March 12, 2025 • 43 mins
There’s a celebrity family with seven children, some dubious accent choices and a wrongful death suit hanging over their heads. So why have Alec and Hilaria Baldwin opened their front door and invited us inside their home? That's right, we're diving into Mia's Roman Empire and the chaotic dynamic of TV reality show, The Baldwins.
Plus, are your friends’ 'tweakments' making you feel bad about your face? Competitive ageing is ruining friendships with women starting anti-ageing treatments younger than ever. We ask why and reveal the exact age most women start worrying about ageing.
And, have you lost your gut instinct? In a world of constant feedback loops and overthinking, many of us struggle to be Hell Yes/Fuck No people. We'll share the simple trick to reconnecting with your intuition.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I really when I see someone with a bun on
the top of their head, I go shit, she is
so deep.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
That's a busy woman.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
That is a daddy, a busy woman. She's got to
concentrate so much, she's got to pull her hair back
from her brain.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
Hello, Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia. Out Loud What
women are actually talking about? Wednesday, the twelfth of March.
I'm Holly Waynwright, I'm mea.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Friedman, and I'm Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
And on the show today there's a celebrity family with
seven children, some dubious accent choices, and a wrongful death
suit hanging over their heads. So they've opened up their
front door and invited us inside. Why also, are your friends'
tweakments making you feel bad about your face?
Speaker 5 (01:06):
Why?
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Competitive aging is ruining friendships and it's starting young than
ever And in a world of constant feedback loops, it's
getting harder and harder to be a hell yes, fuck
no person. How to get better at trusting your gut?
But first, Mia.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
In case you missed it, the first girl's trip to
space has been announced, and my response is, oh no,
I'd hate that. Last week, Blue Origin, the aerospace company
founded by Jeff Bezos, announced an all female crew for
its eleventh human spaceflight. It's going to happen in a
few months time, and this is the exciting bit. The
crew stars Jeff Bezos's fiance Lauren Sanchez, Oprah's best friend
(01:44):
and TV journalist gau King, and popstar Katie Perry, who posted.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Sorry, my question is are they flying the spaceship?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I assume not. No, they're passengers. But Katie Perry posted,
if you had told me that I would be part
of the first ever all female crew in space, I
would have believed you. Gau King, however, is not so
thrilled about it. Have a listened to what she had
to say.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
I have to tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm sore.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Frey stop girl.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Yeah, I'm so afraid, but I'm also so excited about it.
When they asked me, and they asked me around Thanksgiving,
I was like, no, no, no. Then I started thinking
about it. I met with favorite daughter Kirby, favorite son
Will Oprah. That's my kitchen cabinet they will all be
there that day with their spouses, and I just thought,
what a unique opportunity. And then yesterday I met the crew.
(02:31):
We're now the crew. We're all in a text chain together,
and their stories are so amazing.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
It's interesting because it used to be that you needed
years of NASA training and the job titled astronaut to
be launched into space. But we've entered this age of
space tourism. So Blue Origin and Elon Musk, SpaceX and
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic have made going into space and
attainable reality well for the rich and a bit of
(02:58):
a reality spectacle for the rest of us. And now
they're sending these celebrities up there for publicity so that
regular degulars with millions of dollars will hear about it
and book their tickets. And tickets cost between one million
dollars and one hundred and ten million dollars, depending on
how long you're up for how high you go. So, Jesse,
how do you feel about adding another date to the
(03:18):
Out Loud Live tour and getting on a space rocket
with me?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And I'm being sponsored by them doing a little show
from Space Life Broadcast. I'm so annoyed because I feel
like I'm going to get talked into going to space
and I don't want to go. I feel as though
there's a girl's trip in my future where everyone goes, no,
we really want to go to space.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And it's fun.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
It's a hen's week it's a weekend, and.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
I'm going to say you have to come. I want
to go to Mexico. No, I want to go to
the Bahamas, and they're going to say no, Space and
there's not a Paul or a cocktail there.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
I would love to go to space. I would get
on that ship. I would throw Katie Perry out of
that ship. The wood crew is really freaking me out though,
because it does sound like they're flying it. Lauren Sanchez, though,
can flyplanes, so she's a helicopter. Helicopter so she doesn't
and she's written a children's book about a buzzy bean
in space, so she's very well qualified. Lauren could be
(04:08):
at the controls. I would love it.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's no, okay, it's gonna be the worst girl's weekend
because this is what people don't understand. As I talked
about last week, I went to space via a book
that I read recently orbital so vomiting, painting, headaches, not
the I don't think even if it's fancy, I think
(04:30):
you're still in space.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I think Lauren Sanchez's boobs will explode.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Oh, Freedman, that's so help.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I think it's a fair question.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Will help with the floating around. Funny is that when
you're taking tourists into space, it can't be too spacey
like what you're talking about, because that would be terrible.
But they have to get that opportunity to float about,
right otherwise you're not going, like I'm not going unless
I get to it. Currently, Lauren Sanchez.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You've got to do tests for claustrophobia because people often like,
can you imagine going up there? I'm incredibly claustrophobic. I
don't love a lyft. I am an hour in and
I have never been more trapped in my life. I
can see someone. I can see Katie Perry, who's pretty
confident losing it. She's the one who's going to start
hyperventilating and go and get me out, Get me out.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
I can also see a singing woman's world too. You
never again and you're like open.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Nothing, tramped on.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
Now, I'll take my chances with the asteroids.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
We moved into this apartment in November of twenty eleven.
Her and I no kids, quiet, and then number one
came one kid, two kids, No you'll come back. No, no, no,
don't do that. Oh Wedd's up. Three kids, four kids,
(05:52):
And I thought that was the outer limits.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Become going what is what haves? Though he had no
saying how many children they are.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It's hilarious, right, So, welcome to a luxurious penthouse apartment
in Greenwich Village, New York City. We're a very famous
movie star. Just turn him. Alec Baldwin is living with
his much younger wife, their seven children, aged between eleven
and two, two nannies, many pets, and a manslaughter charge
hanging over their heads. Yes, it's feel good reality TV
(06:23):
show The Baldwins, all about Aleck and his wife Hilaria,
and I watched it so you don't have to hear
us some very short life's two short takeaways. The show
is apparently filmed in the run up to Baldwin's trial
over the twenty twenty one death of cinematographer Helena Hutchins.
In case you don't remember, Helena died when a gun
Baldwin was firing on the set of The Western Rust
(06:45):
did not fire the standard blanks but live ammunition. She
was the mother to a nine year old son. That
case was eventually dismissed, but civil charges are pending. This
makes it a tricky tonal needle to thread, right because
that trial and the stress of it on the Baldwins
is frequently mentioned and counted down to through the first episode.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Right, They talk about it all a lot.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah, But the other overarching plotline is like this supposedly
comedic mayhem of a family where a sixty six year
old man is parenting seven children. Right, so there are
like birthday cake calamities and dog weee on the floor
and constant mess and shouting so wacky, yeah, and him
doing a very good job of remembering all their names
(07:29):
and things about their personalities. And then also there's Hilaria, right,
And I know we're not meant to mention women's appearance,
but her breasts are unbelievably distracting and stupendous. She's talking
to camera all the time about her babies, about the
absence of a prenup, about what a dark time this
is in their lives. Such a dark time that it's
been turned into a chirpy reality show Mia, considering that
(07:52):
overall the impression is of a troubled man falling apart
in the middle of an ocean of children and tiny
dogs and cats that he's allergic to. Why would Alec
Baldwin and Alaria, of course, decide to make a reality
show at all, and especially now.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The first reason is because all the lawyer's fees are
very expensive. The second reason is the same reason why
most people do reality shows, which is they want to
be understood, most famous people in the same way that
Megan did her show. They want to write their own narrative,
(08:28):
and they feel that the narrative created for them by
the media and social media is incorrect and unfair, and
they want to change the conversation and be better known.
So the narrative that's been written for the Baldwins until
this show was as you say, the tragedy of what
happened on the set of Rust, and also Alaria and
the how you say cucumber and her accent where and
(08:53):
a few years ago, during a bit of a quiet
news cycle, I think it was around Christmas. A couple
of years ago, a video emerged of her doing a
cooking demonstration and struggling with her English, and she's often
spoken in a Spanish accent, and it came out that
she's actually Hillary from Boston, who has no Spanish background,
(09:13):
no Spanish heritage. She spent some time in Spain. I
think her parents moved there after they retired, and she
visited there a few times. But it became this idea
that she was cosplaying being Spanish.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Speaks Spanish in the show a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, And at one point in the show he says, oh, no,
you're speaking too fast, and you're speaking in a Spanish accent,
which never goes well, and so they do talk about that.
I've only watched a little bit of the show, but
I had it on in the background while we were
preparing for today, and every time I looked at the screen,
Alec Baldwin just looked either like he'd been crying, I
assume that's when he was talking about what had happened
(09:48):
on the set and the trial, or just utterly beleagued
and overwhelmed, as you would be.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Because he's sixty six.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
He is and he's like a curmudgeonally, like his vibe
is like grumpy. He's famously used to have a lot
of clashes with the paparazzi. Way before any of this,
he played Trump on Saturday Night Live for a while.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
He's also sixty six in a way that we're going
to talk about aging in a bit, but like he
is not a sixty six year old movie star who's
in action movie form. Like he's a sixty six year
old movie star who actually looks sixty six, which is
not Tane.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Cruise or Brad Pea.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, not right now. He certainly isn't, both in his
physical shape and his like very deep bags, Like he
looks absolutely knackered, and he also looks like someone you know,
Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeah, this is a dystopian nightmare that is tonally completely incoherent.
