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

The howl of a dire wolf hasn't been heard on planet Earth for more than 10,000 years. 13,000 years after the last dire wolf walked the Earth, scientists say they've now brought them back.

Ben, I have to say you pulled off what I think is the scientific miracle of the decade. What's your roadmap here, pal?

So we're working on the mammoth. We're working on the Tasmanian tiger, We're working on the dodo. I think we could save every species on the planet.

Save every species on the planet. That's, that's pretty extraordinary.

All right, so de extinction 101. And remember, I'm not a scientist. I'm really curious and I feel like I like to ask questions. I don't know anything about it. So I can ask, you know, childlike questions about it and then I get these answers.

One of the spin outs I can't wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial wombs.

I think that if we continue on the current course in speed, by the end of 2026, we will have the world's first mammal birth Foley ex utero.

This provides a bridge to future developments like this that will break open all sorts of potential. What's the next species that we can look forward to?

Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with two incredible entrepreneurs and two dear friends. Salim Ismail, head of Exponential Organizations, who you all know and love. And Ben Lam, the founder CEO of Colossal Biosciences. Colossal has been all over the news around the world. One of the top stories in April, the COVID of Time magazine. And Ben, I have to say you pulled off what I think is the scientific miracle of the of the decade. Seeing Elon capture the super heavy booster on starship was sort of the technological miracle, but bringing back the dire wolf. And so what. I put out a blog yesterday because I was really pissed off about this. This incredible achievement of bringing back to the planet earth after over 10,000 years of extinction. Three direwolf pups. And a lot of people said amazing, but there were way too many people saying is this real? Is this crazy? What is this guy doing? And to those haters out there, listen to this episode because I think this is an extraordinary achievement that heralds a future of synthetic biology that's going to blow our minds as much as AI is blowing our minds today. So Ben, how are you feeling about this? What was all this controversy about?

I feel great. I've got weird tough skin, right? I think that if anyone thought they were going to go into the de extinction world, which involves conservation, synthetic biology, AI, there's actually about 31 different ways to classify an animal. So you're dabbling into an, where a lot of people have a lot of opinions on a lot of different topics. So I think that it would have been really naive, you know, to go, to think that you're going to go into something like this and not have a lot of skepticism and a lot of negative feedback from the start. And then you're gonna, it's, it's only gonna get worse as you're successful. Right? It doesn't go the other way. And so we've talked about this for a long time, is like what happens when we actually start to show the world animals what, what. Well, how does that feel? But I feel fantastic. The team feels fantastic. I think the only, and I'll talk about the controversy. The only thing that I think is a little sad in my mind, I think you nailed it in your blog post is that people miss the science. Like people miss the fact. I'm sure we'll go to go into it today. But it's like, and look, I'm not a scientist, so it doesn't affect me. Like I sleep fine at night. But you know, we had these incredible women and men that have spent the last, you know, 18 months, seven days a week passionately in love with bringing back the direwolf. And whether you want to classify it as a dire wolf or colossal dire wolf or genetically modified gray wolf, whatever you want to do, which we'll get into that conversation at some point, that doesn't matter. The fact that they took 72,000 year old DNA from a skull in 13,000 year old DNA from a tooth, mapped it and built a nearly complete direwolf genome, which before this There was only 0.15% coverage of the genome to go to nearly complete genome and to then select the genes that drove the core phenotypes of a dire wolf and engineer it into a gray wolf cell, which for many don't know this. It is the closest living relative. It's not the closest relative, it's the closest living relative on the planet, which is a non model species, by the way. No one's ever done this. And then to clone that, where you have a healthy birth of animals that exude phenotypes or physical attributes that are driven by genes that have been lost for 12,000 years, it's magic. And I feel like it's a miracle. It's a Miracle. And people just like. And not to mention just the genome engineering, right? So on our mouse, we announced the woolly mouse a couple a month ago and we had eight edits in seven genes and we did it all at once using multiplex editing, meaning we did it all with once hundred percent delivery, 100% efficiency, zero off target effects. That's a miracle. And yet we did get feedback on that. There's like people have made eight edits before, but yeah, they made them sequentially over eight generations. And so to go from eight edits to 20 edits now using 15 of those edits being ancient DNA variants, it's awesome. And so the only thing that I was sad about is I don't really care what people call it, right. I'm not asking people to go to our website or watch our videos, I don't really care. But I think it's sad for the scientist that, that at a minimum, I think people could have elevated the incredible work by the women and men at Colossal and our academic contributors to the project.

Yeah, Salim, what question comes and pops out at you? I mean you saw the, you saw the press going back and forth.

I did, and I read your blog post, but I thought that was phenomenally detailed. I've been tracking this for a while. You know, we first talked about this at Singularity University and the way we used to frame it was, and this is going back 10, 15, 10, 12 years ago, was we essentially can now navigate conservation in a completely different way, in a totally different mindset, and there's some magic that comes from that. So I've got 100 questions, including as a company, your business model. My biggest question though is how, because a lot of people have tried this in the past and I'd love for you to give our viewers a sense of how you went about this because this provides a bridge to future developments like this that, that will break open all sorts of potential and I'd love for you to give some sense of the methodology used.

Let me inject one thing here which is really important, that this idea of de extinction is not just four years old. So, Ben, you co founded with George Church, who's the scientific genius at Harvard Medical School, a dear friend of both of ours, I dare say a very, very close friend of yours at this point. But he's been dreaming about it for many years and it's been discussed for decades and it hasn't happened. It's just now, in the last four years that the tech exists. But I would say there's another thing that exists right now. And for those moonshot entrepreneurs out there, I want you to hear this. It's the difference that a CEO can make. The difference that a moonshot CEO can make in taking something from theory and making it real. And Ben, of course, you've got multiple PhDs in biology and CRISPR and gene editing, right? I mean, your background.

I have no background in biology whatsoever.

I know that's the key point. No background in biology, but just a passion. So if you could, let's bridge this into two parts. Number one, what attributes do you have that enabled you to do this? And number two, what was the tech that enabled this, you know, the direwolf to come back and will enable a multitude of other species? We'll talk about those. Everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on Stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI humanoid robotics, longevity blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to Exponential mastery dot com. That's Exponential mastery dot com.

So fundamentally, I think that there's two things that if you're going to pursue a moonshotty like, you know, approach to a project, there's two things that you have to remember. One is entrepreneurship. It's a team sport. Like it is. It is a team sport. You know, you. Everyone's got to play their role. Everyone's got to play it well. A lot of times, you know, one or two people get the glory or the negativity and. But it is a team sport, right? Like you mentioned, I don't have a background in biology, so I have to trust our science teams to be able to do what they do and I just have to empower them. And then the second thing is I think you have to be a little more persistent than time. And I think you have to think about things in just knowing that, like, you know, whether you have a great day or a bad day, everyone talks about like the trough of disillusionment and all these things. I think those things fundamentally don't matter. I think that if you're doing a moonshot, you just have to be looking like, I think about colossal 50 years from now. I don't think about the direwolf watch. Like people were like, oh my gosh, like just to go, go through a little bit of ptsd because I Think it's important. I don't think anybody knows this. I've yet to say this. But let me, let me. And then we'll get into the science. It's Salima. But I do think this is important. Day one, we on Monday of last week. And I think you could make like a fun like 24 hour or like a five day story about this in just what happened last week. So we were not supposed to launch until Tuesday. We launched on Monday because we, we went to a couple of. Because the science is so detailed and if you just look at a press release without like the scientific papers, without all the data, without sitting down with the scientists, you could just say, oh, it's not a direwolf, right? Like they like, like I could easily have people get to that conclusion very easily. But I think that what we did, which I thought was smart was we went and spent hundreds of, of hours with Time magazine and with the New Yorker and with Rolling Stone and with a couple of key outlets and brought them completely on the unfold. We actually moved the wolves to a secure location and let them see the wolves. Because we live in a, in an AI generated world. Like who's not to say someone couldn't just generate something, right? Like, not that we didn't, we would never do that. But I mean, but that's, that's the level that we put into that. You know, we're certified by American Humane Society. We're, we, you know, flew the wolves on private jets. We literally brought in American Humane Society. We had, I mean we had 15 personnel with them at all times. We wait, we waited till they got acclimated to this new location. Just like so we spent a lot of time and thought into this, right? Well then we're supposed to launch on Tuesday. And so on Monday we had all these people that would have covered us over the years. We were going to give them the heads up. We actually did at a scientific paper and we had nine handouts, nine handouts and an 11 page press release. So we had a lot of material. We were going to give it to all these people under embargo so they didn't feel left out. Even though we went really deep with these other people and we said we think this is a story that's going to persist. So we did that. Monday morning, I'm getting in the shower, kiss my nine month old son, say oh, I'm going to go get ready for work. Kiss him goodbye. About to get in the shower, looked at my phone. It's a cover of The New Yorker. New Yorker broke the market. So that happened. And websites not live. The hundreds of press people that we worked with for years, for years that have covered us pretty favorably when we didn't even have animals feel betrayed. People are like, you know, Time magazine's calling being like, you're on the COVID of Time. Like, what did you do? Did you do this? Insane. Wow. So I'm on my. I'm in my car speeding to one of our labs as fast as possible, and it's like, websites going live. People on Twitter, like, there's Laurel Mipsome on the website. And we're like, no shit. The website was supposed to be live. It's like we had about two hours of content for YouTube that explains all the making of. We're going to roll out. We're just like, push everything live. So. So that was Monday. And then all those stories that we talked about came out, and they're all super positive, but no one got to digest. The scientific paper didn't get submitted to B archive. There was just all this stuff. So then Tuesday was. Wait. Oh, by the way, Monday, we're going to talk to all our scientific advisors, give them an update on the project because we're worried that it could leak because it was just so cool. Our scientific advisors are calling us, being like, why didn't you tell us about that? Like, it was just. It was an insane ripple effect.

