February 17, 2025 • 42 mins
When Louis Theroux sat down with Armie Hammer last week, we witnessed what might be the most spectacular example of 'The Dickhead Defence' in recent history. But what exactly is it? And why do certain men think it's going to work?
Plus:
- The real life people characterised in Apple Cider Vinegar aren't happy. But do they have good reason?
- Could someone pull a Belle Gibson in 2025? (And why are we still falling for wellness scammers?)
- And apparently, generations don't exist. Here's the science behind the claim and why it matters.
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What To Listen To Next:
- Listen to our latest episode: The Exact Age A "Hot Mess" Is No Longer Cute
- Listen: The Great Attention Thief
- Listen: The Bully, The Mum & The Aftermath Of A Viral Video
- Listen: A Very Honest Review Of Nicole Kidman's 'Baby Girl'
- Listen: The True Story Of A Liar: Belle Gibson & Apple Cider Vinegar
- Connect your subscription to Apple Podcasts
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What To Read:
- Read: Everything you need to know about the Mamamia Out Loud ALL OR NOTHING TOUR coming May 2025
- Read: Everything that happened after Belle Gibson admitted to not having cancer.
- Read: Jess Ainscough inspired Apple Cider Vinegar's Milla. Her former partner says it couldn't be further from the truth.
- Read: The most confusing part of Apple Cider Vinegar isn't Belle's cancer lies. It's her relationship with Clive.
- Read: Armie Hammer and the 'cancelled' celebrities who rage bait their way into headlines.
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CREDITS:
Hosts: Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens & Amelia Lester
Group Executive Producer: Ruth Devine
Executive Producer: Emeline Gazilas
Audio Producer: Leah Porges
Video Producer: Josh Green
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast. Muma Mia acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Are you kidding? It's not about the
mainstream media. Who cares in twenty twenty five, who's on
the Today Show or on sixty minutes. It's about TikTok
and Instagram, and there is an algorithm deciding who gets
(00:32):
platformed and who goes viral on those.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
And now, by the way, those platforms are taking away
fact checking and are taking away a lot of the
layers of authority that they put in place during the
pandemic to make sure there wasn't misinformation.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hello, and welcome to Mummy. Are out loud what women
are talking about on Monday, the seventeenth of February. I
am Jesse Stevens, I'm mea Friedman, and we've got Amelia
Lester filling in for Holly today. Amelia introduced herself in
ten seconds or less.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Hello, I'm a friend of Mia Friedman. I'm an editor
at Foreign Policy Magazine and I'm an Australian American who
lives in Sydney.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I think you should have led with the second part.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I know the most important thing in my life is
that I'm a friend of the agreement.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
She's also tertiary educated, which means I now feel officially outnumbered.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
In terms of the letterboard. You are last. And on
the Show Today last week, Louis Theroux interviewed Armie Hammer,
who launched into an impassioned dickhead defense. What is the
dickhead defense and did it work? Plus the real life
characters from Apple Side of Vinegar are coming forward with
their own accounts. Do they have a point? And could
(01:47):
the Bell Gibson spectacle happen today? And apparently the whole
generation thing is a myth, but we are not all convinced.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But first, in case you missed it, one of Australia's
most successful business women, Kayla Itsines, who is a fitness
influencer with an app called Sweat, which she sold for one
hundred and fifty million dollars and then bought back for
a lot less. She posted a TikTok video last week
calling out what she sees as excessive sexualization in the
(02:15):
fitness industry. Ladies, put your bums away, She essentially said,
stop filming those videos up your bum because I don't
want to see that. While I'm having breakfast. That's literally
what she said. We can't play you a grab of
it because she has since taken it down after a
lot of people were very unhappy and called her out
for being a hypocrite because.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Hasn't she been selling bikini body literally the name bikini
body plans for years and.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Years She has, indeed, and at the end of this video,
when am I missing well the part where I said
she was a businesswoman. At the end of this video,
she did do a shout out to her own glutes
program and say that it was essentially if people didn't
want to look up bums but still wanted to have
amazing glutes. As she said, she said, she's got a
(03:03):
glutes program and if they followed her program then they
could just see more modest bottoms and less Still before
what she was saying, Jesse, I'm not really across Kayla
It scenes, although I do know that this is the
reason we launched move because we wanted people to have
an option of it not being so appearance focused.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
I get served a lot of fitness content on Instagram
and TikTok, and I have been served Kayla It scenes
bick anybody for ten years I'm not sure if she
does it anymore, but I distinctly remember the beginning of
sort of the fitness industry. The model was his or
before and after, and I'm talking ten a day before
and after.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Wow, you have a lot of body after baby stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yes, yes, women's bodies, and Kayla is known. I would
say that the appearance of her abdominals is central to
her marketing. It's really important because you know, it's the
illusion of fitness or it makes people it's shorthand to go.
I'm really in the same way that Sam Wood often
doesn't have a shirt on. I think that fitness is
seen as something very visual. So when I heard her
(04:06):
talking about the sexualization, I thought, we're all playing the
same game here, which is that the algorithm of both
is we need attention in order to get people to
buy our products.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So it's like she's more female gaze, and say the
Tammy Hembrowse who have a lot of shots of their
bum filmed in those low angles. She talks a lot
about low angles, which is just a different vibe. It's
more perhaps male gazing.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, I don't necessarily have a problem with it, and
I'm not sure that it is male gaze because I
get served a lot of glute content because I have
issues activating my glutes is a personal issue that I have,
and I say, TikTok, help me with my glute exercises.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, because your legs just connect straight to your.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Bag exactly, And so what I need is to And
this is my defense of the form fitting because I
know what leggings she's talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Was she talking about leggings or was she talking about angles?
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Angles? But she's saying, you can really see the glute being.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Act But is that maybe sometimes because the glute is
an implant.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Well that's a whole other story.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Aren't you just saying then that abs are female gaze
coded and glutes are male gaze coded.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
See, I think that the gaze is just everyone's gaze.
I think that now that we're just looking at the
same I mean, i'd be interested to see the stats
about who's following who, But I'm a woman who's looking
at a lot of glute centered content. And I think
that the reason we have such form hugging clothing in
exercise is often because there is a focus on form.
(05:30):
There's a focus on this is how you correctly do
the pilates, move the weights for the yoga thing, which
is what you're being for because you don't want to
get injured. So you can't have someone dressed as an
Amish person doing a squat because I don't know how
your backs arching.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Among fitness influences, the trend used to be for a
much slimmer body. Kayla, it seems is very much. She's
very slim, whereas some of the other fitness influencers that
do the booty content, well they've just got really big booties. Yeah,
so there's a more muscular, a more big bottomed. And
(06:04):
the criticisms that she obviously took to heart because she
took it down, were that she was hyper critical because
she flaunted her body, as the Daily Mail would say,
and why is she criticizing other women for how they
want to portray their own bodies.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Last week, documentarian and podcast Louis Thuru released a podcast
episode with actor Armie Hammer that has since gone viral
due to the palpable tension that emerged between the two men.
You might have seen this clip circulating on social media.
Did you have anything else you wanted to say? I
(06:39):
should know.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I mean, I don't love the way the interview started.
Just to be perfectly honest, I'm not crazy about drudging
up all of this stuff because for me, a lot
of these issues have been resolved, whether it be legally
or within myself, and I feel like a lot of
those waters have settled. I think doing things like that
(07:00):
stirs up the water again unnecessarily. It definitely wasn't my
favorite beginning. I'm glad we moved past that and got
to a place where we could have a civil, normal
conversation like that felt good. But drudging up all that stuff, like,
I don't love it.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I hear you and I sense that during the chat.
I think in the court of public opinion, the jury
is still out.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
But my thing now is like the court of public opinion. Like,
pick anything that the court of public opinion has an
opinion on, and there's a very good chance that they
will not be fully informed. There's a very good chance
they don't have the full story, and there's also a
very good chance that they're probably wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I sent this around when I saw it first thing
last week and went, that is the single best podcast
trailer I have ever seen. Because I saw that when
I need to listen to it immediately let's take a
few steps backwards. Because Armie Hammer, who you might know
as the Winklevoss Twins in the Social network or he
was the lead in Call Me by Your Name opposite
(07:59):
Timothy Shallamy, he was accused of sexual emotional and physical assault, rape,
and cannibalistic fantasies in early twenty twenty one. Text messages
were published at the time that read I'm one hundred
percent accnnibal. He expressed a desire to cut off a
piece of his partner and eat it, and another text
expressed wanting to hold a partner down and rape her.
(08:20):
Hamma maintained that these were taken out of context and
were part of a sexually charged and consensual back and forth.
The charges against him were eventually dropped in twenty twenty three,
citing insufficient evidence. Hamma has since spoken about losing every
job he had, he was dropped by his agent, he
was shunned by friends, and he's talked about the emotional
(08:40):
toll that the allegations took on him. And now in
twenty twenty five, he is sitting opposite Louis and I'm
going to give you the headlines from the interview. If
you haven't listened.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Amy has a podcast of his own, doesn't he does?
Mum he does?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, released it last year. Remember his mum bought him
a phaseectomy.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
That was so kind. Do you think he's now just
a lot of people have been talking about he's coming back,
and there's no such thing as cancelation. I imagine he's
been on peas Morgan. Do you think he just is like,
I've just got to talk about it. I'm just going
to own it. I'm going to lean into it, and
I'm going to talk about it until it's not interesting
to people anymore.
