Cloning Woolly Mammoths Is Cool. Can It Be Profitable?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Compound interest from Semafor Business. Uh a show [music] where we talk about how business and finance are changing in these gigantic ways. I am Liz Hoffman, Semafor's business and finance editor, [music] and joined by my colleague Ron Insana here on >> it's been kind of a crazy week for both of us, hasn't it? Well, there is a war on and [music] markets are doing what markets do. And uh you know, we thought about steering straight into the skid and and doing like a supermarket oil thing this week and actually [music] we decided for a little escapism. Yeah. We are talking to Ben Lamm, who is the CEO of the company that I am obsessed with, I will say right up front.

[00:00:35]>> [music] >> Um it's called Colossal and to the extent you've ever heard of them, you have heard that they are the ones who are trying [music] to de-extinct the woolly mammoth, to bring back the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf and like Tasmanian devils and the dodo um and all these extinct animals. It is sort of both dystopian and cool and I don't know, should I ask how old you were when Jurassic Park came out? I shouldn't, right?

[00:00:58]>> You shouldn't uh because this is what [laughter] just makes you This is this is a tried and tested pattern we fall into where you ask me these things and you regret the answer. I will say uh it was refreshing for me having known you for almost 2 years now to find out that you do have nerdy hobbies that aren't just finance, they also include biohacking. I'm an equal opportunity nerd.

[00:01:14]>> You are and I love that about you. But when you told me about this guy, I was kind of like, wait a hang on a second, who? What? Why? Um but they're doing some really crazy stuff and as it turns out, there's money to be made here, maybe.

[00:01:25]>> Well, that's I mean, that's exactly what we want to ask him, right? Like neither of us are are science reporters and and I don't think either of us are like deep moral ethicists about about genetic programming, but um I have strong opinions on that issue.

[00:01:35]>> I will get to we'll get to them in the wrap, but I think, you know, like, you know, because my my take is that bringing back the woolly mammoth sounds cool, can it be profitable? And um you know, we spend time on this show talking to people with a lot of different kinds of business models and sort of comparing and contrasting the cool direct-to-consumer thing that you might be trying to do for Built that was like the the rent arcade. You know, for these guys, it's obviously presumably come meet a woolly mammoth, but there are, you know, huge enterprise >> Park approach to this.

[00:02:06]>> Wrapped into this, you know, they have a they spun out an uh a biobank, they've got an AI model, obviously, as one does these days. Um there is, I think, a a business line to service veterinarians. Um you know, which is people do love their pets and maybe clone Tom Brady's I remember this headline. Yeah, this is when I first But can I ask you like just a broader business question while we're talking about direct-to-consumer? Like that model's just dead, right? Even Ankur, the CEO of Built, when we were like, you're a consumer company, went out of his way to explain all the ways that he wasn't. See, companies don't want to be consumer companies anymore, it feels like.

[00:02:39]>> Yeah, and you know, we started this podcast with Dara at Uber who, you know, they have done the thing and and become a consumer verb, but he his for him, clearly, the future is in sort of being a demand aggregator and a platform and and a service provider for all these robo taxis that are going to need to be cleaned and washed. You know, I think that was a big lesson of the 2010s VC era where where Silicon Valley funded just, you know, huge numbers of these direct-to-consumer companies.

[00:03:04]>> Subsidized. Subsidized. Um and that as always, like, the money is really there to be made in the boring uh business-to-business, the B2B economy.

[00:03:13]And so actually, that's kind of what I want to pressure test Ben on a little bit is, yes, this thing you're doing is cool, it's going to get you a lot of headlines, but like where's the money?

[00:03:21]And this is the actually the other weirdly enough, not to make it about everything but our guest who we are obviously excited about, but this is the other tension in the AI race, which is Anthropic is generally more B2B, whereas OpenAI, fairly or unfairly, has this rap as a B2C company, right? Most of its revenue comes from consumers and they're trying really hard to break away from that reputation and index more towards, as you said, where the money is, right?

[00:03:42]The companies, the enterprises. Yeah, like ChatGPT's whole thing is 10% of the world uses us every month or some astronomical number like that, but there's a lot of them are people like me who've never given them a dollar of revenue, whereas you say Anthropic has um you know, has this whole army of forward-deployed engineers that's going into big banks and insurance companies and healthcare companies and like helping them actually make their software better and making money that way. So, I don't know what the I don't know what the forward-deployed engineer woolly mammoth de-extinction is, but I guess we'll find out.

