S02E01: Interview With Dr. Tom Croat (1/2)

00:00:00 Tanya: Happy New year.

00:00:01 Jos: Yay! I mean.

00:00:04 Tanya: Did you just fall off your…

00:00:07 Jos: No, I’m just like, we’re in season two.

00:00:11 Tanya: We are.

00:00:12 Jos: Season two,

00:00:13 Tanya: Season

00:00:13 Jos: baby.

00:00:13 Tanya: two, episode one. Welcome to pop culture.

00:00:16 Jos: I mean, that sounds really cool. Welcome to pop culture. Tanya’s back from the US, but she was already last time.

00:00:24 Tanya: Ya.

00:00:24 Jos: Which

00:00:24 Tanya: I’m

00:00:24 Jos: means.

00:00:25 Tanya: still sick.

00:00:26 Jos: Which means she’s not in her morning gown anymore.

00:00:30 Tanya: Nope. I’m dressed, I’m combed. I brushed my teeth.

00:00:35 Jos: Tanya. Did you sleep well last night?

00:00:37 Tanya: I did. Why?

00:00:40 Jos: Knowing the person we’re going to interview

00:00:44 Tanya: Well,

00:00:44 Jos: in a few minutes.

00:00:46 Tanya: well, I’ve spoken to him before and we’ve emailed a lot, so.

00:00:50 Jos: Okay.

00:00:50 Tanya: I mean, I’m

00:00:50 Jos: You’re not that.

00:00:51 Tanya: honored, but I’m not quite as nervous as you are.

00:00:56 Jos: Yeah.

00:00:58 Tanya: But yeah, I’m very, very happy that he agreed to be with us today. And it’s so fitting because, yeah, it’s the first episode of the season. The first episode of the year. My only worry is that everything that comes after this,

00:01:12 Jos: Yeah,

00:01:12 Tanya: I mean, we might as well shut down the podcast

00:01:14 Jos: I

00:01:14 Tanya: after

00:01:14 Jos: was thinking

00:01:15 Tanya: today.

00:01:15 Jos: the exact same thing, but we are talking from, again, an aroid point of view. And we’re not only here for aroids, so maybe,

00:01:23 Tanya: That’s right.

00:01:24 Jos: maybe even bigger names in other areas of plant collecting

00:01:29 Tanya: Yeah.

00:01:29 Jos: can

00:01:29 Tanya: For

00:01:29 Jos: still

00:01:30 Tanya: sure.

00:01:30 Jos: pass.

00:01:31 Tanya: But I am excited.

00:01:31 Jos: So.

00:01:32 Tanya: I mean, it’s, it really is a true honor because you don’t get to talk to people who have accomplished so much in their lifetime very often. And I’m probably going to have to hold back tears because, you know, I like to get emotional. But yeah, I’m really, really proud that we get to have him.

00:01:50 Jos: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, people are already read the title of the episode so they know who we’re talking about. It’s

00:01:58 Tanya: Yes.

00:01:58 Jos: the name everybody knows when you start collecting aroids, because

00:02:02 Tanya: Yes.

00:02:03 Jos: it’s literally in the name of every plant. Like, not

00:02:07 Tanya: Many

00:02:07 Jos: every plant,

00:02:07 Tanya: plants?

00:02:07 Jos: but most plants. Yeah.

00:02:09 Tanya: Yes.

00:02:09 Jos: Doctor Tom Croat.

00:02:12 Tanya: Yes. And I found out yesterday, or you found out yesterday that he’s actually one eighth Belgian.

00:02:19 Jos: Okay.

00:02:20 Tanya: We got a little bit into genealogy, but it’s interesting. He’s he’s like a mutt, like I am.

00:02:26 Jos: But Croat doesn’t really sound like a Belgian last name, so probably

00:02:30 Tanya: No.

00:02:30 Jos: not his grandfather. Anyways, what is beside that? Do we have anything else planned for today?

00:02:38 Tanya: For today. Well,

00:02:39 Jos: Yes.

00:02:39 Tanya: first of all, we want to play the jingle.

00:02:41 Jos: Play the jingle. You still haven’t played the jingle. Come on. Play the jingle.

00:02:57 Jos: Pop culture.

00:02:59 Tanya: Stop singing. All right, so what do we have today? Today we have, um. We’re going to keep it simple because we really want to put the focus on Doctor

00:03:08 Jos: Yep.

00:03:08 Tanya: Croat. Right. But we do have three items for our news segment. And then we’re going to do a little deep dive into Tom Croat the man, before we actually get him on air with us. And then we’re going to close out with Rate That Weird Plant.

00:03:22 Jos: Okay.

00:03:23 Tanya: Whose turn is it today?

00:03:25 Jos: Well, I think I’m best in finding weird plants, so.

00:03:28 Tanya: Fine. I know it was so anticlimactic. This is the second time I’ve used this word in this episode.

00:03:33 Jos: And

00:03:34 Tanya: Okay.

00:03:34 Jos: your reactions are way cuter than mine. So let me let me surprise you with the weird plants.

00:03:39 Tanya: All right. Okay, let’s get going. Let’s spill some plant tea.

00:03:46 Jos: Yes, I got a new Google alert. Well, I got a few Google alerts, and, you know, um, I usually like to click the titles that sound cool. And we’ve had a few over the past episodes of titles that sounded very interesting and were quite disappointing. So I kind of had the same idea clicking on this one. The title was the ultra rare philodendron variety that every plant lover wants to get their hands on, so I was ready to see Philodendron Birkin or Pink Princess or whatever mentioned there. But I think it’s fair to say that Nancy Schaffner, who wrote the article on December twenty seventh, I think she has either a good research skills or she’s actually part of the plant community because the article talks about Philodendron spiritus sancti, which is a plant that we already know for quite some time, but it’s a really well written article, actually. Like they talk about, when the name first popped up in collecting, what kind of plan it is, how it became legendary. Also the prices during the boom and also how the price has dropped, because of tissue culture and propagation. So actually, I think it’s a really well written article that even, somebody who’s in the plant collecting could find some information in. But I think mostly it’s aimed at people who are not in the plant collecting community. And then it really paints a good picture. So, well done to Nancy.

00:05:29 Tanya: Well done. I don’t have it in my collection. Because it had such a huge price tag on it. And then

00:05:36 Jos: Mhm.

00:05:36 Tanya: I kind of was in a headspace where I was reducing my collection. So yeah, but it is something that I’m thinking about now that I have more room in my plant room, but that’s a story for another day.

00:05:49 Jos: I think one of the benefits of the plant, besides it having really nice leaf shape, is that it has quite short internodal spaces. So you can grow it like quite compact if you have enough, uh, indirect light. I saw somebody had one in their living room, and it kept a lot of leaves on really short space, and it looked really cool. So I think, yeah, with prices going down or already down, it makes a rather good houseplant.

