The Fear of Touch and Time

Summary

Podcast Summary: Bewildered

Episode: The Fear of Touch and Time
Hosts: Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan
Date: September 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Bewildered explores the ways modern culture distances us from our own instincts and natural joy by stoking fear of genuine touch and anxiety about time. Through playful storytelling, personal anecdotes, and insightful commentary, Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan examine how societal forces monetize, outsource, and pathologize the most essential parts of being human—connection, presence, and tactile experience. The conversation swings from chickens in living rooms to the meaning of true abundance, always returning to the question: How can we reconnect with our own nature despite cultural pressures?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Chicken Incident: Rediscovering Connection

• 00:00–01:00: Rowan shares a text from friend Kate, who had to bring chickens into her living room due to a flooded yard, sparking reflection on the loss of direct, nature-based experiences in modern life.

• 21:10–23:57: The excitement around Kate’s chickens serves as a gateway to discussing how rare and precious direct contact with animals (and by extension, life itself) has become in urban, commodified culture.

  “I got chickens and suddenly like you’re back into something that feels nourishing to the soul.” – Martha (21:11)

• The hosts humorously dissect the fact that keeping chickens is not about economics but about reconnecting with the source of food, touch, and a slower, more tactile existence.

The Mystery of the Scorpion Claws—Participation in Nature

• 07:56–17:35: Martha tells the story of finding daily piles of scorpion claws outside her cottage in South Africa and her detective quest to figure out which animal was leaving the “clutter.” Through this adventure, she experiences deep participation in the natural world.

  “Participation in nature is so enlivening... compared to the stuff we’re dealing with here, it was such a lovely break.” – Martha (17:35)

The Outsourcing of Touch and Community

• 24:52–34:30: Beck and Mangan lament how innumerable aspects of lived experience—caring for children, advice-giving, storytelling—have been monetized and outsourced, replacing direct, communal, and tactile relationships.

  “We have to ask permission to have interactions between living things that are profoundly normal for human beings... You could just get a chicken.” – Martha (24:52)

• The role and value of unpaid caregiving (usually by women), the shift from community advice to Google, and from storytelling around fire to industrial-scale entertainment.

The Paradox of Materialism and Disconnection

• 35:19–39:49: The hosts explore how “materialism” has ironically become less about contact with real, physical things and more about pixelated, virtual experiences—and how the search for meaning now tends to be directed to abstractions and transactional relationships.

  “This kind of spirituality… is very much about getting into the body and the senses and what is it to be in this human form. And that’s actually what, like, that’s more material, you know, it is.” – Rowan (36:41)

The Culture-Nature Split: Afraid of Touch and Time

• 37:36–41:10: Beck points out that culture’s avoidance of genuine touch and obsession with saving for the unknown future has left people psychologically “desiccated.”

  “We live in a culture that is afraid of touch and time. It’s afraid of touching anything because that doesn’t monetize it... And it also preys on the fear of the future.” – Martha (37:44)

• They trace the roots of this to the start of agriculture and surplus, noting that hoarding and separation are not inevitable but culturally driven.

Transaction vs. Relationship

• 40:35–44:12: Mangan observes that industrial cultures have traded relationship for transaction, leading to a society that finds the grossness in touch and continuous fear of scarcity.

  “We’ve traded relationship for transactions... What culture is saying in all this is like, ew, gross, get it off me.” – Rowan (40:46)

Money, Abundance, and the Fear of Death

• 52:29–55:14: They connect the cultural obsession with monetization, saving, and “making time” to an underlying, often unspoken, fear of death—suggesting that hoarding money and resources is, at heart, a coping mechanism for existential anxiety.

  “What is money… if not fear of death?” – Rowan (52:58)

Reclaiming Sense and Abundance through Touch and Presence

• 56:08–59:00: The hosts propose that the antidote is simple, though radical: be present, cherish tactile connections, and see true abundance in moments of touch, time spent together, and direct experience. Acceptance of mortality increases the value of presence.

  “I used to not hug people because I was afraid of touch. But we’re all going to die. Oh my god. Hug everybody. We’re dying. Who cares what he thinks? Who cares what anybody thinks?” – Martha (58:30)

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On Connection and Nature:

  • “Being out there in nature, trying to figure out, you know, the only thing I was trying to figure out for those few days is what was eating scorpions. And let me tell you, compared to the stuff we’re dealing with here, it was such a lovely break.” – Martha (17:54)

• On Capitalism and Touch:

  • “Every situation where one person's body touches another person's body... is immediately sexualized. That shows how much the culture has moved away from the concept of touch as something that is natural, necessary, and multi-form.” – Martha (50:16)

• On Transaction vs. Relationship:

  • “A transaction can never be symbiotic because it’s not an exchange in the moment. It’s like a hypothetical future exchange. Right. And so, yeah, look, I just want to cuddle a chicken.” – Rowan (46:08)

• On Scarcity and Abundance:

  • “The effect of that is that it kills our sense of abundance. We have more stuff... and people feel impoverished in the middle of... They can be drowning in clutter and feel impoverished.” – Martha (43:11)

• On Death, Presence, and True Value:

  • “To make a friend of death is the way I kind of get my bearings... I say to myself, okay, we’re all gonna die. How much does it matter given that we’re all gonna die?” – Martha (57:02)
  • “Hug everybody. We're dying. Like, who cares what he thinks? Who cares what anybody thinks? I adore this man. I’m going to hug him because... I'm glad I hugged him that time. It made my life rich.” – Martha (58:30)

• Ani DiFranco Quote (as requested by Martha):

  • “Meanwhile, the wild things are not for sale any more than they are for show so I’ll be outside in love with the kind of beauty it takes more than eyes to know.” – Rowan quoting Ani DiFranco (60:47)

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Conclusion: How to Reconnect

Practical Takeaways

• Remember who you are and ground yourself in the present moment.
• Challenge the notion of “wasted time”—there’s abundance in the now.
• Seek touch, relationship, and direct experience over pixelated or transactional substitutes.
• Accept mortality to cherish connection: “Make a friend of death.”

Episode Tone Warm, playful, gently irreverent, and deeply sincere—hosts mix humor with heartfelt introspection, making heavy topics accessible.