Laid plans.

No, no, it did. Wait, wait, let me just give you. I know. Like, I. I know we have limited time, but I. You have to know how crazy. Yeah. Then on, they broke the embargo.

That's really, really, really.

It gets way worse. It gets way worse. Yeah. Then, so I called up Revive and Restore, who's an incredible nonprofit. You know, I love Ryan and I love Stuart. They actually, to your point, Peter, have been talking about de extinction for a long time. They're a nonprofit. Right. It's like this takes hundreds of millions of dollars in systems theory modeling to actually achieve this. Right. You can't just do it with a nonprofit. And so I said, hey, just so you know, there's. I was going to call you today to tell you about what's coming tomorrow, but this just happened. And I will tell you, we did meet with the Department of Interior, and they're excited about classifying de extinction as a form of conservation. And the feedback was overwhelming. They're like, we've been trying to do this for 10 years. Oh, my gosh, this is huge. That's Monday. Well, then Tuesday we give this Academic backlash, which is, you know, no one cares about two things. The science, which blew my mind and I mentioned I thought was a travesty. And no one cared about the fact that while we made three direwolves, and yes, they're direwolves, there were four red wolves that we cloned using a new non invasive cloning technique, which I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about with, with us in a second. But we, we, we developed a new technique to clone that's less invasive for animals. We made four red wolves, which are the most critically endangered wolves on the planet. There's only 15 left in the wild.

Wow.

No one covered that either. Right. And then it became a philosophical and semantic debate on what makes a species. But what's interesting is there's about 30, I thought there's 11. There's about 31 ways to classify species in all these different ways. Right. And so by many ways, a polar bear and a brown bear should not are considered the same species, but they have a different species name and they look completely different phylogenetically. So there's all these different reasons or different ways to do this. And so that became the discussion. So then we're like, like fighting fire and just kind of like not really trying to explain ourselves, but just saying, like, educating people. Like, not trying to persuade, but just educating. Like, there's actually a lot of ways to do all this. So that was Tuesday and then Wednesday. And then, by the way, conservation community is super stoked about, you know, at least new tools and conservation. So I was like, okay, well, it's a win, whatever. So then Wednesday there's a Cabinet meeting, which obviously we're not a part of. The President.

Like, like the U.S. cabinet.

U.S. cabinet. There's a Cabinet meeting. And, you know, we have yet to, We've not talked back to the Department of Interiors. We don't know the full context of the meeting. Right. Because we're not in the Cabinet meetings. We're not part of the Cabinet of the United States. And a comment was made about de extinction and the Department of Interior. And Secretary Bergam is very passionate. He told us in the meeting with us that he's excited about getting animals off the endangered species list, but that's not removing them, that's recovering them. That means that we have enough of them that's healthy enough that they're no longer on the. And he made a comment that we put things on endangered species list, but they never come off. And so how do we get animals off using technology. And so we Thought, but. But once again, we live in a moderately polarizing climate right now. And so that became. And I don't know if they, I can't speak for the administration, but that became de extinction is now being used to get rid of endangered species. Like, wait, what? So that was my win. So that was my Wednesday, and then Thursday I was like, we'll just answer whatever questions come up. Right? And so last week was a little bit of a crazy thing, but going back to your original question, at the end of the day, that was one week in time and Colossal is looking at 50 years. And our goal with Colossal is to bring back these species as well as use all those technologies to save existing species. In that model, you have to think on a 50 year horizon. So if you get great press on day one, which we did, and you get crazy press on day two, that's okay. Those are two days in a 50 year journey. And I think you have to think like that.

So let's talk about. I have so many questions, buddy, and I'm so proud of you. And just for full disclosure, I'm a seed investor and advisor to Colossal Biosciences. I. I've met Ben and there's something about you as a CEO that have. You've got the right phenotypic attributes that people just want to support you and what you've done. I mean, how old is, is Colossal these days?

So we were founded in September 2021.

So, okay, so you're four years old and you, you went from a $0 valuation at a first conversation with George Church to now say it. What's your valuation today?

Our current valuation is 10.2 billion.

10.2 billion. That's pretty insane in four years.

Yeah.

I want to talk about the business model, but the science real quick. Sort of de extinction 101.

All right, so de extinction 101. And remember, I'm not a scientist, but you basically, so far.

Can I just pause for a second?

Oh, yeah, yeah, go for it.

I think this is so important when people think about moonshots, etc. You have no background in biology to be doing this. Right. Just as Elon has no background in space or the car industry or the energy industry. It's people coming in with a beginner's mind and an MTP leveraging new technologies that are accelerating naturally. And that formula gives you any possibility in the world. And I think that's such a huge thing that we should drill down on. Anyway, the back to the science. I think it's so great.

I'M really curious and I feel like I like to ask questions. And, you know, and George will sometimes say that I'm the best student he's never had because I just, I like to ask weird questions. And he's like, I didn't think of it like that. And those aren't like scientific breakthroughs. They're just. I just, I. To your point, I don't know anything about it. So I can ask, you know, childlike questions about it and then I get these answers and, you know, it's great.

Okay, onto the science.

Okay, so the science and one of the reasons why we had to raise so much capital is you have to build the entire system, right? So just like going to space or even just building a software system, the whole system has work and just design the software. You got to build the software to build a hosting, you got to build all the API calls. So you have to think about it. So I think, like, my background is mostly in software, so I try to think about things like, like how you build software. And so you first have to get ancient DNA, right? And so there's kind of three fundamental parts, right? There's ancient DNA, there's the closest living relatives, and then there's the tools to make it possible.

So how old is the oldest ancient DNA? Because, I mean, I'm going to ask you, because everybody asks you, number one question, can you bring back dinosaurs? Is there any dinosaur DNA out there?

There is no dinosaur DNA. George and I both agree that philosophically that you should not ever say things are impossible because maybe we don't fully understand it yet. I think we're learning things every day, which is also not a very academic mindset. I might have you. Most academics think we know everything, so I deal with that quite a bit. But I think I know nothing. So I'm on the other side of the spectrum. But right now you can go back a little over a million years. Our oldest, we have about 59 mammoth genomes that we're working with. And our oldest is a step mammoth. Joe would argue solely mammoth, but a step mammoth as it's currently classified and it's 1.2 million years old.

Awesome.

But most of the DNA we work with is, depending on the projects, hundreds to thousands of years old. In that kind of range, we're still.

It degrades. DNA degrades very rapidly.

