#297 - Dire Wolf Creators on Resurrecting Woolly Mammoth, Jurassic Park & Playing GOD | Colossal

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #297: “Dire Wolf Creators on Resurrecting Woolly Mammoth, Jurassic Park & Playing GOD” | Colossal
Released: April 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

Julian Dorey welcomes Ben Lamm (CEO/Co-Founder, Colossal) and Matt (Chief Animal Officer, Colossal), pioneers in the field of “de-extinction,” to discuss Colossal Biosciences' work on resurrecting extinct species—the dire wolf, woolly mammoth, and beyond. The conversation dives into genetics, conservation, the ethical challenges of "playing God," practical impacts on biodiversity, and the company’s ambitious business model. They address criticisms from traditional conservationists, detail their scientific breakthroughs, and reflect candidly on the uneasy convergence of innovation, ecology, and media hype.

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Table of Contents

1. The Mission & Motivation Behind Colossal
2. Conservation vs. De-Extinction: A Symbiotic Relationship
3. Why Start with the Woolly Mammoth?
4. Technical & Ethical Challenges: From CRISPR to Rewilding
5. Dire Wolves: Science, Semantics, & Media Hype
6. Genetic Rescue, GMOs, and the Future of Conservation
7. Business, Funding, and Technological Spin-Offs
8. Debate: Is De-Extinction a Distraction?
9. Rewilding & Community Engagement
10. Memorable Quotes & Key Moments

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1. The Mission & Motivation Behind Colossal

• Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company (03:19)—focused both on resurrecting extinct species and on direct interventions for currently endangered species.
• Ben Lamm stresses that although media and public attention gravitates toward “bringing back the mammoth” or “creating dire wolves,” their core mission is as much about conservation as it is about spectacle (03:46).
• Shocking statistics about biodiversity loss: Prediction of 50% of all biodiversity lost by 2050 (00:06, 03:46)—up from 15% when the company started.
• The company purposely hires top scientists and conservation experts, realizing they aren’t “just nerds in a lab,” but need broad, practical expertise (03:33; 61:58).

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2. Conservation vs. De-Extinction: A Symbiotic Relationship

• The research and tech developed for de-extinction projects are immediately applied to conservation—for instance, open-sourcing tech and data for use by other scientists (05:55; 14:23).
• "De-extinction and conservation are intrinsically linked. You cannot undo that they are together." – Matt (14:23)
• Example: Their work developing a vaccine for EEHV (Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus) helps both extinction projects and today’s endangered elephants (12:01–13:40).
• Colossal founded a $50 million Foundation devoted entirely to open innovation in conservation tech (15:09; 16:04).

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3. Why Start with the Woolly Mammoth?

• The woolly mammoth serves as a “charismatic megafauna” to excite the public and drive conservation interest—and because founder George Church had already spent years on mammoth DNA (07:33).
• It's an extremely tough technical challenge: gene editing, reproductive tech, working with elephants (the mammoths' closest living relative), whose reproduction is difficult and poorly understood (10:32–11:00).
• Notably, some commonly cited facts about mammoths are corrected (e.g., they've only been extinct for about 4,000 years, not 14,000 as often claimed) (06:33).

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4. Technical & Ethical Challenges: From CRISPR to Rewilding

• Detailed discussion of CRISPR, multiplex genome editing (ability to edit numerous genes at once), identifying which genes actually define a species (33:47, 79:17).
• Serious limitations highlighted around “cloning” extinct animals: With no viable cells, resurrection means engineering a living relative’s genome, not true recreation (84:16, 99:32).
• Open acknowledgment of risks, unintended consequences, and ongoing questions of ethics. Colossal actively seeks out their critics (“the people who have thought about all the bad”) to advise and challenge them (61:58–67:00).
• "Do you ever sit up at night and wonder if you're playing God here?" — Julian
  "We play God every single day… We're eradicating species, why not use this technology to inspire the next generation and help save what's left?" — Ben Lamm (107:55–108:57)

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5. Dire Wolves: Science, Semantics, & Media Hype

• Colossal recently made global headlines for engineering a "dire wolf" via 14 genes and 20 edits introduced into gray wolves, after deeply sequencing ancient dire wolf DNA (84:26–104:16).
• The science is both real and nuanced: They are clear these are engineered proxies, not 100% identical clones. The public and media often run with oversimplified headlines (“We made dire wolves!”) (93:36–94:33).
• "There are 31 ways to define a species... what we did was identify and engineer the core traits that set dire wolves apart." — Ben (85:03–88:01)
• Animal welfare prioritized over genetic “purity”—some dire wolf genes were swapped for analogous traits shown to be safer for the animal (104:16).

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6. Genetic Rescue, GMOs, and the Future of Conservation

• Use of genetic and computational tools to both resurrect extinct animals and increase genetic diversity in current endangered species (“genetic rescue”; see examples with the Northern White Rhino, Red Wolf, and Northern Quoll) (24:34–35:24).
• Open source sequencing data and tools—enabling “acceleration” of conservation research for others (30:16).
• Defends modern GMO use as a potentially powerful conservation instrument, moving past earlier public fears (35:24–36:24).
• “We're not just out here making super animals. You need a new tool in the toolbox—to actually address the genetic bottleneck in these tiny populations.” — Matt (24:34–26:59)

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7. Business, Funding, and Technological Spin-Offs

• Colossal’s business model is multi-pronged:
  • Spin-outs of biotech and synthetic biology companies (e.g., computational biology for drug discovery, “Breaking.com” plastics-eating microbe) (38:25).
  • Development of carbon and biodiversity credit markets: By reintroducing keystone species, they hope to offer quantifiable "eco-services" (41:33–47:16).
  • Much of their conservation work is open access, but the platform tech and IP are monetized (39:54).
• Transparency about fundraising: $435 million for the main business, $50 million for the Foundation, nearly all from tech/philanthropy, not from money destined for traditional conservation NGOs (118:55).

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8. Debate: Is De-Extinction a Distraction?

• Addressing critics such as Paul Rosolie, who say the hype counts as “sci-fi clickbait” distracting from traditional conservation (115:45).
• Lamm & Matt argue:
  • They bring new money and massive attention to conservation.
  • Their tech is already helping living species (e.g., elephant disease vaccine, Red Wolf awareness, genetic rescue projects).
  • The “zero sum” argument is misleading; Colossal is a research and development arm, not a replacement (117:01–120:54).
• "Informed critics? We love 'em. We can learn a lot. Sometimes we're totally wrong, and we're cool with that." — Ben (120:21)
• "This is such an existential problem we need a tapestry of approaches." — Ben (122:53)

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9. Rewilding & Community Engagement

• Rewilding is not a “let’s just set them loose” plan. Dire wolves, for example, are to remain at a 2,000-acre preserve, not released into the wild (132:24).
• For “classic” de-extinction species (mammoth, thylacine/Tasmanian tiger, dodo), re-introduction is years away. It already involves stakeholder engagement: indigenous groups, government, tourism, logging interests, and even child education (133:44–137:05).
• Proactive community input: advisory committees, “please give us feedback” forms, child-friendly educational materials at local governments’ request (133:46).
• Explicit understanding of the behavioral/cultural and ecological challenges of reintroduction, not just the genetic ones (126:45–130:08).

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10. Memorable Quotes & Key Moments

On Playing God and Responsibility

• “I think we play God... when we burn down the forest, when we overfish, when we eradicate species. The question is, why not use that power also to fix things?” — Ben (108:02)
• “You better have people on your team that feel that weight and responsibility.” — Matt (109:22)

On Conservation vs. De-Extinction

• “De-extinction and conservation are intrinsically linked… The research and development that goes into de-extinction is directly applicable to conservation of currently imperiled species.” — Matt (14:23)
• “We’re actually the de-extinction company saying: You don’t need just us; we need the conservation community. We’re one thread in a tapestry.” — Ben (117:11, 122:53)

On Hype vs. Reality

• "People have a right to do whatever they want... at least our job is to keep advancing the science, advance conservation, and keep the conversation going—even if it's controversial.” — Ben (76:12)
• “Sometimes it’s okay to be a little more general, because we need to bring more audience to the table.” — Matt (94:58)

On Business Model

• “It was very Apollo Program–esque: you build technology to get to the moon, but build a lot of other cool stuff along the way that helps the world.” — Ben (39:54)
• “If we can make $50 million a year and just give it to elephant conservation, that could completely change everything.” — Ben (63:53)

On Technology & Caution

• “We did what we did with dire wolves very carefully. Animal welfare is more important than ‘purity.’” — Matt (101:13)
• “We took the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s point-by-point guidelines and designed our project around them. We’re writing up a draft to show the world exactly how.” — Matt (102:16)

On Engaging Critics

• "You want the people at the top of their field that have challenged this for years, because that means they've thought about it for years." — Ben (61:58)
• “We love informed critics. You learn a lot... and sometimes that 5% we’re wrong on—great, we’ll fix it.” — Ben (120:21)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:06 – Biodiversity crisis: 50% at risk by 2050
• 03:19 – Colossal’s founding: De-extinction and species preservation
• 12:01 – Elephant herpes virus, vaccine development
• 14:23 – De-extinction science directly boosts conservation
• 24:34 – Genetic bottlenecks, ex situ conservation
• 33:47 – Discovery: One gene gives marsupials cane toad toxin resistance
• 39:54 – Technology spin-offs and the Apollo Program analogy
• 41:33 – Carbon credits, biodiversity credits explained
• 85:03 – Dire wolf: Morphological vs. genetic species arguments
• 93:36 – Media and semantics: oversimplification of science
• 104:16 – Animal welfare vs. purity in designing dire wolf proxies
• 107:55 – “Playing God” question addressed
• 115:45 – Paul Rosolie’s critique addressed in depth
• 126:45 – Evolution, learned behavior, and functional proxies
• 132:24 – Rewilding plans: practical, patient, collaborative

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Conclusion

This deeply engaging conversation demystifies the science and ambition that goes into de-extinction, giving equal weight to caution, community, and the realities of how new technology actually enters the messy real world. Colossal’s founders are animated by both vision and humility—a rare combination—actively inviting scrutiny and practical collaboration. Whether or not you agree with the very idea of reviving extinct species, this podcast is essential listening for anyone who cares about the future of conservation, biotechnology, and humanity’s place in the natural world.

Transcript

[Host]

Do you ever sit up at night and wonder if you're playing God here?

[Ben Lamm]

You know, it's forecasted that we could lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. Not as many people talk about the species preservation side and the conservation aspects of kind of what we're trying to do. If you look at technology as humans, apex innovation, access to compute and AI, synthetic biology and all of these tools, this kind of blows people's mind. But we could bring back extinct species, rewild them into the ecosystem. And here's what's crazy and what people don't realize. Red wolves is the most endangered wolf in the world. It's the only wolf that's only endemic to the United States. There's 15 left in the wild. 15, 15. And so that is the world that we live in. We now have the tools where we are going to move from scientific experiments to.

[Matt]

There's people that have already used these things in an unregulated way. There was a Chinese doctor that created a. He got in a lot of trouble for it.

[Ben Lamm]

Alleged trouble. Wait, wait, wait.

[Host]

You guys made a direwolf? Like, what the hell is going on here? Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

[Ben Lamm]

Thank you. I still like this. I think it's cool.

[Host]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Ben Lamm]

Like with, with the random tape measure.

[Host]

Actually, there's a story behind that tape measure.

[Ben Lamm]

All right.

[Host]

So I went down to visit my buddy Paul Rosley in the Amazon like a year ago. He, he's been down there for 19 years, conserving areas within, like the Peruvian Amazon near the Brazilian border. He's got over 100,000 acres. Now that he has, he's like the only American on the team. He co founded it with guys who have literally lived in the jungle their whole lives. And it was really cool because I owe a lot of my, like, the reason I'm here to him because he gave me a shot. He had never been in a podcast studio before. He went to my parents house.

[Ben Lamm]

Awesome.

[Host]

Like three years ago. And then we did a nuclear podcast and the rest was history.

[Ben Lamm]

And it worked out.

[Host]

But when I went down to visit him one day, he said to us, he said, you want to take a quick boat ride upstream? We're like, yeah, yeah, fuck it, let's do it. He's like, we can only go up there. We'll get out for 20 minutes. Then we got to come back before the sun's down. And so he takes us up to this spot, and we walk up through the brush, and suddenly it's just destruction. It's like you just see acres of the Amazon fucking gone. And we're all just like, there's probably 10 of us. We're all looking at this, like, whoa, what the. And he. And he comes up behind us and he goes, what you see here looks really bad, but this is actually a victory. And I'm like, malaka, what are you talking?

[Ben Lamm]

A victory? Everything's gone.

[Host]

He's like, listen, this is like 10 acres or whatever behind there is all good. He said, you see these spots where all these. These, like, wood sheds were set up with tape measures like that sitting on it. He goes, there's still fire burning around here. Congratulations. We just bought this off these guys. This is what going on podcasts and, like, raising money to actually get awareness on this lets us do so. He said, the 50,000 acres back there, no one's going to touch that. And he said, we'll use the balsa wood here to build a new research station.

[Ben Lamm]

That's awesome.

[Host]

So I brought back the. The tape measure there because I was like, damn, that really, like, kind of. Yeah. Brings it home.

[Ben Lamm]

It's awesome.

[Host]

But enough for me. You guys made a fucking direwolf. Like, what the hell is going on here?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I mean, I think our team did. I think. I don't know what Matt actually does, but we does. Yeah, our team did. So, you know, we've. Most people don't know this, but, you know, Colossal is the world's first de extinction and species preservation company. People get really stoked about the de extinction side and want to talk about it, want to debate it, want to get excited about it, which I'm sure we'll go into. Not as many people talk about the species preservation side and the conservation aspects of kind of what we're trying to do.

[Host]

Let's talk about it. So this.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, so your story, you know, resonates with us because, you know, it's forecasted that we could lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. And when we started the business, I went back and looked at our original deck. The forecast was 15%, 1:5. That. That's not the best trend line. When was that?

[Host]

When did you.

[Ben Lamm]

20. 21. Yeah. So it's kind of been crazy. And so George and I had this idea, and I really got to credit George is mostly George Churches. I don't know if you've ever had George. George would be A fun guy to have on the podcast.

[Host]

Yeah, he's the co founder.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, he's. He's six, seven, Head of genetics at Harvard. Got narcolepsy. Super weird and interesting. And ultimately I had a little bit of.

[Host]

Yeah. Audio good?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, it's just the headphones. We should be good, right? Yeah, go ahead. And so George was. Is the head of genetics at Harvard. You know, he's like one of the kind of godfathers of synthetic biology. And I met with him and his whole idea was we could bring back extinct species, rewild them into the ecosystem, help the ecosystem, and also build technologies for conservation, which he thought was pretty, pretty exciting. And I thought that was the wildest, craziest idea I had ever heard.

[Matt]

Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes.

[Ben Lamm]

But for booking her trip to Paris.

[Matt]

Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.

[Ben Lamm]

She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected. And so I kind of challenged him on it in our second meeting, and his response was this. At the time, he was like, you know, we could lose 15 to 20% of species between now and 2050. And then it just has gotten worse and worse and worse in terms of. In terms of deforestation. Oh, yeah. Overfishing, Just eradicating species and putting bounties on their heads, doing all these different things. So we thought we could do this, like, super flat, flashy, different way of conservation, because all the tech we make on the path to de extinction, we open source and give to the world for free for conservation.

[Host]

So real quick, I just want to double check the audio, but I want to dig into this.

[Ben Lamm]

Hold on one second.

[Host]

All right, we're back. So if the headphone keeps going out, we'll just take them off.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Host]

But anyway, so I, I actually really do want to talk with you about the conservation side today, because I also know that's where, like, the controversy comes from, because I think the first question would be, even before we get to dire wolves, and why you started there, like, the excitement of saying we're gonna bring the woolly mammoth back. Yeah, like that gets the people going.

[Ben Lamm]

It gets people excited.

[Matt]

I'm excited about that.

[Host]

I think it's really cool. Then you look at the fact that the woolly mammoth has been gone for Maybe it's like 14, 000 years, something like that.

[Ben Lamm]

4,000, 4,000, 4,000. Most people don't know this, but. But they were like, this kind of blows people's mind. But we were building we as humanity, not colossal. We don't have like super anti aging drugs.

[Matt]

Yeah, we can take credit.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, we could take credit for it, but we were building the pyramids while mammoths were still on the earth. Like that's crazy to me.

[Matt]

That's somebody building pyramids.

[Ben Lamm]

Well, I don't know. You just. I just, I thought we're taking credit for it.

