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

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

Ben Lamm is an entrepreneur, CEO of Colossal and a founder. What if Jurassic Park's dream of bringing extinct creatures back to life was possible? Well it kind of is. And Ben's company is forging ahead in the new frontier of de-extinction, starting with some of the most legendary animals from history. Expect to learn why Ben is bringing Wooly Mammoths back to life, how you give birth to an animal that died out thousands of years ago, where Ben gets the genetic material from, how bringing back Mammoths could fix climate change, whether artificial wombs will actually work, if we can make humans as strong as Neanderthals using their DNA, why we should bring back the Dodo bird and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at https://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Lam. He's an entrepreneur, CEO of Colossal, and a founder. What if Jurassic Park's dream of bringing extinct creatures back to life was possible? Well, it kind of is, and Ben's company is forging ahead in a new frontier of de-extinction, starting with some of the most legendary animals from history. Expect to learn why Ben is bringing woollimamaths back to life, how you give birth to an animal that died out thousands of years ago,

where Ben gets the genetic material from, how bringing back Wollimamaths could fix climate change, whether artificial wombs will actually work, if we can make humans as strong as Neanderthals using their DNA, why we should bring back the DoDo bird and much more. A little bit of an update, I've been in the UK for nearly two full weeks now, and have recorded a ton of episodes with guests that I've been looking forward to for a long time. So keep your eyes peeled for those as they will be coming out very soon.

And this Monday, Stan Effeting, the world's strongest bodybuilder, joins me to talk all things, muscle gain, fat loss, strength training. He is ridiculously knowledgeable in this episode was a lot of fun. So get ready for that one. This episode is brought to you by Woop. Woop is a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress, and more to provide personalized insights that help you to reach your goals. Whether you're obsessed with putting in a little more effort in the gym or getting those extra hours of sleep, Woop helps you improve your everyday health and wellness. Each morning, Woop gives you a recovery score that acts as your daily guide for how much

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Just as a headline here, you're trying to fix global warming by bringing woolly mammoths back to life amongst a number of other extinct creatures. Right? Well, I don't think that one company can fix global warming. I think there we are at the, you know, rank of a major biodiversity crisis, which will lead to ecosystem collapse.

And restoring ecosystems like the Arctic Tundra is something that, you know, we're very focused on. So I hope that we are one of many people working on biodiversity loss and combating climate change, but I think it's maybe a little bold to say that we are solving ourselves. I understand. Okay, so somebody comes up to you at a cocktail party

and says, what do you do? What is your answer for your day-to-day work? So my general answer is I say I'm in technology. If they dive deeper, I'm like, well, I'm in biotechnology. If they dive deeper, I tell them that we're working to bring back extinct species and preserve all life on Earth. And then it kind of unravels from there. Right.

Okay. Talk to me about de-extinction, then. Like what even is that? Yeah, so de-extinction is not necessarily a new concept other everything from books and movies and some other movements Through in the world have talked about the concept of de-extinction in the way we view de-extinction is the de-NC of core genes to build proxy species for genetics that have been lost to time, whether that was due to solely climate change events or due to the fact of man's implications. Fundamentally, we are de-extending the core genes that make all of these species, those unique species.

And so, recently, I was on a podcast where someone wanted to debate semantics over the Dodo and they're like, but Shudodo is just going to be a silly-looking pigeon. And I hated to inform them that a Dodo was a silly-looking pigeon. Dodo's were pigeons. And so, the things that made it a different flightless pigeon were the genes that were de-extincting and so it definitely brings out you know different groups have different perspectives on the work that we're doing but but fundamentally we're bringing back these lost species to increase biodiversity and they were using all those technologies for conservation, which is pretty cool. Okay, nuts and bolts. How the fuck do you bring a dead animal back to life? So you can't clone a dead animal. You don't have living cells. So what you have to do is you have to look for its closest living relative. So in the case of the mammoth, that's the Asian elephant.

Mammoths are actually closer related to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants, which is like that blew my mind when I learned that because I was also the first to hit extinction when I was working on this. And what was interesting is you actually have then go look at the DNA sequences. And what was interesting is you actually have been going to look at the DNA sequences. And so we actually had this assemble 54 mammoth genomes to build out kind of reference genome that we can do all the comparative genomics to that of the Asian elephant. And they're about 99.6% the same genetically. And so then in that difference of 0.4% and so on genes, we then started to isolate what are the genes

that really made a mammoth of mammoth, you know, the dung cranium, the curved tuas, the shaggy coat, these extra fat layer, how they produce oxygen in sub-reasing temperatures, and so we then have to start a lot of time doing computational analysis to really understand that, and then we take and engineer those genes into that of an Asian elephant cell, then we go through the cloning process, kind of like what they did with dollar this sheep, back to the 90s. Only it's way more efficient now, and it uses like lasers and stuff like that versus back in the 90s, they were kind of just jamming stuff together, which is weird. But it kind of worked then, now actually really works because it's way more precise. And

then you actually implant that embryo into the closest living relative, being the Asian elephant from a serivacy perspective. Where do you get the genomics of an animal that's not, when was the last woolly mammoth alive? So the last ones actually were about 3,500 BC. So they were up in Rainbow Island. So they've been extinct for quite some time.

Ironically though during the building of the pyramids, the last mammoths were still alive. So it's kind of weird. It kind of blows up a lot of people think that mammoths were around the time of the dinosaurs and so they're like that 65 million years old. It's not. And a lot of the DNA comes from the permafrost because animals will die up there. They will instantly start to freeze. Layers of snow and ice, layers of snow and ice. And so there's tons of preserved species up in the permafrost.

And so over the last 15 years, there's been incredible researchers like George Cherts and Lou Vidal and Beth Bechephero and teams that we work with, these teams that we work with, that have actually gone on expeditions to the Permer Frost to extract ancient DNA. So it's a little bit of science fiction and Jurassic Parky, it's a little bit of Indiana Jones. It's really interesting how it all comes together in the extinction science today. So, is it entire animals or is it bones of animal? What's preserved?

Yeah, so lots of junk is preserved in frost, right? Yeah, lots of shit can be preserved in frost. But it depends. So in the case of the dodo bird, some of the DNA is actually just taken from the bone or the inner beak that they've actually drilled into. In the case the thylacene, you know, which one extinct only in 1936, hunters actually preserved one of the pups that they killed in alcohol that ended up being in the museum. And so that was a really well preserved.

