Transcript of 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 wooly mammoth.

Yes. They have wooly mouse.

They've created wooly mice.

Yep.

And the list goes on. Yeah, this is impossible. This is where we're at.

Really wild episode.

This is mind-blowing.

It feels sci-fi, but we're living it.

Yes, it's present-day sci-fi. Uh, please enjoy Ben Lamb. 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, your kids, anybody, 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 mail her to Dallas. No, she's amazing. She's— My Gigi, she like helped raise me.

Aw.

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.

Greece.

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.

Yeah, yeah.

So I was like, maybe like, like this is 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 for their parents.

Our kids, 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 2 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 these fake fish and this like fake frying pan with him. He's 2 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.

And so he like ran over to this other mom in the library and he was like, Oh, Gaga. He, like, points back at me like, when did you learn that? Like, that's a weird— that's an interesting, funny interaction where he's, like, making fun of me to this other parent.

Wow. He's already back.

He's already— yeah, he's already embarrassed by it. Oh, God. He's, like, rolling his eyes. It was amazing. Yeah.

Creating new alliances with the other people at the library.

Well, you got to practice early.

But let's be honest, you just said it like you're always at the library. You have a 2-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 6. 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.

I couldn't understand time.

Yeah, sometimes like the bath time, like, my mom's like, you've had bath time for 2 hours. It's like, he loves it. Just keep it. 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?

2, a 2-and-a-half and an 8-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 that 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 5. Then later in my life, I made it back for a few years and I went to Dallas and I kind of bounced all over. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents, right?

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

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've 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 5. Only girl. All the rest are boys.

Oh, my God.

And they're from Nebraska, so they're like Omaha, like hardcore. 5 o'clock, they're like watching sports, drinking Budweiser, and the whole nine. They're the best.

Salt of the earth.

They sound fun.

So we did the same thing. They retired. 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 2 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 it swam around. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I used to catch frogs with my grandpa. 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. Being around, yeah, multi-generational 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 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've 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 stoned.

Yeah, well, let's hope my story ends slightly different. That'd be great.

Okay. And probably Baylor's like, goddamn it, stop talking about that guy.

Yeah.

Okay. So, but by the time you're a senior at Baylor, you already start a company. What was the first one?

Simply Interactive.

It was an e-learning?

E-learning, yeah.

What does that even mean?

My uncle was on the board of Baylor. He was amazing. And he is 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? And 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 checkmarks in my arrangement with my uncle. And then I had this great teacher, Dr. James Moschinsky, 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.

Oh.

I learned that, just kind of self-taught myself that and partnered with Dr. Moschinsky 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.

And like, yeah, it's 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.

And if you can make it like hyper-localized and emotional, That was 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 gonna speed through. You created and sold 5 or so companies from gaming to— there's all kinds of—

Yeah, we made a lot of shitty games. We made one good game.

Okay, that's all it takes is one good game.

Yeah, 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 He's somebody I'm shocked we haven't had on. 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 6'7. Oh, he is? Yeah, he's huge.

Massive beard.

Looks like Santa Claus. Has narcolepsy.

Oh.

And so— but he literally— you'll 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, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 a professor at Harvard.

Oh, okay, great.

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 back.

Oh, he will.

Oh, yeah, great.

Well, yeah, this is comfy. I always try to keep him uncomfortable when I'm around.

I'll have Rob dim the lights slowly.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

But he was also somehow involved early with CRISPR, 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 George is actually a supporting character throughout it. And those CRISPR wars were so interesting between the Broad and Berkeley, and nothing ever really seems to ever get solved. But George is actually one of the first people to use genetic and CRISPR specifically in mammals. So he was using it in mammal and human cells and publishing 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 wooly 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 CRISPR Nobel Prize type work. But George is like, they're amazing. They really did the work. 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 going to 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 ended up getting bought later, so it was fine. It all worked out the way it 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 and whatnot on a computer. So I was really fascinated with that. George is a genius. So he answered that question like 7 seconds on the call. And he's like, you know, this is where I think the opportunity is going. I was like, oh, that's awesome. Amazing. And then I'm like stupid level curious. And I'm like, what else you got? What is going on in this weird lab of yours? And he started telling me about all these crazy things that were 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 wooly mammoth. I'd reintroduce it back into the tundra, and I'd use those technologies to help conservation and also apply them to human healthcare. I have to go to my next meeting now.

I have to take a 6-minute nap and then go to my next meeting.

Yeah. And so the call was over, and I was like, is that real?

And what year is this?

2019.

Okay, this is 2019. So by 2019, I had already read this compelling article in Nature or something that they had found some wooly 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 found wooly mammoth in the permafrost. 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. There are all of these discoveries are happening as people are—

As climate—

Yeah, as the permafrost is melting.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is really bad.

One of the very few silver linings.

Yes, if 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 COVID 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.

Really? Even when they have the full carcass?

Yeah, even when they have the full carcass. Because DNA degrades at such a crazy rate.

'Cause 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 gonna get a living cell. So if you wanted to impregnate through sperm, you're gonna need living sperm, which they did not have. Or you're gonna need— if you're gonna clone it, a lot of times people are like, get on with it with you guys, right? Why are you guys taking so long?

Yeah.

But it's like, 'cause 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 'cause 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 wooly 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 or something.

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.

99-plus.

Pretty good.

Are they smaller?

They are. Yeah, they are. Okay.

Asian elephant.

Most people think that mammoths were, like, these giant things, but they were actually— wooly mammoths, which is what we're focused on, are about the same size as Asian elephants, which are a little bit smaller than African elephants. You did have straight-tusked elephants. You had some other stuff that was, like, quite big. They're still very large. They're just not— sometimes people think of them as, 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 ones.

Pygmy on the Channel Islands.

Yeah, on the Channel Islands.

Yeah.

That's what I want replicated is the pygmy ones so I can have one in my house.

