Him Mike Boris, and this is straight Talk. Can you just take you quickly inside a woman's world, the women's world, Go Me Freeman.
Hello, Marke Worris, Hello Phaps, Well the straight Talk. Thanks for having me on straight Talk. I was fascinated always in the news and information and what we would now call content. I used to love magazines. There was no other medium that really at that time spoke to women. The old joke is that Dolly taught you what an orgasm was. Cleo taught you how to have one, Cosmo taught you had a fake one, and the W This Weekly taught you had to knit one, and then you died.
And so it was like we built our communities around these brands. It was really powerful. Part of the reason I left magazines was because I got tired of trying to explain to my bosses that armageddon was coming in the form of the Internet and that we needed to move, we needed to evolve, and they were like, no, we're a magazine company. What we do at Mama MEA, I guess is cover all of those things. We've got sixty four different podcasts we speak to eight million Australian women
every month. Is to make the world a better place for women and girls.
Look, I'm just looking over it, tour producer me are starting to interview me, Yeah, as she can't help it MEA Freeman.
Hello, Mark Werris, Hello, welcomes straight Talk. Thanks for having me on Straight Talk.
I love the way you dressed like they're so cool. You need to get to a stage in your life that being cool as not what everyone else things being as called as you wear, what the hell you feel like wearing it?
Yeah, just be comfortable, exactly be comfortable. But for me, it's also sparking joy. So I realized I don't dress for men. I don't dress for women either, because I often just dressed in a ridiculous way. But it just gives me joy. And if someone hates it, it doesn't honestly doesn't affect me, and it's not interesting to me what they think. It just sparks joy in me.
Do you know I don't know if you know this, but I know, and I'm hoping you still that. But I knew your dad in the nineties, did you Yeah? Yeah, And I also knew I knew Brian better. Yeah, But your dad and Brian Sherman were the equity known as equid Linked Twins in those days, they were, and they were one of the first group to ever go sort of one of the most prominent groups and first groups to work move into the funds management sort of sphere
in Australia before it was even known. And I got to meet him through some people who are good mates of mine, who were friends there and actually they're a Jewish lawyer guy who used to work for back in the nineties. And that's where I first met Your Father's your father still alive? He is well, none perfect.
I see him every week. He is he turned eighty last year.
Wow.
Yeah, and he's still great.
Well, please give him my regards if he remembers me at all. But I was only a young fellow when I did meet him, and I was with it in a law fulm called Simon Zebowski, and that's where I meet him in those days, back in those days. Yeah, Mason, feel me feel really ancient. But I'm sitting here in front of someone who's the daughter of somebody I know, or the son of somebody I know.
I feel the same way. I had dinner with a girlfriend last night and her daughter is an entrepreneur. You know her daughter, who I knew when she was a little kid, is an entrepreneur of the skin of the sunscreen band Ultraviolet. And I now interview the children of people I used to know. So I hear you totally.
Well, what's for me is what's worse though, was you're a mature woman, have grown How old are kids?
Twenty seven, eighteen and sixteen?
So you've got grown kids? Yeah, pretty much.
I've got a grandchild.
Do you have Wow?
Yeah, my grandma, my eccentric grandmother era.
I have a grand I have three grandsons.
Isn't it the best?
So good?
Do you love it?
Yeah?
I do?
I do, I really have it. I'm actually on a weekend. What's weird? It's amazing. I'm just looking over it. A producer me are starting to interview me as she can't help it. But I tell you why I love it is that on a weekend when I'm thinking what am I going to do? Like I'm trying to I try to chill on weekends. And I just sent them a text for all my sons and I say, semi photograph with the kids. Yeah, And they send me video with
the kids doing something stupid or you know. I bought them all at punching ball the other day.
And how old are their grandkids?
The two of them are one two, one year old each one. There's two weeks between them and the other one. And George's six at seventh. Sorry, And I just love watching their antics.
Yeah, I've got more patients as a grandmother than they probably did as a mum, Like you can enjoy it more.
Well, also, you're not as exhausted because I mean, you ever think back, you've got three kids. Yeah, when you think back, I had four sons, and I think back, how the hell did I do it?
Were your hands on dad?
Yeah? Well yes, with in my second marriage with the three boys, I was more so because my wife at the time, she was ill for a lot a lot of time, and unfortunately, so I had to do a lot. When I say hands on, did I go to everything like school, parent teaching me?
Know?
But I was always there. Yeah, And like in the morning I had to get them ready for school, and I feel someone ill. I would make sure that nanny or my grand my mother came over and the other grandmother came over, and I was always sort of organizing crap. But I was sort of pretty hands on relative to the fact that I was trying to run a business. Yeah, and I was running the Wizard business in those days, so it was pretty full on, and I had a pretty full on partner who was sort of very demanding
of me. So and that's not James, that's scary. So I had really but I wonder where I got the energy from, Like, like I couldn't do it.
I just well, no, because you're older.
I'm old. I just don't have that energy all the patients, I think, and I do you think you get into a fog when you're a mom or a dad and you've got and you're sort of just you're just doing Look, yeah, you're not standing back thinking about it.
No, I mean you have no choice. Whereas that's what's so lovely about being a grandparent is that you can actually enjoy it because it's for shorter periods of time.
How old is your grand.
She's one and a half. So even if she stays the night and she wakes up, I don't even care because it's one night, Like I don't I can sleep in the next day like no, you know, like I've got to get to work tomorrow and put the load of washing on and get dinner, and you know that it's like you feel quite beleagued.
Does she get into bed.
When your kids are little? No, she sleeps in a little sleeping bag. I'm very strict about why not strict, but I follow all the rules that my son puts down for This is what she did, This is her routine. And I wouldn't dare.
Cross that you have one son.
My eldest is twenty seven, my daughter is eighteen, and then I've got a younger son who's sixteen, still at school. Yeah, I've got a child at My husband's biggest fear is we still have kids at school while we had grown children. And hey, it's come to pass. But I'm stoked because I wanted more than three kids. So I feel like, you know, I've got a little bit of that.
At eighteen months old, one and a half years, they're walking, they're actually that's total level. That's when they're a little bit mischievous.
What do your personalities come out?
But also like there, what do you do is your house?
We play with my jewelry. I've got a room set up for her. She loves reading books. We go to the park. But I like we're a family of homebodies. I like hanging out at home and just mucking around.
Yeah. Yeah, but do you job with your house? Like so do you you're running around making sure there's a Yeah, you have to.
Buy all the new stuff, like I have to buy a cot again. I have to buy pram again in a high chair and all that stuff I've just completely forgotten about, and nappies and you know, a lot of the stuff stay the same, but there's you know a few funky new inventions. I like a funky new pram.
And are you one of those grandparents I try to be who tries to be constructive with the kid, for example, relatively the way I was with my kids growing up. I just happy for me to get up, beat their food and go back to sleep. Yeah, as opposed to now when George is there, he's a seven year old. I'm always trying to give in constructive things to do, like lego, let's make something, let's do something like I try to be like more educational.
No, I just want to be fun.
You want to be fun?
Yes, I just want to be fun. And that's what one of the things I love. There's no pressure, like if she doesn't have all the food groups at my house. Oh well, like we just have fun. I feel no pressure to tick all the boxes and do all the things.
On the Tiger are you Yeah, that's weird. I'm the Tiger grand dad. I'm going he's got to be able to you know, like bounce of basketball, hit the punch of pads.
No, I forget all that stuff, like I forget like even with my third I've sort of forgot that I had to teach him things like how to tie shoelaces, how to answer the phone, like I sort of because there was such a big gap between my kids. It was like I've been a parent for so long and now I'm you know, I'm now being a grandparent. So
I kind of I've never been very good. I'm good at the life lessons, like the teaching about you know, feminism, and I love nothing more than having my kids trapped in the car with me so I can deliver a lecture.
Your kids will got about life.
What about grandkids, Well, I don't talk to she's too little to absorbed my life lessons. But particularly I love a car of teenage boys on the way to sport, where I can just give them a little bit of coaching about life and about women and about consent and about how to be a good guy.
