Part Two: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift
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Call zone media. Ugh, what's Epstein, my Jeffries? I think I've done a version of that before. Should we not? Is that bad, Sophie? I didn't like it the first time. Should we not start that way? How many chances do you get now that he's dead, you know? Zero. We don't need to do that. That's right. That's right. That's the real tragedy, you know? No. No. I wouldn't say tragedy. No. No.

Langston Kerman, our guest. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm excited to hear more. This feels weird to say out loud, but I'm excited to hear more about Jeffrey Epstein and everything he's been up to with our boy George Church. Thankfully, we are past, we're done with the Epstein part of the story, because you know how that ends. Obviously, Bernie Sanders sneaks into prison and puts him out of his misery. Yeah.

In order to keep some certain people's secrets. Or something, you know, nobody knows, right? Some people are pretty sure they know. I don't know. There's like, I would say like four or five people who probably know exactly what happened. Yeah, maybe who know exactly. Yeah. I continue to be, you know, an agnostic. I'm an Epstein agnostic.

But definitely fucking George Church, I feel like, knows more than he's letting on. He knows more than we do on this podcast, for sure. Yeah, man. But yeah, maybe it was George. No, that'll get us sued. We can't accuse this bioscientist of having Epstein killed. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Yeah, maybe he inserted a gene into him that made him choke to death.

Yeah. Just made, made something explode in the middle of prison somehow. Right. Right. Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, created a spontaneously grew a new set of his hair. Um, so, oh boy. Um,

Around the time he renewed his association with Epstein, which would have been in the 2014 to 15 era, unless he'd been continuing to talk to him, which we really don't know. But we have records of them starting to meet again multiple times in 2014. Anyway, and around that same period of time in 2014 and 2015, Epstein.

That's when Dr. Church first started seriously pushing de-extinction as a scientific topic, right? Where he was, I think you can find some quotes where he sort of talked about the possibility, but 2014 and 15 is when he really is like, this is an actual thing we can and should do and maybe even a potential business that I want to be in.

He had danced around the issue in his 2012 book, Regenesis, where he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals, which people always get angry at, are like, Robert, you're mispronouncing it again. That is how you say what most people call Neanderthals. I'm not brave enough to have ever challenged you on it. To question me on it?

Some people did in my novel, and then they're like, oh shit, I looked it up. I say Neanderthal, but I'm a dum-dum, so I'm glad. It's fine. They're all dead. Like, who gives a... That's not what they called themselves, right? You call us what? They said ooga booga, so yeah. Absolutely. Wow. No, it's fine. We wipe them out because we're... Well, because we're monsters. We're the devils here. Yeah.

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So anyway, he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals by genetic engineering and using an actual human woman to serve as their surrogate mother. Oh, no. He described in the book the ideal surrogate to rebirth the Neanderthal race as, quote, an extremely adventurous female human.

Oh, man. You can feel however you want about this, but my maybe Sophie, you can chime in here depending on how if you feel I'm getting this wrong. It's kind of fucked up to call her a female human as opposed to like an adventurous woman. Like either way, it's fucked up. But female human seems worse somehow.

Then like, we're going to find some adventurous woman. Right. I don't know if neither is good, but female human. Like you sound like a Star Trek character. You sound like Quark talking about ladies. Female human as if. Female human. You didn't need both of those. Could just say woman again. You could just say woman. Yeah. That's what that word is for. It literally was like. Female human. Really weird. It's just kind of awkward, man.

You're not being chill. You're not being cool. Der Spiegel, and Der Spiegel is a German news agency. I think it literally means The Voice or something like that. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. I'm bad at German. But it's a major, it's like their New York Times almost, right? It's a major publication over there. Interviewed Dr. George Church in 2015 because he had recently made the claim that it would soon be possible to clone Neanderthals.

They asked him, will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime? And he replied, I think so. But boy, there are a lot of parts to that. He goes on to list a few of the technologies that have developed recently, which might allow this kind of cloning, and then adds, another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so? Yeah.

Now we're getting to what you really want here, George. Yeah, exactly. Now we're getting to the real sketchy shit. Something tells me you're not as concerned with these wolves and these Neanderthals as you're pretending. Yeah.

Now, Der Spiegel very reasonably said, well, you shouldn't maybe because it's super illegal, right? Like you're not, it's very illegal to clone human beings. And Church's response is, well, that may be true in Germany, but it's not true everywhere. And laws can change, by the way. Cool. Cool.

That's like if someone was like, I think I'm going to commit some murders. And he's like, but it's illegal to murder. Well, what if the law changed? That's not really my question. It's illegal to murder because you're living in the past, my man. I'm thinking about the future. Like, I'm not really like, if it were legal to murder, that wouldn't change my judgment upon you for wanting to murder somebody, you know? And it's interesting because, again, he's always described as having this deep consideration of ethics.

and, you know, putting even a lot of money into making sure that what he does is ethical. And he's asked like, yeah, but like it's super illegal to clone human beings for like obvious reasons. And he's like, well, what if it wasn't?

Like, not my question, my dude. Okay. Yeah. It's just fascinating. And the other thing that's interesting here is that, like, not only is he like his answer to like, this is kind of fucked up. Well, we could make it legal. But when he's kind of pressed by Der Spiegel on like, why would you want to do this? Like, what's the benefit? His answer is complete horseshit. Yeah.

First off, he's asked, like, why would this be desirable, right? And when you ask that, you're asking, like, give me a good reason to want a Neanderthal clone that's not, like, some sort of cheap profit. Like, why is this desirable? And his first answer is, well, that's another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what's technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

Wow. That is bad scientific ethics. Yeah. First off, man, you shouldn't decide what's desirable based on societal consensus. Go back to the 50s. What was societal consensus on interracial dating? If you're letting that move you to decide what's desirable, you're going to be bad. Oh.

But he's also not taking genuine polls. He's just talking to Jeffrey Epstein. And the average human probably doesn't give a shit about this, right? I didn't know that bringing back a Neanderthal was possible and frankly never was interested in seeing it. It was not on my list of concerns. Yes. No.

And the attitude that like, well, my only job is to determine like, what are people willing to let me do? And then what's technically feasible? You're literally doing the Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park thing. Like you're literally, your scientists are so busy asking what they can do. They're not asking, should we? Is this fucked up? Like my, my,

Michael Crichton was not a good man, but he understood that this is bad ethics, right? That just being like, I wonder if I can. It's like evil. It leads you to do evil. No, you should chill out. Yeah.

Fine. Probably fine. Fuck it. Yeah. So it's very interesting to me how just he has he's completely incurious as to whether or not there's a practical benefit to doing this kind of cloning. And Der Spiegel has to prod him like two or three times to get him to answer kind of directly like, what is is there any potential benefit to bringing back this species?

And here's what Church eventually says. Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial. Okay. I got a lot of issues here. Fine, man. If we're just going to pretend, fine. First off, let's split my issues here into pragmatic and then ethical. Pragmatic, ethical.

bigger brain doesn't mean smarter no bigger brain dolphins have bigger brain than us they're not so far proven useful in getting us off the planet they have other concerns right yeah the other thing is if you're creating if you're bringing back this species this is a sentient sapient species an independent species and you are saying we'll use their big brains to get off the planet well what if that's not what they want

What if they have other interests being their own independent beings? Because it seems like your concern is like, well, we can just harness their big brains so that we can do the science stuff that I want to do because they'll be smart. Well, but what if they don't want to do that? Are you just saying you'll own them? Is that kind of what you're saying? Is that kind of what you're saying? I think you're trying to make big ass slaves, man. Yeah. I think you're trying to make some big old slaves and that's...

That's something you should maybe just say out loud instead of pretending like it has some other value. It is one of those things. He's not saying I want to make big ass slaves. But if you say I want to bring back a new intelligent species, you kind of immediately have to say, and they will immediately be full citizens and right with the rights of human. But you have to like really emphasize that. Yeah. If you don't want me to be like.

You just want slaves. Listen, they don't have to live with me. They can live wherever they want. Yeah. So that's the other thing, because this Der Spiegel journalist is like, how

How do you even go about raising this species that you've brought back to life, right? Like, they won't have parents or a culture. And as, like, this is an intelligent hominid species, presumably most of how the real ones knew how to do the things that they did was that they were raised in families like us, right? Who, like, raised them. But there's no culture of these people anymore. So how do you raise them? Yeah.

