Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Plant Parents

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Although the thumbs typing this are decidedly *not* green, this week’s exploration has been nurtured into fruition with love just for our botanically inclined culties.  Whether you spent quarantine scrolling through other people’s nurseries on #planstagram until your eyes glazed over green, or nobly undertook the task of cultivating an amateur jungle of your own leafy companions, in recent years it seems harder than ever to resist the allure of one of mankind’s oldest cohabitants: houseplants! But is the plant mommy life really the uber-zen, ultra-grounded, self-care-queen hobby we’ve been looking for, or just another tool of the algorithm to thwart the ~growth~ of our time, money, and IRL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS?!? Melodramatic? At SLAC? Never! Here to help Reese and Amanda plant the seeds of healthy skepticism into this seemingly wholesome pastime is arbiter of plant wisdom in both audio and print format Maria Failla of Growing Joy with Plants (@growingjoywithmaria)! Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles. Thank you to our sponsors! This year, skip breaking a sweat AND breaking the bank. Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless plans at https://MINTMOBILE.com/cult Find exactly what you’re booking for on ⁠https://Booking.com⁠, Booking.YEAH! Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://Zocdoc.com/CULT to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Head to ⁠https://www.squarespace.com/CULT⁠ to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code CULT Please consider donating to those affected by the Los Angeles Fires. Some organizations that Team SLAC are donating to are:  https://mutualaidla.org/ https://give.pasadenahumane.org/give/654134/#!/donation/checkout https://shorturl.at/SGW9w Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Plant poaching has gotten really bad. People were robbing greenhouses. People are poaching native plants in other countries and bringing them in illegally. There are people doing really unethical things. I had no idea there was this whole scandal side. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montel and I'm an author. And I'm Reese Oliver, your co-host and Sounds Like a Cult's coordinator.

Every week on this show, we discuss a different fanatical fringe group or guru from the cultural zeitgeist, from IKEA to chiropractors, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? And if so, which of our cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watch yourback, or a get-the-fuck-out? After all, not every culty-looking group these days is equally destructive. Cultish influence falls along a spectrum. The point of this show is to analyze how fanaticism shows up in everyday life, to poke a little

bit of fun at human search for meaning, and to critique just how power abuse shows up in places you might not think to look. Sometimes the cult that's meant for you is dormant within that one little monstera you set out to buy for your living room that quickly devolves into a panoply of highly demanding botanical adopted children. Today's episode is dedicated to the cult of plant parents! Yay! I am so excited to discuss this subject.

I mean, I alongside many millennials and Gen Zers got a little bit more into my homestead or alter ego during the pandemic. I do not have a green thumb by any means, but I have kept a massive ficus alive for like several years. That's very impressive. Ficus aren't the easiest things to keep alive, so congratulations. Thank you for saying that. Reese, do you have experience with this cult? Not really. Just the occasional, I'm bored, let's buy a succulent and try to take care of it, which feels a little unapathetic looking back. I suppose I wish I had been kinder to

my plants in the past. I do love them and I very much enjoy looking at them, but yeah, no green thumb here. I admire plant people greatly though. Yeah, there is time. Now out of the gate, I know some listeners may already be thinking, A, what is a plant parent?

And or B, how could passionately caring for plants in 2025 possibly be considered a cult? And good news, that is both so valid and exactly what we're here to find out. Plant Parenthood has been a world, a lifestyle, a religion, dare I say, that I've sort of been teetering up against for a while. It's definitely made its way into my YouTube algorithm. So we're excited to learn today. And here to help us grow and guide us through the plant parent ecosystem is Maria Fiala, host of the podcast Growing Joy with Plants.

Maria, welcome to Sounds Like a Cult. Thank you. I've never been more honored to represent one of the groups that you guys explore and I think at this point I've spoken to thousands of plant parents in my eight years of being a public happy plant lady so I feel very ready to support you in your exploration of the plant parent. Oh my god, the diplomacy. What I'm hearing is like, I am so ready to defend our army. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think like you said, there's a cult-tronic spectrum. So I could definitely see some cult- like behavior, but all positive. Yeah, 100%. I mean, like that is sort of the thesis of our show is that humans have this

inherent need for communalism and solidarity and meaning. And as our modern American society develops an increasingly like fraught relationship with community, but finds itself no less spiritual. We sometimes look in places that you might not think of as cults to fill those needs. And the idea is not that some people are immune to cults and other people are super susceptible to them. It's that these needs are endemic to our species and America certainly wants us all to participate in

some kind of cult. So it's just a matter of finding the live-your-life level ones as we say. I think too, I mean we're a tribal species right and we're all looking for our tribe and I find it really interesting you know you mentioned in the pandemic so many plant parents got into plants. And again, even now in 2025, like with so much unrest, people are turning to nature, they're turning to gardening, they're turning to these things. Because I think as a species, we understand that being with nature is therapeutic. And when things feel really out of control, controlling plants indoors, or controlling and nurturing nature and feeling like a nurturer is really impactful.

And so it makes so much sense to me that people turn to plants. Totally. And I think the cult-y part kind of enters the picture when we think about plant parents in the context of the online community that's built up around it, which we will get to. But first, Maria, we would love to know if you could start us off by defining what the cult of plant parents means to you as a phrase and tell us a little bit about your personal history with this cult of sorts. Yeah. You know, it's so funny because with cult podcasts, I'm sure you have a huge overlap with true crime podcasts with your listeners. I used

to be an epic plant killer, so I couldn't keep a plant alive if someone paid me money. My entire- You were a murderess. I was a murderess. I couldn't keep a plant alive in my 20s. I was an actress. I was traveling a lot. I didn't have time. I moved in with my boyfriend and wanted to nest. That's when I really was like, every Pinterest photo I'm pinning has plants in it, like for designing my house. Like I have to figure this out. And I Googled my way through it. I loved podcasts.

This was in 2017. And there were literally no podcasts about houseplants. And I kept looking for them because I lived in New York City. I was commuting every day. And so that's why I started my podcast, Growing Joy with Plants, as a way to pull myself out of being a plant killer.

I also find I did some research with my audience and there's a lot of overlap with true crime and plant podcasts, which I find fascinating. I think it's because it's a lot of women, but there's a lot of alignment. So I learned how to become a plant parent and something that I think is one of the key things of if we're exploring if plant parenthood is a cult, there's a real emotional connection with plants. So I like to say that I came to plants for the aesthetic, but I stayed for the wellness. I came because I wanted to nest with my boyfriend, he's my husband now,

and I wanted to make a beautiful home, and all the photos I was pinning had plants in them, but I stayed because what I didn't realize is, in that moment, I was 27, over-scheduled, over-stimulated, millennial, living in New York City in 500 square feet. I had no idea how over-stimimulated, overscheduled I was until I slowed down with my plants.

