moonshots ep53 ben lamm de extinction transcript

a billionaire comes to you and says listen I want to bring back the dinosaurs how the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back what does it mean to De extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place we’re not trying to clone these animals we are de extincting lost genes that produce these physical attributes that you know uh no longer exist in that species you’re bringing back an extinct species after having been in Ai and software coding and such we we’ll have our first caves uh by early 2028 we are on track for that this is the technology that can bring back extinct animals but then you come in as a a for-profit entrepreneur and go from zero the numers still Blow Me Away to 225 million in a couple of years I think I’m insatiably curious right and I like to learn this is the difference that the right CEO and entrepreneur can make for

[00:01:00] moonshot on this episode of moonshots and mindsets I’ll be speaking with Ben lamb an extraordinary CEO whose moonshot it is to bring back animals who are extinct we’ll hear about which animals he’s bringing back what his timeline is a he raised $225 million at a $ 1.5 billion valuation to do this in just two years time it’s incredible lessons for any moonshine entrepreneur out there all right let’s jump in everybody Welcome to moonshots and mindsets I’m here with an incredible entrepreneur and a dear friend someone who blows my mind and the difference that a single individual can make in taking on a massive moonshot Ben lamb how you doing buddy I’m good thanks so much for having me I’m glad to be here yeah know this is a uh going to be a fun show first of all full disclosure I’m an advisor to this company bold capital is a investor in this company but then again I love working with with

[00:02:00] amazing CEOs and those especially taking on great moonshots let’s begin Ben Lamb with what is your moonshot what is colossals moonshot cuz it really is epic yeah it’s uh it’s it’s restoring the past and for a better future right and so fundamentally colossal is the world’s first de Extinction company focused on De extincting a couple of core iconic uh charismatic creatures back to the world uh and then also building Technologies for human health care and species preservation and conservation and we’ll get into those but I mean a moonshot of bringing back extinct animals um you know years ago I had this conversation about having an ex prize like let’s have an xprize to bring back back then it was the dodo but your moonshot here has bridged three species and I may try and squeeze out of you how many more species you’re working on but it’s it’s pretty awesome I mean uh you know as they would

[00:03:01] say what could possibly go wrong but let’s get to that a little bit later so a moonshot of bringing back extinct animals um let’s start with the origin right people who are listening to this who have their own moonshots which by definition are crazy ideas before an entrepreneur actually makes them real I I want them we’re going to talk through the story of where this began how you’ve gotten this funded uh where it is what the timeline is what the difficult Parts have been so um you’ve been an entrepreneur over and over again actually you haven’t been an entrepreneur in the Biotech Industry which is this is squarely faced in it’s this is a a new category for me right but it’s a systems problem right and so like whether you know my background’s been in mostly software some space Hardware but for the most part software and most software problems are systems problem so looking at a challenge or an issue whether it’s AI whether it’s in space or critical EMP infast structure

[00:04:00] or even a video game and looking at like building a system and weirdly enough um you know the extinction is a systems problem you have to build and take a systems mindset uh to solving it so it didn’t scare you to go after this even though you had no biological background I mean you probably knew what DNA was and RNA but you’re bringing back an extinct species after having been in Ai and software coding and such but let’s get to that first let’s go the origin story here so I mean you weren’t just walking around thinking about bringing back the woly mammoth which is your iconic first species how did this get going well you know like I’m I I think I’m insatiably curious right and I like to learn and and I’ve always just done a great job I think of surrounding myself with much smarter you know women and men than me uh to work on these projects right like in my last business like I didn’t build any software that went into satellites right like I had incredible teams to do it I knew how to you know help them and and help you know Inspire

[00:05:00] them and direct them on where we should go but fundamentally it was them that did that did the incredible work and I called George because I was really interested on the intersection George George George Church arguably the father of synthetic biology and you know I would argue one of the not only the one of the smartest uh people on the planet but actually one of the funniest and so you know George so you get this but like a lot of people just look up to George as this like you know incredible industry Titan and kind of leader in the field of genomics and kind of like father of synthetic biology of God Godlike figure with a beard and the and the hair to match also he looks like but he’s also like amazingly funny and so I reached out to George because I was very curious and I wanted to know where AI where uh automation where opportunities could lie in the intersection of software and synthetic biology and kind of this next Revolution that I thought was coming and that conversation lasted

[00:06:02] maybe 10 minutes and then I’m curious and I I have George Church on the phone and I was like what else are you working on and he started to tell me all these other things that he was working on in his incredible Labs working on in in in in everything from kind of like neural regeneration to combating climate change to food security and I’m like oh my gosh this is like you know this is like the Chocolate Factory of innovation and amazingness and uh and then he kind of ended the call with oh working to bring back woly Mammoth uh uh to restore the degraded ecosystem of the tundra and also build Technologies to to help elephants and and and maybe other extinct species and then he was like I have to go to my next meeting and I was like you just dropped this most amazing thing on me ever and so I stayed up all night and and then I saw I like it was kind of like the end of like you know signs or the six sense where you have this like imight Shyamalan moment where I’m like Oh my my gosh like every

[00:07:00] article I’d read about George I didn’t see this through line of the mammoth but then when I went back and started reading and listening to podcast I just saw how there was this through line no matter what he was talking about the mammoth kept surfacing and a week later I was in his lab and I was like I have to I have to go pursue this amazing so those who don’t know George Church he’s a professor of genomics at Harvard um he has probably started 50 plus companies um and has a dozen unicorns number of them public I mean he’s one of the most prolific entrepreneurs and one of the sweetest good-hearted individuals on the planet he’s amazing and and I I feel insanely lucky to be co-founded with him but I think I do monopolize probably more of his time because he so excited yeah it’s so I want you know this is an important point for entrepreneurs out there who are looking at their moonshots um you brought a set of skills to this as a great CEO as a systems thinker uh

[00:08:03] as an entrepreneur uh but not having the biological background didn’t scare you off no it did Scare early investors off like I think it was like your text and like a handful of others that inspired me but like we talked to some folks now that actually that we have great relationships with I won’t say who that did not invest early and their early feedback was like you don’t have a postto from George’s lab you have zero science people on the team at at the time that we put this deck together and they’re like you actually haven’t even signed a research agreement with George’s lab or Harvard and we’re like yeah yeah we’re going to figure all that out there was a lot there was a lot of insert Miracle believe in believe in Ben here type stuff early on I remember that I want to give people an a just to jump ahead a little bit because to understand how epic uh you are and this company so you meet George in 2019 we met first in

[00:09:02] 2019 and then there was a small we kept emailing because there was a small pandemic um that that took up a lot of our 2020 I’ll never forget having uh George was speaking to my abundance Platinum Group over video during the pandemic and he’s like yeah I manufactured my own vaccine and I took it myself in the lab you know that’s that’s George he did he showed up once on Zoom because because we w’t work on colossal during 20 uh but he showed up once on Zoom with this like helmet on that had like these like filtration things and he’s like I’m just testing this out but you should buy one I think I actually did um so so 2019 you meet with them you start incubating this conversation uh colossal as a company starts when uh 2021 so about uh May of 2021 uh I decided I want to go do this I want to do this full-time I brought in a new new CEO uh and it was hard for me

[00:10:01] right because I never let go of The reigns of a company I was running you were you were running what company at that time I was running hyper giant which was an AI company focused on critical infrastructure space and defense and I brought in you know we’re you know 150 160 people working with the US government and a couple other big companies and you know I I had to like hand that over uh you know to a new CEO which was great and the guy and Mike’s done a great job taking over that and I so I like recruited a guy that known for 10 years to take over and I think everyone thought I was a little nuts because I was yeah I’m going to go work on this wly Mammoth company but it’s definitely not competitive no it’s not so that’s 2021 a couple of years ago and today just for people to understand the epic journey that Ben has been on Ben has raised how much money at what valuation Ben uh so we’ve raised $225 million to date uh the valuation in right now post is around a billion five

