Number of podcasts worldwide

It appears that somewhere around 2010, humanity collectively decided that the number of people talking about things into microphones should rise in perfect mathematical step with the number of places to plug in a car, which is the sort of synchronicity that suggests either a deeply hidden law of physics or that we are simply very good at mistaking coincidence for causation. We have somehow created a world where podcast proliferation and EV charging infrastructure move together like dance partners who have never met but received identical choreography in the mail.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly economic expansion and technology adoption moving in parallel through the same decade. The 2010s saw explosive growth in both consumer tech enthusiasm and urban infrastructure investment, particularly in affluent regions where people had disposable income for both podcasting equipment and electric vehicles. Between 2010 and 2022, US charging stations grew from roughly 500 to over 50,000—a hundred-fold increase that tracks almost perfectly with the podcast explosion from thousands to hundreds of thousands of shows, likely because both reflected the same underlying phenomenon: a booming economy, smartphone ubiquity, and a cultural moment where niche audiences could suddenly be assembled and served profitably. They're not talking to each other across time and space; they're simply both riding the same wave of connectivity and investment capital.

Which is to say that if you stare at enough pairs of unrelated statistics, you will eventually find two that waltzed together for a decade purely by accident. The correlation is real, which almost makes it worse. We built podcasting and charging infrastructure at the same speed, in the same places, for entirely different reasons that happened to be motivated by entirely the same economic tailwinds. Probably best not to think too hard about what else is moving in lockstep without our knowing.