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Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.
So I've got some big news. The winner of the Fat Bear competition in Alaska has been announced and it is number thirty two, Chunk. And I love this for a couple of reasons. The first is that Chunk has been in this contest every year since it's begun eleven years ago, and he was runner up the last two years, but now this is his time.
This Boad's well for Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars Nation. Yeah, it does always there, but he never wins, just like Chunk's a win.
And I have to say that I also specially love his name because my partner is trying to make the category of man chunky boss happen. Chunky bosses. Think Vince Vaughn, Yeah, think Jason Segual, Yes, chunky bosses, and so I think that in fact, this means that chunky bosses are now in.
I will also say about Chunk, I have read a single detail about our French and that is that he has a broken jaw, and that to me signals he's commitment to eating salmon like I think he ate too much salmon broke his jaw. But he won in the end and his body on the line.
He could still eat the salmon with a broken jaw. That is quite commitment. That is quite a commitment.
Congratulations to our chunky boss Chunk.
Hello, and welcome to Momma Mia out loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Wednesday, the first of October. I'm Holly Wainwright and I am trying to restrain any panic that it is Wednesday, the first of October.
I am Jesse Stevens.
And I'm Amelia Lester.
And on our show today you might have heard, I know, maybe you've heard. I'm just a little bit of news.
Holly just has been shrieking, running around, frazzled hot.
I have been very very upset by this, very destabilized that's the word. Yeah, he stabilized that Australian royal uncoupling. Well, welcome to today's show, where we're going to decode the gossip and noise around the Nicole Keith divorceview.
Plus it's time for us all to hold hands and climb Cringe Mountain together we discuss why this viral theory could change your life.
And I went to Sephora this morning and waited until the door's opened to get in.
I feel like you're going through something.
I'm going through something. Women over forty are doing our makeup all wrong, and I'm here to tell you what we need to do differently.
But first of all, I'm not going to say in case you missed it, because you didn't miss it. Now, nobody missed this.
Except you for a few hours yesterday morning.
It's true. In fact, we recorded a whole emergency meeting for subscribers about this yesterday, So if you need to go back to the beginning of this story, go and listen to that right But since then, there has been so much coverage, some of it reputable, some of it just very gossipy. And what we're going to do is do a bit of decode for you here about what seems to be true, what seems to be nonsense, what
seems to be pure speculation. And we do need to, as we did in the episode yesterday, we need to lay the table to say we're aware that this is a non of our business, be some people's real lives. That is serious stuff. But I think that it is unquestionable that this is the biggest celebrity story in the world at the moment, and that we all have something of a connection to the Nicole and Keith situation, and it is unfolding in quite actually an unconventional way.
Right.
So, yesterday the separation was reported. There has been no official confirmation from either party. And when we're recorded yesterday, we said probably in the next twenty four hours they will release or one or the other of them, or usually a joint statement will be released which will say something along the lines of what do they always say, Amelia those statements.
Please respect our privacy at this time as we focus on our family and create beautiful separate journeys which are also together.
Yes, and we respect each other and love each other and so on, and so.
We'll always be friends.
Yeah, there's usually that kind of nothing to see here statement now that very noticeably has not happened in the last two days.
So there hasn't been any statement.
There has been no direct as we're recording now. Obviously that could.
Change, but that is very unusual.
It is very unusual because even if and we speculated about this yesterday, is that perhaps there was a leak they were preparing to announce this, but there had been a leak and so they were scrambling. But given the fact that today it has been officially reported that Nicole Kidman has filed for divorce, so it's definitely happening.
Did she file in Tennessee?
She filed in Tennessee, which is where they live, right their primary residence. So court documents obtained by page six reveal that the breakup was due to a reconcilable differences. We all that means too and its what does that? Well, I mean, it's a pretty standard reason. Yeah, but it just means it broke down, it could not be saved.
And listed their separation date the September the thirtieth, which is okay, yeah, right now, right now, Kidman requested to be the primary residential parent of her and Urban's daughters and to have custody of them for three hundred and six days.
And out of the year fourteen and seventeen daughters.
Right, that's not joint customer.
That's primary custody to her. None of the rest of this is authorized what we're about to say. So the court documents are legal documents, so we know it's definitely happening, but there's been no official statement, as we've said, but what there has been is quite a lot of leaking, and the leaking seems to be coming mostly from Nicole's side, because one of the first things that we heard yesterday is that she had been trying hard to keep the
family together. A family member who didn't want to be named told the Sydney Morning Herald because obviously Nicholl's family are Australian, that Kidman is heartbroken and that the actor had been attempting to keep the family together for several months for the sake of the kids.
I thought that was so interesting that clearly her approved source leaked to the Herald, because that's a broadsheet newspaper. It's not a guy brag. So they wanted us to take that at face value.
They did, absolutely, And to explain about sources, right, we often roll our eyes about celebrity sources sources say, but also in these kinds of instances, we know that sources close to the celebrity are a legitimate way that you get this kind of news out without making it seem as if it was you.
You know, they're right, So.
I mean, just ask Prince Harry. On one hand, you can say, oh, tabloids are full of moder named sources. On the other hand, he'll say, the sources that the Palace were leaking about me all the time. So you know that sources can be reached.