[00:11:02] um we have four Labs uh including one in Australia and uh we have 112 full-time people with about 90% of those people being scientists uh and then we fund 30 post STS uh around the world in our advisor labs and we have about 60 scientific advisors all right so you know that’s the uh right back atet to those who didn’t invest early on I mean were Fair but In fairness it’s like Moon shot no yeah and look we we like I do believe that animals may be coming sooner than people think but um but we we don’t have a mammoth now so you know for their sake they’re probably like H yeah we haven’t seen a mammoth yet either and so um but I just want you know what’s extraordinary because I’m in the Venture business through bold which is one of the investors in the last couple of rounds and we you know I work on getting my own companies funded and while you’re out there raising uh uh you know your last round

[00:12:02] 150 million or thereabouts at a 1.3 1.4 pre you know billion pre money everybody else is having a hell of for for a d Extinction company everybody else is having a hell of a time you know raising money for a normal company and I just want to point out this is the extraordinary power of an amazing CEO and I’ve said this to you before Ben you’re and George agrees with you you’re one of the the best CEO I’ve seen out there and I’m going to want to sort of um analyze that a little bit of what you think makes you successful in this realm but we’ll we’ll get to that so D Extinction company you start off with a woolly mammoth uh how the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back what does it mean to De extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place yeah so uh so we’re not trying to clone these animals which I think is a really important you know uh distinction because we don’t have living cells we have Frozen cells and we’ve got you know dead cells and and

[00:13:02] and we can do the genomic sequencing but it’s massively fragmented DNA so we actually have to assemble a re a genome and then compare it to a reference genome to kind of fill in those gaps from its closest living relative in the case of the mammoth that’s the Asian elephant a lot of software so George George has been on a multitude of expeditions into the Tundras of one country into into Siberia uh and actually extracted uh DNA uh from frozen mammoth tissues with arailia our head of biological sciences here at colossa so you go and you’re digging and you find these giant tusks and you find this hairy large elephant and where’s the uh where’s the DNA is it in the in the hair follicles in the skin is there like a dead mosquito and Amber someplace that you’re trying yeah you cannot get the question comes up quite a bit Amber is

[00:14:00] very porous and it does not preserve uh the two biggest questions we had we do not we cannot get DNA from mosquitoes or anything in Amber or and we can’t get anything from the laa tarpits because heat and acids also not good for your for ancient DNA preservation but you know mostly in in Tusk and in teeth those are two places where the DNA is very well preserved and it’s mostly endogenous DNA versus it has been uh you know corrupted by like on the Flesh and whatnot even that that the part that’s fleshy uh you know that’s been corrupted by like microbes and bacteria and other things over the last like 5,000 years and so when you go and you grab the DNA from this animal that’s now what typically 10,000 years old yeah most are about 10,000 years old are you able to get a single continuous sequence you aren’t so you get fragments it’s kind of like confetti and then you have to get these short reads there’s not there’s a couple of kind of decent long reads out

[00:15:00] there and what’s amazing about this is you know for us to build our reference genome for the mammoth we actually had to use 54 Mammoth genomes uh some of those we got that were published by other great researchers some of those were from George and then one of those we have a great partnership with louva Doan at the University of Stockholm who’s arguably one of the number one you know he’s not trying to he’s not a geneticist but he’s one of the number one people in the world that just looks at uh uh mammoths and studying mammoth and their DNA and so uh so building this like International Coalition of collaborators has been really key to the speed at which we’ve been able to move right so you get all of these short read segments and they sort of overlap and you’re putting them together like a puzzle yeah and at the end of the day you’re comparing it to elephants today what’s the closest living relative to the Wily Mammoth so the Asian elephant’s the closest it’s 99 . 6% The Woolly Mammoth genetically it’s actually closer

[00:16:02] to a mammoth than an Asian elephant is to an African elephant which sometimes blows my mind that that mammoths were closer genetically than than they are to than they are to African elephants but you know there’s no even though like Asian elephants and African elephants exist today there was no reference genome so then we had to go separately and go build a reference genome for those and then you have to go through like sides and import permits just to get because these are some of these are endangered animals that you have to go work with and then build a reference genome that then you can compare to so it’s not like we could just go do this then compare so then there’s a then there’s a mountain of work just to build the reference genome to compare to so you’re taking a an Asian elephant and you’re sequencing it right I mean you can get the blood samples you can get the just like today you can sequence you know a human genome is 3.2 billion letters from your mother and your father and you know back when Craig ventor sequenced his genome was $100 million and N months to get his his genome and

[00:17:00] now we have human reference genomes and I think the number is down to like 7 hours and 200 bucks for a human genome pretty amazing that’s not it is amazing it’s not quite you know teler to teler like the the reference genomes that we are use that we are building for our species are that next level so you know it’s more in the you know low hundreds of thousands of dollars of of work but you know it’s not you know 50 million or a billion like it was before so you’ve got a reference genome for an Asian elephant that’s 99.6% similar to a mammoth and it’s and African and we also did African elephant recently we just we just released and so your job now is to find that 4% and do what make the edits in the Asian elephant genome well it’s a great question but we’re not trying to bridge the 4% what we’re really trying to do is understand what were the genes that differed in that in that 4% so not

[00:18:00] trying to bridge that 4% or fill it in like in Jurassic Park there trying to fill in the gaps we aren’t trying to do that we’re just trying to say of that 4% that’s different or sorry 0 4% that’s different you know what were what were the genes that that we could associate with the phenotypes or physical attributes of the woolly mammoth right and so because they lost them in some evolutionary path that that Rose to Asian elephants right so that’s like the curve tus so of the cranial facial morphology uh and then obviously the Shaggy coat that we we think about and so really identifying which genes do what in comparison and what’s missing and also what’s present in the mammoth genome that’s not in the Asian Alpha G so how many actual phenotypes are you trying toing is there a list like you know these are the priorities like if we make these changes we’ve got a woing mammoth but it’s not really woing Mammoth it’s it’s close to it’s a fact similar of a willing you yeah yeah some

[00:19:01] people have different perspectives on this like some people say well technically it’s a cold tolerant Asian elephant that’s been edited with Mammoth alal to produce phenotypes that were one 16ct hair transplant yeah yeah we’re not going to say any of that we’re just going to say like for us if it serves the ecological ecological components of why we’re doing it and if we de extinct the core genes uh that make a mammoth a mammoth then we just call it a mammoth right we make call it the Colossal Mammoth Mammoth 2.0 we’re still working on like branding nen clature but to your point it’s not an direct clone right it’s it’s not really a hybrid or some people called it a chimera it’s not a chimera uh it is we we are de extincting lost genes that produce these physical attributes that you know uh no longer exist in that species and so I think that we are um because of the targeted nature of our approach it does make it easier than you know making a m ion changes but you know I think it’s also a

[00:20:00] pretty smart uh way to think about the engineering efforts versus trying to go overboard so yeah there’s a list there’s about you know five or six core phenotypes that we that we think you need not only to resemble a mammoth but also to make cold tolerance uh at the level that we want amazing so you make those edits using crisper technology so what I love right now about the world is that everybody knows what Chris every every Cher but then it’s also become a catchall right so like Christopher is now like the catchall for genetic engineering right where people as you know Peter there’s a million different tools you know there’s for combinat there’s Talons there’s there’s crisper there’s single nucleotide edits Prime editing base editing like there’s all these things right and and as you pointed out I’m not a biologist or geneticist but what I’ve learned you play a damn good one on TV so I well I’m very curious about so I try to learn right right um George says I I the the

[00:21:01] nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me maybe in my life is that George said I’m one of the best students he’s never had so I’ll take that as a a as a from George I think is a big compliment and but so what’s interesting is like different we are using different tools including crisper based on uh the need so in some cases there are Knockouts that are needed where crisper is a great great fit other CL is we’re doing um you know uh uh bass editing where we’re changing these individual letters on that kind of DNA ladder and in some cases when there’s a a gene with like a lot of edits we’ll actually uh synthesize that entire piece and then just do a complete swap so we’ll put in a big chunk of DNA swapping out what’s there and so um different species have different uh needs we’re doing way more DNA swaps on the Tasmanian tiger or thyine project because there’s more genetic Divergence than there is uh on the mammoth project

