125. Spooky Mushrooms, Modern Folklore, and Mycelial Mind Control w/ Amanda McLoughlin and Julia Schifni

A perfect circle of mushrooms in the grass can feel like a message. We follow that feeling into the heart of fungi and folklore with Amanda McLoughlin and Julia Schifini of Spirits, exploring why mushrooms unsettle us, how they anchor myth, and what they can teach us about living with limits and wonder. From fairy rings and house spirits to cordyceps and body horror, we trace the line between ecology and story: a mycelial network expands and fruits at the edge, myth calls it a threshold, and we decide whether to cross.

We dig into the science that fuels the myths—external digestion, predatory oyster mushrooms hunting nematodes, and the eerie intelligence of networks that appear overnight. Then we connect those facts to the rules of folklore: hospitality laws, shared flood stories, and warnings against greed that echo modern forager ethics. We also examine the complicated modern history of psychedelics, sacred ritual, and the mid‑century rush that stripped context in favor of spectacle, reminding ourselves that power without reciprocity becomes a curse in every tradition.

Finally, we turn to fungi as caretakers: recyclers of forests, soil makers, and even potential allies against plastic pollution. Along the way, Amanda and Julia share why house spirits matter, how rituals make homes feel alive, and why returning to stories of reciprocity might be the most practical climate strategy of all. Press play for a smart, spooky tour of mushrooms, myth, and the moral math of sharing a planet. If this conversation re‑enchanted your sense of the woods, subscribe, share with a curious friend, and leave a review telling us the mushroom story you’ll never forget.

Chapters

• 0:00 Halloween Setup & Guest Intros
• 3:50 Why Folklore Feels Like Home
• 10:05 Spooky Nature And Mushroom Obsessions
• 15:40 Fairy Rings And The Mycelial Circle
• 22:50 Mid-Roll Break
• 24:12 Predatory Fungi And Cordyceps Horror
• 33:40 Psychedelics, Ritual, And MKUltra
• 42:30 Fungi As Planet Recyclers And Problem-Solvers
• 49:20 Lessons From Nature-Based Myth
• 54:30 Plugs, Gratitude, And Closing Thoughts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

What is up, plant people? It's time once more for the Planthropology Podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vicarin Beliga, your host and your humble guidance journey through the sciences. And as always, my friends, I'm so excited to be with you today. Y'all, this is such a good one. So if you're listening to this on the day that it drops, tomorrow is Halloween. That's right, Halloween 2025. And what possible Halloween could be scarier than the one in 2025? I implore you. I ask you, I beg you to tell me. I don't I I can't think of one. It's pretty bad, but that's okay. Because I have such a good pair of guests for you today. So I reached out to my friends, Amanda McLaughlin and Julia Shafini, who are the hosts of The Spirits Podcast, a long-running show about folklores and a dive into all the mythology that defines us in a lot of ways as a people. And I thought as plant lovers and as nature lovers and as folklore lovers, who would be the more perfect guests for Halloween? And I was right. I was right. But what I didn't expect is how much Julia loves mushrooms. It's wonderful. Wonderful. And I just had so much fun listening to both of them talk about folklore and storytelling and how that fits into our lives as humans and how that tells us so much about how we think and how we evolve and how we live based on the stories we tell each other. So this is such a fun episode. We talked about everything from mycelial mind control and how different mushrooms can, I don't know, let us see the future or something, to reindeer, to cordyceps and TV shows and modern and ancient folklore and just about life and and how we contextualize life best based on stories. And y'all, it was so good. I loved talking to them so much. They are wonderful. I've been on their show. Amanda's been on Planthropology before, y'all might remember. I know that was a very popular episode, and a lot of y'all had some really great feedback about that. So without blabbering too much about how excited I am to talk to my friends, I'm just gonna jump into it. So get ready for episode 125 of the Planthropology Podcast: Spooky Mushrooms, Modern Folklore, and Mycelial Mind Control with Amanda McLaughlin and Julia Schafini. Just to get to talk with y'all again. I it is always a pleasure, but it's spooky month, it's October. I think if I'm doing my math right, this is going to come out right before Halloween. So I think it's the perfect opportunity to talk to both of you. So just to kick us off, why don't y'all introduce yourselves a little bit and give us the rundown and the elevator pitch or a longer elevator pitch for spirits, and then we'll jump into talking about how creepy nature can be.

SPEAKER_03: 3:13

Yeah. Vikram, I like to give the stuck in the elevator with me pitch, where perhaps this is like a local elevator going like many floors and between zero and twenty or something. And so you have a little longer than you expected to be stuck with me, but here we are.

SPEAKER_00: 3:26

I I like that. I'm I'm gonna have to like keep that in my back pocket. And for me, I think, you know, at some point into my introduction and the stuck on the elevator pitch, people start to panic a little bit, just like being stuck on the elevator, which is just perfect. I love that.

SPEAKER_04: 3:39

And I mean, if you're going with the theme of sort of our podcast, being trapped in an elevator for an extended period of time, don't know when you're gonna get out, the lights are flickering. Perfect, really, thematically for us.

unknown: 3:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 3:52

Tell a couple ghost stories. And so I'll start. I'm Amanda McLaughlin. I'm a past guest, and I am here with my BFF from kindergarten, Julia Shafini, who is also a very accomplished historian and religious studies lover of mythology. And we, for the last almost 10 years, have been running a podcast called Spirits, which is all about mythology, folklore, and urban legends. Apart from spirits, we're also two spooky bitches who love plants. Um, and so a big part of our hanging out together is hey, do you want to go to the plant store? Hey, look at this new plant I got. Let's check out our garden. We have a little like garden co-op wherein I take over some of Julia's garden each year. So it's it's a wonderful time and a big thread of our friendship. Apart from podcasting, I work on houseplants and reading books generally about plants. So that's me.

SPEAKER_00: 4:41

Well, and your your background there is actually house plants and books, which is just perfect.

SPEAKER_04: 4:46

What's not totally? You know, that is my personality. And I'm Julia Shafini. My my background is mythology and folklore and urban legends. I have degrees in history and religious studies, and I'm the person that explains a lot of stuff on spirits. So you hear my voice a lot while I tell you about why Dionysus is so cool when he gets drunk and has people do a bunch of murders and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_03: 5:10

So and even more than the dramatic details of mythology, which is often kind of what people come for. Ultimately, spirits is about the stories we tell each other as a society. There are some stories that we've been telling each other for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years in different variations. And we're really curious as to why. And so often that means explaining things like why the sun goes up, why the crops work or don't work, why floods occur, why people we love have to die, like all these kind of big questions through a lens of the wildest and often most touching ways that folklore and collective wisdom has explained that over the years, which is sometimes spooky, sometimes heartfelt, but always something in between.

