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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that if we continue on our current course and speed, by the end of 2026, we will have the world's first mammal birth fully ex utero. This provides a bridge to future developments like this that will break open all sorts of potential.

What's the next species that we can look forward to?

Um, [Music] Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with two incredible entrepreneurs and two dear friends: Salim Ismail, head of Exponential Organizations, who you all know and love, and Ben Lamm, the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal has been all over the news around the world—one of the top stories in April and the cover of Time magazine. Ben, I have to say, you pulled off what I think is the scientific miracle of the decade. Seeing Elon capture the Super Heavy booster on Starship was sort of the technological miracle, but bringing back the dire wolf—and what I put out a blog yesterday because I was really pissed off about this—bringing back to planet Earth, after more than 10,000 years of extinction, three dire wolf pups was extraordinary.

A lot of people said, “Amazing,” but there were way too many people saying, “Is this real? Is this crazy? What is this guy doing?” To those haters out there, listen to this episode, because I think this is an extraordinary achievement that heralds a future of synthetic biology that's going to blow our minds as much as AI is blowing our minds today.

So, Ben, how are you feeling about this? What was all this controversy about?

I feel great. I've got weirdly tough skin. I don't think that if anyone thought they were going to go into the de-extinction world—which involves conservation, synthetic biology, AI, and about 31 different ways to classify an animal—they were going to dabble in an area where a lot of people have a lot of opinions on a lot of different topics and not have a lot of skepticism and negative feedback from the start.

It's only going to get worse as you're successful, right? It doesn't go the other way. We've talked about this for a long time: What happens when we actually start to show the world animals? How does that feel?

I feel fantastic. The team feels fantastic. The only thing that I think is a little sad, in my mind—and I think you nailed it in your blog post—is that people miss the science.

People miss the fact—and I'm sure we'll go into it today—that incredible women and men have spent the last 18 months, 7 days a week, passionately in love with bringing back the dire wolf. Whether you want to classify it as a dire wolf, a Colossal dire wolf, or a genetically modified gray wolf—whatever you want to do, we'll get into that conversation at some point—that doesn't matter.

The fact that they took 72,000-year-old DNA from a skull and 13,000-year-old DNA from a tooth, mapped it, and built a nearly complete dire wolf genome—when before this there was only 0.15% coverage of the genome—and then selected the genes that drove the core phenotypes of a dire wolf, engineered them into a gray wolf cell—which, for many who don't know this, is the closest living relative on the planet, and it's a non-model species, by the way; no one's ever done this—and then cloned that, resulting in healthy births of animals that exhibit phenotypes, or physical attributes, driven by genes that have been lost for 12,000 years, is magic. It's a miracle.

People just like—and not to mention the genome engineering, right? On our mouse, we announced the mouse a couple of months ago, and we had 8 edits in 7 genes. We did it all at once using multiplex editing, meaning we did it all at once: 100% delivery, 100% efficiency, and 0 off-target effects. That's a miracle.

Yet we did get feedback on that. People said, “People have made 8 edits before.” But they made them sequentially over 8 generations. So, to go from 8 edits to 20 edits now, using 15 of those edits as ancient DNA variants, is awesome.

The only thing that I was sad about is that I don't really care what people call it. I'm not asking people to go to our website or watch our videos. I don't really care. But I think it's sad for the scientists that, at a minimum, people couldn't have elevated the incredible work by the women and men at Colossal and our academic contributors to the project.

Yeah. What question comes and pops out at you? You saw the press going back and forth.

I've been tracking this for a while. We first talked about this at Singularity University, and the way we used to frame it—going back 10 or 12 years—was that we essentially can now navigate conservation in a completely different way, in a totally different mindset, and there's some magic that comes from that.

I've got 100 questions, including your business model as a company. My biggest question, though, is how? A lot of people have tried this in the past, and I'd love for you to give our viewers a sense of how you went about this, because this provides a bridge to future developments like this that will break open all sorts of potential. I'd love for you to give us some sense of the methodology.

Let me inject one thing here, which is really important: this idea of de-extinction is not just 4 years old. You co-founded Colossal with George Church, the scientific genius at Harvard Medical School, a dear friend of both of ours and, I dare say, a very close friend of yours at this point. But he's been dreaming about it for many years, and it's been discussed for decades. It just hasn't happened. It's only now, in the last 4 years, that the technology exists.

But I would say there's another thing that exists right now. For those Moonshot entrepreneurs out there, I want you to hear this: it's the difference that a CEO can make—the difference that a Moonshot CEO can make in taking something from theory and making it real.

Ben, of course, you've got multiple PhDs in biology, CRISPR, and gene editing, right? I mean, your background—

I have no background in biology whatsoever. I know that's the key point: no background in biology, but just a passion.

If you could bridge this into 2 parts: number 1, what attributes do you have that enabled you to do this? And number 2, what was the technology that enabled the dire wolf to come back and will enable a multitude of other species?

We'll talk about those everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com. So fundamentally I think that there's two things that if you're going to pursue a moonshotty like you know approach to a project there's two things that you have to remember.

One is that entrepreneurship is a team sport. It is a team sport. Everyone's got to play their role, and everyone's got to play it well. A lot of times, 1 or 2 people get the glory or the negativity, but it is a team sport.

As you mentioned, I don't have a background in biology, so I have to trust our science teams to be able to do what they do. I just have to empower them.

The second thing is that I think you have to be a little more persistent than time. You have to think about things knowing that, whether you have a great day or a bad day—everyone talks about the trough of disillusionment and all these things—I think those things fundamentally don't matter.

If you're doing a Moonshot, you just have to be looking forward. I think about Colossal 50 years from now. I don't think about the dire wolf launch. People were like, “Oh, my gosh.”

Just to go through a little bit of PTSD, because I think it's important—I don't think anybody knows this. I have yet to say this, but let me explain, and then we'll get into the science. I do think this is important.

Day 1 was Monday of last week, and I think you could make a fun 24-hour or 5-day story about just what happened last week. We were not supposed to launch until Tuesday, but we launched on Monday because we had gone to a couple of outlets. The science is so detailed, and if you just look at a press release without the scientific papers, without all the data, and without sitting down with the scientists, you could easily conclude, “It’s not a dire wolf.”

I think what we did was smart. We spent hundreds of hours with Time magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and a couple of key outlets, and brought them completely in on the unfolding story. We actually moved the wolves to a secure location and let them see the wolves, because we live in an AI-generated world. Who’s to say someone couldn’t just generate something? Not that we would ever do that, but that’s the level of skepticism we were dealing with.

We were certified by American Humane Society. We flew the wolves on private jets. We literally brought in American Humane, and we had 15 personnel with them at all times. We waited until the wolves got acclimated to the new location, so we spent a lot of time and thought on this.

We were supposed to launch on Tuesday, and on Monday we had all these people who had covered us over the years. We were going to give them the heads-up. We actually had a scientific paper, 9 handouts, and an 11-page press release, so we had a lot of material. We were going to give it to all these people under embargo so they didn’t feel left out, even though we had gone really deep with these other outlets. We said, “We think this is a story that’s going to persist.”

