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Almost one year into her reign, it looks like Australian-born Queen Mary of Denmark may be ascending to a prestigious new role: podcast host. The Danish queen announced this week that her charity, the Mary Foundation, is launching a podcast called Lonely Youth. The three-part series inspired by Denmark’s high rates of youth loneliness promises to “give an in-depth insight into the nuances of loneliness by mixing [expert analysis] and personal narratives from young people”. Though we don’t yet know if she will feature in each episode, Queen Mary announced the news via Instagram, pointing out that a recent study found 73 per cent of Danes, aged 16-19, experience loneliness and 17 per cent of those, between 16-24, feel “very lonely”. “These are heavy numbers that we need to do something about,” the post read. At first glance, it might seem strange that a 52-year-old monarch would be the go-to person to reach disconnected youth – and stranger still that they would do so via a medium often associated with influencers, true-crime detectives and young men in basements. But, this is actually the latest in a long line of royal podcasting projects (and no, it didn’t start with Meghan Markle). The rise of royal podcasting Dr Lisa Beckett, a lecturer at the University of New England researching royalty and popular culture, says it was only a matter of time before royal family members entered the podcast market. “Royals tend to be later than everybody else entering these spaces,” she says, “but [engaging in new mediums] is one of the ways they stay relevant.” And, as a kind of celebrity (“they have been since the time of the Georgians”, she notes), this kind of direct contact with audiences is expected of them. “Queen Elizabeth could get away with quite a bit of distance because she started her reign so long ago, but the younger royals are expected to act more modern and to be in this space ... That distance between celebrities and fans has been shrinking, particularly with social media.” India Hicks, goddaughter of King Charles, was the first notable name to get in on the action. The India Hicks Podcast , which debuted in 2019, offered a “wonderfully intimate look” into her life and her “extraordinary family”. It consisted of conversations about “movie stars, matadors and maharajas” with her mother, Lady Pamela Hicks, the late Queen Elizabeth’s former lady-in-waiting. A couple of years later, Princess Eugenie co-hosted Floodlight : an interview podcast about modern slavery made with her charity, the Anti-Slavery Collective. Then came Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. In this much-hyped 2022 series, the Duchess of Sussex spoke to some of the biggest names in popular culture (including Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton and Serena Williams) about the “labels that try to hold women back”. The following year Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, the Duchess of York, debuted a chat podcast with her friend Sarah Thomson, and Queen Camilla launched The Queen’s Reading Room podcast. The latter, an extension of her literacy charity of the same name, features interviews with authors and prominent book-lovers such as Dame Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant. But Camilla is only featured for a couple of minutes per episode. Though podcasts are an intimate medium, as Dr Beckett points out, they also enable royals to maintain a great deal of control – certainly more so than in a traditional TV interview. “They have to be careful because they’ve tried different tactics like this,” Beckett says. “In 1969, Queen Elizabeth actually allowed for a documentary of her home life. It was broadcast on the BBC once, then she realised it was a mistake. It let people in too much into her personal life, and she actually banned it from being ever played again.” (Decades later, it leaked on YouTube .) In 1987, younger members of the British royal family also competed in the TV game show It’s a Royal Knockout alongside celebrities, running around in costumes doing obstacle courses for charity. “People thought it was a disaster,” Beckett says. “Royals are not like other celebrities, they have to act a certain way and maintain certain standards ... but at the same time be ‘normal enough’ that we [relate to] them.” Moral influencers or ‘f---ing grifters’? So, do people actually care about this exclusive royal content or are they content just watching The Crown ? The most successful of the bunch is undoubtedly Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. The show debuted in the top spot on Spotify in Britain, the US, Canada, Ireland, India, Australia and New Zealand. But it also lost a lot of steam by the end of the season, and Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Audio “mutually agreed” to leave Spotify soon after. Meghan Markle made one season of Archetypes , in collaboration with Spotify. Credit: Their initial deal reportedly cost $US25 million ($38.5 million), and The Wall Street Journal reported the couple had failed to meet “productivity benchmarks” to justify the sum. Though their 2020 agreement promised “a multi-year partnership ... to produce podcasts and shows” (multiple), nothing else materialised. Bloomberg reported that Harry had pitched a number of ideas, including a show in which he interviewed “controversial guests such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump about their early formative years”. Celebrating their exit from the company, Spotify executive Bill Simmons went so far to call the pair “f---ing grifters” on his own podcast. He had also previously criticised Prince Harry, saying: “Why are we listening to you? Nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family, and you just complain about them.” Dr Beckett believes it is a good thing, however, when royals publicly lend themselves to causes. Whether it’s Princess Eugenie with modern slavery or Queen Mary with youth loneliness – or, historically, Princess Diana with AIDS – “royalty adds cachet”. “When they get involved, it really gives the charity or the cause a lot of support and a lot of attention,” she says. At the very least, she adds, “It gets the attention of the media.” Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday .
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An Indian think tank has described Starlink, a satellite internet service provider which recently entered the Zimbabwean market, as a because its biggest customer is the American government intelligence and military. The Kutniti Foundation, a think tank based in New Delhi, says Starlink is an American military and intelligence tool whose dual-use technology enables it to push its own narrative and purpose to be an altruistic one, as a provider of the internet for the underserved populations and regions. “However, its biggest customer and promoter is the American government intelligence and military,” Kutniti says. “In addition, it is well known that the owner of Starlink, Elon Musk, is close to various private intelligence companies, and is a highly politically exposed person in the US, including but not limited to Palantir Technologies USA, and the Trump Election 2024,” the think tank says. Trump won the US elections two weeks ago and will be sworn in in January. He has appointed Musk to his cabinet together with Vivek Ramaswamy to run the Department of Government Efficiency. Starlink and its parent company SpaceX got a lot of business contracts from the United States government during Trump’s first term from 2017-2021 and continued to get support from the Biden administration. Starlink is planning to introduce its services to India, the world’s most populous country with an estimated 1.45 billion people. India is also the world’s fifth-largest economy after the United States, China, Japan and Germany. In their paper entitled: published in the in September this year, Yan Jiajie and Yu Nanping say Starlink will pose new threats to the national defence and security of other countries. “As a low-orbit satellite internet communication system, Starlink can provide global, dead zone-free, informatised military reconnaissance and communication services to support the operational plans of the army, navy, and air force,” they say. “With the space battlefield becoming an increasingly important arena of competition between major powers, core satellite internet technology can be used to threaten the strategic security of other countries and gain the upper hand in future wars.” Citing examples, they say: “On January 3, 2020, the United States used a UAV to take out Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. “On November 27 of the same year, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of Iran’s nuclear program and its chief nuclear scientist was assassinated near Tehran. “These actions were made possible by the global high-speed communication and space-air coordination capabilities achieved via satellite networks. If the Starlink project is applied on a large scale in the military field in the future, it will further enhance the US military’s satellite communication and unmanned combat capabilities.” UAV stands for unmanned aerial vehicle.
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