In the case of the permafrost with mammoths, sometimes you get actual flesh. Sometimes you get actual, you know, errors. Sometimes you get actual meat. It's very old and very disgusting. It's got lots of bacteria, so I would recommend eating it. Some people have, which is crazy. But a great place to get ancient DNA is,

you mentioned it is teeth. So some teeth do a great job of preserving it. And there's an inner earbone called petrospone where you actually get great DNA from species that are 10,000 years or older. What do you mean when you say great DNA? Is this an area where it's, but it's not degraded over time? It's massive. It's a high density of it. There's a high density.

There's massive. There is things like heat and sun and radiation are all very, very bad for DNA. And so DNA starts to degrade the minutes outside of your body. So it is definitely degraded DNA. But you can get more and more of it if it's in these well-preserved spots like teeth, like the petriest bone, or really well-frose it. And we've gotten all of it over and over and times. And we're actually doing a project right now

with the University of Alaska and this program that we put together called Adopt a Mammoth. We're actually taking teeth samples and we're giving them from the universities or from the museums in Alaska, giving them and loaning them to school kids, showing them how you extract ancient DNA and we're doing a whole both radio carbon dating and population genomics study and sequencing all of these Alaska mammoths.

So it's a way to bring kids into it, to wait for moat education, you know, because deacinst is pretty fun, but then also it's an incredible way for us to get tons of data that we can use to understand populations of American mammoths because a lot of the mammoths that we have are actually from Siberia, so they're Russian mammoths. Oh, interesting. And you mentioned 53 different samples that was taken and all of those are combined. Presumably the goal here is if we have like 98% degradation of the genome, but we get tons of them, like 50 of them, we can build that up over time and hopefully we get somewhere close to actually

seeing a full sequence. If you ever get to fully 100%, I mean, you just won't, right? And so in some of this stuff happens in the regulatory region, some of this happens in the non-regulatory regions. So you don't even really need as much as you may think. There's an area that I learned about when we started working on this about kind of DNA coverage and the number of reads that the system does because even these sequencers aren't perfect, right? So they're basically giving you a probabilist, a probability score of what that letter is on in terms of the individual nucleotides in the DNA sequence. And so what's interesting is the

more DNA you get, then the more reads you can do, the higher probability, right? Because if you can go to 20 to 50x coverage, that means that they've gone to the whole genome 20 to 50 times. So that means that there's a higher likelihood they're going to be correct, the machines to be correct, and telling you what that specific letter is. And so anytime you get 25 x up, sometimes as low as, you know, teens up, you typically get enough of the genome that you get 25 x up, sometimes as low as you know teens up, you typically get enough of the genome that you get pretty precise. Okay, so let's say that you now have compared the African elephant. Asian elephant. You've compared the Asian elephant to these 53 AI enhanced sequence differences. There's this 0.4% or 0.6% which is the difference.

We've got this. Yeah. Now what? What are you going to 3D print a mammoth? Like what are we doing here? Just guess. No. You actually do molecular and functional assays and tests

to understand what do those genes do. And what's interesting from both a convergent evolution and a general evolution perspective, is you can start to see in different species how certain hair, for example, grows. So we know this about manas, which is really interesting. I always thought that manas just had long hair, right? They actually have five different types of hair.

And so different genes and different pathways do that. And so one of the things that we're doing with colossal, which we find interesting, is we're not only looking at what were the genes in the single gene and additional genes that work together to produce that phenotype or physical attribute of that species, but we're also, we have an entire phenotype team, our G2P team, that looks in leverages AI and some of these great technologies to actually under try to understand how do things like size, how do things like care, how does that

work cross-plum million species, right, even with different genes? Like, what are the different stages of development? And so we're doing a lot of work in kind of general genotype to phenotype around big core things like, you know, everything from size to cranial facial shapes, to fat patterns, to patterns of the actual kind of fur, and then as well as looking at things like care and fur length and different regulatory regions like that. So it's really interesting because for our perspective, because we're working on multiple species, we have our individual teams that's trying to solve the individual challenge of each species. And then we've got this cross-functional team that's trying to look for

trends that can be applied to other mammals, right? And that can be really helpful for like, you know, drought-resistant cattle in other species. Okay. Moving forward, how do we make a mammoth? Yeah, so the way you do is you to that computational analysis for she get the DNA that you symbol that being a then you actually Do that computational analysis and what you have your targeted gene list you then go through the actual process of Editing Asian elephant cells right because of the closest living So we did you mentioned African elephants we did a work with the Vorder Ray Genome Project to do a full

reference genome of the African elephant. More for conservation than really for our project, we did find some interesting differences between mammoths, Asian elephants and African elephants that we are starting to explore. But once you do that, you go through the process of understanding what that gene list is, you then start making edits and you start looking for the edits that you think are going to be the highest impact. You then do a bunch of tests to make sure that those edits actually took. And then once you get to the point that you feel like you've got a cell with the edits that you feel comfortable with, you do sequencing just like we did at the beginning on those cells to make sure that the edits are there. They didn't create what's called off-target

effects, meaning things that you didn't mean to break in the genome. And so once you feel like you're comfortable there, you didn't go into a user process called somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning. And that's when we take the nucleus of a somatic cell and we put it into that of a germ cell or a... What's a somatic cell for the people that don't know? So somatic cells are basically all the cells in your body that are in an animal's body that are not sperm and eggs.

So those are like skin cells, different types of tissue cells. So we take the nucleus or that brain out of a somatic cell and we put it into that of a germ cell or an egg cell. And then effectively you've got the basis of an embryo. You then use a process of slight electrification and some other media and then it starts to divide. And once you get to the right stage of division, you then implant that into a serigate. In the case of the woolly mammoth, that's the Asian elephant. So that's how it works in mammals. How it works in birds is slightly different. It's a little bit different in a process, but

it's a much easier gestation process. So if that's interesting for Dodo's, I can talk about that or yeah, yeah, I want to know how I want to know how it goes. So birds are even like what's interesting to me about birds is the gestational side because we're not going through the stomach cell nuclear transfer or that cloning step in birds. Birds are harder on the front end, but they're so much easier currently on the back end, right? Because we don't have to work.

We don't have to go work on the cerevisuside. We don't have to do the embryo transfer. You don't have to do the nucleus transfer. So it's great about birds is you, while we can't clone birds currently in the world meaning that we can't find the nucleus at the right time of development to move it. You can't clone birds yet. Maybe one day you can. There's debate on whether it's possible, but you know, everything was impossible until

it's not right. And so, but what's interesting is what we are doing is we're actually using chickens as our host. And so this flew my mind kind of like how close mammoths and Asian elephants were. When you take, if you can cultivate what's called primordial germ cells, so the precursors to Agon's Furt, right? And then you edit those. You can then use that and build an edited chitin with these edited primordial germ cells. So this is where it gets crazy.

