Ben Lamm is obsessed with de-extinction

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0:21Alright, so you all know we love obsessions on this show. We're about to learn about an obsession that might be one of the weirdest ones we've ever talked about. We're going to talk to a guy who is obsessed with, among other things, trying to bring animal species that went extinct years ago back to life for a lot of reasons. But this guy has already helped to bring back the dire wolf. He's really working hard on the woolly mammoth now and has taken some really important steps. Is this, you might wonder, like Jurassic Park coming to life in reality? Well, I kind of wondered the same thing. I'm going to ask him about that.

0:57I'm going to ask him about why he does this. His name is Ben Lamb. He's a billionaire tech entrepreneur. He is founder of Colossal Biosciences. That's his company. And he's just an uber curious guy. Fascinating to talk to. So let's listen.

1:19Ben, thanks for doing this. It's great to meet you. No, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to meet. I have some obsessions that I wanted to ask you about, but I thought it'd be fun to just give you the floor because you told us ahead of time you were thinking about what obsessions you wanted to talk about. Yeah, I feel like all I, I'd say like 99 % of every call I am on, like I was at the dentist yesterday and, you know, the first thing they wanted to ask about was the mammoth, right? So I spent a lot of my time talking about mammoths, right? Even though we're working on a lot more here at Colossal.

1:50So I spent a lot of time on it. And I am obsessed with the mammoth. I think I'm one of those people that's just like weirdly curious and interested. Right. And I just. You don't do your line of work without being a little weirdly curious, I feel like. Exactly. Like or being like, you know, interested in things. And I always like to learn new things. I'm one of those very open minded people where I think it's I can live with the mystery that we may not know everything. Right. But it's like there's just so much cool shit out there. Right. And so, like, I would say from a practical perspective, I'm very obsessed with longevity.

2:20I'm very, very focused on health and wellness. Right. And so that's something that I'm very passionate about and I'm obsessed with. But then it's all the weird stuff that like, you know, I'll find myself down some rabbit hole on aliens or dinosaurs or the pyramids are always like crazy to me. And I've been I've been fortunate to travel and see a lot of these different older sites in the world. And like you can read stuff and see stuff. But like when you go somewhere and you're standing there and you're like in Peru and there's something that's like four tons and it's like, oh, it was queried a thousand miles away.

2:57It's just weird. And so I've gone down a bunch of these crazy rabbit holes because I just find all of it intellectually interesting. I love that. OK, before we move on, I do need to ask you about the dentist, because are you literally like this doctor is doing work on your teeth and asking you about wooly mammoths? I meet with every functional health group, functional body health group every, you know, once a year. And then like things like, you know, you go to the dentist twice a year and I just try to keep track of them and do everything like you should do, right? Yeah. Six months. No, I'm with you.

3:27I'm on track on that. I like, I try all of the things, right? I do four blood tests a year. I do function health once a year and go crazy because it's just the greatest test. So I do all that stuff, right? Function health. What is function health and why am I not doing it yet? Oh, you need to do it. So it's a very comprehensive blood test, right? So it's kind of like what I was doing on steroids, where it's like, you know, my quarterly blood test, which is very all-encompassing. It's everything. And they have tests for microplastics. They've got tests for all the different types of proteins in terms of like heart health is going outside.

4:03Microplastics? Like they're in my blood? In your blood, yeah. Which is not a good thing, I'm assuming? No, no, no, no. I started a whole company around this. We are actually ingesting a credit card size of microplastics. And people will say it's a month or a day, but go take the test and see for yourself. Where am I ingesting plastic? It's in our food supplies. It's in our water supplies. There are some people that you do get some of it through skin contact even. But it's about 90 % is through the gut, through consumption. Okay. All right. So that's an obsession. functional health, four blood tests a year, going to the dentist.

4:39Yeah. And then the dentist loves the mammoth, right? And so we're pretty committed to this mammoth thing. Well, I want to guide this. I want to get to the mammoth, but I don't want to be like your dentist who brings it up like as soon as I meet you. So I want to kind of like, you know, I want to get to other various animals that you're trying to bring out of extinction. But let's, I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs as an obsession. What is that about? You know, I'm not a geneticist. I'm not a biologist, right? I was obsessed with dinosaurs and all this stuff as a kid. But then, you know, I saw Jurassic Park, you know, when it first came out.

5:13And of course, it's exciting. We are not making dinosaurs here. We are not Jurassic Park here. But dinosaurs are amazing, right? This goes into that concept I said of like, it's okay. Like, I'm okay with the mystery, right? And some people aren't. And I still want to pursue knowledge, but I'm okay with the mystery. Like, I don't think that we know everything or even probably should know everything. But there's lots of humans in this world that think that they are the smartest people they've ever met. And I'm not one of them. I'm the dumbest person I know. I don't know about that. But I'm curious about things.

