November 26, 2025 • 48 mins
Would you partner notice if you 'quiet quit' your relationship? You know, quietly moving into separate bedrooms, watching all your own shows in different rooms of the house at night, never socialising together, taking separate holidays... Plenty of people are doing it, and probably always have. So, is it always a bad thing? And is it possible to un-quit?
Also, Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and the world's most-irritating press tour. Yes, Wicked For Good is out and you will not have missed the two stars coo-ing over each other on global red carpets. Are they the world's greatest girlfriends, or are they playing us? And when did press tours become performance art?
And... what are high school reunions for? It's long been predicted that social-media-stalking has killed the reunion, but Amelia just went to her 25th and she had a revelation.
Plus, Jessie, Amelia and Holly share the 'plate' they take to BYO social events, and what "some cheese in a plastic bag" says about you.
Support independent women's media
Read The Women Quiet Quitting Their Husbands by Monica Corcoran Harel in The Cut, here.
What To Listen To Next:
- Listen to our latest episode: The 5 Days You Should Schedule Every Month
- Listen: The Most Telling Detail In That Meghan Sussex Profile
- Listen: ‘I Was An Ugly Child’ & The 5-Second Underthinking Rule
- Listen: Everything That Shouldn't Be Embarrassing But Absolutely Is
- Listen: So That's The Reason I Feel Bad About… My Eyelids?
- Listen: Big Brother Australia, The Golden Bachelor & The TV ‘Algorithm Theory’
- Listen: Get My Boss Out Of My Bed & The Last Relationship Taboo
- Listen: Squirting, Dawn Culture & The Most Motivating Word
- Listen to MID with Monique van Tulder: The Gap Year That Saved A Marriage
- Connect your subscription to Apple Podcasts
Discover more Mamamia Podcasts here including the very latest episode of Parenting Out Loud, the parenting podcast for people who don't listen to... parenting podcasts.
Watch Mamamia Out Loud:
What to read:
- The messy middle stage of separation that no one warns you about.
- A brutally honest review of the new Wicked movie.
- Let's talk about all the most unhinged things that happened in Wicked: For Good.
- The 9 biggest differences between Wicked: For Good and the musical.
- 'The 6 answers I needed about the social media age re
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Do you two inundated by messages? As I got a
few from women wearing leggings feeling really victimized by Monday's
show obsessed. There was a video of a woman exercising
and she's wearing her headphones and she's like, personally victimized
by today's MoMA Mia out loud, and she flashed her
phone down as she was wearing her leggings, and I'm like,
oh no, it's okay.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Can I be clear that I was extremely uncoor in
high school and take storial advice from me.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Hello, and welcome to Mama Mia out loud. It's what
women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the twenty.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Sixth of November. I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm Amelia Last and.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
I am Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
And here's what's on our agenda for today. What color
is your aura? I'm just asking for Ariana Grande. Also,
school reunions.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Who are they for? Why do we go?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Amelia went recently and had a realization and the women
quiet quitting their husbands.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
But first, Jesse Stevens, we are.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Entering into the social season. It's December, literally next week,
and I am in three group chats where I'm being
asked what plate I am bringing, and I have discovered
that at thirty four years old, I need a plate.
So I'm envious of people who have like an iconic
cake that they.
Speaker 5 (01:30):
Bring everyone goes. You bring that flowerless a dip. It's
often a like an onion dip or something.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And I'm sorry, I need a tiny bit more detail
about these groups you're in, all right, that people are
talking about plates?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
All right, give me something. What's happening?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
One is this weekend. I still haven't replied because I'm panicking.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So it's like it's family gathering, friend this is friends,
friends gathering, and you've all been asked to bring a thing.
Everyone brings plate, and no one's policing the thing, so
you could end up with fourteen cakes or fourteen Well.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
We're in a group chat, so I think we're meant
to like follow the Yeah, a self pleasing situation.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Christmas Day? What are you bringing? Right right right there?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
And I'm just waiting for someone to tell me to
bring the bread rolls that.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
I can do.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
And also on Christmas Day? Did you used to not
have to bring anything? But now you've reached an age
where you have to bring something?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Is that how it works?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Got it?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Got it?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Got it.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I think something happens around the age of thirty four
where everyone goes you're not at a kid's table anymore.
Speaker 5 (02:21):
I bring something, contribute exactly, Okay, got it?
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Look to complicate matters. I read an article in The
Atlantic this week that says that your signature dish says.
Speaker 5 (02:32):
A lot about you. Oh gosh, right.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
So, cheese board people very type A people. They are
natural curators. They are highly strung, little bit anal.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
It's really easy to do cheese board. I sometimes do cheese.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
No, but don't think you're doing it right now?
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Are you writing the name of the cheese in a
little piece of chalk in a whimsical fine?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (02:52):
Oh no, then people are mad.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
You offered to bring the bringing some cheese and a
plastic bag.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Oh no, no, you have to spend three hundred dollars
and have the fancy crackers that don't break when you
put the cheese on them.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
Did people caretakers? They like to take care.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
You have everyone right, Salad people, Holly, there's a rumor
that you're a salad person. Apparently that makes you a
sunny optimist with a slight moral superiority complex.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This is.
Speaker 5 (03:26):
Now apparently desert people want applause.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
They're the people who need the fuss, which I think
is very true. I need for my dish, Amelia, do
you have a dish?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
You have sent me into a spiral of despair because
I'm very good at mixing the gronies, very.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Very Apparently that means you're like fun, your social you're
the life of the party.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's yeah, I'm very lazy, so that works.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
No, I like that. Do you have a dish?
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Okay, I am known for bringing my aldi spannicopeter.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Oh do you turn me on to that? That is
Tuesday night dinner? And last night, yeah it was Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
It was a cheese that I exactly right.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
What do you think that says about you?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I think it says that I am cheap, that I
am lazy. The problem with that dish is that I
need an oven, right like I often eat it up there.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
But apparently that's a no. No oh yeah, that's way
too in.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So the reason why it could be genius, if you're
a slightly different kind of person, take it out of
the box. You let it softened to frost a little bit,
and then you put it in a big topp ofware
container on like a clean tea towel or something, and
it looks like you made it.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And then you get to the house and you go,
I've just got to whack this in the oven for five.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Do you think that it's frowned upon to bring something
that's frozen or Once I was told to bring a dish,
I didn't understand the criteria.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
And I brought a cuscuss thing that I bought from coals.
But that's okay. No, No, there was no cutlery and
there were no plates. Oh so it was like, is
this a picnic?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It was kind of like a picnic vibe, and everything
was like a bruiseshetter. It was meant to be fingerfood
and no one could eat it.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay, I've got a sort the best dinner party I
ever went to the hostess of the dessert. She bought
out some cookies and some big tubs of ice cream,
and she said, make your own ice cream sandwiches.
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Did you think she made the cookies?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
She hadn't made the cookies.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Mean, it's very Megan. I've been watching her holidays.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
But of course, what's that she did?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Well, Oh, she's got so many, But this is I
want you to take in some of her hostessing tips,
because that's next on your agenda. Jesse is Oh, Christmas
is at Jesse and Luca's house. Yeah, yes, she says,
always answered the daor to your dinner party dressed all
fancy but barefoot, because that suggests, oh, I'm not quite ready.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Oh I'm a little bit. I'm a little bit with
a bit of it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It makes it like you're all dollied up, but you
haven't had time to put your shoes on.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
So it puts people at ease.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, and then she except for Princess Kate when she
showed up and Meghan had done exactly that perfect.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
It also signals to people, I want you to make
your shoes off. It makes an awkward thing about whether
or not they She was like, oh.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
As you've just said, put an apron over your evening dress.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
I love it anyway.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
But she also says that you should do things like
that cookies, ice cream, or you know, like lay out
people's break like here's some yogurt, here's some fruit, because
people like to make their own things.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
The way they like them. Oh, you're you're right, that.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
Was what's salad?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
This is very boring, but it's actually my favorite thing
to eat in the world. So the other reason I.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Take it is because you want to say neat it.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
I've been making exactly the same salad since I was fourteen,
which is like some kind of grain like.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Brown rice, quemoa. Yeah, of course course, did you know
what keemwa was?
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That was definitely rice. Keema didn't exist, only an ancient grain.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Land Screamline came after jenne.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
J definitely pre dates, but some kind of grain chopped
up tomatoes. I love to tomatoes, my favorite thing to eat.
And lots of herbs, so like basil, parsley, mint, whatever,
lemon juice, feather cheese, bang bit of onion.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
And do you make up before you get it or
do you bring the bits and then do you make
it in the kitchen?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
You know, I make it before I get there, but
I don't put the lemon juice and the olive oil
on it until you get there because it goes soggy.
But I make that in a big bowl and you
take that and it looks pretty and it looks fresh,
but it took nothing.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
It took nothing, all right, I sound like began Jersey.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
I think instead of bringing a dish, what you can
promise is sparkling conversation.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
You can middle.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Did you see that? Cobe your enthusiasm about middling. The
most important thing that you can bring to a dinner
party gathering is middle energy. That means someone who sits
in the middle of the crowd and make sure that
the conversation is always interesting and flowing.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Okay, all right, I can bring that, just middle and
do that and start some fights.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
To keep things spicy.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
There is an essay published in The Cut that is
currently going viral. It is called The Women Quietly Quitting
their Husbands. Monica Corcoran. Harold writes, rather than deal with
the drama of divorce, more and more women over forty
are choosing to check out. I assumed that this would
be a story about money, that it would be we
(08:23):
can't afford to get divorced anymore, But that was not
what the author found at all. Really, these women say
that they just don't have time. They're subconsciously uncoupling, maybe
waiting for the kids to leave home, And maybe that's
not entirely new. She writes, about remembering as a kid,
there was a year where her mother didn't speak to
(08:45):
her father, and then he turned around one day and said,
is there a problem?
Speaker 3 (08:48):
I love, isn't a problem?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Probably didn't even say in a passive aggressive way. He
was like, oh, is there a problem?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I feel like I haven't heard from me lately. But
what does it look like? What does quite quitting your
marriage to look like?
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Yes, it looks like some people don't live together, so
they're living on opposite sides of the country, moving so quiet,
that's not so quiet, living or sleeping in a guest bedroom,
not really talking, definitely not going out together or anything
like that.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
Now will open it up.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's an anecdote in there about how again the author's parents.
She remembers that she would have to go to her
dad on Saturdays and say, do you have any dry
cleaning mums about to go?
Speaker 5 (09:30):
That's middling, that's the child.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
She's been unpacking a lot of this shit in therapy
for a long time.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
I want to know.
Speaker 7 (09:38):
So.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Corcoran Harrold says that the dissatisfied wife isn't entirely new.
