Life After Extinction: Bringing Woolly Mammoths Back Via Artificial Wombs

we have to back up all life. You know, it's forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. So like current conservation works, it just doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating things. So we have to back up all life.

Well, per usual, we're going to get a little weird. On this episode, maybe extra weird, I am going to be joined by Ben Lamb, who is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. You may have heard of them in the press. They want to do nothing less than bring the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and a bunch of other animals back from extinction. No, no small feat, and full of controversy, as, as you can imagine. The company was co-founded by George Church, who is a world-famous scientist doing all kinds of weird genetic things. We're going to get into that, and I promise you, you shall be entertained. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

It's a pleasure, man. I, I, you know, I've talked to George Church over the years who, who you co-founded this company with, but I never had the chance to talk to you. So this is, this is exciting.

Yeah. George is the best. He's, you know, if you've talked to George, you probably know that he's actually just as funny as he is smart. So he's, he's great.

Yeah. He's that man. He is a, he's, he's a wild man of science. For people who have never heard of Colossal, that feels like a very good place to start. It is. It's about as ambitious and, and I'd say weird, but in a, in a good and interesting way as you can get. Um, can you explain the basics of what you guys are trying to do?

Yeah, so Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company. So our goal is to use genetics and genetic rescue, advanced embryology, lasers, all these crazy things to essentially bring back extinct species or proxies for those species, put them back into the wild in collaboration with governments, indigenous people groups, and others, and then build those technologies, uh, take some of those technologies that we build, uh, and apply some of them to human healthcare, but then, uh, make the others available for free to conservation. So we have this idea of like, we can do these cool moonshot projects, inspire the next generation, help the ecosystems, and then hopefully help, uh, existing animals as well. And so it's a, it's a complicated problem that we're trying to solve, but you know, it's a pretty big one.

It, it's very big and there's a lot, lot to get into. I know trying to give— trying to bring people down to earth on this a bit. You know, the three animals in particular that you guys have called out so far that you want to focus on first are the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the Tasmanian tiger. And as a half Australian, I'm all for the Tasmanian tiger effort. People are going to have the very most obvious question: why? Why would we want to bring, say, the woolly mammoth back.

So all these species that we're working on, uh, we do it through the lens of a systems model, right? So kind of like when humanity went to the moon, a lot of innovations went, uh, came from that, and inventions came from that that have helped humanity. Like, some of the same— some of the core tech that, uh, was invented on humanity's pursuit of the stars allows us to have this conversation right now, which is amazing. And so when you can work on these big hard problems, you have to innovate across, you know, genetic engineering, computational biology, in all these different areas, and it creates an opportunity to us to, uh, uh, develop new tools and technologies that could be radically applied to conservation much, much faster. In all these species, there were anthropologic or human effects that caused these species to go extinct, right? And so, um, you know, we thought this is an opportunity to build tech, uh, undo the sins of the past. But then we also thought, well, you know, we can have these species, if we do enough ecological modeling, If we can rewild these species, maybe they can also help the ecosystem as well. And so for us, you know, these 3 species kind of made sense to start with. And then hopefully over time with these successes, uh, we'll even branch into, you know, even weirder species.

Well, okay. Something like the Tasmanian tiger, I can get. Australia has this issue where, well, so it's a natural predator. Um, and, and you have Australia is this crazy case where, you know, it's an island, and so every time someone brings a rabbit or a camel, they're crazy things.

Yeah. Or tons of cats, right, decimating the landscape.

Yeah, yeah. So let's get specific on that one. You bring back the Tasmanian tiger, what is that meant to look like?

Yeah, so the goal is, you know, the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine— you hear the rest of the world calls Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, you probably refer to it more as the thylacine. Um, it was the apex predator, right? And so it was killed off in 1936, uh, because the Australian government put a bounty on its head because all of these sheep farmers were saying that the Tasmanian tigers were killing the sheep. And in reality, they were stealing each other's sheep. Uh, there's no proof. I've read all the books.

Australian thing to do.

Yes, very Australian thing to do, right? And now, and now it's become like almost like a mythos. It's, it's like the, you know, Yeti or Bigfoot, right? And so, you know, and I was warned by Dr. Andrew Pask that when we started pursuing the, uh, pilocene, people would be calling me saying, I just saw one, or I have hair from one, or I have scat from one. And, um, and Andrew warned me about this, and it's so convincing, it's so like steeped in the lore there, that like I get blurry photos and camera trap photos all the time, and it's almost believable. I've even fallen into the trap of saying maybe they're still there. And Andrew Pask, who's at the University of Melbourne, one of our partners on it, it's like, no, Ben, don't fall into the trap. Whatever you do, Quit falling into the trap. But, but when it was removed from the ecosystem, right, nothing has filled, uh, filled the ecological void that it had. And what we found is that when you remove a keystone species, specifically a large herbivore like a mammoth or an elephant, uh, or a keystone predator, you have this tropic downgrading effect where you have all these other kind of side effects in this like kind of butterfly effect that people don't think of. And so many of these like mezzanine level marsupials like the Tasmanian devil, you know, um, with it. They either overpopulate, they overindulge in certain vegetations and whatnot, or other species, or they, they, you know, gives rise to certain sicknesses. And so predators like the thylacine, or like wolves in Yellowstone, they have an energy expenditure, uh, an energy expenditure ratio where they're only going after kill that they think they can make, right? And so they're going after the young, you know, so that's a survival of the fittest moment., the old. So that's cleaning out the population, or specifically the sick. And right now there's this terrible disease in Australia that's plaguing Tasmanian devils, which is the only transmissible— I mean, talk about terrifying— it's a transmissible facial tumor disease. It's transmissible cancer, right? Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah, these devils can't see, right? And then they start transmitting it. But the devils were probably a lot— from everything that we can tell, were a large part of the thylacine's diet, being right in the scale and size that they would eat. And so most likely devils that couldn't defend themselves or sea stray would probably be the ones that would be picked off. And so we've seen this all over the world that when you remove a predator, new sicknesses and zoonotic diseases rise in populations that are typically the prey of those predators. So there's a lot of different ecological modeling that shows if we could reintroduce the thylacine, could it start to balance out that food web that's currently an issue? And so, you know, we're not, we don't just rely on Colossal, right? We're the scientists working on the genetic side. We really rely on our 48 conservation partners that are in Australia and these other countries saying, yes, here's peer-reviewed papers that says this is a good idea. So it's not just our ideas on this in terms of rewilding.

I want to get into the science and, and some other questions around what you talked about. But before we do that, let's do, let's do the woolly mammoth as well. I, I actually, had spent some time reading about and watching this documentary on this place called Pleistocene Park. It's, it's in Siberia. Um, there's these interesting Russian scientists who think along similar lines as you guys, quite, uh, quite the characters. Um, fascinating, fascinating family up there. But, you know, so they have this idea that you reintroduce these, and please correct me if I get this wrong, it's been a while since I watched it, but They have this idea that you reintroduce these large mammals, um, and they help tamp down the, these, these grasslands, I think, right? To, in an, it's all an effort to stop the permafrost from melting as climate change takes hold, because obviously we're afraid that as that melts, all kinds of weird things might be released into the, into the environment, um, viruses and things that have been Frozen for many, many years.

