#681 - Ben Lamm - The Man Bringing Extinct Creatures Back To Life

28:00Well, I mean, I would argue that no one to my knowledge is seen in mammoths, so it's pretty exotic. More exotic. You know, we're older. Let's not call it more exotic. I'm not gonna make a value judgment on your mammoth. Older. Yeah, so I mean, because that is pretty exotic. Merchus is a very exotic place, beautiful with photos. So, you know, right limiting, you know, you can't, you know, harvest DNA from the bone. You know, Kenneth Lachavara, who's incredible, he's one of the top paleontologists in the world. He discovered dreadnottis. He's also one of the most interesting people in the world.

28:36The largest dinosaur ever, dreadnottis. He's actually been able to demineralize bones, dinosaur bones, and get pieces of amino acids, right? But amino acids and even some proteins and some collagen, that's not a big chunk of DNA, right? So we get the amber question, we get the dinodinate question. So I guess there is technically dinosaur collagen and dinosaur amino acids and maybe some proteins here in the air. But that is so so the pieces of confetti you're not making pieces of confetti a pieces of DNA confetti of Confetti to try and do it so a dinosaur it does not make it It does not and so so right now we can go back about a million years I haven't seen the latest in terms of what what's been sequenced But I know we've been able to sequence 700 ,000 to a million years and get viable DNA, but at some point And so there's a lot of exotic stuff between them and now.

29:38Also, cold, dry environments are great for DNA. A lot of people love to talk about the LeBrona tarpets. We get a lot of questions about the LeBrona tarpets. And hot acid -filled places are not great for DNA. There's been some really cool animals that have gone extinct in warm wet and climates that aren't great for DNA. So you can't make those. A big fan favorite is the giant slot. People with, there used to be a giant slot. That was a size of a tree, a giant ground slot. That would literally, and there's like some, I've read some stories about how they loved albacados and how they profigated albacados.

30:18I don't know if there's any truth to that. It's one of the recent things I've read about. So there are lots of different species that are interesting. I think that a lot of the Plei -Sistine species, late Plei -Sistine species, make a lot of sense because there is great pressure as great as preservation as you could probably get because early humans weren't sticking them in some freezing temperature or freezer at the time. Right. Okay, what else from the last million years if you were to have a hit list atop of the pops aside from your mammoth and your dodo What else what else is in there for I would like to bring this back?

31:06Well, I mean I think you have to have a reason, you know why Ben this is we are completely liberated from resources ethics or a service of humanity. What do you want to bring back? I think it's hard to fully liberate ourselves from service of humanity or ethics. There's a couple of species that I find very interesting. I think the great AUC is really interesting. It was like the American penguin. It's super cool. I think that it's a survey purpose. I think that there is a whale size manatee or do -gong called the stellar sea cow. We can't bring it back. We actually have DNA for it. There's nothing to just say to them.

31:47It's just too big. unless we get extra development devices to work, which we do have a 17 -person team work on. A fan favorite is Savor Tooth Cat, which there were several, but there were two that were pretty prominent, one being home Ethereum and one being Spinaldawn, Spinaldawn had the bigger tusk that, you know, the big canines that we think of. So I think all of those are pretty interesting candidates. You know, I don't, we can't do the solar sea calendar. I think that would be incredible to see like, you know, blue whale size, you know, man, I'd say like you'd be like, right? And apparently they were like incredibly helpful to the count forest of the Pacific Northwest.

32:32And so they were also big carbon sinks like elephants. So those are all really cool species. We're not working on any of them currently. All right, so what's aside from aside from the mammoth the mammoth being a very useful one and I want to get on to why it's particularly useful and aside from these other ones that are like the sexy ones. What else would you say to be a mammoth is sexy? I think a mammoth is the least I'm not I'm not a hairy hair that much hair is too much for me. What else is particularly useful from the last one million years? Like I said, we have these very specific use cases for certain animals.

33:16So I'll hit the use cases of the two non -mammoth species and then, I guess, probably the other species. But so specifically with the Dodo, bring back the Dodo doesn't like fix the ecosystem of Mauritius. But bring back the data, which is a symbol of man -caused extinction, will force us in the Maurition Government, who we're working very closely with, on removing the invasive species that actually led to the Dodo's extinction. So a lot of people love to just say that Dodo's were dumb and people just ate them. There's actually not as much data suggesting that, because they were a ground dwelling species of flightless bird, and they laid their eggs on the ground one time a year, long, longer gestation cycles, when you bring in invasive species like pigs, rats, and other things, they eat the stuff that's on the ground because it can conjure you, right, for the most part.

