Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #47 - Plant Questions (featuring Dr. Manuel Lerdau)

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Daniel and Kelly are joined by Dr. Manuel Lerdau to answer listener questions about toxic plants, seed germination, and micropropagation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Y'all are making me nervous, but I found a guess to fit the bill. wrote in with a question about cues that seeds need to make them germinate and wonders why not all seeds respond when they get the same message to activate. Plants are weird, so Kelly says, but her husband wants to know, if I need an army of plant clones, how do I make them grow? Whatever questions are keeping you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right. Welcome to listener questions episode number three. Fetting Dr. Manuel Lirdow. We found a plant guy.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens, and my family talks about science at the dinner table. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, and my family talks about science all the time. Why are you specifying that you talk about it over the dinner table? I feel like there's something you're trying to get at here.

It's not everything's a trap, Kelly. Oh, my gosh. It is with you, Daniel. It is. No, I was wondering how. A question from Zach ends up on the podcast. Is this a question that came up over dinner and you couldn't answer it and you were like, let me put that on the podcast or how did it happen?

No, so I am a cruel wife. Oh my gosh. And Zach was like, I heard about micropropagation and it sounds really interesting. But I feel like that would be a better research project for you than for me and I want to know more. And I was like, put it in the queue, buddy. And so he had to wait as long as everybody else usually has to wait, but his turn did come up. And so we are talking about micropoprogation today. All right, because I also have a physics question from Zach that's near the top of the queue.

That's also been a few months, unfortunately. So thank you to everybody who sends in questions and especially thank you for your patience. Yes. We have such a wonderful community of listeners and question askers that it takes us a little while to get to your questions. We write back to people over email almost immediately, but doing the research and doing the recordings and getting it all edited, it takes a little while. Thanks for hanging on. It does, yes. But we are so glad that you share your curiosity with us. And quite frankly, some of the most fun work that I get to do is digging into some of the questions that you all

ask that I would not get to read about otherwise. Absolutely. Totally love it. Sometimes I think we should do all listener questions on the pod. I don't think I have enough time. It takes a long time to research these. But not when you punt the questions to your friend. You know what? If we just want to keep having a rotation of Kelly's friends come through. I'm on board. We can do that. I feel like we should add a brief disclaimer that we did talk about biology and sometimes talking about biology results in talking about the birds and the bees. Nothing too extreme in this episode, but you might want to be slightly careful if there are young ears around. We go beyond our usual poop jokes today. Just a little, but yes, but we do. So, all right,

Let us wait no more. Let's bring my friend Manuel on the show to answer all the questions you all have about plants. Dr. Manuel Lurdao is a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and he is the research director of the Morven Sustainability Lab. Manuel works on loads of interesting topics, including decomposition, atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, global climate change, the impacts of invasive species, how plants defend themselves against pests, and so much more. Actually, I was not able to figure out a term I could use to describe what Manuel does because it is so diverse and awesome. He's also an avid birder. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.

You forgot his most important attribute. You're going to say that he lives in Virginia, right? Well, that he's a former Californian. Oh, I see. I see. Yes, welcome to Daniel and my long-running debate about whether or not Virginia or California is better. There's no debate. You just disagree with facts.

All right. Well, you know, speaking about disagreeing with facts, Manuel, you wrote me a very polite email to let me know that you listened to our episode about how a species is defined. Oh. And we did not at all capture how plant species are defined. And as you pointed out, they make up the majority of biomass on this planet. So how would you define species? I'm putting you on the spot. You didn't know I was going to ask you this.

This is an episode level digression here. I'm glad to help. Nice. Well, for me, species are akin to, but maybe even more interesting than pornography in that. Oh, great start. Great start. Wow. I have no idea where you were going there.

All right. In that, I may not be able to define them, but I know it when I see it. Oh, got it. Okay. And so for plants, which is on the, at least, on the land surface, that's about 90% of the biomass on the land. For plants, the whole notion of species is a little more complicated. And we're going to get into that. I have a feeling later in the episode when we start talking about how plants grow and reproduce and different

ways to reproduce them. But I think that right now, what I would say for if you were to hold a gun to my head proverbially in Virginia that's often literally. Oh, darn it. The definition I would use for a plant species is a genetic line whose appearance remains constant relatively through time. Oh. Okay. And what I took out of there from what we plant scientists call the zooal.

species concept, not the biological species concept, is this idea of reproducing and producing fertile offspring as the thing that defines a species. And the reason for that is that plants have raised, so to speak, interspecific promiscuity to an art form. And we did a study a few years ago, my collaborator and friend Chuck Cannon, where we looked across tropical rainforests and found that in almost every common group of plants, hybridization that is making fertile offspring across so-called species was more common than reproductive isolation. Wow. So they were more likely to make offspring with other kind of plants than with their own. Yeah. And, And there's a very good reason for that in a tropical rainforest where the diversity of species, so to speak, is so high.

What that means, especially if you're a plant and you can't really walk around and find a mate, but if you're in a forest, let's say you're sitting in an acre or two or three acres of forest and you're a particular kind of tree because there are so many kinds of trees in that forest, the chance that you're. will encounter, or your pollen will encounter the female flower of your own kind is very small. And so we did this study, feeling very pleased with ourselves, that we found this, that in fact, this hybridization is so common. And then, of course, we learned, as so often happens, that this had been done decades before. Oh, no. by a very famous plant biologist named Vern Grant, who published this. And then we found that it had been described even earlier than that.

And in fact, they had already come up with a term for it, which is unfortunately not used anymore. And that is, and it's kind of jargony sounding, the singamian. That is the sharing, the mixing of gametes of reproductive cells. So I try not to talk about plant species so much when I'm teaching as a plant singamian. Oh. So, for example, in Virginia, we have red oaks and we have black oaks.

