Ben Lamm CEO of $12B Colossal Biosciences & $3.8B Astromech

23:07Ben Lamm:Yeah, we have the pigeon colony and a bunch of strange things. We have a chief animal officer. We have like fresh pigeons that come from our, we have an avian facility. So these are things I never thought, because I come from mostly like traditional SaaS and software. And so I never thought I'd have any of these roles. You know, we have an incredible team that takes care of things like fully mice, right? And these are things that we have. But there is so much. And I think that's the value that we've built is we try to look at this from a vertical integration, first principles perspective of looking at, we had to own the entire stack, right?

23:43Ben Lamm:So that's why like when we were looking at expanding our endangered species production, our biobanking and BioVault initiative and kind of our global network that we've been rolling out, buying Viagen made a lot of sense, right? When you look at like animal cloning, most people it's dogs, cats, and horses. But there were like two. There was Viagen in the U.S. and then there was a company in South Korea. And so there was like really two. Well, Viagen had cloning efficiencies at 80%, where most people are at 2%. And so it made sense for us to say, okay, we need to buy them and bolt them on from a vertical integration perspective.

24:20Ben Lamm:So much of the supply chain, we've either built, innovated, licensed, or bought. But you got a taste of it. Today, we put the entire thing under one roof. And I think that cross-disciplinary function of allowing people to work, you know, from everything from animal ops to ancient DNA extraction in everything in the middle makes the products go faster and better. So we have to let our furry friends go. I know. They only get so much time. They only get so much time. The rest you have to pay for it. I'm just kidding. But we'll say goodbye to the little woolly mice and then we'll just continue after that.

24:57Ben Lamm:Great. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on, and I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack. with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work.

25:43It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure frontier labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. So to set the stage, you started this on the premise of extinction.

26:29So what are the stats? I know this is dark. No, it's super dark.

26:32Ben Lamm:It's like it's like but but like it's dark, but I think it's hopeful, right? Like I'm an eternal optimist. It's currently forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50 percent of all biodiversity in the next 25 years. So that's dark. Yes. But it's like that's why we have to do stuff. Right. And so for us, if we can get everyone, like sometimes people get confused that like we think that de-extinction is a replacement for modern conservation. We do not think that. But the reality is, is like no matter how good conservation works, it just doesn't move at the speed of which we're eradicating species and changing the planet.

27:11Ben Lamm:Like we're doing that. Like that is happening. So for us, if you have a combination of a de-extinction toolkit, as lots of other ramifications, which we've talked about some, and you get governments to invest in a global distributed biovault network. So they're at least backing up things. At least we're starting to build a backup plan. And then lastly, we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So anybody can use any of our technologies for free for conservation. There's a bad actors. Well, there's always going to be bad actors, right? And so you can't prevent that, right? That's like when, I don't even remember a decade ago when people were like, you can't, San Francisco temporarily put this moratorium of investing in facial recognition because China was doing some bad stuff, isolating populations using facial recognition.

28:01Ben Lamm:That doesn't mean facial recognition is bad. That just means people are going to use it in bad ways, right? But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't innovate the technologies for positive use cases, right? And so that's the way I feel about these technologies. These technologies are very, very powerful. And people are going to do all kinds of bad things probably with them. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't engineer them and make them so that people can do good with them. I'm an eternal optimist, so I believe that we will ultimately do more, we as a species will do more good with them than that.

28:34Ben Lamm:And so open source them to the conservation community for conservation purposes. So if people use our technologies for nefarious reasons and not for conservation, then yeah, we would probably step in and enforce that. Straight to jail. I don't know if we have that power, but we would give them a lot of legal feedback. No, that's really interesting. So we were just talking when the woolly mice were here before you, and I forget her name. What's her name? Oh, Katie. Katie. So I was talking with Katie, and she was telling me how she got to here. I was like, how long have you been here for? She said she's been here for three years.

29:08She was at a zoo first, then she was at a clinic, and then she came over here and she was like, well, the conservation, preservation side of things is completely broken. There's literally no movement. Nothing's going on there.

29:19Ben Lamm:It's boring. Sometimes it's hard to, and we've had, like, at the beginning we had a lot of negative feedback on this. It's gotten to be, it was neutral. Now it's becoming, trending more and more positive. But the conservation community is actually some of the biggest at times that has been historically some of the most vocal critics of the work, because I think they view it early on is that we thought we positioned ourselves as a replacement for modern conservation, which we never did. We're like, no, no, no, you should do conservation work. Like, don't give us money. And we always view this as net new ideas, net new money, and net new technology, and net new awareness, right?

