“Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!” Alex Cooper croons on an episode of her famed podcast, Call Her Daddy, released in December 2024. “Hi, hello, I see you, I love you,” Cooper continues at the opening of the episode.
Cooper’s warm, conspiratorial, and familial tone masks the fact that rather than her speaking to a close friend over the phone, she is addressing an audience of millions. Cooper’s podcast, the most-listened-to podcast by women and Spotify’s second largest podcast in 2023, reflects a growing infatuation with podcasts around the world.
Over the past decade, podcast listening has steadily increased in popularity. Today, there are over 400 million podcast listeners globally, with more than two million independent podcasts.
What explains this increasing obsession with podcasts? For Dr. Mark Lloyd, associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, podcasts are nothing new. Dr. Lloyd, who has worked as a journalist with platforms like NBC and CNN, told the Daily in an interview over Zoom: “There is nothing particularly unusual or unique about podcasts.” He added that “oral forms of communication as distinct from video and text have been around for centuries.”
Dr. Lloyd pointed to ancient texts from the likes of Homer and Aristotle as stories that were originally transmitted orally well before they became written narratives. Dr. Lloyd noted that “we are extraordinarily drawn to the human voice and the human voice that tells stories.”
Before there were podcasts, this innate attachment to the human voice manifested through radio. “I’ve always loved the radio,” Dr. Lloyd told the Daily. “I’ve always been interested in why radio was so powerful.”
Like any form of communication, radio can be “extraordinarily valuable” but also “extraordinarily harmful to societies,” Dr. Lloyd cautioned. In the 1930s, priest Charles E. Coughlin used the radio to broadcast extreme anti-Semitic rhetoric in the United States. Today, podcasts are used for similar ends. As Dr. Lloyd commented in reference to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast: “What Joe Rogan is doing is really no different than what Charles Coughlin was doing in the 1930s and 1940s. There is no real difference between them in terms of [how they] incite people to believe in conspiracies.” Dr. Lloyd added, “It’s given a different name – ‘podcast’ – but it is essentially a radio form.”
To be sure, there are some differences between current podcasting and the mainstream radio of several decades ago. Malcolm Sanger, PhD student in Communication Studies at McGill University, told the Daily in an email that podcasts are both “a new medium and an old medium.” Sanger added, “[Podcasts] are very similar to radio, obviously, but are accessed in a different way.”
Dr. Lloyd also acknowledged that podcasts are more accessible than producing radio or video content. It is less expensive for people to create podcasts, especially regarding the ease of editing, storing, and transmitting oral content.
That said, despite the distinctions between podcasting and older forms of oral communication, the “fundamentals haven’t changed,” Dr. Lloyd told the Daily. Aristotle’s early cautions about speech and rhetoric illuminated the power of oral communication to drive large crowds to action within their communities.
Today, the significance of oral modes of communication as a medium to influence large groups of people is more relevant than ever. We are specifically seeing major politicians utilize podcasting to reach voters, like US President Donald Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience and Kamala Harris’s interview on Call Her Daddy. As Sanger explained to the Daily, “politicians and their advisors know that podcasts attract larger and larger audiences, and so it is important for politicians to appear on them, just as they once went on radio and TV.”
Lewis Goodall, former policy editor of Newsnight and presenter on the popular podcast The News Agents, discussed a hunger for political podcasts with Elle UK. “There is a real desire from younger people for news and politics content that’s not being well-served by more traditional outlets,” he said.“People like the immediacy of just sitting down, listening, and feeling like they’re part of a podcast.”
No matter the genre, it is evident that podcasts fulfill the strong human demand to interact with information through oral means of communication. With a rich history of audio communication through media like radio, our draw to podcasts is nothing new, but rather reflects an innate attachment to the human voice. As Sanger stated, “I think people have never lost their attention for a well-told, exciting story, […] and it would seem lots of podcasts provide that for lots of people.”