Surprising Benefits of Being Awkward & The Amazing Power of Seeds - SYSK Choice

We’ve all heard the test-taking advice: “If you’re stuck, trust your first answer.” But is that really the smart move? Research says no — and I begin this episode by explaining why going with your gut on exams might actually hurt your score. Source: Joseph T. Hallinan, author of Why We Make Mistakes (https://amzn.to/44PV4SQ). Feeling awkward or embarrassed is awful in the moment — but maybe it’s not nearly as bad as you think. In fact, those cringeworthy moments might even be a secret weapon. Henna Pryor has studied the psychology of embarrassment and shares why embracing awkwardness can help you become braver and more resilient. She’s a keynote speaker with two TEDx talks (https://www.ted.com/talks/henna_pryor_why_awkwardness_is_your_secret_weapon_for_risk_taking_at_work) and author of Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become The Bravest You (https://amzn.to/45Ksgwh). We take seeds for granted — but how plants grow from them is one of nature’s most astonishing processes. Jennifer Jewell, gardening educator, advocate, and host of the Cultivating Place podcast (https://www.cultivatingplace.com/blog-1), reveals the hidden wonders of seeds, including fascinating insights like how seedless watermelons are grown without seeds at all. She’s also the author of What We Sow (https://amzn.to/3EKxv3f), a book that will forever change the way you look at the plants around you. Parallel parking may feel like a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. With a couple of simple tricks, it’s easier than you think. In the final segment, I share a straightforward technique that can make squeezing into tight spots much less stressful. Source: Jason Roberts, author of The Learn 2 Guide (https://amzn.to/3PnPNfH). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Huge savings on Dell AI PCs with Intel Core Ultra processors are here, and they are newly designed to help you do more, faster. Upgrade today by visiting⁠ https://Dell.com/Deals⁠ QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:42Mike Carruthers?

  In fact, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So give yourself a better shot at finding the right person. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast.

• 1:23Mike Carruthers?

  Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. 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.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:14Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:38Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:43Mike Carruthers?

  Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in shop cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for,

• 3:28Mike Carruthers?

  and track your orders all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million shop cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  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 Carruthers.

• 4:20Mike Carruthers?

  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

• 5:03Mike Carruthers?

  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,

• 5:46Mike Carruthers?

  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

• 6:26Mike Carruthers?

  author of a book called Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. Hi, Henna. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

• 6:40Mike Carruthers?

  So I find it interesting because, you know, when I'm embarrassed or I do something awkward and feel foolish, you know, I want to forget about it. You want to study it. You want to dive deep. So what's that all about?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:30Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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

• 8:26Speaker 01

  of discomfort. It doesn't feel good because those two selves are at odds. There's a gap.

• 8:31Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, it almost feels, I mean, to me, when I was thinking about this, like you feel incompetent being you.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. 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.

• 8:56Mike Carruthers?

  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, there flies down, the toilet paper's on their shoe, or whatever it is that that just makes you feel so horrible. But then it's gone. So why is it, why is it worth saying, wait, let's slow down here and take a closer look?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  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 cringe moment. Temporary state, it's fleeting, it goes by. There are other people who use the word to describe themselves as a trait. I am awkward. I am socially awkward, 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, this mask of,

• 10:02Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 10:33Mike Carruthers?

  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? That that's how, do other people notice their awkwardness? Or is it all internal?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  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 no, 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.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:41Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but so here's the thing, though. When, when you see someone do something that you would describe as awkward, they, 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, they're like, "Oh, God, a poor guy," or, you know. So this feeling of dread that people are judging you, they're probably not, but, but so why do we think they are?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Right. I love the question. There's, 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%.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:29Mike Carruthers?

  And those factors are?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  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

• 14:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:43Mike Carruthers?

  I wouldn't be surprised if most people, even if you don't consider yourself

• 14:50Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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,

• 15:56Speaker 01

  but I think everyone shares that one.

