Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast—yes, it’s a podcast—for people—that’s right, like you, like me, who are trying to figure it out. God help us all. It’s a freaking disaster out there.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I can’t figure it out, but I am trying to figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
Tell me what you are trying to figure out.

Martha Beck:
Well, I have recently developed the weirdest occupational injury that I’ve ever had or imagined having.

Rowan Mangan:
How many occupational injuries do you imagine having?

Martha Beck:
Many. Oh, many. I vividly imagined them, but this one, no. So I am physically feeble in every way, so I had to have a job that required no physical movement whatsoever, which is why I became a coach. I can just sort of talk to people and think things.

Rowan Mangan:
If a civilian was listening to this, I think that they would think you were being ironic in some way because coach often would suggest someone vigorously riding a bicycle and blowing a whistle.

Martha Beck:
Riding a bicycle? Since when does a coach ride a bicycle?

Rowan Mangan:
Alongside the river.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you rowed crew!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
There are no bicycles in my sports. No bicycles.

Rowan Mangan:
But they must stand up and things like the sporty ones.

Martha Beck:
Well, I just said it because—

Rowan Mangan:
You didn’t want to say life coach.

Martha Beck:
I don’t like the term “life coach.” Every time I say that, I go into an intense existential crisis because that is what I love doing, and that is what I think I’m best at, and that is what I teach other people to do, and I cannot stand the freaking phrase “life coach.”

Rowan Mangan:
And we’ll get to that later.

Martha Beck:
But yeah, I mean, what occupational physical injuries could you have as a life coach? I went to a thing where I worked with these lovely, lovely people for four days.

Rowan Mangan:
You went to a thing.

Martha Beck:
A thing. It was a seminar thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Was it with the CIA? You couldn’t—

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I can’t say. Can’t say what it is. It was the NSA. I like saying “the NSA” because that sounds more secret than the CIA or the FBI or the TCB or the DNA, I don’t know. Anyway, this is what happened.

Rowan Mangan:
I went to KGB to be their life coach. They could use it.

Martha Beck:
They totally could. Anyway, we had been moving things about in our abode, and I squished my left hand between a big heavy box of things and a wall. I squished it severely, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
But in the middle part, in my palm. So.

Rowan Mangan:
You squished your palm.

Martha Beck:
It happened at this thing that I was put in front of the group.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so wait. First you’re at home and you somehow squish your palm.

Martha Beck:
Yes. It was horrible.

Rowan Mangan:
Then you went to a thing at the NSA.

Martha Beck:
Then I went to a thing and I had a bruised hand.

Rowan Mangan:
Could you just paint a little bit of a word picture for us about the thing you were at?

Martha Beck:
Okay. The thing was this amazing seminar in Santa Fe, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous part of the world. It was wonderful, and there were 40 people there, and we were all in this wonderful campus called the Modern Elder Academy. It’s really awesome.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re not paying her. If anyone’s wondering.

Martha Beck:
It actually did pay me.

Rowan Mangan:
But not for this bit.

Martha Beck:
Not for this. No. I would not do this if it were not true. It was really gorgeous. Anyway, there were 40 people there, and at the end they have a graduation ceremony, which I had never been to. I knew nothing about. I was placed at the front of the room, and each person had to come up and get a diploma and be clapped for. After person number two. I was in such hand pain, I can’t even tell you. I was trying to slap my wrist. I was trying to, but clapping was devastatingly painful. I had to clap my way through 40 people. It’s like I was injured by clapping at a graduation.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s that thing where politicians get the handshake bruising.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Rowan Mangan:
When they’re campaigning. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Do their mouths get bruised from kissing babies?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
That might hurt the baby too, if you kissed them that hard.

Rowan Mangan:
Anything’s possible.

Martha Beck:
Seriously. Handshaking injury?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m feeling better about myself.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you’re doing great, hon.

Martha Beck:
I could be president because, yeah, I can clap through the pain. But yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to go on in my life with this hand injury because I may have to clap again and after the clapping, it was like, I might as well have smashed it against a wall again.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I literally had to just smash my injuries to help people feel good.

Rowan Mangan:
Are you sure you had to smash them that hard? I think maybe sometimes a little polite—

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
No?

Martha Beck:
See, that wasn’t enough because there were people on either side and they could tell. They were clapping loudly. They practice all the time. They do it every week.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
I just wanted to say—

Rowan Mangan:
Life coach, ladies and gentlemen, life coach Martha Beck here, wondering if she’s clapping loud enough.

Martha Beck:
You know what? I need a clapping prosthetic. I mean I need, because I saw this on YouTube with a duck. He was lying on his back in shallow water and just slapping his feet on the water, and it made a loud slapping sound. So what I need is prosthetic duck feet. Maybe I could get some of those swim fins that you wear on your feet and put ’em on my hands and just smash ’em together. That would make some serious slapping noises.

Rowan Mangan:
So that people would take you more seriously at the events in Santa Fe?

Martha Beck:
They would know I approved.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m loving the visuals.

Martha Beck:
I have to put on my clapping prosthetics just to express how proud I was.

Rowan Mangan:
Excuse me, everyone. Excuse me. Sorry, just one minute. Just got to get out me old clapping prosthetics. Fit it on here. Yes, I know it’s a little bit slappy. Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Martha Beck:
Oh, sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, don’t just whack things.

Martha Beck:
That was just my good hand.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so sorry, ladies and gentlemen.

Martha Beck:
Literally my left hand. That’s all I can do.

Rowan Mangan:
Stop it.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
Stop banging the table. This is a professional outfit.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out, woman?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I’m clapping fine. So far, so good.

Martha Beck:
Must be nice!

