Mamamia Out Loud: How To Avoid Cancellation: Cause Chaos

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Mamma Mia Out Loud!

Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia Out Loud, what women are actually talking about on Monday,

the 17th of July.

I'm Holly Wainwright.

I'm Mia Friedman.

And I'm Claire Stevens.

And on the show today, is it harder to be a man than a woman right now?

Can we unpack Mia's interview with a feminist icon who believes very much?

Yes.

Also, what do you do with the people in your life who just won't change their minds?

And if things are going badly for you, should you just double down?

The internet celebrity who believes chaos is the most effective success strategy we've

got.

But first, Claire Stevens.

In case you missed it, on Monday morning, Spanish 20-year-old Carlos Alcaraz beat 23-time

Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon final.

Djokovic is deposed as a new king of Sandercourt, Carlos Alcaraz of Spain.

The thing about Djokovic is that there are a lot of people who like to watch him lose.

Me.

And me.

The 36-year-old lost his composure throughout the match, arguing with the umpire and reacting

to the crowd, getting a bunch of warnings and smashing his racket as it dawned on him

that he was going to be beaten.

Of course, Djokovic is the player who refused to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and had his

visa cancelled in 2022 upon arriving in Australia for the Australian Open.

And generally, he is thought of as the villain in tennis.

And so when he was beaten at Wimbledon, the crowd erupted.

That included the Royal Family, particularly Little George and Little Charlotte, who were

meant to show impartiality because Princess Catherine is a patron of the All England Club

and actually presents the trophies.

So we love people just rooting for the villain losing.

If Louis was there, he would have given Djokovic the finger, I think he would have done.

Look, it's not cool, right, to boo people or to be really happy when anyone loses.

But there's something kind of delicious about the fact that even the Royal Family couldn't

quite pretend that they didn't mind who won in this particular instance.

They were like, no, that guy sucks.

Two feminists walked into a podcast studio and had a conversation about how life is

so much harder for men and boys than it is for women and girls.

And I'm going to be honest with you, friends, talking to feminist icon Catlyn Moran in her

London bedroom last Tuesday night about how worried she is about men and boys and agreeing

with her was really not on my bingo card for 2023.

After spending her 30 year career writing seven bestselling books and thousands of news articles,

really through the dual lens of comedy and feminism, she's very funny, but she's very

feminist.

Catlyn has shocked everyone, including herself this month, by writing a new book called What

About Men.

And I interviewed her for the Mamma Mia cover story and the No Filter episode that are both

out today.

And I have to say, she makes some really compelling points.

Boys underachieve at school compared to girls.

Boys are more likely to be excluded from school.

Boys are less likely to go into further education.

Men are more likely to become addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to pornography.

Men make up the majority of gang members.

They are the majority of the homeless, the majority of suicides, the majority of people

who are murdered.

Men make up the majority of the prison population and the unemployed.

They're the majority that die at work.

They're the majority that die in wars.

And also the majority that lose custody of their children in a divorce.

Now what she says, which I think is really interesting, and this is the bit that got

me, she said, this is all the problem of straight white men has become the default statement

on social media.

And it's applied to absolutely everything, really, despite the fact that straight white

men also includes utterly powerless, depressed, 13-year-old boys sitting in their beds starting

to wonder if there's any point in getting up in the morning.

That's the bit that punched me in the gut.

Here is a snippet of the interview that talks about the patriarchy and how it's actually

impacting men as much as it impacts women.

The patriarchy is just those outdated notions of what gender is.

So if you as a man feel that you need to be the main breadwinner, if you feel that you

need to be muscular, if you feel that you need to protect people and be the leader of

your family, or you are worried about being emotionally open or being accused of being

gay or female in anything that you do, that's the patriarchal ideas of what a man should

be.

The main weapon against patriarchy has been feminism.

Feminism is the only thing we've ever invented that looks at gender roles.

So this is the argument of the book.

It's going, look what feminism has done for women.

We took a bunch of your male stuff and it's definitely improved our lives.

Why don't you come and take a bunch of this female stuff and let's just abolish these

gender roles.

Fuck the patriarchy.

Let's just have whatever we need as human beings because we're here for such a short

amount of time.

