Ben Lamm CEO of $12B Colossal Biosciences & $3.8B Astromech

Ben Lamm is the Co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences + their AI spinout, Astromech. Colossal is the $12 billion de-extinction company using genome engineering, AI and reproductive technologies to bring extinct species back to life, while Astromech is its AI biology spinout, now valued at $3.8 billion. We went inside Colossal’s lab to see its Gen 2 woolly mice and sat down with Ben to discuss the technology behind the dire wolf, the race to bring back the woolly mammoth, and the much bigger business being built underneath de-extinction. Colossal has raised $635 million, including a recent $400 million round that was originally targeted at $200 million. Ben explains why he still believes Colossal is “one of the most undervalued companies in the world,” and how technologies developed inside the company are creating entirely new businesses. Astromech, the AI biology spinout Co-founded by Lamm and George Church, just raised $20 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $60 million. Astromech is using evolutionary and multispecies genomic data to build AI models designed to predict biological change, with potential applications across cancer, disease and drug discovery. We cover Colossal’s rise, woolly mice, dire wolves, mammoths, artificial wombs, genome editing, AI and biology, Astromech, and what happens when humans learn to program life. Ben Lamm: https://x.com/BenLamm Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/zCQuSExl0gI 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Ben Lamm, Co-Founder & CEO at Colossal Biosciences (01:07) Inside Colossal's De-Extinction Lab (06:02) The AI idea that could save the planet (08:28) Revealing Colossal's woolly mice (10:49) Wild requests they get every day (13:35) Colossal's business model (15:07) How Colossal raised $635 million (20:17) How AI is converging with Biotech (22:44) How ancient DNA actually gets to the lab (26:24) The real stats behind Mass Extinction (32:07) Will their animals ever live in the wild? (41:44) Choosing their earliest backers (52:51) Why they refuse to work on Humans (58:07) Are they secretly working on Aliens?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's currently forecasted that we're gonna lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years. So that's dark. These are some of our woolly mice.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Woolly mouse.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Blossom woolly mouse.

• 0:14Molly O'Shea?

  They've begun an experiment in their plan to revive the woolly mammoth.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It's a freaking good mouse. And the way the world is right now, let us have this.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  So we had 100% healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes with the most multiplex edited, delivered at one time ever, and we did it in 30 days.

• 0:32Molly O'Shea?

  So the last one was 400 million. You've raised 630 million in total?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, 635 total. The last round was supposed to be 200 and it got overspread at 400. We're just getting started. I'm sure we'll raise more capital. One of our companies that we spun out called Astromech, it's using AI to build, it's a very focused model. We do get the request of Medvedon quite a bit. We're not working on it. There's no secret US Navy Andoril mashup.

• 0:55Molly O'Shea?

  They don't ask you to do your work on the old ones?

• 1:08Molly O'Shea?

  Ben Lam, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to Colossal.

• 1:11Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you. This place is insane.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny. It just waits till you go through the tour, it gets crazier.

• 1:16Molly O'Shea?

  So we have something pretty nuts over here. Do you wanna show us what's going on?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  So believe it or not, we do not have 330-pound massive extinct Pleistocene wolves here. And so we built an animatronic of one, and that actually is the size of Remus, one of the, probably the most famous of our dire wolves. It was on the cover of Time. And then we constantly have footage from the last six months that we project here. We thought that, you know, most people, when they come here, they wanna see, they're like, oh, can we see the dire wolves? And we're like, we're in Texas. Like, where do you think we have them? You're in an office building, right? And then, you know, we try to, like, so much of what we do is around inspiration and kids, right?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Cause like value creation, impact and inspiration are kind of our big core values that we try to think through all of our decisions. So even thinking about tropic downgrading and the cascading effect that happens with wolves, like the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and like what that looks like and like why predators are important. So we've tried to like, think about like long-term with our museum partners. How do we start to like educate the public on the importance of, you know, keystone species and specifically predators? So this is our like dire wolf installation. We can thank Weta from New Zealand. If you're a fan of like Peter Jaxson, you'll know those guys. And yeah, here's, that's actually Romulus, you know, chewing on something disgusting.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  So, yeah, but this is, well, you know, it, I don't know if every single office you've been to has animatronic dire wolves.

• 2:54Molly O'Shea?

  No, I have not seen any animatronics.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  I'm sure there'll be some like crazy conspiracy based on that, that they're like, all the dire wolves are robots. They're really a robotics company. We get lots of interesting feedback. Yeah, we get lots of feedback.

• 3:08Molly O'Shea?

  I have confirmed, we went into the Avion or Avian lab, that birds are real.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, birds are real. Yeah. Birds are real and the stuff we're doing is real. So it's kind of fun. Yeah.

• 3:18Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so you wanna show us around what you have in the lobby area? And then you can kind of explain what's behind the closed doors or not.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  So this is 50,000, 5,000 square feet. We have another 30,000 square feet of our lab space. Everything wraps around the lab, which you're gonna get to go deep in, which is exciting. Everything, like all the offices, all the conference rooms, everything, all our AI teams wrap around the lab because the science is the heart of what we do here. Also made by Weta. This, most people think this is what we do, but like as you spend time in the lab, you'll see it's way weirder and grosser and more technical. But most people are like, why don't you have a mammoth? Or why don't you have a dinosaur? Why can't you just take like frozen core samples and clone them? But those tissues are dead. You cannot clone from dead cells. But we put this here because this is what most people think that we do.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Like when we launched, like every cover was like something like this of like some mammoth preserved in ice. Just so you know, they look nothing like this.

• 4:15Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  They're disgusting and the smell is awful. Even the permafrost, like you can't get it out of your pores forever. Yeah. So I spent a bunch of time up in Alaska in the permafrost caves in Northern Alaska in the Arctic Circle. And it is just, it's just, I mean, it just gets in you and it's disgusting.

• 4:33Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. But you could just pretend it looks like that and it smells like this and it's incredible. But it does have its own signature scent. And then I think we have the like coolest streetwear that no one can get. It's like science streetwear.

• 4:47Molly O'Shea?

  I have no idea.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super awesome, right?

• 4:49Molly O'Shea?

