914: Ben Lamm | Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth

914: Ben Lamm | Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:06] Ben Lamm: If we could grow 20 northern white rhinos or 100 northern white rhinos with engineered and genetic diversity back into Africa and save that species and open source that tech for anyone in conservation.

[00:00:24] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional hostage negotiator, economic hitman, Fortune 500 CEO, or legendary Hollywood filmmaker.

[00:00:52] And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyberwarfare, crime and cults, and more, that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

[00:01:08] Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. By the way, before you all tweet at me or email me, there's going to be no episode this Thursday because I'm taking a little bit of time off. Not a ton, because it's only one episode, but a little. Enough. Maybe catch my breath.

[00:01:23] Today, many of you were super interested in our last episode with Forrest Galante, where we discussed bringing back extinct animals. I was also, of course, fascinated by this, and I wanted to bring on the CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the company at the forefront of de-extinction. Starting with the Woolly Mammoth that we mentioned on that episode.

[00:01:42] Today we'll dive into why this is a good idea, and not just Jurassic Park 2.0 or whatever version we're on right now, only in real life. And we'll talk about how this can be done and on what timeline and why the Woolly Mammoth is actually the best place to start. It's an amazing time to be alive, folks.

[00:01:58] All right, here we go with Ben Lamm.

[00:02:05] Tell us what you're doing in a nutshell, because when I first heard it, I was like – oh, I saw an ad on Instagram. And I was like, oh, this is fake or something. This is like a satirical thing that doesn't exist because they're trying to test us and get clicks and then like dot, dot, dot, steal my identity. But it’s real.

[00:02:19] Ben Lamm: It would be a very expensive, very late, you know, it's we have 114 scientists and 30 academic partners and postdocs around the world. It’s like, it’d  be a very expensive joke.

[00:02:33] Jordan Harbinger: Expensive grift, man. Like it's all a big hoax.

[00:02:37] Ben Lamm: Yeah, I think we've seen online that there's much easier ways to steal people's identity.

[00:02:41] I think so. Just say that you're a Nigerian prince and send my grandmother an email, but you don't have to do it this way. So we started a company called Colossal. I was mesmerized by George Church and all the incredible ideas that he had. We started our company, Colossal, which is to our knowledge, the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

[00:03:02] What that means is we're working to bring back extinct species or at least proxies of them, at least as much as you can with the DNA that's recovered, and build technologies that help human healthcare, and build technologies that could be helpful for conservation, and we want to subsidize that and give all that conservation tech to the world.

[00:03:21] Jordan Harbinger: The ad I saw was something like, “Hey, we're going to bring back the Woolly Mammoth, and that's why I was like, “Yeah, whatever. This is clearly fake.” But I happened to be that day talking with Forrest Galante, and I was like, “Hey man, have you heard of this?” And he's like, “Actually, I know all about this and I'm on the board.” I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. So this is not fake, this is a real thing?” He explained it, and then I, of course, said this to him, and he said, I should definitely say this to you, because it's probably annoying, and you hear it all the time. This is kind of the idea behind Jurassic Park, right?

[00:03:50] I mean, you had to be influenced by this movie.

[00:03:51] Ben Lamm: Believe it or not, we have heard that before.

[00:03:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I believe that.

[00:03:51] Ben Lamm: It's come up before. I think the theme music now just plays every time any of us goes into an office. But you know, what's interesting about Jurassic Park is I think it did a really good job of showcasing and teaching the world that genetic engineering is a thing, you know? Now we're not doing exactly what Jurassic Park was.

[00:04:12] They were taking ancient DNA, dino DNA from Amber, which you can't get, trust me. You can't get it.

[00:04:19] Jordan Harbinger: Have you tried?

[00:04:21] Ben Lamm: Not that I've tried, but I'm telling you definitively, you cannot get DNA from Amber. It's porous, it's bad, anyways, it doesn't preserve well. But then, they were filling in the holes and the gaps of the dino DNA with frog DNA.

[00:04:33] Think of us as doing the exact reverse, which I think is arguably a lot easier. We're taking the Asian elephant genome and other genomes that we know produce an Asian elephant. And then we're identifying the genes from the Woolly Mammoth genome that made a mammoth a mammoth, and then we're engineering those into architecture that we already know works, right?

[00:04:53] So I like to think of it as we're slightly smarter Jurassic Park, but what's interesting is that George Church's original sequence that he did, and I forgot what it was on, it was on yeast or something, actually from his research, shows up in Michael Crichton's book.

[00:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:05:10] Ben Lamm: So if you want to be technical, I would argue that Jurassic Park was inspired by George. In a way, I think it's completely the other way around, and we just — he's not getting the right royalties on it, but yeah.

[00:05:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right, I like that argument. That's a very lawyerly argument, right? Like, “No, we didn't copy Jurassic Park. They copied my co-founder, George Church’s,” for people who are listening, he's kind of like the OG, he's like the Mick Jagger of genetic engineering and DNA. I'm sure he would roll with that.

[00:05:38] Ben Lamm: Yeah, he is the father of synthetic biology. You know, he's 6”7’ has narcolepsy and he's insanely smart. And what's weird about, you know, your origin story of how you got interested or even like, is this real? That was my moment, too. I called George Church about something completely different.

[00:05:56] I wanted to build a computational biology software platform leveraging AI. I was like, could we build, because I come mostly from software. Could we go build something that's really interesting in synthetic biology? So I was like, who do you call? Well, let's call the man. He answered my question like seven minutes and then I had all this time.

[00:06:11] So I was like, “Well, what else you got?” So he starts talking about regenerating neurons, and sequencing, and DNA synthesis, and all of these things he's doing. And then he ends with like – we have two minutes left on the call, and he's like, “Well, and also I'm working to bring back Woolly Mammoth [to wild] the Arctic to save the world from carbon and methane, and I'll make billions of dollars in carbon credits. I have to go to my next meeting now.”

[00:06:32] And I thought it was like, was this a moment where he's showing his funny side? If it is a joke, it's the longest joke ever from George. And then he hung up. I was like, wait. The greatest thing I've ever heard was just said to me, and then he had to go.

[00:06:47] So I stayed up all night just reading George Church interviews, watching him on Colbert Show, in 60 minutes, and all these things, and there was a mammoth route line. So whenever he was talking about the mammoth would come back and he was making this cameo in every single thing. So I was like, I have to learn more.

[00:07:03] I was on the phone with him the next day. I was like, “Can I come see you?” And he was like, which I thought the answer was no, he's like, “Sure.” I was like, “What about next Thursday?” He's like, “Great.” So within a week, I went from this last 30 second pitch that he gave me to in his lab half the day, and then we decided, “We should go do this.”

[00:07:22] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:07:23] Ben Lamm: It's crazy. But I had that moment like you, where I was like, “This is insane.”

[00:07:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I thought this guy was well respected, and here he is telling me he's going to bring back the Woolly Mammoth? Like, is this the beginning of the downward slope where everyone's like, what happened to that guy? He used to be so—

[00:07:37] Ben Lamm: Yeah, he turned left. He was like going straight for a long time, then he took a hard left and everyone's like, “Wait, what?”

[00:07:43] Jordan Harbinger: Also, I love that you describe one of his chief qualities as has narcolepsy, which tells me that you've been out to eat with him and he's just like falling asleep with a fork in his mouth or something like that.

[00:07:50] Ben Lamm: He has definitely muffeted it out on a Zoom or two. So I know I'm not being interesting if he's looking at the ceiling. Damn it, George.

[00:07:59] Jordan Harbinger:  I grew up with a family friend who had it and he would routinely – like we'd be eating a salad at dinner and he's just asleep. And I thought he was being silly because I was a little kid at the time and my mom's like, “No, he just actually falls asleep all the time.” And he can't drive home. If he doesn't have his medication, he can't drive because he'll fall asleep.

[00:08:15] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:08:17] Jordan Harbinger:  Yeah. I don't think it's a matter of being boring, but yeah, it never feels good when the person you're talking to is immediately put out by whatever you're saying, regardless of the health conditions. So why the mammoth? You said it was kind of something he had come up with and talked about before, but why not start with a worm or a bug or a smaller animal, like some kind of sheep or something like that?

[00:08:36] Ben Lamm: Something that doesn't require 22 months of gestation and is endangered.

[00:08:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Or it doesn't exist at all anymore, right?

