Martha Beck:
So Roey, what are you trying to figure out right now?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty. I’m trying to figure out myself through the lens of what you tell me about myself.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
And I would like to reference something that was recently said that I have written down word for word.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
That I would like you to help me, just like help me understand myself better.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay? This is what you said.

Martha Beck:
Was I fully awake?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t remember.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
But it was a compliment that you said to me. You said, and I quote, “I love the little gangly scarecrow dance you’ve started to do since reaching midlife.” And this was such an interesting bit of language to me that I immediately thought, “I think our Bewildered listeners are going to want to hear about this.” Gangly little scarecrow dance that I’ve started doing since reaching midlife.

Martha Beck:
They pay me for my wordage.

Rowan Mangan:
But I don’t.

Martha Beck:
Because it applies. No, you should for that. You just did it. You were going into the gangly little scarecrow dance. This is what she does. I have to tell them, okay, this is what you do. I’ll talk to you. I will not talk to the other people so that they can defend me because they will also one day see you do this and they’ll go, “Oh, she was right.” So what happens is I’m not sure what triggers it except midlife. But what happens is you start to lift your elbows really high on each side.

Rowan Mangan:
In what circumstances though?

Martha Beck:
You’re like a velociraptor. No, they can’t fly. You’re like a pterodactyl opening its leathery wings.

Rowan Mangan:
But why am I doing this?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. Midlife.

Rowan Mangan:
But what circumstances are there where I—

Martha Beck:
Home. I think it’s when, sometimes it’s when you feel—it’s true—when you feel sweaty. That’s what you say. You don’t look sweaty. You always just say you’re sweaty. And then the elbows start to go out and up toward the shoulder height, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right. To allow for better airflow.

Martha Beck:
It makes sense at that moment. But if you just sort of hung there like Pinocchio, half strung-up or whatever, that would be like sweat related. But then what happens is once the upper arms are fully horizontal, like parallel to the ground, then you begin to waggle your forearms and then you kind of squat. I swear to God, you do, but going into a very wide stance with a squat. So now you’ve got your elbows are up, your forearms are dangling. Your thighs are also parallel to the ground. So upper arms, thighs, both parallel—

Rowan Mangan:
This sounds like I’m doing the haka.

Martha Beck:
Something like that.

Rowan Mangan:
The New Zealand All Blacks or something.

Martha Beck:
It’s a little scary for those of us in the room when it just happens. And then you just sort of scuttle around the room for a while.

Rowan Mangan:
You haven’t mentioned that I tend to try and maintain very intense eye contact with you throughout this.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. You do. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I like that part of it.

Martha Beck:
And then you start sliding. That’s right. You don’t so much scuttle. You keep your feet where they are. Then you slide your upper body back and forth.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s called dancing. Sliding back and forth.

Martha Beck:
And I’m so happy you found it at midlife. I think we figured out why you did it. Like a balance board.

Rowan Mangan:
You think it was all about sweat? I don’t think it is.

Martha Beck:
No, you got a balance board and you learned to wiggle on it.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I know why I do it.

Martha Beck:
Why?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. This is a callback to a long-time-ago episode where I had to do a funny little thing with my thigh in a supermarket.

Martha Beck:
If I could count the number of times I’ve used that sentence.

Rowan Mangan:
I have this thing where every now and again, my thigh needs me to do a certain wiggle to release and it clicks.

Martha Beck:
That’s what she said.

Rowan Mangan:
It’ll do a little click. Someone wrote to me about this and went, “This really happens to me and thank you. ” And I was like, “No worries.” I am a spokesperson for people who need to do weird little thigh things.

Martha Beck:
What would happen in the supermarket if you did not do the weird little thigh wiggle?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. I will tell you. Try to follow this. I would be slightly uncomfortable and aware of it—and aware of it.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You know how it is when you go click for something?

Martha Beck:
If I move my head right now, it sounds like there’s popcorn popping in my damn neck. But you don’t see me dancing. Why? I’m beyond midlife.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh dear. I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with my attempts to figure things out.

Martha Beck:
I think that if you just go into the dance and keep your eyes locked and dance long enough, there will be a day when it will be given to you, that sacred knowledge.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. I am a shaman.

Martha Beck:
Your eyes suddenly lost all focus.

Rowan Mangan:
Yay. What are you trying to figure out, mine?

Martha Beck:
Well, mine is stupid compared to yours.

Rowan Mangan:
Compared to the gangly scarecrow dance? The pterodactyl wiggle?

