You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Hello, and welcome to Mom and Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Monday, the night of February. And I am Holly Waynwright.
I'm Jesse Stevens, and I'm Claire Stephens, filling in for Amelia, who's going to be back on Wednesday, and also for em both of whom are gallivanting around the world while we're sitting here.
I don't think I've ever been on a show with a double Stevens situation before, have I think this is a whole new thing. I'm a little bit nervous.
Yeah, I hope people can tell our voices apart. I'll speak slightly deeper just for Claric. I think you have a tone of despair at the moment.
I'll try to be more upbeat.
You have to declare every time you speak. You'd be like, this is Jesse, this is Claire. Do not attribute my thoughts to another anyway. Don't gang up on me. That's all I'm saying on our agenda for to Claire, what have you.
Got the Melinda Gates comments about the Epstein Files that I cannot stop thinking about and Bianca Ston. Sorry, we need to talk about the profile that was in Vanity Fair. She is the wife of Yee, formerly known as Kanye West.
Yay, yay?
Is it? Yeah?
I don't like having her.
She's a corrector, yay.
Yeah. We talked about this on Friday show. That was actually really rude.
How you just corrected me?
Yay formerly known as Kanye West. She is finally ready to speak. There is just one problem and.
Also dozer recipe to eats and recognizing the particular agony of losing a pet.
But first, as we are recording this episode, the super Bowl is occurring. It is we don't know.
We're calling it the Benito Bowl.
Friends, Okay, yes, because of our friend bad.
Money, Bad Bunny, And we're going to get into who why in case you're not across mister Bunny all of that.
But the out louders have just let out a collective squeal because there has been imagery of friends of the Pod, Lewis Hamilton and Kim kardash In in the audience together on a date there. I think I've seen three to four seconds of footage, and I'm feeling a lot of feelings.
Jessie, it must be serious, because that is a serious coming out date.
Right.
You do not take someone to the Super Bowl with every camera in the world unless you're like, well.
They look really happy.
We kissing.
They look I see happiness in his eyes. I see I see joy. She's feeling herself. She's feeling Yeah, she's feeling herself. I just think the out louders are really mad that I didn't know he was short. I can see when they sit next to each other that he's not a tall man, but she's tiny. But she's tiny, which I think is fine.
We need to move off that and not onto what's happening on the field with the football, because let's be honest, that's not our specialty. It's not even Australian football. We don't understand it, not even English football. I don't even know. But what we do care about is Benita, mister bad bunny. It is Super Bowl today, it's Super Bowl Sunday, but it's Monday. But you know what I mean, right, And by the time you're listening to this, it's all happened already.
And I couldn't tell you who was playing in it. I don't know because Travis Kelsey wasn't involved, So therefore my pop culture references did not coincide. But I need to give you a very quick introduction to a man whose face and potentially other body parts you have seen everywhere today, Bad Bunny.
Okay, I know who he is, to be clear, but my mum would be asking who and what is a bad Yes, exactly.
So if you woke up this morning and you were like, but all Bunny's bad in this case, yes, Bunny is very bad in the old fashioned nineteen eighties meaning of the word bad meaning good. He's really bad as in good.
He's also hot, which isn't relevant.
Really hot, so it is also if you're not fully across Bad Bunny, whose real name, by the way, is Benito Antonio Martinez Orcasio. He is the most streamed artist in the world. Last year he had more streams than anyone else, Yes, including Taylor Swift. He is huge.
I've gotta not laugh because of the video.
We'll get to that later. Cheat sheets. Things you need to know about Bad Bunny is that he's from Puerto Rico. He grew up in a small town there. Puerto Rico is in the Caribbean. It's a collection of Irelands. It's an American territory, so it's not like part of America, but it's governed by America and its citizens are American citizens, so he is an American citizen, which is a bit hawcs for the Mega people who keep being like, why was a foreigner headlining the super Bowl? Ah?
Yes, bad argument, not a.
Foreigner, but also didn't seem to mind when Coldplay were doing it. But anyway, other famous Puerto Ricans for context, j.
Loo, she's done the super Bowl.
She has done the Super Bowl. She with her friendship Ricky Martin. He might have done the super Bowl and they claim him they do. Manuel Miranda Benicio del Toro AOC. Lots of people, very talented people be for Puerto Rico. So mister Bunny as we shall call him, sings in Spanish only. Now. Lots of crossover Latin stars over the years who've become big deals in America in the English speaking world have also released songs in English. He has not,
He says he never will. He says he doesn't care if you understand his songs or not if you don't speak Spanish. This is how he communicates his music and he does it very very well. That's hot. It's really like everything about that bunny is very hot. Traditionally, the music he makes might be called reggaeton, that's what it was called, this kind of breakthrough mix of like Jamaican dancehall and hip hop and Latin Caribbean music. And when he became a really big deal, he moved to America.
He moved to the Hollywood Hills and he started dating Kendall Jenna. That's where many of us might have bumped into him. Culturally.
