How AI Is Bringing Extinct Animals Back (And What Comes Next) | Ben Lamm (Colossal) | EP #245

0:00The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth had been around for a long time. You jump in, take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that. I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was just really interesting. So Colossal as a parent company is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential. Our first biological products company spun out, which was Breaking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can, you know, break the chemical bonds of plastic.

0:31I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. Without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing. What Ben is building inside of Colossal, being able to design using AI and then build living products. Our vision is... Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. How do you like having Elon as your warm-up act? Yeah, that's the greatest thing ever. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. And he loves Bluey Mammoths. And he does. He does. And he wants Jurassic Park. Yeah. He's not alone. He's not alone. I'm not saying that's for me. I'm just saying that he's not alone.

1:12I understand that. It's the number one request we get. Yes. And then Megalodons is too, which is also really weird. Well, Megalodons are just cool. I mean, they litter their teeth all over the ocean floor. They're still scary. That's scary. I'm scared enough of the ocean without it. Jaws times 100. So as we're going along here, please use your Slido app to add questions. So I want, first of all, I've known you now since pretty much the beginning of Colossal. Yeah, you were like first techs. Yeah. First, second techs, yeah. And I am such a fan of you as a CEO, first and foremost, and then second, the company.

1:50The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth had been around for a long time. It had been played around in nonprofits and so forth. I'm going to summarize. This man meets George Church, one of the greatest synthetic biologists, CRISPR, gene editor, entrepreneur, professor at Harvard Medical School. And you ask him, what's your favorite pet project? Yeah. I asked him if he had one project, if he could work on one project for the rest of time with unlimited capital, what would it be? And he didn't hesitate. It wasn't like, let me think about it. Let me get back to you. And it was just instantly.

2:24He's like, I'd worked to bring back mammoths. I'd rewild them back into the ecosystems. And I'd built technologies that could reapply to saving species and also human health care. He just didn't hesitate. So you jump in. You take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that. I was going to fund it as a side project at first. But then I thought it was just really interesting. You build a company which goes from zero to$10 billion valuation in four years. It's massively undervalued. I totally agree with you. Yeah. I love you. And it's you as the CEO who has done this. You've built an extraordinary team.

3:03How big is it? Thank you so much, Phil. How big is the team now? We have 260 scientists, 200 here in the US and 60 in Australia. and a significant number of AI programmers. Yeah, exactly. You become an AI company. Yeah, yeah. I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. So we feel like the synthetic biology part of our work is really interesting. So we don't always lead with AI, but AI without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing. I want you to think about this. What Ben is building inside of Colossal is a platform and an engine for creating living products.

3:43Being able to design using AI and then build living products. Let's talk about the work you're doing in de-extinction. Yeah, so we thought that if we're going to go build this end-to-end pipeline for synthetic biology and we would have to develop technologies across computational biology, cellular engineering, genetic engineering, cloning, somatic cell nuclear transfer, and others, eventually artificial wombs. And we thought that if we're going to do that and build this end-to-end platform, what's the best way to do it? And we thought, well, if you start with de-extinction, right, because we are facing a massive extinction crisis right now, and if we do that, we are going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in biology, genotype-to-phenotype relationships, ancestral-state reconstructions, comparative genomics.

4:31So there's so many things that we have to solve. And in that, that allows us to build a system model that can be applied to all types of solutions for biological products. Our first biological products company spun out, which was Breaking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can break the chemical bonds of plastic. So Colossal as a parent company is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential. We'll talk about a couple of them here. A couple of them are super top secret. We can't discuss, but they're as big or bigger.

5:07So breaking is one. So you guys all know the microplastic issue, right, that we have like five grams of plastic in our brain the size of a plastic teaspoon or credit card. And most of that, 90 % is absorbed through your gut. Some of it comes through your skin and such. But what breaking has done is what? Yeah, we originally thought, the original thought was that they discovered an enzyme from a microbe. But after further analysis, we took this discovery at the Visa Institute, put it in Colossal, started to really understand it. And actually, it's a concert of microbes working together, which was actually even better for us because we were able to essentially understand the enzymes that were being made.