[00:22:01] so there’s more edits required to make a thyine than there is to make a mammoth um and so we have kind of this cluster of tools including crisper that we’re using so I find that fascinating at the end of the day you’re bringing back a woolly mammoth like species uh and you’re uh but it’s new um I I want to hit on one point that I I want everyone listening to hear because it’s it’s really important we’ve already hit on the point that you didn’t have the bio background but you had great experience as an entrepreneur as a systems thinker as a fundraiser as someone who’s able to aggregate an amazing team and focus it you know what most people don’t know is how long has George been working on bringing back the Oly Mammoth when did he first start thinking about this so it’s been about I guess now it’s been about 10 years so uh nine or 10 years he’s been working on it and the only money he was able uh you know and as you

[00:23:00] pointed out he’s not out there raising capital’s he’s out there really in innovating but the only money that went to this was you know Peter teal uh who’s not who’s not a colossal investor um uh but Peter teal donated $100,000 to George’s lab and so can can I tell you one weird funny story about this so when I was when I was on the second call of George about the mammoth and um and I I I was I was talking to George and I asked the question which in hindsight it’s really funny now but you you’ll you’ll notice the the frame of mind at at the time I was like George so now how much money do you need to bring back a mammoth and he said well you know we well we’ve raised a hundred and I literally like I got sick to my stomach because I was already in love right so I I put my I literally sat my phone on my desk in my house put on speaker because I still it’s George Church you still got to listen but I’m like okay it’s I I mean I guess it would take a $100 million I could see that like I know how technology works and I was like racking

[00:24:00] my brain and I was like and then I was like d can I raise $100 million for this I’ve raised 10000 million before can I do that and so so I went through this like while I’m talking to George I’m like having this like existential mini crisis like how do I pull off raising a $100 million for Mammoth and then and then he’s like yeah and then that’s like you know we’re doing it over you know 10 years so that’s only $10,000 a year and I was like wait I’m so sorry how how much money have you has been devoted to this and he’s like $100,000 like how much money do you need to do this in in and just to get to like an embryo and he’s like well there’s a lot to it but he’s like you know probably you know something more like you know 20 million we can make a lot of progress and get really close and I was like then I was like okay cool I I can get there right I can wrap my brain now ironically fast forward to today we have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and we’ll probably raise more money um and so so ironically my initial fear

[00:25:01] became my reality later so I want to point out this has been an idea for 9 or 10 years 100,000 was brought in there was a nonprofit started by some amazingly good-hearted individuals to try and do this steuart and Ryan great yeah um steuart bran and Ryan but then you come in as a a for-profit entrepreneur and go from zero the numbers still Blow Me Away to 225 million in a couple of years um and the team in place the technology in place and so forth and for folks listening this is the difference that the right CEO and entrepreneur can make for a moonshot right it is it nothing changed you know wasn’t a miracle inserted here it was the right individual telling the right story when you get to the story cuz people say well what the hell is their business model what are you going to do like a a a pet

[00:26:02] a woolly mous I I I think that but I do think that passion and conviction is key and one of the things that I wrestled with is um I actually reck wrestled pretty hard with hypocrisy in this deal and which which I I want to explain because I think it’s really important I feel like I can’t speak for every entrepreneur especially every technology entrepreneur but I have said a thousand times probably in in fundraising meetings I want to change the world I want to make an impact and as you know most companies if they’re successful get acquired or go public or whatever but and they maybe they they may create great returns in in Innova in a field but not all of them really have a chance to to make this lasting impact and so I felt like I was going to regret it for the rest of my life and I was going to be a hypocrite to myself if I didn’t pursue this because George Church just served up on a Sil platter an opportunity to really build a great cool

[00:27:01] business build Advanced incredible technologies that can help you know human kind as well as help conservation and all I had to do was go go try that’s all I had to do I was like I had to go at least go try and if I didn’t do it like I I I don’t feel like I really had a choice because I felt like the rest of my life I’ll be like you’re a hypocrite you can’t ever say again that you want to go really try to change the world or make it differ because you were given the opportunity this wasn’t my idea this was given to me and I had to pursue I didn’t really have a choice amazing um I want to hit on a couple of a couple of points here uh the environmental side of this you know we’ve talked about this in fact we’ve got aund million uh gigaton carbon removal X prise and you were saying you know we’re going to enter a colossal into that so so what is the connection between the woolly mammoth and the environment can you explain that yeah so so George and and this this I

[00:28:00] think does a great job of teeing into the business model too right because George’s original pitch to me as we kind of like started to peel back the onion was there’s more carbon and more methane stored in the Arctic uh Tundra than anywhere else on the planet way more than the rainforest way more anywhere and it just piles up year after year it’s about 1.6 uh trillion metric tons which is about double what’s in the atmosphere and and and even more methane which is about 30 times worse in the atmosphere so georg’s you know thesis which is proven you know I’ve now been to the Arctic and I’ve been with the uh Army Corps of Engineers in the permafrost tunnels and actually been in the inside of the permafrost not walked above it and they have shared with me if this all melts humanity is in a lot of trouble and so so George’s uh so this has been a concern of George’s for a long time we talk about this 1.5 degree Tipping Point but what’s interesting is George teamed up with uh some folks some incredible folks uh

[00:29:00] Nikita in in uh in uh Siberia uh outside of church key uh and they created something called Pine Park where they’ve actually published in you know eight or 10 peer-reviewed papers have come up in scientific journals showing that the reintroduction of cold tolerant fauna back at the right biodiversity levels and density levels back into the Arctic tund and the removal of these uh low carbon yielding carniverous trees with have this extremely dark bark they’re not efficient at Carbon at Carbon sequestration they actually are almost like heat lightning rods then perade said so the removal of the trees which they’ve done with bulldozers and tractors and the reintroduction of these you know muscs and and bison and others they’ve actually shown that they’ve been able to lower ground temperatures by up to 8° and sustain them which is incredible in Mammoth and this is going into George’s theory is that Mammoth uh

[00:30:00] could be an accelerate to that cuz they’re also hurting animals they’re also major herbivores they they do a great job of like uh that nitrogen oxygen cycle in the summer months of like of permeating out the the Arctic grasslands but then in the winter months they also love to knock down elephants are notorious for knocking down trees there’s in incredible documentaries and and published papers out there showing that they actually know they actually in or African Forest elephants in particular knock down trees that are low carbon yielding it’s so weird it’s it nature is just amazing it’s it’s incredible and so that combination you got these natural bulldozers You’ got these natural herbivores and then uh their migratory patterns actually help uh to uh get rid of that insulation layer in the snow and pack the snow so that the winter months that cold winter uh air can actually help uh get closer to the ground so it starts at a colder temperature going going into the summer months so so less actually thaw so these

[00:31:01] animals are like 12 feet high 8 ton yeah giant yeah they’re big most most people think that when they think willly Mammoth a lot of times I think people think of the straight test elephant or they think of you know the Colombian Mammoth and a few of these other species that that end up being a little bit bigger but most most of woolly mammoth were about the size of African elephants today which which you know sounds small but you see in African it’s it’s it’s a massive animal and they need to be cold tolerant um which is part of the changes you’re making because you’re not going to take an anric an elephant and move it up there so so what’s interesting about that is we’re not just doing the Shaggy coat but we’re also doing the subcutaneous fat layer and then there’s other things that are kind of like what I what we kind of joke internally they’re like beneath the hood that no one actually sees like uh trip B3 and like it’s there it like like they actually and it’s not just mammoth but like Caribou polar bears some wolf

