Ben Lamm
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yes. Humans had some impact on it. Right. I think that that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that was a could have been a global level flood. with rushing waters and sea rising whatnot. And then you've got, you know, what caused that flood, most likely meteorological, you know, astrological or meteorological.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain impacts. It's like that... It's like that nuclear glass or whatever they call it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But you remember like probably 10, 20 years ago, people, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian. Can't talk to you ever again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Water canopy, you're weird. Don't talk to me again. I know. And now it's like, well, maybe there was a giant flood. Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right? Maybe it was done by impacts of comets, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
vehicles yeah what was ezekiel talking about in the bible have you seen that stuff when have you seen those videos in the last um that have come out in the last year when there was the the most recent uap um uh craze and they'd show it and it looked like crazy ball lightning it almost looked like those things that used to put your you'd put your hands on your head stand up right and then they compare some of those to paintings uh from like you know from like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because you're looking through the atmosphere. I've always seen this stuff on the Internet. Until I was in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was with Peter. Peter, his house in Wellington is, like, on a body of water, the ones I wear. And we were talking, of course, like, the conversation went to ghosts and UFOs because, like, why not? Oh, you've seen them in your time?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We did a partnership with him. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than the Australian government. We made the largest investment in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we do this and then you get into the myth of it. Right. So you start reading it. Right. You start reading.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
No, I haven't seen them in person. I've seen them on his iPhone. This wasn't, like, a telescopic lens. This is an iPhone, and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the Zoom ends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I'll see if Peter will give me his. I'm sure he would. And I'll send it to you because it's just weird to see. Oh, they're weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But this was like not zoomed in. His wife's next to him. And it's just weird stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That's all their, like... zero-point energy and moving and in gravitational wave type stuff. Do you go deep on this? I get bored.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I start reading all the books on the diocese and I want to be obsessive about projects. And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now. And so got super deep in it. And then I started calling Pascal's like, hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos and I kind of think they're still there. And Pascal's like, no, no, stop it. Don't go down that rabbit hole. So I don't believe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I did a call with Hal. I got into that crowd for a while before I started Colossal, and I knew a bunch of those folks. So I talked to Lou. I talked to Hal. I did a Zoom with Hal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. And if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve, it's not that far.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I wouldn't say it's monkeying. It's a little monkey around. The selective precision genome engineering.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I told you one edit makes 5,000, you know, confers 5,000 resistance to neurotoxins. So it's like a couple little edits here does a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I go down those rabbit holes because, I mean, I just think, once again, going back to the stuff of Kuku-Kan and Anunnaki and all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's just so... Strange yeah, and how and how you have certain things that are aligned as celestial they and you're like yeah But they could have picked a lot of constellations Yeah, why do they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is right like right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, there's weird – the cool thing about this, but take a step back. Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, and we get ridiculed even for the actual science that we're doing and proving every day, at the end of the day, it is still cool, and it's interesting. I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Every day is amazing, and we're figuring out amazing things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right? So not just southern Australia, but all over Tasmania. So samples, poop, stuff like that. Samples, just everything, using camera traps. I think they officially say that the thylacine went extinct in 1936. But probably into the late 40s and early 50s, they still existed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcast is because one minute you'll talk to a comedian and a UFC fighter, and the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about the ancient flood than anyone in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But, I mean, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists. It would make our lives a lot easier. Forrest really believes in it. He does. He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. He thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea in the mountains.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, yeah. Very difficult. And the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator prey, from where the Thylacine sightings were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's just another large canid that has a unique howl. Oh, wow. What does it sound like? I'm sure Jamie can find a video.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things. I was like, wait, wait, what? And I was like, if you had one project, is it this mammoth project?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They're wild dogs in Papua New Guinea, but I'm sure people have domesticated them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And hanging out with a fox. So once you have enough of that DNA, right, from all these different samples, and you can assemble it, you then have to build comparative genomic models to its closest living relatives, in the case of the mammoth, the Asian elephant. But I'm from software. So I just assume there's like the, you know, Google cloud of DNA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Like we backed up like we've all done 23andMe before went bankrupt. Right. So we should assume that I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of like the 23andMe of all species.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Which is insane. So there's like there's no back. There's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life, like kind of like the seed vaults that doesn't exist. And so we're actually petitioning the U.S. government to help put a massive project together to help biobank. It's starting with just American megafauna and keystone species. So that doesn't exist at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so then Colossal had to go out and go build reference genomes for all the species, like the closest living relatives for all the species that we're working on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human health care. And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that like the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with. It was a joke.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
How do you create? That's synthetic biology. So you never have to get to 100%, right? You need to get to probably. Synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools. Probably you've heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is, it knocks out, it breaks the DNA. It's not always the best tool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We can now actually make individual edits to, when you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like, that's how precise we can be. We can say at spot, you know, 4,000,008, I need to change that letter. Right. And so you change that letter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference. And if it's in these certain like protein coding regions in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical like attributes, like, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
curved tusk, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, and, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right? Because you're only looking, you're only really looking at that point 4% difference, right? It's a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so the better you can be at software, and the better you can be using AI and the computer models, the less edits you have to make, right? Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So mammoths were about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants. So there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made. And so there are 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different ways, and some of them were larger.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of an Asian elephant. But to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes. We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
See if you can find that. The only unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck. Like people lost their minds, right? Like we're, there's, there's, I was, I was on the phone recently with a, you know, moderately aggressive, um, journalist and, uh, and it was going quite poorly as some calls go. Moderately aggressive?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line, whether it was in 60 Minutes or Stephen Colbert, whatever he's in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths, and everyone kind of wanted him to do this. So I called him back the next day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Some people, yeah, they, they, everyone likes to cut it. Look how cute.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, so we get that a lot from kids. She wants a woolly mouse. So every week, every week, I don't have my laptop, but I should have brought it in here. Look how cute. But every week. Oh, my God, they're adorable. So these woolly mice aren't just adorable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We basically said, look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a mammoth from an Asian elephant to a mammoth? And then because we want to do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants. We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we look for the mouse equivalent. Right. So we look for like all of us have similar genes. And so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them. Right. Or they may not even be compatible with life. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we try to be really, really thoughtful about the woolly mice went like it went insane. There's people that are like making t-shirts, a meme coin. And so we made 36 mice. They're all they're all healthy. There's 36 mice that we made. And what was crazy about it is we're excited about it because it shows that the end to end process of taking data from an ancient DNA sample.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with 100% efficiency. And that's really important and really hard. So we did it with 100% efficiency. Yeah, that's the difference.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They were like a golden brown color, right? Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time. But if you see very fresh mammoths, like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakutsk and other places in northern Siberia that they actually have pretty well-preserved mammoths, they actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so we did that. And now there's people that are making T-shirts that aren't us and pillows that are like legalized Wooly Mice. I'm like, they're not illegal. And then a meme account for the guy that did the like the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Seven days later, I'm in his lab, and we were off to the races on, okay, we're going to try to go build a company to bring back extinct species. So how do you decide what to start with? So we started with the mammoth first, right, because George had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations. We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time, all over the genome, get exactly what we want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then we have this what's called monoclonal screening, where we're screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds like overkill. But then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off-target effects in the genome.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
healthy and so so we try to spend a lot of time you know on that because we're certified by American Humane Society it's the oldest humane organization in the world and if you've seen the film that's like no animals were harmed in the making this film that's those guys so we've ended up so we really care about kind of not just the