Monday morning, I’m getting in the shower. I kiss my 9-month-old son and say, “I’m going to get ready for work.” I kiss him goodbye, and I’m about to get in the shower when I look at my phone. It’s the cover of The New Yorker. The New Yorker broke the embargo.

The website wasn’t live, and the hundreds of press people we had worked with for 4 years—people who had covered us pretty favorably when we didn’t even have animals—felt betrayed. People were calling, saying, “Time magazine is calling. You’re on the cover of Time. What did you do? Did you do this?” It was insane.

I’m in my car, speeding to one of our labs as fast as possible, and the website is going live. People on Twitter are saying, “There’s Lorem ipsum on the website.” We were like, “No, the website was supposed to be live.” We had about 2 hours of content for YouTube explaining how everything was made that we were going to roll out, so we just pushed everything live.

That was Monday. Then all those stories we talked about came out, and they were all super positive, but no one got to digest the scientific paper. It hadn’t even been submitted to bioRxiv. There was just all this stuff.

By the way, on Monday we were going to talk to all our scientific advisers and give them an update on the project because we were worried it could leak. It was just so cool. Our scientific advisers started calling us, saying, “Why didn’t you tell us about this?” It was an insane ripple effect.

Best-laid plans.

No, it did. Wait, let me just give you the full story. I know we have limited time, but you have to know how crazy it was.

Then, on Tuesday, they broke the embargo.

That’s really, really—

It gets way worse. I called Revive & Restore, which is an incredible nonprofit. I love Ryan, and I love Stewart. They’ve been talking about de-extinction for a long time. They’re a nonprofit, right? This takes hundreds of millions of dollars in systems-theory modeling to actually achieve. You can’t just do it with a nonprofit.

I said, “Hey, just so you know, I was going to call you today to tell you about what’s coming tomorrow, but this just happened.” I also told them that we had met with the Department of the Interior, and that they were excited about classifying de-extinction as a form of conservation. The feedback was overwhelming. They said, “We’ve been trying to do this for 10 years. Oh my gosh, this is huge.”

That was Monday. Then, on Tuesday, we got this academic backlash. No one cared about 2 things: the science, which blew my mind and, as I mentioned, I thought was a travesty; and the fact that while we made 3 dire wolves—and yes, they’re dire wolves—there were 4 red wolves that we cloned using a new, noninvasive cloning technique. I’m sure we’ll talk about that with you in a second, but we developed a new technique to clone animals that’s less invasive. We made 4 red wolves, which are the most critically endangered wolves on the planet. There are only 15 left in the wild. No one covered that, either.

Then it became a philosophical and semantic debate about what makes a species. What’s interesting is that there are about 31 ways to classify species, in all these different ways. By many definitions, a polar bear and a brown bear should not be considered the same species, but they have different species names and look completely different phenotypically. There are all these different reasons and different ways to do this.

That became the discussion. We were fighting fires and not really trying to explain ourselves, but just educating people—not trying to persuade them, just educating them. There are actually a lot of ways to do all this.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, the conservation community was super stoked about new tools in conservation, so I thought, “Okay, well, it’s a win. Whatever.”

Then, on Wednesday, there was a Cabinet meeting. Obviously, we’re not part of the presidential Cabinet—the U.S. Cabinet—and we had not yet talked back to the Department of the Interior, so we don’t know the full context of the meeting. We weren’t in the Cabinet meeting, and we’re not part of the Cabinet of the United States.

A comment was made about de-extinction and the Department of the Interior. Secretary Burgum is very passionate. He told us in our meeting with him that he’s excited about getting animals off the endangered species list. But that’s not removing them; that’s recovering them. That means we have enough of them, and the population is healthy enough that they’re no longer on the endangered species list.

He made a comment that we put things on the endangered species list, but they never come off. So how do we get animals off the list using technology? We thought, “What?” But once again, we live in a moderately polarizing climate right now, and that became, “De-extinction is now being used to get rid of endangered species.” We were like, “Wait, what?”

So that was my Wednesday. On Thursday, I thought, “We’ll just answer whatever questions come up.” Last week was a little crazy.

But going back to your original question, at the end of the day, that was 1 week in time. Colossal is looking at 50 years, and our goal is to bring back these species as well as use all those technologies to save existing species. In that model, you have to think on a 50-year horizon. If you get great press on Day 1, which we did, and crazy press on Day 2, that’s okay. Those are 2 days in a 50-year journey. You have to think like that.

Let’s talk about it. I have so many questions, buddy. I’m so proud of you. For full disclosure, I’m a seed investor and adviser to Colossal Biosciences. I’ve met Ben, and there’s something about you as a CEO—you’ve got the right phenotypic attributes. People just want to support you and what you’ve done.

How old is Colossal these days?

We were founded in September 2021.

Okay, so you’re 4 years old, and you went from a zero valuation at your first conversation with George Church to now—say it. What’s your valuation today?

Our current valuation is $10.2 billion.

$10.2 billion. That’s pretty insane in 4 years. I want to talk about the business model, but the science first—de-extinction 101.

All right, de-extinction 101. Remember, I’m not a scientist, but you’ve given me the basics so far.

Wait, can I just pause for a second?

Yeah, go for it. I think this is so important when people think about moonshots. You have no background in biology to be doing this, right? Just as Elon has no background in space, the car industry, or the energy industry. It’s people coming in with a beginner’s mind and an MTP, leveraging new technologies that are accelerating naturally. That formula gives you the possibility of anything in the world, and I think that’s such a huge thing that we should drill down on.

But anyway, back to the science. I think it’s so great. I’m really curious, and I like to ask questions. George will sometimes say that I’m the best student he’s ever had because I like to ask weird questions, and he’ll say, “I didn’t think of it like that.” Those aren’t scientific breakthroughs; they’re just questions. I don’t know anything about it, so I can ask childlike questions about it and get these answers. It’s great.

Okay, on to the science.

The science—and one of the reasons why we had to raise so much capital—is that you have to build the entire system. Just like going to space, or even building a software system, the whole system has to work. You can’t just design the software. You have to build the software, the hosting, and all the API calls. You have to think about the entire system.

My background is mostly in software.

So I try to think about things like how you build software. You first have to get ancient DNA. There are 3 fundamental parts: ancient DNA, the closest living relatives, and the tools to make it possible.

How old is the oldest ancient DNA? I’m going to ask you because everybody asks you—it’s your number one question. Can you bring back dinosaurs? Is there any dinosaur DNA out there?

There is no dinosaur DNA. George and I both agree philosophically that you should never say things are impossible, because maybe we don’t fully understand them yet. I think we’re learning things every day, which is also not a very academic mindset, I might add. Most academics think we know everything, but I think I know nothing, so I’m on the other side of the spectrum.

Right now, you can go back a little over 1 million years. We have about 59 mammoth genomes that we’re working with, and our oldest is a steppe mammoth, which I would argue is still a mammoth. A steppe mammoth is currently classified as 1.2 million years old.