SPEAKER_00: 5:52

Yeah, absolutely. And and I I've listened, yeah, it's crazy that you said that y'all have been on for 10 years. That does that does it feel like 10 years to you? Because I've been doing this six, and it doesn't feel like six.

SPEAKER_04: 6:04

No, whenever Amanda says that out loud, I have a small existential crisis because what is my life? I've been doing this for 10 years. Is this going to be a job in 10 years? It's always a thing that really kind of rushes through my mind very quickly.

SPEAKER_03: 6:21

Yeah, it's pretty astonishing. We started the show in our early 20s as we were like establishing our careers, both back in the same city for the first time since high school, as a way to stay in touch, really, and like just be interested in each other's lives and do a creative project together, which has bloomed into careers. So it is, it is totally wild. We've had the chance to do a little bit of reflection in some recordings over the past few weeks. And it is, at least for me, like an absolute joy and thrill to be able to make a living doing creative stuff. And I feel like real urgency to, I don't know, contribute to people's lives in some way. It's cool that they want to hang out with us in their earbuds. And I want to try to make sure that they take something useful or at least useful, meaning they could, you know, scare their kid cousins with it or something down the line.

SPEAKER_00: 7:06

Well, you know, and I'm I'm a longtime listener to the show. I have been a fan of spirits for forever. And I just I I love the way that y'all talk about it because the way that I think you approach the storytelling and, you know, mythology, folklore, it often delves into some of the dark, like gritty places of our lives, our our minds, and as we'll talk about today, our the world around us. But I think y'all do such a good job of making it fun. Uh, and then making it serious and and heartfelt where appropriate and where you need to, and and just taking it like seriously, but not in a way that makes it stuffy. And and I think when I think about the media that I like to interact with and I like to watch, it's something that can approach heavy topics and heavy things in a way that's relatable. And I think y'all do such a good job of that. So thanks for what you do, and thanks for being on today because it's again a lot of fun for me. And I always love getting to talk to y'all.

SPEAKER_04: 8:03

Thank you. You know what? That is the highest compliment. And the thing that we often hear from listeners of our show is the conversations that we have feel like you're having conversations with your friends. And you should be able to talk about heavy topics with your friends in a way that feels relatable, but also feels like someone is taking care of you. And that's really the way that we try to handle talking about like mythology can be fun and silly at times, but it also can be dark and, you know, mysterious and inexplicable in ways that seem unfair and because that's how the world is. And we like to handle those with as much love and grace as we would show any of our friends.

SPEAKER_03: 8:44

Absolutely. Well put, Julia. I think that's the first time I've heard you phrase that in that way. And it's it's so true. Like, how else would I want to face life's biggest challenges than, you know, shoulder to shoulder with a friend holding a beverage, you know, looking up at the stars? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 8:57

Well, and that's a perfect segue, I think, to what we're talking about today, which is spooky nature or scary and creepy nature. And, you know, as a species that grew up on a planet and spent a lot of time staring at the stars and looking into the dark woods and wondering what's behind the next tree. I think, at least for me, a lot of the folklore and a lot of the stories that I connect with fill in around those themes in a lot of ways. And it helps us, at least for me, I don't know, conceptualize myself as sort of an ecosystem. If I can look at the spooky things in a natural ecosystem and be like, oh, we tell stories about that. I can tell stories about me. And and I don't know, I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but I think that nature-based storytelling wraps up so much of what we do as people, as humans. And so I wanted y'all to come on since it is basically Halloween and it's been a weird, spooky month, year, whatever in a lot of a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_02: 9:58

Decade, millennium so far. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:00

Yeah, something. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 10:01

Longer than we've been doing our podcasts at least.

SPEAKER_00: 10:05

Uh but yeah, I thought it'd be great to be able to talk to y'all about some of the spooky stories in nature. And what y'all suggested when I reach out or what Amanda suggested is that we talk about mushrooms and what is scarier than a mushroom? And I I'm not sure that there's much. So I I I'm gonna let y'all kick it off and and tell us all about spooky mushrooms.

SPEAKER_04: 10:25

Oh boy. I mean, when we're talking about mushrooms, I think that mushrooms are fascinating. It was one of my pandemic hobbies once I got like out of the house and I was like, oh, I can go hiking. That is a pandemic safe hobby that I can do. You know what I mean? I can be outdoors and everything like that. And I got really into mushroom hunting, like in incredibly so. Like every gift I think I got from family members since 2021, I think, has been vaguely mushroom related in some way, shape, or form. So it is fascinating to know that there is like a a species out there that is both intrinsically interesting, that like we can get in our local grocery store, but also could very easily kill us if we ingested it, if we decided to do that. But also the fact that they're capable of eating other things as well. I just I think mushrooms are interesting. Now, my obsession with mushrooms has gone to the point where last year we did a full mushroom month on spirits. So I kind of dove into various different mythologies around mushrooms. I did a sort of boilerplate episode on explaining how mushrooms and mythology sort of interlock with each other. And we did a reading of perhaps the best story we've ever told on spirits, which every month we do a listener-submitted stories episode called Your Urban Legends and the shuddering of creekside mushrooms. If you've never even heard of an episode of Spirits before, search that one and listen to it. It's the best story we've ever told on the podcast. That's the one. That's the one. That's the one. That's the one. But Amanda, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you like about mushrooms before I get into the nitty-gritty of like what they are, what they mean to mythology, and why in real life they can be a little scary.

SPEAKER_03: 12:20

Absolutely. So as the sort of like armchair anthropologist on spirits, I am here as the lay person to Julia's expert, listening and wondering out loud and trying to make sense of why these stories mean something to us and what human beings are are doing here narratively. And so you bring up Vikram, and I totally agree with you, that like the idea of the scary woods is often where I start. When I think about human beings and the stories we tell ourselves, I picture us, you know, huddled around a campfire or maybe the hearth of a home, but something where, you know, there is a kind of like feeble but significant barrier between us and the wide unknown world out there. And often that does mean making home against nature, right? Like making indoors, making this area where we can control something about what's happening here. And a thing I really appreciate about mushrooms is they creep up in places that you don't expect. They can grow in the dark, they can grow in the damp, they can grow in substrate that we don't necessarily think of as being easy and hospitable for plant life, particularly as somebody who I use straw mulch in my garden. And much as I'm trying to grow cucumbers, baby, I am cultivating mushrooms out there. I get way more mushrooms from damp straw than I do from cucumbers in my cucumber vine. But that is just to say that I think when we look out at the dark and we ask ourselves what could be out there, as human beings, we evolve to identify patterns and also to identify aberration from those patterns. It's really evolutionarily helpful for us to be able to scan the tree line and see where a predator might be approaching or where something we could catch might be lurking. And so, so often in mythology, like any good narrative, right, where like Joseph Campbell's hero's journey begins with the call to adventure. The person is in their daily life and something is different. Often that is true in mythology as well, where the season you expect doesn't come, or the um, the the you know, crop that you want doesn't grow, the husband you expect home at the end of the day doesn't show up. What do you do now? And very often the presence of a mushroom is unusual or unotherworldly. They sometimes will signify a portal or a zone or something that is not usual. And like Julieta said too, they kind of dance. Yeah, they kind of dance that line between what is helpful and what is harmful, what is useful, what is poisonous. So much of mythology cautions us against taking too much of a good thing or not taking something useful when it's offered. Um, and particularly for substances we literally ingest. That is a case study of what mythology wants us to do and not do as we differentiate ourselves from other members of the ecosystem, which, you know, we aren't that different, but we like to think that we are.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

