Why This Billionaire Is Bringing Back the Dire Wolf, Woolly Mammoth & More w/ Ben Lamm & Salim Ismail | EP #165

27:36I got an interview over the weekend, like were you frustrated by that comment? I was like, no, this is an educational opportunity, right? No, it's like, this is cool. You think that you move the DNA from here over here. That's not how it works. We just read it. You said this before, Peter. It's just a different coding language. And so we read the code. code, and then we rewrite the code, and we either change this code or we synthesize a block of code and stick it in. We don't move it with tiny tweezers. How much of this is done by using CRISPR? You know, CRISPR has become the catch off for genome engineering, right?

28:12It's a combination. So one of the things that we've done really well is there's knockouts, there's knockins being knocked 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 trivialize that, which I think is insane. I'll give you an example. This is a conservation example. That's amazing. And this goes directly to your question. So in one of our tools of just being able to change the individual letters, not doing a full knockout but changing this from like a C to a G, we have a project where in Australia, they've actually introduced cane toads from South America.

28:50What's killing all of the marsupial specifically the northern coal? They're critically in danger now because they're eating this canto that they did not evolve next to and the neural toxin kills. Well, guess what we found out when we studied snakes, obviously not mammals, and other small mammals that eat cantoes in South America, that they have a similar change at one nucleotide. So think of that three, you know, 3 .5 billion base pairs. One letter, one change, confers a 5 ,000 time resistance to kentotoxin. So we've now made Dunart, which are the closely related, before we wanted to work in the industry, we want to work on a little model species.

29:30We've made Dunart, which are another carnivorous marsupial, that are now 5 ,000 times more resistance to kentotoxins with one letter change. And so when people say, but that, you know, making one letter of change isn't that I can deal. I was like, one letter change could change the entire animal. You could literally like George, but our statement says you could make an entire new species with one letter of faith. That's extraordinary. Wow. And so I mean, the answer, and then we also do DNA synthesis. So if there's a lot of changes all at the same time, sometimes we'll synthesize that block and just put that whole block in because it creates a lower probability of off -target effects because you'll potentially only have off -targets at the ends versus making 20 changes in a gene.

30:14So, and where we're what colossal is probably, I would argue where the best at is multiplexing, meaning that we take all those technologies, put it on one big array and kind of one big guide, and deliver it, and we're pretty good at that. How much easier is the next species to de -extinct? Because when I look at what you're doing, if I use the computing architectures and 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.

30:58You reinventing the whole stack completely. And 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, on the in -biology side, around like, how do you have a, and we're not there yet, just to be clear, we've not done this, I don't want to claim who we've done this. We are working on some pretty interesting ideas around a universal donor egg where you can have matched mitochondria. You can't go too insanely different.

31:35I can't use a cow egg, so different size to grow an elephant, even if the size work the same because you have the potential, let's say, for a 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 eating species. It's pretty interesting. And then you don't have to do the process of stem cell gave me no genesis. So sometimes people are like, you guys haven't thought about embryology as if that's all we think about. And so to your question, I think the editing, the comp bio scaling quite well, software, and compute.

32:14The models that we're retraining on what works gives us a better idea of what tools to use for what job. So that's scaling really well. The multiplex ability in off -target in the model clonal screenings within screening all the cells, we do a lot of sequencing. We even do all the reason why we know that our animals are healthy before we put them in is we screen the embryos. We do full genome type sequencing. You have to. We're just insane. Like it's a lot of money in time that we do all of that. So the sequencing scaling, we're getting better at the library preparation DNA. You know, I think that the big thing is I think that we will get to the point that we will be able to synthesize Eventually full chromosomes and I think we'll get to the side give to the point that we I think is a ways away But I think we'll be there and then I think we'll be like we've already delivered in publishant literature 35 KB or 30 KB.

33:07I think is the biggest car large car swap. We've already done a hundred KB is a kilo base a thousand Okay, sorry, kill base. So it's a thousand letters. So we're gonna bend, well, you're going, sorry. So I think that that's all scaling. The two areas that I think will scale over time is this goes back to your stack analogy, is like the BIOS is similar, right? But we have to create different, like, we have to create like the editing and all the tools that you develop for the application layer, I think, get better and better and better. The two things that we are seeing a lot of time on is that universal egg embryology side to make that easier so it doesn't have to be a custom chip architecture for everything else species.

33:55The second thing is, and kind of on the biocide, I think it's interesting to think about, or what we've been trying to think about, is how do we make it where, What are the universal truths across certain genes or gene families or pathways, right? So like dogs scale really well. So if you have a Chihuahua and you have a great day or you got a diorope, right? Dogs and wolves are dogs. 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 like a couple of clades of animals at scale like that.