00:06:20 Tanya: Yeah, yeah. And they seem really sturdy. All right, so second news is a little bit different from houseplants. But anybody who grows houseplant knows the concept of sphagnum moss or moss poles, whatever. And, I thought it was quite interesting. First of all, I grow a lot of moss. Not intentionally.

00:06:43 Jos: I grow a lot of mushrooms. Not intentionally.

00:06:47 Tanya: But, yeah, I came across an article. Um, it was actually published in November, but still, I thought it was worth mentioning. Did you know that all these space agencies sent space and space into plants? Yeah, right. Send plants into space to see how they are affected by, you know, zero gravity and radiation and all that. So, I saw something on. Let me grab the source right quick. Um, I saw something on Science Today. I believe it was no Science News, right? And it said a recent experiment outside the International Space Station has proven that moss spores can survive exposure to space for nine months and still grow when return to Earth. Now, I was thinking, why on heck would they send moss to to space, right? But first, the key findings that they had was as follows. The survival rate of moss spores was eighty six percent. The specific species that they sent up is psychometry. Impotent? Weird word patterns.

00:08:03 Jos: I think we need. Sorry. We need like a collection of clips where you try to pronounce plants, plant names. I think that would go viral.

00:08:13 Tanya: I wish you root rot. Anyway, yeah. So an impressive eighty six percent of the moss spores actually germinated after their return from space. The conditions were as follows. The spores were attached to the outside of the ISS, so they were fully exposed to the vacuum of space, intense UV radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations. And the secret that these moss spores had is, number one, they were attached in a dried, dormant state, and they were encased in their natural protective barrier, a so-called sporangium, which shielded them from the harshest elements. Again, doesn’t answer why would they do that? Like, who would want to have moss on their spaceship, right? But

00:09:01 Jos: They want to grow it on

00:09:03 Tanya: but here.

00:09:03 Jos: Mars.

00:09:05 Tanya: Why it matters. Space farming. Now hold your horses. This suggests that we could transport plants in a dormant state to the moon or Mars. Once there, they could wake them up, rehydrate them, basically to provide oxygen, food and medicine for astronauts. It says something about the resilience of plants, meaning, moss now belongs to the elite list of organisms. Just like those little tardigrades and certain bacteria known to withstand the lethal environment of space. And the next steps now are for scientists to study the DNA of these space traveling spores, to see exactly what kind of genetic damage they took and how the plants are repairing it. I will say that the article said that once the spores were germinated and they started growing, the first generation kind of showed a little bit damage to the growth, etc., so you could tell something had happened. But then the next generation after that was completely recovered. And they’ve also tried this with tobacco plants in the past.

00:10:11 Jos: That’s so cool. But I, I suspect that the environment that they grow it in still has like, air like qualities. It’s not a vacuum. They don’t

00:10:20 Tanya: But

00:10:20 Jos: grow

00:10:20 Tanya: they

00:10:21 Jos: in

00:10:21 Tanya: didn’t

00:10:21 Jos: vacuum.

00:10:21 Tanya: grow it in space. They just wanted to know if,

00:10:23 Jos: Ah, okay.

00:10:23 Tanya: if they can like in that dehydrated, um,

00:10:28 Jos: Yeah.

00:10:29 Tanya: form.

00:10:30 Jos: State yeah.

00:10:31 Tanya: Yeah.

00:10:31 Jos: So it’s not it’s not for growing them on Mars itself.

00:10:34 Tanya: Oh, no. Then they want to grow them on Mars like. But then you would have, like, tents or whatever. I don’t

00:10:39 Jos: Okay,

00:10:39 Tanya: know how that would work, but you

00:10:41 Jos: but

00:10:41 Tanya: would have

00:10:41 Jos: the

00:10:41 Tanya: a

00:10:41 Jos: idea

00:10:41 Tanya: station.

00:10:42 Jos: is to to terraform Mars to create an, like an atmosphere there.

00:10:46 Tanya: Yeah.

00:10:49 Jos: Oh, yeah.

00:10:50 Tanya: Scary times.

00:10:50 Jos: I

00:10:50 Tanya: Huh?

00:10:51 Jos: mean, that was scary. I think that’s one of the least scariest news I’ve heard in a long time. I mean, you go make Mars habitable. That’s the least of my concern.

00:11:04 Tanya: I still think it’s fun, though, that plants can survive things that we cannot.

00:11:07 Jos: Ah, yeah. Yeah. Would make sense to me. Yeah.

00:11:13 Tanya: I have

00:11:14 Jos: Plants

00:11:14 Tanya: high

00:11:14 Jos: are

00:11:14 Tanya: hopes

00:11:14 Jos: amazing.

00:11:14 Tanya: for Mother Earth.

00:11:18 Jos: I have, uh, one last newsy. Well, it’s not really newsy. It’s just something that I came across whilst browsing the social media dump that’s called Facebook. Um, you know, I always look for new Facebook groups to enter about plants, about plant talk, about whatever, just interesting groups to get information from. And whilst I was searching, I saw a name that was a bit different than the rest. The name of the group said, the Houseplant Enthusiast and then between brackets and in capitals, NON-WOKE group.

00:11:54 Tanya: Oh my God.

00:11:55 Jos: So yeah, my first instinct was like, okay, this can only be bad news. But then I thought, maybe it’s about like saying, like, we don’t have any, like we want to talk real gossip here. I don’t know, you know, like non edited something like that, that I was hoping it meant something like that. But then I clicked on it. And just to give you an idea, the group currently has one hundred and fifty five thousand six hundred and two members. So it’s quite a big group. The banner image of the group was one of Charlie Kirk and his wife and two children. Wearing green caps and surrounded by plants. The description of the group said, amongst other things, “Wandering Jew name is okay as long as you’re not trying to make a point out of it.” So it’s really, the group was really made in reaction to people pointing out these names that have these were some names. There’s three rules. Rule one of the group “Plant names, such as Wandering Jew or Dumb Cane are not up for debate. I joined the historical Jewish community and asked if they are offended by the name and they are not. If you see a plant name argument reported to the group admins and do not engage in the debate. If this name offends you, scroll past without making unnecessary comments.” So that’s rule one. Rule two makes sense. What you can share “Only share your personal photos.” Okay, makes sense. But then rule three. And that’s the best part. “Rule three: two thousand five hundred dollars fine for coming on the group and promoting a business or selling plants. By joining the group, you agree to all of these and you also agree to be billed.”

00:13:51 Tanya: Oh my God.

00:13:54 Jos: Like, like, how would that work? How

00:13:57 Tanya: Oh,

00:13:57 Jos: would

00:13:57 Tanya: God.