And I suppose as well that not all sources are created equal. So you know, the other gossip, I suppose that has been coming out. Every possibility, every rumor that could surface about this relationship has surfaced over the last twenty four hours. So it was always going to be discussions about Keith. Urban has had a history with addiction, so that becomes a question. So it was inevitable that there would be speculation about infidelity. Hollywood, we make of those rooms.
Some of the signs that you know something feels a little off is that the reputable sources like page six and people are now saying so as we're recording this, people are saying the split is turning dramatic. Nicole's hurt and feels betrayed. Now we've heard that part. This next part is the part that's a bit new, which is that she wanted to save their marriage, but it seems he's already moved on. I think that he's already moved on. Is the bit that blends a little bit of weight
to the rumors of infidelity. Clearly, what is coming out here is that the side of the story that we are seeing is that this was not Nicole. This is to do with Keith. She was spending the summer with her daughters. He's been on tour and something has happened. That is the vibe of what is being put out there.
Yeah, I think that the speculation is coming out because there's a bit of a vacuum because there was no official statement proclaiming to still be friends. Because we've seen leaking to reputable sources like The Herald and like Page six, which is where sometimes supporting came from, and People magazine. So that's why we're seeing so much speculation. But I think that the big takeaway is that Nicole's camp wants us to understand that from her perspective, she did everything
she could. She didn't want this to happen, and her filing doesn't negate that. It means that she tried everything and she just couldn't make it work. That's what her camp wants us to understand from this.
The other piece of material we're getting from sources is regarding intimacy. I'm saying, the word intimacy come up a lot, and it's about how there had been a breakdown in an intimacy because Keith Urban had been traveling a lot, she had been traveling a lot, and basically they never saw each other. And it was the nail in the coffin when Keith Urban basically moved out, is what it sounds like, and that that happened at the beginning of
the US summer. So that's sort of the other piece of the puzzle, which you were saying yesterday, Holly on the subscriber episode. Is this going to become a narrative about how hard Nicole works?
Yeah, I'm interested because obviously all the things we just said that the sources saying, particularly the stuff about Keith and whether or not there's somebody else involved that is scorellous gossip at this point definitely is as you've very clearly stated, Amelia. What doesn't seem to be beyond question is that this was his call and that Nicole has
been blindsided, in verted commas by this news. But it's interesting because now all the takes start coming out, and right now that's very much where the story sits that what did Keith do right? But the story will probably turn a few more times in the next couple of weeks. And what we're seeing too are some angles about Nicole's ambition in inverted commas in terms of lots and lots
of work, lots and lots of quite. I've seen some not so veiled references to the fact that she keeps picking these sexy parts that she's choosing to get naked a lot. I've seen some mean reporting about oh, he was so obsessed with his youth and beauty regime and he couldn't Basically, the undercurrent is like that two vain people couldn't survive in this marriage. All of that feel mean spirited. But what do we think about why we project so much and need to dig into all of this so much?
Yeah, the projecting, because there's been as Amelia was saying about the vacuum, I think that's a really good point because then there's just a whole lot of think pieces or heart pieces that are sort of saying There was one I was reading that was saying, oh, well, we were lied to, like because that was the thing is that he called her baby girl. And they were always so publicly affectionate. People are now looking at their relationship through the lens of being quite performative, which to me
is just such an absurd claim. When a couple has been together for nineteen years, things can just change. It doesn't mean they were lying three years ago when they were hooking up on the red carpet, like go for it. That relationship has just evolved, like so many do well.
I also think that there's a parallel here. There's inescapable parallels with Nicole's divorce from Tom Cruise. The idea that she was blindsided, and again that's fairly well sourced reporting that she felt sort of very surprised by the turn the marriage took, and then also the idea that it was very much even though Nicole was this instigator of the divorce, it was something where she felt unable to do anything else about it. We also need to keep in mind that both of them were going through a
lot of personal change over the last year. Nicole has written very beautifully in the Australian press about how hard it was to lose her mother in October of last year and how that really occasioned a big rethink for her of what her life was about and what she wanted to do with her life. Keith earlier this year, just before his tour began, fired a number of his band members, and people didn't really understand why that was.
He'd been playing with them for a long time. He spoke at the time about how he was sort of reorganizing his life and rethinking how he wanted to do things. And then their children are growing up and one of their daughters has become a model and is getting some fame in her own right, So there's a lot of change there separate from the marriage.
They're entering a new era. And we talked about this a little bit yesterday. Is that a midlife marriage collapse is very common, you know, and very often it's instigated by the woman, to be honest. Is that we talked also about how after losing a parent often that destabilization can cause you to make big changes in your life when you look around and go, this is this it now?
And I agree with your point, Jesse, that I think the narrative of like, oh, they were faking it all this time is nonsense because you can't fake it for twenty years. And although some people were always sniffy about the PDA, and to be fair, Tom and Nicole were also known for their PDA. Like there are some very famous, very gorgeous red carpet shots of them from you know, the nineties and noughties where they were all over each other.
Like I think that is maybe who she is, and that's okay, right, Like I don't think that means that anybody's acting there. But over twenty years, so much in your life shifts, and I think there are some celebrity relationships that, because they've been there for such a long time, feel they reflect something about either your own or your own life or chapters in your life. Then that's why you're so obsessed with it.
