Something You Should Know - Why You Should Embrace Your Most Embarrassing Moments & The Fascinating World of Seeds

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

It is conventional wisdom for people taking a test that if you are stuck – go with your first answer. Listen as I begin this episode by explaining why that is such terrible advice Source: Joseph T. Hallinan author of Why We Make Mistakes (https://amzn.to/44PV4SQ) We have all felt awkward and embarrassed at times. It feels terrible. Still, it happens to everyone and so often it isn’t as big deal a deal as YOU think it is and maybe it isn’t a big deal at all. That’s the message from Henna Pryor. She has researched what that feeling of embarrassment is really all about and I think you will find what she has to say to be very liberating. Henna is a keynote speaker with two great TEDx talks (https://www.ted.com/talks/henna_pryor_why_awkwardness_is_your_secret_weapon_for_risk_taking_at_work) and she is author of the book, Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become The Bravest You (https://amzn.to/45Ksgwh) Most plants come from seeds. And I bet you don’t really understand how that really works. And how it works is truly amazing, as you will discover from listening to my guest Jennifer Jewell. She is a gardening educator and advocate and hosts a podcast called Cultivating Place (https://www.cultivatingplace.com/blog-1). She is also author of the book What We Sow (https://amzn.to/3EKxv3f). If you have ever wondered things like how they grow seedless watermelon when there are no seeds, you will like this discussion.  Some people have real trouble when it comes to parallel parking. But there is a secret or two that can make it much easier. Listen as I explain this simple technique. Source: Jason Roberts author of The Learn 2 Guide (https://amzn.to/3PnPNfH) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! PrizePicks is a skill-based, real-money Daily Fantasy Sports game. You pick 2-6 players and if they will go more or less than their PrizePicks projection. It's that simple! Go to https://prizepicks.com/sysk and use code sysk for a first deposit match up to $100 With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Go to https://HelloFresh.com/50something and use code 50something for 50% off plus free shipping! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Anxious thoughts seem to happen at the worst time. It's important to try and get out of those negative thought cycles. If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It’s entirely online, so it’s convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. Get a break from your negative thoughts with BetterHelp Visit https://BetterHelp.com/SOMETHING today to get 10% off your first month! Now, your ideas don't have to wait, now, they have everything they need to come to life. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow U.S. Cellular knows how important your kid’s relationship with technology is. That’s why they’ve partnered with Screen Sanity, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids navigate the digital landscape. For a smarter start to the school year, U.S. Cellular is offering a free basic phone on new eligible lines, providing an alternative to a smartphone for children. Visit https://USCellular.com/BuiltForUS ! Planet Money is an incredible podcast with entertaining stories and insights about how money shapes our world. Listen to Planet Money https://npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money wherever you get your podcasts! With GOLO you will safely and effectively control sugar cravings, hunger, and minimize muscle loss allowing you to feel good and inspired to reach your goal weight. Learn more at https://golo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, what you must be aware of before you take your next test. Then you've no doubt felt embarrassed and awkward in front of other people. It feels terrible. And it happens to everyone. I use the phrase embrace the awkward because here's a truth that I feel so strongly about. That awkwardness is not something we can eliminate. It is not a deficiency to fix. To eliminate awkwardness implies eliminating uncertainty. Also, the secret to parallel parking and the fascinating world of

seeds, how they work, and how you get seedless watermelon if there are no seeds. The seedless watermelon is an anomaly created by humans. So you can't get more seedless watermelons from a seedless watermelon. They are a human creation. They're sort of the Frankensteins of the food. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times,

relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi and welcome you're just in time for another episode of something you should know i have probably i'm almost positive i have mentioned this before on a previous episode quite some time ago, but I still hear this a lot, and that is this advice that parents and teachers have been giving for a long time to people who are about to take a test at the DMV or in school, and the advice goes something like, if you're in doubt about a question, go with your first answer. That's the advice.

Is it good advice? No. Research on this exact question has been going on for well over 80 years, and virtually all the studies have come to the same conclusion. If you think about changing your answer, you're usually better off changing it and not sticking with your first answer. Another often overlooked factor in performing well on tests is sleep. Research shows that lack of sleep impairs your ability to think and reason and drastically increases your error rate. And that is something you should know. Have you ever felt awkward or embarrassed because of something you did? Of course you have. Everyone has. It feels terrible. You say the wrong thing, you trip on the sidewalk, there's spinach between your teeth, or you just generally feel like an awkward person compared to everyone else.

