Millennials Were The Last Generation To Have It All

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Yeah, I can even talk about the fact that I was there on the night that Facebook started. I don't know if I've shared this on the pod before, but I was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, and.

I remember the night it started. My roommate walked into my room in the social news.

I'm sitting in my dorm room and my roommate comes in and she says, have you heard of this thing called the Facebook?

Hello, and welcome to Mamma Mia out Loud and to our Friday show, where you will hear not a peep, not a bleep about what's going on in the wider world because this is a news free zone and it's Friday, the twenty eighth of March.

I'm Holly Waynwright, I'm Meya Friedman, and I am not Jessee Stevens. I am Amelia Lester, filling in for Jesse.

On today's show. We're millennials, the last generation to really have it all. That slight crunch you could here is a merelya Lester flexing gee.

Is one I know loud. That's why so you and I are not.

Recommendations include a deeply original novel, some no bullshit health advice and a lipliner, and our Best and Worst of the Week, which includes singing, dancing, and having nightmares, not all at the same time, but also sort of at the same time.

First mea Friedman In case you missed it. There are five main reasons why women break up with their hairdresser, according to an unscientific investigation in the Age by reporter Hannah Hammond. I have a question before I tell you what they are. How many times do you think the average woman goes to the hairdresser in her lifetime?

Oh my gosh, just quickly, just off the top of your head.

Over a whole life. Do maths one hundred four hundred. It's one hundred and fifty on average, five times a year except during COVID, where we cut our own fringes. There are sixty three thousand hairstylists currently employed across Australia, and at any given moment, many of us are moving between them, leaving one trying another. Here are the five

Okay, it's not you, it's me, Chris.

I'll DM him anyway. The second reason, you don't feel good about yourself when you leave. I love this reason because I sometimes apply this to friendships. You know, when you spend time with someone and you leave and you say, Okay, how do I feel in this moment? What's the word? And it could be burdened, it could be drained, it could be recharged uplifted. If you walk out of the

I need to bring the curly girl energy here because I have very difficult hair. This is not a humble brag, but hair dress get really terrified when they see my hair for the first time. They always say something.

Like, gosh, you've got a lot of hair.

Yeah, and sometimes it's a compliment and sometimes it's an insult, and sometimes it's just sort of a complaint. But either way, it's always a bit fraught when I meet a new hairdresser.

So this is a topic nearing to my heart. Then not accept you like, say thanks, but I won't be doing this today, not yet.

I think it's because you can charge a lot when you've got as much hair as I do. But again, not a humble brag, it's really it creates friction with hairdressers a lot. But I had a hairdresser who I acquired during COVID, So when restrictions were easy where I was living, I just moved to a new place and I got a hairdresser who came to my house and for a while she cut my hair in my backyard because it was still during that time when we needed

But my local park was full of hairdressers meeting their clients.

Park.

Was it like people.

Walking around with their foils in?

Yeah, it was.

But I broke up with her because to your point about how you feel when you leave, I felt really drained. She would come and I felt like I needed to keep the conversation going, and I had to remember her children's names, and we just got into sort of inevitably quite intense conversations about parenting.

I felt exhausted at the end. I like to work at the hairdresser, Holly, what about you.

I didn't have a steady hairdresser until me. I did some matchmaking for me, which you know, it's quite typical of many of the dynamic of our relationship where she's like, we need to fix this. So I always just flooded around. ID just go to whoever.

So you were constantly breaking up with people, I'd.

Be like, whoever can pit me in? And I have exactly the same thing, because dirt, because I was and I'm a commitment fobe, like Ameily, I have a lot of hair. So sometimes they break up with you. Sometimes they're just like, oh no, really yep. And also I think I always feel a lot of sympathy for hair dresses because my expectations are very unrealistic. I'm always like, I want a heavy friend.

Are you bringing a bardo?

That's like my ideal hair, and they're just like, duh, you're delusional, and they're obviously like in any relationship when they tell you you're dreaming, you get a bit upset.