Very, very rapidly. Right. The minute you get blood out of a system, it starts to degrade, Right? And so, so what we do is you first have to get fine ancient DNA and you've got it. A lot of times there's this thing called coverage, right? Because these, these big DNA reading machines, they are, they've gotten incredible, but they're not 100% accurate. So the more coverage you can get, meaning the more times the full genome that you can read, the higher likelihood that they know it. You know, at, at 3081, that that's a C, right. Versus a G, right. And so there it's giving almost like a probabilistic score for each letter at each, at each space and each position. Yeah, each position. So. So the more coverage you can get. So if you only have like 1x, meaning that you got there was. You do. This is a destructive sampling process. Meaning you put it in. It's like, you know, it's like, it's like when that, that old claw game, you put it in, and if you don't get the teddy bear, you still lost your money, right? And so you put the DNA in, into the, you do this library prep, but it destroys the library in the, in the sequencing process, right? So. So therefore you've got to get enough DNA. And the problem with ancient DNA is, to your point, Peter, it. It degrades very quickly. Cold, dry places are the best places we get DNA, but it degrades very quickly because of heat acidification. That's why I love Brand Tar Prince. It's terrible for, for this. Um, and also you have animals that die on top of animals. You have animals that eat animals, defecate on animals. You got bacteria. So you have to then screen it and make sure you understand what's truly endogenous, like what is actually that animal. Right? And so, and that's literally kind of a numbers game, right? So sometimes you get zero DNA on species, sometimes you get a lot of endogenous DNA.

So the mosquitoes trapped in amber just isn't the thing.

It's just so, not that we've tried, but amber is not a great storage vehicle. It's very porous. It's not a great storage vehicle for DNA. So there is no DNA for that. And, and I don't think that we'll get back to. I don't want to ever say impossible, because who knows, but, but I, I, you know, people still think Loch Ness Monster is there. So if some crazy lineage of dinosaur magically existed somewhere and died during the ice Age, that would be great, but I don't know if that, that, I don't think that most likely did not happen. So. So you can go back about a million years so then you get these pieces of DNA, you do the sequencing and you know, we got about a 13x so we had a full read of the genome 13 different times. And for you can do what we do probably at 5 to 6x but you really, if you get north of 10 or especially north of 20, then for what we do, which is called functional de extinction because we're not trying to clone these extinct species. There's no living cells. You can't clone a dead cell from. From. From bone. You can't clone clone from a. A dead bone. We're trying to identify and read the genome and then use synthetic biology to engineer in those lost genes to time. And so once you read it, you compare it to the closest living relative because why would you know, it's like if you're going to make a direwolf, you shouldn't start with a frog because there's hundreds of millions of you. That's a lot of changes, right? And so dire wolves, for example, are 99.5% the same as gray wolves. And many people didn't know this until we just submitted this paper, which is currently the number one paper on bioRxivs. We actually crashed bioRxivs on. So two other weird things. We crashed biorxivs on Friday, on Thursday when we uploaded bioarchives went down. It was the number one research paper. I think it still is right now and it's on a preprint server. Oh, and by the. And also Red, Reddit shut it down. Shut down Colossal for a week. They said they literally put out a statement. I don't know if this has happened before. There was a statement last night that said any mention of Colossal, Colossal biosciences, dire wolves, any memes will be banned for one week. It's the craziest thing. It's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. So anyway, back to the science. So, so once you, once you have. And there's no like GCP of species, which I think there needs to be actually advocating the federal government to do this, there's no like biobank or bio vault, like the equivalent of the seed vault that has all these cells for wolves that are immortalized or pluripotent stem cells, no one's done genome sequencing on all of this, no one's done any of that. So then we have to go do all that and then you compare the two and then once you identify those genes, we look for areas encoding regions and in regulatory regions in areas that we know will drive or we at least believe will drive certain types of phenotypes. And then we engineer them into the genetic donor. In this case, it's the closest living relative being the gray wolf. And then we identify those, we, we edit those into the gray wolf. And then we do a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is basically cloning, which they, which Dall E made famous, only we now use like robotics and lasers and all kinds of stuff to make it much more efficient. You put it into a host and if everything goes well, you get a healthy animal.

Ben, what percentage of your team and your tech do you consider software versus biology? How much is. This is a biology company?

I'd say, I'd say it's half and half. And so, you know, we spend a lot like the sequencing. Like, like, you know, one of the. Once again, this goes back to education people. Some people were critical where they're like, but they didn't use tiny tweezers to move the DNA. They don't understand synthetic biology. And so it's like, it's like, so this is, this is awesome. I like, people were like, were you frustrated? I got an interview over the weekend. Like, were you frustrated by that comment? I was like, no. This is an educational opportunity, right? No, like, this is cool. Like you think that you move the DNA from here, over here. That's not how it works. We just read it. You said this before, Peter. It's just a different coding language. And so we read the code and then we rewrite the code and we either change this code or we synthesize a block of code and stick it in. We don't move it with tiny tweezers.

How much of this is done by using crispr?

You know, CRISPR has become the catch all for genome engineering, right. It's a combination. So one of the things that we've done really well is there's knockouts, there's knock ins. When you knock stuff out of the genome, you can knock stuff in the genome, you can change individual letters, where we do a lot of changing individual letters. And some people trivialize that, which I think's insane. I'll give you an example. This is a conservation example. That's amazing. And this goes directly to your question. So in one of our tools of just being able to change the individual letters, right, not doing a full knockout, but changing this from like a C to a G. We have a project where in Australia they've actually introduced cane toads. From South America, we what's killing all of the marsupials, specifically the Northern coal. They're critically endangered now because they're eating this cane toad that they did not evolve next to, and the neurotoxin kills them. Well, guess what we found out when we studied snakes. Obviously not mammals and other small mammals that eat cane toads in South America, that they have a similar change at one nucleotide. So think of that three, three, you know, 3.5 billion base pairs. One letter, one change confers a 5,000 time resistance to cantotoxin. So we've now made dun Arts, which are the close living relative. Before we wanted to work in the endangered species, we want to work in a little model species. We've made dun Arts, which are another carnivorous marsupial that are now 5,000 times more resistance to cane toad toxins with one letter change. And so when people say but that, you know, making one letter change isn't that big deal. I was like, one letter change could change the entire animal. You could literally like George put out a statement, says you could make an entire new species with one letter change.

That's extraordinary.

Wow.

And so, and then to answer, and then we also do DNA synthesis. So if there's a lot of changes all at the same time, sometimes we'll synthesize that block and just put that whole block in because it creates a lower probability of off target effects because you'll, you'll potentially only have off targets at the ends versus like making 20 changes in a gene. So, and where we are, what colossal is probably, I would argue we're the best at is multiplexing, meaning that we take all those technologies, put it on one big array and kind of one big guide and deliver it and kind of. And we're pretty good at that.

How much easier is the next species to de extinct? Because when I look at what you're doing, if I use the computing architecture as an analogy, you've got hardware, you've got bios, you've got operating system applications. You're essentially reinventing that entire stack in different ways to cobble together what you're trying to do. It's not like you're writing one little application that runs on a very standardized, well understood stack. You're reinventing the whole stack completely. Now that you've done it once, does the next time become exponentially easier and then much easier after that?

I think that the editing becomes exponentially easier and the delivery becomes exponentially easier. We're working on some things with, on the embryology side around, like how do you have a. We're not there yet. Just be clear, we've not done this. I don't want to claim we've done this. We are working on some pretty interesting ideas around a universal donor egg where you can have matched mitochondria because you can't go too insanely different. Like I can't use like a cow egg different size to grow an elephant, even if the size work the same because you'll have, you have the potential, let's say for mitochondrial rejection. But if you can make a universal egg and you can match the mitochondria, then you have a universal egg that could work for any species, which is pretty interesting. And then you don't have to do the process of stem cell gametogenesis. So sometimes people are like, you guys haven't thought about embryology. I was like, that's all we think about. And so to your question, I think the editing the comp bio is scaling quite well software and compute the models that we are retraining on what works gives us a better idea of what tools to use for what job. So that's scaling really well. The multiplex ability in off target in the monoclonal screenings within screening all the cells. We do a lot of sequencing. We even do all of reason why we know that our animals are healthy before we put them in is we screen the embryos. We do full genotype sequencing which is insane. Like it's a lot of money and time that we do all of that. So. So the sequencing scaling we're getting better at the library preferential DNA. You know, I think that the big thing is I think that we will get to the point that we will be able to synthesize eventually full chromosomes and I think we'll get to the side get to the point that we. I think it's a ways away but I think we'll get there and then I think we'll be like we've already delivered in publish literature. 35 KB or 30 KB I think is the biggest large cargo swap we've already done.

