Endless Thread - PARKS! Pt. 2: Slime Mind

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Two years ago, he didn’t even know slime molds existed. Now, he may be the internet’s most famous slime savant. Co-hosts Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson take a walk in the park with Regular Slime Guy. Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson are the co-hosts. (Photo by Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is Miller's Pond, and it is a delight. This is one of my favorite parks in Connecticut.

How come? I mean, I hate to be so stereotypical already, but it's just full of slime molds. I found so many slime bolts here. Earlier, you know, sometimes... this summer, Ben and I went for a walk in the woods. Our guide, Matt, has a unique hobby. He loves to search for slime. You have to get your mind into the mode. The slime mind? Yeah. I came with my slime mind fired up. Slime. As in slime mold. A curious creature that, I don't know, lurks,

oozes, whatever. It lives just about everywhere. And yet, Slimes aren't the easiest things to find if you don't know how to look for them. If you're just, you know, tromping through the woods, you know, getting your exercise, you won't see them. You have to be aware and observing and in nature and thinking about nature. Matt is very in touch with nature. He's also a web guy, known to the internet as... My name's regular slime guy. Regular slime guy.

There's nothing regular about Matt, though, because many, many, many reditors consider him to be the online sage of slime molds. Got a question about slime? Call regular slime guy. Yeah, I mean, Matt's the guy to trust because... The most important thing to know about learning about slimes on the internet is that a lot of information is wrong.

And no, he's not a scientist. He's a slimatist. I wouldn't call myself an expert. I wouldn't trust anyone who calls himself an expert, to be honest. I think that sometimes people decide that they're done learning. Not a fan of that. I think you've got to just keep going, going and going and going. You're a slime mold fan.

I would say I'm an enthusiast. Enthusiast, all right. I would say I'm a teacher. I do try to teach. I try to share everything I have. This is the story of how Matt, aka regular slime guy, shared his slime mind with the online world, how he became the sage of slime,

and what happened after his notoriety started to fruit. Spoiler alert, this story is not without controversy. But before we get there, you may still be wondering, what the hell is a slime mold? Well, dear listener, that is what we went to find out in a Connecticut State Park, overflowing with secret slime. I'm Amory Sievertson, Slimertsen. There we go.

I'm Ben Fruding Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Or ooze into you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Station. Today's episode, the second in our parks series about the outdoors online. This is... Slime Mind. Say slime to just about anyone, and chances are the thing that comes to mind is either... Slime Time on Nickelodeon. Or slimer from Ghostbusters.

Or that movie The Blob. It's kind of like a mess. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. Come on, Steve, makes sense. That's not really what we're talking about when we talk about slime molds. If you go to Reddit and look for R-slash slime molds, the subreddit, you'll learn pretty quickly that these things are weirder than anything Hollywood could dream up. Single-celled organisms that are at once beautiful. and disgusting.

One individual slime mold cell can be tiny, just barely bigger than like a bacteria, or less tiny, like the size of a college dorm room. Again, that's one cell. Our bodies have 30 trillion cells. Slime molds can have stalks like plants. They can move like animals. They can be pink or yellow or clear or iridescent. And like with fungus, they can reproduce by dispersing spruce.

Boars. They also sort of look like fungus, which can fool people like our producer, Dean Russell, when he saw what he assumed was slime. It just looks like a couple of dip and dots that are beige. Yeah, this is a fungus. A fungus, okay. Way to be a slime noob, Dean. Hey, at least he's a fun guy. Oh. So, bacteria, plant, animal, fungus. Slime molds are none of these things. They're not even molds. On the tree of life, they're their own thing. Their own slimy branch.

And on the list of things to get excited about, you could definitely call them an underdog. Maybe for a reason. Oh, our first limbo. There it is. It's dramatically orange. To me, this just looks like something took a poop and then something took a smaller poop next to it. Yeah, yeah, it does look like that. They were a little orange around the side.

Like maybe they ate a lot of Cheetos. They ate a lot of Cheetos. Our guide, Matt, were. only using his first name for reasons that will become apparent later. Matt showed us our first ever slime mold about 10 feet from the Miller's Pond State Park parking lot. It was on a rotten log and about the size of a silver dollar or a pop socket for you, young spring chickens. It was brown with a thin outline of bright orange. And on the inside?

Yeah, just go for it, man. See what's in there. Ooh, it's sort of like. No, not at all. He feels like... He's helping it. It feels like powdered chocolate. He's poking it right now.

I'm poking it with a stick. So if you go deep enough, you'll see yellow. And that's the... That's the fallago reuben A. That's what that is. Should I eat it? I wouldn't eat that. No, it's not edible right now.