That feeling of embarrassment or awkwardness can be so strong that it can prohibit you from doing things or taking risks for fear of appearing foolish. But hold on. There may actually be some good news amongst all this awkwardness and embarrassment, as you're about to hear from someone who has lived it and researched it and truly understands this. Meet Henna Pryor. She is a workplace performance expert and an award-winning TEDx speaker

and a global keynote speaker. She's a professional executive coach, and she's author of a book called Good Awkward, How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. Hi, Hannah, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So I find it interesting because, you know, when I'm embarrassed or I do something awkward and feel foolish, I want to forget about it. You want to study it. You want to dive deep. So what's that all about? Yeah, I love that. Yes, you're exactly right. Most of us are desperately trying to figure out

how to forget about them, how to eliminate them, how to avoid them. Generally, that's the way we think about the word awkward or the emotion of awkwardness. And why I chose to study them is twofold. A, I've been awkward my whole life. Daughter of immigrant parents always felt like I stuck out a bit, like a sore thumb. Most of my adolescent story was one of desperately trying to assimilate. You know, my name is Hannah, not Jennifer or Samantha, like many people from my generation. And awkwardness was something I identified strongly with. So everybody knows that feeling when you do something embarrassing and people see you and

it feels horrible and it feels different than other feelings. So what is that feeling? The way I define awkwardness and to kind of point to what it feels like is awkwardness is the emotion that we feel when the person that we believe ourselves to be or our true self is momentarily at odds with the person that other people see on display. In other words, who we are for a moment in time is different than who they see. And so it's a social emotion. Typically, we don't feel the emotion of awkwardness when we are by ourselves. If we're at home and we sang the song lyric incorrectly, no one was there. We don't typically feel awkward about it.

But if we do it in front of someone else whose opinion we value, that invites awkwardness. So it's a social emotion and it is an emotion of discomfort. It doesn't feel good because those two selves are at odds. There's a gap. Yeah, it almost feels, I mean, to me, when I was thinking about this, like you feel incompetent being you. Yeah, I love the way of thinking about that. You know, someone once asked me, is awkwardness a form of cognitive dissonance?

And I said, in a way, it is because what you're sort of doing is subverting your own expectations of who you are and how something was supposed to go. And the thought is often, why me? Why now? Why this? And yet it's happened to just about everybody. I mean, everyone's had that horrible experience of, you know, their flies down, the toilet papers on their shoe or whatever it is that just makes you feel so horrible. But then it's gone. So why is it worth saying, wait, let's slow down here and take a closer look? Mike, I'm going to challenge.

It's not always gone for people. So what's interesting about awkwardness is that people use the word or the expression one of two ways. Some people, for them, it is gone quickly. They think of feeling awkward as a state, a temporary state. I just had an awkward conversation. Oh, that was an awkward interaction. I just had a, right? And for them, it is less fleeting. It is something that they hold as a part of their identity and walk through life kind of with this mask of, I'm always going to show up like this on. So it's important for us to first figure out which model are we operating from? Are we identifying ourselves as this way? Or is it something that we do see as transient and fleeting? To quickly address your other point, it is a self-conscious emotion, which means that we are really scanning the environment for what do other people see?

And when we're constantly doing that scanning, it invites a different level of discomfort than some of the other uncomfortable emotions. Would you say, is there any reason to believe that when someone self-identifies as awkward, that that's how other people think of them? Do other people notice their awkwardness, or is it all internal? Yeah, it's a great question, because one of the fascinating things I learned in studying this was awkwardness when we're using it to describe a person is not something that can be used as a statement of fact. Awkwardness is 100% subjective. So it is up to us to deem ourselves so, or it's up to someone else to deem a person so. But there is no such thing as a person who

is factually awkward. So we can at no point use that term as a statement of fact. So really what we're looking at is an opinion. So it's a very helpful starting point when we're trying to wrangle or embrace this emotion to start from that belief that awkwardness is an opinion. It's a choice to decide if that's a word we're going to use to describe how we walk through the world. But we also have a choice to choose different words and to empower ourselves differently. Well, but so here's the thing, though, when you see someone do something that you would describe as awkward, they quote, make a fool of themselves. Generally speaking, other people are very forgiving of that and sympathetic to that and don't, they're not laughing.

