How AI Is Bringing Extinct Animals Back (And What Comes Next) | Ben Lamm (Colossal) | EP #245

Summary

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis – Episode #245

"How AI Is Bringing Extinct Animals Back (And What Comes Next)" | Guest: Ben Lamm (Colossal) | April 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

On this episode of Moonshots, Peter Diamandis sits down with Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, to discuss the groundbreaking advances in de-extinction, synthetic biology, and the powerful role artificial intelligence is playing in bringing extinct species back to life—and what these technologies might mean for the future. The conversation dives into Colossal’s multi-pronged strategy, including spinoff companies tackling plastic degradation, artificial wombs, gene drives, and much more. The episode is fast-paced and mind-expanding, filled with both the promise and challenges of building a new biology-powered future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of Colossal and the De-extinction Mission

• Meeting George Church: Ben shares how a conversation with legendary synthetic biologist George Church sparked Colossal’s moonshot—reviving the woolly mammoth as not just a spectacle, but a way to build new tech applicable to conservation and human health.
  • “If he could have unlimited capital and just one project, he didn’t hesitate: ‘I’d work to bring back mammoths, rewild them, and build technologies for saving species and human healthcare.’”
    (Ben Lamm, 02:12)
• Leadership & Vision: Ben didn’t expect to become CEO, initially considering funding Colossal as a side project. But the scale, impact, and interest drew him in full-time (00:07, 02:41).

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2. Building an AI-driven Bioengineering Platform

• AI as Essential: AI is not just an add-on; it’s the core enabling technology for Colossal’s efforts in synthetic biology, from gene editing to designing entire living systems.
  • “Without AI, we would not be able to do anything we’re doing.” (Ben, 03:16)
• Living Products Pipeline: The platform enables the design and construction of living products, making Colossal more than just a de-extinction company.
  • “What Ben is building is a platform and an engine for creating living products, being able to design using AI and then build living products.” (Host, 03:33)

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3. Tackling the Plastic Crisis: The ‘Braking’ Spinout

• Microbes That Eat Plastic: ‘Braking,’ Colossal’s first spinout, engineers microbes that break down plastics at the chemical bond level, tackling pollution at its core—not just breaking it into smaller harmful pieces.
  • “Most plastic degradation companies are just making microplastics. That’s not solving the problem… What’s interesting about this discovery is it actually breaks the chemical bonds of the plastic.” (Ben, 05:29–05:59)
• Health & Environment Impact: They are even exploring human supplements to digest microplastics before absorption (06:55).

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4. Multispecies De-extinction Efforts

• Species in Focus: Colossal is working to bring back the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, moa—and recently announced success with dire wolves.
  • “We could take a 73,000-year-old skull and make puppies. And we did it in 18 months, which is pretty remarkable.” (Ben, 09:13)
• Cultural Connection: Collaborations with figures like George R.R. Martin (creator of Game of Thrones) bring cultural and scientific narratives together (08:13).

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5. Business Models & Mega-markets

• Economic Scale: The de-extinction and bioengineering platforms extend into trillion-dollar markets—ranging from education, licensing, biodiversity, to government partnerships.
  • “If you take net new dollars that are comparable… the world spends about 12.5% of global consumers buy something that’s extinct every year… It turns out to be like $1.7 trillion.” (Ben, 09:40)
• BioVault in Dubai: Colossal announced major deals with the UAE for the world’s first animal biobank, creating a global biodiversity backup (10:52–13:11).

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6. Artificial Wombs & “Moonshot” Projects

• Artificial Reproduction: Developing artificial wombs is integral to scaling the production and reintroduction of revived or endangered species. Three projects (“mini moonshots”) are in progress for different animal groups.
  • “We have three [artificial womb projects], they don’t work yet… but our vision is using AI, synthetic biology, and artificial wombs to productionize species development.” (Ben, 13:47)
• Genetic Bottlenecks: These techs enable engineering genetic diversity into population bottlenecks—like rescuing the almost-extinct Northern White Rhino (14:16).

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7. Advanced Cloning Capabilities

• Buying Viagen: Colossal purchased the world’s top two cloning companies, giving them unprecedented capacity and efficiency in cloning endangered animals.
  • “Viagen… had a 78% cloning efficiency… the only endangered species ever cloned on the planet were cloned by Viagen.” (Ben, 15:39–16:10)

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8. Gene Editing, Custom Life Design & CRISPR Advances

• Genotype to Phenotype Engineering: AI allows Colossal to specify features—longer tusks, immune traits—by editing complex gene networks efficiently.
  • “We’re now doing hundreds of edits at a time… at 90% efficiency. In the coming years, that’s thousands of edits.” (Ben, 32:16)
• Pop Culture Moments: Requests for “real” Pokemon and dragons are frequent; public imagination is running wild with the tech’s potential (17:45, 18:18).

