Mamamia Out Loud: The Side-Chick Coronation

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Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.

Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia Out Loud.

It's what women are talking about on Friday the 5th of May.

I'm Holly Wayne, right?

I have to burp, I'm sorry.

Oh my, she's so unprofessional.

I'm Mia Friedman and who let me in?

Who let her in here?

And I'm Jessie Stevens.

And on the show today.

Some people are calling it a side chick coronation.

Is Queen Camilla free mistress's dream come true?

Oh dear.

Plus, a parent's nagging.

Is it the new way to put a woman down while telling her you love her very much?

Plus, our best and worst of the week, which include getting names wrong, finding emoji and money.

But first, a hungry South Korean student has eaten a $120,000 artwork.

Pardon?

Pardon.

Look, you can't blame him.

The artwork in question is a single banana that was duct taped to a wall.

You're the one who charged his own brother for a bluth frozen banana.

I mean, it's one banana, Michael.

What could it cost?

$10?

And I don't mean to laugh at modern art because there's a lot of thought that goes into it.

But this student walked into the museum in Seoul and took the artwork off the wall and ate the banana and then taped back up the skin.

I think he was clearly trolling.

Because I was going to say, when you're starving, there's nothing like a banana.

Like it just is filling.

Good for you.

Good for you.

It's easy.

It's portable.

You can put it in your handbag.

Comes in the same case.

When the museum asked him why he ate the banana, he replied that he was hungry after skipping breakfast, according to the Korea Herald.

He added, I thought it would be interesting.

Isn't it taped there to be eaten?

Great point.

And it's like, well, just tape another one.

Well, funnily enough, the banana actually does get replaced every two or three days because otherwise it would go off, right?

It would be black.

And the journalist asked the artist about the incident and his response was simply, no problem.

I don't understand how it cost $120,000 when you can just put another banana there.

Jesse got any plans to eat any art?

No, but you do have the situation where you go through galleries sometimes and you're not sure if you're looking at something that's a bit broken or a chair.

On the car, yeah.

Or if that's part of the exhibition.

So I do understand.

Is that a light switch?

Or is it a piece of art?

Or am I meant to look at for a very long time?

That I love.

I absolutely love.

That's just the air conditioner.

I want it.

It's everything.

Tomorrow, Australia gets a new king.

And don't get me started about that.

But we also get a new queen, Queen Camilla.

For about five minutes there, Camilla was not going to be called queen.

She was going to be called queen consort.

But when the invites went out, the consort seemed to have fallen off.

Did you notice that?

I did.

But I didn't realize that for years, decades, at least 10, 15 years, she was never going to be queen consort.

She was going to be princess consort.

And then that was a change.

So when the queen, the previous queen, announced that she was going to be queen consort, it was seen as quite a big deal.

Like, and quite alike.

Oh, you know.

I was going to say it's weird having a king and a princess, but we had a queen Elizabeth and a prince Philip, didn't we?

He was not the king.

He was not.

It's interesting.

Anyway, Queen Liz made her queen consort.

But when the invitations went out, it says Queen Camilla, and it appears quite clear that she is going to be that.

Just Queen Camilla.

That's a pretty serious glow up from Tampon Gate and all of that.

Like, she's come a really long way, hasn't she?

She has come a very long way.

For being the most hated woman in the world.

And I don't want to lower the tone, although Mia did just bring up Tampon Gate, so we may already be there.

It's a bit hard to take this king seriously, let's be honest.

But some people have branded tomorrow's party as the side chick coronation.

Now, a side chick, in case you missed it, I'm sure you know what it is, but it's definitely a kind of derogatory term, really.

The other woman.

The side chick.

The woman you have.

The chick you have on the side.

The mistress.

The mistress.

And I don't think there's anyone on the planet who doesn't know that Camilla was Charles's side chick for a very long time.

Yeah, since before he met Diana.

They were married here.

Yeah.

So they were infamously in love in the early 70s.

Camilla married somebody else.

Charles married somebody else.

Didn't stop them.

Do you think it's a great love story?

Yes, I do.

I do think it's a great love story.

But what I think is interesting is how you feel about Queen Camilla and Prince Harry recently kind of complicated this a little bit.

How you feel about Queen Camilla is a little bit of a raw shark test sometimes because it can be looked at through the lens of this is an ambition realized.

When I read Tina Brown's book, Palace Papers, she was a little bit on the fence about this.

But the idea that once Diana was out of the picture, and I don't necessarily mean her death.

I mean, like when they were officially divorced.

It became clear that Charles and Camilla were going to be an item.

And then after Diana's death, it took a couple of years before he kind of publicly showed her to the world.