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
de-extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out. And so the woolly mouse was a really interesting proof of concept. It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right, and we're getting exactly what we predicted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
No, everyone keeps asking us that. But you know what? Museums actually are now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice? They're like, it'll drive so much value. It'll teach people about genetics and whatnot. So it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, if we ever put them, I think more likely we'd put them in a museum that needs to be free, like the Smithsonian or something like that, from an education perspective versus something that's more attraction-based. I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We may make new ones with new. These won't. They're all separated. They're all separated by sex. So we're not going to like a Jurassic Park moment where they change. They're all separated by sex. But if you if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They live a couple of years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice that live in like a small little cage and all on top of each other. They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them. We spared no expense. Cool little house. Yeah. And they're big and we put fun stuff in them to play with like this. And what's been crazy is we only named two of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we named him Chip and Dale because people were asking what the names were. And I was like, Chip is the only thing that I could think of at the moment. And now even on X, people are like, we need pictures of Chip. Where is Chip? We've only seen pictures of Dale. And there's like these incredible Internet sleuths that are like, that's not Chip. That's Dale. We need a picture of Chip.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There was some ecological modeling that had been done to show that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. And so that was an easy place to start.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Get involved. Yeah. So we've just, yeah. Don't get involved with those people. We've not leaned in. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So it's more of a proof of technology. I think that the mouse model, because it's a 20-day gestation versus 22 months in elephants, it's a great way to test phenotypes. you know, with a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right. One, you can do molecular tests. You can do DNA sequencing to see if it worked. Two, I guess there's four.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Two, you could grow a mammoth and see if it looks like it, but that's a lot of work in 22 months.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
a lot of gestational time a lot of money uh i think there's a lot of risk in that the third and this is a little weird we created what's called induced pluripotent stem cells so we created cells that you can then turn into any type of tissue so we actually do have mammoth hair follicles growing in a lab so we have hair growing in petri dishes in the lab which is pretty cool if you come see the lab you'll get the whole willy wonka tour of it which is pretty cool
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then the fourth way is mice, right? Because it's like if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately within 20 days if the edits were working, if there were any unintended consequences that would be detrimental to the animal. Wow. So we'll probably make more iterations of the woolly mice.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
The thylacine's closest living relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, which is a mouse-sized marsupial. And it actually gestates in 13 and a half days versus 20 days. So there's no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model species.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo for different reasons. We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and indigenous people groups. And a project that we announced through our Colossal Foundation about – Two and a half years ago is doing a population genomics map. We talked about biobanking a little bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
After we launched the company, it went crazy viral and all these other folks from de-extinction research started calling us, like folks from like the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature. It's awesome. The best appear with the dodo. Everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding our entire set.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity? What's been lost? You know, what's the number of inbreeding? So we go through this whole process to try to understand. And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation. Chairman Fox, it's one of the largest organizations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we're giving them a report out on this. We went to their nation, wanted to share this. And then, you know, we're curious. So we said, what other projects would you work on that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison? And they said that we needed help with wolf conservation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They brought up that. They said that we needed help with more bison conservation. They said if we do stuff around eagles and fish. And so we kind of got that feedback. And when Chairman Fox was walking me through their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf. And he said, you know, that's the great wolf.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And and he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost and how many people believed that it could have even been a dire wolf from Game of Thrones. It's cool. I love the show. That's interesting. So he did that. We talked about that. And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up. I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster. You know, it's the only endemic wolf to America. It's only endemic to America. It's a red wolf. It's beautiful. And there's like 15 left in the wild.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
With massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation. We can't save our own. When you think of like the American West, right, you think of wolves, you think of like, you know, eagle soaring, you think of like trout bears catching trout, you know, you think of bison.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, we were like, we have to do something about this. We have to figure something out. And so we put that kind of on the list. And then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years and teachers and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths or dodos or thylacines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We get boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So we're going to make a colossal kids corner at our new labs. And in that, we've had all this – some Hollywood talent, like – Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business, they're just excited about it. Most of them learned about it through their kids, kind of like with the woolly mouse with you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so everyone's excited about it. And then we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the dire wolf again. And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species because dire wolves were only found in the U.S., in North America, but predominantly in the United States, coastal United States.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also help wolf conservation and bring people from like sci-fi, fantasy and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation. We thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost or is no most are most of the dire wolf skulls out there uh there's thousands of them in la brea tar print so if you go there they have this beautiful wall but because of heat and acidification there isn't anything that's protected like there's nothing you can get from that but about six years ago uh a group including best shapiro our chief science officer uh sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave just a single tooth right
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And in that tooth, they actually found a they actually got point one five X or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15 percent of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10 X, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times so that even if there are gaps, you understand enough of the core kind of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's done by AI and software, yeah. So we built, part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than just solving them for existing species, open sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So our first computational analysis company was called FormBio and we actually spun it out of the business. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, let me walk through the whole process. So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate. So we definitely need to find a lot of samples. So we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Wow. But it's also fragmented. It's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is, and someone's stolen part of the puzzle. And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So there's all kinds of problems with that. So this is really an AI and compute problem. It's not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative. And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths. They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants. Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Thank you. Yeah, so these are staying on, you know, like these are not going back into the wild, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids. Like literally like humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Right now they're on a 2,000-acre secure expansive ecological preserve with 24-7 care. We have an animal hospital that we built. Wow. People are always like, you guys raise so much money. And I was like, well, because we didn't just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, so this is Ramos and Remus playing in the snow on the preserve when they are three months old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
God, they're so big. Oh, they just get – as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We didn't know, right? And so we ended up getting a – Is this a full-grown one? No, they're still five months old. So they're 80 pounds at five months. So – Wolves typically grow 12 to 14 months. So they're not full grown yet. Wow. And how big is it already? 80 pounds, about five and a half feet. And the mane. Yeah. And so a couple of things about the wolves, Jamie, if you go back. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we didn't know this, right? We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf. We knew that they existed naturally. And went extinct about 12,000 years ago when a lot of megafauna went extinct, like during kind of that younger dry ice kind of cooling period. They went extinct as well, right? And we knew, all we know, because all we have is, we don't have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25% larger. They were stockier. They probably weren't as fast based on kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be. But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium and whatnot. And we assumed that they're there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool that they are white because there's like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they are red. So they get their papers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. And they have this beautiful, we didn't know this, but they have this beautiful like mane-like quality to them. And when they're babies, you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It's crazy. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's not. It's like typical wolves. But it's incredibly thick. It grows in kind of these clumps. But then as they've grown in, they've started to get this kind of like mane to them, which is incredible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, the female, she's only six weeks old, so it's two years old. So if you keep going through a couple other photos. Wow. Yeah, I mean, they're just beautiful. I mean, it's funny. Someone actually said on our team, they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point, right? Right. There's something. They're so stocky. They're stocky. They're thicker. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They are, I mean, they're absolutely beautiful. So this is Khaleesi, who looks like a baby. And we nailed it. We named her. Can we hear it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They weren't, I mean, now they appeared about two and a half million years ago as far as we understand. And they were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed. They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, everything in nature murders something, right? Yeah. Like we were. Well, cows murder grass. Yeah. And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants like scream.