[00:32:00] species actually have this where they produce hemoglobin at a different uh uh rate and a different ability so they can actually produce oxygen uh at you know subfreezing temperatures like we can’t at at -40 we don’t have our blood crystallizes we can’t we can’t breathe at that temperature but they actually can because of how their hemoglobin works and the same thing goes for nerve endings our nerve endings would just be fried uh their nerve endings are actually different than ours due to some of these some of these genes um so yeah so there’s under the hood stuff that we’re doing but actually elephants are more temporal or more tempered than people think one of our partners in Canada actually has Asian elephants which people think are just you know tropical species and we’ve been up there with them and we have videos of them actually breaking through the ice swimming in frozen lakes rolling around in the snow uh you know that and those are like subfreezing temperatures but those aren’t -40 but but elephants are pretty tolerant species that people don’t think of so you raised $225 million um a large chunk of it from an

[00:33:03] amazing investor entrepreneur industry magnate Thomas tll yeah yes yeah to yeah Thomas Thomas tol as well as his fun usit are are both our largest investors and you know we’re very very grateful to thas and he’s in the movie business so so Thomas is actually a technologist and you know Thomas you’ve met th but he’s most known for legendary pictures uh which was actually weirdly a a a movie studio but it was actually technology driven so they actually built they actually used a lot of Technology uh in terms of like how people were like how did legendary have so many hits they actually had technology and models around what they wanted to to to go produce and so um you know Thomas is very passionate not just about you know uh movies but also science and and technology and also education and he does feel that like us chronicling the story and sharing it with the world will

[00:34:00] help educate and Inspire the next generation of people that um you know could want to grow up and you know be a scientist you know I’m super passionate about longevity and health span and how do you add 10 20 healthy years onto your life one of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep and there’s something that changed the quality of my sleep and this episode is brought to you by that product it’s called Eight sleep if if you’re like me you probably didn’t know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept yeah temperature is off in the culprit traditional mattresses trap heat but your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening and then heat up in the morning enter the Pod cover by H sleep it’s the perfect solution to the problem it fits on any bed adjust the temperature on each side of the bed based upon your individual needs you know I’ve been using pod cover and it’s a GameChanger

[00:35:02] I’m a big believer in using technology to improve life and eight sleep has done that for me and it’s not just about temperature control with the pods sleep and health tracking I get personalized sleep reports every morning it’s like having a personal sleep coach so you know when you eat or drink or go to sleep too late how it impacts your sleep so why not experience sleep like never before visit www.sleep.com that’s EIG ght SLE p.com moonshots and you’ll save 150 bucks on the Pod cover by eight sleep I hope you do it it’s transformed my sleep and will for you as well now back to the episode I’m going to get back to how in the world do you start at a standing start and raise $225 million for a d Extinction company because that in itself is a moonshot we’ll come back to that in a minute so how far are you from this incredible

[00:36:01] uh you bringing back the woolly mammoth where are we on this journey what’s your time frame what can you say yeah so um we have we have successfully achieved induced plur potent stem cells in uh elephants which is a feat in itself which I I can explain why it’s interesting uh we have we we have narrowed down our Gene list to about 60 65 um uh genes that we’re editing uh we’ve established sell lines and we’re in the editing process so we’ve already edited about 20 different CH uh and and we’re doing functional assays uring and and testing and whatnot and then the the the big key thing that we’ve done from a systems approach uh perspective is that we’ve parallel pathed all the different components right so you know I think a lot of people would have done the computational analysis then done the gene editing then wanted to to work on creating uh induced po potent stem cells then worked on sematic Cell Nu transer we actually have an entire embryology

[00:37:01] lab that’s just working on cloning in a lot of other non-model organisms non non-modal organisms out there other than mice and pigs so that we are the most proficient at it so that when we have those embryos we can do that cloning stop and we have an entire animal husbandry team that’s working with elephants in in in Africa and here in the states and so so for us you know we’re well on our way we believe we’ll have our first uh by early 2028 we are on track for that um the biggest hurdle is it’s a 22-month gestation so I mean we’ll have embryos before moms who are listening to this you know imagine carrying your your embrio for 22 months you know three times the length of a typical um but a thyine is only 13 and a half days isn’t that crazy so that is insane 13 and a half you can barely do anything in 13 and a half days what’s crazy is that um a a thilosene which is a wolf- siiz mar

[00:38:01] come back we’re let’s come let’s come back to that in a moment I get excited about the just so I’m going to put a pin in the woolly mammoth here uh and we’re going to come back to more of this conversation but it’s not just the woly mammoth you’re bringing back um and I think that’s important this this began as a single dream a single moonshot from George but you know once the technology exists and the mindset and now the capital and the team you know there’s a lot of extinct animals out there and uh and people have been aggregating genomes so I know there’s a lot you can’t speak about how many can you speak about so we uh so we publicly announced we’re working on the mammoth the phocine and the dodo right the dodo is our first Aven species um we get a lot of people pinging us about all kinds of extinct species um you know I could imagine why we get the dinosaur question we get it all right right and so so for us you know those are three massive teams that that are focused and

[00:39:01] then you know we are doing exploratory research on other species but the the biggest thing for us is is you know really kind of com uh combining the which species we should do with why we should do it right and so there’s some cool species that have been brought up to us we like but why would we ever do that right and so um what’s the impact of that and there’s other people pursuing de Extinction on species that you know that are great but they’re they’re they don’t have the same kind of impact that we think they should have so we’re not pursuing them we can only hit the three yeah but there may be more of the works all right there are more of the works you just can’t talk about um and what could possibly go wrong okay so uh the thyine so what is a thilosene and 12 and a half day gestation period yeah it it the the the thilosene is an extinct uh marsupial that almost they it’s called T it’s also referred to as the Tasmanian Tiger even the Tasmanian wolf it’s a it’s a

[00:40:01] marsupio but it looks like a wolf it’s an absolutely beautiful animal that went extinct in 1936 uh in in in Tasmania and uh it was the top it was the apex predator of the food chain it was it was incredible and the Australian government uh actually put bounties on the heads of of thines and eradicated them so they were paid to eradicate the species uh but unfortunately enough some of them were preserved u in ethanol and uh Andrew Dr Andrew pass like George was really P you know his Mammoth was the thyine and he’s worked uh for the last 15 years on collecting samples and DNA and you know now the tools are making it easier in him to to kind of assemble that genome and the dodo similar story uh so D doto okay so thyine is another mammal makes a lot of sense very similar process it has easier challenges 13 and half day

[00:41:01] gestation versus 22 month 22 months we actually didn’t have to assemble that that uh the the front end of the genome because they got about 92% long reg like incredi well preserved genome which is amazing but a lot because it went extinct it went extinct so recently and it got well preserved yeah and so so it’s almost inverse of the mammoth right cuz like harder more editing uh more computational analysis easier genome assembly and easier gestation right and so we loved the phocine as a bolt as our second species because the it mamillion same team same structure but it was exactly inverse problem set so we thought we could learn a lot complimentary looking at it from kind of that systems lens um the dodo so the dodo like we didn’t pursue that that like this is where you know you got to believe that everything happens on some for a reason and what was crazy about the dodo was best

[00:42:00] Shapiro who’s incredible she’s our lead paleo geneticist she’s one of the top ancient DNA experts in the world um she wrote the book hear that kids one of your future career options is an ancient paleo geneticist you know yeah God crazy it’s crazy it’s it’s amazing it’s crazy and um she actually has a Dodo tattoo and she had been working you know for over 10 years on the dodo genome been to Marius had worked on with Museum samples had been assembling it comparing but once again massively underfunded she’s very well known and a lot of her stuff has incredible funding but this was not a project that you know was super well funded but something that really passionate to her and what was interesting was our investors kind of led the dodo project where Thomas and Jim Brier and a few others said listen you you if you are the D Extinction company the doto is the face of human caused Extinction right or wrong um you why are we not doing that so I talked to

