Ep. 711: So Are Dire Wolves Back From The Dead Or Not?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
for ELK. 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. All right, everybody hot, damn.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
It's first episode is doctor Renela.

Speaker 4 (00:45):
Oh you stole the okay, Phil, cue up the music.
I was you weren't supposed to introduce yourself that way.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
It was gonna be a surprise.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
My daughter teases my ears. With that hat on? Do
you know what you can tell by the hat? What
you got going on?

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah? Like lesser people with the square hat, they don't.
They're not they don't have that hat. Notice that you've
got an octagon going You get a different You get a.

Speaker 4 (01:18):
Taking photos of Steve with his diploma.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Hey man, you guys, just is there a tier above
that of other hands?

Speaker 5 (01:27):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I think that's the top half.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Okay, it's like Pope after that.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
I don't know that they make a better.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Hat than that.

Speaker 5 (01:36):
Where'd you put that diploma?

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Well, that's just the you know, a little inside.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Baseball here, it's just a mod that's a prop.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
My actual diploma, my actual diploma is a big framed thing.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
And you can imagine that.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
It'll be right over your head probably right here is
the time of my life. Down there is the tassel.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Go on a certain side.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
It's pinned. Oh, it's pinned in place. M a couple
of things. You guys think it's all like. You guys
think it's all grave. You haven't that happen to you. Well,
I'll tell you something, something you might not realize. So
you go up.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
You go up.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's in the it's in the arena, you know, like
one hundreds, like six hundred and fifty students, all their parents.
You march up and the seat they give you is
right by the right in the line of action.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
And it's televised.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
So you stand up and you get what they call hooded,
which you can't really see in that picture because it's
all going on behind your hood's all going on behind you.
They give you that. You give up, and you give
your speech, and I gave a speech called There's No
Plan B. Then you sit down and then they have

(03:00):
to hand six hundred and fifty diplomas. But you're on
the camera is aimed in such a way that you're there.

Speaker 5 (03:09):
Not doing anything.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
They've warned you, don't fiddle around, don't look at your phone.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
I fell asleep during my graduation. There's a picture of
me sleeping.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
I was wide away because you had to sit there
for all those people.

Speaker 6 (03:26):
How long did that take?

Speaker 5 (03:27):
A couple hours?

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
They split the schools.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Which one were you?

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I was in the morning.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Sce Is that one more prime time?

Speaker 1 (03:38):
I don't think that anybody looks at it that way.
They split the schools. So my honorary doctor was from
the School of Forestry and Conservation. So that school all
the foresters were coming up. Which is like a stressful
time to be coming out of a forestry program right now,
because that was like, you know, so many of those
kids that come out of that forestry program, I'm going

(04:00):
to land management agencies. It's stressful.

Speaker 6 (04:04):
A doctorate in an area outside of your your area
of expertise.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah, well, like technically, like I think the forestry part,
but the School of Forestry and Conservation covers a lot
of areas that are of relevance. The fact I went
and had I went and did like a Q and
A with the forestry students who have a lot of
considerations around conservation funding and other issues. So I don't

(04:34):
think they mean that I'm like as good as Seth
as telling what trees are what right.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Jean Seth was in forestry school.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
There's a test where you have to identify a hundred
and some trees by the bud, not the leaf a stick.

Speaker 5 (04:51):
Bet you Doug Dern could do that.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, he's pretty good. So they were doing a podcast
on something hardly anyone know about except for people who
listen to this show. This is old subject for people
who listen to the show, but other than that, everybody
found out about them from Game of Thrones.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Dire Wolves.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
This is our current estimate. Is this to be our
second and a half episode on this subject.

Speaker 4 (05:19):
Yeah, because we had a first one.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
We had a first one which was episode four six six,
which was called dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, which
was with Doctor Angela Perry.

Speaker 4 (05:31):
That was number one, and then our half one half one,
touching on it with today's guest.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
With today's guest Matt James from Colossal Bioscience, as we
touched on dire wolves, so there's one point five. At
the conclusion of today's episode, the count will be up
to two point five. If you if you did learn
about that there was such a thing once upon a
time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which

(05:58):
was a misleading portrayal, then you might have caught headlines
such as everywhere, a headline everywhere on the planet that you
could possibly have a headline. Scientists say they have resurrected
the dire wolf, the return of the dire Wolf, the
dire Wolf is back, Scientists revived the dire wolf or

(06:19):
something else. Massive amounts of coverage everywhere about Colossal Bioscience's
dire Wolf project. So today we're going to dig into
all kinds of questions around that, including the big one,
why why would you do that? What exactly are they
and uh is it in fact? Like how do you

(06:42):
make it relevant to conservation? But first the news here's
my news item. We already covered my my heightened level
of everything, which is my ascendency.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
Certainly a framing coming home from my ascendency.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
We drive all the way home and I'm pulling into
my you know, like not my driveway, but our circle
where our house is off, and I see a crow
like we pull in and up ahead of me, I
see a crow like regurgitate what I take to be
a synthetic item, baby blue like a baby. And I'm like,

(07:31):
and I already tell my kids, like, what is that
thing doing? And all of a sudden, he's he like
deposits out of his mouth two robin eggs he carried
at the same time, mm just standing in the road,
and he like spits two robin eggs out. He starts
pecking at one and pulls out a little robin undeveloped robin.

(08:00):
At this point, my younger boy and my daughter out
of the truck, heading toward the crow, which leaves its
whole project in the road and flies off. My older
boy is now heading to he's like making plans to
kill the crow in retaliation. But my daughter gets there

(08:20):
and she comes back to the truck and in her
hand is a little writhing, featherless pink robin, and on
the other hand is an egg with a little crack.

Speaker 4 (08:36):
I know where this is going.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Well, I make my older boy dispatch the I make
him kill the one that isn't going to survive. He
use his boots, but his fingers. Then my daughter goes
around everywhere trying to find a robin ness to put
the egg in.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
And I'm telling you it what works. It's cracked.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
And then she's getting upset and more upset and can't
find a nest. I said, but I want to return
to what I telling you. It'll never live. It's cracked,
so now is living in it's buried, no garden. I
thought it was gonna's nutrients will return.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
I thought this was like, you're gonna put it under
like a pen picture.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
She was, she was, She's like, I know, it's expensive,
we need to get in. I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked.
Like there's nothing you're gonna do. You're gonna put it
so it's returning to the earth. In fact, it's gonna
turn into raspberries. No, it's it's actually where it's positioned,

(09:39):
it will be an acorn squash.

Speaker 5 (09:43):
We've got.

Speaker 6 (09:43):
You've got to rob a nest up under our portrait
now and I'm just waiting. You know how those babies
they can't. They'll come out of the nest, but they
can't really fly real well, when that happens, the dog's
going to eat them.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
This is just gonna happen.

Speaker 5 (09:58):
Well yeah, I mean, what am I gonna do?

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Mo the whole nest? No? I would be smart. You
know what was one of the more interesting things we've
had on the show over the years is, you know
the myth that if you like go near the egg
as abandoned or something. You remember when we had you know,
the whole thing if you touch a fawn, remember we
had Randall Kaufman and Matt from Keith or montef He's like, well,

(10:26):
that's true. None of our colloring projects would ever work out.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Where we like.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Net them, handle them and then they stand up and
go back with their mom.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
You know, uh, probably I was raised to believe it's.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
A good assumption to operate under.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
That's what I was telling my daughter to She says, well,
she won't take care of it anyway, And I'm like,
that's a myth.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
But they tell you that so you.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Don't mess with stuff, but it's not true. It's just
the manipulating you into not they're manipulating you into not
messing with things you shouldn't mess with. Two book thing
News is one forever for those of you awaiting it.
Our guide to wilderness skills and survivals out in Japanese.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
How many other languages don't know?

Speaker 1 (11:13):
I'm not sure of any of the life.

Speaker 5 (11:14):
I don't think any other.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
So they usually buy. When they buy, it'll get it'll
go to like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. This is
the only translation I'm aware of.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
But you, being you know, a.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Little adjacent to.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
You know, here we go significantly Chinese, perhaps you can
help me with something.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
Yep, there are there are some kanji. Uh, there's there's Yes,
there are some script characters that are similar. But I
long long forgot how.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
In China do they read books backwards or forwards?

Speaker 4 (11:48):
So traditionally it's compared to us backwards, and it's not backwards, right,
it's not backwards to them, and let's be friends.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
I'm looking at this from American right to left.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
If I'm not mistaken, right, I think that's what it
is traditionally.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Okay, that's interesting. You already kind of answered my question.
Traditionally because I have a Japanese fish Cleaning Book, which
is my favorite book of all the books I've ever owned.
It's like process descriptions on how to clean all kinds
of fish. But if you read it the right way,
the American way, the fish get put back together. So
you're like, this is a book about resurrecting fish. But

(12:28):
you're supposed to go back to what would be for us,
back to front. So when I picked this up, I
expected it to be that they would have reversed.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
It, but they because it's more modern now.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
So you might if you lived in Japan, you might
grab a book and you might encounter a book that
has read from from our perspective, back to front, or
you might pick up a book that's read front to
back and it would just be like whatever, You're adaptable
either way.

Speaker 4 (12:59):
I think I think more. I think books that are
printed uh these days are just done in the I
don't know if I mean Western orientation.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Me and doctor Randall were trying to find the translator online.
We found her LinkedIn. I couldn't read it being in Japanese,
just in Japanese. I just wanted to get her impressions.
I wanted to get her impressions.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
I thought that was a bootleg copy.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
I saw it.

Speaker 6 (13:29):
It's interesting how they put a dust jacket on a paperback.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
I thought that too. I also thought this version was
prettier than that's a gorgeous cover.

Speaker 4 (13:37):
Yeah what what didn't the American one?

Speaker 7 (13:39):
Americans aren't that.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
Americans aren't that discrete.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
As well, like the the Japanese have this wonderful art
at packaging things up. So if you if you go
there and you buy I don't know, cookies, there's a
problem because there's a ton of waste, but individual cookies
have their own wrapping and then these wrapped individual cookies

(14:04):
are in a wrap box maybe with wrapping paper around it,
as you know, presentation as a reflection of respect and
of mil and so.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
It's not ell that. It's like it's three times the
pack international business.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Yeah, three that's right, that's right. I mean they have
a huge, like plastic waste problem in Japan, but I'm
not surprised that there is a cover on a soft bound.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
Book another paper But oh, you know, I had a
joke I liked a lot and when I put that
Japanese book on Instagram, and I said, if this book
would have come out in nineteen forty we'd still be
fighting in the Pacific.

Speaker 4 (14:45):
That was pretty funny, get it, That's pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
This catch our Kids book, Catch Crayfish, Count Stars is
out in paperback.

Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
So I was saying, if you had a kid that
you don't like enough for a hardcover, or who's out
well behaved enough to deserve a hardcover.

Speaker 5 (15:03):
Or if you have a kid that trashed the hardcover.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Now there's every kid in America should deserve a soft
cover too.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Let there's no kids that are that bad.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Number one New York Times bestseller. This book, Catch Crayfish,
Count Stars fun projects, skills and adventures for outdoor kids.
So if you want to raise outdoor competent children who understand,
as Doug durn puts it, life and death on the
farm or life and death on the asphalt with bird eggs,

(15:34):
this is this is a phenomenal book to get your
kids involved with. It's just projects. There's things they do
and ways to engage them with discussions about ecology and
biology and everything outdoors. Yep. May the gold being if
you see a mouse and you say to your kid,
grab that, it'll grab it.

Speaker 5 (15:55):
And then ideally turn it loose.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Well, I don't mean just the fact that they'll, Yeah,
you know, that's why I let my kids tell them
grab my mouse, You're probably gonna grab. It's doing a.

Speaker 5 (16:06):
Lot of spiders.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
We have an Iraq noophobia problem.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
But I've accepted that it's true.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
It's not just I think it's a psychological like. I
think it's a legitimate psychological thing, the Iraq and noophobia. Now,
this is harrowing. In Florida, a sixty one year old
woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida.
They went over they passed over an eleven foot alligator.

(16:39):
It's it seems like it's spooked and that's the noise
of it spooking in shallow water, flipped the canoe and
then decided and then killed the woman Tiger Creek near
Lake Kassimi, south of Orlando.

Speaker 6 (16:59):
How harrowing be a rough way to go? I think
be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
Bear her husband? How hairing for her husband? Oh way
worse than getting killed by grizzly bear. There's just not
a lot of romance in now.

Speaker 6 (17:17):
No hopefully drowned first, I guess.

Speaker 5 (17:24):
Yeah. Just the question is is.

Speaker 6 (17:28):
Are more people getting killed by alligators these days and
in days past.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
Well, here's the real question. You're right, but there's a
way to arrive at that that. I like, I can't
remember who introduced this idea. Oh, I think it was
a podcast guest. Remember we had Adam Pancrats on the show,
and well, there's there's there's so like, so grizzly bears
dust off, Like, that's that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a

(17:56):
person or two every year in Montana. Right, So you'd
look be like, as grizzly bears have recovered and hit
recovery objectives, and there's like more bears at higher populations,
you'd be like, are bears more likely to kill a person?
Be like, well, let's look at what an individual's bear.
An individual bears chance of having a violent encounter with

(18:22):
a human.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
We're a run in with a human to begin with,
and you look at human populations.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, but the thing but what I'm getting at is
like a bear today, a grizzly today in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana,
a grizzy today an individual bear is not that bear
is not more likely to maul a person. No, it's
not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them. Ye,

(18:49):
So if you went point me, if you went and
looked at Florida, like you know, alligators were had endangered
species protections in the seventies. Now they got one point
five million.