I mean, at least for me being in the extinction. You can then have edited primordial germ cells chicken A and edited from one of the germ cells chicken B. Those chickens can fall in love and spending under world years, they get married or whatever. And then they have a baby and they have an egg. When that egg hatches, it is based on what you put into the primal rule of germ cells. So they've done this in creating transgenic ducts, where they put edited duct cells in

PGCs, primal rule of germ cells, in a chicken one. They've done it in chicken two. Those chickens grow up, those chickens fall in love, they get married, whatever. They have a baby and egg, the egg hatches, and it's a duck. And so what's amazing is that chickens will actually be these sergates for our first dodoes, which as we talked about briefly early are pigeons. So, our seeding must be.

Ah. So it's an interesting world. And now we're even exploring, I don't know if it's possible, but I'm having a show of you. We are exploring bird cloning, right? Because we were told, this is how you have to do it using these types

of primal real-term cells. So that was the process that we followed. But then, you know, we're like, why doesn't bird cloning work? And we got lots of feedback. They're like, huh, they will try that. So we aren't working on bird cloning. Not sure if it's gonna work.

But if not, we'll go down this PGC route that seems pretty plausible. Okay, so getting back to the mammoth, there's an enclosed loop about that one. We have this Asian elephant, this unsuspecting mother, Asian elephant, who is going to give birth to what? What will ultimately come out of this elephant?

Yeah, so it's a great question. It will be our kind of mammoth windados, right? So we take, it's an Asian elephant that has been edited. So I come from software, so I think it thinks like software. So our 1.0's will produce all the core phenotypes that we know and love in a woolly mammoth. So we're de-extincting all the core hair genes, the cranial facial shake that don't cranium, the tusk morphology in terms of the curved tusk, as well as as shorter tails, smaller ears.

And then there's some stuff that's under the hood, like how the manas are more cold-tolerant, with certain bat layers, with the ability for their nerve endings, not to fry at sub-freezing temperatures, the ability to produce hemoglobin in oxygen, in laser eyes. Yeah, yeah, there are no laser eyes,

but that's a that's a we've got asked if we could make a thylacene laser eyes. So we get a lot of interesting requests, believe it or not. Right, so is it accurate to say that it's a mammoth or is it accurate to say that it's an entirely new species? It's really not. So the IUCN in the Species Survival Commission, which kind of like a U.S. species, which is amazing, we work very closely with them, defines a new species and something that gave rise in nature. So it's not really a new species, at least how it's out there.

But it's also not a mammoth, right? Because it's a mammoth. That's it. It has all the core. So this goes in, I mentioned this earlier right you know whether you think Dodo is a silly looking pigeon or a mammoth is an elephant a Mammoth was an elephant like that's just what they were their packages That that's what they were and so I don't know like my dogs are muts, right?

And I would argue that most species are hybrids and that's hybridization Gives rise to newer species, right? And so, you know, if some people aren't happy unless we clone a hundred percent of the mammoth, then I would argue that, you know, it's a cold, adjusted, genetically modified elephant with extinct mammoth alleles from a series of biodiversity gaps of, you know, three to five or 10,000 years, right? So, much less sexy as a name. Yeah, I mean, that's what you want to call out. That's what you want to call it. But I mean,

for you and me, or at least for me, when I see it, and if we are successful, you know, it has all the core phenotypes, and it's called adapted, if we de-extended the core genes that made a mammoth, the mammoth, then to me that's a mammoth, right? Our goal is not to create. There's a lot of infrastructure in the genome our mammoths that don't have any true meaningful effects, but from a purist perspective, you can say, oh, that's closer to a mammoth. That's at least how we view it.

Functionally, it's a mammoth. It's a functional mammoth. It looks like a mammoth. It it's a mammoth, right? So it's a functional mammoth, it's a mammoth, it drives like a mammoth. Yeah. Right. At least that's how we think about it. There is a small percentage of folks that disagree with this, but you know, you mean the mammoth purists out there? If the mammoth purists want to go a step further, they can't name it. And we welcome them too. Okay, what about like gestation and stuff? Because there's got to be differences and into utero bullshit.

There's definitely intro-euro bullshit. So it's about 22 months of gestation. So it's a very months of gestation. So it's a very long gestational cycle, right? Which, you know, I try to think of things from a system's design perspective, right? And so for me, that's one of the reasons why I left the thylacene. So if I can dumb down the process. What's the thylacene?

Tasmanian tiger. It's a large car. It was the largest carnivorous marsupial. Wow. It kind of looks like a wolf from a, it's not genetic related to a wolf, but it's from a convergent evolution perspective, meaning that in the isolated population, it kind of looks like a wolf. Like if you look at a thine or a scene and a wolf skull, I'd say 99 out of 100 times, people would say, oh, the saying, there's only one small difference in the inside. But what's really interesting is that through current conversion evolution almost looks like a wolf. But going back to your question, from a gestational perspective, you've got 22 months with the man.

With the thylacene, you have 13 and a half days. Now, so that's the end of the process. The beginning of the process is computational biology, like assembling the reference genome. With the mammoth, we had 54 mammoth genomes, you have to do a lot of work to your point. It's very degraded. You have to do so much work on it.

On the dialocene, we got over a 92% complete read on the first read, so that's easier. But then in the middle, on the editing, lots of more edits that are required in the dialocene files in the mammoth. So it's like hard, easier, hard. And then this one was easy, harder, easy. So what's interesting from a system's perspective, looking at this is you can look at the entire kind of like system in mammalian de-extension and build a

system that kind of has to work for both. And so that's where we're spending a lot of time. I will say that it is a lot easier to just say the, the, the policy than the MAMA. Yeah, I guess that one Asian elephant is looked at very, very carefully for 22 months. It's like do not let it out of your sight. If it goes missing, you're, you're in trouble.

All right, so what, what about what could go wrong during this process? Are there any? Boy, anything. Anytime you're doing something that's hard from a science perspective, things could go wrong. You could not fully get all of the right edits made. You could, not only that, we test for whether we made them, right? But do all of the edits produced the phenotexer or core physical attributes that we're looking for, right?

How does the semantics' health transfer process work in elephant versus bovine versus pig versus dog versus mouse, right? And so there's still nuances to that. And then gestationally, the thing that's really interesting is that I don't think there's been this whole concept of xenotransfer, of like there's xenotransplantation of taking something from one species to another, sounds like crazy, but we see it all the time. People get xenotransplantation pieces of pigs in their hearts and go live normal lives, right? We also see that species like mammoth, which is closely related to an Asian elephant, than an Asian elephant, and African elephants and Asian elephants can actually interbreeding and produce phylloffs. And so these are two genetically distant species that are further apart than these two.