If we find one that's edible, I'll tell you, and we'll all have it. Okay, we'll try it out. I've eaten some slimes. Please note that I did not have the immediate impulse to poke and eat the slime. Hey, that's why you got me around. You know, that's why they pay me the medium bucks.

Oh, anyway, this little guy is called a follico-septica, otherwise known as the scrambled egg slime or dog vomit slime, or, as Matt prefers, the lufa, because it has a strange, spongy texture. The one we were looking at was at the point in its life cycle where it was releasing spores, little baby slimes. This was a single cell, and it was living in the wood and moving around, like mobile.

It's not like a fungus. It doesn't stay where it is. It actually literally moves around. And when he says it moves. I went on a three-hour hike once, and we saw one, and when we came back, it had moved over a leaf. Like, they're slow. They're slower than you, but they are always moving. Moving slime.

Good luck with all that nightmare fuel, everybody. Matt may be slime's biggest advocate, and he told us, Slimes have taught him a lot about how to live. My whole life is a crossover with slime. I relate to slimes. But he didn't start out that way. Do you have like an origin, a slime mold in your life origin story? Yeah, absolutely, I do. I do. I hope we see it today. We may see it today. That would be really exciting.

Probably not. The particular variety I saw was extra special. So it was 2018. Matt was in his mid-30s living in Connecticut. And life, well, life was not exactly peachy. I talk about this a lot on Reddit. I'll talk about it a little. It's, I haven't dodged. I mean, I have a lot of things. But I have endodging. depression. And it's like, it sounds like depression, and it has similar symptoms to depression, but none of the medicines that treat not endogenous depression do anything for endogenous depression. So it's kind of an unhelpful term. Endogenous depression is often referred to as biological or genetic depression.

It has no apparent outside cause like stress or trauma. And if you have it, the feeling can be hard to escape. I was trying to sleep like 15 hours a day. I didn't want to be awake. I wanted to be. dead. So, but it was like really, you know, being dead is like a not, it's a statistically bad call, right? Because your chances are greater than zero, but then when you're dead, your chances are zero, it's kind of an easy mathematical decision, you know? You're not acting like slime if you want to be dead. Yeah, very true. Slimes never try to be dead. They do everything they can to the point of absurdity. I mean, they literally live under ice. They live in the ocean inside of sea urchins.

Sea urchin slime. At the time, Matt's still had no idea slimes lived in sea urchins or that they even existed. And his depression was crushing. And just a brief note to say, if you're having similar feelings, there's a new national hotline you can call for help. It's 988. Matt had been through countless treatments by then. Medications, shock therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. But one day, his doctor suggested a new medication. So there was something wrong, right? Like, my brain just couldn't operate. And when I take the medicine, that goes away forever. It's gone. I never feel, I haven't felt like that. It was literally like a switch flipping. Literally. Like, one day I was depressed. And then about

two weeks after I was on my current dose, I just suddenly was not depressed. We were sitting on the couch. I remember it. I was like, I'm not depressed anymore. I'm just happy. This was monumental. It was like emerging from the upside down. But it wasn't just medication that helped Matt. because at the time, he had had a picture saved on his phone. It was something he had seen while on a hike, something that looked like a mushroom, and for some reason, it grabbed his attention. And I was like, why is it so red?

And then I got closer and I was like, what is this? Matt suddenly needed to know more. So he dug out one of his wife's nature books. And then when I looked it up, it was like not a mushroom. It was not a fungus. It was something else. And I started looking into it, and I was like, what does that even mean?

Like, what do you mean? It's not a fungus. It was a slime. Matt became enthralled. Like, this was a whole new branch of the evolutionary tree, a slimy branch that no one had told him about. And he wanted to know more. So we went to Google. But... I wasn't really getting a lot of answers anywhere, but I knew on Reddit, Reddit's kind of a place where anyone can say anything to a certain extent.

So I went and I just was looking to see if there was anybody there. Matt signed up for Reddit with the username Saddest of Boys. And he realized that Reddit is a great place to go if you have a picture of something that you need help identifying. A leaf, a rock, a mushroom, that weird brown thing you found in your cereal box. And while the information on slime molds was pretty limited, there were a few Redditors who gave Matt some starter links. I just started reading. And I would say for the past two years, I've been reading or looking for slimes or asking people questions about slimes. every day. Matt attributes this obsession, in part to the fact that he is autistic.

But even so, it's easy to forget that his life of slime only started two years ago, mostly because he says things like, You can even see the hypothalus, look. Oh, yeah. And uses words like... Falago septica. Perfaldia. Arceria. Phalgoceptia. Protoporangeids. Radialaria, lycopyrton, chelromyxia. Famicola. Accutissima. Seminarya.

