Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper on business, love and building an empire
Alex Cooper is the most listened to woman in the world. With every episode, her podcast reaches an audience of tens of millions – but she wants more.
“We know how to produce a podcast,” says Alex Cooper, perched on a leather couch, her straight blonde hair slicked back in a bun. “I could do it in my sleep at this point.”
At 29, podcast host Cooper is the American new media figure with the world at her feet. Just three years ago she inked a $60 million deal with Spotify for Call Her Daddy, her raunchy podcast about sex and dating that became a slick sit-down interview show. Still, as we sit together today it’s clear she has her sights set on a much bigger entertainment empire.
Last year, Cooper and her film producer husband Matt Kaplan founded Trending, a media company aimed at Gen Z audiences. Through a subsidiary called Unwell, she is recruiting online personalities to host new podcasts, looking for buzzy books to option and developing reality shows. She is reportedly also on the hunt for a new distribution partner for her podcast, and is hoping to pocket $100 million in her next deal – a hefty sum in an industry that has retrenched since its frothiest days. “Everyone has put their offers in, and now we’re all going back and forth, trying to decide which is going to be the best place,” she says.
Her ambitions come amid a sea-change in the audio world. The podcast market has chilled since Cooper’s chat show made her Spotify royalty with the No.1 podcast in the US – outperforming even the ubiquitous Joe Rogan, as well as right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson. In Australia she regularly sits within the Spotify top 10. While streamers and radio companies have gone through budget cuts and lay-offs, Call Her Daddy has an average audience of around 10 million per episode and remains one of the most popular shows across all platforms. The show has become an A-list press stop for the likes of Megan Fox, Miley Cyrus, Priyanka Chopra-Jonas and John Mayer. Now, Cooper is betting she can launch a new generation of edgy stars, all while trying to grow her own show and brand.
On a recent Tuesday morning at the Trending offices in West Hollywood, there were few signs of the spicy show that made Cooper a star. The company took over the space Kaplan had rented for ACE Entertainment, his production firm, which is now part of Trending. On the walls are posters from his films like the Netflix hit To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Aside from that, it looks like any old start-up.
Cooper trots around the floor with purpose. She passes Mina Lefevre, a former Meta and MTV executive who is developing scripted and unscripted TV for Trending, and showers her with praise: “She’s an icon and she’s crushing it”.
“Wait, have you been doing your meetings here?” she asks another staffer, incredulously, after spotting a walking pad – a kind of office-appropriate treadmill – under her desk. “Shut. Up.” She introduces the employee as Sienna, Kaplan’s former assistant who now develops concepts for reality shows. “We shove her in this room, and we tell her to go to work.”
Cooper is a young Millennial with a Zoomer’s sense for content. This has made her a decisive talent scout and a coveted conduit for brands looking to reach young women. Back in April, Churchill Downs Racetrack partnered with her to drum up excitement at the 150th Kentucky Derby. At the race, Cooper and Alix Earle, one of her new podcast hosts at Unwell, sat for a Q&A and did a meet-and-greet with fans. In June, she threw the first pitch at a Boston Red Sox baseball game. She recently hosted live Olympic watch parties in Paris for NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock in a bid to drum up interest in the Games. Once appointment TV for people of all ages, US viewership has declined in recent years. “How can we get these people to care?” Cooper says of the challenge she was presented with.
Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency, which represents Cooper, had floated her name to Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production, for potential Games programming. Solomon met Cooper and Kaplan over breakfast in Los Angeles in June 2023, where Cooper pitched herself as a natural partner – a former Division 1 college soccer player with millions of female fans. Her father, a former sports TV producer, had also worked on Olympics coverage back in the day.
“I was just so impressed,” says Solomon, whose own 20-year-old daughters are Cooper fans. “She’s this generation’s Oprah Winfrey.”
The first step in her partnership with NBC for the Olympic Games was to secure a sit-down interview with gymnast Simone Biles, who spoke candidly about her infamous case of the “twisties” in Tokyo, and her decision to return to Olympic competition.
“I thought I was going to be banned from America,” Biles admitted to Cooper in a full and frank discussion. “That’s what they tell you: ‘Don’t come back if not gold. Gold or bust. Don’t come back’.” The subsequent Olympics series Watch with Alex Cooper ran as a companion piece to the network’s coverage of the Games – often as a picture-in-picture feature.
Cooper grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children with their TV producer father and psychologist mother. Cooper enjoyed making movies at home, and when she matriculated at Boston University she decided to study film and television.
In 2018, after graduating and moving to New York City, Cooper and Sofia Franklyn launched Call Her Daddy. They were two roommates in their early twenties, talking frankly and crassly about getting blackout drunk, masturbation and one-night stands. The show was quickly acquired by Barstool Sports, the male-oriented media outlet founded by Dave Portnoy, and soon ranked among the top 30 US podcasts.
After a falling-out with Franklyn in 2020 amid contract negotiations with Barstool, Cooper hosted solo for another year in an agreement that would give her ownership of the show. Then she took it to Spotify, where the show assumed a more traditional interview format. Cooper still turns the conversation to sex and relationships, eliciting dishy details about her guests’ lives. She has also given them space to talk about more sensitive issues, including eating disorders, addiction and transgender rights. The fame of her guests has reached new heights.