And Church is kind of vaguely like, well, you'd like make a bunch at a lot at once, like a cohort, he calls them. And then he's like, maybe they'd become their own culture. Maybe they'd even become a political force. What does that mean? I keep coming back to Jurassic Park because you can't not when it's talking about de-extinction. But also what's amazing to me is, again, Michael Crichton, the climate change denier, fucking weird guy, Michael Crichton.

Oh,

understood all of the ethical issues with this when applied to dinosaurs in a way this guy doesn't when applying them to like effectively a humanoid creature. Because in the actual book Jurassic Park, one of the things that becomes clear, like the raptors, which are super intelligent, the ones that engine clones don't act like real velociraptors. They're terrible to their young. They like murder their own kids. They're just like crazy, violent and dangerous because they were not raised by adults that knew anything about

They're just these monsters that got unleashed. And so they grew up completely without any kind of a culture that would teach them how to like raise their young. And as an intelligence, be like Crichton imagined this when talking about dinosaurs. Yeah. And George Church is just uncurious about it. Yeah. Like literally read Jurassic Park.

park we literally have a a uh an economic system where you see what raising people without their families does and he's like yeah i bet these ones will figure it out yeah like no that's not

That's not how it's going to work, big dog. Well, and it's also like, just even when you're talking outside of Neanderthals, we're talking about like the animals he wants to raise, like a major story from like, like animal, you know, biology and whatnot in the last couple of decades is we used to have these beliefs about alpha wolves that deeply influenced a lot of toxic aspects of human culture. And then the scientist who came up with the idea was like, I was completely wrong. I was looking at wolves raised in prisons, basically, and they don't act like wild wolves, right? Yeah.

Which again, if you're just bringing back a dead ancient animal and it has no animals of its own type to raise it, how the fuck are you going to have it? Because his goal here is always for it to retake its original evolutionary niche. How would it do that? It doesn't know how to do that. You ever seen those videos where like...

They'll like put a tiger in with a pig, like a baby tiger, and then the baby tiger starts acting like the pig a little bit. It's like, well, yeah, that's because that's more influential than it being just raw tiger by itself. Yeah, yeah. This is why I intend to raise a human being with a bunch of tigers. But that's a separate point. I just want to see if they'll grow claws. All the scientists are saying no, but I have my own theories.

Scientists are saying a lot of things. They say a lot of shit as these episodes show. So,

So, yeah, my opinion here is that his primary interest isn't even I don't even think he ever intended to clone Neanderthals. Right. I think he knows that this is not really going to happen. It's clear to me that his real interest is a mix of both like driving up hype because he's going to be starting this. He's trying to and he's gotten very good at using his lab. We'll do some work in like like finding some Neanderthal DNA and sequencing it.

And then he can use that to start making claims that we'll be able to clone them one day and eventually get investments so that he can spin off another startup company.

Right. And that's kind of part of where Colossal Bioscience is the dire wolf company comes from. That's part of what he's doing. I think the other thing that he's doing here, and this becomes clear later in the interview, is he's sort of giving away that his actual interest is not to bring back extinct species. It's to find traits of those species and edit them into other animals for much less altruistic purposes. Right.

At one point he is asked, like, do you think there's anything wrong with creating a whole new species? And he says, the main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would mainly be a question of societal risk avoidance. And that's a really good example of using, like, the language of social justice and liberalism to advocate for horrifying things.

Like, first off, human beings have mostly done fine with that Neanderthals. I don't know that there's any evidence that they would make us, like, more diverse. But also, that's not what he's interested in doing. Later in the interview, Der Spiegel asks, hey, wouldn't you just be able to add some of their genes to a human and change the human?

And the answer Dr. Church gives makes it clear that this is what I think he's really interested in. Because he says, suppose you were to realize, wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. That could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. And that's when I'm like, oh, you just want to create designer smart babies for rich people, right? That's the blueprint here. You're just trying to make it so that the baby comes out exactly the way you planned and with no

other stuff. Right. And you can make hyper smart babies for your rich friends that become a new species to rule over all of us. That's your goal. Yeah, with blue eyes and no need for braces. Right. We get it. Right. Right. That's your dream. He continues, even if you don't have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. And this is where he lays out the blueprint for what Colossal's going to do. Because he's like,

DNA doesn't last. We can't get full dinosaur DNA. You'll never be able to clone a real dinosaur. But then he's like, even if you don't have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you'd first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask, what's the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands? And you would try to identify the mutations to try and back-engineer the dinosaur. I think this will be feasible.

And again, it's not really, but yeah, there's a, um, I learned about this recently, but there's somebody who's making something called the chicken a source where they are essentially claiming that they're like re they've rediscovered or re given us dinosaurs again via this chicken a sort, but it's just a fucked up chicken. Yeah. That like looks like it's got like some dinosaur qualities, uh,

And it's one of those things like, is that kind of interesting? Sure. Would I want something that looks like a dinosaur and is a pet? I'm not made of stone, of course. Is that a dinosaur that you've de-extincted? No. It's a thing you made. And there's still these ethical questions about like, well, what are the rights of that animal? Like, yada, yada. Like, there's a lot of weird things, you know.

Like there's a lot of weird shit about that, right? I'm not thrilled with this, but that's my least kind of concern here is some guy who's like, look, this isn't a real dinosaur, but it looks like one. Do you want to have it as a pet?

All right. Yeah. I have bigger concerns, you know? Right. It's not, it's not the true crime that is, uh, that our boy George is working on the back end of this. Although there's also the day, if it is like made out of a, from a chicken, chickens are soulless monsters. Like you don't want to make them more powerful. Like they're also not particularly bright. None of this feels like a great combination. No. If you know chickens, their favorite food is their own kind. Like they are scary animals. Yeah.

My favorite, Werner Herzog has some great quotes about if you want to be frightened, stare into the eyes of a chicken. There's like nothing but blackness in there. Oh, man. It's good stuff. Your chicken listeners are going to be pissed. You're being nasty. You know, we've all had, like, I've had chickens. I remember once one of my chickens, a raccoon got in the coop and one of my brave chickens fought it off and got injured and all of its friends ate it to death. Yeah.

It's horrible. Chickens are nightmares. Oh, I really didn't even like give him a shit. They don't give a fuck. Holy shit. Oh man. Chicken run really sold me a different story about that. No, chickens are not that good at solidarity. Not their strong suit as a species. Um,

So we'll talk more in a little bit about his so-called de-extinction ambitions. But again, this starts in like 2014, 15. And the fact that he's like working on this stuff, the fact that he's got this history with Epstein and Epstein's weird baby breeding project and all these genome sequencing, all these that he's talking in 2015 about like editing human genes to make designer babies. This all leads directly to the most fucked up thing about Dr. George Church.

which is how often he winds up, shall we say, tugging at the fringes of outright eugenics, right? Oh. Yeah. In a 2019 interview for CBS with Scott Pelley, Church talks about his goal, which is framed in the article as to protect humans from viruses, genetic diseases, and aging. In the interview, George talks about age reversal, which he says has been proven about eight ways in animals. Now,

It hasn't. Right? And that's a really vague statement for a scientist to make. And I want to know, what are the eight ways? What do you mean by proven? Right? These are all the questions that aren't answered. There's that jellyfish that can regenerate or turn itself back into a child. But that's not proving it. That's just that species. Right. And there's turtles that

may basically live forever if they're not killed by something, right? Like, there's some tortoises that are, like, 300 years old, right? And there's some other species where it may be a similar thing, where, like, they kind of only die if something gets them. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't mean... You can't just, like... Maybe there will be some sort of life extension secrets in that animal, but maybe it's just different enough from us that, like...

There's no way to transfer that to human beings. He's saying that we have proved how to reverse age in animals, right? That we have done it using science. And that should be a falsifiable statement, but he doesn't give much more detail there. I did find an article for the Center for Genetics and Society that attempts to reverse engineer his claim. And they're like, he is almost surely overselling this.

But they suspect one of the proven cases he's talking about here is a study about gene therapy for mitral valve disease in mice, right? And it's a study that showed that by editing some genes, you can fix, like, mitral valve disease in mice. Now, that's important and may have some really crucial implications for science, may allow us to extend a lot of people's lives, right? I'm not saying that that's not good science. Yeah. It's not age reversal.

right? That is like, that's curing a valve disease, right? It's not exactly the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. You're still going to die when you die. You just won't die from that. You'll get older. It's just like, you'll be this problem with your heart. We might be able to fix with gene editing. And obviously like, is it possible given enough time that we will be able to extend human life enough that we keep extending it? It's not impossible. I'm not saying, I don't think it's necessarily likely because there's a lot of shit you'd have to figure out.

