Speaker 1: You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Speaker 2: Welcome to mummya out loud where women come to debrief.
Speaker 2: I am Jesse Stevens, I'm mea Friedman, and I'm Amelia Lester.
Speaker 2: And here is what's on our agenda for today, Monday,
Speaker 2: the fourteenth of July. Everyone's talking about Lena Dunham's new
Speaker 2: show Too Much, which dropped on Netflix last week. And
Speaker 2: the girl's creator is suddenly everywhere. So where has she been?
Speaker 2: And have we finally stopped being weird about Lena Dunham.
Speaker 3: We've also got some scurrellous gossip about a secret meeting
Speaker 3: between Teen Charles and Team Harry. I was eating this
Speaker 3: story up over the weekend. We want to know what
Speaker 3: it means and also who tipped off the paps?
Speaker 1: And you are not imagining it. Women really are posting
Speaker 1: less on social media and they're lurking more so are
Speaker 1: we heading towards posting zero?
Speaker 2: But first, in case you missed it, if you find
Speaker 2: yourself dreading mondays or finding them harder than any other
Speaker 2: day of the week, it could be because of this
Speaker 2: phenomenon called identity lag. Speaking to Mamma Mia, a psychologist
Speaker 2: named doctor Marni Lishman said, the shift from weekend you
Speaker 2: to work you can be very emotionally jarring. There is
Speaker 2: also a concept called role fragmentation, which, according to Stylist,
Speaker 2: is what happens when we spend the weekend exploring parts
Speaker 2: of ourselves that sort of go they're not expressed during
Speaker 2: the work week right, and then we turn up on
Speaker 2: Monday and we have to transform right into our LinkedIn
Speaker 2: selves immediately. There's this experience of sort of whiplash, Amelia,
Speaker 2: do you relate.
Speaker 1: I'm about to confess something which probably makes me sound horrible,
Speaker 1: but I actually look forward to Monday's.
Speaker 2: Because you like that identity more.
Speaker 1: I find it easier to inhabit. So I have two children,
Speaker 1: and on the weekend there's a lot of chaos and
Speaker 1: a lot of noise, and we don't have routines, whereas
Speaker 1: during the week I have routines, and I love that routine.
Speaker 1: And I'm often very tired on Sunday nights. And I
Speaker 1: remember when I had very little kids, people at work
Speaker 1: would say to me, have a good weekend, and I
Speaker 1: would hate them because I knew that my weekend might
Speaker 1: be fulfilling but was not going to be fun or easy,
Speaker 1: and now I feel that less. But even so, Monday
Speaker 1: brings routine and normalcy and talking to people who are
Speaker 1: rational and professional.
Speaker 2: But you work with mea the people, how about you.
Speaker 3: I really related to this because I think we all
Speaker 3: wear a mask at work, and we should in many ways,
Speaker 3: because you know, you shouldn't let it all hang out
Speaker 3: at work. Also for me, sometimes I take my medication
Speaker 3: during the work week, but then I didn't on this weekend,
Speaker 3: and I did feel quite different. I do inher habit too,
Speaker 3: sort of slightly different personas. But this morning I'm sort
Speaker 3: of fighting off a cold over the weekend, and I
Speaker 3: thought I didn't want to call in sick because I
Speaker 3: knew Holly was away and all of that stuff, and
Speaker 3: I wanted to do this show, but also I wanted
Speaker 3: to inhabit this persona. I knew I could stay home
Speaker 3: and continue with my weekend persona, which was unwashed hair. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I wanted to lift and be in this persona.
Speaker 2: Don't you reckon when you turn up on Monday, though,
Speaker 2: I find it hard to get my head in the game,
Speaker 2: like my head somewhere else, at least for the first
Speaker 2: half a day. And then when you look around, there's
Speaker 2: a sense of everyone's sort of cose playing work. I
Speaker 2: found this. I remember when everyone came back to the
Speaker 2: office after COVID, and I think identity lag can be
Speaker 2: something that happens with significant life changes that you're still
Speaker 2: People came back to the office and they were still
Speaker 2: work from home identity, and you could see everyone kind
Speaker 2: of cose playing, sitting there, working meetings, using lingo to
Speaker 2: try and get themselves.
Speaker 1: Kind of a lot with the mask back back.
Speaker 3: After holidays or after Matt leave or any Yeah, starting
Speaker 3: a new job, I always find you just sort of codsplaying,
Speaker 3: trying to work out what your new identity is in
Speaker 3: that workplace.
Speaker 1: You could argue that the whole world's kind of going
Speaker 1: through identity like post pandemic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's still happening.
Speaker 3: I spent the weekend binging on all ten episodes of
Speaker 3: Lena Dunham's new Netflix series Too Much. She's the writer,
Speaker 3: of the creator, and the director. She also has a
Speaker 3: supporting role in it, playing the sister of the main character,
Speaker 3: but she's not the star of this show. The show
Speaker 3: is semi autobiographical. It's about an American woman in her
Speaker 3: thirties who leaves New York after a bad breakup to
Speaker 3: move to London where she meets this musician and they
Speaker 3: fall in love. It's a rom com. It's got a
Speaker 3: phenomenal supporting cast. The main character is played by an
Speaker 3: actress called Megan Stalta, who she plays Kayla in Hacks.
Speaker 3: She's kind of the assistant. She looks a lot like Lena,
Speaker 3: and she sort of acts a little bit like Hannah Horvath.
Speaker 1: Thin Girls.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about too much on Friday Show,
Speaker 3: but today we wanted to talk about Lena.
Speaker 1: Girls was obviously her breakout hit.
Speaker 3: She was only twenty five when she wrote and directed
Speaker 3: and was the showrunner on that show, and she was
Speaker 3: everywhere for the six seasons. That Girls was around six
Speaker 3: or seven seasons. It was the sort of the mid
Speaker 3: twenty tens, and we just wanted to have a little
Speaker 3: bit of an explainer about her place in the culture
Speaker 3: and why. You might remember she seemed to be so
Speaker 3: controversial back then until she basically was so controversial she
Speaker 3: imploded and disappeared. She's done a lot of things since then,
Speaker 3: but she also did move to London about five years
Speaker 3: ago and met this musician and got married and he's
Speaker 3: the co creator of this show with her, and I
Speaker 3: just wanted to recap because there's two kinds of people,
Speaker 3: the ones who know all the law and who watch
Speaker 3: Girls and who are huge fans, and then there are
Speaker 3: those who didn't and who are a little bit foggy.
Speaker 3: They've heard of Lena Dunna, they've heard of Girls, but
Speaker 3: they don't really know the details.
Speaker 2: A lot of people have forgotten but know that Lena
Speaker 2: Dunham was somewhat exiled, whether that was like a self
Speaker 2: appointed exile or she was sort of passed out from Hollywood,
Speaker 2: But I don't think people can remember the point at
Speaker 2: which she was sort of what.