[00:08:42] Ben Lamm: For us, it's easy, right? We wanted George, we wanted his technologies. He had been working on it for eight years. We had a major lead. He had identified the genes that he believed made a mammoth a mammoth.

[00:08:53] He had all the core sequencing and engineering tech. So, you know, you kind of got the mammoth with George, right?

[00:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: It’s a package deal.

[00:09:00] Ben Lamm: Yeah, it's a package deal. But why he was interested in the mammoths is he doesn't want to lose elephants. And working on the mammoth kind of gives you an excuse to build all these technologies which can help elephants so we can understand more about elephant behavior, human elephant conflict, how to gestate elephants, even long term ex utero, and artificial wombs.

[00:09:20] How we can eradicate a disease called EEHV, which kills about 25 percent of elephants year round. Most people don't know this, but EEHV is the largest killer of elephants in the world, not poaching. And so, if we can eradicate that disease, well, we could save more elephants than all other elephant conservation combined worldwide.

[00:09:38] And so, it's something that's really fascinating. But as you could probably guess, there's no big total addressable marketing in building a business of curing elephant herpes. But if you're building a mammoth and doing all these other interesting things, you know, it can be one of the by-products along the way that you can go focus on.

[00:09:55] And then he's very passionate of this whole concept of Pleistocene rewilding, like how do we, you know, jumpstart the ecological system that was this mammoth steppe that's now this like Arctic tundra. And he's been working with Siberian scientists and scientists in Canada and in the Arctic slope, and seeing that they've shown that if you can build the right ecosystem with enough biodiversity at the right density levels, you can actually lower ground temperatures by up to eight degrees year round, which is insane because there's more carbon and more methane stored in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet.

[00:10:32] Double what's in the atmosphere. And methane, just so you know, is about 30 times worse than CO2 in the atmosphere. So if we can preserve that and build kind of this lush nitrogen oxygen cycle in the winters and summers with the right level of biodiversity there, you know, we can make a material impact on, you know, kind of rejuvenating this ecosystem, which used to be really, really lush, and really valuable for carbon sequestration. And so that was his vision.

[00:11:00] Jordan Harbinger: What are mammoths doing in the Arctic that somehow keeps – they're heavy and they're big, that's all I got.

[00:11:06] Ben Lamm: Yes, yes, which they're great carbon stores in themselves, right, like elephants are. But four kind of really big things. You know, number one, just any big grazing population that is eating and defecating and spreading, does a better job of creating more biodiversity in the plant life that's there.

[00:11:25] So you have kind of that rich oxygen nitrogen cycle where you have these large herbivores, number one. Number two, elephants, which I didn't, you know, at the time I was like, “Wait, are we starting a war against trees here, George?” Because he was like, “Well, elephants love knocking down trees.” And I was like, “Is that a good thing?”

[00:11:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we're supposed to plant trees.

[00:11:40] Ben Lamm: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it turns out there's been studies that have shown, two different studies that have shown that elephants actually, like forest elephants, are incredible environmental modifiers where they actually knock down and destroy the trees that are the least efficient of carbon, just naturally, which is just amazing.

[00:12:00] And that gives room for the other more carbon efficient trees to exist. And in the Arctic, that taiga forest, they are not very efficient carbon sequestration trees. They're actually like these, almost like heat lightning rods that don't store carbon very well. They're super dark bark. It collects the energy from the sun and permeates it down into the root structure, and it actually warms it up even more.

[00:12:21] But if, so if you can transform that kind of tundra ecosystem more into an arctic grassland, we find that's about six times more efficient at storing carbon than the taiga forest, number one. And then it's about two to three times more efficient at what's called the albedo effect, which is light reflection from space.

[00:12:39] So anything that's not absorbed by those Arctic grasses, it gets restored from space. And then the last thing is this whole, you know, massive kind of grazing and herding mentality. They've shown in Pleistocene Park in Siberia that with the right population density of musk ox and bison, and some horses, that they've actually been able to lower the ground temperatures by up to eight degrees.

[00:13:03] Because what happens in the winter months is they actually compact that snow and what that allows for is the arctic winter winds which are the cooling effect that actually, it permeates deeper than it would be on that fluffy layer because it's closer to the ground.

[00:13:17] Jordan Harbinger: It’s not insulated, yeah, as much.

[00:13:19] Ben Lamm: Exactly. So the ground gets colder and stays colder longer. So if you start to melt something at, you know, negative 20 versus negative 14 degrees, the negative 20 is going to stay cold longer and frozen longer.

[00:13:32] Jordan Harbinger: This is just one of those amazing, like, isn't nature amazing where you just look at, okay —

[00:13:37] Ben Lamm: Nature’s awesome.

[00:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: So they're trampling things down, they're packing snow down, they're knocking down trees that are weak and inefficient and also store heat.

[00:13:44] And they're also doing all this other stuff that helps store carbon. And it's like, this is why when humans mess with the ecosystem deliberately or otherwise by killing things, it just has all those knock on effects that nobody ever would have thought about. Like, why is this getting hotter? Well, actually, the mammoths are gone, and here's all these dominoes.

[00:14:02] I'm guessing also that with a big mammal, you can't unring the bell if you're like, “Oh, speaking of it, altering the environment. Now this thing we never thought about is happening.” But with a bird, it's like, “Well, we're screwed now. We're never getting all those things.” Or some sort of worm, it's like, “We're never—

[00:14:17] Ben Lamm: We got to go catch these things, yeah. You know, we do want to be mindful of intended versus unintended consequences. The nice thing about a thousand pound asset is that you could watch them and help them. And I think we can be more mindful of their disbursement into the ecosystem.

[00:14:34] But there was a paper that just came out a couple of months ago around trophic downgrading. This whole concept that if you remove keystone animals from the environment, specifically predators like they did in Yellowstone, it has this cascading effect when the food chain on the food web on carbon and whatnot.

[00:14:50] And I forgot the number, but it's like, nine species, which elephants were one of them. If we make more of them and we protect them, they can offset all of car emissions. Like it's crazy.

[00:15:02] Jordan Harbinger: That is crazy.

[00:15:03] Ben Lamm: That is your nature based solution. So I do think that there's, you know, to your point, we saw this in the pandemic. Nature can repair stuff pretty quick if we kind of give it a chance.

[00:15:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, give it a little bit of a boost and stop messing with it, I suppose. So how many mammoths do you need? Not millions, I assume, because that's going to be tricky.

[00:15:21] Ben Lamm: Yeah, and they have a long gestational cycle, right? So there's 22 months of gestation that's required just for birth. And then it's about 12 years to sexual maturity in most elephants, right? We're not looking at this point to engineer and try to speed that up. Maybe there's ways in the future But right now from a pure synthetic biology perspective, we're not currently working on that.

[00:15:42] So it takes a long time for those populations to truly grow. Our goal is to start with hundreds, then we want to move to thousands. We can make a material different from our modeling with, you know, low thousands.

[00:15:53] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible. So in a few decades, this could be a thing that's actually doing something.

[00:15:57] Ben Lamm: A thing, yeah, yeah. And I mean, we got –  so everything, all the species that we're working on is through surrogacy, for the most part.

[00:16:06] Jordan Harbinger: It had to be. Right.

[00:16:07] Ben Lamm: What's so weird about my life now is that the de-extinction part of the business doesn't feel like science fiction because I know where the teams are and I know the process. Kind of like software, it's a systems model that we had to go build to tackle on it. The thing that's the most science fiction to me right now is the exterior development. And we've had this incredible 17-person team of women and men that are working to, you know, grow animals ex utero. It's very early stages. I don't think any of our genuine animals will come from ex utero development. But you know, if we are successful in that, I think that that's even a bigger game changer for conservation than all of our genetic engineering.

[00:16:43] Like if we could grow 20 northern white rhinos or 100 northern white rhinos with engineered and genetic diversity, then we could reintroduce them with mindful partners in the conservation world back into Africa and save that species and open source that tech for anyone in conservation. So that's the science fiction part of where I think we are today.

[00:17:06] Jordan Harbinger: I love that. I feel like there's so many cool ideas that come out of this and it's like, you can give a lot of them away because the business model is kind of over here. But this other tech that can change the world, but maybe isn't super profitable is over here.

[00:17:17] And it's like, “All right, fine. We're going to sell these external wombs for use in, I don't know, agricultural breeding or even human fertility.” But like, “Oh, these endangered species? You can just use that stuff too because it exists.”