  Everybody's wearing it too. You guys have great merch.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, but we don't like sell it. It's only available to our employees, our favorite guests. But yeah, it's like, you know, we want to provide the greatest apparel. You know, it's not swag, it is apparel. And then everything that you see, like when you go into the lab, we wanna have all of these different educational moments that are talking about our core values or explaining specifically to the lab of that specific unique lab. Cause we have a core lab that's an open lab, then we have individual labs off the core lab. So this is like one of our production labs and whatnot. So sharing our core values, reminding people what they do is great. But the other thing that we've done is like, we've tried to pick technologies like,

• 5:36Speaker 00

  so on the other side, and you'll see this in the lab, you actually can't see any of this. So this is one-way projecting. It's not a projector. It's actually one-way. It's actually nano film. So we can see it, but it's not distracting. So like when you're going to lunch, or you're going to a meeting, or you're going to the bathroom, you consistently are reminded of the things that matter and the things that we take pride in. But when you're working in the lab, it's not distracting.

• 6:02Molly O'Shea?

  Ben, I have to ask you, what is your hottest take right now?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  My hottest take right now is that I think AI is gonna converge and we are going to build a digital twin of nature. And just like we have prediction models for like everything from like missile defense to tsunamis and earthquakes, we're gonna have that for nature. And we're gonna understand in real time, like how nature is affected by every decision that we make. And that's gonna be incredibly enlightening and terrifyingly scary. But I think we're gonna build a digital twin of nature, we as humanity, where we will be able to truly understand the consequences of our decisions.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  And then we will be able to leverage technologies like what we have to productionize species to combat some of the adverse effects of those decisions.

• 6:56Molly O'Shea?

  So why is that so important? You study extinction.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's so important to me because I think that ultimately we don't really know how everything works. Like we as humanity, like we're like, oh, when people get locked in their houses for COVID, all of a sudden there's like dolphins back in Italy, right? But it's like, why, right? And so for us, thinking through and understanding the ramifications of that, thinking through like how that affects things like water purity and scarcity, food security. All of these things are directly impacted by the ecosystem. And that's also driven by the flora and fauna that are there. And so if we don't understand the ripple effects of either eradicating a species or building XYZ data center, well then, or diverting a river,

• 7:42Speaker 00

  then we don't understand like what that means to us from even our survivability of a new zoonatic disease that arises or food or water security. So I think understanding a digital twin of nature so that we can pick and choose the trade-offs as a society is gonna be critical to our long-term success. And I see a world where all these systems, including AI, actually make it where we're better aligned with nature.

• 8:09Molly O'Shea?

  So what are you looking forward to most in the next 12 months?

• 8:13Speaker 00

  The next 12 months, I'm looking forward to Colossal potentially having the next birth extinct species.

• 8:21Molly O'Shea?

  What does that can be?

• 8:22Speaker 00

  I'm not saying.

• 8:24Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, to be continued.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  To be continued.

• 8:26Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you, Ben.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 8:28Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, Ben, so we just had, I guess we just came from the lobby or so. So we have something special in the room with us today. We actually have something in the room with us.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 8:37Molly O'Shea?

  So what are we about to reveal under the curtain?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so these are some of our woolly mice. These are some of our Gen 2 mice. So our successful woolly mouse project, which I think is objectively the cutest mice on the planet. These are offspring from that first generation. So they're not as probably famous as Chippendale were. But their offspring are, you're gonna see, are objectively as cute. And, you know, these are the second most genetically modified multicellular organisms on the planet after our dire wolves. So do we wanna, can you take it off?

• 9:10Molly O'Shea?

  Let's do it.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 9:15Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, like I said, objectively, pretty cute mice, right?

• 9:19Molly O'Shea?

  They're very cute.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so, these mice, along our process to bring back the mammoth, you know, it takes 22 months to gestate an elephant.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Elephants are endangered, you want to be very thoughtful in that whole process. So with these, you know, what's great about, you know, 21, 22 days of gestation, is that you can actually test a lot of those core phenotypes or physical attributes in the editing. And so what was great about the first generation of the mice is we made them in 30 days. Like, that kind of got lost in the shuffle, which kind of blew me away, is like, so we had 100% healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes, with the most multiplex edited, delivered at one time, ever. And we did it in 30 days. So like, the 30-day part got lost when we announced the woolly mice, because everyone was just like, talking about objectively how cute they were.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  But nobody really realized that it was done all in 30 days. Which is amazing, right? So, so we took all of these edits that we'd been identifying for the woolly mammoth, identified the mouse equivalent of those, and then engineered them in, in 30 days. And then birthed mice, right? So that's like crazy. So it showed that our end-to-end pipeline worked. You know, it broke the internet. A bunch of people talked about it online and talked about how cute they were. And it was a testament that the prediction of the exact edits in the mouse equivalent of those edits worked, which was amazing.

• 10:49Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy. And so I heard you guys have some super fans now, you have to keep everything under lock and key.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so our offices-

• 10:56Molly O'Shea?

  Did you expect that?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So our offices aren't open to the general public, but we had people that just showed up, very excited about the mice, which then made us even more concerned about the dire wolves. So as you know, we don't have dire wolves physically here, because you would have seen them. But that's also-

• 11:12Molly O'Shea?

  There was one in the lobby.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Anamatronic one, right? Because people come and they're like, but where are they? That's why we have that like huge, like, 60-foot screen showing like near, very early screens. We probably are actually going to make that screen be a real-time feed, so you can just see them in real-time. But until we had the camera system worked up in high-def, we just are just putting that loop. And then, we have the animatronic up there, so people could at least see the scale and the size. And we wanted to make something that was like Instagrammable when people showed up, right? But yeah, having a giant 130-pound plesistine wolves in our Texas offices was probably a bad idea. But these guys, obviously, can fit much, much better here.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  And then we have a 8,000-square-yard vivarium that they all live in, day-to-day. But yeah, it is exciting, and people got very excited about the woolly mice. And we had to nicely remind people that we are not open to the general public. So, you have to see everything on YouTube or podcasts. We don't invite people in often.

• 12:16Molly O'Shea?

  And people, have they, I'm sure you've gotten many requests for people to buy them.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Oh, we get a request every day, right? There were people that actually made like legalized woolly mice t-shirts on Etsy, which is weird, because they're not illegal. And then, the crazy scientist in China that did the CRISPR babies, he like posted that they were bioweapons.