[Host]

Oh my God. But either way, like they've been out of our food chain, out of our environments for a very long time.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

So why start with something that is already long extinct, that has, you know, nature's already evolved past in a lot of ways versus starting with, you know, one of the 50% of species that's endangered right now. And, and trying to use, and we'll get into CRISPR and all that and what you do, but trying to use some of this technology to do that.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So we started, you know, I, when I started the business, at the time, we had no scientists before we even hired Matt. Like we were, we were like, I don't know, four weeks out from launching the business. And I, I called George and I was like, you think we should hire someone that's like taking care of elephants and knows a lot about elephants? And George was like, oh, that's a really good idea. That's, that's a great idea. And I was. And so then I had, I was like, you know, my job, I'm not a scientist. Right. I'm not a conservationist. I'm trying to learn it very, very quickly because I'm passionate about it. But my job is an entrepreneur, is to build the team of the smartest people. So then I was like, okay, I have to go on the hunt to go try to find the number one elephant guy in America and then talk to him about mammoths in genetics and engineering. Right. And so we started with the mammoth for a couple of reasons. One, George had already been working on it and you know, George likes to blame the media for the reason why he's worked. He was working on the mammoth. But I think if you, if you watch George Church's like before colossal, like watch him on the Colbert Report, watch him on 60 minutes, watch him on all these things. There's this mammoth through line and you can hear an inflection, his voice, you can totally hear him change. And George Cares a lot about elephants. And you know, elephants aren't model species. They're not really studied in the like in labs and environments. There's not a lot of assisted reproductive technologies for elephants. There's not a lot of people that are studying elephants and building technologies for elephants. So George's view was if we bring back this charismatic megafauna, being the mammoth, we'll get kids excited, we'll get people excited about conservation and we can help the ecosystem as well as we can make technology to help elephants. And he was already eight years in the process. Right. So he had been sampling mammoths, he had gone to Siberia and gone out on these excursions in Russia and actually taken mammoth DNA and brought it back to his lab. He was doing all the computational analysis to understand more about the mammoth. And so George's technologies and some of the technologies we needed to license from Harvard, we, to get, you know, to get George and to get the technologies, the mammoth was a good place to start. And it's probably one of our longer, harder projects. So it's better start that and get that going. We about a 40 person team on just the mammoth.

[Host]

Wow.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, that's.

[Host]

That's escalated quite quickly.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

[Host]

And you, and you think we're within like five years or so maybe of the mammoth. Yeah, of what you can do.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt]

I think, you know, the mammoth is really sort of heavily driven by George's work on the gene editing genomics front. And now we're sort of accelerating. Kept catching up to George on the reproductive front because there's sort of two sides to the de extinction equation.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

You're starting with gene editing and ancient DNA and trying to figure out what was a mammoth versus an elephant and then how can you re engineer the elephant to become the mammoth. But then you also need to be able to create embryos and put those embryos into surrogates and then take care of them. And that's a lot of what my team's doing. And, and so we're still playing catch up because George had a great head start also. Elephant reproduction is really hard, but the pace and scale at which we're making advancements right now, I feel really good about the next five years when these.

[Host]

When you say the elephant reproduction is really hard, are you really referring to like the length of the gestation period?

[Matt]

Everything. Right. Everything from longest known gestation for any mammal in the world.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

A really difficult anatomy. Elephants are big. Their ovaries are really high up in there. Actually their reproductive tract from their ovaries down to their. Their vaginal opening is 3 meters. Yeah.

[Host]

Get deep in there.

[Ben Lamm]

That's actually a more fun fact than the pyramids.

[Host]

Right.

[Matt]

So there's a really long pathway that you have to travel to do a lot of those things. And we don't know a lot about physiology. They're reproductive physiology. If you think about human ivf, you probably know somebody that's gone through it, and they've been on hormonal injections to help stimulate follicular development. Or how can you get them to sort of go into estrus or menstruate. Or menstruate at the right time? We need to do all those things. But the difference is, in humans, you could study people all around you. With elephants, we don't have that luxury. Right? There's. We're losing elephants every single year. We have fewer than 250,000 left in Africa, fewer than 25,000 left in Asia. So it. It's a resource issue. But what's amazing about Colossal is that we've put money into a place that was in desperate need of money. We brought more eyeballs and more attention into a place that needed and deserved more attention. And so even what we've done in the first couple years for elephant conservation by helping accelerate and develop a vaccine against the deadliest.

[Ben Lamm]

This, to me, is the craziest thing. And like, Matt, I had no idea, Right. Because, like Matt, his whole life has lived in conservation, and the team that he's brought in lived in and been fighting this kind of, like, uphill battle to save species. And I always thought, you know, just not. Not being fully educated on it was that the number one reason why elephants die is just poaching. Like, people want their ivory. Right? People want their ivory or people want their ivory. And it is a big driver. But the number one killer is actually this terrible disease called eehv. So when I learned about it, it's like, it kills 20% of elephants a year.

[Matt]

And EHV, elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus. It's a latent herpes.

[Ben Lamm]

It's called ehv. Yeah.

[Matt]

Yeah. It's much easier.

[Host]

I'm gonna stay with that, too.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But it literally. And it kills the babies at the time of weaning, so it also kills baby elephants. Right. So it's like. It's like the worst disease. Like, you can't make the story worse and worse. And. And so we've been working with a couple different groups, some AZA accredited zoos, Dr. Pauling at the Baylor College of Medicine, ourselves and Harvard have been working to come up with a vaccine. So we're not going to cure it. Right. But to do two things. One, we want to understand the disease because if you're going to bring back mammoths, you should engineer in a resistance to this. Right. Because you want 20% of your population to be susceptible to this disease, number one. And then number two, it has this halo effect of helping elephants today that we're open sourcing. Right. We're just doing it. And I'm really excited that our first, like the. The most deadly form of eehv, which kills the vast majority of elephants, we actually have a vaccine that is being tested in elephants right now. In elephants. In elephants in conferring resistance. So if Coloss. Colossal. This is what I always like to talk about from the conservation side because I'm not as deep as Matt. But if colossal does nothing else in the world. Right. We didn't make woolly mice, we didn't make die rolls. Let's assume nothing else we ever do ever works. And we just solved that and we saved more elephants than all of elephant conservation for the last 200 years. Then I. Then I think we sleep pretty well at night. I would agree with that. Yeah.

[Host]

That's the outcome.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

So you. If I'm understanding correctly, and sorry if I asked some stupid questions today, but I really want to get to the. No, we can all understand, but you effectively can use the experimentation of building a mammoth to then simultaneously work with elephants and solve the same problem. Because they come from a similar.

[Matt]

Yeah, exactly. I think of de extinction. People always say, well, why don't you focus more on conservation? You go, no, no, no. De extinction and conservation are intrinsically linked. You cannot undo that they are together because the research and development that goes into de extinction is directly applicable to the conservation of currently imperiled species. And that's what we do. So if you think of de extinction like a massive freighter, like a tanker going down the middle of the ocean, it's creating this huge wake and in its wake, it's pulling elephant conservation. It's pulling conservation awareness. It's bringing conservation science. It's ancient DNA is being, you know, genomics is being brought along with it. So we're creating attention, we're raising funds. Right. $435 million in four years. I spent 15 years working in nonprofit conservation. I don't think I got to 10% of that number.

[Ben Lamm]

Right. Well, that doesn't include our. We also started which most. No one wants to talk about this is crazy. We also, we've seen so, so much success in a short period of time on the application of our de extinction technologies for conservation. So it's not like you have to get to a mammoth and then you're like, okay, what did we build and what can be used? Right. It's like on the path, we're making technologies and we're doing and it's being applied in real time. But we also raised $50 million for the colossal Foundation. So we started a separate foundation saying we shouldn't be the only one innovating in, in not just de extinction sciences, but new, innovative technologies. So we started a foundation whose entire purpose, which we raised $50 million separate, for whose entire purpose is funding researchers. As long as the technologies they develop are new, they're for conservation and open to the world. And so, so we're now funding all that. It doesn't get quite the headlines as like, mammoths and direwolves, but we think it's, you know, moderately important.

[Matt]

Yeah, it's extremely important. And I think it's representative of maybe the new conservation funding model. I think people are a little uncomfortable with this idea that this tech startup, this for profit startup, is in the conservation space, a place not traditionally seen by for profit industry. But what we're doing is injecting momentum and money and eyeballs into this space. And I think that that's only good for conservationists. So I think sometimes when we get some of the pushback from the really conventional conservationists, I say, I get it. We could talk all day about, you know, what you may or may not believe is, is great about what Colossal is doing, but what you cannot disagree on is that today there's more money and more attention on conservation than there was four years ago.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you this weird stat and then we go where I was trying to pull it up. So I want to give you the actual stat. But we.

[Host]

That's a wild shirt, by the way.

[Ben Lamm]

I can't stop looking at that. Well, we don't, we don't sell any. Anything. People are like, do you sell those? Or our T shirts? Because people like our apparels. Like, no. And then they're like. And then it comes. It kind of does us. We actually don't sell anything, but we do lose quite a bit.

[Matt]

You see Colossal swag in the most random places. Our buddy Forrest Galante sent us a text and it was a picture of, of a tuk tuk driver in Indonesia. And he was Wearing a colossal shirt and you go, how the hell did it get out there?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

So hopefully not in the losing super bowl category.

[Ben Lamm]

No, we did this. We did this thing. So with every species that. So outside of the conservation aspects that, that we're opening sourcing our technologies for, in the de extinction projects we're working on, we try to open source or we try to pair every single de extinction with a species preservation. So, so not just like, how can we theoretically, potentially maybe one day use these technologies for conservation? How do we use them today? Like, so obviously it's the Asian elephants with the mammoth, with the direwolves, it was the red wolves. And I'm trying to find this stat because it's amazing. I sent it to Bridget, so I'll pull up Bridget. Here it is. So this is amazing. Red wolves in the. So no one is really talking about red wolves. It's the most endangered wolf in the world. It's the only wolf that's only endemic to the United States.

[Host]

How many of them are left?

[Ben Lamm]

There's 15 left in the wild.

[Host]

Yeah, 15.

[Ben Lamm]

15. 1 5.

[Matt]

There's about technically extinct in the wild. In 1980, they were declared extinct in the wild. There was a captive population of, of some red wolves that the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service had the foresight of going, we better just capture what's left and put them into captive breeding situations. So there's 15 left in the wild that have been reintroduced. The population got up into the, you know, 150 range about 10, 15 years ago and then it's had a huge crash again.

[Ben Lamm]

And but here's, here's what's crazy about like the direwolf and what people don't realize is that. And so I'm just reading these stats and I'll put my phone away. There's been 7 billion media impressions around red wolves on our videos and videos attached to red wolf. There's been 5.7 million views, 380,000 unique engagements, and it's over a thousand exfold. When we went and looked at Google on people searching for red wolf or red wolf conservation on the first day, on one day that we launched the direwolf. So no one's taught. And then, and then, you know, the Today show, a week after the direwolf, we were on the Today show the week before, a week afterwards, they did a whole special on saving the red wolves. They weren't talking about red wolves. You know, no one was talking about red wolves. And so this, this is, you know, we care a lot about the technologies but you know, there's, to Matt's point, we actually colossal. I think we do a really bad job of saying this. We are bringing awareness to things. Like when I saw these red wolf stats from our, from our marketing team, I was like, this is incredible. So we send it to all of the big red team, all the various teams that are working on red wolves around, around the United States. And they're like, you've brought more attention to the red wolves in one day than we've had in the last 10 years.

[Host]

Now that's cool.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, that's, that's not going to save red wolves, but at least starts the conversation.

[Matt]

It's an important step because in conservation we talk about behavior change is one of the key steps for conservation. The way that you affect behavior changes, there's this sort of chain of events. And you say care, connect and then conserve.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

If you can get people to, or I'm sorry, it's connect, care. And then if you can connect people to the issue and show them what it is, make them care about that issue, then they'll take conservation action. And so what we're doing represents that first step, that connection to tell people that red wolf exists, to tell people it's America's endemic wolf and to let them know about this horrible, you know, persecution the red wolf has faced in the wild.

[Host]

Yeah, what's happened there? Like, how did you said it reignited to like 150 and then went back down to 15 in recent years.

[Ben Lamm]

What's that over?

[Matt]

Sort of the drive towards, of civilization and development in the United States led to, you know, some persecution of wolves all over our continent. Unfortunately, gray. Gray wolves and red wolves included. There were bounties on red wolves. There was everything red wolves also tended. Now, now that coyotes have sort of been pushed into their habitat, tend to coexist with coyotes. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of people are really excited about shooting coyotes. So also red tend to get shot as well. So in the 60s and 70s, we realized, oh shit, this species is about to go extinct. And U.S. fish and Wildlife took that really bold action to capture the remaining animals or what they thought were the remaining animals and start a captive propagation program. Starting in the early 90s, they started reintroducing wolves to this small part of northeastern North Carolina that just was sort of on the heels of what was really successful with gray wolves going back into Yellowstone Stone. So as they were doing that, they saw some early success. But unfortunately, you know, societal attitudes towards wolves took a turn in that area and people Started not just shooting them, but then there's also a lot of development. There's roads that go through their habitat. They're getting hit by cars. That's sort of their biggest driver of mortality right now. And even though in about 2012, 2013 there were more than 150, today that's probably less than 15 in the wild.

[Host]

Now where they, where they release them in northeastern North Carolina is this, is there, are there any mountains there or anything? Like, what's the terrain like?

[Matt]

Yeah, it's sort of like that piney coastal terrain. Okay, so it's, it's kind of a damp temperate forest, but it's, there's also significant development. I mean North Carolina is a beautiful place. People want to live there, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of human activity in the area. One of the things that U. S Fish and Wildlife service has talked about for years is setting up separate and you know, in sort of parallel efforts to reintroduce them to other areas, see if there's more success. So hopefully that's where we're going. But the big issue is the stock of animals that they're using for this reintroduction is from the captive breeding program. That captive breeding program was founded by 14 individual wolves. So when the US Fish and Wildlife went in and grabbed what they thought was left of red wolves, it was 14 animals. Now there's about 200, 250 in this captive program. So you imagine 250 animals came out of 14. That's a very narrow level of genetic diversity.

[Host]

Right.

[Matt]

So now they're seeing issues that could be related to genetic erosion, genetic inbreeding. And so we have identified, working with Bridget Von hold of Princeton and Chris and Bresky of Michigan Tech, they've sort of identified, hey, that area in Louisiana where these red wolves were caught in the 60s and 70s actually still is a hotspot for red wolf ancestry and.

[Ben Lamm]

Actual DNA that's like not present and red wolf DNA that's not present in the existing founder lines in North Carolina.

[Host]

Okay, so couple questions here. Number one, does it affect like when you take a population captive and now you're doing it in an enclosed area where they're not in their evolutionary environment to continue to evolve and roam freely, does it affect, affect also the genes of the incoming, you know, breeds that you're going to make? Let's start there.

[Matt]

So I mean being in, we call it XC2 setting, so sort of outside of their normal, of their, of the wild, basically. Think of captivity, it affects everything from Behavior to the genetic expression of their genes, right. Epigenetics change, the sort of inter generational heredity changes. So yeah, the answer is yes, you can't, unfortunately it's unavoidable. You can't do that. However, there are great strategies for how to get around those things. How you can manage animals from a behavioral standpoint, how you can manage the population genetics of a captive group.

[Ben Lamm]

And there's a lot of people around the world like you know, sometimes like just a misunderstanding around colossal is they. A lot of times people just put us in the bucket of like soup to nuts, right? Where it's like we're going to take ancient DNA, make the animals, put it back, put them back in the wild. We're going to do it without oversight, without working with the government, without working with indigenous people groups, without working with ecologists, without working with conservationists. And that's just not the case, right? So like we have to rely on all of those people, right? And so like the current red wolf recovery team which made up of like 25 plus different organizations, they've been doing a great job of like in a captive place, you know, bringing red wolves there. They need more land, they need more strategies for rewilding which they're working on. But, but you know the genetic bottleneck scenario where we can come in, right? And so de extinction and some of the technologies that we're developing around genetic rescue is not a replacement for conservation, it's just a new tool in it. Right? And so if we can, if we can work with like the, you know, Bridget Von Holt, she's amazing but she's the number one red wolf expert in the world, okay. Especially from a genetics perspective. So she can tell you like this population over here that's not categorized as a, as red wolf actually has more red wolf DNA in it than the population that we're actually recovering in North Carolina. And so if we can isolate those genes, if we can isolate that DNA, we can actually engineer in genetic diversity. We're doing the same thing on the Northern White Rhino project. So a lot of people talk about the Northern White Rhino, another great example. They're functionally extinct. There's two left, they're both female. No matter how much they love each other, I don't want to break hearts and minds and create haters here. It's like no matter what, they are not going to have babies. They just are not. I'm sorry, this is not a life finds a way thing. They are gone. And so we work with BioRescue and Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt. And Dr. Thomas Hildebrand's amazing. He's, he's insane. He's super smart and he's leading a lot of these next gen assisted reproductive technology innovations. You know, like, we talked about how we need those for elephants. We're working with him on elephants around the world. We're also working. He also is leading the charge to save the northern white rhino. And so with that, you know, they think about extreme bottleneck, right? They have two. So they have about 18 embryos that they've harvested from two of those, from, from two of the remaining females. Well, over time, we've got to go back to museum samples, frozen zoo samples, all these different samples, and really build like this entire population genomics map.

[Host]

Can you explain how you do that, if you don't mind?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

What goes into that?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, a lot. So, and once again, I'm not a scientist, so I'll do the best I can imagine. Definitely not. I, I just, I, I, I like to learn from smart people. Right. It's kind of, this is like, I weirdly think this is my, I don't have hobbies, so I kind of feel like colossal is my only hobby.