You're not alone. That request comes in more often than you would think.

I bet.

I want one as a pet. Everybody wants a pygmy. I was like, let's get to our mammoth, right? And so George is getting all of this data over the years. He had got a $100,000 gift from Peter Thiel, who is not an investor in our business, but he had given a $100,000 grant to the Church Lab to work on the mammoth. And George stretched that out over like 6 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. I'd say it's probably at 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 nap.

He should just, you know, maybe like vitamins.

You would never—

he's so—

he's going to pass. Gigi.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's going to pass.

Not to mention, if anyone's going to get the epigenome anti-aging, he'll be the first to die.

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 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 serve this function. But I don't think I could ever hear myself say, and I think this is gonna leave an impact on the world. Right? Like, I really felt this was like, hey, do you want—

This is your once in a lifetime.

Lifetime swing. That's how I viewed it. And I was like, look, I'd built and sold 6 software companies, and I was like, if it all fails, I could just go do that. There's no risk.

How's the callback go?

So I called him back the next day. I literally called him 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 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 going to sit down because 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 because he's just like, is this one of those power plays where he's like, I'm going to bail if I'm not interested?

Yeah.

It's just easier for me to walk out. I didn't know. what I was working with here.

Sure.

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 raise 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. 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.

You should have sent it to Dax.

Well, many celebrities are his first round investors. Chris Hemsworth, Peter Jackson. Paris Hilton.

Because they want the piggyback.

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, 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 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 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 is like what we learn on Sunday, we put in the car on Monday.

Yeah.

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 healthcare. 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 4 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, 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, you know what? I got a guy. And so one of the first things we did was I think we've been smart 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 has been really helpful. Like someone saying, do you have someone on the team that's ever raised an elephant? We're like, no, I got to go because I can find that person. Right? And 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 can 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 biggest, 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?

Yeah.

You know, we had 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.

Yeah.

And if I stack up a bunch of papers, that's not going to make a dodo, right? And so that's one. And then 2, 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 going to extract DNA like Indiana Jones style.

Yeah.

And then we're going to go to like the basement and like sub-basement of Fort Sassoonian. and get ancient DNA, and then you're going to help build the AI models to do all the comparative genomics and work with mammoth cells.

You're going to be the Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.

That's so much better.

It is.

That's so much better. 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 creation for our shareholders and impact from our conservation initiatives, but inspiration. And we're like, we want to do this in a way that gets people stoked about science again.

Yeah.

Because 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 is 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.

Yeah.

Because she's thought about all this, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And 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. Okay, got it. to an exact duplicate of what exists.

And even theoretically, there's no mammoth that's been frozen perfectly.

Perfect.

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 because 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. 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 2 most genetically modified multicellular organisms in the world, like animals, are wooly mice Which are objectively the cutest mice on the planet. If you haven't seen them—

They look like little hamsters, Monica. They have kind of the wooly mammoth hair, but they're on a mouse. You would like it.

Yeah, even you.

Oh, we like mouse— mice here.

We like mouse, not mice. Mice means infestation. Mouse is a friend.

Yeah, but mouse are great. And so we identified the core colors, the hair texture, the length, the density, and it was about 8 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 gonna go take— do anything super weird. So we're not gonna take an elephant gene and stick it into a mouse, 'cause we know it's probably not compatible with life because there's too much genetic divergence. This is what's so amazing about the Wooly 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, 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 is very helpful in this?

And 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.

Wow.

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. 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 Expert, if you dare.

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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, Jurassic Park did a great job for us getting people to 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 into 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. I was like, 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, Mm-hmm. this is the compound that we had to figure out how to produce. We had to then go do an analysis on 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.

It's 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are we just copying? Are we cutting and copying?

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 in. That was like a 25-year project or something.

Yeah, billions of dollars.

You've mapped this wooly mammoth in a few years with shitty scraps.

With very shitty broken DNA, not like taking hours, like fresh out of the kitchen, right?

Yeah.

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 Jon Stewart. They were everywhere.

I wish you brought one.

Sorry.

They're in a pretty controlled— like, these wolves are good luck finding them. Do you know about these geolocators? Someone was just telling me about this, that there's these contests. They show people, like, a 5-second snippet of a live feed cam from somewhere, and these geolocators will figure out— it's insane.

challenge them. No, we have taken very thoughtful measures to the point of like planting non-indigenous trees.

Flora.

Yeah, yeah, I'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 direwolf project's gonna be interesting because at this moment we had direwolves. We had the first most genetically modified multicellular organism in the world is the direwolf with 20 edits. So we're sitting there like We thought people were gonna, like, be excited about the wooly mouse.

Yeah, yeah.

The dire wolf— I remember being on South By, being interviewed, kind of zoning out for a second, saying, what is gonna happen in 3 weeks when we announce this?

Yeah.

And that fear was massively realized 3 weeks later.

It was just 3 weeks later you announced the dire wolf?

3 weeks later, yeah.

Wait, so tell Monica about the dire wolf.

Yeah, other than what I know from Game of Thrones.

Well, that's what everyone knows.

Yeah, so we recognize that, and so we have this multidimensional model of how we think about why to bring back a species. What does the indigenous people groups care? 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 de-extinction of that species help existing species, right? And the dire wolf checked pretty much— the dire wolf was not on our initial list, right? It was like mammoth, thylacine, Tasmanian tiger. And that's why the Hemsworths got involved, because they heard they were working on the Tasmanian tiger, right? And for us, dire wolf just wasn't on the list. It just wasn't a top thing because people had sampled La Brea tar pits, Mm-hmm. Got zero 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 US, 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 were 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, 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're just much bigger than a wolf.

6 feet nose to tail and £150. So fucking big.

Yeah, so about 30% bigger than a normal wolf.

Okay.

And we knew all of what Dax said 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 2 dire wolf samples that produced viable DNA, a tooth that was preserved 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.