00:13:57 Jos: that work? You join a group, you post a sales post and then they send you a DM. Here’s a fine for two thousand five hundred dollars.

00:14:07 Tanya: I’m just now looking at the admins.

00:14:09 Jos: Like the entitlement? What the heck? Oh well, they would hate our podcasts. We made an entire episode about plant names.

00:14:19 Tanya: I’m happy that I don’t know any of the admins or moderators because I

00:14:23 Jos: Like

00:14:23 Tanya: would

00:14:24 Jos: we

00:14:24 Tanya: go

00:14:24 Jos: should. We should join

00:14:25 Tanya: batshit.

00:14:25 Jos: the group and then really share the link of our podcast talking about names. And then we’d have some plenty to spill.

00:14:35 Tanya: Dude, you do you have two and a half thousand dollars for this?

00:14:38 Jos: How would they charge me?

00:14:39 Tanya: I don’t know if you agree when you join.

00:14:42 Jos: It doesn’t work like that.

00:14:44 Tanya: I know, I know, I’m kidding, but Jesus Christ, talk about being full of themselves. Sorry. It’s a free country. Like anywhere I am is a free country. There is free speech. They need to wake up.

00:14:59 Jos: It’s

00:14:59 Tanya: Whatever.

00:14:59 Jos: crazy that they won’t have have one hundred and fifty K members, but yeah, whatever

00:15:04 Tanya: I

00:15:05 Jos: I

00:15:05 Tanya: wonder when

00:15:05 Jos: guess.

00:15:05 Tanya: they made those changes to, like, the plant name. Too bad there isn’t like a history page like you have for pages.

00:15:12 Jos: It really sounds like a reach created group, like somebody who got offended because they said, please don’t use Wandering Jew anymore. And then they created that group.

00:15:26 Tanya: I don’t know, not for us, anyway.

00:15:28 Jos: Anyway.

00:15:30 Tanya: Let’s move on to more pleasant

00:15:31 Jos: Yeah,

00:15:31 Tanya: things.

00:15:32 Jos: that was it for spilling the plant tea. Well, for the news at least.

00:15:37 Tanya: Mm.

00:15:38 Jos: Let’s talk about the person of the day.

00:15:41 Tanya: Yes. Doctor Tom Croat. Let’s get into it. I guess a lot of our listeners will have some kind of basic knowledge about him. Perhaps that he works at a botanical garden in Missouri, etc.. But we did a little bit of a deep dive. I knew that doctor Tom Croat was of an older generation. What I did not know is that in two years he will be ninety years old.

00:16:08 Jos: Wow.

00:16:09 Tanya: So he was born in May nineteen thirty eight as Thomas Bernhard Crow in Saint Mary’s, Iowa. After high school, I guess he joined the US Army for two years in nineteen fifty six and worked as a radar technician, where he was stationed in Oklahoma and in Germany. So that’s a surprising technical start before turning to biology, then in nineteen sixty two, he earned his B.A. from Simpson College in Iowa. Nineteen sixty three, he moved to the Caribbean to work as a teacher at Charlotte Emily High School in Saint Thomas on Virgin Islands. I’m going to assume this is likely where his exposure to the tropics began, planting the seed for his future career. This year, he’s been married to his wife, Patricia, Well, last year in twenty twenty five for sixty years. Congratulations,

00:17:04 Jos: Wow.

00:17:06 Tanya: Mr. and Mrs. Croat. And then he earned his master’s from the University of Kansas back in nineteen sixty six.

00:17:14 Jos: And that’s also where he got his PhD in nineteen sixty seven. He did a thesis on the genus Solidago, which is not a tropical plant. But that year he also joined the Missouri Botanical Garden. So I think that marks the beginning of his more than fifty year relationship with the institution and with his work with aroids or tropical plants. The next four years he spent living and working in Panama, as a curator of the Summit Herbarium. And that’s where he famously created a comprehensive inventory of the flora on one of the islands. He was also appointed as the curator of botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden in nineteen seventy seven. And that’s a chair he still holds today. So that’s sorry, I can’t do the calculations that fast. That’s, um. Yeah,

00:18:18 Tanya: Fifty

00:18:18 Jos: almost,

00:18:19 Tanya: years.

00:18:19 Jos: almost fifty years.

00:18:21 Tanya: But more importantly, like the chair that he holds, he was awarded the PA Schultz, as curator of botany at MBG. So that means his work is financed for life. That curator chair

00:18:36 Jos: Oh.

00:18:37 Tanya: has been endowed with a donation that funds his work in perpetuity. So that says a lot about Tom. And then in nineteen seventy eight, I was just a mere two years old, he published his magnum opus, Flora of Barro Colorado Island, with Stanford University Press. It’s a nine hundred plus pages work, and is considered one of the most complete floristic inventories of a tropical forest ever produced, and it established his reputation as a machine in the field.

00:19:14 Jos: Yeah.

00:19:15 Tanya: Same year, nineteen seventy eight. The International Aroid Society published its first volume of the journal Aroideana, and Croat became a central figure and frequent contributor, shifting his focus almost exclusively to the Araceae family. Fun fact, right now, he’s tiding over the Aroideana as editor in chief until we find a replacement. But yeah, that’s one of the ways I get to work with him, because we’re sharing an inbox right now. Right. In nineteen, like, throughout the eighties and nineties, he undertook some pretty grueling expeditions across South America, meaning Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, where he described hundreds of new species of philodendron and anthurium.

00:20:02 Jos: He received many, many awards throughout his life. But I think the award in two thousand and five, the David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration by the National Tropical Botanical Garden was one of his big awards. Two years later, he got to a historic milestone, while collecting in Ecuador, he actually collected his one hundred thousandth herbarium specimen. That’s a difficult word. One hundred thousandth herbarium specimen. So he collected a new plant, which was an anthurium, my favorite plants. And it was then later described as Anthurium centimillesimum. Um, so that’s Latin for one hundred thousandth. Why is

00:20:50 Tanya: I

00:20:50 Jos: that

00:20:50 Tanya: mean,

00:20:50 Jos: so hard

00:20:50 Tanya: you

00:20:50 Jos: to

00:20:50 Tanya: have

00:20:50 Jos: pronounce?

00:20:51 Tanya: to think about that one hundred

00:20:53 Jos: One hundred

00:20:54 Tanya: thousand

00:20:54 Jos: thousand.

00:20:55 Tanya: plant specimens collected,

00:20:58 Jos: Yeah,

00:20:58 Tanya: like.

00:20:58 Jos: and that’s not just taking a cutting. That’s like collecting all the parts of the plants, drying them between sheets, labeling them. That’s amazing.

00:21:06 Tanya: That’s insane.

00:21:07 Jos: Insane. And that’s in two thousand and seven.

