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

Summary

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

Podcast Information:

• Title: Behind the Bastards
• Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
• Episode: Part Two: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift
• Release Date: June 5, 2025

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Introduction

In the second installment of Behind the Bastards, hosts Langston Kerman and Sophie delve deep into the controversial world of de-extinction science, centering their discussion around Dr. George Church—a renowned geneticist—and his ambitious, yet ethically questionable projects. This episode uncovers the tangled web of scientific ambition, ethical lapses, and dubious associations that paint a complex picture of modern genetic engineering.

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George Church and His De-Extinction Ambitions

The episode opens with Langston Kerman introducing Dr. George Church as a key figure in the de-extinction movement. Church's work, particularly his push to revive extinct species like Neanderthals and dire wolves, forms the crux of the discussion.

• Quote: "That's like evil. It leads you to do evil." (10:16)

Church's early interest in de-extinction began around 2014-2015, coinciding with his renewed association with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Kerman suggests that Church's real motivation might not be the ethical revival of extinct species but rather the pursuit of lucrative ventures in genetic engineering.

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Ethical Concerns and Eugenics

A significant portion of the conversation addresses the ethical implications of Church's work. Kerman draws parallels between Church's projects and historical instances of eugenics, highlighting the potential dangers of genetic manipulation devoid of ethical considerations.

• Quote: "You're literally doing the Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park thing. Like, you're literally. Your scientists are so busy asking what they can do, they're not asking, should we. Is this fucked up?" (10:49)

The hosts critique Church's stance on determining desirability based on societal consensus, arguing that it mirrors the flawed ideologies that fueled past eugenic movements.

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Controversial Associations and Companies

The episode exposes Church's affiliations with several controversial entities:

1. Colossal Bioscience: Co-founded by Ben Lamb, Colossal claims to be at the forefront of de-extinction technology. However, former employees describe it as a company driven more by hype than genuine scientific progress.

   • Quote: "They have not. This is based on everyone getting hyped up about the direwolves. There is so much more sketchy shit here." (90:37)

2. Digidate: A genetic dating service aiming to match individuals based on DNA compatibility to prevent inherited diseases. Critics argue that this approach borders on eugenics by attempting to control human reproduction through genetic screening.

   • Quote: "That's us Genics." (39:59)

3. Bioviva: A biotech startup offering anti-aging therapies. The company has faced scrutiny for ethical concerns, especially regarding experimental gene therapies that may pose significant health risks, such as increasing cancer risks.

   • Quote: "I'm not sure that it's time for that just yet." (63:49)

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Jeffrey Epstein’s Influence and Ethical Lapses

Church's renewed association with Jeffrey Epstein raises alarms about the potential misuse of genetic technology. Kerman insinuates that Epstein's influence might have steered Church's ethical compass towards morally questionable projects.

• Quote: "Nobody knows, right? Some people are pretty sure they know. I don't know." (01:01)

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De-Extinction Projects: Dire Wolves and Beyond

Colossal's claim to have successfully de-extincted dire wolves is heavily scrutinized. Experts argue that the genetic modifications made are superficial and do not constitute true de-extinction.

• Quote: "The dire wolf genome likely differs from that of the gray wolf in millions or tens of millions of ways. Editing 14 genes is interesting, but it's not a reconstruction or de-extinction. It's not even close." (87:55)

Kerman points out the impracticality and ethical issues surrounding the introduction of genetically modified species into the wild, emphasizing the lack of transparency and scientific rigor in Colossal's claims.

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Interaction with Political Figures and Public Relations

The episode also touches upon Colossal’s interactions with political figures, notably the Trump administration. Doug Burgum, then head of the Department of the Interior, publicly supported Colossal's de-extinction claims, further blurring the lines between science and political agendas.

• Quote: "We're gonna fuck up the elephants in a new kind of way. Isn't that exciting?" (78:40)

This alliance raises concerns about the ethical oversight of genetic engineering projects and their potential exploitation for political or economic gains.

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Conclusion and Implications

Behind the Bastards paints a troubling picture of the intersection between cutting-edge genetic science and ethical quandaries. Dr. George Church's ventures into de-extinction and genetic engineering, while scientifically groundbreaking, are marred by ethical oversights, questionable associations, and a penchant for hype over substance. The episode serves as a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of unchecked scientific ambition and the importance of robust ethical frameworks in the realm of genetic engineering.

• Final Quote: "This show is always a lot of fun and really sad." (93:32)

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Key Takeaways:

• Ethical Implications: The pursuit of de-extinction and genetic engineering must be balanced with ethical considerations to prevent misuse.
• Transparency in Science: Companies like Colossal Bioscience need to maintain transparency to build credible scientific endeavors.
• Influence of Associations: Associations with controversial figures like Jeffrey Epstein can tarnish scientific reputations and raise ethical concerns.
• Eugenics Concerns: Genetic technologies must avoid echoing the flawed ideologies of historical eugenics movements.

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Timestamp Reference:

• [01:01] Jeffrey Epstein discussion begins
• [10:16] Ethical concerns raised
• [39:59] Digidate critique
• [63:49] Bioviva and anti-aging therapies
• [78:40] Interaction with political figures
• [87:55] Dire wolves de-extinction scrutiny
• [93:32] Episode conclusion

Note: This summary is based on the provided transcript and represents the discussions and viewpoints expressed within the podcast episode.

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, what's Epstein? My Jeffries. I think I've done a version of that before. Should we not. Is that bad?

[Sophie]

Sophie, he didn't like it the first time.

[Langston Kerman]

Should we not start that way? How many chances do you get now that he's dead, you know?

[Sophie]

Zero. We don't need to do that.

[Langston Kerman]

That's right. That's right. That's the real tragedy, you know? No, no, I wouldn't say tragedy.

[George Church]

No.

[Langston Kerman]

Langston Kerman, our guest. How are you?

[George Church]

I'm doing great. I'm excited to hear more. This feels weird to say out loud, but I'm excited to hear more about Jeffrey Epstein and everything he's been up to with our boy, George Straits.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, well, thankfully, we are past. We're done with the Epstein part of the story. Cause you know how that ends. Obviously, Bernie Sanders sneaks into prison and puts him out of his misery in order to keep some certain people's secrets or something, you know, Nobody knows, right? Some people are pretty sure they know. I don't know.

[George Church]

There's like. I would say, like four or five people who probably know exactly.

[Langston Kerman]

There's like four. Four or five. Yeah, maybe. Who know exactly. Yeah. I. Yeah, I continue to be, you know, an agnostic. I'm an Epstein agnostic, definitely. Fucking George Church, I feel like, knows more than he's letting on.

[George Church]

He knows more than we do on this podcast for sure.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, man. But, yeah, maybe it was George. No, that. That'll. We can't accuse this bioscientist of having Epstein guilt. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he, like, inserted a gene into him that made him choke to death. More than that. Yeah.

[George Church]

Just made something explode in the middle of prison somehow.

[Langston Kerman]

Right, Right. Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, Created spontaneously grew a noose out of his hair. So. Oh, boy. Around the time he renewed his association with Epstein, which would have been in the 2014-15E. Unless he'd been continuing to talk to him, which we really don't know, but we have records of them starting to meet again multiple times in 2014 anyway. And around that same period of time in 2014 and 2015, that's when Dr. Church first started seriously pushing de extinction as a scientific topic. Right where he was. I think you can find some quotes where he sort of talked about the possibility, but 2014 and 15 is when he really is like, this is an actual thing we can and should do and maybe even a potential business that I want to be in. He had danced around the issue in his 2012 book ReGenesis, where he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals, which people always get angry at, are like, robert, you're mispronouncing it again. That is how you say what most people call Neanderthals.

[George Church]

I'm not brave enough to have ever challenged him to question me.

[Langston Kerman]

Some people did in my novel. And then they're like, oh, shit, I looked it up.

[George Church]

I say Neanderthal, but I'm a dum dum, so I'm glad they're all dead.

[Langston Kerman]

Like, who gives it. That's not what they called themselves. Right?

[George Church]

You call us what they said. Ooga booga. So, yeah, absolutely.

[Langston Kerman]

Wow. No, it's fine. We wipe them out because we're. Well, because we're monsters. We're the devils here. This is an iHeart podcast.

[Melissa Jeltson]

Hi, listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of what Happened to Talina Zara? It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.

[Sophie]

I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason.

[Melissa Jeltson]

I kept just kind of asking everybody.

[Sophie]

Anyone else think this is strange?

[Langston Kerman]

You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.

[Melissa Jeltson]

You can now get access to episodes of what Happened to Talina Zar? 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime plus subscription. I'm a subscriber and you should be too. So don't wait. Head to Apple podcasts, search I Heart True Crime plus and subscribe today.

[Unknown]

How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.

Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Listen to new episodes of bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Holly Fry]

Explore the winding halls of Historical True crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarky, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. The legend of the Highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrers, known as the wicked lady who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia. Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Langston Kerman]

So anyway, he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals by genetic engineering and using an actual human woman to serve as their surrogate mother.

[George Church]

Oh, no.

[Langston Kerman]

He described in the book the ideal surrogate to rebirth the Neanderthal race as an extremely adventurous female human.

[George Church]

Oh, man.

[Langston Kerman]

You can feel however you want about this, but my answer maybe. Sophie, you can chime in here depending on how. If you feel I'm getting this wrong. It's kind of fucked up to call her a female human as opposed to, like an adventurous woman. Like, either way, it's fucked up. But female human seems worse somehow than like, we're gonna find some adventurous woman. Right? I don't know if neither is good, but female human. Like, you sound like a Star Trek character. You sound like Quark talking about ladies, female human.

[Sophie]

As if female human. It's it. You didn't need both of those.

[Langston Kerman]

Could just say woman again.

[Sophie]

Just say woman.

[George Church]

Yeah, that's what that word is for.

[Langston Kerman]

It literally was like, female human.

[Sophie]

Really weird.

[Langston Kerman]

It's just kind of awkward, man.

[George Church]

Yeah, you're not being chill.

