Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:20:02 · Ben Lamm
[00:20:02] S2: I... So I thought, so a couple things. One is, on the naive side, I think I was naive about parts of it. Right? I was like, oh, all you gotta do is... Like George convinced me very early that all the technologies fundamentally exist in some form or fashion. Right? So there's opportunities for invention, but it's really also just a lot of innovation. Right? Like like the iPhone. Right? Like the iPhone is an incredible innovation. Not really an invention. Like, we had kinda 99% of the parts. Right? And so my my view was George got me very comfortable, and I'm a Trust but Verify guy. So even though I had meetings with George, I went and talked to a bunch of other external scientists, spent some of my own money, like, hiring some consultants and kinda thinking through this whole problem. And and I got to the point where it's like, yes, we have all the tools and technologies. Now the naive part, what came in was I thought that, you know, there's so much more than the lab work here. Right? And so if we only had to raise capital, do it in a lab and then be like, here's a dire wolf, Here's a woolly mammoth. Here's a thylacine. That that... And that's kinda what I thought, the naiveness, then then I think that's hard. But what most people don't realize is for as much as the insane science that there is that we have to to build in in the system, not sure we'll talk about that we had to... That we we... We've been very successful at building. We... There's just as much policy work working with indigenous people groups, working with, like, answering hard ethical questions. How does it apply to conservation? And we're very split with conservation crowd. Like half the conservation crowd is like, we are doomed and what we're doing in conserving land, which is something I still believe we should do, only gets us so far because we have human, know, human advancement, you know, right on the heels of it. Right? And we're losing species at such a crazy rate that we need alternatives. Sometimes people embrace those alternatives, but change is new and scary. And sometimes people are like, we know what we're doing isn't gonna work long term, but but this seems like you're distracting what we should be doing. And so so there's a lot more nuanced to the business.
00:22:21 · Ben Lamm, Alexa von Tobel
And then eventually even the economic models outside of just like, if the business was just raise money, make these animals, build technologies that you can monetize, that is kind of I think where we thought. And and I have no problem admitting that there's so much more to the company that that really had to be developed and that we learned. Right? And we just... One of the things I think we did really good at is like the the... You've got two types of critics. Right? You've got you've got just the absolute asshole critics. Right? That are like... Are those are your your couch ex blue sky folks that are like, we hate you because it's Tuesday. And then and then you've got like the other people that are like, we don't like what you're doing because of this. And you're like, oh, shit. That's a really that's that's a really good point. And so we, we have found in our one of the things that I think the number one thing we did right with Colossal is we were able to bifurcate that audience. And then the, the people that we, that we designated as informed critics that were like, oh, you're the top of your field in like mammoth research. What what what do you mean we're using the wrong genomes? Right? So calling that person, it was a... Like, that... That's just a good business. [00:23:39] S1: Totally get it. Yeah. You're like, that's actually just helpful. You're like Yeah.
00:23:39 · Alexa von Tobel, Ben Lamm
[00:23:39] S1: Totally get it. Yeah. You're like, that's actually just helpful. You're like Yeah. [00:23:43] S2: But but but what we're curious is that category of critics has actually like leaned into us. And and I think it's because we we went to them and we're like, wait, wait, what do you mean? What can we what can we do? Right? And then we would implement what they'd say. And then we go back to them and be like, what else you got? And then they'd be like, this is confusing me. Like, we we said terrible things about you. Why are you talking to us? [00:24:05] S1: By the way, I always call it LITTP, lean into the pain. Lean into the critics. Yeah. Really, really LITTP. Ben, just in plain crazy English, what the hell is de extinction? Like, what are you doing [00:24:19] S2: Yeah. For [00:24:20] S1: all of us who are who who are not geneticists? [00:24:24] S2: Yeah. So it... It's not possible to say... Like, sometimes it turns into a philosophical debate, but it's it's... And and it's funny because at the beginning of the company... I'll tell you this one quick story. At beginning of the company, we did all this, like, we're gonna announce the company. We're gonna... And and and for some reason at the time, we were like, whatever we do, do not mention Jurassic Park. That's gonna scare people. Do not mention Jurassic Park. And so we spent like... Did media training and all these... [00:24:50] S1: Were you like, Jurassic Park? Oh, I wasn't supposed to
00:24:52 · Ben Lamm
