Mamamia Out Loud: The Beckham's Unpack Their Sticky Stuff

Hi Mamma Mia listeners, Beck Melrose here, dropping into your feed to talk about our

new Mamma Mia podcast, Things You Didn't Learn in School.

Things You Didn't Learn in School is the show that helps you realise that we weirdly

all graduate without the basic life skills we actually need.

Should I buy or rent?

How does voting work?

Should I be investing my money?

How do I even talk to my mechanic?

And most importantly, where the hell do I park my car?

I'm Ann Burnham and I'll be the first to admit we obviously still have some things

to learn.

But that is where our show comes in.

And we know what you're thinking, Beck and Ann, why are you even making a podcast when

we can just Google all of this?

Because you haven't Googled it, have you?

No.

So we rounded up experts on everything from finance to fallopian tubes in a cute little

curriculum just for you.

Things You Didn't Learn in School is a new podcast by Mamma Mia.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia Out Loud.

It's what women are actually talking about on Monday, the 9th of October.

I'm Holly Wainwright.

I'm Mia Friedman.

And I'm Claire Stevens.

And on the show today, what we learned about Wife Guys by watching the Beckham documentary

over the weekend and can your boss really make you dance in the office?

But first, getting breaking news out of Gaza, several rockets have been fired from the besieged

Palestinian enclave towards Israel.

There are warning sirens being sounded in and around Gaza, as well as central and southern

Israel.

Israel has declared war after Hamas militants launched a surprise coordinated attack, the

scale of which is hard to believe.

Like many people, I woke up yesterday morning and I reached for my phone.

I opened Instagram.

I don't know if I should admit it, but that's what I do most days.

I saw a friend by a pool in Thailand.

I saw a tip about growing marigolds next to tomatoes.

And I saw the body of a dead young woman lying on the back of a truck.

This weekend, Israel was invaded by terrorists from the militant group Hamas, who controls

the neighbouring territory, Gaza.

Hamas sent waves of fighters on trucks, hand gliders, pickup trucks and boats across Israel's

southern border.

They killed, assaulted, kidnapped and raped an unknown number of people, ranging from

cyclists out exercising on a Saturday morning, to young men and women at a music festival,

to elderly people in group homes and families with small children dragged from their houses.

You've likely seen the images, as I did yesterday morning, of women being torn away from their

loved ones on the back of motorcycles, pulled from cars by their hair and their bodies being

displayed like trophies.

It's beyond distressing.

It's been confirmed that the young woman whose body I saw her on Instagram on Sunday morning

was German-Israeli citizen, Shani Luke, who is 30 years old.

She was visiting Israel for the Supernova Festival, and her mother has confirmed that

she also saw that video.

Israel has now declared war on Hamas and is bombing Gaza.

This is an evolving story, it's moving really quickly, but what we know for sure about what's

going to happen next is that it will involve more suffering and more loss of life.

What you're not going to hear from us on Mamma Mia Out Loud is an analysis of Middle

Eastern politics or any suggestions about what should happen in the region.

That's not what we're here for.

But what we are here for is to help process how we're meant to feel and what we're meant

to do when the horror of war anywhere in the world pierces our carefully curated bubbles

to show itself in all its brutal, violent truth.

Mia, I know this is particularly close to home for you with family in Israel.

How are you feeling today?

I'm feeling devastated.

It's been a really emotional distressing weekend for a lot of people.

You don't have to be Jewish to be distressed by what you see, but there's a particular

fear and distress in the hearts of Jewish people.

There's the two aspects of it, right?

Because there's the distress of what you see and the text messages being exchanged.

My cousin is sheltering in her bomb shelter with her two sons who are in wheelchairs and

her daughter is in her first year of service in the Israeli army along with the children

of a lot of other people that I know because military service is compulsory in Israel and

you do it for two years after school.

So there's all of that.

But then on top of that, while you're sort of grappling with the images that you talk

about whole, there's also the people who are rushing to post on social media about why

it's justified.

And I'm just going to read them because she says it a lot better than me.

Saying that Jessica Yellen, who's a very respected journalist, she's worked for CNN

and the Wall Street Journal, she now posts easily digestible news on social media.