00:21:10 Tanya: Yeah, I think

00:21:10 Jos: He still

00:21:11 Tanya: right

00:21:11 Jos: did

00:21:11 Tanya: now he

00:21:11 Jos: work

00:21:11 Tanya: sits

00:21:11 Jos: after

00:21:12 Tanya: at one

00:21:12 Jos: that.

00:21:12 Tanya: hundred and nine thousand, I believe, if I

00:21:15 Jos: Incredible.

00:21:16 Tanya: recall that correctly. But like, that is insane. And like that amount of work and what he’s done for for the for the family, the Araceae family is incredible. And it gives him undoubtedly, the title of a living legend. Another important award he got, which is which I find personally very prestigious, is in July of twenty twenty two, he was awarded the Asa Gray Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Asa Gray, but he was like one of the most important botanists in the nineteenth century, American general, American botanists. And the significance of this award is that, like among botanists, that is like the lifetime achievement Oscar that you can get. And to this day, he still works at the Missouri Botanical Garden and he’s still actively describing new species. I know he has a ton of specimens in the catalog waiting to

00:22:21 Jos: Yeah.

00:22:21 Tanya: be to be described. He also mentors students, and he manages one of the largest personal collections of living aroids in the world.

00:22:30 Jos: They just imagine having like a catalog of what, like sixty thousand plants? You still need to describe

00:22:37 Tanya: That’s insane.

00:22:39 Jos: it. It’s also a bit depressing, you know, like, you know, you need help to do that because

00:22:45 Tanya: Of course.

00:22:45 Jos: it’s not if you’ve seen what a description looks like of a specimen like, that’s not easy to do. You need to be knowledgeable. You need to. Yeah. Have the right maybe some of the collections are not complete so they cannot be described. But like each year, each month we see new plants in the in the collectors community with new names that have been described by Croat. It’s ninety percent is by Croat, if not more.

00:23:15 Tanya: I don’t know about that, but I would. I would guess so. Yeah. Anyway, my dear Jos, I know

00:23:22 Jos: Yes.

00:23:22 Tanya: your heart is racing. Take a deep breath. The

00:23:28 Jos: Uh.

00:23:28 Tanya: man whose work has taken him to the most remote corners of the world, and who’s been recognized for his lifetime of service to the aroid community. Today we have him on Prop Culture, and

00:23:42 Jos: I mean,

00:23:42 Tanya: I

00:23:42 Jos: just

00:23:43 Tanya: don’t

00:23:43 Jos: him

00:23:43 Tanya: think.

00:23:43 Jos: knowing. Just him knowing who I am makes me, er.

00:23:50 Tanya: Today we have him on Prop Culture, and we could not be more honored. That’s all. Round

00:23:55 Jos: That’s

00:23:55 Tanya: of applause.

00:23:55 Jos: all.

00:23:56 Tanya: Let’s welcome a true living legend, Doctor Tom Croat.

00:24:00 Dr. Tom Croat: This gentleman, here is your business partner.

00:24:03 Tanya Quintieri: Correct. This is Jos van den Abeele, based in Ghent in Belgium. Jos, this is Doctor Thomas Croat.

00:24:10 Jos Vanden Abeele: Hello. Nice to meet you.

00:24:12 Dr. Tom Croat: I don’t know why, but he looked very familiar. Maybe he was at the European Aroid Society meeting in Nancy?

00:24:19 Tanya Quintieri: He hasn’t been, no.

00:24:21 Dr. Tom Croat: Okay.

00:24:22 Tanya Quintieri: But he’s a grower. He does grow, anthurium and hybridizes them, so I don’t know. Do you frequent Instagram? Probably not.

00:24:32 Dr. Tom Croat: Well, I do open it up, but, I usually don’t have time to open actual images. I mean, I have I get notifications, and if something looks really exciting, I might open it up. But I tend to avoid those kinds of distractions, because otherwise you get nothing done. Is that what I mean? Because I get hundreds of them for days. You spend your entire day just looking at email.

00:25:03 Tanya Quintieri: True, true. So, how are you doing on this fine morning?

00:25:07 Dr. Tom Croat: I’m just fine. Just fine. I have I’ve gotten up. I got up before dawn because I wanted to put wood in the furnace.

00:25:16 Tanya Quintieri: Alright. We kind of laid out our questions so that it goes from, you know, your origin story to your adventures in the field. A little deep dive on anthurium and philodendron, and then the legacy, your legacy and the future of botany. So I’ll get right started with my first question. You have been described as one of the most prolific plant collectors in history. Can you take us back to the very beginning, like was there a specific moment or a specific plant that sparked your lifelong obsession with botany?

00:25:50 Dr. Tom Croat: Well, I wasn’t even particularly interested in plants until after I came out of the service. I was in Germany during just after the war and in the late fifties. And when I went back home to farm, of course, I knew weeds from crop plants, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge of plants. Common names of weeds. And when I went to college at a nearby Methodist school where this was the only school really nearby, in the county seat town of Indianola, I met this professor who was a biology professor, and he was a young man just just gotten out of graduate school. He was a student of Bob (Robert) Thorn, who was a famous botanist/phylogeny. And Jack Carter knew plants really very well because he had just been studying the plants of Iowa. So I was so impressed that he was just pointing to plants and putting scientific names on them. I didn’t even realize plants had scientific names. And it was impressive to me that this was the situation that I’d never heard of. So I immediately fell in love with taxonomy, the idea of being able to name and classify plants. And while I was at Simpson College, I never actually had the opportunity to take his course and his taxonomy course. So here I wanted to be a taxonomist, but I really had no actual training at that level. Then I, I followed that graduation. I went to the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, where I taught school, and it was there that I began collecting plants, albeit relatively few because I had no particular way of drying them except to put them in my oven in my apartment. So I dried, I collected plants and dried them in my oven. And that was where I first began my career of collecting plants was in the Virgin Islands. You know, back in nineteen sixty two. And I had decided when I went there that I was going to go to South America. So while I was teaching at Virgin Islands, I tried to save up enough money to take a trip to South America. And when the school year ended, I had a friend who had a another friend on the island of Saint Barts, which was about, you know, ten hours away on a boat. And I took off from there in this sloop and went to the island of Saint Barts, arriving there, I find that there was no way to leave this island. I mean, my intention was to go to Saint Kitts, which was the next island to the south. But that’s a British island. Saint Maurice was a French island, and there was no communication at all. So I was really worried because I had paid for passage on a steamer leaving Saint Kitts two days later, and fortunately there was a light plane arrived on Saint Barts. It disappeared over the over the hill, and I took my duffel bag, which was everything I had in this army duffel bag. I carried it up over the hill and came to this little airstrip where there was a plane, getting ready to leave. And I held up my hand and the guy says, well, what do you want? And I says, well, where are you going? And he says, I’m flying to Saint Martin’s, which was another little island. And I said, Does Saint Martin have an airport? Oh, yes, it’s an international airport. So I flew there and then from Saint Martin’s I was able to take a plane to Saint Kitts. And that’s where I started my journey to South America on this sloop from Saint Thomas. I even wrote a memoir called Under the Spinnaker, which was basically a day by day inventory of what where I visited and what I did on this four month long trip throughout South America. Because there was no means by which I could actually collect and dry plants. On such a trip where you were just traveling day by day, you know, by mostly by car, boat, train, uh, truck. Lots of time just riding on the back of a truck. So I was only able to take pictures and, you know, visit Botanical gardens and visit forests and that sort of thing. I really saw thousands and thousands of places and habitats and plants. So I learned a lot. And while while I was there, I improved my Spanish so that by the time I left South America, I was really quite fluent in Spanish. And then when I returned to the United States, I joined the University of Kansas. And there I was able to test out in Spanish, and I’d already studied German, so I took second year German. So I basically got my language requirement for a PhD out of the road in the first semester, which was something some people just spent four years trying to meet their language requirement. That’s a long answer to a question, but that’s where I am …