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So they love to chew on horns. So we have different phases. We built a 145-page animal guide. These are actually different horns from different elk and other species that we're putting out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we're feeding them still. So they eat a combination of bison meat, horse meat, and some— Do you plan on letting them kill things eventually? So we're just about to introduce carcasses to them, so giving them— part of a carcass, letting them feed, building in that dynamic between the two brothers for now. And they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I mean, they are on a seemingly wild 2,000-acre preserve with just them, so they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve. But they're not doing it yet. They're starting to exhibit kind of the first inklings that it will trend toward that. But we want them to live... We want them, and we're going to probably make two or three more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We want a solid little social pack that we can monitor, that can live a seemingly wild life, that we can understand more about them. Wow. It's cool. But the other thing that's equally cool to it, going back to the Red Bull story, can you— Which is crazy to me that you have reignited these 10,000-year-old hunting genes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Including size, including size. We understand more about like, we, you know, we looked at what genes made really a dire wolf, a dire wolf, like what was separated. And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000 year old tooth and a 73,000 year old skull. So we could actually understand the genetic distance with that much genetic distance between them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We could actually understand, you know, what truly was fixed and conserved in the dire wolf genome and what wasn't just population genomics, right? If there's If you and I are 50,000 years apart, you know, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period. But if we can then really say, OK, you know, what made Ben Ben and what made Jojo? Oh, here's the overlaps.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so I was I was like so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed. And Romulus was partly raised with me. I could go out to the preserve. I'd check on him quite frequently. It's in the northern United States. We don't say where it is. But mainly because we're for not just the animal's health, but for human health. Ever since we launched the woolly mouse, we've had...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Very excited people just show up at our labs are not open to the public. And we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice. And so showing people too much of the preserve, we're always very, very nervous about we scrub all the videos and whatnot to ensure that no one can pick it out. We assume people will be moderately excited.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, so we've done, I'm not trying to challenge them, but we've done everything we can to protect it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Yeah. They have that family has like the largest private zoo and preserve. Just so wild. It's so crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, it's crazy. But I was in the – so of the 2,000 acres, we have a subsection of it that's about six and a half acres where we have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter. We have a couple of natural dens that we've built for them as well as an animal husbandry area.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So that way when we want to take photos of them or videos of them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly more contained area. And – It's funny. Two weeks ago, I was up there, and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of those pictures, and Remus came. Romulus, who I spent the most amount of time with. Remus came up, came pretty close, and I was able to touch him again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, there's a couple different theories, right? One of the theories with Wrangel Island is that they actually, there's lots of inbreeding. So there's lots of, like, genetic bottleneck, which happened because there's not a different species there. How large is Wrangel Island? I'm not quite sure. Can you give me a photo again, Jamie?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But I thought at that moment, and he kind of skittished away. I was like, that's the last time I'm touching Remus. Like, what am I doing? And I mean, don't get me wrong. I had our animal. Yeah, I have animal care teams there and everything. And they have been some, there's some level of,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
habituation between the care team they really know and love the care team but they're still wild animals right and so probably hunted humans yeah I don't I don't I don't we don't know right but the rise of kind of going back to their extinction the rise of the change in kind of this younger driest period and the change the massive I don't know the some of the stuff that there's like several different prevailing theories one of which is human predation right that like the rise of humans led to the extinction of the megafauna
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That's kind of, you know, I think I think the answer is probably a combination. Could have there been an astrological event? They're starting to be more and more data around that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it. Graham Hancock talk about it. And they just got the shit beat out of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, yeah, it's yeah. And it happened. Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right? Because you see different, which also tracks to the theory, right? So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but there was also a massive glacial lake.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied, they then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns. So you went from a period, you know, in that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of insanely accelerated cooling.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It tracks all over the world. It's like those, it reminds me of those stories where they show people, like, the side of the Sphinx. And they're like, oh, man, that's a lot of water erosion. And then they, like, flip the photo and then you see the head of the thing. It's like, that's not water erosion. It's Dr. Rogers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so essentially, though, Wrangell Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and Russia, also is where they were. Those were kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, that I'm not a scientist, but that's and I don't come from academia. I'm just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me. And I find cool shit interesting. And I try to work on it. Right. And what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non-academic, I'm sure I'll get crucified for this, but I don't read the comments. Don't read the comments.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I don't read the comments. Trust me, I don't read the comments. Good for you. I sleep quite well. Nice. But, you know, the academics, we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot. We fund 17 academic universities, right, all over the world. We fund 40 postdocs. right, all over the world, right? And they're doing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we're very integrated with different ideas from academia and these scholars. And our top people that were at Colossal came from academia. So I think we try to be very academically friendly, but they live in this world, this super kind of like fortune and glory world where it's like, It's a popularity contest if someone has a paper because their entire motivation is publisher or pair.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So one of the other things that people bitch about us is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for every single thing you're using. We're not an academic university. We're not. I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with with the community. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But we get this feedback of like if we wrote a scientific paper for every single thing that we did that went through peer review, like we would have 3000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever. Right. Because we just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me. If I submit a paper there and we totally agree with you and we'll help you. But we submit a paper. They judge my paper. It gets rejected. Then I don't get my grant. So then I can't continue my research. I have to fire my postdocs. So it's a complete scam of a system. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so we went through this phase where it's like we didn't have enough scientists. We didn't have labs. We didn't have money. We weren't doing anything for conservation. So we went through this whole like. philosophical perspective of all these things that people threw at us from the scientific community. And some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There is actually another working hypothesis that they actually ran out of water. They ran out of access to fresh water on the island.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And that is why we don't have flying cars, we don't have mammoths, and until Elon, we were not going to live on Mars, right? And so, like, we didn't have, like, I think— Well, it takes time. Yeah, but it doesn't come—but also academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So if you want to go to Mars or you want to bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system, and you have to innovate across everything. Whereas in academia, you're only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I'm not a scientist, but we should just... And guess what? When new data shows up that changes your old data, you shouldn't get mad about that. You should celebrate it. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I just wish we could get philosophy, we separate philosophical perspectives from science.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
One of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because it's like, once we got the scientists, and once we got the money, and once we proved that we are the most advanced synthetic biology company in the world, once In-Q-Tel, which is the funding arm of the CIA and other governments started investing in Because of our technologies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And once we started proof points, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical. It's not a mammoth. It's not a dire wolf. And it's like this concept of speciation is a human construct that we are trying to impose on nature that flows more like a river than a rock.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So you map them next to it. And there was a study that came out about, and once again, this goes back to the status quo of scientists, of academic scientists. There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data. They said that dire wolves weren't closely related to wolves. They were closely related to jackals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And that's because at the time, they only had 0.15% of the genome, right? They just didn't have all the data. That's not negative. They just didn't have all the data. Now we know that they actually were closely related to wolves because we have more data. Which wolves?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
uh gray wolves or the the precursor to gray wolves right so um so they were closer to to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group and so what we found is so once you do that we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what the difference is and we start to see that in certain parts of the genome that are responsible for size for muscle for cranial facial that there's differences right so we can start to map and say okay where are the differences between gray wolves and where are the differences between gray wolves and dire wolves
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And they're actually mammoths because there's, you know, mammoths themselves. Yeah. Mammoths themselves are closely related to the Asian elephant. Which is on the left? Yeah, which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium. They have the small ears. They have a little bit of a hump structure. Mammoths, because they have these massive, massive tusks, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then with those, we have a lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the dire wolves in a gray wolf cell line.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then once you go through that process, we didn't talk about this earlier, you do the same process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively cloning, where you take the nucleus of one cell, you put that into another egg cell, and then you take that embryo and you insert it into a surrogate. And is this a 100% dire wolf or is this a new thing?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So this goes into the philosophical thing. Right. So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species. So you've got certain people that will say, well, if a species is dictated by something that can't breed, that's literally a definition. Like if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Then you have other people, you have the paleontologists, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lacovara, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world that loves us. But then you have other paleontologists who just hate us. And they do it based solely on tooth morphology, because they argue that's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I asked a paleontologist recently that hates us. I said, if I made a mammoth that was giant with pink curly fur, and it had the right tooth morphology... You're saying that, based on your scientific papers, that you would say that's a mammoth. And she's like... Yes, but that doesn't matter. And I'm like, well, we'll do it. Why does she hate you guys?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because, why does anyone, you know, anytime you do anything in this world now that's like moderately bold or polarizing, people give you pushback. But this is heavily bold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, so when you see – well, and we have more stuff to come that I think will be equally interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, there's philosophical and religious. And so like back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species. Right. But they may produce viable offspring all the time. And a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a aquatic adapted, cold adapted bear. Right. And so I always ask people that. Their offspring, they can have children, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