• 15:58Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, and like you say, but when, when it happens to other people, you forget about it pretty fast. You don't, you don't sit in the shower and think about, oh, that Bob, he, what he did. But when you do it, it's, it becomes, it takes on this enormous importance that nobody shares that with you.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 17:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:46Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about awkwardness and embarrassment, something we all experience. And my guest is Henna Pryor. She's author of the book Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path in lonely state. Dry your tears, now there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies, a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 19:17Mike Carruthers?

  So Hannah, what is it you want people to get from this? What is it you want people to take away from this?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  You know, 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, you know, 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.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:19Mike Carruthers?

  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 or what, but that when you feel that awkwardness, people aren't as mean about it as you're imagining they are, that there's a lot of play there, that people are very forgiving of you. And if you could, if you can hold that in, it makes the awkwardness maybe not, not so bad, right?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  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 arms starting to sweat, and 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 it 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.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:06Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  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 ourself 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.

• 23:39Mike Carruthers?

  This is really, you know, as you said several times, it's not something we talk about, but it, well, first of all, it's interesting to talk about it, but, but by talking about it and shining a light on it, it makes it less... Horrible somehow.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  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. And 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 Bayami 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,

• 24:37Speaker 01

  right? Their muscles tightened. They had a, oh, 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.

• 25:01Mike Carruthers?

  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 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?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  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, you know, it's 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.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, never has a sharp jagged edge. Frankly, I'm, I'm over that one.

• 26:41Mike Carruthers?

  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 and knowing that everybody feels it and it's okay. I've been talking with Henna Pryor. She is a workplace performance expert and speaker. She has two TEDx talks and I'll, 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.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure to be here.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters. So you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 27:53Speaker 05

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his pass in lonely state. Dry your tears, now bears a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 28:40Mike Carruthers?

  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 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.

• 29:24Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Hi Mike, thank you so much for having me.

• 29:36Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  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, right, 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.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  But I think what most people are, find like 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.

• 31:27Mike Carruthers?

  So the plant is pollinated, and then the seed from the plant goes off and grows into another plant? Is that the formula here?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:08Mike Carruthers?

  And so, all of this is so that this plant species continues? That's the purpose of all of this, right?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  That is, the purpose of all of it is to reproduce and keep the species going. Yes.

• 32:23Mike Carruthers?

  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 in sitting in that packet for as long as it did, but something reawakens it. And what's, what is that?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Now, 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 dispersal mechanisms to help get the seed out.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  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 2,000 years. I mean, it's crazy how viability varies among species.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:19Mike Carruthers?

  Another thing that I've always never really understood is, okay, 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?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Right? It's so, it's so interesting, but it is, 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.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  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, that 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, like your watermelon seed. On a pumpkin seed, it's a lighter color,

• 37:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Once they are big enough, 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, like, 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.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:05Mike Carruthers?

  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 or whatever, you know, don't taste very good because they're not really grown for flavor. They're grown to travel far distances and...

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:28Mike Carruthers?

  What... How does that all work? I mean, are they still being grown from real tomatoes or is this some kind of voodoo magic to create lots of tomatoes? Or I don't really understand how that works. It's not like your backyard garden.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  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

• 40:30Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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.

• 41:11Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 41:27Speaker 02

  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 with a, back with a normal seed, I guess, and you get a, normal being a, you know, general term.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:39Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  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,

• 43:43Speaker 02

  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

• 44:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  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 northern, you know, North America to start my season right now in spring. So their fall backs up to my spring. Does that make sense?

• 45:16Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, but when you say they produce seeds, they produce plants that produce seeds. They don't produce seeds.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's exactly right. So they are only growing for the seed production of the plants they put in.

• 45:31Mike Carruthers?

  Help me, and people listening, help me understand the fascination, the whatever that is that you have for seeds.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:44Mike Carruthers?

  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 never think about it. So I enjoy you sharing your insight. I've been speaking with Jennifer Jewell. She is 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.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and have a great day.

• 47:24Mike Carruthers?

  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

• 48:09Mike Carruthers?

  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 Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 48:32Speaker 04

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