The howl of a dire wolf hasn’t been heard on planet Earth for more than 10,000 years. 13,000 years after the last direwolf walked the earth. Scientists say they’ve now brought them back. Ben, I have to say uh you pulled off what I think is the scientific miracle of the decade. What’s your road map here, pal? So, we’re working on the mammoth. We’re working on the Tasmanian attack. We’re working on the dodo. I think we could save every species on the planet. Save every species on the planet. That’s that’s pretty extraordinary. All right. So, the extinction 101. Remember, I’m not a scientist. I’m really curious and I feel like I like to ask questions. I don’t know anything about it. So, I can ask, you know, childlike questions about it and then I get these answers. One of the spinouts I can’t wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial wombs. I think that if we continue on the current course in speed, by the end of 2026, um, we will have the world’s first mammal birth fully exuter. This provides a bridge to future developments like
[00:01:00] this that will break open all sorts of potential. What’s the next species that we can look forward to? Um, [Music] now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I’m here with two incredible entrepreneurs and two dear friends, Salem Ismael, head of exponential organizations who you all know and love and Ben Lamb uh the founder CEO of Colossal Biosciences. Uh Colossal has been all over the news around the world, one of the top stories, uh in April, uh the cover of Time magazine. And Ben, I have to say, uh, you pulled off what I think is the scientific miracle of the of the decade. you know, seeing uh Elon capture the superheavy booster on Starship was sort of the technological miracle, but bringing back the direwolf and and so what I put out a blog yesterday cuz I
[00:02:01] was really pissed off about this, you know, this incredible achievement of bringing back to the planet Earth after over 10,000 years of extinction uh three direwolf pups. And a lot of people said amazing, but there were way too many people saying, uh, is this real? Is this crazy? You know, what is this guy doing? Uh, and you know, to those haters out there, listen to this episode because I think this is an extraordinary achievement that heralds a, you know, a future of synthetic biology uh, that’s going to blow our minds as much as AI is blowing our minds today. So, so Ben, how are you feeling about this? What was what was all this controversy about? Well, I I feel great. You know, I I you know, I I’ve got I’ve got weird uh tough skin, right? I I don’t I think that if anyone thought they were going to go into the deextinction world, uh which involves, you know, conservation,
[00:03:02] synthetic biology, AI, uh you know, uh there there’s actually about 31 different ways to classify an animal. So you’re you’re you’re dabbling into an area where a lot of people have a lot of opinions on a lot of different topics. So I think that it would have been really naive uh you know to go to think that you’re going to go into something like this in and and not have a lot of skepticism and a lot of negative feedback from the start and then you’re going to it’s it’s only going to get worse as you’re successful, right? It doesn’t go the other way. And so we’ve talked about this for a long time is like what happens when we actually start to show the world animals? What what what how does that feel? But I feel fantastic. The team feels fantastic. I I think the only and I’ll talk about the controversy. The only thing that I think is a little sad in my mind. I think you nailed it in your blog post. um is that people miss the science like pe people miss the fact I’m sure we’ll go to go
[00:04:00] into it today but it’s like and I look I’m not a scientist so it it it doesn’t affect me like I sleep fine at night but you know we had these incredible women and men that have spent the last you know 18 months seven days a week passionately in love with bringing back the direwolf and whether you want to classify it as a direwolf or colossal direwolf or a genetically modified greywolf whatever you want to do which We’ll get into that that conversation at some point. Uh that doesn’t matter. The fact that they took 72,000y old uh DNA from a skull in 13,000y old DNA uh from a tooth, mapped it and built a nearly complete direwolf genome, which before this there was only 0.15 uh uh percent coverage right uh of the genome. uh to to go to nearly complete genome and to then select the genes that drove the core phenotypes of a direwolf, engineer it into a greywolf cell, which
[00:05:01] for many don’t know this, it is the closest living relative. It’s not the closest relative, it’s the closest living relative on the planet, which is a non-model species, by the way. No one’s ever done this. And then to clone that where you have a healthy birth of animals that exude phenotypes or physical attributes that are driven by genes that have been lost for 12,000 years. It’s magic and and I it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. And people just like and not to mention just the genome engineering, right? So on our mouse, we we announced the one mouse a couple a month ago and we had eight edits uh in seven genes and we did it all at once using multipplex editing, meaning we did it all at once. 100% delivery, 100% efficiency, zero offtarget effects. That’s a miracle. And yet we did get feedback on that. There’s like people have made eight edits before, but yeah, they made them sequentially over eight generations. And so to go from eight edits to 20 edits now using 15 of those
[00:06:00] edits being ancient DNA variants, it’s awesome. And so the only thing that I was sad about is I don’t really care what people call it, right? I’m not asking people to go to our website or or watch our videos. I don’t really care. But I I think it’s sad for the scientist that at that at a minimum I think people could have elevated the incredible work by the women and men at Colossal and our academic contributors to the project. Yeah. See, what question comes and pops out at you? I mean, you saw the you saw the press going back and forth. I did and I I read your blog post. I thought that was phenomenally detailed. Um I’ve been tracking this for a while. You know, we first talked about this at Singularity University and the way we used to frame it was uh and this is going back 10, 15, 10, 12 years ago was we essentially can now navigate conservation in a completely different way in a totally different mindset and there’s some magic that comes from that. So, I’ve got a 100 questions including as a company your business model. My
[00:07:01] biggest question though is how because a lot of people have tried this in the past and I’d love for you to give our viewers a sense of how you went about this because this provides a bridge to future developments like this that will break open all sorts of potential and I’d love for you to give some sense of the methodology you let me inject one thing here which is really important um that this idea of deextinction uh is not just four years old right so And you co-founded with George Church who’s the scientific genius at Harvard Medical School. Uh a dear friend uh of both of ours, I dare say a very very close friend of yours at this point. Uh but he’s been dreaming about it for many years and it’s been discussed for decades and it hasn’t happened. It’s just now in the last four years that the tech exists. But I would say there’s another thing that exists right now. And for those Moonshot entrepreneurs out
[00:08:00] there, I want you to hear this. Um, it’s the difference that a CEO can make. The difference that a moonshot CEO can make in taking something from theory and making it real. Uh, and and Ben, of course, you’ve got multiple PhDs in biology and crisper and gene editing, right? I mean your your background I have no I have no background in in in biology whatsoever. I know that’s the that’s the key point. No background in biology but just a passion. So if you could let’s bridge this into two parts. Number one um what attributes do you have that enabled you to do this? And number two what was the tech that enabled uh this you know the diewolf to come back and will enable a multitude of other species. We’ll talk about those everybody. I hope you’re enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused
[00:09:02] on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren’t at the Abundance Summit, it’s not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That’s exponentialmastery.com. So fundamentally I think that there’s two things that if you’re going to pursue a moonshotty like you know approach to a project there’s two things that you have to remember. One is entrepreneurship it’s a team sport. Like it is it is a team sport. You know you everyone’s got to play their role. Everyone’s got to play it well. Um a lot of times you know one or two people get the glory or the negativity. Um and uh but it is a team sport right like like you mentioned I don’t have a background in biology so I have to trust our our science teams to be able to do what they do and I just have to empower them and then the second thing is I think you have to be a little more persistent than
[00:10:00] time and I think you have to think about things in just knowing that like you know whether you have a great day or a bad day everyone talks about like you know the trough of dis disillusionment and all these things I think those things fundamentally don’t matter. I think that if you’re doing a moonshot, you just have to be looking like I think about Colossal 50 years from now. I don’t think about the direwolf launch. Like people were like, “Oh my gosh, like like ju just to go go through a little bit of PTSD because I think it’s important. I don’t think anybody knows this. I have yet to say this, but let me let me and then we’ll get into the science at SEAS, but I do think this is important. day one we on Monday of last week and I think you could make like a fun like 24h hour or or like a fiveday story uh that that about this in just what happened last week. So we were not supposed to launch until Tuesday. We launched on Monday because we we went to a couple of because the science is so detailed and if you just look at a press
[00:11:00] release without like the scientific papers without all the data without sitting down with the scientists you could just say oh it’s not a direwolf right like like I could easily have people get to that conclusion very easily but I think that what we did which I thought was smart was we went and spent hundreds of hours with Time magazine and with the New Yorker and with Rolling Stone and with a couple of key outlets and brought them completely on the unfold. We actually moved the wolves to a secure location and let them see the wolves because we live in a an an AI generated world. Like who’s not to say someone couldn’t just generate something, right? Like not that we didn’t we would ever do that, but I mean but that’s the that’s the level that we put into that. You know, we’re certified by American Humane Society. We, you know, flew the wolves of private jets. We literally brought in American Humane Society. We had I mean we had uh 15 personnel with them at all times. We wait we waited till they got acclimated to this new location just to so we spent a lot of time and thought into this
