Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve got a different kind of episode for the peeps today, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yes. We are introducing something we are crazy excited about. It’s called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered, and it’s an online digital space where we can go to hang out with you.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s our new community space, and it’s going to be where all of us who are yearning for community or all of us who know that there’s another step ready for us, but we can’t quite find it. Marty and I think that that next step is community, is what happens when we all come together. And so that’s what we are digging into today and we hope you’ll join us.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

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

Martha Beck:
Yes, indeed. And this week, Roey, this episode, I’m not even going to ask you what you’re trying to figure out because we both know what we collectively are trying to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re– just one thing really at the moment, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
Just the one.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve been seized by an obsession, haven’t we?

Martha Beck:
Indeed.

Rowan Mangan:
So there was no real choice when we sat down to record this episode to do anything but our current obsession. And so we’re just going to go ahead and get right into it.

Martha Beck:
That’s what we’re trying to figure out. So you know how sometimes we pronounce Bewildered “Be-Wilder-ed”?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I mean, we don’t really, but…

Martha Beck:
We really don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
That would be weird if we were like, “I have a podcast that’s called ‘Be-Wilder-Ed’ that you have to pronounce the ‘Ed.'”

Martha Beck:
I love that jolly word play.

Rowan Mangan:
It sounds like you’re telling Ed to be wilder. “Be wilder, Ed.”

Martha Beck:
“Ed. I believe in you, Ed. Be wilder.” Yes. Well, I sometimes pronounce it be-wilder-ed. It turns out that you can always be a little wilder, and we have experienced a very strong impulse to be wilder recently, and it affects you.

Rowan Mangan:
It does. So we thought, we’ll tell you a story about how we have recently ended up getting wilder. And it’s like one of those stories where you know where you think you’ve arrived at a destination more or less, but then you sort of adjust your focus or something, and you see there’s this whole new landscape opening up, and the road continuing on, and you’re on a whole new journey. You weren’t done after all.

Martha Beck:
Not at all.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s what we are talking about. But we thought before we let you know where we are, where we’re going, we’re going to put it in the context of where we’ve been. Fair?

Martha Beck:
Yes, because it’s a story, it’s an ongoing story, a neverending story. Ahaha.

Rowan Mangan:
If you are enjoying Bewildered, there are a few ways you can express your support for us. You can subscribe to the pod or follow it, depending on your app. It’s a great way to get us in front of more people. And as always, we love a little rate-and-review action, especially when the reviews are kind and the ratings are high, strangely.

And finally, if you really want to go to the next level with Bewildered, check out our online community, Wildercommunity.com. We’ll see you there.

Martha Beck:
All right, so I’m going to tell you my part. We all have a part of the story. I have a part, Ro has a part, and you have a part, whoever you are. So my story begins with growing up weird, being one of the “Other Butterflies,” not knowing that I was neurodivergent and gay and just generally weird in a fervently Mormon community where I tried and tried to fit in with my culture and failed horribly.

Then I went off to college and graduate school and tried and tried to fit in with that culture and I failed horribly. And then I became a writer. As you’re a writer, we both identify strongly as writers. One big reason for that is you can have a whole career and be completely alone. You don’t have to deal with anybody else. You can be in a garret somewhere pounding away at your word processor.

Rowan Mangan:
Your word processor?

Martha Beck:
Yes! See? That’s how long it goes.

Rowan Mangan:
WordPerfect ‘91.

Martha Beck:
And only occasionally run into an editor somewhere that you’d have to fight with. Like fighting with Rex, the death squid, in a tank. No, you could do most of it alone. But it was weird because I wanted to be able to work alone. I mean, I was too, seriously, I was too physically ill and, one might say, mentally ill, certainly depressed, to work well with other people.

But at the same time, I had always known part of my weirdness was that I felt like part of a “Team”—a team of people whose names I did not know, whose faces I didn’t know, but whose presence I could feel and almost see. And I didn’t know what it was. It was from early childhood. And as a writer, I wrote a couple books: “Oh, here’s a memoir, I can write about this. Here’s a self-help book, I had an idea.” Then they come back to you and they say, “Write another book.”

Well, I ran out of things to write about, except this Team of mine. So, plus the feeling that the Team was out there was getting stronger and stronger. It was a team of people who were the Other Butterflies, who were somehow divergent, but who also felt this intense, deep, empathetic connection with all living things and wanted to fix the world.

And so I started writing to those people and they kept asking for more books. And so ultimately, I wrote a book called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. And it was about: I think there’s a team of people out there who feel strange and alone, but who are part of a group that is destined to change the world. I mean, it was pretty crazy.