You know, that's that's a really interesting take on mythology in general, but in the way that it connects to nature specifically, is don't take more than you're due, right? Don't don't overuse. And then also, like you said, don't uh maybe, I don't know, uh look down on the gift that nature's giving you sometimes. And and I think that I haven't, I've probably on some level thought of it that way before, but never in those terms. And that's really interesting because you're right, so many stories share that rhythm over and over and over again where people overplunder a natural resource and then, oh no, you're cursed forever, that kind of thing. And that that's fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_03: 15:56

Yeah, and if you ever like straying from the path, right? Like we one of the first, I think, scientific explanations for mythological phenomena that I remember us talking about on Spirits, Julia, was the will of the wisp, where there is little, you know, electrical discharges and methane gas and like ways that we can make or ways that optical illusions arise out of just mist in the bog. And of course, we come up with a narrative explanation for it because it is uh unpredictable and kind of low-key terrifying to think of the world as something that could just make weird light shows for our own amusement. And so looking around us, thinking like, what is there? What couldn't be there? Am I being led to something? Am I being led away from something? Human beings make ourselves the main character of every single thing that we, you know, engage with. And often the lesson from mythology is, babe, you are not that important, whether it's a god saying, like, no, no, no, you are not the exception, or it's nature saying, come on, you can't have that much.

SPEAKER_04: 16:55

I I also think that's really interesting because if you exist in any sort of communication with the foraging uh community online and everything like that, they will make a point of being like, you can forage, that's fine. You always have to leave like at least 50% of what you find in the forest, or else they'll there won't be enough for everyone. And I think that is something that mythology likes to teach us as well in countless stories and fairy tales and folk tales, right? The idea of like, if you take too much, you will be punished. If you don't like share with your community, you will be punished. Uh, mythology in particular loves the like hospitality laws as a thing that if you do not follow them, the gods will punish you for that. And I think that's something that we all should probably continue to remember and learn as a lesson. And, you know, I think a lot of people in power maybe could learn that lesson as well. But I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 17:51

Yeah, I agree. You know, it's interesting you say that. I had a guest recently, Gabrielle Serberville. She is the chaotic forager online. Yeah. And she's awesome. But she made an interesting comment, sort of to that same end, where she says she approaches foraging and going into these wild spaces, not in terms of like, okay, what can I go eat? What can I go get? How can I, you know, fill my coffers, so to speak, but to learn more about and the way she says it is like, who's out there? Who is this mushroom? Who is this plant that I'm harvesting from? And she talks about being in community with people, but also community in nature with nature. And uh she had one of my favorite quotes from that that she that's been bouncing around in my head, and I think it speaks well to what you're talking about, is that we need to approach nature from a standpoint of curiosity and community rather than conquest. And uh I think that again, that fits so well with those themes of the way that through our stories people approach nature and that, you know, again, take more than they should or or do it right and are rewarded in some way.

SPEAKER_04: 18:59

Yeah, if if you haven't read The Service Berry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I mean that's that's exactly what they're talking about the entire book. So highly recommend. Definitely check that out. I promise to talk about mushrooms, though. So we could we could talk a little bit about mushrooms. I I feel like I should do like a little bit of a mushroom primer because I think most people know at least a little bit about mushrooms, but maybe don't know like the specifics of the scientific aspects around mushrooms. So one of the things that I always like to say was it was so late before we realized that like fungi were their own thing and not just plants. And so it was back in 1969, it was a scientist named Robert Whitaker who decides he's gonna separate fungi from animalia and the plantalia, right? And so he decides to change that based on how they gain nutrition. So plants are autotrophs, right? And then animals like us, we are heterotrophs. So we ingest our food. Plants can make their own food using photosynthesis and other chemical processes. Fungi are saproths, which means they process decayed organic matter in order to get their nutrients. And so he was like, okay, that's how we're gonna separate these things out, right? So I always think that it's really interesting because sort of how mushrooms go about eating is interesting because they're not always apotrophs. Sometimes they do ingest living creatures that are not decayed matter that is being broken down. Um, but basically what they do is they create their mycelial network, they dump enzymes outside of their network, outside of their bodies essentially, and then they digest it outside of their bodies and they take in the nutrients through their network, which I think is fascinating. It's kind of like the opposite of what animals do when we ingest our food.

SPEAKER_03: 21:02

Extremely efficient. Why, why should I swallow, if I'm a snake, a whole rat and then excrete out or you know, pass out all of the parts of the rat I couldn't actually eat? Whereas instead, I will just bring it to me. I will just get all the good stuff out of there that I want and then slurp it all up. Yeah. I mean, much better.

SPEAKER_04: 21:20

Isn't that fascinating?

SPEAKER_00: 21:22

I mean, it really is in a in a unsettling sort of way. Yes. And I feel like that's there's a lot of that here.

SPEAKER_03: 21:28

Yep. Bram Stoker wishes, right? Like imagine if a vampire like sprayed its its, you know, stuff so that all the flesh dissolves and just the blood was left, and then they like slurp it all up. Ooh, creepy.

SPEAKER_00: 21:38

That's actually that would be a good movie. I would watch that movie. It just carries a straw around, like a big, like crazy straw. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 21:45

Listen, we love a little body horror. I'm all about the little body horror when it comes to any sort of horror movies. I've been watching so many horror movies lately because we are recording this in October. And man, like John Carpenter's the thing, the fly is always a great one. Any sort of like reanimator, the substance is a great one to watch right now as well. But I'm just, I'm a body horror fan. So what can I say? In terms of also, we're talking about like the the mycelial network, right? And how uh these fungi essentially eat their food, but also the mycelial network is how they spread out and what leads to maybe one of the things that people will associate mushrooms and mythology with first, which is the fairy ring, this idea that mushrooms will grow in what essentially is a circle and create this phenomenon that you're like, why did they grow like that? That doesn't make any sense, you know.

