Playing God or Saving Nature? Gene Editing, Artificial Wombs & the Return of Extinct Species | Ben Lamm PT 1

In this thrilling installment of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu sits down with Ben Lamm, visionary founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company on a mission to reverse extinction and rewrite the future of conservation and synthetic biology. Ben and Tom dive deep into the mind-bending world of de-extinction, synthetic gene editing, and how the CRISPR revolution is not only unlocking the secrets of life—but also actively engineering it. In Part 1, get ready for a rollercoaster of concepts as Ben explains the technical magic behind gene editing, DNA synthesis, and multiplex genome editing. From the birth of the woolly mouse to the debated revival of dire wolves, Ben reveals the breakthroughs, challenges, and wild stories behind reviving extinct species. You’ll learn how Colossal is using advanced computational biology, AI, and hands-on bioengineering to not only bring animals back but also reshape the future of healthcare, genetics, and ethical decision-making. This is part sci-fi, part practical science, and 100% mind-blowing. SHOWNOTES 00:00 – Kicking Off: The Mysteries of Editing Life 00:14 – Emergence of the CRISPR Revolution 01:31 – What Is DNA Synthesis and Multiplex Editing? 03:47 – The Woolly Mouse: Engineering Traits Across Species 07:54 – Breaking Down the Process: IVF, Screening, and Sequencing 09:24 – Mapping Genotype to Phenotype and Its Challenges 12:10 – Targeting Gene Edits: From Theory to Application in Health and Conservation 17:09 – From Hair Organoids to Building Mammoth Traits in Mice 24:41 – The Quest for a Universal Egg and Overcoming Cellular Barriers 26:17 – Artificial Wombs: The Next Frontier in Conservation and Science 31:12 – Scaling Conservation and Bridging to Human Healthcare FOLLOW BEN LAMM Twitter/X: @federallamm https://twitter.com/federallamm LinkedIn: Ben Lamm https://www.linkedin.com/in/benlamm/ CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to ⁠https://ButcherBox.com/impact⁠ https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box! Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impact Netsuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at ⁠https://NetSuite.com/THEORY⁠ https://netsuite.com/THEORY iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Mint Mobile: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at ⁠https://mintmobile.com/impact.⁠ https://mintmobile.com/impact DISCLAIMER: Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5 gigabyte plan required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

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• 1:37Tom Bilyeu?

  We're entering into an era where life itself is editable. One company has already brought back the genetic code of extinct animals. They've resurrected DNA that hasn't walked the earth in over 10,000 years. Not as science fiction, not as metaphor, as living organisms engineered, grown and born. Their founder isn't a biologist. He's a tech entrepreneur, and his team is using the same tools, machine learning, CRISPR, synthetic biology, to build something we've never had before. The power to rewrite evolution. Today's guest is Ben Lamm, the CEO of Colossal Biosciences. His company just unveiled the world's first genetically engineered dire wolves. But this conversation isn't really about animals.

• 2:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It's about what happens when the interface to biology becomes a computer. It's about what we design next. I bring you Ben Lamm. Life seems so complex, so mysterious. How is it possible that we can manually edit it? Is there a specific breakthrough that's made it possible for you guys to de-extinct animals?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  If you look at the DNA-twisted ladder that everyone thinks of when they think of DNA, to be able to edit one individual rung and either knock something out, or eventually even to change those into a different letter.

• 2:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Eventually? We can't do that now?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Sorry, we can do that now. But when CRISPR first was discovered, it then moved into single-nucleotide editing, where you could edit certain individual letters, right? And then it came into the DNA synthesis, where we can actually synthesize big blocks and swap them in.

• 3:15Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you mean synthesize?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  So we can actually, like, we do it internally at Colossal. We also have third-party partners that we work with in some. Where we can actually string a bunch of those letters together. So instead of us wanting to go in and make like 20 edits, or 100 edits, or even 1,000 edits in a particular order, it may be easier just to sometimes synthesize that block.

• 3:37Tom Bilyeu?

  So this block does this.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  This block is this letters in this order. And so instead of us changing each one of those letters on that kind of twisted ladder, we can actually just design and build those letters in the right order. So we don't have to change them or swap them. We can literally just insert, knock out that same little block, and insert a block with the letters we want in the right order.

• 3:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, hold on, this is so crazy.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I love this is where we jumped in, right? So this is great.

• 4:04Tom Bilyeu?

  When I say that I'm literally obsessed with how far this can take us, I'm obsessed, but I like to actually understand this.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I don't even think that we're at the doorstep, like where we are, right? Because like, if you look at even what we're doing at Colossal right now, we use a combination of tools, right? So we're not Using just one tool, it's not just like a knockout, meaning we're knocking out pieces of the genome. We're not knocking in pieces of the genome where we're actually, where we have something we're trying to swap it out. We're not editing just individual nucleotides, like making individual letter changes. And we're not just doing DNA synthesis, we're doing all of it. So we're combining all of it. And that's what's called multiplex editing. And so one of the things that that colossal is trying to pioneer and push forward is this ability to take these tools that individually work okay, in some cases great, but in some, a lot of times, okay.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  And deliver it in a mechanism where we can make a lot of edits to the genome at the exact same time. And we're still like, we're, we're running victory laps on the fact that we made 20 edits with one multiplex array, right? Which is, which is unheard of.

• 5:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have to do that in one block? Or you can literally do 20 separate randomly placed?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  All over the genome, yeah.

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Which is amazing. So we, so we announced this woolly mouse. So to give you context, we announced this woolly mouse, which is objectively cute, regardless of what you think about de-extinction. We made this woolly mouse, it's, it's amazing, and it had eight edits to seven genes. So it just had eight single nucleotide edits, right? So it wasn't like, we weren't synthesizing a big block, we were literally making eight specific edits in these, in these seven genes. But what was interesting is they were the same mouse equivalents of what we saw in our mammoth to Asian elephant research. So we do a lot of computational analysis. We spent a lot of time looking at ancient genomes, comparing them to their closest living relatives, understanding the difference and based on the region it's in, it kind of gives us a clue of whether it'll,

• 5:59Speaker 02

  you know, make a change to the hair phenotype, fat metabolism or whatnot. But these eight edits, just these eight edits conferred all of the hair type, hair length, coat color, hair density. So our chief science officer calls it floofiness. But basically how are, how the hairs grow in slightly different ways. So it kind of gives it that, that kind of woolly texture. And then one was around fat metabolism. And if you look at like the control mouse, which just looks like. Your average smooth like gray mouse compared to this, you know, this our our Willie mice look like, you know, that they have a really cool fur coat on, right? And we're still testing whether the fat metabolism works. We don't know if that one, you know, confers

• 6:43Tom Bilyeu?