Martha Beck:
The pterodactly wiggle. Yeah it’s about, you know when we just got back from Costa Rica?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
I remembered that in just 10 short sentences. We got back from the beautiful resort, Imiloa, at Costa Rica.

Rowan Mangan:
Not a resort. Institute.

Martha Beck:
Institute. Institute. We did a retreat there and it’s in the rainforest up overlooking the ocean. It’s absolutely supernally beautiful. And we get up every morning and they have brought us coffee. And we go sit on this little beautiful Balinese deck because they brought these Balinese buildings and put them there in the jungle without cutting a single tree. And we watched this incredible expansive green and then the ocean beyond it. I mean, this does not suck. And then two gorgeous, brilliant scarlet birds with blue and yellow wing tips fly by us, always as a couple, right? Sometimes there’s a throuple. We’ve seen throuples.

Rowan Mangan:
There have been throuples.

Martha Beck:
And in this incredible Garden of Eden like scene, they make a sound. And the sound that they make—

Rowan Mangan:
This most elegant, gorgeous—

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh, everything—

Rowan Mangan:
They look like an angel flying by.

Martha Beck:
And they go, and I can’t do this without doing it loudly. I don’t think you can make this noise without making it loud.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, can back away from the mic.

Martha Beck:
Here you go. They go: [screeches loudly] See, you have to scream it. It’s horrifying. It’s like somebody—

Rowan Mangan:
You have to. You have to.

Martha Beck:
Nope, can’t do it softly. You have to scream. And they do. They scream loudly. It fills the valleys. And okay, so here’s the thing. Here is what I’m trying to figure out. These are birds that famously can be taught to make any sound. They can sing opera. I mean, convincingly. They can rap. They can say, “How are you doing?” And they can say it in exactly that voice. I once saw a macaw in a pet store and people kept coming up to it and going, “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?” For some reason, that’s what you say to macaws. There’s so much to figure out about this, Ro. Really, I’m in the weeds. But this bird, after people would come and talk to it incessantly, would turn to them and go, “What?” Why? Given the ability to make any gorgeous sound they want to make, macaws decided we’re going to go with [loud screech]. Figure me that, Rowan Mangan.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe it’s beautiful to their ears. Why are we the arbiters of what sounds are awful and screeching and vile?

Martha Beck:
I am searching my soul for this and it brings up another thing: that dogs can smell 10,000 times better than we can, but what do they want to do? They want to push their faces into a rotting carcass and just go, “Oh yeah.” They can smell at a level that would absolutely make us faint with joy when we walked past a rose bush, but they’re shoving their faces into dead things.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Two really important points I want to raise here.

Martha Beck:
Yes, please.

Rowan Mangan:
One, dogs can smell time.

Martha Beck:
What the…?

Rowan Mangan:
Two—Dogs can smell time. Two, humans can smell petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth.

Martha Beck:
Rain on rock. Yeah. Rain on rock.

Rowan Mangan:
More strongly than sharks can smell blood in the water. We have evolved to be obsessed with the smell of rain hitting earth.

Martha Beck:
I understand that.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we should just dwell on that for a good hour or two.

Martha Beck:
I’m going to. I may be up all night. Whoa.

Rowan Mangan:
Whoa, man.

Martha Beck:
I don’t even need psychedelics with you around. That’s incredible. Yeah. And maybe they’re going, maybe the dogs are going, “Oh my God, they’re smelling rain on rocks? What is wrong with them?”

Rowan Mangan:
Disgusting!

Martha Beck:
“They could find a carcass somewhere. Wear it like a nosebag.” Yeah. And what it does say is that the perceptual experiences of other animals are very different from ours. And actually, you’ve been reading a book on this. I’ve been reading a book on this. And then Karen’s been reading yet a third book on this. Everybody’s reading a book on this that I know.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Mine is An Immense World by Ed Yong. Oh my God, what a great book.

Rowan Mangan:
Very good book.

Martha Beck:
So literally, I’m up all night thinking about this.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s the word in that book, it’s like umvelt or something.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, if you hadn’t said it, I would’ve remembered. Umwelt. It’s the infelt reality sense or perceptual sense of different animals. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It talks about bats and why they echolocate and all of a sudden I thought, maybe Ro is learning to echolocate because humans can learn that, you know?

Rowan Mangan:
My gosh.

Martha Beck:
Yes, they can.

Rowan Mangan:
I can.

Martha Beck:
I think that’s what you’re starting to do.

Rowan Mangan:
At midlife.

Martha Beck:
Also, the big blue butterflies we see in Costa Rica? They have ears on their wings.

