Mamamia Out Loud: Won’t Somebody Think Of The Celebrity F-Boys

You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.

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

Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia Out Loud,

what women are actually talking about on Friday the 26th of May.

I'm Holly Wainwright.

I'm Mia Friedman.

And I'm Jesse Stevens.

And on today's show,

Cousin Greg has been having a lot of sex.

What the actor behind our favorite succession character can't say

and what it tells us about a shift in the culture.

Plus, what is hyper fatigue and why is it peak 2023?

And, well, it's back.

You spoke, we listened,

our best and worst moments of the week,

which include errant worms,

bath privilege and yes,

Mia's naughty dogs.

I don't think we're very assertive.

We told the Out Louders that we were getting rid of best and worst as a segment.

They said no and we said, OK.

We're so sorry.

But first, Jesse Stevens.

In case you missed it, Tina Turner died this week aged 83

after a long battle with kidney disease,

a cancer diagnosis and other illnesses.

Her career began as a duo with Ike Turner,

who she was also married to for 14 years.

And in 1976, she left Ike without any money

and she also came forward about how abusive he was during their marriage.

And I think that makes her, as far as we can tell,

one of the first vocal domestic violence survivors

to come out so early and talk about it.

Because no one was talking about it back then.

No.

And she was specific about some experiences she had.

Like on the night of her wedding,

she was made to watch a live sex show in a brothel.

She was beaten with a shoe stretcher while she was pregnant

and he would throw scolding coffee at her like really serious abuse.

Is he still alive?

No.

He's died.

He denied for his whole life that he did this,

but she wrote about it and talked about it and made a movie about it.

It's interesting because a lot of the clips

that have obviously come out this week in tribute to Tina,

I love those early ones, like the way she moved,

the way she sang, it was so different to everybody else.

But now you watch it with a different lens,

because he's in all of them sitting behind her on the guitar.

You now know what that took for her to be up there

and the kind of condition she was under.

And it's really different to be able to enjoy those early clips anyway.

And what I love looking at her life is that,

so after I, her career plummets,

and she's a woman in her 40s who has no money,

he took all the money and she just wanted out.

So that's the age Beyonce is now, right?

And they went, you're a black woman who is in her 40s.

No one wants to look at you.

No one wants you in the public eye.

And she absolutely did not accept that.

Was this in the 70s or the 80s?

So this by now, I think were the early 80s.

And she then got this Australian producer.

Roger Davies, very famous agent or manager until she died

and is also the manager of Pink, very famous.

Yes.

So he came along and basically gave her, you know,

their second wind.

Most of the things we look at from all her Grammy wins

to her biggest songs really happened from her mid 40s onwards.

And she was touring.

There's footage of her at 60, touring, dancing on stage,

like doing these incredible moves.

She was so trailblazing in that way.

She met Erwin Bach in 1985, who's a German music executive.

To go from a man who really abused her and abused her

to a man who worshipped and adored her to such an extent

that she was suffering from kidney disease.

And in 2016, he donated his kidney to her to prolong her life

because he said, I don't, I don't want to live with anyone else.

I don't want to have another wife like you're the love of my life.

And what I think people love so much about her story is that it was one of,

yes, she was a survivor, but it was one of triumph

and to turn it all around like that and to,

there's a sense that she died really peacefully

and that she got what she wanted.

And it's such a story of kind of combating like from racism

to sexism to abuse.

Like it's just a story you want to celebrate.

I think everyone should watch this documentary

that my mom watched recently that she said was brilliant

about Tina Turner's life.

And that's what we should be watching this weekend, I reckon.

And that musical.

Yeah.

We spoke about the musical on the show last week,

but I imagine the tickets will be selling like hotcakes.

Exactly.

It's outstanding.

My mom went and saw that too and just said it blew her mind.

Her story is amazing, but also just her music.

You could listen to her music.

So many amazing songs.

There is this weird bent right now,

which would be like being sexual is somehow predatorial.

In exploring all these different power dynamics that needed to be explored,

it did put a whole haze over anyone just fucking,

which is a lovely activity for single people to have.

Yes.

Or people are fucking.

They're out there, they're doing it,

but men can't talk about that they did.

Look, won't somebody think of the famous fuck boys?

That conversation that you heard was a little bit

from an armchair expert interview with Nicholas Braun,

aka cousin Greg.

