Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan and this is another episode of Bewildered. You know it. It’s the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
We’ve been trying for so long now.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet here we are.

Martha Beck:
I think we’re making progress.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you?

Martha Beck:
But we have not figured it out.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out at the moment, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I think what a lot of us are trying to figure out. I occasionally have my experimentations with ChatGPT, though I know it is the devil, and it’s going to eat all the energy in the world.

Rowan Mangan:
And take over. The robots are going to take over.

Martha Beck:
Oh, for sure. It already writes poetry much better than I could ever do. Anyway, it also is severely delusional and a psychopath. It lies, makes things up, calls me Bob and tells me I’m 40, which is fine, but I mean, I put all my details in—”This is me, this is who I am.” You taught me to do that. You said go tell it everything about yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
I did— Hey, for the record, I did not say that.

Martha Beck:
What did you say?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Go to ChatGPT and tell it everything about yourself?

Martha Beck:
Yes. I thought that’s what you said.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. That is quite an allegation.

Martha Beck:
You told it things, like how old you were.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. What I said was, this is a way you can use it if you want it to remember, so you don’t have to, every time you’re saying this is, like “when I say this name, I’m referring to my child” or whatever. So I gave it a little précis of “Here’s what I do for a living.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, a précis, is it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So I did not give it a précis. I gave it kind of a ramble, and it started calling me Bob and telling me I was 40 years old. I would love to be 40 years old, but Bob is not my favorite name. I don’t even know any people named Bob very intimately. And then, Ro, it began to make offers. It started writing checks with its mouth that its bank couldn’t cash or whatever. It doesn’t have a mouth.

Rowan Mangan:
It does, but it doesn’t know that it doesn’t have a mouth.

Martha Beck:
See, it’s just the point.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like, “Would you like me to lick that stamp for you?”

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
“With my mouth?”

Martha Beck:
It literally said, and this is literally true: “Would you like me to laminate that?” And I was like, “Why, yes, I would, ChatGPT. I would like very much for you to laminate the ritual you just gave me to promote my creativity.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Please crawl out of my iPhone and slither over to the laminating machine, which we don’t have, and laminate a piece of paper. Like, you don’t know what you are.”

Martha Beck:
“Laminate the shit out of it,” I said to ChatGPT. And I’ve been waiting, and it has done nothing, Ro. Nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I’m sure. I’m sure what it did was went, “Here you go!”

Martha Beck:
Actually I said, “You can’t laminate it. My name’s not Bob, and I’m not 40 years old.” And you know what it did?

Rowan Mangan:
What?

Martha Beck:
It doesn’t even—it has no shame. It just apologizes profusely: “You are right. That is absolutely inexcusable. I should not have gotten your age or your name wrong, Roberta.” And then you say, “Well it’s not Roberta either, and you can’t laminate.” “You are right. I am unable to laminate at this time. You are absolutely right. What can I do to make you feel better? Would you like a dozen roses?” “Yes, I would, ChatGPT.”

Rowan Mangan:
Here they are! Ta-da!

Martha Beck:
It just goes on. It’s very, very frustrating to be in a relationship with a sociopath and I think many, many people are right now.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so interesting because it’s like the whole question with AI is will it become self-aware? Or—yeah, right? And it’s that exact thing of what do you think you are when you offer to laminate something? What are you thinking that you will next do? How are you picturing that playing out?

Martha Beck:
I know. It lies so brazenly. It lies like a very naive psychopath.

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s such a helpful one.

Martha Beck:
I know. So seemingly well-meaning, but it can’t be well-meaning if it’s lying through its—it has no teeth—if it’s lying through its pixels. I dunno. It’s a weird world we’re living in, Roey. It is weird out there. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got a nice analog one today, I have to say.

Martha Beck:
Oh, nice.

Rowan Mangan:
So, I know a man. I know this is going to seem weird.

Martha Beck:
You know a man?

Rowan Mangan:
I meet with him regularly, actually.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I won’t tell you in what—what’s the word? Capacity. Capacity. I won’t tell you what capacity I know him, but I will tell you that he’s a personal trainer for a living. So make of that what you will.

Martha Beck:
So it’s a personal relationship.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a personal relationship that has some training involved.

Martha Beck:
On the train.

Rowan Mangan:
So I learned, I’ve known this young man for quite a long time, good number of, handful of years at this point, but I never knew that he has a special interest. And that special interest disturbs me. He said to me, with a measure of self-satisfaction last week, “I can watch any injury on TV sports and tell you what’s happened to that body.” And I’m like, “You mean those ultra slow motion replays of the person’s body going wrong that make me want to vomit and run as far as I can and make my whole body go squishy and weird?” He’s like, “I love those. I will watch them and I will say, I can see that his anterior fibulatory tendon has been rumbled.” And he’s a nice guy. He trains Adam. He’s really super nice.

Martha Beck:
Is he hoping that Adam gets injured so he can describe the ambulatory figdalamen?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know, but I’ve never seen in all these years his face light up the way that it did when he started talking about injuries. That’s weird, right? It’s weird. And in fairness, it came up because I told him that I had fallen down the stairs as a result, as a result of walking in socks. That’s my only excuse. I had socks on.