What is a little bit new is the normalization of
settling for being utterly dissatisfied and being quite open with
your mates about it, being like, I pay my husband,
but we're still married.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Holly.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Is this a phenomenon that you've noticed.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Holly, You've interviewed a lot of midlife women. I want
to know if they are quietly quitting their marriages.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yes, yes, and yes. This essay I loved it.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
I loved it because it was very real, even though
it kind of dwells in this because it's American and
it's quite you know, coastal and all those things. But
there is so much truth in this essay. There's so
much truth. There's a quote in there which says marriage
is the world's most impossible endurance challenge.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yep, And it does feel.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Like that sometimes because a lot of the people who
she's talking to in this article have been together for
twenty years plus.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So a long time.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And you know, we all know it's so well documented.
Desire wanes, we're attracted to new stimulus, like we you know,
all of those things are difficult. A lot of these
people will have been through raising kids to a point
at which they're not so desperately involved and bonded by
that activity anymore so that gives you a new like
sort of space to be apart from each other literally
(10:57):
and people who kind of they like each other. Fine,
not all the people in this article do, but they're
kind of like, I'm just done with pretending that I
want to watch your TV shows and I want to
listen to you talking about golf or whatever it is.
I want to live my life now. And that is
an incredibly common midlife experience. And I interviewed this woman
(11:18):
for the last season of mid Monique van Tulder. She
had written a book called The grown Up Gap Year,
and her story wasn't typical because you know, there's a
certain amount of privilege involved that she was able to
literally leave her marriages for a period of time. But
what drove her to that point was all the things
I just said. Her kids had got to a teenage
point where they she'd kind of got them through the
(11:39):
HSC and they were still living at home, but they
didn't really need her.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Her husband was.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Not abusive or awful or anything like that, but he
was very caught up in his job and his life
and his stuff, and she was just like, oh, I'm
just done, And so she left for three months and
went to live somewhere else and went to travel around
and waited for them to notice. Basically waited for her
husband and sons to kind of.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
Go oh, like, where's mom, where's mom?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
And it took them a while to notice. And then
she said when she worked her way back to the relationship,
which she did, she said, the marriage in the relationship
has never been better because they've kind of re established
boundaries and rules that pushed her to that point. But
what was interesting to me is over and over again
in that conversation, she kept saying, men need to understand
that to avoid an expensive divorce, they need to X
(12:26):
Y Z. And I think that that's a large part
of this is very often men are blindsided in midlife.
They haven't really noticed that their partner is kind of
check everything and deciding whether or not they want to
keep going like this or not, and they haven't really noticed,
and by the time the woman comes to them and says, hey,
(12:48):
sometimes too late. And sometimes it's not whether or not
you can remodel that. But the other thing that is
interesting about the quiet quitting, I mean, I think there
are lots of interesting things about it. I think that
on one hand, it could be a season so just
like quiet quitting your job, you might be in the
same job for a long time but go through a
period of time where you're just like, oh, you know,
and you need something to happen to reinvigorate it. The
(13:10):
logical answer isn't leave your job. Is that maybe you've
quite quit and then maybe you lean back in, And
I think that can be true.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
But the other piece is is that leaving, even.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
If you can afford it, even if all of those
things are true, is incredibly brave and difficult and up
into your life in all kinds of ways, and not
everybody is up for that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
One question that I had reading this is what's new
about this that instead of staying together for the kids,
it's more about the fact that it's just simply logistically
too complicated and that people don't have time. Because this
is a generation, broadly speaking Gen X and Alder millennials
who had a lot of trauma around parents divorcing or
(13:50):
not divorcing, as the author's case may be, and then
have they decided that instead of staying together, they've just
decided that it's logistically too complicated.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
What's the difference?
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, I wonder if that's the case, and if there
is also not that it's status, but that being openly
dissatisfied with your job, or your marriage, or your house
or something in your life is kind of allowed now,
like have women always felt like this? Did our grandmothers?
Did our great grandmothers feel like this? But they weren't
allowed to say it out loud? And so now there's
(14:24):
a language around women sitting there at a dinner table
with their friends going I hate my husband because reading this.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
I don't think you could read this and not recognize it.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
And my question was whether or not it's a gender thing.
Is it that there's something going on with men that
they don't have the friendships entering midlife, that they are
not strengthening the muscle of communication, that women feel lonely
because they don't have someone to talk to, or is
this a dynamic that men and women.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Are both responsible.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
I think that men also quite quit their marriage is.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
All yeah, right, me too.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And one of the quotes in this that I pulled
out because it was so familiar to me and a
lot of people around me and women I talk to,
was that for women, this quote was passivity came up
again and again in my reporting. She writes, husbands tune
out their disenchanted wives, like Charlie Brown deflects the monotonous
drone of his school teacher. They make flimsy promises to
(15:26):
engage more on an emotional level. So women will often
go and say I need more, like can we do
date nights?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Can we go to therapy? What about couples yoga? What
about you know whatever?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I need you to vacuum empty the dishwasher, And it
says they make flimsy promises to engage more on an
emotional level, or to help out around the house. Maybe
they vacuum for a month or two, or act all
intrigued when a partner event's about an incapable colleague. But
eventually the extra credit effort falls by the wayside or
just doesn't feel like enough. And that I think that
men absolutely quite quick marriages too. Maybe they're having affairs,
(15:57):
maybe they're not. A lot of this isn't really about sex.
It's more about the compatibility or not of living with
one person for a really long time. And I think
that the question of what's new is I wonder if
it's about expectation. Yeah, because anyone who's been in a
relationship for a really long time knows that. Of course,
not every day you jump up and go like, oh
my god, I love our life together and you're the
(16:20):
most interesting person in the world and all those things,
But at what point is rubbing along? And sometimes as
a woman in this who says we started sleeping in
separate beds, which lots of couples do for lots of
very legitimate reasons, to do with kids, to do with snoring,
to do with work shifts, all those things. And then
suddenly it's like when the kids go to bed, I
go to my room and watch my shows, and he
goes to his room and watch his shows. And then
(16:40):
suddenly you realize you've had six months of that, and
it's like, I think that the expectation of like what's
okay to settle for in inverted commas is a conversation
we're more ready to have, and the answer to that
will be really different for different women.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And is it a rebellion against this push of marriage
is hard?
Speaker 5 (16:59):
Marriage is hard.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
We grew up I think Millennials and Gen X grew
up with it is something you need to work at,
like it was all about labor. And I wonder if
there was an interesting passage that sort of said marriage
isn't hard, it's actually really easy because you get married,
you get presents, you go on a honeymoon, it's lovely.
(17:21):
And then there's no performance plan, there's no manager, there's
no boss that comes in and says, you guys are
doing a bad job. You can just settle and stop
talking and fevery to each other if neither of you
want to leave. And so I wonder if it's just going.
Is marriage an adjective or is it a verb? Are
(17:42):
you married full stop? Or is it something you need
to do.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It's kind of like parenting.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
It's interesting that you said that men quite quit too.
I hadn't really thought about that because my first thought
reading this was that men don't quiet quick marriages, They
loud quit marriages. So you think about like the stereotype
is sort of compare Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Right,
Jeff Bezos loud quit his marriage, and now he's still
loud quitting his marriage with his new marriage.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
He's launting his.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Wealth, he's traveling the world with his new wife, making
it very clear that somehow he has both big divorced
energy but also loud quitting and now getting remarried. Energy
Bill Gates is a different example Melinda Gates French. Now,
Melinda French has talked about how she felt very alone
in the marriage, that it's very cliche initiated that separation
(18:34):
and divorce, and maybe Bill Gates quiet quit that marriage.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And I think that
even in the stereotype, a more like domestic stereotype of
a man going like she's always hon at me about
something and like he just wants this quiet life of
like just leave me alone, that is quiet quitting.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
He's quiet quitting.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
He's like this is fine for me because I just
get to do what I want really.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Which is also stonewalling, which is the word that means,
you know, they talk about the four horsemen that lead
to the end of a marriage, criticism, and this is
a dynamic that's sort of brought up in the article
where someone just stands up stonewalling and going I'm not
going to respond, I'm not going to engage when you
start talking, I get distracted and I walk out and
mow the lawn whatever it is. And I think that
(19:21):
quiet quitting is a mixture of all of those things
because the other one, of course, is contempt, and they
say that that's the biggest predictor of divorce. And you
can tell with a lot of this there's contempt and
there is it's like they don't want to be mean
to each other, so it's like you totally disengage.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Still really like the person, but it's just there's not
like your marriage isn't that much of an exciting thing.
I think that's in some ways the quiet quitting has
also led to we've talked about a little bit these
different models of long term monogamy now where maybe and
this is what happened to Monique van Toulde, who I
was talking about, is that when she returned to her marriage,
they kind of instituted a new way of.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
What that looked like.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
They're still together, they still like being together, but twice
a year they will take time apart to do things
that they want to do. And it's not christ this
time apart. It's just this is what works. And I
think that if you unpick all the expectations, and you know,
we were saying, what about this generation who likes to
talk about things a lot, is that maybe a positive
thing about this is it's allowing us to mess with
(20:24):
the model and go, no, I do love you and
like my marriage, but I can't just be in this
conventional model of you and I just us forever doing
the crossword when we're seventy, me still making dinner, you
still mowing the lawn, Like maybe that's enough, but what
if it's not?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
But we don't want to break up.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
I think that's a great point because you and I
were talking about this article before, and I mentioned to
you that in the comments everyone said how depressing they
found the article. It was all these comments saying, this
is the bleakest thing I've ever read. Why can't these
people talk.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
To each other?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
But then you pointed out that it doesn't have to
be forever. There are seasons for things. You don't have
to quiet quit forever.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
See that's the salad in me, the optimistic with an
air superiority.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
In a moment.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
What color is your aura?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
No, I don't really want.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yours is green?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I don't really want to know. I just want to
talk about Ariana Cynthia and the power of the irritating
press tool.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
If you had to describe each other's aura, what color
would it be? That's a nice question an.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Aura for me sunshine, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
And like also I think there's also purple.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
That's very good.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I see like a like a Siel blue, you know,
like and.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
So moved by that specific. Sorry, it's very specific and.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Like and like a like like sunset orange.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
These people I love them, and conditionally I will not
hear a word against either of them.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
These people, as far as we know, are not tripping
Cynthia Rivo on a red carpet promoting Wicked for Good
for Good, which is.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
The second Wicked movie.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And they've been asked everything at this point, but the
journal shoots them that question and what you can't see
unless you're watching us on YouTube, and hey you can,
but what you can't see. They're a little bit stumped
by the question. And then they're just staring at each
other and going about.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
This and I die having so much fun.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Well, here's the where I want to get to it.