And she did a post that says, I am sad covering this story.

Hamas is kidnapping children and holding them hostage, gunning down concertgoers in the desert.

That is terror full stop.

Excusing these horrors as justified resistance is dehumanizing to Israelis and chilling to

your Jewish friends.

It is heartbreaking that so many Palestinians are suffering in Gaza and the West Bank.

They live in terrible conditions as a result of a never ending conflict that is sustained

by extremists and opportunists.

The horrors are devastating.

That doesn't change the following fact.

Hamas stands for death to Jews and the destruction of Israel.

It always has.

The group was formed in 1987 and started carrying out suicide attacks not to defend a Gaza Strip,

which Hamas took control of 30 years later, but to take out Israel.

To be clear, Hamas's determination to kill Jewish people predates the current realities

in Gaza and the West Bank.

It is striking that people who express compassion for so many other instances of human suffering

skip past Hamas's history and the suffering of the Israeli people.

Yeah, that's kind of how I feel.

I am shaken by what a reminder this is of the way violence against women is used as

a weapon of war.

To see that young woman's body on the back of a truck and see the state of her body is

so sickening.

Then to imagine her mother seeing that and her mother asking for her body back.

While terror is cheer and film.

Yeah, and spit.

It's just so sickening.

There are a lot of conversations going on about moral relativism versus moral absolutism,

but I think looking at that, there is no way to justify the killing of a civilian ever.

It's always a war crime.

There is something so sickening about those images of women because they've been humiliated

and degraded and it's like the absolute worst thing humans can do to each other is rape

and violence against innocent women, civilians who are at a music festival, children.

To that woman and to that woman's family, it doesn't matter what happened 10 years ago

or 50 years ago or 1,000 years ago, her body being brutally attacked and then paraded and

humiliated, there is just no way to justify that.

It's incredibly distressing to see.

That's kind of one of the things that I find really difficult to unpack is that because

of the nature of war now, it used to be that war photographers were embedded journalists

who documented wars and terrible acts of terror around the world and their images may get

published in newspapers.

There may not.

There would be a lot of discussion about what was appropriate, what was too graphic, what

was too violent and now social media is a weapon in war and certainly not only in this

part of the world.

Let's be clear.

We understand.

I certainly understand.

There's a lot of context about which horrible images make it to your feet in the first place

like I totally get that but now it's propaganda.

So there are images of elderly women, the terrorists are making them pose with machine

guns and it's sent out as kind of propaganda.

So social media has been weaponized in war like everything else.

When I saw those images yesterday morning and I found it so upsetting and I don't mean

in any way like a tiny violin for me like it's the absolute least of it.

It is incredibly distressing.

But I also immediately thought that my daughter who is on TikTok will see those images probably

today so I went to talk to her about it and one of the things I really wanted to say to

her was I don't want her to see those images because once you've seen them you can't unsee

them.

But on the other hand, there is an enormous amount of power in understanding the brutality

of war.

You don't want children who see all kinds of things on social media 24-7 doom scrolling

to be desensitized.

I don't want any of us to be desensitized like it's entirely appropriate that we should

be horrified by seeing those kind of images and the fact that it is in your feed next

to somebody showing you their lipstick.

We live in a very strange time and I don't know what the right advice is for how to handle

that because I was listening to a podcast this morning with an interview with Marion

Keys, the writer, and she was talking about wisdom, she's just turned 60.

And she said that when Russia invaded Ukraine, she made a conscious decision to stop watching

the news.

She said she could no longer handle the horror.

She's now had a year, that conflict has been going on for a year, of not watching the news.

And there's a bit of me that totally understands that as an act of self-care.

And then there's a part of me that obviously also understands the privilege in that.

And then there's a part of me that's also like, but shouldn't we almost be forced to

look at this, to look at these images, to understand what's really happening?

I faced that all of those dilemmas and again, a tiny violin for me, but do I share these

images and some of them are distressing and it's important also to make sure that they're

verified.

That they're real.

So if you're in doubt and you're on social media, go somewhere like CNN and see what

they're posting, but they've posted some of these videos and there was a dance party

in the desert of several thousand people and it just shows them running.