Rowan Mangan:
So for people who’ve just tuned into Bewildered, it’s a very serious podcast exploring a lot of like sociophenomena.

Martha Beck:
Sociophenomena, is it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Sociophenomenological. Sociopathy. Sociology.

Martha Beck:
Sociomacy.

Rowan Mangan:
Sociometry. Sociology.

Martha Beck:
Sociomancy. Don’t even know what that is. I’m just making up words now. Let’s move on.

Rowan Mangan:
Socialism. We are serious individuals.

Martha Beck:
I will never figure this out, but it’s fun to try.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s do a podcast.

Martha Beck:
Let’s please, please do a podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, here is what I wish to talk about today. In the time that we’re living in, there is a phenomenon taking place that people kind of mention in passing, but I don’t think we give enough attention to. And that is the unprecedented shit, to quote Ani di Franco in minute one, that goes on every day that I think for about a decade, a lot of us have been sitting there looking at the news and saying, “Well, surely this will be the thing where there’ll be some sort of consequence, or this will be the thing where something will happen.”

Martha Beck:
“That’s beyond the pale. Someone will put a stop to this soon.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Someone will put a stop to this,” and it doesn’t happen. And so what I feel like we’re not taking full advantage of here is that in the egregious failure to observe basic norms of decency, certain people in this world have revealed something really cool. And that is that we’re living in a world in which unprecedented shit can take place—of all kinds, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So imagine this. Video game. We love video game analogies. It’s like we pretend we understand what the kids are doing.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know anything about them.

Rowan Mangan:
They do it like this with their little thumbs. It’s delightful. You’re playing a video game, this is the world. And in this world, people don’t fly, they walk. Right? There’s gravity. Stands to reason. So one day you look up, and there’s someone flying through the air.

Martha Beck:
In the game? Not while you’re playing, you look up and there’s someone because that would be really cool.

Rowan Mangan:
No. Inside the game.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
The game is reality. So you’ve got to really deal in the metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Jump into the metaphor here.

Rowan Mangan:
In the metaphor.

Martha Beck:
You’re in the game.You look up, woo!

Rowan Mangan:
In the game, someone’s flying, but you don’t know how to fly in the game. And this, metaphorically, is what’s happening with people doing bad shit and getting away with it. They’re suddenly flying and you’re like, “But no one’s ever flown before. Stop that. Someone’s got to stop that. That’s not fair.” Right? It doesn’t happen.

Martha Beck:
“He will fall down, they always do.” But they don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
But then they just don’t. So here’s what I think we should do with this situation. Metaphorically. We have to assume that that player who’s flying through the air has figured out what is called a cheat code in video game land. So like say you’re playing and one day by accident you hit control, option, shift. I’m trying to think of something that’s not Mac-specific to be like ecumenical. Up, right? And that’s not something that they’ve been told they can do. But when they do this combination of keys—it’s probably a lot more keys than just that—they go up in the air. So the information that we now have is that we can go up in the air if we figure out the code.

Martha Beck:
Somebody has figured out a cheat code to get up in the air.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. The game allows for that.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s what I want to talk about is how to use this power that we’ve become aware of for good, for “make good world, not bad world.”

Martha Beck:
And actually it’s interesting because you kind of have to pull in this metaphor. The way you just described it is very soothing. It explains it as well as anything ever has that there’s a cheat code in the reality we’re living in. I mean, they are doing something that could not happen for many, many, many decades. And being able to say, “Oh, there’s a cheat code. The parameters of behavior are wider in the game than I ever knew was true.” It is kind of like, “Oh, the game has shifted to something different than I thought the game was.”

Rowan Mangan:
To give you a real life example of what using that cheat code could look like is say something happens in the country and someone and a lot of people film that from different angles on their phones. And then people have seen it. It’s clearly real footage that hasn’t been doctored. And shortly thereafter, someone calls a press conference and says, “No, that did not happen. That was not. What you have seen from three different angles and countless witness statements, that didn’t happen.” And then they just continue with their lives. And so that is the equivalent of like, “Oh my God, gravity doesn’t always apply in this world.” So I’m just trying to decode it a little bit so we know what we’re talking about.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’m glad you did. And I remember when I was in my 20s and I was trying to deal with a history of abuse, trigger warning, and abuse that was sort of interwoven with religion, and realizing that abuse of girls was really pretty much epidemic in this religious group. And I really thought that the leaders of that religious group wanted to save and protect children. And so I was in a position to actually go interact with them and say, “This is happening. We have all this statistical evidence. We have all these women who are suffering.” And the whole thing, and it was like, “No, that doesn’t happen.” And I realized there would be no backlash. There would be no punishment. There would be no calling to account. There would be no consequence whatsoever. And I remember getting out of my car after coming from one of these meetings and standing on my little Utah driveway looking out over the valley and going, “Oh, truth is nothing but consensus.” And that was actually the moment when I separated coming to my senses from coming to consensus. I’ve never told that story, even though we use that every time we make a podcast. But that was happening in this little teapot tempest that I was looking at. And now it’s like it’s the same thing over again. And it’s the same strange magic that so many people in that religion are doing their absolute best and trying their hardest to be good in every way. And then some people just don’t have to. And they never, even if they get caught, nothing happens.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s an exaggeration of a quality of patriarchy, I guess, that you can sort of see, but it’s just become so flagrant that for a certain set of humans, you can do whatever you want.