Speaker 3: Did she do and who was she? Amelia for those
Speaker 3: who were a bit vague.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I actually remember the very first time I
Speaker 1: heard about Lena Dunham, and it was in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and I was working at the New Yorker magazine and
Speaker 1: we had these ideas meetings every week and people would
Speaker 1: bring ideas about things that people were talking about, pitched
Speaker 1: them essentially as stories, and this extremely switched on, very
Speaker 1: very cool young man came to the meeting and he
Speaker 1: always had the best ideas, and he came to the meeting,
Speaker 1: and he said, there's this young director called Lena Dunham,
Speaker 1: and she has written and directed a movie called Tiny Furniture.
Speaker 1: And I thought, that is such a strange name for
Speaker 1: a movie, and because I am evidently not an especially
Speaker 1: good magazine editor, I passed on that story, which is
Speaker 1: sort of like when all those people passed on signing
Speaker 1: the Beatles when they shopping their first album around. Because
Speaker 1: very shortly after that she did become extremely famous, and
Speaker 1: it's easy to forget quite how exciting it felt to
Speaker 1: watch that ascent happen so Tiny Furniture it became very
Speaker 1: famous very quickly because, in addition to being a very
Speaker 1: interesting sort of movie about a woman coming of age
Speaker 1: in New York, there was a sex scene which took
Speaker 1: place in an abandoned tunnel in Brooklyn, Oh, And there
Speaker 1: was this frank depiction of sex that we had never
Speaker 1: seen before. I can't stress how revolutionary this was. It
Speaker 1: was a sex scene in an abandoned tunnel. It was
Speaker 1: not glamorous. The parts did not fit together like tetris,
Speaker 1: which is often how we see sex scenes and certainly
Speaker 1: used to see sex scenes on film. It felt very
Speaker 1: real and gritty and quite literally dirty because it was
Speaker 1: in an abandoned tunnel, and there was something incredibly exciting
Speaker 1: about seeing a young woman's vision of sex, which is
Speaker 1: sometimes profoundly and fulfilling. Sometimes it doesn't always in orgasms,
Speaker 1: and in fact sometimes the man can be a real
Speaker 1: jerk afterwards. And you hadn't really seen any of that
Speaker 1: from a woman's point of view. So if I sound excited,
Speaker 1: it was because it did feel like a new way
Speaker 1: of thinking about young woman. Yeah. And so then unsurprisingly
Speaker 1: shortly after that, she teamed up with Judd Apatow, who
Speaker 1: was everywhere at the time the director of The Forty
Speaker 1: year Old Virgin and This Is Forty and other movies
Speaker 1: like that, sort of you could argue taking that same
Speaker 1: no holds barred approach to men. He teamed up with
Speaker 1: Lena Dunham, who was doing it for women's lives, and
Speaker 1: then they made together Girls, which premiered, as you said me,
Speaker 1: and when she was just twenty five and twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: everyone called Girls the millennial generation's answer to Sex and
Speaker 1: the City. It was sort of everything Sex and the
Speaker 1: City was, and it was also about four women in
Speaker 1: New York. But these four women were really going through
Speaker 1: messy struggles. It wasn't glamorous. They were not drinking cosmos
Speaker 1: in bars. They were kind of like taking gin shops
Speaker 1: in their sort of like hoveled apartments in Brooklyn. It
Speaker 1: felt very different. It had lots of critical acclaim millions
Speaker 1: of viewers. The second season was greenlit before the first
Speaker 1: was even over. But then even as Girls was this
Speaker 1: huge touchstone moment. Over the course of the six seasons
Speaker 1: that it was on, I remember that you started to
Speaker 1: feel Lena Dunham slipped down the mountain, as we so
Speaker 1: often do the women, we build them up, and she
Speaker 1: became the voice of her generation. People often quote this
Speaker 1: line from the pilot of Girls, where her fictional character
Speaker 1: Hannah Horvar says, I may not be the voice of
Speaker 1: my generation, but I feel that I am a voice
Speaker 1: of a generation. But in fact, over time she became
Speaker 1: the voice of millennials.
Speaker 3: Can we talk about her body though? And I, you know,
Speaker 3: I just think we'd be remiss not to, because part
Speaker 3: of what was so transgressive about that show and about
Speaker 3: her starring in it, is that she didn't have the
Speaker 3: kind of body we were used to seeing, even in
Speaker 3: the sex scenes on sex and the City or on
Speaker 3: shows like Friends, the female lead was always a side
Speaker 3: zero and looked a certain way, and she didn't. And
Speaker 3: it's so funny looking back now because like a lot
Speaker 3: of people, I'm rewatching Girls and it's almost like when
Speaker 3: you rewatch Bridget Jones and all of the talk about
Speaker 3: how fat Rene Zellwiga was, and there was all this
Speaker 3: talk about Lena Dunnam and how brave she was or
Speaker 3: how shocking it was to see her having sex and
Speaker 3: not talking about her body. Her body was incidental and
Speaker 3: when you look back now, she'd be what a size
Speaker 3: ten to twelve maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There was even an episode of Girls where she
Speaker 1: has this kind of sexy weekend with a stranger that
Speaker 1: she meets and he's very, very handsome. Yes, And there
Speaker 1: was this whole discourse because this is what we did
Speaker 1: back then, where everyone was saying that it was an
Speaker 1: unrealistic plot because he was too good looking for her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she was this lightning rod in that she was
Speaker 2: being criticized by the far right for being what they
Speaker 2: saw as not conventionally attractive or to work or whatever.
Speaker 2: But then I think she pissed the left off to
Speaker 2: the same degree, and often because the show was criticized
Speaker 2: for not being diverse. It was very white. It wasn't
Speaker 2: maybe self aware about class that show. It wasn't possible
Speaker 2: for it to be all things.
Speaker 3: To all people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, shall we get into some of the controversies. I
Speaker 1: see some of the things that tipped her down the mountain,
Speaker 1: because there's a couple of interesting ones to revisit. I think. So,
Speaker 1: she had a huge memoir deal with Random House in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Her memoir came out and they had paid
Speaker 1: three point five million dollars for it, So there was
Speaker 1: a lot of excitement about that when it came out.
Speaker 1: And in it she talks about being curious about her
Speaker 1: siblings Vagina when her sibling was a toddler. She talks
Speaker 1: about opening it and putting some stones in there, some
Speaker 1: pebbles in there, and also trying to kiss her sibling
Speaker 1: on the lips when she.
Speaker 3: Was changing her siblings naprsing, and she was My memory
Speaker 3: is that she was only seven. No, she was seven
Speaker 3: and her sibling was like three.
Speaker 1: A toddler. Yes, So the alt right, which was rising
Speaker 1: at the time, because we didn't even really have the
Speaker 1: phrase back then, I think we probably would have described
Speaker 1: them as sort of conservative provocateurs. But this rising alt
Speaker 1: right really seized on these anecdotes as evidence that Lena
Speaker 1: Dunham was a sexual predator. And it might sound a
Speaker 1: bit absurd now because her siblings spoke out and said
Speaker 1: this was not a problem and she was a toddler,
Speaker 1: but it made no difference. That was really the start
Speaker 1: of her fall from grace.
