Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T17:00:25.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
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 dire wolves.
Why do you like to fight with people?
Oh, 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.
Like, 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.
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?
Yeah, 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 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 amazing class.
It's 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.
So you just followed your fascination, which is the best advice anyone could
ever get.
Yeah.
How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?
This is something I had no idea about.
I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting
into the university
that I wanted to get into, but wandering around the halls of the university
that I did
get into, and I met this guy called Alan Cooper, who was one of the few people
in the world at
the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab that
you need to
be able to extract DNA from bones.
So this DNA is in terrible condition, so we have to have a purpose-built clean
room to
make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something,
because then
your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify.
So we had one of these labs, and I thought, well, that's kind of cool, because
I was interested
in geology, I was interested in human history.
Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before,
or rewriting
the stories that we keep telling.
This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human
ancestry, and
there was a lot more to be learned.
And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.
And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool, this'd be fun, plus if you join my
lab, you
can go to Siberia.
And I was in.
I was like, yeah, sure, that's the deal for me.
I'll go to Siberia.
Whoa.
So you got sent to Siberia?
That's usually what they do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I have had several not amazing experiences in Siberia, but
overall, it's been
fun.
I've been a couple of times.
Yeah.
What time of year did you go?
Summer.
Wow.
Yeah.
So the first time I went, it was for a meeting.
And I spent some time in Moscow first as a guest of one of my Russian
collaborators.
And then we went out to this meeting in Yakutsk.
And we got on a boat.
What I learned about Siberia is that everything goes wrong.
There's no bit of infrastructure that functions the way it's supposed to
function.
And I learned that initially.
We ended up on this boat that was two hours late.
It was warm and hot.
And there are so many mosquitoes.
I was going to ask you about that.
I've heard the mosquitoes are insane.
It's so crazy.
Like, one of the times I was out in Tymir, the north central Tymir Peninsula,
and we had
brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up so that we could go inside and
take
the masks, take the masks off of our face, because you always have to wear a
hood, otherwise
you'll be breathing mosquitoes.
And we were going outside and playing this game where we would just clap our
hands in front
of our face, and then count how many you killed.
And one time, I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.
Whoa.
And it's just awful.
It's miserable.
So they're trying to sting you through your clothes.
They're just...
Yeah.
And they're big, too, right?
Well, it depends the time of year.
And early in the season, they're really big, and you can catch them fast.
And then they get different species come out that are smaller and smaller.
And toward the end of the season, they're really tiny.
Once I was up in the north of Alaska on the Ick-Pick-Pick River, we were
floating down
the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things like that.
And it had been windy for the first few days, so it was fine.
And this was my first time out in the field, actually.
It was northern Alaska, and I was like, these mosquitoes.
People keep telling me there's mosquitoes.
They're full of shit.
There's no mosquitoes out here.
Right?
The wind is blowing.
Then the wind dies down, and then it's like, oh, fuck.
Like, this is awful.
There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while.
And this poor animal, we were following the river, and he would, every few
steps, he would
just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come back up.
Like, the mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.
I've only been to Anchorage.
Well, I've been to a couple parts of Alaska, but I was in Anchorage, and when I
was there,
it was the summertime, we were salmon fishing, my friend Ari and I, and we got
bug repellent
because we heard you got to spray mosquito spray.
We stepped out of the car.
The moment we opened up the car door, there was a cloud of mosquitoes.
We're shrieking like little girls.
We're like, ah!
Like, what the hell?
It was, it was, I'd never experienced anything like it in my life.
Like, where'd they come from?
Right.
You don't expect it.
There was nothing there.
Like, it didn't, it wasn't like we saw a cloud of mosquitoes, but we opened up,
there
was an impossible amount of mosquitoes that got into the car.
It's terrible.
In Tymir, I remember we would walk along the grass, this tall grass with little
flowers
in it.
Exactly the kind of place you can imagine mammoths roaming and being like the
kings of the universe
there.
But as you were walking, you would kick up the grass, and they would just
emerge off of
the, off of the needles of grass.
It was just really awful.
Well, they're so aggressive because they only have like three months to live.
Yeah.
And I learned, actually, because I was curious about this.
How do they survive if there are so few red blood, because mosquitoes mostly
they take,
they only take, it's only the females that take a blood meal, and they only
take a blood
meal when they're making eggs or making a brood.
They take it to reproduce.
Otherwise, they feed on nectar.
So how do these, how do so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so
few animals
there?
And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate, and they don't
need a blood
meal to reproduce, but they do better if they get one.
So they're after you, but they don't need you.
Whoa.
Kind of makes it worse, right?
Whoa.
It really is fascinating how aggressive they are.
Yeah.
Because, you know, Texas has mosquitoes, but they can live all year round, so
they're kind
of chill.
Yeah.
They're not that worried about 