I wrote a self-help book about this concept of using plants to live a happier life and had this moment where I realized that I had stopped having coffee with my phone in the morning and I started having coffee with my plants in the morning. And in that moment, it created this space for me to have like original thought again.

Like we're taking our phones in the bathroom with us. Like we're never off of our screens anymore. But when you're with plants, it's so tactile that like you're not really on your phone, unless maybe you're taking a picture of your plant to put on your plantstagram and then put your phone away so you can be with your plants. And there's this real connection that happens and this real heart opening. It felt like there was a part of my heart that was dormant that like exploded into new growth, you know, and all of a sudden I was noticing trees on my block that I had never noticed before. I started caring for plants. All of a sudden I was camping. All of a sudden I was interested

in going to Central Park when I never was before. So plants really opened up this connection to nature specifically that I had never experienced before. And I think when you talk to plant parents over and over and over again, you hear plants changed my life. Plants are my therapy. Gardening is my therapy. There's a real emotional connection. I actually have an old episode on my podcast. I interviewed a neuroscientist about like, I love plants so much. I feel crazy. What is happening in my brain? And she explained your brain is experiencing the bonding hormones with plants. So I think to be a plant parent is to have plants. I think you can be a plant parent and have dead plants. I have dead plants currently.

I've been doing this for eight years. But to be a plant parent is to have an interest in caring for plants in some capacity, whether it's houseplants or gardening, and have an emotional connection to it. So more than just an aesthetic connection to it. And I think that's where we start leaning into this cult exploration of the motivation and the why. And also sometimes an

unhealthy obsession. I see tons of people in our community with an unhealthy obsession, just like you see unhealthy obsession everywhere else. But then I see so many people who have completely transformed their lives through the power of watering a monstera plant. And that is verbatim quotes that I've gotten from listeners, right? Like, I'm not exaggerating here. So it's a very interesting community of people. Well, I personally feel like I'm being recruited right now. I was going to say that was one hell of a pitch. I'm the leader by the way. Secret, I'm the George North cult leader that I'm here. Yes, you're like, the Trojan horse, the leader that I'm here. The leader is me in case you were wondering. No, but I think I'll speak for myself and we do joke, but we mean it seriously on this podcast as well that there is a cult for everyone in America in 2025.

And some cults that we discuss on the show don't appeal to me whatsoever, but I am nonetheless very curious about them and want to unpack their appeal and understand their dynamics and their followings and things. But this is one that I think has a ton of inherent appeal, no matter who you are, because human beings are meant to be with plants. You know, like for most of human history, human beings lived among plants and knew so much more about plants than most modern Westerners do anyway, because that was important for survival, for making sure that you didn't eat something poisonous or that you could use something for a medicinal purpose or something like that.

There's a name for that. It's called the biophilic effect. Have you ever heard of that? Wilson, he published this in the 70s, this biophilia and the biophilic effect. Humans, we're living things, right? So we are hardwired to be comfortable for our nervous systems to be regulated in the presence of other living things Just like you said our grandparents grandparents grandparents evolved in nature and only recently we're disconnected living in

unnatural substances Decorating with unnatural substances It's it's not regular for our living bodies to be with plants And there have been study after study that show that when you put the human body with plants in nature, and this also goes for pets. So for plant killers, biophilia, you also feel it with your pets. That relaxing feeling that you feel petting your pet, being in the presence of your pet, it's the same with plants because we're all living things. We're all nature.

Yeah. And I think it only makes sense that during this hyper disconnected, hyper digital time, we're really looking to return to some of those things that inherently soothe us. And sometimes that goes in a kind of fundamentalist sort of tradwife direction. Sometimes it goes in this sort of comparatively more wholesome plant parent direction. However, because we're living in a super capitalist and social media choke held culture, even something as sort of natural and beautiful as a relationship to plants can turn culty. And we're excited to get into that analysis. But before we do,

Reese, could you share a little bit of background just so we can get like the full origin story of the cult of plant parents? I would love to. So talking about how we are bio-philic creatures, you for the Vokai word. I love a Vokai word. Houseplants have been a part of the human experience since roughly 500 BC in ancient Greece and Rome and 200 CE in China, according to an NBC article by Taylor Davies called Why More Millennials Are Buying Into Plant Parenthood. It seems like a no-brainer that such a lively community would erect itself within the houseplant community, given the undeniably Instagrammable quality of plants like the Monstera as we've spoken about, or my favorite one that I researched, the pink princess philodendron.

I've got her right behind me, yep. They're beautiful. I love pink things. Cue the chaperone. Cue the pink pony club. So yeah, it makes double sense that such a space would thrive online as we've been talking about. New York Botanical Garden has spoken about the rapidly growing cyberspace surrounding

plants and their at times fanatical owners in an article on their webpage called, If You're a Plant Person, You're Not Alone. Cosette Patterson and Josh Ehrman state 66% of American households own at least one house plant, according to a study by Statista, and 1 in 3 people under 40, millennials in Gen Z, consider themselves a plant parent, according to a study by Kraftjack. This trend has even trickled into social media. Hashtag Plant Mom has been used 2.6 million times on social media, Hashtag Plant Parenthood 1.3 million times, and Hashtag Pl plants of TikTok has 3.4 billion video views.

Insanity. As such, the plant market has expanded massively in recent decades. According to Vice, market research firm, Garden Media reports that indoor gardening stores made almost $1 billion in 2015 and that the industry has grown 8.2% since 2011, which is crazy.

So in the wake of all of that, my question to you is how much of the plant community do you find is active in real life as opposed to online? Yeah, like are there people who are kind of just doing it for the internet of it all? Oh girl, let's get into it. So yes, there are 100% people who do it just for the internet of it all. And I will say, one of the joys of my life is that I have made true friends online via Plantstagram. Plantstagram being plant Instagram.

It's interesting how I got into plants originally when I started my podcast. I made an Instagram for my podcast, which talked about my plants because I didn't wanna talk about plants on my personal Instagram. No one in my real life wanted to talk to me about plants. They were like, cool, Maria, we get, you have a tomato plant, we don't give a shit. But when I turned to the internet,

I found all of these people who have the same interest in me. And once again, when you start caring for plants and you start caring for plants successfully, there is a chemical thing that happens in your brain where you feel like your heart is exploding. You are so excited to see that monstera leaf unfurl. You are so excited to get your hands on that pink plant that you've been dying for. I just had my Venus flytrap bloom for the first time and it was the most exciting moment. Congrats. Yes, so excited. Talk about that. I feed it blood worms. That's just another story for me. Oh my God. that's where the true crime comes in.