Awesome.

Most of the DNA we work with is, depending on the project, hundreds to thousands of years old. DNA degrades very rapidly and very easily. The minute you get blood out of a system, it starts to degrade.

Right.

What we do is, first, you have to find ancient DNA. A lot of times, there’s this thing called coverage. These big DNA-reading machines are incredible, but they’re not 100% accurate. The more coverage you can get—meaning the more times you can read the full genome—the higher the likelihood that they know that, at position 3,081, that’s a C versus a G.

It’s giving you an almost probabilistic score for each letter at each position.

Yeah, at each position.

The more coverage you can get, the better. If you only have 1×, meaning you’ve only read it once, there’s a problem. This is a destructive sampling process. You put it in—like the old claw game, where you put in your money and, if you don’t get the teddy bear, you still lost your money.

You put the DNA through library preparation, but it destroys the library in the sequencing process. Therefore, you’ve got to get enough DNA. The problem with ancient DNA is, to your point, it degrades very quickly. Cold, dry places are the best places to get DNA, but it degrades very quickly because of heat and acidification. Tar pits are terrible for this.

You also have animals that die on top of animals, animals that eat animals and defecate on animals, and bacteria. You then have to screen it and make sure you understand what’s truly endogenous—what actually came from that animal. That’s literally a numbers game. Sometimes you get zero DNA from a species, and sometimes you get a lot of endogenous DNA.

The mosquitoes trapped in amber just aren’t the thing. Not that we’ve tried, but amber is not a great storage vehicle. It’s very porous, so it’s not a great storage vehicle for DNA. There is no DNA from that.

I don’t want to ever say impossible, because who knows? People still think the Loch Ness Monster is out there. If some crazy lineage of dinosaur had magically existed somewhere and died during the Ice Age, that would have been great, but I don’t think that most likely happened.

You can go back about 1 million years. You get these pieces of DNA, you do the sequencing, and we got about 13×, so we had a full read of the genome 13 different times. You can probably do what we do at 5× to 6×, but if you get north of 10×—especially north of 20×—then you have better results for what we do, which is called functional de-extinction.

We’re not trying to clone these extinct species. There are no living cells. You can’t clone from a dead cell—from bone. You can’t clone from a dead bone. We’re trying to identify and read the genome, and then use synthetic biology to engineer those lost genes back into the genome over time.

Once you read it, you compare it to the closest living relative. Why would you know what to do? It’s like if you’re going to make a dire wolf, you shouldn’t start with a frog, because there are hundreds of millions of changes. Dire wolves, for example, are 99.5% the same as gray wolves.

Many people didn’t know this until we submitted this paper, which is currently the number 1 paper on bioRxiv. We actually crashed bioRxiv. On Thursday, when we uploaded it, bioRxiv went down. It was the number 1 research paper, and I think it still is right now. It’s on a preprint server.

Reddit also shut down Colossal for a week. They literally put out a statement last night saying that any mention of Colossal, Colossal Biosciences, dire wolves, or any memes would be banned for 1 week. It’s the craziest thing. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, back to the science. And there's no like GCP of species, which I think there needs to be. We’re actually advocating for the federal government to create this. There’s no biobank or biovault—the equivalent of the seed vault—that has all these cells for wolves that are immortalized or have pluripotent stem cells. No one has done genome sequencing on all of this. No one has done any of that.

We have to go do all that, and then we compare the 2 genomes. Once you identify those genes, we look for areas in coding regions, regulatory regions, and other areas that we know—or at least believe—will drive certain types of phenotypes. Then we engineer them into the genetic donor. In this case, the closest living relative is the gray wolf.

We identify those genes and edit them into the gray wolf. Then we do a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is basically cloning. Dolly made it famous, but now we use robotics, lasers, and all kinds of other technology to make it much more efficient. You put it into a host, and if everything goes well, you get a healthy animal.

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

I’d say it’s half and half. We spend a lot of time on things like sequencing. Once again, this goes back to education. Some people were critical, saying, “They didn’t use tiny tweezers to move the DNA,” but they don’t understand synthetic biology.

People were asking me in an interview over the weekend, “Were you frustrated by that comment?” I said, “No, this is an educational opportunity.” You think that you move the DNA from here to over here, but that’s not how it works. We just read it. You’ve said this before, Peter: it’s just a different coding language.

We read the code, and then we rewrite the code. We either change the code, or we synthesize a block of code and insert it. We don’t move it with tiny tweezers.

How much of this is done by using CRISPR?

CRISPR has become the catchall for genome engineering. It’s a combination. One of the things that we’ve done really well is work with knockouts and knock-ins. You can knock things out of the genome, knock things into the genome, or change individual letters. We do a lot of changing of individual letters.

Some people trivialize that, which I think is insane. I’ll give you a conservation example.

That’s amazing.

This goes directly to your question. One of our tools allows us to change individual letters—not do a full knockout, but change something from a C to a G.

In Australia, cane toads were introduced from South America. They’re killing the marsupials, specifically the northern quoll, which is now critically endangered because the quolls eat these cane toads, which they did not evolve alongside. The neurotoxin kills them.

We found out, when we studied snakes and other small mammals that eat cane toads in South America, that they have a similar change at 1 nucleotide. Think about 3.5 billion base pairs: 1 letter, 1 change, confers 5,000-times resistance to cane toad toxin.

We’ve now made dunnarts—which are another carnivorous marsupial and the closest living relative we wanted to work with before working in the endangered species—5,000 times more resistant to cane toad toxins with 1 letter change.

When people say, “Making 1 letter change isn’t that big a deal,” I say, “1 letter change could change the entire animal.” George Church put out a statement saying you could make an entire new species with 1 letter change.

That’s extraordinary. Wow.

We also do DNA synthesis. If there are a lot of changes all at the same time, sometimes we’ll synthesize that block and put the whole block in because it creates a lower probability of off-target effects. You’ll potentially only have off-target effects at the ends, versus making 20 changes in a gene.

So, where we're probably best at at Colossal—I would argue we're the best at—is multiplexing. That means we take all those technologies, put them in one big array and one big guide, and deliver them. We're pretty good at that.

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

Now that you've done it once, does the next time become exponentially easier, and then much easier after that?

I think the editing becomes exponentially easier, and the delivery becomes exponentially easier. We're working on some things on the embryology side around a universal donor egg—and we're not there yet, just to be clear. We've not done this, and I don't want to claim that we've done this. We are working on some pretty interesting ideas around a universal donor egg where you can have matched mitochondria.

You can't go too insanely different. I can't use a cow egg, of a different size, to grow an elephant, even if the size worked the same, because you'll have the potential, let's say, for mitochondrial rejection. But if you can make a universal egg and match the mitochondria, then you have a universal egg that could work for any species, which is pretty interesting. Then you don't have to do the process of stem-cell gametogenesis.