[Langston Kerman]

You're not being cool. Der Spiegel. And Der Spiegel is a German news agency. I think it literally means the voice or something like that. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. I'm bad at German. But it's. It's a major. It's. It's like their New York Times almost, right? It's a major publication over there. Interviewed Dr. George Church in 2015 because he had recently made the claim that it would soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. They asked him, will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime? And he replied, I think so. But boy, there are a lot of parts to that. He goes on to list a few of the technologies that have developed recently which might allow this kind of cloning, and then adds another technology that the de extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so?

[George Church]

Yeah, now we're getting to what you really want here, George.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, exactly. Now we're getting to the real sketchy shit.

[George Church]

Something tells me you're not as concerned with these wolves and these Neanderthals as we're pretending.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

Whoa, cool.

[Langston Kerman]

That's like, if I was like, if someone's like, I think I'm going to commit some murders. And he's like, but it's illegal to murder. Well, what if the law changed? That's not really my question.

[George Church]

It's illegal to murder because you're living in the past, my man. I'm thinking about the future.

[Langston Kerman]

Like, I'm not really. Like, if it were legal to murder, that wouldn't change my judgment upon you for wanting to murder somebody. You know? And it's interesting because, again, he's always described as having this deep consideration of ethics and putting even a lot of money into making sure that what he does is ethical. And he's asked like, yeah, but it's super illegal to clone human beings for obvious reasons. And he's like, well, what if it wasn't? Not my question, my dude.

[George Church]

Okay.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. It's just fascinating. And the other thing that's interesting here is that not only is he. His answer to, like, this is kind of fucked up. Well, we could make it legal. But when he's kind of pressed by Der Spiegel on, like, why would you want to do this? Like, what's the benefit? His answer is complete horseshit. First off, he's asked, like, why would this be desirable? Right? And when you ask that, you're asking like, give me a good reason to want a Neanderthal clone that's not like, some sort of cheap profit. Like, why? Why is this desirable? And his first answer is, well, that's another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what's technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits. Wow, that is bad scientific ethics.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

First off, man, you shouldn't decide what's desirable based on societal consensus. Go back to the 50s. What was societal consensus on interracial Dating. If you're letting that move you to decide what's desirable, you're gonna be bad.

[George Church]

But he's also not taking genuine polls. No, he's just talking to Jeffrey Epstein.

[Langston Kerman]

The average human probably doesn't give a shit about this, right?

[George Church]

I didn't know that bringing back a Neanderthal was possible. And frankly, never was interested in.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

This seems bad.

[Langston Kerman]

Michael Crichton was not a good man, but he understood that this is bad ethics, right? Just being like, I wonder if I can. It's like evil. It leads you to do evil.

[George Church]

No, you should chill out.

[Langston Kerman]

This is it. Fine. Probably fine. Fuck it.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

So it's very interesting to me how just he's completely incurious as to whether or not there's a practical benefit to doing this kind of cloning. And Der Spiegel has to prod him like two or three times to get him to answer kind of directly, like, what is. Is there any potential benefit to bringing back this species? And here's what Church eventually. Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial. Okay, I got a lot of issues here.

[George Church]

Fine, man. If we're just gonna pretend. Fine.

[Langston Kerman]

First off, let's split the my issues here into pragmatic and then ethical. Pragmatic. Bigger brain doesn't mean smarter. No, bigger brain. Dolphins have bigger brain than us. They're not so far proven useful in getting us off the planet. They have other concerns. Right.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

The other thing is, if you're creating. If you're bringing back this species, this is a sentient, sapient species, an independent species. And you are saying we'll use their big brains to get off the planet? Well, what if that's not what they want? What if they have other interests, being their own independent beings? Because it seems like your concern is like, well, we can just harness their big brains so that we can do the science stuff that I want to do, because they'll Be smart. Well, but what if they don't want to do that? Are you just saying you loan them? Is that what you're saying? Is that what you're saying?

[George Church]

I think you're trying to make big ass slaves, man.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

I think you're trying to make some big old slaves. And that's. Yeah, that's something you should maybe just say out loud instead of pretending like it has some other value.

[Langston Kerman]

It is one of those things. He's not saying I want to make big ass slaves, but if you say I want to bring back a new intelligent species, you kind of immediately have to say, and they will immediately be full citizens and Right. With the rights of human beings. You have to like really emphasize that. If you don't want me to be like, do you just want slaves?

[George Church]

They don't have to live with me. They can live wherever they want.

[Langston Kerman]

So that's the other thing. Because like, this Der Spiegel journalist is like, how do you even go about raising this species that you've brought back to life? Right? Like, they won't have parents or a culture. And as like, this is an intelligent hominid species, presumably most of how the real ones knew how to do the things that they did was that they were raised in families like us, right? Who raised them? But there's no culture of these people anymore, so how do you raise them? And Church is kind of vaguely like, well, you'd make a bunch at once. Like a cohort, he calls them. And then he's like, maybe they'd become their own culture. Maybe they'd even become a political force. What does that mean?

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

I keep coming back to Jurassic park because you can't, not when it's talking about de extinction. But also what's amazing to me is again, Michael Crichton, the climate change denier, Fucking weird guy. Michael Crichton understood all of the ethical issues with this when applied to dinosaurs in a way this guy doesn't when applying them to effectively a humanoid creature. Because in the actual book Jurassic park, one of the things that becomes clear, like the raptors, which are super intelligent, the ones that in gin clones don't act like real velociraptors, they're terrible to their young. They like murder their own kids. They're just like crazy violent and dangerous because they were not raised by adults that knew anything. They're just these monsters that got unleashed. And so they grew up completely without any kind of a culture that would teach them how to like raise their young. And as an intelligent speech Like Crichton imagined this when talking about dinosaurs.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

And George Church is just uncurious about it.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Like, literally read Jurassic Park.

[George Church]

We literally have a, A, an economic system where you see what raising people without their families does. And he's like, yeah, I bet these ones will figure it out. Yeah, like, no, that's not, that's not how it's going to work, big dog.

[Langston Kerman]

Well, it's also like, just. Even when you're talking outside of Neanderthals, we're talking about the animals he wants to raise. A major story from animal biology and whatnot in the last couple of decades is we used to have these beliefs about alpha wolves that deeply influenced a lot of toxic aspects of human culture. And then the scientist who came up with the idea was like, I was completely wrong. I was looking at wolves raised in prisons, basically. And they don't act like wild wolves. Right. Which again, if you're just bringing back a dead ancient animal and it has no animals of its own type to raise it, how the fuck are you going to have it? Because his goal here is always for it to retake its original evolutionary niche. How would it do that? It doesn't know how to do that.

[George Church]

You ever seen those videos where, like, they'll like, put a tiger in with a pig, like a baby tiger, and then the baby tiger starts acting like the pig a little bit? It's like, well, yeah, that's because that's more influential than it being just raw tiger by itself.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah. This is why I intend to raise a human being with a bunch of tigers. But that's a separate point. I just want to see if they'll grow claws. All the scientists are saying no, but I have my own theories.

[George Church]

Scientists are saying a lot of things.

[Langston Kerman]

They say a lot of shit as these episodes show. So, yeah, my opinion here is that his primary interest isn't even. I don't even think he ever intended to clone Neanderthals. Right. I think he knows that this is not really going to happen. It's clear to me that his real interest is a mix of both, like, driving up hype. Because he's going to be starting this. He's trying to. And he's gotten very good at using. His lab will do some work in, like, finding some Neanderthal DNA and sequencing it, and then he can use that to start making claims that we'll be able to clone them one day and eventually get investments so that he can spin off another startup company. Right. And that's kind of part of where Colossal Bioscience is, the direwolf company comes from. That's part of what he's doing. I think the other thing that he's doing here, and this becomes clear later in the interview, is he's sort of giving away that his actual interest is not to bring back extinct species, it's to find traits of those species and edit them into other animals for much less altruistic purposes. At one point he is asked, like, do you think there's anything wrong with creating a whole new species? And he says, the main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a modern monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would mainly be a question of societal risk avoidance. And that's a really good example of using, like, the language of social justice and liberalism to advocate for horrifying things. Like, first off, human beings have mostly done fine with apneaanderthals. I don't know that there's any evidence that they would make us more diverse. But also, that's not what he's interested in doing. Later in the interview, Der Spiegel asks, hey, wouldn't you just be able to add some of their genes to a human and change the human? And the answer Dr. Church gives makes it clear that this is what I think he's really interested in. Because he says, suppose you were to realize, wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things that could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. And that's when I'm like, oh, you just want to create designer smart babies for rich people. Right? That's the blueprint here.

[George Church]

You're just trying to make it so that the baby comes out exactly the way you planned and with no other stuff.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. And you can make hyper smart babies for your rich friends that become a new species to rule over all of us. That's your goal.

[George Church]

Yeah, we'll do eyes and no need for braces. We get it.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

But yeah, there's a. I learned about this recently, but there is somebody who's making something called the Chickenosaurus.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

Where they are essentially claiming that they're like, re. They've rediscovered or re. Given us dinosaurs again via this chicken of sword. But it's just a up chicken.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

That, like, looks like it's got, like.

[Langston Kerman]

Some dinosaur qualities and it's one of those things. Like, is that kind of interesting? Sure. Would I want something that looks like a dinosaur and is a pet? I'm not made of stone, of course. Is that a dinosaur that you've de. Extincted? No, it's a thing you made. And there's still these ethical questions about, like, well, what are the rights of that animal? Like yada, yada. Like, there's a lot of weird things, you know, like, there's a lot of weird shit about that. Right. I'm not thrilled with this, but that's my least kind of concern here is some guy who's like, look, this isn't a real dinosaur, but it looks like one. Do you want to have it as a pet? All right.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. I have bigger concerns, you know. Right.

[George Church]

It's not the true crime. That is that our boy George is working on the back end of this.

[Langston Kerman]

Although there's also the. If it is like, made out of a. From a chicken. Chickens are soulless monsters. Like, you don't want to make them more powerful. Like.