That's where the true crime comes in. Very little shop of horrors. Truly, truly. But there's actually a lot of plant parents who are introverts and they're more comfortable engaging with people online about their passion for plants than in real life. And I did some research on my audience and I was shocked at how many people in my audience play video games. And I think it's because that's another introverted hobby. But interestingly enough, the way I got into plants

was that I found a couple of local other plant parents on Instagram that I made friends with and we started meeting up at local Brooklyn plant shops and we would go plant shopping together. So oftentimes people do connect with people online and then go take their friendship into real life, going to plant swaps. Plant swaps are huge where a Facebook group

or a plant shop or even a brewery I've seen will host a plant swap where people all bring cuttings of plants to this previously agreed upon place and they swap plants and the stakes get really high because it's like, if you have the philodendron pink princess that's going to be worth three pothos cuttings and they really end up being collector's items for people. So I've seen it go both ways. I've certainly met so many people in real life. There's a chapter in my book on how to make plant friends and there's a lot of safety things that you also want to go about. Like if you're going to do it, if you're going to take an online friendship into real life,

do it in a public place, do it in the daylight. But some of my closest friends, like I've met online through plants and met in real life and are still friends, like came to my wedding, right? So it is because it's really nice. And I think this goes with any group of interest. It's so nice to meet someone else who cares so deeply about the super niche thing that you care about, whether that's knitting, whether that's plants, whether that's fishing. But like, it's so nice to know that you know what a philodendron pink princess is. And I'm sure when you found out that I have one too, it's like, whoa, we have this thing in common and all of a sudden you can go off from there.

I think plant people really like talking to each other, about their nerd, I mean, we're nerds. This is a nerdy hobby. We wanna learn how to propagate and make two plants out of one. And they are like Pokemon, right? You gotta catch them all. There is this collector side of it.

So it's very interesting, but I think you can totally have a really healthy experience just online, or you can take it offline as well Yeah, it's interesting that you use the word nerd because I made this point in my book cultish But I once heard the kink community described as sexual nerds Yeah, they're just like interested in like super niche pockets of sexual culture that might not be considered mainstream Or even cool and cold followers in a might not be considered mainstream or even cool. And cult followers,

in a way, could be considered spiritual nerds. And that can be disruptive when exploitation and lack of opportunity to express pushback and various forms of abuse and lack of exit strategy enter the picture. But the nerdiness itself, the fringiness itself isn't inherently bad. And so much of our show is about like sort of tee hee hee-ing about the fringy aspects because it's fun and fascinating to learn about these really nerdy curious corners of society while also like legitimately identifying, okay, when does it become bad? Summer is just around the corner and you know what I think would be fun is to spend more money on fun summer things and less money on your wireless bill. And that is totally a hundred percent

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Yes, we loved what you were saying about the tokenization of cuttings and the trade in barter systems. So in addition to these swaps, please share with us some other possibly surprising culti rituals, behaviors, or values that might define one as a plant parent. Culti rituals, I love that. Yeah, I guess a plant swap would be a gathering,

a community gathering. I think there'si rituals. I love that. Yeah, I guess a plant swap would be a gathering, a community gathering. I think there's a lot of getting together, going shopping. There's a lot of shopping dates, like getting a coffee and going plant shopping on a Saturday is a big thing. Propagation, which is taking cuttings of one plant, rooting it, and then basically making one plant into two, and then sharing. So there's a lot of community ritual and community aspect when you look at this, but it's not dictated by anything. So when I think of a cult, I often think of like a leader

and a set of rules, but in the plant parent community, there isn't a standard set of rules. It's more colloquial and more you hear about a plant swap. So you want to do one in your own, but it's in your own community. Any like terminology, I mean, you've been saying the word plant killer. Like is that a piece of vocab? You know, there's all sorts of like semi-hydro is a way of growing plants where it's semi-hydroponically and passive hydro. But the interesting thing about plant parenthood

are there are very fringe intense sub-sex of being a plant parent. So there's the people who only grow in semi-hydro, passive hydroponics. They're growing in completely different media. LECA, fluvostratum, these are things that plant parents would know all of these words. They are very interested in control

because you're putting nutrients in water and you're essentially growing plants in water and this like clay, but you're in control of all of the nutrients. So it's not like putting a plant in soil that it's growing. Then on the other side, you have people who are only interested in growing orchids because they have this connection to wanting to see the blooms. And orchids also have like a very specific way that they're grown. I actually have personality profiles. I'm like, now that I'm talking to you guys, I'm like, am I a cult leader? I have personality profiles of five different

plant parent archetypes that I've noticed after talking to different people in my community. You know, there are people who consider themselves collectors. I call this the curious collector plant parent and they heavily invest in their plants. They buy Edwardian cases and they make something called the IKEA grow house. Do you know what the IKEA grow house is? No, we don't. Tell us. But as an addendum to our IKEA episode, please. So there's a certain glass bookshelf at IKEA that you can buy and retrofit with grow lights in it, and it turns it into basically a greenhouse. So Curie's collectors like to buy really rare, harder to find plants that often have higher

care requirements than just our normal indoors. So they need higher humidity, they need consistently moist soil, all these things that you can't really achieve just on your desk or in your living room. So they create these full blown lit greenhouses in their living rooms, and they make it look really aesthetic

by kind of retrofitting this IKEA thing. But this IKEA grow house is a trend that if you type in IKEA grow house, you'll see thousands of them on Instagram of how people have done it. And they put foggers in there and misters and fans and all of these like really prehistoric plants. Then you have the subsect of people that only want to grow plants that they can eat. Right? So they're growing food hydroponically. I grew micro dwarf tomatoes in my home, tiny tomato plants that you can grow on a window sale if you're living in New York City. They have their own kind of like niche ideas too.

But yeah, propagation, prop box. So like a prop box is a clear box that you fill with moss that you'll take cuttings and it's like a really great environment for plants to root. So like you'll have a prop box, you know, you'll have your moss poles. There's all sorts of things that kind of signal that you're like a real next level plant parent, you know?

So I will say on the dark side, there's an over collecting and over spending. I would say any negative things that I've seen about plant parents, sometimes you get so in love, like you fall so in love. And this happened to me. I went from zero to 60 plants in three months because I could not get enough. I got addicted. I was totally connected to this dopamine release that was happening in my brain. And my husband actually had to put me on a plant pause for four months. I had a whole podcast episode about how to go on a plant pause if you need. Oh my God.