And I was afraid people would think I was crazy. And they did. I actually was pretty sure I had ended my writing career by being too obsessed with the bewildering and with the team. And I threw that book out into the world like a message in a bottle because I didn’t think I’d ever get published again. And I really didn’t know who was going to pick it up, if anybody was going to find the bottle. So that’s me on my island with one palm tree.

So the more books I wrote, the more I had to sort of come closer to what I was really thinking about, which was you, whoever out there was somehow like me, the Other Butterflies, and who were fascinated by trying to heal the world and who felt odd and different from most of the people around them.

And I kept telling publishers and editors I was sure this group was out there, and they thought I was crazy. And I finally ended up writing a book called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, which was explicitly written to just the Other Butterflies, just the Team.

And everybody thought I was crazy. I truly thought I would never publish another book because I’d just lost all credibility. Sorry, credibility. When you can’t pronounce credibility, it hurts your credibility.

Anyway, that book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, I threw it out into the universe like a message in a bottle and just hoped there really was a team of people out there that would find it. And then I just sat down under the one palm tree on my tiny little island of solitude and waited to see what would happen. And meanwhile, on the other side of the earth…

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like all of us, probably many of us who identify as the Other Butterflies—and if you’re new to that term in this podcast, there is an episode entitled The Other Butterflies that you can go back and listen to. Yeah, I feel like the subtitle of our lives could just be, “Doesn’t play well with others.” This kind of: grew up feeling weird, check. I don’t think we’re going to be the only ones relating to that.

Yeah, I can remember as a kid recognizing that I wasn’t able to do things easily that seemed easy for other people. And so I very consciously moved into a way of being that wouldn’t seem to be competing with those people for what came easily to them that I couldn’t do. I knew that it just wouldn’t work. So I just was always focused on something different from what everyone else did.

And it was a survival strategy as much as anything else. And a way of hiding in plain sight too, I think. So, yeah. People who listen to the podcast will know I did a lot of travel, I did a lot of solitude, I had my music and I have always had great friends and stuff, but there was always a tension for me between people and not people. I needed so much time to recover from social energy, from having to use my own social energy.

And I also felt a very strong sense of the world is broken, the culture is broken, this doesn’t feel the way it should. And I tried to find a cultural entry point to that. I sort of went through the political science kind of route. Can we fix—I did international politics, graduate degree—can we fix it, at that level, what people are doing wrong? And I ended up working in Southeast Asia doing sort of international development sort of work.

And it was there that I first met someone who would start telling me about this author, Martha Beck, that she was reading and that she thinks, she thought at the time that I would like it. I didn’t think I would like those sort of books, but—

Martha Beck:
I still think you should read them, Ro. I think you might like them.

Rowan Mangan:
And then a few years later, that same friend, when the book that Marty just described as the message in the bottle, when that came out, my friend just pushed it on me, at me, and would not accept no for an answer. She said, “You’ve got to read it. It’s about you.” And fast-forward a bunch of years and a few stories that we’ve told at other times, but we found each other IRL, and then we got together with Karen and we thought that was pretty wild.

Martha Beck:
It was pretty wild.

Rowan Mangan:
And so come full circle, eight years later, it’s time to get wilder.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I had gone off to live in the woods and meditate, be as close to a zen monk as I could be. I thought that would be really wild. And then when Ro joined us, that was completely wild as well. And then right around that time, I felt this intensely strong internal directive: Now go back and be with people. Go be with people in a different way than you’ve ever done.

And I kept saying, “I can’t do people, I love humanity, but I can’t cope with people.” But that internal yearning, all the stuff that I tell people to pay attention to, all that inner momentum, the force was so strong that I couldn’t deny it.

There was no doubt that this sort of period of solitary preparation was over, and we needed to include other people in our worldscape. And so we said, “Hey, why don’t we start a podcast?”

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Gosh, it feels like a million years ago, doesn’t it, that we started this?

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
And as those little messages in bottles went out, and we’re talking about this very podcast that you’re listening to us on now.

Martha Beck:
It’s so meta! Whoa!