Martha Beck:
Right. And I always thought, well, that’s because that was a crazy group of religious zealots. Thank God I live in a broader community in which the church and state are separate and everybody has got their feet on the ground in an empirical reality. It turns out if somebody believes they can swing consensus by standing at a podium and saying it never happened, if they can hold that with such ferocity that enough people gang up behind it and say, “That’s the way we’re going to define reality.” That’s when culture has fully pulled you off your nature. That’s when something very, very bizarre is starting to happen. And you’re right, I think it happens at the turning of epochs. I don’t think you can do that at any time in history. It comes at particular moments.

Rowan Mangan:
Blood moon.

Martha Beck:
What? What the hell? What is a blood moon?

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s like an event that happens in a video game where it’s like all the monsters that you’ve killed re-spawn or something so that it doesn’t just get boring.

Martha Beck:
Is this every game or just a game you once played?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t for sure know. Do you know, Drew? Drew doesn’t know. No. I don’t know. I’ll need to talk to Adam. I’ll get back to you. I’m pretty sure it’s in more than one game.

Martha Beck:
That’s really interesting. Now that we mention it, I think it does come when things are starting to rattle the cage of that particular culture. It’s starting to break at the edges.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That’s right. And so the physics of the whole world doesn’t apply.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it starts, and so things—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like when the nothing comes in The Neverending Story.

Martha Beck:
What? What the hell are you talking

Rowan Mangan:
The nothing. You know how the whole world, in The Neverending Story, of Fantasia is being taken over by this thing called the nothing?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And in the movie, it’s like everything starts shaking and—

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s so interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
The nothing is coming.

Martha Beck:
So here’s the thing. I think this is a pattern. I mean, it’s really interesting that you just brought this up. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But what I was dealing with in that religion was a religion where because of the internet, information was becoming available that disproved a lot of the truth claims of that religion. When I was growing up in Utah, there was a comedy, a soap opera called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, where one of the characters was gay, even though they never really talked about it. And that was legally banned from being broadcast until like 11:00 at night so all the children would be asleep and most of the adults as well.

Rowan Mangan:
Except the gay ones.

Martha Beck:
Except the gay ones who were up waiting.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s when they wake up.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And then you bring the internet into it, and suddenly every kid with a phone can check the veracity of some religious truth claim, and it doesn’t hold up very well. So it was shaking, the whole thing was shaking. And I’m not sure if people were doing worse things. I think it was that things were coming to light that had never been prosecuted, and they were still not prosecuted, but they were getting away with it in broad daylight now.

Rowan Mangan:
God, it’s so interesting, the idea you can check the veracity with your phone because I feel like that’s gone too.

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
That was there for about five seconds. And now that’s gone.

Martha Beck:
The machines will show us what really happened.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s deep fakes. And it’s like … And that’s the Orwell thing from 1984 where he says, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Martha Beck:
Most essential command. So I think we’re living at a time when this issue of “Do you join consensus or do you stay with your damn senses?” we’re seeing it playing out on TV. People looking at the videos and going, “No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t.”

Rowan Mangan:
And maybe consensus itself is getting cracks all through it because I don’t even think, I don’t think people are believing the press conference.

Martha Beck:
No, that’s the interesting thing.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s just this proliferation of truths, right? Of possible truths. And so what our job is is to like, what’s the cheat code? We want to build a beautiful world based on respect and responsible uses of resources and just like peace, love, and understanding, rock and roll. And sorry, sex, love, and rock and roll, peace, love, and understanding.

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s my mission statement.

Martha Beck:
Cool. Works for me.

Rowan Mangan:
But we need to figure out the cheat code, right?

Martha Beck:
Right. Because we’re still playing within the ancient confines of the game as we learned it, and the cheat code people are flying all around us.