100Kb is a kilobase, a thousand kilobase.

So it's a thousand letters. So we're going to.

Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

So I think that that's all scaling the two areas that I think will scale over time is this goes back to your stack analogy is like the BIOS is similar, right. But we have to create different. We have to create the editing and all the tools that you develop for the application layer I think get better and better and better. The two things that we are spending a lot of time on is that universal egg embryology side to make that easier so it doesn't have to be a customer, you know, chip architecture for every single species. Right. The second thing is, is, and kind of on the bio side, I think it's interesting to think about or what. What we've been trying to think about is how do we make it where there. What are the universal truths across certain genes or gene families or pathways. Right. So like dogs scale really well. So if you have a Chihuahua and then you have a Great Dane or you got a direwolf, right. Dogs and wolves are dogs. They scale really well. Right. They scale one to one. Not all species scale really well. And so if you were to take like a goldfish and try to make it the size of killer whale, it wouldn't scale like that. So there's only a couple of clades of animals that scale like that. And so how does that work? And you know, how do we, how does that work like with el coral and some of these gene families and how is that then replicatable across mammals and then separately what are those functional equivalents in birds? So those are the things that we're trying to. That don't scale as well as the media. So all these cells kind of like a little bit different media.

Which media is the growth medium which these cells are getting nutrients and growing. Yeah. So Ben, one of the things about taking on a moonshot like this is along the way towards this massive vision. You're solving all these other problems that can easily become spin out companies. And you've been doing that. You spun out form bio, which is fantastic. And one of the spin outs I can't wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial wombs. I mean you just had a baby, you didn't use an artificial womb. You used your, your wife, which was great. We have surrogates we can go to. But this idea of an artificial womb we've seen in science fiction for a while. How far off are we from full gestation artificial wombs?

It's a great question. So we have a 17 person team on it. Our goal with artificial wombs because colossal to your point, doesn't work on anything human. Anytime that we have a technology that has an application to human, we patented, we patent a lot of technologies. We actually patent some stuff recently around P53 and cancer and whatnot.

Which by the way, P53, one of the reasons that whales live so long is they've got extra copies of this p53 gene.

Yep. And so do Elephants and elephants, you know, we breathe. I mean, I guess we all breed the same thing with whales, but it's easier to study elephants than just whales. Right, because they still go underwater. And so I think there's a lot of cool tech that can come from that. But on the artificial womb side, we spin everything out. So we won't ever make an artificial womb for humans, but I think that someone could potentially use our technology to do that. I will say it's harder to grow an elephant. Not ethically regulatory or philosophically or religious. It is harder biologically to grow some of the species we're working on than a human. And I think that if we continue on the current course in speed, by the end of 2026, we will have the world's first mammal birth fully ex utero. Where we went from, you know, it'll be, wow, it'll be an elephant, it'll be small, and then we'll scale from there. But our vision for that once again goes back to conservation, because imagine a world where you can grow. Everyone knows about the Northern White Rhino, which we're the genetic rescue partner on, but imagine a world where you could grow 200 genetically diverse northern White Rhinos in a lab and then, you know, without ever having to interfere with another animal or a rhino. And then that goes into those, those baby rhinos, then get those, work with rewilding partners, but then back into the field. So I think artificial wombs, if you can do multiple different placental types, will change conservation. And I think we could productionize endangered species development, and we could. I think we. I think we could save every species on the planet.

Well, let's, let's pause on that moment. Save every species on the planet. That's. That's pretty extraordinary.

When you said 2026, that's like next year.

No, I know, I know.

It's right there. Okay, I want to give you an umbrella comment and then you tell me how close we are to this. One of the holy grails of synthetic biology when we used to talk about this was that if you get to that holy grail, you essentially are looking at DNA as a Microsoft Word document, which we can edit. Every one of our cells is governed by the DNA that tells it to be a liver cell or heart cell and how to operate, etc. If you get to that point, the human being of 50 trillion cells or whatever is essentially a software engineering problem. How close are we to that? To that point where you can edit it as easily as you can edit.

Over document it is a focus and funding problem. It's not a lack of knowledge problem. And so like, you know, everyone's spending all this time on large language models, which is great. If the same effort goes into that, into this, solving specifically this, I think it's five years. If it doesn't, I think it's 10.

And by the way, AI is going to be the biggest accelerant to all of this.

Yeah, yeah. AI, access to compute and then eventually quantum, those combine with, with synthetic biology. You know, George has visions of synth that are crazy about synthetic biology. We've talked about like, so define synthetic.

Biology and let's talk about crazy.

Okay, let's go crazy.

Okay. So the way, there's lots of definitions for these things, but we look at synthetic biology as a way that we can use data and AI and other tools to basically change life, engineer life or direct life in a specific way. So that's things like, you know, making drought resistant plants, making drought resistant animals. There's a terrible process that people that, that animals go through for dehorning them because the cows are now like. Everyone loves to think about cows in these beautiful fields like they see on Yellowstone, but they're really not for the most part. And so they dehorn them because a lot of times they're so close together they'll stab each other and they'll get infections that causes disease and hurt. So they, they physically dehorn them. You can actually now we could engineer them to just be hornless cows. Right? So then, you know, and I'm not, you know, I'm not encouraging me to eating meat, I'm just telling you that is something that exists today. And so synthetic biology affords us all these opportunities, right? We've got a company called Breaking that we started which is about using a syn, using synthetic biology to supercharge this microbe that literally breaks the chemical bonds in plastics. It doesn't make microplastic, doesn't eat plastic. It breaks. That's why I call it breaking. It breaks the chemical bonds in plastics, right? So it just makes biomass as an output. And so, you know, I think that we will eventually get to the CAD software of biology. You know. You know, to Salim's point is I think that we will be able to cure most disease states. I think that we will be able to do epigenetic cell resetting. I think we'll be able to live youthful lives for as long as we want outside of natural causes or outside of like, you know, acts of God. Some crazy thing happens to you. I think that we will. George and I talk about living one with nature and we have this vision because George and I both believe that we're going to live hundreds of years. And so we think that there's, and so one of the things that we think is pretty interesting is if we can grow like instead of like a tree grows and you chop it down, right, and you make a house, why don't we make trees that like, like, why don't we make trees that like, this is literally. George, I was like crazy. Like, like, you know, people are going to think, oh, these guys do like mushrooms. But we have this idea of like, what if we could engineer trees to grow faster and grow in the shape of a house? And like, what if you could use trees as water filtration? And what if you could have bioluminescent fungi in there? Right? And like, what, what if you could literally build a engineer and tell a tree to, to grow in the form of a house? Right. And I, and I don't, that sounds psychotic, but I, and I don't think that's in the next five years. But I, I don't, I, I think that's in the next hundred. Like, I, I don't think it's that. I, I think it's closer than people think.

We, we are, we as humans and all animals are effectively molecular robots, right?

Yeah.

We're designed on a molecular basis and we function in different ways. And one could imagine, putting ethics and morals aside, that, and I use this always an example in Singularity University for synthetic biology. I said I'm going to engineer something that looks like a cat, except it walks around your carpet, it eats lint and appease stain remover, and that's its purpose. And it just goes around and cleans the house. Yeah, but you can imagine, you can imagine that I'm not going to get into the alien conversation, but if I were a future civilization, I would engineer sort of aliens to pilot the spaceships. And instead of robotic, robotic systems, you want systems that are self healing.

Yeah.

It was about 13 years ago. I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question. I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a fountain Upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, any neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because, you know, health is a new wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome. So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements. And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important.

Right?

And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team linked to those in the show. Notes down below, please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode.

What are some of the crazy conversations you have with George when you're dreaming up without any limits? Let's hear some of that.

Well, I think the Treehouse one is pretty crazy and pretty good there. Yeah. Another one that we've talked about that, that I think could be, you know, pretty interesting is how do we like, engineer in, like, you've seen these, you've probably heard about phages, right? And these like microbes that you can get in like in the dirt. Like every time they like take a scoop of dirt they find new bacteria and stuff that doesn't exist.