• 12:38Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  I know, it's, we got so many crazy things. We had people that bought woolly mice pillows. And like, all, like, a bunch of like bootleg, like, crazy, like, rip-off products came out of it. And then, even the Smithsonian reached out to us and said, "Hey, look, they're mice, eventually they're gonna die, could we..." I mean, they were being realistic, because mice don't have like 40-year lifespans, right? And they're like, "Could we taxidermy them and like, put them, when they die, on display?" Because if you go to the Smithsonian or the Natural History Museum, you actually have that. So, it's, we've had a lot of weird requests. But we do get schools, museums, a lot of people ask to see them and ask for us to donate them and take care of them.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  We're not in the selling animal business, so therefore, it's not currently a part of our roadmap.

• 13:29Molly O'Shea?

  Are you gonna give them to the Smithsonian?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  I don't know, we have made any formal commitments.

• 13:35Molly O'Shea?

  So if that's not the business model, selling animals is not the business model?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 13:38Molly O'Shea?

  What is the business model?

• 13:39Speaker 00

  I mean, the technology in these guys, I would argue is probably the most revolutionary technology ever. There's a new term, we were in an article recently, and there's, we did not invent this, but there's a new term called "civilization tech", have you heard this?

• 13:54Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Or "civil tech", yeah, it's like, I think, the hot new thing.

• 13:57Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, you created a new category.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  No, no, we did not, we're not, we're in it, right? Like, Anthropic was in it. I think it's the evolution of the moonshot category, right? Where it's like, now that Elon's gonna put like, a whole base on the moon, and then Mars, I guess we can't call them moonshots, moonshots anymore. So I think this is, this new category of like, technologies that have an application broader than their services or products for the market, but have a kind of a bigger ripple effect on humanity. And I think genome engineering at scale, and full DNA synthesis at scale, and artificial wombs at scale, have an application that's like insane. Like, when we were at the conference that we met at, they were like, we had just done our capital rate, our last capital round,

• 14:41Speaker 00

  and people were like, "Yeah, this is a very big round for a company this early." And I was like, they're like, you know, they made some comment, and I said, "Yeah, I do think that we are one of the most undervalued companies in the world", because I truly do, right? Like, the ability to like, preserve, engineer, and direct life on a planetary scale, in all species, I think's a pretty important skillset for humanity.

• 15:07Molly O'Shea?

  That's a really interesting point, though, on the size of your fundraises. So the last one was 400 million, you've raised 630 million in total?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, 635 total. The last round was supposed to be 200, and it got overscribed to 400. Yeah, yeah, and we're just getting started, I'm sure we'll raise more capital.

• 15:24Molly O'Shea?

  On that point, though, I was listening to a few of your podcasts ahead of this, that you've done, you've done so many great ones. But, what I think is underrated is what you use that capital for. It's not just the lab, but it's the preserve, it's the reserve, it's like-

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, a lot goes-

• 15:40Molly O'Shea?

  Medical facilities.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  A lot of it goes into, like, the halo effect of the, effect of the technologies are amazing. And what's interesting is, we don't know what we don't know even about the business model. Like, we know for a fact that there's government use cases around preserving life and building applications to different problem sets, like invasive species, right? So invasive species is like half a trillion-dollar problem globally. It's huge, right? Think about like rats on islands, think about, you know, the screw worm here in Texas, which is gonna decimate the cattle industry. It's terrible, it's awful. And so, like, our choices are beef prices go through the roof,

• 16:23Speaker 00

  we inoculate our cows, which a lot of people don't want to do that, right? Or we attack the invasive species, right? And the best way to do that is a gene drive it, it's engineering in a safe protocol that then goes through the population and makes them sterile, so that there's no future generations, right? It's, you know, it's, if you are an animal welfare person around insects, well then, which is great, there are those people, this is a good solution for you. Because we're not like out there spraying, right now people are like spraying chemicals, it's very, very bad. Same thing with like Lyme's disease and ticks in the Northeast, right? People are literally poisoning the environment, and poisoning like other animals and plants to get rid of ticks,

• 17:05Speaker 00

  because of all the negative effects that it's killing the moose, the moose population, it's killing deer, it's affecting people with Lyme disease. So there's all these huge problems around invasive species, right? That we as humans cause. And so, using gene drives and bio-control and bio-containment technologies to do that is like, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, right? And most people don't realize that when they think about de-extinction, right? The technology said. Also, the technologies that we're developing that have applications to human healthcare are insane. Whether it's individual pieces of the artificial womb for like IVF and embryo health, to be able to, even going as far as like, you know, being able to germline,

• 17:47Speaker 00

  edit out certain disease states for genetic diseases and disorders, right? So colossal is the world leader in that. And so, those are things that we know, but we didn't even know that three years ago. In the last- Few years or a few months, we've had people come to us. There's a particular type of fabric that comes from a particular type of animal that's ethically harvested. But they literally buy billions of this from this country. And they came to us and said, hey, we need to increase this by 6X. And there's just not enough of these animals, right? And so they're like, we're going to keep buying from this. But how do we also do 5X more here domestically?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  And it's like, we own the rights to the animals. They're like, well, can we clone these animals? Can we even productionize it where it's, you know, like lab grown meat? Can we do? We've done, I don't know if you saw this in the lab, but we actually have hair follicles growing in where we've taken elephant stem cells and created follicles so that we can grow mammoth hair. So what if you did plates and plates of that and did full warehouses of growing this without even touching the animals, right? So it's like the lab grown equivalent of hair, which is kind of weird and cool. But we're like the only company to do that. And they are buying billions of this and they want to 5X it. And there's just not that much available. Like three months ago, we didn't know about that. And now we're working on coming up with a solution to help them solve that.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  We've also had an extinct bird or semi extinct bird and critically endangered bird that a lot of the Middle East wants to help bring back because it's important to their falconry and culture. So they've come to us and say, look, this is, you know, billions of dollars in terms of research and conservation that we spend, and we just haven't been successful. With our artificial legs and other technologies, we could help productionize that, right? And so these are the types of use cases that once people understand the capability sets of artificial wombs for mammals and avian, all the way through genome engineering and computational analysis. You know, what's interesting is like we, as we focus on our business model, it creates all these unique opportunities where people say, could you solve my problem with biology?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Or genome engineering or artificial wombs? And so it's interesting that, you know, the plethora of opportunities we have is interesting. And I think that the hardest thing that we will continue to have is making sure that we stay focused on our core mission and don't deviate too much for some of these large economic opportunities.