34:20And so the process of bringing back the Dodo in collaboration with local people and governments and indigenous people groups and whatnot, if we do want to successfully rewild them in Mauritius and then the neighboring islands, then we actually have to do a process of ecosystem restoration. So it's forcing us to undo some of the sins of the past and introducing these invasive species. So a lot of times people ask us about the dodo, it doesn't really solve a pure ecological impact besides forcing us to undo that, which also could help other species that are native to those islands. In the case of the thylacene or Tasmanian tiger, some people also call it Tasmanian wolf but more commonly Tasmanian tiger, it was the largest apex predator in Tasmania and Australia.

35:13And what people don't realize is people just think, oh, creditors, easy life, top of the food chain. It's like, no, those are actually the big herbivores. Those have easier lives, you know, because they are eating grass. There's a lot of energy expenditure that happens in carnivores to go make a kill, right? And so if you're in carnivore and you're in animal carnivore, I should say, and you're out in the field, and you have to go actually make a kill, versus just get it from your local whole foods. You actually have to go do the work. You're gonna be very strategic. You're gonna spend that energy expenditure very wisely.

35:50You're gonna look for either the small, old week or sick animals to pick them off. And so what people don't realize is that a lot of these carnivores had tremendous health in kind of securing the balance of the ecosystem. Not just because they're thinning herds, because they're also eating a lot of the stuff that, you know, in killing off the weak, the young, or the sick. And so one of the animals that Tasmanian Tigers probably prayed on was the Tasmanian devil, smaller in the stack. And now, due to this whole facial tumor disease, and they don't have any natural predators anymore, they are actually spreading this terrible facial tumor cancer to each other when they eat.

36:35I've been with Tasmanian devil in the wild. and it's very issue, they're very aggressive. And so when they're doing that, they're fighting each other, clawing each other and whatnot. And they actually get pretty beat up during that kind of feeding fins, finsy process. And they actually pass that disease. Well, if that are the things around or a larger animal that preyed on them, they would most likely thin out a lot of those animals that can't walk very well or see very well to the fish's genetic disease, right? So then there's less that can actually produce that. So that whole effect is called tropic downgrading when you have a predator that actually can remove that from the wild.

37:11And that helps balance the ecosystem, right? And so, you know, Dr. Andrew Pask is one of our partners on the dialysis and restoration and rewilding project is been very adamant on their demise has led to the potential demise of the devils, which is terrible. So those are the non -mammoth species impacts. Yes, it is. Okay, so why the mammoth is kind of a, it holds a particularly good cultural position. The dodo, I really like that thing about the dodo that it's not about what it does functionally but what it does symbolically. That look guys, we went through all of this effort to bring this thing back because of how topsy -turvy the ecology of this particular location went, you gotta fix this.

37:59I think that's, it's just a really, really smart way of playing with human psychology. The mammoth also kind of is symbolic in some regards. I don't know if we actually do know why it went extinct. Was it hunted to extinction? Was it whatever, whatever? Yeah, there's a lot of different, a defensive you ask, right? Like there's their scientific peer reviewed papers that say, early man hunted them to extinction. There's other papers that show in other research that shows that, you know, it was climate made it in the evolving climate that pushed the further north and then there's genetic bottleneck and Rainbow Island, the last mammoth died of inbreeding.

38:39But most likely, most people don't realize. So I think they're, I think they have sort of somewhere in between because I think there's data. I mean, we have proof of early man hunting mammoths. We have, you know, there's there's spear marks and stuff like that in some mammoths. There was actually mammoth tools that had been used, right? And so I do think that that were that were designed and built at that time. I think more than likely, you know, with with elephants specifically You have 22 months of gestation Then you have about six years to get to the point that they are truly adult elements All of this and then there's about a 12 to 13 year sexual maturity process So if you want to kill all of this you actually don't have to like eradicate elements You don't have to eradicate all of them.

39:22You just have to eradicate enough of them because of that cycle whether it's the environment or predator, someone will thin them off of a tie to get to extinction. From a reproduction perspective and from a fertility perspective, elephants generally are a fragile creature, long gestation, long time as a relatively useless, unprotected infant, still relatively useless. Actually, finally, there's a lot of opportunity to be dead in that matter. Yeah, before you get to the point to pass on your genes, one thing about elephants though, and we are working on this as it relates to mammoth the extinction, we're not looking at it from a cancer perspective.