  In the mice.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  In the mice. What's interesting about that is a lot of people were like, whoa, that's absolutely amazing. But it's only eight edits. It's literally only eight edits. And people had made eight edits before, but they had done them sequentially, right? So they like made an edit in this line of mouse that mouse, you know, had offspring. Then they made an edit in the next line and the next line and the next line. And they stacked them over time.

• 7:06Tom Bilyeu?

  So eight kids deep. You finally have the

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Very different.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:10Tom Bilyeu?

  How are you doing that? Is this writing on the back of a virus that knows that it needs to go in and clip? Like, I have a vague understanding.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've got it. You've got it right, right? So we so we design these CRISPR guides.

• 7:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And a CRISPR guide is a virus.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Is a virus. So we go in, it actually delivers it, knows exactly where to cut it. But it's not 100%, right? So that's that's part of the

• 7:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning what? It sometimes cuts to the wrong place?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  It cuts to the wrong places. Sometimes there's a lot of what's called linear repeats in in the genomes, meaning that there's places where there's the same letters and, you know, some of these tools aren't quite there yet. I mean, we're still in the early stages. Like I said, I think we're just barely opening the door.

• 7:48Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's like opening a book and there's a few times where it says, and the people went.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if you tell it to look for, and the people went, you might be in the wrong chapter.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  You might be in the wrong chapter or whatnot, right? And so, or if you changed it, it may forget people, right? Or may have knocked out people too. So there's these things called off target effects where you get these unintended consequences, right? And so the way that we fix it and the way that, you know, this isn't where I think the technology will exist long term. But where it exists today is we do an intense amount of like screening. So we screen all of the cells before we edit them, right? So we do sequencing on all of them. So we're very heavy on compute. That may not be a surprise to you, given my background in software. But so we spend a lot of time on understanding the existing genomes. Then after we make edits, after those, after we let those cells kind of go through a couple of passages, meaning they divide and

• 8:40Speaker 02

  We then sequence the cells that that fully divide before we even go into things like the woolly mice. You know, people are like, well, how did you get, you know, all 36 of your mice that were born were healthy? It's like, well, because we screened all those embryos. We didn't take any embryos to term.

• 8:54Tom Bilyeu?

  What are you looking for? Because like when I think about human embryos and screening like that, when people are doing IVF.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  They're looking at like morphological for a lot of time.

• 9:02Tom Bilyeu?

  They're just reading the code in the DNA and going, we know what this means. Ooh, this means something bad. And so we're gonna.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  I just went through IVF. So, and yeah, and so we actually went through it. And I actually have a gene mutation that causes a truncated protein on on the Titan gene. And so we didn't want to pass that on.

• 9:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Which has already been mapped. People already know about this.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Which is crazy.

• 9:25Tom Bilyeu?

  How much do we already know about this stuff?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  I'll get pushed back on this, but I think that we don't know very much. I think we are learning at an incredible rate. Right? There's a ton of literature out there, but things like large language models and being able to ingest a lot of research. A lot of times people will call things, different things in research. So like if they're looking at a mouse model, they'll say, oh, this gene could have this effect, but that effect may be described differently in this paper than in this paper. Right? So I think that there's been a lot of raw data created. I think that the kind of access to compute AI and eventually quantum, which I hear is only two years away every two years. I think that those things coming together will be able to ingest a lot of this historical data and existing data. I think that we are at this moment where, you know, in the next

• 10:12Speaker 02

  five years, we will move from scientific research and scientific discovery to engineering. And I think that that is.

• 10:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Say that in another way. Do you mean that instead of a bunch of people writing papers about this, we're gonna know, okay, we've scanned 46 million people. This guy's 6'2". This guy's 5'4". Here's what it looks like. This guy has thick, luscious hair. This guy has like really cheesy, thin hair. And we just start mapping all that stuff out and we go, oh, okay, cool. I know these letters in this place are going to result in this characteristic.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think I think we will. But that's, that's what's called genotype to phenotype, like. That translation layer is pretty hard.

• 10:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's not what you mean.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  No, it is. It is. So, but I think that's, I think that's very hard. There are certain things like, so one of the biggest challenges that Colossal is working on is size. So there's not like a single gene that you make like a single edit in and it makes like, and it's like, oh, well, we can now 3X something. We can now make a chicken that's 20 times larger, right? And that's great for farming.

• 11:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh my god.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  We're not there yet, right? We as humanity are not there.

• 11:14Tom Bilyeu?

  We're literally gonna have dinosaur chickens running around here in 20 years.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that, but

• 11:18Tom Bilyeu?

  That was me.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  We do get a lot of dinosaurs. That's our number, the number one requested thing is dinosaurs.

• 11:23Tom Bilyeu?

  God bless Jurassic Park.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  We get a lot. We've also heard that before too, surprisingly.

• 11:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Shocking.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  But, but I do think that we're at this point where we're gonna start to understand two major categories. One is expression of genes into physical traits or phenotypes, right? So that we know that this gene or this combination of genes actually will have this effect. And it's highly predictable, right? So I think that that is the world, so Colossal spends a lot of time in that genotype to phenotype mapping. That's like a large portion of our time. Secondly, though, I think that we're gonna understand how, and there's been previous research to do this, but the application of these technologies to human healthcare, I think are gonna be even more interesting than, than just like making boy mammals and whatnot. So the ability to understand that you have a predisposition to this type of cancer

• 12:12Speaker 02

  or this type of, of Alzheimer's or diabetes, unlike a, a single gene mutation that only requires a single edit, you have to be able to edit all of those genomes at the same time. With, or all those genes at the exact same time with a high degree of efficiency, right? Because you don't want off-target effects, especially if you're dealing with humans.