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Important Segments by Timestamp

• Chickens as a Lens: 00:00–01:00, 21:10–23:57
• Scorpion Mystery: 07:56–17:35
• Touch, Outsourcing, Capitalism: 24:52–34:30, 37:36–41:10
• Transaction vs. Relationship: 40:35–44:12
• Abundance, Money, and Death: 52:29–59:00
• Ani DiFranco on Wildness and Authentic Beauty: 60:47

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In short:
Martha and Rowan invite listeners to notice, with tenderness and humor, how the culture’s fear of touch and time causes bewilderment and disconnection—and to recover joy, presence, and true abundance by returning—again and again—to our senses.

Transcript

[A]

So, Marty, I got a text from our friend Kate the other night that literally said, how many chickens would you say you have in your living room right now? Because the yard flooded? Which is Kate's very cute way of saying, I've got chickens in my living room. Three chickens. Three chickens. Two cats.

[B]

Yeah, it was. It was a complicated evening, and just that one text led us into a really interesting conversation about the way our culture teaches us to avoid the things that make life rich and full, and it substitutes for them hollow, pixelated abstractions. So, yes, touch is the thing we avoid, and time is the thing we fear. And we went into a deep discussion about it.

[A]

Yeah, we. I think we pretty much solved the meaning of life, so hope you enjoy it, everyone. See you on the other side.

[B]

So, as some of you listeners may know, a few months ago, Ro and I started something called the Wilder Community, which is kind of an online village where people like us who want to find our true nature, even if it peels us away from culture, can get together, commune, make friends, and do things.

[A]

We have all kinds of regular events in there that are just so fun. We have a weekly hang where we get together and we have conversation and we make art in our own little rooms, in our own little places. But all together, there are group meditations that Martha leads that are crazy powerful, and there are just all kinds of, like, monthly themes and, like, personal development stuff that we work through together and just a hive of activities and connection among really wonderful people.

[B]

Yeah. So if you're feeling drawn to belong to a community in these troubled times, give Wilder a try. It'[e-mail] all one word. And we hope we'll see you there. Hi, I'm Martha Beck.

[A]

And I'm Rowan Mangan. And we're already laughing here on Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

[B]

Trying to figure it out. Damn it. Yeah.

[A]

Today on Bewildered, we're very lucky to be welcoming Martha Beck.

[B]

What? Barely. Barely there, Mother Beck. What are you trying to figure out, bro? Just tell us. Just cough it up.

[A]

All right, here's what I'm trying to figure out. You know how. All right, children. Okay, first of all, I know how. Children. I don't really need to say more, but I will. So we're at one of those funny phases with our daughter where, like, you know how development isn't, like, linear, so they. They're, like, trying to fill in, like, a color by numbers painting of the world, but they get unexpected things early while they're still missing the Other things.

[B]

Delightful. It's the way I am in Spanish.

[A]

It's so delightful. I love it. How in your duolingo, we got the AI version version, so you get to have conversations with a cartoon character. And Marty has been telling her about the transformation of human consciousness.

[B]

She comes in and asks me, what is. What do you do for work? And I say, I am attempting to embody the transformation of human consciousness, which I have to look up in Google Translate to even know. And then I read it off. She's like, oh, that's very ambitious. And I say, well, tell me about it. I've been working on it for 50 years. Anyway, one day I will be able to say it fluently from my mother wit. But tell us about our daughter, who is so much better at English than I am at Spanish.

[A]

She. We took her away to a different part.

[B]

We took her away to a farm upstate.

[A]

We literally did. It was a hotel room upstate, and we were there. She was. She's scared to shower. So I showed her that in this particular shower, there was one of those ones where you could hold it yourself. And I thought, she likes control. She likes power. This is going to go great. In you go. Probably about 15 seconds later, the bathroom was flooded like, a good couple of inches. And I was screaming and yelling. And I attest to this.

[B]

I was in a different hotel room, and it was completely obvious what was happening.

[A]

And Lila, the bathroom.

[B]

Why.

[A]

Fast forward to 10 minutes later. She never actually got wet, by the way, during her shower, but.

[B]

And while she was aiming the shower head outside the shower into the bathroom general, she was literally shouting, I can't help myself. Also, like her mother.

[A]

Yeah. Anyway, about 10 minutes later, I'm saying, no, you can't get on the toilet right now, because before you do, I'm gonna wipe the toilet seat, which was covered with water. And she said. Looked at me and said, because of the incident. And I was like, yeah.

[B]

Become an incident.

[A]

Yes. Like the incident that happened 10 minutes ago where you poured shower water all over this bathroom that I've subsequently been cleaning. Yes, because of that incident. Like, it's a. It's like it's got a. Its own, like, FBI file, you know, that's like, been. What do you call it? Like, when they send the X Files, in fact, and they. And they only leave, like, two words, and it's all been crossed out. The incident redacted.

[B]

She. Once I asked her what she was hiding behind her back, and she said, items.

[A]

We were in the car a few weeks ago, and we'd been listening to a song called Blank Space by a little artist that I personally think is going to make quite a splash in the years to come. Little known singer called Taylor Swift, who is a obscure number called Blank Space. And we sang it and we sang it and we sang it. And then Lila said thoughtfully in this, you know, silence after the song, speaking of blank spaces, what is one? It reminded me a lot of a friend's daughter at dinner once, and she was like 17 at the time. And we were talking about those things that you stand on and lean forward and they, they drive forward, you know, they've got wheels. You lean, you step up onto it, lean forward. And we were talking about those.

[B]

You mean like a segue?

[A]

And she said, speaking of segways.

[B]

Uhhuh.

[A]

Which is a segue. No, it's. It's a segue. The speaking of is a segue. Oh, she met her segued. She segued. Segue.

[B]

Wow. Hang on a second. Hang on.

[A]

Yeah, you gotta metabolize this.

[B]

Yeah, that is deep, man.

[A]

Yeah, that is deep.

[B]

Was she on something?

[A]

Anyway, Lila told me not to forget to. To comb my mustache, Missy. She left this morning.

[B]

Don't forget to comb your mustache, Missy. Which is a problem we talk about behind Rose back a lot, but she just said it right to her face.

