You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast.
Is recorded on Hello friends, it's Mea here, and I had some news. The Naomi Watts interview that dropped a couple of weeks ago was actually my last No Filter interview as host.
After ten years and.
Six hundred and fifty five episodes and sixty nine million downlides, I have finally decided to hand over the mic to a new host, and I wanted to be the one to tell you first, and also to tell you a bit about how I came to this difficult decision.
If you've been listening to.
The show for a while, you might have noticed that I've tried to step away a couple of times before, when I've persuaded some very capable women to fill in for me while I took a bit of a breather. No Filter is one of the things I do here at Muma Mia for a bit of background, but there are lots of other things I do here as well.
I wear a few different hats.
I'm a co founder of the company, which started as just me and is now a team of more than one hundred and fifty people. And I'm also a co host on another podcast, which I hope you listen to, called Mom and Me Are Out Loud, which is a daily show and the third biggest podcast in the country. I also write a newsletter called Babbel. I have three kids,
two dogs, and a granddaughter. And for the last seventeen years, since Mum and mea began way back on my laptop, I've just kept adding new things to my plate because I love what I do. I love every single thing that I do, and I've got so many ideas for more things that I want to do. I love our core purpose the most, and that's what drives every new idea I have. And that core purpose is to make the world a better place for women and girls. And thinking about new ways to do that keeps me awake at.
Night, but in a really good way. And this podcast has been and will continue.
To be a big part of that core purpose because by inviting people to tell their stories on no filter, in a candid and intimate, really vulnerable way that's sometimes heartbreaking and it's often funny and it's always interesting, that helps people. And I know this because you tell me it helps you. To understand other people's experiences and perspectives, and it helps you to feel seen if perhaps you've
experienced something similar without getting too kumbaya about it. Sitting across from people in this studio where I'm talking to you from now. Sometimes they're famous people, but usually they're not famous people, and sitting here while they talk about some of their most vulnerable moments, about some of the most wonderful, shocking, astonishing, or devastating, often usually unexpected things
that have happened to them. That is an absolute privilege, and I take that responsibility very serious.
We all do here at Mama Mea.
Every single person who works on this show and at this company is aware of what a responsibility it is to have the trust of someone that you've never met, who lets you ask the most personal or difficult, sometimes intrusive and often confronting and outrageous questions, which is what we do. And there's a moment in every interview when it feels like I'm flying, when you connect with someone and help them to express themselves or maybe tell a
story that they've never shared before. And that's why I've loved doing it every single week for ten years. It's been a joy and a gift to have those conversations and put them out into the world. So why am I leaving, Well, I'm not really leaving. And the thing to understand and that I wanted to explain to you is as much as I love doing it, it's not
always easy. And it was very hard at the beginning ten years ago when we first started this show, me and my original producer and creative partner, Eliza Ratliffe, we really struggled to book guests. Back then, nobody even knew what a podcast was, and Muma Mia certainly wasn't the
size it is now. Legacy media like you know, magazines and newspapers and radio and TV, they still had an absolute iron group on publicists and guests and celebrities who had no idea how fast women were moving to websites like Mamma Mea and podcasts like No Filter. So for the first year or so, it was so hard to land anyone to be on this show. I just called in favors from friends who worked in the media and I'd try to persuade them to talk to me for an hour. And that was the first few months of
the show. But we quickly realized that the interviews that were the most interesting, both for me as an interviewer and for the audience were actually normies, regular people who weren't famous but who had expeperienced incredible things, and those have always been my favorite interviews to do.
So anyway me I get to the point.
Okay, hosting this show is a joy, as I said, but it's also a responsibility, and it.
Takes a hell of a lot of work.
I used to think I could just keep piling on more and more things, but in the last couple of years, I've realized that I can't, and also I don't want to. I've realized that if creatively I want to try some new things and work on some new projects, and also pay respect to the projects that I've already created, like this show, I have to hand some things over. I have to make some room in my life to open new doors, which means, by definition, I have to close
some others. For two years, I reckon, I've been thinking about this on and off, and I've had times when I've thought more or less seriously about stepping away, But honestly, the time never been right for a ton of different reasons.
But now though it's time, and a big part of the reason why it is time and why right now is different to the other times I may have thought about trying to step away, It's because I've needed to find the right hands to take the wheel of this show that means so so much to me and so much to so many of you. And I found those hands in our executive producer, Nama Brown, who I've been working with for a while now.
And of course No Filter's new host, Kate Langbrook.
Kate was my first and only pick to host No Filter when I took my first proper break last summer, and god damn it, she managed to make the most downloaded episode of the year. Her interview with Andy Lee was an absolute masterclass, one of the best interviews I've ever heard. I mean, I knew she was good. Of course I knew she was good. She was not only my first choice, as I said, she was my only choice. And want to tell you why. There are an insane number of interview podcasts around now.
You may have noticed. Some of them are.
Great, a lot of them are pretty average, because interviewing is.
So much harder than it may seem.
And I started off pretty terrible, but I have learned. I've learned a huge amount from the greats Andrew Denton, Richard Feibler, Terry Gross, Oprah. And what they all have in common is how driven they are by one thing, and that is curiosity. They all want to understand people better, whether that person is a prime minister, or an oscar winner or a school teacher.
No filter.
Is driven by curiosity. That powers everything we do here. By compassion and empathy also, for sure, But and this is important, also by humor because even in the darkest situation, in fact, especially in the darkest situation, humour can be found and human needs to be found. And Kate Langbrook has every single trait that I admire as an interviewer and as a human being. She's maternal. You don't need to have kids to be maternal, by the way, even
though she has four. This show does, though, requires some big mum energy, whether you've got kids or not, so that your guests feel safe and cared for and protected when they're telling their stories and opening up to you. She's also funny. She doesn't take herself or anyone too seriously.
She's self deprecating.
She is really original in the way she thinks about things, and she is so so smart, and she's also very very secure, and I'll tell you why that's important. She's not trying to impress anyone or play to an agenda or get followers, or be cool or virtue signal. She's also comfortable going straight from small talk to intense, noble shit. Kate just wants to have fascinating conversations with anyone on air or off air. Gosh, listen to me. Do I want to give her no filter? Or do I want to marry her?
Maybe both? So there it is.
Next week is Kate's first show. She'll be the first voice that you hear, and she has a very special guest.
It's me. I'm the guest.
I never do long form interviews because I'm scared of getting canceled.
That's the truth.
But I trust Kate, and I trust you, my beloved no Filter listeners. And I do feel like it's a safe place, of course, for me to talk in a more in depth and personal way about what the last couple of years have been like leading up to this decision. And there are laughs and there are tears. It's very no filter. It's actually a little bit more like an in conversation because I also ask Kate a lot of questions.
Just try and stop me.
Meanwhile, if you feel like you're going to miss me, thank you, and you can still hear me every day on out Loud. I'll put a link in the show notes so that you can also sign up for my free newsletter called Babbel, where I write and post videos of me chatting while I put on my makeup and all kinds of things. But the last thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to every single guest who has trusted me with their most personal stories.
Thank you to Eliza Ratliffe, my creative partner on No Filter for so many years, To all the executive producers and audio producers that have worked on the show since then, and most of all, to you to every single one of you who's reached out online or stopped me in the street or left a review to tell me about an interview that you loved or that moved you or gave you a new perspective on the very wonderful, complicated experience of being human, which is what this shows about.
Thank you for having me in your ears for the last ten years on No Filter. It has been super cozy in here. Kate's gonna love it, and you're gonna love her.