There are a lot of things I’m willing to do for my podcast — a lot of sacrifices I’ve made over the years, both big and small. And usually I don’t like to draw attention to these sacrifices because no one tunes in to listen to my personal problems. But today I have to make an exception to my normal practice. And once you see the footage I’m about to share with you, you’ll see why.
I just endured what could be the single greatest trial of my podcasting career, if not my entire life on this planet. Without the assistance of any mind-altering substances or the YouTube fast-forward button or anything like that, I just listened to multiple minutes of Michelle Obama’s new podcast called “IMO.” Each episode is a full hour, and it features Michelle Obama, her brother Craig, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, a special guest.
The special guest, however, isn’t an important part of the formula. Whether the guest is there or not, you can expect to listen to approximately one hour of Michelle and her brother talking about themselves. It’s actually impressive, the degree to which the entire show is about inane, completely uninteresting details of these two people’s lives.
Here’s just a sampling of the first episode. And frankly, it’s an impressive achievement if you can even manage to get through this short montage of the most banal and uninteresting footage ever recorded. Here it is:
When she says “blah blah blah” at the end of that clip — that was the one moment, in this entire hour-long episode, that really resonated with me on a deep level. That was when I thought she recognized that actually, people didn’t want to hear about her inferiority complex at Princeton, or her mom giving her an alarm clock as a kid, or the precise educational credentials of her husband. Maybe this would mark a pivot point in the podcast, where she starts talking about something remotely interesting. But it never happened. It never even came close to happening.
By far the best part of the first episode was the comments section, which included lines like: “This should be called “Drop the Mike” with Michelle Obama”; “Remember when this guy drowned his chef in a lovers quarrel?”; and “Joan Rivers was Right.” And then Mark Dice chimes in with, “Which one is Michelle?” — which is, credit where it’s due, one of the funnier YouTube comments I’ve read in quit some time. Then there’s a bunch of people wondering why she’s unwilling to be seen in public with her husband anymore. And then there’s this observation: “Someone here has got some serious balls, by that I mean whoever hasn’t disabled the comments yet.”
And that last person makes a particularly good point. You will not find a single positive comment anywhere on the page. As of Wednesday afternoon, a full 24 hours after this episode launched, it managed to rack up just 65,000 views. And more than half of that figure is from trolls. In the first 15 hours, it had under 20,000 views. Now everyone’s flooding in to mock it — but in the first two days it did not come close to 100 thousand views, which is the bare minimum you’d expect a podcast like this to achieve. Overnight it seems to have made it up to 160 thousand views, which means they’re almost certainly paying for views now. But all in all, this show has not resonated, to put it mildly.
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It’s actually incredible, if you think about it. Someone as famous as Michelle Obama launches a podcast that’s been so widely promoted and publicized, and yet no one’s watching it. The media tells us that Michelle is highly popular and would be a shoo-in if she ran for president. But the numbers suggest that the public isn’t all that interested in her.
Just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, I subjected myself to the second episode of the podcast, which was also released on Wednesday. This one features an actress as a guest, but it doesn’t remotely change what they talk about, which is themselves. Watch:
The lack of self-awareness is genuinely breathtaking, and at least a little hilarious. That last clip came at the very end of the episode, by the way. She spends the whole time talking about herself. And then she nosedives into astrology, and she claims she’s really interested in trying to understand other people. Having discussed herself for two hours across two episodes, Michelle Obama wants you to know that she’s really interested in understanding other people. That’s what this is all about. And once again, the comments are full of people asking what Big Mike did to the chef. This episode has about 75 thousand views in two days. Just for comparison sake, Joe Rogan released an episode on the same day. It has a million views.
Unfortunately for anyone hoping the misery would end here, there was one more video — a “digital exclusive” — that they uploaded along with these episodes. Picture the most cliched, trite content imaginable. And somehow this will probably exceed your expectations. Even if you managed to get through the other two clips, there’s a very good chance this will take you out. Watch:
Whatever focus group they paid to come up with segments like this, they need to get a refund immediately. It’s like if you asked AI to generate a relatable podcast. It would come up with exactly this segment, and have everyone say exactly what these people are saying, and then it would give the podcast the name “IMO.” This is what Michelle Obama — who again, some people still pretend is major star and a potential presidential contender — is capable of producing. By the way, that video about hotdogs has 25 thousand views.