5:51We're also understanding the ability to edit each one of the microbes to make different variants of the enzymes to hit different types of plastics. And, you know, the plastic crisis that we're in is terrible, not only for human health care, but the oceans and many parts of the environment and others that it's now affecting. But what's interesting is that most plastic treatment and degradation companies are just making smaller plastics. They're just making smaller microplastics, and that's not solving the problem in any capacity, right? And so for us, if we just made a company that made smaller plastics, we didn't think that's the right thing.

6:25And if we just designed a company where the chemical process to pre-treat the plastic is worse than the plastic, that was also a bad thing. And so what's interesting about this discovery is it actually breaks the chemical bonds of the plastic. And so we were able to use directed evolution and supercharge it using our pipeline and some of our editing tools so that not only does it have a larger breadth of plastics it can break down, but it also breaks them down at a much faster rate per surface area. And we are starting to look at the human body. So I find this fascinating. Imagine a supplement you could take that actually breaks down the bonds of the microplastics in your gut before it gets absorbed.

7:06Yeah, because the plastic problem is a global problem. And it's not just a problem in the environment. And it's in our food supply. It's in our reproductive tissues across the blood-brain barrier in some cases. So it is a pretty big existential problem that we have to solve. And so you're not going to have like, you know, one solution to rule them all. You've got to have a myriad of different solutions. And that's really the goal of breaking is how do we break down and get rid of plastics, you know, in the world. So when you're how many how many species are you working on bringing back? So publicly, we've announced the woolly mammoth, the Tasman tiger, the dodo and the moa.

7:47and then we've made the dire wolves. We will have more dire wolves coming, which we have announced. By the way, I'm just gonna, let's get the images in the back over here. Here's the woolly mammoth mice. How cute they are. Yeah, they are objectively the cutest mice. And the woolly mammoth. Yep. Those are good, yeah. And the dire wolf. Yeah, so that's Romulus in the front, and Remus in the back. And that's George R.R. Martin, which is great. So we did, that was actually one of the fun, like there's a lot of cool stuff that we get to work on. But one of the cool things is that like, you know, I think kids of all ages, like whether you're like, you know, three or you're older, George R.R.

8:32Martin, we did a Zoom with him and we got introduced to him. And obviously if you don't know George R.R. Martin, he created, wrote A Song of Ice and Fire and he did, which became Game of Thrones, which popularized direwolves. Most people thought direwolves were just mythical creatures, including some members of the Game of Thrones cast, which I won't call them out, but they did. And what's interesting though is, when I got introduced to George and we put him on Zoom and I just, let me just show you something. I showed him to him and he just teared up. He's like, this is like, he knew exactly what it was, right?

9:10He knew it wasn't a mythical creature. So it was a pretty cool thing to show that we could take a 73 ,000-year-old skull and make puppies. And we did it in 18 months, which is pretty remarkable. It's extraordinary. So the de-extinction business, people don't, you know, I didn't think of it as a massive revenue opportunity when I began. What's the business case in this? I mean, EY did an estimate of the size of the market for you. Yeah, they said through educational content and changing STEM-related content in education, as well as looking at the kind of ancillary effects. And they look at, like, where people are, if you could take dollars, and these would be net new dollars, so they wouldn't be taking away from anything.

9:58But you take net new dollars that are comparable to things that are extinct, but layer on education, the world spends about 12.5 % of global consumers buy something that's extinct every year. And so it turns out to be like$1.7 trillion, which is really interesting. And so part of our model and part of our thought process is on the de-extinction work is not only to subsidize the platform, but to help countries do it, which is pretty interesting. And we're helping them preserve their species, which actually is a quite lucrative business model, as well as helping from an educational perspective. And so far, the feedback's been phenomenal.

10:39So just to land that plane, you just came back a month ago from Dubai and announced a few major deals there. Yeah. Can you say what those were? Yeah, so we announced the world's first bio vault. There's not the equivalent of the bio vault for animals as there are for plants, right? You've got a lot of fragmentation. You've got incredible people and nonprofits and zoos and others working on biobanking, meaning they're saving individual pieces of cells and whatnot. But, you know, when I naively started this business, I came from software. So I thought, oh, we'll just plug into the GCP of species, which doesn't exist.