[George Church]

And they're also not particularly bright.

[Langston Kerman]

No.

[George Church]

None of this feels like a great combination.

[Langston Kerman]

No. If you know chickens, their favorite food is their own kind. Like, they are scary animals. Yeah. My favorite, that Werner Herzog has some great quotes about if you want to see be a frightened, stare into the eyes of a chicken. There's like, nothing but blackness in there.

[George Church]

Oh, man.

[Langston Kerman]

It's good stuff.

[George Church]

Your chicken listeners are going to be pissed. You're being nasty.

[Langston Kerman]

You know, we've all had, like, I've had chickens. I remember once one of my chickens, a raccoon got in the coop and one of my brave chickens fought it off and got injured and all of its friends ate it to death. It's horrible. Chickens are nightmares.

[George Church]

Oh, they really didn't even like give them a.

[Langston Kerman]

No, they don't give a shit. They don't give a fuck.

[George Church]

Holy shit. Oh man. Chicken run really sold me a different story about that.

[Langston Kerman]

No, chickens are not that good at solidarity. Not their strong suit as a species. So we'll talk more in a little bit about his so called de extinction ambitions. But again, this starts in 2014, 15 and the fact that he's working on this stuff, the fact that he's got this history with Epstein and Epstein, Epstein's weird baby breeding project, and all these genome sequencing, all these that he's talking in 2015 about like editing human genes to make designer babies. This all leads directly to the most fucked up thing about Dr. George Church, which is how often he winds up, shall we say, tugging at the fringes of outright eugenics, right? Oh yeah. In a 2019 interview for CBS with Scott Pelly, Church talks about his goal, which is framed in the article as to protect the humans from viruses, genetic diseases and aging. In the interview, George talks about age reversal, which he says has been proven about eight ways in animals. Now it hasn't, right? And that's a really vague statement for a scientist to make. And I want to know what are the eight ways, what do you mean by proven? Right? These are all the questions that aren't answered.

[George Church]

I did find that there's that jellyfish that doesn't. That can like regenerate or like turn itself back into a child. But like that's not proving it, that's just that species, right?

[Langston Kerman]

And there's like, there's like turtles that may basically live forever if they're not killed by something, right? Like there's some tortoises that are like 300 years old, right? And there's some other species where it may be a similar thing where like they kind of only die if something gets them. Yeah, yeah, but that doesn't mean you can't just like maybe there will be some sort of life extension secrets in that animal, but maybe it's just different enough from us that like there's no way to transfer that to human beings. He's saying that we have proved how to reverse age in animals, right? That we have done it using science and that should be a falsifiable statement. But he doesn't give much more detail there. I did find an article for the center for Genetics and Society that attempts to reverse engineer his claims and they're like, he is almost surely overselling this, but they suspect one of the proven cases he's talking about here is a study about gene therapy for mitral valve disease in mice. Right. And it's a study that showed that by editing some genes, you can fix, like Mitchell valve disease in mice. Now, that's important and may have some really crucial implications for science. May allow us to extend a lot of people's lives. Right. I'm not saying that that's not. Not good science.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

It's not age reversal. Right. That is, like, that's curing a valve disease. Right. It's not exactly the same thing. Yeah, yeah.

[George Church]

You're still gonna die. When you die, you just won't die from that.

[Langston Kerman]

You'll get older. It's just like, you'll be this problem with your heart we might be able to fix with gene editing. And obviously, like, is it possible, given enough time, that we will be able to extend human life enough that we keep extending it? It's not impossible. I'm not saying. I don't think it's necessarily likely, because there's a lot of shit you'd have to figure out. And I just don't know if we're gonna get there, given all of the other things human civilization's gonna have to deal with. But it's not impossible. It's just the way he talks about this is so blase, and he glosses over so much that it's not, like, serious scientific talk. And some of the evidence for this is that when he gets pressed on, like, all right, well, how do you know? Where are we actually making animals younger? The only real evidence that he's able to cite is an ongoing clinical trial to see if gene therapy can extend the lifespan of dogs. And maybe that will be possible, but any resultant therapy is going to be. Number one, it's not proven yet. And number two, any resultant therapy that might come out of this doesn't. We don't know that it would work on people because dogs aren't people. Right?

[George Church]

Yeah. There's some noticeable differences.

[Langston Kerman]

Not in a genetic sense, Sophie. In an ethical sense, sure, but not in a genetic sense. We're differently constructed. Right.

[George Church]

It's really funny when people sort of, like, sink into these types of sciences because, like, if you want your dog to live longer, just stop making it its cousin. You know what I mean?

[Langston Kerman]

Like, that's part of it, right?

[George Church]

Stop breeding them till they're, like, sick the second they come out and let them be whatever random mutt that they all are kind of supposed to be.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. And you know, for the record, if we ever find a way to make dogs live like 60 years, I'm on board. Ditto cats. You know, I don't have an issue with, like, keeping our pets alive with us.

[George Church]

I'd welcome their presence the entire time.

[Langston Kerman]

I'd welcome their presence.

[Sophie]

I would do so many things to keep my dog alive longer.

[Langston Kerman]

There's no evidence that this thing he's talking about is going to work really on dogs. And it's. Even if it can extend the lifespan, it's also, it's not the same as reversing age necessarily. But also, even if. And again, these are all many, these ifs are increasingly fractional long shots. Even if this study works on dogs, even if there proves to be an application on human beings, any resultant therapy that allows you to extend human lifespan or reverse human age will be exhaust outlandishly expensive. So expensive that it will only be available to guys like Jeffrey Epstein. Right. In response to Dr. Church's claims about age reversal, science historian Nathaniel Daniel Comfort noted, lengthening the lives of rich westerners, the obvious customers, would be the biggest ecological crime since Standard Oil. It's hard to argue with that.

[George Church]

That's true.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

That's pretty fair.

[Langston Kerman]

Obviously, that doesn't mean we wouldn't do it. The question. There's two separate questions. Is this ethical? No. Is this possible also? So far, no. Right. That said, I should note that the ethics of this are not a topic that Church ignores. There's a whole nother CBS article I found where he talks about genetic equality and emphasizes the fact that keeps an ethicist on staff. Quote, he does not want to see a world in which big advances in genetic engineering are available only to those who can afford it. He considers equality both when manipulating genes for therapy, like correcting genetic defects to cure genetic diseases, and for enhancement augmenting genes beyond what is normal. But, like, it doesn't mean anything. Like, for one thing, the pharmaceutical companies that buy this from you are going to set the prices, right? They'll pay you off.

[George Church]

I just think it's always a bad sign when somebody has to outsource ethics.

[Langston Kerman]

Right?

[George Church]

You know what I mean?

[Langston Kerman]

Like someone for the ethics.

[George Church]

You need somebody else to handle ethics because that's just not how you think is you're gonna do some vile shit.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

That's none of my business.

[Langston Kerman]

That's none of my business. It's a very Werner von Braun. When the rockets go up, who knows where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.

[George Church]

I'm just here to make as many humunculi as possible. I don't.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[George Church]

I don't decide where they go.

[Langston Kerman]

Look, man, I'm in the homunculi business. I'm not in the where homunculi go business. You know, he told cbs, we're not necessarily opposed to enhancement if everybody gets access to it simultaneously and again. But there's no how do you do that? You're not talking about how that would ever happen. You're just saying, obviously, that's what I want. Are you gonna turn down millions of dollars or billions of dollars to make sure that happens? Unless somebody guarantees it somehow? Are you? How? Doesn't seem real. Doesn't seem likely. Anyway, he doesn't propose any way to ensure this, nor do I believe he truly cares. Scott Pelley, who's the journalist who interviewed Church, made this statement after talking to him. He doesn't see a great distinction between being able to travel 550 miles an hour on an airliner or changing somebody's genome in order to make them maybe cognitively more astute. That's a big difference.

[George Church]

That's why I fuck with Scott Pelly. He really, end of the day, he really breaks it all down in a. In a very succinct, clear way. He's like, that man that I just spoke to is a psychopath. And you should know that.

[Langston Kerman]

That would be like, if, like a weapons designer is like, what's really the difference between building a new artillery shell and genetically encoding a bomb into someone's DNA without them knowing? Is there really a difference?

[George Church]

They're both dead.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes, I think you can agree.

[George Church]

They're both dead.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, they are both dead. But I do think there's a difference. Now, I know me saying, like, I don't trust that this guy cares about ethics. I think he's lying about caring about equality here. Maybe that just seems like Ol Robert being an asshole, because all the bastards he reads about. There's other good reasons to doubt George Church here. And I want to quote from that article from the center for Genetics and Society. The massive Chinese company BGI sees synthetic biology as a promising field and in 2017 launched the George Church Institute of ReGenesis in Shenzhen. BGI's corporate culture has been criticized as eugenics like, and the company is currently involved in state surveillance and harassment of millions of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group in Xinjiang. Now, man, it's not great that the company that starts the institute named after you has been criticized as eugenics like or for surveilling a minority being targeted by the state. None of those are good things.

[George Church]

I really was hoping this wasn't going to lead to you knowing who the test subjects were.

[Langston Kerman]

Boy, oh boy, prove that. But yeah, the other thing is that, like, just outside of those ethics, the George Church Institute of Regenesis. That's a dystopian name. I'm sorry, that's from like a cyberpunk source book. Like that.

[George Church]

Yeah. George, you're fucked up, man. You're doing something fucked up.

[Langston Kerman]

You should know that's a bad name. But that said, I had to look further into this BGI and everything. When I heard the words eugenics, like for this company culture, I was like, what the fuck does that mean? And holy fuck is this company screwed up. So back in 2018, Wang Xian, who's a co founder and president of the company, participated in a panel discussion at a conference. He stated that BGI's goal was for each of their employees to live to at least age 100. To ensure this, they have, like, they have to, in order to work there, embrace three rules. And I'm going to read you about these rules. Per an article for the English language Chinese news website 6 6th Tone, the first rule is that BGI staff are not allowed to have children with birth defects. If they were born with defects, it would be a disgrace to all 7,000 staff. Wang said it would mean that we are fooling society and just eyeing each other's pockets. Wang added that there are no known serious congenital diseases among the 1400 infants that have been born to the company's employees. Oh, boy. Oh, God. Well, that's just.