First of all, I do need to know what color
is my aura? Yours is like.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Right now, it's red, Jesse, right now? Is the color
of fu off?
Speaker 6 (22:59):
I think?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Anyway, I want to talk about this press tour because,
as we know, we all lived through this last.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Year we lived through that.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You're an enormous onslaught of publicity around the movie Wicked,
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Arrivo.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
You would have to be living under a rock not
to have.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Seen them holding each other's fingernails, fitsing each other's hair,
making each other cry all the time, and spawning a
million memes about some positive about girlhood and solidarity, and
many many more like what.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
The park is wrong with these people?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
They are now back for Wicked too, and they're doing
the same thing, and again the memes are here.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
This is so irritating. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
But this movie is huge. I was rolling my eyes
about how did they break this movie in two? Like
it was fourteen hours long the first version and this
it's never gonna work. Of course it worked. This movie
is open bigger than the first one. It is going
to be, no question, one of the top three or
four movies.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Of the year.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
So we obviously love this. So my question to you
too is are those two playing us?
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Is this the act? Is this part of the press
tour stick?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
We don't love it just because it's the number one movie.
It doesn't mean that we love it. I think this
is a classic example of how the attention economy is
changing how we consume stuff. I find their whole stick
intensely irritating. But this movie is very much on my
radar and I will watch it shortly. And I think
it's a sign that nowadays we don't look at something
(24:32):
because we necessarily like it. We look at something because
we are repulsed. We love it, we hate it, we're
annoyed by it. We're certainly not indifferent to it.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
But it's not boring, right, It's never boring.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
And in fact, Taylor Swift, the genius that she is,
sort of encapsulated this nicely when she was asked on
her press tour for her most recent album, what her
response was to the haters, essentially to people who said
that they didn't like the album.
Speaker 7 (24:56):
Yeah, I mean, I welcome the chaos. The rule of
show business is if it's the first week of my
album release and you are saying either my name or
my album title, you're helping.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
And what is so interesting about that is that she
did not do an album tour for her last album,
Tortured Poets Department, but she did do one for this
album because she understood that if people aren't looking at you,
you are losing.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
It's right, but it's kind of cynical. Jesse, you said
you do love Yeah, Cynthia and Ariana. Do you think
it's cynical what they're doing and is that part of
why you love it? Or do you think this is
genuinely who they are.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
And that's why you love it.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
I can't work that part out, and maybe that's why
I can't look away. I think that you make a
movie and then you've done half the job, and then
there is a content plan that is potentially more difficult,
requires more endurance, requires more energy, which is selling the thing.
And you cannot accuse the cast of not selling the
(25:57):
shit out of this movie. Like they have gone to
every corner of the planet, They have gone to every
red carpet, and they give I must say I have
respect for the fact that they give every interview everything.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
That's the most amazing question I've ever been asked. Thank
you for asking me that question. Oh my god, that
question makes me cry.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Journalists know the feeling of sitting down with someone who
doesn't want to promote their movie, who is resenting sitting
on that couch. You don't really want to be there either,
and it's awkward and it's awful, and you're trying to
get one answer that's not what you're getting from either
of these women. Clearly, the theme or the vibe is girlhood.
So the fact that we're all a bit turned off
by it or find it, you know, slightly cringe or whatever,
(26:42):
is because it's not for us. It's not for adult women.
They're not behaving like women.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Find it cringe because it feels like they're just trying
to sell me something and they're dressing it up in
this incredibly disingenuous stick.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
I just think that they're in character, and so it's
like character and they're sitting there touching each other. I
also wonder if this is how women have to behave
to basically not fuel feud. Yes, do women have to
literally be licking each other's faces in order for.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
People to go?
Speaker 4 (27:12):
I think they might like each other. This movie couldn't
have few rumors it needed to be. They are described
often as best friends, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
It's interesting you mentioned that few because there was a
scandal around the first movie, which is that Ariana had
recently taken off with a married man, and so maybe
that's why they really had to lean into the sack.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
She had to be a girl's girl in order to
because this is about getting ten year old girls or
kids to convince their parents to go to the movie.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
You know, it's funny because I'm not a wicked person,
as in I'm not in the Law.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I've never seen the musical I'm Not in the Law
of It. I didn't really get it. And although I
find it very enjoyable watching them, when I actually did
watch the movie.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I was surprised.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Ariana Grande's character in that movie, the glendonness of it
is very It's much edgier and a bit bitchier and
everything then you would imagine, which was great. I loved it,
but I didn't love it.
Speaker 5 (28:05):
But you've watched it, touched.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
It, And what I mean is that I think in
some ways the press tour misrepresents that. But then I
guess that most people do understand the law to a point.
I wanted to pick up on something you said, You're
so right. I think about, like, do women have to
behave like this so that everybody isn't just checking to
see if they're side eye or competitive dressing?
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But now savvy studios are spending almost as much on
the marketing tour as they are on the movie. So
the two wikeds cost about three hundred million to make,
and the marketing campaign has cost two hundred and fifty
million dollars. Wow, So they recognize the importance of that.
And we could name several movies lately where the press
tour has been as big as the film. And I
(28:46):
wanted to play you this bit from one of my crushes,
Timothy Schallomay, who is revving up to promote a movie
that drops on Christmas Day called Marty Supreme. In the
context of this, the only movies that are doing well
at the box office at the moment are family movies.
So the top movies of the year will be Minecraft movie,
Lelo and Stitch, Yes, Leelo and Steve, an amazing animation
(29:09):
called Niza II, which has taken billions of dollars. Everybody
loves family movies, but other movies are hard to sell.
So for example, one Battle after Another came out. It's
gonna win all the Oscars, It's got Leonardo DiCaprio and
it People aren't really right the f one movie that
one in the top ten, and so that and Mission
Impossible are the two blockbusters that aren't.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Family that are in the top ten.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
And the only outlier the amazing horror movie Sinners. So
Timothy's reving up to promote Marty Supreme. It's a movie
about a ping pong champion. It includes a dalliance with
Gwyneth Paltrow.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
There's gonna be a bit of fun.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
But he is a savvy man because I think to
your point about the attention economy, Amelia, in the old
days when movie stars promoted their movies, they were kind
of like sitting Miller.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Oh wouldn't they like?
Speaker 2 (29:58):
As you said, Jesse, God, you have to hate talking.
This is my least favorite part of the process. But
digital natives understand the attention economy. So this is a
clip of a TikTok that he dropped recently. That is
a skit of him talking to his marketing department about
Marty Supreme and the stunts they should do. And obviously
it's fake, but it's very funny.
Speaker 6 (30:17):
We should have the blink go above, flog now and
rain ping pong balls Marty Supreme branded rain ping pong
balls on everyone.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, I do too. I think one thing we'll have
to kind of take into consideration.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's just the safety hazard.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
Something we'll think about.
Speaker 8 (30:40):
Yeah, and I don't want to put anybody in an
unsafe condition too, But I also don't want to be
too safe about putting out this movie, you know what
I mean. If it's a difference between you know what
I mean, someone losing an arm putting out the movie,
but someone gaining an arm intellectually when they see it.
Speaker 6 (30:53):
I'm a fan of the ladder.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
So they're already doing their pre production shtick about what
the press tour is going to be like and the
pr is going to be like.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Before it happens.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Genius, right, people are already talking about it, sharing it.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
And you're right that it's generational because remember Julia Roberts
had a movie out this year and that movie flopped,
And I remember that during the press tour for that
she was quite sullen at various points and was pushing
back on questions that were given by interviewers. Did not
want to be there, made that very clear. But even
the big movie stars can't afford to do that anymore,
(31:29):
and they know.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
That it's not even about because you know, Ariana Grande
and Cynthia Arrivo both went on long form podcasts as
you do. They went on every morning television show. They
know though, that what they need is a five to
ten second viral clip, and they deliver, and that's what
Timothy Shallimey is doing there too. So the other viral
clip has been the Singapore red carpet.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Did you guys say that?
Speaker 4 (31:53):
And then the Australian guy ran on like went to
grab Ariana Grande would have been genuinely scary, but I've
even been fascinating watching that because of the way Cynthia
jumps in before the security guard does and defends Ariana,
and it's like, is that manufactured?
Speaker 3 (32:11):
I know, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But also so you said the five second viral clip
is what they're after, and you said earlier this is
also that kids can convince their parents to go and
see the movie. But I wonder if it's actually more
to convince the parents that they should go and see
the movie, because I'm not sure how much the kids
are seeing these clips.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
I wonder because it's like you need to get on
people's radar, right, Like you know, Sidney Sweeney had a
movie out.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
I can't even Christy Christie that bond right, that didn't work.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
It did. There's some theories there that what the mass
population wants is not to see Sydney Sweeney roughed up
and looking yeah sort of scroll like she's shooting for
an oscar. Is the you know, the sort of narrative,
and that the people are like, that's not what we
want Sydney Sweeney for Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
I think though, that it almost needs to be like
Wicked needs to be top of mind for like multiple generations,
Like it needs to be something that you wants to see,
that you want to see that you'll go and have
a family experience and them has become within families like
a cultural communal experience where you then walk away and
(33:13):
discuss values. Like it feels like something that's a really
important thing.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
To say, I think, which is ironic because it's about
little screens versus big screens, But taking your kids to
the movies feels like a wholesome family activity.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
It's because you're all watching the screen and if.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You take your kids, you don't need to pay for
a babysitter, which is why I didn't see the New
Paul Thomas Anderson because it was two hours and fifty
minutes long. Yes, So did this press tour thing start
with the Barbie movie? Remember Margot Robbie's famous outfit style
by Andrew McCamy, different for each city that she went to,
created a lot of buzz.
Speaker 5 (33:46):
Is that where this all started?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think that was a large part of it because
the press tour dressing has become a big deal. And
you've always said this Jesse is that people get very
excited about what people are or aren't wearing on their
press tours. But it's about character and it's about linking
it to the brand. Because Timothy my mate, and I
need to stop talking about him and Zendea when they
did June, which was considered a really great press tour
(34:08):
and I wasn't scandal, but they dressed in these.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Really weird sci fi s outfits.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
And so that gets you everywhere. Of course, you can't
talk about press tool drama without talking about it ends
with us because although that work well, the thing is is,
although that movie has ruined many lives, couriers.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
And crunch a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
It cost twenty five million to make and it has
made hundreds Wow.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
But then you've got the don't worry dowling press tour,
which is when I think press tour became narrative.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
But that didn't work for dot So, no matter how
many times we debated whether or not Chris Pine had spat.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
On Yep, Harry starrs.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Harry styles Lap, another one one went to see the movie,
No one went to see it.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
If you are a massive Wicked fan, or even not,
if you've just seen the movie and you want a debrief,
then Mumma Maya's got this new podcast called watch Party
and it deep dives into all the behind the scenes
stuff the easter eggs. It's like you've gone to the
movies with your really smart friend who's just like obsessed
with the law, and he's going to explain it to you.