Rowan Mangan:
It is nice. It’s lovely. I’m trying to figure out, I don’t know if everyone has someone in their lives who texts like stream-of-consciousness book reports while driving via Siri or your—

Martha Beck:
Probably more people than we would think.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s like a new thing where, relatively new, that because of voice and the car knows and all of that, the car knows everything, and then you can listen and then Siri, in our case, Siri, sorry for giving away that we’re slaves to the Apple empire. But anyway, we have a beloved, and she does this sort of impressionistic style of texting, our Karen, and she recently sent me a text that I’ve screenshot and will just always keep close to my—butt cheek, I guess, because in my phone.

Martha Beck:
I’ll always keep it close to my butt. It’ll come from the heart of my bottom.

Rowan Mangan:
For the rest of time. And I just have to share it. I’m not even trying to figure it out because I feel like some things you shouldn’t be trying to figure them out. Yeah, let them be.

Martha Beck:
It’s like a koan.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Sit with this. Okay. Okay. It begins innocuously enough: “Adam and I had fun with Ranio,” right? You just think, oh yeah, so far so good. It goes onto detail their morning with Ranio, our friend. Anyway, then she starts getting into the book report thing about this town they went to. “Lots of 30- and 40-somethings everywhere, talking about AI and art.” And so far it’s like, okay, it’s getting pretty specific. There’s 30 and 40 year olds everywhere talking about AI and art, but then it just got really good to me when she says, “Clearly not into the material world based on how they dress.” I just want to ask, clearly not into the material world? How do you not be into the material world?

Martha Beck:
That basically implies they were naked because there’s no material on them. Material as in matter, and material as in cloth.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, yeah, hm.

Martha Beck:
Two ways to go there.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Yeah. Interesting. I did used to think that with that Madonna song,

Martha Beck:
I’m a material girl. I’m made out of material.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I guess we are, technically, but not cloth. Oh, how I love a double entendre. What did you get from this?

Rowan Mangan:
So “clearly not into the material world based on how they dress.”

Martha Beck:
Maybe they’re all nuns and priests.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like maybe they were wearing portals to another dimension.

Martha Beck:
They were all AI-generated art products from another universe.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s why.

Martha Beck:
It was not material.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what, they were talking about themselves.

Martha Beck:
They were like black holes just wandering the streets of this place going, “Nothing material can be in us.”

Rowan Mangan:
Clearly not into the material world based on how they dress. If you’re listening to Bewildered, the podcast for people who are clearly not into the material world based on how you dress…

Martha Beck:
How would you even put together an outfit if I said, “Dress like you’re not into the material world”? I think I would just wear a pair of overalls with nothing underneath.

Rowan Mangan:
I would wear disappointment.

Martha Beck:
How do you wear disappointment other than on your face?

Rowan Mangan:
And moon beams.

Martha Beck:
Actually, my entire body is a disappointment, so that’s not hard. And moon beams. Woo!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, disappointment and moon beams.

Martha Beck:
It’s a new look.

Rowan Mangan:
Why not?

Martha Beck:
All 2020-something? 20-apocalypse.

Rowan Mangan:
20-apocalypse.

Martha Beck:
Well, we’ll have to have Karen dress up to show us how one indicates that one is not interested in the material world.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so sweet. I’m going to put it on the wall, that text.

Martha Beck:
Oh, it’s so sweet. What are we actually doing here?

Rowan Mangan:
God, I wish I knew.

Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s 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.

So we are going to talk today about “resting joy face.” And…

Martha Beck:
I’m going to out you on this. Ro has a cold and when her sinuses are blocked, I think there are passageways in her brain that go through her sinuses. So every now and then she just goes completely blank like a robot. Okay, so here’s the deal. Most people when I go about being a life coach, when I’m roundabout in the world, they are wound up so tight. Their resting state is extreme anxiety or angst or anger, any of the a-n words.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s probably because you weren’t clapping loudly enough.

Martha Beck:
Anhedonia. That’s true. I need to get back my clapping. I need to get my clapping prosthetics going. Fix everybody.

Rowan Mangan:
Get those clappers.

Martha Beck:
So I was just talking to Ro about how everybody has “resting misery face” and that, okay, there are biological reasons for that, but there are a lot of cultural reasons for it as well. We are born with brains that sort of veer toward the negative, and then we get socialized and our particular culture just throws us hard toward misery as our resting state and says, “This here, this is normal.” And it’s not necessary. It’s like your imagination is this incredible vehicle that’s being driven by somebody else, and you just sit in the passenger seat going, “I guess this is where I go.” Because when I try to get people to shift that into different states of imagination, they’re like, “Well, there is no other state. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” The idea that they’re imagining a world that is very, very difficult doesn’t appear to them to be optional. But I think it is optional.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think that the very premise of the whole conversation is the “question your thoughts” thought, and even that is radically anti-cultural. Because “But it’s my thoughts! It’s my thoughts!”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We are taught to identify with our thoughts as though our thoughts are us.

Rowan Mangan:
But I think what happens with our thoughts, I had a metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Let’s go, baby!

Rowan Mangan:
It just came to me.

Martha Beck:
Out of your sinuses.

Rowan Mangan:
Straight out of the sinuses. So say your point of view, right, your own subjectivity, the frame from which you look out your eyes and see the world is a room that is shaped by habitual thought. So if I think often enough that people are trying to cheat me, say, or everyone’s always trying to exploit something, that’s a green vase. Sorry, Americans, vase or vase. It’s a vase. It’s a vase.

Martha Beck:
It’s a thing you put your flowers in.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I tell you a joke?

Martha Beck:
Why not? This seems like a good time.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m trying to remember how it goes. All right, so there’s two women talking and one says, “Oh, my husband’s bought me flowers this morning for our anniversary,” and the other one’s like, “Well, that’s really nice.” And she’s like, “Yeah, but, you know.” And the other one’s like, “What are you talking about? It’s nice to get flowers.” And the one’s like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to have to spend the next three days of my life lying on my back with my legs in the air to say thank you.” And the first woman’s like, “Don’t you have a vase?” I dunno. I think it’s something that happens in straight world.