Sometimes people are like, “You guys haven't thought about embryology.” I was like, “That's all we think about.” To your question, I think the editing and computational biology are scaling quite well. Software and compute—the models that we are retraining on what works give us a better idea of what tools to use for what job—are scaling really well.

The multiplexability, off-target analysis, and monoclonal screening are also scaling. We screen all the cells, and we do a lot of sequencing. The reason we know that our animals are healthy before we put them in is that we screen the embryos. We do full genotype sequencing on all of them, which is insane. It's a lot of money and time to do all of that.

Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

I think the sequencing is scaling. We're getting better at library preparation for DNA. I think the big thing is that we will eventually get to the point where we can synthesize full chromosomes. I think we're a ways away, but we'll get there.

We've already delivered, in the published literature, 35 KB or 30 KB—I think that's the biggest CRISPR large-cargo swap. We've already done 100 KB. A kilobase is 1,000 letters.

The two areas that I think will scale over time go back to your stack analogy. The BIOS is similar, but we have to create different editing tools. The tools that you develop for the application layer get better and better and better.

The 2 things we're spending a lot of time on are, first, the universal-egg embryology side, to make that easier so it doesn't have to be a custom chip architecture for every single species. The second thing is on the biology side. We've been trying to think about the universal truths across certain genes, gene families, or pathways.

Dogs scale really well. If you have a Chihuahua, a Great Dane, or a dire wolf, dogs and wolves are dogs. They scale really well; they scale 1-to-1. Not all species scale really well. If you were to take a goldfish and try to make it the size of a killer whale, it wouldn't scale like that. There are only a couple of clades of animals that scale like that.

How does that work with coral and some of these gene families? How is that then replicable across mammals? Separately, what are those functional equivalents in birds? Those are the things we're trying to solve that don't scale as well as the media.

All these cells require slightly different media. Media is the growth medium in which these cells get nutrients and grow.

So, Ben, one of the things about taking on a moonshot like this is that, along the way toward this massive vision, you're solving all these other problems that can easily become spinout companies. You've been doing that. You spun out Form Bio, which is fantastic.

One of the spinouts I can't wait for you to talk about is the idea of artificial wombs. You just had a baby—you didn't use an artificial womb; you used your wife, which was great. We have surrogates we can go to, but this idea of an artificial womb—we've seen it in science fiction for a while. How far off are we from full-gestation artificial wombs?

It's a great question. We have a 17-person team on it. Our goal with artificial wombs—because Colossal, to your point, doesn't work on anything human—is that anytime we have a technology that has an application to humans, we patent it. We patent a lot of technologies. We actually patented some things recently around p53 and cancer, and whatnot.

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

Yep. And so do elephants. Elephants, you know, we breathe—I mean, I guess we all breathe the same thing as whales, but it's easier to study elephants than whales, right? Whales still go underwater. I think there's a lot of cool technology that can come from that.

On the artificial-womb side, we spin everything out. So we won't ever make an artificial womb for humans, but I think someone could potentially use our technology to do that.

I will say it's harder to grow an elephant than a human. It's not an ethical, regulatory, philosophical, or religious issue; those are the things we're working on. I think that if we continue on our current course and speed, by the end of 2026 we will have the world's first mammal birth fully ex utero. It'll be an elephant, it'll be small, and then we'll scale from there.

Our vision for that, once again, goes back to conservation. Imagine a world where you could grow 200 genetically diverse northern white rhinos in a lab. Everyone knows about the northern white rhino, for which we're the genetic-rescue partner, but imagine a world where you could grow them without ever having to interfere with another animal or a rhino. Those baby rhinos could then work with rewilding partners and be put back into the field.

I think artificial wombs, if you can do multiple different placental types, will change conservation. I think we could productionize endangered-species development, and I think we could save every species on the planet.

Well, let's pause on that moment: save every species on the planet. That's pretty extraordinary. When you said 2026, that's next year.

No, I know. It's right there.

I want to give you an umbrella comment, and then you tell me how close we are to this. One of the holy grails of synthetic biology, when we used to talk about this, was that if you get to that holy grail, you're essentially looking at DNA as a Microsoft Word document that we can edit.

Every one of our cells is governed by the DNA that tells it to be a liver cell or a heart cell and how to operate, et cetera. If you get to that point, the human being of 50 trillion cells or whatever is essentially a software-engineering problem, right? How close are we to that point, where you can edit it as easily as you can edit a Word document?

It is a focus and funding problem. It's not a lack-of-knowledge problem. Everyone's spending all this time on large language models, which is great. If the same effort goes into this—specifically solving this—I think it's 5 years. If it doesn't, I think it's 10. And, by the way, AI is going to be the biggest accelerant to all of this.

AI, access to compute, and eventually quantum. Those combined with synthetic biology—you know, George Church has visions of synthetic biology that are crazy. We've talked about this, so define synthetic biology and let's talk about crazy.

Yeah, let's go crazy. There are lots of definitions for these things, but we look at synthetic biology as a way that we can use data, AI, and other tools to basically change life, engineer life, or direct life in a specific way.

That's things like making drought-resistant plants and making drought-resistant animals. There's a terrible process that animals go through for dehorning them. Everyone loves to think about cows in these beautiful fields like they see on Yellowstone, but they're really not, for the most part.

They dehorn them because a lot of times they're so close together that they'll stab each other, and they'll get infections that cause disease in the herd. So they physically dehorn them.

You can actually engineer them to just be hornless cows, right? So, I'm not encouraging eating meat. I'm just telling you that is something that exists today. Synthetic biology affords us all these opportunities. We've got a company called Breaking that we started, which is about using synthetic biology to supercharge this microbe that literally breaks the chemical bonds in plastics. It doesn't make microplastic; it doesn't eat plastic. It breaks—that's why I call it Breaking—it breaks the chemical bonds in plastics, right? So it just makes biomass as an output.

I think that we will eventually get to the CAD software of biology. To Salim's point, I think that we will be able to cure most disease states. I think that we will be able to do epigenetic cell resetting. I think we'll be able to live youthful lives for as long as we want, outside of natural causes, acts of God, or some crazy thing that happens.

George and I talk about living at one with nature, and we have this vision because George and I both believe that we're going to live hundreds of years. One of the things that we think is pretty interesting is, instead of a tree growing and you chopping it down to make a house, why don't we make trees that grow in the shape of a house?

What if you could use trees as water filtration? What if you could have bioluminescent fungi in there? What if you could literally engineer and tell a tree to grow in the form of a house? That sounds psychotic, but I don't think that's in the next 5 years. I think that's in the next 100. I don't think it's that far away. I think it's closer than people think.

We, as humans and all animals, are effectively molecular robots, right? We're designed on a molecular basis, and we function in different ways. One could imagine, putting ethics and morals aside—and I use this always as an example at Singularity University for synthetic biology—I said, "I'm going to engineer something that looks like a cat, except it walks around your carpet, eats lint, and pees stain remover. That's its purpose: It just goes around and cleans the house."

You can imagine that. I'm not going to get into the alien conversation, but if I were a future civilization, I would engineer aliens to pilot the spaceships. Instead of robotic systems, you want systems that are self-healing.

