Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. What a thrilling and exciting topic we have today. We have Ben Lamb, who is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. And what are they doing? Well, they're bringing back and have the dire wolf. Yep. You know, they're focused heavily on a woolly mammoth. Yes. They have woolly mouse. They've created woolly mice. Yep. And the list goes on. Yeah. This is impossible. This is where we're at. This is a really wild episode. This is mind-blowing. It feels sci-fi, but we're living it. Yes, it's present-day sci-fi. Please enjoy Ben Lamb. We get support from Quince. You know what I think about a lot? The stuff in my closet, I actually wear. Like, not the trendy pieces, the sweater that goes with everything, or the pants that fit perfectly, the tee you kind of just throw on without even thinking. That's what Quince does. They make those pieces. That's right. 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It came to mind immediately because I know I do it. Someone cuts me off in traffic and somehow I'm still thinking about it at dinner. Two seconds. That's all it was. So, yeah, that's what I'm working on. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. You know how I feel about. Therapy. It's just necessary. In fact, sometimes I know I'm not supposed to say this. I judge you if you've never tried it. Better is a feeling defined by you. And for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress. And it's getting better at letting the small stuff stay small. That's my better. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash DAX. That's BetterHelp.com slash DAX. He's an ultra expert. Hi there. Hey, good to meet you. Ben. Yeah. Great to meet you. We met briefly. Yes, we did. Brought you guys. Colossal shirts. Oh, okay. You and your kids. Hey, buddy. Friends, grandparents. We love shirts. Anybody you want to give it away to? Can you imagine if I still had grandparents? That would be lovely. I have one grandma. You do? How old is she? She's 96. Oh, wow. Good for her. Let's map her to my mom. No, she's amazing. She's my Gigi. She helped raise me. She's the best. Hold on. Don't tell me. I know I have friends who call their grandma Gigi. I'm trying to think what ethnicity. Grease. No, it's just, like, weird Texan. It's a Texan thing. I mean, I don't know. I think I just couldn't say. So, like, my son can't say dada yet. I have young kids. So, he calls me Gaga. Oh, nice. Yeah. So, I was like, maybe, like, is this genetic? Did I, like, not be able to say grandmother? So, I said Gigi. Like, I don't know. Gaga. They all have fun names. Grandparents. Yeah, our kids call all of their grandparents Gaga. Oh, really? Yeah, it's universal. I went to the library a couple weeks ago with my wife and my two kids. And I was just taking, like. Did you use the bathroom or.? No, just to hang out at the library, right? And so, like, we do that in Texas. So, I was, like, playing with this fake fish and this, like, fake frying pan with him. He's two and a half. So, he's at this stage where he's saying things that you're like, where did you learn this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, he, like, ran over to this other mom in the library and he's like, oh, Gaga. He, like, points back at me. I'm like, when did you learn that? Like, that's a weird. That's an interesting and funny interaction where he's, like, making fun of me to this other parent. Wow. He's already backstabbed. He's already. Yeah, he's. Yeah, right, yeah. He's already embarrassed by his dad. Oh, Gaga. He's, like, rolling his eyes. It was amazing. Yeah, creating new alliances with the other people at the library. Well, you gotta practice early. But let's be honest. You just said it like you're always at the library. You have a two and a half year old. The shit I was doing. I was at Travel Town every week, the miniature train museum. Yeah. I haven't been back since they were six. Yeah. Yeah, but you're just trying to pass the minutes. The library is a babysitter's friend. I would always circulate between the park and the library. For some reason, the minutes just would not pass. Yeah. Sure, sure, sure. I couldn't understand time. Yeah, sometimes, like, the bath time, like, when I was like, you've had bath time for two hours. It's like, he loves it. Just kidding. He's in it. He's happy. Yeah, anything that they're happy doing, you'll do until they're no longer happy. How many do you have? Two. A two and a half and a eight month old. Oh, Lord. So I'm in it. And are you originally from Texas? I know you went to Baylor. Yeah, born in Austin. One of the rare people who was actually born there. Yeah, okay. And did your parents move there? So my parents lived there when they had me. They got divorced when I was very young. Yes. And then I left Austin when I was five. Then later in my life, I made it back for a few years. Then I went to Dallas, and I kind of bounced all over. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents, right? Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. So I'm not close to that. Gigi. Yeah, same. By Gigi, yeah. So by Gigi and my grandfather, Poppy, who's no longer with us. You know, my brother just kind of reframed our childhood in the most beautiful way, which was he said, you know, thank God Dad was an addict, because otherwise we would have never had, every single weekend with Papa and Grandma, and then the summers with Papa and Grandma. And they were who you'd want to be raised with. Oh, yeah. They had the time and the resources. I'm an only child. My wife is the youngest of five. Only girl. All the rest are boys. Oh, my God. And they're from Nebraska, so they're like Omaha, like hardcore. Five o'clock, they're like watching sports, drinking Budweiser, and the whole nine. They're the best. Salt of the earth. They sound fun. I love it. So we did the same thing. They were tired. We just got them to move down to Dallas. To be near us. Yes. Because I grew up with my grandparents. They had a farm outside of Dallas, and so I'd go and, like, catch frogs. I did the whole super small town thing as a kid. I loved it, and I really wanted that for my kids. And so now that they're here, it was funny. I came back from a trip two weeks ago, and my father-in-law was there with my son, and my son kept saying, hop, hop. And I was like, what are you talking about? And they had caught a frog and put it in, like, a little baby pool and swam around. And I was like, I used to catch frogs with my grandpa. And so it was cool. I feel very blessed about the childhood I had. I want our kids to be around their grandparents. It's so important. Yeah, yeah. Being on the multigenerational is really cool. A lot of wisdom to observe. Now, really quick, did you listen to Dr. Death? No. Best podcast of all time. And it was about a Baylor-educated surgeon who then practiced at Baylor, and he was completely incompetent, and he decapitated many people, including one of his friends. He was a raging addict. I was in the business school, so I didn't learn. Too bad. That skill set was not bestowed upon me. Yeah. But he was, like, your friend. Yeah, it would have been exciting if you knew who that guy was. I think at that time, he was the first doctor to ever be convicted and sent to prison for crimes committed in the operating room. Because he was drunk and stuff. Yeah, well, let's hope my story is slightly different. That would be great. Okay. And probably Baylor's like, God damn it, stop talking about that guy. Yeah. Okay, so by the time you're a senior at Baylor, you already start a company. What was the first one? Simply Interactive. It was e-learning? E-learning, yeah. What does that even mean? My uncle was on the board of Baylor. He was amazing, and he's like, look, you go to school, and you pick a major that I agree with so that we believe you'll have a job. I don't think he ever really realized I was massively unemployable. Okay. Over time, I think he probably realized that. He's like, you do these things, you take out loans, and then I'll pay for your college, right? So it's like, it's amazing, right? Like, single parent, like, it's an amazing gift that was given to me. And so I was a finance and accounting major because that was one of the check marks in my, arrangement with my uncle. And then I had this great teacher, Dr. James Moschinski, who just happened to be, in Waco, Texas, of all places, one of the world's top cognitive psychologists. Whoa. And he had built a lot of the fundamental models for instructional design to help people, like, how will people learn on computers? Just to, I guess, kind of date me in my time, this is when the internet was moving with this thing called Flash, Macromedia Flash, if you remember those days of the internet where everything was, like, dancing around. I learned that, just kind of self-taught myself, that and partnered with Dr. Moshinsky and started an e-learning company because at the time all these corporations were trying to take training online it was more e-reading than e-learning and you were just like flipping the pages and we wanted to add games and unification multimedia yeah yeah it was like if you're doing something with industrial wastewater disposal that's boring it sounds boring we did it for genentech a big biotech in south city san francisco so if you go take photos of marin and you build this emotional connection to the content a video game yeah if you could play if you could make it more interactive and emotional it's like hey if you throw this water away the wrong way it's going to ruin this park you play with your kids yeah if you can make it like hyper localized and emotional that's kind of our thesis and we grew the company what year was that that was 2004 22 years ago okay so you exited that thing and then i'm just going to speed through you created and sold five or so companies from gaming to there's all kinds we made a lot of shitty games we made one good game okay that's all it takes now we made like 11 shitty games and then the last one was pretty good yeah how do you end up meeting or approaching george church and then let's just talk about who george church is so george is amazing he's somebody i'm shocked we haven't had you should have him you should have him he is look you could say oh you're biased but he is the most interesting person in the world he's six seven oh he is yeah he's huge massive beard looks like santa claus has narcolepsy and so but he literally will talk about superpower where he'll fall asleep and his brain like the ram the random access memory it's still working and so he'll fall asleep and like totally like muppet out yeah but then he'll like jump back in and be like well the solution's xyz and you're like what just happened it's like it's incredible and he thinks that it's like you're getting into a save state like in a video game like when you're sleeping and then it comes back he's awesome so george has got a very prolific lab he's seen as like the father of synthetic biology using directed evolution and genetic engineering and computational biology to engineer life in a direction that we want right like that's what his lab is like prolific for right did we say he's a professor at harvard yeah he's professor at harvard he's a geneticist he's a molecular engineer he's a chemist if we have him on i hope he falls asleep in the oh he will oh well yeah this is comfy i always try to keep him uncomfortable when i'm around i'll have rob dim the light slow yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah but and he was also somehow involved early with crisper no yeah yeah so he in walter isaacson's book right walter's amazing who wrote a book about jennifer doudna who's also equally amazing george is actually a supporting character throughout it and those crisper wars were so interesting between the brode and berkeley and nothing ever really seems to ever get solved but george is actually one of the first people to use genetic and crisper specifically in mammals so he was using mammal and human cells and publishing it before anyone what were the first things i don't know what the first edits were that he did but and this is what you'll love about george is that he truly believes in like open source software he's like how do we democratize these things so that everyone's genome should be sequenced not just the super rich or if you sequence the genome for a woolly mammoth he wants that accessible to anyone who would be studying anyone so we very much saw like in our first meeting which i'll get to it was very clear how aligned we were like philosophically i personally am biased but i think that george should have gotten a lot more credit on some of the things that he did and i think that's some of the crisper nobel prize type work but george is like they're amazing they really did the like he is the most like i just want to work with everybody i just want to collaborate i want to share information we as humanity need to go faster we're not gonna go faster by holding stuff in and i was running another company of mine and we were at this moment where it looked like we were going to be bought it was a defense company a big defense contractor was going to buy us it was right before covid spoiler they ended up not buying us i'm sorry sounds like it would have been lucrative i'm sorry well it was a defense company it was a defense company it was a defense company it was a defense company it ended up getting bought later so it was funny it all worked out the way i was supposed to so i reached out to george because i was really interested in synthetic biology and my thesis when i called him was a myriad of these tools exist for genome engineering dna synthesis being able to synthesize dna cloning was getting better from an efficiency perspective where will ai access to compute and then eventually technologies like quantum be able to take our ability to use software to program life like how do we go from 90 discovery in academia to 90 engineering and 10 discovery because so much can be done through simulations or what i don't know the computer so i was really fascinated with that george is a genius so he answered that question like seven seconds on the call and he's like you know this is where i think the opportunity is going oh that's awesome amazing and then i'm like stupid level curious and i'm like what else you got what is this going on this weird lab of yours and he started telling me about all these crazy things that was so technical so over my head and i just asked him i was like okay with all this stuff if you had one project with unlimited capital what would you do because you have a lot going on in your lab 100 postdocs and all this crazy stuff and it was like a mic drop moment he's like i would just work to bring back the woolly mammoth i'd reintroduce it back into the tundra and i'd use those technologies to help conservation and also apply them to human health care i have to go to my next meeting now i have to take a six minute nap and then go to my next yeah and so the call was over and i was like is that real in what year is this 2019 okay it's 2019 so by 2019 i had already read this compelling article in my book and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to my next meeting and i'm gonna go to my next meeting in nature or something that they had found some woolly mammoths in the permafrost in siberia and that they were optimistic that there was sperm in the testicles that could be harvested and potentially bred with the asian female elephant which you can breed an african and an asian female but not an asian male and african female but very few people know that what you just said that's where i bailed out and i was very excited about this notion of impregnating an asian female with the sperm of a female and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to my next meeting and i'm gonna go to my found woolly mammoth in the permafrost. So what happened with that? I know about that thing. So George, pre us having our first call, and then I was in his lab a week later for a meeting. Before all of that, that was 2019. Since 2008, journalists and others had, there are these discoveries on fully mummified baby mammoths. All of these discoveries are happening as people were- As climate- Yeah, as the permafrost- Yeah, yeah. Which is really bad. One of the very few silver linings. Yeah, it's the only one. So as that's happening, they just keep coming back to George and saying, can you do it? And George is like a mathematical guy. He's like, well, there are no scientific gates. There's engineering challenges, but we kind of have everything we need to put this together to make this happen, right? Yeah. And so it was amazing. He blames journalists and the community for why he's working on the mammoth, but on the cover of his book, his only book, there's a mammoth. So I don't know if I totally buy that. So he was aware of that. They never actually did find sperm. They found a lot of tissues. And what happens is when they go into this tissue that starts to be like emulsified and like leaky and stuff like that, they think that there's viable cells there. There are no viable cells there. Even when they have the full carcass. Yeah, even when they have the full carcass. Because DNA degrades at such a crazy rate. Because it's in the nucleus of the cell. Yeah, it's in the nucleus of the cell. And you'll get some mitochondrial DNA. You'll get pieces of the DNA from the cells, but you're not going to get a living cell. So if you wanted to impregnate through sperm, you're going to need living sperm, which they did not have. Or you're going to need, if you're going to clone it, a lot of times people are like, get on with it with you guys, right? It's like, why are you guys taking so long? Because they just think that we could just clone a cell, right? But there are no living cells. We have about 104 mammoth genomes across 1.3 million years of genetic divergence. And they're all massively fragmented. They're all super broken DNA pieces because they degrade over time. If you had to assign percentages, each of these samples is what? Is it 2% of the DNA? So I think we have now assembled a fully complete, fully mammoth genome at this point. By piecing together all these different samples over a 1.2 million year horizon. And aligning it to the Asian elephant, which is the closest genetic match, right? Right, 99.4. It's 99.6. It actually depends technically on how you measure it. It's 99.6. It can be as low as 99.2 because there's a mass variety. 