I've evangelized my hairdresser, but now everyone on Out Loud goes to her except for you, but Jesse and Holly both go to her. She's like the out loud hairdresser, elle A Edwards, and I'm going this week. Yeah, And I've started a group chat with Elle and Holly about what we're going to do just for feelings about Holly's hair.

MEA's backseat driving my hair. Generational wars are an enormous amount of fun if it is not your generation who's being sledged, which is why I can't get enough of the millennial gen Z fight. But sometimes these silly scraps about arbitrary social groupings of birthdays are profound.

Can you summarize that fire? Do you think it's just like gen Z trolling millennials about being old?

Yes, because now that millennials are, you know, in their thirties and early forties and so on, they are now the old people and inverted commas, and obviously gen zs are the young people, and young people like to sledge old people, and when you're first in the old people category in inverted commas, it is profoundly uncomfortable to have that shifting realization that you are not the young people anymore.

Meanwhile, Gen x's have just become irrelevant and or cute, but you are always kind of a releman. I disagree.

I think we have only become cooler. Meal We are cool, but we are.

Not how they kill a fight. They see us as cute, you know, that condescending phase.

It's like they do genes cute and kind of bombling and pathetic.

And I said that to us the other day.

She did, Actually, that was good. We should get to that. But this essay that we're going to talk about today is not silly. It's profound, and I think there's a lot of truth in it for all of us. It's written by American content creators. She would hate that tag, Liz. It's called millennials were the last generation to have it all.

The virtual world.

Was not more important than the real one. We went out drank Vodkasoda's made mistakes, and those mistakes stayed in the bar bathroom. You could have a bad night without its showing up in someone's group chat five seconds later.

Yes, life was.

Not a personal brand and being young wasn't a content strategy. It was excessive, earnest, ridiculous and free. And jen Z hates us for it because they know they missed out. What do you think about that?

So you'll notice that I bought the side part energy here today.

It really did in your Rocketcas.

I'm reclaiming it, and I want to point out to gen Z, jen Affer is coming up behind you and soon they're going to be making fun of your tube socks and your center parts, and you're going to see.

What it feels like.

But look, I think this is very profound in the sense that Millennials were the last of maybe the good ones, but also the first of the bad ones. And I think that's maybe what Liz Plank is missing a little bit here. So, yes, we know what life was like before the Internet, but life was no walk in the

Not true week old we during nine to eleven, I.

Was eighteen, so it was really a coming of age. Yeah, and in fact it happened the day before I started university, so it's all about me. And then the second thing

The thing that's really interesting about generational algibargie is that all of the things that you just discussed happened to everybody, right as in, the things that happen when you're young tipping into adulthood are very formative, it's true, but everyone else at this table experienced all those events, you know, the financial crisis nine to eleven, So it's really interesting what we think about who owns what time.

That's fascinating because as you were saying that, I was forcing myself to not interrupt and go, But did you have aids Because when we were becoming sexually active, suddenly there was this sex born virus that could kill you. And even though the Boomers also experienced that, they weren't first starting to have sex. So it was much more impactful on Gen X than it was on Boomers, even though we were all having sex.

Yeah, I guess every generation can point to these being seizmic traumatic events. I think the difference from millennials is that we saw it both ways. So we saw the Blockbuster and the Netflix, we saw the radio and the Spotify of it all. So take the Internet like a bridge in generation. There we are, we have to hold everyone else up. So do you remember there's there's a very famous New Yorker cartoon which features a dog sitting at a computer and typing, and the caption is on

No one used real names back then. You a radical idea.

Yes, it was like the Internet was a sort of like mysterious fantasy realm where you never used your full name. You would never post a photo of your face on there. The idea was that on the Internet you'd come up with some ridiculous email address, you know, like whatever at hotmail dot com, Fluffy Unicorn.

At hotmail dot com. You'd never use your name.

And then we thought the Internet was a fun place where you could experiment with different personas. But then what gen Z came into was the Internet was real life. That was your person I wonder if even gen z uses do they say irl because we used IRL to denote this is the Internet, but this is real life.

The thing that's interesting about this is so Plank's essay is very positive, right, It's very like we saw this amazing progressive era. She's American, so she'soid about American politics under Obama. That's why we believe in politics, and we believe in change and all these things. She's like, we got to party, we got to do all this stuff.