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9. Expanding Platform: Disease Resistance, Plants, and Society

• From Animals to Plants: Colossal is applying its genetic toolkit to create disease-resistant, drought-tolerant plants and animals—addressing massive agri-food and ecological challenges (18:18).
• Public Education Needed: Changing perceptions on GMOs and genetic engineering is crucial, including government engagement (22:17).

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10. Gene Drives & Invasive Species Control

• Humane Biocontrol: Colossal is working on gene drives that can target invasive species—potentially a $5.4 trillion global problem—more safely, humanely, and reversibly than poisons or culls.
  • “Gene drives… is a 40% technology problem, 60% marketing problem.” (Ben, 23:25)
  • “If you engineer the right gene drives… you can have animals, including insects, live out their normal lives, and then over time… have a decrease in population, humanely.” (Ben, 25:18)
• Market Size: The U.S. alone spends over $500B annually on invasive species response (27:08).

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11. Innovation in IVF and Human Embryo Health

• Advanced Embryo Grading: Colossal’s work in animal embryos for artificial wombs spins out into new, more accurate and predictive technologies for IVF clinics, moving beyond outdated, morphology-based grading (29:02–30:38).

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12. Unprecedented Biological Scale & Pace

• Exponential Progress: Colossal’s tech is improving so rapidly—hundreds of gene edits at high precision, massive gains in DNA synthesis and delivery, and system-level advances—not matched by any competitor (32:16–34:42).

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13. Company Philosophy and Ecosystem Spinouts

• Strategic Focus: Colossal seeds spinouts for secondary opportunities but keeps focus on de-extinction and biodiversity as core, using internally-built tech and expert teams to launch new initiatives (34:47).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the magnitude of the mission:
  “Now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.” (Host, 00:50)
• On cultural fascination:
  “Most people thought direwolves were just mythical creatures… It was a pretty cool thing to show we could take a 73,000-year-old skull and make puppies.” (Ben, 09:13)
• On the need for AI:
  “We don’t always like to lead with AI, but without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we’re doing.” (Ben, 03:16)
• On public perception:
  “Gene drives is a 40% technology problem, 60% marketing problem.” (Ben, 23:25)
• On global impact:
  “De-extinction, species preservation… is a $10 trillion opportunity, but also one of the most important things to focus on.” (Ben, 34:47)

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Timeline & Timestamps of Major Segments

• 00:00–04:53 – Origins of Colossal, AI and synthetic biology as a platform, first spinout (“Braking”)
• 05:29–07:37 – Tackling plastics, health implications, and the problem of microplastics
• 07:42–09:14 – Species under revival, direwolf project, and George R.R. Martin anecdote
• 09:24–13:11 – De-extinction business model, global markets, Dubai BioVault
• 13:22–15:15 – Artificial wombs, “mini moonshots,” addressing genetic bottlenecks
• 15:23–17:00 – Acquiring cloning companies, scaling up endangered species cloning
• 17:00–20:34 – Engineering new life forms, pop culture intersections, disease-resistant animals & plants
• 20:56–23:18 – AI-enablement of synthetic biology, GMO education, regulatory environment
• 23:18–27:08 – Gene drives, invasive species crisis, humane biocontrol strategies
• 27:08–29:02 – Market size of invasive species, practical and ethical biocontrol
• 29:02–31:52 – Innovations in IVF, embryo health and grading technologies
• 32:16–34:42 – Rapid advances in gene editing, comparison to industry standards
• 34:47–End – Spinout strategy, focus on biodiversity and platform building

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Final Thoughts

This episode captures the audacious scale of Colossal’s work: from reviving extinct animals to building a versatile, AI-powered synthetic biology platform ready to transform both planetary and human health. Ben Lamm’s “moonshot” vision is grounded in sharp business acumen, game-changing science, and a pragmatic approach to spinning out world-changing technologies. For anyone interested in technology, biology, and humanity’s future, this is essential listening.

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For further exploration, follow Peter Diamandis on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis

Transcript

[Interviewer]

The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth had been around for a long time. You jump in, take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that.

[Ben Lamm]

I was gonna fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was just really interesting.

[Interviewer]

So Colossal as a parent company, is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential.

