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

In this episode, Peter and Ben discuss the possibility of bringing extinct species back to life through Ben’s startup, Colossal. 02:05 | De Extinction: Unveiling Our Future 21:10 | Gene-Swapping for Species Survival 59:32 | The Return of Extinct Species Ben Lamm is a renowned entrepreneur and visionary in technology and AI. With successful startups like Chaotic Moon Studios and Conversable, he has made significant contributions to the industry. As the founder of Hypergiant Industries and Colossal, a venture capital-backed startup focused on genetic engineering and reproductive technology in support of George Church's de-extinction efforts, Lamm continues to push the boundaries of innovation, focusing on AI solutions and genetic engineering. Learn about Colossal. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Peter Diamandis?

  A billionaire comes to you and says, "Listen, I want to bring back the dinosaurs."

• 0:37Peter Diamandis?

  How the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back? What does it mean to de-extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place?

• 0:44Speaker 02

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

• 0:54Peter Diamandis?

  You're bringing back an extinct species after having been in AI and software coding and such?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  We believe we'll have our first calves by early 2028. We are on track for that.

• 1:05Peter Diamandis?

  This is the technology that can bring back extinct animals. But then you come in as a for-profit entrepreneur and go from zero, the numbers don't blow me away, to 225 million in a couple of years.

• 1:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:25Peter Diamandis?

  This is the difference that the right CEO and entrepreneur can make for a moonshot. On this episode of Moonshots and Mindsets, I'll be speaking with Ben Lamm, an extraordinary CEO, whose moonshot it is to bring back animals who are extinct. We'll hear about which animals he's bringing back, what his timeline is, how he raised $225 million at a $1.5 billion valuation to do this in just two years' time. It's incredible lessons for any moonshot entrepreneur out there. All right, let's jump in. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with an incredible entrepreneur and a dear friend, someone who blows my mind.

• 2:08Peter Diamandis?

  And the difference that a single individual can make in taking on a massive moonshot Ben Lamm, how you doing, buddy?

• 2:15Speaker 02

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

• 2:18Peter Diamandis?

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

• 2:42Speaker 02

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

• 3:03Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll get into those, but I mean, a moonshot of bringing back extinct animals. You know, years ago, I had this conversation about having an X Prize. Like, let's have an X Prize to bring back, back then it was the Dodo. But your moonshot here has bridged three species, and I may try and squeeze out of you how many more species you're working on. But it's pretty awesome. I mean, you know, as they would say, what could possibly go wrong? But let's get to that a little bit later. So a moonshot of bringing back extinct animals.

• 3:40Peter Diamandis?

  Let's start with the origin, right? People who are listening to this, who have their own moonshots, which by definition are crazy ideas before an entrepreneur actually makes them real. I want them, we're going to talk through the story of where this began, how you've gotten this funded, where it is, what the timeline is, what the difficult parts have been. So you've been an entrepreneur over and over again. Actually, you haven't been an entrepreneur in the biotech industry, which is, this is squarely faced in.

• 4:11Speaker 02

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

• 4:42Peter Diamandis?

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

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Well, you know, like I'm, I'm, I think I'm insatiably curious, right? And I like to learn and, and I've always just done a great job, I think, of surrounding myself with much smarter, you know, women and men than me to work on these projects, right? Like in my last business, like I didn't build a new software that went into satellites, right? Like I had incredible teams to do it. I knew how to, you know, help them and help, you know, inspire them and direct them on where we should go. But fundamentally, it was them that did the incredible work. And I called George because I was really interested on the intersection.

• 5:39Peter Diamandis?

  Which George? George who?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  George Church, arguably the father of synthetic biology. And, you know, I would argue one of the, not only the, one of the smartest people on the planet, but actually one of the funniest. And so you know George, so you get this, but like a lot of people just look up to George as this like, you know, incredible industry titan and kind of leader in the field of genomics and kind of like father of synthetic biology.

• 6:03Peter Diamandis?

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

• 6:08Speaker 02

  He looks like Moses. He looks like, but he's also like amazingly funny. And so I reached out to George because I was very curious and I wanted to know where AI, where automation, where opportunities could lie in the intersection of software and synthetic biology and kind of this next revolution that I thought was coming. And that conversation lasted maybe 10 minutes. And then I'm curious, and I have George Church on the phone, and I was like, what else are you working on? And he started to tell me all these other things that he was working on in his incredible labs, working on in everything from kind of like neural regeneration to combating climate change to food security. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is like, you know, this is like the chocolate factory

• 6:53Speaker 02

  of innovation and amazingness. And then he kind of ended the call with, oh, and I'm working to bring back woolly mammoths to restore the degraded ecosystem of the tundra and also build technologies to help elephants and maybe other extinct species. And then he was like, I have to go to my next meeting. And I was like, you just dropped this most amazing thing on me ever. And so I stayed up all night. And then I saw, I was like, it was kind of like the end of like, you know, signs of the sixth sense where you have this like M. Night Shyamalan moment where I'm like, oh, my gosh, like every article I'd read about George, I didn't see this through line of the mammoth. But then when I went back and started reading and listening to podcasts, I just saw how

• 7:38Speaker 02

  there was this through line, no matter what he was talking about, the mammoth kept surfacing. And a week later, I was in his lab and I was like, I have to, I have to go pursue this.

• 7:49Peter Diamandis?

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

• 8:08Speaker 02

  He's amazing. And I feel insanely lucky to be co-founded with him, but I think I do monopolize probably more of his time because he is so excited.

• 8:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's, it's. I mean, so I want to, you know, this is an important point for entrepreneurs out there who are looking at their moonshots. You brought a set of skills to this as a great CEO, as a systems thinker, as an entrepreneur, but not having the biological background didn't scare you off?

• 8:41Speaker 02

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

• 9:12Peter Diamandis?

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

• 9:31Speaker 02

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

• 9:40Peter Diamandis?

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

• 9:53Speaker 02

  He showed up once on Zoom, because we were working on colossal during 2020, but he showed up once on Zoom with this like helmet on that had like these like filtration things. And he's like, I'm just testing this out, but you should buy one. I think I actually did.

• 10:11Peter Diamandis?

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

• 10:18Speaker 02

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

• 10:34Peter Diamandis?

  You were, you were running what company at that time?

• 10:37Speaker 02

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

• 11:09Peter Diamandis?

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

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Uh, so we've raised $225 million to date. Uh, the valuation right now post is around a billion five. Um, we have four labs, uh, including one in Australia, and, uh, we have 112 full-time people with about 90% of those people being scientists. Uh, and then we fund 30 post-docs, uh, around the world in our advisors labs and we have about 60 scientific advisors.

• 11:52Peter Diamandis?

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

• 11:58Speaker 02

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

• 12:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was a crazy moonshot.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Moonshot, no. Yeah. And look, we, we like, I do believe that animals may be coming sooner than people think, but, um, but we, we don't have a man with now. So, you know, for their sake, they're probably like, eh, eh, we haven't seen a man yet either. And so,

• 12:15Peter Diamandis?

