Windows updated automatically near the end of a full day's recording. On restart, a BIOS screen said the CPU was at 92 degrees, when it should be around 30. A PC repairer told him not to turn it back on or he could lose everything, so he is recording on his old backup PC instead.

On the 6th of September he does an intimate live podcast for about 150 people on Garnish Island in West Cork, reachable only by a provided boat, with Sean Ronayne as guest. It is part of the Island Drift festival; tickets at normal price go on sale Thursday morning at theislanddrift.com.

Sheldrake says the shiitake disassembles the wood and reassembles those pieces into its own body, so it is made of the same stuff in a new configuration. Wood is long strings of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules, plus lignin, which plants invented to be strong and inedible and which is very hard to decompose.

Myco means fungus and rhiza means root: these fungi live in and around plant roots. Plants pass them carbon made from light, and the fungi forage the soil for nitrogen and phosphorus in return. They behaved as roots for the ancestors of land plants 400 to 500 million years ago, making life on land possible.

A field that has been ploughed and doused with nitrates, phosphates, fungicides, herbicides and pesticides will not feel like home to a tree. Moving a spoonful of soil from an ancient site, as Man Con's organisation Home Tree does, brings the right fungal partners; otherwise fungi arrive slowly on wind and water.

Partly clickbait, Sheldrake says. The popular story treats fungi as passive cables letting trees share resources and talk, but fungi have their own evolutionary agendas, and being connected to a shared network does not always help a plant. He suggests thinking of these networks as complex amplifiers of interactions between organisms.

Yes, some plastics. A friend of Sheldrake grew an oyster mushroom on 80% grain and 20% cigarette butts, then phased out the grain and phased in used butts full of toxins like polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Within a few weeks it lived purely off used cigarette butts, trying chemical keys until one worked.

Fleming, studying bacteria in London, returned from holiday to find penicillin mould fighting bacteria on his dishes. During the Second World War most penicillin went to soldiers, so doctors at home grew the mould and slapped the mycelial mat on infected wounds. Folk mould cures, like scraping mould from a leather boot, are far older.

Sheldrake says Terence McKenna argued mushrooms gave early humans imagination and bigger brains. He agrees psychedelics have shaped how culture evolves and how we reorganise societies, but thinks biology is more complex: walking on two feet and cooking food with fire also mattered, so McKenna's version was a little mushroom heavy.

Some fungi are real threats: rice blast destroys rice that could feed 60 million people a year, another fungus is killing ash trees, and a fungal superbug is putting people in hospital. But the insect-puppeting fungi from The Last of Us are not a threat to humans now, perhaps only over a very long time.