You’re Not Worried at All?!

In episode 16, Gandhi talks with Ben Lamm of Colossal, a company working to resurrect the Wooly Mammoth as well as other extinct species. Is it possible? Is it safe? Have we not seen Jurassic Park? We also catch a glimpse of what happens in the studio when Skeery is alone and in crisis, and Diamond is passionate about her entry into the Burn Book. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Sounds on the side. It's episode sixteen, and I gotta say,
Scary and Brody are Brody and is Scary? The Brooklyn
Boys they told me to count every single episode. They're
up to like nine hundred and ninety seven million, and
they said they count every episode.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Don't do that. It's very outdated, like the Brooklyn Boys.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Oh burn woo.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
That was for Scary personally.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Should we talk about how the studio caught on fire earlier?

Speaker 3 (00:31):
That The aftermath of that was probably the best thing
I've ever seen because you were laughing. Scotty was laughing,
but Scary was doing like a nervous laugh. His heart
was clearly still racing.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Oh wait, oh, we have this sound. He was in
here recording a commercial and he heard like pops and
clicks and it all picks up. It is all we
have the sound. Let's play it right now. Hair and
Skilled Trades Training design.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
To the fuck?

Speaker 5 (00:58):
Is that?

Speaker 4 (01:00):
Fuck?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
What the fuck is going on?

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Dude? What I heard that?

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Twelve fucking popping noises like something.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
Cold?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Jeff cold, Jeff, I'm pluging, Jeff, Jeff, Oh my god, Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:19):
Is it the candle?

Speaker 1 (01:20):
No, it's it's Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, help, come down here.
The USB port is exploding in front of Gandhi's thing.
I heard that sixteen pops.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
You smell it. Oh my god, the fire alarm is
gonna go on. Come down here, please record it. If
I'm recording, I'm rolling on a commercial video recorded because
again and it's smoked because when you know what happen
when he comes here.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
Of course that was it because something was plugged in.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
No, it's proofed out of there. I saw it. Oh
my god.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
I'm still recalling recording training design to accelerate entry into
the workforce, and.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
That is scary jobs.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
He's done well in a panic wi Jeff, Jeff, help, Jeff?

Speaker 1 (02:09):
The fuck is that?

Speaker 2 (02:10):
The fuck? Was that? The fuck?

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Oh my god? Okay, anyway, I'm really excited about the
guest today, Diamond. I know you're a little iffy about
what's going on, but we have a guy coming in.
His name is Ben Lamb. He is part of a
project and a company. The company is called Colossal, and
they are doing some really cool stuff. One of the
things that they are working on is bringing back the

(02:33):
wooly mammoth. Sounds crazy, right.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
It's very weird.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
But okay, okay, there are a lot of reasons that
they say this is a good idea, and I'm fascinated
as far as why is a good idea? Why the
wooly mammoth? How are you going to do this? You know,
I'm gonna just pepper him with questions, but we got
to get in here first. I am so so excited

(03:01):
about this. I am with Ben Lamb, CEO of Colossal.
Did I get that right?

Speaker 4 (03:05):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, okay, And Colossal is something that I have been
interested in since I found out about Colossal, but even
before that. Your partner, doctor George Church, I met him
years and years ago when I was in Boston. The
two of you together are working on something. Actually, there's
far more than two of you. There are a lot
of you.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
If it was just us, we wouldn't we would not
be very far.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
A lot of people working on this project. And the
project is too bring back the wooly mammoth.

Speaker 5 (03:31):
As well as bringing back other species and develop technologies
for conservations.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Okay, so why are people focused on the wooly mammoth
right now?

Speaker 4 (03:37):
Then?

Speaker 5 (03:38):
It's what gets the headlines right. Everybody only wants to
talk about the wooly mammoth. Like, what's been funny is
we actually have more conservation applications of our de extinction
tools and technologies for conservation than anything else. But people
are like, that's fantastic, or we're like, hey, we were
working to save the northern white rhin.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
No, that's amazing about this mammoth and so and so.

Speaker 5 (03:55):
Then we announced the Thiolistan or Tasmanian tiger, we announced
the dodo, and people like those are amazing, but about
this mammoth.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Okay, so it's funny you say that. Because I actually
worked in reverse. I didn't look into as much as
I should have because I wanted to talk to you
about this stuff and find out this way. But I
was like, okay, so we're going to bring back the
wily mamoth. What about the animals now that really need help?
I specifically said to Diamond, like, oh, I know the
white rhino specifically, Yeah, maybe they could work on that.
So this is great. So you're working on not just
the wooly mammoth, which we will get to it. Now,

(04:23):
I want to know about the other ones.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
We have three d extinction projects.

Speaker 5 (04:25):
The wooly mammoth, Okay, the tasmani and tiger also known
as the thylacine, and then the Dodo bird from Mauritius.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Okay, those are our three D extinction projects.

Speaker 5 (04:32):
But then we have a handful of conservation projects around
the world, and all of the technologies that we build
on the path to the extinction we're giving to conservation
in the world for free. So, you know, the extinction
is a very hard problem and you have to innovate
a lot of new technologies in order to make it successful.
You have to build the entire system, so little pieces
of that can go and help species now. And so

(04:53):
we can't save every species, but we can be this
like R and D lab for conservation that gets the
benefit of all of our technologies for free.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
So what is keeping you from saving every species?

Speaker 5 (05:02):
I mean, that's just a I mean, the only way
to save every species has changed hearts and minds, right, Like,
that's that's it. And there's some natural extinction rates that occurred.
You know, if we as humans weren't massively changing the
climate and polluting the climate and also polluting the environment
and you know, filling it with plastics and everything else, right,
and so so for us you know, I think that

(05:22):
the more sustainable model is go focus on a couple
of keystone giant, awesome species like the mammoth and the
thialis and the dodo, and then use those technologies and
empower conservationists. Right, there's you know, twenty five different rhino
groups out there. Let's give them the latest and greatest
technologies for conservation that they don't have time or money
to or even the resources and people to build.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
Why don't we just do it and then just give
them that text?

Speaker 5 (05:44):
So maybe we it's us trying to empower a ton
of different conservation groups.

Speaker 4 (05:48):
Around the world. You know, we're not going to be
the sole conservation group.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
So what made you pick these specific species?

Speaker 5 (05:53):
So I didn't have a lot of choice on the
mammoth thing. Just be honest, Like, George has been working
on it, like you mentioned.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
You Yeah, well probably seven are years ago.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
Yeah, several years before like we met, George had been
working on it, had been doing all the competational analysis,
been collecting mammoth genomes, doing trips to Siberia.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
How does one do that?

Speaker 5 (06:11):
Yeah, it's it's there's lots of expeditions involved. So like
people think of Colossal as like just a lab company,
but there's a ton of field work. So you know,
we get the Jurassic part question quite frequently as you assume.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
I'm sure dinosaurs and Jurassic Bug will come up with somewhere, right.
But there's also this like weird Indiana Jones component to
it where we actually go out into the field and
find samples, and we actually go and there's this crazy
like David Attenborough nature component where we're out there doing
conservation and like inoculating and helping animals in the field.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Right, So it's you're describing my dream.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
It's a weird we're hiring.