  But I just want, you know, what's extraordinary, because I'm, I'm in the venture business through Bold, which is one of the investors in the last couple of rounds. And we, you know, I work on getting my own companies funded and While you're out there raising, you know, your last round 150 million or thereabouts at a 1.3, 1.4 billion pre-money, everybody else is having a hell of a for a de-extinction company, everybody else is having a hell of a time, you know, raising money for a normal company. And I just want to point out, this is the extraordinary power of an amazing CEO. And I've said this to you before, Ben, and George agrees with you, you're one of

• 12:57Peter Diamandis?

  the best CEOs I've seen out there. And I'm gonna wanna sort of analyze that a little bit of what you think makes you successful in this realm. But we'll get to that. So de-extinction company, you start off with a woolly mammoth. How the hell do you bring a woolly mammoth back? What does it mean to de-extinguish a woolly mammoth in the first place?

• 13:21Speaker 02

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

• 13:48Peter Diamandis?

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

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Into Siberia, yeah, into Siberia, and actually extracted DNA from frozen mammoth tissues with Ariane Husili, our head of biological sciences here at Blossom.

• 14:09Peter Diamandis?

  So you go and you're digging and you find these giant tusks and you find this hairy large elephant. And where's the DNA? Is it in the?

• 14:21Peter Diamandis?

  And the hair follicles and the skin, is there like a dead mosquito in amber someplace?

• 14:25Speaker 02

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

• 15:06Speaker 02

  like microbes and bacteria and other things over the last like 5,000 years.

• 15:11Peter Diamandis?

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

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, most are about 10,000 years old.

• 15:19Peter Diamandis?

  Are you able to get a single continuous sequence?

• 15:22Speaker 02

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

• 16:04Speaker 02

  of collaborators has been really key to the speed at which we've been able to move.

• 16:09Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So you get all of these Short read segments and they sort of overlap and you're putting them together like a puzzle.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:18Peter Diamandis?

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

• 16:25Speaker 02

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

• 17:10Peter Diamandis?

  So you're taking a, an Asian elephant and you're sequencing it, right? I mean, you can get the blood samples, you can get the, just like today, you can sequence, you know, a human genome was 3.2 billion letters from your mother and your father. And, you know, back when Craig Venter sequenced his genome, it was a hundred million dollars and nine months to get his, his genome. And now we have human reference genomes and I think the number's down to like seven hours and 200 bucks for a human genome.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not, it is amazing. It's not quite, you know, tell them where you're to tell them where you're like. The, the reference genomes that we are used, that we are building for our species are that next level. So, you know, it's more in the, you know, low hundreds of thousands of dollars of, of work. But, you know, it's not, you know, 50 million or a billion like it was before.

• 17:57Peter Diamandis?

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

• 18:05Speaker 02

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

• 18:10Peter Diamandis?

  And so your job now is to find that 0.4% and do what? Make the edits in the Asian elephant genome?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's a great question, but we're not trying to bridge the 4%. What we're really trying to do is understand what were the genes that differed in that in that 4%. So not trying to bridge that 4% or fill it in, like in Jurassic Park, they're trying to fill in the gaps. We aren't trying to do that. We're just trying to say of that 4% that's different, or 4%, sorry, 0.4% that's different, you know, what were what were the genes that us that we could associate with the phenotypes or physical attributes of the woolly mammoth, right? And so, because they lost them in some evolutionary path that that rose to Asian elephants, right? So that's like the curved tus, some of the craniofacial morphology, and then obviously the shaggy coat that we we think about. And

• 19:04Speaker 02

  so really identifying which genes do what in comparison in what's missing and also what's present in the mammoth genome that's not in the Asian elephant genome.

• 19:15Peter Diamandis?

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

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Some people have different perspectives on this. Like, some people say, well, technically, it's a cold tolerant Asian elephant that's been edited with mammoth alleles to produce phenotypes that were once extinct.

• 19:42Peter Diamandis?

  And a hair transplant.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to say any of that. We're just going to say, like, for us, if it serves the ecological ecological components of why we're doing it, and if we de-extinct the core genes that make a mammoth a mammoth, then we just call it a mammoth, right? We may call it the colossal mammoth, mammoth 2.0. We're still working on like branding, nomenclature. But to your point, it's not a direct clone, right? It's it's not really a hybrid or some people have called it a chimera. It's not a chimera. It is, we are de-extincting lost genes that produce these physical attributes that, you know, no longer exist in that species. And so I think that we are, because of the targeted nature of our approach, it does make it easier than, you know, making a million

• 20:28Speaker 02

  changes. But, you know, I think it's also a pretty smart way to think about the engineering efforts versus trying to go overboard. So yeah, there's a list. There's about, you know, five or six core phenotypes that we that we think you need, not only to resemble a mammoth, but also to make cold tolerance at the level that we want.

• 20:47Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. So. You make those edits using CRISPR technology?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  So what I love right now about the world is that

• 20:58Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody knows what CRISPR is.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Everybody knows CRISPR, but then it's also become a catch-all, right? So like CRISPR is now like the catch-all for genetic engineering, right? Where people, as you know, Peter, there's a million different tools. You know, there's recombinases, there's Talens, there's CRISPR, there's single nucleotide edits, prime editing, base editing, like there's all these things, right? And as you pointed out, I'm not a biologist or geneticist, but what I've learned

• 21:23Peter Diamandis?

  You play a damn good one on TV.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Well, I'm very curious about it. So I try to learn, right? George says, the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, maybe in my life, is that George said, I'm one of the best students he's never had. So I'll take that as a, is it from George, and it was a big compliment. And but so what's interesting is like different, we are using different tools, including CRISPR, based on the needs. So in some cases, there are knockouts that are needed where CRISPR is a great, great fit. Other cases, we're doing, you know, base editing, or we're changing these individual letters on that kind of DNA ladder. And in some cases, when there's a gene with like a lot of edits,

• 22:07Speaker 02

  we'll actually synthesize that entire piece and then just do a complete swap. So we'll put in a big chunk of DNA swapping out what's there. And so different species have different needs. We're doing way more DNA swaps on the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine project because there's more genetic divergence than there is on the mammoth project. So there's more edits required to make a thylacine than there is to make a mammoth. And so we have kind of this cluster of tools, including CRISPR that we're using.

• 22:40Peter Diamandis?

