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23. Colossal Biosciences on the future of the wild
73 Plays15 days ago
Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company.
Matt James is Colossal Biosciences’ Chief Animal Officer and Executive Director of the Colossal Foundation
Stefano Daza Arango is Colossal’s Manager of Conservation Partnerships.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hey folks, Ken here.
Colossal Biosciences and Sensitive Information
00:00:20
Speaker
About a year ago, I had a podcast guest on and he leaked just a little bit too much information about Colossal and Colossal ah Biosciences, a de-extinction company. he got in touch with me and my little podcast and said, hey, can you remove this 10 seconds from your podcast? And I was happy to accommodate. And that was the start of something nice um because I had a nice little back and forth dialogue with them. was like, oh, would you be interested in coming on my podcast someday?
Dallas Visit and Podcast Invitation
00:00:49
Speaker
So it just happened that I got invited to speak at a high school in Dallas. And just this past April, 2026, went there.
00:00:59
Speaker
And I was like, oh, Dallas, Colossal's in Dallas. Should I make this happen? So I reached out and I said, hey, do you guys give press tours? And yes. And they said, oh, do you want to do a podcast interview in the studio? So I said, absolutely. So, um, Yeah, I had a wonderful visit. The the the ah facilities there are just mind-blowing. They've been designed to to blow donors, ah philanthropists, journalists' minds, and they've succeeded. I got to see things in there that just amaze me and that are secret and confidential, and they asked me not to share it, but just some new developments and that I think they'll be announcing soon.
00:01:44
Speaker
Everything about them really impressed me.
Interviews with Key Figures at Colossal
00:01:46
Speaker
So I spoke with three people while i was there, one of whom was Ben Lam. He is the CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences. I also spoke with Matt James. He's their chief animal officer and the executive director of the Colossal Foundation. And then Stefano Daza Arango, who also has a leadership position within the organization. so I had about 15 minutes with Ben, 30 minutes with Matt, and another 20 minutes or so with Stefano.
00:02:19
Speaker
ah Each guest brought their own personality and answers. I asked kind of some of the same questions, but I got different answers. So I'm just going to lay it all out here. And first, we're going to start with Ben.
The Future Wild and Nature's Future
00:02:32
Speaker
He's the CEO and co-founder. Thanks, y'all. Let me briefly tell you about a book I'm working on. Okay, great. It's called The Future Wild. Okay. I imagine the future of wilderness and nature in 100 years. Okay. I have nothing but an optimistic vision of that. Oh, my gosh. Thank God. So um just this past summer I walked across American Prairie, which you may have heard about. I know Sean Garrity is it's great on your yeah team.
00:03:03
Speaker
So I imagine huge landscape scale ecological projects, green infrastructure, lab grown food. I imagine all these things that are going to help nature. And of course I need to talk about the extinction. yeah so I want to do de-extinction and productionization of endangered species.
Synthetic Biology and De-extinction
00:03:22
Speaker
like I really believe that that while I'm very bullish on our de-extinction work,
00:03:28
Speaker
I think that the same technology suite, and we're already seeing this, like applying synthetic biology for lost biodiversity, cloning and artificial wombs in that tech stack together, I think can change like how we get to recovery of so many species.
00:03:48
Speaker
ah Cloning and artificial wombs. I heard you talk about that on Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah. that's what that that that That is our, um that that like like, I don't remember, i love the mass production models for d for six species that that we bring back. but But also, like, you know, I see a world where from a northern white rhino perspective, we are growing, you know,
00:04:11
Speaker
a hundred genetically modified northern white rhinos with engineered and synthetic biodiversity in them fully ex utero. And then the teams are really focusing on like rewilding them, animal husbandry, all of the things with the back in the wild, right? like That's the world that I truly see. I don't see us as a species getting to mass recovery without thinking about our critically endangered species, not just through kind of like conserving land and praying, but leveraging, you know,
00:04:48
Speaker
you know advanced manufacturing models to applying it to conservation. These people happen to rear all these rhinos. That sounds like a great job for the ones that AI is about to displace. Like I imagine a lot conservation jobs in the future. Is this in your pipeline at all? kind of Yeah. or The artificial wounds? Yeah. So we have a 17 person team working on artificial wounds now. Amazing. We don't have them.
00:05:10
Speaker
So it's great. you I've said this and and publicly. Artificial Womb still feels a little future sci-fi tech to me because we don't have it, right? The de-extinction stuff just doesn't, right? In terms of the things that you don't need an artificial womb for, like every species we've announced, right, and that we're working on. So it doesn't feel... The scaling edits and doing more and more interesting extinct species doesn't feel sci-fi to me anymore, right, based on where we are and where I know what like we haven't announced in terms of a capability set. But but mass production of endangered species and critically and extinct species through artificial looms still feels a little sci-fi for me. But we do have three projects. We have an avian project, a placental interface project, because you have to solve that. And then we have a, I shouldn't say non-placental mammal, because really that that kind of falls into more that like the platypus echidimatic model but but like um species placental types that require only a cameo like marsupials so we have a marsupial i think it's probably more accuracy a marsupial gestation device a placental a more standard placental mammal device and then a avian device gotcha okay
00:06:24
Speaker
let's Let's take a look into the future. Yeah. So 21, 26, you can go 22, 26. There's no limit as to how far you want to go. What does nature look like to you then? Do you have an optimistic vision? Because on your site, like the Center for Biodiversity, whatever they... Thank you.
