Part One: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift

Release Date: June 3, 2025
Host(s): Langston Kerman & Matt Rogers
Production: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to the Episode

The episode kicks off with a lively conversation between hosts Langston Kerman and Matt Rogers, interspersed with humorous banter and light-hearted distractions. Early in the discussion, they set the stage for an in-depth exploration of a controversial and ambitious scientific endeavor.

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2. The Dire Wolf De-Extinction Claim

Timestamp: [01:39]

Langston Kerman introduces the core topic: Colossal Biosciences' claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf, an extinct species of wolf, using genetic engineering methods reminiscent of "Jurassic Park" technologies.

Langston Kerman [02:01]: "A company that could not sound more like it belonged in a Michael Crichton novel."

Matt Rogers [02:32]: "Trying to rewrite Jurassic Park. Yes."

The hosts express skepticism about the grandeur of the company's claims, highlighting that the dire wolves brought back are not as colossal as often portrayed in popular media.

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3. Colossal Biosciences: The Company Behind the Project

Timestamp: [10:32]

Colossal Biosciences is scrutinized for its marketing strategies and scientific legitimacy. The company relies heavily on the popularity of "Game of Thrones" to market their dire wolves, naming them after characters unrelated to the actual species, such as Khaleesi.

Langston Kerman [10:22]: "Naming a direwolf after a character in the books who had nothing to do with direwolves was by far the cringiest possible choice here."

The hosts critique the mismatch between the scientific reality of the dire wolves and their marketing portrayal.

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4. Press and PR Strategies

Timestamp: [13:10]

The episode delves into how Colossal Biosciences uses media to amplify their claims. They reference an article by Michael Hilsit in the Los Angeles Times, illustrating how the company’s press releases are laden with hype that doesn't align with the scientific achievements.

Langston Kerman [15:11]: "This is just PR. First off, it never takes anything else."

The discrepancy between the company's claims and the actual capabilities of their technology is a central theme.

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5. The Science Behind the Dire Wolves

Timestamp: [06:04] - [15:48]

The hosts provide a scientific overview of true dire wolves versus the ones purportedly brought back by Colossal Biosciences. They clarify that real dire wolves were not as large as depicted in "Game of Thrones," and emphasize that the genetic modifications made do not create true de-extinct species but rather altered modern wolves.

Langston Kerman [06:11]: "Dire wolves were a very real species of wolf... but they're not dire wolves. That's kind of where we're starting here."

They explain the limitations and inaccuracies in the company's genetic engineering claims, underscoring that the creatures are not true dire wolves.

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6. George R.R. Martin's Involvement

Timestamp: [10:23] - [23:31]

The discussion shifts to George R.R. Martin, renowned author of "Game of Thrones," who serves as an investor and advisor to Colossal Biosciences. The hosts question the appropriateness of his involvement, given that he is not a scientist or geneticist.

Langston Kerman [14:33]: "He doesn't really know anything about dinosaurs. Right?"

They argue that Martin's role is primarily a PR move, leveraging his fame to promote the company's projects without contributing scientific expertise.

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7. Ethical and Scientific Critique

Timestamp: [15:48] - [22:39]

Langston and Matt critically analyze the ethical implications of de-extinction and genetic modification projects. They express concerns over Colossal Biosciences' motives, suggesting that the company may be inflating its technological capabilities to secure venture capital funding.

Langston Kerman [15:17]: "They're doing something new and something that is in some ways very interesting, but it's not what they're claiming they're doing."

The hosts debate the potential consequences of treating DNA purely as a technological medium, raising questions about the moral responsibilities of scientists in such endeavors.

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8. George Church: A Deep Dive into His Background

Timestamp: [24:50] - [43:58]

A comprehensive exploration of Dr. George Church’s personal and professional history unfolds. The hosts detail his impressive academic credentials, including his role as the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and his contributions to genome sequencing technologies.

Langston Kerman [40:34]: "He is a really foundational mind in modern genome sequencing."

Despite his scientific achievements, the hosts uncover contradictory aspects of Church's career, such as his history of flunking out of graduate school and his involvement in numerous startups—raising red flags about his credibility and motivations.

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9. Connection to Jeffrey Epstein and Ethical Concerns

Timestamp: [57:31] - [78:48]

The episode takes a darker turn as it reveals Dr. George Church's associations with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender. The hosts scrutinize the extent and nature of their relationship, highlighting multiple meetings and financial ties.

Langston Kerman [58:10]: "Dr. Church has fun ties to Jeffrey Epstein."

They discuss Epstein's illicit ambitions, including a plan to create a "baby ranch," and question Church's ethical judgment in maintaining relationships with Epstein despite his criminal convictions.

Matt Rogers [63:07]: "Superior humans. That's the trigger word for me."

The hosts reflect on the moral implications of accepting funding from controversial figures and the potential corruption of scientific integrity due to such associations.

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10. Concluding Thoughts

Timestamp: [79:11] - [83:30]

In wrapping up the episode, Langston and Matt summarize their findings, emphasizing the problematic nature of Colossal Biosciences' claims and George Church's ethical lapses. They express disappointment in Church's choices and warn listeners about the dangers of conflating scientific innovation with questionable moral practices.

Langston Kerman [83:25]: "He's like, you know, I don't even know this. You're a scientist."

The hosts tease the continuation of the story in Part Two, promising further revelations about the intersection of science, ethics, and human failings.

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Notable Quotes

• Langston Kerman [02:01]: "A company that could not sound more like it belonged in a Michael Crichton novel."

• Matt Rogers [02:32]: "Trying to rewrite Jurassic Park. Yes."

• Langston Kerman [10:22]: "Naming a direwolf after a character in the books who had nothing to do with direwolves was by far the cringiest possible choice here."

• Matt Rogers [15:11]: "This is just PR. First off, it never takes anything else."

• Langston Kerman [24:50]: "He just got lucky. Thank God."

• Langston Kerman [57:31]: "Because when we're talking about, like, this is a technology that could be good or could have some major problematic ethical implications."

• Matt Rogers [63:07]: "Superior humans. That's the trigger word for me."

---

Final Thoughts

"Behind the Bastards: Part One" offers a critical examination of Colossal Biosciences’ dire wolf de-extinction project, unraveling the complex web of scientific ambition, ethical oversights, and morally questionable associations. Through incisive analysis and compelling dialogue, Langston Kerman and Matt Rogers shed light on how the allure of groundbreaking science can sometimes overshadow fundamental ethical considerations, serving as a cautionary tale for both the scientific community and society at large.

For those intrigued by the intricate dance between innovation and morality, this episode provides a thought-provoking narrative that challenges listeners to question the true cost of scientific advancement.

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call zone media.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, wow. Sophie. I don't know. I don't know if we can put that on the air. I mean, that's actionable. Threats against the sitting. Wow. I mean, just. Sophie, that's. It's just dangerous to be saying stuff like that in this day and age. I know. Let's distract the audience and the federal agents listening in by bringing on our guests today who definitely doesn't say stuff like that. Langston Kerman. Langston, do you condemn Sophie's statements, assuming they ever get out in unedited form?

[Matt Rogers]

I was tempted to hang up the zoom right away.

[Sophie]

I understand.

[Matt Rogers]

It was so inflammatory that I said I can't be a part of this.

[Langston Kerman]

No, no. It's time to bring peace to the country. You know, that's what we all need to be focusing on, is peace.

[Matt Rogers]

100%. We gotta get back to what we were, which was normal and peaceful, which.

[Langston Kerman]

Was normal and good. Everyone knows things used to be good in this country for everybody. We were chilling for a while. We were so cool. Yeah. Things were so great. And I think what'll get us back to that is talking about puppies, right? Everybody loves a good puppy, right?

[Matt Rogers]

I like puppies.

[Langston Kerman]

Puppies are wonderful. And there's been some really. Langston looks so nervous.

[Matt Rogers]

I am really nervous.

[Langston Kerman]

What is he talking about? Oh, God. We're gonna talk about puppy mills. No, don't worry. This is a fun one, everybody. We're gonna have a good time this week. Like it is a guy I think is a piece of shit, but it's gonna be fun.

[Matt Rogers]

I will say before you even go, one of the only taboos that exists in film and television is murdering dogs.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes.

[Matt Rogers]

And I'm getting so scared before we even start. I know nothing.

[Langston Kerman]

No dogs are provably harmed yet in the making of this story. Although I do have to specify yet, but there is, like a dog like, creature involved. Because if you. If you spend any time online, if you've been on social media or just been watching the news, I think probably close to 100% of our audience caught this. There was a big story a couple weeks back about how this company brought back the dire wolf. Right.

[Matt Rogers]

That's right.

[Langston Kerman]

Which is an extinct kind of wolf. And they did it using some. Yeah, I think we could call it Jurassic park style machinations. Right. Like, that's what everyone thought of. And this is all the work of an actual, like, science like, bioscience startup called Colossal Biosciences, which is just by name. A company that could not sound more like it belonged in a Michael Crichton novel. If they just called it Engine. Right. It's amazing.

[Matt Rogers]

It really feels like a fourth grader was like, I got it.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Trying to rewrite.

[Langston Kerman]

Like when I was in fourth grade trying to rewrite Jurassic Park. Yes.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. Okay. Okay. We'll get sued. That's fine.