So you could hear Dax Shepard talking to Nicholas Braun

about his sudden fame.

So for context and for non-succession people,

Nicholas Braun is a young-ish actor.

He's actually now in his sort of mid-ish thirties

and he's been working since his teens.

So he's actually been an actor his whole life basically,

but he only got famous with succession in the last five years or so.

And he's a young, then single, famous person

who also happens to co-own a bar in New York City.

And he suddenly found himself with a lot more female interest

let's put it that way.

And apparently he likes it, but also it kind of tortures him.

Here's another clip, and in this you can hear

Dax's female co-host Monica Padman

chipping in with a bit of context

about how the internet sees Nicholas Braun.

When that power hits ya, in so many ways,

it's the fairy tale ones been having

since they were 12 years old, that girls would like you.

Definitely.

I'm still not very good at believing that.

But you have to be aware of what's happening right now, right?

We're like on Dumois, like go to this bar.

Cousin Greg is at this bar.

Yes.

I own this bar called Raise.

I'm a part owner in this bar called Raise.

Oh, in real life.

In real life.

And so I would go there a pretty good amount.

That was in July of 2019.

So that was kind of as things were taken off with the show.

Yeah, I guess it was a place that I frequented

and they knew I could be there.

You're so nervous.

I know.

I'm really telling the line here.

Because I don't.

Just tell me your fears.

Like what is it you're afraid of

that you'll sound like what, a player?

I've seen it so many times where you say a thing

and then it gets snatched up and thrown into the internet.

So it is nice when I'm like,

okay, well that girl's looking at me

or that girl's looking at me, that girl.

Yes, of course.

A person.

Of course it's going to feel good.

But I trust almost no stranger girl that I meet.

Oh poor Nick.

He trusts no stranger girl.

Anyway, what follows is an intensely awkward conversation

where he sort of says that any encounter

he might have sexually, a bad kiss, a lack of chemistry.

Maybe he's not super attentive in the texts

that follow as a hookup about like,

maybe we won't see each other again or whatever.

He says his reputation will be trashed

in a potentially dangerous way.

Now it's worth noting that Nick Braun is considered

on the internet by the people who haven't met him in a bar

as a bit of what they call a baby girl.

Like they like him because his character's hapless.

They're like, oh, look at baby girl.

But actually he does, as you can tell from his interview,

really like dating women.

He made a whole video once about why he'd like to date Kim Kardashian

and now she was single.

Could she please call him?

And there have been some claims on the internet

that he's approached really young girls.

What young girls?

Like how young is a young girl?

Teenagers over 16, but teenagers.

So when I was 17, I dated a guy who was 33.

So that kind of vibe.

So the question I have is in 2023,

can you be a fuckboy, particularly a famous one,

and not be seen as a pig or possibly a predator by the world?

Jesse Stevens.

I don't think you can.

And what is fascinating hearing Nicholas Braun

tie himself in knots.

And I know that you said, oh, poor Nicholas Braun,

but I actually do feel a little bit sorry for him

in terms of being a dating person in the public eye

and how scrutinized that can be

and how nothing you do in private is necessarily private,

which in some way I guess keeps you to account.

But I was speaking to someone recently

in the public eye in Australia

and it was a young man, say 30,

and he said that the amount of women

that send him naked photos on Instagram, it's a lot.

If you were single and you've replied,

like, does that make you look like a creep?

And the reason why I find this fascinating

is because for women, it's going the other way.

I look at someone like Abby Chatfield,

who is launching Fuck Boy Island,

the new show that she's worked on.

I say this, it is for a microcosm of people

and it has been three minutes in the scope of human history.

But just yesterday, there was an article that Abby was quoted in

where she had said that she's banned from a bunch of dating apps

and Raya won't let her on,

even though she slept with half the people on Raya.

And she's talked about famous people

and been very open about her sex life.

Why are the apps let her on?

They think that she's like an impersonation,

that she's not real or something.

It's just interesting that I listen to Abby Chatfield

and I go, you go girl, that's subversive, that's cool.

If I was Abby and I was in my 20s

and I had the whole world,

the amount of options and offers she'd be getting,

great for her, love that.

And that was a man talking about it.

I would bristle.

But of course you would.

And isn't that what we're talking about?