00:06:41
Speaker
They take note of just how much yeah species loss we could have by 2050. Yeah, it's not good. It's not good. But do you have an
Technology in Solving Environmental Issues
00:06:49
Speaker
optimistic vision? I do. i do. but But I, like, i you know, I think that, um yes, and i and I do for two reasons. One, I do from a technology perspective. And two, i may I would argue from an awareness perspective, right? What's interesting and and I love, I'm so grateful that your your preface to this conversation is that you have an optimistic view because I do too. i' an I'm an eternal optimist, right? I really am. and And I view it as that if we can inspire the next generation around the technologies and or around the problems, but not do it in this 24 hour doom and gloom news cycle, I think it's highly likely that, that you know, it's it's the old adage of like teach a man to fish versus like fish for them, right? weak If we give them tools and give them hope,
00:07:35
Speaker
they will solve these problems, right? And so so that's that's kind of like my inspirational layers to it. But then the technology perspective of it, I'm very bullish on it because I truly believe that that we have the tools where if you fast forward, you know, 100 years, we will have a nature-based digital twin.
00:07:55
Speaker
So there's no way for us as as humans to not look. And I think that even Jeff Bezos recently, his company, is kind of talking about some of the ah world-based digital twin. I think he's thinking about it more for like a Project Prometheus. I think he's thinking about it more for like cities and defense and infrastructure. But I think we will have that in nature, right? and so Nature-based digital digital twin. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry. So...
00:08:21
Speaker
Do you know how digital twin is? Not really. Okay, that's fine. so so so so So think of it if like we have this physical building that we're in right now. yeah But imagine with all the cameras and NFC, near-air and near-field communication, and computer vision, and AI models, and we like there's like seven badge readers like just to get to my office, right? so like when you take all that data right you can build a living you can also do a quick scan of lidar you can build a digital version of this office and use computers and ai and camera and cameras and and even nfc type devices to understand i see what's going on. So so now extrapolate that nature. So if you have understand over time, look, looking at at things like satellite imaging of like the rainforest, right? And then you look at like economic policies in Brazil, and then you look at things like NOAA and different data sources, from space around kind of like climate patterns and whatnot over time you get enough data that you can build predictive models for it what everything from a policy perspective or a el nino will affect the rainforest of that and then you can extrapolate down like how that relates to biodiversity right now you've got to have people in the field with e-dna there's a lot that goes into it but i think that feeding that engine over the next hundred years we'll get very very good at it so so i think that with a real world digital twin of of ecosystems and um in biodiversity and the ability to then relevance rank which species you need for recovery whether that's for food security water security uh ecosystem collapse like with the the keystone species or even like heritage heritage and national pride like if america lost the bald eagle even if you couldn't make a a
00:10:18
Speaker
a direct case for its its requirement for the ecosystem, I think America would do everything in its power to bring back, those to to preserve and mass produce the the bald the eagle because it's a symbol of national pride.
Impact of Synthetic Biology on Conservation
00:10:30
Speaker
right And I think you have those country and cultural specific examples worldwide. So I think if you look at kind of the those nuanced inputs coupled with the digital twin, I think you can use that to those digital twin models to fuel relevance ranking prioritization of of endangered species production. And I think that a synthetic biology stack that we have, which is mostly humans and humans in the loop, but eventually would be offset by robotic process automation.
00:11:00
Speaker
cloning embryos based on a cell lines and in a biobank and taking them to term in artificial womb, they will actually require very little human involvement in 100 years. Amazing. That's really interesting to see how these tools can kind of scale up stuff and make things go quicker and all that.
00:11:17
Speaker
I'd like to encourage you to be playful in your vision of the future. Well, I think it's all positive and playful, right? Like robots growing stuff and laughs. That is playful. But what about in terms of, like, being out in the wild in nature? Like, do you envision free-roaming mammoth herds, the dodo? no i do the a great question. I do, I do. i think that that I think that all the species that, you know, sometimes people will think of Colossal as, oh, you get to the, like, when you have the dire wolves or when you have... the Dodo you're at the finish line is like we do that as the starting line, right? Like we're now working on more genetically diverse direwolves right now, right? And then how do we integrate those in the herds? And then where is their long term ecosystem impact in living and how do we track them with drones and collars like like the the work starts there and so in a hundred years you know all the species that we sure certainly work on we want integrated back into the wild someone said what does success look like for you with the Tasmanian tiger once and I said well when people to see it and say oh cool there's Tasmanian tiger in the wild
00:12:21
Speaker
And he's like, what does that mean? It's like, well, where it becomes almost a non mythical creature because of its ah successful reintroduction, where it's like seeing, you know, like seeing a cool animal, like seeing a deer or seeing an elephant, but it's not seeing this like one of one mythical creature because we've been so successful, not in just the genetic diversity engineering and the de-extinction, but also successful in the rewilding that it's just a part of the habitat. And so I see that. I see that in 100 years, all the species that were, I mean, there will be dodos in Mauritius and it will be cool and there'll be, at oh I'll remember 100 years ago, to the company that helped work on bringing these back, but they're just going there. Gotcha.
00:13:01
Speaker
Gotcha. Wonderful. um So I was looking at Colossal's website, and I saw some of the goals for bringing the mammoth back. and It's oftentimes framed in these kind of ecological or scientific terms like climate, biodiversity.
00:13:17
Speaker
there's less so less less as much about joy, wonder, enchantment, sublime. And I do get that from the tone of yeah when I talk to you So I'm I think that's been a big miss on our part, just so you know. So that's which when we make decisions at the company at the highest level, like if you go at the the highest level, like board governance level, part of tenants like obviously down like when you're working on the animals, you have animal. We have American Human, Human Global. We have animal ethics decision when you're working on these like, okay, we're not going to apply these technologies to humans. So we have different ethical standards boards that that kind of govern the decisions at this level. if you go to the very highest level, every decision we we want to make, we want to think about value creation for our shareholders. Right. So so value creation, we want to create impact. That's how why we're open sourcing these technologies for conservation, but also inspiration. Right. Like, you know, we have half a trillion media impressions, 78,000 stories we were and written about colossal.
