Number of podcasts worldwide

It turns out that as Amazon's annual revenue grew from roughly 34 billion dollars in 2010 to over 575 billion in 2023, the number of podcasts in existence rose in almost perfect synchrony, as though Jeff Bezos were personally podcasting his way to dominance one audio file at a time. The universe, it seems, does not care about causation. It simply enjoys watching two entirely unrelated human endeavors dance together like passengers on the same escalator, each convinced they are climbing for different reasons.

The real story, of course, is that both podcasts and Amazon's revenue are riding the same wave of internet infrastructure growth and increasing global wealth. Between 2010 and 2023, smartphone penetration roughly tripled, broadband speeds increased tenfold, and the global middle class swelled by about a billion people—all of which would naturally accelerate both podcast creation (people suddenly able to listen) and e-commerce spending (people suddenly able to buy things from their phones). It is rather like noticing that coffee shop visits correlate with umbrella sales, then realizing both simply follow rainy weather.

We are pattern-seeking creatures living in a world of accelerating correlations, most of which are accidents caused by three or four confounding variables we haven't named yet. The podcast-Amazon pairing tells us almost nothing about podcasts, Amazon, or the future, except that we will probably find fifty more meaningless correlations before breakfast. Numbers move together for reasons that are usually boring and infrastructural.