The recalibration of, let's talk,

address the elephant in the room, which is Aziz Ansari,

which our ladders will know.

Holly and I have had many conversations

and you just see on this podcast,

he's the actor who was written about

in an anonymous first person story a number of years ago

on a website called babe.net that's now closed.

And it was a girl who'd met him at a party.

They'd gone on a date.

She had pretty much wanted to pursue a relationship

and he was just looking for sex, essentially.

And she then described in detail

what happened when they went back to his house

and he wanted to have sex with her and she kind of didn't.

And he was canceled.

Like he was really canceled.

I think that's exactly what Nicholas Braun

and every famous man is now worried about,

where he never assaulted her.

He never forced himself on her,

but she felt that he should have read the signals

and she didn't want to have sex

and he kept still wanting to have sex with her.

That caused a lot of division among people

and also among feminists.

Older feminists tend to say, why didn't she just leave?

And young ones are like, he's just a sleazebag

and he shouldn't have done that

and that's borderline sexual harassment.

But my point is that we used to celebrate

horny young hot celebrities.

I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio used to be a stud,

not just celebrities, but young men who used to sleep around.

They used to be studs.

They used to be legends.

And women used to be called sluts.

And now there's a recalibration of that

where the kind of guy who sleeps with a lot of women

is not necessarily seen in a positive light.

And is that a bad thing?

I don't think that's a bad thing.

It's not desirable.

But I also don't think that every man who sleeps

with a lot of women should be seen as some kind of predator

or a bad guy, as long as it's consensual.

I would push back on the idea that this script has flipped

because I think, yeah, you can talk about an Abbey Chatfield

and there are some sex-positive influences

and writers and all of those things.

But I can't think of a female celebrity

in Nicholas Braun's cl- like a Hollywood star.

Like, look at how we talk about even Taylor Swift

when she used to date a lot of men

in inverted commas in her 20s, that she dated a lot of guys.

And we were all so happy when she finally stopped doing that.

Now she's doing that again, you know what I mean?

And the conversation starts up again.

I don't know that it has flipped.

I think it's really interesting because it used to be

that a celebrity kiss and tell,

there were only a couple of avenues for that, right?

Like, if I slept with Leonardo DiCaprio 20 years ago,

and I did not, but if I did, I would have to hope that maybe,

you know, the National Enquirer or The Sun

or like some tabloid with a big checkbook

would be interested enough to tell my story.

Whereas now, of course, you can just make a TikTok and Instagram.

I mean, we could all remember that mortifying video

that was leaked of Ben Affleck when he contacted that woman on Raya

and he was like, hey, it's me, it's Ben.

And we all were like, that is the most embarrassing thing we've ever seen.

So is it bad that women can now call out men

who they think are treating them disrespectfully?

No.

If you're going to a bar because you want to meet cousin Greg

and you think that, you know, wouldn't it be great to go home with him

and have a good story to tell?

Like, that's fine.

But that's also your choice.

It's murky.

I'm an emergency doctor and I'm listening to your Wednesday episode

on my way into my night shift tonight.

And I had a good laugh at Jesse's story

because this is so legitimately what we use in emergency disease.

You're OK if you walk in and see someone on their phone

before you could sign that they're OK.

We call it the phone sign, positive phone sign.

I just found your story hilarious.

A new type of fatigue has just landed and the question is, do you have it?

All of it.

Are you ready?

According to the market researchers Mintel,

2023 is the year of hyper fatigue,

which describes a state of continual physical, emotional and mental exhaustion.

Apparently, our animal brains are overwhelmed by rolling news

of hundreds of global atrocities and dangers,

TikTok, deepfakes, AI, monitoring, 48 WhatsApp groups,

and we also still haven't processed the pandemic, I think,

because we've all been in that near state of fight or flight

for almost three years through COVID.

The good thing about hyper fatigue is that at least now I know it's not just me.

In an article for The Guardian, Emma Beddington spoke about the phenomenon

and she wrote,

In a recent survey, 35% of people said they were too tired to make healthy changes

to their diet and activity levels,

suggesting that many of us are in a vicious cycle of fatigue-induced self-sabotage,

which leads to more fatigue.

We're too tired to tackle our tiredness basically.

And then she went on to outline the different types of fatigue

and these were just different types that she'd invented.

