Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out, like us.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we’re trying so hard and getting very, very little distance toward figuring it out.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s pretty subjective. I think how close I feel to having it figured out on a given day is pretty much how I feel about everything else.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. A couple of days ago, I really thought I almost had it all figured out, and then it just crashed and burned. And I realized I have nothing figured out at all.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you working on right now, as far as on the whole figuring-it-out front?

Martha Beck:
You know, parenting, which you’d think by my age I’d be done getting it wrong, but no. Because I recently realized, I thought that while we were in South Africa, our 4-year-old, Lila, had married one single golden retriever puppy named Waffle.

Rowan Mangan:
Perfectly acceptable.

Martha Beck:
Yes. She proposed, they had a marriage ceremony. She refers to Waffle as her husband. Waffle is, was it eight weeks old at the time? Which has moral implications. Yeah. But then you told me that on the little vacation that she’d taken to a different part of South Africa, she also married a maltipoo? What was the other dog?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s not bring it all down to race. She married another dog.

Martha Beck:
Okay. She married another dog, so she’s now married to, she’s a bigamist, and I’m not sure that I’m giving her a pattern of living that’s going to make her fit in really well at school. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s like that right-wing shock-jock line where it comes to gay marriage of “If you let men marry men, what’s going to be next? People marrying cockatiels? People marrying golden retrievers?” And it took our family to finally prove those people right.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. It’s so funny to hear you say that. It sounds so posh to an American when you say, “People marrying cockatiels” and it’s like shock jocks, “People marrying cockatiels?” That’s kind of how a right-wing shock jock talks in my mind. Not with this posh—

Rowan Mangan:
Because we have so much experience.

Martha Beck:
“Cockatiels.”

Rowan Mangan:
Also, I don’t know if I should bring it up or not now, but she also proposed—Lila, our daughter, also proposed to me recently.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
She picked a flower.

Martha Beck:
And I think the more troubling this is you said yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, of course I did. I want all my little girl’s dreams to come true.

Martha Beck:
Oh, are we going to get bad mail from this? I don’t know. I mean, this is tricky territory. This is why I’m trying to figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s why this is such a controversial podcast, guys.

Martha Beck:
It is.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re prepared to say it like it is.

Martha Beck:
We’re so controversial. What are you trying to figure out, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
Something quite different.

Martha Beck:
Oh, good!

Rowan Mangan:
Etiquette. I mean, I guess this is all about interpersonal stuff, right? Long time ago, I heard someone say that when you’re hosting a party or whatever, which of course we do all the time, you’re meant to, you are the host. A person comes in to the party, you bring them into the party, you spot someone who’s already at the party, you navigate towards them with your new person and then you say, “Diane, this is Robert. Robert works in landscaping. Diane is into, she has a plot at a community garden. Talk about that. I’m out of here. Bye.” And that’s called etiquette, right?

Martha Beck:
Classic. Classic wingman, sort of wing-host etiquette.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So you find something that they have in common. So I’m often trying to figure out, I was going to say marry, but that’s not the best word.

Martha Beck:
Here it comes again, this is the issue.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m trying to reconcile the culture that I grew up with with the culture in which I now find myself. Australia to the US. And always testing what things apply in both cases. I’m always asking you and Karen, our other partner, “Do Americans say this? Do Americans do this? Would this be normal?” I dunno why I’m asking you what would be normal. So this came up with Karen a few weeks ago, and again, there’s another layer to it, which is what’s American, and what’s just Karen or you in a given moment? So here is what I’m trying to figure out.

Martha Beck:
True. We’re not representative.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I do not think so. And yet you are my only go-to people really.

Martha Beck:
Any port in a storm, honey.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So a few weeks ago, someone came to fix something. I believe he was going to install reverse-osmosis water or something?

Martha Beck:
Whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Whatever that is. Karen thought we needed it.

Martha Beck:
Sounds like aliens.

Rowan Mangan:
It does. It sounds like, yeah, or a surgical procedure.

Martha Beck:
Because if you learn by osmosis, things soak into your head. If he came to do reverse osmosis, he’s bringing something to the house that would soak us into it, it sounds like to me.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, we’re in danger.

Martha Beck:
We are.

Rowan Mangan:
I shouldn’t have been worrying about etiquette at a time like this.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. Run for your life. Reverse osmosis is coming for you.

Rowan Mangan:
So the guy’s coming to do the thing, the mysterious thing, and he drives up, but he doesn’t come into the house. And so it’s already a sort of charged etiquette moment. And luckily in our household, it’s often Karen who does the small talk dimensions, and people come to the house and she helps with them because we’re way too autistic to do that.

Martha Beck:
We’re hiding. We’re hiding somewhere behind a mirror or something.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was in the communal area, not hiding for a while for long enough for Karen and I to go, “It’s weird that he’s not coming in.” The dogs are like, no, he’s there in the driveway going [imitates dogs braying] in the way that dogs do, and still doesn’t come in and still doesn’t come in. So eventually I’m like, “Karen, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to leave you with this situation and go hide.”

Martha Beck:
Which is our process in this kind of situation.

Rowan Mangan:
My curiosity about the mystery of the man in the driveway was not greater than my horror at having to make small talk. But a little bit later he did come in, and I heard Karen talking to him. And I had to go downstairs at one point. I wouldn’t have chosen it. And it was at this moment that I got my lesson from Karen in American introduction etiquette. I don’t know if this is funny or interesting if you don’t know Karen, but this is how it went. I walked down the stairs into the kitchen where I find Karen and a man chatting. Karen turns to me the second I walk into the room and says, at somewhat elevated volume, apropos of nothing and with no preempt, she says, “Jason got his face eaten off by a dog.”

Martha Beck:
Oh no. Why are we laughing? That’s wrong. First of all, of all, why are you laughing? It’s terrible.

Rowan Mangan:
Because I don’t even know if this is Jason. Like, who’s Jason?