For me, that just ran into like a whole lot of names of people who have dated Kardashians and Jenna's that I can't differentiate. So I'm glad you're kind of spelling this out.
They didn't go out for all that long, by the way. And apparently the way the story goes is that after that kind of period, like that was his kind of Hollywood period, right, and then he moved back to Puerto Rico. He made the album that is just when the Grammy of the Album of the Year for which is called DeBie Tara Masfhoto, which loosely translates as I should have taken more photos And it's kind of like a breakup album. That's also about home. So maybe it could be about Kendallwi.
Probably not, And it's very much about like I should have embraced the moment more. And it's sort of mashed in with all these traditional rooms and it has been massive.
And the irony is like I hear all of this, and it's like, how has an artist who spans continents and like is just widely popular and beloved, How is he at the center of a culture war?
Well, here we go, just in case you haven't heard Bad Money, I'm going to play you a tiny bit of his most famous song at the moment, and it's called d T MF. You know it. Here's a little tiny bit of it. Okay, we got it. We're on board. The reason he's ended up in the middle of a culture is because America, for a start, right over the last few years, the person who organizes who performs at the super Bowl halftime it's jay Z. Jay Z's Rock
Nation runs the super Bowl halftime show. They have done that since the first one they did was j Loo Shakira. Then they've done Usher, they did that amazing one with all the West Coast hip hop with Dr Dre, and they did Kendrick and this year Bad Bunny, and it's largely seen as a bit of a nod to let the NFL want to remain relevant cool reflect the multicultural nature of their fans because of America multicultural nation, lots
of different people play and watch football. But also it means that very often there's a little bit of friction, like a little bit of like, we're gonna like mess things up a bit here. We're not just gonna give
you country stars and pop stars every time. So this year it's landed in a very feebro moment because Bad Bunny is not a particularly political person, but in the last couple of years he has been quite a critic of Trump, and he is really supportive of Puerto Ricans, and he's really against Ice and all the anti immigration rhetoric.
Well even the politics of speaking Spanish in America right now with the Ice raids. Like whether or not he wanted to be political is kind of enforced exactly.
So when he became the biggest person in the world last year, he could have gone, everyone says, on a massive stadium tour like Tata and made hundreds of millions, but he went, no, you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna build a place in Puerto Rico, do a ten week residency and if you want to come see me, you come to Puerto Rico, put money into the economy here and everybody did. All the famous people went. You've all seen John Hamm going ham as it were at the concerts.
Speaking of John ham you just because you showed me just a lovely video for my Monday morning morning, can you just talk to me about the relevance of bad bunnies thrusting.
I don't want to be a creep. I don't want to objectify mister bunny. I don't want to suggest anything about anything except that if you watch some of the videos from that residency where he's gyrating, where he is gyrating clearly perhaps unrestrained by under Okay, it's pretty exciting.
Do you think that upsets the MAGA people.
I think they don't like that. They don't like the spanishness, they don't like the fact that. So for example, when he won his big award at the Grammys last week, he did speak out against ice. He also said, you know, we are not He was talking about Puerto Ricans, obviously, and he was like, we're not savage. We're not animals, we're not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans. That would not necessarily seem like an outrageous thing to say, but where it lands now anyway, So lots of pressure
on mister Bunny for the halftime show. Is he going to be political? Is he going to be polytical? You would know that by now because it will have happened.
But unfortunately for bad Bunny, there is a competitor. There's another super Bowl happening, and who is headlining that?
So Turning Point USA, which is the charity run by Erica Kirk after the widow of Charlie Kirk, they decided to put on at the same time what they are calling an alternative all American halftime show with a couple of country singers and Kid Rock as headliner.
I don't want to watch that one, rather watch they.
There will be too many underpans. Do we feel that we know now who Benito is? Oh?
Yes, and I'm very excited. I'm very excited to watch this halftime show as soon as we're out of this studio. Same, I am desperate to talk about Melinda Gates. So it's been just over a week since the release of millions of files relating to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his correspondents with some of the world's most powerful men.
We talked about ailon Musk on last Monday show. The sheer volume of the files is overwhelming and sickening, but among them is a draft email written by Epstein claiming that tech billionaire Bill Gates contracted a sexually transmitted disease after sleeping with Russian girls. That's how he's written it, and had asked Epstein to get him antibiotics to secretly
give to his then wife. Days after the files were released, Bill Gates's ex wife, Melinda Gates, was interviewed on MPR's wild Card podcast, and here's a bit of what she said.
For me, it's personally hard whenever those details come up, right because brings back memories of some very very painful times in my marriage. But I have moved on from that. I purposely pushed it away and I moved on.
I'm in a really.
Unexpected, beautiful place in my life. So whatever questions remain there of what I don't can't even begin to know all of it. Those questions are for those people and from even my ex husband. They need to answer to those things, not me well, and I am so happy to be away from all the muck that it was there.
Later in the week, Bill Gates did answer to the allegations. He said the claims in the email were false and he didn't know what Epstein was thinking there. But Melinda Gates publicly weighing in begs the question what do we owe an X and are we culpable for their sins?