[Langston Kerman]

I'll change it. It's fine. Michael Crichton's not going to sue a 4 year old 4th grader. Colossal Biosciences original. Yeah. So it'll publish this. This is an iHeart podcast. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Ameca, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking.

[Matt Rogers]

It's human.

[Langston Kerman]

Amica. Empathy is our best policy.

[Bowen Yang]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas.

[Langston Kerman]

And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas.

[Bowen Yang]

It's Pride Month. And you know what that means.

[Langston Kerman]

Friendship Parties. Dancing. Correct.

[Bowen Yang]

And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is?

[Langston Kerman]

But when we talked about this, I'm not a thing.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay, Chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer.

[Bowen Yang]

Casamigos. Margarita during Pride. Now that a sleigh.

[Langston Kerman]

Ah, Casamigos.

[Matt Rogers]

Anything is a sleigh.

[Bowen Yang]

Because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Langston Kerman]

Anything goes with my Casamigos. Bo, you're a poet.

[Bowen Yang]

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[Langston Kerman]

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[Matt Rogers]

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[Langston Kerman]

So most news coverage of this whole direwolf thing kind of casually accepted the PR claims being made by Colossal and its co founder, slash scientific spokesman, Dr. George Church. Time published an article with the title the Return of the Dire Wolf. And it's as hype an article as it could possibly be. And on the front of it there's a photo of a very charismatic looking wolf as the header image. I mean, that's a beautiful wolf, right?

[Matt Rogers]

That looks like that wolf has charm.

[Langston Kerman]

That wolf has charm. That is a screen ready wolf.

[Matt Rogers]

You can tell that wolf knows how the business works. That's not a wolf that you gotta like put a caretaker on, you know, gotta.

[Langston Kerman]

They said that they put some direwolf genes into this wolf. I think they might have stuck one or two Tom Cruise jeans in there because that wolf knows where the camera is, right?

[Matt Rogers]

That wolf does its own stunts. I hear you.

[Langston Kerman]

That wolf does its own stunts, right? Obviously it's a good looking wolf. No one's throwing shade against these animals here. They're gorgeous, but they're not dire wolves. Right? That's kind of where we're starting here. It gets much more fucked up than that. Dire wolves were a very real species of wolf which roamed the Americas. They were found in parts of both north and South America from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene period, which is a span of somewhere over 100,000 years. Its bite force, like when these animals lived, they had a stronger bite force than any known modern wolves. So they, they were pretty formidable. But the reputation for them being like the size of horses is something they largely accrued via Game of Thrones because dire wolves were around the same size as the largest modern wolves. A little bigger, but we're talking like 10 or 20 pounds heavier than like a Yukon WOL wolf on average. And there was a. Right.

[Matt Rogers]

There's pretty extensive collection of direwolf bones in the La Brea Tar Pits Museum.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, right.

[Matt Rogers]

And boy, was I disappointed when I saw how little those bones were.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. I thought I was Game of Thrones shit.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, man. I walked in there and I said, I'm gonna see the biggest wolf that's that ever was. And those wolves look like schnauzers. They're, they're tiny little dogs as far as I'm concerned.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Cause you, I mean like the average size of a dire wolf was like 150 pounds, which is like a good sized canid. But like I've known dogs bigger than that. I've known some 200 something pound mastiffs. Right. Like, and they're not that big on average. Yeah, no. So yeah, again, these are, they're bite, in terms of bite force, very formidable animals. But they're not huge. Like that's stuff that George R.R. martin put in his book. Because George R.R. martin knows how to make a book cool. Right. You gotta judge up reality a little bit, you know, especially if it's a fantasy novel.

[Matt Rogers]

He knows how to make a book cool. And he knows how to make a hat cool. He's got cool hats, cool books and scarves.

[Langston Kerman]

Cool hats, cool books. And he's achieved. I have a lot of respect for George. He's achieved every writer's dream, which is to never have to write again. Right. That's what we're all shooting for. So just live in a lighthouse and never finish your series.

[Matt Rogers]

He's done.

[Langston Kerman]

I say, as I'm two years overdue with my novel. But the Name of the Species is presumably the major thing that inspired George R.R. martin. It's just a cool name. Direwolf direwolves have been in D and D before George put them in his books. Right. Cause it's just a cool thing to call a wolf. It's like, yeah, that sounds like a scarier wolf to me. And Colossal Biosciences Knowing and being primarily. This is a company that describes themselves as being in gene sciences. They're in the PR business as much as anything else. And they made the wise decision to rely heavily on the popularity of, of the Game of Thrones books and TV shows to act as advertising for their quote unquote dire wolf. Right. And in fact, this is even written into that fawning time coverage. And here's a quote from that article. Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient preserved DNA, colossal scientists deciphered the direwolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus and their sister, two month old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter, effectively for the first time, de extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool vanished long ago time met the mates. Khaleesi was not present due to her young age at a fenced field in a US wildlife facility on March 24 on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes. Now, naming a direwolf after a character in the books who had nothing to do with direwolves was by far the cringiest possible choice here. Right?

[Sophie]

Missed opportunity.

[Langston Kerman]

There were direwolves with names.

[Matt Rogers]

There were a lot of Starks. They could have just gone down the Stark lineage. They didn't have to go to Khaleesi, quite literally.

[Langston Kerman]

She had nothing to do with the wolves. Did she even meet any of the wolves?

[Matt Rogers]

She's a dragon lady.

[Sophie]

She met. She. She last.

[Langston Kerman]

The. Yes. Did she. She met. Okay, she met John maybe. Okay, right. Ghost. Right. Okay, so maybe one. We don't.

[Sophie]

We don't talk about that last season.

[Langston Kerman]

We don't talk about that last season.

[Sophie]

I got really sad for a second.

[Matt Rogers]

But it's a bummer, folks. You should do. You should do that season as one of the bastards.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that' we're working on a six parter, but having the animals. They also had the animals pose with George R.R. martin as part of the press tour, and that was a particular choice. First off, look at this. Which again, no shade on George. I wanna hold a wolf pup. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Absolutely.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, it looks cuddly as hell, but that's also kind of part of the problem because that wolf is actively yawning. Right. It seems pretty chill to be there. And it's interesting to me because if the information given to the team at Time by Colossal Biosciences was accurate, there's no way this photo should exist. Here's what Time claimed right at the start of their the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans. Trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses, is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches, even if one of the handlers who raised them from birth can only get so close before Romulus and Remus flinch in retreat. This isn't domestic canine behavior. This is wild lupine behavior. The pups are wolves. Not only that, they're dire wolves, which means they have cause to be lonely. And again, just genetically, they're not dire wolves. But also, why is George cuddling that animal then, if you can't? Are you. You're either forcing the animal into a situation that makes it distinctly uncomfortable, but the animal looks like it's yawning, so maybe they're just not as wolfy as you're pretending.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, you're really trying to weave a story here. And that's. That's a nice dog. That seems like a really polite, sweet dog.

[Langston Kerman]

It's chill. It looks like a husky. Yeah, I don't know, man.

[Sophie]

And frankly, George, why are you not finishing the books?

[Matt Rogers]

Well, he's got a lot of wolves.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm not gonna give him shit for that. Again, I also haven't. And if I had the chance to cuddle a wolf rather than spend another day working on my novel, I would be heading to that wolf so fucking fast. I understand the man owns a lighthouse. How you expect him to finish a book? He's finished other books. I'll give him shit for his involvement in this company, though.

[Matt Rogers]

That's cool. To make that much money and be like, I'm a buy a lighthouse.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm going to get a lighthouse. Yeah, of course.

[Matt Rogers]

I'm not sleeping where normal people sleep anymore. I've got a different thing going on.

[Langston Kerman]

No, I'm going to recreate that great Robert Pattinson movie.

[Matt Rogers]

Where everybody was fine at the end, where everyone was happy.

[Langston Kerman]

No, no, really good movie with a good ending. So the fact that there's this photo of George R.R. martin with one of these dire wolves makes a lot more sense when you learn a few things about both the company behind these animals and the actual science behind the project itself. For one thing, George R.R. martin is an investor in Colossal Biosciences and also an advisor to the company. Which advisor in what? George R.R. martin's a number of things. He's not a scientist. He's not a geneticist. He's not an expert in real direwolves.

[Matt Rogers]

Because he's got sunglasses on.

[Langston Kerman]

He does have sunglasses. Like, he invented fake direwolves for his novels. I don't understand. Like, under what circumstances would he be an advisor to this company doing genetics work? That's like, if they hired the guy who played Dr. Alan Grant to advise a company cloning dinosaurs, it's like, well. But he doesn't really know anything about dinosaurs. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

That's actually not his forte. He's actually, he doesn't even speak with that accent. He's pretending.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Like, it's like bringing Jeff Goldblum onto the project. Well, you know, if you, if you're trying to like. I just don't think he has the expertise. Nothing against Jeff.

[Matt Rogers]

If you want to flirt with the dinosaurs.

[Langston Kerman]

If you want to flirt with people, yes, bring Jeff in.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, you want them dinosaurs horny as hell. Get Jeff. But otherwise you gotta.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, he could do that.

[Matt Rogers]

You gotta talk to a scientist you.