That makes it sound a little bit dense.

I should say that the book and the conversation is a lot more anecdotal than that.

But Hull, have we done such a great job of building up the girls and the women these

past few decades, thanks to feminism and Gen X mothers of girls and boys like us?

Have we done such a good job that the men and the boys are now suffering for it?

I find this really difficult to grapple with, right?

Because everything that Catlin said in that particular grab about the patriarchy and how

it's as much an enemy for men as women I entirely agree with, right?

And about how male gender roles are a prison.

100% agree.

But the most obvious kind of pushback on Moran's position that actually it's men we need to

kind of feel sorry for at the moment is born out in the headlines we see every day.

In Australia today, there have been more than 300 men arrested over the weekend in a big

blitz on domestic violence.

It's just a tiny drop in the ocean.

It's the 17th of July.

Five women this month have been allegedly murdered by their romantic partners.

And I'm not so unsophisticated in my view of that that I don't understand that in a

way that intersects with Moran's argument, which is alienated, isolated, males are angry

and violent.

I mean, I get all that.

But I think that one of the reasons why it rankles me is I think the pictures she paints

of ra ra, super confident girls all sharing stories about their vaginas and thinking they

can do anything.

And it's not really what I see when I look around.

I think that might be a very specific bubble, a very specific group of young women she's

talking about, because when I look around my world, the young women are paralyzed with

anxiety about body image, about expectation, and the older women are buckling under overwhelming

pressure to be everything to everybody, still carrying most of the load at home.

Often if they are in traditional relationships with men, the men are still kind of skating

around on the top of domestic life while the women are literally buckling under that pressure.

I know older women on the dating scene who tell me that men are absolutely still holding

all the cards and treating women as disposable.

Like, I just, it's not a recognisable world that Catlin Moran is painting for me in this

argument.

So I kind of struggle with it as much as I very much agree with her that I don't think

we should be belittling boys and men and being like, boo, who, you know, what have you got

to add?

I so hate all of that.

And I think we should be white men tears.

And I think we should be ripping up male gender roles and expectations about them being strong

and breadwinners and don't cry and all that.

I so agree.

But I just don't think that we're at a point yet where we can go, well, the women are sorted.

Let's turn our attention to the dudes.

I disagree with the premise of the question she seems to be asking.

I understand why she's asking it because it's interesting and it garners attention.

So the question of, is it harder to be a man than a woman right now?

I just don't think that's what the conversation is.

I think we need to be able to hold two truths at once.

As you said, Holly, that there are all sorts of significant issues that affect women, the

domestic violence stories and the headlines right now.

You can't look away from them.

But there are also issues that affect men that are worthy of conversation and it's not a

competition. And if we turn it into a competition, that's entirely counterproductive.

It's like arguing whether sexism or racism is worse.

It's not fruitful or helpful and it's just not the point.

I think what's interesting about what Catlin Moran is saying is that any movements, even

feminism, cannot be based on contempt.

And if we are looking at men as though we have no respect for them and they're worthless, we

just won't affect change and instead they'll feel that anger and they'll turn to people

like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who make them feel better about themselves.

I recognize that there is a movement of contempt towards men.

When the truth is, men and women can't be looked at separately.

We're relational.

There are certain voices that are missing nuance and are really happy to make broad strokes,

claims about white men and male tears.

And that seems counterproductive when the people we really need to be talking to, even

about issues like domestic violence, are men.

So I think we've kind of made men feel so worthless and ashamed that we have this real issue.

I'm pushing back on the idea that we, whoever the we are, have made men feel that way.

That's not true. It's just not true.

The men you need to be talking to aren't listening to you.

Yeah, and that's not where we're at, right?

A few years ago, I did some work with the NRL with Mamma Mia and I sat in on some anti-violence

workshops and some anti-sexual harassment and anti-sexual assault workshops that the NRL

were running. We all know that there's a massive glaring issue there.

And the number one insight was it's peers.

The only people who will get through to men are other men in the same situations.

They're saying the only thing that changes the culture in, say, a football club, for

example, is there being a man of high status within that organisation who is prepared to

be brave enough to stand up and call it out and say, no, you don't talk about women like

that. No, you don't treat your girlfriend like that.

