Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Michelle Obama has launched a new podcast with her older brother called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. IMO stands for “in my opinion”, though the topic remains woolly. “This show isn’t about us being experts in anything other than the lives that we’ve lived,” says Obama. “But what we do have are a lot of opinions.” Hmmm.This isn’t Obama’s first podcasting venture. As well as founding the production company Higher Ground with her husband, former US president Barack Obama, she also hosted The Michelle Obama Podcast in 2020, in which she talked to friends about politics and community.But IMO is a very different project, and not just because it’s available in audio and video. The opening episode finds the pair talking about their humble beginnings in the South Side of Chicago, what they admired about their parents and congratulating themselves for being siblings who are also best friends. Delightful for them, I’m sure, but listeners may struggle to muster an interest in the exact layout of their childhood bedrooms, or how their parents taught them to be punctual, or how they loved the smell of the cleaning fluid their mother used to mop the floors — the same cleaning fluid that is sponsoring this podcast, it turns out.The second episode is more structured and marks the start of the show’s regular format, in which these self-proclaimed non-experts endeavour to solve dilemmas submitted by listeners. This week there’s also a guest, actor and writer Issa Rae, who is invited to offer opinions of her own. The first dilemma is from a woman with a query so rambling that the actual question — something about balancing friendships — gets lost. Their advice? That is also hard to glean amid the platitudes and generalising about men and women and how they handle friendships (men like surface-level chit-chat, according to Obama, while women “are sociologists” who always dig deep).Obama talks with conviction, yet her thoughts and pronouncements are resolutely bland; the days when she made pronouncements such as “When they go low, we go high” feel like ancient history. No doubt, during her time in the White House, she had to master the art of being warm and engaged while not saying anything that could be construed as controversial. But here she sounds like an influencer dispensing wellness and self-love mantras while Rae coos: “That’s so real.” This would be fine were Obama an actual influencer and not a former first lady launching a podcast about having opinions, and who must have some pretty spicy thoughts on, say, the activities of the current US president. But this series seems to go out of its way not to mention current events. According to the blurb from Higher Ground, IMO finds Obama “at her most relaxed and honest”. On this evidence, dreary and in denial would seem a more accurate assessment.