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

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So it's been about, I guess now it's been about 10 years. So nine or 10 years he's been working on it. And the only money he was able, you know, and as you pointed out, he's not out there raising capital, he's out there really innovating. But the only money that went to this was, you know, Peter Thiel, who's not a colossal investor, but Peter Thiel donated $100,000 to George's lab. And so can I tell you one weird funny story about this? So when I was, when I was on the second call with George about the mammoth and I was, I was talking to George and I asked the question, which in hindsight, it's really funny now, but you'll, you'll, you'll notice the frame of mind at the time.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  I was like, George, so now how much money do you need to bring back a mammoth? And he said, well, you know, we, well, we've raised a hundred and I literally like, I got sick to my stomach because I was already in love, right? So I put, I literally sat my phone on my desk in my house, put it on speaker because I saw it's George Church, you still gotta listen. But I'm like, okay, it's, I mean, I guess it would take $100 million. I could see that, like, I know how technology works. And I was like racking my brain and I was like, and then I was like, dude, can I raise $100 million for this? I've raised $100 million before, can I do that? And so, so I went through this, like, while I'm talking to George, I'm like having this like existential mini crisis, like, how do I pull off raising $100 million for a mammoth? And then, and then he's like, yeah. And then that's like, you know, we're doing it over, you know, 10 years.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  So that's only $10,000 a year. And I was like, wait, I'm so sorry. How, how much money have you, has been donated to this? And he's like, $100,000, like. How much money do you need to do this? And just to get to like an embryo? And he's like, well, there's a lot to it. But he's like, you know, probably, you know, something more like, you know, 20 million. We can make a lot of progress and get really close. And I was like, then I was like, okay, cool. I can get there, right? I could wrap my brain. Now ironically, fast forward to today, we have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and will probably raise more money. And so ironically, my initial fear became my reality later.

• 25:33Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to point out, this has been an idea for nine or 10 years. A hundred thousand was brought in. There was a nonprofit started by some amazingly good hearted individuals to try and do this.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Stuart and Ryan, yeah, they're great.

• 25:48Peter Diamandis?

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

• 26:32Speaker 02

  I think that, but I do think that passion and conviction is key. And one of the things that I wrestled with is I actually wrestled pretty hard with hypocrisy in this deal, which I want to explain because I think it's really important. I feel like I can't speak for every entrepreneur, especially every technology entrepreneur, but I have said a thousand times probably in fundraising meetings, I want to change the world. I want to make an impact. And as you know, most companies, if they're successful, get acquired or go public or whatever. And they may be, they may create great returns and innovate in a. But not all of them really have a chance to to make this lasting impact.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  And so I felt like I was going to regret it for the rest of my life. And I was going to be a hypocrite to myself if I didn't pursue this because George Church has served up on a silver platter, an opportunity to really build a great, cool business, build, advance incredible technologies that can help, you know, humankind as well as help conservation. And all I had to do was go, go try. That's all I had to do is I had to go, at least go try. And if I didn't do it, like I, I don't feel like I really had a choice because I felt like the rest of my life, I'll be like, you're a hypocrite. You can't ever say again that you want to go really try to change the world or make a difference

• 27:58Speaker 02

  because you were given the opportunity. This wasn't my idea. This was given to me and I had to pursue. I didn't really have a choice.

• 28:04Peter Diamandis?

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

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so George and, and this, this I think does a great job of teeing into the business model too, right? Because George's original pitch to me as we kind of like started to peel back the onion was there's more carbon and more methane stored in the Arctic tundra than anywhere else on the planet, way more than the rainforest, way more anywhere. And it just piles up year after year. It's about 1.6 trillion metric tons, which is about double what's in the atmosphere and, and even more methane, which is about 30 times worse in the atmosphere. So George's, you know, thesis, which is proven, you know, I've, I've now been to the Arctic and I've been with the Army Corps of Engineers in the permafrost tunnels and

• 29:08Speaker 02

  actually been in the, inside of the permafrost, walked above it. And they have shared with me, if this all melts, humanity's in a lot of trouble. And so, so George's, uh, so this has been a concern. ...of George's for a long time. We talked about this 1.5 degree tipping point. But what's interesting is George teamed up with some folks, some incredible folks, Nikita in Siberia, outside of Churchkey, and they created something called Pleistine Park, where they've actually published in, you know, eight or 10 peer-reviewed papers have come up in scientific journals showing that the reintroduction of cold-tolerant fauna back

• 29:51Speaker 02

  at the right biodiversity levels and density levels back into the Arctic tundra and the removal of these low-carbon yielding carnivorous trees that have this extremely dark bark. They're not efficient at carbon, at carbon sequestration. They actually are almost like heat lightning rods that then permeate set. So the removal of the trees, which they've done with bulldozers and tractors, and the reintroduction of these, you know, musk ox and bison and others, they've actually shown that they've been able to lower ground temperatures by up to eight degrees and sustain them, which is incredible. And mammoths, and this is going into George's theory, is that mammoths could be an accelerant to that because they're

• 30:32Speaker 02

  also hurting animals. They're also major herbivores. They do a great job of like that nitrogen-oxygen cycle in the summer months of like permeating out the Arctic grasslands. But then in the winter months, they also love to knock down, elephants are notorious for knocking down trees. There's incredible documentaries and published papers out there showing that they actually know, they actually, African forest elephants in particular, knock down trees that are low-carbon yielding. It's so weird. It's, nature is just amazing. It's incredible. And so that combination, you've got these natural bulldozers, you've got these natural herbivores, and then their migratory patterns actually help to get rid

• 31:14Speaker 02

  of that insulation layer in the snow and pack the snow so that the winter months, that cold winter air can actually help get closer to the ground. So it starts at a colder temperature going into the summer months, so it's for so less actually thaw. So

• 31:30Peter Diamandis?

  These animals are like 12 feet high, eight ton.

• 31:35Speaker 02

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

• 32:00Peter Diamandis?

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

• 32:08Speaker 02

  So what's interesting about that is, we're not just doing the shaggy coat, but we're also doing the subcutaneous fat layer. And then there's other things that are kind of like what I, what we kind of joke internally, they're like beneath the hood that no one actually sees, like trip B3, and like, it's, they're, like, they actually, and it's not just mammoths, but like caribou, polar bears, some wolf species actually have this where they produce hemoglobin at a different rate and a different ability, so they can actually produce oxygen at, you know, sub-freezing temperatures. Like, we can't, at negative 40, we don't, our blood crystallizes, we can't, we can't breathe at that temperature. But they actually can because of how their hemoglobin works. And the same thing goes

• 32:52Speaker 02

  for nerve endings. Our nerve endings would just be fried. Their nerve endings are actually different than ours due to some of these, some of these genes. So yeah, so there's under the hood stuff that we're doing. But actually, elephants are more temperate than people think. One of our partners in Canada actually has Asian elephants, which people think are just, you know, tropical species. And we've been up there with them, and we have videos of them actually breaking through the ice, swimming in frozen lakes, rolling around in the snow. And those are like sub-freezing temperatures, but those aren't negative 40. But elephants are pretty tolerant species that people don't think of.

• 33:28Peter Diamandis?

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

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, Thomas Toll, as well as his fund USIT are both our largest investors, and, you know, we're very, very grateful to Thomas.

• 33:47Peter Diamandis?

  And he's in the movie business.

• 33:50Speaker 02

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

• 34:35Speaker 02

  you know, could want to grow up and, you know, be a scientist.

• 34:38Peter Diamandis?

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• 36:05Speaker 02

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• 36:15Peter Diamandis?