And if you spend any time out in the forest, you realize that half to two-thirds of the oaks you actually see are somewhere in the middle between the two. All right. And that's because they form a singamian. So maybe we shouldn't think about California podcasters, Virginia podcasters. We should think of a podcast gammon, a blend. I'm not going to wade into your personal relations and how your various spouses might feel about these things. I don't know what that implies behind the scenes is happening on this podcast, so I'm going to move on. But I will wager that a talented cartoonist could do something with this if you happen to know any.

I don't. And so we'll move on to the next question. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, I do. Well, since you raised the question of spouses, I asked my spouse, who's a microbiologist, about plants and some of these questions. And she said that she thinks of plants mostly in terms of the microbes that live on them. And basically, her plants are like apartment complexes to host the microbes. So they're basically just scaffolding for the interesting bits. Well, that's been, I mean, I'm married to a musician. So we have a different. instead of issues. But my experience professionally with microbiologists

is that's how they tend to view plants, animals, everything that's not a micro. It's simply a scaffolding for the microbes that they're interested in. And they're not necessarily wrong. Exactly what I was thinking when she said that, am I also a scaffolding to you?

Anyway, we're not going to dig into my marital issues on today's podcast. Let's answer the questions from listeners because that's why Manuel is here. That sounds good. So first we're going to start with two questions on a similar theme, and these are questions about poisonous plants. This is another line of questioning that makes me wonder if the extraordinaries are actually a big group of supervillains that are using Daniel and me and our friends for information about how to take over the world or kill their enemies. So let's go ahead and listen to those two questions now.

Hey, D&K, drop the show. Quick question. Do you guys ever get into the biology of deadly plants? like scopolamine, the Tura, that kind of thing. I don't remember an episode on plants specifically. So I'm just curious if it has ever come up or if it's on your radar. Thanks. This is Tan from Oklahoma State.

Howdy Extraordinaries? Listener Renix from our Discord community submitted a question but then didn't have a chance to listen to the episode or record themselves. So I'm going to go ahead and read their question for them, and then they can listen to the episode when they have some more time. Here's the question. Biology question for Kelly Weiner-Smith. As a cat lover, I'm very aware that things that are harmless to me, like lilies, garlic, etc., are toxic to cats. I also know feeding sheep with high copper feeds meant for cattle can quickly kill them.

Why is it that different things can be toxic to what appear to be relatively similar organisms? I'd expect differences between, say, a fish and a beetle, but it seems odd to me that it can vary significantly between mammals. All right. So, killing people with plants. So let's start simple. Why do plants produce toxic chemicals? Well, I mean, I think the easiest way to get at that is to think about all the things a plant cannot do.

A plant can't run away. A plant can't really throw a punch. Some are quite good at tripping you, but on the whole, plants are stuck where they are. Yeah. And they don't move that much. And the world is a nasty, scary place, and you have to be able to defend yourself. And plants generally have two ways to defend themselves. One is what we call mechanical.

So being really tough and strong, like the... outer bark of a tree or the spines on a cactus. And the other is chemical. And that is, if someone's going to eat you, they're going to pay for it. And that's why so many plants are poisonous. In fact, pretty much all plants have at least one chemical to try to deter animals or fungi or bacteria from eating them. So we know about some of the poisons because they're famous in human history and have been really important for us,

but really all plants have something. This reminds me of something I read a long time ago about plant genomes, something about how plant genomes are surprisingly larger than human genomes and maybe because of all the complex biochemistry they have to do to produce toxins. Is there a connection there? That's a really interesting question.

And even before we had genomes measured, the plant chemists knew something about plants that made them really different from animals, which is they have much more chemical diversity than animals do. And then about, I'm going to get my dates a little wrong there, but I would say the late 1980s, two plant chemists when they started looking at the geneal. underlying the production of these chemicals discovered that, in fact, plants have genes for more toxic chemicals than they actually make. Oh. So the genome is sitting there ready to go in case they need to make a new toxic chemical. In case an insect who is a particular pest learns to overcome the toxic. that's used, the plant can turn on something else. So not only do they have a whole storehouse of poisonous bits to throw at things,

they have a backup library of other poisonous bits they can brew up in a moment's notice. Exactly. Wow. I'm scared of plants now. Yeah. So any of our extraordinaries who are supervillains should jump in the lab and start looking at what the plants aren't using yet and see what they can do with that. Isn't it amazing from that point of view that like any plants are edible?

Well, in fact, if you look at wild plants, the vast, vast majority of them are not. And in fact, much of domestication of plants has involved making them no longer poisonous to us. For example, there are wild tomatoes growing throughout North and South America. All of them will kill you. Whoa. And you don't want to ever eat a wild tomato. We domesticated them and we got the toxins out of them. If you've ever eaten a potato, you know that when the potato has green coming out, you don't eat the green.

You always cut off the green. Why is that? That's the vestige of the toxin in the potato. We bred out, we've removed out by selection on the potato, the toxins in the part we eat, but the rest of it will kill you. Wow. For those of you who've never eaten a potato, it's a delicious tuber you can find in many places, including California and Virginia. But does that mean that the delicious French fry has in it still the genome to produce poisons that would kill you? Exactly. It does.