Speaker 6 (19:03):
Golf course ponds and canals in people's backyards.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
So don't Yeah, it's not like gators are like individual
gators are like, man, I wouldn't have before, but now
I'm gonna bite a person. It's just like there's you know,
so it might even be that alligator, an individual alligator
still has a point oh whatever percent chance of doing it,

(19:29):
and an individual alligator is not like more likely to
attack a person, but you just have more opportunities. But
still be like, what a couple of people. I don't
know how many people get attacked every year in Florida.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Couple die.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
We've talked about a bunch that died, But I mean,
what is it like five six people per year? That's
easy in March get bit in Florida. How many people
get bit in Florida by an alligator? Divided?

Speaker 4 (19:53):
I think Spencer is checking up on that. But in March,
this same area where this woman got was killed, another
woman was killed brilliantly. Yeah in March.

Speaker 6 (20:06):
Same Did that one have something to do with a
dog rescuing a.

Speaker 5 (20:09):
Dog or something?

Speaker 6 (20:10):
Oh, yeah, there's something about a dog.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Because yeah, eighteen hundred grizzly bears and the lower forty
eight eighteen hundred grizzly bears kill a couple people a year,
so and so they're more dangerous per bear than gators.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
If you have one thousand gators.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, but the other thing is you got tons of
dinky gators that you can't really count.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
You have to start counting them out a certain size.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
I guess Since nineteen forty eight, there have been four
hundred and fifty documented alligator bites in Florida. Thirty of
them were fatal. It's a eighty years seven years span.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
I think we should finally get you on a gator
hunt for an episode.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, you know, I'd like to. I just never had
not that I don't want to. There's a lot of
stuff to do in this life.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
There's a lot of stuff to.

Speaker 1 (20:58):
Do in this life.

Speaker 4 (20:58):
The gator nuggets are really good.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, I've had friends give me sax a gator me.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
I just have never like.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Planned it, you know what I mean? This got us
thinking about this. Did you know that there used to
be it's so crazy and eleven thousand pound alligator?

Speaker 6 (21:23):
You mean used to be like ten years ago, like
ten million years.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Ago, seventy eighty million years ago.

Speaker 4 (21:31):
My colossal probably doesn't want to work on this.

Speaker 7 (21:34):
Yeah, that one's a little too old. It's old.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Six to eight foot long, teeth.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
Six to eight inch long?

Speaker 1 (21:44):
What am I saying that would be? But do you
maybe mean inches? Yeah? Yeah, that's right, six to eight
inch teeth. There's a picture of one eating. There's like
a like a fanciful.

Speaker 4 (22:01):
Painting of an artist rendering.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Oh yeah, but it's like it's not an actual photo.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
R a t rex, which I love.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
But you can't rule out an eleven thousand pounder.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Uh. They found the bones from one in North Carolina
in eighteen fifty how long, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (22:24):
I mean, that's an alligator the size of an orca
gown with.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Your kid, and they nudging up to the edge of
the pond.

Speaker 5 (22:35):
And the head would be the size of this table.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
You'd seen him from so far away.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
That's the thing I think about with dinosaurs is like,
what's that big ass dinosaur, the big plant eater. If
you're driving down the road, you'd be like, hey, look,
five miles away, there's one.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (23:01):
It'd be so obvious. Uh quick? How many other news
items we get?

Speaker 7 (23:12):
It's even bigger than an orca.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
This is an interesting deal because we had a wildlife
We had a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service agent
on the show not long ago talking about the smuggling
of wildlife parts, and there's this is reported that there
has been a post COVID decline in the smuggling of

(23:35):
panglin scales and elephant ivory, related to a Chinese encyclopedia
of medicine having said perhaps there is no health benefit
to panglin scales, I love it and ivory.

Speaker 5 (23:59):
How was the eye every tied to medicine?

Speaker 1 (24:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
And I feel like the black market is always operated
outside of what traditional medicine would say is useful for
curing or doing something. So I can't believe that, like
they're attributing this to an official journal saying, hey, penguins
don't help your libido or whatever.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
In twenty nineteen, smugglers crime syndicates were shipping vast quantities
of the two products from Africa into China. Says trafficking
fell during the pandemic has remained low. Law enforcement efforts

(24:45):
have helped. Falling prices have helped, and it goes on
to say another possible factor is that in twenty twenty,
Panglin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine.

Speaker 6 (24:59):
We found out why.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Ivory quote ivory can purge the body of toxins and
enhance the complexion.

Speaker 6 (25:07):
Sure, now do you just like rub a piece of
ivory on your face?

Speaker 4 (25:12):
I think you grind didn't eat it? You know, obviously
not backed by science, but that's the.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
My wife was getting off her toxins out last week,
she did a cleanse, and I was like, what toxins specifically,
the same way anybody answers it. They don't know what?
Tell me what toxins are coming out of you?

Speaker 4 (25:38):
Pepass which we can't get out of us.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
I had a social media hissy fit.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
When and when uh, the Trump administration canceled some federal
spending on the lamp ray problem in the Great Lakes,
which I thought was a huge mistake and perhaps quite
expensive in the long run, and better news they're following
through now with trying to keep big head carp, silver carp,

(26:06):
the asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes, And
in fact, which surprised me, is they've now working with
Michigan's Governor Jennifer Whitner. Whitmer, the administration is fast tracking
a barrier system to keep carp going through the Chicago
Canal and into the Great Lakes. There's often there's also

(26:29):
been a big argument among ecologists and fisheries people is
would those carp even like the Great Lakes anyways?

Speaker 2 (26:37):
Do?

Speaker 5 (26:37):
I mean?

Speaker 6 (26:39):
The current thinking the only way to figure that out
is let them get in there, right, Like what you don't?
I mean, that could be devastating to the Great Lakes.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
The current thinking is they would. Because some people said that,
well they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is
that they would like it and that it would be devastating.

Speaker 7 (26:57):
Yeah. Well, the problem with carpe is they seem to
like almost everybody at water they've ever been in.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
I liked everything. Yeah, all right, we're gonna do a
little background on dire wolves here.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
You mentioned Game of Thrones twice earlier. Have you seen
Game of Throne.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Never I'm aware of it, have you?

Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (27:19):
But I wanted your review on it.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
Never watched it, Okay, I watched serial drama like it.
I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like.

Speaker 4 (27:26):
Did you watch Narcos?

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (27:28):
Wait, Narcos?

Speaker 1 (27:30):
And then what's that?

Speaker 4 (27:31):
There wasn't there a Danish serial dramas.

Speaker 5 (27:37):
Fantasy stuff other than Star Wars.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
A little bit of Star the Star Wars guy, a
little bit of Star Wars guy. I don't watch serial
dramas because I don't with the exception of what did
you just name that?

Speaker 4 (27:49):
I did watch Danish drama and.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
There's no date yet, okay, d Narcos, Yes, that's it.

Speaker 4 (27:59):
Oh there's another one, push your one, Pushura or something.
An Italian an Italian series. I did watch that, Tina.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
No Gomora well, because Gomora was a book, was a
nonfiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came
a film called Gomorra, which was a devastating film about
the Italian mafia. And then out of that so I
watched because I was liking Gomore of the book, Gamore

(28:30):
of the movie. I watched some of the Gomora the series.
What I not that it matters. What I don't like
about serial dramas is after a while, I want to
get out with my life.

Speaker 4 (28:40):
Did you watch Breaking Bad?

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Can you?

Speaker 2 (28:42):
I've got the top five here. See if you've seen
any TV dramas of all time from the University of
Pennsylvania and the Sopranos. No The Wire, no Breaking Bad,
Mad Men, no Game of Thrones. Okay five, I trust
you now.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
I'm not hacking on it.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
I just can't sure.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
I need to move on, like I can't give you
know me movies.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
I could have watched in that amount of time and
then I could start.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Here's the other problem I have, and I don't want
to take up too much of our time. Here I
can start to smell the writers keeping it going. The
minute I get a whiff of them keeping it going,
getting extra season or two of yeah it is, Oh brother,
you know you can just smell them keeping it jump
the shark. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:23):
Well.

Speaker 7 (29:23):
The good news about Game of Thrones is it wasn't
that they were struggling to keep it going as they
were struggling to condense it into what they did. Oh,
because the books are just so the books kept it
going for them.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh, interesting thing here just about wolves in general. So
the two dire wolves were going to discuss today are
Romulus were named Romulus and Remus, which are fitting for
wolf names because Romulus killed his brother.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Was that part of your thinking, Well, we were.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Hoping nobody wolves are hipped to frat.

Speaker 7 (29:54):
Sorry, yeah, exactly, it was fitting and plus the you
know race by a she wolf and h.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
There's a statue in in sus Saint Marie Michigan of
Romulus and Remus suckling from the mother's the wolves teats.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
Ye, do you feel like rolling pictures for the video audiences.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
There on the little.

Speaker 4 (30:14):
You want to start with the then adults? I mean
they're now what Matt, you said, seven.

Speaker 7 (30:18):
And a half at seven point five months old, and
they're tipping the scales nearly your past.

Speaker 4 (30:24):
Their little white fluffy pops.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Cute. Uh let me let me kick off a little bit.
Despite characters like that Game of Thrones are supposed to
be up north, right, it is a fictional Uh yeah,
it's like show in Canada.

Speaker 5 (30:46):
It's a whole world. So there's like up north stuff and.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Down the family associated with dire Wolves. They're in the north.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yes, despite because in my thing I have here. I
wrote this like, despite characteristics otherwise, dire wolves were Southern animals.
They ranged throughout the lower forty eight. They liked the
south and the hot so much that four thousand died
in La Have I told my story eighteen times about
my first date with my wife twenty Okay, yeah, at

(31:14):
least there were dire wolves in Mexico. There were dire
wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of
a dire wolf showing up in extreme southern Canada. A
way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps.
If you look where turkeys are, that's where dire wolves were.

(31:37):
Little teeny bit in Toronto, like a little teeny bit
in Ontario.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
The National Park Service says they were found as far
north as Alaska.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
That's not true.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
I'm just telling you what the National Park Service says.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
We've debated that and we haven't even talked about it
with our multiple people.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
But the one guy who debated it said that they
weren't found at the Lebrea tar pits.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Who said that Angela Perry.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
No, he was an older fella, got it got mildly
uncomfortable because I was like, no, I've I've seen him there.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
We talked about that with the old person.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, we didn't, and we did. I could probably find it's.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Not talking about the guy that fishes muskies all the time.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
When we can come back to this.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
I think you're I think you're talking about a dream sequence.

Speaker 7 (32:28):
They're definitely in lebre A lot of them, A lot
of them.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
I have to tell my story about my first date and.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
My wife all over.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
I know, I know.

Speaker 4 (32:37):
Oh, do you mean seem to have like Jack Carr? No,
I'm not, Jack said not. Sorry, we can visit this.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
I will find it.

Speaker 5 (32:46):
We know there'ner.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
No Jack Corner. He was on the show Big Dinosaur Guy.
Spencer was talking about.

Speaker 4 (32:55):
John Corner is composed.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
They seem to have like water Florida and Texas has
a dire wolf. I don't believe we have good archaeological
sites showing humans and dire wolves together. How do you
feel about that statement, Matt.

Speaker 7 (33:10):
I think that's directionally accurate.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray
wolf skull and you take fifteen measurements on it, this
is a good little tidbit. Four of those measurements are different.
I'd like to know what a black bear and a
grizzly bear. How many measurements are different on their skulls.
So if you take like somehow like you're doing like
skull morphology, they have four differences wider, wider, and burlier

(33:41):
than a gray wolf. Colossal says that ninety nine point
five percent similarity between a gray wolf and a dire wolf,
which always sounds like a lot until you think about
some other things. They say, we have sixty percent. We
humans have sixty percent genetic similarity with a carrot.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
In this world.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
What I'm pointing out is in this world little do
you know what I mean? Like in this world, little
things get different. I mean, like the differences of when
you start talking about these like numbers, what you're arguing
about is what comes after the last decimal point.

Speaker 7 (34:24):
And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome. Okay, right,
So when you say ninety nine point five percent, you're
still looking at point five percent of three billion base pairs.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Yeah, a lot, but I mean like hearing it in
the percentage thing that gives you like a different idea.

Speaker 7 (34:36):
And the percentage thing can be is one way to
explain it is a hard way to conceptualize it, because
at the same time, you could say African elephant and
an Asian elephant are early ninety eight percent similar.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Oh well, because I was just going to point out
that according and people debate these counts humans and chimpanzees
ninety eight point eight percent similar m.

Speaker 7 (35:03):
And I think an important part of to remember when
we talk about percentages of genome is what part of
the genome is coding for very specific traits that end
up expressing as differences between us and a chimpanzee size, strength,
you know, musculature, hair, some pretty significant differences, so that

(35:24):
that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to
make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't
code for anything. It's just sort of, you know, it's
what we call non coding regions that we don't fully understand.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
That's the part that's the part.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Of this that puzzles me that I don't get, And
that's probably why you can't look up how much genetic
similarity do we have with carrots, which I was doing
because it's like a lot of people areaying that's not
really a good way of looking at it.

Speaker 7 (35:48):
I've seen a few people that look like a carrot was.
Do you know.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
The form of former his genetics similarity might be like
sixty one percent sixty.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Okay, explain that point five percent? Like it like to you, Matt,
explain that if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf,
and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire
wolf for ninety nine point five percent similar, what is
the point five and is it accurate to go and

(36:23):
look and say, like, I'll think about this with chimpanzees,
just to set up the question a little more specifically,
because everybody knows humans because you're one, we're all one,
and we know chimps because we've been watching nature documentaries
for a long time. So if humans and chimps are
ninety eight point eight percent similar, is it fair to
say two hundred and forty genes separate us from chimps?

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Or is that a dumb way to look at it?

Speaker 7 (36:51):
I mean, we're waiting into dangerous territory. Because I'm more
a conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a
geneticis at back home, right. I work with really some
people like Beth who really explain these things really well.
But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to
say two hundred and forty genes separate us from a chimpanzee.
Yeah that said, I mean when we talk about the

(37:12):
differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, well, we're really
looking for what are the core you know types, What
are those key areas of the genome in that point
five percent that we need to target in order to
confer the difference the primary difference, which is, like you said,
you know, sort of a robustness of a size, a musculature,
a hair difference, a coat difference that we've identified. And

(37:36):
how can we then identify those within that point five
percent and pick the few most impactful changes.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
How do you decide look at.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Let's look at color? Why white?