Speaker 5 (06:46):
I think people think it's just a lab thing, and
it's just not. It's it's just like really interesting mix
of stuff. And so we partner with great organizations. So
I'm part of the Explorers Club. Many of our top
advisors part of the Explorers Club. It's really this network,
you know, it's not just George and I. We've got
one hundred and thirty people at Colossal. We have sixty
scientific advisors around the world, and then we fund another

(07:07):
thirty or forty.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
Post docs in lab.

Speaker 5 (07:09):
So you know, we're over two hundred people that are
kind of working towards this crazy mission.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Where are you based?

Speaker 4 (07:14):
So we're based in Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Okay, yeah, when you guys decided, actually, George Church decided
a long time ago that he thought it would be
a good idea to bring back the wooly mammoth. Tell
people why.

Speaker 5 (07:24):
So George had looked at George had kind of like
this two part goal. One, if you can pick a
keystone species like the mammoth that had ecological benefits while
also looking for a species that isn't well studied, like
elephants and elephant reproductive systems, you could build technologies to
help save elephants because elephants will go extinct prey on

(07:46):
our lifetime, but maybe in the next generation's lifetime if
we don't do anything about it. There's a deadly herpes
virus that kills twenty percent of elephants every single year
that no.

Speaker 4 (07:54):
One's done anything about.

Speaker 5 (07:55):
We have the tools to fix it, just no one's
anything about it because they don't money in it. Right,
we have poaching, we have human elephant conflict, you know,
especially in parts of Afroa, parts of India, and so
it's like you've got all of these issues around around
you know, elephants today. But then separately, you've got this
crazy degraded ecosystem that's pretty absent of life, right, and
that's the that's this tundra, this art heard about the

(08:18):
Arctic tendra. Well most people don't realize this, but go
back ten thousand years. It was actually called the mammos
step and it was full of life. It had wooly
rhinos and dire wolves and wooly mammos and.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
All other diolves are not just from gaming. They're not just.

Speaker 5 (08:34):
From game of thro something every Yeah, yeah, we actually, yeah,
they're they're great, and so uh there's all kinds of species, right,
and so they're they're not a mythical creature. So they
had all these different species that lived in this ecosystem.
And what we found is that a more diverse ecosystem
leads to a higher kind of nitrogen oxygen turnover, so
that actually brings in more vegetation that actually like increases

(08:57):
kind of what this it's called the albedo effect, which
is our sign's turn where it's light reflection back into space.
So everything that's not absorbed into photosynthesis gets reflected back
into space, so it actually cools the ground temperatures in
the winter months, keeps the permafrost frozen. Why that's so
important is because there's more carbon in the permafrost stored
than all of the atmosphere by about two to three x,

(09:17):
so that stuff melts. We got bigger problems than the
problems we have today in the world, and so and
so George was like, Wow, we could start to build
a keystone species that we think that people would get
excited about because they're not like a bunch of hate
groups about mammos, right, people love mammos. So you could
inspire people, you could build technologies to help elephant conservation,
and you could start to revitalize this ecosystem that's completely.

Speaker 4 (09:41):
Desolate of life now.

Speaker 5 (09:42):
And it required us to go beyond Harvard and have
these academic partnerships and work in collaborations with groups like
the Explorers Club to really pull this off.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
How hard has this been? When you guys pitched the idea, Hey,
we're thinking about bringing back the wooly mammo so that
we can prevent climate change and at least slow it.
What is the reaction?

Speaker 5 (10:00):
So, so, what's crazy is we've gotten over eighty billion
media impressions, which is stupid. We pretty much stopped, yeah,
pretty much stopped counting. And so what we found is
that in a couple of different ways, we've we've kind
of like sparked the curiosity of like the young. Right,
so we get like we like my favorite on the
worst day at Colossal, when you like open up a

(10:22):
letter and it's like a mom that's like, thank you
so much for doing this. My kids are like asking
me about science, right, like I was Actually I was
actually in the Maladives on vacation, sitting at breakfast on
the small island, and I literally heard this woman behind
me say, hey, that's uh, I think that's a Dodo?

Speaker 4 (10:39):
Is that a Dodo?

Speaker 5 (10:40):
And the kids like, no, mom, the dodos extend. This
kid's like eleven or twelve, Like the Dodo is extinct,
but there is a company that's working to bring back
the Dodo.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
And I was like, did you turn around like this?

Speaker 4 (10:50):
I got, I turned around and like went and talked
to him for like twenty minutes. Right.

Speaker 5 (10:54):
So on one part of it is like we've gotten
kids and parents people really excited about science. We all
sat in our house for a year and a half
with this COVID right, and it's like, shouldn't we be
doing more moonshots? Shouldn't we trying to help save the planet.
Shouldn't we like help conservation. So I think people are
there's a lot of people that are excited about it.
You know, we have an attitude towards our to the

(11:15):
negative naysayers, to run towards them. Like Best Shapiro, who
just joined as our chief science officer, who's amazing, number
one ancient.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
He said, Beth Shapiro, Yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 (11:25):
Yeah, Oh did you think? I said, no, it could have.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Not like Ben, you know, don't I would not be
on board side.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
I don't think he's exactly qualified for this project. So yeah,
So but Beth Shapiro, number one ancient DNA researcher in
the world. She actually wrote the book How to Clone
a Mammoth, right, and so she's awesome. She was one
of our biggest naysayers. We went to her and said,
what are we doing wrong? How could we She's like,
you're pushing your climate models too far. You really need

(11:52):
more data to justify how many mammoths are there, and
we need to do a peer reviewed paper. We need
to understand what can survive there now. So I'm happy
to tell you that we have a peer view paper
right now. Took her advice right, and it takes years
to get peer of view papers. To have a peer
view paper in review, we listened to her. Our second
biggest naysayer when we launched was a guy named Louva Dollin.

Speaker 4 (12:12):
I'm here with Luva in New York. He just sat
on my table at the Explorers Cup.

Speaker 5 (12:16):
He's a number one Mammoth researcher, and he was like,
they didn't reach out to me, Like, I'm the number
one mamoth researcher in the entire world. They didn't talk
to me. So how do these guys think they're going
to be successful? And I'm the one that knows all
the genes that make a mammoth at the Mammoth right, So.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
We listen to their point.

Speaker 5 (12:30):
Yeah, So we listen to that feedback and we kind
of just run towards it. We really love the informed
critics because we wouldn't be where we are today without
Louva Dollan or Best Shapiro, and those were our two
biggest critics at launch.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
I love this and now they're on your side. So
if this project succeeds, I think I saw online that
you guys planned to have this going by twenty twenty seven.

Speaker 5 (12:49):
People are very excited about the dates because yeah, hello, yeah,
we are.

Speaker 4 (12:54):
Too right, because we work, you know, twenty four to seven.

Speaker 5 (12:56):
Yeah, we have set a big, hairy, colossal goal of
twenty twenty eight for our first mammoth caves.

Speaker 4 (13:02):
Ok So twenty twenty eight is our first manoth cavs.

Speaker 5 (13:04):
What I will say, just for fun, is there's a
twenty two month gestation for elephants.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
So that means that.