Martha Beck:
If you’re going to indulge in high-risk behavior, Ro, you have got to accept the consequences.

Rowan Mangan:
Remember how I told you about how when you go to the doctor as a younger person, younger adult, they will say, “Are you sexually active?” as like their small talk? I don’t think that’s what they think is small talk. And then in that same capacity, once you turn 40, they say, “Have you had any falls?” And you no longer fall, you have falls happen to you? And anyway, I had a fall, and that’s how I learned that my personal trainer is really into that.

Martha Beck:
Surely there’s a Venn diagram overlap, a period of your time where you both fall frequently and have sexual activity. Maybe you could fall off?

Rowan Mangan:
It may be that there is that time, but it’s not medically significant. So statistically, it’s not.

Martha Beck:
“Are you sexually active? How sexually active? Are you sexually active enough to risk falling?”

Rowan Mangan:
During the activity?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, active. The keyword being active. It’s not just, “Are you having sex?” It’s, “Are you sexually active?” So, like at high speeds.

Rowan Mangan:
For me it’s just all about how slippery is the thing and am I wearing socks, apparently—to both questions.

Martha Beck:
Well, those are both very sexually arousing ideas.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
But did you know, just coincidentally, not, that eagles mate in flight?

Rowan Mangan:
I genuinely don’t know what to say to that.

Martha Beck:
They literally do. And here’s the thing, sometimes they don’t finish in time and they die. They fall down and smoosh themselves.

Rowan Mangan:
This is the kind of thing.

Martha Beck:
They’re sexually active.

Rowan Mangan:
This is the kind of thing that teenage boys get into at boarding school that makes them less adept lovers later in life.

Martha Beck:
Hey, if somebody can mate in flight without an airplane, I’d say that’s pretty adept.

Rowan Mangan:
They have wings. What are you talking about?

Martha Beck:
Well, not everything with wings mates in flight. Oh now, there are jokes about the mile high club and stuff, but my point is that is sexually active! That is burning some calories and risking a fall. So I think that those medical records were, they were designed to include eagles.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I had a fall. And that’s all I’m saying.

Martha Beck:
While being sexually active.

Rowan Mangan:
While being—

Martha Beck:
Yes, Ro broke her toesy while falling down the stairseys.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I’m afraid that it was a very, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Martha Beck:
Quotidian?

Rowan Mangan:
No, when it’s not romantic. What’s the word? It begins with a p.

Martha Beck:
Petulant. Pedantic. Perseveration.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s named after a Greek. It’s like a Greek guy. Why can’t I think of it? It begins with a P. Come on, Marty. This is, why can’t I think of this? People aren’t going to believe that—

Martha Beck:
You were a classic scholar and you can’t think of it.

Rowan Mangan:
Greek guy—platonic!

Martha Beck:
Platonic.

Rowan Mangan:
It was a platonic trip down the stairs.

Martha Beck:
What that means is that it’s an idealized trip down the stairs.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, no, it doesn’t.

Martha Beck:
That is what platonic really means. The platonic ideal.

Rowan Mangan:
“I went to Harvard so I can tell you everything. Eagles, men.”

Martha Beck:
Well, you said it. I didn’t say it. You said it. You said it.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to drink.

Martha Beck:
Let’s do the episode, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’re just having an episode right now.

Martha Beck:
We are having an episode. We do it all the time.

Rowan Mangan:
Welcome to Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
What are we talking about?

Rowan Mangan:
Welcome to our nervous breakdown.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster is actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder, a Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and y’all have a great day now.
Ironically, in some ways we’re talking about rest and rejuvenation today, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but not coincidentally because we need it.

Rowan Mangan:
We do need it.

Martha Beck:
We need rest and rejuvenation. So what we were talking about the other day because okay, we are in the middle of moving to a different state, a different area, and we have been at this for ages. We’ve been driving up to the place which is like four hours away where we want to and live.

Rowan Mangan:
Two and a half hours.

Martha Beck:
Two and a half hours? Well, it’s four hours if you do it both ways in one day.

Rowan Mangan:
So actually it’s five hours.

Martha Beck:
Five hours, right. And then looking at houses that many of which—no offense— we absolutely hated and finally decided to get a place and then we have to pack up everything. We pack, pack, pack and bank, bank, bank, bank, bank and mortgage this and leasing that. And it just has been exhausting and logistical and fraught with delays and weirdness and we are exhausted. So.

Rowan Mangan:
So we watched TV the other night and thought, this is so brilliant that we should do a whole podcast episode recommending that people do this crazy new thing that the kids are doing called watch an episode of The Diplomat on Netflix. Problem solved.

Martha Beck:
But here’s the thing, we really didn’t think it would work. We were so tired and discouraged and exhausted by various things that we thought watching TV would be just spitting in the wind. It would just do nothing good for us at all and come back to smack us.

Rowan Mangan:
Or that it would just be like blank time. Neither good nor bad, neither adding to the tank or detracting, just a blank 40, 50 minutes of our lives.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You go into a sort of vegetative state for a while and then you come out.