Martha Beck:
Ah, yeah, it would be. It could happen in a lesbian world.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I may buy you flowers.

Rowan Mangan:
I have a vase.

Martha Beck:
Oh no, this is terrible. We’re making people think of us lying around with our legs in the air.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I was just thinking about vases.

Martha Beck:
I wasn’t. All right, where were we with this? A room. There’s a thought. The thought is “I’m always exploited.” It’s a green vase or vase.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t hit the table.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I’m not supposed to hit the table, injured hand, which takes us to a fixed, imaginary thought of a woman entertaining flowers in the wrong way.

Rowan Mangan:
Or being entertained by flowers.

Martha Beck:
Could be.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’re sort of furnishing this room to the point that it doesn’t even look like a room anymore to you. It just looks like the air.

Martha Beck:
It’s reality.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but all these things are there and that’s your resting, it’s the inner resting of your face.

Martha Beck:
Do you know?

Rowan Mangan:
Your inner face.

Martha Beck:
Your inner face. There’s language for this. There’s neurological language for this. It’s called, drum roll, “the default mode network.”

Rowan Mangan:
Marty’s been waiting to say that for about four hours.

Martha Beck:
Love it. I keep reading about the default mode network.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s because you keep Googling it.

Martha Beck:
Aww, I’ve never had a chance to work it into a conversation without being slapped, but now I’m going do it.

Rowan Mangan:
Does someone have one of those bing duck things?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Someone in a clapping prosthetic just bash me across the phys. You know what phys is, right? Physiognomy. It means face. I just shortened it, assuming everyone would understand. It’s not my fault.

Rowan Mangan:
Phys, the physiognomy of the face.

Martha Beck:
Be quiet. Let me talk about the default mode network without slopping me, slapping me. Okay, here’s the thing. When you’re just sitting around, you’d expect, maybe, if you were a neurologist to see the brain just go blech and not really light up much because the lighting-up part is where you can see the activity and the neurons. Well, it turns out that when we’re just sitting around, our brains do light up in a variety of places, sort of spread around the brain, and they call this the “default mode network.” So it’s when you just are not thinking about anything, these parts light up. And this is what they take care of in the world. First, they establish a sense of our autobiographical information, like what we remember about ourselves, which is selective. You can remember that you’re a coach but not a life coach.

Rowan Mangan:
Mm. I see.

Martha Beck:
But or you know, some people just remember being a terribly abused person, and they remember primarily the bad things that happened. And somebody else can be like, “I saw myself as a lucky person” and that’s sort of their autobiographical state of being. That’s the way they furnished that room in terms of their autobiography—who I am—and it’s shaped by imagination and choice. Then there’s mind wandering, and that’s where you pick up little stray bits of information, but you pick them up selectively, again. You could walk down the street and notice the people who are being mean to each other or the people who are being nice to each other or the people who were serving each other or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. But are you saying that you’re not walking down the street at this time, you’re sitting on the couch vegged out and the mind wandering to the?

Martha Beck:
No, you could walk down the street without anything particularly in your mind.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I see.

Martha Beck:
It’s just when you’re not actively thinking of something, so you’ve got your sense of autobiography.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s all the time for me.

Martha Beck:
You’ve got the mind wandering, but wandering in a way that is sort of directed. Then you’ve got what’s called “theory of mind,” which is what you think other people are thinking. And a lot of that is, a therapist friend of mine once said, “What they’re thinking about you.” So theory of mind is mainly your fantasies about other people’s fantasies about you. So that’s in there, and then finally there’s a sense of continuity over time: “This is the way things always are and therefore it’s the way they always will be.” It’s just an assumption. So you’re selecting four things. You’ve got your autobiography, this is who I am, but you’re selecting what you’re going to look at and you’re decorating the room with that stuff. Then there’s mind wandering—wherever you are, you’re picking up new stuff to put in the room, but selectively.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and I would say that it’s probably likely that the things you’re picking up are going to match the decor of the room you’re already furnishing and decorating because this is what we’re imagining is that you’re building this worldview which is telling a certain story, and so the decor matches,

Martha Beck:
Right. And then there’s the theory of mind, what you think other people are thinking, especially about you. And in this thing you could give a performance, and a hundred people clap for you, and one person doesn’t because that person has a bashed hand and no prosthetics, and you might just think, “That person didn’t clap, that person didn’t clap.” If you are focused on something that is negative, you’ll pick out one person who’s negative toward you and ignore a hundred who are positive if that’s how your theory of mind goes.

And then there are people who think, “Everybody loves me!” and people could literally come up—I knew a guy once who would get, he was a writer, he’d get rejection slips, and he would interpret them so positively he thought they were acceptance. Because they would say something like, “You have a fine tone in the first chapter.” And he’d be like, “They want it!” And he would send back letters, “So glad you liked it.” And they’d be like, “No, we hate it.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s called a shit sandwich.

Martha Beck:
Oh, there’s a double meaning in that. So theory of mind is another thing that is selective. And then finally the sense of continuity over time: “this always” or “this never.” Those things we say, which are never really true—ah, just did it. I just did it—where we generalize about how things have been and therefore how they’re going to be. And all these things, as you said, are just, we’ve been living in a room that’s looked pretty much the same for a very long time, even though instead of it being a solid thing that’s always there, it’s a fluid thing that we’re continuously recreating in its own image through the use or what I would call the misuse of our imaginations. So I work with people and I always think, “This is the problem. They’re misusing their imaginations, but they don’t know it.”

Rowan Mangan:
You were telling me that you were teaching a group a while ago and that you felt like they were misusing their imaginations. Can you give an example?