Speaker 5 (13:11):
We've got to have our embryos ready by at least
late twenty twenty six in order to see that we
are on track for that. For as much as excitement
as people had on the earlier announcements, I think the
announcements we're gonna have in the latter half this year
it's gonna be weird.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
It's gonna be fun. Will we come back, Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 5 (13:24):
I'm gonna work all the time, so I'm here once
a month, Okay, Yeah, so I'm happy to come back.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
Keep you guys posted.

Speaker 5 (13:29):
But I don't believe the mammoth will be the first
species for that is extinct.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Do you want to say what you believe will know?

Speaker 4 (13:38):
I won't say what I want it ta Yeah, it's
good qualities.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Let's talk about the actual logistics of how this is
gonna work. So you're gonna have some calves first, how
many so.

Speaker 5 (13:47):
We don't know, but I mean we want if you
look at elephant herds. We work really closely with elephant
conservation groups in Botswana elephant Havens, and then say the
elephants is the largest one in Kenya, and we're actually
using ai and droves and fleer cameras and others to
train models to understand how you rewild orphaned elephant babies
back into herds. So most likely the first hurd will

(14:09):
be eight to ten. That's kind of like what a
normal kind of small the mid sized herd is.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
But who's going to raise the baby calves and teach
them how to be big grown mammis.

Speaker 4 (14:17):
Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 5 (14:18):
So that's what So one of our partners, elephant Havens,
that's what they do with all day long with African elephants, right,
is they they look at orphaned elephants. They save orphan
elephants they help build those herd dynamics help teach these things.
What's incredible about a lot of species, especially some of
the smarter species, is you know, it takes us a
while to like walk and talk and whatnot, but there's

(14:39):
lots of species that come out. They know how to
eat yea, they know how to walk. They even speak
their own language, right. Like, I had this really interesting
conversation with this indigenous tribal leader about how he was
telling me how wolves in weird ways are smarter than
us because they can speak their own language from.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
Day one, and they're like, we don't. We have to
learn this, and we're pretty bad at it even after
we learn it.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Right, Some people never really get a grass people.

Speaker 4 (15:01):
I think some are very generoud, most people never do.

Speaker 5 (15:13):
So for us, you know, working with elephant conservation groups,
understanding those models is key. Asian elephants will be the
surrogates for the first mammoth caves and so there will
be a lot of that social behavior that works together.
And some people are like, but Asian elephants are like
tropical and hot yes where yes exactly, So so we

(15:35):
get those questions right and so right now you know
our roles put them back into the Arctic Circle in
an area called Circle Polar North, which is actually a
little bit further. It comes down a little bit into
Lower Canada and northern United States. Right now, we are
focusing mostly on Alaska and Canada given.

Speaker 4 (15:51):
All the geopolitical conflicts that we're seeing in Russia.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (15:55):
But what's interesting though, is one of our partners in
Canada has elephants on this big refuge and these are
Asian elephants, and we've been up there and we have
videos of them like rolling around in the snow. These
are not Arctic adapted, genetically modified mammoth elephants. These are
just Asian elephants, like straight out the womb, right, and
they are running around, they're breaking through the ice. They're

(16:16):
actually swimming in frozen lakes, and you'd be like, how
is that possible?

Speaker 4 (16:20):
But most people.

Speaker 5 (16:20):
Don't realize this also about mammis. During the during the
last two and a half million years, you had the Pleissistine, right,
which is like what we think of with like ice age,
and then you have the Holocen which we're in now.
But there's been these different kind of interglacial moments where
there are actually periods over the last one hundred thousand
years where mammis survived very well that were actually hotter

(16:42):
than today, And so mammis actually we have data that
shows that they traverse pretty far south, so they actually
were in pretty warm, temperate climates. They could survive you know,
here quite easily, but then they could go up to
negative forty so they really had that versatility.

Speaker 4 (16:58):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, so you got these They're going to be sort
of introduced into a herd of Asian elephants somewhere up north.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
Yes, somewhere up north.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
How long is it going to take for these calves?
Because what I read was, and again correct me if
I'm wrong, very well for you, that the DNA is
ninety nine percent Asian elephant, yeah, and one percent the mammoth.

Speaker 4 (17:18):
So that yeah, so it's ninety nine point six percent.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
Nine nine point six Asian elephants.

Speaker 5 (17:23):
Ninety nine point six percent genetically the same as a mammoth. Uh,
they're actually this is this is kind of fun dinner
trivia feat.

Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yes, they are actually closer related.

Speaker 5 (17:33):
Mammas are closer related to Asian elephants than Asian elephants
are to African elephants. Okay, yeah, that when I learned
that kind of blew my mind. That was one instring fact.
The second in string fact I learned that blew my
mind is that when we were we as humanity, not colossal,
we're building the pyramids. Uh, they're a mamos running around
and that like sometimes people like group mammoths back into
like the dinosaurs.

Speaker 4 (17:54):
Absolutely, they're not sixty five million years.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
Right, They're not going to be the first generation of
these the calves, they're not going to be full on
wily mammos. Right, It's going to take some more generational
breeding for them to actually become full on willly mamas.
How long is that going to take?

Speaker 4 (18:08):
That?

Speaker 5 (18:08):
But that goes to purpose, right, Okay, so we think
of we're not trying to clone extinct species at colossal, right,
And so the way that the world currently defines de extinction,
like feid to Wikipedia, it says, either an animal that's
engineered to look like an extinct species.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
Which we think is kind of dumb. Yeah, yeah, like
that's just dumb.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (18:26):
The second thing is a clone is a clone of
that extinct species. But like, you're never going to be
able to clone extinct species. I try to say never
or impossible. I currently do not see a technological path
to where you can clone dead cells and get one
hundred percent accuracy, because the minute we take blood out
of you or me or anybody, it starts to degrade
environmental factors. Right, So imagine ten thousand year old DNA.

Speaker 4 (18:47):
Is pretty fragmented.

Speaker 5 (18:48):
So we view de extinction at colossal differently than how
it's currently defined.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
We define it more.

Speaker 5 (18:53):
As rebuilding extinct species for today, So we don't ever
really care if we get to ninety nine point nine
nine nine nine percent of mammoth. If we if we
successfully genetically de extinct the core genes that drove the
phenotypes or physical attributes.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Of a mammoth, so that's now cold adaptive.

Speaker 5 (19:11):
So those are things like the small ears, dom cranium,
that fat layer, the big shaggy coat that we always
think of like.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
You're describing me, no no, no.

Speaker 5 (19:19):
No no, the big shaggy the big shaggy coat that
we all think of, right yeah, like snuffy, yeah, exactly
when we think of stuff like if that is the
curve tuss, if we distinct those core phenotypes that have
been lost to time, then we think that's successful.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
If the mammoth. Now there's other things that are like
kind of under the hood type stuff where it's like
how the nerve endings work.

Speaker 5 (19:39):
So in a lot of cold adapted animals, their nerve
endings work slightly different than us, Like ours actually freeze
and they fry. They basically get fried at certain temperatures. Right,
but polar bears, caribou mammos didn't.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
Right.

Speaker 5 (19:52):
How they produce oxygen through hemoglobin is completely different than us.
Right because at negative forty our lungs crystallized yea and
we can't these red blood cells.

Speaker 4 (20:00):
So therefore we get oxygen our bodies. Right, so we
actually suffcate. So if we.