Speaker 5 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I think so. I think he probably had two choices.
I mean, he did retreat for a significant period of time,
But the biggest thing is in a moment, he's going
to have movies to promote, so he can't just come out.
And I think when he promotes the movies, he probably
wants to promote the movie.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So he's working again.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Yeah. Is he getting cars?
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, he said he's getting offers every day.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Okay, interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
So these were the headlines from the interview. He admitted
to having an affair while still married to his wife,
but said that people in happy marriages don't have affairs.
He said only one side of the text. Conversations were leaked,
meaning that they would devoid of context. He talked about
intergenerational trauma. His grandfather was accused of killing a man
of sexually abusing his daughter. There's a documentary called The
(09:54):
House of Hammer about the history of the family. He
says the scandal was the greatest thing that ever happened
to him. It forced him to get sober. He didn't
recognize who he had become, and he denies, ultimately that
he was guilty of anything that resembled a crime. Ultimately,
he used what hollywould call the dickhead defense. He was
a bad person, radicalized by fame and money and pornography
(10:18):
and access to anything he wanted All the time, he
treated people badly, women his wife. He says that like Icarus,
he flew too close to the sun, but he was
not guilty of abuse. Maya does the dickhead defense work.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I thought it was a really interesting interview to listen to.
I'm not all the way through it, but I think
that when you call yourself a dickhead, you show two things. Firstly,
there's humility in there, and secondly, there's self awareness. And
I think implicit in that is an apology of sorts,
(10:56):
because what we know is that no matter what you do,
however you apologize, will be critiqued and found wanting by
the apology police. And the other time that I can
think that this really really worked. Although the two things
aren't comparable. But Karl Stefanovic a number of years ago
used an offensive term for a marginalized group of people
(11:19):
and there was a big backlash about it, and the
next day on the Today Show he said, I was
a tool. I really shouldn't have used that word. Now
I understand, I won't use it again. And by calling
himself out so strongly, he sort of left no room
for people to come at him anymore. And it worked.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Have you ever seen a woman do it?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Never?
Speaker 5 (11:40):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
God, no, I don't think a woman can use it
acad defense Amelia, do you think it works well.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
One thing that I thought was so interesting about that grab,
which I assume was the most interesting part of the interview,
is that it reminded me of this phenomenon that doctors
describe as the doorstop question.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
Oh have you heard of that?
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So apparently when you go and see the doctor, they
know that you're basically going to sort of fluff your
way through the actual consultation, and then as you stand
up on the way out, you go just one other thing,
and then that often turns out to be the thing
that is wrong with you, or you know, you might
have a mole that you That's how I almost get
cancer removed.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
We're standing and walking out of the room going actually while.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I'm here, doorstop question Mia. In No Filter interviews, would
you always ask people is there anything else you want
to say? That kind of like cleaning up question in
the air?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Never? I never ever would. Maybe I probably should have.
That's really I think it's a little.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Bit of a lifetack in general, because if you're having
a conversation with someone, it takes time to warm up
to the actual meat of it. I think, sorry, that
was bad given the cannibal discussion.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I think that that's specific to this type of interview
right because Louis, I think this is season four or
season five of his podcast, and it has in terms
of charting, it's not really been working. I listened to
a few of them and I stopped because I don't
think Louis Threux is a celebrity interviewer.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
It's not where he's best.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
He's best talking to weird people about weird thing.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
He is a subculture journalist, like that's where he got
his experience, and he is so skilled at sitting with
someone and giving them space and playing the idiot.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And but it's also not just about him. It's celebrities
have gotten so good at this, and they've all got
their own podcasts. Yeah, they don't need to give you anything.
Whereas real people are less guarded, they have less to lose.
They're also just more interesting. They're not media trained. And
back to your original question, Jesse, do I think it worked? Yeah?
I guess it did work because I came away from
(13:43):
that podcast interview thinking was he a dickhead? Is he
still a dickhead? Absolutely? Is he a cannibal? And all
of the things that I actually had believed that he was.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
No, it's interesting you use two terms. The first was
you said it shows some humility. I do not see
one ioda of humility in that manner.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
No, I think it for him, I think it shows
false humility. Ah, that's why. So I think that's why
it's a defense. I don't think it's always effective, and
I don't think he came across as having humility at all,
But I think if it's done right, like with Karl Stefanovic,
it worked because it did show humility.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
You also said that it was a type of apology,
which was interesting given you can scrape this entire interview
and you will not find anything that is a semblance
of an apology.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, he's angry.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
There's also a semblance of truth in what he said, too,
which is when he talked about the court of public opinion.
And it's true that the court of public opinion can
linger long beyond.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
The actual courts.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
And it brought to mind a case that happened in
twenty twelve in New York a cannibal cop. Have you
heard of this, Jesse Nature Crime Explorations. There was an
NPD officer named Gilberto Valet and he was arrested because
he had been on online forums talking about roasting women,
cooking women, eating women. He was stood down from his
job at the NYPD, but the criminal charges were dropped.
(14:59):
The judge said, look, you clearly have a diseased mind,
that was the phrase he used, but you haven't committed
any crimes. And his lawyers had been arguing that all
along that he was just exploring these sexual fantasies online.
It seems to me that there's a bit of a
parallel here with Army and the idea of minority report,
that old Tom Cruise movie. If you haven't actually done something,
and here I'm just talking about the cannibalism charges, how
(15:21):
do you ever escape it?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yes? And the question is, then what's worse is being
tired with the brush that you're a bad person or
that you're a dickhead, better or worse, and being tired
with the brush that you're a criminal. And what I
found interesting about the dickhead defense was that I thought,
I think I would rather own having committed a crime
than being a bad person. But there are many men
(15:45):
in Hollywood who seem happy to sit there and go
I'm a piece of shit, I'm a terrible person.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Because that's their path back to employment and reintegration into society.
Whereas for a woman to say that she ain't coming back,
like that's not a path back, I think it's completely calculated.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It makes it so clear where our line is in
terms of do you have permission to re enter? Did
you go to even if you went to prison. You
did serve your time, and we'll let them back in.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
But for women like I just thought about Ellen or whatever.
I thought, if she stood and she made a few
jokes and stuff, but if she stood there and went, yeah,
I was a selfish piece of shit who treated everyone poorly,
we'd have gone it just doesn't work. But for him,
even the affair, I thought only affair, and he said, well,
you know, you don't have an affair if your marriage
is going well. And I was like, oh, you're even
(16:31):
blaming her for the affair.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
What I took away from it was that he was
wanting to clarify. It's like, the word out there is
that I'm accountable. I'm not. The word out there is
that all of these things were non consensual. I'm saying
they are now Again it's him against her, he said,
she said, But he was still providing that context that
you hear in people who feel misunderstood, and he says
(16:55):
that he feels very misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
One of the most interesting parts of the interview I
thought was the question about Woody Allen.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
If Woody Allen offered you a role in his new movie,
would you take it?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Would I work with Woody Allen. I mean at this point,
I don't know that I buy into any of the
cancel we need to dis and that like I don't know.
I mean, I know that this is like a trick question,
and I know there's no right way to answer this question.
But I think I think it's well no, because like
(17:26):
if I say.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, it is a trick question. I think louis really
ques brilliant, but it is a trick question. Louis being
disingenuous there.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
He was basically speaking to how there does appear to
be a line being drawn down Hollywood, And he goes
on to ask, oh, also in that movie is Kevin
Spacey and Harvey Weinstein's producing it?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
This movie is going to happen right the way that's
coming out next to you.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, and everyone's going to go and say everyone, And
what he's saying is, have you been so radicalized by
your cancelation that you now go everyone's mad. Let's just
kind of put myself in the camp with the other
men who have been canceled. And I thought he had
quite a fair answer to that, which is I'd want
to sit down with Woody Allen first. I mean, we
(18:09):
all know that that's not going to reveal everything, but
that he just knows that a lot of what is
being said isn't necessarily the truth of someone who he says,
has experienced that.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think we are seeing a big backlash to the
late Orts cancelation era.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I mean, so many of the people, even in Trump's cabinet,
are people who used to be on the Democratic side
of politics who got canceled and then said, well, I'm
seeking revenge. I'm joining Trump's cabinet.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
That's true. I think of the moment, there's a Trump
theme here. I agree. After the break some updates on
the Bell Gibson story. One week after the release of
Apple Side of Vinegar.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
It's been a week since the new series Apple Side
of Vinegar has been released on Netflix, and it has
sparked global attention from people discovering this story for the
first time from around the world. And also there've been
quite a few developments from people who are associated with
this story in real life. The family of Jessinskoff, who
(19:09):
who is the wellness influencer who's portrayed in the show
as Miller Blake heavily inspired by Jess's story, but her
family have come out her father in particular, and said
that it's just not true. There are a lot of
inaccuracies in the way.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
What does he say are the inaccuracy Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
So he says that the main inaccuracy is that Jess
and Bell Gibson were friends. And Talon Parmenter, who is
Jess's former fiance, has also come out and said that
same thing. And I think what's really important for people
to understand because I watched that story happen as it
happened in real life to Jess. They're not disputing the
medical side, so nobody knows exactly what her medical history is.