00:14:11
Speaker
The vast majority of them have been positive or neutral. reporting but but if you ask even our most critical skeptics kids about us they love us right and they're the ones that are gonna inherit not just our problems but the choices of our solution sets to those problems that we start right so they're they're not just hand it's like tech debt right it's like you that's why Africa has been a been such an interesting mobile case because they didn't have legacy infrastructure so they can jump into mobile payments much faster than any other continent in the world And so it's the same thing here, right? They're going to inherit our tech debt in terms of the decisions of those things. And so we always think about like the excitement and the wonder and we've got celebrities and all these people that have like, I wish I could tell tell you we engineered it, but it just kind of organically happened. But like a lot of our current website, not so much our new website, but a lot of our current website doesn't focus as much to your point on the wonder, right? But like, yes, outside of the ecological impact, of reintroduction mammoths and implications of the technologies and the conservation benefits, a child seeing a mammoth will
Inspiration and Long-term Goals of Colossal
00:15:20
Speaker
be a sense of wonder.
00:15:21
Speaker
and And I do not think that we, I think we talk about it enough, even though it doesn't get represented enough, very little of the media actually talks about that side of it. But um it's definitely not in our, i think it's represented in the vibe of our culture. Very much so. But it's not represented in the words of the website. But that's changing in 2.0. Okay.
00:15:40
Speaker
okay Okay. And speaking of. It is a thoughtful observation. And speaking of kids. This is last question. Sure. Thank you. You mentioned kids, the next generation.
00:15:53
Speaker
I'm guessing we're about the same age, early 40s? 44. Okay. But I'm epigenetically 36, so may I but you i may beat you there. I don't know how ah young I am epigenetically, but anyways. Function health, go test it. Okay. um So
00:16:11
Speaker
it's not you or me who's really going to see the end point of of what you're doing here. And I view what you're doing here on the same level as the people who built the pyramids or a great cathedral. This is a multi-decade, perhaps multi-century thing. I said that on an investor call today, and I think I scared them.
00:16:30
Speaker
Is that right? Yeah, because I said, well, we're thinking about the next 200 years here. And they're like, that's a weird statement. Like, the the guy literally was massively put off by the statement. what is it like for you to not to to know you're not going to be able to see...
00:16:44
Speaker
what you're doing at its full amazing. I think that to your point, to your comment on joy and your comment on wonder, I think we already are seeing that. And I think that we will see that. And and i I said this also on a different call today. Once again, not sure how well it was received, but I said, i don't think that colossal,
00:17:07
Speaker
the scientific community, the conservation community, and the press and the global world at large, really none of us will be able to truly measure the impact of the dire wolves already. i'm not talking about I'm not talking about our success, hopefully in artificial wombs, robotic process automation, any of the stuff that that we talked about a little bit here today, dodos back in the wild, just the dire wolves. I think the impact that we have had is unmeasurable. I do not think the world is the same.
00:17:37
Speaker
after the dire wolves. I'm not saying that it's like vastly changed, like, you know, if Trump and everyone shows his aliens tomorrow, right? But at the end of the day, i do think that that people saw that. And I think people's aperture for what is possible grew.
00:17:54
Speaker
Maybe, did it grow 1% or 50%? I don't think that's measurable, but I don't think that we have an understanding. And and ah one real world example to that is...
00:18:06
Speaker
is the week after the dire wolves, I had a handful of investors call me and that are investors in Colossal and said, we have been trying to get this synthetic bio, not Colossal, this other synthetic biology deal done for two years.
00:18:20
Speaker
I got that and two other deals done this week. wow And so so I know just in that small microcosm that a handful of investors got 10 plus, there's 10 plus synthetic biology companies that exist on earth today. i don't know what they're gonna do. i don't even know what they are, but i don't know, cureate who knows what they're gonna right? um but But because of that, and that's just what I saw and could measure. And so going to your quiet back to your question, I think that that you know while we will not see the end fruits of of the labor, right? I think that we will see the trajectory.
00:18:52
Speaker
Gotcha. One quick rapid fire question. for um A crowning achievement that I know you've already had one, maybe several. Yeah. But what's the one big one that you want to see? What would be the equivalent of a moon landing in regards to de-extinction or some of the other side projects you have going on Um, so I think the one we've already had is like taking a 73,000 year old skull and making puppies. Like, I think that's a big pretty big one. But, um, I, I think that, um, to, to, I'll give you two. I think successfully birthing, uh, one of each of the animal clades so not just the mammoth right but but having having the dodo or the moa having the thylacine so having those uh i'm going to group them all as one unfortunately and then the second is doing all of that fully ex utero in the end-to-end system okay amazing yeah interview with ben dunn next up is matt james colossal's chief animal officer
00:19:56
Speaker
what what compelled What compelled you to be ah part of a ah de-extinction or organization? Is it the moral responsibility of bringing back these long-gone species? Is it to enhance ecosystems? Is it to be a part of something historic?
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's probably some mixture of all those things and more, right? So before I joined Colossal, i was working in non-profit zoo-based conservation organizations trying to find solutions for the extinction crisis. How can we, in in the the zoo world, we we're creating sort of these populations in human care that were like Noah's Ark assurance populations against extinction in the wild. How can you kind of propagate the world's most endangered species to ensure sustainability?
00:20:41
Speaker
But after 15 years in that field, it really felt like we weren't... hitting this, we weren't addressing the scale of the problem. we We weren't having the impact that I really saw. So I think this offered, this the really ambitious vision of Colossal offered an opportunity to scale up that impact in a really interesting way and then to bring new solutions to an old problem.
00:21:03
Speaker
So it was really attractive, but Obviously, I think there's still a lot of fun in being part of something new and exciting and growing a company. And when I joined, I think we were like 15 of us. So to be able to be part of the growth and everything and be early on at a startup is also a really exciting thing to do. So, yeah, it was, I think sort of the the the, that moonshot ambition is really attractive to work at because you can help address a problem while also getting to go on a hell of a ride.