5:43I like to learn things. Yes, yes. Obviously, you know, T-Rex, you know, Blizzard King, King of the Dinosaurs, everyone knows the T-Rex. And it's pretty iconic. Like when you think of it, when you think of dinosaurs, a lot of times T-Rex, you know, which is mostly an American dinosaur. Ruled our planet, right? I mean, is that an exaggeration? No, ruled our planet. And by the way, this is crazy. They only lived to about 30 years, but that we, that we know of. Oh, that I didn't know. Okay. Yeah. So they lived about 30 years. Uh, that we know, uh, their bite was so ridiculously strong that like the strongest bite in history that we know of, uh, they actually had cartilage in part of their jaws because if not, it would shatter their own skull with how strong they bite.

6:29I mean, that's insane. The cartilage broke the force of the bite to protect their - When they bite, their entire jaw is compressed a little bit, which is crazy, right? But here's the thing that I find interesting, or I think it's the most fascinating. We have discovered less than 100 T-Rexes, yet it's modeled, right, that there were over like two and a half or three billion T-Rexes, right? Where are all these fossils? Like, where are these? That's the thing, right? It's like not everything is perfectly preserved, right? And so we do all this modeling. It says there were probably this many. and I'm not a paleo, like I can't tell you how they came up to that two and a half billion number, but that's a lot of T-Rexes, right?

7:08Now over the course of millions of years, but still when you think of the fossil record, you know, we dealt with this with the direwolves, like so many people will bet their lives on this fossil record. I was like, guys, this is broken. Like, I mean, it's good. It's like kind of what we have because we're like T-Rexes running around. So like we can see this, but fewer than a hundred have been found, right? And so like, I always feel bad when someone comes out and they have like a crazy or interesting theory that may not be mainstream and they just get like attacked. Like, I don't know if you saw, like Rogan got like attacked by every media outlet when he said, I can see there being dragons.

7:44It's like, because they are in all these different categories of people's histories, right? And like, you look at the Zodiac and everything's a real animal except the dragon. So it's kind of interesting, right? And then you look at like, and then you look at the fossil record and you say, wow, there are two and a half billion T-Rexes. Those are pretty big, so you'd assume, and they were not made of cartilage, so all cartilage, they had somewhere. Yeah, they're out there somewhere. They're somewhere. You would assume that some percentage, more than 100 of them existed. Yeah. It's fun to think about.

8:17Yeah. I don't know. Well, I mean, you, I think about Rogan and saying like maybe dragons exist. I feel like that's some of your influence over all of us right now. Like just this infectious curiosity, like what what could be and why not explore it and why not test the boundaries of our understanding? Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I'm curious. It's like, you know, I've always been a believer in aliens. Right. And like right now, it's like I'm having to you know, there's this is a weird time in the world with like everything that's going on in the war. And, you know, there's so much politics on both sides of the aisle when it comes to media.

8:55And then there's still these moments that are interesting, right? Like, you know, now our government is showing that there's documented cases of some type of, whether they're craft or not, things in the sky. Yeah, pilots are seeing them, like, I mean, round things, like, I mean, literally. Yeah, and that are moving, that can traverse, like, you know, thousands of kilometers within a second, and also could go into water. If you want to look at definitive data, like, we have, like military sensors that are now identifying and finding anomalous objects. That's just interesting. It's interesting. And here's my thing.

9:33If a pilot sees a flying saucer, and I mean, I say flying saucer, they've actually seen things that look like flying saucers. Yeah. Like now it's like more persistent. It's everywhere. Right. And it's like either that's some sort of extraterrestrial thing. Yeah. Or if it's not and our government has proof that it's not, then say why it's not. And if they can't do that, then they're responsible for it. And so they're responsible for putting this weird shit in the air. One or the other, like, I want to understand it. I need to know. I want to know which it is. But there's it's a mystery. And maybe we just have to live with that.

10:07But it's interesting. It's so interesting. Yeah. I'm going to apologize for acting like your dentist. You know what? I'm not going to ask you about the mammoth for the moment. I'm going to ask you about the dire wolf. OK, great. OK. Yeah. Okay, so dire wolves, I knew them from Game of Thrones. That was, and that was part of our, like, decision. We have this really interesting, I think it's interesting. We have this, like, we don't, everyone's like, what is the checklist you have to bring back a species? And we just don't have that. We have this, like, weird decision matrix that we sit down in these, like, group huddle sessions and go through.

10:36And one of them is, like, what will the educational and kind of, like, what is this, like, extra layer of, like, halo effect or ethereal effect that we'll have on it? And the direwolves, they, you know, they have a pop culture effect. And I won't say who, because George R.R. Martin is an investor. He did know that they were real. But there are members of the Game of Thrones cast that thought, like, when I talked to them about it before launch, they were like, wait, these were real? And so. Even member, people who were in Game of Thrones did not realize that this was like an actual. The vast majority of people thought it was a mythical creature.