Holly, I think Melinda Gates is in a really tricky position here, and I think she's carrying herself with a lot of class. So I interviewed flex I introd I Introdude that was like that too. She was really impressed
with that. I interviewed Melinda French Gates last year when her book came out the next day, which is all about rebuilding after trauma or after big changes and transitions, right, And in that book she speaks kind and obviously I read the book, she speaks kind of obliquely about the fact that after her and Bill were together for a really long time, they had three kids, they've built this huge foundation together that she was running and very much part of. She's kind of clear about the fact there
was just stuff going on that she could no longer ignore. Like, reading between the lines, you kind of got the impression that she tolerated a certain amount of things. That's not what she says, but that's kind of the impression you get.
He admitted to an affair, Yes.
He admitted to an affair, and then it became untenable for her, is the vibe that you get. And as this muck literal muck is coming out, I think we're beginning to get a picture of what that might have been like. I think it's really hard because she is, without doubt, a deeply principled, serious person. She comes across that way. She's like that when you talk to her. She's very head girl energy. She was a computer science major.
She's so brainy. She obviously believed so deeply in everything they'd built together, and she doesn't want to trash the father of her kids. But on the other hand, this stuff coming out is so horrendous. I think it puts the women in these men's lives in a really difficult position.
She didn't have to acknowledge it, and I don't think that answering to your ex's potential misdeeds or allegations against them is on you to answer. So the fact she did is clearly like she was comfortable making a statement. But I keep thinking. There was a brilliant column by Julia Baird published by the ABS over the weekend about how these are meant to be, like the names that come up in this, from Deepak ch Opra to Nome Chompsky to Bill Gates, these are meant to be the
brightest minds that the planet has potentially ever seen. Right, and yet these men had allegedly no idea that Jeffrey Epstein, who is at this stage been accused of sex trafficking assault, basically victimizing more than one thousand women. The fact that none of those men have willfully come forward and said, you know what, I did smell that something was off. They've all gone what, which is interesting given that so many women, including Melinda Gates, have come out and said
I felt it, I saw it. So Melinda Gates in twenty twenty two told Gail King that she'd met with Epstein one time because she wanted to see what kind of man he was, and she said, I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was a Borrn. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. How is it that the dozens and dozens potentially hundreds of men that come up in the files never say anything like that. This isn't just like you know, normal guys.
They're meant to be real, like business entrepreneurs and like they read people really well and they're running the world, and yet they can't tell when they're sitting across from a sexual predator. There was no critical thinking. And I mean the important thing is that he was convicted by the time. Yeah, these a lot of the more acknowledging that in their correspondence.
Yeah.
The person that I'm obsessed with in this situation as well is award winning writer and editor in chief Tina Brown, who wrote on her sub stack that when she was editor of The Daily Beast in twenty ten, she got a call from a pr person asking her to come to dinner with then Prince Andrew. It was hosted by Epstein and Woody Allen would also be attending. Her response is iconic. She said, what the F is this?
Peggy?
The pedophiles ball? And I just think, why were men not reacting like that?
The most cynical read answer to that question because they don't care that, you know that what was clearly being built by epsy. And we talked about this a bit last week. Last Monday, he was obviously scratching the backs of enough powerful people and an important enough connector fundraiser, benefactor that his peccadillos as they saw them, like oh maybe he's I mean, like, this is a generous read.
Let me just put that out there, A very generous read of like, oh maybe he's a bit and wouldn't leave your daughter with him kind of thing was not important enough to them in the scheme of things for them to feel that they had to distance themselves, and that, unfortunately, is a pattern you see played out a lot in these kind of circles where it's like, so he's not great with women, whatever that might mean, and that could mean anything from maybe just not a good boyfriend to
downright abusive. But hey, you know he's important, he'll get things done, he's a connector, you know, he's an important guy. I feel for the wives, except for the ones who seemed clearly complicit, like perhaps Sarah Ferguson, former Duchess of York, whose emails jest that she was very close to Epstein and she relied on him for lots of things.
Which is at odds with what she said publicly.
And also I feel for the adult daughters of these men, I really do, because I think there's a particular betrayal, and that includes obviously princesses Eugenie Beatrice who seemed to be having quite different reactions to what's going on with their dad, but to Bill Gates's kids too. I think there's a particular betrayal that young women feel understanding that their dads could or did or do treat other young women in at best a dismissive way and at worst
a potentially abusive way. I think that's a really difficult head scramble, and I just do have a lot of empathy for those young women as well as obviously more and most empathy always to the victims who keep being thrown under the bus, named rolled out to give evidence in situations.
Well well, other names are redacted. And Melinda Gates actually in that statement, she goes on to say when she's talking in the podcast, and I'm pretty sure that every time she's made just talked about the victims and the men who have come out to clear their names and go.
I didn't know.
I didn't even get that email. I was manipulated.