And remember, to your point earlier, we're not making exactly this, we're making somewhere in between, right? So we're even closer to an Asian elephant. So we believe there's a high degree of confidence in that inner species transfer and in that in that service. But people ask me all the time, where will the man be the first species

due to the 22 month gestation? I think it's highly likely there will be another species. Oh, it's gonna get ripped up. It's gonna start off on the race first and it's gonna end up coming in last. It's got 22 months of gestation. I mean, that's just, that's hard to, you know, there's people.

It takes time to grow a mammoth. Yeah, there are people, there's other species that's, that's hard to, you know, it takes time to grow a mammoth. Yeah, there, there are people, there's other species that could do a victory lap before. Yeah, you've gotten an entire army of those things that look like wolves. All right, what else? Actually, here's a question. So, it seems to me, with my extensive knowledge

of how genomic sequencing works, that the main limiting factor is the quality of the DNA that you can get from whatever the sample is of the animal. Is that right? I think that that's overcome. I don't think that's the limited thing. I think that the August of limiting, I think that what you just said is overcome with more samples, right? And so we've got incredible partners like Louis Vuitton and Stockholm. It's Louis Vuitton's arguably one of the most knowledgeable people in the world of the genes that make a man with a man with a man with a man. And he's constantly just finding sequencing more man.

So I think that we can problem-bolistically get through what you just suggested. I think that the biggest issue, and I think of different for species, but it's just editing, right? What's amazing is that we have a lot of incredible editing technologies. People kind of just clump all GMM editing is one thing,

but there's a lot of different technologies. There's editing individual letters in kind of that twisted letter, right? Each one of those rungs, you can edit individual ones. You can knock out pieces of it, you can edit multiple things at the same time all over the genome, that's called multiplex editing. That's where we are spending a lot of time

and we're trying to be the most innovative company in the world, being able to edit a lot of the parts of the genome at one time, so you don't have to be so precise. You can edit that same level of precision all over. And we've had, you know, over 90% efficacy already proven internally, which is amazing for our edits, and we're trying to stack those. And then you come to DNA synthesis, where it's like, if you can get to your point earlier, if you can get that right amount of, you know, letters in the right order and you have

a high degree of confidence in it, you can synthesize a big piece of that and then just swap it in. So in areas where there's lots of edits, instead of doing lots of edits, you know, either using kind of some of these individual editing tools or even editing multiplex, or even synthesizing pieces, full pieces of DNA and swapping it in because that may have 20 different edits that we didn't have to make, because we really only had to synthesize it in the

swapping one. So I think that depending on how far we want to push editing, I think that in the rate at which editing, the rate at which editing technologies progress will probably be the limiting factor not on our success, but on the number of edits that can be made. When it comes to other animals, if we were to try and get more exotic, I mean the Jurassic Park memes write themselves with this, right? Yeah, we've heard that before. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. With those, what's the limiting factor there? Why is it the case that you, maybe you can, but why is it the case that you can't do something

which is a little bit more exotic? Well, I mean, I would argue that no one to my knowledge is seen in mammoth, so it's pretty exotic. More exotic, you know, we're older, older, let's not call it more exotic. I'm not gonna make a value judgment on your mammoth older Yeah, so I mean because that is pretty exotic Mauritius is very exotic place beautiful with photos

So you know right limiting you know, you can't you know harvest DNA from bone You know Kenneth Lachavara who's incredible is one of the top paleontologists in the world He just he discovered dreadnottis. He's one of the top paleontologists in the world. He discovered Dreadnottis. He's also one of the most interesting people in the world, the largest dinosaur ever, Dreadnottis. He's actually been able to demineralize bones, dinosaur bones, and get pieces of amino acids, right? But amino acids, and even some proteins and some collagen, that's not a big chunk of DNA,

right? So we get the amber question, we get the dyno DNA question. So I guess there is technically dinosaur collagen and dinosaur amino acids and maybe some proteins here and there, but that is so, so the pieces of convent, you're not making pieces of confetti, a pieces of DNA conf, of confetti to try and prove it. A dinosaur, it does not make it. It does not. And so right now, we can go back about a million years.

I haven't seen the latest in terms of what it's been sequenced, but I know we've been able to sequen 700,000 to a million meters and get viable DNA. But at some point, you know, and so, so that there's a lot of exotic stuff between them and now. Also, you know, cold, dry environments are great for DNA. You know, hot, a lot of people love to talk about the LeBrona tarpets.

We get a lot of questions about the LeBrona tarpets. And, you know, hot acid-filled places are not great for DNA. There's been some really cool animals that have gone extinct in warm wet and climates that aren't great for DNA. So you can't make those. A big fan favorite is the giant sloth. People with, there used to be a giant sloth. It was a size of a tree, a giant ground sloth.

That would literally, and there's like some, I've read some stories about how they loved albacados and how they profanated albacados. I don't know if there's any truth to that. It's one of the recent things I've read about. So there are lots of kind of different species that you know are interesting. I think that a lot of the Plei-Sistine species, late Plei-Sistine species, make a lot of sense because there is great pressure, there is as great as preservation as you could probably get because early humans weren't sticking them in some freezing temperature of research at the time. Right. Okay. What else from the last million years,

if you were to have a hit list, a top of the pops, aside from your mammoth and your dodo, what else is in there for I would like to bring this back? Well, I mean, I think you have to have a reason, you know, why. No, no, no, Ben, this is, we are completely liberated from resources, ethics, or a service

of humanity. What do you want to bring back? I think it's hard to fully liberate ourselves from service of humanity or ethics. There's a couple of species that I find very interesting. I think the great ock is really interesting. It was like the American penguin. It's super cool. I think that it's served a purpose. I think that there is a whale-sized manatee or do-gong called the Stellar Sea Cow. We can't bring him back. We actually have DNA for it.