(19:50):
And that's frankly not so much how business, except for
what she told us through her Instagram, and she was
very open and honest about saying that at the end
she wished that she'd listened to doctors earlier on in
her journey. The other person who's come out this week
is Richard Gilliat, who says that he was the one,
and indeed he was. He's a journalist from The Australian.
(20:13):
He broke the original story and revealed the moment that
Bell Gibson's lies began unraveling, and he also said that
what he thought was most different about the way Bell
was portrayed versus his experience of her, and he did
interview her a number of times, is that he said
she was portrayed as this quite conniving, successful scammer, and
he said that she was actually terrible. She was terrible
(20:35):
at covering her tracks. It was a time before people
would dig online, so she didn't have to be as
good as she would have had to be today. But
he said she was actually a really bad liar and
there were always big holes in her story. It's just
that nobody really looked into them at the time. The
Victorian premier Justinto Allan has come out and said that
consumer Affairs Victoria, who is owed hundreds of thousands of
(21:00):
dollars from a fine Bell Gibson, was given back in
twenty seventeen. It's now over half a million dollars that
she ownes with penalties. Just Cintra Allen has said that
they will continue pursuing that debt, and it was also
recently revealed that Belle has split from her longtime partner
Clive Rothwell, who is portrayed in the show, and also
claims that she still can't afford to pay her fines.
(21:24):
What we were thinking about is could Belle Gibson happen
in twenty twenty five or was that a moment in
time and we've all learned our lesson about wellness scammers? Amelia?
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
One thing they thought was really interesting in that Richard
Gilliad story was that he pointed out this was the
very beginning of the wellness movement. He said that when
he started reporting on that he had never written anything
about wellness before.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Can you imagine, Yeah, well, a man working at a
broadsheet and mainstream media, right, so at the time.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, it was have a different era, but.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No one was really willing to call it out at
the time because, especially when someone came out and said
they had cancer, you can't ask for someone's medical records.
It didn't occur to people that lies were being told
or that they were going to necessarily have tragic ends.
Everyone was just sort of watching this slow moving car accident.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It got me thinking more broadly about the trajectory of
the wellness movement, because if you assume it sort of
started around twenty ten, let's say, and then it kind
of reached its climax, if you will, during the pandemic
when we had this actual public health emergency, and suddenly
thinking about our fourteen stepskin care routines and the optimal
(22:37):
way to tone our abs might have seemed irrelevant. But
if anything, I think it caused more people to embrace
the idea that their body was the only thing they
could control in this completely out of control moment.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Well, that was Pete Evans' time, right when he was
selling those health lamps and the bone broth, and when
he sort of imploded. Do you think a lot of
people who were perhaps interested in alternate medicine became radicalized
during COVID Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I think that what happened was that when the world
became more out of control, people realized, well, I can
make sure I e five servings of fruit and vegetables
every day, and I can make sure that I get
my body into optimal shape. And that idea of optimization,
which came to us via Silicon Valley but then sort
of trickled down into the wellness industry, I think was
a big part of that. That idea of making sure
(23:24):
that every part of your life serves a purpose and
your body is running like a well oiled machine.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
So it almost seems like an absurd question to ask
you when over the weekend the new health secretary in
America was sworn in and it's rfk Jr.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
Yes, So, Robert F.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Kennedy Jr. Is now Donald Trump's new Health and Human
Services Secretary. It's interesting because in his confirmation hearings, he
was asked a lot of questions about whether he believes
in vaccines, and he kept saying that, yeah, he's actually
fine with them. The way that he would make an
official distinction is that he thinks that people should make
their own choices about vaccines. Now, of course that kind
of undercuts the whole purpose of vaccines, which has herd immunity.
(24:03):
But Caroline Kennedy, his cousin, came out with a video
before his hearing where she said he vaccinates his kids.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
It's just that he's decided that.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
It's financially lucrative for him to profit off these families
with sick children and basically scare manger about the health
effects of vaccines. Broadly speaking, I think that his appointment
really shows that the Make America Healthy Again movement has
fully taken flight. Are you familiar with this basically like Maha, Yeah, MAHA.
So basically, it really emphasizes integrative and holistic medicine, reducing
(24:35):
environmental pollution, eating healthy. Look, all of this sounds great, obviously,
I don't think anyone at this table would disagree that
those are worthy goals. But I think there is a
darker side to it, which says, your health is solely
your responsibility. The government needs to get out of helping
you live a healthy life, and if you get an
illness or a disease, it's kind of on you. And
one example of that is that at his hearing he
(24:57):
said that we should study the origins of chronic illness
over researching infectious diseases. Now, I think that most people,
certainly most scientists, would probably say we should do both.
Let's figure out how to fix obesity and make sure
that we prevent the next airborne pandemic.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
What Apple Side of Vinegar did so well that I
think actually plays perfectly into this MAHA moment is that
the wellness movement and the MAHA movement both have a point,
like they have a real point. And Jess's family coming
out and saying don't put her alongside Bell Gibson. I
think that's fair because Jess really had cancer, and that's
(25:33):
what they're trying to say too, And that is a
totally different thing the wellness movement. People who talk about
holistic or alternative remedies aren't lying about their health conditions.
That's like a.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Separate thing, but it was some of them are.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
It's a total anomaly like that someone would lie about it.
I think the question of whether or not it would
happen today is an interesting one because I keep seeing
a lot of commentary and criticism about the role that
the media played in this.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But hang on, don't we have these We just had
an Australian influencer parenting influencer arrested a couple of weeks
ago for faking an illness allegedly allegedly in her child
and actually allegedly harming her child.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
So in that way, the onus, I think has to
be on the media in terms of what they platform
and doing their due diligence. If you've got someone on
your morning TV show saying that each how do you do.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
That, Jesse? Do you ask them for their medical record? Well,
this is what I mean.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
If they're sitting there saying you should do a coffee enema,
it'll cure your cancer, whether or not they have cancer.
I don't think you should platform them because every scientist
in the country will tell you that's not true. But
we cannot. And this is something I don't know it
comes up in the show, but there is patient doctor confidentiality.
We cannot access people's health records. If someone comes out
(26:49):
and says, if Bell Gibson emerges now and says she
has cancer, we can't prove or disprove that what n
did this whole case was actually following the money. And
one of the things I was most surprised to learn
was about the five year old boy who in real
life she pledged to give him an enormous amount of
money for surgery. And that was true, and that was true,
(27:10):
and she never gave it to him, and he died.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
What Jess's father and former fiance have objected to, again
is not so much the portrayal of her medical story,
but it's the idea that she was somehow parallel to
Bell Gibson, that she cared about Bell Gibson, that she
wanted to enact revenge on Bell Gibson. At the end
of her life. None of that happened, and I have
(27:33):
to say, I wasn't aware of any of that sort
of connection, which.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Is why Mila was understood to be an amalgamation of
a few different people and wasn't given the real life
name of Jess. And so I think we've got to
be really careful in talking about it.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Belle wanted to be like Jess, like that part is
true clearly because Jess was much more famous.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yes, but we have to be careful to not say
that Mila is Jess because she's not.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Belle did turn up at Jess's funeral, though, that's true.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just back on that question of whether it can happen again, though, Jesse,
I think you made a really interesting point, which is
that people are feeling tired, exhausted, run down, stressed, anxious,
can't sleep. That's been happening ever since we got smartphones, basically, yeah,
and we're searching for solutions.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
And the conspiracy that institutions, that governments, that pharmaceutical companies,
you know what we eat, is making us sick. It's
not totally a conspiracy, the pharmaceutical industry in the US especially,
it's a for profit medical system. I watched a movie
recently called Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo about a company
(28:39):
that put toxic chemicals in its water supply, and this
whole town people were getting cancers and autoimmune diseases. The
erosion of trust in institutions is real and justified.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
In Australia, they've been finding certain chemicals in dams. Back
to the point of could it happen today? And when
you said about the mainstream media needs to be careful
who they platform, are you kidding? It's not about the
mainstream media. Who cares in twenty twenty five, who's on
the Today Show or on sixty minutes. It's about TikTok
on Instagram, and there is an algorithm deciding who gets
(29:13):
platformed and who goes viral on those.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And now, by the way, those platforms are taking away
fact checking and are taking away a lot of the
layers of authority that they put in place during the
pandemic to make sure there wasn't misinformation.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
But to their credit, those platforms also have amateus looths.
And so I think that everything that happened in the
portrayal of the other thing that the reporter from The
Australian said is that his wife actually had breast cancer
and he really resented that being grafted onto the story
of the two guys from the age who do exist
as well, but again they were all fictionalized. I think
(29:50):
that TikTok would do this lou thing, so it's kind
of like it couldn't happen again, but it already is.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
We're all hungry for the magic bullet, for the solution
to our general feelings of malise and exhaustion, and I
think we're going to keep looking for that as long
as these big institutions are declining in front of our
very eyes. Are you always thinking about your next meal
or snack? I am. I think that everyone in the
world can be divided into two categories. People who are
(30:16):
thinking about what they're going to eat next, and people
who think that there should be a pill for food
and you never have to do.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I'm in that category.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
What do you mean there is?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's called weight loss drugs.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
No, as in like I wish that I could just
have a cup of sludge a day, but had on
my nutrients.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Oh, I fall somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I'm one of those people who looks at the menu
of a restaurant before I go to decide exactly what
I'm going to order.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
See, I'm the one who sits there and goes you order.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
I'll just pick anyway.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
There's a word for people like me, and this Japanese
word is kushi sabishi, which translates to lonely mouth. I
learned this from Pandora Sex newsletter, and it refers to
when you want to eat something, not because you are
hungry or because you require nutritional value, but because your
mouth needs company. And I love this, Oh.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I love this. So it's different to eating your feelings.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yes, it's just because your mouth needs company. And this
explains okers smokers, Maybe it'd explains smokers. It's an oral fixation. Actually,
I once had a yoga teacher who said that part
of the reason why people get addicted to smoking is
because you're doing yoga breathing and it relaxes you.
