Name: The Company Trying to Clone Woolly Mammoths
Uploaded: 2023-01-17T18:33:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Company Trying to Clone Woolly Mammoths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Company Trying to Clone Woolly Mammoths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-17. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
So I wanted to talk to you about this cloning and the rewilding and the mammoths
and all of that stuff.
I'm going to Colossal tomorrow to learn a little bit more about it myself.
Explain Colossal.
Yeah, so Colossal Biosciences is this, if you ask me, incredible company.
And they are, by their own declaration, a de-extinction company.
So it's this guy, Ben Lamb, and he's got George Church, who's a world-leading
cellular scientist.
I don't know the specifics, you know, of de-extinction and cloning and CRISPR
and so on and so forth.
And they've come together and raised a ton of money, and they are de-extincting
animals.
And the science is there.
Like, it's done.
All it took was the money, basically, behind it.
And they've put together this incredible Rolodex of scientists and people.
And it's real-life Jurassic Park with purpose.
Where are they going to put them?
So there's a couple different things going on.
So the first one they're working on is the woolly mammoth, right?
And this isn't just for fun.
This has real, like, important conservation implications, which is really
fascinating.
But they are planning on starting with, I think, 100 mammoths and putting them
in this
place called Pleistocene Park, not Pleistocene Park, something like that, this
park in Siberia
that they've been doing this experiment on as to what happens when you add megafauna
back
into the Arctic tundra to offset carbon emissions.
Wow.
And so they're using what DNA?
They're using elephant DNA and mixing it with something else?
So it's Indian elephant is the closest living relative to the woolly mammoth.
And what does an Indian elephant look like?
Is it similar to an elephant?
Yeah, it's a smaller...
So African elephants are bigger.
They have the really big ears.
Indian elephants are typically the ones you'd see at the circus, you know, with
the red,
the pink in the ears, the smaller triangular shaped ears.
So just a different species of elephant.
And so they're taking Indian elephants and they're using CRISPR technology and
they're using
existing mammoth DNA and they're making an embryo and then they're implanting
it into the Indian
elephant.
And 22 months later, an Indian elephant's gestation period, she will give birth
to a mammoth.
A real mammoth.
A real mammoth.
So it's not like a hybrid?
That's okay.
That's a good point.
So it is in the sense of what they do is if you imagine like, if you imagine
the DNA of
an animal, right?
And then you imagine the fragments that are broken out of it, right?
What they're doing is they're taking that DNA of the, and I don't understand
the cellular
side of it very well.
This is just my base level understanding of it.
I can talk about the conservation side of it, but they're taking that double
helix, that
DNA, and all those pieces that are missing from the mammoth, they're putting in
Indian
elephant pieces.
So you end up with an animal that is physically and morphologically identical
to a mammoth,
but has used all of the DNA from the closest living relatives in order to get
there.
Whew.
Boy.
And this process, how long does this take?
So I think they've been going for about five years on the science, but the
science of de-extinction
and cloning, I mean, you remember Dolly the sheep, right?
That was like a known thing.
So that's been going on for a long time.
Well, you can get your cat cloned.
Exactly.
Or your dog cloned.
Exactly.
For like 20 grand, you can clone your dog.
Yeah.
Which is kind of creepy.
It is.
It's bizarre.
But the point is, the science has been there for a while.
There just hasn't really been the funding or the motivation for it.
But what I think is so fascinating, the reason I'm so emotionally invested in
it, is the conservation
implications that it has.
Because what this company is ultimately doing is rewilding species that humans
have removed.
And that's going to, in theory, in a lot of places, sort of fix the offset, the
imbalance
of the ecosystem.
That's interesting.
That's really interesting.
There's a lot of debate about whether or not humans killed off the woolly mammoth,
though,
isn't there?
I think there is.
Yeah, I think there is.
And I can't really speak on that.
But I do know that when the mammoths disappeared, so the Arctic used to be like
the savannas of
Africa.
It used to be big grasslands, right?
It wasn't all covered in trees and things.
And that's a recent adaptation since the mammoths went away 10, 20,000 years
ago.
And so that's what's happened is the permafrost up there is melting pretty
rapidly, right?
Underneath that permafrost is like one and a half trillion tons of carbon.
And once that carbon enters the atmosphere, it heats things up like crazy.
So by removing those mammoths, and I can explain why the mammoths keep it
colder, but by removing
those mammoths, it's allowing that permafrost to melt much quicker and release
more carbon.
So the idea from like a financial standpoint of how they make money is the
carbon offset
of putting mammoths back into the environment.
How do they make it colder?
So it's a couple different things.
It's basically when there's trees and shrubs, they take in more heat and that
heat transfers
into the ground.
So in this Pleistocene park, this park that they've been doing this experiment
in Siberia for
a while, they have, they've put in a couple hundred animals that aren't mammoths,
right?
They put in ox and reindeer and things like that.
And they're knocking trees over with the tractors.
And once they knock trees over and they simulate a mammoth knocking the trees
and shrubs over,
the other, the fleet grazers are able to keep the vegetation from regrowing.
So when the vegetation doesn't regrow, you get all this grassland and the grassland
has snowpack.
The snowpack gets stumped.
So there's no insulation.
It reflects more light.
It just, it's like, it's like three or four different processes that make the
ground.
I think on average, it's like eight degrees colder.
So it keeps things more frozen.
So once we removed all the megafauna from the Arctic through hunting or maybe
other means,
regardless, once they were removed, the Arctic got warmer.
The Siberia and Alaska got warmer.
And so slowly we're getting more and more carbon emissions from up there.
But by putting these animals back, and I just love the idea of going up to the
Arctic and
it looking like the African savanna, right?
With all of these incredible animals.
But by putting these animals back, it in theory will make the Arctic colder,
slow down the melting
of the permafrost, which will in turn trap the carbon for longer in the ground.