Gluck-Gluck Diplomacy: How ‘Call Her Daddy’ Conquered the Globe One Dirty Secret at a Time

**From Moscow to Manila, the World Listens: How a Brooklyn Bedroom Podcast Became Global Soft-Power Diplomacy**

If you’ve ever wondered what American cultural hegemony sounds like in 2024, it’s the wet slap of saliva on a microphone somewhere in DUMBO, accompanied by the phrase “gluck-gluck 9000.” “Call Her Daddy,” the sex-and-satire podcast that began as two roommates dissecting Tinder horror stories, has metastasized into a planet-spanning phenomenon—proof that the empire doesn’t export democracy anymore; it exports dating tips and daddy issues, gift-wrapped in a Brooklyn accent.

From the outside, the numbers look like a Pentagon budget line item: 2.3 million YouTube subscribers, chart-topping spots in 68 countries, and a rumored $60 million Spotify exclusive that could bankroll a mid-size Balkan navy. But the real shock is the geography. In India—where public kissing can still trigger a morality mob—episodes trend on Twitter minutes after release. Saudi teenagers binge the show in AirPods tucked under hijabs, absorbing lessons on rim-job etiquette they will almost certainly never practice without a death sentence. Even in Pyongyang, defectors report bootleg MP3s swapped on USBs smuggled across the Yalu, because nothing punctures totalitarian monotony like a Manhattanite ranking dick pics.

The show’s secret sauce is its cheerful nihilism: relationships are transactional, self-worth is quantifiable in Instagram likes, and love is just a marketing funnel. That worldview travels surprisingly well. In São Paulo, where Tinder is essentially a city-wide hostage negotiation, the podcast’s mantra of “block and move on” feels like liberation theology. Meanwhile in Tokyo, overworked “herbivore men” discover that American women actually verbalize desire—albeit in graphic metaphors involving deli meat—and the earth shifts slightly on its axis.

Of course, every empire attracts guerrillas. French feminists accuse the show of “Yankee phallocentrism,” apparently forgetting that France literally invented the phrase “ménage à trois.” Italian newspapers blame it for plummeting birth rates, as if the peninsula’s economic crater and 40-percent youth unemployment were mere appetizers. Even the Kremlin got in on the panic; state TV ran a five-minute segment claiming the podcast is CIA psy-ops designed to sterilize Russian women via chronic singledom—because nothing says “geopolitical threat” like advising girls to delete a guy’s number if he owns Bitcoin.

The cynic’s read is that “Call Her Daddy” is just soft-power colonialism 2.0: instead of McDonald’s, we ship serotonin. But the darker joke is on us. While Washington argues over TikTok’s national-security risk, an even more intimate data harvest is underway. Every download whispers your location, your kink spreadsheet, your headphone model, your bedtime. Spotify knows that 3.2 million listeners re-listen to the blow-job tutorial at 1:43 a.m.—and it knows whether they finish. If information is the new oil, then global libido is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Alex Cooper is the charmingly ruthless wildcatter.

Still, you can’t blame a Brooklynite for weaponizing loneliness when the world keeps ordering refills. South Korean youth have given up on dating, literally; their government pays couples to procreate and they still prefer K-drama parasocial romances. British pubs are closing faster than the show’s former co-hosts can sue each other. Even the Swedes—once the undefeated champions of casual sex—now report record celibacy, presumably because someone told them orgasms aren’t carbon-neutral. Against that backdrop, a podcast that insists sex should be fun, sloppy, and slightly humiliating feels almost revolutionary, or at least like a halfway decent antidepressant.

So laugh if you want at the spectacle of planet Earth taking relationship advice from a woman who once used a dental dam as a metaphor for emotional boundaries. The laugh is on us. While diplomats draft sternly worded communiqués about “rules-based order,” the real negotiations are happening in earbuds: a billion strangers agreeing, for one hour a week, that desire is messy, power is hot, and everyone—yes, even you in Ulaanbaatar—deserves an orgasm that isn’t apologized for. If that’s not world peace, it’s at least a cease-fire with ourselves.