[A]

Like, how hard is it to comb mustache? It's like, well, yours. Yeah. Marty, for God's sake, what are you trying to figure out? Other than how to make comb my mustache?

[B]

Mine's not as good. But it is something I literally was trying to figure out. Literally. True. So, spent a long time in South Africa this year. Had an absolutely fantastic time at Londolozi, our favorite game preserve. And I was sleeping in a thatched cottage and there was a daybed outside. And every day I would like, obviously you have to sleep with the doors closed so that leopards, lions, whatever, do not come in hyenas or whatever. But the first thing in the morning, I would go out and I would want to sit on the daybed and do my meditation and whatnot. But the. There was clutter. And I do not mean this in the human sense.

[A]

There was non human clutter.

[B]

Yeah, it was non human clutter. It had a weirdly human clutter vibe. Like it really looked like something someone had been, like, binge watching a TV series and eating snacks and taking their socks off. It had that kind of, I've been here a while and having a good time. But when I examined it closely, it consisted sometimes of moth wings. But Always every single day. Of scorpion claws, huh? Yes.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

And a few tails thrown in as well. But mostly the claws were the tail.

[A]

Also scorpion.

[B]

Yeah, well, the tails are long and.

[A]

Well, I just didn't know if it was from a different animal or the same animal.

[B]

Same.

[A]

Same.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And it's weird because, you know, we, we kill lobsters which are kind of the same shape as a scorpion and then we eat just the claws. But this, whatever was eating the scorpions was not even the claws.

[A]

Do we not ate the whole body of a lobster?

[B]

Oh, that's true. We do. But the closet especially tasty, right?

[A]

I don't have. No.

[B]

Well, I guess the claws of a scorpion are not tasty at all because they were always remaindered. They were always just lying there. Like every single day there's a little pile of scorpion claws. And of course then people would clean it off every day because the place is immaculate. But I was very much fascinated by it. And there were bats directly above it. In fact, at first I thought they were bat droppings, but they looked too much like somebody had.

[A]

Too much like scorpion pieces.

[B]

Too much like scorpion claws. Yeah.

[A]

In the end to be bat shaped.

[B]

So I went on a big detective binge. I, I was going to solve this mystery and it was literally something I had to figure out. And you had gone home already. I was staying to wait for some people who were coming after we finished our retreats down there. So I had this, this time of just being in the cottage with the scorpion claws. And I became obsessed with the mystery of the serial kill scorpions. And it was really fun. I like looked up every animal that could possibly be eating.

[A]

Oh, wasn't the bats.

[B]

I thought the bats. But then I thought, wait, they don't have. Like how are they going to hold a scorpion so as to take off its claws and munch it and do they even wait? They, they, they, they hunt on the fly. It's kind of what they do. Scorpions are not in the air. It's not bats. Okay. So not bad there. I'd be like, hi, bats. But the scorpion tail mystery was not. I, I started calling it the scorpion killer. You know how it wasn't when there are serial killers? They give them fancy names, I think, whatever. They don't deserve it, but they get them. Anyway. I, I narrowed it down.

[A]

Well, I just want to say something. No, no, I just, I have to say.

[B]

What?

[A]

That those, that scorpion clutter was being left there as a warning to you.

[B]

What?

[A]

And I don't think you were. Yeah. Like it was, it was being left there as a warning.

[B]

Like, like I would all of you. But your claws. Yeah, something was saying that to me.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you have to consider the.

[B]

Possibility now, I'm afraid.

[A]

Well, you're a very long way away from it now. But tell me about your detective binge.

[B]

Well, I, I, I did a lot of. I went round and round the cabin trying to find tracks of something.

[A]

The outside or the inside?

[B]

I went round and round the inside because that was more convenient.

[A]

Last year when she went, she walked round and around the inside of the cabin because she was training for a walk.

[B]

I did. I walked like 8,000 steps a day round and round that cottage.

[A]

Inside this time you were outside hunting for.

[B]

I was outside and I was more crouched and peering at the, at the dirt. And I didn't get any clear tracks. I got some. They were smallish. I knew some. The thing had to have paws. And then, you know, I went to the, to the Google, which is the substitute for experience and wisdom, and I narrowed it down to two animals that had the digital dexterity to manhandle a scorpion in that fashion and also a taste for the little critters and that it had to be either a cape Gray mongoose or a genet. Yes. And I, I have seen some people.

[A]

Won'T know what either of those things are, you know.

[B]

Well, I didn't either. But I have seen two kinds of mongooses at Longalozi in the past. Pygmy mongooses, who are tiny little brown things. They're adorable. And then band mongooses, which are much bigger, and they run around in mobs, you know, like terrorizing neighborhoods and stuff.

[A]

I know I'm not really letting you get your story out, but it is a criminal linguistic thing to have to say mongooses and not monkeys.

[B]

I know. I looked it up long ago.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah.

[B]

I thought about mongai.

[A]

Mongai?

[B]

Yeah, mongay. Mongi, like algae. Mongi. It could be anything. But no, it's mongooses.

[A]

It's like how, you know in French you to say my. You say mon. So, like mongoose. Of course, goose isn't goose in French, so it breaks down halfway through, but yeah, it is. For a while there, it was great.

[B]

Now I'm trying to remember the word for goose in French. We're moving on here.

[A]

I'm so sorry. I'm going to let you tell your story now.

[B]

It's really cool. Because here's the thing. I had narrowed it down on the Google. I was sitting on the daybed and I narrowed it down to a Cape gray mongoose, which I'd never seen there, but would have been about the right size with the right predilection for munching scorpions. And I thought, no, I think those. First of all, I've never seen one here. And then, I'm not kidding, I'm looking intensely at this animal, this Cape greymong is. Why are you touching your face?

[A]

I didn't mean to touch my face. It was just because you went. So then I thought, hmm. And I love the idea of you thinking to yourself.

[B]

So anyway, this is the cool part and this is what always happens at Wanda Lilzi. I'm thinking about a Cape gray mongoose and how I've never seen one. And I look up from the daybed and as I live and breathe, standing on the lawn in front of me about 10ft away, was a Cape gray.

[A]

Mongoose trailing scorpion claws.