And infamously now, thanks to Harry's book, at that time, Charles hired a new PR guy and the PR guy's job was turn this shit around because Camilla was it is hard to overstate the most hated woman in Britain.

Newspapers would have pictures of her next pictures of a horse.

They would go on and on about what she looked like a fish, a horse, a pig.

They would openly gasp about how you could ever choose her over an elegant beauty like Diana.

And obviously also she copped all the home record situation.

So everybody hated her.

And apparently Charles hires Mark Bowland to his PR guy and said, we've got to turn this ship around.

And it took a long time, but that ship has turned.

And here we are now. How many years since then? 25?

And she is going to be Queen.

And not only is she going to be Queen, but in the royal party of the little kids who follow the King down the aisle or whatever he does when he marries God or whoever he's marrying on tomorrow night.

Her grandchildren are in the pages, whereas only William's kids.

More of her grandchildren than his.

Yes. Her children will be front and centre.

Her ex-husband will be sitting in the congregation.

So she is fully in the royal family.

Now some people, and Harry has insinuated this, were like, that's what she always wanted.

Tina Brown has said that Camilla's is the greatest image rehab in history and she deserves a crown just for toughing it out.

I think that's probably true.

But the Rorschach test thing is that is either she's an ambitious piece, you know, who's like hustled her way to the top or true love story.

The right woman to be standing by the man's side at the biggest moment of his life.

She has suffered through hell.

Her son says that during those years, those post-Diana years when they had paps outside their door, when there was character assassinations everywhere, he said, you could not dent our family now if you tried.

My mother is bulletproof.

And I think that's why it is a love story.

I think she's with Charles in spite of him being the king, not because, because you cannot say she was playing such a long game that she thought that if she just hung in there, she'd become the queen.

Like, there is no possible way.

I mean, I think it's...

Well, she knew he was going to become the king one day.

Yeah.

But I mean, there was a long history and I think she said, my grandmother, when they first met my grandmother was the mistress of your grandfather.

So let's get it on kind of thing.

There was never, and you saw that in the crown, the crown's a documentary, but in everything I've read about Camilla and Charles, there was never an expectation that she would become his wife.

Like, never.

And if Diana hadn't died, probably she never would have been able to.

Like, because Diana would have, I'm going to be honest, she would have been putting her version of events out and she would have been poisoning the well.

Understandably, like, I can understand why she was devastated, but I think that Diana dying first of all made it seem like it would be impossible that they would ever be able to see in public together.

But then as time went on, it was almost more of a blank slate in terms of that did emerge as being a way back.

But I just don't think that there's any way.

Like, she went through the hard parts.

You don't get the sense that Camilla is interested in being famous, in being rich.

She likes her horses.

She likes her gumboots.

She's no bloody nonsense.

But don't you reckon knowing that our sense of her is not by accident challenges that narrative a bit?

Like, they had the best PR team in the entire world.

Not before.

Not before that happened.

Yes.

But I just think that her image has been so controlled and sold to us that I'm like, any sense I have of Camilla, because I actually look at Camilla and I go, she looks nice.

Like, her face makes me feel warm.

But that's not an accident.

That's something that has been so purposefully constructed over a lot of years.

But by all accounts, and these are not her PR people's accounts, she was and probably still is, bawdy, loves a bevy, loves flirting.

Charles famously would just put his hand down her top at dinner parties.

Is, as you say, outdoorsy, horsey, other things, which is not, that's not an image.

That's just what posh English people of that particular demo are meant to be, you know, the outdoorsy.

There's a story about her that she was at an event with Charles that she was finding really boring.

And then she just went and sat in the car and waited for him to finish and just waited in the car.

She doesn't seem to be in it for the perks.

I went to a dinner with them.

Oh, you've told us this.

I've mentioned this many times and gosh, I'll keep mentioning it forever.

But she was funny.

You could tell the chemistry between them was very real.

At a certain point, he was delightful.

And I felt like I was a bit guilty for betraying Diana by sort of liking them.

And then they just went upstairs and you just knew they were going upstairs to have sex like you just knew.

You just knew.

I reckon I'm trying to think about last year because before the Queen died,

it was very clear that Charles needed her to say the Queen consort line.

And I just imagine this is 2022 that you've got it's like being annoyed by your son about your will.

Like that Charles was just in her ear being like, can you just drop the things about Queen consort?

And she was like, I don't give a shit.

And so that obviously made such a difference.

I think it was on the jubilee that she said there were so many easier lives that she could have had.

You know, this was not an easy path for her.

So is this a win for side chicks?

Because there are side chicks everywhere who are raising their glass going, we played the long game.

You said he'd leave us.