40:04But one of the things that's interesting about elephants that I believe also blue whales, is they have an over expression of this protein called P53. You and I and mice, we have about one expression of it. They have seven. And what's interesting is if you look at elephants for both body weight and size and longevity of life, they get cancer, a fraction of what they, quote, unquote, should, based on like cancer and mutation curves of most mammals. And it is believed that a lot of that is due to P53, right? And it's just something that's not as well studied as it probably should be. Most people work in mice and in pigs.

40:51So one of the things that's interesting about what we're doing with colossal outside of the extinction or species preservation efforts, which I'd love to start to at some point if it's an option. But finding, because we are working in so many non -model organisms, we're starting to see really interesting things and learning a lot about species that there's just not been enough research into, at least at the genetic level. And so I'm not saying that P53 or elephants have the cure to cancer, but they may. And so we are working like for us to do our editing, think about that for us. For us to create what's called induced thoracic potent stem cells, the most naive state of stem cells that then you can reprogram it to any type of tissue, which is very helpful for us, right?

41:35We're trying to do. We've achieved that in our marsubial species, the fat tala, that's our model orids up for a thiosine. But in the case of the mammoth and the asian elephants, we're very, very close. We haven't gotten there quite yet. We've gotten to IPSEs, but we want to get to further differentiation of them so that we can really characterize them as the most purest form of IPSEs. It's a great scale. And we've achieved that kind of first step and now we're progressing. But we actually had to isolate and build a construct around P53 and learn how to regulate it because think about what do mutations look like?

42:14They look like cancer, right? And so when you're introducing mutations into the genome, it looks like it looks like they form with cancer. So we're learning a lot about how cellular regulation works around P53, which is really, really fascinating. One of our advisors, Fritz of Ulrat is one of the top P503 researchers who has been very helpful to us. But fundamentally, that's an area where some of these species, while not massively reproductive bioblasts, as you said, could be really helpful if we understand more about their genetics. Okay, so Dodorburg, symbolic, useful, not being gone for that long.

42:57Tasmanian tiger would be good to stop the Tasmanian devils from getting this face tumour. Also symbolic because they are only extinct because the Australian government put a bounty on their heads and and paid people to eradicate them. So also very symbolic. 100 % man caused the extinction, or extinct. That, all of that being said, will he mammoths functionally do some cool stuff? What cool stuff do they do? How did they help the planet? Yeah, so there's a group called Pleistin Park that George has been working with for the last 10 years in northern Siberia. And what they found, and they've done this and I think they published an eight different peer review papers.

43:41If you can do two things, if you can remove these carnivorous trees, this tiger forest that is not the best carbon sink, they're also very dark bark. They almost are like heat -lightening rods that permeate that heat down into the ground. If you remove those and if you get to the right level of cold tolerant dense species, the right level of density, you can actually lower ground temperatures by up to eight degrees. Now, why not? I'll talk about that here in a second, but why is that important? We already talked about this 1 .5 degree tipping point. Well, there's more carbon and more methane in methane's about 30 times worse than the atmosphere.

44:23I think that's what kind of being this is, actually, is predominately made up. There's more carbon and more methane stored in the permafrost in that tundra area than anywhere else on the planet. It's more than double. it's been released in the atmosphere. So we're truly metrotons carbon in methane, which is terrible. It's more than even in the Amazon rainforest, right? Because the Amazon and the rainforest have a carbon oxygen cycle that they just repeats, not in the Arctic. It frees something dies, frezes, dies, frees, and just piles up, right? So there's all this condensed biomass there. And you know, if it really, if it releases, it could be pretty bad.

44:59I was actually with the Army Corps of Engineers up there outside of Fairbanks in the Permanfrost research tunnels and it's absolutely amazing but also kind of terrifying if it does melt. And so what's interesting is there's been studies shown about how effective elephants are specifically forest elephants in Africa and doing a couple of things. They actually made the ground temperatures cooler because they packed the ground and they let the wind actually come down and hit the ground during the cooler months. So that actually makes the ground cooler. Number one. Number two, elephants love knocking down trees.