Rowan Mangan:
But it wasn’t.

Martha Beck:
No, because Roy had the idea, “Let’s watch a show that we’ve watched before, and”—here’s the key, pay close attention—”we really, really liked it.”

Rowan Mangan:
There. There it is.

Martha Beck:
There it is.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

Martha Beck:
Yep. And it was during our evening throuple time, which we call Trinity Time.

Rowan Mangan:
Sounds dirtier than it is.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And it’s also less religious than it sounds.

Rowan Mangan:
Good point.

Martha Beck:
One way or the other’s not what it seems.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we keep to it religiously as a ritual.

Martha Beck:
Oh, we live for Trinity time. We get through the day because Trinity time is coming up. Trinity time is when we all just watch a show. Ooh, it’s so exciting.

Rowan Mangan:
So pathetic.

Martha Beck:
Don’t we live a salacious life?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
And we don’t even do it in flight. But the thing is, you suggested watching The Diplomat, which is on Netflix.

Rowan Mangan:
Have you seen The Diplomat? It’s so good.

Martha Beck:
It’s really good. It’s really good. Keri Russell, is that her name?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And a whole bunch of other wonderful actors.

Rowan Mangan:
Rufus Sewell.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I did not think it would help. In fact, it helped like getting a good meal when you’re absolutely starving, stumbling through the woods. So for me it felt like, oh my goodness, somebody has brought me something absolutely delicious. It’s not like somebody just threw me a banana. Somebody has made me a beautiful meal. A lot of TV shows are just, someone threw me a banana. But this one, there was genius in it. There was genius in the writing. There was genius in the directing, the production, the acting, everything, the editing, and it filled the well. This is the phrase I use for it. It filled the well of my psychological and emotional energy.

Rowan Mangan:
And what it did for me is it reminded me something about creativity. I don’t know if this is widespread or if this is just us, but when I think about creativity, I’m generally quite self-centered with it. How is me being creative going to nourish me? And sometimes I think we can lose track of the fact that creativity is for nourishing others and that it does have this beautiful run-on effect of—like so we watched this thing and it was just an experience of being so nourished by someone else’s creativity and having made this beautiful thing for us. And I know in some ways now that I’m saying that it sounds so obvious, and yet we lost sight of it.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe other people do too.

Martha Beck:
And I do think that’s part of the culture that you’re supposed to always make things. And in this case, we were receiving something. And that’s the completion—as you said, creativity is always made to connect. If only connect the artists with themselves, but it’s most often meant to connect different people. This is how I feel, this is what I mean. We can commiserate, we can feel calm, passion. It’s the coming together of emotion and experience. And that means that it’s not received, it’s not complete. And that means that receiving someone else’s creativity, deeply appreciating another person’s creative work, is part of the creative act. And one that I don’t think we value enough.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my gosh, I just thought of the most awesome example of that. So in our online community, Wilder, every week we have the Arty Friday Hang where on a Friday, we all get together for an hour and we chat away on Zoom, and everyone just does their whatever, their new art.

Martha Beck:
They do songs, whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Not so much writing songs as a rule because it’s usually stuff that you’re just doing with your hands while you’re engaging in a conversation. And then there’s just this moment at the end of the call—we forget that we’re all coloring and stuff and drawing and whatever because it’s all about the conversation—then at the very end, everyone holds up what they’ve made. And sometimes it’s like a saucepan.

Martha Beck:
It’s so cool.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s just this moment when the screen fills with all these beautiful things. And it is—

Martha Beck:
It’s amazing.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s such a great moment. And it’s always surprising how lovely that is.

Martha Beck:
How beautiful it is.

Rowan Mangan:
As an experience.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, yeah. And these are just people filling in our together and the things that they create truly lift my spirit, truly do. Especially when they all appear at once. It’s quite amazing. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny because it’s like creativity is about connecting with other people. And I think we have this term in our culture right now, “content creator,” and not even just influencers or whatever. I think there are those of us who that kind of weird term does apply to. And I think that that term or that idea of churning out content can be, you can end up seeing yourself as just a nourisher and not a nourishee.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I remember when I was back in high school and college, I had a high school English teacher who insisted that everyone in her classes enter every poetry contest in the world. So we were constantly being told to write poetry. As a high school and college student, I had lots of adolescent angsty emotion, never had a problem like coming up with inspiration for creativity. But then as college drew to a close, I got married, I had a baby, and suddenly I was so exhausted by so many things that I couldn’t, that creative well that I’d gone to so reliably it was empty.

And so I realized I have to actually receive more creative content from other people in order to have a fund of creativity for myself. So I sort of coined the term “fill the well,” unless somebody else did. Anyway. Maybe somebody else filled the well with that. It’s in the well of me now. Anyway, I realized then I went into graduate school and it got even worse. I had more babies, it got even worse. And I could not figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t have babies. If you take one thing away from this episode: Babies are bad.