00:21:32
Speaker
It sounds really exciting to be a part of something so big and potentially historic. Well, it already seems historic. um I'm wondering what kind of kid you were and what kind of relationship you had with the natural world because you spent your whole adult life working
Personal Influences and Nature Connection
00:21:48
Speaker
with animals. There must be something there deep in childhood.
00:21:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of it probably goes back to the, the, the environment I grew up in. So both my parents were in the army, which meant we moved a lot. Right. I was born overseas. I lived in Germany for several years. We were moving every three years, basically. And when you do that, you don't get to develop sort of like those foundational relation childhood relationships, right? Like I don't have, oh, this is a guy I went to second grade with and I've known him ever since then, right? I never had that in my life. But the one consistent across all all of that change every three years was the way that I could go and engage with nature, the way that I could engage with animals. And so I i think that's really where I found sort of that steadiness was it was in that that. That felt much more steady and interesting to me. um
00:22:36
Speaker
So later on in life when I grew up, or you know i was in high school trying to figure out what I was gonna do with my life one day when I was going to go to college and it was really focused on animals, was always animals. And as a kid think your your parents hear animals say, oh you're gonna be a veterinarian.
00:22:54
Speaker
And so like in high school I i tried that out, right? I went to work at a vet clinic and I did some things and I just thought well this is just sort of more client service than it is animal focus. So I was always trying to find something new, a new way for me to engage with animals and nature. And that led me to a ecology.
00:23:13
Speaker
And so seeing animals out in the wild, how they engage with their environment, how humans impact the ecology was really interesting. And I had an opportunity after after undergrad to go to grad school study marine science. And it just sort of took off from there. So it was you know really fortunate that I had that kind of unsteady upbringing of being a military brat because I think it it made room in my life for me to go and find things outside of human relationships.
00:23:39
Speaker
Did you pay any attention to the animals of the Pleistocene? or no that No, I was like, yeah, I was not a, like a paleontology nerd. I wasn't really focused on, you every kid has some fascination with dinosaurs. I was whatever like 10 years old when Jurassic Park came out. yeah So those things were obviously in your mind, but I never thought about, oh, I want to go study like, paleontology or extinct species, it was always very much of how do we protect what we have today? How do we work with the really amazing you know fauna that that that exists today? and And the colossal thing kind of came out of left field for me.
00:24:19
Speaker
We might be the same age because I think I saw Jurassic Park when I was 10. Are you 1983? 84, yeah. 84, okay. Where did you live in Germany? I spent so much time in Germany because my wife's from there. Oh, really? Yeah, so I was born in Bremerhaven, like up on the North Sea, and then we I was raised mostly in Stuttgart. Okay.
00:24:35
Speaker
I spent a ah lot of time in this little American base called Gellonhausen outside of Frankfurt. Oh, yeah. That's a different subject altogether. Yeah. What's like a lasting memory you've had here at Colossal? So like a big highlight, a big accomplishment, a big wow moment that really sits with you.
00:24:56
Speaker
i mean, there's so many. It's it's incredible that right I've been here four and a half years, but it feels like it could have been 40 years. At the same time, it could have been four days. right like It's just really flown by. and But at the same time, it feels like we've packed so much into it. um I think you know the obvious answer is probably being in the operating room when we when we did the Caesarian sections for the Dire Wolves. To be in the room to see that sir sort of first flash of white come out of of the surrogate was one of those holy shit moments, we've done this thing that we set out to do. yeah
00:25:32
Speaker
um It was incredible, it was exciting, there was some, you know, sense of relief immediately followed by terror because relief that we did it, this is amazing, immediately the responsibility of taking care of these these these animals that hadn't existed in 12,000 years again dawns on you pretty quickly and you go, oh, we better not mess this up. yeah what They got us here, now my job is to make sure that I can see. It's like you turned a page and opened up a new chapter of exactly humanity. When I first heard about the dire wolf, my reaction was like,
00:26:06
Speaker
Oh my god, they did it. And then I learned a little bit more and understood that it wasn't an exact replica. And then I thought, OK, well, this is still like a really impressive step forward.
00:26:18
Speaker
how and you know like you know, the Time magazine covers like the dire wolf is back or whatever. How would you like the public to understand what this is and what it represents?
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really complex topic to try to cover, especially, you know, in to a mass public group. What we're talking about is bringing a species back from extinction, but that also has this hard thing of defining the species to begin with. And so being able trying to try determine exactly what a dire wolf is, if you could have the opportunity to go back in time, grab a little skin sample, and clone a direwolf, then would that be a direwolf if we made it today?
00:26:55
Speaker
it's a good, fun debate to have because technically, yes, you would have cloned an exact animal, but at the same time, that animal, if you went back 25,000 years ago to Mexico and found that animal, or you went back 100,000 ago to Canada, Those two animals would have been so distinct from each other. Would they still be considered one species or how do we classify all that stuff, right? So you get into this sort of how does this how is a species defined in the way that we define it just in art the context of our lifetime or how do you define a species across you hundreds of thousands of years of existence and across hundreds of thousands of miles of range.
00:27:31
Speaker
So for us, we you know we really believe, and and when we'll always say that this is the extinction, this is bringing species back from extinction, because its DNA sequence might vary from any individual you would have found should you have traveled back in time, but it's but everything about it would be the same, right? We're talking about the same physical characteristics so that it would perform the same ecosystem function. So the public is like,
00:27:56
Speaker
such a hard story to explain that you can't clone that animal and if you could you'd have to clone the whole population in order to get the all the representation. So what we're really focused on is functional de-extinction, restoring function to ecosystems. And it's just not a fun way to to try to explain it to people, right? It's easy, it's much easier and captivating to say this is a direwolf because by any account it is a direwolf other than does it have 100% of the same C, T, and G in the right order as one individual that could have existed 100,000 years ago. Yeah.
00:28:34
Speaker
You can kind of consider me like a normal member of the the public because I have like zero scientific brain at all. like so so like You say the word nuclear tide. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. um So this is coming from like an average brain. Mm-hmm.