11:12They're kind of mythical. I mean, they seem kind of mythical. They give a mythical vibe. They're pretty awesome and they're stronger and they got, and we didn't know this until we made them, but they have like this, like almost like lion maid that like goes backwards. Like if you've seen like a Rhodesian Ridgeback, right? Like a dog where it's got that light, it's got, they have something like that only it's much thicker. It's pretty cool. So cool. And they wrote, they were ice age ish. Yeah. Ice age. So best guess is, is that they went extinct about 12 ,500 years ago. Okay. Which by the way, a lot of other megafauna went extinct around that.

11:45which is a whole nother, that's that whole like Younger Dryas, Graham Henry. So all that's interesting too. Yeah. Super interesting. Yeah. Okay. So how did you get into the de-extinction business? It's completely George Church's fault. When people are like, I don't like what you're doing. I was like, not my fault. He made me do it. That's the way to. No, I was, I had built a handful of companies, mostly software, a little space hardware, but mostly software and sold them over the years. Precursors to large language models. I missed that by like, you know, $800 billion. And we were early. So we built some like precursors to that in conversational intelligence, kind of like invented that category.

12:25And then was in gaming for a while. And so always just mostly doing things I found interesting through the lens of software and technology. And I reached out to George because I thought I wanted to go build really like genetics. I think it's fascinating. I think that AI and eventually quantum is going to like accelerate. I had this thesis that we're going to move, that we can use AI in AI co-pilots to essentially help us in laboratory environments where we basically will be able to do accelerated evolution, more editing, more DNA synthesis at the scale that will enable a really interesting world through biology.

13:00And what was George up to that got you super excited about meeting him? Well, so he's like the father of synthetic biology. And, you know, he's known for all of his read-write technologies. He has obviously talked about the mammoth for a while, but I didn't even call him about the mammoth. Like, I didn't call him and say, let's go make a mammoth. I reached out to him just trying to understand the trends of where he thought synthetic biology, access to compute AI, eventually quantum, where all this was going to go. and what software would one go build to to build something that's interesting and could like move the industry forward and so he answered that in like four minutes and then i was like okay what else you got going on and he walked through a bunch of projects and they're doing crazy stuff there he's got this like food computer concept where he's found the fastest replicating algae in algae-based uh life forms his goal is is he's like you if we can just ensure that we can process it in different ways where it could taste like a burger or taste like bacon or taste like a salad.

14:00Everyone could have their own like star. His view is like this could be the this could be the material that a Star Trek like food processor could use. So this could like someday like help with food insecurity and yeah exactly. Yeah and it's like it's high protein. It's incredible. I mean right now it's disgusting but it's incredible what the value is incredible. They were working on things like how do you replace the nucleus of a neuron and like how do you like do mitochondrial injections into neurons so that like when your neurons make up the neural net that becomes your brain you know and memory and all all those connections and how you process data if you're if they die could you could you swap out like the battery in it and so and so they're working on crazy stuff and so i I listened to George for like 20 minutes, just say the insane world of stuff that he was working on.

14:53And then I stopped him and I said, look, if you had one project, okay, like you got a lot of stuff going on. He has a hundred people in his lap and all at Harvard. And I was like, if you had one project that you could work on with unlimited capital and it wasn't, that's a good question. Let me think it wasn't a, you know, pondering moment for him. He was like, he like looked straight in the case. I would work to bring back the mammoth, use those technologies for conservation. and I'd apply those same technologies to human health care. And I was like, this is insane. Okay, so he gives you this clear, immediate answer.

15:25I want to bring back the woolly mammoth. Yeah, and then the call's over. He has another call. And I'm like sitting there and I'm like, let me just drop that on you and then leave. Yeah, just like insane, cool thing. And I was at my place in Austin and I was running another company at the time and I just was Googling George. And it's like the end of like, you know, signs or sixth sense where like everything comes together. I sat there and I was like, no matter what, and I had research source before I talked to him. I wasn't like completely dumb. I like looked him up. I knew I was talking to him.

15:55I asked for the meeting. But what's crazy is like, I missed a lot of the mammoth talk. But what was crazy is that in everything, whether it was on Colbert or 60 Minutes or whatever, there was this mammoth through line. And you could hear an inflection in his voice when he talked about it. And I was like, this guy is very committed to this. And then I thought, hey, I don't know anything about this. And I don't have a background in biology, so I'm perfect. I'm the guy. I'm the partner. Okay, what is the argument for why it's so important and awesome to make the woolly mammoth no longer extinct? Yeah, so great question.

16:32So a couple of things. One is the pursuit of the mammoth, right, and we'll get to the mammoth, does a couple of things. It builds technologies that are really needed for elephant conservation because elephant conservation is a majorly underfunded area. And it's something that, you know, all the technologies that we develop, we open source for conservation, right? We also established a hundred billion dollar foundation to help in this too. Okay. So we're saving, saving elephants is one important. So saving elephants is one. Okay. A second one is the technologies when you work on, if you want to bring back a mammoth or any of these species, it's not a point solution.