  I'm going to get back to you. How in the world do you start at a standing start and raise 225 million dollars for a de-extinction company? Because that in itself is a moonshot. We'll come back to that in a minute. So how far are you from this incredible bringing back the woolly mammoth? Where are we on this journey? What's your timeframe? What can you say?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have successfully achieved induced pluripotent stem cells in elephants, which is a feat in itself, which I can explain why. It's interesting. We have narrowed down our gene list to about 60, 65 genes that we're editing. We've established cell lines and we're in the editing process. So we've already edited about 20 different genes and we're doing functional assays, ensuring and testing and whatnot. And then the big key thing that we've done from a systems approach perspective is that we've parallel path all the different components, right? So, you know, I think a lot of people would have done the computational analysis,

• 37:20Speaker 02

  then done the gene editing, then wanted to work on creating induced pluripotent stem cells, then worked on somatic cell co-transfert. We actually have an entire embryology lab that's just working on cloning in a lot of other non-model organisms, non-model organisms out there other than mice and pigs, so that we are the most proficient at it, so that when we have those embryos, we can do that cloning step. And we have an entire animal husbandry team that's working with elephants in Africa and here in the States. And so for us, you know, we're well on our way. We believe we'll have our first calves by early 2028. We are on track for that. The biggest hurdle is it's a 22-month gestation.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  So, I mean, we'll have embryos before.

• 38:07Peter Diamandis?

  Moms who are listening to this, you know, imagine carrying your embryo for 22 months, you know.

• 38:15Peter Diamandis?

  Three times the length of a typical.

• 38:17Speaker 02

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

• 38:21Peter Diamandis?

  So, that is insane. Thirteen and a half, you can barely do anything in thirteen and a half days.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what's crazy is that a thylacine, which is a wolf-sized marsupial.

• 38:31Peter Diamandis?

  We're gonna, let's come, let's come back to that in a moment.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  I get excited about the gestational side, it's crazy.

• 38:36Peter Diamandis?

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

• 39:09Speaker 02

  So, we, so we publicly announced we're working on the mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo, right? The dodo's our first avian species. We get a lot of people pinging us about all kinds of extinct species, you know.

• 39:22Peter Diamandis?

  I can't imagine why.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  We get the dinosaur question, we get it all, right? And so, so for us, you know, those are three massive teams that are focused. And then, you know, we are doing exploratory research on other species. But the, the biggest thing for us is, is, you know, really kind of combining the which species we should do with why we should do it, right? And so, there's some cool species that have been brought up to us, and we're like, but why would we ever do that, right? And so, what's the impact of that? And there's other people pursuing the extinction on species that, you know, that are great, but they're, they're, they don't have the same kind of impact that we think they should have, so we're not pursuing them.

• 40:02Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's hit the thylacine first.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  We can only hit the three, yeah, but there may be more in the works.

• 40:07Peter Diamandis?

  All right, there are more in the works, you just need to talk about that.

• 40:12Peter Diamandis?

  What could possibly go wrong? Okay, so the thylacine. So what is a thylacine? And 12 and 1/2 day gestation period?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thylacine is an extinct marsupial that almost it's called the it's also referred to as the Tasmanian tiger, even the Tasmanian wolf. It's a marsupial, but it looks like a wolf. It's an absolutely beautiful animal that went extinct in 1936 in Tasmania. And it was the top, it was the apex predator of the food chain. It was incredible. And the Australian government actually put bounties on the heads of thylacines and eradicated them. So they were paid to eradicate the species. But unfortunately enough, some of them were preserved in ethanol. And Andrew, Dr. Andrew Pass, like George, where it was really

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Pat, you know, his mammoth was the thylacine. And he's worked for the last 15 years on collecting samples and DNA. And, you know, now the tools are making it easier on him to kind of assemble that genome.

• 41:19Peter Diamandis?

  And the dodo, similar story?

• 41:21Speaker 02

  So dodo is, okay, so thylacine is another mammal. Makes a lot of sense. Very similar process. It has easier challenges, 12 and 1/2 day gestation versus 22 month, 22 months. We actually didn't have to assemble that, that the front end of the genome, because they got about 92% long range, like incredibly well preserved genome, which is amazing.

• 41:45Peter Diamandis?

  But a lot more edits. It went extinct, it went extinct so recently.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so well preserved, yeah. And so, so it's almost inverse of the mammoth, right? Because like harder, more editing, more computational analysis, easier genome assembly and easier gestation, right? And so we loved the thylacine as a bolt as our second species. Because the is mammalian, same team, same structure. But it was exactly inverse problem set. So we thought we could learn a lot complementary, looking at it from kind of that systems lens. The dodo.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  So the dodo, like, we didn't pursue that. That, like, this is where, you know, you've got to believe that everything happens on some level for a reason. And what was crazy about the dodo was Beth Shapiro, who's incredible. She's our lead paleogeneticist. She's one of the top ancient DNA experts in the world. She wrote the book.

• 42:39Peter Diamandis?

  You hear that, kids? One of your future career options is an ancient paleogeneticist. You know?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:47Peter Diamandis?

  God, crazy.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  It's crazy. It's amazing. It's crazy. And she actually has a dodo tattoo, and she'd been working, you know, for over 10 years on the dodo genome, been to Mauritius, had worked on with museum samples, had been assembling it, comparing it. But once again, massively underfunded. She's very well-known, and a lot of her stuff has incredible funding, but this was not a project that, you know, was super well-funded, but something that's really passionate to her. And what was interesting was our investors kind of led the dodo project, where Thomas and Jim Brier and a few others said, "Listen, if you are the D extinction company, the dodo is the face of human-caused extinction, right or wrong. Why are we not doing that?" So I talked to Beth.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  It's a little, it's very similar in many ways, easier in some, harder in others. It forced us to develop new tools around, like, primordial germ cells and other things that we didn't have built, that we don't need for our other projects. And, you know, we told our investor base, "If you guys support us, you know, with the financing, we will pursue it." And we have the subject matter expert in Beth. And so, that was one that we were very fortunate from, that it kind of came from the general public and our investors that really kind of helped drive that decision.

• 44:06Peter Diamandis?

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

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:14Peter Diamandis?

  So, it's been a few hundred years.

• 44:16Speaker 02

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

• 44:37Peter Diamandis?

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

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yes, we have, we, we, we kind of have like two parts of the business model. One is all about, we're huge believers in option value, right? And so we believe that, very similar to the Apollo program, on the path to the, you know, the, the de-extinction of mammoths and thiocines to dodos and maybe other species, we will build technologies that have an application not just for conservation, but for human healthcare. And, and, and so that innovation creates a massive kind of option value for our investors, right? Because like Bold and, and all our incredible investors out there, you know, when we create those technologies and we spin them out of the company, you know, all of our shareholders get those, get their appropriate shares in that spin out. We did that last year with

• 46:00Speaker 02

  ForBio, which is our first computational biology software platform. We, we didn't have all the tools we really need to do this, we wouldn't build them. And then we, then we realized that as application to other places, we raised an oversubscribed $30 million round, you know, for that business, which was amazing. And, you know, Kent Wakeford, CEO, that's just absolutely crushing it. And you know Kent as well, and, you know, they're, they're doing quite well. You know, they're doing mid seven figures in ARR already, which is just, I mean, in, in this market, like for a software company that just started is incredible. They just announced a major partnership with Google. And, and, and so, so the first part of our business model is really in the technologies, right? Like, how do we build?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  You know, we've got about 36 patents in process and, you know, we've got Another spin out on the horizon. Uh, probably won't be this year, probably be early next year, but we've got what we think is our next really strong advancement. But any of these advancements, any of these spin outs and this option value could be multi-billion dollar companies in themselves, right? And, you know, I think, I think that we'll probably have ten plus spin outs. You know, uh, or potentially more over the life of our, over the life of our company.