99 plus. Are they smaller? They are. Yeah, most people think that mammoths were like these giant things, but they're actually woolly mammoths, which is what we're focused on, are about, about the same size as Asian elephants, which are a little bit smaller than African elephants. You did have straight test elephants. You had some other stuff that was like quite big. They're still very large. They're just not, sometimes people will think them was like the size of like buildings. Yeah, I don't think I knew they were even as big as elephants. You thought they were smaller? Yeah. There's pygmy one. Pygmy on Channel Islands. Yeah, Channel Islands, yeah. That's what I want replicated is the pygmy one so I can have one in my house. You're not alone. That request comes in more often than you think. I bet. Pygmy one's a pygmy. I was like, let's get to a mammoth, right? And so George was getting all of this data over the years. He'd got a $100,000 gift from Peter Thiel, who is not an investor in our business, but he'd given a $100,000 grant to the church lab to work on the mammoth. And George stretched that out over like six years, right? He's like spending $12,000 a year just keeping it alive. And this ended up being this project where people knew that George was working on it, but it wasn't like funded to the way of like one of his big sponsors. And it's not on the front burner for him. Right, right, right. I'd say it's probably in the front of his mind. Yeah, not allocation of lab time and resources. How old is he? 72. 72 now. Oh, I know, hurry. No, he's the best. It scares me. He just had a birthday. He's the best. He's taking his name out. He should just, you know, maybe like vitamins. You would never, he is so. He's gonna pass GG at some point. Yeah, he's gonna pass GG. Not to mention if anyone's gonna get the epigenome anti-aging, he'll be the first to dial up. He's definitely working on all of the anti-aging stuff. So he's great. So he had been working on it for a long time. That's not why I called him. But then I hung up the phone and. and I went through this like weird introspection. You've talked to other tech CEOs. If they say they didn't say this, they're just completely lying. Every tech CEO and founder I ever know has talked about, oh, I'm doing this, I wanna make an impact, I wanna change the world. But most companies, they fail. They get bought, they go public. I don't know how many of them really put a dent in the universe. Like Steve would always talk about, yeah, they put like really a change. I left the call really inspired and I left the call thinking, is this an opportunity that's being presented to me by the universe? And if I don't take it, I can say I'm building this company that's gonna create a lot of shareholder value, it's gonna make money, and it's gonna provide jobs and services function. But I don't think I could ever hear myself say, and I think this is gonna leave an impact on the world. Like I really felt this was like, hey, do you wanna- This is your once in a lifetime swing. That's how I viewed it. And I was like, look, I built and sold six software companies. And I was like, if it all fails, I could just go do that. There's no risk. How's the call back go? So what's the second call? The next day. I literally called the next day. I stayed up all night. I was at my house in Austin, stayed up all night, couldn't figure out, there was this mammoth through line. You could hear this different inflection in his voice, how passionate he was about it. So I called him back the next night and literally I talked to him. I was like, I think I just need to come see you. Which if I were him, I'd be like, this guy's weird. I talked to him yesterday. So I went up there a week later, within a week I was in his lab, spent the whole day with him. We couldn't be more philosophical and philosophically aligned. And it was funny, I was in his little office. He came in, he's like standing up. He's like, I'm not gonna sit down 'cause I may fall asleep. And I was like, I didn't know some of these attributes about him at the time. So I was like, is that 'cause he's just like, is this one of those like power plays where he's like, I'm gonna bail if I'm not interested. It's just easier for me to walk out. Like, I didn't know what I was working with here. I brought one of my lawyers at the time to see what are the requirements of doing a deal like this and how do we work with Harvard? And then I brought a scientist and we went in, talked about it. We talked more philosophically, like how we think about things. I left that meeting 400 times more excited than going into it. - And you must have told him, I have the capacity to bring to you quite a bit of funding. - We actually ended the meeting with, I was like, I think there's no one less qualified than me to do this. So it makes perfect sense that I should go do this. - Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking. What, from his point of view, what are you offering that he's even interested? - I said, look, I'm very good at building teams of people that are much smarter than me. Your science teams are much smarter than me, number one. Number two, if you have a plan that you believe we can get there and you think these are engineering challenges, I know how to solve engineering challenges. I know how to hire people to solve engineering challenges. And I know how to rise capital towards it, right? Our first investor deck was quite shitty though. And so it wasn't a great deck. It's like, we have no deal with Harvard. We have no IP. We have no scientists. This guy thinks he can bring back a mammoth and we had no monetization models at that time. - Well, I was gonna say, you have to- - Put money in. - You have to have some monetization scheme. - We do now. - Otherwise, what are we doing? Like, how are we funding this? You know, there's no money in bringing back the mammoth unless you have a theme park, I guess. - You should have sent it to Dax, his deck. - Well, many celebrities are his first round investor. - Okay, I was gonna say. - Chris Hemsworth, Peter Jackson, Paris Hilton. - 'Cause they want the piggy pens. - But they came to us, which is crazy. We've been very fortunate. In the early days, we went to investors, some of which I'd worked with in the past, some of which just had our long-term views. And our original pitch was, hey, look, this is a systems model. No different than building software. It's a systems model. No different than building space hardware. If we are going to bring back a mammoth, we are going to engineer solutions and technologies along the way to build a synthetic biology platform that the same platform that can make you a mammoth can make you a bunch of other species. But it can also create disease-resistant cattle or drought-resistant plants. Or we will advance the technologies to do this, the number of edits that we have to make. We will advance all of the genome engineering and DNA synthesis tools. To the point that it's now viable for humans. So if we are successful. It feels like the product's the mammoth, but really the product is the tools that can get you the mammoth. It's the technology. It's that end-to-end kind of developmental biology, genetic engineering and cellular engineering and computational biology stack. It is that infrastructure and then the innovations and inventions that come along that path. You know, I was thinking of the perfect parallel model is really in the automotive space, which is, when you race on Sunday, there's no reason to race. It's a huge money loss for all the manufacturers. But the tech discovered through racing funnels down into the production car and they always justify racing to stockholders as like what we learn on Sunday, we put in the car on Monday. And that's kind of the model, right? Yeah, I didn't know that. We would talk to investors early on about like Apollo. It's like, hey, a lot of stuff came out of humanity going to the stars. We believe that here. And we believe that the total addressable market for, programmable life, being able to engineer life the way we want will have a massive ripple effect for the world and in agriculture, food security, environmental cleanup, human health care. And so that market and those opportunities actually are significantly larger than we initially anticipated. Okay, so walk me through from 2021 when you formed the company, what are the baby steps and accomplishments along the way kind of in order? Like what's the first thing you guys are successful at doing? Pre-launch, the first thing that I think we were pretty successful on was we hired a chief animal officer. We were four days out from launching the company and a buddy of mine that had bought one of my previous companies was like, "Hey, do you have anyone that's ever raised an elephant on your team?" You know, you have these moments where people say something to you that you're like, "Wait." I called George, I was like, "Hey, we should hire someone that's like birthed an elephant and like knows like what they eat." What they need to survive. What they need to like, not just survive, but to thrive. And George was like, "Oh, that's a really good idea. We should." He's very thoughtful. And he's very hilarious. He was like, "We should think about this." I was like, "No, I got a guy." And so one of the first things we did was, I think we've been smarter enough to know and listen to feedback. You'll see this theme, I think, through all of Colossal. We've got a lot of feedback. And a lot of feedback's been really helpful. Like someone saying, "Do you have someone on the team that's ever raised an elephant?" We're like, "No, I gotta go. 'Cause I gotta go find that person." We got a great guy doing that now. But since the launch of the company, the most important thing is we have built, and you should come see the labs, and you should bring your kids if you want. - They're in Dallas? - Yeah, we're in Dallas. So we have a lab in Melbourne, Australia, but the one in Dallas is cooler. But you go to both if you want. We have built a team of 260 scientists and a collaboration with 17 of the top academic universities around the world. And we fund 80 postdocs in academia. And then we have about 75 conservation partners around the world. So I would say that before we get into like scientific or any major milestones, the thing I'm big is it's the team, right? It's unfair, right? Like if you look at your alternative for genome engineers or synthetic biologists, it's you go into academia, which has a lot of brokenness to it right now, right? It's underfunded, it's highly competitive. - You have to publish. - It's papers, not progress, right? You know, we have this argument a lot with people where it's like, why don't you publish papers more? And I was like, well, we'd have to do 10 papers for every press release we do. I'd have to hire 200 people just writing papers. And if I stack up a bunch of papers, that's not gonna make a dodo, right? And so that's one. And then two, they can go into like biopharma or work on yeast models. If I'm like, hey, come with us and I need you to go to the Arctic with me and we're gonna extract DNA, like Indiana Jones style. And then we're gonna go to like the basement and like sub-basement for Smithsonian and get ancient DNA. And then you're gonna help build the AI models to do all the comparative genomics and work with mammoth cells. - You're gonna be the Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. - That's so much better. - It is. It's great. And you can see the product of it. And when we really start to talk to our recruits as scientists, we always talk about its value and creation and our shareholders and impact from our conservation issues, but inspiration. And we're like, we want to do this in a way that gets people stoked about science again. 'Cause I think we've lost that in America. And it's a big passion of mine now with my young kids. And so it gives us an unfair recruiting advantage for kids. Like I got Beth Shapiro, who was our chief science officer, who literally wrote a book saying how to clone a mammoth and it ends with, you can't. And so I was like, she's perfect. 'Cause she's thought about all this, right? So when I sat down with Beth, she's like, you read my book. I was like, no, but I know how it ends, so we're good. And I was like, you cannot clone a mammoth, but you can engineer one from scratch. - Quickly, why did she say you can't clone one? - Well, because there are no living cells, right? So you can't just do an exact duplicate of what exists. - And even theoretically, there's no mammoth that's been frozen perfectly. In Jurassic Park, they use the MacGuffin, the device of the mosquito frozen in amber who has sucked the blood from a dinosaur. - And by the way, I don't want to break hearts. But there is most likely, George and I don't like to say impossible, but most likely there's no dinosaur DNA. 'Cause it's about 65 million years old. There's been lots of very warm periods of time between now and then. And amber forms is very porous, so it's not a great DNA store, not that we've tried. It forms in hot, wet places. DNA likes cold, dry places, right? And so that's the best preservation. So if something could like die in like the perfect cave, that's what's best for us. - Okay, okay, okay. So you've got the team there. You've got the team. That's the first thing you're happy about now. What are the incremental? - Big milestones are, from an editing perspective, we're now doing about 300 edits at a time all over the genome. Just to put that in perspective, the two most genetically modified multicellular organisms in the world, like animals, are woolly mice, which are objectively the cutest mice in the planet, if you haven't seen them. - They look like little hamsters, Monica. They have kind of the woolly mammoth hair. - Oh, really? - But they're on a, you would like it. - Yeah, we like mouse, mice here. - We like mouse, not mice. - Mice means infestation, mouse is a friend. Yeah, but the mouse are great. And so we identified the core colors, the hair texture, the length, the density. And it was about eight genes that we put all into a mouse. There's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between a mouse and an elephant. We have a huge animal welfare team. We spend a lot of time with American Humane Society and others. And so we're not going to go take, do anything super weird. So we're not going to take a elephant gene and stick it into a mouse because we know it's probably not compatible with life because there's too much genetic divergence. This is what's so amazing about the Woolly Mouse Project, besides their objective cuteness, is that we did it all in 30 days. So we took our mammoth edits, right, which we're editing into an Asian elephant cell because it's the genetic donor that we work with. And I'm sure we'll talk about the process at some point. We took those edits, found the functional equivalents in mice, right? So we're putting mice edits into mice that are the equivalent of the mammoth edits in elephants. I was going to say, is this where now AI has very helpful in this? And we had to build. We had to build all this bespoke. At the time, like OpenAI and Claude were like great at like helping kids cheat on term papers. Ancestral state reconstruction models was not on the menu. And so we had to build all these comparative workflows and comparative genomics models. And so we took that, made the prediction, made the edits. 