And I just don't know if we're going to get there, given all of the other things human civilization is going to have to deal with. But it's not impossible. It's just the way he talks about this is so blasé and he glosses over so much that it's not like serious scientific talk.

And some of the evidence for this is that like when he gets pressed on like, well, how do you know? Where are we actually making animals younger? The only real evidence that he's able to cite is an ongoing clinical trial to see if gene therapy can extend the lifespan of dogs. And maybe that will be possible, but any resultant therapy is going to be – number one –

It's not proven yet. And number two, any resultant therapy that might come out of this doesn't, we don't know that it would work on people because dogs aren't people, right? Yeah. There's some noticeable differences. Not in a genetic sense, Sophie. In an ethical sense, sure. But not in a genetic sense. We're differently constructed.

it right it's really funny when people sort of like sink into these types of uh sciences because like if you want your dog to live longer just stop making it fuck its cousin you know what i mean like that's part of it right stop breeding them till they're like sick the second they come out and let them be whatever random mutt that they all are kind of supposed to be yeah

And, you know, for the record, if we ever find a way to make dogs live like 60 years, I'm on board. Ditto cats. You know, I don't have an issue with like keeping our pets alive with us. I'd welcome their presence the entire time. I'd welcome their presence. It'd only help. I would do so many things to keep my dog alive longer.

There's no evidence that this thing he's talking about is going to work really on dogs. And even if it can extend the lifespan, it's also not the same as reversing age necessarily. But also, even if, and again, these are all many, these ifs are increasingly fractional long shots. Even if this study works on dogs, even if there proves to be an application on human beings, any resultant therapy, right?

that allows you to extend human lifespan or reverse human age will be exhaust and outlandishly expensive. So expensive that it will only be available to guys like Jeffrey Epstein, right? In response to Dr. Church's claims about age reversal, science historian Nathaniel Comfort noted,

Lengthening the lives of rich Westerners, the obvious customers, would be the biggest ecological crime since Standard Oil. It's hard to argue with that. That's true. Yeah. That's pretty fair. Obviously, that doesn't mean we wouldn't do it. There's two separate questions. Is this ethical? No. Is this possible? No.

Also, so far, no, right? That said, I should note that the ethics of this are not a topic that Church ignores. There's a whole other CBS article I found where he talks about genetic equality and emphasizes the fact that he keeps an ethicist on staff.

Quote,

But like, it doesn't mean anything. Like for one thing, the pharmaceutical companies that buy this from you are going to set the prices, right? They'll pay you off. I just think it's always a bad sign when somebody has to outsource ethics. Right. You know what I mean? Pay someone for the ethics? You need somebody else to handle ethics because that's just not how you think is, is you're going to do some vile shit. That,

That's probably a fair point, too. And it's also hard for me to square this statement that like, well, I really I don't want, you know, there to be genetic, you know, bias. I want everyone to have access to these wonderful things. We're definitely going to be able to do his claims that that's what he wants are hard for me to square with other statements he has made saying like, but that I quoted earlier where he's like, hey, man, it's just my job to figure out what we can do. Right. Whatever society is fine with is, you know, what's right. Right. Right.

That's none of my business. It's a very Werner Von Braun. When the rockets go up, who knows where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun. I'm just here to make as many homunculi as possible. I don't decide where they go. Look, man, I'm in the homunculi business. I'm not in the where homunculi go business, you know?

know um he told cbs we're not necessarily opposed to enhancement if everybody gets access to it simultaneously and again but there's no how do you do that you don't talking about how that would ever happen you're just saying obviously that's what i want yeah are you going to turn down millions of dollars or billions of dollars to make sure that happens unless somebody guarantees it somehow are you how

Doesn't seem real. Doesn't seem likely. Anyway, he doesn't propose any way to ensure this, nor do I believe he truly cares. Scott Pelley, who's the journalist who interviewed Church, made this statement after talking to him. He doesn't see a great distinction between being able to travel 550 miles an hour on an airliner or changing somebody's genome in order to make them maybe cognitively more astute.

There's a big difference. That's why I fuck with Scott Pelley. He really, end of the day, he really breaks it all down in a very succinct, clear way. He's like, that man that I just spoke to is a psychopath. And you should know that. That would be like if a weapons designer's like, what's really the difference between building a new artillery shell and genetically encoding a bomb into someone's DNA without them knowing? Is there really a difference? They're both dead. Yes. I think you can agree they're both dead. There is.

They are both dead, but I do think there's a difference. Now, I know me saying like, I don't trust that this guy cares about ethics. I think he's lying about caring about equality here. Maybe that just seems like old Robert being an asshole because all the bastards he reads about. There's other good reasons to doubt George Church here. And I want to quote from that article from the Center for Genetics and Society.

The massive Chinese company, BGI, sees synthetic biology as a promising field, and in 2017 launched the George Church Institute of Regenesis in Shenzhen. BGI's corporate culture has been criticized as eugenics-like, and the company is currently involved in state surveillance and harassment of millions of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group in Xinjiang. Oh, man. It's not great.

The company that starts the institute named after you has been criticized as eugenics-like or for surveilling a minority being targeted by the state. None of those are good things. I really was hoping this wasn't going to lead to you knowing who the test subjects were. Ha ha ha!

I can't prove that, but yeah. The other thing is that just outside of those ethics, the George Church Institute of Regenesis, that's a dystopian name. I'm sorry. That's from a cyberpunk source book. Yeah, George, you're fucked up, man. You're doing something fucked up. You should know that's a bad name. But that's...

But that said, I had to look further into this BGI and everything. When I heard the words eugenics like for this company culture, I was like, what the fuck does that mean? And holy fuck, is this company screwed up?

So back in 2018, Wang Jian, who's a co-founder and president of the company, participated in a panel discussion at a conference. He stated that BGI's goal was for each of their employees to live to at least age 100. To ensure this, they have to, in order to work there, embrace three rules. And I'm going to read you about these rules per an article for the English-language Chinese news website Sixth Tone. Quote,

The first rule is that BGI staff are not allowed to have children with birth defects. If they were born with defects, it would be a disgrace to all 7,000 staff, Wang said. It would mean that we are fooling society and just eyeing each other's pockets. Wang added that there are no known serious congenital diseases among the 1,400 infants that have been born to the company's employees. Oh, boy. Oh, God. Yeah.

Well, that's just, I mean, do I have to like talk about why that's evil? God damn. That's, they're just saying stuff plainly. Holy shit. Holy fuck. That's crazy. These people made a center named after you, George? Jesus Christ. They also, there's no way they mean that about like the cleaning staff. No. You know what I mean? Like they're only talking about very specific employees at this company. Yeah. Yeah.

That's nuts. That's – also, what do you consider a defect, right? And I know this is actually tricky. The ethics here are really tricky, right? If I was having a kid and I learned like, hey, this future potential child would have a heart defect, we found evidence of, and we can fix it in utero. Of course you'd want to fix that as a parent. You wouldn't want your kid to have a heart defect. Yeah.

What about if they're like, hey, your child, they'll be perfectly healthy, perfectly intelligent, but they'll be on the autism spectrum or they'll have ADHD. Yeah. And they give you an option to zap that because that kind of feels like genocide to me. Right? Yeah, 100%. And this is... They're going to have a sixth finger. Right. The slope is so slippery for like what they'll decide is acceptable and not acceptable. Yes. Yeah.

And this is something we will have to grapple with, and it's not going to be easy, because obviously, if you're like, hey, your kid's going to be... has this genetic condition that will mean that they will be constantly in horrible pain for every second of their short life, but we can fix that right now. Who wouldn't want to fix that? But then how do you build guardrails in so that you're not just saying, we're going to get rid of everyone who's different, right? Yeah. Like...

And who, frankly, are the scientists in charge of making those decisions? Right, right. We know for a fact it's a real, I'll bring back dire wolves ass person. Yeah, or Wang, who's like, none of the kids of my employees can be defective. Right? Like, this is all just like, it gets really bad very, very quickly.

Right. And it's also like, you know, church makes this big claim of like, I'm a big believer in diversity. He talks about like, I have narcolepsy and I have a lot of my greatest ideas. And when I like kind of have these quick narcoleptic naps and stuff, he's a big believer in neurodiversity according to what he says, but also the science and the people he's working with are actively working to end neurodiversity. Yeah. Like that's the result of this, right? Like we all know that's where these people would go.

Is that not a problem? It's a real... It's like Hitler being like, well, my mom was Jewish. So that's why. I mean, yeah. That's why I'm doing this. That would have been a weird thing for Hitler to say. Oh, Hitler. So...

