Call her Obama

Michelle Obama is the latest guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast – the raunchy girlfest “Howard Stern for women” – and the conversation is about as relatable as you might imagine. Obama and host Alex Cooper spend a couple of minutes up top talking about skiing. The former First Lady is particularly fond of Aspen. “There are a bunch of mothers and daughters. We’ve all raised our kids together, and we take the long weekend, go to Aspen and ski,” joined, she says, by a man named Vance, her personal instructor and “ski husband”.

Michelle Obama, “one of the most influential and powerful women in the world” according to Cooper, is promoting her new book The Look, about fashion, style and self-expression. Sometimes, she says, it’s hard to be a woman. She tells Cooper that when she was First Lady, “We’re on a trip where there’s 8,000 things happening in one day. We’re on a safari, and then we’re at a meeting.” Barack could just take off his tie and be ready to rumble, whereas “I got heels and flats and cobblestones and sweaters and blazers and tops and skirts that are too short, and now you can’t stoop.”

This is what makes Michelle Obama advice, or any First Lady advice, a hard sell. She and Cooper are the super-elite. Watching them talk to each other feels like gawking fan fiction, about as applicable to the lives of ordinary people as an episode of Bridgerton. “I’m not the person that’s just going to talk about some dresses, right?” Obama says. “It’s got to have a meaning behind it… This is really a book about self-determination, who we are as women, how it’s about the team of people that help us. And. And it’s an industry and a business, and it’s a billion dollar business.”

Do most women, or men, have a “team” of people, though? This is the problem with Call Her Daddy. Obama and Cooper talk about the patriarchy, and “Mean Girl” culture, and objectifying women on Instagram, and, sure, these are definitely things to talk about, but just look at them in that podcast studio. They might as well have their pinkie fingers extended over their teacups. “And once my friends are in, in my journey, we’re all going together, you know, I mean, it’s just, it’s never just my journey,” Obama says. “It’s like, you’re coming, you know, let’s do this.” Join me on my journey! Buy The Look!

Michelle Obama is here to tell women that it gets better. “Well, I always say that we just, men get older and wiser and esteemed, right? Women, we just get old, right? But the truth is that, like, my 60s are the best time of my life. That’s all. It’s the canary in the coal mine. I’m just telling you, ladies, girls, like, it gets better and better and better.” It’s true, in your 30s she was just a successful lawyer and in your 40s she was just First Lady. And now she is a billionaire. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards progress.

Women are wise, Michelle Obama tells Cooper. They can choose their own path and give themselves grace while nurturing female friendships and avoiding the toxicity of social media. “I love it,” Cooper says. “It’s so real.”

Obama and Cooper are doing the work. They’re staying true to themselves and being the change. Michelle is one of the wealthiest and most successful people in human history, living a life of luxury and privilege that would make Cleopatra genuflect to her, but she’s humble and still intends to “go high” in this era of toxic masculinity.

“So going high to me is feel the feelings,” she says. “But where are you trying to go with them and let that lead? That’s what going high is. Thinking before you talk. I mean, we teach our kids that. It’s like, count to 10. Because how I feel at the kitchen table… that’s what the kitchen table is for.” And there’s a team of people to put things on that kitchen table. Michelle Obama never has to set foot in a kitchen again for the rest of her life unless she chooses to do so.

This interview – two super-rich ladies having a chat – is damn long, two hours of therapy for them and torture for the thousand million people listening to it on their commutes or on the self-improvement machine at the gym.

“Michelle, I need to hang out with you more,” Alex Cooper says, and we’re sure that can be arranged. Just have your publicist call my assistant and we’ll have a girls weekend in Aspen before the snow melts. The fire will be roaring and the apres-ski will be delightful, and we’ll go very high indeed.