Yeah, it's 60,000 years of genetic diver— I mean, think about that for a second. Wow.

Yeah, that's insane.

There's more genetic divergence between those 2 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 of evolution.

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 direwolves 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 had ever seen on direwolves, 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. Like, one thing we didn't know is we knew We knew the fur was white. We knew the specific genes, but we didn't know exactly what the texture was gonna 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 2.

How small were they?

Oh, they looked like little pandas. but they were pretty big at the time.

At 6 months old, they were already £80.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

The photos I've seen are from when you allowed 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 are they?

We showed them to the world when they were about 7 months old.

And the little girl was 2 months old, so we couldn't see her. She's Khaleesi.

Yeah.

Oh my.

Which, by the way, we got a lot— so 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 fucked up. No, but our thought process was— we actually had a thought process. Our thought process was on the right track. was that, hey, we already have direwolves, so the Stark lovers will already be in this. Let's give something for the Targaryens.

Interesting.

We were trying to be thoughtful about this.

Okay, you might need to do dragons for them.

So Peter Jackson's 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, so they— 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.

Yes.

Like, they were thriving in the Americas, the Homo sapiens arrived.

There is an 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've made it, maybe they wouldn't have, but certainly we caused the extinction of so many of these animals.

So many of these things. And then recent extinctions, Like, with the Tasmanian tiger and thylacine, we— the Australian government— I don't wanna say we, 'cause people are like, wait, Colossal killed off the thylacine, they're bringing it back. 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 'em out of the way for the railroads.

Why?

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? And 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 that, 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 just like with an iPhone.

The first what?

It was the first howl from the direwolves. Oh, when they were puppies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we played it for him. He's like, this is what you need to lead with. He's like, oh, we're gonna do this big production. He's like, no, no, this is what you show. Trust me. I was like, I think we should probably trust Peter Jackson on 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 we 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.

Yes.

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 flew out. 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 direwolf 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 direwolves. And Beth Shapiro, your head writer, 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 wooly 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. Yeah, 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.

Okay, yeah, 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 wooly mammoth and it then starts having fertile offspring? Now it is its own species.

No, I don't, because 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 it.

We're categorical.

We like this box and this box and this box. and 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.

Yeah.

Like, we're different by 3 million edits. For us, going from a software lens, we're gonna 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 of us. When you go over 1.3 million years, there's a lot of difference, but they all shared those core phenotypic expressions that gave them these like shaggy coats, fat deposits, curved tusks.

You know, 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 are you or you are 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 and you say, are they bears? A child's gonna be like, yes. Like, are they the same? And they're gonna 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 carnivore, one is an omnivore, one's Arctic-adapted and white. They're just different.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

I do have one more fun thing I always say. Yeah, the 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 our mammoths are 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 2 years old.

Okay, 2 years old.

14 in dog years.

Yeah, they're up to— sorry, they're about to be 2. They're gonna be 2 in November. Terrible dad. Like, I should know that.

It's hard to keep it all in.

I have biological human children, so I know the precedent.

Good, 'cause we found out one of the red flags of a sociopath is if you ask them their children's birthdays, they don't know. 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.

Oh, God.

Keep knowing it.

Yeah.

Okay. You have, though, declared that you're going to have a wooly mammoth calf by 2028.

Yeah.

Oh.

So we will not have a calf by 2028. That was our original target date.

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 have better access to data. We've also had 2 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 governments' 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?

Yeah. So our government, we're very transparent with our investors. We don't have any secrets. grid investors. We've had state governments in the United States invest in us. 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 timeframe?

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 story.

Yeah, this is similar to, like, you don't want to tell anyone you're pregnant.

In case something happens.

Yeah, in the first act. So it's like, yeah, if you get these mamas out, and the whole world knows, and now they want updates, and then they have, like, 3 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, meaning an unintended consequence in the genome, or could have any effects that are negative for the animal welfare. So we have IACUC 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 that are like doing mammoth stuff and dire wolves 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 US. We spend 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 more species. I think you're gonna see more wooly 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 haven't told anybody.

Yeah.

If we get a saber-tooth...

That's what you want? I'm trying to think what I want.

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 yours? 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 in real life. I would love to see that.

Yeah.

Of all the hominids.

It might kill us.

I would love to see that too.

But what do you do with them? That's the ethical thing.

Yeah, exactly.

Where do you put them? It's like now you got something that's cognitively—

So we spin out technologies and build whole companies and license out our technologies. for human healthcare. But even at Colossal, we do not do things with human healthcare 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 wanna push the bounds to the point there. So we just said, hey, we're not gonna do anything non-human primates or anything humans.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's probably safe.

We get the Neanderthal question quite a bit. I bet.

Yeah.

I bet.

But they're already here. They're with us. We've absorbed them. So they're present in your DNA.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I wanna see the elephant bird very badly.

I do too. We're not working on it.

Sabertooth 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 La Brea Tar Pits or the Natural History Museum and you see the skeleton of the giant sloth?

That would be insane.

I think they're like £1,500.

To do an extinct species, depending on 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 we showed off the artificial egg this year, which is like straight out of a movie.

That's one of my 3, 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 3 different lineages of giant sloth. So I would love to put giant sloth on there. I'd love to put a Steller's 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.

What? Wow.

It's amazing. It was super big.

So it's a mammal.

Yeah, it was amazing. It was killed off, to your point.

Yeah, good.

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 animal.

Yeah, we're working on— we are working on artificial wombs. We have 3 artificial wombs projects. We're not there yet, but we're making progress.

Wild.

What's on your list?

I need to like look up the list of— 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, 'cause it's always All the megafauna. That's what I'm most interested in.

I love the megafauna.

Yeah, I want miniatures.

Right?

I want little things.

Got a lot of pygmies we could work with. Again, I would love— the pygmy hippo would be so fun.

That would be so cute.