It was crazy. And I can't tell you how many people have had to do this. Like this is real shit that people go through when you're a plant collector. And for four months, I had to not bring any new plants home because it can get away from you and plants are expensive, right? So the beauty of plant parenthood is you can have one plant that you buy for 20 bucks and you have it for the rest of your life or you get a cutting from a friend that you have for the rest of your life and you can get tons of rewards from that. You could also spend thousands upon thousands of dollars as much as people spend on Nexium, you know, like unplanned. Should you want, should you choose? It's really a choose your own cult experience.

Like you can choose which MLM starter pack you want to buy, so to speak. Maria, thank you for confessing this because I could just like hear in my mind's ear the critics being like, this ain't a cult. This is just a hobby. This is just a sweet little subculture. But the truth is that like in America, babe, like a hyper-consumerist society where we are in a loneliness epidemic and there are more threats to identity and solidarity than ever before, but also more opportunities for identity and solidarity than ever before.

A cult can really erect around anything. And what I'm hearing is that there are so many positive aspects to this cult community, sect. You can like discover that you're a hydroprop, or I don't know. You love growing in passive hydroponics. Yes, I have not memorized the glossary yet. And that's beautiful.

And that can open you up to a community of people online. And if you're an introvert, that can be really transcendent actually. And it offers the opportunity for these moments of IRL connection too. But when combined with certain pressures of modern society, it can become cultier than anyone might expect. So I want to get a little bit more into how plant parenthood and the rise of this billion-dollar industry that's come up around

it connects to our epidemic of loneliness in the contemporary United States. So house plants, as we've been discussing, allow young people in particular, but also, you know, you don't stay young forever. You could be a plant parent for life. So they're allowing all these people to engage in the joy of cultivating and caring for nature, even if they can't afford the lush outdoor spaces that maybe our boomer parents had or don't have time to attend to a huge garden. That NVC article by Taylor Davies titled Why More Millennials Are Buying Into Plant Parenthood theorizes that millennial houseplant ownership is, in part, the modern renter's equivalent

to the front lawns tended to by Gen X in decades prior. Eliza Blank, owner of the online plant retailer, The Sill, who was interviewed for this piece, said the following, but the way my mother uses time is very different from the way that I use time and the way the next generation will too. No 25 year old that I know has six hours on a Sunday or a backyard to spend gardening, but that doesn't mean they don't have an interest in plants.

We're helping to usher in this new way to garden that reflects the way millennials want to use their leisure time, millennials engines years. And as we alluded to the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown was a huge catalyst for the online plant ownership movement as it was for so many of the hobby related subcultures that we've discussed, knitting, crocheting, homesteading, tradwifery, the whole live your life to get the fuck out spectrum was represented during the pandemic. So Vogue India's Joris Hendrik in a piece titled, A Self-Confessed Plant Parent on the Rewards of Plant Ownership writes, for many, not being able to go outside or meet others has left us collectively hungry for companionship with other beings.

Quote, when it comes to people being home at this very moment, if they didn't have a lot of plants, they understood what was missing from their lives. The article continued to say, all of us want to be connected with nature. We want to feel companionship with a living thing. So yeah, we have just a few more questions exploring the kind of ups and downs, the bounds of what plant parenthood can offer during times of loneliness. I think too, I was just reading a study the other day, there was a study done in the pandemic

about people's levels of stress and anxiety who had plants indoors and who didn't. And there was a definitive decrease in stress and anxiety for people that had plants. And I think that is a real reason why we saw so many people get into plants. I think there's a reason why people call plants their plant babies or their plant kids.

In my book I write about, it's like you learn to tune your ear to their frequency. Plants are like green aliens that we're trying to take care of. When you have a dog, it can bark at you. When you have a kid, it can say, mom, I'm hungry. But for some reason with plant parents, we choose to try and care for these little green aliens sitting in pots that can't really communicate with us. So there's this level

of attention and attunement that you don't necessarily need with other living things. And I think when you get hooked on that and when you feel the reciprocity of that, oh, I noticed you needed water. I gave you water and then you perked up. There's this like feedback loop that is so rewarding and feels so good. It's empowering and it's also that feeling of nurturing. So I think when we talk about loneliness and the loneliness epidemic, I think people do feel at comfort, like with their plants.

I mean, I have this Epic Green Wall that I installed in my office that sits right behind me when I work all day. And these are like my green cheerleaders. Like I feel they have energy, right? Like they're living things and they're just like cheering me on throughout my day. And I launched a digital course and this plant behind me bloomed the day before my digital course launched. Like I choose to believe in the magic of that. If that makes me culty, then I'm cool with it. Cause for me, it's a very simple, very

fun existence. But I think when it comes to loneliness, like you really do develop a relationship with your plants in some capacity of your pets. I'm not saying that your relationship with your dog is the same as your relationship with your Monstera, but there is a relationship that gets developed. And I think that speaks to the loneliness, the comforting of the loneliness. Oh, totally. Yeah. There is like a black mirror version of this discussion where slowly but surely over the years,

the cult of plant parents convinces you that you literally do not need other human beings. And suddenly you wake up and you realize that the only living things in your life are plants. Yeah, 100%. That's someone's origin story. You're just surrounded by a jungle, cast away. I think the other thing, and I'm sure whatever your hobbies

are outside of studying cults, I'm sure you feel this way too, but I can't tell you how many parties I've been at where I don't know that many people. I'm either a guest of my husband or something like that. I tell people what I do or I'm wearing a planty thing and they say, oh, you're wearing a planty shirt. I like plants.

Cut to like 45 minutes, we're in the corner, their phone's out there showing me millions of photos of their plants. We've had two glasses of wine. The plants ends up being the vehicle to connect. And then we're talking about other things because plants are a mirror for life. So you can get into these big philosophical conversations

after you start talking about plants. So also, for loneliness in person too, once you meet another plant person out there in the real world, you're in. You've got a friend. Oh my God. I would so much rather you be discussing existentialism through the lens of vines and leaves than trying to recruit people to Mormonism because they happen to like your shirt. 100%, 100%. Okay, serious question. When was the last time that you needed to go to the doctor

but you put it off? There is always an excuse not to go to the doctor. I'm busy, it'll heal on its own. I don't need help. We've all been there. Booking a doctor's appointment can just feel so very daunting, but thanks to ZockDoc, there is no reason to delay. They make it super easy to find and book a doctor who's right for you. I am absolutely not exaggerating

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also happen super fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. Again, I use ZocDoc. I highly recommend you use it, too. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com slash cult to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's z-o-c-d-o-c dot com slash cult, zocdoc.com slash cult. This podcast is brought to you by the one and only Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website building platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to even your valuable time.

