Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. What it is. Welcome to planet Tyrus. And as you should know, I'm Tyrus. I am beyond excited with my guest today. I love talking about all things Mother Nature and I love talking about evolution and fossils and one of the coolest things we've had in, in my lifetime anyways that I feel was, was when we brought back the dire wolf. I thought that was amazing that we brought something back from de extinction that is awesome. The power of science. And you cannot get there without my guest today, Ben Lamb, who's the co founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. And it's a Texas based biotechnology company built building de extinction which means like if your ass is gone, your whole tree is gone, they could bring you back. So there's some real exciting things we're going to talk about today. Different animals and I have a wish list trying to get my woolly rhino back and so without further ado, let's do this. First of all, hey man, thanks for doing this.
B (1:08)
Yeah, no, I'm super excited. Thanks for having me.
A (1:11)
Now obviously the direwolf, you know, got really popular in Game of Thrones, right? That's when yeah, they and I think a lot of people thought it was invented in the Game of Thrones. Like it's some.
B (1:23)
So people actually from the cat. I won't out anybody but there are people on the cast that also believe that.
A (1:29)
Yeah, it's wild to me. Like do your. I mean, I guess if you're not into to animals or prehistoric history and stuff, I, I guess it would be a, a slip, you know, because I guess they had giants there, but I guess there's evidence. It's possible there was giant people at one time, so who knows?
B (1:45)
There's all kinds of stuff. I think every day we're learning more stuff, right?
A (1:50)
Yeah. And I think one of the cool things about what you do is you can also long term as far as conservation, not just for wolves, but people too. Like being able to, to be able to have DNA records and have like in capsules and things like that in case, in case of population break glass, you know, you know something.
B (2:13)
Yeah, like, like full genetic rescue across all vertebrate species is something that we're crazy passionate about. And you know what's crazy is like a lot of the de extinction work that we do gets headlines, which is amazing and it's by design, but it inspires kids, gets people excited about like one of the reasons we did the direwolf was, you know, we were working through like the mammoth and the Dodo and some of our other projects. But then when we thought that we could actually pull out the direwolf and when we actually went and talked to some of the indigenous people groups and people were excited about the direwolf, we looked at the wolf conservation. There was this angle that's like we can get kids and like fantasy fans from Game of Thrones or Magic the Gathering or World of Warcraft, that, that where these animals like persist, but people think they're mythical to get into like science and excitement. Right. We think that's pret exciting. And then we've kind of leveraged that momentum to then apply all those technologies to conservation. And what's amazing, kind of what you said about all of the species backups is that's a major focus of our foundation is like, how do we go build a DNA record store of life on Earth? Because we're just losing a lot of species really quick.