00:31:14 Tanya Quintieri: Love it. So then you come back to Iowa and you joined the Missouri Botanical Garden. Obviously the landscape of taxonomy looked very different back then. What were like the biggest challenges you faced as a young botanist trying to map out the Neotropics?

00:31:33 Dr. Tom Croat: Well, I first must say that getting a job was my primary concern. After I finished my, uh, I got my master’s in my PhD at about three years and was I realized I was having I was going to have to get a job. But, you see, I was born in thirty eight, and there weren’t very many babies at that at that time. So basically the job opportunities were much bigger, much greater. I mean, they just weren’t there weren’t people. So they would just create jobs for you. So when I wrote to the Missouri Botanical Garden and I said, I see that you’re working on the flora of Panama. And, do you have any jobs working on the flora of Panama? Because I really thought it was quite exciting. And he wrote back and said, no, we don’t have a job on the Flora of Panama Project, but we have a job in Panama to do the Flora of Barro Colorado Island. And I later learned that, in fact, that job was just created out of whole cloth because, uh, Martin Moynihan, who was the director of the Smithsonian, had talked with Walter Lewis, my boss at some party. And Walter Lewis was chiding him for not having a flora out on this big research place the Smithsonian ran. So Moynihan was a bit embarrassed and said, well, if you find money, if you find a person or find money for a project, we’ll pay half of it and you can pay half of it. And that was it. So he remembered this and he called Moynihan. Moynihan gave him two years of salary. And then there was a professor at Washington University who was, he was a big professor with lots and lots of money from the NIH. And he picked up my salary for two years. So here I had a job, uh, and it involved running the Barro Colorado Island. And I knew absolutely nothing about tropical plants. This is the odd thing was I was faced with doing this job, and I had absolutely no experience with what I was talking about, but I had a a very strong work ethic. And everybody said, oh, he can do it. If he says he’ll do it, he can do it. So I began going down there and spending two months at a time collecting plants, and then I would go home and work on my identifications for two months and then go back for two months. I did this for two years until the entire year had been covered. Every day of the of the year had been covered from the standpoint of finding things, because tropical plants don’t always flower every time, everywhere. They’re often seasonal. And so if you don’t spend every month of the year, every week of the year in an area, there are species that you would never find because they would not be in flower you wouldn’t recognize. So, that period of time or two years I was living in, I was living down there on alternate month, alternate two month period. And then after I finished that two year period, um, I still realized that there was a lot I didn’t know, especially when I started writing up things. I thought, oh my gosh, I really don’t know how big or how common this is. So, Walter Lewis created a curatorship at Summit Garden because we had developed a field station there. And I went down as the first curator of Summit Herbarium and the first director of our field station. And that gave me an opportunity to go with my wife to Panama and lived there for eighteen months. And, I was able to go two or three times a week to Barro Colorado Island and collect fresh plants, take them back to Summit Gardens, where we lived in a trailer house, and we had a nice herbarium, air conditioning, and I was able to sit there describing these plants from fresh specimens, which made the descriptions very vivid and much more accurate and detailed. And it was like one of the first Floras ever that was written, you know, mostly from living material rather than herbarium. So the Flora of Barro Colorado Island, you know, made me rather relatively well known to the botanical community. And that was just the beginning of my work, because while I was there, I realized that the Araceae was a complicated family. It wasn’t really complicated from the standpoint of what I know today, because it’s really a kind of a simple, simplistic flora. But at that time, just dealing with all the juvenile forms and intermediate phases of growth was very complex and confusing because I assumed everything was different. And, you know, later I found out that all this stuff was put together, and it’s all one thing. I could not recognize them. Juvenile from the intermediate phases and so forth. So that was an enlightening experience. And I, I debarked from that point on. I was concentrating on Araceae. I did a lot of other families from the flora of Panama because I was in charge of that for about five years. But it was basically from that point on that I worked almost exclusively with Araceae. And it was at a time when almost nothing was known about Araceae. I could literally go to the field, collect, uh, plants all day and come back. And ten years later, I realized that everything I touched was new. So? So it was an astonishing time to collect. And there weren’t very many people collecting plants, period. And very few collecting aroids because they were very hard to dry. And I also realized that even in the past, people who collected, you know, one hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty years ago, they were not collecting very many aroids. Or if they did, they probably were lost because they rotted. They simply had no way of drying things that thick. So, all the people that would have been collecting two hundred years ago are nearly devoid of aroids because they, you know, they didn’t collect them. And I assume it was because they simply tried and then realized they can’t dry them. You know, they didn’t have the proper they didn’t have aluminum corrugates, they didn’t have electricity, they didn’t have any good, reliable source of heat. So it was a very difficult task to collect aroids , especially the really big ones and really big thick anthurium, which dries fairly quickly. Most of those could be dried thoroughly successfully with a charcoal fire. But imagine trying to dry a Xanthosoma with, you know, it’s got about ninety percent water and a massive thick bark. So that was my experience collecting plants in my initial phases of my career. My development of my skill on Barro Colorado Island, then then slowly moving into South America, especially Colombia and Ecuador. I eventually, you know, started working everywhere and eventually got got, National Science Foundation grants, which enabled me to do revisions of large groups of plants, enabling me to go basically everywhere in South America.

00:39:23 Tanya Quintieri: That’s amazing. Yeah. Jos, I believe you had a question for Tom.

00:39:28 Jos Vanden Abeele: I have so many questions, but which were like, to me, a burning question is having described so many plants, over one hundred thousand. Is there one or few that stick out, like the stories, how you collected them, or how you named them, how you describe them? Is there is there one that pops to mind now, if I ask you which one sticks out?