It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. uh without question I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, any neurodeenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So, super important. So, fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members cuz you know health is a new wealth. Uh but beyond that uh we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells fungi vy and we you know don't understand how that impacts us and so I use a company and a product called Viome and Viome uh has a technology called Metatanscripttoics. It was actually developed uh in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins and as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid, right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day, is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap scenile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. Uh I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now, back to the episode. What are some of the crazy conversations you have with George when you're dreaming up without any limits? Let's hear some of that.

I think the treehouse one is pretty crazy and weird. Another one that we've talked about, which I think could be pretty interesting, is how do we engineer in—like, you've seen or probably heard about phages, right? These microbes that you can find in the dirt. Every time they take a scoop of dirt, they find new bacteria and stuff that doesn't exist.

Phages are viruses that infect bacteria, versus viruses that infect humans. There are 1 billion quadrillion phages on the planet. There are more phages on the planet than there are stars in the universe. It's crazy. It's the most insane thing. Every time you scoop up a bit of dirt, they discover something new. Literally, just go outside and everyone can make a discovery. Go grab some dirt. The number of phages on Earth will blow you away. It's crazy.

They've been using these lattice architectures to show that, in a typical scuba tank—and this isn't even with synthetic biology, just with a scuba tank—they can 3- or 4x the volume of oxygen that it can hold, using this kind of structure from some of these phages.

Some of the stuff that George and I have also talked about is, how do we build self-healing systems outside of humans and outside of houses? How do we build underwater cities that are also self-healing? That's probably our biggest and craziest dream.

If you look at the world, what's interesting about space is that it makes you think about closed systems. What's interesting about underwater is that it makes you think about closed systems. But you have a more stable temperature. You don't have this negative-250-to-250-degree variance from the sun that's instantaneous. You don't have the vacuum, and you don't have the radiation. It's also much cheaper per kilogram to sink something than to put it in space.

We've talked a lot about how, if you just look at the surface of the Earth, we could do a lot of cool things, but you'd have to build very sustainably. It would force you to build cities underwater. That's a project we're interested in. That may be a 2090 project, but I think we'll get there.

All right, I've got to ask you this question, and I'm going to force some version of an answer. A royal or a decabillionaire comes to you and says, "Ben, I know you say it's impossible, but I want to create a dinosaur." How do you do it? I'm not saying you are doing it, and I'm not saying you plan to do it, but theoretically.

There is no dino DNA, right? Just to give a shout-out to the haters, Jurassic Park is not a movie about dinosaurs. It's a movie about genetically modified birds with dinosaur and frog alleles—or it's a movie about dinosaurs, depending on how you want to classify our dire wolves.

There is no dino DNA. If I were to try to build one, I don't think you can today. I don't think that you could bring back a dinosaur. Using synthetic biology, probably not today but probably 10 years from now, 8 years from now, or some period in time, you could do an ancestral-state reconstruction of what we know of the phylogenetic tree.

I think that you could do a giant sequencing project, and I think there's enough conserved across multiple clades of birds and reptiles that you would probably be able to go down and make an archosaur, which is probably at the very base of the tree.

It's like the basal animal, before stuff starts to get weird and split. I think you could do that, and then you would be engineering for phenotypes. You'd be looking to drive certain phenotypes, and I think that, at least computationally, we understand what a lot of those protein-coding regions are at this point.

I don't even know if it would be less of a dinosaur than a dinosaur that existed. That's probably where I would start, but I think it's a huge project. I think it's a lot of money. I don't think it's a $100 million project; I think it's quite a lot more.

Is there any possibility that we can harvest the DNA of a dinosaur and find that it's preserved somewhere, somehow?

The problem is DNA degradation and fossilization. You have to remember that when the dinosaurs perished, it was due to extreme heat. There is dinosaur DNA in the form of birds. Birds exist, and they're dinosaurs. But I don't think you'll ever get to the point that you will have true dinosaur DNA.

There are people like Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, who's arguably the number 1 paleontologist in the world and who discovered the 4 biggest dinosaurs, including Dreadnoughtus, which is the biggest dinosaur. He called me last week when everyone was debating all this stuff—not debating all this stuff, actually; they were only debating the name.

He said he had the same problem with Dreadnoughtus. He said it was the biggest dinosaur, and he based that on kilograms and all this stuff. A lot of times, they find a bone and say, "It looked like this." But this one was nearly—you can Google it; I don't know what percentage—but it was like 40% or 60% complete. It's very, very complete for a large dinosaur.

He found it in Argentina. It's a super-cool story. He said it was so annoying because people called him wanting to argue—not U.S. versus the metric system, but wanting to come up with a measure, a dinosaur mass unit.

He got into this big debate when it came to one of the biggest dinosaur discoveries ever, and a large part of it was because, I think, he said it was like 60 tons or something like that. People wanted to debate a metric that everyone could agree on for dinosaur mass, which is ludicrously absurd.

But Kenneth has done something that's pretty cool: he's demineralized dinosaur bones so he can get those amino acids. His long-term goal—and this is his work, not ours; we are not doing this, so I want to make sure I give him full credit—is that it would be cool if you could pick up a dinosaur bone and, say, you found it in Montana or North Dakota, ask, "Is this a T. rex bone? Is this a Triceratops?"

Let's say you didn't have the dating of the geological formations around it. You could demineralize a piece of the bone and, based on the amino acids, say, "Oh, this is a Triceratops bone," which is kind of cool. But those are single data points. You can't glean any data on how to build the animal from that.

So listen, I remember at the very beginning we were talking about your vision. It started with the woolly mammoth, then it went off into the thylacine and discussions about the dodo bird and the dire wolf. How many different species have you had conversations about bringing back? Rough order of magnitude, because you must be getting calls from all different parts of the world.

20 or 25.

Yeah. What's your roadmap here, pal?

We're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo. Given our most recent round of funding, we will most likely expand those into other avian and non-avian species.

We haven't quite cracked the code on primordial germ cells. It's a little bit different in birds and mammals. This goes back to that media question: getting the media that PGCs want to grow in for birds is pretty hard.

Once we show we can do it for pigeons—which has never been done before, because dodos were pigeons, just like dire wolves were wolves—then I'd probably feel confident in adding another avian species. There are amazing species out there, and there are some we can't do until we get further into the technology.

My favorite animal is—you should look this up—the Steller's sea cow. It's the coolest damn animal ever. I don't know anyone in the world who doesn't like manatees. Manatees are just awesome. They're harmless, cute, vegetarian, kind of tubby, and they move kind of slowly. They do great stuff for the ecosystem.

There aren't Facebook hate groups for manatees. If there are, those people should go straight to jail. Or else—yeah, apparently I do that too now.

There was this thing called the Steller's sea cow. I'm probably going to butcher the year, so someone will yell at me online about it, but it went extinct about 60 years or 30 years after it was discovered. It was all up and down the Pacific Northwest. Apparently, the kelp forests there were even thicker because it would eat and defecate, and they were whale-sized. They were literally bigger than whales.

