How AI Is Helping Solve Extinction w/ Ben Lamm | EP #53

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By Granger for the ones who get it done. A billionaire comes to you and says, listen, I want to bring back the dinosaurs. How the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back? What does it mean to de extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place?

We're not trying to clone these animals. We are de extincting lost genes that that produce these physical attributes that no longer exist in that species.

You're bringing back an extinct species? After having been in AI and software coding and such, we believe we'll have.

Our first calves by early 2028. We are on track for that.

This is the technology that can bring back extinct animals. But then you come in as a for profit entrepreneur and go from zero, the numbers still blow me away to 225 million in a couple of years.

I think I'm insatiably curious, right? And I like to learn this is.

The difference that the right CEO and entrepreneur can make for a moonshot. On this episode of Moonshots and Mindsets, I'll be speaking with Ben Lam, an extraordinary CEO whose moonshot it is to bring back animals who are extinct. We'll hear about which animals he's bringing back, what his timeline is, how he raised $225 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. To do this in just two years time, it's incredible lessons for any moonshot entrepreneur out there. All right, let's jump in everybody. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with an incredible entrepreneur and a dear friend, someone who blows my Mind and the difference that a single individual can make in taking on a massive moonshot. Ben Lam, how you doing, buddy?

I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah. No, this is going to be a fun show. First of all, full disclosure, I'm an advisor to this company. Bold Capital, is an investor in this company. But then again, I love working with amazing CEOs and those, especially taking on great moonshots. Let's begin, Ben Lam, with what is your moonshot? What is Colossal's moonshot? Because it really is epic.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's restoring the past and for a better future. Right. And so fundamentally, Colossal is the world's first de extinction company, focused on de extincting a couple of core, iconic, charismatic creatures back to the world and then also building technologies for human health care and species preservation and conservation.

And we'll get into those. But I mean, a moonshot of bringing back extinct animals. You know, years ago I had this conversation about having an X prize, like, let's have an X prize to bring back. Back then it was the dodo. But your moonshot here has bridged three species, and I may try and squeeze out of you how many more species you're working on, but it's pretty awesome. I mean, as they would say, what could possibly go wrong? But let's get to that a little bit later. A moonshot of bringing back extinct animals. Let's start with the origin. People who are listening to this who have their own moonshots, which by definition are crazy ideas before an entrepreneur actually makes them real. We're going to talk through the story of where this began, how you've gotten this funded, where it is, what the timeline is, what the difficult parts have been. So you've been an entrepreneur over and over again. Actually, you haven't been an entrepreneur in the biotech industry, which is. This is squarely faced in.

This is a new category for me. Right. But it's a systems problem. Right. And so, like, whether, you know, my background's been in mostly software, some space hardware, but for the most part, software. And most software problems are systems problems. So looking at a challenge or an issue, whether it's AI, whether it's in space or critical infrastructure or even a video game, and looking at like, building a system. And weirdly enough, you know, de extinction is a systems problem. You have to build and take a systems mindset to solving it.

So it didn't scare you to go after this, even though you had no biological Background. I mean, you probably knew what DNA was in rna, but you're bringing back an extinct species after having been in AI and software coding and such. But let's get to that first. Let's go to the origin story here. So, I mean, you weren't just walking around thinking about bringing back the woolly mammoth, which is your iconic first species. How did this get going?

Well, you know, like, I think I'm insatiably curious, right? And I like to learn. And I've always just done a great job, I think, of surrounding myself with much smarter, you know, women and men than me to work on these projects, right? Like, in my last business, like, I didn't build any software that went into satellites, right? Like, I had incredible teams to do it. I knew how to help them and help inspire them and direct them on where we should go. But fundamentally, it was them that did the incredible work. And I called George because I was really interested on the intersection. George Church, arguably the father of synthetic biology, and I would argue, not only one of the smartest people on the planet, but actually one of the funniest. And so, you know, George, so you get this, but, like, a lot of people just look up to George as this incredible industry titan and kind of leader in the field of genomics and kind of like father of synthetic biology.

Sort of a godlike figure with a beard and hair to match.

He looks like Moses, he looks like. But he's also, like, amazingly funny. And so I reached out to George because I was very curious, and I wanted to know where AI, where automation, where opportunities could lie in the intersection of software and synthetic biology and kind of this next revolution that I thought was coming. And that conversation lasted maybe 10 minutes. And then I'm curious, and I have George Church on the phone, and I was like, well, what else are you working on? And he started to tell me all these other things that he was working on in his incredible labs, working on in everything from kind of like neural regeneration to combating climate change to food security. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is like. This is like the chocolate factory of innovation and amazingness. And then he kind of ended the call with, oh, I'm working to bring back woolly mammoths to restore the degraded ecosystem of the tundra and also build technologies to help elephants and maybe other extinct species. And then he was like, I have to go to my next meeting. And I was like, you just dropped this most amazing thing on me ever. And so I stayed up all night. And then I saw it was kind of like the end of like, you know, Signs or the Sixth Sense where you have this like M. Night Shyamalan moment where I'm like, oh my gosh. Like every article I'd read about George, I didn't see this through line of the mammoth. But then when I went back and started reading and listening to podcasts, I just saw how there was this through line. No matter what he was talking about, the mammoth kept surfacing. And a week later I was in his lab and I was like, I have to go pursue this.

Amazing. So those who don't know George Church, he's a professor of genomics at Harvard. He has probably started 50 plus companies and has a dozen unicorns, number of them public. I mean, he's one of the most prolific entrepreneurs and one of the sweetest good hearted individuals on the planet.

He's amazing and I feel insanely lucky to be co founder with him. But I think I do monopolize probably more of his time because he's so excited. Yeah.

This is an important point for entrepreneurs out there who are looking at their moonshots. You brought a set of skills to this as a great CEO, as a systems thinker, as an entrepreneur. But not having the biological background didn't scare you off.

No, it did scare early investors off. I think it was your text and a handful of others that inspired me. But we talked to some folks now that actually that we have great relationships with, I won't say who that did not invest early. And their early feedback was like, you don't have a postdoc from George's lab. You have zero science people on the team at the time that we put this deck together and they're like, you actually haven't even signed a research agreement with George's lab or Harvard. And we're like, yeah, yeah, but we're going to figure all that out.

There was a lot, there was a lot of insert miracle, believe in Ben here type stuff early on. I remember that I want to give people a. Just to jump ahead a little bit because to understand how epic you are and this company. So you meet George in 2019.

We met first in 2019 and then there was a small. We kept emailing because there was a small pandemic that took up a lot of our 2020.

I'll never forget having George was speaking to my Abundance Platinum group over video during the pandemic and he's like, yeah, I manufactured my own vaccine and I took it myself in the. That's George.

He showed up once on Zoom because we weren't working on colossal during 2020. But he showed up once on Zoom with this helmet on that had these filtration things and he's like, I'm just testing this out, but you should buy one. I think I actually did.

So 2019, you meet with him, you start incubating this conversation. Colossal as a company starts when?

2021. So about May of 2021 I decided I want to go do this. I want to do this full time. I brought in a new CEO and it was hard for me, right, because I never let go of the reins of a company I was running.

You were running what company?

At that time I was running Hypergiant, which was an AI company focused on critical infrastructure, space and defense. And I brought in, we're 150, 160 people working with the US government and a couple of other big companies. And you know, I had to like hand that over, you know, to a new CEO, which was great. And the guy in Mike's done a great job taking over that. And I, so I like recruited a guy that known for 10 years to take over. And I think everyone thought I was a little nuts because I was, yeah, I'm going to go work on this William company. But it's definitely not competitive.

No, it's not. So that's 2021 a couple of years ago. And today, just for people to understand the epic journey that has been on, Ben has raised how much money at what valuation, Ben?