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was like a lot of people, it was like 125 people. And I started out by saying, “How many people think the world, that the world has a potential for good?” And they just were sitting on their hands. “How many people feel positive about the future?” No hands go up. “How about the past?” Nooo. And I said, “Okay, I get it that things are bad. And actually things have always been kind of bad.” Right now we’re facing all this unprecedented shit, as Ani DiFranco so eloquently says, but my parents lived through World War II, and that was no picnic either. There’s a lot bad in this world. But even given that, can you try to see the world with a different complexion, with a different sense of how things are and what people think of you and what your autobiography has been? And they were like, “Nope. No can do.” It was amazing.

Rowan Mangan:
So let me see if I’m understanding right. The way that our brains work in with this is that our brains have a negativity bias, which is an evolutionary adaptation that is to make sure that we pay more attention to that which can kill us than that which is benevolent and fine. Okay, so that makes sense. But our brain can’t differentiate between a great white shark and the potential disapproval of an acquaintance. And so they become the same thing. And then I would say that we talk about culture and nature on this podcast, and so I think the culture is also steering us towards upholding that tendency of the brain’s, right?

Martha Beck:
Accentuating. In fact, that is some of the unprecedented shit because no other generation in history has ever had the internet, which is running on algorithms that are based on how long we focus on any given piece of information. So what happens is the brain has a negativity bias. That means that if something’s scary, you pay closer attention to it. Attention is what people monetize on the internet. And in particular, the algorithms focus on repeatedly giving us more of whatever holds our attention the longest. It so happens that by biological predisposition, we tend to put more emphasis on things that are alarming or upsetting because of that negativity bias. But then the algorithm starts editing itself, so it gives us more of that. And it’s pushing out other pieces of information that might create a different default mode network setting.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And that’s not the laws of physics. That’s someone’s agenda, then, pushing in, more likely than not.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. They want your attention. And then I don’t think they sit around saying, “We’re going to scare people to death.” It’s just, “We’re going to get attention.” And that happens when you scare people to death.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I think it’s more, it can be more insidious than that. I mean, we’re talking about algorithms now, so that’s slightly off topic, but it’s also true that if you want people to think a certain way, then you literally build the rabbit holes that their attention ends up funneling down.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So now you’re into the really dark stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I think I’m into the fucking mainstream. I think I’m into the very surface of what you’re talking about. I think it’s, and obviously that’s part of the way our minds work. So we’re kind of in form and content mirroring each other now, right?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you are saying, well, the world’s always been really bad. My brain’s like, “Not this bad. Not this bad. And we often talk about the must be nice.” We have some friends that we have a text thread with that we often joke about and send examples of social media comments where someone’s like, “My hip doesn’t hurt anymore.” And then someone inevitably in the comments it’s like, “Must must be nice to not have a hip hurt anymore. I don’t even have a hip. Both of mine were removed by alligators.”

Martha Beck:
Oh dear. We’re going to start getting email from people whose hips were removed by alligators. You know it’s a demographic out there. Okay, so.

Rowan Mangan:
And I feel like the “must be nice” thing is that defense mechanism of not defense mechanism, that evolutionary adaptation rising up to go, “Be careful. Things are bad. Don’t say things are good because things could be bad. And if you miss it, the alligators will get you hip.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and don’t forget that when you go into a state of fear at any level, even slight, so when people are reading things online, and their attention is being drawn to frightening things, so their fear levels are pretty high, and then they read something about somebody whose hip doesn’t hurt anymore, and what you’re hearing when they say “must be nice” is a fight response. It’s not just mindless cruelty. It’s because their anxiety is up and that’s a fight-or-flight mechanism and they’re not running, so they’re going to fight you. And then they fight you. And then somebody puts that out there, and everybody else sees it and it looks aggressive, which automatically makes the brain respond with aggression.

Rowan Mangan:
But you know what else it does is it’s also, the more we see those comments and that dynamic playing out, it’s also shaping our perception of our culture. It’s something where if anyone says something’s okay in the world, someone else will go, “Get down here in the muck, little child.”

Martha Beck:
Could I speak of my experience with this in the culture?

Rowan Mangan:
Would you please?

Martha Beck:
So I grew up in a very sarcastic, sort of bitingly cruel family. Literally there was a Mormon hymn that we were all supposed to sing in terms of the church. It was called “Love at Home.” And we were forbidden to sing that song even if it was being sung by the congregation because it was just considered too maudlin and disgusting and we don’t go there. So it was not the warmest of environments. So then I got to a little place called Harvard when I was 17 and found out sure enough, it was full of biting sarcasm. I was right at home. I freaking loved it. People would punch me in the face with their words, and I would punch back. It was great. Other poor kids from wherever were going, the Midwest, “Why is everyone mean here?” And I just loved it. Anyway, then I had my son—sorry, you and your friend used to drink every time I mentioned Harvard or Down syndrome. I’m mentioning them both now.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
It was pretty brutal. And I didn’t see a lot of upside in having a child with Down syndrome or more to the point, being a person with Down syndrome. But I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. I refuse to give up.” And I started thinking of things that were positive about having a child with Down syndrome, being a child with Down syndrome. So I started being like, “There’s joy to be had.” And I got slammed.

Rowan Mangan:
You got it. Yeah. What is that? Why? I mean, I bet everyone listening is like, “Oh yeah, I totally recognize,” either having been you in that or the impulse to slam someone who will not acknowledge how fucking bad things are.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. In fact, since we’re talking about my family, my sister, I said to her after he was born, she was talking about something in her life, and I said, “Yeah, it was hard for me to adjust to Adam having this extra chromosome, but I’m starting to see some people sparkle like a diamond. And he kind of glows like a sapphire. It’s a different light, but he brings a light of his own.” And she burst into tears and I said, what’s wrong? And she said, “We were so happy because we thought something bad had finally happened to you. And now it turns out it was something good.”

Rowan Mangan:
God damnit. You lucky thing. Must be nice. I don’t even have a son with Down syndrome.

Martha Beck:
I know. Anyway, the point is that when I was shifting my default mode network to try to want to live, she thought that I had entered a reality where everything was automatically easy for me.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but you weren’t shifting your default mode network. You were adapting the circumstances to your existing default mode network because the room that you furnish always goes, “Let me find a way to make this sunny.”