SPEAKER_03: 22:44

I don't often see perfect circles in nature. And again, like scanning the environment, being like, what's out of place here that could kill me? The answer of a perfect circle of mushrooms all the same age and size, like I'm pretty scared. Yes, it's it's incredible.

SPEAKER_04: 22:58

So if you've spent any time outside before, you probably have seen a fairy ring of some kind. Again, this is like a group of mushrooms that naturally forms either a ring or sometimes it's an arc, depending on how you see it. The fairy ring, the fairy circle is probably the most common one talked about in mythology and folklore. But naturally speaking, the arc does occasionally happen as well. So this is seen as this sort of supernatural occurrence in a lot of folklore, not just in Europe, but across the world, right? And basically, sometimes they'll talk about them as a positive, sometimes it's a negative. A lot of times it's like if you step into the fairy ring, the fair is going to take you. You are transporting yourself into another portal, you are trapping yourself there to be eaten by some sort of monster, et cetera, et cetera, right? But uh you might also be wondering like, why is it a perfect circle? Why is it so unnatural in the the natural world, right? So part of this is because of the the root system of mushrooms, that's the mycelium, right? And so the mycelium is the thing that absorbs the nutrients around the mushroom. It breaks down different soils and stuff as they feed. And this mycelium network grows outward from a center point until the nutrients in the center are entirely exhausted. Now, at that point, the center point dies off, which then allows the mushrooms to the mushroom spores to sprout, which creates this circle around the already eaten point. And that's how you get your perfect fairy circle of mushrooms.

SPEAKER_01: 24:34

Right.

SPEAKER_04: 24:35

So I think that's just incredible. Like the idea of this like system that works so perfectly that it just continues sprouting and spreading and sprouting and spreading is fascinating to me. And of course, it does feel supernatural in a way, right?

SPEAKER_00: 24:51

Yeah, it does. And it we see like sort of that resonating through nature in some uh places and in the plant world too, like aspen trees. I think aspen trees are so fascinating because they're all kind of the same tree, and you can get some that cover hundreds of acres. Uh and then I think it, but all of that leads to sort of that otherworldly uh effect that you're talking about, right? Like, oh, why are these mushrooms here? Why is it getting bigger? Why is it you know, it's taken over my whole yard. Surely this is a a fairy trap. And I've seen and I was gonna say maybe they're popular videos. It may just be that my algorithm is very specific, tailored in a really specific way. Uh but I've seen a bunch of videos of people like walking through the woods and coming upon like a ring of mushrooms or like uh a root with a specific kind of mushrooms on them, or like a leaf that looks like it's waving at you. And it's always like, that's a fay trap if I've ever seen one. And and that's like cool contemporary folklore surrounding the same thing.

SPEAKER_04: 25:53

Yeah. And a lot of it too is just a lot of the fay folklore that we talk about to this day tends to be the create I don't even want to say creation, but the um extrapolation of a lot of fantasy writers that, in particular, generations like ours and later have sort of continued to evolve the stories around the Faye itself. Like the idea of the like Faye romance novel is so popular nowadays. And I mean, like it was back then, but it was much more streamlined to like, you know, nerdy fantasy romance books. And now that is mainstream. The nerdy fantasy romance books are now the New York Times bestselling series, you know?

SPEAKER_03: 26:41

Yeah. And as a society, we have always dreamt about what it would be like to be swept off of this world and into a different one, right? Like whether we are thinking about what happens before we're born or after we die, what happens in faraway lands or below the sea or within mountains or in the earth, we are always thinking about, well, surely it must be just like this, but different. And so, even thinking back to something that, you know, grabs Julia's and my attention we when we were kids, like Alice in Wonderland. There's the idea that like there is that portal that you can enter that place and that everything's a little too big, too small, out of order, you know, different colors, different style than you would expect. And specifically with the Fae, I love what you said earlier, Julia, about the hospitality laws. And that is often really wound up in what we talk about when we talk about the Fae, that idea of the, you know, the drink me potion or the delectable food that if you eat, you're actually entering into a bargain that you didn't understand. A lot of as society, you know, we operate by a set of rules that we really punish people, either in the carceral state or in like the morals of Victorian England, however you want to think about it, by when they aberrate from that rule. And so when we look in nature and so many parts of it are surprising, I think that is just a delectable treat to or or entreaty to like have a fantasy about what it would be like if it was just like this, but a little bit different. And the people were, you know, uh more beautiful, the food was more lovely, the timelines were longer, lifetimes, you know, you have a little more time. And it really is about entering into that unseen bargain, which I think a lot of us, you know, in trying to have a more complex and I would say reciprocal relationship with nature, in trying not to just be a, you know, extractor or a user, but to try to live in community with the planet that we're on as one species of many. I think that mythology has a lot to teach us about that, because you can't just take something without expecting to give something in return. You are a part of, you know, forces that you can't see. You are acted upon by stuff that you're not aware of. Um, and whether that's as small as like a mushroom popping up somewhere in your yard that seems completely random and like someone put a lego of a mushroom on that square of grass when in fact there is so much under the earth that is uh not visible to us actually happening there, or like the aspen tree, where you think, oh my God, how is that tree 400 miles away from here genetically identical to this one? It boggles the mind. And I think in the best cases and in the writings of Kimmerer and others, like gives us other models than the individualistic, capitalistic one that we are raised with here in the US. So maybe it's just a circle of mushrooms in the forest and you don't pay it any mind, or you know, a I once saw a perfectly ripe apple sitting in the middle of an empty subway car. Absolutely. And I said, no babe, nope, no babe. I'm smarter than that. No, sir. Those are I just little little invitations, little re-enchantments asking us, you know, who we are acting with in our daily lives. Yeah.

unknown: 29:44

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04: 29:45

Uh to the point of the Aspen tree, this is a total aside, but it is the fun fact that blew my mind when I was first starting to learn about mushrooms. You know, when you go to your local grocery store, Virgum, what what like what are the types of mushrooms that You see at your like local stop and chop or food lion or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 30:03

Mostly, you know, oyster mushrooms or shiitake mushrooms. Every now and then you'll get a lion's make. Wow. But actually, you know, it's interesting. Our local market carries some of those because we have a couple of growers locally who are who are growing like warehouse-grown mushrooms. And so we get some of the bougie stuff because they show up. Or like button mushrooms or whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_04: 30:25

So the the ones that always come to my mind, I'm like, okay, the ones that I always see are the button mushrooms, you'll see the creminy mushrooms, and you'll see like portobello mushrooms, right? Like those in my mind are like the grocery store mushrooms. Those are all the same species of mushroom.