11:19So we had to go build reference genomes for every single species that we work on. And then we said this should be more of a global project. Individual countries should have stakeholdership from it. So we partnered with the UAE as our first partner. There's incredibly diverse fauna in the region, much of which is going extinct. So we need to protect it. And then we also need to sequence it and build digital backups and also ensure that that's shared with the global scientific community and that should be subsidized by governments, right? And they should take, I think we did a lot, over about a year, we did a good job educating them on the importance of biodiversity, why you need to protect biodiversity, why it's so important for people.

12:00national pride as well as the impacts from the data from these animals. And so if you don't like, you should do it because you like ecosystems. If you don't like ecosystems, you should do it because you like animals. If you don't like animals, you should do it because the applications could be helpful to humans. And if you don't like humans, then you're probably not the right fit for us to talk to. But fundamentally, we got them to agree to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the world's first bio vault. And instead of also doing it in some secret backroom cave or underground thing, and there's still redundancy models around that, but do it in a high-trafficked area.

12:41If you're going to spend X dollars, spend X plus Y and wrap educational content around it, make it available for kids and whatnot, which they did, which they agreed to, which is great. And then from that, we're building a living lab. And so it's a nine-figure initiative for us. It's a nine-figure initiative for the country. And I think it also builds capabilities in-country for countries to also protect their biodiversity in a completely new way while also sharing globally the data. Yeah. So the way I think about this is countries are your customer for saving their endangered species. And eventually it'll be productionized.

13:21Once we are successful with artificial wombs. you're just puzzling so the other thing that they're doing besides breaking is they're giving birth excuse the pun to an artificial womb company so that these mammals and these birds can actually give birth ex utero right so imagine a future uh in which and speak about you have three of these projects going on yeah so we have we have three uh they don't work yet but we have three we have three mini moonshots within our big moonshot right of artificial wombs for different animal clades and you know our vision is using biobanking using synthetic biology using automation and robotic process automation with assistance from ai and computer vision and artificial wombs we could productionize species development and so when you have small and we have genetic bottleneck around a certain species or you have long gestations like with the northern everyone knows about the northern white rhino, right?

14:23A lot of people at least know about it. There's two females left. They're functionally extinct. There's low diversity in them. There's a bottleneck because they're related, and their 18 embryos are related. But if you can engineer in genetic diversity from that, both synthetically and from lost specimens, and then productionize it through artificial wombs, the$25 million that people are spending a year keeping two animals alive, you could use a piece of that to productionize it. And then the rest of that could go to, you know, water education, other things for the country. Right. And so, um, so I really do think that productionizing endangered species and, uh, also helping species adapt at the same curve of which we are changing environments is also something that's going to be needed in the future because evolution is not, uh, fast unless it's directed.

15:14Um, you also purchased the world's top two clothing companies. yes i love that yeah you you forget that you just happened to buy it so so most people think of cloning and they're like i think i've read something about a celebrity cloning their dog right uh and and we did clone tom brady's dog so i think we're part of that tom brady's an investor along we did so he did we do we do kind of like push that narrative to people because it's true um so i guess we're part of the problem of when people think about it but what's interesting is that only like 18 species have ever been cloned, and 15 of those have been cloned by the company Viogen, the main one that we bought.

15:54We bought another one. And most cloning efficiencies, and I think this is really important, most cloning efficiencies is only about 2%. And Viogen's was at 78 % pretty consistently, which is amazing, right? And so the only endangered species that have ever been cloned on the planet were cloned by Viogen, right? And so things like the black-footed ferret and others that are going extinct, Viagen took old cells and were able to reanimate them and then clone them. And so I think that people still love their dogs. Nothing negative about dog cloning. People get asked if I would clone my dogs. They're mutts, so I'd probably save more.