[00:04:11]>> I would not honestly want that job. If we are going full Jurassic Park, I haven't seen that movie in a long time.

[00:04:16]I know enough to know I don't want to set foot in that thing. We will find out. I actually think Ben's waiting for us, so let's go let him in.

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[00:04:56]Welcome to the show, Ben. Thank you for for joining us.

[00:05:00]Let's like start to the extent people have heard of Colossal, it's probably come across their feed as a guy's trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And in fact, I think that is what your job is on LinkedIn. So, tell us, what is this company? How did you get this idea?

[00:05:11]Where are you headed? And then we'll dig into all that.

[00:05:14]>> So, this is really George Church's idea.

[00:05:15]So, if you really love it, you can say we're code matters. If you hate it, let's just blame George for everything.

[00:05:21]Um but uh you know, we're we're going to lose up to 50% of biodiversity in the next 25 years and I'd built and sold a handful of software uh companies and tech companies over the years and met George Church, who's the If you don't know George, he's like he works at Harvard, he's the father of synthetic biology. And um he had this vision of we could bring back extinct species and build a systems model to help existing species and oh, by the way, a lot of that could be applicable to like, you know, human health care and longevity.

[00:05:51]So, it seemed interesting, it seemed like it could be something that could feed my ADD and, you know, I'm a newer father, so the idea that uh you know, we could do something that also do it in a fun way that gets kids excited about science, but also aware of the problems facing our planet was interesting, right? It I we could do it in a way that wasn't preaching doom and gloom and got people back to the like old-school science fair days. So, I don't know, it it seemed like, you know, uh given that I have zero background [laughter] in biology, it seemed like a perfect terribly wrong in some Jurassic Park way that we'll talk about in a bit, I'm sure people will know that you you do not actually have a background in biology. I was a software guy. Like, why are you blaming the software guy? Blame the biologist.

[00:06:28]>> your guy.

[00:06:29]guy dabbling in uh an extinct species.

[00:06:31]But let me ask Okay, so what have you what have you brought back? What's in the pipeline?

[00:06:35]>> publicly announced uh that we're working on the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo and then the, you know, legendary moa uh in partnership actually with both the Ngāi Tahu people and Peter Sir Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings fame in in New Zealand. Um and uh and so those are projects that we've announced that we're working on. There may or may not be some more secrets in there. I think I did buttonhole you at Davos, which is a terribly obnoxious sentence to say, and ask if you if you could put the Carolina parakeet on your list, which I think is like truly one of the worst things >> Wait, wait, wait, hang on. Why the parakeet, Liz? What what? It's a lovely bird and we we shotgunned it into to oblivion about 100 years ago and that was sad. It's a beautiful bird. It's like it looks like a Caribbean or like exotic Australian parrot. You're like, wait, this existed here? Oh, it is really beautiful. Wow.

[00:07:22]>> We're not working on it. Okay. Uh I'd love to work on it. Uh we did we shot a video with Mr. Beast um uh a couple months ago and and, you know, Jimmy's from North Carolina. I was like, we should work on this I got to So, I'm seeing him in like a a month or so and I'm going to I'm going to bring it up. So, maybe we're not working on maybe we could work on it. Uh it'd be fun. I'll take it.

[00:07:41]>> So, there might be some more surprise and delights. We did surprise and delight and also make some people mad with the dire wolves last year, so we we did get a 73,000-year-old skull and a 12,000-year-old tooth and made puppies, um uh which is amazing. The the it's a species that's been extinct for, you know, uh 12,000 plus years, which is amazing. And then last year, we also showed the world uh uh technology demonstration of the woolly lice, which are objectively the cutest mice, I think, in the world. Um we named the first two Chip and Dale. It was it was amazing. It was it was funny. We when we broke the internet when we launched them, they were on Saturday Night Live, they were on Jimmy They were on everything, Jimmy And then but then I was sitting there at South by saying, man, people really responded to this mice.

[00:08:24]What are they going to think in a month when we tell them about these dire wolves? Well, and for our viewers who don't and haven't followed the controversy there, can you tease it out as much as you want to or are able to or on the dire wolves?