Speaker 3: You know, you would never put that in a book now, right,
Speaker 3: because it was those early years of when things were
Speaker 3: being weaponized offhanded comments, and Lena Dunham was very unfiltered.
Speaker 3: Her character was as well, but she was then called
Speaker 3: to sort of as the voice of her generation to
Speaker 3: speak about all these different things and girls was it
Speaker 3: was back when there was more of a monoculture.
Speaker 1: Everybody would watch it and.
Speaker 3: Every week there would be these big discussions, and it
Speaker 3: was also the rise of women's websites and blogs like Jezebel,
Speaker 3: so everything would be sort of picked apart every Now.
Speaker 2: There was this quote by Kevin Fallon where he said
Speaker 2: it was the discourse apocalypse, which I think is a
Speaker 2: really good description of that hot tame of that time,
Speaker 2: and the book I think fits into this. What's worth
Speaker 2: acknowledging is that it was absolute cultural saturation because while
Speaker 2: there was girls, there was also the memoir, the personal essay,
Speaker 2: which you know has disappeared people do not.
Speaker 1: Well, and that was part of her breakthrough, was that
Speaker 1: disclosure and women talking frankly about these most private things
Speaker 1: was seen as a liberation rather than sort of a liability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then there was Lenny Letter, There was Women
Speaker 2: of the Hour, there was interviews, there was social media
Speaker 2: early on everywhere.
Speaker 3: She's incredibly prolific, and it's interesting strife is set at
Speaker 3: this time too, very deliberately because it was the beginning.
Speaker 3: It was the rise of women's media and a lot
Speaker 3: of women's voices in the media, like Lena Dunham. But
Speaker 3: it was also the beginning of cancel culture, when the
Speaker 3: left started to be very censorious of particularly outspoken women.
Speaker 1: And let's get to that, but also the idea of
Speaker 1: so we've talked about why the right kind of seized
Speaker 1: on her. She was a messy woman who was also
Speaker 1: in their viewer, sexual predator. On the left, there was
Speaker 1: also this rising sort of criticism of her. You mentioned
Speaker 1: Lenny Letter, that was her newsletter, and that was also
Speaker 1: she has always been ahead of her time, podcasting Before
Speaker 1: a Time newsletter Right Before a Time, And in this newsletter,
Speaker 1: Lenny Letter, she wrote an essay once, a personal essay
Speaker 1: about going to the met Gala, and she wrote that
Speaker 1: she was sitting next to this football player called Odell
Speaker 1: Beckham Junior, and I'm just going to quote from it.
Speaker 1: It was like we were forced to be together. And
Speaker 1: he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look
Speaker 1: at a woman in a bow tie because Lena had
Speaker 1: worn a bow tie to this met gala. I was like,
Speaker 1: this should be called the Metropolitan Museum of getting rejected
Speaker 1: by athletes. So the whole point was how fat and
Speaker 1: ugly she felt sitting next to Adell Beckham Junior, who
Speaker 1: was not interested in talking to her. This was at
Speaker 1: the time when intersectionality not a new concept, but one
Speaker 1: which was rising in value and in prominence. At the time,
Speaker 1: people felt like a white woman was saying that she
Speaker 1: was entitled to attention and affection from a black man,
Speaker 1: and that was a real lightning bolt moment.
Speaker 3: Do you think would you say, Amelia that it's when
Speaker 3: Because she's always done a lot of personal disclosure, and
Speaker 3: so her authors and artists since the beginning of creativity,
Speaker 3: but it was the time when the personal was being
Speaker 3: very politicized. So everything she would say personally, whether it
Speaker 3: was about playing doctors with her sibling or this personal
Speaker 3: experience of how she felt next to this man, suddenly
Speaker 3: everything was taken and overlaid with this political context that
Speaker 3: was often used to cancel her.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm quite literally political because the other thing I'm
Speaker 1: going to throw into this heady cauldron of cancel culture
Speaker 1: is Hillary Clinton. So twenty sixteen, she starts basically part
Speaker 1: time to full time campaigning for Hillary Clinton's presidential run.
Speaker 1: And there was that whole idea around them that this
Speaker 1: was going to be Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling
Speaker 1: in her pants suit. Remember pants suit Nation. This idea
Speaker 1: of women felt jubilant that finally they were going to
Speaker 1: get a woman in the Oval office, and Lena really
Speaker 1: spent the year campaigning for her. Along the way, while
Speaker 1: she was on the campaign trail, she said that she
Speaker 1: was she had an abortion, another reason why the left
Speaker 1: did not love her, And of course the left didn't
Speaker 1: really love Hillary Clinton. She was a centrist candidate who
Speaker 1: happened to be running for the left.
Speaker 3: But I know what she was trying to say like
Speaker 3: that is just such an example of how the conversation changed.
Speaker 3: So as part of her podcast, she'd done an episode
Speaker 3: about abortion, and someone asked her in an interview, have
Speaker 3: you ever had an abortion? And she said, no, I
Speaker 3: wish I had. But taken out of context, what she
Speaker 3: was trying to say is she was trying to be silly.
Speaker 1: And you know, self, step.
Speaker 2: Think that what you're speaking to as well is that
Speaker 2: we didn't know how to take her because she was
Speaker 2: this character, this classic to uncouple Hannah Horvath from Lena Dunham,
Speaker 2: I still think we don't quite know how to do that, and.
Speaker 1: That's why she's cast someone else as in this new exactly.
Speaker 2: And I think that activists now almost have to adopt
Speaker 2: this earnest tone because if you are an activist, if
Speaker 2: you have something very serious to say about the world,
Speaker 2: you can never joke. So she would clumsily say things,
Speaker 2: she would joke about something that.
Speaker 1: Was very seriously because she's very funny.
Speaker 2: She's very funny, and girl was very funny, brilliant writer,
Speaker 2: and so she'd say things tongue in cheek, even on
Speaker 2: girls that were then weaponized because we were like, well,
Speaker 2: what are you about? Are you a feminist or are
Speaker 2: you And it's how feminism became this like stick to
Speaker 2: beat women with, because sometimes she did and she did
Speaker 2: make real mistakes. Like I think it was just after
Speaker 2: the Me Too movement when someone was accused.
Speaker 1: Of Yeah, we should just talk briefly about that, because
Speaker 1: that was I think the fine or nail in the
Speaker 1: coffin Fellina Dunham. The left and the right just couldn't
Speaker 1: handle her anymore. So what happened was in November twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: So yeah, during the metre movement, there was a girl's
Speaker 1: writer named Mary Miller a man, and an actress named
Speaker 1: Aurora Perry No accused him of sexually assaulting her. This
Speaker 1: was back in twenty twelve, but the allegation came out
Speaker 1: in November twenty seventeen. Dunham responded to the accusations and
Speaker 1: she said, Nope, I know him. He did not do this.