Speaker 7 (37:53):
So if you look at the genome of the dire wolf.
And this is a really great question and one that
kind of goes back to know when you talk about
having doctor Perry on earlier. Doctor Perry was part of
a paper that came out of twenty twenty one along
with Best Shapiro or chief scientist, who sequenced the genome
of the direwolf, and they only got what we would

(38:14):
say is about a zero point two five percent cover
or point twenty five x coverage, so sort of on average,
they were able to sequence a quarter of the genome
one time, so not a lot of data. We went
back and we started and found two samples of dire
wolf specimens that we were able to sample and sequence
their DNA, one from a seventy two thousand year old

(38:36):
skull and another from a from a thirteen thousand year
old tooth. We ended up producing what we would call
thirteen x coverage, so on average we sequenced every base
pair in that genome about thirteen times, so that gives
us a really robust data set as compared to the
twenty twenty one paper. What we identified when we have
this new robust data set is that they're between these

(38:59):
two investments that one was from Idaho, one from Ohio,
one from seventy two thousand years old, and one that's
thirteen thousand years old. Both code for the same light
coat color, not necessarily stark white like what we ended
up getting, but they could have and we don't know that.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
But did you guys tweak it to make it white? No,
So it's because it's like such a wild I mean,
you have to admit, like the Game of Thrones thing
and people like the writer is involved with you guys,
like he makes them white.

Speaker 7 (39:28):
Yep, well he made one of them white.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Like for the show.

Speaker 7 (39:31):
Yeah, there's five of them that are sort of characters
in that show. Only one of them is white. The
other have very typical morph I'm sorry, wolf or coat colors.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
So but when it was born, you didn't know what
color would be, knew it?

Speaker 7 (39:45):
Okay, Yeah, we already knew because we had made that change.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
So so you had like purposefully made it white.

Speaker 7 (39:51):
Yes, Okay, So when we identified that definitely over this
sixty thousand years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution
between Ohio and Idaho, both animals coated for a very
light colored coat as compared to what we would have
seen in a gray wolf.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Like perhaps it was like kyot colored.

Speaker 7 (40:12):
Could have been. Yeah, it could have been where it
could be even lighter like this white we saw.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
We said, mountain pale if you look over your shoulder.

Speaker 7 (40:21):
Yeah, I mean that could certainly be it, or it
could be white. You know, there there are reasons for that,
that white coat that could have persisted. But since we
saw this common trait between across space and time and
these two specimens We said, well, that's certainly interesting. We
only have two sequences, so that means one hundred percent
of what we sampled, you know, had this coat color.

(40:44):
So we said, well we should code for that. The
trick there is that we also identified very close to
that gene and what we had seen if you use
the genetic background of a wolf, wolfs that have that
same mutation also often can have an issue with deafness
or blindness. So we said, well, we don't want to

(41:04):
use the exact variant from the dire wolf genome that
we sequence because it could confer a deafness or blindness issue.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Can you explain that more? I don't understand. I don't
don't have the background to understand what you mean.

Speaker 7 (41:17):
The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when
we've seen that trait in the in a gray wolf,
like did it a naturally occur? It isn't naturally occurring.
It would be closely associated with.

Speaker 6 (41:30):
So like a white gray wolf would be more likely to.

Speaker 7 (41:34):
Yeah, exactly have that those issues. So we made a decision.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
We said, well, so that's that's not something that was
found out. That's not something that people found out by
trying to insert that into.

Speaker 7 (41:46):
Now that's just from people that had studied Kana genetics
across Yeah, across that.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
I didn't understand. I was like, because I was like,
that would be a lot of experimentation to real exactly.

Speaker 7 (41:55):
So our computational team is able to sort of run
these simulations that tell us what they think the gene
will code for, what it could also be associated with.
What could be an off target effect if you made
that edit and you know it had an unintended consequence.
So we elected. You'll you'll see in our press release
or in our news we talked about we made twenty
edits across fifteen genes with fifteen specific diabolf variants. I mean,

(42:18):
there are five variants that we edited for that were
not actually dire wolf. What we did is we went
and found analogous genes in closely related species. In the
case of the white coat, it was from domestic dogs.
We chose that specifically because we wanted to confer the
coat phenotype without risking welfare of the animal. So we

(42:39):
made a decision that said the safest way in order
to do this functional the extinction project we were working
on without risking the animal's health or welfare was took
it from a dog exactly. So that's why you know,
people go is it one hundred percent? Direbolf when you go, well,
number one, this whole hundred percent thing we just talked
about percentages of relatedness. It's kind of hard, it's not

(43:01):
a very clean way to explain it. On hundred percent
is kind of a bullshit argument.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
But it's why is that not a good way looking
at it?

Speaker 7 (43:09):
Well, just the variation between two individuals like you and
I have a significant variation. We're not one hundred percent identical.
So if aliens came and abducted you and I, right,
they would not then go and clone a human and
make current right. They would say, well, all humans look
like you and I. Well, we know that we represent

(43:29):
a very small portion of the genetic variability across the globe.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
The one's got an honorary doctorate.

Speaker 7 (43:35):
That's coded in there, I'm sure.

Speaker 5 (43:36):
Yeah, so did.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
You probably have a legit one right?

Speaker 7 (43:41):
Not a doctor? No. I stopped at the master's level
and said this isn't for me. Yeah, So we we
tried to avoid this one hundred percent because that's really cloning, right,
We're not creating the identical individual we sequenced.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yeah, because I think this is the thing that people
don't understand and it's hard for me to understand, is
that there's an idea from watching like Jurassic Park or whatever,
that you're able to pluck some living thing out of
a dire wolf bone and like add it into something.

(44:19):
It's more like you're looking at trying to think of
it like a I shouldn't do an analogy, but it's
like you're you're looking at a someone's got a paint
sample and you're like, oh, I could make something that color.
I don't know how they made that that color, but
I could make something that color, right, yep. And in

(44:43):
the end I'd look and be like, wow, that is
that kind of same color, but it might have different
constituent parts exactly. Is that a good analogy?

Speaker 7 (44:49):
I think that's pretty good analogy. I might use it
later too. It's good.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah, let me refine it for a day.

Speaker 5 (44:54):
A doctor should have a more refined The way I.

Speaker 7 (44:58):
Think about it is when we seek it's ancient DNA,
which is what best specialty is. Right when we go in,
what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a
two billion piece puzzle from that specimen. The DNA has
been fragmented over time and time, and you know, things
have been introduced like bacteria that chop up DNA into
small pieces. All we get out is we're able to

(45:20):
sequence all that, and we get these two billion puzzle
pieces and we have to figure out how to put
them back together. But we don't have the reference on
the cover of the puzzle, right, so we have to
use artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms in order to help
tell us how to do that. We also have to
align it to a close living relative, so then we go, well,
we know a dire wolf was sort of like a
gray wolf, so we can start building towards a gray wolf.

(45:43):
Then there are specific parts that we go, well, we
know it wasn't totally gray wolf, so we have to
start making educated decisions. Here almost guesses as to what
puzzle piece goes where, and so that's when you won't
end up with one hundred percent accurate representation of the
animal you sequence. Because there was non viable DNA in there,
you can't clone it. And now we're trying to put

(46:03):
something back together without a clear picture of what it
should have been.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
So let me hate you with this one. Let's say
you took one of you took one of your animals
Romulus or Remus, and you uh have them forbid something
were to happen to it, and you boiled its skull
down and cleaned it up and threw it into.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
A pile of la Brea tar pits.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
Yeah, and then there's the person there sorting skulls.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
What do you think the likelihood is that they would
grab that skull and they would throw in the dire
wolf pile.

Speaker 7 (46:37):
That's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way.
I would do it in a much less uh fatalistic way.
I would. We can use uh you know, high tech
CT image in an actually three D print their skeleton,
which is one of the things we will be doing
is as a mature as they kind of come into
their full size, we're using CT imaging in order to
kind of get a clear picture of morphology from a skeleton.

Speaker 6 (46:58):
Yeah, we're gonna like you mentioned that, we know, like
there's four skull measurements that are different, Like did you
build that into these?

Speaker 7 (47:08):
Yeah? The diurbl farians we picked were specific to changes
that we knew would be associated with those few morphological
differences between the species, so you could.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
You were you looked in at like what is with
the wide skull, the strong skull, or whatever you put it.
You know, we're talking about dogs, mingol this is one
and reading all the coverage about your projects, why did
the dogs get Why did the dog that birth?

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Why was it a cesarean section?

Speaker 7 (47:33):
Well, so it's a good question. I So one of
the things we did is while we were starting this project, I,
me and my team we put together this one hundred
and sixty page document that is the Animal Care Manual
of the Direwolf. Right, so we wrote an animal care
and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with.
That's twelve thousand years extinct, super fun project. In there,
we had very specific uh protocols for how would we

(47:55):
birth this animal. Well, one of the fears was is
we don't know the fetal development rate and the size
of a newborn dire wolf. So we had one contingency
was cesarean section. The other plan was natural birth. As
we got closer, we were taking skull measurements via ultrasound
and comparing that to the pelvic opening of our surrogate.

(48:16):
Turns out would have been totally fine. We could have
passed those those pups naturally. That however, day sixty two
was sort of our cutoff. We said, if she doesn't
give birth by six day sixty two, they're gestations about
sixty to sixty three days. But using cloning technology, usually
you're a day or two ahead, right because the embryo

(48:37):
has developed in vitro before you've transferred it, So say
day sixty two might be more like day sixty four,
day sixty five. So we just had just like most humans,
sort of their doctor, if they're pregnant, will tell them, hey,
if you don't give birth by this date, we will
induce you. Well, we don't really do inductions with dogs.

(48:57):
The safest way to remove all the variables was just
a cesarean section, and it's a very common procedure dogs,
and we have you know, we had an amazing team
of surgeons that were able to do it, and you know,
I think the results speak for themselves. We remove those variables,
we give health, give birth to two healthy puppies, a
third on a second litter, and then and then all

(49:19):
the moms you know, ended up great and now they're
in their forever homes, you know, living life and.

Speaker 6 (49:24):
When you say a second litter, like did you was
there only two puppies in? Like you weren't trying to
grow six of them?

Speaker 7 (49:32):
It was like, well read, embryology is the numbers game.
If you've you know, know anybody it's gone through IVF,
you know years ago that used to put multiple embryos
into into a mom. The same idea with us is
when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know,
twenty five embryos understanding that only two to six of

(49:52):
those would take, and in our case we got two
of them. We had another female that was had was
pregnant with a second letter and that's where Callisi, our third,
our female dire wolf was born in January. She actually
had a second puppy that she was born with. That
puppy unfortunately pass away in day ten of antritis, so

(50:14):
basically a perforated gut, and she got septically ill, which
is you know, we did a lot of looking and
we were able to determine it wasn't related to any
sort of effects of editing or cloning. It was sort
of an unfortunate event of puppy development that we see,
you know, a certain level of mortality. So that's how
we got to three. We originally thought we were going
to have four.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Will the dire wolves be fertile?

Speaker 7 (50:37):
Yes, yeah, they would, They would be very fertile. We
have specific strategies we can deploy in order to ensure
that they would only breed when we intend to breed.
Right now, our interest is not in breeding at the moment,
but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive
management of you know, time in when the female is
with the pack or outside of the pack.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Can you give us some other examples of things that
are in this manual for raising a dire wolf? And
how do I get my hands on one?

Speaker 7 (51:08):
The manual or the dire the manual?

Speaker 2 (51:10):
I'm ment well both, but I'm I'm let's settle for
a manual.

Speaker 7 (51:13):
The really cool thing is we published the manuals on
our website. So if you go to the fossil dot
com fors dire Well f you'll see there is a
downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the
partuition issues. So how do you take care of a
of a whelping litter of puppies to how do we
manage them socially as they grow up. What is the

(51:35):
diet that they should be eating as they grow, What
are the expected milestones developmental milestones. These are things we're
sort of extrapolating from our worked with gray wolves and
other wild canids.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
Who nursed them. The dog didn't nurse them.

Speaker 7 (51:46):
So the dog did nurse them for the first few days,
and so Romulus and Remus there surrogate was a very
attentive mother, and she got to be so attentive that
she If you've ever had puppies with a mom, sometimes
they get to be a little nervous and they pick
them up and they just poke them too much and
starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we

(52:07):
just said, you know, it's similar to the precautionary approach
we took with cesarean section. We said, we're gonna pull
them and we're gonna hand rear them on bottles. So
on day three we ended up pulling them.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Where's that dog. Now, that'd be a valuable dog.

Speaker 7 (52:19):
It's a very valuable dog. And it was sort of.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Become a famous little like a famous little donor dog.

Speaker 7 (52:24):
Yeah, we did this We worked with the American Humane Society,
is sort of the oldest global welfare society in the world.
We worked through them to do a double blind adoption,
so they vetted a home for them.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Whoever has it doesn't know.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
They has no.

Speaker 7 (52:39):
Idea what that whoa They don't know correct, nobody knows.
I don't know where they are and the home doesn't know.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
Someday, that dog this is gonna do like a lot
of people do, where they start getting like I need
to find on my real parent. It's gonna look for
its incredible Disney movie. It's trying to find its children.
I'll be quite surprised when it finds them. You're so
big and white. What kind of dog was this?

Speaker 3 (53:08):
You probably want to.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Say, this is give it up. Yeah, it was.

Speaker 7 (53:10):
It was. It was a mutt, right, it was. It was.
It was a large hound that was mixed with a lot.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Of other rough big.

Speaker 7 (53:16):
Somewhere between forty and seventy pounds.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
Okay, you know.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
I don't know if you're in a color you recently
got a dog. It's forty to seventy pounds.