• 12:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Can you do this to somebody that's already alive?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  You will be able to, right? And so what's, what's great about Colossal is that we work in, we do a combination of editing in micro-injection into embryos, but also in editing cells that then we use a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where we're taking the nucleus of an egg, or of a somatic cell, and putting it into that of a germ cell or an egg cell, also known as an egg cell. And so, so we aren't doing that, but a lot of the gene therapy work And a lot of these other works are looking at how we target different tissue types for delivery. So you've got the gene editing requirements, you've got the computational requirements, then you have the the delivery requirements. I mean, for us, it's not, it's not as a high, as a high priority, but there's entire teams. I sat there a presentation at

• 13:16Speaker 02

  the VES Institute last year, where there was like three teams that are just looking at kind of like air traffic control of how you push different targeted therapies to different tissue types in the body. So there are people working on it.

• 13:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning, we put it into the body, but we need to tell it exactly where to go and what to do.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  And what to do, yeah. So it targets ourselves, yeah. And people are, people are looking at how that could be a form of treatment even for cancer, right? Like, how do we, how do we target things better? So targeting is a huge thing in, in this field.

• 13:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Targeting is a huge thing. That makes a lot of sense.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  It affects colossal less, right? So we aren't focusing on much of it, because like, we're not trying to take a, you know, wolf and engineer in traits to it in a, in a, you know, three-year-old wolf. We're starting at the cellular stage and the embryo stage.

• 14:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you're taking advantage of the fact that viruses already do this. They go in and they snip.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:10Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say that you're training a virus, how do you give it the sequence of letters or whatever to look for?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  I think I told you this before, it's like, I'm not a scientist, but I just get like nerd out on it. I come from a software perspective. So we actually have a team that just do all of the different guide design. So they actually design it, they actually put the letters in, they'll actually, in some cases, synthesize little pieces of, of the, of the code that we want in the right, in the right order, and then, and deliver that in the entire pack, give that to the entire package that then goes into the cell to deliver it.

• 14:45Tom Bilyeu?

  More with Ben Lam after this short break.

• 14:49Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:10Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:05Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 17:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo, okay, what's the craziest thing that you guys are doing right now with that technology?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  The craziest, I'll give you, I'll give you three things that are just super weird, and I don't know if we'll get there, but we are trying to synthesize a massive block of DNA. There's a project that we're working on, without going into it, has-

• 17:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you can't, because lord knows with that smile, I want you to.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so most people know we're working on the mammoth thylacine in dodo. People now know that we're working on, or we have worked on dire wolves, but there's other projects, but like, for example, with the-

• 17:39Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say, just for anybody that doesn't know you, when you say worked on dire wolves, you mean they exist?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, they exist. We have three dire wolves right now.

• 17:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, which I'm sure we'll talk about, which are amazing, so Romulus, Remus, and then Khaleesi, so-

• 17:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Crazy. They've been extinct for 10,000 years?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Uh, 10,000 years, a little over 10,000 years. We use a 73,000-year-old skull and a 12,000-year-old tooth to do all the computational analysis to kind of build-

• 18:03Tom Bilyeu?

  To get the DNA.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, okay, so craziest thing?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  So the craziest, so two crazy, or three crazy things that we're doing right now. Number one is patterning, both in the thylacine and in other species is really important, right? So like getting how the stripes, for example, you know, we can't just like make up, like if dire wolf, if we did the DNA analysis and saw that dire wolves were striped, there's no preserved dire wolf, so it's like, okay, well, the stripes don't have to be 100% from a fidelity perspective, but we know exactly what the thylacine looked like. There's pictures, there's color corrected videos, there's hides. So to get that right, we're actually synthesizing large blocks of DNA, larger than anyone's ever synthesized, and we're working to safely deliver that in the cell.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And one of the technologies that we've developed is we, we built it really large and assembled it. We're then cutting it at specific points, putting it in, and then trying to stitch it together all at the same time. So that's one really insane hard thing that we're doing.

• 19:03Tom Bilyeu?

  That's really hard because of the size of the block you're trying to-

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Size of the block because it's pretty fragile, right? It's going into the cell, there's only so much you can push-

• 19:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So there's like a physical manipulation problem?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a, yes, but it's all done with like chemicals. So we're not, we're not doing it with like tiny robots.

• 19:17Tom Bilyeu?

  That The virus isn't, that's what I had in my head.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but we aren't doing it right. The, the system, the virus is doing this.

• 19:23Tom Bilyeu?

  But does the virus literally carry it like a tugboat?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  It, it carries it like a tugboat.

• 19:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Get out, that's insane.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  So that's one. A separate thing that we, that I think's pretty interesting is we want to create a universal egg. Which I know sounds a little weird, but because when, when you look at doing somatic cell nuclear transfer.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  In, in this one.

• 19:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, do tell. What's a somatic cell?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so a somatic cell is basically any cell in your body that's not a egg or sperm cell.

• 19:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So whether that's a tissue, we actually have started using what's called EPCs. We did this on, on the dire wolves, which is pretty cool, endothelial progenitor cells. And we love them because they're only partially differentiated. So if you think about like pluripotent stem cells or all these stem cells, they're in the most naive state. So that you can use a bunch of different chemical factors to convince them to turn into different tissue types. Right? And so you can use these transcription factors to convince them to turn into different tissue types. Right? Which is pretty interesting. So we're using that with like hair. It's kind of creepy, but interesting. So in addition to woolly mouse, we actually built hair organoids for mammoths. So we are growing hair follicles.

• 20:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Just to make sure it works?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, to make sure it works, right? So making sure that the edits that we are making in our elephant cells. Will actually deliver the phenotypes that we're looking for, right?

• 20:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on. So we know enough about the soup it would need to be in to grow? That we can grow the hair by itself?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  That's a whole nother thing. So if you look at, so this is what's interesting about like, why I'm super fascinated with what we're working on. Is we don't just have to get multiplex editing right. We don't just have to get computational analysis right. We don't just have to have the screening for off targets right, or the embryology right, or the somatic cell transfer, which we'll talk about. The cloning, right? We actually have to do things like media conditions, like the soup, right? Like we have to get that right. And then we have to also create different soups or medias in order to make them change. And, and certain tissues do certain things.

• 21:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Damn.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  So it's not just adding, so you have to build the whole system.

• 21:31Tom Bilyeu?

  The whole.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  And so it's funny, like, when we launched the woolly mouse, people were like, you know, we have a lot of people that love us. We have some people that question us, which is great. You know, I think it increases the likelihood of us having great conversations about science, which is awesome. But some of the people that have questioned us and they pushed back on us. One of the things is they're like, well, it's only eight edits. And I was like, yeah, but it's eight edits in this system. Like, we're focusing on this, right? Where, when in reality, we need to look at the whole system.