[00:08:35]>> through this like three-dimensional model, right? When we um make a a make a choice on an animal. And in the dire wolf was amazing, right? It was like, okay, we can build technology to help wolves. We can use our new cloning from invade non-invasive cloning technology with from from a blood to to make more red wolves, which is the most endangered wolf in the world. Uh people mostly think these are like mythical creatures from Game of Thrones, so we can bring all these people into science. Wolves are important for ecosystems, so we can educate people that wolves aren't the big bad wolves that are going to like blow down your house and eat Red Riding Hood. Um you like it's an American species or American like there was like check, check, check, check, check, check, right? It's like super cool. It's 12,000 years old. People thought they were closer related to jackals and so uh there's an opportunity to educate them that they weren't uh based on the data. So, we're like, oh, it's the perfect thing. And then we were like, okay, people are going to be scared of wolves, ranchers are going to think that we're going to release them back in the wild and they're going to kill cattle.

[00:09:33]The controversy was two things. One, we launch it, nobody says anything about that, right? Uh you know, at all. Like all the things that were like, well, that's weird. Uh giant Pleistocene predator, no one cares. Um and so uh so so so one, the the fumbled the ball on the 1-yard line on launch because we were trying to be really thoughtful about launch. We had met magazine break the embargo in print by the way and online. That is an that is an analog media screw up, yeah.

[00:10:03]>> Yeah, wow. No, no, it wasn't a screw up.

[00:10:05]They literally said, "Story is too big."

[00:10:07]They were mad because we were transparent and said, "Hey, we gave seven people the story. We didn't give 100 people the story. We gave seven people the story."

[00:10:14]Uh and uh they were very mad. New York was very mad. They take a view that they don't write very many stories about the same company. So, they're like, "Sure, let's do it." So, uh yeah, Toy broke the embargo, totally screwed us over.

[00:10:24]Like I had to call like the CEO of Time magazine. They gave us the cover of Time. Joe Rogan held his podcast. And Joe doesn't do that, right? Uh our scientific paper proving that dire wolves were closer related to wolves than jackals like wasn't lot. And then about 15% of the uh academic data guy, right? So, I look at numbers. And about 15% of uh of a subset of the academic community wanted to just argue speciation definition. And if you don't know, it's dumb. There's about 35 ways to define a species. And they all contradict each other because that's a human construct that we try to put on there. And so, people wanted to argue that they weren't dire wolves. We're like, "Okay, then don't call them dire wolves." And then they got mad at us for >> This was the whole gray wolves conversation.

[00:11:05]>> "But they're genetically modified gray wolves." I was like, "But do you understand that dire wolves were genetically modified gray wolves?" They It just happened slowly and we were pretty efficient at it, right? And and I was like and then that I got people got mad at me cuz I was like, "You're probably the guys that like tell your kids Jurassic Park is a movie about hubris and not dinosaurs." And then dude got mad at me for making that comment, but it's true. And it's like So, then I took the the stance that if you want to tell your kids that Jurassic Park's about hubris or genetically modified frog birds, you should do that.

[00:11:36]But if you just want to tell your kids are about dinosaurs and take them to see a fun movie, you could do that, too. And the the the unwillingness for me to accept or cat cave to a small subset of the populations perspective on it made them very angry at me. How do you decide which species to save and in what order? It sounds like there's a checklist, but a lot of that checklist was basically, "Do you guys think it's cool?"

[00:12:00]>> it has to go beyond cool, right? Like, you know, >> Okay. Like some things are cool I don't think we should do, but like >> Like what? Like well, I mean, we don't we can't make a T-Rex because there's no dino DNA, but like I think that's really cool. Not sure if that's a good idea.

[00:12:13]>> If you can bring something back, specifically something that we eradicated, that's interesting and helpful. If you can do it scientifically, that's interesting. If the technologies then could be applied to conservation and you can directly one-to-one show the positive impact for something that is, you know, critically endangered today, we think that's interesting. When we when we did the dire wolf, we actually met with a lot of indigenous people groups on some other projects that we're doing for um conservation.

[00:12:41]Most people don't realize this. We actually have more conservation projects than de-extinction projects. So, in that, there were several uh uh tribal leaders that I told us that, you know, they thought that the great wolf was the dire wolf. It was this larger white wolf in their mythology. And they thought if we did that, that'd be an incredible thing for their people. One of them is actually currently talking to us and the government about saying could they rewild them back on their public on their private, you know, sovereign land.

[00:13:07]Yeah, no, I I I am in the minority of people that thought they were made up um from Game of Thrones. So, yeah.

[00:13:12]>> from the cast I'm not going to out anybody, but there's people that are involved with our business that uh from the cast of Game of Thrones that were like, "Wait, what?"