It's like a pig, but it looks like a— but they're buck bastards too, those hippopotami. They're aggressive.

Wait, have the wooly mice mated?

Yeah, I think we're on gen 3.

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 Goode, 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 Columbia who's quite mad about a lot of the stuff you're doing. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about some of the fun things that you've discovered along the way. And I know one of them is 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 Wyss 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?

Wow.

A lot of these plastic degradation solutions that you see pop up in the news occasionally, or a scientific paper, they either require preheating pretreatment, 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, 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 disgusting.

I don't believe that. I've heard you say that. Where did you get that?

The interwebs. Yeah, you can fact check.

You guys should fact check. Yeah, 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, yeah. I just want to know where it originated. I don't I don't know that that's actually 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 us.

Microplastics is in all 3 of us.

Yeah, yeah.

And everyone listening to this.

I don't doubt that. Just to push back on the panic about it, it's like, A, I don't know about how they came to that figure. 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 plastic on Earth, regardless of what I'm saying. Let me maybe be 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 company.

Yeah, I own a petroleum refinement facility that's making polyurethane as we speak.

Yeah. So now that we have disclaimed our affiliates, but look, plastics is a big issue, right? So they discovered this thing, incredible scientist Sukanya.

And it just leaves the mahogany carbon and some biomass.

Some biomass, right? And so they came to us. They didn't know what to do with it. 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, that's now. 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 were focusing initially on textiles. Water treatment and composting are now things because you go to like a 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. Yeah, they'll just throw it away, which leads to methane and all these other things. So composting is now a 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 somehow.

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, one, 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.

Yep.

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 case?

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.

current landscape of our regulatory framework with the 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 then they found out there's 25,000 jeans. They're like, fuck, these companies don't have them. No, no, you can't do that, right?

Yeah.

So you can't patent those jeans. 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 at least have the technology.

Yeah. Okay, so that's a really cool thing. And then tell me about germline 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.

Okay.

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 your offspring so that your offspring doesn't have, uh, 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 in it. Not removing it. 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 editing, 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-y.

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, Tay-Sachs.

Exactly. If we can eradicate these specific diseases from the gene pool, all of humanity benefits. And I think we'll get there. I think we as humanity we'll 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'd have seen like dyslexic, ADHD, addict, 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 likely to be incarcerated. Well, then as I got older, I learned you're 4 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 kids, we did, because you can do the testing, the morphologic. We actually had a miscarriage. My wife, she didn't wanna go through it again.

Yeah.

I didn't wanna go through it. Didn't want her to go through it. So we went through IVF, 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.

Yeah.

But then you can go to this next step. We hired a company and used the service of a company called Orchid. Full disclosure, I ended up investing in the company only because I was so happy. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

George Church was involved, so he 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 and others that we know if 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 populations.

Well, it's a dopamine dysregulation disorder.

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's 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.

Yeah.

We're getting all this 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 that will be cured. But we made some decisions from there.

Sure, sure.

But to your point, if we would've done all that, we wouldn't have had any kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, 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.

So I think that's coming. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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 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 states, that's bad. Everyone agrees that'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 population. 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, 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 I wouldn't say that was an invasive species.

Well, it was indigenous to Tasmania. This is more like when you bring in the brown trout to this stream and it displaces all the fish.

So you have Asian carp in the Great Lakes and it's destroying the Great Lakes ecosystem. The US government has a $3 billion environmental remediation program that will not kill them. We're dealing with invasive species right now. Texas is pretty bad. There's this thing that came in 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 screwworm, which is this fly that lays larva that literally screws down. It spreads disease, kills cattle. 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 or—

yeah, it's bush 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 as a pet. And 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. I'm not anti-cats.

I am.

Cats are fun.

Okay, let Monica take the—

Yeah, 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 to Ireland. So then they bring in mongoose to kill the snake. Now the mongoose is like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 3 choices. You can release tons of irradiated flies that will slow the population, and they're spending $1.5 billion right now in Texas doing that. Not efficient, not going to solve the problem. We'll slow it, then they're going to have to do it again and again. Like, 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 could 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 8 months to eradicate the species versus 12 years.

Wow. 8 months.

8 months.

Are there any pilot programs where this is happening?

Ours.

Okay. And it's gonna be for this worm?

We're trying. We have gotten approval from different groups within the intelligence community and in the defense community. Okay.

Are mosquitoes part of the food web here?

Yeah.

I hate them so much.

Well, bats are chowing down on 'em. Spiders are eating 'em.

Mosquitoes are absolutely key to most food webs.

Yeah.

Except in certain island states like Hawaii. Avian malaria is being spread by mosquitoes and killing a lot of these amazing— like the Hawaiian honeycracker, a lot of these amazing birds. So you could eradicate mosquitoes.

Albatross.

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 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 get rid of 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.

And again, we're responsible for bringing these species in.

Yeah, we move all this stuff around.

We've caused it.

Or changed 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 3 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 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 synthetic uterine wall so that we can make a synthetic uterine sac 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 Scale of Development, and we've tracked them through it, and we're pretty close on both of those. Wow. And then we had a third one for the avian because there's no bird big enough that can grow— definitely an elephant bird, but definitely a South Island giant moa.

Right.

So what we did, because we're working with the Ngāi Tahu people, working with Peter Jackson and the Māori, the eggs are still 8 times bigger than that of an emu. So you're going to have to birth it through an emu, then transfer it into an artificial egg.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so we birthed the world's first birds fully ex utero using this repeat artificial egg process. Looks like a more fun version of Alien.

Yeah, sure.

Wow.

What is the actual synthetic— like, what is the cell made of? Is it made of carbon?

Yeah, so we take the cells from the chickens and we put them into this matrix.

It's like a little infrastructure that it grows around?

Yeah.