[00:12:01] right well then we’re supposed to launch on Tuesday and so on Monday we had all these people that have covered us over the years. We were going to give them the heads up. We actually did had a scientific paper and we had nine handouts. Nine handouts and an 11page uh press release. So we had a lot of material. we were going to give it to all these people uh under under embargo so they didn’t feel left out even though we went really deep with these other people and we said we think this is a story that’s going to persist. So, we did that. Monday morning, I’m getting in the shower. Kiss my my nine-month-old son. Uh say, “I’m going to go get ready for work.” Kiss him goodbye. About to get in the shower. Uh looked at my phone. It’s the cover of The New Yorker. New Yorker broke the embargo. So, that happened and websites not live. the hundreds of press people that we work with for years, four years that have covered us pretty favorably when we didn’t even have animals uh feel betrayed. Uh people are like, you know, Time magazine’s calling being like we we
[00:13:01] you’re on the cover of Time like what do you what what did you do? Did you do this? Insane. Wow. So I’m on my I’m in my car speeding to one of our labs as fast as possible and it’s like website’s going live people on Twitter like there’s Laurel Mipsum on the website and we’re like no the website was supposed to be live and it’s like we had about two hours of content for YouTube that explains all the making of we’re going to roll out. We were just like push everything live. So, so that was Monday and then all those stories that we talked about came out and they’re all super positive, but no one got to digest the scientific paper didn’t get submitted to bioarchchive. There was just all this stuff. So then Tuesday was wait oh by the way Monday we’re going to talk to all our scientific adviserss give them an update on the project because we’re worried that it could leak because it was just so cool. Our scientific advisors start calling us being like why didn’t you tell us about the like it was just it was an insane ripple effect. Best laid plans. No no it did. Wait, wait. Let me just give you I
[00:14:00] know like I I know we have a limited time, but I you have to know how crazy it was. Then on Tuesday, they broke the embargo. That’s really really really It gets it gets way worse. It gets way worse then. So I called up uh Revive and Restore who’s an incredible nonprofit. You know, I love Ryan and I love Stuart. They actually, to your point, Peter, have been talking about deextinction for a long time. They’re a nonprofit, right? It’s like this takes hundreds of millions of dollars in systems theory modeling to to actually achieve this, right? you can’t just do it with a nonprofit. And so I said, “Hey, just so you know, there’s uh uh I I was going to call you today to tell you about what’s coming tomorrow, but this just happened and I will tell you, we did meet with the Department of Interior. Um, and they’re excited about classifying deextinction as a form of conservation.” And the feedback was overwhelming. They’re like, “We’ve been trying to do this for 10 years. Oh my gosh, this is huge.” That’s Monday. Well, then Tuesday, we get this academic backlash, which is, you know, no one cares about two things. the science which blew my mind and I as I mentioned I thought it
[00:15:00] was a travesty and no one cared about the fact that while we made three direwolves and yes they’re direwolves there were four red wolves that we cloned using a new non-invasive cloning technique which I’m sure we’ll we’ll talk about with with you in a second but we we we developed a new technique to clone that’s less invasive for animals we made four red wolves which are the most critically endangered wolves on the planet there’s only 15 left in the wild wow no one covered that either Right? And then it became a philosophical and semantic debate on what makes a species. But what’s interesting is there’s about 30 I thought there was 11. There’s about 31 ways to classify species in all these different ways, right? And so by many ways a polar bear and a brown bear should not are considered the same species, but they have a different species name and uh they look completely different phoggenetically. So there’s all these different reasons or different ways to do this. And so that became the discussion. So then we’re like like fighting fire and just kind of like not really trying to explain ourselves but
[00:16:01] just saying like educating people like not trying to persuade but just educating like there’s actually a lot of ways to do all this. So that was Tuesday and then Wednesday and then by the way conservation community is super stoked about you know at least new tools and conservation. So I was like okay well it’s a win whatever. So then Wednesday there’s a cabinet meeting which obviously we’re not a part of the the presidential like like the US cabinet US cabinet there’s a cabinet meeting and you know we have yet to we have not talked back to the department of interior so we don’t know the full context of the meeting right because we’re not in the cabinet meetings we’re not part of the cabinet of the United States and um a comment was made about deextinction and and uh the department of interior and secretary uh Bergam is very passionate he told us in the meeting with us that he’s excited about getting animals off the endangered species list, but that’s not removing them. That’s recovering them. That means that we have enough of them that’s uh that’s healthy enough that they’re no longer on the and he made a comment that we put things on endangered species list, but they never come off. And so,
[00:17:01] how do we get animals off using technology? And so, we thought, but what but once again, we live in a moderately polarizing climate right now. And so that became uh and I don’t know if they I I I can’t speak for the administration, but that became deextinction is now being used to get rid of endangered species. Like wait, what? So that was my win. So So that was my Wednesday. And then then Thursday I was like, we’ll just answer whatever questions come up, right? And so, so last week was a little bit of a a crazy thing, but going back to your your original question, you know, at the end of the day, like that was one week in time and Colossal is looking at 50 years and our goal with Colossal is to bring back these species as well as uh use all those technologies to save existing species. And so in that uh model, um you have to think on a 50-year horizon. So, if you get great press on day one, which we did, and you get crazy press on day
[00:18:01] two, that’s okay. Those are two days in a 50-year journey. And I think you have to think like that. So, let’s talk about I have so many questions, buddy. Uh, and I’m so proud of of you and and just for full disclosure, I’m a seed investor uh and advisor to Colossal Biosciences. I’ve I’ve met Ben and there’s something about you as a CEO uh that have you’ve got the right phenotypic attributes that people just want to support you and what you’ve done I mean how old is Bio is Colossal these days? So we we were founded in uh September 2021. So Okay. So, you’re four years old and uh you you went from a Z valuation at a first conversation with George Church to now you’re say it. What’s your valuation today? Uh our current valuation is 10.2 billion. 10.2 billion. That’s pretty insane in four in four years. Yeah. Um I want to talk
[00:19:01] about the business model, but the science real quick. Uh you know, sort of uh de-extinction 101. All right. So, deextinction 101. Remember, I’m not a scientist, but you basic in so far. Wait, can I can I just pause for a second? Yeah, go for it. I think this is so important when people think about moonshots, etc., you have no background in biology to be doing this, right? Just as Elon has no background in space or the car industry or the energy industry. It’s people coming in with a beginner’s mind and an MTP leveraging new technologies that are accelerating naturally. And that formula gives you any possibility in the world. And I think that’s a that’s such a huge thing that we should drill down on. But anyway, the back to the science highlight. I think it’s so great. I’m really curious and I feel like I like to ask questions and um you know and and and George will sometimes say that I’m the best student he’s ever had because I just I I like to ask weird questions and
[00:20:00] he’s like, I didn’t think of it like that. And those aren’t like scientific breakthroughs. are just I just I to your point I don’t know anything about it so I can ask you know childlike questions about it and then I get these answers and you know it’s great okay onto the science okay so the science uh and and the one of the reasons why we had to raise so much capital is you have to build the entire system right so just like going to space or even just building a software system the whole system has to work you can’t just design the software you got to build the software you got to build the hosting you got to build all the API calls so you you have to think about it so we have I I think like My background is mostly in software. So I try to think about things like like how you build software. And so um you you first have to get ancient DNA, right? And so there’s kind of three fundamental parts, right? There’s ancient DNA, there’s the closest living relatives, and then there’s the tools to make it possible. So how old is the oldest ancient DNA? Because I mean, I’m going to ask you because everybody asks you, it’s your number one question. Can you bring back dinosaurs? Is there any dinosaur DNA out
[00:21:01] there? There is no there is no dinosaur DNA. George and I both agree philosophically that you should not ever say things are impossible because maybe we don’t fully understand it yet. I think we’re learning things every day. Um which is also not a very academic mindset I might have you. Most academics think we know everything. Um so I deal with that quite a bit. Um but I think I know nothing. So I’m on the other side of the spectrum. Um but uh right now uh you can go back a little over a million years. Our oldest, we we have about 59 mammoth genomes that we’re working with. And our oldest is a step mammoth. Um, which I would argue is still mammoth, but a step mammoth is currently classified. Uh, and it’s 1.2 million uh years old. Awesome. But but most of the DNA we work with is um depending on the project, hundreds to thousands of years old in that kind of range, which still it degrades. DNA degrades very rapidly, very easily. Very, very rapidly. Right. The minute you get blood out of a system, uh, it starts to degrade, right?
