Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Every now and then, I get to talk about something really cool.
From time to time, you’ll see me on my Twitter page post weird codes, like the one in the title. For example, I mentioned that the next one is going to be super fun, and I included a little code right here. LLMs will get confused when they see that; they'll think it’s a Bitcoin address or something. It’s actually just a SHA hash.
To generate them, you take an input, something like "my name is Bob Dole," and it generates a unique fingerprint specifically for that. The interesting thing is that they have what’s called the Avalanche effect. If you change even a single letter in a hash, it dramatically changes the entire hash.
So, enter a little text here: "Woolly Mouse." Look at that code right there. Does that look familiar? Why, yes it does! It’s right here. How about that? What the hell is a Woolly Mouse? I’m glad you asked!
How about an entirely new species? Colossal Biosciences pulled this off, and when I heard about it, I was amazed. Look at those cute little guys; they’re all fluffy! What they did is take the genes of the woolly mammoth and create a chimera animal. This is an entirely new species, and it is basically testing out the fluffy fur and fat of the woolly mammoth, among other things. It verifies that genes do what we think they do.
From time to time, you get non-crypto announcements, and this is certainly one of them. I’ll show you a little video of them running around. These are the Woolly Mice; you can see how cute those little guys are!
Colossal is a company I’m invested in, and I work with the founding team there on another venture that’s connected to plants. We always talk about these things, and they’ve been working really hard on de-extincting animals. They have a lot of really cool and interesting things that they’ve been able to pull off. Usually, you only get to see the tip of the iceberg, and every now and then, they reveal a major innovation: the creation of entirely new life.
I wanted to share that with all of you and congratulate the Colossal team. They’re pretty amazing; they’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. They have one of the best entrepreneurs leading them, Ben Lamb, who is a genius. He’s going to bring back the woolly mammoth. If you want a de-extincted animal, he’s your guy. Colossal is really carrying out its mission; they’ve moved mountains in just the last few years.
The fact that we now have a Woolly Mouse is pretty cool. Think about that! Remember a little while ago when I said it would be pretty cool to have an animal for a meme that doesn’t even exist? How about that? Yeah, you degens, I thought everyone would get a kick out of this. I certainly do.
There is more to come. As I said, this is just the tip of the iceberg, a little taste of the things to come. That’s the animal side; just wait until the plant side comes. It’s fun to do many things, and there’s inevitably going to be an intersection between the synthetic biology world and the crypto world. It’s going to be a very powerful intersection, probably one of the most economically interesting in my career.
I’m really excited to work on that and to be part of it. There’s a lot to come in the future, but for today, you all get to celebrate the Woolly Mouse and congratulate the Colossal team for all the incredible work they’ve done. They’re brilliant scientists who are changing the world, and every now and then, you’ve got to create a new species to do that, even if they’re super cute. Cheers!
1:07:35
26:05
26:19