[B]

No, he wasn't. No, because we couldn't, because it was happening at night and there he was in the middle of the day. So I checked it out. Mongooses are diurnal. The scorpion killer was hunting and eating at night. That left Janet. So then I enlarged the field of my trekking. I went round and round the cabin in a spiral form until I found in some fine dust about 50ft away from the cottage, the clear tracks, like tiny leopard paws of a genet.

[A]

What's a genet?

[B]

A genet is like a tiny leopard with paws. It's a beautiful. It's a little cat like animal. It's sort of like halfway between maybe a cat and a weasel, but spotty and very fluffy and absolutely gorgeous. One of the things that's so amazing about Africa and, and South Africa in particular, where we go there is so much biodiversity that I constantly see animals I've never ever seen before and don't even know what they are like. I've never even seen this in a book. Right. So it was the thing that was cool about it, and I'm still trying to figure out is every time I visualize an animal really vividly at London Lazy, it just shows up. Like the Cape grey mongoose. I mean, I have never seen one. I've been going there for 20 years.

[A]

And then the other showed up just to say I'm diurnal. No. Yeah, I'm diurnal. You?

[B]

I'm diurnal. What kind of and by the way.

[A]

Jungle detective are you?

[B]

Its feet don't look anything like a genet's little pauses. I don't. I think it would have done a much rougher job of like shredding them on the scorpions.

[A]

Listen, I owe you an apology.

[B]

Yeah, you do. It's about time.

[A]

How long have we been married? I shouldn't have left you there by yourself. I feel like you weren't in a good place.

[B]

It was fabulous. I did forget to eat and get a little light headed for a week or two.

[A]

Crouching in the dust while crouching in the dust for mini leopards.

[B]

It was so fun. And here is the thing about this entire podcast. It's about how participation in nature is so enlivening. I mean, I came back here and read the news and practically wanted to just go like jump in the Delaware, which is not far away.

[A]

It's a river.

[B]

Being out there in nature, trying to figure out, you know, the only thing I was trying to figure out for those few days is what was eating scorpions. And let me tell you, compared to the stuff we're dealing with here, it was such a lovely break. Such a lovely break.

[A]

I'm really happy for you.

[B]

Thank you. Someday I will learn to touch you like a Janet. And I'm trying to figure out now whether I will be the Janet touching you or I will touch you the way I would touch a Janet. Either way, you're gonna love it.

[A]

What's going on right now?

[B]

Don't worry, separate rooms. Relax.

[A]

Oh, my God. It's an interesting way to. Speaking of segues. Interesting way of segues to bring us into today's topic. 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 you all.

[B]

Have a great day now. Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty Martha inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called Five Paths to youo Purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is how do I find my purpose? Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out There are certain things you have to do to find your purpose. And I broke them down into five and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to marthaveck.compurpose and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all. We have a story, the most exciting thing that's happened to us here in Pennsylvania for a very long time, which will show you how exciting our lives here in Pennsylvania really are. Tell them what happened.

[A]

Our friend Kate got chickens.

[B]

She got chickens.

[A]

She got chickens. And she got three serious chickens.

[B]

They're alive.

[A]

She's one of them for many years. And she finally got them and chickens. Three little chickens. And we get photos of the chickens. We haven't been to meet the chickens yet because they need to. They're not used to their new home yet.

[B]

So there's like, for four days, there's.

[A]

Like an adjustment period for the chickens. But I did get a very delightful text from Kate last night after a rainstorm that says, how many chickens would you say you have in your living room right now because the yard flooded? And I just love that there's no non chicken related content coming from our friend Kate anymore. All the content is chicken related. And that's great because for a long time it was just devastating political news.

[B]

It's just, I got chickens and suddenly like you're back into something that feels nourishing to the soul. And I just, I started thinking about what a kind of miracle it is that we're all very worried about eggs. The price of eggs, the diseases of eggs, the way they keep chickens. That's horrible and inhumane to get us all the eggs. And I thought, here she has these chickens and she said if she'd bought them as new chicks, they could have been like five bucks a piece. So you spend $15 to get three chickens. Then she said she spent like 20 bucks on a 50 pound bag of feedback. And if you feed them, they give you eggs.

[A]

They give you eggs. Well, just eggs. Let's just be super clear here, because I don't want to. They will lay eggs and she will steal them.

[B]

Oh, that's true. That's true.

[A]

Okay, so there is still some exploitation, but we can, we can do that.

[B]

Do you want to tell them what you said to me when we were talking about this?

[A]

Oh, yeah. Well, that eggs are chicken periods and, and we steal their periods and eat them. And I just think we don't talk about it enough.

[B]

Oh, sorry. I just had like a scorpion barfing Moment. But no, it's true. Every month, a woman after a certain age and before another certain age lays an egg. And no one comes to steal, if you're lucky. And those who do are imprisoned.

[A]

So we were like, why, if it were purely about the money, we would all have chickens because that, like, return on investment. Very high. Five bucks for a chook. Sorry. We call them chooks in Australia. That's what we call them. And the chooks are there. They give you the eggs, you eat the eggs, you eat their monthly. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. We don't need.

[B]

I may never be able to eat an egg again. The stolen periods of the fowls of the air.

[A]

And also, you know, we don't truly know if we have consent from the chickens, so. Oh, we don't. No, they want. They want a baby. Look, have you seen how cute baby chickens are? Of course.

[B]

They're really cute. Anyway, you're right. Like, here's. And here's the thing. The reason we're so excited about the chickens and the reason Kate wanted them, and I know a lot of other people who live in cities and keep chickens, they get permission for some reason, and it's great they have all these eggs.

[A]

Who are you getting permission from? The chicken warden?

[B]

Well, it seems like. Like you're hoa or somebody.

[A]

What the is that? That doesn't mean anything.

[B]

How could you.

[A]

Isn't that just like the epitome of culture is you have to ask someone to have a chicken.

[B]

Chicken. Can I have a chicken, please? What? No. How dare you?

[A]

How dare you have a chicken? But no, I just want to say that's not on. I'm not. I'm not having the man tell telling me whether or not I can steal a chicken's period and eat breakfast on sourdough.

[B]

Oh, no. You added sourdough. And now I'm thinking other thoughts about. Oh, no, I won't speak of it.

[A]

Listen, here's the story about capitalism.

