as a conservation tool and I think you know, I can see ways that we can fix habitats using the extinction from lost species, and that we can save currently imperiled populations of animals.
Knowing what you now know, did they do the right thing on the Florida panther or like we had current technologies, would you have approached the Florida panther question differently?
I mean, using today's tools, we could have done it differently and you wouldn't need to go to Texas to get more expensively. And this is an amazing toolkit we're building. And this goes back to that northern white rhino example. Is one of the things we're doing. And this should be right up Hunter's Alleys right is we're going back into people's private collections. We're going back into museum collections and understanding if you hunted a northern white rhino in the fifties, sixties, eighties, whatever it was, and you have this specimen, we want to sequence it. We want to go in and we want to figure out what was the genetic diversity representative of this species before it became extremely bottlenecked, functionally extinct and now we have twelve lines of Northern white rhinos, so essentially you only have twelve founders for the population.
When we talk about.
Florida panther, it was a a couple hundred and they were so inbred, so it tells you that there's a really low level. But what we can do is take those twelve lines and leave them sort of what we call wild type, and then start to use the genetic diversity information we found from those samples and edit that diversity back in, so we're actually artificially building more founder representation into the population. So that's what's happening right now for us with Northern white rhino. That's our key role in that project. We're going to Mauritius to talk about doing this with pink pigeons, which were a highly bottlenecked population that went extinct in the wild, and now we're looking at where else could we apply that. So for the Florida panther question, we could have done the same thing, or we could just go into the western cougar and identify what parts of of the genome would be most impactful back So without taking all of the Western cougar and mixing it in, you could take pieces of it and be more deliberate or intentional about what you want to do. Obviously that's more high tech and science y, so it becomes more expensive than just translocating western cougars, but it is a way to sort of, I think, answer some of the concerns about are you diluting an endemic subpopulation.
And is there any temptation to alter these gene sequences, like to find these like Jurassic Park type ways of being, Like, oh, instead of like eradicating all the rats, can we make it so that ground nesting bird doesn't smell. Yeah, like to where the rats don't even see the nest because they can't.
So we just announced this amazing project a couple weeks ago, I think. And so there's this A species in Australia comes from the Northern Ratory of Australia called the Northern quall quoll. It's a dazzy year it so it's closely related to Tasmanian devils. Years and years ago, cane toads marine toads were introduced to Australia as some attempt to control other invasives and just became an invasive in and of themselves, right, cane toads excrete buffotoxin boufotoxin. You know, so these are animals native to South America. Boufotoxin is a neurotoxin that kills animals that do not have a resistance to it. So when the cane toad was introduced to Australia, it really impacted the coal because it's a perfect size and sort of niche for the coal to predate, and when the qualls predate on them, they eventually die, and so it's really impacting the population. So what we're doing sort of in that same light is we've identified that animals that co evolved with the buffotad marine toad in South America actually have this natural resistance to that toxin. And as it turns out, it's a very simple that it's like one base pair change. So we're we just announced that we are going and making that change in northern coal lines so that we can release those genetically edited quill back into the Northern territory. And that that's amazing because it does two things. It saves the northern qual from this imminent extinction, which almost certain extinction, and they can start those kill down there. A nature based way to remove an invasive space. So it's you know, it's so exciting, and I think that is so to your question, yeah, we want to continue to find solutions like that.
Wow, are there regulatory hurdles on that one?
People got to be freaking out.
I mean we talk about there's a big fear about genetically modified organistness, right, and I think there is also.
A I got news for everybody, you're eating them?
Yeah, exactly.
That was going to be what I was gonna say, is I think anybody vacation and like Florida, right, and it's like you see helicopters spray and stuff everywhere.
Yeah, chemicals are much worse.
So yeah, right, and you're like, do you want that or do you want Well, that's three choices. Get absolutely eaten live by mosquitoes, have them aerial sprayed everywhere, or you can have a genetically modified mosquito in there that makes everybody uh male right, yep, males don't.
Yeah, that would be one way to do it.
But you know, I think to your point, there's an unwillingness to acknowledge that we have been domesticating our dogs, We've been domesticating our agriculture crops for tens of thousands of years, right, Like, that's sort of what we've done. That tomato that you eat every day isn't representative of what a tomato really is. That's what we've made it. But we did it through traditionally, through you know, artificial selection, back breeding, cross breeding, things like you know, sort of that Mendelian idea of genetics. If we like this phoenotype in this one, we're going to breed them and see what happens. We're doing the same thing. We're trying to get this gene from that target that we like, but we're just going to do it in an accelerated way in a lab. So we're still going to pull the same gen and put it in there as you would might achieve through selective breeding, but we're going to do it much faster and with fewer maybe unintended consequences.
And isn't there an example of a species of zebra that they the quaga, that they brought back by doing sort of the Mendelian you pick out.
There there's two efforts underway.