This is not a scientific type.

But a couple of my favourites were anxious tired

when the only executive function still available to you is catastrophising.

That's when you're like so tired

because you're just worrying about everything all the time.

Another one of my favourites, existentially tired.

You're only saying, I am so tired

because the English language doesn't give you adequate ways to express

your profound existential malaise.

Skinned alive tired, which feels as if someone has taken a kitchen scourer

to every inch of you and then kicked you down some stairs.

I know that feeling.

Angry tired, if your day had a soundtrack, it would be screaming finished death metal.

And stupid tired, your brain has been replaced with a single dried pee.

It really points to the fact that we don't have enough words

to describe a very complex.

We all know there are different types of tired,

but if someone says to you, I'm tired,

then it could mean dozens and dozens of different things.

Yeah, it might mean I didn't sleep well last night

or it might mean I have such despair

or I feel really, really anxious and my nervous system is overloaded.

Which type of tired are you?

I think at the moment, I'm a combination of all those things.

But you know, I remember and I don't want to scare Jesse

that I really began to understand,

because generally my energy levels are relatively good, right?

Like in my normal life, my energy levels are relatively good.

But when my kids were little, I absolutely understood

for the first time the words bone tired,

because there is a tiredness that comes with that relentless sleeplessness

that you can literally feel in all of your bones.

And you have no choice but to push through

because you've still got to keep the humans going.

And I've never felt that level of exhaustion before or since.

But interestingly, we ran a story on Mama Mia last week

by Alex Nicholson saying, parents do not own tired.

I think that's true that a lot of parents,

particularly of little kids are like,

you don't know what tired is.

When clearly right now everybody knows what tired is,

because as we're saying, I don't think that we've processed the pandemic

and we're all completely bamboozled.

I was speaking to a psychiatrist the other week for a different interview

and she was saying that she's finding in her practice

really unusual things that in 20, 30 years she's never seen before

and she was talking about the uptick in ADHD diagnosis and anxiety.

And she said, it was like we were thrust into this fight or flight response

and the way the nervous system works is that it takes years,

really takes years to calm down.

And she said, none of us are okay yet, especially young people.

That's true.

That's true.

I was going to say though, the only thing about this spate of articles

and we ran one on Mama Mia by Alfie Scott too,

is that I feel like I've been reading a version of this story for three years now every year.

Like 2022 is the year of exhaustion, 2021 is the year of all these things

and 2023 is peak fatigue.

And I'm like, how helpful is it?

Like we've got to keep going.

Holly, it's interesting you say that because you know why those articles get written

is because they get bloody red.

Every time you write it, it goes viral because everyone's like, this is me, this is me.

And I do think that there are different brands of fatigue.

I notice that I've hit a certain one when I start fantasizing.

I get like this absolute fantasy of just laying flat on the floor with my head down

just in like a quiet room with face down or yes, face down, maybe under a bed.

I remember my auntie used to talk about her hit by bus fantasy,

where she would say, I just would like to get hit by bus, not catastrophically,

but just hospital to three weeks, just tap out.

But I think that the question is why are we getting here

and what's different about this time?

And obviously the pandemic is a climate crisis, all of those things.

And I was reading something about hyper focus and hyper fatigue

and how that exhausts us.

Like how much we're using our brains and with work.

And then you kind of go home and you're like, I'll do a bit more work on the couch.

It's not just work though.

It's also the hyper focus of just scrolling and browsing

and reading different news stories and clicking on breaking news.

Do you think we're overextending ourselves?

You know, I talked a few months ago about, I'm so overwhelmed, I'm so overwhelmed.

And I've reflected on that a lot.

If we're honest with ourselves, like whose fault is it?

If you're so tired that you're angry, that you're rude, that you're irritable,

that you're not your best self.

But that sounds like victim blaming Jesse.

No, but I think it is your fault.

I think that it's almost...

Yes, but it's also the world we live in.

I think that, you know, I really liked what was said in that article

about our animal brains are overwhelmed.

Like back in the olden days, you would hear news

when someone walked over 14 hills with something written on a piece of paper

once a month.

Now, like it is just this constant churn of things that you can't do anything about,

that you jump from thing to thing to thing to thing.

And the Internet is designed to keep us in a state of hyperarousal.