[Langston Kerman]

Might want to bring in like Robert Backer or someone if he's still alive. But anyway, an article by Michael Hilsit for the Los Angeles Times explains how Martin is being credited as an advisor here. He's named as a co author on a technical paper the company published as a non peer reviewed preprint describing its de extinction effort. The text credits him with the review and editing of the paper's text among 36 other credited co authors in that category. So he's one of 36 people who helped copy edit an article.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. This is. To your point. This is just PR.

[Langston Kerman]

This is just PR. First off, it never takes anything else. 36 people to edit an article.

[Matt Rogers]

And they didn't let those other 35 people hold that dog. And that's pretty fucked up.

[Langston Kerman]

No, no, just George. They just pressed George in there for that. Yeah. Anyway, to kind of enforce the point I made earlier. These wolves, while very cute, are not dire wolves. There's some genes that they found while sequencing direwolf genetics that have been put into a normal wolf, but that doesn't. It's kind of like how like some people have some Neanderthal DNA in there, but they're not themselves Neanderthals. Right. They're people.

[Matt Rogers]

You know, that's got to be a tough thing to. To figure out for yourself though, that you got a little bit of that in there because.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, you got some DNA from a species we wiped out.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, you can kind of see it. And then, then that bums you out where you' sure.

[Langston Kerman]

Like Jon Hamm, I assume. Right. It's a big head. Big old head. Big old head. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

So Colossal Biosciences is not actually in the de extinction business. They are in the modifying animals genetically in ways that in some cases hadn't been done before business. And that is interesting. But it's not de extinction. And so they are doing stuff. They are doing something new and something that is in some ways very interesting, but it's not what they're claiming they're doing. So I can't call this a straight up con, right, because they did make an animal that didn't exist before, but it's also not a dire wolf and they're not de extincting anything. And I think the evidence shows they are massively inflating what they and their technology can do in order to win VC funding. The whole explanation as to why will take a while, but I'm gonna start by talking about the claims that first brought the company public attention. Back In September of 2021, a whole spate of almost identical articles dropped announcing the creation of Colossal Biosciences and their plan to clone a woolly mammoth by 2027. So we got two more years before there ought to be mammoths, right?

[Matt Rogers]

We're getting woolly mammoths back, y' all.

[Langston Kerman]

This is exciting very soon, like probably right around the same time we get severance season three, you know, if we're lucky. You know what sucks about same year.

[Matt Rogers]

Sucks about woolly mammoths too is, is they also are not bigger than elephants.

[Langston Kerman]

No. No.

[Matt Rogers]

I thought this whole time that woolly mammoths were like these giant beasts that we would never be able to see again. And they're like smaller than the average African elephant.

[Langston Kerman]

No. And again, it's one of those things. Whenever people start to think about odds, it's a bum. We've missed all the coolest animals that existed. The largest thing to ever exist on earth is still around. It swims in the sea and we're currently killing them.

[Sophie]

Okay, something you missed in this story now that you've brought up. The woolly mammoth is part of. The investors for this company are like a tick tock.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm getting to that, Sophie, don't you worry.

[Sophie]

I was like, I was like, I know this. Why do I know this shit.

[Langston Kerman]

We're getting to the other investors in this fucking company. Don't worry. But here's a, here's a representative example from like the, the press. That explosion around this woolly mammoth claim. So this is a CNBC article. Lab grown woolly mammoths could walk the earth in six years if Geneticists new startup succeeds. This was published in 2021 and the geneticist that they're discussing and the guy the article is based around interviewing is co founder of Colossal Biosciences, Dr. George Church, who claimed that he'd had the idea kicking around for years and research supports this fact. He's been pushing this idea in one form or another for like a decade or more, but that he'd just been given $15 million in seed funding and a company had been established with serial entrepreneur Bin Lam as CEO. And we will talk about Ben Lamb some more in part two. Church, though, Dr. George Church is a real doctor and his credentials are impeccable on paper. And just to state, this guy's kind of a weird case where he's exaggerating a lot and I think you could even argue lying about some things. But he's a real scientist with some very impressive achievements behind him.

[Matt Rogers]

And I, I, I think it's important for us to say that scientists can be both legitimate and liars.

[Langston Kerman]

Full of shit, Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, you, yes, we, I think, conflated somehow where scientists are like these moral beings that exist above us all and no, they can be liars and also really smart and capable people.

[Langston Kerman]

Right? It's like how you could be a great science fiction author and racist as fuck. Right? Like those two things have existed. Or like Isaac Asimov where you're like, wow, what a genius and also sex pest. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Like those things do not conflict whatsoever.

[Matt Rogers]

You know, it might have helped him. I don't know, it might have helped him.

[Langston Kerman]

Who knows? So Church's credentials. I'm not calling Church a sex pest. Although he has some shady involvement with people that we'll talk about. None of it involves accusations of his specific behavior. Just his choice of company. Anyway. His academic credentials. Anyway, he is the. Oh, this episode ends. You know, I'm not gonna give you a hint, but you're gonna be psyched. You're not gonna be psyched. You're gonna be bummed.

[Matt Rogers]

I can't wait.

[Langston Kerman]

He is the Robert Winthrop professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member at the Weiss Institute for Biolo Engineering, also at Harvard. So, you know, that alone, pretty big achievement, right?

[Matt Rogers]

And he still holds those positions today?

[Langston Kerman]

Yes, as far as I'm aware, yes. Church has his name on more than 100 patents. And some of those are things where maybe he got on there because he helped someone else. But a lot of them are because he contributed really significant work to those patents. He started the personal genome project and he has also helped found more than 20 companies. Now, that last claim was the first thing I read about him that made me wonder, like, okay, is there something like, shady here? Cause 20 companies is too many. No honest man has found more than 20 companies. You're doing some fucked up shit, right?

[Matt Rogers]

You gotta focus, big man. That's a few too many companies.

[Langston Kerman]

That's too many companies. And then when I read about the actual claims Colossal through Church was making about why cloning mammoths was not just like a cool thing to do, but like necessary for conservation. I went fully over the edge. This is when I was like, okay, I gotta dig more into this guy. There's gotta be something fucked up here. And he has made claims like this quote. This is a quote from the article. Proponents of the project, and they're talking about Church say rewilding the Arctic with woolly mammoths could slow global warming by slowing the melting of the permafrost where methane is currently trapped. That's not true. How it has something to do with them stomping down the ground to stop like trees from growing up. So the permafrost days. But like that, that's. If theoretically there were a massive healthy mammoth population, it might do that. We're not talking about, number one, they're not talking about making mammoths. They're talking about modifying African elephants as a spoiler for what will be in part two. But also, like, that's just not a feasible place for this project to end with like massive herds of mammoths clumping across the tundra, clumping the ground to fix. Also, no amount of mammoths is going to fit global warming at its current. Like, the problem is not just there's too many trees in Siberia. There's other shit going on.

[Matt Rogers]

If that's the approach you're taking, you're missing the mark quite a bit. I think mammoth mammoths can't be our first start at fixing the problem for sure.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't think a lack of mammoths is the primary reason this is a problem. Yeah. Further shady factoids about the business include the fact that it is a for profit enterprise. Now Ben Lamb, who's his co founder and the CEO, was quick to tell cnbc, none of our investors are focused on monetizing right now, which is great. But then you read about who those investors are and you wonder. I don't know if I believe that because investors in Colossal outside of George R.R. martin include self Help Grifter, Tony Robbins and Winklevoss Capital.

[Sophie]

Oh, we got Winklevoss.

[Langston Kerman]

The Winklevoss twins. Wow. Winklevi.

[Matt Rogers]

That's crazy.

[Langston Kerman]

They'd only be involved in a real project.

[Matt Rogers]

This is like when a bunch of celebrities open up an ice cream store, right? Like, why do y' all know each other?

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, one of you is moving coke and you guys needed a way to launder shit. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

What is this relationship that somehow fostered naturally between you?

[Langston Kerman]

Uh huh. Something's Wrong here. I'm missing something. And, yes, there are some famous tiktokers involved as well, and some other celebrities who should not be involved in a biosciences company that we'll talk about later. So by the time I read about the Winklevoss twins being involved, I was fully on Team Fuck these people. Winklevi, The Winkles. V. But that's not enough to actually, like, justify accusing a person and their company of being bastards. Right? Just, like, even I wouldn't do that. So I looked deeper, and, boy, howdy, did I find some shit. Before we get into everything that's fucked up about this company, a lot of what's fucked up here is actually Dr. George Church and talking about what this guy's done and where he's come from, because this is a story of, like, a great scientist who makes some choices that I would argue puts him into a series of very unethical situations because there's money in it. Right. That's what I think is going on here. But I'm just gonna read you his bio. George McDonald Church was born on August 28, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He grew up in Clearwater, the capital of Scientology. But I can't hold that against him. He's got no ties that I found to the. The organization. He just grew up there.

[Matt Rogers]

He just got lucky.

[Langston Kerman]

He just got lucky. Thank God. Yeah. He's near Blue Base. I think that's the big base in Clearwater. His family life was somewhat chaotic by most people's standards, as he laid out in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. I had three fathers as my mother remarried. The first one lasted about eight months post birth, and he was an Air Force pilot, a pretty colorful character. I knew him off and on through the years, up until his death. He was the sort of father that a young boy would admire because he wasn't tied down by actual responsibilities. That was Stu McDonald. He was called Barefoot Stu. He was inducted into the Water Ski hall of Fame. He wasn't a terrific athlete. I mean, obviously, he was a pretty good one. But his real contribution to the sport, which was relevant to me, was that he was a good communicator. He was the first ABC Wide World of Sports color commentator. He was also just generally charismatic. He was a male model. He worked on film, television stuff as well.

