Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm
Uploaded: 2025-04-07T17:03:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up, Ben?
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
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?
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.
Yeah, and that is a wild thing.
I mean, this is essentially, literally wild.
This is essentially real-life Jurassic Park.
Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally.
Like, believe it or not, we get that.
Of course.
I mean, I got to drop my hydrogen tablet in here.
Oh, you do those? The Gary Brecker ones, right?
Oh, yeah. I'm all in.
Those are great.
Yeah, so.
Yeah, I love those.
I just didn't want you to think we were going a different direction.
How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?
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 biology.
He's at Harvard University.
He's 6'7 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, 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.
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 extinct species.
So how do you decide what to start with?
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 Beshapir with the Dodo, everyone just started calling us.
And then we just started expanding, you know, our entire set.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When did they go extinct?
So the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago.
Really?
On Wrangell Island.
Yeah.
Wow.
So they've been a while.
They were around for a long time.
4,000 years ago.
I know.
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.
Wow.
And where's Wrangell Island?
It's northeast of Siberia.
Whoa.
And they just, was it a small island?
They just ran out of resources there?
Like what happened?
Well, there's a couple different theories, right?
One of the theories with Wrangell 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.
Is it the largest Wrangell Island?
I'm not quite sure.
Can you give me a photo again, Jamie?
I'll pull up a map.
Okay.
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.
And they died out 4,000 years ago.
Yeah.
And now some actually, there is actually another working hypothesis that they
actually ran out of water.
They ran out of access to fresh water on the island.
Oh, wow.
So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.
Wow.
4,000 years is so recent.
I know.
It's crazy recent, right?
Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus a African
elephant?
And they're actually mammoths because there's, you know, mammoths themselves.
Yeah.
Mammoths themselves are close 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.
You know, mammoths because they have these massive, massive tusks, right?
And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world.
They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly.
They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in
order to do that.
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.
Wow.
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, like, take care of them?
Yeah.
You have to, like, get a relationship with them.
So you feed them sugar cane and you wash them and, you know, you play nice with
them for, like, a while.
Yeah.
Like, a couple hours.
It was, like, at least an hour.
You're just hanging out with them, petting them.
And then once they decide you're cool, they let you ride them.
But my whole family rode them and I was, like, totally opposed to it.
I was, like, I'm doing it just because you guys want to do it.
I just want to feed them.
Yeah.
I just want to hang out with them.
Hang out with them, yeah.
It just felt weird.
My daughter fell off.
I think twice.
One of them, my youngest daughter fell off once, at least.
And I was, like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It's kind of a weird thing.
It's a weird thing, right?
Yeah.
And then afterwards you get in the water and you wash them and everything.
And I just kind of hung out with them.
I'd be cool.
They're very sweet.
I don't think I want to ride one.
I would just, I like being, you know, around them.
I think there's a video on my Instagram of it.
Yeah, there is.
There definitely is because she was eating a log.
I was like, why are you eating a log?
Yeah.
It's just weird.
They're so enormous, but they're really, like, peaceful and chill.
And incredibly smart.
Yes.
And they have incredible pack dynamics, right?
Yeah.
They live in a herd.
They've even had all these different examples where they also adopt other
animals.
I don't know if you've seen any of these videos.
Oh, yeah.
So here it is.
This is a few years ago in Thailand.
And this is an Asian elephant.
Just chilling with this elephant.
Yeah, 2018.
Okay.
There it is.
It was really cool.
Yeah, it's awesome.
It's just cool to be around them.
They're just a fascinating animal.
Yeah.
Just the biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists.
It's enormous.
Yeah, they're this enormous thing with this, like, robotic pretentious arm.
Yeah, it's crazy.
As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you.
Yeah, they sense it, right?
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.
So some of our animals have been around and they're starting to get quite large,
which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point.
Yes.
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.
Yeah.
So let's just get right to it.
Wait, wait.
You want to finish the process?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Please.
So, okay, 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.
It's disgusting.
Yeah.
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.
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.
So we take these expeditions.
We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval.
And 