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head to squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So we have been talking a lot about the connective power of plants. Obviously plants are a way for us to get all of our nurturing sillies out, so to speak, while still, I guess, retaining a lot of our sanity and our time and our money, if you choose to engage with it this way. Having said all of that, do you see a potential correlation between the rising amount of young people realizing

that actual parenthood might not be for them and people totally willing to raise dozens of really labor-intensive plants? Because for me personally, this is something when I had the realization of, oh, that is actually a lot of work that I don't necessarily need to sign up for. It definitely does free you up to sign up for other things. So do you see a correlation there? Wow, let me sit with that for a minute. That's a really interesting observation. I think of my personal journey.

I'm a millennial. I'm having kids later in life, right? Then my parents did. Because of so many different things that millennials have been up against, it's taking us longer to buy homes. It's taking us longer been up against. It's taking us longer to buy homes. It's taking us longer to feel settled. It's taking us longer to have kids.

Plants have filled that void a little bit, but I'm not going to equate plant parenthood with human parenthood. I think there's a wide gap. I haven't heard of anyone who's like, I don't need human kids. I'm just going to have plant babies. I've never interacted with that. However, if someone was to tell me that, I'd be like, cool, good for you. Oh my God, I know someone like that. I think that's a very interesting and hot take. Well, if I can be a little bit crude, plants are something that, like you've said,

you can build such a deep relationship with like a child and you can care for it and love it. But like ultimately if it dies, that's okay. And that's not true with a kid. That's really not. The stakes are lower, but there's still love there. It's lower than a dog. I don't have a dog. I will say if you go on vacation for long periods of time, you do have to hire a plant

sitter. That is a thing that I'm sure you'll giggle at. Like you would have to hire a babysitter, but that's only if you're gone for more than 10 days. But I think that's really interesting. I think there's a lot of circumstance happening here all at the same time. Yeah. It's not like the cult of planned parents is conspiring to end society. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm a plant mom and I hope to have kids, but I find it very interesting and it makes sense to me that people are like, no, I'll just have my plants. The world is on fire. We need more plants for just like carbon dioxide reason. Yeah, yeah. I understand people making the choice not to have kids at this moment. Well, I think it's less like people are being like

brainwashed to take care of like an apartment full of plants instead of having kids. I think it's more that people who are deeply caring but have decided not to have children for any number of other reasons, doomy reasons, financial reasons, whatever, have to put their nurturing somewhere. And plants are like a really aesthetic place to put that. I like to say get a plant, then get a dog, then get a baby. I feel like that's a nice nurturing sequence in terms of stakes to plant, pet, baby, like boom, boom, boom.

And you know, you brought something interesting up I wanna draw attention to because you said brainwashing. And I love cults, I'm on board, I love this podcast is amazing, this concept is amazing. But I do think with cults, there is a level of brainwashing and there's a level of someone, some structure, some higher up person brainwashing

or telling people what to do or selling people on plants. And I actually really don't feel that in the plant community. It's a single entry. So I actually giggle now where I don't push my plantiness on anyone in my real life They all know that I'm a professional plant lady But like a lot of them are plant killers or a lot of them are on Broadway like they have no interest and it's so

Funny because one by one I get a text. Okay, I brought this monstera home and then two months later Oh my god, my monstera has its first unfenestrated leaf. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm so excited And then two months later, okay Now I have five plants on my windowsill like the the brainwashing comes from within. You are brainwashing yourself. Iconic. It's your own sunk cost fallacy brainwashing you. It's interesting to me that you hooked onto that term brainwashing because I was using it, obviously, ironically. And when I'm having like a more sober and rigorous conversation about cult influence, I actually tend not to use it because it can be like kind of alarmist and even dehumanizing like, oh, that person

was just brainwashed and doesn't leave space for the reality that someone can't actually convince you to do something that you don't want on some level to do. I like to think of it in terms of this one religious studies scholar named Rebecca Moore who describes it rather with these three C's which are conversion, conditioning, and coercion. And so maybe we could think about it that way, like in terms of plant parenthood, like maybe you're doing like the tiniest little bit of conversion, but I'm not detecting much. Well maybe there's some sort of passive or organic conditioning, but I'm not detecting much, well, maybe there's some sort of passive or organic, dare I say, conditioning, but I'm definitely not at this point sensing much purposeful, exploitative

coercion. Yeah, I don't think it's very exploitative. The product, the plant does it for itself. I'm catching people where they can't keep a plant alive and they really want to. So I help them keep the plant alive, but I'm not really selling them on keeping plants. Like I'm not the one who's like, you need to have plants. It's more like I got this plant. I'm struggling with it.

You know what I mean? It's interesting. And you have me thinking, I love looking at this through your lens, too, because it just has me thinking about the people I'm always talking to. It's an interesting lens because it's like a bit but not a bit and it's like a balance that I genuinely try to strike in my everyday life between like critical thinking and mysticism and surrender because those things are important and like communalism without giving all of your power 24 seven to someone. So it's all about that balance.

And that's like at its most sort of like serious and breaking the fourth wall, like what this podcast is all about. I also notice not to give you ladies another plant pun, gosh, but I see plant parents go through seasons, right? And oftentimes you can give your power away sometimes, right? If you tip over to like overspending, overpurchasing, bringing too many plants home, getting overwhelmed,

killing all those plants because you don't have the capacity to care for them all, buying, buying, buying. Like there are those seasons and then they kind of come out of it and they give some of their plants away and then they have a healthy amount of plants. It's very interesting though, because when you explore and talk about power and agency

and alignment with any hobby or with any mystical or spiritual practice, you can be in and out of alignment for sure. Totally. So I want to just dwell on this terminology of plant babies and plant mommies for one second. So the founder of that company. Eliza. I know her very well. Yeah. Eliza. Yes. So, okay, great. Well, she trademarked the term plant parenthood after very astutely witnessing customers' proclivity toward calling their plants their babies. And I mean, I love the irony of this. And I think a lot

about the sort of ironic, until it's not ironic, use of paternal, maternal, familial language to refer to people and things that are not actually your family. It's like we're inspired by the history of like the LGBTQ plus community using familial language to describe chosen family. I think we're just at a place in our society where we are reckoning with family structures and who we actually want to be in our family. And if we want to conceive of ourselves as parents to a cactus and call that thing a baby, then pop off. That's the time that we're living in. So Naomi Huffman, a reporter wrote in a piece for the New York Times titled, How Taking Care of Houseplants Taught Me to Care to care for myself about how she was not only connecting to her house plants like they were her babies, but

that the house plants were allowing her to build a more familial connection to her friends. She said, quote, When my propagations were successful, I gave the plants away to friends. This was more intimate than I expected. Giving someone part of something that you kept alive conveys an explicit trust in their capacity for thoughtfulness and tenderness. It says, I admire the way you live, the care you take to survive your own life. So I was wondering, Maria, do you sincerely or ironically call your plants your babies? And are there people in your life that you would or wouldn't trust with your babies? For sure.