You know, this was an unprovoked, unworn attack.

You know, it was early on a Saturday morning and I was like, should I share them?

But I didn't know.

And yeah, there's stuff on my Instagram of here's my jeans and here's what I'm wearing

today, which feels ridiculous.

But also we live in this soup now, right?

So like, even if you were glued to your TVs all weekend watching the news, you also had

to chat with people and go and make yourself some breakfast and yeah, have a shower and

maybe do those things.

And I feel like we're not conditioned to process all this stuff.

I was laying in bed last night and I couldn't sleep for many reasons.

But as I was laying in bed, I just could not fathom the dichotomy between me

laying in my bed in Sydney and, you know, I'm just hearing some cars go past

and hearing the beach.

And then the fact that there are people in many parts of the world, but you know,

we're talking about the Middle East right now, who are completely unsafe.

It's the civilians that I just can't get my head around the fact that these people

who have got nothing to do with war, who have not been part of any active part of

the conflict are the victims of this.

They're there because it's their home and watching those women and children

also being loaded into the back of trucks.

I mean, that's Holocaust imagery.

So if you have Jewish friends, if you've got Jewish people in your life,

check in with them, see how they're going.

It's a really tough time and the sort of moral relativism and sort of saying,

well, you know, watching people that I follow rush to justify, well, you know,

what do you expect?

That's another level of horror.

It shouldn't be controversial to say that what happened on Saturday was horrific.

That shouldn't and doesn't negate the horror that Palestinians living under

occupation are facing have faced.

But it is horrific to see so blatantly on our phones, women in particular being

used as weapons of war like that, and it shouldn't be controversial to say so.

So.

For complete change of pace,

which is the nature of my mayor out loud, a show that talks about the most

complex, devastating news stories of our time and also the light pop culture

that's in the zeitgeist, we all inhaled the four part Beckham documentary on Netflix.

The doco covers the iconic footballers early years, his meteoric rise from modest

working class beginnings to global sporting stardom and his almost three

decades with his wife, Victoria.

I don't know what you guys watched over the weekend, but I watched this great

documentary about Posh Spice, but there was too much sport in it.

Exactly.

I fast forwarded through the sport.

It was a lot of football and it was in the documentary documentary.

Yeah.

Fun fact, the documentary is directed by the guy who plays Hugo in succession.

Fisher Stevens.

Fisher Stevens.

So if you notice that the interviewer sounds familiar, that could be white.

Now, there is so much we want to discuss about this documentary.

There's almost a thesis we could write because this is just an absolute work of art.

We want to talk about the nature of the Beckham family, David's early experience

of what we'd now call cancel culture to the one moment where the director stops

asking questions, but let's start with the dynamics of David and Victoria's relationship.

I would argue that we've just seen a very good and very rare example of a long,

long term relationship in action.

How long have they been together?

27 years.

In the early part of the series, I was initially I messaged you guys because I

was a little bit frustrated that Victoria Beckham doesn't get soccer.

I am not into football at all.

I wasn't into football then.

I'm not into football now.

And even in the most very important moment, she's like, no, I didn't really care.

It's like he just scored the winkle and she doesn't care.

But the more I watched, the more I realized, I can.

That's probably the best thing in a long term relationship is for your partner

to not really get what the fuss is about you.

I think that's so interesting because I loved what she said about.

I love it because he's doing it.

So if he was painting a wall, I'd love watching him painting a wall because I love him.

I think that there was another moment in the documentary.

Oh, look, I thought a couple.

I thought everything.

But the part that jumped out to me is that he is not an alpha guy.

No, he's really not.

So in that relationship, she even says I wear the pants and he's really comfortable

with that, which I just loved because he seems to be, you know,

he's this incredibly successful.

He's not charismatic, actually.

But in all, I think, sorry, gorgeous, not when he talks.

But in his like persona, he's it.

But what I thought was interesting, there was one point in the documentary

where she just won't come to Spain and she just keeps going home.

And he says she was really bored.

She didn't just want to be a wag.

And it's true.