So we've raised $225 million to date. The valuation right now post is around 1 billion 5. We have four labs including one in Australia and we have 112 full time people with about 90% of those people being scientists. And then we fund 30 postdocs around the world in our advisors labs and we've about 60 scientific advisors.

All right, so you know, that's the right back at you. To those who didn't invest early on, I mean.

No, no, they were fair. I mean but in fairness it's like.

Yeah, it was a crazy moonshot.

Moonshot. No. Yeah. And look, we like I do believe that animals may be coming sooner than people think, but we don't have a mammoth in the house. So you know, for their sake they're probably like eh, yeah, we haven't seen a math yet either.

But I just want you know what's extraordinary because I'm in the venture business through Bold, which is one of the investors in the last couple of rounds and we, you know, I work on getting my Own companies funded. And while you're out there raising, you know, your last round, 150 million or thereabouts at a 1.3, 1.4 pre billion pre money, everybody else is having a hell of. For a de extinction company, everybody else is having a hell of a time raising money for a normal company. I just want to point out this is the extraordinary power of an amazing CEO. And I've said this to you before, Ben and George agrees with you. You're one of the best CEOs I've seen out there. And I'm going to want to analyze that a little bit of what you think makes you successful in this realm. But we'll, we'll get to that. So De Extinction Company, you start off with the woolly mammoth. How the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back? What does it mean to de extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place?

Yeah, so. So we're not trying to clone these animals, which I think is a really important, you know, distinction because we don't have living cells. We have frozen cells and we've got, you know, dead cells and we can do the genomic sequencing, but it's massively fragmented DNA. So we actually have to assemble a genome and then compare it to a reference genome to kind of fill in those gaps from its closest living relative. In the case of the mammoth, that's the Asian elephant.

So George, George has been on a multitude of expeditions into the tundras of.

What, into Siberia, and actually extracted DNA from frozen mammoth tissues with Ariana Hussili, our head of biological sciences here at Colossal.

So you go and you're digging and you find these giant tusks and you find this hairy large elephant. And where's the DNA? Is it in the hair follicles, in the skin? Is there like a dead mosquito in amber someplace that you're.

Yeah, you cannot get. The question comes up quite a bit. Amber is very porous and it does not preserve. The two biggest questions we had, we do not. We cannot get DNA from mosquitoes or anything in amber or. And we can't get anything from the La Brea tar pits because heat and acid is also not good for your. For ancient DNA preservation. But you know, mostly in, in tusk and in teeth. Those are two places where the DNA is very well preserved and it's mostly endogenous DNA versus it hasn't been you corrupted by like on the flesh and whatnot. Even that part that's fleshy, you know, that's been corrupted by like Microbes and bacteria and other things over the last, like, 5,000 years.

And so when you go and you grab the DNA from this animal, that's now what, typically 10,000 years old.

Most are about 10,000 years old.

Are you able to get a single continuous sequence?

You aren't. So you get fragments. It's kind of like confetti. And then you have to get these short reads. There's not. There's a couple of kind of decent long reads out there. And what's amazing about this is for us to build our reference genome for the mammoth, we actually had to use 54 mammoth genomes. Some of those we got that were published by other great researchers. Some of those were from George. And then one of those, we have a great partnership with Luva Dahlin at the University of Stockholm, who's arguably one of the number one. He's not trying to. He's not a geneticist, but he's one of the number one people in the world that just looks at mammoths and studying mammoths and. And their DNA. And so building this, like, international coalition of collaborators has been really key to the speed at which we've been able to move.

Right. So you get all of these short read segments and they sort of overlap and you're putting together like a puzzle.

Yeah.

And at the end of the day, you're comparing it to elephants today. What's the closest living relative to the woolly mammoth?

The Asian elephant's the closest. It's 99.6% the woolly mammoth. Genetically, it's actually closer to a mammoth than an Asian elephant is to an African elephant, which sometimes blows my mind that mammoths were closer genetically than they are to African elephants. But even though Asian elephants and African elephants exist today, there was no reference genome. Then we had to go separately and go build a reference genome for those. And then you have to go through, like, cites and import permits just to get. Because these are. Some of. These are endangered animals that you have to then go work with and then build a reference genome that then you can compare to. So it's not like we could just go do this, then compare. So then there's a. Then there's a mountain of work just to build the reference genome to compare to.

So you're taking an Asian elephant and you're sequencing it. Right. I mean, you can get the blood samples, you can get the. Just like today, you can sequence. You know, a human genome was 3.2 billion letters from your mother and your father. And, you know, back when Craig Venter Sequenced his genome. It was $100 million and nine months to get his genome. And now we have human reference genomes and I think the number's down to like seven hours and 200 bucks for a human genome. Pretty amazing.

It is amazing. It's not quite telomere to telomere. Like the reference genomes that we are used, that we are building for our species are that next level. So it's more in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars of work, but it's not 50 million or a billion like it was before.

So you've got a reference genome for an Asian elephant that's 99.6% similar to mammoth and African.

And we also did African elephant recently, we just released.

And so your job now is to find that point of 4% and do what? Make the edits in the Asian elephant genome?

Well, it's a great question, but we're not trying to bridge the 4%. What we're really trying to do is understand what were the genes that differed in that 4%. So not trying to bridge that 4% or fill it in like in Jurassic park, they're trying to fill in the gaps. We aren't trying to do that. We're just trying to say of that 4% that's different or sorry, 0.4% that's different. You know, what were, what were the genes that, that we could associate with the phenotypes or physical attributes of the woolly mammoth. Right. And so because they lost them in some evolutionary path that, that rose to Asian elephants. Right. So that's like the curved ties, some of the cranial facial morphology and then obviously the shaggy coat that we, we think about. And so really identifying which genes do what in comparison in what's missing and also what's present in the mammoth genome that's not in the Asian alpha genome.

So how many actual phenotypes are you trying to, is there a list? Like, you know, these are the priorities. Like if we make these changes. We've got a woolly mammoth, but yeah, it's not really woolly mammoth, it's close to, it's a facsimile of a woolly mammoth. It's in you.

Yeah, yeah. Some people have different perspectives on this. Like some people say, well technically it's a cold tolerant Asian elephant that's been edited with mammoth alleles to produce phenotypes that were once extinct and a hair transplant. Yeah, yeah, we're not going to say any of that. We're just going to say like for us if it serves the ecological. Ecological components of why we're doing it. And if we de. Extinct the core genes that make a mammoth a mammoth, then we just call it a mammoth. Right. We may call it the colossal mammoth, mammoth 2.0. We're still working on, like, branding, nomenclature. But to your point, it's not a direct clone, right? It's. It's not really a hybrid or some people call it a chimera. It's not a chimera. It is. We are de. Extincting lost genes that produce these physical attributes that, you know, no longer exist in that species. And so I think that we are, because of the targeted nature of our approach, it does make it easier than, you know, making a million changes. But, you know, I think it's also a pretty smart way to think about the engineering efforts versus trying to go overboard. So, yeah, there's a list. There's about, you know, five or six core phenotypes that we, that we think you need not only to resemble a mammoth, but also to make cold tolerance at the level that we want.

Amazing. So you make those edits using CRISPR technology.

So what I love right now about the world is that everybody knows what CRISPR is, but then it's also become a catch. All right, so like, CRISPR is now like the catch all for genetic engineering, right? Where people are as you know, Peter, there's a million different tools. You know, there's recombinases, there's talens, there's. There's crispr, there's single nucleotide edits, prime editing, base editing. Like, there's all these things, right? And as you pointed out, I'm not a biologist or geneticist, but what I've learned.

You play a damn good one on tv.