BGI's second rule is that the company can't detect cancer later than hospitals do, which I guess is fine as an ambition, right? You want your company who does these screenings to be faster than the current technology? Okay. Give you a pass on that one. The third rule for BGI employees is almost as fucked up as the first. And I'm going to quote from Sixth Tone again.

Employees are forbidden from having a heart bypass surgery. Instead, they are expected to rely on gene tech and clean living to prevent cardiovascular disease. To promote fitness and healthy eating, Wang said, BGI tracks the dining habits of employees at its cafeteria and has put its elevators out of service. Now... Man.

Wang describes this policy as a bit mean. He's also opposed women from the Chinese mainland getting HPV vaccines in Hong Kong, not because he's anti-vax, but because he thinks that genetic testing is a better value for the money, which is like, that's just none of your fucking business, man.

Oh, man. He's like, no, don't don't cure their disease. I want to figure out how to test more. I need more diseases to play with. What if they get vaccinated and get you? Anyway, this company is fucked up. And the fact that Dr. Church is involved with this guy and his company to such an extent that this BGI named a center after George Church says more than every vague claim he makes about ethics and genetic equality about what I think his actual ethics are.

And the more you read about him, the more it becomes clear that there are two very different George Churches. There's the one who legitimately contributed to some huge scientific breakthroughs and who runs a Harvard lab that does work on some really cool projects. One of the companies he's affiliated with is working to, like, clone pigs with organs that can, like, be transplanted more easily into human beings. I think that's a really good idea, right? Not that there's no ethical concerns there, but, like, probably worth it in my opinion. Some people will feel differently, but, like...

Not enough organs out there right now for everybody who needs them. But there's another George Church, and that's the guy who will work with absolutely anyone and anything if there's money in it for him. Right?

Right. And we'll kind of say anything, you know, that's my interpretation of events. I'm not saying that's objectively true. My opinion. You see the first George in these hagiographic articles for the popular press that are talking about like how amazing he and his companies are. And you see the second George when you actually look into a lot of the companies that he's either co-founded or had been hired to advise. Right.

For an example of a company he's co-founded, I'd like to introduce you to a venture that he co-founded in 2019 called Digid8 or Digidate. Digidate. No. Do you think you know where we're going here? I have no clue. Oh, it's dating. It's a dating service. It's a genetic dating service. Oh, no. No. Oops. Oh, shit. Yeah. That sounds bad. Fuck. Fuck.

His co-founder is Bhargavi Govindarajan, who is a Harvard graduate who met Church at a school event. They got to talking about consumer genetic testing, and she seems to have soft-pitched him, like, what if we integrated genome sequencing into a dating app? Yeah.

And this is what she said later. It did not take us much time to uncover synergies in terms of how we wish to build a nimble, modern platform that taps into molecular biology and accelerates the impact of preventative health for a variety of consumers. Within a year of the first meeting that seeded our conversations, we incorporated DigiDate with planet-wide ambitions.

God, that's just, it's both like such tech corporate speak and also evil supervillain speak. Planet. Planet scale. Yeah, that's nuts. That's terrifying. You can probably guess the basics of this idea. You give Digidate your DNA. They sequence it and they compare it to other people on the surface to ensure that you only match with someone you're compatible with. I really don't like where this is going.

You don't like where this is going, Sophie? This sounds kind of like eugenics.

Yeah. Eugenics, me-genics, who knows, right? You plus me, eugenics equals us genics. No. No, guys. Quote, the idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people, and this is from the MIT Technology Review, the idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people who share a genetic mutation, like those that cause Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis, never meet, fall in love, and have kids. Yes.

Well, I mean, I... That's a really fucked up way to say it. That's like, yes, two people with cystic fibrosis are dangerous to each other if they're near each other, but... Well, no, I mean, that's not even true. It's like, if two people are likely to have kids with a certain horrible disease, maybe adoption's a better choice or something, I don't know. This is like, why?

wildly abusive and creepy. Making sure they never meet is just like reducing human beings to things that combine DNA. Or maybe they're not interested in having kids, right? Yes. Maybe they just... They can meet. They can hang out. They can even talk about it. They might love each other. Right, yeah. They might be like, hey, you got that too? I'm good.

let's make other choices like they're they have the ability to figure this out for themselves yeah it's just the whole like the goal is to make sure they don't fall in love it's like wow okay I don't like this Sylvia I want you to pull up the image of this tweet from Digidate in March 16th of 2021 let's just take a look at this

I'm going to read this. Digidate is here to help enhance your relationships, providing a dining experience that relies on communication, teamwork, and intimacy. Give it a try today. Hashtag couple, hashtag dating, hashtag virtual date, hashtag date. And

And then there's a little image macro that says intimacy isn't always easy, but DigiDate is here to help. We provide a virtual dining experience for you and your date leading to closer, more intimate connections. So again, they're advertising other aspects of this, which is like, we let you have a digital date before you meet. They're not talking in the public facing ads about the fact that like, also we're sequencing your DNA to determine who you'll make a good genetic match with. I don't like these two little fuckers in the corner. Nope. No, and I,

I'll go so far as to say that look how little they invested in the actual images. They don't give a fuck. I don't know if there's a lot of money behind this either. They're like, just give us your DNA. If you're going to fall for this, we're not spending a dime on advertising. That's right. But you know who is spending a dime on advertising? That was perfect. Our advertisers, baby.

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We're back. We're talking about crimes, but we're not going to tell you what crimes. We're not planning an Ocean's Eleven heist of a casino. Of course not. Langston's not also the best safe cracker in the business. You know, I'm not, you know, the world's best getaway driver. Surfie. So surfie. Jesus Christ. What the fuck was that?

I was going to make a joke about Sophie being trained in jujitsu, but I ruined it by mispronouncing your name. I'm sorry. That was weird. I don't think I'd be very good at that. It's okay. But I'd be good at crimes. You'd be great at crimes.

Theoretically. Yeah. Theoretically. Now I'm just thinking like, you know, if you find, I would do so many crimes to keep Anderson alive longer. I'm thinking of you as the monster in the movie Ghost Dog starring Forrest Whitaker. Forrest Whitaker, of course. I love Forrest Whitaker. Great film. Yeah, you could be using Ghost Dog to assassinate your rivals. He would love you.

You could be his daimyo. I think daimyo. I'm looking directly into my dog's eyes. Sorry, we got off the thing. We're talking about Digidate, the creepy genetic dating company. I was trying to distract us away from it because it makes me so uncomfortable. No, we still got more shit to talk about.

So here's the MIT Technology Review. The MIT Technology Review in this article about DigiDate describes Church's lab as gravitating towards provocative projects. And they describe DigiDate not as a separate dating app, but as a service like GPS.

in the company's words, that could run in the background of any existing dating app. Not like GPS! Yeah, I don't like that either. So basically, every dating app could use Digidate's technology in order to have their users send in their DNA and get their genomes sequenced to stop them from meeting genetically incompatible people. Whoa.

Now, genome sequencing costs like 750 bucks. So obviously, this is not super easy to pencil out financially for a dating app, which generally is not that expensive. But Church thinks you could offset this by increasing the subscription price of dating apps. I don't know if I think this is a great business. Hasn't taken off yet. But as usual, he puts what is effectively eugenics, like this is a eugenics dating app, in humanitarian terms.

claiming it would eradicate huge numbers of diseases which cost, quote, about a trillion dollars a year worldwide. And again, when it comes to horrific diseases, I'm all for stopping horrible diseases that harm people. But there's a lot of other ethical concerns when you start talking about this shit and you're just not dealing with them at all.

As a guy who is like, I'm not neurotypical, and I think there's huge benefit in having people with brains that work different be involved in science. You're also creating an app to put an end to that, maybe. And you're not talking about that problem at all. Anyway. Yeah, you're not. And you're not being even transparent about, to your point, about what is being considered a deformity, a not typical problem.

inside of a person. Because it's like, if some scientist is like, hey, there's a disease where people's skin is born inside out, we want to stop that. I'd be like, yeah, man, I don't think we gain anything from babies having their skin inside out, right? But that's just never where it ends, you know? No. Like, also, I want you to know what color that skin is when we flip it around. Yeah, right. It's going to be the color we like. It's not going to be the color you like. Right. What other stuff are you wanting to do with baby skin? Right?