Most men never ever acknowledge that there even were victims. It's more about clearing their names. Their own name. And as you were saying, Jesse, about these are meant to be intelligent, successful, high functioning men. Bill Gates's response didn't even make sense, like that the email was false. I don't know why Epstein did that. Can you give some kind of insight into why you were close with this person?
And this is why this trial feels like, I said, such a standstill, because it's like someone here knows something. Come on, who saw andrew on all fours? Who saw like something at a party that you walked in? And a few people have come out and said, I saw something at a party that was a little bit weird. But it's like they're holding hands and deciding not to speak, which some people have come out and said, it's almost like this QAnon thing that was coming out years ago
with the tinfoil hats is coming true. The idea that there's some kind of elite pedophile ring running the world. There seems to be some credibility to that, and at what point are they going to drop each other's hands and start telling on each.
Other on the fact of women with terrible exes?
Right?
And I know that's a very broad spectrum, but this rumor about the STI is so upsetting and so awful and humiliating, exactly humiliating. And if that was you, you would hate for that to be out there. But the thing that is really important that she has said, and I think is so important that we all get our heads around again and again and again. The shame is not hers. The shame is his. If that story is true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The shame is not hers.
The humiliation shouldn't be hers. It's his entirely, And there's no reason for her to hang ahead or go silent or any of those things. I think we've just got to keep pushing that shame back that everybody always wants to put on women, Like how embarrassing for you? That's awful for you, poor you. It's like what about that guy? You know? So I have a lot of respect for
the fact that she addressed it. Even though she did so in the most careful, liber and emotional terms that she could, her voice was heard.
And the fact that she said the questions are for those men. That was an understated thing to say, but there are still so many men named in there that have not even acknowledged it, or who have previously said things that are now completely proved to not be true and don't seem to need to confront that publicly.
I agree.
I think we've had this rhetoric for the last few years about believe women, believe women, and it's become almost mocked. And then you look at this and you go, there are so many women who have come forward. Epstein has been found to have been a convicted sex offender in Call, and yet all of those women were not believed until these documents came out. And even still, I don't think we're getting the reckoning that I would like to see.
After the break recipes and eats Dozer and how the loss of a pet really really matters.
It's mea out louders and I'm back in your ears twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays exclusively for Muma Miya subscribers, and this week I want to talk about some weird shit.
First of all, the weird shit that.
Comes with the way different generations parent who is on top of the leaderboard? Is it x's, is it boomers or is it millennials? Holly Jesse and I have such an interesting chat about that, and you'll be shocked to hear we don't agree. And then I'm desperate to talk to you about the deeply weird twin shit that's going on around here, so weird, and we have a bit of a surprise that's coming on Thursday, if I can
wait that long. So, if you're not already a subscriber, follow the link in the show notes to get us in your ears five days a week and you will be the first to hear some great gossip.
A very famous Australian dog has died, and we need to talk about the very specific grief of losing a pet. If you've ever clicked on a recipe to eats recipe or bought one of Nagi Mahashi's million selling cookbooks, you know who Dosa is because Doza is all over recipe. He eats, his face is on the cookbooks on the website. He's always at any of her public events. He's been on play School, he's been on the cover of the Big Issue. Because Nagi has a big charitable arm with
recipes in the kitchen. He's been you know, in a children's book. He's a very famous dog. Last week, Nagi shared that he was really, really unwell, that he'd entered veterinary I see you on January the twenty second with a double lung infection. She posted at the time that she was going to take a step back from work for a little while to be with him. She said, I've cried a thousand tears and there's a million more to come. He died last Thursday, February the fifth, and
she announced it on her socials yesterday. The post, which was a beautiful video of Doza, just said, he didn't make it. My heart is shattered. Look, the loss of a pet is extremely common grief. Everyone around this table has experienced it, and I'm sure most of the out louders listening to this have Why is it a grief that we downplay a bit? And do we agree with this article that I read on the ABC last week that said recipe Tineat's Nagi Mahashi is normalizing taking time
off for pets. Here's why that matters in it. A psychologist called Amanda Ferguson was quoted as saying, if people don't take the time they need to grieve a sick or dying pet, it can be detrimental to their mental health and end up with a problem called rested grief or adjustment disorder. She said that sensitive workplace leaders record as the need for people to take time off with their pets to grieve. What do we think?
I would say, firstly, just on that kind of insight from a psychologist, that it's important to acknowledge that not everybody grieves the same way, and sometimes distraction can be really good, and being around people can be really good rather than being on your own. But in terms of Nagi, that video, just I watched it and just you can't watch it without crying.
Just give it a go.
But she wrote in it, thank you Doza for the best years of my life. And I thought that was actually a really profound statement, because when we grieve a pet,
it's often not just the pet that we're grieving. I lost my fourteen year old, beautiful gentleman Caesar in April last year, and you are grieving that dog and the familiar sound of their footsteps in your house and the snort and all of that, But you're also grieving the fact that this has been a fixture of your life for a period of time, and that they represent the
inevitability of everything ending. And it can be about how time just keeps speeding up and all of us are moving closer and closer in the direction of facing our own mortality. With Nagi, I imagine just from the information I've seen, that she was in a similar position to what we were in that your dog is really, really really unwell.
