Founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and author of Red Notice Bill Browder (left) and Daily Maverick editor-at-large Richard Poplak (right). (Photos: Supplied)
More than 3,000 attendees of the Daily Maverick webinar heard that ‘Vladimir Putin is a criminal kleptocrat and his main objective has been to steal money. And then afterwards, his main objective is to stay in power to keep his money and not go to jail.’
“He’s never told the truth once in his life. He’s like the Tinder Swindler. Everything he says should be discounted, and one should then say, what are his incentives? What’s he really trying to achieve?” said Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, author of Red Notice and architect of the Magnitsky Act, about Russian President Vladimir Putin during an exclusive Daily Maverick webinar on Sunday night.
Daily Maverick editor-at-large Richard Poplak and Browder were discussing the character of Putin, his recent invasion of Ukraine and the effect this will have on South Africa and the rest of the world.
Russia: not a country but a criminal organisation
“Russia is not a sovereign country in the way we think of sovereign countries, it’s a criminal organisation, with all the powers of a sovereign state. So any person who enters into the Russian government does so not to serve their country, but to steal as much money as possible,” said Browder.
Browder said that since Putin came to power 22 years ago, about a trillion dollars had been stolen from the Russian state, with Putin himself raking in more than $200-billion.
Browder explained that Putin and his ministers get away with this by using oligarchs, well-known rich people around them who hold the money, then launder it through different countries where it’s invested in mainstream businesses.
“When you see the Forbes list of the most wealthy people, half that money doesn’t belong to them,” said Browder. “It belongs to Vladimir Putin.”
And it’s not just wealthy Russians who hold the money. Browder said the Russian government had created a “population of Western enablers”, who help them launder and hide the money.
“They’ve succeeded in fully compromising and integrating into the Western society and allowing for many, many years the most outrageous financial crimes to go unpunished.
“There’s plenty of dirty Russian money everywhere,” said Browder, emphasising that the UK is particularly bad because this type of criminality goes uninvestigated there.
‘A liar and a con man’
“Vladimir Putin is a liar and a con man,” said Browder. “And everything he says or does has an ulterior purpose. I don’t think that Vladimir Putin has an ideology. I don’t think he cares about the Soviet Union. I don’t think he cares about Nato.”
Browder was responding to a question from Poplak about whether Western countries should have paid more attention to Putin’s pro-Soviet stance, such as he projected at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and in various speeches and essays after that.
“Vladimir Putin is a criminal kleptocrat and his main objective has been to steal money. And then afterwards, his main objective is to stay in power to keep his money and not go to jail. And so he’s not thinking about anything other than survival.”
What this war is really about
“This war is not about any of those things he said,” said Browder.
Browder explained that Putin was first put into power to get rid of the oligarchy system and bring order to the state following the hyperinflation and destitute state the previous president, Boris Yeltsin, left Russia in.
“This war is that he’s been in power for 22 years, people have not gotten better off after all those promises he made about getting rid of the oligarchs and so on, they’ve gotten worse off.
“And all of a sudden, all around him, the dictators are either being overthrown or attempted to be overthrown by the population,” said Browder, mentioning how the Belarus people tried to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko and the more recent Kazakh uprising that got rid of the Nazarbayev family.
“Putin could see the writing on the wall,” said Browder, explaining that Putin didn’t want to wait for the citizens of Russia to rise up and kick him out, so he started a war.
“He doesn’t give one [any] sense of thought about any ideology, this is purely about staying in power.
“And all this stuff is a pantomime of theatre for the Russian people and for the Western world so that there’s some narrative that we think he’s trying to pursue.”
Is nuclear war a real threat?
Browder said that it’s not inconceivable to him that Putin would set off a nuclear bomb if it was his best chance of staying in power – maybe not in the short term, but possibly in the medium term.
Browder explained that because of all the crimes he’s committed, if Putin lost power he’d end up in jail, lose all his money and probably die, so he will use any means to ensure he stays in power until the end of his natural life.
“It’s a real threat. Vladimir Putin is a man who can’t back down, who only escalates, who knows no boundaries.
“It’s something that we should have all thought about when everybody was appeasing him for 20 years, hoping that he would just go away.”
Poplak responded, “Well he hasn’t gone away, that’s for certain.” DM
Warsan Shire: ‘Class has always been something I’ve been very aware of.’ Photograph: Shaniqwa Jarvis/The Guardian
One is a breakout poet, the other is a Booker-winning champion of Black talent. They swap notes on class, impostor syndrome and the day pop’s biggest star came knocking
But even before Beyoncé came knocking, Shire was starward bound. After a responsibility-laden adolescence, spent combining writing with co-parenting her threeyounger siblings, Shire published her debut chapbook of poems, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth in 2011, aged just 23. In 2013, she was appointed the first Young People’s Laureate for London and in 2015, her poem Home became a viral anthem for the refugee crisis. Shire’s first full poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, comes out next month. In between these professional milestones, she also found time to meet and marry a Mexican American charity worker called Andres, move continents, and have two children.