[Host]

I mean, it's a good hobby.

[Ben Lamm]

It's a cool hobby, right? Yeah. It's like every day I get to work with people that are much smarter than me and learn.

[Matt]

But it's an expensive hobby.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, it's not, it's not the cheapest hobby. Like, if golf you got a few billion years, golf would have been easier though, so. But that's boring. So now I'm gonna get, just for.

[Matt]

Everybody else out there, I.

[Ben Lamm]

Golf. Golf.

[Matt]

Don't listen to that.

[Ben Lamm]

You've recovered species. Recovery of golf for me. Thanks. So what we do is we don't make these sequencing machines, but what we do is we go take samples. Whether it's ancient DNA samples, like in the case of the direwolf or the mammoth or the thylacine or other species, or existing DNA, and we run it through a system, right? So there's, there's PacBio, there's Luma. There's all these different machines that you can use, and it basically reads the code and so it spits out. My background's in software, so it's like, I used to think that biology was just software. Now I realize it's the shittiest, weirdest software that's like borderline magic that you've ever seen. It's just crazy. So it spits out a code, right, and tells you roughly kind of like what letters go where in the full end to end genome. So you kind of get the genetic map of that species. So then you can use software and we built a lot of models around understanding what's called comparative genomics. So that does, we do a lot of that for our ancient DNA comparison to understand what, what genes made a mammoth a mammoth or what genes made a direwolf a direwolf compared to their closest living relatives. So that's the easiest place evolutionary to start. Well, with existing species like the northern white rhino, we can look at a lot of the big regions that drive morphology are the same, right? So you don't have like a rhino with like five horns, right? You see, you see the exact same kind of patterns, but then you can look in different parts of the genome that aren't driving the morphological effects that actually have genetic diversity baked into them. So then we can engineer in that lost genetic diversity into cell lines and create embryos or into existing embryos through micro injection so that you actually get. So these embryos that now are 18 from two founder lines now could be 18 from 18 different founder lines. And so that's the power of like this, this concept of biobanking and genetic rescue is like we can actually engineer in genetic diversity. So you could literally have a species that's on the brink of, of extinction or is functionally extinct and you could engineer in that. And so like Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt in the BioRescue team, you know, they're not coming to colossal saying, oh, we can't solve this, go solve this. They, they've, they're, they are very close to solving, you know, bring making more northern white rhinos, but they're going to have the same genetic bottleneck issue. So we're now working, we're assuming success on all the reproductive issues that they're solving and all the IVF issues that they're solving in rhinos. And assuming that success, we're over here working on, okay, how do we bank as much genetic material from all over the world from all these different places, including museums, Right. It's no different than how we're thinking about ancient DNA. And then how can we do all of these studies so that we can get all this data into a computer, do the comparison and then engineer that into future cell lines and that, you.

[Matt]

Know, these are data problems, right? Like, unfortunately, it's expensive to harvest this data in order to do this ancient DNA extraction and sequencing using all the computational tools needed to analyze that data. And then make it publicly available. But, you know, that's what I think. Just colossal, being present in the area and researching these things. We create all this data and we just keep uploading it to the cloud and we're making it available for other conservationists. So in a way, we're accelerating other people's research efforts as a for profit, though.

[Host]

Yeah, please go ahead.

[Ben Lamm]

I don't want you to forget that. I want to say this other thing about the data. So another conservation project we're working on is the northern coal. Have you ever seen a northern coal?

[Host]

No.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Northern coals are, like the cutest little. I don't know if you pull it, but. Yeah, let's pull it up.

[Matt]

Q, U, O, L, L. Q, U, E, L, L, O, L, L, O. Yeah.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

Oh, it's like a little squirrel.

[Matt]

Yeah, it's a little carnivorous marsupial from the northern.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh, it's carnivorous? Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah.

[Host]

Meatheads.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's.

[Host]

Yeah, my kind of guy.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, he's. They're. They're awesome. So they're going extinct in northern Australia. They're actually, like. The pictures don't. I mean, they're cute in the pictures. Pictures don't do it justice. They're unbelievable when you see them in person. And what's crazy about this? How big are these little.

[Matt]

Oh, they're, you know, whatever that is.

[Host]

Okay, so they're bigger than a squirrel.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, bigger than squirrel. And, you know, they're carnivorous marsupial. They're only found in Australia. And what. What? We, once again, not colossal. We didn't build the pyramids, and we did not do this a long time ago, but we, as humanity brought in cane toads somehow, some way, probably stowed on ships and whatnot from South America. Cane toads have a neurotoxin. Right.

[Matt]

It was an intentional introduction to try to remove the cane beetle. Oh, that was an invasive species.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So they introduced. So they introduced these cane toads. Right. Which. You should look these up. These. These are like, you know, Jabba the Hutt. And so they're ugly. Yeah. And so. And there's even. I mean, I. I think those are. I think some of these photos are like glamour shots. That's what they actually look like. They're just. These mean. Yes, they're. Yes, we should win the war against, like, toadzillas.

[Host]

And so that's the apocalypse right there.

[Matt]

Yeah, you just upset. A lot of.

[Host]

It's over.

[Matt]

Amphibian conservationists out there.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, no. Toadzilla. Toadzilla. But I mean look, I think amphibian conservationists will also agree they should not be in northern Australia. Exactly. And so. So they are introduced there. They have a lot of babies really, really quick. And when. If you look at the diets of carnivorous marsupials, frogs are on the menu. They love frogs, they love toads. It's a big portion of their diet. But they have not co evolved next to these toads like the. An. Like some of these snakes and. And other mammals in south. In South America. So when they eat them, they die. They. So so the quolls are going extinct because they're eating. Yeah.

[Matt]

The cane toad excretes a bufotoxin.

[Host]

Bufo toxin.

[Matt]

And it's a neurotoxin that kills most things that try to predate on it, except for these. These species that co evolved with them in South. South America.

[Ben Lamm]

And this goes back to that data. So we found. So this is the importance of biobanking, sequencing all these things not just for genetic rescue, but what we found in collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia, who's incredible and Dr. Andrew Pask, we actually identified these specific. There's one single change. One change on that three on that three and a half billion letters. Right. One single change confers a 5,000 times resistance to cane toe toxin.

[Host]

What is that even. That's like crazy the numbers to hear about. But what does that even look like? Like you say it's one change. You're literally putting a number in there and that's.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. If you're changing a letter.

[Matt]

Yeah. If you think about DNA, DNA codes for proteins typically. So this sequence codes for a specific protein. Proteins, their function are based on the shape of the protein that's developed.

[Ben Lamm]

Got it.

[Matt]

So if you change one, a little one base pair, it can change the way the protein folds. That changes the function and the ability of that protein to perform its function.

[Ben Lamm]

What do you say?

[Host]

It's like DNA is the software, proteins the hardware and then the cells are the factory. Something like that.

[Matt]

I think that's a great analogy.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

I'll be here always.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Like. Well, I'm actually starting a colossal on Tuesday. Yeah. So we do have to I think express conflicts now that you're part of the team. But what's interesting about this is. And so that goes back to the power of this DNA. Right. So we need to be doing this. Right. And so some people say, oh, genetic rescue or biobanking, we just need to save what we have. We do need to Save what we have. Like, like I said, this is not a replacement for modern conservation. But what we do need to do is we need to look at these types of things because now we can make super quals. We don't have to engineer, we don't have to just eradicate every single cane toad in Australia and we don't have to genetically modify every single marsupial in Australia. We just have to make super quolls. It'll make the coal population come back. They will eat the cane toads. It'll suppress the cane toad population. Will they eat them all? Who knows? But at least suppress that population so that then it has this halo effect to the ecosystem of other marsupials.

[Matt]

And I don't know about your, you know, when you were coming up through school, but for Ben and I, when we were in school, everybody villainized gmo. Oh my God. There's this horrible thing about.

[Ben Lamm]

They also told me that water. I was also told I was the generation that was like, water is the most amazing thing in the universe. There's no aliens. There's only water. It's. Water's only here. It's magic. Fast forward like 20 years. It's like, it's, it's, you know, in the atmosphere of Venus, it's frozen on the moon, it's underwater. There's like entire lakes on Mars. The aliens are here. Yeah, yeah, there's like, there's, there's water moons in our solar system and people are like, well, what we knew back then was, was different.

[Matt]

But so we, we know more now, right? Like, GMOs aren't just used for, you know, for corn. You know, they had terminator seeds and things like that. Now we have found ways to harness the power of genetically modified organisms to help recover ecosystems, to help protect endangered species. And so we're trying, we're out there trying to pump up the GMO thing, which is a little counterintuitive to some health nuts out there, you know, probably.

[Host]

But what's their.

[Matt]

Well, there was just a real fear of transgenic things and this idea that somebody has altered the genome of this thing so you shouldn't eat it because you don't know what the effects of that could be. We know a lot more now than when I was in college, you know, 20 years ago. And now I think we understand the power of GMOs and using not just completely made up genes, right. We're going and identifying genes that exist that co evolve with some of the problems we have. Like, like cane tone, cane toad Predators in South America and we can use those and we already know the effects of those genes.

[Host]

Is there still like just, I guess like straw manning this a little bit. Is there still the possibility though that, you know, let's say you make a hundred different things, you could be wrong.

[Ben Lamm]

About one in terms of edits. Yeah. And then.

[Host]

And then it does cause a problem.

[Ben Lamm]

That's a great question. Right. And so we do a lot of screening on all of this before we go. So it's like going back to coding, for example. And once again, I think this is an educational opportunity. I'm a big, like two big rules that I have is like I don't like to. I believe in freedom and I believe people can believe whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. And so I think that also creates opportunities for education. And so for me, I think it's important for us to educate people on the fact that like, you know, we have colossal. I'd say if you take a step out of de extinction, out of conservation, what is colossal? Because I know you had questions on that in a second. But, you know, we are arguably the number one computational biology and genetic engine genetic engineering company that's using what's called multiplex editing. Be able to edit all over the genome as well as DNA synthesis, being able to synthesize parts of the genome and replace it. If you take it, if you just look at our core technology stack, that is, that is who we are kind of at a company. And those technologies, regardless of your application to conservation or your application to, you know, human health care or making a mammoth, those. Those technologies are fundamentally transformative for the world and people need to be innovating on them.

[Host]

And you're going to have IP on that.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, and we have IIP on that. So part of our business model is we've actually spun out. We spun out three companies. We've only announced two. The first was a computational biology platform called Form Bio and it's all about identifying and doing genome analysis. So look at our genome tools to start and looking at how we can identify areas of the genome that could be used for drug therapeutics. Right. And so we have a whole healthcare team that got spun out, raised separate different capital. That company's valued over $100 million and just growing, which is amazing. We spun out a second company called breaking. It's just breaking.com huge shout out to Sukane. She's amazing. But basically they discovered a microbe that emits an enzyme that destroys plastic. And so. And not makes like smaller microplastics. Right. Like actually we call it breaking because it breaks the chemical bonds of the plastics. Right. Which is incredible. So it truly disintegrates it. And then we used computational biology plus synthetic biology, being able to engineer and kind of speed up that process so that it can actually eat plastic and destroy it instead of plastic in never to 22 months. We're trying to get it down to 22 days. And we have 11 pilots already with that business because so many companies, textile, water treatment, all these, all these places have plastics or microplastics. So there's huge industrial, outside of conservation, there are huge industrial applications and human health care applications to some of the work that we're doing. Right.

[Host]

Because I mean my question was going to be a little bit ago and you pretty much just answered it like what the business is and how and how you plan to make money. Because what you've talked about and correct me if I'm wrong here is like when it comes to rewilding and things we'll talk about here at some point, you know, you're going to give this away for free. It's like, it's not like you're selling a direwolf for fudgeing, you know, $10 billion. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Lamm]

We're not, yeah. We're not getting like.

[Matt]

Yeah. So you say 10, 10 billion.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Host]

I don't have that money.

[Ben Lamm]

So, so I, so we will make so this just because we always want to be really, really transparent. We learn stuff every day. So two other things. So that was kind of like our phase one monetization was all about that. It was like very Apollo program esque. Right? Like you build technologies to go to the moon. You build a lot of cool stuff along the way because it's a systems model that you can innovate that can help the world like in conservation or you can make money. So that was kind of our phase one. There's, there's two other phases that we found that we didn't even know about. Right. And so the second phase, George, about this, in the beginning we didn't, you know, it was early in, but that's how George, short George is like, like, George will talk to you about like Alpha Centauri, like that. That's just how smart George is. And he'll just assume that we can solve all the technologies of how to get to Alpha Centauri. Right. That's just how George's brain works. And so he's already assuming that we have 10,000 mammoths. So he's like, if I model it out, this is how what the impact of carbon will be in the. In the ecosystem. And this will also be the impact of what you can be carbon credits or biodiversity credits. So what's interesting about George is sometimes he's called crazy, but he's proven a lot of people wrong for quite a long time. Right. For like, you know, 50 years, he's.

[Host]

Proven a lot of people first they call you crazy. That is always how it goes.

[Ben Lamm]

And so. And George is awesome. And so. And so we looked at these things and my view is, oh, we can make money in technology. George's idea is kind of rewilding species, making money from the rewilding. So, yes, we're not charging the conservation community, but there is actual money in the rewilding process. Right. So you've probably heard in, you know, I think some of your conservation friends have probably talked about carbon credits. So there's actually, there's a way to subsidize protecting forests and whatnot through this whole idea of carbon credits. Well, that's actually, it's been kind of like crypto. It's kind of gone up and down. People, people have abused it. There's been, you know, there needs to be more regulatory oversight. That's all starting to happen. But now you've got people like PwC, the big consulting firm, and auditors. You've got even TPG, which is a huge venture private equity firm that raised $8 billion around this. You've got Lloyd's of London endorsing this. And so you now are starting to build certification processes. And what we're seeing in that model is that people are looking at carbon credits. They're also looking at biodiversity credits because they're actually being able to put a value on the animal. You know, the whole hunting adage where people are like, well, if I buy a ticket to kill a lion, then we're putting a value in the lion. So therefore people won't. That's part of the. The. That that's what some people in the hunting world kind of.

[Host]

Yeah. I don't love that logic.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, I love. But I love the idea of valuing the animal. Right. That. That was their model of doing it.

[Host]

Right, right. They're trying to backdoor.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Because the reality is, you know, most people don't have the same intrinsic value for animals or nature as you do or as I do or Ben does. Right. And so we have to find ways to show value nature. And if you're Living in the city, sometimes it's hard to understand that, that in the upstate, right, the, the forest and the biodiversity up there is, is performing nature based services that make humanity possible.

[Host]

Listen, we got a lot of biodiversity right here. I don't want to hear it. There's a lot of wolves running around. 57.

[Matt]

But sometimes you're a little detached from nature and you forget that it impacts you. So one of the things that we've been talking about is how can we begin to show and evaluate nature based activities? How can you put a value on a whale? There's this brilliant economist, Ralph Chamney, that we, that we work with, who wrote a really cool paper a couple years ago and said, how much is a whale worth? And they literally went out into nature, studied all the impacts that one whale, one blue whale would have in the nitrogen cycle and carbon cycle, in biodiversity, lifts in ecotourism in every aspect you can imagine. And they found that a blue whale every year performs about $2 million worth of ecosystem services.

[Ben Lamm]

How did they.

[Host]

And what was that based on?

[Matt]

So it was every. Like I said, Ralph, who's this amazing economist, can kind of look at every bit and say, well, we know that you know that air quality has a certain value, that you know that. And he'll break down everything. And the paper's incredible and anybody can go read it. It's not an overly technical paper. I think people should look at it. And. But that's interesting because if you are driving a giant tanker ship through the middle of the ocean and you see a whale spout ahead, you have two options. You can say, I'm going to divert course so that I don't accidentally strike this whale, or I can stay on my course and risk hitting the whale. Well, today it's a lot cheaper as a captain of that ship to just stay on course, arrive to your destination on time and not pay penalties or have losses of product. However, if that whale's worth $2 million and your insurance provider has to cover the damages that you've inflicted on that whale to whatever country that whale's waters is in, then suddenly you go, well, it could cost me $100,000 to divert or $2 million to hit the whale.

[Ben Lamm]

And they're doing this in Gabon too. So they've done a similar. So people have taken this research and applied it now. So carbon credits around keeping protecting forests and whatnot has been a thing, this new concept of biodiversity credits in like protecting the animals. So it's that same. It's not about, you know, Hunting the animal, it's about protecting the animal and keeping them alive. And so they're doing this in Gabon with forest elephants and they're like, they've, they've done a study about how much the forest elephants in Africa do in terms of how much carbon value and ecosystem value they have. And it's, it's half a trillion dollars. It's insane. It's half a trillion dollars.

[Host]

Half a trillion.

[Ben Lamm]

Half a trillion dollars. Which is crazy. And this isn't our math. These are all these scientific, peer reviewed things. And so, so our view is that, you know, if we can make the, you know, we can make these man, if we can make mammoths and we make our thylacines, we make our dodas and reintroduce them back in collaboration with, with ecologists, conservationists, indigenous people groups and, and governments and even private landowners in some cases. If we are able to do that and we're successful at that, we can, we can help restore these ecosystems. And in that process, you know, we can get governments to issue us biodiversity and carbon credits, which we can go sell to the people that need to be carbon negative. That can't be carbon.