Martha Beck:
Did he have a face?

Rowan Mangan:
Is this Jason or is Jason someone else?

Martha Beck:
You didn’t mention that.

Rowan Mangan:
No, because as soon as she said “Jason got his face eaten by a dog,” I couldn’t look at his face in case he saw me looking at his face to see if it had been eaten off by a dog.

Martha Beck:
Ro. I mean, we’re going to get in bad trouble for this. We should not be laughing. It’s the tension of it.

Rowan Mangan:
Not because our daughter’s marrying animals.

Martha Beck:
It’s the tension. It’s horrifying, it’s tension. It make us—

Rowan Mangan:
This is Marty being genuinely worried at this moment that I’m setting all these people up. I’m so sorry. She said—she didn’t say, “Ro, I’ve solved the mystery. It’s a little bit awkward, but in his past, Jason had a traumatic experience with a dog, so that’s why he was hesitant to come in while the two dogs living with us were being really noisy and sounding big.” Even though one of them in particular is not very big. So instead of like, “So anyway, that’s what happened. But this is Jason. He’s going to reverse our osmosis somehow. He’s had surgery.” Which I found out later. He looked completely normal.

Martha Beck:
Oh, thank God.

Rowan Mangan:
No. All that happened is she turned to me and then in a loud voice just said—

Martha Beck:
I remember this. I mean, I remember you saying it.

Rowan Mangan:
“Jason got his face eaten off by a dog.” And I would ask you, in American etiquette, what is the best rejoinder to such a moment?

Martha Beck:
What did poor Jason do?

Rowan Mangan:
We all just stood there. We all just stood there.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve repressed everything else. I was just like, what’s the reaction?

Martha Beck:
She chose a very unfortunate—

Rowan Mangan:
Like, “I’m sorry,” or, “Oh, that’s interesting,” or, “Are you better? How’s the osmosis? Is it going forwards or backwards at this point?”

Martha Beck:
It is really, really—it did put you in a situation, I have to say, that’s one I have not yet had to figure out. Thank God I was hiding upstairs behind a mirror. As is my wont.

Rowan Mangan:
I love the idea of—

Martha Beck:
In such situations.

Rowan Mangan:
You behind a mirror and then someone comes to look in the mirror, and you’re just this little voice going, “Oh boy, is that the best you can do? Wow. That must be disappointing.”

Martha Beck:
That is what I say when I’m looking at the mirror from my side. All right, that’s a hard one to figure out. And I don’t know either, because I am completely socially inept myself as I think we’ve proven in this episode. And I think probably we’ve alienated everybody who is not going to come to our house and osmosis us to death.

Rowan Mangan:
Married to a dog or terrified of dogs.

Martha Beck:
Or both could happen. Oh, we have so much to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
This is a new low. Even for this podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait for the most brilliant segue you’ve ever heard.

Martha Beck:
Ah, yeah, so.

Rowan Mangan:
So all this happened, and we had to move house.

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. Oh, 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 you all have a great day now.
We could no longer stay in the place where our daughter had been marrying multiple dogs, and Karen embarrassed a man whose unfortunate past included his face getting eaten off by a dog. So we’re moving house. That’s what’s happening. And that was a segue. This is now us in the actual podcast talking about the podcast topic. Moving house, eh?

Martha Beck:
It’s horrible.

Rowan Mangan:
Doesn’t it just tend to disrupt everything in your life?

Martha Beck:
They’ve done studies that show the place where you live has an incredible impact on your quality of life. So anytime you move, since we’re territorial animals, there is the potential for huge disruption.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
I don’t cope well.

Rowan Mangan:
No, you don’t. And I was just thinking today, you really don’t cope well, and yet you’ve made more big cross-country, cross-international moves than most people.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
Than the vast majority of people do in a lifetime.

Martha Beck:
Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Now I feel better about myself.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve been all over the place.

Martha Beck:
I can’t count the number of clients I’ve had who have moved, and I’ve told them, “It’s going to, you’re go through a phase of grieving and re-patterning.” And they’re like, “Not me. I’m thrilled about this move.” And then six months later they call me back and say, “I hate my life.” And I say, “Honey, you just moved. It’s okay. It’ll get better.”

Rowan Mangan:
So what I’m thinking about, what we’re thinking about, the vibe is that since everything, all our daily rhythms are going to be completely upended—because we’re also moving to a different part of the country. Not very far, but enough that we’re not going to any of the same places. Dentists, for instance. I don’t what else people go to, dentists and things.

Martha Beck:
Dentists. Reverse-osmosis people. That’s it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s all there is really.

Martha Beck:
You’re covered.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was trying to think about, okay, how are we going to consciously repattern our days, take advantage of this upheaval to restructure our lives day to day? It’s exciting.

Martha Beck:
Because you can decide to change your life at any time, but it’s very difficult to fight what’s already in motion, the inertia of whatever’s happening.

Rowan Mangan:
Though you are trying your damnedest right now.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I am. That’s called inertness. Inertness is where you just sit in a lump and cry. Inertia is where you keep going in the direction that you’re going until operated upon by an equal and opposite force. So all our lives are going forward with inertia and that makes it kind of hard to shift major pieces of life—unless something dramatic happens. You can do it, but if you have an upheaval, like you’ve decided to move house, it’s actually an opportunity. Since everything’s going to be disrupted and deconstructed, you now have an opportunity to reconstruct things.