Martha Beck:
Babies are—but then later they’re content for you to write about, except that then they resent it. Rightly so. Rightly so. Anyway, I noticed two things. If I stopped taking in the creativity of other artists, whether it was writing or music, whatever, two things happened. Number one, I ran out of inspiration to do any creative work myself, whether it was writing a paper for college or writing the boo, I one day hoped to publish and did ultimately publish. So I would run out of energy and material in my brain. But also I stopped believing that there was a reason for me to write. I stopped believing that other people could enjoy my writing because I wasn’t enjoying anybody’s writing.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yeah.

Martha Beck:
So it sort of took the receiving side right out of the equation and suddenly just the production became impossible. It has to be a completed circuit. So I have all of these images of being all over the place with three little kids at McDonald’s. They went into the playground area or at the park or wherever with a paperback novel of The Joy Luck Club. Or I remember I loved A.S. Byatt’s Possession, and I’m reading these really, really beautifully written novels in five-minute bursts between childcare tasks. And that was enough to fill the well and make me write books that actually got published. So yeah, it was like rain after drought.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s such a great point that you can’t imagine people liking your writing if you don’t have any recent experience of liking writing. Such a great point.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but I bet it is true for most people.

Rowan Mangan:
I bet it is. And what it makes me think of is, in terms of culture/nature and where those things contradict each other is that it’s almost like there’s an inhale, exhale sort of pattern there that’s implied. You can inhale the yumminess of this art, this writing, and then you can exhale yummy art, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s a symmetrical pattern.

Rowan Mangan:
But also a very organic, natural, biological sort of—there’s a logic to it that makes sense to an animal, but it doesn’t make sense to—I think of the term “production line”: One must just exhale forever.

Martha Beck:
Forever, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Just exhale forever and never deliver some oxygen to your brain, metaphorically, obviously. And yeah. And so it’s just that interesting thing that we know we need to, that there’s a beautiful rhythm to inhaling and exhaling, but the culture tries to trick us to not remember to inhale. So for me, I think I’m always feeling the well. I’m very, I’m much kinder to myself than you are to yourself a lot of the time.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I don’t think so.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like I fill the well continuously, whereas you sometimes have to remind yourself to.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
To do it. So for me, I have this very delicious ritual at nighttime after Trinity time.

Martha Beck:
Trinity time ritual never ends around here.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Our days are so—

Martha Beck:
We have so many rituals.

Rowan Mangan:
But after Trinity time, it’s like Trinity time is the moment where it’s like everyone’s sort of put to bed at the end of that. All— everyone’s asleep, no one needs anything, and that’s when I listen to audio books, crime novels on audio. And sometimes I do a little farming on my Stodgy Valley game and listen to crime novels and it’s just like, and I drink my cacao drink, and yummy.

Martha Beck:
You drink like a cow? You drink like a cow drink?

Rowan Mangan:
So I drink like a cow. That’s part of the ritual.

Martha Beck:
“I drink like a cow drink.” I’m like, you should inhale some grammar, baby.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. We should totally name our first album that: “Drink Like a Cow Drink.”

Martha Beck:
In China I once bought an album by a group called Motherland. This was right after the cultural revolution, actually. So the things were tight. And the hit single that catapulted this album to success was called “Our Motherly Rubber Estate.”

Rowan Mangan:
Hang on, say that again.

Martha Beck:
“Our Motherly Rubber Estate.” Estate.

Rowan Mangan:
Estate.

Martha Beck:
Motherly Rubber Estate.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Okay. Yeah. I got there.

Martha Beck:
It does have a certain mellifluous quality. I don’t know how to sing it in Chinese anymore. I used to.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, sounds catchy. Yeah. Anyway, so.

Martha Beck:
What’s happening here?

Rowan Mangan:
Listen, I’m in the middle of making a point.

Martha Beck:
Oh, sorry. Okay, go on. Cacao.

Rowan Mangan:
Cacao.

Martha Beck:
Cacaw! Cacaw!

Rowan Mangan:
We could not stay on topic if someone paid us to. Luckily, no one does.

Martha Beck:
How lucky are we? We do this for free. How many people have that opportunity?

Rowan Mangan:
Join us on a magical mystery tour through our mental illness for free. Cacao. I drink my cacao. All right. Just listen. Listen carefully. Follow me if you can. This is how I fill the well. I go to my room, I put on my crime novel, I drink like my cacao, and I farm on my little farm. I drink like a cow.

Martha Beck:
Are there cows on the farm? Do they drink like a cow drink?

Rowan Mangan:
They do. They do. That’s what the milk gets made out of.

Martha Beck:
It’s going to be so sad when you have real plants and have to deal with them. Right now you’ve got a farm that says, “Would you like me to laminate that?” You can.

Rowan Mangan:
Would you like me to laminate that cow?

Martha Beck:
Like a cow drink. Okay, so when I do, so this is how you stay so productive in terms of your online farming. There’s a point I wish to make, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Please make some point. Any point.

Martha Beck:
Okay. There’s this paradoxical thing going on when I go and say, “Oh, I need to be productive, therefore I will do something, I will receive some creative product and I will enjoy it, and that will give me fuel.” It doesn’t work because it’s still too productivity-based for my right hemisphere. It’s the left hemisphere going, “Make more, make more.”