And then we actually had to develop a polymer. It just looks like plastic. when you watch the video, where it allows the right level of permeability of oxygen and whatnot. And so people had tried to grow chickens and other birds outside of an egg or womb, and they would plug in oxygen. They do all these steps that were developmentally lethal, right? The egg's actually porous. Eggs actually breathe. How do you recreate that? But also then, if you're going to recreate it, how do you re-engineer it so you can do more? So our artificial eggs, you can hook up to microscopes. We actually created a visible and non-visible spectrum lighting system so you can put it in a cradle and truly understand it and have different lights. But if you point directional, even these high-frequency lights into the developing embryo, it can destroy the embryo. Yeah, the embryo. So we actually had to create channels and refractive mirrors so that you dissipate the light.

Oh my God.

So a lot went into it. And then eggs 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 for the dire wolf. It's the roan antelope for the bluebuck. Making sure I don't say anything that we haven't said.

Yeah, no, you said bluebuck.

'Cause 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 Ceresi, 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 because 50% of the time during meiosis, there's, like, disjunction. 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%—

And we're pretty good at it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we've been evolving for this long.

Cloning efficiencies are somewhere between 2% and 4%. We bought a company called Viagen 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. Yeah, sorry, Celine.

That was a big deal.

She did that before we acquired them. 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 8 of the same horses, Monica. The horse he won the most on, they just made 8 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 were worried. We actually got a lot of emails where people were like, are you gonna not allow them to clone the dogs? I was like, no, you keep doing that. We're using their tech for us. 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 2 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, that's foolproof. That's a good criticism.

People have asked me, I have 2 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— we have super—

we have ended their senescence.

But they're both rescues and they're amazing, right?

Yeah.

So I'm very pro-rescue.

Sure.

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 your point.

Yeah.

But if my 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 somehow first you're required to—

I don't agree with that though.

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, 100%.

Or when you eradicate the dodos, or when you cut down the rainforest.

Get rid of— yes.

Or overfish the oceans.

Like, we play God every Yeah. So why don't we blame 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— 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 wouldn't 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.

Yeah.

Come fall in love with this thing and in 9 years you'll be heartbroken.

I don't want—

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 lesson.

Yeah.

I don't—

it is worth the pain to experience the love.

I do not disagree with that at all.

But I don't need that to apply to everyone else cuz that's what I think my kids should learn.

Yeah. But they're not gonna experience the pain if they just have the same dog.

That's my point. Like it wouldn't be for me because Because we all miss Lola. If ever there was a dog we would have cloned, it would have been Lola.

That's right.

It teaches them it's still worth it to put yourself out there for these other dogs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I say this about Biogen, like, my goal is, you know, 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 raise $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 biobanks. 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 Viagen was I think people should have those conversations. I told you, I don't know what I would do.

Yeah.

And I own Viagen. 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 Viagen, right?

Wow.

Black-footed ferrets, Przewalski's horse. We worked with them on some of our work on the 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 biovaults, that 1+ 1+ 1 isn't 3. That is a key backup model for life. Now, that doesn't mean we should go hunt things and kill things off.

Right.

But we are in a spot where we are losing species in 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 Viagen, 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, like we're not keeping any secret data. And then the next thing we're gonna ask them to do is like, can we pick a couple species and can we clone them for you?

Yeah.

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 Whoa.

So cool.

Okay, my last question, you'll hate. You are a business at the end of the day.

Yeah.

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 Formlabs, Form Bio, it's worth over $100 million. Our plastic degradation company is worth over $100 million. Astromac, which is our computational biology ancestral state reconstruction business, we just raised a $3.8 billion valuation, right, is one of our spinoffs. We have 2 other spinoffs 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 4 things. I think we will spinoff 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 4 and a half years. Yeah, it's kind of insane.

That's wild.

We are the number one genome engineering company by at least a decade in 4 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.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it's huge.

Okay.

in the world that has invertebrate and vertebrate gene drives that can work cross-species.

Okay, so that's a big—

So government will be another 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. Like, 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. Fucking fascinating, man. I mean, talk about being on the brink of all this biology, AI.

It's fun.

This confluence of all the things that are exciting. This was very, very fascinating.

Thanks for coming. This was great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yes.

He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. Thank God Monica's here. She's gonna let him have the facts. Is that your tea or hers?

Mine.

Oh.

You know, it's not a common pattern.

Tell me.

Collecting mugs. That's just me.

Did you collect magnets as a kid?

Yeah.

Did you?

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? 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 just been educated on this. I had no idea.

They're pretty.

Magpies?

Oh, sure. Oh my God.

And they're very smart, I believe.

Oh shit.

Sure.

Yeah, it says highly intelligent long-tailed birds.

You gotta be intelligent to wanna collect stuff, I guess.

Oh my God. Magpies rank among the world's smartest animals.

Oh boy. Maybe you need a magpie tattoo like my crow tattoo.

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?

Neck? Yeah. Head tattoo.

Forehead?

What if I got one and so you never saw it 'cause 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. 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?

Yeah, but below.

Just below. Like when you're playing the game with your eyes closed and someone's running their finger up where you think it—

So that was just thinking of that.

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 so you do let it go further than you think, and then still, that'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 of like a back tattoo? Yeah, dick on your neck or something. No, it's a mag on your crook of your elbow there. $1 million?

No, this is a bad game.

Okay.

'Cause then if people— whatever I say, people will get mad at me.

You won't get one for $400?

Yeah, exactly. Look, I—

On David Sedaris's thing, remember he's talking about COVID and people yelling at other people? And if you were just to write, like, 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 Sidera 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, yeah. I can tell that.

Okay.

First, I have to say that Jeffrey Johnson is—

Shout out.

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 love him like you can't imagine. He was the prop master on Parenthood for 6 years.

And CHiPs.

And then he did CHiPs, and I think he had another job, and I think 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 for themselves, which is warranted and adorable.

Yeah.