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
And I don’t mean that in a facile way.

Martha Beck:
No, no, that’s what I do.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you do this amazing yoga in your room until there’s a way that it all looks good.

Martha Beck:
Pretty much. Yeah. I actually was dealing with that in Santa Fe. This one woman, we were doing these things where your body gets very weak when you’re miserable or you’re lying or whatever. And she was just, we were doing all these muscle-testing things and she was always strong. And one of the things we have people say that is not true, that I know is a lie, is, “I love to vomit.” And she would say that, and she’d start to weaken, and then her strength would pop up again. And I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “Well, at first I think ‘Yuck,’ but then I think, ‘Better out than in!'” And she was just relentlessly sunny. And I got to tell you, she was physically strong like an ox and radiant and everything. And I was like, “Damn! Must be nice.”

Rowan Mangan:
Must be nice to be strong like ox.

Martha Beck:
Default mode network. But she really had, she’d pushed it even further than I had do, which is saying something. You’re right, I kind of—but that’s not something I was born with. It’s something I developed.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and that’s kind of what we’re driving at is that it feels like stuff is baked in, but actually we’re recreating it in every moment. And so it’s like one of the sort of tools that you’ve drawn on a lot is the work of Byron Katie, which is one of these brilliant ways that we can kind of get into our own circuitry without any invasive surgical procedures and start wiggling with the motherboard. Because if you don’t wiggle with a motherboard, you’re not really trying.

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh, that’s got to be—

Rowan Mangan:
Byron Katie would love me for saying this about her work.

Martha Beck:
If that isn’t the name of a band, it has to be the name of a song.

Rowan Mangan:
“Wiggle with the Motherboard.”

Martha Beck:
“Wiggle with the Motherboard.” It’s so classy.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s going to be like the band that decides to do a kid’s album.

Martha Beck:
It’s heavy metal. Wiggle with the Motherboard.

Rowan Mangan:
Wiggle with the motherboard.

Martha Beck:
Have I talked on this podcast about my Chinese song album that I got in mainland China in 1983 that was called Our Motherly Rubber Estate? Featuring the song “Nobody Would Say Bad of Our Motherland.”

Rowan Mangan:
Aww.

Martha Beck:
Anyway. Yeah, wiggle with the motherboard.

Rowan Mangan:
Wiggle with the motherboard and start looking at things that we are choosing that feel like they’re not choices.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
What we’re choosing to see, what we are choosing to reinforce by circumstance.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. People don’t think that their thoughts are optional. They think their thoughts are reality.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And this is what Byron Katie just over and over and over blows to smithereens inside people’s heads. She works with—well, she has this work that is brilliantly simple and brilliantly brief and incredibly hard to learn. So don’t take it from us. Go to her website and do this. And it’s four questions you ask of any, you have a thought that makes you feel bad and you see if it’s true and you see how it affects you, and you go in ruthlessly like a scientist. It’s the most scientific methodology of thinking I’ve ever encountered in my life. And at the end when you’ve questioned a thought that you think is absolute and you started to see that it may not be absolute, she has you do something called a turnaround where it’s the opposite of the thought, the direct grammatical opposite of the thought. And you have to start to think of ways in which that might be true. And it’s so interesting because you watch people who, it’s almost like watching someone try to lift a weight that’s too heavy for them.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s how it feels too.

Martha Beck:
Yeah! It’s like this straining. Or in one, I read an anthropological study of this rainforest tribe that didn’t have straight lines in their environment at all. And this anthropologist would draw a straight line in the dirt and then say, try to make it that way. And they would draw a curved line because that’s how the arm bends. And he’d say, “No, make it straight.” They would just look at him like he was crazy. Then they would try, but it was like they would be sweating and gritting their teeth. The reason is they didn’t have that neuron connection in the brain. And we have it all over. We see straight lines everywhere, but there are very few in nature. So same thing when you’re trying to think the opposite of a thought you’ve always believed. Like, “I’m a piece of crap.” Okay, that one, how many times have I thought that? But I’m a shining jewel or whatever you think the opposite of a piece of crap is. Then she says, find the evidence, find the evidence, look for the evidence. And you don’t get to ignore any of the evidence. She’s ruthlessly scientific.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s not about, what’s fascinating with The Work is that it’s not actually about proving that the opposite is true. It’s about wiggling the tooth. That’s where I got the motherboard thing, wiggling. You wiggle the tooth of the thought.

Martha Beck:
Double metaphor in a room where you have a green vase.

Rowan Mangan:
In the room with the green vase, you wiggle the motherboard until the tooth pops out and then you have it.

Martha Beck:
And the vase is golden.

Rowan Mangan:
I think—any questions?

Martha Beck:
I think we’re done here. So I remember trying to work with a therapist whom I deeply respected to do this kind of work. Why are you laughing?

Rowan Mangan:
Because what you’re talking about is, “So I was trying to life coach my therapist while I paid her to be my therapist.”

Martha Beck:
I said a therapist that I knew, okay, yes, she was my therapist, but we had observed two years, no contact. I cut off that relationship, two years of no contact. Then we were friends.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you began life coaching her like a motherfucker.

Martha Beck:
Well, she wanted to learn. Oh God, that sounds horribly like—”Oh she wanted to learn, the poor thing was yearning for some information from moi. Real, real thinking.” No, she wanted to learn the Byron Katie work. So I’d go through and I’d say, you know, she’d say something like, “Well, you got to make money to live.” And I’d say, “Okay, is that necessarily true? You’re on an island somewhere.” Could I just say something about an island somewhere?

Rowan Mangan:
We are on an island somewhere.