[Ben Lamm]

Our first biological products company spun out, which was breaking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can, you know, break the chemical bonds of plastic. I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. Without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing.

[Interviewer]

What Ben is building inside of Colossal, being able to design using AI and then build living products.

[Ben Lamm]

Our vision is.

[Interviewer]

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. How do you like having Elon as your warm up act?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. That's the greatest thing ever.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. That's pretty awesome. So. And he loves woolly mammoths.

[Interviewer]

He does, he does. And he wants Jurassic Park.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. He's not alone.

[Interviewer]

He's not alone.

[Ben Lamm]

I'm not saying that's for me. I'm just saying that he's not alone.

[Interviewer]

I understand that.

[Ben Lamm]

It's the number one request we get.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Ben Lamm]

And then Megalodon's is too, which is also really weird.

[Interviewer]

Well, Megalodons are just cool. I mean, they littered their teeth all over the ocean floor.

[Ben Lamm]

They're still scary.

[Interviewer]

That's scary. Jaws.

[Ben Lamm]

I'm scared enough. The ocean without it.

[Interviewer]

Jaws times 100. So as we're going along here, please use your Slido app to add questions. So I want, first of all, I've known you now since pretty much the beginning of Colossal.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. You were like, first text.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Ben Lamm]

First, second text.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And I am such a fan of you as a CEO, first and foremost. And then second, the company, the idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth had been around for a long time. It had been played around in nonprofits and so forth. I'm going to summarize. This man meets George Church, one of the greatest synthetic biologists. Crispr Gene, editor, entrepreneur, professor at Harvard Medical School. And you ask him, what's your favorite pet project?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I asked, if he had one project, if he could work on one project for the rest of time with unlimited capital, what would it be? And he didn't hesitate. It wasn't like, let me think about it, let me get back to you. And it was just instantly like, I'd worked to bring back mammoths, I'd rewild them back into the ecosystems and I'd build technologies that could be applied to saving species and also human healthcare. He just didn't hesitate.

[Interviewer]

So you jump in, you take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that.

[Ben Lamm]

I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was just really interesting.

[Interviewer]

You build a company which goes from zero to $10 billion valuation in four years. Years.

[Ben Lamm]

It's massively undervalued. I, I totally agree with you.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. I love you. And it's just, it's, it's you as the CEO who has done this. You've built an extraordinary team. How big is this? Thank you so much, Val. How big is the team now?

[Ben Lamm]

We have 260 scientists, 200 here in the US and 60 in Australia and

[Interviewer]

a significant number of AI programmers.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

You've become an AI company.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, we, I think every company is, should be an AI company or is an AI company. So we feel like the synthetic biology part of our work is really interesting. So we don't, we don't always like lead with AI, but AI without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing.

[Interviewer]

I want you to think about this. What Ben is building inside of Colossal is a platform and an engine for creating living products, being able to design using AI and then build living products. Let's talk about the work you're doing in de extinction.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So we thought that if we were going to go build this end to end pipeline for synthetic biology and we would have to develop technologies across computational biology, cellular engineering, genetic engineering, cloning, somatic cellular transfer and others, eventually artificial wombs. And we thought that if we're going to do that and build this end to end platform, what's the best way to do it? And we thought, well, if you start with de extinction, right. Because we are facing a massive, massive extinction crisis right now. And if we do that, we are going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in biology. Genotype to phenotype relationships, ancestral shape reconstructions, comparative genomics. So there's so many things that we have to solve and in that, that allows us to build a system model that can be applied to all types of solutions for biological products. Our first biological products company spun out, which was fraking, which is our plastic degradation company. And so the same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can break, break the chemical Bonds of plastics.

[Interviewer]