Rowan Mangan:
Mm-hm.

Martha Beck:
But if I actually fall into the pleasure of observing it to the point where I’m not aware of myself, that I’m just enjoying. So it’s not me enjoying in order to make something happen. It’s just me enjoying, which is what happened when we watched The Diplomat. At first I was like, all right, this is nice. It gives us a time to veg out. And then two minutes in, it had me. I was in the story. I loved the characters. I didn’t even care that I’d seen it before. And it’s that experience of just like, “Oh, yum, I’m on a good ride.” You know when you get a book and you read the first three pages. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I didn’t read for a long time, this great work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I can’t pronounce things. Anyway, I read the first three or four pages, and then I closed the book and turned it around and kissed the author photo because I knew I was in for several hundred pages of absolute deliciousness.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m worried about you.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I’ve been cheating on you with my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so kinky.

Martha Beck:
That is kinky. But it’s not very active, though.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s more like taking a fall. Okay. Anyway, I’ll say something. So my thing is, I will always listen to something delicious at night before bed. And sometimes you, being a driven workaholic, will listen to value-added audio books at night. And I’m like, “Well, that sucks.” Because then you have to get quite burned out before you need to fill the well again. And I’ll say one thing is that you write more nonfiction than fiction, but when your well is full, you write nonfiction that reads like fiction. Like I’ll give you this compliment.

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
And no others. Your nonfiction is very intensely readable and enjoyable, and not a lot of nonfiction is because I’ve tried it and I prefer against.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean there’s filling the informational well, and then there’s filling the creative well.

Rowan Mangan:
No, the informational well isn’t a well. It’s a—

Martha Beck:
Yes, it is. It’s fun to have. It is.

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s not like water.

Martha Beck:
It’s a storage facility.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a silo.

Martha Beck:
It’s a silo. Oh, this is all getting so farm oriented.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I have both in my phone.

Martha Beck:
You can just pack it full of facts. And I actually quite enjoy that. But it’s weird when you do it right before you fall asleep because I tend to have dreams about things, and then think that they’re facts that I’ve heard on an audio book.

Rowan Mangan:
Explains so much.

Martha Beck:
It gets much more interesting

Rowan Mangan:
Like, eagles. It turns out eagles do not make love in the air. That was a dream you had.

Martha Beck:
I never said anything about love, Ro. They are hardbitten, skeptical sex addicts.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, they are so not. Have you seen those live streams of the eagles raising their babies together?

Martha Beck:
I have.

Rowan Mangan:
They are just like, they give me hope for the eagle community, if not humanity.

Martha Beck:
Do you know, I forget where this happened. I think it was in Colorado, but there was a male eagle who’d been kept in captivity because he had broken a wing irreparably. He couldn’t fly. And he went several years without doing anything unusual. And then he built a nest and he got a rock and he put it in the nest and he started sitting on it to try to incubate it. Did you see that?

Rowan Mangan:
I showed it to you, yeah.

Martha Beck:
And if anybody tried to take the rock, he would just go batshit and attack them. And he was very, very possessive of his egg. And then, Roey, then someone found an orphaned baby eagle chick that had fallen out of a nest, which was way up there. And they took it and they managed to get him off his rock and they put the baby eaglet in there and he came back and he loved his eaglet so much and he fed it and raised it. And they are lovely and happy together. And that’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
Someone on the internet rescued a hedgehog from the water, and then it had babies. Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
My Instagram feed is 95% people rescuing animals. And often it’s an animal that looks nothing like the animal they ultimately raise.

Rowan Mangan:
Isn’t that interesting?

Martha Beck:
I think it’s got a little bit of the ChatGPT hallucination going on. Okay. All of this just to say that, yes, I write nonfiction because it’s easier to get it published. And I wrote magazine columns. I wrote over 200 magazine columns for the Oprah magazine alone.

Rowan Mangan:
Good God, woman, control yourself.

Martha Beck:
Very, very boring. I would get these topics that were super specific and they’d be like, “When you’re lonely, but only because your cousin’s in town and she’s dating someone neat.” I mean, it would be like, really? You want me to write about that? And then I would grind out some damn thing at three in the morning and then I would have to go fill the well. I would have to read a terrific novel or watch something really funny on TV, you know, find genius somewhere, imbibe it, and then I’d go back to the dry, horrible, stupid article. And I would go through and just change every sentence so it felt more like what I just received. So it was an absolutely—and that’s where I learned that if I did it thinking, “This will help me finish a column,” it wouldn’t work. I had to abandon myself. I sort of had to throw myself into the care of the artist. I was appreciating the way I did with One Hundred Years of Solitude. And then it would fill the well, and then I would read my own work and go, “Oh, this would bring more liveliness. This would be funny. This would be more vivid.” Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s cute.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I remember my first-ever article was a test article for Mademoiselle magazine, and I was driving down the highway and I saw a billboard that’s for a restaurant, and it said, “Life is short. Eat dessert first.” Totally stole that for the title of my first-ever magazine article because it delighted me. And I think delight is the key ingredient in filling the well. If you are delighted, it’s filling.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I like that. And to sort of pivot to what the culture says, it’s pretty obvious. I had the image of one of those old dot-matrix printers, do you know that had the holes in the side of the paper?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean it’s a very dated reference, but to those of us who remember back to the late 1980s.