I have no idea why you would think this is
a good idea, and this would end well to have
the storyline of the sort of bumbling father and the
funny chaos of the seven kids and da da da
(10:55):
that reality show green Light understand great happens all the time.
That's great. Then you need to layer it with some steaks,
which is often the thing. It's like you see in
every documentary It's like, what's our narrative arc, what are
we working towards to laya that with the stakes of
a woman who was killed and a little boy lost
his mother, and the family is reeling and has said,
(11:18):
we don't like this, we don't want this, we don't
want this show. We find this really really uncomfortable, just
feels so wrong, And a lot of people are saying, like,
Alec Baldwin wasn't victim. Stories can have more than one victim,
And I actually have empathy for Alec Baldwin. It was
an accident. His life will never be the same. He
is certainly not a victim in the same way as
(11:40):
Helena was and her family. That's just the most awful,
horrendous thing to have happened on set, But to use
it as fodder for a reality show is so distasteful.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
My suspicion is that this was in the works way
before that happened, because I mean it has been for
those people who sort of followed her. She was a
yoga instructor, Taylor's oldest time, older man hooks up with
younger woman and then she starts having the babies, and
you know, one and two, yeah, and one and two,
and then three, and then it suddenly he's a bit
(12:14):
my Roman empire. That's why this reality show is a
little bit my brain coming to life, because I think
about it often, like sometimes on the weekend, when I'll
just be chilling, I'll go imagine being Alec Baldwin. You
finished work and you come home because he's still got
to work, he's got to support seven children, and you
come home and you've got seven babies.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, but it's funny how we do this to older men, right,
And it happens a bit in the White Lotus too,
like the dynamic of the older man and the younger woman,
almost like he's being manipulated or exploited by a younger
woman who wants one hundred children and five hundred pets,
as though he has no agency in his life, like
the thing of just like how do we get all
(12:53):
these children? And then he refers more than once I
think to having seven children, like, oh we had seven children,
you have eight children, mate.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Yeah, but it is true that the question of why
seven children is not answered, right, But he does say
at the beginning, and she says too that when they
very first met, he was very clear, I want kids.
I want more kids. I want them now. And he
says that he had this famously toxic, acrimonious divorce from
Kim Besinger back in the day, with whom he had
a daughter Ireland, and that went very badly. And a
(13:21):
voice message back in the times of answering machines and
all the rest of it was released where he was
berating his teenage daughter a carder, a little pig, and
that went well old fashioned viral, and his whole thing
was what a terrible father, what a monster. And he
sort of says I wanted a chance to do it again.
And what's interesting about him saying that is I think
(13:42):
a lot of older men think that they think I
screwed it up the first time. I want another go
at it. I'm going to do it differently. There's two
things about this that I find interesting. Usually I'm pretty
forgiving about people putting their kids in content. Right, if
everyone's having a good time and people are getting paid
and it's fair, I'm like, go for it. But this
is really interesting because over the course of episode one,
(14:02):
you get individually introduced to every kid with their name,
with their personality traits. Little so and so likes planes,
This one's really thoughtful, this one's really funny. This little
girl's really bossy. The teenage girl is a classic teenage
girl with lots of hair tossing and short shorts, and
you're kind of like that footage is there forever now
in a show that a lot of people are gonna
hate watch. And the other thing that's interesting to me,
(14:25):
I'm as much as the next person like to look
inside rich people's lives, and so I'm like, I want
to see this five bedroom penthouse apartment and they've got
to see through dog pen and they've got the nannies
and the cars and all that. But there is nothing
aspirational about this show, right, you just go, oh no, no, no, no,
no no, did you I see?
Speaker 3 (14:43):
I don't mind the chaos. And there's something about the
presenting it as a bit of a freak show that
irks me a little bit. Maybe because my mum was
one of seven and they, you know, came from like
big Irish families. I see the appeal of that and
the whole like why would you have like seven, which
is what a lot of people are saying, is like.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
They're always interested in big families.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, and how they work? Yeah, I think that the
machinations of how they all get car like, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Do you remember all their names? Like how you give
them all attention?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
But I agree with you Holly on the kids, because
there was a clip I watched of she might have
been twelve speaking to her mum about Alec being in
court and reflecting on how scared she was he was
going to be sent to jail, and I just thought,
this is a really private, vulnerable, scary moment. And what
we know now about how reality TV is produced and
(15:39):
the way that would have been filmed, the crew, how
much they would have had to get in order to
even make the show.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Anytimes she would have had to have the conversation. That's
a great point.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Do you think they would have been paid lots and
lots and lots, Yeah, because, as you say, the money
is significant, and they in this you see they're lavish
in inverted commas Hampton's Beach House, which apparently is up
for sale for similar reasons. So it's a little bit
of desperation.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yeah, Well, they've got bills to pay. It's simple business.
And I think what's also fascinating, and I wonder if
they'll referenced in a future episode. But I remember when
she had I think her fifth or sixth baby, When
that baby was about three or four months old, she
appeared on Instagram with another baby, and no one could
really understand what was going on, and then she said,
(16:25):
we've adopted this baby. And I think now they're saying
it was maybe a surrogate, and of course that's their
personal business, but that's a pretty interesting decision in the
middle of clearly she's not got fertility problems that we
know of, and having all of these babies, which she
documents herself carrying and her body snapping back after having
each of them, she adopted one when she already had, Like, yeah,
(16:46):
I'm fascinated in wonder.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
I thought, was there a way to embark on this
project as a documentary if this was a documentary similar
to the Beckhams.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah, a different style, different.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Style that could speak to the family, much of the victim.
Because it is a tragic, horrible story. I haven't been
able to look away from it because I just think
how many lives have been touched.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Again, to be a little bit fair, Hilaria in particular
is very often saying to camera, we're going through a
very hard time, Alex's mental health is hanging by a thread,
but of course it is nothing compared to that is
A many issue is.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
That the next scene is like Doo Do doin and.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Tone is so strange.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So if you want to watch the first episodes out,
I'm not sure where the rest of them are. We
found it on bin Chip.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
After the Break. A story about a facelift went viral
on Muma Maya this week, and we want to discuss
the exact age women start worrying about aging. Stay with us.
My best friends look better than me. I feel betrayed
by their tweaks. That's a headline on a story I
(17:57):
came across from The Daily Mail this week by Kate Mulvey.
She is a woman in her early sixties who describes
catching up with friends from her UNI days and discovering
that she was the odd one out. She says, I quote,
I looked like their mum. Mulvey reflected on the storyline
from this season of The White Lotus. The three friends
from school to have had tweaks, the third hasn't, and
(18:19):
the trio was confronted with the spectacle of aging in
this week's episode, What.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
The actual fuck is this?
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Place.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
This is like a bargain hotel for retirees. It kind
of seems like that, why would he.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
Send us here?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I got to get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
That was Jacqueline realizing that she had been sent to
a hotel full of what she saw to be old people.
Add to that a story on Mama Maya this week
about a thirty seven year old woman named Kim who
recently traveled to Turkey for a facelift. So she noticed
what she saw as like excess skin and felt her
reflection didn't match how she felt, and so for thirty
(19:00):
thousand dollars she underwent a facelift. Now I was thinking recently,
I'm thirty four. Am I doomed to worry or to
think about aging until the day I die? And is
it starting younger and younger? Because I reckon I've been
thinking about the signs of aging since I was twenty eight.
And if I live to eighty three, that's a life
(19:21):
expectancy of an Australian woman. I will have spent fifty
five years concerned about aging. That's most of mine.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
When you say aging you mean physically physically, I appear
it's wise.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
The word decline it's like you feel. I honestly think
that from about twenty eight you're like, am I in decline?
And do you ever truly revel in youth?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Decline? By whose measure? Well?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Everything. It's like physically you start to go, am I
looking older and older? And you start to see your
face move more and more and more lines, which you
are seeing as a culture, the women older than you're raising,
so you're hearing bad, bad bad. I also think about
things though, like memory and energy and all that kind
of stuff, and the proper importance the important stuff. Longevity
(20:06):
is the Yeah, Holly, there's no way my ground mother
or my mother with thinking about aging in their early thirties.
I know, it's ridiculous. What is going on?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Well, one of the things that's going on and MEA
Friedman called this a while ago when she wrote an
essay about how aging has apparently become a choice, right,
because it hasn't really actual aging hasn't become a choice.
The years still tick over, our bodies are still aging
all of those things. But visually, physically, aging on our
faces appears like it's become a choice, which is not
(20:38):
how it used to be. It's a little bit Like
we've talked before about how it used to be that
if a woman didn't have children and she was sort
of forty early forties, people would be like, oh, we'll
stop asking because you know, whereas now that pressure is
never off because the technology has evolved, and so it
has with being able to erase the signs of aging. Right,
So now the barriers to looking eternally young ish are
(21:03):
only money, time and a sort of discipline and will
is it important enough to you? Are you going to
do it? So it seems now that well, you could
look young, So why wouldn't you? Because what's interesting is,
despite all the many advances we've made in lots of
areas about how we see women and women's choices in
women's lives and women's decisions to work well into their
(21:25):
later years or have kids or not have kids or whatever,
women getting older is still the scariest thing that any
of us can imagine. And if you couple that with
what we talked about last week, which is that we've
never looked at ourselves more from an earlier age. Remember
we talked about mirrors, school kids and mirrors, and how
my daughter has literally been using her phone as a
mirror since she got one at twelve. Those things have
(21:47):
clashed into each other and mean that instead of feeling
more positive about well, look at all these advances in aging.