So the quaga, which is is a closely related zebra and sort of it's very phenotypically different, has no stripes, it's like more brown, it's about it and the ROC from Europe. Right, there are two efforts to use back breeding to do that, and they're making headway, and they can do so with much less fanfare and and maybe criticism because people are really comfortable with breeding.
Because it looks like what people were doing, yeah, tens of thousands of years ago.
But the process, when you really get down to it, if you really want to oversimplify, is essentially the same. You're targeting very specific phenotypes in instead, we're figuring out what gene makes a phenotype and then we're trying to get that to be expressed in our line of interest, so we can do it much faster, and.
I think that's much intention more.
Probably what scares people though, like without leaning too far into like the paranoia and conspiracy theory thing, like it's like, who's making sure they're not going too far with this, right, yeah.
Or in the case of the tiger, right, and it's like somebody in labs like, but we want them a little more pissed off.
But I think that's why, you know, we invite the regulatory environment. We want to be the subject matter expert that builds those guardrails, because frankly, there are very few people in the world that understand the true power of this technology more than.
The people at Colossal.
So we need to sit down with the world leading experts in ethics and regulation to say, this is how we think we can use this, and here's how we think it could probably go wrong, right, and let's build a guardrail that keeps us on this path. Because when we have this first breakthrough, when we blow all your minds with this first restored spaces from extinction, we won't be the only show anymore.
And then Pandora's box is wide open.
And luckily we'll be light years ahead of it and anybody else. But somebody else can start to work from the same foundation that we built.
Mm hmm.
So we need responsible regulation and I want it for me. The only way I could ever achieve my dream of putting a restored spaces back into the wild or preventing an extinction is to have really strong regulation that invites that type of work.
Yeah, you're a You're in an interesting position of when it comes to policy and legislation, you're in the interesting position of needing to point out what it is.
Yeah, like you'd be like, like.
Hear me out. I'm gonna tell you about a thing we're figuring out how to do that you're probably not aware of. And then I'm gonna tell you some things that you might want to do in order to get your hands around the thing. I'm gonna tell you exactly.
Yeah, And that's why you've said I don't if if you've looked into us a bit, you know, one of the one of the groups that invested in Colossal Is is the venture capital Alarm of the intelligence community here in the US, because they want to understand more of that so we we can work in concert and show them sort of what are the capabilities of today and and so that's why they've invested in US, because they understand that it's also important to national security that the United States leads this effort. If we're not doing it, somebody else is doing it, we better be the best at it.
You may put a chimp into outer space, but you haven't put a colossal.
Because if our enemies come out with a psychic war elephant, right, they're gonna look at you and be like, well, how come out of that a psychic war elephant? You know what you know what you know, you'll be you'll be pleased to know. I just thought of how to tackle the dinosaur deal.
Oh great, let's hear it.
Check it out. Everybody now knows that, like, uh, you know, birds, people are like, well, dinosaurs didn't really go away because some of them became birds. Somewhere deep in that bird's blood I mean, yeah, turkey, Maybe a crane somewhere deep in that turkey is probably the secret of what you're looking for. Deep in his blood.
All of Steve's best ideas begin with everybody knows X, but deep down in his blood, I mean the blood in the middle of his heart.
And we might have just been looking at the wrong part of the aim is probably some clue. Have you seen a watson? Watson, Watson. It's a South American beard that looks like a tiny velociraptor.
That might even better than a crane.
Yeah, that might be where it's there. They're terrifying looking. They have little claws on their wings.
Well they do.
I like the fact that nature has sort of put up a roadblock according to you, that is going to hopefully prevent us from doing what you're talking about.
Too far back, too far back.
Yeah, or that its just and to me in a way, like I've said this for a long time, I get a lot of like frowned and like weird looks, and I say it, But extinction if it happened way back then, we lost all these species.
It was a crazy place.
It was a very diverse world, and then all of a sudden, like something hits the Earth and it changes, all the shit goes wrong. It would lose everything. But look right now or one hundred years ago. Wow, we have another very diverse, cool place. And there's nothing to say that as bad as we fuck it up in the next five hundred to one thousand years and we are gone that ten thousand years after that, it won't be another beautiful place.
I look forward to us all being gone, humans all gone, and then let millions of years go by and then come back and look it'll be cool, like good lord.
Yeah, I'm certain that they're.
Gonna put in the bio bank so you can come.
Back, come back, Ted Williams, just your head, yeah, yeah, Ted Williams style. I'm certain that in you know, nature and Earth will survive. It just won't be the nature of Earth that we know. And we're pretty attached to right, so it'd be nice. I think you're a little optimistic to think that civilization will last.
Five hundred or thousand years.
So at this rate that we're that we're we're chasing down biodiversity loss. You know, people think that biodiversity loss is only about, you know, the intrinsic value of nature. It's important to your food security, your health, you know, everything. Without a balance in nature, humanity will not thrive. That's why we have people looking at figuring out how to go to Mars.