All of that is the only way to get through to them.

All the lessons and PowerPoint presentations and well-meaning feminist legends going to talk

to them. Yeah, entirely irrelevant.

I think that who she's aiming at is us.

I think that her market is essentially Gen X women, right?

We've got sons, we've got daughters, we've got partners, we've got, you know, male

colleagues and male friends, brothers and fathers.

And I think that perhaps we've led the charge in conversations with our daughters about

female empowerment and, you know, knocking down gender roles.

And our lives are pretty unrecognisable from the lives of our great-grandmothers, right?

But the men, Gen X men, their lives are pretty much the same as their grandfathers,

their great-grandfathers, their great-great-great-grandgrandfathers in terms of what society

expects of them.

And I think you've got a group of teenage boys now that have grown up in the Me Too era.

You've got mothers who are going, oh, my God, my son is listening to Andrew Tate.

And we talk, there's a whole conversation that we have about Andrew Tate.

There's a whole chapter in her book about that and about Jordan Peterson.

These teenage boys, and Catlin points this out, if a boy or a man was set on

social media, I'm proud to be a man.

We would see that as sinister, suspicious, you know, sexist.

We would say that it was giving Andrew Tate vibes, right?

Whereas if a woman, I'm proud to be a woman, we've got a whole international day for that.

We've got, you know, you go girl.

Like every time anyone posts, whether it's a photo of their body, like there's a real

fabric of women supporting other women and helping to expand what it means to be

a woman and a girl, that men don't seem to have, which is into this void pops

Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

I totally recognise that.

And I mean, I said to you, Mia, and you've used it in your newsletter.

This is years ago now that Billy, my son, I've got a son and a daughter and my son

saying to me when he was about six, I know girls can do anything, but can boys do anything too?

I was like, that's hilarious.

Could it never occurred to me to tell him that my big issue with this?

Yes, we need more positive male role models, right?

And I would argue that that is happening in Australia.

Shows like the Imperfects are enormously popular and it's men talking about their

feelings and it's men discussing vulnerability and mental health issues.

I think that the model young men, but not only young men.

Look at my crusty old Gen X partner.

He's not my husband.

The kind of fathers they want to be is changing enormously.

I'd say that those wheels are in motion.

My issue is about who we're blaming.

I wouldn't be upset by a man saying I'm proud that I'm a man unless it comes

at the expense of women to Claire's point before is that a lot of these toxic role

models are kind of like in order for us to assert our masculinity.

We have to keep the women down under the thumb.

That certainly Andrew Tate's position and Jordan Peterson loves to blame

feminists for all the problems in the world.

I reject that women's empowerment has not come at the expense of men.

Holly, don't you think that there are certain feminist voices and I'm not

critiquing them individually because a lot of these voices are speaking

the way they do because they are passionate about issues that are deeply

affecting women's well-being and in some cases affecting their safety

in the world in a life or death way.

But don't you think that there are certain feminist voices that if you

were a man, you'd be looking away?

Yeah, but how hasn't it come at the expense of men in your house?

No, I don't think so.

When you say, though, you bigging up your daughter and I've done the exact same

thing like I've had the same conversations in my house.

And I also have had conversations where my son has said something and I've

just gone, oh, shit, I was doing such a good job telling her you can do anything.

Be careful of rapists, you know, consent, blah, blah, blah, that he's listened

and absorbed all those messages as well.

And I hadn't even occurred to me.

But I think like Billy making that point to me was interesting.

I don't believe I've ruined his life in the process of doing that.

You know what I mean?

I think it's an interesting point and I correct it.

I mean, I agree with you, Claire, that, of course, there are voices who are

unhelpful. One of my bugbears, and I actually argue with my girlfriends

about this all the time, because I'm very passionate, as you know,

about domestic equality.

Like that's one of my absolutes because I think it actually affects

women's lives far more than lots of the other kinds of equality we discuss.

And when my friends are like, oh, look at how, oh, what, Hamish Blake

makes a birthday cake for his kids.

What a hero. Like, I hate that.

I actually think that for this correction, we do need to celebrate

fatherhood and elevate its status.

