Episode 113: Sam Crosby | Returning to Myth, Wisdom and Eldership

Dec 19, 2025

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Right then, this is our final episode of this year.

But first up to say a big hearty thank you to all who have listened, shared and supported the podcast this year.

To all the guests who’ve joined the rambling - respect for your time, wisdom and open-ness.

And to my podcast crew who help make this a reality - Charlie Shread, Seemah Nahome-Burgess and Fin Burgess.

And a massive shout out to those who subscribe with a monthly payment to this project.

So to Episode 113…

My guest, Sam Crosby, is an oral storyteller and myth-informed guide whose work braids together story, psyche, ancestry, eldership and the living Earth.

This episode was recorded around the fire at Ghost Wood Down - two men sitting in the half-light, speaking honestly about what it is to search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly senseless.

Across two hours we wandered, wondered, and returned again and again to the mythic ground beneath our feet - the place modernity keeps trying to concrete over.

But there were core themes and patterns we were carrying throughout:

1. Myth as orientation, not entertainment

Myth isn’t a story about long ago - it’s a technology for staying human in ambiguous, unraveling times. We kept returning to myth as a compass when the rational mind fails.

2. Eldership vs.“Oldership”

A core wound: we’ve lost the adults who know how to hold the whole. Modernity extends lifespans but not wisdom.Sam goes deep into the distinction between age and elderhood - and the hunger for guidance that can hold complexity without collapsing into certainty.

3. The mythic roots of the AI moment

What if the crisis with AI is not technological — it is mythic.Humanity is generating intelligence way faster than it is generating wisdom. Our conversation suggests AI as a kind of mirror, revealing our disconnection from story, meaning and long arcs of time.

4. The crisis beneath the crisis: meaninglessness

What makes these times unbearable is not the data - it’s the absence of orientation. Sam repeatedly speaks to the human need for story, ritual and shared containers of meaning.

5. Rites of Passage & thresholds

One of our deepest shared passions: Cultures that lack thresholds create perpetual adolescence.This is why the absence of elders is so severe — there is no one to midwife beginnings or endings.

6. Stories as living beings

Sam treats stories as alive, with their own agency. This shifts storytelling from performance to participation - a relational act where story chooses the teller and carrier.

7. The danger of speed & the loss of the underworld

Modernity has flattened the vertical dimensions of being -no descent, no soul work, no underworld, no mysteries. We point toward slowness, ambiguity, and unknowing as necessary conditions for true wisdom to spread.

Sam is a wonderful human who speaks beautifully with great humility, courage, and imagination, and is doing really extraordinary work, especially the project on rekindling cultures of eldership, which we speak to at length here and I link to in the show notes below.