And yet those parallels are striking because remember how with Nicole and Tom, there was that same line that Nicole was too ambitious, Nicole was working too hard, Nicole took her clothes off in a London production of the play The Blue Room, and she did, and there was also eyes White Shut, which of course they weren't together, but there was also this narrative that Nicole was putting herself out there too much.
I think what we can probably conclude at this point is that the split is acrimonious like that.
This is quite because if you can't get your lawyers together in a room and your pr people together in a room to settle on a statement that you can put out to put out a few fires.
And if you're hearing that one party feels betrayed, it is going to be I just keep thinking, that is a lot of time with lawyers that they've got ahead of them.
If you do want to go back to the beginning of this story, if it is obsessing you, I know it isn't obsessing everybody, but it's definitely obsessing. My group chats, my GenEx group chats are going off with this story, different levels of devastation about it. You can go and listen to our subset that we were talking about. There is a link in the show notes.
Go do that in case you missed it. If you are a woman over forty, you are doing your makeup wrong. This is the confronting truth that I learned from a TikTok and Instagram personality called Erica Taylor. She is an American makeup artist who has over ten million views on YouTube for a video called common Mistakes Which Age Your Face? Now.
The premise of This is that she puts one hand over half of her face and she shows you her makeup done according to the way millennials have been taught for time immemorial to do their makeup, and then she reveals the second half of her face. She takes her hand away, and you suddenly see how much younger she looks when she follows her own tips on how to do your own makeup.
And importantly, it's the same products. It's not even that she's using different products, it's just the great page is different.
Yes, she's using the same products. Let's have a listen, because she's really interesting the way she talks here she is on eyeshadow.
If we're in our forties and up even later thirties, and you've been doing the same makeup that you learned in high school or in your twenties for the last twenty to thirty years, forty years, possibly this is for you what we did with our shadow and what we should do with her eyeshadow.
Let's go. And what I found so confronting about this and why I ran to Saphora this morning is because I thought I had a pretty good handle on how to do my makeup, because I am a woman in my early forties who read women's magazines religiously all through my teens. I know to put the little bit of white eye shadow underneath my brows for a bit of pop. I know how to do the lining of my lips. This is what I thought. No, I was wrong. I
was wrong about all of it. Would you like to know the specific ways in which I've been doing my makeup wrong? Number one, you press your eyeliner. You do not pull your eyeliner, so you don't think about that. First second, pull your.
Eye out to do this.
You don't touch it because you're distorting the eye shape. Then you just need to let your eye be and then you need to press in your eyeliner like it's a little stamp.
I've seen makeup hardist do that.
I don't.
I can't do it. It's definitely pul I definitely that's what we.
Were taught to do. Secondly, you need to extend your eyeshadow up to your eyebrows.
I'm not doing that. That's that's crazy, Like.
That's what she says. That's what she says. Your blush it needs to go even higher than you think, even high. I don't think my blush.
Could go high because I've been I've been hearing this advice about like we used to think, smile, put it on the apple of your cheek. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I've been hearing this advice for a while now on Mama Mea whenever we do, you know, make up advice for over forties, over fifties, it goes not and they're like high high. My blush at this point is kind of somewhere here, somewhere. I look like it's on your scalp exactly.
And then finally, don't extend your lipliner to the edges of your lips because that will make them look bad or something. You just have to like stop halfway interesting because that's the opposite for your eyes. They say that your eyes.
I was saying that if you stop kind of bluntly, because if you don't know how to do a wing, let's be honest, most of us are not good at a wing. Then we stop, and apparently that makes our eyes look smaller. So we've got to just kind of do a little flick to have them look up.
A little flick, which felt crazy to me, but then I tried it today and I got about two hours sleep last night, so I think I look better than I would have looked without the flick you look.
But question at this point, if I started coming in with a Wingland highlighter, would you think Holly has finally lost it? It's just lost. The highlighter is not gonna save your sister.
It does feel crazy. I think this is all in service of an idea that I read about, which was that babies and children have extremely wide faces. They're very wide, yes, and then as your age, it sort of just turns long. And so all of these tips are in service of making your face look as wide as possible.
Yeah, and apparently the big thing I remember Maya writing about this that the thing that ages you is uneven skin tone. So what you have to try and do is get completely even skin tone. It's like one of the first things, that's what things.
Oh sure, that seems easy to do underneath the harsh Australian sun. Thanks me for that very practical tip.
No powder only creams. Yes, So if I haven't put a powder on my face for a long time, but if I am now extending.
My eyes, yes, my brow yes, with your fingers, she says.
Dark brown like up to here with the This is going to be very exciting for you all next week.
The idea is, you know how we were taught to put a sort of gentle fawn color on our lids to make it pop. When you get older, you don't want it to pop because it looks swollen. You've got to use a medium colored eyes shadow on it.
I feel victimized.