For the bestselling author Bernardine Evaristo, all this is a delight but no surprise. “Beyoncé chose to collaborate with Warsan because of the richness of her work,” she says. “It transcends these perceived barriers and boundaries around women’s experiences.” Evaristo was 60 in 2019 when she found her own global fame, by winning the Booker prize with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other. Evaristo’s route to the top had been slow and winding, so she determined to blaze a more direct trail for those who came after. With young talent exactly like Shire in mind, she initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme in 2007 (Shire was a mentee) and founded the Brunel International African Poetry prize in 2012 (Shire was the inaugural winner). This year, Evaristo completes her trek to the apex of the British literary establishment, by assuming the presidency of the Royal Society of Literature (the same august organisation that in 2018 elected Shire as its youngest fellow).
Now, on the occasion of the publication of Shire’s collection, she and Evaristo have come together to swap notes on their influences, ideal writing conditions and occasional bouts of impostor syndrome. There was a time when these two women would regularly run into each other at poetry readings and publishing events, but since Shire now lives in Los Angeles, it’s been a while. So when we arrive on the Zoom call – Evaristo from her airy, art-filled London living room and Shire from what looks like a hastily grabbed hiding place in the basement – they get immediately stuck into conversation. It’s full of laughter, mutual admiration and gratitude for the wonders of a life lived in literature. Ellen E Jones
Bernardine Evaristo There’s so much to ask you about your journey to where you are now – I mean, it’s just been incredible, hasn’t it? But maybe I’ll kick off with Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: how does it feel to finally have your first full collection published?
Warsan Shire I remember the advice you gave me, to take my time and not rush it. I think, starting off young, I wanted to make sure I didn’t burn out quickly and just release something that I wasn’t really proud of. Also, poetry was always linked to my mental health, as an outlet, so it feels very cathartic to finally let go of this collection. I was writing this book on the precipice of starting my own family. It feels really massive, like I went from a girl to a woman in the middle of writing it.
BE This is why you are a really serious writer, because you could have ridden the wave of Lemonade and put out a collection then, but you knew you wanted it to be the best it can be. I really respect that. I think many other people would have thought that if they don’t exploit the moment, it’s gonna pass them by. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Did you start off with Jacob Sam-La Rose’s Barbican Young Poets?
WS When I was about 15, Jacob came to a youth club where I lived, in Wembley Central. Because I raised my sisters, it was really difficult to get out, so I had to lie and do all these things to get to the workshop, and I got there a little bit late, stumbled in, but that’s how I met Jacob. After that day, my life was completely changed because I’d met a real-life poet. He introduced me to the works of really amazing Black British poets and writers, and then I was able to actually meet them. So that’s how I got to know Nii [Parkes, poet and co-founder of Shire’s first publisher, Flipped Eye], and that’s how my first chapbook came through.
BE That’s such a wonderful introduction to the arts, because you weren’t alienated from the material, y’know? Whereas, with me, when I was your age, it was all white. The struggle for me, as I grew older, was to find Black writers, Black theatre and, in the end, I had to create my own through Theatre of Black Women in the 1980s. The way in which you became part of the poetry community was through a kind of mentoring, wasn’t it? Through Jacob and Nii and then through Pascale Petit and The Complete Works, and it’s so important, when we’re coming from the kind of backgrounds that are underrepresented in literature.
WS There’s not a day that goes by when that’s lost on me. I can only imagine how you felt, because before I got to know these people, I thought that becoming a writer was as likely as becoming a Hollywood star. That’s why it’s such an honour to be speaking with you today, because people like you were the reason why any of us have any opportunity at all. I’m just so, so grateful! I hope that I can do something like that for younger writers as well.
BE Yes, I think that’s something else that we share. Even though writing is something that’s deep within us, we are still also about our communities. It’s not just art for art’s sake, is it? It’s about being a voice in the world as a Black woman. I mean, do you feel that responsibility?
WS I would love to speak to somebody who is from our kind of background, who doesn’t feel the responsibility, because how is that possible? I think whenever you come from a people who don’t have a voice, and you have a voice, how could you not? For those who don’t have to, that is wonderful. I mean, how great that you can write a poem only about garden gnomes and it means nothing other than the beauty of the garden gnome! Like, how gorgeous that you can do that! But also, I want to speak for people. Not only is it necessary and important, it’s also fun!
‘The best thing that could happen is that your work is used to raise awareness.’ Photograph: Shaniqwa Jarvis/The Guardian. Tunic: Valentino. Top: Tyler McGillivary. Earrings: Mondo Mondo
BE Yes, that’s right. It’s not a burden that we carry, is it? It is something that we embrace as really positive. But you see, I grew up in a political family. Both my parents were political activists. My Nigerian immigrant father was a Labour councillor and a socialist, my parents went on demonstrations … You also grew up with politics. I mean, you were in Britain because of the politics of Somalia, right?
WS Yes, and my mum has always been this natural feminist, even though she spent her life as a housewife and didn’t really get to go to school. She always relished seeing me be free. My family is a Muslim family, so at times when I would be told: “Hey, you need to wear a hijab,” it would be my mum who’d be like: “She’ll do it when she wants to.” So that just made me feel formidable. My dad’s a writer and he was the reason why we had to leave Somalia. He was writing this book about the corruption in the Somali government, there were threats and intimidation, and ultimately, we had to leave just before the war broke out. He was the first person that introduced to me the idea of being Afrocentric, pan-Africanism, and the history of Somalia. He made me feel really proud to be Black from a very young age. And he also put in me the importance of writing and sharing your stories. So that, mixed with growing up with the backdrop of a civil war – and constantly looking after and meeting traumatised family that had just come from war – all of that came together to create in me this urgency to write.