[00:17:28] Ben Lamm: Look, we're not as cool as NASA. I think I would argue NASA stands for hope and meaning, and it's arguably, you know, when the US is doing stuff right or wrong, I still think NASA persists, right? I think it's one of those things that the whole world can get behind. And looking to that Apollo program as a literal moonshot, is kind of the inspiration that all these technologies came off of it.

[00:17:52] Some people talk about Tang, but some of these technologies are fundamental to internet communication right now, right? And so, those are trillion dollar industries that came off of that. You know, we've already spun out our first technology company, which is a computational biology platform.

[00:18:08] Even the pieces to the artificial womb could be helpful like right now, we've got this really cool hydrogel system that's leveraging AI, computer vision, and a little bit of robotics and microfluidics to basically keep embryos healthier, longer at their different developmental stages.

[00:18:27] So even before you get into the super sci-fi artificial wombs for all these different animals or humans or whatnot, just that system, if we could make embryos healthier, longer from an IVF perspective, that's really interesting, right? That can be really helpful. So I think there's a lot of these technologies that can be monetizable, even on the path to our bigger goals.

[00:18:49] Jordan Harbinger: Mammoths have been extinct for 4,000 years, something like that, right?

[00:18:54] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:18:55] Jordan Harbinger: And were they hunted to extinction?

[00:18:56] Ben Lamm: Yeah. So there's some debate on this, right? Some people are like, “Mammoths were not hunted to extinction,” because the last mammoth died on Wrangel Island, then they were an isolated population through inbreeding and through a genetic bottleneck.

[00:19:07] But you know, there's lots of evidence that shows that early man hunted and killed mammoths. There are spear marks in mammoths. There's actual mammoth tusks and teeth that were in bones that were used in early man's weapons and in art. They're in France. There's cave drawings of mammoths.

[00:19:25] So we know that there was this coexistence. What's interesting about, you know, some people say, “Well, it would have been impossible for humans to kill all the mammoths.” But I think the combination of the climate changing and early man's influence, like you can't — there has been an interesting study last year that shows that the rise of early man and the fall of mammoths were directly inverse, right?

[00:19:45] And that goes back to the fact that you don't have to kill off all the mammoths to eradicate them like you would do the thylacine, right? Because the thylacine in Australia, you know, it had 13-and-a-half day gestation. They can produce very, very quickly. But with 22-month gestation, single calves, for the most part, there have been a couple twins, but for the most part, single calves, and 13 years of sexual maturity, you only have to kill off enough, right? Because then the population goes into a slump and it kind of just kills itself over time because you have natural predation and other things outside of early man.

[00:20:20] So if you just impact those numbers enough, you will cause that unfortunate demise.

[00:20:27] Jordan Harbinger:  How does the process work in brief? Okay. No mosquitoes trapped in a piece of Amber. Got it. Do you find a Tuscan bones in like a mine somewhere, and then you're like, “All right. We're going to drill into this thing and get some DNA out of there.”

[00:20:39] Ben Lamm: You can get it in a lot of different places. Different animals have different ways of extracting the DNA, but I'll talk about mammoths. And to your mind question, I was just in North Dakota where they just discovered another, with the governor and team there, and they just discovered in a working mine are partially entire mammoth that had actually soft tissue on it.

[00:20:59] Jordan Harbinger: God, imagine finding that. You're digging for some bauxite or whatever, I don't even know what that is, and you're like, “What? It’s a tusk!”

[00:21:04] Ben Lamm: Yeah, and then you're like, well, here's a tusk, right? That's exactly what they saw first, they saw a tusk.

[00:21:09] And so, in the permafrost and other areas that are extremely cold, mammoths would die. They'd freeze very quickly and then they'd get no layers, no layers. So unlike hot, wet environments where they just decompose very, very quickly. And so for us though, it's still very degraded. So you can get DNA from tusks, you can get it from some bone, some soft tissue.

[00:21:30] Teeth is a great area to get DNA specifically because it's stored really well there. And so for us to build kind of the, what we need, it's not a true reference genome, but to build kind of the framework of a reference genome that we could use, it actually takes about – it took us about 54 mammoth genomes.

[00:21:48] So about five of those were public, about five of those, Eriona Hysolli, our head of Biological Sciences and the mammoth lead. who worked for George and went to Siberia with George, they got about five of those from retrieving them from the permafrost. And then one of our collaborators, Love Dalen in University of Stockholm, who's incredible, he actually is one of the top mammoth researchers in the world.

[00:22:09] He let us leverage 44 of his unpublished mammoth genomes. So it's kind of that assembly of all of that in that analysis that you can really start to understand, was this the gene that caused X or this a cluster of genes that caused X, or was this diversity? And so, you really have to get to the population genomics level so that you can start understanding and narrowing down your targets.

[00:22:31] Jordan Harbinger: Right, because otherwise if you have just a damaged piece of DNA, you don't know if that missing part is the one that's whole on this other specimen or if that was totally different in both of those species.

[00:22:42] Ben Lamm: Yeah, or was this the Wrangel Island piece and this piece of DNA is going to be really bad, right, if we were able to produce it?

[00:22:48] Jordan Harbinger: That’s interesting.

[00:22:49] Ben Lamm: So there's a lot of computation. So George, as I mentioned, did six to eight years of analysis. The tools have come a long way. We built an entire software company around doing the analysis of the mammoth and then spun it out. But yeah, doing that work and leveraging the latest tools has been critical.

[00:23:05] And we have about, it was about 65. It's grown a little bit. It's now in the low 70s. There's about 70 targeted genes that drive all the core phenotypes that have been lost in the elephant lineage.

[00:23:19] Jordan Harbinger: So if the DNA from one animal specimen is damaged, can you use DNA from another specimen to fill in the gaps?

[00:23:26] Ben Lamm: That's the kind of Jurassic Park question. Think of it exactly reverse. We use the DNA of the Asian elephant, which is 99. 6 percent the same as a mammoth, as the reference genome. So we built a reference genome, which we were the first to ever build a reference genome for the Asian elephant and the African elephant.

[00:23:42] And once again, that is conservation benefit, so we publish that, we give that to the world. And then, we use that as our map, right? Because we know that DNA was taken from a live elephant. So we know that this DNA and this map produce this elephant because we took the blood from it, right? We know that that worked.

[00:23:59] And then we use that, and with other elephants to build a reference genome that we can do comparison from. But what's interesting is that, this is an interesting stat that I learned in this process, an Asian elephant is 99.6 percent a Woolly Mammoth, genetically. It's actually closer to a mammoth than an Asian elephant is to an African elephant.

[00:24:23] Jordan Harbinger: Really? I wouldn't have guessed that.

[00:24:24] Ben Lamm: I mean, I thought that African elephants and Asian elephants were just so close.

[00:24:27] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah.

[00:24:28] Ben Lamm: I had no idea that the mammoths were actually closer.

[00:24:30] Jordan Harbinger: I thought it wouldn't be like the difference between somebody with blue eyes and somebody with brown eyes or like dark hair and light hair. That's kind of what I think.

[00:24:35] Ben Lamm: Exactly.

[00:24:37] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:24:38] Ben Lamm: But Asian elephants and African elephants can actually still interbreed and produce viable offspring. It's a weird — biology is so weird.

[00:24:44] Jordan Harbinger: It's so amazing. So, this becomes, not like a chimera, but like a hybrid species with DNA from non-extinct species. It sounds like you're adding the mammoth DNA to the elephant, not the other way around. You're kind of adding the cold weather — you're adding the hair and et cetera, and the fact. I'm sure there's more.

[00:25:03] Ben Lamm: There's more under the hood, too, and kind of subsystems and how they work and curved tusks, and there's a lot more to it.

[00:25:09] But, directionally 100 percent accurate in terms of how you're thinking about it. But all animals are effectively hybrids. I was on a podcast or interview a couple months ago and I got into this philosophical debate and this guy was not happy with me, which is fine.

[00:25:24] Jordan Harbinger: It's not a real mammoth.

[00:25:25] Ben Lamm: Yeah. They weren’t very good at the dodo. They're like, “You're not building a dodo. You're building a stupid,” this is a direct quote I think, it was like, “a stupid looking pigeon.” And I was like, “But sir, dodos were pigeons.”

[00:25:38] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't know that.