• 20:17Molly O'Shea?

  I'm sure you're going to get inundated with more, especially because of AI. Like we haven't done many biotech interviews, but now because AI is really converging with biotech, it's exploding.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  It is truly exploding, right? It's like you're going to see like this like pre Cambrian explosion of new drugs and new therapies that all come from, you know, AI assisted drug design discovery. One of our companies that we spun out called Astromech, which raised money recently and may or may not be raising money now soonish. It is, this is going to sound crazy, is a different way of looking at drugs. It's using AI to build, it's a very focused model. So it's not, it doesn't need the breadth that a lot of these other models need, right? So we don't have to go build a $500 billion data center in computing power. We don't have to like fight for water and other things that people are all upset about.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  We can be very, very focused, but it's looking at evolutionary trends to understand why over evolutionary trends do certain animals have certain conserved regions of the genome that prevent things like cancer. So if you look at a protein like P53 in elephants, elephants get cancer at about a rate of two to 3%. Humans are about 24 to 25%, right? And so they do that because that cancer suppression comes from an overexpression of P53, right? Well, we have the largest data set on elephants in the entire world. We actually have the largest data set of multiple species of herpes because EEHP is a herpes vaccine that kills elephants, right?

• 21:54Speaker 00

  So, so when you start to look at things of like why certain species have invulnerabilities to certain disease states, you know, that affect human healthcare, we can track that evolutionary trend over time and look in and even build like if you look at some of the prediction models out there, build a prediction model that can be applicable not only to like cancer evolution, but also things like bird flu and other things. And so what's really interesting is that while AI is critical to what we're doing at colossal, and none of this would be possible without AI, and a lot of the stuff that we've had to build is bespoke, we're now even applying it to kind of the next level of like drug and therapeutic design discovery.

• 22:33Molly O'Shea?

  That's insane.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  All using like ancient genomes all the way through like the most recent genomes from even endangered species, which is crazy.

• 22:44Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, one thing when we were walking through, like I, I know this is kind of maybe a nerdy thing, but like I was just totally blown away by even the supply chain of everything that goes into finding the, you know, cells for these things, how they escape thousands of years, sometimes millions of years, that kind of thing. And then also like the pigeon eggs that you have.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we have the pigeon colony and we have a bunch of strange things. We have a chief animal officer. We have like fresh pigeons that come from art. We have an avian facility. So these are things I never thought, because I come from mostly like traditional SAS and software. And so I never thought I'd have any of these roles. You know, we have an incredible team that takes care of things like woolly mice, right? And these are things that we didn't have. But there is so much, and I think that's the value that we've built is we try to look at this from a vertical integration, first principles perspective of looking at, we had to own the entire stack, right? So that's why like when we were looking at expanding our endangered species production,

• 23:49Speaker 00

  our bio banking and bio vault initiative and kind of our global network that we've been rolling out, buying Viagen made a lot of sense, right? When you look at like animal cloning, most people, it's dogs, cats and horses, but there were like two, there was Viagen in the US and then there was a company in South Korea. And so there's like really two. Well, Viagen had like cloning efficiencies at 80% where most people are at 2%, right? And so it made sense for us to say, okay, we need to buy them and bolt them on from a vertical integration perspective. So, so much of the supply chain, we either built, innovated, licensed or bought, but you got a taste of it. Today, we had to build, we put the entire thing under one roof.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  And I think that cross disciplinary function of allowing people to work, you know, from everything from animal ops to ancient DNA extraction and everything in the middle makes the products go faster and better.

• 24:43Molly O'Shea?

  So we have to let our furry friends go.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  I know, they only get so much time with us.

• 24:48Molly O'Shea?

  They only get so much time, the rest you have to pay for it. I'm just kidding. But we'll say goodbye to the little woolly mice and then we'll just continue after that.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Great.

• 24:58Molly O'Shea?

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• 25:43Molly O'Shea?

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• 26:24Molly O'Shea?

  So to set the stage, you started this on the premise of extinction. So what are the stats? I know this is dark.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  No, it's super dark. It's like, it's like, but like it's dark, but I think it's hopeful, right? Like I'm an eternal optimist. It's currently forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years. So that's dark. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, but it's like, that's why I have to do stuff, right? And so, and so for us, if we can get everyone, like sometimes people get confused that like we think that de-extinction is a replacement for modern conservation. We do not think that. But the reality is, is like, no matter how good conservation works, it just doesn't move at the speed at which we're eradicating species and changing the planet. Like we're doing that, like that is happening.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  So for us, if you have a combination of a de-extinction toolkit, that has lots of other ramifications, which we've talked about some, and you have a, you get governments to invest in a global distributed bio vault network. So they're at least backing up things. At least we're starting to build a backup plan. And then lastly, we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So anybody can use any of our technologies for free for conservation.

• 27:39Molly O'Shea?

  There's a bad actor.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Well, there's always going to be bad actors, right? And so like you can't prevent that, right? Like that's like when, I don't even remember like a decade ago when people were like, you can't, you like San Francisco like temporarily put like this moratorium of investing in facial recognition because China was doing some bad stuff, isolating populations, using facial rec. That doesn't mean facial recognition is bad. That just means people are going to use it in bad ways, right? But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't innovate the technologies for positive use cases, right? And so that's the way I feel about these technologies. These technologies are very, very powerful and people are going to do all kinds of bad things probably with them. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't engineer them and do, and make them so that people

• 28:25Speaker 00

  can do good with them. I'm an eternal optimist, so I believe that we will ultimately do more, we as a species will do more good with them than that. And so open sourcing them to the conservation community for conservation purposes. So if people use our technologies for nefarious reasons and not for conservation, then yeah, we would probably step in and enforce that.

• 28:47Molly O'Shea?

  Straight to jail.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  We, I don't know if we have that power, but we would, we'd give them a lot of legal feedback.

• 28:53Molly O'Shea?

  No, that's really interesting. So we were just talking when the woolly mice were here before you. And I forget her name, what's her name?

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Oh, Katie.