They were apparently really docile and would swim up to people. They were curious, like, I guess, dolphins are, and people would just spear them and kill them. Curiosity is a bad evolutionary trait for large, slow-moving megafauna, for sure.

We've seen the rise of early humans on continents and the decline of megafauna be inversely related, nearly 1:1. Once humans move to a certain scale on a continent or subcontinent, megafauna drops at a very predictable rate.

Yeah. We just go after the big ones. We all work together and kill a couple of big things. A lot of times, the big things have single births and long gestations. You don't have to kill all of them to send them into a decline.

I would love to do the Steller's sea cow. I'll say publicly—I've said it 100 times, and no one listens to me—it's 100% on the list. We just can't grow it in anything, so I have to get artificial wombs to work. We have to get them to work for elephants, and then eventually we could do the Steller's sea cow. I would love to do the Steller's sea cow. Amazing.

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

It's really—I would say, originally, and this is what's been cool—one of the things I think we're good at is saying what we don't know. The original pitch deck, which Peter saw, was moderately shitty: "Hey, George Church says he can bring back a mammoth. We're pretty sure that we make money somewhere in there, but we don't know." That was kind of the pitch.

Here's how it's evolved. It then became technology, which is working. We've spun out 2 companies publicly, Form Bio and Breaking[?]. We spun out a third one that we can't talk about yet, but I'm super excited about it. Its valuation is already over $100 million in the seed round. I think it's super cool. I don't think it will have any philosophical debates about what to call it. It's cool; it is what it is.

We have another one in embryology that we're really excited about and working on. We have to get a little further on, but I think it could be helpful to IVF clinics. So there's technology, which is "get what you get."

There is a long-term opportunity, and this isn't really a science thing. This is more about working with governments and working with auditors, ecologists, and whatnot. You've probably heard about carbon credits. There's now a new thing called biodiversity credits. It's getting a lot of traction because some of the problems with carbon credits are not that they're manipulable, but they're sort of manipulable on some level. Certain things like biodiversity credits aren't.

If you can understand and quantify the value that a forest elephant brings to Gabon, that's now a thing. It's researched by people like PwC, and it's certified by Lloyd's of London. A biodiversity economy is now emerging, and part of that is really helpful because if you can put a value on an animal—this is the old hunting adage—people are like, "Well, if we kill a lion for $100,000, it's a good thing because we're saying that lion's worth $100,000, so don't poach them."

Philosophically, I'm not a hunter. I've never killed anything intentionally—probably a goldfish, but that wasn't intentional. As a non-hunter, I can at least step back and understand what they're trying to say there on some level, even though I think that's partly manipulated so that they can achieve what they want to achieve.

What I'll tell you, though, is that I do think that if you put things of value, people tend to protect them. If you can protect an animal and it has a certain value that you can trade against, it becomes some sort of commodity play.

What we're seeing with this Paris Agreement is that 62% of the pledges are nature-based solutions: restoring ecosystems, restoring bogs and wetlands, and all these types of things. Animals are critical to all of that. Where we think that market is going is a combination of biodiversity credits, nature credits, and carbon credits into what will probably end up being called nature credits. That's highly quantifiable, and the variance in trade on it will probably be based on the sexy factor, right?

You have a lot of these companies that cannot become carbon-negative because they're in the mining business, the oil-extraction business, or the extraction economy. We still live, on some level, in a world where there's unlimited solar, but there's not unlimited cold fusion and stuff like that yet. Until that happens, there will still be a transitional period where you have an extraction economy.

If you put a value on nature, then you can create annuities based on that. We're working on models around rewilding that turn the animals into annuities. If we can show that we make these animals with this genetic diversity, think about an annuity that's not only growing and highly valued because a company like Chevron, Sumitomo, Exxon, or whoever would buy those credits—because they have to, from a compliance perspective or from an ESG and social-good perspective—but they're also annuities that multiply because they have more babies and create more ecosystem value.

That's the second thing that we're now pretty deep in. The science has to work to do that, which is proving to be on the right track. The third thing that's interesting is that, while we open-sourced all of our technologies for conservation—we didn't know this—I talked to Peter about this offline about 6 months ago. We open-sourced all of our technologies for conservation, so anybody can use them for conservation. We also started a foundation with $50 million to go fund conservation projects, right? They're innovative.

By the way, congratulations on that. People need to hear about it.

Yeah. Nobody talks about it because it's not a direwolf. The foundation's great, and we're working right now to get another big donation that, once again, isn't coming from conservation. It's coming from tech people who are trying to bring technology into conservation. This is new money for conservation.

What we're finding is—you'll love this, Salim, because it goes directly to open-source software—if you build open-source software, you build the community. People start to use it, and developers start to use it. But then you have a Red Hat/Microsoft-type opportunity where it's like, okay, we want to go implement this at scale for Cisco. We don't want our developers to do that. We love that you have all this documentation; you guys made this code. We want you to do it.

While we open-source all this for governments, NGOs, and everyone else, we're now having governments say, "In our hands, we think we can get this done, but in your hands, we'll pay you." There's 1 government that's trying to get a species recovery. It's going to cost them about $300 million to recover that species, and it's going to take 23 years. We can do it in less than 3, and we can do it for about $70 million.

It's not just the $300 million. That money could go to more recovery efforts, education, water, or whatever. It's the fact that we can recover species in less than 2 decades. We're starting to see these government opportunities, like biovaults and other things, where this is work. It's not free.

It would be easy if it were all just free, but we're now saying, how do we build a consortium of partners around the world where we can also biobank all species, but not just put them in a freezer? How do we build pluripotent stem cells? How do we do immortalized cell lines? How do we do sequencing? All of that requires compute money. Someone has to pay for that.

I think we can offer this redundancy model, as well as this kind of acceleration, if people want it. But once again, we're happy to have people just use all of our stuff for free.

Ben, when am I going to go to the L.A. Zoo and see a Colossal dire wolf or a woolly mammoth? That has to be an important future business line where it's scientific education, right? You'd have lines winding around any of these facilities.

It's a really great question, and we get it a lot. In the early days, we had a lot of folks from that community wanting to know, "How do we sign up first?"—both nationally and internationally. But as we've spent a lot of time thinking about it, I think it's more likely that you will see them in an ecological preserve, back in their natural habitat, than you're going to see them in Los Angeles.

You do have to travel, unfortunately. You have to travel to their locations. But I also think that one of the things we've started to have conversations with governments about is the brand-building that can do for a country. We're talking to northern states of the United States, and we don't want to be exclusive or exclusionary.

People argue the zoo thing to us all the time in a positive way. They're like, "But if you made a zoo, what about kids who want to see this and get inspired by it?" There have been all these studies showing that zoos are actually good for people; people care more about animals if they go to zoos as a kid. There's peer-reviewed science showing that. Not all zoos are Tiger King. There are great zoos, like the San Diego Zoo, that do great work. Groups like the AZA and others are trying to do more to fight for conservation. So you've got that, and we're seeing that it works.