There's nothing to just say to them. It's too big. Unless we get extra development devices to work, which we do have a 17-person teamwork on. A fan favorite is Saver 2's Cat, which there were several, but there were two that were pretty prominent. One being home with the area, one being smiling ondon had the bigger tusks, the big canines that we think of. So I think all of those are pretty interesting candidates. I don't, we can't do the solar sea count, but I think that would be incredible to see like, you know, blue whale size, you know, man, it's easy like you'd be like, and apparently they were like incredibly helpful to the count forest of the Pacific Northwest. And so they were also big helpful to the count forest of the Pacific Northwest. And so they're

also big carbon sinks like like elephant. So those are all really cool species. We're not working on any of them currently. All right. So what's a side from aside from the mammoth, the mammoth being a very useful one. And I want to get on to why it's particularly useful. And aside from these other ones that are like the sexy ones, what else would you consider to be? You just don't think a man with the sexy is that, I think a man with the sexy. Look, I'm not a hairy, that much hair is too much for me. What else is particularly useful from the last one million years? Like I said, we have these very specific

use cases for certain animals. So I'll hit the use cases of the two non-mammoth species in the, I guess, partly the end of other species. But so specifically with the Dodo, bring back the Dodo doesn't like fix the ecosystem of Mauritius. But bring back the dodo which is a symbol of man-caused extinction will force us and the Mauritian government who we're working very closely with on removing the invasive species that actually led to the dodo's extinction. So a lot of people love to just say that Dodo's were dumb and people just ate them. There's actually not as much data suggesting that as that because they were a ground dwelling species

of flightless bird and they laid their eggs on the ground one time a year, long, longer gestation cycles, when you bring in invasive know invasive species like pigs rats and other things they eat the stuff that's on the ground because it can come to us right for the most part and so and so the process of bringing back the dodo in collaboration with you know local people and governments and the indigenous people groups and whatnot we will, if we do want to successfully rewild them in Mauritius and then the neighboring islands, then we actually have to do a process

of ecosystem restoration. So it's forcing us to undo some of the sins of the past in introducing these invasive species, right? So a lot of times we'll ask this about the dodo. It doesn't really solve a pure ecological impact besides forcing us to undo that, which also could help other species that are native to their islands. In the case of the thylacene or tazmanian tiger, some people also call it tazmanian wolf but more commonly tazmanian tiger, you know, it was the largest apex predator in tazmanian

and lower Australia. And what people don't realize is people just think, oh, predators, easy life, top of the food chain. It's like, no, those are actually the bigger ones. Those have easier lives, because they are eating grass. There's a lot of energy expenditure that happens in carnivores to go make a kill, right? And so if you're in carnivore and you're a, you're an animal carnivore, I should say,

and you're out in the field, and you have to go actually make a kill versus just get it from your local whole foods. You actually have to go do the work. You're gonna be very strategic. You're gonna spend that energy expenditure very wisely. You're gonna look for either the small, old week or sick animals to pick them off.

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

when they eat. I've been with Tasmania Devils in the wild and it's very issue, they're very aggressive. And so when they're doing that, they're fighting each other, clawing each other and whatnot. And they actually get pretty beat up during that kind of feeding fins, finsy process. And they actually pass that disease. Well, if dialysis things around or a larger animal that preyed on them, they would most likely thin out a lot of those animals that can't walk very well or see very well,

too, the fish and the genetic disease. So then there's less that can actually produce that. So that whole effect is called tropic downgrading when you have a predator that actually can remove that from the wild. And that helps balance the ecosystem, right? So, you know, Dr. Andrew Pask is one of our partners on the dialysis and rewilding restoration and rewilding project has been very adamant on their demise has led to the potential demise of the tunnels, which is terrible.

So, those are the non-mammoth species impacts that we're working on. Okay, so why the mammoth is kind of a, it holds a particularly good cultural position. At the dodo, I really like that thing about the dodo that it's not about what it does functionally but what it does symbolically. That look guys, we went through all of this effort

to bring this thing back because of how Topsy Turby, the ecology of this particular location went, you gotta fix this. I think that's, it's just a really, really smart way of playing with human psychology. The mammoth also kind of is symbolic in some regards. I don't know if we actually do know why it went extinct, was it hunted to extinction, Was it whatever, whatever?

Yeah, there's a lot of different, it depends on who you ask, right? Like there's scientific peer reviewed papers that say early man, hunted them to extinction. There's other papers that show in other research that shows that it was climate and the evolving climate that pushed the further north. And then there's genetic bottleneck and

Rangel Island the last man has died of Embroidering but most likely what most people don't realize and so I think they're I think the interest are somewhere in between Because I think there's data. I mean we have you know proof of early man hunting mammoths We have you know, there's there's spear marks and stuff like that in some mammoths. There's actually mammoth tools that have been used, right? And so so I do think that that were that were designed and built at that time. I think more than likely, you know, with with elephants specifically, you have 22 months of gestation. Then you have about six years to get to the point that they are truly adult elements,

six years to get to the point that they are truly adult elements, all of it. And then there's about a 12 to 13 year sexual maturity process. So if you want to kill all of it, you actually don't have to, like, in eradicate elements, you don't have to eradicate all of them. You just have to eradicate enough of them because of that cycle, you know, uh, you know, whether it's the environment or predator, someone will thin them off of a tie to get to extinction. Re from a reproduction perspective and from a fertility perspective, elephants generally are

a fragile creature, long gestation, long time as a relatively useless, unprotected infant, still relatively useless. Actually, finally, we can do it. You know, there's a lot of opportunity to be dead in that. Before you get to the point to pass on your genes, one thing about elephants though, and we are working on this as it relates to mammoth the extinction, we're not looking at it from a cancer perspective, but one of the things that's interesting about elephants and I believe also blue whales is they have an over expression of this protein called P53, you and I and mice,

we have about one expression of it, they have seven. And what's interesting is if you look at elephants for both body weight and both body weight and size and longevity of life, they get cancer, a fraction of what they, quote, unquote, should, based on like cancer and mutation curves of most mammals. And it is believed that a lot of that is due to P53, right? And it's just something that's not as well studied, as it probably should be,

is most people work in mice and in pigs. So one of the things that's interesting about what we're doing with Colossal outside the extinction or species preservation efforts, which I'd love to talk to at some point if it's an option. But finding, because we are working in so many non-model organisms, we're starting to see really interesting things and learning a lot about species that there's just not been enough research into, at least at the genetic level. And so I'm not saying that P53 or elephants have the cure to cancer, but they may.

And so we are working like for us to do our editing, think about that for us. For us to create what's called induced thoracic potent stem cells, the most naive state of stem cells that then you can reprogram into any type of tissue, which is very helpful for us, right, with what we're trying to do. We've achieved that in our marsubial species, the fat talut, that's our model orids for phytosine. But in the case of the mammoth and the asian elephants, we're very, very close. We haven't gotten that quite yet. We've gotten to IPSEs, but we want to get to further differentiation

of them so that we can really characterize them as the most purest form of IPSEs. It's a like a grading scale. And we've achieved that kind of first step and now we're kind of progressing. But we actually had to isolate and build a construct around T53 and learn how to regulate it. Because think about what are mutations look like? They look like cancer, right? And so when you're introducing mutations into the genome, it looks like they form with cancer. So we're learning a lot about how cellular regulation works around P53, which is really, really fascinating.