So I agree with you, but we can't expect any movement or organisation

to speak with one voice.

There was a part in this interview where Katlin was talking about the pushback

that came to her from men when the book came out.

And she was like, you know, some of them were telling me I was being patronising

and there's no problem. And some of them are telling me it's all my fault.

And why can't they just agree?

And I'm like, have you met a feminist like nobody agree?

Like all women don't agree about one thing.

Any movement doesn't all agree about one thing.

I think there's room for lots of voices.

I just am allergic to the idea that it's women's fault that men are in trouble.

That is not at all what she was saying.

And if you've got that impression from this conversation,

no, you're right. No, it is really not what she was saying at all.

She's not saying that.

She's saying it doesn't have to be a zero sum game,

that we don't have to say women are great and men are shit.

Our fates as feminists and as women and girls are inextricably linked

to how men and boys are doing.

So, you know, it's that rising tide, live cell bites.

Interested to hear what you think out loud is we'll put a link in the show notes

to both the cover story and the No Filter episode.

Tell us what you think. Who's it harder to be?

I know a woman.

Last week, Pete Evans, who has mostly disappeared from public life

after a series of controversies in 2020,

appeared on Kyle and Jacquiot in a half hour segment.

During that time, he had to be censored repeatedly.

What was fascinating about the interview was that despite being

effectively cancelled for the last few years,

he just doubled down on all his ideas.

A reminder that Evans was one of Australia's leading media personalities,

a celebrity chef who appeared on My Kitchen Rules for 11 years

before he started to raise eyebrows with his controversial health views.

The nail in the coffin for Evans was really twofold.

So in 2020, he was slapped with a $25,000 fine

by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for selling a $15,000 biocharger device.

He falsely claimed could fight COVID.

He was also swiftly dropped by 15 sponsors and companies.

So Kyle and Jacquiot newsreader Brooklyn Ross asked about the biocharger.

Pete Evans, you asked about the lamp and you laughed it off and said,

I never, I never said it had any settings about it.

You will find $80,000 because you did get on Instagram and say,

$25,000.

Hey, buy this, buy this $15,000 lamp.

It's got a setting for COVID.

So you don't look back on that and think I shouldn't have done that?

No, not at all.

Wow. So you've really not learned anything

because that's what really led to you being cancelled.

There are people both in the public eye and in our everyday lives

who simply aren't ever going to change their minds.

And what are we meant to do with people like Pete Evans

when arguing doesn't work and information doesn't work

and even legal ramifications like fines do not work?

Mia, what do you do with people in your life

who simply don't respond to logic?

You kind of imagine that they look back and they go,

yeah, that was a weird time when I thought all that stuff.

I'm so glad that I've now seen the light.

And we did a story on what happened to Pete Evans, like where is he now?

Because you kind of think, well, everyone else has got back to life.

Surely you've moved on from all your conspiracies.

But it turns out that he hadn't and he's just still on like these weird

social media apps still talking about the same conspiracies

that he was during COVID.

I've got people in my life who were anti-vaxxers

and who didn't get vaccinated.

I'll never forget.

And we know now to sort of step around those issues.

But it's not the same.

It's not the same because as soon as in a close relationship

you start having to have no go areas,

you start self-censoring and it's like, oh, no, we can't talk about that.

We can't talk about that.

We can't talk about that.

It becomes challenging.

I mean, I was shocked the other day to see an old friend of mine

still posting her conspiracies on Instagram about Bill Gates.

And I'm like, really?

Are we still doing that?

It's funny though, isn't it?

Because in our everyday real lives, and we talked about this a lot during COVID,

there are always people in your life who you just know,

oh, let's not talk about politics.

You know what I mean?

Let's not do that because if we do, we're going to get into it.

And maybe we just want to have dinner and we don't want to get into it.

Not every social interaction is a debate.

On my mirror, we talk often about how, respectfully, we disagree.

We love to debate something.

But it's not necessarily always a competition.

You know, you often walk away and like something me has said will percolate with me,

something Claire will put, and I'm like, oh, it's informed the way I think about that.

But I won't necessarily go.

I mean, sometimes you do, obviously.

Yes, she was right.

I'll change my mind.