[B]

Dude. Here's the thing. We have to ask permission to have interactions between living things that are profoundly normal for human beings over the massive majority of time that we have existed. You could just get a chicken. Nobody would. You didn't need to have permission. And now what? You said, if it were about the money, we'd all have eggs.

[A]

Chickens, actually.

[B]

I challenge you on that. I think it is about the money, but not in the way you meant it. You meant if it were just to be economically viable and feasible and rational, we would have chickens and get eggs. But it's all about the money in a different way. There's something about our culture that is so mechanistic and so into dividing us from nature that it, in place of all the things that happen in a kind of tactile and biological sense, it is trying to put money, money, money, money. You know, like I remember as a young mom at a little place called Harvard, don't know if I mentioned it.

[A]

Drink, drink.

[B]

I started popping out pups there at. In 1986 and someone fertilize those eggs. I threw my first calf at 26. And that was a long. No, I was 23. It was 1986 and there weren't a lot of people having babies around the place.

[A]

And you know how the 80s.

[B]

I just didn't meet a lot of women at Harvard who were having babies at that time. I don't know what it's like now. Anyway, they won't let me back anymore. I keep saying it on podcasts, but here were all these things. I had to take my little kid to a daycare and pay for that. And then I had to make sure that I was paying for formula when my body was busily producing exactly what it needed. But I had to be. I couldn't always be there to nurse the baby.

[A]

So like the pumping closet in the.

[B]

Office, that's a whole thing we should do a whole thing on. Yeah, just breast milk. Nobody wants to talk about.

[A]

You can buy cheese from human breast milk. Did you know?

[B]

Oh my God. It wasn't bad enough with the eggs and the periods.

[A]

We need to embrace fertility in all its forms and you need to be a little bit less squeamish.

[B]

So anyway, it was like I just started thinking and I. I've told the story over and over about how this sociologist told me, children don't require any effort until they're five and then you have to drive them to school. Because that's when he had had to deal with five year olds and nothing else existed outside of his worldview. And he was an expert of human social behavior and he believed that. But what it boiled down to was if I didn't have enough money to buy someone to clean the apartment and someone to take care of the kid and someone to like formulate breast milk and do all these things so that I could live in this highly artificialized society, if I didn't have money, I couldn't have the things that human beings always just had during most of our evolution, women. So I thought women. We've monetized everything, but especially women. What?

[A]

Well, you know, I mean, all those, Those, like, the things he couldn't see were the things women do. Like, I was thinking about caring and as a, like, as a very valid pursuit, the way that people spend their lives, you know, caring for other people and how. Yeah, in the US Particularly, there's just.

[B]

Like, no, no reimbursement.

[A]

And so people still have to do it. And, and there's like, I heard someone who works in this area saying that at any international conferences and stuff for carers. They. They say, you know, in most of our social systems, there's, you know, there's money allotted for carers. And in America, they just have women.

[B]

Yep. Just women who are trying to do all the other things, too. And I mean, like, everything is being removed from basic contact with other biological systems and going through monetized, professionalized, mechanized things. You know, advice giving. I. I did not go find the village elder and say, what the hell eats scorpions and leaves the claws. I'm happy to have Google. You know, I'm thrilled that I get to look things up online, but I don't go to people for advice the way I did when I was a kid. There's, you know, for storytelling when we sit around the table, the fire in the evenings, and people tell stories about their adventures out there in the bush. It's so bonding, and it's very much. You're there in a flickering light hearing stories, and a TV is a flickering light that tells you stories. And it's a huge industry to make these stories now. And you have to be a professional actor to. And be part of this huge system. And it's awesome, but it's. It's not storytelling around a fire. You could say that all these things are better, that the advice I get from Google is better than any given village elder or whatever.

[A]

But I don't think. I don't think anyone would be arguing that. Although, you know, one of the sort of things that our society has done as it's become so technocratic is that it used to be that the more years on Earth you'd amassed, the more valuable experience you had to pass on. And now there's like a strange inversion of that where the more plastic your brain is, so the younger you are and the more you engage natively with technology, you're more likely to be the person bearing the how for how do you program the vcr? To use a very dated reference.

[B]

Yeah, you've just, you just gave us a perfect example of what it means to age out of technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So. But it's like. It's interesting, isn't it? Because, like, we. We will say it takes a village. You know, it's one of those things that is just constantly said to you when you have a small kid, usually as a way of demonstrating that we.

[B]

Don'T have enough help.

[A]

Yeah, please help me. Please help me take the village.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, Anyway. But, you know, like, it takes a village is not just about raising a child. It's about every aspect of our life. It actually should take a village. And a lot fewer professional roles.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. So I actually. Thinking about this all because Kate got chickens.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It struck me that we're so divorced from so much of what we evolved to do that there's. There's almost an existential crisis happening where our biology expects us to touch the world, to touch the things that make life worth living, to hug each other more, to. To go out looking and seeing what the footprints in the earth are actually telling us.

[A]

Hands in soil, put seeds in soil, pull food from soil.

[B]

Yes. Yes. And, you know, when I talk to people who garden a lot, it's life giving to them in more ways than one. And the touch of the soil and the. And the friendship, if you want to say that, of the plants, because they are. Now, we know from botanists, they're pretty much conscious. We're always just busy trying to amass more of this weird abstraction called money so that we can pay to keep our biological systems running when the. The real joy of life may be in doing those things in the way we evolve to do them, instead of having to chase money. Always thinking about, I will need this in the future. So we're never present in the now. And, And. And constantly obsessed with how lonely we are at the same time.

[A]

Yeah. And trying to find a pharmaceutical or professional or technological solution to that rather than, like, establishing friendships and stuff. And. And, you know, it's not like we're saying we're. We're outside of this. We're very much like, observing it from the inside, from being in these same sort of paradoxes. Right. And it's like this. This weird tendency that goes along with where society is right now is. You know, all these business terms kept coming to me as we were talking about this topic, Marty. And it's like, this is outsourcing, right?

[B]

Oh, yeah. You've got.