So colossal as a parent company is spinning out a dozen companies, each of which have massive potential. We'll talk about a couple of them here. A couple of them are super top secret, we can't discuss, but they're as big or bigger. So breaking is one. So you guys all know the microplastic issue, right? That we have like 5 grams of plastic in our brain the size of a plastic teaspoon or credit card. And Most of that 90% is absorbed through your gut. Some of it comes through your skin and such. But what Braking has done is what.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, there's actually. We originally thought, the original thought was that they had discovered an enzyme from a microbe. But after further analysis, we took this discovery at the Wyss Institute, put it in colossal, started to really understand it. And actually it's a concert of microbes we working together, which was actually even better for us because we were able to essentially understand the enzymes that are being made. We're also understanding the ability to edit each one of the microbes to make different variants of the enzymes to hit different types of plastics. And the plastic crisis that we're in is terrible, not only for human healthcare, but the oceans and many parts of the environment and others that it's now affecting. But what's interesting is that most plastic treatment and degradation companies are just making smaller plastics. They're just making smaller microplastics. And that's not solving the problem in any capacity. Right. And so for us, if we just made a company that made smaller plastics, we didn't think that's the right thing. And if we just designed a company that could, where the chemical process to pre treat the plastic is worse than the plastic, that was also a bad thing. And so what's interesting about this discovery is it actually breaks the chemical bonds of the plastic. And so we were able to use directed evolution and supercharge it using our pipeline and some of our editing tools. So that not only does it have a larger breadth of plastics it can break down, but it also breaks them down at a much faster rate per surface area. And we are starting to look at the human body.

[Interviewer]

And so I find this fascinating. Imagine a supplement you could take that actually breaks down the bonds of the microplastics in your gut before it gets absorbed.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. Because the plastic problem is a global problem. Yeah. And it's not just a problem in the environment and it's in our food supply, it's in our reproductive tissues across the blood brain barrier in some cases. So it is a Pretty big existential problem that we have to solve. And so you're not going to have one solution to rule them all. You've got to have a myriad of different solutions. And that's really the goal of breaking, is how do we break down and get rid of plastics in the world?

[Interviewer]

So when you're. How many species are you working on bringing back?

[Ben Lamm]

So publicly we've announced the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo and the Moa. And then we've made the dire wolves. We will have more dire wolves coming, which we have announced, by the way.

[Interviewer]

I'm just going to. Let's get the images in the back over here. Here's the woolly mice. How cute they are.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. They are objectively the cutest mice on the planet. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

The woolly mammoth.

[Ben Lamm]

Yep. Those look good.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And the. The direwolf.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So that's Romulus in. In the front and Remus in the back and that. And that's George R.R. martin, which is great. So we did. That was actually one of the fun. Like there's a lot of cool stuff that we get to work on. But one of the cool things is that like, you know, I think kids of all ages, like whether you're like you know, three or you're, you know, older. George R.R. martin, we did a Zoom with him and we got introduced to him and obviously, if you don't know George R.R. martin, he created. Wrote a song of ice and fire and he did, which became Game of Thrones, which popularized direwolves. Most people thought direwolves were just mythical creatures, including some members of the Game of Thrones cast, which I won't call them out, but they did. And what's interesting though is when we, you know, I got introduced to George and we put him on Zoom and I just, I just. Let me just show you something. I showed him to him and he just teared up. He's like, this is like. He knew exactly what it was. Right. He knew it wasn't a mythical creature. So it was a pretty cool thing to show that we could take a 73,000 year old skull and make puppies. And we did it in 18 months, which is pretty remarkable.

[Interviewer]

It's extraordinary. So the de extinction business, people don't, you know, I didn't think of it as a massive revenue opportunity when I began. What's the business case in this and how big. I mean, ey did an estimate of the size of the market for you? Can you.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, they said through educational content and changing stem related content in education as well as looking at the kind of ancillary effects and they look at like where people are. If you could take dollars and these would be net new dollars, they wouldn't be taking away from anything. But if you take net new dollars that are comparable to things that are extinct but layer on education, the world spends about 12 and a half percent. 12.5% of global consumers buy something that's extinct every year. And so it turns out to be like $1.7 trillion, which is really interesting. And so part of our model and part of our thought process is on the, the, the de extinction work is not only to subsidize the platform but to help countries do it, which is pretty interesting. And we're helping them preserve their species, which actually is a quite lucrative business model as well as helping from an educational perspective. And you know, it's. So far the feedback's been phenomenal.

[Interviewer]