This is not just a problem that Michelle is facing. This is a broader crisis on the Left. The trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, for example, has just launched yet another effort to get himself some publicity, after falling off the face of the Earth. Specifically he released a new book that promises a “modern lens to womanhood,” even though it’s written by a man who decided he was a woman a couple of years ago. And predictably, his book launch has been a complete disaster, like everything else he’s ever been associated with. The word “flop” does not begin to describe this particular publication. It sits at number 1,081 on Amazon at the moment, just a few days after its release. A day after it’s release it had not cracked the top 500. This probably translates to maybe a few hundred books sold, at most. To go along with a rating of 2.9 stars on Amazon. So it’s an unmitigated failure.
Initially, I wasn’t even aware that Mulvaney’s book had come out. But then I saw that, like Michelle Obama’s podcast, pretty much every major media publication in the country has been covering it. CBS News, for example, had a friendly sit-down with Mulvaney. They asked him a bunch of softball questions which he somehow couldn’t answer. Getting a sit-down interview on CBS to talk about your book is the kind of promotion most authors can only dream about. Conservative authors especially. But this is the sort of assistance Mulvaney, as the great trans mascot, gets. And it has not moved the needle for him even one inch.
But maybe Mulvaney’s most embarrassing media appearance came on “The View,” when he didn’t seem capable of articulating a coherent thought. Watch:
So “Whoopi Goldberg” begins by distancing herself from Gavin Newsom, because he dared to suggest — dishonestly — that he doesn’t think men should compete against women in sports. And then she asks Mulvaney about his thoughts on the topic, and it turns out that he has no thoughts. He can’t defend the idea of men competing against women, because it makes no sense. So instead, he defers to someone named “Schuyler” who he says is a “trans athlete.”
From what I can tell, Schuyler was a top-performing female swimmer at Harvard. Then she decided during a “gap year” that she’s really a man, so she swam with the men. And in that capacity, she went from a record-breaking swimmer to one of the worst athletes on the team. Somehow this is supposed to be proof of something, I guess. If you ask Schuyler, it’s proof that men don’t have any advantages over women in sports, even though Schuyler herself is living proof that the opposite is true.
But as the interview continued, Whoopi offered her own assessment of the situation, in an attempt to pick up the slack for Mulvaney.
Here’s how that went:
What Whoopi pretends not to understand is that no one’s “assuming” that women are weaker. We know that it’s true. It’s true in every relevant respect. This is why high school boys can defeat the best women’s soccer team on the planet. It’s why women don’t play in the NFL. And it’s why no one is watching “The View” anymore, or buying Dylan Mulvaney’s book, or listening to Michelle Obama’s podcast. People are tired of being lied to, in the name of a political ideology that becomes more discredited by the day.
We could add to this list the total failure of Meghan Markel’s Netflix show, and her Spotify podcast that was just canceled. These are all people — all leftists — who have been heavily promoted by the media and Hollywood. They get the kind of mainstream exposure that nobody on the Right has ever gotten or will ever get. And yet the audience doesn’t care. They can’t sell books or a podcast. The public is totally disinterested.
In fact, just about the only success the Left has had lately is with Gavin Newsom’s new podcast. That’s actually doing fairly well. But it’s only doing well because his guests are all Republicans. If Gavin Newsom were doing a solo show, or talking to other Leftists, it would do about as well as “IMO.” In other words, the Left has the same problem culturally that they have politically.
They have no stars. No leaders in the culture or on the political scene. There’s a reason nearly all of the most popular political podcasts are right-wing. No matter how aggressively the Left tries to force demented actors and disingenuous politicians and incoherent ideologies on the public, it’s just not working. They can shove all of these people in our face, but what they’re discovering is that they can’t make us care.