Rowan Mangan:
And I love what you were saying to me about how it’s going to happen anyway. So you’ve got, when things are in upheaval, you’ve got this fork in the road between being acted upon by your new situation or circumstances and to some extent choosing how to repattern your life in the new space.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So we thought, given that we’re doing this right now, we would do an episode about how you consciously—I used to call what I do life design because it’s more, they call it life coaching, which sounds sporty and fun, but to me it was more like a creative, a design function that you’re going to build your life with conscious attention to fit an inner map of beauty and joy and whatever is best in your life. And when disruption comes along, whether it’s invited or whether it’s just imposed on you by life and fate, you have this opportunity to sort of clear the slate and consciously design what comes next. So I’m going to use moving for that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and I’ll say, though, that this life design stuff is fun to work with, even when you are more or less in a rhythm. It’s not only during huge upheaval that you can make these changes. But it’s all about us and this is what we’re living right now, so.

Martha Beck:
Anybody out there, whether they want, for example, to reverse their osmosis or whatever they want to do.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s actually reversible, I’ve heard. People used to think it was progressive, but it’s actually reversible.

Martha Beck:
I think it’s remitting-recurring osmosis. So anybody out there might say, “Oh, life design, that’s kind of an interesting concept. I wish to do that despite the fact that my life is completely in a state of complete inertia.” Yeah, you can do this anytime, but if there is a disruption of some kind, that’s an especially exciting opportunity to make things different.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and to avoid potentially indulging all those ruts that we can fall into when we’re not being conscious about stuff. So for instance, for me, I suddenly realized very recently, too recently, I could have realized it earlier, that I’m about to turn 45 years of age.

Martha Beck:
Could have predicted it. One would think that if you had applied your well-trained mind to this issue, it could have been predicted.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s true, that’s true. But in fairness, you just did say, “I can’t count the clients who’ve said to me,” and I’m like, well, look, neither of us is particularly good at math, so whatever. We’re doing our best.

Martha Beck:
If they wouldn’t stop moving. They’re all running about—how can I count them?

Rowan Mangan:
So I’ve managed to get to 44 and three quarters, as Lila would put it, and I’ve just been stuck in the mentality of “I’m probably about 22, so I’m probably fine to not really prioritize my health for anytime soon.” And 45, for some reason, literally about 48 hours ago I went, “Fuck! That’s— whoa! Okay, shit, I’m going to die. I should—like, bone density and muscle mass, these are now things that mean something to me. Peri-something-or-other, won’t say what. But yeah, shit’s going down. So I’m like, okay, no more cruising on youth. I’m going to turn 45, I’m moving house right before I turn 45. Boom, let’s build healthy body things for an aging mortal human into our new day map.

Martha Beck:
Aw, that’s so depressing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
But it’s true. I remember the moment when I suddenly went, “Oh, I need to eat kale. Give me kale, I’m old.” That’s been my only reaction so far. So I await disruptions more. You can just look at the calendar, the clock. But yeah, it’s like let’s use this move and this moment, this unforeseeable moment of you turning 45 at some point in your life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Came out of nowhere.

Martha Beck:
To sort of lay down some habits that support what we want going forward. Just slam some down.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, because I think I sort of have two modes. And we have discussed these ad nauseum on the podcast, but in case someone’s tuning in for the first time, my two modes are: I am a productivity junkie and I am high performance. Or, I sit still, that’s it.

Martha Beck:
I not move.

Rowan Mangan:
I not move. I am of the not-moving persuasion.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, so you either run about doing things sort of without a plan or don’t move at all?

Rowan Mangan:
Or I make very rigid plans that cannot be lived up to, and when I reach the point of not living up to them, I stay still.

Martha Beck:
These are really typical ways—I’m sorry, I’m going to get all sociological—they’re really typical ways to react in our particular cultural framework because there’s so much rigid planning, and there’s so much performance focus. I was just talking to someone else because I’m trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure it out. So I was talking to someone and I said, “What would you do if you were moving?” And she said, “Oh, I’d think I would just—it seems like there would be a lot that I would have to do. So I would just wait until I figured out what I had to do, and then I would do it.” And I thought oh, that is the cultural default that we have from showing up at school and having our days given to us and not being allowed to say, “No, I don’t want to sit at the desk right now. I want to go somewhere else. Or I would rather not learn Spanish, I would rather learn Japanese.” Or whatever. The schedule was given to us with some parameters, sort of changeable. But then you go to a job and you’re told what to do. So the cultural default basically says to the individual, “Wait until you are told by external forces how your time should be used and what your experience should be and then do it, but don’t plan anything else because we want you at our disposal. We want you to do whatever external forces impose upon you.”

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so true because I just think about, okay, finish, just say—there’s variations—finish school where your days are handed to you, go to college where your days are handed to you—bit more flexibility with your schedule. In Australia, there’s a real thing between people who say “schedule” and people who say “schedule.” I won’t get into it.

Martha Beck:
Which is better?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh mate, don’t—let’s not open that can of worms.

Martha Beck:
Oh boy, I thought the multiple dog marriages were going to get me in trouble. “Schedule.”

Rowan Mangan:
No, you’re going to start a civil war in Australia.

Martha Beck:
So go ahead and talk us through your schedule.