SPEAKER_03: 30:39

I can't get over this a year ago. I still don't accept them.

SPEAKER_04: 30:43

They're just like different points in the grow process of the mushroom. So your button mushrooms and your creamini mushrooms are just like the baby versions of your portobello mushrooms. And that blew my mind the first time I found out about that.

SPEAKER_00: 30:57

Yeah, that's that's pretty wild. And it almost feels like someone's playing a trick, right? Like, hey, this is unfair. You're selling these as three different things, and it's the same thing. It's it's fascinating, though.

SPEAKER_04: 31:08

Well, wait until you find out about brassica and how all like broccoli and also Brussels spellets are all the same plant, just different types of the plant. That drives me crazy too. I'm like, how dare you?

SPEAKER_00: 31:18

Yeah, it's all some like dumb wild cabbage that someone was like, you know what?

SPEAKER_04: 31:23

Mm-hmm. We can do something with this. We're gonna make this better somehow. And actually, I'm glad you brought up oyster mushrooms because I do want to talk a little bit about oyster mushrooms. They eat things, Vikram. They eat things. I don't know if the audience knows this, but so oyster mushrooms, they typically grow on like damp logs. They are mushrooms that need a lot of nitrogen in their diet in order to thrive and survive, right? In order to get that essential nitrogen, which they can't necessarily get to the amount that they really need by breaking down all of the wood that they are occupying, right? Oyster mushrooms feed on nematodes, which are essentially very, very small worms. They're like microscopic worms, essentially. It's they release basically a thing that makes the nematodes want to crawl onto the body of the mushroom, the spore itself, and then they release a toxin that paralyzes the nematodes. And then the mushrooms have these sort of tendrils that are sort of like I would compare them to like the fingers of the mycelial network. They're called hyphae, and they reach for the nematodes, they disrupt their cell membrane, which then causes them to, and we talked about this earlier, rapidly dissolve so that the oyster mushroom can then devour them and get essentially sweet, sweet nitrogen that the oyster mushroom craves.

SPEAKER_03: 32:54

They said nitrogen fixing beans, hold my beer.

SPEAKER_00: 32:59

Yeah, the the thought of a predatory fungus is uh upsetting. Upsetting. Yeah. And I I actually I think let's take a quick break right now. And I want to come back and I want to pick back up with this and a very famous Tumblr post that lives in the same vein, and and we can go from there. So let's take a quick break and we'll come right back.

SPEAKER_04: 33:20

That sounds great.

SPEAKER_00: 33:21

Well, hey there. Welcome to the mid-roll. So happy to have you here. Are you scared of mushrooms yet? I'm a little bit. I may have been before. And the story that we come back with and the quote that we come back with right after the break may not make that better, and I can't wait. And I I hope you can't wait either. So, how great are Amanda and Julia? I know the answer to that, but I want you to think about how great they are too. Thanks for listening to Planthropology. Thanks for being a part of what we do here, and this great stories that we get to tell, not just about ourselves, but about how we fit into nature. If you'd like to support the show, there's a lot of ways to do that. You can tell a friend about it. Uh, word of mouth is still the best way to get podcasts out there. You can monetarily support the show at buymeacoffee.com slash planthropology. And for the price of a cup of coffee, I will not put plants in my coffee cups like it's sitting on the shelf behind me, put coffee in it. This show runs on coffee. And thanks for helping with that. You can also head to planthropologypodcast.com and snag some merch, listen to past episodes, and connect that way. If you want to reach out about the show with some advice or tips or just to say hi, send me an email at planthropologypod at gmail.com. You can find me all over social media as planthropology or planthropologypod, or me personally as the plantprof. So, so much good stuff going on, so many great episodes coming up for the next few weeks between now and the end of the year. But let's talk more about mushrooms and get a little bit more ready for Halloween. So let's get back to it in five, four, three, two, one. And we're back. This is again a thing that maybe is only famous in certain circles. But for you know, maybe the tumblr generation or a very specific like niche in the Tumblr generation, there was this post from however many years ago. Do you say it again?

SPEAKER_04: 35:10

Probably 15 years. And then you found Vikram. We're the Tumblr generation.

SPEAKER_00: 35:14

Yeah, target market achieved, right? And I think a lot of the my listeners probably ours too. Yeah, 15 years, which I don't like to think about very much. But there's this post that goes, me holding a gun to a mushroom, tell me the name of God. It says, Can you feel your heart burning? Can you feel the struggle within? The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. You cannot kill me in a way that matters. And that last line with the thought of a mushroom saying this to you is chilling. Yeah. Horrifying.

SPEAKER_04: 35:44

Yeah. Yep. They they are in a lot of ways fully Eldra cars. They just they just are, right? Like I think Amandy, when I told you about the oyster mushrooms and their tendrils for the first time, I think you called them Cthulhu-esque. And I was like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Sounds like me. You're right. It does seem like that, doesn't it? And I mean, I I think we would be I think your audience would yell at me if I didn't mention cordyceps as a horror trope and also terrifying mushroom. Which are these bad boys? Yeah, essentially you people know what they are. They're the zombie ant fungus. You've heard of it before. It's they is oviocordyceps unilateris. So it is essentially a fungus that will infect ants and will take over their bodies and will have them try to go towards other ants so that they can infect even more ants. And if you've seen The Last of Us, both the video game and the television series, you are familiar with the term cordyceps because they really shorthanded it to the whole genus and said, Yeah, those scary mushrooms, you're going to fear those for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_03: 37:06

And if you think about it, like this is, I mean, this is normal in nature, right? Like we attract the other species that is useful to us. Don't give me that inquisitive head tilt, Julia. I see you there. Like, think about a tree. Like you, you attract animals with fruit that can digest the seeds that you are trying to propagate and then bring them forth into other parts of the world. Something about the fact that it like hijacks the nervous systems and brains of these animals takes a very normal thing to an absolutely horrific end. Because, like, think about it. All of the stuff that I fear comes back to the erasure of my individuality. I fear death because I'm not here anymore. I fear being taken over by a virus or zombieism or vampirism because someone else is feeding off of my body or doing something that I'm not used to. We fear our relatives coming back as specters that look like what they used to, but are actually infernal or have some other purpose. And so just the like nature doesn't do individuality in the way that humans have really insisted on this as like the thing that makes us different and the thing I love most and find most chilling about these cordyceps, which deserve their place in the Last of Us, you know, franchise, is that they really hijack another species for their own benefit in a way that, you know, I don't know. I think we're currently thinking about when it comes to AI and corporations. And like everything, you know, I think you can see through this lens of does it rob me of my autonomy and individuality?