This got announced, this dating service, for the first time during an appearance Church made on 60 Minutes. He later claimed that the section about Digidate wasn't supposed to air. Like, oh, I had no idea they were putting that in the show. I was just talking. And that he'd intended to just talk about his pig cloning company. But here's how the documentary wound up sounding. I don't know if I believe him on this, but Sophie's just going to play this whole clip for you.

Thank you very much. Okay, wonderful. Church is a role model for the next generation. You got it working, it looks like. He has co-founded more than 35 startups. Oh, this is incredibly important. Recently, investors put $100 million into the pig organ work.

Hey. Hey. Another church startup is a dating app that compares DNA and screens out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease. You wouldn't find out who you're not compatible with, you'll just find out who you are compatible with. You're suggesting that if everyone has their genome sequenced and the correct matches are made, that all of these diseases

No. No, we just want to, like, prune about 5% of the population, you know, of those types of people happening. Problematic there. I just want to walk through, like, some kind of, like, conference and walk up to a board and go, this is important.

This is important. I do that. That's exactly what I'm like at CES. If I think they'll give me something cool. When I do my consumer electronics show work. Oh yeah, this is important. Yeah. So when you're a tall guy with a beard and you walk around leaning into screens going, this is important. People will just give you stuff. It's nuts.

He really sped past it in a way that it's more about the elimination of the diseases and not the curation of another species. This is important. 7,000, huh? Can I get a list?

He's so tough to look at. Yeah. Given how bad he wants perfect people. Right. You would think that he should not get to say what a perfect person is, and yet here we are. No. You know what he looks like? Do you remember back when...

Internet comedy websites were all funded by T-shirt ads where they would like Photoshop different T-shirts into the same like Old white guy with a long beard who was like Surprisingly jacked He looks like that guy if he stopped taking HGH Um

So this 60 minutes interview caused a ruckus online, to put it lightly. And I don't think I need to go into the obvious issue people had with the eugenics app, but it's worth emphasizing that this would be just a nightmare from a privacy standpoint. Dr. Cherry, like your genome being out there? OkCupid having your genome? Yeah.

yeah it's not good maybe not the best no not all of these apps are created equal I don't even know that they have the staff that can manage your genome properly much less right yeah

So Dr. Church responded to this by declaring his detractors clickbait critics who weren't thinking deeply about a complex problem. He assured everyone that any given person on the app would still be compatible with 95% of the population and that the app wouldn't provide health data to users. Although there's also stuff that got like brought up in that MIT article where they're like, what about people with like Huntington's disease markers? Because

Because like, there's no one technically that you could match them with and be totally safe. Do people who have those markers not deserve to have relationships? Is that kind of what you're saying? Like, that seems kind of bad. I don't know.

I also can't find where he says the data would never be sold or used for any other purpose ever. I certainly don't know that that's written down anywhere in like an EULA, although again, this service does not exist really yet. I'm sure part of his funding says that he's not allowed to say that, that like, we want to be able to use this in a different kind of way, and that's how we can...

we can justify giving you all this money. Also the elimination of diseases is such a silly concept because you also might make new ones. It's not like we know for sure that like, there's not, there's no new possibilities in these perfectly synchronized genomes. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for being the Ian Malcolm of these episodes and like reminding us all of chaos theory. If you want, you can drop a little bit of water down your hand.

Maybe unbutton the top two buttons of your shirt, like really go for it here. I got to get jacked first. I'll get there. I'll figure it out. Oh man, he did look good in that movie. He looked great. As to the whole eugenics of it all, when he got challenged on this, Church, who is a Twitter user, replied, "'Eugenics, US, Germany, etc. 1920-1970 interfered with human lives and personal reproductive choices.'"

True. Not just those two countries. Not just that type, but okay. Okay. It's Twitter. If we're listing facts, yeah, that's cool. And then he says, like, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to help people understand genetic risk. But you're saying they won't even be matched with those people. So is that really accurate? Right? Now, in that MIT article also noted that, like, what he's claiming to do, like, preconception genetic testing is already common. Right.

But that's a lot less sketchy because you're not saying we want to stop people from meeting who aren't quote unquote compatible. That's just saying if people decide they might want to have a kid, we can test them both and see are there potential things like illnesses that those kids could have, right? And there's a debate to have about that too, but it is very different because those people have already met, right?

And Church even responded to this by saying, if you do it after you've already fallen in love, it's mostly bad news by that point. A quarter of kids will be diseased. If you can go back in time before they fell in love, you get a much more positive message. And like, not everyone wants kids, George! Yeah. Like...

Not everyone wants kids. Not everyone, frankly, wants kids the way you want them. It really is putting a lot of your decision-making on random people. Yes. Yeah. It's not great. So Digidate's motto is science is your wingman. No.

No. Which I think makes it clear that their desired clientele is more on the tech bro side of things. That said, they've also sought to go after what he was described in an ad as an untapped market at one point, which is communities around the world who do arranged marriages or only marry within a limited caste or tribe. Oh.

Like, we can make sure that you only marry Brahmins with Brahmins in India or whatever. And this is what people were led to believe by a job ad posted on Digidate's website. And Church later claimed that post was an error and that, no, no, no, we'd never help anyone with that sort of thing. That's obviously unethical. Maybe. Maybe.

That's really smart to go that route. Because I'm so ignorant, I just presumed that he was going at young singles in the city. It's like, no, you need nasty conservative principles that have already been established. You gotta get the Saudi royal family here. Yeah, to agree to this. Yeah. Oh.

Oh, man. And it's like, yeah, he says that's not what we wanted to do. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. So Digidate does still seem to exist in 2025, although it has not gotten a lot of press since the initial uproar. And it seems to be on George's back burner since the dire wolf stuff. Apparently, the company is now more focusing on like general dating planning and health planning and stuff like that.

Yeah, I kind of. I don't know that I actually have much of a product.

So let's talk about another company George is involved with, this time as a board member and expert advisor, but not a co-founder. And this company is BioViva. They are a U.S. biotech startup that sells anti-aging therapies. In May of 2021, Stat News reported that the CEO, Elizabeth Parrish, was awaiting data from a human study of six patients who'd received experimental gene therapy for Alzheimer's in Mexico the year before. These

These were supposed to be six people with dementia who were getting an experimental, like, telomerase, like, lengthening therapy that would help de-age their brains. Now, Langston, you've been on the show a while. Sophie, you've been on every episode. You all know that when we're talking in this show and say the words experimental therapy and Mexico, something not great is about to be happening. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a reason there's that small of a sample size, and it's because they're doing something pretty fucked up. Yeah. Per a write-up by science journalist and former molecular cell biologist Leonid Schneider on the website For Better Science, the gene therapy these Alzheimer's patients received was an adeno-associated virus, AAV, carrying the telomerase enzyme TERT.

which may have zero effect on rejuvenation, but is known to be a potentially cancer-transforming oncogene, which makes these clinical tests even more exciting.

Especially because BioViva's CEO Parrish announced in July 2018 in a lifestyle magazine to have had turd AAV injections herself. Quote, over a period that lasted well into the night, there would be more than 100 injections in her triceps and thighs and buttocks and even her face just below the cheek. And again, we don't know that this has any impact on aging, but we do know it can cause cancer. Weird thing to shoot yourself up with 100 times, ma'am.

Whoa. I love it when these people self-experiment. That's nuts. Right? That's full Red Hulk shit. You're really... Yes, yes. You're doing something freaky. Oh, fuck. We've all tried protein drinks on the go, but why don't they taste more like the ones we make at home or from the juice bar? They're too chalky and too sweet from sugar or artificial sweeteners. We love the health benefits, but hate the taste. Now you can finally get both with Don't Quit Protein Drinks. Loaded with 33 grams of proteins,

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Now, the basis of this experiment was that, once again, it seemed like it worked on mice, right? Parrish is an outspoken believer in the fact that if a scientific study shows benefits in animals, human patients should be allowed to volunteer to receive it. The issue is, again, first off, that's not good. That's not ethical or good science. That's not enough, right? You don't just jump immediately to putting it in people because you get a study that shows maybe this helps animals. Right. Like,

that's just not enough. Right. It's certainly not enough to let volunteers pay to get it, which is kind of what she's saying. The issue is again. Yeah. That's always where it gets icky is like the plan is never to put it like, uh, put it in people, you know, for, for the greater good, it's put it in people because you have funding to do this to be profitable. Yeah. And again, these enzymes can cause cancer, uh,

Now, that fact has made it very difficult to get approval to conduct these studies. And so the inventor of the treatment, a guy named Bill Andrews, who worked at a different company before BioViva, tried to conduct a trial with this other company in Mexico in 2017, in which participants with mid- to late-stage Alzheimer's would pay $11 million to attempt this treatment.

wound up not being able to find anyone with Alzheimer's who was willing to pay that, probably because their families had control of the money and were like, I don't know, I kind of want that $11 million for me. Grandma's pretty old. Yeah.