Well, I'm very curious about. So I try to learn, right. George says I, I. The. The nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, maybe in my life is that George said I'm one of the best students he's never had. So I'll take that as a. As a. Is a. From George. I think it's a big compliment. And. But so what's interesting is like, different. We are using different tools, including crispr, based on the need. So in some cases, there are knockouts that are needed where CRISPR is a great, great fit. Other cases we're doing, you know, base editing or changing these individual letters on that kind of DNA ladder. And in some cases, when there's a gene with like, a lot of edits, we'll actually synthesize that entire piece and then just do a complete swap. So will put in a big chunk of DNA swapping out what's there. Different species have different needs. We're doing way more DNA swaps on the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine project because there's more genetic divergence than there is on the mammoth project. There's more edits required to make a thylacine than there is to make a mammoth. We have this cluster of tools, including.

Crispr, that we're using, so I find that fascinating. At the end of the day, you're bringing back a woolly mammoth like species, but it's new. I want to hit on one point that I want everyone listening to hear, because it's really important. We already hit on the point that you didn't have the bio background, but you had great experience as an entrepreneur, as a systems thinker, as a fundraiser, as someone who's able to aggregate an amazing team and focus it. What most people don't know is how long has George been working on bringing back the woolly mammoth? When did he first start thinking about this?

So it's been about. I guess now it's been about 10 years. So nine or 10 years he's been working on it. And the only money he was able, as you pointed out, he's not out there raising capital, he's out there really innovating. But the only money that went to this was Peter Thiel, who's not a colossal investor, but Peter Thiel donated $100,000 to George's lab. And so can I tell you one weird, funny story about this? So when I was on the second call with George about the mammoth, and I was talking to George and I asked the question, which, in hindsight, it's really funny now, but you'll notice the frame of mind at the time, I was like, george, so how much money do you need to bring back a mammoth? And he said, well, you know, we. Well, we've raised 100. And I literally, like, I got sick to my stomach because I was already in love, right? So I put my. I literally sat my phone on my desk in my house, put on speaker, because I saw. It's your church. You still got to listen. But I'm like, okay, it's. I mean, I guess it would take $100 million. I could see that. Like, I know how technology works. And I was like, racking my brain, and I was like. And then I was like, dude, can I raise $100 million for this? I've raised $100 million. Before, can I do that? And so, so I went through this, like while I'm talking to George, I'm like having this like existential mini crisis. Like, how do I pull up raising $100 million for amen? And then, and then he's like, yeah. And then that's like, you know, we're doing it over, you know, 10 years, so that's only $10,000 a year. And I was like, wait, I'm so sorry, how, how much money have you has been doing this? And he's like, $100,000. Like, how much money do you need to do this just to get to like an embryo? And he's like, well, there's a lot to it. But he's like, you know, probably, you know, something more like, you know, 20 million. We can make a lot of progress and get really close. And I was like, then I was like, okay, cool, I can get there, right? I could wrap my brain now, ironically, fast forward to today. We have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and we'll be probably raise more money. And so ironically, my initial fear became my reality later.

So I want to point out this has been an idea for nine or ten years. 100,000 was brought in. There was a nonprofit started by some amazingly good hearted individuals to try and do this.

Stuart and Ryan.

Yeah, Stuart Brand and Ryan. But then you come in as a for profit entrepreneur and go from zero, the numbers still blow me away, to 225 million in a couple of years. And the team in place, the technology in place and so forth. And for folks listening, this is the difference that the right CEO and entrepreneur can make for a moonshot, right? It is nothing changed. You know, it wasn't a miracle inserted here. It was the right individual telling the right story. When you get to the story, because people say, well, what the hell is their business model? What are you gonna do? Like a pet, woolly mad.

I think that. But I do think that passion and conviction is key. And one of the things that I wrestled with is I actually wrestled pretty hard with hypocrisy in this deal, which I want to explain because I think it's really important. I feel like I can't speak for every entrepreneur, especially every technology entrepreneur, but I have said a thousand times, probably in fundraising meetings, I want to change the world. I want to make an impact. And as you know, most companies, if they're successful, get acquired or go public or whatever, and they may create great returns and innovate in the field, but not all of them really have a chance to make this lasting impact. And so I felt like I was going to regret it for the rest of my life. And I was going to be a hypocrite to myself if I didn't pursue this. Because George Church just served up on a silver platter an opportunity to really build a great, cool business, build advance incredible technologies that can help, you know, humankind as well as help conservation. And all I had to do was go, go try. That's all I had to do. I was like, I had to go, at least go try. And if I didn't do it, like, I don't feel like I really had a choice because I felt like the rest of my life I'll be like, you're a hypocrite. You can't ever say again that you want to go really try to change the world or make a difference because you were given the opportunity. This wasn't my idea. This was given to me and I had to pursue. I didn't really have a choice.

Amazing. I want to hit on a couple of. A couple of points here. The environmental side of this. You know, we've talked about this. In fact, we've got a $100 million gigaton carbon removal X prize. And you were saying, you know, we're going to enter a colossal into that. So what is the connection between the woolly mammoth and the environment? Can you explain that?

Yeah. So George, and this, I think, does a great job of teeing into the business model too. Right. Because George's original pitch to me, as we kind of like started to peel back the onion, was there's more carbon and more methane stored in the Arctic tundra than anywhere else on the planet. Way more than the rainforest, way more anywhere. And it just piles up year after year. It's about 1.6 trillion metric tons, which is about double what's in the atmosphere. And even more methane, which is about 30 times worse in the atmosphere. So George is, you know, thesis which is proven. You know, I've now been to the Arctic and I've been with the Army Corps of Engineers in the permafrost tunnels and actually been in the inside of the permafroston walked above it. And they have shared with me, if this all melts, humanity's in a lot of trouble. And so. So George is. So this has been a concern of George's for a long time. We talk about this 1.5 degree tipping point. But what's interesting is George teamed up with some folks, some incredible folks. Nikita in Siberia, outside of Church Key and they created something called Pleistocene park where they've actually published in eight or ten peer reviewed papers have come up in scientific journals showing that the reintroduction of cold tolerant fauna back at the right biodiversity levels and density levels back into the Arctic tundra and the removal of these low carbon yielding carniferous trees that this extremely dark bark, they're not efficient at carbon at carbon sequestration they actually are almost like heat lightning rods. Then permeate said the removal of the trees which they've done with bulldozers and tractors and the reintroduction of these muskox and bison and others they've actually shown that they've been able to lower ground temperatures by up to 8 degrees and sustain them which is incredible in mammoths. And this is going into George's theory is that mammoths could be an accelerator to that because they're also herding animals, they're also major herbivores. They do a great job of that nitrogen oxygen cycle in the summer months of permeating out the Arctic grasslands. But then in the winter months they also love to knock down. Elephants are notorious for knocking down trees. There's incredible documentaries and published papers out there showing that they actually know they actually African forest elephants in particular knock down trees that are low carbon yielding. It's so weird. It's nature is just amazing. It's incredible. And so that combination, you got these natural bulldozers, you've got these natural herbivores and then their migratory patterns actually help to get rid of that insulation layer in the snow and pack the snow so that the winter months, that cold winter air can actually help get closer to the ground. So it starts at a colder temperature going into the summer months. So it for so less actually thaw.

So these are, these animals are like 12ft high. 8 ton.

Yeah. Giant animals. Yeah, they're big. Most, most people think that when they think woolly mammoths a lot of times I think people think of the straight test elephant or they think of you know, the Colombian mammoths and a few of these other species that end up being a little bit bigger. But most, most of woolly mammoths were about the size of African elephants today. Which, which you know sounds small but if you see an African it's, it's, it's a massive animal and they need.

To be cold tolerant which is part of the changes you're making because you're not going to take an elephant, African elephant and move it up there.