Yeah, he'd been unwell the year before, and yes, early in the year been hospitalized, I think too, Yes.
And the hard thing with pets is that very often the person who loves the most has to make the call at some point, and there's a lot of guilt and weird emotion wrapped up in that. I remember thinking with Caesar, Caesar outlived his life expectancy by eighteen months, and still I felt like a monster having to make the decision. And there's something so confronting about the fact that they can't tell you when they're ready, or if they're going to have a second wind or anything like that.
I Caesar was given a period of time that he was expected to live.
Wasn't he any Yeah, defied he defied it. And in some ways the death of an animal can be more dignified than the death of a human in the way that you euthanize, and it can be really peaceful and stuff. And in other ways, there's no ritual, there's no marker of grief in the same way there is for a human. People don't all wear black and turn up to a
funeral and say eulogies, right, that would seem ridiculous. And there is this kind of cultural snootiness, probably because when your grandfather dies, there aren't people who go, no, I don't like grandfathers. I've never been a grandfather person. They kind of annoy me and I find them yappy. Point. But with dogs and with cats and with any pet that's in a family, kind of either get it or you don't. So there's a cultural snootiness. But then in the same way, I was so heartened to read all
the comments. There were tens of thousands of comments of people who just got it that this is like a member of your family, and they represent so many seasons and moments of our family. Dog who we got kind of just as I became a teenager, and when Ted died, it was like I was mourning that period and all the times, whether it was heartbreak or whether it was getting home really late at night, or any season I was in, he was there and he was there, sitting
there kind of keeping me company. And there's just this simplicity to the relationship with a dog that there isn't with humans that I find so beautiful.
I have a theory that a dog, in particular, if you're a dog person, is like a place you put your feelings. Like a dog allows you to be silly with them, you know, when you would never be silly in front of anybody else, And they allow you to cuddle them, as you say, when they are sad, and run around with them, and they offer you all these wonderful things. But I also think they are place to put When people think that grief for a lost pet is outsized, I think that they're often not considering all
the things you've said about what they represent. But also, I don't know, because of that simplicity of that relationship, but it allows you to express a lot of things that you would find difficult to do in a more complex relationship. When we lost our beautiful dog Elvy, And there'll be people listening to this who are like, I can't even listen to this because it's so upsetting, Like people get very upset, and rightly so. But when we
lost our beautiful dog, Elvy, it was a surprise. It wasn't a long illness, and we were all really shocked by how much it messed with us, not least Brent, right, he was absolutely devastated. And I remember at the time I got a message from someone I didn't know, an out louder probably, who said, my husband lost his brother and he didn't cry, but when he lost the family dog, he fell to pieces. That doesn't mean that he loved
the dog more than he loved his brother. It means that you can put your feelings in this simple relationship in a way that you can't in a more complex one. That it kind of takes you by surprise how much you have kind of invested in that. And also to your earlier point, Claire, I think it's such a tangible loss, particularly if you live alone. My neighbor's just recently lost
her dog, and she's a widow who lives alone. But it's such a tangible loss that might not actually be real in other situations have lost someone you see every day who lives in your house, who is a fixture of every daily routine that you make, whether it's getting up and taking them for a walk or what you do in the evenings, Like they are a fixture of your day every day, design your life around them, and so I think that that's why it upends everything so much,
as well as just obviously the pure love you feel. I think it's beautiful that Nagi has said she needs time.
And the fact that she's had this astronomical success and you've got this dog. He doesn't give a share, whether it's the best or an award or how much money you've got, just absolutely doesn't care. Is just they're no matter what. I think that there's something grounding about that.
We talked off Friday about mattering, and I think people who and you know, not everyone has the relationship with their dog that Nagi did, but there are people who like wake up in the morning like that's for a lot of people, their purpose is like looking after their dog. It gives them a sense of purpose every single day,
and then that evaporates overnight. I also think one of the reasons it is quite shattering, is because most of us are really insulated from the reality of death, especially if you haven't seen, you know, your parents go through it, if you haven't been confronted with it in a really close way, holding your pet's hand and watching as the light goes out of their eyes and they take a breath in and don't take a breath out. That is it might be the first time you've ever in Canada. Yeah,
it's a really destabilizing type of grief. And I think, as you say, Holly, it then becomes a bit of a channel to put a lot of a lot of feelings. And I remember thinking with Caesar because I just could not believe how I cried and how distraught I was. And then I thought that maybe it's it's kind of this weird tear through time where you momentarily feel the
weight of what you've already lost. So with the person you were saying who didn't cry for their brother, they probably are crying for their brother through their dog, and then what they're still is to lose. I remember looking at Caesar and it's just a reminder of mortality and how terrifying that is, and you're confronted with it in a way that so few of us are in the modern world.