[00:22:01] And so, um, so what we do is you first have to get, uh, find ancient DNA and you’ve got to a lot of times there’s this thing called coverage, right? Because these these big, uh, DNA reading machines, um, they they aren’t they’ve got incredible, but they’re not 100% accurate. So the more coverage you can get, meaning the more times of the full genome that you can read, the higher likelihood that they know at, you know, at at 3,081 that that’s a C, right? Versus a G, right? And so there it’s giving a almost like a probabistic score for each letter at each at each space and each position, right? Yeah. At each position. So, so the more coverage you can get, so if you only have like one X, meaning that you got there’s you do this is a destructive sampling process, meaning you put it in, it’s like, you know, it’s like it’s like when that that old claw game, you put it in and if you don’t get the teddy bear, you still lost your money, right? And so you you put the DNA in into the you do this library
[00:23:00] prep, but it it destroys the library in the se in the sequencing process, right? So so therefore, you’ve got to get enough DNA. And the problem with ancient DNA is to your point, Peter, it it degrades very quickly. Uh cold, dry places are the best places we get DNA, but it degrades very quickly because of heat, acidification. Uh that’s why I love brand tarpets is terrible for for this. Um uh and also you have animals that die on top of animals. You have animals that eat animals, defecate on animals. You got bacteria. So you have to then screen it and make sure you understand what’s truly indogen like what is actually that animal, right? And so, and that’s literally kind of a numbers game, right? So, sometimes you get zero DNA on species, sometimes you get a lot of indogenous DNA. So, the mosquitoes trapped in amber just isn’t the thing. It’s just So, not that we’ve tried, but uh amber is not a great uh storage vehicle. It’s very porous. It’s not a great storage vehicle for DNA. So, there is no DNA for that. And and I
[00:24:00] don’t think that we’ll get back to I don’t want to ever say impossible because who knows? But um but I I you know people still think Loch Ness monster is there. So if if some crazy lineage of dinosaur magically existed somewhere and died during the ice age that would have been great. But I don’t know if that that I don’t think that most likely did not happen. So um so you can go back about a million years. So then you get these pieces of DNA you do the sequencing and you know we got about a 13x. So we had a full read of the genome 13 different times. And for you can do what we do probably at 5 to 6x but you really if you get north of 10 or especially north of 20 then for what we do which is called functional deextinction because we’re not trying to clone these extinct species there’s no living cells. You can’t clone from a dead cell from from from bone. You can’t clone clone from a a dead bone. uh we’re trying to identify and read the genome and then use synthetic biology to engineer in those lost uh genes uh to
[00:25:00] time. And so once you read it, you compare it to the closest living relative because why would you know it’s like if you’re going to make a direwolf, you shouldn’t start with a frog because there’s, you know, hundreds of millions of that’s a lot of changes, right? And so uh direwolves, for example, are 99.5% the same as as uh greywolves. And um and many people didn’t know this until we just submitted this paper which is currently the number one paper on bioarchchives. We actually crashed bioarchchives on so two other weird things. We crashed bioarchchives on Friday uh on Thursday when we uploaded bio archives went down. Uh it was the number one research paper and I think it still is right now and it’s on a pre-print server. Oh and by and also Reddit Reddit shut it shut down Colossal for a week. They said they literally put out a statement. I don’t know if this has happened before. There was a statement last night that said any mention of colossal colossal biosciences direwolves any memes will be banned for one week. It’s the craziest thing. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. So anyway,
[00:26:00] back to the science. So So once you once you have um and there’s no like GCP of species, which I think there needs to be. We’re actually advocating the federal government to do this. There’s no like biioank or bio vault like the equivalent of the seed vault that has all these cells for wolves that are immortalized or pur potent stem cells. No one’s done genome sequencing on all of this. No one’s done any of that. So then we have to go do all that and then you compare the two. And then once you identify those genes, we look for areas uh in coding regions and in regulatory regions and in areas that we know will drive um or we at least believe will drive certain types of phenotypes. And then we engineer them into the genetic donor. In this case, it’s the closest living relative being the greywolf. And then we identify those. We ed we edit those into the greywolf. And then we do a process called sematic cell nuclear transfer, which is basically cloning, which they which Dolly made famous only we now use like robotics and lasers and all kinds of stuff to make it much more efficient. You put it into a host and if
[00:27:00] everything goes well, you get a healthy animal. Ben, what percentage of your team and your tech do you consider software versus biology? How much is this is a is a biology company? How much? I’d say I’d say it’s half and half. And so, you know, we spend a lot of like the sequencing like like you know, one of the once again, this goes back to education. Uh people some people were critical where they’re like, but they didn’t use tiny tweezers to move the DNA, but they don’t understand synthetic biology. And so it’s like it’s like so this is an this is awesome. I like people were like were you frustrated? I got an interview over the weekend like were you frustrated by that comment? I was like no this is an educational opportunity, right? No, like this is cool. Like you think that you move the DNA from here over here. That’s not how it works. We just read it. It’s you’ve said this before, Peter. It’s just a different coding language. And so we read the code and then we rewrite the code um and we either change this code or we synthesize a block of code and
[00:28:00] stick it in. We don’t we don’t move it with tiny tweezers. How much of this is done by using crisper? You know, uh crisper has become the catchall for genome engineering, right? Uh it’s a combination. So, one of the things that we’ve done really well is uh there’s knockouts, there’s knockins, mean you can knock stuff out of the genome, you can knock stuff in the genome, you can change individual letters. We do a lot of changing individual letters. And some people um trivialize that, which I think is insane. I’ll give you an example. This is a conservation example. That’s amazing. Um, and this goes directly to your question. So, in in one of our tools of just being able to change the individual letters, right, not doing a full knockout, but changing this from like a C to a G. Uh, we have a project where in Australia, uh, they’ve actually introduced cane toads from South America. What’s killing all of the marsupials, specifically the northern coal, they’re critically endangered now because they’re eating this cane toad that they did not evolve next to, and the neurotoxin kills them. Well, guess
[00:29:00] what? We found out when we studied uh snakes, obviously not mammals, and other small mammals that eat can toads in South America, that they have a similar change at one nucleotide. So, think of that three three, you know, 3.5 billion base pairs. One letter, one change confers a 5,000 time uh resistance to cantoxin. So, we’ve now made art, which are the close living relative. Before we wanted to work in the endangered species we want to work in a little model species, we’ve made dunarts which are uh another carnivorous marupial that are now 5,000 times more resistance to cane toad toxins with one letter change. And so when people say but that you know making one letter change isn’t that big a deal. I was like one letter change could change the entire animal. You you could lit like George put out a statement says you could make an entire new species with one letter change. That’s extraordinary. Wow. And so and then to answer and then we also do DNA synthesis. So if there’s a lot of changes all at the same time, sometimes
[00:30:01] we’ll synthesize that block and just put that whole block in because it it creates a lower probability of offtarget effects because you’ll you’ll potentially only have offtargets at the ends versus like making 20 changes in a gene. So, and and and where we’re what Colossal is probably I I would argue we’re the best at is multipplexing, meaning that we take all those technologies, put it all in one big uh uh array and kind of one big guide and deliver it and kind of and we’re we’re pretty good at that. How much easier is the next species to deextinct? Because when I look at what you’re doing, it’s if I use the computing architecture as an analogy, you’ve got hardware, you’ve got BIOS, you’ve got operating system applications, right? And you’re essentially reinventing that entire stack to in different ways to do to cobble together what you’re trying to do. It’s not like you’re writing one little application that runs on a very standardized, well understood stack. You’re reinventing the whole stack
[00:31:00] completely. Um, now that you’ve done it once, does the next time become exponentially easier and then much easier after that? I think that the editing becomes exponentially easier and the delivery becomes exponentially easier. We’re working on some things with um on the embryology side around like how do you have uh a and we’re not there yet just to be clear. We’ve not done this. I don’t want to claim that we’ve done this. We are working on some pretty interesting ideas around a universal donor egg uh where you can have matched mitochondria because the the you can’t go too insanely different like I can’t use like a cow egg different size to grow an elephant even if the size worked the same because you’ll have you have the potential let’s say for mitochondrial rejection. But if you can make a universal egg and you can match the mitochondria, then you have a universal egg that could work for any species, which is pretty interesting. And then you don’t have to do the process of stem cell uh giogenesis. So um sometimes people are like you guys