[George Church]

Just.

[Langston Kerman]

I mean, do I have to like, talk about why that's evil?

[George Church]

God damn, that's. They're just saying stuff plainly.

[Langston Kerman]

Holy. Holy.

[George Church]

That's crazy.

[Langston Kerman]

These people made a center named after you, George. Jesus Christ.

[George Church]

They also. There's no way they mean that about like the Cleaning staff. No, you know what I mean? Like, they're only talking about very specific employees at this company.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

That's nuts.

[Langston Kerman]

Also, what do you consider a defect? Right. And I know this is actually tricky. The ethics here are really tricky. Right. If I was having a kid and I learned, like, hey, this future potential child would have a heart defect. We found evidence of and we can fix it in utero. Of course you'd want to fix that. As a parent, you wouldn't want your kid to have the heart defect. What about if they're like, hey, your child, they'll be perfectly healthy, perfectly intelligent, but they'll be on the autism spectrum. Or they'll have ADHD and they give you an option to zap that? Because that kind of feels like genocide to me. Right?

[George Church]

Yeah. And they're going to have a sixth finger. This slope is so slippery for, like, what they'll decide is acceptable and not acceptable.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

And who, frankly, are the scientists in charge of making those decisions?

[Langston Kerman]

Right, Right.

[George Church]

We know for a fact it's a real I'll bring back direwolves ass person.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Or Wang, who's like, none of the kids of my employees can be defective. Right. Like, this is all just, like, it gets really bad. Very, very. And it's also like, you know, Church makes this big claim of, like, I'm a big believer in diversity. He talks about, like, I have narcolepsy, and I have a lot of my greatest ideas when I, like, kind of have these quick narcoleptic naps and stuff. He's a big believer in neurodiversity, according to what he says, but also the science and the people he's working with are actively working to end neurodiversity.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Like, that's the result of this. Right. Like, we all know that's where these people would go, is that not a problem?

[George Church]

It's a real hit. Like, it's like Hitler being like, well, my mom was Jewish, so that's why.

[Langston Kerman]

I mean.

[George Church]

Yeah, that's why I'm doing this.

[Langston Kerman]

That would have been a weird thing for Hitler to say. Oh, Hitler. So BGI's second rule is that the company can't detect cancer later than hospitals do. Which I guess is fine as an ambition, right? You want your company to. Who does these screenings to be faster than the current technology? Okay. Give you a pass on that one. The third rule for BGI employees is almost as fucked up as the first. And I'm going to quote from 6th Tone again. Employees are forbidden from having heart bypass surgery. Instead, they are expected to rely on gene tech and clean living to prevent cardiovascular disease, to promote fitness and healthy eating. Wang said BGI tracks the dining habits of employees at its cafeteria and has put its elevators out of service.

[George Church]

Now, man.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

Oh, man. He's like, no, don't. Don't cure their disease. I want to figure out how to test more. I need more diseases to play with.

[Langston Kerman]

What if they get vaccinated and get, you know. Anyway, this company is fucked up. And the fact that Dr. Church is involved with this guy and his company to such an extent that this BGI named a sinter after George. Church says more than every vague claim he makes about ethics and genetic equality, about what I think his actual ethics are. And the more you read about him, the more it becomes clear that there are two very different George Church's. There's the one who legitimately contributed to some huge scientific breakthroughs and who runs a Harvard lab that does work on some really cool projects. One of the companies he's affiliated with is working to, like, clone pigs with organs that can be transplanted more easily into human beings. I think that's a really good idea, right? Not that there's no ethical concerns there, but probably worth it, in my opinion. Some people will feel differently, but not enough organs out there right now for everybody who needs them. But there's another George Church, and that's the guy who will work with absolutely anyone and anything if there's money in it for him, right? And will kind of say anything. That's my. My interpretation of events. I'm not saying that's objectively true. My opinion. You see the first George in these hagiographic articles for the popular press that are talking about how Amazing he and his companies are. And you see the second George when you actually look into a lot of the companies that he's either co founded or been hired to advise. For an example of a company he's co founded, I'd like to introduce you to a venture that he co founded in 2019 called DigID8 or Digidate.

[George Church]

Digidate.

[Sophie]

No.

[Langston Kerman]

Do you think you know where we're going here?

[George Church]

I have no clue.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, it's dating. It's a dating service. It's a genetic dating service.

[George Church]

Oh no.

[Langston Kerman]

Oops.

[Melissa Jeltson]

Uh oh.

[George Church]

Oh shit.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, that sounds bad. Fuck. His co founder is Bhargavi Govindarajan who is a Harvard graduate who met Church at a school event. They got to talking about consumers tumor genetic testing and she seems to have like soft pitched him like what if we integrated genome sequencing into a dating app? And this is what she said later. It did not take us much time to uncover synergies in terms of how we wish to build a nimble modern platform that taps into molecular biology and accelerates the impact of preventative health for a variety of consumers. Within a year of the first meeting that seeded our conversations, we incorporated Digidate with planet wide ambitions. God, that's just. It's both like such tech corporate speak and also evil supervillain speak. Planet, Planet scale.

[George Church]

Yeah. That's nuts. That's terrifying.

[Langston Kerman]

You can probably guess the basics of this idea. You give Digidate your DNA, they sequence it and they compare it to other people on the service to ensure that you only match with someone you're compatible with.

[Sophie]

I really don't like where this is going.

[Langston Kerman]

This is. You don't like where this is going to come? To me, this sounds kind of like eugenics. Yeah, eugenics, Me genics, who knows, right?

[George Church]

You plus me eugenics.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, US Genics. Yes. Quote. The idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people and this is from the MIT Technology Review. The idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people who share a genetic mutation, like those that cause Tay Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis, never meet, fall in love and have kids.

[Sophie]

Well, I mean I.

[Langston Kerman]

That's a really fucked up way to say it.

[Sophie]

That's like, like yes, two people with schizophrenia are dangerous to each other if they're near. Near each other. But.

[Langston Kerman]

Well, no, I mean like that's not even true. It's like if, if two people who have, like, if two people are likely to have kids with a certain horrible disease, maybe like adoption's a better choice or Something, I don't know, it's like.

[Sophie]

Wildly abusive and creepy.

[Langston Kerman]

Making sure they never meet is just like reduc beings to things that combine DNA. Or maybe they're not interested in having kids. Right?

[George Church]

Maybe they just, they can meet, they can hang out, they can even talk about each other.

[Langston Kerman]

Right? Yeah.

[George Church]

They might be like, hey, you got that too. I'm good. Let's make other choices. Like they're, they're, they have the ability to figure this out for themselves.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. It just the whole like the goal is to make sure they don't fall in love. It's like, wow.

[Sophie]

Okay, I don't like this.

[Langston Kerman]

So I want you to pull up the image of this tweet from Digidate in March 16th of 2021. Let's take a look at this. I'm going to read this. Digidate is here to help enhance your relationships, providing a dining experience that relies on communication, teamwork and intimacy. Give it a try today, couple dating, virtual date date and then there's a little image macro that says intimacy isn't always easy. But Digidate is here to help. We provide a virtual dining experience for you and your date leading to closer, more intimate connections. So again, they're advertising other aspects of their this which is like we let you have a digital date before you meet. They're not talking in the public facing ads about the fact that like also we're sequencing your DNA to determine who you'll make a good genetic match with.

[Sophie]

I don't like these two little fuckers in the corner. Nope.

[Langston Kerman]

No, neither do I. I'll go so.

[George Church]

Far as to say that that look how little they invested in the actual like images. Yeah, they don't give a fuck.

[Langston Kerman]

I don't know if there's a lot of money behind this either.

[George Church]

Yeah, they're like, just give DNA if you're gonna fall for this. We're not spending a dime on advertising.

[Langston Kerman]

That's right. But you know who is spending a dime on advertising?

[Sophie]

That was perfect.

[Langston Kerman]

Our advertisers baby.

[Unknown]

Offer valid on standard browsers. Us only.

[Sophie]

When I heard about date my age I thought, really? But there I was in my empty quiet house, my laptop on the kitchen counter and I typed in my name. Looking for a man between the ages of 40 to 60. Sure, why not?

[Melissa Jeltson]

Date my age is different. With verified profiles, you can feel safe and secure to explore meaningful connections with interesting and mature singles.

[Sophie]

Date my age made it really easy. I could join and view online profiles for free. All of a sudden my empty house wasn't so quiet anymore. I got so much attention. It just made me feel seen and alive. Date my age helped me start a totally new chapter in my life.

[Melissa Jeltson]

Find a friend, a lover, a partner at date my age. Get 60% off when you [e-mail] today. That's datemyage.com to connect with thousands of singles worldwide. Datemyage.com.

[Unknown]

How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back, that allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling after a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide.

[Langston Kerman]

Why?

[Unknown]

What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon on all proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[Melissa Jeltson]

Hi listeners, I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of what Happened to Talina Czar? It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.

[Sophie]

I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason.

[Melissa Jeltson]

I kept just kind of asking everybody.

[Sophie]

Anyone else think this is strange?

[Langston Kerman]

You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.

[Melissa Jeltson]

You can now get access to episodes of what Happened to Talina Zar 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime plus subscription. I'm a subscriber and and you should be too. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts. Search iHeart True Crime plus and subscribe today.

[Unknown]

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season one.

[Langston Kerman]

I just knew him as a kid. Kid.

[Unknown]

Long silent voices from his past came.

[Langston Kerman]

Forward and he was just staring at me.

[Unknown]

And they had secrets of their own to share.

Gilbert King I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.

I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.

Every time I hear about my dad is oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was because becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never.

Known if the cops and everything would have done their job properly. My dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.

I never expected to find myself in this place. Now I need to tell you how I got here.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley Season 2 Jeremy.