In a moment the importance of cringe and why gen Z in particular have a phobia of it. Friends, it's time to put your hiking boots on and climb up cringe Mountain. Let me explain. The phrase cringe Mountain comes from an Australian creator consultant named Erica Mallett who coined
the term in twenty twenty three. And she was part of a hip hop duo and she was also like a radio host on Triple J. All these career pursuits were very public, and when she was on Triple J, she would get messages through the text line calling her cringe. That was the number one piece of feedback. She got your cringe. An article in The New York Times by Gilander Mizzizzi says this idea of stumbling publicly enduring judgment and finding resilience in the process isn't new. What's new
is the language. The phrase cringe is distinct of the Internet age, born of comments sections and meme culture to describe acute awkwardness or social embarrassment. Now, rather than get hurt by the cringe comments, Mallet decided to embrace the word. She decided it meant that she was taking risks, that the audience could hear, that she had not yet arrived at a place where she was clear and confident, and
she acknowledged that witnessing that makes people very uncomfortable. Here's a little bit of how Erica explains her concept of Cringe Mountain.
People who hate on you for climbing Crench Mountain are never the ones who have climbed Cringe Mountain themselves. They are never hating from the.
Land of cool.
They are always hating from base Camp. So this is Crnch Mountain. This is you climbing Cringe Mountain. Everyone has to climb Crunch Mountain to get to the land of cool. This is base Clamp where everyone starts, and this is where the haters live. Nobody who has ever been through the climb will hate on someone who is still climbing. Ever, because they know what it's like to climb crench Mountain, they would never laugh at you.
They know it's hard.
Now, this is proven very hard for gen Z in particular to do because they live in a culture of total digital surveillance, and that has made them a lot of research into this hesitant to try new things because they don't want to be seen as being cringe. Cringe culture, some creative say, is holding these young people back. And as Mallett says, you can't reach the land of cool until you have climbed your cringe mountain, Amelia, Cringe was definitely a thing for me growing up. It was a
term we threw around. But do you think that there is a greater fear now, given that the Internet doesn't exist in your home study it exists in your pocket all the time, that we're more afraid of looking embarrassing online.
Yeah. Look, I just did a segment on a podcast about how I'm now trying out winged eyeliners. So I think I speak from a position of real authority from the very apex of Cringe Mountain, and the view from up here is good, honestly, Like I'm at the top, I'm obsessed with this idea because I think it almost gives us permission to try new things. It almost gives us permission to lean into that embarrassment that we feel
when we're trying something outside of our comfort zone. And the first thing that I thought of when I came across this concept was whether it's applicable to book writing. This is an achievement that I have not fulfilled in my life. I would love to one day. Did you feel you were climbing cringe Mountain when you go first wrote your books?
Holly, one hundred percent, like one hundred percent. So much of writing is trying to get over your own cringe because I don't know who said it, Jesse you might remember. But there's some really good writing advice, which is, you know your ambition for what you're writing isn't yet matched by your skills, particularly when you start like You've got some talent, obviously, but in your mind, the thing you're going to write is this amazing.
You know what good writing looks like, and you know that what you've done.
Is yeah, and you're cringing through it, but it's also probably far worse in your mind than it is. So it's somewhere in the middle, but the cringe of it and the how dare you? And the who do you think you are? And people are going to laugh at that and all of those things. Yes, And then the other thing that is enormously cringe about writing a book
is promoting a book because self promotion. And I think it's interesting because you're so right, Jesse, that generations that have grown up with internet surveillance are very sensitive to cringe.
But gen X is very sensitive to self promotional cringe because we grew up being told that selling out is the worst thing you can do, Whereas if you've grown up with Instagram and people basically selling things to you all the time, everywhere you look, in every format, you kind of take a certain level of self promotion and selling on board. But gen X's we were told that's very uncool, and then suddenly you have to be out there all the time self promoting, and the cringe is real.
Yeah. Yeah, I think with any creative process there is certainly an element of cringe. And I always think that the most ruthless reviews are written by people who have never written the book they want to write, Like I think Goodreads is full of peace, people tearing apart books with a sense that they could do a better job, and they might be able to do a better job,
but they've never written the book. Like cringe is real in that there's this vicarious empathetic embarrassment that we see for people, even someone doing something embarrassing online or making a mistake or whatever. You go, oh, and that's a deeply psychological, just true emotion. But at the same time, I think there is a sense even online of who do you think you are? With people who are either
publishing anything, their ambition is worn on their sleeve. Like in some ways gen Z are able to throw off those shackles because the content creator is something that never would have existed among say boomers. But then on the other hand, I was reading that there is this fear among I think it was Tyler, the creator was talking about how young people are scared of dancing now, like they'll go out and they he was in some situation they weren't dancing and he was like, why aren't you dancing?
And they were like, I'm scared someone's going to film me.
Like, but this is so real because I think about this for my daughter's generation, well, but not only, but they've literally grown up knowing that, and maybe millennials did too.
You tell me, but that whatever you're doing, even in your friend group, even in your school, even in your life, somebody somewhere is probably bitching about it on the internet, as in I don't mean publicly shaming like we do with a celebrity, but in negative chat, in a group chat that is a side chat to the one that you have with your friends in the dms that you're not invited to, that someone will be going did you see that picture that so and so posted? Who does
she think she is? Or did you see that thing that they tried to do on the football field or on the stage at the school musical or whatever, And who do they think they are? That is a very different experience than the one that I had growing up, for example, where of course people bitched about people. I'm not pretending that's a new invention, but there were so
fewer forums and public places to do it. So if you literally grow up knowing that everything you're doing is being there's a commentary to it somewhere, and it will probably be mostly negative. It takes a very particular type of strengths to push through and climb cringe Mountain.