[00:43:01] Beth it’s a little it’s very similar in many ways easier in some harder in others uh it it forced us to develop new Tools around like primodial germ cells and other things that we didn’t have built that we don’t need for our other projects and you know we we told our investor base if you guys support us you know with the financing we will pursue it and we we have the subject matter expert in Beth um and so uh we that was one that we were very fortunate from that it kind of came from the the general public and our investors that really kind of helped drive that decision amazing and uh just note here the last widely accepted sighting of the dodo was in 1662 yeah so a few hundred years yeah been a while and most people don’t think that this the pictures you see of the Doos uh a lot of those are like chicken and turkey feathers so we’re actually doing computational anal like people just think that Doos were like brown or white and they may have been but we’re

[00:44:00] actually verifying that the G you know what you see in museums has been you know assembled yeah um human bias comes in there so people say to me last year when I was bragging about you and bragging about the company and saying you know in the middle of sort of the worst uh investment meltdown here comes the D Extinction company raising you know money at a $1.4 billion money and their their mouth just drops and it’s like what in the world is their business model so let’s jump into that you know because to raise capital and uh you need something exciting you need a massive transformative purpose you need a great team and you need a good business model or a great business model so what is it yes so we have we we we kind of have like two parts of the business model one is all about we’re huge Believers in option value right and so we believe that very similar to the Apollo program on the path to the you know the the de Extinction of Mammoth and thines and

[00:45:00] doos and maybe other species uh we will build technologies that have an application not just for conservation but for human health care and and and so that Innovation creates a massive kind of option value for our investors right because like bold and and all our incredible investors out there you know when we create those Technologies and we spin them out of the company uh you know all of our shareholders get those get their uh appropriate shares in that spin out we did that last year with for Bio which was our first computational biology software platform we we didn’t have all the tools we really needed to do this we wouldn’t build them and then we then we realized that as application other places and we raising over subscrib $30 million round you know for that business which was amazing um and you know that Kent wakeford CEO that’s just absolutely crushing it and you know Kent as well and you know they’re they’re doing quite well you know they’re doing mid seven figures and ARR already which is just I mean in in this market like for a software company that

[00:46:01] just started is incredible they just announced a major partnership with Google and um and and so so the first part of our business model is really in the Technologies right like how do we build you know we’ve got about 36 patents in process and uh you know we’ve got another spin out on the horizon uh probably won’t be this year probably be early next year but we’ve got what we think is our next really strong advancement but any of these advancements any of these spin outs and this option value could be multi-billion dollar companies in themselves right and you know I think I think that we’ll probably have 10 plus spin outs you know uh or potentially more over the life of our over the life of our company which by the way as a as entrepreneur sort of uh studying this it’s an interesting approach that a lot of individuals don’t take typically you retain that inside the company make it a division of your company hire a president to run it and you’ve been and it’s great right the investors love you for this because it

[00:47:00] allows you to focus on the primary purpose of what you built colossal for and gives this incredible optionality adjacency uh for everybody else uh and doesn’t take your eye off the ball so great idea for other entrepreneurs to be uh no we it I mean we needed these te this Tech anyway right now there’s other Tech that we built that’s amazing that we don’t think has a marketability you know outside of what we’re using for so we’re not going to go spin those out right like we’re not going to just spin out everything we make so we’re going to there’s a lot of intentionality to creating that option value that that’s meaningful right um and then the second part of our business is around you know uh education and Partnerships and so you know we we mentioned obviously Thomas and others you know we’re working on a big entertainment partnership around uh the docu series uh letting you know educational content around that docu series uh you know we want to Chronicle this for the world and you know media

[00:48:00] and entertainment does you know uh make money and what’s interesting about that that uh aspect of the business is that it’s starting to lead us into conversations with governments where governments where um you know we’re we’re in the middle of I can’t say who yet you know who but we’re in the middle of closing a a very you know large eight uh figure and a separate nine fig contract can say on planet Earth we can say yeah it is it is on planet Earth um where governments are you know while we want to open source all of the Technologies for conservation um some governments have some critically endangered issues and need us to help them preserve their keystone species that’s very important to their cultures and so you know we are working on uh two very large deals uh that have very large price tags uh to them uh but but are still massively uh uh there they are a massive accelerant to these Count’s uh

[00:49:01] biodiversity uh restoration programs in one case we’re cutting down a country’s work uh by 20 years and saving them hundreds of millions of dollars and so when you can show that you can create that value for countries uh and allow them to preserve their their uh animals on that scale uh as well as they can save their conservation the budgets of conservation hundreds of millions dollars that can be then applied in in in other and potentially better ways and cut decades off their reing timelines you know it’s a value prop that you know one of the the negative CR criticisms we’ve got at launch was you’re taking money away from conservation it’s like no first of all we’re bringing new money and new technologies to conservation and we’re going to show the world that you can actually do really smart innovative ways of techn using technology in select cases of conservation that that shortens timelines by decades and saves hundreds

[00:50:00] of millions of dollars so you can actually help governments take a number of their species that are on the edge of going extinct and to help bring back those populations you know one of the things I find amazing uh when we first discussed it I said is well okay I understand how you go to get a embryo or a single cell of a thyine or a doo but how do you grow it into the whole animal uh where where do you incubate it and I have to say you don’t consider this an independent moonshot but I think the idea of uh the end point here of ultimately an artificial womb is an amazing you know moonshot into itself so what are you doing in the near terms where do you incubate the embryo for 22 months in for a woolly mammoth so uh so it’s weird is I’m so close to the

[00:51:00] science and the teams I live and breathe and and stay in the labs most days that when I’m not traveling and so what’s weird to me and I love that you brought this up is that de Extinction no longer to me seems like a moonshot because I’m just so close I know where we are and I know how fast some things are coming and so it just doesn’t seem like a moonshot anymore based on where we are right and what the the tangible progress that we see on a quarter over quarter basis um what’s interesting to me is what I do see think still as a moonshot is our artificial W or exor development and I ex uo ex uo development uh teams we found that people resonated better with that than artificial wombs um but it’s but they’re they’re the same and I’m actually sitting in in our office in my office that’s at the exor development lab so I’m spending a lot of time now on that given that the the D Extinction side of the business is very uh uh uh I feel like has all the right people en rolling I’m spending a lot of time on EXO development systems now uh for the

[00:52:00] for the artificial womb and what’s interesting is all of the animals our first generation of animals will all be born through surrogacy so that’s why I have the big animal husbandry group uh so we don’t need artificial WS to be successful on thyine slow that down slow it down a second so for a woly mammoth you’re going to have made these edits in some 60 or 70 loai whether it’s a gene replacement or a crisper edit or whatever it might be and you’ve got a a single effectively fertilized cell of a woolly mammoth like species and you probably have a number of these right you’ve done this you’ve probably done this in in uh in vitro um hundreds of them like when you have a surrogate child and you do invitro fertilization and in this case who is the surrogate so um so two things that you brought up I think really interesting I think that we will shock

[00:53:00] people in the next year with some of our successful IVF and cloning numbers um cloning historically and that’s the sematic cell nuclear transfer part and then the acceptance through somatic cell nuclear transfer so this is a sematic cell is a body cell versus your gametes versus your C exactly a nuclear transfer is taking the nucleus out putting it into a different cell and put it into one of those egg cells right and um we’ve had a couple really interesting breakthroughs um that that we will be announcing in the not too distant future that uh that increase the efficiency of that uh over 25x of what’s out there which is incredible and um and so so to that process we are going to be using Asian elephants as our surrogates uh for the mammoth we’ll be using this is

[00:54:00] interesting about the thyine and we’ll come back to artificial Wills here in a second but we with the thyine we’re using the closest phenetic relative in that Desi ID family is actually the fat tail dunard it’s it’s a it’s like a marsupial Mouse it’s like this big and so it’s funny people are like wait you’re telling me a wolf siiz animals can C from this but they’re younger the same size they’re both the when they’re born after that 13 half gestation they’re about the size of a grin of rice uh and most marsupial gestate mostly outside of the womb so that that leads to other challenges that we’re working on like exop pouches and yeah exactly um but but our goal though is long term we want uh our system we want exud development or artificial wounds that we can grow a thousand mammas right because we won’t be able to grow a thousand Mammoth uh you know the oldfashioned way right and so being able to do that for not just but imagine a world Peter where you know we are down