Rowan Mangan:
So the cultural kind of thing that gets handed out is then you go to college, then you get a job, and then you are arguably in an office under fluorescent lights—I always think of the fluorescent lights—between nine and five. And at lunchtime the culture tells you, “You should get a salad.” So you go get a salad in a plastic container and eat it with a plastic fork and sit outside and look at the sky for about 35 seconds and then go back in. And then I just realized how cultural the other stuff is as well. Just the fact that “Before work, I go to the gym,” like there’s just all these narratives about what you do with your non-prescribed time as well. And then circumstances often define a lot of them too. So I think already there’s something a little bit renegade about the idea of designing life at a day-to-day level because we’re mostly thinking about that the aspects of choices we make are like what am I going to major in? Should I apply for this job or that job? Which are huge, but they’re at one level removed from what does our day-to-day look like? And I wanted to talk about day maps because this was something that you introduced me to.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean when I was trying to help people make big changes, and I realized that the amount of inertia that we go into our lives carrying, the amount of habitual patterning we have makes it so hard to make changes. And I wanted them to, there’s a lot of research showing that if you can do something called action priming, which is getting things ready for things to be different, instead of trying to make them different, you get ready to make them different.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah because that’s a way of creating the path of least resistance for yourself.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And it’s a small disruption. It’s like you introduce a small disruption. So what I noticed was that what I was doing had a lot to do with where I physically was in space at any given time. So I wanted to make some changes. They were health related. I was about 45 and I literally just, I wrote on a clock face where I tended to be at any point in the day. So I’d wake up in bed at seven o’clock and then I would sit on my meditation cushion until 8:00 and then I would go into the kitchen, and I literally put the places that I went and I just decided to change the places that I went during a given day. And I called this a day map. And I was not going to the gym at the time. I started going to a gym by just driving to the parking lot and then going home. As long as I knew I had to go, I would go there, park the car, start the car again, drive home. And I did that four days in a row. Then it started to feel habitual. And then I actually went into the gym, came out, went home. I mean it worked. It was really an interesting thing. It was like training a dog.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean we’ve talked a lot about how we have to train ourselves in that way. Find ways to manage the selves that we are.

Martha Beck:
But a day map, shifting a day map is one way you can start to get creative about your life.

Rowan Mangan:
I love the idea of adjusting the geography because you don’t hear that very often, but I think about myself, it’s a hack. And when people talk about hacks, they mean how to trick yourself. And so the way to trick yourself—because I think about that. I don’t go to the gym, so I need to go to the gym. I’m on the couch, I am inert on the couch and I want to be inertia’d on my way, on my workout. But couch to working out—that’s too far. Those two states are way too different. And so what I can do is say, this is just a nice little walk or car ride or whatever. That’s nice. You can listen to a podcast in the car. That’s all you’re doing.

Martha Beck:
That’s actually, I try not to get too coachy, but put some positive reinforcement in there. Listen to a podcast that you enjoy on your way. Ooh. You’re going to find yourself repeating that action.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Like I was saying. I love how you’re like, “I’m a life coach, so I’m going to interrupt you saying the thing to do by saying that’s actually the thing to do. I’m a coach.” Yeah, I know. That’s why I was saying it, dude. So I can go from on-the-couch mode to getting, going towards-the-gym mode. And what I find is when I’m at the gym, I’ve pulled up, I’m like, “I would love to work out. I’m already in motion.”

Martha Beck:
There you go. Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
And all I need to do is lift a few weights, which is fun and never as exhausting as I think it’s going to be. So yeah, that’s sort of incrementalism, but starting with where are you? And for our lifestyle that’s really relevant. So for instance, where we’re moving to to a much smaller place and I am looking into doing some of my work in a coworking space for the first time, and I’m so excited about that. But it is going to radically change where I am.

Martha Beck:
Your day map.

Rowan Mangan:
At different times of my day, my day map. And so it feels like a really rich place to start. But before we do, I want to backtrack and go, all right, so what is our cultural kind of programming in terms of life design at the day level?

Martha Beck:
Forget the how, let’s go back to the what. What does the culture tell us we’re supposed to do with our lives?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think it’s generally avoid change, aim for comfort, stability, homeostasis, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And a combination of the sort of socioeconomic rules and the cultural stories of how people live each day: when they go shopping, when they go dancing, whatever. In other words, as usual, culture is telling us you don’t get to follow your own rhythms. You don’t get to go to the places. Your day map looks like everyone else’s day map, and it follows a cultural norm. And you just let that be, you don’t mess with it.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s funny because it’s all tricks and traps. There’s a trap in that you can import culture when you try to say, “I’m taking control, I’m taking control of my own destiny. I’m going to marry two dogs and then my mother.” But then you end up importing a cultural rigidity into that, which is what I was talking about before with the, “Now I’m a productivity maniac and I wake up at five and I do three reverse-osmosis backflips before I get out of bed.” Or whatever. So there’s strict schedules and stuff. And it’s so me to fall into this cultural trap where I’m creating my own inner culture that is as rigid as another one because I’m trying to solve productivity in some way by finding a shortcut where I always have to do the same thing because we think that’s going to be easier.

Martha Beck:
So you start out with, “Okay, I’m going to be wild and free and design my own life. I’m going to make everything the way I want it to be.” And you envisage what you think you want your life to be, and then you write out a day map and a schedule and everything about how it’s going to be different. And then you rigidly try to conform to that. So what you’ve done is failed to notice that it’s not just the day map—where you go and what you do—that is part of the culture. It’s the idea of rigidly conforming to a pattern and forcing yourself to toe the line, be at exactly that place at that time.

So this may sound contradictory because we’re saying invent your own way of doing things and do it, but also we’re saying maybe not do it the way you did the other culture. Maybe obsessive control is the part of the culture that you need to leave. People tend to change the form of what they do, but then impose very rigid rules on everything. I mean as our listeners may not know if they’ve been—maybe they should run screaming away from me every time I ever show up anywhere—I was raised Mormon. And it’s really interesting that the early Mormons went way outside the cultural rules by deciding that polygamy—polygyny, actually, one man marrying many women—was the way that they were going to live their lives. But what was interesting was they went off the cultural map by being polygamous. I know I’m married to multiple women, don’t even. You didn’t say it, but I saw it in your face. I know it’s ironic. Go ahead, just press the irony button harder, Ro. Hurt me more.

Rowan Mangan:
Well it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word polygyny.

Martha Beck:
Polyandry is where one woman marries many men and polygyny is where one man marries many women.

Rowan Mangan:
But that’s just like going, “Many vagina. Many vagina. Polygyny.”

Martha Beck:
I will go to any graduate seminar with you and I will raise my hand and say “polygyny” and you will say “mini vagina” and we’ll see who gets along better.

Rowan Mangan:
“Many vagina,” not “mini vagina.”

My own wife can’t even understand my accent. No wonder, I struggle. Many vagina.