• 29:01Molly O'Shea?

  Katie. So I was talking with Katie and she was telling me how she got to here. I was like, how long have you been here for? She said she's been here for three years. She was at a zoo first, then she was at a clinic and then she came over here and she was like, well, the conservation, preservation side of things is completely broken. There's literally no movement. Nothing's going on there. It's boring.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Sometimes it's hard to, and we've had, like, at the beginning, we had a lot of negative feedback on this. It's gotten to be, it was neutral. Now it's becoming trending more and more positive. But the conservation community is actually some of the biggest, at times, that has been historically some of the most vocal critics of the work because I think they view it early on is that we thought we positioned ourselves as a replacement for modern conservation, which we never did. We're like, no, no, no. You should do conservation work. Like, don't give us money. And we always viewed this as net new ideas,

• 30:00Speaker 00

  net new money and net new technology and net new awareness, right? Like, most people don't know that 20% of baby elephants die because of EEHPV. So people like should know that. And so if you go talk to any of our elephant conservation partners, they'll tell you that their funding has gone up since Colossal was invented. So I mean, so I view it as a net positive, but in the early, to her point, in the early days, it did take, it did take some long conversations with that community because that community is very stuck in its own ways. But if you spend time with that community and you ask them, are we as a whole, as humanity as a whole,

• 30:41Speaker 00

  with current modern conservation techniques, are we winning the fight to save species? And they will all tell you no. So it's okay. So we gotta do something different. And so we argue that like 99% of people should keep doing what they are doing with conservation and we're that 1% difference. But wouldn't you rather have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it? Like, remember like Star Trek when like the aliens came and they're like, we don't have blue whales and if we don't listen to, if we don't have the sound of a blue whale, like, we're gonna like destroy the planet. Do you remember this?

• 31:16Molly O'Shea?

  Totally.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  An old school Star Trek movie. And it's like, they had to go back in time and like, like, capture a blue whale and bring it to the future so like the aliens didn't destroy us. Well, that's like, you know, we don't have that exact issue currently. At least I don't think. There's a lot of UFP noise right now. So maybe they're looking for something. But ultimately, I would rather have this technology set and not need it, or at least use it in these interesting capacities that help individual species and help inspire the next generation and get people excited about science. And I'd rather do that and never need it for a mass scale extinction event than have a mass scale extinction event,

• 31:57Speaker 00

  which we know what we're in right now. We know where that's happening and then not have these tools. And, but I think I'm more pragmatic about this.

• 32:07Molly O'Shea?

  I guess to put this into practice, one of the really cool things that I saw when we were walking through the lobby was with the dire wolf. You see this like, this, you guys have this like little like model of like how land has evolved over time and the benefits of the dire wolf on the land and how biology changes and all this kind of stuff. So like in practice, are you gonna be releasing any of these animals?

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in a couple of phases. So obviously, you have to work very closely with governments, indigenous people groups, private landowners. For our extinct species, we do want to put them back into the wild with all these collaborations in place, right? Where they help the ecosystem, the government's supportive, indigenous people groups are supportive. We want to do that. For our gene drives and whatnot, that's also highly up to the government, right? Like, right now, we are educating USDA, the intelligence community, the Department of War and others on these technologies and how they can combat these issues domestically and abroad. So, but it is up to them, right? Like, they have to give us the green light.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Like, there are some, I did an interview about the screw worm, then it went viral, and then there were like 20 articles about it. And then there was feedback on like Blue Sky of all places. Surprise, there was negative feedback on Blue Sky, right? The echo chamber, you know, or liberal Twitter, right? And so there was feedback on Blue Sky that's like, well, Colossal doesn't have permits. Like, yes, we do not have permits. But, but this is a technology that if it is permitted, can eradicate this problem. And so like, in the screw worm example, it's like they're spending a billion five in taxes and in eight years, they're gonna like slow or stop the problem.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Our solution, which is already made, could eradicate the entire problem in every model that we've done in six to seven months. So we could save a decade in billions of dollars for taxpayers. And, you know, and also the animals that are gonna go through this painful death from the screw worm, right? So like, if you're a beef person, your price of beef is gonna stay low. If you're an animal welfare problem, person, well, then you're, these animals are not gonna be in pain from this terrible infectious disease that comes from the burring screw worm larva, right? And if, you know, and if you're just a, if you're somewhat fiscally minded, you, we're gonna save the taxpayers money, right?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And so, but these are those, these are those technologies. But once again, to put it back in the wild, we have to have support of the government. So our goal for our extinct species, our genetically modified gene drives and even cloning of endangered species, all of that is to go into the wild, but we have to have government and indigenous and global support.

• 34:58Molly O'Shea?

  It's honestly, it's just so crazy. It's also really cool because you come from like a real like tech software background. You're already very.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Well, this is, I mean, you, if you've seen other labs, it looks probably most like no other lab you've seen.

• 35:10Molly O'Shea?

  No, I mean, it's beautiful. It's cinematic. It's like, there's like, I mean, there's also.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  It feels like a tech office, right?

• 35:15Molly O'Shea?

  Fun stuff going on in the background of it. But, I mean, it is, there is very techie for a lab, for sure. It is.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  We look at this more as a product company, you know, tech company than a traditional biotech company, right? Like, we're not an academic lab. We're not a think tank. We're not a biotech that's gonna just, you know, work on one solution. We have to innovate across the entire spectrum of the pipeline. And, you know, I think that you feel it here. There's a real sense of urgency towards the mission, which I think we have to have, given some of the stats we talked about.

• 35:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. So how did you construct the organization?

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Having zero background in biology and biotech, I couldn't be more qualified to run this company. But, but we look at it as a systems model, right? Like, extinction is a systems model. Genetic engineering from like taking a 73,000 year old skull and going to puppies is a systems model. And so taking that kind of approach and just asking the right questions and trying to fill in the right, like, like, what's great about this company and is also hard about this company is that there's not another one, right? There's not another de-extinction. So there's not like, it's not like, here's your SaaS company roadmap, right?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  And so the good news about that is like, if we make mistakes, there's not really other people to be judged against, right? Because no one else had ever done it before. But the bad news is, no one had ever done it before. And so we tried to take a very rudimentary first principles, build from the ground up. How do we, how do we build complete vertical integration in how we thought through the design of the business? And we've reorganized a couple of times internally and I feel like we finally got the right momentum, you know, as a company. And I think you're starting to see that with more and more innovations that come out of the company.

