REFLECTION
I first met Ben Lamm, the cofounder of Colossal Biosciences, through a friend who’d heard him speak at a conference a few years back about cloning, gene editing, and the possibility of de-extincting animals. I’m not a scientist, obviously, and I will only ever have a layman’s grasp of the processes involved in something like bringing back an extinct species, but I have always been drawn to people who work in areas of the biological sciences related to longevity, recovery and repair, and performance. I’m inspired by people who are invested in making life longer, better, and better for longer. Ben and his cofounders, Beth Shapiro and George Church, are some of those people.
Ironically, my first question for Ben had nothing to do with extending or expanding human life. I asked him, half-jokingly, whether they could clone my sweet old dog Lua. He indulged me and said that’s not really what they’re trying to do, but yeah technically they could clone her.
Our conversation quickly moved on from there, and over the course of the next few months (but really pretty much any time we talk, still) I learned so many cool things that it forced me to readjust what I thought I knew was possible. Not just in terms of genetics, or science more generally, but in terms of the capacity for human beings to dream, to experiment, to problem solve, and to innovate.
How do you even start to think about de-extincting a dire wolf, or a mammoth, or a dodo bird? How do you start thinking seriously about de-extinction itself?
LESSON
From talking to people like Ben or David Sinclair (the Harvard anti-aging researcher), and from my own experience, I’ve come to understand that big ideas start with simple questions. And it’s the hard work of trying to answer those questions that produces life-changing innovations.
When I think back through all the innovative things I was a part of during my playing career in terms of diet, sleep, exercise, neuroplasticity, recovery and mental preparation, what led me to those places was a very simple question: how can I play at a high level for a long time?
Seeking answers to that question led me to my best friend, Alex Guerrero. It led both of us down many paths. Some were interesting but not very useful. Plenty were dead-ends. Some, though, became permanent fixtures in our training protocols and a select few became indispensable pieces of TB12, which doesn’t exist as a business or a set of principles without that single, simple question driving our exploration.
APPLICATION
But there’s a thing that will happen when you find your own question and you start trying to answer it.
You will be wrong. Probably a lot.
When you explore new ideas and try new things, it’s inevitable that, from time to time, you will find yourself down blind alleys, or stuck in deep ruts, or just wildly off course.
There’s a word for when this happens: failure.
Too often in our culture, people who are curious, who push boundaries and ask questions, are punished for failing. They are criticized, mocked or second-guessed—even when they don’t fail, even when the real issue is with the critic who doesn’t like the answers they found or with the doubter who doesn’t understand the question that produced them.
I saw it first hand with the early skepticism around my pliability training. Not everyone understood what we were doing, because it was new and different and at times, hard. The reality is, Alex’s insights and guidance, and the partnership we created, prolonged my career well into my forties and helped me play 23 successful seasons in the NFL at the highest possible level.
I saw the same pattern of criticism this past week in response to the news about the dire wolves. There were half-cocked takedowns, frightened hot takes and know-it-all Twitter threads—some posted within hours of the original Time article going live online—and what they all had in common was a laser focus on things the authors either didn’t like, didn’t know, didn’t understand, or in some cases, didn’t bother to read. Worst of all, in my opinion, there was a willful blindness to the amazing, cutting edge work being done in a very important field that could one day foster world-changing progress.
The problem with all of this is not the criticism itself. Feedback is invaluable. Anyone who wants to improve or be great at something has to be able to accept criticism and be willing to learn from it. The problem is that attacking someone merely for seeking answers, for having a crazy idea or for trying something new and outlandish, risks paralyzing others into inaction. Young people, especially, who are hypersensitive to judgment and online hate, will bite their tongues instead of asking their questions.
We can’t allow that to happen to our future. You can’t allow that to happen to yourself. Your simple questions and the big ideas they reveal are too important to deny. The answers and innovations they produce are too powerful to ignore. Because there’s no telling where they might lead!
A dire wolf. A new cancer or Alzheimer’s drug. Our next dog. Maybe even a new world.