BE I remember you said years ago that everybody in Somalia is a poet: is that true?
WS Yeah, it’s very true. That’s why, when I met Jacob, I was like: “Oh, you can do this for a job?” Because, before then, in my home, I was around people just reciting poetry, all willy-nilly. We call it “gabay” in Somalia, and it’s used when a child is born, when somebody dies, when we go to a wedding, when you’re courting somebody, when you’re cursing somebody, when you’re beating your children – there’s something for every single activity in life. When I was born, my grandmother wrote me a poem about how one girl is better than a thousand boys, basically, because everybody wanted the first child to be a boy – y’know, sexism and everything – so, to counteract that, she wrote me this poem.
BE So you had the poetry, which was just part of everyday life, and then you had your dad’s politics, your mum’s feminism – I’m psychoanalysing you here, Warsan! And you’ve got the grandmother who says to you, “One girl is equal to a thousand boys” – I mean, how amazing is that?! In my case, it was a Nigerian father, and he spoke broken English, which I didn’t realise until I was in my late 20s, and I interviewed him on tape and then I heard it back. I think somehow that has affected me as a writer, because I do like capturing the vernacular with my characters. And then Catholic church, where I went every Sunday for 10 years of my life. Torture! But I was absorbing the rich, poetic language of the Bible. When I started writing, it came out as poetry and I always thought it was some kind of miracle, but actually, it was rooted in the church. I also want to ask another question about voices … With your book, to me it’s obvious that you’re drawing on all these different women’s experiences and it is, in a sense, poly-vocal. So can you talk a bit about that?
WS Yeah, definitely. I think it was sitting down and listening to all the women that came through my home, which felt like hundreds and hundreds. My mum is a big-time social butterfly so, from a young age, I was privy to these private conversations, which as I got older turned into these women talking to me directly, and nobody seemed to care about it being inappropriate, because I’m the eldest, so it was just like: “Oh, she can deal with it.” So I really heard about people’s private lives, people’s marital issues … I heard about the complications and consequences of female genital mutilation, things that people will not tell anybody else – especially from my culture. They knew that I was interested in writing and it was like: “Oh yeah, she’s gonna be a writer, so let’s tell her all our stories.” It was really, really sweet how they championed me, and I just wanted to honour that.
‘I grew up listening to Beyoncé, so it was very surreal. I was very starstruck.’ Photograph: Shaniqwa Jarvis/The Guardian
BE Sometimes I draw on people I’ve known, and I’m always really entertained [to discover] the people who don’t read my books, because I know that they might recognise themselves, but they don’t read the books! So I can say what I like!
WS Has anybody ever come to you and said please stop writing about me?
BE Oh yeah, I’ve been heckled! One of my characters was kind of inspired by somebody I used to know and they came to an event and started shouting out, having a go at me. And it was a really smart, prestigious event! That was the worst. But, as writers, I think we are ruthless, to a certain extent. Y’know, if you’re not somehow drawing on the people around you, then what are you going to draw on? I’ve just published a memoir [Manifesto: On Never Giving Up] and I really worked hard to disguise people. I had to stay true to the experience I had with them, but somehow obscure their identity. So, like, somebody might, for example, be living in America, but I maybe put them in the north of England.
WS Witness protection! You have to witness-protect your exes! There are some family members of mine that I just won’t touch, because I know that they’ll hunt me down.
BE Another thing that’s interesting about your process,I remember you telling me that you write while watching television? We know writers talk about their noise-cancelling headphones, and no distractions and so on, and here you are; I think you said you wrote in bed, watching television?
WS Yeah! These are the places that I write: I write in the cinema, in the loudest coffee shop in the world. I used to really love writing in Ikea, because it’s so loud. I love when children are screaming, so now that I have kids, it’s really inspiring! The more noise, the better! It’s because I was parent-ified from a young age and had to look after my sisters. I just had to get on with it. If I was gonna write, I was gonna have to write in the middle of three screaming children, in the middle of cooking and cleaning and doing my schoolwork and finding a little boyfriend in the street and hanging out with my friends. And I needed to do everything. I knew that I had all this responsibility, but I knew that I also wanted to be young while I was young, because I could see in my mother the repercussions of giving up your youth, and how it catches up with you later. So I was gung-ho about having all the experiences.
BE That’s really inspirational for aspiring writers, because the myth is that you need to have your own desk in a quiet room. And that’s not going to work for everybody! I grew up in a large family with eight kids, so it was a noisy household, but as a middle child, I didn’t have to take responsibility for anybody except for myself. I would retreat into reading books. I didn’t have a room of my own until I left home when I was 18. So it’s a class thing as well, isn’t it? Now, I want to move on to America. You abandoned us! You eloped with the Mexican guy. Explain yourself!
WSMaaaan … OK, so let me speak honestly: I think that sometimes you’re faced with this decision to either take care of those that you’ve taken care of your whole entire life, and sacrifice your life, in a way. Or you can make a choice – which is what I did – to, for the first time ever, put myself first. That was really hard. And also, y’know, I fell in love! I needed to know whether or not this was going to work. I didn’t want to look back on my life later and feel resentment towards my sisters. I didn’t want to feel like Miss Havisham, up in the attic, and be like: “I gave up everything for you guys!” I want them to have these amazing, bright, vibrant, fulfilled lives, but if I stayed I’d be resentful. I knew that could happen to me very easily because it’s happened to women in my family over and over again. Then what happened was that Trump became president shortly after I moved, and then there was the whole “Muslim ban” thing, and then the pandemic … So back-to-back stuff has happened, which meant I couldn’t travel. Although it seems like I didn’t want to come back, I really have missed London so much.