Martha Beck:
We always are really. Third rock from the sun. No, we have transcripts sometimes of things we say, or maybe this was just me. Anyway, I was saying something on a recording and it got automatically transcribed. And I think what I said was imagine yourself in a lovely place like maybe an atoll in the Pacific. Atoll meaning, I think, a small island with other islands sprinkled around. I think that’s what it means. Anyway, the transcript just said, “Imagine yourself someplace really divine like an asshole in the Pacific.” And I was like, “Is that the maelstrom or something?” Anyway, what was I talking about?

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got a cold and I’m on a lot of drugs. What’s your excuse?

Martha Beck:
I’m just mind mirroring you. My mirror neurons.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I’m so sorry.

Martha Beck:
Anyway. “Got to have money to live,” she would say, and I’d say, “Not if you’re on an asshole in the Pacific.” Eating coconuts.

Rowan Mangan:
And then she said, “I really can’t be your therapist anymore.”

Martha Beck:
“You’re beyond help.” Anyway, she could not think of any examples of a person who might not need money to live. And most people in our culture cannot because it has been so selectively programmed into us that the one thing we absolutely have to have is this token of exchange that links us inexorably to the whole mess, the whole catastrophe. And nobody, in my experience, not nobody, very few people that I’ve worked with over the years, and there have been many, ever thinks in terms of what they could do without money. You do. You think that way. No, you don’t. You think of interesting ways you could get money.

Rowan Mangan:
I do.

Martha Beck:
You’re really, and that’s part of your default mode network.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because you’ll just be driving.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, like, “I don’t need money right now, but boy, I could work in a noodle shop.”

Martha Beck:
Absolutely. Everywhere we go, Ro goes, “Yeah, I could work here. They want me.”

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I don’t say they want me.

Martha Beck:
It’s implied.

Rowan Mangan:
I see. Well, of course it’s implied.

Martha Beck:
Because I literally became a life coach because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hire me for anything. I would think, “They’d never hire me.”

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t get it. What do you mean?

Martha Beck:
No, literally we had lunch at a noodle shop.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh! For a job. So you became the life coach.

Martha Beck:
So you’d think, “I could get a job,” and I’d think, “There’s no way they’d give me a job.”

Rowan Mangan:
And so you thought you were therefore qualified to be a life coach, to tell people how to live.

Martha Beck:
Well… I did help people get jobs by shifting the way they thought about getting jobs for themselves. I just never thought that I could get a job for myself.

Rowan Mangan:
I see, I see. Well, and we’ll explore that further.

Martha Beck:
So here’s the thing, the default mode network: Most of us are set to negative. The culture sets us to highly negative. We get pushed and pushed and pushed. And if we try to shift back toward optimism and positivity, we get sneered out, we get lambasted, we get, “Must be nice.” There are actual pressures to keep from shifting from resting misery face to resting joy face. Resting joy face is where you walk around going, “I could throw up, but better out than in!” And I don’t mean we should all put on a happy face. I hate that. I hate that. There’s nothing worse than performative positivity.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
I too have been on morning television, not often, but I’ve done it.

Rowan Mangan:
Do not turn that frown upside down, whatever you do. But I think we can all benefit from questioning some of those reflex thoughts.

Martha Beck:
I think the keyword there is questioning. What we benefit from is walking around with a mind that is open to questions all the time. And most of us think of that as a difficult or frightening thing because we want to know things. In Asia they call it “don’t know mind.” I’ve talked about it a million times. But it’s the idea that Shunryu Suzuki said, that there, in the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are a few. If you walk around going, “I have no particular bias here. I’m just observing the world.” Generally what works for us best is something more on the optimistic side.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, because actually you’re always listing to starboard a little bit. That’s a nice little maritime reference for you there.

Martha Beck:
Isn’t it port? Left?

Rowan Mangan:
You can list either way towards negativity. It doesn’t matter if it’s left or right. Towards negativity because of our evolution. So in actual fact, doesn’t it, wouldn’t it be better to kind of force the issue a little bit towards the positive? Even though people are dying and people are being exploited and people are suffering and all of that is going to be true. And what Marty’s book Beyond Anxiety showed is that if you remain clenched in the part of your brain that is focused on the misery, the exploitation, the suffering, and let’s be honest, feels a little bit self-righteous in staying there.

Martha Beck:
That part of the brain is very into judgment and righteousness.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that’s why “Must be nice” is always said with that particular tone of voice.

Martha Beck:
Yes. It’s judgment and it’s self-satisfaction.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And what I was saying was from that space, you can sneer, you can put other people down, you can empathize like fuck, but you cannot solve.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You can’t solve from that place. And so why would you want to try and go for resting joy face at a time like this? Because that’s what we need. That’s what we need is people who can come up with creative solutions, which you can’t do.

Martha Beck:
Right. You can do it if you walk through the world going, “Anything could be possible. Let me look for what’s useful.” As a sociologist, I was told, “We’re never going to deal in absolute truths.” There’s no absolute truth in the social sciences, but there is usefulness. So is optimism true? No. Optimists are more often wrong than they are right. But is optimism useful? Indubitably! It gives people more longevity. It gives people better health. It improves your immune function. And here’s how I think of it—because we don’t have enough metaphors in this podcast yet.

Rowan Mangan:
I was just working on the metaphor, like enlarging the metaphor for this.

Martha Beck:
You remember I—we’ve moved, so I haven’t seen my physical therapist slash dominatrix for a long time.

Rowan Mangan:
I know, honey.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And that woman—

Rowan Mangan:
And I’ve done a terrible time filling her shoes.

Martha Beck:
I know, you never make me lift anything. But one of the things that was really gnarly about having her dictate my workout was that she made me use my non-dominant hand and leg and everything to try to equalize the strength on each side of my body. And as you said, we most of us have a natural inclination to use one hand more and to use one point of view more. But you’re going to be more balanced and your ability to function effectively in the world is going to be better if you purposely use the less dominant part to make it stronger. So my whole life, honestly, I was so negative, growing up. Oh, so negative. And it really was, like Camus said, “Do I have a cup of coffee or end my life?” And when I was about 18, I just was like, “Okay, I’m going to have to do something here. I’m going to have to find something as an alternative to the way I see the world because if this is the bus I’m on, I want off.” So I started just—

Rowan Mangan:
You started decorating the bus.