[00:25:39] Ben Lamm: They were. They are pigeons. Dodos are stupid looking pigeons. A mammoth is a hairy elephant. Those are just facts, and so we get in – for a while we had this percentage of people that were like, “We don't believe it's possible,” and then, they kind of turn to “Oh, no, maybe it's possible. But we don't know if you should do it,” and then we try to explain why we're doing it like, “But it's not a hundred percent.”

[00:26:01] I was like,  well, my dog is a rescue and she's awesome. I mean, she's a hundred percent dog, but she's not purebred. And so it's like, where do you draw the lines? Like if an Asian elephant can interbreed with a mammoth, does that mean that it's not a male? All species go through a hybridization process that creates a new species. That is the process. There is a percentage of people that like to argue the semantics of what we're doing, but it just doesn't affect me.

[00:26:32] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ben Lamm. We'll be right back.

[00:26:38] This episode is sponsored in part by Nissan. These days, too many people have to settle for the next best thing, especially when it comes to choosing a car. But at Nissan, there's a vehicle type for everyone, for every driver who wants more. Whether you want more adventure, more electric, more action, more guts, or more turbo charged excitement, Nissan is here to make sure you get it. Because Nissan is all about giving people a whole spectrum of thrills to choose from, with a diverse lineup of vehicles, from sports cars, to sedans, to EVs, pickups, and crossovers. With Nissan's diverse lineup, anyone can find something to help them reach their more. In my life, I'm always looking for more. Engaging dialogue that doesn't just make for killer podcast episodes, but genuinely push the boundaries of my understanding and growth. After all, if I'm not learning something new or getting a fresh perspective, what is the point? And that's why I like that Nissan wants to help people find their more. More freedom, more adventure, or even just more fun. So thanks again to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show, and for the reminder to find your more. Learn more at nissanusa.com.

[00:27:30] This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. Ever find yourself yearning for a nourishing salad, fully aware of its benefits, only for your mind to conjure up images of a gooey pizza? That's our brain's sneaky way of diverting us, and we've all felt it, knowing what's right, yet being swayed by conflicting desires. This mental push and pull is exactly where therapy can be transformative, navigating you through these cognitive challenges and ensuring your choices mirror what's truly good for you. So whether you've tried therapy before or not, it's a goldmine for fostering good habits, establishing clear boundaries, unveiling the optimal you. Therapy's not just helpful for those super rocky patches in life. BetterHelp is, frankly, it's amazing. You can check out the 123,000 five-star reviews on the App Store. BetterHelp has helped Jen through a rough patch as well. It's just very easy to get started. I love that. The barrier to entry is so low. Just a brief questionnaire so they can pair you up with a therapist that matches with what you need. Jen clicked with the first match, but if you don't, you can change therapists anytime with no additional charge. So make your brain your friend with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/jordan today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's BetterHelp-H-E-L-P.com/jordan.

[00:28:40] If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, well, it's because of my network, the circle of people that I know, like, and trust. I get guests like this through other guests or through other friends of mine. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. I get it. You don't run a podcast. Maybe you think you don't need to network. This is not cringy. It's down to earth.It's not awkward. There's a happiness dividend from crafting and maintaining relationships. We've talked about the science of that on the show. So it doesn't matter if you're 70 and retired, it doesn't matter if you're in a government job that supposedly doesn't require networking. I call BS on that, but I digress. And many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Once again, the course is at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:29:17] Now, back to Ben Lamm. On that same annoying line of thought, is it really a mammoth if it's just the DNA but it's not raised by other mammoths? I mean, I guess what I'm asking is, they don't have the same habits of other mammoths, because they're not raised by a mammoth mom. I asked this of Forrest, because I was like, “How's it going to learn how to do mammoth stuff?”

[00:29:37] Ben Lamm: That’s a great question, right? And so a couple things. We work with a lot of different partners around the world, so we've been fortunate. We're partners with Elephant Havens and International Elephant Foundation and Save the Elephants. A lot of people are like, “But do we think conservation groups hate you?” I was like, “Well, you've been to our homepage, because it's on our homepage.”

[00:29:53] But in all seriousness, you know, you can learn a lot from existing folks that have been working on this for decades. And so, Elephant Havens, for example, we're working on a project right now, leveraging computer vision and AI to understand herd dynamics and rewilding of orphaned elephants.

[00:30:11] They're a great group in Botswana that focuses on looking at elephants and saving orphaned elephants, and helping rebuild herds for rewilding, right? And so for us, we can learn from that. We can try to be a little bit smarter and layer in AI and computer vision, so it doesn't always have to be a human in the loop scenario that kind of comes from our tech background.

[00:30:31] And then we can apply that to our herds. And I didn't know this either, because I always think of Asian elephant tropical equals hot, right? Like in my very simple cave brand, in my knee and [inaudible] But there's interesting, we've actually worked with some groups in Canada that have Asian elephants that you, once again follows that kind of same line that in Canada. And in the winter they sleep in barns or whatever.

[00:30:53] They can't go to like negative 40, but they actually let them out. They break through the ice. They swim in frozen lakes. Man, I have videos of mammoths playing with snowballs and stuff. And they're just rolling around having a great time, and these are elephant behaviorists that are with them that aren't like, these are like distressed mammoths.

[00:31:11] They like, can't wait to play in the snow. And it's the same thing for mammoths. Mammoths actually went into pretty warm temperatures, too. And so those ecosystems still exist that can survive that, but even an Asian elephant today raised by an Asian elephant mom can survive and start playing around in a snow-filled environment.

[00:31:31] Jordan Harbinger: Right, okay. You said mammoths, but you meant elephants. I was like, you already have mammoths?

[00:31:35] Ben Lamm: Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

[00:31:31] Jordan Harbinger: No, they have elephants in the cold water.

[00:31:36] Ben Lamm: They’re Asian elephants playing in the water, yes.

[00:31:37] Jordan Harbinger: That does make sense. And so what you end up with is, and again, I'm not trying to be like, “It's not a real mammoth, bro.” But it's a proxy species, an animal that holds its same place in the ecosystem, right?

[00:31:46] Ben Lamm: Yeah, exactly. It's an animal that holds — with the core genes and traits that have been lost to that lineage, Right.

[00:31:53] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha.

[00:31:54] Ben Lamm: The definition of de-extinction on Wikipedia is the bringing back of it or creation, I think they may have added this for us. We did not add it though, of a proxy species that even resembles that of the extinct species.

[00:32:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:32:09] Ben Lamm: It's a new category, so it's constantly evolving and being redefined.

[00:32:13] Jordan Harbinger: I assume you're not going to make the mammal down there in Austin because it seems like something with a ton of hair would be uncomfortable in that hot climate. Maybe you can speak from personal experience. All my hairiest friends don't last very long in Texas. It seems like a mammoth would be no exception.

[00:32:26] Ben Lamm: Our two biggest labs are in Dallas and you know, it's until today it was 111. And so all the core engineering is happening in Boston. And then we will start to look for not just rewilding locations, but raising locations. And so, we just announced – we actually didn't really announce it.

[00:32:46] But it did get out in the press. We just announced a partnership with North Dakota. You know, we are talking to other states as well. We're talking to Canada. We're talking to some folks all over kind of the — not just the Arctic Circle, but Circle Polar North, which is even bigger. I got to spend about 10 days in Alaska last year meeting with the lieutenant governor and a bunch of folks. But we just did a partnership with North Dakota that the government actually invested in Colossal, which is great.

[00:33:11] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow. Yeah.

[00:33:12] Ben Lamm: And so we're long-term collaborators and we want to build – it's a great location because they actually get down to negative 30 in parts during the winter in North Dakota. And so it's a great state that, you know, I think could be a really – we haven't made a definitive decision, but it could be a place where we have early mammoth calves because it's got a pretty temperate summer and then a great winter for them.

[00:33:33] Jordan Harbinger: I'm always like, this is so great. I'm so optimistic about this kind of stuff. But what about other general public perception, you know? How do we get the whole world on board with something that is so radical?

[00:33:42] Because you certainly must be getting letters from people that are like, “This is against what nature intended and this is demonic of you,” or just like you're insane.

[00:33:51] Ben Lamm: We get a lot of feedback.

[00:33:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, feedback.

[00:33:53] Ben Lamm: Feedback. But you know, before I answer that, I want to say one thing about kind of the last thing.

[00:34:00] What I didn't know about this business, which I found really interesting, was it's very hard to build a system that, you know, has computational analysis and has this Indiana Jones ancient DNA component, has this Jurassic Park genetic engineering component, has this conservation component. But what I did, that's all hard.

