Hank: Good morning, John. I had the pleasure of attending YouTube's Education Summit recently, and meeting a ton of amazing EduTubers, including CGPGrey, who everyone agrees, the world needs more of. He told me making videos in his style was very hard, and so today, to prove it to him that I can do it, I'm going to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about apples. No, not those apples. Original apples. No, the original apples. Apples are wonderful. Sweet, tart, big, small, red, green, yellow, brown, purple, every apple that has ever passed your lips, I can almost guarantee was descended from wild apple trees in Kazakhstan. American as apple pie? Nope. Immigrants. The oldest known apple pie recipe was written in 1381. Apples may have been indeed the first cultivated fruit tree in human history. And the fruit has been part of Asian and European culture since, well, hm, unfortunately, until the 17th century, the word for 'apple' in both old English and Latin was used as a generic term for all fruits, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, not berries, though, they had their own word, but nuts, apples. So it's difficult to determine when it's apple apples being written about in ancient texts and when it's persimmon apples or fig apples or pomegranate apples. Nonetheless, they're ripe, sweet, decadence has them heavily featured in Greek myths, especially ones about beauty and sexuality. And throwing an apple at a young lady used to be a great way of saying, 'hey, I fancy you' as long as you didn't throw it too hard. While apples are immigrants, America does have some great apple history, particularly the story of Johnny Appleseed, who, unlike Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, was actually a real person. John Chapman was a businessman nomad missionary and kinda crazy person who crossed the American frontier in the early 1800s, making sure people had plenty of apple saplings. Many American settlers were actually required to plant fruit trees on their property, as a sign that they were improving the land they had claimed as theirs. Chapman's business operation relied on him planting tree nurseries from seed, and then selling the saplings, which, for anyone who knows anything about apple trees, sounds nuts. Apple fruits exhibit something known as extreme heterozygosity, meaning that the apple of a daughter tree will likely look and taste nothing like that of the mother. And the default phenotype for apple taste appears to be terrible. Once you do find a tree with a tasty apple, you graft buds or limbs of that tree, creating clones of the original on top of the root stalk of a seeded tree. Chapman didn't do that. He just planted the seeds, creating tons and tons of terrible tasting apples. Why? No one cared. No one was interested in eating them--apples were mashed for their juice and fermented into booze. First, because everyone had seen dysentery first hand and no one trusted the water, and second, because, well, booze. While most apples were destined for hard cider, farmers always had their eye out for that one tree with the nice tasty eating apples in the orchard. And those that found good ones won a kind of cosmic lottery and often became rich selling grafts and apples. For example, tree that Scotsman John McIntosh found on a farm he purchased in 1796 in Canada, a small, sweet, crisp apple, red with swashes of green, from that one tree came in effect every McIntosh apple every eaten. The McIntosh apple was so successful that in the end, it inspired the naming of the Apple Macintosh, which somehow happens to be the kind of computer I'm editing this video on right now. There you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about apples, or, yeah. (endscreen)