30 days later, the mice were born and 100% they were healthy. 100% had exactly the phenotype or physical attribute that was expressed from the genes. Meaning that it looked exactly as we predicted. And it worked within 30 days. Like we didn't have to do lots of trials and errors. Yeah, and not to get bogged down in biology, but yeah, you can be genotypically something and then phenotypically something else. So there are steps between what the recipe says and what comes out of the oven. And what actually comes out of like when it gets expressed. Yeah, it's now interacting with the epigenome and all these other things that it could not produce the phenotype you were looking for. 100%. You can only get half excited when you have the genotype figured out. I know, exactly. Stay tuned for more Armchair Experts. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your teeth before walking into a meeting. You smiled at six people in the hallway. Confidently. Full teeth. You felt great about it until you caught your reflection and realized you'd been carrying a piece of spinach like an accessory since lunch. Yeah, checking first is a good idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands. With Allstate. Potential savings vary subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates. Northbrook, Illinois. We get support from YouTube Premium. 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Like, did you know, Premium automatically downloads videos from channels you subscribe to? So even when I forget, my content is still right there for me. So if you're like me and you already like YouTube, you're going to love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. We get support from Superhuman. I'm someone who wants to do big, meaningful work, but the small stuff eats up, my day before I even get to it. The endless emails, docs, scheduling, follow-ups that pile up. By the time all that's cleared, there's no energy left for the ambitious stuff. Most AI tools promise to fix that, but they require opening a new tab, re-explaining everything from scratch every single time. A week later, it's just another thing collecting dust in the browser. Superhuman from the makers of Grammarly is different. It's already embedded inside the tools people are using. Email, docs, browser. It's not waiting to be, you know, found. It's already there working alongside clearing what's in the way. So the focus stays on what's actually worth doing. A thought partner that's already up to speed. No catching it up. It knows the style, the workflows, and it backs people up without getting in the way at your service, not after your job. That's the difference. Give it a try for yourself. Start streamlining your workflows with Superhuman. Try today at superhuman.com. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers? Which is a fair question. Yeah. So Instagram has got something called teen accounts and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sleep mode is genius. Right. And here's the thing. For anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age appropriate experiences for teens. I am really glad Instagram is helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. You have to do the protein modeling to figure out what the protein is. Most people, when they think of DNA, they think of that twisted ladder, which is great, right? Like the Jurassic Park did a great job for us. People understand these things. The double helix. The double helix, right? But people are like, oh, that's what it looks like. So take that double helix and then just, compress it with like the force of God down in this crazy ball. And then you have proteins that come off. It's very complicated. The folding of it and where you actually have connection points. All of those things matter in epigenetic expression. There's a project we haven't announced yet. And I was walking one of our government friends through it and I was showing them the progress on this thing. And I was showing them the edits and they were like, oh, that's great. You're sexy. Yeah. But let me show you what we actually had to do. And then there was like down to the organic chemistry level of like, this is the compound that we had to figure out how to produce. We had to then go do an analysis and all these other species to figure out how they produce those. What are the common genes? How can those be activated? And then how do we model that engineer that, including engineering, the binding sites and the activation to get the expression? Yeah. Jesus. Crazy. Like people sometimes are like, can't they, you're just taking like a mammoth gene. You found the mammoth gene. You're like, oh, that's a mammoth gene. You just stick it in. Right. Control C. Control V. Are we just copying and pasting it? And again, back to the AI, for you to have compared all the other animals, 50 plus years, right? Yeah. For humans to go through that, or even look at the speed that they mapped the first human genome. And that was like a 25 year project or something. Billions of dollars. You've mapped this wooly mammoth in a few years with shitty, with very shitty, broken DNA. Not like taking hours, like fresh out of the kitchen. Right. And then we have multiple species going on and then we have a lot of research species going on. So there's a ton that we are constantly mapping. Okay. So let's talk about the dire wolf. We had the mice. I was sitting, getting interviewed at South by people were losing their mind on it. The mice were on Saturday night live. The mice were on the mice were on John. So they were everywhere. I wish you brought one. Nah, sorry. They're in a pretty controlled, like these wolves are good luck finding. Yeah. Do you know about these geolocators? Someone was just telling me about this, that there's these contests. They show people like a five second snippet. Of a live feed cam from somewhere. And these geolocators will figure out it's insane. I'm not going to challenge them. No, we have taken very thoughtful measures to the point of like planting, non-indigenous trees. Flora. Yeah. We've been pretty thoughtful about it. No one will find our stuff. There's red herrings everywhere. Okay. But I'm sitting there and everyone's losing their mind and I'm like, well, the dire wolf project is going to be interesting because we had this moment. We had dire wolves. We had the first most genetically modified multicellular, origins of the world is the dire wolf for 20 out of 10. So we're sitting there like we thought people were going to like be excited about the woolly mouse. Yeah. The dire wolf. I remember being on South by being interviewed, kind of zoning out for a second saying what is going to happen in three weeks when we announced this? Yeah. And that fear was massively realized three weeks later. It was just three weeks later. You announced the dire wolf. Yeah. So tell Monica about the dire. Yeah. Other than what I know from game of thrones. Wow. That's what everyone. Yeah. So we recognize that. And so we have this. Multi-dimensional model of how we think about why to bring back a species. What is the indigenous people groups care about? Why did they go extinct? Can they survive today? What's their environmental impact? Can any of the technologies that are developed on the path to the extinction of that species help existing species? Right. And the dire wolf checked pretty much the dire was not our initial list, right? It was like mammoth dials, Tasmanian tiger. And that's why the Hemsworth got involved because they heard they were working on the Tasmanian tiger. Right. And for us, that just wasn't on the list. It just wasn't a top thing. Because people had sampled La Brea Tar Pits, got zero DMs. DNA due to heat and acidification. So nothing they could find. We started this process. We started having conversations with indigenous people groups here in the U.S., a few others. And we were with Chairman Fox of MHA Nation up in North Dakota. And he told us this whole story. We were on his land and they're walking us through everything, told us a story about the great wolf. And he's like, you know, they were dire wolves. And like you said, with high conviction, I was like, really? And so we started talking all about it. He goes, yeah, we as tribes always think that our ancestors communed with the dire wolf. And it was this big white wolf. And I was like, maybe we should bring back the dire wolf. They died off like 10,000 years ago? Yeah, 10 to 12,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah. And they're just much bigger than a wolf. Six feet, nose to tail, and 150 pounds. So fucking big. Yeah, so about 30% bigger than a normal wolf. Okay. And we knew all of what Dax had from the fossil record. What we didn't know is there are certain things, like there were specific gene variants that we could tell that made them white. So we had two dire wolf samples that produced viable DNA. A tooth that was about 13,000-ish years old, 12,000 years old. And then a skull that was 73,000 years old. And just an ear bone in the skull. That's 72,000 years old. We had 60,000 years of genetic diver. I mean, think about that for a second. Wow, yeah. There's more genetic divergence between those two samples than our most recent sample and wolves today. Yeah. Right? Also, their fecundity rate and how long they live, the amount of generations within that 60,000 would be the equivalent of probably 300,000 human years. We got so much data from that. That's insane. Okay. So we took that data and we mapped it. At the time, people believed that dire wolves were closely related to jackals because it's Game of Thrones. People wanted to study it. And they only got about a fraction of the DNA. The fragments that they got aligned mostly to jackal because we had about 500 times more DNA than anyone ever seen on dire wolves. We actually found like, oh, they actually map closer to wolves, gray wolves specifically, which is what you would think. There were things we didn't know. One thing we didn't know is we knew the fur was white. We knew the specific genes, but we didn't know exactly what the texture was going to be like. They had this like mane to them, which I know sounds crazy. Take like a lion and then take like a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog and it's somewhere in between. Or chows even have that kind of a bit of a mane. It's crazy. At the end of the day, we took a 73,000-year-old skull and a 12,000-year-old tooth and made puppies. And before we announced them to the world. Romulus and Remus. Romulus and Remus were the first two. How small were they? Oh, they looked like little pandas. They were small, but they were pretty big at the time. At six months old, they were already 80 pounds. Oh, my God. The photos I've seen are from when you allow time to look at them. I didn't see that mane. Has that mane come in? It's come in more, yeah. Oh, wow. Are there more recent photos? Yeah, we put them out online. Oh, you do? Yeah. So when was this? How old were they? We showed them to the world when they were about seven months old. And the little girl was two months old, so we couldn't see her. She's Khaleesi. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Which, by the way, we got a lot of photos. We got a lot of feedback where they were like, well, you know, Khaleesi was not, was a Targaryen, not House Stark. True. And I was like, no, we are not that dumb. We do understand that, but we were trying to be like. It sounds cooler than Ned Stark for a girl. No, but it could have been Arya. Ooh, that would have been nice. Yeah, so we got. Okay, all right. We already thought. You already fucked up. No, but our thought process was, we actually had a thought process. Our thought process was on this, was that, hey, we already have dire wolves, so the Stark lovers will already be in this. Let's give something for the Targaryen lovers. Interesting. We were trying to be thoughtful about this. Okay, you might need to do dragons for them. So Peter Jackson is one of our investors. This is a crazy stat. This is actually one of the things I'm most proud of about this company. 30% of our investors come to us from their kids. Oh, I bet. Yeah. So their kids see it. Their kids get excited about it. They tell them, right? And they reach out to us. So Peter reached out to us, and basically my first call with Peter and his partner, Fran, he basically cussed me out because I was not working on the moa, which he, as a Kiwi, felt very strongly that I was not working on the moa. 12-foot-tall bird. Yeah. No wings. When I say no wings, not like little stubs or flightless. No wings. The feathers are almost like hair-like. When you're thinking of the ethics of this, we know for certain that humans caused the extinction of the megafauna. Like they were thriving in the Americas. The Homo sapiens arrived. There is a inverse relationship. You can track pretty much one-to-one. Yes. And same with the arrival of people in Australia. They killed off all this megafauna. We killed off the giant sloth here. So humans got rid of all these animals that we don't know. Maybe they would have made it. Maybe they wouldn't have. But certainly we caused the extinction of so many of these animals. So many of these things. Yeah. And then recent extinctions, like with the Tasmanian tiger and thylacine, we, the Australian government, I don't want to say we because people are like, wait, Colossal killed off the thylacine, then bring it back. The Australian government actually put a bounty. The Australian government actually put a bounty on the head of killing Tasmanian tigers. Wow. So they were paying people to eradicate this species. It's like the buffalo here. Yeah. Get them out of the way for the railroad. They were probably eating something. They were pests. No, they believed that they were killing sheep and eating sheep. Okay. There's no data. Go talk to all the Tasmanian tiger experts. There's no data they ever did that. What was happening is they were stealing each other's sheep and then blaming it on the Tasmanian tigers, right? Also, they had now had canines probably involved. Yeah. They had the dingoes and other stuff that came in, right? So you have this movement across the world. And so as Colossal has grown in our technology capabilities, as well as financial support from our investors, we've broadened the horizon. So now we're working on the Tasmanian tiger, the moa, thanks to Peter Jackson and a handful of other species. But when I was with Peter, going back to the direwolf, when I was with Peter in his house in Auckland, I was like, hey, I want to show you something. I plugged in the computer to his little HDMI thing and showed him the first howl. It's not a highly produced clip, right? It's kind of a. It's kind of just like with an iPhone. The first what? It was the first howl from the direwolves. Oh, howl. When they were puppies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we played it for him. He's like, this is what you need to lead with. It's like, oh, we're going to do this big production. He's like, no, no, this is what you show. Trust me. I was like, I think you should probably trust Peter Jackson. Yeah. Storytelling. Yeah, he's moderately good at this. And then he's like, have you shown this to George R. R. Martin? So I said earlier, I guess slightly incorrect. The