So just to just to land that plane, you just came back a month ago from Dubai and announced a few major deals there. Can you say what those were?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah. So we announced the world's first bio vault. There's not the equivalent of the biovault for animals as there are for plants. Right. You've got a lot of fragmentation. You've got incredible people and nonprofits and zoos and others working on bio banking, meaning they're saving individual pieces of cells and whatnot. But you know, when I naively started this business I came from software, so I thought oh, we'll just plug into the GCP of so species which doesn't exist. So we had to go build reference genomes for every single species that we work on. And then we said this should be more of a global project. Individual countries should have stakeholdership from it. So we partnered with the UAE as our first partner. There's incredibly diverse fauna in the region that is much of which is going extinct. So we need to protect it. And then we also need to sequence it and build digital backups and also ensure that that's shared with the global scientific community and that should be subsidized governments. Right. And they should take, I think we did a lot over about a year. We did a good job educating them on the importance of biodiversity, why you need to protect diversity, why it's so important for national pride as well as the impacts from the data from these animals. And so if you don't like, you should do it because you like ecosystems. If you don't like ecosystems, you should do it because you like animals. If you don't like animals, you should do it because the applications could be helpful to humans. And if you don't like humans, then you're probably not the right fit for us to talk to. But fundamentally we got them to say agree to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the world's first bio vault. And instead of also doing it in some secret backroom, cave or underground thing, and there's still redundancy models around that, but do it in a high trafficked area if you're going to spend X dollars, spent X plus Y and wrap educational content around it, make it available for kids and whatnot. Which they did, which they agreed to, which is great. And then from that we're building a living lab. And so it's a nine figure initiative for us, it's a nine figure initiative for the country. And I think it also builds capabilities in country for countries to also protect their biodiversity in a completely new way while also sharing globally the data.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, so the way I think about this is countries are your customer for saving their endangered species and eventually it'll be productionized.

[Ben Lamm]

Once we are successful with artificial wombs, you're just passively.

[Interviewer]

So the other thing that they're doing besides breaking is they're giving birth, excuse the pun, to an artificial womb company so that these mammals and these birds can actually give birth ex utero. Right. So imagine a future in which. And speak about it, you have three of these projects going on.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, so we have three, they don't work yet, but we have three mini moonshots within our big moonshot right. Of artificial wombs for different animal clades. And our vision is using biobanking, using synthetic biology, using automation and robotic process automation, with assistance from AI and computer vision and artificial wombs, we could productionize species development. And so when you have small and we have genetic bottleneck around a certain species, or you have long gestations, like with the northern. Everyone knows about the Northern White Rhino, right. A lot of people at least know about it. There's two females left, they're functionally extinct. There's low diversity in them, there's a bottleneck because they're related. And there are 18 embryos are related. But if you can engineer in genetic diversity from that, both synthetically and from lost specimens, and then productionize it through artificial wombs. The $25 million that people are spending a year keeping two animals alive, you could use a piece of that to productionize it. And then the rest of that could go to water education, other things for the country. I really do think that productionizing endangered species and also helping species adapt at the same curve of which we are changing environments is also something that's going to be needed in the future because evolution is not fast unless it's directed.

[Interviewer]

You also purchased the world's top two cloning companies. Yes, I love that. Yeah, you forget that. You just happen to buy that.

[Ben Lamm]

So most people think of cloning and they're like, I think I've read something about a celebrity cloning their dog, right? And we did clone Tom Brady's dog. So I think we're part of that.

[Interviewer]

Tom Brady's an investor long

[Ben Lamm]

term of like push that narrative to people because it's true. So I guess we're part of the problem of when people think about it. But what's interesting is that only like 18 species have ever been cloned and 15 of those have been cloned by the company ViaGen. That, that we, the main one that we bought, we bought another one. And most cloning efficiencies, and I think this is really important, most cloning efficiencies is only about 2%. And Viagens was at 78% pretty consistently, which is amazing. Right. And so the only endangered species that have ever been cloned on the planet were cloned by viagen. Right. And so things like the black footed ferret and others that are going extinct, viagen took old cells and were able to reanimate them and then clone them. And so I think that people still love their dogs. And nothing negative about dog cloning people. I get asked if I would clone my dogs. They're mutts, so I'd probably save more, but I don't know, maybe I'd clone them because I love them. So we're not taking away the cloning business for consumers. So people love that business. It's a profitable business. We're still supporting that business. But then separately, we're now taking those technologies into country and helping not just productionize with artificial wounds, but productionize cloning of critically endangered species. We have some big announcements to share with a local government on it.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so I want you to think about the pipeline. The platform that Colossal is, is being able to use AI and synthetic biology to say, we want this phenotype, these genes, these gene copies. I was in a conversation with one of your scientists saying, yes, we're going to a tusk conference. I was like, what? And being able to understand, okay, we want the snout to be longer, we want the teeth to be longer, and being able to use AI to change which genes, which Enhancer sequences and, and be able to like design the living animal that you want. Which is why I said, you know, someone asked you, could you create Pikachu? And you said, yeah, we could probably create Pikachu.

[Ben Lamm]

I did get asked. I, I got asked. That is like the first question on south by Southwest a few years. And then the rest of the entire panel was about Pokemon, which, which I was really hopeful to talk about, like our vaccine development for elephants and others. But it was mostly about Pokemon.