[Host]

Sure.

[Ben Lamm]

We, we as humanity still have, live in some form of a extractive economy, right? And so like we take oil from the ground, we take rare earth minerals from the ground, we take lithium, we, you know, our car, our electric cars are, you know, based on lithium. Yeah, yeah, we get these every, every year we get a new one. Right. And so, so these are the types of things that we've got to find those balances. And so there's now an entire economy that's being built around helping companies. While the Apples of the world and the Mitsubishis and the Exxons of the world try to become more green over time, they do have certain standards they can't meet. So they have to spend money on carbon offsets and investing.

[Matt]

If you think about extractive industry, and this isn't to villainize anybody, these things are important to make the world go rapid ground.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, we came to your podcast based on extract.

[Matt]

Yeah, 100.

[Ben Lamm]

We could have made it.

[Matt]

But if you think about extractive industry, we all basically subsidize their. We first, we buy their product and then we also underwrite all, all of the things that happen in nature. That's right, because as they cut down forest, we lose some of the, you know, some of the earth's lungs and that impacts us and impacts health. And then we start, right, all these things are us subsidizing them and then paying them on the other end. So what's interesting about carbon and biodiversity credits, and I understand it makes people uncomfortable to put a value, a monetary value on nature, but that's a little over idealistic because the pragmatic, the real approach is we need to find ways that you can truly cost account for the impact of the work and then that person or that entity is responsible for helping to float the repair and the restoration.

[Host]

You know, I hate to say this line, but I used to say this before I did this. I worked on Wall street, believe it or not.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

But I used to have this line to people where I'd say, what are the two most important things to you in the world? And usually they'd say like family and health. And I'd say to him, money pays for both. It sucks to say that, but it is unfortunately the way the world works. So I understand, like what, like you say, look at it pragmatically, you have to, you have to start with that. And even like some of the stats you were talking about earlier where you're talking about getting attention on certain things which relates to monetary currency as well. Like, like that makes sense.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. And our, and our elephant conservation groups, like one I have openly told you, I, I didn't know EHV was a thing. Right. Our elephant, you know, we work with the top elephant conservation groups in the world and they're like, you have brought more attention to this terrible disease then no one ever even knew about it outside the core community. Right.

[Host]

I'm very passionate about the poaching. I know all the stats on that. I followed that for years, done podcasts on that. I haven't talked about this before. The eehv. Yeah, that's like. And that. And that.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh yeah.

[Host]

Yes. But I'm saying like even someone like me who's pretty locked in on this kind of stuff, that's not something I was really familiar with.

[Ben Lamm]

And that's, that's the cool, like that, that's the cool thing about it. Like I. Obviously we're here, so I can't, I can't show you, but it's like every single week we get like kids and parents sending us like pictures of mammoths and dodos.

[Matt]

Stacks.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, just, I mean like stacks of stuff. Right. And so the like we can talk about the halo. We can talk about the measurable effects to ecosystem restoration in the monetization of that. Right. We can talk about the technology spin offs. But then there's this weird halo effect around colossal. Right. Where it's like yes, there's things that people want to debate about Colossal, but no one can argue that we are not bringing attention to two things. One, wildlife conservation and issues that we need to talk about. Gene editing issues, rewilding issues, conservation issues as well as we're getting kids superstar stoked, right? Like literally every single week we get letter. Like last week I was finally back in my office and I had a whole stack of letters and papers and I actually had this incredible. I mean I need to take a photo of him put on, on Instagram or something that they. There's this person that wrote me a three page letter. I feel terrible. I haven't read it yet. But a three page letter, you shouldn't admit that. No, it's on. It is on my day. It is literally on my desk.

[Matt]

A little long winded six year old.

[Host]

Crying at home now.

[Ben Lamm]

No, but I am going to read it. And it's from Europe. And then this person made me this incredible, you know, mammoth etching on wood and it's just incredible. And talking about how, you know, they want to grow up and be a geneticist because of what Colossal is working on. And we all talk shit about and make fun of. We get the Jurassic park comparison occasionally.

[Matt]

Yeah, once or twice.

[Ben Lamm]

Once or twice a day and but.

[Host]

The words out of my mouth.

[Ben Lamm]

But if you, but if you go talk to some of the world's leading geneticists, that movie at that time got people excited about genetics. And a lot of people that are into the genetics field went into genetics because they saw Jurassic park, not because they want to make dinosaurs. They just thought it was awesome. But this stuff's cool.

[Host]

Let's also not get eaten by them, you know what I mean? Like we gotta, we gotta keep this in the box. Like I think of that first scene and I am legend all the time, where the blonde lady comes out and goes, we cured cancer. And then like five years later, everyone's dead. They're all zombies. And I'm like, you know, the road to hell sometimes we notice, can be paved with really good intentions. Like, it's not like you guys are Bond villains out here. Like, yeah, everyone.

[Matt]

But the reason I am legend is fiction is because that lady came out, said I cured cancer and then they just pretended like they could release this cure to the world. When in reality we live in a world of regulation, right? The work that we do every day is regulated by so many agencies. EPA, USDA, U.S. fish and Wildlife, Department of Interior.

[Host]

Yeah, they don't do the best job though. Sometimes let's be honest.

[Matt]

Let's be. I'll tell you, I live through Covid. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But from our side, it is, you know, it's onerous to have to be able to be responsible to all these people. So there are a lot of steps, a lot of forethought that goes into these things. We work in a lab. That's where most of our stuff is happening right now.

[Ben Lamm]

Well, that's what. But people think that's where all the.

[Host]

Time was a lab, too.

[Matt]

Yeah, well, that. I think that lab had some, some.

[Ben Lamm]

Well, you said you took creatine this morning that was also made in the lab. Yes, it was. Yeah. So lots of good stuff comes from a lab.

[Host]

Yes. No, I, I. And, and that's, that's where we got to be careful in society to not throw the baby out with the bad exact stuff.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Host]

Like, we can. There's this weird thing that's been happening that I feel like I'm always in the middle of having a show like this where you have, like, the pure establishment people versus the everybody people. And it's. And it's based off of one, two or three things that were just like a, an enormous clusterfuck that then everything else below that that's related to that must be. Or like we're going to trust the experts on everything. And I like to look at things on a case by case basis a hundred percent.

[Ben Lamm]

And you can be doing really good things that also have negative implications. Right, for sure. And so. And you have to weigh all of that. Right. And so those are the things that we have to do. You know, these technologies. You know, a lot of the core technology around genome engineering, we did not, like, colossal. Did not invent those. That genie's out of the bottle. There's people that are going to use these technologies for nefarious cases. Right.

[Matt]

There's people that have already used these things in an unregulated way. There was a Chinese doctor that, you know, created a gene edited child.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

Wait, wait, what? Yeah, I must have missed this one.

[Matt]

Yeah, it was a few years back. He got in a lot of trouble for it.

[Ben Lamm]

But he was alleged trouble.

[Matt]

Yeah, allegedly.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

He got a stern talking God.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, he was, he was in it. He was off the grid.

[Matt]

That's a whole nother podcast, by the way. Like, this guy is.

[Host]

So he made a gene edit. Committed child. It's like real. It talks.

[Matt]

Yeah, well, apparently it's. It's in China, so obviously we don't have as much Transparency into it.

[Host]

Let's get him on the podcast.

[Matt]

Yeah, he probably would. Yeah, he's out there, man. But he got in a lot of trouble. Supposedly he went to jail, allegedly. He's out right now. But he. But, you know, that is.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, he did germline editing.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Ben Lamm]

In a weird series of events. There's a meme account of his on X, and that follows Colossal.

[Matt]

We're not certain it's a county.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no. It did get Antonio from mit, believe it or not, has exposed who it is. You won't believe who it is, but it's another. That's all. Another podcast, too. But. But it's not him. It's not him actually on X. Right.

[Matt]

It's so good, though.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

When we. When we came out, the woolly mice, he. It was just a picture of him, and it said, woolly mice are a bioweb.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, it's in. So he's. He's just been trolling us. Right?

[Matt]

It's so good.

[Ben Lamm]

Good. So it's so funny. But. But this is the kind of stuff that.

[Host]

This is the guy, though, right?

[Ben Lamm]

That's the actual guy. And. But this is the stuff where, you know, to your. To your point about intended unintended consequences and negativity. Like, you know, people. There's a general moratorium on doing germline editing, meaning edits that can be passed on the next generation in humans. Right. They're now starting. Yeah. It's a good rule. And. But, you know, what he did obviously violated that. Right? In China. China. And. And so. But this is where the technologies go, right? Like, you know, a single. Like a disease, like sickle cell anemia is a single gene mutation, so you can do a single knockout for that, and you can get rid of. You can. You could literally get rid of sickle cell anemia. Right. And so that. There are now people that are looking.

[Host]

One universal adjustment, you're saying?

[Ben Lamm]

One universal adjustment. Yeah.

[Host]

Okay.

[Ben Lamm]

So. Well, to people that have it, but obviously that. That would be effective in.

[Host]

Right.

[Matt]

Yeah. If you're a carrier.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. It would end it.

[Host]

And.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. And so. And so those are the things that now biotechnology companies and the US Government and kind of the world. World Health Organization, they're all looking at this, right? Because, like, how do we. Where do we draw the line? Where do we help? Right? Where do we eradicate disease? Like, Gary Brecke will probably punch me in the face for this, but Gary's awesome. I don't know if you know Gary.

[Host]

But I. I'm aware.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So I. I love, I love Gary. He's done a lot to like, change my life and how I look at stuff. Stuff. But one thing that I haven't totally subscribed, not subscribed to, is I do, I do take a drug that basically turns off a PCKS9, which lowers, which significantly lowers LDL. Just my family has crazy high LDL, right? Even if we had just nothing but like, you know, Kale, we'd have crazy ldl.

[Host]

That was your thing too, right, Alessi? Wasn't Luisa saying you had like crazy ldl?

[Ben Lamm]

So that was. Yeah, so. So you can take this shot. Call Repatha. And I take it, I'm not a shareholder and I'm just. I just take it. And it does. And it does lower it by about 60%. Just the LDL doesn't fuck with triglycerides or doesn't fuck with hdl. So it was great. Now there are people that look at kind of the whole system. Gary's one of those people. So we're like, I'm still looking into it, but right now I have been taking it. But that's an example where one medication, like, I didn't take a gene therapy to change that. I'm taking a medication to change just silence that gene.

[Host]

Right?

[Ben Lamm]

And so that's the power though, of where we're going with this technology. And I think that most diseases are multigenic in nature, meaning that there's multiple genes that have to work together to cause a disease state. Some of those are genetic diseases, some of those are in concert with environmental factors if you have core genetic dispositions to them. And so for us, Colossal will never do that. But to your point, on technology, we are working on multiplex editing. So being able not to just do that single edit to sickle cell anemia or that single pcks9 edit, but being able to edit multiple genes at the exact same time with high efficiency. So I do think that some of the multiplex editing technologies that we're developing will have massive pharma implications. Now the good thing for us is we're just going to license those and we'll spin those out into other companies. And then there's other people that need to work with fda.

[Host]

It's not your fault.

[Matt]

The lawyers are happy.

[Ben Lamm]

Right?

[Matt]

It's a really good example that, you know, in this anti GMO world that we, we sort of were living in, I think we're coming out of now, is that people had this complete distrust of anything gmo, but you could take a random chemical and put it in front of somebody and they say, oh, you have a headache, Just take that. And they're like, yeah, pop it.

[Ben Lamm]

Right? Yeah.

[Matt]

That's kind of crazy.

[Ben Lamm]

Yes.

[Host]

Yeah, 100%. When, when Ben first came to you with this though, Matt, like, what, what were your thoughts? Was you're coming at it from the.

[Ben Lamm]

More it was over drinks.

[Matt]

Just if I do anything, it's probably a drink.

[Ben Lamm]

Know your audience, right?

[Host]

What were your thoughts?

[Matt]

Ben did some recon. He knew that the safest place to approach me was in a bar, so he did. So Ben and I had this mutual friend that sort of connected us about up. And he, and I was playing, playing golf with this guy and he goes, hey, I know this guy that's bringing back mammoth.

[Ben Lamm]

What the. If you know this mutual friend, that's exactly how he talks. And then he would bring it up. So I, I, I could see Adrian bringing up just that weirdly catchy.

[Matt]

He was just like, yeah, I know a guy bringing back mammoths. I was like, would you, I'm trying to putt. Get the out of here. Right. And then he's like, no, seriously, you should talk to him. And so he connected us on text and Ben's like, hey, you meet me at this place for drinking drinks and, and we'll talk about this thing. At the time, do you remember where.

[Ben Lamm]

Our first date was?

[Matt]

I don't remember. It was at that outdoor cafe. I don't remember what it was.

[Host]

That's cute. You remember.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, I do. There was a candle.

[Ben Lamm]

It's two candles.

[Matt]

But, but they, you know, the, the, the funny thing was that I, we were coming out of COVID and I had been running a zoo in Dallas. All the animal care for the, for the Dallas Zoo too. And I was burnt out.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

It was sort of that time of like self reflection. I mean, that's when you sort of pivoted too, right? Like you kind of have this same, same. Yeah, you have this weird. You're isolated and you're thinking a lot.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

The, the impacts that you're going to have in your life. And, and I was like, I was just honestly dissatisfied with the level of impact I was making on conservation and the fight against biodiversity loss.

[Host]

What was what, why though? Like, like, because you felt like a zoo wasn't enough or it was just like, there's more out there.

[Ben Lamm]

What was it?

[Matt]

Yeah, there's more out there. There's, there's ways to have a larger scale impact. I thought I had a very satisfying career. I worked at big zoos in Miami and Dallas and Tampa. And I'd done a lot of fun things, met incredible people, some of the most passionate, incredible conservationists in the world. But for me, I thought, I want a larger, more lasting impact. Just. That's just who I am. I'm driven that by. By some of that. By some saying, I want to have a fingerprint on a big piece of something, right? And at that time, you know, Ben's like, I'm making mammoths. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. But, you know, you said, drinks, I'll meet you there. So I go out, we have drinks, and he brings it up. And I think, you know, the first reaction was sort of like, yeah, okay, that's cool. George Church is an impressive guy. I get it. You guys have money, which was interesting. I think at that time it was just a seed rack around and.

[Ben Lamm]

And it is more expensive than $15 million.

[Matt]

Turns out that was a massive underestimate. But, but Ben, you know, to. I challenged a few things. I had a few questions as have you thought about X, Y or Z? To Ben's credit, because we haven't thought about that. We know nothing about animals.

[Host]

But here's a mammoth.

[Matt]

He says, but you. I think you understand what this means for conservation. I said, absolutely. And we started talking about the conservation impact. Ben. Ben, to his credit, was like, we're going to change the world for conservation. You're going to get to do it. We're going to go get more money, we're going to make more technologies, we're going to have larger impacts. And I was like, it, I'm in. Let's just do this.

[Ben Lamm]

I asked you, I was like, the truth is, we didn't know anything about animals at the time. We knew that we had some software nerds and we had some geneticists and we could try to figure some stuff out. But I. I think that's one of the things that we're really good at, is also saying what we don't know. And we're not afraid to be like, oh, we. We don't have a solution to that. But it's good. It's a good feedback. The whole course of our. Our company, like our chief science officer, Best Shapiro, was like one of the negative, most negative people on the planet towards colossal. When we launched, she actually wrote a book. Yeah, so we wrote a. She wrote a book before we started that says how to clone a mammoth. I don't know if you're gonna read it. So I don't want to. Spoiler alert. But it ends with, you can't. So I was like, she's perfect, right? Our head of bioethics.

[Host]

How much did you pay?

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, no. We went to her because she.

[Host]

I mean, I'm a ball bear. You're in Jersey?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's first time in Jersey. Really? Yeah.

[Matt]

You've never been to Jersey? He goes to the city all the time and doesn't cross the river.

[Ben Lamm]

But I. I've been to Brooklyn one time, so don't.

[Host]

Like, that's not Jersey.

[Ben Lamm]

No, I understand it's not Jersey. I'm just saying, I just try to get out. Yeah. So. But I was. Yeah, it is a cute neighborhood. But the. But. But I. But I did say to Matt, I said. I said to Matt, you know, you know, we. We don't know these things, and we want these. We want to solve these things. And I asked him, I said, what if we could give you $50 million a year for elephant conservation? And Matt looked at me and goes, you would completely change elephant conservation more than any aspect of, like, with 50 million. For 50 million. And I was like, can we do 50 million a year? And he goes, it would completely change everything. I was like, okay, we just need to get to the point where the company's making $50 million a year profit, and then we'll just. Let's just change all elephant conservation. And I think that part of one of my issues in my. In the. I guess the brokenness in my. Or non brokenness in my neuroplasticity is that. That, to me, doesn't seem that hard. Like, we. We just have to go build a business that can make $50 million.

[Host]

We've done it before.

