#2338 - Beth Shapiro
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Hello, Beth.
Hello. It's very great to see you again.
I am pleased to be here.
It's been really interesting getting to talk to you and communicating with you and all the stuff that you guys have done at Colossal has been insane. So why don't you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do?
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. And 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. And 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.
Why do you like to fight with people?
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.
Well, it's certainly a controversial subject and you guys are certainly groundbreakers. So whenever there's a controversial subject and people are groundbreakers, 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.
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.
There's a lot of gatekeeping, too. You know, 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.
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.
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 thing.
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.
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?
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 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.
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