[00:32:00] haven’t thought about embryology. I was like that’s all we think about. Um and uh and and so to your to your question, you know, I think the editing the comp bio is scaling quite well, right? software uh and compute uh the models that we are retraining on what works gives us a better idea of what tools to use for what job. So that’s scaling really well. The the the multiplex ability and offtarget in the monoc clonal screening. So then screening all the cells we do a lot of sequencing. We even do all of the reason why we know that our animals are healthy before we put them in is we screen the embryos. We do full genotype sequencing on all of which is insane. like it’s a lot of money and time that we do all of that. So, so the sequencing scaling, we’re getting better at the library preparation DNA. You know, I think that the big thing is um I think that we will get to the point that we will be able to synthesize uh eventually full chromosomes and I think we’ll get to the side get to the point that we I think it’s a ways away but I think we’ll get there. Um and then I think we’ll be like
[00:33:01] we’ve already delivered the in published literature uh 35 KB or 30KB I think is the biggest car uh large cargo swap. We’ve already done 100 um KB is a kilobase a thousand kilobase. So it’s a thousand letters. So we’re Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. So, so, so I think that that’s all scaling that what what what the two areas that I think will scale over time is this goes back to your ass your your stack analogy is like like the BIOS is similar, right? But we have to create different like we have to create like the editing and all the tools on that you develop for the application layer I think get better and better and better. The two things that that we that we are spending a lot of time on is that universal egg embryology side to make that easier. So it doesn’t have to be a custom, you know, chip architecture for every single species, right? The second thing is is and kind of on the bio side, I think it’s interesting to think about
[00:34:01] um or what what we’ve been trying to think about is how do we make it where uh there what are the universal truths across certain um uh genes or gene families or pathways, right? So like dogs scale really well. So if you have a Chihuahua and you have a great Dane or you got a direwolf, right? Dogs and wolves are dogs. They they they they scale really well, right? They scale one to one. Not all species scale really well. And so if you were to take like a goldfish and try to make it the size of killer whale, it wouldn’t scale like that. So there’s only a couple of clades of animals that scale like that. And so how does that work? And you know, how do we how does that work like with al coral and some of these gene families? And how is that then replicatable across mammals? And then separately, what are those functional equivalents in birds? So those are the things that we’re trying to that that don’t scale as well as the media. So all these cells kind of like a little bit different media which
[00:35:00] media is a grow the growth medium in which these cells are getting nutrients and growing. Yeah. So so Ben, one of the things about taking on a moonshot like this is along the way towards this massive vision, you’re solving all these other problems that can easily become spinout companies. And um and you’ve been doing that. Um, you spun out Form Bio, um, which is which is fantastic. And one of the spinouts I can’t wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial wombs. I mean, you just had a baby. Uh, you didn’t use an artificial womb. You used your used your your wife, which was great. Uh, we have surrogates we can go to, but uh, this idea of an artificial womb, we’ve seen in science fiction for a while. How far off are we from full gestation artificial wombs? Uh, it’s a great question. So, we have a 17 person team on it. Um, our goal with artificial wombs because Colossal, to your point, doesn’t work on anything human. Anytime that we have a technology
[00:36:00] that has an application to human, we patented we patent a lot of technologies. Uh, we we actually patent some stuff recently around um around P-53 and cancer uh and whatnot. And so, which by the way, p-53, one of the reasons that whales live so long is they’ve got extra copies of this p-53 gene. Yep. And so, and so do and so do elephants. And elephants, you know, we breathe we I mean, I guess we all breathe the same thing with whales, but it’s easier to study elephants than it is whales, right? Because they still go underwater. The um uh and and and so I think there’s a lot of cool uh tech that can come from that. Um but on the artificial womb side, you know, we spin everything out. So, we won’t ever make an artificial wound for humans, but I think that someone will could potentially use our technology to to do that. I will say it’s harder to grow an elephant, not ethically, regulatory or um philosophically or religies we’re working on than a human.
[00:37:02] And um I think that if we continue on the current course in speed by the end of 2026 um we will have the world’s first mammal birth fully exudo where we went from no it’ll be an elephant it’ll be small and then we’ll scale from there. But our vision for that once again goes back to conservation because imagine a world where you can grow everyone knows about the northern white rhino which we’re the genetic rescue partner on. Um, but imagine a world where you could grow 200 genetically diverse northern white rhinos in a lab and then you know uh in in without ever having to interfere with another animal or a rhino and then that uh goes into those those baby rhinos then get uh those work with rewing partners put them back into into the field. So, I think artificial wombs um if you can do multiple different placental types will change conservation and I think we could productionize
[00:38:01] endangered species development and we could I think we I think we could save every species on the planet. Well, let’s let’s pause on that moment. Save every species on the planet. That’s that’s pretty extraordinary. Uh when you said 2026, that’s like next year. No, I know. It’s right there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. I want to give you an umbrella comment and then you tell me how close we are to this. Okay. One of the holy grails of synthetic biology when we used to talk about this was that if you if you get to that holy grail, you essentially are looking at DNA as a Microsoft Word document which we can edit. And every one of our cells is governed by the DNA that tells it to be a liver cell or heart cell and how to operate etc. If you get to that point, the human being of 50 trillion cells or whatever is essentially a software engineering problem, right? How close are we to that to that point where you can edit it as easily as you can edit over document? It is a focus and funding
[00:39:00] problem. It’s not a lack of knowledge problem. And so like you know everyone’s spending all this time on large language models which is great. If the same effort goes into that into this solving specifically this I think it’s five years. If it doesn’t, I think it’s 10 still. And by the way, AI is going to be the biggest accelerant to all of this. Yeah. Yeah. AI, access to compute, and then eventually quantum. Those combined with with synthetic biology. You know, George has visions of syn that are crazy about synthetic bi we’ve talked about like so define synthetic biology and let’s talk about crazy. Yeah, let’s go crazy. Okay. So, so the way there’s lots of definitions for these things, but we look at synthetic biology as a way that we can use data and AI and other tools to basically change life, engineer life, or direct life in a specific way. So, that’s things like, you know, making drought resistant plants, making droughtresistant animals. There’s a
[00:40:01] terrible process that people that that animals go through for dehorning them because the cows are now like everyone loves to think about cows in these beautiful fields like they see on Yellowstone, but they’re really not for the most part. And so they dehorn them because a lot of times they’ll they’re so close together they’ll stab each other and they’ll get infections that causes disease and go herd. So they they physically dehorn them. You can actually now we could engineer them to just be hornless cows, right? So then you know and I’m not you know I’m not encouraging eat me eating meat. I’m just telling you that is something that exists today and so synthetic biology affords us all these opportunities right we’ve got a company called breaking that we started which is about using a syn uh using synthetic biology to supercharge this microbe that literally breaks the chemical bonds in plastics it doesn’t make microplastic doesn’t eat plastic it breaks that’s why I call it breaking it breaks the chemical bonds and plastics right so it just makes biomass as an output and so you know I think that we will eventually get to the CAD software of biology you know, you know, to to
[00:41:00] Selen’s point is like I think that we will uh be able to uh cure most disease states. I think that we will be able to do epigenetic cell resetting. Uh, I think we’ll be able to live youthful lives for as long as we want outside of natural causes or outside of like, you know, acts of God, some crazy thing happens, too. Um, I think that we will, George and I talk about, um, living one with nature and we have this vision because George and I both believe that we’re going to live hundreds of years. Um, and so, uh, we we think that there’s and and and so one of the things that we think that’s pretty interesting is if we can grow like instead of like a tree grows and you chop it down, right, and you make a house, why don’t we make trees that like like why don’t we make trees that like this is literally George and I’s like crazy like like you know people are going to think, oh, these guys do like mushrooms, but we have this idea of like what if we could engineer trees to grow faster and grow in the shape of house and like what if you
[00:42:00] could use trees as water filtration? What if you could have bioluminescent fungi in there, right? And like what what if you could literally build a engineer and tell a tree to to grow in the form of a house, right? Um and I and I don’t that sounds psychotic, but I and I don’t think that’s in the next five years, but I I don’t I I think that’s in the next hundred. Like I I don’t think it’s that I I think it’s closer than people think. We we are we as humans and all animals are effectively molecular robots, right? We’re designed on a molecular basis and we function in different ways. And one could imagine putting ethics and morals aside that and I use this always an example at Singularity University for synthetic biology. I said, “I’m going to engineer a a uh something that looks like a cat except it walks around your carpet and it eats lint and it pees stain remover and that’s its purpose and it just goes
[00:43:01] around and cleans the house.” Yeah. And but you can imagine you can imagine that I’m not going to get into the alien conversation, but if I were a future civilization, I would engineer the sort of aliens to, you know, to pilot the spaceships and uh and instead of robotic uh robotic systems, you want systems that are self-healing. Yeah. It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. uh without question I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I’ve done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and