Can you—

okay, so is that—

you're— yeah, so you're totally directionally accurate on all this. So it's the Zimovs in, uh, northern Siberia, and they're awesome. You know, they're, they're very— I mean, they're very, very Russian. I have not visited them yet because of the geopolitical world that we currently live in. I started— I got started this project before, but George has visited them and seen Pleistocene Park and talked to them. And their whole thesis is, if you can do two things, if you can remove the carnivorous trees there that are not being, you know, Not all trees are created equal. Not all plants are created equal from a carbon sequestering, carbon sequestration perspective. These trees are heavy, dark bark. They almost act like heat lightning rods. So they're collecting heat. They're not storing a lot of carbon. And then that heat's permeating down around, uh, uh, the root structure and it's actually releasing, it's, it's actually warming and releasing carbon. So generally, uh, so if you can, we're, and they've been doing this with tractors and other, uh, uh, large vehicles, but can they remove the coniferous trees and could they introduce large cold-tolerant megafauna that can, you know, eat and do defecate and increases the nitrogen oxygen through defecation, right? You know, in areas that you've got, you know, bison and oxen and muskox and even elephants and rhinos, you end up having these like these grasslands, which are also really carbon efficient, right? They're about 6 times more carbon efficient.

Okay. That's where I got it wrong. So the idea is all these animals are tamping, they're walking across the grasslands and tamping down the, the trees from—

they're trampling down the trees and removing trees. And elephants do this all the time in Africa. So you— there's a lot— like elephants love to be environmental modifiers. They love, they love to knock down trees and whatnot. So the idea is if you can have these nor— these natural animals knocking down the trees and, uh, during the winter months packing the snows on the migratory patterns— they've done these scientific studies both in the Arctic as well as even in Africa in the areas where there's a, uh, where there's stampeding patterns, it packs it so tight that the night winds are able to permeate down into the soil and, or in this case, the, the permafrost up there and actually make it colder. And they've seen that in areas where they've tested this in, in, uh, in the, in, in Northern Siberia, they've been able to lower ground temperatures by up to 8 degrees, which is great, cuz in the winter months, guess what happens? It takes a lot longer. For those warm temperatures to permeate down that much deeper to get— you know, we always talk about the 1.5-degree tipping point. And so this is all modeled, right? And so you've got some scientists— there's about 8 peer-reviewed papers that say if you reintroduce mammoths or other cold-tolerant, it will— it will lower ground temperatures, which I think generally most scientists agree with. And it will help with carbon sequestration because there's more carbon and more methane stored in the Arctic than anywhere else. Right. Now, the other side is, and, you know, one of the things that Colossal is pretty good at is, you know, we've got 95 scientific advisors and we work with 17 of the top universities. Not all science, believe it or not, not all scientists agree on everything, even this topic. Right. So we have other scientists that say, no, it won't do that. It's a top-down environment. It won't have the same impact. Right. George falls more on the Zimov side. We have other scientists like Lou Vidal that falls more on the other side. But we, but we have found in kind of bringing these scientists together is that they all generally agree that a biodiverse, a more biodiverse ecosystem with both predators and large herbivores is more biodiverse and it will lead to more ecological function in terms of nitrogen oxygen turnover, more plants, more grasslands and whatnot, which will help. So there is some debate on how big of the impact will be where you've got one side being the Zimovs that says it will save the world. And then you've got other side saying it'll do something good, but they both generally agree that it will, it will help revitalize that ecosystem. And we know a revitalized ecosystem is much more efficient at carbon sequestration. So I think the true data will be when we get there, right?

And, and so is your woolly mammoth effort, is, is that the main driver is to explore that thesis, or are there other reasons we would want woolly mammoths running around?

Yeah, so I think there's kind of 3 core reasons we want, you know, woolly mammoths running around. One, to explore that thesis and to create a lineage of elephants that— the second, uh, or this, uh, the, the third cause of, uh, leading cause of elephant death is human-elephant conflict. Like, we are encroaching their land. So a, a population of cold-tolerant elephants that can exist in low population density areas, you know, removes one of the major drivers of elephant extinction. So that's, I think that's a kind of a halo effect. So you can test the model and you can create more biodiversity ecosystem and you can build an elephant population that can live in an area that humans aren't, you know, massively there. So I think that's one category. Uh, you know, the second category is it kind of creates an opportunity to build technologies to save elephants, right? So the number one cause of elephant death is actually a disease called EEHV. It kills 20% of baby elephants every year, more than poaching, more than anything. We currently have a vaccine in trials in elephants with Dr. Paul Ling in Baylor College of Medicine and George Church that has proven to confer resistance to this disease. So that one vaccine alone, because we don't want our mammoth— we don't want 20% of our mammoths to die of, of EHV. That one disease, that one vaccine alone could save more elephants than all of elephant conservation for the last 50 years. Right. If we are successful. So I think the tech side of of helping elephants is the third, second. And then the third is it is cool. Like, not enough people talk about this. No, I'm serious. I'm serious.

Everybody, everybody, number one for me.

No, no, but everybody, but everybody wants to talk about like the conservation aspects. You know, we've raised $50 million for our foundation and we're doing all these things around conservation. Like, so we're happy to talk about that. People want to talk about the ethics of it and the science of it and the Jurassic Park of it. So everybody wants to talk about that, right? But, but one thing that, that came to me recently is like every single week we get like kids' little drawings of mammoths or dodos and like messages from parents saying, thank you for what you're doing. My kids and I are talking about climate change. We're talking about mammoths and biodiversity. My kid wants to be a scientist. He wants to work at your— what does he have to do to— what does he have to get a degree in to work at your company one day? And so like, we can also take a step back. And Lou Vidal always says this, like, why can't we also just tell the world it's also just fucking cool? Like, we're doing something That's really interesting and it's really cool and it seems to be inspiring people to talk about science. The—

I mean, this is a little more along the Jurassic Park lines, but, you know, when I read these books about the era when there were all these large mammals, the big sloths and the tigers, and I've always wanted some sort of simulation or a video. For some reason, that's like my favorite period of time. And I would love to I would love to see what that looked like with all these, these giant mammals cruising around. And anyway, bit of a tangent, but I get it. I get the cool part that that would be amazing. All right, let's, let's figure out how, how you actually would, would do this. I know you guys have done things like with the elephant where you've done the most detailed sequence of the genome, which obviously you need you need to be able to go from— I know you do a mix of trying to find, trying to find tissue from, from these extinct animals and then also trying to genetically understand the creatures that we have that are similar and where the differences between the past and the current lie so that you can reverse engineer what's going on. But let's break down, let's break down the mammoth and how you would actually go about about bringing a woolly mammoth back?