What I really loved in this idea of you being a bridging generation is that and what Liz thank got to in this was that you experienced all of the good things, or a lot of the good things about the Internet before the really toxic things took hold. So She says millennials were the last generation to experience social media when it was fun, before it turned into a full time job. Social media was essentially one big group chat, just a place for your friends and family to keep

Yeah. I can even talk about the fact that I was there on the night that Facebook started. I don't know if I've shared this on the pod before, but I was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, and I remember the night it started. My roommate walked into my life the social network.

Were you a CA? I don't know if we've spoken about this enough. O the Leicester.

So I'm sitting in my year with this two thousand and four. Okay, I'm sitting in my dorm room and my roommate comes in and she says, have you heard of this thing called the Facebook? And it started literally a couple of hours beforehand. So I signed up. So I was the sixtieth user, and that used to be in my URL of my name Amelia sixty Amelia sixty not sixty nine, and face sixty. Everyone was super excited because it was the first time that you could upload

And what made it feel safe because it just for.

Harvard students, so it was just it was very restricted. And then it only became for other university students, and you know, it gradually got bigger and bigger, but it started as a closed ecosystem, so you joined that night. It had all these fields, like political views. Everyone put very liberal regardless of their political views, because that's what we did at the time. Favorite movie, favorite quote. People put Annie Hall as their favorite movie, which is like

Media first time that we all know so well.

Yes, And then I emailed Mark Zuckerberg because I wrote a column in the university newspaper, and I emailed him and said, Hi, Mark, I'm writing an article about the Facebook, and I'm trying to find out how to leave the Facebook, but there's no way to leave it. And he wrote back immediately. He was really worried and anxious because keep in mind, he was like twenty years old and didn't know what he was doing. He wrote back immediately. He

Never wrote the code. So I wrote this article which now runs the world that yeah, he does.

And so I wrote this article, which was the second ever published article. It was about Facebook. It was ten days after it had started. And basically the article, I was like, I feel bad about Facebook because it it only took ten days.

I mean, you were an iconiclass.

It's just that social media makes everyone feel bad. It wasn't a profound thought. It was just that I felt this pit in my stomach ten days in.

And ironically, the Facebook was about rating women, That's what it was about. Galat face. So he was known to us.

So when my roommate came in, I knew who Mark Zuckerberg was because a few months before that he had started face mash, which was where he took our official student ID photos and pitied both men and women's official photos against each other, and you had to vote for the hotter one. And I remember there was a ranking of the top ten women on campus and the top ten men, which is.

What social media at its heart, basically, it is whether it's comparing faces or lifestyles.

And he hadn't met Priscilla Chan, his wife. She was He met her in the line for the bathroom at a fraternity party, but he hadn't met her when he started facemash, so it very much read as sort of a horny opportunity stick, almost like twenty year old coding.

Yeah. In Liz Plank's story about this Golden Age and why Millennials had it good, she says, the faces, My god, the faces. The women of that era had faces, distinct ones, faces with character and quirks, Noses that weren't mathematically whittled into aerodynamic ski slopes, lips that weren't pre measured to one to one to six golden ratio. Rihanna had her face care and Nightley had her jawline. Zoe Deschanel had her big, awkward round eyes. Women weren't expected to morph

Saw ourselves in a photo because at your time, you had to go to the chemist to get photos produced, and so when the Facebook started, you had to literally scan in a photo. You didn't have digital photos of yourself, like cast.

Your mind back. So beauty was more varied then, because now, for jen Z, it's completely homogenized and there is literally an algorithm that tells us what kind of beauty performs the best. It's Instagram face.

I want to ask this bit about celebrity because you know, I'm obsessed with celebrity culture, right. One of the things that Liz writes that was great about pop culture at that time, which, let's face it was not all great, but she said, we got to live through Solunge and jay Z and the Elevator as a mystery, not as a micro trend dissected in a thousand tiktoks by teenagers

I love this.

There has been a shift, the rail shift in how we view celebrity culture now as a mystery to solve.