17:04It's a systems model. It's like you have to break down and you have to invent and innovate across a wide spectrum of technologies that are dealing with biology, which is harder to work with in elephants than it is in humans. So many of the technologies that we are developing on the path to the mammoth also have direct applications to human healthcare, genome engineering, computational analysis, media conditions, IVF, like a lot of things can be impacted based on what we're doing, right? So there was a human good, an animal good, and the human good is also highly monotoxable, right? So you can build the business case around it.

17:43But when it comes to the human, you're learning a ton of shit that could help people who want to get pregnant, cure disease, like all, it's just opening doors that we don't even know yet what... Exactly. Like right now, synthetic biology, being able to engineer and direct life and make these edits and even synthesize life is somewhat capped, not in a negative way, But it's capped because the researchers have funding to solve X or they want to get Y drug through clinical trials. So they focus on that. They're not saying, how many edits can I make? How many edits can I make? Right. Like they're like, if I'm trying to make a gene therapy with one edit for sickle cell anemia knockout, well, then that's their focus.

18:21They're not saying, how do I do this a thousand times at the same time? That's what we're doing. Right. And so we're having like a lot of people are taking victory laughs about doing two or three edits, which is awesome, right? And they're about a 40%, 50 % efficiency and probably the high side. We have over a 90 % efficiency and we're doing hundreds of edits. This is editing DNA, right? I mean, that's what's... Editing DNA. But that's just one of like 100 things in our kind of end-to-end stack that you have to make work to be able to do things like dire wolves and dodos and mammoths. Okay, so there's the human health care.

18:53there's also the ecological function and so um here like this is a fun thing i've learned about working with scientists is that none of them agree on anything um what's interesting is i kind of love it because from a conviction level perspective they're so high and they're so like you know but what's interesting is like you'll put two of the top mammoth people in the room and one person will say if you look at the model and you look at like what studies have done in Russia and others, you know, the reintroduction of cold tolerant megafauna will have this impact to the environment and this, therefore, this impact to other species and climate change.

19:30And then if you put these, like, another equally talented person in this field on this thing, they're going to say, it will have this impact, but I completely disagree with you because it will not have this impact of carbon. But what's crazy is if, so if you take out the carbon, right, because we got a lot of shit when we launched because, like, we were more on the left side of this conversation, but the right side was like, I agree with everything you say, except to the exact model to carbon. I was like, okay, well, both sides agree this is good for the environment and it will help recharge that environment, right?

19:58And both sides are like, yes, but I don't agree with that person's perspective on that. And I was like, okay, well, okay, then we'll just say that this is good for the environment for these 10 reasons you guys both agree. It's like seed dispersal, removal of carnivorous trees that are not carbon efficient, increasing debt through defecation, the grasslands, which has a higher carbon sequestration and albedo effect. So there's a lot of general— And all this positive environment stuff is coming from bringing back species that once were on Earth and are no longer here. Yes, large—in the case of a mammoth, it's large, cold-tolerant megafauna, right?

20:34And so putting them— That's the scientific word for a woolly mammoth? Yeah. Well, it depends on who you ask, right? Some people will say they're, you know, genetically modified Asian elephants with mammoth alleles. It's eye of the beholder, right? But you bring them back and that's a positive change for the environment if we have them. It's a positive change. And then you have this halo effect, right, outside of helping animals in the technologies for human health care, is that people are really excited about it, right? And it's like, I feel like we've moved away from like the old school science fair days of like making the volcano and like, you know, like putting in the food coloring and baking soda and watching it erupting, making a disaster or Bill Nye.

21:14Right. It's like now, like those days aren't here anymore. It politicized science in a lot of ways. And we've separated it. But what's interesting is that if you go to a child or a parent that are not a biologist, that didn't get a Princeton PhD, right, and you just go to some random person in middle America, they love science. They love nature. They don't necessarily love all the scientists preaching at them right now, but they love science. So it's like, how do we communicate to them and create a sense of wonder and excitement for science and nature? I mean, that's a general positive thing, I think.

21:47No, I agree. And reading about your work, I mean, I had that sense of wonder and curiosity. It's just fun, right? Well, and OK, so you've you've not brought back the woolly mammoth. We have not. No, we have no secret mammoths. But you have a you have a woolly mouse. We have a woolly mouse. Objectively, the cutest mice on the planet. They look really cute. I mean, they look like I'm imagining as little miniature versions of big, big ass woolly mammoths. But what are these what are these mice? So the woolly mice we made and we did it in 30 days. 30 days it took you to 30 days which is amazing because we have a end-to-end platform where i talked about like we have to have all these things work in concert together to produce life and so the technical challenges were you know we wanted to say there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants i mean man it's just mice and elephants and so we said okay what are the core genes that we've been editing in the asian elephant cells we want to test are the gene expressions creating the physical attributes or phenotypes that we're looking for.