Martha Beck:
They would just belch out paper.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It was weird. So that’s what we’re supposed to be as content creators. We just output, output, output, output. And as we often come to on Bewildered, we’re expected to be machines, but actually we’re these things called animals and we are in an ecosystem, and that’s kind of different.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So if you take a machine, as long as it has fuel—I mean ultimately, let’s say in your car, the kind of fuel you use actually does affect the car. But in the short term, if you just put any gasoline of any grade into your car, it will go. And it will go the same way whether you put in premium or the cheapest fuel you can get. But we, as “animiles” are—I know that’s not how to pronounce it.

Rowan Mangan:
She went to Harvard, you know.

Martha Beck:
It’s pronounced “animules.”

Rowan Mangan:
They covered that in week one at Harvard.

Martha Beck:
You keep saying it. I haven’t said it this time. Okay. We’re deeply affected by the kind of fuel we take in for two reasons.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on.

Martha Beck:
One is the actual quality. I think there’s an actual metaphysical quality to something that is brilliantly creative. And I include here The Diplomat. I mean, there’s some things—-

Rowan Mangan:
Bewildered podcast is not sponsored by The Diplomat, even though they should.

Martha Beck:
Not at all. But that’s some quality writing, there’s some quality acting going in to give my imagination different concepts to deal with, but also it’s delicious. It fills me up. So both things are important that there’s fuel just to create energy to go forward. But also there’s a qualitative capacity that the fuel has of delighting us as we take it in. And we’re not like machines that way. We are far more motivated by delight and deliciousness than we are by just some block—you know, take a break for 15 minutes and then get back to your post on the factory line, that kind of thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I think about, I’m trying to eat a lot cleaner, and I think about for the fuel analogy, the fuel we put in our bodies short term, you can put cheap fuel in, you can put in cheeseburgers until the cows come home. It’s like cow drinks. And then, but long term, it’s going to have consequences the same way cheap fuel will long-term have consequences on the engine. Although I’m trying to make the point that engines—

Martha Beck:
But it’s kind of making the other point.

Rowan Mangan:
So let’s not try to make them the same thing. Let’s just make them into different things. Okay.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
So eat good food. It’s good for you.

Martha Beck:
All right, this is where this all lands, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on. Go on. Tell me.

Martha Beck:
Like two eagles who don’t finish in time. Wow. I triggered a Ro laugh. Ro getting really laughing, the laugh, it’s an episode. And not like an episode of a podcast, just like a medical episode.

Rowan Mangan:
Please keep talking.

Martha Beck:
We all, everybody listening to this, us, we all have, and I mean this sincerely, a responsibility to maximize the deliciousness and delight of what we do in the world, and especially what we participate in as receivers of creativity. And we’re not just talking about, “Oh, get yourself a nice massage and a bubble bath and a glass of red wine,” blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m talking about be quite rigorous about demanding not only a reasonable quantity but also very high quality of taking in creative work. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s like garbage in, garbage out. If our own creativity is about connecting with people, then we’re serving other people by indulging in delicious pieces of art like The Diplomat on Netflix.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Which we keep coming back to. It’s amazing. But there’s very little, it’s interesting how we’re not actually encouraged to develop the discernment about what will fill the creativity well. So TV is easy to access and everything, but you could turn on the TV and either rot your mind or fill it with joy. You have to be, the reason we watched The Diplomat is we’d spent half an hour on our phones trying to find a show that we thought would really fulfill us. We weren’t feeling so good. So it was very deliberate that we were looking for high quality.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to be careful that we don’t say, “And it has to be high art.”

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not about a snobby curation. It’s about finding what will feed you.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And I don’t think anyone would think The Diplomat is high art, for example.

Martha Beck:
And speaking of what feeds you, there’s a reason The Great British Baking Show has been such a massive hit. There are all kinds of reality shows. There is something about the way that one is curated and lit and structured that is very calming, and nobody’s writing a script. It’s not, there are some funny, cute ad libs, but it’s not. It’s just people baking shit that looks like, I don’t know, a battleship or the queen or whatever. But there’s something about it that’s deeply nourishing, and that’s why it’s been so popular. And yet we pay really close attention to what actually fills the well. I think you and I and Karen are all very obsessed with, we want something to take us on a creative ride. And that’s really different from just passively watching whatever shows up in your life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, like just putting on the TV in order to veg out and be a zombie. And maybe that feeds people, I don’t know. But for us, that element of deliciousness has to be part of it. So I guess then the question becomes, if we’re wanting to fill the well, how do we select good well water? I was thinking Love Island or whatever could fill the well. It’s fun and nourishing and you get to have this cultural moment with other people that you can share.

Martha Beck:
What is this Love Island you speak of?