That's true and also the opinionification of everything. The hot take, which is ironic given that's what we do on this

And I'm cuan on arguably Taylor Swift. She was famous all through the two thousands, but she really hit the stratosphere when we developed this receipts culture because people essentially were consuming her music as gossip and connecting the dots of her music in a way that was quite distinct from when Lemonade came out twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen.

Sorry, it was a quite different way.

You were listening to the music first and foremost, yes, but now it's different.

And Taylor very much pioneered easter egg culture from a mainstream point of view. Yes, intentionally dropping and creating all of those easter eggs.

One of the things that Liz Plank says in this and obviously she's very specific media lens, and she made her name in like startup internet businesses like BuzzFeed.

Fun fact about Liz Plank. She also co hosted a podcast with Justin Baldoni That's Feminism. Quite recently quit after the New York Times story.

And in this piece she writes about the enthusiasm of that time, like throwing yourselves into these kind of startups, working like a mofo, like never you know. She says, we didn't go home till late, and we didn't want to. That's where we found our family was fun back then. Yeah, and she says that we even though she says with kind of with hindsight, there was a fair amount of exploitation in a way. It meant that people could build these careers and it felt very exciting and you.

Yeah, we were institutionalists. I think we were the last institutionalist. So we entered the workforce wanting to climb the corporate ladder. The notion of work life balance was not important to us. The word hustle was glorified. Leaning In, Leaning In, I watched The Devil We was prior recently a great movie. Love Stanley Tucci and love Anne Hathaway, but it feels like a relic.

Of another time.

The whole notion that you should sacrifice yourself to work in order to get this delayed promise of getting ahead, that just feels so alien now.

And I know that younger people in the.

Workforce resent that idea that they should pour themselves into the work at the expense of everything.

Now, I think Anne Hathaway's character would be telling Anna Winto's character that she has boundaries and yeah, work life wants and she worked from home.

Anne Hathaway would be the content creator. Now the movie would be about her.

Yeah, the last one to drop about womanhood, Because I wonder if you feel as optimistic about millennial women as Liz did. She says, if you were a girl, you were the first generation of women who truly had choices, not just in theory but in practice. Unlike our mothers, we weren't expected to marry straight out of college. We could be messy, ambitious, chaotic, and unapologetic in ways they never could. I kind of feel like jen X could do that too. We weren't just given the option of independence,

It was aspirational.

Do reckon that was a real thing, and that she doesn't buy it, She's not buying the millennials at at all.

It felt a little tragic.

I mean, I'm not proud of saying that, but as a woman who was single for much of my twenties, I really felt like, frankly a failure at thirty when I wasn't married.

Really, you didn't, You weren't empowered by the girl's era, You know that, because it's.

What you should mention girls. I mean, Lena Dunham, that show is all about. It's sort of like a retelling of sex and the City for twenty something. Ye, but Lena Dunham had the same desire to find someone for in love settled don as Carrie Bradshaw did.

Ten years earlier.

Yeah, so a merely saying, no, millennials did not have it all you being at day one of the culture we all live in now at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg. We need to unpacked further at another time, but the link to the essay that we're talking about is going to be in the show notes, and we'd love to know if millennials feel like they had it great or like Amelia, that they did not.

We could have had it all out loud is in a moment, something to listen, to read and pop on your lips.

It's our recommendations, vibes, ideas, atmosphere, something casual, something fun.

This is my best recommendation. It's Friday, so we want to help set up your weekend with our best recos Amelia, go your hardest.

So I went on a girl's trip recently with two friends I haven't seen in a long time, and naturally what we did was god a Sephora and we went in and there was a young lady working there.

Because now I'm an older millennial, I use the phrase young lady.

And she was wearing dark lip liner with a pale lipstick. She looked so good, and I just blurted out, I need exactly what you're wearing. And she sat me down and she did me up, and she gave me Bobby Brown's lipliner in rum raisin.

This is so I used to have that. This is so ninety, which is a brown terra cotta brown if you will, ye, I'm getting like flashbacks.

Yeah, And she gave me a sort of baby pink Na's lipstick to wear on the top of it. And it does feel nineties, but it feels like it's a little bit edgy in a good way for me. And the interesting thing is, I think it's just very flattering to outline your lips and that went out of fashion.