[A]

You've got something that you want done, but in this country, it's too expensive to hire people to do it. But at this point, AI isn't. So we're Going to outsource it to India, right? Where they don't have to pay or they don't have to pay people as high wages. So we're outsourcing to systems and products, commodities, the functions that kind of define what it is to be alive. And it's weird because we also have this kind of paradoxical idea that of like materialism, right? Oh, I'm a real materialist living in a material world and a material girl. It's the. Wow, today is the real dated references.

[B]

Speaking of material girls, what is one?

[A]

What is one? I always thought that song was about fabric. It was really strange growing up. I was like, congratulations. I mean that's nice.

[B]

But you do you. Exactly.

[A]

So you're materialistic. But actually increasingly what that means is that you, you're much more interacting with pixels, you know, like, than, than material, like three dimensional materials. Like it's like that. It's actually quite an abstracted thing where it's materialism is like grocery delivery services and like Netflix cues, you know, like my, my cue of what to watch next. And, and so, and then so what I realized is that the kind of spirituality that we're usually banging on about on this show, which is a sort of secular spirituality, right, is very much about getting into the body and the senses and what is it to be in this human form. And that's actually what, like that's more material, you know, it is.

[B]

It's so weird. And I actually, that's kind of one of the things I do because there's an industry around like yoga teaching you. You go to a place so that you can have someone like gently touch your hips and tell you to stay in your body. I get, I don't teach yoga, but I get paid for helping people get back into their bodies so that they, and they experience that. I like, I'll say to a group of businessmen, okay, what do your, what does your stomach feel like right now? And they'll be like, that's too woo woo for me. I don't do the spiritual stuff. And I'm like, I just asked you about your stomach. It's literally the most material thing about you. Anyway.

[A]

It's funny, isn't it?

[B]

I totally agree that this is very paradoxical and very weird. So this, this is, I see it. This is the issue that we're talking about today.

[A]

We want to cuddle chickens.

[B]

We want to cuddle chickens. Yes, on the occasion.

[A]

And the man won't let us.

[B]

The man is taking our chickens.

[A]

Fuck the police.

[B]

Amen. So it's the culture nature split, right. We're always looking at. Where have we been unaware of the fact that culture has pulled us way out of our nature to the point we may be getting sort of psychologically desiccated by it all. And Kate's chickens led straight to the conclusion that we live in a culture that is afraid of touch and time. It's afraid of touching anything because that doesn't monetize it and it doesn't make it, it doesn't mean you can profit from it. And it's also, it also preys on the fear of the future. So we're always thinking about how we can get piles of money and resources so that we won't have to deal with like privation in the future. Which by the way, is very much our culture. There were thousands of cultures all over the world for ages that were not obsessed with hoarding things against time. They trusted nature to provide things in different seasons. So that the obsession with hoarding up huge amounts of something for the future is, is really related to the whole guns, germs and steel obsession with the materialistic world. That sort of grounds the culture we're.

[A]

Talking about, wouldn't you say? It predates that though. Like it's, it's. Once we started like agriculture, wouldn't that be like. Yeah, you know, like agriculture sort of predated a sort of colonial.

[B]

You make a solid point.

[A]

But it's sort of, it's interesting, right, because it created the possibility of surplus. Because while you're just living in nature according to the seasons, you, you can't store anything and therefore you can't hoard. And therefore like a silo is like the beginning of, you know, the sort of capitalist mindset. Right?

[B]

Yeah. The last 5,000 years, the construction of the hierarchical pyramid shaped uber society started. Yeah. You could trace it back to that for sure. But if you're out in a non agricultural setting, there's. When you do things, there is an incredibly intimate relationship with other parts of your ecosystem. Some living, some structural like rocks or water. And yes, it can be very, very much harder to get them, especially if you're alone. You need your village. But once you. But that's part of it. The intimate contact with the village that says we're all needed for this.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. We're all needed for this. Now at this point, time strikes me that what we've traded is we've traded relationship for transactions.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

You know, and that, you know, in a very strange way, like what culture is saying in all this is like, ew, gross. Get it off me. You know, like what it is to be human is kind of. Is gross.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's like, don't change me.

[B]

Oh, no, don't change me.

[A]

I am this, this product that's rolled out, that stays young and so don't grow old and don't trust.

[B]

No.

[A]

You must hoard against possible future scarcity.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or else you can and you can never feel safe. And it's like so like the actual act of, of hoarding, storing, saving, we would call it.

[B]

We're basically going to come out of this telling everyone to cash out their savings accounts. I mean, you need 401 structure. Yeah. You need. We're not saying you have to drop all these structures. We're just pondering on them and the.

[A]

Way that they've affected Incorporated does not take any liability.

[B]

Waiver. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, Mark's talked about surplus value. Right, Right. That's the, like the. When you are in an exploitative system. I'm not a Marxist. Okay. I'm just saying that there is definitely something strange about a hoarding mentality which says what you are doing is worth more than what you are doing getting for it. And I'm going to pick up that, that marginal value. That's that money. I'm going to, I'm going to have that because I, I'm here and you're there.

[B]

Yeah. And it feeds that. It feeds the pyramid of power and it reinforces the structure of the oppression of the many by the few. So, yeah, we are the great money hoarding culture in the history of the world, even more than anything that went before. And what that. The effect of that is that it kills our sense of abundance. We have more stuff than. I mean, piles and piles, especially in the U.S. you know, there's so much stuff and people feel impoverished in the middle of. They can be drowning in clutter and feel impoverished. It's not.

[A]

Well, they can be drowning in clutter and be impoverished and be genuine impoverished.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Unable to access services. If you've, if you've, you know, got all. You're working in the landfill economy, you know, it's not. But what's odd is even not the clutter, I think even stranger is, is the way that we, we love the metaphor for the value, which is what money is. Right. Like the pixels in the bank account or whatever, that's what we're hoarding. It's not, it's not anything. It's not even cash anymore. And so this weird metaphor for trade or for value, or for this exchange of abundance that used to happen in the now in relationship, now happens in a potential future in pixels, in transactions.

[B]

And it's all coming right from South Africa into that culture again, because I was there for so long this time it struck me that what we're hoarding is a lack of a value system that includes something in South Africa they call Ubuntu, which simply means that. Not simply, it's actually a really deep and multilayered term, but in its barest essentials, it means I exist because we exist. That I am in relation to you. That I do not consider myself something separate from you or from anything. I consider myself something participating in being with you. And that is what gives me I.