I wonder if we kind of set up every social interaction with people who we know we have

some quite fundamental disagreements about as an exercise in which we have to win them over

and they have to admit we're right if we're just setting ourselves up for failure and disconnection.

Because that's not really how conversation works.

It's how a debate works in a court room or a high school debating session.

But in our everyday lives, I have to accept that there's a friend who I love very much,

but who we're just never going to see eye to eye about public education or whatever.

And so you just go, OK, well, sometimes we might be in the mood to go there.

But mostly I'm happy for you to just think what you think.

In real life, we do that.

Is it just with public figures that we don't?

I look at Pete Evans and all of these bizarre ideas actually in a similar way to how I look

at what we were just talking about with Katlyn Moran.

And basically, the fact is that in our day to day lives, we change our minds all the time.

There is so much that over the last 10, 20 years, I have totally flipped on because you

have a conversation with somebody and then you think about it and then you might do some

research and you realize you were totally wrong.

I think the way that public conversation is now playing out online completely breaks down

the opportunity for that to happen when Pete Evans comes out and makes all these bizarre

claims, particularly about things like COVID, we mock him, we laugh at him, and you will

both know that we don't get the kind of backlash from stories like we do from when we make

a point about Pete Evans, because Pete Evans supporters are incredibly sensitive to him

being mocked, made fun of or dismissed.

I wonder if you had somebody in your life who came to you and said, this machine can cure

COVID, we wouldn't laugh, we wouldn't point, we wouldn't yell because you just don't do

that in a normal situation.

You'd probably ask questions, you would probably try to understand where they were coming from

and you'd gently have a conversation where you might be able to put some points forward.

I think Pete Evans is a symptom of the fact that our online dialogue is so broken that

people like him are not going to change their minds because we are coming at them with vitriol

and contempt.

So it's our fault?

I think it's because one of the things I'm really thinking about at the moment in terms

of public conversation is something like the voice to parliament.

When I'm watching that conversation unfold and thinking, it is impossible to have a nuanced

conversation on the internet.

It is impossible for a side to come forward.

For example, during COVID, it was impossible for medical experts to come forward and say,

the vaccine isn't 100% effective and it's actually quite complicated how it works with

immunity.

You can't say that.

Also, we were literally in that situation learning as we went.

We thought it was about washing your hands and singing happy birthday, but it's actually

about masks.

Yes.

So there wasn't that opportunity to say, yes, there are some things about the vaccine

that we should talk about.

You can't do that in public conversation because people are so, their emotions are so heightened.

So the free idea is so flattened online that we end up with really opposing polarized sides

instead of really nuanced conversations.

You know, I think first of all, it's not just online, it's the algorithm because it's the

algorithm that funnels you and radicalizes you and puts you in an echo chamber.

It just does.

It will feed you more of what you want and give you that confirmation bias and make you

feel justified and vindicated.

And that's why it's so jarring when someone like Pete Evans or my friend pops into my

algorithm and it's just like, oh, wow, there's still people out there who are trying to die

on those heels when it feels like everybody else has moved on.

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I caught an interview with Caroline Callaway on 60 Minutes Last Night.

Now I know broadly speaking who she is because I work at Mama Mia with young women who live

on the internet, but your average human probably doesn't necessarily.

So very top line of who Caroline Callaway is and please correct me if I get it wrong,

Claire, because you know more than I do about her.

Back in the kind of teens, the 20 teens, she became a big deal.

She was an early influencer who made a lot of money and then didn't follow through on

any of the things that she was being paid for.

She had about 500,000 people following her journey studying at Cambridge University and

she wrote all these like really long captions about, I mean, they were kind of the early

days of Instagram rights.

There might be avocado toast, but then her really long captions.

Everybody loved them.

Everybody engaged.

Yes.

Well, apparently she was a great and beautiful writer, so much so that she got a massive

book deal in 2016 with half a million dollars for a book that she never actually wrote.

She charged her followers for creativity workshops that never eventuated or happened, or when

they did, they were just these very vague sessions where they did a bit of craft together

and that was that.

She sounds like a lady girl.