But look at how far we got with the Queen of England.

You'd say everyone said it would never work and look at us now.

I think that this is actually a triumph for people who are genuinely compatible,

who on paper, right back at the beginning, she wasn't actually good enough for him on paper,

even though she came from the right kind of family.

And as Mia's already said, her great-grandmother was his great-grandfather.

She was a virgin.

And she was known to be a bit out there.

Her and her husband, Andrew, who she married not long after,

both had other relationships.

So she wasn't good enough for him.

But what you get the sense of with them, as well as as Mia says about wanting to have sex all the time,

is they genuinely like each other.

Remember when it was locked down in England and sometimes they'd send out a picture of them

in their garden in Scotland or whatever, and they were wearing their cardigans.

And you can tell that they get along when no one's around.

And if you marry the good on paper person, it might all work for the cameras,

but when it's just you and them, and then maybe there's a global pandemic and you're stuck with them forever, whatever,

you're like, we don't have anything to talk about.

They would never have worked.

Is it a triumph for side chicks?

Yes, I think it probably is.

The ultimate triumph, isn't it?

If being the queen is what you want, I mean, I would not want it.

I don't think Harry will be pleased tomorrow.

He'll be there as we know.

But I think that he will be a bit pissed off seeing Camilla get her crown,

because as he said in his book as recently as when he wrote that,

he and Will understood that Charles and Camilla belong together,

but he never wanted them to marry.

Never mind get the crown.

He would prefer she'd have stayed side chick and not be there tomorrow,

but be like waiting at home with his cup of cocoa.

I googled what would happen if, say, in six months Charles died.

Good question.

Jesse Stevens.

Well, is Camilla going to be the Queen of England?

Because the difference with Prince Philip, of course, was that he was a prince.

No.

So what happens is that...

Will's will still be.

Exactly.

It will be Will, and then Kate will also be like a queen consort,

and then it goes to the next in line.

It's totally hereditary.

So you can only marry into the perks, not the lineage.

Who the hell wrote this script?

There's an article doing the rounds at the moment,

which is all about nagging 2.0.

Do you guys know the term nagging?

Young people use it, so I didn't know if that was...

Does it mean you're being mean to me?

That's what you just did then.

Yeah.

That's nagging.

Yes, exactly.

I negged.

It's used by pickup artists,

and it's a method to get your romantic interest to like you,

by criticising them, making them feel a bit insecure,

and then being there to pick them up when they fall, right?

So there's sort of harmless nagging.

Except you don't pick us up when we fall.

No, I don't, because you're not my romantic interest.

I just do the nagging.

Taking the piss out of each other is one thing,

but then there's pointing out physical flaws in someone

or being outright cruel, and there's a lot of women in particular

who have stories of dating or being out,

and some guy has tried nagging,

but he's just gone up and said something awful,

and it's unpleasant.

But writer Phoebe Maltz-Bovey has noticed a new brand of nagging,

where men seem to think that they're complementing

their female partners by telling the world

they are not with them due to their looks.

So there was a post that went viral on Twitter

by a sports guy this week, right?

And he put this up.

He put a picture of his family out,

and it's him and his three kids, and he's written.

I've seen some guys posting on social media lately

about how they are winning because their wife is attractive.

Who does that, by the way?

I don't know.

Okay.

Well, I don't disagree.

I think finding a wife who is a great mother is five...

I just burped into the mic.

What's going on?

I don't know.

It's just a burpy day.

Yeah.

Anyway, well, I don't disagree.

I think finding a wife who is a great mother

is 500% more important.

And then thanks, and he tagged his wife

for being such a great mum to our kids.

And that's not an isolated example.

There was also a question in an advice column

in the Washington Post about a comment a husband made

about his wife.

He thought it was a compliment she didn't.

He said to her,

you know, I lowered my usual standards of attractiveness

when I decided to date you.

And I'm so glad I did because your personality is wonderful

and I love our life together.

He was trying to emphasize the second half of that sentence,

but it's hard to ignore the first half.

So here's my question.

Is saying I'm not with you for your looks

offensive or a compliment?

I think this is really hard.

To your point, Holly, who does that?

Who posts?

There are guys who post pictures of themselves

with their attractive partner and be,

oh, punching above my weight.

It's a form of humble bragging.

She's so hot.

Guys take pictures of like candid pictures of their wife

or their girlfriend and they're like on the beach,

just prancing.

They're like, how did I get so lucky?

Look at my sexy wife.

And I'm like, oh, my partner's never taken a photo of me.

No, no, I think that, like, wouldn't we say

if someone said to you,

I didn't fall in love with you for your looks

or I wasn't attracted to you when we first met,

but then I got to know you.