• 47:10Peter Diamandis?

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

• 47:46Speaker 02

  No, we, I mean, we needed these tech, this tech anyway, right? Now, there's other tech that we built that's amazing that we don't think has a marketability, you know, outside of what we're using it for. So, we're not going to go spin those out, right? Like, we're not going to just spin out everything we make. So, we're going to, there's a lot of intentionality to creating that option value that that's meaningful, right? Um, and then the second part of our business is around, you know, uh, education and partnerships. And so, you know, we, we mentioned, yeah, obviously, yeah, Thomas and others. You know, we're working on a big entertainment partnership around, uh, the docu-series. Uh, letting, you know, educational content around that docu-series.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, we want to chronicle this for the world and, you know, media and entertainment does, you know, uh, make money. And what's interesting about that, that, uh, aspect of the business is that it's starting to lead us into conversations with governments where governments, where, um, you know, we're, we're in the middle of, I can't say who yet, you know who, but we're in the middle of closing a, a very, you know, large eight-figure and a separate nine-figure contract.

• 48:55Peter Diamandis?

  We can say it's on planet Earth.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is on planet Earth. Where governments are, you know, while we want to open source all of the technologies for conservation, some governments have some critically endangered issues and need us to help them preserve their keystone species that's very important to their cultures. And so, you know, we are working on two very large deals that have very large price tags to them, but are still massively, they are a massive accelerant to these countries' biodiversity restoration programs. In one case, we're cutting down a country's work by 20

• 49:39Speaker 02

  years and saving them hundreds of millions of dollars. And so, when you can show that you can create that value for countries and allow them to preserve their animals on that scale, as well as they can save their conservation, the budgets of conservation, hundreds of millions of dollars that can be then applied in other and potentially better ways and cut decades off their rewilding timelines, you know, it's a value prop that, you know, one of the negative criticisms we've got at launch was, you're taking money away from conservation. It's like, no, first of all, we're bringing new money and new technologies to conservation, and we're going to show the world that you can actually do really

• 50:22Speaker 02

  smart, innovative ways of using technology in select cases of conservation that shortens timelines by decades and saves hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 50:31Peter Diamandis?

  So, you can actually help governments take a number of their species that are on the edge of going extinct and to help bring back those populations. You know, one of the things I find amazing when we first discussed it, I said, well, okay, I understand how you go to get an embryo or a single cell of a thylacine or a dodo, but how do you grow it into a whole animal? Where do you incubate it? And I have to say, you don't consider this an independent moonshot, but I think the idea of the endpoint here of ultimately

• 51:13Peter Diamandis?

  an artificial womb is an amazing, you know, moonshot into itself. So, what are you doing in the near terms? Where do you incubate the embryo for 22 months for a woolly mammoth?

• 51:25Speaker 02

  So what's weird is I'm so close to the science and the teams. I live and breathe and stay in the labs most days when I'm not traveling. And so what's weird to me, and I love that you brought this up, is that de-extinction no longer to me seems like a moonshot. Because I'm just so close, I know where we are and I know how fast some things are coming. And so it just doesn't seem like a moonshot anymore based on where we are, right? And the tangible progress that we see on a quarter-over-quarter basis. What's interesting to me is what I do see, think is still as a moonshot, is our artificial womb or ex-uterine development.

• 52:02Peter Diamandis?

  Ex-uterine.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Ex-uterine development teams. We found that people resonated better with that than artificial wombs, but they're the same. And I'm actually sitting in our office, in my office, it's at the ex-uterine development lab. So I'm spending a lot of time now on that, given that the de-extinction side of the business is very, I feel like, has all the right people enrolling. I'm spending a lot of time on ex-uterine development systems now for the artificial womb. And what's interesting is all of the animals, our first generation of animals, will all be born through surrogacy. So that's why we have the big animal husbandry group. So we don't need artificial wombs to be successful in thylacine.

• 52:44Peter Diamandis?

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

• 53:24Speaker 02

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

• 53:45Peter Diamandis?

  Somatic cell nuclear transfer. So this is a somatic cell is a body cell versus your gametes versus your

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Like your germ cells, yeah. Exactly, exactly.

• 53:55Peter Diamandis?

  And nuclear transfer is taking the nucleus out

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 54:00Peter Diamandis?

  And putting it into a different cell.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  And to put it into one of those egg cells, right?

• 54:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  And, um, we've had a couple of really interesting breakthroughs, um, that, that we will be announcing in the not too distant future, that, uh, that increased the efficiency of that, uh, over 25x of what's out there, which is incredible. And, um, and so, so to that process, we are going to be using Asian elephants as our surrogates, uh, for the mammoth. We'll be using, this is interesting about the thylacine, uh, and we'll come back to artificial wombs here in a second. But we, with the thylacine, we're using the closest phylogenetic relative in that desiurid family is actually the fat-tailed dunard. It's, it's, it's like a marsupial mouse. It's like this big.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  And so it's funny, people are like, wait, you're telling me a wolf-sized animal's going to come from this? But their young are the same size. They're both the size, when they're born after that 13 and a half days gestation, they're about the size of a grain of rice. Uh, and most marsupials gestate mostly outside of the womb. So that, that leads to other challenges that we're working on, like exopouches and, yeah. Exactly. And, but, but our goal though, is long-term, we want, uh, our system, we want exuter development or artificial wombs, that we can grow a thousand mammoths, right? Cause we won't be able to grow a thousand mammoths, uh, you know, the old-fashioned way, right? And so being able to do that for not just mammoths, but imagine a world, Peter, where, you know, we're down, uh, we have

• 55:31Speaker 02

  A hundred X, we're down a hundred X right now on a number of species or a number of blue whale individuals in the ocean. Imagine a world where we can work with governments to grow, where you have these football-sized, you know, uh, systems where you can grow, you know, a hundred blue whales for reintroduction. Um, so, so we can.

• 55:54Peter Diamandis?

  For the, for the rhino, for lions.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  For northern white rhinos, for anything, right? It's like, work with, let, let's let, let's let conservationists and rewilding partners work to do the hard work of reintroducing the species and socializing and herd dynamics and all that incredible work that they do, but the gestation, let's grow them all ex-utero. And so I actually believe that the artificial womb has a more, uh, potential for impact to the world even than our de-extinction work. And so we have a seventeen-person team working on the ex-utero development, uh, systems here. We also have a partnership with the University of Melbourne outside of our thylacine partnership that's working on it. And then we, we fund people in George's lab that's working on it. So it's a combined team of probably about twenty-five, twenty-six people that are working

• 56:42Speaker 02

  on artificial wombs here at Colossal, um, that we want to be able to grow everything in.