I mean, it's funny. I love that. I love that quote you just wrote. The last chapter of my book is called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Plants. And it's actually a conversation about just that. I inherited 20 plants from a friend who had to move last minute when I was taking care of her plants.

It was the ultimate honor and the stakes were so high because she trusted me with her plants. I didn't want to kill them, right? She has this one jade plant. It's right up there on my green wall. I have gifted so many cuttings of this jade plant to so many friends. They have gifted cuttings of their cutting

of the jade plant to their friends. When I think about the web of connection that I have to humanity through this one jade plant, or when I was on tour for my podcast and I would have listeners bring me cuttings of their plants that they took care of by listening to my podcast and then giving me cuttings of that, I can't even begin to describe how that feels. So I do think that connection is so real. It's similar to people who bring you a bouquet of flowers that they grew instead of flowers that they bought. It's a very similar feeling.

And yes, I totally have people in my life that I would gift cuttings to, and I have people in my life that I would not gift cuttings to, because once again, I think you have to find Planned Parenthood. I don't think it should be pushed on you. Actually, I learned a huge, huge lesson early on in Planned Parenthood. I don't think it should be pushed on you. Actually, I learned a huge, huge lesson early on in Planned Parenthood. My brother is an entrepreneur and I

sent him a money tree and I sent it to him very earnestly being like, this is your money tree. Your business is going to grow and it's a metaphor for your business and blah, blah, blah. He didn't know how to care for the money tree. The money tree died and I think it really messed with him a little bit. Understandably so. Whoa, it was like dropping the spirit stick. You're so much, it was too much, it was too much. It was a real miss.

Big sister fail. So I'm actually very sensitive now about gifting people plants because I would never want to gift them a failure. And that's why also I think I spend so much time educating people on if you are going to gift plants, like these are plants you should gift and these are plants you shouldn't gift

because you wanna set someone up for success and not to have them just feel bad. And do I call my plant babies? I don't call my plants my plant babies anymore, but I will say I talk to my plants all the time. I sing to my plants all the time. Like they are my buddies and I do recognize them as living things.

And also it's interesting you brought up the LGBTQ like named chosen families because I just did this amazing interview with this indigenous herbalist. And she was talking about how in indigenous cultures, you call your trees, plants, the earth, the grass around you, we call them our relatives. Anamacy. It's really cool. Yeah.

I learned a little bit about this concept of animism in indigenous and some Eastern practices and how there is an idea of personhood imbued into living things or even a rock, you know, like the rock doesn't want to be climbed, like the garden doesn't want to be trampled. And it's such a beautiful way of conceiving of living things because again, like speaking to the cultishness of the West and the United States in particular, we have this exceptionalist attitude

that not only is human life the most valuable form of life, but like wealthy, self-improved, self-actualized humans are the most valuable life forms. And yeah, I think maybe like plants can help you conceive of a very beautiful notion that like, we don't need to rank life that way. And I loved what you said about calling your plants your buddies now, because it really,

I see that connection that as you spend more time with them, the internal power dynamic between you and the plants kind of erodes and you become on one level and that's the community, you know? Oh my God, that's so funny that you say that because I was like trying to think about who is the leader and who was the follower here. And it's like, sometimes you're your plants cult leader and sometimes your plants are your cult leader and sometimes there's no cult leader at all. Yeah, it's not anthropomorphizing the plants. It's decentralizing humans. Absolutely.

That's beautiful, Reese. And yeah, I mean, I think also really why I'm in this is to make the world a kinder and greener place. I think if you build a relationship with plants again, it's going to help you build a relationship with yourself. It's going to help you show up kinder. Also, it's going to help us build a better relationship with the earth. If you walk around looking at trees, calling them your elders or calling them your relatives

or calling your plants your buds, it's gonna make you look at recycling and composting and the earth differently because we're so disconnected. Like Amanda, to your point earlier, when you were saying our ancestors were so connected with nature, they lived in community with nature and because of society and buildings and amazing inventions,

we've never been more disconnected from nature as a society. And it's this healing that needs to happen. And I tell you to heal by talking to your plants, but it's deeper shit than you think it is. Okay, so to do our due diligence, we do want to interrogate you a little tiny bit about the potential dark side of Planned Parenthood before we get into a Wii game. Let's do that. Let's do it. Okay.

Question numero uno of the dark side of Planned Parenthood. Have you ever experienced pressure to buy a certain plant or treat your plants in a certain way in order to fit in or follow group trends. I think there's pressure because of social media. It's so visual and there are these really intense plant trends. So you brought up the Philodendron Pink Princess. In 2017, it was the Pylea peperomioides, the friendship plant, the coin plant. Everybody on Instagram is talking about it.

Everybody is taking these beautiful photos. And so you want it too, right? And little cuttings would sell for $40, $50. Now, if you go to Trader Joe's, you can get that plant for $2.99. Right. So you see these intense trends. Philodendron pink princess. You saw these trends where you were buying a Philodendron pink princess

for $200 when they were in the peak trend. Now you can get it for 20 bucks at your Home Depot or Lowe's. So you definitely see those trends, but I would say no more pressure than you would see in fashion, right? Something is trendy, you're a collector, you want that purse, you want that thing, you're gonna buy it, but I think depending

on how you're feeling emotionally that day, you might like put a plant on a credit card or you might buy something that you don't need just to have it and just to make your own photo, right? Cause there is an online presence there. People make Instagram accounts just for their plant collection. That's a very common thing. Okay. I was going to say, I was like, unlike fashion though, something that makes the plant parent community, I would think more constructive but also cultier is the fact that plants are

alive. Kind of a follow-up question to that. Any specific plant care practices that have been pushed upon you or that are seen as the standard? I have a little Reddit post here of someone with their plant next to a humidifier. And they're saying, is my child spoiled? Here's Martha with her personal humidifier.

Are behaviors like that, is that a common thing you see? I see behaviors like that very commonly, yes. People use humidifiers, people spritz their plants, people are buying moss poles and trellises to make sure that their plants are set up perfectly. People are buying very nice, fancy pots. But I don't see it as pressure. Also, if you invest in a $200 rare plant

and that plant needs more humidity than you have, to get the $20 humidifier makes sense. So a lot of those, that curious collector plant parent, one of my profiles, they have humidifiers or these Edwardian glass cases that they put their plants in to manage humidity. So I definitely see it a lot, but not in a like anybody is pressuring you.