That's interesting because they usually.
Try to get out of the car while it's still moving to get away from me.
Thanks missus, Frevean, Why, thank you? Thank you?
Thanks?
Okay, Well, sixteen year old is a pretty interesting age group. Fifteen sixteen is a pretty interesting age group.
I love sixteen year old boys.
They're pretty aware, they're so.
Oh, they're so funny. My son's group of friends are just so funny and interesting and quirky, and they're just good kids. They're just really interesting, good kids. I love talking to, you know, younger people, my daughter's friends as.
Well, But when they're that age me like, you can get the boys who are not not sulky, but it's not cool to talk to MoMA or be sin as talking to mom.
In front of them. Yeah, they've come out of that. He's come out of that. Luckily. That always breaks my heart, that face. At least I was prepared for it because it happened with my eldest. But I find those years between about twelve and about sixteen really hard. I really missed them because they're just they don't even you know, you touch them.
And they literally totally you were touched before.
Like they recoil from you, and that breaks my heart. But then they come back around this age we.
Were just talking about, because it's interesting you just said to me about you know, you might talk to about life lessons, things that you've learned and experienced and things that you're passionate about, and you know, and that is, you know, I don't want to see women's rights and feminism generally in the broader sense and all those things ago with it, and you know the position of women in society. I actually read most of my sons on my own, so it was me and before sons, and
then we had a male dog as well. And one of the things that I noticed that when they all went out on their own, they left time at made in nineteen twenty. They'd had very little experience with it other than my mother and that was more a grandmother.
Did they go to boys schools as well?
They were Cranbrooken Escot And.
I think that's really really challenging, you know. I think that single sex education is yeah, is problematic, particularly if kids don't have siblings of the opposite sex at home. I think it can It can mean that, I mean, and I went to a girl's high school, but it can mean that weekends can just be about hooking up.
Like you're so focused on the hook up, you almost don't have time to have girls as friends or boys as friends unless you're in a sort of a group, which I had growing up because my best friend had a twin brother, so we had this big group of girls and boys. And my son has that as well. They have a big group of girls and guys that are all mates. But yeah, I think that that's it's so important to have friends of the opposite sex.
Well, given it that you're someone who's you operate in this environment, what would you have said to someone like me and during that period, because I was acutely unaware of what might be the consequences of not having them exposed to enough women in their life, influencial women I'm talking about. And they all relied on each other quite
heavily because I was always flying overseas to work. So we had a nanny there, but she was Japanese, couldn't speak hardly in the English, and she would take over when I was away, and the boys had sort of pretty much run right. What don't mean by that? Not in a bad way. But they owned the house. They owned the place because it's four of them, and they range from nineteen down to nine and a probably a bit overwhelming for the poor girl when I think about
it in hindsight. But I never used think about this stuff. But I didn't really have an alternative. I guess I've got a sold them to send them to, a sold them, could have sold them to, could have sent him to a co at school. But I wasn't aware of those things. You know, maybe I'm maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I was just totally unaware of having proper balance for them. I only become aware of when they got older. What
would you say to someone like that? Because there must be other men in those situations.
I just think they learn a lot by how the men in their life treat women and talk about women. I think that that's I think that you model that behavior, whether it's how the men in their life treat their mother or their grandmother, or their aunts or their you know, waitress, or you know someone that works in their house or that works for them, or their teacher. You know, it's
how you talk about women. It's how you talk about women that you know, how you talk about women that you don't know, women that are in the news, women you know, And I think they learn a lot about how to be in the world just by osmosis. It's not though, it's not you know, for all of my life lessons in the car, it's not really that. It's the quantity exposure that they get. Because kids biggest role models are always their parents, and they have the most
exposure to their parents in most cases. So I think that it's about that interesting.
So probably what I should have been doing at that time is because I was very close to my mother and my sister, I probably should have been exposing them. Well, I did expose them a bit, but I should expose them. I should have exposed them more to those things. It's funny because I just never grew up aware of those things. Maybe it's a generational thing too for my generation. You know, men and men women women. Men went to work, you know,
provided the women stayed hound mind the kids. You know, if the husband and wife never sort of crossed paths because when he got home she was on a bed, or because she was too tight, and that was pretty normal. Certainly when I grew up and a firm believe monkey, see monkey, do exactly. It doesn't matter what you get told, you said Biasmosis. And as you said that, I'm thinking, well, observation. I observed I did, and my son's probably observed me.
I wasn't disrespectful to women, but I just had no women in life. I didn't even have a girlfriend. Like. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to challenge them with that, So I was just Dad went to work. Dad came home and looked and you know, marked around with the boys and told him do the home and go to bed, and then Dad would go on a work trip and come back ye later.
I don't know how you would have constructed that, like without it, you know, it's not like, let's go and be around some women like I don't know if you can sort of do that, but it's you know, I think one of the toughest things for boys and girls is seeing the opposite sex is the other. And you know, one of the I remember saying to my son he really appreciated were on the way to school one day he had like an exam. He was in the middle of his exams and something had happened in the US.
I think it was the Supreme Court Roe versus Weight or something, and I was trying to explain that the rights to reproductive right. It's like the abortion being legal is not just a women's issue. It's also a man's issue because if you accidentally get a goal pregnant, which you probably will in your lifetime at some stage, guess what that is half of your problem. And if she doesn't have access to abortion legally. And I was giving this whole copse, and it's like, can I please just
study for my friends Inciente? And I was like, okay, yeah, but it's really important.
So can I just do you mind if I just take a little bit. I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in the bedro on Wikipedia, but I know half the stuff in Wikipedia, with the gross perspective, Wikipedia is incorrect. I know that my birthday is on there sometime in November, and it's like my birthday was in June. So what my team produced to me is probably incorrect. So can I go back? Mea Friedman as a young kid? Yeah, where'd you were up?
I grew up in Sydney, brothers and sisters. An older brother seven years older.
Yeah, and mum and dad divorce, married, married, still married, happily married. And your dad, my dad.
Was started his own business when I was probably in late primary school. So it was like he had a business partner. He'd worked in you know, he'd been as sort of a stockbroker, went out on his own entrepreneur.
It was very much the two families because it was his business partner was his cousin's husband, and they kind of literally from the kitchen table, like I have very strong memories of the two families sort of grew up together, and it was you know, we'd be putting things in envelopes and sending them out the kids, and it would be walking, you know, trying to think of names for the business. So we watched that happen. I wasn't you know.
He was an immigrant from South Africa, so his whole family came over as a political protest to apartheid in the sixties because that's the only way you could protest apartheid is by leaving. And they had a great life there. His father was a doctor and his mother was an artist, and you know, white people had great lives in South Africa during apartheid, but they found it absolutely oborron and they left in protest and came to Australia with nothing and had to start again. So I did not grow
up in a house with money. My mum, her father's a doctor, but you know, very working class and middle class, and she was Australian or yeah Australian, you know, back to the convicts. And so, yeah, I grew up in a house that was, you know, kind of typical seventies where the parents were doing their own thing. A parent was something you were, not something that you did, you know,
kind of normal regular childhood. And my dad's business became really successful probably when when I was in my late years of primary school, but it kind of wasn't really overnight. And yeah, so I always had an entrepreneur in my world. You saw it since Yeah, I saw it. I saw what it looked.
Like watching your dad starting a startup, doing a startup.
Yeah, it was very much a startup with business existed.
Yeah, yeah, very much started and this is the this is the funds managed business.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that was pretty new. I don't know if you know that, but yeah, there was a lot of going on in the US. It got exported or imported from US to Australia. We didn't really have funds management, particularly definitely in the eighties. There was a few people talking about it. It was nowhere near as prevalent as was in the United States. And then a few people like your dad and his business partner started to have a crack of these things. But it wasn't easy to
raise the money. It wasn't easy to get.
