"I was determined to find a way where no one could ever silence me again."

Before she was the highest-paid female podcaster in history, Alex Cooper was a red-haired kid in Newtown, Pennsylvania, sitting in the back of a hockey broadcast control room wearing a miniature headset, watching her father produce Philadelphia Flyers games.

She was five. She was already learning to control the frame.

Three decades later, that instinct has produced a media empire estimated at nine figures: "Call Her Daddy," the Unwell Network, a beverage line, a creative agency, a Golden Globes nomination, and a reported $125 million SiriusXM deal. Forbes ranked her the seventh highest-earning creator in America in 2024.

But the empire isn't the interesting part. What built it is.

Between that kid in the control room and the mogul at the Golden Globes, there was a girl whose classmates slammed her head into the ground until she lost consciousness. A college athlete whose coach allegedly leveraged playing time for details about her sex life. A business partner she hasn't spoken to since 2020.

Alex Cooper built an empire on one principle: no one will ever silence me again. The question is what happens when that principle runs the show, when the same instinct that builds also burns.

TL;DR: Why Alex Cooper is an Enneagram Type 7
  • Freedom over everything: From podcast pivots to business expansions, Cooper resists getting boxed in. When something stops feeling expansive, she moves.
  • Momentum as medicine: A core fear of being trapped with pain shows up as relentless forward motion: new ventures, new formats, new deals.
  • The charm offensive: She doesn't dominate like a Type 8 or polish like a Type 3. She charms, riffs, pivots, and makes you feel like you're the only person in the room.
  • The cost: Two high-profile professional relationships, one co-host and one protegee, ended in public fallouts. The pattern is consistent.

What Is Alex Cooper's Personality Type?

Alex Cooper Is an Enneagram Type 7

Enneagram Type 7, the Enthusiast, is driven by a need for freedom, stimulation, and options. The core fear: being trapped in pain or deprivation. The core desire: to be satisfied and content.

From the outside, Cooper can look like a Type 3 (the Achiever, driven by image and validation) or a Type 8 (the Challenger, driven by control and dominance). The difference is in the motivation.

Type 3s polish their image and chase external approval. Type 8s confront and overpower. Cooper charms, riffs, and pivots. When something stops feeling expansive, she moves. Not to prove herself (Type 3) or to assert dominance (Type 8), but because staying in one place too long feels like a cage.

You see it in every major turn of her career: the 2020 split with her co-host, the pivot from raunchy sex talk to A-list celebrity interviews, the jump from Spotify to SiriusXM, the expansion from podcast to network to agency to beverage line to TV production.

The Girl in the Control Room

Alex Cooper was born August 21, 1994, in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Bryan, produced television broadcasts for the Philadelphia Flyers for over three decades, previously at ESPN and NBC Sports. Her mother, Laurie, is a school psychologist with a master's from the University of Bridgeport. She has an older sister, Kathryn, and an older brother, Grant.

Alex was the youngest. The wild child.

That pairing of parents explains more than it seems.

Before she turned ten, Alex was sitting in the back of her father's control room, watching him call shots for live hockey broadcasts. By the same age, she'd taught herself Adobe Premiere and was editing comedy skits filmed in the family basement. "I was obsessed with editing," she said in her 2025 documentary. "I loved having control over the timing and the pacing and the comedy."

Her mother shaped the other half. Growing up with a school psychologist meant nothing stayed hidden: "She was so intuitive and could always tell when I was lying." Alex found it maddening as a kid.

She'd later call it the reason she's good at her job: "A lot of what I'm doing goes back to what my mother taught me from a young age, which is making someone feel seen and heard and understood."

A broadcaster's instinct for production. A psychologist's instinct for people. But what drove both instincts into overdrive wasn't ambition.

It was pain.

What They Called Her

Alex went to a Catholic school in Newtown. The boys made it hell.

They called her "a skeleton." They said she was "frail," that she looked "disgusting," that she "had no soul" because of her red hair. In one incident, a group of students slammed her head into the ground until she lost consciousness.