SPEAKER_00: 38:39

Yeah. And and there's one specific species that in addition to telling me ant, hey, go hang out with your buddies, you know, go make some friends, go be a, you know, a spy for me or whatever. It will act it. And uh to your point, Amanda, of it of something causing us to act against our free will or against our nature, it'll tell these ants, you know, you should really go climb that tall thing. And that's a place where an ant may not want to be, because that's where the birds live, and that's where the other insects live, and that's where they get eaten by stuff. So they'll climb up to the top of whatever branch or twig or blade of grass and then just clamp down with their jaws and just hang out there. And then the little mushroom sporulates and comes out through their head and then drops spores onto all of their friends. And like, where does that get fun? You know?

SPEAKER_04: 39:29

Fun for the mushrooms, fun for the mushrooms. Certainly. And there's like uh several species of mushrooms that specifically will coat their spores so that it can survive the digestive systems of animals so that it can continue to reproduce even far away.

SPEAKER_03: 39:43

Dude, where can I get some of that? I just want to digest milk. Okay. Can someone can someone let me access burrata once more? Can we study this? I'm your scientist. Can you work on this for now? I'll get on that. Yeah. Thank you. I think we have lectate girlfriend. Yeah, but it doesn't coat the delicious cheese and then make it go through my digestive system, uh, you know, unbidden.

SPEAKER_04: 40:05

What you're suggesting is a thing that allows you to just poop out a full thing of yeah, that's not what I want.

SPEAKER_03: 40:10

You're right. You're right.

SPEAKER_00: 40:10

Yeah, that that's that's a whole other thing. Yeah, that may not be fun either.

SPEAKER_03: 40:14

Yep. Can we talk too about the fact that mushrooms don't grow from soil in the ways that I expect? They like Julia, you were saying, they can grow on on like full tree branches and like not even necessarily need to break it down into what I would think of as soil. I think that's also a little bit creepy.

SPEAKER_04: 40:31

Yeah, I think so. Like, I think when it all comes back to the fact that it is able to break apart things outside of its body by releasing those enzymes and then breaking them down and then absorbing it. So it does really allow mushrooms to attach themselves to areas that you might be surprised by. So you might be thinking, like, how does that mushroom get all the way up on top of that tree up there? And the idea is that because it has these tendrils and it is putting these microscopic tendrils into the trees and the plants and everything, it's able to hold on in that way and sprout and fruit from something that it normally would not be able to grow out of, essentially.

SPEAKER_03: 41:15

Not the earth. It seems it seems like it can fly. Like if I'm limiting myself to my visual imagination and I'm not thinking, oh, surely it has a microscopic, you know, kind of like spine up the trees. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like it can fly, which feels unfair.

SPEAKER_00: 41:31

It does, it does feel unfair. I don't, I don't want the mushrooms to have wings. And and the fact that some of them are just like visually creepy too. Like they just look weird.

SPEAKER_04: 41:40

Like to the inky cap, one of my favorite mushrooms of all time, just looks like it's slowly dissolving over time. If you have a moment to look it up and Google what it looks like, it looks like a normal kind of like capped mushroom that is slowly dissolving into black goo. It looks haunted.

SPEAKER_00: 42:00

Oh, this was a new one for me. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't think I'd seen that one. That is like it feels like they should grow in like a horror house, like in an art exhibit or something.

SPEAKER_04: 42:13

Yes. And I mean, then we have to obviously talk about the bleeding tooth mushroom, which just looks like it is sweating blood. Sure does. Hate that. We really try to give it better names sometimes. Like people will be like, oh, you mean the strawberries and cream mushroom? No, I mean the bleeding mushroom. I don't mean that. No, babe. I don't. I mean the devil's tooth mushroom, another name that they have for it.

SPEAKER_03: 42:38

And Julia, how about like the super, super red ones that have led us to the kind of like smurf toads, you know, little people of the forest?

SPEAKER_04: 42:46

The fly agarrick, which is probably the reason that people know it so well is because it is one of those mushrooms that uh historically, but also in pop culture and the world we live in today, were associated with tripping, you know? So the fly agarrick is one of those ones where if you ate it, it would potenti it could potentially kill you. So a lot of times the idea that we were able to use it in order to have like religious experiences, for example. Oftentimes it would be like if you're talking about like in the sort of like Arctic region area where they they would sometimes grow, what would happen is reindeer would eat those, and then the reindeer would pee out their their excrement, essentially. And then the this is gonna sound really gross. I'm sorry that I'm going through this. The psychedelic effects, like the the it's not psilocybin, but the neurotoxins would still be in the reindeer pee, but to a lesser extent where it wouldn't really make a human being sick, and so it would be drank by shamans, and then they would have that religious experience.

SPEAKER_03: 44:07

Listen, man, we're all breaking down each other's nitrogen when it comes to it. Like it doesn't, it doesn't freak me out anymore that I am consuming something else's pee at most times of the day. Like it just it's it's gonna happen, but only only rarely does that set me into trip and boss.

SPEAKER_00: 44:26

Yeah, it usually doesn't. Usually it's just, you know, everything has been cycled at some point and you know, with with mixed results in some cases.

unknown: 44:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 44:35

I I think this is a fun opportunity to talk about a weird uh a weird history of magic mushrooms in the United States, if if you'll indulge me very quickly into this one, because I do think it kind of goes along with modern mythology, we'll call it in terms of like conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. So 1950s culture really is where the magic mushroom started for the United States, and it has to do with this guy named Robert Gordon Wasson. Now he was an author three names, I'm suspicious already. Anytime a man has three names, Amanda is like immediately no, this man is terrible. So he's gonna do something horrible. And that's two-thirds first names, which is he's on notice. So Robert Gordon Wasson, he's like an author, he's sort of like an amateur ethnomycologist. That's not a thing yet, but he kind of creates it as a thing. But he loves mushrooms, and at the same time, he is also the vice president for public relations at the bank, JP Morgan.

SPEAKER_01: 45:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 45:48

So he is super interested in mushrooms because when he was on his honeymoon with his wife in the Catskill Mountains in 1927, he discovered how cool the mushrooms were up there. His wife was from, I believe, Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe, and she taught him all about foraging and stuff because she had grown up foraging in the forests out there. So he learns foraging from his wife. Oh, I'm sorry, she was a Russian uh pediatrician. So he was like, Teach me all your ways. And so she says, yes, absolutely. That's 1927. We fast forward to the 1950s. This guy is super interested in mushrooms. He is working for JP Morgan, and he is particularly interested in the different view of mushrooms in the United States compared to what his wife has told him about how mushrooms are seen in Russia. Loves his Russian wife. Now, he is specifically very interested in the Amanita the Muscaria, which is the fly agaric, which we were just talking about, that red mushroom with the white spots. Everyone knows it's poisonous. Exactly. It's poisonous, but it's psychoactive. So he writes a book that becomes very popular. But moreover, he starts traveling and doing a bunch of research into psychoactive mushrooms. Now, you might be wondering, like, hey, why is this guy who is the VP for public relations at JP Morgan doing all this world traveling and researching mushrooms in 1956 when he has uh presumably a job, right? He not only has his finance salary, but he also was being funded by the CIA.