Speaker 5 (20:04):
Bring back those things, those those core genes, you know,
that does not make it one hundred percent a mammoth,
but if it meets the physical kind of look definition,
and more importantly, it meets the ecological impact definition. And
even more importantly, it is those core genes that we
have identified using you know, competitional analysis and AI and

(20:26):
brought those genes back that have been lost to time.

Speaker 4 (20:28):
That's how we define the exchange. Now other people may
define it differently.

Speaker 5 (20:32):
Now we also layer in some other stuff we want
to also enhance the animals, and we want to engineering resilience.
You know, I mentioned that herpes virus, that there's a
deadly herpes virus EEHV that we're working to eradicate. It
kills twenty percent of Asian elephants every single year, way
more than port poaching. And it's like in a Bola
level death. It's it's just fucking terrible. It's awful, but
no one's solved it yet because there's not a lot

(20:54):
of money in just curing elephant herpes, even though it's
a terrible disease. Well, if we're going to spend all
this effort in money to make these mammis, they are
genetically susceptible to this disease. So a purest perspective of
the extinction would say, well then you can't, you know,
engineer and resilience. But it's like why like why would
we not try to make these animals the healthiest and

(21:15):
the best they can for survivability, right, And so we
are engineering. We have early indications of our vaccine with
doctor Pauline at Baylor College of Medicine, and if that's successful,
then we were going to engineer that into our mammis.
And so that's why we go back to this whole
concept of the extinction should be really about you know,
rebuilding extinct species for thriving today, not just trying to

(21:37):
clone the past.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
So you're going to have these calves, yeah, yeah, male
or female.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
Probably mostly female to start.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
What's the reasoning behind that?

Speaker 5 (21:46):
Just because you in elephant herd dynamics you kind of
look at that males go off at.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
A certain age and then they recavoc Yeah, they procreate
and whatnot.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
What are they going to eat?

Speaker 4 (21:57):
That's a great question.

Speaker 5 (21:58):
So most mammis actually just a you know, like existing elephants.
They ate grasses, the Arctic grasses, they ate the mosses,
ate the shrubs in the trees up there. They knocked
down they actually knocked down trees. Elephants are weird about
loving knocking down trees. And I know, we like grew
up and they're like planet a tree, plant tree, and
people should totally plant trees. Colossal does not have a

(22:18):
position that's anti tree, clear, but.

Speaker 4 (22:23):
I actually but what's.

Speaker 5 (22:25):
Interesting is not all trees are created equal, and so
like for example, the tiger forests are these terrible carniferous trees.
They are like the worst carbon stores. They almost act
as like heat lightning rods that permeate the sun's radiation
down in the root structure and help increase the speed
at which the permafrost melts.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
Right.

Speaker 5 (22:45):
And there's actually been some really weird but amazing scientific
studies that have come out of Africa and Gobon looking
at forest elephants and how they actually love They also
love to knock down trees, but they don't knock down
the trees. They know which trees are like the most
efficient at carbon of course, and they don't they don't
knock them down.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
They only knock down kind of the shittier trees. It's amazing,
that's I mean, love to watch it.

Speaker 5 (23:08):
You should go down this like forest elephant carbon tree
knocking down rabbital It's the weirdest.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Well, guess what I'm doing later today. Then, So they're
gonna they're gonna have their own ecosystem. They'll be able
to survive on whatever is there. So you guys are
not going to also introduce new plants or anything like that.

Speaker 5 (23:23):
But there have been studies that have shown that the
reintroduction with the removal of the tyg of forests and
the reintroduction of other coal tolerant mammals that the Arctic
grasslands come back naturally, right, And we see.

Speaker 4 (23:36):
This all over the world. Right.

Speaker 5 (23:37):
So we're working also in Mauritius with Mauritian Wildlife Foundation
to bring back the bring back the dodo.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
And I'm totally butitch for the story because we're all
involved in it.

Speaker 5 (23:46):
Basically, there was this large uh like Galopicus style tortoise that.

Speaker 4 (23:52):
That they hunted to extinction, that went extinct and extinct Maurcius, right.

Speaker 5 (23:55):
But what they've done recently is they've reintroduced a similar
turtle from Say, which is a neighboring island. They reintroduced
it and then all of a sudden, like they started
seeing this weird plant that no one had seen in
like fifty years.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
Where's this plant coming from? This is amazing?

Speaker 5 (24:11):
And what they found was there something about the the
gestational track of the tortoise that allows this like it
partly germinates in the gestational attack of the tortoise based
on this other plant that it eats. So bringing back
that tortoise has created this new plant life and new

(24:31):
fauna that they hadn't seen in like fifty years.

Speaker 4 (24:34):
That they thought was extinct. That wasn't extinct.

Speaker 5 (24:36):
It just didn't have the right system for the for
the entire ecology to work together. I do think that
we will have a more robust and more divert biodiverse ecosystem.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
So this turtle, this tortoise that you were talking about,
was brought back. I didn't know that. Are there other
species that have been d have become stinct?

Speaker 4 (24:56):
So that was really the extinction that was how do you.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Even say that have become what I would say resurrected, resurrected, Okay,
I think the extinction, Yeah sounds weird.

Speaker 5 (25:07):
Okay, but probably should but I think it sounds weird.
So that that was just a process called rewilding. So
they were just rewilding that species.

Speaker 4 (25:15):
Okay, back there from another thing.

Speaker 5 (25:16):
So like something similar that's kind of more related to
the United States was Yellowstone, right, So like in nineteen
twenty five they called, you know, we as humans were
super smart, right.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
And we're like, wolves are bad because we've heard.

Speaker 5 (25:29):
That they like, you know, ate red riding hood and
they ate our you know, our cattle. By the way,
cattle isn't raised like that anymore. And so I don't
think a wolf even wants to go near cattle farm.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Because they're discussed disgusted by.

Speaker 5 (25:41):
The Yeah, and so yeah, they like, you know, they
blew the pig's house down, Like wolves are just evil, right.
We had this mentality, and so in nineteen twenty five
in Yellowstone they're like, we have to call the wolves.
So they killed all the wolves and and then seventy
years later they reintroduced like fourteen or fifteen wolves, like
not even that many wolves, and in five years the

(26:01):
park completely changed. There's more by there's more plant life,
more dynamic river flow, and more more species, not less,
because there's this mentality that like, if the wolves are here,
they're going to kill all the species, so we have
to get rid of them. But what they didn't realize
is that the absence of wolves made things like the
elk and the large herbivores and bison stopped to migrate,

(26:26):
and then they overprocreate and they overgraze. And then with
that stop of migration, they stay in like one area
and they ate like all the stuff around, you know,
the banks of rivers, So then the beavers can build
their dams. That means the rivers and the ponds didn't
exist that or they at least were much more shallow.
That means that the temperature can work for certain types
of fish and salmon. And so there's this like entire

(26:46):
it's called tropic downgrading. There's entire like ripple effect of
when you remove a keystone species. And so the world
is getting better at reintroducing and kind of undoing the sins.

Speaker 4 (26:57):
Of the past.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
So you don't think that there's any aspect of this
that is in some ways screwing with nature by bringing
this stuff back.

Speaker 4 (27:03):
I think that we have a duty to do it right.