And they traveled a lot and they raised money Australia, went overseas, got money to be invested in Australia. And you know, I remember any kid whose parents run a business and grows up in that family, there are really tough times, and there are scary times, and it's the stakes are high, and you know, there's there's highs, a lot of highs and lows.
Could you see that, I mean, as a young girl, how would you been, like, Yeah.
I remember the big I remember the stock market crash that was terrifying in the age seven yeah yeah, and I was what sixteen then, and that was like shockwaves through the world. But but I was not protected from that, like that was potentially ruinous.
What happened. I mean, remember, what did you feel though, fear in the household.
Absolute terror because like, is this the end.
Stock marke rush was a big deal, Like it was huge, massive, and your dad's fund would have been investing in the stock market. So one in those days people do is maybe I'm a high net worth person. I put in, you know, maybe a million dollars into the fund, and the objective was your dad would invest mine and all my other friends' money. In those days, they would invest in the stock market. They didn't really startups and equity private equity stuff in those days, but the investment stock market,
stock market crashes. Do you have any sense of as a teenager, have any sense of the devastation that you would the anxiety that your father would have been experiencing.
Oh massive. I mean, my whole childhood was just anxiety. Before I realized that I actually had anxiety, which is only sort of much later in my life. I was an incredibly anxious child because there was also the threat of nuclear war because it was the Cold War with Russia and America, so I lived and then there was also AIDS, so that was the eighties. So the eighties was just the worst time to grow up because between
the stock market Crash, AIDS and the Cold War. We were a generation that was just terrified, constantly terrified.
Well, the ads major terrified AIDS.
Absolutely because we became of age sexually when sex was connected with death and so that was our introduction to sex that it could kill you. And the Simon Reynolds, the Grim Reaper ads, and it was everything was scary. My memory of my childhood and adolescents was just terror, absolute terror.
How did you become aware? Because aware of those things, because it's pretty unusual that, certainly in my household at that stage, I had a teenage son. Close enough to teenage son, I would not have brought home the newspaper to him. How is it that mer Freedman was aware of that? Did you? Was it from TV? I mean, the ads are on television, but was it? Did you watch?
My parents were always very you know, my mother's always been heavily into social justice and used to take us on Palm Sunday anti nuclear marches. When all my friends at school were, you know, going to tennis days and stuff, we'd be in the city carrying placards going to know
nuke's marches. So I grew up with a real understanding of the world and social justice and politics, and because my father had come from South Africa, all of those conversations would happen around our table, and I was fascinated always in the news and information and what we would now call content. But I used to love magazines. I would, you know, watch magazines were my thing as a kid growing up, because that was the only women's media, any
magazines I could get my hand on. I mean, Cleo was my go to and favorite, and you know, gold Star, but everything from of course, I started with Dolly and followed Lisa Wilkinson through her career. But I would buy Women's Weekly, I'd Buyom's Day, I would buy a new Idea because there was no other medium that really at that time spoke to women and that covered issues that
were relevant to women. And I don't just mean like lipstick and sex, but like relationships, career, you know, physical health, all of those kinds of things. They would all be in women's make. So that was when I really and I was a really lonely kid, so all I wanted to do was read magazines, and it just drove me crazy that they would only come out, most of them once a month.
I had a mean lonely.
Like in that year, my brother I was seven years older, so that was that was a big gap. And I well, you know, now I know that I had ADHD, So I was like bored. I needed a lot of stimulation and I didn't have it, Like I didn't you know, I didn't have anyone to play with on the weekends, and my parents were kind of busy with their own lives, and so I would love, you know, I would just
go and buy magazines. I spent a lot of time with my dog, and I would just go out to the shops and save all my pocket money to buy magazines and lawleies.
Okay, I'm just sort of having an imagination of you sitting at home, sitting on your bed with magazine, reading magazine.
Yeah, and cutting things out and sticking them on my wall and sticking them in my school diary and on my school folder.
More than that, more than just reading, you were participating in that.
Yeah, it was as much as you could. And it's funny you say that, because one of the wonderful things about the Internet and that has been so revelatory for women is the two way that engagement. You couldn't really engage with magazines unless you wrote a letter to Dolly doctor or that was pretty much all you could do. But you know, I'd cut them out and I wanted to I wanted to become them.
Yeah, that's very interesting because not too many people and officer those people like, if you want to be good at something, you've got to take the next step. Just don't read about it, cut it out even today, or if you're reading online's a bit different. But maybe you've photoshot it and you put it in record it somewhere.
Which is so anyone can make content now, but.
You've got to get the content and you've got to be part of it. You've got to be participatory as I was, just being an observations reading kind of the next thing because then because then it becomes part of your brain's DNA, you really get it inside your head. And Dolly magazine and Cleo. I remember because my girlfriend at the time, who became a she used to get all the magazines and she'd we still always want you do those quizzes and stuff.
Yeah, relationship quizes and that was interesting, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And it was like in a media that didn't speak to women or care about women. And a culture that kind of didn't really rate women, and it was very focused on men. Women's magazines were where we built our communities around these brands. And you know, the old joke is that Dolly taught you what an orgasm was, Cleo taught you how to have one, Cosmo taught you had a fake one, and then this Weekly taught you had
a knit one, and then you died. And so it was like, we built our communities around these brands, and we moved from brand to brand as we got older in our interests, in our life stage changed, and it was really powerful, which is why it's just such a travesty and yet an opportunity for me that, you know, when I went on to work for those magazines and edit some of them, that company didn't understand that what
they had were incredible. They had the most amazing collateral in those brands that they just pissed into the wind. And it's so sad that there's no Cleo, there's no Dolly.
You know, even brands like The Bulletin. There was these incredible brands that meant so much and that should have become these iconic digital brands across different platforms and they were just you know, part of the reason I left magazines was because I got tired of trying to explain to my bosses that armageddon was coming in the form of the Internet and that we needed to move, we needed to evolve, and they were like, no, we're a magazine company. Internet's are fad where a print company and
magazines are a fad. And anything that we put on our website for the magazines is just to get people to buy the magazine, and we don't want to you know, if we put content online, then they won't buy the magazine, and that's our business model.
Yeah. They didn't want to bussardize.
Yeah, they thought it was going to be killing the golden goose, and in fact, he killed the golden goose by not seeing what was happening under their nose.
Before we moved past that. What was your first introduction to working in magazines.
Doing work experience at CLEO Lisa Wilkinson and Deborah Thomas. Yeah, I mean, iconic, amazing. I had dinner with them both last night and some of my CLEO friends. So that was the most incredible education that I could have got.
Like I to work at the knee of those women, and to be in that building in Park Street during that time of when the Packers owned it and it was Nannie King and it was it wasn't at a Buttros, but it was like Lisa and Pat Ingram and you know, absolute icons and Richard Walshon and then Nick Chan and
even later John Alexander liked it. But yeah, Ja, to be around those people was an ab salute privilege and like that was my university because I dropped out of university almost immediately and that was my university.
I just scored the job. How old you get?
I just wrote a letter. I just wrote a letter, and it was like to Lisa and to just like, you know, can I please call I love mag It wasn't a very original letter. And you know, she came and said, I knew someone else who'd been a guy actually who'd been doing work experience like a day a week, and that was my dream. And you know, I think I sort of used his name to get in the door. And you know, in my naivity, I thought Lisa would
offer me a job. But like I was a nineteen year old, eighteen year old, I had no experience, nothing, And she said, I remember exactly what she said in that conversation, she said, because she was no doubt useful. A lot of people going on magazines, it's glamorous. I didn't want to go to the photo shoots. I wanted like she was my hero, not the models on the cover. It was Lisa. I wanted to be in the office.
I wanted with the disgusting carpet that was masking tape down and the shit falling from the ceiling and the little rabbit Warren. You know, Carrie didn't get rich by spending money on his officers. But that's where I wanted to be, learning at the knee of those incredible women, and that's where I spent the next pretty much fifteen years of my career.