[00:34:17] That's all real hard, building tech. That's all very difficult. Software, technology and sciences, biology is not easy, but what I didn't anticipate is we spend, and have as many teams working on working with the public, working with the governments. working with legislators, working with nonprofits, working with indigenous people groups.

[00:34:38] Like today I was on the phone with one of the largest indigenous people groups in the United States, just hearing their cultural feedback on what we're doing. So we try to take a very inclusive strategy, which gets into your question, but there's a lot around the company that has nothing to do with making a mammoth or a dodo or a thylacine.

[00:34:56] There's so much around the company that also you have to do and be very mindful of. If we could just stay in our lab and make mammoths and then, someone could just run with it from there, that'd be awesome. But there's a lot of extra around it that I did not necessarily anticipate from day one. In public sentiment, you know, we've garnered 70 billion media impressions since launch.

[00:35:17] We haven't even produced an animal, and so people are pretty excited. Interestingly enough to your question, 98 percent positive or neutral feedback, and I would consider neutral feedback, at least our PR teams are telling us that neutral feedback is anything that has both a positive sentiment and it reflects that as well as the negative and it's fair and balanced reporting, right?

[00:35:37] Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Like, it seems interesting. Hope it doesn't ruin the whole planet. Is that neutral feedback? Okay.

[00:35:42] Ben Lamm: Yeah. For us, we do get a lot of feedback. I will say that we get more positive. If you take out neutral, we get significantly more positive, about four to one than negative, which is amazing. And, you know, I think that we've had a very good attitude that some of our top critics, even at launch, like Lou Vidal was a critic at launch.

[00:36:00] We didn't include him. Davis, he's like, is this like, didn't really know us. We're like, who are these guys out of the blue that are just saying this crazy stuff? And then instead of just ignoring them or complaining about them, we try to reach out to them and try to work with them because if you are what we call an informed critic, you're pretty smart, and you're informed on about something that we're doing, and maybe you're totally wrong, but maybe you're totally right and we missed something.

[00:36:25] And so, if we didn't have Lou Vidal, for example, as a part of our project, our work would be significantly harder. And so, we reached out to him and said, “What do you not like about what we're doing? Where could we be better?” We try to run towards critics versus away from them. But once again, that's the category of informed critics.

[00:36:43] There's sometimes we do get annoyed by just like, what I call the uninformed critics of like, “I'm a curator at some random museum that no one's ever heard of, and I have an opinion on genetic engineering, but I've never taken a genetic engineering class in the world. But I don't believe George Church, the father of genetic engineering,” right? That feedback isn't as helpful.

[00:37:02] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. That's, I think we call that haterade in the sphere that I'm in. Yeah, that's it.

[00:37:07] Ben Lamm: Yeah, we do get some haterade. We get some religious debates on it, you know?

[00:37:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:37:12] Ben Lamm: We try to be really mindful and listen to them from a religious perspective. You know, we think that we play God when we eradicate a species or we destroy the ecosystem that – and so we try to listen and give that feedback, but at the same time, we've also taken the reality. It’s like, we're going to do the best we can.

[00:37:30] We're going to do some sh*t that's really wrong. We're going to do the best to fix it. And we're going to try to do a lot more right than we do wrong. We'll try to learn from our mistakes and from the public. But, we're not going to do everything right, so we can't please everybody.

[00:37:45] Jordan Harbinger: If there's religious criticism for this, I do wonder how they sort of explain the Noah's Ark thing. Were they like, “Well, he had direct permission from God.” I mean, that's probably the counter, but it's like the guy literally built a boat to save the animals and put them on there. I mean, whatever. I don't know. I'm no expert. But it seems—

[00:37:57] Ben Lamm: But we're fine. But we're also helping biobanks. So, in a way, it's very Noah's Ark-ish.

[00:38:02] Jordan Harbinger: It's very Noah's Ark-ish, man.

[00:38:03] Ben Lamm: We're preserving species, like, that's not a bad thing. Regardless of where you fall on the religious or belief spectrum, if you are doing things to help preserve the value of life, that seems like a good thing.

[00:38:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it's the whole concept of shepherding. I'm, again, no expert on religion. So, what is the target date for you petting a mammoth and getting that historic, iconic photo that you've been dreaming about for like, a decade or whatever here?

[00:38:28] Ben Lamm: Our goal is 2028 for our first cast.

[00:38:31] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

[00:38:32] Ben Lamm: And we are on track for that, you know?

[00:38:34] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:38:35] Ben Lamm: As you know, science is hard, engineering's hard. But yeah, I mean, we have over 35, 37 people, I don't know the exact count off the top of my head, on just the Mammoth team alone. So, it's a lot of people.

[00:38:45] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:38:46] Ben Lamm: And we aren't like, still thinking about it. So we've established multiple cell lines, gone through and expanded the edits list, and we are actually making edits and stacking edits. And we're advancing multiplex editing. There's a couple parts of the project that are later stage on the gestational side that we will announce maybe later this year or next year, some really interesting milestones on that that have been achieved.

[00:39:09] So we feel confident about that date. If it slips, I think it could slip. months to a year, you know? But it's not going to be like, “Oh, in 2050, maybe,” right? Like, we feel pretty confident.

[00:39:21] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's not fusion. We're still 10 years away from fusion. Every five years we hear that.

[00:39:24] Ben Lamm: Yeah. We've been 10 years away from fusion since before I was born.

[00:39:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say, there’s something about the ‘60s when they were doing nuclear kind of initial—

[00:39:32] Ben Lamm: I’m hopeful on it. We'd all be happy if we get there. And I think, you know, we all — what was that movie we saw about Kilmer and like fusion and we're like, “Yes!”

[00:39:40] Jordan Harbinger: That was The Saint.

[00:39:40] Ben Lamm: The Saint, yes!

[00:39:41] Jordan Harbinger: Where he's stealing the Sacred, yeah, from Elizabeth Shue who's the person who invented nuclear fusion.

[00:39:47] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:39:48] Jordan Harbinger: I love that you reach out to your critics. I think that's important. I mean, for every white bearded, what was his name, John Hammond welcoming you to Jurassic Park, there's a Jeff Goldblum somewhere who's shaking his head and being like, chaos theory, life finds a way, right? And you're like, “Oh, I better find out what that means.”

[00:40:01] Ben Lamm: All the top 10 quotes we get tweeted at quite a lot.

[00:40:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can only imagine.

[00:40:05] Ben Lamm: By the same 20 people, but yeah.

[00:40:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, but the same movie nerds. But, that guy, like the point is he wasn't wrong, right? He was kind of like, “Well, you know, if they'd asked me, maybe I wouldn't have done the frog DNA thing.” Because wasn't the idea they were going to get off the island because of what they had from the frogs, and then they were going to swim to New York and kill everyone, something like that.

[00:40:24] Ben Lamm: Yeah, the frog DNA allowed them to amorphized sex. And so they were all females, but then they were able to start breeding because they were able to change their sex based on some frogs.

[00:40:37] Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. The asexual reproduction or whatever it was called. Yeah, that's right.

[00:40:40] Ben Lamm: Yeah, yeah.

[00:40:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm looking at the collapse of species and things like that, and we're slated to lose 50 percent of all biodiversity between now and 2050. And it's just, it's really horrific. You know, 1,000 to 10,000 times higher in terms of loss of species than natural extinction rate. So what you're doing is providing a backup plan. What do we call it? The sixth extinction crisis or something like that. Is that what we're in right now?

[00:41:00] Ben Lamm: Yeah, sixth mass extinction. It's completely driven by us.

[00:41:03] Jordan Harbinger: That's the most depressing part is it's something that we could control. And it sounds like Colossal is going to be able to speak the language of money, right? So while we might take a multi trillion dollar hit from ecosystem decline, we can say, “Hey, this is going to stem that. And also, we're going to do something cool that our media brain can pay attention to, which is bring back extinct species.”

[00:41:26] Ben Lamm: I think we're bringing awareness to the bio. I mean, I hope, maybe I'm wrong, but I hope we're bringing awareness to the biodiversity crisis that we're in. I hope that's — I hope we're doing a good job and good steward of that message, and I hope we're bringing attention to the great, you know, women and men that are solving real problems in conservation. But I do think that if we can use de-extinction, the de-extinction of a couple of these species to develop tech that conservationists don't have the money to go, or expertise, to go develop, I think that's huge. I think that's a win for humanity, not just a win for Colossal.