[Interviewer]

Oh God, yeah. But what I find fascinating is if you can engineer life, the missions that the companies that are being built and spun out include company that can create disease resistant plants or drought resistant plants.

[Ben Lamm]

Plants and animals are something that we're disease resistant animals. We're spending a lot of time on it because leading extinction rates are not just human caused, but some of them are supercharged by humans, but they're existing in nature like diseases. And we get this. A project that I'm very passionate about that we're working on is chytrid. And most people have never heard of chytrid. It's the leading extinction driver right now on the planet in frogs and amphibians. And they're not fluffy so they don't get as much attention, but it's terrible for ecosystems. But it's something that we can solve with genetic engineering. Right. And so for us, and not only can we solve the current problem, but we can also create frogs and salamanders and others and amphibians that are chytrid resistant, which have huge applications. Same thing. We're not currently working on corals after dinosaurs. It's like dinosaurs, corals and then I guess Pokemon, dinosaurs, corals, dragons, Pokemon. Everyone's really excited about dragons. And so we aren't working on dragons and we're not working on Pokemon or corals yet. And so yeah, we get a lot of requests. But the coral side is really fascinating and it applies directly to this idea of animals and plants. So we have an entire group now that's focusing on how do you apply some of the, like what are some of the biggest issues from livestock to, you know, critically endangered species? What are commonalities around these vaccines? What are commonalities around what can be developed to infer resistance. Right. And you know, part of it's also amazing because, you know, most people think about colossal, they only think about the mammoth, they only think about de extinction, they don't think about the platform like you've talked about, which I'm really appreciative that someone's Talking about the larger synthetic platform and bio system that we're building. But then also people don't really think about kind of like what the ripple effects on society are. And we don't want to live in a non biodiverse ecosystem and environment. We don't want to live in a world where we are changing it faster than nature can catch up. And I think that synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, will be, and I'm sure others in other industries will disagree with this, but I believe it will be the most transformative technology we as humanity ever has.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you think of AI as a multi, multi trillion, $100trillion dollar market.

[Ben Lamm]

That's why I think we're massively undervalued.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Synthetic biology enabled by powered by AI is as big a diverse market. I mean, how big is the market for engineering disease resistant plants and drought resistant plants and animals?

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, I mean it's hundreds of billions today. And that's. And it's just not well tracked. Right. But if you look at everything that can be applied and what the, what the current rate is, you have a terrible, like a swine flu or a bird flu or whatnot that wipes out a population. You've got so many precautions that also go into these. Right. When we roll it. When we brought back the direwolves, we got some feedback that are like, oh, people don't like wolves because they're going to go kill the cattle. It's like the way we raise cattle, the wolves aren't going near it. Like, that's gross. And so it just is. It just actually is. And so it's just gross. And so what's interesting though is I think that we do that because of how we've had inbreeding and hybridization and all this over time. I think that if we're smarter about this and we also have the opportunity to educate governments on things like GMOs. Right? Because for a while there was this anti GMO genetically modified organism movement, right? Because people thought, oh, it's going to change your genome. And then you're going to, if you eat GMO corn, you're going to like, I don't know what they thought.

[Interviewer]

I mean, I had this conversation with Rob Sake on Zoom earlier today that, you know, GMOs have saved so many lives, they've taken nobody.

[Ben Lamm]

It's an educational moment, right. It's like, like, you know, there was a season when seat belts were scary for people.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Ben Lamm]

There was literally a time where like cars were like, no, we can't Put seat belts in cars because it's going to make people think cars are scary bad or. Or that cars are dangerous. Like, well, cars are dangerous. Right. And so it's an opportunity to educate. Right. And so we get that. And if you go look at like, you know, when we were meeting with the Australian government about reintroducing the Tasmanian tiger, because all the species that we're working on, we want to reintroduce, you know, their law. Technically, the Tasmanian tigers are GMOs. And so they are genetically modified organisms. Right. Even if they're 100% genetically identical, they're an amalgamation of 53 different Tasmanian tigers over the course about 300 years. And so what's interesting about that is they're still GMOs. And so for us, we had to then educate the Australian government. Like, you can't just have an anti GMO narrative as it relates to the Tasmanian tiger, because then you can't rewild this incredible species back into your country because you see it as what you were afraid of in the 80s.

[Interviewer]

There's another, dare I say, multitrillion dollar market. You're working on gene drives.

