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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And it is Cactus time here on the podcast. We're going to be talking about what is, I think, arguably the most iconic species of cactus. Joe and I were actually having a conversation, though, off mic, trying to decide exactly how we are going to agree to pronounce

this this cactus we are talking about the soarro cactus but there are different versions of the

pronunciation floating around out there and I do want to apologize to my Arizona family

for not 100% remembering how they were pronouncing it.

But I feel like I've heard it a number of different ways in different places.

So I was like watching interviews with researchers who work on this type of cactus.

And what I was hearing most often then was Sawaro.

But then we look it up and the dictionary says, well, you can either do Saguaro or Sawara.

And so there I'm just kind of lost.

So we're going with Sawaro because, I don't know, it seems like we're splitting the difference.

Yeah, but our apologies, if we are doing it wrong here, certainly if any of you out there have thoughts about how it should be pronounced, do right in. We can carry on from there. This is probably going to be, I think, a two-parter, and this is going to be part one. So it's entirely possible our pronunciation will shift between part one and part two, depending on feedback. We'll see how it goes. Or maybe we should just use the scientific name the whole time because I think you've got a whole story on that, right?

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the scientific classification for the Suaro. This is something,

I've been going out to Arizona for years and seeing these things and I've always been impressed by

them.

But I think I certainly have read the scientific name before, but I've just kind of let it pass through me, I guess, without really thinking about it.

And it wasn't until researching this episode that I was like, huh, it's called Carnegie Gigantia.

And... Carnegie. Yeah, that's an interesting name for this particular because to be clear i'm going to get into a little bit about it we're talking about

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