So there is a link to that episode in the
(35:15):
show notes.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, and if I can peg you back on top
of that, on Parenting out Loud this Saturday, we are
actually talking about another aspect of the press tour, doing
another kind of cultural analysis around why this became such
a big thing. We're going to be talking about the
Wicked press tour elephant in the room. That is the
thing that everyone was thinking but not necessarily talking about
(35:37):
after the break. The unexpected lesson that I learned at
my high school reunion.
Speaker 5 (35:42):
One unlimited out loud access.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for 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 1 (36:03):
So I went to my high school reunion recently, and
what was really interesting about it is how instantly it
took me back to how I felt in high school.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
What number was it.
Speaker 5 (36:12):
By the way, I don't want to sound.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Rude, but no, by all means, it was my twenty fifth.
And what was striking about it is that it was
held at a bar here in Sydney, and I instantly
felt exactly the way I felt in high school. I
felt like a ghost, just floating through the halls, like
no one really like knew me or I wasn't in
any of the videos that they showed, and it just
(36:35):
really made me feel that sense of being a little
bit small and a little bit invisible.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
You weren't in any of the videos?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
No, absolutely no, why not? Look, I was really uncool
in high school. I know that's hard to believe now
that I am at the apex of pool. But I
was very uncool and I felt very unsure of myself socially.
I went to a single sex school, and I felt
like everyone else knew lots of boys and were going
on dates and that just wasn't me.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
And can I ask why you decided to go? Because
I think the big thing about high school reunions is
some people go, I'm curious to see how everyone's going,
and others believe that people don't change, and they go,
I've been there, I've done that. I don't need to
revisit it. I don't have fond memories. What made you
choose to go to a twenty fifth?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Well, that's the interesting thing because for a long time
now people have been predicting that high school reunions are
going to die. They say, you can find out everything
you want to know about everyone on the internet now,
so what is the point in going to a high
school reunion. It's easier than ever to keep in touch
with people, Like why bother going? The thing is they
never die. The media keeps predicting this, and the high
(37:45):
school reunions keep on happening. My dad had his the
same week as mine. He had his sixtieth. He had,
by the way, exactly the same feelings that I had
about the fact that clicks never go away. People are
still real like walling into the same social patterns. So
what I wanted to test out here today is a
theory of why I think they haven't died despite the
(38:06):
fact that social media is everywhere and we know too
much about each other. We go to them because they
teach us not about what other people are up to,
but how we're doing. It's kind of an opportunity to
check in with ourselves by comparing ourselves.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
To other people.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I have many questions, Yes, is this the first time
you've gone.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
No, so I've also been to I went to university.
In the US, reunions for university there are a huge deals.
So I also went this year to my twentieth university
reunion in the US. Ask me anything, I'm kind of
a reunion expert.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
You enjoyed that more.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I enjoyed that more.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Jesse, are you a school reunion person?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I would go, but they just don't organize well. So
these are some of the questions I have. Who organizes school?
Speaker 4 (38:48):
I think it's meant to be ya the cool people.
That's what I was wondering, people who are doing well.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yea, surely this influences it, because don't really come from
a culture of school reunion.
Speaker 6 (38:59):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Maybe it's not a big thing in the UK.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Or maybe I just went to the because private schools
are much bigger on school reunions and public schools are.
In fact, some private schools have alumni departments that do
things like this.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah, to be clear, I went to a public and
this was just the cool girls at my public school.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
So that's what I was wondering. Is like, the people
who organize it probably set the tone a little bit,
don't they in terms of who's in the video?
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Yes, they do their ages all.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And also another thing I noticed is that outliers, either
people doing exceptionally well or people not doing so well,
don't show up. It's the people in the middle who
are like, yeah, I mean, my life, it's okay. They're
the people who show up.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So I guess the stereotype is Jesse says that we
go to reunions or interested in them because it is comparison.
As you've said, so do you have to before you go,
like provide a little bio like, I'm a million lester,
I work in media. Now I'm the first people like,
do you do that? So everybody knows? Or is the
whole evening just people going up to people and going
did you get divorced?
Speaker 3 (39:57):
What's your job now? How much money have you got
in your bank account?
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Like? Okay. So this is an interesting thing because in
an American context, for universities, you write in a little
thing about how you're doing in advance of the reunion,
and for my university, it's called the Little Red Book,
and it gets delivered to your house a couple of
months before the reunion, and you go through it and
you look up all the famous people first and you
see what they've put and generally, to my earlier point,
they don't send anything in. And then you look up
(40:22):
all your ex boyfriends who you know are doing disastrously,
and guess what, they haven't sent anything in either. So
it's the people who are just like I got a mortgage,
I got a.
Speaker 5 (40:31):
Pet, I got a kid.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
These are the people writing in. It's the kind of
people with the more quote unquote normal lives who tend
to be more willing to put themselves out there.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Do we take partners.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
This is interesting too. In an American context, you do
take partners. In an Australian context, you do not. And
the way this changes the dynamic is that I think
this is why reunions in Australia tend to be more clique,
because everyone in that room theoretically knows each other, whereas
if you have partners there, people feel like, well, half
(41:01):
the people in this room don't know anyone, so I
may as well get introducing people, I may as well mix.
The thing that was striking it my high school reunion
is that no one mixed. You basically just hung out
with your friendship group from high school.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Which brings me to my big.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Surprising revelation from all this is that not only did
I learn about myself from this reunion and it helped
me get in touch with how I felt in high
school and how that influenced decisions I subsequently meant about
my life, it also really strengthened my bond with my
high school best friend. And I think that's the other
thing about reunions and why they're great is the people
(41:36):
who you're already friends with, it helps you deepen your
connection with them because there's all the nostalgia you revisit
all these memories. This is why Romey and Michell's High
School Reunion, the nineteen ninety seven classic, which apparently they're
making a sequel of.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
We Invented post It notes.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Well, I couldn't resist a clip from that.
Speaker 6 (41:53):
So Michell, what are you up to? Okay, I invented
post its. If you're kidding, you must have made a fortune.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Well, yeah, I've gotten on these so much. Apparently Jens
love it too now, And that movie is all about
celebrating a friendship that has stilled the test of time.
I have a friend who's still a very dear friend
of mine who I was very close friends with in
high school. But we really just had a fabulous time
like revisiting memories together, which is why I think Rome
(42:24):
and Michelle's High School re Union is such a great
movie and connects with so many people.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Because a lot of narratives about high school probably aren't true.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
No, and they're very egocentric, And I wonder if there
is something about ego that is brought out with high
school reunions. And I was reading this article that said
it was a psychologist saying there is a time of
year when my office is full of people who sit
there for an hour talking about whether or not to go,
like it's a really distressing kind of big decision where
(42:54):
they go. I just don't know what to do. And
I wonder if for some people it's like you want
to show up and go. This is the newest iteration
of me. I want to feel seen and understood and
I'm not. It's like a shedding and like this social
pageantry of like I am now this, I have evolved,
while at the same time maybe wanting to believe that
(43:16):
everyone else is exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
I just think I've got a message for these people
who are agonizing over it, and my messages get over yourself.
I know that sounds harsh, but an article on The
Atlantic recently, which was sort of interrogating the point of reunions,
makes the same point because the author of that article
chose not to go to his twentieth high school re
union because he kind of felt, all these things, is
my life where I want it to be? Will I
(43:38):
feel inadequate? And then in the end he concluded that
it's actually more sort of uncool not to go to
the reunion because it implies your overthinking how important you
are to other people, and it implies that they actually
are going to sort of analyze your life. And they
don't care either. It's just an opportunity to revisit your
old self.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I can't imagine the stress when I was looking at
who goes high school unions. Apparently twentieth is very well attended.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Tenth people are still a bit too angsty.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
This is a whole thing, right, This is a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Fifth and tenth is still a bit too close.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So here's how it goes. Five is just I'll get
to that. Five is just everyone's really drunk. Ten is
the worst because ten everyone is still so caught up
in comparing and it's that point at which everyone's lives
really start to diverge. So at my tenth university reunion,
I left it early. I was so miserable, and I
(44:35):
just felt like I wasn't at the place in my
life where I needed to be, and I was comparing
myself to other people and feeling inadequate. There was someone
at my tenth university reunion who had founded Airbnb, too,
better than I was. Fifteen. That's when the shit starts
to hit the fan, because interesting and by twenty someone
(44:58):
said to me at my twentieth university reunion, everyone here
has been through a humbling experience. And it's true, whether
it's the death of a parent, in fertility, problems with children, divorce,
so many things happening. There's no way you get to
twenty unscathed.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
Whereas in high school there are a lot of people
who have never been humbled.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And so that's what's quite interesting is that I do
believe people evolve over a lifetime, and I think we
almost can't talk about this without talking about how social
media has changed, because a lot of the predictions have
been you can go just find someone on social media,
why would you go to a reunion? And then in
twenty sixteen there was the great social media algorithmic revision,
(45:37):
where no longer did your friends pop up on your feet.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
And now all.
Speaker 4 (45:42):
The people I went to school with either don't post,
are on private.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Don't stop hosting. Isn't what it used to me.
Speaker 4 (45:49):
They're not even telling me that they've had their third baby,
so I can't keep up. They're certainly not posting about
their divorce. So I feel like there's been this withdrawal
of sharing, and now I'm interested in their lives again.
And it's not I don't know everything, I can't get
access to everything.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
I'm still hung up on what you where. I think
you're So this is a depressed story, but it's true.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Is that because.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Reunions aren't a thing in my world. But I went
to a funeral not that long ago from a lot
of people that I was in my very tight friend
group when we were in our early twenties, which was
a very sad event, obviously. But one of the things
that was so striking about seeing a whole room full
of people who you used to know really well but
you haven't seen for a long times most of us
drifted apart, is everybody is so judging about what people
(46:35):
look like. The men were divided into either they'd got
really into cycling and they were you know, tryouts and
they were like super fit, or they were like beer belly,
like thinning, like no dissing, like we're all along that spectrum.
And the women had made a lot of effort even
though this was not a reunion, because you knew that
(46:57):
that this is one of those moments in life where
you're going to see all these people.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
And you're going to be judged.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Reunions must be like that on steroids where and do
they like massively diet or get their botox done or like,
how does did you get your brows done before?
