YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Lamm

lines on the record: 25
first: 2025-12-23
most recent: 2025-12-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think the biggest thing at stake is conservation, right? It's like we are losing species at an alarming rate. And I think part of that is, I think it's less on the science, honestly. I think that's more on adoption, on federal funding and support of incredible partners in the conservation field. I encourage people, people ask how they can help colossal donate to conservation. Donate to people that are in the field actually doing the work. And then trying to get these technologies more well known. Like I said, the saddest part of the last week for me is that people didn't focus at all on the red wolves. And that to me is a bigger story than the dire wolves. But, you know, that's on us, right? Like we're doing big stuff. Those things are exciting. At least a percentage of those people trickle down into conservation, then hopefully we've done something.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consortium of people, you know, they should have people like Beth and George and really smart people to set those guidelines.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, is one of the most powerful things that humanity's ever discovered or invented. I think over time, you know, probably certain disease states that are inherited diseases could be eradicated, which I don't think the NB passed on, which I don't think is a bad thing. It just, that's not going to be us that does that, right? We're very focused on species. We've kind of drawn our own framework, right? We've said we're not going to work on animals that are in the non-human primate category. We're not going to work on things like Neanderthal. We're not going to work on anything like that. Every species that we work on has to have a tie back to saving an existing endangered species. So we built our own kind of ethical framework. I don't know if I'm qualified to be at the table of much smarter scientists than I'm not a scientist, so much smarter people than me that are scientists around synthetic biology and what we should be doing with it. If there ever is a could.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think the science is far. I think that you need to be really thoughtful on the regulation, on the ethics, right? I think it's much harder to grow an elephant fully executed to grow physiologically than a human. I do. I think it would be much easier for a human fully executor than an elephant. But I think you have moral, ethical, religious, and regulatory hurdles that someone, if they want to do that, should go do that. to do that for many many reasons. But I do think that from a science to your question, the science is there. We are at the doorstep of a lot of these breakthroughs.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we don't do it's a great question. The answer is yes. I think the vast majority of our technologies can. We don't do anything with humans or even non-human primates. So we don't want to get”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal, right? We're not there yet. If things go well in the next two years, maybe we'll be able to birth a small mammal like a mouse fully exutero. We have a 17-person team on it. You know, I mentioned the Northern White Rhino project, right? There's two females left. They're functionally extinct. But imagine a world where we engineer in genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos. We grow them all in a lab fully exutero. It never has to bother an existing rhino. And then we work with teams on the ground to rewild that species back into the environment.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but if a mammoth, which is 99.6% the same genetically as an Asian elephant, mammoths are closer to Asian elephants than Asian elephants are to African elephants. That's kind of crazy. And it's true to think about, but that's just genetically and phylogenetically true. But what's interesting about that is they are susceptible to EEHV. So we spend all this time to bring back this herd of elephants, right, that we reintroduce into the Arctic. And then they get EEHB and die. That seems like a bad idea, right? And so we always try to talk about that functional de extinction should be about engineering and rebuilding extinct species for today, right? And so if we know that we can cure this EEHV or prevent it from causing death, we should engineer that into our mammoth species as well.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, resurrecting species is hard, and you're not direct clones, right? They're expensive, they're hard. We make that very, very clear to everyone. Some of the work that we're doing, like EEHV, and elephants, the general public did know that the vast majority of elephant deaths is not from poaching. It's from a disease called EEHV, a herpes virus. And we are working with AZA partner zoos as well as Dr. Pauling at the Bailey College of Medicine to advance this research. And we actually have those vaccines being tested right now in elephants to save elephants if it continues to work and it confers resistance to all this. We will save more elephants than all of human elephant conservation combined, right?”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Passionately about elephant conservation, quit your job, move to Africa. And I can give you the top, we fund the top 10 conservation groups and elephants. We will happily get you a placement there and fund you to leave your job and go help elephants if that's what you really want to do. But the reality is a lot of people want to just talk about these things. They don't want to put their money where their mouth is. And we're trying to put substantial money towards what we're saying.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we're doing is not going to solve the extinction crisis. We need a thousand companies like Colossal, maybe some in de extinction, some in cryo preservation, some in advanced immunogenesis to create egg and sperm cells from tissues. Like we need a thousand companies like this. Like this is a huge existential crisis. So I think that we have a moral obligation to do it personally. And I also think that we play God every day that we overfish the ocean or eradicate a species. We're deforesting the planet at a massive rate. And so I think that if we are the apex fighter on this planet and we have technology as our beacon of humanity, then we should use it for good, right? And so this is what we're doing. We're not asking people to subscribe to it, but go do something, you know. It's funny, some of our biggest critics around the mapp project have actually spent zero money on elephant conservation.