Martha Beck:
No, here’s my point, though. Instead of saying we have this wild, free, crazy, hip lifestyle, the Mormons went, “The only way that you can go to heaven is that every man has to marry many women and every woman has to be living in a so-called plural marriage.” And the people who don’t have multiple women in a marriage don’t get to go to the highest part of heaven.

Rowan Mangan:
Point of order. I don’t know much about maths as we’ve established. Isn’t there a problem if all men have to have multiple wives? Isn’t there at some point going to be an arithmetical quandary?

Martha Beck:
Not if you kill enough men.

Rowan Mangan:
Now you’re talking my language.

Martha Beck:
Well, that is one of the points, but interestingly, historically, women were more religious than men, and more women tended to end up in the Mormon church. But I’ve got a whole set of sociological observations around the results of polygamy that my own ancestors, not too far back—

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, Marty. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think the term you’re looking for is polygyny.

Martha Beck:
That’s the term I’m looking for.

Rowan Mangan:
Which etymologically means “many vaginas.”

Martha Beck:
I think the term I’m looking for is “Fuck you.” Sorry. Sorry. I don’t mean that.

Rowan Mangan:
Little glimpse inside our marriage there, ladies and gents.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s so weird to be like, “Those Mormons, they’re so weird and polygamous. I have two wives.”

Rowan Mangan:
“But I’m doing it in a cool way and they’re doing it in a lame way. Losers.”

Martha Beck:
“Losers.” At least I don’t say everyone else is going to hell.

Rowan Mangan:
Well that’s true.

Martha Beck:
My point is that the rigid, I mean I grew up in this weird culture where this super, super rigid deviation from the super, super rigid monogamous culture had developed. Everything was rigid, there were just wildly different sets of—now don’t go there.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. I’m sorry. You started it.

Martha Beck:
Do not go there.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. All right, listen.

Martha Beck:
You know what the answer to that is? Everything was rigid. “That’s what they said. Not she. They.” Sorry. Oh, this is terrible.

Rowan Mangan:
This is terrible. I’m so sorry.

Martha Beck:
“That’s what she said.”

Rowan Mangan:
No, everyone knows what you were going for.

Martha Beck:
Everyone knows it, right? I didn’t know it growing up. So I had to learn. People think you’re different because you’re Australian. Try growing up Mormon.

Rowan Mangan:
No, thank you. The point—I want to make a point here.

Martha Beck:
A point?

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll try to drag us back to the through line. Culture is not out there. Culture exists because our psyches have certain tendencies, and we tend to create in macro what we are in micro. And they’re all just hacks. “Oh, it’s more convenient to do it this way.” And the same way I get addicted to productivity and get really rigid in that, that’s what we do at societal levels. So it’s like culture is living inside us as well. So we just have to keep an eye out for that. As we have these conversations, you’re going to keep slipping in there.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We come to consensus with other people, and then that consensus rules what we decide in our own heads. Yeah. Then we have to get away from it.

Rowan Mangan:
How do we move away from consensus, Martha Beck, and towards coming to our senses?

Martha Beck:
Well, I will tell you in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So you were just about to tell us how we come to our senses.

Martha Beck:
Yes. In terms of utilizing a disruption in your life to practice some good old-fashioned life design.

Rowan Mangan:
Remap our days.

Martha Beck:
Yes, remap your days. So it’s not about making a different schedule that you can then follow rigidly in the manner that you have rigidly followed other schedules in the past. And it’s also not about curling up on the couch or behind a mirror and pretending that nothing is happening and going la, la, la, la, la for as long as you can so that you never have to do anything, total passivity. It’s actually about crafting something that reflects your values, has an ideal of some kind, but also leaves space to respond to nature. So the parallel of culture is nature, yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So you’re saying my values are I want to age with as little decrepitude as possible for as long as possible. So that’s the value that I’m now following in how I’m approaching this remap.

Martha Beck:
Or you could call it an ideal. Whatever your objective is, what you want your life to be like, you choose the general image of what you want to create. Coming from a design perspective, if you thought of it visually, you want a general image of something that for you looks healthy and vital and youthful.

Rowan Mangan:
I love this, right? Because the reframe is like I’ve just recently been reading more of these productivity and habit books. And so the cultural model is here is your goal, and then incrementally every day you take X, Y, Z step. And that is how you reach your goal in this finite number of steps. Do you know what I mean? It’s rigid, but it’s also very linear and very, God help us, numerical. And I love the way that what you are doing kind of brings it into more dimensions, like you’re actually starting to draw a picture and that feels more natural and less constrained.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We really do live in this sort of arithmetic way of setting up tasks and time periods. And that is not how—you know, other animals that don’t measure time, they still do things that please them, but they never get stuck in a mindset that goes away from their original nature.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, that overrides.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
That overrides.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they never override nature with culture unless they’re forced to or trained to by humans, who are the only ones who do it on purpose. But it starts, as you said, culture exists outside us, but then we import it into our heads. So it’s inside our heads that we have to start shifting the map of our lives when we want to design a life that works better.

And the way that I always start with people, with clients or with myself is to look at the sense of yearning or longing, which is such an interesting—I actually thought, years ago, that I would “solve” yearning because I experienced it as painful. I still do sometimes, but the more I work with people, and the more I work with myself, actually as I get older, yearning becomes more and more and more central to forming the life that I want to have and helping other people form what they want.

Because the rules are changing and society’s sort of breaking down and getting weirder all the time. And what I’ve found is that if you are mapping out beyond the known world, if you’re in the place on the map where it says, “Here be dragons,” which is where a lot of us are these days, the way you map the territory, the way you know which direction you want to go into “here be dragons,” into the unknown, is by feeling for what causes the sense of yearning and letting yourself sort of abide in the sense of yearning until it starts to draw you a picture or send you a song. It’s very arty.