• 37:09Molly O'Shea?

  What does that composition look like? Lab, research?

• 37:12Speaker 00

  It's mostly scientists. So, you know, we have 260 plus people, plus 17 academic partners, plus 80 folks in academic labs. We also fund and about 95 advisors. And so.

• 37:27Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  I know. But they're tiered. So we have like scientific advisors, indigenous advisors, executive business advisors, and the youth advisors, right? Because like they're, most people don't realize this. Everyone talks about our problems and how the youth are gonna inherit the problems. They're also gonna inherit our solutions to some of these problems. So when we're solving these problems, if we are solving it in dumb ways, like, I think, you know, a lot of the air capture systems and other ways, the direct air capture carbon systems and others and a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are dumb. And so, but if we invest, you know, a trillion dollars in that infrastructure globally

• 38:07Speaker 00

  and we hand it to our kids, our kids are gonna have to then, you have this like, you know, tech debt that comes with that. And so, so we've tried to think through how do we make a solution that not only are we proud of, but our next generation is. That's why having like a youth advisory board is like really helpful. Like, getting their feedback to us is as important as our indigenous board or our scientific board. So, so it sounds like a lot of people, but we have different groups that manage each one of those external folks.

• 38:39Molly O'Shea?

  It also seems like you guys are really popular with kids either way.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Every decision we make at that, like, if you go to the highest level, we try to create value for our investors, right? So it's value creation, impact for the world and inspiration. So that, like, so for us, and we told our investors this from day one, that inspiration needs to be as important as value creation. And you need to be on board with that. Like, if we do the greatest thing in the world that nobody knows about and like, you know, kids don't get excited about science, then we think we failed. And so we really try to put a heavy emphasis on kids and education. And we have this conversation with the scientific community a lot in some of the scientific journals is that, like, kids don't read nature and science and cell, right? The ones that do, I don't know, like, those.

• 39:27Molly O'Shea?

  You should hire them.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, they should work here. But, but they, but like those, the kids, the kids that make, that like read that are already committed to science, right? Like, that'd be incredible because I can't, and some of these papers are really hard to read. But most people are like, we're competing with pop culture for like the latest celebrity trend. And so you have to be able to communicate really hard things like CRISPR and some of these genome engineering tools and the impacts and positivity on the world and what they're doing today. And you gotta do it in 20 seconds and you gotta do it on Instagram. Like, I mean, that, but that's real, right? Because that's where people, that's where the next generation is. That's how they communicate, right? Like, what's our Snapchat strategy?

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Those are the things we think about.

• 40:14Molly O'Shea?

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• 40:59Molly O'Shea?

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• 41:44Molly O'Shea?

  Well, so we should talk about your funding history.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 41:48Molly O'Shea?

  I can imagine that has evolved.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:51Molly O'Shea?

  The story of the business model, like the

• 41:53Speaker 00

  In the early days, it was, yeah.

• 41:54Molly O'Shea?

  The ones that are backing up the truck now. Like, it's probably very different.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, in the early, we were very thoughtful in the early days. Like, we wanted to have long term investors, technology focused investors, uh, people that could, that could look at like, okay, here, what is this event horizon? You know, ten years, twenty years, fifty years out, right? We were not looking for investors that were saying, we want a fund return in four to five years in fund X, right? Like, those just weren't for us. We have some of those. But those were not our primary, um, uh, focus. Then we wanted a percentage of impact investors. Like, who are people that part of their internal K P I system that they track is around making positive impact? Um, and so we really tried to find the right balance.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  And I think we did a really good job, right? I think, you know, I, I think the most people would have said, oh, you should call Masa or SoftBank out of the gate, right? Like, that was kind of like, I think, how most people think about a business like this. But we haven't, right? And we're, we're big fans of, of what he's done. But some of those types of funds, we didn't go after. We said, okay, let, let's go for very thoughtful business people. Like, let's go to people like, you know, Jim Breyer. Let's go to people like Thomas Tull, Mark Walter, people that had built these legacy large infrastructure, uh, plays that, that, that have, uh, uh, done stuff in education, in entertainment, uh, in, in science, in technology, uh, people that were early backers in the internet and quantum,

• 43:26Speaker 00

  people that understand, like, what full new economies and systems can come from getting the entire pipeline, right? And so I think we were very, very thoughtful on that. And, you know, what's funny is I, I think that we've completely mispriced every single round of capital, because every single round of capital has been more than two X over subscribed. So what I hear from that is we're cheap. Like, we're not, we're a cheap date, and we should, we should raise our rates on capital. And so maybe we'll do that in the future.

• 44:03Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, don't sell yourself short.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  I, I think, yeah, but we've, we've, every round's been massively, so it makes me think that people are not just excited and see the vision, but, but in the impact, but they also, um, you know, uh, I, I, I think they've also, they thought they've got a good deal.

• 44:19Molly O'Shea?

  But this is not your first rodeo. I mean, you've had a successful exit.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we, I, I've, I've, I've been very fortunate to work with much smarter people than me, uh, to build a handful of businesses that have had successful, profitable exits. So I do think that helps. I think that helped in the early days, right? Where it's like, you've got, I think in the early days when we had a, like, our, our original deck was like, we have no scientist, we have no partnership with Harvard, um, we have no technologies, um, and, and we're a handful of software and hardware people that are pretty, that have no background in biology. And George Church thinks he can make a woolly mammoth, and we're pretty sure that that's worth something. Like, that was like the, the original deck.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  And the original, the, the original deck was, was that. It was pretty bad. I mean, I'm being honest, like, I would have passed on it. Like, I, I talked to, uh, an investor that passed in the early days, uh, got a very big fund and, uh, wants to get involved. And he was like, I just can't believe I passed on this. I was like, I would have passed on this. Like, in all reality, I would have passed on this. Yeah.

• 45:27Molly O'Shea?

  So how did you guys prove them all wrong?