[00:44:01] therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, any neurodeenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So, super important. So, fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members cuz you know health is a new wealth. Uh but beyond that uh we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells fungi vy and we you know don’t understand how that impacts us and so I use a company and a product called Viome and Viome uh has a technology called Metatanscripttoics. It was actually developed uh in New Mexico, the same
[00:45:01] place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what’s going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins and as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid, right? What’s going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what’s best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid
[00:46:01] peptide that’s able to zap scenile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. Uh I’ll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now, back to the episode. What are some of the crazy uh conversations you have with George when you’re dreaming up um without any limits? Let’s hear some of that. Uh well, I think the treehouse one is is pretty crazy and weird. Yeah. one another one that that we’ve talked about um that uh that that I think could be, you know, pretty interesting is how do we like engineer in like you’ve seen these uh you’ve probably heard about phages, right? And these like microbes that you can get and you like in the dirt like every time they like take a scoop of dirt, they find new bacteria and stuff that doesn’t exist, right? So fa fa f ph f ph f ph f ph f ph f ph f
[00:47:00] ph f ph f ph f phages are viruses that infect bacteria versus viruses that infect humans and the numbers are I think there’s like a uh a billion quadrillion phages on the planet there more phages on the planet than there are stars in the universe yeah it’s crazy it’s the most insane like every time you scoop a thing of dirt you they they disco like like literally just go outside and you can everyone can make a discovery just go grab the number of phages on Earth, you’ll be blown away. It’s crazy. But they’ve been using these like lattice architectures is um uh to to actually then they’ve shown that, you know, in a typical scuba tube, and this isn’t with like synthetic bi not even t synthetic biology with a with a just a scuba tank, they can like three or 4x the volume of oxygen that it can hold using this kind of like structure from some of these phasages. And and I think it’s really interesting and uh and so I think um so
[00:48:01] some of the stuff that we’ve George and I have also talked about is you know how do we build uh selfheal healing outside of um outside of humans and outside of uh outside of houses but how do we build underwater cities that are also self-healing right and so that’s that’s probably our biggest and craziest dream is like how do we you know if you look at the world’s you know what’s interesting about space is it makes you think about closed systems. What’s interesting about underwater is that it makes you think about closed systems. Uh but you have you don’t have a you have a more of a stable temperature. You don’t have this like you know negative 500 to 500 degree uh fire or 500 or 250 to 250 uh 500 degree variant in the sun that’s instantaneous. You don’t have the vacuum. You don’t have the radiation. It’s also the cost per kilogram of sinking something is much cheaper than putting it out in space. Um, and so, so we we’ve talked a lot, one of the more weirder ideas out there was we’ve talked a lot about if you just look at the surface of the earth, you know, we could
[00:49:01] do a lot of cool things and you’d have to it would force you to build, you know, very sustainably uh uh cities underwater. And so that that that’s a project that we’re interested in. Um, that may be a 2090 project, but I think we’ll get there. All right. I got to ask you this question and uh I’m going to I’m going to force some version of an answer. So a uh a a royal or a you know a deca billionaire comes to you and says Ben I I know you say it’s impossible but I want to I want to create a dinosaur. Um how do you do it? I’m not saying you are doing it, not saying you plan to do it, but sort of theoretically. Um, yeah. So, so there is no dino DNA, right? And so, um, just to kind of, you know, give a shout out to the haters,
[00:50:00] um, Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs. It’s a movie about genetically modified birds with dinosaur and frog alals, or it’s a movie about dinosaurs, depending on how you want to classify our direwolves. Um but uh so so there is no dino DNA. If I were to if I were to try to go build a uh to to I don’t I don’t I don’t think today you can I don’t I don’t think that you could bring back a dinosaur. I think using synthetic biology and probably not today but probably 10 years from now, eight years from now, some period in time, you could do an ancestral state reconstruction of of uh what we know of the tree. Um and and I think that of the phoggenetic tree and I think that you could do a giant sequencing project to and I think there’s enough that is conserved across multiple clades of birds and reptiles that you would probably be able to go down to make like
[00:51:01] an arcosaur which is probably the at the very base of the tree. It’s like the basil animal um before it kind of stuff starts to get weird and split. Um and um yeah, I would I I think that you could do that and then you would be engineering for phenotypes, right? So I think you’d be looking at, you know, looking to to drive certain phenotypes. And I think a lot of those at least we understand computationally at this point what those protein coding regions are. So um I don’t even know if it’d be less of a dinosaur than a dinosaur existed. Uh and and and and so that’s that’s probably where I would start. But I think it’s a huge project. I think it’s a I think it’s a lot of money. I I don’t think it’s a I don’t think it’s a hundred million dollar project. I think it’s quite a lot more. Is there any possibility that we can harvest DNA of a dinosaur and find that it is preserved in some place some way somehow. The problem is is DNA degradation and
[00:52:00] fossilization. And and you have to remember when the dinosaurs perished, it was due to extreme heat. And so, right, um, you know, there is dinosaur DNA in the form of birds, right? Birds exist and they’re dinosaurs. Uh, um, and so, but I do think that I I I don’t think you’ll ever get to the point that you will have dinosaur uh, true dinosaur DNA. There’s people like uh, Dr. Kenneth Lakavara, who’s arguably the number one paleontologist in the world, who’s who discovered the four biggest dinosaurs, including Dreadnotus, which is the biggest dinosaur. Um, and uh, he he called me last week when we’re when everyone was debating all this stuff. Uh, well, not debating all this stuff. They were only debating the name. Uh, and he uh, and he said he had the same problem with Dreadnotus. He said that he said that it was the biggest dinosaur and he did it based on kilograms and all this stuff. And you know, a lot of dinosaurs they find like a bone and they’re like it looked like this. But this one it was a nearly you can Google and I don’t know
[00:53:01] what percent but it was like 40 or 60. It’s very very complete for a large dinosaur. And um and he found in Argentina. It’s a super cool story. And um he had people that called him and he said it was so annoying because they wanted to argue not like us versus metric system, but they he wanted to come up with they with a measure with a dinosaur mass unit. And and so he got into this big debate when it came the the one of the big one of the biggest dinosaur discoveries ever and it was about and a large part of it was because he he I think he said it was like 60 uh tons or something like that. And they people wanted to debate a a metric that everyone could agree on of dinosaur mass which is just which is which is ludicrously absurd. Right. But but but Kenneth, one of the things he’s done that’s pretty cool is he’s demineralized dinosaur bones where he can we can get those amino acids. And what his
[00:54:01] long-term goal is, it’d be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone. Um, and this is his work, not ours. We are not doing this. So, I just want to make sure I give him full credit. It’d be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone and be be like, and you know, you found it in, you know, Montana or North Dakota. So, you could say, is this a T-Rex bone? This is a triceratops. And let’s say that you didn’t have like the f the gene the the the dating of the geological formations around it. You could demineralize a piece of the bone and based on the amino acids say, “Oh, this is a triceratops bone, which is kind of cool.” So, but those are those are like single I mean those are like I mean you can’t you can’t glean any data on how to build the animal out of that. So listen, I remember at the very beginning we’re talking about about your vision. It started with the woolly mammoth. It uh it sort of be it sort of went off into thyloine and discussions about the dodo bird, about the direwolf. And so how
[00:55:02] many different species have you had conversations about bringing back? Rough order magnitude because you must be getting calls from all different parts of the world. 20 25. Yeah. What’s your roadmap here, pal? Uh, so we’re working on the Mammoth, we’re working on the Tasmanian Tiger, working on the dodo. Um, you know, uh, given our most recent round of funding, we will most likely expand those into other aven non-avian species. Um, uh, you know, we have not quite crack the code on the primordial germ cells. It’s a little bit different in birds and mammals. Go, this goes back to that, um, media question, right? It’s like getting the media that PGC’s want to grow in for birds is pretty hard. Um, and once we do that, once once we show we can do it for pigeon, which has never been done before because dos were pigeons, uh, just like direwolves were wolves. Um, the, uh, once we do that, then we I’d probably
[00:56:01] feel confident in adding another aven species. But there’s amazing species out there, and there’s some we can’t do until we get further in the tech. Like my favorite animal is, you should look this up. It’s the stellar sea cow. It’s the coolest damn animal ever. So, I don’t know anyone in the world that doesn’t like manatees. Like, manatees are just awesome, right? They’re harmless. They’re cute. They’re vegetarians. They’re kind of tubby. They move kind of slow. Uh they’re, you know, they they do great stuff for the ecosystem. Nobody There’s not like Facebook hate groups for manity, right? Uh if they are those people should go straight to jail. Um and or else yeah or or I apparently do that too now. Um and so the um uh there was this thing called the stellar sea cow and I’m probably going to butcher the year so someone will yell at me online about it but they it was like it went extinct like 60 years or 30 years after it was discovered and it was all upon the