So, so what's interesting about that is we're not just doing the shaggy coat, but we're also doing the subcutaneous fat layer. And then there's other things that are kind of like what I, what we kind of joke internally. They're like beneath the hood that no one actually sees, like trip B3 and like it's there. It like, like they actually, and it's not just mammoths, but like caribou, polar bears, some wolf species actually have this where they produce hemoglobin at a different rate and a different ability. So they can actually produce oxygen at sub freezing temperatures. Like we can't. At negative 40, we don't have our blood crystallizes. We can't, we can't breathe at that temperature. But they actually can because of how their hemoglobin works. And the same thing goes for nerve endings. Our nerve endings would just be fried. Their nerve endings are actually different than ours due to some of these, some of these genes. So yeah, so there's under the hood stuff that we're doing. But actually elephants are more temporal, are more temperate than people think. One of our partners in Canada actually has Asian elephants, which people think are just, you know, tropical species. And we've been up there with them and we have videos of them actually breaking through the ice, swimming in frozen lakes, rolling around in the snow, you know, and those are like sub freezing temperatures, but those aren't minus 40. But, but elephants are pretty tolerant species that people don't think of.

So you raised $225 million, a large chunk of it, from an amazing investor, entrepreneur, industry magnate. Thomas Tull. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Thomas. Thomas Tull as well as his fund usit are both our largest investors and we're very, very grateful to Thomas.

And he's in the movie business.

So Thomas is actually a technologist. And you know Thomas, you've met Thomas, but he's most known for Legendary Pictures, which was actually weirdly a movie studio, but it was actually technology driven. So they actually built, they actually used a lot of technology in terms of like how people are. Like, how did Legendary have so many hits? They actually had technology and models around what they wanted to go produce. And so, you know, Thomas is very passionate, not just about, you know, movies, but also science and technology and also education. And he does feel that like us chronicling this story and sharing it with the world will help educate and inspire the next generation of people that could want to grow up and be a scientist.

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Yeah, we have successfully achieved induced pluripotent stem cells in elephants, which is a feat in itself, which I can explain why it's interesting. We have narrowed down our gene list to about 60, 65 gene genes that we're editing. We've established cell lines and we're in the editing process. So we've already edited about 20 different genes and we're doing functional assays, ensuring and testing and whatnot. And then the big key thing that we've done from a systems approach perspective is that we've parallel path all the different components. Right. So I think a lot of people would have Done the computational analysis, then done the gene editing, then wanted to work on creating induced pluripotent stem cells, then worked on somatic cell nucleotransfer. We actually have an entire embryology lab that's just working on cloning in a lot of other non model organisms, non model organisms out there, other than mice and pigs, so that we are the most proficient at it. So that when we have those embryos, we can do that cloning step. We have an entire animal husbandry team that's working with elephants in Africa and here in the States. And so for us, you know, we're well on our way. We believe we'll have our first calves by early 2028. We are on track for that. The biggest hurdle is it's a 22 month gestation. So I mean, we'll have embryos before.

Moms who are listening to this. You know, imagine carrying your embryo for 22 months, you know, three times the length of a typical.

But a thylacine is only 13 and a half days. Isn't that crazy?

That is insane. 13 and a half. You can barely do anything in 13 and a half days. Yeah.

What's crazy is that a thylacine, which is a wolf sized marsupial.

We're going to come back. Let's come back to that in a moment.

I get excited about the gestational process.

So I'm going to put a pin in the woolly mammoth here and we're going to come back to more of this conversation. But it's not just the woolly mammoth you're bringing back, and I think that's important. This began as a single dream, a single moonshot from George. But once the technology exists and the mindset, and now the capital and the team, there's a lot of extinct animals out there and people have been aggregating genomes. So I know there's a lot you can't speak about. How many can you speak about?

So we, so we publicly announced we're working on the mammoth, the thylacine and the dodo. Right. The dodo is our first avian species. We get a lot of people pinging us about all kinds of extinct species. You know, imagine why we get the dinosaur question. We get it all right? And so, so for us, you know, those are three massive teams that are focused and then, you know, we are doing exploratory research on other species. But the biggest thing for us is really kind of combining which species we should do with, why we should do it. There's some cool species that have been brought up to us. But why would we ever do that? What's the impact of that? There's other people pursuing de extinction on species that are great, but they don't have the same impact that we think they should have. So we're not pursuing them.

All right, let's hit the thylacine first.

We can only hit the three. Yeah. But there may be more in the works.

All right, there are more in the works.

You just can't talk about them.

What could possibly go wrong? Okay, so the thylacine. So what is a thylacine and 12 and a half day gestation period?

Yeah, the thylacine is an extinct marsupial that almost. It's called the Taz. It's also referred to to as the Tasmanian tiger or even the Tasmanian wolf because it's a, it's a marsupial, but it looks like a wolf. It's an absolutely beautiful animal that went extinct in 1936 in Tasmania. And it was the top. It was the apex predator of the food chain. It was, it was incredible. And the Australian government actually put bounties on the heads of thylacines and eradicated them. So they were paid to eradicate the species. But fortunately enough some of them were preserved in ethanol. And Dr. Andrew Pass like George, where it was really his mammoth was the thylacine and he's worked for the last 15 years on collecting samples and DNA and now the tools are making it easier in him to kind of assemble that genome.

And the dodo, similar story.

So dodo is. Okay, so thylacine is another mammal. Makes a lot of sense. It's very similar process. It has easier challenges. 13 and a half day gestation versus 22 month. 22 months. We actually didn't have to assemble that the front end of the genome because they got about 92% long reach, like incredibly well preserved genome, which is amazing because.

But a lot because it went extinct. It went extinct so recently.

Yeah. And they've got well preserved. Yeah. And so. So it's almost inverse of the mammoth. Right. Is like harder, more editing, more computational analysis, easier genome assembly and easier gestation. Right. And so we loved the thylacine as a bolt, as our second species because the is mammalian, same team, same structure, but it was exactly inverse problem set. So we thought we could learn a lot complimentary looking at it from kind of that systems lens. The dodo. So the dodo, like we didn't pursue that, that like this is where, you know, you've got to believe that everything happens on some level for a reason. And what was crazy about the dodo was Bess Shapiro, who's incredible. She's our lead paleogeneticist. She's one of the top ancient DNA experts in the world. She wrote the book.

Hear that, kids? One of your future career options is an ancient paleogeneticist, you know?

Yeah.

God. Crazy.

It's crazy. It's amazing. It's crazy. And she actually has a dodo tattoo. And she'd been working, you know, for over 10 years on the dodo genome, been to Mauritius, had worked on with museum samples, had been assembling it, comparing it, but once again, massively underfunded. She's very well known and a lot of her stuff has incredible funding. But this was not a project that, you know, was super well funded, but something that's really passionate to her. And what was interesting was our investors kind of led the dodo project where Thomas and Jim Breyer and a few others said, listen, if you are the De Extinction company, the dodo is the face of human caused extinction. Right or wrong. Why are we not doing that? So I talked to Beth. It's a little, it's very similar in many ways. Easier in some, harder in others. It forced us to develop new tools around like primordial germ cells and other things that we didn't have built that we don't need for our other projects. And you know, we, we told our investor base, if you guys support us, you know, with the financing, we will pursue it. And we, we have the subject matter expert in Beth. And so we, that was one that we were very fortunate for him that it kind of came from the general public and our investors that really kind of helped drive that decision.

Amazing. And just note here, the last widely accepted sighting of the Dodo was in 1662.

Yeah.

So been a while. A few hundred years. Yeah, been a while.

And most people don't think this. The pictures you see of the dodos, a lot of those are like chicken and turkey feathers. So we're actually doing computational analysis. Like people just think that dodos were like brown or white. And they may have been, but we're actually verifying that the gene, you know, what you see in museums has been assembled.