One of our advisor's Fritz of Ulrat isz, is one of the top P-53 researchers who's been very helpful to us. But fundamentally, that's an area where some of these species, while not massively reproductive viable, as you said, as you've said, could be really helpful if we understand more about their genetics. Okay, so Dodobud, symbolic, useful, not being gone for that long. Tasmanian tiger

would be good to stop the Tasmanian devils from getting this face tumour. Also symbolic because they're only extinct because the Australian government put a bounty on their heads and paid people to eradicate them. So also very symbolic. 100% man caused the extinction. All of that being said, woolly mammoths functionally do some cool stuff. What cool stuff do they do? How did they help the planet?

Yeah, so there's a group called Pleistene Park that George has been working with for the last 10 years in northern Siberia. And what they found, and they've done this and I think they published an eight different peer review papers. If you can do two things, if you can remove these carniporous trees, this tiger forest,

that is not the best carbon thing. They're also very dark bark. They almost are like heat-lightening rods that permeate that heat down into the ground. If you remove those, and if you get to the right level of cold tolerant dense species, the right level of density, you can actually lower ground temperatures by up to eight degrees.

Now, why not? I'll talk about that here in a second, but why is that important? We always talk about this 1.5 degree tipping point. Well, there's more carbon and more methane in methane's about 30 times worse than the atmosphere. I think that's what kind of beingness is apt to here, is predominantly made up. There's more carbon and more methane stored in the permafrost in that tundra area, than anywhere else in the planet. It's more than double what's been released in the atmosphere, so we're truly

metropolitan carbon in methane, which is terrible. It's more than even in the Amazon rainforest, right? Because the Amazon and the rainforest have a carbon oxygen cycle that just repeats not in the Arctic. It frees something dies, frezes dies, frees and just piles of stuff, right? So there's all this condensed biomass there. And you know, if it really, if it releases, it could be pretty bad. I was actually with the Army Corps of Engineers up there, outside of Fairbanks,

in the Permanfrost Research Tunnels. And it's just, it's, it's, it's absolutely amazing, but also kind of terrifying if it does melt. And so what's interesting is there's been studies shown about how effective elephants are, specifically forest elephants in Africa, doing a couple of things. They actually made the ground temperatures cooler because they packed the ground and they let the wind actually come down and hit the ground during the cooler months. So that actually makes the ground cooler. Number one, number two, elephants love knocking down trees. And I know that sounds like, but I thought trees were good,

is this colossal have a war on trees. We do not have a war on trees. We just don't love the non-efficient, carniferous, dark bark trees in the Arctic that aren't helpful. The grasslands, or the Arctic grasslands at that time, were about two to three times more efficient at what's called the albino effect at light reflection. So anything that wasn't absorbed in those grasses is not only reflective back to space

about 2-3 times more efficient than trees. And as well as there are about 6 times more efficient at storing carbon down into their root structures. And so there's been a lot of really great modeling done that if you could return the Arctic back to a more biodeverse with these like pysistine creatures area where you have these natural hurting animals during the winter that will pack the snow down deeper or pack the snow down so that the winter months can actually like lower the temperatures. And we've seen that work in Siberia already.

Mammoths, like elephants, are natural. They love knocking down trees, right? So then you don't have to use tractors and other equipment like they're doing in Siberia to knock down those trees. And then just building up that biodiversity in that area will lead to a better oxygen nitrogen cycle so that they will, you know, with their defecation and what not that plant more of the graphase

that are more efficient in the summer months, right? So it's really interesting when you put the whole pluzzles together outside of mammoths, it's about eight degrees lower, which is pretty important when we're looking at probably surpassing that one book type degrees that we talked about in the Paris agreement, right? It's pretty important to keep all that trapped in. And the model is that mammoths can be in a massive accelerant and can push those numbers even higher. Little Harry farmers. Big Harry farmers walking all over the place. So I've went to Thailand seven years ago.

I volunteered at a conservation center that was reclaiming land from monocrop, monoculture stuff. I want to say soy beans, maybe. Do they do kind of aggressive? Anyway, it was somewhere that had been just one thing. And this guy that had bought tons and tons of hectares of land had also bought two elephants. He'd saved two elephants that had been carrying mother and daughter,

that had been carrying tourists up hills. One of those like classic like mistreated animal stories. Yeah. And then brought them in. And I remember asking at the time, I was like, why would like, is the L, is it just for fun? Or whatever? Oh no, the elephants, they keep the trees to a certain level.

They help to rotate the crops and the different insure that manure from one side goes to another side and then this fertilizer and they do all this other stuff as well. And yeah, I realized that elephants are basically nature's farmers in a way. Yeah, you're 100% spot on. And there was a study that came out that we can get and just send you if you find it interesting to read it I think probably will where I think that they defined the cup in just force elephants in Africa and Asia Preserve the equivalent of half a trillion dollar of carbon credits. That's amazing. And so people with more relevance. Breathe more relevance.

Yeah, and we wanna do that, right? Like this part of our goals. How do you, have you considered, I know that you haven't got one yet. What is the game plan upon, right? We can now produce elephants or we can produce mammoths at the pace of about one every 22 months and then we can like scale it. Yeah, what do you do? Fly them in. Fly them in on a big, a big level of the C-130 plane. C-130, yeah. No, no, we work closely with the US government, but not I don't know if they'll give a C130s for elephant transports. So the idea is kind of twofold. One, let me talk about scaling briefly and then we'll

talk about rewilding. So on the scaling function, you know, to your point, breeding elephants is a long tedious process, right? You're not going to make thousands of mammoths the old fashioned way, it's just going to take a long time, right? But fundamentally, so we have a group, and once again, what's so weird about my day-to-day life today is that de-extinction no longer seems like science fiction to me, because I'm so close to it, right? It's like, I see a lot more than the World Seas, and we try to talk about everything we're doing as much as we can, but I see how close some things are and set off our other things are.

And so, the extinction to me doesn't seem like science fiction anymore. The science fiction part of my job is we have an extra year of development or artificial wound team that we're really, you know, investing heavily in. And I do think that there's no major science gates there. It's just engineering challenges, right? You have to know enough about this PC's. You have to build the right environment. You have to ensure that you have the right placental interface for the placenta.