They're like, oh, God, poor guy. So this feeling of dread that people are judging you, they're probably not. So why do we think they are? Right. I love the question. There's two angles to explore here. One is, you know, Tom Gilovich, he has great work around the spotlight effect, right? This general idea that people are paying much closer attention to us than they are. And the truth is, to your point, they rarely are, right? They're much more concerned with themselves, whether they look awkward, whether they're

making a fool of themselves. There's actually a study that's fascinating that was done with people in Barry Manilow t-shirts, which at the time they deemed a highly embarrassing t-shirt. Poor, poor Barry Manilow. They had students walk in and they were asked, what percentage of other students do you think noticed your t-shirt? And the students estimated about 50%. And in the first study, the answer was actually 25%. So half of what they thought. They then replicated this study again with another group of non-embarrassing t-shirts. At the time, I believe

it was Dave Matthews, Martin Luther King Jr., or one other. And it was actually less than 10% of people that could identify what was on the t-shirt. So the lesson there is people are not looking at you as closely as you think, but there are some other contributing factors that make us believe that they are. And those factors are?

There's a phenomenon called vicarious embarrassment. And understanding our relationship with vicarious embarrassment is really helpful to assessing how we think others look at us. So vicarious embarrassment is essentially what you've described, the situation where someone does something embarrassing, and rather than feeling just embarrassed for another person, we actually feel embarrassed with that person.

We almost take on their embarrassment as though it's our own. And vicarious embarrassment, interestingly, is a function of a certain type of empathy. So when we're very high on a certain type of empathy, it's actually called easily empathetically embarrassed. When we can easily become embarrassed with someone else, we take on their embarrassment as though it's our own. It is actually very difficult for us to detach from the idea that someone else wouldn't feel the same way about us. And so when we have that response, we tend to assume other people will have that sort of spotlight on us as well. I wouldn't be surprised if most people, even if you don't consider yourself awkward, like I don't consider myself an awkward person,

but I probably consider myself more awkward than just about everybody else. Like, because I know the things I've done that are awkward, but I don't know the things that you've done that are awkward. So because I have that knowledge of me, I'm probably more awkward than you, even though I'm probably not. Everyone would say that, Mike. Everyone would say, there's no chance you're more awkward than me. I'm probably more awkward than you, right? Because this is how we feel about this emotion. We tend not to talk about it. We tend to hold it as our own. And so interestingly, this is a general

feeling most people have because we know our own blunders. We know our own missteps more intimately than anyone else does. We've thought about them more. We ruminate on them more. Sometimes in an especially awkward interaction, we're playing that sucker around in the shower for hours. So of course, it's something that we feel more intimate with versus someone else's who we've forgotten seconds after it occurred. So that's, it's a valid, it's a valid feeling, but I think everyone shares that one. Yeah. And like you say, but when, when it happens to other people, you forget about it pretty

fast. You don't sit in the shower and think about, oh, that Bob, what he did. But when you do it, it takes on this enormous importance that nobody shares that with you. And that's exactly right. And part of, I think, where I'm very passionate is it needs to be shared. I think the biggest danger facing us as a society right now is our social musculature is weakening to terrifying degrees. And sometimes people, when they hear about this topic, they think, oh, you know, Hannah wrote a book for

introverts or, you know, Hannah's studying this stuff for introverts. No, actually, I'm very much an extrovert. I am through and through an extrovert. And so awkwardness is not limited to introverts. This is something that as a society, we all actually got to experience what it feels like for our social muscles to have taken a hit. Because when we all came back from the pandemic, when meeting restrictions started lifting and we all came back together again, I don't know one of us that doesn't remember that moment where we were first in a room of people together and we were like, are we high-fiving? Are we fist bumping? Are we standing far away from one another? I can't read your face. I don't really know what's going on here. Our social muscles started to atrophy

and we're at a real dangerous intersection here where more and more of the society we live in is optimizing for friction-free communication. We don't have to ring doorbells anymore. We just text, hey, I'm here. We don't have to call on the phone to order food. We put it in online. And so more and more, our social muscles are becoming so weak that it is presenting a real dangerous territory for introverts, extroverts, and everyone else. We're talking about awkwardness and embarrassment,