That would hurt my feelings.

Yeah, I guess it would.

Shit, I think I've said that.

But does it also speak to the idea of

I'm not superficial because looks fade.

People change shape and they get wrinkly

and they get gray hair.

And what do you think, Holly?

We all know that successful long-term relationships

are built on lies.

Yeah.

You have to, even if that's the truth, right?

That when you met your partner,

they weren't necessarily your physical type.

Perhaps is actually true of my partner.

I have said that to him.

I feel bad.

Not that he isn't attractive,

but he wasn't my type in inverted commas.

But then you fall in love with them for other reasons.

That's a fair thing to say,

but no one wants to hear that.

So you have to lie and say,

from the minute I saw you, I knew you.

First of all, it was the physical attraction.

And then the souls met after that.

So there are certain names like demisexual,

which means you can only be attracted to someone

after you've formed an emotional bond with

or sapiosexual,

which means that you're only attracted to someone's intelligence

that basically declare looks don't mean anything to me.

And I don't respond to them.

So some people use that as a brag to say,

I'm actually so much more deep.

Don't you think the only possible way that the whole,

I'm not with her for her looks thing works

is if you're with Emrada or Camilla Maroney

or like, you know, somebody who is, you know,

El McPherson at the top of her game, whatever.

It's like, I'm not shallow.

I'm with her because she's an amazing person.

Like then we might go, oh yeah, nice guy.

We wouldn't go, he's negging her.

But for the rest of us humans,

I will never forget someone that I was madly in love

with saying to me once,

you're not empirically attractive,

which is a line from when Harry met Sally.

I'm empirically you are attractive.

He said, you're not empirically attractive.

Like some people might think you're attractive

and some people wouldn't.

And I happen to be the people who do.

Now the thing is that is honesty.

What that is right there is honesty.

I'm not Camilla Maroney.

And I'm not, no one can argue about whether or not, you know,

Emrada is physically attractive.

So it's true that I'm not empirically attractive,

but my God, it killed me because it was a neg.

Because what he wanted to kind of say to me

is you're kind of lucky.

Yes.

You're kind of lucky.

It's about the syntax.

What they need to say is I love you

for so much more than your looks.

Correct.

And then you go, oh, so my looks,

I am Emrada because I need my partner to,

but do you really,

do you really need your partner to think you're Emrada?

Are you happy to go along with the lie?

Not that you're not beautiful, Jesse, but you're not Emrada.

I think that I need to believe,

and this is what I find interesting,

if we all need to believe in our relationships,

that the person that we're with

believes that we're attractive.

And that's different to being like conventionally beautiful

on paper and whether they think other people

find you attractive.

But it's like, if the person you're sleeping with

doesn't find you attractive,

you're going to feel like shit.

I agree that there's an element of lying to each other-ish.

But yeah, that feels like an awful thing to say.

Firstly, what if you're not?

And secondly, what if you look really different

to how you used to look when you first met?

Back to that old, my husband used to be hot story.

I would think, and obviously I've only been with my partner

for, say, six, seven years,

but I would hope that that is a part of our relationship

that's there.

And no one's lying about,

you looked like you did when you were 25.

And I was actually thinking about this,

going, it's interesting because in our vows

and in our speech, I realized that none of us said anything

about beauty or beautiful.

And you hear some people, and I think it,

who are objectively attractive,

and they will often say,

I haven't heard it in, like, father of the bride's beaches,

where they go, my daughter is so beautiful.

And I'm like, God, my parents never described me like that,

which I like.

But that's about values.

It is about values,

but I quite liked that it didn't come up in vows.

That that was central to our love for each other.

It was a bunch of other things that we prioritized more.

But I think you've got to understand that hope,

that there's a level of attraction there.

So my question about these nagging,

the trend of this, like,

I love her for more than her looks on social media or whatever.

Are they nagging?

Because nagging implies a deliberate strategy

of manipulation, right?

And I would argue that probably

we've all been on the end of that in bad relationships.

Or are they just clueless?

I think they're clueless,

and I think our bar for men is really, really low.

And so we're like, no, but they're saying

they like your personality.

What if they are trying to just be nice?

Like, you know, we're telling them not to objectify us.

Like, oh, Jesse's so hot.

And it's like, well, you wouldn't like that, would you?

I think the issue, and this is what it often comes down to,

is that culturally the value that we place

on how women look is so great.

Yeah, yeah.

That it is quite ignorant and oblivious

for a man to make a comment like that.

And that's not why...

Even if he thinks he's giving you a compliment.

Yes, and that's why it's not the same when a woman does it back.