• 45:30Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, trust, I think it's easy to raise capital when you have trust. And I think trust is built with setting and managing expectations. So we've, I think, done a really good job with our investor base and with, hopefully, the world, uh, and also, uh, our board of setting and delivering on expectations. And I think we, we've shown, we've had these surprise, like, the woolly mice were a surprise and delight moment. The dire wolves were definitely a surprise and delight moment. Um, and so, so I think that, uh, like, delivering on, on kind of our roadmap, we've been very consistent on kind of our delivery, and we've been ahead. And then I think we've also done a really good job

• 46:13Speaker 00

  of exceeding those expectations of what's possible. Like, we were told if in five years we were doing five to seven edits, we'd be great. We're now doing hundreds, you saw I left, we're doing hundreds of edits. We, we haven't done this yet, but we're now pushing, uh, a new construct that we've designed and a new delivery mechanism that we think we can be doing thousands of edits at once. Like, these are things that, like, you know, a year, like, three years ago was like, sounded impossible. A year ago still sounded impossible, right? And so we, I, I think we're, we're consistently showing that. And so when you build that trust, I think it's very easy for people to, to continue to deliver, or to, to invest.

• 46:52Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, we saw some lasers back there.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some lasers, right? Like, yeah, the, the lasers thing's pretty cool. So, um, but eventually, even that, that, that was in our, uh, some axonal nuclear transfer cloning lab, but that entire embryology thing will, that, that will eventually all be automated, right? So we've got the best embryologists doing the same thing every single day in multiple different clades of animals. So that, you know, in, in that screen that you saw, that's doing full time screen recording. So we're looking at the position of the laser. We're looking at the position of the, the, uh, O site. We're looking at the position of, of like, how much DNA is extracted. That entire system, we had to go build that entire system. I don't know if they told you that on the, the tour. That's all custom. So we had to go build and innovate all of that hardware.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Um, but in the future, that whole process will be automated with robotics.

• 47:44Molly O'Shea?

  So do you get, like, a report at the end of the day, at the end of the month? Like, how do you learn and train off of that?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so on that data, that's highly visual data. So, uh, so it's all, um, screen capture and can, uh, computer, uh, vision, uh, from an input and capture perspective. We track efficiencies and cloning rates and, and, and so we, we track all of that in spreadsheets. Uh, now with, thanks to, like, some of the next gen applications of, of A I. In the early days, things like Open A I and Claude and others, um, weren't super helpful to our company, because it's like, turns out that, like, you know, Opus doesn't do like an ancestral state reconstruction of like, a genome and like, it doesn't, like, build comparative genomics models.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  So we had to go build all of that, uh, which, which I think was good, because we had to go build up an A I team and, and think there's some pretty hard problems. But now we're connecting existing systems like, you know, most labs don't use things like Jira. And so I think the hardest thing we've done is reprogram, not stem cells, but scientists working things like Jira and Smartsheets, like, traditional software, like, things. And then, and then we're connecting those to, like, the lab notebooks and some of our proprietary systems all through an A I layer, right? And so the visibility that we can give our mid level and senior management on the science teams of what's happening in the lab in near real time

• 49:14Speaker 00

  through, uh, the aggregation of A I across systems. Now we're implementing some of these systems, these existing enterprise A I systems at scale, where it's really, really helping.

• 49:25Molly O'Shea?

  So you guys do, between that and the labs and how everything is designed here in this secret location, how did you get, I mean, you have a very distinctive style here. Like, how did you guys develop that style and the branding around that?

• 49:39Speaker 00

  So we wanted to make Once again, couldn't be more underqualified. We wanted to make, um, we wanted to make, this kind of goes back to inspiration. We wanted to make science cool and fun and engaging. And so when we set out to do the, the task of like getting rid of extinction, uh, we wanted, you know, we thought it was a big problem. So we thought colossal was a good name because it's a pretty big problem they were trying to solve. Um, and then at the same time, we're also working with cells, which we thought was funny that we're working the most small things, but hopefully they're successful to make really big things. So we're kind of planning success, right? With it, with mammals and stuff. So, so that's where we came with the name. But then we had this idea that it's like, if you're going to go back to the like Bill

• 50:23Speaker 00

  and I, old school models of like science and excitement, where it's like you're putting in the red food coloring and then shit's exploding and the volcano versus like today where it's like only spelling bee champions and like kids inventing like nuclear fusion. If you want to go back to like the stuff that I could do, like in, in like the eighties and nineties, well then like, that's like old school MTV, like back before it was like sixteen and pregnant and it was like TRL, like how do you go back to like the TRL days of MTV and mash that up with like the like robustness and thoughtfulness and scientific rigor of Harvard, right? But that's boring and stuffy. So how do you take like Harvard meets MTV?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  That was like our thesis from like day one. And, um, and I think we nailed it. Like I think the colors, I think the attitude.

• 51:13Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, it's sick when we walked in.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  If I say, if I said to you randomly, if you had not been here or seen anything Harvard meets MTV, you'd be like, that's just dumb. But now that I say Harvard meets MTV with everything you've seen, you're like, does it like, like, that actually describes exactly what you guys had built. So I, I'm very proud of that because we spent a lot of time in it and we want to evoke uh, our brand in messaging and we don't want to just say, oh, we have happy hours like once a month and we have foosball tables. Uh, we don't have foosball tables. They're annoying and loud. Like that's why you see the murals, you see everything in there. We want to constantly remind not just the people that come here, but our staff, like,

• 51:56Speaker 00

  you know, we have this unfair advantage of recruiting, being that you get to work on things like bully mammoth cells, uh, and, and like, you know, done arts versus like yeast in an academic lab, but also after you work in this lab, go try working in another lab. Like go work back in academia where you're underfunded. It's all like massively politicized and it's massively competitive and your labs are like held up by pizza boxes, right? Like go like, I chat, like go work in academia after you work here. It's like, you just don't see that.

• 52:33Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, we are like technically, well, I can't say where we are, but there's lots of medical buildings around us.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. They don't feel like this though.

• 52:40Molly O'Shea?

  No, I would imagine they don't. We, we accidentally walked into a few.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:45Molly O'Shea?

  Cause it's really hard to find.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is good. Great. That's great. That's the best thing I learned today. Yeah.

• 52:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Um, but I'm really curious. Okay. Here's a hard question.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  I love hard questions.

• 52:55Molly O'Shea?