45:36And I know that sounds like we, but I thought trees were good. It's just colossal having a war on trees. We do not have a war on trees. We just don't love the non -efficient carniferous dark bark trees in the Arctic that aren't helpful. The grasslands, or the Arctic grasslands at that time, were about two to three times more efficient at what's called the albino effect at light reflection. So anything that wasn't absorbed for those grass, absorb in those grasses is not only reflective back to space, but two to three times more visioned the trees. And as well as, they're about six times more visioned at storing carbon down into their root structures.

46:14And so there's been a lot of really great modeling done that if you could return the Arctic back to a more biodeverse with these like Pleiostean creatures area where you have these natural hurting animals during the winter that will pack the stone down deeper or packed so down so that the winter months can actually lower the temperatures. And we've seen that work in Siberia already. Mammoths, like elephants, are natural. They love knocking down trees, right? So then you don't have to use tractors and other equipment like they're doing in Siberia to knock down those trees. And then just building up that biodiversity in that area will lead to a better oxygen nitrogen cycle so that they will, you know, with their defecation and what not that plant more of the grasslands that are more efficient in the summer months.

47:03So it's really interesting when you put the old puzzles together outside of mammoths, it's about eight degrees lower, which is pretty important when we're looking at probably surpassing that one -foot type of degrees that we've talked about in the Paris agreement. It's pretty important to keep all that trapped in. The model is that mammoths can be in a massive accelerant and can push those numbers even higher. little hairy farmers, big hairy farmers walking all over the place. So I've been here when I went to Thailand seven years ago. I volunteered at a conservation center that was reclaiming land from monocrop, monoculture stuff.

47:47I want to say soy beans maybe, do they do kind of aggressive? Anyway, it was Somewhere that had been just one thing, and this guy that had bought tons and tons of hectares of land had also bought two elephants. He'd saved two elephants that had been carrying mother and daughter, that had been carrying tourists up hills, one of those like classic like mistreated animal stories, and then brought them in. And I remember asking at the time, I was like, why is the is it just for fun or whatever? And they were like, oh no, the elephants, they keep the trees to a certain level. They help to rotate the crops and the different insure that manure from one side goes to another side and then this fertilizer and they do all this other stuff as well.

48:26And yeah, I do. I realize that elephants are basically nature's farmers in a way. Yeah. You're 100 % spot on. And there was a study that came out that we can get into Cindy you if you find it interesting to read. I think Brian will where I think that they defined the cup in just forced elephants in Africa Asia, preserve the equivalent of half a trillion dollars of carbon credits. That's amazing. And so, people with more relevance. Yeah. And we want to do that, right? Like, as part of our goals. How do you, have you considered, I know that you haven't got one yet? What is the game plan upon, right?

49:10Right, we can now produce elephants or we can produce mammoths at the pace of about one every 22 months and then we can scale it. What do you do? Fly them in. Fly them in on a big level, the C -130 plane. C -130, yeah. No, no. We work closely with the US government, but not, I don't know if they'll give us C -130s for elephant transports. So the idea is kind of twofold. One, let me talk about scaling briefly, and we'll talk about rewilding. So on the scaling function, to your point, breeding elephants is a long, tedious process. You're not going to make thousands of mammoths the old fashioned way.

49:51It's just going to take a long time. But fundamentally, so we have a group, and once again, what's so weird about my day -to -day life today is that the extinction no longer seems like science fiction to me, because I'm so close to it. It's like I see where I see a lot more than the World Seas and we try to talk about everything we're doing as much as we can. But I see how close some things are and set off our other things are. And so de -extinction to me doesn't seem like science fiction anymore. The science fiction part of my job is we have an ex -year in development or artificial room team that we're really investing heavily in.

50:27And I do think that there's no major science gates there. It's just engineering challenges, right? You have to know enough about this PC's, you have to build the right environment, you have to ensure that you have the right placental interface for the placenta. But you can really build out an extra -year development. That's where you can get scale, right? And this is before we talk about where do you have to put them back. But our long -term goal is to be able to produce many, many mammoths in a facility, right? Where you're not even using serigates. And I think that interestingly enough, some of the work they were doing for conservation is a game changer as we're building the STXT toolkit.

51:07But then separately, I think this artificial womb, if we are to be successful in it, it will have more impact even than all this other work we're doing on species preservation. Because if you could think about it, if you could grow, you know, we talk about the Northern White Rhinos, there's only two left, they're functioning extinct because they're only two females. But if you could grow 100 Northern White Rhinos, different engineered in genetic diversity and then work with three wilden teams to put them back into the wild. We need to change conservation forever, right? And so I do think there's some things that we're working on that are more science fiction, but if we are successful, I'll have kind of that scale functions that you're talking about.