But if your partner posted a tweet like that,

saying, I don't care about whether she's attractive,

I just, she's a good mother.

Would you be upset?

I wouldn't be upset.

You know what's interesting?

I was thinking about that particular one.

As you were saying it,

I love anyone telling me that I'm a good mother, right?

Except for Brent.

Like, it's kind of funny how that's not a compliment

of value from my partner.

To me, I'm like, I assume he thinks that.

But like, if someone I know who observes me

with my children says to me, you're a really good mom.

Like, it means a lot.

That's true.

I know a lot of women who go out of their way to say that

to women because they never hear it, right?

Women never hear that very often.

So it's funny that in that particular example,

I'm like, yeah.

He's like, what's most important

is picking a partner who's a good mom.

Like that.

And again, empirically, that's true.

If you want to have children, you want to be good parents.

But it feels so desexualized and so...

It does.

I don't know.

It's funny.

There's a lot of different values in that one statement.

So do you think, Mia, that your partner thinks you're hot?

Yeah.

I mean, I know that he does.

It's funny because also the hotness of your partner can change.

I don't just mean like he was and now he isn't.

It's like, to a certain time, often for me,

it's how I'm feeling about him.

I can be like, oh my God, you are so hot.

And then I'm going to be like, I can't look at you.

But we've often said there's so much wrong with our relationship.

If we weren't so attracted to each other,

it would be easier because we could just...

You know what?

Be nice.

See ya.

Do you ever tell each other when you're less attracted to each other?

No.

No.

That's something you just...

I asked Brent yesterday.

So whenever we're talking about a show...

But you can tell.

Yeah, you can tell.

Whenever we're talking about a show,

we've got a group chat, unsurprisingly.

And one of you put this in the...

I think it was you, Jesse, put this in the chat last night.

I was sitting on the couch with Brent and the kids.

And I turned around to Brent and I go, Brent, do you think I'm hot?

And Matilda nearly died.

Did Brent look terrified?

And he was like, why are you asking me?

Why are you asking me?

He feels like a trap.

But he was like, of course I do.

And Matilda was like, of course he does.

And then she was like...

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It's time for our best and worst moments of the week.

I'm going to kick off.

My worst happened a couple of days ago.

I'm very bad at names.

I always have been.

I've got like a blank in my brain.

Some people are good at names.

Some people are not good at names.

I'm quite good at faces, although also not really.

I don't know what I'm good at, but I'm very, very bad at names.

Can we blame this on neurodiversity?

I don't think so.

But if you want to try, I'll pay that, like, please.

I do this all the time.

In a social situation, it can be awkward.

But at work, it can be really upsetting for the people

you work with because I'm the boss.

And so I've been in situations where I'll be at a client meeting

at a function.

There'll be lots of people around.

And I'll come in and I'll put my hand out and I'll introduce

myself to someone.

And they'll be like, I know who you are.

I work at Mama Mia and have done for three years.

And I'll be like, of course you do.

I'm so sorry.

That's just me being an idiot, but people can feel really upset

because there's a power imbalance in there.

And I was giving a big presentation to the team this week.

And there was someone, I'm never good on the fly.

And what I was trying to do is I was trying to name a couple

of extra people because I wanted to shout them out.

And I had one person's name in my head and then because I was

going to mention it for something.

And then anyway, I got names mixed up.

And it was mortifying.

It was mortifying for that person.

And I didn't realize at the time I was really, really confused

because I thought I'd said the right name.

And she was saying her name.

And I was like, yeah, I know who you are.

And I didn't understand that I'd actually called her a different

name.

Anyway, was one of those moments.

It's really hard to say to someone, of course, I know who you are.

I value you.

I'm so sorry.

That was incredibly awkward for you.

And I just feel like shit.

So of course I went up to her afterwards and apologized.

And I reached out to her and I've apologized.

And I just feel terrible and something that happens to me a lot.

And it's fine in the world, but at work it's not.

And I think maybe everyone will have to wear name tags.

I've done it before or had it done to me as well.

You feel as though you've taken the relationship with that person

back 10 steps.

And you're like, no, you think I don't value you.

Yeah.

I don't know you.

And I do.

They're just like something short circuited in my brain.

And it happens to me all the time.

It happens to me, actually.

It happens to me.

And I know this does sound like an excuse that I'm trying to,

but more since Perry, for me personally, is that I find that

I blank in those situations quite a lot.

Like with my friends, children, you know, like that.

You're really embarrassed because when it happens to you,

it feels awful.

Like if someone forgets my name when I feel like I know them,

I'm like, oh, I clearly didn't register.

Yeah.