She didn't just want to sit there all day.

So and he says that's why he loves her.

It's interesting because you say that about him not being an alpha.

But he's clearly what we refer to as a confident beater, right?

Because he does keep making these decisions that really annoy her.

It's not like he's not.

It's not like he goes, oh, I'm not going to go and play for

Inter Milan because Posh doesn't want me to or I'm not going to go.

But he does it.

And she says at one point, she's like, he just pulls a Beckham and decides

that he's going to go off and do this thing and we've got to deal with it.

So it's not like he's in any way like making himself smaller

so that she can be bigger.

And I think that that is the key to healthy relationships.

Neither of them make themselves smaller.

If one of you has to make yourself smaller so the other one can do what they need to do,

it's not working.

There's going to be resentment, you know, and in the early stages of their relationship,

I loved hearing about how he would fly to a different city to see her for like seven minutes.

And it was he wasn't sacrificing his sport.

He would never, ever do that.

But it was that his entire priority outside of that was her.

So this is my other thesis that I need us to unpack is that I would argue that Beckham,

despite the fact, as we will reference, I'm sure that there have been several,

what we would call cheating scandals in tabloid world.

He is a wife guy, right?

Through and through.

And it's clear that even before Posh and he was very young when they got together,

he was obsessed with her, but it lasted, right?

So usually when those kind of relationships like literally he would drive for two hours

so they can spend seven minutes in each other's company and then he'd drive back,

that burns out.

But this has lasted.

And now his son, Brooklyn, is also a wife guy because let's take a minute to appreciate

that obviously it wasn't referenced much in the documentary.

But Brooklyn Beckham is 24, I think.

And he's married to and he's been married for over a year.

So he married young.

He's married Nicola Peltz.

He has 100 tattoos on his body and 70 of them are dedicated to her.

Do you mean an actual 100?

That's not just a euphemism for like lots of tattoos.

He literally has 100 tattoos and 70 of them are dedicated to Nicola.

So he has her eyes on the back of his neck.

He has a face on his arm.

Beckham also has Victoria's face on his arm.

He has, you know, her grandma's favorite saying on one arm and their wedding vows on his bicep.

And he follows her everywhere too.

And I think that the model that he's had with his family, because Posh and Bex are

incredibly successful people, but their marriage is so central to them and their

family is so central to them that that's Brooklyn's example, right?

But that could be a recipe for disaster because you need someone to really be on

board with that for that to work, right?

I know.

And there was an interesting moment where David Beckham was talking about what it was

like to raise kids with that level of fame, with paparazzi yelling at them.

He said it was probably hardest for Brooklyn because he was the oldest.

So he would hear all the sorts of horrible things people would say about his mum.

So the parts would shout out, you know, your dad cheats on your mum, Brooklyn.

How do you feel about that?

And these kids like six.

Yeah, there's footage of him in a car and he's really upset and it looks terrifying.

And David Beckham says we've tried to give our children the most normal

upbringing as possible, but you've got a dad that was England captain and you've

got a mum that was posh bias and they could be little shits and they're not.

Brooklyn's a bit of a weirdo.

He's a strange one, but I think the difference is he's 100 per cent

modelling his relationship off his dad and his mum's.

But the difference is it's like, oh, sweetie, no.

Your dad had his thing, which was football that he was incredibly good at.

Your mum had her thing and they built this empire.

Brooklyn doesn't have his thing.

So it's just absorbed by Nicola.

But she also doesn't have a thing.

Her thing is money.

She has lots of it, which is also a family value because one of the things

that is so disarming about this whole doco is that posh and Beck's were clearly

made for each other. No question.

They get together and they're both really like shiny things.

Fancy clothes watches and they're completely unembarrassed about that.

I love it. They talk about it.

They were clearly absolutely destined to be together because they're like the same person.

There's something really endearingly bogan about them.

Like I watched the wedding and I went, it's bogan and I love it.

Like it's not classy.

And that's why I think they're really likeable with the infidelity,

which they did reference.

I want to ask you about how you think they decided what they were going to say,

because if you're Fisher Stevens, the most famous infidelity that was

covered by the media was when a woman called Rebecca Luz, who I think was

appointed as his like assistant or something when they moved to Spain

and showed him around.