They get to have a glitzy night like all the other departments. And so each year I present, and 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 prop person has a bag with all your props in it. They've got your watch, they've got all the bullshit you gotta 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 things to him and putting stuff on and blah, 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 a last-minute idea. And he said, you know, and then when 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.

Right.

I was like, yeah, that's no problem. I can definitely carry you across the stage. I do nothing but train for God knows what. This is it.

Yeah.

So I pick him up, I'm holding him, waiting for them to go through the whatever they call that when they are saying he's a podcaster and an actor.

Oh, they're introducing you.

The introduction, right?

Yeah.

And again, I'm holding him and I'm like, skip the act, 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.

It's a big stage.

And I haven't carried a man like a baby ever. I'm just assuming, yeah, I can lift weight. 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. 'Cause 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, the category of— 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'm getting blasts of light in my eyesight.

Yeah.

Like little sparklers are going off in my aurora.

Yeah.

And to the point where I have to acknowledge it, I can't carry on. It's like 3 pages, this category. category intro, maybe more. And so finally I go, oh, okay, gang, I'm just going to admit that I am winded. Okay? I shouldn't be, but I've really lost my breath. And so laughing, laughing, laughing.

That's funny.

And then I somehow thought that got me the breaths I needed, but really I needed to sit there and I needed to breathe for about 10 or 15 seconds of silence. I wasn't going to do that. I just acknowledged the thing, and then I went back into it, and then I was proceeding through, and there were some hard names to read. Really hard. I feel so ashamed that I know I butchered this name. I'm hopeful the person wasn't actually there.

Okay. Fingers crossed.

Because I said, I'm butchering this. I acknowledge it. I'm so sorry. Like, offering, like, mea culpa.

Is this televised?

No.

Okay.

Thank goodness. Although it is being recorded, so God knows where this exists. But all to say, I really was teetering on consciousness by the end of it, trying to hold in tight, 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. I'd be like, what's all this about? If you can't carry a guy across the stage and then talk, I'm having the same feeling.

That's what I'm saying. Did you have a crisis?

But I do urge someone to carry a 190-pound man a couple hundred feet.

Well, you don't know 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 the lesson I learned. Yeah. Don't worry. No, I had a very healthy 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. And on the ride home, which in the past I would've really been lashing myself over, I was like, Jeff still knows I love him. And that 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 health.

I know.

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 the guy?

Lance Armstrong could probably do it. He had the best cardio probably of anybody.

Right. But he might not have the strength.

Oh, let's hope. 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 to challenge him. 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. Do you know that famous show?

Sort of, yeah.

It would be on a Saturday. This would be a good show. So you have— 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 evaluated, and that's how you win or lose. And it'd basically just be John Cena and I, I guess, competing.

No, we could add— no, there's other people like Alan Ritchson.

Oh, yeah, he would be great.

I mean, for old time's sake, Schwarzenegger. He's a little older. 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. And it made me very happy because I had seen that doc of him and I was very sad. He seemed really lonely. In the dock. 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. But to see that they were enjoying each other's company, I don't know, it gave me an abnormal amount of happiness.

That's good. Yeah, I think families, if they can, Yeah. I mean, your mom and dad were on date night.

They were 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 Barker, my stepdad. Did he cheat?

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 son.

That was the beautiful part of the doc. He's like, this is a great embarrassment to me, but I would never deny my son. 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.

And now he's a bodybuilder. He just competed in a natural bodybuilding 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. It's not even the same.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Yeah, I'm glad he— that would be really horrible if he didn't want anything to do with them. So I'm glad that he brought this person into this world who has no choice. So I'm very glad to hear that.

It's shrouded in a lot of public embarrassment.

Sure. Again, that this person's born into, and they themselves are now a part of this narrative that they didn't choose. So on top of it, if your parent was like, I don't want anything to do with you because you're reminding me of this, that's extra difficult.

Or I don't want to talk about it. That would be an 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 nice.

Yeah, it is. It's definitely nice.

A lot of people just go like, I don't want to 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 the kid— I wonder if the kids hang out, all of his children.

I think so. I don't know that, but I think so. I feel like I've seen photos. That's so nice.

I mean, again, it's like—

They're a lovely family.

Like, I've met them.

Again, I was lucky enough to be around that family 20 years ago. They're lovely, lovely folks. I love Maria. She's radical.

I think you could be lovely and still be like, eh, I don't know. But 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.

I love Thanksgiving together.

Yeah, I can't put too fine a point on how much I love Maria. She's so smart and fun to talk to.

Great.

She'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.

Of all of her many virtues, which there are probably too many to list, carrying a 190-pound man across the stage might not be what she can do.

Okay. Do you think she could lift off the tracks?

I don't know.

Okay. I don't know. We just don't know.

We don't know. I don't know how she feels about me. I don't know if the adrenaline, you know, like the superpowers might not hit her 'cause she doesn't care enough about me.

Yeah.

Yeah. You got a point.

Well, 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 up here.

Yeah.

How much I would enact her super human story.

Human strength.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Huh.

Yeah. I care about Jeff a ton, so I could carry him forever. It's just I can't make a speech afterwards.

Understandable.

Yeah.

Gosh.

Do you think you'd risk your life—

For who?

For a stranger? If a stranger was on the tracks? This is a really hard question.

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, I act very instinctually to, to get involved.

That's true.

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. I just was more like, said, I said hi to her on the sidewalk occasionally, you know? But yeah, I hear a woman screaming and I'm glad. I go. 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, it's not—

I won't go, but I'll call 911.

Yeah, that's— Brie handled the 911 of it all. I ran up the staircase and then came tumbling down the stairs. 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 Richie film. Yeah, he had a head the size of a microwave, shaved, thick, thick fucking Cockney accent. Yeah, he 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 the fire extinguisher. It's got the glass break. So my elbow went through that. And then now all of a sudden, we're tumbling 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 got to fucking— please don't get in this. I want to go back up. And then as he starts coming down the stairs, when he finally realizes, 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 going to get in there. And as he starts coming downstairs, I now come down the sidewalk to my stairwell, which is the next one over. Bree's standing there with the cord. cordless phone on with 911. 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 2 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.