00:39:49 Dr. Tom Croat: There are many that there are many that come to mind. Of course. Uh, I have no favorites, basically, because I consider all these plants equally beautiful and equally useful. But of course, when I came to a number that was sort of a round number, for example, five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, I would always select something for that round number, that was, you know, out of the ordinary. So it was just a game I’ve always done. And I remember my twenty five thousandth, fifty thousandth, seventy five thousandth, one hundred thousandth. And I remember when we knew that the one hundred thousandth number was going to come up sometime within the next day or two on this field trip, when it got close to one hundred thousand, I realized we were in a really shabby place where there wasn’t much of anything of interest. And so we drove halfway across Ecuador to get to an area that was much more productive in terms of the likelihood of having interesting plants. And it was there on the on the particular day that we were pretty certain that the one hundred thousandth number was going to come up. We would actually preselect the I mean, we would say, okay, this is going to be one hundred thousandth. So you would just make it arrange the collection sites so that they would that the this really fancy plant would appear at a particular place. It was a, it was a game we played. But uh, with, you know, moving things around a little bit like throwing this locality out for that locality because this next locality has all the interesting things. But, that one hundred thousandth plant, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what should I name this thing? And I chose the name centimillesimum, which means one hundred thousandth. But I really didn’t know how to write this in Latin, so I had to consult with various Latin experts. And there was a group of people of four or five people with whom I was conversing. And they were disagreeing about the spelling of of centimillesimum and whether you know exactly what it should be. So a there was an interesting event that involved several other people in the choice of this name, and unfortunately, I still haven’t published it because I’ve still not finished my work on Belolonchium and that plant falls into the section Belolonchium. I have maybe a, oh, at least five hundred plants that are fully described and not published because of lack of time.

00:42:34 Tanya Quintieri: Oh wow!

00:42:36 Dr. Tom Croat: I realized that this is a real problem because a lot of people are using these names, but it’s anybody can publish that species, if they ran across it. So I have had lots of species like, described out from underneath me, but by other people, especially Eduardo Gonzalez in Brazil. He’s published several pieces that I had known were new, but I was just too slow in getting them published.

00:43:03 Tanya Quintieri: I did have a look at that one hundred thousandth anthurium. I think it’s gorgeous. It has, like, this really, really beautiful sinus. Or is that even a sinus? I’m not quite sure, but, it’s a beautiful leaf shape.

00:43:18 Dr. Tom Croat: Uh, that particular area of the leaf. Interesting. You know?

00:43:23 Tanya Quintieri: Yeah.

00:43:24 Dr. Tom Croat: Over the sinus. Your hand is covering nearly all of the really good territory to separate plants, to separate at least forty plants. You’ve got the the number of basal veins, the number of prebasal veins, the degree to which the remaining basal veins are fused together. The length of the posterior rib. The shape of the posterior rib and the shape of the sinus. So there’s about six or seven characteristics there, which are perhaps the most reliable in terms of describing a plan. You know how you can distinguish one from another. So in my Lucid Key, which I have developed for most of the tropical genera, those keys are based on descriptions. We we put the description into the computer and there maybe there’s about one hundred and fifty characters, but, you know, not all of them are equally useful. So generally speaking, I will choose when I’m keying something out, I’ll start off with a number of basic things and, and then that quickly eliminates many of the possibilities. And what I generally do, it starts off with about two thousand species. Mind you, there are a lot more than two thousand species, but there are only three thousand species, which I haven’t listed. But all of the described species are in it, but, many of the undescribed species are not in there. But I don’t have to worry about the undescribed ones because they can’t be mentioned anywhere.

00:45:00 Tanya Quintieri: In your journey with Araceae let’s look at anthurium. Just because Jos is an Anthurium breeder, and that’s what his heart beats for. So, um, with it being such a massive and complex genus, do you think we’re close to understanding the full scope of the genus, or are we barely scratching the surface in terms of what exists in the wild?

00:45:23 Dr. Tom Croat: Probably. Uh, it’s true that we have some idea of the sexual classification, especially with molecular biology helping that, assist. But if you consider the sections, we currently have about twenty valid sections, some of which don’t seem to be phylogenetic, that is to say, they’re not they’re not they’re not good sections. They’re just unnatural sections. Recently we split up the section Xialophyllium into three different groups that we published last year in the Aroideana. And many of the sections that still exist, are clearly probably not natural, but I am using the information that I have always used for the different sections, and we’re going to publish a revision and section of Cardiolonchium hopefully this year. And that group has at least four hundred pieces, I would say, and Belolonchium is probably every bit as large. Calomystrium is somewhat smaller, but it hasn’t been revised. All of these big sections have not been revised. The section Porphyrochitonium, for example, I suspect it has a thousand spieces by itself.

00:46:40 Tanya Quintieri: Wow.

00:46:41 Dr. Tom Croat: And, it’s an incredible because they’re tiny plans and you can find, you know, dozens of them on one green, and they can all be different. So that group is, I think it has the potential for being really an enormous section. So what I’m saying, basically, is that I think Anthurium is the largest genus in the world. A lot of people refute this. They won’t believe me. And of course, I can’t prove it until we get all the species enumerated and published. And you can’t just say you’ve got these species, you actually have to publish them in order to make them count as a species. But, one of my goals, if I live long enough is to prove that this genus is the largest genus in the world. And, I’m pretty convinced of it simply because.

00:47:35 Tanya Quintieri: There’s lots of work to do.

00:47:37 Dr. Tom Croat: Three thousand five hundred names. And that’s not even the beginning. That’s not even the end of it. Of course, some of these names haven’t been tested, so perhaps they’re not, they’ll be replaced. But if they’re replaced, they’ll just be replaced with another plant anyway. So I really believe that, you know, in time, I’ll prove that Anthurium is the largest genus in the world. The largest genus currently is something like Astragalus. Now, I don’t even know. I think I’ve seen a Astragalus, but here is the largest in the world. And it’s it’s to me, it’s very poorly known. They say it’s not like anthurium, where nearly everybody recognizes as an interesting plant. The Astragalus are they’re little weeds that crawl all over the world. Russia and China. And so that’s probably why they’ve been a lot of described. But I contend that, you know, as has been looked at a long time by a lot of bodies. Whereas Anthurium has not, and there are few people working on that. And they’re just, you know, publishing one species here and another species here. It’s not it’s not any kind of a systematic look at the genus at all. So that’s my one of my big, big goals is to try to do that. Go ahead. Next question.