only person we did pursue in the celebrity world was we reached out directly to George R. R. Martin because Peter introduced us. And Peter told him, he's like, you just need to get on Zoom with this guy. So I got on Zoom. I shared my screen. George R. R. Martin cried on the call. He's like, is that what I think it is? I was like, yes. Very few people have seen them. I was like, you made these popular for the world. And I was like, do you want to? And he's like, can I invest? Can I be involved? I was like, sure, sure. I was like, we'd like for you to come see them at an undisclosed location. So he and his wife. Somewhere in the world. They flew out. They flew out. And they held them when they were babies. And he was like, he told me, like, one of the best days of his life. Wow. We have more dire wolf puppies that we've talked about that will be born in the near future. We are working on the next litter. And he texted me. He's like, are they born yet? Can I come see them? So I do need to point out at this point that you have critics. And you have a lot of people saying, you know, these aren't dire wolves. And Beth Shapiro, your head scientist, has stated pretty clearly, these are gray wolves with 20 edits. Right. Right? Yeah. It's a bit semantical. We are very clear on this. And sometimes this frustrates our critics, just being transparent about it. We believe in freedom of speech and choice, right? And so, like, if you want to say our mammoth is a woolly mammoth, great. And if you want to say our mammoth is a cold-tolerant Asian elephant with 200 edits across 1.4 million years of genetic divergence of alleles that are then activated epigenetically to produce the phenotypes that are cold-tolerant to serve an ecological function that once mammoths and mastodons were too, you can say that, too. But don't you think, so one of the definitions of a species. One of the 36. Oh, there's a lot of definitions. One of the 36, I didn't know there were 36, but one of them is that they can produce a fertile offspring, which is why a, I don't know, a mule, whatever you cross a donkey and a horse, it's not its own species because it can't have its own children. So, don't you think the debate ends when you create the woolly mammoth and it then starts having fertile offspring? Now it is its own species, no? No, I don't. Because if you. If you go talk to a paleontologist that will not agree with that definition of speciation, the problem is we as humans like to put things in boxes. Yes. We're very good at compartmentalizing. We're categorical, we love it. We like this box and this box and this box. You're like, that doesn't fit in a box. I don't understand what to do. We're very robotic in our models, right? And so, I don't think that that debate will go away. But for me, I think that's okay. So, for us, a gray wolf is just a genetically modified dire wolf. It just is. Like, there's over 3 million edits between you and me and you and me. Like, we're different by 3 million edits. For us, going from a software lens, we're going to make the edits that matter that we know drove the core phenotype. So, if you look at our 104 mammoth genomes, I can't clone them because I don't have those living cells. But magically, if I could clone them, which one do I clone? Which one's a mammoth? Of those 104, over 1.3 million years. Here's what I can tell you. We were all born reasonably around the same time, right? And there's 3 million edits for this. When you go over 1.3 million years, there's a lot of difference. But they all shared those. Those core phenotypic expressions that gave them these, like, shaggy coats, fat deposits, curved tusks. Yeah, they have 10 centimeters of fat on them. And what's interesting, though, is that it's really not the sum of the parts that make something the way we acknowledge you or you or you or you. It really is the unique parts. Yeah. It's not the sum of the parts. You show a kid a polar bear and a brown bear, you say, are they bears? A child's going to be like, yes. Like, are they the same? And they're going to say, no. But polar bears and brown bears can intermix and produce viable offspring. By that definition, they should be the same species. But one is a giant. giant carnivore one is an omnivore one's arctic adopted and white they're just different yeah yeah okay great i do have one more fun thing i always say yeah people that want to argue on is it a mammoth i'm like what do you tell your kids jurassic park's about is jurassic park a movie about dinosaurs yeah then are mammoths or mammoths or are they genetically modified frog birds which is in the movie how the that's how they're made yeah yeah yeah how big are romulus and remus now romulus right now is like 140 remus is like i think 137 138 i'm sorry how old are they now when did that happen i guess they're two years okay two years old 14 and dog years yeah they're sorry they're about to be two they're gonna be two november terrible dad like i should know that it's hard to keep it on i have biological human children so yeah they're gonna have to take precedent good because we found out one of the red flags of a sociopath is if you ask them their children's birthdays they don't know you we interviewed a confirmed sociopath who's also a psychologist fascinating she could detect when there's other sociopaths present by all these different things and one of them is if you ask them when their child's birthday is they won't know keep knowing it yeah um okay you have though declared that you're gonna have a woolly mammoth calf by 2028 yeah oh so we will not have a calf by 2028 that was our original target okay we actually just did a big story with time on this we spent a ton of time with time magazine and our scope has significantly grown so we've gone from one mammoth one cell line about 65 edits to 14 cell lines and we've already done 130 edits today so double what we anticipated and that's because we had better access to data we've also had two governments that have reached out to us saying we do not want you to make a mammoth we want you to make viable herds of mammoths to your interbreeding comment that's what they want is it top secret who those countries are top secret is a classification right and we do work with the government it's not a classified thing but these are government's choices of when they want to talk about their programs okay and we have larger partners in the program now you can see where suspicion and scrutiny would arise when we don't know what countries are funding these things well ours is right yes so our government we're very transparent with our investors we don't have any secret investors we've had state governments in the united states invest in us uh-huh we've had the federal government invest in us we've had the uae invest in us those are the only government entities i can't imagine the uae is a great place for a mammoth the uae is not one of our partners on the mammoth project okay so you're no longer saying 2028 is there some time frame our goal was to have births and announce the births i don't know if we will announce the births kind of how like the direwolves were a little bit older and there were multiple i think that's a more likely yeah this is similar to like you don't want to tell you when you're pregnant in case something happens yeah the first so it's like yeah if you get these mammoths out and the whole world knows and now they want updates and then they have like three extra trunks we spend so much time and one of the things that i think we do a really good job in our pipeline is we do genetic screening and computational analysis in full genome sequencing after every editing pass and embryo pass so we don't take anything to even potential term that has an off-target effect and meaning an unintended consequence in the genome or could have any effects that are negative for the animal welfare so we have i cook protocols we work with usda one of the things that most people think about when they think about colossal like oh those are the guys they're like doing mammoth stuff and direwolves and dodos but they don't realize that like the lab work that we do is half of it right we consult with indigenous people groups private landowners fda usda all regulatory bodies the intelligence community here in the u.s we've spent a lot of time with a lot of these folks okay so now let's get into some of the i'm gonna call them off-label discoveries that you've amassed along the way in pursuit of these what's the term de-extinction i think it's highly likely you're gonna see more species i think you're gonna see more woolly mouse type moments in the near future around things that prove out phenotypes in model species like mice are and i think you're also gonna see other extinct species some of which we've mentioned and then i think maybe you'll have more direwolf like moments of stuff we have we haven't told anybody yeah if we get a saber tooth that's what you want i'm trying to think what i well i want a lot of things what is the wish list and i'll tell you how it compares to the general wish list what's your australopithecine giganticus so for the layman so you call that gigantopithecus you will not get that from us because we have drawn a line in the sand with colossal that we do not work in non-human primates are over right so i was an anthropology major so of course i want to see how big the australopithecine giganticus is yes in real life i would love to see that yeah of all the hominids i might kill us i would love to see that too but what do you do with them that's the ethical thing it's like now you got something that's cognitively we spin out technologies and build hold companies and license out our technologies for human health care but even at colossal we do not do things with human health care because it's like the last thing you want is like they're already doing stuff there's already enough weird conspiracies we don't want to push the bounds to the point there so we just said hey we're not gonna do anything non-human primates or anything in humans yeah yeah that's probably we get in the ender tall question quite a bit yeah but they're already here they're with us we've absorbed them so they're present in your dna yeah yeah but i want to see the elephant bird very badly i do too we're not working on it saber tooth tiger of course not working on it but i'd like to see it i don't know enough have you ever been to the labrea tarpids or the natural history museum and you see the skeleton of the giant sloth that would be like 1500 pounds to do an extinct species depending on the level of engineering you've got to have a viable genetic donor so something close enough genetically that you can edit from like asian elephant for mammoth you've got to have a way to gestate it we are now working on artificial wombs we kind of broke the internet again this year when it showed off the artificial egg this year which was like straight out of a movie that's one of my three like offshoot things you've discovered along the way but there are species like right now we have an academic partner that's got 30x coverage you need about a minimum of 10x coverage but about 30x coverage so well within the capabilities of three different lineages of giant sloth so i would love to put giant sloth on there i'd love to put a stellar sea cow on there that's one of my favorites a sea cow well so think of like a dugong or a manatee that's bigger than a whale wow it's amazing so it's a mammal yeah it's amazing it was killed off to your point yeah killed off within like 30 years of discovery right we just can't gestate those things yet so there's things that aren't on the list you need a womb you need another we're working on artificial wombs we have three artificial wombs projects we're not there yet we're not there yet we're not there yet we're making progress wild what's on your list i need to like look up the list i don't know enough like i didn't know about a sea cow yeah this just goes to show my bias for things that are huge because it's all the megafauna that's what i'm most interested in i love it yeah i want miniatures i want little things got a lot of pygmies we could work with yeah yeah and i would love the pygmy hippo would be so fun this is like a pig but it looks like but they're bastards too those epitomize they're aggressive wait have the woolly mice made the megalomaniacs or the megalomaniacs mated yeah i think we're on gin three oh my god and so then what's the ethics around people having them so we don't sell anything we've been asked like the smithsonian reached out to us and they're like mice don't live forever we could taxidermy them and have them here we've had museums and zoos call us asking us to have them yeah it's just not our model are you watching monsters of god huh you must it's by eric good the guy who made tiger king and chimp crazy and now it's about the illegal reptile trade yeah but a lot of the things you're talking about are very present yeah they are yeah and the ethics behind all of it yeah we have bioethicists we spend a lot of time on that we're trying to do this in a very collaborative communal way yeah you're trying to build as much consensus as possible probably knowing you will never have full consensus you've got the guy from columbia who's quite mad about a lot of the stuff yeah yeah okay let's talk about some of the fun things that you've discovered along the way and i know one of them's a company you spun off called breaking but tell me about x32 this is amazing and this kind of goes back to taking away de-extinction and species preservation and i'd like to talk about the species preservation part because no one talks about it as much as they should that should be like what everyone's talking about because we're losing so many species but the same platform that can do directed evolution and accelerated evolution through genome engineering can be applied in a lot of other categories this incredible team at the vise institute discovered a microbe or they thought it was a microbe we'll get to that in a second that works very slow that breaks the chemical bonds of plastics and so it doesn't make smaller plastics right a lot of these plastic degradation solutions that you see pop up in the news occasionally or scientific paper they either require preheating pre-treatment and the chemicals a lot of times are worse than even plastic they're actually a lot of times making microplastics they're making smaller plastics yeah which is not what we want yeah stuff that'll penetrate your cell membrane yeah we are ingesting like a credit card size of microplastics every week yeah it's i don't believe that i've heard you say that where did you get that the interwebs yeah you can factor you guys like yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's extreme i hear that consistently i know there's a lot of moral panic about it all and i think this to me reeks that is the stat that's out there right yeah yeah i just want to know where it originated i don't know that that's actually yeah figureoutable i hope it's a fraction of that but we know it's a fraction of it we know for a fact that people are getting tested and it's showing up everywhere in the body and in embryos and in sexual organs it's getting passed on like we know for a fact it's in microplastics is in all three of us yeah and everyone listening to this i don't doubt that just to push back on them panic about it's like a i don't know about how they came to that figure yeah b they are observed we don't know that they're bad yet they're starting to do tests there are published peer-reviewed tests where they do believe that they have higher issues of cancer rates and other things so that is coming and that is out there there are some studies about it immediately can see the impossibility of figuring it out which is what is your control yeah your control we're all on planet earth eating the plastic so you're gonna say what i'm gonna compare this person's cancer rate to whose there's no control it's a really really good point it's like saying what does oxygen do to the human body yeah different variables right i don't want plastics on earth regardless of what i'm saying let me make me clear i want them out of the ocean i think that any conflict disclosures need to happen on this because it's very apparent that tax is very invested in a plastic yeah i own a petroleum refinement facility that's making polyurethane as we yeah so