Watch out, Joe Rogan – podcasting tycoon Alex Cooper is coming for you

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Alex Cooper has a strict rule when it comes to guests on her podcast. 'All I ask is people just be vulnerable and honest,' she said in an interview last year. People are not always ready to do that, she added, in which case, she turns them down.
It's a formula that has served Cooper, 30, remarkably well: she has got everyone from Jane Goodall to Kamala Harris to bare their most intimate thoughts and feelings for her listeners. Gwyneth Paltrow rated her former lovers for Cooper; Jane Fonda talked about the secret bulimia she battled with in her youth (and called Cooper 'one of the best interviewers I've ever had'); Hailey Bieber divulged her favourite sexual position.
For those who don't know who Cooper is, a quick rundown: she's a blonde, beautiful American podcaster who hosts the wildly successful show Call Her Daddy and became famous for a viral episode focused on her oral sex techniques.
Since it launched in 2018 as a chatty, sex-positive, no-holds-barred advice show, Call Her Daddy has become the most-listened-to podcast by women, with nearly five million downloads per episode. Cooper's podcast ranks only behind The Joe Rogan Experience as Spotify's most popular podcast.
In 2021, Time Magazine called her 'arguably the most successful woman in podcasting' after she signed a three-year exclusive deal with Spotify worth $60 million; last October, Forbes ranked Cooper as number eight on its Top Creators list, noting that her endeavours brought in $22 million. In August last year she signed a three-year deal with SiriusXM to replace Spotify as her distribution and advertising partner which netted her $125 million.
In possibly her biggest coup – and a sign of Cooper's cultural clout – last October she uploaded an interview with Kamala Harris in the final weeks of Harris's presidential campaign. Harris did not discuss her sex life, but she did discuss her upbringing, her political career, her stance on abortion and used the interview to respond to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' suggestion that Harris's lack of biological children meant she didn't have anything to keep her humble. 'Family comes in many forms,' said Harris pointedly. 'This is not the 1950s.'
So how did Cooper – once an awkward, gangly, red-haired teen who almost became a pro football player – become queen of the podcasting world? It's a story that she attempts to explain (but with her trademark ruthless control) in Call Her Alex, a new two-part documentary on Disney+.
Cooper grew up in Newton, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three siblings each two years apart. Her father worked as a TV sports producer for an ice hockey team; her mother is a psychologist. 'She acted like the oldest child,' her chic mother tells the cameras. 'She was an easy baby, but once she became a toddler…' she tails off. 'She had exceptional internal motivation,' her father says.
From an early age, Cooper was both behind and in front of a camera. Fascinated by her father's job, she learnt that 'when you're seeing something or have a vision, film it. Tell a story,' she explains in the documentary. Making videos – movies, music videos, dressing up in silly wigs with her friends – became one of Cooper's driving passions in life.
Bullied at school for her red hair and skinny frame, scared of boys 'because of the way they treated me', Cooper found solace in film-making and her female friendships. She taught herself how to use Adobe Premier aged nine and became obsessed with editing, loving having control over the timing and the pacing. 'It was the place where I felt 100 per cent myself,' Cooper tells the cameras.
The other place she could be herself was on the football field. She'd started playing soccer young; she was great at sport 'and I loved it because it was all women. I had all of these girls on my team.' Where the films tapped into her creative side, the football field was where Cooper could play out her competitive, gritty side ('I'm a competitive motherf----r', she tells the cameras).
In 2013, Cooper won a full tuition sports scholarship to Boston University to play soccer. But in her second year, it all started to go wrong. Nancy Feldman, the BU women's soccer coach, 'started to fixate' on Cooper. According to Cooper, Feldman called a private meeting in which she asked Cooper if she'd had sex the previous night. Eventually, her parents asked for a meeting with the university. Nothing was admitted to; the family was asked what they wanted. Cooper quit soccer, though she retained her scholarship.
Whether or not this was her turning point is not explicitly clear. But it did shift something in Cooper. She stopped playing football, but she also stopped caring what other people thought. After leaving BU, she started her own YouTube channel. One day, someone suggested she start a podcast. The subject? Women, of course – and their lives. Specifically their sex lives, in candid, intimate detail. Cooper asked her relatively new roommate Sofia Franklyn if she'd be up for doing a show together. They decided to call it Call Her Daddy – because Cooper was the Daddy. Nobody was going to push her about, and she was going to talk about sex like she owned it – like men did.