Speaker 1: She said. While our first instinct is to listen to
Speaker 1: every woman's story, our insider knowledge makes us confident that
Speaker 1: this accusation is one of the three percent of assault
Speaker 1: cases that are misreported every year. Now I remember reading
Speaker 1: that on Instagram, do you I do I think. I
Speaker 1: talked about it at the time, and I was devastated
Speaker 1: because it just felt like a real betrayal. And I
Speaker 1: don't identify with either the far left or the far right,
Speaker 1: but to me, she lost me in that moment. I
Speaker 1: have to appear right. She lost me and I was
Speaker 1: a huge fan of hers. So then after that she
Speaker 1: went very much to ground. She basically left public eye.
Speaker 1: There were some health reasons for that. She had a hysterectomy,
Speaker 1: Judah endometriosis, and she wrote about that very beautiful lest
Speaker 1: for US Vogue. She also was diagnosed with Ella's dwan
Speaker 1: Lows syndrome, and so she does now identify and describe
Speaker 1: herself as chronically ill. She moved to London in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. She went to rehab. She went to rehab.
Speaker 3: She was addicted to prescription medication and she broke up
Speaker 3: a long term relationship through almost the entirety of girls.
Speaker 1: She was dating Jack Antonoff.
Speaker 3: Who's Taylor Swift's co collaborator, Lord's collaborator Margaret Qually. He's
Speaker 3: married to Margaret Qually, and that was a very defining
Speaker 3: relationship obviously in her life at a very defining time.
Speaker 1: In her life, and.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of biographical similarities. There's a character
Speaker 3: very similar to him in Too Much, which is which
Speaker 3: is also very interesting. But she's also very good friends
Speaker 3: with Taylor Swift, who she no doubt met through her
Speaker 3: relationship with Jack Antonoff and who she remains friends with
Speaker 3: to this day. Taylor Swift was actually at her wedding too.
Speaker 3: She was a brise man, yeah to this musician Loue Felder,
Speaker 3: who's her co creator on Too Much. And she was
Speaker 3: part of remember that whole squad, Yeah, with the nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty nine tour. It was all of these supermodels and
Speaker 3: Lena Dunham And she spoke afterwards, even though she's still
Speaker 3: friends with Taylor, how that wasn't very good for her
Speaker 3: self esteem.
Speaker 1: Oh, it wasn't very good for Taylor's self esteem either.
Speaker 1: They both suffered from eating disorders around that time that
Speaker 1: they've spoken about. She moved to London. She did make
Speaker 1: some films, none of them really hit. And now there's
Speaker 1: this She.
Speaker 3: Has a I think it's a fifty five million dollar
Speaker 3: deal with Netflix, so she's made Too Much, which is
Speaker 3: a ten episode series which I assume will go to
Speaker 3: a second season because I think it's been pretty well received.
Speaker 3: She's also currently directing I think it's a rom com
Speaker 3: with Natalie Portman in New York.
Speaker 1: Called Good Sex.
Speaker 3: She's got a ton of different projects on the boil.
Speaker 3: I think she's so talented, like crazy talented. She's like
Speaker 3: one of the most talented creators of our generation.
Speaker 2: She's a beautiful writer, and I suppose you can compare
Speaker 2: her almost to a bo Burnham. He's a male comedian
Speaker 2: of the same sort of age, and he does something
Speaker 2: really interesting, which is he releases a special, whether it's
Speaker 2: stand up, whether it's on Netflix, like Inside, and then
Speaker 2: he disappears for years. Is that a privilege that's afforded
Speaker 2: to men. I don't know, but I was thinking about, like,
Speaker 2: you're Jerry Seinfeld, You're Larry David, You're Ricky Gervais. I
Speaker 2: think that men are allowed to create, star in develop
Speaker 2: these personas who are imperfect and funny and play with
Speaker 2: that in a way that we don't allow women to.
Speaker 2: I think there was a lot of misogyny, a lot
Speaker 2: of fat phobia in our treatment of Lena Dunham. I
Speaker 2: just think it's very interesting that she's been invited back
Speaker 2: to the party.
Speaker 1: And what I'm so glad she has. What I'm loving
Speaker 1: about this is that jen Z seems to be able
Speaker 1: to rediscover her and girls without bringing the subsequent baggage
Speaker 1: to it. They can appreciate it as the brilliant show
Speaker 1: it was and celebrate her storytelling capacity without then having
Speaker 1: to assume that she has to mean something politically to them.
Speaker 3: So we'll be talking more about too much. If you
Speaker 3: want to get it into your eyes, it's on Netflix
Speaker 3: at the moment.
Speaker 1: You can watch all ten episodes.
Speaker 2: In a moment. An inconvenient truth about alcohol and what
Speaker 2: we're meant to actually do about it. Should Australia mandate
Speaker 2: cancer warnings on alcohol? And how much labels on anything
Speaker 2: really even matter?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 2: In January of this year, the United States Office of
Speaker 2: the Surgeon General recommended that warnings about alcohol's cancer risks
Speaker 2: be displayed on drink packaging. We are, as often cited,
Speaker 2: much to Maya's disappointment, not doctors.
Speaker 1: We're not. Man, we're not.
Speaker 3: You're not.
Speaker 2: But according to a study in The Lancet, alcohol is
Speaker 2: responsible for five thousand, eight hundred new cancer cases per
Speaker 2: year in Australia. That is more than I would have assumed.
Speaker 2: It has been found that any level of alcohol use
Speaker 2: increases the risk for several types of cancers. Now we're
Speaker 2: going to leave the medical studies to the side, because
Speaker 2: the question is how best to communicate this information given
Speaker 2: a lot of Australians actually aren't aware of the risk.
Speaker 2: So in Australia and the US there are warnings on alcohol,
Speaker 2: about its impacts on unborn children and about operating heavy machinery.
Speaker 2: Right did you know the pregnancy warning labels only became
Speaker 2: mandatory in twenty twenty three in Australia.
Speaker 1: Did not know that?
Speaker 2: I thought they'd always been there.
Speaker 1: Is that the one with the picture of the pregnant woman? Yes?
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Ireland is the first country to have a
Speaker 2: mandatory cancer label on alcohol. It hasn't come in yet,
Speaker 2: but they've made the sort of policy and Australian health
Speaker 2: bodies want us to follow suit. My question is do
Speaker 2: we reckon that labels make that much of a difference, Amelia,
Speaker 2: What do you think?
Speaker 1: I went on a real journey here because my instinct
Speaker 1: was to say, no, they're white noise and we tune
Speaker 1: them out and we want the drink. But then I
Speaker 1: read about California. So when you go to California, you
Speaker 1: see labels everywhere. They're on like everything from pleather jackets
Speaker 1: to drink cans, like like soda cans.
Speaker 2: What kind of labels?
Speaker 1: Subway seats there are these huge labels that say, essentially,
Speaker 1: this product may cause cancer. I cannot stress how widespread
Speaker 1: these labels are. But what do you like on a
Speaker 1: subway seat?
Speaker 3: Yes, because of the plastic that's used.