[00:57:01] Pacific Northwest. And apparently the the kelp forests there were even thicker because it would eat and defecate and and they are whalesized. Like they’re literally like bigger than whales uh and they were apparently really docil and they would just like swim up to people uh and they’re curious like I guess like dolph like bo dolphins are and people would just spear them and kill them. So curiosity is a bad evolutionary trait for for large slowmoving megapona for sure. We’ve seen the rise of anthrop we’ve seen like the rise of early human on on continents and the decline of of megapana be inversely related nearly one to one. Once once humans move to a certain scale on a continent or subcontinent the megapana drops at a very predictable rate. Yeah. Yeah, we just like which kind we go after big, you know, we all work together, kill a couple of big things. A
[00:58:01] lot of times the big things have single burst, long gestations. You don’t have to kill all of them to send them down on a on a decline. But I would love to do the stellar sea cow. And I will say publicly, it’s I’ve said 100 times, no one listens to me. It’s 100% on the list. We just can’t grow it in anything. So I got to get artificial wombs to work. And we got to get it to work for elephants and then eventually we could do seller seal. I would love to do seller seal. Amazing. What is the business model that gets your valuation to where it is? Is it spinning off breakthrough medical ideas? It’s really it’s really it’s I would say originally and this is what’s been cool, you know, like one of the things I think we’re good at um is we’re also good at saying what we don’t know. And uh the original pitch de deck which Peter saw which was moderately shitty was hey George Church says he can bring back a mammoth. We’re pretty sure that we make
[00:59:01] money somewhere in there but we don’t know right that was kind of pitch and and and so here’s how it’s evolved and and here’s kind of the three ways that it’s evolved. It then became uh tech which is working right. You know we’ve we’ve spun out two companies publicly form bio and breaking. Uh, we spun out a third one that we can’t talk about yet, but I’m super excited about it. It valuation is already over $100 million in the seed. I think it’s super cool. Um, I don’t think it’ll have any philosophical debates on what to call it. So, it’s cool. Um, it’s like it is what it is. Uh, and so, uh, so I’m super stoked about that one. We have another one, uh, in embryology that we’re really excited about that we’re working on, um, that that, you know, we got to get a little further on, but I think could be helpful to IDF clinics. So, so there’s technology which is get what you get. Um, there is a long-term and this is a this is a not really a science thing. This is more of working with governments
[01:00:01] and working with um uh auditors, ecologists and whatnot. But you’ve probably heard about carbon credits. There’s now a new thing called biodiversity credits. it’s getting a lot of traction because some of the problems with carbon credits is not that they’re manipulatable, but they’re sort of manipulatable on some level. But um certain things like biodiversity credits aren’t, right? Like the if you you can understand and quantify the value that a forest elephant brings to Gabon like that’s now a thing like it’s like it’s it’s like uh researched by by people like PWC. It’s certified by Lloyds of London. And so we’re there now is becoming a biodiversity economy where in part of that is really helpful because if you can put the value of an animal right this is the old hunting adage right where people are like well if we kill a lion for $100,000 it’s a good thing because we’re putting we’re saying that lion’s worth $100,000 so don’t poach them. I I philosoph I’m not a hunter. I’ve never killed anything
[01:01:00] intentionally. Probably a goldfish, but like that wasn’t intentional. But it’s like I wouldn’t like I I I as not a hunter I I at least can step back and understand what they’re trying to say there on some level even though I I think that’s partly manipulated so that they can achieve what they want to achieve. Um, what I’ll tell you though is that I do think that if you do put a things of value, people tend to protect. And so if you can protect an animal and it has a certain value that you can trade against, it’s comm it becomes some sort of a commodity play. And what we’re seeing is with this uh Paris agreement that you know uh 62% of the pledges uh pledge nature-based solutions reing restoring ecosystems restoring bogs um all these types of things right and wetlands and so and animals are critical to all of that. And so where we think that market’s going is a combination of biodiversity credits, nature uh uh and
[01:02:01] carbon credits into what will probably end up being called nature credits. That’s highly uh quantifiable. And the the variant trade on it will probably be based on sexy factor, right? Like you have a lot of these companies that cannot become carbon negative because they’re in the mining business. They’re in the oil extra. They’re in the extraction economy, right? And we still live on some level. We still live in the world where there’s ext there’s not unlimited you know solar or there’s unlimited solar but there’s not unlimited um you know cold fusion and and and stuff like that yet right and so like until that happens we still have some and there’ll still be a transitional period where you have an extraction economy well if you put a value on nature then you can create annuities based on that and so we’re working on models around reing that turns the animals into annuities and so if we can show that we make these animals with this genetic diversity. Think about an annuity that’s not only growing and is highly valued because of a company like Chevron or Sumitomo or
[01:03:02] Exxon or whoever would buy those credits because they have to be from a compliance perspective or kind of an ESG and per they’re kind of social good perspective. They are they are also annuities that multiply because they have more babies they cause more of a guard. So that’s the second thing that that we are now pretty deep in, right? And so the science has to work to do that. Um which is proving to be on the right track. And then and then the third thing that’s interesting um is while we open source, we didn’t know this. I told I talked to Peter about this offline like six months ago. Um but we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So anybody can use our technologies for conservation. We also started a a foundation with $50 million to go fund conservation projects, right? They’re innovative. By the way, congratulations on that. And I just people need to hear. Yeah. Nobody talk like it’s like but it’s not a direwolf. Yeah. What embargo. Um and so th those
[01:04:00] are those are my life. Um but the uh uh but yeah the foundation’s great and I I we’re working right now to get another big um donation that that uh once again aren’t coming from conservation. They’re coming from tech people that were trying to bring tech into conservation. So this is new money to conservation. And but what we’re found what we’re finding is you know even it I think you’ll love this Selen because it goes directly to open source software. You know if you build open source software you build the community people start to use it dev start to use it but then you have someone like the Red Hat Microsoft type opportunity where it’s like okay we want to go implement this at scale for Cisco. We don’t want our developers to do that. We love that you have all this documentation. You guys made this code. We want you to do it. Right. And so while we open source all this for governments and NOS’s and everyone else, we are now having governments saying in our hands we think we can get this done, but in your hands we’ll pay you. Uh and there’s one government that’s trying to
[01:05:00] get a recovery of a species. Um it’s going to cost them about $300 million to get to that species and it’s going to take 23 years. Um we can do it in less than three and we can do it for like $70 million. Um, and so it’s not just the third 300 million. It’s like that could go to more recovery efforts or education or water or whatever. It’s the fact that we can recover species in less than two decades. Um, and so so we’re starting to see these government opportunities like biovaults and other things where it’s like, you know, th this is work, right? So it’s not free. It it’d be easy if it was all just free, but you know, we’re now saying, how do we build a consortium of of partners around the world where we can also biioank all species, but but not just put them in a freezer, like how do we build pur potent stem cells? How do we do immortalized cell lines? How do we do sequencing? Well, all of that’s compute money, right? Someone’s got to pay for that. Um, so so I think that we can offer this like, you know,
[01:06:00] redundancy model as well as kind of this acceleration if people want it. But once again, we’re happy to have people just use all of our stuff for free if that’s Ben. When am I going to go to LA Zoo and see a colossal direwolf or a uh you know, some uh a woolly mammoth? I mean, that has to be uh a important future business line where it’s it’s it’s scientific education, right? I mean, you’d have lines winding around uh any of these facilities. It’s a it’s a really it’s a really great question and we get it a lot and in the early days we had a lot of uh folks from that community want to like how where do we what do we have to do to sign up first both nationally internationally but you know as we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it um I think it’s more likely that you will see them in a ecological preserve being back in their
[01:07:00] natural habitat than you’re going to see them in Los Angeles. Um, so you do have to travel unfortunately you have to travel to their locations but but I also think that that you know one of the things that we’ve started to have conversations with with governments is the brand building that that can do for the country. So we’re talking to northern states of the United States and we don’t want to be exclusive. So like you know uh or exclusionary you know like people people argue the zoo thing to us all the time in a positive route. They’re like, “But if you made a zoo, like what about kids that want to see this and get inspired by it?” Because there’s been all these studies that show that zoos actually are good for people care more about animals if they go to zoos as a kid. There’s like actual peer-reviewed science that shows that like not all zoos are tiger king. There’s great zoos like the San Diego Zoo. They do great stuff. You know, groups like the AA and others are trying to do more to fight for conservation. So, you’ve got that, right? You’ve got that and and we’re seeing that that works. What I would tell you though is, you know, our focus is on uh rewing back into the ecosystem.