SPEAKER_00: 47:29

Oh. Like you do, you know.

SPEAKER_04: 47:32

Like you do. So he claims in all of his books that he didn't know that the CIA was funding him.

SPEAKER_01: 47:39

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 47:40

Okay. But documents have surfaced since the Freedom of Information Act happened that claimed he was quote unquote an unwitting participant. Which I think is interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 47:51

I don't know, man. At some point, someone like slides you an envelope of of cash, and you you do need to ask where it came from, or else it's an unbidden gift from the Faye, and you find yourself in bed with the US government.

SPEAKER_00: 48:03

Yeah. Oh, that that actually those connections work pretty well. There's a lot that works there.

SPEAKER_04: 48:07

Yeah. So the project that is funding him from the CIA is one you might have heard of before, which is MKUltra.

SPEAKER_01: 48:16

Oh.

SPEAKER_04: 48:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 48:17

There you go.

SPEAKER_04: 48:18

There it is. So they're basically hoping that his research on psychoactive mushrooms would help them learn how to brainwash and mind control people. So he's getting his CIA money. He accepted it under the cover name, like the CIA's cover name is the Gesticker Fund for Medical Research, which I think is just really funny. I have some questions about why they chose a German name, but yep. Around this time, Life magazine publishes an article about his research that is called Seeking the Magic Mushroom, which outlines both him and his wife becoming the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec, which is an indigenous people of Mexico's mushroom ritual, right? So we're tying this again to religious practices that involve using psychedelic mushrooms. He is a white man, and so he's trying to do a religious ritual from people that is not his culture, right? He lies to this coronera, which is a you know medicine person from the this region who does the ritual for him. He essentially tells him, he's like, Oh, I'm worried that like, you know, my son is dying. Can you please help me? It's all a lie. Yeah, it's it's very frustrating. I'm sorry, it's not that his his son was dying, it was that his son was missing, and this ritual was specifically to help find missing people, right? So this guy ruins this person's life because he immediately goes and he publishes about this, profits greatly from it, never faces any consequences. That's why we call him out on shows like this, because he's a terrible person. But this is what popularizes this idea of recreational use of psilocybin mushrooms in the United States, right? And so it's just very frustrating because this is obviously a religious ceremony, and now you have a bunch of, you know, 1960s stoners doing magic mushrooms, being like, I'm I'm seeing God. I'm like, you're not, because you're you're so disconnected from what this actual religious experience was supposed to be, that you just it's just very frustrating.

SPEAKER_03: 50:34

Julia, I think disconnection is exactly the word, right? It's it's removing part of an ecosystem or part of ritual, whether that's contextualized by culture and religious belief from that system and culture. It's you know, extracting without valuing or putting anything back. And to this day, finance bros do this and they go on ayahuasca trips and, you know, just pay a lot of money to get access to acid that in a way that they criminalize other people for doing that. So the cycle of history goes on. But this is, I think, such a valuable lesson for us in you can't just extract what you want and leave the rest. There are going to be consequences.

SPEAKER_04: 51:08

And it's not to say that like Mesoamerica is the only place where they were doing, you know, religious practices with psychogenic mushrooms, but it's just that this guy popularized it by lying to someone who was doing folk medicine, assuming he was telling the truth. And that's the frustrating part to me.

SPEAKER_00: 51:27

Yeah. Yeah. And and again, there's thousands of years of folklore that basically say don't do that thing. Yeah. Don't do the thing.

SPEAKER_04: 51:36

Just just don't do that thing. Just don't do that thing. I don't don't know why we're doing the thing, but here we are. Um yeah, I'm trying to think. I I love talking about mushrooms, obviously. And there's so many good, like, creepy things. Like the idea that like Santa's reindeer fly because of the folklore around that area from you know, the fly Garrick is a whole story as well, but it's also debatable because the first actual like writings we have about that are from like the 1960s. And so you're like, I think you might have extrapolated something that wasn't exactly true, but sounds fun. And so that just ends up getting repeated over and over again because people like things that are fun and not realistic, I guess.

SPEAKER_00: 52:23

Yeah, and and that is interesting, and that's an interesting point, too, about you mentioned earlier talking about everything from conspiracies and and modern mythology that comes out of some of this. Uh I I think where some of that falls for me is that it's not like we were you're y'all were just talking about connection. Yeah. And it's not rooted in uh this connection to community, to nature, to all these things. It's it's rooted in some ways in just, oh, here's a thing I can say that will that people will like and I'll get you know famous from it. And so I think as we talk about some of this, it's really fascinating to think about the uh heritage that comes with some of these stories and how we kind of throw some new ones out there sometimes that are like, ah, you know, we're gonna get weird zombies that have mushrooms on their face and things like that. But I don't know. I this whole idea of this uh other facet of life of fungi that are, you know, they're not an animal, they're not a plant, they're sort of a little bit of both is so strange. I wanted to uh uh make a point earlier just to kind of jump back a little bit of you you were talking about how mushrooms and fungi in general eat things and maybe eat things they shouldn't. And you were talking about how they climb trees. And yes, you know, the concept of me going out and chewing on the inside of a tree is weird, but a Ganoderma mushroom doing that and turning it into, you know, spongy foam that makes a tree fall over isn't. And they're the things that cycle all of us one day back into the system. I think that's part of what uh for me leads to sort of this uh weird vibe around them, right? That like at the end of the day, they're sort of the winners, they're patient and they're uh in some ways inevitable to you know use an overused term at this point. But something that has come about in recent years that they're studying that I think is so fascinating is that blue oyster mushrooms, um Pleurotus Austriatus, can eat plastic. Yes, petroleum.

SPEAKER_03: 54:40

Well, that's helpful.

SPEAKER_00: 54:41

It is. And so they're looking at uh putting it on big rafts and things and putting it out in the ocean into some of these big plastic islands and just telling these mushrooms, hey, go do the thing. Go because they'll they'll break down all those hydrocarbons and they'll eat all those things and just take them apart. And uh again, I think it's like we let the fungi off the chain at some point and they just they start fixing things, maybe not in a way that's comfortable for us as you know, living things that can think about scary stuff, but it's really fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_04: 55:17

But I think that's also really important, right? Because fungi play such an incredibly important role in the life cycle of our planet and breaking down the like essentially like dead things. And we as humans get nervous about that because we're like, oh no, one day we're going to be the dead thing. But I think that is so that's what mythology is about, is sort of grappling with this idea of the life cycle exists even when we are no longer part of the life cycle. And so to have mushrooms be so important to like take over and to correct things is such a I think it's I think it's beautiful, you know? And I know that like scares a lot of people, this idea of like decay and something taking over and like taking over your body is a lot of like big body horror stuff around mushrooms, but it's just part of the cycle of life. And when humanity fears death a little bit less, I think we see how beautiful it is to have something that takes care of us in death to bring us back into the cycle itself, right? So I I don't know, I love mushrooms. I I think they're beautiful and I think they deserve more respect than we tend to give them.