ways to characterize it making a mule yeah but there's different ways to say something or something right and so you know we are not the same right if i don't know what percent you probably from 23 and me or something have some percentage neanderthal you don't say that you're an admixture or a hybrid you just say you're human you don't you don't really but that's a good point though because neanderthal if you want to talk about us different species just because they could breed with us god they're so different
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally. Believe it or not, we get that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But like I said, there's six different ways. There's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographics, and there's a funny paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through, and the same toads live on two sides of the street, and they're different species. And they're the same fucking toad. Just because there's a road. Just because we as humans changed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's called geographic isolation of speciation. So it's just crazy. And so the only arguments that we now have is, but is it a mammoth? And it's like, well, then don't call it a mammoth. I asked people, did you see Jurassic Park? And they're like, yeah. I was like, what was Jurassic Park about to you? To me? Yeah. If you're going to take your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world. They actually move their heads quite slowly. They had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Is it because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff? Are they dinosaurs or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or are they dinosaurs? If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de-extinction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
If they serve the ecological function and they have the lost biodiversity and phenotypes that made that animal unique, like the polar and a bear and a bear, they're just that animal. So these goes into this starts the whole religious and philosophical debates where it's funny because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don't like what you're doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Oh, it's just like it's by their own definition. They're like, well, it doesn't have enough DNA. So I was like, so I said, but the second direwolf that we have, the second genome that we have from the tooth has is has less of the same DNA than the skull. Does that mean that it wasn't a direwolf? And it just turns into an you're missing the point conversation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
The general point of the people is that they want to pick one speciation definition and adhere us to that. And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species, right? It's just people that are using the framework that they set that isn't consistent kind of based on the argument that they want to make.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, I mean, that is one definition. There is another definition saying that it's only a species if it can't breed with another thing. So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves, does that mean they're now their own species? It just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But one of the things that's awesome also about the Asian elephants is some Asian elephants, some of the ones that are born actually have they look they're not mammoth like, but they have a lot of fur on them and they kind of lose it over time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
100 percent. Right. But I think that if we don't do big, bold things, it's it's important. You know, one of things we should definitely show is this is just like the guy in Jurassic Park. This is basically the same conversation. Don't worry. But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that didn't make it to final cut.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So if we could show the red wolf, I think that'd be amazing because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back the dire wolf, we, one, make available to conservation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. So, uh, if you go to, um, the one more, yeah. So this is a red wolf. Uh, that's hope that's the world's first cloned red wolf. So I've actually made more red wolves than I've made dire wolves. So I've made four red wolves, one female. Are you just releasing these fuckers? No, no, they're, they're in a, they're in an ecological preserve as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so, but you're, you're gonna, you're gonna die when you hear what I went through on this. So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free, right? Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They don't pay us a dime. It's all open source. It's all free. We have 48 conservation partners. The team that's running the Northern White Rhino Project, we're their exclusive genetic rescue partner. We're working with elephants in Botswana, working elephants in Kenya. So anybody can use our technologies for free, right? We're working on chytrid, a terrible fungus in Australia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so if that's not enough, I found out that, you know, that there's only 15 of those red wolves back in the wild in North Carolina. So I met with the upcoming governor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand? Yes. And Thailand and then parts of different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent. I actually rode one of those once with my family. I don't recommend it. Did you go to one of those places that you take care of them?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We'll get to that. We'll get to that. So they're only recognized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife there. But this incredible woman from Princeton, you know, top of her field, she's one of the top wolf geneticists in the world, Bridget Von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have red wolf-like characteristics. So she started darting them Taking samples.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And what she found is they actually have more, quote unquote, red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in in North Carolina.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, but they've all been like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes. All the red wolves have some coyote in them because they look like coyotes. Well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, because the reality is every single species is what's called an admixture. Everything is inbreeding with everything on some level, right? And so everything in life is an admixture. It goes back to the Neanderthal. So this binary idea that we have is silly. No, it's a human-caused construct, right? Right. It's insane. So I went to some folks from the last administration, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I took some data with me, and I said, hey, we really want to help this Red Wolf program. We don't need any money. We open source all of our technologies. And we've used a technology that's non-invasive for cloning where we actually take a vial of blood, we isolate what's called endothelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because there's no nucleus in blood cells. So we catch those. And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right? Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, A lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal. You have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's actually a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning. We can simply do it. Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot. We give blood all the time. And so it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so we found a way, which we're open sourcing on Tuesday, is open sourcing this model of how you go clone from blood, which is a game changer for biobanking because now you don't have to go herd an animal, take pieces of the animal, anesthetize the animal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using this thing. So I went out to Washington. With my team. I showed them, showed them hope as a baby and little videos of, and you may have videos of, of, of hope, Jamie. I don't know if it's in the folder. It showed him videos of hope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I said, Hey, you know, there's, there's only a handful of, uh, we made these four wolves from three different genetic lines. Um, we made these from, we made these from three different genetic lines, right? So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves, uh, than what's alive in the population. And we said, we'd like for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead? And we'll just give them to you. There's no cost. Here was the feedback. We need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend $22 million to see if it's possible to clone wolves. And I was blown away. I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. I wasn't very clear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
This is a cloned wolf. Like here, you can fly with me to the preserve. You have to sign an NDA, but you fly with me to the preserve. And they're like... We need to spend five to six years and 20 plus million dollars to go understand this. To understand this podcast. We'll give you all of the technology. And if you tell me you want 100 wolves, I'll just make you 100 wolves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you. And the response was, we'll get back to you. We went to, we tried to have three other meetings, no showed and canceled, every time, when we were there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I just got back from a meeting with the Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife rolls up to, and they're very, very focused on innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing. And immediately they said, we celebrate, Doug Burgum, the Secretary of Interior there, who we met with, said,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
we celebrate he's a huge conservationist huge teddy roosevelt guy member of the explorers club and he's like that we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list only about three percent ever come off and we're really good at putting them on and we celebrate putting them on so we have to do something about this and if you're saying that we could productionize species and as long as we have the right support to rewild them
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