[Langston Kerman]

Jeremy. I Want to tell you something.

[Unknown]

Listen. Listen to new episodes of bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad free with exclusive content. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Langston Kerman]

We're back. We're talking about crimes, but we're not gonna tell you what crimes. We're not planning an Ocean's Eleven heist of a casino. Of course not. Langston's not. Not. Also the best safecracker in the business. You know, I'm not, you know, the world's best getaway driver. Surfy. So surfy. Jesus. What the fuck was that? I was gonna make a joke about Sophie being trained in jiu Jitsu, but I ruined it by mispronouncing your name. I'm sorry. That was weird.

[Sophie]

I don't think I'd be very good at that. It's okay. But I'd be good at crimes.

[Langston Kerman]

You'll be good at. You'll be great at crimes. Theoretically. Theoretically.

[Sophie]

Now I'm just thinking, like, you know, if you find I would do so many crimes to keep Anderson alive long.

[Langston Kerman]

I'm thinking of you as the mobster in the movie Ghost Dog starring Forest Whitaker.

[George Church]

Forest Whitaker.

[Langston Kerman]

I love Forest Whitaker. Great film. Yeah. You could be using Ghost Dog to assassinate your rivals. He would love you. You could be his daimyo, I think. Daimyo.

[Sophie]

I'm looking directly into my dog's eyes.

[Langston Kerman]

Sorry, we got off the thing. We're talking about Digidate, the creepy genetic dating company.

[Sophie]

I was trying to distract us away from it. Cause it makes me so uncomfortable.

[Langston Kerman]

We still got we're shit to talk about, so here's the MIT Technology Review. The MIT Technology Review, in this article about Digidate, describes Church's lab as gravitating towards provocative projects. And they describe Digidate not as a separate dating app, but as a service like gps. In the company's words, that could run in the background of any existent dating app.

[Sophie]

No, like gps.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, I don't like that either. So basically, every dating app could use Digidate's technology in order to have their users send in their DNA and get their genomes sequenced to stop them from meeting genetically incompatible people. Now, genome sequencing costs, like, 750 bucks, so obviously this is not super easy to pencil out financially for a dating app, which generally is not that expensive. But Church thinks you could offset this by increasing the subscription price of dating apps. I don't know if I think this is a great business, hasn't taken off yet. But as usual, he puts what is effectively eugenics, like this is a eugenics dating app in humanitarian terms, claiming it would eradicate huge numbers of diseases which cost quote, about a trillion dollars a year worldwide. And again, when it comes to horrific diseases. I'm all for stopping horrible diseases that harm people, but there's a lot of other ethical concerns when you start talking about this shit and you're just not dealing with them at all. As a guy who is like, I'm not neurotypical and I think there's huge benefit in having people with brains that work different be involved in sc. You're also creating an app to put an end to that maybe. And you're not talking about that problem at all anyway.

[George Church]

Yeah, you're not. And you're not being even transparent about to your point about what is being considered a deformity, a not typical thing inside of a person.

[Langston Kerman]

Because it's like if some scientists are like, hey, there's a disease where people's skin is born inside out, we want to. I'd be like, yeah, man, I don't think we gain anything from babies having their skin inside out. Right. But that's just never where it ends, you know?

[George Church]

Nah. Also, I want you to know what color that skin is when we flip it around. It's gonna be the color we like. It's not gonna be the color you like.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. What other stuff are you wanting to do with baby skin? This got announced, this dating service for the first time during an appearance church made on 60 Minutes. He later claimed that the section about Digidate wasn't supposed to air. Like, oh, I had no idea they were putting that in the show. I was just talking. And that he'd intended to just talk about his pig cloning company. But here's how the documentary wound up sounding. I don't know if I believe him on this, but Sophie's just gonna play this whole clip for you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay.

[Unknown]

Wonderful.

[Langston Kerman]

Church is a role model for the next generation. You got it working. It looks like he has co founded more than 35 startups. Oh, this is incredibly important. Recently, investors put $100 million into the pig organ work.

[George Church]

Hey. Hey.

[Langston Kerman]

Another Church startup is a dating app that compares DNA and screens out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease. You wouldn't find out who you're not compatible with. You'll just find out who you are compatible with. You're suggesting that if everyone has their genome sequenced and the correct matches are made that all of these diseases could be eliminated. Right. It's 7,000 diseases. It's about 5% of the population. It's about a trillion dollars a year worldwide. No, we just want to, like, prune about 5% of the population, you know, of those types of people happen. Problematic there.

[Sophie]

I just want to walk through some kind of conference and walk up to a board and go, this is important.

[Langston Kerman]

This is important. I do that. That's exactly what I'm like at CES if I think they'll give me something cool when I do my consumer electronic show work. Oh, yeah, this is important. Yeah. Sophie, when you're a tall guy with a beard and you walk around leaning into screens going, this is important. People will just give you stuff. It's not nuts.

[George Church]

Yeah, he. He really. He really sped past it in a way that it. It. It's more about the elimination of, like, the diseases and not the curation of.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

Of another species. Like, truly saying, like, this is important.

[Langston Kerman]

7,000, huh? Can I get a list?

[George Church]

He's so tough. He's so tough to look at.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

Given how bad he wants perfect people.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[George Church]

Like, you would think that he should not get to say what a perfect person is. And yet here we are.

[Langston Kerman]

No, he. You know what he looks like. Do you remember back when, like, Internet comedy websites were all funded by T shirt ads where they would, like, Photoshop different T shirts into the same, like, old white guy with a long beard who was, like, surprisingly jacked? He looks like that guy if he stopped taking HGH. So this. This 60 Minutes interview caused a ruckus online. To put it lightly. And I don't think I need to go into the obvious issue people had with the eugenics app, but it's worth emphasizing that this would be just a nightmare from a privacy standpoint. Dr. Ch. Like, your genome being out there, OkCupid, having your genome.

[George Church]

Yeah. It's not good.

[Langston Kerman]

Maybe not the best. No.

[George Church]

Not all of these apps are created equal. I don't even know that they have the staff that can manage your genome properly, much less.

[Langston Kerman]

Right. Yeah. So Dr. Church responded to this by declaring his detractors clickbait critics who weren't thinking deeply about a complex problem. He assured everyone that any given person on the app would still be compatible with 95% of the population and that the app wouldn't provide health data to users. Although there's also stuff that got, like, brought up in that MIT article. They're like, what about people with, like, huntington's disease markers because, like, there's no one technically that you could match them with and be totally safe. Do people who have those markers not deserve to have relationships? Is that kind of what you're saying? Like, that seems kind of bad. I don't know. I also can't find where he says the data would never be sold or used for any other purpose ever. I certainly don't know that that's written down anywhere in like, an eula. Although, again, this service does not exist really yet.

[George Church]

I'm sure part of his funding says that he's not allowed to say that. That, like there's. We. We want to be able to use this in a different kind of way. And that's how we can. We can just you all this money. Also, the elimination of diseases is such a silly concept because you also might make new ones. It's not like we know for sure that, like, there's not. There's no new possibilities in these perfectly synchronized genomes.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes. Yeah. Thank you for being the Ian Malcolm of these episodes and like, reminding us all of Chaos Theory. If you want, you could drop a little bit of water down your hand, maybe unbutton the top two buttons of your shit, like, really go for it here.

[George Church]

I gotta get jacked first. I'll get there. I'll figure it out.

[Langston Kerman]

Oh, man, he did look good in that movie.

[George Church]

He looked great.

[Langston Kerman]

As to the whole eugenics of it all, when he got challenged on this church, who is a Twitter user, replied, Eugenics, US, comma, Germany, et cetera, 1920-1970, interfered with human lives and personal reproductive choices.

[George Church]

True.

[Langston Kerman]

Not just those two countries, not just that time, but. Okay, okay, it's Twitter.

[George Church]

If we're listing facts, yeah, sure, that's cool.

[Langston Kerman]

And then he says, like, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to help people understand genetic risk. But you're saying they won't even be matched with those people. So is that really accurate right now? In that MIT article also noted that, like, what he's claiming to do, like, preconception genetic testing has already come, but that's a lot less sketchy. Cause you're not saying we want to stop people from meeting who aren't quote, unquote compatible. That's just saying if people decide they might want to have a kid, we can test them both and see are there potential things like illnesses that those kids could have. Right, and there's a debate to have about that too, but it is very different because those people have already Met. Right. And Church even responded to this by saying, if you do it after you've already fallen in love, it's mostly bad news by that point. A quarter of kids will be diseased. If you can go back in time before they fell in love, you get a much more positive message. And like, not everyone wants kids, George.

[George Church]

Yeah, not everyone wants kids. Not everyone, frankly, wants kids the way you want them. It really is putting a lot of your, your decision making on random people.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes. Yeah, it's. It's not great. So Digitate's motto is science is your wingman, which I think makes it clear that their desired clientele is more the tech bro side of things. That said, they've also sought to go after what he like was described in an ad as an untapped market at one point, which is communities around the world who do arranged marriages or only marry within a limited caste or tribe. Right. Like, we can make sure that you only marry Brahmins with Brahmins in India or whatever. And this is what people were led to believe by a job ad posted on Digidate's website. And Church later claimed that post was an error and that, no, no, no, we never help anyone with that sort of thing. That's obviously unethical.

[George Church]

Maybe that's really smart to, to go that route because I, I'm so ignorant. I just presume that he was going at like young singles in the city. It's like, no, you need nasty, conservative sort of like, yeah. Principles that have already been established.

[Langston Kerman]

Got to get the Saudi royal family here.