So the class of compounds that are in the tomato and the potato, they're very closely related, that will kill you, are a set of compounds called alkaloids. and if you read Sherlock Holmes, you've run into that word. So if you look at the cells in the potato tuber, that which we're eating, they have the genes for those alkaloids as well, but they don't express them. They don't turn them on. And keeping those genes quiet is why we can go back to McDonald's more than once for French fries. Even if it's not really good for us. So every time I eat a salad, I'm basically having to say thank you to this.

salad for not killing me because it basically has a gun pointed at my head and it's not pulling the trigger. Right. If we domesticated animals to slow them down so they wouldn't be able to run away from us like cows and pigs, we domesticated plants so they wouldn't kill us. So do we know what those alkaloids do when they're inside of us to kill us? I guess that answer really What do you mean by weed? There is an enormous field of study of how different plant toxins affect different animals and the ways in which they affect different animals. It's not something I know a lot about. I know a few of the really cute stories because they've been involved with things that I've worked on.

So, for example, I worked some years ago on one of the, on the tree that is most closely related to nutmeg. Okay. Nutmeg, you know, it's a yummy spice. It has a beautiful, beautiful, red, fruity-like thing called an aral that surrounds it. And that aral is quite toxic to people, but birds love it. and birds actually lack the metabolic ability to uptake that toxin so they can eat the arrow. And this happens quite frequently. So, for example, actually in both Virginia and California, we have in Virginia poison ivy and California, poison oak.

And they have these gorgeous light blue berries in the fall. And something in the name, poison, should tip you off. off not to eat them. But if you go in the fall, when the berries are ripe, during bird migration, birds inhale those berries. They just love them. And they're actually very important nutrition sources for certain migratory bird species, swallows, for example, and they're not bothered at all.

So birds are really different from mammals in a lot of ways. one we don't think about as often is they can eat things that we can't. I love how toxicity is both dose dependent, right, how much of it you get and also species dependent. But can I ask a question about poison ivy have always wondered about? Because I once took a cross-country road trip with Katrina from California to Chicago, and we stopped and had a really nice picnic in what looked like a very nice field and then later developed terrible rashes and went back and found our pictures. like, oh my God, that was all poison ivy. But my question is, like, the delay. You know, I get that

something tastes spicy or bites you or stings you. It teaches you not to touch it, not to eat it. But poison ivy, it's like, I'm going to do nothing but put this on your skin. And then days later, when you've forgotten who I even was, then I'm going to make you suffer. So why the delay? It seems like very ineffective. First of all, I assume Katrina is the microbiologist in your life. She is, yeah. So just remind her of that story when she talks about plants as only scaffolding. They're also enemies. Take that, Katrina.

But to answer your question, so that question has been around for a very long time. And actually, some of the very first colonial naturalists, you know, long before Darwin, we're asking the question, what's the point of something that gives us a rash three days later? Yeah. And it is probably, we don't know this, we don't have great evidence for this, it's probably a side effect, not the evolutionary purpose. I see. Of the toxin. The toxin in poison ivy will make you very sick very quickly if you eat the leaves.

Yeah. Nobody does so they don't realize that. My goats do. Sometimes people will burn poison ivy. Oh, no. And they get that toxin inhaled. Oh, by the way. And they get very sick very quickly.

Yeah. So it's probably actually not an intended purpose for this rash. And in fact, most animals, most mammals in the forest don't get rashes. The poison ivy oil doesn't actually ever even get to their skin. Well, my rash was bad enough that when I went to the dermatologist, she had the reaction of, hold on a moment, I have to go get my colleagues. I've never seen anything like this. and they all clustered around me. Well, you're only telling part of the story. Yeah, I think this is kind of a family show.

We might want to move on to it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you mentioned that birds can eat poisonous berries and they're fine. And so is there can, I think probably the answer is obvious to a lot of people who know how, like, seeds get from one place to another, but let's just bottom line this. Why is it that plants are letting birds do that, essentially? So a lot of the fruit that birds eat has very small seeds inside of them. And those seeds, especially the ones eaten by birds, are small and not particularly hard.

But the skin, the outermost surface of that seed, is chemically very tough. And so what happens is that seed is small enough and, oddly enough, squealing. pliable enough that they can pass right through the bird's digestive tract and then come out in the poop. And one of the great things about many birds is that they eat. It takes them 10, 15, 20 minutes to digest. That's it? By then they're somewhere else. And that gets the seeds dispersed.

That is how the plant who can, as we said, they're stuck where they are. That's how they get their seeds around is through. bird dispersal. And birds, of course, fly, and they tend to move farther than a lot of animals. So bird dispersal is a very efficient way to move your seeds around in the forest or the field. And I imagine a pile of bird poop is a great place for your seeds to land. It's pretty good. I mean, I think the real advantage is that you are far away from your mom. and there's a real advantage for plants and probably other maybe people too to try and grow up far away from your parents. Really?

And in the case of plants, and this comes back to the aforementioned Katrina, the advantage of growing up away from your mother is that imagine a tree who's sitting there for 200 years. Yeah. That's a long time from microbes and fungi. to grow up and be around you. And those fungi that might not be too bad for an adult tree, that 200-year-old one, would make life really hard for the baby. So there's what we call, to go into science jargon,

negative density dependence. That is, the further away you can get from your mother, with reason, of course, the more likely you are to succeed. And this explains that, pattern I mentioned earlier of having very high diversity in the tropical rainforests, right? Tropical rainforests are warm and wet, great places for fungi to grow. And so you don't want to be right next to your mom because she's probably hosting some fungi that would be really bad for you. So in the plant kingdom, there's no benefits to having a mom. There's no like protection or

transmission of, you know, immunity or antibodies or anything? Oh, I mean, the, the, the, plants also have sperm and eggs. And so anything that you can carry through in an egg, plants don't have the same immune systems, of course, as animals. So there's no mother's milk analog. Yeah. But reptiles and birds don't have that analog either. I'm just trying to stick up for moms here.

I mean, somebody has to. You've been bashing them for minutes here. Plants are different. I'm okay with this. No, I think, I mean, what plant moms. do a very good job of is creating the environment around that seed so that the seed has a good chance to develop. All right.