She then went and sold her story and said about the affair that they'd had.

Pottenbeck's then went to a ski chalet.

That was weird somewhere in Switzerland and hold up and had like peace talks or

like negotiations about whether they were going to keep their marriage or not

in the middle of this crazy media storm.

So if you're Fisher Stevens and you're the documentary maker,

you go into it saying, we can't not cover it, right?

And so my question to you and Holly, you're the expert on these things.

What did Posh and Becks discuss beforehand about how they would both

not deny it or refuse to talk about it?

But say exactly what they wanted to say.

I think they would have agreed.

We will address it, but we won't refer to any names and we won't explicitly admit

to it because he doesn't explicitly admit to it, but he sets the table.

So this whole piece about he was so heartbroken being kicked out of Manchester

United and he went to play for Real Madrid and he's supposed to be very lonely.

And he talked about that a lot.

So that was obviously setting the scene.

And my family wasn't with me.

My family wasn't with me.

They had always been with me.

I'd always gone home to my family and now I couldn't.

And then there was a little bit of well chosen imagery of him being out

on the town with the other playboy players drinking.

And those guys, Ronaldo and that lot, they are playboys.

And so I think that was kind of like sewn imagery.

And then he draws a line, doesn't he, where he says, but it is our private life.

I think they agreed.

We will refer to it.

We won't deny it, but we're not going to give you the details.

Pop some criticism because Fisher Stevens is a really, really good documentarian.

Well, this documentary is brilliant.

You can clearly see that.

And he doesn't skirt around things.

He's an award-winning documentarian.

So people have said, is it even a documentary?

If there are certain questions you can't ask, but the thing that I found is

that a viewer is smart enough to read between the lines.

And the fact that they didn't explicitly ask, you can tell that it happened

and that David Beckham is sorry.

And I actually think it was a really clever way to handle it

because it then didn't get into the name of another person who then has to respond.

Who then has to like you have to dredge it all up.

It was about them.

And I almost thought in the narrative of their entire marriage,

it seems like a moment that made them stronger.

I mean, I come away from watching that and thinking, as I say,

that's a model of a long-term relationship.

You don't see that often.

And if you're with someone for nearly three decades,

you're going to go through some shit together, particularly if you're living

the kind of lives that they're living.

Very high profile, lots of travel, lots of separate times, lots of choice.

He's the most beautiful human in the world at that time and all the rest of it.

I think that it's kind of beautiful to see that relationship in that way.

And I think that Fisher Stevens gets to walk away from that with his head up too,

because really, we make the joke about how, why did our Spice Girls doco

have too much football?

And it is a sports documentary, right?

It's really about his career and it kind of ends when he stops playing

with a little like addendum at the end.

I particularly enjoyed his middle aged hobby of raising bees.

You know, we all have to have one of those boring middle aged hobbies.

And he's so neat.

That was why I found that fascinating too.

And when I saw the beautiful house and how everything's perfect,

you're like, well, of course, the staff do that.

And he's like, no, after we go to bed, I wipe out the insides of the candles.

That blew my tiny mind.

And he's like, after everyone goes to bed, I've cooked dinner,

but then I have to clean up.

It was just such an incredible inside.

Everyone who knows Victoria Beckham or who's interviewed her or whatever,

says she's so funny and you got that in this.

What's the name of your honey again?

There's a bit of an argument in the house at the moment.

I think it should be Golden Bees.

Victoria likes DB sticky stuff.

You know, what's interesting is I read an interview with Fisher Stevens,

where he said, and this is so classic of a British man of a certain generation

and an Australian man of a certain generation, that Beckham's never done therapy.

And he found all the introspection of that interview process really uncomfortable.

And, you know, when he was asking him about his father

and he's asking him to think about the effect that these things had had on them,

he was kind of like, oh, whereas Victoria has done plenty of therapy.

Of course she has.

And so she was much more comfortable with knowing how to talk and frame it

and with introspection.

Yeah, I think you could tell.