[George Church]

Yeah. To agree to this.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Oh man. And it's like, yeah. He says that's not what we wanted to do. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. So Digi Date does still seem to exist in 2025, although it has not gotten a lot of press since the initial uproar. And it seems to be on George's back burner since the direwolf stuff. Apparently the company is now more focusing on like general dating planning and health planning and stuff like that. Yeah, I kind of. I don't know that they actually have much of a product. So let's talk about another company George is involved with this time as a board member and expert advisor, but not a co founder. And this company is bioviva. They are a US biotech startup that sells anti aging therapies. In May of 2021, Stat News reported that the CEO, Elizabeth Parish was awaiting data from a human study of six patients who received experimental gene therapy for Alzheimer's in Mexico the year before. These were supposed to be six people with dementia who were getting experimental like telomeres, like lengthening therapy that would help de age their brains. Now, Langston, you've been on the show a while. Sophie, you've been on every episode. You all know that when we're talking in this show and say the words experimental therapy and Mexico, something not great is about to be happening, right?

[George Church]

Yeah. There's a reason there's that small of a sample size, and it's because they're doing something pretty fucked up.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Per a write up by science journalist and former molecular cell biologist Leonid Schneider on the website for Better Science, the gene therapy these Alzheimer's patients received was an adeno associated virus, aav, carrying the telomerase enzyme Tert, which may have zero effect on rejuvenation, but is known to be a potentially cancer transforming oncogene. Which makes these clinical tests even more exciting. Especially because Bioviva's CEO Parrish announced in July 2018 in a lifestyle magazine to have had Tert a injections herself. Quote, over a period that lasted well into the night, there would be more than 100 injections in her triceps and thighs and buttocks and even her face just below the cheek. And again, we don't know that this has any impact on aging, but we do know it can cause cancer.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Weird thing to shoot yourself up with a hundred times, ma' am.

[George Church]

Whoa.

[Langston Kerman]

I love it when these people self experiment.

[George Church]

That's nuts, right? That's full red Hulk shit. You're really.

[Langston Kerman]

Yes.

[George Church]

You're doing something freaky. Oh.

[Unknown]

How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide.

[Langston Kerman]

Why?

[Unknown]

What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[Melissa Jeltson]

Hi listeners, I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of what Happened to Talina Czar? It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdowns and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.

[Sophie]

I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason.

[Melissa Jeltson]

I kept just kind of asking everybody.

[Sophie]

Anyone else think this is strange?

[Langston Kerman]

You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there there. I'm an action kind of girl.

[Melissa Jeltson]

You can now get access to episodes of what happened to Talina Zar 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime plus subscription. I'm a subscriber and you should be too, so don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts. Search I heart True Crime plus and subscribe today.

[Unknown]

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.

[Langston Kerman]

I just knew him as a kid.

[Unknown]

Long, silent voices from his past came.

Forward and he was just staring at me.

And they had secrets of their own to share.

Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.

I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.

Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.

If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.

I never expected to find find myself in this place. Now I need to tell you how I got here.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley Season 2 Jeremy.

[Langston Kerman]

Jeremy, I want to tell you something.

[Unknown]

Listen to new episodes of bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to hear the entire new season ad free with exclusive content.

[George Church]

Content.

[Unknown]

Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

Where it gets icky is like, there's money. Plan is never to put it, like, put it in people, you know, for, for the greater good. It's put it in people because you have funding to do that.

[Langston Kerman]

We want this to be profitable, right?

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

And again, these enzymes can cause cancer. Now, the fact that that fact has made it very difficult to get approval to conduct these studies and so the inventor of the treatment, a guy named Bill Andrews, who worked at a different company before Bioviva, tried to conduct a trial with this other company in Mexico in 2017, in which participants with mid to late stage Alzheimer's would pay 11 million dol attempt this treatment. Wound up not being able to find anyone with Alzheimer's who was willing to pay that. Probably because their families had control of the money and were like, I don't know, I kind of want that 11 million for me. Grandma's pretty old.

[George Church]

She ain't gonna be here that long.

[Langston Kerman]

Nah, nah, nah, I'm gonna keep that money in house. Yeah. This proved impossible. So they tried to recruit patients for another trial in Colombia for just $1 million each. I don't think that worked out. As far as I know, no evidence of it. Now the technology is in bioviva's hands, and it's unclear how much they charged participants to be guinea pigs here. For his part, Church was asked in 2016 about ties to Bioviva. And he said, I wouldn't call them ties. I advise people who need advice. And they clearly needed advice. He has been on the board of the company since 2015. This isn't like a informal, you're on the board, man. This is public ties.

[George Church]

Being on the board is a tie. All right.

[Langston Kerman]

Do I have ties to iHeart Media? I've advised them on podcasts.

[George Church]

I talk to them.

[Langston Kerman]

It's not like I get from them every two weeks. You know, they don't pay for my health care or anything. Right.

[George Church]

I drink blood with them every once in a while. It's not.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, do I drink a little human blood? Is it the only way I can stay alive? Am I allergic to the sun? Of course. But I'm not a vampire. That'd be weird to call me a vampire.

[George Church]

You're being crazy. You're honestly being crazy.

[Langston Kerman]

When asked about the risk of causing cancer through this treatment, Church replied, I think that's still an issue with telomerase. I would not sugarcoat that. So I'm not sure that it's time for that just yet. But it's close. It's extremely close. Meanwhile, bioethicist Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota said of Bioviva's study using this dangerous treatment, everything I'm seeing indicates the involved parties are not conducting a credible clinical trial with appropriate safeguards. Now, despite Church being cagey whenever someone asks, hey, don't you work with that, like, sketchy anti aging firm? In 2022, Church published a scientific article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Sciences alongside Elizabeth Parrish and like 10 other authors. So he's one of a bunch of authors on this article that suggests that you can vape a gene therapy vector called CMV in order to, if you like, vaporize it and let a mouse inhale it, it will increase their lifespan by 41% without increasing the risk of cancer. The article concludes the impact of this research on an aging population cannot be understated as the global aging related, non communicable disease burden quickly rising, rises. So the article is like, obviously if it extends a mouse's life, we could extend human lives by 41% just by having people vape this thing. Right? Like that's what they're insinuating.

[George Church]

You remember when, when they were claiming that vapes were, were like killing people, that everybody was dropping dead from vaping.

[Langston Kerman]

Like vapes make you immortal.

[George Church]

Yeah. Now all of a sudden, this technology is not gonna make you drop dead, it's gonna make you live forever. Yeah. It's just, you just gotta put the.

[Langston Kerman]

Right thing at it, you know, you just gotta throw the right thing at it.

[George Church]

You have those naughty cartridges. We're gonna put really top, top shit cartridges in there.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the good stuff, right? We'll throw some Delta 8 in there too. Fuck it, you know?

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

So, but it's also like, yeah, obviously Church is a real scientist. Some of the people on this are scientists. Maybe this is a thing you could vape to. Why not? Let's look into it a little further. So that write up by Leonid Schneider notes that this study was allowed to bypass the normal peer review process at pnas. Pnas, the journal. And that George Church was listed as a contributor without noting that he and multiple other authors of this article testing something bioviva's like, advocating. All were employed by bioviva in various capacities. And you're supposed to do that. They had to like update the article, be like, oh, by the way, like all these people work at this company that's got a financial interest in this. Sketchy, sketchy. We don't have time to discuss all the different shady life extension companies and schemes that George Church is tangentially connected to. But I would be remiss if I didn't bring up his colleague Aubrey De Grey. Now, if you've ever been interested in the. Sophie, pull up a picture of Aubrey de Grey real quick. If you've ever been interested in the scientific quest for immortality. Right. For people, or at least massively extending human lifespans. You've come across Aubrey De Grey. He was a major name in the field for a very long time. He was the former. Yeah. He looks like fucking Rasputin.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

And like I get that sometimes, but he really looks like Rasputin. Like look at that Rasputin esque. He's doing a Rasputin in that picture. He's got his like hands out in a prayer pose. I know, I'm sorry. What else is that supposed to be?

[George Church]

He looks like he's turning into a wise old tree.

[Langston Kerman]

He's got resting int face. Yes. No. Yeah. If an int was a sex criminal. Spoiler.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

That's not a person, that's not an idol comment.

[Sophie]

And I don't appreciate that in. In a sentence with Ents because Ents are great.

[Langston Kerman]

Well, you don't know about all of the Ents, Sophie. One of those Ents that attacked Isengard had to have like a problematic. That's why the Entwives left, Sophie. They're gone for a reason.

[Sophie]

I will. I won't take and slander.

[Langston Kerman]

The Entwives bounced and we don't know why. One of those Ents knows why.

[Sophie]

Jesus Christ.

[Langston Kerman]

So Aubrey De Grey was the former head of an organization called the SINS Research Foundation. Sens Schneider describes SINS as quote, an anti aging eugenics club for the very rich. And this is like a big thing in the earlier to mid aughts a lot of. I think Peter Thiel least had some tangential. A lot of like very rich tech guys were super into this because the promises degrey was making and he did a ton of media. He was very similar to like George Church in that he was really good at getting a lot of media. George Church is an actual scientist in a way that Aubrey wasn't. But Aubrey has since been revealed as Per Schneider, a disgusting sex predator and pimp. And yeah, yeah, pimp. Let's talk about. So Aubrey De Grey has been accused by multiple women of various kinds of sexual harassment and abuse. Women who like worked with and at Sims, his colleagues. You can find a lot of gross stuff about the guy online. But I'm going to just read one account because it reveals something important about the culture of the immortality for rich people movement and the organizations associated with it. Quote, SINS funded much. And this is from a woman who claims that DeGray abused her. She's going to explain how sins funded much of my undergraduate and graduate work. And as such I was often paraded in front of their donors. The role of my attractiveness in discussions with Donors, almost always older men, was made explicit by SINS executives. At one such dinner, I was sat next to Aubrey by a Sims executive. I was told to keep him entertained. Aubrey funneled me alcohol and hit on me the entire night. He told me that I was a glorious woman and that as a glorious woman, I had a responsibility to have sex with the SINS donors in attendance so they would give money to. To him. Cool.

[George Church]

All right.

[Langston Kerman]

Great guy, Aubrey. Maybe we'll talk about him more.