But they realize that maybe that seed doesn't need to develop with them. Tough love. If you love your seed, disperse it. Wow. That advice works in so many ways. So we've talked about how plants aren't necessarily producing toxins to go after birds because they want the birds to eat their seeds and distribute them. But then you get weird things like one listener pointed out that sheep, I think, can't have copper, but goats can, and that she loves garlic, but it would kill her cats.

Is there an evolutionary reason for that level of specificity within, like, sort of animals that have kind of similar strategies? Or is that just kind of bodies work different and throw up our hands? A lot of it is bodies work different. So copper, I actually love copper. I didn't know you were going to bring that up. We worked on copper in plants a few years ago because it's sort of weird and mysterious there. Copper is really interesting because all animals need copper, right?

You need copper, you can't do respiration. You can't breathe without copper. And copper is part of how the energy is transferred and compounds are made in respiration. And so everybody needs copper and it's toxic. at high levels. So the amount of copper that you keep in your cell and where you put it in your cell at any one moment

is incredibly tightly regulated. Because if you don't, your body will take up copper and it'll end up acting as a toxic. And actually, a lot of the reasons it's toxic at high levels are chemically the same that let it be so important at very low levels. to keep you alive for respiration. So plants and copper are even more special, as you might imagine, because they're plants

and so they're special, that copper is also used in plants in this really neat pathway. I'm going to jump into jargon for a moment again because it's the name. It's called the escorbate pathway. And if you're into human nutrition, you know that escorbate is vitamin C. And so plants have this very neat escorbate pathway for dealing with very chemically reactive compounds that they make when they get stressed. So this escorbate pathway is what keeps plants from self-poisoning. And it requires copper also. And so you need, plants need copper.

Some of it goes into escorbate and some of it goes into a scorbate. and some of it goes into what we call electron transport, that part of respiration and photosynthesis. And the reason that plants have to sort of have this special problem, it all comes back to the fact that plants are stuck and can't move around. And for almost all plants, how do they get their food? They capture sunlight. And they use the energy that they capture from the sun

to turn carbon dioxide into sugar. Now, the problem is, if you're a plant, you can't control how much sunlight you capture always. And sometimes there's more sunlight and thus you're trapping more energy than you can use to turn carbon dioxide into sugar. Okay. And in that case, and we're getting really close to physics here,

in that case, you have enough energy in there that you end up with singlet oxygen, not O2, but O, which actually becomes O minus. And that is really poisonous. And you need a special detoxification pathway to take care of that odd oxygen. And that's why plants need that copper in that escorbate pathway is to take care of all the odd oxygen. Now, we get this, you know, if you go into your health food yoga store, you'll read about antioxidants and buy foods that are antioxidant. Well, that's the same thing. We make low levels of odd oxygen, but it's not really such a problem for us.

Plants are producing this all the time when the sun is bright, and they need a specialized chemical pathway for it. So they have things that are toxic to themselves, too. So that sounded like a lot of fascinating chemistry. I didn't hear any physics in there. Well, you know, oxygen O versus O2. Oh, I see. You don't get that without physics. Right. Yeah, I guess physics is just perspective. So it's pizza night, and I'm making my pizza with like 50 cloves of garlic on it. I always wonder when I do that, like, is there a limit to how much garlic you can put in your food?

Can you poison yourself with garlic or am I free to just keep going to infinite garlic pizza? I'm an empiricist. I would say let's do the experiment. I don't necessarily want to be part of the experiment, but I'll read about it. You'll be hard to replace as a co-host, Daniel. So the chemicals that make garlic taste good are the very same chemicals for most people. There are a few people who are unable to eat garlic. They react very badly to it. and there's sulfur-based compounds in the garlic. That's what gives it that strong flavor. And some people react very badly to that. Now, all of those compounds at high enough levels will cause problems.

Remember I said that there are, and you used the phrase dose-dependent earlier, all plants have chemicals in them that if you eat enough of them, you will not be able to digest it, and it will cause, at the very minimum, My guess is that if you're able to eat garlic at all, you probably have some kind of dose dependency and at some point it would get too much and you would probably get sick to your stomach from it. The easiest example for people to know about is the fact that the chemicals in leaves that give them their toughness and structure, things called tannins and ligands. and all of these chemicals, what they do, tannins are the famous ones because tannins are what are in tea. And tannins are not exactly toxic to most organisms at reasonable levels, but they do inhibit the digestion of protein. So they make you a much less efficient eater. So imagine you're a bug eating a leaf.

and as you eat the leaf, you want the protein in that leaf because your protein concentration is 10 to 50 times greater than the leaf. So you need to eat a lot of leaf to get your protein every day. You don't get it from milk or anything. So you're eating all that. That means you're eating all that tannin. That tannin actively interferes with your protein digestion. And so it's a trade-off. And of course, from the plant's perspective, the reason it doesn't just fill itself with toxins

is that if it did that, well, then it wouldn't have chemicals for photosynthesis and for reproduction. So you always have to balance how much you defend yourself. Now, bugs are pretty smart too. And what a lot of insects have figured out how to do is to have an early stage in digestion where they chemically modify the tannin before it interferes with protein digestion. So they've sort of worked around it. Humans don't have that workaround.

So we could have our protein digestion very much inhibited by tannins. Okay, let's send that answer on over to TAN and see what they have to say. Hey, TNK, that was excellent. I learned a ton. The bit about alkaloid genes just sitting dormant in potatoes and tomatoes and is ready to switch back on, that kind of blew my mind. So I will never look at French fry this same way again.

Hey, keep up the show. Make it last. I hope you guys never go away. Syndicate this thing if you can. Thanks again. Pan from Oklahoma City. Bye. It shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factor solves all that.