  What can you, what's on the like the no go list? Like what can you not make? I listened to a few podcasts and one of them was like.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Ironically, the T-shirt that I'm wearing is what we can't do.

• 53:06Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 53:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is, this is giant epipithecus, which was like not King Kong, but not an existing ape. It was like, it was like a giant. So we're not working, we will not work on anything related to, our technologies can be applied to human and we can spin them out and license them, but we won't do the human work here, right? Like I made the joke before, but we, we don't want to have like, like, like colossal launches a hair solution. And then people were like, is that mammoth chip that people are putting on us? Like we don't, we never wanted that. And so like, we already have people that there's a fringe group of people that already have some like crazy conspiracy ideas about

• 53:47Speaker 00

  us. So I don't want to encourage that. Oh, that we're a secret government. I mean, the, the list goes on.

• 53:55Molly O'Shea?

  I don't think a government lab would be like this cool.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  No, right? And so, uh, but that's part of the cover up.

• 54:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  And so the, uh, and so, so we have that kind of, we have all kinds of weird things. Uh, people have assumed that we like, like, we actually had a, um, very critical group of, from this one publication that's, uh, New York based, that is just weird.

• 54:22Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Um, and they, uh, like to be critical on lots of things and they, they were here and at the end of it, they were like, do you secretly have a mammoth that you're not telling us about? I was like, no, why would we do that? So there's all kinds of like weird stuff. So, so we won't work on humans here because we've been asked the Neanderthal question. And so non-human primates in over, we won't work on, right? Giant epipithecus would be amazing to see, but, um, but we're not going to do that.

• 54:54Molly O'Shea?

  There was this crazy, we did this crazy interview with Ashley Vance. Has he come in here yet?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  No. So I did, so I, I've done it weird. It's crazy that you just said this.

• 55:02Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  So I did his, I think I was his first podcast.

• 55:06Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 55:07Speaker 00

  When he left and he did his first, I think I was the first episode or like.

• 55:12Molly O'Shea?

  In his studio?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Edit or mode. But he literally messaged me like a week ago and, and so we're, we're.

• 55:20Molly O'Shea?

  He has crazy, I mean, he's seen some crazy shit. Like you, like you went with George Church to like, you know, whatever land and you've seen drawers with like lots of stuff in them. But he's like, went to Russia or like Serbia or something, some, I don't know where it was, some cold place over there. And there were, there was this like mad scientist dude who was like, I guess the chill guy, but he had like human heads in a cold locker and all this stuff. I'm like, Ashley, you weren't there.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:47Molly O'Shea?

  What? He's like, yeah, that was the craziest interview I ever did. I'm like, oh.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  We'll work the topic next time he's here. The, or he hasn't been here, but, but when he comes, uh, but yeah, I just, uh, he's great. And I, I, I, we did his podcast and I didn't know him before that.

• 56:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Um, and he was awesome. And then we just reconnected like literally in the last week.

• 56:05Molly O'Shea?

  He's great.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's, he's great. But yeah, there's, there's always some weird stuff, but that's like, like synthetic biology. I don't think this is where, what people realize is a, the intersection of AI and compute, eventually quantum and, and synthetic biology, like it will transform everything. Like, you know, we will have a point where we can like, George and I have like got asked this question, like we were on some weird, whose podcast was it? I think it was, um, it may have been, uh, Adam Draper's podcast where he was like, if you and George could do one thing, what would it do? And we both talked about how we have this weird idea that eventually we will be able to program into trees. Uh, like, how, like, can you build like a redwood that actually

• 56:49Speaker 00

  grows in the form of like a house? And then like we're going down this like really weird, like mushroomy hippie thing.

• 56:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  And, and like, and like, I think it was even too weird for Adam Draper. He was like, okay. Um, mammoth, he like completely, and George and I are like, huh. But I think that's going to be the power of synthetic biology is like the idea that we can like program life in whatever image we want is pretty amazing. And like, we're advancing it, I think further than anyone, but at the same time, we haven't even scratched the surface of what's going to be possible.

• 57:24Molly O'Shea?

  Any megalodons?

• 57:26Speaker 00

  So, so this just shows how like fucked up the world is. Um, dinosaurs is request one. Megalodons is request two.

• 57:34Molly O'Shea?

  Well, you have a megalodon room.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  I do. But that's because it's like, like a, it's, it's.

• 57:39Molly O'Shea?

  Really cool.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  It's really cool room, but it's like a fish tank, right? So it's like a fishbowl. So you gotta like, you know, thematically do something. There is no megalodon DNA. Um, and if there was, it would be terrible, um, to make, I mean, the ocean's scary enough, but we do get the request of megalodon quite a bit. We're not working on megalodon.

• 58:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. Well.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  There's no secret like US Navy, uh, Andoril mashup for megalodons.

• 58:07Molly O'Shea?

  They don't ask you to do your work on aliens?

• 58:10Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 58:11Molly O'Shea?

  You can't disclose that?

• 58:12Speaker 00

  That's another thing that we get, right? Because I've, I've been, I've been weirdly tangentially connected to the UAP crowd for a long time. From, for pre, like I had a satellite company. No, no, but I like know a lot, really know, and then, um, and did some imaging work for Army Space and some other stuff in, in a, in a previous company. Uh, and like I'm on the UAP, um, uh, scientific advisory board, uh, for Avi Loeb. And, um, and so, so there's, so I understand why people draw the conclusion. It's not, it's not a reasonable, there's some easy, easy dots. But so people think that like part of like one of the other conspiracies is like, like the advancements in genome engineering has come from us studying like, which is just not the case, which is just crazy talk.

• 58:56Molly O'Shea?

  I'm glad you clarified that today.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's crazy talk. So we get, we, there's a lot, we, we, you could spend an hour just on weird, like Reddit, like conspiracies around colossal.

• 59:07Molly O'Shea?

  That's fun.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  It's fun. We should do that. It's most fun.

• 59:10Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. Well, Ben, that leaves us, we're out of time.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:13Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you so much. This was so much fun. The tour was interesting.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Good. I'm glad you came.

• 59:17Molly O'Shea?

  I like, I, I was actually a little concerned walking from the tour into here. Cause I'm like, my mind just like exploded.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Good. I love that. That's awesome.

• 59:25Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  I'm glad you came.

• 59:27Molly O'Shea?

  Cool. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.