That's sort of the humble origin of what's botanized, right?

It was just sort of us trying to share our passion with people around the world.

And as we sort of grew to a much broader audience, right, we sort of started to ask ourselves, like,

do we have a, is there a bigger mission here, right?

Is there a bigger idea than just kind of like getting people excited about plants? The idea here is the sort of

bigger mission, right? The initial mission is to spread the hop your botanizing, but sort of the

bigger mission, which maybe is less quantifiable, is to help combat the climate and biodiversity

crises through botanical education.

Welcome back to the Beat podcast. Today, we're going a little bit deeper. We're going to be talking

about botany and botanizing, which you guys may have heard about if you follow the let's botanize guys,

which we have on today. We have both Ben, Gouleth, Scott Suisa, and Taye, we're going to get deep. I'm really curious about this conversation. I'm very excited about it. But first, I'd love to hear from you guys, like, what drew you into the world of botany and plants and kind of got you started in this whole adventure? Yeah, great. Maybe I'll go first. My Marseic circuitous, Jacob's story makes more sense.

So I didn't really become interested in plants until I got to grad school.

So I was 21 or 22 years old at that point.

I started off as a kid just being into nature in general, love being outside.

And so love being around plants as part of these diverse habitats that I wanted to spend time in.

But I was more interested in like fish and birds and sort of these other nature-based hobbies based around animals.

And that eventually led me in college to studying evolutionary biology

and trying to understand through an evolutionary lens,

how did we end up with this incredible biodiverse planet?

And I ended up studying fruit flies, which maybe are not the most charismatic

or group of organisms, but they are very useful in the lab.

And we know a lot about them genetically.

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