Speaker 7 (53:29):
I should have adopted the dog, like in Australia or
something where they would.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
They'll never put together. Yeah, I know, it would be
like a real it's a little science project. Huh. So
that's what happened to it.

Speaker 5 (53:40):
What do you feeding those things?

Speaker 4 (53:41):
Now?

Speaker 5 (53:41):
They're six months old?

Speaker 7 (53:43):
So they started on a very typical milk replacer formula
once we pulled them from mom, and then we started
introducing ground meats, like really slurried meats, until they eventually
startied in ground meats mostly beef and horse meat. Raw meat, yeah,
rob me. And then we also had some dry kibble
in there, you know, essential nutrients things that like that
for development. Now that you know they're almost eight months old,

(54:05):
we're they're they've transitioned from that sort of ground meat
to whole prey item. So I get a whole rabbit,
a whole chicken, they'll get a quarter of a deer,
things like that. So we're starting to get them away
from the two square meals a day to a sort
of a gorge and fast more similar to a wild

(54:25):
cadence of feeding.

Speaker 6 (54:26):
Are they in like a big outdoor enclosure?

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (54:30):
So I heard a rumor where it is. Oh you did, Yeah,
that should be good.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
Wait are you letting out private? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (54:39):
Okay, I'll tell private because it might be accurate.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
I just heard and I was like.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Really, oh that would be good.

Speaker 7 (54:45):
I want to hear that off.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
I'll tell you what what I'll tell you what I heard.

Speaker 7 (54:49):
I will tell you they are in the northern continental
United States. They live on about two thousand acres of
a wildlife preserve.

Speaker 3 (54:56):
Oh yeah that fits.

Speaker 7 (54:58):
Yeah, we might be we might have to go, you know,
snuff somebody out if they're telling our secrets. The real
reason behind the secrecy is there. Did you guys see
that we came out with this news about a month
before dire Wolf that we made a wooly mouse. Yeah,
I saw this. Kind of a silly thing, but a
lot of fun. The idea was this was like a

(55:19):
phenotype validation study. We were taking traits we knew existed
in wooly mammoths and that we're targets for us to
edit into wooly mammoth. But we wanted to say, oh,
these edits are having the intended effect, So we didn't
take the same wooly mammoth edit and edit that into
a mouse. That just wouldn't work. We found the analogous
genes in mice and conferred those changes and we made

(55:41):
these little wooly mice. The idea that it showed that
they had the same effects on coat length, coat color
at a post tissue. Things like that that would be
important to make an Asian elephant a wooly mammoth. We
came out that news and I thought, I can't believe
we're going to go public with this thing. And it
broke the Internet and people just started showing up at
our front door of our office building, not where the

(56:04):
mice are.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
One.

Speaker 7 (56:06):
They wanted one, They wanted to see one. They wanted
to talk to the people that did that. So we
quickly said, well, this was a month before launch a direwolf.
We knew we were about to launch a direwolf. We said,
there's no way we could tell anybody even what state
these animals are in, because suddenly people will be showing
up and two thousand acres is a lot to protect.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
So if they're on two thousand acres, they there's no
way you have a two thousand acre parcel that's free
of other animals.

Speaker 7 (56:32):
No, yeah, it's so.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Are they hunting whatever's on this two thousand acres.

Speaker 7 (56:36):
And they're fed so regularly it's like a zoo animal.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
But they're interacting. They're interacting with wildlife.

Speaker 7 (56:42):
I've seen them chase deer off things like that, so
they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it.
But yeah, they also don't have some adult wolf that's
showing this is how we sort of stalk a prey
and then we get on it and this is the
kill move. They don't have that yet. We could, over
time and over generations do that similar to what they

(57:03):
do with Mexican gray wolves and red wolves in terms
of preparing them for introduction to the wild.

Speaker 6 (57:07):
And ye aren't you worried that like they could pick
up like canine distemper or some disease from a wild canine.

Speaker 7 (57:14):
So we were pretty meticulous in our site selection process
and one of the things we wanted to ensure was
that it was an area that you know, gray wolves
had been extirpated from, so there wasn't a potential issue there. Obviously,
there's still coyotes in those areas, so we have to
worry about that. We have coyote pre fencing, but coyotes

(57:34):
are pretty widely they can get through some of that.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
So you got two thousand acres with no coyote on it.
There's gonna be some people to want to talk.

Speaker 7 (57:42):
Yeah, yeah, but you know they undergo a pretty typical vaccination, right,
and similar to what we would do with other animals.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
I'm looking at the care program milestone. There's a lot
of things about social interaction in here. How does that
work when you only have two of them?

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Oh? If three? Okay?

Speaker 7 (58:01):
So if three and there is an intention that will
bring new litter on. Because our goal was to get
to six to eight sort of a typical pack size. Obviously,
you know we ended up at three, so we'll look
at adding another litter to that to that group.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Hit me with it.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
We're gonna get in this earlier. Tell me the why.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
I mean I get the why, like I get the
why from a showman like that. You would build a park, right,
you'd be able to use them for movies, and that'd
be valuable. You'd build a theme park and that would
be valuable. But what is like the what is the why? Like?
Or maybe that is the why? Why?

Speaker 7 (58:38):
Yeah, you could do those things. That is not our why.
That is not what we're doing. Our why is really
built more around around this selection process that we had
about two years ago we were looking at, you know,
knowing that our big three projects Willie mammoth, Tasmani, and
tiger ditto, those are going to take us a while.
He said, well, we should start working on other projects

(58:58):
that we could also help develop some of these de
extinction pipelines, get through this process a little quicker and
be able to see and learn and help inform the
other projects. In addition to that, in twenty sixteen, the
ICN came out with a Proxy Species Rewilding Guide or
a creation guide, basically this guideline document that an independent

(59:19):
group of international experts wrote something like thirty five key
points in this guideline that talks about if you were
to pursue de extinction or the creation of a proxy
of an extinct species which is easier just called the extinction,
here is how you should do it. And one of
the most important things that it talks about there is,
you know, there's a big welfare implication which sort of

(59:41):
goes back to why we selected the specific edits we selected.
There's also this process that these things should happen sort
of in this contained, almost laboratory environment where we if
you're going to pursue this the first time you do it.
You should find a species that you know a lot about.
You should do these things in a very controlled setting
so you can study all the impacts from cradle to grave.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Oh, just to be clear, the IUCN did this independent.

Speaker 7 (01:00:07):
Of you guys in twenty sixteen, way before Colossal was
the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
This was long. Yeah, so they were operating on like
an assumption that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet.

Speaker 7 (01:00:16):
And that was when the Wooly Mammittee things and stuff
was really bubbling up, and so it started. Biotechnology was
getting to a point where they said we should come
up with some sort of advantage. Yeah, so it was
really it was great forethought. We use that as as
a bit of a guiding light in the way that
we designed this project. Because so we know a lot
about canids and canad genetics. Right, we know more about

(01:00:38):
canids than almost any other species, mostly because we all
have you know, a gray wolf in our house, right,
I mean it is dog days, right, we all have dogs.
We all love our dogs. We study a lot about them,
and we know a lot about North American canids. So
that gave us a really strong foundation in order to
be able to predict what were the effects of edits,

(01:00:58):
what genes were responsible for, what physical trait, things like that.
At the same time, there was this sort of you know,
opportunity for us to show the de extinction pipeline is
a real thing. I think when we talk about bringing
back Willie Mammos, people sort of giggle and they go,
that's never going to happen. So there was sort of
this proof of principle need that we said, well, we
could show how this would work. And finally, there was

(01:01:21):
also the pop culture bit you touched on Direwolf, right,
this idea that we could bring science into the pop culture,
blend those, bring more eyes and attention onto de extinction,
onto extinction conservation things like that. So there was this
perfect ven diagram that sort of overlapped with gray Wolf
and dire Wolf, that we could do all of those
things while creating technologies that were responsible or could help

(01:01:45):
save other endangered canids like the American red wolf, which
you know lost in our bit of a media circus
that occurred after Direwolf was this idea that we were
also working on American red wolves and there's some cool
stuff that we should talk about there. But so the
why was sort of that perfect opportunity to blend in
pop culture with a proof of principle of de extinction

(01:02:07):
and taking that first passive de extinction that this twenty
sixteen guideline sort of showed us how to do it,
and that really outlined you know, know a lot about
the animal, put them in an area where you can
study them closely, and these would not be animals that
would be a generation ready for release. We knew dire
wolves were not going back into the wild. We made
these as part of that pursuit of de extinction.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
So you do it knowing they won't go into the wild.
Because those are our questions that have is how much
do you like? How much how worried or wildlife professionals
This is a question they hadn't had to grapple with before.
How worried are wildlife professionals and conservationists that you would
create a that you would like, create a creature that

(01:02:55):
could potentially get out and then reproduce what imperiled species
in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species,
Like that's got to be a real concern. We're having
a conversation right now where guys are like in the
deer in the servid world, people are saying, oh, we
can make We have some examples of deer that are

(01:03:17):
very slow to develop CWD or they get CWD, but
they're slow to be affected by it, And they say,
what we'd like to do is cut these deer loose,
just to introduce some of this besides it being, as
it's been explained to me by many servid experts, is
kind of like doesn't make sense when you understand the

(01:03:39):
scale of the millions of deer out there and that
you're going to try to like influence gene flow by
cutting animals loose. But they also point to all these
moral issues and other like issues like what if those
things also carry a susceptibility to other diseases? What if
that infers upon them a so sort of hidden weakness. Right, So,

(01:04:02):
if you have these creatures and they get out and
they start breeding with wolves, I assume they could breed
with wolves. How nervous are people that that'll happen?

Speaker 7 (01:04:13):
I mean, that's a question we get almost every day
when when people talk about it. So, first, the first
step to protect against that is the facility itself, you know,
extremely secure double fence actually triple fence if you include
our perimeter fence. You know, we just we've had to
have really thorough conversations with government agencies to explain all

(01:04:34):
the measures that have been taken to ensure it's a
biosecure facility. So there's that piece of it. The other
side of it is is really sort of like the
CWD example is really good is you know, we need
to know more about these animals before you would ever
cut something loose, whether it's a dire wolfer, it's a
wooly mammoth, right, we need to know a lot about

(01:04:55):
these animals and what are the effects of gene editing,
what are the effects of cloning, what are the effects
of the specific edits we chose, which is exactly why
we chose dire wolf because we knew it'd stay in
this area and we can do that cradle to grave
sort of research with them. So this is a great
opportunity for just to show what are those impacts. But
you know, the CWD example is really interesting because you

(01:05:17):
are you know, we get a question about playing God
a lot, and that is sort of one of those
sort of God decisions we're making. As we said, these
animals have this specific preon gene that makes them more
resistant or you know more can can bear the preonic
disease more than others. But what are the what are
the things that tag along with that? Or if all

(01:05:39):
that's say, all the white tail in Texas were suddenly
wiped out by CWD and only the animals that were
released are remain you've created this sort of genetic bottleneck
because I guess you didn't make ten thousand of those, right,
you only made a hundred of them. So there is that,
you know, there are a lot of these ethical decisions
we have to have. Love the extinction, I love class.

(01:06:01):
I love the Diary Project because it push puts that
debate forward because we're gonna have to start having these
conversations more.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Right, That's that's like in my mind, that is the Yeah,
Like that is the conversation. And and and I credit
like to get somewhere, like, you know, let's let's say
look at the people that are eager about the idea
of colonizing Mars. Right, Yeah, there's all kinds of questions,
huge questions about the possibility that but at some point

(01:06:32):
you just go like, well we'll start going that direction.
We'll solve what we can solve, understanding that there could
possibly be a wall that we don't see. Like that
you start before the pathway is clear, yep, right, you
just like I don't know, we'll start walking that way
and when.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
What happens, what happens, may we fall off the end
of the earth.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
At some point it was all or not, but we
got to start asking questions answer questions. I feel that
with anything to do with the extinction, Like, because I
don't understand the science, I'm not like train enough, smart
enough to.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Understand the science.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
You are a doctor, though I am.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
Other area of forestry.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
I can't understand the science, like I'm incapable of understanding science,
but I can understand this. At some point, the de
extinction process will be that we have, like we have
a Tasmanian tiger, or a thiosine or an approximate we
have an approximate ivory built woodpecker. We humbly ask your

(01:07:37):
permission to let it go. And like I can just
imagine the resistance, maybe even a knee jerk resistance, maybe
an unwarranted resistance, but that will that to me not insurmountable,
But that to me is the final argument.

Speaker 6 (01:07:57):
Because there's got to be a like, what's going to happen?
And if we do, yes, we want to see what's
going to happen?

Speaker 7 (01:08:02):
Right, But I think what's missed often in that sort
of that very conservative approach to these things of well,
we need to answer every question before we take the
next step, is what is the opportunity cost of not
acting right? If we could restore a diallyscene to Tasmania,
could we start to reduce wildlife disease and level out
prey populations in a way that helps support biodiversity of Tasmania? Yeah,

(01:08:24):
I think we could. Are there some other negative effects
there might be, and we should understand those. But we
also can't say we need to tick one hundred percent
of the boxes before we take the next step, because
we will never get anywhere.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:08:37):
I think you know, Teddy Roosevelt had that really famous
quote in the moment of any decision, the best thing
to do is the right thing, The next best thing
to do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing
to do is nothing right. And so that's really our
mentality is we need to push forward. We need to
push technologies forward that give us an opportunity to solve
for some issues, and could there be this butterfly effect
that creates an unforeseen issue. Absolutely, should we be prepared

(01:09:00):
as possible before we take those steps. Absolutely, I'm not
debating that. But right now there is there is an
issue in the conservation community that we are accepting status
quo because we're afraid of the unknown, and we haven't
acknowledged that status quo means a reduction of biodiversity over
the next twenty five years of maybe up to fifty

(01:09:21):
percent of the biodiversity that exists today. We need to
start taking steps and bringing tools to the to the
conservation game that create fundamental change, that create magnitudes of change,
because we are getting our asses kicked on the biodiversity front.