34:38And so how does that work? And you know, how do we, how does that work? Like with Al Corlan, some of these gene families. And how is that then replicable across mammals? And then separately, one of those functional equivalents in birds. So those are the things that we're trying to, that don't scale as well as the media. So all these cells kind of like a little bit different media. Which media is a growth, the growth medium, in which these cells are getting nutrients and grow up. Yeah. So, so, so, been 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 a spin out companies.

35:18And, and you've been doing that, you spun out form bio, which is, which is fantastic. And one of the spin outs I can't wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial I mean, you just had a baby. Yeah. You didn't use an artificial womb. You used your wife, which was great. We have surrogates we can go to, but this idea of an artificial womb, we've seen in science fiction for a while. How far off are we from full gestation artificial wounds? It's a great question. So we have a 17 person team on it. Our goal with artificial wounds, because colossal to your point, doesn't work on anything human.

35:59And anytime that we have a technology that has an application to human, we patented, we patented a lot of technologies. We actually patented some stuff recently around P53 and cancer and whatnot. And so, you know, by the way, P53, one of the reasons that Wales live so long is they've got extra copies of this P53 gene. Yep. And so to elephants and elephants, you know, we, we, I mean, I guess we all read the same and things like whales, but it's easier to study elephants in this way, right? Because they still go underwater. The, and so I think there's a lot of cool tech that can come from that. But on the artificial womb side, we spin everything out.

36:42So we will never make an artificial womb for humans, but I think that someone will potentially use our technology to do that. I will say it's harder to grow an elephant, not ethically regulatory or philosophically or religion. It is harder biologically to grow some of this species we'll work on than a human. I think that if we continue on the current courses bead by the end of 2026, we will have the world's first mammal birth fully exudered where we went from. It would be an elephant, it would 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 where you can grow, everyone knows about the Northern White Rhino, which were the genetic rescue partner on.

37:29But imagine a world where you could grow 200 genetically diverse Northern White Rhino's in a lab. And then, you know, without ever having to interfere with another animal or a rhino, and then that goes into those baby rhinos, then get those work with rewilding partners with them back into the field. So I think artificial wounds, if you can do multiple different placental types, will change conservation. And I think we could productionize endangered species development. And I think we could save every species on the planet. Well, let's pause on that moment. Save every species on the planet. That's pretty extraordinary.

38:13When you said 2026, that's like next year. No, I don't. It's right there. Yeah, yeah, so okay. I'm gonna 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 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, et cetera. If you get to that point, the human being of 50 trillion cells or whatever is essentially a software engineering problem How close we to that to that point where you can edit it is easily as you can edit overdoctor?

38:58It is a focus in funding problem. It's not a lack of knowledge problem And so like you know everyone's shooting 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

39:20Yeah, yeah, AI access to compute in the eventually quantum. Those combined with synthetic biology, you know, George has visions of that are crazy about synthetic about. We've talked about like, so to find synthetic biology and let's talk about crazy. Yeah, let's go crazy. Okay. So so it's 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 making drought -resistant plants, making drought -resistant animals. There's a terrible process that animals go through for dehorning them because the cows are now...

40:07Everyone loves to think about cows in these beautiful fields, like basically 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 they'll hurt. So they physically dehorn them. You can actually now, we could engineer them to just be horned in scouts, right? So then, you know, I'm not encouraging, 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 synthetic that biology just supercharges this micro that literally breaks the chemical bonds and plastics.

40:44It doesn't make microplastic, doesn't eat plastic, it breaks, so I call it breaking. It breaks the chemical bonds and plastics, right? It just makes biomass as an outplay. And so, I think that we will eventually get to the CAD software of biology. So, at the same time, I think that we will be able to cure most disease states. I think that we will be able to do epigenetic cell resetting. 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 to have us to. I think that we will George and I talk about living one with nature and we have this vision because George and I both believe that we're in hundreds of years and so we think that 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, why don't we make trees that, like, this is literally George's eyes like crazy, like, like, you know, people are going to think, oh, these guys do like mushrooms.

41:52But we have this idea of like, what if we could engineer trees to grow faster and grow in the shape of a house? And like what if you could use trees as water filtration and what if you could have biolumistic fungi in there right and like what if you could literally build it? Engineer and tell a tree to to grow in the form of a house right and and I and I don't and that sounds Psychotic but I and I don't think that's in the next five years, but I don't I think that's in the next hundred Like I don't think it's that I think it's closer than people think I mean, we are, we as humans and all animals are effectively molecular robots, right?