16:31But I don't know. Maybe I'd clone them because I love them. So we're not taking away the cloning business for consumers. So people love that business. It's a profitable business. We're still supporting that business. But then separately, we're now taking those technologies into country and helping not just productionize with artificial wounds, but productionize cloning of critically endangered species. We have some big announcements to share with the local government on it. Okay. So I want you to think about the pipeline, the platform that Colossal is, is being able to use AI and synthetic biology to say we want this phenotype, these genes, these gene copies.

17:14I was in a conversation with one of your scientists saying, yes, we're going to a Tusk conference. I was like, what? And being able to understand, okay, we want the snout to be longer. We want the teeth to be longer and being able to use AI to change which genes, which enhancer sequences and and be able to like design the living animal that you want. Which is why I said, you know, someone asked you, could you create Pikachu? And you said, yeah, we could probably create. Yeah, I did get asked. I got asked that is like the first question on South by Southwest a few years. And then the rest of the entire panel was about Pokemon.

17:55which i was really hopeful to talk about like our vaccine development for elephants and others but it was mostly about pokemon oh god yeah but what i find fascinating is if you can engineer life that way uh the missions that the companies that are being built and spun out include a company that can create disease resistant plants or resistant plants plants and animals are something that we're a disease resistant animal we're spending a lot of time on it because you know So leading extinction rates are not just human caused, but some of them are supercharged by humans, but they're existing in nature like diseases.

18:32And we get this, you know, a project that I'm very passionate about that we're working on is Kytrid. And most people have never heard of Kytrid. It's the leading extinction driver right now on the planet in frogs and amphibians. And they're not fluffy, so they don't get as much attention. but um and but but it's it's terrible for ecosystems but it's something that we can solve with genetic engineering right and so for us uh you know and not only can we solve the current problem but we can also create frogs and salamanders and others and and amphibians that are chytrid resistance which have huge applications same thing you know we're not currently working on corals after dinosaurs it's it's like dinosaurs corals and then i guess Pokemon.

19:13Dinosaurs, corals, dragons, Pokemon. Everyone's really excited about dragons. And so we aren't working on dragons and we're not working on Pokemon or corals yet. And so we get a lot of requests. But the coral side is really fascinating and it applies directly to this idea of animals and plants. So we have an entire group now that's focusing on how do you apply some of the, like, what are some of the biggest issues from livestock to, you know, critically endangered species? What are commonalities around these vaccines? What are commonalities around what can be developed to infer resistance, right?

19:49And, you know, part of it's also amazing because, you know, most people think about colossal. They only think about the mammoth. They only think about the extinction. They don't think about the platform like you've talked about, which I'm really appreciative that someone's talking about the larger synthetic platform and system that we're building. But of what the ripple effects on society are. And we don't want to live in a non-biodiverse ecosystem and environment. We don't want to live in a world where we are changing it faster than nature can catch up. And I think that synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, will be, and I'm sure others in other industries will disagree with this, but I believe it will be the most transformative technology we as humanity ever has.

20:33Yeah, you think of AI as a multi-trillion dollar, hundred trillion dollar market. That's why I think we're massively undervalued. Yeah, synthetic biology enabled by, powered by AI is as big a diverse market. I mean, how big is the market for engineering disease-resistant plants and drought-resistant plants and animals? Yeah, I mean, it's hundreds of billions today, and it's just not well-tracked, right? But if you look at everything that can be applied and what the current rate is, you have a terrible swine flu or a bird flu or whatnot that wipes out a population, you've got so many precautions that also go into these.

21:18When we brought back the dire wolves, we got some feedback that are like, oh, people don't like wolves because they're going to go kill the cattle. It's like, the way we raise cattle, the wolves aren't going near it. It's gross. And so it just is. It just actually is. And so it's just gross. And so what's interesting, though, is I think that we do that because of how we've had inbreeding and hybridization and all this over time. I think that if we're smarter about this, and we also have the opportunity to educate governments on things like GMOs, right? Because for a while, there was this anti-GMO genetically modified organism movement, right?