Speaker 5 (27:05):
And so like there's evidence, you know, we killed the
thylacine in nineteen thirty six was when the.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
Last one went extinct.

Speaker 5 (27:13):
Wow, and which ironically his name was Benjamin but the
but but the United the the government of Australia actually
put a bounty on their heads and like and like
we eradicate them for right. The Dutch introduced invasive species
and killed the dodos. Right, if you look at the
rise of early man. There's been debates on the mammis,
but if you really if you look at the rise

(27:35):
of early man in in in the US and in
and in Siberia, in the decline of mammas. They're exactly imverse, right,
And they didn't have to kill them, all right, they
just had to kill enough of them to send them
down this path as we as we.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
Talked about it.

Speaker 5 (27:52):
And so I feel like we have a responsibility if
we have the technologies, Like I feel like we play
god every day when we like eradicate these vcs or
when we like cut down the forest or.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
Take medicine for ourselves.

Speaker 5 (28:05):
So like, if we have these tools and technologies, why
not you know, undo some of the sins of the
past while also building technologies that can help conservation. And
so you know, that's part our core of our mission
is that everything that we develop from a the extinction
perspective in this pipeline, we just give to the world
for free.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
That's incredible. So what's in it for you then? Just
saving the earth?

Speaker 4 (28:25):
No, I mean they're I mean different you know, strokes
for different folks.

Speaker 5 (28:28):
Right For me, you know, I think it's I built
a bunch of technology companies. I like building teams of
women and men that are much smarterer than me. So
I get I love building hard challenges. I also like
building systems because like software is mostly a system.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Is that your background mostly?

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Okay?

Speaker 5 (28:44):
Yeah, so technology mostly software. I did a little space
hardware stuff, so I don't have a biology background at all.
So I'm learning it as as as fast as I can.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
You present it quite well. I would buy it if
you just told me, like, hey, I do have a
biology background. Yeah, I believe that.

Speaker 5 (28:58):
George said that I'm one of his better students he's
never had. So I had to unpack that for a
minute because he said it really early in the morning once,
and I was like, it's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
But yeah, so so far it seems like this is
a great plan ALTA.

Speaker 5 (29:10):
It's going well and there are lots of ways to
make money from it, right, and so like the system
that we are developing, not only can it help conservation
and be helpful for the extinction, but we are spinning
out tools and technologies. We have another company that is
gestated at Colossal that we announced last week called Breaking.

Speaker 4 (29:31):
We're super stoked about this.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Is that the plastics? Yeah, okay, yes, tell me about that.

Speaker 4 (29:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (29:35):
So, so we did not discover it at Colossal, was
discovered by an incredible woman named Sukanya and our partner
of BASCAR that they actually discovered it while working at
the VS Institute, which is a part of Harvard and
working with George And what's interesting is they found this
micro x thirty two through a process called bioprospecting, and

(29:59):
they found microbe and actually a series of microbes, but
this one microbe that eats everything, every plastic that they've
thrown at it. Right, And so if you look at
like the spectrum of plastic, it goes from like, you know,
very easy to degrade, like the super recyclable stuff to
like the industrial like military complex stuff.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
That's like virtually impossible.

Speaker 5 (30:20):
And it was able to degrade things that were not
possible to degrade, that would not naturally degrade, and also
things that would take about eight hundred years in twenty
two months, and all you had to do is add
salt and water.

Speaker 4 (30:33):
And so what's really important.

Speaker 5 (30:34):
The reason why we named the company breaking is that
it's not making microplastics, it's actually breaking the chemical bonds
of the plastic and just making dirt.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
It just leaves behind carbon, actually just.

Speaker 5 (30:45):
Leaves behind dirt and some and some garden. Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
So how quickly can you guys roll out a program
to get all the crap out of the ocean, and
just so.

Speaker 5 (31:04):
In any of these processes, right, especially when you start
to leverage synthetic biology and genetic engineering and directed evolution.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
And so when we saw this, which all of that
sounds like something out of our horrific sci fi mana. Yeah,
directed evolution, yes, that.

Speaker 4 (31:17):
Is what we do.

Speaker 5 (31:17):
Yeah, but we also do that naturally, right, Like have
you seen a pug like that's directed evolution?

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Like something wrong with those little things?

Speaker 5 (31:24):
Yeah, exactly, But someone made a lot of decisions to
breed stuff like right, people are like, oh, genetically modified organisms.
You know, there was the whole anti GMO thing for
a long time, which we need GMOs to exist in
today's world with the number of people on this planet
and transport and all this other stuff and disease resistant
crop resistance. We can't have a situation where a massive
amount of crops fail and we're like, okay, well cool,

(31:45):
a third of the plant's just going to die this
year like back in the old days, right, And we
have been like breeding strains of like wheat and stuff
together for thousands of years.

Speaker 4 (31:53):
So we we've just.

Speaker 5 (31:54):
Been doing genetic engineering and directed evolution pretty shittily right,
So now we have better tools, we're just barter and
more efficient about it. And so so right now everything
with breakings happening in the lab, happening in contained bio
containment systems. But it lives one hundred percent on the plastic. Right,
so in the oh it got out.

Speaker 4 (32:13):
In the wild, there's no those role issues, right because.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
So even if it escaped, it would just go be plastic.

Speaker 4 (32:18):
It wouldn't even go eat plastic.

Speaker 5 (32:19):
I mean, it's not a movable thing. It wouldn't like
go find the plastic. Right, So we have engineered in
kill switches and some other things, so it only has
a certain shelf life and whatnot?

Speaker 1 (32:29):
What is a kill switch for something like that?

Speaker 4 (32:30):
How do you kill it?

Speaker 5 (32:31):
It's a shelf life, So regardless of how successful it is,
like we engineer in sin essence.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
So when they go out into the field and they
come back with these microbes, where did they find them?

Speaker 4 (32:41):
So we aren't saying where we found X thirty two?

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Oh okay again this is so I want to.

Speaker 5 (32:47):
Say it because it's being on the bord of trustees
the Explorers Club, and also working so closely to the
words Club.

Speaker 4 (32:51):
I would love at some point we will.

Speaker 5 (32:53):
Tell the story of how X thirty two came to
be found, because it's an adventure in itself.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Okay, all of this is the very Indiana Jones esque
aspect of it that you were talking about. We found
a microbe. Don't tell anybody where it is. If you
tell them, all these other teams are going to descend
upon the area, take it, maybe mess up the research.
I think this is amazing. But all the things that
you've talked about so far are all good things. Yeah,
what are the downfalls? What is a possible negative impact

(33:21):
that bringing a wooly mammoth back could have on the planet.

Speaker 5 (33:24):
Yeah, So I think you have to look at unintended
and intended consequences, right, And the rewilding process on all
these species is one that takes as much time and
I'll tell you probably even more effort in the science.
And so we launched our Tasmanian Tiger Working Group last year,
but we've been doing it for three years. We just
announced it publicly and so we're working closely with indigenous

(33:46):
people groups, private landowners, the public at large, local governments
and so. Like the largest industry in Tasmania is logging,
and so it's stupid to think that we're going to
reintroduce an animal that's like culturally important to Tasmania without
having their opinion.

Speaker 4 (34:02):
Because they've got lots of money. You got to.