I want to send massive love both to Nagi of course and all the fans of Dozer, but to any out louders who are struggling with loss of all kinds like I think that one of the reasons why that you get a big reaction to a story like this, And I know a lot of people. When Nagi posted that Dozer was unwell last year and then also in recent weeks, people have been really invested and worrying about him and posting about him and talking about it. And I think it's because it's a grief we can very
many of us that can touch and understand. So massive love to you out louders.
Okay, do you guys remember the Coldplay kiss Camp?
How could we not?
Oh the couple kissing on the Jumpertron who then jumped apart as soon as they appeared on the big screen because turns out they were both married to other people.
How long ago was that? Do you think it's one of those moments in time? Yeah, we all moved.
On, Yeah, but yeah, it was really fun for the whole family.
I thought likely.
Families exactly, so fun for all of us except mostly two people in their families. So a man named Andy Byron, who was the CEO of a company called Astronomer, and the woman he was cheating on his wife with his human resources executive, Christian Cabot, Well, a bit of who wasn't even cheating? She was separated.
She was separated.
Yes, I feel like that's an important detail that we need to keep reminding people. Well she has don't worry okay, so but a bit of an update, so I know you guys were hanging out to know what has been happening since for just eight hundred and seventy five dollars. You can hear Christian Cabot speak at a one day Crisis Comm's conference about how she took control of the narrative and rewrote her story. My first question was, did she should I miss that.
Popular yeah, opinion.
Like she gave that interview to the New York Time.
Well, so the description her like kind of bio for the conference said, while attending a Coldplay concert in July, there would go middle of last year and unwittingly appearing on the kiss cam, Kristian Cabot's life blew up. She experienced firsthand the extremity of public shaming that women have long experienced when in the negative spotlight of the media, won their male counterparts often seemed to avoid. I would argue Andy Byron did not avoid that in this particular situation.
But in terms of crisis comms, you're exactly right, Holly. She did an interview with The New York Times in December. I missed it, which I'm obsessed with this story of the passing of time. Is that no one cares.
I know that.
That's part of the strategy, is that you wait for everything to blow over, and then you go, I'm ready to tell my story, and everyone's like who.
But also crucially, everybody's already made up your story in their head. So when she gave that interview to the New York Times, she did give some very important details, like the fact she was separated, like the fact that their relationship didn't continue. It did for a hot minute and then it didn't. It was the first time she kissed him, Yeah, exactly. Allegedly, she gave all these details.
But the thing is is we'd all gone cheetahs, dirty ditty cheetahs, and we just didn't have space to listen to.
But when you actually read it.
It's a brilliant interview and what she says about public shaming and trying to teach your kids that it's okay to make mistakes while she's being yelled at in the street for being a home wreck card can I.
Ask, do you guys reckon?
She should write a book? Do you reckon? Anyone would buy it?
Whole book?
Well, I mean, I think she could write an essay I'd read. I wouldn't so once I'm wondering, I'm wondering how she can make a buck.
Well, well, here she can talk at pre conferences, Holly.
I read that even though they're charging that much for a day, that she's not getting paid.
Why would you do it if you weren't getting paid?
So here's she's unemployed.
Well, this is what I mean. So I would expect she was getting paid because the problem with this kind of fame, this is a very tricky, particular kind of notoriety infamy. Right. So I remember at the time people said that story will follow these people everywhere. She'll go off and get another job in corporate comms or whatever she was doing. Hr he lost his job, but he'll go and get another CEO job somewhere as some non
high profile company and everyone will forget about it. And then people are like, but would they like, if Christian Cabbot turn up in your pilates class, would you be like, that's the sea lady.
But the interesting thing is I didn't know her name or I couldn't recognize her face.
That's why this is a tricky thing to get right, isn't it Because by following it up and putting the record straight, she now has entered the public conversation in
a way that maybe she wouldn't have needed to. But then, on the other hand, she does have an interesting story to tell about what happens when you get busted cheating at a Coldplay concert and the entire world, like Australia, India, everywhere in the world is showing your face on the telly and being like, look at these idiots loll like and.
Imagine if we're at work and they were like, hey, new HR person, it's Kristin Cabot and you went, oh, I kind.
Of can you imagine the group?
Yeah, didn't she have an affair with a CEO? Like it also was probably incongruous with the role she wants to do. So she probably does need a career a pivot, but I think she needs better advice if she's doing conferences for free. Yeah yeah, yeah, not a good myths this movie, I reckon.
We have to pay then.
For their Wayah, I reckon in a couple of years, I'd watch a docco. I think she should produce the document do flick stocko through Parter. Yeah. If Chris Martin was in interview, yes, because the I want Gwyneth Paltrow.
She was really so, she was really mad about Gwyneth. That was another thing that Kristin Cabot said in the New York Times. Thing because people will remember. Maybe they won't, but I clearly do that Gwyneth jumped on very quickly and didn't add for Astronomer, which was genius pre moved from astronomer. But it kind of really took the piss out of the situation. And we all thought that was funny. But Kristin Cabot did not. She thought it was mean
and unsisterly. How dare she say those things about my Gwyneth?
