Number of podcasts worldwide

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find deeply reassuring, that as humans have developed an increasingly sophisticated technology for broadcasting their opinions into the void, the gray wolves of the Northern Rocky Mountains have been doing roughly the same thing, albeit with fewer microphones and substantially better survival instincts. Between 2010 and 2022, these two entirely unrelated phenomena moved together with the kind of eerie synchronisation usually reserved for couples who have been married too long. One wonders what the wolves are podcasting about.

The most likely explanation involves neither conspiracy nor cosmic coincidence, but rather the simple fact that both trends ride the wave of economic recovery and technological expansion that followed the 2008 financial crisis. As broadband penetration increased in the early 2010s and smartphones became genuinely useful (rather than just impressive), more people had both the tools and the disposable income to start shouting into recording devices; simultaneously, wolf populations benefited from decades of conservation policy, habitat protection efforts, and a genuine cultural shift toward rewilding that picked up momentum as the economy recovered and people had time to think about things other than keeping their houses. A single gray wolf occupies roughly 50 square miles of territory—imagine the Northern Rocky Mountains as a vast podcast studio where the wolves and the humans were both suddenly able to claim space they couldn't afford in 2009.

What we're looking at here is not a discovery but a mirror, reflecting the simple truth that the world contains many trends all moving upward at once, and the human brain is magnificently equipped to find the meaningful pattern among them. The podcasts and the wolves are both symptoms of the same cultural and economic moment, which is perhaps less interesting than it is comforting—less mysterious, but somehow more strange. We are creatures of the same decade as the wolves.