Palony liipliner, we just we haven't. I've started using liipliner again.

It was such a faux pat do you remember for the last twenty years it was basically a faux par to wear lipliner.

You know what it looks like because I'm looking obviously at ilips, I've been looking at them for a couple of days. Knowing that you're doing.

This rather sounds a little creepy, I.

Know, sorry, but what it's kind of added like mentioned, do you know what I mean? It's not like you look if you listen to this and thinking she's got like an outline, You've got it. It's not that it just gives it like, yeah, it makes your lips pop.

Yes, yeah.

And it's a little bit high maintenance because for the longest time we were just sort of rocking a like pale pink lip gloss. But I think it's it's well keep things tidy.

And the trick that I learned is if you don't want to do the dark one and the lighter one inside is a neutral lipliner before any color. So if you're just going to buy one lipliner, just buy a neutral one that's just a bit darker than your lips. So even if you're wearing red, use that first to just define the outline of your lip.

I got a glimpse of you when you used to be a beauty editors.

Did you ever use the perfect pout? I've got a recommendation for a book by a well known author and friend of the Pod and former executive producer of No Filter or she still is the executive producer of No Filter, but she used to be my producer. Her name is Niama Brown. She wrote one of my favorite books from a couple of years ago called The Shot, which is a phenomenal, romping, page turning novel about a reality TV show. Did you have watch The Swan where they get plastic

I think you'd like it, Amelia, because it also has this political undertone because it's set in America and Brinn's husband is quite trumpy and she's sort of finding this very conventional traditional role that she's in suffocating. It poses a lot of like quite provocative questions about how much you should care about yourself and your when you're a well identity is and so you know, it's like save yourself, but who you're leaving behind kind of thing. It's really interesting.

She studied hard, she did. You got to give it.

As well as being the person who fixed me up with the hair dresser and telling me what pants to wear, she's also the person that you go to and you say, should I go to the doctor about this?

Mole? Like that generally.

Mia, she loves it.

I'm the other way.

I am health avoidant and I get a bit intimidated by health information by doctors. And so Mama Mia has launched a big new content pillar this week called Well, which is all about health, and it's got a podcast that's hosted by Claire Murphy, friend of the poem Murphy wonderful Quickie host.

Do you know what I love about this show is that when Claire Murphy was the host of the Quickie, she had to be quite serious, but whenever she'd come on out loud, there would be a different side of Claire that people would here and on. Well, it's version of Claire. She laughs a lot and she's prepared.

With the doctor, right, doctor Marriam. She's a Sydney based GP. She's really no nonsense.

She's great.

And when we were launching this, I went to the launch. It's kind of health, real life health stuff like a full body check for women, and there was this board at the launch where you could stick a sticker if you related to it, so it said things like, have you ever tried a treatment that you saw on the internet, diagnosed yourself with something that only three people in Australia have compared the color of your period blood.

With your friends?

Right, people would go and stick their stickers.

City for us to do when we're on the road.

I oh, and this is very me, Like ignored something because you think you're too busy, that's very me. So a lot of women relate to a lot of this. And the thing that's great about well is that it's very accessible. So if you're a bit of a health avoidant person like me, it's entertaining. There's going to be newsletters,

Sperms that don't get a graveyard bemy, they all go to a special place to die. Well. To find out where that place is.

You can find well in your podcast app of course a Mom and Me I will put a link in.

The show notes.

It is great, dinner, parties, dancing, Yes, we're talking nightmares literal and otherwise it's Best and Worst.

Do you want daily out Loud access? Why wouldn't you? We drop episodes every Tuesday and Thursday exclusively for Mum and Me are subscribers. Follow the link in the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week and a huge thank you if you're already a subscriber. It's time for Best and Worst, the part of the show where we share a little more from our personal lives. I'm going to go first. My worst and Best happened

Would you pass your tiny violin to me?

Please?

I know, like people will be like, well, you didn't have to sit at a computer all day. You got to sing and dance and have makeup put on you.