[00:13:21]>> Well, so so wait, who who in the cast thought they were made up? I'm not going to say that cuz that's mean. But I'll tell you who didn't. George R. R. Martin did know they were dire wolves. He knew exactly everything about them. So, he was very knowledgeable on the topic. And he cried when I started to tell him.

[00:13:35]We've talked about the science. This is you have tripped uh into a business and finance podcast. So, so I I Bringing back extinct species is I think very cool. Some people might say very dystopian, dangerous, whatever. Is it profitable? What is your business plan here? It it's insanely profitable, right? We're not profitable today, but but but the path to profitability is ludicrous for us. The technologies that we're developing uh do two things, right? Um One, the end-to-end systems model that allows you to make woolly mammoths can also directly be applied to making like drought-resistant animals or disease-resistant plants or microbes that eat plastics, okay? So, so the same engine cuz it's a systems model that you have to build to create this allows you to build other things. We spun out four companies from Colossal.

[00:14:25]Um uh one's still in stealth. Um but it's valued over $100 million. Uh our our computational biology platform for uh human for drug discovery is valued over $100 million. And uh our breaking our plastic degradation company is, you know, over valued over $100 million. So, so and then we have a a one that we spun out recently. They're going to spin out the last time I'm talking about that's valued at, you know, uh they just did to raise it to $2 billion valuation. So, so the technologies that's been out of Colossal from the systems is very interesting. Um In addition to that, the individual pieces uh are directly licensable themselves.

[00:15:03]So, so think of this is like uh genome engineering. A lot of people are getting excited about doing a couple of edits. We're doing hundreds of edits.

[00:15:12]Most people's efficiency in this category is about 30 to 40% if they're lucky.

[00:15:16]We're at 90% efficiency. Working with ancient DNA and ancestral state reconstructions is significantly harder than working with like fresh blood from a mouse. So, so we're building much harder technologies which have tremendous value uh as it relates to to um uh health care, right? Another component of it, which is interesting, is we are a large data source of non-model species data, right? So, if you look at the GLP-1 craze, that came from the Gila monster, right? So, it came from this little venomous lizard.

[00:15:46]And in studying it allowed you to have breakthroughs. Well, we have the largest data set in the world on elephants. And um elephants don't get cancer uh at the same rate as uh humans or what what they should, mostly cuz of an overexpression of this protein called P53. And so, does that mean Colossal's going to go make drugs for humans? No, but given the access to computing AI and some of our partners, we are working with them to leverage our data sets to then go apply those to some of the large LLMs and others that then could be applied to license out to health care, right? So, so we have a data set model. Then uh we have a country-specific model, right?

[00:16:26]So, we're working with countries to solve really hard problems using genetic rescue, uh cryopreservation, um and whatnot that also are uh cost savings for the country, but pretty um massive when it comes to revenue opportunities.

[00:16:43]Can you give us an example of that?

[00:16:45]Yeah, we just did a nine-figure deal with the UAE um around our biovault infrastructure. So, uh helping them build a strategy to manage biodiversity.

[00:16:54]We built a a a system that we haven't shown out yeah, publicly. Um that that allows us to build effectively like a biodiversity credit score for a country and prediction rates on extinction and what the cascading economic impact on that is. And and so, it's kind of like think of like your country's like biodiversity credit score and then how are ways to mitigate that and then what the return on investment are. And there's certain countries, including the US, that have spent tens of billions of dollars on things that haven't made any impact. And so, we're like, "How do we fix that?" And we think that that that is something that is highly and we're saying that's highly monetizable.

[00:17:35]It's funny. You're you're talking about a couple of interesting B2B business models. You have not um mentioned the two that I think most people would would I was going to say Jurassic Park, yeah.

[00:17:44]One is Jurassic Park and the other is cloning Tom Brady's dog forever. But but is that like people really love their pets? Like Javier Milei, the uh um president of Argentina, has like six of the same dog.

[00:17:53]>> ViaGen, which is the number one cloning company in the world. We didn't buy them for the consumer business. We are going to allow it to continue to operate. We love them. People love their pets. If you want to do do that, great. There are That business is profitable and growing. So, I guess yeah, we guess we do make money from that. I just don't think about that business often. We bought it because of our government business because I think that we will help governments productionize endangered species development is as a part of our core technology stack. There are governments that are spending eight and even nine figures on specific species that uh are that are still have genetic bottleneck, that are still They're they're just not a good use of money, right? And so, if we can come in at a fraction of that and leverage our technologies to produce uh higher genetic diversity and get to outcomes for recovery in country and charge for that and save the money that can then go to like education, schools, environmental remediation, whatever, that's a win for the country. That's also a win for us. So, that is kind of more of a B2G2C model. And then um we are not building Jurassic Park, but you know, we have a huge educate like, you know, there's we have half a trillion media impressions. There's, you know, uh tens of thousands of stories have been written about Colossal. And so, um we have a huge educational component.