Speaker 1: Because of the plastics. So there was this law in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six which basically identified nine hundred chemicals that
Speaker 1: could be carcinogenic. So it was a pretty low bar,
Speaker 1: and they decided to slap these giant labels on any
Speaker 1: product that contain these chemicals. We're talking big labels too.
Speaker 2: See my response to that, I imagine that if I
Speaker 2: lived in that context, I would stop seeing it. And
Speaker 2: I'm feeling this already, that there's a new study every
Speaker 2: day about a new castinogen, and I just have to go, Okay,
Speaker 2: everything's carcinogenic. I'm not taking it.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I assume too, because as a consumer,
Speaker 1: what can you do about it? So you get a
Speaker 1: car seat, for instance, you rent a car and you
Speaker 1: get a car seat, and on the car seat is
Speaker 1: a giant label that says that the car seat that,
Speaker 1: by the way, you are legally mandated to put in
Speaker 1: the car and news may cause cancer. And you think
Speaker 1: to yourself, well, that's unfortunate because I have to use it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it turns out that they've had this unexpected consequence
Speaker 1: that no one was really thinking about. So there was
Speaker 1: a recent study done that said, let's look into what
Speaker 1: sort of effects these labels have had, and they talked
Speaker 1: to both consumers and to companies. And you're right about
Speaker 1: the consumers because again, using the car seat example, there's
Speaker 1: nothing I can really do about it. I have to
Speaker 1: use the car seat unless they fashioned one out of bamboo,
Speaker 1: which I don't think would be legal. Legal. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: they are the companies. And it turns out that eighty
Speaker 1: percent of the companies that this survey interviewed said that
Speaker 1: the law had prompted them to reformulate their products. So
Speaker 1: think about, for instance, nail polish remover, like, yes, you
Speaker 1: can make it with the carcinogenic substance, or you can
Speaker 1: try and something else that maybe doesn't cause cancer. And
Speaker 1: so what I think is fascinating about this in the
Speaker 1: context of this debate about Australia and the labels and alcohol,
Speaker 1: is that obviously you know something either has alcohol or
Speaker 1: it doesn't. It's a little bit different. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, I think we are seeing a trend towards
Speaker 1: people wanting lower alcohol beverages or maybe even those fancy
Speaker 1: non alcoholic beverages that people are increasingly using for mocktails
Speaker 1: and as a substitute in social events. So I wonder
Speaker 1: if it is going to prompt companies to innovate more
Speaker 1: to make lower alcohols or no alcohols, like a phoney
Speaker 1: Negroni for instance. That could be a positive.
Speaker 2: This is also being discussed in the US around highly
Speaker 2: processed food and wanting to have clear labels about what's
Speaker 2: in the food, and it has been adopted in places
Speaker 2: in South America and apparently has had an impact on
Speaker 2: firstly the knowledge and secondly the choice whether or not
Speaker 2: to buy it. I think Australia has sort of messed
Speaker 2: this up a bit with the Health Star rating because
Speaker 2: I've started to ignore that. Do you actually take any
Speaker 2: notice of the health Star rating?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: And in fact, my child looks at the snack and
Speaker 1: it has one star, and yes, well, it's got a star.
Speaker 2: It's got a star. And what a lot of people
Speaker 2: don't know about your health star rating is that it's
Speaker 2: been compared to other foods in the same category. So
Speaker 2: you're not comparing yoga and chips. You're comparing chips and chips.
Speaker 2: So your four star actually isn't healthy, right.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting. I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: So there are some labels that I've stopped seeing. But
Speaker 2: the difference with alcohol, I was thinking, is most of
Speaker 2: the context in which I consume alcohol, I have absolutely
Speaker 2: no proximity to the label. So I am at a bar,
Speaker 2: a restaurant, even if I'm at work and someone pours
Speaker 2: me a drink, I'm at dinner and someone pours me
Speaker 2: a drink. My behavior around alcohol is that I don't
Speaker 2: generally have it in my house. But I wonder if
Speaker 2: that's going to make any difference if it's being poured
Speaker 2: at a venue. Whereas with cigarettes, for example, where we
Speaker 2: know that the label had made a big difference, there's
Speaker 2: no such thing as getting a cigarette as distinct from
Speaker 2: its packaging, you know what I mean? Like alcohol exists
Speaker 2: is a very specific type of consumer good in that
Speaker 2: often it's not linked to its packaging, so I would
Speaker 2: never see that label, Like do you read labels on things?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: I don't read the fine print, But if it's an
Speaker 3: actual label, yeah, I mean I do. I guess I
Speaker 3: do if it's warning me of something. I'm also a
Speaker 3: little bit wary, you know. I like being educated. I
Speaker 3: like knowing so that I've got choice. I think that
Speaker 3: a lot of people don't know the connection between alcohol
Speaker 3: and cancer. Everyone knows the connection between cigarettes and cancer.
Speaker 3: But I don't think that's a bad thing.
Speaker 2: I wonder too, if the cigarettes and the alcohol. So,
Speaker 2: for example, the two messages on alcohol at the moment
Speaker 2: are about pregnancy and unbond baby and operating heavy machinery.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: There is enormous stigma about those two things, and the
Speaker 2: stigma I think comes from it impacting another person.
Speaker 1: Ah, that's fair.
Speaker 2: So if I sit there at the pub and my
Speaker 2: friend has had four drinks and picks up their car
Speaker 2: keys horrified, you simply wouldn't let it happen. And that's
Speaker 2: been a change in a generation. That's been a really
Speaker 2: positive thing. Same with drinking. The idea that you would
Speaker 2: if a heavily pregnant person was sitting there with the
Speaker 2: bottle of wine in front of her, you'd get looks.
Speaker 2: But cancer impacts you, and so I wonder if there
Speaker 2: will ever be the same amount of stigma around that
Speaker 2: even with cigarettes. My issue with people smoking in public
Speaker 2: is the passive smoke of like it impacting people around them,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I'd be interested to know whether the because obviously the
Speaker 3: photos that are on cigarette packets are extreme and they're
Speaker 3: not like your regular warning label. They're very, very graphic.
Speaker 3: I know that some people have actually black humor, name
Speaker 3: the people and name the photos, and there's a sort
Speaker 3: of a oh, this is Jerry with the lungs, or
Speaker 3: this is you know, Jane with the fingers, whatever it is.
Speaker 3: But it would be probably hard to measure that because
Speaker 3: over the same period of time, the price of cigarettes
Speaker 3: has gone up a huge.
Speaker 2: And advertising was pulled.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is a different kind of detern.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting point. You make me out.
Speaker 1: I'm a bit stuck on it, the idea that we
Speaker 1: all now understand that cigarettes cause cancer. We read articles
Speaker 1: just constantly telling us about the direct links between alcohol
Speaker 1: and cancer. Why do you think it's been so hard
Speaker 1: for us to internalize that as a society.