51:42But long term, it's to actually have those breeding centers in the Arctic, in Alaska, in our allied nations, in the Arctic Circle, and actually do that work there and then work to rewild up there. And then? that in hidden bars. Slap them, slap them on the ass. Yeah, send them out into the world. Just give them a treat and an offer to the balance. Oh, you go. Can mammoths produced by you, you just allowed to let them have sex and proliferate, and then do you get mammoths out the other side, or does something weird happen? You do get mammoths out the other side, and there's actually data to suggest that mammoths and Asian elephants did to interpret it, which is interesting, but the cyber conversation.

52:31So we work very closely with every nation, every state has slightly different rules. We work very closely with the US government, we're working with the Australian government, the Russian government, and then we're working with a couple of state governments, the US government's actually an investor in one of the groups as an investor in Colossal. And so for us, you know, it's really important to be inclusive, not when we get mammoths and slap them on the button and hope for the best. It's important to do it now, right? So we spend a lot of time with the government. We spend a lot of time with different regulatory agencies.

53:03We spend a lot of time with indigenous people, groups, private landowners. And that's important, right? Because it's not just about government regulation and support, a BBA and other equivalents. but you also have Indigenous people groups, you have private landowners. So we've been, we've taken the stance that the rewilding process is going to be as long as the engineering process. So why don't we start that now? And so just because we don't want approval, we want true collaboration. And so that's one thing that I think that we've done really right. We have a team that works with these governments and indigenous people groups and how will the public town hall forums that have conversations with local public, but from an education and a feedback perspective.

53:54You can actually learn a lot from a critic if you listen. And so I think we've done a good job of taking a wide range of feedback that we've been given. More so on the critical side, less so on the please make a dinosaur side. understood. Rolling the clock forward, the next question evidently is, what does this mean for humans? Does this mean that we can change our DNA to survive space flight? Can we give us the strength of Neanderthrals? Can we, can we do, I know you work with Chris Mason, he had that thought experiment in his book about if you were able to make humans do photosynthesis and you don't need three tennis fields worth of skin and you'd be able to survive just on the sun like some crazy butterfly of space.

54:42Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Roll the clock forward. We can do for humans. So, so I think so, so just to be transparent, we are not working on humans. We are working in mammals. I think a lot of the technologies that we're developing will have applications to two humans. In the case that that occurs, we spin that out as a technology company. We did that last year with Form Biore, our first AI -based computational biology platform. But I think as we get better at computational biology and as we get better at editing, I think this guy is the limit, right? And that's where you need to spend a lot of time on the ethics side of it.

55:21So, you know, I do believe that from a technology perspective, you know, it's not possible or it's not allowed to do germline editing. So the editing that we are doing in currently with man with it colossal you can't do that in humans So it's not allowed But I do think that as That changes that you think that'll be a societal change of a time with more strict policies and and not that price drift But that regulation around gene editing because right now it's like sounds scary We shouldn't we should only do it in these limited cases, but but it's incredible So so let me give you let me give you a real world example today and then I'll tell you about tomorrow So they're and I probably can screw it up because I'm not a biologist, but they found that like I you know I don't know what your cholesterol is right, but my cholesterol is pretty great But part of it is it's because I've actually I actually use a drug that limit that that that stops and blocks one of the genes my body Called PKS 9 and so what's interesting is there is these these PKS -in inhibitors PCKS, I'm inhibitors that literally block how your body produces LDL.

56:36So some people genetically, even if you're vegan, do everything right, that was Tuesday, you will produce too much LDL, right? You will build up in your system. And this lowers if I, you know, 40 to 70 percent, it's incredible. And it's not, I'm not, I'm not edited my genome, but I take a drug that blocks that. So what about a world where we can edit out that gene where no one, you know, like, like, I believe that diabetes heart disease right now are 100 % curable. They're curable. And I'm not just talking about through lifestyle. I'm at through medications that exist today, right? And so from a human perspective, we are, I take a shot twice a month in order to achieve that, right?

57:18To block that. But fundamentally, I do believe that that's something that could be gene edited at some point, right? And so I think in the near term there will be applications of gene editing and gene therapies that cure that I think in the long term I don't think Chris Mason is wrong I think that we can become more radiation tolerant and with more radiation tolerance that people think about oh that allows us to be a face space -faring species It also allows less breakdown of our DNA and lets us probably live longer on Earth. And so, you know, the sun is not always our best friend in that, right?