Yeah, Human bias comes in there. So people say to me, last year when I was bragging about you and bragging about the company and saying in the middle of sort of the worst investment meltdown, Here comes the De Extinction Company raising money at a $1.4 billion pre money and their mouth just drops and it's like what in the world is their business model? So let's jump into that because to raise capital and you need something exciting, you need a massive transformative purpose, you need a great team and you need a good business model or a great business model. So what is it?

Yes, we kind of have like two parts of the business model. One is all about we're huge believers in option value, right? And so we believe that very similar to the Apollo program on the path to the de extinction of mammoths and thylacines and dodos and maybe other species, we will build technologies that have an application not just for conservation but for human health care. And so that innovation creates a massive kind of option value for our investors, right? Because like bold and all our incredible investors out there, you know, when we create those technologies and we spin them out of the company, you know, all of our shareholders get those, get their appropriate shares in that spin out. We did that last year with Form Bio which was our first computational biology software platform. We didn't have all the tools we really needed to do this. We went and built them and then we were, then we realized that as application other places and we raised an oversubscribed 30 million dollar round, you know, for that business which was amazing. And you know that Kent Wakeford CEO, that's just absolutely crushing it. And you know Kent as well and you know they're, they're doing quite well. You know they're doing mid seven figures in ARR already which is just, I mean in this market like for a software company that just started is incredible. They just announced a major partnership with, with Google. And so the first part of our business model is really in the technologies, right? Like how do we build? You know We've got about 36 patents in process and you know we've got another spin out on the horizon. Probably won't be this year, probably early next year, but we've got what we think is our next really strong advancement. But any of these advancements, any of these spin outs in this option value could be multi billion dollar companies in themselves, right? And I think that we'll probably have 10 plus spin outs or potentially more over the life of our company.

Which by the way as an entrepreneur sort of studying this, it's an interesting approach that a lot of individuals don't take. Typically you retain that inside the company, make it a division of your company, hire a president to run it and, and you've been. And it's great, right? The investors love you for this because it allows you to focus on the primary purpose of what you built Colossal for and gives this incredible optionality adjacency for everybody else and doesn't take your eye off the ball. So great idea for other entrepreneurs to be.

We needed this tech anyway. Right now there's other tech that we built that's amazing that we don't think has a marketability, you know, outside of what we're using it for. So we're not going to go spin those out, right? Like we're not going to just spin out everything we make. So we're going to. There's a lot of intentionality to creating that option value that that's meaningful. Right. And then the second part of our business is around, you know, education and partnerships. And so, you know, we mentioned obviously Thomas and others, you know, we're working on a big entertainment partnership around the docu series, letting you know educational content around that docu series. You know, we want to chronicle this for the world and you know, media and entertainment does, you know, make money. And what's interesting about that, that aspect of the business is that it's starting to lead us into conversations with governments where. Governments where, you know, we're in the middle of, I can't say who yet, you know, who, but we're in the middle of closing a very, you know, large eight figure and a separate nine figure.

We can say it, it's on planet Earth.

We can say, yeah, it is. It is on planet Earth where governments are, you know, while we want to open source all of the technologies for conservation, some governments have some critically endangered issues and need us to help them preserve their keystone species. That's very important to their cultures. And so, you know, we are working on two very large deals that have very large price tags to them but are still massively, they are a massive accelerant to these countries, biodiversity restoration programs. In one case, we're cutting down a country's work by 20 years and saving them hundreds of millions of dollars. And so when you can show that you can create that value for countries and allow them to preserve their animals on that scale as well as they can save their conservation, the budgets of conservation, hundreds of millions of dollars that can be then applied in other and potentially better ways and cut decades off their rewilding timelines, you know, it's a value prop that, you know, one of the negative criticisms we've got at launch was you're taking money away from conservation. It's like, no, first of all, we're bringing new money and new technologies to Conservation. And we're going to show the world that you can actually do really smart, innovative ways of using technology in select cases of conservation that that shortens timelines by decades and saves hundreds of millions of dollars.

So you can actually help governments take a number of their species that are on the edge of going extinct and to help bring back those populations. One of the things I find amazing when we first discussed it, I said, well, okay, I understand how you go to get a embryo or a single cell of a thylacine or a dodo, but how do you grow it into the whole animal? Where, where do you incubate it? And I have to say you don't consider this an independent moonshot, but I think the idea of the end point here of ultimately an artificial womb is an amazing, you know, moonshot into itself. So what are you doing in the near terms where do you incubate the embryo for 22 months in for a woolly mammoth?

So what's weird is I'm so close to the science and the teams. I live and breathe and stay in the labs most days when I'm not traveling. And so what's weird to me, and I love that you brought this up, is that de extinction no longer to me seems like a moonshot because I'm just so close. I know where we are and I know how fast some things are coming. And so it just doesn't seem like a moonshot anymore. More based on where we are. Right. And what the tangible progress that we see on a quarter over quarter basis. What's interesting to me is what I do see, think it sells a moonshot is our artificial womb or ex utero development. And I met with the ex utero, ex utero development teams. We found that people resonated better with that than artificial wombs. But it's, but they're, they're the same. And I'm actually sitting in our office, in my office that's at the extraordinary development lab. So I'm spending a lot of time now on that. Given that the, the de extinction side of the business is very, I feel like has all the right people enrolling. I'm spending a lot of time on Exudo development systems now for the, for the artificial womb. And what's interesting is all of the animals, our first generation of animals will all be born through surrogacy. So that's why we have the big animal husbandry group. So we don't need artificial wombs to be successful in thylacine.

Slow that down, slow it down a Second, so for a woolly mammoth, you're going to have made these edits in some 60 or 70 loci, whether it's a gene replacement or a CRISPR edit or whatever it might be. And you've got a single effectively fertilized cell of a woolly mammoth like species. And you probably have a number of these. Right. You've probably done this in vitro, hundreds of them. Like when you have a surrogate child and you do in vitro fertilization and in this case who is the surrogate?

So two things that you brought up that I think are really interesting. I think that we will shock people in the next year with some of our successful IVF and cloning numbers. Cloning historically. And that's the somatic cell nuclear transfer part and then the acceptance through somatic cell nuclear transfer.

So this is a somatic cell is a body cell versus your gametes versus your diseases.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And nuclear transfer is taking the nucleus out.

Exactly.

Putting it into a different cell and.

To put it into one of those egg cells. Right? Yes. And we've had a couple really interesting breakthroughs that, that we will be announcing in the not too distant future that, that increase the efficiency of that over 25x of what's out there, which is incredible. And so, so to that process we are going to be using Asian elephant surrogates. For the mammoth we'll be using. This is interesting about the thylacine and we'll come back to artificial wombs here in a second. But with the thylacine we're using the closest phylogenetic relative in that desiurid family is actually the fat tail Dunnart. It's, it's a, it's like a marsupial mouse. It's like this big. And so it's funny, people are like wait, you're telling me a wolf sized animal is going to come from this? But they're younger, the same size, they're both the size when they're born. After that 13 and a half days gestation, they're about the size of a grain of rice. And most marsupials gestate mostly outside of the womb. So that, that leads to other challenges that we're working on. Like exopouches and. Yeah, exactly. But our goal though is long term. We want our system, we want ex utero development or artificial wombs that we can grow a thousand mammoths. Right. Because we won't be able to grow a thousand mammoths, mammoths the old fashioned way. And so being able to do that for not just mammoths but imagine a world, Peter, where we are down, we have 100x. We're down 100x right now on number of species or number of blue whale individuals in the ocean. Imagine a world where we can work with governments to grow, where you have these foot pulse sizes, you know, systems where you can grow, you know, 100 blue whales for reintroduction.

So we think for the, for the rhino, for lions, for anything.