00:28:49
Speaker
American. But part of me wants, like, probably wanted de-extinction to feel like an apology. Like, this is our way of humanity to pay penance and say, we're sorry, mammoth.
00:29:03
Speaker
This is, you know, we're going to rectify things. But then when you realize the new animal is not truly the old animal, the apology maybe doesn't make any more sense. Maybe it's just more complicated than that.
00:29:19
Speaker
I'm wondering just what you what you think about that. Well, I like that viewpoint of an apology because we talk about a moral responsibility to restore what's been lost. And I think that is still present in in this because our apology isn't to the species and species and it it doesn't exist. hard to apologize to it. Our apology is to Mother Nature. this greater system of all living beings in the way that they engage with each other. And you know, I when I'm talking to crowds, I'm always talking about ecosystems and restoring functions and improving stability. So I talk about them as Jenga puzzles. So if you think about nature like a big Jenga puzzle every time we
00:29:57
Speaker
drive a species to extinction, you're pulling a block out of that puzzle and the whole thing's losing stability. So our apologies back to that the entire system, and by focusing on the functional restoration of these species, you can help restore the function in a way that improves the stability and the greater the greater survivability of of the entire system. So that's really, you know, I like the apology model, but I think it it shouldn't be directed to the species. It should be directed to the system. To the Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And that's kind of where my thinking eventually turned to. It's just hard to give an apology to an ecosystem rather than yeah a charismatic yeah megafauna.
00:30:34
Speaker
If we're kind of imagining like the Mount Rushmore of scientific breakthroughs, I don't know what you would put your top four, but let's say one of them is the moon landing. Mm-hmm. maybe another is the atom bomb. I don't know. yeah what would the what would be What would make the Mount Rushmore in terms of de-extinction? Would it be a particular animal? Would it be the first free-roaming herd of mammoth? In your mind, what would kind of, in terms of de-extinction, what would be that big?
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think the the mammoth is that iconic species. I think Dodo is probably right there, too. If you could restore one of those two species, which we're going to do then suddenly you're on the you're on the Mount Rushmore of scientific achievement. i think for me though, it's less about checking the box that you we were able to do a seemingly impossible
Importance of Species Reintroduction
00:31:22
Speaker
thing. and It's more about having the desired impact. The impact we talked about is reintroduction, rewilding of extinct species to create the recreate the ecosystem that was lost, right? The mammoth step ecosystem that existed 4,000 years ago when mammoths were going extinct. That was once as biodiverse as the African savanna. If you could use a mammoth to re-engineer that ecosystem, restore that in a way that creates ecological niches to make more room for more biodiversity in a way that improves natural so things like carbon sequesters and nitrogen cycles as a way to lift up an entire ecosystem. That, I think, is the moment.
00:32:00
Speaker
It's not the birth. It's the reintroduction to the wild. I see. Okay. um I'm curious about this, because when I tell people I'm going to go to colossal biosciences, and they're like, who is that? I'm like, it's the de-extinction people. And I'm almost immediately hit by this knee-jerk skepticism. It's just like, is there going to be enough habitat? you know You're not going to have enough genetic diversity in in the pool.
00:32:27
Speaker
ah What's the point of bringing jack back just a few animals? And these are fair questions, right? That's some good critical thinking. But I also, i sense that this skepticism is like reflecting a fear of the new um or discomfort with humans crossing into more active role in evolution.
00:32:50
Speaker
how do I'm sure you've noticed this knee jerk skepticism as well. How do you make sense of it? I think you're you're you're right that there's a fear of the new. There's also a fear of things you don't understand.
00:33:01
Speaker
there There are these irrational fears about the extinction that exist. There are plenty of rational fears as well, and so our job is to answer those. I think a big piece of that skepticism is also reflective of the greater failures we've had as a conservation community. Our inability to keep up with our destruction of nature means that when, more often than not, the stories we hear in conservation are negative.
00:33:28
Speaker
There are fewer wins, more losses. um And so I think that creates this natural skepticism like, oh, you'll never be able to do that. Like it's a disbelief that you can achieve the thing you set out to achieve because conservation doesn't have a winning record.
00:33:44
Speaker
Which is great actually because it opens up our ability to create a narrative and and tell the story about why these technologies are needed and how they could be impactful and how they'll help conservation win while also driving de-extinction forward. And I think de-extinction sucks up so much air in the room that we often don't tell the story of of conservation and and what this does, why this is an important tool for conservation. Because they're right, we shouldn't just go and create a few animals.
00:34:11
Speaker
We need create populations. To do that, we have to restore habitat. and Now you're getting back into the conventional conservation world, and now we're using de-extinction as this amazing beacon of hope and inspiration as a way that drives behavior change for every human being, but also maybe inspires more funds and action for habitat restoration protection of critically endangered species today.
00:34:32
Speaker
Gotcha. I've got some fun rapid-fire questions here, but first let me just talk about the future for a second, because one of the reasons I have the great privilege of sitting across from you today is because I'm writing a book called The Future Wild, which is an optimistic vision of, say, the next one hundred years of of nature. Like, I see... things like American Prairie as an amazing landscape scale ecological project. I see depopulation happening naturally in the human population, green infrastructure, lab-grown mates. There's many things that hit that. And de-extinction, of course, is a part of that. I see many things positively about where we're heading in terms of wilderness nature and all that.
00:35:12
Speaker
I'm wondering how you view the future. Do you have an optimistic view of the future with regard to these things?