42:35Yeah. 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 in singularity for synthetic biology. I said, I'm going to engineer something that looks like a cat except it walks around on your carpet in each lint and a piece, stain remover. And that's its purpose. And it just goes around and cleans the house. And 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 pilot the spaceships. And instead of robotic systems, you want systems that are self -healing.

43:23Yeah. 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. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really 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 found upload. You know, found is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that AI system is able to look at, to catch disease at inception.

44:12You know, look for any cardiovascular and cancer, neurodegenerative disease and 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 it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a virus. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company in a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics.

44:56It was actually developed in New Mexico at the same 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 super foods that are best feed -a -eat? Or what food 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 biome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me?

45:39And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror, saying, I feel great about life is so important. 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 peptide that's able to zap senile 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. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode.

46:24What are some of the crazy conversations you have with George when you're dreaming up without any limits? Let's hear some of that. Well, I think the tree house one is pretty crazy. And we're pretty good, sir. Yeah, another one that we've talked about that I think could be pretty interesting is how do we engineer in, you've seen these, you've probably heard about phages, right? And these microbes that you can get in the dirt, every time they think it's scuba dirt, they find new bacteria and something that doesn't exist. So, phages are viruses that infect bacteria versus viruses that infect humans.

47:08And the numbers are, I think there's like a billion quadrillion phages on the planet. They're 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, I think it dirt, you, they, they, like literally, you just go outside. Just group out. Everyone can make a discovery. Just go grab. a number of phages on earth. You'll be blown away. It's crazy. But they've been using these lattice architectures to actually, then they've shown that, you know, in a typical scuba tube, and this isn't with synthetic biology, you know, not even taintest the biology.

47:45With a, with a, just a scuba tank, they can like three or four acts, the volume of oxygen that it can hold, using this kind of like structure from some of these phages. And I think it's really interesting. And so I think, so some of the stuff that George and I have also talked about is, how do we build self -healing outside of humans and outside of houses, but how do we build underwater cities that are also self -healing? And so that's probably our biggest and craziest dream is how do we, if you look at the world's, 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.

48:31But you don't have a more of a stable temperature. You don't have this like, you know, negative 500 to 500 degree, 500 or 250 or 250 to the 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 up in space. And so we've talked a lot, one of the more weirder ideas out there was we talked a lot about it. If you just look at the surface of the earth, you know, we could do a lot of cool things and you'd have to, it would force you to build, you know, very sustainably cities underwater.

49:11And so that's a project that we're interested in. That may be a 2090 project, but I think we'll get there. I got to ask you this question and I'm going to force some version of an answer. So a royal or a deck of billionaire comes to you and says, Ben, I know you say it's impossible, but I want to create a dinosaur. How do you do it? I'm not saying you are doing it. I'm not saying you plan to do it, but sort of theoretically. Yeah, so there is no dyno DNA, right? And so just to kind of give a shout out to the haters.

50:01Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs. It's a movie about genetically modified birds with dinosaur and frog alleles or it's a movie about dinosaurs depending on how you want to classify our dwarves. But so there is no dyno DNA. If I were to try to go build a, I don't think today you can, I don't think that you could bring back a dinosaur. I think using synthetic biology in probably not today, but probably 10 years from now, eight years from now, some appeared in time. You could do an ancestral state reconstruction of what we know of the tree. And I think that of the phylogenic 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 an arcasaur, which is probably the very base of the tree.

51:05It's like the basal animal before it kind of starts to get weird and split. And yeah, 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 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 I don't even know if it'd be the less of a dinosaur than a dinosaur existed. And so that's probably where I would start. But I think it's a huge project. I think it's a lot of money. I don't think it's a $100 million dollar project.

51:49I 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 DNA degradation and fossilization. And you have to remember when the dinosaurs perished, it was due to extreme heat. And so, you know, there is dinosaur DNA in the form of birds, right? Birds exist and they're dinosaur -ish. And so, but I do think that I don't think you'll ever get to the point that you will have dinosaur -true dinosaur DNA. There's people like Dr. Kenneth Lackavara, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world who discovered the four biggest dinosaurs, including dreadnotus, which is the biggest dinosaur.

52:36And he called me last week when we're when everyone is debating all this stuff. We're not debating all this if they're only debating the name. And he said he had the same problem, which red nod is. He said that he said that it was the biggest dinosaur and he did it based on kilograms and all this stuff. And 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 didn't Google and I don't know what percent. but it was like 40 or 60. It's very, very complete for a large dinosaur. And he found in Argentina, it's a super cool story. And 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 wanted to come up with a measure with a dinosaur mass unit.