People can use your technologies for free to make more of these different species that are critically endangered while also biobanking the samples along the way. He's like, why wouldn't we do this? And I was like, why not with the previous folks? And they said that we need, you know, five years and 20 million that they were going to spend internally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They weren't going to ask us to do the feasibility. So they were going to spend it internally on this. And we're like, we'll just do it for free. And he's like, we will completely support the initiative and we're going to help get you plugged in so you can help biobank our species and also help us support, you know, red wolf conservation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Are we going to? I think you focus on the species that are critically endangered and are keystone species, meaning the environment needs them. Right, but you're bringing them back. But the ones that we drove to extinction, right? Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I think most likely it's a combination. We do know that when early anthropologic effects from humans, that when early man went onto a landmass at scale, that we start to see that. We see that in Australia and other places. But to your point, it's much slower. It's much, much slower.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We, so we get, everyone seems to have their favorite animal up for us to save, right? Like the vaquita.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That would be my favorite. Dire wolves, you got to come, maybe at some point you'd see them, but. I want to. They're amazing. I mean, they're, they're, they're just beautiful animals. Yeah. Um, so, uh, we, they're, they're, so saber, saber tooth tiger is a class of, we put it, that is a class of, Most commonly, people think of the Smilodon as the saber-tooth tiger.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There's not, to date, been really great Smilodon DNA. There is great homotherium DNA, which is another type of saber-tooth cat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They classify them differently, you know, based on it. Obviously, you've been studying this, so you're thinking about doing it. I'm not... I mean, we like to study ancient DNA, right? Like, you know, one of the things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is 100% right is... People say there were no saber-toothed tigers in Alaska. That's just an incorrect statement.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There were probably no smilodons there, but there are homotheriums, which are a saber-toothed cat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I've held things in his – I've held a direwolf skull in his – I hope he's fine with me saying that – in his facility. Okay. Yeah, I think he's talked about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, so Homo Theorem is still a saber-toothed cat. But what happens is, this goes back to that philosophical perspective. They think that only, so if you look up Smilodon in comparison.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It has the largest known teeth. But when people think of saber-toothed tiger, this is what, or saber-toothed cat, this is what they think of. Those are crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides in them because they're quite thick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I love, because we don't, you know what's amazing? We don't have the DNA from it, so we have no idea what the color pattern is, which you can see here, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we do have, there have been some really well-preserved pups and others in the permafrost of homotherium. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We don't. I don't want to say we do or don't. We have not done the analysis on that, on homotherium yet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Okay, so that has brown hair. Have you seen the American short-faced bear?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That's the thing I'm probably the most scared of. Yeah, you can't bring that back. 17 or 18-foot giant bear. You can't bring that back. We're not working on it. I'm just saying it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Those are great. Yeah, I love those. I just didn't want you to think we were going a different direction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see and just like if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines. We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacine with in one of the groups that we have involved in is the Logging Commission.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Going back to your how do we live with nature, kind of like with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers. Well, the biggest economic driver right now in Tasmania is actually the logging commission.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having an end to the forest, without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so we going back like the thylacine and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups in ahead of time so that people can get excited about, you know, you know, what are the challenges? What are the unintended consequences? And that's not our job to persuade them. It's just our job to kind of listen to them and then figure it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And, you know, that that approach of like listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities has helped us, I think, traumatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And the woolly mice are not getting released. Right, right, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So on the evolve part, this is actually kind of weird. So you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land. So you have to work with these kind of big working groups. We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You know the old school Looney Tunes, like Wile E. Coyote, where he goes through a wall and there's a hole, or the Kool-Aid Man, right? Well, if you had that cutout, we made cutouts and painted them of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and wolves and other things. And we put them out near camera traps in central Tasmania.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And when we've reviewed the data, you'll have like a quoll or a wombat or one of these animals kind of walking through or even a wallaby kind of walking through. And they'll see a cat. They'll see a cat and they'll kind of look at it. Remember, to your point, for them, it's multiple generations, right? Because these animals don't live hundreds of years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I kind of fell into it. I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park. I'm super stoked. I love animals. I want to go work on this. I'm just a weirdly curious person. So there's this guy named George Church. If you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biologies at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze and they absolutely freak out. Wow. Yeah. So we've been collecting this data for 18 months. We're publishing a paper on it. That is so cool. There's like generational trauma that is baked in to their DNA to avoid a thylacine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
This enormous thing with this robotic pretensile arm. Yeah, it's crazy. As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you. Yeah, they sense it. Right. Yeah. I mean, we see that nature with a lot of animals. Right. If you sense it and they don't feel like they're, you know, being backed into a corner or fearful, then they're not going to be around that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I don't have like road noise. I'm like, this is going to be really hard to get out of here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, I hate flying, too, which sucks because I fly. Yeah, I don't like it. I fly all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because the worst is when you're sitting there, and there's now been these renders of planes that have glass or plexiglass. I'm like, I don't want to see that. I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don't shut the windows. I'm in the tube. It's lit on fire. I just want to go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because if you think about the point where you're sitting in a chair, and then you look down, and you have a floor, you're like... There's not that much. There's like 10,000 feet or 3,000 feet below me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
A Delta Airlines life. Yeah. It wasn't like crazy airline you've never heard of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I go to D.C. a decent amount. And so, like, the whole D.C. thing, like, absolutely freaked me out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Because sometimes I stay at some of those hotels that are right on the river, and you see the choppers fly. You see the choppers fly. You see the choppers fly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Bye-bye. If I saw a ghost, I'm like, all right, I'm moving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I was like, I'm going to be very nice on all of my requests on Croc.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So some of our animals I've been around and they're starting to get quite large, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. Yeah. That. Yeah. At some point, though, you're still kind of like they are wild animals. So you have to maintain some level of healthy distance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but you have two eggs, if you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%. Yeah. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They're saying that Gary said it was, I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was like, it's now becoming a more popular belief that it's diabetes type 3.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I mean, part of the reason I started Colossal, I mean, I told you the story about how I got with George. But before that, I built a handful of different technology companies. My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it. And this was in early, late 2019, early 2020. I had to be in Tokyo and I had to be in Shanghai. So I came back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in Vegas. Saw everyone in the world, right, that's there because it's stupid big. A week and a half later, I'm in NASA Marshall with the director there because we're doing some work for NASA at the time of my last company. And I was with one of my number two, my number two of the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
He was coughing. He wasn't feeling well. We both were kind of feeling like shit. I was like, oh, we've been on the road a lot. We've been drinking. We came back on a Friday, a Friday night. We had we were going back on Slack around talking about aliens and shit. And then the next day I got a call from his wife that he had a sudden cardiac event.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so that for me was a big wake up call because I got really sick during COVID. Like I was on that early strain of COVID. And there's definitely multiple strains. I don't care what anyone tells you. There's definitely multiple things that came out of the thing. And so I got super, super sick. And, you know, I now rarely drink. I rarely have caffeine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You know, I've kind of tried to cut out some exercise regularly. And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light. I do that every day now. Every day. Every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please. So we have the ancient genome. So you have to collect and assemble. Right. And that's a lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab. But that's like some Indiana Jones shit. Like we're literally going into the permafrost and like collecting dead samples from the permafrost, which, you know, you've had, you know, John Reeves on here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, I don't want to be, like, I now have a nine-month-old son, right? And he, like, wants to hang out, and, you know, he's going to get bigger. And if I can't pick him up, that's a sad day, you know? And I've kind of gotten this mindset of, like, you know, I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can't walk. It's kind of a blessing to walk. It is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So why would I squander that blessing? Why would I not lean into it and make sure that when I'm 90 I can walk?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I'm on the journey. I'm not at the end, right? It is a constant journey.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But since I started working with Gary, have you seen this function test? Have you done the function test? What is the function? It's like function health. It's like a it's just a suit. It's just all if you go to your doctor, like I do quarterly blood work. But then I also then do this, the function test, which is a massively all encompassing type of blood. It's like two tests twice a year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so I do that test. And after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my my biological age or my actual age is 43. My my biological age is 35.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients. You know, I buy – and you can actually taste a difference, right? Like if you go to a store and get a steak or chicken, even if it's like free range and all that shit – It tastes great. It tastes better than something that you buy that's terrible at a store.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But when you order from some of these true Amish places and places that have actually grown the food completely natural, that doesn't have just a fake... pre-purchased certified organic, you can taste the difference in the nutrient density. It's insane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. So that's what I order now. So I order a bunch. So I do elk steaks. I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary recommended to me. It's just great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They do have bison, too. Yeah, it's Parker Pastures. They're just, like, when I have a steak from these guys, like, it's been, like, you can taste it. And I've had, like, my brother-in-law and my father-in-law had friends. I was like, no, no, we're going to try these steaks out of the freezer. I was like, we're not just going to buy something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's disgusting. Yeah. It's it smells like death. It literally I mean, I guess it is death. It's just over time piled up death. Have you visited, John? Yeah, I visited, John. You went to the boneyard? Yeah, I went to the boneyard. What's it like there? It's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect. I didn't know John. So I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, it looks completely different, but the taste- It tastes different. You want to eat more of it. I feel full, but I want to finish it, and I also feel like I'm like- My body likes this because it's getting shit that it hasn't been getting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's awesome. It is so great. But in the early days of Colossal, that was one of the things that we got asked by, like, heads of state, like not, not by like, you know, just random people, random people on the internet do it mostly like some people at large, uh, at different locations. They're like, can we eat them? Can we eat a mammoth? What's it taste like?