Human-designed Nature and Technology
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, I certainly, think my wife would tell you that I'm an eternal optimist. I mean, I'm a Nebraska football fan, which means I have to live in optimism because that's all I have. from Nebraska? Yeah. I lived in a little town called York outside of Lincoln. Oh, yeah, I know York. You do know York? Yeah, yeah. We used to go to a restaurant in York called Chances Are. okay. I would go to the movie theater there all the time. That's funny. So, you know, I live in this world of optimism and I think colossal represents a great reason to be optimistic. And so that's one of the things that drew me here. I look at technologies and I think, oh, wow, what amazing things we can do with AI. What amazing things we can do with synthetic biology and why that's going to end up being, you know, a reason for hope. And I think more often than that, when I do that, then I'm surrounded by more skeptical people and cynical people that say, well, AI is going to,
00:36:14
Speaker
yeah become Skynet and take over the world. and This is Terminator. And then de-extinction is going to become Jurassic Park and all all these things. So I totally get it. But I do see a reason to be optimistic, I think, especially when start talking about how these technologies will play off each other. AI ai makes de-extinction possible.
00:36:32
Speaker
De-extinction makes conservation possible. And so people talk about AI's horrible impact on the environment. At the same time, it's supercharging things that restore the environment. So I think that there's all these secondary and tertiary effects of these technologies that people just have appreciated that I don't appreciate today. But I'm sort of have this blind faith that they'll play off each other in a really amazing way that we could have never predicted. Yeah.
00:36:55
Speaker
If I'm going to ask you to illustrate the future, and let's say you get everything your way, your eco-utopian vision, Can you give me some of the things you see? you see free-roaming mammoth herd such as?
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, I see. It's funny because I think we've always talked about natural beauty and this amazing thing that, say, God designed, right? I think our future is going to be this amazing thing that man has designed, right? The way that humans have now impacted nature so negatively, we're finding ways to to enhance nature so that it can survive with us. We can co-evolve together. And that evolution is now directed more by humans than ever before.
00:37:35
Speaker
So, you know, we have We have a future where you have crops that take up much less space because they require less water and and they are restoring nutrients back to the soil because we've engineered all the best qualities of various plants into these crops, right? We have animals that, you know, maybe we have fewer animals because we're living in the lab-based meat world or we found different sources of protein or find better ways to to propagate, feed animals But I think we live in a nature that is built to be more resilient to things that we do to it.
00:38:08
Speaker
The way that we redirect water, the way that we destroy habitat, the way that we introduce pathogens. We're finding more ways that that nature can be resilient to humans. And I think a big part of that is introducing specific functions to ecosystems so that we can restore these things that we've lost. but But we have to do it in ways that we probably can't even predict right now. because the current vision is go grab as much land as you can and protect it from development and keep human footprint off it. but That's not a sustainable model for the future. There has to be a way that humans have a a regular presence in there and an impact on it, but we just have to give nature the tools to be able to respond to that impact.
00:38:48
Speaker
I know Colossal has a ton of very interesting side projects. Could North American Pleistocene Park be one of them? Yeah, I mean, I would... You talk about just what a silly movie did...
00:39:01
Speaker
for generations of scientists in Jurassic Park. I think if you could go and see Pleistocene Park in person, if you could go visit a piece of land that looks like 100,000 years ago, think that could be such an impactful tool for inspiration and storytelling to get new generations of scientists off the ground and and and having them build the next you know revolution in science.
00:39:26
Speaker
I'd love to see an American Serengeti again. I'd like to see sky or ground darkened by the shadows of passenger pigeon. I'd love to take a catch sight of a mammoth herd. Have you ever talked to Dan Flores before? I've had him on my podcast. my yeah Having him describe some of those things is just incredible.
00:39:43
Speaker
Let me get to some rapid-fire questions here. And you can take your time with these questions or give them to me rapidly, whatever you you whatever you like. um What extinct animal do you most want to see with your own eyes?
00:39:58
Speaker
I think it's woolly mammoth. I know it's it's kind of boring, but it's it's definitely woolly mammoth. The other, well, the list goes on. After that would be stellar sea cow and then gliptidon, you know, the giant armadillos.
00:40:11
Speaker
But I really want to see what a dinosaur actually looks like. Okay, okay. Oh, you would? I do. I don't want to bring dinosaurs back, but I want to see what a dinosaur actually looks like because the sketches are so bad. Who knows what they look like? okay. I wasn't expecting that. um Well, that ah applies to my next question. What extinct animal that's not a dinosaur would you be most afraid to meet?
00:40:35
Speaker
Oh, um probably megalodon. Which one is that? 45 foot shark. Oh, jeez. that in your pipeline as well? Yeah, we're safe from that one. We don't have a giant pool anywhere. Okay. And that did that pre-existed humans, of course. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
00:40:55
Speaker
And that's another point. Yes, it pre-existed modern humans. I'd actually have to go back and see what hominid might have. Would you ever consider an animal kind of that predates ah the existence of Homo sapiens, you 300,000 years ago?
00:41:11
Speaker
If it served an ecological purpose. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so the criteria isn't solely um humans are responsible or partly responsible for the extinction. Yeah, think a big a big thing that we focus on is how do you, you know, what are the anthropogenic extinctions that we should be addressing? But I wouldn't say it's a must.
00:41:32
Speaker
what's it What's an animal that might fill an ecological niche that we weren't responsible for eradicating? That's a good question. I mean, i haven't even really thought about it, honestly. yeah we're we We've done enough damage in our short existence that our list is pretty long to keep it within those bounds, but we haven't really looked at it going beyond
Ethical Debates on De-extinction
00:41:54
Speaker
that. But I mean, you think mammoths were around for one and half million years.
00:42:00
Speaker
like so they exist they They predated us. We just caught them at the end. yeah
00:42:08
Speaker
Can an engineered animal be sacred?
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's a tricky question. I'd say yes. I mean, what's more sacred than saying that we have designed this ourselves?
00:42:24
Speaker
what criticism of Colossal annoys you the most?
00:42:29
Speaker
I get honestly welcome them. I think the one that is most frustrating is there's this very sort of superficial dismissive idea that, oh, you guys haven't thought about this before.