Speaker 6 (01:09:37):
So another why that I've heard is like, why work
with a species like a dire wolf that ultimately proved
to be like unsuccessful. You know, it had its time
and then was unable to cope with whatever changes led
to its extinction. Why not work with like Siberian tis

(01:10:01):
that are like imperiled and you could grow those.

Speaker 3 (01:10:04):
If they won't let them caught them loose.

Speaker 7 (01:10:06):
I'm just saying I think it's also not an either
or proposition, that's not how we work. We are a
mores more yes and type of group. So we loved
using de extinction as this ability to bring new eyeballs,
new funding to the table, bring attention and awareness and
money to the conservation battles that we face on the
endangered spaces front by using the extinction as an engine

(01:10:27):
to fuel that that fight. So with the with the
de extinction of the dire wolf, we have also been
working on the genetic rescue of the American red wolf.
Right red wolf declared extinct in the wild in nineteen eighty.
In the sixties and seventies, US Fish and Wildlife realized
that we had almost killed them all. So they went
to Louisiana and Texas and they captured what they thought

(01:10:51):
was the remaining group of red wolves using very specific
morphological measurements similar to this dire wolf gray wolf debate right, Well,
in reality with they did is they caught fourteen animals
and they said this is now the founding population of
a captive group that will then be kept in human
care until we figure out how to get them back
into the wild.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Yeah. On what was the island they put them on?

Speaker 7 (01:11:11):
Oh? Yeah, I can't even was it off South Carolina? Yeah,
it was off South Carolina. Now now they're in northeastern
North Carolina, which is the experimental release site. Well, the
problem with that is they were looking for a very
specific phenotype and they didn't have the power genetics in
the seventies when they were trying to understand what was
a red wolf and what was a coyote in Louisiana

(01:11:33):
and Texas. So what they did is they caught fourteen
animals that fit a very specific bill. Wind the clock
back about eight nine years ago Bridget von Holt from
Princeton University in Chris Enbreski for Michigan Tech, they rediscovered
that there is actually this extremely high level of red
wolf ancestry in that canid population in Louisiana and Texas.

(01:11:55):
And if you look at the genetics of those canids
from this sort of high spot and it radiates out,
you can see that the proportion of red wolf within
these these Louisiana and Texas populations is about seventy percent
red wolf thirty percent coyote. As you radiate out, you
sort of flip it and by the time you get
to like Dallas where I live, it's totally inverse. It's

(01:12:16):
barely any red wolf in totally coyote. So this is
a very unique group of canids that have persisted since
the seventies. Meanwhile, the closed population that used the captive
population that used for reintroduction to North Carolina has had
the same fourteen founders. Actually only twelve of those bred
and are represented. So now you have about two hundred
and fiftywo hundred and seventy animals in captive population that

(01:12:40):
stemmed from twelve individuals, huge genetic bottleneck and totally missed,
you know, some of the phenotypic diversity of the red wolf.
Going back to aliens abducted you and I, they would
have missed all the people you liveing in Asia and
Africa and South America, and they, you know, they would
think everybody looks like like us, and that would be

(01:13:01):
a horrible representation of what our species actually is. They
did similar to that, they missed a lot of genetic
diversity that still exists there. So we've created using the
same technology used to make dire wolves, we now have
this ability to be able to sequence all of these
red wolves or these Gulf Coast canids, is what we
call them or ghost wolves, because they have such high
levels of genetic ancestry of the American red wolf. They

(01:13:25):
also have a portion of their genome that's not assigned
to any other canid. So it's likely that ghost portion
is the ancestral red wolf, the pre extinction red wolf
that we don't have our reference to yet, but we're creating.
We're doing historic sequencing to understand before the extinction what
was red wolf, and then that would assign how much
red wolf are these coyotes. Now that's an opportunity, and

(01:13:49):
this is one of the things we've been meeting with
the US government and Secretary of Bergamon is now we
have this opportunity to create a genetic rescue tool that
could be an you know, sort of an opportunity to
the US Fish and Wilde Recovery program to say, your
species is sort of headed for extinction because of its
extreme genetic inbreeding. We have a fresh set of genetics

(01:14:09):
that we could plug into your population and help sort
of revitalize. Similar to when Texas cougars went into the
Florida panther population. We could do that type of genetic rescue.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
Effort, which was controversial at the time.

Speaker 7 (01:14:22):
And now people hail it as one of the biggest successes.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
What it was like, well, you're corrupting the Florida gene
pool or it's not the same thing. Yeah, those Florida
panthers will now be not quite Florida panthers.

Speaker 7 (01:14:36):
But they won't be cross eyed and can Yeah, And.

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
People are like, well they're closer than none.

Speaker 7 (01:14:41):
Yes, would be the art. That's our focus is function
within an ecosystem. Can we create a direwolf that would
have performed the same function in its ecosystem or can
we help rescue a species and it still performed the
same function. The answer is yes, we absolutely can, and
we need to be more focused on the pragmatic idea
of what function does the species provide to its ecosystem

(01:15:02):
versus genetic purity in this weird eugenics mentality we have
about species. So that's why we sort of I think,
raise eyebrowsers because we are more focused on that side
than this idea of what is one hundred percent gray wolf?
What is one hundred percent tire?

Speaker 6 (01:15:20):
I think there's some of the blowback is like you
have an animal and that animal is that animal out
in the wild and it becomes like less wild when
you start tinkering with its.

Speaker 5 (01:15:31):
Genes and laying the hand of man on it. And
you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
But in that case, the hand of man, I mean
they were in a pen. Off of that, they were
in an enclosure on an island, right to build up
a reproducible numb I understand. I'm just saying it's very different.

Speaker 7 (01:15:48):
Yeah, Well, and the hand of man is why they're
going extinct, right we were, Yeah, we were poaching them
out of existence.

Speaker 3 (01:15:58):
But let me hit you with a critical let me
red wolf criticism.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
Yeah, And in some ways I think this criticism was
a little bit unfair because it's not like you're taking
federal money that would normally go to red wolf, recovering
it and using it for something else exactly. So it's
like it's pure what the work is added. Well, there's
the criticisms that would say this, like, guys that work
on the red wolf problem are like, our problem is
that people shoot them, yep, and they get hit by cars. Yes,

(01:16:24):
So we're not looking for new animals. We're looking for
how do we create an atmosphere in a place where
they don't get shot and hit by cars. So it
was like it's like, that's beside the point it is.

Speaker 7 (01:16:38):
It is not a silver bullet to the red wolf problem.
It provides a genetic rescue and get buys them more time.
Their captive population will begin to suffer as it's a
closed population, right, so this gives us an opportunity to
inject fresh genetics. Also, that North Carolina site, you know, whatever,
you take it back eight years ago or so, the
US Fishing Wildlife announced, Hey, we're gonna start finding a
second site. A parallel left it because obviously, you know,

(01:17:01):
if you're familiar with the red wolf issue, red wolf
population in that area got north of one hundred and
fifty individuals in around twenty thirteen. Basically people started shooting
and they started getting hit by cars. Today their primary
issues car strikes. What's interesting is it's a different area.
In Louisiana and Texas, you have larger landscapes, but you
don't you don't have as many public lands that protect

(01:17:24):
the animals there, and those animals have persisted since we
thought they would have gone extinct. I think there is
this weird issue that people sort of say, well, if
we acknowledge that these animals are predominantly red wolf or
maybe even truly red wolf as we understand more about
their genetics. That's also acknowledging the fact that we didn't
need to intervene in nineteen seventy. They would have continued

(01:17:45):
to persist in that area.

Speaker 3 (01:17:46):
Yeah, because where they do or they did bring them,
they've tried.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
To keep coyotes. Yeah, right, like that understanding of that
species with coyotes, and then here you have that other
source population that probably has a bleeding edge where Kyle's
roll in.

Speaker 7 (01:18:01):
People talk about admixture. You know, people will say call
it hybridization, and hybridization is the wrong word, but admixture
sort of this idea that two species have this you know,
blending of genetics. They look at that as a bad thing,
as it as diluting the gene stock of a species.
But you know, hybridization and admixture of species is a
natural process. It's actually evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advantages

(01:18:23):
to animals, gives them the opportunity to thrive with a
new within an evolving habitat. Right, they can look at
a species and say, oh, that coyote actually is you know,
much faster or stronger, whatever it is, and they breed
with that, and that that it brings that into their
gene pool. That's an adaptive strategy.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
That's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system of
know that we.

Speaker 3 (01:18:48):
What's wolf, canis lupus.

Speaker 7 (01:18:49):
Yeah, canis lupis.

Speaker 1 (01:18:50):
We're Homo sapien. The rainbow trout is on crinth, on corinth,
this micas micas whatever the hell you go in and
you say, ki, I'm gonna take all creatures on Earth
and I'm going to say that they're all. Whatever causes
you to lose sight of the long time, and the
long time.

Speaker 3 (01:19:11):
Is that there's fluidity.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
Yes, things right, It's similar to things come together and
fall apart, and it's not static. It's a snapshot.

Speaker 7 (01:19:19):
When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem.
We say recovered to what right are we recovering? You know,
in North American centric conservation we say recover to fourteen
ninety two, right, recovered before Europeans came in and ruined
the place.

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
Yeah, that's always my view.

Speaker 7 (01:19:35):
Yeah, but you know there was a there ebbs and
flows before that, and there would have been ebbs and
flows after that. At what point, why do we pick
an arbitrary point in time. Why do we pick an
arbitrary definition of a species in time to say that's
the species it's it's I think it makes sense from
a communication standpoint, we need to be able to talk
about these things, classify things, have goals. That's very important.

(01:19:59):
But to use that as this ideology that we cannot
stray from, I think is naive.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
When I had many conversations with friends of mine in
the wildlife world, when when Colossal made its announcement about
the dire wolves, one of the conversations I can't remember
who the hell is talking to was saying to me,
you know where this would be really helpful. Blackfooted ferrets. Absolutely,
blackfooted ferriests went through a ten ferret bottleneck.

Speaker 7 (01:20:25):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Okay, but I want to return. I want to do
the regulatory thing about ivory built woodpeckers and blackfooted ferrets
who like who? What would ever have to say? Okay
to be that like our population? Our global population of
blackfooted ferrets was reduced down to ten animals, But we

(01:20:48):
have all these specimens that show a level of genetic
diversity that did not exist in those ten Those blackfooted
farans aren't getting shot they're not getting run over, right,
they're fairly easy to protect. Who has to say yes
to start inferring lost genetic diversity into blackfooted ferrets, Like

(01:21:12):
who would be the who is the one that goes okay,
it's it's it's hard.

Speaker 7 (01:21:17):
So blackfoot affair, it's a great example because they've been
using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue blackfooted ferret because
people were banking tissues of blackfoot affairs back into the seventies.
So if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone
that they brought back. She was, you know, an unrepresented founder.
They cloned her. Unfortunately that that single individual she didn't

(01:21:38):
actually she wasn't able to reproduce, but they cloned her again,
and now they've had the first ever clone breed and
give give birth to offspring. Who's the US Fish and
Wildlife Service recovery program. So that's where we would start.
You start with the US Fish and Wildlife Service because
they are the ones that are mandated by the Endangered
Species Act to recover species listed by the Act, so

(01:22:00):
they have the jurisdiction in that area. Now, if we're
just using cloning like what they did, US Fish and
Wildlife has been able to do that on their own.
Now if we were to bring colossal type technology, which
is cloning plus genetic editing, and we said one of
the primary drivers is the blackfooted ferret extinction crisis we're
facing is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is present in their

(01:22:23):
obligatory prey species, the paradog. Thanks, that's a hard one
to remember. So parad dogs are carrying sylvatic plague, and
that when they predate on an animal that has plague,
they also get plague and they die. We know for
a fact that the closest living relative of the blackfooted ferret,

(01:22:43):
which is the domestic ferret, has a naturally occurring resistance
to plague. And it's a very small change. So you
could go in and make a genetic edit within the
black footed fair genome and suddenly ferrets are resistant to
blackfooted to sylvatic plaque. And now we can make a
huge difference in the recovery of blackfoot affairs.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
But now it's like, now we're going to have whatever.

Speaker 7 (01:23:08):
Yeah, now someone's now we're dealing with multiple agencies, the USDA,
the FDA, they all have they all have some jurisdiction
in what we call intentionally altered genomes.

Speaker 6 (01:23:20):
Okay, there are examples of US Fish and Wildlife Service
like saying this is an acceptable level of genetic representation.
Like in Colorado, they like with cutthroat trout, they would
find like an isolated like subspecies of cutthroat trout and
be like, it's like pretty much there, So we're going

(01:23:41):
to put it back into this place. And so I
mean someone's capable of saying like it's close enough.

Speaker 7 (01:23:48):
And that's US Fish and wildlife typically. But once we
start getting into gene editing and sure start inviting more
regulators to the table. And that's what we're doing right now,
and we're actually pushing the boundaries of the regulatory environment
because this you know, these were all hypotheticals and now
their realities and people are scrambling to say, how the
hell do we do this?

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
So could you run? Could you How long does a
blackfooted fair it live?

Speaker 7 (01:24:10):
Ten twelve years?

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (01:24:12):
Could you run?

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
Would it makes sense that you would run a generation? Right,
you'd make a plag resistant blackfooted ferret if you ran
it for a if you just let it go for
a generation in captivity, would you then be able to
be like would you then be able to dispel Would

(01:24:35):
that be enough time to dispel some of the questions? Yeah,
I think does it take like would you have to
run five generations? It's a good question that puts you
sixty years down the road.

