By Anandhi Gopinath
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but Khairy Jamaluddin speaks like a politician. By this, I don’t mean the script fed by the vote-hungry glib men of office, but the carefully considered manner in which a man used to the public attention should speak. Even the most potentially contentious question is answered with diplomacy and aplomb. This is PR 101, the AUGUSTMAN team quietly notes.
The former politician turned podcaster is chatty when the recorder is on and more than accommodating when the camera is trained on him, but Khairy is otherwise fairly reserved. It is only when the music of Queen filters through the speakers that we see a lighter side of the newly minted 49-year-old. “Chipping around, kick my brains ’round the floor/These are the days, it never rains, but it pours,” crooned Freddie Mercury (credit if you guessed what song this is from without help) and we could see the tension lift from Khairy’s shoulders as if he were shrugging off a too-heavy jacket, as he started to jive to the music.
Those pictures of him dancing made our final cut—images of a man secure in his own skin, utterly self-assured about what he stands for and, despite the career pivots he’s made, he remains confident about his calling. Khairy’s departure from politics was marked by his unceremonious—and highly publicised—expulsion from UMNO in 2022, after which he debuted as a co-host for local radio station Hot FM.
“I was on the morning show, and you have to show up very early in the morning, pagi buta as it were. But its not just showing up, but being switched on,” he grins. “You may have just woken up but you have to be interesting and engaging and funny. It’s intense, especially since I do wake up early but I’m not a morning a person.”
Podcasts (recorded on kinder schedules than his radio days) were his next career pitstop; the Keluar Sekejap show that he co-hosts with his former UMNO mate Shahril Hamdan has featured thought leaders and a string of prominent politicians, both past and present. The list includes Malaysia’s Iron Lady Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz, Malaysia’s ninth Prime Minister Dato’ Sri Ismail Sabri Yaakob, World Bank Lead Economist for Malaysia Apurva Sanghi, and on several occasions, the previous Deputy Minister of International Trade and Industry and former Member of Parliament for Bangi, Dr Ong Kian Ming.
Going from politics to podcasts is a good way to reinvent oneself, I suggest, but Khairy prefers the word pivot. “I don’t think I am reinventing myself; the core person and the core values are the same. I’m embracing a new medium, which is media and entertainment. I would say it’s adjacent to the world of politics I once inhabited. It requires communicating, it requires engaging people in thoughtful discussions about current issues—even the pivot has not been too forced.”
This comes from Khairy’s ability to be quite agile, stemming from a deep understanding that nothing in politics lasts forever. “Whilst in politics, even as a cabinet minister, I always told myself that everything can disappear overnight. And in 2018 it did. I was Youth and Sports Minister, and when we lost the elections, everything changed. I told myself to never get used to the trappings of the role, and to be prepared to move on to something else. That’s perhaps why I’ve found the transition quite seamless,” he says.
In fact, Khairy believes his ability to reach out to a wider audience and his relationship with the public has improved since leaving politics. “People act differently around you when you’re a politician,” he muses. “They are a bit more filtered; they may not tell you the whole truth. Now I am seen as anyone else, and I get more honest conversations.”
Despite being “one of us,” as he puts it, Khairy still wields a good amount of influence and acknowledges that. In fact, he admits being in the media has allowed him to connect in ways politics never did. “Maybe even I was more filtered back then. As a politician, you have to be mindful, toe the party line. That works until it doesn’t. Being on radio and the podcasts, I have more freedom. We are still mindful, of course, not to go overboard.”
Podcasters these days do engage in news reporting and often produce multiple shows a week. Traditionalists can clutch their pearls all they want, but several US-based studies have found that podcasts are perceived as highly credible due to the non-anonymous nature of presenters and the in-depth research that supports the content.
And lest we all forget, Khairy started out his career in journalism—he was a presenter on the talkshow Dateline Malaysia and wrote for The Economist. Keluar Sekejap registered an impressive listenership of over 200 million just last year.
Being on morning radio was more of a revelation to him than podcasting, but the politics of language has become a more central topic for Khairy in this part of his career. While the bulk of the feedback to Keluar Sekejap has been gratitude for the manner in which he and Shahril educate the broader public on certain issues, there have been many more who appreciate that they produce in Bahasa Malaysia.
The duo made this conscious decision from the start, knowing that using English would limit their reach. “We wanted to make it fashionable to speak about politics in Malay, especially among those who don’t always do so. For example, those in the commercial or corporate world since the official language of the business is English.