Rowan Mangan:
And we’re like, “Someone will do something any minute.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and you see that after things start to collapse in anything, people’s trying desperately to hold onto the old rules and they never really work.

Rowan Mangan:
And so there’s great power in knowing the cheat code. And you and I were trying to figure out what is the cheat code that’s being used here? If we continue to torture our beloved metaphor. And I think you landed on maybe what’s happening, one sort of mechanism that’s happening, that we could call the cheat code.

Martha Beck:
I think, and this is happening all around us. People are proliferating stories, they’re spinning different narratives. And I think those of us who are trying to do it by the old rules stick with the old narratives. But when you see that people are doing outlandish things that nobody’s supposed to be able to do, you kind of have to broaden the story of why things are happening, like the story of cause and effect. So once you broaden the story, you can start experimenting with different narratives that describe the world as you’re seeing it. And here’s what I found, and I know it sounds a little abstract, but I can get very specific. At different crisis points in my life, I have broken the story of what would work in the world, and I have started telling another story.

Rowan Mangan:
Broken the story of what would work in the world.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So here’s, I’ve told it a million times, and I’m sorry that I always use this example, but it was the first time it happened. So when I’m pregnant with Adam, and it turns out he has Down Syndrome, and people told me, “This is a tragedy. It’s going to ruin your life. He will not have a life worth living.”

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s the story that the culture was giving you about your situation.

Martha Beck:
Especially at Harvard, right? So it was a really strong version of that story. Intellect, meritocracy, achievement, hard work, that’s how you get ahead. Nobody got ahead by being not even knowing how to do math, right? Nobody got ahead in that way. But there I was and I was like, “I can’t stand that world.” So I tried a bunch of different narratives, like the narrative that said, “Oh, they have these early intervention things. He won’t be any different than any other child. People with Down syndrome can be exactly like other children and other adults.” I tried telling that one. A lot of parents I knew were clinging to that very hard. I remember once saying in a group of, when I was actually teaching some parents, once I said, “Look, I’m 28 (or whatever it was) and I’m teaching myself to play the piano. I could tell myself that I can be a world renowned concert pianist, but I don’t think that’s going to work no matter how hard I practice.” And I pretty much got nailed to the wall and set on fire. Like, “Anyone can be anything,” they kept saying, and I was like, “That story felt good to me, but it didn’t work.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s almost like, so if the cheat code is control/shift/up and they’re saying, “I just press F and G and up, and you jump and you jump and you jump and you jump.”

Martha Beck:
But here’s the thing. And so I kept casting a wider and wider net of story and I tried a really crazy one, and it started working.

Rowan Mangan:
What was the story?

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s coming out now in a, what I think is wonderful, but I guess it’s controversial podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. I had these weird psychic experiences once I got pregnant. What if this kid was a little factory of paranormal abilities? Is that why I was able to sort of know what was happening with people I loved who were far away?

Rowan Mangan:
When you were pregnant with him.

Martha Beck:
When I was pregnant with him. Is that why I had these incredibly vivid dreams that were so intense? They would make my teeth buzz when I woke up, that there was a purpose for this child’s life. I started getting into a very mystical way of defining human life. And so the first thing, I can force this to be the way I want it to, I really, really wanted that to work. I tried so hard, and anybody else out there who’s trying it so hard, you keep trying. When I started saying, “I think he’s telepathic,” I started having experiences that worked. I would look down and find myself flying in the game.

And I kept it a secret for a long time because it is so outside consensus. And I remember when I wrote it as a novel and then my editor said, “But I’ve come to know you and all of this is true.” And I was like, “Oh shit.”

Rowan Mangan:
That’s really funny because you’re trying to write it, the narrative, as a novel as like a workaround for the culture.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I was hoping that maybe—

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m not saying it’s true.”

Martha Beck:
No. But inside, this is what I was saying, I found a cheat code, y’all. Here’s a novel. It’s not real, but maybe it’ll slide you sideways into a longing for that kind of magic. As I now realize I was doing before Adam was born, I was desperate for that kind of beauty and that kind of mystery and that kind of magic. And when it started working, I was afraid to tell people about it because that was “getting away with something.” I wasn’t suffering the consequences I was supposed to suffer in the old rules. The shoe was on the other foot at that point.

Rowan Mangan:
“How come you get to fly?”