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That was like, that question came up faster than we thought. And this isn't the, I know that wasn't the first weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We get the dinosaur question. Probably the number one question we get is the dinosaur question.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We know that some dinosaurs had feathers. We know some had hair, like kind of precursor to feathers. And we know some that were just scaly. We have preserves of them. We can see in the fossil record whether they had it, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Have you seen the Watson? No. Can we pull up a Watson? So this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon. Watson. It's called a Hudson. I don't know how you spell it. It's like H-O-A-T-Z-E-N or something like that. We can find it. Yeah. Apparently it also smells terrible. But if you type in, oh yeah, it's the Hudson.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then if you click in and find a baby picture, it's got these little creepy hands. It looks like kind of like a bird-like dinosaur. We did the Geno on this for fun. Oh, yeah, you can see it. It climbs. So before it ever climbs, it actually climbs up everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then it evolves. Like if you, the first kind of like quote unquote dinosaur bird out there, it actually, yeah, it crawls. It crawls like it doesn't fly. You know, most birds just sit there with their little like wing nubs and just don't do anything. These guys actually climb. What about terror birds? Oh, yeah. Those are scary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we take these expeditions. We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval. And then we're also doing some cultural studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoths. Like, do you want mammoths back? Is this a good idea, right? Because we try to be pretty inclusive. Yeah. And they were like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Millions, right. The oldest DNA that we have is about 1.5 million years old. That's it? Yeah. So dinosaurs are out of the picture. So you can – a guy you should talk to about – not that, but that's interesting – is Kenneth Lacovara. He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including Dreadnoughts, which is just – It's the craziest thing ever. Dreadnought. Dreadnoughtus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And going back to the issues that... What is Dreadnoughtus? Oh, Dreadnoughtus is amazing. So, I don't know if it looks like that. Imagine if it did. Yeah, go to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he found it in Argentina. And he's amazing. Kenneth Lacovara, he's amazing. He found it in Argentina, discovered the species, named the species. And he brought it to New Jersey to do all the modeling and all that. The government changed. And they yanked it back. You know the old school, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That's where it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's basically in a warehouse. So it's on display for people in a museum. It's literally, this goes back to some of these governments and these museums. It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in Western Argentina. Really? Yeah. And it's like the coolest thing ever. This is. Yeah. So, yeah, that's like of ours lab. And so but but it's it's truly, truly amazing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Like a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks, fill in a lot of like sometimes they'll get like a jawbone and they're like, and here's the reconstruction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They look absolutely, if you look at it, they look like the scariest things ever. And then you put a whale on there and you're like, oh, that's not the worst thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I was like, okay, great. I'm excited. So go meet him. We pull up. He's in a different car. And he's like, and I think he wanted us to follow him. He's like, get in. I was like, okay. And he's a big dude. He's enormous. I'm not that big of a dude, right? No, especially after. John's a giant. Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me. I'm a smaller dude. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There was one species that we don't have DNA for that would be amazing to bring back because the ecological benefit is there was a giant beaver. Yeah. A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I don't know. It would probably be in the late Pleistocene.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so like I literally get in. I get in the car. There's a there's a bunch of stickers and there's one that has butterflies on it that says give zero fucks. And I was like and then there's just move the gun over. So I move the gun over and he goes, listen, and this is the first words out of his mouth to me. If I stop short, you hand me that gun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
yeah and they are they're literally on the side there yeah they this is what would have been so amazing to like look at what the earth looked like you know 12 000 years ago it is it is cool like america like to to your point when you travel and you go to these different places where you have that are truly more remote right and i'm not just talking about like yellowstone but you know like when you've said like going to kruger national park or looking at some of these places in africa when you go to central tasmania
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
it's almost like a weird Disney movie. Like at dusk, you've got like echidnas running around and you've got wallabies jumping through. And they all just come through and you're like, it's like that scene in like Ace Ventura, right? Where he sings and like everything fucking comes to him. And I remember the first I was like, this isn't real. Like, are these animatronics?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There's no way there's this much life in biodiversity. And it's all and it was all just like, you know, the echidnas are running. The wallabies are jumping. You've got like wombats like kind of like kind of scurrying along. And you're just like, there's all these weird, dumb animals that are just excited. You know, they're so strange to us. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
In terms of how we think about them, because you never see them. But then there's just like this insane plethora of them. They're just so many. It's crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So they say that- Because that was kind of the only thing that was- for Tasmania and lower Australia. And have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person? Not in person. They're awesome.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They're cool as shit. They're awesome. They eat in these little packs. And the reason why they call them Tasmanian devils is because they make the weirdest – I mean, they make – if I heard the sounds that they make, if you're out in the woods and you hear that sound, you're like, this is Sasquatch. This is crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Look at his face. So cool. And so they're part of the reason why they're – but isn't that terrifying? You know they give each other cancer? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think – that if the thylacine was there, because this is where people give wolves and thylacines and predators bad, but they go after the sick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There's an energy expenditure ratio, right? They're not just sitting there grazing. They're not getting sedentary. They have to go make the kill. They have to decide, I'm going to go kill stuff. So they kill the young, so they're thinning out the weakest. They kill the old, then they kill the sick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
An environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate kind of that mezzanine level of marsupials. And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not – I don't know if you saw it. It's disgusting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And I was like, I didn't even ask a follow-up question because, like, what do you do when you get in the car with John? And he says, you hand me that gun. If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun. I was like, that's awesome. And he showed me around the— What kind of gun was it? It was just some type of rifle. So it was just Grizzlies?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, they don't even notice you're there. It's crazy. So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of wallaby.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights, and that fighting is when they... That's when they do the transmission.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But they literally scratch and bite each other, and then they transmit this. It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of. So then it latches onto the next face through biting. And if you see an animal with a Tasmanian devil with a facial tumor disease, and you see them, like, they can't walk well, they can't really see well, those are the animals that would be picked off by predators first.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Right. And so there's a big movement within Tasmania and in southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator, being the thylacine, it would eat. I can't even look.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
He was amazing. They'll be sitting there not making those sounds. They start eating or they get threatened and they make those death sounds. It is a terrible – because if you've never heard it before in person, it just catches you by surprise and it blows you away. So it was a pretty weird experience the first time I did it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
No, no, no. They'll start thinning it out, and it'll achieve a balance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I assume it was for Grizzlies, yeah, or Bears or, you know, something large. Yeah. But then he showed me around the boneyard and showed me his collection. And he was completely, I mean, he didn't know us from anybody. He just opened up everything to us, right? And he's like, let me show you all this. Showed us his skull. He actually has a warehouse. I don't know if he ever discloses where it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's literally the worst. It's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate in Australia to the cats.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So the good news about the Tasmanian in the southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right? Hopefully they'd eat the cats. If you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats outside of the cats that they actually own.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials. They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They hold them up like trophies. Well, because it's a huge problem, right? It goes back to the invasive species. One of the projects that we're working on with the thiocene, because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation, is have you ever seen a northern quoll?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Northern Quoll. It kind of looks like a mink or like a ferret, but way prettier. It's amazing. How do you spell it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Oh. I mean, they're absolutely beautiful. I mean, their coats are beautiful. But they're another type of carnivorous marsupial. But, you know, 100 years ago or so, they got, we as humanity, introduced cane toads. Uh, have you ever seen a cane toad? It's like the job of the, I mean, it looks fucking evil, right? They're monsters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so we introduced, we as humanity introduced cane toads into, uh, Australia and, um, and they have a neurotoxin. Well, guess what? Most quolls and small marsupials love to eat frogs and toads. This is actually, I think, about our work. This actually is about our work. Actually, I think this is part of our work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And what we've done is if you go back to your point about co-evolving and evolution, if you go back to South America where cane toads evolved along snakes and mice and other animals, small mammals, they eat cane toads all day long. And they don't die of the neurotoxin. They don't completely stroke out and die, which is what happens in northern Australia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so the cane toads, they reproduce in an insane rate. They're having thousands of babies. There's making more and more of them. So guess what? More and more More and more moles and others are eating these cane toads and dying. So what we did is we actually did a study where we understood what are the genes in the mammals and snakes even in South America that make them cane toad toxin resistant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And here's what we found. This is amazing. One letter in three and a half billion base pairs. So one letter, a one letter change conferred had no other, you know, deteriorated, had no other effects that were negative. And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad. Wow. So because, you know, quolls are endangered and we don't want to work an endangered species first.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But he has a warehouse where he has some of the greatest specimens ever. So it's cool. You should go. It's cool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You want to start with a more model species. We worked in the fat-tailed dunnart, which is our model species for the thylacine. And we engineered dunnarts and dunnart cells and dunnarts that can eat cane toad tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to enter, we'd like to engineer in this one edit into quolls. Because if quolls would have, most likely through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put the quoll next to the cane toad, they would have co-evolved together. They probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation. And so then you could like make these super quolls that eat the cane toads. And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this and help the population of the quolls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, he's and he's a cool and he's a cool guy. And then, you know, being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, oh, we'd love to we'd love to, you know, take you some of your sandwich. Can we take him? He's like, no. And he was very honest. And he told us. And that's like before your podcast with him. We kind of learned that story. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But it also has a halo effect to all these other marsupials that we don't know how many are dying from eating cane toads.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