[George Church]

I'm gonna need you to bone a few people in here so that I can make money.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. That is just like pimping for fucking VC money. Yeah. Attempted pimping. Now, victims have alleged that sexual harassment of this type was. Was normal within the SINS foundation and practiced by more men than just Aubrey De Grey and was routinely covered up. Now, there aren't allegations that George Church participated in this, but he was on the SIN Scientific advisory board while De Grey worked there. They were colleagues. He worked for this organization with a very shady history of doing this, with a guy who had a shady history of doing this. And, I don't know, you look at that and you look at the Epstein stuff. It's just a lot of times where you're really close to some people doing questionable things, man, and. And haven't separated yourself from it.

[George Church]

Pimp me once, shame on you.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. One thing if, like, he'd been the guy who blew the whistle on Aubrey De Grey or whatever, but, like, he didn't, you know? I don't know. I don't know.

[George Church]

Yeah. I don't know. Multiple sex traffickers.

[Langston Kerman]

Right.

[George Church]

You know what I mean?

[Langston Kerman]

Right. Right. Yeah.

[George Church]

I think after a while, it starts to feel like that's a thing you're into.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. Kind of a weird that it happened twice situation. Now, the SINS foundation represented the crest of a wave and hype for anti aging research and functional immortality that seems to a downswing at the present, largely because none of the promises people like De Grey were making around 2010 seem any closer to coming true. Schneider suggests that, being a smart guy, Dr. Church realized this early on and started pivoting to anti aging cures for pets. Because there's just as much money there, but you're not at any risk. Right. Like, it's just a safer business to be in. In fact, I would say the primary genius George Church has exhibited over the last 20 years since his real scientific achievement achievements has less to do with science and genetics and more to do with branding and merchandising. He understands the same thing. Elon Musk used to understand, which is that if you're good enough at announcing sexy new products that go viral, even if you only deliver like 5% of the time, people will think you're a genius. As long as you keep enough of those stories in the media. Right. And you get very rich doing that.

[George Church]

Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

This brings us back to the direwolves. Right?

[George Church]

We're back. They're back, back.

[Langston Kerman]

We've come around full circle, baby.

[George Church]

I didn't know they were coming back. I thought maybe they were going for good. Yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Church's whole point is that they're coming back, baby. So let's talk about his whole crusade de extinct animals. When the first claims of this went viral, they were focused on, obviously, Neanderthals. And George and his lab at Harvard started working on a scheme to clone and bring back the woolly mammoth in 2014. This was a micro budget endeavor for like a decade or more. George claims they spent about 100 grand on it prior to 2021, which is way, way less than any other project in my lab, but not through lack of enthusiasm. It's by far the favorite story. We've never done a press release on it in all those years. It just comes up naturally in conversation. And that may be true, but he talks about it in a lot of these media appearances. Like, he talks about this kind of shit de extinction in that 2015 interview. And that's his PR. He doesn't need to put out press releases because he's mastered the art of using journalists as his pr. Right. And that's what he's doing with this direware thing. The way Church tells it in 21, Ben Lamb, who's the CEO of Colossal Biosciences and his co founder, kind of came out of nowhere to throw money behind the idea and help him start a company. Ben came out of the blue, I think inspired, at a distance from what he was reading about this very charismatic project which was very underfunded. He and Ben met at Church's lab in Boston, which acts as an incubator and advertisement for his different business ventures. Lamb, being another serial entrepreneur, gets involved. And Colossal is Lamb's sixth star. His first was acquired for a fortune when he was 29. And the others he's created did well enough that he's got. He's worth like 14 or 15 million dollars. So he's like rich, but he still hasn't. He's not a success by Silicon Valley standards yet. Right. So he's still looking for his big hit. His past ventures are all pretty Standard chasing the zeitgeist tech stuff. He had an e learning company, a mobile app development studio, a gaming company, and Hypergiant, an enterprise AI software company that once had Bill Nye on the plan. In 2019, Hypergiant announced a world changing product, the EOS Bioreactor, which was meant to use AI to optimize algal growth to sequester carbon. And they were like, it's a climate change solution. You can sequester more carbon per square, you know, acre or whatever than you can with like a forest. Using this by optimizing algae growth. Sounds great right now. I know you're wondering, is that real though? Like, is that a real product?

[George Church]

It crossed my mind, yeah.

[Langston Kerman]

Crossed my mind. I can't say no. Legally, it was acquired by tribe Capital in 2023. But a former employee on Glassdoor noted, and this is from an article called Colossal Liarwolves for the blog for Better Science. There's no secret sauce, there is no product, there is no money, just hype. And another former employee commented, this isn't a software company, it's VC marketing hype. So those people claim there's no real product who work there?

[George Church]

Yeah, the people who work there saying, we're not doing any work is really awesome.

[Langston Kerman]

This is not a real company. Nothing real here. Now for this stage of George's plan, right, like the Colossal Biosciences stage. Once they announced this company, his PR rep of choice was a journalist for CNBC who got the first big scoop. And when they put out this first big article about there's this new company, they're gonna bring back the mammoth in six, four years ago, one part of their article reads, it could take as little as six years for Colossal to create a calf. George told CNBC the timeline is aggressive. He admitted, when people used to ask me that question, I said, I have no idea. We don't have any funding. But now I can't dodge it. I would say six is not out of the question. Now, obviously there's no evidence that they're any closer to doing this here. And if you actually read these articles, George isn't even really saying that they're trying to clone a woolly mammoth. Right? Just like the dire wolf is just a wool with a couple direwolf genes kind of plucked in there, here and there. What they're trying to do is alter the DNA of an endangered Asian elephant so it can withstand colder temperatures and then release a bunch of mutated Asian elephants in Siberia. When he was interviewed by the Times, Church even allowed that calling it a woolly mammoth was probably a bad idea. An Arctic elephant is a better term. Right, but that's not what you're calling it. Right. You're calling it a woolly mammoth in all of the press coverage.

[George Church]

Yeah. And also, so we can skip past the fact that you're not actually helping the existing elephants, you're just trying to create a new species that'll mirror the old one.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. It's like if you go to, like, a family who's, like, in, like, living on the edge and about to lose their Section 8 housing, and you're like, I'm going to fix everything for you, and then you give them all haircuts that they don't like or didn't ask for, they're like, problem solved. Look at you guys.

[George Church]

All right, guess what? All of you guys got the Rachel. Ain't that nice?

[Langston Kerman]

Isn't that good?

[George Church]

You all got the Rachel.

[Langston Kerman]

Anyway, bye. Here's what his business partner, Ben Lam told CNBC in that same article. Our goal is the successful de extinction of interbreedable herds of mammoths that we can leverage in the rewilding of the Arctic. And then we want to leverage those technologies for what we're calling thoughtful, disruptive conservation. First off, using leverage twice in two sentences. That's a bad. That's just a bad guy. Disruptive conservation, not what conservation is.

[George Church]

So first, we're gonna leverage these people over here, and that's gonna allow us to swoop in and leverage these people over here so that we can.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. So you know how conservation is trying to, like, stop species from going extinct and save ecosystems that are threatened? We're gonna disrupt that by just making new shit and dropping at random places.

[George Church]

We're gonna fuck up the elephants in a new kind of way. Isn't that exciting?

[Langston Kerman]

That is disruptive.

[George Church]

Yes.

[Langston Kerman]

A bunch of random elephants being in Siberia would disrupt things.

[George Church]

If you think you know what elephants problem is now, you are going to be so surprised by the problems we're about to introduce.

[Langston Kerman]

Elephants are going to have a bunch of drunk Russians sniping them like all sorts of shit they don't have to deal with right now. So that article is a masterclass in what I call hype journalism, which primarily exists to pump up the perceived value of tech companies. It's like Theranos style shit. Right? And again, they. They make the claim that, like, well, this could stop climate change by slowing the melting of the permafrost. And I think that because they say it's like proponents of the Project say this, I think it's just George Church, right? And I wanted to look into like, is there even any evidence this would work? And I found an article in the Journal of Medical Sciences that says, quote, according to Colossal, the reintroduction of these animals into the environment for the ancient mammoths would change the environment from tundra wooded to separate step, stabilize the permafrost and thus combat global warming. It's quite difficult to take these claims seriously. Now, the article goes on to note, we don't even know if they can modify an Asian elephant, right? Modifying a wolf is one thing. There's a lot into like, let alone it's not even. There's nowhere near being able to clone a fucking mammoth, right? Modifying an Asian elephant with mammoth genes is also a major undertaking. And they explain why. Why this presupposes the availability of early embryos of an Asian elephant whose nucleus would be eliminated and replaced by that of a cultured pseudo mammoth cell. After a few divisions, this embryo would be implanted in the uterus of a female Asian elephant and would develop until the animal is born. This is the pattern that led to Dolly's birth in 1996 and since then to the cloning of many other animals. But this is not an option in this case. The Asian elephant is an endangered species and given the low success rate of cloning, generally less than 1%, obtaining the many embryos needed and using dozens of surrogate females is not possible, not only for ethical but also practical reasons. This is what is indicated in the work plan presented on the Colossal website. But it seems that Church and his company are now moving towards the use of induced pluripotent stem cell IPSC lines that would be obtained from the somatic tissues of the Asian elephant and could be used for correct cloning. These lines have yet to be obtained. The next step is to ensure the development of the embryos, which, according to Church's recent interviews, could involve the use of an artificial uterus that avoids the use of female carriers. But of course, this artificial elephant uterus has yet to be invented. It does not currently exist for any species, even if work is being carried out with this objective. So again, their first plan is illegal because you would be destroying a ton of embryos and endangering a lot of females of an endangered species species. Your second plan, you've done none of the actual work to acquire what you'd need. And your third plan, again, the science doesn't exist and there's no evidence that you're getting closer to making it.

[George Church]

And Also is you just saying, all right, we'll just make an elephant synthetically is nuts. That's not.

[Langston Kerman]

We don't know how to do that.

[George Church]

Yeah, it's not cool.

