Former US first lady Michelle Obama has launched a new podcast called IMO (as in, ‘in my opinion’). Co-hosted by her and her brother, Craig Robinson, the pod’s aim, according to Obama, is to ‘let people in’ and ‘have honest conversations about how people are working it through’.
It’s as boring and full of platitudes as it sounds – I barely got through the first episode. Still, what do we learn? Obama and her brother were close growing up. They went to the same university. Their parents would talk to them over the kitchen table…
On and on it goes in this vein. They tell us they grew up in a two-bedroom apartment that was so small the dining room had to be used as a living room. We even get to hear about the homemade decor their mother made for their shared bedroom, which Obama calls ‘poverty crafting’.
The faux-humility soon grates. ‘What’s really ironic is how we were talking about how small our place was growing up’, says Robinson, ‘and look where we’re doing this taping, in this big beautiful Airbnb’. Obama chimes in at this point, saying, ‘Who would’ve thought we’d be able to be in a snazzy place like this?’. Which would sound a little more sincere if it didn’t come from a former resident of the White House.
This terrible show is not Obama’s first podcast rodeo. She’s got a history of turning out this stuff. In 2020, she partnered with Spotify for The Michelle Obama Podcast, interviewing her husband. Then, in 2023, she made The Light Podcast with Audible – one of the episodes was titled, ‘Our hair is a portal into our souls’.
It should be clear by now that Obama is incapable of coming up with compelling content for contemporary audiences. Even the Financial Times, a bastion of the centrist establishment, has called IMO ‘dreary and in denial’.
Media Matters for America (MMA) recently released a report complaining that the most popular figures online are ‘overwhelmingly right-leaning’. MMA misses the point. Shows such as The Joe Rogan Experience are popular not because they are ‘right-leaning’, but because they are authentic, unguarded and interesting. Unlike IMO, which is a preening vanity project in which someone who is already rich and famous pretends to be just like us.
Indeed, in what must be the most disingenuous moment of the year, Robinson fondly reminisces about his childhood chores, in particular the smell of Pine-Sol, a detergent brand. ‘Ooh, nothin’ like Pine-Sol!’, says Obama. It turns out, though, that this super-duper, extra-real story about the warm nostalgic smell of mopping floors is not quite what it seems. Pine-Sol sponsored the episode.
That isn’t the only time Obama and Robinson pull this trick. They also tell a charming story about renting half of a two-family house that their aunt owned, and how great that was. That feeds effortlessly into an ad for Chase Bank home-mortgage lending. At points, IMO feels like pure grift.
It’s all a bit of a shame. Over a decade ago, I had genuine admiration for Michelle Obama. She’s a successful, smart woman. But she’s now posing as someone she’s not. She’s downplaying, perhaps even hiding, the privileged life she has led, in order to sell Pine-Sol to an audience that she clearly thinks is very stupid.
Obama has often made being first lady sound like an inconvenience, but here she suggests it caused serious resentment in her marriage. Robinson even tells her ‘not to penalise [Barack] for being really good at what he does’. As someone who loved the public image the Obamas projected when Barack won in 2008, that was jarring – like finding out your cool aunt and uncle in the big city actually secretly hate each other and live separate lives.
This also hints at a missed opportunity to speak more openly. There’s so much Obama could talk about honestly and genuinely. She and Robinson could have talked about their parents, and in particular their father, Fraser Robinson, who had multiple sclerosis. They could have talked about anything, in fact, that touched on their real lives, and it would have been far more interesting than the dull puddle of insincerity they serve up on IMO.
But it seems Michelle Obama simply doesn’t care to share anything with her audience. She assumes the Democratic base – which, let’s face it, is the only source of audience for this show – will consume any old slop. The rest of us, however, will give this empty, cliché-ridden affair a very wide berth.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.