57:56And so, I do think that from, you know, we already know about genes like myostatin. Myostatin, if you've seen the Belgian blue cows, you know, we can double muscle mass. That's one at it. It's one knockout. Like I'm not saying we should do it. some bodybuilders, I believe you should do it. But fundamentally, to your point, I think that we live in a really interesting time, and from an ethical framework perspective and a regulation perspective, I think that we just have to be mindful of ethics regulation. But I do think from a technology perspective, we are surpassing the rate limits of regulation and in ethics in terms of what's possible.

58:44More responsible today than we as humans are allowed to do. Yeah, yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with Jonathan Anomaly, who is out here in Austin, and he is about to release, at some point, a company that has been ready for a long time, which does embryos selection, it does embryos selection based on risk for all manner of different things, but it also select for IQ. And it didn't select for IQ, but it gives you a risk profile. Where does eugenics start and stop? Not only that, not only that, but I asked him this question. I think it's very interesting is what's the difference between embryo selection?

59:27Which you could do right now. Like you just be like, if you don't have the actual samples, you're like closing your eyes and going, IVF number five, or whatever, right? What's the, is there a difference? Is there a fundamental ethical difference between embryos selection and genetic enhancement? Is there? And his argument is no. I would argue the answer is no, because people are like, but we can't create like GMOs or genetically modified organisms or bad. I'm like, we've been creating GMOs with crops for thousands of years. We've just been doing it very inefficiently. We've been crossbreeding shit and crossing our fingers, right?

1:00:05And like that we've been doing that with dogs. We have dogs that are all different shapes and sizes that aren't even very some of them are genetically disposed of cancer because of the decisions that we made through selective breeding. But selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering. And so I would argue, no, it's really not at its core. And so before I don't know what exactly his tech is, but another company, I'm not affiliated with, but it's called Orchid Health, George Shoeb's also co -founded it. And they actually, you know, when couples have a baby, they'll get a genetic testing to see if they're compatible.

1:00:41Some people do some tests for Down syndrome and other stuff in womb, right? Sometimes you look like that's controversial. You'll do it. And then what's interesting though now to your IVF point is once you have those embryos to your point, you can close your eyes and pick one. But what's really interesting is now they're doing a risk score where they're saying this, This may be the absolute best looking gene or best looking embryo, but we do full genome sequencing on it. Now we can tell you that this has a predisposition to late stage Alzheimer's, right? So, even though everything else about it's healthy, do you want to insert that one or do you want to take the gamble that we're going to do?

1:01:25I mean, this is this this ultimately is the most interesting part of what I learned from Jonathan Which is At the moment what we do is we roll the dice, right? We roll the dice with whichever whichever is the fastest sperm Which ever is the egg that was timed at the right time of the month or whatever whatever whatever with the right particular month That is rolling and it seems like there are a number of defense mechanisms. I learned that around about 50 % of all fertilized eggs are cast out of all men's body without her realizing within the first fortnight. But it's just you wouldn't, you don't even miss anything at all.

1:02:03And there is, you know, you could imagine why that would be adaptive. That there's something that's not gone quite right here. Perhaps this is an early warning system that just ejects this particular egg. Is that a miscarriage? Why, if you want to wear a bit kind of... And so they, so I don't know if this stats right, but I believe this is in the ballpark. I think George may have told me this, but natural worth is about an 8 % success rate, which is kind of crazy because there's so many of these early stage ejections that you don't even know about, or that the woman just knows, the female just know about.

1:02:39And so it's really interesting, you know, because like even I'd be able to get shipped 50 -50, right? So like, it's crazy to me. And part of the reason why I think some of those only 50 -50 is because they are not doing full genome sequencing of the embryos. So you can have a developing embryo that looks great in microscope, but it has a genetic defect that at a certain point will not work. I thought he just says, nope. Yeah, so you're starting to your point. It takes like, here, if you have this many embryos, you didn't go through a freezing process, you can get through this. It keeps going down and down and down until, but I think that what Jonathan's doing and what work and how does they're doing are really, really important.

1:03:26And, but I also believe that personalized healthcare everyone needs to take responsibility for that. They should get full genome sequencing. They should know what's fundamentally not actually involved in the body. I had mine done the other couple of months ago. So I got one copy of the C677T mutation, not associated as a major driver of home assistant levels. It's not as bad as this other one blah, blah, blah, just make sure that you supplement with B vitamins and some methylated, some other bullshit. Anyway, I had that done. I also went and had a full body MRI brain angiogram, heart angiogram, dexascan.