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Yes, obviously that's really interesting, Holly, because I wonder if
like twenty is a bit of the sweet spot or
twenty and twenty five because you still feel like you're not.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Yet officially old.
Speaker 5 (47:25):
A lot of people still have a.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Bit more time than they used to have for maintenance
and stuff like that. I didn't feel that judgment at
twenty five. In any case, I wore a farm Rio
cocktail dress. I think cocktail dresses are great for occasions
where you want to impress, but you don't seem like
you're trying too hard. But maybe throw on an apron.
I don't know what would Megan do.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Like Megan, she'd be wearing a twenty two thousand dollars btlllegat.
Speaker 5 (47:48):
I'm surprised for that.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
Amelia didn't wear a tweet skirt I was talking about
on Monday's show with a sensible shoe.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Thank you out louders for listening to today's show. Don't
forget to like and follow us on YouTube if you
like that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
You wear.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
It sound like a fetish.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
You don't need to shame. Keep all who just want
to see our amazing makeup tech on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
We are there, will be back in your ears tomorrow.
Speaker 5 (48:14):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Mamma.
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which
we've recorded this podcast.
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Do you two inundated by messages? As I got a
few from women wearing leggings feeling really victimized by Monday's
show obsessed. There was a video of a woman exercising
and she's wearing her headphones and she's like, personally victimized
by today's MoMA Mia out loud, and she flashed her
phone down as she was wearing her leggings, and I'm like,
oh no, it's okay.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Can I be clear that I was extremely uncoor in
high school and take storial advice from me.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Hello, and welcome to Mama Mia out loud. It's what
women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the twenty.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Sixth of November. I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm Amelia Last and.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
I am Jesse Stevens.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
And here's what's on our agenda for today. What color
is your aura? I'm just asking for Ariana Grande. Also,
school reunions.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Who are they for? Why do we go?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Amelia went recently and had a realization and the women
quiet quitting their husbands.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
But first, Jesse Stevens, we are.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Entering into the social season. It's December, literally next week,
and I am in three group chats where I'm being
asked what plate I am bringing, and I have discovered
that at thirty four years old, I need a plate.
So I'm envious of people who have like an iconic
cake that they.
Speaker 5 (01:30):
Bring everyone goes. You bring that flowerless a dip. It's
often a like an onion dip or something.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And I'm sorry, I need a tiny bit more detail
about these groups you're in, all right, that people are
talking about plates?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
All right, give me something. What's happening?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
One is this weekend. I still haven't replied because I'm panicking.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So it's like it's family gathering, friend this is friends,
friends gathering, and you've all been asked to bring a thing.
Everyone brings plate, and no one's policing the thing, so
you could end up with fourteen cakes or fourteen Well.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
We're in a group chat, so I think we're meant
to like follow the Yeah, a self pleasing situation.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Christmas Day? What are you bringing? Right right right there?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
And I'm just waiting for someone to tell me to
bring the bread rolls that.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
I can do.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
And also on Christmas Day? Did you used to not
have to bring anything? But now you've reached an age
where you have to bring something?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Is that how it works?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Got it?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Got it?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Got it.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I think something happens around the age of thirty four
where everyone goes you're not at a kid's table anymore.
Speaker 5 (02:21):
I bring something, contribute exactly, Okay, got it?
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Look to complicate matters. I read an article in The
Atlantic this week that says that your signature dish says.
Speaker 5 (02:32):
A lot about you. Oh gosh, right.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
So, cheese board people very type A people. They are
natural curators. They are highly strung, little bit anal.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
It's really easy to do cheese board. I sometimes do cheese.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
No, but don't think you're doing it right now?
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Are you writing the name of the cheese in a
little piece of chalk in a whimsical fine?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (02:52):
Oh no, then people are mad.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
You offered to bring the bringing some cheese and a
plastic bag.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Oh no, no, you have to spend three hundred dollars
and have the fancy crackers that don't break when you
put the cheese on them.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
Did people caretakers? They like to take care.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
You have everyone right, Salad people, Holly, there's a rumor
that you're a salad person. Apparently that makes you a
sunny optimist with a slight moral superiority complex.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
This is.
Speaker 5 (03:26):
Now apparently desert people want applause.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
They're the people who need the fuss, which I think
is very true. I need for my dish, Amelia, do
you have a dish?
Speaker 1 (03:37):
You have sent me into a spiral of despair because
I'm very good at mixing the gronies, very.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Very Apparently that means you're like fun, your social you're
the life of the party.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's yeah, I'm very lazy, so that works.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
No, I like that. Do you have a dish?
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Okay, I am known for bringing my aldi spannicopeter.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Oh do you turn me on to that? That is
Tuesday night dinner? And last night, yeah it was Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
It was a cheese that I exactly right.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
What do you think that says about you?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I think it says that I am cheap, that I
am lazy. The problem with that dish is that I
need an oven, right like I often eat it up there.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
But apparently that's a no. No oh yeah, that's way
too in.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So the reason why it could be genius, if you're
a slightly different kind of person, take it out of
the box. You let it softened to frost a little bit,
and then you put it in a big topp ofware
container on like a clean tea towel or something, and
it looks like you made it.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And then you get to the house and you go,
I've just got to whack this in the oven for five.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Do you think that it's frowned upon to bring something
that's frozen or Once I was told to bring a dish,
I didn't understand the criteria.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
And I brought a cuscuss thing that I bought from coals.
But that's okay. No, No, there was no cutlery and
there were no plates. Oh so it was like, is
this a picnic?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
It was kind of like a picnic vibe, and everything
was like a bruiseshetter. It was meant to be fingerfood
and no one could eat it.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay, I've got a sort the best dinner party I
ever went to the hostess of the dessert. She bought
out some cookies and some big tubs of ice cream,
and she said, make your own ice cream sandwiches.
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Did you think she made the cookies?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
She hadn't made the cookies.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Mean, it's very Megan. I've been watching her holidays.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
But of course, what's that she did?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Well, Oh, she's got so many, But this is I
want you to take in some of her hostessing tips,
because that's next on your agenda. Jesse is Oh, Christmas
is at Jesse and Luca's house. Yeah, yes, she says,
always answered the daor to your dinner party dressed all
fancy but barefoot, because that suggests, oh, I'm not quite ready.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Oh I'm a little bit. I'm a little bit with
a bit of it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It makes it like you're all dollied up, but you
haven't had time to put your shoes on.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
So it puts people at ease.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, and then she except for Princess Kate when she
showed up and Meghan had done exactly that perfect.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
It also signals to people, I want you to make
your shoes off. It makes an awkward thing about whether
or not they She was like, oh.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
As you've just said, put an apron over your evening dress.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
I love it anyway.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
But she also says that you should do things like
that cookies, ice cream, or you know, like lay out
people's break like here's some yogurt, here's some fruit, because
people like to make their own things.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
The way they like them. Oh, you're you're right, that.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
Was what's salad?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
This is very boring, but it's actually my favorite thing
to eat in the world. So the other reason I.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Take it is because you want to say neat it.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
I've been making exactly the same salad since I was fourteen,
which is like some kind of grain like.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Brown rice, quemoa. Yeah, of course course, did you know
what keemwa was?
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That was definitely rice. Keema didn't exist, only an ancient grain.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Land Screamline came after jenne.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
J definitely pre dates, but some kind of grain chopped
up tomatoes. I love to tomatoes, my favorite thing to eat.
And lots of herbs, so like basil, parsley, mint, whatever,
lemon juice, feather cheese, bang bit of onion.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
And do you make up before you get it or
do you bring the bits and then do you make
it in the kitchen?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
You know, I make it before I get there, but
I don't put the lemon juice and the olive oil
on it until you get there because it goes soggy.
But I make that in a big bowl and you
take that and it looks pretty and it looks fresh,
but it took nothing.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
It took nothing, all right, I sound like began Jersey.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
I think instead of bringing a dish, what you can
promise is sparkling conversation.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
You can middle.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Did you see that? Cobe your enthusiasm about middling. The
most important thing that you can bring to a dinner
party gathering is middle energy. That means someone who sits
in the middle of the crowd and make sure that
the conversation is always interesting and flowing.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Okay, all right, I can bring that, just middle and
do that and start some fights.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
To keep things spicy.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
There is an essay published in The Cut that is
currently going viral. It is called The Women Quietly Quitting
their Husbands. Monica Corcoran. Harold writes, rather than deal with
the drama of divorce, more and more women over forty
are choosing to check out. I assumed that this would
be a story about money, that it would be we
(08:23):
can't afford to get divorced anymore, But that was not
what the author found at all. Really, these women say
that they just don't have time. They're subconsciously uncoupling, maybe
waiting for the kids to leave home, And maybe that's
not entirely new. She writes, about remembering as a kid,
there was a year where her mother didn't speak to
(08:45):
her father, and then he turned around one day and said,
is there a problem?
Speaker 3 (08:48):
I love, isn't a problem?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Probably didn't even say in a passive aggressive way. He
was like, oh, is there a problem?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I feel like I haven't heard from me lately. But
what does it look like? What does quite quitting your
marriage to look like?
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Yes, it looks like some people don't live together, so
they're living on opposite sides of the country, moving so quiet,
that's not so quiet, living or sleeping in a guest bedroom,
not really talking, definitely not going out together or anything
like that.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
Now will open it up.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's an anecdote in there about how again the author's parents.
She remembers that she would have to go to her
dad on Saturdays and say, do you have any dry
cleaning mums about to go?
Speaker 5 (09:30):
That's middling, that's the child.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
She's been unpacking a lot of this shit in therapy
for a long time.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
I want to know.
Speaker 7 (09:38):
So.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Corcoran Harrold says that the dissatisfied wife isn't entirely new.
What is a little bit new is the normalization of
settling for being utterly dissatisfied and being quite open with
your mates about it, being like, I pay my husband,
but we're still married.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Holly.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Is this a phenomenon that you've noticed.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Holly, You've interviewed a lot of midlife women. I want
to know if they are quietly quitting their marriages.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yes, yes, and yes. This essay I loved it.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
I loved it because it was very real, even though
it kind of dwells in this because it's American and
it's quite you know, coastal and all those things. But
there is so much truth in this essay. There's so
much truth. There's a quote in there which says marriage
is the world's most impossible endurance challenge.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yep, And it does feel.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Like that sometimes because a lot of the people who
she's talking to in this article have been together for
twenty years plus.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
So a long time.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And you know, we all know it's so well documented.
Desire wanes, we're attracted to new stimulus, like we you know,
all of those things are difficult. A lot of these
people will have been through raising kids to a point
at which they're not so desperately involved and bonded by
that activity anymore so that gives you a new like
sort of space to be apart from each other literally
(10:57):
and people who kind of they like each other. Fine,
not all the people in this article do, but they're
kind of like, I'm just done with pretending that I
want to watch your TV shows and I want to
listen to you talking about golf or whatever it is.
