Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:40:36 · Ben Lamm, Alexa von Tobel
And so and so so that was that that was the thing that, you know, I... You know, our animal care team told me that we would... If things were going healthily with their development, they would get to. But then there was that moment where I kind of experienced it firsthand. Was like, I don't think I'm ever gonna be in the preserve again. [00:40:57] S1: Yeah. You're like wild wolves, like, literally. [00:41:00] S2: Yeah. Like, this is this is a good... This has been great, and I love you guys, but I'm gonna I'm gonna respect you from my my distance. Right? And so, but that was something that that, you know, I I think that was both sides of of your question. [00:41:13] S1: When you think five to ten years out with what you're doing, what's the what's the end state? What's the end goal here? And, obviously, you've created an incredible AI infrastructure that cannot only code extinct animals, then create this bridge to the most, you know, similar living species. And then in it, I I heard you say, you know, synthetic wounds and all these incredible other things. But is... And so so what's the business model? And, like, what's the... What's your hope and dream been for what you're building five to ten years out?
00:41:47 · Ben Lamm
[00:41:47] S2: So I'll talk about the hope and dream and then we can talk business. But hope and dream, if we fast forward ten years out, I hope that we have a handful of species that we have brought back with enough engineered genetic diversity that they can successfully thrive and live and thrive on their own back in their natural habitat or something very close to it. Right? So so that that's data point one. The second thing that I think is equally important is I hope we we're seeing mass adoption much quicker than we thought with our technologies to conservation. But I hope that that a combination of those tools and technologies, including things like artificial wounds and bio banking all come together so that this de extinction toolkit that's super cool to bring back things like mammoths and thylacines, and hopefully even species like Steller's sea cow and others that we can't yet because we don't have waste ingesting them. I hope that same application is being applied in real time for endangered species. And, know, I don't... And once again, sometimes this is an unpopular opinion, I'm... I still am convicted about it regardless of whether it's it's it's popular or not. Like, while 99.9% of the world should be focusing on existing or slightly innovative new ways for conservation, there is 1%, which I think should be us, that is is developing some level of a fail safe. And if we can get to the point which we can take samples, engineering genetic diversity, and then use artificial wombs to grow a 100 Northern White Rhinos versus even having to use surrogates, right, from an animal welfare perspective, from a population growth perspective. You know, if we could help production... Use these tools to help productionize endangered species, well, then I think that we will get recovery of species much faster. And that's not to take away from the incredible work that current conservation has done for the last hundred years. It's just new tools to help augment the fight. Right? Because it is currently a losing fight. So a world where a little kid can see videos or go to, you know, Northern America or Alaska or wherever and see, you know, mammoths thriving back in their population and also see a... Those technologies being applied to create a more biodiverse world in Africa with Northern White Rhinos and those same technologies being applied to both.
00:44:18 · Ben Lamm, Alexa von Tobel
To me, that... That's kinda my, I think, in state for sure. [00:44:22] S1: Important question just because I I wanna better understand it. How do you make money? [00:44:27] S2: Right now, we don't. We're really gonna loosen it. And and [00:44:33] S1: I bet you could sell you could sell a lot of people wanting to see photos of these... Of of the gaming.
00:44:39 · Ben Lamm
[00:44:39] S2: We we get all kinds of stuff. Like, get... We... They're like, you know, we get everything to... Will you make me a dragon to can I buy direwolves? Can you make a pink direwolf for my kids? Like, from... So we get all kinds of... We get weird... We get lots of weird request. And and and so our our bit... I don't think we yet know every aspect of it, but we know kinda three parts of the business model. When we started out, was just technology innovation. Right? We spun out two businesses that we've announced publicly. One, FormBio being a computational biology platform. The second one breaking, which is breaking.com. It's a it's a plastic degradation company that's using a a super accelerated microbe that we genetically engineered using our tools and computational biology to break down the... Break the chemical bonds of plastic. So not making smaller plastics, but literally eviscerating plastic. And then... And everything we've thrown at it, it works, which is pretty cool. And then we have a third one we haven't announced yet. We'll announce hopefully next year. So we'll continue to spin out technologies. And then there is a huge opportunity to work with governments to rewild these species, get government subsidies, get carbon credits, Eden bonds. There's a huge... Like like, if you look at the carbon market and the biodiversity credits market and what will probably end up being evolved into nature credits. And now you've got people like PwC certification. You've got people like, know, TPG just raised like an $8,000,000,000 funder on this thesis. You've got you've got Lloyd's of London certifying it. So I think that you're seeing kinda like you've seen in crypto, a a maturation of trackability as it relates to improvement to land and improvement to carbon sequestration and methane suppression. So, you know, if we are successful in our efforts to... And successful in rewilding them, I think there's a lot of long term... The animals become long term annuities, which which is which is pretty interesting. And then the third is governments. Governments are coming to us even though we open source our technology, kinda like open source a lot of times. We will go to the open source providers and say, hey, we tried this. This is great, but we need you to solve this problem.
00:46:45 · Ben Lamm, Alexa von Tobel
And we're working with one government right now that wants to get to a certain number of species that are female for breedability, for captive breeding programs to save the species that's culturally important to them. And it's gonna take them about twenty three years. We can do it in three. It's gonna cost them a couple $100,000,000. We can do it for less than a $100,000,000. So we can save them money and also save them decades and also give them genetically engineered products that have additional genetic diversity engineered into them that we've taken from, you know, museums and other samples. Right? So so we've... And even some synthetic genetic engineering as as some genetic diversity. So so, these are the types of business models that are starting to evolve that we think is pretty interesting. [00:47:29] S1: Wow. That note... I... There's many different ways where it sounds like you can make money from, like, the the the core, DNA of the business, no pun intended. I have to ask this because I'm dying to ask this because I also grew up obsessed with woolly mammoths, which is a whole other story. But you're targeting the woolly mammoth for de extinction by 2028. Obviously, behind you is incredible numbers of really cool woolly mammoth, elements. Wow. Like, what what goes into that, and how do we make that happen?
00:48:01 · Ben Lamm, Alexa von Tobel
[00:48:01] S2: So we're so we're in the editing phase. Right? So so, in Chip and Dale, our woolly mice were a, some people mischaracterize it and said, oh, well, this is a good first step. It's really a validation step. Right? Because, like, we we didn't just start the mammoth. So we've done a a... We've gotten a lot of the ancient DNA through partners like Love Dalén and and others. We've done a lot. We... We've actually... We colossal had to go build genome for the African elephant, the Borneo elephant, the Asian elephant. Like, none of those existed, so we had to go build those reference genomes and open source does for the world. And then we've done the comparative genomics, and there's about 85 genes and probably multiple edits in a couple of the genes. So don't know the exact edit count yet, and and that that we're editing. And so we're in the editing phase. We created, stem cells from elephants, which is insanely hard. And now we're in the editing phase, and, we made edits to about 25 of the 85 targeted genes. And then we tested some of the cold tolerant phenotypes like, fat metabolism and then, coat color and woolly woolly... The texture and how it grows in a mouse model because it's twenty days of gestation versus twenty two months to verify if we're on the right track. We... What's what's incredible about that project is we did it in one month. And then one month later, we had woolly mice, which was amazing. So it shows that the system works really, really quickly. [00:49:24] S1: That super dumb question. Do you literally invent a new species with the woolly mice?