30:04Ben Lamm:Like, most people don't know that 20 % of baby elephants die because of EEHV. So people, like, should know that. And so if you go talk to any of our elephant conservation partners, they'll tell you that their funding has gone up since Colossal was invented. Damn. So, I mean, so I view it as a net positive. But in the early, to her point, in the early days, it did take some long conversations with that community because that community is very stuck in its own ways. But if you spend time with that community and you ask them, are we as a whole, as humanity as a whole, with current modern conservation techniques, are we winning the fight to save species?

30:46Ben Lamm:And they will all tell you no. So it's okay. So we've got to do something different. And so we argue that like 99 % of people should keep doing what they are doing with conservation and we're that 1 % difference. But wouldn't you rather have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it? Remember like Star Trek when like the aliens came and they're like, we don't have blue whales. And if we don't listen to, if we don't have the sound of a blue whale, like we're going to like destroy the planet. Do you remember this? Totally. Old school Star Trek movie.

31:18Ben Lamm:And it's like they had to go back in time and like like capture a blue whale and bring it to the future. So like the aliens didn't destroy us. Well, that's like, you know, we don't have that exact issue currently. At least I don't think there's a lot of UFP noise right now. So maybe they're looking for something. But but ultimately, I would rather have this technology set and not need it or at least use it in these interesting capacities that help individual species and help inspire the next generation. and get people excited about science. And I'd rather do that and never need it for a mass scale extinction event than have a mass scale extinction event, which we know we're in right now.

31:59Ben Lamm:We know that's happening. And then not have these tools. But I think I'm more pragmatic about this. I guess to put this into practice, one of the really cool things that I saw when we were walking through the lobby was with the dire wolf. If you see this, like this, you guys have this like little like model of like how land is evolved over time and the benefits of the dire wolf on the land and how biology changes and all this kind of stuff. So like in practice, are you going to be releasing any of these animals? Yeah. So in a couple of phases. So obviously you have to work very closely with governments, indigenous people groups, private landowners.

32:40Ben Lamm:For our extinct species, we do want to put them back into the wild with all these collaborations in place, right, where they help the ecosystem, the government supportive, indigenous people groups are supportive. We want to do that for our in for our gene drives and whatnot. That's also highly up to the government. Right. Like right now we are educating USDA, the intelligence community, the Department of War and others on these technologies and how they can combat these issues domestically and abroad. So but it is up to them. Right. Like they have to give us the green light. Like there are some there are some I did an interview about the screw worm that went viral.

33:20Ben Lamm:and there were like 20 articles about it. And then there was feedback on like Blue Sky of all places. Surprise, there was negative feedback on Blue Sky, right? The echo chamber, you know, or liberal Twitter, right? And so there was feedback on Blue Sky that's like, well, Colossal doesn't have permits. Yes, we do not have permits, but this is a technology that if it is permitted, can eradicate this problem. And so like in the screw worm example, it's like they're spending a billion five in taxes and in eight years, they're going to like slow or stop the problem. Our solution, which is already made, could eradicate the entire problem in every model that we've done in six to seven months.

34:02Ben Lamm:So we could save a decade in billions of dollars for taxpayers. And, you know, and also the animals that are going to go through this painful death from the screwworm, right? So like if you're a beef person, your price of beef is going to stay low. If you're an animal welfare problem person, well, then you're these animals are not going to be in pain from this terrible infectious disease that comes from the burrowing screwworm larva. Right. And if you know and if you're just a if you're somewhat fiscally minded, you're going to save the taxpayers money. Right. And so these are those these are those technologies.

34:39Ben Lamm:But once again, to put it back in the wild, we have to have support of the government. So our goal for our extinct species, our genetically modified gene drives, and even cloning of endangered species, all of that is to go into the wild. But we have to have government and indigenous and global support. Honestly, it's just so crazy. It's also really cool because you come from a real tech software background. You're already very successful. Well, this is, I mean, if you've seen other labs, it looks probably most like no other lab you've seen. No, I mean, it's beautiful. It's cinematic. It's like there's like, I mean, there's also fun stuff going on in the background of it.

35:17But I mean, it is there is very techie for a lab for sure. Yeah, it is.