21:56Because people thought, oh, it's going to change your genome, and then you're going to – if you eat GMO corn, you're going to like – I don't know what they think. I had this conversation with Rob Sake on Zoom earlier today that GMOs have saved so many lives. They've taken nobody. It's an educational moment, right? It's like there was a season when seatbelts were scary for people. There was literally a time where cars were like, no, we can't put seatbelts in cars because it's going to make people think cars are bad or that cars are dangerous. It's like, well, cars are dangerous, right? And so it's an opportunity to educate.

22:28And so we get that. And if you go look at when we were meeting with the Australian government about reintroducing the Tasmanian tiger, because all the species that we're working on, we want to reintroduce. Their law, technically the Tasmanian tigers are GMOs. And so they are genetically modified organisms. Even if they're 100 % genetically identical, they're an amalgamation of 53 different Tasmanian tigers over the course of about 300 years. And so what's interesting about that is they're still GMOs. And so for us, we had to then educate the Australian government. You can't just have an anti-GMO narrative as it relates to the Tasmanian tiger, because then you can't rewild this incredible species back into your country because you see it as what you were afraid of in the 80s.

23:18There's another, dare I say, multi-trillion dollar market you're working on. gene drives oh yeah once again gene drives is a 40 technology problem 60 marketing problem yeah can you describe uh what it is uh yeah who's a customer is and how big it is so so the invasive species uh problem it's global problem it's about 5.4 trillion dollars it's currently measured i think it's much larger than that uh because i don't think it's it's hard to truly quantify But as the world gets smaller from a commerce perspective, invasive species are just more prevalent, right? And that's everything from what we're seeing, you know, in Australia with the cane toad, cats, even carps in Australia, like invasive carp.

24:05And that sounds weird. I don't know who put them there, but they shouldn't be there. And then people talk about mosquitoes. But what we're seeing right now in the U.S. and a big problem coming to the U.S., Texas has just declared it as a national emergency, is the screw worm. It's coming up through Honduras and Mexico. It's now in southern Texas. It's going to decimate our cattle and bison industry. And so how do you combat that, right? And so the best way to combat that was you kind of have a couple choices. You can create vaccines and try to do different things to the animals themselves, but then that goes directly into USDA, and you've got to work through that.

24:44And there's some anti-GMO movement still that persists from an education perspective. But then separately, an idea that you could create genetically modified screwworms and release them so that as the next generation are produced, they're all male. And so you, over time, know how much they love each other. They're not going to make more. They don't have the same technologies that humanity has and disposable thumbs. So they're going to go. They die out. They're going to die out, right? And so there's people. This is terrible. This is true. In New Zealand, in Australia, in parts of Africa, people are killing animals because they're invasive species.

25:26They're killing cats. They're killing possums. They're killing these because they're decimating their local population of small marsupials in Australia or like birds in New Zealand. And, you know, that's an animal welfare nightmare. That's a social nightmare. Like who wants to be, you know, because people care more about cats than screw worms. Um, and so if you, uh, but if you engineer the right gene drives into them and create the right biocontrol around them, you can have animals and including insects live out their normal lives. And then over time you have a decrease decrease in that population humanely.

26:03And so, you know, people release gene drives in Africa around, uh, mosquitoes and everyone freaked out and then they stopped it because they thought, you know, Oh no, it's bad. Um, but mosquitoes are a part of the food web. I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to stop it because they were part of the food web. But we know invasive species are not a part of the food web because this is a word invasive. And so, yeah, so it's a huge problem. We're working with our government and we're working with international governments on it. But that's the magic of AI combined with synthetic biology. Two years ago, if you said, should you be working on biocontrol and biocontainment and gene drives, I would have said, well, it didn't really work with, I didn't really get into it because I would have thought it didn't really work when it was distributed around mosquitoes.

26:51But now it's a$5 trillion problem, right? And there's not, we have an interesting model to it and some proprietary technologies that makes it safer than what has ever been dispersed in the wild. And also we have the ability to roll it back, which is helpful. How big is that marketplace? How big is the spend on going after invasive species? U.S. is over$500 billion a year in the economic impact, just domestically. But I don't know off the top of my head what the spend against it is because the way that it's mostly combated is with everything from poisons, like literally poisons. They literally poison the environment as a way to get rid of the invasives.