Speaker 3: I think that alcohol is so much part of our
Speaker 3: culture and so connected to celebrations, whereas they don't have
Speaker 3: a celebratory cigarette. I mean, you know, there used to
Speaker 3: be that cliche after really good sex, you know, people
Speaker 3: would say, I feel like a cigarette. But it's not like, Oh,
Speaker 3: it's you've got a promotion at work, let's all have
Speaker 3: a cigarette.
Speaker 1: There's never been that row and it's your one cigarette
Speaker 1: a week. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That smoking I think was that widespread in say my parents' generation,
Speaker 2: like it was something that everyone did, and you see
Speaker 2: it even in films. It's like the easiest way for
Speaker 2: them to sit to wait themselves. Within the context of
Speaker 2: the seventies is that everyone has a cigarette in I've.
Speaker 3: Seen a lot more smoking in popular culture, like on
Speaker 3: and just like that, for example, the way same as smokes,
Speaker 3: the way carry sometimes smokes.
Speaker 1: There's also been this wishful thinking about the idea that
Speaker 1: young people are going to understand just how bad alcohol
Speaker 1: is and not drink, And there's been this rising trend
Speaker 1: of articles about how gen z have rejected alcohol as
Speaker 1: a social lubricant in the way that past generations loved it.
Speaker 1: It turns out that really was just wishful thinking. A
Speaker 1: new report and the Financial Times says that seventy three
Speaker 1: percent of Gen Z admitted to consuming alcohol in the
Speaker 1: past six months. And so it turns out the reason
Speaker 1: why they weren't drinking was because they weren't in the
Speaker 1: workforce and they didn't have money to spend on alcohol.
Speaker 1: But now that they're aging into the workforce and earning
Speaker 1: real money, it turns out that they like a drink
Speaker 1: just as much as any other generation. I think it's
Speaker 1: time for a bit of scurrillous gossip, just to lighten
Speaker 1: the mood here a little bit. Prince Harry and King
Speaker 1: Charles may be working towards making amends, and I am
Speaker 1: so relieved. I've been very worried about this.
Speaker 2: What do we know about this? Because I saw the
Speaker 2: headlines over the weekend, what steps have been taken?
Speaker 1: It's actually not even that scurrilous. There's photos. So the
Speaker 1: Mail on Sunday had the scoop. They said that the
Speaker 1: Monarch and the Duke of Sussex's aides met for a
Speaker 1: secret peace summit in London last week and there were
Speaker 1: photos in fact of these high level officials leaving the meeting.
Speaker 1: So It took place at a place called the Royal
Speaker 1: Overseas League. That is a private members club that was
Speaker 1: set up to promote wait for it, international friendship. Oh
Speaker 1: across the pond overseass two words for some reason, and
Speaker 1: I can just smell the other bound books in their car.
Speaker 1: It was very the Crown. I want to go to
Speaker 1: their people, shaman might say, who is there? So I'm
Speaker 1: glad you asked that, mere because we've got their names.
Speaker 1: Meredith Mains who was Prince Harry's new CEO, Liam McGuire,
Speaker 1: who was the Sussex's pr lead. That's a busy job,
Speaker 1: isn't it. And Tobin Andre who was King Charles's communications secretary.
Speaker 1: Now what I really want to know is who leaked this?
Speaker 1: Which side do you think has more interest in leaking
Speaker 1: that these talks are happening?
Speaker 2: May I the're the pr expert.
Speaker 3: I think it was a joint decision to leak it,
Speaker 3: because it's almost a leak off, right. I imagine that
Speaker 3: the terms and conditions by which this meeting and any
Speaker 3: future meetings would happen, because part of the reason they
Speaker 3: haven't happened until now is because no one trusts the
Speaker 3: Sussexes anymore because every text message, every phone call, every conversation,
Speaker 3: a lot of these really private exchanges have become fodder
Speaker 3: for interviews, for books, for Netflix documentaries. So I think
Speaker 3: for anyone to feel safe having these conversations, the leaking
Speaker 3: policy would have had to be very much laid out,
Speaker 3: So I think it was probably mutual decision.
Speaker 1: I also think Harry has a real incentive here to
Speaker 1: patch things up fast. Now I'm going to get a
Speaker 1: little bit pragmatic and maybe a little bit more, but
Speaker 1: about this, Charles is in his mid seventies. By all accounts,
Speaker 1: William is determined not to let Harry get away with
Speaker 1: any of this royal ish funny business anymore. So for
Speaker 1: instance calling himself the Duke of Sussex. Jamie Kern Lee
Speaker 1: mckho was the first person to have Megan on a
Speaker 1: podcast as an interview guest showed on her Instagram that
Speaker 1: Meghan had sent her a gift using the HRH nomenclature,
Speaker 1: which William is simply not going to allow. So when
Speaker 1: William becomes king, all these royal sort of trappings are
Speaker 1: going to go away. So I think what Harry wants
Speaker 1: to do is shore up what he can use and
Speaker 1: what he can't use now, because soon enough it's going
Speaker 1: to be very hard for him to get away with it.
Speaker 3: He's so completely excommunicated.
Speaker 2: As soon as I saw this headline, my first reaction
Speaker 2: was concerned for Charles because I went, oh, he's sicker
Speaker 2: than we thought because he was diagnosed with cancer in
Speaker 2: February last We do not know what type of cancer
Speaker 2: that is still there was Also, when Harry recently did
Speaker 2: that interview following the court case, he said, I.
Speaker 3: Don't know how long my father, Yeah, but they were
Speaker 3: very upset about that.
Speaker 2: They weren't set about that.
Speaker 3: Firstly, he doesn't know, and secondly that's a pretty awful
Speaker 3: thing to say.
Speaker 2: But for Charles to come to the table here, I
Speaker 2: just thought, there is nothing like mortality to kind of
Speaker 2: bring potential or an attempt at reconciliation.
Speaker 3: You know who wasn't represented at that meeting, William No.
Speaker 1: And nor will he after the break?
Speaker 3: Has posting on Instagram and Facebook become cringe? And are
Speaker 3: we heading towards posting zero?
Speaker 2: What unlimited out loud access? We drop episodes every Tuesday
Speaker 2: and Thursday exclusively for Mum and Maya subscribers. Follow the
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Speaker 4: I just came back from Greece, so I definitely would
Speaker 4: say I insufferably overposted on that holiday, both grid posts
Speaker 4: and stories. Most of the time, though I probably consistently
Speaker 4: post Instagram stories grid posts probably more, maybe once every
Speaker 4: two weeks.
Speaker 5: I do not post a lot to my main kind
Speaker 5: of like Instagram or TikTok feeds. But what I do
Speaker 5: use social media for a lot more is stories. I
Speaker 5: kind of like that it's temporary and there's less pressure
Speaker 5: I feel to get it right. You don't have to
Speaker 5: curate anything, you don't have to get a caption. It
Speaker 5: can just be a lot simpler. So I do not
Speaker 5: post regularly on social media. Maybe once a year if that.