Speaker 7 (01:24:46):
I mean, I certainly don't think Colossal has the answer
for that, For that specific question. I think that is
a regulatory question. You know, at what point do we
feel comfortable with this now, knowing that they have a
close living relative with this exact gene doing how how
much do we need to do Because we've studied domestic
ferrets for mm hmm hundreds of years, right, that might

(01:25:08):
inform what's happening here. But I think you could set
up an experimental population where you're able to do a
lot of those things and within a generation or two
begin to put animals back into the wild. Now, the
trick with blackfooted ferret is that, you know, we probably
need to find some resistance for prairie dogs as well.
All right, if they're going to continue being the vector
of the disease, you need to remove the vector, and

(01:25:30):
they have to you know, you have to have parade
dogs because parade dogs are blackfoot af fairts rely on
their holes. Plus they eat them. So, you know, ranching
folks don't really love parade dogs. They create a lot
of problems for cattle, and so to go and convince
people that we should do something protect parade dogs might
be a harder sell.

Speaker 1 (01:25:48):
Like you feel that that the constant exposure could in time,
that the susceptibility could could.

Speaker 7 (01:25:58):
Return potentially, I see.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
A month ago, Time magazine reported that the Mandan and
Ricara tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves
live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal
is studying. So two things. One that seems to go
against what you said earlier about the dire wolves living
in the wild. And then two, what is that tribal
communication been like with you guys about why they have

(01:26:25):
a desire to have dire wolves on their reservation.

Speaker 7 (01:26:28):
Yeah. I wouldn't say it goes against what I was
saying earlier. I think it would be replicating what we've
done already, but on tribal lands.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
So in two thousand acre enclosure, Yeah, okay.

Speaker 7 (01:26:37):
So a year and a half ago we launched Colossal's
Indigenous Council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community
from the indigenous world to the table to say, how
can we enhance the conservation work you're already leading. How
could we adopt you know, things like coexistence strategies that
our Native American partners have been much better at than

(01:26:59):
we have uh and and so part of that was,
you know, one of the reasons for dire Wolf when
we were launching is we were working with Chairman Fox
at mh a nation in North Dakota, and we were
talking to him about some bison genetic work that we
were doing because Beth has a big background and by
some genetics and and and Chairman Fox had started telling
us an origin story of his of his people, and

(01:27:21):
it talks about the great wolf, which was this large,
extremely large wolf.

Speaker 4 (01:27:26):
UH.

Speaker 7 (01:27:27):
It was it was a white wolf or a light
colored wolf, similar to what we're talking about, and it
was part of their origin stories passed down through oral tradition,
and their people believe that that that they had coexisted
with dire wolves and that's part of their origin story.
So there was a big interest. They said, if you
guys are able to do this, we would love to
bring the dire wolves back to our lands so we

(01:27:47):
can also honor this UH this ancestral wolf that's important
to our people.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
Who has done this is a global story? Who's done
a good or a bad job? From your perspective of
covering it?

Speaker 7 (01:28:00):
That's a that's a great question.

Speaker 1 (01:28:02):
I don't know. Yeah, there was one that was crazy.

Speaker 7 (01:28:06):
What's that one?

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
It was like, I don't even want to say on
the air.

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):
It was like a cult reporter.

Speaker 7 (01:28:14):
Oh yeah, we won't give them any clicks. That was wild.
That was that was just looney tune stuff. I think
there's been some bad stuff. A good example is what
is the Cowboy Statesman. There's a Wyoming publication. They wrote
an article about, you know, this is what's going to
happen when direwolves introduced to Yellowstone, Like there's such a

(01:28:35):
leap of logic, steps to the end. Yeah, yeah, And
it was just you know, this is going to be
horrible for Yellowstone. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:28:41):
Well, I like their stuff generally, but they are kind
of bulldogs. I could see how they could take a
story like this and and do exactly what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (01:28:50):
Yeah, I was skipping a lot of steps.

Speaker 1 (01:28:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:28:52):
Another one that did a poor job that I was
disappointed with because it's a friend of ours that we
know pretty well. Was the Washington posted after Secretary Bergham
had come out with the public statement of support for
the extinction technologies as a tool for conservation. Was basically there.
The headline was this really superficial stretch that said, oh,
Secretary Bergham and the Trump administration will use the extinction

(01:29:13):
to gut the Endanger Species Act. And they've said that. Well,
they didn't say that. I mean his act, his quote,
which is pretty powerful, and I was blown away that
he took such a bold stance. Basically said, this is
technology that could be fundamentally game changing to the recovery
of species, which would lead to delisting. This wasn't just

(01:29:34):
gutting the endangers.

Speaker 1 (01:29:35):
I read that, and that was but that's a very
common kind of environmental reporting. Yeah, that it was. He
he said something to the effect of in a perfect world,
we would never get there.

Speaker 3 (01:29:48):
Yes, And then that was taken like, in.

Speaker 1 (01:29:50):
A proper role, we would never get to needing the
ESA correct, which would wind up being if you if
you pull a bunch of Americakinson said, would you like
to live in a world where the Endangered Species Act
was never necessary? Everyone will go Well, sure, he says that,
and it's that he must mean he's going to get

(01:30:12):
rid of it.

Speaker 7 (01:30:13):
Yeah, it's just funny and it happens.

Speaker 1 (01:30:15):
It was like it was it was a wild extrapolation,
but I see what they were getting at. They're getting
at that. It would be like, oh, they're going to
use a squishy definition, right that, Like like, here's the fear.
I'm guessing, like what what's driving the mentality? It would
be that you get down to ten blackfooted ferrets and

(01:30:36):
someone saying like, wow.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
They really should have ees a protection.

Speaker 7 (01:30:40):
And they'd be like, don't worry, we just ordered two hundred, right,
But what's missing and like that's like I think that's
what they're getting That would become the play in that
sort of that just you know, menu of options and
ordering the next species of interest. What's missing in that
whole thing is habitat. And that's what I think a
lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very

(01:31:01):
hardline stance are missing. Is this idea that recovery has
very specific parameters around habitat requirement, right and sustainable population
in the wild. So in order to achieve recovery, there's
a habitat requirement. Also, I think de extinction technologies and
using de extinction technologies to recover in danger species also
has this really great sort of beacon of hope and

(01:31:23):
sort of inspirational effort that if we said tomorrow we
could bring back the I rebuild woodpecker, would we start
suddenly protecting doing a better job of protecting habitat in Arkansas?

Speaker 5 (01:31:35):
Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:31:36):
I mean.

Speaker 6 (01:31:36):
If the ESA comes with what many people would call
like onerous regulations right regarding protecting habitat, other people would
be like, oh.

Speaker 7 (01:31:47):
No, it's like we need them anymore.

Speaker 6 (01:31:51):
So bringing them back doesn't necessarily solve the problem exactly.

Speaker 7 (01:31:56):
It is a tool that could help accelerate and scale recovery.
That's what it is.

Speaker 1 (01:32:00):
I want. I want a narrow one on the ivy
build woodpecker. Maybe you can correct me on some of this,
but here's why it excites me. It's like.

Speaker 3 (01:32:09):
There still is habitat.

Speaker 7 (01:32:12):
There is people more today than when they went extinct.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):
Yeah, Like, I mean, there was a lot of habitat
destruction that led to the problem, but there is habitat. Uh,
this was so recent, right, there's people alive right now,
there are people alive that saw Ivory build woodpeckers.

Speaker 7 (01:32:33):
Yeah, there's actually like photographs of them. There's a real
to real video of what they think was the last
Ivory build woodpecker leaving as singer was cutting down the tree.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:32:43):
It's pretty powerful.

Speaker 3 (01:32:44):
Yeah, there's like, yeah, that's the craziest part about it.

Speaker 7 (01:32:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:47):
Dan Flores talks about that while New World is They're like, oh, yeah,
there's some in that tree. Literally, I mean, I'm not
joking literally that they actually cut the tree during a
logging project. There was a contentious logging project cut the tree.
No one really knew that it was the last ones,

(01:33:08):
but they knew it was damn near and it turned
out probably to be the last ones. They cut the
tree down with the thing in there as like a
hey man, don't tell me what to do kind of thing.
So here you have where there's habitat. It's it like
it's hard to put it a try, Like it might

(01:33:30):
as well have not gone extinct, do you know what
I mean? Like it's like it one extinct. It seems
to almost have gone extinct by like a freak chance,
or it might as well if it didn't, if it had,
if it had stayed intact, we wouldn't think it was weird. Yeah,
follow me, yep. If we had, if we had kept
short faced bears and tact, it would be a thing

(01:33:53):
that people remarked on every time they killed a person.

Speaker 3 (01:33:57):
You know, I'd be like, my god, can you believe?

Speaker 1 (01:33:59):
Right? The same way we marvel over alligators, we marvel
over grizzly bears, we marvel over polar bears, and just
be a bird.

Speaker 3 (01:34:06):
Yep, it'd be like a bird.

Speaker 1 (01:34:08):
It was kind of cool, but like a bird, you know,
so like it's not an earth shattering environmental thing to
have it around the ranch and farm community is not
gonna have a be jeopardized by this.

Speaker 4 (01:34:24):
Ye.

Speaker 1 (01:34:26):
I can't think of anyone except affiliated woodpecker that would
maybe be annoyed.

Speaker 3 (01:34:31):
They would like they're like, dude, we were the biggest woodpecker.
Now we're not.

Speaker 1 (01:34:34):
Like they might be annoyed, but it's just there's no
it doesn't seem like there's friction.

Speaker 7 (01:34:39):
No, there's not there.

Speaker 1 (01:34:41):
If we people you go like, how do you feel
about bringing the irobialt woodpecker back, most people would be
like the what Yeah, like it's the woodpecker is here,
not long ago, We're gonna put it back.

Speaker 3 (01:34:51):
It's just it's a woodpecker. They'd probably be like, Okay,
you know what I.

Speaker 1 (01:34:56):
Mean, Like like that seems to me, just from from
a novice perspective, that seems to me like the thing.

Speaker 7 (01:35:05):
To do first, Well first is hard, right, there's technical
challenges and the extinction of a bird. Right, So we
have the Dodo project, which is our flagship avian species,
and this is sort of leading the charge and overcoming
the technical challenges, the biggest challenges. There is an important
step in a d extinction where you've edited a cell

(01:35:25):
line to the point where you go, this is now
a cell of the animal of interest. This is now
a direable cell. Now we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer,
which is most famously Dolly the Sheep cloning. That's called
somatic cell nuclear transfer, and that's taking the DNA from
that cell, removing the DNA of an egg cell and
putting your DNA in and that fertilizes the cell and

(01:35:46):
it becomes an embryo, and then you can transfer it
into a circuit. With birds, very early on in the
development of their egg they're calcifying the outside of it. Right,
we can't access the eggs internally of the of a bird.
We have to wait for them to lay those. So
we are creating new platforms in order to edit germ cells,
or the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. So

(01:36:09):
as an egg is laid, you can window the egg,
you can extract a few microleaders of blood. You can
plate that blood and take out what we call them
primordial germ cells. Those primordial germ cells are the cells
that are circulating freely in the blood of this early fetus,
and they eventually migrate to the gonads and they become
sperm or egg, depending on the gender of that egg.

(01:36:34):
If we then edit those while they're plated, you can
create a stable line of these in vitro. Then now
you have edited the germ cell that will eventually become
Spermer egg, and then in a different egg, which is
you know, sort of an egg that's been engineered to
be sterile so they don't produce any of their own
Spermer egg. At that same point of development, you can

(01:36:55):
check you'll edited germ cells, they migrate to the gonads,
and then you could have a pigeon or a chicken
that's creating the sperm or egg of a dodo. When
they breed, they give birth, they lay a Dodo egg
or in this case, an I Rebuild woodpecker egg. So
we're overcoming those challenges. Right now, we don't know a
lot about woodpeckers, so we need to study more. Last

(01:37:18):
year we launched Colossal's nonprofit, the Colossal Foundation. I'm the
executive director of that foundation, which is meant to sort
of be where the rubber of de extinction meets the
road where.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):
It meaning the road being the regulatory structure.

Speaker 7 (01:37:30):
Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally
keep species off our duty lists?

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
Right?

Speaker 7 (01:37:36):
But also in some cases there's a North American conservation
focus of that. So one of the flagship projects for
the foundation is the I Rebuild Woodpecker.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
What is is it? Mauritius mauritious?

Speaker 7 (01:37:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
What is their attitude toward the Dodo?

Speaker 7 (01:37:51):
It's interesting it is a culturally significant icon of Mauritius.
It is also closely associated with colonization. Right as colonizers
showed up, they brought this species that wiped out this
the Dodo. Now what's interesting there was not.

Speaker 1 (01:38:09):
Wasn't it people that wiped out the dodo.

Speaker 7 (01:38:11):
Yeah, it was the colonizers that came in, right. But
what's interesting is Mauritius didn't have an indigenous people at
that time, right, so they sort of came into the island.
They introduced invasive species. So it was primarily rats and
cats that were introduced to the island that started decimating
a ground nesting bird and a flightless bird at that
that's what led to the dodo.

Speaker 3 (01:38:30):
Plus sometimes I thought they just ate them all.

Speaker 7 (01:38:33):
There's there is a common misconception that they were a
favorite food of sailors. There are also some really interesting
funny logs you can read of, you know, sailors that
said they would bring them on to provision the boat
and then people would just resent having to eat it
because it was all they had was this gross, greasy bird.
So it was probably some combination thereof but the real

(01:38:53):
issue was habitat was being destroyed as people came in
to make room for colonies, and invasive species were just
wiping out nests. And the dodo hadn't evolved with a
mam million predator, so it didn't have this natural instinct
to run or to do any so, you know, I
think they said from the time Dodo was discovered to
it when extinct was eighty years so just a really

(01:39:15):
rapid extinction event. So Mauritius is really interested in recovering
the Dodo. They on Mauritius, So we engage directly with
the government of Mauritius with the Mursian Wildlife Foundation to
talk about how can we use the extinction to drive
conservation projects and habitat restoration projects on the island of
Mauritius and the islets that surround Marcius. And then also

(01:39:36):
in preparation for a Dodo, can we start to find
habitat suitable habitat that would include us removing invasive species,
not just invasive animals, but invasive plants have taken over.
How can we restore the you know, the lost ebony trees,
How can we start to bring back, you know, the
forest of sixteen hundreds in order to prepare it for

(01:39:58):
the Dodo. And so there's there's this amazing the interest,
we have, this great underswellow support. We've launched a council
of people, a stakeholders group that is about ten fifteen
people that sort of represent a variety of industry from
tourism to science to government, and regulatory so that we
can begin to say, hey, we're making progress towards restoring

(01:40:18):
the dota from extinction. What do we need to be
doing here with the people of Mauritius, with the land
of Mauritius, in order to make sure society, society is
prepared and ecosystems are prepared.