[A]

Am because we are.

[B]

I am because we are. And you went to me, with me once to a conference with, for a wonderful company. I won't say what they were. I had a lovely time. The people were amazing. I love their products. I think they're ethical and everything. And they had got this concept of Ubuntu and they were gonna, they were.

[A]

Gonna monetize the out of it.

[B]

See them at a conference, they were going to just play. They loved the concept of Ubuntu and they had adopted it and they did. They weren't culturally appropriating it. They gave full credit to it. And all over the conference were these huge signs that said, we are because I am exactly the opposite of Ubuntu. The individualism saying, you can come and join me and we'll be people because I'm here. Like, it was so, so, so individuated and separatist and completely non ironic. They just did not see it. They had it exactly backwards.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

They're hoarding metaphors instead of Ubuntu.

[A]

Yeah. And like with the, so with the chickens.

[B]

Oh, always with the chickens.

[A]

With the chickens. There's. The relationship is symbiotic. Yeah, like that's what a transaction, A transaction can never be symbiotic because it's not an exchange in the moment. It's like a hypothetical future exchange. Right. And so, yeah, look, I just want to cuddle a chicken.

[B]

And.

[A]

I, I, I think that would be nice.

[B]

And then, you know, but, you know.

[A]

I would demand and you would be.

[B]

Stealing their periods and making yourself a capitalist delicious period. This is so disgusting. You.

[A]

Hey, I'm not, I'm not owning that one.

[B]

You know, in a state of nature it wouldn't be disgusting, so whatever.

[A]

So why are you so scared of haircuts?

[B]

Oh, yeah, Good segue. Speaking of segues, now we were talking about this how the actual physical connection. There are a few places where it's needed and where it occurs in my life. I go pay someone to do something, but they have to actually touch my body. So my. My hairstylist has to cut my hair, which grows from. I don't know if you've noticed this, my head. And so I have to take my head in there and have its hair cut. And here's the problem. When someone starts touching my head, I become their friend. I went for 20 years cutting my own hair with a tiny pair of sewing kit scissors.

[A]

Oh, my God. This is.

[B]

I didn't realize the back of my head was completely covered with cowlicks and that it wasn't working.

[A]

It's not working at all. It was a real surprise the first time I met the great Martha Beck. Saw the back of her head. Those little scissors, like, literally the little like they're not even scissors.

[B]

They're not even sharp. You basically have to just push on the tricks.

[A]

Another way of characterizing.

[B]

Not get my haircut without making friends with my hair stylist and that. That maintains to this day. David, I love you here.

[A]

You know, so another title for this episode of Bewildered could be Two Autistic women blaming capitalism for their social anxiety. Right.

[B]

That would be a good alternate title, actually. Yeah.

[A]

So like. Oh, and so what?

[B]

What?

[A]

The business term that comes to me now as we discuss this is like literally we're talking about touch and time. And we. I've never even thought about the fact that we call high touch products that aren't scalable. Right. So we do retreats.

[B]

Right.

[A]

People fly to.

[B]

In person retreats.

[A]

In person retreats. It's like kind of funny, isn't it? Because the notion of retreating to me would involve no other humans.

[B]

No other people at all. Yeah. Retreat to be in a clump. Yeah. It's more of a gathering artistic women trying to figure. Trying to figure it out.

[A]

Yeah. And so we like where the question is by the culture is how do we scale it? How do we mass produce it? How do we replicate it for no extra labor via pixels. Yeah. What ends up having value to us. It's like the. It proves the rule is the high touch stuff where. Which you know, involves us, you sitting together, sharing a moment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And sometimes touching each other's bottoms.

[B]

Sometimes touching each other, but not like. Not like that.

[A]

Not in a bad way.

[B]

Yeah. I wrote down earlier, you know, we have. We are professionalizing every situation where One's per. One person's body touches another person's body. And then immediately I was like, I can't say that on a podcast. It sounds way too sexual.

[A]

Sex therapists should unionize is what we're trying to say.

[B]

There you go. That's a whole nother podcast. But even the fact that I have to. When I say one person's body touches another person's body, it is immediately sexualized. That shows how much the culture has moved away from the concept of touch as something that is natural, necessary, and multi. Multi form. It takes many, many forms.

[A]

Another thing we had in our notes for this episode was the note, a different kind of grooming. Oh.

[B]

Oh, you weren't gonna go there, babe. But.

[A]

No, but, like. But it's true. Because, like, social primates, you know, did you. When you were, like, a kid, did girls, like, play with each other's hair? Like, that was a really big thing. Like, yeah.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. My oldest sister had this beautiful hair, and I. One of my biggest privileges was to go in while she read and gently brush her hair. I had no idea that it was pleasurable for her. I just loved it.

[A]

And you were being exploited.

[B]

I was. Seriously, I should actually.

[A]

But that's relationship, not transaction. Right. It's actually, you were getting something.

[B]

And it was, as a little kid, my natural. I'm a social primate. You know, I cuddled. I wanted to be cuddled. I wanted to comb my sister's hair. And I remember once I was sitting with one of my sisters out on our front lawn, and we were sitting close together, and she put her arm around me and hugged me. And some people driving by in a car screamed, lesbians. We were like, five and nine. It's true, though.

[A]

I mean, they were very pestilent.

[B]

Exactly. I am, in fact, a lesbian. She is not different, sister. Anyway, all I'm saying is that any kind of touch is sexualized, even pathologized. Right. And it's. It kills connection. Yeah, the fear of touch kills connection. And the fear of time kills the genuine abundance.

[A]

Yeah. Because real abundance exists in time.

[B]

Well, in the moment. So if you think of time as this flow where you're always thinking, oh, what's going to happen next? What's going to happen next? And you're afraid of time because of the future. You're always afraid of the future, never of the present moment. Even if something's chasing you, you're afraid of the moment. It catches you. I've studied this at length. So abundance is in now. It's not in a left hemisphere dominated abstract sense of future, which is the kind of time we fear.

