Sadly, when we learn plants as kids, it's like, well, here's the parts of a flower, which is important. But you never told these stories. At least I wasn't. And I don't think a lot of people are. You know, we go and watch these David Attenborough documentaries and you see the wildest things that animals are doing and the cool, clever ways that things have evolved to survive, eke out an existence out there. But we think it's only reserved for animals.

That's Matt Kandais, an ecologist and the creator and host of the podcast In Defense of Plants. Matt loves plants. Any plant, I mean, any

plant you go out and look, there's something weird going on there. There's some weird relationship it has with the organisms around it. It might be a microbe. It might be a beetle. It could be a bird. And they're doing it in such weird and alien ways, creative ways, genetically speaking, because they can't move. They're stuck in place. So evolution and natural selection have just pushed them to these wild strategies. And to say we've scratched the surface is being too generous. It's the Wild West out there. And the sad part is, is because animals are so popular, we've studied plants far less, except when you think about every animal you love, every ecosystem you enjoy visiting, even your lifestyle as a modern human being living in wherever you're living right now, you need plants. Everything we do relies on them, and we know so little about them, comparatively speaking.