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And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song.

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stillard. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves over.

Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was a.

in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. I don't think she was an American pie, but I still like that. I haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Then Mary Steenberg. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to me

that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And the next question is Jane from Redcar England. And so Daniel, do you want to go ahead and get in your, you love Jane's accent? I love Jane's accent.

She has a great accent. She's wonderful to listen to. It's melodic and harmonious. And it also just seems like she's having fun thinking about science. Nice to hear from you again, Jane. All right. So let's go ahead and hear Jane's question. Hi, Daniel, but mainly Kelly.

It's Jane from Redcar, England again. Now, I know that I'm greedy, but I've got another question. What causes seeds to germinate? I know that some plants need fire to germinate and other need several weeks below zero, Celsius, sorry, and moisture and light also affect germination, but that's not what I mean. If you saw several seeds in the same conditions,

not all of them will germinate. So what is the spark that sets it off? I presume that it's some sort of chemical reaction rather than divine intervention. And once cell division starts, it is complex but understandable. But how does it start? Is it some random quantum process?

In which case, Daniel should be answering after all. I'm still loving the show. You and Daniel, as well as being so intelligent and great science communicators, are just so much fun to listen to. Even when the jokes are painful and the poetry is more McGonagall than Keats. I always find myself smiling as I learned something new.

So I can't wait to hear what your answer will be. Thank you. Always lovely to hear from Jane. And so, Manuel, let's start from the beginning. What does germinating mean for those of us who weren't in introbiology for like 20 years or something? Well, I used to teach at SUNY Stony Brook, which is on Long Island, right outside of New York City, and we had a lot of students who were not native English speakers. And when I would get to germination in intro bio, one of the first points I'd have to make,

I learned this only by not saying it one year, is it has nothing to do with becoming German. Completely independent of that. Okay. So germination is a really interesting thing. And germination occurs when the plant, in the seed form decides that instead of being in the form of a seed, it's going to be in the form of what we think of as a plant, something with a stem, something with leaves, and something with roots. That stereotypical example.

And that transformation, so it's genetically exactly the same, that transformation from seed to differentiate itself, with leaves and stems and roots is germination. Okay, so like, you know, with humans, when it's time to go from being like, I don't know, a fetus to a baby, there's like a nine-month window. And when that nine-month window passes, you come out of the body. And there's, so it's like a very fixed time thing. But with seeds, is it like you wait three weeks until you go from being a seed to a plant? Or is there different cues for that?

So I guess I'm kind of going to. push back on your idea that you go from being a fetus to a human being. In a sense, when you're a mammal, as soon as fertilization occurs, you are developing and you are initially just dividing and then you're dividing and differentiating and then all of a sudden, at some point, you're born. And it's not like you're only linked to some internal clock, right? You're marinated in a bath of signals from the mom, right? And you're marinated in the signals, but if you're a bird or a reptile, you start as an egg, but as soon as you fertilized, you are developing.

Now, in many animals that are born from eggs, the rate that you develop is temperature dependent, but you're always developing. Seeds are really, really different. A seed is a plant. it's not a developing organism along the way to a final adult form, it's an adult in itself. A seed is not a baby plant. A seed is a plant. A seed is an adult? That's mind-blowing. A seed could be thought of as an adult.

Wow. Right? How so? A seed, there's fertilization occurs. And what happens after fertilization is that it becomes a seed. So in a plant democracy, seeds could vote? Well, the male seeds, yes. We don't let females go.

Whoa. Well, remember we're in Virginia, right? Oh, why? You're raining down the bombs over here. I am retrospectively upset about the getting away from your mom comments because now I'm seeing anti-female sentiment throughout all of this. No, no, no. Not all.

But it's an important distinction both in ecology and in evolutionary terms because that seed is something that in some species can survive for years, decades, centuries, even sometimes millennia. Amazing. And it is not that it is a plant frozen in development. It is itself what it is. Now, it's unique and different in that it's not drawing resources from the environment. It's not metabolically active. Yeah.

And so it challenges our idea of what it means to be, quote, alive. Oh, it's a little bit apollically active, not very. The question, I'll rephrase your question, Kelly. The question is, what causes a seed to decide to go from being one form, the seed form, to being that differentiated, quote, plant form, the leafy form. And that's where things get interesting. because for some plants, that decision is a chemical one, right? There are some seeds that need to, remember, we talked about the seed going through the bird

digestive tract or mammals, some mammals as well. That seed needs to pass through the physical and chemical scarification of its surface so that it can germinate. other seeds need a certain period of low temperature before they can germinate. Still, other seeds need a combination of low temperature and water before they can germinate. Essentially, what it all can be explained by is that seeds are somehow able to use cues from their environment. It might be the intestinal tract of the bird or the spring rain in the desert as a cue to say, okay, this is a good time to go from being seed form to being leaf form.

So that is what germination is. Little different than animal development. And so why would you need the cold spell? What does the cold spell tell you? Well, think if you're, we've got, we're in July now and in Virginia. and in California, you've got grasses now who are beginning to set seeds. And those seeds are going to see at some point rainfall. And if they say, oh, it's nice and rainy, let's germinate and grow.

If they do that in October, in Virginia, they're going to be seedlings when it starts to freeze. Bad idea. They don't want to do that. So they say, okay, I'm going to need some kind of a low temperature signal for long period, months, before I turn on my water sensitivity. And of course, this is one of the great things scientists are trying to figure out now who work on sea germination is what is that low temperature sensor that they're using that says, okay, two weeks of low temperature were not enough. to make me water sensitive, but four months are. And what genetically is happening in that? But to bring us a little bit back closer to Jane's original question,

you know, I think a common experience is you buy a bunch of seeds, you put them in the ground, you treat them all the same, they're in basically the same place, some germinate, some don't, some grow fast, some don't. Is that genetic variation among the seeds? Is that some sort of historical difference in the seeds before they came to you? Or is there some quantum mechanical randomness where they're sensitive to cosmic gray muons.