And then it almost made you wonder,

because when you hear about some of the really tough moments in David Beckham's career

and I wanted to mention in 1998, where he got a red card during the World Cup

and got cancelled.

Yeah.

Argentina go through and England go out.

Michael Owen, distressed, ball in, shedding of new tears.

I feel so sorry for all of them.

You look at a moment like that and you look at how he kept going.

And it is that British stiff upper lip.

Who do you think you are to be so sensitive that this would hurt you?

But he is not OK.

There are several moments like that that you look at him now

and you think there is still shame about what happened in 1998

for a 40 something year old David Beckham.

He suppressed it.

I found those scenes extraordinary.

The parts I forced forwarded through were just his childhood.

I found that boring, but the soccer parts I really enjoyed and the football stuff.

And so we say cancel culture is something of the digital age.

Here's experience of it before the words cancel exist,

but also before the word mental health existed.

Because now cancellation is quite a cerebral thing, right?

It happens on your phone.

People don't boo you in the street.

They don't call your names.

It all happens in the digital world.

And the hard part about that is that it's in your pocket

and you take it into your house and it's always with you.

But what he had to do is walk into stadiums of.

Oh, my gosh.

100,000 people who were all booing him

every time he fell over, they'd cheer.

But for years.

I did think there was a lesson here.

So for context, for people who haven't seen it and don't follow football.

So he got this red card for kicking another player who was sent off.

England lost this World Cup that they should have won.

Not necessarily because of him, but certainly.

But the coach, the coach managed to put a little line to Beckham's mum

was not happy about that to make it sound like it really was Beckham's fault.

But I saw that and I found I mean, I always find something inspirational

in the stories of athletes.

But I thought you don't get a legacy career

like somebody like David Beckham without a moment like that.

Those moments kind of make you who you are.

And there was something really inspirational about watching

how he just through sheer grit and determination

and his love of the sport just kept going,

even though he was being roundly shamed by everyone

and his country hated him and he came back.

But isn't it interesting, though?

Because as Mia said, and one of the players says,

we didn't talk about mental health then and Fergie, the boss was like,

we will look after you or close ranks and we'll look after you,

but you show up every day and we're not talking about it.

And how different that is to now when we understand a lot more about mental health.

And so if an athlete needs a break, we're like, yes, absolutely.

It's so different.

And I wonder what the psychological scars of pushing through that are

relative to pulling back, which is what would happen now.

Someone would go, I'm not going out there because it is, as you've said,

Mia, literally a whole stadium of people booing you,

insulting your wife, like calling you names.

And it's just unbelievable to think about how you get through that.

And if it's not an advert for the stiff upper lip, I'm not sure.

The one other thing that I loved is, remember the term metrosexual?

He was back in the 90s.

There were no role models for straight men who cared about what they wore.

Maybe you skincare, cared about their hair.

He wore a sarong and it was front page.

He loved fashion.

He really enjoyed his appearance.

I love that was very different to.

I loved the teammate who said, we kept wondering,

is he getting fitted differently for things?

Because he looks totally different in clothes to how I look.

And I'm like, hard, hard relate, but watching it with my partner,

who grew up in the 90s, early 2000s, he was like, this is amazing.

Because I wanted that haircut.

I remember wanting that haircut.

I remember wanting those boots.

I remember wanting to look exactly like that.

And it was weird.

It was a role model for straight men for how they wanted to look.

Yep. Out louders, tell us what you think.

Have you watched it?

Did you love it?

What were your highlights?

So much to discuss.

I just loved it.

We're very working, working class.

Be honest.

I am being honest.

Did your dad drive you to school?

OK, in the 80s, my dad had a Rolls Royce.

Thank you.

Mum and Mia, out loud!

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And a big thank you to all our current subscribers.

Can you enforce fun in the workplace?

Well, I've tried.

We try.

And in this particular studio, it's often challenging,

especially when someone's pregnant and grumpy.

No.

The Sydney Morning Herald dove into a dilemma

about workplace culture this week

and the concept of enforced work-jolity.

Yeah! OK, dancing!

It is a primal art form used in ancient times

to express yourself with the body.

A person wrote in, they worked in an office environment.