So phages are viruses that infect bacteria versus viruses that infect humans. And the numbers are, I think there's like a, a billion quadrillion phages on the planet. There are more phages on the planet than there are stars in the universe.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's a d. It's the most insane. Like every time you scoop I think a dirt you, they, they just like, like literally you just go outside just you, everyone can make a discovery.

Just go grab phages on Earth, you'll be blown away.

It's crazy. But they've been using these like lattice architectures is to actually then they've shown that in a typical scuba tube and this isn't with synthetic biology, not even taint synthetic biology with just a scuba tank, they can 3 or 4x the volume of oxygen that it can hold using this kind of structure from some of these phages. And I think it's really interesting. And so I think, so some of the stuff that we've, George and I have also talked about is, you know, how do we build self healing outside of, outside of humans and outside of, outside of houses, but how do we build underwater cities that are also self healing? Right. And so that's probably our biggest and craziest dream is like how do we, you know, if you look at the world's, you know, what's interesting about space is it makes you think about closed systems. What's interesting about underwater is that it makes you think about closed systems. But you have, you don't have a, you have a more of a stable temperature. You don't have this like, you know, negative 500 to 500 degree fire. 522, 52 50, 500 variant in the sun that's instantaneous. You don't have the vacuum, you don't have the radiation. It's also the cost per kilogram of sinking something is much cheaper than putting it up in space. And so, so we've talked a lot. One of the more weirder ideas out there was we've talked a lot lot about if you just look at the surface of the Earth, you know, we could do a lot of cool things and you'd have to, it would force you to build you know, very sustainably cities underwater. And so that, that's a project that we're interested in that may be a 2090 project. But I think we'll get there.

All right, I got to ask you this question, and I'm going to, I'm going to force some version of an answer.

So.

A royal or a deca billionaire comes to you and says, ben, I know you say it's impossible, but I want to create a dinosaur. How do you do it? Now, I'm not saying you are doing it, not saying you plan to do it, but sort of theoretically.

Yeah. So there is no dino DNA. Right. And so just to kind of, you know, give a shout out to the haters. Jurassic park is not a movie about dinosaurs. It's a movie about genetically modified birds with dinosaur and frog alleles, or it's a movie about dinosaurs, depending on how you want to classify our direwolf. But. So there is no dino DNA. If I were to. If I were to try to go build a. I don't, I don't, I don't think today you can. I don't. I don't think that you could bring back a dinosaur. I think using synthetic biology, and probably not today, but probably 10 years from now, eight years from now, some period in time, you could do an ancestral state reconstruction of, of what we know of the tree. And, and I think that. Of the phylogenetic tree. And I think that you could do a giant sequencing project to. And I think there's enough that is conserved across multiple clades of birds and reptiles that you would probably be able to go down to make like an archosaur, which is probably the very base of the trees, like the basal animal, before it kind of stuff starts to get weird and split. And. Yeah, I would, I think that you could do that. And then you would be engineering for phenotypes. Right? So I think you'd be looking at, you know, looking to drive certain phenotypes, and I think a lot of those, at least we understand computationally at this point what those protein coding regions are. So I don't even know if it'd be less of a dinosaur than a dinosaur existed. And so that's probably where I would start. But I think it's a huge project. I think it's a. I think it's a lot of money. I don't think it's a. I don't think it's a hundred million dollar project. I think it's quite large.

Is there any possibility that we can harvest DNA of a dinosaur and find that it is preserved in some place, some way somehow?

The problem is DNA degradation and fossilization. And you have to remember when the Dinosaurs perished. It was due to extreme heat. And so, you know, there is dinosaur DNA in the form of birds, right? Birds exist in their dinosaurs. And so but I do think that I, I don't think you'll ever get to the point that you will have dinosaur true dinosaur DNA. There's people like Dr. Kenneth Lakavara, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world, who's who discovered the four biggest dinosaurs, including Dreadnought, which is the biggest dinosaur. And he, he called me last week when we were, when everyone was debating all this stuff. Well, not debating all this, they're only debating the name. And he, and he said he had the same problem with dreadnoughts. He said that, he said that it was the biggest dinosaur and he did it based on kilograms and all this stuff. And you know, a lot of dinosaurs they find like a bone and they're like, it looked like this, but this one, it was a nearly. You can Google and I don't know what percent but it was like 40 or 60. It's very, very complete for a large dinosaur and he found in Argentina. So super cool story. And he had people that called him and he said it was so annoying because they wanted to argue not like us versus metric system, but they wanted to come up with a measure with a dinosaur mass unit. And so he got into this big debate when it came the, one of the, one of the biggest dinosaur discoveries ever. And it was in a large part of it was because he, I think he said it was like 60 tons or something like that. And they, people wanted to debate a metric that everyone could agree on of dinosaur mass, which is, just, which is, which is ludicrously absurd. Right. But Kenneth, one of the things he's done that's pretty cool is he's demineralized dinosaur bones where he can, we can get those amino acids and what his long term goal is. It'd be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone. And this is his work, not ours. We are not doing this. I just want to make sure I give him full credit. It'd be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone and be able to be like, and you know, you found it in, you know, Montana or North Dakota. So you could say is this a T. Rex bone? Is this a Triceratops? And let's say that you didn't have like the, the genius, the, the, the dating of the geological formations around it. You could demineralize a piece of the bone and based on the amino acids Say, oh, this is a Triceratops bone, which is kind of cool. So, but those are. Those are like single. I mean, those are like. I mean, you can't. You can't glean any data on how to build the animal out of that.

So listen, I remember at the very beginning we're talking about, about your vision. It started with the woolly mammoth, sort of. It sort of went off into thylacine and discussions about the dodo bird, about the dire wolf. And so how many different species have you had conversations about bringing back rough order magnitude? Because you must be getting calls from all different parts of the world.

20, 25.

Yeah. What's your roadmap here, pal?

So we're working on the mammoth, we're working on the Tasmanian tiger, We're working on the dodo. You know, given our most recent round of funding, we will most likely expand those into other avian and non avian species. You know, we have not quite cracked the code on the primordial germ cells. So it's a little bit different in birds and mammals. This goes back, Salem, to that media question, right? It's like getting the media that PGCs want to grow in for birds is pretty hard. And once we do that, once we show we can do it for pigeon, which has never been done before because dodos were pigeons just like direwolves were wolves. Once we do that, then I'd probably feel confident in adding another avian species. But there's amazing species out there, and there's some we can't do until we get further in the tech. Like, my favorite animal is. You should look this up. It's the stellar sea cow. It's the coolest damn animal ever. So I don't know anyone in the world that doesn't like manatees. Like, manatees are just awesome, right? They're harmless, they're cute. They're vegetarians, they're kind of tubby, they move kind of slow. They're, you know, they do great stuff for the ecosystem. Nobody. There's not like Facebook hate groups for manatees, Right. If they are, those people should go straight to jail. Or El Salvador. Yeah. Or apparently we do that too now. And so there was this thing called the stellar sea cow. And I'm probably going to butcher the year so someone will yell at me online about it. But it was like it went extinct, like 60 years or 30 years after it was discovered. And it was all upon the Pacific Northwest. And apparently the. The kelp forest there were even thicker because it would eat and defecate and they are whale size. Like they're literally like bigger than whales. And they were apparently really docile and they would just like swim up to people and they're curious like I guess like dolph like balance dolphins are and people would just spear them and kill them.

So curiosity is a bad evolutionary trait.

For large slow moving megapauna. For sure. We've seen the rise of anthropolog. We've seen like the rise of early human on, on continents and the decline of, of megafauna be inversely related nearly one to one. Once, once humans to a certain scale on a continent or subcontinent, the megafauna drops at a very predictable rate.

Yeah, we just like we go after.

Big, you know, we all work together, kill a couple of big things. A lot of times the big things have single bursts, long gestations. You don't have to kill all of them to send them down on a, on a decline. But I would love to do the stellar sea cow. And I will say publicly It's, I've said 100 times, no one listens to me. It's 100% on the list. We just can't grow it in anything. So I got to get artificial wombs to work and we got to get it to work for elephants. And then eventually we could do seller seekout. I would love to do seller seekout.

