Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)
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What funny family stories and childhood memories kick off the episode?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. What a thrilling and exciting topic we have today. We have Ben Lamb, who is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. And what are they doing? Well, they're bringing back and have the dire wolf.
Yep.
Yep.
You know, they're focused heavily on a woolly mammoth.
Yes, they have woolly mouse.
They've created woolly mice. Yep. And the list goes on.
Yeah.
This is impossible.
This is where we're at. This is a really wild episode. This
is mind-blowing.
It feels sci-fi, but we're living it.
Yes, it's present-day sci-fi. Please enjoy Ben Lamb.
He's an object
expert.
Hey, good to meet you. Ben?
Yeah.
Great to meet you.
We met briefly.
Yes,
we did. Brought you guys colossal shirts.
Oh, okay.
You,
your
kids, anybody.
Thank you. Friends, grandparents.
We love shirts.
Anybody you want to give it away to? Can you imagine if I still had grandparents? That would be lovely. I have one grandma. You do? How old is she? She's 96. Oh,
wow. Good for
her. Let's map her to me. No, she's amazing. She's my Gigi. She helped raise me.
She's
the best.
Hold
on,
don't
tell
me. I know I have friends who call their grandma Gigi. I'm trying to think what ethnicity.
Grease.
No, it's just, like, weird Texan. It's a Texan thing. I mean, I don't know. I think I just couldn't say. So, like, my son can't say dada yet. I have young kids. So he calls me Gaga.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, so I was like, maybe, like, is this genetic? Did I, like, not be able to say grandmother, so I said Gigi? Like, I don't know. Gaga.
They all have fun names, grandparents.
Yeah, our kids call all of their grandparents Gaga.
Oh, really? Yeah,
it's
universal. I went to the library a couple weeks ago with my wife and my two kids, and I was just taking, like... To use the bathroom, or...? No, just to hang out at the library, right? And so, like, we do that in
Texas.
So I was, like, playing with this fake fish in this, like, fake frying pan with him. He's two and a half, so he's at this stage where he's saying things that you're like, where did you learn this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he, like, ran over to this other mom in the library, and he was like... Oh, gaga. He, like, points back at me. I'm like, when did you learn that? Like, that's a weird, that's an interesting, funny interaction where he's, like, making fun of me to this other parent. Wow. He's already backstabbed. He's already, yeah. He's
already embarrassed by his
dad. He's, like, rolling his eyes. It was amazing. Yeah, creating new alliances with the other people. Well,
you've got to practice early.
But let's be honest, you just said it like you're always at the library. You have a two and a half year old. The shit I was doing, I was at Travel Town every week, the miniature train museum. I haven't been back since they were six. Yeah.
Yeah, but you're just trying to pass the minutes. The library is a babysitter's friend. I would always circulate between the park
and
the library. For some reason, the minutes just would not
pass. Yeah.
I
couldn't
understand time.
Yeah, sometimes like the bath time, I was like, you've had bath time for two hours. It's like, he loves
it.
He's in it. He's happy. Yeah,
anything that they're happy doing, you'll do until they're no longer happy. How many do you have? Two. A two and a half and a eight month
old.
Oh, Lord. So
I'm in it.
And are you originally from
Texas? I know you went to Baylor. Yeah, born in Austin. One of the rare people who was actually born there.
Yeah, okay. And did your parents move there?
So my parents lived there when they had me. They got divorced when I was very young. Yes. And then I left Austin when I was five. Then later in my life, I made it back for a few years. Then I went to Dallas, and I kind of bounced all over. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents, right? Yeah, yeah. By Gigi, yeah. By Gigi and my grandfather, Poppy, who's no longer with us.
You know, my brother just kind of reframed our childhood in the most beautiful way, which was he said, you know, thank God dad was an addict because otherwise we would have never had every single weekend with papa and grandma and then the summers with papa and grandma.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What funny family stories and childhood memories kick off the episode?
0:00–7:25
2
How does Ben describe his Texas upbringing and early family influences?
7:25–19:44
3
What led Ben to connect with George Church and start Colossal Biosciences?
19:44–1:05:22
4
How are gene‑drive technologies being proposed to control invasive species?
1:05:22–1:19:27
5
What are the artificial‑womb and synthetic‑biology projects that could grow animals without surrogates?
1:19:27–1:53:05
6
How does Colossal plan to turn its biotech breakthroughs into revenue and new spin‑outs?
1:53:05–2:03:22