53:26And so he got into this big debate. When it came, one of the biggest dinosaur discoveries ever, and it was a big and a large part of it was because he said it was like 60 times or something like that. And people wanted to debate a metric that everyone could agree on of dinosaur mass, which is just, which is ludicrous. the absurd, right? But Kenneth, one of the things he's done that's pretty cool is he's de -mineralized dinosaur bones where we can get those amino acids and what his long -term goal is it'd be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone and this is his work, not ours. We are not doing this.

54:07I just want to make sure I give him full credit. It'd be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone and be like, you know, you found it in that you know Montana or North Dakota, so you could say it's a T -Rex bone, this is the triceratops. And let's say that you didn't have like the genealogy of the dating of the geological formations around it, you could even analyze a piece of the bone and based on the amino acids, they say, oh, this is a triceratops bone. Which is kind of cool. So those are like, those are like, I mean, those are like, I mean, you can't, you can't clean any data on how to build the animal out of that.

54:45So listen, I remember at the very beginning we're talking about your vision. It started with the woolly mammoth. It sort of went off into thylacine and discussions about the dodo bird, about the dire wolf. And so how 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? So we're working on the bandwidth. We're going to test the entire working on the dodo. You know, given our most recent round of funding, we will most likely expand those into other avian and non -avian species.

55:32You know, we have not quite cracked the code on the primordial germ cells. It's a little bit different in birds and males. goes back to that media question, right? It's like getting the media that PGC's want to grow in for birds is pretty hard. And once we do that, once we show we can do it for pigeon, which has never been done before because dodo's were pigeons, just like dioros were wolves. Once we do that, then I'd probably feel confident in adding another avian 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.

56:11It'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, it's just awesome, right? They're harmless, they're cute, they're vegetarians, they're kind of tubby, they move kind of slow, they're, you know, they do a great stuff for the ecosystem. Nobody, there's not like Facebook hate groups for many. Right? If they are, those people should go straight to jail. And or a solider. Yeah. Or I'm apparently going to do that too now. And so the, there was this thing called the stellar sea cowl and I'm probably going to butcher the years or someone will yell at me online about it.

56:54But it was like, it went extinct like 60 years or 30 years after it was discovered. And it was all upon the Pacific Northwest. And apparently the kelp forest they were even thicker because it would eat and defecated and they are whale size like they're literally like bigger than whales. And they were apparently really docile and they would just like swim up to people and they're curious like I guess like dolphin like bottled in the dolphins are and people would just spear them and kill them. So, curiosity is a bad evolutionary trait for large flow of moving megaponifer. Sure. We've seen the rise of hamplet plough.

57:31We've seen like the rise of early human on on continents and the decline of Megafana be inversely related nearly one to one What's once you means we do a certain scale on a Connit or subcontinent the Megafana drops at a very predictable rate Yeah, we just like After big, you know, we all work together or kill a couple of big things. A lot of times the big things have single bursts, long gestations. You don't have to kill all of them to send them down on a decline. But I would love to do the Stellar Seekow and I will say publicly, I've said a hundred times, you're doing lessons to me. It's 100 % on the list, we just can't grow it in anything.

58:20So I gotta get artificial wounds to work and we gotta get it to work for elephants and then eventually we could do Stellar Seekow. I would love to do Salicygo. Amazing. Talk about it. What is the business model that gets your evaluation where it is? Is it spinning off and break through medical ideas? It's really, it's really, I would say originally, and this is what's been cool. Like one of the things I think we're good at is we're also good at saying what we don't know. And the original pitch deck, which Peter saw, which was moderately shitty was, hey, George Church says he can bring back a mammoth.

59:00We're pretty sure that we make money somewhere in there, but we don't know, right? That was kind of a pretty check. Yeah, and so here's how it's evolved. And here's kind of the three ways that it's evolved. It then became tech, which is working, right? You know, we've spun out two companies publicly or in bio and breaking. We spun out a third of the line that we can't talk about yet, but I'm super excited about. It's it's value issues already over a hundred million dollars in the seed. I think it's super cool I don't think it'll have any philosophical debates on what to call it It's great. It's cool It's like it is what it is And so so I'm super stoked about that one.

59:38We have another one in Embryology that we're really excited about that we're working on That that you know, we got a little further on but I think it could be helpful to IDF clinics So there's technology which is get what you get But there is a long term, and this is a not really a science thing. This is more of working with governments and working with 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.

1:00:18But certain things like biodiversity credits aren't, right? Like, you can understand and quantify the value that a forest elephant brings to Gabon. Like, that's now a thing. It's like research by people like PWC, it's certified by Lloyds of London. And so, there now is becoming a biodiversity economy where, in part of that, it's 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 saying that lions were $100 ,000, so don't poach them. I feel a saw, I'm not a hunter, I've never killed anything, intentionally, probably a goldfish, but that was intentional.