Speaker 5 (34:04):
Include, You got to be inclusive, right, So we rely heavily
on these experts. We work really closely with a group
called Rewild, which is one of the top groups out
there for rewilding species back into their environments. And so
you know, it really does take a very large consortium.
And so even though we don't have mammis or dialo
scenes or dotos, now we've started all those meetings and

(34:26):
we have quarterly meetings with these various groups. And then
there's this other outside of kind of measuring the intended
and potential unintended consequences and trying to plan for the best,
you also need to ensure that you are taking an
account kind of the importance.

Speaker 4 (34:40):
And there's a spiritual aspect.

Speaker 5 (34:41):
So like if you ask the Aboriginal people in Australia
about the Thilet Center Tasbanian tiger, they'll tell you it's
core to their creation story. It's part of who they
are as a people. And their view is it's never left.
They're like, it's spirit sell here. You know, you guys
murdered it, but like you as these settlers and Tasmania
and Australian sheep farmers, but fundamentally, it's never left and

(35:05):
it's always been part of our creation story. So we're
not going to go out there and just like open
the gates and be like have fun, mam miss and
we'll cross our fingers and maybe this will go well, right, right.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
So the natives in Tasmania, they're on board with bringing
this back in the way you guys are bringing it back.

Speaker 4 (35:22):
They actually did. It's cool.

Speaker 5 (35:23):
They did a poll in ABC did a poll and
it was like people excited about bringing back the Tasmanian
tiger and it was like twenty percent.

Speaker 4 (35:30):
I was like, that's not good.

Speaker 5 (35:31):
We've spent a lot of time, you know, because because
our job is not to persuade anyone, it's just to
educate people, like we should be when you do big bullshit,
you should be transparent about it, but you shouldn't try
to sell.

Speaker 4 (35:42):
People on it.

Speaker 5 (35:42):
So we just like have conversations like this, like this
is what we're doing, and when people tell us like, oh,
if you thought about this, like Oh, that's a good idea.
We should We're very open to that, right, We're open
to that criticism and feedback and so and so. With that,
we constantly are our tunear model. But then ABC redid a.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
Poll and it was like seventy percent a year later.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
So the question that I asked you was what are
the negatives? And the answer, a short version of the answer,
is really just we're not We don't know until we know.

Speaker 5 (36:06):
We don't know until we know, right, Okay, but I
think that there's enough modeling data and if you were
inclusive in the approach, which we are, you know you
can try to hedge.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
The best you can.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, let's get to the Jurassic Park questions. People have
to have told you, guys, don't do this, this is
a bad idea.

Speaker 5 (36:22):
Correct, Well, we've gotten we've gotten the jurass so we've
gotten We've gotten lots of Jurassic Park memes in famous
quotes and Jurassic Park.

Speaker 4 (36:30):
Right, there are.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
Seven movies about why we shouldn't do this.

Speaker 4 (36:32):
Yes, okay, we all know who it ended, right.

Speaker 5 (36:34):
I don't think the Jurassic Park was focused on conservation,
but maybe there was an underlying conservation undertone I missed,
I don't think. But also, you know, it's not possible
to de extinct A dinos where the DNA just doesn't exist, right,
So it's not possible. Amber it's massively porous. It doesn't work,
not that we've tried or anyone's tried it, but it
is not an efficient storage of DNA.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
So you're telling me Jurassic Park was bunk science.

Speaker 4 (36:59):
Yeah, I will tell you may now.

Speaker 5 (37:00):
But here's two interesting things about dress Park, right where
I don't think Dress Park gets tough credit. Number one
is it taught the world, Like there's this thing called
genetic engineering. Little mister DNA's like speech in it. I
think inspired people. Like when I was young and saw it,
I was like, maye, maybe I should be at genes.
That's cool, right, So I think.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
It really opened our eyes, as a lot of sci
fi does, to the art of the possible. So I
think it did do good stuff. Right. It's also an
entertaining movie, right.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
All of them. I love all of them. We argue
about this all the time. I thought they were all great.

Speaker 5 (37:30):
They're all great, I do. I think in the new one,
the one that's coming out, it's gonna be I think
it's gonna be great.

Speaker 4 (37:37):
Okay, so I should know over really endorse individual people,
but I do.

Speaker 5 (37:41):
I'm very very excited about the next one in the
director on it, Okay. But I will say that that
another thing that people some days to ask us is like.

Speaker 4 (37:51):
Were you inspired by a Jurassic Park.

Speaker 5 (37:53):
Here's a fun another fact in Michael Crichton's original book,
there's this DNA sequence.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
It's like one letter off from.

Speaker 5 (38:00):
George, which is like statistically basically impossible or highly highly
highly improbable. It is probably a better way to say
it is that it's like one letter off from George
Church's research that he published.

Speaker 4 (38:12):
In the seventies all day because he was one of
the top guys in the World War. Did they use
his Yeah?

Speaker 5 (38:16):
So, if anything, I like to think and George, and
I think that maybe George inspired Michael Crichton on genetic
engineering and sequencing genome. So we were not inspired by
drastic bark. But I do think that there was a
likelihood that you know, Michael Crichton probably he was very
smart and knew of George's work, and something that is
like ninety nine percent George's work showed up and in.

Speaker 4 (38:38):
The book itself.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
So is there any chance or thought of you guys
resurrecting any type of human genes that have gone extinct?

Speaker 5 (38:48):
Yeah, we get the Knanderthal question. Probably like the Jurastic Parkway.
It's probably the next kind of set of those types
of questions.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Damn, I thought it was so original.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
Yeah, no, it's all right, it's right.

Speaker 5 (38:58):
We are not working on so Colossal has made a
mandate that we are only working on de extinction and
species preservation of existing species for conservation. We're not doing
any competition analysis on humans Neanderthal. There's many people are
that's just not us now. I do believe that some
of our genetic engineering tools in a separate company would
be used to help different disease states, just like our

(39:21):
competitional analysis and AI software is now being used for
drug discovery and cancer research.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
I think this entire thing is amazing. Do you wake
up every day like I have the coolest.

Speaker 4 (39:30):
Job around On the worst day, it's still pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
How does one become part of your explorer team? So
Explorers Club?

Speaker 4 (39:36):
Yes, so the Explorers Club is here based here in
New York. It's amazing.

Speaker 5 (39:40):
They have lectures every Monday, it's awesome. So anybody can
apply it just explores dot org. And then if people
want to get follow Colossal, they just go to Colossal
dot com and all of our social and we try
to be really responsive and transparent to everything from media
to social requests.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Okay, what is your criteria let people in asking for
a front.

Speaker 4 (40:01):
Oh to work out.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Didn't work at Colossal, So get into the Explorers Club.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
Oh so on the Explorers I got.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
To start small. I mean, she has to start small.

Speaker 5 (40:08):
Yeah, that your friend, your friend. Yeah, so you should
just go to some lectures. You know, you know, you
know some people now, right, So so go to some
lectures they have. They have all these cool things that
happen at the Explorers Club here in New York. And
then there's the Global Explorers Club. Uh, the Global Explorer
Summit in the Azores in Portugal, which is in June.
So if you could pull it, you should do it

(40:29):
because it's it's the best conference I've ever been to.
And it's just this network of incredible women and men
that are doing everything from conservation to going to the
moon to going to the bottom of the ocean. So
there's been a handful of famous first like the first
people that went to the Moon carried the explorers. Like
the first people went to the bottom of marion Is
Trench carried the exports side. The first people at the
top of Everest carried the explorers. Are the first people

(40:49):
go down the Amazon. From a charting perspective, obviously indigenous
people did a wait before carried the explorers flag. And
so it's a really cool organization. You can apply online.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
I'm at the website right.