[00:42:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, I think anybody listening probably would agree with that. What ethical considerations are there? I mean, it's exciting to de-extinctify a species, but I'm sure there's somewhere some responsible scientist is like, well, you haven't — someone's Jeff Goldblum-ing this whole thing, right? And what is that criticism or what is that concern?

[00:42:23] Ben Lamm:  So, we have an incredible team of scientific executive and conservation advisors that help us. One of our bioethicists is Alta Charo. She's incredible to the point about running towards your critics. Pre launch, I was like, who should we have from a bioethics perspective?

[00:42:40] And I actually saw an interview where she debated George Church on why you should never bring back a mammoth. But so I was like, “She's the one.” Because she's probably thought through this pretty well. So we got Alta, we spent a lot of time with her. I think she realized that someone's going to do this and we were trying to do this the most transparent at the way possible.

[00:42:58] Gave us a lot of feedback, helped us build an ethical framework of how we think about these projects. And what's interesting is, within a month before launch, I was talking to her and she's like, “You know, have you thought about doing a genetically modified tomato first?” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, the trains left the station.” Like, we've been out raising money hiring people. We can't like, my bio doesn't make what? And so I like, I had this like panic moment of like, “Please—

[00:43:24] Jordan Harbinger: “Remember when you gave us $200 million for the mammoth? Hear me out here. Tomato instead, no thanks.”

[00:43:30] Ben Lamm: Yeah, it’s going to be a very cold-tolerant tomato.

[00:43:33] Jordan Harbinger: Give me my money back, buddy.

[00:43:34] Ben Lamm: Yeah, here's our ADA and routing number. And so what's interesting though – so we joked to them, we talked through that, but you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about that. We have a whole animal husbandry group, an animal welfare group, a conservation group. You know, as I mentioned earlier, we have this entire group of people in parts of the business that I honestly didn't think when we were starting the business. I guess I knew people would be excited.

[00:43:59] I knew we needed to take care of the animals and have an animal husbandry and welfare group, but just thinking through all of the touch points that go into the project outside the science is something that we have had great guidance from Alta and others on. But those ethical considerations of what animal should you bring back?

[00:44:19] Why should you bring it back? How do you pair it? We've got some ideas around not just the conservation side, but how we pair de-extinction events with conservation events in interesting ways and show that the technology that we developed for Species X is directly applicable to a sister or cousin species, right?

[00:44:37] So we're working on some interesting models with governments around that, that we think, you know, could be helpful. It's not really positioning, but it's really helpful in educating the public. Because fundamentally, it's not really our job to persuade anyone. It's our job to educate people what we're doing, and then try to listen and do better, right?

[00:44:56] And so if we can find opportunities to educate the conservation community, the general public governments on loss of biodiversity and how the pursuit of de-extinction, these technologies can directly go into their conservation pipelines, then I think that solves a lot of the ethical challenges around this.

[00:45:16] Jordan Harbinger: It's a heavy lift. You've got to have government cooperation, too, otherwise –  you could put mammoths in Siberia and then they get poached or some billionaire goes and kills one and takes a selfie, or people start eating it or whatever, selling them to people to kill because they’re just out there.

[00:45:32] Ben Lamm: The Jimmy John's Founder is not an investor in Colossal.

[00:45:35] Jordan Harbinger: Was that the guy that went and killed a lion and just got absolutely skewered for it?

[00:45:38] Ben Lamm: Yeah, or multiple things, like while eating one of his sandwiches or something.

[00:45:42] Jordan Harbinger: There was a dentist that went and killed that lion, that endangered one, the one they lured out of the preserve. That guy, I mean, that guy just, I think he had to retire because people were just like, this guy is dead meat. I mean, he never recovered from that.

[00:45:55] Ben Lamm: Yeah, I'm not a hunter. Not probably out of any philosophy — it’s just never my thing.

[00:46:01] Jordan Harbinger: Busy?

[00:46:02] Ben Lamm: Yeah. It's just like, it's not – I don't really have hobbies. So it's definitely not one of the ones I don't have. But I do understand that there are pockets of overpopulation in certain species that hunting makes sense. So I am not against philosophically hunting like, we eat a lot. I'm also not a vegan. So I do eat animals, meat, animal products and so, I know those come from somewhere. I'm not like, “Oh, these were just magically made in the lab.”

[00:46:28] So what I will say is, is that, I do think to your point, we have to be very mindful about the animals because for us, you know, we spend all this money and time, and effort on bringing back these species, and then some random person shoots it. That's just awful. We're trying to get ahead of that.

[00:46:45] We've already been working on facilities. There's some great technology companies out there that we aren't currently working with, but my last company's in defense, so I know a lot of the big defense technology companies and some of the newer ones. We'd love to collaborate with those guys on tech to protect the animals in sanctuaries and whatnot. We're in the early stages of that, but we're at least thinking, kind of, we're at least conceptualizing ideas.

[00:47:10] Jordan Harbinger: If you can add cold resistance to an elephant, which is, I know, sort of the first principles basic thing here, is there a future in which you can add radiation resistance to humans? I mean, not that exact thing, but modify other—

[00:47:22] Ben Lamm: So at our core, right, Colossal is starting to understand genotype to phenotype, like gene to physical expression. We are understanding that and building core technologies around that to make editing easier and whatnot, like one of the big areas of our focus is called multiplexing.

[00:47:40] There's people talking about CRISPR and other things, but there's one that's where you not do a single knockout or make a single nucleotide, like one little edit. One of the big areas we focus on is multi-gene edits like a lot of disease states aren't a single, you know, like single cells, like a single gene mutation.

[00:47:56] But a lot of disease states require gene edits on multiple genes at the same time. And building technologies that allows us to be very efficient without causing all these unintended consequences or off target, also known as off target effects, in the genome where like, kind of f*cks up something you weren't planning on is kind of core to the technologies that we are developing.

[00:48:16] And I think that the combination of those will allow for understanding ultimate trait response or engineering through kind of that computational analysis and editing abilities. And so to your point, you know, Chris Mason, and by the way, I don't know if you ever get plugs, but Chris Mason is another person you should talk to.

[00:48:35] I think he's super crazy and interesting like George. And Chris, he has a book that's called like the 500 Year Person or Humans in 500 Years, or something like that. And one of his big things is radiation tolerance. It works really closely with SpaceX and NASA, and whatnot. So he's on our scientific advisory board. He’s amazing, and awesome, crazy.

[00:48:55] He's crazy smart, from New York, just a great guy, who has a mason lab at Cornell. And that's one of the big things that Chris is interested in. So, you know, we've actually worked on a paper together with George and a few others on radiation tolerance in humans and whatnot.

[00:49:09] So we at Colossal aren't focusing on that, but I do believe there's a world at some point in the future where we're seeing gene editing or gene manipulation, even on a complex, multiplex edited basis that has incredibly possible effects on humans. So I'll give you a real world example today.

[00:49:30] We did not develop this. But you know, you've probably heard of statins and like all these drugs that lower your cholesterol.

[00:49:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, cholesterol stuff.

[00:49:38] Ben Lamm: Yeah, yeah. I don’t take statins. I have a million reasons why I don't take statins, but that's a podcast in itself. But I have genetically high cholesterol. Well, I take a PCSK9 inhibitor, which basically blocks the way a certain gene responds. It's two shots a month and lowers my cholesterol by 60 percent.

[00:49:56] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:49:57] Ben Lamm: That's incredible.

[00:49:58] Jordan Harbinger: That is.

[00:49:59] Ben Lamm: And that was a study that was actually ironically done by Helen Hobbs, another one of our advisors here in Texas. And they found that, I mean, it's a game changer for people that have high cholesterol, whether that's through lifestyle or genetics, especially it's through genetics, which was in my case, and it was a game changer like within five days of taking my first shot, I was like, “Wait. I’ve never seen numbers like that.”

[00:50:23] That's truly, truly remarkable. And that's just us, you know, blocking it. So think about the point when we can just edit that gene and everyone in the population doesn't have that. So, you know, we are doing human genome engineering, but the technologies are here and now we need to wrap the – we need to make those technologies better and we need to wrap the right regulation and ethics around them. But I do see a world where a lot of disease states can be eradicated.

[00:50:52] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ben Lamm. We'll be right back.