There was a giant one of those toads back in thousands of years ago. How big was it? I don't know. I've seen a 3D render of it, and it, like, grabs, like, you know, deers and stuff. It's crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But from a natural selection perspective, stupid people are like, I have to save him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart, but in reality it just got a free meal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So that's what sucks is how like some people can ruin it for everybody. Yeah. Because outside of Fairbanks, it's not the easiest place to build a biocontainment level three lab. But he's open. He's like, you build a lab here, you can use whatever you want. But he's like, the bones stay here. So he's very consistent with his messaging.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's the absolute best. He's a genius. And I thought my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. And well, I mean, you you've built a relationship with John. He's just a normal, no bullshit kind of guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Or he's also like, hey, if you want to come work on it, come on. Like, he's very collaborative.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
What is that? I mean, when we do work outside of the expeditions of collecting ancient DNA, when we do work, we also work with museums, right? And so we go to the catacombs of the museums, and it's exactly what you think of as the Vatican archives, right? You go down to sub-basement four of the Smithsonian, and it's just…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And the same thing for hair, right? The reason why our hair is great. That's going to be real soon? Yes. I mean, the speed of which, I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process. And not the technology. I think it'll be a process problem. We saw that with Operation Warp Drive, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
rows and rows and rows of taxidermy animals that you've never seen it's got like like little drawers and boxes and they're like oh this is giant sloth poop and I was like I didn't know there was giant sloth poop they're like yes and we think there's DNA and I was like well this is like you know the card catalog of like all of all like dead species but it's not on display for the public it's just in a basement
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to. So I think that's number one. And I think that you're going to have the ethical pushbacks on this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of for the folks that are deep in longevity, they'll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it's not currently classified as a disease state. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They're getting, all that funding is going to other random stuff. You know, but people aren't focusing on longevity. That's why you've got, like you've seen anything that like Bob Nelson's done. Bob started Arch Ventures and he's like arguably the number one biotech, And he's working on epigenetic resets or resetting your clocks at a cellular level. That's what Jeff Bezos and them have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They're doing it. Altos Labs. George Church is another company called Rejuvenate Bio. They're doing the same things. And they're smart. They did it in dogs first because people love dogs. And they can also collect a lot of data that they can then apply to clinical trials.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, there's people that are cloning their dogs. They can do it even easier now with this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I know. I've got two, and they're amazing. And, you know, I did – my wife is closer to one. And so I did – full disclosure, I did – we did do a blood sample on that one. Just in case? I just don't know what the meltdown could look like. But the other one we haven't. And so, because you have environmental factors, you have personalities, we don't understand all of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But I won't say who it is, but someone that's very well known in the world, when I was showing him some of our dire wolf and red wolf tech, his kids were devastated because his dog was dying. and they didn't wanna put her in any harm. They didn't wanna go to one of these dog cloning companies and do like a ear, they didn't wanna put her to sleep. They didn't think she'd wake back up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So we did a blood draw. He called me over Christmas, or before Christmas last year, and told me that they think the dog's got weeks, days to weeks to live. Could we do it for her? And we did it for him. We're not in that business. That's not our business. But he was just happy because his choice wasn't he didn't want this other dog or his family didn't want another dog.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
His biggest issue was they couldn't let go of that dog, number one. And number two, but they didn't want that dog to suffer. They didn't want to say for our selfish means, you're already suffering. We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken, like Frankenstein pieces of you. And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I was like totally awake, just sitting right there while we did it. And he was happy with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We don't really exactly know what life is. No, we don't. We definitely don't know alive. And here's one thing that his assistant told my chief of staff. He said to her, he's like, you know what's weird? I didn't think it was the same dog at all. It's definitely not the same dog.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But he's like, it goes and sits in the same place, which isn't like, it's not like in front of a window on its bed, right? I don't know the exact place, but it would always go sit in the exact same place the other dog sat. So there's weird stuff. We don't understand this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Same thing. It's like my dog, Ken, if he gets on, he only wants to sleep on my feet. If I fall asleep on the couch, he's cool. He won't sleep on my feet. He just wants to sleep on me. And that's not comfortable for him because I'm kicking him and everything, but that's just where he wants to sleep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're the best. Yeah, and we didn't even teach it this, but when we say security at our house, Ken just loses his mind. He just runs to the door. He runs to the front door, runs to the back door, runs to the side doors. What kind of dog? They're just mutts. So I have Barbie and Ken. They're just two little weird mutts. But we named them before the movie.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I wouldn't say that they are the, at least any museum, I think they have a lot more than they know. I don't see it in massive computer systems. Because we ask for inventory lists. What's the shopping list? It's been over 100 years they've been doing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I think loss is important. I don't want to, you know, I only, I'm new to this whole father thing, but you know, I think it's important that they understand that there's real, there's real things and there's consequences to decisions and we're going to age and we've got a limited time. I think that in his lifetime it will be massively accelerated and, But I think that's important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And, you know, that is one of the things, though, I think having a kid, you know, and also all of these kids and parents that have been sending us pictures of mammoths and thylacines and dodos and hopefully now direwolves is something that's exciting because we get these handwritten notes from kids. Right. So like on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Um, and we get, or an experiment doesn't work or, or, or whatever bad happens. And you look at this pile of kids photos and teachers, like we have this, this, there's a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter in, in literally like, like 40 pictures of mammoths. And in that letter, she goes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
my kids won't be quiet we're in this like attention war with everything my kids won't be quiet i start talking about colossal i show the woolly mouse stuff they all want to just talk about it they just zone in right because it's interesting it's interesting in kids and so i i think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good we can use technologies for conservation for good and we can help ecosystem with bringing back existing species but
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I think that we can also inspire the next generation. Don't we want to preach hope? We're on this 24-7 psycho news cycle, right? That wasn't around when I was a kid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And this idea of these 24-hour news cycles, right? There's actually a law in the UK, this blew my mind. There's a law in the UK that they cannot report on a piece if it has any degree of social impact that they don't tell the negative side. I was like, so what happens if someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to get the dog's perspective? And they're like, yes. And they're dead serious.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Oh, they'll pull out – yeah, and they'll pull out drawers that have like Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So it's like there can be stories that are just negative and there can be stories that are just positive. That's okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I mean that's how we did the thylacine. We actually found in a cup about this size, we actually found what's called – we call it the miracle pup where they shot the mother. They took the three joeys, the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde, and we got a 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute, AI, and synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer life. I think that we were at the doorstep of everyone's very, very worried about AI. But I do think that synthetic biology is in that camp. I think it's like discovering fire.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then the interface at all, like the neural link stuff and everything. It's just going to get, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That's today. We can't even think about what's tomorrow. We spun out a company from Colossal called Breaking last year. And this incredible group at the Wyss Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to it. And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That's why I named it breaking. It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing. Well, guess what? You know, so it takes things out of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
uh broken down never and has got it down into years we have used now computational biology and uh synthetic biology to engineer it so now that it's in you know 22 months and i think that we can get it down to two weeks and so that will be huge for the plastic problem because we can all say that we're going to change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics but
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We still have the existing plastics here. We have to do something about it. So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, someone said, we give you a magic microbe that you can put in a vat and you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw salads and other stuff there and it won't even touch it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
That would have sounded like science fiction 10 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we're talking about not just your- Water bottle. Your water bottle, but you're also talking about things that are industrial defense plastics that are radiation hardened and whatnot for space. We're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Oh, they actually have a bigger- Landfill for windmills. And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But they didn't even know they had it. On the thylacine, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later, they also found a head in a bucket. It was the mom's head. So we could actually look at the genetic relation between the two. And they didn't know they had the head in the bucket. They just had a head in a bucket. They opened it up. It was marked thylacine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. Yeah. They kill animals, kill birds. They disrupt- Whales. They also disrupt migratory patterns of birds. Of course they do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You can't fly into that. Yeah. And they're all made with plastic and plastic polymers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