[A]

You know, like the billionaires. This sort of cliche of the billionaires hoarding more than could ever be spent in 100 lifetimes and still wanting more. And, you know, it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that what is money, I wrote in the notes, if not fear of death? You know, like, it's like the final frontier is like mortality. And I started thinking about like cryogenics. Right? Like, that's what rich white men do.

[B]

You're talking about Walt Disney, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The first thing that happened when he got super rich, but the very first thing he tried to do was become immortal.

[A]

Yeah. Well, now, and now it's like stem cell IVs and whatever else, you know, like there's all these that, that optimize biohack sort of mentality is, is very, it's, look, it's natural to us. Like we're doing this because that's what, like that's a compulsion that we have. Like it's part of the experience is.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Being aware of death, resisting the, the inevitability of death.

[B]

Right, the inevitability of it. Yep. What you're basically saying is money is intimately linked with the fear of death, amassing so much value that you think you can buy everything, including life itself.

[A]

Yeah. And the idea that things are finite. Right. Because it's so weird that as we get into this mentality that's all about scaling up, what we're actually doing is making everything more and more finite. We don't, we're not, you know, like that distrust of nature and that protecting against possible hypothetical futures. And, you know, there's, there's this sort of way in which we're huddling down, we're denying life because life flows in and out of us like no big deal. You know, it's just flowing. But like, no, I, I, Walt Disney need to be the exception to nature.

[B]

It is really strange. And it doesn't happen in other animals to the same extent. And the irony is that by being obsessed with keeping life longer, we lose life. Because life always happens now and only now. So how do we come to our senses? This is, I mean, this is a big cultural cluster of weirdness. And we all are breathing it in with every breath we take from infancy onward. How do we come not to consensus, which is culture, but back to our senses, which is nature?

[A]

And we'll tell you this after a quick ad break to light our bank accounts.

[B]

So rowie how do we come to our senses in a culture that fears touch and fears time and is driven out of being by those two fears?

[A]

Yeah. And it's. Well, I think it's always going to be in some way, like remembering who we are and when we are and this. This moment. Right. So, you know, I think this, to. To get rid of the idea of time can be wasted would be like one first step. Because escaping the. The finite, this. This mentality of. Of scarcity.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[A]

Is like, we can't. You can't waste time. Time is not.

[B]

It's an asset. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's like saying, I've wasted. People do say I'm a waste of space. You can't waste space. Space. It just is. Yeah. For me, it's about. It has always. And this will sound weird and grim because this is the way our culture makes it sound because we're so terrified of death. But to make a friend of death is the way I kind of get my bearings because, for example, right now we're packing up the house. I just got back from. We just got back from a trip, and my bedroom is kind of a mess. And somebody came over to help with Lila, and they saw inside the room, and I thought I should have cleaned that up or paid someone to clean it up. Right. Always pay someone. And then I say to myself, okay, we're all gonna die. How much does it matter given that we're all gonna die? And suddenly what's important is that the babysitter got to play with Lila in my room. Not what the babysitter thought of it or what I had done or not done in the. Like. So for me, when I'm. When I lose money on something, you know, that's supposed to be. That. That's. Oh. Oh, no. If you. You. You bought high and sold low. Okay, I'm going to die pretty soon. Like 20 years, 20 minutes. I don't know. We're all going to die.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't really care suddenly, about all the. About scrimping and saving.

[A]

I get more relaxed with it, which is abundance.

[B]

Yesterday I hugged my Pilates instructor. I used to not hug people because I was afraid of touch. But we're all going to die. Well, oh, my God. Hug everybody. We're dying. Like, who cares what he thinks? Who cares what anybody thinks? I adore this man. I'm going to hug him because when I'm actually doing death, I'm going to look back and say, I'm glad I hugged him that time. It made My life rich.

[A]

So. So there's that switching out of. Of the idea of abundance into, like, what if true abundance is touch and time? Like, what if it was just that? You know, like, let's. Let's revel in those things and. And that's the opposite of wasting them.

[B]

Yeah. To revel in them. Do you have. I don't know why this. I picked this, but I have this weird idea that you might have a quote from Ani DiFranco that might apply.

[A]

Ani DiFranco, poet laureate of this show?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, as. As that happens, Marty, here's me. Any given moment on this planet. There is a perfectly apt little bit of Anita Franco lyricage.

[B]

When you're right, you're right.

[A]

There's a great song by Ani called Half Assed.

[B]

Haps.

[A]

I can't say it. This is like. This is the bane of my existence.

[B]

Half assed.

[A]

I can't say half assed because clearly that's not the name of the song. It's not half asked. And so I have to say. But I can't say half. I can say ass. I can't say half. Oh, my God, it's so hard to be me.

[B]

It is. It really is. Anyway, we need chickens.

[A]

Me.

[B]

Okay. They won't care. They don't care. Half off, half ass, they don't care they're gonna die they're laying eggs that will never hatch they're quite sorry.

[A]

Oh, my God. Let's not tell them, though. I'm about so much hope.

[B]

Okay. Oh, God, now I hate myself. Okay, we gotta take. There are so many additional episodes that we need to spin off. This one say what the ANI quote is.

[A]

Meanwhile, the wild things are not for sale any more than they are for show so I'll be. Outside in love with the kind of beauty it takes more than eyes to.

[B]

Know Outside in love with the kind of beauty it takes more than eyes to know that the kind of beauty that we can touch and we can lie down in and we can swim in and grow things and feed things and take the chickens into the living room because the yard is flooded like this. Touching life and not thinking forward into the future as much as we think about what we're doing now. They're kind of like gateway drugs to a state of connection to all things in a state of presence which takes us into the state they call flow. But not as something moving in time, but something so present that life becomes rich, rich, rich. It's really that simple. Shift the perspective that way and suddenly you know for damn sure that a hug is worth more than paying someone for a Pilates session, you know?

[A]

Yeah. And that's how we stay 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.

[B]

People are always asking me, how did you get into training life coaches? And the answer is backwards. I did it backwards. That is, I didn't set up a program and then look for people to fill it. It's just that so many people were coming to me for coaching that I realized in order to serve the market, I was going to have to train other people in my methods. That was decades ago, and now the Wayfinder program contains all my very best wisdom and tools for living, boiled down to their savory essence. Now, if that sounds interesting to you, head on over to MarthaBeck.com and find your way.