Awesome. So it's a systems model, right? And so one of the things that I think we've done really right at Colossal is we have said we're not going to do this in a linear fashion because it'll take 40 years. We're going to do all of it at the exact time. So what that means is we have to collect ancient DNA and we actually have about 65 mammoth genomes. Many of those are from Lou Vidolin, who is one of our biggest critics when we launched the company. Now he's one of our best advisors, which is amazing.

Who is he? He's a scientist.

So Lou Vidolin is arguably the number one mammoth expert in the world.

Okay.

He's at the University of Stockholm. Uh, you know, he's also a member of the Explorers Club with me, and he goes on these expeditions into the Arctic and gets mammoth samples, you know, from bone and tusk and petrous bones and all these places, right? And so what you have to do is you have to collect a lot of mammoth DNA because it's highly— the longer we go back, the more fragmented it is. So it gets— it degrades very quickly over time. And so we have about 65 mammoth genomes that are ranging from, uh, about 3,500 years ago all the way back to 700,000 years. So while that makes it hard hard to assemble this reference genome, which we've now done, uh, one of the great things is, is it does allow us to see what has been conserved. So what are the genes over that evolutionary distance that truly were mammoth, right? Because a mammoth is about 99.6% the same, uh, genetically as an Asian elephant. But what were the genes that really were conserved over that period of time? So more painful for assembly, but better to understand really what genes drive, uh, mammoth phenotypes or physical, like, their cold tolerance features, right?

Yeah. Well, like, just super quick on that to give people something specific they had a lot more body fat.

They had more body fat, they had smaller ears, they had their curve, their iconic curved tusks, dome cranium for, for heat distribution. And then they actually had 5 different types of hair that made them woolly, right? Um, and so they had this shaggy coat that, that's probably the most iconic thing that people think of. But they did have that subcutaneous layer of fat. They also had a different way of handling hemoglobin production. So like oxygenation from your blood, how that happens at subfreezing temperatures, at temperatures that our blood would crystallize, theirs didn't.

And also like in kind of like hypoxic conditions to—

Exactly, exactly. And they also had pretty wide variety. So, you know, when people think about the Pleistocene era, we're currently in the Holocene era. But when people think about the Pleistocene era, they think, oh, it's only just -40. There were these interglacial periods during that time that were as warm and even warmer than today. So you have different distributions of mammoths and different types of mammoths like Columbian mammoths and woolly mammoths that actually were able to traverse large temperature swings too, which, which is also pretty cool. So there's a lot about the mammoths that's pretty awesome from a scientific study perspective. Okay, so you get the ancient DNA, right? And you have to compare it to its closest living relative, which in this case is the Asian elephant. Now, I come from software and a little bit of space hardware, but mostly software. So I just thought, oh, we'll just plug it into the GCP of species. You know, surely there's the world, you know, everyone's got 23andMe. Surely we've done that for all animals. Uh, turns out we haven't, which is another major issue. That's why we're trying to preach biobanking and cryopreservation pretty hard right now to every government that'll listen to us. I was just at the WEF, at the World Economic Forum, preaching about this cuz it's so important. So, so we had to then go build the reference genome for Asian elephants and African elephants. Elephants and forest elephants and Borneo elephants, because that just doesn't exist, right? They, like, from a conservation and research perspective, no one had done that.

Um, a question about that real quick. Yeah, you know, I remember there was, there was this company/research organization in China, BGI, the Beijing Genomics Institute. I remember after the human genome had been sequenced, probably 15 years after that, they went on this, this big sequencing craze and were trying to sequence all kinds of different animals and bank them away. And so when I was reading about you guys and I read that you had by far the most detailed elephant sequence, and that was the first time somebody had done that, I believe, for a large mammal in a long time. What— where does this fit in with what BGI— I remember them sequencing pandas and I remember everything.

You know, we, you know, we're an American company, so we have different views on some of these issues, right? Uh, they— as I understand, BGI is sequencing everything. They're not, uh, they don't share as much, I think, as—

well, I don't know. The CEO had the best quote ever. He said, he said, if it's cute, we'll sequence it, and if it tastes good, we'll sequence it.

Yeah, yeah. Someone asked him, uh, uh, in the last 2 years, like, are you sequencing people to try to figure out, uh, what the smartest humans are and what those genes are? And he said, why wouldn't we?

So they might be doing this, but that information is not available. Yeah, that information is available, right?

We, we think of this more of like the seed vault, right? Where it's like, oh, we have to back up all life. You know, it's forecasted that we're gonna lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. So like, current conservation works, it just doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating things. So we have to back up all life. Um, and so, so part of that though is we started with the species that we're working on and then the clades of animals that make sense, right? So in this case, it's the elephants. Uh, on the thylacine projects, it's all the carnivorous marsupials, and then it's several different pigeon species on the dodo, because the dodo was just a weird-looking pigeon. So, um, and so, so then you have to build a reference genome, and then you have to do comparative genomics to understand what genes made a mammoth a mammoth and what has been lost in that elephant lineage over time, right? And most people don't realize this, and this, this is kind of another fun party fact, is that You know, Asian elephants are closer related to woolly mammoths than Asian elephants are to African elephants, right? And so as you do comparative genomics across this, you know, of all these pachyderm, these pachyderm species, you can then really identify what is truly mammoth. And then based on historical literature and doing, uh, functional tests in labs, we can identify, okay, these are the genes associated with hair, and then you can start to edit those into Asian elephant cells. So when people think of us and they think of Jurassic Park, it's exactly opposite. Like in Jurassic Park, they're trying to fill in the holes of ancient DNA they got from amber. Side note, amber is not a good vehicle for storing DNA, not that we've tried. It's very porous and you can't get dino DNA from it in case people, a listener is curious about it. But they were filling in with like frog DNA into that of the, into that of the dino DNA. And then they were putting a bunch of other weird stuff in there, right? We're doing an exact opposite, right? Like we're looking at the Asian elephant genome and we're like, we know these cells made an elephant because we took the blood from an elephant, right? And then, um, and then we say, okay, what genes made a mammoth a mammoth? And then we're engineering those genes in. And sometimes that's a small change, sometimes we're synthesizing big pieces of DNA and putting it in. Uh, so we use a combination of tools in order to, uh, in, in order to, to make that possible. And then the last step is once you have your edits, I'm sure your questions are all on some of these past But, but once you have your edits, you then do a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, most famously known as cloning with, you know, Dolly the sheep, which was, which was magic. Like, back then they were like jamming pipettes. The fact that that worked blows my mind. We now use like lasers to drill holes and robotics to remove it and computer vision. Like, it's come a long way since Dolly, uh, Dolly's magic that it worked even ever. Um, and then we replace that embryo, and then you use a very similar process to IVF to put that into a surrogate elephant. Now, the last thing I'll say is we have a 17-person team that's working on artificial wombs. Uh, we're expanding that team right now with our most recent capital raise. And, uh, you know, none of our first-generation species will be born, uh, ex utero, but I think in the next 2 years, based on kind of where we are, we'll be able to produce the world's first mammal fully outside of the womb that grew from a single embryo into an animal.