“When Jane Fonda came on, I remember so many Gen Z people were like, ‘This woman’s iconic,’” Cooper says. “I’m like, ‘Of course’.”
Heidi Klum says that her 20-year-old daughter, Leni, encouraged her to go on the podcast this year. She answered questions like, “On a scale of prude to total freak, where do you fall, Heidi?” (Her response? “Nine.”) “I let my guard down,” says Klum.
Cooper records Call Her Daddy at a West Hollywood home near the Trending office – an atmosphere that guests say is more inviting than other press stops. “There were no frills or anything, she was in sweats. We rolled right into conversation laughing,” says actor Chace Crawford. “I wish they were all like that.” A listener since the earliest days of the show, which he calls “peak comedy and also very real and raw”, he recently jumped at the opportunity to go on the show while promoting the new season of Amazon’s The Boys.
“Alex is genuinely interested and fully engaged,” he says of her interview style. “There’s no BS. And it’s why she’s on top.”
Last fall, Cooper sold out her seven-show, six-city Unwell Tour, filling venues including the Theatre at Madison Square Garden, and two nights at The Met in Philadelphia. Each show had surprise celebrity guests, including talk show host Andy Cohen, comedian Chelsea Handler and country artist Kelsea Ballerini.
“Being not a part of the demographic and not part of the ‘Daddy Gang’, when I went on tour and really saw the audience and the relationship she had with them – I have never seen anything like it,” says T.J. Marchetti, 55, who joined Cooper’s company last fall as the chief brand officer for Unwell.
Cooper launched Unwell with two signed TikTok stars, Alix Earle and Madeline Argy, in August 2023. Both are hosting podcasts, and Earle has already seen success with a line of T-shirts, sweats and baseball hats; Cooper says two recent merchandise drops sold over “seven figures” apiece. In February, Unwell announced its first male star: Queenslander Harry Jowsey, a YouTuber and reality TV personality from the Netflix shows Too Hot to Handle and Perfect Match.
“We want men to be a part of the conversation,” says Cooper. “I think the more men can be a part of the conversation, the more things can change. Elevating female voices is important to me, but I’m absolutely not opposed to bringing the men in.”
Cooper says she looks for talent that is “very concrete in who they are, who they’re trying to reach and what their voice is”.
“When you’re looking at social media, you can tell which people are floundering all over, trying to appeal to everyone,” she says.
Unwell’s stars have all first created podcasts but those might not be the starting point for all future talent it brings into its fold, Cooper says. The company’s focus was to help personalities build community, she says, and then expand into areas including merchandise, events, consumer products, film and TV. Thanks to Cooper’s experience navigating ownership of her podcast’s intellectual property, Unwell stars can own the rights to the brands they’ve built if they leave its network.
Kaplan is in charge of Trending partnerships and oversees the scripted film and TV ventures. Meanwhile, Cooper says she additionally takes meetings with authors she finds on TikTok to see about optioning their work for film.
Travis Pollio, director of ticket strategy and promotion for the Boston Red Sox, says he experienced the power of Cooper’s fandom last November when he stumbled upon a line of over a thousand people chanting “Daddy” on Boston’s Lansdowne Street. They were queuing up for an Unwell Tour event.
Pollio says he reached out to Cooper’s team earlier this year to see about collaborating on an event. “We’ve been very intentional about our programming on game days, towards women and the female audience,” he says. He noted that the Red Sox’s successful 2023 Barbie Night and Taylor Swift’s NFL effect are proof that young women can be better galvanised around men’s professional sporting events.
In June, when Cooper threw the first pitch at the Red Sox match, the baseball stadium was decorated with posters of her and there was a mechanical bull in the concourse. Ticket holders received Red Sox jerseys with “Unwell” emblazoned on the back.
Pollio says over 5500 tickets were purchased for the themed event, a large portion of all individual tickets available – and that nearly three-quarters of buyers were women.
“It shows the power of her brand,” he says.
In an election year, Cooper’s fan base also comprises two coveted demographics in the eyes of political candidates: young people and women. She has yet to attend an event at the White House, she says, though she has been invited. “I was too busy [to go],” she explains.
Cooper hasn’t shied away from talking about politicised issues like abortion. “[For] anyone that has a uterus – and even if you have a penis – you should care about women’s rights,” she says. Still, politicians don’t make good guests for her show, she insists. “I think my fans have no interest,” she says. “When it comes to political figures, I kind of just feel like they can be on CNN and Fox.”
The youthful Cooper – who got married earlier this year and turns 30 later this month – says for now she intends to remain absorbed absolutely in her business. “When a child is involved, who knows, maybe I will have a moment and reset my boundaries within the show and myself,” she says.
As for that Oprah comparison? “I just compete with myself in a healthy way,” Cooper says. “I don’t think there is anyone that I would want to be compared to, or that I see doing exactly what I want to be doing.”