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[00:54:29] Now for the rest of my conversation with Ben Lamm.

[00:54:33] I love that stuff. I mean, radiation resistance in humans for space travel reasons or for living on another planet or something like that, if we need it with less atmosphere.

[00:54:40] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:55:41] Jordan Harbinger: Or even something more closer to home, like helping animals who are, their natural environment is mostly gone. So you make it so that they can digest different foods or live in a colder or warmer climate by tweaking something.

[00:54:54] Ben Lamm: Yeah, like drought resistant cattle and things like that. I think that's the world that we are in. I think these tools kind of give us some level of dominion, not really over biology, but with biology. Like, you know, we as humans can work with biological systems and help engineer a path where there's a better coexistence.

[00:55:14] Jordan Harbinger: I'm embarrassed that I'm asking you this, and I don't want to waste your time if this is way out there, but is the dinosaur thing possible? Why or why not? Because people are going to be like, to ask them about T-Rex, ask them about Velociraptors, and I'm going to, so here it is.

[00:55:29] Ben Lamm: Believe it or not, we do get this question also.

[00:55:32] Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure you do.

[00:55:33] Ben Lamm: Around dinosaurs. So, I don't want to break hearts, but there is no true dino DNA. One of our other advisors, Kenneth Lacovara, by the way, these are all really interesting women and men. So if you ever are like, “Oh my gosh, I'm bored and Jordan needs something new.” If you ever ping me, I'll introduce you to these people because they're amazing.

[00:55:32] Jordan Harbinger: I will.

[00:55:33] Ben Lamm: But Kenneth Lacovara is arguably one of the coolest – he is definitely the coolest paleontologist on the planet, and he's one of the most famous. And one of his big claims of fame is of the dinosaurs that have been discovered, the top four biggest, including Dreadnoughtus, which is the largest dinosaur ever discovered, was discovered by Kenneth.

[00:56:09] And he's awesome. He's just incredible. And he has actually developed a way to demineralize dinosaur bones or fragments of dinosaur bones so that he could identify the amino acids. That's really helpful from  a paleontology perspective, because you could be in the field and you can be like, “This looks like a triceratops bone, but there are no triceratops bones.”

[00:56:30] If you do this process, you could say, “Oh, maybe this has the markers of a triceratops.” But those are amino acids, like individual pieces of the genomes. They're not big fragments or even small fragments or genes. So there is amino acids. There's probably a gene or two out there that has been found and discovered.

[00:56:49] But fundamentally, you know, there's not big strands of dinosaur DNA. So I do think it's highly unlikely someone could de-extinct a dinosaur because there's just no DNA.

[00:57:01] Jordan Harbinger: It would have to be when we can construct DNA almost out of like, whole cloth and then you make something that looks like what we think it probably looked like. But isn’t that—

[00:57:07] Ben Lamm: Humankind probably at some point could engineer through DNA synthesis and doing ancestral state reconstructions using AI and, you know, much harder systems and LLMs. But yeah, I don't believe it's possible and I personally do not see a path. to really, you know, de-extincting a dinosaur, even the way that Colossal defines de-extinction.

[00:57:34] Jordan Harbinger: Even that's also just like, we would literally just make a Jurassic Park Zoo out of it, which is a little bit like, do we really need that? Do we need that? I don't know if we need that.

[00:57:42] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:57:43] Jordan Harbinger: It seems a little bit cruel to make something and it's like, this is here for you to gawk at and then for us to treat it kind of sh*tty.

[00:57:48] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:57:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I don't think we need that.

[00:57:50] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[00:57:51] Jordan Harbinger: What other animals are on the roadmap? Even if the roadmap is like a list in your head.

[00:57:54] Ben Lamm: So, you know, we're very focused on the mammoth, thylacine, and dodo. We get a lot of, you know, kind of like dinosaurs, we get a lot of requests and there's a part of me that's like, “Well, shouldn't we just finish these?”

[00:58:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:58:06] Ben Lamm: We get a lot of requests for new species. We are funding some academic labs on other species. We are thinking about it. One species that we are not working on, but I'm very excited about which I'd love to make is the Steller’s sea cow.

[00:58:19] Jordan Harbinger: What is that?

[00:58:20] Ben Lamm: Yeah, it's awesome. It's like a whale-sized manatee. So think of like, a giant manatee in the Pacific Northwest, all over Alaska, all the way from Oregon up through Washington.

[00:58:31] And it was, you know, hunted to extinction. And it was vital. It really helped promote and circulate the kelp forest of the Pacific Northwest. The kelp forest, kelp, another thing that's great for carbon and carbon sequestration, you know, the Steller’s sea cow was instrumental in making that ecosystem even healthier, significantly healthier than it is today.

[00:58:54] But what's hard about the Steller’s sea cow, We actually have genomes, we actually have DNA, but there's nothing to gestate with it. So, you can't gestate a whale-sized manatee in a manatee, right, or in a dugong, or something else. So, you have to be really mindful about, you know, like for us, the whole system has to work.

[00:59:14] I do think that would be a great species. If we get actually to develop, well, I will make the commitment that if we get artificial wombs to work, and work at whale size, we'll totally do that one because that would be amazing.

[00:59:26] Jordan Harbinger: That is really interesting.

[00:59:27] Ben Lamm: It'd be awesome. It'd be great. If we get success in creating these primordial germ cells, which are, it's a little bit different with avian genomics versus the system that we built for mammalian work.

[00:59:39] If we get that right, I think there's a lot of bird species like the moa and others that could be really, really cool. But I think that we, and Mike McGrew, he's one of our advisors, are probably now the furthest when it comes to genetic engineering and birds from what we've already built in this year, which is amazing.

[00:59:58] But I think that we could get to the point that we could do some pretty cool birds. Those would be on my list. I think the moa is awesome. And I think that, I mean, there's a lot of great extinct species.

[01:00:10] Jordan Harbinger: What is the moa? I don't even know what that is.

[01:00:11] Ben Lamm: The moa was like, think of it like a giant emu or ostrich in New Zealand. It was like, it’s big iconic extinct species is the moa. It's super, super cool.

[01:00:25] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I just googled it. It's enormous.

[01:00:27] Ben Lamm: Yeah.

[01:00:28] Jordan Harbinger: It's enormous. It's bigger than a person.

[01:00:30] Ben Lamm: Yeah, it's like 12, 14 feet, something like that.

[01:00:30] Jordan Harbinger:  Oh, my God.

[01:00:33] Ben Lamm: Here’s where it even gets weirder. It was the prey of the Haast eagle. So think about that.

[01:00:38] Jordan Harbinger: What?

[01:00:39] Ben Lamm: There's a bigger, giant eagle that's extinct and that is basically a pterodactyl.

[01:00:44] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, my God. That's terrifying.

[01:00:46] Ben Lamm: That is terrifying. That's scary.

[01:00:49] Jordan Harbinger: Do not bring that one back. If that eats a bird that's bigger than a human, that would just fly around big events and pick people off.

[01:00:56] Ben Lamm: It'd be terrifying, yeah.

[01:00:57] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[01:00:58] Ben Lamm: It'd be like the Jurassic World scene. There's a lot. there's a lot of stuff that's like, maybe that's good.

[01:01:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, maybe that one was that extinct because is that like a dinosaur era thing or was that hunted to extinction because I’m imagining—

[01:01:09] Ben Lamm: That's in the last couple hundred years. It's primary food source was moa, which partially was hunted. And the other thing was the introduction of invasive species. What a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of people say like, “Oh, the dodo was just killed because it was stupid and people were hungry,” which isn't necessarily the case.

[01:01:27] They laid one egg a year and they were a flightless bird, meaning that that egg was on the ground. So, if you introduce rats, and wild pigs, and other things to wild dogs and they eat those eggs, there's no more, right? This kind of talk’s kind of like the elephant example.

[01:01:44] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to ask about invasive species because I mean, I don't see how you could really do this accidentally, but you'd have to be really careful.

[01:01:51] I mean, you hear about how a certain kind of muscle or a bug cost the economy billions of dollars in some areas because they’re impossible to get rid of, the pigs on the islands are tearing up all the vegetation and killing all the dodos, and the rats are eating the bird eggs, and the bugs are eating all the trees You can't unring that bell.