Or if you don't remember someone's baby's name or you call them

Hunter instead of Hudson, which I also do for a friend of mine.

But it's just very, very awkward.

But I also do it to my children.

I sometimes call them by the name of the dog.

It's awful.

I just don't know how to fix it.

My best of the week is I rented, I don't know if I've mentioned it

on the podcast before, but a couple of months ago,

I rented a Pilates reformer.

Jesse, I know you're a big Pilates fan.

I can't remember why I did this.

I did the maths on it and the renting of the reformer is better value

than if you were to go to a class.

Reformer Pilates can be really expensive.

Yeah.

And if you go to a class, say three or four times a week,

and then you told me how much it was to rent.

And I was like, that's really good value.

But do you need someone to tell you what to do well?

No, you just, I rented it and it's a three month rental

and it's something like $40 a week, like a $44 a week.

And I won't ever go to a class.

Like I've been to maybe four Pilates class in my life.

I like them and I do treadmill and I do a elliptical,

but I do the same kind of thing every day.

And I want to move differently.

I want to move differently.

Yeah, exactly.

So, and then all you do a whole, like the place that I rented it

from has an app and it's got a whole lot of things on it.

But I just go to YouTube and I literally go Pilates reformer

arms 10 minutes and it'll give me a whole bunch.

And I've got some that I like more and some that I don't.

So literally it'll be how much time have I gotten,

what do I want to do?

And there's a million free things on the internet to look for.

I'm very much a beginner with Pilates, Jesse's very advanced

because I've got a philosophy that if I can't do it at home,

I won't do it.

I'm just, some people are the opposite.

Some people like to exercise outdoors or in a group or they need the,

you know, the rigor of going to a class.

I need to do it alone, not speaking to anybody preferably while

watching something on my iPad.

And I've just really enjoyed moving my body in different ways.

And I really liked the reformer.

It's kind of fun.

My worst can be summed up by the question,

where is all my money going?

Cause I keep checking my bank account and being like,

Oh, have I not been paid this month?

Or like, I thought I would have more in there cause I don't like

looking at my bank account very often.

No, things are just cost of living expensive.

And there's just all of these things happening.

And just those shocks that you get of like,

it will go to order takeaway or whatever.

The other day we were ordering something and you go for two people,

$65 is like, and that's not a nice restaurant.

And that's sitting on my couch.

That's just sitting on my couch,

ordering dinner in what world.

And so now what we've got to do is bloody look at the money and

the spending budget, which is boring and sickening.

And I've always gotten away with not looking too closely at it.

I'm not kind of a big spender on things.

So I kind of feel like, oh,

I don't really have to worry about all those little things.

And I don't buy things I don't need,

but I think we're all in the position now where it's like,

no, we have to reassess and actually look at where every dollar is going

because it's out of control.

Best twofold, both of them podcast related.

The first is that we have been recording a new season of Hello Bump

with myself and Gemma Prenita.

And it has been so much fun.

The first season of Hello Bump with Monique Boley and Beck Judd.

Oh, that was iconic.

Was one of my favorite podcasts.

I listen to every episode.

And when I...

So it's about pregnancy.

Before you had a baby, why did you listen to it?

You were in your 20s when you listened to that.

Yeah, I needed to be prepared.

You didn't even have a boyfriend.

I loved how pervy it was.

Like it just gave me all the information.

And then when I discovered I was pregnant,

I felt like Mons and Beck Judd knew before anyone else

because I put them in my ears and I was getting like a refresher.

And so this season has been obese and midwives and nurses

and every question you could possibly have.

Is Gemma pregnant as well?

She has two kids, one via C-section and one via like an induction.

And so she's got lots of different experiences.

Because the model that we set up for Hello Bump the first time around

was Mons didn't have kids yet and she was questioning

and Rebecca Judd has like 10.

She has four and just twins in there.

And so it's that kind of not expert,

because you're not an expert just because you're a parent,

but someone who's been there and someone who hasn't said that

there's someone who could ask all the curious questions.

And this time the curious questioner is one, Jesse Stevens.

It is me and I am deep in the weeds.

And we interviewed Martha from Maths yesterday.

She is the one you will have seen who got HG so badly during her pregnancy.

What's HG?

I was like thinking of that Roy and HG.

Gravidarium.

Oh, the vomiting one.

I call that the Kate Middleton Vomity thing.

Yes.

And then also last week we had our first cancelled live show.

And so cancelled is the podcast that I co-host with my twin sister,

Clare Stevens, and we went to the powerhouse

and we sat there and had a chat for an hour and it was...

Who did you do for your live show?

Ben Affleck.

Oh, perfect.

Sad Ben.

She's got a side live show.

