Mommy and Daddy Trees

[00:05] Oh, we doing under Google rules. That was the plan. Super excited. Told us we had to. We
[00:20] signed up for it. In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give
[00:26] you. All right. Coalson. I need an under Google in my life. Do you have anything for me today
[00:34] that I can answer for you? I do. I've got a long list right now. But the one that's
[00:39] most pressing to me that, you know, if I don't get answered soon enough, it's going to start
[00:45] to freak me out. I want to talk about seedless fruits. I want to talk about how they exist.
[00:54] My understanding of fruits is that they have seeds and that's how they produce other fruits.
[01:00] And so if I am getting like a grape, right, where I'm eating my grape and it's got no
[01:06] seeds in it, then how is it reproducing? Also, how are you making something that can't reproduce
[01:13] seedless fruits? Why do they exist? How do they make this happen? So the answer to your
[01:19] first question, why is because seeds are annoying. And so that's why. And also money. Yes. What
[01:30] do you mean money? Well, because they suck. I don't want them in my food. I'll pay more
[01:34] to not have them in my food. Okay. Yeah. You can sell multiple products, right? Yeah. Okay.
[01:41] And then I don't, my knowledge of plants reproduction is not where it used to be. But I think the
[01:50] idea is that you create a cross between two parent plants that have seeds, but their progeny
[02:04] do not have seeds. And so you, but how do you know? Experimentation. Yeah. I mean, luckily
[02:12] plants don't take 90 years to go through a life cycle like we do, right? It happens
[02:17] relative quickly. So, so you say you could have two plants have sex and give you a seedless
[02:26] thing, but that seedless thing can't have sex. I mean, it can, uh, you know, it just
[02:34] can't have, it can't have free babies. You can have sex. It can't have babies. You can
[02:37] have a very pleasurable sexual life, but it can't have babies. Very fulfilling. Right.
[02:43] Exactly. All of the pollen. We support you. Yeah. But, but, uh, so what you're saying
[02:49] is that the, the, the boy, the boy tree and the girl tree, I don't know. Have sex
[02:56] and they have a, a, a genderless sexless baby. No seeds, no seeds. Now, do you just keep
[03:06] making those, those mommy and daddy trees having sex over and over again, or do you have like
[03:13] the sexless, like I actually, you can't, cause once the berries out there without a, like
[03:20] a, a sex organ, it can't have sex. Like what happens when the, the, the, the boy tree and
[03:30] the, and the, the girl tree die? Well, so these days you would just do, you would, you
[03:35] would genetically engineer your, your, your F zero generation. So the parent generation
[03:47] to produce, how would this work? It's a produce offspring that we're not seed bearing. Right.
[03:58] So do you have, okay. So, okay. This is a weird question, but do you have to find like the
[04:03] smallest seed grapes on either side of the male and female thing and be like, oh yeah,
[04:09] they produce small seed grapes and connect them and keep getting smaller and smaller. I
[04:13] probably that's how it started. Yeah. Is, I mean, that's sort of the, the nature of crop
[04:22] breeding, right? Is you're going to cross different crops with, with properties that
[04:28] you want. Right. So you said crossbreeding and I said evolution. So is that different?
[04:33] Well, so crossbreeding is probably, I mean, I guess it's not an accelerated version of
[04:40] evolution, but it's, it's guided, trait. It's breeding. It's like dogs. Dogs aren't really
[04:50] evolving and just forced their breeding habits. Yeah. That's a good analogy. Yep. Okay. So,
[04:56] so yeah, I guess you would take, if you like, if you want a smaller dog, you take two small
[05:00] dogs and have them enjoy each other, be a smaller dog, right? Yeah. So the same thing
[05:06] with the, the plants like, Hey, you have smaller seeds. Let's have you guys keep having sex.
[05:11] I mean, these days we're probably talking about full blown genetic engineering, aren't we?
[05:14] We're just going in there and splicing stuff up. That's what my guess would be is that
[05:18] at this point, like the way like Monsanto makes like the, the Roundup ready corn or
[05:25] whatever, but that corn cannot propagate itself. And that's the whole trick is Monsanto has
[05:31] you come by the stuff every year. Right. So that's what are they getting that from active
[05:37] plants somewhere, right? Or they're just genetically creating it in a lab. I mean,
[05:43] both, right? Like you need the actual plants, but you have genetically engineered the plants to do
[05:48] what you want them to do to produce progeny that don't, uh, that are unable to replicate.
[05:56] Okay. So here's a, here'd be another question. So like a cutie, are you familiar with the cutie?
[06:01] It's like a tiny orange. Look at the club. Oh, nevermind.
[06:07] It's like a tiny orange cutie didn't have seeds. Orange has seeds. So did they create a small
[06:13] orange without seeds? Yes. And that's why it's called a cutie. And they did that. It's called
[06:19] the cutie because somebody marketing thought it would be right. But what I'm saying is they took
[06:23] a bunch of orange plants and was like, you don't have that many seeds. You don't have that many
[06:28] seeds either baby. And they just all like, you know, fell in love and had babies.
[06:34] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And the store came or something. I don't know.
[06:38] I feel like you are probably writing some fiction and dark corners of the internet.
[06:44] I'm just trying to figure this is, this is the history of agriculture. Coalson is,
[06:49] is people see that help crossing plants in order to get, uh, ones that bear larger fruit or
[06:55] fruits without seeds or fruit that are actually red or green or our college, my college roommate
[07:02] married a gal whose family, great, great, great grandfather or something pioneered
[07:07] multi-eared corn. There used to be like one year of corn per stock. And that's not enough.