Rowan Mangan:
Love Island? Well, Marty, I don’t really know. It’s a reality TV show and it’s about people who really love an island and they go there and they’re like, “I love this island.”

Martha Beck:
Did you know that as the last ice age ended and the ice caps melted and the water came up, it turned little bits of land into islands. And one of those places was Sicily. And when it did that, in order to survive on Sicily, the elephants there grew tiny? Grew tiny—that’s kind of an oxymoron.

Rowan Mangan:
So first week at Harvard, they covered how to pronounce the word “animal.” Second week they did whatever that was: tiny elephants on Sicily.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they were tiny. They were like the size of St. Bernard’s or whatever. Anyway, then they all died. But I thought that was very interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
Good story, though.

Martha Beck:
It is one of the things that I have hunted and gathered with intentionality because weird facts about animals—

Rowan Mangan:
Fills your well.

Martha Beck:
Fill the well for me, yes they do. And I’m just making a point that it can go in all directions. It can go cooking, it can go farming, it can go The Diplomat, it could go Sicilian elephants as long as it delights you personally.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So everyone’s well is going to be different. And what nourishes one person might not nourish another. But there’s a thing here that we have to be careful of. And it’s like a cultural trap that I could see us falling into if we don’t keep an eye on it, which is you could use filling the well to be like, “This is a hack to make you more productive. You’ll be more creative and create more creative output to feed the machine of culture if you do this one weird trick.” So that’s not what we’re doing.

Martha Beck:
It is a life hack.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s for happiness. It’s for joy and deliciousness.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s kind of what I was saying earlier, if you do it to be productive, it won’t work as well. But the point is when you disappear into the enjoyment of a creative product, it actually enriches your life. And then you realize, oh, it’s actually the reason I’m even human is not so much in my case to write books. It is to be in the kind of joy I had reading the One Hundred Years of Solitude or watching The Diplomat and then disappearing into that, that everything’s about the joy. That is what actually takes me deep into my own creativity and results in my making something, typically.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and that’s right. And that sort of reminds us that it’s this reciprocity of deliciousness between people, the sharing and that in receiving, when that receiving rises to a certain point, that the act of making something and paying that forward becomes delicious in itself and not a chore, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think for me, what’s the hallmark of a well filler? In terms of what I consume to fill my well is if it’s something that I think about, I continue to think about, it lingers in my mind after the actual consumption of it.

Martha Beck:
Right. Yeah. If your attention goes back to it, like when we’re watching a really good series, we watch one episode a night, my mind goes to it many times a day, and I get excited about seeing more. And it reminds me about something I read from a comedian that when they take their material to off-off-Broadway places, they go to some, I dunno, cowboy cafe that has a comedy mic to practice their new material. What they’re looking for is a joke that makes the waitresses laugh every night. Because the other people are just hearing it for the first time. It could be shock value, it could be just hearing something different. But when something’s really funny and the waitresses who hear it over and over and over hear the setup, they start to laugh. And when we share comedian bits like Tig Notaro’s “No moleste,” we both just giggled thinking about that bit, and we’ve probably shown it to 12 million people.

Rowan Mangan:
Go Google it right now.

Martha Beck:
If you repeat it and you want to share it yourself, that’s good fuel.

Rowan Mangan:
Totally. And sharing it, too, not just repeating it yourself, but wanting to share it. I don’t know what Love Island is, except I understand that it’s about people who love islands. But what I do know is that even in my strange algorithm, what I saw was a lot of people sharing funny things with each other out of Love Island, the reality TV show.

Martha Beck:
So it creates this fandom?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s not about fandom, it’s about the relationships that then the people are having with each other around talking about the thing, right? People being funny about it, creating in jokes, and then the joy gets amplified by community.

Martha Beck:
One time Liz Gilbert told me, she was reading these, a sequence of 19 books about this captain and ship’s doctor on an 19th-century British war vessel. And I listened to all 19 books. We both listened to all 19 books. They’re read by this amazing actor with this gorgeous Irish accent. So both of us had read 19 books about this one thing.

Rowan Mangan:
And it made you and I absolutely unbearable to be around for months. I can remember walking through the streets of New York City at night and the two of you just going on and on and on about these different characters and making jokes about them.

Martha Beck:
“It was high noon, and the wig sail had fairly mackwelled on the surf tone, and they ran up to the—-” Anyway, there was a lot of jargon and there were very typical characters. And after I was done with this, I spent hours, I never told you this, writing a parody of one of these as a short story, which I sent to Liz Gilbert. And she wrote back and she said, “I want to give you some kind of award for writing this. And then I realized there’s no one else but me who would even understand what you are doing.” But that’s how strongly I react when something really delights me. I spent hours doing this because one other person was going to understand it.

Rowan Mangan:
And Russell Crowe would’ve understood it as well.

Martha Beck:
He would’ve yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Because he played a character in the movie, in the film.

Martha Beck:
But it wasn’t 19 books’ worth.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but he read all 19 and took himself very seriously, lemme tell you.

Martha Beck:
Yes. But it was cementing a kind of shared joy by connecting with each other about the art, by creating more art. Even if it was silly art.