• 21:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I find anybody that says this isn't interesting completely uninteresting. Like, I don't even get that line of questioning. I hear you talk about it a lot. Like, that one to me is just like, what, I don't have time for that.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  But I think, look, I think that, I believe in personal choice and freedom, and as long as you're not hurting anyone. And, you know, I think that what's interesting about this is that people sometimes don't respect, like, like, the woolly mouse is like a technological triumph. I know it sounds insane, because it's just, it's like cute little mouse.

• 22:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That sounds.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  But it is, it's amazing. We literally met, we took, we took 60 genomes in varying lengths from a 1.2 million year old step mammoth, all the way down to a 3,500 year old woolly mammoth, built a, kind of this pan-geno model, compared it to Asian elephants, African elephants. By the way, which genomes didn't exist. We had to go create those genomes. Like, coming from software, I just assumed.

• 22:57Tom Bilyeu?

  It just hadn't been mapped.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, no one had mapped, so no one had, one, made the genomes, and then no one had annotated the genomes. So no one had gone out and said, this is this region of the genome, this is this region of genome. No one had done that. Coming from software, I just, you know, and I knew that like 23andMe existed.

• 23:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, there'd be a bank somewhere.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just thought, like, oh, we'll just log on to the GCP of species and be done with this thing, right? Like, we'll just write, you know, comparison algorithms to call this a day. Yeah, but none of that, none of the data on either side had existed, which was crazy. So we had no data sets to start from a comparative side. So once we did all that, and we identified all of these core regions, we started growing things like hair organoids. But before we grow hair organoids, we had to actually figure out how to turn elephant cells back into pluripotent stem cells, so that we can then turn them from pluripotent stem cells, reprogramming them and turning them into organoids.

• 23:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus, man.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  So there's a lot that goes into this and, you know, we've only been around for three and a half years.

• 23:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say, there's not only a lot that goes into it, but there's a lot you've already solved.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, we're a long ways away from everything we want to do, but like that, that just little model right there, I think is like borderline magic. And so if you take all of that and then you map all of those edits that drive the hair phenotype, which is what we're looking for in our woolly mouse, to a mouse equivalent model, right, of that specific gene edit, because we didn't want to just put mammoth genes in a mouse. We thought that was unethical and we thought that, you know, there's 200 million years of genetic divergence between the two, so it probably wouldn't have been compatible with life. We actually had to engineer it. So we want to do this safely and responsibly. Then you sequence it and all of that had to work to produce a mouse. We produced 36 and they're all healthy.

• 24:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  And objectively cute.

• 24:41Tom Bilyeu?

  They definitely are cute. There's no doubt about that, but the, like you said, the, I don't know that it's borderline magic. Sounds like it spills over into proper magic.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Tom Bilyeu?

  This is by far the most sci-fi episode I've ever done. This is bananas. Okay, so we know the soup. We know the areas of the gene that we can edit. We were going through the three craziest things. That's one, these gigantic blocks.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, the second one was going back to that somatic cell nuclear transfer where we actually take the nucleus of a cell, of a somatic cell, and put it into an egg cell. Well, you have to have egg cells. So you kind of have like three choices for egg cells. Choice A are four choices. One, you can harvest egg cells from animals, right, you know, and do it in a humane way where you actually have to, in some cases, develop devices to like, we do this on the Northern White Rhino Project, where we actually have to go extract eggs so that we can bio bank them and fertilize them so that we have them in case that species goes extinct because it's functionally extinct. There's only two left.

• 25:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And you'd rather start with a full-blown egg than like a skin cell?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  You need a germ cell, so you need a germ cell. Secondly, you can make germ cells through a process called gametogenesis because they're, they're gametes. And how you do that is you have to figure out, you have to take a cell, like a skin cell, turn it back into its most naive state, pluripotent stem cell, and then from there you actually have to reprogram it and get it to turn into an egg cell that you can edit, right?

• 26:03Tom Bilyeu?

  When you reprogram it, what are you doing?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  You're adding a combination of these chemical factors.

• 26:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Is this the Aminaka?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Aminaka factors, yeah.

• 26:13Tom Bilyeu?

  That, okay, so it's basically a chemical sequence?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:18Tom Bilyeu?

  That does this?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:19Tom Bilyeu?

  I can't believe somebody figured this out, okay?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy, but they're all, but they're all different for different species, right? And so colossal works in non-model species, right? So like, most people will study mice, pigs, non-human primates, right? And so we're working in wolf cells, we're working in fat tel done ourselves, we're working in pigeon cells, like, we're working in elephant cells, we're working in these cells that just don't get a lot of attention. And so, and they just don't have a research. So we have to figure out those soups, we had to figure out the chemical transcription factors, the right combinations, and they all have uniquenesses, which is crazy. Like, so wait, so closing out the three crazy things, then, because I, well, we can go on tangents for this forever, because it's fun and interesting.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  But one of the things that we're trying to do is, is to make a universal egg. But the egg donor will have a mitochondria, right? So we all have these like little powerhouses of our cells, these mitochondria, and there is, is an ability, the further you go genetically, in, in time, that you could have mitochondrial rejection, meaning that, that the mitochondria in the egg may not be compatible with what's in the nucleus, right? And so, I'm not, I'm not, I don't get that deep into the epigenetic side of it, or in the mitochondrial rejections out of it. But one of the things that we're trying to do is if we could make a universal egg, that would be incredible for like, all of conservation and obviously all of our projects, right?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Because then you would never have to harvest oocytes or egg cells from a species, especially an endangered species.

• 27:50Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say "universal," do you mean any species?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Well, we're starting in mammals, right? So it'd be a million work to begin.

• 27:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that all?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  That's what we're working on right now.

• 28:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  It's hard.

• 28:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so failure of imagination on my part, I never would have thought that that's even possible.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  And we don't know if it is yet.

• 28:08Tom Bilyeu?

  But the theory is that there is a point at which we all share a set of things.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  The egg cells for these different species are so different, right? But if you could get the right housing structure and if you could actually build the right ways to either change or manipulate the mitochondria or do mitochondrial swap in the egg cells, then you'd have kind of the building blocks like the Legos for building a universal egg. So then, because there are species, so gametogenesis, taking cells back to their pluripotent stem state, their most naive state to then program from, or sorry, reprogram from, is hard. It's very, very hard. Hasn't been done. It's not like, once again, there's not the GCP of that. There's not a book that just tells us how to do all this, right?

