Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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?
00:49:29 · Ben Lamm
[00:49:29] S2: No. So so this goes... So that you asked the biggest critic question. Right? And and there's two. There's why don't you just focus on conservation? But that's an education thing that... You know, we have a we have a $50,000,000 foundation that we just donate people working on conservation, and then we open source all of our technologies for conservation. So I think of this as like a free research and development thing for conservation. The second one kinda goes to your Willie Mouse question. It's that there's about 30 different ways to classify a species. Speciation is a human construct. It's not something that nature invented. Right? And so you separate... You put a fork in a river of forks and it separates these two toads over some period of time. If there's different environmental pressures or different predation, different survival of the fittest, you're gonna have two different species. Right? And so some people will classify polar bears as the same species, even though a child will be like, well, that's a white Arctic adapted bear, and this is a brown bear that's not aquatic adapted. Yet they can interbreed and produce viable offsprings, and they do it all day long. And so there's our species definitions where if a species can interbreed, it's it's not... It should be the same species. But a child will tell you that a brown bear and a polar bear are not the same thing. And by the way, they are classified as two different species. So so, this... I don't think the woolly mouse... The way I think about it is I don't think the woolly mouse is a new species. Some people think it is and some people think it's not. Right? And so there's just... This is this human construct of how we lay... We we like to compartmentalize things and put things in boxes. That's how we as as as this this current evolution of hominids look at things and put things in box. And and and and so that... That's how we think about them. But, you know, what's what's what's interesting on the the direwolf stuff is that, you know, no one... You know, we had indigenous people groups, we had private landowners, we had, you know, the the the government which causes, you know, I thought it was a good thing to tell our government regardless of what party they're on, what we were doing. I thought that's a good responsible thing for me to do as the CEO.
00:51:48 · Ben Lamm
We got negative feedback on that, but the the biggest feedback that we got was, you know, 20% of the paleo community and the evolutionary biology community wanted to argue classification. But if you look at the phylogenetic tree of life, 99.9% of all of life is based on where it lived, when it lived, and its morphological state. Like, we don't have DNA for all of that. And so and so based on the morphological definition of species and the fact that we use the DNA from The US, we use a donor wolf from The US, so it kinda lives here. It it it met numerous of those... Of of the species definition, but but that's that's been the biggest... It's surprising to me, but that's been the biggest debate. You know? Every day we get this. I don't know why that's the debate. When every single day we get, like, parents sending in and teachers sending in stuff like this and like I got this couple weeks ago where like people like draw us, like make... Like they made this for us and they like write like, you know, multi page letters to us and it's like, okay, we're doing something right because we're helping species. We're building cool technologies that can help human healthcare, and then, you know, we're also inspiring kids, and I don't don't know how helpful to to conservation inspiring kids or to developing technologies for for for human health care. I don't know how how arguing what to call something, whether a woolly mouse is a new species or a dire wolf is a dire wolf or transgenic wolf, like, I don't know how that helps any of those causes. So Yeah. It We But those are those are the biggest that that
00:53:23 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:53:23] S1: that This was this was this was beautiful because we actually... First of all, those were also some really great pictures that get sent your way every day. That's pretty cool. You're creating the platform to help prepare us for extinction. And as we all know, like, we all live on one planet, and all Yeah. Every species is why the other species can evolve and live and thrive. And, no. I mean, you're pre preparing us, to be able to stay alive.