[Ben Lamm]

And then. And then. And then we can just give it to conservation. Yeah.

[Host]

How many companies have you, like, spun off from Colossal.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, no, no.

[Host]

Yourself. Before this.

[Ben Lamm]

This is my. This is my sixth company that I've founded and ran.

[Host]

Yeah, you've done this. You're not missing any meals. Like, this is. Yeah, you've been around this block. Yeah, I understand why you think that way, but.

[Ben Lamm]

So I was like, could we raise. You know, we could just make. All we have to do is make $50 million. You're telling me if we made $50 million in profit and I give it to you, you can help fix elephant conservation? He's like, yeah. I was like, okay, that just. That doesn't seem that hard to me.

[Host]

But Beth, who, to your point, wrote a book literally saying at the End like, you can't. She ends up coming around.

[Ben Lamm]

So wait. So wait. So the other thing is. Well, I'll give. Let me give you two. Let me give you two other examples and we'll loop them all together. Our head of bioethics, Alta Charo, she's amazing. She's. She's like. She's literally the best. Well, best. They're all the best. But she, she's awesome. And she debated.

[Matt]

She's a New Yorker.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, she. She debated. She debated George Church and was like, we should never bring back mammoths. And when I talked to her the first time, she's like, have you thought about making a tomato? And I was like, well, this is gonna be an uphill battle. But. But it's like. But you want the people that have. So the way, the way I think about it is you want the people that have thought about all the bad, right? You don't want the people that just say, yeah, we should go do this. This is amazing. We can get a lot of those. We can get a lot of those. We got a lot of people that love this business. Right? But we want the people that are at the top of their field that have challenged this for years, because that means they've thought about it for years. The person that just gets some random interview that's at like Western Cincinnati State, that's like, never, never done anything in their life. That person isn't the, the top of their field. So let's go find the top of their field that are also not pro this. And so, like our. So another person that was not very nice to us when we launched was a guy named Luva Dahlin. He's the number one mammoth researcher in the world. World number one. He's at the University of Stockholm.

[Host]

How do you rank? Like, mammoth?

[Matt]

There's an official world ranking.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's got. Yeah, he's. He's, he's at. He's at the top of the leader.

[Host]

It's like, it's good for marketing.

[Ben Lamm]

No, no, he is, he is like. I mean, he's.

[Matt]

No, but he's highly published, highly respected.

[Host]

We're going to get a GitHub for mammoth people.

[Matt]

That's a good idea.

[Ben Lamm]

No, it's a great idea, actually. But he's done more mammoth research, more mammoth publications. He's. He's driven the research in, in understanding the evolutionary tract and all the genetics of mammoths more than anyone in the world. And when we launch. Much. He was pretty negative and we called him and I Think he was a little confused when we called him. He's like, you know, he's like, I just talk about you in the press. Why are you calling me? And it's like, well, you're the number one guy in the world. And so now 59 of our like 65ish mammoth genomes come from Luba.

[Host]

How did you turn him? How did you take.

[Ben Lamm]

It's not ours, Cole.

[Matt]

I don't think it's that hard.

[Ben Lamm]

It's not, it's not that hard. And people ask that. It's like people say, oh, you sold them, you persuade them.

[Matt]

It's like we people think it's money all the time. Half these guys don't get a dime out. But what it is is I think everybody has the same superficial reaction, right? They all go, well, have you thought about these five bad ideas? They go, yeah, we thought about this, this. And then, okay, well. And then they start to stretch. What about these three things? And then you go, yeah, here's how we're addressing it. And then suddenly they go, I'm comfortable with this. What about, have you thought about trying this and doing this? And suddenly the excitement comes out.

[Ben Lamm]

So with Alta, with Alta, I actually said, she gave me some feedback about like ethical frameworks and all this other stuff. Stuff. And so I came back and I wrote some and I, I just sent her an email. I was like, are these good? Are these a bad idea? And she was like, I, I, I think the fact that we are not just open to criticism but listening to the experts right there, there's a lot, you know this, there's a lot of difference between the ex couch experts that know everything right in the world about every topic, right? We've got those people, people, those people are just annoying, right? But the rest, but people that are like the top of their field head of leaderboards are that, that are negative. You should at least hear them the out. And so that's. And I think the fact that we don't just listen to them, but then we try to implement what they say. So Alta and I started this conversation where we were going back and forth and she was like helping us think through regulatory and ethical. And by the way, at the time, super anti colossal. And we're, but, but I think the fact that we were listening to her and that we did the same thing with George, the same thing with Beth. And with Beth, I said, join our advisory board. Like we're doing this. Maybe it'd be good for you to have some oversight so you can tell Us what we're doing wrong or all over it, right? And then that led to us then saying, we got some ancient DNA. I was like, we, we don't have the best lab to do it. Can we. She's got one of the top, at the time, one of the, the largest ancient DNA labs in the world at, at UC Santa Cruz. And we said, can we use your lab to do this? And she processed it. And I was like, and we got better results with her lab than this other lab we were using. And then we were like, how do we get better results? Why do we. We ask a lot of questions. Questions. And I think that that level of vulnerability and transparency with the world leaders in these various fields has, has brought them in and then our relationships with them evolved.

[Host]

So what do you think? So going from the last chapter though, where she says you can't, and now where she is now, so I was.

[Ben Lamm]

Sitting with her, I was sitting with her and, and I was like, I agree with you. You can't bring back a mammoth. You cannot. They're not living cells, they're not clonable cells. But I was like, don't you think you can engineer one? And when you ask these, like, the thing about science is if you say, yeah, well, that's all fucking science is. And so like, I can give you a thousand examples of semantic arguments in science. And the reason, the reason we don't live on the moon and the reason we don't have like trips to, you know, cold fusion and shit is because of semantics and science. So I truly fundamentally believe that. But I asked her that and I said, I said, but do you think that we can understand enough about the genome, do comparative genomics and edit, and Edit and Engineer1? And her response was, yeah, I think the technologies are here today to do that. And so that's the thing that's interesting to me is I think that all of science, sometimes this is not a popular statement, but I think all of science, we are moving to a world, when you look at access to compute, AI, synthetic biology and all of these tools where we are going to move from scientific experiments to engineering. And so that is the world that we live in. We now have the tools. So it's about knowledge and understanding, access to compute and AI and then being, and having the tools to engineer. So we're moving to a scientific engineering world, less of a scientific experiment world. Like, we'll be able to run full simulations where you don't even have to do wetware experiments. What does that look like? It Would be amazing. So you could figure out like what are the potential off target effects or unintended consequences like you asked about in the genome that you could do that all in a simulation? Because we'll know enough about gene to gene interactions and the various sub pathways that. That's incredible.

[Host]

So are you leveraging AI to do that? So.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah. So our company would not be possible without AI.

[Host]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's crazy because also like AI was something that in, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017, a lot of smart people in the world were really talking about and I got really into. Because I'm like learning about this like, holy, this is crazy frontier here. And then there was like this. At least publicly. Not you guys, obviously not the people working on it, but there was like this pause button for like five years and no one really talked about it. And then one day they're like, chat gbt.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

And now it's just everywhere. I mean, Joe's in the studio today. We were, we were going through like, he's a script writer, so he was going through like how he was able to develop like, like a whole cartoon concept based on his script with.

[Ben Lamm]

What was that?

[Host]

Chat GPT4.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So, yeah. Amazing.

[Host]

It's insane like how far it's come in the last couple years. So you guys, but it's almost like you guys gotta be looking at your watch going like, where you been, everybody? Like, we've been on this.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

And I. But I feel the same way about de extinction. Right. Ten years ago. We're talking about how, oh what, you know, you watch Terminator like Skynet is AI. We can't, we can't unleash AI on the world. And now people are going, well, you watch Jurassic park, we can't unleash the extinction on the world.

[Ben Lamm]

My favorite, my favorite on the dress Barbie is people. We literally get the question. Like, didn't you see what happened in Jurassic Park? And there's almost this like assumption that it was real for a minute. And I love that.

[Host]

It's like that was, I mean, art imitates life though.

[Matt]

Absolutely. I think what's great about Jurassic park is it asks some really challenging moral questions.

[Ben Lamm]

Right?

[Host]

Yes.

[Matt]

And that's great. And for people like Ben and I, when we get asked that all the time, you know, it's the whole Jeff Goldblum. Your scientists were so busy wondering if they could, they forgot to ask if they should. Right.

[Ben Lamm]

I should make a preoccupied shirt.

[Matt]

Yeah, you should.

[Host]

That would sell.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. We don't sell anything. I know but I'll send you.

[Host]

You're gonna start selling stuff.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, no, we, I, I think that the technology, spinning out the technologies plus the long term carbon credits. I think that we'll have a multi billion dollar ARR business which I think's pretty interesting.

[Host]

The merch.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. We'll just make it, we'll just make it more exclusive. Right.

[Matt]

Loose change in the catcher be that would point.

[Host]

I do like a lot like I didn't have to ask you this and you were just running through it as with, with several examples. I do like that you've gone out of your way over the years of working on this to reach out to people in say the evolutionary biology field who are not amenable at least at first to what you're doing. Because that was going to be a question. It's like would you, would you want to talk to some of the critics and, and the people who are not just like excited about, about you know, direwolves and seeing you on Joe Rogan and seeing you on the Today show and, and all the hoopla around it, you know, who may have concerns about this distracting from the things they've worked on. I mean I mentioned Paul Rosley. Like obviously he feels that way actually. Alex, can we pull up. He did an Instagram post on this. Can we, do you have that? Can we pull this up? Because this would be good.

[Ben Lamm]

Like no, I love it and I mean look, I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club and there's a lot of conservations I we have ecad on the Explore Self annual dinner on Saturday. I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of feedback from a lot of people, but that's okay. It creates but you take it.

[Host]

I like that.

[Matt]

But I think with the whole distraction narrative that happens. Colossal is a media circus. Right? Colossal brings a lot of attention, brings a lot of excitement. But the idea that it's a distraction is a false narrative because that's assuming we live in a net zero world where there's only so much attention that can be put put on conservation. But what we know is that there hasn't been enough attention so we're bringing more attention so we can still pay attention. And Colossal does a great job of highlighting conventional conservation. De Extinction does not work without habitat. So we have to work with people that protect habitats, that restore habitats. We can't bring back in Northern White Rhino without having a place in Uganda for that Northern White Rhino.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Host]

And what was the just, just to have this out there. We talked about this at the beginning, but I want to redrive this home so you can, can get this out there, right? The logic of working on things that have long been extinct versus the things that are in danger right now, which you're still working on. But it's like of saying, yo, we're going to bring back the dodo, we're going to bring back the mammoth, we're going to bring back the direwolf. It's strictly to be able to test on your test tubes, to be able to relate it to current.

[Ben Lamm]

I think it's three things, right? I think one, it's a harder systems model, right? So if we work in DNA that's not ancient DNA DNA, we are solving harder problems and it's vastly more applicable to more recent species if you solve an end to end. Like the de extinction process is a systems model, so you have to solve the entire innovation around everything from ancient DNA in assembly and whatnot. We have those same problems with extant species and with our DNA, right? So you're solving harder problems. That implies that you're making better technologies. So that's number one. The second thing is we're working on species, the vast majority of that, we actually are doing more conservation work than we even are doing de extinction work. But the de extinction work that we're doing, we're working on species that for the most part will have an ecological benefit to their return, a cultural benefit, a spiritual impact in some cases. And then the third is, to Matt's point, on the attention side, you'll get people excited about these technologies. Right? And so there's all these different debates on everything that, that, you know, or not everything, but a lot of things that we do. But when you do it in, in that side of things, not only are you bringing the attention, but you're building technologies that are harder. Right. You just simply are. Right. And you know, it's not our job to persuade the world about it. It's our job just to educate people what we're doing and create the conversation. Right. And, and, and we don't even care if it creates the conversation, it just seems to do it. Right. Yeah. Which, which we find, you know, moderately interesting.

[Host]

Which is good to have it in the public forum too, where you can have I, I, and I like that, like this, this is, this can be talked about publicly and it's not just like behind closed doors, people bitching at each other.

[Ben Lamm]

The other thing though is it depends on how people want to go deep, right? If People want to go listen to a multi hour Joe Rogan podcast or your podcast or, or get really, really deep. You know, so like, like Time, when we, when we launched the, the direwolves on with Time and with New York and a few others, they went really deep. They spent hundreds of hours to understand the science, to understand where phylogenetically, you know, we've had the. The. What's interesting is like, no one talked about the fact that we brought up Pleistine Wolf back. Everyone just wants to argue what to call it and classify it. Right. And so which, which, which it's People call me and they're like, are you upset about that? And I was like, no. People have a right to do whatever they want. Right. And so my view though, which, which I, I think's important is that at least to me is that, that, that regardless of what, what, you know, some of the quote unquote controversy is on this, we are advancing the tools and advancing the conservation and at least our conservation agenda pretty quickly. And we actually had a lot of feedback after the. I don't know if you saw the woolly mouse. I don't, I don't want to get away from what you want to talk about. No, no. But the woolly mouse. I don't know if you saw that project that we worked on. No. Can we also pull up a picture of the woolly mouse? Because it is what you could hate Colossal. Yeah. And not.

[Matt]

Not a real species. Right.

[Ben Lamm]

This is a. Yeah, you could, you could hate colossal. Well, these are objectively cute. You can't not say that. Right. So. Oh, it's a little puffball. Yeah. And so, and so Cheeto. And so what we did to. To do this. And then I think this leads well.

[Matt]

Into the one on the right kind of shows an unedited mouse versus what we did.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. And so they're little. Little. Yeah, yeah. They're mice. Right. We didn't make like one misconception is people think these are the size of mammoths.

[Host]

They are advertising.

[Ben Lamm]

They are not. Not yet. And so. And so. Yeah, don't do that. What are you doing?

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, don't do that.

[Ben Lamm]

So, so what I'll tell you though is like, you know, we actually took so, so in a, in a. Just talk a little bit about the science. And then the lead, I think, really well into the direwolf is that what's interesting was we. We've identified and we're in the editing phase of the mammoth project. That means that there's about 85 genes that we have to edit. We're not trying to clone a mammoth. We've been very, very clear about that. We're not trying to clone direls, we're trying to clone these ants. We're trying to make the exact replication of that. Right? That's kind of silly. We think that kind of like coding, if you can write and if you talk to anyone that's written any code, they say, oh, I can write 3,000 lines of code. And it does. And it does X. And then someone else says, I can do the same thing in five lines of code. Everyone objectively in software will say, do it the second way because there's less things that you can fuck up, there's less things that you can break, right? So the better we do computational analysis in the. The smarter we are on the comparative genomics and identifying the core genes, the less edits we have to make. We're not trying to make like, I could have made a thousand. We have the technology colossal. We could have made a thousand plus edits in the direwolf, which would have blown people's mind from a genome engineering show of force perspective.

[Host]

Super animal.

[Ben Lamm]

But it doesn't make a super animal. It's not more direwolf. If you think it's different, it just doesn't make more. Right. If you look at it from truly a mathematical perspective, it doesn't have a true mathematical reasoning. And so with, with the woolly mice, for example, we made eight edits, right? Only some people say only eight edits. Most people were doing it one edit at a time, meaning they, they'd edit a mouse, they then edit the next generation. With one edit, they'd edit the next generation and they go through eight generations of mice to what's called stack those edits. Using our technologies and using multiplex editing, we delivered all of those edits one time. So one generation of mice from a health perspective, we also do monoclonal screening and then we do do genome sequencing, full genome sequencing on all the embryos.

[Host]

How long did this take?

[Ben Lamm]

One month. That's it. Well, because we had built the system, right? So that's the thing. We started the woolly mouse project in September and October of last year. We had woolly mice. Wow. But what we did is we took. And so what we did, which I think sometimes is lost on people, is not only is the multiplex editing and the fact that we had nothing but healthy mice born with exactly the physical attributes or phenotypes we wanted was. We won't, we don't want to just Go test in elephants. Right. Because it's ethic. Non ethical. 22 month gestation. So you have three ways to test to see if your mammoth edits are working. One, you can test them in silica and test them and do functional tests in cells, which we're doing. Two, you can grow what's called organoids. It's because a little science fiction.

[Host]

Organoids.

[Ben Lamm]

Organoids, which this is a little. This is. It's cool. It's a little science fiction word where we actually have hair follicles that are growing. Mammoth hair. Yeah. So they're live, but they're not a full system of an animal. Right.

[Host]

Plant.

[Ben Lamm]

I mean it's very. A very, very.

[Matt]

Like an airplane.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, A very, very, very small plant. Right.