22:50Well, there's only a couple ways to do that. You can like test it in the lab, which we do. You can make organoids where you can actually grow super frankenstein-y and amazing. You can grow hair on skin cells, which we've done. And that's living, but so weird. You can grow hair on skin cells. Yeah, yeah. Oh, from skin cells. Yeah. So, yeah. So you basically... Imagine you being able to grow hair like on human skin and turn us into like Chewbacca or something. That's why we don't do anything with all the technology that apply to humans. We license those out or spin those out. We don't do that. We don't do anything directly with humans here because people are going to say, wait.

23:23If we came out with a hair product, people would be like, wait a second. Like, where did you get? I mean, I'm not against it. We get weird. We get a lot of weird feedback occasionally. So we're going to try to minimize that. You're staying focused right now and letting others deal with the human ethics and all of those questions. Exactly. We'll support it from a technology perspective, but we don't have to have the direct governance on it, right? Which is, I think, very good. But then you could do a random roll of the dice and see, like, did everything work in Make-A-Math, right? But it's 22 months.

23:53It's expensive. Elephants are endangered. You should be really thoughtful when you do that last stage. So the other thing is mice are model species. You know, it takes them about 22, 23 days to be born and into their model species. And so it was amazing and what I think was incredible from a feats of strength perspective that people just thought they were cool. And then people, some people wanted to argue about them. But at the end of the day, I don't think we got enough credit in the fact that like they, one, were the most genetically modified multicellular organism made at the time only to be surpassed by our direwolves.

24:26Right. Number one. Number two, we delivered all of the edits in one delivery, multiplex editing. and people, some people gave us feedback that, well, other people have made eight edits in mice. They have, but over like eight generations, you make one, you have them breathe, then you make another. I was like, no, no, we did it all in one, a hundred percent healthy. All of the, all the 38, I think the 38 pups, all of them were born healthy and all of them exuded the phenotype or physical attributes that we were hoping for. And what we did is we engineered the mouse equivalent of the mammoth genes that we were editing.

25:01And we used our computational analysis tools to give us those targets. So we used our AI systems. They worked. They came out healthy, most importantly, and exactly as predicted. And they did that in 30 days. That's extraordinary. Yeah. No, like, I think the mice are pretty important, but no, like, you know, I think it's cool. It is definitely cool. So dire wolves. Yes. You've brought back, there are two of them that you have. three three so we have two brymus and remus and then we have uh calice so we have a female too okay and we're making more you're making so we will have more pups how does one make dire is there a simple way to describe like you you have to go find ancient yeah dna right ancient dna and and that exists like a archaeologist as well sort of or paling what's the most people think of they think of the jurassic park aspects of the business the labs right yeah but they don't realize that like we work with 17 universities across the world and about we find about a hundred post-doctoral students in those labs that are doing research on a lot of ancient dna number one we also work with museums and so like we like we've gone to like the secret basements in like the smithsonian and like they'll like it's like a movie they'll pull out something there's dust on it you're waiting for like the indiana jones yeah and it's like the light gets weird are those There are secret basements at the Smithsonian?

26:25I don't know if they're secret, but I mean, if you add secret to basement, it sounds cooler. Okay. But it's their basement. They're definitely basements. The child's doing me wants to go find those basements and like look at the fossils. It's not the catacombs, right? It's not like the catacombs of the Vatican that apparently have like the world secrets that we don't get. But you've got a network of people who have access to like ancient DNA. This is not. Yeah, exactly. But then also in the field. So like, no, I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club, which is a group of incredible women and men that are just exploring different parts of the world.

26:53And so some of our, like a lot of our tissues from mammoths actually come from the field, from expeditions out in the field. So there's a fun kind of inventory component to the ancient DNA. With the direwolves, we just took a tooth that had already been sampled that didn't produce great DNA. We want to use our tools, number one. One tooth. These three animals came from one tooth. One tooth and one skull. So we have a 13 ,000-year-old tooth and a 73 ,000-year-old skull, which is great because we had two different samples. The samples, we actually got a good amount of DNA, even given that there's not a lot of dialogue of DNA out there because most of the samples were found in La Brea Tarpe because of heat and acidification.

27:36The DNA doesn't exist anymore. So these were found separately. But there's 60 ,000 years of genetic divergence, between those two. So we could really, that's a great, you know, it wasn't like a hundred years and they were from two different regions. So what was great about that is that really lets us zero in on the genes and some of the parts of the genome that are fixed, meaning conserved, that don't change, that didn't even change over that. And that's, you know, like our belief. And I think that evolution agrees with us that like we are not like what makes us us is not even the sum of our parts.

28:14It's the individual parts that are conserved. Technical question. Yeah. Who is giving birth to a newly bioengineered de-extinct dire wolf? So today we use large wolfhounds. So we use seriates. So wolfhound is the carrier, the surrogate. And then... And you put in the embryos. But we do have, and this doesn't work yet, right? So it's crazy. This is going to be a fun, insane statement for you. Well, de-extinction is no longer science fiction to me, just because not because of the dire wolves or what we've been able to achieve with the mice. Just I know all the stuff behind the scenes that we're working on and I know where we are.