something we all experience. And my guest is Hena Pryor. She's author of the book Good Awkward, How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. So, Hannah, what is it you want people to get from this? What is it you

want people to take away from this? I use the phrase, embrace the awkward, because here's a truth that I feel so strongly about. And, you know, every piece of data I unearthed echoed this is that awkwardness is not something we can eliminate. It is not a deficiency to fix. To eliminate awkwardness implies eliminating uncertainty in life. And so what we can learn to do instead is embrace it, lean into it, learn how to recover from those moments quickly. Elimination is not an option, but strengthening our comeback rate is. And the only way to strengthen our comeback rate is through repetitions, is through conditioning,

is through practice. So I'm really passionate about people finding everyday low stakes opportunities to keep their social fitness muscle, not even just strong, but frankly alive. We need to stop making everything in our life socially friction free. It certainly helps to hear, even though people probably know this to some extent, but to hear you say, which I think you said earlier, maybe I said it and you agreed, but that when you feel that awkwardness, people aren't as mean about it as you're imagining they are. There's a lot of play there, that people are very forgiving of you. And if you can hold that in, it makes the awkwardness maybe not so bad, right?

Sure. I think what you're pointing to in psychology, they refer to it as the illusion of transparency. So essentially, I have an embarrassing moment, a gaffe, a blunder, my face is hot, I can feel my arm starting to sweat. And I think everyone can see that. I think everyone can see that I think everyone can see that occasionally they can so this isn't an absolute but more often than not they can't we feel that much more acutely than they do now that said some of us can move through it quickly independently and move on but for others actually what I suggest which might sound counterintuitive is to actually bring the thing out into the daylight

So ironically the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness When an awkward moment happens and we all avoid it it makes us all feel more awkward about it and all it takes is that one person who says Man, that was awkward, wasn't it? And we all relax and we all share a smile because we've all been there. And the sooner we can put it out into the room and actually externalize it, the sooner we can all move on. So counterintuitively naming it can actually help release its power. And so are you saying that because we are much more socially isolated and we're not

flexing that social muscle, perhaps as in previous times, that awkwardness is on the rise? It feels that way. A lot of people increasing in numbers are saying that they've forgotten how to manage these situations when they arise. So there's new data that came out post pandemic that supports the idea that people are feeling more and more socially awkward.

They're feeling more and more socially isolated. And the numbers are there. There's been a diminishing of public spaces. There's more and more folks that are still working completely from home or at best, a hybrid workspace environment where just on a volume basis there's not as much opportunity to have accidental run-ins or opportunities to you know course correct should a conversation go in a different direction and so

what's happening as a result one of the studies that I really enjoyed learning about was we're doing a lot more catering, which essentially means performing to meet other people's expectations because we don't have that social practice. So we're putting on versions of ourselves that we think will be more palatable to the masses. And when something does inevitably go sideways, because again, life, right? We can't plan for all of uncertainty. We are less equipped with how to handle it. We haven't had as much practice with those unexpected moments because we're not together enough to have them.

This is really, you know, as you said several times, it's not something we talk about, but well, first of all, it's interesting to talk about it, but by talking about it and shining a light on it, it makes it less horrible somehow. I think what makes me laugh and smile the most around this is as we start talking about it, you realize just how universal it is. Another favorite moment that I discovered was there was a study that was done by an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea where he showed a mirror for the first time to a tribe called the Biami tribe who had never seen their own reflection. Never seen it because they didn't have the modern trinkets and the river in their area actually flowed too quickly for them to catch their own reflection. So this anthropologist brought a mirror for the first time. They saw their own appearance for the first time and their body had what could only be described as a full-body cringe, right? Their muscles tightened. They had a kind of a grimace face. And what it really speaks to is the universality of the awkward emotion.