Amazing.

What is the business model that gets your evaluation to where it is? Is it spinning off breakthrough medical ideas?

It's really, it's really, it's I would say originally and this is what's been cool. You know, like one of the things I think we're good at is we're also good at saying what we don't know. And the original pitch deck which Peter saw, which was moderately shitty was hey, George Church says he could bring back a mammoth. We're pretty sure that we make money somewhere in there, but we don't know. Right. That was kind of the pitch deck. And so here's how it's evolved and here's kind of the three ways that it's evolved. It then became tech, which is working. Right. We've spun out two companies publicly form Bio and breaking. We spun out a third one that we can't talk about yet, but I'm super excited about its valuation is already over $100 million in the seed. I think it's super cool. I don't think it'll have any philosophical debates on what to call it. So it's cool. It's like it is what it is. So I'm super stoked about that one. We have another one in embryology that we're really excited about that we're working on that. You know, we got a little further on, but I think could be helpful to IDF clinics. So there's technology which is get what you get. There is a long term and this is a, this is a not really a science thing. This is more of working with governments and working with auditors, ecologists and whatnot. But you've probably heard about carbon credits. There's now a new thing called biodiversity credits there. It's getting a lot of traction because some of the problems with carbon credits is not that they're manipulatable, but they're sort of manipulatable on some level. But certain things like biodiversity credits aren't right. Like if you can understand and quantify the value that a forest elephant brings to Gabon, like that's now a thing. Like it's like, it's like research by, by people like PWC and it's certified by Lloyd's of London. And so there now is becoming a biodiversity economy where in part of that it's really helpful because if you can put the value of an animal right, this is the old hunting adage, right, where people are like, well if we kill a Lion for $100,000, it's a good thing because we're putting, we're saying that lines worth a hundred thousand dollars to don't poach them. I, I feel a, I'm not a hunter, I've never killed anything intentionally, probably a goldfish, but like that was intentional. But it's like I wouldn't like I as not a hunter, I at least can step back and understand what they're trying to say there on some level, even though I think that's partly manipulated so that they can achieve what they want to achieve. What I'll tell you though is that I do think that if you do put things of value, people tend to protect. And so if you can protect an animal and it has a certain value that you can trade against, it becomes some sort of a commodity play. And what we're seeing is with this Paris Agreement that 62% of the pledges pledge nature based solutions, rewilding, restoring ecosystems, restoring bogs, all these types of things and wetlands and so in animals are critical to all of that. And so where we think that market's going is a combination of biodiversity credits, nature and carbon credits into what will probably end up being called nature credits. That's highly quantifiable. And the variant trade on it will probably be based on sexy factor. Right? Like you have a lot of these companies that cannot become carbon negative because they're in the mining business, they're in the oil extract, they're in the extraction economy. Right. And we still live, on some level, we still live in the world where there's, there's not unlimited, you know, solar, there's unlimited solar, but there's not unlimited, you know, cold fusion and stuff like that yet. Right. And so like, until that happens, we still have some point, there'll still be a transitional period where you have an extraction economy. Well, if you put a value on nature, then you can create annuities based on that. And so we're working on models around rewilding that turns the animals into annuities. And so if we can show that we can make these animals with this genetic diversity. Think about an annuity that's not only growing and is highly valued because of a company like Chevron or Sumitomo or Exxon or whoever would buy those credits because they have to be from a compliance perspective or kind of an esg and they're kind of social good perspective. They are also annuities that multiply because they have more babies, they cause more of a garden. So that's the second thing that, that we are now pretty deep in. Right. And so the science has to work to do that, which is proving to be on the right track. And then, and then the third thing that's interesting is while we open source, we didn't know this and I told, I talked to Peter about this offline like 6 months ago, but we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So anybody can use our technologies for conservation. We also started a foundation with $50 million to go fund conservation projects. Right. They're innovative, by the way.

Congratulations on that. And I just. People need to hear, that's huge.

Yeah, nobody talks about. But it's not a direwolf. Yeah. What embargo? And so those are my life. But the. But yeah, the foundation's great. And we're working right now to get another big donation that once again aren't coming from conservation, they're coming from tech people that were trying to bring tech into conservation. So this is new money to conservation. And. But what we're found, what we're finding is, you know, even I think you'll love this slim because it goes directly to open source software. You know, if you build open source software, you build a community, people start to use it, devs start to Use it. But then you have someone like the red hat Microsoft type opportunity where it's like, okay, we want to go implement this at scale for Cisco. We don't want our developers to do that. We love that you have all this documentation. You guys made this code. We want you to do it right. And so while we open source all this for governments and NGOs and everyone else, we are now having government saying, in our hands, we think we can get this done, but in your hands, we'll pay you. And there's one government that's trying to get a recovery of a species. It's going to cost them about $300 million to get to that species. And it's going to take 23 years. We can do it in less than three, and we can do it for like $70 million. And so it's not just the 3300 million. It's like that could go to more recovery efforts or education or water or whatever. It's the fact that we can recover species in less than two decades. And so we're starting to see these government opportunities like bio vaults and other things where it's like, you know, this is work, right? So it's not free. It'd be easy if it was all just free. But, you know, we're now saying, how do we build a consortium of partners around the world where we can also biobank all species, but. But not just put them in a freezer? Like, how do we build pluripotent stem cells? How do we do immortalized cell lines? How do we do sequencing? Well, all of that's compute money, right? Someone's got to pay for that. So I think that we can offer this like, you know, redundancy model as well as kind of this acceleration if people want it. But once again, we're happy to have people just use all of our stuff for free.

If that's Ben, when am I going to go to LA Zoo and see a colossal direwolf or a, you know, some. A woolly mammoth? I mean, that has to be a important future business line where it's scientific education, right? I mean, you'd have lines winding around any of these facilities.

It's a really great question and we get it a lot. And in the early days, we had a lot of folks from that community want to, like, where do we. What do we have to do to sign up first nationally, internationally? But, you know, as we've spent a lot of time thinking about it, I think it's more likely that you will see them in a ecological preserve being back in their natural habitat than you're going to see them in Los Angeles. So you do have to travel, unfortunately you have traveled to their locations. But, but I also think that, that you know, one of the things that we've started to have conversations with, with governments is the brand building that that can do for the country. So we're talking to northern states of the United States and we don't want to be exclusive so like, you know, or exclusionary. You know, like people, people argue the zoo thing to us all the time in a positive route. They're like, but if you made a zoo, like what about kids that want to see this and get inspired by it? Because there's been all these studies that show that zoos actually are good for people care more about animals. If they go to zoos as a kid there's like actual peer reviewed science that shows that like not all zoos are tiger king. There's great zoos like the San Diego Zoo, there's, they do great stuff. You know, groups like the AZA and others are trying to do more for conservation. So you got that right? You got that and we're seeing that that works. What I would tell you though is you know, our focus is on rewilding back into the ecosystem. And so the two things that we've talked about and I don't know what where we'll end up on it is, you know, we've said to like Tasmania, you should once, you know, once we have enough thylacines and once they're back in genetically diverse up to be reintroduced. We've, we've gone through a very thoughtful feasibility study of rewilding them. They're benefiting the ecosystem. You should offer ecotourism to see them back there, right? And then, you know, not like there's like the, there's this thing that I didn't even know existed, but there's like a sloth cam and there's like a bald eagle cam and there's all these AMs. But it's like how do, if you can't, we don't want to be exclusionary. So if you can't afford to go to Tasmania, which is really not the easiest place to get to, I go several times a year. The, the, you know, how do we bring that experience to you without making it about exhibition of the animals? And so we've been talking a lot about this. We've actually been talking to a lot of education partners including the Australian government about how do we do content. Right. Which I Know, isn't the same, Peter, as like seeing a mammoth in, in, in real life. But you know, I, and so, so we don't have an answer. I, I think the, the short answer is we'll put animals back into the wild with collaborations with indigenous people groups and private landowners and governments for the purpose of ecosystem restoration. And then how do we put the science on display? Because the animals are awesome. But how do we bring the science on display? Right, because that is something that Jurassic park nailed. Regardless of whether you, how you feel about Jurassic park, the movie, we, a lot of people know about genetics because of Jurassic park and that, you know, who cares about the rotten tomato score that did something like there are geneticists today that don't want to make dinosaurs, but went into genetics because that movie got them excited about genetics. And so we've, we're filming a docu series. We, you know, we'd like to build more educational content.