She kept it a secret. She was too embarrassed to tell her parents.

A teacher humiliated her for wearing makeup to conceal her acne. The bullying continued for years. In high school, she dyed her red hair blonde, a change that would become her known look for over a decade. Cooper later said the bullying made her believe she would never get married or have kids.

Her escape was the basement. While other kids were socializing, Alex was editing. She told Jay Shetty she'd logged roughly 10,000 hours in front of editing software by eighth grade, making skits, impersonations, anything that let her control the frame.

Content creation wasn't a career ambition. It was a survival mechanism.

"I had people-pleasing tendencies because of my childhood and feeling left out," she told Shetty. "I still catch myself doing it in media."

The kid who was rejected learned to perform. The kid who was silenced learned to talk. And the kid who lost control of how people saw her became obsessed with controlling the narrative.

What the Coach Wouldn't Say

Alex earned a Division I soccer scholarship to Boston University, playing 49 games for the Terriers from 2013 to 2015. She thrived on the field. Off the field, something darker was happening.

In her 2025 Hulu docuseries "Call Her Alex", Cooper alleged that her soccer coach, Nancy Feldman (who coached at BU from 1995 to 2022), subjected her to years of escalating sexual harassment: asking about her sex life and dating, making comments about her body, placing her hand on Cooper's thigh in private meetings, repeatedly insisting on being alone with her. She alleges Feldman leveraged playing time for personal information.

A former teammate corroborated: "Every minute that Alex played was highlighted during that film session. It was all based off of her appearance, whereas I felt like when she made comments about other players, it was about their performance."

One game captures the dynamic. Cooper was benched for a critical NCAA first-round match against St. John's. When she was finally allowed to play, she scored the tying goal and led the team to a 2-1 victory.

Afterward: "We walked the entire length of the soccer field after we had just won this huge game. It is dead silence. She will not say one word to me, and then she does the interview. She will not say my name."

When Cooper and her parents brought documentation to BU's athletic department in 2015, she says the department refused to review it. Boston University has since said it takes the allegations seriously and retained outside counsel. Ninety-nine former players signed a letter supporting Feldman. One other former player has publicly come forward alleging abuse.

Cooper didn't speak publicly about BU for a decade. When the documentary finally aired, the reviews were mixed. Time called it "less a portrait of a fascinating personality than a shallow branding exercise." Defector described watching it as "being pitched a product."

But consider the bind: a woman who built an empire on talking about everything makes a film about her deepest trauma, and the result still feels polished and controlled. Did the critics miss the point, or did they see it too clearly?

She graduated from BU's College of Communication in 2017, carrying all of it with her.

From an Apartment to a War

She moved to New York. Advertising sales by day, dreaming by night. Her first real media taste had come anchoring for Dirty Water Media in 2016.

In 2018, she and Sofia Franklyn launched "Call Her Daddy" from their New York apartment. They'd known each other for only a few months.

Downloads reportedly jumped from 12,000 to 2 million per episode within two months. Barstool Sports acquired the show almost immediately.

The early episodes were raw, raunchy, revolutionary. Alex and Sofia flipped the script on sex talk, giving women permission to be as bold and unapologetic as men had always been. The infamous "Gluck Gluck 9000," a graphic oral sex technique that became a viral meme, turned them into a cultural phenomenon overnight.

Then came the 2020 "Daddy Divorce."

During contract renegotiations with Barstool, Dave Portnoy offered both hosts a deal to gain ownership of the "Call Her Daddy" IP if they stayed one more year. Alex accepted. Sofia wanted more, reportedly $1 million per host plus increased merchandise revenue.

The public narrative, shaped by Portnoy and Alex, was clear: Sofia's greed killed the partnership.

Sofia's version, shared years later, is different. In a 2023 Rolling Stone interview: "The betrayal piece was more upsetting than the financial piece." She said Cooper negotiated separately without telling her. "There's no way in hell I would speak to our boss without you, that would be f***ing crazy, and I don't think that went both ways."