35:21Ben Lamm:We look at this more as a product company in a tech company than a traditional biotech company. Right. Like we're not an academic lab. We're not a think tank. We're not a biotech that's going to just, you know, work on one solution. We have to innovate across the entire spectrum of the pipeline. And, you know, I think that you feel it here. There's a real sense of urgency towards the mission, which I think we have to have given some of the stats we talked about. Yeah. So how did you construct the organization? Having zero background in biology and biotech, I couldn't be more qualified to run this company.

36:01Ben Lamm:But we look at it as a systems model, right? Like extinction is a systems model. Genetic engineering from like taking a 73 ,000 year old skull and going to puppies is a systems model. And so taking that kind of approach and just asking the right questions and trying to fill in the right. Like what's great about this company and is also hard about this company is that there's not another one. Right. There's not another DXA. So there's not like it's not like here's your SaaS company roadmap. app, right? And so the good news about that is like, if we make mistakes, there's not really other people to be judged against, right?

36:40Ben Lamm:Because no one else had ever done it before. But the bad news is no one had ever done it before. And so we try to take a very rudimentary first principles, build from the ground up. How do we build complete vertical integration in how we thought through the design of the business? And we've reorg'd a couple of times internally. And I feel like we finally got the right momentum, you know, as a company. And I think you're starting to see that with more and more innovations that come out of the company. What does that composition look like? Lab, research? It's mostly scientists. So, you know, we have 260 plus people, plus 17 academic partners, plus 80 folks in academic labs.

37:23Ben Lamm:We also fund and about 95 advisors. And so, Oh, my God. I know. But they're tiered. So we have, like, scientific advisors, indigenous advisors, executive business advisors, and youth advisors, right? Because, like, they are – most people don't realize this. Everyone talks about our problems and how the youth are going to inherit the problems. They're also going to inherit our solutions to some of these problems. So when we are solving these problems, if we are solving it in dumb ways, like I think, you know, a lot of the air capture systems and other ways that direct air capture carbon systems and others in a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are dumb.

38:01Ben Lamm:And so our but but if we invest, you know, a trillion dollars in that infrastructure globally and we hand it to our kids, our kids are going to have to then count. You have this like, you know, tech debt that comes with that. And so we've tried to think through how do we make a solution that not only are we proud of, but our next generation is. That's why having like a youth advisory board is like really helpful. Like getting their feedback to us is as important as our indigenous board or our scientific board. So it sounds like a lot of people, but we have different groups that manage each one of those external folks.

38:39It also seems like you guys are really popular with kids either way.

38:43Ben Lamm:Every decision we make, if you go to the highest level, we try to create value for our investors, right? So it's value creation, impact for the world, and inspiration. So for us, and we told our investors this from day one, that inspiration needs to be as important as value creation. And you need to be on board with that. Like, if we do the greatest thing in the world that nobody knows about, and like, you know, kids don't get excited about science, then we think we failed. And so we really try to put a heavy emphasis on kids and education. And we have this conversation with the scientific community a lot in some of the scientific journals is that like kids don't read nature and science themselves.

39:24Ben Lamm:Right. The ones that do. I don't know. Like those. Yeah. They should work here. But but they but like those the kids, the kids that make that that like read that are already committed to science. Right. Like that would be incredible. I can't. Some of these papers are really hard to read. But most people are like we're competing with pop culture for like the latest celebrity trend. And so you have to be able to communicate really hard things like CRISPR and some of these genome engineering tools and the impacts and positivity on the world and what they're doing today. And you got to do it in 20 seconds and you got to do it on Instagram.

40:04Ben Lamm:But I mean, but that's real, right? Because that's where the next generation is. that's how they communicate, right? Like what's our Snapchat strategy? Those are the things we think about. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25 % year over year.

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41:47Ben Lamm:Yeah, sure. I can imagine that has evolved. Yeah, yeah. The story of a business model, like the early believers versus the ones that are backing up the truck now. Like, it's probably very different. Yeah, in the early, we were very thoughtful in the early days. Like we wanted to have a long term investors, technology focused investors, people that could that can look at like, OK, here, what is this event horizon? You know, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years out. Right. We were not looking for investors that were saying we want a fund return in four to five years in fund X. Right. Like those just weren't for us.