She ain't gonna be here that long. No, no, no, no. I'm gonna keep that money in-house. This proved impossible, so they tried to recruit patients for another trial in Columbia for just $1 million each. I don't think that worked either, as far as I know. No evidence of it. Now the technology is in BioViva's hands, and it's unclear how much they charge participants to be guinea pigs here.

For his part, Church was asked in 2016 about ties to BioViva, and he said, I wouldn't call them ties. I advise people who need advice, and they clearly needed advice. Whoa. He has been on the board of the company since 2015. Ah.

This isn't like informal. You're on the board, man. This is public. Ties? Being on the board is a tie? All right. Do I have ties to iHeartMedia? I've advised them on podcasts. I talk to them three, six times a week. But it's not like I get a paycheck from them every two weeks, you know? They don't pay for my health care or anything, right?

I drink blood with them every once in a while. It's not. Yes. Do I drink a little human blood? Is it the only way I can stay alive? Am I allergic to the sun? Of course, but I'm not a vampire. That'd be weird to call me a vampire. You're being crazy. You're honestly being crazy. When,

When asked about the risk of causing cancer through this treatment, Church replied, "I think that's still an issue with telomerase. I would not sugarcoat that, so I'm not sure that it's time for that just yet. But it's close. It's extremely close." Meanwhile, bioethicist Lay Turner of the University of Minnesota said of BioViva's study using this dangerous treatment, "Everything I'm seeing indicates the involved parties are not conducting a credible clinical trial with appropriate safeguards."

Now, despite Church being cagey, whenever someone asks, hey, don't you work with that like sketchy anti-aging firm? In 2022, Church published a scientific article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences alongside Elizabeth Parrish and like 10 other authors.

So he's one of a bunch of authors on this article that suggests that you can vape a gene therapy vector called CMV in order to, if you like, vaporize it and let a mouse inhale it, it will increase their lifespan by 41% without increasing the risk of cancer.

The article concludes, the impact of this research on an aging population cannot be understated as the global aging-related non-communicable disease burden quickly rises. So the article is like, obviously, if it extends a mouse's life, we could extend human lives by 41% just by having people vape this thing, right? Like that's...

What they're insinuating. You remember when they were claiming that vapes were like killing people, that everybody was dropping dead from vaping? Seems like vapes make you immortal. Yeah, now all of a sudden this technology is not going to make you drop dead. It's going to make you live forever. Yeah, it's just weird. You just got to put the right thing in it.

You know? You just gotta throw the right thing at it. You had those naughty cartridges. We're gonna put really top shit cartridges in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The good stuff, right? We'll throw some Delta-8 in there, too. Fuck it. You know? Yeah. So... But it's also like, yeah, obviously, Church is a real scientist. Some of the people on this are scientists. Maybe...

This is a thing you could vape to, why not? Let's look into it a little further. So that write-up by Leonid Schneider notes that this study was allowed to bypass the normal peer review process at PNAS, P-N-A-S, the journal, and that George Church was listed as a contributor without noting that he and multiple other authors of this article testing something BioViva's like

advocating all were employed by bio Viva in various capacities. And you're supposed to do that. They had to like update the article to be, Oh, by the way, like all these people work at this company that's got a financial interest in the, sorry. Um,

That's crazy. Sketchy. We don't have time to discuss all the different shady life extension companies and schemes that George Church is tangentially connected to, but I would be remiss if I didn't bring up his colleague, Aubrey de Grey. Now, if you've ever been interested in the... Sophie, pull up a picture of Aubrey de Grey real quick. If you've ever been interested in the scientific quest...

For immortality, right? For people, or at least massively extending human lifespans. You've come across Aubrey de Grey. He was a major name in the field for a very long time. He was the former- Oh my God. Yeah, he looks like fucking Rasputin. Yeah. And like, I get that sometimes, but he really looks like Rasputin. Yeah.

Like, look at that Rasputin-esque. He's doing a Rasputin in that picture. He's got his, like, hands out in a prayer pose. I'm sorry. What else is that supposed to be? He looks like he's turning into a wise old tree. Yes! Yeah!

He's got resting int face. Yes. No. Yeah. If an int was a sex criminal. Yeah. Spoiler. That's not a person. That's not an idle comment. And I don't appreciate that in a sentence with ints because ints are great. Well, you don't know about all of the ints, Sophie. One of those ints that attacked Isengard had to have like a problematic. That's why the wife's left. Sophie, they're gone for a reason. I won't.

I won't take Entslander. The Entwives bounced and we don't know why. One of those Ents knows why. Jesus Christ. So, Aubrey de Grey was the former head of an organization called the Sins Research Foundation, S-E-N-S. Schneider described Sins as, quote, an anti-aging eugenics club for the very rich. And this is like a big thing in the earlier to mid-

A lot of – I think Peter Thiel at least had some tangential. A lot of like very rich tech guys were super into this because the promises DeGray was making and he did a ton of media. He was very similar to like George Church in that he was really good at getting a lot of media. George Church is an actual scientist in a way that Aubrey wasn't.

But Aubrey has since been revealed as, per Schneider, a disgusting sex predator and pimp. And, yeah, yeah, pimp. Let's talk about that. So, Aubrey de Grey has been accused by multiple women of various kinds of sexual harassment and abuse. Women who, like, worked with and at sins, his colleagues.

You can find a lot of gross stuff about the guy online, but I'm going to just read one account because it reveals something important about the culture of the immortality for rich people movement and the organizations associated with it. Quote, sins funded much, and this is from a woman who claims that DeGray abused her. She's going to explain how.

Sins funded much of my undergraduate and graduate work, and as such, I was often paraded in front of their donors. The role of my attractiveness in discussions with donors, almost always older men, was made explicit by Sins executives. At one such dinner, I was sat next to Aubrey by a Sins executive. I was told to keep him entertained."

"'Aubrey funneled me alcohol and hit on me the entire night. "'He told me that I was a glorious woman "'and that as a glorious woman, "'I had a responsibility to have sex with the sins donors "'in attendance so they would give money to him.'

Cool. All right. Great guy, Aubrey. Maybe we'll talk about him more. I'm going to need you to bone a few people in here so that I can make money. Yeah, that is just like pimping for fucking VC money. That's nasty.

attempted pipping. Now, victims have alleged that sexual harassment of this type was normal within the Sins Foundation and practiced by more men than just Aubrey de Grey and was routinely covered up. Now, there aren't allegations that George Church participated in this, but...

He was on the SIN Scientific Advisory Board while de Grey worked there. They were colleagues. He worked for this organization with a very shady history of doing this with a guy who had a shady history of doing this. And I don't know, you look at that and you look at the Epstein stuff, it's just a lot of times where you're really close to some people doing questionable things, man. And...

separated yourself from it. Pimp me once, shame on you. Yeah. What if he'd been the guy who blew the whistle on Aubrey de Grey or whatever, but he didn't? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know multiple sex traffickers. Right.

I mean, right. Right. Yeah. I think after a while it starts to feel like that's a thing you're into. Yeah. Kind of a weird that it happened twice situation. Now, the SINS Foundation represented the crest of a wave and hype for anti-aging research and functional immortality that seems to be on a downswing at the present, largely because none of the promises people like DeGray were making around 2010 seem any closer to coming true.

Schneider suggests that, being a smart guy, Dr. Church realized this early on and started pivoting to anti-aging cures for pets because there's just as much money there, but you're not at any risk, right? Like, it's just a safer business to be in. Mm-hmm.

In fact, I would say the primary genius George Church has exhibited over the last 20 years since his real scientific achievements has less to do with science and genetics and more to do with branding and merchandising. He understands the same thing Elon Musk used to understand –

which is that if you're good enough at announcing sexy new products that go viral, even if you only deliver like 5% of the time, people will think you're a genius. As long as you keep enough of those stories in the media, right? And you get very rich doing that. Yeah. This brings us back to the dire wolves, right? We're back. They're back. We've come around full circle, baby. I didn't know they were coming back. I thought maybe they were going for good. Yeah. Church's whole point is that they're coming back, baby. So.