What fun? I know, And this is what's so strange. It would seem like I should have loved that, but I didn't, And I realized my happy place. I just wanted to be alone with my laptop. Does it give you a new found respect.

You know how you and I are both obsessed with the nineties supermodels. Yes, does it give you a new found respect? You know how they're always like, well, Christy challenging is just the most professional of all.

Now you'll know what I would have been, Naomi Campbell throwing a fine you would My best of the week, though, was all the other people on that shoot and seeing how professional they were, A very big cast of people behind the scenes, in front of the scenes. Everyone was very lovely to me. I didn't deserve it, and there were good snacks out loud as.

I promise that if you come to the show and you see the end result of this, it was.

Worth it in every way. Oh yeah, I was totally worth it. That was just my personal worst. I realized that I would have made a terrible pop star or supermodel, let the record show.

Or actress because actresses, because one of the things is there's a lot of setting up a shot. Yes, and obviously we're not super famous, so you stand there while they set up a shot. Imagine that Nicole has a body double stars, but there's a lot of that. It makes you realize anyway, my worst is a disguised best, but I have to get it out this week for somebody who has the kind of celebrity icon obsessions that I do. You're Gwyneth's, your Megan's, you're Jennifer Anist, You're.

A basic bitch, elder millennial gen X.

Yes, it's been hard to keep up. For example, I can't that Gwyneth and Meghan are sitting together in a kitchen the point we're recording this. It's not clear why they are, if they're recording an episode of something. If it's just that Gwyneth has managed to get past security. She did say in that profile last week that she wanted to take Megan a pie, but that there was too much security at the gate. So maybe she busted her way in.

Who knows.

I don't know, but it just feels like all my favorite people are coming together and coalescing, and I couldn't be more excited. Meghan dropped her shopping line like, well, we're not a shopping line, but her affiliate links page.

Did the Meghan Duchess of Sussex. I may earn a commission from anything that you buy on this list.

We talked about it on Wednesday, but it's like it's.

A lot going for dinner with Pedro Pascal.

Well and then Jen. And the thing is is I need Mia when she has a hot minute to go and observe those paparazzi pictures of Jen and Pedro closely, because what Jen is wearing is going to enrage Mia. She is wearing what she has been wearing, the exact thing that she has been wearing.

I want to hear it. Have already given some feedback to Gen about her hair. I feel like I need to just back off. And she's wearing a white teeth. Not that we look at paparazzi photos ever, because we don't have very but my eyes glanced at them briefly, and she was wearing a white T shirt with a black waistcoat over the top. It's a lot and jeans with cuffs, which I thought, well, it's been coming back.

Enormously fun for me, but also slow down, I have stressful.

I think that's fair. My best is a very petty best that I love.

Right, don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about my dreams because that's the worst thing that ever happens. But do you ever have one of those nightmares? Wait in your nightmare you're trying to shout but nothing comes out. Yes, that's the one I have all the time.

Right, What does that mean that you mean silence or you are silent?

So I was having one of those dreams the other night, right, and I was trying to tell someone about a bad guy. So in my dream, I'm shouting, it's him, it's that guy. Right, nothing was coming out. Text me immediately said Rant was away that night. He was taking Matilda to one of her twenty five million football games in.

Some far from place.

But I woke up in the middle of this dream to the dog licking my face because you know how you think you're shouting and you actually are, like in your in your sleep, you're going get back.

She didn't jumped on the bed to try and perform the highway conover her mastssly really disturbed and she.

Jumped up and she was like mom, And I was like, good dog, good dog saved me from the background.

So good. I'm glad you didn't like clock her in the face.

She was some funny I'm just imagining the dogs were actually hearing this, like strangled, like like what lifted her ears?

Like?

Mom?

Anyway, do you know that's funny because my dog jumped on the bed last night for absolutely no reason. I wasn't having a nightmare. It was the middle of the night. I think she just wanted to put her tongue in my mouth. Amelia, what was your worst of the week and your best?

I mean, it's hard to top house stressful celebrity gossipers right now. I agree, there's a lot going on. So I went to a very lovely dinner party on the weekend. Some new friends invitim me over. I love a dinner party, and I was so impressed. And they had a signed seating which I love, and there were three different desserts.