So if you're buying your seeds, in Virginia, we buy our seeds from Southern States Cooperative, you buy seeds who have received all the chemical and temperature treatment that that species of plant might need to be able to germinate when you put it in the ground and water it. So you put it in the ground, you water it, it is primed and ready to go. That's why you buy the seeds,

is that you don't want to have to worry about letting them sit in your freezer or in your refrigerator over a winter. You buy them, you plant them, they grow. So this is something I didn't understand at all. You're saying seeds have a very complex set of germination requirements and highly variable. And when you buy seeds, all that work has been done for you except for the last step. Put it in the ground and water it. Wow. And so this is another thing that we did when we domesticated plants.

A lot of the seeds you buy are of domesticated. plants where we have reduced the number of experiences the seed needs to have before it germinates. Most domesticated plants, we've selected them to be very fast germinators. Wow, domesticating plants seems like a lot of work. Well, you know, we've been at it for a long time. We started roughly 12,000 years ago. Exactly. All right.

So you were saying that purchased seeds are prime to go. All right. Now, some of them don't. And that largely occurs for a couple of reasons. One, those seeds were improperly fertilized to begin with, and the seed developed, but it wasn't really viable. And there's nothing you could have done to make it work. Sometimes those seeds were fine, but maybe because they were so primed to go, some of them sat for too long. and they actually, they were a little bit too active in the seed form.

Before I corrected myself when I said, they're not entirely inactive the seeds, but they're largely inactive. But if they're, you know, they could be a little too much in the seed, and then they're not able to go. And some of it is you think you're doing it all right, but you don't always do it all right. But one of the things that happens is that when people who sell seeds learn that certain ones are not germinating well from their customers,

they often start doing things differently to try to improve that germination rate. And that's why it is so high. Now, you can see this same sort of thing in wild plants. You can collect acorns and do what you need to do to the acorn so that it will germinate and different species of oaks have different requirements. They won't all germinate. usually that's because they didn't all develop along the way properly. And is that genetic?

Is that environmental? It's really hard to say. I would say it's internal, but it could be genetic. It could be environment. But it sounds like if you have seeds with the same genetics and you give them exactly the same experience, then you should get the same germination. Yes.

There is no real randomness. No, this is one of the few cases where the physics, the muons are not that important. Although it underlies everything, of course. Absolutely everything. So do you have any stories for like the most complicated set of conditions that a plant has needed before it will germinate? Do you have like a favorite example of a plant being high maintenance? And is it sequoia trees?

You know, maybe it's because I have and I'm still in the midst of raising up three high-maintenance offspring. But I think the really interesting stories involve the low-maintenance ones. And I think that these cases, there's a lovely study still going on. And I think it's about, I think it's about 120 years old right now.

It started about 120 years ago at Michigan State University, where they took seeds and put them in pots and buried them. many, many, many, many, all identical. And they've been digging them up. I think it's every 10 years, maybe, and germinating from these posts and seeing how germination rates change with time. And they're still getting incredible germination rates. And what's amazing in these studies is that they now have plants growing today who were adapted to the environment in East Lansing, Michigan. 120 years ago.

Huh. And so they can actually study evolution by comparing these seeds from 120 years ago with seeds that come from individuals today. They can study how, what adaptations have occurred. And there have been similar kinds of works on people who find seeds. There was a guy who was actually not working on plants. He was working on ancient covers. You know, condors used to occur pretty far into the western United States.

They weren't just on the coast. So he was studying condors, fossil condors, and ancient condors in pack rat middens in the Rocky Mountains. And he discovered seeds while he was looking for condor bones. And so they germinated some of these seeds. And these are seeds from thousands of years ago. So you can actually study adaptation in real time across centuries and millennia because of the ability of seeds to not germinate when the conditions aren't right. And the seeds from the condor poop did germinate still? Well, they weren't in the ponder poop.

They were in the pack rat. You know, pack rats have these middens, these little tiny caves where they bring stuff and they store stuff. They had bones in there and they had seeds in there. And so you can take these seeds and germinate them and see what the plants from that time were like. And this is not long enough for new species. That's cool. But it is long enough to see adaptation that changes in the environment. That's awesome.

All right. Super fascinating. Shall we send this off to Jane? We should send this off to Jane. All right, Jane. What do you think? Wow. Please thank Manuel for answering my question, which I'm stunned to hear is at the cutting

edge of science. There were so many cool facts in this answer, like a seed is a whole plant. I believe Manuel called it an adult in itself, and they're just primed and ready to go, just waiting for the right resources to kick things off. But I am relieved that we're not reliant on muons. I didn't appreciate that commercial seed merchants prepared seeds so carefully, but that begs the question. If some seeds, as Manuel suggested, need to pass through the gut of a bird or an animal before they germinate, how on earth is this achieved commercially? Thank you once more for satisfying my thirst for more science knowledge. Hi, Kelly. Thanks for that interesting question from your Richard.

On the whole, this need for physical passage through an animal gut has been bred out of domestic. planks. So when you buy seeds for flowers or vegetables for your garden, they largely don't need that kind of physical abrasion that they get by passing through the bird or the mammal intestinal tract. And that is one reason that many wild plant seeds have lower germination rates than domestic ones. The wild plant seeds are missing animal scarification that they may still require. One example where people on the east coast of the United States or Europe can see this is with a plant called wineberry. Wineberry is a European kind of raspberry that is very common as a wild plant but has

never been domesticated. Wineberry rates of germination are much lower than the germination rates of domestic raspberries. There are some seed sellers who use physical abrasion to increase germination rate. You see this on the packet with the fancy word. scarification. That usually means they just rolled the seeds around with some rocks to break up the seed coat a little bit. But of course, if any animals are used for scarification, it's likely goats, because as you well know, people who raise goats are lovely, willing to try anything, and sometimes

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Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bill. Connection is everything. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves

to tell you about Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea?