I want to live my life now. And that is
an incredibly common midlife experience. And I interviewed this woman
(11:18):
for the last season of mid Monique van Tulder. She
had written a book called The grown Up Gap Year,
and her story wasn't typical because you know, there's a
certain amount of privilege involved that she was able to
literally leave her marriages for a period of time. But
what drove her to that point was all the things
I just said. Her kids had got to a teenage
point where they she'd kind of got them through the
(11:39):
HSC and they were still living at home, but they
didn't really need her.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Her husband was.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Not abusive or awful or anything like that, but he
was very caught up in his job and his life
and his stuff, and she was just like, oh, I'm
just done, And so she left for three months and
went to live somewhere else and went to travel around
and waited for them to notice. Basically waited for her
husband and sons to kind of.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
Go oh, like, where's mom, where's mom?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
And it took them a while to notice. And then
she said when she worked her way back to the relationship,
which she did, she said, the marriage in the relationship
has never been better because they've kind of re established
boundaries and rules that pushed her to that point. But
what was interesting to me is over and over again
in that conversation, she kept saying, men need to understand
that to avoid an expensive divorce, they need to X
(12:26):
Y Z. And I think that that's a large part
of this is very often men are blindsided in midlife.
They haven't really noticed that their partner is kind of
check everything and deciding whether or not they want to
keep going like this or not, and they haven't really noticed,
and by the time the woman comes to them and says, hey,
(12:48):
sometimes too late. And sometimes it's not whether or not
you can remodel that. But the other thing that is
interesting about the quiet quitting, I mean, I think there
are lots of interesting things about it. I think that
on one hand, it could be a season so just
like quiet quitting your job, you might be in the
same job for a long time but go through a
period of time where you're just like, oh, you know,
and you need something to happen to reinvigorate it. The
(13:10):
logical answer isn't leave your job. Is that maybe you've
quite quit and then maybe you lean back in, And
I think that can be true.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
But the other piece is is that leaving, even.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
If you can afford it, even if all of those
things are true, is incredibly brave and difficult and up
into your life in all kinds of ways, and not
everybody is up for that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
One question that I had reading this is what's new
about this that instead of staying together for the kids,
it's more about the fact that it's just simply logistically
too complicated and that people don't have time. Because this
is a generation, broadly speaking Gen X and Alder millennials
who had a lot of trauma around parents divorcing or
(13:50):
not divorcing, as the author's case may be, and then
have they decided that instead of staying together, they've just
decided that it's logistically too complicated.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
What's the difference?
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, I wonder if that's the case, and if there
is also not that it's status, but that being openly
dissatisfied with your job, or your marriage, or your house
or something in your life is kind of allowed now,
like have women always felt like this? Did our grandmothers?
Did our great grandmothers feel like this? But they weren't
allowed to say it out loud? And so now there's
(14:24):
a language around women sitting there at a dinner table
with their friends going I hate my husband because reading this.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
I don't think you could read this and not recognize it.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
And my question was whether or not it's a gender thing.
Is it that there's something going on with men that
they don't have the friendships entering midlife, that they are
not strengthening the muscle of communication, that women feel lonely
because they don't have someone to talk to, or is
this a dynamic that men and women.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
Are both responsible.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
I think that men also quite quit their marriage is.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
All yeah, right, me too.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And one of the quotes in this that I pulled
out because it was so familiar to me and a
lot of people around me and women I talk to,
was that for women, this quote was passivity came up
again and again in my reporting. She writes, husbands tune
out their disenchanted wives, like Charlie Brown deflects the monotonous
drone of his school teacher. They make flimsy promises to
(15:26):
engage more on an emotional level. So women will often
go and say I need more, like can we do
date nights?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Can we go to therapy? What about couples yoga? What
about you know whatever?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I need you to vacuum empty the dishwasher, And it
says they make flimsy promises to engage more on an
emotional level, or to help out around the house. Maybe
they vacuum for a month or two, or act all
intrigued when a partner event's about an incapable colleague. But
eventually the extra credit effort falls by the wayside or
just doesn't feel like enough. And that I think that
men absolutely quite quick marriages too. Maybe they're having affairs,
(15:57):
maybe they're not. A lot of this isn't really about sex.
It's more about the compatibility or not of living with
one person for a really long time. And I think
that the question of what's new is I wonder if
it's about expectation. Yeah, because anyone who's been in a
relationship for a really long time knows that. Of course,
not every day you jump up and go like, oh
my god, I love our life together and you're the
(16:20):
most interesting person in the world and all those things,
But at what point is rubbing along? And sometimes as
a woman in this who says we started sleeping in
separate beds, which lots of couples do for lots of
very legitimate reasons, to do with kids, to do with snoring,
to do with work shifts, all those things. And then
suddenly it's like when the kids go to bed, I
go to my room and watch my shows, and he
goes to his room and watch his shows. And then
(16:40):
suddenly you realize you've had six months of that, and
it's like, I think that the expectation of like what's
okay to settle for in inverted commas is a conversation
we're more ready to have, and the answer to that
will be really different for different women.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And is it a rebellion against this push of marriage
is hard?
Speaker 5 (16:59):
Marriage is hard.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
We grew up I think Millennials and Gen X grew
up with it is something you need to work at,
like it was all about labor. And I wonder if
there was an interesting passage that sort of said marriage
isn't hard, it's actually really easy because you get married,
you get presents, you go on a honeymoon, it's lovely.
(17:21):
And then there's no performance plan, there's no manager, there's
no boss that comes in and says, you guys are
doing a bad job. You can just settle and stop
talking and fevery to each other if neither of you
want to leave. And so I wonder if it's just going.
Is marriage an adjective or is it a verb? Are
(17:42):
you married full stop? Or is it something you need
to do.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
It's kind of like parenting.
Speaker 5 (17:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
It's interesting that you said that men quite quit too.
I hadn't really thought about that because my first thought
reading this was that men don't quiet quick marriages, They
loud quit marriages. So you think about like the stereotype
is sort of compare Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Right,
Jeff Bezos loud quit his marriage, and now he's still
loud quitting his marriage with his new marriage.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
He's launting his.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Wealth, he's traveling the world with his new wife, making
it very clear that somehow he has both big divorced
energy but also loud quitting and now getting remarried. Energy
Bill Gates is a different example Melinda Gates French. Now,
Melinda French has talked about how she felt very alone
in the marriage, that it's very cliche initiated that separation
(18:34):
and divorce, and maybe Bill Gates quiet quit that marriage.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And I think that
even in the stereotype, a more like domestic stereotype of
a man going like she's always hon at me about
something and like he just wants this quiet life of
like just leave me alone, that is quiet quitting.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
He's quiet quitting.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
He's like this is fine for me because I just
get to do what I want really.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Which is also stonewalling, which is the word that means,
you know, they talk about the four horsemen that lead
to the end of a marriage, criticism, and this is
a dynamic that's sort of brought up in the article
where someone just stands up stonewalling and going I'm not
going to respond, I'm not going to engage when you
start talking, I get distracted and I walk out and
mow the lawn whatever it is. And I think that
(19:21):
quiet quitting is a mixture of all of those things
because the other one, of course, is contempt, and they
say that that's the biggest predictor of divorce. And you
can tell with a lot of this there's contempt and
there is it's like they don't want to be mean
to each other, so it's like you totally disengage.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Still really like the person, but it's just there's not
like your marriage isn't that much of an exciting thing.
I think that's in some ways the quiet quitting has
also led to we've talked about a little bit these
different models of long term monogamy now where maybe and
this is what happened to Monique van Toulde, who I
was talking about, is that when she returned to her marriage,
they kind of instituted a new way of.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
What that looked like.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
They're still together, they still like being together, but twice
a year they will take time apart to do things
that they want to do. And it's not christ this
time apart. It's just this is what works. And I
think that if you unpick all the expectations, and you know,
we were saying, what about this generation who likes to
talk about things a lot, is that maybe a positive
thing about this is it's allowing us to mess with
(20:24):
the model and go, no, I do love you and
like my marriage, but I can't just be in this
conventional model of you and I just us forever doing
the crossword when we're seventy, me still making dinner, you
still mowing the lawn, Like maybe that's enough, but what
if it's not?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
But we don't want to break up.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
I think that's a great point because you and I
were talking about this article before, and I mentioned to
you that in the comments everyone said how depressing they
found the article. It was all these comments saying, this
is the bleakest thing I've ever read. Why can't these
people talk.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
To each other?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
But then you pointed out that it doesn't have to
be forever. There are seasons for things. You don't have
to quiet quit forever.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
See that's the salad in me, the optimistic with an
air superiority.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
In a moment.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
What color is your aura?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
No, I don't really want.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yours is green?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I don't really want to know. I just want to
talk about Ariana Cynthia and the power of the irritating
press tool.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
If you had to describe each other's aura, what color
would it be? That's a nice question an.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
Aura for me sunshine, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
And like also I think there's also purple.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
That's very good.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I see like a like a Siel blue, you know,
like and.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
So moved by that specific. Sorry, it's very specific and.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Like and like a like like sunset orange.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
These people I love them, and conditionally I will not
hear a word against either of them.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
These people, as far as we know, are not tripping
Cynthia Rivo on a red carpet promoting Wicked for Good
for Good, which is.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
The second Wicked movie.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And they've been asked everything at this point, but the
journal shoots them that question and what you can't see
unless you're watching us on YouTube, and hey you can,
but what you can't see. They're a little bit stumped
by the question. And then they're just staring at each
other and going about.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
This and I die having so much fun.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Well, here's the where I want to get to it.
First of all, I do need to know what color
is my aura? Yours is like.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Right now, it's red, Jesse, right now? Is the color
of fu off?
Speaker 6 (22:59):
I think?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Anyway, I want to talk about this press tour because,
as we know, we all lived through this last.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Year we lived through that.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You're an enormous onslaught of publicity around the movie Wicked,
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Arrivo.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
You would have to be living under a rock not
to have.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Seen them holding each other's fingernails, fitsing each other's hair,
making each other cry all the time, and spawning a
million memes about some positive about girlhood and solidarity, and
many many more like what.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
The park is wrong with these people?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
They are now back for Wicked too, and they're doing
the same thing, and again the memes are here.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
This is so irritating. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
But this movie is huge. I was rolling my eyes
about how did they break this movie in two? Like
it was fourteen hours long the first version and this
it's never gonna work. Of course it worked. This movie
is open bigger than the first one. It is going
to be, no question, one of the top three or
four movies.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Of the year.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
So we obviously love this. So my question to you
too is are those two playing us?