[Ben Lamm]

Oh, yeah. Once again, gene Drives is a 40% technology problem, 60% marketing problem.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Can you describe what it is, who the customer is and how big it is?

[Ben Lamm]

So the invasive species problem, it's a global problem. It's about $5.4 trillion it's currently measured. I think it's much larger than. Because I don't think it's. It's hard to truly quantify. But as the world gets smaller, from a commerce perspective, invasive species are just more prevalent. Right. And that's everything from what we're seeing, you know, in Australia with the cane toad, cats, even carps in Australia, like invasive carpet. That sounds weird. I don't know who put them there, but they shouldn't be there. And then people will talk about mosquitoes. But. But what we're seeing right now in the US and a big problem coming to us, Texas has just declared it as a national emergency. We're is the screw worm. It's coming up through Honduras, in Mexico, it's now in southern Texas. It is going to decimate our cattle and bison industry. And so how do you combat that? Right. And so the best way to combat that was you kind of have a couple of choices. You can create vaccines and try to do different things to the animals themselves, but then that goes directly into USDA and you've got to work through that. And there's some Anti GMO movement still that persists from an education perspective, but then separately an idea that you could create genetically modified screw worms and release them so that as the next generation are produced, they're all male. And so you over time know how much they love each other. They're not going to make more. They don't have the same technologies that humanity has and disposal and opposable thumbs. So they, so they, they're going to go, they die out. They're going to die out. Right. And so there's people. This is terrible, but this is true. In New Zealand, in Australia, in parts of Africa, people are killing animals because they're invasive species. They're killing cats, they're killing possums, they're killing these because they're decimating their local population of small marshal in Australia or like birds in New Zealand. And you know, that's a, that's an animal welfare nightmare. That's a, that's a, you know, social nightmare, like who wants to be, you know, because people care more about cats than screwworms. And so if you, but if engineer the right gene drives into them and create the right bio control around them, you can have animals, including insects, live out their normal lives. And then over time you have a decrease in that population humanely. And so people release gene drives in Africa around mosquitoes and everyone freaked out. And then they stopped it because they thought, oh no, it's bad, but mosquitoes are a part of the food web. I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to stop it because they're a part of the food web. But we know invasive species are not a part of the food web because the word invasive. And so yeah, so it's a huge problem. We're working with our government and we're working with international governments on it. But that's the magic of AI combined with synthetic biology. Two years ago, if you said, would you, should you be working on biocontrol and biocontainment and gene drives? I would have said, oh well, it didn't really work with, I didn't really get into it because I would have thought it didn't really work when it was distributed around mosquitoes. But now it's a $5 trillion problem. Right. And there's not. We have an interesting model to it and some proprietary technologies that makes it safer than what has ever been dispersed in the wild. And also we have the ability to roll it back, which is helpful.

[Interviewer]

How big is that marketplace? How big is the spend on going after invasive species?

[Ben Lamm]

US is over 500 billion year. So in the economic impact, just domestically. But I don't know off the top of my head what the spend against it is because the way that it's mostly combated is with everything from poisons, literally poisons. They literally poison the environment as a way to get rid of the invasive disease. You know, it's like archaic ways of treating cancer. Right. And versus what we know is here and what is coming. It's the same thing is what people are doing with the environment. So poison is one and then for specifically larger animals, they're killing them, poisoning them, trapping them and it's pretty non humane.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. I just want you to understand how huge this opportunity is. Dozens of dozards of species to be attacked and cost dozens and none of

[Ben Lamm]

the people are focusing. I mean the good news is compute power AI, anthropomorphic robots and others people are really focusing on, which is great. I still think if you go ask 90% of people that are fluent in synthetic biology and think about genome engineering, I'd say 99% of them will focus only on human healthcare, which is great. Right. But I'd say that's 99%. But the same technologies apply to other use cases I think are even larger economically, but also have a bigger opportunity to help us.

[Interviewer]

You're focused on creating healthier embryos, reinventing ivf, advanced gene editing technologies. I mean these are all sort of spinouts that are coming out from this engine that you've created.