Let's talk about his whole crusade to de-extinct animals. When the first claims of this went viral, they were focused on obviously Neanderthals. And George and his lab at Harvard started working on a scheme to clone and bring back the woolly mammoth in 2014. This was a micro-budget endeavor for like a decade or more. George claims they spent about $100,000 on it prior to 2021, quote, which is way, way less than any other project in my lab, but not through lack of enthusiasm.

It's by far the favorite story. We've never done a press release on it in all those years. It just comes up naturally in conversation. And that may be true, but he talks about it in a lot of these media appearances, like he talks about this kind of shit, de-extinction in that 2015 interview. And that's his PR. He doesn't need to put out press releases because he's mastered the art of using journalists as his PR, right? And that's what he's doing with this direwolf thing.

The way Church tells it, in 21, Ben Lamb, who's the CEO of Colossal Biosciences and his co-founder, kind of came out of nowhere to throw money behind the idea and help him start a company. Quote,

Lamb, being another serial entrepreneur, gets involved. And Colossal is Lamb's sixth startup. His first was acquired for a fortune when he was 29. And the others he's created did well enough that he's worth like $14 or $15 million. So he's like rich, but he's not a success by Silicon Valley standards yet. Sure. So he's still looking for his big hit.

His past ventures are all pretty standard, chasing the zeitgeist tech stuff. He had an e-learning company, a mobile app development studio, a gaming company, and Hypergiant, an enterprise AI software company that once had Bill Nye on the board. In 2019, Hypergiant announced a world-changing product, the EOS Bioreactor, which was meant to use AI to optimize algal growth to sequester carbon.

And they were like, it's a climate change solution. You can sequester more carbon per square acre or whatever than you can with a forest using this by optimizing algae growth. Sounds great, right? Now I know you're wondering, is that real though? Is that a real product? It crossed my mind. Yeah, it crossed my mind. I can't say no. Legally, it was acquired by Tribe Capital in 2023. But a former employee on Glassdoor noted, uh...

And this is from an article called Colossal Liar Wolves for the blog for better science. There's no secret sauce. There is no product. There is no money, just hype. And another former employee commented, this isn't a software company. It's VC marketing hype. So those people claim there's no real product who work there. Yeah.

The people who work there saying we're not doing any work is really awesome. This is not a real company. Nothing real here. Now, for this stage of George's plan, right, like the colossal biosciences stage, once they announced this company, his PR rep of choice was a journalist for CNBC who got the first big scoop.

And when they put out this first big article about this new company, they're going to bring back the mammoth in six years, four years ago. One part of their article reads, it could take as little as six years for Colossal to create a calf, George told CNBC. The timeline is aggressive, he admitted. When people used to ask me that question, I said, I have no idea. We don't have any funding, but now I can't dodge it. I would say six is not out of the question. Now, obviously, there's no evidence that they're any closer.

to doing this here. And if you actually read these articles, George isn't even really saying that they're trying to clone a woolly mammoth, right? Just like the dire wolf is just a wolf with a couple dire wolf genes kind of plucked in there here and there.

What they're trying to do is alter the DNA of an endangered Asian elephant so it can withstand colder temperatures and then release a bunch of mutated Asian elephants in Siberia. When he was interviewed by the Times, Church even allowed that calling it a woolly mammoth was probably a bad idea. Arctic elephant is a better term, right? Yeah.

But that's not what you're calling it, right? You're calling it a woolly mammoth in all of the press coverage. Yeah, and also so we can skip past the fact that you're not actually helping the existing elephants. You're just trying to create a new species that'll mirror the old one. Yeah. It's like if you go to a family who's living on the edge and about to lose their Section 8 housing, and you're like, I'm going to fix everything for you. And then you give them all haircuts that they don't like or didn't ask for. And you're like, problem solved!

solved. Look at you guys. All right. Guess what? All of you guys got the Rachel. Ain't that nice? Isn't that good? You all got the Rachel. Anyway, bye. Here's what his business partner, Ben Lamb, told CNBC in that same article. All goal is the successful de-extinction of interbreedable herds of mammoths that we can leverage in the rewilding of the Arctic. And then we want to leverage those technologies for what we're calling thoughtful, disruptive conservation. And

First off, using leverage twice in two sentences. That's a bad guy. That's just a bad guy. Disruptive conservation? Not what conservation is. So first we're going to leverage these people over here, and that's going to allow us to swoop in and leverage these people over here so that we can... Yeah. Yeah.

So you know how conservation is trying to stop species from going extinct and save ecosystems that are threatened? We're going to disrupt that by just making new shit and dropping it random places. We're going to fuck up the elephants in a new kind of way. Isn't that exciting? That is disruptive. Yes.

A bunch of random elephants being in Siberia would disrupt things. If you think you know what elephant's problem is now, you are going to be so surprised by the problems we're about to introduce. Elephants are going to have a bunch of drunk Russians sniping them. Like all sorts of shit they don't have to deal with right now. So that article is a masterclass in what I call hype journalism, which primarily exists to pump up the perceived value of tech companies. It's like Theranos style shit, right? Yeah.

And again, they make the claim that like, well, this could stop climate change by slowing the melting of the permafrost. And I think that because they say it's like proponents of the project say this. I think it's just George Church, right? And I wanted to look into like, is there even any evidence this would work? And I found an article in the Journal of Medical Sciences that says, quote,

According to Colossal, the reintroduction of these animals into the environment for the ancient mammoths would change the environment from tundra, wooded, to steppe, stabilize the permafrost, and thus combat global warming. It's quite difficult to take these claims seriously.

Now, the article goes on to note, we don't even know if they can modify an Asian elephant, right? Modifying a wolf is one thing. There's a lot into, like, let alone, it's nowhere near being able to clone a fucking mammoth, right? Modifying an Asian elephant with mammoth genes is also a major undertaking. And they explain why. Mm-hmm.

This presupposes the availability of early embryos of an Asian elephant, whose nucleus would be eliminated and replaced by that of a cultured pseudomammoth cell. After a few divisions, this embryo would be implanted in the uterus of a female Asian elephant and would develop until the animal is born.

This is the pattern that led to Dolly's birth in 1996 and since then to the cloning of many other animals. But this is not an option in this case. The Asian elephant is an endangered species, and given the low success rate of cloning, generally less than 1%, obtaining the many embryos needed and using dozens of surrogate females is not possible, not only for ethical but also practical reasons.

This is what is indicated in the work plan presented on the Colossal website, but it seems that Church and his company are now moving towards the use of induced pluripotent stem cell, iPSC, lines that would be obtained from the somatic tissues of the Asian elephant and could be used for cloning. These lines have yet to be obtained.

The next step is to ensure the development of the embryos, which, according to Church's recent interviews, could involve the use of an artificial uterus that avoids the use of female carriers. But of course, this artificial elephant uterus has yet to be invented. It does not currently exist for any species, even if work is being carried out with a subjective. So again...

Their first plan is illegal because you would be destroying a ton of embryos and endangering a lot of females of an endangered species. Your second plan, you've done none of the actual work to acquire what you'd need. And your third plan, again, the science doesn't exist and there's no evidence that you're getting closer to making it. And also, is you just saying, all right, we'll just make an elephant synthetically is fucking nuts. It's hard. It's hard.

No, we don't know how to do that. Yeah, that's not cool. It's like me being like, I'm just going to make a car that runs on water. Easy enough. Hydrogen power is potentially a thing. And it's like, well, but people have tried. It's really difficult. It's really hard.

When Colossal was brand new, Dr. Church talked constantly about their ambition to create an artificial womb. But as the years have gone by, this goal is evidently no closer to reality. And so Colossal and its marketing have shifted to focus on promising other easier kinds of de-extinction. Per Schneider's article in For Better Science...

Church's problem is that his business investors and admirers in the media keep asking about, um, the progress of his mammoth project. One has to throw them a stick to chase after. So here's Church's colossal new plan to de-extinct the thylacine, also known as that Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger. This Australian apex predator the size of a smallish dog got wiped out in the 1930s. Incidentally, it is a marsupial, meaning it doesn't gestate in a womb, real or artificial, for very long. You know, in case the artificial womb isn't working. Disgusting.

Detracting that yapping media and investors with a stick was a good idea, but even better to throw them two sticks. So after Mammoth and Thylacine, Church and his company Colossal announced in January of 2023 to de-extinct the Dodo, the giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius, which was exterminated centuries ago. Birds don't need wombs to gestate.

So again, we see the first pivot away from like, fuck, we can't figure this out. We're not doing a mammoth. It's not going to work. Let's talk about this. Talk to Tasmanian tiger. Let's try to get these dodos back. Yeah. What about that bird that we beat the shit out of? Yeah. It was walking down the street. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We can bring that guy back. Right now.