42:25Ben Lamm:We have some of those, but those were not our primary focus. Then we wanted a percentage of impact investors, like who are people that part of their internal KPI system that they track is around making positive impact. And so we really try to find the right balance. I think we did a really good job. Right. I think, you know, I think the most people would have said, oh, you should call Masa or SoftBank out of the gate. Right. Like that was kind of like I think how most people think about a business like this. But we haven't. Right. and we're big fans of what he's done. But some of those types of funds, we didn't go after.

43:01Ben Lamm:We said, okay, let's go for very thoughtful business people. Like, let's go to people like, you know, Jim Breyer. Let's go to people like Thomas Tull, Mark Walter, people that have built these legacy large infrastructure plays that have done stuff in education, in entertainment, in science, in technology, people that were early backers in the internet and quantum, people that understand what full new economies and systems can come from getting the entire pipeline. And so I think we were very, very thoughtful on that. And what's funny is I think that we've completely mispriced every single round of capital because every single round of capital has been more than 2x oversubscribed.

43:51Ben Lamm:So what I hear from that is we're cheap. Like we're not, we're a cheap date and we should raise our rates on capital. And so maybe we'll do that in the future. Don't sell yourself short. I think, yeah, but every round has been massively. So it makes me think that people are not just excited and see the vision, but in the impact, but they also, you know, I think they've also thought they've got a good deal. But this is not your first rodeo. I mean, you've had a successful exit. Yeah, yeah. I've been very fortunate to work with much smarter people than me to build a handful of businesses that have had successful, profitable exits.

44:32Ben Lamm:So I do think that helps. I think that helped in the early days, right, where it's like you've got, I think in the early days when we had a, like our original deck was like, we have no scientist. we have no partnership with Harvard um we have no technologies um and and we're a handful of software and hardware people that are pretty they have no background in biology and George Church thinks he can make a woolly mammoth and we're pretty sure that that's worth something like that was like the the original deck and the original the original deck was was that it was pretty bad. I mean, I'm being honest, I would have passed on.

45:11Ben Lamm:I talked to an investor that passed in the early days, got a very big fund and wants to get involved. And he was like, I just can't believe I passed on this. I was like, I would have passed on this. In all reality, I would have passed on this. Yeah. So how did you guys prove them all wrong? I think that trust, I think it's easy to raise capital when you have trust. And I think trust is built with setting and managing expectations. So we've, I think, done a really good job with our investor base and with hopefully the world and also our board of setting and delivering on expectations. And I think we've shown, we've had these surprise, like the Woolly Mice were a surprise and delight moment.

45:56Ben Lamm:The Dyer Wolves were definitely a surprise and delight moment. And so I think that delivering on kind of our roadmap, app, we've been very consistent on kind of our delivery and we've been ahead. And then I think we've also done a really good job of exceeding those expectations of what's possible. Like we were told if in five years we were doing five to seven edits, we'd be great. We're now doing hundreds of edits. We haven't done this yet, but we're now pushing a new construct that we've designed and a new delivery mechanism that we think we can be doing thousands of edits at once. Like these are things that like, you know, a year, like three years ago was like sounded impossible.

46:38Ben Lamm:A year ago still sounded impossible. Right. And so I think we're consistently showing that. And so when you build that trust, I think it's very easy for people to continue to deliver or to invest. I mean, we saw some lasers back there. Yeah, there's some lasers, right? Right. Like, yeah, the lasers thing is pretty cool. So but eventually even that was in our somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning lab. But that entire embryology thing, well, that will eventually all be automated. Right. So we've got the best embryologists doing the same thing every single day in multiple different clades of animals.

47:15Ben Lamm:So that, you know, in that screen that you saw, that's doing full time screen recording. So we're looking at the position of the laser. we're looking at the position, the O site, we're looking at the position of like how much DNA is extracted. That entire system, we had to go build that entire system. I don't know if they told you that on the tour. That's all custom. So we had to go build and innovate all of that hardware. But in the future, that whole process will be automated with robotics. So do you get like a report at the end of the day, at the end of the month? Like how do you learn and train off of the data?

47:49Ben Lamm:Yeah. So on that data, that's highly visual data. So it's all screen capture and computer vision from an input and capture perspective. We track efficiencies and cloning rates. And so we track all of that in spreadsheets. Now, thanks to some of the next-gen and applications of AI. In the early days, things like OpenAI and Claude and others weren't super helpful to our company because it's like, turns out that like, you know, Opus doesn't do like an ancestral state reconstruction of like a genome and like it doesn't like build comparative genomics models. So we had to go build all of that, which I think was good because we had to go build up an AI team and think through some pretty hard problems.

