Number of podcasts worldwide

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it does, that the number of people in the world willing to listen to other people talk into microphones has risen in almost perfect synchronisation with the number of frozen pizzas sold in American supermarkets between 2010 and 2022. One might reasonably expect these two metrics to have absolutely nothing to do with one another. One would be wrong, or at least, statistically speaking, one would be very wrong indeed.

The link is the lockdown lunch break. Frozen pizza sales ballooned in 2020 as a workforce suddenly at home needed quick, unambitious meals, while the same captive audience fueled a podcast explosion as a replacement for the commute they no longer had. Both series measure what a nation does when it eats at its own kitchen counter and needs something in its ears.

What we are witnessing, then, is not causation but a kind of statistical shadow-play, where two entirely separate industries happen to be solving the same problem—the problem of how to get through an evening without thinking too hard. The correlation is real. The meaning of the correlation is something else entirely. We live in an age of accidental synchronisation.