But you can really build out a exterior development. That's where you can get scale, right? And this is before we talk about where do you have to put them back. But our long-term goal is to be able to produce many, many mammoths in a facility where you're not even using serigates. I think that interestingly enough, some of the work they were doing for conservation is a game changer as we're building the state station toolkit. But then separately, I think this artificial womb, if we are to be successful in it, it

will have more impact even than all this other work we're doing on species preservation. Because if you could think about it, you could grow, you know, we talk about the Northern White Rhinoes, there's only two left, they're functioning extinct because they're only two females. But if you could grow a hundred Northern White Rhinoes, different engineered in genetic diversity, and then work with three wilden teams to put them back into the wild, we need change conservation forever, right? And so I do think there's some things that we're working on that are more science fiction, but if we are successful, I have kind of that scale functions that you're talking about. But long term, it's to actually have those breeding centers in the Arctic, in Alaska, in our allied nations, in the Arctic Circle, and actually,

you know, do that work there and then work to rewild up there. And then, in heated bars, slap them on the ass, yeah, send them out into the world. Just give them a treat and know for the best. Oh, you go. Can mammoths produced by you,

you just allowed to let them Have sex and proliferate and then you get mammoths out the other side or does something weird happen You do get mammoths out the other side and there was actually Data to suggest that mammoths and Asian elephants did interpret which is interesting With the sub conversation the So we worked very closely with every nation, every state, and it's slightly different rules. We work very closely with the US government,

we're working with the Australian government, the British government, and then we're working with a couple of state governments, the US government's actually an investor in one of the groups as an investor at Colossal. And so for us, it's really important to be inclusive, not when we get Mammus and slap them on the button and hope to the best. It's important to do it now, right? So we spend a lot of time with the government, we spend a lot of time with different regulatory agencies,

we spend a lot of time with indigenous people, groups, private landowners. And that's important, right? Because it's not just about government regulation and support, a VBA and other equivalents, but you also have Indigenous people, groups, you have private landowners. So we've taken the stance that the rewilding process is going to be as long as the engineering process. So why don't we start that now? And so just because we don't want approval, we want true collaboration. And so that's one thing that I think that we've done really

right. We have a team that works with these governments and indigenous people groups and how would the public town hall forums that have conversations with local public, but from an education and a feedback perspective. You can actually learn a lot from a critic if you listen. So I think we've done a good job of taking a wide range of feedback that we've been given. More so on the critical side, less so on the please make a dinosaur side. Understood. Rolling the clock forward, the next question evidently is, what does this

mean for humans? Does this mean that we can change our DNA to survive spaceflight? Can we give us the strength of Neanderthrals? Can we, can we do, I know you work with Chris Mason, he had that thought experiment in his book about if you were able to make humans do photosynthesis and you don't need three tennis fields worth of skin and you'd be able to survive just on the sun like some crazy butterfly of space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, roll the clock forward.

We do for humans. So I think so just to be transparent, we are not working in humans. We are working in mammals, I think a lot of the technologies that work developing what applications to humans, in the case that that occurs, we spin that out as a technology company,

we did that last year with form bio, our first AI based computational biology platform. But I think as we get better at computational biology and as we get better at editing, I think this guy is the limit, right? And that's where you need to spend a lot of time on the ethics side of it. So, you know, I do believe that from a technology perspective, you know, it's not possible or it's not allowed to do germline editing. So the editing that we are doing currently with with, with, with, it, it colossal, you can't

do that in humans. So it's not allowed. But I do think that as that changes, because I do think that'll be a societal change of a time with more strict policies and, and, and not that price drift, that regulation around gene editing, because right now it's like, sounds scary. We shouldn't do it in these limited cases. But it's incredible. So let me give you a real world example today,

and then I'll tell you about tomorrow. So they're not probably going to screw it up, because I'm not a biologist. But they found that, like, I don't know what your cholesterol is, right? But my cholesterol is pretty great. But part of it is it's because I actually use a drug that limit that stops and blocks

one of the genes of my body called PKS9. And so what's interesting is there is these PKS9 inhibitors, PCKS9 inhibitors that literally block how your body produces LDL. So some people genetically, even if you're vegan, do everything right, when I was a mouse day, you will produce too much LDL, right? It will build up in your system. And this lowers if I, you know, 40 to 70 percent, it's incredible. And it's not, I'm not, I'm not edited my genome, but I take a drug that blocks that.

So what about a world where we can edit out that gene where no one, you know, like, I believe that diabetes heart disease right now are 100% curable. They're curable. And I'm not just talking about through lifestyle, I'm not through medications that exist today, right? And so from a human perspective, I

take a shot twice a month in order to achieve that, to block that. But fundamentally, I do believe that's something that could be gene edited at some point. And so I think in the near term, there will be applications of gene editing and gene therapies that cure that. I think in the long term,

I don't think Chris Mason is wrong. I think that we can become more radiation tolerant. And with more radiation tolerance, that people think about, oh, that allows us to be a face-sphere in species. It also allows less breakdown of our DNA and let's probably live longer on Earth. And so, you know, the sun is not always our best friend in that, right? And so, I do think that from, we already know about genes like myostatin. Myostatin, if you've seen the Belgian blue cows, we can double muscle mass.

That's one at it. It's one knockout. I'm not saying you should do it. Some bodybuilder, I believe you should do it. But fundamentally, to your point, I think that we lived in a really interesting time, and from an ethical framework perspective and a regulation perspective, I think that we just have to be mindful of ethics regulation. But I do think from a technology perspective, we are surpassing the rate limits of regulation and ethics in terms of what's possible.

More is possible today than we as humans are allowed to do. Yeah, yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with Jonathan Anomaly, who is out here in Austin, and he is about to release at some point, a company that has been ready for a long time, which does embryos selection. It does embryos selection based on risk for all manner of different things, but it also can select, it can also select for IQ. And it didn't select for IQ, but it gives you a risk profile. Where does eugenics start and stop? No, not only that, but I asked him this question. I think

it's very interesting is what's the difference between embryo selection, which you could do right now. Like you just be like, if you don't have the actual samples you're like closing your eyes and going IVF number five or whatever right um What's the it is there a difference is there a fundamental ethical difference between embryos selection and genetic enhancement? Is there and his argument is no I would argue I would argue the answer is no because People are like but we can't create like GMOs or genetically modified organisms are bad.

I'm like, we've been creating GMOs with crops for thousands of years. We've just been doing it very inefficiently. We've been cross breeding shit and crossing our fingers, right? And like, that we've been doing that with dogs. We have dogs that are all different shapes and sizes that aren't even very,

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

Some people do some tests, you know, for Down syndrome and other stuff in womb, right? Sometimes you look like that's controversial or something, you'll do it. And then what's interesting though now to your IVF point is once you have those embryos to your point, you can cross your eyes and pick one, but what's really interesting is now they're doing a risk for what they're saying. This, you know, this may be like the absolute best-looking gene or best-looking embryo, but, you know, we do full genome sequencing

on it. Now we can tell you that, you know, this has a previous position to light stage all-spinning. So, yeah, even though everything else about it's healthy, do you want to insert that one or do you want to take the gamble that we're going to do? Dude, I mean, this is this ultimately is the most interesting part of what I learned from Jonathan, which is, at the moment, what we do is we roll the dice, right? We roll the dice with whichever, whichever is the fastest sperm, whichever is the egg that was timed at the right time of the month or whatever, whatever

whatever, the right particular month. That is rolling. And it seems like there are a number of defense mechanisms. I learned that around about 50% of all fertilized eggs are cast out of all men's body without her realizing within the first fortnight, that it's just you wouldn't, you don't even miss anything at all, and there is, you know, you could imagine why that would be adaptive, that there's something that's not gone quite right here, perhaps this is an early warning system that just ejects this particular egg. Is that a miscarriage? Me, why?