Rowan Mangan:
You get information.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it gives you information about what you want to experience, and that becomes a kind of compass, and you can start turning toward parts of the map that are likely to have that kind of experience.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you remember there’s some scene from Seinfeld where George Costanza, I think they’re in the diner, and George Costanza just says, “Do you yearn? I yearn.”

Martha Beck:
Aww.

Rowan Mangan:
Aww. We’re all yearning, but we’re living in a New York sitcom, and we don’t have a place for our yearning to become matter because we don’t abide in it. As you say, enough.

Martha Beck:
It’s a sitcom about nothing, too. So we’re all kind of—think of sitting in a sitcom about nothing and finding your yearning and actually sitting with your yearning and asking it for information about where you want to go next and what you want to experience.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s almost like yearning itself is the map.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I truly believe that yearning is the tool of the human imagination that it uses to create unprecedented things. Because if it’s precedented, if you already know what it is, you can desire it. But if you don’t actually know quite what it is, yearning will tell you how you want it to be more or different.

Rowan Mangan:
Tell me the difference between the feeling of yearning and the feeling of desire.

Martha Beck:
Desire is like, “Oh, I see that car and I really, really want a car.” Yearning is when you look at the car, and suddenly you see yourself driving down a highway in that car and there’s someone with you and there’s a song on the radio and there’s a feeling state of joy or liberation or whatever it is that you are now associating with that car. What you’re yearning for is not the car itself, it might be involved in it. What you’re yearning for is a feeling state. And that’s what I’ve found people are always yearning for is a feeling state. Once you know the feeling state, then there are multiple ways you can go toward it. You don’t need to get that car, you know? You don’t need that specific thing.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s an interesting take on manifesting as well, but we’ll put that aside for a different show. So for me, I guess if I were to put what my yearning is, as I alarmingly and unpredictably turn the next age that I’m turning, is vitality, right? That’s what I’m yearning for is the feeling of being vital and being comfortable and strong in my body.

Martha Beck:
And if you start to think about the feeling state that you’re yearning for, you’ll find that images come up. You’ll find that when you’re imagining that feeling, there are also people around you. Things are happening.

Rowan Mangan:
Garden.

Martha Beck:
A garden?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I thought you said a gun. I’m like no!

Rowan Mangan:
Just if I fail.

Martha Beck:
Ah, this is so problematic. Okay. Yes. A garden. For you, the feeling of vitality involves a garden. When I think of vitality, it involves walking outside long distances. So the yearning is a feeling state that drags us into the design, which is happening, I think, outside of the cultural mindset, which is left-hemisphere-dominated and sort of thinking along established lines and into the unprecedented type of connections that are made mainly in the right hemisphere of the brain. Yearning is sort of the royal ticket to getting the map drawn for you before you even explore it.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So we we’re moving towards building our days and our day map around that yearning and not importing someone else’s idea of what we should be doing to get there. It may not look like go to the gym at 7:00 AM and do burpees, whatever they are.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, you can sort of combine this sort of practice of day mapping with the original design work of yearning, and you make a map, you make the day map you yearn for. So I would make a day map that says 6:00 to 8:00 AM go for a walk. I actually have been doing that.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I ask you, though, if you’re doing this day mapping, are you doing a template for the ideal, or are you actually in the morning about to set out your day? What are you describing?

Martha Beck:
Oh no, I set out the template in this sort of dreaming-and-scheming session.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what I thought.

Martha Beck:
You just dream up the ideal thing, and then you do make a schedule and a map of where you’re going to be physically at different points during the day. But that’s where you want to watch out for that rigidity of the rule-following nature of culture itself. Because what you want is something much more fluid and responsive to your true nature. You’re setting out to—you make this map, then you go to explore, and you’re going to find things when you explore that are going to change your ideas.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, interesting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Cool. So I just love this and we’ve sort of covered it, but it’s like instead of writing exercise 7:00 to 8:00 AM, we go to—our role at 7:00 AM or whenever, 9:30, is to go to the place where it makes it easier to move our body in the way that we yearn to. So go to the walking path.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and the interesting thing about this is it’s gentle, but it’s powerful. Usually the way people try to change their lives is forceful and weak. “I’m going to make these rules. I’m going to change. I’m going to do just what this book says I should do. I’m going to take the crazy challenge that’s supposed to kill you in six days or make you perfect and I’m going to do that thing.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Then it looks very intense, but it’s very weak because its ability to thread its way into your natural biological process of living, it’s short, it’s trying to avoid everything animal about you and turn you into a machine.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. So what we’re trying to do here, I guess, is we’re kind of navigating between the rigidity of culture, whether it’s externally made or whether we’re creating it ourselves in that rigidity. And the other extreme would be some kind of totally unguided passivity where it’s like we think we have to choose between “I will do it every day, no matter what” and “I’ll only do what I absolutely feel moved to do in the moment.” We’ve always got to be trying to navigate between those two extremes because neither of them are sustainable in the long term.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean I definitely see this with writing, which is a big part of my life. Not recently, but it needs to be a bigger part of my life coming up. Because if I try to force myself to do it rigidly, I get writer’s block. But if I say, “I’ll only do it when the muse is upon me,” I never ever start. So it’s about treating the part of you that’s making your new life as a living thing. The map of your life, the schedule, these are all living, growing things.

So think of it as an ecosystem instead of a factory with objects you can place in different places. Instead, it’s a system of living things that are all interacting with each other. And that means that you’re responsive. If I wake up and I have COVID as I did once, then I may not write that day. If I wake up and I feel a little better, I may write a few words and then stop short of my goal. If I feel really good one day I might write for three hours, whatever.
Do you remember we were talking to someone recently about the rains in Australia? “I bless the rains down in Australia” and how it was finally raining, and so the farmers were able to put the wheat crop in. And they had been holding back because the time to plant wheat had come and gone, but there was no rain. So if you put your wheat in the ground, it just dies. So they’d been waiting and now they were going to plant the wheat because the rain had come. So culture says, “Just plant the wheat.” But they had that plan and then they have to be responsive to what nature is doing so that the wheat can actually grow.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So, yes, being sensitive to nature as you set out to change your life and design your life is the fundamental ground of what will make you successful. You have to be sensitive to the fact that everything is nature, not culture.