Speaker 5 (41:00):
There is a process to get in, like you have
to have some exploration stuff, but you can just go
to the Explorers Club and every single night at the bar,
basically a new expedition, uh comes up. And I like
to say that an expedition is just an adventure with
a purpose, so you can go on on one. Everyone's
always excited for new explorers and new people to join.

(41:22):
Anybody can be an explorer, anybody can be a scientist
that they want to be right and then that you
just start you know there, and then you know, eventually
have some credentials and apply.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
This is so cool, all right, last couple of questions about.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
The manager, Yeah, whatever you want.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
How do we know they're not going to have some
type of conflict with the polar bears and stuff that
they're there is that gonna is that it has to
be possible.

Speaker 4 (41:43):
Weird.

Speaker 5 (41:44):
These are the weird things that happened in my life
now is like I spent we had to hire a
caribou migratory pattern expert and so there's actually.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
You can pressed that that's a job this.

Speaker 5 (41:56):
I don't know what it pays, but I don't remember
the consultant being expensive. And we actually had to go
not just talk to the indigenous people groups, but we
had to go look at like and understand what are
migratory patterns of caribou and would any of the potential
mammoth re wilding hubs affect the caribou r I don't
have an answer yet on on on polar bears. That's

(42:17):
another species that just needs a lot of it.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Absolutely with the loss of ice.

Speaker 5 (42:21):
Best Shapiro, It's actually done a lot of work in
polar bear genetics and the cross breeding with brown bears.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
So if people want to help you out, they want
to get on board with this cause, how do they
do that?

Speaker 5 (42:29):
They just go to our socials, they go to our website.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
You know, we try to constantly put out content we
try to be as well.

Speaker 5 (42:37):
We found though, and so we just put out so
much content just never enough, like people just want more
and more, so we're trying to do more and more.
We just announced our partnership with James Reid. I don't
know if you saw My Octopus Teacher.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
I sure did.

Speaker 4 (42:49):
Do you eat octopus after that?

Speaker 1 (42:50):
And I don't see. Oh my god, I feel like
such an idiot. Yes, because exactly that is exactly what
happened Octopus Delicious. Watch My Octopus Teacher. Haven't had it once.

Speaker 4 (43:00):
Since the same same I like to do it.

Speaker 5 (43:02):
I've actually walked out of dinners where people have ordered
octopus after I told them.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
Not to tell me that. Their argument is it's already
dood Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
That's someone's gonna eat it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (43:10):
And I was actually at a restaurant, like a top
mission restaurant in Mexico and with a guy and he
was so pissed and I was like, I'll have the carrot.
And he's like, I'm not going to eat a five
star restaurant, a mission star restaurant a carrot.

Speaker 4 (43:25):
I was like, cool, then I'll buy myself right.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
So I'm very religious about this now.

Speaker 5 (43:30):
But but anyway, we digressed James Reed, who did my
Octice Teacher and One Oscar for it and critically claimed
Chimp Empire. We've signed a partnership with him to do
our docuseries. So we always talk about transparency, and I
will tell you there's nothing more transparent than having cameras
on you twenty four to seven. It's like when I
was going to the E Sports Club this week, there
were cameras in the car and it's it's it's it's

(43:52):
intense and weird, but then everything's captured, right, And so
we really wanted someone that could be independent, cared about
capturing the content from the journey perspective, but also would
be completely objective in it. And James is that guy
in his team. Hopefully, you know, in the spirit of
transparency and also the spirit of content. You know, hopefully

(44:13):
that'll show up on a major streaming network in the
future and get more behind the scenescause we can't let
everyone come to the lab. We can't let everyone go
to the Yukon with us.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
We can't let everyone, do you let anyone go to
the lab?

Speaker 4 (44:23):
We do let some of our investors we've let come
to the.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Lab only investors, not podcasters or people on the.

Speaker 5 (44:29):
Radio, so I'm sure there's exceptions can always be made.
We've had some media come in, so yes, if you
want to come to our Dallas lab.

Speaker 4 (44:35):
I'm sure we caul figure it out.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
I won't touch anything.

Speaker 5 (44:37):
I'm gonna tell you it is so much cooler talking
to them and seeing the amazing work that those women
and men are doing is so much better than talking
to me.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
So if you do come to Dallas, I'm sure we
could figure something.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
This has been awesome talking to you, So if it's
better talking to them.

Speaker 4 (44:51):
It's a thousand times.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
But are so cool.

Speaker 4 (44:53):
I'm not making MAMO, so I'm just kind of helping people.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yeah, how did you get involved with it?

Speaker 4 (44:57):
I called? I called called George Church because my last
company was a satellite.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Software I tried to do that. It didn't work.

Speaker 4 (45:03):
It worked for me.

Speaker 5 (45:04):
My last company was a satellite software and defense company,
and we're building reconfigure overble satellites and some other stuff.
And I wanted to build a synthetic I wanted to
build an AI based synthetic biology software because I felt
like we feel like the future of compute competitional analysis
AI and eventually quantum will basically give us, like the

(45:25):
CAD software, the core technologies to be to have like
the CAD software for biology.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
I really tried to hold on to what you were
saying here. I do not know what you just said.

Speaker 5 (45:35):
So basically, a lot a lot of innovations that are
here and continuing to progress, and some new ones that
are coming. I think together will make us like software
will give us the We'll give us the foundational foundation.
We need to build software that we can then engineer
and do directed evolution on all of life like and
so I see that coming.

Speaker 4 (45:56):
So I called George to talk to him about where he.

Speaker 5 (45:58):
Sees synthetic He's like the father of he is the
father of synthetic biology. Yeah, so I called George to say,
you know, where would this go? That lasted like seven
minutes and then and then I said, what else you got?
He started walking through all the other crazy stuff in
his lab, like neural regeneration, and it was actually incredible,
which is also incredible in itself, right, reversing aging through

(46:19):
like these these weird cells in the blood.

Speaker 4 (46:22):
All kinds of crazy amazing. So show up.

Speaker 5 (46:26):
I was like, first, trust me, I'm first in line.
I'm building George mammoth. So I'm first and lined enough
and so uh.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
So we're in this thing. And then I said, but if.

Speaker 5 (46:36):
You had one project, you had unlimited cap if you
had one thing and you couldn't do these hundred things,
what would you do? And he's like, I would bring
back the wooly mammoth and build technologies for the extinction
in the species reservation. I was like, and then the
call was over because it was like, it was like crying,
all right, I have to go to my next meeting.
I thought it was kind of a joke. And then
as I listened to podcasts, read interviews, saw him on

(46:57):
Colbert in sixteen minutes and there was this mammoth through line,
and every time we talked about the mammoth, his voice changed.
You noticed an inflection. So I called him back the
next day, and then I didn't sleep that night. I
called him back the next day, and as an entrepreneur,
I've said a thousand times, you know, oh, I want
to do this.