00:42:42
Speaker
Like, yeah, trust me, we spend a lot of our cycles thinking about these things. I think it's just such a lazy argument to be like, well, they haven't really thought this through. Gotcha. What criticism of Colossal do you respect?
00:42:55
Speaker
I think the ethical criticism of, you know, it's the whole Jurassic Park. They're so busy wondering if they could, they forgot to ask if they should. I think that's a really good question. Yeah. Okay. Great power.
00:43:08
Speaker
That whole Spider-Man, great power comes great responsibility. right We need to be asking ourselves every day, how do we wield that power? Um, so I think I welcome it as many times as we can have the ethical debate because I think every time we do, you uncover a new thought and you go, oh, that's, that's a really good thing to add in or pivot away from.
00:43:28
Speaker
What's one landscape or biozone that you would like to see rewilded with some of these extinct species? Um, um,
00:43:39
Speaker
I mean, the Pleistocene-era grasslands were amazing. Like I said, they they kind of had an African savanna-esque biodiversity level, but you can kind of get that vibe by going to African grasslands today. um think some of the, I would really like to see some of the coastal habitats that had things like giant beavers and yeah and stuff like that. know I think there were some great, crazy environments that we can't even wrap our minds around today.
00:44:06
Speaker
They follow me. This might not apply to you because you're a Nebraskan, it sounds like, but what's the most Texan thing about colossuss Colossal? I think the maybe the the self-pride. right Texas is very much of a Texas over everything. Colossal very much has that big ambitions, big ego.
00:44:30
Speaker
Okay. That can be your tagline. Big ambition, big ego. ah where do you hope this What do you hope to see by the end of your life?
00:44:42
Speaker
I hope that we have a that we're on a path of nature recovery. right i hope that I don't think we'll ever recover everything that's lost, and recovery is a whole tricky thing that we could get into.
00:44:54
Speaker
But by the end that by the end of my life, I hope that we see that we're on the upswing of a recovery, not on this downswing of loss.
00:45:03
Speaker
What's an animal that you'd like to see brought back but it's kind of like a borderline animal. Like, I don't know if this makes too much sense. Maybe because humans weren't responsible for their death, or maybe the ecological niche isn't there. Is there like an animal that's just kind of borderline, like, oh, we're not sure about this one?
00:45:23
Speaker
think some of those hyper-carnivores would have been amazing to see. You you love to go see... lions and in Africa tigers in India to go see a saber-toothed cat, right? yeah i It'd just be fascinating to see that. See a pack of cats hunting a mammoth or something, right? That'd be incredible.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, but it's just like maybe they don't serve a purpose right now or anything. Yeah, there's certainly not room in nature for a saber-toothed cat. I know you guys are so sick of this question, but I have to ask it. Any talk about the ancient hominin species.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah, not here. You won't find it here. I'm the chief animal officer, not a chief hominid officer. Very, very focused on the animal side. the The ethics of de-extinction are really challenging. If you bring hominids into that, it's...
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah, exponentially more challenging. You can make, they can give a Neanderthal a job here. You can set them up here in Dallas. I bet they were pretty, I don't know if they're that smart, but. I've encountered a few Neanderthals.
00:46:28
Speaker
um So you probably had multiple crowning achievements here at Colossal and in your past careers. If you could have one or two more crowning achievements,
00:46:42
Speaker
before you kick the bucket here, what would you like to see here at your with your time at Colossal? Mine are very much focused on the conservation side. One project that's underway that if we can pull it off would be the absolute, I mean, nothing would make me happier is is solving the chytrid fungus crisis. And chytrid fungus is it is ah is a waterborne fungus that has driven 93 amphibians to extinction, threatens another 500.
00:47:10
Speaker
It's an introduced pathogen that we introduced. If we can create a resilient line that protects 500 species of amphibians, I mean, we celebrate people all the time for their effort to protect and slow the loss of one species. If you could be a part of a team that helps save 500 from going extinct,
00:47:31
Speaker
I don't think it gets bigger than that. Okay. um Bug, bird that flies, a plant, and a marine animal. What comes to mind as some potential de-extinction candidates? Because I know you've mostly focused on terrestrial animals and flightless birds.
00:47:49
Speaker
um I mean obviously on the bird side, like you had mentioned, the passenger pigeon is an iconic extinction event. It's and it's incredible because rather boring individual animal but incredible in numbers, right? Like I think that's that's something that we've we've never been able to see.
00:48:06
Speaker
ah On the bug side, I'm really worried. yeah Mostly worried, like what's going to happen to our pollinators? like that yeah That's where I really sweat. And i don't I just don't dive enough into the invertebrates to really know all those species we lost. But just thinking on the protection front, anything you can do to protect pollinators, I think it goes into that whole Jenga example of that's the base layer of everything that we live off of You still have plant?
00:48:34
Speaker
Plants. What about like the chestnut tree? I know there's other folks working on that. American chestnut's a really cool project and they they've really paved the way on the and fighting the genetic modification regulatory pathway. So that's incredible, but um you know I think we also lost 90% of our kelp forests off the Pacific coast.
00:49:01
Speaker
That's where we've got to focus is how do we restore kelp. gotcha Not a real plant, but close enough. So a lot of de-extinction and rewilding is about restoring ecological function, whether that's grazing, predation, seed dispersal.
00:49:19
Speaker
When you're thinking about de extinct animals to bring back, which lost functions, ecological functions, do you prioritize?
00:49:32
Speaker
I think we're usually focused on the two main ones, right sort of both keystone effects within a population. Apex predator and the way that a predator can help bring balance to an entire ecosystem, la gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. And that's really very much the thylacine model.
00:49:49
Speaker
The other side is that ecosystem engineer of what does a species do that improves all the foundational functions of an ecosystem from turning soils and and improving a nutrient cycles to opening up ecological niche for for other biodiversity to grow in. And that's that mammoth model, the elephant model.