[Matt Rogers]

What?

[Langston Kerman]

Right, right. So. And this guy, he's also primarily a communicator now. Right. And he's like. He's very old now, but he's like a Handsome, kind of old. Like, he's the. You would cast him to be like the old king in like a fucking new Robin Hood movie who, like, comes back at the end. Right? Like, he is that kind of old guy. He was my birth dad, but I don't think he really influenced me that much intellectually. My second father was a lawyer and had the least influence. Third dad was a physician who had two pretty important roles. He sent me away to school, to an awesome high school. Both my stepbrother and I went away at roughly the same time. It might have just been to get the young teenage boys out of the house, but in my case, it was very good. It was a liberal east coast school. Andover, which is where the bushes went. I don't know if I'd call that liberal, but. And Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides and a bunch of other interesting people. And the other thing he did was just being a physician. I could look at his medical technology and somehow be enthralled by it. And Dr. Dat is where he gets the last name Church. So that definitely seems to be the guy he primarily considers to have been his father. And that summary of events does kind of smooth over a couple of things, including what seems to have been a difficult start for George at school. He's always very bright, but he has learning disabilities. He had to repeat the ninth grade as a result. George has claimed in recent years to have dyslexia, narcolepsy, ocd, and add. All of which he says it's a lot of stuff. He says they were all mild, but it made me feel different. Right. And so he became kind of desperate in grade school not to stand out or get attention. Right. Like he doesn't want to seem weird, which is a pretty normal way for kids to feel in school.

[Matt Rogers]

So far, it's the thing I've related to him most on.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[Matt Rogers]

I get that.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I get it.

[Matt Rogers]

That I connect to. Saying you reinvented wolves is a different conversation.

[Langston Kerman]

The wolf thing I'm having trouble with. You very rarely claim that, Langston.

[Matt Rogers]

It's almost never come up in our conversations, at least.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, seldom. Prior to going to Andover, Church attended both public and Catholic schools, but had bad experiences in both systems. He just says the schools in Florida weren't very good. Again, I don't have trouble seeing that. Despite his difficulty with academics, he was a voracious reader and good at self directed learning when he was interested in something. He built an analog computer when he was 10. And when he started at Andover, they had a timeshare computing program with nearby Dartmouth College. So he was able to spend time on a computer before most people his age did, which is like, you see similar stories with, like, a lot of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a lot of the guys who are, like, around this age and also wound up being major tech players. Right? Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

It was such rare technology to access at that age that I bet if you really were able to invest in the time and energy, you advanced the chess piece so far for yourself.

[Langston Kerman]

And you were generally kind of a rich kid. Right. Which is the case with. Even though he's got. He goes through a couple of dads, this last one is very comfortable financially. And as a result, he gets this opportunity. And as a result, then his story sounds less like a lot of big science guys and more like a lot of tech startup dudes.

[Matt Rogers]

Right.

[Langston Kerman]

That's the kind of background this dude has.

[Matt Rogers]

They always talk about how Bill Gates started Microsoft in his garage, but it's like, oh, you had an entire garage.

[Langston Kerman]

That's garage.

[Matt Rogers]

Most people have to store things and park cars in there. And you were just like, nah, the garage is a workspace.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that's right. Speaking of garages, if you want to afford a garage, I don't know, I can't help you, but you can buy these products.

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, nice. This is a beautiful segue.

[Langston Kerman]

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[Langston Kerman]

Listen to HighKey, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment, that's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer and then the Aries comes out and they said who the is that? No you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon. Get outta here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay, that is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Okay, so so far, it's been a pretty similar story to a lot of tech guys. And George has a story about how when he was like, 10 or so, he goes to the New York World's Fair. And that has a huge impact on him. He gets to see very early touchscreens, which are obviously a precursor to a real technology, and also a lot of fake future technology, like personal jetpacks and stuff that, like. I mean, there's technically some jetpacks, but it's not what we thought it would be. Right. We're not flying around in those things, you and me.

[Matt Rogers]

I thought it was gonna be Rocket man shit. And it's not that at all.

[Langston Kerman]

No, no. I thought right up to the fact that I thought we'd all be shooting Nazis. And it turns out we chose other things to do with Nazis, which is unfortunate.

[Matt Rogers]

Turns out some of us think they're a better hang than we anticipated.

[Langston Kerman]

Certainly the better hang than the Rocket Man. The Rockete. So. But a lot of the tech he sees is also just stuff that, like, never happened. Right? And George would later say, quote, it didn't take too long for me to become disillusioned. Not only was it not like that in Florida, it probably wasn't even like that in New York once they shut down the World's Fair. And it might not ever be like that if I didn't do something about it. So I sort of felt like if I want that, I have to work for it. And you could take two things out of this. Either he realizes the World's Fair is largely like a PR thing, and most of this stuff isn't coming, or at least not coming anytime soon. And, like, well, then I'm gonna get into. I'm gonna become a cutting edge scientist to try to make this future real. Or maybe what he learns is like, wow, it's really easy to lie to a lot of people about what you can do and, like, get money. And maybe that's. Maybe that's a lot easier than inventing the future.

[Matt Rogers]

I think spotting a grift is real profitable real fast.

[Langston Kerman]

It can be, yeah. Now, maybe, to be fair, maybe both of those things hit him because he does get into some real making the future shit at first. Church wound up attending summer courses in quantum physics at mit. He gets into crystallography, which I don't really understand, but is important science. And he describes this as showing him, quote, the intersection of computers and biology, which is going to be like a constant source of fascination for him. Now he does still have issues in school. He has to repeat his first year of graduate school. And depending on where you find him interviewed, this is explained differently. I found one article that just said, well, he was just taking so many classes, too many classes, so that he couldn't graduate. He was just like too interested in doing too many different things. And it just like graduating kind of slipped by him. And that's not really accurate. The way he explained it in this Harvard student paper is different from that. But it's also kind of weird. Sometimes I could get away with barely going to classes. Other times, like in organic chemistry, I loved it so much. I did every single problem set in the back of each chapter. They didn't even assign any of them. I did them all. It was a full year course. And I think I finished the book, including all the problems in it, by halfway through the fall semester. That was pretty typical. But I guess the reason I did it in two years was that I was cheap money wise. Like a lot of teenagers, I didn't want to keep being a burden on my parents. Steve Jobs dropped out of college because he was worried about his parents finances. He did not. I didn't drop out, I just finished early. I also think I had this feeling that if I took four years to do it, I would probably flunk out so it would be better to finish that. That turned out to be true at about the three and a half year point. I did flunk out, but out of graduate school. And you see how that doesn't make sense. How he's like, well I graduated early so I wouldn't be a burden to my parents. But actually I flunked out after three and a half years. And I was like, well, I don't understand what you're saying.

[Matt Rogers]

And I think if we're going back, that really speaks to both the passionate learner and the grifter working in sort of synchronicity.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. If you'll forgive me, Langston, he has two wolves inside him.

[Matt Rogers]

The man contains two wolves. Yeah, one Dyer, one pretty much a regular one.

[Langston Kerman]

Trying to sell you Amway.

[Sophie]

I don't forgive you.

[Langston Kerman]

Now the way he describes this other times is that he didn't even realize he'd flunked out of graduate school. Cause he was so excited about the crystallography work his advisor had him doing. And his advisor was like, hey man, you're actually flunking. You know You've gotta like you're getting kicked out. And hired him as a technician, but was like, you can't just keep doing this. You have to reapply to graduate school somewhere else. And church eventually reapplies to Harvard and describes himself as being shocked at getting in because he'd flunked out of Duke, but he had also gotten accepted to Harvard before he went to Duke. And anyway, whatever, he gets accepted. Did some stuff happen behind the scenes with his dad in Harvard? I don't know. It may just have been that he'd been accepted before.

[Matt Rogers]

I was about to say, I bet having rich parents and a nice little parachute probably helped him figure that out.

[Langston Kerman]

And he's got this professor who's probably going to bat for him too because he is good at some things. But anyway, how he dropped out and exactly why is a little bit different every time I read it. Which always kind of raises my grifter hackles just a skosh. But maybe I'm missing some things. At any rate, he gets into Harvard and he does better here. He gets into chemistry and genomic sequencing, which is what he does. His thesis on his 1985 PhD from Harvard, per a write up on Edge.org's included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcoding. These led to the first genome sequence pathogen helicobacter pylori in 1994. His innovations have continued to nearly all next generation DNA sequencing methods and companies. And as far as I can tell, and I even like reached out to a friend of a friend who's in this field that is accurate. He is a legitimately like foundational mind in modern genome sequencing. His work has been massively influential in like specifically personal genome people. He didn't invent genome sequencing, right? But when we first started sequencing it cost billions of dollars to do that the first time. And he's a major reason why individuals can do it and why you can do it for. I think it's like 750 bucks to get your genome sequenced now, right? Like he is a big part of that process, right? Not even, not to just write it down to just him either. But his role is substantial and this is meaningful, important science, right? And I don't, I'm not gonna try to take that away from him or pretend like, like this does not seem to be exaggerated. Other aspects of his achievements will be. This does not seem to be right. A write up on him in Popular Science by Janine Interlandi summarizes scientists are now using it personal Genome sequencing to identify intractable diseases such as cancer and schizophrenia. And doctors are beginning to use it to identify genetic mutations that cause rare and until now, undiagnosable illnesses. So. So church becomes a PhD. Seems like he earned that doing some good work. Doing some good work. He initiates the Personal Genome Project at Harvard in 2005 with the goal of sequencing and publicizing the complete genomes and medical records of 100,000 volunteers to further research into personalized medicine. And all this is great, but there's also, even in just this, you could be like, well, these people are volunteering, so maybe it's cool. But like, there is some potential troubling privacy stuff about publicizing everybody's genomes. I think we've all thought about that more in the last couple years.