She did. 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.

Yep.

The worst it would be if 2 days later you saw him back in there.

I mean, that's the pattern, sadly.

That is. I know. So good for her.

Yeah. She did not invite him back over. 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 You got out of there. Mm-hmm. Brie was there for another year and a half or so.

By herself.

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 physically, Physical violence is different than— It is chaos.

But at that point in our relationship, she had already witnessed a pretty good deal of it. I mean, 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. And this is when the roommate Is I'm in a conversation with the roommate.

Whose roommate?

Bree's.

Oh, Bree's.

Carrie's visiting from Michigan.

Oh, okay. You go over to Bree's house.

Go over to Bree's house. She lived with like 4 people.

Okay.

One of the dudes and I are talking. Apparently we're in a fight, but I truly don't recognize that. Tim Lovestead's there too.

Oh.

And I'm sitting cross-legged on my hands, sitting on my hands, leaning against a dresser in the middle of, like, I think we're just having kind of a friendly debate.

Oh, boy.

And he stands up, and then I'm like, oh, this guy is 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. And 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 their nose. 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.

And Carrie's there and she says to Bree, she goes, this is nothing.

This is nothing. This is fine. She's like, don't even— Yeah, this is standard biz.

And she's still, you know, she still dated you after that for 9 years. I wonder what not to do. Sorry.

Go ahead.

I just wonder, I wanna know what the convers— the debate was. I wanna know what led to that. Like, I know, 'cause in your head you're like, what? We're just— but obviously.

It was about his girlfriend.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And I told you, he broke every bone in his wrist. He ended up having surgery, 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. That story is from when I was 21.

God, I can't even— yeah, 21. So young. Isn't it weird to think about? You took such a left turn in life. Like, really, you're so different. Your life is so different than it was.

My life is so different. Yeah.

Yeah. Not you're so different necessarily, but your life is completely different. You live in—

A nice house.

A beautiful, nice house.

Beautiful children.

Incredible children. And a wife who's like America's sweetheart. That is so different. Yeah.

to say, if I got my nose broken in the living room now, Kristen would not be like, ah, it's nothing.

Right.

This is fun. This is fun.

No, but you're not getting your nose broken in the living room. That's my whole point. You're not doing that anymore.

I'm not. I'm an old man now. Yeah.

And 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. for you.

But well, you got to also— you, you, you have to, um, paint a full picture. So that's happening. 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.

That's— yeah, but that's a big That's a big part of it.

It is. It is. 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 fuckup. That's not the vibe.

That's not what I mean. I guess I mean like—

There was so much chaos in my life.

Yeah.

Yes. And now there's not much.

And partying and like being so show— like there's just a lot. Like now your life just looks very different. You're a 51-year-old man with a family.

I never leave this house. I work at the house.

I—

yeah.

Yeah. It's a much, much different existence. And I just—

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.

But I got to tap into that energy source I used to have at my disposal all the time, which is like, yeah, let's go to that thing and let's drive to Mexico tonight and let's— 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 don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I just feel like the shift is much bigger.

Seismic. 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.

Oh, no, I know. But you were saying, like, I wonder what the people then think now of this domesticated life you have.

Yeah.

And 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. Tim is a good boy, so he wasn't present during—

right, there's also like a whole other versions.

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, uh, child's play.

Exactly.

So what Aaron and I were seeking out at all times.

Yeah. Funny.

Yeah.

You're an interesting person.

Oh, well, thank you. I was trying to become one.

Yeah, you are. I think if anyone, myself included. This is weird to say, but I remember, um, 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 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. Why would— how could anyone have had any idea, right? You were on Punk'd and Baby Mama and playing dumb. But I was definitely like, oh, he is? Oh, okay.

Unexpected.

It 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.

Well, 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 Where are you gonna keep it? In my bedroom.

Where?

On my bed.

It's gonna live there?

Those huge tusks. Because even a pygmy— yeah, I think even a pygmy one— like, 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 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. And on Bless This Mess. I am Bless This Mess, but I was really close on The Ranch because it's a small stage and there's a cow and you're right there and their eyeballs are so sweet.

That's nice.

You can, like, look in them. You can look in them. They're like whales. 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. 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 this meat producer.

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 Apart 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 cow be able to get around?

I don't know if it will.

Well, yeah, I don't think so.

Don't you need a brain to tell it to move? It's just gonna have 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. and get—

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, it's, um, M. Night Shyamalan. And, um, I don't want that.

Wes Craven.

It's a little more M. Night Shyamalan to me.

Okay.

Um, 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 shot—

Paint the picture for me.

He walks into the basement.

Oh, they're in the basement.

Joaquin Phoenix. He walks into the basement.

Oh, Joaquin Phoenix walks into the basement.

And he sees a little crack in the ground. And he gets his tool, and he's like, oh, oh, the floor board is loose. Oh, okay.

It's a wooden floor.

Yeah. And then he lifts it and he's like, oh, what's that smell?

Oh, 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?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah, That's a bummer.

That's a sad ending.

That's not what I want to happen. I want him to just be able to grow ribeyes with no suffering.

Speaking of the movie I just wrote, I watched a scary movie with Adam Scott on—

Oh, he was in it?

He's in it. It's him, Michelle Monaghan, 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 it is on Netflix.

Is it a series or a—

It's a movie.

It's a film.

Yeah. And it's not too long.

Great. That's your new criteria.

It passed my test.

Yeah. 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 the words for grandma and grandpa in other cultures.

Okay, great. Babushka?

Yeah, for Russian, babushka and dedushka.

Oh, daddy is a dedushka?

Grandpa.