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so first of all, when people don't remember about Colossal is that like one of our biggest critics when we launched was Best Shapiro. She's an archie science officer, right? We have this history of running towards critics, not away from critics. We want to hear from them. What can we be doing better? What can we be doing different? But, you know, ethics is something that, you know, we take very, very seriously and we want to have these conversations. But, you know, I think that, you know, given that we're going to lose up to 50% of biodiversity between now and 2050, we have a moral obligation to do something”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a kid, like sparked his imagination and whatnot in sci fi. And so we don't look for attention. Every time we announce a cell edit, we get a lot of attention. We believe in that science is for everyone. I think that the celebrity partners that we have and investors we have definitely gets more people excited about it. My hope is that there's one less influencer and there's one more scientist in the world. And so, you know, we do put content out on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else because we think it's cool and we're not asking people to think it's cool, but it's not our job to persuade anyone. It's just our job to be transparent and educate people.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how the science could be more sexy. And like, we didn't reach out to Tom Brady. We didn't reach out to Peter Jackson. These people reached out to us, right? And so we aren't out there pursuing Hollywood. Hollywood's been pursuing us. Peter Jackson got excited about it when he was a kid. He read comic books and sci-fi novels and he thought we'd be like vacationing on Venus and we'd have flying cars. And he's like, none of that happened. He said he literally says that the reason why he invested in Colossal was it was the first time he saw a company trying to do something that like”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most endangered wolf in the world is the red wolf. It's an American wolf. There's only 15 left in the wild from 12 founder lines. Skin biopsies, ear punches, you gotta do a lot of stuff, right? And from an animal welfare perspective, this is now just simply a blood draw. And you can isolate these specific cells in the blood and then cloak from them and they're pretty cloning efficient. And so, you know, I think most likely what you'll see is more endangered species being worked on from colossal, probably before you see the next extinct species.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Periods, yeah, long gestation, so it's 22 months gestation, but we're in the editing phase, right? So we think it's about 85 genes. So more edits than obviously the direwolves. We've edited about 25 of those. We're doing quite well. I will say, though, that one of the things that we care a lot about is the system. And so we try to parallel path these things. So we are working on elephant IDF. We're working on rhino IDF where the exclusive genetic rescue partner for the Northern White Rhino project, which is pretty cool. And so we're trying to develop new, what's called assisted reproductive technologies that anyone can use to help save species. That's pretty awesome. You know, I think that what's next, it's hard to guess, but ma'am, my thylcine and dodo are all, you know, chugging along. They're kind of all generally on track somewhere a little ahead of schedule. And then I think you'll also be able to see big conservation wins. Like many people aren't talking about this, but”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I'm three or four weeks ago. And Remus came out to me, and I saw Pat Remus, because remember, they're not dogs, they're wolves. And, you know, they're starting to become more and more like wolves every day. I thought, yeah, this is probably the last time I will be in. I'm going to put myself in the preserve. Where we go from here is we're certified by American Humane Society. So we constantly give them updates to do vet checks. I think the goal from here is to monitor them, take care of them. We'll probably make another three to five more because we want to get the right pack dynamics. We're not going to breed them. Now, I will say that we do have really close Indigenous partners that they have a connection to the Direwolf, and several of them think it could have been the Great Wolf in some of their oral traditions. And so there could be a season where or a time when we actually rewild them back into secure, expansive ecological.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I met Romulus, you know, when he was this big. So I wasn't very scared, right? And I bottle fed Romulus as a pup, right? We have them in a 2,000 acre secure expansive ecological preserve. And then a subset of that's about six and a half acres where we have an advanced storm shelter in case something worked bad to happen. We could put them in. We've got an animal hospital on site that we built. And we have an animal husbandry thing where we can feed them to check up some of them and stuff like that, right? And so I was actually in that six acre preserve with them”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's one, right? The second one is actually in long-term rewilding. And so you've probably heard about carbon credits. You've probably heard about there's a newer thing called biodiversity credits. It's much more valuable to keep an elephant alive than to sell its location to poachers, right? Because of the application of what it does to the environment and the carbon store. So now you actually have entire markets. And, you know, like a lot of these newer markets like crypto, everything, it takes a while for them to mature. We do believe that the long-term rewilding impacts of species back in their natural habitats will create a combination of government subsidies, carbon credits, biodiversity credits. But think about that, you know, making species, putting them back, helping the environment, and then getting long-term annuities for them is also pretty interesting when you think about the long scale. So you kind of have short-term technology development in longer term applications to.