After she uploaded the first episode onto her Instagram, Dave Portnoy, founder of American pop culture website Barstool Sports (known for its conservative-leaning audience) DMd her. He liked the idea of a female version of what boys talk about in the locker room. When he discovered that Cooper cut and edited the show herself, he wanted to hire her. Barstool signed Cooper and Franklyn on a three-year deal for $70,000. It was the beginning of what would be a stellar rise to fame.
Call Her Alex kicks off with Cooper preparing for her first live comedy tour in 2024. What is immediately apparent are three things: first, that this is a woman who works relentlessly hard to get what she wants; second, that what she wants is to serve (and grow) her audience; and third, that her audience really, really loves Alex Cooper.
The camera flashes through some of the fans at her first show, in Boston's MGM Music Hall at Fenway. 'She helped me through my first breakup,' says one, tearfully. 'I feel like whenever I'm listening to her, I'm talking to a friend,' says another. One pair of friends have 'Unwell', the name of Cooper's media company, which focuses specifically on Gen Z content, tattooed on their wrists.
Everywhere, women wearing Cooper merch are laughing, talking, crying, or shrieking with excitement at getting to see their idol in the flesh. When she eventually comes on stage in her trademark tracksuit, Uggs and tousled beachy waves, and shouts 'What's Up, Daddy Gang?', the crowd – her gang – goes wild.
However you feel about her language, her eye-poppingly detailed sex chat or the guests on her show, this is the secret of Cooper's success: that she loves women. They are her allies, her crowd, and she wants to fight for them: for better sex, for more empowerment, for the ability to know what to do in any given situation. It's why she doesn't shy back from asking the most explicit questions, or probing her guests.
'We've got to talk about your personal life,' she tells them. 'I know you're promoting [something], but if listeners care about you, they'll care more about your product.' She is also not afraid to share details about her own life – it's how she got Hailey Bieber to own up to her favourite sex position with popstar husband Justin.
When she walks through a crowd, she talks to the women who stop her; she holds their hands; she looks into their eyes. When she goes back to visit the apartment where the podcast began and runs into the group of girls who now share it, she appears truly delighted to see and meet them – and even more so when they invite her up. She hugs them and chats to them. She is someone in whom they can see themselves. As the former CEO of Spotify puts it in the documentary, 'she cries when her audience cries; she connects.' It's why her audience is broad and spans both sides of the political spectrum.
And yet Cooper is not without – or afraid of – causing controversy. In 2020 she put out an episode called An Abortion Story, where she visited an abortion centre in North Carolina, interviewing both women who worked there and protestors outside. It is a compassionate, painful, fascinating episode, but it's clear whose side Cooper is on: the women.
'Overturning Roe [vs Wade] puts every single one of us in danger,' she declared. When she interviewed Harris, she was at pains to spell out that she knows the Daddy Gang is made up of both Republicans and Democrats – and that her people had been in talks with also hosting Donald Trump on the show – ('My goal today is not to change your political affiliation,' she said), but there was intense backlash, not least because of the obvious broad agreement between the two on issues such as abortion.
Her interviewing technique – which has been criticised for its generic line of questioning, lack of follow-ups, and reluctance to go for the jugular – was singularly soft on Harris, especially given she was Vice President at the time. Data from Social Blade showed she lost 5,000 followers on Instagram and just over 3,000 on the podcast's main page within a day of the interview airing, with a net loss of over 4,000 in the days after. Cooper was unapologetic. 'It was a no-brainer,' she said at the time. 'People can say they're going to cancel me all day, but they're still listening.'
Whether or not she's a feminist – although she would certainly call herself one – it's abundantly clear that her mind is about more than just her USP of sex. She is explicit that she created her podcast persona; at the very start, she took control of the cover artwork, insisting it feature herself and Franklyn, knowing that way it would be far harder to replace either of them as host.
Six months into the first contract with Barstool, Cooper negotiated for more money than Franklyn, arguing that she did more of the work and edited the podcast. In 2020, realising the show's potential (and how much money it was making Barstool), Cooper renegotiated a deal with Portnoy to own the share's IP, a deal that Franklyn didn't want to take. Undeterred, Cooper cut her free. 'I'd realised the Daddy Gang was bigger than both of us.' If feminism means building a brand around yourself as a strong, liberated, sexually emancipated woman, Cooper has nailed it.
And yet watching the documentary, that shy, awkward teen keeps popping her head out too – which is perhaps what saves her from herself. It would be easy to dislike Alex Cooper: she is brash, filthy-mouthed and utterly shameless. But she is trying, she says, 'to make women feel liberated, respected, seen, heard. To not be quiet, speak your mind, bulldoze through doors.'
Cooper has bulldozed through a fair few herself. And she doesn't look set to stop.
Call Her Alex is streaming on Disney+