But that's the thing about Matt. He just likes to learn. And pretty soon, his passion for slimes, it would start to get noticed online. You became the slime guy. People would tag you, right, when they saw... Oh, yeah, they still tag me. But not all slimes fare well in the sunshine. More on that in a minute.

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the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. We moved pretty slowly through this Connecticut State Park, keeping our eyes peeled for slimes. Matt had already scoped the place out, and after a bit of chatting by slime number one,

he took us to slime number two. So what happened was, this thing emerged from the wood, and it looked like frosting? This one was called steminitis. So it came out, and then it formed a whole bunch of bubbles, and the bubbles pulsed really creepy. I'll show you a video of this at some point. And then the bubbles raised up in the air,

and they made these little brown, sort of like burnt corn dogs. And then they manufactured the black stalk, which sort of looks like an eyelash, inside of their body. Imagine a handful of burnt corn dogs shrunk to a few millimeters tall and plugged into an old wet piece of wood. Pretty cool, right? Well, just wait until you hear about slime number three. Hemitrichia caliculata.

It's like a, it's like the littlest blue. The littlest grayish white balloon. Matt tells us that slimes can live all over the place, in the soil, the ocean, the desert, and don't forget. I never finished telling you about the butt. No, I was going to ask about the butt. They're in your butt. I mean, I don't know how many of them are in your butt.

I suspect that they're in everybody's butt. But... But... But even more interesting to Matt is what they do. They do problem solve. They do things that don't really make sense without a brain, but they do them anyway. Case in point.

Even though slime molds are understudied, scientists have run experiments and found that some slime molds can solve mazes. Like put the mold at one end of the maze, some yummy bits of bacteria or protozoa or something at the other end, and voila, maze solved. Also, if something bad is happening on a regular basis, they'll anticipate it, they'll remember that it happened, they'll somehow time out when it's going to happen next, and then they'll prepare. These blobby guys can even exchange knowledge. For instance, many slimes don't like salt. But if one slime learns to adjust to an extra salty surface,

it can bump into another slime and be like, Pse, hey, that salt over there, it's not so bad. There's even this famous experiment where scientists put slime on a map of Japan. Then they put food on top of all the major cities, and they watch the slime stretch out to create a giant network of connections. a network that looked exactly like Japan's actual train system. And those connections were at the same efficiency level as the actual transportation network devised by thousands of engineers

who have studied in schools for years. These are the types of things Matt was learning and sharing online. He became particularly good at identifying pictures of slimes. I made a custom feed. of, you know, compost subredits, gardening subredits, aquarium subredits. And I would just go online and I would look at these feeds and then people would be like, what is this? Slimes are not heavily studied. In fact, for the longest time, science miscategorized them as fungus.

And there's still a lot we don't know. So Matt developed what he called a wall of text, a copy pasta, if you will, a beginner's guide to slime that says this is what slime is, this is its life cycle, this is what it eats, no, it's not toxic. And I just like the idea of giving people things you know because you don't lose anything, but they gain a lot and then you can feel good about it.

It's nice. And it's better when people know more. Matt says he was working at a factory at the time, and he's currently between jobs. But being a slimeatist on Reddit was also like a full-time. job. He eventually updated his Reddit display name and became regular slime guy. And whenever people wanted his help, IDing a photo, he'd get tagged with a slime signal. Then he'd respond. Slime signal received. I would say after two years, the expertise level on Reddit went up significantly. I saw people coming in and just identifying things that never would have been, you know, species that

never would have been identified before. There were very few threads now, I would say, where someone posts a slime, and everyone in the thread is just, like, wrong or confused. There's always a couple people now come in. And I'm not going to take credit for that all by myself, but it was probably me. Matt has kind of a charming wink and swagger, not afraid to say what he thinks, mostly about slime, and not afraid to admit when he's wrong. You get the impression that he just likes knowledge, giving it, receiving it,

whatever. But maybe not everyone saw it that way. Maybe that's why things started to take a turn on Reddit. I'm banned for most of the, most of Reddit, fungi-wise. So I can't even answer them anymore. But they still tag me. I upset one of the mods and they just had like a kind of stereotypical meltdown over it. This all gets very in the weeds or in the cytoplasm, you might say. So here's the gist. Over a year ago, Matt privately questioned an R-slash-slime-mold mod for banning another user. The mod conversation turned into an argument, which Matt says turned into harassment. And at that point, they just decided that they were going to do what they could to make me miserable, and they have done so. On a different sub, R-slash-mycology for mushrooms, the mods began removing certain posts related to Matt.

