How a Vigilante Botanist Became a Cult Icon

Outside Podcast

English - March 16, 2022 11:55 - 22 minutes - ★★★★ - 1.9K ratings
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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.