Mate, she doesn't even need us anymore.

I know.

It was very weird without you two.

Or dancing.

There wasn't any dancing.

It was just...

It was so, so, so much fun.

Hopefully we will do more in the future.

Holly, best and worst.

So my worst is a parenting related one,

which, you know, I hate how Mia is always right about parenting things.

I'm not always right.

I'm still refusing to pay that necessarily,

but she may have words of wisdom about this.

I'm at that phase with my daughter in particular

and she is 13 where I am,

when do you step in and when do you step back?

Do you know what I mean?

If something happens.

So we've had a few things going on in her world,

just like, I mean, I don't want to go into too much detail,

but just like any adolescent girl,

a few things with friends, a few things with boys,

a few things with this and that,

that you're navigating these new waters as a parent

and our instinct, because we've always been told this

from when they're little, is solve their problems.

Solve their problems, solve their problems, solve their problems.

And as I know, because we did that teen summit on Mama Mia, et cetera,

there's a point at which you've got to let them start solving their problems

or fight their own battles, solve dramas.

And it is incredibly hard to do that.

It's incredibly hard not to be the helicopter, be the snowplow,

whatever we want to call it and swoop in and go,

well, I should just call so and so and such and such

and talk to them about this.

Or do you want me to talk to the teacher?

Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do that?

And the thing is, it's a teenager, or certainly my teenager,

she doesn't want anything less than she wants me,

or at least she says so, to wade into her issues.

But that whole thing of like, when do you, when don't you,

what should you get involved with, what you shouldn't,

is keeping me up at night.

Because I think it's also hard to let go of that stripe of guilt

that all parents have of like, I mean,

it is your responsibility to protect your child,

but if you're not solving their problems, you're a bad parent.

And the point is, there's a flip.

And if you are solving all their problems, you're a bad parent.

Do you know what I mean?

And obviously, you also know better than she does.

So it's like, I actually have the solution.

Do I jump in and give that to her or watch her fail?

Yes.

And that, yeah.

When Coco started high school, I remember the deputy principal

gave sort of an induction talk to all the parents.

She talked about training wheels and how, you know,

you're moving from manager of your child to consultant.

And part of that is when you take the training wheels off

and they become more independent, they're going to wobble.

And she's like, let them wobble.

And I've got that mantra in my head a lot when I'm like,

is this a wobble or is she like going to fall off her bike?

And break her leg.

Yeah. And break her leg.

And sometimes you only know on the other side of that.

And I know that I've often jumped in just at the wobbling point

when I shouldn't have.

It was so much easier for our parents because they just never

stepped in and they were never in the helicopter.

But it's like, when do I need to helicopter?

When do I need to not?

And can someone just please send me a text or something to let me know?

I saw that new, I don't know if you've seen it,

but that new Dov ad, we did a story about it on Mamma Mia

about the teenage girl with the phone.

There's all this footage of this beautiful little girl

like twirling in dresses and climbing trees

and being a little happy girl.

And then she gets handed a phone for her 12th birthday

and everything changes.

And it goes to quite a dark place,

but it speaks perfectly to that kind of moment where, you know,

it seems more pronounced with girls, the external pressure thing,

but I know that it's true.

But where they just change from these open to the world

and the stakes seem kind of low and then suddenly...

It's the innocence.

It's you watch them lose their innocence.

And it's a lot.

And that's hard.

Anyway, so that's been something I've been wrestling with this week.

My best though, and I thought this was a relevant one

because we were talking about friends a lot this week.

So we did a subscriber episode about ex-friends on Tuesday.

Did you reach out to that friend?

I haven't.

So it can't be that one.

Hopefully that's the best to come.

But I'm going to.

I promise.

So I'm out loud as I've contacted me and said,

this is what you should do.

You should write her a letter or you should write her a letter.

So I'm going to do that.

But it made me realize though,

so it's nearly two years since we moved.

It's going to be two years in June.

Can you believe that?

I would have said it's been closer to four.

Really?

Maybe it's just felt like that to me.

Yeah.

To me, it seems like I would have said a year or something,

but it's been nearly two years.

And you're in your second house and your second dog

since you've moved.

That's true.

On Sunday, I was having lunch round at my good friend

down there, Tori's house.

And she's a great cook and she hosts.

Then it's great.

But anyway, we had friends around and all their kids

and there are dogs and there are things.

And I was like, I've been new friends.

Like there's a wonderful thing in making new friends.

And building a new circle.

And I haven't let go of my Sydney friends.

Certainly not.

They're so strong and important in my life.

But there's a quiet joy to making new friends when you've done it.