So you said the first the first that you bring back will not be ex utero. They'll be in, they'll be in an elephant, um, implanted in, in an elephant, into an elephant.

Yes.

And then we get to the artificial womb.

And I think the artificial womb has the ability to drive scale for our projects, but also it gives us the opportunity to do bigger and cooler stuff that we can't currently gestate, like the Stellar Sea Cow, which is awesome. Um, and I think it's also game-changing for conservation, right? If you can grow 200 northern white rhinos in a lab and then rewild them with rewilding partners on the ground, that'll gain— that's a game changer for both animal welfare and for conservation.

I'm sure there's people listening now who say, I didn't know people were working on artificial wombs or even thinking about this. It is, in fact, I think I know probably, I would say, 3, 4, 5 startups, some of whom remain secret for the moment, who, who are pursuing this. And also, yeah, different—

we know all of them.

Yeah, yeah, different directions. But this a real thing. People are looking to build this container that you could grow humans, animals, all kinds of things in.

Now, we don't focus on humans, but I would think—

No, no, no. I'm saying—

It's much harder to grow an elephant and a marsupial and a, you know, manatee in an artificial womb with the 4 major placental types and kind of the sub-12 different subtypes. It's much harder to do that than a human. So, I do think if we are successful, most likely, our tech could be applied to humans.

Okay, to go backwards on some of the other tech first, I love— I really do like George Church and, and the spirit of which he approaches synthetic biology and, and these big ideas. Sometimes I feel like he is so smart or so ahead of where everybody else is, he, he makes it seem like things that sound futuristic are not easy, but like they're— it's a fait accompli. I think, I think he goes to this place in his head where He can see it being done.

He sees every step. And so he's just like, he does think it's easy, right? So it's just, it's just focus and funding, right?

Right. But like, would you, because you guys are talking about bringing the mammoth back, I think by 2028, when you're talking about these large DNA sequence, um, injections or edits, it's, it's my understanding, and you would know much better than I, I mean, that we have not fully solved that, that puzzle, that this stuff remains very hard and that often go wrong. I know everybody hears about CRISPR, but then I see startups telling me all the limitations of CRISPR, and we're only now getting—

CRISPR has become the catch-all for genetic engineering, right? Like, what I love about CRISPR is it, it kind of started the art of the possible, right? And so it's like, we can edit, we can knock things out, we can knock things in, but, you know, it's, it's a sledgehammer. It's, it's not precision editing the way it is. We have a couple of proprietary tools, and the, the two areas that we're focusing a lot of our time is what we call multiplex editing. So editing a lot of the genome at the same time. So we're not— we do use the knockout stuff where we knock out parts of the genome and the knock-in stuff, but it's highly disruptive. Sometimes it creates double-branded. So for the audience, you know, with DNA you've got kind of two things. It, uh, it, it causes sometimes more off-target effects.

The double helix sort of phrase goes a little funky.

It gets a little wonky. Yeah. So you got to get really specific. So what we've done a really good job at is coming at it from an AI perspective and a software perspective. And what I can tell you is we've made— we announced this in October of last year— we've made 300 edits in a Dunnart cell that are all over the low side. I mean, they're all over. They're not linear repeats. You can look at the number of edits people have made. And I love George, and he's very George Church. The number— I think the, the biggest number is 26,000 in a single cell line. That's George's record, but those are all linear repeats. Not to take away from George, but it's the same edit 26,000 times, right? Um, we've made 300 edits in a non-model species, being a fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial that are— that drive cranial facial shape from the thylacine. So it's ancient DNA. Never been done before, into a cell, never been done before, 300 times, never been done before, and delivered at over 90% efficiency. Never been done before. Some of the efficiencies that I'd say the general people are using even on the precision editing side is like 15%. So we've had to spend a lot of time and this is a— this to George's credit, it is a focus and funding issue. Right. And so, you know, we are not at the point that we can go like do a DNA synthesis of an entire chromosome and just stick it in a cell and call it a day. I think eventually we'll get there, but, you know, we've been able to— at Colossal, been able to drive, you know, 30+ edits from a multiplex editing perspective at a time at near 100% efficiency. No one's done anything— and I, I think that's why In-Q-Tel and other investors have invested in us, because of the genome engineering tools and capabilities that we've been doing. And then we've been able to synthesize, you know, about 3 times larger than anyone else has been able to synthesize and successfully put it into a species. So, to your point, getting the technologies do exist, but if you're getting 15% efficiency and having to do one at a time, that's gonna take, you know, you need like 5,000 people working 24/7 to, to get there, right? We, we've been really focusing on creating efficiencies in the tech and, I think that's where we shine. You know, I think at our core we're a genome editing company. Company.

Again, half Australian but also half Texan. I grew up in Houston.

Yeah, me too.

I know, I know. This is why— this is where I'm going. Um, you guys are based in Dallas, and this is not a knock on Texas, but you would almost definitely expect, for the, the level of science that you guys are doing, that this company would be in Boston or San Diego or Silicon Valley, where most of this type of talent— obviously CRISPR really grew out of Boston and or Berkeley, depending on which side you argue with.

Yeah, you're going to be on which side of that argument.

Yeah. But Dallas, how are you finding, how are you finding the scientists to, to do this type of work? It just wouldn't be the obvious place to be.

Yeah. You know, well, I'm from Texas, right? And I built 5 companies in Texas. I love Texas. You know, it's going to be hard to ever get me out of Texas. Is we do have a lab in Boston, we have 2 in Dallas, and then we have 1 in Melbourne, Australia. But ultimately, uh, you know, from a synthetic biology perspective, I would argue that this is the coolest synthetic biology— is the hardest, and it's the coolest synthetic biology project in the world. And, you know, I think most people have a choice to go work in academia and have to work on the things that they're getting granted and funded and sponsored research, option A. Option B, go start a therapeutic that's going to go through Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 clinical trials, or option 3, go work on yeast. So, so we, we are— our group here is very international. We have 170+ scientists. Most of them are in Texas, but most of them have been relocated to Texas. So, okay, we did have some Texas folks because, you know, we've got in Dallas specifically, we've got UT Southwestern, which is a top university and top— sorry, top research hospital. So we have recruited some out of there. But, you know, most of the people we have relocated and And, you know, I think that, you know, we've spent a lot of time and money on our labs, arguably one of the most advanced labs. Our new lab's coming online in June of this year, and it'll be like nothing else out there. I think you give people that environment and you give them the ability to work with all of these top Nobel laureates and scientists like George and Beth and Louva and others. And I think you create that environment of discovery that they can't get even in academia, and you put it on a timeline. That, you know, is significantly more aggressive than they would ever do in any other, any other world. Well, I, I think you're kind of creating this environment that's attractive to the scientists that really want to do something that, you know, makes history. And so recruiting to Texas has been, I think, a huge thing, uh, uh, for us. And, you know, Texas is a pretty, um, diverse, interesting place in the major metropolitan cities, maybe not so much in the rural cities, uh, maybe not as much as Midland as it is in Dallas, uh, Yes, but it's cool and it's working. You know, we, we, we aren't— people aren't saying we don't want to come to Colossal because we don't move to Texas.