[00:19:06]So, we will make money on educational curriculum. We will make money from online media uh of this. We always get asked if we sell our apparel cuz some people really like it. We don't. It's only for our friends and the and employees. It's like the coolest science streetwear that you can't buy. We're now working with like eight huge brands that want to bring like their brand into science, right? And so, yeah, so we will make money on consumers, but not in your traditional like zoo park model. We're not against those models, but we will make money on like eco-tourism, right?

[00:19:38]Like we will make money with government partners on the rewilding of species and, you know, letting people see them back in the wild like Kruger National Park and those types of things. But we won't make money on like the zooey type transaction like I never want to be in the you brought animals back, put them in zoos. And I'm not against zoos.

[00:19:57]People think that when I say this I'm against zoos. Zoos do a lot of good stuff for the world, at least the good ones do, but um it still feels transactional. I pay money, I see an elephant, right? Like it still feels transactional. I think there's better models to do that um that are consumer facing. And so we're not going to not do consumer, it's just not our highest priority. I would personally like to hear more about Jurassic Park, but we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more from [music] Ben.

[00:20:24]Welcome to What's Working, the show within a show featuring Compound Interest season partner Amazon Business.

[00:20:30]I'm your host Rachel Oppenheim, Semaphore CRO, joined by Amazon Business's VP of Technology Doug Gray.

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[00:21:44]>> [music] >> Is there a securitizable product here? I think I think it is the question that Liz and I would both like the answer to.

[00:21:50]Yeah, there is. There is. I I I think that there's a world Yeah, I I I do. I think that there's worlds where carbon credits and biodiversity credits merge into uh nature credits. You see Lloyd's of London, TPG, others kind of like thinking about this. It's you know, it like look, if crypto's a thing, which it is, >> [laughter] >> which is not real, uh imagine crypto-like infrastructure on stuff that's truly measurable and actually real. On the cloning front though, I mean, I don't know if you ever saw or read Altered Carbon, but that franchise has always fascinated me. Is is what you're doing theoretically applicable or And for those who don't know, the premise is basically a bunch of super rich people who can detach their consciousness from their body, clone their body, and continue to live forever. We haven't figured out the whole stacks part of it, the consciousness part of it, but do you see a world where your technology is going to be used by really super rich people to if not live longer than even clone themselves wholesale?

[00:22:50]>> So, we do not do anything with humans, right? Uh but we will license out and spin out technologies that do apply to humans. Some of the work that we spun out for Astromek, which we just raised capital at a at a $2 billion valuation, has direct applications to humans. Two examples, birds, right? Like birds have a better immune system, but they have certain things like bird flu that people are freaking out about bird flu and they think about jumping from a zoonotic disease perspective. If we can understand and do predictive analysis and then even map that cross species, that's very interesting for predictions of of what evolved and why and how it is evolutionary what we might prioritize in the tree stack. This seems like a more elegant way of like listening to biology. And I think it could go into vaccine design, uh antimicrobial resistance, livestock disease. I think there's a lot of applications to it.

[00:23:48]Like it's instead like like drug discovery ask like what target should we hit? We want to ask like what target should we hit that biology hasn't evolved around and why hasn't it evolved around. So, going back to your question, I love open source software, so I I would prefer to think that our technologies will not be applicable only to the super rich. I think our technologies will be leveraged to democratize really hard things like gene therapies for the masses. Why do you think Silicon Valley is so obsessed with living forever?

[00:24:19]>> Well, it sounds interesting. Like I mean, I like life's pretty cool. I don't know if I'd want to live forever on this plane of existence, but I would live I would love to live a lot longer cuz I think there's a lot of really interesting things to do here. You can't see and do everything on Earth in one, you know, 120-year lifespan, so like I think that's interesting. Yeah. I believe there's much more beyond this, so therefore like I I personally don't want to live in this plane forever, but Yeah, there's a lot of to do in this plane, right? I health span and lifespan extension seems really interesting to me. But I think it's personal choice, right? It's like if you have the personal choice to live a thousand years and it doesn't hurt anybody, like why not do that? You know, we never got a Dolly the Sheep movie in the '90s, but I feel like there's a bunch of media executives who who kind of think that was a missed opportunity. But you're going to maybe get a woolly mammoth and you don't want to put it in in like an eco zoo. We're going to have Ice Age, but with like whatever woolly mammoth >> making a movie with Peter Jackson, right? Um we're doing it because um for him, bringing back the Moa is important to him as as a Kiwi. We need to go get permission from the government. We need to get permission from the Maori people.