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Secondly, then going through the gametogenesis process of making eggs and sperm, that's insanely hard. That's harder than making like a skin tissue. So if you could, you know, not have to do that for every single species, and maybe AI and quantum just magically figures out, who knows? But I highly doubt it. If you could make a universal egg, or at least have the building blocks for a universal egg, when you're working on non-model species like the northern white rhinos or elephants, you could just use that. So that's the second thing that we're working on that's super weird. And then the third thing is the artificial womb. So we are working on a full end-to-end system to grow everything ex utero.

• 29:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo. Stay tuned, we'll be right back with more from Ben Lamm after this. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and Takes notes after it it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 30:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Tell me more about the artificial womb. That's like one of the in my prep, I was like, okay, I've got to know how far along we are with that.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  If we are successful by the end of 2025, or probably end of 2025, we'll show some implantation in a model species like a mouse. By the end of 2026, you know.

• 31:09Tom Bilyeu?

  You say implantation. What do you mean?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  So what's interesting about this is that the placenta is this like awesome, amazing thing, but it comes from the embryo. So we don't have to engineer that, right? We just have, I'm going to massively oversimplify it. But all we have to do is to create the right environment with the right chemical cuing in the right place. If it is a placental mammal and it needs to implant like 99.9% of placental mammals like a mouse. Then we have to give it a uterine wall or a synthetic wall that it can implant into. So that means that the.

• 31:42Tom Bilyeu?

  So you'll implant an artificial womb?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  So we'll implant, we will.

• 31:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I always thought this was going to be like a plastic bag.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  So we will hatch. So I think there's a part of it that is a plastic bag. That's the most outer component. But I do think that you need an internal component. We're doing it with. A combination of hydrogels, like we're using these like super sticky membranes, but we're also using bioprinting. So we're actually having to print insanely small because it's massively vascularized. Right. Because if you think about how it works in like a human body or in a mammal, the embryo will hatch out a placenta. The placenta will attach or implant into the uterine wall. That uterine wall, the placenta, which is almost like this awesome alien. So it's amazing.

• 32:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:33Tom Bilyeu?

  The more you look at this, the more you're like, oh, God.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But what's great is like, I was like, we don't have to solve that part. Biology does that part for us. Like it does want to work and want to live. And so it has to then connect and invade into the placental wall. But it has to be able to, you know, obviously stay implanted. So it's got to be sturdy enough, but it can't be too sturdy that it can't implant. It's then has to be able to be vascularized enough so that it's getting the right level of oxygen, nutrient, extramin exchange and chemical cuing. Because some of that chemical cuing comes through the placenta. Some of it also comes from the uterine wall and just that kind of amniotic sac. So you have to figure out, so, but once again, it sounds more like to me like a data problem and a tissue engineering problem. Then it, I mean, it doesn't sound like magic. It sounds like just, it's just data.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  It's like if we track every single day of pregnancy and we, and we test and understand, you know, what that chemical cuing is, then kind of like the transcription factors for, for reprogramming stem cells, we kind of know what the variables are, right? Is it glucose? What are these different knobs? And then we just have to tune them for every different species. And I think over time, if you get enough data, then you can probably get 80% there. So if this goes great, by the end of 2026, I predict we will have the first mammal born fully ex uro, which isn't that long from now.

• 33:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Not even a little bit.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  It's not going to be a mammoth. Yeah, it's not going to be a mammoth, it's not going to be a wolf. But yeah.

• 34:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you already have one in mind?

• 34:02Speaker 02

  It'll be a mouse or a marsupial.

• 34:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. Are they just higher turnover rate?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a, our fat-tailed dunard, which is our model species.

• 34:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Fat-tailed dunard?

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Fat-tailed dunards, it's literally the, it's, it will give the woolly mouse a run for its money on objectively cute factor. So, but if you look at the, if you, if you look at them, they only have about a 13 and a half day gestation. Because marsupials have so much gestation that happens outside the womb. Mice have a little north of 20 days.

• 34:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  But mice, unlike mice, the, the placenta, technically marsupials are placental mammals, but the placenta only shows up for a cameo for like the last day of gestation. So it's not really needed in terms of like gestation for the fat-tailed dunard.

• 34:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. Okay, so when you say something will be born ex utero, would I be able to walk into the lab and see it like in its placenta just growing?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  One, if we achieve it, and then two, if we achieve it and it's highly replicatable, then yes, you'd be, we would probably stage get it. So you'd have it at every single, like, you'd be able to say, oh, here's device one, and it's at day three, this is day seven, this is at day 24, or in this case, day 20, 20, and it's birthing.

• 35:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, this is so sci-fi.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 35:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Legitimately.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  But I actually think that artificial wombs, if we're successful, will have way more impact to conservation than anything else. Like, we work on the Northern White Rhino Project, and we're, our, our job is to help them do-

• 35:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it just because you can do so many?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can do it at scale. That's what, that's the beauty of the artificial womb. If we're really good at this, instead of, it's great for animal welfare perspective, it's also great for conservation. Because, you know, instead of having to do IVF in rhinos to help save the Northern White Rhino, right, and put them in Southern White Rhinos to birth them, you know, this is how the technology stack immediately applies at scale to, to conservation. We could take a blood draw, isolate EPCs into the lipatner cells, which is what we did on the wolves, edit those, engineer in genetic diversity, right, from, from a population map that we've done, a population map that we've done- On like taking tissue samples of northern white rhinos in frozen zoos, in museums and other collections.

• 36:22Tom Bilyeu?

  To overcome the cloning problem.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Well, no, to overcome the genetic bottleneck problem. So then they're not, you know, they're not all clones. They're all, they have enough genetic diversity. So they all become their own founder lines, right? So then you take that, then you do somatic cell nuclear transfer. You make an embryo, put it in a universal egg, or use gametogenesis to make it. And then you take those embryos after you've done some extra cell transfer, and you put it in a ex utero device or an artificial womb, and you grow it to term. So the system, once again, the system model that we're applying to make mammoths, or dire wolves, or thylacines, or whatever, you know, has a direct application where we could become a technology partner for governments and NGOs around the world

• 37:06Speaker 02

  to go take our technology into conservation at a scale we've never seen.