That mod team wouldn't agree to speak with us, but they sent us a long message. They said that Matt's comments were helpful because slime molds are often confused for mushrooms. But his popularity became an issue when users began posting too many slime signal comments on the same post. To the mods, this verged on spam, so they removed the extraneous slime signal comments. Matt says they were removing a lot more than that. Because removed comments are by definition no longer there, we can't verify either claim. We have seen messages in which a mod told Matt that they, quote, started to cut down on the slime mold stuff and emphasized that slime molds are not fungi and thus, quote, off topic. The mods told us they reached out to Matt to tell him what they were up to and that Matt responded with hostility.

Matt says it was the other way around. Again, we don't have full records, so it's hard to say definitively. Matt saw these two things, the public content removals and private alleged harassment as related. This could be because the mob that Matt accused of harassment told him, quote, if you are trying to get away from seeing me on Reddit, good luck with that. I have numerous accounts. This same mod would later go on to publicly question Matt's mental health. You know, he's insane. He's delusional, whatever.

And accuse Matt of using Reddit for, quote, inflating his Patreon account where he makes money, which I do have a Patreon, and I do not get a ton of money on it. But it makes a big difference, I will say. But I usually tell people not to pay me. Matt Maud didn't want us to use his real name for fear of being harassed. But he told us on the phone that he didn't remember making public comments about Matt's mental health.

or financial motivations. He, the mod, did say that he can be abrasive, which he attributed to his being on the autism spectrum similar to Matt. He also said that Matt was a valuable contributor to R-slash slime molds. Matt later publicly posted about what he believed was happening, and this whole thing blew up.

He included a list of who he said were his aggressors and screenshots of several private messages. The Mycology mods told us that was, not okay, and that one of those mods was later harassed by a regular slime guy fan at work. Again, we can't verify that. Matt says he was banned and felt attacked. In one post, he wrote, The slime signal is dead.

For many people who watched the slime mold community develop, it was a sad thing to see. It was sad for Matt, too. He says being regular slime guy was a lot of work, but he got a lot of joy from sharing information. Why? Because people who don't get that from anybody can get that for me, and it cost me nothing.

I've had a lot of people specifically tell me that they teach their kids about science. They learn about science together because I saw your stuff on the Reddit, and so I talked about it with my kid, and that's kind of like where we went with it. And I've had other people who are like, oh, I'm going to study them now because, like, you kind of piqued my interest.

and even just one person, I think, makes my entire life worthwhile. One of the last slimes we visited was the same species as the one we started with. It's just a regular old follicopecta. Regular old fologoseptica. And even though we thought Matt had told us everything we needed to know about regular folliceptica, he is just bursting with fun facts. The blob in the 50s was based off of an incident where folicoceptic, I believe, was found on somebody's yard in like massive amounts and everything.

And they were like, oh, God, it's aliens. But like, no, it's just amoevas. And they live in the soil. And they just been there the whole time, you know. You just didn't notice. That's amazing that the blob, the movie, is literally based on this line mold that we're standing next to you right now. Matt had a few similar spats on Facebook and the app I Naturalist.

But he's not offline. He's on Patreon. And he has been dabbling with the idea of a YouTube channel. And he still actually uses Reddit, just far less frequently. Almost all of his comments are answering people that find strange things growing in their house that look like the blob. But... But... But really, Matt's happy place is here, in the outdoors.

So if you really want to know more about slimes, you could just go for a walk in your local park. Look for some rotten logs and see what's there. Oh, and there's one very important thing. to mention. Are you going to listen to my rap song? Yes, we are. All right, okay. Matt has decided to make a hip-hop album dedicated to slime mold. He says it's one more way to spread the word about slimes and a way to find out more about them. The thing is, once the rap music comes out, of course, I'll be the most famous rapper on earth, and then I'll be able to buy the equipment I need to do, the experiments I'd like to do.

After our walk in the woods, we all gathered around Matt's car, where he queued up a rough cut of his latest track. And wow, if Matt is right about one thing, it's that his music is incredible. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell, who is one of the least slimy people I know, I gotta say. And it's hosted by me, Amory Sievertson. And me, Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. The rest of our team is Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Matt Reed, and Paul Vichis. You can find picks of our gross and beautiful slimes at our website,

WBUR.org slash endless thread. And next week in part three of our park series about the outdoors online, we ask, what's in a name? Anytime you see a landmark with the word devil or Satan or hell, it's probably a sacred site to some American Indian tribe. That's a sacred site. Bye.