[Host]

Real quick, Ben, can I just go pee? Real. All right, we'll be right back. All right. Sorry about that. This is actually the earliest podcast we've ever recorded because my bladder in the morning is so bad. So apologies to everyone out there. But Ben, you were talking about growing like just a hair.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, so. So to test whether we got these phenotype, whether the genotype to phenotype, the editing is working. The second way is growing organoids. So we're growing organoids and we're testing it, but that's still not a full animal. And so we came up with. Many people use what's called a mouse model because mice are very well studied in laboratories. And so what we did was we identified all of the genes that we're working with. Mammoth. There's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between elephants and mice. So we're not just going to take a random gene from a mammal, mammoth, and ram it into a fucking mouse and like hope it works. Right. But that's also like an animal welfare and ethics thing. Right. And we're certified by American Humane Society, the oldest humane organization in the world. And so we have to do, we want to do, but we also have standards of how we do all this stuff. And so what we did is then we used AI and compute to understand what are the mouse equivalent of these mammoth genes. So to see if we're on the right track. So we took those genes, we delivered them all in one edit edit. And one was called multiplex edited array. It then made we got 100% of the edits in, which is nearly unheard of in multiplex editing. Typically these things have like 15 to 20% efficiency where you have 100% or right under 100% in most cases. And what's crazy about that Is then, you know, 22 days later our mice were born. And then they grow and we got exactly the phenotypes. Right. So what's great is we could test this in 20 days versus in 22 months in elephants with little risk. And. And these guys like blew people's minds and went crazy. The. I didn't realize they'd be the Internet.

[Matt]

Yeah. I was shocked when Ben was said, hey, we're gonna go public with the woolly mouse. I thought, well that's just ridiculous. Especially new. I mean we were coming out with direwolf soon, but then when we broke the Internet with a mouse, I was like, holy. But people, what's gonna happen with these people?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, but I will say when we came with Daryl people, some people that are, you know, there's. There's about 20 scientists that are consistently not our biggest fans, which is fine. Like we're not trying to. We don't care what, you know, if they like us or not. I think it's our job. Just keep doing what we're doing. But one of the feedbacks they got is they've lied to the world because they had this mouse and we were, we were mad at them or they were. They literally. There's quotes in from a handful of these folks about how they were excited. Hahaha. They're only working in mice. They'll never make it to what's called the non model species. Like a wolf. And they were like the entire time they were taking this negative feedback from us when they had had these secret direwolves. So then people were. This community, this small community was somewhat frustrated because they felt like they were laughing at the fact that we were here. Even though, by the way, the woolly mice are a genetic like they're a huge achievement for genetic engineering. They're an insane achievement for genetic engineering. But they thought, oh, if they're here, that means that they won't be anywhere else for 10 years. And then we deliver 20 edits in a non model species being a wolf. Right. And so. Which I'm sure we'll get into. But the woolly mice was something that we were really excited about because it just shows kind of the application of the intended targets on genes, what the intended outcomes would be. And more importantly, all the mice were healthy. Yeah.

[Host]

You had said before we pause for a second back there, you had said a line where you were going to be clear, we're not cloning these species.

[Ben Lamm]

We are are engineering.

[Host]

Engineering. Right. So that's. And that seems to be some of the criticism with respect to direwolf, where people are saying, okay, you took a gray wolf.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Which is 99.5% a direwolf.

[Host]

Right. So you took something very close and they'd leave out that context, to be fair to you.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

And you edited. I forget what the number was. Eight or 14 genes.

[Ben Lamm]

14 genes, 20 edits. Yeah. Okay.

[Host]

And so it's, it's really just like a gray wolf with some edits. We can't know for sure that's actually a direwolf. Like, how do you respond to that?

[Ben Lamm]

So I'm sure we'll both have different responses to that. I think we got different responses.

[Host]

I like this.

[Ben Lamm]

Well, I think, I think we'll be additive to it because I think we look at it from a different perspective. There's about 31 ways to classify a species, just so you know this. So there's not one way.

[Host]

Right.

[Ben Lamm]

Like we were taught in school. I assume we're both taught the same thing, which was the biological ways. Like if things can't breed with something else, it's a species. That is what I think generally they get taught in the textbooks. But a polar bear and a brown bear, I don't know if you know this. Those are different species. And I think if you look at a polar bear and then you look at a brown bear, you're like, okay, one's aquatic and white and cold adapted and one isn't. You would be like, it makes sense to the different species. They mate all the time and have viable offspring. So by the biological definition of speciation, they should be the same species. But I think you could look at them and say, say, well, that's dumb. Right. And so I, once again, I'm not a biologist, I'm not a conservationist. I, I just am a. Just a person that likes to ask weird questions with smarter people than me. And, and so I was like, well, that's weird. And then there's a. What's called the morphological definition, right? Where it's like if something looks like something and has specific. So this is where polar bears and bears trade and ironically, so do wolves and dogs fall in this category. And I, to break people die rolls were wolves. And so what's interesting about that is that, you know, there is a morphological concept which is that if it has specific traits to serve specific ecological functions that aren't found in other. In other things, then it's its own species that's classification. And what we know about dire wolves is that they were about before colossal. Here's what we knew about direwolves, they were 20 to 25% bigger. They had a little bit stronger. They think they had a stronger jaw, but had a little bit larger cranial facial structure and jaw. And then they had. And then based on the bone density, they think they were heavier, stronger, more muscle. That is what, that is what is known definitively about dire wolves. Before Colossal, they didn't even know where the lineage was. They didn't even know where in the canid family they fell. Before Colossal, before Colossal, there was a paper that came out which ironically be Shapiro and half the people on our direwolf paper are on our, that are on paper were on the original paper around direwolves because direwolves were popular because of Game of Thrones. Scientists believe it or not, really do like the limelight I found over the years. I thought that working with engineers in Silicon Valley was challenging. But I learn and adapt, right? We all do. And so, but what's interesting is that the conclusion about five years ago from this paper before Colossal existed was. We don't know that was the conclusion, but believe it or not, the media read that and said because the paper mentions, the paper mentions jackal. So then it ran with the headlines were Game of Thrones direwolves were jackals, not wolves. So that was like. So that got into the zeitgeist, right? So then everyone just read the headlines. Nobody read the scientific paper. No one looked at the phylogenetic charts. So there was just this belief that they were jackals, which is actually a media interpret, an incorrect media interpretation.

[Host]

They don't do that.

[Ben Lamm]

That. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're spot on. And so really smart people think they were jackals. But if you go ask anybody on that paper, even if they hate Colossal, if you go ask people on that original paper, they say that was not the result. Our result was we don't know. And that's because they had about 0.15x of the genome. And so they only had. They didn't have a full complete genome genome. We got 13x meaning that we had, you know, we talked about the genetic code earlier. That means that we got a full read of both of our genomes because we have two genomes. One is 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull. So 60,000 years of genetic divergence between our two genomes. Right. And so we got 13 reads of it. So we actually were able to identify the core genes that are what's called conserved. So we talked about genetic diversity in the genome earlier. So the things that really made a direwolf a dire wolf and what we know from a phenological perspective, right, like we know about cranial facial, we know about size and we know about coat. One thing that we discovered that nobody knew because there's no hair of direwolf to know, to be known to exist, is that they were white. And what's funny is there are all these different because they, there's a season where people thought they were related to jackals, that they, that there are paleo artists that designed them, painted pictures of them where they were pre generative AI, where they were red. So people were like, no, but dire wolves were jackals and they were red. Well that's just incorrect at the time. It was actually incorrect because the paper came out with it's inconclusive. Right. We now know definitively that they were closer to wolves than jackals through our deep genome sequencing. And we also identified that their coat was white, which is amazing. And what people don't also realize, you mentioned the gray wolf stuff, which I know we'll get into, is that there's 60,000 years of genetic divergence between our two direwolf samples. 60,000 years. 60,000 years. But what people don't think about is that there's less than 60,000 years between our wolves of today and our 12,000 year old tooth, right? So, so we actually understand, I think colossal has about 500 times more data on this than anyone else in the world, which we're now starting to publish so that people can kind of go through it. And so if you like people say, well you're not making a mammoth, you're just making a genetically different and genetically edited Asian elephant. It's like, but that's what mammoths were, they're just different, you know, they were just genetically engineered by nature and in a very slow and efficient way. Like we have been doing, you know, you talked about GMOs, we've been doing cross breeding and genetic engineering for a long time as a society, like look at a pug. But we've been doing that, you know, like, like no wolf thought one day is gonna be a pug, right? And, but we have been doing that and doing selective breeding for traits for a long time. We manually, in a way, yeah, we've just been really shitty at it, right? Yeah, it's old fashioned, a roll of the dice, right. And so I, I, it does not bother me when people come out and say, say that our dire wolves are genetically modified wolves because that is a Factual statement. We said that in our press release, we said that in our paper. We say that on our website. Right. We're not secretly saying, oh, we have 400 million edits in this thing and no one will ever know.

[Host]

Right.

[Ben Lamm]

So we've been very clear about what we did. And the issue really is that, you know, even if you go talk to, you know, there's a DNA concept, there's a morphological concept, there's, there's so many different concepts. And if you look at the phylogenetic tree of life, life of all life, 99% of the classification of species and where they fall in the tree of life is morphological. 99%. We have not done the DNA sequencing on 99.9% of what's alive, let alone everything that's been extinct. You know, and we can't on some of those because some of them are just fossil and there's no DNA. But if you look at even just what's there, 90, we have not sequenced less than 0.1% of the Earth. So to hold this weird. So it's a little. So it is a, it is, is a semantic argument.

[Matt]

Well, and we get a lot of the. Is it 100% dire wolf? And it's just, that's like, you can't even start with that question because that assumes that all dire wolves are 100% the same. And to Ben's point, you know, we have 60,000 years of divergence just between our two samples, but the species persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, was from southern Canada all the way down into northern South America. So if you were a dire wolf in Venezuela 25,000 years ago, the good chance that you were not identical, you're probably very different than a direwolf 150,000 years ago in Idaho.

[Host]

Here, here's the other thing that is not your guys fault at all. And I have to, I have to call out everyone in my industry or in industries close to it because it is unfortunately how things work. When Time magazine comes out with a fucking incredible cover, it was amazing, right? They're on an even tighter restriction than we are. Like when I write a trip title about this, let's start there, you guys are going to be called like the direwolf team or whatever, right? So that's going to be the back characters. I have a hundred characters on YouTube and really what I want to do is get the actual base of the title down to 60. Yeah, right. So I got. What do we got, Alessi? Maybe eight to ten words to work with something like that. Which means I can't write out a title saying this de extinction company has genetically engineered a dire wolf or something close to it with 14G mutate mutations. So it's not. Not necessarily exactly the direwolf. You see what I'm saying?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

I have to write they made direwolves.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

And when you look at Time magazine, they have to go de extinct or extinct no more.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

Right. And so then the average person, me included, you know, we quickly see that.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh, they brought the direwolf back.

[Host]

And we don't get the context of you sitting down and saying, here's exactly what this means. Here's what this translates to. Here's why this isn't necessarily confirmed as like a literal direwolf, but why it's actually something that could be painted to the. That filer or what.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

And we're talking about some really complex technical things that require a lot of nuance. And so I totally understand knee jerk reactions or some sort of, you know, superficial emotional reaction when somebody goes, that's incorrect. Totally get it. I think as a scientific community, as a conservation community, we could do a better job of communicating to the public in a way that's more understandable. But there is a real desire for most scientists, and you know, we talked about, Beth, our, our colleague about this all the time, is that, you know, sometimes it's okay to be a little more general because we need to bring more audience to the table.

[Ben Lamm]

And the thing is, is so a couple additional points on this is I once again, the media, some of the headlines were misleading. Right. Believe it or not. Yeah. And so, but what's crazy is like they're like, but scientists disagree is like we have 95 scientific advisors from the top universities in the top. Yeah. And I was like, we also. But that's also discredit the 172 people we have at Colossal with 140 of them being scientists that left academia. So that. So we have 95 scientific advisors outside of the 140. So just to be clear, some of the scientific community disagrees. Right. And those are the people that people want because people want clickbait. Right. Like that's what they want now to times defense time. And even though New Yorker us and. And broke the embargo and made my life very painful for a couple days.

[Host]

I don't know about this.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh, you don't?

[Host]

No.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh, we'll talk about. Yeah, okay. This is. I'll go four hours on this thing.

[Host]

Okay.

[Ben Lamm]

So no, so. So she's saying yes, but But. But. But to their credit and to. To times credit, they spent a hundred hours with us. They came to the lab, they came, saw the direwolves, they spent time with the scientists. They understand. And the results. Results. We didn't say, hey, go make a salacious headline, or go say their die wolves. That was the result. That. That was the conclusion that they came to after talking to experts that are affiliated with Colossal, not affiliated with Colossal, after going insanely deep on it and spending a hundred hours. Their conclusion is based on looking at the fact there's 31 ways to classify it. There's no species on the planet that falls into every 31 categories. Very few even fall into three. So less than 10% of categorization works. Right. It's because that is a general view. Right? You talk to Kenneth Locavara, the number one paleontologist in the world, who discovered the largest dinosaur in the world, Dreadnought, which is incredible. What kind of dinosaur? Dreadnoughtus Dinosaur. If you ever want. He's. He's in New Jersey.

[Host]

Let's get him in here.

[Ben Lamm]

He's just awesome. He's.

[Host]

I want a dinosaur podcast.

[Ben Lamm]

He's.

[Host]

Dude, I'm into this.

[Ben Lamm]

He's your guy. He's. He's incredible. But I mean, he'll even argue semantics. And then he's like, well, technically, polar bear should be the same species. So then he'll go down this whole thing as broadbear. So he'll even debate this, even internally. Right. And so. But what I'll tell you is when you spend the time with it and you understand all of it, you can come to a conclusion of, wow, this is a scientific, incredible feat for humanity that nothing's ever happened like this before. A. This is like the moon landing of genetics. And you can come to that. It's a dire wolf. Or. Or it's the closest thing, like, we have our website pulled up. But if you go to our. If you. I don't know if I could do this. If you go to. If you scroll up and go to our main menu. And we have to build a new website because there's so much on here. If you click De Extinction. If you go. Scroll up one more time. Sorry, top left, top left. Yeah. If you click De Extinction. So the first button on our website is De extinction, which nobody clicks on, which is crazy. If you scroll down.

[Host]

Well, it's a little hidden.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, it's hidden. You know, it's only the first one war. So if you scroll down. Just scroll down a little bit. For it. Right. Scroll down. Because it's about conservation. If you stop right there. Right. So what's funny is, since the direwolf launch, Wikipedia has been edited on the extinction page like a thousand times. Yeah, but it used to. We love the CIA, to be clear.

[Matt]

That was Julian.

[Host]

That was not sitting there yesterday. So, you know, maybe we got to check wires around here.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So, but. But before Colossal launched the direwolf, the Wikipedia definition was the process of generating an organism that resembles or is an extinct species. You cannot. We. We think that. And if you scroll down a little. Just stop. Yeah. So we think. We think that that was flawed now obvious now because of the direwolves, that page has been completely rewritten to drive a certain agenda, which is interesting and weird in itself. But what's crazy is we think that engineering a species to look like another species is enough. You know, we could do that without ever using ancient DNA. We just go to trait engineering. The second thing is it's not possible to clone extinct species, as Beth wrote in her book. And we have said from day one. Right. So if you scroll down a little bit further, we actually talk about. I've just a little bit further Right there. Yeah, Was that. We think that's perfect. We think, we think about. About rebuilding extinct species for today. And so we. We have this concept that we put out years ago. So this is on our website. This isn't like some. Some like hidden board deck that's like not available to public. It's functional de extinction. Right. The process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost lineage of core genes. Because we identified the core genes that made a direwolf a direwolf. But there's a lot of stuff in there, even between the 60,000 years of genetic divergence between the two direwolves. So we have had. That aren't core genes that weren't conserved over time. So we identified the ones that were conserved over time. And then we also want to engineer natural resilience and enhance adaptability so they can thrive in today. So if you scroll down just a little bit further. And we pause here. So going back to ehv, there will be.

[Host]

If I could clone the elephant disease.

[Ben Lamm]

The elephant disease. If I clone a mammoth, which is not possible. If I clone a mammoth. A hundred percent, which is not possible. Possible. And we're not doing it because it's not possible. And we've never said it's possible. But if we cloned a mammoth a hundred percent. Couple things. It's not going to have the same gut biome because it's not going to be birthed by a mammoth who ate the exact same things. Number one. So we know that the gut biome affects us. It changes how our behavior. It changes a lot of things about it. Here's the other thing. We know definitively that eehv, that mammoths were susceptible to eehv, that means that. So if I. If we engineer a cure for ehv, and I do not put that in here, if I put those edits into our mammoths and then make them confer resistance to EEHV, and I was 100% a mammoth, I got gut biome, right? I used a time machine to get the right mom. I nailed everything. But I'm like, you know what? We should make the change so that 20% of mammoths don't die. Then everyone in the world could be like, oh, then at that point, your mammoths are now no longer mammoths. Right. So these are semantic arguments, but I think it's of it from an ethical responsibility perspective. If we have the ability to rebuild extinct species, which we are at our core, we're a genetic engineering company. We're not a genetic cloning company or extinct cloning company. We really want to think about engineering these things and going back to the coding example. If we can make less edits and we can get the core phenotypes. If you look at our direwolves, if we want to pull up any pictures of our direwolves, they are. Yeah.

[Host]

Who's your photographer, by the way? There's some good.

[Matt]

There's some good ones.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, there's some good ones. So he's here in New York, Andrew Zuckerman. He's awesome. Yeah.