Martha Beck:
I started decorating the bus with—and it was hard. Walking around with my perceptions, you know, the mind wandering would go to the negative. And to try to force my wandering mind to say, “Actually, I don’t know. Let’s see something positive.” And I know this sounds like Mary Sunshine, but I would read something that would depress me horribly, and I still do this, and then—like my Instagram feed, it is preferentially when I see something that makes me love the world.

Rowan Mangan:
Otters and puppies, otters and puppies.

Martha Beck:
Otters and puppies. But also I cannot say enough about that man who plays his pink guitar to various species of animal.

Rowan Mangan:
They like it.

Martha Beck:
They sing along, they always do. The howler monkeys, the tiger, everything sings along, cows. Oh my God. In Santa Fe I was talking to this sweet man. Now this is an example. This is where my mind goes, when it wanders. He’s so funny. He’s this tough, brawling cowboy, and he owns Texas longhorns, and he herds them around and he’s just like a Texas dude. And he said he read one of my books, and it was about how animals connect with us or whatever. And he went to the pasture and he put his hands on the railing, and his longhorns were in there and they’d always had a very adversarial relationship. He gets on the field and his energy is so big, those cows just stampede away from him. This time he put his hands on the railing and he closed his eyes tight, and he thought about love and he wouldn’t stop thinking about love. And it was hard. And he told me how hard it was. And then after about 10 minutes, he felt something, and he looked up and the cows were licking his hands.

Rowan Mangan:
They were like, “Man, are you okay? It shouldn’t be this hard to think about love. Lighten up.”

Martha Beck:
They licked his hands.

Rowan Mangan:
They licked his little hands.

Martha Beck:
See now that’s what I mean by you got to test it. Like, so you think, “Animals are afraid of me.” Really? Are you sure?

Rowan Mangan:
Can I tell you what I thought?

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
People eat those tongues?

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s your default mode network, isn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I was like, “Must be nice to get licked by a cow while it’s still got a tongue before someone puts it in a tin and eats it.”

Martha Beck:
You do—oh my God, do they tin cow tongues in Australia?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know, but it seems probable.

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know why you brought Australia into this. That’s just a general thing.

Martha Beck:
Well, I’ve never heard of tinned cow tongue. You totally took my default mode network, which was on love and cow tongues, and you took it to killing and tinning those cow tongues because your default mode network is running the way culture wants it to. And you are not wilder in that sense at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Truly. I can recognize through this conversation about cow tongues that I definitely have trained the algorithm of my own default mode network to be really sensitive to potential suffering of animals over a long time. And so yeah, it’s absolutely true that it’s like my brain, to put this in a context, you are saying something cute, my brain is casting around for some way for those happy cows having a moment to be suffering.

Martha Beck:
That’s so interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s true. It’s literally true.

Martha Beck:
You know, I used to have that so much that it was one of the reasons I wanted to just check out. Like the thought of an animal suffering. I used to play this Bach sonata, and my beagle really loved it, and I would start playing it and I would hear his little toes come tapping in so he could lie under the piano and listen to it. And then I would make mistakes, and I would literally go into anguish thinking, “I could have played this perfectly for my beagle, but I messed up and he is suffering.” That’s how sensitive I was to the suffering of animals.

Rowan Mangan:
You still get pretty uptight if you think a dog is going to be disappointed by anything you’ve done.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I can’t handle the disappointment of dogs. Don’t even.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s rough.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, the whole animal suffering thing was just horrific, especially with climate change and habitat infringement and all that stuff. And I still would, I am still a huge, rabid activist for animals being allowed to feel joy and have their own space and everything. But that’s one thing I worked on for years in meditation where I would get to the point where I could be completely not just calm, but in a state of deep peace, like in a tiny little hotel bathroom or something. I’d be sitting in there meditating and everything was peace. And I would tell myself—

Rowan Mangan:
Oh wait, so the bathroom’s not metaphorical. The bathroom’s actual.

Martha Beck:
Literal. So now I think, “Okay, animals live with easy access to this state of sort of spiritual calm that they can drop into it. You watch a cat, even a cat that’s sick or something, and they’ll go into a space of really, like, they don’t fret the way we do. But that was something I had to teach my default mode network. Because I was overwhelmed with the suffering of animals. Oh, I can’t even describe it. As a child. Ah, god.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, me too. I used to rescue ants from my dog’s water bowl. I was like, “Oh my God!” And in my mind it was like being tossed on the ocean and thinking all the thoughts. And I’ve barely got started. I have so much to give.

Martha Beck:
And then glub, glub. Out, out. Yeah, I can’t, oh. I try to rescue worms on the sidewalk when I’m going out for my morning walks. But when you touch ’em, they go completely berserk. Have you noticed? They freak out.

Rowan Mangan:
You are very sensitive to that. I don’t mind it. It reminds me of cow tongues.

Martha Beck:
But I literally am like, I’ll see a worm headed the wrong direction out into the road instead of away from it. And I’m like, “I have to save it, but how do I do that without distressing it?”

Rowan Mangan:
“So I became a life coach.”

Martha Beck:
I didn’t say what form of life. I’m specializing in worms now. I thought I’d start simple and move up.

Rowan Mangan:
Worms and therapists?

Martha Beck:
Worms and therapists. But it’s hard because there are certain things you just can’t teach a therapist to do.

Rowan Mangan:
Very good.