1:01:04But it's like, I wouldn't, like I, I, as not a hunter, I at least can step back and understand what they're trying to stay there on some level, even though I think that's partly manipulated so that they can achieve what they want to achieve. What I'll tell you though is that I do think that if you do put 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 becomes some sort of a commodity play. And what we're seeing is with this Paris agreement that 62 % of the pledges it's pledged nature -based solutions, rewilding the store, ecosystems for storing bugs, all these types of things, right, in wetlands.

1:01:52And so, in animals, we're critical to all of that. And so, where we think that market's going is a combination of biodiversity credits, nature and carbon credits into what will probably end up being called nature credits, that's highly quantifiable. And 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 extraction economy. And we still live on some level, we still live in the world where there's not unlimited, you know, or there's unlimited solar, there's not unlimited, you know, cold fusion and stuff like that yet.

1:02:32Right? And so, like, until that happens, we still have some, well, 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 rewilding that turns the animals into annuities. And so if we can show that we can 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 Coutinho or Exxon, or whoever would buy those credits because they have to be from a compliance perspective or kind of an ESG and they're kind of social good perspective.

1:03:11They are also annuities that multiply because they have more baits. They cause more of our... So the second thing that we are now pretty deep in, right? And so the science has to work to do that, which is pretty good to be on the right track. And then the third thing that's interesting is while we open sort... We didn't know this. I talked I talked to Peter about this offline like six months ago, but we open source all of our technologies for conservation So anybody can use their technologies for conservation We also started a foundation with $50 million to go fund conservation projects, right?

1:03:44They're innovative By the way, congratulations on that and I just people need to keep it that's huge Yeah, nobody's not like it's like, but it's not a dire wolf Yeah, what embargo And so those are my life. But the foundation is great. And we're working right out to get another big donation that once again aren't coming from conservation. They're coming from tech people that we're trying to bring tech into conservation. So this is new money into conservation. But what we're finding is, you know, even I think you'll love this, because it goes directly to open source software. You know, if you build open source software, you build a community.

1:04:26people 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? So while we open source all this for governments and NGOs, and everyone else, we are now having government saying in our hands, we think we can get this done. But in your hands, we'll pay you, and there's one government that's trying to get a recovery of a species. It's going to cost them about $300 million to get to that species, and it's going to take 23 years.

1:05:09We can do it in less than three, and we can do it for like $70 million. And so it's not just the 3300 million. It's like, and 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. So, we're starting to see these government opportunities like biovolts and other things where it's like, you know, this is work, right? So, it's not free. It'd be easy if it was all just free. But, you know, we're now saying, how do we build the consortium of partners around the world where we can also bio bank all species, but not just put them in a freezer.

1:05:47You're like, how do we build pluripotent 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. So I think that we can offer this like, you know, 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 been. When am I going to go to L .A. Zoo and see a colossal dire wolf or a, you know, some, you know, a woolly mammoth. I mean, that has to be a important future business line where it's, it's, it's, it's scientific education, right?

1:06:28I mean, you'd have lines winding around any of these facilities. It's a really great question, and we get it a lot. And in the early days, we had a lot of folks from that community want to, like, where do we have to do to sign up first, both nationally and internationally. But as we've spent a lot of time thinking about it, I think it's more likely that you will see them in an ecological preserve being back in their natural habitat than you're to see them in Los Angeles. So you do have to travel, unfortunately. You have to travel to their locations. But I also think that that one of the things that we've started to have conversations with governments is the brand building that that can do for the country.

1:07:16So we're talking in northern states of the United States. And we don't want to be exclusive. So our exclusionary 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 get a Zoos is a kid. There's like actual peer reviewed science that should have that like not all zoos are tire king There's great zoos like the San Diego Zoo they do great stuff, you know groups like the AZA and others are trying to do more It for conservation.

1:07:51So you got that right you got that and the and we're seeing that that works What I would tell you though is our focus is on rewilding back into the ecosystem. And so the two things that we've talked about and I don't know where we'll end up on it is, we've said to Tasmania, once we have enough dialocines and once they're back in genetically diverse, to be reintroduced, we've gone through a very thoughtful feasibility study of rewilding them. they're benefiting the ecosystem, you should offer ecotourism to see them back there, right? 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 swath cam and there's like a bald ebkel cam and there's all these cams.

1:08:39But 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, the, you know, how do we bring that experience to you without making 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, including the Australian government, about how do we do content, right, which I know is at the same Peter's, like seeing a mammoth in real life. But you know, I, and so we don't have any answer. I think the short answer is we'll put animals back into the wild with collaborations with indigenous people groups in private land and rivers and governments for the purpose of ecosystem restoration and then how do we put the science on display?