[Host]

Shout out, Andrew.

[Ben Lamm]

So he's.

[Host]

Please continue.

[Matt]

But I think Ben's point is really good. And as sort of the token animal guy, you know, we could try to edit. Right.

[Ben Lamm]

Well, it's Chief Animals.

[Matt]

Yeah, Chief Animal, which is a great title ever. Right. But, you know, one of my primary mandates at Colossal is to ensure that the safety and welfare of the animals in our care.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

And part of that doesn't just mean once the animal's born, it's my responsibility. It also means that as we're designing strategies to return species from extinction, we need to have welfare as one of our paramount concerns. To Ben's point, we focused on core edits. We could have taken it further. We could take it further. Today we could go to 100,000 edits. We could go to 4 million edits. But every time we do that, we're increasing the risk. Risk of the outcome being less than optimal for that animal. And we have to ensure the health and welfare of every animal. So we'll take a stepwise approach. And what gets missed often is that nine years ago, an international independent group of people that run the iucn, that's an international union for the conservation of nature and the species survival.

[Ben Lamm]

They're at the UN of species. Yeah. Okay.

[Matt]

They wrote a white paper on proxy species rewilding, which is essentially what de extinction is today. And what we did is we. There were something like 36 points that go through there. If you are going to pursue this endeavor, these are the considerations that you must make. And we went point by point through that thing, and we developed strategies that aligned with exactly that. And one of those is, at first, you need to take a cautionary approach that ensures the health and safety of your animals. Nailed it. You see those direwolves? I mean that. It's pretty. Yeah. Adorable. Healthy. They look amazing. Extremely happy.

[Host]

Are they eating people yet or just.

[Matt]

People we don't like?

[Ben Lamm]

Okay.

[Matt]

Yeah. But, you know, and now, and. And, you know, we'll. We'll actually. We decided that we're going to write up a little draft and we're going to share it with the world so they can kind of see where we align with this guideline. Because we took lot of time and consideration to go into that, and now people sort of dismiss it. You haven't listened to any international experts. We took your playbook. We just did it. Right.

[Ben Lamm]

If we scroll. Can we scroll down and see the. The bigger wolves? Because, like, so if you keep scrolling. Oh, yeah. Here's a click thing.

[Matt]

You can click also. What's amazing is I now have the most famous hands in the world.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

Oh, those are all your hands.

[Matt]

Every time.

[Ben Lamm]

Funniest. And so. So we have. We have healthy animals with genes that have not been expressed in 12,000 years. But I want to give one. This goes back to rebuilding. I want to give an example, because no one actually talks about this. It's in the fucking press release, but no one talks about this. So with the edits that we made, there were 15 of them that were specific ancient DNA variants from the direwolf. Right. But we chose five that weren't people. No one's talked about this. Which blows my mind. So I mentioned earlier that we now know definitively that direwolves were white. I can't say that, you know, this is me being around too many Scientists, I can't say all direwolves were white, but 60,000 years of genetic divergence, both those were white. I'm going to say statistically, more than likely they were white.

[Matt]

And a significant geographical distance as well. We're talking Idaho and Ohio.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. And. And they're both in there during the Pleistocene. So it kind of makes sense that they're white. But one thing that's interesting is we know that the specific variant of the gene that the direwolves have that made it white has been studied in Canids. So we also, once again, people think that this is just colossal and they discredit the fact that we have science. The number one person in the world in Canid genetics and Canid evolution is a woman named Eleanor Carlson. She is at the Broad Institute. The Broadway is most famously known for the one that like fought Jennifer Doudna and Berkeley on the whole Crispr wars. Where did it. Was it invented at the Broad? Was there. So, like the Broad's a very. I mean, it's about as high of an echelon as you can get. And she is as high as an echelon as you can get when it comes to Canid evolution and genetics. Right. And so we worked with her. Right. We didn't, once again, we didn't just do all this is even just the colossal people. Right. We're not drinking our own Kool Aid here. And we actually identified that the gene specifically for that that made direwolves white has been known. And this is evolution selective in natural selection has been observed in wolves and in dogs to sometimes cause blindness or deafness. So from a purity perspective, some people be like, we should put the fucking gene in. Right. From an animal welfare perspective, that's stupid. So we actually did trait engineering on the white coat color. So we know definitively that this gene made dire was white. We know it's 100 or we at least know that R2, just to be fair to scientists, is that we know that at least R2 samples were white. And we think that that probably means that most were white. We then said if we put this exact gene in, there is a. It's not 100%, but there's a non zero probability that we could cause some negative effect on the animal welfare. So what we did did was just like in the woolly mouse, we identified a gene that made it the same color. Right. So all of the coat color, or all our. Sorry, all the coat thickness. If you scroll back a couple. If you go back like two pictures. Yeah, like all of that. That's all their genes, right, that make it this, like, crazy Arctic thing. Like, they have this, like, level. They have this, like, main. Like, we didn't know that, right, from the fossil record. So. So that's all direwolf specific stuff that we've never seen. Seen before. But what I'll tell you is that. That white. We knew that the gene from the direwolves made it white, but we know that it comes with some risk. So we didn't put it in. We chose a different gene. This is where synthetic biology comes in. We chose a synthetic biology. Synthetic biology to be able to engineer life or doing full DNA synthesis, where you're engineering little blocks and putting it in. So we did that and we put in a gene that would make it the same color that the. That. That we know dire wolves were without any risk to the animal. Now, from a purist perspective, people would argue that, right? They'd say, you made it less dire wolf. No, you didn't. Like, if you go to the morphological species concept, it is. Which is still. Is still what 99% of the entire fossil record is based on our animal classification is what we classify. Our die rolls on. But people would. Some people would say, well, then you made it less direwolves. Like, no, we. It still has the morphological thing and we did it without having any risk. It's. It's the same argument with eehv. If we know eehv. Yeah. If we can't improve the species, why not do it? Why do it?

[Host]

Yeah. And I mean, you know what the core question is here, and I haven't asked it all day, but do you ever. And this goes to both of you, actually, because this would be anyone on the team.

[Ben Lamm]

It sounds hard.

[Host]

You should start, obviously, as a founder, do you ever sit up at night and wonder if you're playing God here?

[Ben Lamm]

I think we play. I mean, going back to your mentor, I think we play God and you saw the force cut down. We played God every single day, right? Like, we play God. Like, I take God when I take Repatha on some level on my body, right? I take God. You take. You play God when you add more creatine to your body, right? We play God when we. When we burn down the forest that you've seen with your own eyes, right? When we overfish. When you overfish the ocean, we as humans are playing God. God every single day. We just are, right? That is where humanity is. We are eradicating species like the thylacine. The Australian government put a bounty on their head to kill them. They didn't just naturally fall off the planet. Right. And so we choose to do that. So we think of this as a way that we can. If you look at technology as currently humans like apex innovation, well, why don't we start using that technology to do really great things that could help the world world and inspire the next generation.

[Host]

Here's, here's real fast man. I just want to make sure we hit this. Here's what I would view as the difference between what you're saying is the example of playing God and what I'm getting at. Everything you're referring to are things that we do on accordance of our own free will already created here on Earth.

[Ben Lamm]

Correct.

[Host]

What you're doing is getting to the beginning of the foundation of the actual creation. So it is a lit. You understand what I'm saying? It's a little bit different to me. And it's, and I'm not saying it's bad.

[Ben Lamm]

Bad. Yeah.

[Host]

I'm saying like it's heavy.

[Matt]

As heavy as. And you better have people that have that feel that weight and feel that responsibility. I think that was when, you know, going back to that first meeting with Ben and some of the conversations I had with people in my personal life afterwards, when I said, am I going to take this hard, right? Turn out of my career into this, this psychopath new company, right? I said, I said, you know, a.

[Ben Lamm]

Study recently came out that like 40% of CEOs are psychopaths. I saw that on Instagram.

[Matt]

My experience is 100.

[Ben Lamm]

And I was like, I, I have to flip through that faster. I have to flip that faster.

[Matt]

But, you know, you have two options there, right? Like Ben said it earlier, the cat was out of the bag on this thing. Somebody had to do it. And, and somebody challenged me in my life and they said, you have two options. You can sit on the sideline and cast stones and be pissed when they do it a way that you don't agree with, or you can jump on that ship and help steer it and help take the helm. And that's where I feel more responsibility. Your, your, your kind of point about how heavy this is, this is spot on, but I'd rather be at the table helping influence that thing. And I think that's where some of our skeptics that don't really use critical thinking, they just cast stones. They're missing out.

[Host]

This is a great point too, because like anyone who we, we always see throughout human history, regardless of what it is, people are always afraid of the new Technology. The reality is though, based on the law of numbers of population and innovation and people who are going to try stuff, someone's going to do it.

[Ben Lamm]

It.

[Host]

Yeah. So it's not to like rectify every single thing that happens, but it's like if you can't prevent it, and we know as human beings we can't prevent innovation, it just happens. It's better if you know in your heart your intentions are good. It's better for you to actually, as you say, have a seat at the table and try to steer that. And it is cool. Again, like, Ben, it's one thing for you to be a business guy and come at it from that level and whatever, but then you have on your team, I mean, your co founders are scientists, right? You have on your team guys like Matt who are coming at it from the conservation and ecological realm like that. It, what you're striking me today is under, it is being someone who understands the important balance right there, which is what I do want to hear now. We'll see that in practice.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. As this goes, actions speak louder than words, Right. We can say whatever the we want, but you have to like see it. Right. And I think the fact that we go towards our critics, that we are honest with everything that, you know, we, we put out there, like, I think those things speak louder than, you know, just quote, unquote, trust us.

[Host]

Right.

[Ben Lamm]

And, and I think one of the things that I, I feel like one of my superpowers is, is I, especially in today's world, I'm not afraid to say what I don't know. I don't know all of those things. I don't know all the ripple effects of the ecosystem. I don't know the ripple effects of conservation. I don't know those things. So what I, what my job is isn't to know those things. My job is to find and identify the smartest women and men in the world in these topics and bring them together.

[Host]

Have you run into any problems? I shouldn't even say problems so far, but almost like arguments in your head where you have the capability to do something. Rabbit hole, where it's more high level, I think, but I'll let you decide it. Where, like you have the capability to do something and you want to do it and then you're talking to so many different heads, whether it be from conservation or science or whatever, whatever. And it's almost like, you know, the, the motions being stopped because there's too much clutter and you're like, do I push through and like, is it a risk if I push through because this is taking suit too long, or do I pull back and then we don't actually innovate here. Like, do you run into that?

[Ben Lamm]

I think for me, I really do trust our RC suite. Right. It's like, I feel like we've brought the best people together and so I actually feel like I don't have that burden. Like, there's not been a decision in. Matt, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not been a decision where, like, you know, our chief science officer, our chief animal officer, you know, our VP of data, and all these people have said we absolutely should not do this. And I'm like, we should do it. Let's just, let's go.

[Matt]

So, yeah, we, we haven't gotten that. I think that's been really good. I think for me, coming from this conservation background and I know how, you know, sort of typically reserved and conservative the conservation community is, I always come out it as a little. I undersell it a bit because, you know, some audiences don't like the big, bold, audacious brand that been built. I get it. So I'm always trying to temper that for them. And then often I actually get the inverse where I'm like, well, we could maybe think about this thing. And they go, we should do this. And suddenly the excitement comes out and then it feels better that there is a community that also supports that because that external validation is extremely important because we live in the, in this insane bubble right now at Colossal, and we're doing amazing things and we're getting a lot of attention. So sometimes you can get a little echo chambery, but that's where the 95 scientific advisors that, the 25 conservation advisors we have on our board, you know, all of our academic partners, all the people in my life, all the people that, that we get to talk to, doing this, that get to ask questions and they can validate concerns, they can validate ideas, and sometimes they'll shit on things. And you go, yeah, you're right, that was stupid.

[Ben Lamm]

Stupid.

[Host]

And also your history, though, of going to the outside of people who end up coming onto the team and whatever. And when we were on the break real fast, you were reading what we're going to read in a second about Paul and you're like, we'd love to talk to him. I like that. Yeah, yeah, I like that. So let's actually pull that up now. Let's read that because it's going to lead into a question I have about the evolutionary aspect of this and. And what the capabilities are there. Do we still have that, Alessi?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I have to.

[Host]

How many screens do we have pulled up? All right, there we go. All right. Perfect. So this was. This was a post he put up with a meme of Brad Pitt from Fury talking about the news on direwolves. And Paul. Paul's also like a very funny guy and a great writer too, so he's got good sarcasm in here, I think. But he said, everyone is being fooled. It's the ship of Theseus with no water. These are genetically modified gray wolves. Not direwolves wolves. I listened to the podcast he was referring to, the one you did with Joe Rogan. I've spoken to the experts. Everyone feels the same. Amazing science project, Cool stuff. But this is not conservation. There's a lot of amazing work being done to save species and ecosystems all over the world. So many heroes saving species. The direwolf thing is just sci fi clickbait and it's robbing too much money that could be used to actually conserve the species we have here. And we've addressed some of this today already in more effective and impactful ways. Ways. These people talk of productionizing species. They are cloning dogs for rich people who can't let go of their pets. And in that was. He did talk to me about that one.

[Ben Lamm]

That was.

[Host]

That was kind of funny. And in doing so, exposing a terrifying gap in basic logic. They don't get it. You can't clone Grandma and expect the meatballs to taste the same. It's a copy of Grandma, not the woman you love.

[Ben Lamm]

I agree. I. I totally agree.

[Host]

Same goes for animals. This whole thing is exposing people's enormous amnesia for reality. Salmon have been hammering themselves upstreams and against rocks for millions of years to become salmon. Only the strong survive the journey. They are inextricably tied to and the product of their environment and their history and context. Just as each species is tied to its ecological context. If you take a poison dart frog out of the jungle, it ceases to be poisonous. And he was explaining to me that's because the ants.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Host]

They eat certain insects that allow that biograded. And an orphaned tiger can never be wild without a mother tiger to teach it how to hunt. Animals have complex cultures. There's a sacred cycle and a natural order. We must protect our species. Respect the wisdom of the wild. So my question's going to be like, I think.

[Ben Lamm]

I think it's really well written.

[Host]

Yeah. Actually, let's start like, with, what do.

[Matt]

You think Of, I think, I mean clearly I've listened to Paul on your podcast. I've read Paul's books.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

Like, like brilliant guy.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Amazing writer. I wish I could express myself that way.

[Host]

Yes.

[Matt]

I think like there's one severe flaw in the argument that he's presented here and that is assuming that de extinction is a replacement for conservation, which it just isn't.

[Ben Lamm]

And by the way, we are the De Extinction coming company that is saying that we don't need the conservation community. So that we say that.

[Matt]

Yeah, we, we believe that de extinction is a part of conservation. It's one of the tools in the toolkit. It is an enhancing, accelerating factor for conventional conservation. As I said earlier, de extinction doesn't work without habitats. So we have to start with habitat preservation, habitat restoration. All his points on, on sort of animals and it being in situ versus XC2. Totally valid. But those same arguments could be made for things like the red wolf captive breeding program. Well, yeah, we had to. This was a last resort. This was not our first choice. Nobody said, you know, it'd be really cool, let's just pull the wolves off the landscape so we can do whatever we want to the landscape and we'll just keep them in a zoo. People make the same argument about biobanking, this idea of creating frozen tissues, that there's a moral hazard, that if we can sort of put something on ice and ensure it won't ever go extinct, then why should people care about extinction?

[Host]

Right.

[Matt]

Well the real, the real issue here is not enough people care about extinction already. I think Colossal is doing a great job of bringing more eyeballs to the awareness.

[Ben Lamm]

Awareness is definitely a great argument. It doesn't affect extinction. Doesn't affect people. Like in your mural there. Right. Most people in there don't think about extinction every day. It doesn't affect people on a daily basis. So therefore they don't think about it every day. Right. I don't come with the community, so I am not as familiar with Paul as Matt is or as you are. But this also is assuming a zero sum game. So I like to say that there's one less, less shitty app that exists because we raised money from technology investors. We, we didn't go out and take money from the foundations that are, that are giving money to conservation.

[Matt]

This is, this wasn't a WWF funded product.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we're not taking money away from habitat restoration. We are bringing money from technology people that invested in, that invest in AI companies and technology companies. We are having them invest in this business that, that is 99% of our investors are, are from technology investors, the long term technology investors that invest in things like SpaceX and OpenAI and those types of technologies. Right. And so now they're investing in a company and we've got them in our board to agree that all the technologies that we have, that we make an application to conservation, we give to the world for free. So this is new money coming into conservation. We're almost, I think of us as like a research and development lab for conservation. Right. And to your point, you said this earlier, like new technologies are scary. Right. And so what I assume Paul and I don't want to speak for Paul, but what I assume Paul and other people will say to this is they're going to say yeah, but you know, know it's not 100% direwolf, so we can't call it a dire wolf. And he'll go down one speciation argument which he's pro, he's not wrong on based on that one definition. But there's also 30 other definitions. Right. The second thing is, I think based on what he said he's, he's worried about is this is going to take money away. Which it's not this, this that that implies that there's a finite supply of money. This is shifting money from technology development into conservation. And then I think the third, I.