That's what makes it addictive.

And we're in a constant state of what might happen next

because a pandemic happened and we got locked up inside

and then we thought it was over and then it wasn't over

and then we thought it was over and then it wasn't over.

We thought everyone we knew was going to die.

Yes, exactly.

It was a really traumatic experience.

Sometimes it's really strange to think we all went through that, even now.

I find that I have it in my pocket and I sometimes just go back there

and I'm like, no, no, no, I can't go in there.

I can't look in there because it actually was really traumatic

and I can't even process it on that big, big level

because it's not like, and we talked about this a lot afterwards

and why everyone was talking about burnout and the big resignation.

It's not like the world was like, okay, the crisis is over.

Everyone can now have a month off to recover.

In fact, everybody hit fast forward on their lives

and got pregnant and went travelling and changed jobs

and moved houses and got divorced and all of those things.

So everyone was like, well, screw this.

I haven't had a life of threes.

I'm going to start having one now.

And that's tiring as well.

And if you look at historical events, this was what was interesting

in a few of the studies that have been done

about this hyper-fatigue experience.

Say it's a world war or it's the Great Depression or it's, you know, the GFC.

The actual psychological impacts aren't felt for years

or are kind of cumulative.

And then you see this massive uptick,

whether it's in, you know, anxiety or exhaustion or whatever it is,

which I think we expected it to be sort of cordoned off to like,

okay, 2021 ends and we all get better.

But now we're just sort of feeling it.

I'm too tired to take on everyone else's tiredness.

Yeah, I know.

And it's a boring answer, isn't it to say you're tired?

But just also what you said about, it's your choice.

Like you were overwhelmed.

That's very specific.

So you were overwhelmed because you'd taken on a whole lot of different projects.

But for most people who were really tired,

I was saying to a girlfriend just this week,

I'm so exhausted and overwhelmed.

And she's like, you know, you just might want to rethink and just do,

and I'm like, I've got a business.

We employ a couple of hundred people like I can't just go, you know what?

I'm just tired.

I'm just going to have a change.

But is this also dovetailing with a rise in perfectionism?

Which is...

No, but if you've got toddlers or a baby,

you can't just go, you know what?

I'm just too tired.

I'm going to make some changes.

You just have to push through.

But the question is for how long?

Because ever since I've been in Perry,

I've had trouble sleeping for the first time in my life.

We've talked about that before.

And I felt like I'd beaten it, but lately it's back.

And I am having such problem sleeping and it makes you so sad.

As everybody who has issues with sleeping knows,

it makes you sad as well as exhausted and anxious and self-loathing

because you're lying there just going, why can't I sleep?

And although I think all of this discussion is really helpful,

I do think you're right, Jesse,

that we do need to do a little bit of victim blaming and go, how do we fix it?

So, Outladders, what do you relate to the most?

What kind of tired are you?

Or maybe you're not tired.

If you're not tired, we want to hear from you as well.

I know there are people who aren't tired.

There was one in that article called Heavy Tired,

which said, your face is sagging off your skull.

Your mouth has become stuck slightly open

and you're not strong enough to close it,

allowing a thin line of drool to escape intermittently.

That's mine.

Your teeth are lead and even your hair feels heavy.

Ooh.

That's, yeah, relatable.

I'm just so tired.

I'm so very tired.

I just need to close my eyes.

Mamma Mia Out Loud!

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Look, it's time for best and worst and I have something I need to say.

I was sick one time, got COVID in the flu.

You bitches have a meeting without me

and you said everything on fire

and you basically went, we're going to cut best and worst.

I was informed.

Do you know what we actually said?

We're like, oh, we're tired of that.

We're so tired.

We can't be bothered to do that anymore.

We're too tired of talking about ourselves.

Yes.

And you cut it and the Out Louders have rioted.

They've come out and said, no, no, no, this is a hallmark of our show.

And what you, well, we appeared to overlook is that it is also a time in their week

for them to reflect on their own best and worst.

And so we're bringing it back because we're not wedded to anything, really.

We're too tired to fight you Out Louders.

We won't fight you.

If you like it, we'll do it.

Yeah.

We actually quite enjoy best and worst.

We were just worried that you thought we're a bit navel-gazy.

Some of you might.

In which case you can turn us off.

Please don't.

But.