Right. It's like work with, let's, let's let conservationists and rewilding partners work to do the hard work of reintroducing the species and socializing and herd dynamics and all that incredible work that they do. But the gestation, let's grow them all ex utero. And so I actually believe that the artificial womb has a more potential for impact to the world even than our de extinction work. And so we have a 17 person team working on the ex utero development systems here. We also have a partnership with the University of Melbourne, outside of our thylacine partnership that's working on it. And then we fund people in George's lab that's working on it. So, so it's a combined team of probably about 25, 26 people that are working on artificial wombs here at Colossal that we want to be able to grow everything in.

Is this an artificial womb that will take a embryo from single cell through to surviving on its own? So it really is the work of the science fiction stories of a real full of artificial womb.

It's a true artificial womb. Like so. Like Alan Flake for example, who's an incredible mind. He doesn't work with Colossus. He's amazing. He's done, he did the biobag lam work back in like 2015, I remember. He's, he's very, he's very focused on later stage, you know, for preemies. For preemies, exactly. And they do a microsurgery in the umbilicus and whatnot. And that's great for, for that use case. It's incredible. And, and he is the world's best at it. But what we really want to do is we don't want to be doing, if you want to grow a thousand animals, we don't be doing a lot of microsurgeries in that umbilicus. So really being able to build a artificial placenta or, sorry, an artificial kind of this endometrial layer of the uterine wall that a placenta can invade and connect to. Yeah. Now the beautiful thing for us. Well, here's the beautiful thing about it. Though is that that while there's varying different placental types. I didn't know that. I thought everything just threw in a bag inside of another bag right before I started this. But there's actually different placental types. Right. And what's interesting is that that comes from the embryo. And so the embryo basically makes the organ that invades this, this uterine wall. So we really have to go get, right, the gas exchange as well as nutrient and excrement exchange through kind of this like, you know, system. I know, you know, Doris Taylor, we're working with her on, you know, decellularized membranes. So it's really kind of interesting because we're bringing all these different people like Doris together to think through how you could build these membranes through synthetic bio biology that a embryo would want the placenta to invade into. Right. So that it's as natural as possible.

Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devotion, devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at Exponential Technologies, AI 3D Printing, Synthetic Biology, AR.VR Blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandis.com blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. You know, I can't help but ask some timelines here. You said that the woolly mammoth is 2028. We're recording this in mid, you know, third quarter, entering third quarter of 2023. So five years out. Can you give us timelines on the dodo and the thylacine?

Yeah. So the thylacine, I would assume that you would see it sooner given that it's a 12 days, a 12, 13 and a half day gestation. So there's a higher probability of that in the dodo. What's really interesting about the dodo is it's about a 30 day gestation. Right. And we're using these sterile chickens this is, this, this to me is crazy about. This is the kind of stuff that you've learned about biology that you're like, wait, what? That, that to me sounds like science fiction, but they've actually, you can actually take edited primordial germ cells of it. They done this experiment where they've taken, edited these things called primordial germ cells that are found in birds and they take these primordial germ cells of ducks, insert them into that of a sterile chicken. The sterile chickens mate, an egg is laid, it hatches and it's a duck. That to me, I know that sounds like we talk about de extinction. I kind of like, oh yeah, that's, that's fine, we got that. That to me is the stuff that just seems like, wait, I still have a hard time doing it. So we have an entire avian genomics group now that's focused on cultivating these primordial germ cells, which is very, very difficult. And the closest living relative to the dodo is the actual Nicobar pigeon, which is beautiful. It's nothing like what we think the dodo look like. If we can get those primordial germ cells completed in a, in a, in stable and growing in culture at the right scale fast. And I think the dodo, you know, could be in the next couple years. That's really the rate limiting factor is now. If it takes us two years to do that, then I think it'd be, you know, 20, 20.

Would you bet on the Tasmanian tiger before the dodo?

It's. You just have this variable, you have this massive variable in the primordial germ cells. If that. Okay. If the PGC stuff works, I'd bet on the dodo first.

All right. All right. Okay. So I'm not going to ask you to tell me what's next, but I am going to ask you to tell me.

I told you about mammoth. Yeah.

Order of magnitude. How many species have you been dreaming about? Are there dozens or hundreds of species that could be on the de extinction list?

I think for, for us, you know, there will be a hand, I think over time for us.

So you open source a technology for others to play with?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that for conservation purposes. Right. Like, I do think that, I think de extinction is something that needs to be measured and thought out. Well, of like, what's the intention of it and why are you doing it? And remember all the species that we're working on, we want to breathe wild, so we're working with local governments in some cases. Foreign governments, we're working with indigenous as people groups, we're working with private landowners. So there's a lot of people that go into this outside of just the colossal team. Right. So you really need to collaborate and whatnot. So. So we are going to open source all the technologies for comps or that have an application to conservation for conservation purposes. There will be some de extinction tech that we just don't open source because we just think that maybe not everyone should have that.

Okay, now let's get to the top secret part of this episode. A billionaire comes to you and says, listen Ben, I want to bring back the dinosaurs, or at least a dinosaur. This is something I truly want to do. I want to demonstrate it's possible for scientific purposes. We're not going to rewild with these guys. And you say to them, no, you say it's impossible. Come on, give up here.

What's possible here?

So I mean, a chicken is kind of a dinosaur in one sense.

Yeah. Birds, birds are just generally scary. So the like, I don't know, I think that birds are dinosaurs. Like Kenneth Lacovara, arguably number one paleontologist in the world, was one of our advisors. You know, he's like, dinosaurs are around us and so they're birds, they're the bird, the dinosaurs that made it. And so I have been asked that question. Not once. That's a theme that we get. It was just that it was just the 30th anniversary of Jurassic park. So you can believe the number of calls, press everything that asks us about dinosaurs. So it is impossible to bring back a dinosaur. And I always break people's hearts when I say that. Because right now, from a technology perspective, we can go back, you know, a million or so years in terms of like that, that ancient DNA. But the problem is unless you find some frozen dinosaur or some dinosaur that was just so well preserved in a cave that hasn't fossilized, you're not going to get any DNA. Now what you could do, which I think is interesting, is you. I do think that you can do ancestral reconstructions through computational analysis of like, you know, early dinosaur, like birds. I think that is a possibility in terms of like computational analysis. It's also possible to demineralize dinosaur bones to get amino acids, but you're not going to get even small fragments of DNA. Right? So, so, I mean, so, so I do think that from a technological perspective, humanity will have the ability to do ancestral state reconstructions of, of like early birds or early mammals. But, but we will not be able to de. Extinct a dinosaur, you know, and I think those technologies could be applied in better ways, like how do we make, you know, more drought? You know, how do we make more drought resistant animals or crops? How do we, you know, I think growing 100 blue whales at this, at the same time, or a thousand will have more meaningful impact. And I think it's as hard as engineering a precursor to birds.

Okay, well, I'll have to break the news to my 12 year olds, but yeah, let's go back, my friend. So we're talking to entrepreneurs here about moonshots, and I want to hit on two points for those who are dreaming big dreams and want to go and make a dent in the universe and go and, and do something. Because I think you said it really beautifully in the beginning. You know, this is my shot of doing something significant in life. And if I don't take it, I'll never be able to look at myself in the mirror and say, you know, you could have and you didn't. So let's talk about that and let's talk about the importance of having. What is it that allows you to feel the confidence to take it on in a field that isn't yours? And then the third thing I want to talk about is how in the world do you raise money for something like this? Like when I want to talk about those early conversations because no bucks, no Buck Rogers. So take it from there.