Speaker 5 (31:16):
It's so true, we should put a health warning on that.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
A much healthier habit is buying your pretzels in bulks
from cost Co, which is what I do. Because I
have lonely mouth. I always need to have a party
in my mouth. And now I have a word to describe.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Did you gun No?
Speaker 5 (31:31):
Because I don't like it. Don't doesn't do a bit
of crunch, a little bit of salt.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I'm quite particular about my mouth. Do you have a
favorite snack for your lonely mouth?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Okay, T T yeah, yeah, my mouth is lonely without
tea as.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Someone nothing likes my brain up. I don't really get
excited about things, but I have begun with the Easter eggs.
I know it's only February.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Cross bunds, but it's a particular type of taste of
East eggs.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Which there's just the little Cadbury, nothing inside, nothing fancy,
and you chuck it in the mouth and then you
just suck it. And I have them every single night,
Like I'm just well, I've been overdoing it and I've
been feeling a bit seack. So I'm trying to cut
down to say five, what would r would? He would
say anything that happens for you as your own fault,
(32:17):
and he'd probably be right.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Coming up next, a generational argument that we have been
waiting to have all day. Maybe all our lives.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Want unlimited out loud access. We drop episodes every Tuesday
and Thursday exclusively from Mum and Maya. Subscribers follow the
link in the show notes to get us in your
ears five days a week and a huge thank you
to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Are generations Real? An ABC podcast called Future Tense has
come up with a pretty provocative theory on this in
an episode called The Danger of Generational Labeling. The podcast
brings in demographers who argue that the naming of generations
is pseudoscience. Says it's no better than astrology.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
But it's a hang on. Isn't it based on literally
when you were born?
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, but there's always christ Us true.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
So baby boomers apparently they're allowed to still be a generation.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
They can breathe easy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
They are based on what the experts call a demographic reality.
But then you move on to these more pseudoscience cultural generations.
Generation X, Sorry, Mia, that's not based on an economic
or demographic reality.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
In my head, it's all.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
In your head.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Millennials, Jesse and I. It's just a reference to a
point in time. It doesn't mean anything. Gen Z was
still arguing on when that group begins and ends, and
apparently Jen Alpha, no one even knows if that's a
real thing. And also the name is very unimaginative because
we're starting at the side of the alphabet.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Is this because baby boomers were actually a reference to
a change in population. Right, So there's a certain number
of babies born every year, but there was a big
spike after the war, hence the name of the baby boomers.
What generations have come to me now is like how
they've been influenced by the culture. Is that what generations are?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yes, And so there's all these problems with labeling people
like that they suppress individuality, they're very static. So like
a millennial when a millennial was fifteen is probably quite
different to what a millennial is like now. For instance,
I now like watching nature documentaries and talking about real estate.
But when I was fifteen, I was still a millennial.
I did not enjoy either of those things.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
But isn't that just then what a millennial like? Now
millennials are all having children, So that's just what millennials
are doing.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
About a difference between us age rather than generation.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
Yes, So in fact it's brilliant.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Millennials were seen as this kind of cynical work, obsessed,
were obsessed generation.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
And halfaway and the devils products exactually a tootemic millennial.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
You're not a writer in reality by ites as yours
like we.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Were given this specific personality, and then we grew up
and faced the housing market, or whether or not we
were going to have children, all of these things that
people do in a lifespan, and we responded to those variables.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
But it's different because the generation behind you, which is
Gen Z, aren't the same as you. They're not obsessed
with work, they're not the differences between I think that's
changing too at the same age.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
So back in twenty seventeen, I wrote a big article
about Gen Z as the most socially progressive generation ever,
and that was grounded in some social science research that
was emerging at the time. For instance, they were much
more accepting of the idea of gender fluidity. They were
much more into racial justice. They were called sometimes the
Harry Potter generation, meaning that they wanted to go out
and avenge the wrongs of the world. But look in
(35:37):
the recent US election, almost half of young people voted
for Donald Trump, and that was much higher than it's
been in previous generations or in previous elections. So the
idea that we assume that young people are always progressive,
maybe it's just that young people are always progressive, and
then as they get older and they face adversity in
different problems in life.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
They're not progressive because gen z big maga people. Yes,
I'm being general, but.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
They've grown up a little bit, is the point. And
what people are saying is that there's datists to suggest
that as you grow up, you become more risk averse.
So the idea that you become more conservative as you
grow older, rather than it being we can look at
this generation and go, they're going to vote this way.
How they vote actually can change throughout a lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
So then why was the cover story of New York
magazine all these young, hip gen z maga people.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Well, the point is, and I think this is what
they're trying to make that media and marketing has become
obsessed with generations. Before they even look at the data,
they've decided what they're going to see, and they're kind
of projecting these stories onto people that aren't true. So,
for example, a lot of generations and millennials, gen Z
(36:47):
is about cultural shifts that happened in the US. Now
South Korea is using the idea of gen Z. Nothing
happened in South Korea that was particularly fundamental, So that's
one problem with it. The second is that it doesn't
look at variables like class. And that's the big thing
that we never seem to talk about, is that a
white middle class millennial is not the same as a
(37:11):
migrant who lives in a totally different suburb. They don't
vote the same, they didn't have the same set of
life experiences to that point.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Just last week, I can't believe I'm defending boomers, but
here we are. A report came out and it showed
that there's a bunch of renting retirees in Australia who
are living below the poverty line. The actual stat was
two thirds of renting retirees. You don't think of boomers
in our discourse, okay, boomer discourse. You don't think of
them as living below the poverty line, but a lot
of them are.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
And it's causing a lot of unnecessary tension between generations
when we might have more things in common than we think,
and we get this stereotype. So before a gen Z
walks into the office, you might go, oh, here we go,
here's another one, and then they do or say something
and it just sort of reinforces what we already suspect.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I think it can be a helpful acknowledgment of the
cultural impact of certain things depending on how old you are.
That's what it is to me. So for example, I
looked at this thing about one point zero versus gen
Z two point zero and the differences with it. One
point zero graduated high school before COVID and two point
(38:16):
zero graduated high school after COVID.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
So the demographers in this talking about generations said that
matters COVID is massive, exactly, And so.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
To say gen Z, like, that's a big impact. And so,
for example, the relevant cultural events for gen Z who
graduated high school before COVID were like the Women's March
and the Climate Strikes Back March and Black Lives Matter
and all of those things were part of the zeitgeist.
But for the ones who graduated after COVID, it's more
about resistance to COVID and masking protocols and more of
(38:49):
a move towards MAGA and anti cancer.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
And I think that's that's right me and I was
going back and forth on this topic myself. Another example
is jen Alpha. They're very young people under the age
of six or seven. Apparently a lot of them are
suffering from slow development in gross modor skills and that's
because when they were meant to be going to playground,
all the playgrounds were shut.
Speaker 5 (39:10):
Now that's a clear cultural impact. So they were lives.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
You have a whole generation who were in utero and
then at home. It's kind of like the COVID rescue dogs.
They're messed up. A generation of dogs that were adopted
or born during COVID are messed up because they missed
all of that socialization. So we now see the effects in.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah, apparently young kids are having problems with toilet training
because that requires you to involve various gross motor actions
in your body. They grew up on screens a lot
more than other kids because their parents were trying to
work at the same time as the kids were stuck
at home. All of this meant that there's a sort
of population wide problem with gross motor skills.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
And so yeah, see that seems a lot more significant
to me than say, looking at millennials and they say
the GFC was really you've got early and late millennials.
When you graduated in proximity to the GFC matters a
lot in terms of what career choices you made. But
I would also say add class in there.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Like that's the way the on the GFC, there's a
thing about micro generations. Have you come across this concept?
Speaker 2 (40:13):
So my husband graduated from university in two thousand and
eight and I graduated in two thousand and five.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
See I graduated high school in two thousand and fo. Okay,
so it's a different yeah, you go.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
So the thing is that between him and me, there's
three years, but there's a world of difference in terms
of I entered the workforce when everyone was feeling good.
First job had a caviar and oyster tower at the
Christmas Priorty. When he entered the workforce, he said, this
is not so good. I'm going to go and be
a professional mover for a few years because there's not
a lot of jobs available.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
That's so interesting. So those big cultural moments do impact
on a generation, but I think they impact on a
generation differently depending on how old you are. So for example,
for Gen.
Speaker 5 (40:52):
X, yeah, what are your generation?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Well, AIDS was a big thing and becoming sexually active
at a time when sex was being portrayed. You know,
the boomers had free love and by the time the
millennials came along and were having sex, HIV was not
seen as a death sentence anymore, and you know, it
was just a different time. But for us it was
like our COVID essentially connected to sex.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
I also think that technology and the speed at which
technology is evolving, is churning out generations at a faster pace,
because I think there's such a distinction between when you
got your first phone, what apps you use.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
My daughters sat down in front of the television yesterday
to pick something on Netflix, and she started, now, this
is a podcast, but she started scrolling my TV and
she just knew intuitively how to scroll, and I had
to explain, sorry, we don't have touchscreen TVs.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
But how did she even learn that?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Now I'm having the same like lunar and a phone.