• 56:49Peter Diamandis?

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

• 57:03Speaker 02

  It's a true, it's a true artificial womb. Like, so like Alan Flake, for example, who's an incredible mind, he doesn't work with Colossus, he's amazing. He's done, uh, he, he did the bio-bag lamb work back in like twenty fifteen.

• 57:15Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that, yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  And he's, he's very, he's very focused on later-stage, uh, you know.

• 57:20Peter Diamandis?

  For premies.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  For, for, for, for premies, exactly. And they do a microsurgery in the umbilicus and whatnot. And that's great for, for, for that use case, it's incredible. And he is the world's best at it. Um, but what we really want to do is we don't want to be doing, if you want to grow a thousand of animals, we don't want to be doing a lot of microsurgeries in, in, in, in that, in that umbilicus. So really being able to build a artificial placenta, uh, uh, or sorry, an artificial, kind of this endometrial layer of the uterine wall that a placenta can, can, uh, invade and connect to. Yeah. Now, the beautiful thing for us, well, here's the beautiful thing about it, though, is that... That while there's varying different placental types, I didn't know that. I thought

• 58:04Speaker 02

  everything just threw in a bag inside of another bag, right? Um, before I started this, but there's actually different placental types, right? And what's interesting is that that comes from the embryo. And so the embryo, uh, basically makes the organ that invades this, this, uh, uterine wall. So we really have to get right, the gas exchange and the, um, as well as nutrient and extrament exchange through kind of this like, you know, uh, system. I know you know Doris Taylor, we're working with her on, uh, you know, uh, decellularized membranes. So it, it's really kind of interesting because we're bringing all these different people like Doris together to, to think through how you could build these membranes through synthetic

• 58:47Speaker 02

  biology that, uh, a, a, a embryo would want the placenta to invade into, right? So that's as natural as possible.

• 58:56Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog.

• 59:35Peter Diamandis?

  One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. You know, um, I can't, uh, help but ask some timelines here. You said that the Woolly Mammoth is 2028. We're recording this in mid, you know, third quarter, entering

• 1:00:16Peter Diamandis?

  third quarter of 2023. So five years out. Can you give us timelines on the dodo and the thylacine?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thylacine, I would assume that you'd see it sooner, given that it's a, a

• 1:00:29Peter Diamandis?

  12 days.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  13 and a half day gestation. So there's a higher probability of that. In the dodo, what's really interesting about the dodo is it's about a 30 day gestation, right? And we're using these sterile chickens. This is, this, this to me is crazy about, this is the kind of stuff that you've learned about biology that you're like, wait, what? That, that to me sounds like science fiction. But they've actually, you can actually take edited primordial germ cells of it. They've done this experiment where they've taken edited these, these things called primordial germ cells that, that are found in, in, in birds. And they take these primordial germ cells of ducks, insert, insert them into that of

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  a sterile chicken. The sterile chickens mate, an egg is laid, it hatches, and it's a duck. Like, that to me, I, I know that sounds like, we, we talk about de-extinction, I kind of like, oh yeah, that's fine. We, we got that. That to me is the stuff that just seems like, wait, I still have a hard time doing it. So we have an entire avian genomics group now that's focused on cultivating these primordial germ cells, which is very, very difficult. And the closest living relative to the dodo is the actually Nick of our pigeon, which is beautiful. It's nothing like what we think the dodo look like. And what's in, and so if we can get those primordial germ cells completed in a, in a, in, in stable and in

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  growing in culture at the right scale, fast, then I think the dodo, you know, could be in the next couple of years. That's really the rate limiting factor is now if it takes us two years to do that, then I think it'd be, you know,

• 1:02:08Peter Diamandis?

  Would you bet on the Tasmanian tiger before the dodo?

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Um, it's you just have this variable, you have this massive variable in the primordial germ cells. If that

• 1:02:18Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  If the PGC step works, I'd bet on the dodo first.

• 1:02:22Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  I told you about me and my style, yeah.

• 1:02:30Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:45Peter Diamandis?

  Will you open source the technology for others to play with?

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that for conservation purposes, right? Like, I do think that that I think de-extinction is something that needs to be measured and thought thought out well of like, what's the intention of it? And why are you doing it? And and remember, all the species that we're working on, we want to be wild. So we're working with local governments, in some cases, that's foreign governments, we're working with indigenous people groups, we're working with a private landowners. So there's a lot of people that go into this outside of just the colossal team, right? So you really need to collaborate in in in whatnot. So so we are going to open source all the technologies for that have an application to conservation for conservation purposes. There will be some de-extinction tech that

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  we just don't open source because we just think that maybe not everyone should have that.

• 1:03:36Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  So

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, birds, birds are just generally scary. So the, like, I don't know, I think that birds are dinosaurs, like Kenet Lakhavara, arguably number one paleontologist in the world, was one of our advisors. You know, they, you know, he, he's like dinosaurs are around us. And so they're birds. They're the birds, the dinosaurs that made it. And so, so I have been asked that question, not once, that's a theme that we get. It was just that, it was just the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park. So you can believe the number of Calls, press, everything that asks us about dinosaurs. So it is impossible to bring back a dinosaur. And I always break people's hearts when I say that because right now, from a technology

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  perspective, we can go back, you know, a million or so years in terms of like that that ancient DNA. But the problem is unless you find some frozen dinosaur or some dinosaur that was just so well preserved in a cave that hasn't fossilized, you're not going to get any DNA. Now, what you could do, which I think is interesting, is you I do think that you can do ancestral reconstructions through computational analysis of like, you know, you know, early dinosaur-like birds. I think that is a possibility in terms of like computational analysis. It's also possible to demineralize dinosaur bones to get amino acids, but you're not going

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  to get even small fragments of DNA, right?

• 1:05:37Peter Diamandis?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  So I mean, so I do think that from a technological perspective, humanity will have the ability to do ancestral state reconstructions of of like early birds or early mammals. But but we will not be able to de-extinct a dinosaur, you know. And I think those technologies could be applied in better ways, like how do we make, you know, more drought, you know, how do we make more drought resistant animals or crops? How do we, you know, I think growing 100 blue whales at this at the same time or 1,000 will have more meaningful impact.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  And I think it's it's as hard as as engineering a precursor to birds.

• 1:06:23Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, well, I'll have to break the news to my 12 year olds, but we'll.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Peter Diamandis?

  Let's go back, my friend. So we're talking to entrepreneurs here about moonshots. And I want to hit on two points. For those who are dreaming big dreams and want to go and make a dent in the universe and go and do something, because I think you said it really beautifully in the beginning, you know, this is my shot of doing something significant in life. And if I don't take it, I'll never be able to look at myself in the mirror and say, you know. You could have and you didn't. So let's talk about that. And let's talk about the importance of having. How, what is it that allows you to feel the confidence to take it on? In a field that isn't yours?