1:09:26Because the animals are awesome. But how do we bring the science on display, right? Because that is something that Jurassic Park nailed regardless of how you feel about Jurassic Park, the movie, a lot of people know about genetics because it's Jurassic Park. And that, 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're filming the docu series. We'd like to build more educational content. What I hear Ben is you've got an incredible respect for the life that you're bringing back.

1:10:04And it's not your goal to commercialize it in a craft fashion. Right. And so I would rather us put animals back on a psychological reserves, protect them. We don't even, I mean, you know, but very few don't know where the actual bulls are. But like, we'd rather get them back in the wild, doing their thing in the wild. Maybe there's eco -tours in like Kruger National Park, where money goes back to help the environment, help the indigenous people, have 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.

1:10:43So how do we, so we're trying to film everything, how do we put science on display? not animals on display. But we don't have an answer yet. I have a fun question. You and I have a common friend who's another extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur by the name of Palmer Lucky. Yeah, Palmer's great. Yeah, Palmer's amazing. I'll be doing a follow -up podcast with him in a couple weeks. And when I get together with him, my brain storm, okay, what would be a great ex -price, you know, what should we be doing? Because he's one of the teams competing in our wildfire prize. In fact, he was the very first person to register to compete in the ex -price wildfire, and he's got a crazy solution, which I love.

1:11:28But we brainstormed. So one of the prize ideas that we kicked around over dinner was the idea of an uplift prize. Can we uplift a species? can we take a dog and make it far more intelligent or shall we say plenty of the apes? Introduce the genes that increase intelligence to these animals. Is that something that's putting aside the moral ethical? It's a very Palmer lucky... Yes, it's about as Palmer lucky as it gets, right? And sometimes Palmer gets a mixed rap, but he is so brilliant. And he's so passionate about the safety of America. And 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.

1:12:36And so, I, you want him on your side. Yeah, you want him on yours at wheel. So lucky for have Paul. I'm a huge, I mean, obviously he's a friend, full disclosure, and I think very highly of him. But sometimes he gets his polarizing thing because it's like, you know, it's cute to, you know, go to the grocery store and drive your car or a Tesla or whatever and think that that all is free. and it's just not. And you gotta have our incredible armed forces and people supplying them like to Palmer to make our way of life possible so that we can do this and we can do, it's wonderful that we can debate whether we can call it a dire will for not versus someone killing us for that, right?

1:13:18And that's fucking amazing. And so anyway, back to your question. I think that there are genes associated with, that could be associated with intelligence. There's been, so he's been done in mice. I think that you can do non -invasive sequencing of really smart animals. Colossal is never gonna work. Outside of humans, we also drew the line at non -human primates because we got, we get the knee -end or a tall question all the time. And so we just said, great, sorry. And then people will get sad. They're like, well, what about trying to pit a cappist? and I'm like, there's not really any DNA anyway, so no, we're not making giant apes.

1:14:01That's not what we are trying to do at this company. King Kong is coming back. Yeah, King Kong, not here though. And so I would say that for us, I do think that if you could make smarter animals like dogs or cats or something that you had that type of relationship with, I think that's interesting. But you also have to be careful, right? Because I think it's a very important ethical thing to really think through because it's a slippery slope because what happens when you make smarter livestock, right? It'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, yeah, so that's what we've I know it sounds like a cop out But that's why we've drawn some of these lines saying hey, we're just gonna do this.

1:15:02We're not gonna do that Because we even though I'm not feel softly against some of those things You know, we will never work in some of those categories. How do you deal with the invasive species? Problem like for example the Scottish when in New Zealand and took the gorse bush with them figuring that would make good fencing and that took over the island and totally messed up the ecosystem. So an area that I love is gene drives. Like nobody, and you know it's crazy, like certain people like the US hasn't been as pro gene drives is I think they should be, but but island nations like New Zealand and Australia are like, okay, we're in trouble within basis species.

1:15:44We have to have new things. And I love gene drives because cats, for example, define the gene drive for a person. So gene drives are technologies that you can develop where you can introduce them to a population where it will silence or change certain genes within that organism. And you can deliver it by food or other things. And so right now, Australia is like the face of mammalian extinction. And it's because of cats. They've interviewed like everyone's cats cats loved them baby cat kittens and People let their feral cats get out to get feral and then they're killing and decimating these small marsupials Well, there's people now that kill cats in Australia, right?