Speaker 5: If we've been on holidays and I want to post
Speaker 5: a photo, I feel this weird pressure about getting the
Speaker 5: caption right and do I need to ask a friend
Speaker 5: to edit the lighting?
Speaker 1: And like, who am I.
Speaker 4: Doing this for?
Speaker 5: Because I don't care, and in my real life I.
Speaker 3: Don't care if you know anybody who's on holidays at
Speaker 3: the moment, particularly in Europe. You might be struck by
Speaker 3: how surprising it is to see this almost retro use
Speaker 3: of social media where they're posting his what I ate
Speaker 3: for lunch, Here's me in front of a landmark, Here's
Speaker 3: what I bought in a shop. I've got a few
Speaker 3: friends who are overseas at the moment, and it's such
Speaker 3: a stark contrast because it feels like what social media
Speaker 3: isn't anymore. And I only realized that when I started
Speaker 3: seeing those photos again. As social media has evolved, the
Speaker 3: baseline expectation for posting keeps rising. We've been posting, well
Speaker 3: some of us for fifteen years now, and it started
Speaker 3: off with sort of dashed off tweets. Then it became
Speaker 3: carefully composed Instagram photos, which were replaced in turn by
Speaker 3: TikTok clips, which are increasingly showing the production value of television.
Speaker 3: Have you noticed that it's now and you flick through,
Speaker 3: everything's moving towards short form video content. So there's very
Speaker 3: few pictures of people's breakfasts, very few pictures of sunsets,
Speaker 3: very few pictures of people's dogs or selfies or their families.
Speaker 3: And women, we know that women are posting less and
Speaker 3: lurking more and there are three. There are actually four
Speaker 3: reasons for this, which I'm just quickly going to go
Speaker 3: through and tell me if any of these resonate with you.
Speaker 3: The first one is with everything going on in the world,
Speaker 3: a lot of which we see via social thanks to
Speaker 3: the algorithm, people are feeling self conscious about posting just
Speaker 3: sort of mundane, benign updates about their life because you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of shouting and a lot of assumptions
Speaker 3: are being made by what you don't post.
Speaker 1: Or what you do post.
Speaker 2: I think specifically in a context where there is discussions
Speaker 2: around Gaza and what is happening in the US with
Speaker 2: Ice at the moment, that anything you post does look
Speaker 2: tone deaf beside the worst thing happening in the world
Speaker 2: right now, and therefore people are sort of opting out
Speaker 2: whether you post or you don't post, that will be weaponized.
Speaker 3: Because those things didn't used to be on Instagram so much,
Speaker 3: but now there's so many brands posting and creators and
Speaker 3: influencers they've sort of taken over, and news brands as well.
Speaker 3: The second reason, which I alluded to earlier reels it's
Speaker 3: now whether it's on TikTok or whether it's on Instagram,
Speaker 3: even on Facebook, people are posting these kind of movie
Speaker 3: trailer production quality values, and social is a place of
Speaker 3: work for a lot of people, influencers, creators, and brands.
Speaker 3: So these are big budgets. It takes a lot of
Speaker 3: time to edit and produce and film these reels, and.
Speaker 1: Not everybody's up to it, right, And that's not an accident.
Speaker 2: I think, as you say, the average person, women are
Speaker 2: posting less and less, and that is because of a
Speaker 2: very intentional algorithm change that happened, which was we are
Speaker 2: going to present your content to strangers. This is no
Speaker 2: longer about friends engaging. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about that
Speaker 2: on Instagram. Initially it was like I was sharing with
Speaker 2: my community, and now it's been like who.
Speaker 1: Chose to follow you?
Speaker 3: Now they were interested in what Jesse had for breakfast,
Speaker 3: or maybe that you've got a haircut.
Speaker 2: Now you're performing to strangers. And therefore it is the
Speaker 2: erasure of context, which brings it back to your I
Speaker 2: suppose either you post about everything all of the time
Speaker 2: or you post about nothing.
Speaker 3: That context is really important. And that's the next point
Speaker 3: is that millennials who grew up on social media. Like
Speaker 3: you two, you're moving into middle age and seeking more
Speaker 3: privacy in your lives. You don't want to be perceived
Speaker 3: all the time, that sense of I don't want to
Speaker 3: show the world what I'm doing. It's almost like everybody's
Speaker 3: woken up from this collective fever dream of why were
Speaker 3: we just sharing all the private moments from our lives?
Speaker 3: Firstly with a bunch of people who we might you know,
Speaker 3: the person who went to school with, or an ex
Speaker 3: boyfriend or an ex boyfriend's mother.
Speaker 1: That still follows you.
Speaker 3: And now it's literally why would I want to share
Speaker 3: those things with strangers? And that idea of being perceived
Speaker 3: by people either who you don't know very well or
Speaker 3: you don't at all. And then the fourth reason is
Speaker 3: group chats. This is relatively new over the last few years.
Speaker 3: If you wanted to share an observation about something, a
Speaker 3: picture about something, some news that you've got a promotion,
Speaker 3: or that you'd had to put your dog down, you
Speaker 3: would do that on social media. Now you're much more
Speaker 3: likely to do it in a group chat.
Speaker 1: I think there's a fifth reason ai as Ai scraped
Speaker 1: the internet for fodder. People are understanding you don't want
Speaker 1: to put your baby photo up there because your baby's
Speaker 1: going to end up being used by AI to make
Speaker 1: a completely unrelated video.
Speaker 3: So Jesse, I was reading this amazing piece about posting
Speaker 3: on we which is kind of like everyone's feeling a
Speaker 3: bit weird about posting.
Speaker 1: It was in The New Yorker this week.
Speaker 3: I certainly feel that way. I used to do insta
Speaker 3: babbles on Instagram all the time, where I just sort
Speaker 3: of chat, you know, spontaneously while I put my makeup
Speaker 3: on a couple of months ago, I felt uncomfortable about
Speaker 3: doing that, and I stopped doing that. And I used
Speaker 3: to post lots of sort of getting ready videos and stuff.
Speaker 3: I don't do that anymore. And I loved the idea
Speaker 3: of understanding why. And it's said in this article social
Speaker 3: now is just used for punditory provocation and promotion. Does
Speaker 3: that ring truth for you?
Speaker 2: Yes? And it is my greatest concern, like reading this
Speaker 2: about who we're leaving social media too, because I think
Speaker 2: it's a very skewed vision of who people are, what
Speaker 2: they care about, morality, ethics, tone, discourse, all of those
Speaker 2: things being left to the content creators now. When someone
Speaker 2: uploads something onto social media. It's sort of like, oh,
Speaker 2: are you trying to be a content creator? You kind
Speaker 2: of don't know why else.
Speaker 3: It feels vulnerable because people talk about feeling cringe when
Speaker 3: they post something.
Speaker 1: But why is that bad? Why don't we just leave
Speaker 1: it to the professionals.
Speaker 2: I suppose the reason why I worry about leaving it
Speaker 2: to the inadverted commas professionals is because of the tone
Speaker 2: of that conversation. You get the extremes on both sides.
