Mike Carruthers

And that is something you should know.

You don't have to look far from where you are right now to see plants.

Perhaps you're surrounded by plants.

After all, plants cover the earth.

There are a lot more of them than us.

And what you're about to hear will amaze you because there's a whole world in which plants live, thrive, communicate, defend themselves, trick predators, and do a whole lot of other cool things you've probably never heard about.

Here to explain all this is Zoe Schlanger.

She is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, and a bunch of other places.

She is author of a book called The Light Eaters, How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.

Hi, Zoe.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

So I love the title of your book.

I love this whole idea that plants eat light because that's in fact what they do.

So explain what you mean by that.

So when you talk about plant intelligence, that seems, I don't know, almost oxymoronish somehow.

Because there's no brain, right?

I mean, I'm not a botanist, but plants don't have brains.

They don't have the ability to think, well, I'm going to do this instead of that.

So plant intelligence must be something else if it's a thing.