• 37:11Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a world that I don't think people fully understand, like how transformational this is gonna be. We have a lot more to cover, but I do wanna touch on the ethics of this. So I unfortunately am the unhinged guy that wants to see this stuff like pushed to the absolute max.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But for people who their toes curl at the thought of us playing God, how do you think about this?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Well, I think that we have a moral, I don't think that, I think that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to do it. So because, you know, we actually have developed all of these tools and technologies as a species. We've become the apex predator on this planet. When we started the company, it was forecasted that we're gonna lose up to 15% of biodiversity between now and 2050. That was three and a half years ago. It's now 50%. Those aren't our studies. Those are independent studies with-

• 38:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Why is it going so much faster?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Well, because we're accelerating climate change, we're accelerating overfishing, overhunting, eradication of habitat, right? And so polluting, cutting down the rainforest, all of that is a form of playing God, right? And like, we go into the rainforest and like slash it all down. And burn it. Well, that is a form of playing God. We are changing that environment. Right. I would even argue that taking cholesterol medication on a micro level is a form of playing God. Right. Cause you weren't, you weren't designed or engineered or got the random roll of the dice to have a specific, you know, cholesterol problem. Right. And so I think all of these choices are a form of playing God. And so I think that we have a moral obligation to do something that, you know, with these technologies, that can not only help and benefit human healthcare, but could help species.

• 38:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. Talk to me about human healthcare. Is this going to be a, dear parents, everybody is going to have kids via IVF. Don't worry. It's going to become very cheap. It'll be de rigueur. Like everybody's going to be doing this. Don't worry. It's not just for the rich. But you're going to want to do that so that you can select.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Here's the beautiful thing for colossal is we only work on animals and conservation.

• 39:15Tom Bilyeu?

  You're gonna dodge like that?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  No, I'm not gonna dodge. I will answer the question, but I'm saying colossal takes the stance that we as a company, aren't going to work on humans because we already get so many crazy conspiracy theories about the company. Given that Incutel and others are investors are like, what are they doing? What is this secret programs? They don't tell us about. But we're pretty transparent about what we're working on.

• 39:31Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say the things you're talking about already are like.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  They're already weird enough. Like, I mean, why be weird? They're, I think people give us too much credit and like that we've got like crazy stuff.

• 39:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Even more crazy things hiding in the background. Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  But, but what's interesting is, is for us is like we at colossal draw that line. So we won't, we aren't going to make those decisions.

• 39:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Why not? Like Ben Lamm, why do you not want to do it?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so.

• 39:54Tom Bilyeu?

  It's just too big of a headache?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I, I think that the separation for colossal is, is good between animals and, and humans. Like we won't even work on anything in the non-human primate world. So anything in the monkey world, we won't do, or ape world, we won't do any of that. Because like there was a species which I don't think there's any DNA called giant apithecus, which was not King Kong, but much larger than, you know, our orangutans and apes. We wouldn't touch that project. We've made a decision that we're not going to work on anything. Cause people get asked us about Neanderthal, right? And so they're like, oh, could you do a Neanderthal? It's like, it's just a slippery slope. So we've made the decision.

• 40:28Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a slippery ethical slope because it's too human.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  It's, it's just a slippery, yes. It's just too, too human. It's too close. There's enough problems for Colossal to solve without doing it. With that said, all the technologies that we develop that have an application to human healthcare, we will license out, we'll spin them out. So other people may use our technologies to eventually grow, you know, humans and artificial wombs and whatnot, even though Colossal will not do that, right? Right. But I do think that, you know, other people, thank God it's not us, but other people will have to think about what is the line between making selections for the betterment of a society from a genetics perspective, before you go all out, Gattaca, or you look like, or it looks like Eugenics, right?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  And so, those are really hard things. Like, I'm glad that I don't have to, like, make those decisions. But I will say, I just had a kid and went through IVF. And there's now, have you seen this whole genome sequencing stuff that's come out? No. So, most people, when they, when they go through IVF, there are great doctors out there will look at a morphological grade, like, how is the embryo doing on day one, day two, day three, day four, whatever? And so, how is it developing? How is it ready? And they, a lot of times, they'll grade them based on the morphologic, like, how does it look? How's it behaving? An ideal embryo would look just like this. Right? Or be behaving like this at this stage development. So, that's one. Well, then they started saying, okay, well, let's look for specific things like extra chromosomes or extra things that could, that could be

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Facts. Could be, could be really bad, right? And so, they started looking at those types of things, right? And at least giving that data to the people, right? Like, you know, this is, this is an issue. A lot of times, people have miscarriages because something was broken in the genetics of it and, of the developing embryo, and it just wasn't compatible with life, even though it was developing on day one, day two, or day three. Well, so now there's a new company, full disclosure, I use them as a service. I was so impressed with what came out that I did invest in them, so I'm not. I just always want to be transparent about my investments. But Orchid Health, which is pretty awesome, and what they do is they take a tiny little couple of cells from the outer ring, so not in the developing embryo, but in the, in the outer ring,

• 42:45Speaker 02

  they do full genome sequencing. So not, they're not doing

• 42:50Speaker 02

  They're not doing like 23andMe. They're doing like really deep sequencing.

• 42:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Because 23andMe is too surface.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Too surface, right? They didn't look for everything, right? So they look for the core stuff, but they didn't go. I think there's a lot of reasons they went out of business, but they, they went. They do the full genome sequencing, so they can do, they can look for their specific markers. Like I had this Titan gene mutation. And so we did not want to pass that on because there's risk so that we could screen for that. Right? Well.

• 43:18Tom Bilyeu?

  So you literally checked the embryos. This one does, this one doesn't. The one that does, don't implant.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we saw, yeah, so you build, so I built a spreadsheet to kind of, and I built a relevance ranking.

• 43:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I like your style.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  System of it.

• 43:30Tom Bilyeu?

  How many embryos did you have?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  So we went through two rounds of IVF. And so we ended up getting, I think at the end, we ended up having, we down selected down based on this kind of distributed kind of bell curve that we, that we made in a spreadsheet. And we ended up having nine.

• 43:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa. Okay, so nine that you personally were like, I'm going to give these a grade.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Before we even did the morphological rating with the thing. So, so the other thing that's interesting, so you're talking about like.

• 44:00Tom Bilyeu?

  What other things other than the Titan gene?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  So there's also, and so this is, this gets into, and so this goes back into your question about like, you know, and once again, this isn't colossal making these decisions. This is me personally with, you know, in my, with my family making these decisions.