Now you can be forty and you're not considered old.
It's instead it's like, oh my gosh, I notice every
little thing, and I should be on it now.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And you should be trying to reverse it earlier. And
that's what the faith lift at thirty seven. And there
are a lot of comments and a lot of readers
who just went, what on earth are you doing? And
this Kim who spoke to my Maya was saying, no,
it's a good thing because if I do it now,
it's almost preventative. I don't have to get the big
face lift in my fifties or sixties, I have to
all ye.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
So I see it as like being a cog in
the capitalist machine of the younger you get women, and
it is majority women. The younger you get them, the
more tweaks are going to have. You can't tell me
that someone who's getting the facelift at thirty seven isn't
geting another one in ten years, another one, another one
in ten years. And then I think some sort of
(22:42):
and I don't want to be flippant with the use
of this word, but some sort of dysmorphia kicks in.
There's a cultural dysmorphia, which is sometimes I look around
and go, no one's for it is moving anymore. But
then there's also in the mirror. If you start getting
those tweaks, then any signs you start to remove more
and more, which is you know, we've seen this with celebrities.
(23:04):
They get a few tweaks, whether it's they want to
look more youthful, but then can get more and more
extreme because what you're seeing in the mirror has become
so skewed.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, it becomes an arms race, doesn't it. And back
to what you said about when your peer group starts
to all get it and the age is getting younger
and younger, it does become an arms race. And it's
not even just fomo. It's more like I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Want to be the odd one out. Yeah, and out
louders have spoken to us about this, because there are
some out louders who will say, I don't know a
single person who's had any of it done.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
It's contagious.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It's totally contagious. It's the same as lifestyle factors. It's
the same as where your holiday. It's all of those things.
And then there are other outluders where they will sit
down at dinner and they've all they all had it.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
What you said about Kim, the woman who got the
facelift at thirty seven, and she noticed some excess skin
and she didn't look the way she felt. I think
that's probably a little naive in that she didn't look
the way she looked in her phone, and she didn't
look the way she looked in the filtered photos that
she posted of herself.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
I thought that, but then in the interview she was
saying she often shows up on TikTok or Instagram without
makeup on, like she seemed to have a sense of
what she really looked like.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, it's interesting because the other aspect to all of this,
and you mentioned our mothers and our grandmothers didn't worry
about aging, or maybe they did, but there was no
choice and the only thing that was available were like
creams and a full face lift, which was something that
old rich people and maybe celebrities got. It was not accessible.
(24:41):
It was not accessible at all. Now there are so
many little tweakments that you can get which is the
on ramp to bigger and bigger procedures. And again with
the arms race, you start with it and this was
always my fear of getting botox. You start with a
little bit and then it's like once you've broken that
fourth wall. For me, I was like, oh, well, maybe
(25:01):
I could get a bit more, Maybe I could, you know.
Suddenly to me it was like, I've I liked being
able to say I've had nothing, and I've had to
really watch that in myself, and I've found myself fascinated
by other women's faces. And what we've also seen is
this absolute homogenization of women's faces. You looked at the
oscars and whether it was Mikey Madison or Demi Moore,
(25:22):
they all look around the same age and that's weird.
So you know, look, that's how beauty standards change one
hundred percent. And I think that it takes like an
Olympic level skills at disassociation from what you look like
to not feel this pressure or iron clad self confidence
and self belief which some people have. Right, You've never
(25:43):
had it, so which is it for you?
Speaker 4 (25:45):
But I struggle with it all the time, and I
think about it all the time, because there's no question
that it is confronting seeing your face age, and in
some ways it's more confronting because as MEA just said that,
our choices to people are like, why wouldn't you be
doing that? Why wouldn't you be doing that? Why wouldn't
be doing that? And I think maybe there used to
be more of a cultural sense that like beauty in
(26:07):
inverted commerce was for the young and the old. People
had other virtues, right, like wisdom and you know, all
of that kind of stuff, souperation. The idea is long
gone because now we've extended the time and the pressure
to be beautiful. Yeah, from the minute you are conscious
of the face that looks back at you in the
mirror until the moment you die, there is absolutely no
excuse for it. Have you let yourself go? Do you
(26:29):
want people to? And sometimes it's really existential because you
worry about am I relevant? Am I interesting? Is anything
I've got to say interesting? If people just think I'm old?
Because as I say, I think agism has gotten worse,
not better, in the past decade or so, and I
think that that's really tricky. I also think about the
friend groups that what usually happens is the first person
(26:53):
in the friend group to get some work or whatever
it is done, you know, like whether it is just
a bit of a more expensive facial going into maybe
some injectables, turning into a bit of filler. Whatever is
usually mocked in the friend group, either quietly or behind
the back at the beginning, and then a few months
everybody stopped mocking. That's gone silent, starts going so exactly
(27:16):
thing you're getting done, because you know, as brutal as
that headline is from the woman who's like, my friends
look better than me, that's how you begin to feel
and you're like, what am I holding out for?
Speaker 3 (27:27):
It's funny. It reminds me of I've seen this thing
online about blonde dysmorphia, which is that every blonde feels
like it's not blunt enough. You keep getting blunder and blunder,
and you get you sit in front of the hairdresser
and you have white hair, and you're like, I just
need to be lighter. Your vision sort of changes with it.
But I think that, you know, people talk about vanity.
I don't think that the choice whether or not to
have it is even about vanity or values so much
(27:50):
necessarily as it is about switching off the noise. I
think some people are just like I think about these lines,
this thing, you know, people think like many hours a
day exactly, and people have it with you know, whether
it's a mole or a nose job or whatever. It's
just like, I don't want to think about this anymore.
(28:10):
I'm sure I could do some psychological work.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
I think about it less since I did it, and
that's where i'd when I recognize in you, I was
at my most tortured in the years where I wanted
to have it, but I felt conflicted about it, and
I didn't want to want to have it.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I know, because it's this week. You're so right, Jesse
about it isn't to do with values. And just to
be really clear, like I do not have a judgmental
position on this, I really really don't. I'm just more
like I want to be the kind of person who
can accept myself.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
How it turns out, I wanted that too.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
I don't know that I am. How do you prove
to your boss that you're working. It's a dilemma that
gen Z have solved for everyone, and it's called task
masking amid sweeping back to work mandates a new generation
of figuring out office etiquette for the first time and
realize that, unlike what you're doing at home, people can
actually see you when you're at work. Enter task masking,
(29:04):
which is essentially making sure you look busy at all times.
Examples include walking moving quickly around the office space with
a laptop or notebook held tightly to your chest, typing
loudly and fervently, even when what you're typing has no
relevance or urgency, and the classic line that George Costanza
said and Seinfeld, right now.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
I should around pretending that I'm busy. Now you pull
that off.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
I always look annoyed.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
When you look annoyed all the time, people think that
you're busy.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
We have that, I know.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
We asked our resident hustle hard girl boss, etc. Gen
Z friend am Vernon if she's familiar with task masking.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
So I don't task masks because I'm actually genuinely, really
busy and everybody knows that. But what I have seen
some people do is that they would slack out of hours,
and they would slack non urgent messages when we all
know that you can schedule that message in. So we
can send during a work appropriate time. We know what
you're doing. You're task masking, You're not that busy.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I have fired.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah, I have so many examples of this. I think
bad posture makes you look like you're working harder than
good posture. Anyone who's sitting up too straight.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
I'm like, that's just a justification for hunch.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yes it is wrappers on your desk, lunch trappers. Oh yes,
coffee yeap, dirty cup really really helps in terms of
that person's busy.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I think headphones in headphones mess up your hair.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I think a little bit of messy hair, maybe a
little bit of smudged eyel.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So you've just made all of these things up to
justify looking like a hot mess.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. I really when I see someone
with a bun on the top of their head, I go.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Shit, she is so deep.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
That's a busy woman.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
That is a busy woman. She's got to concentrate so much,
she's got to pull her hair back from her brain.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Me, you're a boss. Do you ever get fooled by
task basking all the time, all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I'm so easily impressed. Schedule a message out of hours
and I'll be like you.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Legend Jesse just huffed she must be having a big day.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
After the break. Have you lost your gut instinct? You
are not alone. We are going to tell you the
trick to getting it back. In the age of advice on.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
A it out Loud access, we drop episodes every Tuesday
and Thursday exclusively for Mamma Mia subscribers. Follow the link
at the show notes to get us in your ears
five days a week, and a huge thank you to
all our current subscribers.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
We're living in the age of being influenced by celebrities,
people we follow, gurus Megan Sussex. There's never been so
much advice out there from self proclaimed experts who are
telling us what to think and what to do, and
what they think and what they do. They're teaching us
how to ask for a pay rise, what attachment style
we have, why we should watch our cortisol levels, and
(31:52):
whether this season of The White Lotus is a triumph
We're a bit disappointing. But what is the effect of
all these opinions and all this advice on our own
ability to tune into our gun instinct, to know instinctively
what we think about something or what we think we
should do. One of the most read articles on Mama
Maa this week was by Ailish Delaney, who wrote about
(32:14):
how she fears that having so many people available to
tell her what to think has made her lose touch
with her gut. And it's interesting this idea of gut instinct,
because it can sound a little bit woo woo, but
it's actually not. According to clinical psychologist Rachel Harker, who
was quoted in this article, she says that gut instinct
(32:34):
is essentially our brain processing things really quickly, almost before
our consciousness catches up or our rational mind catches up.