If you want to wear a bit, kind of. And so they, so I don't know if this stats right, but I believe this is in the ballpark. I think George may have told me this, but natural worth is about an 8% success rate, which is kind of crazy, because there's so many of these early stage injections that you don't even know about that that that that the woman just know that the female does know about and so it's really interesting

You know because like even IVF along you shipped 50 50 right and so like you're it's crazy to me in part of the reason why I think some of those are only 5050 is because they are not doing full genome sequencing at the embryos. So you can have a developing embryo that looks great in microscope, but it has a genetic defect that at a certain point will not work. I'm about to just say nope. Yeah, so you're starting to your point, it takes care if you have this many embryos, you then go through a freezing process and you can get to this, it keeps going down and down and down until, but I think that what Jonathan's doing and what Orc at Health are doing are really, really important.

But I also believe that personalized healthcare everyone needs to take responsibility for that. They should get full genome sequencing. They should know what's, you know, fundamentally not actually. I had, I had mine done the other couple of months ago. I got one copy of the C677T mutation, not associated as a major driver of home assisting levels. It's not as bad as this. So the one blah, blah, blah, just make sure that you supplement with B vitamins and some methylated, some other bullshit. Anyway, I had that done.

I also went and had a full body MRI, brain, angiogram, heart angiogram, DEXIS scan. Yeah. Yeah. Did you got a fountain life? Peter D. Amanda says, I didn't notice a Peter's a good friend. He's an advisor in investment colossal. No, I've just done fountain life? Peter D. Amanda says, I didn't know that as a Peter's a good friend, he's an advisor in investment colossal.

No, I've done, I've just done a lot of that individually. I've even done a CT cardiac angiogram scan, which then uses this clearly analysis as AI tool, where they can tell more, think about this like few years ago, they were like still doing, I think people still do, they do angiograms by sticking like a cap years ago, they were still doing, I think people still do. They do anti-grows by sticking a cap into your body and going into your heart and looking

at it, right? Like that all can be now done with imaging in AI. So you can see like pre-plac buildup, it's incredible. And so- Did you have the, I got an image of the left ventricle first thing out and we're like, we've got like 0.5% or whatever. Did you do the thing where they IVU with that shit that makes your torso go really, really hot? Yeah, yeah, and it makes you feel like you're in T.

Dude, that is the craziest feeling. Yeah, that's the contrast. And it makes me feel like it makes me feel like I'm in T. And so I'm like, it's what that's the contrast and makes you feel like it makes me to I'm okay. It's what it's what I imagine being a dragon feels like oh yeah 100% I know exactly the feeling but but interestingly enough like this kind of goes to I don't know exactly the results were but going back to like LDL right They've now shown that if you can get LDL down to 50 to 75 not only well 700 it doesn't continue to accumulate but 50 to 75 it actually reverses and

Dr. Osborne in Dallas he's incredible he's one of the pioneers in this field and what's really crazy about it is you know if you can start to not just like you can stop and prevent any buildup, but you can reverse any damage that's there. I mean, you're not gonna die of heart attack stroke. Like, that is a mitigatable thing. And you may have to not just change life style, you may have to take a cocktail of cocktails,

of drugs to it. To the rest of your life. Yeah, but yeah, it it's so it's interesting. I understand why people get eaky and I maybe would have done and if Jonathan, I'll send you the episode, you should check it out with him. I think you're gonna do it. I love you, I love you, yeah.

You really just very slowly walked me through step by step, all of the different ways that we make adjustments to ourselves and that we have done to other animals. We've done it through selective breeding, we've done it to get rid of the pips out of bananas, also to make make adjustments to ourselves and that we have done to other animals. We've done it through selective breeding. We've done it to get rid of the pips out of bananas, also making them bigger and sweeter and all this sort of bullshit. And then we do it to ourselves. We modify ourselves with, I'm gonna take this antibiotic.

I'm gonna take this particular type of pink. I'm gonna take this particular statin. I'm gonna take this whatever. And he goes, okay, so let's take this one step further. You are a person who has a predisposition to anxiety or depression. And you go through embryo selection and we can see on there, we can maybe do some sort of polygenic score and say, it seems based

on our data, based on the AI, this particular embryo would have a predisposition towards depression. Would it not, like if you found, as you with the person that lived in your life with kids, you're going to put your kids in the best school, right? So why don't I start them off the best they can't be. Correct. And then he said, well, you as a person who has depression, or figuratively hypothetically had depression, if you found out that your parents had the opportunity to step in and not give you depression depression either through embryo selection, which actually technically would mean that you weren't here, so it kind of worked.

But we forget that bit. Or through gene enhancement and say, what, you cursed me with this thing. And as soon as you concede, let's say that it was something really extreme, right? Like, you were gonna be born with like one foot, or like some sort of deformity, or whatever, whatever, whatever. You could have given me, you could have taken this away from me. As soon as you can see that that is a, and I think he's right, a moral thing to do,

to allow that to occur, it's off to the races all the way down to maximizing IQ. Like, it's the f**k. And one of the things that isn't talked enough about is like, you know, other countries have different ethical views, right? Like, you know, BGI in China is Beijing, Genomics Institute has said, we're sequencing everyone we can and we're trying to find the smartest humans

and we're gonna use it, right? And so... A sortative mating, baby. Just done by computer. Yeah, and so it is one of those things that, you know, there needs to be more work in effort, in thoughtful regulation of these technologies because we can make the world better through genetic. And we can do that.

I'm obviously, I mean, I work at colossal so I had to put them in a way that. But, you know, I do think that it deeper lens on healthcare because I think that we could, we have the tools and technologies to make humanity better today. Ben Lam, ladies and gentlemen, Ben, I appreciate the hell out of you. Your work's fascinating. I'm glad that it's not me having to turn up with this pressure on my shoulders every day, but I think they've chosen the right guy for the job.

Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the, I'm just getting it to. Colossal.com. Oh yeah, Ben, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Awesome, thank you.