now that we've disclaimed our affiliates but look plastics is a big issue right they discovered this thing incredible scientist sukania and it just leaves them behind carbon and some biomass some biomass right and so they came to us they didn't know what to do with it we took it into our system we have a very robust ai and computational biology core to understand it what we found is it's actually a concert of microbes making this enzyme but when you modify the individual microbes they can produce more or less of the enzyme which can then break down different plastics 20 months it was much further than that we've now got it down to 20 months but things that take never to 800 years to 20 months yeah that's out now we are working on applications to broader use cases other than industrial wastewater and textiles and composting you're focusing on textiles right so we're focusing on textiles water treatment and composting are now things because you're like whole foods and they'll have like wrapped lettuce they can't just go throw that in the composter right and so yes they have to separate it or a lot of times a lot of food waste is being thrown because of plastic contamination not microplastics because it's wrapped in plastic they'll just throw it away which leads to methane and all these other things so composting is now use case we are looking we have nothing yet to announce yet but that team that company is deeply looking into humans and how it could be helpful releasing the enzyme in the humans i don't think the enzyme would work in the humans i think you get quite sick from it okay but some other yeah that's the power of synthetic biology right it's like scientific discovery still takes hundreds of years what do i do with it we put it through a pipeline we want to understand it and then we figure out how we edit it and regulate it so this does remind me and i listened to some great piece on it i wish i could remember and credit them but it was really about the issue of whether or not we can give patents to genomes right and it was driven by the exxon valdez oil spill and there was an engineered organism that they created to eat the oil yeah what was that biological engineering versus what you're doing do you know that okay i don't know that case i saw another case that was a naturally occurring enzyme that was discovered that was being used for a river cleanup different but similar yeah yeah and the current landscape of our regulatory framework with uspto which we work very closely with is around intentionally genetically modified organisms right so if you discover something in nature in my view and you sequence it you should give that to the world totally agree someone can't own the genome of a chimpanzee yeah you can't protect that or a human the first people if they had patented that there were companies that tried to i think originally they thought there was like a million genes and they found out there's 25 000 genes like these companies don't have them no no you can't do that right yeah you can't patent those genes now if you go spend money and time and effort to understand if i take this microbe and i supercharge it you can't take the microbe and patent it but that supercharged microbe that you've invested time and used your technologies to make that does not naturally occur in nature you can patent or lease out the technology yeah yeah okay so that's a really cool thing and then tell me about germ line editing okay there's a general moratorium on it moratorium meaning there's a pause right now there's a global consistent well i wouldn't argue it's consistent there is a public-facing global moratorium saying there's a pause on germline editing meaning that you will not do edits in a human that will be passed on into the general population pool right isn't this most prescient in the mosquito debate right now so that gets into gene drives which we'll talk about but on germline editing in humans so when you make an edit let's say that you have sickle cell anemia and we could make an edit that then gets passed on to a human and you're like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again i'm gonna make an edit that gets passed on to your offspring so that your offspring doesn't have a germline now that's different than you doing ivf and having full genome sequencing with someone like orchid or one of these other companies to test and then you choose not to choose an embryo that has that mutation right yeah like i did that i went through we went through ivf we used orchid there were certain things that i had that we didn't want to pass on germline is when you edit it and it gets passed on to the broader pool and i think the fear of that is like super intelligent very eugenics physically i only want my kids to be this tall so there is that i still think that there is a category that everyone can agree on that if we can eradicate sickle cell taste sacks exactly if we can eradicate these specific diseases from the gene pool all of humanity benefits yeah and i think we'll get there i think we as humanity will get there the problem is is that you have these rogue nation states like china where they're like we made edits to make these kids immune to hiv we didn't tell anybody we as china not us or america and then you know like they do in china if they don't like things they locked him up but he only was like locked up for like a handful of months so doesn't feel like everyone was that really mad at him for doing it but the technologies are here the technologies exist today the work that colossal is doing is significantly harder than solving those problems well if i could get on my soapbox for half a second i was just having a conversation with a couple that did very extensive embryo selection and i said my issue with it is simply if you were evaluating me as an embryo you would have seen like dyslexic adhd addicts name the shit well some of those are environmental let's say you find the gene for the adhd or you find the genes for this there are other people that didn't have those things there are a lot of people that you would have bet on a different embryo yeah and like i turned out pretty good we know all of the downside of a lot of these things but we've really yet to understand well what is the huge upside the dyslexia thing growing up i always learned you're twice as like to be incarcerated well then as i got older i learned you're four times as likely to be a ceo so how do we yeah like i'm dyslexic and i have add there you go and you got all kinds of money and you're changing the world but someone might have selected yeah i just don't think we know actually maybe too personal but it's true i want to hear with our kids we did because you can do the testing the morphological we actually had a miscarriage my wife just didn't want to go through it again yeah i didn't want to go through it didn't want her to go through it so we went through ibf went through the process of selecting embryos there's certain morphological grading and testing and there's only so much the ivf clinic will do yeah but then you can go to this next step we hired a company and use a service company called orchid full disclosure i ended up investing in the company only because i was so happy yeah george church was involved so we recommended them and they do full genome testing to your point i have a mutation on my titan gene i got really sick during covid because of so i wanted to screen for that because it is a mutation that creates a truncated protein for your heart so i did not want to pass that on so i wanted to make that decision right my wife and i agreed on that secondly though to your point they do a very good job because it's a bell curve and they give you this distributed score there are some things like schizophrenia in others that we know you have a low disposition to it and so you're probably not going to be schizophrenic you have high creativity markers like they've seen that in population well it's a dopamine dysregulation yeah what we did is said hey this is all really interesting we are going to make a first round of selections based on if it's compatible with life a and then b if it doesn't have this particular mutation that we don't want to pass on and then c we're going to look at the data and we looked at things like alzheimer runs in my wife's family so we looked at that one yeah right and we said that's a pretty big so we weighted that in our score and how we came up with it but some of the other ones that have high environmental factors we didn't factor those in now once again you get the burden of knowledge right right exactly we're getting all these knowledge i will make the argument that by the time my kids are old enough to have a disposition to have alzheimer's more than likely to get it right so we're going to look at the data and we're going to look at the data and that will be cured but we made some decisions from there but to your point if we would have done all that we wouldn't have had any kids there was no like perfect model out there so it is an interesting question as it relates to germline editing but i think that over time the world will agree that there are certain things that we should use our powers for good to eradicate that all you know ethnicities all genders and all religious affiliations would agree on i think there are some of those of course yeah yeah i would hope so as we said i don't know why anyone would be against being able to edit out sickle cell yes i think that's coming stay tuned for more armchair expert 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But even dream jobs have some not-so-dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now, that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish. Cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most. Which for me. For me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am? They never are. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Okay, tell me then about gene drives. So I'm very pro gene drives. But I'm only for them for invasive species. So the most famous example is using a genetically modified insect. They also work for vertebrates, which we'll get into. Using a genetically modified. A genetically modified insect to then put a gene that then gets distributed through the population for population suppression and control. The mosquito's the big example. The mosquito example was, there's this thesis of like, in Africa, you get malaria, you get all these disease traits, that's bad. Everyone agrees that it's bad. With that said, they didn't actually use a gene drive. They actually used a form of, kind of got marketed as a gene drive. It was more irradiated mosquitoes that lowered the populations. But the problem is, in Africa, mosquitoes are a part of the food web. They are not an invasive species. I totally agree that there's badness that comes from the spreading of disease. And mosquitoes are a major spreader of disease. In other cases where you have invasive species, where they are eradicating other species and having an effect on the landscape or on food production, that their removal only benefits the land, I'm pro that. But how do we know? Like the other one that said the extinct one was eating all the sheep, they would say that was an invasive species. Well, it was indigenous to Tasmania. This is more like when you bring in the brown. Brown trout to this stream and it displaces all other fish. So you have Asian carp in the Great Lakes and it's destroying the Great Lakes ecosystem. The U.S. government has a $3 billion environmental remediation program that will not kill them. We're dealing with invasive species right now in Texas pretty bad. There's this thing that came up from Panama because global warming, it's gotten hotter. And then also we as humans are just translocating more and more and more, right? So we have actually brought in the screw worm, which is this fly that lays larvae that literally screws down. And it spreads disease, kills cattles. It multiplies like crazy in hot weather. Texas was like 104 when I was there the other day. Yeah. Not great. New Zealand, it's either the possum. Yeah, it's bush-tailed possums. They're not supposed to be there. They come over on ships and cargo holds. They get into the population or someone brings them in as a pet. And like everywhere in New Zealand, it's like if you see one call, they got to get rid of these fuckers. Same thing for cats in Australia, right? I'm not anti-cats. I am, so it's fine. Okay. Let Monica take the hit on this one. So I'm sort of anti-cats. But in Australia, people are poisoning cats because the largest mammalian extinction rates that are occurring in the world are in Australia of unique species of marsupials because of cats. Cats are great predators. No one followed Bob Barker and like spayed and neutered them. They just released them out there, right? Yeah. So people are actually shooting. And that's an animal welfare disaster. And also we have this history of it too, Monica. It's like the snakes got into Ireland. So then they bring in mongoose to kill the snakes. Now the mongoose is like, yeah, yeah. Right. So the idea with gene drives is you can introduce a gene. It's not going to jump species. We spent a lot of time with this administration educating them on genetic engineering and showing that like with your choice on the screwworm, you have three choices. You can release tons of irradiated flies that will slow the population. And they're spending a billion five right now in Texas of doing that. Not efficient. Not going to solve the problem. We'll slow it. And then they're going to have to do it again and again. Like this is a repeat. This is a repeat thing forever. It's like the war on drugs. Yeah. Or you can inoculate the cows. Nobody wants to do that. Right. You can accept higher beef prices because you're going to have less cows. Start to import beef, which they're doing. And you're seeing the feedback on that. Or you can use a gene drive that eradicates just the species from where it's not supposed to be. Wow. And it's eight months to eradicate species versus 12 years. Wow. Eight months. Are there any pilot programs where this is happening? Ours. Okay. Okay. And it's going to be for this worm? We're trying. We have gotten approval from different groups within the intelligence community and in the defense. Okay. Are mosquitoes part of the food web here? Yeah. I hate them so much. Well, bats are chowing down on them. Spiders are eating them. Mosquitoes are absolutely key to most food webs, except in certain island states like Hawaii. Avian malaria is being spread by mosquitoes and killing a lot of these amazing, like the Hawaiian honeycrate, a lot of these amazing birds. So you could eradicate. You could eradicate them on certain islands. So if you do everything right from a conservation perspective and you don't eradicate invasive species, you're like, we're not going to drill them over here. We're not going to produce over here. You're going to protect all these lands. You're going to protect all these species. And you don't eradicate invasive species. You don't even make a dent in environmental remediation. Yeah. Like invasive species are the biggest threat to disease spread, environmental collapse, and environmental remediation efforts. Yeah. And again, we're responsible for bringing these. Yeah. We move all this stuff around. We've caused it. Or change the climate for them. Okay. Let's talk about artificial eggs, the synthetic womb, and just synthetic biology in general. Like what's happening there? We have three artificial womb projects. We have a marsupial roller culture system. So all of the pursuit of these is how do we grow animals fully outside of needing a surrogate? So we have that. We also have a second project, which is a placental. We have a placental interface, which sounds weird. We're making uterine walls. The way it works is the embryo hatches, and then we actually have a placenta that invades into the uterine wall. It's pretty amazing. It's like right out of a sci-fi movie. That's how biology works. So we're making a synthetic uterine wall so that we can make a synthetic uterine sack that you can grow them to turn in. And we've had successful invasions. So you track these on, there's this thing called the Carnegie sale of development, and we've tracked them through it, and we're pretty close on both of those. So we're going to do a little bit of a