[Matt Rogers]

I prefer to keep my genomes pretty private.

[Langston Kerman]

To me. Yeah, I know a lot of people who use those 23andMe companies and are like, actually, I kind of wish I hadn't done that now, knowing what they do with the data. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. They can refuse a mortgage because you've published this and now they're like, oh, we think you're going to have diabetes and diabetes means you won't be able to pay 30 year worth of mortgage. So nah, we're good.

[Langston Kerman]

And it's one of those things you're not necessarily a bastard for like being in a science that is used by corporations and that isn't fundamentally evil, but gets used in some shady ways. But kind of what this does show is I don't really think he often thinks about the negative applications of what he's involved in. That is gonna be kind of a through line with George Church, as we'll talk about later. But that article in Popular Science continues. More so than any other scientist in his field. He is helping to forge a new kind of biology, one less geared towards studying DNA than harnessing it for our own aims. And this is where the fucked up shit starts to kind of come in is like, he is a. DNA is no different from, you know, a computer chip. Right. And we shouldn't think of it as different than that in terms of allowing us to build new technologies. And I can understand on some extent that attitude, but it is also different. It's not. Not, it's not a computer chip.

[Matt Rogers]

I really get nervous whenever the language starts dehumanizing human experiences like that. There has to be some attachment to what it means to be a person for this to remain healthy, normal, applicable in a way that isn't just you scamming us into something much more scary. Evil.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. Yeah. And that's the thing is like, there's a degree to which, if you're just talking purely logically. Right, right. There's a degree to which you can be like. Well, I guess it makes sense to say like, you know, if I'm open to the idea of like genetically editing people to make them, you know, avail more resilient to diseases or something, maybe it makes a little sense to think of it as a technology in that way. But the line from that to thinking about the people and other living beings you create as just smartphones, that how do you. What stops you, what guardrails are you building in to stop that? If this is how you're looking at it, where are the guardrails?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, people turn into minesweeper real fast.

[Langston Kerman]

You know what I mean?

[Matt Rogers]

It's not exactly. You're not dealing with bodies anymore in that skin.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. And that's not great. And that is kind of where we're headed here. So. Church's success led to Harvard funding the establishment of his lab. He has like a lab that is funded by Harvard that has been for quite some time. And he brings in minds that excite him and hires them and basically pays them to like fuck around and try to figure shit out. And he uses this like, this is both a valid thing to do in terms of science, but it's also, he uses it as like an incubator for startup ideas. Like once people do stuff that shows promise, he'll often spin what they're doing off into a company, per an article in Popular Science. The result is that his lab manages to be both one of Harvard's top producers and a well known receiving center for science's misfit toys. There's an artist encoding Wikipedia entries into Apple genomes to create a literal tree of knowledge. And an insurance industry refugee who fled his office job over a decade ago, worked several months for free while teaching himself biochemistry, and now serves as co head of the lab. So again, that sounds kind of cool potentially, you know, I guess.

[Matt Rogers]

What's the tree of knowledge?

[Langston Kerman]

What is that supposed to do?

[Matt Rogers]

What does that do? Yeah, that's cool. I get, I don't know, it sounds awesome.

[Langston Kerman]

Sounds like an art project. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

The article we'll talk a little bit about like DNA coding that's actually, there's some science there. But the article quotes a former student of Church's who founded a genetic engineering screening company that looks for inherited diseases. And he said, we always joke that the only thing you need to do to join George's lab is show up. There is zero organization. His style is just to let things happen. Mostly you have the constant sense that exciting things are happening or about to happen. And if you miss out on it, you have only yourself to blow.

[Matt Rogers]

Wow.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. And that's kind of the tech industry fomo, PR thing in a nutshell.

[Matt Rogers]

That's also just not a good thing to sort of, I guess, have is like, what people know about you that, like, yeah, if you show up, he'll give you a job.

[Langston Kerman]

He'll give you a job he didn't give. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as you're there. He's looking for bodies who are fucking around now. In the mid aughts, Church participated in kind of his first noteworthy project after the genome sequencing stuff that we'll talk about, which is a project to actually encode digital data made of text into binary code and then transfer that into genetic code, thus using DNA to store digital data. In his case, this was also a marketing stunt because the thing that he stored in DNA was like 70 billion copies of the book that he had written with another guy that was just about to come out, right? So he does this as a PR move, right? And it's a brilliant PR move. The book Regenesis was about to hit shelves, and suddenly there's all these articles about how he stored 70 billion copies into, like, a dot of DNA, no longer than, like, a fucking period, on a piece of paper that was able to store so many copies. Like, isn't that amazing, right? And it is pretty interesting, right? Like, that he synthesized a strand of DNA, replicated it, and, like, put it onto a scrap of paper and it contained. Contained real data, right? This, in fact, was so interesting that it got him an appearance on the Colbert Report, right? Where he pulled out the paper scrap, which was like the size and shape of a fortune cookie slip, and showed it off to everybody. And this got representatives of different companies who like archive films and other stuff reaching out to him. Cause they were like, oh, shit, you know, oh, shit.

[Matt Rogers]

He has a piece of paper.

[Langston Kerman]

He's got a piece of paper, right? Yes, yes, yes, it is.

[Matt Rogers]

This paper got a dot on it. We should work with him.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, it is funny again, I don't know that this is exactly how a scientist should be putting out a discovery of this magnitude, apparently, but it's also. It's one of those things that's both really cool and interesting and somewhat less impressive than it sounds when you drill into what's actually happening here. Right. Because that article by Inderlandi makes it seem. And this is obviously like a proof of concept for something that could be potentially a huge deal for like, data storage. And that's not entirely untrue, but it's not totally accurate either. The article goes on to summarize the book that he co wrote with Ed Regis, who it's weird to me that his co author's name is Ed Regis because Ed Regis is also a character in the book Jurassic Park. He was the public relations manager for ingen in the novel. Oh no, he doesn't wind up in the film. It's just really weird to me that his co author on this book has that name.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, but I bet he gets eaten. He sounds like he got eaten.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, yeah, man, that motherfucker gets the hell eaten out of him. Yes. If I am remembering right, he's one of the ones who gets eaten like a son of a bitch. I think he gets replaced with the lawyer in the movie. So the book regenesis that Church writes with Ed Regis, quote, envisioned the future this new biology could bring. One in which bacteria fuels cars and commercial jets and humans are immune to cancer. It may sound like science fiction, or at least like a litany of overhyped pipe dreams that science so often sells, but George Church's pipe dreams have an uncanny record of becoming reality. And I'd say this is the fundamental lie about George that keeps getting repeated and spread by a too credulous media. The man makes constant wild and almost impossible claims about what's going to happen in the future. And then people will be like, yeah, it sounds nuts, but his crazy dreams have become reality before, so we should take him seriously. And we shouldn't. Because while Church contributed massively to the science of gene sequencing, at no point were his ambitions in that field a pipe dream. No one was ever like, no one can do what you're trying to do, George. You can't personally sequence the human genome. Scientists had been doing that, Right. There were teams of people who had figured out aspects of this before he got into the field. And while what he discovered to do was really meaningful, nobody was like, this will never get done. It was more like, well, someone's gotta figure it out. And he was the one who figured it out. I'm not saying that's not impressive, but it was never a pipe dream, right? It was not by the time he got into it. And the stuff he's talking about in this book, like altering human biology to make us immune to cancer, that is a pipe Dream. There's no evidence that will ever be possible, in part because cancer's a bunch of different diseases. There's never gonna be a single thing that, like, renders you immune to cancer unless you start uploading people to the cloud, which is also probably not possible.

[Matt Rogers]

I also get really nervous when the science includes both car technology and cancer elimination. That feels like, wait a minute. You gotta focus, big dog. Both of those things can't be true from your single discovery.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, it's like if you, like, you know, you're a Hollywood actor who's like, starting to go bald and you go in for, like, Turkish hair transplants and the doctors like, hey, man, if you want a new liver, like, I haven't I got one. I'd be like, wait, what? Wait, I don't.

[Matt Rogers]

I actually don't know. I prefer to keep the one I have. I know it sucks, but I'll keep it.

[Langston Kerman]

I just came in here to get the Joel McHale, man. I really was not interested in a new organ. Never have hair transplants worked out better for a man. My God.

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, yeah, his are. His are low and they're strong. I really respect it.

[Langston Kerman]

The Mona Lisa of hair transplants. So even when it comes to the cool things, Dr. Church actually did, like, store his book in DNA. And I do think that's a cool idea. The practical reality behind it is a lot less exciting than the hype. Now, before we bust that, I wanna show you a video of Church presenting the exciting promise of DNA storage in a video that was part of the promotional campaign for his books. And he's being interviewed here with one of his colleagues for this encoding project.