And then yes, but then in 2019, a massive scandal grew up because one of her former friends

said, well, wrote a piece saying that all those beautiful captions that everybody really

engaged with and she got her book deal from weren't written by Caroline Calloway.

They were actually written by her friend and so on and so on.

And Caroline Calloway kind of got canceled in broad terms, I guess, for being a scammer.

And now she's kind of on the comeback trail with a book called Scammer and she's leaning

into a reputation, which is one of the things I wanted to talk about, right?

I was watching this on 60 Minutes Last Night and she said this amazing thing about her

PR strategy being chaos and it suddenly turned on lots of lights for me.

Here's a little bit of what she said.

You've said once you've had one scandal, you might as well have as many as you want.

Not you might as well.

I think you should.

I mean, if you've had no scandals, my advice would be continue to have none.

But if you've had one scandal, have as many more as you can because otherwise that one

scandal will define you and you really need to play into the Trumpian, Kardashian information

overload principle.

Like at a certain point, we just can't remember all the stories about someone.

Once you've had one big scandal, that is your way forward.

I was like, oh, so all this chaos of reputation is deliberate, Claire.

Is this the modern genius PR strategy?

It's sort of like that thing that you say where it's like, if somebody does the wrong

thing, shame on you.

But if they do it multiple times, then shame on me for trusting them.

You look at Caroline Calloway and especially with this book, it's been the funniest story

of her announcing.

She loves to announce.

We love announcement culture.

So I'm doing this project.

I'm doing this workshop.

I'm releasing this book.

She's announced that it is coming out very shortly for about five years.

She has literally been like, it is being shipped and it's not finished.

And when it gets to that point, I genuinely think her fans are like, shame on me.

Shame on me for trusting that she was telling the truth.

I find it fascinating that we've been told that if you make a misstep in public,

the best thing to do is to apologise and go quiet, to just step back.

The sting will be removed.

You'll come back.

You'll be able to restart your career.

But somebody like Calloway has done the opposite.

And we often talk on this show about how it's men who seem to double down people

like the Joe Rogans of the world who just keep going, put their head down, ignore

all the hate, their careers don't seem to suffer for it.

Whereas women will step down and apologise.

Calloway is the rare exception of somebody who has just kept going, kept going.

She gets cancelled.

She's like, well, I'm doing another thing.

Here we go.

There is always commentary about her being a scammer.

For example, even when she had to pay back that huge book advance, she did it

on only fans, but she did it by charging like the most you can possibly charge

and putting out very little content.

So everyone was furious, being like, we're being scammed again.

But what she's done in the meantime is created so much confusion that when

you hear the name Caroline Calloway, it's almost something to laugh about

rather than something to be angry about.

And I kind of think the strategy is genius.

And this book is probably really, really going to sell.

It would be funny if you bought the book and it was just empty pages.

And you only found out when you got home.

Yeah. Donald Trump was the master of this.

And he continues to be the master of this.

You know, if I say to you, what's wrong with Donald Trump?

What would you even say to me?

Well, I could.

I could actually state quite a long list of that stuff.

But the thing is, you could stay a long list, but there's not one thing like

you'd probably just go, he's just awful.

But well, also, the other thing I'd probably say is that this very strategy

of chaos, because remember, if you cast your mind back to 2016 in the campaign

that was so chaotic and so hate filled and so crazy, a lot of people

went, well, when he actually gets in, he's not going to keep being like that.

He's surely good.

Then he's going to be like listening to the grownups in the room.

And we all know that history showed what didn't happen.

I would argue that his proven chaos theory has probably ruined politics.

That's one of the things I'd say.

I agree with that, because I think that this stuff is addictive.

Chaos is addictive because it's exciting.

People are drawn to things that are exciting and not towards things that are done.

There's like color and movement.

Basically, it's color and movement.

And it's the dopamine hit.

So the more angry you feel, the more you will be driven.

And that's what Facebook has basically built its entire algorithm on.

And so has Twitter.

Things that make people feel angry will be shared more and be more highly engaged with.

So therefore, people are rewarded for posting things that are angry

and things that are dramatic.

This is how our culture works now.

The more interesting you are, the more of our attention economy

you can dominate.

