Where Did the Waka Waka Money Go? Tim Cohen on Loose Canon

Waka Waka, the 2010 World Cup song Freshlyground helped write, has passed a billion streams on Spotify. And the band gave away the rights. One of them told Tim Cohen in the small Karoo town where Tim now lives. Tim's reply: "Are you nuts? How did you do that?" Tim tells how it happened, what FIFA would and wouldn't tell him, that Sony wouldn't talk to him, and why the band didn't lose out entirely.

Tim was studying law in Durban when he ambled into the office of Dome, the student newspaper, and never really left. He spent most of his career at Business Day: political correspondent, London correspondent, finance editor and, eventually, editor, with a spell editing the Financial Mail along the way. Today he writes for the Financial Mail again and publishes a weekly column of his own, Loose Canon. His new book of the same name collects the best of his writing, chosen by the writer TJ Strydom. Tim didn't change the list.

Then the "vibecession". In the past 30 years, billions of people have moved out of absolute poverty, yet ask people how they feel about their economy and they're often quite depressed. Tim explains why each of us has our own inflation rate, and in a sense our own GDP. We talk about what the early AI forecasts got wrong about radiologists, why he sees AI as a tool, and his four rules for growing old and remaining irritating.

Loose Canon is published by Tafelberg, an imprint of Jonathan Ball Publishers, and is in bookshops and online. Tim's weekly column is at timcohen.co.za.

Thank you to Sherie, Tim's publicist, for making this conversation happen.