What I would tell you, though, is that our focus is on rewilding them back into the ecosystem. The 2 things we've talked about—and I don't know where we'll end up—are that we've said to Tasmania, once we have enough thylacines and once they're genetically diverse enough to be reintroduced, we've gone through a very thoughtful feasibility study of rewilding them. They're benefiting the ecosystem, and Tasmania should offer ecotourism to see them back there.

There's also this thing that I didn't even know existed: there's a sloth cam, a bald eagle cam, and all these other cams. If you can't afford to go to Tasmania, which is really not the easiest place to get to—I go several times a year—how do we bring that experience to you without making it about exhibiting the animals?

We've been talking a lot about this. We've actually been talking to a lot of education partners, including the Australian government, about how we do content right, which I know isn't the same, Peter, as seeing a mammoth in real life. We don't have an answer. I think the short answer is that we'll put animals back into the wild, in collaboration with Indigenous people groups, private landowners, and governments, for the purpose of ecosystem restoration. Then how do we put the science on display? The animals are awesome, but how do we put the science on display?

Jurassic Park nailed that. Regardless of how you feel about Jurassic Park, the movie, a lot of people know about genetics because of Jurassic Park. Who cares about the Rotten Tomatoes score? That movie did something. There are geneticists today who don't want to make dinosaurs but went into genetics because that movie got them excited about genetics.

We're filming a docuseries, and we'd like to build more educational content. We're trying to film everything.

What I hear, Ben, is that you've got incredible respect for the life that you're bringing back, and it's not your goal to commercialize it in a crass fashion, right? And so that so I would rather us put animals back on ecological preserves, protect them. We don't even know. I mean, you know, but very few people know where the actual wolves are, but like um it the but like we we we'd rather get them back in the wild doing their thing in the wild. Maybe there's ecoturism like Krueger National Park where money goes back to help the environment, help the indigenous people, help the local communities. Maybe we do something like that in collaboration with governments. But then, you know, but to your question, how do we also, it is awesome science. So, how do we So, we're trying to film everything. How do we put educ how do we put science on display, not animals on display? And we don't have an answer yet.

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

Yeah, Palmer's great. Palmer's amazing. I'll be doing a follow-up podcast with him in a couple of weeks. When I get together with him, I brainstorm: What would be a great XPRIZE? What should we be doing? He's 1 of the teams competing in our wildfire prize. In fact, he was the very first person to register to compete in the XPRIZE Wildfire.

And he's got a crazy solution, which I love. But we brainstormed, and one of the prize ideas that we kicked around over dinner was the idea of an uplift prize.

Can we uplift a species? Can we take a dog and make it far more intelligent? Or, shall we say, introduce the genes that increase intelligence to these animals? Is that something that's possible, putting aside the moral and ethical questions?

It's a very Palmer Luckey idea.

Yes, it is 100%. It's about as Palmer Luckey as it gets, right?

Sometimes Palmer gets a mixed rap, but he is so brilliant. He's so passionate about the safety of America. I've seen people attack him online, and I want people like Palmer, who wake up every day, are that smart, and are working on a defensive or offensive weapon system that is a deterrent for some bad guy not to hurt my kid.

You want him on your side.

You want him on your side. We are lucky to have Palmer. I'm a huge fan. Obviously, he's a friend—full disclosure—and I think very highly of him.

Sometimes he gets this polarizing thing because it's cute to go to the grocery store and drive your Tesla or whatever and think that all of it is free, but it's just not. You've got to have our incredible armed forces and people supplying them, like Palmer, to make our way of life possible. It's wonderful that we can debate whether we can call it a dire wolf or not versus someone killing us for that. That's amazing.

Back to your question: I think there are genes associated with intelligence. There have been studies done in mice. I think you can do noninvasive sequencing of really smart animals.

Colossal is never going to work outside of humans. We also drew the line at nonhuman primates because we get the Neanderthal question all the time. We just said, "Great, sorry." Then people get sad. They're like, "But what about Gigantopithecus?" I'm like, "There's not really any DNA anyway, so no, we're not making giant apes. That's not what we're trying to do at Colossal."

King Kong is coming back.

King Kong is not here, though. I would say that if you could make smarter animals, like dogs or cats—something that you have that type of relationship with—I think that's interesting.

You also have to be careful, because it's a very important ethical thing to think through. It's a slippery slope, because what happens when you make smarter livestock? That's even worse for livestock. It's hard balancing some of the ethical questions in the name of progress in synthetic biology.

We've drawn some of these lines, saying, "Hey, we're just not going to do this, and we're not going to do that." Even though I'm not philosophically against some of those things, we will never work in some of those species.

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

An area I love is gene drives. Nobody—and you know what's crazy? Certain countries, like the United States, haven't been as pro-gene drives as I think they should be. But island nations like New Zealand and Australia are like, "Okay, we're in trouble with invasive species. We have to have new things."

I love gene drives. For example, Australia is the face of mammalian extinction, and it's because of cats. People introduced cats—everyone's cats. Cats love to have kittens, and people let their feral cats get out. They go feral, and then they're killing and decimating these small marsupials.

There are people now who kill cats in Australia. In America, God knows what would happen if you shot a cat, but in Australia, if it's not their personal house cat, they hate them. They despise cats because the cats are killing their most unique animals—animals that no one else has in the world.

A way to handle that in a very thoughtful way that's healthy for the animals is to introduce gene drives. The cat eats it, and it's not poison; the cat doesn't die. It has offspring, so it does have another generation, but that offspring cannot give rise to more offspring. It's effectively sterile. After a few generations, there just are no more cats, but they get to live out their natural lives. They just don't get to overprocreate.

This got a lot of attention about 5 or 6 years ago when gene drives were being put forward to basically decimate mosquito populations. I think the biggest concern is that everyone's seen one too many movies.

Right.

You have Resident Evil, and then people are like, "You make a gene drive, and it turns us all into zombies." It just doesn't work like that. One of the Mission: Impossible movies had a targeted bioweapon around that stuff, too, so you have to be thoughtful about this.

I do think that you can silence certain forms of procreation in animals using gene drives, especially where they're invasive.

We're doing kind of the opposite of a gene drive with these marsupials, right?

That's right. If we make super quolls, then we don't have to engineer all of the other marsupials to eat cane toads, because quolls love eating cane toads. Then they eat the cane toads, so they don't die; their numbers rebound and they recover.

At the same time, there are other marsupials that don't eat those cane toads, so they don't die because there are fewer cane toads. People think this is playing God. People think this is geoengineering, but we introduced the cane toads, and we're geoengineering by default anyway—every day, every day.

We should start being thoughtful about this. I love the arguments that GMOs are bad for you. It's like, "Oh my God, that's all we've ever done is genetically modify everything." We've just been shitty at it through selective breeding: slow, shitty, and unpredictable.

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

Look at a pug. Look at any of this. "Oh my God, we should breed a bunch of stuff together that ends with a pug."