It's more, oh, I do want to set my kid up for success. I do want to give my buds like the best thing. So I'll get them a humidifier. Good to know. It seems like there is a very wide range of acceptable care. You've been speaking a bit about de-stigmatizing plant killing. Sharing again from New York Botanical Garden, the average plant parent has killed seven houseplants, according to a 2020 study by Article and OnePoll. And 48% of millennials are worried about keeping their plants alive. So don't let it get you down. How are people in the plant parenting community treated when they do fail, when they kill a plant? And follow up to that, do you think people are honest

about their failures all the time? Only seven is my first response. I'm like, only seven? This is a great question. I think Instagram leads a very false narrative about what everybody's plants look like. You never see a yellow leaf on Instagram. You never see a crispy leaf on Instagram. You see perfectly positioned plants, right? So I think for a moment, people will feel pressure to have beautiful plants. And they go through this reckoning when they're like, whoa, my plants don't look this way. There are hashtags like plant fail Friday, where you're encouraged on Fridays to show a plant fail. I talk about plant fails a lot.

I do think there's a pressure for new plant parents when they're absorbing so much and they're probably online so much. They have this higher standard, but I think once you have plants for a year, so you go through all fourth seasons, you get really comfortable with a yellow leaf or with a dead plant. I think dead plants are so important because they're how you learn, right? If you kill something, you feel the pain of that death

and you apply what you learned on your whole collection, right? Also, if you compost your plants, that turns into compost and nutrient rich soil that then you can put in your garden, right? There's something very poetic about that. I was gonna say, like there there is probably a culty, in a bad way, way of, like, experiencing a plant death

where you're just like, oh my God, I need to hide this from Instagram. I feel shame because of how I'm gonna be perceived versus like, oh my God, I feel actually, like, mournful or like, this is an opportunity to learn in the wake of a plant's death and like, how can I responsibly care for this dead plant by composting or whatever. I was also thinking about like people who might

be gardening and like accidentally plant like an invasive species or something like that in the garden. Like I think there are probably some like important lessons that people need to learn along the way and like maybe certain online corners of this cult might distract them from what the real lesson should be, if that makes sense. This is very interesting. You say that too, because now that I'm just realizing, I'm like, sorry to go like so deep here right now.

But I had a moment where like all my plants almost died in 2021. And it was the trigger for me to realize that I was clinically depressed. Like your plants can act as a mirror when your plants are doing well, you're doing well, I find. When my plants aren't doing well, it's also this trigger to be like, wait, am I doing well?

Like if I haven't been watering my plants, am I watering myself? And it was this like really big kind of trigger moment for me to be like, whoa, I am not okay. I've stopped going to therapy. I've stopped doing all these things. It's in my book. If you guys feel like you're in a struggle and you need that support.

So I think there's lessons on both sides, right? Like I think also that those plant tests can be an indicator of something much larger as well. Wow. Thanks for sharing that. My next question after that is like, what if someone has decided that they don't want to be a plant parent anymore? that they don't want to be a plant parent anymore. Are there exit costs of any kind, emotional, interpersonal? Once again, you have seasons, right? So you're gonna have seasons where you want to have a hundred plants and then you're gonna have seasons where you're like,

get these plants the fuck away from me. I don't want to do this anymore. I think we're seeing it a lot right now because people got a lot of plants in the pandemic and now as people go back to work and back to life, like they don't have the same capacity. Exit costs, you can do it two ways, right? Like you can let all your plants die

and compost them and toss them. And I guess that cost is the lost investment in the plants, but there are really beautiful ways that you can kind of transition out. So I always recommend, and once again, like you're asking these questions and they might sound silly, but these are all things that I have full episodes

on my podcast about. Cause when you're in plant parenthood and you've invested and you are here and you need to get rid of plants, like it is a real emotional moment that you're figuring out. You can gift them, right? Like I inherited those 20 plants when I started, gift the plants to someone who's new and interested in giving plants. You can give them away to your local hospital or your local retirement home. Maybe there are people who want plants

in their retirement home room or something like that. There's tons of different ways that you can get rid of them in like an empowered way. So you're not like, wow, I just wasted all of that money in two years on these plants. In terms of exit costs, I don't think so. Cause you can bring those plants to your local Facebook group and give those plants to all of your plant friends, right?

And then maybe those plant friends send you occasional pictures that are like, hey, look, your plant is thriving or the plant you gifted me is blooming. So I don't think there's ever that pressure. Not to my knowledge. I don't think the stakes are that high in this hobby. Also, I feel like your plant friends that you find are these like gems in your circle, then normally people have a fully robust life outside of their plant friends. So it's not like an all or nothing situation in terms of my experience of it. Maybe there are very specific examples that I don't know about. I also think most plant people are like,

girl, I get it. Like if a friend of mine was to be like, I'm taking a break with plants or I just got rid of half my collection, I'd be like, yeah, I get it. I've been there too. They'll be here for you. It's a lifelong hobby. Not to pun again, I'd be like, yeah, I get it. I've been there too. They'll be here for you. It's a lifelong hobby.

Ugh, not to pun again, but that seems like a green flag. Oh, brother, this guy stinks! So we talked a little bit about it with the insane markup on cuttings of very trendy plants. But although there are no larger systemic leaders of the plant parenthood community or none that you can discern, are there any bad actors financially exploiting vulnerable plant lovers? There are. And there's a fabulous, I think, six-part podcast series that's actually a true crime series about plant poaching. It's called Bad Seeds. It's really great. My friend Summerine Oakes is the host of it. Homestead Brooklyn is her brand. And it's all about

plant poaching has gotten really bad. So particularly in the pandemic when costs were so high, people were robbing greenhouses, people are poaching native plants in other countries and bringing them in illegally. So yeah, there are bad faith factors 100%. And so when you purchase plants, if you're purchasing from an Etsy,

if you're purchasing particularly online, like really understand who you're buying from, because there are people doing really unethical things, particularly with tropical plants from other countries, and you really have to be very careful when you buy. That's why I always recommend buying from a plant shop that knows what they're doing. That is so helpful. I had no idea there was this whole scandal side. Our final question for you. What advice would you give to someone who maybe wants to engage with plant ownership, wants to dip their toes in the cult,

but feels a little overwhelmed or a little intimidated by it, whether online or in real life? You're not alone. Plants are really overwhelming. You're making an investment. And I understand going to the plant shop and being surrounded by these tables full of green plants that all look the same but different.

And you're like, what the heck is bright and direct light? I don't know what my light is. There's so many things. Shameless plug, but this is a problem I've seen so many people go through. So I have a plant parent personality test on my website. You take it. It's two minutes to complete. You get your personality type and a list of plants that are perfect for your lifestyle.