Rowan Mangan:
And that means sort of understanding nature and really dwelling in nature, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. That’s the thing is drive to the gym, but then be very, very sensitive to what your own body is feeling.

Rowan Mangan:
But also—listen, if the roads are blocked by snow, understand enough about snow to go, “Oh, that might actually kill me rather than making me move.”

Martha Beck:
You don’t know very much about snow, do you, honey?

Rowan Mangan:
I know less than others.

Martha Beck:
It’s all right. Where we’re going, you’re going to get to know snow, honey. Oh, you’re going to get to know snow so well. But you’re absolutely right. The thing about nature is that we tend to trivialize it when we’re in culture. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book that for the very first time said we are part of nature and we are killing ourselves when we kill nature, she was absolutely, she was mocked right out of existence almost because people thought it was so stupid that nature had to be understood. “What we need to do is follow our schedule. We are not nature. Nature takes just does its stuff.”

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and we dominate it into submission.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we dominate it. And we didn’t even have the concept, and this was just in the 50s. This wasn’t like hundreds and hundreds of years ago. This was in the 1950s. People really considered human life to be dictated by factory-like schedules without any consequence from nature. And what we’re saying is we are still sort of outgrowing our inability or our training that says we are not supposed to tune in to every situation as it unfolds because it is filled with multiple interacting, living factors.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s so hard to quantify in advance and build the template around in advance, and so that’s why we try to create the foolproof, no-matter-what thing. Oh my God, can you talk about the mouse’s ear, the thing about the mouse’s ear?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes, the mouse. I hope this is the thing. I hope you don’t have a mouse’s ear in your cupboard somewhere.

Rowan Mangan:
Not until I turn 45 and I need it for the ritual.

Martha Beck:
“You’ll be given a mouse’s ear.” Yeah, I read once a farmer’s almanac, and it was from the place where I grew up where there are a lot of aspen trees.

Rowan Mangan:
Can you see her being so scared of being fact-checked right now? Like, “Well, no, I mean, this isn’t for everywhere.” It’s literally true.

Martha Beck:
Well, this is just the point. It’s not for everywhere. And you have to be that specific when you’re dealing with nature.

Rowan Mangan:
Very good point.

Martha Beck:
So it said that, I can’t remember what you were supposed to do, but I think it was putting in a crop of some kind. You were supposed to do it at the time in the spring when the aspen leaves on the trees were the size of a mouse’s ear. Which is so—like everyone, for one thing, everyone in that society knew how big a mouse’s ear was, which not everyone does. And then you have to be so attentive to the trees that you notice the day on which the aspen leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear. And you know that that’s when the soil is right to put in a crop. The amount of, there’s almost this artistic love affair with nature. The sensuousness of it, the sights, the sounds, the interaction with every bit of the ecosystem is so sophisticated. And we evolved to be completely responsive to that. And then we’ve been acculturated to be non-responsive to it.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s right. And it’s not that it’s completely responsive, there’s still an order to be kept there. There’s still an order there, but it’s not at 9:00 AM on January 15th. It’s when this moment comes. And I would add that “About a mouse’s ear. It depends on the mouse.” So if you wake up and you’ve got COVID that morning…

Martha Beck:
How old is the mouse?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, which mouse is this? Speedy Gonzalez? Mickey Mouse? I think you’ll find: very different. How do you like my American cultural references?

Martha Beck:
Very good.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
How do you voice Mickey Mouse? Okay, we’ll do that some other time. Go on.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we need to get a ruler out and figure this out. So if you did wake up with COVID that morning, you know that it’s still going to be more or less a mouse’s ear tomorrow. Do you know what I mean? We are not having to be to the millimeter. We’re just getting a feel for the moment in the season. And I just love to think of how much reverse engineering, which is a terribly cultural way of talking about it, but “Oh yes, we had a great crop the year that we planted when the aspen leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear.” Like, “Oh yeah, that’s true. It was the year that the aspen leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear.” I just love it. So yeah, so it’s like between rigidity and complete looseness, it’s like informed and tactile and intuitive and moving.

Martha Beck:
There are these things in sociology, there are certain people that you call key informants because they’re the people that watch all the other people. And it might be someone who it’s Madame DeFarge in A Tale of Two Cities or a barber.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the busy body.

Martha Beck:
It’s the busy body. Somebody who knows everybody knows everything and wants to talk about it. They’re called key informants. And then in biology there’s something called a keystone species, which is like a species that has an influence on the environment such that other animals, their lives sort of depend on the conditions created by the keystones. So beavers are the classic keystone species. They make these dams, then that creates ponds and wetlands, and suddenly you’ve got totally different biological systems arising: different numbers of moose and wolves and everything, based on the fact that there are beavers in the area. So I like to look for what is the key thing? What is the key piece of information? Like that aspen leaf.

Rowan Mangan:
A variable.

Martha Beck:
The aspen leaf is like that is a tell for the whole of nature being ready to grow the crop then. Because you can’t follow everything logically. You can sort of intuitively, but you look at the thing. For example, when we’ve been in South Africa, there’s a particular barking sound where there are all these sounds going on in nature, but if there’s a barking sound of a certain timbre, all the trackers look up and they look toward it because it is the bark of a kudu. It’s the alarm call of a kudu.

Rowan Mangan:
Kudus never lie. Hashtag.

Martha Beck:
That’s what we’ve been told.

Rowan Mangan:
Kudus never lie.