She never sees me pick up a ringing phone. So
I got a ring ring and she's like, what, that's
all we have time for today. A big thank you
to all of you the out louders for listening to
today's show and our fabulous team for putting it together.
We will be back in your ears tomorrow. Bye.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Shout out to any Mum and Maya subscribers listening if
you love the show and want to support us as well.
Subscribing to Mama Maya is the very best way to
do so. There is a link in the episode description
You're listening to a Muma Mia podcast. Muma Mia acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Are you kidding? It's not about the
mainstream media. Who cares in twenty twenty five, who's on
the Today Show or on sixty minutes. It's about TikTok
and Instagram, and there is an algorithm deciding who gets
(00:32):
platformed and who goes viral on those.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
And now, by the way, those platforms are taking away
fact checking and are taking away a lot of the
layers of authority that they put in place during the
pandemic to make sure there wasn't misinformation.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hello, and welcome to Mummy. Are out loud what women
are talking about on Monday, the seventeenth of February. I
am Jesse Stevens, I'm mea Friedman, and we've got Amelia
Lester filling in for Holly today. Amelia introduced herself in
ten seconds or less.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Hello, I'm a friend of Mia Friedman. I'm an editor
at Foreign Policy Magazine and I'm an Australian American who
lives in Sydney.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I think you should have led with the second part.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I know the most important thing in my life is
that I'm a friend of the agreement.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
She's also tertiary educated, which means I now feel officially outnumbered.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
In terms of the letterboard. You are last. And on
the Show Today last week, Louis Theroux interviewed Armie Hammer,
who launched into an impassioned dickhead defense. What is the
dickhead defense and did it work? Plus the real life
characters from Apple Side of Vinegar are coming forward with
their own accounts. Do they have a point? And could
(01:47):
the Bell Gibson spectacle happen today? And apparently the whole
generation thing is a myth, but we are not all convinced.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But first, in case you missed it, one of Australia's
most successful business women, Kayla Itsines, who is a fitness
influencer with an app called Sweat, which she sold for one
hundred and fifty million dollars and then bought back for
a lot less. She posted a TikTok video last week
calling out what she sees as excessive sexualization in the
(02:15):
fitness industry. Ladies, put your bums away, She essentially said,
stop filming those videos up your bum because I don't
want to see that. While I'm having breakfast. That's literally
what she said. We can't play you a grab of
it because she has since taken it down after a
lot of people were very unhappy and called her out
for being a hypocrite because.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Hasn't she been selling bikini body literally the name bikini
body plans for years and.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Years She has, indeed, and at the end of this video,
when am I missing well the part where I said
she was a businesswoman. At the end of this video,
she did do a shout out to her own glutes
program and say that it was essentially if people didn't
want to look up bums but still wanted to have
amazing glutes. As she said, she said, she's got a
(03:03):
glutes program and if they followed her program then they
could just see more modest bottoms and less Still before
what she was saying, Jesse, I'm not really across Kayla
It scenes, although I do know that this is the
reason we launched move because we wanted people to have
an option of it not being so appearance focused.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
I get served a lot of fitness content on Instagram
and TikTok, and I have been served Kayla It scenes
bick anybody for ten years I'm not sure if she
does it anymore, but I distinctly remember the beginning of
sort of the fitness industry. The model was his or
before and after, and I'm talking ten a day before
and after.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Wow, you have a lot of body after baby stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yes, yes, women's bodies, and Kayla is known. I would
say that the appearance of her abdominals is central to
her marketing. It's really important because you know, it's the
illusion of fitness or it makes people it's shorthand to go.
I'm really in the same way that Sam Wood often
doesn't have a shirt on. I think that fitness is
seen as something very visual. So when I heard her
(04:06):
talking about the sexualization, I thought, we're all playing the
same game here, which is that the algorithm of both
is we need attention in order to get people to
buy our products.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So it's like she's more female gaze, and say the
Tammy Hembrowse who have a lot of shots of their
bum filmed in those low angles. She talks a lot
about low angles, which is just a different vibe. It's
more perhaps male gazing.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, I don't necessarily have a problem with it, and
I'm not sure that it is male gaze because I
get served a lot of glute content because I have
issues activating my glutes is a personal issue that I have,
and I say, TikTok, help me with my glute exercises.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, because your legs just connect straight to your.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Bag exactly, And so what I need is to And
this is my defense of the form fitting because I
know what leggings she's talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Was she talking about leggings or was she talking about angles?
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Angles? But she's saying, you can really see the glute being.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Act But is that maybe sometimes because the glute is
an implant.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Well that's a whole other story.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Aren't you just saying then that abs are female gaze
coded and glutes are male gaze coded.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
See, I think that the gaze is just everyone's gaze.
I think that now that we're just looking at the
same I mean, i'd be interested to see the stats
about who's following who, But I'm a woman who's looking
at a lot of glute centered content. And I think
that the reason we have such form hugging clothing in
exercise is often because there is a focus on form.
(05:30):
There's a focus on this is how you correctly do
the pilates, move the weights for the yoga thing, which
is what you're being for because you don't want to
get injured. So you can't have someone dressed as an
Amish person doing a squat because I don't know how
your backs arching.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Among fitness influences, the trend used to be for a
much slimmer body. Kayla, it seems is very much. She's
very slim, whereas some of the other fitness influencers that
do the booty content, well they've just got really big booties. Yeah,
so there's a more muscular, a more big bottomed. And
(06:04):
the criticisms that she obviously took to heart because she
took it down, were that she was hyper critical because
she flaunted her body, as the Daily Mail would say,
and why is she criticizing other women for how they
want to portray their own bodies.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Last week, documentarian and podcast Louis Thuru released a podcast
episode with actor Armie Hammer that has since gone viral
due to the palpable tension that emerged between the two men.
You might have seen this clip circulating on social media.
Did you have anything else you wanted to say? I
(06:39):
should know.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I mean, I don't love the way the interview started.
Just to be perfectly honest, I'm not crazy about drudging
up all of this stuff because for me, a lot
of these issues have been resolved, whether it be legally
or within myself, and I feel like a lot of
those waters have settled. I think doing things like that
(07:00):
stirs up the water again unnecessarily. It definitely wasn't my
favorite beginning. I'm glad we moved past that and got
to a place where we could have a civil, normal
conversation like that felt good. But drudging up all that stuff, like,
I don't love it.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I hear you and I sense that during the chat.
I think in the court of public opinion, the jury
is still out.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
But my thing now is like the court of public opinion. Like,
pick anything that the court of public opinion has an
opinion on, and there's a very good chance that they
will not be fully informed. There's a very good chance
they don't have the full story, and there's also a
very good chance that they're probably wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I sent this around when I saw it first thing
last week and went, that is the single best podcast
trailer I have ever seen. Because I saw that when
I need to listen to it immediately let's take a
few steps backwards. Because Armie Hammer, who you might know
as the Winklevoss Twins in the Social network or he
was the lead in Call Me by Your Name opposite
(07:59):
Timothy Shallamy, he was accused of sexual emotional and physical assault, rape,
and cannibalistic fantasies in early twenty twenty one. Text messages
were published at the time that read I'm one hundred
percent accnnibal. He expressed a desire to cut off a
piece of his partner and eat it, and another text
expressed wanting to hold a partner down and rape her.
(08:20):
Hamma maintained that these were taken out of context and
were part of a sexually charged and consensual back and forth.
The charges against him were eventually dropped in twenty twenty three,
citing insufficient evidence. Hamma has since spoken about losing every
job he had, he was dropped by his agent, he
was shunned by friends, and he's talked about the emotional
(08:40):
toll that the allegations took on him. And now in
twenty twenty five, he is sitting opposite Louis and I'm
going to give you the headlines from the interview. If
you haven't listened.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Amy has a podcast of his own, doesn't he does?
Mum he does?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, released it last year. Remember his mum bought him
a phaseectomy.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
That was so kind. Do you think he's now just
a lot of people have been talking about he's coming back,
and there's no such thing as cancelation. I imagine he's
been on peas Morgan. Do you think he just is like,
I've just got to talk about it. I'm just going
to own it. I'm going to lean into it, and
I'm going to talk about it until it's not interesting
to people anymore.
Speaker 5 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I think so. I think he probably had two choices.
I mean, he did retreat for a significant period of time,
But the biggest thing is in a moment, he's going
to have movies to promote, so he can't just come out.
And I think when he promotes the movies, he probably
wants to promote the movie.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So he's working again.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Yeah. Is he getting cars?
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, he said he's getting offers every day.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Okay, interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
So these were the headlines from the interview. He admitted
to having an affair while still married to his wife,
but said that people in happy marriages don't have affairs.
