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