00:49:01 Jos Vanden Abeele: Yeah, I have a nerdy question related to that. And it might be a stupid question, so my apologies for that, but I work with Anthurium and I mostly create hybrid plants because I love the idea of creating hybrids and I love the outcome of it. But also I was taught in school in biology that species are, well, not supposed to create hybrids. That’s one of the parts of the definitions of species. And I know that’s not like a hard definition, but what I like to know is what what parameters do you use to determine whether an anthurium is a new species or either a subspecies or a variant or an ecotype, because to me, that’s not always clear. Like plants can look a lot like each other but then have a different color of inflorescence, for instance, like what parameters do you use to determine this is now a new species?

00:50:03 Tanya Quintieri: This is future, Tanya. Just to let you know, we’ve decided to cut this interview in half to give you the full experience. Tune in tomorrow when we upload the second part of this interview. We look forward to see you there. Back to the show.

00:50:24 Jos: Er. Whew.

00:50:27 Tanya: How are you?

00:50:27 Jos: That was a that was a good. I think we did good here.

00:50:30 Tanya: You did great. I really

00:50:32 Jos: No

00:50:32 Tanya: thought

00:50:32 Jos: we.

00:50:32 Tanya: you were going to lose your words or something.

00:50:34 Jos: Yeah, we

00:50:36 Tanya: No,

00:50:36 Jos: both

00:50:36 Tanya: you did

00:50:36 Jos: did.

00:50:36 Tanya: good.

00:50:37 Jos: Yeah. We both did good.

00:50:39 Tanya: Let’s

00:50:39 Jos: Don’t do

00:50:39 Tanya: do the weird plant.

00:50:39 Jos: that. That’s. Let’s try again. Let’s try again. Okay. I need something to clear my mind. Let’s rate weird plans.

00:50:54 Tanya: Yay!

00:50:55 Jos: Yay! I need more enthusiasm, Tanya. Okay,

00:50:59 Tanya: Hmm.

00:51:01 Jos: let’s start with the first one. What are we seeing?

00:51:06 Tanya: Oh! I was gonna say something now, but I can’t say it because this is the episode with Tom Croat. Um. Oof!

00:51:16 Jos: Just say it. Just say it.

00:51:18 Tanya: It looks like a butt plug. No, I don’t know. Um.

00:51:28 Jos: Yeah, that was the nickname. The plant is called Eulychnia castanea spiralis. And what I found really funny was on Reddit. Somebody gave it a new name.

00:51:39 Tanya: What

00:51:39 Jos: Stuck.

00:51:40 Tanya: was it?

00:51:40 Jos: Stack of booties toweris.

00:51:43 Tanya: A booty? What?

00:51:44 Jos: Stack of booties toweris.

00:51:47 Tanya: Oh, Stack of booty towers. Okay. Um. Yeah. What am I looking at? Okay, so it’s like a cactus like structure, and it looks like somebody pressed or stacked, um, little balls of cactus and flatten them a little bit on top of each other. And it’s like this tower of green spheres, I guess, I don’t know. Very interesting.

00:52:11 Jos: It’s also called a unicorn horn cactus. Um, it’s a rare, slow growing Chilean cactus, prized for its unique twisting spiral stems that grow either clockwise or counterclockwise. So cool.

00:52:25 Tanya: Depending on which side of the equator.

00:52:27 Jos: Uh, no. They grow in Chile, so I think depending on how they started or a variety, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer for you. Sorry. So how we’re gonna rate this plant on a weirdness scale?

00:52:47 Tanya: That’s a seven.

00:52:48 Jos: I mean,

00:52:48 Tanya: Oh,

00:52:48 Jos: it’s

00:52:48 Tanya: now

00:52:48 Jos: weird.

00:52:49 Tanya: I see where that Reddit user gets the idea from that. It looks

00:52:51 Jos: The booties

00:52:52 Tanya: like stacked butts.

00:52:52 Jos: stack of booties.

00:52:54 Tanya: Yeah. Okay. Seven.

00:52:57 Jos: But also somebody called it the buttplug cactus. So you’re not wrong.

00:53:01 Tanya: Yep.

00:53:02 Jos: Seven. Seven. Okay. Seven. Let’s go to the next one. The next one is part of the orchid family. Dendrobium wassellii.

00:53:14 Tanya: Hmm. Okay, so I’m looking at a pot with, like, two, three roots that grow out horizontally. They’re quite pale. And then on top of it, we have, I guess, leaves, but they look like pods. Like bean pods that stick straight up. It kind of looks like a Hanukkah. Hanukkah? You know,

00:53:33 Jos: Yeah,

00:53:33 Tanya: those candle holders?

00:53:34 Jos: yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good description. Yeah,

00:53:36 Tanya: That’s exactly what it looks

00:53:38 Jos: yeah.

00:53:38 Tanya: like. But like, where does it bloom? Does it bloom? Well, yeah it

00:53:42 Jos: Yeah,

00:53:42 Tanya: does bloom but.

00:53:43 Jos: yeah, those greens are. They’re not pods. I mean, they look like seed pods, but they are actually leaves.

00:53:48 Tanya: Mhm.

00:53:49 Jos: And then the flowers are usually white like completely different to that. Uh, so Dendrobium wassellii, commonly known as furrowed pencil orchid, is a species

00:54:01 Tanya: Mhm.

00:54:01 Jos: of orchid endemic to Cape York, Australia. So it has these white flowers and I think that’s all I have to say about it. I can show you the flower if you want to.

00:54:14 Tanya: Yeah. Please.

00:54:15 Jos: It’s pretty flower, but then it makes it less weird. So that’s why I didn’t add it at

00:54:21 Tanya: Um.

00:54:21 Jos: first. Like we need to keep the plant weird. This is how the flower looks.

00:54:29 Tanya: Okay. But now it um.

00:54:30 Jos: Now it looks normal, right?

00:54:32 Tanya: No, but if you take away the flower, it looks like a bunch of chaotic bananas. Like a,

00:54:38 Jos: Yup.

00:54:38 Tanya: you

00:54:38 Jos: Yup

00:54:39 Tanya: know,

00:54:39 Jos: yup.

00:54:39 Tanya: green little bananas. Interesting. Not too much a fan of the flowers, but really interesting. Why do some orchids choose to be ugly? Well, no, it’s not ugly. It’s just very. I’m going to

00:54:53 Jos: I

00:54:53 Tanya: give

00:54:53 Jos: don’t

00:54:54 Tanya: that

00:54:54 Jos: think.

00:54:55 Tanya: because, like, the growth pattern makes no sense to me. That’s going to be another seven.

00:55:00 Jos: Okay! Then, I have one final one for you.

00:55:06 Tanya: Mhm.

00:55:08 Jos: The plant is called Cynomorium coccineum.

00:55:13 Tanya: Okay. So I’m looking at a I don’t know a meadow or something. Um, and there’s this brown. I don’t even know how to describe that shape. Do you know the hot dog plant?