He said only one side of the text. Conversations were leaked,
meaning that they would devoid of context. He talked about
intergenerational trauma. His grandfather was accused of killing a man
of sexually abusing his daughter. There's a documentary called The
(09:54):
House of Hammer about the history of the family. He
says the scandal was the greatest thing that ever happened
to him. It forced him to get sober. He didn't
recognize who he had become, and he denies, ultimately that
he was guilty of anything that resembled a crime. Ultimately,
he used what hollywould call the dickhead defense. He was
a bad person, radicalized by fame and money and pornography
(10:18):
and access to anything he wanted All the time, he
treated people badly, women his wife. He says that like Icarus,
he flew too close to the sun, but he was
not guilty of abuse. Maya does the dickhead defense work.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I thought it was a really interesting interview to listen to.
I'm not all the way through it, but I think
that when you call yourself a dickhead, you show two things. Firstly,
there's humility in there, and secondly, there's self awareness. And
I think implicit in that is an apology of sorts,
(10:56):
because what we know is that no matter what you do,
however you apologize, will be critiqued and found wanting by
the apology police. And the other time that I can
think that this really really worked. Although the two things
aren't comparable. But Karl Stefanovic a number of years ago
used an offensive term for a marginalized group of people
(11:19):
and there was a big backlash about it, and the
next day on the Today Show he said, I was
a tool. I really shouldn't have used that word. Now
I understand, I won't use it again. And by calling
himself out so strongly, he sort of left no room
for people to come at him anymore. And it worked.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Have you ever seen a woman do it?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Never?
Speaker 5 (11:40):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
God, no, I don't think a woman can use it
acad defense Amelia, do you think it works well.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
One thing that I thought was so interesting about that grab,
which I assume was the most interesting part of the interview,
is that it reminded me of this phenomenon that doctors
describe as the doorstop question.
Speaker 5 (11:57):
Oh have you heard of that?
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So apparently when you go and see the doctor, they
know that you're basically going to sort of fluff your
way through the actual consultation, and then as you stand
up on the way out, you go just one other thing,
and then that often turns out to be the thing
that is wrong with you, or you know, you might
have a mole that you That's how I almost get
cancer removed.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
We're standing and walking out of the room going actually while.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I'm here, doorstop question Mia. In No Filter interviews, would
you always ask people is there anything else you want
to say? That kind of like cleaning up question in
the air?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Never? I never ever would. Maybe I probably should have.
That's really I think it's a little.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Bit of a lifetack in general, because if you're having
a conversation with someone, it takes time to warm up
to the actual meat of it. I think, sorry, that
was bad given the cannibal discussion.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I think that that's specific to this type of interview
right because Louis, I think this is season four or
season five of his podcast, and it has in terms
of charting, it's not really been working. I listened to
a few of them and I stopped because I don't
think Louis Threux is a celebrity interviewer.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
It's not where he's best.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
He's best talking to weird people about weird thing.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
He is a subculture journalist, like that's where he got
his experience, and he is so skilled at sitting with
someone and giving them space and playing the idiot.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And but it's also not just about him. It's celebrities
have gotten so good at this, and they've all got
their own podcasts. Yeah, they don't need to give you anything.
Whereas real people are less guarded, they have less to lose.
They're also just more interesting. They're not media trained. And
back to your original question, Jesse, do I think it worked? Yeah?
I guess it did work because I came away from
(13:43):
that podcast interview thinking was he a dickhead? Is he
still a dickhead? Absolutely? Is he a cannibal? And all
of the things that I actually had believed that he was.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
No, it's interesting you use two terms. The first was
you said it shows some humility. I do not see
one ioda of humility in that manner.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
No, I think it for him, I think it shows
false humility. Ah, that's why. So I think that's why
it's a defense. I don't think it's always effective, and
I don't think he came across as having humility at all,
But I think if it's done right, like with Karl Stefanovic,
it worked because it did show humility.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
You also said that it was a type of apology,
which was interesting given you can scrape this entire interview
and you will not find anything that is a semblance
of an apology.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, he's angry.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
There's also a semblance of truth in what he said, too,
which is when he talked about the court of public opinion.
And it's true that the court of public opinion can
linger long beyond.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
The actual courts.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
And it brought to mind a case that happened in
twenty twelve in New York a cannibal cop. Have you
heard of this, Jesse Nature Crime Explorations. There was an
NPD officer named Gilberto Valet and he was arrested because
he had been on online forums talking about roasting women,
cooking women, eating women. He was stood down from his
job at the NYPD, but the criminal charges were dropped.
(14:59):
The judge said, look, you clearly have a diseased mind,
that was the phrase he used, but you haven't committed
any crimes. And his lawyers had been arguing that all
along that he was just exploring these sexual fantasies online.
It seems to me that there's a bit of a
parallel here with Army and the idea of minority report,
that old Tom Cruise movie. If you haven't actually done something,
and here I'm just talking about the cannibalism charges, how
(15:21):
do you ever escape it?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yes? And the question is, then what's worse is being
tired with the brush that you're a bad person or
that you're a dickhead, better or worse, and being tired
with the brush that you're a criminal. And what I
found interesting about the dickhead defense was that I thought,
I think I would rather own having committed a crime
than being a bad person. But there are many men
(15:45):
in Hollywood who seem happy to sit there and go
I'm a piece of shit, I'm a terrible person.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Because that's their path back to employment and reintegration into society.
Whereas for a woman to say that she ain't coming back,
like that's not a path back, I think it's completely calculated.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It makes it so clear where our line is in
terms of do you have permission to re enter? Did
you go to even if you went to prison. You
did serve your time, and we'll let them back in.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
But for women like I just thought about Ellen or whatever.
I thought, if she stood and she made a few
jokes and stuff, but if she stood there and went, yeah,
I was a selfish piece of shit who treated everyone poorly,
we'd have gone it just doesn't work. But for him,
even the affair, I thought only affair, and he said, well,
you know, you don't have an affair if your marriage
is going well. And I was like, oh, you're even
(16:31):
blaming her for the affair.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
What I took away from it was that he was
wanting to clarify. It's like, the word out there is
that I'm accountable. I'm not. The word out there is
that all of these things were non consensual. I'm saying
they are now Again it's him against her, he said,
she said, But he was still providing that context that
you hear in people who feel misunderstood, and he says
(16:55):
that he feels very misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
One of the most interesting parts of the interview I
thought was the question about Woody Allen.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
If Woody Allen offered you a role in his new movie,
would you take it?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Would I work with Woody Allen. I mean at this point,
I don't know that I buy into any of the
cancel we need to dis and that like I don't know.
I mean, I know that this is like a trick question,
and I know there's no right way to answer this question.
But I think I think it's well no, because like
(17:26):
if I say.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, it is a trick question. I think louis really
ques brilliant, but it is a trick question. Louis being
disingenuous there.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
He was basically speaking to how there does appear to
be a line being drawn down Hollywood, And he goes
on to ask, oh, also in that movie is Kevin
Spacey and Harvey Weinstein's producing it?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
This movie is going to happen right the way that's
coming out next to you.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, and everyone's going to go and say everyone, And
what he's saying is, have you been so radicalized by
your cancelation that you now go everyone's mad. Let's just
kind of put myself in the camp with the other
men who have been canceled. And I thought he had
quite a fair answer to that, which is I'd want
to sit down with Woody Allen first. I mean, we
(18:09):
all know that that's not going to reveal everything, but
that he just knows that a lot of what is
being said isn't necessarily the truth of someone who he says,
has experienced that.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think we are seeing a big backlash to the
late Orts cancelation era.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I mean, so many of the people, even in Trump's cabinet,
are people who used to be on the Democratic side
of politics who got canceled and then said, well, I'm
seeking revenge. I'm joining Trump's cabinet.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
That's true. I think of the moment, there's a Trump
theme here. I agree. After the break some updates on
the Bell Gibson story. One week after the release of
Apple Side of Vinegar.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
It's been a week since the new series Apple Side
of Vinegar has been released on Netflix, and it has
sparked global attention from people discovering this story for the
first time from around the world. And also there've been
quite a few developments from people who are associated with
this story in real life. The family of Jessinskoff, who
(19:09):
who is the wellness influencer who's portrayed in the show
as Miller Blake heavily inspired by Jess's story, but her
family have come out her father in particular, and said
that it's just not true. There are a lot of
inaccuracies in the way.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
What does he say are the inaccuracy Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
So he says that the main inaccuracy is that Jess
and Bell Gibson were friends. And Talon Parmenter, who is
Jess's former fiance, has also come out and said that
same thing. And I think what's really important for people
to understand because I watched that story happen as it
happened in real life to Jess. They're not disputing the
medical side, so nobody knows exactly what her medical history is.
(19:50):
And that's frankly not so much how business, except for
what she told us through her Instagram, and she was
very open and honest about saying that at the end
she wished that she'd listened to doctors earlier on in
her journey. The other person who's come out this week
is Richard Gilliat, who says that he was the one,
and indeed he was. He's a journalist from The Australian.
(20:13):
He broke the original story and revealed the moment that
Bell Gibson's lies began unraveling, and he also said that
what he thought was most different about the way Bell
was portrayed versus his experience of her, and he did
interview her a number of times, is that he said
she was portrayed as this quite conniving, successful scammer, and
he said that she was actually terrible. She was terrible
(20:35):
at covering her tracks. It was a time before people
would dig online, so she didn't have to be as
good as she would have had to be today. But
he said she was actually a really bad liar and
there were always big holes in her story. It's just
that nobody really looked into them at the time. The
Victorian premier Justinto Allan has come out and said that
consumer Affairs Victoria, who is owed hundreds of thousands of
(21:00):
dollars from a fine Bell Gibson, was given back in
twenty seventeen. It's now over half a million dollars that
she ownes with penalties. Just Cintra Allen has said that
they will continue pursuing that debt, and it was also
recently revealed that Belle has split from her longtime partner
Clive Rothwell, who is portrayed in the show, and also
claims that she still can't afford to pay her fines.