1:16:27And in America Like you'd go to like I got nose would happen to shut cat America, but it's like you know to Australia If it's not their personal house cat they hate them They despise cats because it's killing their most unique animals in the world. And so a way 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 offspring cannot give rise to more offspring. it's effectively sterile. So then after a few generations, there just are no more cats, but they get to live out their natural lives.

1:17:12They just don't get to overprocreate, right? There's got a lot of attention back about five, six years ago when gene drives were being put forward to basically decimate mosquito populations. And everyone, and I think the biggest concern is, You know, everyone's seen one too many movies, right? And so like you got Resident Evil and then people are like, oh, you make a Gene drive and then it turns it's all in the zombies, right? It just doesn't work like that. And so when I do, I do think that or like one of the mission impossible, I think they had targeted like a bio weapon around that stuff. And so you have to be thoughtful about this.

1:17:51But I do think that you can silence certain, I think you can silence certain procreation in animals using gene drives, especially where it's invasive. And I mean, we're doing kind of the opposite of a gene drive with these marcoophiles, right? If we make super -coals, then we don't have to engineer all of the other marcoophiles to eat coals, because the coals are to eat the cane toads. The coals love eating the cane toads. So then they eat the cane toads. 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.

1:18:27So then they don't die because there's no less cane toads. So, you know, people think this is playing God, people think this is geoengineering, but I mean, we introduce the cane toads. And we're doing geoengineering by default anyway. So every day, every day. And so we should start being thoughtful on this. I love the argument 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, I use the analogy. We get slow and shitty and unfathomable. I use the analogy of film photography to digital photography.

1:19:06We've been doing breeding for thousands of years and nobody says anything. Now we've got the digital photography. We can do that scale. And everybody's like, oh my God, we should be, where we can do it. Look at a pug. Yeah, look at any of this. We should breed a bunch of stuff together that ends with a pug. Oh my god. Ben, quantum sciences, quantum computation, quantum tech. How much do you think about that as the next layer? Yeah, what does that fit in? I mean, I think it will be a game changer for specifically simulation design for editing and if you feed enough data and do the model on top of on top of quantum you could get you could get I think pretty good at predicting not just you know type -to -familitary relationship you get pretty good at understanding you know what negative effects would be from editing and so and in predictions of editing like hey here's the 50 spots you should go at it you know, we always say that better we are at competent and this annoys people, but it's true.

1:20:15Every edit has a risk. Every edit has a risk. It just has a risk. And we don't, we, to the 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, I think what's interesting about quantum is if you could simulate these things and simulate those edits. is we always say the less edits we can make that get the desired outcomes and the lost phenotypes, that's the safest for the animal, that's the same.

1:20:51So, if it takes 1 ,000, that's make 1 ,000 edits. But if you can do it in three, you're in three, right? It's, we have a very programming, like this won't come to surprise you. 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 ago. So I think Wantum will be a game changer. I just, I don't, like I meet with like, I see Will every year from MIT, he's great and it's just like, but it's like, I never know, like Quantum Sensing is here, but in Quantum Sensors are here, but it's like, and like Quantum Coms is kinda here -ish, But it's like I don't know when we're really gonna get there I thought Microsoft's breakthrough earlier or last late last year on some of their chip architectures really interesting But you know when is it gonna be truly here still to me as a question mark?

1:21:51It's two years every two years You employ ethicists in the company don't you yeah? What are they what are they debating right now? Well, I mean, every single species we bring on, we go through a pretty rigorous process and include obviously them in that. Right now, we're talking to them about, one of the biggest things we're talking to them about is the current conservation. We're opening sources of these technologies for conservation. We're making red walls, working on these projects, but then you get the, it's kind of our ethicists right now are focused mostly on, how do we recognize, I think that conservation is a bipartisan issue.

1:22:43And in, by the way, we hear that from the government, not just, we don't just put that, like both sides of the aisle, go look at who retweeted us, right? It's like you got Biden's number one advisor and you've got Elon, like you kind of have both sides of the aisle, right? And it's ours, the political spectrum. And we think that these are really important technologies in the conversation. And we're right now the bioethicists are helping us think through how do we educate the existing people on, and how do we bridge, 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.

1:23:28And so they're going kind of a step beyond even the bioethic 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 hugely 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 don't feel a soft way to agree with that and so So I think that we worked great with the last administration. We're working great with this administration. There's pros and cons to every administration. And so I think we just have to, but did, I watch Bill Mar of a week to probably show you where I lean on a lot of these things.

1:24:11And Bill Mar's show last week was really talent, right? And if you haven't watched, I highly recommend you to watch. I think having a diet, I refusal to have a dialogue, log. 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 we're fusing to have a dialogue that is as ignorant as things that you may accuse another administration of them doing. You know, I think there's a testament here to your ethics and your MTP where you're able to work with either side of that aisle because of the and the objectives, the open sourcing.