• 1:07:12Peter Diamandis?

  And then the third thing I want to talk about is how in the world do you raise money for something like this? Like when I want to talk about those early conversations. Because no bucks, no Buck Rogers. So. Take it from there.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, you know. Well, I'll start with the raising capital side and we'll go from there. You know, we were very mindful. In terms of who we approached, right? Now, after we started raising capital and we went public with the news that we're working on this. We did have a lot of conversations because people were like super interested. And look, we got a lot of no's. In any deal that I've ever done. I have yet to have the experience where you just walk in and someone's like, I love that idea. Here's a term sheet that's blank with as much money as you want at whatever price and whatever terms. I've yet to see that deal. I hear stories in the movies of those deals like that.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  The Silicon Valley napkin on a Sunday night before the partner meeting. Yeah, I've heard those stories too. I've never experienced them. So maybe I'm just not good. But the, but, but, but, but really being intentional. That we had to align this project with people like you. With people like Tom's Toll, people like, you know, Jim Breyer and Tim Draper. These are all people that, that think it like, you know, to use your words, that think in abundance. That, that want to advance humanity, that have all made a ton of money and they're not just doing it for the money. They want to, they want to make money and return money to their shareholders. But at the same time, they want to push all of humanity forward, right?

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  And so we were very thoughtful on who we went to and why.

• 1:08:59Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:46Peter Diamandis?

  Andrew's been part of your team over years.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Over years, been really leading.

• 1:09:50Peter Diamandis?

  You guys have a great track record together.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:00Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  I know. I, I, I, I know. We had, we had zero. I, I reached out to, I, you know, I was fortunate enough to win, um, uh, Ernst & Young, uh, Entrepreneur of the Year a few years ago. And I met Joe De Simone, who's incredible, who did Carbon 3D, and he's an amazing entrepreneur. And if you haven't talked to him, you should talk to him. He's amazing. I love Joe. And I, so like, I was like, I, I got connected to him through the EY Network. So I was like, I'll talk to him. So I, I started having a couple of these like individual science conversations. And I, and they were like, we would love to work with George on this. We'd love to advise you on who you should hire, and we'd love to be on our scientific advisory board. So we had very early success on the, even though

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  we had zero people internally on, on, on the science team, we had very early success on the sci, on, uh, the scientific advisory board to help guide us. And then George said, hey, one of my postdocs is being poached to go do venture capital. I think that she would, uh, do much, this is what she wants to do. This is Ariana, who you've met, spent time with. And, uh, he's like, this is what she wants to do more than anything. And if she really has the opportunity, I think she'll succeed and be the bridge between Harvard and, and colossal. And so, um, we, I, I had one meeting with her, you know, and I, I should, I don't think I've ever told Ariana this, I should tell her this, uh, about how

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  amazing it was. I, I remember like hanging up the phone or the Zoom with her. And I was in Omaha, Nebraska when I zoomed and I called our other scientist Sarah Ord, who had worked with me before and consulted with me at Hypergina, whatnot. And she was our only other scientist. I was like, oh, my gosh, we have someone from the church lab and we have, we have two scientists now. And I was like so ecstatic, right? Because we had one from Harvard, one from Johns Hopkins. I was like, those are good. Like, like we got this, right? And Ariano was a really great moment when we were like, oh, my gosh, you know, we can, we can recruit scientists this. We knew we could get advisors to it, but could we recruit actual scientists that wouldn't go pursue a drug?

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  And, you know, it was, it was like eight people. I remember when Kent moved to Dallas to help us get started. And, and, and we were in one of my other company's offices and we're sitting there and Dave Cops from Worlds. We were sitting there in Dave's, in, in, in Worlds offices and Kent and I were looking around. It's like, so it's us.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  But those are the fun days when you have a blank piece of paper.

• 1:12:38Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  So I, I spent, and I do this with all of the companies that I go work on. And I never asked for terms on it. I know a lot of people ask for terms on it. I don't though. So I spent a little over, I spent low seven figures on, on this from my pocket. Just for, you know, before we started in 2021, talking to people, traveling, hiring external consultant scientists. Like I am a somewhat trust but verify guy. And so, you know, I trusted George, but I was like, is it as close as he says? And whatnot. So I wanted, so I, I spent that capital on my own dime. And then, and then like kind of doing that research and then, you know, some of the first money in was, you know, Thomas Tull,

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Bold, Jazz Ventures, Tim Draper, the, you know, what's interesting and then, Then Tom Chee, like I remember Tom Chee was the biggest check in the seed and Tom Chee got it. And I was like, you know, you had these pivotal moments on your journey where, you know, my conversation, our first conversation where you were like, you need to go do this. Like you, you were very inspiring to me like, and this is before you even introduced me to the bull team. You were like, you need to go do this. How can I help? And so you were a major inflection point, which I really appreciate. When I talked to Animal Capital, I was late. I'd been told no a handful of times. I was exhausted.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  It was like a nine P M. Call, talked to Marshall and Marshall's like, yes, we're in, we're in right now. Why are you $250,000 tomorrow? And I was like, that was an inflection point because that was very early before we had Ariana or whatnot. And then Tim Draper, which, which, you know, he came on and, and he came in and wrote a million dollar check. And then when I talked to Tom Chee, Tom was like, he totally got it. His fund at one is so focused on impact.

• 1:14:50Peter Diamandis?

  And Tom, by the way, a co-founder of Google X with, with Astro on the team there.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  And just, and he just, as you know, he's just amazing and thoughtful. He understood the science and he was like, you know, we'll take, we'll take the rest of the round. And I was like, amazing, right? And so, you know, because I felt like we were too early almost for the big traditional funds. And so we raised all of it on a convertible note with a cap. So we raised at the time eight million dollars with, with Thomas kind of rounding that out. And then Thomas was like, and then Thomas was, we then raised another eight on a, on a uncapped note.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Which, you know, if you can get it, and, and Thomas was the one that said, You need to go, you need more money. And so he was, so they, Thomas would have put more money in. He, we filled out that, that remaining, we launched with 16 million and within a week, we were getting term sheets from funds that wanted to put in 40 million and do an A. And, um, and so that, that happened very quickly. I called Tom Chi, called you, called, uh, uh, Thomas Toll. And Thomas is like, none of us got, the consistent message we got, none of us got as much as we wanted in the seed. And so they're like, we'll give you a term sheet. And so, um, so we ended up raising 60, uh, versus 40.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Um, uh, and we brought in new partners, which is great, but a lot of, you know, obviously, uh, our, our early team.

• 1:16:21Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:16:59Peter Diamandis?

  Any, any take, any big takeaways?

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  I think a couple of big takeaways for me are you will, I, I, I did have a little bit of, you know, I have a proven track record. I, I did get more no's than I anticipated because I was like, how can you guys not want to do this, right? This is incredibly valuable for the world. You know, it's like, if, if, if you could go back to like the 60s, right? Like if, but you could offer someone a time machine and go back to the 60s and be like, hey, would you want to invest in the, in NASA? Which I would argue is, then regardless of how you feel about America worldwide or politics or aside or whatever, NASA is the number one brand that came, that came out of America. Everyone supports NASA. Like it is the brand. It's like, if you could invest. Invest in NASA, why wouldn't you invest in NASA?