Plus you've got queso and breakfast tacos.

Yeah, you got the— this is your two food groups. What else do you need?

Who could, who could turn it down? Okay. On the money question, you guys have raised a lot of money and yet you went from being a billion-dollar unicorn to a decacorn recently in terms of the valuation of the company. The look, you know, as far as like sellable products. Even if you get to 2028 with a woolly mammoth, it's not like this is, this is an iPhone that's gonna, gonna start generating a lot of revenue. I, it's impressive what you guys have done, and I know you've done spin-offs of some of the technology where, where that can become its own biotech company. But man, I mean, if I'm speaking just really honestly, this seems like Seems like an awesome thing to try and do, and that amazing science will come along the way to make the— to make everything close on, on venture capitalist funding. This— that seems much more difficult to me to, to actually get to some ends.

I mean, we were oversubscribed. We had one person, uh, and one group, TWG Global, that took the Series C, and we have 10 people that I met with at the World in Davos that are like Can we put in $200 million? Can we put in $100 million? Can we put in $500 million? So there's a—

because they think it's cool or like people see this as a revenue generating business.

It's a combination, right? And so I think that, you know, one, it is cool. Like, let's— we have to always say that, right? You know, it's like my first investor I talked to about it. I was like, you know, Mark, how many questions, how many deals are you in? And he said, I was like, how many of them do you talk about at the golf course? The answer was zero. Zero, right? And I was like, now you got one. So, um, uh, so, so different people have different reasons for coming into Colossal, right? But when you look at big institutional capital, they do need a return, right? And they are looking at return. We have a lot of funds in our deal, right? We don't have just rich humans, right, that are passionate about it. We do have those too, but we also have very big institutional funds that are, that are in the deal, are expecting returns. And, and so if you look at the business model, um, as it exists today, and we learn more every day, it's quite interesting, right? So we've got technology spinouts which don't create revenue revenue because we spin them out, we distribute the shares, but they create option value. Well, we've spun out 3 companies, 2 of which we've announced. A third one's valued at, you know, the first one's valued over $100 million. It's a computational biology company. The second one isn't valued at that quite yet, but it's in mid-eight figures. I think it'll get there. We've got 11 pilots on our plastic degradation company, another major existential problem that we need to solve. Our third one we haven't announced yet, but we've you know, it's valued over $100 million out of the gate based on what it's already achieved scientifically. Um, you know, our genome engineering tools, our technologies for, uh, artificial wombs, even the subsets, right? Like, so, so I'll give you a, a, a— it's a little tangent, but I think it's interesting. Um, you tell me if you don't think it's interesting, but even the, the Lego blocks before we get to a full-scale artificial womb are pretty powerful, right? So we've actually built a computer, uh, vision system that uses, uh, like the this hydrogel model and hydrofluidic system where we are able to keep non-model and model. So, uh, specifically mice, um, and then other, uh, non-model species, embryos healthier, better, and do a better morphological grade. Well, in IVF, they just do morphological grading. It's a pretty bad system, right? And so if you look at the number of people in the, in the, on the rise that are going through IVF, I went through IVF for my child. You know, uh, the system's kind of broken, right? And if you could increase more embryo viability and let them— some of the, the, uh, embryos that aren't the best morphologically on day 1 are not always compatible with life, uh, but some of the ones that aren't the best morphologically on day 1 end up being the best one. And they— and some women have to go through 2 or 3 rounds, and it's that third embryo that worked, right? But it— but that morphological state at the beginning and how it looked wasn't right. So we have a system to improve that, that could, that could revolutionize efficiencies for IVF across the world.

And so, and well, I totally get— look, I was reading up on you guys before this. Yeah, some of these startups that you've already announced, really interesting tools, and, and you guys are at the cutting edge of, of pushing this technology to its limits. So it makes sense that you're going to find, find things maybe that others haven't. There was part of me where I'm like, oh man, This is funding incredibly ambitious, semi-nuts, totally amazing startup with the promise of other more startups, right? And it becomes like this.

The startups are just option value, right? Which we think is pretty interesting. I do think the option values alone, if we do nothing else right, is pretty, pretty powerful. But going on to later stages in the business model and this assumed success, right? And we have these long-term investors is there is a lot of money in rewilding. Like, I mean, yes, it helps the world. It's pretty interesting. But if you look at the carbon market that's forecast to be up to $2.7 trillion and you now look at this rise of the biodiversity credits market, if you look at Lloyd's of London, if you look at TPG, not DWG, and their $8 billion fund, if you look at what PwC is doing and you look at all of kind of like where analysts predict, generally speaking, it's going to probably move towards a nature credit, which combines the parts that were broken in the carbon model and applies new models around biodiversity, which is highly trackable through eDNA and other things. Right. And so if you look at kind of that market and you look at, you know, not just regulatory reasons but social pressures on carbon negative, I mean, companies and global companies like Sumitomo Corporation, Exxon, GM, them, they, they are not going to become carbon negative. They're gonna become carbon negative through regulatory issues and social pressures due to buying carbon credits. And the highest trading credits, which we eventually think will be nature credits, will be— they are annuity-based systems. So a lot of these people are, are selling carbon credit annuity systems around the coolest stuff and the coolest projects out there. And right now a lot of those are like algae-based systems. I would argue mammoths are significantly better than algae.

And so, so Exxon buys like 10,000 woolly mammoths a year or something like that.

Right. I know it sounds crazy, but that is the world that it currently exists. It's not a future that we have to predict. It exists today. Right. And then when you do that in partnership with governments, right, that are gonna be driving ecotourism, carbon sequestration improvements to the land, you can build these public-private partnerships that are actually quite lucrative, right? So we've got 9-figure opportunities that are annual recurring revenue partnerships partnerships with several governments around the world, right? Like Colossal doesn't spend a trillion dollars a year, right? And so we get, we go from losing lots of money, creating lots of option value, being really cool as we both generally agree and inspiring people, helping nature to, oh wow, we're, you know, we've got, you know, $500 million in, in ARR, right? So, so there, I just be, I am a capitalist, right? I think you can create impact and create value at the same time. Now we also wanna inspire, so we get that magic triangle and this is perfect. But I, I, I do think that the long-term annuities from those government partnerships is pretty interesting. And then the next thing, this is what I spoke about at the World Economic Forum, is that, you know, countries are now calling us saying, hey, we're spending $20 million to save this critically endangered species. If everything works out, it's gonna cost us, us, you know, half a quarter billion to half a billion dollars, and it's going to take us 15, 18 years. We can come in because they're not self-selecting the sexes, right? They need breedable females. They can't engineer in genetic diversity, right? So they have to just kind of let nature play its course. Um, we can come in and we can shorten that 20, 25-year timeline to 3 years. We can do it for $50 million, um, and then get ongoing, uh, license fees to the And, you know, that for us is a pretty interesting business. And more importantly, it helps save the species, helps the country, whether that's ecotourism, national pride, whatever the reason is. And it also saves the country hundreds of millions of dollars that can go into conservation, education, other programs that help that country. So, you know, government contracts is also a new leading component of our model.