It's pretty full on though, as a nine year old thinking that way, especially as opposed to playing the ball the magazine, you played the man the woman. In this case, he played the player. So you actually wanted to be with Lisa Wilkinson. What did she what did she represent you? And how do you know Lisa was as important a person potentially into the characteristics as you did know about like most people. Was she the editor of She'd.
Been the youngest ever editor in Australia twenty one because I'd read Dolly as an eight year old or nine year old whatever. And my favorite thing was Lisa's editor's letter at the front of the magazine. And it's so funny that editor's letters ended up becoming, you know, these
airbrushed glamour shots. But Lisa was always very relatable. She had this long hair, and she had like glasses and she looked like a regular woman girl like she was my idol, absolutely, and then meeting her and just learning so much from her over the time that I was there before she you know, left and had a baby and whent a maternity leave and I can't remember if she came back before she had a second child, but you know, sitting with her and Deborah, and the most
important thing Lisa ever taught me was something that's a core value at Mamma Mia now, which is walking her shoes. And she didn't use those exact words, but she always said, look, we're making this magazine not for ourselves, not to impress our peers or other people at other magazines or our friends. We're making it for our readers. And so every photoshoot that you're on, every cover line, you write every story
you pitch. Don't think about what you want to put out to the audience, think about what it looks like from their point of view. And that has been something I've never forgotten, and that has informed every career decision I've ever made, and every content decision I've ever made is walking her shoes.
That's funny because as well Kerry say to me, he used to say, I couldn't give a damn what you think borrowers want. I want you to work out what they want, and that's what you talk to them about. Yeah, and that's the only reason we're in business.
A lot of people make content for themselves or to impress other people, and that's one thing to do. But that's never been interesting to me. The way I've always edited, the way I've always thought about content is not through the eyes of me to them, but from through their eyes what they can see, what they can hear.
And who's your consumer?
Other words, Yeah, who's your consumer? And always be the eyes and ears of your consumer.
That's that's And how would you find out what your consumer wanted? I mean, I mean, you're a survey of you're an end of one, you know, just one in the whole algorithm. So it's good to look at yourself what I think I would like to see as a consumer, But how do you find out what your consumers wanted? I mean, would you let's just elevation now from the nineteen year old just started. Yeah, and you became the editor. You became the editor of which magazine? Cosmo?
Adam Cosmo?
Yeah, yeah, you become the out of Cosmo. How would you say? What would you say to your team in terms of finding out at that point what your audience wants? Was it? Survey based.
Surveys are always unreliable, so as market research because you'll often you know, those those market researchers. Back in the magazine days, people would say, like, numbers don't lie. So people would say, oh, you should have more interesting people on the cover, Like you know, I remember someone saying to me in the nineties, you should have like Natasha Stott to spoiler on the cover. She was the head
of the Democrat Party back then. And it's like, oh, you should have this one on the cover or that one on the cover. But the covers that sold were very different. So what people say they want and what they actually want. The numbers don't lie, and same with digital even more so now. But in terms of how before we had this intense feedback loop that digital media gives you where you are not short of anyone's opinion in real time, and the analytics that you have can
literally show you what works and what doesn't work. Back then, I've always had this real split in me because I'm such a consumer of women's media. I'm always able to split between me and the creator and me and the consumer, and I'm always just able to flip. I I can't even explain it. But sometimes when I'm talking to people, I'll say I don't understand that headline. I'm really confused by what And they're like, but you you know what that headline? I don't mean me? MEA, I mean me.
I'll slip into first person as the voice of the audience in their shoes, yeah, walking in her shoes, and someone who comes to it without assumed knowledge, without having read the whole article. She's just reading the headline. That doesn't make sense. That headline only makes sense if you've read the whole article. And I'm just able to flip. I can't explain how I'm just always able to flip and put myself in the shoes of other women.
Do you think it's fair to say, because I've noticed this sometimes that when experts on a topic have conversations, they're generally speaking when they're talking to an audience, having a conversation with themselves about what they know, as opposed to having conversation with the audience about what the audience is actually out there to find out about them. You know, we all can do it. We tend to. And I know what happens to him when it comes to the
interest rates. I forget that I've got an audiences doesn't know maybe anything about interest rates and just wants me to break it down from a certain way. But I sometimes I slip into the same mistake all the time is start having a conversation with myself with Mark. It's Mark talking to Mark.
Yeah.
And in your case, you've got experts who know where the topic is, and they therefore they put the headline up that reads well to themselves writing a speech and then getting up and speaking what you wrote, and it sounds completely this sound sounds really dull relative to what.
You've always got to be a clean skin like you know, if I'm thinking about the first thing I asked you when we sat down was just tell me a bit about your audience, because I'm thinking about what's going to be interesting to your audience. Because I will, I will give different answers than if I was doing a podcast about fashion, or a podcast pitch to women in business, or a podcast pitch to you know, news or content creators.
And it's not that the answers aren't authentic, but it's like, Okay, I need to thin, slice and package up the most interesting thing for this audience in a way that's most interesting to them, not what do I want to talk about today, because that's a whole other thing.
Yeah, we're not sitting down.
We're not here to hear what I want to talk about y or.
Me for that matter. And by the way, that's part of the skill of podcasting, isn't it. Like I mean, it's about my audience doesn't really give it down what I think anyway. They're more interested in hearing what me for even.
I don't know. I think podcasting is different. I think podcasting is different. I think that you know and you look at all you have to do is look at the US election. I think the difference between podcasting and traditional interviewing on news media like say seven thirty or sixty minutes.
A three minute clip.
Yeah, it's that. And it's also that's about I get you, whereas a podcast is about getting to know you. And that's why Donald Trump went to Austin and sat down for Joe Rogan for three hours, and that was a really smart use of his time. And the other biggest cut through was Kamala Harris's interview with Alex Cooper from Call Her Daddy, which she paid for Alex to come
to her, but still did it in Alex's format. So you know, it's interesting you look at we've just seen the first podcast election and we've got our election in Australia next year, and it will be really interesting to see what happens because at the last election, I remember so clearly. You know where the biggest women's media company in the world in Australia we speak to We have the biggest podcast network in the world. We speak to
eight million Australian women every month. Anthony Albernezi straight away, Yes, I'll come talk to you, I'll sit down, do no filter. Scott Morrison wouldn't have a bar of us would not do it. And I remember, it's not like he wasn't here, because he came in and talk to you, And I remember that day. I'm like, he's literally up the road because we are one hundred meters down the road our office, and he wouldn't come to Mamma Mia.
He didn't ask, he refused.
Oh, we asked him for months. We asked as we said, it's not a gotcha, we just want to sit down. Anthony Aberneze has come on no filter. We want to give you the same opportunity. I mean, you know, I'm not Lee Sales. I'm not going to give him a grilling. It was just an open invitation with no.
Probably should totally sales too, to be frank with him, and he did, Yeah, of course he did, but he should.
But I'm not saying it's in instead of but the fact that he was always and Tony Abbott was the same. I've interviewed every Australian Prime minister since i've you know, over the last fifteen years, except for Tony Abbot and Scott Morrison, who would not sit down with me. And it's like, why why would you? And it's not about me anyone at Muma Mea. They would not engage with Muma Mea. They gave interviews to all kinds of people you twice, but they would not give an interview to
the biggest women's media company in Australia. What does that say, you know, we're talking earlier about attitudes to women. What does that say about their understanding of fifty percent of their electorate fifty one percent of their electorate actually or they're disdained for and their understanding of the influence that women have. Like it's almost like these men have such old fashioned ideas about women. It's like, oh, they'll just vote the way their husband tells them, Like, I don't
know what they would think. It didn't go well for either of them.
That's sort of the assumption anyone could make, whether they think that way or not. It could be definitely different assumption century who.
Could make the assumption that women will just vote the way their men tell them.
To What's interesting as Peter Dutton reached out to you.