1:24:53I love the fact that you're open sourcing everything. It's such a huge thing for the world. It's really great to have somebody like you be at the forefront of something like this because it could go so badly, so many other ways. And you're navigating a very fine line of breaking through signs, but doing it in a very, very thoughtful, ethical Even a spiritual kind of always, so I just want to hats off to you and all that. No, it's really kind of you. I got feedback, pretty negative feedback from someone I respect in the community and the conservation community because they said that I was empowering this administration and I was like, there's a difference between empowering and educating.

1:25:32And if you don't educate people and you don't show up, I think it's always better. We showed up for the last administration and 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 the this, we are looking at conservation in the extinction. We're looking at this on a 50 -year horizon. And that goes beyond a four -year party or an eight -year party. It goes way beyond that. And this to me is as big of an existential threat as anything else. My 13 -year -old heard I was doing this, so he did a quick burp run in his class, and his class collectively asked the following question, what's the next species that we can look for too.

1:26:11I don't know what your kids down. We are on target for the mammoth by end of 2028. We feel good about that. But the editing is moving really fast. You know, we have done 300 edits in a Dunard cell. And so if the Dunard, this is a bad non -answer, but if there's a 13 and a half day gestation on the thylsine, if the, if editing progresses at the same an exponential rate that it is. I think the thylacene could be the mammoth. And if we saw PGC's in dodo's because of the easy, not easy, but the easy, or it's a pretty self -contained system being a meg, they, and you don't have to solve IVF or some acts of nuclear transfer in a non -model species, then the dodo could be.

1:26:55So I mean, right now it's kind of a three -horse race and it's unclear who's gonna win. Not that it's a competition we love all those pieces equally. just station periods play into this right so what is the just station period of an elephant 22 months 22 months wow for any pregnant women out there can you imagine 22 months caring crazy and the thylacene is how many how long 13 and a half days yeah talk about two ends of the extreme and the chicken chicken which is what we use as a cereal we use these genetically modified chickens for the share rates for this starting day for the data. Ben, you know, so let me have a closing question, but I just want to say thank you for all the work that you're doing.

1:27:39I've never, 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 listening to understand that, right? It's, you can have the idea, you can have access to technology, but if you've got a compelling CEO who builds a moonshot team is driven by a clear measurable vision and passion, you've attracted hundreds of millions of dollars at a $10 billion valuation, which is,

1:28:24I don't over again. So thank you. And in four years, and four years, I remember the, I have to say one thing, I remember the early, in the earliest days, because when you, when you started colossal, the idea of a de extinction company, the William Amaths 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 like hitting the acceleration button when you did that. Well, that is one of the things that we often get. There's an article that came out a couple of weeks ago that says you can't trust a poor profit.

1:29:04It's like, well, we are very honest that we are going to make a lot of money off the rewilding. Like I said that here, it's like, well, you think that we'll make billions of dollars on the animals being back in the natural habitat. We also think that we will make 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 is 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 merging in my head Which is you're not just incubating and bringing back all species you're actually An incubator and a womb yourself for breakthrough technologies that change everything let change humanity and change everything which I think is awesome.

1:29:51It's very meta. Yeah. And 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, I get to say I'm jealous about somebody's job but I think you might have it. It is a, it is a 365, seven day week but I like, I don't have, I always joke that I don't have friends or hobbies. So, I mean, I do have friends, but I work with all of them in some level, right? On some level. So I just it's fun. I love what we do Amazing Ben Lamb CEO of colossal biosciences. Thank you buddy for your work Please get my best of George. I'll be chatting with them shortly as well Selene as always love having you in this conversation with me and for everybody So where do folks go to learn more about colossal?

1:30:37So we're just at colossal on X and the network You can get a 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 dire would, dire will, pups that have been extinct on the off the place, face the earth for 12 ,000 years are back again. And that's, that is incredible. They're also cute. They're also cute. Congrats on the baby, which is a real startup? Yeah, it is a real startup. I'm learning that in the hard way too. Yeah, it's a self -learning startup.

1:31:20I have my own large language model continually growing. It's interesting. You have to be looking at the birth and your son very differently given the business that you're in. Yeah, my son has no idea obviously what I do and I think he'll really like it or not. I think it'll be 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 we don't take the wrong way. He's pretty curious like at an early age he's really weirdly curious and so I think he'll dig it. We'll see what kind of Pepsi grows up with isn't it in his teenage years?

1:32:03Alright, take care guys. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to be releasing all of the talks, all the key notes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponentialmastory .com. You can get on to band access there. Go to exponentialmastory .com.