[01:08:04] And so the two things that we’ve talked about and I don’t know what where we’ll end up on it is, you know, we’ve said to like Tasmania, you should once you know once we have enough thyloines and once they’re back in in genetically diverse enough to to be reintroduced, we’ve we’ve gone through a very thoughtful feasibility study of rewing them. They’re benefiting the ecosystem. you should offer ecoourism to see them back there, right? Um, and then you know, not like there’s like there’s this thing that I didn’t even know existed, but there’s like a sloth cam and there’s like a bald ego cam and there’s all these cams, but it’s like how do if you can’t we don’t want to be exclusionary. So, if you can’t afford to go to Tasmania, which is really not the easiest place to get to, I go several times a year. um the uh the you know how do we bring that experience to you without making it about exhibition of the animals and so we’ve been talking a lot about this we’ve actually been talking to a lot of education partners
[01:09:01] including the Australian government about how do we do content right which I know isn’t the same Peter like seeing a mammoth in in in real life but you know I and so so we don’t have an answer I I think the short answer is we’ll put animals back into the wild with collaborations with IND indigous people groups and private land owners and governments for the purpose of ecosystem restoration and then how do we put the science on display because the animals are awesome but how do we bring the science on display right because that is something that Jurassic Park nailed regardless of whether how you feel about Jurassic Park the movie a lot of people know about genetics because of Jurassic Park and that you know who cares about the Rotten Tomato score that did something like there are geneticists today that don’t want to make dinosaurs but went into genetics because that movie got them excited about genetics. And so we we we’re filming a docu series. We we you know, we we’d like to build more educational content. Um what I hear, Ben, is you’ve got incredible
[01:10:00] respect for the life that you’re bringing back and it’s not your goal to to commercialize it in a in a crass fashion, right? And so that so I would rather us put animals back on ecological preserves, protect them. We don’t even know. I mean, you know, but very few people know where the actual wolves are, but like um it the but like we we we’d rather get them back in the wild doing their thing in the wild. Maybe there’s ecoturism like Krueger National Park where money goes back to help the environment, help the indigenous people, help the local communities. Maybe we do something like that in collaboration with governments. But then, you know, but to your question, how do we also, it is awesome science. So, how do we So, we’re trying to film everything. How do we put educ how do we put science on display, not animals on display? And we don’t have an answer yet. I have a a fun question. Um, you and I have a common friend who’s another extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur by the name of
[01:11:02] Palmer Lucky. Yeah, Palmer’s great. Yeah, Palmer’s amazing. I’ll be doing a follow-up uh podcast with him in a couple weeks. Uh, and when I get together with him, I brainstorm, okay, what would be a great X-P prize? You know, what should we be doing? Because he’s one of the teams competing in our wildfire prize, right? In fact, he was the very first person to register to compete in the uh X-P prize wildfire. And he’s got a crazy solution, which I love. But we we brainstormed. And so, one of the prize ideas that we kicked around over dinner was the idea of an uplift prize. Can we uplift a species? Uh can we take uh you know a a dog and make it far more intelligent or uh you know shall we say Planet of the Apes u you know introduce the genes that increase intelligence to these animals is that something that’s that’s you know putting putting aside the moral ethical it’s a very Palmer lucky yes it is 100%
[01:12:02] it’s about as Palmer llucky as it gets right and and sometimes Palmer gets a mixed rap but he is so brilliant. He’s so passionate about the safety of America and and you know I I’ve seen the people attack him online and it’s like I want people like Palmer that wake up every day that are that smart and that are like working on a defensive weapon system or an offensive weapon system that is a deterrent for some bad guy not to hurt my kid. And so I I You want him on your You want him on your side. Yeah. You want him on your We are lucky to have Palmer. I I’m a huge I mean obviously he’s a friend, full disclosure. And I I think very highly of him, but sometimes he gets this polarizing thing because it’s like, you know, it it’s cute to you know go to the grocery store and drive your car or Tesla or whatever and think that that all is free and it’s just not. And
[01:13:02] you’ve got to have our incredible armed forces and people supplying them like Palmer to to to make our way of life possible so that we can do this and we can do it’s it’s wonderful that we can debate whether we can call it a direwolf or not versus someone killing us for that, right? And that’s amazing. And so anyway, back to your question. Um I think that um there are genes associated with that that that could be associated in with intelligence. There’s been studies been done in in mice. Um you know uh I think that um uh you can do non-invasive sequencing of really smart animals. You know colossal is never going to work outside of humans. We also drew the line at non-human primates because we got we get the neandertol question all the time and so we just said great sorry and then people get sad they’re like but what about giant epitcus and I’m like h there’s not really any DNA anyway so no we’re not
[01:14:00] making giant apes that’s just not that’s not that’s not what we are trying to do at this king Kong is coming back yeah king Kong not here though um and so I would say that um for us uh I I do think that if you could make smarter animals like uh you know dogs or cats or something that you have that type of relationship with. I think that’s interesting. Um but you know you also have to be careful right because you know um I I think it’s a very important ethical thing to really think through because that it’s a slippery slope because then you what happens when you make smarter you know livestock right then like that’s even worse for livestock right and so it’s hard I mean it’s hard balancing some of the ethical questions in the name of progress of synthetic biology you know also So, so that’s what so we we’ve I know it sounds like a copout, but that’s why we’ve drawn some of these lines saying, “Hey,
[01:15:01] we’re just not going to do this, we’re not going to do that, because we even though I’m not philosophically against some of those things, um you know, we will never work in some of those cities.” How how do you deal with the invasive species um problem? Like for example, the Scottish went in New Zealand and took the gorse bush with them uh figuring that would make good fencing and that took over the island and and and totally messed up the ecosystem. So an area the area an area I love is GAN drives like nobody and you know what’s crazy is like certain people like like the US hasn’t been as pro gan drives as I think they should be. But but island nations like New Zealand and Australia are like okay we’re in trouble with invasive species. We have to have new things and I love gan drives because cats for example define the gene drive for for so so gene drives are are technologies that you can develop where you can introduce them to a population where it will silence or change certain genes within that organis within that
[01:16:01] organism and you can deliver it by food or other things. Uh and so right now Australia is like the face of mamillian extinction and it’s because of cats. They’ve introduc like everyone’s cats. Cats love to have baby cat kittens and the people let their feral cats cats get out. They get feral and then they’re killing and decimating these small marsupials. Well, there’s people now that kill cats in Australia, right? And in America, like you’d go to like I God knows what would happen if you shot a cat in America, but it’s like, you know, to Australia, if it’s not their personal house cat, they hate them. They they despise cats because it’s killing their most unique. they have these unique animals that no one else has in the world, right? And so a a way to to handle that in a very thoughtful way that is healthy for the animals is you introduce gene drives where that cat eats it instead of it’s not poison, it doesn’t die, it has an offspring, so it does have another generation, but that
[01:17:00] offspring cannot give rise to more offspring. It’s effectively sterile. So then after a few generations, uh, there there just are no more cats, but they get to live out their natural lives. They just don’t get to over procreate, right? This got a lot of attention back about five, six years ago when gene drives were being put forward to basically decimate mosquito populations and and and everyone and I think the biggest concern is, you know, everyone’s seen one too many movies, right? Right. And so like you got Resident Evil and then people are like, “Oh, you make a GAN drive and then it turns us all into zombies, right? It just doesn’t work like that.” Um, and so uh but I do I do think that um or like one of the Mission Impossibles I think they had targeted like a a boweapon around that stuff. And so, um, you have to be thoughtful about this, but I do think that you can silence certain, uh, or not, I think you can silence certain procreation in in in animals using GAN drives, especially
[01:18:01] where it’s invasive. And I mean, we’re doing kind of the opposite of a gene drive with these marsupials, right? That’s right. If we if we make super coals, then we don’t have to engineer all of the other marsupials to eat coals because the coal or to eat the can toads. The coals love eating the cane toads. So then they eat the cane toads. Uh so then they don’t die. So their numbers rebound and they recover. But at the same time there’s other marsupials that don’t eat those cane toads. So then they don’t die because there’s no there’s there’s less can toads. So um you know I people think this is playing god. People think this is geoengineering but I mean we introduce the can toads and the we’re geoengineering by default anyway. So every day, every day. And so we should start being thoughtful on this. Um I love the arguments that GMO is bad for you. It’s like, oh my god, that’s all we’ve ever done is genetically modified everything. We’ve just been shitty at it by selective selection. I use the I use the analogy
[01:19:00] slow and shitty and unpredictable. I use the analogy of film photography to digital photography. We’ve been doing breeding for thousands of years and nobody says anything. Now we’ve got the digital photography. We can do it at scale and everybody’s like, “Oh my god, we should be we look at a pug.” Yeah. Look at any of this. Oh my god. We should breed a bunch of stuff together that ends with a pug. Yeah. Oh my god. Uh Ben, uh quantum sciences, quantum computation, quantum tech. How much do you think about that as the next layer? Yeah. Where does that fit in? Still way too early. I mean I I I think it will be a gamecher for specifically simulation design for uh editing and and and and if you feed enough data into the model on top of on top of quantum you could get you could get I think pretty good at predicting not just genotype to phenotype relationships but you could get pretty good at understanding you know what um
[01:20:04] negative effects would be from editing and so and and predictions of of editing like here’s the 50 spots you should go edit. You know, we always say the better we are at comput and this annoys people, but it’s true. Every edit has a risk. Every edit has a risk. It just has a risk. And we don’t to that question you asked earlier about when do we know everything about the genome? You know, I think for humans it’s that, but for all life, who knows, right? It’s going to take quantum, it’s going to take AI before we can truly understand it for all life. And I think that um I I think what’s interesting about quantum is if you could simulate these things uh and simulate those edits, we always say the less edits we can make to get the desired outcomes and the the lost phenotypes that that’s the safest for the animal. That’s the and so that like if if you can if it takes a thousand heads to make a thousand out of it, but if you can do it in three, do it in three, right? It’s it’s it’s we have a very programming like it’s this won’t
[01:21:01] come as a surprise to you but it it we we think about this like programming right it’s like if you could do something in three lines of code versus a thousand lines of code you should do it in three lines of code so so I think quantum will be a game changer I just I I don’t like I I meet with like I I see Will every year from MIT he’s great and it’s just like but it’s like I I never know like quantum quantum sens sensing is here, but in quantum sensors are here, but it’s like and like quantum comms is kind of hereish, but it’s like I I don’t know when we’re really going to get there. I thought Microsoft’s breakthrough earlier or last late last year on some of their chip architecture is really interesting, but you know, when when is it going to be truly here still to me is a question mark. It’s it’s two years every two years at least in my experience. Um, you employ ethicists in the company, don’t you?