Yeah, I think that I'll start with the raising capital side and we'll go from there. We were very mindful in, in terms of who we approached right now after we started raising capital and we went public with, with the news that we're working on this, we did have a lot of conversations because people were like, super interested. And look, we got a lot of no's in, in any deal that I've ever done. I have yet to have the experience where you just walk in and someone's like, I love that idea. Here's a term sheet that's blank with as much money as you want at whatever price and whatever terms. I've yet to see that deal. I hear stories in the movies of those deals, like that the Silicon Valley napkin on a Sunday night before the partner meeting. Yeah, I've heard those stories too. I've never experienced them, so maybe I'm just not good. But the. But, but, but, but really being intentional that we had to align this project with people like you, with people like Tom's Toll, people like, you know, Jim Breyer and Tim Draper. These are all people that, that think it, like, you know, to use your words, that think in abundance, that. That want to advance humanity, that have all made a ton of money, and they're not just doing it for the money. They want to. They want to make money and return money to their shareholders, but at the same time, they want to push all of humanity forward. Right. And so we were very thoughtful on who we went to and why and who is who.

Who is who in the early days. I mean, George is on as the scientific advisor. What term did you use for George in the early days?

Well, I just said co founder. And then.

Fair enough.

Yeah. And so I said co founder. But what's interesting is that because George, to your point, has done a lot of companies. People are like, oh, but he's not working on too many things. It's like, yeah, but ask him if you know him, ask him. And when they, when people, several people reach out to him, he's like, oh, yeah, this is. He's like. He's like, I love all the projects I'm working on, but this one, you could, you could hear in his voice how he felt. I mean, you've talked about this. It's like you could hear the difference in his voice on this one. And so it was. It was me, it was Andrew, who we'd started a handful of companies together. He's been a great product guy.

So Andrew's been part of your team over years.

Over years. And really leading.

You guys have a great track record together.

Great, great track record. Kent Wakeford, right. And Kent moved across country to help me get this thing started.

But of course, Andrew, and Andrew and Kent, neither of them had sort of this biological background.

I know, I know. We had. We had zero. I reached out to, you know, I was fortunate enough to win Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year a few years ago. And I met Joe Desimone, who's incredible, who did carbon 3D, and he's an amazing entrepreneur. And if you haven't talked to him, you should talk to him. He's amazing. I love Joe. And I. So, like, I was like, I. I got connected to him through the EY Network, so I was like, I'll talk to him. So I started having a couple of these, like, individual science conversations. And I. And they were like, we would love to work with George on this. We'd love to advise you on who you should hire, and we'd love to be on your scientific advisory board. So we had very early scientific success on the. Even though we had zero people Internally on, on the science team, we had very early success on the, on the scientific advisory board to help guide us. And then George said, hey, one of my postdocs is being poached to go do venture capital. I think that she would do much. This is what she wants to do. This Ariana, who you've met spent time with, and he's like, this is what she wants to do more than anything. And if she really has the opportunity, I think she'll succeed and be the bridge between Harvard and colossal. And so we had one meeting with her, you know, and I should, I don't think I've ever told Ariana this. I should tell her this about how amazing it was. I remember like hanging up the phone or the zoom with her. And I was in Omaha, Nebraska when I zoomed and I call our other scientist, Sarah Ordinary, who had worked with me before, consulted with me at Hypergyne, whatnot. And she was our only other scientist. And I was like, oh my gosh, we have someone from the church lab and we have two scientists now. And I was so ecstatic, right, because we had one from Harvard, one from Johns Hopkins. I was like, those are good. We got. This area was a really great moment when we were like, oh my gosh, we can recruit scientists. This. We knew we could get advisors to it, but could we recruit actual scientists that wouldn't go pursue a drug? And you know, it was. It was like eight people. I remember when Kent moved to Dallas to help us get started and we were in one of my other company's offices and we were sitting there with Dave Copps from Worlds. We were sitting there at Dave's in World's offices and kids and I were looking around. It's like, so it's us, but those are the fun days when you have a blank piece.

They are. I remember those days. I think I came on as an advisor just about that point and. And then introduce you to Bold and a few other funds. What was the first capital you brought in? Was it convertible note? Was it your own money? Was it a yes investor?

So I, I spent and I do this with all of the companies I go work on. And I, I never asked for terms on. I know a lot of people ask for terms on it. I don't though. So I spent a little over. I spent low seven figures on, on this from my pocket just for, you know, before we started in 2021, talking to people, traveling, hiring external consultant scientists. Like I am a somewhat trust but verify guy. And so, you know, I trusted George. But I was like, is it as close as he says? And whatnot. So I wanted. So I spent that capital on my own dime. And then. And then, like, kind of doing that research. And then, you know, some of the first money in was, you know, Thomas Tall, Bold Jazz Ventures, Tim Draper. You know what's interesting? And then. And then Tom Chi, like, I remember Tom Chi was the biggest check in the seed, and Tom Chi got it. And I was like, you know, you have these pivotal moments on your journey where, you know, my conversation, our first conversation, where you were like, you need to go do this. Like, you, You. You were very inspiring to me. Like, and this is before you even introduced me to the Bolt team. You were like, you need to go do this. How can I help? And so you were a major inflection point, which I really appreciate. When I talked to Animal Capital, I was late. I'd been told no a handful of times. I was exhausted. It was like a 9pm call. Talked to Marshall, and Marshall's like, yes, we're in. We're in right now. I'll wire you $250,000 tomorrow. And I was like, that was an inflection point because that was very early, before we had Ariana or whatnot. And then Tim Draper, which, you know, he came on and he came in and wrote a million dollar check. And then when I talked to Tom Chi, Tom was like, he totally got it. His fund at 1 is so focused on impact.

And Tom, by the way, a co founder of Google X with Astro and.

The team there, as you know, he's just amazing and thoughtful. He understood the science. And he was like, we'll take the rest of the round. And I was like, amazing, right? And so, because I felt like we were too early almost for the big traditional funds. And so we raised all of it on a convertible note with a cap. So we raised at the time $8 million with Thomas Kind of rounding that out. And then Thomas was. And then Thomas was. We didn't raise another 8 on a. On a uncapped note, which, you know, if you can get it. And Thomas was the one that said, you need to go. You need more money. And so he was. So they. Thomas would have put more money in. We filled out that. That remaining. We launched with 16 million, and within a week, we were getting term sheets from funds that wanted to put in 40 million into an A. And so that. That happened very quickly. I called Tom Chi called you, called Thomas Toll. And Thomas is like, none of us got the consistent message. We got Journals like none of us got as much as we wanted in the seed and so they're like, we'll give you a term sheet. And so we ended up raising 60 versus 40 and we brought in new partners, which is great. But a lot of obviously our early team.

It's a beautiful startup story and I love the fact that you made the commitment yourself with your own capital which if you're able to do it as an entrepreneur, it's a show of, of success, a show of commitment beyond just your time, that your team from previous ventures continued to join you, that George's right hand person joined the team. So there's the formulation, the scientific advisory board. But it was doing this also at a very difficult time to raise capital. Just for contextual period. What's your advice for entrepreneurs looking to take on a moonshot? Any, any take, any big takeaways?

A couple big takeaways for me. Are you Will? I did have a little bit of, you know, I have a proven track record. I did get more no's than I anticipated because I was like, how can you guys not want to do this right? This is incredibly valuable for the world. You know, it's like if you could go back to like the 60s, right? Like if you could offer someone a time machine and go back to the 60s and be like, hey, would you want to invest in the, in NASA? Which I would argue is the. Regardless of how you feel about America worldwide or politics or aside or whatever, NASA is the number one brand that came, that came out of America. Everyone supports NASA like it is the brand. And it's like, if you could invest in NASA, why wouldn't you invest in NASA? It's crazy. It is an absolutely no brainer. And so I will say that it was a little bit struggling that we did get no's because I was shocked. I'm not surprised given we had so very little at the beginning. But still I was like, we have a really smart team. Tangent sold. You've taken companies public, sold companies for billions of dollars. Me and Andrew had done quite well. So it's like I feel like we had stuff that like people would get behind. But I'd say if you're going to do a moonshot, you have to be even thicker skinned. And I think going through the process not of successfully building startups, but I've been told no so many more times before I started Colossal that I was so used to being told no that it just didn't really affect me. I was, I had the conviction. And so you have to like, you can't go talk to two people or five people and be told no four times and be like, ah, I can't do this. You know, I, I mean I've been told probably no a thousand times.