We all feel cringe. We all fear awkwardness. And the most confident people you know have not cracked the code on how to eliminate it. They've just gotten comfortable with it instead. And I think that's something we can all stand to do. Do you think, though, that somewhere in this conversation ought to be the mention of confidence, that you can trip on the sidewalk, and if you're a confident person, you know you have a better sense of the reality that you can trip on the sidewalk. And if you're a confident person, you know, you have a better sense of the reality that I tripped on the sidewalk, everybody does it and move on versus the person who trips on the sidewalk is not confident, feels like they've screwed up and they fall apart. Yes. Firm, yes. One of the phrases that I really lean into to describe, frankly, myself

is awkward confidence. I will never have cool as a cucumber confidence. I don't think it's going to be available to me in this lifetime. I don't think my edges will ever be smooth. And frankly, as I get older, I don't want them to be. But people tell me regularly that I'm very confident. And that makes me laugh because I feel awkward every day of every minute. This is just who I am. But the big difference is I've learned to embrace it. I've learned to laugh at myself. I've learned that this is universal. We're all going to trip over the sidewalk. We're all going to whack our arm on the metal rack at the department store. We're all going to say the wrong thing or sing the wrong song lyric.

And I think the more that we can humanize these experiences and learn to lean into them, this is very much the key message is there is a new brand of confidence that is available to all of us. The version that is cool and polished and never has a sharp, jagged edge. Frankly, I'm over that one. Well, I like your attitude. And I think for anybody who's ever felt awkward, which is everyone, this has been a very liberating conversation, knowing that everybody feels it and it's okay. I've been talking with Hena Pryor. She is a workplace performance expert and speaker.

She has two TEDx talks, and I'll link to those in the show notes. And she's author of a book called Good Awkward, How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. And there'll also be a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thank you for talking about this, Henna. Thank you so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure to be here.

People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson,

discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast,

it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS

and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

get your podcasts. Look around at all the living things you see, like trees and plants and fruits and vegetables. Pretty much all of them came from a seed. Seeds are the beginning of life for a lot of living things. And haven't you ever wondered, like, well, how is it that a seed that's, say, sitting in a seed packet in a drawer for a few years, how is it you can plant that and it turns into a flower or a fruit or a plant right in front of you? How does that work? And if you need a seed to grow a fruit or a vegetable, how do you grow seedless watermelon?

These are the kind of questions I want to talk with Jennifer Jewell about. Jennifer is a gardener and a gardening educator. She's host of a podcast called Cultivating Place, and she's author of a book called What We Sow. Hi, Jennifer. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. So what is a seed? I mean, we know a seed when we see one, and we see them in our apples and our tomatoes or in that, you know, that packet from the hardware store.

But what is a seed? A seed is the fertilized reproductive unit of a seed-bearing plant and can produce a whole nother plant that looks much like its parent. In the plant kingdom, there are different kinds of plants. There are the non-seed-bearing plants, the ferns being a perfect example, who reproduce by spores. And then there are the seed-bearing plants, which include both the angiosperms, which are our flowering plants, and the gymnosperms, which are like our conifers. Together, the seed-bearing plants represent about

80% of plant life on this planet. And sometimes a plant is self-fertile, meaning it can fertilize itself without the help of something else. Sometimes plants, let's say rice and wheat, these are wind pollinated, meaning that the wind blows the pollen around when the pollen is ripe on the plant. That will also happen for, say, aquatic plants, Mike. Water will help with the pollination. But I think what most people find the most charismatic about this process is when the birds and the bees and the butterflies and the beetles and sometimes even humans will help with the pollination. So the plant is pollinated and then the seed from the plant goes off and grows into another plant. Is that the formula here?

The point here is that the seed is then sent off into the world, sometimes with a soft, juicy, succulent casing like that tomato or an apple or a cherry. But sometimes it goes out into the world pretty much on its own. Like, think about a milkweed seed that flies up into the air and that little seed is at the bottom of the filaments and is carried on the wind out to find ground and germinate where it lands. And so all of this is so that this plant species continues. That's the purpose of all of this. Right. That is the purpose of all of it is to reproduce and keep the species going.

Yes. And so one of the things that I've always wondered about is like you could get like buy a package of seeds at the hardware store and the garden shop, and they could sit around forever. And you could plant them, and it seems like it still grows. So how could that be? You would think it would have died sitting in that packet for as long as it did, but something reawakens it. And what is that? So that is a great question. And what you are referring to is a seed's viability. And that's its ability to reawaken, as you just said, to absorb water and heat and light and actually do this seriously miraculous act of going from this dormant, seemingly dead little thing