(21:24):
What we were thinking about is could Belle Gibson happen
in twenty twenty five or was that a moment in
time and we've all learned our lesson about wellness scammers? Amelia?
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
One thing they thought was really interesting in that Richard
Gilliad story was that he pointed out this was the
very beginning of the wellness movement. He said that when
he started reporting on that he had never written anything
about wellness before.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Can you imagine, Yeah, well, a man working at a
broadsheet and mainstream media, right, so at the time.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, it was have a different era, but.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No one was really willing to call it out at
the time because, especially when someone came out and said
they had cancer, you can't ask for someone's medical records.
It didn't occur to people that lies were being told
or that they were going to necessarily have tragic ends.
Everyone was just sort of watching this slow moving car accident.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It got me thinking more broadly about the trajectory of
the wellness movement, because if you assume it sort of
started around twenty ten, let's say, and then it kind
of reached its climax, if you will, during the pandemic
when we had this actual public health emergency, and suddenly
thinking about our fourteen stepskin care routines and the optimal
(22:37):
way to tone our abs might have seemed irrelevant. But
if anything, I think it caused more people to embrace
the idea that their body was the only thing they
could control in this completely out of control moment.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Well, that was Pete Evans' time, right when he was
selling those health lamps and the bone broth, and when
he sort of imploded. Do you think a lot of
people who were perhaps interested in alternate medicine became radicalized
during COVID Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I think that what happened was that when the world
became more out of control, people realized, well, I can
make sure I e five servings of fruit and vegetables
every day, and I can make sure that I get
my body into optimal shape. And that idea of optimization,
which came to us via Silicon Valley but then sort
of trickled down into the wellness industry, I think was
a big part of that. That idea of making sure
(23:24):
that every part of your life serves a purpose and
your body is running like a well oiled machine.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
So it almost seems like an absurd question to ask
you when over the weekend the new health secretary in
America was sworn in and it's rfk Jr.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
Yes, So, Robert F.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Kennedy Jr. Is now Donald Trump's new Health and Human
Services Secretary. It's interesting because in his confirmation hearings, he
was asked a lot of questions about whether he believes
in vaccines, and he kept saying that, yeah, he's actually
fine with them. The way that he would make an
official distinction is that he thinks that people should make
their own choices about vaccines. Now, of course that kind
of undercuts the whole purpose of vaccines, which has herd immunity.
(24:03):
But Caroline Kennedy, his cousin, came out with a video
before his hearing where she said he vaccinates his kids.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
It's just that he's decided that.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
It's financially lucrative for him to profit off these families
with sick children and basically scare manger about the health
effects of vaccines. Broadly speaking, I think that his appointment
really shows that the Make America Healthy Again movement has
fully taken flight. Are you familiar with this basically like Maha, Yeah, MAHA.
So basically, it really emphasizes integrative and holistic medicine, reducing
(24:35):
environmental pollution, eating healthy. Look, all of this sounds great, obviously,
I don't think anyone at this table would disagree that
those are worthy goals. But I think there is a
darker side to it, which says, your health is solely
your responsibility. The government needs to get out of helping
you live a healthy life, and if you get an
illness or a disease, it's kind of on you. And
one example of that is that at his hearing he
(24:57):
said that we should study the origins of chronic illness
over researching infectious diseases. Now, I think that most people,
certainly most scientists, would probably say we should do both.
Let's figure out how to fix obesity and make sure
that we prevent the next airborne pandemic.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
What Apple Side of Vinegar did so well that I
think actually plays perfectly into this MAHA moment is that
the wellness movement and the MAHA movement both have a point,
like they have a real point. And Jess's family coming
out and saying don't put her alongside Bell Gibson. I
think that's fair because Jess really had cancer, and that's
(25:33):
what they're trying to say too, And that is a
totally different thing the wellness movement. People who talk about
holistic or alternative remedies aren't lying about their health conditions.
That's like a.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Separate thing, but it was some of them are.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
It's a total anomaly like that someone would lie about it.
I think the question of whether or not it would
happen today is an interesting one because I keep seeing
a lot of commentary and criticism about the role that
the media played in this.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But hang on, don't we have these We just had
an Australian influencer parenting influencer arrested a couple of weeks
ago for faking an illness allegedly allegedly in her child
and actually allegedly harming her child.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
So in that way, the onus, I think has to
be on the media in terms of what they platform
and doing their due diligence. If you've got someone on
your morning TV show saying that each how do you do.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
That, Jesse? Do you ask them for their medical record? Well,
this is what I mean.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
If they're sitting there saying you should do a coffee enema,
it'll cure your cancer, whether or not they have cancer.
I don't think you should platform them because every scientist
in the country will tell you that's not true. But
we cannot. And this is something I don't know it
comes up in the show, but there is patient doctor confidentiality.
We cannot access people's health records. If someone comes out
(26:49):
and says, if Bell Gibson emerges now and says she
has cancer, we can't prove or disprove that what n
did this whole case was actually following the money. And
one of the things I was most surprised to learn
was about the five year old boy who in real
life she pledged to give him an enormous amount of
money for surgery. And that was true, and that was true,
(27:10):
and she never gave it to him, and he died.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
What Jess's father and former fiance have objected to, again
is not so much the portrayal of her medical story,
but it's the idea that she was somehow parallel to
Bell Gibson, that she cared about Bell Gibson, that she
wanted to enact revenge on Bell Gibson. At the end
of her life. None of that happened, and I have
(27:33):
to say, I wasn't aware of any of that sort
of connection, which.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Is why Mila was understood to be an amalgamation of
a few different people and wasn't given the real life
name of Jess. And so I think we've got to
be really careful in talking about it.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Belle wanted to be like Jess, like that part is
true clearly because Jess was much more famous.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yes, but we have to be careful to not say
that Mila is Jess because she's not.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Belle did turn up at Jess's funeral, though, that's true.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just back on that question of whether it can happen again, though, Jesse,
I think you made a really interesting point, which is
that people are feeling tired, exhausted, run down, stressed, anxious,
can't sleep. That's been happening ever since we got smartphones, basically, yeah,
and we're searching for solutions.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
And the conspiracy that institutions, that governments, that pharmaceutical companies,
you know what we eat, is making us sick. It's
not totally a conspiracy, the pharmaceutical industry in the US especially,
it's a for profit medical system. I watched a movie
recently called Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo about a company
(28:39):
that put toxic chemicals in its water supply, and this
whole town people were getting cancers and autoimmune diseases. The
erosion of trust in institutions is real and justified.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
In Australia, they've been finding certain chemicals in dams. Back
to the point of could it happen today? And when
you said about the mainstream media needs to be careful
who they platform, are you kidding? It's not about the
mainstream media. Who cares in twenty twenty five, who's on
the Today Show or on sixty minutes. It's about TikTok
on Instagram, and there is an algorithm deciding who gets
(29:13):
platformed and who goes viral on those.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
And now, by the way, those platforms are taking away
fact checking and are taking away a lot of the
layers of authority that they put in place during the
pandemic to make sure there wasn't misinformation.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
But to their credit, those platforms also have amateus looths.
And so I think that everything that happened in the
portrayal of the other thing that the reporter from The
Australian said is that his wife actually had breast cancer
and he really resented that being grafted onto the story
of the two guys from the age who do exist
as well, but again they were all fictionalized. I think
(29:50):
that TikTok would do this lou thing, so it's kind
of like it couldn't happen again, but it already is.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
We're all hungry for the magic bullet, for the solution
to our general feelings of malise and exhaustion, and I
think we're going to keep looking for that as long
as these big institutions are declining in front of our
very eyes. Are you always thinking about your next meal
or snack? I am. I think that everyone in the
world can be divided into two categories. People who are
(30:16):
thinking about what they're going to eat next, and people
who think that there should be a pill for food
and you never have to do.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I'm in that category.
Speaker 5 (30:22):
What do you mean there is?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's called weight loss drugs.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
No, as in like I wish that I could just
have a cup of sludge a day, but had on
my nutrients.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Oh, I fall somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I'm one of those people who looks at the menu
of a restaurant before I go to decide exactly what
I'm going to order.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
See, I'm the one who sits there and goes you order.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
I'll just pick anyway.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
There's a word for people like me, and this Japanese
word is kushi sabishi, which translates to lonely mouth. I
learned this from Pandora Sex newsletter, and it refers to
when you want to eat something, not because you are
hungry or because you require nutritional value, but because your
mouth needs company. And I love this, Oh.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I love this. So it's different to eating your feelings.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yes, it's just because your mouth needs company. And this
explains okers smokers, Maybe it'd explains smokers. It's an oral fixation. Actually,
I once had a yoga teacher who said that part
of the reason why people get addicted to smoking is
because you're doing yoga breathing and it relaxes you.
Speaker 5 (31:16):
It's so true, we should put a health warning on that.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
A much healthier habit is buying your pretzels in bulks
from cost Co, which is what I do. Because I
have lonely mouth. I always need to have a party
in my mouth. And now I have a word to describe.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Did you gun No?
