#2338 - Beth Shapiro

Beth Shapiro (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jamie (0:06)

Shrink by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

SPEAKER_4 (0:12)

Hello Beth.

Beth Shapiro (0:14)

Hello.

SPEAKER_4 (0:14)

It's very great to see you again.

Beth Shapiro (0:16)

I am pleased to be here.

SPEAKER_4 (0:17)

It's been really interesting getting to talk to you and communicating with you and all the stuff that you guys have done that Colossal has been insane. So why don't you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do?

Beth Shapiro (0:29)

I'm a scientist. I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics. It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it. What is fantastic about that is it's being a modern day explorer. I get to go somewhere, I get to find out something new that completely rewrites what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant. I get to fight with people a lot, and because I love to fight, I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the Chief Science Officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those direwolves.

SPEAKER_4 (1:02)

Why do you like to fight with people?

Beth Shapiro (1:04)

I don't really like to fight with people. I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute. I end up fighting with people though, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.

SPEAKER_4 (1:17)

Well, it's certainly a controversial subject, and you guys are certainly ground-breakers. Whenever there's a controversial subject and people are ground-breakers, you're, without doubt, going to get a lot of pushback. And a lot of people that just want attention, a lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention. There's a lot of stuff going on.

Beth Shapiro (1:37)

Yeah, there's a big―I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset, and this leads people to be kind of negative about everything. That's going to be too hard. If I say that that's good, then that means that the thing that I want to do probably isn't going to get that money. Or if you get attention, that means I can't get attention. And it leads to this negativity that I think stifles innovation.

SPEAKER_4 (1:59)

There's a lot of gatekeeping too. We talked about that recently. There's a lot of people that want to be the only people that are allowed to either discuss or work on things.

Beth Shapiro (2:10)

Yeah. I've spent my whole life working on this, therefore I am the only expert. And if anybody says something that disagrees with what I believe to be true, they're just wrong. I'm not even going to think about it. They're just wrong.

SPEAKER_4 (2:20)

It's unfortunate, but fortunately, we live in a very unique time where you can do podcasts, and podcasts get extraordinary amounts of attention. And so I think that's also one of the reasons why people push back so much as well, it's because they don't like that. They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.

Beth Shapiro (2:42)

Yeah. There are going to be people, there are going to be colleagues of mine, that are angry with me, that I have come here to talk to you. And that is part of the problem.

SPEAKER_4 (2:50)

Yeah. It just seems kind of silly, you know. But the subject, without all that stuff, the subject is absolutely fascinating. So how did you get started in this? Like, what did you initially want to do when you first started your career?

Beth Shapiro (3:05)

I actually started in broadcast journalism. Really? I was in high school. I was convinced that I wanted to work in broadcast journalism. I got a job working at the local TV station. I grew up in Rome, Georgia, northwest corner of Georgia.

And I got a job at the TV station where I was first operating the camera and helping people write copy. And then I got to be on air. I auditioned for a spot in the morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news in the, like, 24 and 54 after the hour. But I had to wake up really early in the morning and go to work. I was in high school. Go to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to read the teleprompter. It was pretty fun. And eventually got―and I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career. I went to the University of Georgia. They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school. I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations. And this job, let's just say, wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college. There was―there were mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but I had only been asleep for one and a half hours after being out for too late at night doing things that I shouldn't have been doing because I was underaged, right, and had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station. It was terrible. Anyway, how did I move from there to science? I took this―took this amazing class, similar to a class that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently, where it was a field geology and archaeology program. And we started off on the East Coast. We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals. And then we drove across the country and slept outside in national parks and learned about the history of North America, the geological history, the human history, everything, while being there in person. Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country. It was nine weeks. And I thought to myself while I was there, this is the story that I want to tell. I want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again, and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape. So I thought, I'll get a degree in science, because I know how to do broadcast journalism, you know, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something. I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing. And that's the history of it. I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist. I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out. I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist, because it's so much fun.