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Is this the act? Is this part of the press
tour stick?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
We don't love it just because it's the number one movie.
It doesn't mean that we love it. I think this
is a classic example of how the attention economy is
changing how we consume stuff. I find their whole stick
intensely irritating. But this movie is very much on my
radar and I will watch it shortly. And I think
it's a sign that nowadays we don't look at something
(24:32):
because we necessarily like it. We look at something because
we are repulsed. We love it, we hate it, we're
annoyed by it. We're certainly not indifferent to it.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
But it's not boring, right, It's never boring.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
And in fact, Taylor Swift, the genius that she is,
sort of encapsulated this nicely when she was asked on
her press tour for her most recent album, what her
response was to the haters, essentially to people who said
that they didn't like the album.
Speaker 7 (24:56):
Yeah, I mean, I welcome the chaos. The rule of
show business is if it's the first week of my
album release and you are saying either my name or
my album title, you're helping.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
And what is so interesting about that is that she
did not do an album tour for her last album,
Tortured Poets Department, but she did do one for this
album because she understood that if people aren't looking at you,
you are losing.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
It's right, but it's kind of cynical. Jesse, you said
you do love Yeah, Cynthia and Ariana. Do you think
it's cynical what they're doing and is that part of
why you love it? Or do you think this is
genuinely who they are.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
And that's why you love it.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
I can't work that part out, and maybe that's why
I can't look away. I think that you make a
movie and then you've done half the job, and then
there is a content plan that is potentially more difficult,
requires more endurance, requires more energy, which is selling the thing.
And you cannot accuse the cast of not selling the
(25:57):
shit out of this movie. Like they have gone to
every corner of the planet, They have gone to every
red carpet, and they give I must say I have
respect for the fact that they give every interview everything.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
That's the most amazing question I've ever been asked. Thank
you for asking me that question. Oh my god, that
question makes me cry.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Journalists know the feeling of sitting down with someone who
doesn't want to promote their movie, who is resenting sitting
on that couch. You don't really want to be there either,
and it's awkward and it's awful, and you're trying to
get one answer that's not what you're getting from either
of these women. Clearly, the theme or the vibe is girlhood.
So the fact that we're all a bit turned off
by it or find it, you know, slightly cringe or whatever,
(26:42):
is because it's not for us. It's not for adult women.
They're not behaving like women.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Find it cringe because it feels like they're just trying
to sell me something and they're dressing it up in
this incredibly disingenuous stick.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
I just think that they're in character, and so it's
like character and they're sitting there touching each other. I
also wonder if this is how women have to behave
to basically not fuel feud. Yes, do women have to
literally be licking each other's faces in order for.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
People to go?
Speaker 4 (27:12):
I think they might like each other. This movie couldn't
have few rumors it needed to be. They are described
often as best friends, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
It's interesting you mentioned that few because there was a
scandal around the first movie, which is that Ariana had
recently taken off with a married man, and so maybe
that's why they really had to lean into the sack.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
She had to be a girl's girl in order to
because this is about getting ten year old girls or
kids to convince their parents to go to the movie.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
You know, it's funny because I'm not a wicked person,
as in I'm not in the Law.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I've never seen the musical I'm Not in the Law
of It. I didn't really get it. And although I
find it very enjoyable watching them, when I actually did
watch the movie.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I was surprised.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Ariana Grande's character in that movie, the glendonness of it
is very It's much edgier and a bit bitchier and
everything then you would imagine, which was great. I loved it,
but I didn't love it.
Speaker 5 (28:05):
But you've watched it, touched.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
It, And what I mean is that I think in
some ways the press tour misrepresents that. But then I
guess that most people do understand the law to a point.
I wanted to pick up on something you said, You're
so right. I think about, like, do women have to
behave like this so that everybody isn't just checking to
see if they're side eye or competitive dressing?
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Or whatever.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But now savvy studios are spending almost as much on
the marketing tour as they are on the movie. So
the two wikeds cost about three hundred million to make,
and the marketing campaign has cost two hundred and fifty
million dollars. Wow, So they recognize the importance of that.
And we could name several movies lately where the press
tour has been as big as the film. And I
(28:46):
wanted to play you this bit from one of my crushes,
Timothy Schallomay, who is revving up to promote a movie
that drops on Christmas Day called Marty Supreme. In the
context of this, the only movies that are doing well
at the box office at the moment are family movies.
So the top movies of the year will be Minecraft movie,
Lelo and Stitch, Yes, Leelo and Steve, an amazing animation
(29:09):
called Niza II, which has taken billions of dollars. Everybody
loves family movies, but other movies are hard to sell.
So for example, one Battle after Another came out. It's
gonna win all the Oscars, It's got Leonardo DiCaprio and
it People aren't really right the f one movie that
one in the top ten, and so that and Mission
Impossible are the two blockbusters that aren't.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Family that are in the top ten.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
And the only outlier the amazing horror movie Sinners. So
Timothy's reving up to promote Marty Supreme. It's a movie
about a ping pong champion. It includes a dalliance with
Gwyneth Paltrow.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
There's gonna be a bit of fun.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
But he is a savvy man because I think to
your point about the attention economy, Amelia, in the old
days when movie stars promoted their movies, they were kind
of like sitting Miller.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Oh wouldn't they like?
Speaker 2 (29:58):
As you said, Jesse, God, you have to hate talking.
This is my least favorite part of the process. But
digital natives understand the attention economy. So this is a
clip of a TikTok that he dropped recently. That is
a skit of him talking to his marketing department about
Marty Supreme and the stunts they should do. And obviously
it's fake, but it's very funny.
Speaker 6 (30:17):
We should have the blink go above, flog now and
rain ping pong balls Marty Supreme branded rain ping pong
balls on everyone.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, I do too. I think one thing we'll have
to kind of take into consideration.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
It's just the safety hazard.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
Something we'll think about.
Speaker 8 (30:40):
Yeah, and I don't want to put anybody in an
unsafe condition too, But I also don't want to be
too safe about putting out this movie, you know what
I mean. If it's a difference between you know what
I mean, someone losing an arm putting out the movie,
but someone gaining an arm intellectually when they see it.
Speaker 6 (30:53):
I'm a fan of the ladder.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
So they're already doing their pre production shtick about what
the press tour is going to be like and the
pr is going to be like.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Before it happens.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Genius, right, people are already talking about it, sharing it.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
And you're right that it's generational because remember Julia Roberts
had a movie out this year and that movie flopped,
And I remember that during the press tour for that
she was quite sullen at various points and was pushing
back on questions that were given by interviewers. Did not
want to be there, made that very clear. But even
the big movie stars can't afford to do that anymore,
(31:29):
and they know.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
That it's not even about because you know, Ariana Grande
and Cynthia Arrivo both went on long form podcasts as
you do. They went on every morning television show. They
know though, that what they need is a five to
ten second viral clip, and they deliver, and that's what
Timothy Shallimey is doing there too. So the other viral
clip has been the Singapore red carpet.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Did you guys say that?
Speaker 4 (31:53):
And then the Australian guy ran on like went to
grab Ariana Grande would have been genuinely scary, but I've
even been fascinating watching that because of the way Cynthia
jumps in before the security guard does and defends Ariana,
and it's like, is that manufactured?
Speaker 3 (32:11):
I know, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But also so you said the five second viral clip
is what they're after, and you said earlier this is
also that kids can convince their parents to go and
see the movie. But I wonder if it's actually more
to convince the parents that they should go and see
the movie, because I'm not sure how much the kids
are seeing these clips.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
I wonder because it's like you need to get on
people's radar, right, Like you know, Sidney Sweeney had a
movie out.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
I can't even Christy Christie that bond right, that didn't work.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
It did. There's some theories there that what the mass
population wants is not to see Sydney Sweeney roughed up
and looking yeah sort of scroll like she's shooting for
an oscar. Is the you know, the sort of narrative,
and that the people are like, that's not what we
want Sydney Sweeney for Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
I think though, that it almost needs to be like
Wicked needs to be top of mind for like multiple generations,
Like it needs to be something that you wants to see,
that you want to see that you'll go and have
a family experience and them has become within families like
a cultural communal experience where you then walk away and
(33:13):
discuss values. Like it feels like something that's a really
important thing.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
To say, I think, which is ironic because it's about
little screens versus big screens, But taking your kids to
the movies feels like a wholesome family activity.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
It's because you're all watching the screen and if.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You take your kids, you don't need to pay for
a babysitter, which is why I didn't see the New
Paul Thomas Anderson because it was two hours and fifty
minutes long. Yes, So did this press tour thing start
with the Barbie movie? Remember Margot Robbie's famous outfit style
by Andrew McCamy, different for each city that she went to,
created a lot of buzz.
Speaker 5 (33:46):
Is that where this all started?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think that was a large part of it because
the press tour dressing has become a big deal. And
you've always said this Jesse is that people get very
excited about what people are or aren't wearing on their
press tours. But it's about character and it's about linking
it to the brand. Because Timothy my mate, and I
need to stop talking about him and Zendea when they
did June, which was considered a really great press tour
(34:08):
and I wasn't scandal, but they dressed in these.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Really weird sci fi s outfits.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
And so that gets you everywhere. Of course, you can't
talk about press tool drama without talking about it ends
with us because although that work well, the thing is is,
although that movie has ruined many lives, couriers.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
And crunch a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
It cost twenty five million to make and it has
made hundreds Wow.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
But then you've got the don't worry dowling press tour,
which is when I think press tour became narrative.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
But that didn't work for dot So, no matter how
many times we debated whether or not Chris Pine had spat.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
On Yep, Harry starrs.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Harry styles Lap, another one one went to see the movie,
No one went to see it.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
If you are a massive Wicked fan, or even not,
if you've just seen the movie and you want a debrief,
then Mumma Maya's got this new podcast called watch Party
and it deep dives into all the behind the scenes
stuff the easter eggs. It's like you've gone to the
movies with your really smart friend who's just like obsessed
with the law, and he's going to explain it to you.
So there is a link to that episode in the
(35:15):
show notes.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, and if I can peg you back on top
of that, on Parenting out Loud this Saturday, we are
actually talking about another aspect of the press tour, doing
another kind of cultural analysis around why this became such
a big thing. We're going to be talking about the
Wicked press tour elephant in the room. That is the
thing that everyone was thinking but not necessarily talking about
(35:37):
after the break. The unexpected lesson that I learned at
my high school reunion.
Speaker 5 (35:42):
One unlimited out loud access.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for 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 1 (36:03):
So I went to my high school reunion recently, and
what was really interesting about it is how instantly it
took me back to how I felt in high school.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
What number was it.
Speaker 5 (36:12):
By the way, I don't want to sound.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Rude, but no, by all means, it was my twenty fifth.