Martha Beck:
I think I’ll have to work on that. Where they squiggle, but it’s okay. They’re not going to spend a lifetime with PTSD because I picked them up and threw ’em into the forest. I can do that. Okay, wait. Back to what we were saying. We tend to go to the negative. It is considered maudlin and stupid and sort of sub-intellectual to not go to the most negative scenario in our culture. But unless we are open to all scenarios, we are not in touch with reality at all. And if you’ll remember the whole motto of this show is: “Culture comes to consensus. Nature means coming to our senses.” And if you’re just walking along with your senses fully active, you’ll find—like, try it. I don’t want to sound hokey, but count how many things you see every day that are working and just be amazed. People obey traffic laws most of the time. People—

Rowan Mangan:
Are kind to each other.

Martha Beck:
Are kind to each other most of the time. Most of the time in an airport when you lose something, somebody will try to return it instead of stealing it. Not all the time, but most of the time. Every time it happens. If you register that and start gearing your default mode network, your resting face toward what is working instead of what is not working, what is done out of love rather than what is done out of hate. If you just give it equal numbers, the positive stuff way outweighs the negative.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But you’ve got to integrate it. You can’t just notice it because it slides off.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s still going to slide off. The blinkers is the classic—

Martha Beck:
Blinkers.

Rowan Mangan:
Horses. Blinkers get put on them so that they can only look straight ahead because if they get distracted, they could go anywhere. They could get scared. They could, like horses do.

Martha Beck:
So are you saying that I’m like, that you need blinkers? Venetian deaths. What are you saying?

Rowan Mangan:
So I’m saying that you widen the scope, you widen the scope of what you see, even though there’s the potential for scariness.

Martha Beck:
But we’re saying the culture is only selecting for scariness. When you open your blinkers, you see more good things.

Rowan Mangan:
If you’re just listening to the audio of this, you’re really missing out.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, this is really good.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So what we’re saying is if you are questioning your thoughts and you’re just opening the parameters for what’s possible: “Could this be possible? Could this be possible?”

Martha Beck:
Yes. You’re going to be in “don’t know mind” and you’re going to pick up more data from your senses. And I’m saying those will probably in many situations veer toward the positive where if you hadn’t opened your perceptions, you would stick with negativity. And we had an example.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on. Prove it.

Martha Beck:
We went to dinner with our Pilates instructor and his delightful husband. We were out there with Ray, our beloved Ray, and I said to Ray, “You have changed my life because I had just had surgery when I met you. I was very weak. I was very lopsided in my physical strength and everything.” And doing this little Pilates routine once a week with Ray really changed my body and therefore changed my life. And Ray, instead of going, “Oh, it was nothing, it was Joe Pilates.” There literally was a Joe Pilates. He said, “Could you say that again?” And I was like, “Sure.” I was dying to say it again.

Rowan Mangan:
And he just sort of sat there, like this time I’m going to…

Martha Beck:
He needed to take it in and he wanted to make sure he’d heard it right.

Rowan Mangan:
Probably because the first time you said it, he was fighting off all those conditioned responses.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, like, “I didn’t do well enough.”

Rowan Mangan:
“She doesn’t mean it. She’s just blowing smoke.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, there are all kinds of stuff that immediately comes up from resting misery face. But he wanted to just sit still and let it actually land. And after that dinner, I actually went back to some times in my life when people said something I wanted to hear, but I negated it because of my resting misery mind. And I thought, “What if they actually meant it? What if they actually meant, ‘You’ve helped me’ or ‘I love you,’ or ‘I thought you were fantastic.’ Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Ma’am, what are you doing? This is a blood bank.

Martha Beck:
Problem with blood banks, they’re always asking, “Where did you get it? Where did you get it?”

Rowan Mangan:
“Why is it here in a bucket?”

Martha Beck:
We totally stole that off the internet.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not stealing if it’s off the internet.

Martha Beck:
Oh, okay. Great. So that’s it. We all have resting misery mind, and it’s not realistic. And open mind is better. Or maybe even work out that positive side of your default mode network and check out what’s working.

Rowan Mangan:
“Is that true?” When you think a thought. “Is that true?” Especially if the thought makes you feel like shit.

Martha Beck:
First thing is realize that thoughts are optional. Your thoughts are not reality. There are infinite thoughts you could think on a given topic. No one of them would be actual reality. And you’re choosing between a vast array, some of which will make you miserable, and some of which will make you happy. That’s the first thing. Your thoughts are not reality. And then if it’s putting your default network into a state of misery, are those thoughts actually reality? Are they true? This is the Byron Katie work. “Is that thought true?” And you subject the thought to rigorous thinking, not just slapdash default mode network: “Well, the course is true. Everybody’s mean all the time.”

Rowan Mangan:
If it feels good, let it land. Take a minute with it because that’s how we integrate the alternatives. Feels bad, question it. Feels good: “Can you say that again?”

Martha Beck:
Can you say that again? Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And sit under it like a warm shower.

Martha Beck:
In your room. So now your room has no vases at all. It’s just a room with a warm shower.

Rowan Mangan:
And you’re sitting in the shower. So I imagine you sitting in a plastic chair like you have in a hospital when you’re too weak to stand in the shower.

Martha Beck:
And judging by the way you dress, you’re not interested in the material world. So you’re wearing nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you’re in the shower, Marty. It’s practical.

Martha Beck:
I know. Well, apparently people in their thirties and forties do that.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, only if they’re talking about AI and art.

Martha Beck:
Do they talk about other things? No. You’re sitting there and now you’re in default mode network. Your resting face has gone to whatever’s real. And when you focus on the things that actually make you function better from your health to your job, to your relationships, you will find that the thoughts that make you function well are always more joyful.

Rowan Mangan:
And those thoughts when they’re kind of collected into a way of being become humans who can solve problems, not just sneer.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the culture will tell you you’re being stupid and that your thinking is feeble and that only sneering and hatred are right. And it “must be nice” to think a happy thought. You’ll be shamed, shamed, shamed.

Rowan Mangan:
You will.

Martha Beck:
But choosing resting joy face, that’s how you…

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

Martha Beck:
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.