[00:28:13]So, having someone like Peter that can come in and help with all of that uh was massively strategic. You know, In-Q-Tel is an early investor um in Colossal and some of our other initiatives. Um we work very closely with governments around the world including um our government and the IC.

[00:28:30]Um and you know, I think that these technologies are very important uh for the world. Our last company was a defense business, so it shouldn't shock anyone that we have relationships that are uh are cross um administrations. Like we worked with the Biden administration. We worked with this administration. We'll work with the next administration. Um but yeah, In-Q-Tel I think they they put a blog post out. I don't want to speak on behalf of the IC, but they put a blog post out about, you know, the importance of uh the multicellular type work that we are doing and its impact um on a government level.

[00:29:03]If they said to you, "This technology we've decided is critical to national security for the next, you know, 10,000 years. You can't You can't do anything else with that outside the US."

[00:29:13]Uh is that a realistic thing that would happen?

[00:29:15]>> There are technologies that we have developed that uh we we don't work with uh um internationally.

[00:29:23]May have not made it into a press release or the website. Got it. But that presumably the government is using or wants to use or just doesn't want anyone else to get their hands on.

[00:29:33]Some combination. Can I ask related to just the government side of things? I mean, is there I realize that you have a beautiful, wonderful vision for for the impact of this, but you know, when I think about the other things that are trapped under the Arctic ice. I mean, scientists have talked about long-extinct or dormant viruses, right? I mean, is there a is there a bio-weapons angle here?

[00:29:55]>> are not doing offensive biotech engineering, but, you know, look, synthetic biology is a category it is one that is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. I believe we should take a American stance that this is an area like AI and like space that we should we should understand, we should lead in, and we should set examples in, right? Cuz I think one of the things that makes us different as Americans as versus some of our adversaries is what we're willing to not do.

[00:30:24]Are the applications of synthetic biology technologies and tools, including you know, computational analysis and AI, predictive modeling, and genome engineering applicable to weapon systems? Yes. Like, anybody that tells you no is they're uninformed or lying.

[00:30:43]We are not working on those things. That doesn't mean our adversaries are, but understanding capability set, I think is as important as developing capability set.

[00:30:53]In that vein, I mean, you've talked about dozens of different arms. You're a software guy, I mean, you think in this language. What's the TAM on on the various areas that you operate in?

[00:31:02]>> The TAM for uh uh de-extinction is $1.7 trillion.

[00:31:10]The TAM for de-extinction plus species preservation is unmeasurable. What is What is the value of protecting, enabling, and being able to do directed evolution on vertebrate and invertebrate life on Earth excluding plants? How did you get to that 1.7 trillion?

[00:31:31]>> We had some theses that we worked with some of the big consulting firms, and the second question they couldn't answer was what is the balance sheet value of >> I assume then you didn't hire McKinsey because McKinsey would have come back with some ridiculous large number.

[00:31:43]>> you know, I don't hire McKinsey, no offense McKinsey, [laughter] but they'll just write down whatever number you tell them.

[00:31:49]We hired uh uh your more traditional um uh uh uh accounting nerds.

[00:31:57]Hundreds of species go extinct every day, thousands every year. How do you actually like make a dent in that number when the odds seem really overwhelmingly against you guys?

[00:32:05]>> Yeah, I I think you do it three ways. I think one, you have to prioritize, right? Like, Colossal's not going to build a de-extinction model for every species, but we could focus on the biggest keystone species, number one.

[00:32:15]Number two is you we have to uh educate and um and get governments excited about their own biodiversity and the importance of it, which I think our system is currently doing. Uh with the info with about 12 governments we're we're working with. And then third, this is the like, you know, you can, you know, fish or teach someone to fish, like, enable other people to use the technologies for conservation for free. Like, Colossal is not going to save all elephants in the world. But we can prioritize the the problem. So, if if you look at elephants as a keystone species and you say what are the three reasons why elephants go extinct, well, you have the list, right?

[00:32:53]It's first EEHV. Actually, it's actually a virus kills about 20% of baby elephants a year.