Martha Beck:
That has happened periodically. Whenever I hit something, actually it goes with the way I now know the brain works. If you’re working a problem in your life that is unsolvable and you’re trying to analyze it and work with the left hemisphere, which is very methodical and logical and you hit an impasse, but there’s a very, very strong feeling of wanting to find the solution, sometimes the right hemisphere of the brain without your knowing it, if you go and just do random things like taking a walk or taking a bath or whatever, it will do something called a “far transfer” and it will link ideas that you’ve never had before, that have never been linked before in your brain. And suddenly it will flare forward a new set of rules that you never knew existed. Your right hemisphere will give you a cheat code.

Rowan Mangan:
Very cool.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. Can I give another example?

Rowan Mangan:
Please do,

Martha Beck:
Okay. So I used this in a book I wrote once.

Rowan Mangan:
Was it a novel?

Martha Beck:
No, it was the last one I wrote. It’s called Beyond Anxiety. And it’s about these firefighters, these wildfire fighters. In 1949, they were called out to fight this fire and the section chief or whatever, his name was Wag Dodge. And he had 17 dudes with him and they went out and they were fighting this forest fire in a valley. And it was coming, the burn was coming down one side, and they were trying to create a fire break by digging with their shovels and axes and whatnot. And then Wag looked up and he saw that the wind had picked up and the fire embers were being blown over to the other side. So they were now in this choke canyon with fire that was going to be coming down both sides. And he knew that it was going to come faster than they could run, run out of the valley. So he got somebody’s attention and they all started screaming and running. And he kept saying, “Don’t run, don’t run,” but they didn’t really hear him. This is 1949, so he didn’t have any fancy equipment. He took out a book of matches. He had a wool blanket for beating the fire. He stood on a patch of grass and set fire to the grass in a circle around himself. He waited for that grass to burn over. And then just before the fire hit him, he threw himself in the burn patch, covered himself with the blanket and the fire went over him because there was nothing for it to eat around him.
No one ever used that technique before. No one had proposed that as a potential solution to being caught in a forest fire. It came to him instantaneously when he was absolutely at an impasse and it was pure inspiration, and now all firefighters do it. It was like a cheat code for the guys who were running out of the valley. He stayed and lived. He was the only one that lived, actually. So it was tragic, but it’s a really interesting example of somebody suddenly finding a cheat code. It works. It’s just not anything anybody’s ever done before.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m trying to drill down into when we know we’ve hit the correct cheat code versus when we’re pressing a lot of buttons, but we’re still just jumping along the screen. So you were saying something about the world starts feeding back to you validation.

Martha Beck:
Right. So when I was trying to believe that I could force my child to be different than he is, there was a sense of like grasping for things, but never quite–iIt was like trying to climb a glass building. I wanted so much to climb that thing, but there was no purchase.

Rowan Mangan:
And you weren’t Spider-Man.

Martha Beck:
I was not Spider-Man. Though oddly, things got better when I decided to believe that he is basically Spider-Man. No, he’s not Spider-Man, but when I started to believe things about the nature of his consciousness, for example, he never became very verbal. And I mentioned The Telepathy Tapes podcast. So when Adam’s in his 30s, from a completely different source, I get feedback that other parents of children who are subverbal are also experiencing evidence that their children are telepathic, are able to communicate without words. And I’ve been so spanked for even believing this; people are controversial about it. That is my experience. And I was not in conversation with those parents, and they weren’t in conversation with each other. Apparently, the children are in conversation with each other, even though they ostensibly can’t communicate verbally, but they’re talking to each other over distance.

Again, controversial, but that’s what’s happening. You’re out on the edges of what the culture will accept. So when I say, “I think my kid is kind of telepathic,” I’m breaking the rules and people go, “When’s that going to come down? That’s going to come back to bite her.” But instead I hear evidence from somebody else that’s like, “Yeah, I think my kid was the same way.”