WS So the Beyoncé thing happened very randomly, honestly. I opened up my email and there was one from Parkwood, which is Beyoncé’s company. I thought somebody was pranking me, but it turned out to be actually them. They thought I was in London, and I said: “Actually, coincidentally, I happen to be in LA right now … ” So it all happened very quickly. I woke up that morning, and that afternoon, I was sitting with Beyoncé listening to the album [Lemonade]. I grew up listening to Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé, so it was very surreal. I was very starstruck. I thought, finally, the mental health issue that my mum has always talked about on my dad’s side of the family had kicked in, and what a beautiful psychosis this is! Of all the ways to lose my mind, this is a great one. And then it turned out to be real. It was a really beautiful experience, in that she made me feel just safe and special. She was very, very kind to me and she’s really sweet – she sent me flowers after the births of both my children – but yeah, then I just went back to writing. I don’t really think about it much.
BE That’s because you’re so grounded. It hasn’t gone to your head. But I think it’s testament to your work, that she chose you, out of all the poets around. You write with such empathy and compassion that your work transcends these perceived barriers and boundaries around women’s experiences. You write beautifully about loss and displacement, the bond between women, and these are all things that women around the world can relate to. I think this book will have incredible global reach. Your work is not depressing; even though you are tackling some really serious subjects, it’s uplifting. I think that’s a really special skill.
WS Thank you! It means so much coming from you, you don’t even know.
The conversation turns to Shire’s 2009 poem Home, which became a viral sensation around 2015, when Benedict Cumberbatch recited lines from it as part of a charity fundraising single in response to the Syrian refugee crisis: “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark.”
WS I remember when I wrote that poem, it came from visiting Italy and meeting some Somali refugees who lived in the old, abandoned Somali embassy there. There was no electricity, no running water and a young man had, the night before, jumped to his death from the top of the building. I was seeing first-hand, and hearing straight from the people who were experiencing it, how difficult it was to be a refugee or an immigrant. So that poem came out of that. I think it was André 3000 that said: “Across cultures, darker people suffer the most, why?” And so I think it’s really great, obviously, that this poem has spread far and wide, but it’s not lost on me that it only started to get traction when the refugees in question had lighter skin from those that I was speaking about to begin with. That said, obviously, the best thing that could happen is that your work is used, not only to raise awareness, but to raise funds. I get contacted by synagogues and churches all over the world [wanting to do that]. I do think it’s really odd, that it takes all that for people to understand how hard it is to be a fucking refugee! You have to really, really drum it in! And although it’s a beautiful thing that everybody can come together to connect with these words, and have more empathy, the downside of it is that whenever I see it’s being shared, I know it’s because something really horrible has happened, like all these people have just drowned.
Photograph: Shaniqwa Jarvis/The Guardian. Styling: Anna Su at Art Department. Hair: Ash Nicole. Makeup: Eliven Quiros. Dress: Mara Hoffman. Shoes: Charlotte Stone. Glasses: Gucci. Earrings and cuff: Mondo Mondo
BE Obviously, that poem is so powerful and so quotable, but I think a lot of your poetry is quotable, actually. I think that’s one of its strengths. It’s complex and multi-layered, and can take rereading, but at the same time its reach is beyond poetry readers.
WS People say quite a bit: “I don’t really like poetry, but I like your work.” I, personally, really love poems that are difficult to get into and take time to understand. I think, though, maybe what’s making it accessible to those who aren’t that interested in poetry is that I’ve always felt like I’m a writer who’s not very academic, not very intellectual. When I hear other writers speak, I would feel like: “Oh, OK, I must be a hoodrat, because I can’t speak that way!” So maybe some of that goes into it. I don’t know. I think class has always been something I’ve been very aware of and, at times, has made me feel like an impostor, because I don’t sound like how I imagined a writer would sound.
BE I want to pick you up on this idea that you’re not intellectual, Warsan, because you are! But we’re brainwashed in this society to think that unless you were privately educated and went to Oxford and draw on certain literary or cultural references, then you are less sophisticated, less intelligent, less cultured than those who have gone through that system. I have had that. I don’t have it any more because I do what I do and that’s it; I am myself. You are most definitely yourself, and the way you write, your process, your cultural references are valid and true to who you are, and that’s the most important thing that we can be as writers. Your communication is incredibly effective.
WS Oh, thank you. You gave me a therapy session there! I really appreciate it. You’ve worked really hard to create space in publishing and literature for Black and non-white writers. I know you’ve done so much to make it possible for our voices to be heard. How does it feel to see the needle move just a little tiny bit?
BE Y’know the needle has shifted quite a lot, actually. Right now, it’s quite … I don’t want to use the word “fashionable”, but certainly I think publishers want to have diverse lists now and before they didn’t care. Now there are so many new writers coming through I’ve lost track, whereas before I knew literally everybody. So it feels really good. But what I’m really interested in, at this stage, is that people should have long careers. I don’t want us to find that in 10 years’ time, there are only, like, three writers remaining, continuing to publish … What is the scene like over there? Are you reading American writers?