You've just made me realize that cringe is basically doing something in the view of the Internet, which these days means everything. It's different from embarrassment. When Jesse and I were younger and we were growing up as millennials who maybe didn't even have smartphones yet, embarrassment was when you did something and you felt a little bit embarrassed. Cringe is when someone's watching you and they cringe. It's a different thing.
Yeah, And as you say, Amelia, it's like, if you want to launch a new business central to that strategy, we'll probably be making an Instagram page, and then whether that page grows or not is in public view. And maybe you get a new job. Do you post it on LinkedIn? Do you then do a few posts about your successes there and image of you at a conference?
And what's the line?
Like?
Yeah, like, I see these people over here sharing their successes in a very proud way and it seems to be working for them. Can I do that or does that?
Like?
What's the line? And sometimes you're gonna.
Do you think that success hinges on a high tolerance for cringe? Do you think that people who climb the mountain. So this woman who does the videos, she found an old clip of post Malone, and post Malone is, you know, one of the most successful recording artists currently and this first film clip could only be described as cringe, which I'm sure if you went back to early Taylor Swift or if you went.
Back Taylor Swift is a very good example.
Yes, and you just have to greet your teeth and go call me cringe. I'm on my own journey. Do you think that the more tolerance you have for cringe, the higher you'll climb.
Yeah, Tailor Swift's a great example. Another example is Robin. Think about the fact that in the first part of her career, Robin was really seen as a somewhat embarrassing pop artist, and then she comes out with a single that's probably one of the greatest songs of all time, Dancing on my Own, and she's not cringe anymore. But both Taylor and Robin did many years in the cringe trenches.
But there are plenty of people who still would call Taylor Swift cringe right Like, I'm not one of them. We're not bashing her. Let's face, She's going to own the next few days. Out louders. As we know she's got an album dropping on Friday, you'll be hearing about it. But there are people who I watched one of her videos this week. It was like for kmart or something, and she was directing a version of her self target.
She was directing a version of herself in this video, and one Taylor was dressed as the showgirl and was a bit wobbly on her feet and like looking wrong, and the other Taylor was the director. Now there was something a little bit cringe about that video, right, But Taylor Swift owns the universe, So who cares if there are people cringing about her? And cringe is to do with cool. Cool people don't like to ever be seen to try anything, and at some point you have to
try to succeed anything. And it sounds like such a very cliched little mantra, but I think about it with my daughter, who not to turn this into a parenting conversation, but she loves football, she loves NFL. Sometimes on the field she'll make a really embarrassing mistake, like try and run and bounce the ball and it gets out of her hands. And it's more she's mortified because she knows her friends have seen it. She knows she tried to do something cool and she fucked it. Yeah, and the
cringe is all part of it. And she'll come off and she's like, I shouldn't have even I'm not good at bouncing, I shouldn't have tried to bounce.
And it's like, so it's a cringe about really the fear of trying. And if you've got a whole generation who is internalized the fear of trying.
Being caught trying try in private is okay. But as you just said about cringe being trying something in the view of the internet, that's so true.
Eventually you've kind of got to be seen with most of what you do, and failure is obviously in terms of growth, mindset and getting to where you want to be. Failure is one thing, but cringe is a whole other. There's shame and embarrassment just tied up with that that no one wants to feel.
And it's why this analogy is great, right, because it's the idea you could now go, you know, I'm pitching my tent on cringe Mountain for six months, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, I've got to cringe all out. I know I'm going to make some mistakes in however I talk about this thing or do this thing.
Cringe isn't going to kill me.
It's inherent to any creative endeavor. In twenty twenty five, I think about an acquaintance of mine who has recently become somewhat incongruously a musician. She was always a musician, but she's now trying to make a niche in music for the dom and sub community, and so she just sort of like came out as a member of that community who was also a musician who writes music about
it on Instagram exactly. And she I've watched her career kind of develop and really take on a lot of momentum in the last year or two on Instagram, and I think about how much cringe she must have felt coming out to everyone in her life about the fact that she was in this community and that she wanted to write music about this community. But if she wants to succeed as a musician these days, you just got to climb cringe mountain.
Question, Actually, is it only worth climbing cringe mountain if you do land in the land of cool? Because I think I've had moments of climbing Cringe Mountain I'm thinking of I have an acquaintance who was doing something on the internet, very specific thing, and all of us were going, what the hell is she doing?
Like this is mother in law?
Yes it was me, as she was doing something that none of us understood. This niche has blown up to such an extent that this person is the most successful person any of us know. Most people will have heard of them. They have this incredible profile. It's amazing. And now all of us look at each other and go, we were wrong.
So she's in the land of cool.
She's absolutely in the land of cool. And we now look retrospectively on cringe and go, we were cringe for cringing. But if that person stayed at two hundred views, if there is no growth like that does happen for a lot of people, And then us a board mission.
The narratives that you'll try, and you'll try, and then one day you will see like it just isn't true for everything. Very many of us never achieve our dreams, as they say, so I think that's fine. But if your friend had stayed on two hundred views, how long would she have slogged up Cringe Mountain four before she'd chosen a different path to really talture this analogy. Yeah,
I was on Saturday night. I went to see Ben Lee, right, iconic Australian musician, and he was playing through an iconic album of his that's twenty five years old now, right, And one of the songs on the album is We're all in this together all yea, And he before he sung that, because he sang those songs in order, and it gets towards the end before he sings that song, he basically apologizes for it. He basically says, everybody thinks this song is cringe.