It's like a super fascinating way to think about it. I mean, the carbon credit stuff is already—

but you know, but you know, but you know about open source, right? And so, so think about applying open source to this, right? So open source, you know, you make— you become the best, you build the community, and you say it's free for everyone. So you can use our— any conservationist or government can use our tech for free. But just like in open source, you have what, you know, if you're like Microsoft off. You have people use the open source, you have your developers play around with it, and they're like, this is great, but now we have to go implement this for like Toyota. And so we don't want our people tinkering around with the open source code, we want to call the people that made it, like the Red Hats of the world, and say, we need you to go implement a $5 billion problem for us, even though it's available for free. That's cute, we really want the people that did it to do the work. And so it's, it's, it's applying that open source model to the tech. So anybody they can use our tech, but if you want us to then go implement resources on it, then obviously there's a cost.

I'm with you on how you're thinking about this. My— in my experience, the two things that seem to take the longest, that are, that are my favorite but that seem to take the longest, are biotech and aerospace. And anytime anyone gives me a date in aerospace, I add 4 or 5 years on.

That's generous.

Yeah. When I hear when I hear, you know, woolly mammoth by 2028, I have to be honest, in my head I'm thinking not, you know.

And that's okay, right? Like, like it's our— I believe that work is— a much smarter person than me said that, you know, work fills the time allotted, right? And so we're in the editing. We looked at the work, we said, how fast could we get there? And we're in the editing phase, right? So we're in the editing phase. We're not in the like, okay, say maybe we should figure out how to make a edit, right? So we have 65 gene targets, uh, we've already made 25 of them. They're stably integrated. Uh, I think by the end of this year we'll have over 1,000 edits in the thylacine. I mean, so we're making crazy edits. What I will tell you though, here's the bet I will make. I'll make a bet that says before 2028 we will have an extinct animal back. Uh, it won't be the mammoth, but I would bet that, you So where, based on where we are, before 2028, we'll see the world will see its first animal.

Just a small, oh, first mammal.

For, uh, first extinct animal.

Animal. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So something just with less, less genes to, to deal with. Yeah. Okay. Um, how, how much, we talked a lot about, about gene editing, you know, there, and I, there's this whole field of these things called iPSCs. They're these pluripotent stem cells. Let me take a crack at explaining it and then you can fix everything. But, but, you know, about 20 years ago or 15 years ago, this Japanese researcher named Yamanaka discovered these 4 proteins that they called transcription factors.

So they can—

yes, take a— take any cell, even take like a skin, a skin cell off, off an old, old animal, and you, you hit it with these transcription factors and it gets taken back to a stem cell, like the kinds of things people always hear about with embryonic stem cells, this natural, natural state. But you haven't had to— you haven't had to get an embryo. You've made it, you've made it in a lab. And then you can do all kinds of interesting things with these cells, although it's a science that's a work in progress. When I was reading about you guys, it seemed like at least— and please correct me— but it seemed like on the artificial Womb part, maybe these could come into effect where you're, you're having cells and turning them into placenta type cells or uterine cells. Um, tell me, tell me where iPSCs fit into this because that seemed like a second key part of the puzzle.

So one, just because I always, you know, I do want to make sure that it's clear that we also want to help conservation. Um, they're huge for conservation, right? So if you bank these induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs for them, the idea is using those transcription factors factors, you can create any, any type of cell, including, uh, gametes, so egg and sperm, right? So a process called gametogenesis. Harder than making like skin cells, but still, if you get the cocktails right of those transcription factors, you can make anything, including eggs. So I think, to my biobanking mantra right now, uh, we need to back up cells and we need to create iPSCs for all life.

So you're saying, just to break this down, you're If you get these cells from different animals and we biobank them, then we haven't perfected this quite yet. But in the future, you should be able to create a baby of any of those animals.

Yeah. So I think— but I think biobanking not just tissue samples and cells in population diversity, but also specifically then creating iPSCs for all of them is key. Right. And what it allows us to do is kind of two— is, I'd say, kind of threefold. One, been tested for tissue types. So we actually have, um, uh, hair organoids growing in the lab of mammoth hair, right? So we don't have to grow a mammoth to see if the hair is working, right? We don't have to go through this whole process and say, it's not hairy, what, what happened, right? So we, we can test the edits that we're making and then hyperlocalize that by creating in, in a petri dish these cells, and we can test the—

what's the organoid? It's, it's a bunch of hair cells growing in a petri dish?

It's like hair. It looks like cells that have hair grow. It's kind of gross and weird.

Okay.

Um, and, uh, it's exactly as you probably imagine it, right? Only probably less fluffy. Um, and so, uh, so you, so you can do that. The other thing you can do, to your point, is, um, what's great for us— my Exodev team will hate me saying this because it's a massive oversimplification, but But the, um, uh, the, we, the embryo does so much. It creates this awesome thing called the placenta. And I've never, it's probably my favorite thing in biology is the placenta because it, it's like right out of the movie Alien, right? It like bursts, it hatches. They literally call it hatching. It hatches out of this blastocyst and then it invades and it attaches. It's, it's like, it's literally like an alien, right? It invades into this like decidualized endometrial, like the uterine wall, right? And then it sucks the nutrients out and pushes the extra amount, does all the gas and oxygen exchange, right? And, and, uh, yeah, you got amniotic fluid and stuff, but, but, but it's all of that. What's great for us is we don't have to recreate that. Biology does that for us. And so we— this is the oversimplification that people would be very frustrated about— we just have to create that right environment, give it all the right signaling cues at every single stage of the Carnegie stages of development. That's kind of how we map development of a species or development of an animal to a, from a zygote to an animal. And then, and then, and then give it a uterine wall or synthetic uterine wall that wants to join, that it wants to join into. Right. And so it's, we, we as humanity have not been very successful yet at, at keeping organs alive for long periods of time. Right. And so, you've got, you know, Doris Taylor's on our advisory board, dude. She's done great stuff with ghost hearts and decellularization. And George and taking a more synthetic biology approach to try to, uh, uh, create an entire closed system with it. So you have different approaches and shots on goal on this, but, but we are good at keeping just tissue cell, just specific tissue cells alive, not the full organ structure. So this is where, uh, the iPSCs can come in handy is that we can make those uterine cells and just like you do heart grafting on like a stent or whatnot, we can graft on these very small microtubules that we 3D print. It. So, um, so that's pretty awesome. Uh, you also can use— so outside this, the growing, testing things like in vitro, in like cell, in, uh, in, in like labs of the, uh, uh, hair organoids or doing artificial womb type stuff, you know, we want to perfect, uh, gametogenesis. So like we work on the northern white rhino project. Well, they've gone in, uh, Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt and the BioRescue team has gone in and extracted, 18, uh, egg cells that they fertilized with the dead, uh, with Sudan, a dead male, the only, the last male's, uh, uh, sperm, and to create 18 embryos. But it's like, if we can just take those skin cells from the rhino, make iPSCs, and then, uh, derive, go through a process of gametogenesis, these egg cells, guess what? We have an endless supply of egg cells for northern white rhinos. That we can then either engineer in genetic diversity, we can fertilize, you create redundant populations, and you know, from an animal welfare perspective, you never touch the animal. You don't have to like anesthetize the animal and go in and, and extract egg cells like you do in humans. So this gametogenesis has to happen from iPSCs. So I think ultimately the biggest thing is for us to make egg cells, uh, for all of our species.