Yeah, really don't.

Joe, Joe, Joe.

This is really good.

Holly, do you want to go first?

What was your worst of the week?

My worst of the week was kind of a best, but it went a bit pear shaped.

So as many Out Louders know, my most recent enthusiasm is my veggie patch.

It is bringing me much happiness.

It combats tiredness.

It does all those things.

I keep saying if only it were one of my jobs, it isn't, but I wish it were.

Well, Holly, in the reading I did about hyper fatigue, one of the solutions is green space

and getting out into green space.

Apparently it's one of the best things for your tiredness.

Definitely works for me.

I am definitely somebody who, you know, being outside really helps.

Anyway, the next level, once you started growing vegetables, the next level is you start composting,

right?

And so this past weekend, Billy and I, my son, we had a wholesome Sunday morning activity

of planting a world farm.

I got this thing called a sub pod.

It's very fancy.

I won't bore you with it.

But basically you have to go to the shop and buy boxes and boxes of worms and they're

all squirming around and you make them a comfy little house at the bottom of your sub pod

and you bed them in.

You've got a little worm blanket.

It was great fun.

We did that.

Billy loved the worms.

We put them all in there and then you've got to let the worms settle in before you start

feeding them.

The reason why this is the worst, although I'm sure it will turn around, is that yesterday

I went to check on the worms and they've all moved out of the farm.

Holly, where do they go?

You plant the pod into soil so that you can grow things around it and they've all slithered

off into the soil.

But apparently if I start feeding it with really tantalising things like banana peels

and stuff, they'll come back in.

But me and Billy were like looking under the blanket yesterday and he's like, they've all

gone.

Where have they all gone?

They're like scrambling through our soil to try and find our worms.

That's so depressing.

I have a question.

I have a worm question.

Isn't the whole point that they get out and just make themselves at home in all the soil?

Isn't that the point?

Or they have to stay in this confined space?

To eat the compost, right?

The idea is that they help you with the compost.

So you put your food scraps in and the worms eat the food scraps and they poo it out and

then that's really good compost.

So it is designed for them to travel out and in again.

I imagine that they would like love their farm and like sit around drinking cups of tea

in there and stuff.

But that's not what happens.

So they haven't like run off?

Well they have run off, but hopefully they'll run back.

Okay.

This is exciting.

I'm looking forward to the next installment.

So my errant worms were a troubling part of the week.

My best of the week was I have been obsessed with my family with a loan Australia on SBS.

Gave it a recommendation for it a few weeks ago.

It's an amazing documentary where 10 Australians or something were dropped in the middle of

nowhere in Tasmania and they had to fend for themselves.

And this week it finished and spoiler alert, spoiler alert, spoiler alert.

The winner was a woman.

It's only the second woman to ever have won in any of the worldwide editions of alone.

And she is this incredible woman called Gina Chick, right?

And she is in her fifties.

She's a total hippie, lives off grid.

So she was incredibly at one with the nature out there.

And she put up with the most unbelievable conditions.

But she's the most interesting woman I've seen on TV for such a long time.

She talked really openly about how she'd had cancer and then she had a little girl and

then her little girl got cancer and died age three, which is just horrendous.

And that was 10 years ago.

And she has rebuilt her life since then and her husband or her partner who she had a child

with, has repartnered and had another child who Gina's actually the godmother to.

He was the person who was there for her at the end.

Like just the most amazing woman and her energy and her attitude.

There were people in there.

There were like war veterans, you know, suffering PTSD attacks.

There were survivalists who have got every bit of kit known to man and know what to do.

And just this woman's resilience was just inspiring and I loved it, loved it, loved it.

So Gina Chick was my best of the week by far.

My worst is short because I don't want to talk about it.

It's AI.

I'm scared of it.

I don't want to think about it.

I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to hear about it.

I just want to just someone to just turn it off.

Okay.

But I know it's the future and I have to get my head around it, but I don't want to.

My best, I record my podcasts when I do them at home, which I try not to because the technology

is just complicated, but sometimes you have to.

So I was in the roof recording an interview for our podcast called 456 Club, which is

for women in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

And I was doing an interview with them about what it's like having grown up children and

that transition of being the mother of young adults, basically.

And to get into the roof where my, I call it a podcast studio.