[01:02:08] Ben Lamm: It's hard to unring but you can do it very thoughtfully. So like, this whole concept, we aren't working on this, but there are folks that are looking at this. I don't know if there's that many cat hate groups here in the United States, but in Australia there are. Because cats, which were introduced for captivity purposes, have gone crazy in Australia, and there's just a ton of them. They are eviscerating all of the small marsupial populations, which are only, you know, they only exist in Australia.

[01:02:43] And so there's been talks, we aren't doing this, but we've had conversations with different groups and governments around this, is that, that you can introduce this concept, which I'm actually very pro, which is called the gene drive. So it doesn't go out and kill the cat, but it makes it where if this cat eats a certain food or whatever the necessary delivery mechanism.

[01:03:05] They're doing this also with invasive carp species, this fish species in Australia, where if the cat eats this, it basically makes it become reproductively unviable. So that cat gets to live out its natural life and be a stray cat and kill marsupials and do all the stuff it does, but it can't mate.

[01:03:23] And so several generations from now, you get to the point that that isolated population of cats doesn't exist, right? And so this whole concept of gene drives is very, very interesting to remove invasive species. And I'll give you one other example that is being worked on. We're pseudo collaborating on it. It's not a focus of us. We're just helping the lab a little bit.

[01:03:46] But there's this incredible animal that's beautiful called the quoll in Australia. It's awesome. It looks kind of like a mongoose. It's a spotted quoll. You should look at it. It's beautiful, but it's endangered and moving towards critically endangered because guess what?

[01:04:01] It loves to eat toads, and settlers out of Australia introduce these animals called cane toads. So if you have a picture of the quoll on one side you put a picture of the cane toads on the other side, cane toads are just f*cking disgusting. They're just gross and they eat them. But because of the neural toxin of the cane toad, it kills the quolls.

[01:04:21] And by the way, it kills other marsupials that eat it as well. I will probably get this wrong. It's either one or two gene edits that make the quoll resistant to the cane toads. So now you don't have to go kill all the cane toads, you could make minor modifications to populations of quolls, and they could –  they already love to eat the cane toads, it just kills them.

[01:04:40] And they could eradicate the cane toads. And so that's the power of gene drives. I do think that we can be very smart and let nature, if we give nature a little bit of boost, we can let nature help fix the problems that we created themselves. You know, we could empower the quolls to kill all the cane toads.

[01:05:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're kind of speeding up natural selection by a few, I don’t know.

[01:05:04] Ben Lamm: It's a directed evolution.

[01:05:06] Jordan Harbinger: Thousands, hundreds of thousands of years by, by making sure that it doesn't die, but ends up sort of turning the – stemming the tide of battle or whatever. It's so interesting. Thylacine is what? A big cat? Tasmanian tiger? Dodo bird?

[01:05:19] Ben Lamm: The thylacine, it's called the Tasmanian tiger, but it's actually a big carnivorous marsupial. So it has a pouch and everything. So most people think it's either a, based on the name, they think it's a cat or they see it and they think because of convergent evolution, it's not related at all to dogs or canids, but it looks very similar.

[01:05:39] Like the morphology of the shape of the skull, if you have a wolf skull and a thylacine skull, they look almost identical, even though they're not related just due to this concept of convergent evolution. They both evolved independently but are very, very similar.

[01:05:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I looked at it and I was like, “Oh, it's like some kind of,” I don't even know because I'm no animal expert. I was like, it's either a hyena or a big cat or something. I can't really tell.

[01:06:01] Ben Lamm: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:02] Jordan Harbinger: Wolfy thing, yeah. It's so incredible that this stuff is even possible. When I saw Jurassic Park, I was like, “Well, this is obviously fake and never going to happen.” And I mean, look, dinosaurs still not going to happen, but it's really, little did I think like, “Oh, we're going to use some version of this technology to do something in my lifetime.” That part had not ever occurred to me.

[01:06:22] Ben Lamm: Yeah. I mean, I was inspired by it. It made me excited about genetics. But you know, it was until George spent 30 seconds at the end of a call, just kind of hit me at the right time.

[01:06:32] Jordan Harbinger:  It sounds like you've got a mammoth task ahead of you, man. And I've been holding on to that one since I started prepping the show.

[01:06:39] Ben Lamm: Yeah, it's a big hairy goal.  So, we'll get there.

[01:06:41] Jordan Harbinger: I wish you all the best. I would love to come and see what you're doing at some point, if that's even allowed. I don't know what you got over there.

[01:06:47] Ben Lamm: Absolutely. I mean, I'm always happy to talk about it because I'm excited about it. Talking to our scientists is way better.

[01:06:53] Coming to the lab is even a billion times better than talking to me, but talking to the incredible women and men that are doing the work, it's just awesome. So you're welcome anytime. It's amazing. You would have the most fun. Ask Forrest. Forrest comes and he's like, how do I get – every time Forrest is here, I get texts a day later. It's like, “How do I get more involved? How do I get more involved?”

[01:07:15] Jordan Harbinger: It’s really amazing. I'm looking forward to that news release where it's just you with a baby mammoth. I mean, that's going to be – you must just be dreaming about that moment every night when you’re actually able to sleep.

[01:07:25] Ben Lamm: I do. I'm very excited about, you know, we've made a bunch of big promises. And it's our job to deliver on those promises. And yeah, I'm excited about that because I think it's delivery on George – I always like to say, I'm kind of a steward of George's vision. So I love to deliver that for George and for the world. I'm pretty stoked.

[01:07:48] Jordan Harbinger: Ben Lamm, thank you very much, man.

[01:07:49] Ben Lamm: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

[01:07:52] Jordan Harbinger: Here is a trailer for our episode with Rob Reid, also on synthetic biology, but a little bit more dark than this one.

[01:08:00] Rob Reid: The terrifying thing is COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed.

[01:08:16] Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who for whatever reason go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multiplier. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID and the smallpox genome.

[01:08:41] Both of those are online and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu that kills 50 to 60 percent of the people that it infects.

[01:09:03] Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath. No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff from running out. And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough.

[01:09:24] If the lights shut off on a country wide basis after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple.

[01:09:35] Jordan Harbinger: That was episode 244, Rob Reid, Synthetic Biology for Medicine and for Murder.

[01:09:43] This is one of those episodes where the guest is doing something so epic it makes me kind of feel like, “Well, what am I doing with my life?” I'm just talking into a dang microphone with no pants on. This is really incredible stuff. I can't wait to pet a baby mammoth if I ever get the chance. By the way, this also makes economic sense. I know a lot of people are like, “Wait a minute, they're going to make one of these things, find out it costs ten million dollars, it's going to be a novelty, they'll shut it down.”

[01:10:04] As we mentioned on the show, you can always speak the language of money. And I looked this up, the stats vary depending on where you get it, but the global economy takes more than a $5 trillion hit annually from the ecosystem functionality decline. So that's the loss of natural services, and that's probably like all natural resources.

[01:10:22] Take it with whatever grains of salt required, but it's an astounding 44 trillion, more than half the global GDP relies on nature, including food, materials, fuel, according to UNPRI. The economic impact of the loss of species and lack of diversity, this can be framed as a business problem, which is frankly what we probably need in order to get a solution that people actually care about.We really do need to speak economic sense here. And I'm hoping Ben's work over at Colossal really is on the forefront of all that.

[01:10:52] All things, Ben Lamm will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot also on the website, transcripts in the show notes, of course, advertisers, discount codes, deals, ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show.

[01:11:08] We've also got our newsletter every week. The team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons and takeaways. So if you want to know what to listen to next, you're a fan of the show. You want to dig into the back catalog, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. I'm going to be doing some giveaways on there as well. So I'm pretty excited about that reminder. There's no Thursday episode, so you don't have to email me or tweet at me. Your podcast app is not broken, but we will be back with Feedback Friday.

[01:11:32] Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking over at jordanharbinger.com/course. And if you want to reach me, I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me on LinkedIn.

[01:11:42] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in biology, bringing back extinct species de-extinction is what we're calling it, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

[01:12:14] Again, special thanks to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:12:20] Mandy Matney: Family patriarch and disbarred prosecutor Alex Murdaugh was convicted of the brutal murders of his wife Maggie and his son Paul in March of 2023.

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[01:12:52] Liz Farrell, Eric Bland, and I invite you to get an entertaining understanding of this case and others. You will love Cup of Justice shows on the new feed. Together, our hosts create the perfect trifecta of legal experience, journalistic integrity, and a fire lit to expose the truth wherever it leads.

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