WS No, to be honest I haven’t stayed on top of it … The last book I read was The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry and then before that it was Jay Bernard’s Surge. I still drink PG Tips. I watch Gogglebox, I still watch EastEnders. I have started a deep love affair with Karl Pilkington, who I listen to every single night before I go to sleep. It’s really important for me to remember where I come from, y’know? My nightmare is to get an American accent.
BE Which you haven’t got, so that’s OK.
WS No, listen, I don’t speak to Americans! The only American I speak to is the one I’m married to.
BE And Beyoncé!
WS Oh yeah, and Beyoncé.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is published on 10 March, at £12.99, by Chatto & Windus in collaboration with Flipped Eye. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Warsan Shire will be appearing at the Women of the World festival at Southbank Centre, London, on 12 March. Buy tickets here.
A boom in athlete-driven podcasts has illuminated what players actually value.Illustration by Joe Maccarone
In October, 2014, three days after Derek Jeter played the last game of his Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, he launched the Players’ Tribune, a Web site for athletes to tell their side of the story. It seemed like an odd decision. As a player, Jeter had always been a polite but almost pathologically reserved presence, offering the media pro-forma pleasantries, deflecting deeper inquiries into his personal life. The site, he explained, would give athletes a chance to speak directly to fans, who deserved “more than ‘no comments’ or ‘I don’t knows.’ ” Naturally, these were just the types of answers that he was known for.
At first, it was a bit funny, the notion of Jeter hounding athletes for their delinquent essays. Most imagined that the site would be little more than a place for tight-lipped players to issue elegant press statements. But Jeter’s peers began to understand the allure of speaking on their own terms, and in their own voice. In 2015, Kobe Bryant announced his retirement by publishing a poem in the Tribune. The following year, Kevin Durant revealed his free-agency decision there. The appeal of the site as a space for storytelling, and the extent to which it was disrupting traditional flows of information, became hard to ignore. In 2017, Dion Waiters, a player renowned for his astronomical level of self-regard, cemented his legend with an essay about his scrappy upbringing, titled “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles.” The All-Star forward Kevin Love wrote about struggling with depression. The Tribune helped popularize a wider range of athlete stories. Triumphs were flecked with pain or self-doubt; stars openly shared their traumas.
In the past, if athletes wanted to speak candidly, they would write a tell-all book, do a sit-down interview, maybe phone in to a radio show. If they aspired to work in media, they would try to land a cushy network job, providing expert commentary or analysis. But the Internet, which allows any of us to air the slightest thought, has changed those rules. Players have grown infatuated with sharing their perspectives in real time, in direct, unfiltered ways. Retired greats have realized that they possess endless content—stories, memories, behind-the-scenes morsels—that fans crave. And athletes everywhere are seizing the means of production. Around the time that Jeter launched the Tribune, LeBron James got funding for a new company, Uninterrupted. Its aim was to produce content from players’ points of view, and to show that those players could be “more than an athlete.” People like Jeter and James no longer had to settle for being talking heads. Now they barely had to settle for sports at all.
The space where athletes—or male athletes, at least—have found the greatest success as storytellers is in podcasting. The more polished shows can feel like extended auditions for media jobs, full of the rhythms and recurring segments of mainstream sports talk. The wrestler Chris Jericho hosts a surprisingly brisk interview show, “Talk Is Jericho,” with regular appearances from the Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. The controversial, bro-centric media company Barstool Sports produces “Spittin’ Chiclets,” featuring the former N.H.L. players Ryan Whitney and Paul Bissonnette, and helped launch a popular series by the former N.F.L. punter Pat McAfee. Mike Tyson leads “Hotboxin’,” which has a loose, philosophical energy—it’s more “On Being” than “The Joe Rogan Experience.” And, in 2016, the writer Bill Simmons founded a Web site and podcast network called the Ringer, which elevated podcasters like the former pitcher C. C. Sabathia, the Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and the New Orleans Pelicans guard J. J. Redick. If athlete-driven podcasts were once shoestring affairs, they’ve now been absorbed into the sports-media economy. Last year, the Ringer was acquired by Spotify for around two hundred million dollars.
Redick’s current podcast, “The Old Man & the Three,” which he started last summer, alongside his own production company, embodies the strengths of these more tightly packaged shows. Redick has interviewed Stacey Abrams, Bob Iger, and Matthew McConaughey, but his primary role is as a sort of liaison between players and fans. He’s mellow and thoughtful, conscious of his position as a white athlete from a hippie background, which makes him an outlier in the N.B.A. (His likability might be surprising to those who recall his career at Duke University, where his smug affect made him one of the most hated players in basketball.) Now a respected veteran, he often talks about the tedium of N.B.A. life; after all, it’s why he has time to podcast in the first place.
It’s particularly fascinating to hear Redick relate to younger players. In a recent episode, he talked to his former teammate Markelle Fultz about a spell a few years ago, in Fultz’s rookie season, when the guard dealt with a mysterious injury. As Fultz recovered, the media seemed to delight in dissecting every twitch of his body, and Redick lashed out at reporters. On the show, Fultz expressed his gratitude for Redick’s support, before talking about the mental strain of being scrutinized. It was an interesting moment, in which Redick was able to move between being a teammate, sympathetic to Fultz’s apprehension of the media, and an inquisitive member of the media himself.