[00:55:00] uh we have 100x we’re down 100x right now on uh number of species or or number of blue whale individuals in the ocean imagine a world where we can work with governments to grow where you have these football size you know uh systems where you can grow you know a hundred blue whales uh for reintroduction um so so we think the for the Rhino for lions rhos for anything right it’s like work with let let’s let re let’s let conservationists and re Wilding Partners work to do the hard work of reintroducing the species and socializing and her Dynamics and all that incredible work that they do but the gestation let’s grow them all EX utero and so I actually believe that the artificial womb has a more uh potential for impact to the world even than our de Extinction work and so we have a 17 person team working on the exu development uh systems here we also have a partnership with the University of

[00:56:01] Melbourne outside of our thyine partnership that’s working on it and then we we fund people in George’s lab that’s working on it so it’s a combined team of probably about 25 26 people that are working on artificial wombs here at Colossal um that we want to be able to grow everything in is this an artificial womb that will take a embryo from single cell through to surviving on its own so it really is the work of the science fiction stories of a of a real full oficial W it’s a true artificial womb like so like Allan flake for example who’s an incredible mind he doesn’t work with colossal he’s amazing he’s done uh he he did the biobag lamb work back in like 2015 he’s he’s he’s very focused on later stage uh you know for PR for for for premies exactly and they do a micro surgery in the umbilicus and whatnot and that’s great for for that use case it’s incredible and he is the world’s best at

[00:57:01] it um but what we really want to do is we don’t want to be doing if you want to grow a thousand of animals we don’t want to be doing a lot of micro surgeries in in in in that in that umbilicus so really being able to build a artificial placenta uh uh or sorry an artificial kind of this endometrial layer of the uterine wall that a placenta can can uh in con yeah now the beautiful thing for us well here’s the beautiful thing about it though is that that while there’s varying different placental types I didn’t know that I thought everything just threw in a bag inside of another bag right um before I started this but there’s actually different placental types right and what’s interesting is that that comes from the embryo and so the embryo uh basically makes the organ that invades this this uh uterine wall so we really have to get right the gas exchange in the um as well as nutrient and extent exchange through kind of this

[00:58:00] like you know uh system I know you know Doris Taylor we’re working with her on uh you know uh decellularized membranes so it’s really kind of interesting because we’re bringing all these different people like Doris together to to Think Through how you could build these membranes through synthetic biology that uh a a a embryo would want the placenta to invade into right so that’s natural as possible hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are

[00:59:01] Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotch increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode you know um I can’t uh help but ask some timelines here you said that the willly MTH is 2028 we’re recording this in mid you know uh third quar entering third quarter of 2023 so 5 years out uh can you give us timelines on the dodo and the thine yeah so the thylacine I would assume that you would see it sooner uh given that it’s a uh 13 and a half day gestation so

[01:00:02] there’s a higher uh probability of that um in the dodo what’s really interesting about the dodo is it’s about a 30-day gestation right and we’re using these sterile chickens this is this this to me is crazy about this is the kind of stuff that you’ve learned about biology that you’re like wait what that that to me sounds like science fiction but they’ve actually you can actually take edited primordial germ cells of they’ve done this experiment where they’ve taken edited these these things called primordial germ cells that that are found in in in birds and they take these primordial germ cells of ducks insert insert them into that of a sterile chicken the sterile chicken’s mate an egg is laid it hatches and it’s a duck like that to me I I know that sounds like we talk about D Extinction I kind of like oh yeah that’s fine we got that that that to me is the stuff that just seems like wait I still have a hard time doing it so we have an entire uh Aven

[01:01:01] genomics group now that’s focused on cultivating these primordial germ cells which is very very difficult and uh the closest living relative to the doto the actually nicar pigeon um which is beautiful looks nothing like what we think the DOTA look like and um what’s so if we can get those primordial germ cells completed in a in a in stable and in growing and culture at the right scale um fast then I think the dodo you know could be in the next couple years um that’s really the great limiting factor is now if it takes us two years to do that then I think it’d be you know 202 would you bet on the Tasmanian Tiger before the doto um it’s you just have this variable you have this massive variable in the primordial germ cells if that okay if the PGC Stu works I bet on the dodo first all right all right okay so I’m not going to ask you to tell me what’s next but I am going to ask you to tell me I told you about yeah order magnitude

[01:02:01] how many species have you been dreaming about are there dozens or hundreds of species that could be on the de Extinction list I think for for us you know we there will be a handful I think over time for us will you open source of technology for others to play with yeah absolutely I think that uh for conservation purposes right like I I do think that that I think de Extinction something that needs to be measured and thought thought out well of like what’s the intention of it and why are you doing it and and remember all the species that we’re working on we want to re wild so we’re working with local governments in some case that’s foreign governments we’re working with indigenous people groups we’re working with um private land owners so there’s a lot of people that go into this outside of just the Colossal team right so you really need to collaborate and and whatnot so so we are going to open source all the Technologies for conser that have an application to conservation for conservation purposes um there will

[01:03:00] be some D Extinction Tech that we just don’t open source because we just think that maybe not everyone should have that okay now let’s get to the top secret part of this episode a billionaire comes to you and says listen Ben I want to bring back the dinosaurs or at least a dinosaur you know this is something I truly want to do I want to demonstrate it’s possible for scientific purposes we’re not going to re wild with these guys and you say to them no you say it’s impossible you know come on give up here what’s what’s possible here so so I mean a chicken is kind of a dinosaur in one sense yeah BS BS are just generally scary um so the like I don’t know I think that birds are dinosaurs like Kenneth lovara arguably number one paleontologist in the world was one of our advisers um you know they you know he he’s like dinosaurs are around us and so uh they’re Birds um they’re the bir the dinosaurs that made it and so uh so I have been asked that question uh not

[01:04:00] once that’s a theme that we get it was just the it was just the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park so you can believe the number of calls press everything that asks us about dinosaurs so it is impossible to bring back a dinosaur and I know I always break people’s hearts when I say that because right now from a technology perspective we can go back you know uh a million or so years in terms of like that that ancient DNA but the problem is unless you find some frozen dinosaur or some dinosaur that was just so well reserved in a cave that hasn’t fossilized you’re not going to get any DNA now what you could do which I think is interesting is you I do think that you can do ancestral reconstructions through computational analysis of like you know uh you know early dinosaur like birds um I think that is is a possibility in terms of like computational analysis um it’s also possible to demineralize dinosur bones

[01:05:02] to get amino acids but you’re not going to get even small fragments of DNA right so so I mean so so I do think that from a technological perspective Humanity will have the ability to do ancestral state reconstructions of of like uh early birds or early mammals um but but we will not be able to De extinct a dinosaur um you know um and and I think those Technologies could be applied in better ways like how do we make you know more drought you know how how do we make more drought resistant animals or crops how do we you know I think growing a 100 blue whales uh at the at at the same time or a thousand will have more meaningful impact and I think it’s it’s it’s as hard um as as engineering a uh precursor to Birds okay well I’ll have to break the news to my 12-year-olds but we’ll let’s go back my friend so we’re

[01:06:00] talking to entrepreneurs here about moonshots and um I want to hit on two points uh for those who are dreaming big dreams and want to go and make a dent in the universe and go and and and do something because I think you said it really beautifully in the beginning you know this is my shot of doing something significant in life and if I don’t take it I’ll never be able to look at myself in the mirror and say you know you could have and you didn’t so let’s talk about that um and let’s talk about the importance of having um how what is it that allows you to feel the confidence to take it on in a field that isn’t yours and then the third thing I want to talk about is how in the world do you raise money for something like this like when to want to talk about those early conversations because no bucks no Buck Rogers so um take it from there yeah I I think that um you know well I’ll start with