into a growing being that sends out a root and sends out a shoot and puts on leaves. There are about 300,000 different species of angiosperms alone, the flowering plants, Mike. And only about 260,000 of those have been described fully by science. So there's a bunch that we know are out there, but we haven't yet described. They've been co-evolving for something like 365 million years. So they have figured out a lot of ways to reproduce, create seed, adapt that seed, attract, you know, dispersal mechanisms to help get the seed out. So viability is a big term for just how long each individual species of seed will remain alive and possible to germinate. Now, some that can last for a couple of weeks, so you can't actually get them from the hardware store, hold them for five years, and expect them to germinate. But others like these date palms

that they found in an ancient Egyptian tomb, they have been germinated after like 2000 years. I mean, it's crazy how viability varies among species. That said, most of the ones you pick up at the hardware store are probably good for two or three years. So if you get a package of seeds, let's say lettuce or zinnias, and there are maybe 60 seeds in that little packet, the first season, you should expect up to 90% of those seeds will germinate successfully. Each year going on from that, you will get fewer and fewer of those seeds remaining viable.

Another thing that I've always never really understood is, okay, so you could have a watermelon seed and a pumpkin seed, and you could put them in the same pot, in the same soil, feed them the same whatever, give them the same water. One turns into a pumpkin, one turns into a watermelon. Why? And what is it that comes into the seed that allows that? I mean, matter cannot be created or destroyed. So where is that pumpkin and that watermelon coming from? Right. It's so interesting. But it is the miracle of plant life. The pumpkin itself, right? So the seed finds its ground. The seed germinates and

all of that DNA, just like it is in the sperm and the egg for humans, is in that seed already. Most seeds have a little package around them. So think about your pumpkin seed or your acorn. And that little packet includes the viable embryo. It includes the first shoot root that goes down and seeks deeper soil or deeper ground, wherever they might be. It includes this little shoot that shoots up into the sky, into the air, into the light, and puts out one set of leaves. Those are called the cotyledons, the seed leaves. They were also in miniature form in that little seed. Once the seed receives all the cues it needs, and there are different cues for every seed, Mike, those cues, which include moisture, heat, and light, tells the seed it's a good time to germinate. The seed coat, which is like that,

you know, dark outer coating on most seeds, like your watermelon seed. On a pumpkin seed, it's a lighter color, but there's still this seed coat. As it breaks down, its enzymes go into the seed. And the final element that was already in that seed in most flowering plants is called the endosperm. And it's this fleshy little carbohydrate packet, like a lunch sack, people often describe it as, for the seed. And that root and that first shoot and those first seed leaves they eat that endosperm to get themselves going once they are big enough the the the root is deep enough in the ground and the shoot that's going up into the air has its second set of leaves its first true set of leaves those leaves start photosynthesizing. So they are pulling in carbohydrates and sugars

from the air around us. Our plants, right? The leaves have these beautiful little pores that open. They pull in the carbon in the air around us. So all the carbon dioxide, they use that to feed themselves and then they exhale the oxygen that we breathe. The root is doing the same thing in the soil below. It is kind of connecting with microorganisms and with fungal allies and it's getting more sugars and more carbohydrates and water and feeding that plant as well. And eventually, the plant puts on enough growth that it produces either a pumpkin or a watermelon. So we screw around with seeds, I assume, in order to produce food for the food supply and you know one of the things you hear is like you know a lot of the commercially grown fruit and vegetables like tomatoes and whatever

you know don't taste very good because they're not really grown for flavor they're grown to travel far distances and hey what how does that all work mean, are they still being grown from real tomatoes, or is this some kind of voodoo magic to create lots of tomatoes? I don't really understand how that works. It's not like your backyard garden. Right, right. We are reproducing plants by tissue culture. We are reproducing plants by division or cuttings. These are all

clones. So they don't add to the biodiversity of the plant kingdom the way a seed grown plant will. But they are also produced in sort of human created conditions. So it could be hydroponics. It could be some of these indoor vertical greenhouses we're hearing of in cities. It could be that they are grown in greenhouse conditions in far Southern California all year round with with unnatural light and heat and food being given to them. So they are not getting all of the input of regular sun, regular rain, regular air, and the vibrant living soil that we have in our backyard gardens or in a small-scale organic farm. So what we can reproduce as humans in these human-created conditions is some kind of abbreviated form of the magic that nature creates every day with these plants.