Martha Beck:
An impala will lie to you. A steenbock: liars. Waterbuck: horrible liars. But kudu? They do not lie. So all these species of antelope have these alarm calls, but they will alarm when they see anything, like a cloud. So you can’t know when you hear an impala alarming that there’s a predator nearby. But when a kudu barks, it’s like, “We’re going over there because kudus never lie.” That’s the key piece of information. So for me, if you look for the key piece of information that says, “Are you ready to write or not? For real, if you were going to work on your writing, what’s the key thing? What is the aspen leaf or the kudu bark in your system that tells you you’re ready?”

Rowan Mangan:
At the day-to-day level?

Martha Beck:
Yea.,

Rowan Mangan:
“I have childcare for the next two hours.” No, seriously, if I was looking ahead, it’s like if I don’t have childcare, I know for a fact that I won’t be able to enter the mental space that I need to sustain in order to write.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that becomes really, when you have a kid, that becomes a massive key ingredient, doesn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
What about you? What’s your writing key stone?

Martha Beck:
Have I had enough sleep? It’s a hundred percent sleep. And I’ve done so much riding at night, doing allnighters, trying to be a working mom. And I finally learned that is actually the way to destroy my body and my writing career. I have to have had sleep. And that was not the key thing I was looking at for a long time. And that’s why I ended up being hospitalized for exhaustion. And it wasn’t good writing at that point either. It was just trying to drive it like a factory. It didn’t work.

Rowan Mangan:
So there’s those rhythms: Do we have childcare, have I had enough sleep? But then there’s also, it strikes me, larger seasonal kind of things too that are writing seasons. When you’ve got, you have, as someone who writes books, you’ve got very clearly delineated seasons where there’s a more amorphous one that you’re in now where you’re going to write a proposal. But then once the proposal has been accepted by a publisher, then you’ve got a due date and then you’re very much in a writing season. And we, at that point, this is kind of interesting, I don’t know if it is to anyone else, but we put in, your assistant and I change your calendar, and the period first thing in the morning is a block every day and it’s called Sacred Writing Time.

Martha Beck:
And that means I have to go to a place that my body associates with writing after I’ve done it a few times. And if I go to that place and I’ve had a decent amount of sleep, I can go a little short, but the map will carry me to that place at that time, and I will be able to get some work done. And that actually is a really blissful way to live, to put the seasons in place for what you love and then to create this gentle way of moving the animal and its natural inclinations to the place where it will want to do its creative work.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and hopefully this coworking space is going to be that geographical node that becomes the keystone thing where if I need to be away from my child, I’ll figure out something. I won’t just leave her wandering around on the street.

Martha Beck:
Marrying dogs.

Rowan Mangan:
Marrying dogs left, right, and center. And so for me, I’m entering a season where suddenly, unforeseeably, I am going to turn 45 and my health suddenly steps forward and goes, “Are you ever going to think about me?” And yeah, and it’s a different focus too in this season because in the past when I sporadically and occasionally think about my health, it’s much more been like a cosmetic thing. Do I want to look nice? And now it’s much more about strength and vitality and all that bone density and stuff, and it totally has a different focus. So then I go to different places. Right?

Martha Beck:
Right, right. Yeah. And it’s interesting because you’ve shifted from avoiding the bad, which is avoid the negative consequences, which is the way we’re socialized usually to keep ourselves in shape or whatever we think our health should be like. You’ve switched from that to the yearning for vitality, which is a very different, it brings in a different picture and it means that you’re cultivating the good instead of avoiding the bad. And cultivating the good requires that responsiveness to yearning, responsiveness to seasons, responsiveness to the way things shift and the aliveness of it all. So living life this way, designing it and living the design is not one of those “set it and forget it” things where you put in a schedule and just do it. It’s more like—I had a client once who was a terrific surfer and he said, “When you go surfing, you’re dancing with the ocean, and she always leads.” So you take your surfboard out there, you take your yearning and your desire and your plan and your day map, and then you let nature lead. And she does.

Rowan Mangan:
So we set intentions via our yearning, but as we enter the individual moment where we’re alert to feedback from the environment—ςhat’s working, what needs adjusting—and that combination of factors keep us in a gentle structure that keepσ us from collapse or tyranny.

Martha Beck:
Right?

Rowan Mangan:
And I heard this thing about most days as a way of looking at that, and I think most days could be a way to operationalize what we’re talking about, where it’s like, yeah, on most days it matches my yearning to do this and I remain responsive to the environment.

Martha Beck:
Right. Yeah, it’s consistent, but it’s soft as well. It’s very, very different from the way most people think of designing their lives. They think of it as, “I’m going to get a lookbook and I’m going to figure out exactly what everything’s going to be, and I’m going to force it to look that way.” And that’s very left-hemisphere-dominated. And if you can take that plan, it’s perfectly good. You just need to use all of your brain. So the left hemisphere that counts and controls will operate without the input from the right hemisphere, which is the part of us that does things like finding the meaning of our life. It’s the part that yearns. It’s the part that uses the five senses. It’s the part that is integrated with nature, and it integrates the information from the left hemisphere of the brain. So it’s not left-hemisphere-dominated versus right-hemisphere-dominated. Only the left hemisphere leaves out the rest of the brain. So really it’s like: Are you going to be your whole self? So make a plan, make a map, and then go out and be your whole self—directed, even captivated by the vision of doing something new, but also responsive continuously to yourself and everything around you.

Rowan Mangan:
Where you can hold plans and feelings at once, right? So it’s not about rigidity versus freedom. There’s a third way, which is designing a life with care and attention, and then letting the ocean lead, letting nature co-lead us. And isn’t that, in a way, the miracle of being human and having access to the kinds of minds we have is that we get to do both. We get to let these two capacities that we have support each other, and that’s a nice-feeling life.

Martha Beck:
That is the feeling that people get when they go out to surf or they go out play. To do anything that makes us feel intensely and vitally alive, 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.