They had to have a lot of meetings every week.

And most of the meetings were really essential.

And so there wasn't a way to cut down the meetings.

But what the writer's boss said that they wanted to do

was to maybe spice up the meetings

and having a little dance party before every meeting.

And the dilemma goes,

I'm not sure if I can express how much I dislike this new practice.

I don't feel comfortable dancing in front of colleagues,

often first thing in the morning.

But I can swallow my pride and even my embarrassment.

What I can't stomach is the feeling

that we're being infantilised

and the implication that if you don't laugh and show enthusiasm,

you're somehow not a team player.

Am I just too old and boring for the modern workplace?

Claire!

I find dancing profoundly embarrassing.

For me.

There are certain... I don't think I've ever seen you dance.

Oh, her wedding. No, at my wedding.

After a few champagne. I shall play a dancer her wedding.

Now, there are certain things I have no issue with.

For example, I could get up and speak in front of 100 people.

That doesn't bother me.

But dancing, I absolutely detest.

I hate it.

And I just think it is so unfair

to ask somebody to dance on cue

and to have fun on cue.

It is patronising, it is infantilising and it is degrading.

Do you understand what the boss is trying to do though, right?

Lift the mood, change the vibe, get everybody excited.

But from a psychological perspective,

I would like to say that it implies that good work and fun

are mutually exclusive and have to be separated.

And I would say, make the work more engaging.

And also, I love meetings.

I like meetings. I don't mind a meeting.

So I would be fine with having the meeting.

And actually, I'd much prefer just use those five minutes

that you've now made people dance.

Just use those five minutes to start the meeting earlier.

I understand the boss's urge to raise the energy, right?

Because I'm not really the boss of people anymore,

but for many years I was.

And Claire will testify to this.

I am the person who comes into the office and goes,

hello, hello.

You'd never ask us to dance.

We've all led teams.

I'm not a dance leader.

I would never ask you to dance, you're right.

But sometimes you start a meeting

and everybody's sitting down and you can feel the energy's low,

you can feel everybody's disengaged, they're tired.

And I understand the kind of like, how do we get...

But we used to do stand-up news meetings at Mamma Mia.

And in the early days, we used to have a big...

I don't know if I should even tell them,

what if you get cancelled?

We had a big inflatable boob

that we got as some kind of breast cancer awareness thing.

And we used to use it like a beach ball

and throw it around the circle

and whoever caught it had to pitch.

Now, that was a classic example of trying to raise the energy

and do something in a meeting that was a bit different.

And I'm sure that many people did not like that.

I don't know, I've heard of lots of different ways.

I mean, it's the same as an icebreaker,

when you go around the table and all of those kinds of things.

Some people like to keep their work persona

to be particularly formal.

But the idea of bringing the energy,

which is something that can be quite challenging

when you're a leader, it really can.

And I think a lot of people felt that with Zoom

during the pandemic when office-based workers

were working from home,

I think that the thing that's most annoying to you

is that, well, all of it.

But when we were talking about this topic,

we were talking about how our former producer lies.

She would always watch us come into the studio.

And if something was going on and we were in a shitty mood

or we just had a meeting or we were stressed about something,

she would pick it up and she would play funky music

in our headphones.

She'd sometimes say, get up and dance

or get up and do a burpee or...

Yeah, Mons used to do that too.

I should be like, up you get, jump around, move around,

shake it out, move the energy around your body

to lift your vibe.

And there's something I really like about that.

OK, as somebody who is, A, scared of getting in trouble

and B, just the biggest conformist,

if I was in a situation I wasn't fully comfortable in,

like with you guys, I would dance if I was told.

Oh, no, I would hate that. I'd dance like a monkey.

It's like, OK, come on, dance.

And I'd do it to conform.

But I'm just saying that I think there are far better ways

to engage people. Like what?

OK. Or lift a vibe.

Tell me how to lift a vibe. To lift a vibe.

Well, I used to have to do this with meetings all the time

and you come in and you come in with energy

and the best ideas for lifting the vibe come from the team.

Like they come organically.

For example, I remember when we moved to a new office,

our editorial team were always like,

oh, I don't know where to get lunch anymore.

