How a Vigilante Botanist Became a Cult Icon

Outside Podcast

Wilderness, Sports

4.3 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2022

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An ex-punk and former train engineer who is self-taught in the sciences, Joey Santore does not fit the mold of the stereotypical botanist. He has lots of tattoos and no college degree and is known for illegal tree-planting projects. Then there’s his voice: a native Chicagoan, he can sound like he’s on an SNL skit about Da Bears. Maybe all this explains why his YouTube channel, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, has more than a quarter-million subscribers. We join Santore on a peyote hunt in the South Texas scrublands to try to understand how he’s getting so many different kinds of people to geek out on plants.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From Outside Magazine, this is the Outside Podcast.
0:10.6	I don't know why you're taking it kind of stanced with me.
0:17.8	All right, I'm not trying to harass you.
0:20.1	I just don't think what you're doing is the safe behavior.
0:23.0	I think it's kind of risky, okay?
0:25.9	Allow me to introduce you to Joey Santor.
0:28.8	Joey is standing in the middle of a road in Central California, filming with his phone
0:33.6	as he has a heart to heart with a very distressed looking Northern Pacific rattlesnake.
0:39.0	All right, I thought you was a go for a snake at first.
0:42.0	You're obviously a Norpeck, okay?
0:44.9	Don't you dare rattle that fucking thing at me.
0:47.2	Listen to me, I don't want to hear it, okay?
0:50.1	No, it's not like that, all right?
0:52.5	We're keeping it civil, okay?
0:54.2	You got to get out of the road.
0:55.7	Being a stick that does not seem nearly long enough to me, Joey hurts the snake out
1:00.9	of harm's way as it flicks its tongue ominously.
1:04.6	Seeming to tolerate just barely this loud swearing man trying to save it.
1:10.6	Being an important member of the natural ecosystem, you don't want to see them get smacked.
1:18.2	Let's say a croneless or a gainess of Norpeck, I believe, Northern Pacific rattlesnake.
1:24.7	I think it is, buddy, sorry.
1:28.8	This video went viral when Joey posted it back in 2019, but venomous snakes are not his
	...

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