[01:22:00] Yeah. What are they what are they debating right now? Um, well, I mean, I mean, we we we every single species we bring on, we go through a pretty rigorous process and include obviously them in that. Um, you know, right now we’re talking to them about uh one of the biggest things we’re talking to them about is is you know, the current conservation. you know, we want to we’re opening sourcing these technologies for conservation. We’re making red wools, working on these projects, but then you get uh the it’s it’s kind of our our ethsists right now are focused mostly on h how do we recognize h like I think that conservation is a bipartisan issue and um and and by the way, we hear that from the government, not just we don’t just look at it’s like both sides of the aisle. Like go look at who retweeted us, right? It’s like you’ve got Biden’s number one adviser and you’ve got Elon. Like you’ve you kind of have both sides of the aisle, right? In in as far as the
[01:23:00] the political spectrum. And we think that this is these are really important technologies and conservation important. Right now the bioethicists are helping us think through how do we educate the existing people on um and and how do we bridge how do we how do we show these technologies off from an ethics perspective but also be able to rise above the politicizing of it on either side not just one side. And so they’re going kind of a step beyond even the bioeththics side thinking about how do we have these dialogues because you know I was really sad that within a 24-hour period we made a huge leap forward for conservation using these technologies by the federal government but because it was by this government it’s seemingly bad and you know I I don’t philosophically agree with that and so um you know I think that we we worked great with the last administration we’re working great with this administration.
[01:24:00] There’s pros and cons to every administration. And so I think we just have to but but but to I I watch Bill Maher every week um to probably show you where I lean on a lot of these things. And you know, Bill Maher’s show last week was really telling, right? And if you haven’t watched, I highly recommend people watching it. Yeah, it was a great episode. I think having a d a refusal to have a dialogue because one party or another party is super polarizing. You can acknowledge they’re doing bad things or you can acknowledge you don’t agree with them, but refusing to have a dialogue that that is as ignorant as as things that you may accuse another administration of of doing. So, you know, I think it’s a testament there’s a testament here to your ethics and your MTP where you’re able to work with either side of that aisle uh because of the and the objectives, the open sourcing. I love the fact that you’re open sourcing everything. It’s such a huge thing for the world. Um I it’s really great to have somebody like you uh be at the
[01:25:02] forefront of something like this because it could go so badly so many other ways and you’re navigating that very fine line of breaking through science but doing it in a very very thoughtful, ethical, even a spiritual kind of way. So I just want to hats off to you and all that. No, I it’s really it’s really kind of you. Like I got feedback um pretty negative feedback from from someone I respect in the community uh in the conservation community because they said that I was empowering this administration and I was like there’s a difference between empowering and educating. And if you don’t educate people and you don’t show up, I think it’s always better you we showed up for the last administration. We’re going to show for this administration and we’re going to show for the next administration because like we said at the beginning of this, we are looking at conservation and deextinction. We’re looking at this on a 50-year horizon. And that goes beyond a four-year party or an 8-year party. It it goes way beyond that. And this this to me is as big of as an existential threat as anything else. My 13-year-old heard I
[01:26:01] was doing this, so he did a quick whip around in his class. And his class collectively asked the following question. What’s the next species that we can look forward to? Um, I don’t want to let your kids down. Um, it uh we are on target for the mammoth by the end of 2028. We feel good about that, but the editing is moving really fast. You know, we have done 300 edits in a Dunart cell. And so um if the done art and this is a bad non-answer but if if there’s a 13 and a half day gestation on the thiocene if the if editing progresses at the same exponential rate that it is I think the thyloine could be the mammoth and if we solve PGC’s and dodos because of the easy not easiness but the easy or it’s a pretty self-contained system being an egg um they uh and you don’t have to solve IVF or smack sub nuclear transfer in a non-model species then the dodo could be. So I I I mean right now it’s kind of a three-horse race and it’s unclear who’s going to win. Not that
[01:27:01] it’s a competition. We love all the species equally. Gestation periods play into this, right? So what is the gestation period of an elephant? 22 months. 22 months. Wow. For for any pregnant women out there, can you imagine 22 months caring? Crazy. Uh and the thyloine is how many how long? 13 and a half days. Yeah. talk about two ends of the extreme and the chickens a chicken which is what we use is a serate we use these genetically modified chickens for the serats for is 30 days with the data yeah so u Ben you know Selene you have a closing question but I just want to say thank you for all the work that you’re doing um I’ve never I I have said this over and over again the difference that a individual can make in birthing a company is extraordinary and I want all the entrepreneurs out there uh listening to understand that right um it’s you can have the idea you can have access to technology
[01:28:00] uh but if you’ve got a compelling CEO who builds a moonshot team is driven by a clear measurable vision and passion uh you’ve attracted hundreds of millions of dollars um at a you know at a 10 billion valuation uh which is I don’t want to say it’s insane but it’s massively impressive and you’re executing um over and over again. So, thank you. And in four years, yeah, in four years, I remember the I have to say one thing. remember the early in the earliest days because when you when you started Colossal, the idea of a deextinction company for the Woolly Mammoths had been around for some period of time and people have been working on it and it had been extremely slow in the nonprofit world and people were upset that this moved into the for-profit world. But guess what? It’s like hitting the, you know, the acceleration button when you did that. Well, that that’s one of the that is one of the things that we often
[01:29:00] get is like there was an article that came out a couple weeks ago says you can’t trust a for-profit. It’s like well we are very honest that we are going to make a lot of money off the reing. Like I I said that here like I we think that we’ll make billions of dollars on the animals being back in their natural habitat. We also think that we will make you know billions of dollars off of the tech that we’re building. And so for us to be able to give that technology and subsidize, people don’t realize this unless they’ve done technology development. They think of research and development as free. Well, it’s typically a lot of research and very little that goes into development because a lot of this stuff just doesn’t work. And I love that there’s a metaphor emerging in my head, which is you’re not just incubating and and bringing back old species. You’re actually a an incubator and a womb yourself for breakthrough technologies that change everything that change humanity and change everything, which I think is awesome. It’s very meta. Yeah. And we’re we’re we’re I mean, we’re look, we’re having fun and I think we’re making a difference and so that’s all we can do. It’s rare that I get to say that I get
[01:30:01] to say I’m jealous about somebody’s job, but I think you might have it. It is a it is a 365 7-day a week, but I like I don’t have I always joke that I don’t have friends or hobbies. So, um I mean I do have friends. I but I work with all of them in some level, right? On some level. So, I just uh it’s fun. I I I love what we do. Amazing. Ben Lamb, CEO of Colossal Biosciences. Thank you, buddy, for your work. Please give my best to George. I’ll be chatting with him shortly as well. See, as always, love having you in this conversation with me and for everybody. So, where do folks go to learn more about Colossal? So, we’re just at Colossal on uh X and you know, we’re uh they can go to colossal.com and find the rest of our social channels. And when you go, if you listen to this podcast, you know, go to your friends and say, “Did you hear about the miracle that occurred last week?” It’s extraordinary. Three direwood dire wolf pups that have been extinct on the off the place the face of
[01:31:01] the earth for 12,000 years are back again. Uh and that’s that is incredible. They’re also cute. Cute. Congrats on the baby the which is a real startup. Yeah, it is a real startup. I’m learning that the hard way too. So yeah. Yeah, it’s a it’s a self-learning startup. It’s I have my I have my own large language model continually growing. It’s interesting. You you have to be looking at your the birth and your and your son very differently uh given the business that you’re in. Yeah. My my my son has no idea obviously what I do and um uh I think he’ll really like it or not. I think it’ll be a moderately binary outcome. I just can’t wait for Peter and I. Neither of our 13-year-olds have any idea what we do either. So, so don’t take it the wrong way. He’s pretty curious. Like, at an early age, he’s really weirdly curious. And so, I think you’ll I think you’ll dig it. We’ll see. We We’ll see what kind of pets he grows up with is in in his teenage years.
[01:32:02] Awesome. All right. Take care, guys. If you enjoyed this episode, I’m going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponentialmastery.com. You can get on demand access there. Go to exponentialmastery.com. [Music]