It is.
He basically was like, it is cringe, but funnily enough, Australia or the world seems to find this song again at particular moments when they need it. But he basically sort of said, I'm sorry that this is cheesy and some of you find it embarrassing.
He sort of said sorry, not sorry. Yeah, he did, And that brings me to I think my proposition to the two of you about Cringe Mountain, which is this is something that we've talked about how jen Z in particular is struggling with the concept of Cringe Mountain. I think as you get older, you realize that you can just keep climbing the mountain and that you just surrender to the cringe. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
You feel less observed and you just say, I'm fed, and you know what, no one cares about me, and no one is looking at me as much as I think they are.
I want to talk about something that I deeply love and it's something that I do when I'm feeling sad. That's what I do is I pull up my phone and I start watching the Jennifer Hudson show Spirit Tunnels. Let me tell you what the spirit tunnels are if you don't know about them. So, Jennifer Hudson is an Egot winner. She's won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. She now has a talk show that
is pretty not particularly acclaimed or particularly widely viewed. But the Spirit Tunnel, which is what guests do before they come on the show, has in fact gone viral worldwide.
And what happens is the guests before they come on set, they walk down a very normal corporate looking corridor which is lined with the staff of Jennifer Hudson's show, and the staff sing and they clap, drawing on the soul train tradition, and the guests engaging in singing and dancing and clapping, and really what happens is you watch their reactions, and in their reactions, you learn everything about that person.
So there are two very best spirit tunnel performances, and the first is from Aaron Pierre, who voiced Mafasa in the Mafaser movie. This next spirit tunnel rock the Jinsennet.
I'm not even sure I need to set this clip up at all. I'm gonna just let.
Y'all watch, Okay, So I know that this is in a visual medium and you won't be able to fully appreciate this until you watch it. But Aaron Pierre, who no one had heard of before this spirit tunnel performance. Let's be clear, he was not a famous actor, but now he is famous because of how unbelievably smooth, appealing attractive he is as he walks down this spirit time.
I'm going to share it on our Instagram story so everyone can find it.
Yeah, and if you are confused about spirits, Chunnles full Stop. We shared yesterday the top five, So get your phone, go to Mama Maha out loud Instagram and look at those and you know exactly what we're talking about.
The second spirit tunnel that I have to mention because I think about it, it's my Roman Empire. I think about it a couple of times a week. It's Michelle Obama who bought a certain confidence and an ease which I just aspire to having in everyday life, not just in spirit tunnels. Everybody that was her going uh oh. That was sung to the tune of Stevie Wonders I Wish, and it's just a delightful thirty seconds. There are other
great ones. Gwen Stefani Usher came in on rollerblades. Chelsea Handler was an interesting one because she's obviously not comfortable dancing, which maybe puts her a disadvantage in spirit tunnel terms. But she was very endearingly awkward and she kept walking down the tunnel saying I wish I could dance better, and it kind of softened her image because I think of her as someone who's quite brash.
I have a question, so I love your theory that how you react to a spirit tunnel reveals who you are, because it's kind of like when everybody sings happy Birthday to you in public.
Or something exactly like that.
But how comfortable you are with that, and Australians and English people like we were not not comfortable reveals a lot about you. But also this has become, as you said, like the Jennifer Hudson show, maybe successful, maybe not, but just like James Cordon's carpool Karaoke or so like, this has become the social play for that show. And so now if I was ever in vite to go on Jennifer Hudson, I would have to prep with my team, right, I would have to be like, how should I react.
I don't know how to dance. I'm not talented, I don't know much the bet.
Would it be.
Better for me to just like high five people as the tunnel or should I try and do a bit of a shimmy or should I just pretend I'm not there choreographs? So now there must be strategy.
Yeah, Well it's interesting because only one we only know of one person who's simply abstained from the Spirit Tunnel, and that was Noah Wiley from the Pit and obviously from Er and I actually kind of love that move. It's like he knew it wasn't going to do him any favors, so we just said, I'm not going to do it.
He says in the interview. He was like, I refuse to dance in public. And I was like same, Like I didn't know we could just range Mountain, Jesse range mountains. I was so indeed. I saw that, and I was like, I have never related more to anyone because the other one that I saw that I highly related to was Simon Cowell.
Oh, dear, let's talk about Simon kaw.
Kind of why this really got into psyche this week. He didn't know what he should.
Have abstained is. I think I guess he figured, look, I'm in the music industry. It would be churlish of me not to get involved in the Spirit Tunnel. But let's just say he did the Nicole Kidman seal clap, if we remember that, where the fingers sort of display outwards and he just looks intensely uncomfortable. Here's a question for you, Holly, do you think any english person could ever do the Spirit Tunnel? No?
I think that English people are not well plased. Oh no, no, no, Actually, he would be endearing in how grumpy he would be about the whole thing.
But it's just he would do finger guns.