No, but we've reached out to him, so we've opened up an invitation for you know, we know that the election is going to be sometime in the next nine months. The invitations there for Peter Dutton to come on mom a Mayor Out Loud, which is our flagship show and it's the third biggest podcast in Australia of any kind. And of course Anthony Albanezy now I hope, like it would be madness for him not to. We've seen what
happened in America. Like I think one of the biggest mistakes come in and made not going to sit down with Joe Rogan. I think that was a real, really missed opportunity. I'm not saying it would have moved the election, but I just think that idea of is really old fashioned. Scott will only talk to you, and Abbott will only talk to you because you're a man, like we won't talk to It's like, come on, those days are over.
That's really interesting. You should make that point because don't actually is coming on our show and they reach out to us. But of course that's the thing.
I would reach out to you, but it won't occur to them. Even though women are responsible for it's I think it's eighty percent of purchasing decisions in Australia. This is why smart advertisers advertised to women because this idea that women and not Women aren't just responsible for like buying the breakfast cereal and the washing powder, finance, investment, insurance, banking, cars, real estate. Women are incredibly influential, if not entirely responsible for making those decisions.
That's our experience in the lending business.
The purchasing power of women is extraordinary. The voting power of women is extraordinary. And the thing about women is that women are kind of programmed to be viral. Like the word of mouth and the amplification of your message when you put it in the mouths of women or you can get women to engage with you is I'm told, look, men don't amplify.
What would you say to Peter Dutton because I want to show him this clip when he comes on in the show, What would you say to Peter in this camera?
I'm not going to look down the camera because, to be honest, I think Peter Dutton needs women more than women need Peter Dutton. I think it's I think it's his game to lose in that sense in winning the hearts and minds of women.
Do you just need to win them or does he just need to introduce himself at least?
Yeah, I think it's that and I mean it used to be oh, they'd go and do an in view with the Women's Weekly, which Scott Morrison did last election campaign and he did sixty minutes and he played his ukoleli. But that part of the audience is absolutely dwindling. Like if you want to reach women over the age of eighteen up to about fifty five, you know, Mum and Maya is where they are. We've got sixty four different podcasts we've got, you know, between our social our written content.
This idea that women are somehow a niche is just kind of well, it is laughable.
We'll given the voting in this country's compulsory to It just doesn't make sense mathematic right. I mean it's funny you should say that about Morrison because I've invited Elbow in this show and Jim Charmers so many times.
And they won't come.
They won't come on my show, which is interesting he goes on your show. I don't know if it's in my case on an think it's necessarily my audience, and I don't think it's necessarily men versus women or their views. I think it's more about what they think my politics is. Because I've had Scott Morrison on and I'm not going to I'm not here to pull olbos pants and I just want to talk to about his story.
Of course, that's what my shows, of course, And that's the thing it's getting to. It's not a gotcha anyone that political leaders and their advisors have not got that message that podcasts aren't a hostile environment. I mean, I'm not Lesa Ales, you're not Kerry O'Brien, like if only I bow down to those people. But that's not what a podcast is. It's just not and it actually is the best way for someone to introduce themselves and to yeah, tell people who they are. And it's like, you know,
I wouldn't be interested. I'm not the best person and out with Cooper said this when she interviewed Kamala to sit down and talk about fracking and talk about the economy necessarily, but she spoke to her about reproductive rights and about abortion because that is such a critical issue for women. As it turned out, it wasn't such a critical issue when it came to voting. But there's just not a lot of downside. There's not a lot of downside because I think what people expect now not just
from politicians, but from public figures. Is not just a sound bite, you know, it's to understand or who are they really? Because if there's one thing people can always say about Donald Trump, you know who he is.
Yeah, you know what you're going to get.
You know what you're going to get, and whether you think what you get is awful or spectacular, you know. And going into this election in the US, I think it was eighty five percent of people said they will not have their mind changed about Donald Trump, no matter what they thought about him, good or bad. Their mind was made up and nothing that could be said or done to change their mind. And I think that's really interesting.
Do you think that in terms of Trump anyway? Do you think his propensity that I just don't care what people think. I'll go on any podcast.
Do you think it's his sor But he didn't and go on Alex Cooper, So he only what goes on friendly, He only goes on friendlies. And I understand like politicians go on friendly want to do Rogan Rogan was Necessarilyrogan's very friendly. Rogan very friendly, and I think he would have been fine to cume Ala and I think he would have been awful. But to Donald Trump, he was very friendly, like very friendly.
As opposed to not being unfriendly well.
As opposed to like calling him out on his bullshit, Like he's not going to do that because that's just not the kind of podcast that he has. Yeah, you know, like you can go on to Rogan and pretty much talk about yourself for three hours and he'll just kind of let.
You, Yeah, which is sort of what both of us do.
Yeah, for sure, exactly. We're not interested in having someone there to tell them what we think.
That's an podcast.
Yeah, that's our podcast work. And that's why podcasts are in Dex so much higher for women than they do for men. And that's why for us at mum and MEA, so much of our business is built on audio and on our podcast network.
Can I go back to momom me? Then just kicked off early two thousands.
Two thousands, two thousand and eight, actually yeah, sorry, two thousand and yet started as a blog yeap.
Just me blogs is a thing.
Yeah, it was just someone writing on the internet really, and it wasn't a personal blog, so it was always going to be about, you know, just what I wanted to write about, really, what I thought might be interesting to people because back in that time there were women's women's websites were like, they were very net specific. They were about cooking, or they're about gossip, or they're about fashion,
or they're about parenting. And I was interested in all of these things, but I was also interested in news and pop culture, and every other woman I know was not just interested in one of those things. So it made sense to me to have a log and then a website and our media company that covers all of those things, because this idea of women's issues through a different looking at the world through a female lens versus
women's issues. All issues are women's issues, but what we do at Mum and mea I guess, is look at it through a female lens, because most of the media tends to look at it through a male lens, just by virtue of the fact that most media companies, in fact, pretty much all media companies are run by men. So I just saw, you know, a gap in the market, and then I established that there was a market in
that gap, and then I'd been growing an audience. But I was a one woman operator, and I was completely exhausted, and my husband had sold his business he'd been in the liquor industry and he was looking for something to invest his time in, and he'd sold his company and so he came on board as a co founder after about eighteen months, and he said, let's try and monetize this in the next twelve months, or because I hadn't earned it sent in two years, or it's time to
you know, it's going to be time to get another job, because we've got a mortgage to pay. And so he came on board and we did. We monetized it. We were profitable, I think in that first year, which was not as impressive as it sounds, because it was just him and me and we weren't earning any money. There was no else to pay, so we were profitable. But then we just slowly moved into a little tiny office and slowly started hiring people. And of course nobody wanted
to really come and do this thing. The internet was still a bit untested, and yeah, we we just grew from there, and now we've got about one hundred and fifty people, and yeah, we're sort of a pretty big bill. Not not a small business anymore.
When two people husband and wife, Yeah, at the coffee table or whatever the kitchen table, and often wonder about let's say at that stage husband wasn't involved, and you were doing your blogs of is a blog for some people therapy?
That's a really interesting it was for some people. I think what was amazing about the rise of blogging, particularly the parenting bloggers of around that time, which I never was,
but I was very influenced by them. It was this very flourishing way of women to communicate to other women in a way where there was no gatekeeper, so there wasn't no edit, and there was no one saying, well, that's interesting to people or that's not interesting to people, and there was no goal is that going to be interesting to enough people to be able to monetize it through advertising. It was just women expressing how they felt about things, and it was an amazing time. It was
fairly short lived, but it was an amazing time. And for me, I wasn't interested in writing personally, particularly, but I was interested in being the one. I've been an editor for so long and then an editor in chief with lots of magazines under me ACP, and I'd been sort of managing people and teaching other people and editing
other people for so long. I've spent a lot of my career climbing up the ladder because I'm very ambitious, but then realizing I don't really like it up there, and climbing back down and wanting to get back to the cold face without anyone between me and an audience, and just wanting to communicate directly, and that's what I love, And ironically I'm in the process of that at the moment again, de escalating, coming back to the cold face where I can just create directly for an audience.