[00:32:59]Don't know what the TAM on curing that is, but you should do it.

[00:33:03]We have a vaccine that's being tested right now in elephants that is conferring complete resistance to most deadly form of EEHV. So, just that vaccine at scale will save more elephants than all elephant conservation combined that's ever happened and most likely ever will happen just based on like mathematical probabilities. I don't know where the direwolf was like originally from, but the Tasmanian tiger talking about elephants in Africa. It's the 250th birthday of America. Is there is there some project You talked a little bit about the Carolina parakeet, but like, I don't know, the Eastern mountain lion, passenger pigeon, a lot a lot of things that we've we used to have that we don't have.

[00:33:40]Listen, there's so many extinct species.

[00:33:42]I'm a nerd. Bringing back the passenger pigeon is just a weird project in my mind because you then put you what to make them work, for them to really solve the ecological niche, you need billions of them. You think the Eastern seaboard's going to be cool with a billion of pigeons? Like, you we have to be realistic about like how we also live in concert with nature.

[00:34:02]So, yeah.

[00:34:04]All right, Eastern mountain lion?

[00:34:06]We're not working on it, but it's interesting. I mean, there there was an American lion, it's kind of cool. We're also not working >> There was an American lion, yeah. If America wants us to do it, you know, we're happy to to do it.

[00:34:17]You know, there we have other countries that have animals that are ecological and also more probably culturally important to them that they approached us about, so we we'll probably layer on some of those that are helpful. But yeah, we would do we would do something fun for America 250, so if anyone in Fish and Wildlife or Interior calls me, we'll we'll do it for them.

[00:34:36]Well, this actually is a question I wanted to ask you, which is like, yes, okay, so half of it is in the lab, but then you're also like building artificial wombs, which I presume are massive.

[00:34:44]>> we're working on artificial wombs. We have three artificial womb projects, not just one. We work but we also are working with indigenous people groups and conservation groups and ecologists for modeling. We're working with uh uh kind of next gen nature and finance people thinking about like long-term carbon and biodiversity. Nature credits.

[00:35:04]Now you're Now you're speaking our language.

[00:35:07]All right, Rohan, this is this is your moment. What I mean, I there is so Okay, fine.

[00:35:11]I saw George R.R. Martin's on the cap table. I got to ask cuz he told me when Winds of Winter is coming cuz it's it's killing me, man. It is just killing me.

[00:35:19]>> I I talked to George uh last Friday. We're just We hadn't talked in a while. It was We were just personally catching up on some Not not business, just tying up personal stuff.

[00:35:27]So, um I do not um uh I do not have a I do not know a date.

[00:35:33]It's fine. Pass on my my love and admiration.

[00:35:35]>> Well, that feels like a good place to leave it. Ben, thanks so much. This was a blast. Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:35:39]Thanks, Ben.

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[00:36:10]>> [music] >> Well, that was fun, Rohan. What do you think?

[00:36:14]That was great. I'm surprised that I asked the question about securitized products and not you. I thought that'd be your first one, honestly. I'm trying not to get pigeonholed. I'm I'm a woman of the world.

[00:36:22]>> on. But uh but no, I mean, you know, I've I've heard Ben talk a a bunch about the science, and obviously that's that's fun to hear, but um you know, he has like a real business plan, and and it's interesting like, you know, you and I on this show so far have sort of poked and prodded at people's business models, and I think of like my point of view on the world at least is that like a lot of companies, particularly startups, want to do buzzy direct-to-consumer things, but actually the most valuable business they have inside them is some is some B2B or some some proprietary data, and that's clearly where his mind is. Sadly, no Jurassic Park, it doesn't doesn't sound like, but some what is it, systems model for drug discovery? That'll make money there.

[00:37:00]>> he didn't rule out the idea that like a government Like, I could totally see once NEOM gets back on track, MBS going, you know, I want a Jurassic Park in the desert. Colossal, help me build it out.

[00:37:09]Like, that's not He didn't preclude that possibility. But to your point, it's also rare to see startup founders discover moonshots along the way as they're building their main thing and have the knowledge to be like, spin that guy out, we're not focused on that.

[00:37:22]Like, even he's he's doing all these things and he thinks he has this crazy market opportunity, which he may very well have, um he's not afraid to like hive off adjacent businesses and make them part of like a network, it seems like, but stay very focused on like their thing.

[00:37:35]>> Just to do the math for people, they've raised about $600 million. They are worth about $10 billion. They've spun off four companies. I think he said three of which are worth about $100 million, and which is worth $2 billion.