28:52So de-extinction to me sounds not science fiction. We have a 17-person team working on three different artificial womb projects. That still sounds a little science fiction-y because we haven't demonstrated success there yet. But our long-term goal is everything will be grown ex-utero in bags. Okay. I'm going to ask this question as simply as I possibly can. What do you say to people who look at all of this stuff you're doing and say this is all royally fucked up? Like it is scary. It is breaking ethical boundaries. It's like engineering extinct species and bring them back. Like what's your how do you answer those?

29:28I first say why. Because, I mean, just saying it's fucked up is interesting. It's a position. It's not less specificity in that. Yeah, I know. But it's like why do you think it's fucked up because the ethics? Are you worried about like the animals? You worry about, can they exist in the ecosystem? You worry about playing God. Like, so. I'm into it. I'm just, how about the playing God? The playing God, the playing God argument, the people who say that. So we try to have an attitude. We try to be as transparent as we can. We try to collaborate with a lot of people. Some of our biggest haters and skeptics in the early days now work for Colossal.

30:01That's kind of fun. Like, I love that. That's kind of fun. Well, because I have an attitude. So I think that people that give us negative feedback fall into two categories. You have informed critics and uninformed critics, right? So you have people that have never really done anything or they've done very little and they're like, my new thing is I'm going to hate colossally. Okay, cool. But we don't really need to engage you because that's not helpful, right? But if you're an informed critic, right? Like if you're like Bess Shapiro, who wrote, so Bess Shapiro, our chief science officer, number one person in ancient DNA, like arguably number one in the entire world, right?

30:37And she wrote a book that says how to clone a man. Spoiler, it ends with you can't. And I was like, she's perfect. You want her, you want her in the room. Well, no, because she's thought about this, right? And so I met with her, flew out of my mouth or talked to her before she became an advisor. We're talking to her. Beth is amazing. She's also very direct. She's like, why would you want, I wrote a book saying you can't do this. And I said, well, you can't clone anything without living cells, correct? And she's like, yeah. I was like, and we don't have living cells, correct? She's like, correct.

31:07So you can't clone a man. but I was like, but you could engineer one. And she's like, you could engineer one. And I was like, yeah. I was like, so your book still stands. Academics don't like you to challenge their previous written down words. Right, that was smart. That also works. But guess what? You could join, you know the most about this from an ancient DNA perspective. She's not the, we have George from the editing and we had this and then we brought on Andrew Pass from developmental biology. And that kind of like, you know, Triforce makes like, I think that allowed us to engineer the system that we need to engineer the animals.

31:40And so back to your playing God question, you know, I think we play God every day. Like, you know, we play God when we like make the dodo go extinct or when we overfish our oceans or when we take cholesterol medication. And that's a form of playing God. Like you are changing the natural course of where nature is intended with either supplementation for longevity or in destroying our ecosystems. Okay, Jurassic Park. Tell me why it's not possible now to do what they did in that movie and like bring back dinosaurs. So they got it all very, very right in a lot of ways. Right. And I think the biggest thing they did was they taught a lot of people all over the world in a very simplistic way.

32:25Hey, there's this stuff called DNA and we as humans can now edit it and make stuff. Right. And so I think that opened I think Jurassic Park. I think that Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton, the late Michael Crichtons, I think that may have done as much for science as the moon landing. Wow, that's bold. Well, because I think they put really hard, complicated science through an interesting lens, and they fed it to the world in a captivating dystopian movie. But guess what? You got to eat your vegetables with your dessert there, right? And that's cool because people left knowing that there's this thing called gene edited.

33:07Right. And I think that's a major inflection point of humanity that not everyone acknowledges. But to your question. Is it possible? So, no. There is no dino DNA. So, the oldest DNA we work with is about 1.4 million years old. Okay. And it's highly degraded. It's a step mammoth. I love that that's, it's like, it could be possible, but we just don't have access to. We just don't have DNA. The DNA. Okay. So, but I'll answer it in two questions. So, dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, so we believe, and is mostly generally accepted by the world. And so, there is no dino DNA that is known, right?

33:48I don't like to say impossible. So, sure, maybe somewhere, somehow, something got preserved in a case. Who knows? But I highly, highly doubt it. It's all those T-Rexes. They are hiding somewhere in some perfectly secure place. that has... They're under the secret pyramid moon bases in Antarctica or wherever. Yeah, perfectly preserved DNA sitting there. Or just having coffee. Yeah. And so they, with very small teacups. So with a weird, I don't know how they drink it. But anyway, assuming that they can make it and hold it, I'm more worried about the physics of how they drink it than everything before that.

34:23I love the way your mind works. Like we're literally, I mean, this is the best rabbit hole ever. Like how could T-Rex drink coffee? Like that's the question. They can't. I mean, I guess they could toss it, but I don't know. Anyway, so there is no dyno DNA. Amber is also in hot, wet places where it forms. Best DNA is cold, dry places from a storage vehicle perspective. Amber is really porous. You're not going to get any DNA from amber. Amber is where their DNA would be hiding? Well, in the movie, like they found the mosquito in the amber. Right. Okay, so that was a non-realistic part of it. Yeah, it's not realistic.