We don't know what to do, Like, it's just not in us. It's just not there. The other thing I always think about the Spirit Tunnel, and maybe this is just because of my workplace, is I don't know if the people who are doing all the singing clapping are really the crew, but those poor people have to learn us off rehearse it, presumably, and then they're having a busy day and they're doing all their things and Jennifer's like,
get up, its Spirit Tunnel time. And you know, for Michelle Obama that corridor is packed, but for some other people it's a little light on. And it just reminds me of sometimes we've had like politicians into Mama Maya and you know, we're like, everybody look like really happy to see them.
Come on.
We need everybody for the social videos, and some people are like, I think I've got a headache or like, and then other people come and they're like, oh my god. I would also be really insecure about how many people turned up from me.
It's incredibly vulnerable and there is no where to hide.
It is.
It is the epitome of my worst nightmare.
Like but that's why it's telling of personality. Because Aaron Pierre, no one showed up, no one knew who Aaron Pierre from The Fasta was, and he still bought his A game and it's a fun game to play. A parlor game in your life is to think about who in your life would do a great spirit tunnel and who just because I got to say, Maya, we're doing an amazing spirit tunny annoying.
My Roman empire has been. There's a band called role Model and they are performing this song you will have heard it called Sally when the wine runs out live and every time they do it, there's a bridge, there's a really catchy bit and a really famous person gets on.
Stage and down seas again another great social place.
Yes, so you've got Kate Hudson, you've got Olivia Rodrigo, You've got I think Renee Rap came out, But the best one so far that I have watched on repeat, and I think it's always when it's someone you don't really expect to be amazing was Natalie Portman. She came out, she was so confident, so uninhibited, had incredible rhythm, and I was just like, what can I do in my life? I'll climb any fucking cringe mountain to look like Natalie Portman in my mid forties or whatever it is.
Do you think it was a black Swan training?
I was very rat there was something very she sold her soul to the devil about that particular appearance because she looked twenty and she was having the best time.
I'm wearing cutoff jenim Shwe.
It's like, you just can't learn it, and that's why it's so revealing him a person?
Is it? You go?
It really says something about who you are.
We should share the little internet clips that we watch when we're sad, because Is and I do this quite often. Is Timothy Chalomaye on Saturday Night.
Ah.
He is exceptionally good, particularly the sketch she does with Pete Davidson called Eat Skirt, which every time I see it I have to love so hard. Share out that is with the things that just lift your spirits when you watch that.
Oh, I love it.
After the break, the actress who refuses to promote her new TV series or pocket any money from it, we unpack a scandal unfolding in real Time.
One unlimited out loud access. We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for Mamma Mia subscribers. Follow the link of the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week. And a huge thank you to all our current subscribers.
An actress named Natalie Dormer is refusing to promote her latest TV series and has donated every last cent of her salary to charity. This was not originally her plan. If you don't recognize that name, you will probably know her face. Natalie Drmer was in Game of Thrones, she was in the Hunger Games franchise, who popped up in
Captain America. Anyway, this year, she's got this series coming out called The Lady, where she plays Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and she says that after learning new information about Sarah Ferguson's behavior after filming had all wrapped up, she will not promote the project and will donate all earnings to the National Association for People Abused in Childhood
and the Center of Expertise on Child's Sexual Abuse. Holly, I've seen some headlines Sarah Ferguson, Jeffrey Epstein leaked email something something, What is actually going on there?
So an email has come to light recently in reputable British newspapers about an email that Sarah Ferguson sent to Jeffrey Epstein all the way back in twenty eleven. Now most people know that Prince Andrew has had a whole Epstein related crisis and that the late Virginia just Frey accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor, allegations that he denied, but he still reached a settlement
with her. It was sealed, so we don't know exactly how much it was, but it's estimated to have been somewhere between three and twelve million pounds. Right, But this isn't about Andrew. This is about Fergie. What came to light via these emails, although this part of the story was well known already, is that Fergie borrowed money from
Epstein in twenty ten. And I want you to all remember that everybody knew by twenty ten that Epstein had already been found guilty of sexual charges around a minor and had actually served time for it, So that was already on the table. It's not that people didn't know that right. In twenty ten, she borrows fifteen thousand pounds from him. That might seem like a small ish amount of money, but it was allegedly to pay off one of her personal assistants. And then she gave an inn
where she publicly distanced herself from Epstein. So she said in that interview where she was brought up, you borrowed money from him? Is he one of your friends? She condemned pedophilia's sexual abuse, basically distance herself from Epstein, But the email which is the new part, was sent to him after that interview, basically apologizing for writing it. In the email, she writes, I know you feel hillaciously let down by me, and I must humbly apologize to you
and your heart for that. She called him a steadfast, generous and supreme friend, and she assured him that she never used the P word her words about him. Now you might be wondering why a duchess would need to borrow fifteen thousand pounds from a dodgy billionaire.
Couldn't you borrow it from the queen?
Well?