[Sophie]

And yes, he does look exactly like I thought he would.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, no, he does.

[G]

The density is remarkably high. As little as 1 bit per base, 1 base per cubic nanometer. And so we can store on the order of almost a zettabyte in a gram of DNA, a milliliter volume.

[Langston Kerman]

The theoretical density of DNA is that you could store the total world information, which is 1.8 zettabytes, at least in 2011, and about 4 grams of DNA.

[G]

And it leverages rapidly improving next generation reading and writing of DNA.

[Sophie]

He looks like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush.

[Langston Kerman]

He does look like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush. I think he's a lot smarter than Stockton, though. Although that is a very low bar because Stockton was really dumb or Stockton turned into Paste Rush. He does have the vibes of a guy that gets eaten by his own dinosaurs. But I don't Think that's gonna happen to him either, which is really tragic. That actually does bum me out.

[Matt Rogers]

It definitely felt like late stage James Cameron, you know what I mean? It felt like you're telling me about the avatar technology, but this movie still sucks. So what's happening?

[Langston Kerman]

So what he says here isn't technically wrong. That's all technically accurate about what you could do with DNA. But it doesn't mean that DNA is currently or will be in any kind of timeframe, a good way to store data. Now obviously there's a need for a much better way to store data. Digital data storage is not forever and has a lot of problems. And like, is it just a really bad way to long term protect human knowledge? And obviously like paper is actually in some ways better if you're storing it in like the right conditions. Like it will degrade less than digital data over a long enough timeframe. But there's obvious problems with paper. Paper, right, like, or other things. Like if you've got like a climate sealed place to store books versus some hard drives, those hard drives will break on a faster timeframe, assuming you manage to keep that place, you know, properly stored and whatnot. But so we do need ways that are much more space efficient. Because also the amount of data humanity is producing, you know, especially since we have projects like the Hadron Collider going, there's so much data being made and storing it is a problem, right? Like, cause you need these massive facilities in order to even store a lot of this stuff. So these are issues that we have, right? And DNA and the fact that you could store data with such density in it could be a solution to aspects of it. But it's kind of framed a lot as like, and this is in the future, Netflix will keep all its data in like DNA drive, yada yada, like everyone like everything will be stored. And that probably is never gonna happen. I can't say definitely, but there's cause there's a lot we don't know about this, how this technology would work. But the shit we haven't figured is really significant. For example, there's a high error rate when you write data to DNA currently. And since it's really easy to fuck up writing the data, the current best practices is to store multiple redundant copies of each piece of information. So you have some that are right, which is like he puts 70 billion copies of that book on like a dot, right? Like that's kind of what we're talking about here. You store a shitload of copies of something because you Know, and scientists don't even know how many redundant backups we need yet. Right. I found a study where they're just trying to figure that out. Like, okay, what is the actual best practice for the actual number of different redundant copies to store? Because we really hadn't locked that down yet.

[Matt Rogers]

So all of those, all of those books, there's like six of those books that are. Right. And then 70 billion others that are like just mid, like really shit books.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't know if it's that bad. But we like the. I think the problem is like we don't actually know how many we should be doing. Right. Right. We're still figuring that part of it out. And then there's a separate issue of like, okay, well you've got that on this dot, but you can't. Like that dot's not connected to a computer. Like, sure, the data's there, but how would you access and store it and use it if you wanted to? Right. Like, could you get that on a Kindle easily? And the answer is no. Right. I found an article on DNA data storage written by Nithal Krishnaraj that lays out some of the other practical issues inherent to doing this. For any practical reason, DNA has horrendously slow read and write speeds, so it isn't ideal for real time storage. And activities like streaming video and gaming definitely won't be viable at this time. As a result, DNA data storage loses some of its versatility and as of now, it would only work best for long term storage. It's also not rewritable. Once you encode data into DNA, there's no way of making changes to your data without redoing the encoding process. There's also no random access functionality, which means you can't access a certain part of the data without decoding all of of it. And this is still like interesting and potentially a way. Again, you could have a bunch of different places where all of the data we've made up to a certain point is stored on DNA somewhere. And that would potentially allow future people to access a lossless version of it in a way that might be really helpful. But we're not talking about something that's going to alter daily life in its current form and maybe not ever on any timeframe any of us will see, because it's just not practical. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. Netflix isn't going to exist when this is actually a thing, right?

[Langston Kerman]

Yes, yes. Like at some point in the future, maybe they'll figure out all this stuff, but that is not any kind of timeframe Anybody should be, like, waiting for. Right. Again, not to say this isn't interesting or doesn't have a potential use. It's just prep is like, this is the future of data storage. And it's like, well, maybe in like a couple hundred years. I don't know. Now, there's also something in that video that I find creepy as an aside, which is that Dr. Church proposes one use of this technology would be to create permanent records of the brain activity of a human being. And I just don't like the way he says this.

[G]

Or you could imagine other huge data sources, like all the neuronal firings in the brain, which could be encoded into DNA. And again, you could do selective reading of that as needed.

[Sophie]

Yikes.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't love that. No, he's saying, like, well, you could do some really groundbreaking medical studies if you had access to this much data. And sure, but when you talk about making perfect records of a human brain's activity, you're also getting into the kind of territory where I'm like, I want to immediately hear what you think about the potential for surveillance and violation of privacy. Right. Like, you kind of have to bring that up right away. You can't just be interested in the technology here.

[Matt Rogers]

It seems like you want to download some information from people that may. Maybe they didn't want to give you. That's some nasty work there, Dr. George.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm a little. And I promise you, we're so far getting into all this. Well, theoretically, there's stuff about this that could be wrong. Or he's exaggerating. The actual fucked up stuff starts right about now. Right.

[Matt Rogers]

Okay.

[Langston Kerman]

Because when we're talking about, like, this is a technology that could be good or could have some major problematic ethical implications. You want to know the scientists working on the technology that could have fucked up ethical implications has a strong history of personal ethics. Right. And this brings me to Dr. Church's history with our old friend of the pod, Jeffrey Epstein.

[Matt Rogers]

Jeffrey Epstein.

[Langston Kerman]

Yep. Yep.

[Sophie]

Yike.

[Langston Kerman]

Yep. That's the monster at the end of this book. Okay. Or at the end of this episode. Dr. Church has fun ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, indeed.

[Matt Rogers]

Well, well, well.

[Langston Kerman]

Surprise.

[Matt Rogers]

Epstein the Babadook emerges.

[Langston Kerman]

Literally, he is the thin white duke of evil Scientists. It's fucking Jeffrey Epstein.

[Matt Rogers]

That's really cool. That's like a really exciting plot twist that you don't see coming. I love this.

[Langston Kerman]

It's like the end of the second or third Kingsman movie when Hitler comes out of nowhere, like, oh, there we go. There we go. I Know him?

[Matt Rogers]

You guys really built that a long way.

[Langston Kerman]

Great. Dropping him like Phantom.

[Unknown]

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[Langston Kerman]

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment, that's all it takes. Everyone loves, loves me at the cancer and then the Aries comes out and they said, who the is that? No, you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon. Get outta here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay, that is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. At Ameca Insurance, we know it's more than just a car or a house. It's the four wheels that get you where you're going and the four walls that welcome you home. When you combine auto and home insurance with Amica, we'll help protect it all. And the more you cover, the more you can save Amica. And empathy is our best policy.

[Bowen Yang]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas.

[Langston Kerman]

And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas.

[Bowen Yang]

It's Pride Month, and you know what that means.

[Langston Kerman]

Friendship parties, Dancing. Correct.

[Bowen Yang]

And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is?

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, and we talked about this. I'm not a thing.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay, Chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer, right?

[Bowen Yang]

There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with. With Your friends.

[Langston Kerman]

That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos whole vibe is friendship.

[Matt Rogers]

It's literally in the name.

[Bowen Yang]

I didn't realize that. Well, the vibe is working because everyone loves it. It's good with anything. Watermelon juice, Bloody Mary mix, coconut, grapefruit, diet freaking cola, for crying out loud.

[Langston Kerman]

The deepest friendships have been forged over Casamigos margaritas.

[Bowen Yang]

A Casamigos margarita during pride. Now that's a slay.

[Langston Kerman]

Ah, Casamigos.

[Bowen Yang]

Anything is a sleigh because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Langston Kerman]

That is so true.

[Bowen Yang]

You can thank me later. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains New Potsamingus Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

[Langston Kerman]

So some sources, I have said, say that Church and Epstein's relationship started in 2005. I've heard church claim 2006, but people have said that he was receiving funding from Epstein as far back as 2005. It may just be that his lab started receiving unrestricted funding from Epstein before they met. And I will remind you here, they were receiving funding from 2005 to 2007. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of sex trafficking. Although that's not the end of their relationship. But let's talk about those first couple of years now. At that point in his career, 2005. Right. He is. He's just started the Personal Genome Project. His primary focus and the thing that he's most famous for is his work on like gene sequencing and gene editing. You know, he's into both of these things. An article for the New York Times that discusses churches and other scientists associations with Epstein described Dr. Church in this period as a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans.

[Matt Rogers]

Uh oh.

[Langston Kerman]

Uh oh. Oh, boy. Don't like that.