[01:07:00] the the raising Capital side and we’ll go from there you know we were very mindful uh in in terms of who we approached right um now after we started raising capital and we went public with with the news that we’re working on this we did have a lot of conversations because people were like super interested and look we got a lot of Nos and in any deal that I’ve ever done I have yet to have the experience where you just walk in and someone’s like I love that idea here’s a term sheet that’s blank with as much money as you want at whatever price and whatever terms I’ve yet to see that deal I hear stories in the movies of those deals like that the the Silicon Valley napkin on a Sunday night before the partner meeting yeah I’ve heard those stories too I’ve never experienced them so maybe I’m just not good but the uh but but um but but really being intentional that we had to align this project with people like you with people like thas toll

[01:08:01] people like you know Jim Brier and Tim Draper these are all people that that think it like you know to use your words that think in abundance that that want to advance Humanity that have all made a ton of money and they’re not just doing it for the money they want to they want to make money and return money to their shareholders but at the same time they want to push all of humanity forward right and so we were very thoughtful on who we went to and why who is who who is who in the early days I mean George is on as the Scientific Advisor uh what term what term did you use for George in the early days well I just said co-founder and then fair enough yeah and so I said co-founder and but was interesting is that because George to your point has done a lot of companies people were like oh but he’s not working on too many things it’s like yeah but ask him if you know him ask him and when they when people several people reached out to him he’s like oh yeah this is he’s like he’s like I love all the projects I’m working on but this one

[01:09:01] you could you could hear in his voice how he felt I mean you’ve talked him about this it’s like you could hear the difference in in in his voice on this one and so it was it was me it was Andrew who uh we’ started a handful of companies together he’s been a great product guy and he’s Andrew’s been part of your team over years for over years and really leading you you guys have a great track record together great great track record Kent wakeford right and Kent moved across country to help me get this thing started um course Andrew and Andrew and Kent neither of them had sort of this biological background I know I I I I know we had we had zero I I reached out to I you know I was fortunate enough to win um uh ernston young uh on of the year a few years ago and I met Joe de Simone who’s incredible who did carbon 3D and he’s amazing entrepreneur and if you haven’t talked to him you should talk to him he’s amazing I love Joe and I so like I was like I got connected to him through the ey Network so I was like I’ll talk to him so I started having a

[01:10:01] couple of these like individual science conversations and I and they were like we would love to work with George on this we’d love to advise you on who you should hire and we’d love to be on your scientific Advisory board so we had very early success on the even though we had zero people internally on on the science team we had very early success on the S on the scientific Advisory Board to help guide us and then George said hey one of my post dos is being poached to go do venture capital I think that she would uh do much this is what she wants to do this is ariona who you’ve met spent time with and uh he’s like this is what she wants to do more than anything and if she really has the opportunity I think she’ll succeed and be the bridge between Harvard in in colossal and so um we I I had one meeting with her you know and I I should I I don’t think I’ve ever told ariona this so I should tell her this about how amazing it was I I remember like hanging up the phone or the zoom

[01:11:02] with her and I was in Omaha Nebraska when I zoomed and I called our other scientist Sarah or uh who had worked with me before it and consults with me at hrina whatnot and she was our only other scientist and I was like oh my gosh we have someone from the the church lab and we have we have two scientists now and I was like so ecstatic right um because we had one from harvor one from John’s Hopkins I was like those are good like like we got this right and and ariona was a really great uh moment when we were like oh my gosh you know we can we can recruit scientists this we knew we could get advisers to it but could we recruit actual scientists that wouldn’t go pursue a drug and you know it was it was like eight people um I remember when Kent moved to Dallas um to help us get started and and and we we were in uh one of my other company’s offices and we’re sitting there with Dave cops uh from Worlds we were sitting there in Dave’s in world’s U offices and in K and I were

[01:12:02] looking around it’s like so it’s us let’s go but those are the fun days when you have a blank piece of are I remember those days I think I came on as an adviser just about that point and uh and then introduce you to to bold and a few other funds what was the first capital you brought in was it a convertible note was it your own money was it a first investor so I I spent and I do this with all of the companies I go work on um and I I never asked for terms on I know a lot of people ask for terms on it I don’t though um so I spent a little over uh I spent low seven figures on um on this from my pocket just for you know before we started in 2021 talking to people traveling uh hiring external consult scientists like I am a somewhat trust but verified guy and so um you know I trusted George but I was like is it as close as he says and whatnot so I wanted I so I I I spent that capital on my own dime um and then and then like

[01:13:00] kind of doing that research and then uh you know some of the first money in was you know Thomas tall uh bald uh Jazz Ventures Tim trer the you know what’s interesting and then and then uh Tom Chi like I remember Tom Chi was the biggest check in the seed and Tom Chi got it and I was like you know you have these pivotal moments on your journey where you know our my conversation our first conversation where you were like you need to go do this like you you you were very inspiring to me like and this is before you even introduced me to the bow Team you were like you need to go do this how can I help and so you were a major inflection point which I really appreciate um when I talked to animal Capital uh I was late I’ve been told Noah a handful of times I was exhausted it was like a 900 p.m. call talked to Marshall and Marshall’s like uh yes we’re in we’re in right now I’ll wi you $250,000 tomorrow and I was like that was an inflection point because that was

[01:14:00] very early before we had ariona or whatnot um and then uh uh Tim Draper uh which which you know he came on and and he came in and wrote a million dollar check and then when I talked to Tom Chi Tom was like he totally got it uh his fund at one is so focused on impact U Tom by the way a co-founder of Google X with with Astro on the team there just and he’s just as you know he’s just amazing and thoughtful he understood the science and he was like you know we’ll take we’ll take the rest of the round and I was like amazing right and so um you know because I felt like we were too early almost for the big traditional funds um and so we raised all of it um on a convertible note with a cap um so we raised at the time $8 million uh with with Thomas kind of rounding that out out and then Thomas was like and then Thomas was we then raised another eight on a on a uncap note um which you know

[01:15:02] if you can get it um and and Thomas was the one that said you need to go you need more money and so he was so they Thomas would to put more money in um he we filled out that that remaining we launched with 16 million and within a week we were getting term sheets from funds that wanted to put in40 million and do a and um and so that that happened very quickly I called Tom Chi called you called uh Thomas tall and Thomas is like none of us got the consistent message we got Journal like none of us got as much as we wanted in the seed and so they’re like we’ll give you term sheet and so um so we ended up raising 60 um versus 40 um uh and we brought a new partners which was great but a lot of you know obviously uh our our early team what’s your it’s a a beautiful beautiful startup story and I love the fact that you made the commitment yourself with your own Capital which if you’re able to do it as an entrepreneur it’s a show of success a

[01:16:02] show of commitment Beyond just your time that your team from previous Ventures continued to join you that George’s right-hand person joined the team so there’s the formulation the scientific Advisory Board you know um and but it was doing this also at a very difficult time to raise Capital just for contextual um period what’s your advice for entrepreneurs looking to take on a moonshot um any any take any big takeaways someone wants to a couple big takeaways for me are you will I did have a little bit of you know I have a proven track record I I I did get more nose than I anticipated because I was like how can you guys not want to do this right this is incredibly valuable for the world you know it’s like if if if you could go back to like the 60s right like if you could offer someone a time machine and go back to the 60s and be like hey would you want to invest in the in NASA which

[01:17:00] I would argue is then regardless of how you feel about America worldwide or politics or aside or whatever NASA is the number one brand that came that came out of America everyone supports NASA like it is the brand and it’s like if you could invest in NASA why wouldn’t you invest in NASA it’s crazy it’s it’s it’s a it’s it is an absolutely no-brainer and so I will say that was a little bit struggling that that we did get nose cuz I was I was shocked I mean not surprised we had so very little at the beginning but still I was like we have a really smart team you know Kent had sold you Tak companies public sold companies for billions of dollars you know me and Andrew had done quite well so it’s like I feel like we had stuff that like people would get behind um but you you I’d say if you’re going to do a moonshot you have to be even thicker skinned and I think going through the process not of successfully building startups but I’ve been told no so many more times before I started colossal