• 44:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  And we started looking at, they actually do this like polygenic risk score, which some people don't.

• 44:21Tom Bilyeu?

  What's polygenic?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  They basically look at, at like, we do know that certain genes and certain mutations, in addition to environmental factors, could lead to higher diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's or diabetes or certain types of cancers, right? So one of the things that Orca does, which I found pretty interesting is it kind of gives you like the bell curve where most people fall, and then it can tell you like this embryo fell here and it has this mutation falls here, right? And so, you know, I think that, you know, the easiest grade is like, if you're looking at this, what the technologies currently allow for, the easiest grade is, you know, is it compatible with life? Does it look more morphologically right? Okay, are there major things that we want to screen, screen for like extra chromosomes

• 45:07Speaker 02

  or chromosomal anomalies? And then, and then from there, you can look for specific things, like in the case of me looking for this Titan gene. Mutation that we didn't want to pass on. And then it goes into this like area that's, I wouldn't say it's gray, but it's not like if you have this exact gene variant, you will get Alzheimer's.

• 45:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It's off-white.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  It's off-white.

• 45:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  But it's still interesting, right? It's not based on like, you know.

• 45:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do you want to push it all the way?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Why do I want to push it all the way? So, I mean, I did, right? I mean, that's as far as the technology goes today. So I did that. Like, we chose, we chose, you know, we looked at all of the data and we made a selection based on the data. But we didn't make the decision based on, was it compatible with life? And how did it morphologically look? We went through all the way to the distributor.

• 45:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Now.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  And then we built a spreadsheet.

• 45:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Our, oh god, I want to see that spreadsheet so bad.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  I promise I will never show anyone that spreadsheet.

• 46:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I figured that was going to be the answer. Wherever we are today, I have a feeling we're going to be able to read more and more things.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:10Tom Bilyeu?

  One human response that while I get it because humans are like that, strikes me as very strange. You've, you've said this a few times in a very sort of polite way about looking for extra chromosomes. Down syndrome. Now, when you say, yeah, I wouldn't implant an embryo, this is Tom Bilyeu speaking. I would not implant an embryo that had Down syndrome. But then you're going to get, I will get backlash on that because people are pretty fiery about that.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  In my family, we have people with Down syndromes, like, you know, in my extended family, right? And so I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't, but that, but it should be your choice. That's, I'm a big believer in personal choice.

• 46:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think there's too many morphological characteristics? Like, this kid is going to be tall or beautiful or whatever that people think, or smarter. Oh, let's get really weird.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  And so people have already said that, right? Like, we at, and there's a general moratorium in the world, including the United States, on germ line editing. Meaning, making edits that will get passed on to the gene pool. But then you've got certain places like in China, at the Beijing Genomics Institute, where they are like, we are sequencing everyone and we are looking for genes and gene. Clusters that can drive intelligence. And so they're very open about that, right? And so it is a really hard thing, right? It's like if we could remove, I'll give you an example, like sickle cell anemia, which affects a percentage of the population. It's one gene edit. It's just one. So if we could eradicate that for all humanity, should we? I mean, I would make the argument, yes, but I also don't have sickle cell anemia, right?

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And so these things go beyond, you know, science in terms of capabilities, but go into not just ethics, but go into philosophy. You know, it's like, I would argue that we have some form of directed evolution as a species, right? You know, we are no longer just hunters and gatherers.

• 48:05Tom Bilyeu?

  We already have.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  We are, we're already doing it, right? It's like when people say that like what colossal is doing is could go too far. Are that, you know, we, one of the things we get back, you know, people love to argue whether it's a, you know, whether we can classify it as a dire wolf or not. But what people, which I'm sure we'll get into, but what people don't realize is that like these, the, and what people don't argue is that the technologies that we have, that we're now deploying here exist and they're only going to get better.

• 48:31Tom Bilyeu?

  No.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And so we have to be thinking about what the applications are for humanity. But I would argue, I always tell people that, you know, we've been doing gene editing for a long time. We've just been really shitty at it, right? Like we've been, we've been like cross breeding stuff forever. Like whether it was weed or corn or dogs, you know, like.

• 48:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Or who you pick as your spouse.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  We have been doing this the old fashioned way for a long time. Now let's just use data and let's just do it faster and more efficient, where we have a high degree of predictability of the outcome.

• 49:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, this is inevitable. So I'll put my cards on the table. I have no idea how you're going to react, but we are in a cold war with China. China is going to do everything that they can to beat us in AI.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I agree, I agree.

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So we can't play around.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:16Tom Bilyeu?

  China's going to do everything they can. I saw a video today of a robot dog with a gun on its back and training it to autonomously do its thing.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:24Tom Bilyeu?

  If we know, so right now, as far as I know, the only place that has done edits on humans is China.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  It's China, yeah.

• 49:33Tom Bilyeu?

  You will often say the person that did that, the doctor that did that was allegedly punished. I always find the use of the word alleged.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  It's interesting. Yeah, it's like you do something that big. Gets out of jail pretty quick.

• 49:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, because you have at least, running in the back of your mind, the possibility that that was sponsored, or at least like, oh, well, if you're doing it.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  It's a, China's an information state, so I find it hard to believe that people at various degrees of government didn't have the information.

• 50:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  So.

• 50:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Very delicate way to put it.

• 50:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Also, I feel like, forget editing for a second, selection of the embryos that you have, I would fully expect people to go as hard in the paint as they possibly can to get the ones that meet whatever characteristics that are desirable.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Can I add something that is crazy, this is from my own personal journey. The morphological embryo that looked the best, based on, you know, this side, like, not going all the way out, but just this side, the one that actually looked the best was, had a genetic defect and was not compatible with life.

• 50:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  So more than likely, our incredible doctor would have put in an embryo that would have led to a miscarriage.

• 50:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Which is, which is emotionally taxing on the family, specifically on the female, and it's also, it's also economically taxing. And he wasn't wrong, based on the morphological grade, like, there's a grading system, you can look at it, and, but it was not genetically compatible with life.

• 51:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  But that's what would have been implanted.

• 51:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  If we wouldn't have done these other things. So I do think that data can help us be informed to make, you know, we just make, we make more informed decisions with that data, right? Doesn't mean they're always going to be the right decisions, but at least we have the personal choice to make those decisions.