So, okay, all right, and And just a couple more questions for you. The, I mean, it's all so fascinating. The, I love talking about this.

So I, I, as much as you ever wanna talk about, I'm always up for a game.

Thank you. I mean, in the big picture, you guys must face, my head's just, you must face weird questions because yes. On the one, yes. Like on the one hand, it's humans who have caused a lot of this harm. I can also see that if you talk about what you're trying to do, this very same people who might be environmentalists and upset upset about what humans have done would then be some of your biggest critics or have the most concerns of, oh, and now you're geoengineering. You're— we're just— even if it worked out, it's— there's something— it's like, oh, those humans are, you know, doing weird stuff again. They're just going to complicate things. I mean, do you get where I'm going? Where, like, even You're trying to fix this problem that we've already made, but it's kind of weird and maybe you're just a mad scientist that's going to make it all worse. I'm sure you've heard something like that.

We've heard playing God. We've heard, why don't you just donate money for conservation? We've heard every version of it, right? And we have an attitude of, we're transparent about everything we can. We have this attitude that it's not our job to persuade anyone. It's just our job to educate. I think there needs to be 1,000 people trying to solve the biodiversity crisis. This is what we're doing, right? Like, I'm not saying that we're right. This is what we're doing. It seems to be working. And all of the tech that we're making for conservation is being applied to the 48 top conservation partners in the world, right? So if we were doing things wrong, I don't think we would, uh, be able to raise capital for conservation. We raised $50 million for our foundation. I don't think that we would have any conservation partners partnering with us, let alone some of these the top people in the entire world, right? Um, so I think that, that we're doing a lot of things right, and we're also showing very quick wins, like EEHV, like engineering marsupials to kill the cane toads in Australia, um, like the work we're doing on the induced pluripotent stem cells, uh, for, um, and, and genetic diversity in the northern white rhinos. So I think we're doing a lot of stuff right. But the, the biggest thing that I think we have done right on the whole critic point is that we ran towards critics. Like Lou Vidalin hated us when we launched the company, and he's the number one mammoth researcher in the world. Now he sits next to me every year at the Explorers Club dinner. We get most of our mammoth genomes from him. I talk to him all the time. Beth Shapiro, you know, National Academy of Science Award winner, HHMI, biggest ancient DNA lab in the world, number one person in the world in ancient DNA, left academia and joined us as Chief Science Officer. Massively bashed us when we launched the company, right? And so So I think the best thing that we've done is we run towards those critics and we're like, how could we do stuff better? Right? Like, you know, George said that bringing back mammoths will save the world. Lou Vidal said, no, it won't. And I'm like, cool, you guys are both smart. Let's go to dinner and talk about it because maybe George is too far left and maybe Lou is too far right. And guess what? They found a common ground that they agree on that it will be beneficial. They just had, they had different metrics of beneficial, right? So, so I, I think we've, the best thing that Colossal's done, I don't think is the stem cell reprogramming. Or productize, trying to productize the process of innovation. I think that, you know, us really running towards our biggest critics has been our secret sauce. You know, like that has been our attitude. Now there's going to— there's always people you can't please. And, you know, there's people like sometimes we get feedback from like a philosopher that's like, well, Gina, and, you know, in my, in my doctorate, in, you know, the doctorate that I got in like art history, 'Genome engineering isn't possible at that scale.' It's like, okay, well, that's not helpful because you don't understand genome engineering, right? But we, we get a lot of museum, uh, curators, right, whose job it is, is like to dust the formaldehyde off dead animals, and they say, 'Yeah, but, but, you know, induced pluripotent stem cells don't seem real to me.' It's like, right, well, that's not helpful feedback.

Kevin. And I would encourage people to Google you guys and do some of the reading about where you've, you've found some of the cells for things like that. The Tasmanian tiger is pretty fascinating to see, see how people actually manage to get some of these samples. I want to ask a more futuristic question though. So I would imagine you would If you were bringing back the woolly mammoth to the Arctic, you wouldn't— why do I— I'm sure you want to do this animal by animal, make sure nothing weird is going on with the, the first ones you make, but like at some point you don't want to just put one woolly mammoth up there by itself. You want it, you want it to have, you know, family and friends and, and go off to, to thrive in diversity so it can breed. Yeah, but like how, how do we know that if we drop 100 woolly mamas in the Arctic that they'll even know what to do to survive.

Yeah, so what's great is a lot of that's already programmed into their DNA, right? And so we have the same conversation about, you know, a fat-tailed dunnart is the size of a mouse, and a thylacine, as you know, is a wolf-sized marsupial. Uh, and so they're like, but how will it know how to eat? And it's like, well, you know, they're both carnivores. It's, it's actually baseline programmed And we've— there's been tons of studies on rewilding that shows if you reintroduce these species, they're not going to say, "No one taught me how to drink water. No one taught me how to kill an animal." And so, there is some of that work that's learned, but a lot of it is just programmed in. And so, we work with— so, on the elephant-specific work, so we work with a group in Botswana called Elephant Havens and we work with a group called Save the Elephants. In Kenya, and we're actually using AI and FLIR cameras and a bunch of tools to do, uh, uh, elephant migratory pattern research and understanding herd dynamics. Elephant Havens actually rescues, uh, orphaned elephants and, uh, and, and helps reestablish herds. And what's great about elephants is they're social animals. We would never make just one. And so they even adopt, sometimes elephants will adopt things like dogs and stuff like that into their herds. It's, it's quite incredible. And so for us, before we get to mammoths, before we get to thylacines, we want to spend that time, uh, not just on, uh, the ecological benefits, which we've talked about, but on the social care of the animals, right? So we're certified by American Humane, which is the oldest humane organization in the world. Very hard to get that. Um, and so we work with them on, on how do we do this in the best way. We work with the rewilding groups that have done it in like Yellowstone with wolves and others. But then we also like work on a species by species basis. So we go to Botswana, we work with them, we provide technologies with them, our teams work with them, and we're like, okay, how do we build tech that makes it better for you to understand elephant social cues and rewilding orphan elephants to rebuild herds? And then great, that helps elephants today, but also selfishly, it, it teaches us how do we engineer those herds, uh, uh, inorganically in, in, in Mammuth. So a lot of the conservation work has a dual purpose. Of helping today, but also applying as insights so that we can be better in the future. Like they did this with the California condors. They've, they've done it enough. Much smarter people than us have done it with animals in field, and we rely a lot on that expertise, and we've gone and partnered with those people early. So we're not just going to get to elephants and put them together and hope for the best.