We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody.

Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Solita, we share the messy stories of traveling alone as a woman. Your duolingo is not going to come back to you when a man is inside of you. Oh, no.

I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes. without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. I can wait four hours for the next bus,

or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This last question comes to us from my favorite web cartoonist. Turns out I do know a good web cartoonist, and I'll change my tune and be nice here for a second. So Zach, go ahead and ask your question about micro-propagation.

Hello, this is Zach Wiener-Smith. I'm a 90-year-old retiree from... Japan, and I was just reading a book on horticulture, and I came across this idea of micro-propagation, where somehow you use cells from plants to grow a bunch more plants. And I'm wondering, as are my friends here in Germany, exactly how that works. Thanks. A huge fan of the podcast. Good day, sir, and madam. Zach is not just a web cartoonist. He's quite a gardener. I've been to the farm.

I know he's like always involved in planting or growing something. Doesn't he have like a bunch of trees where he's like grafting this and that? He hasn't started the grafting yet, but that he has planted a bunch of trees and he plans on doing grafting. And he planted 60 paw paw plots this year and the hope that he'll get to do some pawpaw grafting and stuff in the coming years. So are you queen of the animals and he's king of the plants? Is that how things divide over there? That's right. And I thought that made me superior, but Manuel is pointing out that the biomass is in Zach's favor.

But anyway, yes, he's quite the gardener. He would say he doesn't know what he's doing, I think, but he's learning as he goes. Would he? No, I'm pretty darn sure he would. You would say that he would say that. All right. Well, I'm sure he'll weigh in on his comment at the end. So, all right.

What is micropopogation? So Manuel and I agreed that I was going to try to explain this first and that then he would jump in. So let's see how this goes. Okay, so folks who have house plants know that sometimes you can cut off a piece of the house plant and like stick it in soil or stick it in water and you get a whole new plant. And so that is a way to get more plants quickly. But that's not fast enough if you want to be selling like thousands and thousands and thousands of a plant to people who, you know, there's a plant that's in great demand and you need to have a lot of them quickly. And so micro-propigation involves essentially taking certain. parts of the plant, sterilizing it so that you're getting rid of all of the bacteria,

all of the fungus, etc. And then you put it in a little environment with hormones and other cues that the plant uses. And one of the things that you can do is create in these like little containers with hormones is callous, where you get a lot of undifferentiated plant cells. So they haven't become leaves. They haven't become roots. They're ready to become something eventually. But at the moment, they don't really know what their future holds. And so you get lots and lots of these cells, and then you can break them up gently and put them into different containers with different sets of hormones, and each one of those will become a new plant. And so you can essentially have this stage where you're growing up a bunch of cells in an

environment, you separate those cells out, you give them different hormonal cues, and now you can get thousands, maybe even millions of these plants much more quickly. What have I gotten wrong so far, Manuel. No, I think you nailed it. I think I was very smart to ask you to do this first. Kelly, you're an excellent guest on Manuel's podcast here. Oh, good. Okay. It points up, I mean, let's go back to Daniel's potato there, right? It points up the fact that these cells throughout the plant are genetically identical. And it highlights one of the really interesting differences between plants and animals. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one, which is that plant cells have a lot of flexibility compared to animal cells.

And even though when a leaf develops, those cells that are formed by, you know, the cells are growing, they divide. the leaf gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And those cells all become leaf cells. They're not fixed to doing that the way a lot of animal cells are. If you can pull those cells out of the leaf environment, and that's what microproprogation is, they become equivalent functionally to stem cells in animals. That is, they can then become anything they want.

and you can grow them up in the right balance of hormones and sugar. Remember, they need a food source. You can grow them up into a new plant, and that's micropropagation. And the reason it works so well with plants is that this, what's called de-differentiation, which is almost impossible with animal cells. Once you have a liver cell, it's almost impossible to have it become anything but another. two more liver cells. On the other hand, a plant cell from a leaf, from a stem, can become that plant. Now, coming back to, oh, I forget who it was who asked, about germination.

Jane. Jane, what you don't seem to be able to do in microproprogation is take that callous and have it developed directly into a seed. That doesn't happen. And it's not clear why that is so impossible. But of course, you could imagine that if you were trying to grow something where the seed is the crop, it would be lovely if you could do that. Right? Skip that whole step of the apple tree, just go apple to apple to apple. And that doesn't work.

We don't, we can't do that. We seem to be only able to propagate from a callus the leaf form of the plant. And nobody knows why that is. Interesting. I bet if you could figure that out, you'd make millions, maybe billions. Right. I would not be on your, I would not be sitting at the University of Virginia or on this podcast. You would be the plant king.

No, I would still be on the podcast. I'd definitely be on the podcast, but I wouldn't be it. Yeah, wouldn't be a professor anymore. I wouldn't be in the lab on a Friday, on Friday before July 4th. You know, if I made a billion dollars, I would still be a physical professor. Well. It's easy to say. It was pretty easy to say that.

You're right. But I think it is. Like, you know, this is what I enjoy doing every day. So can you, when you're going to make that callus, can you take cells from any part of the plant? Or are there some cell types that work better? Well, there are some cell types where it's easier. Okay. And a lot of that has to do with what kind of cell wall is around the cell.