[Ben Lamm]

Yeah, yeah, so. So our artificial wombs don't work yet. Just full disclosure. And we have three projects around that. But what we found is that like, you know, as you break some of these problems down from a first principles perspective and you look at kind of like how would you rethink it? How would you start? And what's interesting is like we are keeping like, you know, I've got kids now and they're great and we went through the IVF process and you know, it's a, it's weird and crazy and it's archai and it's emotional. And then like this thing that's so precious, you look at it from this archaic grading scale, right? Like this morphological grading scale and it's like that's how we're choosing these things. It's crazy, right? I think it's crazy. I think it's very archaic versus where technology currently is. And so what's interesting is for us to be successful even long term with our mammalian base, artificial wombs is about nine different, there's four Core, but nine different core placental types. We have to innovate in a couple of different categories. And one of those is just keeping embryos healthier longer. Right. And if you look at like how current modern day IVF clinics work, they've been doing it the same way a long time. Right. And what's interesting about that is that if you look at the, you look at the data, it's just based on this morphological grade. And what we've found is that sometimes embryos that are day two, that are day three or day five in non model species, and in some model species, like mice, they look like they wouldn't be the winner of the race morphologically at that stage where most humans make their decision. But if you go a little bit longer, they actually are the healthiest embryo, which is kind of crazy, right? So we as humans are making this decision on probably one of the most important things in our lives. If you go through IVF with this archaic old system based on this one moment in time and bad imaging, to say the least. So you do that. But what we found is that things will speed up and things will slow down at these different stages. For us to be successful in artificial womb, we had to build a hydrogel and microfluidics device that actually makes the embryos healthier. And we've actually been able to take embryos in non model species much further than anyone else has in the world. In both mice and as well as in non model species, it's a lot easier to do it in humans. We don't do it in humans, but that same technology could be applied to embryos. And we have a slightly different grading scale that is proving way more efficient and more importantly, way more accurate in both model and non model species. And so just that little innovation I think could be pretty transformative to ivf.

[Interviewer]

You know, pal, I want to take us to a close here, but give me a sense of how fast this field is moving, what the transformations you've experienced over the year or two. And as far as I know, there is no other company out there that's even close to what you have built in terms of production pipeline.

[Ben Lamm]

Yes. So obviously I'm biased disclosure, but I am too. Yeah, we're both biased. But I will say objectively, two years ago, three years ago, we were doing victory laps when we did a couple edits, and I think that's where most people are doing it. We're now doing hundreds of edits at a time. And when we were doing a couple edits, we were getting like 40% efficiency and we're like that's pretty good. Most people are doing 15, we're really smart. But then now we're doing hundreds of edits at 90% efficiency. I think in the coming years that's thousands of edits. And those are not linear repeats, meaning they're all over the genome. They're completely, and they're very precise to the point that I would feel comfortable that that technology could be applied to human health care. We're not going to do it. We'd spin it out or license it because we are pretty myopically focused on biodiversity and de extinction at the cor. But no one's near that. No one's even near that. But even two years ago we thought we were by far the best based on every single standard, which was interesting. I will say that what we're finding also from DNA synthesis we've now put in at least from what we, unless there's secret something we haven't seen based on research and based on what's published. And a lot of scientists love to take the victory lapse pretty early in the journals. So based on what we've seen, you know, we've surpassed the largest delivery by 5x already. I think that will be at 20x before the end of this year. And so the DNA synthesis, large heart delivery and the clustering models that we have are you know, very superior. But at the same time I do think that, you know, I think the part of the reason for that though is because we have taken a product and systems model approach to synthetic biology leveraging AI, whereas most people are trying to solve one off point solutions for human health care. So they have different goals, so I can understand why they have different ambition levels. But for us to, to, to be able to understand genotype to phenotype expression and being able to do it all over the genome, it's just a different set of challenges. But, but I think, I do think in the coming years that you know, hopefully the models that we are applying and the way we're thinking about it applies broader to synthetic biology and you're

[Interviewer]

taking these capabilities and spinning out companies.

[Ben Lamm]

We want to stay very focused and so like we're opportunist and we're capitalists but at the same time we think these tech, these, some of these problems are very hard and we want dedicated teams on them. Right. And so de extinction, species preservation we think is a, you know, $10 trillion opportunity but we think it's also one of the most important things to focus on, and we think it's solving the hardest things in biology. But if we say, oh, we get a great discovery on plastics and we could spend some resources on it, then we invent that here, and then we spin it out and we put incredible women and men to then go work on that, right? And we bring in the right capital and attention to it. It's a part of the ecosystem. We build intercompany agreements where we share the editing efficiencies and whatnot that we develop so it can help them. So it is a really interesting ecosystem of how we approach this. But fundamentally, I don't ever want to spread ourselves too thin. I want to focus on the platform, focus on biodiversity and de extinction, but then bring in women and men that then can go run those. But they're typically seeded by us with the scientific team internally that built it. Sam.