She said, you're the one who talked about unconscious uncoupling, and now you're making fun of me.
It would be really hard to be. I don't know.
I do think there's something in it. I do think there's a career opportunity. I would go to the session if it was free, I wouldn't pay it. Fair after the Break the most bamboozling celebrity profile I have ever personally read. Okay, have we all read the Bianca Sensory profile in Vanity Fail?
Every word?
I have and look. I like Vanity Fair. I respect their journalism, but that story was too long. What actually happened in that story? Nothing? All right?
This is what I need to get to the bottom of. So a reminder, Censory is the wife of Yay formerly known as Kanye West. She grew up in Melbourne, and let's all be honest and transparent about what she's best known for, and that would be how she dresses, or rather doesn't. She three years she's been with him, and for most of her public appearances she has been somewhat naked.
She's been naked so Grammy's last year, she wore a naked dress, but like it was completely see through and in order to I think that we put a picture on our Instagram, and I think that meta punished us Like it was you could see nipples, you could see bottom, you could see everything.
There was also a lot of pap shots where she appeared to not be wearing anything in public.
Yes, exactly right, although sometimes she covers her face and everything else is kind of nude. So she's worn fishnets with no underwear underneath. She has worn a like plastic sea through poncho, again no underwear. Sheer naked body suits stockings like you can see she's got stockings, but then she's also got stockings on her head. You get the drift, So vanity fair. This article seems to be an attempt
to rehabilitate sensory and by extension, Yay's image. There have been stories coming out about what Yay has said for literally years. We have touched on some of them. Some of them are almost too borrent to go into. And the line between mental illness and hate speech and what sense can be made of any of it, we've kind of struggled to work that out at times. Back to sensory, the profile starts with the sentence Bianca Sensory says she's done being naked. Did you notice that nowhere did she say.
That it's going to be awkward having a bath having sex like she needs to be that.
She needs to be naked sometimes. And also the feature image on the article is her riding a horse naked. Naked, Yeah, I worry about fleets.
I can't be entirely done with being naked. No, not really.
No, I worry about the cleanliness of the horse and what my climb up. That's why we don't straddle horses nude.
It's that why.
That's why.
That's why.
I thought that might be other reasons.
But guys, she's ready to expect. Paragraph four, she ready to speak. Paragraph eight, she is ready to speak. I don't understand a single thing, she says. A nice entire article.
I'm trying to be kind.
I'm trying. But the high lights I suppose when she says I love my artwork, which I think is her nudity. She also asks the author of the piece to tell the Vanity Fair editor that last year she was the most googled woman in the world.
That's my favorite part of this.
I really enjoyed that detail. And she said, it's not about me bragging. Basically, she says, it is not a position that anybody in time has ever had that much visibility without speech, which is like, if you ever wanted to say anything, everyone's listening. It's just you have stockings on your head. But I also kind of I'm not quite sure about that. I'm like, oh, I don't know, Cleopatra, what'd she say?
Do you know what I mean?
Marilyn Monroe modlight weird. Yeah, actually that revelationary that women are seen and not heard. She didn't get the cover, by the way, Tayana Taylor got the cover. She's asking to dominated Bianca do better.
Sorry, sorry, mate, your performance.
So ann Appeal, who is the author, wants to know who is in control of her life because that's been a big theme. Is like, is Bianca sen sorry being controlled?
Because yay, Like among all the awful shit he's said in the past couple of years, he has quite explicitly said at times that.
He was controlling her yep, and that she tried to leave. He posted he posted on x I have dominion over my wife in capitals. Yeah, he released a song. I think that was all about where she went and like it's really scary stuff.
So it's not like a weird question to ask, no, but she.
Keeps giving answers, like a tree is the shape of a tree because that's what nature does, or whatever. What does a house want to be? And that I feel will be my life's work. I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand.
Look generally speaking, I quite like it when celebrities are bat shit. I generally think I don't want my celebrities to be dislike me. I am boring, I go to the shops, I scrub toilet. I don't want my celebrities like that. I'm sorry. Sometimes I want them riding a horse in the nude and talking about how they bought a house just to gut it and move out again, which is another thing that happens in this article.
Even though she has a degree in architect Okay, that's something I have to talk about.
She's not thriving with her.
Arquet whatever whatever we think about, and I do struggle, you know. I try it not to be judgmental, but that period of the naked Bianca yay paparazzi was very tricky to get through as a mother, as a bothering It in inverted commas is that you know, you've got a teenage daughter who notices these things, and she's like, why is that? Lady, always naked, and why is everybody always looking at her? And why is she the most google woman.
In the world standing next to a fully clothed Kanye And.
These are difficult questions to answer. Bianki, you did not make our lives easy there for a little while. You can't deny, though, that this is an interesting story, like a pretty ordinary and inverted Commas schoolgirl from Melbourne who's got sisters and a mom and just normal life.
Ever, brother who refuses to a brother of ends up. I want him to talk. He knows what he's doing.
But that is an interesting story.