And what are the signs that you and your husband saw that either encouraged him or you to think, how he's going to take on the co founder role and we're going to monetize this. What did you say exactly?
What it was? No, there were probably about ten thousand or more people coming every day to read what I was writing. I was doing about six posts a day on my own per day. Per day I was there were thousands of comments. I was moderating every single comment like I had no one to work for me. It was literally me walking around with my laptop in my house.
And then I had another baby during that time. But the reason that he realized there was something there is, because I kept getting approached by private equity who wanted to start things and get me to run them for them, and.
He would come with me.
Yeah, there was. There was a big thing at the time called Daily Candy Out of the US, which was a daily email that would like do a roundup of the best kind of deals and fashion things and various things. And so everyone wanted to to get into this women's digital space. And so I'd get Jason to come to these meetings with me and Jason Levine being my husband, and and you know, we went to a couple and it was like, why on earth would we go and work for these clowns to make something for women when
I know how to do this. Let's just we're doing it like so that that's where he was like, well, if they can see something in it. And he was starting at Harvard at the time, and he used Mama Maya as because he didn't have his business. He just sold his business before he'd started this three year Harvard course, and he used Mama Mea as A as a model
because they had to sort of plug in their business. Yeah, not a case study, but they had to plug in their own businesses to these things they were learning, and he used Mama Maya at the time, and it just made him see the potential there. And I was getting all these approaches, but I didn't have the bandwidth or the skills, to be honest, to monetize any of the
approaches I was getting. So for a while, you know, he was managing me and people would get me to come and you know, they wanted me to be the brand ambassador for their whatever, and he would do those deals and then he's like, there's a business here potentially, and he could see that I was completely burning out and I didn't have a capacity to monetize it myself. And I also didn't I didn't have a business plan. I didn't know how to do a business plan. He
was like, what's what's your exit? You're not and I'm like, I don't know. Rupert Murticle, come along and buy me. And he's like, by what it's You're on your laptop, there's nothing to buy. And I was like, I couldn't. I couldn't see that because I was just so caught up in it. And he was the one that's always
had the vision. I've always been really good at this, and he's always been the one that can see over the horizon and been like, no, Mom and man needs to be a website that you edit, and I'm like, oh no, that'll never work. Or he's like, Mum and me needs to and I'm like, oh no, that'll never work, and then he's right, and he's right, and he's right.
So we've been a really good combination, whereas he's very much steered the business and the financial side of it and everything other than the content, and I've steered the content and it's worked, you know, really well for seventeen years and one of the most dangerous times for any startup. And I'm much more suited to start up culture, I've realized.
But he always had much bigger ambitions and the most angous time for a business we learned was, oh we knew was going from startup to scale up because culturally it's a big shift. The people that you hire as generalists you then move to needing specialists. It's a big risk moving up. And he managed us through that. He was now that he's been an outstanding CEO, managing through all of those rocky waters and through COVID and through we tried to you know, not everything we've done has worked.
We tried to expand into the US, that didn't work, so we closed that down and decided to really focus here. But probably the biggest thing for us was when Facebook
told everybody to pivot to video. They told publishers to pivot to video, and everybody sacked their riders, invested all this money, started making video, pivoted, and then Facebook quent ah yeah nah, yeah, And that was sort of the beginning of the end for the buzzfeeds, the vices, and they just ended up getting more and more investment, more and more, needing more and more, doing bigger and bigger
cat raisers to fund this bigger and bigger expansion. And because we've never done that, we've always been in control of our own destiny. And that's a decision that Jason made because he knew that, you know, and I would say, how come they've got all this cup raising and we don't, and He's like, it means that we can make the
best decisions for our business. So when everyone pivoted to video, we actually pivoted to audio, and that was before most people knew what a podcast was, and that ended up being a really, really good decision.
For us. So I just want the co found a thing, because often people say to me, do I need to co founder? Or some people come to me and say I knew the co founder because they heard someone else say that you need a co founder.
Well, I needed a co founder.
Well is it better to say, though, mere that I'm really good at this, but I'm not so good at those things? Those things are important in my business. In the business, therefore, a co founder can do those things. Because you know, my old man is my dad, uses always say just always put up on a whiteboard what you're good at and what but equally, be honest, what's your crap at? And you know? And I often say my various businesses. And I've always had my brother involved,
my younger brother involved as a lawyer. I say, I cut his sows, and you know, and if because he's he's really good at stitching things up, making really nice and neat and tighty and relevant, et cetera. Not in terms of content, but just in terms of structure finances.
It can't need to break in an accelerator totally.
They are. So did you did you me or sort of recognize that your husband had those qualities?
Yes, I knew that I couldn't do because I was just all I knew I was really really good at this one thing, but I was not. There was this whole other thing that not only was I not good at, wasn't interested in coming at it, I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't a good use of my time doing this thing that I didn't understand or wasn't good at. And so for me, not only did Jas have skills that I didn't have in terms of business and finance, but
he also had a different mindset. Because I have a high I have a low boredom threshold and a high appetite for risk. He is more cautious, and I think that has been in a business. If you just have unharnessed ambition or unharnessed risk appetite, that's really dangerous, both of you risky. Yeah, you can't. And so I think you know the best partnerships. And I've always said, you know, I ran this whole course part of the business for many years called Lady Startup, which is about helping women
start businesses and about the co founder thing. I would always say exactly what you've said, which is either partner with someone who has different strengths to you or higher if you can afford to. And the problem is that most people their co founders will be like a friend or a sister or something and I had you know, they'll say, oh, this is my co founder. We're really different, like I'm this, and it's like your differences are like this.
You need differences that are like this, like whether you're really you know, you look at some of the most successful partnerships in Australian business, Nicki and Simone Zimmermann, you know, clothing zimmm and sisters Yeah, Nick creative, Nicole is I think a lawyer by trade or maybe an accountant and so you know, they're very clear about who does what. And I think that that's been that's been the key
for me and Jason. There's no way I could have done this without him, and you know he would have done something else without me, but it wouldn't have been this So.
An important point here though, and I've seen this happen with people, especially husband and wife or a boyfriend, girlfriend or brother and sister, etc. Brothers and sisters. If you have somebody like you say, with your skills and things you like doing and with a high appetite for risk. You say, and this is sort of what you're explaining
to it. You say, look, I want to do this, and he will come back and he'll say, well, wait a minute, let's just check this out and do a bit of analysis on and blah blah blah.
Did you cut once?
But would you ever get to the point where you'd say, well, hang on, don't you believe in me? Like this is what I believe in. Do you ever get to the point and say I just want you to believe in me, And he's going to say, well, hang on, I do believe in you, but my role is correct. Now how do you deal with that little a small conflict there? But would happened counseling?
It was? It's really interesting we've come to really like I bristle at being held back and he bristles at me running headlong into something passionately. But what we've learned over the years is that is to trust each other. Like it's been proven time and time again that my instincts when I want to run hard at something I can't often explain. Like with podcasts, there was no business model. I just knew that it was something we had to do.
And I remember getting up in a leadership team meeting and explaining podcasts and they all kind of like laughed at me and whatever, and I'm like, no, guys, like take this in. It's like, oh me, I' like we've got our business plan. We can't we do it. This is our strategy. We can't. And I'm like, and so I'll just go off and do it on my own.
It's like Lady Startup. I just Jase walked past my office one day and I was on the floor and I was cutting things up, or maybe it was the Very Pery Summit and I was whatever, and he's like, oh, babe, you know what are you doing? What's and I said, and he goh, what's the business plan? I'm like, I'm not sure, Like what's the revenue attached to it? And I'm like, I'm not sure, but I'm sure I'll find it.
And I always have, so, whether it's been podcasts, the Very Pery Summit that I did, or the Lady Startup.
Courseause Erry menopause.
Yeah, So they've all been like multimillion dollar become multimillion dollar parts of our business, but they didn't start off going how can we make a lot of money. It's been I've gone what walking in her shoes? What do women want? Okay? And then we find a way to make it financially viable to actually do it because we're not a charity, where a purpose driven business, and our purpose is to make the world a better place for women and girls. So I'm always looking at what can
I make that fulfills that purpose. So yeah, that's kind of how it works.