Ben, quantum science, quantum computation, quantum technology—how much do you think about that as the next layer? Where does that fit in?

Still way too early. I think it will be a game changer specifically for simulation design for gene editing. If you feed enough data into the model on top of quantum, you could get pretty good at predicting not just genotype-to-phenotype relationships, but also the negative effects of editing. You could get pretty good at understanding predictions of editing: "Here are the 50 spots you should go edit."

We always say the better we are at computation—and this annoys people, but it's true—the fewer edits we can make to get the desired outcomes, and the fewer phenotypes we affect, the safer that is for the animal. If it takes 1,000 edits to make the desired outcome, but if you can do it in 3, do it in 3.

We have a very programming-like approach. This won't come as a surprise to you, but we think about this like programming: If you can do something in 3 lines of code versus 1,000 lines of code, you should do it in 3 lines of code.

I think quantum will be a game changer. I meet with Will from MIT every year, and he's great, but I never know when quantum is really going to get there. Quantum sensing is here, and quantum sensors are here. Quantum communications is kind of here, but I don't know when we're really going to get there.

I thought Microsoft's breakthrough late last year on some of its chip architecture was really interesting. But when is it going to be truly here? To me, that's still a question mark. In my experience, it's been 2 years every 2 years.

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

Yeah.

What are they debating right now?

Well, every single species we bring on, we go through a pretty rigorous process and include them in that. Right now, one of the biggest things we're talking to them about is current conservation. We want to open-source these technologies for conservation. We're making dire wolves and working on these projects, but our ethicists right now are focused mostly on conservation. I think conservation is a bipartisan issue.

By the way, we hear that from the government—not just from one side of the aisle. Go look at who retweeted us: you've got Biden's No. 1 adviser and you've got Elon. You've got both sides of the aisle, as far as the political spectrum.

We think these are really important technologies, and conservation is important. Right now, the bioethicists are helping us think through how we educate existing people on this and how we bridge that gap. How do we show these technologies from an ethics perspective, but also rise above the politicizing of it on either side, not just one side?

They're going a step beyond even the bioethics side, thinking about how we have these dialogues. I was really sad that, within a 24-hour period, we made a huge leap forward for conservation using these technologies with the federal government, but because it was this government, it was seemingly bad. Philosophically, I don't agree with that.

We worked great with the last administration, we're working great with this administration, and there are pros and cons to every administration. I watch Bill Maher every week, which probably shows you where I lean on a lot of these things. Bill Maher's show last week was really telling, and if you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it.

Yeah, it was a great episode. I think a refusal to have a dialogue because one party or another is super-polarizing is misguided. You can acknowledge that they're doing bad things, or you can acknowledge that you don't agree with them, but refusing to have a dialogue is as ignorant as the things that you may accuse another administration of doing.

I think it's a testament here to your ethics and your MTP that you're able to work with either side of that aisle because of the objectives and the open-sourcing. I love the fact that you're open-sourcing everything. It's such a huge thing for the world.

It's really great to have somebody like you at the forefront of something like this, because it could go so badly in so many other ways. You're navigating that very fine line of breaking through science, but doing it in a very thoughtful, ethical, even spiritual kind of way. I just want to take my hat off to you and all that.

No, it's really kind of you. I got some pretty negative feedback from someone I respect in the conservation community because they said I was empowering this administration. I said there's a difference between empowering and educating. If you don't educate people and you don't show up, I think it's always better. We showed up for the last administration, we're going to show up for this administration, and we're going to show up for the next administration.

As we said at the beginning of this, we're looking at conservation and de-extinction on a 50-year horizon. That goes beyond a 4-year party or an 8-year party. It goes way beyond that. To me, this is as big of an existential threat as anything else.

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

I don't want to let your kids down. We are on target for the mammoth by the end of 2028. We feel good about that, but the editing is moving really fast. We have done 300 edits in a dunnart cell.

This is a bad non-answer, but if there's a 13.5-day gestation on the thylacine, and editing progresses at the same exponential rate, I think the thylacine could beat the mammoth. If we solve PGCs, dodos could be next because it's a pretty self-contained system, being an egg. You don't have to solve IVF or somatic cell nuclear transfer in a non-model species, and then the dodo could be next.

Right now, it's kind of a 3-horse race, and it's unclear who's going to win—not that it's a competition. We love all the species equally.

Gestation periods play into this, right? What is the gestation period of an elephant?

22 months.

22 months. Wow. For any pregnant women out there, can you imagine carrying for 22 months? Crazy. And the thylacine—how long?

13.5 days.

Yeah, talk about 2 ends of the extreme.

The chicken, which is what we use as a surrogate—we use these genetically modified chickens for the surrogates—is 30 days with the dodo.

So, Ben, Salim, you have a closing question, but I just want to say thank you for all the work that you're doing. I've said this over and over again: the difference that an individual can make in birthing a company is extraordinary. I want all the entrepreneurs out there listening to understand that.

You can have the idea, you can have access to technology, but if you've got a compelling CEO who builds a moonshot team, is driven by a clear, measurable vision and passion, you've attracted hundreds of millions of dollars at a $10 billion valuation—which I don't want to say is insane, but it's massively impressive—and you're executing over and over again. So, thank you.

And in 4 years—yeah, in 4 years—I remember the earliest days. I have to say one thing: when you started Colossal, the idea of a de-extinction company for woolly mammoths had been around for some period of time. People had been working on it, and it had been extremely slow in the nonprofit world. People were upset that this moved into the for-profit world. But guess what? It's like hitting the acceleration button when you did that.

Well, that's one of the things that we often get. There was an article that came out a couple of weeks ago that said, "You can't trust a for-profit." We're very honest that we're going to make a lot of money off the rewilding. I said that here: we think we'll make billions of dollars from the animals being back in their natural habitat. We also think we'll make billions of dollars off the technology that we're building.

People don't realize this unless they've done technology development. They think of research and development as free. Well, it's typically a lot of research and very little that goes into development, because a lot of this stuff just doesn't work.

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

Yeah. We're having fun, and I think we're making a difference. That's all we can do.

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

It is a 365-day, 7-day-a-week job, but I like it. I always joke that I don't have friends or hobbies. I mean, I do have friends, but I work with all of them on some level. It's fun. I love what we do.

Amazing. Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, thank you, buddy, for your work. Please give my best to George. I'll be chatting with him shortly as well.

Salim, as always, I love having you in this conversation with me. And for everybody, where do folks go to learn more about Colossal?

We're just at Colossal on X, and they can go to colossal.com and find the rest of our social channels.

It's extraordinary: 3 dire wolf pups that had been extinct on the face of the Earth for 12,000 years are back again. That's incredible. They're also cute. Cute. Congrats on the baby, which is a real startup.

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

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

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

I just can't wait for Peter and me. Neither of our 13-year-olds has any idea what we do, either.

He's pretty curious. From an early age, he's been really weirdly curious, and so I think he'll dig it. We'll see what kind of pets he grows up with in his teenage years.

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