SPEAKER_00: 56:42

Yeah, that's that's really cool. We all as we sort of wrap up here, this is I could I could talk about this all day.

SPEAKER_03: 56:49

Like I can just yell mushroom facts at you all the time. That's fine. Whatever you need. I highly recommend it. Julia's an excellent friend, and the mushroom facts only happen a couple times a week. Only a couple times a week.

SPEAKER_00: 57:00

Only a couple times a week.

SPEAKER_04: 57:01

No, not Monston, I promise.

SPEAKER_00: 57:04

Not that often. But just just real quick as we wrap up, I I like to you know try to leave listeners with something we've talked about so much just in terms of what we take from nature and what we take from mythology about nature. But for both of you, and I'm I'm aware I'm surprising you with this question a little bit, but is there a do you have a thing that you've learned from like nature-based mythology that you carry around with you? Is there something that like really jumps out as you is like, this is the thing. This is the thing that like brings me back to this type of storytelling over and over. And maybe that's a really hard question because y'all look at so much of it.

SPEAKER_03: 57:43

It's a great question.

SPEAKER_04: 57:44

I think for me, and I don't know if this falls under nature. It talks about the changing of the seasons. So I will say that's nature. I'll I'll give myself a broad category of nature. For me, there is a story that we did uh fairly early on in our canon. I don't know how I feel about calling it a canon, but I'll allow it. Our body of work, our corpus. Yes, which is the story of Biavi. And now Biave is a sun goddess from the Sami people. And essentially her worship day is actually on the winter solstice. And I think that's fascinating. It's a sun god because obviously that is the the shortest day of the year. It is the the longest and the darkest night. And her worship and particular like festival day is all about checking in on the vulnerable, checking in on the vulnerable people in your community, making sure that like it's like recognizing that, yeah, this is dark. And, you know, there are people in the community who might not have the support that they need every single day. And this idea of like there is a day that we check in on those people and make sure mentally they're doing all right. And that feels so beautifully human to me, and something that I wish we could incorporate all the time into uh, you know, human culture rather than individual cultures uh across the world, you know, where this idea of like your community is here for you when you are suffering and is there to check on you, to make sure that you know that the sun is coming back.

SPEAKER_01: 59:23

That's yeah, that's lovely. I love that.

SPEAKER_04: 59:26

Yeah, it's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_03: 59:28

Mine is a little less specific, but I am more and more interested in hospitality and homekeeping mythology as time goes on. Some of the earliest mythology I remember learning in my vague Irish German American, you know, upbringing is around spilling salts, around thresholds and boundaries, how to keep things out, keep things in, and specifically around house spirits, how dwellings do more for us than protect us from the elements. They are so important and psychologically, like I Was saying earlier, just thinking of ourselves as folks that are protected in some way from the outside world. Maybe it's part psychological, but it certainly is mythological because there are so many house spirits where you have to, you know, reward them, feed them, compensate them with bread or milk or salt or sweets. And we see this for me, I was raised late, laying out carrots for the Easter bunny, laying out cookies for Santa Claus. There are so many ways in which those rituals, which I think of as kind of, you know, maybe a little frivolous, a little silly, a little childlike, really, you know, draw from a long human experience of making a dwelling more than four walls and a roof and a floor, if you're like that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:42

Yeah, and I think both of those are such good lessons. Um especially just right now when when there's so much uh division between people, and it just brings us back to some commonality, some lessons about the way we treat each other and the way that we see each other and how connected we all are at the end of the day. And that's that's really cool.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:04

And that's something that we talk a lot about on spirits too, is human beings have so much in common. And when we like culturally divide ourselves, it can be really frustrating to be like, no, you both kind of think the same thing, even though you are separated by thousands of miles and oceans and have never interacted. Like the fact that we have flood stories that span the entire globe and just like do their thing, uh like and have such similarities, I think is absolutely fascinating. The idea that we all have stories about why the seasons change or why the sun rises when it does and sets when it does is amazing. And so when when I talk about like the division that people are feeling, particularly nowadays, the idea that our cultures are so similar and our our ideals and our like love for one another, our love for one another is so similar, is really highlighted by mythology. And we could all learn from looking and listening to those stories a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:15

Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. Well, y'all, thank you so much. That was as always. I love getting to talk to both of you, and it's just a delight. Um, so real quick, one more time, plug your stuff, tell us where all we can find you, and uh we can find more about mushrooms or whatever, just to tell us your stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:33

You got it. Listen to spirits in your podcast app, but just type in spirits mythology, and we will come up. We have 450 episodes and counting. You can jump in anywhere you like. You don't have to start in any particular place. And spiritspodcast.com is where you can learn more about Julia and me. Follow us on the show on social. Pick up some of our merch. We have merch if you are an old wives tale teller. We have merch of Mothman's juicy ass. Yes, you'll learn more about that if you listen to Spirits, um, and more and more.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:04

Awesome. Well, thank y'all so much. I hope you've had a wonderful October. I hope that it wraps up well and that you have some fun on Halloween. And hopefully we get to do this again another time.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:15

Oh, I can't wait to tell you about more creepy plants. I would be my delight and privilege. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:20

Like mushrooms vic room, we're here under the surface. Just waiting. Waiting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:24

Y'all listening to this episode, I hope that you never forget to wonder about the life around us and whether it's mycelium in the ground that eats old trees or controls the mind of an ant or the big stories we tell each other about ourselves as a species. Wonder is such an amazing thing, and storytelling is a way that we express that and we share it with each other. So thanks so much to Amanda and Julia for your passion for what you do and for being my friend. I really enjoyed it. Plananthropology is written, hosted, directed, all the things by me, yours truly, Vikram Beliga. Our intro music is by the award-winning composer Nick Scout, and our mid-roll is by my buddy Rui and his lo-fi dad jazz beats. And I hope you'll go look both of them up because they're fantastic. Keep being kind to one another. If you have not yet been kind to the people around you, this is a real good time to start. You know I love you, and that I hope you're safe, and that you're well, and that you're being good. So keep being good, keep being really cool plant people, and we'll talk next time.