So can you just list out? I know you've got fifty odd podcasts or something like that in your group, and I don't want you to list every one of those out, but I would imagine. But could you just explain your model, mum? And mean model? Is it sort of an umbrella model that sort of sits Lots of other podcasters sit inside your model.
So we are pure We're a pure podcast network, so we're all owned and operated, all and operated.
So you go and find the talent to do a particular podcast theme or has it.
Yeah, so we will. You know, our first podcast was Muma mea Out Loud, which is about sort of what women are talking about, and that's a daily it's now daily show. It started as a weekly show. So we built that first and then I started doing an interview podcast called No Filter, and then we went, Okay, we want to do a parenting podcast. So we found two people and we did a weekly parenting podcast.
Do people to run the podcast?
Yeah? To host the podcast?
Talent?
Yep, yeap talent. And then you have advertisers who are like, oh, we want to advertise to parents, so we'll advertise on that podcast, or will sponsor that whole show. And then we're like, well, what else do women want? The news is pretty hectic, there's a lot of assume knowledge in the news. How about a quick daily news podcast. So that's when we started The Quickie, which is now twice daily news podcast. Then we did The Spill, which is a once daily entertainment podcast.
And you're finding talent for these shows every time.
Yeah, that among our writers, among our editors, in house talent. A lot of the time. Now we also work with external talent, but they're our shows. We create them. We're about to launch a show called Diary of Birth with people tell their birth stories. We're launching a story about once upon a Once upon a Divorce, about stories about divorce.
You know. We have podcasts about true crime, we have podcasts about comedy, pop culture, different aspects of pop culture, you know, all that we've done sport before, all our different aspects of women's lives and areas of interest.
So the umbrella business sort of is really like you're a big publisher, one big published, a media company. You're a media company, correct, so you and underneath it you own all the various aspects. A bit it's a bit like the old you know, maybe it's a bit like news Corp. You know, you might back when it was you know, there's not only the early Telegraph and but there's a whole lot of magazines that might sit under there, and there might be a bit of tea, a bit of yeah.
So some people say, are you a branded house or a house of brands? We're actually both. So we're a branded house in terms of Mumma Maya, but we're also a house of brands in terms of we've got the canceled podcast, we've got the Quickie podcast, we've got Mama Maya out Loud podcast. So we've got all these different brands. We've got a whole beauty podcast, we've got a fashion podcast, we've got a midlife podcast, we've got a mental health podcast,
a wellness podcast. So we've got all these different you know, categories, and each of them have their own ecosystems. So around our wellness podcasts, for example, there's a newsletter, there is a you know, it might be a Facebook group. There might be written content on our website. There will be social accounts, so there'll be tiktoks, they'll be Instagram, so you know, there are these ecosystems that are built around these brands as well as the podcasts themselves.
Given that you built that, how do you keep excited? I mean, what's exciting coming up? What are you thinking about? What's going on?
Yeah, so at the moment, I'm super excited about it. I do.
Yeah, I got the vibe when you walked in. Yeah.
Do you know why? Because I'm extracting myself from management after seventeen years, we've finally made some big hires. We've hired a CEO this year for the first time. We've hired a chief content officer for the first time.
Roles sort of yeah, exactly.
Well, Jason was CEO and I was Chief content officer essentially, and we've hired to replace ourselves and we've sort of got this whole big management team now senior leadership team. You know, we've got a chief operating, a product officer, We've got CFO, We've got all these people head of content. And I'm climbing back down the ladder and I'm back to making content. So I've got an audio documentary that
I'm making. I'm still doing my maror out loud. Yeah, I'm really excited because the running the business part, I'm very tired. Like that's been seventeen years of Mum and Maya and before that, I was in management for another fifteen years.
And you're both a long time you're both a podcast and in the business of podcasting.
Yeah, so I run three hat. I have three hats in the business. I'm a co founder and co owner. I am a manager, and I am talent. I'm a creative and a content creator. And that's what I want to be. I mean, I of course I'm a co founder in that stays and a co owner, but I want to be a creator. I want to get back to actually making stuff.
How important is for someone like yourself? And we're going to have to draw a close moment because our audience is done to last more than forty four minutes, not long me though I've trained them that way before.
What if, I mean, it's quite a long time.
It is a long time. But how important is it to some one I've never experienced this, But how important is it someone like you to be independently successful as a woman in the family, like your parents' family and your own sibling and you're and your mum and dad. How important is it for you to be successful in your own right without any help from a super successful father.
Yeah, I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of you know. I'm so proud. No, I'm so proud of my dad. And you know, let's be very clear about privilege and all of those things I grew up. You know, it's a huge privilege to even have that modeled in your family. And I also know that even though I didn't grow up you know, hugely, we didn't grow up
wealthy or anything. My father became very successful when I was a teenager, and there is a degree of mental safety of that that can't be underscored, like the confidence of that. But Jason and I literally have built this from our lounge room together and it has been the hardest thing we have ever done. It has nearly brought us to the brink of divorce. Lucky we got the divorce out of the way earlier and got back together. But it has been so tough. It is still so tough,
like business is still so tough. Like it is a great We're in a great place now and the business is doing really, really well. But you know, no one saw COVID coming, and you never know. When you're a business owner, it never stops being stressful.
So I can ask a question. Jerry Harvey once said
to me on a golf course. I said, mate, why are you collecting all these crappy old golf balls you're finding on the side that other people discarded and putting in a bag And though and we're playing golf up and New South Wales and this is some years ago, and he said to me, and at that stage you would have been a billionaire Forsial at that stage, And he said to me, Mark, he said, I never think, or I continually think that one I don't deserve it, and two someone could take it away from me at
any time, because they could. And I think the same.
I think the same too, And that drives you, of course, it does. No you're one hundred percent right. And sometimes people come into Mama meha, and we have a big office now down there, And if they don't, if they don't own a business, they'll come in and they go, wow,
it's so big. It's amazing. And if they do own a business or have owned a business, they'll walk in and they go, wow, it's so big because they see what we know, which is the cost of paying the salary of every person and every computer and the tea bags in the kitchen, and the rent, the rent and
the like. They don't. If you're a business owner, you see the duck paddling underneath, right, and you see the stress of it and the risk and the uncertainty and all of those things, and you know we've had to just metabolize that. So I think most business owners don't spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back and going, gee, look at what we've achieved. Like I literally never ever, ever do that. I always am like, what can we do better? What haven't we done well
enough today? How can I make this better? What can we do next? I spend very little time going yeah, no, I never like never, never, never, never, never, never.
Do you feel failure constantly in whose eyes, eyes, your eyes, your dad's eyes.
Having been canceled a few times, that that always lives like a big, you know, weight over me, the specter of that, not just because of the personal damage that does me mentally everything, but the implications for the business, Like that's a lot of pressure to carry. But luckily the business exists kind of separate from me now and
I've been backing out the door for seventeen years. Has been always our mission is to make ourselves redundant within the business, and I think we're closer than ever to doing that. But I always feel failure every I'm madly competitive, hugely competitive.
File you fail, don't fail? Who wants to fail? So the obsession is not to fail all.
The time, to be clear, Like, I fail and I fuck up, and I get things wrong, and I make mistakes like all the time, but I try like i'd prefer not to. But you own the mistakes too, Oh yeah, oh my god, Yes, I mean, I think our mistakes are the most interesting part of our stories. I don't think our successes are.
Yeah, totally well for us.
I learn a lot more about myself about my own diss from my failures.
We learn about ourselves. Yeah, but others sort of are very interested in our successes because you know, failure is a great driver to be successful. It's a great drive to be competitive. So in order not to fail, I have to compete some people. Where do you think it comes from?
Like, well, women aren't really women talk. Women have to talk a lot about our failures and our mistakes because we expected Yeah, because it's you know, by the world doesn't like a woman who is successful, and yeah, the world doesn't like that.