little bit of a test. We're going to do a little bit of a test. A lot went into it and then eggs actually actually based on the shape and the pressure and gravity help form the developing chicken. So the actual cells are derived from chickens? Yes. And across all, even if you were doing like a mammal wound? Oh, no, no, no. Those are just for that. How do you get the mammal cell? So the mammal cells are whoever the genetic donor is. It's the fat-tailed dunnart for the thylacine. It's a respective genetic donor. It's the gray wolf or the dire wolf. It's the roan antelope for the blue buck. Making sure I don't say anything that we haven't said. Yeah, no, you said blue buck. Because these are the closest matches. Yeah, they're the closest genetic matches. Okay. Wow. Because we're not just doing somatic cell nuclear transfer for sericeae, the cloning step. We're doing interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is crazy. You have mitochondrial rejection. There's a lot of things that go into the engineering of this. Well, also, I just know this from humans, right, that 50% of all pregnancies self-terminate. Yeah. Because 50% of the time during meiosis, there's like disjunction. And there's so many errors that happen that the body's great at detecting, screening, and then aborting. Exactly. And so if our own average is 50% success. And we're pretty good at it. Yeah, exactly. And we've been evolving for this long. Cloning efficiencies are somewhere between 2% and 4%. We bought a company called Viagin last year that most famously cloned a bunch of celebrities' dogs, including Tom Brady's dog, which like broke the internet. Celine Dion was the first. No, Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand. I'm sorry, Barbra Streisand. Sorry, Celine. That was a big deal. She did that before we acquired. They do horses, cats, and dogs. Did they do this? I saw a great 60 Minutes on the world's most famous polo player. I think he's from Argentina. Yeah, they did their horses too. And he's got eight of the same horses, Monica. The horse he won the most on, they just made eight of. That is their main. Yeah. We bought them because there's another like 18 species that have ever been cloned. They're at 78%. We didn't say that. They're at 78%. Yeah, versus 2%. Yeah, that's one of the reasons we bought them. We support their consumer business. People are worried. We actually got a lot of emails where people are like, are you going to not? Allow them to clone the dogs? I'm like, no, you keep doing that. We're using their tech for endangered species production. Because I do think that we can productionize endangered species. Yeah, because people's moral issue with cloning the animals is interesting because we've discussed this, I think, on here as well. It doesn't come at a real ethical cost, but for some reason it does strike people. There's two common pushbacks. One is legitimate, which is like all the people that are in the rescue a dog. It's like if you want a dog, there's all these dogs that need a home. Go get one of those. So that's bulletproof. That's a good criticism. People have asked me. I have two dogs, Barbie and Ken, before the movie came out. They're much older. But if you're like before the dolls. They're 95 years old. They're quite old dogs. They're not cloned, but we have. We have super enhanced. We have ended their cynicism. But they're both rescues and they're amazing, right? Yeah. So I'm very pro-rescue. We work with American Humane Society around it. But at the same time, I could see the other argument, right? So people ask me, would you clone your dogs? And I'm like, I don't know. If my kid was like, I would just go adopt another dog because I love to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if my kid's like, I don't know. I'm not in that position yet. Yeah. Well, the other criticism is you're playing God. So if the argument is semi-first, you're required to believe. I don't agree with that. No, I know. I'm just saying if the prerequisite for the argument is you must first believe in God, I'm already out. But then secondly, guess what, y'all? We've already been playing God by fucking eradicating. You're playing God when you take cholesterol medication. Yeah. Like on yourself. Or when you eradicate the dodos. Or when you cut down the rainforest. Yes. Or overfish the oceans. Like we play God every day. Yeah. So why don't we play God for some good? Yeah. But part of it is like, okay, so if your kid is like, it has to be Barbie, are we then teaching them the right lesson? Exactly. I don't know. How will they process grief? Like I understand our dogs are like a part of our family. And I think some people take that even further. I don't know. It's a good question. It's tricky. I have not cloned my dog yet. Here's the other issue is like, just because I want to do something, I don't understand why. I think that should apply to everyone. So no, I think the beauty of dogs is what you teach the kids is that they don't live that long. It's a crazy endeavor. Come fall in love with this thing. And in nine years, you'll be heartbroken. I don't want one. But that's a great experience for people to have. And then lo and behold, they get another dog and do it again. There is a beautiful life. It is worth the pain to experience a love. I do not disagree with that at all. But I don't need that to apply to everyone else because that's what I think my kids should learn. But they're not going to experience the pain if they just. Have the same. That's my point. Like, it wouldn't be for me because we all miss Lola. If ever there was a dog we would have cloned, it would have been Lola. That's part of human life. That's right. And it teaches them it's still worth it to put yourself out there for these other dogs. And love is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I say this about Biogen. Like, my goal is, you know, where we're standing up outside of the de-extinction work and the technologies that can be applied to humans and some of the other stuff we talked about, we open source all of our technologies for conservation, right? And so we have a foundation. We raised $100 million for our foundation. And we just say. Use our technologies for free for conservation, right? And we've been standing up these, like, Noah's Ark 2.0 bio-vaults all around the world because we're eradicating species so fast as humanity, we've got to have a backup plan because conservation doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating these species. And so why I bought Biogen was I think people should have those conversations. I told you. I don't know what I would do. And I own Biogen. I don't know if I would clone my dog. But that's just me being transparent about it. I'm very interested because not just that cloning efficiency, but of the, like, 18 species that have ever been cloned, like. 16 of them were done by Biogen, right? Right. Black-footed ferret, Swarovski's horse. We worked with them on some of our work on the red wolves. And so when you start to go talk to these governments, if you can have those capabilities and you have genetic engineering where you can engineer and lost genetic diversity so you don't have bottleneck and you have these bio-vaults, that one plus one plus one isn't three, that is a key backup model for life. Now, that doesn't mean we should go hunt things and kill things off, but we are in a spot where we are losing species. And some of these national pride species, ecological function species, these keystone species, or if they're important to indigenous people groups, we should do everything to accelerate their recovery. And the current recovery models, they're just not working. We are slowing an inevitable end. And that's why I bought Biogen, because one of the things we've been educating this administration on is like, hey, let us go back everything up. We're not going to ask any money from this administration or taxpayers. We'll do it on our dime and we'll give all of that data to the world. We're not keeping any secret data. And then the next thing we're going to ask them to do is like, can we pick a couple of species and can we clone them for you so that we can like build a population where they actually can survive on their own, not in a captive managed model? That's where I think that the cross-functional integration of these technologies through the lens of synthetic biology gives us so much more than just a mammoth. Okay, my last question, y'all, hey, you are a business at the end of the day. And you've raised, I think, $600 million and you're valued at $10 billion-ish. Those are rough numbers we can agree on. What's the big revenue stream? Why is it worth $10 billion? Where is money being made? So right now, we're not focused on revenue. The technologies for us are key to the revenue. And so in the short term, we've produced viable spin-out businesses. Our drug discovery platform company, FormBio, is worth over $100 million. Our plastic degradation company is worth over $100 million. We have a company called Intramec, which is our computational biology, ancestral state reconstruction business. We just raised a $3.8 billion valuation, right, is one of our spin-offs. We have two other spin-offs we haven't announced yet that we're very excited about. But I guess my curiosity is, do you think ultimately you'll be licensing or performing procedures? I think we'll be doing four things. I think we will spin-off and license technologies for new businesses, which we've gotten pretty good at in a very short period of time. We've only been around for four and a half years. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of insane. We've been around genome engineering company by at least a decade in four and a half years. So I think that's quite interesting. So we've proven the license and spin-out model of the technologies for new sectors. Licensing the technologies directly into human healthcare stuff is kind of another phase of it. Invasive species is a $6 trillion global economic impact. Wow. Oh, really? Yeah, it's huge. It's huge. Okay. We are the only company in the world that has invertebrate and vertebrate gene drives that can work across species. Okay. So that's a big. That's vertical. And then I do think there will be a component, which I say all the time, around working with governments in ecotourism and carbon credit models. If we can restore ecosystems in the Arctic by putting mammoths back in there, we will get annuitized carbon and nature credits from that. Okay. Fascinating. Fucking fascinating, man. I mean, talk about being on the brink of all this. I know. Bionic, AI. It's fun. This confluence of all the things that are exciting. This was very, very fascinating. Thanks for coming. This was great. Yes. is an armchair expert but he makes mistakes all the time thank god monica's here she's gotta let him have the facts is that yours here hers mine you know it's not a common pattern tell me collecting mugs that's just me magnets as a kid yeah like if well i mean if my mom would let me buy it like if we're on vacation or something yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i liked doing that and keychains keychains as well i love collecting yeah you're a collector i'm a what do we call it a magpie not a hoarder fuck you and thank you what do we call what do you call it um a hoarder i think it's called a magpie yeah well a magpie collects little trinkets i think i'm a magpie yeah but do you know there's it's a huge industry i've - He has been educated on this. I had no idea. - They're pretty. sure oh my god they're very smart i believe oh shit sure yeah it says highly intelligent long-tailed birds you gotta be intelligent to want to collect stuff i guess yeah oh my god magpies rank among the world's smartest animals oh boy maybe you need a magpie tattoo like my crow tattoo that would that's actually cute but you know i'm not getting a tattoo yeah where would you get a tattoo if you were gonna get one um yeah head head tattoo forehead what if i got one and so you never saw it because it was on my head my hair was covering it well you'd first have to shave your head ouch i'm not doing that um i would get one probably here commonplace that for the listener this is my forearm but like right in the crook of your elbow there below just below like when you're playing the game with your eyes closed and someone's running their finger up where's your finger at right in the crook of your elbow there right in the crook of your elbow there where you think it yeah right when you think it's there but it's not when you say stop but you're not there yet it'd be there you know what's fun about that game is you already know that you're gonna say stop too early i know and and so you do let it go further than you think and then still it's not there what a game what a game universal game or like here it would be i think on my arm i'm not getting one though no what would be the price oh god but i could still get whatever i wanted or what's the price like a big dick on your dick on your neck or something no it's a magpie on your crook of your elbow there one million dollars no this is a bad game because then people whatever i say people yeah exactly look like david sedaris's thing remember he's talking about covid and people yelling at other people and if you were just to write like i am the sun was on my face and it made me smile today oh it must be nice i don't even have a face yeah i don't even have a face boy it really that parasocial thing is i it is as bad as you know when people say like i constantly bring it up this podcast or that podcast that is me almost anything anyone says it triggers a sedaris story yes and then they got to hear it well luckily his stories are fantastic so they're good ones to bring up i i would say that's true well you just told it on an episode so maybe you don't want to but i was going to say do you want to talk about your hosting because you did bring up that you were going to host not host sorry you were going to present at the prop master awards oh yeah i did on saturday yeah yeah i can tell that okay first i have to say that um jeffrey johnson is shout out is is one of the greatest human beings in all of show business of all the different crew members i've ever worked with i just i love him like you can't imagine he was the prop master on parenthood for six years and chips and then he did chips and i think he had another job and i think he was he really did me a favor by doing chips he's incredible and we had so much fun and so at any rate they have an award show on emmy weekend and for themselves which is warranted and adorable yeah um they get to have a glitzy night like all the other departments and uh so each year i present and we he and i usually do some kind of a bit and he always thinks of it so it was i think last year because you know your your prop person has a bag with all your props in it they've got your watch they've got you know all the bullshit you got to wear and they come up to you before the scene and they put your watch on you and they hand you your ring and all this crap yeah and so he had to speak and i stood next to him last year and had his prop bag and i was constantly doing it and i was like oh my god i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna doing things to him and putting stuff on and blah blah so anyways this year his idea was that i would carry him across the stage set him on the other side then come back to the microphone to do my presenting of the category yeah and it was last minute idea and he said you know and then you come back to the mic say you know prop department always carries the actors on their shoulders thought i could return the favor so it didn't go as planned um i was like yeah that's no problem i can definitely carry you across the stage i do nothing but train yeah for god knows what this is it yeah so i pick him up i'm holding him waiting for them to go through the uh whatever they call that when they are saying he's a podcaster and an actor oh they're introducing you in the introduction right yeah and again i'm holding him and i'm like skip that you know whatever just get to one thing this is too many things because i'm holding him and then i walk across the stage and then the stage is longer than i think it is and slash i haven't carried a man like a baby uh-huh ever i'm just assuming yeah i can live away yeah so anyways it's a pretty long walk