It's just like a little bit of a nook in my roof that I've stuck some soundproofing around.

You have to climb up quite a steep, it's almost a vertical ladder.

It's not quite vertical, but it's like almost a 90 degree ladder.

And I'm up in the roof and then just suddenly my dog appears.

She's run up the ladder.

I don't know a dog could get up a ladder.

Oh, she's so stupid.

She's barely sentient.

So I was surprised, very surprised.

And she's not got very good coordination.

She'll often just fall over like walking, really.

But she was so excited to find me up there because she could hear my voice.

She ran up the ladder, got in the roof, then became a bit complicated

about how to get her down.

Yeah. It's a very small space up there.

But it was just so delightful.

And I was very proud of her that she has a skill.

So maybe she should be like a fire fighter dog or something.

My worst, I have spoken on this podcast a few months ago

about how I'd started seeing my pelvic floor physio to help with my stretching.

We have now moved into the next stage of stretching

because this was like sort of deep muscles where they stretch like on the inside.

On the inside.

Now I've moved into perineal massage.

Can I ask what they stretch it with?

Do they just like put a pretend baby up there?

No, no, no.

They have put a glove on their hand, coconut oil, and they go.

And they just stretch manually.

Yeah. Yeah.

And like, what are you chatting about?

I'd work.

So it's like having a pap smear or something.

Yeah. All sorts of things.

It's great. And she said to me that for women

who have had really bad period pain throughout their life, which I have,

you know, how if you have a heart attack, but your heart is an organ,

obviously not a muscle, people talk about a pain that they get through their left arm.

Yeah. What happens with pain is that it refers to the closest muscle.

So if you get period pain for your whole life,

your pelvic floor gets really wound up and really, really tight

because it's anticipating pain.

So that's why for a lot of us, it's an issue.

Anyway, so she's been doing her stretching inside.

Oh, my God, it hurts, but it's good.

It's productive.

We've moved on to perineal massage,

which I thought would be the bit between your vage.

Yeah, sounds quite sexy.

Just a little massage.

I thought a bit massage.

It sounds relaxing.

Yeah.

Bit of ania playing in the background.

Exactly.

Light a few candles.

Exactly. Love it. Love it.

This is a fun bit.

This is where pregnancy gets fun.

No, no, no.

It's not fun because it is like getting the corners of your mouth

and like pulling it.

And you have to pull it to like burning stinging mode

at three o'clock, nine o'clock.

And then you kind of go down, right?

Just because this is not a visual medium.

You don't mean three o'clock and nine o'clock.

The times you mean on the clock.

On the clock.

Yes. OK.

And so it's about you put in kind of like.

So if your vage was a clock.

Yes. At three o'clock and nine o'clock.

Yeah. You want to put your fingers in and just pull.

Yeah. Pretty much.

Like a mouth. Yes.

And it is the only thing to be proven to reduce risk of tearing.

And you go in about not as far as your knuckles.

So it's really the kind of surface level skin.

Stop at your elbow, definitely.

Stop at your elbow. Oh, my God.

She does it. You've got to do it every second night.

And if you can't get to it, which you can't because it's very awkward.

Partner. You're meant to get your partner to do it.

Do you think Luca could think of anything worse than me going,

Luca, we've got to do our five minutes of perineal stretching.

I've heard of a lot of couples who did this.

Oh, my gosh.

They're kind of people than Luca because he would.

No, that's just not what it's going to do.

I think they used some rubbed some oil in or something a few times

until I couldn't reach anymore.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

It's like, how does one even?

Anyway, so it's not fun.

My best is I now have bath privilege.

I have moved into a new place and my number one, I said, I don't care.

I don't care about the suburb.

I don't care about any of the details.

All I care about is a bath and I got my bath.

I can't believe it's better than your inflatable bath

that you bought for $40 on Amazon.

Oh, yes, from the internet.

Never forget, this is a real bath.

Every single night since I moved in, I get into that bath

and I put in my magnesium, some salts or whatever.

And I lay there and I listen to a hypnobirthing meditation.

Who even are you?

I know, with like mantras, but I can't really remember them.

What are the mantras?

You will open like a flower.

Yes, you will open like a flower.

You and your baby.

The baby will slide out.

I always stuff them up because Lucas started hearing them too.

So he starts randomly just yelling them in our house.