[Langston Kerman]

It's like me being like, I'm just going to make a car that runs on water. Easy enough. Hydrogen power is potentially a thing. And it's like, well, but we've tried. It's really difficult. It's really hard. When Colossal was brand new, Dr. Church talked constantly about their ambition to create an artificial womb. But as the years have gone by, this goal is evidently no closer to reality. And so Colossal and its marketing have shifted to focus on promising other, easier kinds of de extinction. Per Schneider's article in 4 Better Science, Church's Problem is that his business investors and admirers in the media keep asking about the progress of his mammoth project. One has to throw them a stick to chase after. So here's Church's Colossal new plan to de extinct the Thylacine, also known as that Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger. This Australian apex predator the size of a smallish dog got wiped out in the 1930s. Incidentally, it is a marsupial, meaning it doesn't gestate in a womb, real or artificial, for very long. You know, in case the artificial womb isn't working. Detracting that yapping media and investors with a stick was a good idea, but even better to throw them two sticks. So after mammoth and thylacine, Church and his company Colossal, announced in January of 2023 to de extinct the dodo, the giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius, which was exterminated centuries ago. Birds don't need wombs to gestate. So again, we see the first pivot away from like, fuck, we can't figure this out. We're not doing a mammoth. It's not going to work. Let's talk about this Tasmanian tiger. Let's try to get these dodos and back.

[George Church]

What about that bird that we beat the shit out of when it was walking down the street?

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

The most serious scientists I mostly can think of. Scientists who should not be there.

[Langston Kerman]

Right, right, right. Well, I'll answer because obviously the Answer is Paris Hilton, right? That's who you bring on as an advisor for the dodo project, right? I mean, obviously, yeah, there's a fucking brilliant mind. Of course she's advising the company, A.

[George Church]

Person deeply connected to both science and dodo birds. Of course you need pair of Paris Hilton.

[Langston Kerman]

Of course you need Paris. And again, she announced that she had been made an advisor in a post about their Series B funding. My guess is she just helped fund this thing. And so they're like, yeah, you're an advisor now, Paris. Great science. I should also note that during this fundraising round, Colossal was found to have stolen dodo artwork from another artist for their pitch deck. Very funny. Anyway, moving on.

[George Church]

They're like, we can't even draw dodo.

[Langston Kerman]

Much like, draw a fucking dodo. Let's. Yeah. So this brings us back to the start of the episode and Colossal's first and only real success. The direwolf. In their press release, they call this the world's first de extinction and a revolutionary milestone and scientific progress that would lead to the de extinction of other species. Robin Ganzert of the Humane Society cheered that this would make extinction a thing of the past, which is nonsense for a lot of reasons. Actual scientists like cell biology expert Paul Kepler at the UC Davis medical schools had this to say. The dire wolf genome likely differs from that of the gray wolf in millions or tens of millions of ways. Editing 14 genes is interesting, but it's not a reconstruction or de extinction. It's not even close. The three produced gray wolves with 15 genetics, making them genetically a smidge more like dire wolves are not a de extinction event. Bin Lam responded with anger at this, saying, everyone just wants to argue about what to call these things. No one got deep into the science of how we created new models for ancient DNA extraction, and that's because Colossal has not been very transparent about telling people how they did that, because that's not what they're interested in. Those are company secrets, right? They're more interested in putting up photos with, like, George R.R. martin. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, however, Ben made it clear that the company does have plans to profit from this nonsense. And this is where shit gets really. This is. This is like a Tesla con, right? As for de extinction projects, to the extent they contribute to efforts at conservation, we just give them to the world for free, Lam told me. But he also foresees marketing biodiversity credits to other companies, similar to the environmental regulatory credits that Tesla sells to automakers without its zero emission footprint revenue from which enabled it to report a profit for the first quarter of 2025 this week. So he's like, you know, the animals are free. What we're selling is credits to companies that just, like, throw more fake direwolves out there. And like, you know what, Chevron, Buy some wolves and suddenly you can offset your carbon footprint. Yeah, yeah, there we go. That's the con. That's the con.

[George Church]

These aren't just wolves. You're gonna, like, keep and take care of you. Really?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah.

[George Church]

You're gonna leverage these wolves?

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah. I'll admit, when I first read the direwolf article, I did. I called something being wrong. I did not call carbon credit scheme.

[George Church]

No, it's really.

[Langston Kerman]

That I did.

[George Church]

It's really awesome. If you. If you think about it, it's like, it's such a long game for being able to not pay taxes everywhere else.

[Langston Kerman]

You got it. You got to have the long game if you really want to avoid the most taxes. So that LA Times article does a good job of puncturing the myth. These are animals are dire wolves. One thing they point out is that, like. And they talk to a scientist about this. There's visible skin around the ears of these animals. You can see pink skin, skin. Arctic wolves and other Arctic mammals have very thick fur around their ears because they need to survive and have their ears function while being constantly exposed to freezing temperatures. Right. And they also point out that, like, well, dire wolves wouldn't have all looked had white coats because they're not all Arctic animals, actually. Like, they lived in a lot of places, but they didn't just live in freezing temperatures. And all of these are like the dire wolves they made look pure white because that's how one of the direwolves in Game of Thrones looked like. That's probably what's going on, is they were like, yeah, people will buy this better. Right.

[George Church]

Arguably, the most famous direwolf in Game of Thrones was white. So. Right, yeah, we'll just make that one.

[Langston Kerman]

That make him look like ghost. He also notes, suspiciously, Colossal cannot stay consistent with how much direwolf DNA they sequenced. According to Colossal's preprint, they achieved 3.4x and 12.8x sequence reads of the genomes from two different dynamics Direwolf. It is also claiming 55x times more and 70x more if they only sequence two individuals as they claimed. Why am I seeing three differing figures? I don't know. Seems sketchy. There's a lot that's interesting about Colossal based on recent reporting, like the fact that Dr. Church has no ongoing equity in the company he co founded. Maybe he just only cares about the science. Or maybe he's kind of a cash up front guy because he doesn't see this one last. I don't know. Lamb has been the one to go on the Joe Rogan experience to talk about their direwolf, where he responded to the criticism this way. They live in this sort of. This is his critics. This sort of fortune and glory world where it's a popularity contest. So one of the things people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for everything you do. We're not an academic university. I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. If we wrote scientific papers for every single thing we did that went through peer review, like, we would have 3,000 papers and no mammoths. But, like, you don't have any mammoths.

[George Church]

Like, we remain mammothless.

[Langston Kerman]

There's still no mammoths, man.

[George Church]

There. There hasn't been a single mammoth. And. And I guess, yeah, your other point is kind of moot.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, like that. Like it's one of those things you could start making maybe if, if you were making that statement, sit next to a mammoth, I'd be like, well, he doesn't have a mammoth. Yeah, he's got a mammoth, but. But he doesn't. That said, his company is now worth $10 billion based largely on the strength of how viral those direwolves meant. This is not real money. No, they have not. This is based on everyone getting hyped up about the direwolves. There is so much more sketchy shit here. The company also claims to have cloned the nearly extinct red wolf, but their red wolves are just coyotes with a few red wolf alleles stuck in there. Right. And confusingly, Colossal claims that they have more red wolf DNA than any actual animals in the real red wolf recovery, which isn't true because the red wolves in that program are not coyotes. Right.

[George Church]

They don't have coyote mixed in, so they can't be less.

[Langston Kerman]

Yeah, no. And the final point I'll make in these episodes is about this kind of sketchiest thing about Colossal, which is the Trump administration has taken a lot of interest in their de extinction claims. Trump's Department of the Interior head, Doug Burgum visited Columbia Lossell, and the Washington Post reports that he does, like a big press conference talking about, like, this is why we need to get over the Endangered Species Act. We don't need it anymore. We can de extinct animals. No need to protect endangered animals anymore. Right? Now, obviously, this causes problems for Ben Lam and a lot of people who had backed the company as, like, oh, are they just gonna use this as an excuse to remove the Endangered Species Act? And Lamb goes on CBS and he's like, no, no, no. We need an Endangered Species Act. Right. But, you know, Doug Burgum still wound up on Colossal's website. And to an extent, do I believe Ben Lam really cares all that much as long as he stays a pay per billionaire and his company keeps getting investment dollars? I don't know. Is it possible Colossal would get in the business of selling credits that allow companies to create the illusion that they're keeping species alive while also destroying more environmental regulations? Maybe.

[George Church]

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

[Langston Kerman]

No, there's billions of dollars in selling carbon credits to company or de. Extinction credits to companies. Companies who make more random wolves that they shoot into the world. Cool stuff. I love it. I love it.

[George Church]

This show is always a lot of fun and really sad.

[Langston Kerman]

It's great stuff. I love it. Well, Langston, how you feeling?

[George Church]

I feel great.

[Langston Kerman]

It's been a long one. I'm sorry.

[George Church]

No, this was great. I'm happy that we got to do it. And frankly, I'm devastated to know that there's a new man to be afraid of out there.

[Langston Kerman]

There's a new bearded man to be frightened of.

[George Church]

Really scared of him. And also, don't. Don't care to look at him, but here we are.

[Langston Kerman]

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

[George Church]

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

[Langston Kerman]

Follow Langston Kerman. And yeah, if you see a direwolf? No, you literally didn't.

[George Church]

No, you're good.

[Sophie]

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

[Melissa Jeltson]

Hi listeners. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of what Happened to Talina Czar? It's the story of a woman who disappears in the early days of COVID lockdown and the group of online sleuths who try to find her.

[Sophie]

I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason.

[Melissa Jeltson]

I kept just kind of asking everybody.

[Sophie]

Anyone else think this is strange?

[Langston Kerman]

You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.

[Melissa Jeltson]

You can now get access to episodes of what Happened to Talina Zhar 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime plus subscription. I'm a subscriber and you should be too. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search iheartruecrime plus and subscribe today.

[Unknown]

How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide.

[Langston Kerman]

Why?

[Unknown]

What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.

Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Listen to new episodes of bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Holly Fry]

Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Trimarchi, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the the past. The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field. But tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrers, known as the wicked lady who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia. Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Langston Kerman]

This is an iHeart podcast.