across the stage i think people get a little chuckle out of it sure they know jeffrey's being carried like a baby yep i set him down and now i'm hyper aware of like i gotta run back to the microphone because it's like they're now waiting for a while they had to watch me carry him so then i run back to the microphone and then when i get to the microphone it is starting to occur to me like i need to really kind of bend over and breathe like i've just done 20 squats right i'm like i'm the category of you know and i start reading and i'm like oh my god i'm so out of breath yet i'm having to read it's getting so bad that i can i'm getting blasts of light in my eyesight yeah you know like little sparklers are going off in my aurora yeah and to the point where i have to i have to acknowledge it like i can't carry on it's like three pages this this this category intro maybe more and so finally i go oh okay gang i'm just gonna i'm gonna admit that i am i am winded okay i i shouldn't be but i i've really lost my breath yeah and so laughing laughing laughing and then i somehow thought that got me the breaths i needed but really i needed to sit there and i needed i needed to breathe for about 10 or 15 seconds of silence i wasn't gonna do that yeah i just acknowledged the thing and then i went back into it and then i was proceeding through and i was like and there was some hard names to read really hard i feel so ashamed that i i know i butchered this name i i'm hopeful the person wasn't actually there okay fingers because i said i'm i'm butchering this i acknowledge it i'm so sorry is like offering like is this televised uh no okay thank goodness although it is being recorded so god knows where okay this exists uh but all to say i really was teetering unconsciously by the end of it trying to hold in tight my make my talking voice normal while hyperventilating yeah that's hard did you have an identity crisis because you're like and did you also think people were watching and like how is he having a hard time carrying he's so big exactly if i were them i'd be like what's what's all this about if you can't carry a guy across the stage and then talk yeah then i'm having the same feeling that's what i'm saying did you have a crisis but i do urge someone to carry 190 pound man you know a couple hundred feet what it's like for me to try to get your body off the train tracks okay it's not as easy as you think okay that's but super that's the lesson i learned yeah yeah don't worry um no i had a very healthy response which is like that didn't go well i didn't do a good job presenting i didn't do a good job reading i fucked up some names yeah and um on the ride home which in the past i would have really been lashing myself over i was like jeff still knows yeah i love him yes and then i'm always around if he calls you showed up and that was the goal yes the goal wasn't to be spectacular exactly or to have perfect cardiovascular training i know it's i'd like to see if anyone could really do what i did and not be out of breath i think even if you train i think if like um who's lance armstrong could probably do it he had the best cardio probably right but he might not have the strength oh that's you need both i need something on him i think john cena could do it well that would be a good challenge okay yeah i'd like this could be a new like um you know that old show they used to have on nbc it was like um contest of the stars or whatever and then and they'd have tv stars competing against athletes oh do you know that famous show it would be like on a saturday this would be a good show so you have it's like it's a game show and you have to carry someone across the stage and then you have to come back and you have to make some kind of speech and then that's somehow a value to you and then you have to come back and you have to make some kind of and that's how you win or lose and basically just be john cena and i guess competing um no we could not no there's other people like um alan richson oh yeah he would be great i mean for old time's sake schwarzenegger he's a little well but we don't know what he's capable of i don't like to dabble in gossip but i will say i did see a little headline that katherine schwarzenegger had posted some pictures this summer and there was a picture of marie and him together having a lovely time uh-huh and it made me very happy because i had seen that doc of him and i was very sad he seemed really lonely oh in the doc i could i felt the heartbreak that he had you know wasn't with this woman oh yeah i think he very much would like to have stayed with his that's my guess i have no inside information yeah but to see that they were enjoying each other's company yeah i don't know it gave me an abnormal amount of happiness that's good Yeah, I think family. if they can yeah i mean your mom and dad were around each other spectacular at it yeah exactly i think a lot of people strive for that if they can it's hard i tip my hat to dave barton my stepdad did arnold cheat oh very publicly he had a child with the housekeeper oh wow i'm really out of the loop who is now competing in bodybuilding competitions the housekeeper son his son oh the that was a beautiful part of the doc he's like this is a great embarrassment to me but i would never deny my son i want to be proud of the fact this is my son yeah his name is such and such i would never hide from that as much as this is painful i want the world to know i couldn't be more proud to have him as a son yeah that's and now he's uh he's a bodybuilder he just competed in a like a natural bodybuilding uh contest which if you want to see the difference between using steroids and not look at one of these natural bodybuilding shows versus the steroid ones mm-hmm it's not even the same yeah it's crazy yeah i'm glad he that would be really horrible if he like didn't want anything to do with them so i'm i'm glad that like he brought this person into this world who has no choice you know so like i'm very glad to hear it's shrouded in a lot of public embarrassment sure yeah again that this person's born into on like and they themselves are now a part of this narrative that they didn't choose yeah so on top of that if your parent was like i don't want anything to do with you because you're reminding me of this that's or i don't want to talk about it that would be a understandable thing for him to go i don't want to talk about this in public so i think it is an act of integrity to go like yeah i don't want to talk about this but of course i am going to talk about this because i am very proud to be his father yeah i think it's i think it's nice yeah it is it's definitely nice um a lot of people just go like i don't want to talk about this yeah that yes they would and i guess i'm saying like for that other person actually for both the other people involved the mother and the son that's like horrible so i'm glad i'm happy to hear that and i think um the kid i wonder if the kids hang out all his children i think so i don't know that but i think so i feel like i've seen photos so nice yeah i mean again it's like they're a lovely family like i again i was lucky enough to be around that family 20 years ago yeah they're lovely lovely folks yeah i love maria yeah yeah she's radical i think you could be lovely and still be like uh yeah i don't know but i again well i guess we don't know for sure but my hope is that they've embraced this person that's nice maybe they all have thanksgiving perhaps all of thanksgiving together um yeah i can't put too fine a point on how much i love maria she's so smart and fun to talk to right it's a great debater she could be part of it carrying the in the competition show you think maria shriver could be a part of carrying we don't know you of all of her many virtues which there are probably too many to list uh-huh carrying 190 pound man across the stage might not be what she could do okay do you think she could lift you off the tracks i don't know okay we just don't know we don't know i don't know how she feels about me i don't know if the um adrenaline you know you know like the superpowers might not hit her she doesn't care enough about me yeah yeah we don't know until we're in this position none of us know as we know practice doesn't make perfect in this case but i do have a hunch you are capable of more if you care about the person a lot yeah of course yeah so i just don't know how i rank out of 10 yeah how much i would enact her super human strength yeah yeah yeah huh yeah i care about jeff a ton so i could carry him forever just i can't make a speech afterwards understandable gosh do you think do you think you'd risk your life or who for a stranger if a stranger was on the tracks this is really hard question like it's almost a useless question because there's what you think you would do and then there's what you do yeah i will say my track record shows that when i see stuff that i think i can change i act very instinctually to to get involved that's in the past i have right um again do i want to run into the apartment of my neighbor who's getting beat by this guy who's twice my size if i think about that no right um but i did yeah you know yeah um yeah and i didn't know her well it just was more like said hi to her on the sidewalk occasionally you know but yeah i hear a screaming and i'm glad i go i i'll go i feel bad because i just don't want to go you don't want to have to go into the apartment yeah again i won't go but i'll call 9-1-1 yeah that's brie handled the 9-1-1 of it all i yeah i ran up the staircase and they came tumbling down the staircase i know i know i know stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare but i'll you know what i'll do i'll have a i'll have a hard conversation with anyone you know yeah when those people are in jail yeah they're handcuffed so they can't hurt me this guy was straight out of a guy ritchie film yeah he had a head the size of a microwave shaved thick thick fucking cockney accent yeah it looked like a rugby player uh yeah did he go to jail i have no idea he well he was not arrested in that moment he wasn't no i came you know we got into a wrestling match on the top of the stairwell my elbow went through the um uh the fire extinguisher you know it's got the glass break it so my elbow went through that and then now all of a sudden we're like we're crumbling down this very tall staircase yeah and she then locks deadbolts her door okay so she's now good we separate enough he runs back up the stairs to her he's pounding on the door but it's now deadbolted yeah i am now at the bottom of the stairs just making sure he can't get in i'm like i gotta fucking please don't get in this go back up and then as he starts coming down the stairwells when he finally realizes and i and i'm yelling dude the fucking cops are on their way so i'm like letting him know the cops are on the way he recognizes he's not gonna get in there and as he starts coming down the stairs i now um come down the sidewalk to my stairwell which is the next one over brie's standing there with the cordless phone on with 9-1-1 and then she takes a few steps up i stand between her and him because i don't know what's next and then he walks by and he does not want round two with me and he goes you wouldn't understand she's a fucking cunt oh yeah yeah that was his last words and then he disappeared and i never saw him again yeah um she did we were i was doing laundry at one point a week later and i was coming out of the little shared laundry room and she thanked me that's nice yeah the worst it would be if like two days later you saw him back in there i mean that's the pattern sadly yeah i know yeah so good for her yeah you know she did not invite him back over gosh yeah life is so hard it really is it really is hard i gotta tell you that was an action-packed apartment building yeah there was something happening about once a month something happened there yeah you know watch the one neighbor od right below her apartment yeah uh yeah it was fucking action packed you gotta get out of there brie was there for another by herself year and a half or so yeah yeah that's she's uh she is tough like she could definitely she could definitely play in the competition she was pretty comfortable in chaos yeah yeah but that's different like yeah i guess but physical violence is different than like it is chaos but at that point in our relationship she had already witnessed a pretty good deal of it i mean you know one of the we were just like we weren't even really dating i had a girlfriend she had a boyfriend carrie was in town we went over to her house to hang with her we all got drunk yeah and this is when the roommate is i'm in a conversation with the roommate who's roommate breeze oh breeze uh carrie's visiting from michigan oh okay you go over to breeze house go over to breeze house go over to breeze house she lived with like four people okay one of the dudes and i are talking apparently we're in a uh a fight but i don't i truly don't recognize that tim lovestead's there too oh and i'm sitting cross-legged on my hand sitting on my hands leaning against a dresser in the middle of like i think we're just having like kind of a friendly debate oh boy and he stands up and then i'm like oh this guy's leaving the room over this and as he crosses me he just starts fucking punching me in the face and this is when I got my nose broken. - Oh. And I like, I can't use my hands to get up because I got to use my hands to cover my face. And then he runs out of the room and it's like someone poured a gallon of milk on there. It's the most blood I've ever seen that came out of my nose during this. And then I get up and I run to his room. He's deadbolted the room. Then I hear his side door open. Then I hear his car drive down the driveway. Bree's pretty alarmed. There's a lot of blood. But Carrie's there and she says to Bree, she goes, this is nothing. This is nothing. This is fine. She's like, don't leave him. Yeah, this is nothing. This is standard. This is nothing. And she's still, you know, she's still dated you after that for nine years. I wonder what, not to do, sorry. Go ahead. I just wonder, I want to know what the conversation, the debate was. I want to know what led to that. Like, I know, because in your head, you're like, what? We're just, but obviously. It was about his girlfriend. Okay. And, um, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I told you, he broke every bone in his wrist. He ended up having surgery. Yeah, that sucks. And he was supposed to leave to go on tour with his band. Oh, shit. It was a big loss for everyone. And I had that commercial I had booked. Oh, yeah. We both lost jobs over it. I was 21. 