So for our weekly editorial meetings,

the beginning of the meeting was a section

where someone would present where they recently got lunch.

And they'd be like, I got this sandwich.

This was the texture of the sandwich.

This was the sauce.

I learnt many things from that slide.

And it was just like, this is informative.

Somebody's put together a slide with some gifts.

Like it was actually helpful.

But there was a great comment on this SMH article

from a man named John who said, I've got an idea.

Bring a cup of coffee and a copy of the SMH

to the next meeting.

While the others are dancing like nobody can see them,

enjoy yourself reading the paper.

If anybody asks why you aren't dancing,

just respond, you waste your time your way,

I'll waste my time my way.

And I'm like, that would be me.

The thing that's good though about dancing,

not that I would ever enforce dancing,

is that you can opt in or out of how vigorously you dance.

Right?

So I have a theory that everybody's dance style is frozen

from the time that they did the most dancing in their life.

So like if you were raving in the early 2000s

or something, you probably like dance like a rave

or like this, whenever you were dancing,

that's still your dance.

And so it's really embarrassing.

If you asked me to dance,

I like jiggle my shoulders up and down.

And I go, that is so like,

be mortifying for the young people.

I need to put something on the floor and dance around it.

Yes, a handbag.

Imagine if you like enforce the before meeting dancing.

And although most people are just like politely like,

oh, God, let's humor the boss.

Somebody really breaks out.

There's always that person.

And just break dancing and stuff, that would be hilarious.

And you know the sad thing?

I'm so envious of that person.

I'm so envious of the confidence of that person.

And I think it actually triggers something in me

that I don't have that confidence.

And therefore the workplace is harming me.

And therefore we can't do the dancing thing.

You're dancing.

Okay, forced fun, no.

No.

Sometimes you have to take a break

from being the kind of boss.

It's always trying to teach people things.

Sometimes you have to just be the boss.

Mother Mia, out loud!

You've got a quick record before we go class, Stevens.

I do.

So Laura Brodnick,

who is our head of entertainment here at Mum and Mia,

wrote a story a few weeks ago called,

I'm Just So Embarrassed.

We're now living in the era of friendship currency.

And Laura writes about how she was just about

to record a podcast at Mum and Mia.

And the producer was doing a sound check

and you guys will know that you get asked,

like, why'd you have a breakfast, that sort of thing?

And the producer was running out of questions

to just check the audio.

And the last question was,

what are you doing this weekend?

And the person Laura was hosting with

actually became quite emotional

and said, I'm not doing anything.

I don't really have any friends.

And Laura goes on to write

that she's now started to notice

how often women pepper their conversations

with explanations about their friendship status.

And she writes, I think of a former colleague

whose greatest stress leading up to her wedding day

was that people would think she didn't have enough friends

to share it with.

She's essentially arguing that friendship

has so much currency that we've placed on it

from even things like Taylor Swift's Girl Squad.

And not having a group in the way

that's celebrated culturally

can be a loss as profound as never finding romantic love.

It's a beautiful piece of writing.

The examples within it that she shares of women she knows

who feel embarrassed and ashamed

by not having the friends they think they should have,

I think it'll really resonate with a lot of people.

So it's brilliant.

You can read it at mummea.com.au

and we've also put a link in the show notes.

And on the subject of,

we were talking about posh and becks earlier,

the modern day version of that,

except I don't think it's gonna have any longevity,

is Taylor Swift now dating the most famous sports person?

It's a whole other code that I don't understand.

So I called an emergency meeting about Taylor Swift

because there's stuff going on with her at the moment.

I had some concerns to raise about this new boyfriend

as well as this string of public outings

or while she's on her world tour.

We all had some strong thoughts and feelings.

It was good. It was great.

A link to that episode will also be in the show notes.

Thank you for listening to Australia's number one

news and pop culture show.

This episode was produced by Emily and Gazillas,

the assistant producer is Tali Blackman,

with audio production by Leah Porges,

and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.

Shout out to any mummea subscribers listening.

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

subscribing to mummea is the very best way to do it.

There's a link in the episode description.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.