1:04:08Yeah, did you got a fountain life? Peter D. Amanda says, I didn't know that. So Peter's a good friend. He's an advisor and investor in colossal. No, I've done, I've just done a lot of that individually. I've even done a CT cardiac angiogram scan, which gets you, which then uses this clearly analysis as AI tool where they can tell more, think about this like few years ago, they were like still doing, I think people still do. They do angiograms by sticking like a cap into your body going into your heart and looking at it, right? Like, that all can be now done with image in AI. So you can see like pre -plat buildup.

1:04:44It's incredible. And so - Did you have the, I got an image of the left ventricle first thing out. And we're like, oh, we've got like 0 .5 % or whatever. Did you do the thing where they, uh, IVU with that shit that makes your torso go really, really hot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes you feel like you're in P .E. Yeah. Dude, that is the craziest feeling. Yeah, that's the contrast and makes me feel like it makes me feel like I'm a tape. It was into what it's what I imagine being a dragon feels like. Oh, yeah, 100%. I know exactly the feeling, but interestingly enough, like this kind of goes to, I don't know exactly the results or but going back to like LDL, right?

1:05:34Well, some 100, it doesn't continue to accumulate, but 50 to 75, it actually reverses. And Dr. Osborne, in Dallas, he's incredible. He's one of the pioneers in this field. And what's really crazy about it is, if you can start to not just like you can stop and prevent any buildup, but you can reverse any damage that's there, I mean, you're not gonna die of heart attack stroke. So that is a mitigatable thing. And you may have to not just change life so you may have to take a cocktail of drugs to it. For the rest of your life. Yeah. But it's so it's interesting. I understand why people get achy and I maybe would have done it if Jonathan, I'll send you the episode.

1:06:19You should check it out with him. I'd love to. I'd love to. Yeah. You really just very slowly walked me through step by step. All of the different ways that we make adjustments to ourselves and that we have done to other animals. So we've done it through selective breeding. We've done it to get rid of the pips out of bananas, also to make them bigger and sweeter and all this sort of bullshit. And then we do it to ourselves. We modify ourselves with, I'm going to take this antibiotic. I'm going to take this particular type of pink. I'm going to take this particular statin. I'm going to take this whatever.

1:06:45And he goes, okay, so let's take this one step further. You are a person who has a predisposition to anxiety or depression. And you go through embryo selection. and we can see on there, we can maybe do some sort of polygenic score and say, it seems based on our data, based on the AI, this particular embryo would have a predisposition towards depression. Would it not? Like if you found, as you would the person that lived in your life with... You're gonna put your kids in the best school, right? So why don't I start them off the best they can be? Correct. And then he said, well, you as a person who has depression, or figuratively hypothetically had depression.

1:07:26If you found out that your parents had the opportunity to step in and not give you depression either through embryo selection, which actually technically would mean that you weren't here, so it kind of didn't work. But we forget that. But all through gene enhancement and say, what? You cursed me with this thing and as soon as you Oh, let's say that it was something really extreme, right? Like you were going to be born with like one foot or like some sort of deformity or you were going to whatever whatever And it's that you could have given me you could have taken this away from me as soon as you can see that that is a I and I think he's right a moral thing to do to allow that to occur It's off to the races all the way down to maximizing IQ like it's the Gamma one of the things that isn't talked enough about is like you know, you know other countries have different ethical abuse, right?

1:08:22Like, you know, BGI in China is the Beijing genomics institute has said, we're sequencing everyone we can and we're trying to find the smartest humans and we're going to use it, right? And so... A sortative mating, baby. Just done by computer. Yeah, and so it is one of those things that, you know, there needs to be more work in effort, in thoughtful regulation of these technologies, because we can make the world better through genetic. We can do that. I'm obviously, I mean, I work at colossal, so I do fundamentally believe that. But I do think that a deeper lens on healthcare, because I think that we have the tools and technologies to make humanity better today.

1:09:12Ben Lam, ladies and gentlemen, Ben, I appreciate the hell out of you. Your work's fascinating. I'm glad that it's not me having to turn up with this pressure on my shoulders every day But I think they've chosen the right guy for the job Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the Oh, yeah, Ben. I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Awesome. Thank you