34:57But a lot of it was realistic. And so look, If we had dino DNA, you know, I think you could definitely engineer one. You know, and I think where synthetic biology is going, that's freaked people out. But I think not today, but I think at some point in the future, synthetic biology will get to the point where you can build full synthetic genomes. You know, I don't know what level of simulation you can do in silica so you don't have to create a bunch of things that don't make it to they're not compatible with life. But I do think at some point you will, we as humanity, will have the ability to, you know, have complete dominion over genomes and be able to engineer something that, you know, resembles a dinosaur.

35:36I don't know what event horizon that's at. But you could engineer some like giant reptile that might start to look dinosaur-like. I'd probably start with a bird because dinosaurs were birds. Right. At least theropods were birds. it's it's unclear whether some of like you what's again this goes back to this like the the the you know this is this will be controversial but you know if you look at uh egg shapes and the basil tree of life and how things uh uh scaled you kind of had two core body plans for dinosaurs you had your theropods and your sauropods right and so you're like brachiosaurus and like you're kind of big you know brontosaurus-y type things from the 90s right and then you had your stuff that was like Velociraptor and T-Rex that, you know, and so I think you had two, you had others, but you had in the non-marine reptile or ancient reptile category, you kind of had those as your kind of two bases.

36:30Most people will tell you that, or the vast majority of people will tell you that all went up from the archosaur through the bird lineage and reptiles diverted at the base of the tree. But, you know, if you look at egg shapes of seropods, you know, they're much more reptilian in the egg clusters we found. There are much more. So, you know, it depends on, I guess, maybe you wouldn't start with the bird. You'd start with whichever body plan you're trying to achieve.

37:03I want to finish with kind of a lightning round that we always do on our show. What is behind you? Teeth? Dire wolves? No, this is, no, it's not. Oh, well, that's a dire wolf mural. Okay. Just because I haven't figured out what I want to put behind me yet. And so that we just put that up quickly. But that's a plesiosaur flipper. Say that again? It's a plesiosaur flipper, a large marine reptile. So, you know, Loch Ness Monster, Loch Nessie. Are you bringing them back or to life? I mean, that's a flipper. That's about as rock as it gets, though. No, no. So, plesiosaurs, many people that believe in the Loch Ness Monster believe it was a surviving family of plesiosaurs.

37:44Okay. I don't have it because I like this monster. I just have it because it's cool. It is cool. And are those direwolves that I'm seeing kind of different versions of them, different heights? Yeah. So there's a big dire mural behind me. Okay. You have two kids? I do. I have two kids. Okay. How old are they? 22 months and five months. Okay. I was going to ask you what they tell other kids about their dad and what he does at work, but that feels like that's not... They don't know words yet. I don't know. Yeah. My son says like up, right? Like that's like, yeah, he says up and down and anything else the wiggles teaches him.

38:20But that's about, that's what he knows. And so, but it's funny you say this because like he has dinosaur books. He plays with little dinosaurs. We've got some bones at the house. And so I can't wait till he knows that I'm not an accountant. And I think that'll be fun. Nothing against accountants. No, no, no, no, no, no. They're a critical part of our. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you hope they tell people at school when people ask, tell me about your dad? They just avoided it and they're like, oh, he's in biotech. Like, I think that's what that'll be. I say that a lot of times. You don't you don't want them to say, like, my dad's bringing back animals from extinction.

38:54It's their choice. Right. Like, it's like because I think that will lead to follow on questions. Right. And so it's really, you know, I want them to say whatever makes them comfortable and happy. I love that. Really basic question that is like, I think I imagine lots of people want to ask you and maybe don't always. What is it like being a billionaire? The same is, I don't know, it's fine. I mean, I don't really talk about my finances publicly, but I mean, I do the same thing now that I've done my entire career. I wear jeans and T-shirts and I work on a laptop that students at XYZ College does.

39:32And is that important for kind of you to feel that way? There must be a psychological thing. I, if, if, if I had a trillion dollars or$2 and I had the ability to do what I'm doing now, I would do that. Cause I, I, I'm very convicted about the work. So, you know, it's like you can make a lot of money doing a lot of things and there's much easier ways to make money than like building software companies, space companies, and the extinction companies. I'm very passionate about the journey. It's not really the destination, but I do, I do, I do, I do not get asked that question often. Yeah, no, it's true.

40:06Well, I, you know, I pride myself on unexpected questions. Your dogs are named Barbie and Ken? Yes, they're mutts. We did not engineer them. And by the way, we named them. They were named, they were named before the movie. Before Barbie was cool again. Yes, yeah, yeah. And so it's like, oh, you love Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Yeah, the movie was great. But just so you know, these dogs are old. Like, you're not like, this was, now it would be cool. When we did it, it was stupid. And so it's like, like that's a, yeah. But yeah, Barbie and Ken. That's a very important thing. Both rescues. Both, why'd you decide on Barbie and Ken?