And what was striking about it is that it was
held at a bar here in Sydney, and I instantly
felt exactly the way I felt in high school. I
felt like a ghost, just floating through the halls, like
no one really like knew me or I wasn't in
any of the videos that they showed, and it just
(36:35):
really made me feel that sense of being a little
bit small and a little bit invisible.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
You weren't in any of the videos?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
No, absolutely no, why not? Look, I was really uncool
in high school. I know that's hard to believe now
that I am at the apex of pool. But I
was very uncool and I felt very unsure of myself socially.
I went to a single sex school, and I felt
like everyone else knew lots of boys and were going
on dates and that just wasn't me.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
And can I ask why you decided to go? Because
I think the big thing about high school reunions is
some people go, I'm curious to see how everyone's going,
and others believe that people don't change, and they go,
I've been there, I've done that. I don't need to
revisit it. I don't have fond memories. What made you
choose to go to a twenty fifth?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Well, that's the interesting thing because for a long time
now people have been predicting that high school reunions are
going to die. They say, you can find out everything
you want to know about everyone on the internet now,
so what is the point in going to a high
school reunion. It's easier than ever to keep in touch
with people, Like why bother going? The thing is they
never die. The media keeps predicting this, and the high
(37:45):
school reunions keep on happening. My dad had his the
same week as mine. He had his sixtieth. He had,
by the way, exactly the same feelings that I had
about the fact that clicks never go away. People are
still real like walling into the same social patterns. So
what I wanted to test out here today is a
theory of why I think they haven't died despite the
(38:06):
fact that social media is everywhere and we know too
much about each other. We go to them because they
teach us not about what other people are up to,
but how we're doing. It's kind of an opportunity to
check in with ourselves by comparing ourselves.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
To other people.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I have many questions, Yes, is this the first time
you've gone.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
No, so I've also been to I went to university.
In the US, reunions for university there are a huge deals.
So I also went this year to my twentieth university
reunion in the US. Ask me anything, I'm kind of
a reunion expert.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
You enjoyed that more.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I enjoyed that more.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Jesse, are you a school reunion person?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I would go, but they just don't organize well. So
these are some of the questions I have. Who organizes school?
Speaker 4 (38:48):
I think it's meant to be ya the cool people.
That's what I was wondering, people who are doing well.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yea, surely this influences it, because don't really come from
a culture of school reunion.
Speaker 6 (38:59):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Maybe it's not a big thing in the UK.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Or maybe I just went to the because private schools
are much bigger on school reunions and public schools are.
In fact, some private schools have alumni departments that do
things like this.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah, to be clear, I went to a public and
this was just the cool girls at my public school.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
So that's what I was wondering. Is like, the people
who organize it probably set the tone a little bit,
don't they in terms of who's in the video?
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Yes, they do their ages all.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And also another thing I noticed is that outliers, either
people doing exceptionally well or people not doing so well,
don't show up. It's the people in the middle who
are like, yeah, I mean, my life, it's okay. They're
the people who show up.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
So I guess the stereotype is Jesse says that we
go to reunions or interested in them because it is comparison.
As you've said, so do you have to before you go,
like provide a little bio like, I'm a million lester,
I work in media. Now I'm the first people like,
do you do that? So everybody knows? Or is the
whole evening just people going up to people and going
did you get divorced?
Speaker 3 (39:57):
What's your job now? How much money have you got
in your bank account?
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Like? Okay. So this is an interesting thing because in
an American context, for universities, you write in a little
thing about how you're doing in advance of the reunion,
and for my university, it's called the Little Red Book,
and it gets delivered to your house a couple of
months before the reunion, and you go through it and
you look up all the famous people first and you
see what they've put and generally, to my earlier point,
they don't send anything in. And then you look up
(40:22):
all your ex boyfriends who you know are doing disastrously,
and guess what, they haven't sent anything in either. So
it's the people who are just like I got a mortgage,
I got a.
Speaker 5 (40:31):
Pet, I got a kid.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
These are the people writing in. It's the kind of
people with the more quote unquote normal lives who tend
to be more willing to put themselves out there.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Do we take partners.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
This is interesting too. In an American context, you do
take partners. In an Australian context, you do not. And
the way this changes the dynamic is that I think
this is why reunions in Australia tend to be more clique,
because everyone in that room theoretically knows each other, whereas
if you have partners there, people feel like, well, half
(41:01):
the people in this room don't know anyone, so I
may as well get introducing people, I may as well mix.
The thing that was striking it my high school reunion
is that no one mixed. You basically just hung out
with your friendship group from high school.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Which brings me to my big.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Surprising revelation from all this is that not only did
I learn about myself from this reunion and it helped
me get in touch with how I felt in high
school and how that influenced decisions I subsequently meant about
my life, it also really strengthened my bond with my
high school best friend. And I think that's the other
thing about reunions and why they're great is the people
(41:36):
who you're already friends with, it helps you deepen your
connection with them because there's all the nostalgia you revisit
all these memories. This is why Romey and Michell's High
School Reunion, the nineteen ninety seven classic, which apparently they're
making a sequel of.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
We Invented post It notes.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Well, I couldn't resist a clip from that.
Speaker 6 (41:53):
So Michell, what are you up to? Okay, I invented
post its. If you're kidding, you must have made a fortune.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Well, yeah, I've gotten on these so much. Apparently Jens
love it too now, And that movie is all about
celebrating a friendship that has stilled the test of time.
I have a friend who's still a very dear friend
of mine who I was very close friends with in
high school. But we really just had a fabulous time
like revisiting memories together, which is why I think Rome
(42:24):
and Michelle's High School re Union is such a great
movie and connects with so many people.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Because a lot of narratives about high school probably aren't true.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
No, and they're very egocentric, And I wonder if there
is something about ego that is brought out with high
school reunions. And I was reading this article that said
it was a psychologist saying there is a time of
year when my office is full of people who sit
there for an hour talking about whether or not to go,
like it's a really distressing kind of big decision where
(42:54):
they go. I just don't know what to do. And
I wonder if for some people it's like you want
to show up and go. This is the newest iteration
of me. I want to feel seen and understood and
I'm not. It's like a shedding and like this social
pageantry of like I am now this, I have evolved,
while at the same time maybe wanting to believe that
(43:16):
everyone else is exactly the same.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
I just think I've got a message for these people
who are agonizing over it, and my messages get over yourself.
I know that sounds harsh, but an article on The
Atlantic recently, which was sort of interrogating the point of reunions,
makes the same point because the author of that article
chose not to go to his twentieth high school re
union because he kind of felt, all these things, is
my life where I want it to be? Will I
(43:38):
feel inadequate? And then in the end he concluded that
it's actually more sort of uncool not to go to
the reunion because it implies your overthinking how important you
are to other people, and it implies that they actually
are going to sort of analyze your life. And they
don't care either. It's just an opportunity to revisit your
old self.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I can't imagine the stress when I was looking at
who goes high school unions. Apparently twentieth is very well attended.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Tenth people are still a bit too angsty.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
This is a whole thing, right, This is a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Fifth and tenth is still a bit too close.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So here's how it goes. Five is just I'll get
to that. Five is just everyone's really drunk. Ten is
the worst because ten everyone is still so caught up
in comparing and it's that point at which everyone's lives
really start to diverge. So at my tenth university reunion,
I left it early. I was so miserable, and I
(44:35):
just felt like I wasn't at the place in my
life where I needed to be, and I was comparing
myself to other people and feeling inadequate. There was someone
at my tenth university reunion who had founded Airbnb, too,
better than I was. Fifteen. That's when the shit starts
to hit the fan, because interesting and by twenty someone
(44:58):
said to me at my twentieth university reunion, everyone here
has been through a humbling experience. And it's true, whether
it's the death of a parent, in fertility, problems with children, divorce,
so many things happening. There's no way you get to
twenty unscathed.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
Whereas in high school there are a lot of people
who have never been humbled.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And so that's what's quite interesting is that I do
believe people evolve over a lifetime, and I think we
almost can't talk about this without talking about how social
media has changed, because a lot of the predictions have
been you can go just find someone on social media,
why would you go to a reunion? And then in
twenty sixteen there was the great social media algorithmic revision,
(45:37):
where no longer did your friends pop up on your feet.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
And now all.
Speaker 4 (45:42):
The people I went to school with either don't post,
are on private.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Don't stop hosting. Isn't what it used to me.
Speaker 4 (45:49):
They're not even telling me that they've had their third baby,
so I can't keep up. They're certainly not posting about
their divorce. So I feel like there's been this withdrawal
of sharing, and now I'm interested in their lives again.
And it's not I don't know everything, I can't get
access to everything.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
I'm still hung up on what you where. I think
you're So this is a depressed story, but it's true.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Is that because.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Reunions aren't a thing in my world. But I went
to a funeral not that long ago from a lot
of people that I was in my very tight friend
group when we were in our early twenties, which was
a very sad event, obviously. But one of the things
that was so striking about seeing a whole room full
of people who you used to know really well but
you haven't seen for a long times most of us
drifted apart, is everybody is so judging about what people
(46:35):
look like. The men were divided into either they'd got
really into cycling and they were you know, tryouts and
they were like super fit, or they were like beer belly,
like thinning, like no dissing, like we're all along that spectrum.
And the women had made a lot of effort even
though this was not a reunion, because you knew that
(46:57):
that this is one of those moments in life where
you're going to see all these people.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
And you're going to be judged.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Reunions must be like that on steroids where and do
they like massively diet or get their botox done or like,
how does did you get your brows done before?
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Yes, obviously that's really interesting, Holly, because I wonder if
like twenty is a bit of the sweet spot or
twenty and twenty five because you still feel like you're not.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Yet officially old.
Speaker 5 (47:25):
A lot of people still have a.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Bit more time than they used to have for maintenance
and stuff like that. I didn't feel that judgment at
twenty five. In any case, I wore a farm Rio
cocktail dress. I think cocktail dresses are great for occasions
where you want to impress, but you don't seem like
you're trying too hard. But maybe throw on an apron.
I don't know what would Megan do.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Like Megan, she'd be wearing a twenty two thousand dollars btlllegat.
Speaker 5 (47:48):
I'm surprised for that.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
Amelia didn't wear a tweet skirt I was talking about
on Monday's show with a sensible shoe.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Thank you out louders for listening to today's show. Don't
forget to like and follow us on YouTube if you
like that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
You wear.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
It sound like a fetish.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
You don't need to shame. Keep all who just want
to see our amazing makeup tech on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
We are there, will be back in your ears tomorrow.
Speaker 5 (48:14):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Mamma.
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which
we've recorded this podcast.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.