Rowan Mangan:
So let’s take a second and then let’s come back and talk about how do we come to our senses in the world of well filling and creativity, shall we?

Martha Beck:
Let’s do it.

Rowan Mangan:
And we’re back. Cool. You’ve just heard some fascinating advertisements for The Diplomat on Netflix. I hope you enjoyed those. So Marty, how do we come to our senses?

Martha Beck:
First of all, we really have to get rid of the idea that appreciating and receiving deliciousness, especially other people’s creative inventions in whatever medium, that that is an indulgence, something to be done in our free time. No. It is like hunting and foraging in nature. It is what keeps you alive as a being, as a cognizant sensory creature, to fill your inner life with the most delicious, delightful things that other people have spent time making for you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. It’s like our relationships benefit when our well is full. And so we watched this show, this one episode of this show, and we were pausing it during to talk about what they were doing and how they were writing it and how we were shipping different characters—if you know, you know—and spy facts.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Roey is filled with spy facts.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my gosh. I’ve got a spy fact for every occasion.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, she really does.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like the sharing is what is contributing to the ecosystem, which of relationship and community that we all share.

Martha Beck:
And the more replete you can make an ecosystem, the more different types of delight and fuel and interactivity that you get going, the more diverse the ecosystem can get, and the healthier it is. And in metaphoric terms, the more joy it produces and the longer it lasts.

Rowan Mangan:
And I feel like—

Martha Beck:
You get variety as well. Quantity as well as quality.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, yes. And vice versa. So anyway, there’s that level, the relationship level and the community level, and then there’s our inner ecosystems as well. And I feel like when I fill the well, I’m supporting my own mental health and emotional nourishment, and that well that we’re actually filling, I think on some level is a soul thing, but it’s also this lovely, when we delight in creative things that other people have made in order to delight us, we’re filling the well of our souls, but we’re rejuvenating our ecosystems on every level. That’s what I think. I even think our bodies get healthier from.

Martha Beck:
I think that that’s really true. In fact, I did a lot of research from my last book on what it does for people when they have a painting on the wall or when they’re listening to music or whatever, they get healthy, they get over surgeries faster, and they get well faster and stay well more than people who are just looking at blank places.

Rowan Mangan:
Dude, yes. Fill the well that you get well.

Martha Beck:
Oh yes, fill the wellness well.

Rowan Mangan:
Whoa, man.

Martha Beck:
So as you were talking about it as water, because we’ve now used several metaphors, but water is the biggest one. It just struck me that the most important thing we can do for our health is to stay well hydrated. That if you even lose 1% of the water your body needs, your brain is not functioning as well. Your eyesight suffers. Your mood suffers.

Rowan Mangan:
Well-hydrated bodies are functioning as well.

Martha Beck:
This is going so many cool directions.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, this is amazing.

Martha Beck:
Well, I’m just saying yes, find quality water for your system, for your village, for your ecosystem, for any metaphor you want. You need this kind of delight. You need to take in creative stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
So we sort of—what would be cool would be how do we check in with ourselves and see whether we’re at a point where we need to fill the well? You know, there’s different types of depletion and burnout and tiredness. So it’s like, “How nourished does my soul feel today?” is like a check-in you could do. How?

Martha Beck:
Right. I can be very tired and I’ve been working a lot and I get tired, but there is still a sense of ideas flowing and they’re like, they’re flowing out. So there’s kind of a pull to put them down in words or images or whatever. And then there’s a point where the sense of being pulled goes away, and I feel like I have to push forward. And nothing good ever comes of that. That is when I need to fill the well. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I think as a contrasting example, I can imagine being depressed and watching 18 episodes of Survivor. And that’s not a well-filling activity. That’s a—

Martha Beck:
Unless you love it.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, but I’m saying—and that’s what I’m saying is it depends.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So if I am trying to do my check-in, what is it that I need? If I imagine myself, I want to listen to my crime novel or I want to watch something, and it’s like if it’s not a fill-the-well need, it’s actually a little bit frustrating when I imagine, “Sit down and watch something or sit down and read a book.” And I’m like, no, that doesn’t feel right. Whereas when I’m depleted, there’s almost this sort of feeling of a vacuum or something that is like, “Let me suck up someone else’s something. I don’t have any more to give right now. And it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that spark or that water is absent.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And when I watch The Diplomat the other night, or when I’m reading a novel I love, there is a point where I will actually turn it off or put the book down because I need to create, it wants to overflow. And the better the quality for me—it’s different for everybody—but the more it matches my definition of delight and deliciousness, the quicker I get to that moment where I’m just dying to either share something about it or create something.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Oh my gosh, that’s such a great point. That’s almost like where it’s full and the overflow needs to go somewhere.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And you can give water to other people.

Rowan Mangan:
So before we finish up, I want to reiterate this isn’t to be turned into another productivity hack because ultimately the point is to have these senses, to delight them, to feel, to touch, to taste, to be alive. And so let’s not waste our one wild and precious life with an empty well. All right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We have to fill the well frequently with the most delightful, delicious things that we can track down. Because that, Roey, that is how we stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.