Speaker 1 (01:40:32):
So crystal ball it for me? What ook at never
not the science, the social component. If you had a
crystal ball the social component, what are the odds socially,
socially regulatory, whatever that you would get that you could
get to where they would say, let's do it. Let's
take this little islet and let's yeah cuss somehow, and

(01:40:56):
they're just gonna They're gonna just live or die. They
their ability to make a living here.

Speaker 7 (01:41:04):
I would never say anything's one hundred percent, because we
could get wiped out by a night an asteroid. But
right there there's I mean, I'm ruled out that. I
like that the Earth kind of keeps going along. Yeah,
I think it's ninety nine percent. Beth and I went
to Murcius last year and had an incredible visit. We're
going again this year, and the idea is to kind
of keep these conversations. Moving forward, Mauritius has done an

(01:41:25):
incredible job on their own of going and recovering some
of the islets around there. There's this really famous island
or islet on the north end of Mauritius called Round Island.
It's this massive, round rock island. You know, you can't
even you know, we landed a helicopter on it in
order to get out there, and you're sort of at
this twenty degree angle as you land, and you're landing

(01:41:45):
on top of giant tortoises, and it was basically an
island that was stripped down to just the rock. All
the soil and plant life had been completely eradicated because
they had introduced goats, and the goats were left there
so that when you sailed buy you could pick up
a few, you know, and you could provision the boat. Well,
they just grazed the hell out of the whole thing,

(01:42:06):
and basically every species native to that little islet was
basically wiped out. So they've been recovering it for twenty years.
And when you go and see where they were to
where they are today, it's incredible work.

Speaker 1 (01:42:17):
So for all the reasons they've been recovering it Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:42:19):
Yeah, they just wanted to bring background island. It has
a lot of endemic species that we're important to try
to save. So they're already doing this great work, I
think colossal showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance,
bring more funding, try to bring technology to the table
to do just that. So there are the reason why
I think it's so high and imercious. The chances are

(01:42:40):
so high and maercious. It's because there's all these islets
that are sort of like living laboratories. You know, you
can mitigate risk of some of these fears around GMOs
or what is going to be the effect of this
reintroduction by putting them on an island.

Speaker 6 (01:42:54):
Yeah, like if suddenly tomorrow all the grizzly bears in
the lower forty eight when extinct us and you guys
were like, oh that's okay, we can repopulate. There's still
only so there's not a lot of appropriate habitat available
for them, right, So.

Speaker 5 (01:43:16):
In an island.

Speaker 6 (01:43:17):
Situation, you have way more control. But it seems like
your challenge is not like growing the animal, it's like
cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully.

Speaker 7 (01:43:33):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges around preparing
the habitat for one of these animals and making sure
the protections are in place, but also making sure that
the people are ready for that.

Speaker 5 (01:43:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:43:43):
I think this is a huge step for a society
to say we want to take this next step. Whoever
is will be the first government regulator culture to say
we want to introduce a species return from extinction to
the wild. I mean that is a massive step. I
mean that is going to take somebody very bold, and
I think that's why island nations are a little more.

(01:44:05):
They have a little more opportunity because they can mitigate
the risk because they don't have to worry about their
neighbors say you no time out, you're doing what?

Speaker 1 (01:44:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:44:12):
If we did this in the US, Canada would say
what the hell are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:44:15):
Yeah, we know it's a little bit interesting. A similar
approach was we wound up introducing wild turkeys in a
lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. Yeah, so
you know they think that historically he had turkeys and

(01:44:36):
what's today thirty four states. Now we have turkeys in
forty nine states. Very little friction there was I remember
one state there was some friction in there and it
was a worried about some rare annual and these guys
wound up doing a big crop survey like bird crops,

(01:44:56):
you know, and they just didn't find anything analogous to
this and wild turkeys around the world or around the country,
Like it just doesn't seem to think turkeys would pray on.

Speaker 3 (01:45:05):
But that was like one little.

Speaker 1 (01:45:06):
Test and they let them go, and it wound up
being that we always talk about, well you have like invasives,
which are bad, but it wound up being like it's
like a species of no known negative. It's like no
no negative. But the climates changed so much you might
not get away with that what they were doing with

(01:45:27):
turkeys into seventies, eighties, early nineties. You might not today
be able to go into I'm not trying to pick
on California today, it might not be able to go
into California and say, hey, we're going to turn some
wild turkeys loose.

Speaker 7 (01:45:42):
Oh like the cultural climate change.

Speaker 1 (01:45:43):
Yeah, you know what I mean, Like you might hit
resistance for something that was just that happened. Because if
you look at like the shift too in the fifties,
they brought add ad into Texas, they brought Ibex into
New Mexico.

Speaker 3 (01:45:56):
They bought oricx in New Mexico, and there.

Speaker 1 (01:45:58):
Was kind of a let's just see what happened, like
they can't be bad attitude. That's that's built up resistance.
And now even when people look like with ELK, we've
only recovered ELK on fourteen percent of twenty percent of
historic range. Fourteen percent of historic range, there's kind of
mind boggling. Yeah, and that recovery effort is ground to

(01:46:20):
a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just there's a less
of an appetite to move servids from one area to
another because like disease transmission. So it is in the
conversation about what we get to a place where we're
actually trying to do this, it's like the appetite seems

(01:46:41):
to be just generally declining to like any kind of
dice rolling.

Speaker 7 (01:46:46):
Well, yeah, I think you know there is a certain
aspect of this that is you know better than you
do better. Right, So we know that these animals, you know,
a foreign animal or an invasive animal would have certain
impacts on an ecosystem. So that is important that we
take that precautionary approach because now we know better, so
we must do better. However, I think the pendulum swunk

(01:47:07):
all the way where now it's you know, any change
is bad. Oh, and right now, if we do anything,
if we try to change anything about the status quo,
there are things we cannot account for. Yet therefore we
should not take that step. And so we've moved into
this fear based decision making, which is grinding recovery to

(01:47:27):
a halt of a lot of species.

Speaker 1 (01:47:29):
No, and look, I was management help, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 7 (01:47:32):
So I think we need to sort of the pendulum
needs to come back to the center. I think, you know,
on most things in life, from this moderate approach is
probably the best approach. So how can we make the
most informed decision while also having a certain appetite for risk,
and with this idea that without risk there is no
chance for a win out there, right, we need to
take certain risks in order to recover species.

Speaker 2 (01:47:53):
You mentioned earlier that you didn't care for the reporting
by Washington Posts and Cowboys Stay Daily, who did a
good job of covering the story.

Speaker 7 (01:48:01):
Well, we had a lot of great folks, I mean,
you know, obviously we were blown away that we got
the cover Time magazine and Time did a great job.
Jeff Jeff Pluger. He did this great article on the
whole thing. The New Yorker broke our embargo and published
the story. Oh yeah, so, although we're mad at them,

(01:48:23):
if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's pretty
good story.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):
They know they were breaking it.

Speaker 7 (01:48:27):
Yeah they did. There's you know, there's I'll just put
it this way, there's some emails going back and forth
saying can we do this? We said no, and then
they did it. Anyways, So that was heartbreaking because there's
so many, you know, there's one hundred and seventy five
people at Colossal that we're working their tails off to
do this thing. Our marketing team was killing themselves, their
PR teams were killing themselves to have this really ambitious
launch event and then for somebody to selfishly try to

(01:48:50):
go first was really frustrating. But despite all of that,
New Yorker read a pretty cool piece now that said,
he gave me like the dumbest quote ever and that thing,
so I'm a little up about it.

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
He gave you a bad quote.

Speaker 7 (01:49:01):
Yeah, well, you know, I was. I was out of
the country when he was visiting, so I was zooming
into a few calls and he was interviewing me over
zoom and I just didn't have a lot of time.
He basically said, what do you do here? You know,
chief Animal Officers not a title. People really know what
the hell it means. I'm not sure I know what
it means. It's like you're a zoo keeper or something,
chief zookeeper. One of my guys on my team calls

(01:49:21):
me the chief pet officer. So I just told him
I play with animals, just joking.

Speaker 1 (01:49:27):
Of course.

Speaker 7 (01:49:27):
That's the one thing he published.

Speaker 1 (01:49:31):
Like a cocky.

Speaker 7 (01:49:33):
I was like, there's a lot of thought that goes
into what I do, right, But but it was fine.
But yeah, I think there was a vast majority. I's
a ninety five percent of the things that were published
I thought were fair balanced, shed a positive light on
what we were doing. Five percent of them were hyper
negative to ass like almost just for the purpose of clickbait.

Speaker 1 (01:49:54):
Yeah, well, I mean you have to acknowledge that there's
a real stir of the pot. Yeah yeah, I mean
you're starting the pot.

Speaker 7 (01:50:03):
That's what I like about it. I think the conservation
pot needs to be stirred. Like I said, I think
we've gone to this fear based approach, where you know,
in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at we're at the
third point where we said, you know, the worst, We're
doing the worst thing, which is we're not making decisions.

Speaker 6 (01:50:18):
But do you guys feel an urgency to you're not
going to stop messing around with ancient extinct species, but
do you feel an urgency to like do something like
more timely, like with a specie that is like.

Speaker 7 (01:50:34):
We I mean, the American red wolf is a good
example of how what exactly what we're doing. But the Foundation,
the Colossal Foundation, has forty five conservation partners. That's forty
five separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation.
Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock
the language of wolves? Right here in Yellowstone working with

(01:50:54):
the Yellowstone Wolf Project Yellowstone Forever, Jeff Reed and the
Grizzly Systems team trying to unlock language and in a
way that we can track wolves over space and time
without requiring collars and understand what are they talking about.
To conferring resistance to toxins from invasive species. The Northern coal
from the Northern Territory of Australia, is being decimated because

(01:51:15):
one of the animals that predates on is the invasive
cane toad, which has a buffotox in the boo. That
neurotoxin kills the cane the coal when they eat them.
So we've actually found one base pair change that animals
that co evolved with the cane toad in South America
have evolved that. So we're changing that one base pairent
coal and we've already shown in the lab that it

(01:51:37):
confers resistance to bufotoxin. So now we can give that
to the government off Australia and say here is a
tool for you guys to recover your northern coal and
as a bonus, they'll eat all those cane toads that
are invasive and are sort of one of the most
famous examples of an invasive species. We also created a
vaccine to help elephants with one of the most deadly

(01:51:59):
virus as they face the elephant indo, thelotropic Herpes virushi,
kills about thirty percent of elephants and human care and
more and more, we understand that is an is decimating
wild populations. So you know, we have forty five of
these projects ongoing. Obviously, What makes it to the top
of that of the storyline is always the exction. But
that's the power of the extinction is it does bring awareness,

(01:52:22):
It brings attention, it brings funding. Four hundred and fifty
million dollars we've raised over four years to support the
business of Colossal, and we've raised another seventy five million
dollars for the Colossal Foundation. So you know, we talk
about conservation is an under resourced fight. We're bringing resources
to table. These are not a distraction of resources from

(01:52:42):
places where you know you would have normally given money
to WWF. Now we're going to Silicon Valley, We're going
to capital you know, venture capital investors, and.

Speaker 1 (01:52:51):
We're right vay getting They like, what in the end,
because you're not a nonprofit, you're not an.

Speaker 3 (01:52:57):
Environmental we have a non profit, you have oh not
a foundation?

Speaker 1 (01:53:00):
Yep, Well, then there's a for profit component one in
the end, what is the product?

Speaker 7 (01:53:05):
The product is the all of the technology we're creating.
So it's more about process. Les's it's about product. We're
creating processes that then we can license that IP to
other fields of science, human healthcare research, you know, university research,
things like that. We've already spun out two companies out
of Colossal that are now standalone businesses, self sufficient businesses.

(01:53:25):
One is a computational biology platform, So it's an AI
tool that essentially helps you compare genes of animals and
understand this gene codes for this trade god that type
of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:53:35):
Now clients being universities and research facilities. Exactly, I gotcha.

Speaker 7 (01:53:39):
Another one is a plastics degradation company. So we've identified
a microbe that's able to consume almost every plastic we've
ever thrown at it, everything from really soft plastics to
very hard, high density plastics, and we're using genetic engineering
to try to enhance those types of qualities. And so
this gives us, you know, a new tool in the
way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle limit

(01:54:00):
to you know, smaller pieces of plastic microplastic. This is
breaking down the molecular bonds of this. So that's sort
of what we're doing, is we're this incubator of technology
that we can spin out and it funds the whole program.

Speaker 2 (01:54:14):
I've seen how wrapped or recovery centers when they're feeding,
like an eagle chick or a hawk chick, they'll cover
themselves in a bed sheet and they'll put like a
puppet on their end to feed the chicks. To prevent
human imprinting, And what kind of protocols that you guys
have about dealing with your three dire wolves, Like how
many humans have they seen?

Speaker 7 (01:54:34):
Oh, they've probably seen say fifteen or twenty, but they
see four or five on a regular basis. These are
not candidates for release into the wild. So we take
a slightly different approach. Right if we're creating a stable
population of captive animals that could eventually go back into
the wild, which is not the case with the dire wolves,
but with the red wolves that we cloned, you know,

(01:54:56):
this generation is not a candidate for rewilding. We'll begin
to take a more hands off approach as you create
subsequent generations and model after very similar projects that are
already going on with red wolf release into North Carolina,
Mexican gray Wolf into the American Southwest. So mammals are
a little different. They don't imprint the way birds do.
Birds have a very strong imprint potential, so you can

(01:55:22):
really mess a chick up if it imprints on a human,
whereas with the mammals, they don't take that same level
of their habituation.