[00:37:46]So, you know, that's taking $400 million of capital and turning it into 13 or 14 billion dollars of of at least, you know, paper value. Yeah. Um Yeah, you know, I thought one thing was interesting, you know, when he was he was saying that they're they're getting some heat from the scientific community, and he says, well, look, I don't want to there's plenty of PhDs out there who write who write papers for Nature and and Science. You know, but I I do think that that is a tension that a lot of the tech community, you know, as we talked with David at Andreessen Horowitz about, as they move into fields that have been dominated for a long time by people who think they know what they're doing in it. There is sort of that tension, and it it was fun to see him kind of take it straight on. And to remind us that he does actually have a lot of scientists there.

[00:38:26]>> He has a ton of scientists, and and he alluded at this with the the idea of like what your takeaway from Jurassic Park the movie is, right? Is it hubris or is it dinosaurs? And I think there has been unfairly or fairly a rap against Silicon Valley as almost deliberately contemptuous, but there are the rare cases, I think defense is obviously one, and it sounds like here, too, where the institutional dogma around doing things and building things is a real impediment to actually getting things done. The direwolf controversy which he talked about, sure, I mean, we can quibble about whether it's a genetically modified gray wolf or not, or we can go, hey, this is really cool, and millions of people who didn't care about this dead species now know what it is and know it's not just, you know, the Stark family mascot.

[00:39:03]>> a latecomer to Game of Thrones, and I fully thought that was a a made-up animal. What did he Yeah, what did he say you would if you want to tell your kids that Jurassic Park is a movie about hubris and not dinosaurs, you're free to. I suspect that when I when I watched Jurassic Park as a kid, I thought it was about dinosaurs, and you know, I think if I watched it today, I'd probably think it was about hubris. So, maybe there's like a little bit of um a little bit of perspective that that comes to that. But you know, a lot of what he's doing is you know, talking about gene editing and and CRISPR, which, you know, I think primarily primarily came out of the University of California at Berkeley, um was was sort of funded in the higher ed sphere, and there is this big discussion that our colleague, you know, Reed Albergotti has been writing a lot about, you know, where the line between sort of a government-funded Manhattan Project for these next-gen technologies, you know, should that happen at the government level, which is, you know, pulled a ton of money out of universities. Silicon Valley, as David told us, is happy to bear that risk for like weapon systems that do or don't work. So, I I do think that like in on again, I find it refreshing that after solving some slightly dumb consumer pain points for like 15 years, that venture is trying to solve these big problems.

[00:40:07]If it goes badly, I think we will >> say, "Well, of course they had they had no business being there." Like was was talking about this, right? Is um and it's not quite the the the C, but there's sort of been basically two business models for a bajillion years.

[00:40:20]One is one is B2C, one is B2B. And to hear um to hear Ben talk about B2G and B2G2C, obviously the G there being governments, um is really interesting. I mean, you put it so well in the first word the other day. What was it? It was uh the military-defense-industrial-financial complex. Yes.

[00:40:37]>> Right? Like the the these things are transmogrifying. And if if there will be like a really durable, I think, impact of this administration on finance, it'll be that government and finance and industry generally have become more enmeshed and closer together in a way that right now, early days, actually does kind of seem to be working and producing real things that are going to stay well beyond this administration or the next administration. But that you are a Gen Zer who pronounces finance like you are a boomer or Gen Xer. I do have three gray hairs. I will say that.

[00:41:07]If finance is a real like if you came up on Wall Street in like the '60s, '70s, '80s, you call it finance. If you came up in the '90s on, I think you call it finance. I'm I'm learning something about you.

[00:41:17]>> it on my old man. I mean, that's just that's just that's just a parental tick, I guess.

[00:41:20]>> 25 going on 40. It's really 25 going on 50, isn't it?

[00:41:24]With the ties. Well, that's it for us [music] this week. Thanks for listening to Compound Interest from Semafor Business, produced by the incredible Josh Billingson. Special thanks [music] to Anna Pacino, Katherine Gilgore, Claire Einstein, Rachel Oppenheim, Tory Cole, Valona Wang, Garrett Wylie, [music] Stephanie Chang, Michael Crichton, and Daniel Hayft. Our engineer is Bob Mallory.

[00:41:42]Our theme music [music] is by Steve Bone.

[00:41:44]>> you like Compound Interest, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want more Semafor Business, sign up for our twice-a-week newsletter in your inbox at [music] semafor.com.

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