00:55:30 Jos: Yeah. And you know,

00:55:31 Tanya: But

00:55:31 Jos: you

00:55:31 Tanya: without

00:55:31 Jos: know how

00:55:32 Tanya: a stem.

00:55:32 Jos: to you didn’t you know how to describe the shape?

00:55:35 Tanya: Again, it looks like a butt plug. I’m sorry.

00:55:38 Jos: It’s phallic.

00:55:39 Tanya: It is very phallic. Um, but like the surface, it… Is that dead? Does

00:55:47 Jos: No,

00:55:47 Tanya: it grow like that?

00:55:48 Jos: no,

00:55:48 Tanya: It’s like a

00:55:49 Jos: it’s not

00:55:49 Tanya: deep.

00:55:49 Jos: that. That’s the flower.

00:55:51 Tanya: That’s the flower.

00:55:52 Jos: Yes. Or like the

00:55:54 Tanya: The

00:55:54 Jos: the

00:55:55 Tanya: spadix.

00:55:55 Jos: the inflorescence. I, I think

00:55:57 Tanya: Oh.

00:55:57 Jos: there are different flowers on there.

00:55:59 Tanya: I wouldn’t say it’s very tall. Maybe like a really fat thumb. A long thumb? I don’t know, but it’s this cone shaped that… like the surface. I’m sorry. Um, I don’t. Y’all should be seeing my head. I’m like, turning my head like a curious dog from left to right. Because I’m trying to see what I’m looking at. But I’m going to say the surface looks like somebody shredded some moss or something like really finely and glued it to the structure, but in deep dark brown. Yeah.

00:56:37 Jos: Okay. So Cynomorium is a genus of parasitic perennial flowering plants. Its genus only consists of one species. So that’s the one you see here.

00:56:47 Tanya: Mhm.

00:56:48 Jos: Um, and its common names include the misleading Maltese fungus or Maltese mushroom. So it’s often called a fungus or a mushroom, but it is a plant. It’s also called the desert thumb, red thumb, and some other local names. It grows in dry, rocky and sandy soils, or globally. Um, so it has a wide variety of uses in European, Arabian and Chinese herbal medicine. It has no chlorophyll and is unable to photosynthesize. It is a geophyte, spending most of its life underground in the form of a rhizome. So it’s completely parasitic. It depends on its host to grow. The inflorescences emerge in spring, following winter rain, on a fleshy, unbranched stem. And yeah, it’s pollinated by flies, which are attracted by its sweet, slightly cabbage like odor. Hmm.

00:57:47 Tanya: But see,

00:57:48 Jos: I.

00:57:48 Tanya: I said it looks like a big thumb. And you said it’s called a red thumb.

00:57:52 Jos: I mean, those names don’t invent themselves. It’s like it describes what we’re seeing.

00:57:59 Tanya: I think this is this series is like a crash course for me into taxonomy. I could start describing plants.

00:58:09 Jos: I think it’s cool. It’s one of those plans that would like if you would ask a person, what defines a plant? How do you describe a plant that they would say like green or it has chlorophyll or it has leaves or whatever. This one shows you it needs neither of those. Like why? Why? What defines it as a plant?

00:58:33 Tanya: But I can see how people confuse it for a fungus because

00:58:36 Jos: Of course.

00:58:37 Tanya: of the base.

00:58:37 Jos: Yeah, it looks

00:58:38 Tanya: So

00:58:38 Jos: very

00:58:39 Tanya: that one

00:58:39 Jos: similar.

00:58:39 Tanya: gets a nine.

00:58:40 Jos: It’s really weird.

00:58:41 Tanya: It’s a nine. One hundred

00:58:43 Jos: It’s

00:58:43 Tanya: percent.

00:58:43 Jos: a nine. Yeah. That’s a good start of the new year.

00:58:47 Tanya: Mhm. Before we close out, do you have any New Year’s resolutions. Do you believe in them.

00:58:51 Jos: Uh, believe in them, of course. I see them more, uh, like ambitions for the new year. But it’s not that they are formed on the first of January. It’s like

00:59:02 Tanya: No.

00:59:03 Jos: it’s they are formed throughout twenty twenty five and like, okay, next year I want to focus on that. I’m gonna, you know, put some extra effort into that. And

00:59:14 Tanya: Okay.

00:59:14 Jos: I think for me, it’s mainly gonna be more professional, like try to really get our companies off the ground

00:59:24 Tanya: Yep.

00:59:24 Jos: because they are amazing and people need to know and

00:59:28 Tanya: Mhm.

00:59:28 Jos: they need to get on board. The ambition is to keep up with Prop Culture. So I can see you every week, and we get to inform people about plans. I really hope that we can expand our listener base and get some more interaction. So

00:59:45 Tanya: Mhm.

00:59:45 Jos: I think that’s yeah, that’s mainly the New Year’s resolutions for me. What about you?

00:59:52 Tanya: Well, I’m going to be fifty years old this year. Not that I feel like it. I also don’t think I look like it. God has blessed me with some good genes, I believe. But it does kind of mark a how do I say a milestone that I’ve not quite figured out yet. So in terms of that, I do want to make it to September and have expanded my list of things that I’ve achieved. I mean, I’m never going to get Tom Croat like level. Hello?!

01:00:22 Jos: Mm.

01:00:23 Tanya: Um, that’s not even my aspiration. But I do want to have some milestones achieved, including, you know, taking better care of myself, being kinder, swearing less. Like, those are are my little goals. And, I think that’s that’s just about it being

01:00:42 Jos: Well,

01:00:42 Tanya: a good person.

01:00:43 Jos: f Well fuck that.

01:00:49 Tanya: Did I tell you that one year I was organizing a conference? I think it was in Hamburg, and I closed out the conference. It was a two day conference. I closed it out with a song called Fuck This Shit, I’m Out.

01:01:02 Jos: Okay, so no more swearing for you.

01:01:05 Tanya: No

01:01:05 Jos: We’re gonna

01:01:05 Tanya: more swearing

01:01:06 Jos: be very

01:01:06 Tanya: for me.

01:01:06 Jos: American Puritan here.

01:01:08 Tanya: No, no, no,

01:01:10 Jos: To our American listeners, we love you,

01:01:11 Tanya: we

01:01:12 Jos: doooot.

01:01:12 Tanya: love you. All right, we’ll see you back next week for episode two of season two. And, um. Yeah, we’ll see who else we can get on board throughout the year to talk to us on Prop Culture.

01:01:28 Jos: See you next week.

01:01:29 Tanya: Y’all have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful twenty twenty six

01:01:32 Jos: Yes.

01:01:32 Tanya: and see you around. Bye bye.

01:01:34 Jos: Bye.