I mean, the thing I love the most is that she's so insistent that she didn't want to use her voice until she had something to say. And yet she says absolutely nothing in all of these words. But in the age of Epstein, where we've got widespread sex trafficking and women who have no voice while rich, powerful men use them solely as sex objects, is it radical to be naked and say nothing. That's what I'd like to
ask her. And you know what, the one thing she does say, and this is on a more serious note, is she does say, I am not anti Semitic, and she's like, I knew I'd have an opportunity to say that one day and then moves on. But then in the same breath she says she's talking about how in love she is with Yay, and she says, I love him so much. We're like the same person. I'm like,
this is the issue. You've become so enmeshed and work in the same business and excuse him, and you say it's been like doing CPR on him for last year. We all know he has mental health issues, and we can't possibly understand or speculate how much of that has to do with the objective hate speech that's come out
of him over the years. But when you say we're like the same person, it's very difficult for us to watch her stand next to him at events and hold his hand and enable him when he is literally threatening violence to Jewish people all over the world. Like, I don't think that's actually sexist to kind of look at her and go, mate, you're working in the same business endeavors, you're in the same meetings, you're privy to your benefiting from this man's his career.
I find that a bit difficult because she didn't say any of those things, like he has been. I mean, it's hard to overstate how offensive a lot of the stuff that has come out out of his mouth over the past couple of years had been. But it didn't come out of her mouth. And benefit of the doubt, it is very difficult being in a relationship with someone who is suffering from very severe mental health issues. On its face, it appears that that is what's been happening
with Kanye. It doesn't excuse any of it, you know, the anti semitism, the racism, any of that stuff. It doesn't excuse it. The misogyny, it doesn't excuse it. But it wasn't her. And sometimes I think, and this is a thing we've been talking about a bit today, we do love to blame a woman, particularly a provocative woman, which there's no question that the way she dresses everything,
provocative is a loaded word. But she says herself deliberately trying to provoke a reaction for a man's awful deeds, Like it wasn't Biancher Sensory who said those things.
I will say I actually quite liked this she said. This year was a lot like doing CPR for months. I have the love and empathy for him to be able to do that, and I understand the world doesn't I quite liked. I was like, yeah, like you might have the patience to do that for the person you love, but I don't.
This is why this is very complicated talk about in a way, because there are clearly a lot of mental health issues going on here. She also in another part of this, she talks about going into rehabit. She talks about having issues with drugs. They both definitely read and did for that manic period at least, like people with some serious issues going on, and so to sort of celebrate that is really difficult, but also to look at it through a lens of normality is also really difficult.
And it's interesting how a lot of people wanted to believe that she was under his control and maybe she wasn't. She says that she wasn't, But I also don't necessarily believe that either. There are lots of you know, she certainly wouldn't be the first woman who's been in a difficult relationship who is like everything's fine, totally want to be here. He's a lovely guy like that. Whole stuff is very it's complicated territory, right, whether or not people
know that they're being controlled or not. All we can do is critique this on its face, and on its face, she's like, it was an art project. You lot were all obsessed with my boobs, but I was doing an art project, is basically what she was. And that's the interesting question, right is It's like, maybe it doesn't matter at all that she was naked for a year and we all obsessed about it. But also it's a very unsatisfactory answer, isn't it just like it is art?
And I got to the end of it and I went, I just had this epiphany. Biankson, sorry belongs on a season of Maths. Yes, that's where she would thrive. I think she'd make great reality television. I think i'd watch. I think she'd be mashed with someone. I think she'd have some great outfits. I think she'd have some fabulous outfits.
She's risen to this level of power that's actually quite dangerous. Yeah, well, this is a quote that I think belongs on mass So it says when she was a child who would read books of factoids, so she'd have something to say about any topic that I wrote. So I think this is trying to paint her as like brain. She has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. She's she's not idiot, so why doesn't any of this makes sense? But anyway, she says, people would bring something up and then I'd
know something about that topic of information. She says, that's a fun map. She says, I'm a researcher and factual. Also great, put that in your valve that like, I would watch that. I'm a researcher and factual. Also, I think you're taking the piss and maybe this is also yeah, that probably is, I know, And just all the stuff, like even the description of what the show is in South Korea, the performance arte and it's seven and something about fame and having images projected on you.
But you are in control.
Apparently, it's like the Emperor's got no close. It's like when does art just You're like, hold on, nobody's making literally no little bit of sense. No, exactly right, exactly out loud as I.
Hope you've had a fabulous, bad bunnyish day. We are certainly happy to be here with you through it. Thank you for filling in Klaid Stevens, thanks for having you got such a pleasure, and thank you to our amazing out loud team as always for helpings put the show together. We will be back in your ears. Well, Miya will certainly be back in your ears tomorrow. Who knows which of us she will choose to sit beside her and tomorrow's subscriber episode.
I personally prefer having a longer lunch break.
Don't tell her, she'll.
Definitely call you in.
But we'll be back in your ears tomorrow.
Bye.
Mama.
Mayor acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.