21. Like, that story is from when I was 21. I can't even, God, I can't even, like, yeah, 21. So young. Isn't it weird to think about, you took such a left turn in life? Uh-huh. Like, really? You're so different. Your life is so different than it was. My life is so different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, not you're so different, necessarily. But your life is, like, completely different. You live in. A nice house. A beautiful, nice house. Beautiful children. Incredible children and, like, a, like, a wife who's, like, America's sweetheart. Like, that is so different. Yeah. And. Suffice to say, if I got my nose broken in the living room, no, Kristen would not be like, oh, it's done. Right. This is fun. This is fun. No, but you're not getting your nose broken in the living room. No. That's my whole point. Like, you're not doing that anymore. I'm not. I'm an old man now. Yeah. And I, I, I wonder if it's interesting for people who were around you back then. To see this. To see this version of you. I hope they are happy for you. But. Well, you gotta also, you, you, you have to, um, paint a full picture. So, that's happening. Yeah. Sure. These things are happening on the weekends. Yeah. Um, I'm also doing incredible in college. Sure. I'm going through the groundlings. I'm doing well. Like, I'm still the, like, very ambitious, motivated, dependable person. Yeah. And then, yeah, I'm getting wild on the weekends. Yeah, but that's a big part of it. That's a big part of it. Like. It is. It is. Yeah. But I guess, what I'm pointing out is, I don't think anyone would be like, I'm shocked he's made it. He was such a fuck up. No. That's not what I mean. That's not the vibe. Yeah. I guess I mean, like. There was so much chaos in my life. Yeah. Yes. And. And now there's not much chaos. And partying and, like, being so, like, there's just a lot. Like, now your life just looks very different. You're a 51-year-old man with a family. You never leave this house. Yeah. I work at the house. I, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a much, much different existence. And I, I just, I. That's why that wedding was so fun. Because I got to be my kind of wild, crazy self, but in a very safe now way. Yeah. Yeah. But I got to tap into, like, that energy source I used to have at my disposal all the time. Yeah. Which is like, yeah, let's go to that thing. And let's, let's try. Yeah. Let's try to Mexico tonight. And let's, you know, all that stuff that I used to be game for. Yeah. I don't think too many people, I mean, I'm sure a lot of addicts have this similar story. But if you're not one, I don't think you have that kind of life changing. I, you know, I don't know. Maybe I'm not, maybe I'm wrong. I just feel like the, the shift is much bigger. The seismic. You know, the great thing is, is we could ask Tim Lovestead, right? Because he was there the whole time and he's still here. Oh, I don't mean people wouldn't be around anymore. Oh, no, no, I don't. I know. But you were saying, like, I wonder what the people then think now of this domesticated life you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, Tim would be an easy person for us to ask because he was present that night and present during a lot of the stuff or some of it. Yeah. Tim was a good boy. So he wasn't present during. Right. Right. There's also like a whole other. There is. And there's, there's levels because then if I, when I was in Detroit with Aaron, then it was like the stuff that was happening in Hollywood is like a child's play. Exactly. So what Aaron and I were seeking out at all times. Yeah. Funny. Yeah. You're an interesting person. Oh, thank you. I was trying to become one. Yeah, you are. I think if anyone, myself included, which is weird to say, but I remember, um, I was I watched you on Punk'd and I was like, Punk'd is so funny, blah, blah, blah. That guy's crazy. Yeah. All of them are crazy. Um, and then when I moved here and we had the same circle, but I hadn't met you yet. Yeah. And I remember some friends saying something about you and I was like, huh, like you were, that you were in a conversation about blah, blah. And I was like, oh, and they're like, he's really smart. Oh. Well, that's nice. And I was like, really? I did. I was like, oh, I had no idea. Sure. Why would, how could anyone have had any idea? Right. You were on Punk'd and Baby Mama and playing dumb. And then Idiocracy. But I was definitely like, oh, he is. Oh, okay. Unexpected. I was unexpected. And then I met you and I was like, he is. Yeah. Wow. This is all a big surprise. Oh, funny. Speaking of being smart. Yes. Let's do some facts. Okay. This is for Ben. Very interesting. No, it couldn't get more interesting. I can't believe this is happening. I know. Really crazy. I can't wait to have a pygmy mastodon. Where are you going to keep it? In my bedroom. Where? On my bed. I'm going to snuggle it. He's going to live there? In those huge tusks. Because even a pygmy one. How big will he be? Yeah. I think even a pygmy one. Like, I think. I think the pygmy mastodons on the Channel Islands were about the size of cows. Oh, that won't fit in your room. Well, it would, but it'd be, it'd be make things tight for sure. I've worked with cows a lot on TV when I was on the ranch. Oh, yeah. And I got to tell you, they're so sweet. I am blessed as mess, but I was really close on the ranch because it's a small stage and there's a cow right there and their eyeballs are so sweet. That's nice. That's nice. You can like. You can look in them. Yeah. They're like, um, like whales, you know, when you see a whale's eye, you're like, yeah, there's a person in there. Oh, that's sad. Yeah. But it's, they're sweet. Because people are, I know, but like people are mean to them and kill them. Cows, I'm part of the problem. Me too. Yeah. What would you think the ethics are if Ben could figure out how to grow a cow with no brain? Like no head. Oh, and then we eat those? Yeah. Because there's like, there's not, all it is, is just meat produced. There's just some. I bet people would be mad about it, even though that would make no sense. Well, there's something about engineering. I mean, there is just something about engineering a new being. Well, aside from that, I think even the people would think it was cruel to kill something that's not even sentient. Oh, that. You know what I'm saying? Well, you do. Remember Coco? Well, Coco's got a big face and a smile. Coco is not sentient. Well, it kind of, he can get around town. He's not sentient. Yeah. So will that, that cow will be able to get around town? I don't know if it will. Well, yeah. Don't you need a brain to tell it to move? This is kind of a computer chip that tells all the organs to work. It'll have a chip that also makes it walk around. Probably to get exercise. Build muscle and get, yeah. Yeah, get yummier. Can you imagine seeing a field full of cows with no heads? No, see, that's what irks me. That's very scary. Yeah, it's sci-fi. It's M. Night Shyamalan. And I don't want that. Wes Craven. It's a little more M. Night Shyamalan. Night Shyamalan to me. Okay. He would definitely make a movie where there's all these cows with no heads that someone engineered. But you wouldn't see it to the last frame of the movie. No, what you see is, okay, in the last frame, you, okay, in the last frame, the last frame. Paint the picture for me. He walks into the basement. Oh, they're in the basement. Joaquin Phoenix. Oh, Joaquin Phoenix walks into Phoenix. And he sees a little, like, crack in the ground. And he gets his tool. And he's like, oh, oh, the floorboard is loose. Oh, okay. It's a wooden floor. Yeah. Okay. And then he lifts it. And he's like, oh, what's that smell? Oh, okay. Okay. Pungent. Yeah. And then he sees on the back of the floorboard, there's blood. Okay. Then he looks, and it's the heads of all the cows. They weren't engineered headless. They were real cows. Oh, they were just decapitated. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a sad ending. I want them to just be able to grow. with no suffering speaking of um the movie i just wrote uh i watched a scary movie with adam scott on um oh he was in it he's in it uh-huh it's him michelle monahan robert de niro ever heard of him okay i have and it is good what's it called it's called the whisper man it's scary is it on netflix i think is it a series or it's a movie it's a film yeah and it's not too long great you that's your new criteria my test yeah and anything above 90 gets you're in trouble you better have a great film but it was good i enjoyed it okay so i looked up uh the words for grandma and grandpa in other cultures okay great um babushka yeah for russian uh babushka and dadushka oh dog daddy is a dadushka grandpa uh spanish spanish abuela abuelo yeah we love that we know that italian nona mamma mia no nona and nona no no nona and no no i don't think i knew no no german is orna wow orna is i know oh no it's not okay it's oma oma see now do you see what happened the m to me was an r and an n that makes sense because you're bad eyesight oma and opa oh no no that's cute greek is yeah yeah maybe it's yeah yeah yeah that's what peggy calls her grandma yeah yeah okay because it's but it's y i a so i do think it's yeah yeah but that's i do too interesting spelling and then papu poopoo papu french oh mimi and pippi no but i mean sure it's supposed to be i was taught to call my french grandparents grandmere oh i love it that must be official grandmere is grandma and grandpere is grandpa i love it um i just want to know where mimi and pippi went irish is oh my me i okay irish is hard it's gaelic or something my mayo thing sometimes me ma yeah i know a lot of friends who have me ma me ma yeah it's true me mom papa yeah a lot of people have papas my dad might go by ashi oh is that grandpa and nope it's just since his name is a choke oh okay well we're gonna it's really close to um not ashi but who is the baguan what did he become he became no that he became ah oh osha osho oh show tough titties oh show yep um i think we're gonna he's gonna try to push for that but you know memphis gets to decide sure yeah um that's the first born gets to decide what the grandparents are called that's why my papa bob was papa bob because of david my brother david but were there any other grandkids yeah but they all came after david and i did okay yeah jamie and jason are like two years and four years respectively younger okay got it so david was the first born grandchild oh he sure was he was the bell of the ball for five whole years he got to be doted on so cool yeah it sucks when the other one comes you when dax arrives he's deaf and colicky he grunts do you think that's why delta wants to learn sign language because my dad was deaf yeah maybe um oh there's okay there's a lot um this says in india in hindi specifically though so my parents don't speak that yeah so i don't know but it says nani and nana well i like that oh this is funny because i always say they're close to italians oh yeah that's my observation oh well okay it's specific for maternal grandma maternal grandpa too complex no we're smart paternal i feel like it reeks of the cast has that too it's part of the cast system god okay oh in swahili it's bb and babu oh i love it bb and babu actually these are clearly set up for babies to be able to say like you notice the pattern here they're all like baby talk oh yeah in hawaiian tutu there you go kid baby could say that okay dr death baylor yeah um he held surgical privileges at baylor regional medical center in plano texas starting in 2011 um and then 2012 the first time i saw him was when he was suspended and then resigned uh well he wreaked havoc in a short amount of time his name is christopher dunch yeah first physician in united states history to be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for criminal acts and gross malpractice committed directly inside the operating room during surgery he also look at him he kind of looks familiar though he's a big lug right he's a football player but he wasn't his oh like yeah he looks like a he looks like fred flintstone oh fuck me look at that photo i mean you shouldn't you shouldn't ever judge a book by its cover but i'm telling you if i shook my surgeon's hand and that's what he looked like i'd be like i'm gonna pass but remember he people call him dr swagger they did i'm just reading oh i don't remember that detail because i well i do remember them saying at first like he was really cool like everyone like thought he was cool it was because he partied okay so i just was looking up the extinct animals because i'm just not well versed okay what have you said i'm just not convinced oh my god what if whoa that would be crazy yeah what a revelation yeah so i'm just gonna read some that we these are kind of obvious i guess well dodo is the dodo flightless bird um stellar sea cow he mentioned the sea cow he's hot to bring that one back yeah okay there's the quagga it's a south african subspecies of the plain zebra hunted for meat and skin but it it looks like that but that kind of looks like a regular zebra yeah so i don't care about i'm just kidding i care yeah passenger pigeon that's cool because lost well we lost it though right yeah but if we could bring it back this is like an immoratorium at the oscars for animals like there should be music playing and then you just read the dodo bird the shishuan pony mule the passenger pigeon and then you're oh yeah i love the passenger the passenger pigeons would make me want to get into animals uh tasmanian tiger i mean i do want one of those actually no they look kind of ugly because they look kind of like coyotes i saw two coyotes yesterday okay chinese paddle fish ew i think the problem is i just don't like animals very much right that's gonna pose a problem when asked to be sympathetic probably well i'm sad i don't think animals should be extinct right but but you don't need to see them other than that yeah except there's a pint pinta or pinta island tortoise 2012 it went extinct no 2015 kind of recent yeah well the plow the one that's a big part of monsters of god ding ding ding is the plow something tortoise from madagascar and they're now extinct in the wild they still exist but only in captive breeding sitches yeah and then of course we got the woolly mammoth we got the saber-toothed cat oh they don't want to call it a tiger anymore i guess it's called a smilodon um or oaks now this is a type of cattle uh the moa the great auk also a flightless seabird okay all right that's a i was just thinking about who i'd want to bring back there's irish elk which was a gigantic deer from the pleistocene yeah i want to see anything that's gigantic yeah that's what i'm drawn to the megafauna i want to yeah elephant bird thousand pounds a thousand pounds madagascar yep exactly home of the pygmy hippo woolly rhinoceros that sounds fun hold on the caspian tiger i want to look at this okay it looks regular you're like a six-year-old you're learning about animals right now real time you're like leafing through a national geographic book this reminds me okay the game that i taught you guys about imposter uh-huh um when we were playing the word was clownfish and so someone said nemo and then whatever uh jess said he said circus he said circus okay and then anthony once we were done anthony was like it's just circus and i was like no it's like that makes the clowns are at circus yes it's like that makes sense and then just like well i don't know what this is okay all right and then anthony was like oh it's definitely just like who wouldn't know what that is and i was like of us don't know animals that well like he's from sweden no i mean if you're from burbank but he did spend some time if you're from india he was born in france and he lived in sweden for a long time when you're learning about animals yeah okay and if you're if you're from sweden you don't know clownfish if you're from georgia india if you're if you're from india you don't know seahorses and i'm gonna make a collective list of your observations of yeah of the holes in animal learning uh-huh according to cultures it'd be fascinating if you had some real data that proves that yeah remember i asked that other indian man and he didn't know about do you think it's part of like do you think it's a it's a product of great wealth that like you have the free time there's like less pressing issues you and it's like you just have you know you're in a house and you have all this free time and you have this books and all these nations i learned all these at my papa and grandma's house because they had the whole right encyclopedia of animals for me the national geographic and i just looked at them endlessly yeah like do you think it could be a some reflection or related to wealth yeah wealth of nations it could adam smith i mean it's like what other cultures have like aquariums in their house do we think that's common i doubt in like saharan africa there's a lot of aquariums or in asian maybe because like at chinese restaurants okay let's just slow down before we get into trouble in the south in the south of the united states in the chinese restaurant sure there are aquariums right anyway okay well that's that's everything yeah and i guess i still don't know oh okay maybe i want to bring back the bar bar barbary lion oh tell me about that one a majestic north african lion subspecies that vanished from the wild in the mid-20th century i like that it said majestic yeah what if it was called the majestic rat would you be interested in that well i am part mouse so i have to like i can't hate rats that much you can't sell out your species so quickly exactly sister species i look forward to you getting um a pig me mammoth or mastodon yeah yeah i look forward for you i wouldn't want to pick me giant sloth because then that would just be a sloth be a three-toed sloth right that's true so we already have that that's not of interest okay actually this rhino does look cool oh hell yeah yeah yeah big old fucking horn really big big big girthy horn i mean really i would love to see like one dinosaur yes of course we all would okay all right that's it love you