[07:13] And then someone need more than that. Someone bred, uh, uh, you know,
[07:17] Australian that would do more and got very rich. Right. I guess, I guess, and I, and I'm with you
[07:22] and I, I, and I appreciate that understanding of, of how we've gotten to this place.
[07:27] It's a pretty mellow strain of corn. I think it's a good list.
[07:31] But my, but my question is, if you stop having seeds, you can't replant that thing.
[07:36] Right. Right. I see what you're saying. So for all of these, it all dies out, right?
[07:41] Yeah. So for all of these other ones, you can make it in bed, have sex with a,
[07:44] you know, dorm room pincher and they create something different,
[07:47] right? But like now I've got seedless things. How do I keep them alive?
[07:52] You just need, yeah, you just need clones of the seeds that you used originally, right?
[07:59] But were we able to do this before we could clone things? I guess what I'm saying.
[08:06] I mean, plants probably. What's your first seedless cherry?
[08:11] You know, do they make seedless cherries? Hell yeah, they do.
[08:16] Do they? Really? I didn't know that.
[08:18] I was also unaware of that. Apparently I'm not in that tax bracket.
[08:22] Yeah. You know that the maraschino cherries just have the seeds already removed.
[08:30] Those aren't seedless cherries. Oh, I just thought those were, I thought those were candy.
[08:36] I thought it was that I didn't think that was a cherry.
[08:39] Just a candy. I mean, also seedless grapes may not be a zero number of seeds, right?
[08:45] It's just an imperceptibly small amount of seeds, right?
[08:49] That's a good point. Yeah. Which is what she said.
[08:54] I don't think she did. What he said. I don't know.
[08:58] He might have. Your doctor might have said that.
[09:03] Before I started warning. They're supposed to be some sort of HIPAA thing here.
[09:14] You don't share all my public information between the enforcer and his patient. I don't think.
[09:20] If you can tell me what HIPAA stands for, I'll observe something about a
[09:28] Hippocratic oath nailed it from Hippocrates.
[09:42] So it turns out most commercial fruit isn't grown from seed.
[09:49] What even fruits that still have seeds like apples and cherries are grown from cuttings
[09:54] because this guarantees that the plant will be genetically identical to the parent plant
[09:59] from which they are clumped. So very clever farmers. See this.
[10:09] So you can clip off part of a plant and then replant it.
[10:13] Right. Is that like grafting onto another tree?
[10:19] More like cutting off part of a starfish and it grows that part back.
[10:24] But no, you can. Yeah, you can take part of a plant and it will, you know,
[10:31] you can get it to grow from there. You don't need the entire plant, right?
[10:35] So you can use some subset called a clipping to replant that that plant and it will grow
[10:43] to maturity plants. Just want to live. Seedless grapes were were originally
[10:48] a natural mutation that prevented the young seeds from maturing and developing a hard coat.
[10:55] And even seedless varieties do sometimes produce small numbers of seeds.
[11:00] Fruits develop without fertilization or pollination triggers fruit development,
[11:05] but the ovules and embryos abort without producing mature seeds.
[11:16] Yeah. Okay. Lacking seeds. Fruits are generally propagated
[11:23] vegetally from cuttings or grafting. Like you said,
[11:30] the seedless grape. I don't know. I don't know how reliable this is going to be
[11:35] because it's from a for profit company, it looks like. But the seedless grape is thought to date
[11:40] back to ancient Rome and was first introduced to the U.S. in the mid 1870s under the name
[11:46] Thompson, a Scottish immigrant who first cultivated it for raisin production
[11:50] for seedless watermelons. They did sort of what our plan was. So, but the, the science of it is
[12:01] they, they have a normal watermelon plant that has is diploid. So it has two sets of chromosomes
[12:11] and then a, they cross it with a variety that has four sets of chromosomes.
[12:17] And so then they end up with a triploid one that has three sets of chromosomes that are unable to
[12:28] reproduce. And so they make seedless watermelons.
[12:32] Yeah. I've seen a lot about things that aren't able to reproduce. Now, it seems like these have
[12:38] been around for a lever because they happen naturally, but we've figured out how to make
[12:42] them artificially. So that's, yeah. And then we do that for profit. You're right. Money.
[12:47] Yeah. And the grafting actually, yeah, we should have thought of grafting. We should have. That's
[12:51] like, like all the almonds basically in the world are just grafted onto a different type
[12:57] of tree stump or something like that. And then there's that like cool hybrid plant that like
[13:05] grows tomatoes on top and potatoes on the bottom or whatever. It's supposed to like save the
[13:09] world at some point. Still, still waiting for that. No, it exists. It's a thing for the
[13:15] world to be saved. That's why. Yes. Yeah. We got to go through the apocalypse first. Okay. And then
[13:25] we get the tomato, tomato, potato, potato, that everybody has to yell about. There's nobody knows
[13:31] the answer to what it's over and over and over again. That's just now it's got a different human
[13:35] history. Tomato, potato. Jason, you're talking about the tom-tato plant. Yeah, the tom-tato.
[13:43] Better than tobacco. Yes, better than tobacco.
[13:49] Is that a sentence? But it's so addictive.
[13:54] I'll take a crate or a carton, however they come.