#2301 - Ben Lamm

Jamie (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

What's up, Ben?

Ben Lamm (0:13)

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

My pleasure, very nice to meet you, man. So, why don't you, instead of me, why don't you explain to people what you do?

Ben Lamm (0:22)

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.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

Yeah, and that is a wild thing. I mean, this is essentially, literally wild. This is essentially real life Jurassic Park.

Ben Lamm (0:41)

Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally, like, believe it or not, we get that.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Of course.

Ben Lamm (0:46)

I got to drop my hydrogen tablet in here.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

Oh, you do those, the Gary Breckle ones, right? Those are great.

Yeah, I love those.

Ben Lamm (0:52)

I just didn't want you to think we're going a different direction.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

How did you get started even thinking about doing something like that?

Ben Lamm (0:59)

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 biologists at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right? So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just 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. Like how do we do directed evolution and how that can apply to like 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. 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? And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them to 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 was a joke. 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, you know, 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. 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 sing species.

Joe Rogan (2:39)

So how do you decide what to start with?

Ben Lamm (2:42)

So we started with the mammoth first, right? Because George, you know, had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. 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. 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 ship here with the dodo, everyone just started calling us. And then we just started expanding, you know, our entire set.

Joe Rogan (3:22)

So how does one do this? It's like, let's, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing, before that, how does one do this? Like, from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth.

Ben Lamm (3:38)