[00:24:52] S2: say that. Well, George did. So on the second interview, George is like, well, it's very much like Jurassic Park only fluffier. And and everyone was like... It was like, could hear a pin drop. And then the journalist was like, oh, I totally get it. So it was like what mister DNA talked about. And George like, yes. And then then we... So we... It's funny. We kinda prepped for, like, three months to, like, never say Jurassic Park and how to avoid, getting away from Jurassic Park. But but in a weird way, it is just kinda like Jurassic Park except not with dinosaurs. Right? And so what you do is you you have to take a, as a de extinction and species preservation company, you have to take a bunch of... Find a bunch of ancient DNA, which there's work in that. You've just simple the ancient DNA, which there's work in that. You have to compare it to the closest living relatives. And then and then once you identify these edits, you then start editing it in those closest living relative cells. Right? So... But like Jurassic Park that's trying to, like, fill all the gaps, we we we do all the computational analysis, then we just make edits to the closest living relative for the lost genes or lineage. And then there's a couple of different ways that you can use somatic cell nuclear transfer or editing in micro injections in the embryo. You can do a couple of different things in order to get to the point that you then have something you can put into a surrogate. And then hopefully long term, we're working on... We have 17 person working on artificial wounds. Hopefully long term we do artificial wounds, but the naiveness comes into play even in that system because I just thought, well, we'll just compare all... We'll... We can solve all these problems, but we'll just go compare it to like the, you know, GCP of species. And then I was like, wait, what do you mean? Because I've seen 23 me and all this stuff. Was like, what do you mean there's not a cloud like access to all DNA of all life. There's... We have not sequenced everything on like why? Like that's also an insane proposition to me that like we're losing We these should protect them, but why haven't we sequenced everything and bio banked it? And people are like, we don't... And the answer is just kinda like, no one's really wanting to put money into it.
00:27:00 · Alexa von Tobel, Ben Lamm
[00:27:00] S1: That's so... That... First of that is fascinating, and you're like, we clearly should be doing that. Okay. Ben, I wanna go down to, like, nuts and bolts of, like... You know, first of what was the first animal that you guys de extincted? Was it the dire wolf? [00:27:16] S2: It was the dire wolf. So so the first animal... The first, extinct species back is the dire wolf. We did produce a woolly mouse before that, but that was not Chip and [00:27:25] S1: Dale. That's Chip and Dale. [00:27:27] S2: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Chip and Dale. Okay. [00:27:30] S1: Well, so let... Well, let's start with the direwolf. We're gonna come back to the woolly mouse. Okay. So in plain English, how did you guys do that?
00:27:40 · Ben Lamm
[00:27:40] S2: Yeah. So there's a lot of, direwolf skulls in Libre... La Brea Tar Pit. It's... There's this incredible wall and it's sick, but the problem is there's heat and acidification in those tar pits. So you have to find ancient DNA. So about six years ago, there was a group that Beth Shapiro, my chief science officer, was a part of because they were excited about Game of Thrones that actually sequence got a very little bit of DNA from a single tooth. So you got all these crazy beautiful skulls, but only one tooth from this one k ever produced any viable DNA. So we went back and got that tooth. We also discovered another skull that had been found in a riverbed. So it was not found in La Brea Tar Pits. And we actually took out what's called the petrous bone, which is a bone in the inner ear, like in the back swollen kind of inner ear area That's very, very hard. It doesn't change a lot in development. So it's a great DNA storage vessel. We drill into it. So kinda like what you see in Jurassic Park with Amber, you extract that DNA, you run it through these sequencing machines, and it gives you those letters. Right? Like what mister b... DNA tells you. It gives you this, like, twisted... It tells you the letters or the g n a... DNA code of that animal. But the problem is ancient DNA is very fragmented. It's very old. It's very degraded. So you gotta do lots of sampling, and it's destructive sampling, you gotta be careful with these old specimens. And then you've gotta ensure that you do and get enough passes of the DNA that you have enough that you can then piece together it so that you know enough about the animal that then you can start, looking at, what its closest living relatives is. And then you have to do the exact same thing with the, closest living relative, and then you start to compare it all. So once you start to compare it at all, you start to see what genes, are consistent. So a dire wolf is 99.5% a gray wolf. Most people didn't realize... So some of the negative feedback we got because people didn't do the math was that we have two direwolf samples. One that's 73,000 years old and and, one that's, 13,000 years old. And there's there's more genetic diversity and drift in my two direwolf samples than there is from my second direwolf sample and today with wolves. So Wow. Yeah. And so and so so we...