[Host]

Think you guys have made some great arguments on that today.

[Ben Lamm]

But, but once again, in Paul's defense sense, he just read some, I have no article idea which article he read. He read some clickbaity article.

[Host]

Well, he did talk to 11, 11 evolutionary biologists, which is, which is great.

[Ben Lamm]

But he should also talk to Con, you know, we have 48 conservation.

[Host]

He's friends with some guys who are involved with your project.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, that's great. But when we love to talk to him. Right. Because once again you can learn a lot more. Paul is an informed critic, right? Yeah. So you can have critics, very informed, they're dumb. And then you can have informed critics, critics, we love informed critics. Even if they don't like everything we're doing. You can learn a lot from them.

[Matt]

And what's great is when you have those conversations with people like Paul and other informed critics, what you end up walking away with is you go 95% of the time we're completely aligned. We're arguing about 5% of a topic here.

[Ben Lamm]

But sometimes that 5% we're totally wrong on which we're cool with. We're not going to do everything right we're just like, that's, that's not, that's not going to happen. And so, so in that we have to like have these conversations and learn better. But the other thing that Paul's pointing out, which I think is very valid, is that there seems to be a concern that this is a replacement and that it's going to get people not focused on conserving land and conserving ecosystems. And he's spot on. We have to do that. But the thing that I think that Paul has missed in this, and I'm not speaking negatively, is that when we started the business that external peer reviewed scientists. Not colossal. Colossal has never said this outside of reference. Other things. It was forecasted that we were going to lose 15%, 1 5. It's now forecasted that we're going to lose 50. So we can conserve all the land we want. But I don't think it's going to trend that line. So we have to do that and we have to biobank as an insurance plan. It's so fucking expensive to bring back species. It's not feasible to bring back every species. Anyone that thinks that that is insane.

[Matt]

And like Paul says, it's not grandma, it's not to create a functional replacement.

[Host]

Yeah, the cl, the clone and the dog thing that I think that was like sticking in them just cuz it's like, it's not the same.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. We're not a dog cloning company.

[Host]

Right, Right. So yeah, that's more symbolic like in a way. But that's pro. That's the kind of thing that maybe for someone like that he's like, all right, come on guys.

[Matt]

I totally get that. But that, you know, one, one point Paul makes in here is that, you know, this money, you know, Ben already highlighted this money isn't being taken away from conservation, it's additive to conservation. We get a lot of people that come to us and say you've raised $435 million for the business, $50 million for the foundation. So $485 million. What you should be doing this with half a billion dollars.

[Ben Lamm]

Right.

[Matt]

And to my argument is yeah, you should, you should go raise half a billion dollars and do that thing that you think is the right answer and I will support you and I'll help you raise the money.

[Ben Lamm]

Money.

[Matt]

But this is how we believe we can be impactful to the world.

[Host]

This is your line of expertise.

[Ben Lamm]

This is, I always say this is like, this is such an existential problem that we need, we need a entire tapestry to solve this problem, this is an existential threat. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem collapse is an existential threat that will affect how we as humans can and live on this planet. We are one threat. And I like to say to the critics, if you hate what we're doing, that's great, great. But like some of our biggest critics, I'm like, they're like, oh, well, you're not doing stuff enough for elephant conservation. It's all good. I was like, well, how much money do you spend on elephant conservation? I mean, what are your checks? And we can do it a percentage of income. I'll tell you what I've spent, you tell me what you. I'll do a percentage income and because I don't want to be not fair to different socioeconomic statuses, but then separate. So we do it based. We can do it based solely on a percentage basis. That is more than fair. And then I'll say, great, if you don't have any money, which is fine. How much time have you done it to it? Yes, and often the answer is zero. And I'm not, I'm not being a dick about it, I'm just saying the reality is, is that like, it's easy.

[Host]

To throw stones from glass houses.

[Ben Lamm]

It really is. And by the way, we're not going to do everything right, as I just said, but this is our thread. We need a thousand, we need a million threads that are doing what we're doing. Doing things are crazier than we're doing. They're doing things more conservative that we're doing. We need an entire tapestry of this. We are not the solution. We are one small thread. But if you don't like what we're doing, get off the couch and go do something else. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt]

And I think, you know, we, we sort of talk about conservation in, in this, in this funny way is that we say, well, this is how much I spent on conservation. Right. Oh, the, you know, that we measure success by inputs. Well, I think what colossal is doing and what I'd love to see everybody do is we want to measure, measure by outcomes. What was the outcome of your work? How did you impact it? How many species were saved, you know.

[Ben Lamm]

And how many more elephants are there? Right. Like we, like I always, sometimes this creeps people out. I say this in Joe Rogan. I got a lot of weird feedback about it is like, we, we have not solved this yet, but we do have a 17 person team working on artificial wombs eventually.

[Matt]

Artificial wombs, yeah. This will get Paul with the productionizing idea, but it's, but it's talking about scaling, it's on.

[Ben Lamm]

I'm not saying everyone's going to do it, but it's like, like if you could grow artificial, if you could grow species fully ex utero in a system so you have no animal welfare issues and you can engineer in genetic diversity like we could. And you could make 50 founder lines of Northern White Rhinos and then work with people conserving land like Paul and work with, you know, say the rhinos and all in biorescue and all of these teams to put them back in the wild. Right? Yes. You are going, to Paul's point, you're going to have Gen1 problems around elephant or rhino socialization. Right. And so one of the things that we also don't get credit for is like we work with elephant havens in Botswana who, who saves adopted or saves orphaned elephants and works to synthetically engineer herds and figure out the social dynamics to put orphaned elephants back into herds. Right, right. Including people, including baby elephants that don't have a mom. Right. And so, so we are funding that research now because it helps elephants today. But that will also, lessons learned from that will teach us how we do so we're not, once again, we're not just in a lab. A lot of people think, oh, it's just crazy people in a lab. Right. But we're working with the top people in the field in elephant conservation. We have a project going on in Kenya that's all focused on herd dynamics, migratory patterns and using drones to identify specific social cues on a specific, specific elephant so we can understand are they stressed or whatnot. All of that helps elephant conservation today. Like we have an AI team that's just working on that. They're not doing anything with the genetic side of our business. And I think that's super important because that also then gives us data so that when we do have mammoths, not today, but tomorrow when we do have them, at some point we will have lessons learned from elephants. So that some of Paul's very valid points we hopefully have solved.

[Host]

Well, what about the evolutionary aspect in the sense that you can, could. Let's say you got it perfect, right? Let's go hypothetical world. And you actually borderline, I know you say you don't do this to be clear, but you borderline, like cloned a, a mammoth. Yeah, let's go with that. You still actually. No, let's go. You, you cloned an elk and pretend that's extinct because it's going to be easier for me to make this example, if, if an elk were extinct and you were able to clone it and actually get it back. Elks are 11ft tall or whatever and then you know, they have the, this 30 foot horizontal leap that they've developed over millions of years because they're running from packs of wolves. And now you develop a clone of like this extinct elk or whatever. And it wasn't trained and hardened by Darwinism, by that environment to be able to run from, from wolves and jump that far. Even if it's built the same, the muscles look the same, the tone looks the same. It's not the evolutionary animal.

[Ben Lamm]

So, so I'll let all Matt talk about animal behavior, but we are seeing that there's a lot of things from a genetic, genetic disposition perspective that's built in. Okay, which is pretty interesting, right? So like there are certain trained behaviors that are, are learned as, as you're pointing out in Matt I'll comment on. But then there's other things that are just, you know, that this not to go back to the life finds a way perspective. But there are things that are genetically, you know, if you are a carnivore and you are genetically a carnivore, you want to eat meat like our, our carnivorous marsupials want to eat, eat, you know, meat, right? That is, that, that is their thing. They're not gonna, they're not gonna like be alive and say why should I eat the grass? Like they don't get confused, right? Like that is there is genetic programming in what we're building, right? In all of us, right. They're even saying that there's, there's crazy amounts of genetic stress that can be passed down generations that we're now learning that we in, in the world of epigenetics are learning about.

[Matt]

Oh, and so if you brought back this hypothetical elk, right. It's not as if colossal tomorrow is going to throw it in the wild and say godspeed, right? There is this sort of very stage gated process where you start small, highly managed situations, understand the effects of the cloning, the editing, whatever it is, and you begin to put them in larger, more semi wild and truly wild places and observe and see what they're doing. My guess is to Ben's point, there's a lot of intrinsic behavior and ability that's built into DNA is the nature versus nurture thing still plays a role. And so if you don't have the nurture aspect that teaches, you know, this elk how to jump or a tiger how to hunt in Paul's example, there are ways that you can over.

[Ben Lamm]

People don't train their house cats to.

[Matt]

To kill mice, but they just, they.

[Host]

Know how to do.

[Ben Lamm]

You see? But a house cat sees a mouse. Crazy.

[Matt]

Yeah, but you can work. And there are large carnivore rewilding efforts like the Red Wolf effort. Like there are, there are big cat orphanages that release cats back to the wild. And so there are tactics that you can use in a management setting. But also if you're doing it correctly, you're putting this animal in a habitat that has all of the same environmental pressures and, and that, that are driving those behaviors. So if you give them the program and you give them the right motivation and pressures and a little bit of training, you can definitely get the get there. Paul's point's still not wrong. Grandma's dead. She's not coming back. You're not going to be able to make her the exact same person. But we can create functional replacements and ecosystems that perform specific functions that help boost biodiversity and carbon sequestration in an ecosystem in a meaningful way.

[Ben Lamm]

Got it.

[Host]

Emily, real quick, can I ask one more question? We don't have to if, if you got the hook. Okay, cool. Yeah. There's a million questions I, I have for you guys.

[Ben Lamm]

This has been awesome like, but these conversations. So we would love to continue the.

[Matt]

Dialogue before you ask the question. I would say, you know, tons of respect for Paul. I love the, the podcast that you guys have done together.

[Host]

Thank you.

[Matt]

I love listening to Paul and his work and just because I'm a fan of his, I'll challenge him and say if there are things of conservation in conservation, in the conservation space that Colossal should learn, I will fly down there and see his work firsthand. I would love to learn from him and I'd love to share with him what we're doing at college. Colossal.

[Host]

That would be awesome. And I really actually, I want, I.

[Ben Lamm]

I, I, I smart but I want to go.

[Host]

I hope you do that. Because it was a, it was a life altering experience for me because it brought it home. Like I'm just some in Jersey with a podcast, right? And this guy's coming here and spilling his guts about all the, that he was screaming about for years that no one would listen to. And it started this spark that then, you know, now he's like a celebrity, which he would hate if I said that. But it, it's true because he's like, his work's amazing. But I always knew Paul was legit as fuck. And then I went down there And I watched him live 150 yards into the, like deeper into the jungle with no running water. And like, you know how when we fuck, we put a sock on the door, he has to put a 15 foot long industrial towel across a fucking deck.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Host]

Because he lives on it on a hardwood surface. And the dude is 100% about that life. And it's the coolest thing. Like he, he, he loves it.

[Ben Lamm]

It's, he loves it. Well, it's authentic, right? It's like you can have once again the ex, you know, armchair critics. But when, when, when people that live it and they really put their money and time and effort and their, their, even in, you know, their physical, you know, harm potential in like they're putting their money where their mouth is, like 100%. He lives it.

[Host]

But the, the, the last question we'll get to today and we can continue the dialogue hopefully in the future. This has been, been really awesome today, guys. I appreciate you doing this, but the rewilding aspect, what's the earliest thoughts on that? I know there's probably going to be a lot of changes because you're taking everything as it comes, but maybe start with the dire wolves as an example today. What would be the plan there and how would that go down?

[Matt]

Oh, we're lucky that we have this amazing setting for these direwolves to live in. The plan is that these direwolves are going to stay right there. They're going to stay on this 2000 acre expansive ecological preserve that they live in. We're not planning on putting these animals out in the wild and having any, any sort of competition with gray wolves. However, we've got amazing rewilding plans for, for the other species that we're working on with mammoth, dodo and thylacine.

[Host]

What would that look like?

[Matt]

So it really starts today. You know, people go, well, you know, if mammoth's not here for five years, if dodo's not here for five years.

[Ben Lamm]

Can we pull up the, can you get a one more page? Just as you talk about this, could you go to colossal.com Tasmania and we.

[Matt]

Have to do a lot of work today. So what Ben's going to show you shows some of the social responsibility that we have to do, how we have to engage with stakeholders. We also need to go repair ecosystems. There were pressures that existed in these places that were drivers of extinction. We have to help address those today. That's what's really cool about Colossal, is it is this engine that is supporting all this other conventional conservation work, removing invasive species Restoring habitat, ensuring that there's good coexistence measures for people and wildlife. So we're doing that right now on habitats where we think the dodo could return to, where we think the thylacine could return to, where the mammoth could go.

[Ben Lamm]

And if we just scroll down, we don't have to like read the page, but we just scroll down through it while I'm talking, like. So we have a huge thylacine advisory committee. If you just keep scrolling down, you'll, you'll get to them.

[Host]

This is that Tasmanian tiger.

[Ben Lamm]

Tasmanian tiger, yeah. And so just go a little bit further. So we basically. So we went and partnered with people from, you know, indigenous representation, local ecologists, local conservationists, as I mentioned, meet people from the aboriginal community, people like Mayor Draculis, where the last thylacine was actually seen in, at least observed in the wild. We even had people in there from tourism and brand Tasmania because they care about like if you do something here what it says, we even have people on there from the logging commission and people are like, that's weird. But the largest industry in Tasmania from an economic driver perspective is logging. So once again, if you think that you're going to go do something that applies to the forest forest without including them and being inclusive, you're just crazy. You're, you're just naive. And so you know, we don't have thylacines, we're not gonna have thylacine for a while. But we want to rewild the thylacines. So we meet with this group every single quarter. I think it's next week. This entire group's at our Melbourne lab doing. Oh, in person. Yeah, in person. So coming over from Tasmania to Melbourne, Australia on this. But the, but I think this is important. And then if you scroll to the very, very bottom, you'll even see that we have like input forms and of like, please tell us like what we're doing wrong. What feedback do you want to be? Who do you represent? Do you want to be involved in this council? Right? And the council started off with two people. Now it's over 30 people. And we meet every single quarter just giving them the update, hearing their concerns, getting them excited. One of the things they said if we go to, if we could plug our YouTube channel on our. You on our YouTube channel link in description. Yeah. And so in on our YouTube channel, you'll actually see that there we've actually have like a task. They asked, asked us. The feedback that we got from the local government was could you create A child, something that a kid would like to watch and that parents could teach them about the thylacine. And so on our page, if you scroll down, I'm not sure where it is, though, we have a whole Tasmanian tiger. Go a little bit further. A lot of these. Oh, yeah. So we have a whole. We have a whole series that we've been creating. We, we don't raise money, we don't pay, we don't. We don't ask for money for this. We're not giving government subsidies for this. We're not taking anything away from Tasmania about this. We're literally creating content that's actually cool and interesting, may be fun for you guys to watch in your own time. But that literally is just that now is getting into the Tasmanian ecosystem teaching people about what the Tasmanian tiger was. How did it affect the ecosystem? How are we using genetics for this? And so that's kids education that we're doing for free. But we didn't come up with that idea. Idea. The committee said, hey, we really think that we want parents to be able to talk to their kids about this and get their future, because it's the kids that we're going to affect. It's not us. It's like future generations are what will be the most impactful for this. And so that's just like an example. To Matt's point, we've been. Even though we don't have thylacines, we've been working for years with a committee that meets every single quarter. If we only had to just sit in the lab and put blinders on and make animals with middle fingers up to the air care, that'd be a lot easier. But for us, we're sitting here trying to like, really do community engagement and listen to critics like Paul and, and others learn from them. And I appreciate you doing that, but we do. We. I mean, we, we, we want to do it. Like I said, we're not gonna do everything right. We haven't done everything right. The New Yorker, us. And, and so they broke embargo. So, yeah, very frustrating.

[Host]

All right, guys. Well, I have a million other questions.

[Matt]

I love that we just ended on the New York.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, Propel.

[Ben Lamm]

Wait till you see my shirt.

[Host]

But this is. I, I really appreciate the transparency and what you're doing and going through this. We'll obviously have to continue the conversation. Another point. But the work is really amazing and I hope it's all used for the intentions that you're looking to actually use it.

[Ben Lamm]

And we love to get connected. You know you have a great relationship directly with Paul, so we'd love to get.

[Host]

I can do that.

[Ben Lamm]

That'd be great.

[Host]

I can do that.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah.

[Matt]

We'll continue this conversation. Maybe one day we could sit down with Paul here.

[Host]

That would be very cool.

[Ben Lamm]

That'd be cool. And you guys should come see the live up.

[Host]

I would love to do that.

[Matt]

So, yeah, if you guys ever leave Jersey, you know, I make it out sometimes.

[Host]

You know, it takes a while, but I'll get down there.

[Ben Lamm]

Awesome. But thank you for the invite.

[Host]

And we'll have the links down below so everyone can check this out.

[Ben Lamm]

Awesome. Thanks a lot.

[Host]

Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.