Grandpeppy.

Spanish, abuela, abuelo.

Yeah, we love that.

We know that. Italian, nonna.

Mamma mia.

No. Nonna and nonno.

Nonna and nonno. I don't think I knew nonno.

German is Oma.

Wow. Oma is—

I know.

Her name is Grandma.

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 your bad eyesight.

Oma and Opa.

Oh no, that's cute.

Greek is Yaya. Maybe it's Yaya.

Yeah, that's what Peggy calls her grandma. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, because it's— but it's Y-I-A. I-A. So I do think it's yaya, but that's—

I do too.

Interesting spelling. And then papou.

Poo-poo.

Papou. French. Ooh.

Mimi and Pippi.

No, but I mean, sure.

That's what it's supposed to be. That's what I was taught to call my French grandparents.

It's grand-mère. Oh, I love it.

That must be official.

Grand-mère is grandma and grand-père is grandpa. I love it.

I just wanna know where Mimi and Pippi me are. and Pippi went.

Irish is— ooh, my ma— I— okay, Irish is hard.

It's Gaelic or something.

My mayo, maymay, meemaw, maymayo.

My meemaw. Um, meemaw is like a Southern thing sometimes.

Meemaw. Yeah, I know a lot of friends who have meemaws.

Meemaws.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. Meemaw and Papa.

Yeah.

A lot of people have Paw-Paws. My dad might go by Oshie.

Oh, is that Grandpa in—

Nope. It's just since his name is Ashok.

Oh, okay.

Well, we're gonna start—

It's really close to, um, not Oshie, but who is the Bhagwan? What'd he become? He became—

No, that— he became Osho.

Osho.

Osho.

Osho. Tough titties.

Osho.

Yep. Um, I think we're gonna— he's gonna try to push for that, but, you know, Memphis gets to decide ultimately.

Yeah.

That's the firstborn 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.

They did.

Okay. Yeah. Jamie and Jason are like 2 years and 4 years respectively younger.

Okay. Got it. So David was the firstborn grandchild.

Oh, he sure was. He was the belle of the ball for 5 whole years. He got to be doted on.

So cool.

Yeah.

It sucks when the other one comes.

When Dax arrives. He's deaf and colicky. He grunts.

Do you think that's why Delta wants to learn sign language? Because he said, my dad was deaf.

Deaf. Yeah, maybe.

Um, oh, there's— okay, there's a lot. Um, this says in India, in Hindi specifically though. So my parents—

Take it with a grain of salt.

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.

I feel like it reeks of the caste system.

Spanish has that too.

It's part of the caste system.

Oh God. Okay. Oh, in Swahili it's Bibi and Babu.

Oh, I like that. Baby 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 is when he was suspended and then Well, he wreaked havoc in a short amount of time. His name is Christopher Duntsch.

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.

Oh.

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 as— 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. 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 turns—

Because he partied.

Okay, so I just was looking up the extinct animals because I'm just not well-versed.

Okay. What if you said, I'm just not convinced?

Oh my God. What if— whoa, that would be crazy.

Yeah, what a revelation. Yeah.

Yeah. some that we— these are kind of obvious, I guess. Well, dodo is. The dodo, flightless bird. Stellar sea cow. He mentioned the sea cow.

I'll have to bring that one back. Yeah.

Okay. There's the quagga. It's a South African subspecies of the plains zebra hunted for meat and skin. But 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. Passenger pigeon. That's cool because—

Well, we lost it though, right?

Yeah, but if we could bring it back.

This is like an in moratorium at the Oscars for animals.

Like, there should be music playing and then you just read the dodo bird, the Sichuan pony mule, the passenger pigeon, and then you hear, oh yeah, I love that.

The passenger pigeons made me want to get into animals.

Tasmanian tiger. I mean, I do want one of those.

Do you?

Actually, no, they look kind of ugly because they look kind of like coyotes. I saw 2 coyotes yesterday. Okay, Chinese paddlefish. 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, about—

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 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?

Mm-hmm.

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 wooly 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.

Oh.

Um, aurochs. 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.

£1,000.

£1,000.

Madagascar.

Yep, exactly.

Home of the pygmy hippo.

Wooly rhinoceros.

Ooh, that sounds fun.

Hold on, the Caspian tiger. I want to look at this.

Okay.

It looks regular.

You're like a 6-year-old. You're learning about animals right now, real time. You're like leafing through a National Geographic book.

Oh, this reminds me. Okay, the game that I taught you guys about, Impostor.

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 Jess, circus. And I was like, no, I was like, that makes sense.

Clowns are at circuses.

Yes. I was like, that makes sense. And then Jess was like, well, I don't know what this is.

Okay. All right.

And then Anthony was like, oh, it's definitely Jess. Like, who wouldn't know what that is? And I was like, some of us don't know animals that well. I was like, he's from Sweden.

No.

I mean, if you're from India—

He's from Burbank, but he did spend some time in Sweden.

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— If you're from Georgia?

India.

If you're from—

If you're from India, you don't know seahorses.

Right.

And I'm collect— I'm gonna make a collection 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. I think it's real. Yeah.

Remember I asked that other Indian man and he didn't know about sources?

Do you think it's part of, like, do you think it's a product of great wealth that, like, you have the free time? There's, like, less pressing issues. 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 National Geographics. I learned all these at my papa and grandma's house because they had the whole encyclopedia of animals for me, the National Geographic, and I just looked at them endlessly. Yeah. Like, do you think it could be 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, sub-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 restaurants.

Sure.

There are aquariums.

Right.

Anyway, okay, well, that's it.

That's everything.

Yeah. And I guess I still don't know. Oh, okay, maybe I want to bring back the 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 pygmy wooly mammoth or mastodon. Yeah, yeah, I look forward for you.

I wouldn't want a pygmy giant sloth because then that would just be a sloth, be a 3-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 horn.

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.

Love you.