DT Maxx
Appearances
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Okay, so first of all, we just got to get this out there. We either have to put direwolves in quotes or we have to give them a name. Like, I don't know, we could do anything like... How about Diet Direwolves? Yes, exactly. These so-called direwolves were created by extracting DNA from a 72,000-year-old direwolf inner ear bone and a 13,000-year-old direwolf tooth.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
But the other point is it doesn't really matter when you're seeing them because, you know, you're seeing something, you know, that's absolutely amazing. I mean, you're seeing something that, so there's two bright white wolves. I did not see them where they live. I saw them where they were brought to be seen, which was far, far away.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Yeah, I do hold bigger secrets as a journalist, but I'm not supposed to tell you where. But so what happens, okay, so first of all, I see a couple of people I know from the reporting on the piece. I see George Church, who looks as much like Gandalf as any human being on this planet who holds tenure.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And I also see Ben Lamb, the guy who founded the project, looks a lot like, it's Johnny Snow, right? Yeah. The point is, like, it's the perfect setup. And then there are these two bright white teenage wolves. So, you know, even any wolf is impressive. So it's not... I mean, I have actually seen wolves before for another article, strangely enough.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So a wolf carries its own weird kind of authority with it. But these, they do look different. And again, I'm not an animal morphologist. So, you know, I've been told pale, but they're white. And they're... They're like celebrities.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
I mean, there's no other way, you know, there's no other way to describe it that they're delightfully, blissfully heedless of how much like money and effort has gone into the creation of them. They're basically, you know, they're in this enclosure. They're doing little things wolves do and dogs sometimes do. One pees, the other rolls in it. But, you know, they're majestic.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
They are going about their quasi-meta-direwolf existence. Blissful disregard for any controversy about what you want to call them. Or blissful disregard of whether they should have been brought back in the first place.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
So, I mean, Ben Lamb is kind of amazing. I am pretty much in awe of Ben Lamb. Here's a guy who's maybe 40-something. He's already had like four or five successes by which he started up four or five companies and they were bought out by larger companies, which is kind of what you want to do when you're a startup guy.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And then, you know, one day he meets a guy named George Church, Church being the Gandalf of our earlier narrative, if that survives. And Church is a Harvard professor, a guy who's gotten a million patents and loves to do deep thinking. He's a big kind of what-if guy, like, what if we were to bring back the Neanderthals? Yeah. And then the press goes, ah!
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And then George Church goes, I was just considering it. I was just thinking about it. You guys calm down. So George Church and Ben get together, and basically what Ben says is, if you had all the money in the world, George, what would you bring back? What would you want to do with your time? And George says, I'd bring back the woolly mammoth. Sick.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
I mean, I don't know if it's responsible, but it sounds cool. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, they get together. It's like, let's put on a show, right? And, you know, this being Ben Lamb, super talented, perfectly adapted modern entrepreneur, and he raises money. Basically, I don't know the details. I think he raises money with a phone call because he's got a great second idea.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And his second idea is while we learn how to de-extinct these animals, we're going to learn an awful lot of interesting biomedical tech and that we could sell. That's where we make our money. We're not going to make our money. He's very, very firm on this. There will be no Jurassic Park. We will not display these animals. Let's check back in in five years, but we will spin off the biotech.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And the biotech is honestly probably worth even more than, what is Disney World charged now or Disneyland?
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
All right, so maybe I take that back. Maybe the better business is displaying them.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
All right, so they've now raised over $400 million, and their valuation, which is a kind of complicated metric involving what shares are worth, is over $10 billion, which puts it at the size level of Moderna. They've had an insane first few years.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
The dire wolf is not, let me just get this out there for everybody. The dire wolf is not, there's a difference between being extinct for 40 million years and being extinct for 14,000 years. They both sound like a long time to us, but it's just not comparable. So you can get, you can get, I can't get, you can't get, but Beth Shapiro could get viable ancient DNA.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Now, what you do with that DNA is you read the genetic sequences and then you recreate them, right? And you're going to put that DNA in the cells and the cells are going to replicate and you're going to have an animal, ultimately, once you put in an embryo and then implant it in a womb, you're going to have an animal that has those genes being acted on.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
That makes it sound like you or I could probably do it with just a little bit of help. But it's not that easy because there are problems, you know, at every step of the way. And it's a little bit like if I described to you how to hit a home run, you'd be like, yeah, OK, there's the force and there's the counterforce and there's the angle of the swing. But most people don't hit home runs.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can get that much money going at a university lab without a fair amount of grant writing. I mean, grant writing is slow, and getting funded is slow. There's a guy named Lova Dahlin, who's a Swedish mathematician. Woolly Mammoth guy. And I think he made a really good point in my piece that nobody's really picked up on.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
And I think it's about the money, which he said, like, the people who invested in this company weren't going to give, you know, I'm paraphrasing him, $100 million to the World Wildlife Fund. Like, you know, they're tech people. They probably would have bought Bitcoin with it otherwise. Like this, you know, Peter Jackson said that owning, being a part of Colossal was as much fun as movie making.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
You know, I think that kind of tells you something. I don't think if they'd been doing this in Bess Shapiro's old lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he'd have thought it was as much fun, you know, as movie making. I mean, I give Colossus a lot of credit And Ben Lamb, in particular, a lot of credit for meeting people where they actually are.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
I mean, all I can say is a journalist, someone who writes about people, and I have written about conservation other times, other places. I am not opposed to the idea that if you're ever actually going to turn around this massive environmental disaster that is the present, you really got to meet people where they are.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
You know, never say never, but I think they're expected to live out their lives. I think a wolf gets the same 15 years, I think, that a smaller dog gets. Live out their lives. You know, they will not hunt. They will be given, like, I don't know if you've ever been to a zoo and seen what they feed the lions and tigers. They feed them, like, something they would have hunted, but they didn't hunt it.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Like, just oozing, bleeding food. massive amounts of meat. And I think that's what the dire wolves are going to get. But they're not planning to breed them, which I don't entirely understand. Colossal talks a lot about like reintroducing some of their animals into the ecosystem to do environmental good. I don't think the dire wolf was conceived by them with that as a possibility.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
First of all, I mean, people don't want dire wolves in their backyard.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
Yes. Yes, I did. It was absolutely, you know, there were a number of sad moments in reporting this piece. I mean, first of all, you have to kind of come to grips with the immensity of the damage that humans have done. and for how long we've been doing it, because the dire wolf is essentially driven extinct mostly by human activity, you know, 14,000 years ago.
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
But I don't know, when you realize that this whole thing is kind of to show we can, Yeah, it becomes sad because isn't one of the reasons that we used to drive animals extinct because we could? Because there was money in it? And isn't it kind of weird that we're now de-extincting an animal, you know, kind of because we now have this...
Today, Explained
The startup that cried dire wolf
this technology that can reopen the door that we thought that we had absolutely and, you know, incontrovertibly closed before. So the whole thing leaves you a little bit blue.