Oh, I would hope not. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Yeah, most people don't realize this, the work and the science is really hard. All of the rewilding stuff, all the working with indigenous people groups and private landowners and working with conservation groups, that is just as much work as the science here. And I think people just think of us as the folks in the lab doing it, but that's literally half the battle.

All right, I'm going to let you go in one second, but not before you tell us about the Explorers Club. It's been around for a long time, all kinds of interesting people in it. Um, how did you— well, please explain what, what it is and how you got involved and, and your— give me, give me your, your best exploit.

Yeah, so I'm, I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club. It's one of the old— it's the oldest exploration club. Uh, it's very well known for its flag expeditions. So all of the biggest like world exploration moments, like the bottom of the Marianas Trench, going to space and the Moon, uh, you know, like Buzz Aldrin carried our, our flag to the Moon, uh, the top of Everest, Shackleton, North Pole, South Pole, um, all of those, uh, exploration feats were made by exploration, uh, by Explorers Club members. Um, I got interested in it because I'm very passionate. I travel a lot, both personally and professionally, um, for this job and previous jobs, and I, I love expeditions, I love science, I love nature, so I I did some work on pre-Incan civilizations that was very interesting and not to get into like the Graham Hancock world of interesting, but like one step closer to reality than that.

I'm pretty into the Graham Hancock.

No, I am too. No, I am too. I look, I love Graham and, but there are some pretty interesting things in some pre-Incan civilizations I think in the next, you know, hopefully 10 years that will come out that, that predated them. I did some work on that, you know, in the field. Um, and I was sharing that once and a friend of mine, Richard Garriott, cuz you know, I owned a gaming company that I sold to Zynga.

Super interesting guy.

He started Origin. So I used to, he started Origin Systems and, you know, basically invented, if you don't know, Richard invented Lord British, invented, uh, massive multiplayer gaming, right? Like that was him.

And so he's the, I always think of him as like who Ready Player One was kind of based on.

Yes.

I did.

100%, right? And he's the first commercial astronaut and went to the space station. He's just awesome. Like everything's just awesome about him. And so we have a passion for exploration and going on these adventures, right? Like we always say that an expedition is just an adventure with purpose. And so, and so I, I, I was familiar with it and I was talking about this Incan thing that I did. Head, and I was very passionate about it. And I, and he and I were catching up because we'd both known each other, both from Austin. We're having cocktails and he's like, you should really get involved. And I was like, I just don't have time. I'm on the board of the Planetarium Society, I'm on board all this. I was like, I'm actually trying to get off things. And he's like, listen, just come to the club. So I went to the club in New York, the, the main headquarters, and sat around the bar, heard all, and people were going on these crazy expeditions. And I was like, I, I do need more of this in my life, right? It's all about scientific discovery. It's all about expeditions and it's all about adventures. It's like, it's, it's as close to like Indiana Jones. It's like the, if you could create a club of Indiana Jones, that's what we got here, right? And so, and so I wanted to do it and he asked me to do it. I got involved, I got super involved, and then they, they asked me to, they started the board of trustees. To oversee the board and oversee the general long-term strategic direction. Board of Trustees don't transition out, and, uh, asked me to be an inaugural member. Um, and, uh, and yeah, and ever since then I've just been more and more involved. And by the way, the club's awesome. Um, it's great.

Okay, when do we get to come film people telling stories at the bar, and when do we get to film from you and Richard taking me on an expedition.

Wait, I'm serious. Let's, let's connect offline. So the ship— so do you remember when the Shackleton ship, uh, was discovered?

So yeah, well, and I've, I read the book about that, that—

and so that's— so, so that's— Shackleton is Richard's favorite. So Richard's one of my best friends, and Richard, um, CEO of the Explorers Club, uh, and, uh, Richard is, uh— so we were supposed to go on that. And then Richard couldn't go 'cause of COVID I wasn't like, well, I don't wanna go spend 5 weeks at sea with complete strangers. At least I was at Richard there and, and it was gonna be a fun boondoggle. And so, uh, so I didn't go 'cause Richard didn't go. And then we're both sponsors of the trip. Then, uh, they got, my wife told me, he's like, they got stuck in the ice. She'd be freaking out. So they got stuck in the ice. I was like, oh my gosh, I'd be totally freaking out. Well, then they broke free and then they found it and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so So sad.

I, I, I, it's FOMO.

Yeah. It's the most, it's the most FOMO when they found the Endurance. It was like the most FOMO moment ever. I mean, I'm happy for society and the, the team and, but I was like, man, I could have been there. And so, yeah. So what we should do is we should go, we'll meet for drinks in New York at, at the club and then we should do some stuff. It'll be fun.

Okay. A TV episode was born. Ben. Ashlee Vance, thank you so much for your time. As I'm like a huge animal softie, I'm sure there's gonna be people who listen to this and think, you know, it's weird and maybe a bad idea or something. But I, I find, you know, with climate change, um, in particular, well, look, the long history of what humans have done to animals and then what we see happening with climate change with, with just species getting wiped out on such a massive scale, I think it's like the saddest thing because we can do whatever we want to ourselves, but it's especially sad when there's this collateral damage of things that are alive and pretty awesome. So, you know, this one, I don't know, this resonated with me because if nothing else, like you're talking about, if we get the tools to make a seed bank type thing, whether we see a woolly mammoth or not, I think that would be cool, but I I think if you had the seed bank type idea where maybe we become a better species at some point and we can bring all this stuff back, we should put that in place. And so, so anyway, it's cool to see a group that has raised this much money is like this energetic about doing this type of science to see what's possible. And, and yeah, anyway, so thank you. Thanks for the time. And, and it's just just, you know, fascinating stuff.

Yeah, thanks for talking about it. You ask great questions. This is fun.

Oh, thanks, man. Um, okay, we'll, we'll meet again on an adventure.

On an adventure at the Explorers Club.

This episode was hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. Our guest today was Ben Lamb. Core Memory is Produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme music is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland, and our episodes are edited by Jon Sortland.