Speaker 6 (01:55:31):
There's a certain degree of like learn behavior too, right,
Like wolves need to be taught how to hunt by
their pack, and.

Speaker 7 (01:55:39):
So there's a lot of opportunity for cross fostering. So
you know, you can create puppies that then you would
drop into dens of wild wolves if you wanted to,
like say this was a gray wolf project. As you know,
the pack it leaves the den for a bit, you
can go and drop puppies in, and that's called cross fostering.
So we could do that.

Speaker 1 (01:55:57):
Drop bunch nerd because someone we're going to get at.

Speaker 5 (01:56:03):
But as far as like you never.

Speaker 6 (01:56:07):
You would never be able to get to a situation
where you would have real dial like diar Rols teaching
diar Rolls how.

Speaker 1 (01:56:14):
To be direbls. You know that's impossible.

Speaker 7 (01:56:16):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible generations
to get to, but you first have to.

Speaker 3 (01:56:22):
Know what there's no way to find out.

Speaker 7 (01:56:25):
Yeah, I mean this kind of goes back to some
of the debate that you know, I thought people were
going to say, you made a dire wolf, What the hell?
This thing's an enormous hyper carnivore and really what they
were going, well, that's not a direolf. You're so sure
that's not a diarolf? Can you please tell me what
a dire wolf is? Because if you can't tell me
definitively what it is, you can't tell me what it
isn't uh, you know, there's there's a lot of nuance

(01:56:46):
to taxonomy, and we don't know how transgenics fall into
taxonomy that you know, taxonomy wasn't built with this idea
that suddenly along the evolutionary tree something just pops up
on its own branch, right, So transgenics really challenge taxonomic classification.
So you know, we're trying to help the world cope

(01:57:07):
with that. We're trying to challenge taxonomists to figure out
because transgenics are not going to stop a dire wolf.
It won't stop with colossal they're synthetic. Biology is now
a tool that conservation can use to cover a number
of animals, a number of species issues. There will be
the use of one gene from one animal put into
another animal, and then they go, well, how do you
now classify that animal? You know, taxonomy wasn't built to

(01:57:30):
handle that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:31):
But and the thing and the behavior thing though this
isn't the hack on it.

Speaker 3 (01:57:35):
But I'm saying, like you just.

Speaker 1 (01:57:40):
You might get you might get where you can win
the debate and say, like, based on an agreed upon definition.

Speaker 7 (01:57:48):
This is a dire wolf.

Speaker 1 (01:57:49):
But what the problem is when you if you say like, behaviorally,
there's no foundation for it.

Speaker 7 (01:57:57):
We can't say definitively no, you would never know what
the animal what was doing. We haven't studied it. I mean,
there's how many species across the world that are live
today that we don't know behaviorally what they do, what
is their function with an ecosystem?

Speaker 1 (01:58:08):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:58:09):
So it's it's a valid point. It's one that it
will challenge the extinction as we go forward. But I
don't think it's a reason to not pursue the.

Speaker 2 (01:58:17):
Exc Has there been anything with their behavior that really
surprises the people who watch them, Like they never howl
or boy, they sure like digging holes.

Speaker 7 (01:58:27):
They love sticks, O big fans of sticks.

Speaker 2 (01:58:30):
Like wolf puppies love sticks.

Speaker 7 (01:58:31):
I don't know, yeah, I mean I don't think they
get a lot of sticks to say, and tire.

Speaker 1 (01:58:36):
You guys carrying bones around it?

Speaker 6 (01:58:38):
Do you guys like go in there and cuddle with them,
or will they rip your arm off.

Speaker 7 (01:58:42):
There's no cuddling at this point. You know, we were
pretty specific early on. Contact was only what was required
for the care and health of the animal. Now contact
is basically not required. We'll drive in in order to
drop feed and things like that. They also have an
indoor building that they have access to, and it's sort
of a smaller pen where they we can coax them
into that so that we can do some basic management

(01:59:04):
stuff if we ever had to, you know, anesthetize an
animal because it was sick or injured. We use these areas,
so there is some habituation to those areas because it's
a management advantage for us to be able to not
have to go out there and dart one.

Speaker 2 (01:59:17):
So what about their behavior is surprised you though?

Speaker 7 (01:59:20):
I know it is so early. It's hard to say, right,
because they were just really goofy puppies that were that
were around people and now they're really developing into their
own I think the level of despite the habituation early
on in their life, the level of flight distance that
they still maintain with people outside of like two people
on my team is pretty startling. Whereas I've worked with

(01:59:43):
a lot of other captive wild canids and and they
are go, oh, person equals food and they come running
over all right. That these guys do not have that.
There is a real fear of new people, new things.
They how like they do, Yeah, they do. They They
have a good howl. There's really you know, famous video
that we put on YouTube that was their first howl,

(02:00:04):
which was pretty powerful moment for the team, you know,
sitting there holding them in one of the vetexs that
works in the clinic we were giving we were doing
a check up on them. It was like singing a song,
a little mermaid song, and there's a part where it's like, uh,
and she starts doing that, and all of a sudden,
both boys just popped into a howl. That was pretty
pretty incredible.

Speaker 2 (02:00:25):
Is their body size on track with what you'd expect
the body signs of a dire wolf to be.

Speaker 7 (02:00:32):
Yeah, so we're looking you know, fossil record kind of
suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that one hundred and
thirty hundred forty pounds up to one hundred and sixty pounds.
I think we're on pace for one hundred and forty pounds.
Where we stand today, we're seven and a half months
as shy of one hundred pounds. As is, their growth
curve is definitely leveling out. But you know what we
know from gray wolves is we could expect them to

(02:00:53):
continue to grow until they're about twelve fifteen months and
then from there they'll continue to put on weight. But
they're they're pretty hall leggy animals as they are today.

Speaker 1 (02:01:03):
M I'm excited for this Ivory build woodpecker situation.

Speaker 7 (02:01:09):
Well yeah, I mean we gotta we got to get
you down to the lab and we can show you
what we're doing with with the woodpecker stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:01:16):
You know who else wouldn't like it to see? For
the people who claim they see them now because they
kind of they're like special.

Speaker 7 (02:01:21):
We get that on the thighlasting project too.

Speaker 1 (02:01:23):
Oh don't need Yeah, there's one behind my own.

Speaker 7 (02:01:27):
We were at a town hall meeting because we we
will visit Tasmani and have town halls and try to
hear from from the locals, and we have it at
that Thilasting stakeholder group and one of them said, you know,
I this is ten years ago. I was pumpkin gas
down at this intersection. I saw one run by you.
It's like, I don't want to be rude, but if
they do exist, I don't think they're visiting gas stations.

Speaker 1 (02:01:48):
Yea, yeah, do you guys use that term Lazarus? We haven't.

Speaker 7 (02:01:53):
Yeah, but it's good. It's a good analogy.

Speaker 1 (02:01:58):
I was going to get to this before we're running
out of time, but uh, Crystal ballt on Crystal Ball
at on Tasmania saying hell, yeah, let's cut some thiosines loose.

Speaker 7 (02:02:13):
I think the chances will go much higher once we
have a thioasine in hand, because I think there will
suddenly be oh, this is a real thing that we
need to be very serious about. Australia has a very
conservative approach to wildlife management, and they've been burned.

Speaker 3 (02:02:28):
They don't have any non natives.

Speaker 7 (02:02:29):
Yeah, yeah, they've been burned in the past. Right, Cane
toads a great example.

Speaker 1 (02:02:34):
I can see that.

Speaker 7 (02:02:35):
So I think there will be an onerous owner's process
in order to get there. But I would say, yeah,
you know, you know, that's sort of seventy five eighty
five percent chance that they will definitely come along. I
think Mauritius is much more willing to take that.

Speaker 1 (02:02:49):
What was the percent chance on Tasmania seventy five eighty five?
Really optimistic.

Speaker 7 (02:02:53):
I'm telling you, what's these animals are back? I think, well,
he'll be fighting people to say why is it in
Texas in the United States and not in Tasmania.

Speaker 1 (02:03:05):
I love Willem Dafoe. One of the worst movies ever made.
His style of scene movie, it's really bad. Just the logic.
They had magical backpack syndrome.

Speaker 2 (02:03:17):
What is that?

Speaker 1 (02:03:18):
Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack.

Speaker 2 (02:03:24):
Inducing like all sorts of ships.

Speaker 7 (02:03:28):
It's like a Harry Potter bag and I just keep
pulling stuff out of it.

Speaker 3 (02:03:31):
And it's it's just the logic.

Speaker 1 (02:03:33):
It was like a great They're like, we should do something,
or the idea is we should do something around Tasmanian times,
and then that's just what came out in the end. Terrible.

Speaker 3 (02:03:43):
I assume on the show.

Speaker 1 (02:03:46):
I'd love to have.

Speaker 2 (02:03:48):
I assume your company has competitors. Have they Have they
been excited for you guys? Have they been critical of
what you've done? Are they like, damn, we thought we'd
land on the moon first.

Speaker 7 (02:03:59):
I think it's I'm aware we're the only the extinction
species preservations.

Speaker 2 (02:04:02):
Nobody else, the only people.

Speaker 7 (02:04:04):
We truly compete with the other nation states. You know,
Korea has pursued some of the stuff. We know China
has an interest in it, but it's not really at
a company level. I think you're acutey. I think you're
about to see people come in, but they're about four
hundred and fifty million dollars in five years late.

Speaker 1 (02:04:19):
Are you guys constantly suns discouraged?

Speaker 6 (02:04:22):
Are you guys constantly getting like petitioned by people or
or organizations about like their pet the extinction project or
their pet project to prevent something from their animal.

Speaker 7 (02:04:36):
You know what we get. We get a lot of
that where it's you know, hey, THI listen, is a
really cool project. But did you consider about like the
red pilliated northwest woodpecker. Right, it's like some random bird
that you got well I didn't actually let me look
it up, and you go, well, it's not really just
extirpaated from that area. It's still lounge. Yeah, right there,
you get a lot of that type of stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:04:56):
Dude, Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 7 (02:04:57):
Man, Hey, always great to be here. You guys, come
on time you want I appreciate that, because I'll take
you up on that, because you know, we're working in
Yellowstone on a pretty regular basis now, so we're up
in your neck of the woods.

Speaker 2 (02:05:07):
People aren't gonna like to hear that.

Speaker 1 (02:05:08):
I don't think.

Speaker 7 (02:05:09):
Well, if you're not dire related.

Speaker 1 (02:05:11):
Let me give you my end, let me give you
my end sentiment about the whole thing. I think there's
things that happen in American culture, global culture, whatever. There's
things that happen to make everyone dumber, and there's things
that happen to make everyone smarter. Right, this is definitely
whatever ends up happening, like whatever happens with romulus and remissing,
like whatever happened. This made everybody smarter because everybody said, wow,

(02:05:36):
I never really thought about what is a species? What
is de extinction? How do you define a blank? Is
this okay or not okay? Like everyone got smarter and
normally stuff happens. Every big is dumber.

Speaker 7 (02:05:50):
I love that. I'm going to steal that from you
as well, because.

Speaker 3 (02:05:53):
I'm trying to get things that made everybody dumber.

Speaker 7 (02:05:55):
This isn't that positive.

Speaker 1 (02:05:56):
I think, Yeah, everybody got dumber.

Speaker 7 (02:06:00):
Yeah, people got a lot dumber TikTok. Yeah, net positive
for the world. I think that's you know, if we're
boiling down the story, this is a net positive because
no one got hurt. Nobody got hurt. We're injecting, you know,
we're injecting science into pop culture. We're injecting conservation where
you know, if you look at Google search terms and
hashtag trends from when we launched that first week, we

(02:06:20):
saw all time highs of Google searches for red Wolf,
for conservation, for the term extinction.

Speaker 1 (02:06:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:06:26):
You know, if we can push this into a dinner
table conversation for families to have with their kids talk
about the biodiversity crisis, that is a win in and
of itself.

Speaker 3 (02:06:37):
Yeah, you didn't.

Speaker 1 (02:06:37):
But and the other thing is you didn't siphon off
of limited federal spending. No, it was like willing seller,
willing buyer, willing investor, willing investment.

Speaker 7 (02:06:48):
Ben loves to say, we spared the world in another
shitty software company.

Speaker 5 (02:06:52):
I like that, right, I like that.

Speaker 1 (02:06:56):
Yeah, it's a potster, dude, but it made everybody smarter exactly. No,
I like I like it. It's like it's like a
real mental It causes a lot of mental wrestling. Yeah,
you know, what was that quote we had recently? That's
the last thing I say. But it's not really applicable here,
but I think we're Dan Floyda. No, it's a great quote.
Dann Floyes was.

Speaker 3 (02:07:15):
Saying about historians.

Speaker 1 (02:07:17):
He goes, the reason the arguments are so the reason,
it's like, the reason the arguments are so vicious is
there's nothing at stake.

Speaker 3 (02:07:29):
But he was just making a joke about his own.

Speaker 1 (02:07:31):
Discipline as a historian, you know, like, how could people
get so worked up about Clovis first or whatever? Right,
But there's something at steak here. But I think the
main thing is it's like, not the main thing. It's
just fun to watch.

Speaker 3 (02:07:44):
Yeah, I appreciate that. It's fun to watch.

Speaker 1 (02:07:46):
People like all of a sudden arguing about stuff that
the day before they didn't know.

Speaker 7 (02:07:50):
Yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker 6 (02:07:51):
You guys should do an Irish el connect.

Speaker 7 (02:07:55):
I won't tell you we're not going.

Speaker 5 (02:07:58):
Hunters would love that. Diarls could eat him.

Speaker 7 (02:08:01):
It works for me.

Speaker 1 (02:08:02):
He's got the amusement part figured out, all right. Thanks man,
I really appreciate you coming.

Speaker 7 (02:08:07):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (02:08:08):
Thank you

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Host

Steven Rinella

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