And I was listening to your no filter with Lisa and Sarah,

Mia,

and I can't remember whether it was Lisa or Sarah,

which is a bit rude,

but she was saying how she's got a talent for making friends.

Like she says,

I just always take the opportunity and jump in.

And I wouldn't say I'm like that at all because I can be quite like,

not standoffish, but I'm not reserved.

Yeah.

I'm not necessarily jumping up to people.

But really interesting, lovely people.

You suddenly look around at like a Sunday lunch or a Friday evening dinner

or whatever.

And you've got your people again.

We've built people again.

And it's great.

And Brent's going to some boring arsed Star Wars trivia night.

He couldn't be more excited.

So it's like you've embedded yourself into the community.

Yeah.

It made me feel really good.

We have built a new circle.

And I read a thing by Anne Helen Peterson,

who's a writer we all love,

who she said when you move to a new place,

you should set yourself a challenge to make a couple of friends in some

specific ways.

Ask someone to go for a walk with you and have a coffee with someone you

haven't met before and stuff.

And I was, I read all that.

I remember reading all that and being like, okay.

And then I feel like two years down the line,

some of those things have really paid off.

And that was a good one.

Oh, that's so nice.

Maya, you have a recommendation for us before we go.

I do.

I've got a,

one of my favorite authors is a woman called Curtis Sittenfeld.

There's no one type of book that she's written.

No.

The most recent one that you might remember is Rodham,

where she wrote basically what would have happened if Hillary had left

Bill.

So she never married him.

She never married him.

So they were dating.

They fell madly in love.

And then he cheated on her,

which is what happened in real life.

But instead of going sucking it up, she left.

Yeah.

And it was the most extraordinary thing because she used their names

and told this story and recounted conversations and situations and

sex scenes and events that never happened, but she used their real name.

So it was so good.

It was so good.

It's such a creative idea.

It was.

And then she did another one that was a modern adaptation of a Jane Austen

novel.

I can't remember which one.

I think Pride and Prejudice maybe.

And her latest book is called Romantic Comedy.

And what I love about Curtis Sittenfeld is that she just decides,

what am I interested in?

And obviously at the time she was interested in Hillary Clinton and she

dove deep into that and researched it.

This is all about what would happen if a really famous hot male celebrity

like a Harry Styles or Robbie Williams fell in love with a writer on

Saturday Night Live.

Because it happens the other way around quite often.

Yeah.

So like Ben Affleck, for example, dated for a long time.

I can't remember her name.

One of the writers on Saturday Night Live.

And so it's basically this comedy writer who's in her late 30s.

She's divorced.

She's been working on this show that's basically Saturday Night Live

or a version of it.

And this hot singer, like a Chris Martin, I guess, comes onto the show to

post it.

And they made, I won't say they fall in love because they don't,

but it's what happens after that point.

And so there's like really pervy stuff of what goes on behind the scenes

of so shows.

And it's just romantic comedy.

It is that, you know, like so many books, particularly at the moment,

are quite bleak.

And the ones that often do well are the ones that talk about tragedy

or that are dealing with heavy subjects.

But this is really light.

It's not stupid, but it's lovely.

She's kind of playing with that trope of like Pete Davidson gets to date

with the hot women.

Like Scarlett Johansson's married to some comedy writer.

Colin Jones from Saturday Night Live.

So it happens all the other way around all the time.

And she's kind of playing with that.

Why is it always that way?

What would happen if it was the other way?

It's Reese's pick for this month.

It's very good.

It is next on my list.

I can't wait to read it.

That is all we have time for.

Mama Mia Out Loud for this week.

Look, we hope you enjoy the coronation if you're into such things.

And if you're looking for something else to listen to on yesterday's

subscriber segment, we broke down the final season of succession so far.

I'm a newbie, as you know, but we all weighed in.

Mia and Jesse told me what's going to happen.

Do not sing the thing again.

So if you love succession and you want to hear us talk about it,

the link is in the show notes.

Please stop.

We present our theory for what we reckon would be the most satisfying.

Yes.

Yes.

Question before we go.

Do I have to watch the coronation?

No.

Just absorb the vibe.

Okay.

All right.

On Monday, am I going to sit down to record out loud and you guys are going to go?

No.

It's just going to be a long...

It's going to be very godly.

Are you going to watch it?

I'll probably have it on.

Brent will hate this.

I'm going to be in here.

It's going to be on the background.

Yeah.

I'm not coming in.

Okay.

Interesting.

Just absorb the vibe.

Okay.

Just watch it on TikTok.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you for listening to Mama Mia Out Loud.

The executive producer is Talitha Bazaz with audio production by Leah Porges and assistant

production from Susanna Makin.

We'll see you next week.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.