In the past, this kind of mediation was handled mostly by journalists. That arrangement could be mutually beneficial for reporters (who sought access) and players (who wanted to protect their images). But there was always a tension thrumming in the background. Generations of Black athletes witnessed firsthand how they could be misread simply for having tattoos, wearing certain clothes, or speaking in ways that the media deemed inarticulate. This was especially true in the N.B.A. of the late nineties and early two-thousands, when the league, confronting the decline of its icon, Michael Jordan, cast about for a new identity. At the time, players could enter the league straight from high school, bringing a youthful, hip-hop-adjacent swagger that made owners and officials wary. A turning point came in 2004, when a skirmish broke out in the final seconds of a nationally televised game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons. The Pacers star Metta Sandiford-Artest—then known as Ron Artest—charged into the stands after a fan threw a drink at him. The media demonized the players involved, and new rules about off-court dress were introduced to make the league seem more presentable. Athletes rarely got the chance to speak their minds from inside the fishbowl.
It’s not surprising that players from this era have taken to podcasting, and that they produce some of the richest, most vibrant work in the form. An exemplar is “All the Smoke,” hosted by the former players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. (“Smoke” refers to their taunting and trash-talking, and winks at their fondness for marijuana.) Barnes and Jackson were scrappy and competitive; they became folk heroes as part of the 2006-7 Golden State Warriors, an underdog team whose coach now shares the pair’s enthusiasm for weed. Their show is loose and meandering, even playfully unhinged. They tell stories that few reporters could pry out of them—gossip about life on the road, women, who was authentically tough. (Jackson was part of the Pistons-Pacers brawl, and he often ponders how his career might have been different had he not been vilified.) The show routinely sheds light on the fraternal aspect of basketball. Last year, it featured one of the last interviews with Kobe Bryant before his death. At first, Bryant, who had known Jackson since they were teen-agers, adopts his standard, media-trained mode, issuing homilies about creativity and focus. After a few minutes, though, he eases up, chuckles, and recalls the first time he heard the rapper E-40, in the mid-nineties, at a camp for the nation’s best players.
“All the Smoke” rejects the decorum of the TV studio, and one of its pleasures is how openly the hosts talk about their inner lives, their experiences as Black men. In one episode, Barnes asks his former coach Doc Rivers what it was like to grow up with a father who was a cop. Last September, Jackson spoke movingly about his relationship with George Floyd, whom he befriended when they were teen-agers, growing up in Texas. After Floyd’s death, Jackson went to Minnesota to help lead protests against police brutality. He described how helpless he felt, contrasting it with the feelings of control that he found on the court. Floyd had fallen into the street life, Jackson said, and their friendship became complicated as they grew older. “That could have been you if it wasn’t for basketball,” Barnes observed.
Cartoon by Will McPhail
The exchange laid bare the fallacy that athletes should “stick to sports”—a call that has grown almost in direct proportion to Black players speaking out about police brutality or racial abuse. A subtle feeling of gratitude runs through “All the Smoke,” a disbelief, on the part of Barnes and Jackson, that they are lucky enough to have full lives to look back on. In a recent episode, their guest was Kendrick Perkins, who retired in 2019. Perkins was not a player known for his finesse, and he now draws on his blunt, bruising directness as an analyst for ESPN. Perkins claimed that he appeared on the network for a year without compensation. (Apparently, the promise of “exposure” also works on people who have earned seven-figure salaries.) He initially saw the gig as a ramp into coaching. But he talked about Jackson’s influence as a trailblazer, and joked that the success of “All the Smoke” proved that he, too, could speak “broken English” and find a home in the media.
It remains enormously expensive to broadcast live sports. Few things compel millions of people to watch TV like a big game, and the captive audience props up an increasingly outdated economic model of commercial breaks, high-profile sponsors, and advertisers. But fan engagement is no longer bound by live contests, or by seasons at all. Trades, trash talk, and backstage maneuvering have made leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. year-round concerns, driving up demand for more content. At times, the sheer volume of N.B.A.-related material online—from Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights brand, which aggregates clips, to the dozens of Instagram accounts devoted to player fashion—can make the games feel ancillary.
Podcasts are a part of this shift, though they operate at a different rhythm. They’re slow and immersive, more concerned with humanizing players than with turning them into culture-war memes. In 2017, the veterans Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye started a podcast called “Road Trippin’,” interviewing their teammates on the Cleveland Cavaliers. Both men admitted that they were just sticking around the league as long as they could, riding the coattails of All-Star teammates like LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. Fans are accustomed to seeing teams as engaged in collective struggle, and we often frame that struggle in moral or political ways. But “Road Trippin’ ” also depicted the Cavs as a kind of workplace, where you simply had to tolerate some of your colleagues’ strange habits. In one episode, Jefferson and Frye talked to Irving shortly before the 2017 All-Star break. They joked about the aliases they use when checking into hotels, and exchanged thoughts on extraterrestrial life. At one point, Irving aired his skepticism that the Earth was round. “Here we go,” Frye said. Within the flow of their conversation, it was just another quirky moment, proof that Irving was, in the parlance, a different dude. But the clip became a sound bite—evidence, for the wider world, of Irving’s insoluble weirdness. He was constantly asked about it by reporters.