[Matt Rogers]

Superior humans. That's the trigger word for me.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah, boy. Has anyone ever said those two words and not been doing something horrifying?

[Matt Rogers]

Yikes.

[Langston Kerman]

So Dr. Church was an early pioneer for the use of CRISPR to edit human genes. And one, one of his ambitions was and is to create a method of gene therapy to, in his words, knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can't get AIDS anymore because the virus can't enter your cells. And hey, that sounds fine. AIDS is bad. Stopping people from being able to get it. Lovely. The issue is that Church's ambitions don't stop here. And Epstein was not drawn to Church's life work for anything as humanitarian as Stopping a violent I have found a couple stories of how Church and Epstein actually met for the first time. Church has claimed that he was connected to Epstein first either, and he says, I don't know which, either through the chairman of Harvard's psych department or through his literary agent, John Brockman.

[Sophie]

Sure, buddy.

[Langston Kerman]

I feel like I remember how I first met Jeffrey Epstein, but maybe I'm.

[Matt Rogers]

Wrong, but that speaks to his multitude.

[Langston Kerman]

He's either busy man, right?

[Matt Rogers]

It could either be a money man or it could be academic man, but one of them introduced me and both.

[Langston Kerman]

Of them are implicated in some sketchy Epstein stuff. To be clear, we were all there with Jeffrey. But in another interview, Church seemed to suggest that Epstein probably reached out to him because Epstein was friendly and working with a biologist and mathematician named Martin Nowak. Church and Nowak had worked together on various applications of CRISPR to edit genes. Per an article in STAT by Karen Beg at the get togethers with Noach, Church said Epstein seemed interested in the science of life's origins and mathematically modeling the evolution of viruses, cancer cells, and life itself. Epstein did not leave much of an impression on him. Church said the meetings weren't really about Jeffrey. They were about the scientists who were talking with each other. Normally, expectations are low for people who sit in on meetings far outside their field of expertise. So he's kind of like, well, it was mostly just a scientist talking and Jeffrey didn't really know much and when he talked, it didn't really make an impression as a result. Right?

[Matt Rogers]

Oh man.

[Langston Kerman]

And if that's the truth, which I have trouble believing because their relationship goes on after this. But if that's the truth, then all Church did was take this guy's money who was not convicted of a crime yet, and show up at some dinners to talk about science. And that wouldn't be so bad, right? And in fact, there are some people who got some funding from Epstein and were not involved in the sketchy stuff because he funded a lot of guys and they didn't all go to his parties or have sex with teenagers. Right? And I'm not saying Church did.

[Matt Rogers]

He made enough money to buy an island. You can't do that with only sex pests. Some people had to be on some version of an up and up.

[Langston Kerman]

There's some people who were involved with him who have been tarnished unfairly. Right. I'm also not saying that Church is tarnished unfairly here, because I don't think he is. However, I would be remiss if I did not read a Different description of the dinner parties and events that Epstein held for scientists around this time. Maybe these are a different set of parties than the ones Church attended, although they include people he's listed as his friends. So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he was invited by colleagues including Martin Nowak, a Charvard professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, to salons and coffee klatches at which Mr. Epstein would hold court. On multiple occasions. Starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a business base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award winning scientists and an advisor to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it. It was not a secret. The advisor, for example, said he was told about the plans not only by Mr. Epstein at a gathering at his Manhattan townhouse, but also by at least one prominent member of the business community. One of the scientists said Mr. Epstein divulged his idea in 2001 at a dinner at the same town. The other recalled Mr. Epstein discussing it with him at a 2006 conference that he hosted in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Once at a dinner at Mr. Epstein's mansion in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Mr. Genier, and he's talking about Jaron Lanier, said that he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein's goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000 square foot Zorro ranch in a tiny town outside of Santa Fe. Whoa, cool.

[Matt Rogers]

It is is pretty impressive to find out that Jeffrey Epstein is somehow more of a piece of shit than I thought. I was like, nah, he's just a monster. I don't think he's like a super monster. And God damn, no no, no.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't think he's got a baby ranch. Oh yeah, he's got a baby ranch.

[Matt Rogers]

Fuck.

[Langston Kerman]

Or he tried to have a baby ranch now. Stat News to their credit, did ask Dr. Church after Epstein's death about Epstein's eugenics baby ranch being like, you're working in like gene editing people and Epstein wanted to do this. Did he talk to you about this? Because you guys knew each other when he was talking about this, right?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Now I have no proof either way. For his part, Dr. Church said, I never heard anything about it. Although he went on to say, and I find this curious. I'd have thought that I would have been involved in that kind of conversation, but it didn't tend to go in that direction. But also, I think people tend to behave themselves around. That's a weird thing to say after that.

[Sophie]

What a strange little guy.

[Langston Kerman]

Honestly, bro, if someone asks you whether or not you're involved in Jeffrey Epstein's baby ranch, you end the statement with, I never heard anything about it.

[Matt Rogers]

No.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

You don't have to be like, I would have liked to talk to him about it.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I would have. I'm kind of offended he didn't bring me in.

[Matt Rogers]

But also, that actually sounds awesome. I just. No, I didn't talk to him.

[Langston Kerman]

But also, then when you say it didn't tend to go in that direction. Well, tend doesn't mean never. Does that mean sometimes it kind of did. Like, what are you saying? Once in a while, you seem like a man who's precise with his language. I don't know why you're phrasing it this way. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Jeffrey Epstein's like, you know, I want to start a baby ranch. And he's like, huh? He's like, nothing. Nothing.

[Langston Kerman]

I thought he was going to bring it up again, but he didn't. You know, never mind, never mind.

[Matt Rogers]

I thought you'd be cool about it.

[Langston Kerman]

I thought you were cool. Yeah. It's like Jeffrey being like, he wants some coke. What? Nothing. I didn't say anything. Nothing. I don't do coke. Yeah. No, sober, sober, sober Jeffrey Epstein. That's what they call me. I'm gonna go to the bathroom. Like, 15 minutes. I'm gonna come out really excited. I love peeing.

[Matt Rogers]

We're gonna talk business. As soon as I get out, I'm.

[Langston Kerman]

Gonna look like Robin Williams in 1985 when I step out of that thing. It's nothing weird. So perhaps that is the truth, that he had nothing to do with this. Friends and colleagues of Dr. Church expressed surprise when, after Epstein's death, the years of close connections between Epstein and Church were made public. One associate pointed out that Church even brought a philosopher into his Harvard lab to flag potential B issues and experiments, and that he teaches a research ethics class, which is uncommon for a scientist in his field working at his level. And so they're like, well, it's weird to me that he would have any relationship with Epstein because I have always considered him one of the most concerned with ethics people in our field. And again, to emphasize, for legal and moral reasons, there is no evidence that Church was working on any kind of eugenics baby project for Epstein. Not that there would be, because Jeffrey Epstein didn't publish all the details about everyone he was involved with. With everyone, everything. We just know he talked about this plan during several coffee clatches and other events with his pet scientists and that Church was at similar events. Dr. Church claims that working with Epstein at all was an ethical lapse, but not entirely his fault. He points out that universities are supposed to vet donors before they meet with faculty. And he told stat, my understanding is this vetting is the responsibility of the development office, which is yet another reason why scientists are a little more relaxed. They feel they have administrators who in theory do the difficult job of figuring out out who's legit. So I'm just a little guy. How could I be expected to think about this sort of thing? That's someone else's job.

[Matt Rogers]

And now he's picking who introduced him. Previously he didn't know who introduced him. Turns out it was Harvard.

[Langston Kerman]

The whole time it was Harvard. Yeah. Now, he added that scientists, quote, myself included, are not very good at screening or judging human beings. Right. That just like, ah, we're all just kind of, you know, bad at people. You know, it's not really our struggle. And to be fair to also, first off, I just don't believe that for Church because he's an incredibly skilled public relations expert. I think he's very good with people, right? And he's probably very good at judging people because that's what he does. Anyway, to be fair to Church, he went on to make a good point in that Stat interview that almost does sound like a mea culpa. He states that a lot of scientists working on cutting edge projects with important applications field what he described as an exceptionalism, which is a scientific that anything they do is okay if the work is important enough. This is almost like a precursor to like effective altruism type feelings. Right? He predates that, but I don't think he's wrong here. I do think that's a thing that a lot of scientists working in important fields feel, which is that like, well, if I have to do something a little fucked up to further this research with incredibly important like implications, it's worth it. And he cited the case of a Nobel laureate, a biologist named Sydney Brenner, who took $15 million from Philip Morris to fund a biology institute. And Sidney's argument was that like, look, if Big Tobacco keeps this money, they'll use it for something worse than I will using it for science. Which is like an arguable point, but also like, well, Big Tobacco is give you that money because it's a write off. And like, they're gonna. They're expecting something. They're expecting something from it, right? Aren't they, Sydney, are you giving them anything? Are you sure? Right?

[Matt Rogers]

And also there you pick the worst guy. You know what I mean? It's not like you picked a comparable space to be putting this money into.

[Langston Kerman]

It's one thing. Like, Walmart needed a tax write off, so they funded this, like, medical thing I was doing. And like, you know, Walmart's a sketchy corporation, but also, like, the science is good. It's like, no, this is the tobacco industry. Like, their product is literally killing more people every year than World War II.

[Matt Rogers]

They win. They win the murder game. You did it.