Rowan Mangan:
People started coming up to us in airports, at concerts, whatever, and just telling us how much they relate to what we talk about here. And we were suffering from the fact that we knew you were there, but it’s a one-way conversation, more or less. We try to find ways to bring your voices in, but it is ultimately like a broadcast that we’re doing. And one-way conversation just started to not feel like enough.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It felt fine for a while. It felt great. And then it felt like there was something more. It didn’t feel bad to be yapping at you on the airwaves, but both of us became aware of something that we call the “next Best Step.” We didn’t know what it was, but there’s a push. The same push that told me, “Go out and be with people” was saying, “Okay, the podcast is all very well, but the conversation should be a conversation.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, exactly. And that sort of came as quite a yearning, like you said, in us. And I started thinking about part of our origin story of getting together concerns South Africa and Londolozi, the game reserve that you’ve heard—if you’ve heard Martha Beck talk about anything or read the book, Finding Your Way in Wild New World, you’ll know a little bit about Londolozi.

And I had a very memorable moment sitting on the steps of the house with Boyd Varty, our beloved Boydie, not that long after you and I first met, Marty, but you weren’t there. I’d gone over to do some work with Boyd, and he was telling me about Terrance McKenna saying—I’m pretty sure it was Terrance McKenna, I should have looked that up. But that’s my memory is the saying, “What are we here for? What is the point? What’s our mission on Earth?”

And he said, “It’s three words: Find the others.”

And I remember, you know that sense when you, a moment something happens, something clicks in for you, and there’s this three-dimensional, full five-sense photograph taken. And I can go into that moment when he said, “Find the others,” and remember almost every detail of what I could see here.

Martha Beck:
It actually makes me tear up.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, it’s wildly—it was a very meaningful, resonant kind of thing for me when it happened. And what we’re realizing now, along those same lines, is we need a place. We need a place where we can hang out with our bewildered, our listeners, the people who are feeling like we are, the Other Butterflies.

Martha Beck:
And Ed.

Rowan Mangan:
Be wilder, Ed. Yeah, Ed, come on, dude. Get it together. So, here’s how we are imagining this thing that we’re doing. The first step, almost, for me, if we’re talking about it as your best next step, is that we need a sanctuary because we’re all a little bit traumatized from the culture and from the long-term, just wear and tear on our nervous systems that trying to mask and behave and be around people who are not like us and that sort of thing.

Martha Beck:
That “fit in and be proper.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So there’s the bit where you need a sanctuary at first, and we keep making the joke, you know, “Weirdos like us.” It’s not that we don’t want weirdos, we just want the right kind of weirdos. And that’s you, by the way. And so we create this space, this is the plan, and we—

Martha Beck:
Not in—in real life, but not in geographic space.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That might come later, that might come later, but it is a digital vision right now. And we create this sanctuary, and that’s where there can be some healing and some recovery and that sort of thing. And then as that happens in this space where we are together, I feel like there’s the possibility of that alchemy of total transformation that can only happen in community. It’s the first time we’ve used that word community. This is the project of the day.

Martha Beck:
A digital community of Wilders. And even though it’s only a digital space, right now at the level the technology—

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t say “only” a digital space.

Martha Beck:
Okay, well I’m old school, you know?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to be experienced that way because if it was only a digital space as someone who grew up on the other side of the world, there was never an opening for, in IRL, in real-life spaces that could include my time zones or anything. So I do think that, I don’t think it’s for minimizing the digital aspect, I’ll just say that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Okay. So I shouldn’t have done that because it’s actually in that book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, I call it the magical technologies. Being able to do this, being able to create an online community is technological, but it seems like magic to me. And through these magical technologies, actual magical experiences can flow. So I called it “the technologies of magic flowing through the magical technologies,” and my editor wanted to throw things at me and sic her dog on me, but that’s what I did.

I never knew that something like this could exist. I was on my island with the one palm tree. There were websites and I was trying, I sometimes tried to create them and they would die, little haploid things that would die. But I sort of remembered that there would be a gathering of minds for the Team and a gathering of people who were feeling, just as you and I are feeling, that there’s a next Best Step close to us, close.

And I’m sorry, I’m going to nerd right out for a minute. I’m going to nerd out so hard on social science here. There is something, there is a word for an idea that has not quite been born at a moment in history when it is possible to do it. Like it’s possible to use computers to do things. It’s possible to plug into the internet with your cell phone wherever you are. These technological things have made possible—Stop laughing at me, young’un! “Don’t eyeball me, boy.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Ed.

Martha Beck:
Oh Ed.

Rowan Mangan:
I think you’re Ed.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, I’m in love with this phrase, and I keep screaming it at Rowan. She’s like, “Just use English.” It’s called the “Adjacent Possible.” It’s something that is right next to you, that’s what adjacent means, right next to you. It is bursting to happen, but it is held in many fragments in the minds of many people.