This is something we are very happy about. There’s a certain ideological bias. A lot of Malay conversations around politics tend to be more conservative, while ones in English are more liberal. We bridge the gap, presenting points of view from both sides. I’d like to think my Bahasa was already decent before I started Keluar Sekejap.
But obviously we are exploring complex topics, so the standard of my language has improved too,” he laughs. The topic of language, something that interests us both, is a complicated one in the context of Malaysia, and not just because we speak so many. It is common knowledge that language serves as a unifying force by facilitating communication and cultural exchange.
A common lingua franca allows individuals from different backgrounds to converse, thereby fostering unity. In government-run schools, this is the role Bahasa Malaysia should play. It often does not, which is where the complication lies. The conversation meanders to the concept of mother tongue. While the conventional definition is the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood, Khairy considers this the language one thinks in.
“Mother tongue to me means inner voice. Personally, it has always been English. But I have trained myself to not just speak and write well, but also think in Malay so my inner voice isn’t predominantly in English.” If language is not quite the great unifier for this generation, sports certainly is. It’s the portfolio that truly saw Khairy’s star shine.
A huge fan of combat sports—he has a lengthy conversation with AUGUSTMAN editor-in-chief Farhan Shah over past and upcoming boxing matches—he deeply ruminates on the lack of corporate support it gets here. Passionate about keeping fit and a proponent of the idea that movement is medicine, one of the most successful initiatives his ministry spearheaded is the annual Hari Sukan Negara, held on the second Saturday of October.
The campaign aims to inculcate a sporting culture and make Malaysia a sporting nation. When it was launched in 2015, Malaysia was only the third country to organise this, behind India and Qatar. “There is science behind Hari Sukan Negara; it’s no secret that we have some of the highest obesity rates in the region. But I was very mindful of this point. A lot of people work multiple jobs to put food on the table, and I wanted to remind them that even small steps make a difference. You don’t need a fancy bicycle or an expensive gym membership! Exercise is an important investment in your own life. I understand my privilege in pushing for time to exercise, but my thing was this—meet me halfway, and at least put in the effort.”
Those in the B40 segment of the population often lack the head space to consider something seemingly superficial when focusing on putting food on the table. However, Khairy emphasises that neglecting self-care can ultimately affect that very ability to provide for their families. All this talk on sports inevitably leads us to his favourite football team, Manchester United, who beat Arsenal 5-3 in the days prior to the interview.
Khairy breaks into a huge smile when the topic comes up, laughingly acknowledging that being a supportive fan is particularly painful at the moment, despite their win. An ardent follower since the 80s, well before Manchester United became the global behemoth they are today, Khairy is eager to see his favourite team change from the inside and top the table again. It is, he assures me, but a matter of time.
“It’s a big club with a lot of heritage, and now the team has a good ownership structure. But it is going to take a while and the system is broken somewhere since nothing has worked since Ferguson left. We need to give Amorim some time,” Khairy says, referring to the team’s new head coach Ruben Amorim. “I am, once again, going to witness this glorious rise of this team. It happened before, it will happen again.”
They will reinvent themselves, pivot and return to their former glory, but only when the team is able to look at themselves and work hard at fixing what’s not working, and find what defines them as a group, Khairy shares. We find ourselves back at the topic of reinvention, and I put this question to him. As young people today grapple with an increasingly fast-changing world, how do they celebrate change without losing sight of who they are?
“It should be genuine, reinvention should be limited to something that doesn’t deviate from your authenticity,” he says thoughtfully. “Reinvention means finding new avenues where you can channel your genuine self. By all means, pivot, but at the end of the day always be you. When you become someone you’re not, you can’t stay too long in that skin.”
To his 30-year-old self, and others in that age group, Khairy has this sage advice: “Everything is transient, and life is not linear.” There’s a reason why Khairy’s podcast is called Keluar Sekejap, which roughly translates to temporary exit. It is meant to signify that he may have left the world of politics, but it is not forever. “I don’t know how long this phase of my life will last, but I am 99 per cent sure that I will be returning to politics,” he states confidently. “It’s only a matter of when and with whom.
That’s a question I haven’t been able to answer. Until I know where I want to be, I cannot yet go there.” As the interview winds down, Khairy leans back, contemplative. The man who spoke with measured precision is a portrait of someone at ease in the present yet tethered to ambition. Reinvention, after all, is not the abandonment of identity. It is the art of expanding it, and it’s a balance that Khairy has clearly mastered. Whether in politics, media, or the sporting arena, this much is clear—his story is far from over. There’s another pivot coming.
URL to News Report :
https://www.augustman.com/my/covers/khairy-jamaluddin-is-a-modern-maverick