Rowan Mangan:
So I’ve got an idea. What if the—you’ve given this example of the way that the cheat code can work in your life is you start having these telepathic experiences when you’re pregnant with Adam who has a similar brain difference to this group of people that 30 years later turn up on a podcast and can be telepathic with each other. And so what if instead of that being an illustrative example of the thing, what if this is actually what we’re talking about? What if this is part of the cheat code is actually the fact that in this moment of chaos where one storytelling machine is saying, “Disbelieve the evidence of your eyes and ears here,” and that means be utterly cut off from your instincts, from each other, from any sort of way of knowing, that it’s just, “Listen to me, and I will feed you reality.” And there’s whole channels devoted to that on TV. So what if the counterpoint to that that’s happening is that the other storytelling functions that are much quieter are actually happening—we’re forging connections with each other in ways that are not apparent to the eye.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. And the way—so this is one of the cheat codes that has worked for me. I’ve told different stories in my life. They’ve sort of presented—I’ve been presented with data I couldn’t understand, then I’d go try to find a story that fit. Most of them didn’t fit, but then one would fit. So I had this encounter with a sangloma, a shaman in Africa that I could not explain. I had a dream that turned out to be a dream that means you have to see the shaman. I didn’t know that. But some of my friends from the local tribe brought this woman to meet me in the dark of night outside in an African chilly midnight. And I could not explain what happened to me when that woman looked at me. She was just this little refugee from Mozambique, and I could feel myself being read almost. It was as though I had these icy needles going in. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t fun. And then she started telling my whole life with the bones she was throwing and everything. And I thought, “Okay, maybe she’s making that all up. Maybe she’s just got some really smart hits, but something happened there.” There’s something in this ancient practice that affected me physically, and I can’t deny it. So I spent the next five years—one of the things she told me was, “You have to understand this.” And so I spent a lot of time doing it. And I told many stories and they didn’t work, but the story that did work is that in every population, there are people born who are—they called them the shaman born—people who were born to be like the healers and medicine people of traditional cultures. And I wrote a book about the shamans of a culture that has no shamans, which is modern culture.

And I listed all these characteristics, and the things that I saw that were demonstrably real, that did not fit into my Western materialist worldview. And I wrote that book and I put down the list of characteristics and somebody gave it to you in—I mean, you can tell that part of the story.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’ve told it before.

Martha Beck:
I think we’ve told it before. Okay. So that story, oh my goodness, there are shaman born people. And I thought, “Okay, why? Why am I getting this? Why am I getting this story?” And the story that I came up with was we’re supposed to work together at a time in human history that is very, very perilous where healing is deeply needed. That was the story I told in my book. My editor hated it. She didn’t believe it was true. And then I went on the book tour. And I may have said this before too, but it was so weird. Every single driver—when you’re on a book tour, you have a driver who takes you around town to different bookstores and you have a chaperone who sort of makes sure you don’t wander off into the river or whatever. Every driver—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a good job when it’s you.

Martha Beck:
Every driver and every chaperone, they would just start like rivers of speech proving my hypothesis. I’d get into the car and this guy would go, the driver would suddenly say, “I need to tell you something. I feel really, really bad that I was a hunter for a while. I was a soldier. I learned to use a gun and then I came back to the US and I went hunting, but I swear I can feel the animal’s souls and now I only use my hunting gear to go out at deer hunting season and chase deer away from hunters.” And I’d be like, “Why are you telling me this? ” And he’d be crying and saying, “I don’t know. ” But it was dozens of people. It got so-

Rowan Mangan:
They were all deer hunters?

Martha Beck:
No, they were different things. They would say something like, “When I was a kid, my father was stationed in Japan after the war and I would go into the Shinto shrines and I would see these little forest spirits and they’re real.” And again, tears. “They were real. The forest, the stones are sentient. I know they are.” I’m like, “You’re a taxi driver.”

Rowan Mangan:
So people that you were encountering on the book tour about the shaman-born team were like people you were encountering were reinforcing your hypothesis in real time.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the story was coming back at me.

Rowan Mangan:
So the story was telling itself to you in three dimensions.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And you mentioned the mycelial network, which is the, it’s my latest story, this is my latest cheat code that we see all this really shocking behavior in public that’s very loud and very violent sometimes, but silently, subtly, beneath the visible landscape, something is forming like the network of fungi and algae that exists underneath a forest that send nutrients to different parts, that those shaman-born people are connecting with—oh God, I sound like such a lunatic—connecting with each other the way the kids in The Telepathy Tapes did. And they are part of the shaman born. I mean, being neurodivergent is a massive marker for shamanism in most cultures. So there’s this telepathic or apparently telepathic sensibility that is linking the healers of the world, the human healers of the world, to one another. And it is the balance for the violence, for the cheat code that lets people do things that are horrifying without consequence.

Rowan Mangan:
I just had a really cool image come into my head because earlier when I was talking about the fracturing of consensus in this moment where no one’s agreeing with each other about the evidence of their eyes and ears, right? And I pictured like when glass breaks and it does that spiderweb-like design of breaking, and that’s the fragmenting of consensus. And that’s the one part. And then at the same time, you have the web that is the web of connection, the fungal web beneath the surface, and that’s almost like an “as above so below” kind of mode where one thing is dividing and shattering, its mirror image is connecting.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that is—I love that. And it always seems to work that way. That’s one of the ways the story works for me, that in this game, if you see someone flying because there’s a cheat code, there’s also a cheat code for the underworld. There’s always a balancing, almost a polar opposite that’s happening. And the interesting thing is that one of the ways in which these two phenomena are very different in my current story is that the one cheat code is allowing people to do things very publicly and very loudly and very frighteningly. And the other cheat code is letting people do things silently and gently and incredibly powerfully without catching any attention at all. I don’t know why, but when I put that story into the world, it comes back as valid through the evidence of my eyes and ears.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, how about if we look at our Wilder community online and the group of people that gathers electronically from all over the world—

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, everywhere!