48:39Ben Lamm:But now we're connecting existing systems like, you know, most labs don't use things like Jira. And so I think the hardest thing we've done is reprogram not stem cells, but scientists to work in things like Jira and smart sheets, like traditional software like things. And then we're connecting those to like the lab notebooks and some of our proprietary systems all through an AI layer. And so the visibility that we can give our mid-level and senior management on the science teams of what's happening in the lab in near real time through the aggregation of AI across systems. Now we're implementing some of these systems, these existing enterprise AI systems at scale, where it's really, really helping.

49:25So you guys do, between that and the labs and how everything is designed here in this secret location. How did you get, I mean, you have a very distinctive style here. Like, how did you guys develop that style and the branding around that?

49:39Ben Lamm:So we wanted to make, once again, couldn't be more underqualified. We wanted to make, this kind of goes back to inspiration. We wanted to make science cool and fun and engaging. And so when we set out to do the task of, like, getting rid of extinction, sanction uh we wanted you know we thought it was a big problem so we thought colossal was a good name because it's a pretty big problem that we're trying to solve um and then at the same time we're also working with cells which we thought was funny that we're working the most small things but hopefully they're successful to make really big things so we're kind of planning success right with that with mammoths and stuff so so that's where we came up with the name but then we had this idea that it's like if you're going to go back to the like bill nye old school models of like science and excitement where it's like you're putting in the red food coloring and then shit's exploding in the volcano versus like today where it's like only spelling bee champions and like kids inventing like nuclear fusion if you want to go back to like the stuff that i could do like in in like the 80s and 90s well then like that's like old school mtv like back before it was like 16 and pregnant and it was like tRL like how do you go back to like the tRL days of MTV and mash that up with like the like robustness and thoughtfulness and scientific rigor of Harvard.

51:00Ben Lamm:Right. But that's boring and stuffy. So how do you take like Harvard meets MTV? That was like our thesis from like day one. And and I think we nailed it. Like I think the colors, I think the attitude. I mean, it's like when we walked in. But if I say if I said you randomly, if you had not been here or seen anything, Harvard meets MTV, you'd be like, that's just dumb. But now that I say Harvard meets MTV with everything you've seen, you're like, does it like, that actually describes exactly what you guys have built. So I'm very proud of that because we spend a lot of time in it and we want to evoke our brand in messaging.

51:41Ben Lamm:And we don't want to just say, oh, we have happy hours like once a month and we have foosball tables. We don't have food tables that are annoying and loud. That's why you see the murals. You see everything in there. We want to constantly remind not just the people that come here, but our staff. We have this unfair advantage of recruiting, being that you get to work on things like bully mammoth cells and done arts versus yeast in an academic lab. But also, after you work in this lab, go try working in another lab. Like go work back in academia where you're underfunded. It's all like massively politicized and it's massively competitive.

52:22Ben Lamm:And your labs are like held up by pizza boxes, right? Like go like, I chat, like go work in academia after you work here. It's like, you just don't see that. I mean, we are like technically, well, I can't say where we are but there's lots of medical buildings around us yeah yeah they don't feel like this though i know i would imagine they don't we know we accidentally walked into a few yeah because it's really hard to find yeah yeah this is good all right that's great that's the best thing i learned today yeah yeah um but i'm really curious okay here's a hard question i love hard questions what can you what's on the like the no-go list like what can you not make i listened to a few podcasts and one of them was like ironically the t-shirt that i'm wearing is what we can't do really yeah so this is this is giant epithecus which was like not king kong but not an existing ape it was like it was like a giant so we're not worried we will not work on anything related to our technologies can be applied to human and we can spin them out and license them but we won't do the human work here right like i made the joke before but we don't want to have like Colossal launches a hair solution and then people were like, is that mammoth chip that people are putting on us?

53:38Ben Lamm:Like we don't, we never wanted that. And so like we already have people that there's a fringe group of people that already have some like crazy conspiracy ideas about us. So I don't want to encourage that. Oh, that we're a secret government. I mean, the list goes on. I don't think a government lab would be like this cool. No, right? Right. And so that's part of the cover up. Yes. And so the it says we have that kind of we've all kinds of weird things. People have assumed that we like like we actually had a very critical group of from this one publication that's New York based. That is just weird.

