Podcasting has surged in popularity. Pew Research found that in 2022, 49% of Americans reported listening to a podcast in the past year, and 20% of podcast listeners reported tuning in to a podcast nearly every day. 

But among the enormous number of podcasts, with 5 million on Spotify alone, few can claim to have reached 19,000 listeners in the span of a few years, let alone over 100 listeners upon the release of a debut episode.

At 19, first-year student Amanda Penny can. She hosts “Amanda’s World,” a podcast she releases every Thursday and Saturday out of her SUNY Oswego dorm room. “Amanda’s World” consists mostly of interviews with friends and special guests, typically influencers and small business owners. 

“Anything that I just find that I want to talk about, I talk about,” Penny said.

Her door is empty, lacking a name tag. Upon entering her room, however, one is greeted by a plethora of pillows, string lights and artwork. The string lights color her room with a purple glow. A large poster of Billie Eilish looks over her room across one for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.” She has two small mirrors, one shaped like a heart, the other like a butterfly. A watercolor painting reading “Amanda’s World,” courtesy of a hometown friend, sits atop her desk.

She records most interviews on her bed using her phone and her laptop for virtual interviews. The editing is often rough with fuzzy sound, but the discussions are audible. She produced each of the nearly 350 episodes on her own, though she received advice from her friends in her hometown of Northport for advice on editing and helping to book guests.

Despite not having a professional set-up, each episode of “Amanda’s World” receives hundreds of listeners on release day. On average Penny gains about 100 listeners a month. Depending on the episode, that number could rise to as high as 1,000. 

While Penny’s recent uploads feature her peers from college, Penny’s full roster of guests includes figures from the entertainment industry and social media. She interviewed a producer for “The Vampire Diaries,” the singer Shontelle and the cast of the Netflix reality show “Titletown High.” Her guests also include a Swedish musician, a spiritual healer and Aunrée Houston, an executive at Paramount who was a panelist from the then-recent media summit.

“I just try to build connections and make connections,” Penny said. “People get very shocked when I say that I’ve been doing this for so long.”

Penny interviewed TikTok creator Cooper Noriega in 2022, the last interview Noriega had before dying of fentanyl poisoning two days later. At the request of Noriega’s family, Penny removed the episode.

“That was very shocking,” Penny said. “I wasn’t expecting that… I was a junior in high school when it happened.”

Penny admits to not researching before most of her interviews and instead goes off what comes to mind naturally, but her guests enjoy her casual approach, she said. 

Along with emails and Instagram DMs, Penny said she tries to ensure a booking by “manifesting,” the belief that concentrating on a goal will make it happen.

“I’m a big manifestation person,” she said. “I believe in psychics.” 

For months she has been manifesting an interview with rapper Lil Tjay. She likes hip-hop, evidenced by her posters of Juice WRLD, Lil Uzi Vert and A Boogie wit da Hoodie. One of Penny’s goals is to feature Boogie, who was on the ballot for the 2024 OzFest concert.

“Amanda’s World” tends to keep a mellow tone, with a focus on everyday life since she began college. But Penny does not avoid serious topics. For the Dec 2, 2023 episode of “Amanda’s World,” Penny invited a volunteer from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. She said the episode hit close to home since a family friend of hers had died from pancreatic cancer when Penny was in middle school. Penny also raises money for charities that fight drug addiction and alcoholism.

Sometimes she records a solo episode in which she talks about topics surrounding her everyday life, such as mental health. She said her peers often criticize her for speaking about her experience with bullying.

“I’m very open with my audience like I tell them anything and everything,” Penny said. “I feel like up here [in Oswego], kids can be kind of like ***holes about it, and be like jerks and be like, ‘Don’t talk about that stuff,’ and I’m like, I’m talking about things I find important.”

Penny considered this the original point of the podcast, along with allowing her to exit her comfort zone. The heaps of pillows and purple lights help alleviate any discomfort Penny feels from her anxiety and ADHD. 

“I like anything sensory,” Penny said. “Like touch-and-feel.”

Penny pictures the podcast in the future having its own studio, staff and brand deals. She compared herself to The Unwell Network, a network of podcasts run by Alex Cooper, host of “Call Her Daddy.”

“I want to have something like that one day,” Penny said, “where I have my network full of people who make content like mine.”

Penny credits her podcast’s rise in popularity to an episode about her first break-up with a man she dubs “The Libra” after his zodiac sign. The episode reached 500 listeners on its debut. Three years later, Penny invited The Libra, who had become a friend, as a guest.

Penny’s friends from Northport support her project, often as guests themselves. Thea Særvoll met Penny through a mutual friend who invited her on the podcast. Særvoll has since been a guest for five episodes.

“I think that the podcast can grow and be very big,” Særvoll wrote. “She has already gotten a good start and if she keeps it going getting lots of people with a great following to be a guest, she would [become] even bigger.”

“I was really impressed because I couldn’t imagine doing something like that because it takes a lot of courage,” Penny’s friend Tristan Reilly wrote. “I thought she was so brave and enjoyed listening to it.”

The project began due to a broken bone.

“I went to a high school where all you cared about was sports,” Penny said. She initially wanted to play basketball in her senior year of high school, but she shattered her humerus.

“That’s like how I’m known [in my hometown], as the girl who broke her arm her senior year,” she said.

Wanting something to do with her free time as her arm healed, Penny started “Amanda’s World” in January 2021. Her first episode featured Ireland Bennett, a TikTok creator known for cosplaying Marvel characters. 

To her surprise, the episode received over 100 listeners on its first day.

“To this day, I can’t process it,” Penny said. “I never promoted the episode. I never did anything to like bring it out there, I just got so many listens.”

After a month she gained 1,000 listeners, a fact she said she discovered while showing her podcast to her high school history teacher. 

Since then, “Amanda’s World” has become Penny’s pride and joy.

“I’ve been doing this for so long, and it’s just something I’ve fallen in love with and I want to take it to the next level,” Penny said.

Photo by Evan Youngs