00:50:10
Speaker
I think that's really where we tend to focus. and so You get outside of there, because then you get in, like, Dodo was a seed disperser, obviously gonna be really important. Moe was also seed disperser. But we're generally focused on those two big ones, Apex Predators and Engineers.
00:50:29
Speaker
Gotcha. um
00:50:34
Speaker
With the dire wolves, and I'm sure you've spent some time with the dire wolves, Has any behavior of them surprised you? any Anything that seemed unfamiliar? um I think what was most surprising was their ability to... They're obviously heavily habituated animals because of the nature in which they came into this earth and the way that that we've cared for them and studied them, but their ability to quickly dissociate from us and go back to being almost semi-wild animals was amazing. i did not. but I thought we were going puppies on our hands for the rest of our lives, and they are wolves.
00:51:09
Speaker
and they Have they hunted anything? They do, yeah. So they they've been they've gotten pretty good at hunting rabbits, which is not that exciting because they're a big, scary wolf attacking this poor little rabbit. But they're they've given chase to quite a few deer, and I'm thinking they're going figure it out eventually.
00:51:24
Speaker
You described it a bit when you said the caesarean birth of them, but do you feel different around this animal that you feel about any other animal because it's been resurrected?
00:51:38
Speaker
ah Is it a mystical being of the past or is it just like any other animal? Yeah, i I mean obviously every time you're around them you're thinking about de-extinction, you're thinking about what are the next projects, what are the next effects, also what are what those moments that that you that you first encountered them like when they were coming when they were coming into this world.
00:52:01
Speaker
But yeah, I've never really, I've always been a pretty laid back pragmatic guy around the animals and it's like, these are These are just animals. They have their space. I have my space. I want to do everything I can to support them, but I don't get caught up in it. Because I've been really fortunate to be able to hang out with some of the coolest animals in the world. And if you get too focused on it you kind of lose focus of what you're doing. so I think what's amazing about them is how quickly they just sort of fit in as another animal. that they they're They're not mystical. They are quite natural. Yeah, which makes me think within a generation it wouldn't be hard for the public to accept that these are yeah natural animals. And is that part of your job as as chief animal officer to kind of design the habitat and make sure they're
00:52:53
Speaker
well cared for. It's one of the coolest things that we did on this direwolf project, we do with every project is you have to create an animal care manual for a species that hasn't existed in 12,000 years. So you get together with the smartest guys you know and you do a lot of literature review and you write a 250 page document of when direwolves come back to this earth this is what they're going to eat, this is their medical like milestones, this this is how we're going to do behavioral enrichment, yeah all these things. and you kind of you know At first you're like, this is ridiculous, how are we ever going do it? And then know two weeks into that project we were all knee deep like, this is yeah we've got this figured out. yeah So it's pretty cool. The other side of it is we also get to design how do you put them back in the wild. yeah Obviously dire wolves are a bit of an exceptional example because we've we've had this intentional stop in in that process where we're going to keep them on this large semi-wild preserve. But but with everything else, we're designing rewilding plants for species that don't even exist yet.
00:53:53
Speaker
I used to be a ah park ranger for Gates of the Arctic National Park. yeah i just when I'm just thinking, like, woolly mammoths would just fit in here just perfectly. There's plenty of space for them. They could probably do wonders for habitat.
00:54:06
Speaker
um Could they be part of our park system? yeah They should be. I mean, park's about the park system is really about preserving something that was, right, and protecting and keeping it. Being able to go back even further in time would be over an amazing park, right? Like, the gate to the Pleistocene sounds pretty cool, right? Oh, that should be ah the next park name. There's a big kind of National Petroleum Reserve right north of there. It's just like, oh man, that could just be used for so many interesting animals.
00:54:37
Speaker
um that's tuesday it That's pretty much all of my questions. We went through a lot in a very short amount of time. At the end of my podcast, I usually ask my guests what they're enjoying in the culture these days. i Looking forward to Project Hail Mary coming out of that book. I love Andy Weir and all his work. and so It was good. isn't great Yeah. I was really worried and it turned out to be excellent. So i was I was really happy with it. Obviously you have to truncate the story quite a bit for a movie, but totally worth it. I'll probably go see it again.
00:55:08
Speaker
Gotcha. and And then I'm also, ah I got a two-year-old at home. So yeah, she keeps me pretty fascinated every day. i get to get to watch her grow up. and what's gonna be cool is thinking about when she's like 10 or 12 and she's gonna think this is a totally normal thing. Like yeah her dad works at a de-extinction company. Daddy brings back dead animals. Yeah, yeah. My dad's a, it's like like I'm an accountant. She'll just be like, yeah, he works at a de-extinction company. Who cares? and That's how the children of athletes are just like, oh, he plays for the NFL.
00:55:38
Speaker
I think that's so, like such a cool idea that that would just be normalized. for her my daughter has no idea what I do she's sick you know what I really like I like Marty Supreme oh yeah I loved Marty I think that's gonna be like a generational movie yeah it was really good good yeah that's what I enjoyed in the culture but but Matt this has been wonderful thank you so much for your time appreciate it yeah we love chatting about it so Hey folks, that's my interview with Matt Dunn. Up next is the interview with Stefano.
00:56:14
Speaker
Stefano might be lesser known to the public than Ben and Matt is, but I found um our interview to be as illuminating as with these other guys, and um you can really sense Stefano's passion, and I think he... perhaps doesn't get podcasts as much as these other guys. So he brought his A game. It was a really good conversation. I'm going to make this next section available just to paid subscribers. If you've been listening, thanks a lot. If you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber and having full access to all of my essays and podcasts, go to my sub stack out of the wild and really appreciate it. You make this work possible. I go to places like Dallas.
00:56:57
Speaker
And I have amazing people on this podcast. I can't believe it. um So yeah, you pagesre paid subscribers make this possible. Really.
00:57:23
Speaker
This was the Out of the Wild podcast. Original music by Duncan Barrett. For more episodes, subscribe to my sub stack.