If you're trying to bring back the dodo, and again, they died recently. This could be possible, right? We might be able to do that someday. Someday. Just like it's possible. Someday. A mammoth, maybe. Who would you bring? What's the most serious scientist that you could bring on as an advisor to your project to bring back the dodo?

The most serious scientists. I mostly can think of scientists who should not be there. Right, right, right. Well, I'll answer because obviously the answer is Paris Hilton, right? That's who you bring on as an advisor for the Dodo Project, right? I mean, obviously. Yeah.

There's a fucking- A brilliant mind. Of course, she's advising the company. A person deeply connected to both science and Dodo Birds. Of course, you need Paris Hilton. Of course, you need Paris. And again, she announced that she had been made an advisor in a post about their Series B funding. My guess is she just helped fund this thing. And so they're like, yeah, you're an advisor now, Paris. Wow. Great science. Yeah.

I should also note that during this fundraising round, Colossal was found to have stolen Dodo artwork from another artist for their pitch deck. Very funny. Anyway, moving on. They're like, we can't even draw a Dodo, much less make one. We can't even draw a fucking Dodo. Yeah. So this brings us back to the start of the episode and Colossal's first and only real success, the Direwolf.

In their press release, they call this the world's first de-extinction and a revolutionary milestone and scientific progress that would lead to the de-extinction of other species. Robin Ganzert of the Humane Society cheered that this would make extinction a thing of the past, which is nonsense for a lot of reasons. After the extinction of the human race,

Actual scientists like cell biology expert Paul Kepler at the UC Davis Medical Schools had this to say. The direwolf genome likely differs from that of the gray wolf in millions or tens of millions of ways. Editing 14 genes is interesting, but it's not a reconstruction or de-extinction. It's not even close. The three produced gray wolves with 15 genetics making them genetically a smidge more like direwolves are not a de-extinction event.

Binlam responded with anger at this, saying, everyone just wants to argue about what to call these things. No one got deep into the science of how we created new models for ancient DNA extraction. And that's because Colossal has not been very transparent about telling people how they did that, because that's not what they're interested in. Those are company secrets, right? They're more interested in putting up photos with like George R.R. Martin, uh,

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, however, Ben made it clear that the company does have plans to profit from this nonsense. And this is where shit gets really, this is like a Tesla con, right?

As for de-extinction projects, to the extent they contribute to efforts at conservation, we just give them to the world for free, Lamb told me. But he also foresees marketing biodiversity credits to other companies, similar to the environmental regulatory credits that Tesla sells to automakers without its zero-emission footprint, revenue from which enabled it to report a profit for the first quarter of 2025 this week. So, he's like...

you know, the animals are free. What we're selling is credits to companies that just like throw more fake dire wolves out there and like, you know what? Chevron, buy some wolves and suddenly you can offset your carbon footprint. Yeah. There we go. That's the con. That's the con. These aren't just wolves you're going to like keep in

take care of. You're going to leverage these wolves. I'll admit, when I first read the Direwolf article, I called something being wrong. I did not call carbon credit scheme. That I didn't get. It's really awesome if you think about it. It's such a long game for being able to not pay taxes everywhere else. You've got to have the long game if you really want to avoid the most taxes.

So that LA Times article does a good job of puncturing the myth. These are animals are dire wolves. One thing they point out is that like, and they talked to a scientist about this. There's visible skin around the ears of these animals. You can see pink skin. Arctic wolves and other Arctic mammals have very thick fur around their ears because they need to survive and have their ears function while being constantly exposed to freezing temperatures. Right. And they also point out that like,

Well, dire wolves wouldn't have all looked... had white coats because they're not all Arctic animals, actually. Like, they lived in a lot of places, but they didn't just live in freezing temperatures. Yeah. And

All of these are like the dire wolves they made look pure white because that's how one of the dire wolves in Game of Thrones looked. That's probably what's going on is they were like, yeah, people will buy this better. Arguably the most famous dire wolf in Game of Thrones was white. Right. Yeah, exactly. We'll just make that one that. Make him look like Ghost.

He also notes, suspiciously, Colossal cannot stay consistent with how much direwolf DNA they sequenced. According to Colossal's preprint, they achieved 3.4x and 12.8x sequence reads of the genomes from two different direwolf. It is also claiming 55x times more and 70x more. If they only sequenced two individuals as they claimed, why am I seeing three differing figures? I don't know. Seems sketchy.

There's a lot that's interesting about Colossal based on recent reporting, like the fact that Dr. Church has no ongoing equity in the company he co-founded. Maybe he just only cares about the science, or maybe he's kind of a cash-up front guy because he doesn't see this one lasting. I don't know.

Lamb has been the one to go on the Joe Rogan Experience to talk about their dire wolf, where he responded to the criticism this way. They live in the sort of, this is his critics, this sort of fortune and glory world, where it's a popularity contest. So one of the things people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for everything you do. We're not an academic university. I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. If we wrote scientific papers for every single thing we did that went through peer review, like we would have 3,000 papers and no mammoths.

but like you don't have any mammoths like there's not main mammoth list there's still no mammoths man there hasn't been a single mammoth and yeah i guess yeah your other point is kind of moot yeah like that like it's one of those things you could start making maybe if you were making that statement sit next to a mammoth i'd be like well shit he doesn't have a fucking mammoth you got a mammoth yeah he's got a mammoth

But he doesn't. That said, his company is now worth $10 billion, based largely on the strength of how viral those direwolves meant. This is not real money. No. This is based on everyone getting hyped up about the direwolves.

There is so much more sketchy shit here. The company also claims to have cloned the nearly extinct red wolf, but their red wolves are just coyotes with a few red wolf alleles stuck in there, right? And confusingly, Colossal claims that they have more red wolf DNA than any actual animals in the real red wolf recovery program, which isn't true because the red wolves in that program are not coyotes, right? Right.

They don't have coyote mixed in, so they can't be less. Yeah. No. And the final point I'll make in these episodes is about this kind of sketchiest thing about Colossal, which is the Trump administration has taken a lot of interest in their de-extinction claims.

Let's go. Trump's Department of the Interior head, Doug Burgum, visited Colossal, and the Washington Post reports that he does like a big press conference talking about like, this is why we need to get over the Endangered Species Act. We don't need it anymore. We can de-extinct animals. No need to protect endangered animals anymore, right? Now, obviously, this causes problems for Ben Lamb and a lot of people who had backed the company as like, oh, are they just going to use this as an excuse to remove the Endangered Species Act? Yeah.

and Lamb goes on CBS and he's like no no no we need we need an endangered species act right um but you know Doug Burgum still wound up on Colossal's website and to an extent do I believe Ben Lamb really cares all that much as long as he stays a paper billionaire and his his company keeps getting investment dollars I

I don't know. Is it possible Colossal would get in the business of selling credits that allow companies to create the illusion that they're keeping species alive while also destroying more environmental regulations?

Maybe. Yeah, that's the problem. It's just really hard to go back to like flying coach. You know what I mean? Like whatever, whatever his lifestyle is, he's not going to sacrifice it for the greater good of tigers and, you know, dodo birds or whoever they're trying to protect. Yeah.

No, there's billions of dollars in fucking selling carbon credits to company or de-extinction credits to companies who make more random wolves that they shoot into the world. Cool stuff. I love it. I love it. This show is always a lot of fun and really sad. Yeah. It's great stuff. I love it.

Well, Langston, how you feeling? I feel great. It's been a long one. I'm sorry. No, this is great. I'm happy that we got to do it. And frankly, I'm devastated to know that there's a new man to be afraid of out there. There's a new bearded man to be frightened of. Really scared of him and also don't care to look at him. But here we are. Yeah. Well, everybody, you know.

Until next time, try not to take any of Jeffrey Epstein's money. Although, if he's found a way to cheat death, I don't know. Maybe he's like a Sith Lord or something. Maybe that... I don't know. Whatever. Find your own ethical line. Langston. Oh, wait. You need to plug your plugables.

Oh, yeah. Listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. I host it with my friend David Borey. It's about black conspiracy theories. Watch everybody's live on Netflix with John Mulaney. I was a writer and performer on that show. And you can watch my special. It's called Bad Poetry. It's also on Netflix. And I'm really proud of it. And that's it. Follow me at Langston Kerman on all social media platforms.

Follow Langston Kerman. And yeah, if you see a dire wolf, no, you literally didn't. No, you're good.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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