Rowan Mangan:
And we come together and I mean, talk about like mycelial network or whatever, people who get each other, connecting in this way. It is just like the nodes, right? Sending nutrients, sending messages back and forth. I mean, I feel like, and I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but the moment for these unlikely communities, these sort of ragtag groups of people to hunker together, whether it’s in using the new technologies or using the technologies of you’d live next door to me, that classic technology.

Martha Beck:
It’s magical and it works.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I love the idea that both are happening and both things must rise at the same time.

Martha Beck:
And they aggregate naturally. And that’s really true. Resistance movements are fascinating. I mean, we felt really strongly compelled to move to Kingston, New York, for some reason we didn’t understand. And you were telling me about, “We’ve got to move to this place. It’s the most wonderful place,” which it is. And I was like, “I don’t even care. I’m obsessed with the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.” And then as I was researching Sojourner Truth, it turned out she lived in Kingston, New York, and there’s a national park devoted to her and everything. So that’s why we moved. Reality started feeding back really direct instructions saying, “Yeah, it’s a good idea for you to move to Kingston, New York,” as part of the arrangement of the mycelial network.

Rowan Mangan:
And there were so many things that were about connections with other people that were happening in that and the way that reality was mirroring, that the story we were telling was also telling itself back to us.

Martha Beck:
And it keeps getting, we keep meeting more people that we think are living in France or something, and they’re all living in Woodstock. It’s crazy.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s insane.

Martha Beck:
So here’s what I think we need to do is most of us would be embarrassed to even attempt the things that some public people are doing very, very shamelessly and getting away with it. We’re embarrassed, our embarrassment and our social propriety keeps us from going to the edges of things. And even doing this podcast has made me feel really socially weird because I’m going to the edges of things, the edges of what the culture will tolerate from me without calling me crazy. But I think we have to go to the edges and bend the story to different degrees in order to cope with the way it’s being bent. We have to have cheat codes that work as powerfully as the cheat codes that public figures are using.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, right. Because another cheat code is that you say, “You can’t do that.” And they go, “Watch me.” And you go, “But something bad will happen.” And they go, “No, it won’t.” And so let’s say the thing, you know what? Let’s say the unsayable thing: What if we’re all connected telepathically and we’re all like nodes in a network that’s slowly going to liberate this reality into something much more beautiful?

Martha Beck:
It’s so funny because, I think I’ve told this story before, but right after the three of us got together, you, me and Karen, that bent the edge of my story, I’ll tell you, it really did. But people just started taking bets on how long it would take to implode. It was exactly the same thing: “They’re going to suffer the consequences. They can’t get away with this.” And we’re like, 10 years and counting. In a way, we’ve gotten away with something that a lot of people think should have had dire consequences, but we’re just like—

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. That’s true. So what I’m saying is maybe things that we think are absolutes are just like serving suggestions and that if we go, “Are we sure we can’t do that? ”

Martha Beck:
Oh, I like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Are we absolutely sure we cannot do that? Because what if we did? It’s just wild to see how many rules were never written down because there was an assumption that no one would ever dare to cross the unwritten rule, and it just worked for 250 years. So maybe what we can learn from this conversation is that where we see something that looks egregious and unjust going on, instead of just condemning it or hoping that the old consensus or the old checks and balances or whatever will step in and curtail that behavior, what if we try to reckon with it as a force of physics that’s changing and say, “Okay, so if this is so, how can I use it myself? How can we use our powers for good instead of evil and what can that look like?” And just remind ourselves that it’s not necessarily physics, it’s just the serving suggestion. Let’s just check whether something is true or not before we give up.

Martha Beck:
And dare to try believing in the things that you wish were true.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And see what the world does back.

Martha Beck:
See what comes back. Oh, I wish, I wish there were a mycelial network of like-minded people who would understand me and could love and enjoy my company while we save the world. Just try. Try it. See what comes back. See what comes back to you.

Rowan Mangan:
Say what comes back because that’s how we…

Martha Beck and 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.