You know, I wonder, because so this is what's really interesting about all this. I don't want to disappear down a tunnel. But we imagine that all the royals are loaded, and obviously compared to ordinary people, they are, but at unless you're one of the very top tiers. Most royals are asset rich but cash poor. So they might get given here's an estate to live in. It's got a crumbling beautiful estate house on it. It's got staff who need to be paid, it's got grounds that need to
be maintained, it's got blah blah blah blah blah. But they're not allowed to earn money in traditional ways very often, and this is changing a bit over time as the rules have changed about who's on the public person who isn't. But broadly speaking, you're a bit restricted in what you can do for money, but your lifestyle might be quite expensive. And Prince Harry wrote about this in Spare and a
lot of royles have sort of muched about it. Is that they perceive to be living the life of the extremely privileged, and they are, but their actual resources are not that deep, which is why your Prince Andrews of the world, well, I mean one of the reasons why the Prince Andrews of the World was traveling around the world staying in Epstein's house in Florida, staying in Epstein's house in New York, and various other high profile business
people who want to associate themselves with royalty. It's funny because when I've said this before, but I was just sick and I was watching the Gilded Age and all the way back then. So in New York in the eighteen hundreds, they were kind of buying dukes, you know, to marry into their families because the Americans had money and the Brits had status. And it's kind of like, why do you think, oh, I need to get back to Fergie, don't I?
Yeah, why do you think that she's now been cast as such a villain in this story.
So that email leaked a couple of weeks ago, and since that happened, a lot of charities in the UK have dumped Fergie, so they, you know, even though she's not an official royal anymore, she still is the patron of a breast cancer charity, and she still lives quite a public life, and she's still in the royal family, to the point that at Princess Michael of Kent's funeral recently she was there. She was quite prominent at it
with Andrew. But since that email leaked that showed that she apologized to Epstein sort of cozied up to him after the fact, it's really trashed.
Share commented or apologized about that. Has there been any comment from.
Fergie not Since then, she hasn't made any official comment. But I think that what's happened is that people are conflating rightly, So I guess people are conflating the fact that you know, you pretended. And this is also what Prince Andrew got sort of skewered for in that famous interview. You pretended that as soon as you knew that Epstein
was who he was, you backed off. But then, funnily enough, a year later, here's a photo of you at his house in New York, and Prince Andrew was like, oh, I just want to tell him that we couldn't be friends anymore, and like this is a similar thing.
That's so interesting. You just wonder what Epstein's dynamic was with these people, because the British ambassador to the US was just fired a couple of weeks ago for doing exactly the same thing as Fergie, publicly disavowing his relationship with Epstein. His friendship with him and then writing him an email saying, don't worry about everything I said in public. I actually think you're the best friend ever. Yes, So to go back.
To Natalie do What I find interesting, right, is that in five minutes there will be a film about Jeffrey Epstein with let's go Sean pin Choice play Jeffrey Epstein. He'll be paid a bunch of money and he will be on every show promoting his movie about Epstein. Probably won't donate that money to charity We've got. I mean, Taika Waititi has played Hitler, like you know, people play
bad in adverted commas characters all the time. For Dormer, do you think it was that she played a character who she thought she knew and understood, and now she feels like she hasn't presented an accurate portrayal because she didn't have this piece of information.
Look, it's hard to know without seeing the project, right, but let's imagine, because that Fergie is one of those people who lives in the British imagination as a bit of a joke. Right, So, even though she was also busted by an undercover reporter soliciting access to the Prince for money for fifty pounds, like, oh, I'm sure I could get your business proposition in front of them, like she has been done for a few dodgy things over time.
Has she ever considered a job?
It is a very good question. One of the things she said in the Epstein email is that because she writes children's books, right, And she said, that's why I had to say those things, like she's very dodgy anyway, But she even with that knowledge, the space she occupies in the British sort of culture is a bit of
a joke and interesting. Who knows how Natalie Dormer plays her because maybe it's quite light And what I wonder about that because I think you're so right, Jesse, like the Sean Penn will just throw him under the bus. Sean Penn is playing Jeffrey Epstein in the arm in it is taking the millions. But you know that when that project comes out, every press interview that Dorma does, she would be asked about this now because the Epstein email has changed the way people see Fergie. I think,
at least for now it might blow over. But she would be saying, how do you feel about portraying somebody who was you know, an apologist for a pedophile or whatever. And does Natalie do normally want to put herself through that this show? I think that actually it's quite a small part in it. It's not about Sarah Ferguson, but Sarah Ferguson appears in the story do you want to put yourself through that?
You know? Yeah, she thought she'd be like answering questions about the toe sucking that fergue in the eighties, not about pedophilia exactly.
And I think one of the things that it brings up that's interesting to me is that we've always touch tutted, and rightly so about how much public money royals get. But one of the things about them not having an income stream and not being allowed to earn money, which is what Prince Harry has complained about a lot. One of the reasons why he and Megan wanted to leave is it does actually open them up to being quite corruptible.
And Andrew isn't the only royal who that's been the case for and so it kind of makes you think we ask all the time, why doesn't King Charles cast Andrew like properly out like publicly humiliate him, kick him out of the family and Fergie, and some of the speculation I've seen around this reporting has been that they might be more detrimental outside the tenth and inside the tent, as in they'll just start talking they know like harsh yep, they know too, like exactly like Harry, he's you know,
from outside the tent. He can say all these things. They know a lot of things, they can reveal a lot of things, and so that actually what the Lion King Charles is trying to walk is like.
Keep them onside.
I don't approve of my brother and his wife, but they're not completely kicking them out because they might be more trouble outside. Out Louder is a massive thank you for being with us today as always, and to our fabulous team for putting the show together. Don't forget you can watch us on YouTube and that we'll be back in your ears tomorrow.
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