[01:18:00] that I was so used to being told no that it just didn’t really affect me I was I had the conviction and so you have to like you can’t go talk to two people or five people and be told no four times and be like ah I can’t do this you know I mean I’ve been told probably no a thousand times team Tech or Capital so I mean you know if you have all three you’re all set um you look sounds like you came in first with Team yep and and then Capital then and then bet on George on the tech yeah and is that what you would recommend for moonshots your team together I I think it’s team and conviction is just so important right like you know George has a saying where he doesn’t let anyone in his lab use the world word impossible he’s like we may not understand how to do it yet but I won’t use the word impossible and he doesn’t allow it in his his lab and and I think that that it was inspiring to to to start the company with George because I mean George was so

[01:19:01] happy when we l when we raised $8 million I know I mean come on it was like orders of magnitude more than he’ done before yeah he was ecstatic he’s like are you serious like he was so excited are you guys uh playing with you know large language models or what’s coming in AI in the work that uh that we’re doing yeah so we are so on the large language model uh piece uh we have a outside of form bio we have a genotype to phenotype team and it it’s really helpful for literature review right because there’s a lot of stuff that comes out obviously it you know some of these things are gated in time so it doesn’t help with some of the most recent uh articles that have come out um but it does help with uh reviewing peer-reviewed papers uh uh making summaries for on boarding and whatnot so we are using chat GPT and several of the uh other large language models out there we’re also using some of the um generative AI uh uh uh tools out there

[01:20:04] to to talk about like you know um we have an idea for this like educational experience that we’re working on and you know instead of going and copying up we’re using some of the generative tools there so yeah outside of the models that we’re building for like we have a we have a tool that’s pretty cool internally that allows that actually makes recommendations of what uh tool sets that will create to use for each edit that has uh the least likelihood of offt targets and like that’s insanely valuable right so all right last subject I want to get into here before I ask you what your X prize should be um let’s go the morals and ethics uh I have to imagine you get a lot of people sort of raising their hands and saying you know come on I mean you’re playing God how can you find this morally acceptable what’s the ethics involved here aren’t people going to use this technology not

[01:21:00] to bring back extinct species but to sort of like come up with you know glow-in-the-dark cats and you know cats with horns and a whole slew of mix and match um you know and it’s a lot of I remember when I was in at at the at the whad institute at MIT uh as an undergrad you know the early days of genetic engineering and the conversation was all around these these restriction enzymes are going to allow us to reinvent species and come up with things and a lot of debate and discussion about the ethics and morality now it’s calmed down it’s come back now with AI but have you reignited that are you getting a lot of people concerned about this going out of bounds well you know AI you know synthetic biology it’s hard to put you know crisper it’s it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle on some of these things right and so we work very closely with the federal government um

[01:22:00] and and we’ve been public about our investment from incel and whatnot and so we we we want to be part of the teams that helps think through like what should be used and why and where do we draw boundaries uh around it you know I think that we’ve been very fortunate with people like altao and others who’s also is one of the world’s leading bioethicist who joined our team uh and we’ve been very fortunate to to pull together not just scientists and bioethicist but also conservation conservation groups you know we partnered with all the top conservation groups because and we’ve really listened and I I think I have a different perspective now than I did maybe 10 years ago on critics and and kind of like including ethical critics and you know I think you can learn a lot from an informed critic right like they are the subject matter expert they don’t have to share your belief and and and we’ve taken this attitude that it’s not our job to persuade anyone it’s our job to educate people and be transparent about what we’re doing and and so that’s what that’s what we you know strive to do and then we really try to listen those

[01:23:00] feedback and some of our earliest critics uh have become our most uh valuable assets and you know like loua doal he was pretty he was pretty negative when we came out and now we could not be where we are on the mammoth Project without it yeah you know I have to point out um the human brain is incredible at imagining all of the terrible things that can happen as a result of some technologies I mean we have been trained by Hollywood and the crisis News Network to always go dystopian all the time and and it’s just you know it makes billion dollar Blockbusters uh but we don’t think about what would happen if the technology didn’t come into existence right I mean this is the technology that can bring back extinct animals and Main maintain uh you know large breeding herds for animals on the ex on the bridge on the uh on the precipice of Extinction he

[01:24:01] you brought up a a good point there you know me and I don’t I’m I’m an eternal optimist so I don’t think as much about by the way optimists live an average of 15 years longer than pessimists so go good so that’s going to take me from like 400 to 415 there got it great so um so I’m excited about that um that’s great that’s great data and so but the but what’s interesting is that like before the dystopian because we out even if you talk through it and you understand the ethical applications because I would argue we play God every day like we eradicated the dodo we eradicated the thyine we had a hand in early man had a hand in eradicating the the mammoth right and when we chop down a forest or pollute our rivers or take medicines you know we play God every day even with our own bodies so so I I think that this is an opportunity to not only undo the sins of the past but but fundamentally for that dystopian crowd I believe that hopefully it doesn’t get to this point but wouldn’t we want a d Extinction toolkit and wouldn’t we want the capabilities to

[01:25:01] bring back at least keystone species that are fundamental to ecosystems which are fundamental to things like food security so in the event that we do lose all species isn’t it better we can all say that we just want to preserve life which is great but in the event that we had that had to bring stuff back isn’t it better that we have that capability set for those I don’t believe in that world but for the dystopians of the world I think it is better that we have that tool that those capabilities and that knowledge base because you know we are losing species at an alarming rate and you know in the event having the tools to bring them back is better than not uh beautifully said all right Ben here we go it’s uh a few years from now you know I’m done so incredibly well on on my uh my colossal investment that I’m like you know I want to say thank you Ben want to fund a Ben lamb xprize um what is an x prise that you want to inspire entrepreneurs around the

[01:26:00] world to go morning through night to go and solve do you have one yes I do and I don’t you know I don’t think I’ll get to it but hopefully and it hopefully you know I would love if someone does I’d love to advise it but you know I think that Elon is doing an incredible job of recognizing that we have to extend Consciousness into the universe and become an interplanetary species and I think that’s amazing and I’m whole disclosure of a SpaceX investor I’m a huge fan supporter but but but but interestingly enough most of the world is is covered by water right and I want I I think that there’s an opportunity when we start to think about like sustainability in these closed ecosystems that we are going to have to do for off world I’d love to see that happen here also in parallel to to extending life uh uh interplanetary is I’d like to see that happen here in the oceans right it’s like I would like you’ve got these like little um you know

[01:27:00] uh hotels that have like the rooms underwater but it’s like we should have the Technologies where we can colonize which will force us to build closed systems right where we life support yeah yeah life life uh support systems also we have to be more thoughtful about food sustainability so I’d love to build sustainable underwater cities I think that you know I think that will make us appreciate our oceans more you know if you have reefs and fish outside and kelp outside versus plastic so um I would love to see an ex prise on building not an underwater hotel but a sustainable underwater city how big a population um you know I I mean I me we don’t have put some numbers on this yeah that’s that’s fair I mean I think that you need a small town I think you need like 10,000 people wow I mean I mean real cities like you know like real like eventually metropolitan cities but yeah I know

[01:28:02] that’s not going to start there but I mean that would be the goal it’s like how do you get to a 5,000 person sustainable City not like 50 or 100 like a real City Ben uh I can honestly say it is um always an incredible pleasure when I get your phone calls and Peter do you have a second and the updates I get from you are amazing where on the planet you are when you call me I you know sort of Russian Roulette uh you are an example of what an amazing CEO can do um I just want to say thank you on behalf of of bold myself George Church uh and Humanity uh as you bring these Technologies to bear I mean uh everything from the artificial womb uh to helping re wild extinct species to actually bringing species back from the precipice of Extinction um that’s amazing work thank you thank you buddy appreciate you take [Music] [01:29:07] care