Speaker 5 (31:31):
Because I don't like it. Don't doesn't do a bit
of crunch, a little bit of salt.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I'm quite particular about my mouth. Do you have a
favorite snack for your lonely mouth?
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Okay, T T yeah, yeah, my mouth is lonely without
tea as.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Someone nothing likes my brain up. I don't really get
excited about things, but I have begun with the Easter eggs.
I know it's only February.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Cross bunds, but it's a particular type of taste of
East eggs.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Which there's just the little Cadbury, nothing inside, nothing fancy,
and you chuck it in the mouth and then you
just suck it. And I have them every single night,
Like I'm just well, I've been overdoing it and I've
been feeling a bit seack. So I'm trying to cut
down to say five, what would r would? He would
say anything that happens for you as your own fault,
(32:17):
and he'd probably be right.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Coming up next, a generational argument that we have been
waiting to have all day. Maybe all our lives.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Want unlimited out loud access. We drop episodes every Tuesday
and Thursday exclusively from Mum and Maya. Subscribers follow the
link in the show notes to get us in your
ears five days a week and a huge thank you
to all our current subscribers.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Are generations Real? An ABC podcast called Future Tense has
come up with a pretty provocative theory on this in
an episode called The Danger of Generational Labeling. The podcast
brings in demographers who argue that the naming of generations
is pseudoscience. Says it's no better than astrology.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
But it's a hang on. Isn't it based on literally
when you were born?
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, but there's always christ Us true.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
So baby boomers apparently they're allowed to still be a generation.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
They can breathe easy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
They are based on what the experts call a demographic reality.
But then you move on to these more pseudoscience cultural generations.
Generation X, Sorry, Mia, that's not based on an economic
or demographic reality.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
In my head, it's all.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
In your head.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Millennials, Jesse and I. It's just a reference to a
point in time. It doesn't mean anything. Gen Z was
still arguing on when that group begins and ends, and
apparently Jen Alpha, no one even knows if that's a
real thing. And also the name is very unimaginative because
we're starting at the side of the alphabet.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Is this because baby boomers were actually a reference to
a change in population. Right, So there's a certain number
of babies born every year, but there was a big
spike after the war, hence the name of the baby boomers.
What generations have come to me now is like how
they've been influenced by the culture. Is that what generations are?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yes, And so there's all these problems with labeling people
like that they suppress individuality, they're very static. So like
a millennial when a millennial was fifteen is probably quite
different to what a millennial is like now. For instance,
I now like watching nature documentaries and talking about real estate.
But when I was fifteen, I was still a millennial.
I did not enjoy either of those things.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
But isn't that just then what a millennial like? Now
millennials are all having children, So that's just what millennials
are doing.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
About a difference between us age rather than generation.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
Yes, So in fact it's brilliant.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Millennials were seen as this kind of cynical work, obsessed,
were obsessed generation.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
And halfaway and the devils products exactually a tootemic millennial.
Speaker 5 (34:46):
You're not a writer in reality by ites as yours
like we.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Were given this specific personality, and then we grew up
and faced the housing market, or whether or not we
were going to have children, all of these things that
people do in a lifespan, and we responded to those variables.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
But it's different because the generation behind you, which is
Gen Z, aren't the same as you. They're not obsessed
with work, they're not the differences between I think that's
changing too at the same age.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
So back in twenty seventeen, I wrote a big article
about Gen Z as the most socially progressive generation ever,
and that was grounded in some social science research that
was emerging at the time. For instance, they were much
more accepting of the idea of gender fluidity. They were
much more into racial justice. They were called sometimes the
Harry Potter generation, meaning that they wanted to go out
and avenge the wrongs of the world. But look in
(35:37):
the recent US election, almost half of young people voted
for Donald Trump, and that was much higher than it's
been in previous generations or in previous elections. So the
idea that we assume that young people are always progressive,
maybe it's just that young people are always progressive, and
then as they get older and they face adversity in
different problems in life.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
They're not progressive because gen z big maga people. Yes,
I'm being general, but.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
They've grown up a little bit, is the point. And
what people are saying is that there's datists to suggest
that as you grow up, you become more risk averse.
So the idea that you become more conservative as you
grow older, rather than it being we can look at
this generation and go, they're going to vote this way.
How they vote actually can change throughout a lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
So then why was the cover story of New York
magazine all these young, hip gen z maga people.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Well, the point is, and I think this is what
they're trying to make that media and marketing has become
obsessed with generations. Before they even look at the data,
they've decided what they're going to see, and they're kind
of projecting these stories onto people that aren't true. So,
for example, a lot of generations and millennials, gen Z
(36:47):
is about cultural shifts that happened in the US. Now
South Korea is using the idea of gen Z. Nothing
happened in South Korea that was particularly fundamental, So that's
one problem with it. The second is that it doesn't
look at variables like class. And that's the big thing
that we never seem to talk about, is that a
white middle class millennial is not the same as a
(37:11):
migrant who lives in a totally different suburb. They don't
vote the same, they didn't have the same set of
life experiences to that point.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Just last week, I can't believe I'm defending boomers, but
here we are. A report came out and it showed
that there's a bunch of renting retirees in Australia who
are living below the poverty line. The actual stat was
two thirds of renting retirees. You don't think of boomers
in our discourse, okay, boomer discourse. You don't think of
them as living below the poverty line, but a lot
of them are.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
And it's causing a lot of unnecessary tension between generations
when we might have more things in common than we think,
and we get this stereotype. So before a gen Z
walks into the office, you might go, oh, here we go,
here's another one, and then they do or say something
and it just sort of reinforces what we already suspect.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I think it can be a helpful acknowledgment of the
cultural impact of certain things depending on how old you are.
That's what it is to me. So for example, I
looked at this thing about one point zero versus gen
Z two point zero and the differences with it. One
point zero graduated high school before COVID and two point
(38:16):
zero graduated high school after COVID.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
So the demographers in this talking about generations said that
matters COVID is massive, exactly, And so.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
To say gen Z, like, that's a big impact. And so,
for example, the relevant cultural events for gen Z who
graduated high school before COVID were like the Women's March
and the Climate Strikes Back March and Black Lives Matter
and all of those things were part of the zeitgeist.
But for the ones who graduated after COVID, it's more
about resistance to COVID and masking protocols and more of
(38:49):
a move towards MAGA and anti cancer.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
And I think that's that's right me and I was
going back and forth on this topic myself. Another example
is jen Alpha. They're very young people under the age
of six or seven. Apparently a lot of them are
suffering from slow development in gross modor skills and that's
because when they were meant to be going to playground,
all the playgrounds were shut.
Speaker 5 (39:10):
Now that's a clear cultural impact. So they were lives.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
You have a whole generation who were in utero and
then at home. It's kind of like the COVID rescue dogs.
They're messed up. A generation of dogs that were adopted
or born during COVID are messed up because they missed
all of that socialization. So we now see the effects in.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah, apparently young kids are having problems with toilet training
because that requires you to involve various gross motor actions
in your body. They grew up on screens a lot
more than other kids because their parents were trying to
work at the same time as the kids were stuck
at home. All of this meant that there's a sort
of population wide problem with gross motor skills.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
And so yeah, see that seems a lot more significant
to me than say, looking at millennials and they say
the GFC was really you've got early and late millennials.
When you graduated in proximity to the GFC matters a
lot in terms of what career choices you made. But
I would also say add class in there.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Like that's the way the on the GFC, there's a
thing about micro generations. Have you come across this concept?
Speaker 2 (40:13):
So my husband graduated from university in two thousand and
eight and I graduated in two thousand and five.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
See I graduated high school in two thousand and fo. Okay,
so it's a different yeah, you go.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
So the thing is that between him and me, there's
three years, but there's a world of difference in terms
of I entered the workforce when everyone was feeling good.
First job had a caviar and oyster tower at the
Christmas Priorty. When he entered the workforce, he said, this
is not so good. I'm going to go and be
a professional mover for a few years because there's not
a lot of jobs available.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
That's so interesting. So those big cultural moments do impact
on a generation, but I think they impact on a
generation differently depending on how old you are. So for example,
for Gen.
Speaker 5 (40:52):
X, yeah, what are your generation?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Well, AIDS was a big thing and becoming sexually active
at a time when sex was being portrayed. You know,
the boomers had free love and by the time the
millennials came along and were having sex, HIV was not
seen as a death sentence anymore, and you know, it
was just a different time. But for us it was
like our COVID essentially connected to sex.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
I also think that technology and the speed at which
technology is evolving, is churning out generations at a faster pace,
because I think there's such a distinction between when you
got your first phone, what apps you use.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
My daughters sat down in front of the television yesterday
to pick something on Netflix, and she started, now, this
is a podcast, but she started scrolling my TV and
she just knew intuitively how to scroll, and I had
to explain, sorry, we don't have touchscreen TVs.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
But how did she even learn that?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Now I'm having the same like lunar and a phone.
She never sees me pick up a ringing phone. So
I got a ring ring and she's like, what, that's
all we have time for today. A big thank you
to all of you the out louders for listening to
today's show and our fabulous team for putting it together.
We will be back in your ears tomorrow. Bye.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Shout out to any Mum and Maya subscribers listening if
you love the show and want to support us as well.
Subscribing to Mama Maya is the very best way to
do so. There is a link in the episode description
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