What I hear, Ben, is you've got an incredible respect for, for the life that you're bringing back and it's not your goal to, to commercialize it in a, in a crass fashion.

Right? And so that, so I would rather us put animals back on ecological reserves, protect them. We don't even know. I mean, you know, but very few people know where the actual wolves are. But like the, but like we, we'd rather get them back in the wild, doing their thing in the wild. Maybe there's ecotourism like Kruger national park, where money goes back to help the environment, help the indigenous people of the local communities. Maybe we do something like that in collaboration with governments. But then, you know, but to your question, how do we also, it is awesome science. So how do we're trying to film everything? How do we put, how do we put science on display? Not animals on display. And we don't have an answer yet.

I have a, a fun question. You and I have a common friend who's another extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur by the name of Palmer Luckey.

Yeah, Palmer's great.

Yeah, Palmer's amazing. I'll be doing a follow up podcast with him in a couple of weeks and when I get together with him, I brainstorm, okay, what would be a great X Prize? You know, what should we be doing? Because he's one of the teams competing in our Wildfire Prize. In fact, he was the very first person to register to compete in the X Prize Wildfire. And he's got a crazy solution which I love. But we brainstorm. And so one of the prize ideas that we kicked around, over dinner was the idea of an uplift prize. Can we uplift a species? Can we take a dog and make it far more intelligent? Or, you know, shall we say Planet of the Apes? You know, introduce the genes that increase intelligence to these animals. Is that something that's, that's, you know, putting.

Putting aside the moral, ethical, it's a very. Palmer lucky.

Yes.

It's about as Palmer lucky as it gets. Right. And sometimes Palmer gets a mixed rap, but he is so brilliant, he's absolutely so passionate about the safety of America. And you know, I've seen the people attack him online and it's like, I want people like Palmer that wake up every day that are that smart and that are like working on a defensive weapon system or an offensive weapon system that is a deterrent for some bad guy not to hurt my kid. And so I.

You want them on your. You want them on your side?

Yeah. You want him on yours. We are lucky to have Palmer. I'm a huge. I mean, obviously he's a friend, full disclosure, and I think very highly of him. But sometimes he gets this polarizing thing because it's like, you know, it's cute to, you know, go to the grocery store and drive your car or Tesla or whatever and think that that all is free and it's just not. And you've got to have our incredible armed forces and people supplying them like Palmer to, to, to make our way of life possible so that we can do this and we can do. It's. It's wonderful that we can debate whether we can call it a direwolf or not versus someone killing us for that. Right. And that's amazing. And so anyway, back to your question. I think that there are genes associated with that, that, that could be associated with intelligence. There's been studies been done in intelligence in mice. I think that you can do non invasive sequencing of really smart animals. Colossal. Is never gonna work outside of humans. We also drew the line at non human primates because we get the Neanderthal question all the time. And so we just said, great, sorry. And then people get sad. They're like, but what about Gynopiticus? And I'm like, there's not really any DNA anyway, so. No, we're not making giant apes. That's not what we are trying to do at this company.

King Kong is coming.

Yeah, King Kong. Not here though. And so I would say that for us, I, I do think that if you could make smarter animals, like, you know, dogs or cats or something, that you had that type of relationship with. I think that's interesting. But you know, you also have to be careful, right? Because you know, I think it's a very important ethical thing to really think through because it's a slippery slope. Because then what happens when you make smarter, you know, livestock, right? Then like it's even worse for livestock, right? And so it's hard, I mean, it's hard balancing some of the ethical questions in the name of progress of synthetic biology, you know, also. So that's what, so we, we've. I know it sounds like a cop out, but that's why we've drawn some of these lines saying, hey, we're just going to do this, we're not going to do that. Because we, even though I'm not philosophically against some of those things, you know, we will never work in some of those categories.

How do you deal with the invasive species problem? Like for example, the Scottish went into New Zealand and took the gorse bush with them, figuring that would make good fencing and that took over the island and, and, and totally messed up the ecosystem area.

The area, an area I love is gene drives. Like nobody. And you know, it's crazy is like certain people like, like the US hasn't been as pro gene drives as I think they should be. But, but island nations like New Zealand and Australia are like, okay, we're in trouble with invasive species. We have to have new things. And I love gene drives because cats.

For example, define the gene drive for.

So, so gene drives are, are technologies that you can develop where you can introduce into a population where it will silence or change certain genes within that organism, within that organism and you can deliver it by food or other things. And so right now, Australia is like the face of mammalian extinction. And it's because of cats. They've introduced like everyone's cats. Cats love to have baby cat kittens and the people let their feral cats, cats get out, they get feral and then they're killing and decimating these small marsupials. Well, there's people now that kill cats in Australia, right? In, in America, like you go to like, God knows what would happen if you shot a cat in America. But it's like, you know, to Australia, if it's not their personal house cat, they hate them, they despise cats because it's killing their most unique. They have these unique animals that no one else has in the world, right? And so a way to handle that in a very thoughtful way that is healthy for the animals is you introduce gene drives where that cat eats it Instead of. It's not poisoned, doesn't die, it has an offspring. So it does have another generation, but that offspring cannot give rise to more offspring. It's effectively sterile. So then after a few generations, there just are no more cats, but they get to live out their natural lives. They just don't get to over procreate. Right.

This got a lot of attention back about five, six years ago when gene drives were being put forward to basically decimate mosquito populations.

And everyone. And I think the biggest concern is, you know, everyone's seen one too many movies, right? And so like you got Resident Evil and then people are like, oh, you make a gene drive and then it turns us all into zombies. Right? It just doesn't work like that. And so but I do, I do think that, or like one of the Mission Impossibles, I think they had targeted like a bioweapon around that stuff. And so you have to be thoughtful about this. But I do think that you can silence certain, or not I think you, you can silence certain procreation in, in animals using gene drives, especially where it's invasive. It. And I mean, we're doing kind of the opposite of a gene drive with these marsupials, right?

That's right.

If we, if we make super coals, then we don't have to engineer all of the other marsupials to eat coals because the coal are to eat the cane toads. The coals love eating the cane toads. So then they eat the cane toads so then they don't die. So their numbers rebound and they recover. But at the same time there's other marsupials that don't eat those cane toads, so then they don't die because there's no, there's, there's less cane toads. So, you know, I. People think this is playing God. People think this is geoengineering, but I mean, we introduced the K toads and.

We'Re geoengineering by default anyway, so every day.

Every day. And so we should start being thoughtful on this.

I love the arguments that GMO is bad for you. It's like, oh my God. That's all we've ever done is genetically modified everything. We've just been shitty at it by selective.

I use the, I use the analogy.

Slow and shitty and unpredictable about it.

I use the analogy of film photography to digital photography. We've been doing breeding for thousands of years and nobody says anything. Now we've got the digital photography, we can do it at scale. And everybody's like, oh my God, we should be.

We, we've been doing forever. Look at a pug.

Yeah.

Look at any of this.

Thought we should breed a bunch of stuff together that ends with a pug.

Oh my God. Ben. Quantum sciences, Quantum computation, Quantum tech. How much do you think about that as the next layer?

Yeah. Where does that fit in?

I think it will be a game changer for specifically simulation design for editing. And if you feed enough data and do the model on top of, on top of Quantum, you could get, you could get I think pretty good at predicting not just genotype to phenotype relationships, but you can get pretty good at understanding, you know, what negative effects would be from editing. And so in predictions of editing, like hey, here's the 50 spots, you should go edit. You know we always say the better we are at computation. This annoys people but it's true. But every edit has a risk. Every edit has a risk. It just has a risk. And we don't we to that question you asked earlier about when do we know everything about the genome? You know, I think for humans it's that but for all life, who knows, right? It's going to take Quantum, it's going to take AI before we can truly understand it. For all life. And I think that, I think what's interesting about Quantum is if you could simulate these things and simulate those edits. We always say the less edits we can make that get the desired outcomes and the loss phenotypes that that's the safest for the animal. That's the. And so like if you could, if it takes a thousand heads, make a thousand out of it. But if you can do it in three, do it in three. Right. It's. We have a very. Programming like this will come to surprise to you but we think about this like programming, right? It's like if you could do something in three lines of code versus a thousand lines of code code, you should do it in three lines of code. So, so I think Quantum will be a game changer. I just, I, I don't like, I, I meet with like I, I see Will every year from mit. He's great. And it's just like, but it's like I, I never know like quantum, Quantum sensing is here but in Quantum sensors are here but it's like in like quantum comms is kind of here. Ish. But it's like I don't know when we're really going to get there. I thought Microsoft's breakthrough earlier or last late last year on some of their chip architecture Is really interesting. But when is it going to be truly here still to me is a question mark. It's two years. Every two years at least in my experience.