Since then, Irving’s relationship with the media has curdled, especially as he’s become more outspoken about politics. The most in-depth interview he’s given in some time was last fall, when he appeared on his teammate Kevin Durant’s podcast, “The ETCs.” A few months later, at the beginning of this season, he skipped his mandatory media sessions, writing on Instagram that he didn’t speak with “pawns.” Whatever the root offense had been, it was clear Irving no longer felt that reporters could convey the full range of his thoughts or priorities. He was a quester who happened to be very good at basketball. The sport seemed no more important than the clout it gave him, which he could then apply to the issues—police brutality, Native rights, food insecurity—that he cared about.
In a recent episode of “Real Ones,” a Ringer podcast that pairs the former player Raja Bell with the journalist Logan Murdock, Bell reflected on what it meant for players like Irving to tell their own stories. He brought up a sour period from his playing days in Utah, noting that fans might have treated him differently had he had a more expansive platform. But Bell also suggested that there was a generational difference between someone like him, who came of age in the eighties and nineties, and a millennial like Irving. Back in his day, social media would have been a useful tool against one-sided reporting. Yet he didn’t necessarily share Irving’s need to feel recognized on some deeper, human level. “No one says you have to bare your soul,” Bell said.
When I was growing up, an athlete like Michael Jordan could feel ubiquitous yet totally unknowable. In the eighties and nineties, this was what it meant to be iconic: people grabbed on to fragments of your persona, as with Jordan’s near-psychotic will to win, and turned them into tokens of virtue. Controlling one’s image meant withholding any signs of weakness or vulnerability.
For the most part, the media abetted this process. Fans turned to sports for escapism, and sports coverage allowed them to view athletes from a distance, as avatars that they could manipulate. Listening to players talk about what they actually value—for hours, and often to each other—upends this theatre, destabilizing the role that sports play in our lives. If, as Bell suggests, the Internet makes us believe that we might be understood, then athletes are still avatars, but for our real selves, rather than for our fantasies of greatness. Durant, for example, is unflappably cool on the court. But on his podcast he often seems open and slightly vexed, as though whoever he’s talking to might help him figure out something crucial.
I recently began listening to “Knuckleheads,” a podcast launched, in 2019, by Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, darlings of the stylish, early-two-thousands N.B.A. The two met as kids, in Illinois, and were handpicked by Jordan to star in a commercial for his shoes—a fact that still astounds them. The show grew out of essays they wrote, for the Players’ Tribune, about adjusting to their rising fame, and listening to it can feel like eavesdropping. The pair often digress into Chicago-high-school-basketball minutiae, memories of seeing palm trees for the first time. Richardson is friendly and gregarious; Miles is shyer, and it’s sometimes hard to hear him at all. If it were any other podcast, I probably would have tuned out. But once Miles gets going, his laugh crackly and warm, you hear how simply talking aloud can be a form of therapy. It’s a reminder that claiming your narrative doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll end up the hero. It means that you will be free. ♦
The podcasting genre is supremely conducive to telling people what to think and do.Illustration by James Joyce
Doris Lessing hated recorded music. She feared it. She thought that music might addle people’s brains so much that it would drive them to kill, to torture, to maim. “Is it possible—and I know this mad hypothesis is asking for ridicule—that we are poisoning ourselves with music?” she wrote, in 1994. Lessing recognized that making such a powerful, intoxicating substance—one that shamans use to create magical moods, that generals use to inspire soldiers to go to war, that priests use to rouse their congregations to devotion—instantly available to anyone and everyone had to be, at the least, a very big deal in the course of human history.
What would Lessing have made of the podcast revolution? We walk around with plugs the size of shelled peanuts in our ears, listening to the people we invite to live inside our heads. The power of the medium is immense. It used to be that in order to preach you needed a pulpit or a TV or radio show, or at least a soapbox. Now all you need is an Internet connection—and, preferably, the support of one of the well-funded companies that have sprung up to develop the genre, like Pineapple Street Media or Pushkin Industries, which was founded, in 2018, by Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Only a few years ago, Alex Blumberg, a radio producer who was a regular presence on “This American Life,” made a podcast, “StartUp,” whose first season followed him as he tried to found his own podcasting company. In an early pitch to an investor, he was all but laughed out of the room. The show featured Blumberg’s agonized conversations with his wife about his decision to potentially flush their family’s financial future down the drain. He is currently sitting pretty as the C.E.O. of Gimlet Media, which he sold to Spotify, last year, for two hundred and thirty million dollars. There is a prospecting feel to the podcast industry, a rush to mine the gold of our thinly stretched attention before it runs out for good. Podcasts these days are rife with brightly voiced ads for other podcasts. Anyone can be a podcaster: novelists, journalists, comedians, professors, actors, scientists, plus a nice smattering of conspiracy theorists and self-appointed demagogues. It’s like starting a garage band, but without the element of cool.
I have listened to podcasts for a number of years, but I usually come back to the same half-dozen. The hosts are my friends now, though they don’t know it, and every so often I get sick of indulging their banter without being asked what I think. In the hope of inviting some new people into my mind, I went looking for podcasts on a very podcast-y subject: happiness. Self-improvement is big in the podcast world, which makes sense for a medium that is supremely conducive to telling other people what to think and do. There are well-being podcasts galore, but the ones that seemed most worthy of consideration for limited listening time are hosted by psychologists and neuroscientists who have professional purchase on the subject.