So there are all these people who’ve been learning, learning, learning, using different types of technologies, different types of ideology, all kinds of things. And they’re all climbing toward an idea, a big idea, that can flash through the whole population, but they have to be together for that to happen.

And this is going to get even more nerdy: Kleiber’s Law. Okay, I’m not going to say that again. There’s a number. There’s a number that you can get that will actually show you how life forms fractals when something like all animals have the same number of potential heartbeats in their lifetime.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Okay, all right, I’ll stop. It’s just that the smaller things get, the quicker they get. And the bigger things get, the slower they get. And that is true of human gatherings when they consist of nuts-and-bolts things where you have to have roads to go on and food to eat and everything. When you’re doing this systemic thing, when you’re gathering a group in physical space, it slows things down.

But when a group gathers in conversation, the number flips and becomes positive. And the bigger the group, it doesn’t just get twice as creative when there are twice as many people. When something is 10 times larger than something else, it is 17 times more creative. Every single person in the group will start to experience, really radically, explosive growth in creativity, in problem solving, in shared joy, in service to each other and all beings.

It is an actual number that increases as the group increases and it’s exponential and it affects every single person in the group. It makes them exponentially more creative, more innovative, more weird.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’re saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but like, there’s a number. That’s what’s so cool, you can calculate it.

Rowan Mangan:
You can calculate.

Martha Beck:
Every person that joins this community makes every other person in the community exponentially more creative. How amazing is that?

Rowan Mangan:
And so I feel like, so when we say creative, I feel like it’s like we’re using that term to encompass so many different types of transformation, but maybe so all our internal transformations will be accelerated by a special number and—oh, it’s a special secret number, though, it’s 17.

Martha Beck:
Kleiber’s Law. Go look it up.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no, I really won’t be doing that. But I do understand that “wilder together” is a concept that I can get behind and get excited by because, partly because it just intuitively feels so true that when people who share this kind of sense of being out of step and being an “Other Butterfly,” that pulling us together in a space is going to just create some crazy shit, right?

Martha Beck:
It’s the “Adjacent Possible.” It’s the next Best Step.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. She doesn’t mean “next best” as in not quite the best. She means it’s the next step that’s also best.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the best way to go for you toward—and creation, when I say creativity, I mean the creation of your own personality, your presence in the world, the way you do your hair. I mean literally everything that changes as a result of interaction within a creative community is part of the creation. So I’m not just talking about the arts and fingerpainting and whatnot.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and the creation of solutions to problems that we face collectively. And creativity in the sense of the process by which something that is not, becomes in the world, becomes manifest or whatever.

Martha Beck:
And can I also say that creativity, when creativity turns on in the brain, anxiety turns off. So as you jump in and become more creative and the group accelerates your creativity, it’s going to decelerate your anxiety. That’s my theory.

Rowan Mangan:
So let me tell you a little bit in nuts-and bolts terms what this community is going to be. It’s called Wilder. It’s an app. It’s a social space, like an Instagram app on your phone, but just full of Other Butterflies. You can also use it on your desktop, and it’s wherever you are with your technology.

We see it as “a Sanctuary for the Bewildered” is the sort of subtitle of Wilder. So it’s a place where we can go and be our weird selves and not be judged for it. And it’s going to be there 24/7.

It’s not like, so Martha does, her other podcast is called The Gathering Room, and that is a time and space where people can connect, but then it’s over. This won’t be over. This conversation gets to continue, and it’s 24/7 and everyone around the world is invited and there’s going to be a lot of conversation, a lot of supporting each other and a lot of creating a new way.

And well, primarily it is a community, so we’ll be doing weekly livestream connection moments and hangouts. There’ll be heaps of interaction. Marty and I will be in there with a couple of our specialist sort of helpers—our most special helpers, not specialist helpers, although both work.

Martha Beck:
The livestream hangouts, that’s what has me most excited. Arty Friday hangs.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re going to have the Arty Friday hangs where we all bring our little creative project and chat to each other while we—you know, it’s for, if your heart has been yearning for the next thing: “What’s the thing that’s supposed to happen? I need to accelerate, I need to take off. There’s something missing.”

It’s because we reach a point as individuals where we can’t get to that Adjacent Possible that I gave Marty a lot of shit for talking about, but I think is actually pretty cool, just between us. We can’t get to that by ourselves. We have to do it together. We have to find the others.

That’s what we’re doing right now. We create sanctuary, we get creative together, I don’t know, save the world? What do you think?

Martha Beck:
I’m down with that. Let’s get together and save the world! And in the meantime…

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.

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.