Speaker 4 (47:11):
Because it's gonna change the world. It's gonna have this
massive impact. Sorry, it was just such an emotional moment
for me.

Speaker 5 (47:17):
It's gonna have such a massive impact, that it could
truly change the world, and being an entrepreneur that said
that so many times, and then George just throwing this
crazy opportunity to actually do it on my plate.

Speaker 4 (47:30):
I was like, I have to go do this.

Speaker 5 (47:32):
So a week later I was in his lab and
we're like, we're gonna go build classle And here we are,
and here we.

Speaker 1 (47:38):
Are, about two years away from starting the gestational process
for me for a.

Speaker 5 (47:44):
Mammoth, but probably not two years away from the first pieces.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
You keep saying, this is such a tea you can't
do this. So this is like the number one rule
of radio is you have to deliver on the teas.
Now I know that you didn't know that some of them.
Let's go, but the teas thing, I can't wait. I'm
gonna be so tuned in. It's Do I find it
on Instagram Explorers Club or.

Speaker 5 (48:04):
On Instagram? Uh, it's it is colossal. On Twitter it
is colossal, and then and then our.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Webs is Colossal dot com.

Speaker 5 (48:13):
Okay, you can also follow the Explorers Club, which is
a lot of stuff outside of what we do.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Thank you so much for coming in and spending so
much time with me and answering my million questions.

Speaker 4 (48:21):
Yeah, this is great.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
I feel smarter now. I'm gonna have to look up
a lot of the stuff that you said, because again
I was trying to hold on. But I think this
is great. Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (48:28):
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Okay, Diamond, So after that, how do you feel?

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Oh, I'm into it, Like I'm I'm shocked that I'm
so into it, but.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
I'm shocked that you're so into it.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
I love this Colossal just got to follow from me.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Same. Yeah, and I'm going to join their Explorers club.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Can go with you?

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Yeah, it seems like we have to be like a
friend of the Explorers Club, like I haven't. I haven't
really done any exploration. But it's not too late. Our
next off the grid trip we could go dig some
stuff up.

Speaker 4 (49:04):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Well, once you get in, then bring me and I'm
gonna get in done.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
I love that you liked it though, and now you're
following them.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, I'm into it, Diamond, that's like a whole new you.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
I'm into that.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
It's giving growth.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
It is giving growth. I like it, and I like
that they're doing all kinds of stuff, not just the
wooly mammoth. I get it. The woly mammoth is the sexiest.
What they're gonna do if, if it is to work
out the way he says it, I'm excited to see
what they what this actually works out to be. What
do you think is a tease? He keeps teasing. There's
gonna be something else before the wooly Mammoth. What do
we think that's gonna be? Actually, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
I didn't think that deep. I was just so shocked
that something is happening. What if they bring back a person,
a human being well or caveman.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
No, we don't need them back. We already have them
in the studio.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Scary.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
Hello, they're everywhere.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
You just gotta look for this whole episode, just like.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Just like this, PLU, I got lit up on fire.
Oh but you have someone I know you want to
put in the burn book, and I am wholeheartedly on
board with this. Go ahead. Who are you burning today?

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Oh, Kathy Hulkel.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
If you don't know who Kathy Hlkel is, she is
the governor of New York City, the first by default
by default, yes, absolutely, we won't get into that one.
But she is the first female governor of New York
and I just want to know why she thinks that
from her home in Albany or office in Albany as well,

(50:35):
that she can run what we're doing here in the
great New York City. I'm confused, but you know what,
she's going to be holding hands burning with Eric Adams.
I'm throwing his ass in there too, the mayor of
New York City, who honestly is just a party boy.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
This is Democrat on Democrat crime.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yes, absolutely, and I'm standing by it.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
I'm Kathy Hukel.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
I don't understand why, as someone who was born in
New York City, I have to pay fifteen dollars every
day to come into the city from Brooklyn to work.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
So what Diamond is talking about we talked about on
the show a couple of times. It's called congestion pricing,
and they're about to enact it here, and if they do,
that is going to cost people. I believe it was
between three and seven thousand dollars a year, depending on
where you're coming from. So if you come from Brooklyn,
where Diamond lives, Jersey City, where I live, if you

(51:28):
are going through a bridge or a tunnel anywhere below sixtieth,
which is everywhere.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Yeah, nobody goes to the East Side. I would say, literally,
it's the housewives up there and they can't afford.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
People and they don't have to pay it. But they're
about to tax everybody who comes into the city from
outside the city and again outside the city Queens Brooklyn, Jersey,
the people who keep the city running. Our entire show,
You're about to get taxed fifteen dollars every day to come.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
To work, on top of what you're already paying for
the bridges and tunnels.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
Which are expensive as booked and parking.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yep, I just I don't understand how, Eric Adams, this
is why you're getting burned too.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
You're letting this woman ruin the city. I'm sorry, I.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Just need to know what the endgame here is. I
know that they're saying they're trying to make up like
lost money from COVID and do all this stuff. They're
coming after the wrong people, wrong people to do that.
You're coming after people who cannot afford to spend three
to seven thousand dollars more a year that they're not making.
And I'd like to burn our company for a second.
They're not helping us out with at all.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
Then you think about the people who live in this area.
They don't have to pay anything, no, because they're already here.
And these are the people who, according to Eric Adams,
can afford these things.

Speaker 4 (52:46):
What.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
I'm sorry, it's crazy. I'm about to lose it now.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
But I don't understand and I don't think that Number one,
it's right, even though we live in a world where
nobody cares if things are right or wrong. They're trying
to force people to get on the trains. Well, maybe
I would get on the train if it was safer,
if you weren't gonna murder me, and if you weren't
putting the National Guard in only the popular areas. Kathy

(53:10):
hulkl you know you know, Yeah, she's burning and gasoline draws.
If you ask me, I'm sick of her. Ask Oh yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Diamon is not happy with Governor Hochel, Mayor Adams. I
heart that was me.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
That's that she said, not me, You scared, You're scared. No,
I gotta stand ten tones on this one.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
It's okay, that's okay, I'll take I'll take I heeart.
It's funny because our company they actually like if if
they're cool with you, and you're cool with them. You
say whatever you want, they don't care.

Speaker 4 (53:40):
Oh well you do.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
So we're about to find out how cool I am?
What I right now? Ah? All right? I feel like
maybe we just skipped the ask me anything today because
I know that we were with Ben for a long time.
This has gone on for a minute.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
We'll be back.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
Hit us up right now, like follow, subscribe. We appreciate it.
By the way, some motherfucker left review because I went
and read it and it said worst podcast ever one star.
No explanation was.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
That you no, but whoever it is, if you want
to let me know who you are, I'll give you
my congestion text of pricing for the day.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
I'll send you fifteen bucks just so that I know
who did it is. That's hilarious, Literally.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Just the worst podcast ever one star. I was like, wait,
you can't tell me why? Okay, on purpose, please reach
out to me. How can they reach out to you?

Speaker 2 (54:26):
Diamond at Diamond Sincere on Instagram.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yeah, great, love it at Baby Hot Sauce on Instagram.
And we will be back next week with uh something
kind of cool. If you're into teeth, I know that
sounds weird, but we got a lot to talk about,
all right, Say bye, bye bye,