Laurie Santos, the host of “The Happiness Lab,” which is produced by Pushkin, is an upbeat Yale psychologist whose course Psychology and the Good Life is the most popular class in the college’s three-hundred-year history. (When it was first offered, in 2018, nearly a quarter of the school’s undergraduates enrolled.) One reason for such popularity is obvious: like the rest of us, but more so, undergrads are under-rested and overworked, and need help making their lives more of a joy and less of a misery. Another reason becomes clear when you listen to the podcast: the class is a gut.
Santos started her podcast last year; before that, she taught similar material on Coursera. (Some of her students’ parents may find their happiness levels dipping when they realize that a version of the instruction they are paying for is widely available for free.) In each segment, she employs the magazine writer’s time-honored strategy of opening with a sharp, specific story that introduces the general theme. In the show’s second season, which began in April, the Georgetown neuroscientist Abigail Marsh’s experience of being rescued by a stranger from a near-death incident on a highway leads to an exploration of altruism and its inverse, psychopathy. An encounter with an exterminator inspires an examination of what makes a job worthwhile; a mother’s horrified realization that she has been gazing at her phone rather than at her newborn’s face raises the question of distraction, and how to avoid it.
Along the way, we are taught various happiness techniques—better to put your phone away during dinner than to leave it lying face down on the table, where it can still tempt you with its siren call—and told about studies in the field of hedonics, like one in which subjects were handed money and told to either keep it or give it away. (The givers turned out to be happier, at the end of the day, than the keepers.) I have now heard this study referred to on other podcasts about happiness, with its results invariably presented as counterintuitive. Didn’t the Beatles figure out that you can’t buy love? Recent episodes of “The Happiness Lab” feature an ad for Chanel’s J12 watch, the price of which can run as high as fifty thousand dollars. If you’d like to experience true happiness, try giving one of those away to me.
“The Science of Happiness” is hosted by Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who runs Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which co-produces his podcast with PRX. The show, currently in its sixth season, is straightforward about its self-help proposition; episodes have alluring titles like “Do You Want to Be More Patient?” and “How to Love People You Don’t Like.” The answer, to these and other conundrums, seems to involve becoming more mindful, which Keltner’s guests accomplish through a range of meditation techniques available on the Greater Good Web site. Keltner’s show has a looser format than Santos’s mainly scripted one; he invites subjects to choose a happiness practice, kibbitzes with them about their experience of it for ten or fifteen minutes, and then does a skim of the science involved.
The conversations go on a little too long, and you get the feeling that these people—who have spent a few minutes of their day observing a tree, in an effort to relax enough not to kill their whiny children—are being polite. In one episode, the interviewee, the disabled violinist Gaelynn Lea, describes her distress at being put at risk of contracting the coronavirus by people who refused to wear a mask. She tried a loving-kindness meditation that involved wishing for the happiness of the people you love, and of those you really don’t. One day, as she approached the second category, Mitch McConnell popped into her head, which should be enough to put anyone off loving-kindness meditations. I prefer a strategy for coping with the stress of “time famine” that was suggested on “The Happiness Lab.” The guest, Tom Hodgkinson, a writer who somehow makes a living by encouraging people to be more idle, told Santos to remove her earbuds once in a while. Listen to the birds sing; take a nap. I followed his advice, and did not regret it.
Listeners seem to enjoy these podcasts. Their iTunes ratings are high. They have similar strong points; both hosts are accomplished and likable, and you tend to learn a little something, even if you already knew it. (You probably understood that too much of a good thing reduces your pleasure in it; now you can call that the “hedonic treadmill.”) And they have similar flaws. The main one, I’m sorry to say, is that they are boring. An oddity of the scientific approach to happiness is that it can seem, to the laypeople among us, to be reinventing a wheel that has been turned, for thousands of years, by the world’s great religions, philosophers, novelists, and poets. Santos recognizes this; the show is currently in a “mini-season” that deals with thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, and the Buddha. (There is some kind of hello-fellow-kids pact among podcasters to use only the cheesiest contemporary jargon. Wisdom from the ancients translates, in Santos’s words, to “old-school tips”; the journalist Dan Harris, who hosts the podcast “Ten Percent Happier,” refers to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths as a “listicle.”) In fact, Buddhism, with its acknowledgment of the reality of suffering, seems to be what is often missing from these podcasts’ evaluative, quantitative view of happiness. They could use a little sand in their oyster—an appreciation of life’s rougher qualities which brings its beauty into relief.
This is the point of the highly enjoyable first episode of the novelist Hari Kunzru’s new podcast, “Into the Zone,” which proposes, in the sweeping, vague language of podcast promotion, to be about “opposites.” The opposites, in this case, are the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, and Norman Vincent Peale, the “Power of Positive Thinking” guru. The theme that ties the two together is California, the positive-psychology capital of the world, where Adorno lived as an émigré during the Second World War. That this story has been told before doesn’t make it any less of a pleasure to hear Kunzru, together with a fellow-Brit, the writer Geoff Dyer, knock around Venice Beach, trying to understand how the sober, dialectically minded author of “Minima Moralia” (subtitle: “Reflections from Damaged Life”) could have taken such pleasure in being chauffeured around the West Coast by his wife, Gretel, in a Ford they called their “Little Aladdin.” Adorno, it turns out, was, like Lessing, suspicious of popular music. He considered it a tool of power—as Kunzru says, “something that lulled the listener, urging them to consume instead of provoking a genuine emotional or intellectual response.” We should be careful what we listen to, Adorno thought. He was right. ♦
Alexandra Schwartz has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2016.