So if you're confused and overwhelmed on like which plants make sense for you, the biggest rise of plant killers is picking the wrong plants for your lifestyle. So if you're confused and overwhelmed on like which plants make sense for you, the biggest rise of plant killers is picking the wrong plants for your lifestyle. And I've completely eliminated that issue for people with this personality test. So take the test. And I have over 200 podcast episodes that are completely free, helping you care for basically whatever you want. That's amazing. Offering that people take a personality test is a time-honored cult recruitment tactic. That's how the Scientologists got me to go into their church. So that's genius. I'm really keeping you on your toes. I feel like you're like, no, no, no, this isn't a cult.

And then you're like, wait, Chesifer's now in the message. It's a cult, but I kind of like it. I don't know. I know. We do love a personality test. Everybody's narcissism is just like, oh, I want to understand. It's so good. Who am I?

Me too. That's why I made one. I was like, I love all those tests. Yeah. Me too. ["The Little Mermaid"] Okay, so let's get into a little game. This game is called culty or just cringe, but we mean that with incredible

fondness. So we're going to read a list of plant parenthood scenarios and you're going to name whether you think each one is culty or just can't cringe. Number one, smuggling cuttings from plants you see in public cult culty or just cringe? Illegal. Criminal. It's a third category. Third category, illegal. I would want to say cringe, but it is illegal and I would highly advise against doing that. All right, well, I guess someone would have to have

some kind of culty thing going on inside of them to motivate them to commit such a crime. Oh yeah. Okay, culty or just cringe, rejecting potential partners because they don't understand your plant parenthood style. I guess that would be a little culti, right? To forgo true love for your passion for plants. I would not advise that either.

I love how open-minded you are to this game, thank you. I know. Okay, we talked about this earlier. Culti or just cringe, buying a plant you don't particularly like just because it's popular online. Okay, that's cringe. Who hasn't done that? I mean, maybe you guys, because you're not plant parents,

but I'm like, gosh, that's a dime a dozen. Yes, and actually in a similar but sort of opposite way, I saw a video online, my whole YouTube algorithm is just like decor videos. That's my hobby. I'm so into interiors lately, but I watched a video where someone was advising that people not get fiddle leaf figs anymore because they're no longer trendy and I'm like, that sucks.

Like you should get the plant that you like. That's a hard pass. Okay. Cold. You're just cringe regularly bumping plant Asia. Do you know what that is? Oh, Plantasia was common knowledge. Wow. Wait, Plantasia the soundtrack? Yeah. Or like playing it.

What is that? It's music for plants. This whole question is just cringe for me. This whole question. It's music that you play to help your plants grow. No, I know. I know it. Oh. Yeah. No, I'm explaining too badly.

Yeah. Cringe, cringe. Not cult know. Oh. No, I'm explaining too, Amanda. Cringe, cringe. Not culty. Not culty. Culty or just cringe. Giving unsolicited plant advice when visiting friends' homes. That's cringe. Yeah.

That's cringe. That's just cringe. And that's so something everybody does. Oh, you know, you should really like water her. That is a classic. Like, if you're on Plantstagram, that's a classic meme is like walking into a friend's house and just like seeing all of their like dying plants and trying not to say anything.

That's a total plant parent struggle. Okay, last one, cult here just cringe. Turning down an apartment or house because the lighting isn't right for your collection. Cult here just cringe. You girls are, where'd you get these? Reese invented them out of her mind. I mean, I might have to vote cult, but like I'm in the cult then because I, 100% I just

moved and every house I went into, I took my compass out and I held it up to every single window to see the window exposure. That's a very intense thing to do, but 100% I'm there. So I guess I'm in the cult. Justifiably culti. Yeah, justifiably, I guess I'm there. That is beautiful.'m in the cult. Justifiably culty. Yeah. Justify, I guess I'm there. That is beautiful. Thank you for your vulnerability today, Maria. If folks want to keep up with you and your cult, where can they do that? You guys come on over because we're not a

cult. We're just a bunch of nerds. Famous last words. I know. I think I've threaded really nice today. Come on over. I mean, you're listening to this podcast, so you should come listen to mine. It's called Growing Joy with Plants threaded really nice today. Coming over, I mean, you're listening to this podcast, so you should come listen to mine. It's called Growing Joy with Plants. We have plant care episodes, but also a lot of wellness rooted in nature episodes, so how to live a happier life with plants. I have a book, Growing Joy,

and then Growing Joy with Maria on all socials. So come hang out with me. I promise I will not recruit you. You will not have to like join any multi-level marketing schemes to be a Planned Parent. I've got you. I'm just here to try and help people live happy lives. The more you defend it, the colder it sounds.

Just a tip. Don't worry. We're totally not a cult. No, totally. So this has been super fun though, girls. Great job with this podcast. And it's been fun to look at Planned Parenthood through your lens for this hour. Thank you so much.

This was super, super fun. Oh my gosh, that was such a fun convo, Reese. Out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Which one do you think the cult of plant parents falls into? I'm living my life. Maria said she was gonna set us plants. I feel like, I mean, we got recruited a little bit. I feel like we're being forced to not only live our lives,

but nurture and grow a new one. I know. I feel like these plants are gonna give me life. Oh yeah. And I'm going to give them life. It's gonna be a biophilic joy fest. Yeah. I feel like we kind of knew this going into today's recording.

And that's why we wanted to do this topic because I just needed, I just needed a rest, right? Spiritually. I like, everything is so awful. I feel like it's more that this cult is a vehicle for revealing all of the deep ways in which the modern psyche is troubled by all of the other cults we talk about

on this show constantly. Yes, it's actually giving people, again, because you can't avoid cultishness altogether in America in 2025. So if you have to participate, and you do and you should, go the way of Plant Parenthood, which is not to say that it's not a cult, like it is. Like it's so culty, there's like such a culture there,

but it's a live your life. Yeah, live your life. That's beautiful. Well, that is our show. Thank you so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty.

But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty.

But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty.

But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. But not too culty. Hell and Reese Oliver. This episode was produced by Reese Oliver. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson. Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality, and Wordslet, A Feminist's Guide

to Taking Back the English Language. Thanks as well to our network, Studio71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult Pod, or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult. to listen to the show ad free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Aura monitors the dark web for users' phone numbers, emails, and social security numbers,

delivering real-time alerts if any suspicious activity is detected. For a limited time, Aura is offering our listeners a 14-day trial plus a check of your data to see if your personal information has been leaked online, all for free when you visit aura.com slash defense. That's aura.com slash defense to sign up for a 14-day free trial and start protecting you and your loved ones. That's aura.com slash defense.

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