And she says that it's basically like a thin slice,
quick call from all of our past lived experience and
memories and learned behavior. And it's interesting because Alish writes,
(32:56):
when something goes wrong in my life, I rushed to
the group chat for advice. I send the same voice
note to several friends to get their opinion on how
a date went. I turned to strangers online to see
if how I'm feeling as normal. I scroll and scroll
until the external chatter and my internal anxiety has become
so loud it leaves me wondering what my gut feeling
even was in the first place, Jesse, do you trust
(33:18):
your gut instinct or have you lost touch with it?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
My gut has a mental illness, and this is something
I've always struggled with. So I think that because I'm
a anxious person, I have a really complicated relationship with
my gut because I think it lies to me. I
have to believe it lies to me. Like I wrote
a book called something abaud is going to Happen because
my gut has been telling me that something really, really
awful is bad to happen.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Okay, So yes. I used to think when I was
really scared of flying, I would be like, I've got
a gut instinct that the plane's going to crash, and
then it's like, no, sweetie, that's just anxiety.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Yes, And so I've had a complicated relationship on that end.
But I think with parenting, people say to you, go
with your gut. You'll know if something's wrong, you'll know,
you'll know.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
What to do.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that you
often feel like taking your child to hospital just to
get them checked out. But I do think a big
problem has become there is so much a There is
so much undermining I make the choice to sort out
Luna's sleep, and then I go on Instagram and forty
five experts tell me that I am forever traumatizing my child.
(34:21):
That's going to undermine my gut instinct, and parenting from
a place of fear and zero confidence isn't good for anyone.
So I've had to have moments where I go to
do something, whether it's to do with it's like you've
got to let go of maybe what the book would
tell you to do and go what's my gut telling
me is the right way to parent my child right now.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
You're very data driven, though, and you like research, So
how much of it is about going and gathering a
whole lot of data, thinking about it and then tuning
into your gut.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Well, that's the thing. I think. It's the process of
almost untangling the gut. So the other day I did something,
a work thing, and my gut instinct afterwards told me
I'd done a terrible job. I felt sick. I felt
like it had gone really really wrong, but all the
data was telling me hadn't gone wrong. And then I
start to ruminate, and then it'll ruin my week. So
(35:12):
when I had a moment alone, I sat there and
I wrote in my notes AP just kind of worked
out what had happened, where's this gut instinct coming from?
And I think I was able to unwrap it a
bit and go, Okay, this is coming from a place
of insecurity because this thing happened, and then I was
able to trust it a little bit more. I think
sometimes these not good beliefs or values can make you
(35:35):
feel like this.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Is a worst job.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
I'm similar in that I don't trust my instinct when
I'm going through a period of shaky confidence, which I
definitely do. And what I love about Miya one of
the many things I love about Meya is if I
walk into MIA's office and I say, what should we
do about this thing? Mia will say we should do this.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Right.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
If you come and ask me what should we do
about this thing? I think different on different days and
when I had different jobs, I'll probably say, well, we
could do this or we could do that. Let's have
a little minute to think about it and work it out.
Speaker 6 (36:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Yeah, And I always really admire that Mia is tuned
into her gut in that way. Right, does your gout
always see right?
Speaker 3 (36:14):
I would say your gut is wrong at times.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, of course it is when I think about big times,
because I second guess my gut a lot often sort
of go my gut's saying this, but let's wait and
see a minute to see if it's gonna happen. When
I have an absolutely you know, I was sadden the
intro hell yes, fuck no. People say everything in your
life should either be a hell yes or a fuck no.
And I think that depends on the type of person
you are, because some things are very clear and I've
(36:38):
gone yes, my gut says that is a hell yes,
and my gut was right. But if I'm wavering between
those things, how do I get to a hell yes
or a fuck no?
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Mea free That's so interesting. I think that you both
have strong gut instincts that are overridden by external factors.
And I think if we go back to the beginning
of the show, when we're talking about going to space,
I am very clear that I will never be going
to space because I don't want you.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I'm not going to space, but your gut tells you.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
But then you also said I probably will end up
going to space because someone will make me whereas that's
not a consideration for me. I just know it's not
going to happen. I think that being overly decisive is
a mask for also just being completely uncomfortable in uncertainty,
and that's not a good quality. So for me, there
(37:27):
are times when I just can't stand the not knowing,
and I will be overly decisive for that reason. And
you're right, Jesse, I won't always make the right decision.
But that's not necessarily about my gut instinct. That's just
about me being able to not existingly.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yes, And the reality is that the best choice is
a choice that you make. And if you have any
underpinning of perfectionism, which I know that I do, you
get so totally stuck because you think there's a wrong
decision and a very right decision. Mia. I think that
you've got a more practical view of it, which is like,
there's just a decision and just.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Get it done, to just get it.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
What do you think so about the article on MoMA
Maya and the idea that just generally we don't know
what we think, or what we like or what we
want anymore because there's too much feedback in the green
So an example would be do you like that book?
Or do you like that TV show? Right, so Megan
for example, or like Severance. We've been talking about the
show Severance.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Right, your gun is telling you don't know the.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Hot show, that smart hot show that everybody likes, and
so I watched one and I was like, I don't
like it. But then everybody in the world is telling
you it's great. So you're like, Okay, I've got I'm
supposed to like it. So I will make myself like it.
And that's true of a book or a song or
a thing, and sometimes you do make yourself like it, right,
you give it a chance, you make yourself like it.
If you apply that to people in the zeitgeist, like
(38:44):
the Megans or whoever, who are very polarizing, always women
who are polarizing, it's like, do I like it?
Speaker 3 (38:50):
No?
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Why I'm clear.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
I think it's slightly different because I think now that
we're in the era and have been for a long
time of hot takes. It used to be that just
there was the opinion page, and it used to be
one part of the media consumption that you had. Now
everything is opinion, like whether it's on Reddit, whether it's
on social whether it's reviews that you read. We're much
more likely to read a hundred hot takes about something
(39:16):
without knowing what that actual thing is, and when that
goes bad, that's like cancel Culture is an example. You're
probably going to read the reaction to something, and we're
always very careful we go back to the source, and
most people don't. So you probably have read a whole
lot of things about what people think of Megan's show,
including us, before you've actually watched it. I think this
(39:37):
is and I think that can really.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
Take agree with that person.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
No, I just think you're a blank page and everyone
and you absorb like a sponge, the zeitgeist opinion and
it might be a person that you particularly admire or
something else, but that severs you from your gut instinct.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I think this is checking behavior, and I've had my
psychologists use that before. I can get a little bit
socially anxious in some situations, and what I will do is,
let's say I'm at a dinner in Claire's there and
we both do it. I'll leave and I'll call Claire
and I go, was I weird? I feel like I
was off tonight? Was I did a and it's coming
from a place of anxiety and kind of like, could
people see that I was off? And then you're going no, no, no,
(40:14):
you're fine, You're fine. It's an anxious behavior that makes
you more anxious because in the checking, you're actually not
building any confidence or resilience in you go bad state.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
You externalize the checking.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yes, so I think that we're addicted to checking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
It's like they say that with people with OCD that
one of the things if you've got any anxiety, or
if you always want to get tests to rule out this,
you can get addicted to that retro y mia.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Do you have a way to help us connect better
with our gut when we're getting lost in this checking
behavior or sex?
Speaker 1 (40:46):
I do, And a friend taught me this about thirty
years ago when I was offered the editorship of Cosmo
and I had been planning to move overseas and live
in New York and freelance, and I was really paralyzed.
I didn't know i'd actually already turned it down, but
I was second guessing that decision. I didn't know what
to do. I always do this, and I give this
advice to other people. Imagine you are definitely taking that
(41:09):
job or breaking up with that guy or doing that thing.
Imagine you definitely are quick what feelings come up? How
do you feel? And you've got to answer quickly because
it's got to be like relieved or scared or sick.
And then you say, okay, now, imagine you're definitely not
taking it. It's just you've said no, it's not happening.
You're moving to New York. How do you feel? Excited, exhilarated, nervous?
(41:33):
And it's a great way at cutting through your head
and to your heart or your gut. And for me,
what I learned about that is that the thought of
taking the job made me feel nervous but excited. The
thought of not taking the job made me feel like
I'd stopped running before the finish line, but a little
bit relieved because there was less pressure. So it was
and that time I knew it was the right thing
(41:54):
to take the job.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
Okay, my gut tells me the show is finished, and
a big thank you. Be sure, yeah, because my gut's
telling me that the outlouders are like okay, I've got
to go now, like.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Shut up, We've got to work out what we think
about the ball rooms exactly.
Speaker 4 (42:09):
Thank you out louders for being here with us today
as always, added to our fabulous team for helping us
put it together. We're going to be back in your
ears tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
If you are looking for something else to listen to,
not bye. We did a very juicy ask Me Anything
episode and it was a little bit different because what
we did was we actually had a bunch of questions
about particular news stories and angles that had come up
that maybe we hadn't discussed on the show. For example,
the Marty sheer Gold Matilda's controversy from the other week.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Heep, you wanted to know what it was like on
red carpets, Yeah, big Awards shows.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
It was really fun. So we will pop a link
in the show notes.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
Now we can say bye, Maya bye, bye, bye, bye
see ya. Shout out to.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Any Muma Miya subscribers listening.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
If you love the.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Show and want to support us as well, subscribing to
Mom and Miya is the very best way to do so.