• 51:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that there's any of the gray in selecting from unedited but IVF-created embryos?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Um, no, I think, I, I think that that's, you know, it's, it's like the, like, I don't know if you, have you seen the gallery test, the Grail test, the blood test?

• 51:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I just got one.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  You did?

• 51:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally like a week ago.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  You got, you get your results?

• 51:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I haven't gotten my results yet.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  That's a little nerve wracking, isn't it? For me it is. I do, I do it every year.

• 51:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I went in because literally as we're recording this, I had skin cancer removed from my face. So I was like, uh, I want to know everything.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  But you're one of those people. I'm one of those people. You know, I do, I do the function test and I do four quarterly blood tests. Uh, in addition to the function test, which is already insane and incredible and, and comprehensive as it is, then I do four blood, then I do four quarterly blood tests. Um, I do the, the Grail gallery test, wherever you, I don't know, grail.com. It's whatever it is they, they actually call it. Um, I, I do all, I do all of that because I want the data, but a lot of people like, they don't want that data. So going back, so, so that, but that applies, sometimes it's hard for, I think, people like you and I to understand that. But if you and I, uh, but because we're wired a certain way, but I think that goes the same way with embryo selection. Hmm.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  I want the best amount of data to make the best decision, but not everyone does. Everyone, some people are like, I, I just want to trust nature and trust, and I just want to trust the universe and trust the chances.

• 52:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  I don't understand it, but they're entitled to it.

• 52:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I definitely think people should be able to make their own decisions.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, I just don't understand the pushback on the selection.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  There's been pushback on Orket. And I'm like, here's this incredible woman that developed the technology, uh, and just wants to give people more data so that they can make a, a decision, right?

• 53:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Say more about this? What is it?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  This is the Orket help. This is the Orket, Orket test that gives you that, that risk score.

• 53:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  This is the system that we use. But it's like, they got pushback when they launched. And I was like, it's just data.

• 53:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  You don't have to use the data. You don't, you don't have to take tests. So.

• 53:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Can you steelman their argument?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  I think that their argument is with more data, you'll make a better decision and you will lead to healthier babies that have longer lives that will also have a longer term impact.

• 53:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, the people that hate it.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Oh, they hate it? I think they think it's a form, it goes back to it's a form of playing God, right? It's like, or it's eugenics, right? But, I mean, I think that selecting for, I think selecting for a certain like skin color or hair or eye color, that's eugenics, right? Seeing if your, seeing if your kid has like my gene mutation that has my, that has like the issue that I have with my truncation on my Titan gene, that's not eugenics. That's just like, I don't want to pass that on. I would argue that things like Orchid are a service to humanity. They're not just an individual service because your, those genes will persist in the gene pool long after you're gone.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  It's a moral obligation to do this, not just to you and your family and to your child, but to humanity as a whole and, and because of the ripple effects of the gene pool.

• 54:39Tom Bilyeu?

  This will get so bizarre. If I'm a kid and my parents chose an option that they thought was cool or kind, or there needs to be a distribution, like, wait a second, I could have been the embryo that was three times smarter, like, I'm now suing.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That's gonna get certainly very bizarre.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  It's gonna be, get bizarre. And Orchid doesn't test for intelligence, by the way.

• 55:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yet, yet.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not part of it.

• 55:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And maybe they never will, but that strikes me as one of the things that you should.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  To your, to your comment, BGI, and this isn't like some like deep state, like dark web secret, like they've been, like the CEO is like, yeah, we do that. Like they're, they're very open about it.

• 55:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, please.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like, why shouldn't we?

• 55:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. That, that is quite literally my question. Um, okay, so, uh, by what mechanism do we decide what is eugenics and horrible and what is, uh, yeah, it's my kid, I want to fine tune a little bit here.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the good news is there's no germ line, there's this moratorium on germ line editing and, uh, and so we don't have to make that decision.

• 55:45Tom Bilyeu?

  But let's pick an easy one. So I was just, for whatever reason, this came across my feed. And my wife happens to have a very good friend of hers, mixed race guy, white wife. They have twin daughters.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And one looks light-skinned, African American, but not American because she's British. But she looks light-skinned, black.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And then the other one is ginger, freckles.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, how are these two twins? Obviously, they are not monozygotic twins, but twins nonetheless.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Twins, yeah.

• 56:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you have that and you're looking at that and you get to pick, like, instead of, you know, two, or you go through and you want every color of the rainbow or whatever, like, ooh, where do we go?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  It is in the realm of sci-fi, right? And it's like leaning on this to, as it relates to government, what is government's decision in that, right? Like, what is their right? You know, we have a general moratorium on not being able to...

• 56:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that considered journaling, though? You're just selecting. Because that's already like, this is happening right now. I don't know if they were IVF or not.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  But I don't, I don't think anyone out there has or is surfacing that type of data, like eye color. No one's surfacing that type of data.

• 56:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So people are just like, we're not going to tell you.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:00Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think that lasts forever.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  I don't think it lasts forever. And, you know, one of the things that makes America different than China is our ethics, is what we'll choose to do, right? Like, yeah, I, I mean, one of the things that, like, Colossal is certified by American Humane Society, the oldest humane organization in the world. We run everything by them, from where our animals live, to how we treat them in the lab, to every single thing, right? It's hard. It's very, very hard. And if we didn't care about that and we just wanted to do something in a country, like in a Southeastern Asian country, and, you know, be like, oh, we'll just go kill 100 elephants to do this and we'll have a mammoth in two years. Like, we, we choose to do things as an American company in America by American standards, America's ethics and America's rules.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  And, you know, not all countries, you know, in this weird, complicated geopolitical world we live in, you know, play by the same rules and play by the same ethical standards. They also look at things. They also look at, like, if you're, if you're looking at a lot of the Asian countries, they're looking generational, right? So they're making, they're thinking about what is the generational thing? And we're more of a society that looks at today and tomorrow. So I think there's cultural and, and kind of generational views that go into this that have a very, very big, very like, it's, it's like the old adage about like how people steer like a cruise, a cruise boat, right? If you want to go over there, you make a small turn now and it'll eventually go there. And I think that some countries think like

• 58:24Speaker 02

  that. And I think that affords them a, at least a perspective where they don't look at the ethics the same way we do.

• 58:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. All right, guys, that's it for part one, but there's more to come in part two. Make sure you are following Impact Theory and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It really does help other people find the show. Please hit us up. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed

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