Yeah, I think that, I mean just our increasing understanding of the microbial structure of soil. Yeah, Like, I don't know. We talked about Aldo Leopold the other day, his idea of of someone that doesn't really understand a watch looking at a disassembled watch and being like, I don't see what good this part is, right, it's not obvious you know that part does, and flick it out.
And then later be like, god, damn it that I think that's the part that does the And we do that every day when we say, you know, you know, commercial fishing is over fishing our seas and we're seeing different you know, sizes of fish or different populations of fish out there just because of industrialized fishing.
You know, we talk about when we are even doing you know, development for human housing, we're just digging up pieces of land that we got well, nothing that we know of today was important there.
You know.
A great example to that was there's this this small lizard from Australia again in Victoria called the Victoria and Grassland early Dragon, and it went extinct in nineteen sixty nine and never seen again. And then they were one guy was digging up some housing some land in Victoria to put up a housing development, had to do an ecological survey and they discovered the Victorian Grassland early Dragon while they.
Were destroying its What's great about that is our partners at Zoos Victoria and in Australia called us and they said, you know, unfortunately the Australian economy is not strong right now with all the stagnations stagflation issues down there, and they said, unfortunately, there's no money to save this animal.
We ended up fight, Yeah, we ended up funding it. We ended up supporting all the genetics and genemic research and Zoos Victoria has done an amazing job, maybe one of the best species recovery stories I've ever heard of. They're the most prepared. They thought, one day, somebody's gonna find this lizard. So they went and found a closely related lizard and perfected its husbandry. In the first year that we put that animal at Ze's Victoria, they laid eggs and now there's we went. Yeah, we went from sixteen animals to about seventy or so.
Yeah.
So, I mean just amazing, right, absolutely incredible story. And I think that's just goes to show you that, you know, just because things aren't obvious, you know, there's a lot to nature that we don't understand or that we just that that you kind of miss and couldn't have these insane ripple effects.
Well that was great, Thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
I mean, this is uh you got a lot of fans that lass uh yeah, yeah, I'd be remiss if I didn't give shout out to our head of animal husbandry, Steve Metzler. He's the biggest fan of you guys, so he was jealousy couldn't be here. But we really appreciate the audience with you and and uh and and and getting to share a little bit of what we do. We hope we have some exciting updates for you coming up.
Yeah, I want to. I want to make my final clarification here. Like we had we we joked a little bit and had some lass about things, right, But I I do think that when we had dinner last night, we talked about that I used to had this, I had the wrong idea that I always saw people justified the space race by pointing to Teflon, you know, and I was and then someone pointed out tough On didn't come from I thought it came from our efforts to land on the movie. Either way, I was bringing up this idea that you chase a thing, right, and and and and and maybe it's not clear why the why we have this desire at the time me this desire to go to the moon, right, it's kind of what are you gonna do when you get there? And it's an open question, but it leads you down this path, and for us, it led down this path of set you know, eventually, satellite technology, internet whatever. It opens up all these things. And I do really appreciate in the conversations that we've had, I do really appreciate that there's this kind of like North Star idea that's very arresting about like that we would make a mammoth, right, we would de extinct a mammoth, And I appreciate that for its It's it's like lunar shot appeal, right, But the way in which that, like looking at that north Star, the way in which that has created and will continue to create strategies and technologies that would be like applicable to real world current problems is like it's noteworthy.
Yep, I agree.
I'm like, I'm supportive. I'm supportive of the pursuit mostly as much as I'd love to see a mammoth. I'm supportive of the pursuit because of the all the implications that you discussed about ways in which you can be currently currently helpful on real problems of species blinking out.
You know, absolutely the journey is as important as a destination in this case, right we are. We are doing amazing things along the way. If we ever get to the point where we've had so much success that your concerns about the destination come into play, We've hit such a home run that we have made such a difference to the natural world that I think people really understand, you know, in retrospect.
Why this pursuit is so important.
When it comes time to find out the regulatory structure on mammoth haunts. I would appreciate if you guys can talk to us.
Yeah, definitely hope.
Hunter's orange necessary.
All right, Matt James, some colossal biosciences. Thanks for coming out, man, Thank you so much.
Guys, appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's a fresh instead of eyed. We'll always find more.
Be crawl down in the car for them on your hands and knelt on my being the worm to tell you.
You don't wrong. But come on, baby, last, not tonight. So listen to my song. Honey, I a hot pos Sam the pot with you.
There's nothing that I can do, so feed the flame, Honey.
I love you. I'm your pusson the hot line, my how phossum o you.
There's nothing el that I can do, Sophia the Flame, Honey.
I love you.
You're Pusson. Oh wow, Pusson.
You don't believe my honey, I'm You're person