There is a link in the episode description
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
I really when I see someone with a bun on
the top of their head, I go shit, she is
so deep.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
That's a busy woman.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
That is a daddy, a busy woman. She's got to
concentrate so much, she's got to pull her hair back
from her brain.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
Hello, Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia. Out Loud What
women are actually talking about? Wednesday, the twelfth of March.
I'm Holly Waynwright, I'm mea.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Friedman, and I'm Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
And on the show today there's a celebrity family with
seven children, some dubious accent choices, and a wrongful death
suit hanging over their heads. So they've opened up their
front door and invited us inside. Why also, are your friends'
tweakments making you feel bad about your face?
Speaker 5 (01:06):
Why?
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Competitive aging is ruining friendships and it's starting young than
ever And in a world of constant feedback loops, it's
getting harder and harder to be a hell yes, fuck
no person. How to get better at trusting your gut?
But first, Mia.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
In case you missed it, the first girl's trip to
space has been announced, and my response is, oh no,
I'd hate that. Last week, Blue Origin, the aerospace company
founded by Jeff Bezos, announced an all female crew for
its eleventh human spaceflight. It's going to happen in a
few months time, and this is the exciting bit. The
crew stars Jeff Bezos's fiance Lauren Sanchez, Oprah's best friend
(01:44):
and TV journalist gau King, and popstar Katie Perry, who posted.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Sorry, my question is are they flying the spaceship?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I assume not. No, they're passengers. But Katie Perry posted,
if you had told me that I would be part
of the first ever all female crew in space, I
would have believed you. Gau King, however, is not so
thrilled about it. Have a listened to what she had
to say.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
I have to tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm sore.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Frey stop girl.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Yeah, I'm so afraid, but I'm also so excited about it.
When they asked me, and they asked me around Thanksgiving,
I was like, no, no, no. Then I started thinking
about it. I met with favorite daughter Kirby, favorite son
Will Oprah. That's my kitchen cabinet they will all be
there that day with their spouses, and I just thought,
what a unique opportunity. And then yesterday I met the crew.
(02:31):
We're now the crew. We're all in a text chain together,
and their stories are so amazing.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
It's interesting because it used to be that you needed
years of NASA training and the job titled astronaut to
be launched into space. But we've entered this age of
space tourism. So Blue Origin and Elon Musk, SpaceX and
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic have made going into space and
attainable reality well for the rich and a bit of
(02:58):
a reality spectacle for the rest of us. And now
they're sending these celebrities up there for publicity so that
regular degulars with millions of dollars will hear about it
and book their tickets. And tickets cost between one million
dollars and one hundred and ten million dollars, depending on
how long you're up for how high you go. So, Jesse,
how do you feel about adding another date to the
(03:18):
Out Loud Live tour and getting on a space rocket
with me?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And I'm being sponsored by them doing a little show
from Space Life Broadcast. I'm so annoyed because I feel
like I'm going to get talked into going to space
and I don't want to go. I feel as though
there's a girl's trip in my future where everyone goes, no,
we really want to go to space.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
And it's fun.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
It's a hen's week it's a weekend, and.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
I'm going to say you have to come. I want
to go to Mexico. No, I want to go to
the Bahamas, and they're going to say no, Space and
there's not a Paul or a cocktail there.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
I would love to go to space. I would get
on that ship. I would throw Katie Perry out of
that ship. The wood crew is really freaking me out though,
because it does sound like they're flying it. Lauren Sanchez, though,
can flyplanes, so she's a helicopter. Helicopter so she doesn't
and she's written a children's book about a buzzy bean
in space, so she's very well qualified. Lauren could be
(04:08):
at the controls. I would love it.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's no, okay, it's gonna be the worst girl's weekend
because this is what people don't understand. As I talked
about last week, I went to space via a book
that I read recently orbital so vomiting, painting, headaches, not
the I don't think even if it's fancy, I think
(04:30):
you're still in space.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I think Lauren Sanchez's boobs will explode.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Oh, Freedman, that's so help.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I think it's a fair question.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Will help with the floating around. Funny is that when
you're taking tourists into space, it can't be too spacey
like what you're talking about, because that would be terrible.
But they have to get that opportunity to float about,
right otherwise you're not going, like I'm not going unless
I get to it. Currently, Lauren Sanchez.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You've got to do tests for claustrophobia because people often like,
can you imagine going up there? I'm incredibly claustrophobic. I
don't love a lyft. I am an hour in and
I have never been more trapped in my life. I
can see someone. I can see Katie Perry, who's pretty
confident losing it. She's the one who's going to start
hyperventilating and go and get me out, Get me out.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
I can also see a singing woman's world too. You
never again and you're like open.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Nothing, tramped on.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
Now, I'll take my chances with the asteroids.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
We moved into this apartment in November of twenty eleven.
Her and I no kids, quiet, and then number one
came one kid, two kids, No you'll come back. No, no, no,
don't do that. Oh Wedd's up. Three kids, four kids,
(05:52):
And I thought that was the outer limits.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Become going what is what haves? Though he had no
saying how many children they are.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It's hilarious, right, So, welcome to a luxurious penthouse apartment
in Greenwich Village, New York City. We're a very famous
movie star. Just turn him. Alec Baldwin is living with
his much younger wife, their seven children, aged between eleven
and two, two nannies, many pets, and a manslaughter charge
hanging over their heads. Yes, it's feel good reality TV
(06:23):
show The Baldwins, all about Aleck and his wife Hilaria,
and I watched it so you don't have to hear
us some very short life's two short takeaways. The show
is apparently filmed in the run up to Baldwin's trial
over the twenty twenty one death of cinematographer Helena Hutchins.
In case you don't remember, Helena died when a gun
Baldwin was firing on the set of The Western Rust
(06:45):
did not fire the standard blanks but live ammunition. She
was the mother to a nine year old son. That
case was eventually dismissed, but civil charges are pending. This
makes it a tricky tonal needle to thread, right because
that trial and the stress of it on the Baldwins
is frequently mentioned and counted down to through the first episode.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Right, They talk about it all a lot.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah, But the other overarching plotline is like this supposedly
comedic mayhem of a family where a sixty six year
old man is parenting seven children. Right, so there are
like birthday cake calamities and dog weee on the floor
and constant mess and shouting so wacky, yeah, and him
doing a very good job of remembering all their names
(07:29):
and things about their personalities. And then also there's Hilaria, right,
And I know we're not meant to mention women's appearance,
but her breasts are unbelievably distracting and stupendous. She's talking
to camera all the time about her babies, about the
absence of a prenup, about what a dark time this
is in their lives. Such a dark time that it's
been turned into a chirpy reality show Mia, considering that
(07:52):
overall the impression is of a troubled man falling apart
in the middle of an ocean of children and tiny
dogs and cats that he's allergic to. Why would Alec
Baldwin and Alaria, of course, decide to make a reality
show at all, and especially now.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The first reason is because all the lawyer's fees are
very expensive. The second reason is the same reason why
most people do reality shows, which is they want to
be understood, most famous people in the same way that
Megan did her show. They want to write their own narrative,
(08:28):
and they feel that the narrative created for them by
the media and social media is incorrect and unfair, and
they want to change the conversation and be better known.
So the narrative that's been written for the Baldwins until
this show was as you say, the tragedy of what
happened on the set of Rust, and also Alaria and
the how you say cucumber and her accent where and
(08:53):
a few years ago, during a bit of a quiet
news cycle, I think it was around Christmas. A couple
of years ago, a video emerged of her doing a
cooking demonstration and struggling with her English, and she's often
spoken in a Spanish accent, and it came out that
she's actually Hillary from Boston, who has no Spanish background,
(09:13):
no Spanish heritage. She spent some time in Spain. I
think her parents moved there after they retired, and she
visited there a few times. But it became this idea
that she was cosplaying being Spanish.
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Speaks Spanish in the show a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, And at one point in the show he says, oh, no,
you're speaking too fast, and you're speaking in a Spanish accent,
which never goes well, and so they do talk about that.
I've only watched a little bit of the show, but
I had it on in the background while we were
preparing for today, and every time I looked at the screen,
Alec Baldwin just looked either like he'd been crying, I
assume that's when he was talking about what had happened
(09:48):
on the set and the trial, or just utterly beleagued
and overwhelmed, as you would be.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Because he's sixty six.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
He is and he's like a curmudgeonally, like his vibe
is like grumpy. He's famously used to have a lot
of clashes with the paparazzi. Way before any of this,
he played Trump on Saturday Night Live for a while.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
He's also sixty six in a way that we're going
to talk about aging in a bit, but like he
is not a sixty six year old movie star who's
in action movie form. Like he's a sixty six year
old movie star who actually looks sixty six, which is
not Tane.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Cruise or Brad Pea.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, not right now. He certainly isn't, both in his
physical shape and his like very deep bags, Like he
looks absolutely knackered, and he also looks like someone you know,
Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeah, this is a dystopian nightmare that is tonally completely incoherent.
I have no idea why you would think this is
a good idea, and this would end well to have
the storyline of the sort of bumbling father and the
funny chaos of the seven kids and da da da
(10:55):
that reality show green Light understand great happens all the time.
That's great. Then you need to layer it with some steaks,
which is often the thing. It's like you see in
every documentary It's like, what's our narrative arc, what are
we working towards to laya that with the stakes of
a woman who was killed and a little boy lost
his mother, and the family is reeling and has said,
(11:18):
we don't like this, we don't want this, we don't
want this show. We find this really really uncomfortable, just
feels so wrong, And a lot of people are saying, like,
Alec Baldwin wasn't victim. Stories can have more than one victim,
And I actually have empathy for Alec Baldwin. It was
an accident. His life will never be the same. He
is certainly not a victim in the same way as
(11:40):
Helena was and her family. That's just the most awful,
horrendous thing to have happened on set, But to use
it as fodder for a reality show is so distasteful.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
My suspicion is that this was in the works way
before that happened, because I mean it has been for
those people who sort of followed her. She was a
yoga instructor, Taylor's oldest time, older man hooks up with
younger woman and then she starts having the babies, and
you know, one and two, yeah, and one and two,
and then three, and then it suddenly he's a bit
(12:14):
my Roman empire. That's why this reality show is a
little bit my brain coming to life, because I think
about it often, like sometimes on the weekend, when I'll
just be chilling, I'll go imagine being Alec Baldwin. You
finished work and you come home because he's still got
to work, he's got to support seven children, and you
come home and you've got seven babies.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, but it's funny how we do this to older men, right,
And it happens a bit in the White Lotus too,
like the dynamic of the older man and the younger woman,
almost like he's being manipulated or exploited by a younger
woman who wants one hundred children and five hundred pets,
as though he has no agency in his life, like
the thing of just like how do we get all
(12:53):
these children? And then he refers more than once I
think to having seven children, like, oh we had seven children,
you have eight children, mate.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Yeah, but it is true that the question of why
seven children is not answered, right, But he does say
at the beginning, and she says too that when they
very first met, he was very clear, I want kids.
I want more kids. I want them now. And he
says that he had this famously toxic, acrimonious divorce from
Kim Besinger back in the day, with whom he had
a daughter Ireland, and that went very badly. And a
(13:21):
voice message back in the times of answering machines and
all the rest of it was released where he was
berating his teenage daughter a carder, a little pig, and
that went well old fashioned viral, and his whole thing
was what a terrible father, what a monster. And he
sort of says I wanted a chance to do it again.
And what's interesting about him saying that is I think
(13:42):
a lot of older men think that they think I
screwed it up the first time. I want another go
at it. I'm going to do it differently. There's two
things about this that I find interesting. Usually I'm pretty
forgiving about people putting their kids in content. Right, if
everyone's having a good time and people are getting paid
and it's fair, I'm like, go for it. But this
is really interesting because over the course of episode one,
(14:02):
you get individually introduced to every kid with their name,
with their personality traits. Little so and so likes planes,
This one's really thoughtful, this one's really funny. This little
girl's really bossy. The teenage girl is a classic teenage
girl with lots of hair tossing and short shorts, and
you're kind of like that footage is there forever now
in a show that a lot of people are gonna
hate watch. And the other thing that's interesting to me,
(14:25):
I'm as much as the next person like to look
inside rich people's lives, and so I'm like, I want
to see this five bedroom penthouse apartment and they've got
to see through dog pen and they've got the nannies
and the cars and all that. But there is nothing
aspirational about this show, right, you just go, oh no, no, no, no,
no no, did you I see?
Speaker 3 (14:43):
I don't mind the chaos. And there's something about the
presenting it as a bit of a freak show that
irks me a little bit. Maybe because my mum was
one of seven and they, you know, came from like
big Irish families. I see the appeal of that and
the whole like why would you have like seven, which
is what a lot of people are saying, is like.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
They're always interested in big families.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, and how they work? Yeah, I think that the
machinations of how they all get car like, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Do you remember all their names? Like how you give
them all attention?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
But I agree with you Holly on the kids, because
there was a clip I watched of she might have
been twelve speaking to her mum about Alec being in
court and reflecting on how scared she was he was
going to be sent to jail, and I just thought,
this is a really private, vulnerable, scary moment. And what
we know now about how reality TV is produced and
(15:39):
the way that would have been filmed, the crew, how
much they would have had to get in order to
even make the show.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Anytimes she would have had to have the conversation. That's
a great point.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Do you think they would have been paid lots and
lots and lots, Yeah, because, as you say, the money
is significant, and they in this you see they're lavish
in inverted commas Hampton's Beach House, which apparently is up
for sale for similar reasons. So it's a little bit
of desperation.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yeah, Well, they've got bills to pay. It's simple business.
And I think what's also fascinating, and I wonder if
they'll referenced in a future episode. But I remember when
she had I think her fifth or sixth baby, When
that baby was about three or four months old, she
appeared on Instagram with another baby, and no one could
really understand what was going on, and then she said,
(16:25):
we've adopted this baby. And I think now they're saying
it was maybe a surrogate, and of course that's their
personal business, but that's a pretty interesting decision in the
middle of clearly she's not got fertility problems that we
know of, and having all of these babies, which she
documents herself carrying and her body snapping back after having
each of them, she adopted one when she already had, Like, yeah,
(16:46):
I'm fascinated in wonder.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
I thought, was there a way to embark on this
project as a documentary if this was a documentary similar
to the Beckhams.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah, a different style, different.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Style that could speak to the family, much of the victim.
Because it is a tragic, horrible story. I haven't been
able to look away from it because I just think
how many lives have been touched.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Again, to be a little bit fair, Hilaria in particular
is very often saying to camera, we're going through a
very hard time, Alex's mental health is hanging by a thread,
but of course it is nothing compared to that is
A many issue is.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
That the next scene is like Doo Do doin and.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Tone is so strange.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So if you want to watch the first episodes out,
I'm not sure where the rest of them are. We
found it on bin Chip.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
After the Break. A story about a facelift went viral
on Muma Maya this week, and we want to discuss
the exact age women start worrying about aging. Stay with us.
My best friends look better than me. I feel betrayed
by their tweaks. That's a headline on a story I
(17:57):
came across from The Daily Mail this week by Kate Mulvey.
She is a woman in her early sixties who describes
catching up with friends from her UNI days and discovering
that she was the odd one out. She says, I quote,
I looked like their mum. Mulvey reflected on the storyline
from this season of The White Lotus. The three friends
from school to have had tweaks, the third hasn't, and
(18:19):
the trio was confronted with the spectacle of aging in
this week's episode, What.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
The actual fuck is this?
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Place.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
This is like a bargain hotel for retirees. It kind
of seems like that, why would he.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
Send us here?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I got to get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
That was Jacqueline realizing that she had been sent to
a hotel full of what she saw to be old people.
Add to that a story on Mama Maya this week
about a thirty seven year old woman named Kim who
recently traveled to Turkey for a facelift. So she noticed
what she saw as like excess skin and felt her
reflection didn't match how she felt, and so for thirty
(19:00):
thousand dollars she underwent a facelift. Now I was thinking recently,
I'm thirty four. Am I doomed to worry or to
think about aging until the day I die? And is
it starting younger and younger? Because I reckon I've been
thinking about the signs of aging since I was twenty eight.
And if I live to eighty three, that's a life
(19:21):
expectancy of an Australian woman. I will have spent fifty
five years concerned about aging. That's most of mine.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
When you say aging you mean physically physically, I appear
it's wise.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
The word decline it's like you feel. I honestly think
that from about twenty eight you're like, am I in decline?
And do you ever truly revel in youth?
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Decline? By whose measure? Well?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Everything. It's like physically you start to go, am I
looking older and older? And you start to see your
face move more and more and more lines, which you
are seeing as a culture, the women older than you're raising,
so you're hearing bad, bad bad. I also think about
things though, like memory and energy and all that kind
of stuff, and the proper importance the important stuff. Longevity
(20:06):
is the Yeah, Holly, there's no way my ground mother
or my mother with thinking about aging in their early thirties.
I know, it's ridiculous. What is going on?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Well, one of the things that's going on and MEA
Friedman called this a while ago when she wrote an
essay about how aging has apparently become a choice, right,
because it hasn't really actual aging hasn't become a choice.
The years still tick over, our bodies are still aging
all of those things. But visually, physically, aging on our
faces appears like it's become a choice, which is not
(20:38):
how it used to be. It's a little bit Like
we've talked before about how it used to be that
if a woman didn't have children and she was sort
of forty early forties, people would be like, oh, we'll
stop asking because you know, whereas now that pressure is
never off because the technology has evolved, and so it
has with being able to erase the signs of aging. Right,
So now the barriers to looking eternally young ish are
(21:03):
only money, time and a sort of discipline and will
is it important enough to you? Are you going to
do it? So it seems now that well, you could
look young, So why wouldn't you? Because what's interesting is,
despite all the many advances we've made in lots of
areas about how we see women and women's choices in
women's lives and women's decisions to work well into their
(21:25):
later years or have kids or not have kids or whatever,
women getting older is still the scariest thing that any
of us can imagine. And if you couple that with
what we talked about last week, which is that we've
never looked at ourselves more from an earlier age. Remember
we talked about mirrors, school kids and mirrors, and how
my daughter has literally been using her phone as a
mirror since she got one at twelve. Those things have
(21:47):
clashed into each other and mean that instead of feeling
more positive about well, look at all these advances in aging.
Now you can be forty and you're not considered old.
It's instead it's like, oh my gosh, I notice every
little thing, and I should be on it now.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And you should be trying to reverse it earlier. And
that's what the faith lift at thirty seven. And there
are a lot of comments and a lot of readers
who just went, what on earth are you doing? And
this Kim who spoke to my Maya was saying, no,
it's a good thing because if I do it now,
it's almost preventative. I don't have to get the big
face lift in my fifties or sixties, I have to
all ye.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
So I see it as like being a cog in
the capitalist machine of the younger you get women, and
it is majority women. The younger you get them, the
more tweaks are going to have. You can't tell me
that someone who's getting the facelift at thirty seven isn't
geting another one in ten years, another one, another one
in ten years. And then I think some sort of
(22:42):
and I don't want to be flippant with the use
of this word, but some sort of dysmorphia kicks in.
There's a cultural dysmorphia, which is sometimes I look around
and go, no one's for it is moving anymore. But
then there's also in the mirror. If you start getting
those tweaks, then any signs you start to remove more
and more, which is you know, we've seen this with celebrities.
(23:04):
They get a few tweaks, whether it's they want to
look more youthful, but then can get more and more
extreme because what you're seeing in the mirror has become
so skewed.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, it becomes an arms race, doesn't it. And back
to what you said about when your peer group starts
to all get it and the age is getting younger
and younger, it does become an arms race. And it's
not even just fomo. It's more like I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Want to be the odd one out. Yeah, and out
louders have spoken to us about this, because there are
some out louders who will say, I don't know a
single person who's had any of it done.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
It's contagious.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It's totally contagious. It's the same as lifestyle factors. It's
the same as where your holiday. It's all of those things.
And then there are other outluders where they will sit
down at dinner and they've all they all had it.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
What you said about Kim, the woman who got the
facelift at thirty seven, and she noticed some excess skin
and she didn't look the way she felt. I think
that's probably a little naive in that she didn't look
the way she looked in her phone, and she didn't
look the way she looked in the filtered photos that
she posted of herself.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
I thought that, but then in the interview she was
saying she often shows up on TikTok or Instagram without
makeup on, like she seemed to have a sense of
what she really looked like.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, it's interesting because the other aspect to all of this,
and you mentioned our mothers and our grandmothers didn't worry
about aging, or maybe they did, but there was no
choice and the only thing that was available were like
creams and a full face lift, which was something that
old rich people and maybe celebrities got. It was not accessible.
(24:41):
It was not accessible at all. Now there are so
many little tweakments that you can get which is the
on ramp to bigger and bigger procedures. And again with
the arms race, you start with it and this was
always my fear of getting botox. You start with a
little bit and then it's like once you've broken that
fourth wall. For me, I was like, oh, well, maybe
(25:01):
I could get a bit more, Maybe I could, you know.
Suddenly to me it was like, I've I liked being
able to say I've had nothing, and I've had to
really watch that in myself, and I've found myself fascinated
by other women's faces. And what we've also seen is
this absolute homogenization of women's faces. You looked at the
oscars and whether it was Mikey Madison or Demi Moore,
(25:22):
they all look around the same age and that's weird.
So you know, look, that's how beauty standards change one
hundred percent. And I think that it takes like an
Olympic level skills at disassociation from what you look like
to not feel this pressure or iron clad self confidence
and self belief which some people have. Right, You've never
(25:43):
had it, so which is it for you?
Speaker 4 (25:45):
But I struggle with it all the time, and I
think about it all the time, because there's no question
that it is confronting seeing your face age, and in
some ways it's more confronting because as MEA just said that,
our choices to people are like, why wouldn't you be
doing that? Why wouldn't you be doing that? Why wouldn't
be doing that? And I think maybe there used to
be more of a cultural sense that like beauty in
(26:07):
inverted commerce was for the young and the old. People
had other virtues, right, like wisdom and you know, all
of that kind of stuff, souperation. The idea is long
gone because now we've extended the time and the pressure
to be beautiful. Yeah, from the minute you are conscious
of the face that looks back at you in the
mirror until the moment you die, there is absolutely no
excuse for it. Have you let yourself go? Do you
(26:29):
want people to? And sometimes it's really existential because you
worry about am I relevant? Am I interesting? Is anything
I've got to say interesting? If people just think I'm old?
Because as I say, I think agism has gotten worse,
not better, in the past decade or so, and I
think that that's really tricky. I also think about the
friend groups that what usually happens is the first person
(26:53):
in the friend group to get some work or whatever
it is done, you know, like whether it is just
a bit of a more expensive facial going into maybe
some injectables, turning into a bit of filler. Whatever is
usually mocked in the friend group, either quietly or behind
the back at the beginning, and then a few months
everybody stopped mocking. That's gone silent, starts going so exactly
(27:16):
thing you're getting done, because you know, as brutal as
that headline is from the woman who's like, my friends
look better than me, that's how you begin to feel
and you're like, what am I holding out for?
Speaker 3 (27:27):
It's funny. It reminds me of I've seen this thing
online about blonde dysmorphia, which is that every blonde feels
like it's not blunt enough. You keep getting blunder and blunder,
and you get you sit in front of the hairdresser
and you have white hair, and you're like, I just
need to be lighter. Your vision sort of changes with it.
But I think that, you know, people talk about vanity.
I don't think that the choice whether or not to
have it is even about vanity or values so much
(27:50):
necessarily as it is about switching off the noise. I
think some people are just like I think about these lines,
this thing, you know, people think like many hours a
day exactly, and people have it with you know, whether
it's a mole or a nose job or whatever. It's
just like, I don't want to think about this anymore.
(28:10):
I'm sure I could do some psychological work.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
I think about it less since I did it, and
that's where i'd when I recognize in you, I was
at my most tortured in the years where I wanted
to have it, but I felt conflicted about it, and
I didn't want to want to have it.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I know, because it's this week. You're so right, Jesse
about it isn't to do with values. And just to
be really clear, like I do not have a judgmental
position on this, I really really don't. I'm just more
like I want to be the kind of person who
can accept myself.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
How it turns out, I wanted that too.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
I don't know that I am. How do you prove
to your boss that you're working. It's a dilemma that
gen Z have solved for everyone, and it's called task
masking amid sweeping back to work mandates a new generation
of figuring out office etiquette for the first time and
realize that, unlike what you're doing at home, people can
actually see you when you're at work. Enter task masking,
(29:04):
which is essentially making sure you look busy at all times.
Examples include walking moving quickly around the office space with
a laptop or notebook held tightly to your chest, typing
loudly and fervently, even when what you're typing has no
relevance or urgency, and the classic line that George Costanza
said and Seinfeld, right now.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
I should around pretending that I'm busy. Now you pull
that off.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
I always look annoyed.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
When you look annoyed all the time, people think that
you're busy.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
We have that, I know.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
We asked our resident hustle hard girl boss, etc. Gen
Z friend am Vernon if she's familiar with task masking.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
So I don't task masks because I'm actually genuinely, really
busy and everybody knows that. But what I have seen
some people do is that they would slack out of hours,
and they would slack non urgent messages when we all
know that you can schedule that message in. So we
can send during a work appropriate time. We know what
you're doing. You're task masking, You're not that busy.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I have fired.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah, I have so many examples of this. I think
bad posture makes you look like you're working harder than
good posture. Anyone who's sitting up too straight.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
I'm like, that's just a justification for hunch.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yes it is wrappers on your desk, lunch trappers. Oh yes,
coffee yeap, dirty cup really really helps in terms of
that person's busy.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I think headphones in headphones mess up your hair.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I think a little bit of messy hair, maybe a
little bit of smudged eyel.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So you've just made all of these things up to
justify looking like a hot mess.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. I really when I see someone
with a bun on the top of their head, I go.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Shit, she is so deep.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
That's a busy woman.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
That is a busy woman. She's got to concentrate so much,
she's got to pull her hair back from her brain.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Me, you're a boss. Do you ever get fooled by
task basking all the time, all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I'm so easily impressed. Schedule a message out of hours
and I'll be like you.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Legend Jesse just huffed she must be having a big day.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
After the break. Have you lost your gut instinct? You
are not alone. We are going to tell you the
trick to getting it back. In the age of advice on.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
A it out Loud access, we drop episodes every Tuesday
and Thursday exclusively for Mamma Mia subscribers. Follow the link
at the show notes to get us in your ears
five days a week, and a huge thank you to
all our current subscribers.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
We're living in the age of being influenced by celebrities,
people we follow, gurus Megan Sussex. There's never been so
much advice out there from self proclaimed experts who are
telling us what to think and what to do, and
what they think and what they do. They're teaching us
how to ask for a pay rise, what attachment style
we have, why we should watch our cortisol levels, and
(31:52):
whether this season of The White Lotus is a triumph
We're a bit disappointing. But what is the effect of
all these opinions and all this advice on our own
ability to tune into our gun instinct, to know instinctively
what we think about something or what we think we
should do. One of the most read articles on Mama
Maa this week was by Ailish Delaney, who wrote about
(32:14):
how she fears that having so many people available to
tell her what to think has made her lose touch
with her gut. And it's interesting this idea of gut instinct,
because it can sound a little bit woo woo, but
it's actually not. According to clinical psychologist Rachel Harker, who
was quoted in this article, she says that gut instinct
(32:34):
is essentially our brain processing things really quickly, almost before
our consciousness catches up or our rational mind catches up.
And she says that it's basically like a thin slice,
quick call from all of our past lived experience and
memories and learned behavior. And it's interesting because Alish writes,
(32:56):
when something goes wrong in my life, I rushed to
the group chat for advice. I send the same voice
note to several friends to get their opinion on how
a date went. I turned to strangers online to see
if how I'm feeling as normal. I scroll and scroll
until the external chatter and my internal anxiety has become
so loud it leaves me wondering what my gut feeling
even was in the first place, Jesse, do you trust
(33:18):
your gut instinct or have you lost touch with it?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
My gut has a mental illness, and this is something
I've always struggled with. So I think that because I'm
a anxious person, I have a really complicated relationship with
my gut because I think it lies to me. I
have to believe it lies to me. Like I wrote
a book called something abaud is going to Happen because
my gut has been telling me that something really, really
awful is bad to happen.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Okay, So yes. I used to think when I was
really scared of flying, I would be like, I've got
a gut instinct that the plane's going to crash, and
then it's like, no, sweetie, that's just anxiety.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Yes, And so I've had a complicated relationship on that end.
But I think with parenting, people say to you, go
with your gut. You'll know if something's wrong, you'll know,
you'll know.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
What to do.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that you
often feel like taking your child to hospital just to
get them checked out. But I do think a big
problem has become there is so much a There is
so much undermining I make the choice to sort out
Luna's sleep, and then I go on Instagram and forty
five experts tell me that I am forever traumatizing my child.
(34:21):
That's going to undermine my gut instinct, and parenting from
a place of fear and zero confidence isn't good for anyone.
So I've had to have moments where I go to
do something, whether it's to do with it's like you've
got to let go of maybe what the book would
tell you to do and go what's my gut telling
me is the right way to parent my child right now.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
You're very data driven, though, and you like research, So
how much of it is about going and gathering a
whole lot of data, thinking about it and then tuning
into your gut.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Well, that's the thing. I think. It's the process of
almost untangling the gut. So the other day I did something,
a work thing, and my gut instinct afterwards told me
I'd done a terrible job. I felt sick. I felt
like it had gone really really wrong, but all the
data was telling me hadn't gone wrong. And then I
start to ruminate, and then it'll ruin my week. So
(35:12):
when I had a moment alone, I sat there and
I wrote in my notes AP just kind of worked
out what had happened, where's this gut instinct coming from?
And I think I was able to unwrap it a
bit and go, Okay, this is coming from a place
of insecurity because this thing happened, and then I was
able to trust it a little bit more. I think
sometimes these not good beliefs or values can make you
(35:35):
feel like this.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Is a worst job.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
I'm similar in that I don't trust my instinct when
I'm going through a period of shaky confidence, which I
definitely do. And what I love about Miya one of
the many things I love about Meya is if I
walk into MIA's office and I say, what should we
do about this thing? Mia will say we should do this.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Right.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
If you come and ask me what should we do
about this thing? I think different on different days and
when I had different jobs, I'll probably say, well, we
could do this or we could do that. Let's have
a little minute to think about it and work it out.
Speaker 6 (36:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Yeah, And I always really admire that Mia is tuned
into her gut in that way. Right, does your gout
always see right?
Speaker 3 (36:14):
I would say your gut is wrong at times.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, of course it is when I think about big times,
because I second guess my gut a lot often sort
of go my gut's saying this, but let's wait and
see a minute to see if it's gonna happen. When
I have an absolutely you know, I was sadden the
intro hell yes, fuck no. People say everything in your
life should either be a hell yes or a fuck no.
And I think that depends on the type of person
you are, because some things are very clear and I've
(36:38):
gone yes, my gut says that is a hell yes,
and my gut was right. But if I'm wavering between
those things, how do I get to a hell yes
or a fuck no?
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Mea free That's so interesting. I think that you both
have strong gut instincts that are overridden by external factors.
And I think if we go back to the beginning
of the show, when we're talking about going to space,
I am very clear that I will never be going
to space because I don't want you.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I'm not going to space, but your gut tells you.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
But then you also said I probably will end up
going to space because someone will make me whereas that's
not a consideration for me. I just know it's not
going to happen. I think that being overly decisive is
a mask for also just being completely uncomfortable in uncertainty,
and that's not a good quality. So for me, there
(37:27):
are times when I just can't stand the not knowing,
and I will be overly decisive for that reason. And
you're right, Jesse, I won't always make the right decision.
But that's not necessarily about my gut instinct. That's just
about me being able to not existingly.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yes, And the reality is that the best choice is
a choice that you make. And if you have any
underpinning of perfectionism, which I know that I do, you
get so totally stuck because you think there's a wrong
decision and a very right decision. Mia. I think that
you've got a more practical view of it, which is like,
there's just a decision and just.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Get it done, to just get it.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
What do you think so about the article on MoMA
Maya and the idea that just generally we don't know
what we think, or what we like or what we
want anymore because there's too much feedback in the green
So an example would be do you like that book?
Or do you like that TV show? Right, so Megan
for example, or like Severance. We've been talking about the
show Severance.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Right, your gun is telling you don't know the.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Hot show, that smart hot show that everybody likes, and
so I watched one and I was like, I don't
like it. But then everybody in the world is telling
you it's great. So you're like, Okay, I've got I'm
supposed to like it. So I will make myself like it.
And that's true of a book or a song or
a thing, and sometimes you do make yourself like it, right,
you give it a chance, you make yourself like it.
If you apply that to people in the zeitgeist, like
(38:44):
the Megans or whoever, who are very polarizing, always women
who are polarizing, it's like, do I like it?
Speaker 3 (38:50):
No?
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Why I'm clear.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
I think it's slightly different because I think now that
we're in the era and have been for a long
time of hot takes. It used to be that just
there was the opinion page, and it used to be
one part of the media consumption that you had. Now
everything is opinion, like whether it's on Reddit, whether it's
on social whether it's reviews that you read. We're much
more likely to read a hundred hot takes about something
(39:16):
without knowing what that actual thing is, and when that
goes bad, that's like cancel Culture is an example. You're
probably going to read the reaction to something, and we're
always very careful we go back to the source, and
most people don't. So you probably have read a whole
lot of things about what people think of Megan's show,
including us, before you've actually watched it. I think this
(39:37):
is and I think that can really.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
Take agree with that person.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
No, I just think you're a blank page and everyone
and you absorb like a sponge, the zeitgeist opinion and
it might be a person that you particularly admire or
something else, but that severs you from your gut instinct.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I think this is checking behavior, and I've had my
psychologists use that before. I can get a little bit
socially anxious in some situations, and what I will do is,
let's say I'm at a dinner in Claire's there and
we both do it. I'll leave and I'll call Claire
and I go, was I weird? I feel like I
was off tonight? Was I did a and it's coming
from a place of anxiety and kind of like, could
people see that I was off? And then you're going no, no, no,
(40:14):
you're fine, You're fine. It's an anxious behavior that makes
you more anxious because in the checking, you're actually not
building any confidence or resilience in you go bad state.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
You externalize the checking.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yes, so I think that we're addicted to checking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
It's like they say that with people with OCD that
one of the things if you've got any anxiety, or
if you always want to get tests to rule out this,
you can get addicted to that retro y mia.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Do you have a way to help us connect better
with our gut when we're getting lost in this checking
behavior or sex?
Speaker 1 (40:46):
I do, And a friend taught me this about thirty
years ago when I was offered the editorship of Cosmo
and I had been planning to move overseas and live
in New York and freelance, and I was really paralyzed.
I didn't know i'd actually already turned it down, but
I was second guessing that decision. I didn't know what
to do. I always do this, and I give this
advice to other people. Imagine you are definitely taking that
(41:09):
job or breaking up with that guy or doing that thing.
Imagine you definitely are quick what feelings come up? How
do you feel? And you've got to answer quickly because
it's got to be like relieved or scared or sick.
And then you say, okay, now, imagine you're definitely not
taking it. It's just you've said no, it's not happening.
You're moving to New York. How do you feel? Excited, exhilarated, nervous?
(41:33):
And it's a great way at cutting through your head
and to your heart or your gut. And for me,
what I learned about that is that the thought of
taking the job made me feel nervous but excited. The
thought of not taking the job made me feel like
I'd stopped running before the finish line, but a little
bit relieved because there was less pressure. So it was
and that time I knew it was the right thing
(41:54):
to take the job.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
Okay, my gut tells me the show is finished, and
a big thank you. Be sure, yeah, because my gut's
telling me that the outlouders are like okay, I've got
to go now, like.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Shut up, We've got to work out what we think
about the ball rooms exactly.
Speaker 4 (42:09):
Thank you out louders for being here with us today
as always, added to our fabulous team for helping us
put it together. We're going to be back in your
ears tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
If you are looking for something else to listen to,
not bye. We did a very juicy ask Me Anything
episode and it was a little bit different because what
we did was we actually had a bunch of questions
about particular news stories and angles that had come up
that maybe we hadn't discussed on the show. For example,
the Marty sheer Gold Matilda's controversy from the other week.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Heep, you wanted to know what it was like on
red carpets, Yeah, big Awards shows.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
It was really fun. So we will pop a link
in the show notes.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
Now we can say bye, Maya bye, bye, bye, bye
see ya. Shout out to.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Any Muma Miya subscribers listening.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
If you love the.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Show and want to support us as well, subscribing to
Mom and Miya is the very best way to do so.
There is a link in the episode description
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