Speaker 2: You get the people like exactly what it said here,
Speaker 2: get people who are provocative on.
Speaker 3: Purpose professionals, and we don't want to do it anymore.
Speaker 3: You haven't posted on social for a long time.
Speaker 1: Have you? No?
Speaker 2: But like normal people, sometimes I have to go on
Speaker 2: to TikTok and I scroll and I scroll, or I
Speaker 2: scroll on Instagram and I go The normal people aren't here.
Speaker 2: The normal people have left this party. The normal people
Speaker 2: are all watching. It's like, you know what, it's like.
Speaker 2: It's a party and it's four am, and all the
Speaker 2: normal people with normal lives went home and you look
Speaker 2: around and you think all parties are like this all
Speaker 2: of the time, And people are throwing things and there's
Speaker 2: vomit in the corner and there's like people on the
Speaker 2: hard drugs and you're just looking around, going this is
Speaker 2: this is terrible.
Speaker 1: People telling me about Amazon Prime sales.
Speaker 3: People being way too intense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's descended into chaos, and you go, what
Speaker 2: has happened to parties? And it's like, no, no, no, it's
Speaker 2: not the party, it's the people.
Speaker 4: Who are left.
Speaker 1: But on the flip side, Jesse, I'm going to attempt
Speaker 1: a more optimistic take on this trend, which is maybe
Speaker 1: the normal people quote unquote I have just realized that
Speaker 1: real life is much better than social media, and now
Speaker 1: they're prioritizing IROL experiences. This is my theory as to
Speaker 1: why we've all suddenly become obsessed with tennis. Have you
Speaker 1: noticed that, yes, I know you always liked. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: everyone's watching the Wimbledon front row this year so much
Speaker 1: more than they ever have in past years. And I
Speaker 1: feel like the hype around sporting events, around the eras tour,
Speaker 1: around live music generally is because people are turning to
Speaker 1: real life more. They're valuing it more. And I've noticed
Speaker 1: that even in my group chats, particularly with American friends,
Speaker 1: because the enormity of what's going on is difficult to
Speaker 1: summarize and get at. People are even retreating from group chats,
Speaker 1: or maybe they're just not talking to me. Either way, Yes,
Speaker 1: I can't.
Speaker 3: Believe you haven't said the word capitalism.
Speaker 2: That's the thing, right, is that these social media companies
Speaker 2: couldn't charge any of us to be on it, right,
Speaker 2: And in fact.
Speaker 1: There are those pictures of our breakfast.
Speaker 2: Yes, that incredible documentary called The Social Dilemma made the
Speaker 2: point that it is one of the widest used products
Speaker 2: that every one would refuse to pay for. In fact,
Speaker 2: most people not only wouldn't pay a dollary use that,
Speaker 2: they would pay a dollar not And the only people
Speaker 2: who have upheld these companies is advertisers. And I think
Speaker 2: that that's eroded trust. But the reason why Amelia, I
Speaker 2: think your optimism is totally misguided is because people have
Speaker 2: not left the party and gone home. They are standing
Speaker 2: by the windows, addicted to watching what's going on. If
Speaker 2: you looked at the time people are spending on social
Speaker 2: media that hasn't gone down, that has not gone down.
Speaker 3: That's the thing we're not posting. We're lurking.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Men have always been lurkers, right, Women have always been posters, commenters, likers, sharers,
Speaker 3: but now women aren't doing that anymore, not as much.
Speaker 3: And as Jesse said, we're looking through the window and
Speaker 3: the problem with that. If we've just left the party,
Speaker 3: that's different. Let them, you know, eat, But because we're
Speaker 3: watching it, it's skewing our idea of reality.
Speaker 2: The other element to why millennials in particular stopped posting
Speaker 2: is because we watched as the dumb stuff that the
Speaker 2: famous people posted got dug up.
Speaker 3: So the dig which we've talked about on this show,
Speaker 3: it was weaponized.
Speaker 2: It was all weaponized.
Speaker 1: So I think what happened was Trevor Noah, Yes, when
Speaker 1: was that he was named to the Daily Show chair
Speaker 1: after John Stewart left, So that was when the Daily
Speaker 1: Show was absolutely at its peak. Trevor Noah was named
Speaker 1: the new chair and people dug up all these sort
Speaker 1: of fat phobic, fat shaming tweets.
Speaker 2: How many careers like have been I mean destroyed might
Speaker 2: be too big a word, but have been impacted.
Speaker 3: What's that idea of social excavation, which is why you know,
Speaker 3: when Lauren Sanchez Bezos got married, she wiped her Instagram.
Speaker 3: It's this idea and if you look at a gen
Speaker 3: Zeta or Jen Alfa's social they'll only have on Maine,
Speaker 3: which is in their feed. They'll only have like three
Speaker 3: or four posts. For millennials and gen X's it was
Speaker 3: like a record of everything.
Speaker 1: Every time we didn't avocado toast in a sun dappled room.
Speaker 3: You go back and it was a record of our relationships.
Speaker 3: It was almost like a public diary. But this idea
Speaker 3: of being perceived and not wanting to be perceived, that's
Speaker 3: something that gen Z's and jen alf Is are much
Speaker 3: more savvy about because they don't want people drawing conclusions
Speaker 3: about them because of something they posted two weeks ago,
Speaker 3: let alone two years ago.
Speaker 1: That's why Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift have never followed
Speaker 1: each other on Instagram because they know that the unfollow
Speaker 1: would be such a big story.
Speaker 2: Which I find it interesting that jen Alphas and Z's
Speaker 2: have pulled back because when I look at my own
Speaker 2: social media usage, and if I'm being entirely honest with myself,
Speaker 2: I think it was indexed a lot on whether or
Speaker 2: not I was courting, like in my single life. So
Speaker 2: I wonder if too, if you're on sort of hinge
Speaker 2: or you're on bumble and.
Speaker 3: You're but it's it's more curately dating. It's more curated
Speaker 3: and with less shots.
Speaker 2: Because you won't be paved when you're seeing You.
Speaker 3: Don't want someone going back and seeing pictures of you
Speaker 3: with your exes, or you don't necessarily want to be
Speaker 3: known in that public way, whereas our generation it felt
Speaker 3: like we really wanted to be known. It's like remember
Speaker 3: my Space, which it was like what are your favorite books?
Speaker 3: What are your favorite movie?
Speaker 1: It happened quickly, Like I remember, I had my first
Speaker 1: child in twenty eighteen, and practically the first thing I
Speaker 1: did was post a picture of him on Instagram. By
Speaker 1: the time I had my second child in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: I was not putting a photo of her on the
Speaker 1: internet ever.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, A big thank you to all of you the
Speaker 2: out loud as well. We we are done. That was
Speaker 2: great for listening to today's show and our fabulous team
Speaker 2: for putting this show together. We'll be back in your
Speaker 2: ears tomorrow. Bye.
Speaker 3: Shout out to any Muma Maya subscribers listening. If you
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Speaker 3: subscribing to Mom and Maya is the very best way
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