wow so these microbes would be able to break that down yeah i mean we haven't tested on that specific but like one of the biggest ones that we tested on was was nylon just because there's so much if you look at like what's in the ocean a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets oh that makes sense so we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases and then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others so if we could if we get the point that we could do filtration on microplastics
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
at at the treatment level right because all that's passing through right now like in our drinking water and everything that's why you have to have these massive you have to like the the three layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water you've got to do gary got me a new water machine so but you have to do those types of things because the microplastics and then um the chlorine and other stuff still passes through a lot of the existing materials
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But with a distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA. There's a lot of testing that you have to do, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I don't know, based on heatness and salinity and whatnot, right now it's working in bioreactors, so I don't want to overpromise and say we can just go sprinkle it and call it a day. But that's a long-term goal, right? Wow. But that's the power of, you know, we used AI and computational analysis of this microbe that's found in nature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then we said, let's supercharge it, just like supercharging the coals, right? But the process of using it outside of contained systems like a bioreactor has to be done very thoughtfully and measured, just like rewilding, right? Like, this is where sometimes people get confused about, like, the Yeltsin stuff. They didn't just...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
open the gate and throw some wolves in there i mean sounds like they did more of that in colorado but they there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through right because there's intended consequences which you get excited about but then there's a shit ton of unintended consequences if you're not careful yeah but synthetic biology is is that net is that it's it's an ai level thing that we need to be worried about
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So I think that the U.S. is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective. It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and biobanking because they're biobanking. We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here. That's one of the things I was meeting in Washington about. But China does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
China is going, like, we see them in Africa where they'll make donations to a university or a school and say, oh, but we're going to take blood samples from all of your animals around here. You guys are cool, right? So they are doing this, right? So they're looking for insights in animals. They're looking for that data. They're also trying to build, like, today's Noah's Ark.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
They opened it up, and there was a full thylacine skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything. And we used that to get to a 99.9% complete genome because we also had the ancestry of the two, of the pup and mother.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And so China is for sure. There's some countries it's harder, like the European Union's harder to do anything because they've kind of put a moratorium on GMOs or genetically modified organisms. But, you know, we've been making GMOs for a long time. Like, have you ever seen a pug? Like, we've just done it pretty inefficiently, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences now through AI and software.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, that's not the future that I hope for. I'm more of an optimist, so I kind of believe in the general good of humanity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And we're learning a lot, right? And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
So the closest you could get from a dino DNA perspective is that there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids. So like the smallest building blocks possible, you don't know where they go, right? I think that – It's not possible to de-extinct a dinosaur.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I do think at some point you could use AI and software to do an ancestral state reconstruction, looking at kind of what we know about birds, what we know about reptiles and kind of where they branch. So you could make one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
i think from a genome engineer from a technology and genome engineering perspective that is eventually possible so they could easily make a t-rex i wouldn't say i wouldn't say easily yeah but but they could potentially some future state at some future state i think we'll have like you know the cad software biology where you can engineer almost anything oh my god i mean that's just where the technologies go right the better and you said it best when you brought up quantum
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. So there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being fully utilized.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You know, quantum is only two years away every two years I hear. But eventually when it works and works at scale and you have that coupled with, you know, where some of these companies like X.AI and others are taking it, I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff. And look, it will be in nefarious hands. Let's just be real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right? Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right? And so this is nuclear weapons. And I think that you have to be – just because it exists, we can't put our head in the sand and say, oh, we just can't let it be because it does exist. And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like – It's like five years. No, no longer. That was like seven years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of a certain subset of race. Right. And they were they were doing bad things with facial recognition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of where a lot of the funding comes from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said not not not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says we will not at all support any technology. We're going to ban investing in facial technology. Well, that's just dumb. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Because we now know there's things like deep fakes and all this stuff. But it's like that's setting American innovation back because someone's doing something bad with it. Right. That's like saying, oh, my gosh, they have guns.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
we should never develop guns right like it's just it's a it's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology and so um you know i think the same way about synthetic biology the world is currently the united states is the leader in synthetic biology and we've got national treasures like george church my co-founder and others and and i hope that we continue to be the world's you know leader but i do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do and they will experiment on kids
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, there's the head in the bucket. So, Andrew Pask, who leads our, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And, yeah, that's the head in the bucket. I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrous bones, which we'll talk about at some point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, we definitely have investment by In-Q-Tel, right? So I'm sure that makes us more of a target.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
How do we do directed evolution and how that can apply to life? crops and animals and all kinds of stuff. So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions. He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Well, either panspermia or that we were engineered in places.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, but I will say that if you look at, you know, not to get too weird, but if you do look at the, it's like Kuku Khan and folks in, if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, There's a lot of weird, similar, I mean, you can't objectively, it's like the guy with the Sphinx, right? It was like, yep, that's water. I'm an expert on erosion. That is water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And then they're like, head of the Sphinx, like, that's not water, right? It's the same thing as this. You cannot look at some of this stuff and say, that's not weird, right? You can't look at like, you know, the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that There's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced out of you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It's like you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more, especially the stuff around. If you look at Mayans and then you look at, you know, stuff in the Middle East and how it looks exactly the same.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
It looks exactly the same. Have you been to Peru? No. Machu Picchu? I do not want to take you away from going and visiting the boneyards. You should totally do that. But you should also go to Peru. You can see Peru. It's like standing in the Grand Canyon versus seeing it on Google Maps, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
If you go to like Aliantombo or whatever it's called and you see these blocks that you can't like put a piece of paper between. You know, you can't see it. And you see it and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw. Oh, and by the way, they came from a type of rock in a quarry that's 2,000 miles from here or whatever, however many thousands of miles from here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
You can't sit there and say, well, that's weird. Yeah. If you don't say that's weird, then it's like you're one of those people that are just like, huh, weird. You're a denier. You can't say it's not weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, it's the weird. So you should put Peru on your, because when you see it, there's nothing like it. I've been fortunate to be able to travel all over the world. You see it, and you're just like, that just doesn't make sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
No, I did. So Andrew Pask for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing. He's awesome. He's been working on it like a shoestring budget. And that's part of the problem with de-extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah. How did you guys do this? You know what's crazy about Chichen Itza? They don't let you go there anymore. But I don't know where, but you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chichen Itza. Well, in the jungles there on the Yucatan Peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But the carvings that they have on Chichen Itza and the carvings they have there, they're actually – the older ones have more precise carvings. But now guess what? It's not open to the public. I've seen that. I've been there. Oh, it's so frustrating. But it is such a weird world, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm talking to you about like hardcore genetic science.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
But then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, it is we don't know a lot. A lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And there's no way you can know a lot. And anytime you suggest something new, you get shit for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
Yeah, but I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if they're kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
I don't think they were just like playing around and like, oh, we're going to write something that's going to be in history as a joke forever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And he's been working on it for 15 years and he's had people send him, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years. They just send it to him. And then He loves the thylacine so much. He just sequences it. And he's like, no, it's a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks. I mean, it's demoralizing. But like when I got in the thylacine, you know, we met Andrew.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2301 - Ben Lamm
And it's immense. I do think that the Younger Dry stuff is also... A combination of, I think, generally speaking, if you break down the Younger Dryas period into that rapid cooling, I think the vast majority of people will say some of it, some of the destruction around megafauna was anthropologic, which I'll give it some percentage. Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.