Did they state the couples next to each other? No, that's such a faux pat I never want to sit next to me. Tell me where to see at the dinner party. You don't want to sit next to him? Did you both know everybody there? No, we knew no one.

It was delightful. It was an extroverts dream. So the dinner party itself was lovely. Oh and they said this amazing cocktail in a big jug when we all got there, which was made with like prosecco and sorbet.

How do you know when it's time to go home. That's what makes me feel anxious.

Oh I love to leave a dinner party with everyone wanting more from me.

So I typically round nine forty five, just citing a baby, just as I just cite a babysity that just after.

She said me, So I emailed Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.

So yeah, I do love leaving. I once read the Anna Win Tour.

The editor of USFO Devil was prior of inspiration, leaves every party after fifteen minutes and only ever has one glass of champagne.

Oh my god, that's me. I aspire to that anyway.

So the dinner party itself was lovely, but you know, talk turned to politics, and I know this is Friday, so I'm going to keep it very vague, but you know, things are happening in politics, just like they are in celebrity gossips. And I am a joint Australian American citizen. So I was sharing some anxieties that I'm having about the state of one of those countries politics.

I'll as leave you to guess which.

One, and I was sort of saying, look, my home is changing.

America's my home.

Australia is my home, and I was saying, I don't know what's going to happen to my home in America, and as an immigrant to America, obviously a very privileged one, but nonetheless someone who has chosen to make America my home, I have certain worries about the direction it's going in. And there were two people seated next to me. One was from Russia, left after the Ukraine War started, and

And it was a reality check for me.

I realized how privileged it was for me to be like, well, politics are.

Very stressful for me right now, and I don't know what's going to happen.

Meanwhile, people in basically every other country on the planet have been dealing with this forever, so.

That was a really interesting reality check.

The best was something that I hope a lot of people listening can relate to because Australia is a nation of immigrants and a lot of people here come from other places.

And my brother lives.

In London, and I have one brother, and he and I were very close growing up, despite a seven year age gap, and we lived in the same city. We lived in New York for about ten years together. We saw each other every weekend. We were very close. He moved to London, I moved to Sydney and we're no longer close. I'm afraid to say that that time difference, it's wholly must know. World between the UK and Australia is just awful.

There's just no way.

To ever have a conversation which you're just in a very different It's always either early morning, late night.

You're very rarely in the same It's really hard.

And then, as with a lot of sibling relationships, we've gone in very different directions with our lives. He lives a very different life to me, but he and his family are coming to visit this week. Can for an extended period during the UK school holidays, and I'm really excited to reconnect because sometimes you do have to have conversations with your siblings or in any relationship in person to maintain them.

It's just been too hard.

My brother is And I know this is a stereotype, but like the classic man who's no good on the phone, no good on text, no good on anything except face to face. So it's very hard.

If you yeah, my brothers, it's very different. He just always wants to tell me how much he loves me. Oh my gosh, he's got a lot of big feelings, my brother. He just is very like I just love you so much, and I'm like slower role that is so lovely, but just role, you just live down the road. I'm so happy for you. Thank you beautiful. Oh my gosh.

All right, that is all we have time for today. Out Loud is a massive thank you to you all for listening to our show all week. We're going to be back in him Is next week. Thank you Amelia very much fulfilling him for our Jesse And why don't you and me a read this out.

We have some people to thank for helping us to be here in your ears. Group executive producer Ruth Devine, Executive producer Emmeline Gazillis.

Audio producer is Leah Porges, video producer is Josh Green, and our junior content producers are co Co and Tessa.

Goodbye bye, except I'm still here. We're going to leave you with a bit of a conversation we had on the subscriber episode yesterday with Amelia about a little whoopsie that happened in a group chat, because don't you hate it when you're a journalist who gets added to the political chat about a war? And I think we've all been there. We'll pup a link in the show notes.

Shout out to any Mamma Mia subscribers listening. If you love the show and you want to support us, subscribing to Mamma Mia is the very.

Best way to do it.

There's a link in the episode description.

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