Team, tech or capital. So I mean, you know, if you have all three year olds set, it sounds like you came in first with team.

Yep. And, and then capital and then bet on George on the tech.

Yeah. And is that what you would recommend for Moonshots?

I think it's team and conviction is just so important. Right. Like George has a saying where he doesn't let anyone in his lab use the world word impossible. He's like, we may not understand how to do it yet, but I won't use the word impossible. And he doesn't allow it in his lab. And I think that, that it was inspiring just to start the company with George because I mean George was so happy when we lay when we raised $8 million.

I mean come on, it was like orders of magnitude more than he done before.

Yeah, he was ecstatic. He's like, are you serious? Like he was so excited.

Are you guys playing with you know, large language models or what's coming in AI in the work that, that we're doing?

Yeah. So we are so on the large language model piece we have a, outside of Form Bio we have a genotype to phenotype team and it's really helpful for literature review. Right. Because there's a lot of stuff that comes out. Obviously some of these things are gated in time so it doesn't help with some of the most recent articles that have come out but it does help with reviewing peer reviewed papers, making summaries for onboarding and whatnot. So we are using ChatGPT and several of the other large language models out there. We're also using some of the generative AI tools out there to talk about like, you know, we have an idea for this like educational experience that we're working on and you know, instead of going copying up, we're using some of the generative tools there. So yeah, outside of the models that we're building for like we have a, we have a tool that's pretty cool internally that allows, that actually makes recommendations of what tool sets that will create to use for each edit that has the least likelihood of off targets and that's insanely valuable. Right.

All right, last subject I want to get into here. Before I ask you what your X prize should be, let's talk about the morals and ethics. I have to imagine you get a lot of people sort of raising their hands and saying, come on, I mean, you're playing God. How can you find this morally acceptable? What's the ethics involved here? Aren't people going to use this technology not to bring back extinct species, but to sort of like come up with, you know, glow in the dark cats and, you know, cats with horns and a whole slew of mix and match, you know, and it's a lot of. I remember when I was in, at the. At the Whitehead Institute, MIT as an undergrad, the early days of genetic engineering, and the conversation was all around, these restriction enzymes are going to allow us to reinvent species and come up with things. And a lot of debate and discussion about the ethics and morality. Now it's calmed down, it's come back now with AI but have you reignited that? Are you getting a lot of people concerned about this going out of bounds?

Well, you know, AI, you know, synthetic biology, it's hard to put, you know, crispr. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle on some of these things. Right. And so we work very closely with the federal government and we've been public about our investment from in Q Tel and whatnot. And so we want to be part of the teams that helps think through, like, what should be used and why and where do we draw boundaries around it? You know, I think that we've been very fortunate with people like Alta Charo and others who's also one of the world's leading bioethicists who joined our team. And we've been very fortunate to pull together not just scientists and bioethicists, but also conservation, conservation groups. You know, we partner with all the top conservation groups and we've really listened. And I think I have a different perspective now than I did maybe 10 years ago on critics and kind of like including ethical critics. And, you know, I think you can learn a lot from an informed critic, right? Like, they are the subject matter expert. They don't have to share your belief. And we've taken this attitude that it's not our job to persuade anyone. It's our job to educate people and be transparent about what we're doing. And so that's what, that's what we, you know, strive to do. And then we really try to listen to those feedback. And some of our earliest critics have become our most valuable assets. And, you know, like Louva Dahl, he was pretty negative when we came out, and now we could not be where we are on the mammoth project without him.

Yeah, you Know, I have to point out the human brain is incredible at imagining all of the terrible things that can happen as a result of some technology. I mean, we have been trained by Hollywood and the Crisis News Network to always go dystopian all the time. And it's just, you know, it makes billion dollar blockbusters. But we don't think about what would happen if the technology didn't come into existence. Right. I mean, this is the technology that can bring back extinct animals and maintain, you know, large breeding herds for animals on the bridge, on the precipice of extinction.

You brought up a good point there. You know me, and I'm an eternal optimist. So I don't think as much about.

By the way, optimists live an average of 15 years longer than pessimists. So go well, good.

So that's going to take me from like 400 to 415. So I'm excited about that. That's great. That's great data. And so. But the, but what's interesting is that like before the dystopian, because we out, even if you talk through it and you understand the ethical applications, because I would argue we play God every day. Like we eradicated the dodo, we eradicated the thylacine, we had a hand in. Or early man had a hand in eradicating the mammoths. Right? And when we chop down a forest or pollute our rivers or take medicines, you know, we play God every day, even with our own bodies. So. So I think that this is an opportunity to not only undo the sins of the past, but, but fundamentally for that dystopian crowd, I believe that hopefully it doesn't get to this point. But wouldn't we want a de extinction toolkit? And when we want the capabilities to bring back at least keystone species that are fundamental to ecosystems, which are fundamental to things like food security. So in the event that we do lose all species, isn't it better we can all say that we just want to preserve life, which is great, but in the event that we had that, had to bring stuff back, isn't it better that we have that capability set for those. I don't believe in that world, but for the dystopians of the world, I think it is better that we have that tool that those capabilities and that knowledge base because, you know, we are losing species at an alarming rate and you know, in the event having the tools to bring them back is better than not.

Beautifully said. All right, Ben, here we go. It's a few years from now, you know, I've done so incredibly well on my colossal investment and I'm like, you know, I want to say thank you, Ben. I want to fund a Ben Lam X Prize. What is an X prize that you want to inspire entrepreneurs around the world to go morning through night to go and solve? Do you have one?

Yes, I do and I don't, you know, I don't think I'll get to it. But hopefully. And it, hopefully, you know, I would love, if someone does, I'd love to advise it. But you know, I think that Elon is doing an incredible job of recognizing that we have to extend consciousness into the universe and become an interplanetary species. And I think that's amazing. And I'm full disclosure on my SpaceX and investor. I'm a huge fan supporter. But interestingly enough, most of the world is covered by water. Right. And I think that there's an opportunity when we start to think about sustainability in these closed ecosystems that we are going to have to do for off world. I'd love to see that happen here. Also in parallel to extending life interplanetary is I'd like to see that happen here in the oceans. Right. It's like I would like you've got these like little, you know, hotels that have like the rooms underwater. But it's like we should have the technologies where we can colonize which will force us to build closed systems. Right. Where we have to put people.

Life support.

Yeah, yeah, life support systems. Also we have to be more thoughtful about food sustainability. So I'd love to build sustainable underwater cities. I think that, you know, I think that will make us appreciate our oceans more. You know, if you have reefs and fish outside and kelp outside versus plastic. So I would love to see an X prize on building not an underwater hotel, but a sustainable underwater city.

How big a population?

You know, I mean we don't have.

Some numbers on this.

Yeah, that's, that's fair. I mean I think that you need a small town. I think you need like 10,000 people. Wow. I mean I'm in real cities, like you know, like real, like eventually metropolitan cities. But yeah, I know that's not gonna start there, but I mean that would be the goal is like how do you get to a 5000 person sustainable city? Not like 50 or 100, like a real city.

Ben, I can honestly say it, it is always an incredible pleasure when I get your phone calls and Peter, do you have a second? And the updates I get from you are amazing. Where on the planet you are when you call me, it's sort of Russian roulette. You are an example of what an amazing CEO can do. I just want to say thank you on behalf of bold, myself, George Church, and humanity as you bring these technologies to bear. I mean, everything from the artificial womb to helping rewild extinct species to actually bringing species back from the precipice of extinction. That's amazing work.

Thank you.

Thank you, buddy.

Appreciate you.

Take care.