Another important way that plants are really different from animals. is that plants and cells, in addition to having that membrane that we all have, also have a wall, a fairly rigid wall around them. So micropoprogation often, you want to work with cell types that have the thinnest, most pliable, most easy to degrade cell walls. Because that's a whole side of micropoprogation that becomes, that's tricky and important. It turns out that cell walls are a challenge for the plant as well, right? Because if you're going to divide and split, you have to break open your cell wall and then reform it around the new cells. And so plants have a whole really cool genetic system to essentially chemically degrade their cell wall just enough. So it can

split, but they don't degrade the whole thing because then they'd have to rebuild the whole wall. And they'd spend all their time doing that. So in micropropagation, it tends not to get done on cells that have really heavy, thick cell walls like the parts of wood that are really strong. Okay. Those tend not to be used for it. Right. That makes sense.

And then is it safe to assume that when you finish doing micropropagation, you end up with plants that are genetically identical to the plants that you took the cells from? Yes, they are literally clones of them. Of course, if you do it for long enough, there can be some kind of small-scale mutation that occurs along the way, but essentially they're genetically identical. I mean, the real challenge for micropoprogation and why not everyone does it and why most people just cut off a leaf and stick it in is that one of the very first things you've said was really important, comes back to the microbes, that you have to do this in a super sterile environment because everything you do when you are doing the micropropagation

to help the plants grow will help the microbes grow also. And what you'll end up doing is propagating an enormous microbial colony instead of a plant. Okay. If you don't do it entirely sterile. And microbes and plants have this incredible, tightly tight relationship with one another, where you really don't, I mean, your wife is correct again, you don't have plants in nature ever without microbial infections.

That's right. Ever. They're everywhere. That is the challenge in micropropagation, not so much the propagation techniques themselves, but getting the environment clean enough so that you can do it without micropropagating microbes simultaneously. And is this part, so I remember at the end of micro-propagation, there's a stage where you have to harden the plants back up again because they've been in this like perfect, sterile, delicate environment. Is part of that process, like reintroducing them to the like organisms that they kind of

need? Or is it just trying to toughen them up because they've been coddled? It's interesting. I think probably one of the things that you're indirectly doing is toughening them up for the micro- Okay. But usually that hardening is more focused on the physical environment and the chemical environment that they're in rather than the microbial. You just, you stop being so, so inally retentive about sterility and you start letting them struggle a little bit more. And wherever there is carbon, there are microbes. And so the microbes get there. Yay, microbes.

So, all right, so some of the benefits of micro-propagation are that you can quickly get a whole bunch of clones of some plant that you really want. And if you specifically are trying to make a plant that you know tends to have a disease, doing it in this sterile environment means that like when you send this plant, for example, to another country, you can be pretty darn sure you're not going to be sending that disease to another country where it can then go and infect other plants. And so sterility is a feature, even if it makes things complicated. Does that sound fair, Manuel? Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure how much that sterile environment is important for, say, international shipping or interstate transport. I think it's mostly important for getting plants who are not only genetically uniform, but have grown up in a really similar environment. If you have some who've been infected and some who've not been infected, they're going to be different plants.

I've only been involved in one major study where we used micropropagation, and that was with a, we wanted the exact same genotype of a kind of tomato that we were working on, and we needed thousands of them to grow. And so when you're growing 7,500 tomatoes, you don't garden anymore for a few years. but we were able to do that. That was the main goal was to get these identical plants so that we would know that any differences we saw were due to the perturbations.

We were exerting on the plants not to differences that they came with. I was listening to the In-Defensive Plants podcast and he was interviewing someone who does orchid conservation. And I hear that this is also like a helpful technique and some conservation programs for plants as well where you want to grow up a lot of them sort of as fast as you can, and maintain a bunch of genotypes. And so have you heard about this being used in conservation for plants as well?

So it's pretty famous for orchids. Okay. And the reason for that is that, one, people love orchids. Two, link to one, a lot of orchids are quite rare. And three, because orchids have such intricate, complicated pollination systems, usually requiring a specific species of bee to pollinate that orchid. It's really hard to get orchids, many species, to get them to make seeds. Because your orchid from South America that you're growing in Albemarle County, Virginia,

may not have the right bee. And so your seed production will be low, so you can use microprogation in order to get many others of your. Now, you're only getting that genotype of that species of orchid, but it's better than nothing. Yeah. So, yeah, in orchids, it's been hugely important. Anything that's really difficult to get pollinated, micropopogation would be good for. All right.

Let's send this answer to Zach and see if we have sated his appetite for knowledge about micropopagation. See if he's still awake after a... I'll hail the king of plants. Oh, no, I think the queen of the animals is the one that should be hailed. Hi, this is Zach Wienersmith. I am a 95-year-old retiree here in Geneva, and I just wanted to say I appreciated the thorough response

from Manuel and Kelly on the Kelly Show. Thanks very much for answering the question, and au revoir. Okay, and that's our episode. Thanks, everybody. If you have a question for us, you can send it to questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. And some of the questions make it on the show and the ones that really stump us

we bring our friends on to answer for us. So thanks for joining us today, Manuel. All right, take care. Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, the and K universe. Come engage with us.

You can email us at Questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www. www. www. danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation

to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. Summer Blockbuster are back. The Odyssey and Spider-Man. Brand new day have taken over cinemas and Raiders of the Lost

podcast has all the coverage you need, including our interview with director Destin Daniel Cretton. What surprised you about Tom Holland? He shows up to every meeting early. He's the first one on set. Aside from learning all of his lines, is also able to memorize everybody's name on set. Download the free IHeart Radio app. Search Raiders of the Lost podcast and listen now. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together,

breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. Your duolingo is not going to come back to you when a man is inside of you. Oh, no. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by my... because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility.

Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed, and Mary Steenberg. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.