So the more little plot lines you have every time Kanye West does something

or Caroline does something or Donald Trump does something or Kim Kardashian

does something and you're right, it muddies the water.

So if you look at someone like Aziz Ansari, who had that experience

where that post was written about him by the woman he went on the date with,

he said it was bad date.

She said it was a consent issue.

He then disappeared.

This is the opposite of chaos theory.

So he's just, he came back with a standup where he addressed it

and he's tried to do some other things.

And he's pretty much flown under the radar mostly since then.

Compare that with Kim Kardashian, who one of the issues she had was when she did

her cultural appropriation.

I mean, there's something every second week, right?

But that's what the Kardashian machine is built on, is the attention

economy and staying in the news cycle.

So there's no one thing that you think of that's terrible that Kim Kardashian did.

It's true, right?

And although I have to state the record that Kim Kardashian is Ansari a different

woman, but we won't have that.

So different.

No, no, no.

I completely agree.

But it's interesting that a really good example of this is if you watch the

Caroline Calloway thing on 60, which I end up doing, right?

So she is presenting quite strangely in it, right?

She's got a cat wearing some knitted ears, who she's making talk to the camera,

like her house is really wild.

She looks a little bit, just a little bit not quite right in the, you know,

her physicality.

Once upon a time, we would have gone train wreck interview, what a disaster.

But this model of PR is like train wreck interview.

How awesome, you know?

It doesn't work when you're Prince Andrew, right?

Who gave that absolutely train wreck interview where he revealed himself to be

clueless, heartless.

But that's because it was accidental, right?

It was accidental.

And that's not a model that works.

But if you're a creature of the Internet, who, as you say me,

our understands the necessity for color and movement and always providing a new

storyline, then it's not a desirable narrative for like, oh,

Caroline Calloway came back and she's so together now and she made so much sense.

And she's so contrite about what she did in the past.

And like, you know, that isn't the narrative people want.

And it's really interesting because I think maybe even generationally,

I didn't really understand that until it was really spelled out for me.

There's also something about a person who owns their mistakes

and has made a lot of mistakes that makes us feel better about ourselves

and that we find strangely relatable.

So Caroline Calloway has really lent into that.

Claire, you've got a recommendation for us.

I do.

So a major issue in my life is my technology addiction.

I've written before on the site about how I have a safe at home

where I put my phone in and lock it away.

Sometimes I don't have the discipline to lock my whole phone away.

And the fact is that I have it day to day when I'm on my way to work

and waiting for a coffee.

So what I've done is I was out on the weekend

and a friend recommended this app called OneSec.

What it is is that you can pair it with another app.

So I've paired it with Instagram at the moment.

And when I go to open Instagram, it gives me this screen

that's like, it's time to take a deep breath.

And basically, it gives me like a five second break

where I have to make a decision about whether I actually want to open Instagram.

And so after that immediately, it then says,

I don't want to open Instagram or continue to Instagram.

And I get to choose essentially what it is is asking you to be mindful

about your social media use.

Like, yes, you can.

You can open Instagram if you want to.

But did you just tap on it mindlessly because you were bored?

Or do you actually want to use it?

And I think it's absolutely genius and I recommend it to everyone.

I think it sounds brilliant.

And I love that Mia is literally as we're talking now, downloading it.

And I predict she will throw her phone out of the window by the end of the day

because she was like, I don't want to wait five seconds to get on to Instagram.

So true.

But that's brilliant because I do that all the time when I'm meant to be writing.

I'll be like, come to a natural pause for a second.

Oh, Instagram.

So it's sold as a screen time impulse blocker, which is what I need.

But if you do want to listen to something else,

it's funny because you never open your podcast app as a.

Unintentional, very intentional.

Next time you do, you might want to listen to our recaps of and just like that.

We're doing them every Friday.

There's only a few more left before the season ends.

We do our regular subsep on Tuesdays.

And our latest recap involved a conversation about a penis pump.

We'll put a link in the show notes to the episode.

You can listen right now.

Thank you for listening to Australia's number one news and pop culture show.

This episode was produced by Emily and Cosillas and Susanna Makin.

Audio production is by Leah Porges, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye. Bye.

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If you love the show and want to support us as well,

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There is a link in the episode description.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.