[Langston Kerman]

It's just a little different. But anyway, there is an argument about, like, well, how. Obviously I'm in the advertising business. There's always an argument. How many moral compromises should you make to fund something valuable? Right? And the answer isn't none. You know, this is capitalism. I would say big tobaccos, maybe like $15 million of Philip Morris money is maybe a step beyond that. But, you know, people feel differently. You know, is it fine to advertise vaping? I don't know what. Whatever. What's less arguable is that after Epstein was charged, convicted, and sentenced in 2008, Dr. Church continued his association with the, by this point, known sex criminal. Right? So 2005 to 2007, we don't know if he was involved in the weird eugenics stuff. We know he's taking Epstein's money, but Epstein's not a known criminal, Right. He could have been, you know, kind of innocent. He continues associating with Epstein repeatedly after he is convicted as a sex criminal in 2008. And that's crossing a line for me, right?

[Sophie]

At one point, it's like, I fear this man just lacks common sense.

[Langston Kerman]

Nope, nope. You should have known.

[Sophie]

This is an active decision to associate with one of the world's biggest monsters.

[Langston Kerman]

You're making a choice here, brother.

[Matt Rogers]

He was like, nah, Jeffrey's awesome to me and I'm going to keep hanging.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. So When Church's book ReGenesis came out in 2012, it elevated his profile, and Epstein seems to have gotten back in touch with him soon after. And this would have been, you know, after Epstein finished doing his quote unquote time, which doesn't really was not time by normal people's standards, right? Like, his slap on the wrist didn't even get a slap on the wrist, right? Yeah, and it's not clear to me when they got back in touch or if they ever got out of touch after 2007. I don't even know that. Whatever the case, Dr. Church has posted a public online calendar every year since 1999, and it shows that he had six separate phone calls or meetings with Epstein in 2014. Stat News writes sample entry. June 21, 2014. Lunch with Jeffrey Epstein. 12 to 1:30. Martin Nowaks Institute. And that's a lot of times to talk to Jeffrey Epstein, right? In a year, that's a lot of. That's a long lunch, too.

[Matt Rogers]

12 to 1:30. You really. You guys were chatting.

[Langston Kerman]

You were pushing it, huh? When interviewed after Epstein's death, Dr. Church admitted to meeting Epstein several times each year since 2014. And STAT was like, didn't you hear that he'd been convicted of all those sex crimes? And, like, you're a father and a grandfather. Did it not skeeve you out to be involved with this guy? And Church replied, I did read a couple of news articles, like, 10 years back, quote, but they weren't clear enough for me to know if there was a serious problem. Now, I should note here that reporting in 2008 alleged that Epstein had received massages from teenage girls. You didn't know?

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Langston Kerman]

You didn't know, huh? You're a researcher.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, like, that's a real R. Kelly. When we say teenage, how are we talking?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, we'll be talking right now. When he asked if he felt Epstein had paid his debt to society, Stat's like, so do you think he'd, like, paid his debt to society after 2008 and deserved a second chance? And I really respect stat for sitting down with this guy and kind of drilling him on this. Church responded with what I would call a non answer. So they like, hey, so is it that you thought, you know, he'd made good, that everything was okay now? And he said, as far as I know, people just didn't have that conversation, but it sure should have. So let's break that down. He's asked, do you think that after 2008, Epstein had paid his debt to society? And he said, as far as I know, people, not me, didn't have that conversation, but it should have.

[Matt Rogers]

It's. It. I guess the people. The.

[Langston Kerman]

Your grammar should be better than that, man. But, like, what do you. What do you mean?

[Matt Rogers]

I think he's like, I'm not gonna answer for myself. You? Yeah, you. The single body of people that exist around me should have had the conversation with Jeffrey Epstein.

[Langston Kerman]

Okay, man. Now, he went on to add in that interview, I would think, to like that people's reputation is multi dimensional and multi year. It takes a long time to build up. But also to tear down and stat notes. He was speaking generally and about himself, as in, like, this shouldn't destroy my reputation because, like, I've done other things. But it's kind of hard not to read that as I'm talking about Epstein, too, that, like, well, he's a complicated guy. He's got other stuff that he's done besides the sex crimes.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, great.

[Langston Kerman]

Love an answer like that from our ethics man. Working on brain reading. For what it's worth, George Church did ultimately apologize for taking Epstein's Money in a 2019 interview. Although you want to guess what he blamed his lapse in judgment on?

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, boy.

[Sophie]

No, no, no.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. No, just tell us. There's no way.

[Langston Kerman]

Nerd tunnel vision.

[Matt Rogers]

There we go.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm just too much of a nerd to have a problem with sex crimes.

[Matt Rogers]

He's like, whoa, I don't even know this.

[Langston Kerman]

You know. You know how it goes. You're watching Star wars, your friends trafficking teenage girls around the world. It just happens.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, no, there is this. This. This again. It's just this. This want to, like, cutify themselves out of, like, the human experience. Yeah, I'm just a nerdy little cutie boy. I. I didn't even notice that bad things were happening. Like, you know, you're a grown man who's trying to manipulate genes. This isn't. You're not a sweetheart at all.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's. It's just very. It's. It's great stuff. Good work. Good work, Dr. Church. Now that's pretty bad ending on Epstein in part one. Not ideal. It gets so much worse in part two. There's so much eugenics coming. There's so much fucked up shit on the way. I am so excited to tell you the rest of this story, Langston. But first, let's talk about you. You know, what's your favorite color?

[Matt Rogers]

Favorite color is coral.

[Langston Kerman]

Coral.

[Matt Rogers]

I love coral.

[Langston Kerman]

I honestly didn't call that. Okay. I didn't actually call anything. I had no idea what your favorite color would be.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, I think for years I used to say blue to purpl. Protect myself from. From my own insecurities. But then at some point, I had to be honest and say, this is a safe place. My. My favorite color is nuanced and slightly effeminate.

[Langston Kerman]

I guess I. I Have been looking for a pair of coral shorts for the summer. It does seem like a nice, nice short color, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sophie]

My brother wears a lot of coral. It's a good color.

[Langston Kerman]

We're all getting over our insecurities here, you know, just like George Church got over his insecurities about his friend Jeffrey Epstein.

[Matt Rogers]

He's like, you know what?

[Langston Kerman]

No, not like that.

[Matt Rogers]

I can get past.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, we can get past this. And we can get past the part where we talk about George Church to talk about your pluggables. What are they?

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, you can listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. I do it with my friend David Bore, who is also alumnus of this, this gorgeous podcast. And we talk about conspiracy theories, specifically black conspiracy theories. And it's really fun and silly and we do not nearly as effective research as you do, Robert.

[Langston Kerman]

Well, my only hope is that George Church gets integrated into a series of conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein because everyone else who was tied to him has been. And look, you know, are all of those accurate? No. Are they all fun? Yes. And why should George miss out?

[Matt Rogers]

You know, I will say there was that era on what, what is now X, but formerly Twitter where they were just making up lists of the people who were on the flight log. And it was always a funny list, it never failed, no matter who wrote it. The right, the left, the sickos, the imagineers, they were always funny lists of people.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh yeah, one of my favorite things about that is just like, you know, maybe that's sketchy that fucking Eddie Murphy wound up in there. But I could also like, it's a perfect thing for an Eddie Murphy movie where he just finds out he's been on this sex criminal's plane a bunch of times. Like I'll watch that 90 minute comedy.

[Matt Rogers]

There were a few people on some of those flight logs where I was like, I don't think they knew what they got on the plane for.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, you might have just been going to a thing with him, right? You're going to some sort of conference.

[Matt Rogers]

Somebody said, get on the pj. And you were like, yeah, I'll get.

[Langston Kerman]

On a private jet, sure. Yeah, it has. I will say one thing that I have learned as a result of this cause previously, before I knew anything about Jeffrey Epstein, if some rich guy had been like, like, hey, we're gonna pay you to go to a conference. You wanna ride my private jet? I probably would have been like, yeah, fuck man, that sounds dope. You know, fucking 25 year old me probably wouldn't have had the wherewithal to be like, I don't know, but now. Absolutely not.

[Matt Rogers]

Someone asked me the other day if. If I would get on that Trump plane, the. The one that. That Qatar gave him. It's like, for the story alone, I kind of think I have to.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, yeah, no, that one. Yes, yes, yes. That's justifiable for journalism.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. I just got to ride this wave and deal with the fallout later.

[Sophie]

Yeah, I'm good. I'm staying home.

[Matt Rogers]

You were staying home. You wouldn't touch it.

[Sophie]

No, I'm good. I'm staying home.

[Langston Kerman]

But no, folks, the lesson here is that if a rich guy wants to fly you and pay you to speak at some sort of weird conference, tell him first class from a real airline, right? You know, it's nice enough, and no one can be like, well, what if that was that Delta flight, Like, implicating you in crimes? The only thing a Delta flight implicates you in is crashing at Newark. Right. Sorry, that's. That's bad.

[Sophie]

That was dark.

[Matt Rogers]

They said they'll do better. They said they'll do better.

[Langston Kerman]

They said they'll do better. Everyone's got to do better.

[Sophie]

All right, that's the episode.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Behind the Basterds is a production of Cool Zone.

[Langston Kerman]

Me.

[Sophie]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.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 behindthebastards.

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[Unknown]

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[Langston Kerman]

This is an iheart podcast.