40:42Well, Barbie, there were like these terrier mutt mixes and Barbie is like scraggly. She doesn't speak English to my knowledge or I think they only understand like 200 words and she won't listen to the podcast most likely. But she's, she's cutely ugly and. I know dogs like that. That's really cool. And so she, yeah. And so Barbie was, that was funny. And then, and then she got a brother and so he was named Ken. Like that was just, that one was a layup. I love that. I hate when fads like, you know, you have to come out and say, I did this thing before it was, before it was cool. Yeah, no, I did.

41:16I say that. I'm like very clear. I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, yeah. And that's not to take away from the movie. We just, I just want to be factually accurate. Do you have tattoos? I have no tattoos. I have no tattoos and like the tattoo I really want, I came up with this. You want to talk about having kind of a curious mind. I interviewed TLC, the band, Chilean T-Boz a long time ago. And at the end of the interview, they said, we like your voice. We're going to call you big sexy. And I was like, that's all I need in my life. Like, I'm going to drop the mic. That's it. That's a great, that is a pinnacle.

41:47Like, that's incredible. That's it. So I came up with this idea. I was like, what if I, could you do an audio wave file of a tattoo that like was the wave file of them saying that? So I could just live with that every day of my life. That's cool. And before I got that tattoo, that became a thing. Like everyone started doing these like audio wave file tattoos that you could read with your phone and like listen to it. So I didn't get a tattoo because I was like, I don't want to do the thing. So I respect that Barbie and Ken were named before before the movie. Yeah. I have like I've gone back and forth on this on a concept of a tattoo.

42:22I just never. I don't know. You don't pull a trigger. My wife, my wife has tattoos. She warns me. She's like, you're going to once you do one, you're going to do seven. And that's what people say. It'll become an obsession. That's what people say. And but it's like I never thought of anything that I'm like, you know, I don't know. It's just never it's just not been on. It's just on the priority. Like maybe if I had more time, I could think about it. Yeah, you're busy. All right. Two more questions. What is an obsession in your life that you have told no one about except like the people closest to you?

42:54I'll give you two. I can't believe I'm telling this. But the so I really like I don't watch a lot of TV. And when I do, I like to watch sci fi. But I'm just I'm just busy. So mostly I'm like planes. Right. But occasionally you need to turn your brain off. And so I will watch Bravo. So a guilty obsession, guilty pleasure and obsession of mine is I will watch some of the Housewives stuff. So like it's just so ridiculous. And it's amazing. And so no judgment, zero judgment. I think it's great. And the other thing I'm obsessed with, or another weird obsession is, like, did you ever go deep on the whole John McAfee storyline?

43:31You know who John McAfee is, right? Yeah, but I never went deep. Oh, my gosh. He's insane. But then it's like, is he dead? Is he not? Like, you should watch. Like, there's an old school documentary on it and other stuff. But I went down. That was another thing. I always thought that guy was crazy. And then I was like, was he really the creator? like there's all these open-ended questions around him like he was i think he's generally a pretty bad dude but i do think it was still interesting right like you could still appreciate the craziness of it all yeah well wait before we move on from that what's your favorite real housewives which one so i'm an old school kind of guy so i'm orange county okay it's a good one others will argue otherwise but uh i'm there with you finally what's an obsession in your life that scares you an obsession in my life that scares me oh it's easy the ocean i love the ocean but i have a amazing fear of it and so i love the ocean but i kind of want to just splash around and water i can see the bottom of you're afraid of the ocean terrified of it's like it like there's a lot we don't we don't know much about it we really don't yeah we know a lot about we wait what is like you know we know more about mars or the moon than we do the ocean so i'm obsessed with the ocean because of how valuable it is to the world and how incredible it is.

44:46Like when you're at the beach, how peaceful and connected you feel and you have this massive moving thing that's alive in some way. It's interesting, but it's also terrifying. But you're not afraid of like swimming. You're saying you're afraid of just the breath of this thing that we have no clue what's going on. Yeah, but it's like when you really think about it, like you're on a boat or you get in super deep water, like you really just don't know, like it's a lot. Yeah. the Loch Ness Monster might be somewhere in there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one day. Ben, you have a wild life, man. And it's been really fun learning about it.

45:21And best of luck in all this work that you're doing. Yeah, thanks. It's really, it's fascinating to follow. Thanks for having me. We'll keep you posted as we make some interesting progress. Awesome.

45:37David Green is Obsessed is a production of Campside Media. It is hosted by me, David Green. Our senior producer is Lane Rose. We are mixed by Ewan Leitramuen. The executive producers of Campside Media are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Scherr, and Josh Dean. Special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren and Sabina Mara. If you have an obsession you would like to share, hope you do, you can send us an email. The address is obsessed at campsidemedia.com. That's obsessed at campsidemedia.com. And hey, if you enjoyed the show, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Really appreciate you listening.