You employ Ethicis in the company, don't you?

Yeah.

What are they, what are they debating right now?

Well, I mean, I mean we, we, every single species we bring on, we go through a pretty rigorous process and include obviously them in that. You know, right now we're talking to them about. One of the biggest things we're talking to them about is, is, you know, the current conservation. You know, we want to, we're opening sources and these technologies for conservation. We're making red bulls working on these projects. But then you get the, it's, it's kind of our, our ethicists right now are focused mostly on how do we recognize like, I think that conservation is a bipartisan issue. And, and by the way, we hear that from the government, not just, we don't just look at that. It's like both sides of the aisle, like go looked at who retweeted us, right? It's like you've got Biden's number one advisor and you've got Elon. Like you kind of have both sides of the aisle, right. As far as the political spectrum. And we think that this is, these are really important technologies and conservation right now. The bioethicists are helping us think through how do we educate the existing people on and how do we bridge, how do we, how do we show these technologies off from an ethics perspective, but also be able to rise above the politicizing of it on either side, not just one side. And so they're going kind of a step beyond even the bioethics side thinking about how do we have these dialogues because, you know, I was really sad that within a 24 hour period we made a huge leap forward for conservation using these technologies by the federal government. But because it was by this government, it's seemingly bad. And you know, I don't philosophically agree with that. And so, you know, I think that we worked great with the last administration. We're working great with this administration. There's pros and cons to every administration. And so I think we just have to. But I watch Bill Maher every week to probably show you where I lean on a lot of these things. And you know, Bill Maher's show last week was really telling. Right. And if you haven't watched, I highly recommend people watching it.

Yeah, it was a great episode.

I think having a diet, a refusal to have a dialogue because one party or another party is super polarizing. You can acknowledge they're doing bad things or you can acknowledge you don't agree with them, but refusing to have a dialog that, that is as ignorant as, as things that you may accuse another administration of doing.

So, you know, I think it's a testament to. There's a testament here to your ethics and your MTP where you're able to work with either side of that aisle because of the, the and the objectives. The open sourcing. I love the fact that you're open sourcing everything. It's such a huge thing for the world. It's really great to have somebody like you be at the forefront of something like this because it could go so badly, so many other ways. And you're navigating that version. Very fine line of breaking through science, but doing it in a very, very thoughtful, ethical, even a spiritual kind of way. So I just want to. Hats off to you and all that.

No, it's really, it's really kind of you. Like I got feedback, pretty negative feedback from, from someone I respect in the community, in the conservation community because they said that I was empowering this administration. And I was like there's a difference between empowering and educating. And if you don't educate people and you don't show up, I think it's always better. We showed up for the last administration, we're going to show up for this administration and we're going to show up for the next administration. Because like we said at the beginning of this, we are looking at conservation and de extinction. We're looking at this on a 50 year horizon and that goes beyond a four year party or an eight year party. It goes way beyond that. And this to me is as big of an existential threat as anything else.

My 13 year old heard I was doing this. So he did a quick whip around in his class and his class collectively asked the following question. What's the next species that we can look forward to?

I don't let your kids down. We are on target for the mammoth by end of 2028. We feel good about that but the editing is moving really fast. You know we have done 300 edits in a Dunnart cell and so if the Dunnart. This is a bad non answer but if there's a 13 and a half day gestation on the thylacine, if editing progresses at the same exponential rate that it is, I think the thylacine could beat the mammoth. And if we saw PGCs and DODOs because of the Easiness. Not easiness, but the easy or it's a pretty self contained system being an egg and you don't have to solve IVF or smax cell nuclear transfer in a non model species than the dodo could be. So I mean right now it's kind of a three horse race and it's unclear who's going to win. Not that it's a competition. We love all the species equally.

Gestation periods play into this. Right. So what is the gestation period of an elephant?

22 months.

22 months. Wow. For any pregnant women out there, can you imagine 22 months carrying crazy. And the thylacine is how many, how long?

Thirteen and a half days.

Yeah. Talk about two ends of the extreme.

And the chickens, A chicken which is what we use as a stereot, we use these genetically modified chickens for the cigarettes for is 30 days for the data.

So Ben, you know Selena, you have a closing question, but I just want to say thank you for all the work that you're doing. I've never, I have said this over and over again. The difference that a individual can make make in birthing a company is extraordinary. And I want all the entrepreneurs out there listening to understand that. Right? You can have the idea, you can have access to technology, but if you've got a compelling CEO who builds a moonshot team, is driven by a clear, measurable vision and passion, you've attracted hundreds of millions of dollars at a, you know, at a $10 billion valuation, which is, I don't want to say it's insane, but it's massively impressive and you're executing over and over again. So thank you. And in four years and four years, I remember that. I have to say one thing, I remember the early, in the earliest days because when you, when you started colossal, the idea of a de extinction company for the woolly mammoths had been around for some period of time and people have been working on it and it had been extremely slow in the nonprofit world and people were upset that this moved into the for profit world. But guess what, it's like hitting the, you know, the acceleration button when you did that.

Well then that's one of the. That is one of the things that we often get is like there's an article that came out a couple weeks ago, it says you can't trust a for profit. It's like, well, we are very honest that we are going to make a lot of money off the rewilding. Like I said that here we think that we'll make billions of dollars on the animals being back in their natural habitats. We also think that we will make billions of dollars off of the tech that we're building. And so for us to be able to give that technology and subsidize. People don't realize this unless they've done technology development. They think of research and development is free. Well, it's typically a lot of research and very little that goes into development because a lot of this stuff just doesn't work.

And I love that there's a metaphor merging in my head which is you're not just incubating and bringing back all species. You're actually a, an incubator and a womb yourself for breakthrough technologies that change everything, that change humanity and change everything. Which I think is awesome. It's very meta.

Yeah.

And we're, I mean look, we're having fun and I think we're making a difference and so that's all we can do.

It's rare that I get to say that I get to say I'm jealous about somebody's job, but I think you might have.

Is a 365 seven day a week. But I like, I don't have. I always joke that I don't have friends or hobbies. So I mean I do have friends but I work with all of them in some level. Right. On some level. So I just. It's fun. I love what we do.

Amazing. Ben Lamb, CEO of Colossal Biosciences. Thank you buddy for your work. Please give my best to George and I'll be chatting with him shortly as well. Salim, as always, love having you in this conversation with me and for everybody. So where do folks go to learn more about Colossal?

So we're just alossal on X and you know, we're. They can go to colossal.com and find the rest of our social channels and.

When you go, if you listen to this podcast, you know, go to your friends and say did you hear about the miracle that occurred last week? It's extreme extraordinary. 3 Direwood Dire Wolf pups that have been extinct on the off the place the face of the Earth for 12,000 years are back again. And that's. That is incredible.

They're also cute.

Congrats on the baby. Which is a real startup.

Yeah, it is a real startup that learning that the hard way too. So yeah, all right. Yeah, it's a self learning startup. I have my own large language model continually growing. It's interesting.

You have to be looking at the birth and your son very differently given the business that you're in.

Yeah. My son has no idea obviously what I do, and I think he'll really like it. Or not. I think it'll be a moderately binary.

I just can't wait.

Peter and I, neither of our 13 year olds have any idea what we do either, so don't take it the wrong way.

He's pretty curious. Like at an early age he's really weirdly curious and so I think you'll. I think he'll dig it. We'll see.

We'll see what kind of pets he grows up with is in his teenage years.

Awesome.

All right, take care guys. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponential mastery.com you get on demand access there. Go to exponentialmastery.com.

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