Do you think other women like that too? Do you think other women also think, well, I don't like her because she's successful.
When a woman calls another woman ambitious, that's very coded for what for usually bad mother. Someone goes, no, not it can be, but it's it often is she's very ambitious. It just is is. It's a real burn like it is.
That's mad. Obviously live in that world, but that's mad. I've never thought about it.
It shouldn't be.
Yeah, but when you just what about when you describe yourself as very.
It's interesting I say cool by self competitive. See I've internalized that, and I'm like, I'm not going to say I'm ambitious because that doesn't feel like an okay thing for a woman to say. I say competitive is because for some somehow you're allowed to be competitive, But saying ambitious feels like you're a bit too full of yourself. I don't know, so I don't. Yeah, I think of myself as competitive.
Can you just take me quickly inside a woman's world, the women's world, because you know obviously I'm not in there. But take me inside for a second, Okay. The level of envy that exists in that world for someone who's more successful than them, or the level of the level of competition. Maybe it's not necessarily it's probably Maybe I'm just speculating it's less so after certain age groups, but more intense in a coort. Maybe I'm just making it's up twenty to forty five. I mean, what's it like?
Is it really competitive? Men? Men aren't like quite like that. We don't really give it damn.
I don't think that's guys.
I don't really give damn bout something else. Most of it's only interested in what we're doing, how we do.
The culture kind of has always said there's only room for one woman, or like, you know, a couple of women and there's also that thing of generationally, you have to overthrow the generation above you to take your place. Right. It's like the you know, the line will attack the headline of the pride of that. And you know, I've noticed that the people who have the hardest go at me are usually younger feminists who were wanting to come up and make their name.
And is that because they can take you out. They think they can take you out to make their name. They ought to take you out, Yeah.
I think, I think also to I think it's also like, I've got a daughter, and I know that it's really important for people to define themselves in opposition to what's gone before them. Yeah, yeah, which is interesting. I think father's sons and mother sorry father daughter and mother son relationships are a little bit different. But I think that generations of women, often in media, will feel and I know that I did it. When I came out of magazines, I said awful things about magazines. I think I was
really angry about magazine. I was angry at magazines, and which is a funny thing to say, but I was really horrible about magazines for a while because I guess I had to establish what I was doing in opposition to magazines like Mom and Me or is everything magazines aren't in that we're not perfect, We're not about making women feel bad. We're not about being old fashioned and being st and being all photoshopped and all of those things.
But now I'm sort of I'm very affectionate and Mum and MEA stands on the shoulders of women's magazines and those phenomenal editors, the actual women who ran them, who were absolute icons and who were not recognized for the incredible business women that they were, you know, Eita and Ninie and Lisa and Deborah and all of those phenomenal women women's media and even those bloggers now and years ago. We are stood on the shoulders of those giants.
Do you feel as though me Friedman is now in the same role as deb and Lisa and that you should or you'd probably do it anyway? Do you do it? I should ask you encourage young women to come in if they write your letter, you know, do encourage young women to come and do what you did with.
We employ Lisa, more than one hundred of them, probably have one hundred and fifty staff. Probably one hundred and forty of them are young women. So yeah, yeah, that's what stoked. I love it. I mean it's I learned so much from them. They're delightful. Like, you know, I'm a big fan of cross generational friendships, Like I've got great friends who are in their twenties, thirties, sixties, seventies, you know, not just in my decade, in my fifties, and so yeah, I love it. I think young women
are phenomenal. I think they're so exciting and interesting and different to us and energetic and energetic. But they've got very good boundaries. Mark, they've got very good boundaries.
Yeah, the younger generally speaking.
Yeah, it's like I've got my work and then I'm switching off my work and you know, I have my right to disconnect and all of those things. And I think that's actually really healthy. After you get over the part where you go all back in my day, I didn't and that lane you go, oh my god, I sound like positively geriatric, and then you go, you know what, that's actually kind of cool.
That's actually great. Well it also makes sense. And before I go, I mean, can you throw that over here? Sure? I really want it to be really good? Is this for ADHD?
Yeah?
Yeah, and do you take it everywhere?
Everywhere I drive with it. I hold it in my hand while I'm driving.
And it's interesting. Like I was, I was wondering to myself, is this a little technique that helps you concentrate on the conversation or is it she's I know you're very clever, and is this is this a process to sort of send me distract me?
Because oh, I didn't think about that. No. Do you know why this one's really good is because usually I'm used to doing a podcast interview, either it'll be on zoom or it'll be with a desk, right, So usually I do it under the desk sols, not to distract anyone, and also because you know, I don't know, some people might find this embarrassing and silly. I always you have
little toys in meetings. But this is my special podcasting one because I've got a whole you know, a whole basket of fidgets on my on my desk and everywhere that I record. But I can't have noisy ones in podcasts. No, I'm the absolute arch enemy of producers and sound engineers. So this one someone gave to me because it's silent and I love it.
I love it too. Yeah, yeah, I love it. And I'll just put on the camera what I love about this because it wouldn't have picked you up because you're shot from the waist up, So why I wanted to Was it distracting for you?
No?
No, no, I I love these things. There's something I don't know in a physic sense and a chemistry sense, so quite fascinating about how this thing doesn't fall apart and doesn't squeeze out, and it's a fascination to me.
It is, yes, it is, and it's very It's I can't explain why. It helps me concentrate, and I've got various different ones. But otherwise I tend to pick my fingers, so this is that. Yeah, I'll pick the skin off my fingers because I won't even be where I'm doing it. I just need something physical while we're talking. It just helps me com.
Yeah, it's My mother was like that, and of course ADHD wasn't a diagnosed thing in those days, but she used to pick her fingers all the time and I used to say, Mum, what are you doing? And her fingers would be bleeding. She would even know same. I'm sure she had an ADHD, which is quite interesting, like in hindsight, because some of my kids have got it, some of my it's.
As genetically inheritable as.
High totally inheritable, and I probably have it or had it, but I don't know. But but I also, you know, I have other techniques.
It's a very high incidence of ADHD and entrepreneurs, much higher than the general population because entrepreneurs have a high appetite for risk. Yeah, and people with ADHD aren't able to metabolize consequences very well and risky and they like they've got a high appetite for risk. That's why a lot of young men particularly at risk of being injured or killed in.
Accidents and also in fidelity.
Yeah. Interesting because yeah, you can't think about the consequence. It's like this in this moment. Impulse control is really tricky.
I'm not trying an excuse for it, but like it depends on the relationship anyway. But I'm not trying to make an excuse for it, because there's all sorts of different types of relationships which tolerate, don't tolerate, tolerate some of it, et cetera. But I do know and I have read about this, but I've written in scientific magazines. But it is now correlated at least whether it's causation, it is correlated to infidelity in a lot of cases.
I mean, I would say people like Trump, it probably has something going on there.
A raft of.
Everything else.
The season would be probably at the top of the leader and.
Perhaps perhaps I wouldn't say psychopathic or in a pathological way, but perhaps a little bit of psych psychopathic psychopathy.
There's a lot going on there. Yeah, definitely, which is just great news for the next for all of us.
I'm not saying Kmala doesn't have it, because she may have to. I don't know her well enough. I do know him, and I have met him and talked to him and interviewed him stuff like because he did during the Apprentice. But just my interaction with him, I could say that there is a bit of psychopathy there because that's something I've studied. And there is a book out there.
It's it's David Gillespie's book.
Yes, and it gives you the twenty one or seven and I can't remember it is now.
That's his phenomenal. Yeah, that wasn't really I insured him too. It's really interesting. I walk among us paths.
Well, someone asked told me they thought I was, and by that it was a female. So she's suggested by the book. So I thought a better again by the book as we're as we're parting company.
Oh I see that's a great like farewell gift.
Yeah, so I thought I better read it me for even Thanks. This has been wonderful. Thanks for honestly I had got. I got so much out of it.
Energies are I just enjoyed the conversation so much.
Thanks,