So we have something like we have something called seedless watermelons but we never used to have them and if it's seedless then how do you grow new ones and then and how did watermelon go from seeded to seedless? Right well this is one of those you said it yourself just one question back we screw with seeds a little bit to get what we think we want. The seedless watermelon and seedless varieties of our food crops anywhere is an anomaly created by humans. And essentially, the seed of a normal watermelon is treated with a chemical bath. It's an alkaloid chemical that messes with the chromosomes

of the DNA in that seed. That seed is then bred back with a normal seed, I guess, and you get a normal being a general term, and you get essentially a mule. You get a sterile variety of the same plant. So you can't get more seedless watermelons from a seedless watermelon. You have to go back and do this engineered breeding with these two different sets of chromosomes to get a seedless watermelon. And that's true with all the seedless varieties. They are a human creation. They're sort of the Frankensteins of the food. Are plants grown for their seeds? Or if you want a potato, you grow a new potato from an old potato, and that should be a fine potato. Or do you grow special potatoes that have seeds

that are best for producing new potatoes? Well, all of the above, and it really depends on the crop. And there are, which is such a great thing, like this was one of the things that was really a revelation for me in doing the research behind the new book, What We Sow, is that seed is grown everywhere in the world for different reasons. There are sections of the globe that are seed growing kind of centers, if you will. There's certain plants that grow for their seeds specifically well in the Northeast. There are others that grow really well like carrots in the Pacific Northwest. There are a lot of seed grown in China, in the Philippines, like it used to be, that we would grow our crop and we would collect some of the seed from the crop plants that we grew. We would let the

very best of those plants go to seed. So the biggest, and we would be selecting for certain traits because maybe you want an early producing cucumber or tomato. Maybe you want a late producing flowering plant because you want it to extend the season in a pollinator garden, let's say. So you are selecting from what you're growing in your fields right now for the traits that you want to continue in your next season. You mark the plant and you say, this one was the earliest, this one was the biggest, this one was the reddest, whatever it might be. And you save seeds from those plants in order to move those traits forward. But now that we are growing, in most cases, large scale growing, you need your seed right now for this season. So it is being produced actually

probably on the other side of the world where they can produce the seed for this season in their opposite season so that they can ship it to me here in North America to start my season right now in spring. So their fall backs up to my spring. Does that make sense? Yeah. But when you say they produce seeds, they produce plants that produce seeds. They don't produce seeds. Exactly. That's exactly right. So they are only growing for the seed production of the plants they put in. Help me and people listening, help me understand the fascination, the whatever that is that you have for seeds.

I think the greatest thing about seeds is just how miraculous they are. And they are around us all the time. They are on the trees, they are on the flowers, they are on the shrubs. They are feeding the trees. They are on the flowers. They are on the shrubs. They are feeding us as humans. They are feeding all of the insect, bird, and mammalian lives around us. And they are so often invisible. And if I had one piece of advice, I would say, look at what your trees and

your shrubs and your flowers are producing and marvel at the ingenuity that these lives offer out every year in order to keep our planet going. I think that is where we will learn both the wonder and the respect to really think about how our seed is being cared for and allowing us to become advocates for its integrity in our food supply, in our native plant supply, just in our own lives, Mike. They're miraculous. Well, the world of seeds and plants, I mean, I've never been a big student of that,

but I enjoy listening to the story because it's all around us and we see things growing and know they come from seeds, but we enjoy listening to the story because, you know, it's all around us and we see things growing and know they come from seeds, but we never think about it. So I enjoy you sharing your insight. I've been speaking with Jennifer Jewell. She is a, well, she's a gardener. She's a gardening educator and advocate, host of the podcast Cultivating Place and author of the book, What We Sow. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. I appreciate you coming on, Jennifer. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Ah, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and have a great day.

I like to think of myself as a pretty good parallel parker, but I'm sure you've seen people who, they just don't get it. And perhaps maybe you have trouble when you have to parallel park. There is a secret to parallel parking, and it is all in the name. Parallel. To properly parallel park, you have to pull up parallel, and even with the car in front of the parking space you want to go into. That means all the way up, so your front bumper is even with that car's front bumper. Plus, you want to be reasonably close to that car. Where people often go wrong is they don't pull up far enough,

or they come in at weird angles, or they're too far out in the middle of the street, not close enough to the car. And that is something you should know. The very best way to support this podcast is to help us grow our audience by telling people you know about it. And hopefully they'll listen and like it too. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions,

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