54:22Ben Lamm:And they like to be critical on lots of things. And they were here, and at the end of it, they were like, do you secretly have a mammoth that you're not telling us about? I was like, no. Why would we do that? So there's all kinds of weird stuff. So we won't work on humans here because we've been asked the Neanderthal question. And so non-human primates in over we won't work on, right? Giant epithecus would be amazing to see. But we're not going to do that. There was this crazy time. That's where we were all on. You did this crazy interview with Ashley Vance. Has he come in here yet? No. So I did.

54:59Ben Lamm:So I've done it weird. It's crazy that you just said this. Okay. So I did his, I think I was his first podcast. Really? When he left and he did his first, I think I was the first episode or like. In his studio? Editor mode. Yeah. But he literally messaged me like a week ago. And so we're catching up. He has crazy. I mean, he's seen some crazy shit. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like you went with George Church to like, you know, whatever land. And you've seen drawers with like lots of stuff in them. But he like went to Russia or like Serbia or something. Some, I don't know where it was. Some cold place over there.

55:36And there was this like mad scientist dude who was like, I guess, a chill guy. But he had like human heads in a cold locker and all this stuff. I'm like, Ashley, you weren't there.

55:46Ben Lamm:Yeah. What? He's like, yeah, that was the craziest interview I ever did. I'm like, oh. We'll work to top it next time he's here. Or he hasn't been here, but when he comes. But yeah, he's great. And we did his podcast. And I didn't know him before that. Yeah. And he was awesome. And then we just reconnected, like, literally in the last week. He's great. Yeah, he's great. But yeah, there's up in some weird stuff. But that's like synthetic biology. I don't think this is what people realize is that the intersection of AI and compute, eventually quantum, and synthetic biology, like, it will transform everything.

56:20Ben Lamm:Like, you know, we will have a point where we can like George and I have like got asked this question. Like we were on some weird whose podcast was that? I think it was it may have been Adam Draper's podcast where he was like, if you and George could do one thing, what would it do? And we both talked about how we have this weird idea that eventually we will be able to program into trees. uh like how like can you build like a redwood that actually grows in the form of like a house and then like we go in down this like really weird like mushroomy hippie thing yeah and and like and like i think it was even too weird for adam draper he was like okay um mammoth he like completely george and i were like but i think that's going to be the power of synthetic biology is like the idea that we can like program life in whatever image we want is pretty amazing.

57:16Ben Lamm:And like we're advancing it, I think, further than anyone. But at the same time, we haven't even scratched the surface of what's going to be possible. Any megalodons? So this just shows how like fucked up the world is. Dinosaurs is request one. Megalodons is request two. Well, you have a megalodon room. I do have a megalodon room. But that's because it's like a... It's really cool. It's a really cool room. But it's like a fish tank, right? So it's like a fishbowl. So you got to like, you know, thematically do something. There is no Megalodon DNA. And if there was, it would be terrible to make...

57:55Ben Lamm:I mean, the ocean is scary enough, but we do get the request of Megalodon quite a bit. We're not working on Megalodon. Okay. Well... There's no secret like U.S. Navy anduril mashup for megalodons. They don't ask you to do your work on aliens? No, no. You can't just close that? That's another thing that we get, right? Really? Because I've been weirdly tangentially connected to the UAP crowd for a long time. For pre... Like I had a satellite company. No, no. But I like know a lot. I really don't. And then did some imaging work for Army Space and some other stuff in a previous company. And, like, I'm on the UAP Scientific Advisory Board for Avi Loeb.

58:38Ben Lamm:And so I understand why people draw the conclusion. It's not reasonable. There's some easy dots there. There's some easy, easy dots. But so people think that, like, part of, like, one of the other conspiracies is, like, the advancements in genome engineering has come from us studying, like, which is just not the case, which is just crazy talk. I'm glad you clarified that today. Yeah, it's crazy talk. So we get, there's a lot. But you could spend an hour just on weird, like, Reddit, like, conspiracies around Colossal. That's fun. It's fun. And we should do that some of those fun. Okay. Well, Ben, that leaves us.

59:12We're out of time. Yeah. Thank you so much. This was so much fun. The tour was insane. Yeah, good.

59:17Ben Lamm:I'm glad you came. I was actually a little concerned walking from the tour into here because I'm like, my mind just kind of exploded. Yeah, good. I love that. That's awesome. So thank you. I'm glad you came. Cool. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.