And it's like a contraction cannot overpower me

because I am my contraction.

Oh, wow.

I am my contraction.

Like it's not pain.

It's just one moment closer to meeting my baby.

Let's not call it pain.

It's just an intense wave.

Yes, so that's been how I'm living now.

And you could give birth in there.

Are you considering it?

I love how this is what people say is that I'm very calm

when I'm not in pain and that when I'm in my bath,

just, you know, laying there and then I'll feel pain

and I'll just be screaming, give me the epidural.

That's how I'm preparing.

And I'm just, a bath is the best thing in the whole world.

Oh, it so is.

Mia, you have a recommendation.

I have a recommendation.

I've actually brought it in.

So anyone that watches my babbles on Insta,

which is someone called an Insta babble in an insulting way,

because they were like,

why would anyone want to watch you babbling on Insta?

So then I decided you're right.

And I'm just going to call it Insta babble and lean into it.

It's basically me having a chat with anyone who wants to listen

while I put my makeup on in the morning.

But anyway, if you've ever watched it,

you'll notice that I like a dedicated product.

You know those hair towels that are specifically,

they've got a little bit of elastic at the thing

and a button and you wish your hair in it

because I don't have very long hair,

but sometimes you put a bath towel in your hair

and it falls out and it's a bit heavy

and becomes dislodged.

So the ones that I've been using are just a little bit,

like they look pretty and they're at the right shape

and everything, but they're not absorbent enough.

And so I went online and discovered

that the best ones to get are like microfiber ones, right?

And so you can get all these fancy ones

and there's a million of them available on Amazon very cheaply.

I found this one on Adore Beauty

and they send you a free Tim Tam with every order.

So I love that.

And also it's an Australian lady's startup.

It's called Strand, but with two As.

It's a woven microfiber hair towel.

It looks fancy.

It's the best one I've ever used.

The reason I'm even talking about this is that it's winter.

I have to blow dry my hair every day.

Can't just let it air dry because it's cold.

And you want to halve your drying time.

I need to, because it's boring drying my hair,

but I reckon it's halved my blow dry time.

It actually absorbs it.

And these are like 15 bucks or less.

Okay, that's pretty good.

My hands can be free.

It doesn't come dislodged.

Would it hold all my hair?

Cause I would like that.

Yeah, it would.

It's actually bigger than I need.

It's actually, I could have one, a smaller one.

But yeah, it would be really good for you.

I don't know how you do it with your hair hole.

I was at dinner with Hall the other night,

Jessie and I was sitting next to her

and I was just using her hair as a blanket.

It's so long and thick.

And that can, a blanket, a pretend moustache.

I want one of those so that we'll put a link

in the show notes, right?

Yeah, you don't just Google microfiber hair towel.

Like you don't have to have a specific brand.

I really like this one strand from Adore Beauty

cause it came with a Tim Tam.

That is all we have time for a mama mirror out loud today.

But if you are looking for something else to listen to

on yesterday's subscriber segment,

we answered some of your questions.

So we jumped onto Instagram and Facebook yesterday morning

and we said, have you got any Ask Me Anythings?

Or Wednesday morning.

Oh, they were juicy.

Good questions.

And they were really good questions.

So we've put a lot of them aside.

So if yours doesn't get answered

in yesterday's subscriber segment, don't worry.

There'll be more.

But there's a link in the show notes.

So really good ones.

There were ones about,

do we remember the first time we met Mia

and our job interview experiences?

What my grandmother name is gonna be.

I learned what Mia's grandmother's name is

and then I told Luca, who you apparently hadn't told me.

Well, I just decided then.

As we were sitting there, I picked it.

Well, the out loud is new before your son.

So it's situation normal.

It's not up for discussion.

It just, me against the pick.

No, I've chosen it now.

Although we did put a poll in out louders.

And they agreed.

So they agreed.

So you're lucky, it sticks.

Okay, thank you so much out louders

for listening to Australia's number one

news and pop culture show.

This episode is produced by Emma Gillespie

with assistant production from Susanna Makin

and audio production by Leah Porges.

And we'll see you next week.

Bye.

Bye.

Shout out to any mum and Mia subscribers listening.

If you love the show and you wanna support us,

subscribing to mum and Mia is the very best way to do so.

There's a link in the episode description.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.