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working on technologies that can help conservation. And the third thing is. And this will take time once you get enough species, our goal is to work with Indigenous people groups, private landowners, governments, ecologists to rewild those species because certain species can have a tremendous impact on the environment.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of threefold, right? It is cool. If a kid sees that using genetics, you could make a woolly mammoth. I do think that inspires kids. Like, I know a lot of scientists that don't want to make dinosaurs, but they saw Jurassic Park and they became geneticists because they thought it was cool. So there is a cool factor to your point. Secondly is conservation. It's forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050 if we don't do anything about it. We know conservation works. This is not a substitute for conservation. It just doesn't work at the speed at which we're eradicating species and changing our planet, right? So we need new tools in all of the technology that Colossal makes on the path to de extinction that has an application to conservation, we make available for free to our conservation partners, right? And if that wasn't enough, we then went and raised $50 million separate of our business to start the Colossal Foundation to fund even other academics.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Son. I'm pretty stoked that we're working on something that could have a huge application to conservation as well as advanced science. And it's also something that can inspire generations. And we don't get a lot of credit for this. And I think it's our fault. We don't do a good job. But like every single week, we get like pictures from like kids talking about like their favorite animals and like we have whole classrooms that send us like thank you videos and stuff. And so it's cool, right? Like yes, there's a conservation element. Yes, there's a deep science element. But there's this kind of cool inspiration element to it. And so I can just go build another software company, but to one end, right? To make a little bit better of a chat platform to make a little bit better of a defense software, to make more money. Like at some point, I think there's got to be more to it. And this is something that, you know, I was really passionate about.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we are a for profit business. You know, the reality is I had built a handful of software companies. I liked building technology businesses. I didn't mean to start this business. I reached out to George Church. He's the number one geneticist in the world, maybe of all time at Harvard. And he's definitely the father of synthetic biology. And I reached out to him and I just asked him, you know, with the proliferation of access to compute AI, automation, synthetic biology, like what are the opportunities? Is there opportunity to build software for synthetic biology and directed evolution? What are the opportunities? And I ask him if he had one project with unlimited capital that he thought could change the world. What would it be? And it was this one. I'm not a biologist, but I like to learn new things. And I know how to build teams of women and men much smarter than me. And I thought this would be something that's cool. And now that I have a nine month old.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the world, who wrote a book saying how to clone a mammoth? And it is with you can't because you cannot clone an extinct species, but you can engineer one. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're trying to rebuild extinct species for today using data from the past. And the only thing that annoyed me about the argument was it's a semantic argument and it's a semantic argument that overshadowed a lot of the great scientists that people put their blood, sweat, and tears in. And, you know, I think over time that'll die down and people will just like look at the science, which is truly amazing and what it can do for not just human healthcare, but also for endangered species.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That if people want to call them Direwolves, call them direwolves. If they want to call them colossal dire wolves, call them colossal direwolves. If they want to call them genetically modified wolves, call them that. But it's still amazing. It's like, if you go to Jurassic Park and you believe that movie is about dinosaurs, then our dire wolves are direwolves. If you go to Jurassic Park and say, those are genetically modified birds with dinosaur alleles and frog DNA, well, then ours are genetically modified wolves with dire wolf alleles to it, right? And so it's really a semantics issue. But what's crazy, and I didn't know this because I'm not a biologist or a scientist, is that there's actually over 30 ways to classify a species. And, you know, while some of the scientific community pushback, we have over 95 of some of the top scientific minds in the world, right? We've got people like George Church and Louva Dahlin and Tom Gilbert and, you know, Andrew Pask and Beth Shapiro, who's arguably the number one ancient DNA expert.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not really a new species, right? And part of that, so I'm a big believer in personal choice and freedom, right? And so people are like, doesn't it bother you that like some of the scientific community is pushed back? And I was like, no. I was like, that's the beauty of science, right? And some people, though, are quite mad about it. But the reality is that we've done things in this project that no one's ever done. No one's ever taken, you know, an edited 15 genes with ancient genomes that have been lost to time for 12,000. No one's ever done that. And so the problem with the argument isn't one, it doesn't bother me, but my issue with it is I think it overshadows the incredible science of the women and men that have done this, right? Like they took 12,000 year old DNA and made puppies. That's incredible. That's the moon landing of genetics, right? And so my argument is.”
2025-12-23 · Masters of Scale · Resurrecting dire wolves is just the beginning for Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT