August 6, 2025 • 42 mins
Australia isn't having enough babies but why is it women who are the only ones being scolded about it? Jessie, Amelia and Holly discuss if a reintroduction of the Baby Bonus could reverse the declining birth rate or if it's all too little too late.
And some scurrilous new gossip in the Peltz-Beckham feud saga including yacht wars and a premature vow renewal — Amelia can hardly contain her excitement.
Plus, the new wellness retreat which involves five days in a *checks notes* pitch black cabin in the middle of nowhere. It's one of our host's worst nightmare for a multitude of unusual reasons while Eat, Pray, Love author Liz Gilbert tried it and offers a completely different opinion.
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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. Mamma Mia acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on Hello, Hello, and welcome to Mom and Mia.
Out loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Wednesday,
the Seat of August. My name is Holly Wayne Wright.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Jesse Stevens, and.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Amelia Last.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Just a quick note out louders, if you listen to
our lovely voices and sometimes you think you know what
I'd like to see. I'd like to see those women
have these fascinating conversations. I tune in for every.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I don't think anyone's ever asked to see our faces
back alas they are available.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
They have to see them anyway. We now have our
entire episodes up on YouTube, so the whole show from
start to finish, with few like inserts to show you
the things we're talking about. And if you find YouTube
a confusing place, as some of us do, there is
always a link in our show notes to where you
can go and watch that if you want to. Now,
don't worry, We're still in all your podcast apps and
(01:09):
all the usual places. But if you feel the need a.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Lot of people see our social clips and say, can
I watch the whole thing?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yes? Is that true? Or is that like when influencers
say a lot of people are asking a lot of.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
People are asking, and actually, here's my discot code.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
That is true.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I have seen I've seen the It's probably so they
can hate watch it, but it is.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It is there.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So follow the link in the show notes and you
will watch the whole show if you want to. What
you will see us talking about today.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Why don't women when I have babies anymore?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Plus Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz Beckham's vow renewal and
how their family drama now involves yachts in santra Pe.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yes, indeed it must be terrible, must be terrible to
have to play out your family dramas on magga yachts
and sandtrape. But anyway, are you ready to go into
the dark? Five Days in the Cave is the new
spiritual wellness trend?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Join us?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
But first, Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Walking backwards is good for your health and we should
all be doing it.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I've heard this before. Why why why?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
A report by BBC journalist. Did you hear me giggling
at my desk today because yes, little tot was about okay.
So the journalist named Melissa Hog and Boom has found
that walking backwards can help relieve back pain, arthritis, knee issues.
Some studies have said it improves memory, reaction time, and
problem solving. Doing so for just ten to fifteen minutes
a day can increase hamstring flexibility and strengthen back muscles,
(02:32):
which all sounds great. Why was Jesse laughing Because I
feel like the researchers aren't acknowledging that when you walk
backwards you run into people. And I kept imagining all
of it's going for like a fifteen minute walk on
our lunch break, because the walking backwards is good for
us around the city. And the report starts with Hog
and Boom saying, have you ever given much thought to
(02:53):
why we walk the way we do? And I'm like, yeah,
so we can see where we're going.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
We get from here to there, and I want to
see there and I don't want to bump into twenty
five people on my way back.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Exactly when we were hunters and we had to go
and get our food, is like we would have been
eaten by a lion or tripped on a rock and
hit our head before we got to the food. Like,
walking forward is really important now, miss really full on?
Do we see any other problems with walking backwards or
are you guys going to do?
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Is this kind of like when you close your eyes,
it's so much harder to balance on one leg. Maybe
it's that.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, I think that it activates different parts in the rain,
which is definitely good. And a lot of athletes do it,
like when they're warming up. You know how they run back, Yes, and.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
You see that a lot, but I'm just imagining you
see them on the track like running running players and
starting back. But I'm just imagining the main character Energy
evolved to be the only person in the park who's
walking backwards. When I go on my morning walk and
I do a loop of a park or I walk
along the beach, the person who's walking backwards that's massively.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
It is also going to be wearing the shoes that
have the toes on them.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
You know, I'm sorry, but walking backwards it's anti social.
You're going to run into people. It's just might be
great for your brain, but it's not how we were designed.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I have something else that the government wants you to
be worried about. Okay, I know you're delighted to hear
that Australia's birth rate has plummeted to its lowest level
in seventeen years. Back in two thousand and four, the
then Treasurer Peter Costello urged Australians to have more babies.
He famously said you need to have one for mum,
(04:37):
one for dad and one for the country. And now
new ABS stats put their birth rate really low. They
put it at one point five children per women. One
point five.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Oh, okay, despite our efforts in the last seventeen years,
we've tried to contribute and we've just not been doing enough.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
It needs to be two point one. That's what you
need to have. What's called replacement level to keep the
population going. By the way, that doesn't include immigration, but
that is what it's called the replacement level. It hasn't
been there since two thousand and eight. Now, I want
to congratulate Western Australia and Tasmania. They have been doing
their part so well done. Every other state not so much.
(05:16):
But don't worry because John Howard has entered the chat.
Remember John Howard, our Prime minister for many years. He's
got my dear, he is urging because there's a lot
of male politicians urging people in this story. He is
urging Treasurer Gen Charmers to reintroduce the baby bonus. This
was a scheme that Howard introduced back in two thousand
and four, and it gave parents an initial sum of
(05:38):
three thousand dollars per child, and then that rose to
five thousand over time, and by some accounts, the scheme
did work pretty well. By two thousand and eight, women
were having two babies per woman as opposed to the
current one and a half, which we can all agree
half a baby is not good. But a lot of
people are pretty skeptical about the idea of reintroducing it
(05:59):
these days. For instance, the National's leader David Little Proud
he is not urging a baby bonus. He says that
three thousand dollars would not be enough to cover the
cost of living. And it's true that search shows that
more than half of eighteen to thirty four year olds
say that they're delaying starting a family because of cost
of living. And if you delay having children, you likely
have fewer of them. So what I wanted to talk
(06:21):
about today is what will it take for women to
do their part and have children. These male politicians keep urging,
but is the baby bonus the way to do it?
Just to throw a stat at you about the insignificance
of this baby bonus and how much it costs to
have a child. A Choosy study from twenty twenty three
showed that the average cost of raising a child is
(06:43):
twelve eight hundred dollars a year. Now I did the
maths for you. That's two hundred and thirty thousand dollars
over eighteen years. It's nearly a quarter of a million,
which makes three thousand look kind of not not enough, Jesse,
Do Australian women need more help having children or raising children? Discuss?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, it's interesting, right because a lot of people then
come up with ideas and say, well, if you subsidize childcare,
if housing was more affordable, if parental leave was longer,
there are all of these policies that people sort of
agitate towards. But South Korea is the example that everyone
points to, which is I believe they have the lowest
birth rate of pretty much anywhere in the world.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Their birth rate is below one.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, so it's become and this is my theory is
that it's not just my theory. A lot of people
say this, how many children you have or if you
have them at all, is incredibly contagious. It depends on
what your community has sort of normalized. If no one's
having babies and you look around and go, I guess
we're not having babies.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Children themselves are also contagious. Incidentally, they often have a
lot of illnesses.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
They do, very many reasons. It's in the no column.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I saw something the other day, completely unverified, but I
should say it on a podcast. It said something like,
if you have two kids, then you are sick fifty
of the year. That was the suggestion. Yeah, and then
it just goes up and up. Anyway, in South Korea,
they've done all of the things. The housing market, they've
tried to make that more affordable. They have subsidized fertility
(08:13):
treatments like egg freezing and IVF. They have done the
financial incentives. They've tried to promote policies that improve work
life balance. They've done all of these, even like dating
things to try and get men and women to just
have the sex and have the babies. They've spent two
hundred and fifty billion dollars on this problem. There was
a tiny increase last year, nothing too significant, but a
(08:35):
lot of experts say when the birth rate decreases like this,
there is no getting it back up. And Sarah Wilson
has said this, She's written a lot about this recently,
and she says that when a population's replacement rate drops
below two, which is where Australia is right now, it
apparently never returns above it statistically.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
That's what it says.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So, Holly, do you think that there's anything like incentives
or do you think that we're just.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I want to step back and understand why it's important, right.
I know that might sound really basic, but I see
everywhere at the minute lots of panic about declining birth rates.
And there are corners of the world that do not
have declining birth rates. There are some parts of Africa
that don't, there are some parts of South Asia that don't.
But the western world does, even in the you know,
the Nordic countries where lots of wonderful social supports for parents.
(09:23):
So everywhere does. And it's very hard in my mind
to unpick that from basically women's lives changing so drastically
in a generation. The majority of women's lives. I mean
in terms of choice generally speaking, when the female population
is more educated, are working, have more options, have more choices,
(09:43):
and they have control of their fertility, they will choose
to have fewer children. And that is what we're seeing everywhere.
And the reasons for that can be mirroad and some
of them are very much about age. As you mentioned already,
is that if you've delayed the start of having children,
you're just going to have fewer children. Of course, you
are right, And so I'm a bit suspicious of the
pearl clutching because there are still a lot of people
(10:03):
on the planet. The resources of the planet still aren't
great at keeping up with that. And I know I'm
not an expert, but I'm just like, why do we
need to make people? And I know you're going to
say looking after the old people. That's what you're going
to say to me, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Partially?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Is that what you're going to say, No, I'm not that.
We're going to say. Are you going to say economic growth?
And I'm going to be like, well, think.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Of the taxos? Holy, I need to pull you up
on something. So it is true broadly speaking that as
countries get richer, the birth rate declines. But what I
discovered reading about this is there's a big caveat to
that trend, which is in those richer countries, the richer
women keep having babies and the poorer women stop having babies.
(10:47):
So we're seeing this in Australia right now. Children are
becoming almost a luxury good. Everything is so expensive that
if you can't afford eighteen thousand dollars a year and
two hundred and eighty thousand dollars over the course of
your lifetime, you're simply going to opt out of having children.
Of course, and obviously there are many reasons why women
don't have children or choose not to have children, And
(11:08):
so I think why argument one way to address what
you said, because I'm sympathetic to your idea that it
does feel pearl clutching and sort of scolding to say
women need to have more children. But part of it is,
don't we want to make sure that everyone who does
want to have a child, who, by the way, will
then contribute to taxes and look after all people, don't
we want to make it possible, yes, for women of
(11:29):
all socioeconomic stations to be able to make that choice.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
One hundred percent, of course, And I think, you know,
there are lots of interesting conversations out there about whether
or not IVF should be subsidized and all these different things.
Of course I entirely agree with that, but I just
I think every time I read about aging populations and
who's going to look after the old people, I think
there are other ways to solve those problems. Age care
(11:52):
in particular, is going to be such a massive issue
in Western countries over the next few years. Why don't
we invest in those industries. These are jobs that probably
aren't going away, healthcare jobs, they're saying are not going away.
So why don't we make those jobs higher status, better paid,
better trained. We invest in those facils, these and make
that a more desirable thing to time with you. And
why don't we invest in the population if that's such
(12:15):
a problem. We all know that immigration is a solution
to that too, But you've got to grow sustainably, decentralize
the population, put the infrastructure in place. It's also if
the women have babies.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
To invest in the age care and to invest in
the infrastructure you're talking about, you need taxes, yes, and
taxes come from people who are working, working, you're not
going to have the taxes.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
And for sure, but right now we like Australia has money.
It's about choices of where you put it.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Your sense that there's something a bit uncomfortable about this conversation,
I think is correct, and it's because there are some
very strange bedfellows who are telling us to have more babies.
The the pronatalist there's some really uncomfortable wording, and I
think that there is a sense that some of this
pronatalist stuff is kind of inherently a bit racist, because
(13:05):
you go, are you telling white people to have more babies?
And then at the same time, where what are.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
You talking about? So you've a multicultural society saying we
want to make it possible for women across socioeconomics, So
what statuses to have children?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
What the US wants is more Americans to have babies
at the same time that they're closing their doors and
going no migration.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Well, it's true that Trump has instituted a baby bonus.
It's a very poultry eighteen hundred dollars, which is by
the way, that's an Aussie dollars, it's one thousand dollars US.
And women have understandably said to him, this is not
enough money. But I think it's a bit of a
long voter, Jawn. Can you explain more about what you
mean by that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I think that there is a panic about what countries
are growing and what countries.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Are multi ethnic countries Jesse. Rich countries are almost by
definition multi ethnic because they open their doors to more
immigration over time.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yes, but I feel as though that's going like with
the US exams South Korea. Yeah, yeah, No, South Korea
Japan's got the same problem, is a different one. But
Japan even has quite a monoculture right in.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Terms of neither of them are having babies, and their
governments are worried about it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yes, and I agree with you that the panic that
people have is, yes, who's going to look after the
old people? Yes? Economics, what Sarah Wilson says is civilizational collapse.
She says it creates such chaos that, for example, in
South Korea, just things you wouldn't expect. In South Korea,
they can't find any bus drivers, like they can't, so
(14:27):
the bus routes change, and then who's doing cancer research?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Who?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Like, Yes, they're looking after the old people is a
big one. But there's also a lot of innovation, a
lot of new ideas comes from young people coming up,
and it becomes this top heavy. It changes the politics,
it changes everything, and I think that that really worries people.
And then I suppose the question is can you change
the birthrate? A lot of people say no, And if
(14:52):
you can't, then what are we going to do about it?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yes, look, I agree that the proto natalists. I kind
of side eye them a lot too. For a slightly
different reason. There is this sense that it's interesting that
we've heard from John Howard, we've heard from Peter Costella,
we've heard from Donald Trump. It does tend to be
conservative politicians who want to throw a one time at
women and say we've solved the problem, as opposed to,
as Holly suggests, investigator, maybe more long term things.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Maybe that's why I feel like it's racist, because the
Elon Musk thing is also about what genes are worth promoting,
and so I think that's made me uncomfortable is that
he's kind of like, I want to spawn more Elons.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I don't know if the racism thing totally holds up,
given that, as we talked about South Korea and Japan,
are really concerned about it too, But on the pro
need list, here's what they say in response. They say that, look,
we're not concerned with this holiday of trad wives. What
we're trying to address is the missing children. That's their phrase.
The missing children are first children rather than subsequent children.
(15:47):
In other words, the reason why we don't have enough
babies is because more women are saying I'm not going
to have children at all, because as a passion, I'm
not going to have a bigger family, but.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Also because they can. You know, one of I mean,
one of the many things that we have done over
you know, the course of like quite a short period
of time in fact, and we talk about this all
the time, is normalizing whatever choice women make, if it's
a choice. I mean, I entirely take on your point, Amelia,
that everybody who wants to have a child should have
that choice if they want to. But what we've also
(16:20):
done in the massive shift in the way that women's
lives are now is it's no longer the only option
available to you. You know, we talk about this all
the time, and plenty of my friends don't have children
and they still feel the societal judgment of that. But
it's shifting. It's beginning to shift. Now there are more
models for how women's lives can be when mother isn't
(16:41):
their central role. And then it seems to me, and
I know I'm like rankling at this a bit, but
it seems to me that now, just when that shift
is happening, they're kind of being pushed back upon and
being like, well, your advancement, if you want to call it,
that inverted commas is now going to be the reason
for civilizational collapse. Maybe it's a readjustment. One of the
(17:02):
reasons I think that maybe gen x's find this hard
to get their head around is we have very much
been swimming in a soup as we like to swim,
and soups were out aloud of over population panic for
a really long time, Right.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
That's what you were told. You were told those in population.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Too many babies, It's it's irresponsible to have more than
two children replace yourselves. And that's it. Like that is
the very much the cultural milieu that I grew up
in is that the planet can't handle it. We've got
way too many people. The oceans are being emptied, everything's
being mine and like it is more responsible to not
have children, and so it's whiplash to suddenly being told, well,
(17:36):
now you have to to the baby bonus point. I
got the baby bonus. I had my kids in baby
bonus years?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Is that why I had them?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Definitely, three thousand dollars was definitely enough. And what that
did do because there was all this like eye rolling
about people just buy a flat screen TVs with it,
da da da da, it meant that I got like
ten minutes of maternity leave instead of five minutes of
maternity leave, you know what I mean, Like I put
it on my salary so that I could have a
little bit more time off work or I've been between
(18:04):
Brent and I.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
We could.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It was useful, it was helpful. It did make my
life a little bit easier for the time. But as
you've very clearly pointed out, Amelia, this is not life
changing money, and not should it be. But this is
not the kind of money that's going to make you
go definitely going to do something that is going to
affect everything forever.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
I think you've hit on a real sort of problem
with talking about this is because it doesn't feel like
politically aligned in any way. For instance, part of the
reason why the birth rate has declined so much in
the US is because there are basically no longer teenage mothers,
and that was a huge problem in the US demographically
in the eighties and women having children older, and then
(18:42):
there were big social reforms that enabled younger women to have,
for instance, better access to contraception, better educational opportunities, and
then they basically stopped having children as teenagers. They stopped
having children when they were children themselves. Now you could
say that's a great thing, and it is, but on
the other side, it's part of why we're seeing this
demographic decline.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I also think on the baby bonus, I looked into
the stats about whether or not it worked, because the
jury is still out whether it worked, because there was
an uptick the next year. There definitely was, and a
lot of people suggested that that was because maybe if
you were going to have a baby anyway, you had
the baby earlier. There was an incentive. It created a
context in which there was positive social messaging around having
(19:27):
more babies, so it could kind of give it a
little boost.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But other demographers say that that was always going to
happen because the demographic at the time happened to be
that a lot of women of child bearing age were
coming into that. But people also say that we have
talked about this quite often. Is what it did do
is culturally spread a really positive message about children and
babies good. And to what I was just saying about
how we had kind of been internalizing this idea that
(19:54):
it was bad and also that a kind of welcoming
society to children.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The thing that I suppose worries me culturally about some
and this has been written about and researchers are looking
at it is a fear of dystopia. That means that
a lot of if young people are going, I don't
want to have children in this climate, right, And I
think that having kids is a vote for hope. It
is a way of going I believe that the future
is good. And that is incredibly depressing that you would have,
(20:23):
you know, and I completely also understandable that people might say,
I don't want to bring a child into this world.
That's also quite new. It's also interesting to me that
we only ever talk about women in this context, as
though men have no part or no say or no
perspective on no opinion on how many kids.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Well, they have a lot of opinions about it.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
They definitely do. But even within a relationship, it is
not like the woman is the only one calling the
shots about if you have kids, how many kids you have?
I know they carry the baby, but it is a
conversation that is focused entirely on incentivizing women and kind
of getting women in trouble and scolding them about the
birth rate.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
And also only as far as I can see, male
politicians introducing the baby bonus idea, Yeah, so true.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Does several days in dark silence sound lucky you? There
is a cave with your.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Name on it.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Could you be in a completely dark room with no sound,
no distractions, no books, definitely, no phone, no music, no
TV obviously, no no nothing for between three to five days.
Do you think you could do it?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
I wouldn't come out saying I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Do you think you could do it?
Speaker 4 (21:37):
So?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I once said something a little bit like this. I
had a head injury. A screen door fell on me
and I had to go into what is called cognitive
rest oh where you were not permitted to use your brain,
which means no phones for sure, because it's too much
brain to use your so much deep thinking about my
(21:59):
life about the world. I mean, nothing changed as a
result of it, but it was it was a period
of really deep thinking.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
For well, that is what is going on, because dark
treats is a new Well they're not new, they're actually ancient, right,
But dark retreats are now very hot in a certain set,
like literally not always sometimes they're cold. They're very trendy,
I guess popular.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Terrified, Yeah, terrified of the dark. I can't even sit
in the dark.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Tell you how they work, right, So I've been reading
about these lately because they're kind of hot with like
the tech broke crowd and the you know, the real
self healthy, longevity seeking male podcaster crowd. But then this
week it popped up in a newsletter that I get
from Liz Gilbert. I subscribed to her substack, and I've
been particularly Liz focused lately because I'm going to interview
her soon. And this week the one that she sent
(22:50):
out said I've just come out of five days in
absolute isolation on a dark retreat, and she put a
link to the place that she'd gone to, and so
I went and looked. And the way that it works
is so it's like a sort of this is in
America but they do exist in other places. There is
one in Australia. It's like a cabin in the woods
built into a sort of you know, a cave. Yeah,
(23:13):
but it's quite nice. It's got like a bed and
it's got a flushing toilet and it's got all the things.
And you go up there for say a week, and
the first day you're like learning about what's about to
happen to you. And then you're and you're being kind
of like settled in and they say wind down a bit,
and then they put you in the cabin and just
after sunset they turn off all the lights. So there's
(23:35):
like this is dark now. And as they say, you're
going into the dark now, you can choose whether you
want that to be for a day, three days, five days,
seven days. For the real hardcore, you get three meals
a day sort of delivered to you. Actually they only
get delivered once, so that they only interrupt you once.
But they put them under the door or whatever. They've
got a hatch or whatever, and otherwise you are just
(23:56):
left alone and they check on you once a day
just to make sure you're not spiraling. Yeah, but again
they don't interrupt your darkness. And this goes on for
as long as you want it to go on for
and then when you come out. And this is what
you'll see on social media about dark retreats. People often
film people taking off imasks to see light again for
the first time. Now, Liz is one. In her newsletter,
(24:19):
she put one of these videos in because you can't
make a lot of content when you're in a dark
room with no phone, and hers is a great for
audio because she doesn't really say anything, but a few
people do. So this is audio of a guy coming
out of the dark retreat and taking off his mask
and how he felt the first time it happened.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Oh my god, just moving on a little bit. Oh
my god. Oh that is way brighter than I thought
it'd be.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Oh my god, there's a lot of oh my god,
I bet that would be.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
It's so funny when you find something that you didn't
really realize was lost. Other things are like that, you know,
Am I doing that with love? I think I have love?
You know, before coming in here, I would have said
I definitely know love.
Speaker 6 (25:11):
When now I'm wondered if it's gotten packed on with
all these other things I've forgotten just what it's like
just to like, just beam, just beam love with no
expectation whatsoever.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
This reminds me of when I turned my phone grayscale
for three days in twenty nineteen, and then when I
turned it back onto full color again, you were like
that planing. That's the sound of what I did.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
You know how you said when you were in Colt
Force cognitive resue a lot of deep thinking. That guy's
just done a lot of deep thinking. I'm just going
to tell you what Liz Gilbert said about the experience,
and then well she'll unpack what we think this is
all about. So she wrote in her newsletter that when
she heard about it, she had like a full body yes,
like she was like, that's something I know I want
to do, so, she writes, So I signed up for
the experience, and I will admit there were times last week,
(25:59):
sitting in the inky, unmovable darkness and silence for hour
after hour, when I said to my body, whose dumb
idea was this? I mean, it's summer. I could be
at the beach, I could be floating in a pool
with my friends. I could be reading a book in
a hammock with a nice cold beverage. But no because
of my loud, mouthful body responsive. Yes, instead of doing
normal things. Last week I spent one hundred hours in
a cave with no light, alone with the terrorist of
(26:21):
my brain. But here's the thing. My body knew I
needed this. My body knew that something was going to
happen in that dark that I needed. A treasure would
be found in that difficult experience, and so it was.
What's our reaction is this?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Rich people? Camping?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Camping is fun?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
But how is this different?
Speaker 4 (26:43):
I mean, what are you then no sausages rather than
there's no organic okay, there's no like you know, did
she like was she allowed to take in things like,
for instance, alcohol or anything like that?
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Book's okay?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
No, because it's pitch black.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Even during the light, it's pitch black.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
This is the point event you go into the dark. No, no, no,
you go you can enjoy daylight. I don't know. You
go into the dark and then you are in dark
for as Liz Gilbert was one hundred hours. I find
it really interesting why people how these things, because you know,
to be clear, when you go to the site and
learn about this, they'll tell you that this is an
(27:22):
ancient practice that people have gone into retreat for years
and like, and they have lots of stats about the
dark and everything. But it's really interesting what sort of edgy,
extreme wellness spiritual things pop up at different times.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
And how they do seem to be getting more and
more extreme. So silent retreats have been a big deal
for a long time. That's been and of course, as
often happens is that's a practice that like Tibetan monks
have for a very long time practice silence, a lot
of religious people have, and the Dark Caves is a
Tibetan monk thing, so they described it, and it's an
(27:59):
advanced practice. It's not something you do in your first
year of being a monk. Like you've got to know
how to meditate and like get back in touch with yourself.
And they describe it as like a return to the womb.
It's almost like confronting death because it's just blackness, which
sounds horrific to me. But what I found interesting in
what Elizabeth Gilbert said is that she said, it turns
(28:22):
out when you take everything else away, love is the
only thing left in the room. And that's what that
guy said too that we just listened to. And I
never understood what they meant by love. It felt really vague.
But I was listening to this monk recently. I think
he was interviewed on Ezra Klein. His name is Mark Epstein,
and he was saying that when they talk about love,
especially at the end of a silent retreat, people will go,
(28:42):
I felt love. And you know how when you try
and meditate, you get the chatter and then you start,
as we all do. We judge our thoughts, and we
kind of are in conversation with our thoughts, and we say,
that's a stupid thought. Why am I stewing on this one?
Why does this memory keep coming back? Apparently if you
sit with those thoughts for long enough. He described it
as being like the mother who has unconditional love for toddler,
(29:04):
and the toddler is yelling and throwing things and running
it like they're are going crazy, and that mother just
stands there and observes, and their love is never it
never falters because that's unconditionally.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Although that's why she needs to go into a dark
retreat every down again exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And I was like, her love never falters, but like,
does she just stand there passively?
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Does she?
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Or does sometimes she start also throwing her arms around.
But I quite liked that idea that people say they
don't leave with a greater understanding of themselves, they leave
having abandoned the self and realizing there's nothing there.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Okay, I feel like there's an element here of these
rich people trying to outdo themselves with these wellness rituals.
Basically like, yeah, it's almost boasting at this point. So
apparently there's one Guatemalan retreat where you can also be
deprived of light and censory distractions for three thousand dollars
for four nights. So I'm sure that the Tibetan monks
(30:01):
were not charging each other three thousand dollars for four
nights of a silent retreat.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
They were going into actual caves.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
This is about outdoing each other. And basically, seeing as
Holly said, how extreme are these wellness rituals going to get?
Speaker 2 (30:14):
And I reckon it is about efficient wellness. So you
hear about these people who have I guess, especially in
the US, where even your annual leave is really short. Right,
Let's say you're a high flyer, you've got a really
intense job, You're on twenty four seven when you have
a break. It isn't enough to lay on a beach.
You need to fully restore as efficiently as possible in
(30:35):
three nights and four days, And like, what do you
need to do to do that? Maybe lay in a
dark hat.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
It's to bring up another phone. Analogy like turning your
phone to airplane mode to get it to charge more quickly.
This is basically turning yourself to airplane mode.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yes, but I agree as well that it's about trends
because I was thinking flow tanks were everywhere five minutes ago,
and I just thought, where did they go? Did they
die with COVID? Like, because that I suppose is an
hour long version of this where you laid in the
dark and kind of meditated or whatever. But it does
feel like these pop up and then disappear, and it
(31:09):
does feel a bit like appropriating the Tibetan monks who
have been doing it better than us for a long time.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It's interesting because the other bit, the cynical bit of me,
is like, what an excellent business idea because it's like
a hotel, but you don't have to do anything, Like
some of these ones are about nine hundred dollars a night,
so you go for however long that you go for
and yes you have to provide food, but that's all.
The guests are very quiet. They're all in their cabins.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
No parties, no bodies.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
No drama, no activities needed, no snorkeling trips. I don't know.
Like it's funny, there's a part of me that's very
attracted to this stuff. Like I like to think maybe
when I'm not working anymore, and clearly I've sold a
booked to Hollywood or something and I'm rolling in it,
then like I would go and do all this stuff
because I'm fascinated by it. But I actually don't think
that my mind could do it.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Like I don't want to spend time with her. I'm like,
I get enough of her and I don't want to
spend a holiday in my own head, I think she's
not good company.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Also worry about insects. Oh so true.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
You wouldn't be able to see them creeping up on
you after the break some schrorelous gossip playing out on
Europe's Mega Yachts.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Every Tuesday and Thursday, we drop new segments of Mummy
Out Loud just for MUMMYA subscribers follow the link in
the show notes to get your daily doseph out loud
and a big thank you to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I can't vouch for the veracity of this information and
that's why it's schirrelous. But word on the Celebrity Street,
I want to where Celebrity Street is alabasis? Perhaps is
that Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz Beckham just
renewed their vows, possibly in the Hamptons in New York City.
And know she didn't wear a dress designed by her
(33:00):
mother in law this time, and no, in fact, the
other Beckhams were not invited because, as we know, the
family feud is still going.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I kept reading that it was very private, very planner
for this one soon.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Not yet, but who knows, there's time. In telling wording
from Celebrity Diary People magazine, the couple apparently wanted to
do this to create new memories, maybe ones that didn't.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Involve Victoria Beckham specific parents.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Meanwhile, and Amelia, I know you've got the goods on this.
Although the vowy newal is sort of scoreless gossip and
speculation at this point, Instagram does not lie, and there
has been quite the drama playing out across two Beckham
Instagram accounts to do with a yacht, So Amelia, bring
us some yacht gossip.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Thanks Holly. Yeah. As Yocht correspondent, I'm happy to send
this dispatch direct from Monaco. Actually can so. I feel
so sorry for David and Victoria beck Let me tell
you what happened. So David, you know recently knighted like
living the high life, now reached the pinnacle of their careers.
Everyone loves them after the documentary, I think they were
(34:07):
feeling really good about life, David and Victoria. So in
twenty twenty two they purchased their own yacht. That is
a sign you've made it, isn't it. That is a
sign you've made it. As they say, if you want
to light money on fire by a yacht. It is
one hundred and thirty feet long, that's forty meters. It
costs thirty two million Australian dollars and it's called seven,
which is in reference to David Beckham's football number. I
(34:29):
am told it also has a spa bath as well,
which his dice. Because I bet Victoria loves a spa
amazing lovely. It looks really nice. I wouldn't say no
if they invited me on it. However, at the very
same time, the Peltzers decided to take their own yacht
for a spin that they own. This is Nichola's father,
who is a millionaire. He owns a yacht. It's one
(34:51):
hundred and seventy five million Aussie dollars. It has it's
just bigger. It has an elevator, it has a heighty
solar on it has underwater lights, and it can house
twelve guests in nine cabins. So it's just a sort
of better yacht, like clearly a better yacht. I want
you to picture how ridiculous the bear Comes yacht looks
(35:11):
in comparison to the Peltzer's yacht.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
There's always someone richer than you that's like.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
A little toy Fisher price yacht. And they're clear speedboats. Yeah,
they're sailing around at the same time, and David and
Victoria are like beaming with pride in the photos they
posted on Instagram from this yacht, because again it's kind
of a big deal. And then you've just got Nicola
and Brooklyn posting from the Mega.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yacht, because what you do when you're in that corner
of the world I was there last year. Is that
you go imagine being on that boat and you say
it from the port because you're personally not on a
boat and you can't even afford my ice cream, but
you're looking around going imagine being on that boat. That's
the best. That's David and Victoria sitting there being like, wow,
imagine being on that one, and Brookies like, fuck your
(35:58):
mom and dad?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Why would you.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Fancy people like yacht so much? Like if I had
all the money in the world, I don't think that's
what I'd do with it anyway. That's on the sidebar.
But what I want to know is this, Right, there
are lots of places to take your fancy yachts in
Europe at this time of year. You can't move for them,
the billionaires on their bloody yachts.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Isn't it a bit weird that they all end up
in Santrapez exactly the same time? And is that because
do you think that that David and Victoria were like
hoping that they could trail the big yacht with the
little yacht and that maybe they'd bump in, maybe they
could be a reuni.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I assumed it was the exact opposite. Look, everything we
know about the Peltzers, please don't sue me. Peltzer's is
that they sue everyone, including the wedding planner for Nichola's
wedding Pelts himself seems kind of unpleasant. The Beckham's look,
I've watched the Netflix documentary. They look lovely. I'm sort
of team Beckham here. I think they plan this. I
bet they booked this like twelve months ago. They've been
(36:55):
counting down the days, and I just have to believe
that Brooklyn and Nicola were the ones who showed up
to sort of one up them.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Don't you think I have a holiday hat for free?
This is my holiday hat, Sherryot like it would have
been so much more cheap.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
A twelve cabins on the they're not talking to it.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
It's like, this is what happens when families fall apart,
is that we end up paying frowing.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
It's very sad. I have one other piece of evidence
that Nicola and Brooklyn engineered it this way. They had
lunch while they were sailing around the south of France
in cann with Elton, John Nichola and Brooklyn and Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I thought that David and Elton were mates.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Elton has been a friend of the Beckhams for years because.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
They would talk about the knighthood. They have those things
in common.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
What is clear is that Nichola and Brooklyn got Elton
in the family breakup, and they went and performed the
Bowery knew they ordered lobsol and Guinie. It did cost
three hundred and forty dollars each. Elton paid, though, which
is nice. Elton paid, and then Nichola posted on Instagram
a picture of herself naked in a bathtub on her
(38:02):
family's yacht to thank Elton for the lunch. Now, I
don't think Elton's inclined.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I did see that picture. Look, I do understand why
fancy people like lobster lingue.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Me. I would like that, But do they do because
I'm no good as that. I definitely would.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
A little person would do that for you.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
She doesn't need people paying for a linguine. I'm puffer
fishing and I need to get this off my Yes,
I love it when you're popery.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
So it is about the appification, which is a fancy
word for saying too many apps of everything. There was
a great Substack article by Jill Vlopovich about this, and.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
I nodded at every word.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
How many times have you bought a product only to
learn that in order to use it you have to
download an app. How many times have you sat down
to order food suddenly there's a QR code. You go,
that's fine, because I downloaded an app last time. No, no, no,
you need a new app to get your sandwich. You
want to book an exercise class, You want to use
your baby monitor, You want to transfer money, join a
loyalty program, book a doctor's appointment. Your supermarket has an app,
(39:06):
Your phone service has an app. Your health insurance goddamn it,
we have an app. It's great app. But that's not
the point. The point is I audibly moan every single
time I am told I must download an app. It
is annoying. I have too many. Half of them are
now redundant. And once I get.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
And they all have a log in, of course, they
all have a log in.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
And then I get on that app and you want
my email address, I have to make up a new
password and remember those Why do you need my email
address when I just want to buy a glass of wine? Like,
how is that any of your business? We have reached
peak app and I am writing. Are you guys equally
as irritated?
Speaker 3 (39:42):
It's happy hour, isn't it? So? Sorry? No? I really
relate to this, and the problem with apps is that
you increasingly need them when you want to carve time
away from your phone, and yet you need the app
to carve time away from your phone. Let me give
you an example. My child, I gave him a toy dinosaur.
(40:02):
It literally had an app where you could enhance play
on the app. It's like, no, I'm trying to get
him away from to the toy dinosaur. Another example, wanted
to whiten my teeth. Drink too much coffee? Yeah, maybe
a bit too much? Red Wine had to download an
appy and I was like, well, is there gonna tell
me interesting things about my teeth? No? No, it told
(40:24):
me nothing interesting about my teeth. It merely enabled me
to use the teeth whitening device.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I've got apps to get into apps. That's really drives
me crazy when you have to like download an app
to give you the security thing to get into the
other app. I counted the apps on my phone. I've
got one hundred and eighteen. How many do you think
you've got? Because so I've got one hundred and eighteen
apps on my phone, and I think they're like cookery
books used to be. You know how people always say
that your average person has a few cookery books but
don't use any of them. Yeah, Or they say, you know,
(40:53):
if you're a proper cook, you've got lots of news too,
apps like that, right, I've got one hundred and seventeen
apps living on my phone, all mining my data, spying
on me wherever I go, telling each other what I'm
up to, having a little gossip, and I probably used
three of them.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I'm the same American. I have about that many apps.
The average Australian I think has eighty to ninety.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I'm overperforming, top of theboard.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Overperforming.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I think that's because my mum has two because she
doesn't know how to download them from the because she
has an Android. I do not know how to get
it out how that works. There are some hilarious apps.
There is one called is It Dark Outside? Guess what
it does?
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Mrs Gilbert needs that one.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
If you're in the case.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
And my dad I don't know what it's called, but
he downloaded an app not so long ago that applauds
him every time he makes a joke, what yeah, tell
Brent about it? So he just goes on and it
applauds and we're just like, who told that about it?
Speaker 3 (41:45):
There is an Australian Museum app shout Out which you
should download around Christmas time, which will tell you what
species of Christmas beetle you were seeing in your part
of Australia. See that's actually kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
I do. I have some of those ones that you
can point at a plant and it tells you what
plant it is. That's kind of helpful, but then sometimes
you need another app to tell you what to do
about the plant. Like it's just it's a lot, It's
a lot. I'm with you, excellent puff.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
We have reached peak app. I just think let's just
all hold hands and go. We're not downloading another one.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
We shan't ow loud as that is all we have
time for on this Wednesday. Thank you all for being
with us here this week and to our fabulous team
who help us put this show together. We're going to
be back in your ears tomorrow of course.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
And if you are looking for something else to listen to.
On yesterday's episode, we unpacked the logs which were on
Sunday night. They went till four am, so you may
have missed some of it. Well, don't worry myself, emmadam you.
Hollyween Wright sat down, talked about Sam Pang's hilarious monologue.
We had to talk about Magda Zabanski. That is all there, Hamish.
(42:47):
There is a link in our show notes. As always, bye.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Shout out to any Mamma Mia subscribers listening. If you
love the show and you want to support us, subscribing
to MoMA Mia is the very best way to do it.
There's a link in the episode description.
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on Hello, Hello, and welcome to Mom and Mia.
Out loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Wednesday,
the Seat of August. My name is Holly Wayne Wright.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Jesse Stevens, and.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Amelia Last.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Just a quick note out louders, if you listen to
our lovely voices and sometimes you think you know what
I'd like to see. I'd like to see those women
have these fascinating conversations. I tune in for every.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I don't think anyone's ever asked to see our faces
back alas they are available.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
They have to see them anyway. We now have our
entire episodes up on YouTube, so the whole show from
start to finish, with few like inserts to show you
the things we're talking about. And if you find YouTube
a confusing place, as some of us do, there is
always a link in our show notes to where you
can go and watch that if you want to. Now,
don't worry, We're still in all your podcast apps and
(01:09):
all the usual places. But if you feel the need a.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Lot of people see our social clips and say, can
I watch the whole thing?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yes? Is that true? Or is that like when influencers
say a lot of people are asking a lot of.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
People are asking, and actually, here's my discot code.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
That is true.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I have seen I've seen the It's probably so they
can hate watch it, but it is.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It is there.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So follow the link in the show notes and you
will watch the whole show if you want to. What
you will see us talking about today.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Why don't women when I have babies anymore?
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Plus Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz Beckham's vow renewal and
how their family drama now involves yachts in santra Pe.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yes, indeed it must be terrible, must be terrible to
have to play out your family dramas on magga yachts
and sandtrape. But anyway, are you ready to go into
the dark? Five Days in the Cave is the new
spiritual wellness trend?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Join us?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
But first, Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Walking backwards is good for your health and we should
all be doing it.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I've heard this before. Why why why?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
A report by BBC journalist. Did you hear me giggling
at my desk today because yes, little tot was about okay.
So the journalist named Melissa Hog and Boom has found
that walking backwards can help relieve back pain, arthritis, knee issues.
Some studies have said it improves memory, reaction time, and
problem solving. Doing so for just ten to fifteen minutes
a day can increase hamstring flexibility and strengthen back muscles,
(02:32):
which all sounds great. Why was Jesse laughing Because I
feel like the researchers aren't acknowledging that when you walk
backwards you run into people. And I kept imagining all
of it's going for like a fifteen minute walk on
our lunch break, because the walking backwards is good for
us around the city. And the report starts with Hog
and Boom saying, have you ever given much thought to
(02:53):
why we walk the way we do? And I'm like, yeah,
so we can see where we're going.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
We get from here to there, and I want to
see there and I don't want to bump into twenty
five people on my way back.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Exactly when we were hunters and we had to go
and get our food, is like we would have been
eaten by a lion or tripped on a rock and
hit our head before we got to the food. Like,
walking forward is really important now, miss really full on?
Do we see any other problems with walking backwards or
are you guys going to do?
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Is this kind of like when you close your eyes,
it's so much harder to balance on one leg. Maybe
it's that.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, I think that it activates different parts in the rain,
which is definitely good. And a lot of athletes do it,
like when they're warming up. You know how they run back, Yes, and.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
You see that a lot, but I'm just imagining you
see them on the track like running running players and
starting back. But I'm just imagining the main character Energy
evolved to be the only person in the park who's
walking backwards. When I go on my morning walk and
I do a loop of a park or I walk
along the beach, the person who's walking backwards that's massively.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
It is also going to be wearing the shoes that
have the toes on them.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
You know, I'm sorry, but walking backwards it's anti social.
You're going to run into people. It's just might be
great for your brain, but it's not how we were designed.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I have something else that the government wants you to
be worried about. Okay, I know you're delighted to hear
that Australia's birth rate has plummeted to its lowest level
in seventeen years. Back in two thousand and four, the
then Treasurer Peter Costello urged Australians to have more babies.
He famously said you need to have one for mum,
(04:37):
one for dad and one for the country. And now
new ABS stats put their birth rate really low. They
put it at one point five children per women. One
point five.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Oh, okay, despite our efforts in the last seventeen years,
we've tried to contribute and we've just not been doing enough.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
It needs to be two point one. That's what you
need to have. What's called replacement level to keep the
population going. By the way, that doesn't include immigration, but
that is what it's called the replacement level. It hasn't
been there since two thousand and eight. Now, I want
to congratulate Western Australia and Tasmania. They have been doing
their part so well done. Every other state not so much.
(05:16):
But don't worry because John Howard has entered the chat.
Remember John Howard, our Prime minister for many years. He's
got my dear, he is urging because there's a lot
of male politicians urging people in this story. He is
urging Treasurer Gen Charmers to reintroduce the baby bonus. This
was a scheme that Howard introduced back in two thousand
and four, and it gave parents an initial sum of
(05:38):
three thousand dollars per child, and then that rose to
five thousand over time, and by some accounts, the scheme
did work pretty well. By two thousand and eight, women
were having two babies per woman as opposed to the
current one and a half, which we can all agree
half a baby is not good. But a lot of
people are pretty skeptical about the idea of reintroducing it
(05:59):
these days. For instance, the National's leader David Little Proud
he is not urging a baby bonus. He says that
three thousand dollars would not be enough to cover the
cost of living. And it's true that search shows that
more than half of eighteen to thirty four year olds
say that they're delaying starting a family because of cost
of living. And if you delay having children, you likely
have fewer of them. So what I wanted to talk
(06:21):
about today is what will it take for women to
do their part and have children. These male politicians keep urging,
but is the baby bonus the way to do it?
Just to throw a stat at you about the insignificance
of this baby bonus and how much it costs to
have a child. A Choosy study from twenty twenty three
showed that the average cost of raising a child is
(06:43):
twelve eight hundred dollars a year. Now I did the
maths for you. That's two hundred and thirty thousand dollars
over eighteen years. It's nearly a quarter of a million,
which makes three thousand look kind of not not enough, Jesse,
Do Australian women need more help having children or raising children? Discuss?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, it's interesting, right because a lot of people then
come up with ideas and say, well, if you subsidize childcare,
if housing was more affordable, if parental leave was longer,
there are all of these policies that people sort of
agitate towards. But South Korea is the example that everyone
points to, which is I believe they have the lowest
birth rate of pretty much anywhere in the world.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Their birth rate is below one.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, so it's become and this is my theory is
that it's not just my theory. A lot of people
say this, how many children you have or if you
have them at all, is incredibly contagious. It depends on
what your community has sort of normalized. If no one's
having babies and you look around and go, I guess
we're not having babies.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Children themselves are also contagious. Incidentally, they often have a
lot of illnesses.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
They do, very many reasons. It's in the no column.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I saw something the other day, completely unverified, but I
should say it on a podcast. It said something like,
if you have two kids, then you are sick fifty
of the year. That was the suggestion. Yeah, and then
it just goes up and up. Anyway, in South Korea,
they've done all of the things. The housing market, they've
tried to make that more affordable. They have subsidized fertility
(08:13):
treatments like egg freezing and IVF. They have done the
financial incentives. They've tried to promote policies that improve work
life balance. They've done all of these, even like dating
things to try and get men and women to just
have the sex and have the babies. They've spent two
hundred and fifty billion dollars on this problem. There was
a tiny increase last year, nothing too significant, but a
(08:35):
lot of experts say when the birth rate decreases like this,
there is no getting it back up. And Sarah Wilson
has said this, She's written a lot about this recently,
and she says that when a population's replacement rate drops
below two, which is where Australia is right now, it
apparently never returns above it statistically.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
That's what it says.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
So, Holly, do you think that there's anything like incentives
or do you think that we're just.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I want to step back and understand why it's important, right.
I know that might sound really basic, but I see
everywhere at the minute lots of panic about declining birth rates.
And there are corners of the world that do not
have declining birth rates. There are some parts of Africa
that don't, there are some parts of South Asia that don't.
But the western world does, even in the you know,
the Nordic countries where lots of wonderful social supports for parents.
(09:23):
So everywhere does. And it's very hard in my mind
to unpick that from basically women's lives changing so drastically
in a generation. The majority of women's lives. I mean
in terms of choice generally speaking, when the female population
is more educated, are working, have more options, have more choices,
(09:43):
and they have control of their fertility, they will choose
to have fewer children. And that is what we're seeing everywhere.
And the reasons for that can be mirroad and some
of them are very much about age. As you mentioned already,
is that if you've delayed the start of having children,
you're just going to have fewer children. Of course, you
are right, And so I'm a bit suspicious of the
pearl clutching because there are still a lot of people
(10:03):
on the planet. The resources of the planet still aren't
great at keeping up with that. And I know I'm
not an expert, but I'm just like, why do we
need to make people? And I know you're going to
say looking after the old people. That's what you're going
to say to me, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Partially?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Is that what you're going to say, No, I'm not that.
We're going to say. Are you going to say economic growth?
And I'm going to be like, well, think.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Of the taxos? Holy, I need to pull you up
on something. So it is true broadly speaking that as
countries get richer, the birth rate declines. But what I
discovered reading about this is there's a big caveat to
that trend, which is in those richer countries, the richer
women keep having babies and the poorer women stop having babies.
(10:47):
So we're seeing this in Australia right now. Children are
becoming almost a luxury good. Everything is so expensive that
if you can't afford eighteen thousand dollars a year and
two hundred and eighty thousand dollars over the course of
your lifetime, you're simply going to opt out of having children.
Of course, and obviously there are many reasons why women
don't have children or choose not to have children, And
(11:08):
so I think why argument one way to address what
you said, because I'm sympathetic to your idea that it
does feel pearl clutching and sort of scolding to say
women need to have more children. But part of it is,
don't we want to make sure that everyone who does
want to have a child, who, by the way, will
then contribute to taxes and look after all people, don't
we want to make it possible, yes, for women of
(11:29):
all socioeconomic stations to be able to make that choice.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
One hundred percent, of course, And I think, you know,
there are lots of interesting conversations out there about whether
or not IVF should be subsidized and all these different things.
Of course I entirely agree with that, but I just
I think every time I read about aging populations and
who's going to look after the old people, I think
there are other ways to solve those problems. Age care
(11:52):
in particular, is going to be such a massive issue
in Western countries over the next few years. Why don't
we invest in those industries. These are jobs that probably
aren't going away, healthcare jobs, they're saying are not going away.
So why don't we make those jobs higher status, better paid,
better trained. We invest in those facils, these and make
that a more desirable thing to time with you. And
why don't we invest in the population if that's such
(12:15):
a problem. We all know that immigration is a solution
to that too, But you've got to grow sustainably, decentralize
the population, put the infrastructure in place. It's also if
the women have babies.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
To invest in the age care and to invest in
the infrastructure you're talking about, you need taxes, yes, and
taxes come from people who are working, working, you're not
going to have the taxes.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
And for sure, but right now we like Australia has money.
It's about choices of where you put it.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Your sense that there's something a bit uncomfortable about this conversation,
I think is correct, and it's because there are some
very strange bedfellows who are telling us to have more babies.
The the pronatalist there's some really uncomfortable wording, and I
think that there is a sense that some of this
pronatalist stuff is kind of inherently a bit racist, because
(13:05):
you go, are you telling white people to have more babies?
And then at the same time, where what are.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
You talking about? So you've a multicultural society saying we
want to make it possible for women across socioeconomics, So
what statuses to have children?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
What the US wants is more Americans to have babies
at the same time that they're closing their doors and
going no migration.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Well, it's true that Trump has instituted a baby bonus.
It's a very poultry eighteen hundred dollars, which is by
the way, that's an Aussie dollars, it's one thousand dollars US.
And women have understandably said to him, this is not
enough money. But I think it's a bit of a
long voter, Jawn. Can you explain more about what you
mean by that.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I think that there is a panic about what countries
are growing and what countries.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Are multi ethnic countries Jesse. Rich countries are almost by
definition multi ethnic because they open their doors to more
immigration over time.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yes, but I feel as though that's going like with
the US exams South Korea. Yeah, yeah, No, South Korea
Japan's got the same problem, is a different one. But
Japan even has quite a monoculture right in.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
Terms of neither of them are having babies, and their
governments are worried about it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yes, and I agree with you that the panic that
people have is, yes, who's going to look after the
old people? Yes? Economics, what Sarah Wilson says is civilizational collapse.
She says it creates such chaos that, for example, in
South Korea, just things you wouldn't expect. In South Korea,
they can't find any bus drivers, like they can't, so
(14:27):
the bus routes change, and then who's doing cancer research?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Who?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Like, Yes, they're looking after the old people is a
big one. But there's also a lot of innovation, a
lot of new ideas comes from young people coming up,
and it becomes this top heavy. It changes the politics,
it changes everything, and I think that that really worries people.
And then I suppose the question is can you change
the birthrate? A lot of people say no, And if
(14:52):
you can't, then what are we going to do about it?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yes, look, I agree that the proto natalists. I kind
of side eye them a lot too. For a slightly
different reason. There is this sense that it's interesting that
we've heard from John Howard, we've heard from Peter Costella,
we've heard from Donald Trump. It does tend to be
conservative politicians who want to throw a one time at
women and say we've solved the problem, as opposed to,
as Holly suggests, investigator, maybe more long term things.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Maybe that's why I feel like it's racist, because the
Elon Musk thing is also about what genes are worth promoting,
and so I think that's made me uncomfortable is that
he's kind of like, I want to spawn more Elons.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I don't know if the racism thing totally holds up,
given that, as we talked about South Korea and Japan,
are really concerned about it too, But on the pro
need list, here's what they say in response. They say that, look,
we're not concerned with this holiday of trad wives. What
we're trying to address is the missing children. That's their phrase.
The missing children are first children rather than subsequent children.
(15:47):
In other words, the reason why we don't have enough
babies is because more women are saying I'm not going
to have children at all, because as a passion, I'm
not going to have a bigger family, but.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Also because they can. You know, one of I mean,
one of the many things that we have done over
you know, the course of like quite a short period
of time in fact, and we talk about this all
the time, is normalizing whatever choice women make, if it's
a choice. I mean, I entirely take on your point, Amelia,
that everybody who wants to have a child should have
that choice if they want to. But what we've also
(16:20):
done in the massive shift in the way that women's
lives are now is it's no longer the only option
available to you. You know, we talk about this all
the time, and plenty of my friends don't have children
and they still feel the societal judgment of that. But
it's shifting. It's beginning to shift. Now there are more
models for how women's lives can be when mother isn't
(16:41):
their central role. And then it seems to me, and
I know I'm like rankling at this a bit, but
it seems to me that now, just when that shift
is happening, they're kind of being pushed back upon and
being like, well, your advancement, if you want to call it,
that inverted commas is now going to be the reason
for civilizational collapse. Maybe it's a readjustment. One of the
(17:02):
reasons I think that maybe gen x's find this hard
to get their head around is we have very much
been swimming in a soup as we like to swim,
and soups were out aloud of over population panic for
a really long time, Right.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
That's what you were told. You were told those in population.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Too many babies, It's it's irresponsible to have more than
two children replace yourselves. And that's it. Like that is
the very much the cultural milieu that I grew up
in is that the planet can't handle it. We've got
way too many people. The oceans are being emptied, everything's
being mine and like it is more responsible to not
have children, and so it's whiplash to suddenly being told, well,
(17:36):
now you have to to the baby bonus point. I
got the baby bonus. I had my kids in baby
bonus years?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Is that why I had them?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Definitely, three thousand dollars was definitely enough. And what that
did do because there was all this like eye rolling
about people just buy a flat screen TVs with it,
da da da da, it meant that I got like
ten minutes of maternity leave instead of five minutes of
maternity leave, you know what I mean, Like I put
it on my salary so that I could have a
little bit more time off work or I've been between
(18:04):
Brent and I.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
We could.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It was useful, it was helpful. It did make my
life a little bit easier for the time. But as
you've very clearly pointed out, Amelia, this is not life
changing money, and not should it be. But this is
not the kind of money that's going to make you
go definitely going to do something that is going to
affect everything forever.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
I think you've hit on a real sort of problem
with talking about this is because it doesn't feel like
politically aligned in any way. For instance, part of the
reason why the birth rate has declined so much in
the US is because there are basically no longer teenage mothers,
and that was a huge problem in the US demographically
in the eighties and women having children older, and then
(18:42):
there were big social reforms that enabled younger women to have,
for instance, better access to contraception, better educational opportunities, and
then they basically stopped having children as teenagers. They stopped
having children when they were children themselves. Now you could
say that's a great thing, and it is, but on
the other side, it's part of why we're seeing this
demographic decline.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I also think on the baby bonus, I looked into
the stats about whether or not it worked, because the
jury is still out whether it worked, because there was
an uptick the next year. There definitely was, and a
lot of people suggested that that was because maybe if
you were going to have a baby anyway, you had
the baby earlier. There was an incentive. It created a
context in which there was positive social messaging around having
(19:27):
more babies, so it could kind of give it a
little boost.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But other demographers say that that was always going to
happen because the demographic at the time happened to be
that a lot of women of child bearing age were
coming into that. But people also say that we have
talked about this quite often. Is what it did do
is culturally spread a really positive message about children and
babies good. And to what I was just saying about
how we had kind of been internalizing this idea that
(19:54):
it was bad and also that a kind of welcoming
society to children.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The thing that I suppose worries me culturally about some
and this has been written about and researchers are looking
at it is a fear of dystopia. That means that
a lot of if young people are going, I don't
want to have children in this climate, right, And I
think that having kids is a vote for hope. It
is a way of going I believe that the future
is good. And that is incredibly depressing that you would have,
(20:23):
you know, and I completely also understandable that people might say,
I don't want to bring a child into this world.
That's also quite new. It's also interesting to me that
we only ever talk about women in this context, as
though men have no part or no say or no
perspective on no opinion on how many kids.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Well, they have a lot of opinions about it.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
They definitely do. But even within a relationship, it is
not like the woman is the only one calling the
shots about if you have kids, how many kids you have?
I know they carry the baby, but it is a
conversation that is focused entirely on incentivizing women and kind
of getting women in trouble and scolding them about the
birth rate.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
And also only as far as I can see, male
politicians introducing the baby bonus idea, Yeah, so true.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Does several days in dark silence sound lucky you? There
is a cave with your.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Name on it.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Could you be in a completely dark room with no sound,
no distractions, no books, definitely, no phone, no music, no
TV obviously, no no nothing for between three to five days.
Do you think you could do it?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
I wouldn't come out saying I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Do you think you could do it?
Speaker 4 (21:37):
So?
Speaker 3 (21:38):
I once said something a little bit like this. I
had a head injury. A screen door fell on me
and I had to go into what is called cognitive
rest oh where you were not permitted to use your brain,
which means no phones for sure, because it's too much
brain to use your so much deep thinking about my
(21:59):
life about the world. I mean, nothing changed as a
result of it, but it was it was a period
of really deep thinking.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
For well, that is what is going on, because dark
treats is a new Well they're not new, they're actually ancient, right,
But dark retreats are now very hot in a certain set,
like literally not always sometimes they're cold. They're very trendy,
I guess popular.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Terrified, Yeah, terrified of the dark. I can't even sit
in the dark.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Tell you how they work, right, So I've been reading
about these lately because they're kind of hot with like
the tech broke crowd and the you know, the real
self healthy, longevity seeking male podcaster crowd. But then this
week it popped up in a newsletter that I get
from Liz Gilbert. I subscribed to her substack, and I've
been particularly Liz focused lately because I'm going to interview
her soon. And this week the one that she sent
(22:50):
out said I've just come out of five days in
absolute isolation on a dark retreat, and she put a
link to the place that she'd gone to, and so
I went and looked. And the way that it works
is so it's like a sort of this is in
America but they do exist in other places. There is
one in Australia. It's like a cabin in the woods
built into a sort of you know, a cave. Yeah,
(23:13):
but it's quite nice. It's got like a bed and
it's got a flushing toilet and it's got all the things.
And you go up there for say a week, and
the first day you're like learning about what's about to
happen to you. And then you're and you're being kind
of like settled in and they say wind down a bit,
and then they put you in the cabin and just
after sunset they turn off all the lights. So there's
(23:35):
like this is dark now. And as they say, you're
going into the dark now, you can choose whether you
want that to be for a day, three days, five days,
seven days. For the real hardcore, you get three meals
a day sort of delivered to you. Actually they only
get delivered once, so that they only interrupt you once.
But they put them under the door or whatever. They've
got a hatch or whatever, and otherwise you are just
(23:56):
left alone and they check on you once a day
just to make sure you're not spiraling. Yeah, but again
they don't interrupt your darkness. And this goes on for
as long as you want it to go on for
and then when you come out. And this is what
you'll see on social media about dark retreats. People often
film people taking off imasks to see light again for
the first time. Now, Liz is one. In her newsletter,
(24:19):
she put one of these videos in because you can't
make a lot of content when you're in a dark
room with no phone, and hers is a great for
audio because she doesn't really say anything, but a few
people do. So this is audio of a guy coming
out of the dark retreat and taking off his mask
and how he felt the first time it happened.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Oh my god, just moving on a little bit. Oh
my god. Oh that is way brighter than I thought
it'd be.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Oh my god, there's a lot of oh my god,
I bet that would be.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
It's so funny when you find something that you didn't
really realize was lost. Other things are like that, you know,
Am I doing that with love? I think I have love?
You know, before coming in here, I would have said
I definitely know love.
Speaker 6 (25:11):
When now I'm wondered if it's gotten packed on with
all these other things I've forgotten just what it's like
just to like, just beam, just beam love with no
expectation whatsoever.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
This reminds me of when I turned my phone grayscale
for three days in twenty nineteen, and then when I
turned it back onto full color again, you were like
that planing. That's the sound of what I did.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
You know how you said when you were in Colt
Force cognitive resue a lot of deep thinking. That guy's
just done a lot of deep thinking. I'm just going
to tell you what Liz Gilbert said about the experience,
and then well she'll unpack what we think this is
all about. So she wrote in her newsletter that when
she heard about it, she had like a full body yes,
like she was like, that's something I know I want
to do, so, she writes, So I signed up for
the experience, and I will admit there were times last week,
(25:59):
sitting in the inky, unmovable darkness and silence for hour
after hour, when I said to my body, whose dumb
idea was this? I mean, it's summer. I could be
at the beach, I could be floating in a pool
with my friends. I could be reading a book in
a hammock with a nice cold beverage. But no because
of my loud, mouthful body responsive. Yes, instead of doing
normal things. Last week I spent one hundred hours in
a cave with no light, alone with the terrorist of
(26:21):
my brain. But here's the thing. My body knew I
needed this. My body knew that something was going to
happen in that dark that I needed. A treasure would
be found in that difficult experience, and so it was.
What's our reaction is this?
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Rich people? Camping?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Camping is fun?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
But how is this different?
Speaker 4 (26:43):
I mean, what are you then no sausages rather than
there's no organic okay, there's no like you know, did
she like was she allowed to take in things like,
for instance, alcohol or anything like that?
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Book's okay?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
No, because it's pitch black.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Even during the light, it's pitch black.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
This is the point event you go into the dark. No, no, no,
you go you can enjoy daylight. I don't know. You
go into the dark and then you are in dark
for as Liz Gilbert was one hundred hours. I find
it really interesting why people how these things, because you know,
to be clear, when you go to the site and
learn about this, they'll tell you that this is an
(27:22):
ancient practice that people have gone into retreat for years
and like, and they have lots of stats about the
dark and everything. But it's really interesting what sort of edgy,
extreme wellness spiritual things pop up at different times.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
And how they do seem to be getting more and
more extreme. So silent retreats have been a big deal
for a long time. That's been and of course, as
often happens is that's a practice that like Tibetan monks
have for a very long time practice silence, a lot
of religious people have, and the Dark Caves is a
Tibetan monk thing, so they described it, and it's an
(27:59):
advanced practice. It's not something you do in your first
year of being a monk. Like you've got to know
how to meditate and like get back in touch with yourself.
And they describe it as like a return to the womb.
It's almost like confronting death because it's just blackness, which
sounds horrific to me. But what I found interesting in
what Elizabeth Gilbert said is that she said, it turns
(28:22):
out when you take everything else away, love is the
only thing left in the room. And that's what that
guy said too that we just listened to. And I
never understood what they meant by love. It felt really vague.
But I was listening to this monk recently. I think
he was interviewed on Ezra Klein. His name is Mark Epstein,
and he was saying that when they talk about love,
especially at the end of a silent retreat, people will go,
(28:42):
I felt love. And you know how when you try
and meditate, you get the chatter and then you start,
as we all do. We judge our thoughts, and we
kind of are in conversation with our thoughts, and we say,
that's a stupid thought. Why am I stewing on this one?
Why does this memory keep coming back? Apparently if you
sit with those thoughts for long enough. He described it
as being like the mother who has unconditional love for toddler,
(29:04):
and the toddler is yelling and throwing things and running
it like they're are going crazy, and that mother just
stands there and observes, and their love is never it
never falters because that's unconditionally.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Although that's why she needs to go into a dark
retreat every down again exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And I was like, her love never falters, but like,
does she just stand there passively?
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Does she?
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Or does sometimes she start also throwing her arms around.
But I quite liked that idea that people say they
don't leave with a greater understanding of themselves, they leave
having abandoned the self and realizing there's nothing there.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Okay, I feel like there's an element here of these
rich people trying to outdo themselves with these wellness rituals.
Basically like, yeah, it's almost boasting at this point. So
apparently there's one Guatemalan retreat where you can also be
deprived of light and censory distractions for three thousand dollars
for four nights. So I'm sure that the Tibetan monks
(30:01):
were not charging each other three thousand dollars for four
nights of a silent retreat.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
They were going into actual caves.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
This is about outdoing each other. And basically, seeing as
Holly said, how extreme are these wellness rituals going to get?
Speaker 2 (30:14):
And I reckon it is about efficient wellness. So you
hear about these people who have I guess, especially in
the US, where even your annual leave is really short. Right,
Let's say you're a high flyer, you've got a really
intense job, You're on twenty four seven when you have
a break. It isn't enough to lay on a beach.
You need to fully restore as efficiently as possible in
(30:35):
three nights and four days, And like, what do you
need to do to do that? Maybe lay in a
dark hat.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
It's to bring up another phone. Analogy like turning your
phone to airplane mode to get it to charge more quickly.
This is basically turning yourself to airplane mode.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yes, but I agree as well that it's about trends
because I was thinking flow tanks were everywhere five minutes ago,
and I just thought, where did they go? Did they
die with COVID? Like, because that I suppose is an
hour long version of this where you laid in the
dark and kind of meditated or whatever. But it does
feel like these pop up and then disappear, and it
(31:09):
does feel a bit like appropriating the Tibetan monks who
have been doing it better than us for a long time.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It's interesting because the other bit, the cynical bit of me,
is like, what an excellent business idea because it's like
a hotel, but you don't have to do anything, Like
some of these ones are about nine hundred dollars a night,
so you go for however long that you go for
and yes you have to provide food, but that's all.
The guests are very quiet. They're all in their cabins.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
No parties, no bodies.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
No drama, no activities needed, no snorkeling trips. I don't know.
Like it's funny, there's a part of me that's very
attracted to this stuff. Like I like to think maybe
when I'm not working anymore, and clearly I've sold a
booked to Hollywood or something and I'm rolling in it,
then like I would go and do all this stuff
because I'm fascinated by it. But I actually don't think
that my mind could do it.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Like I don't want to spend time with her. I'm like,
I get enough of her and I don't want to
spend a holiday in my own head, I think she's
not good company.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Also worry about insects. Oh so true.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
You wouldn't be able to see them creeping up on
you after the break some schrorelous gossip playing out on
Europe's Mega Yachts.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Every Tuesday and Thursday, we drop new segments of Mummy
Out Loud just for MUMMYA subscribers follow the link in
the show notes to get your daily doseph out loud
and a big thank you to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I can't vouch for the veracity of this information and
that's why it's schirrelous. But word on the Celebrity Street,
I want to where Celebrity Street is alabasis? Perhaps is
that Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz Beckham just
renewed their vows, possibly in the Hamptons in New York City.
And know she didn't wear a dress designed by her
(33:00):
mother in law this time, and no, in fact, the
other Beckhams were not invited because, as we know, the
family feud is still going.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I kept reading that it was very private, very planner
for this one soon.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Not yet, but who knows, there's time. In telling wording
from Celebrity Diary People magazine, the couple apparently wanted to
do this to create new memories, maybe ones that didn't.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Involve Victoria Beckham specific parents.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Meanwhile, and Amelia, I know you've got the goods on this.
Although the vowy newal is sort of scoreless gossip and
speculation at this point, Instagram does not lie, and there
has been quite the drama playing out across two Beckham
Instagram accounts to do with a yacht, So Amelia, bring
us some yacht gossip.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Thanks Holly. Yeah. As Yocht correspondent, I'm happy to send
this dispatch direct from Monaco. Actually can so. I feel
so sorry for David and Victoria beck Let me tell
you what happened. So David, you know recently knighted like
living the high life, now reached the pinnacle of their careers.
Everyone loves them after the documentary, I think they were
(34:07):
feeling really good about life, David and Victoria. So in
twenty twenty two they purchased their own yacht. That is
a sign you've made it, isn't it. That is a
sign you've made it. As they say, if you want
to light money on fire by a yacht. It is
one hundred and thirty feet long, that's forty meters. It
costs thirty two million Australian dollars and it's called seven,
which is in reference to David Beckham's football number. I
(34:29):
am told it also has a spa bath as well,
which his dice. Because I bet Victoria loves a spa
amazing lovely. It looks really nice. I wouldn't say no
if they invited me on it. However, at the very
same time, the Peltzers decided to take their own yacht
for a spin that they own. This is Nichola's father,
who is a millionaire. He owns a yacht. It's one
(34:51):
hundred and seventy five million Aussie dollars. It has it's
just bigger. It has an elevator, it has a heighty
solar on it has underwater lights, and it can house
twelve guests in nine cabins. So it's just a sort
of better yacht, like clearly a better yacht. I want
you to picture how ridiculous the bear Comes yacht looks
(35:11):
in comparison to the Peltzer's yacht.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
There's always someone richer than you that's like.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
A little toy Fisher price yacht. And they're clear speedboats. Yeah,
they're sailing around at the same time, and David and
Victoria are like beaming with pride in the photos they
posted on Instagram from this yacht, because again it's kind
of a big deal. And then you've just got Nicola
and Brooklyn posting from the Mega.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yacht, because what you do when you're in that corner
of the world I was there last year. Is that
you go imagine being on that boat and you say
it from the port because you're personally not on a
boat and you can't even afford my ice cream, but
you're looking around going imagine being on that boat. That's
the best. That's David and Victoria sitting there being like, wow,
imagine being on that one, and Brookies like, fuck your
(35:58):
mom and dad?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Why would you.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Fancy people like yacht so much? Like if I had
all the money in the world, I don't think that's
what I'd do with it anyway. That's on the sidebar.
But what I want to know is this, Right, there
are lots of places to take your fancy yachts in
Europe at this time of year. You can't move for them,
the billionaires on their bloody yachts.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Isn't it a bit weird that they all end up
in Santrapez exactly the same time? And is that because
do you think that that David and Victoria were like
hoping that they could trail the big yacht with the
little yacht and that maybe they'd bump in, maybe they
could be a reuni.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I assumed it was the exact opposite. Look, everything we
know about the Peltzers, please don't sue me. Peltzer's is
that they sue everyone, including the wedding planner for Nichola's
wedding Pelts himself seems kind of unpleasant. The Beckham's look,
I've watched the Netflix documentary. They look lovely. I'm sort
of team Beckham here. I think they plan this. I
bet they booked this like twelve months ago. They've been
(36:55):
counting down the days, and I just have to believe
that Brooklyn and Nicola were the ones who showed up
to sort of one up them.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Don't you think I have a holiday hat for free?
This is my holiday hat, Sherryot like it would have
been so much more cheap.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
A twelve cabins on the they're not talking to it.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
It's like, this is what happens when families fall apart,
is that we end up paying frowing.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
It's very sad. I have one other piece of evidence
that Nicola and Brooklyn engineered it this way. They had
lunch while they were sailing around the south of France
in cann with Elton, John Nichola and Brooklyn and Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I thought that David and Elton were mates.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Elton has been a friend of the Beckhams for years because.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
They would talk about the knighthood. They have those things
in common.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
What is clear is that Nichola and Brooklyn got Elton
in the family breakup, and they went and performed the
Bowery knew they ordered lobsol and Guinie. It did cost
three hundred and forty dollars each. Elton paid, though, which
is nice. Elton paid, and then Nichola posted on Instagram
a picture of herself naked in a bathtub on her
(38:02):
family's yacht to thank Elton for the lunch. Now, I
don't think Elton's inclined.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I did see that picture. Look, I do understand why
fancy people like lobster lingue.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Me. I would like that, But do they do because
I'm no good as that. I definitely would.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
A little person would do that for you.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
She doesn't need people paying for a linguine. I'm puffer
fishing and I need to get this off my Yes,
I love it when you're popery.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
So it is about the appification, which is a fancy
word for saying too many apps of everything. There was
a great Substack article by Jill Vlopovich about this, and.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
I nodded at every word.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
How many times have you bought a product only to
learn that in order to use it you have to
download an app. How many times have you sat down
to order food suddenly there's a QR code. You go,
that's fine, because I downloaded an app last time. No, no, no,
you need a new app to get your sandwich. You
want to book an exercise class, You want to use
your baby monitor, You want to transfer money, join a
loyalty program, book a doctor's appointment. Your supermarket has an app,
(39:06):
Your phone service has an app. Your health insurance goddamn it,
we have an app. It's great app. But that's not
the point. The point is I audibly moan every single
time I am told I must download an app. It
is annoying. I have too many. Half of them are
now redundant. And once I get.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
And they all have a log in, of course, they
all have a log in.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
And then I get on that app and you want
my email address, I have to make up a new
password and remember those Why do you need my email
address when I just want to buy a glass of wine? Like,
how is that any of your business? We have reached
peak app and I am writing. Are you guys equally
as irritated?
Speaker 3 (39:42):
It's happy hour, isn't it? So? Sorry? No? I really
relate to this, and the problem with apps is that
you increasingly need them when you want to carve time
away from your phone, and yet you need the app
to carve time away from your phone. Let me give
you an example. My child, I gave him a toy dinosaur.
(40:02):
It literally had an app where you could enhance play
on the app. It's like, no, I'm trying to get
him away from to the toy dinosaur. Another example, wanted
to whiten my teeth. Drink too much coffee? Yeah, maybe
a bit too much? Red Wine had to download an
appy and I was like, well, is there gonna tell
me interesting things about my teeth? No? No, it told
(40:24):
me nothing interesting about my teeth. It merely enabled me
to use the teeth whitening device.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I've got apps to get into apps. That's really drives
me crazy when you have to like download an app
to give you the security thing to get into the
other app. I counted the apps on my phone. I've
got one hundred and eighteen. How many do you think
you've got? Because so I've got one hundred and eighteen
apps on my phone, and I think they're like cookery
books used to be. You know how people always say
that your average person has a few cookery books but
don't use any of them. Yeah, Or they say, you know,
(40:53):
if you're a proper cook, you've got lots of news too,
apps like that, right, I've got one hundred and seventeen
apps living on my phone, all mining my data, spying
on me wherever I go, telling each other what I'm
up to, having a little gossip, and I probably used
three of them.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I'm the same American. I have about that many apps.
The average Australian I think has eighty to ninety.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I'm overperforming, top of theboard.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Overperforming.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I think that's because my mum has two because she
doesn't know how to download them from the because she
has an Android. I do not know how to get
it out how that works. There are some hilarious apps.
There is one called is It Dark Outside? Guess what
it does?
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Mrs Gilbert needs that one.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
If you're in the case.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
And my dad I don't know what it's called, but
he downloaded an app not so long ago that applauds
him every time he makes a joke, what yeah, tell
Brent about it? So he just goes on and it
applauds and we're just like, who told that about it?
Speaker 3 (41:45):
There is an Australian Museum app shout Out which you
should download around Christmas time, which will tell you what
species of Christmas beetle you were seeing in your part
of Australia. See that's actually kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
I do. I have some of those ones that you
can point at a plant and it tells you what
plant it is. That's kind of helpful, but then sometimes
you need another app to tell you what to do
about the plant. Like it's just it's a lot, It's
a lot. I'm with you, excellent puff.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
We have reached peak app. I just think let's just
all hold hands and go. We're not downloading another one.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
We shan't ow loud as that is all we have
time for on this Wednesday. Thank you all for being
with us here this week and to our fabulous team
who help us put this show together. We're going to
be back in your ears tomorrow of course.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
And if you are looking for something else to listen to.
On yesterday's episode, we unpacked the logs which were on
Sunday night. They went till four am, so you may
have missed some of it. Well, don't worry myself, emmadam you.
Hollyween Wright sat down, talked about Sam Pang's hilarious monologue.
We had to talk about Magda Zabanski. That is all there, Hamish.
(42:47):
There is a link in our show notes. As always, bye.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Shout out to any Mamma Mia subscribers listening. If you
love the show and you want to support us, subscribing
to MoMA Mia is the very best way to do it.
There's a link in the episode description.
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