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  It gets crazy, it's, it's, it's, it is an absolutely no brainer. And so I will say that it was a little bit struggling that, that we did get no's because I was, I was shocked. I'm not surprised if we had so very little at the beginning. But still, I was like, we have a really smart team. You can't get sold, you take companies public, sold companies for billions of dollars. You know, me and Andrew had done quite well. So I was like, I feel like we had stuff that like people would get behind. But you, you, I'd say if you're gonna do a moonshot, you have to be even thicker skinned. And I think going through the process, not of successfully building startups, but I've been told no so many more times before I started Colossal,

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  that I was so used to being told no, that it just didn't really affect me. I was, I had the conviction. And so you have to like, you can't go talk to two people or five people and be told no four times and be like, ah, I can't do this, you know, I, I mean, I've been told probably no a thousand times.

• 1:18:47Peter Diamandis?

  Team tech or capital? So, I mean, you know, if you have all three, you're all set.

• 1:18:54Peter Diamandis?

  You look, sounds like you came in first with team.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:18:58Peter Diamandis?

  And.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:03Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:34Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:43Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we are. So on the large language model piece, we have a, outside of form bio, we have a genotype to phenotype team, and it's really helpful for literature review, right? Because there's a lot of stuff that comes out. Obviously, you know, some of these things are gated in time, so it doesn't help with some of the most recent articles that have come out. But it does help with reviewing peer-reviewed papers, making summaries for onboarding and whatnot. So we are using ChatGPT and several of the other large language models out there. We're also using some of the generative AI

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  tools out there to talk about, like, you know, we have an idea for this like educational experience that we're working on. And, you know, instead of going and copying it up, we're using some of the generative tools there. So, yeah. Outside of the models that we're building for, like, we have a, we have a tool that's pretty cool internally that allows, that actually makes recommendations of what toolsets that will create to use for each edit that has the least likelihood of off targets. And like, that's insanely valuable, right? So.

• 1:21:06Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Last subject I want to get into here before I ask you what your X Prize should be. Let's talk about the morals and ethics. I have to imagine you get a lot of people sort of raising their hands and saying, you know, come on. I mean, you're playing God. How can you find this morally acceptable? What's the ethics involved here? Aren't people going to use this technology? Not to bring back extinct species, but to sort of like come up with, you know, glow-in-the-dark cats and, you know, cats with horns and a whole slew of mix and match, you know, and it's a lot of, I remember when I was in, at the, at the Whitehead Institute at MIT

• 1:21:48Peter Diamandis?

  as an undergrad, you know, the early days of genetic engineering and the Conversation was all around these these restriction enzymes are going to allow us to reinvent species and come up with things and a lot of debate and discussion about the ethics and morality. Now, it's calmed down, it's come back now with AI, but have you reignited that? Are you getting a lot of people concerned about this going out of bounds?

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, AI, you know, synthetic biology, it's hard to put, you know, CRISPR, it's it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle on some of these things, right? And so we work very closely with the federal government. And we've been public about our investment from Incutel and whatnot. And so we we want to be part of the teams that helps think through like what should be used and why and where do we draw boundaries around it? You know, I think that we've been very fortunate with people like Altacharo and others, who's also is one of the world's leading bioethicists who joined our team. And we've been very fortunate to to pull together not just scientists and bioethicists, but also conservation conservation groups. And we've partnered with all the top conservation

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  groups and we've really listened. And I I think they have a different perspective now than I did maybe 10 years ago on critics and and kind of like in including ethical critics. And, you know, I think you can learn a lot from an informed critic, right? Like, they are the subject matter expert. They don't have to share your belief. And and and we've taken this attitude that it's not our job to persuade anyone. It's our job to educate people and be transparent about what we're doing. And so that's what that's what we, you know, strive to do. And then we really try to listen to those feedback. And some of our earliest critics have become our most valuable assets. And, you know, like Lou Vidal, he was pretty, he was pretty negative when we came out. And now, we could not be

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  where we are on the Mammoth Project without him.

• 1:23:47Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:38Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Good, so that's gonna take me from like 400 to 415, is there?

• 1:24:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you got it.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  So, so I'm excited about that. Um, that's great, that's great data. And so, but the, but what's interesting is that, like, but for the dystopian, because we, even if you talk through it and you understand the ethical applications, because I would argue we play God every day, like, we eradicated the dodo, we eradicated the thylacine, we had a hand in, or early man had a hand in eradicating the, the mammoth, right? And when we chop down a forest, or pollute our rivers, or take medicines, you know, we play God every day, even with our own bodies. So, so I, I think that this is an opportunity to not only undo the sins of the past, but, but fundamentally, for that dystopian crowd, I believe that, hopefully it doesn't get to this point, but wouldn't we want a de-extinction toolkit?

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  And wouldn't we want the capabilities to bring back at least key-stem species that are fundamental to ecosystems, which are fundamental to things like food security? So, in the event that we do lose all species, isn't it better, we can all say that we just wanna preserve life, which is great, but in the event that we had to, had to bring stuff back, isn't it better that we have that capability set? For those, I don't believe in that world, but for the dystopians of the world, I think it is better that we have that tool, that, those capabilities and that knowledge base, because, you know, we are losing species at an alarming rate, and, you know, in the event having the tools to bring them back is better than not.

• 1:26:08Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  Yes, I do. And I don't, you know, I don't think I'll get to it, but hopefully, and hopefully, you know, I would love, if someone does, I'd love to advise it. But, you know, I think that Elon is doing an incredible job of recognizing that we have to extend consciousness into the universe and become an interplanetary species. And I think that's amazing. And I'm, full disclosure, I'm a space science investor. I'm a huge fan, supporter. But, but, but, but interestingly enough, most of the world is, is covered by water, right? And I want, I, I think that there's an opportunity, when we start to think about like sustainability in these closed ecosystems, that we are going to have to do for off-world.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  I'd love to see that happen here also, in parallel to extending life, uh, uh, interplanetary, is I'd like to see that happen here in, in the oceans, right? It's like, I would like, you've got these like little, um, you know, uh, hotels that have like the rooms underwater, but it's like, we should have the technologies where we can colonize, which will force us to build closed systems, right? Where we

• 1:27:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, closed technological life support.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:28:12Peter Diamandis?

  How big a population?

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I, I mean, I mean, we don't have

• 1:28:17Peter Diamandis?

  I'll put some numbers on this.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's fair. I mean, I think that you need a small town. I think you need like 10,000 people.

• 1:28:24Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm in real cities, like, you know, like, real, like, eventually metropolitan cities. But yeah. I know that's not gonna start there, but I mean, that would be the goal. It's like, how do you get to a 5,000 person sustainable city, not like 50 or 100, like a real city.

• 1:28:42Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:29:24Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Appreciate you.

• 1:29:27Peter Diamandis?

  Take care.