She alleged Cooper had a relationship with Portnoy that she wasn't aware of. When Alex later sold to Spotify for $60 million, Sofia called it vindication: "I think her selling it for that amount was just a testament to what I was saying the entire time, which is what I was chastised for."

The quieter detail came later. Sofia said she thought Cooper "was going to stand by her on her wedding day and be the godmother to her children." The betrayal "messed up her view of female friendship."

"When everything went down, I actually was silent," Sofia told Rolling Stone. "But people with opposing views were so vocal on so many different platforms that were so ginormous... I was a little bit silenced."

Alex's counter in her documentary: "It was the classic, 'You think you see something online and people genuinely believe you're like sisters, but our relationship was so awful.'"

By 2021, "Call Her Daddy" had left Barstool for Spotify. The show shifted from sex tips to celebrity interviews. The raunchy brand had become a box instead of a playground, and Cooper would rather burn the box than stay trapped inside it.

How She Gets Them to Talk

How does Alex Cooper get Hailey Bieber to address the Selena Gomez timeline controversy for the first and only time? How does she get Miley Cyrus to reveal she was attracted to women before men, something she hadn't shared anywhere else?

Three techniques. She follows emotional flow over scripted structure. She leaves room for mess instead of rushing to clean up silence or oversharing. And she protects her guests in the edit, telling them: "This is going to make you look really bad, and I'm going to choose to believe you didn't mean to say that."

That protection creates trust. Trust creates confessions.

She also deliberately avoids being photographed socializing with celebrities. She told Dax Shepard she built a "bubble." If people see her with famous people, they'll assume she's "fame hungry." She can't make people confess on air if they think she's collecting famous friends offstage.

The clearest proof came in October 2024, when Vice President Kamala Harris sat with Cooper for 40 minutes in a Washington D.C. hotel room. The woman who became famous for the "Gluck Gluck 9000" was now asking a sitting VP about reproductive rights and the "childless cat ladies" attack. Harris called JD Vance's comments "mean and mean-spirited" and added: "This is not the 1950s anymore."

Cooper lost roughly 5,000 Instagram followers overnight. Critics accused her of peddling propaganda. Her defense: "This specific election, the entire focus is on women's bodies, and we're losing rights by the day." She called it "totally worth it."

That episode was the pivot made visible. Not just from sex tips to celebrity interviews, but from entertainer to someone whose audience trusted her enough to hear a Vice President speak through her microphone. Rolling Stone had already dubbed her "Gen-Z's Barbara Walters." The Harris sit-down was the moment the label stopped being aspirational.

What They Actually Get From Her

None of that explains why 5 million people download an episode. Technique alone doesn't build an audience. Something else does.

Cooper's own description: "Sexuality, money, not being able to stand up for ourselves, confidence, mental health, anything you think about when you're alone in the shower. Come to Call Her Daddy and there's gonna be a conversation elaborating on it, and you're not going to feel alone."

The audience, predominantly women ages 18 to 26 who call themselves the "Daddy Gang," treats the show less like a podcast and more like a group chat with a big sister who went first. Elle described it as "friends from sleep-away camp, girls who haven't seen each other in years and have a lot to catch up on." Cooper regularly DMs her 2.2 million Instagram followers about their romantic and sexual quandaries between episodes.

What she offers is permission. She gave women permission to talk about sex the way men always had. Then she gave them permission to talk about therapy, insecurity, and ambition with the same directness. Her mother raised her in a house where emotional intelligence was "a prerequisite," and Cooper turned that into something millions of women were starving for.

The Daddy Gang isn't just an audience. It's a belonging structure: shared language ("unwell," "daddy"), inside references, a sense of being in on something that outsiders find uncomfortable.

For a woman who spent her childhood desperate to belong and unable to, building the world's largest sleepover is either poetic justice or the ultimate coping mechanism. Probably both.

The Unwell Machine

Start with the name. "Unwell" is Gen-Z shorthand for "I'm not okay, and that's fine." Cooper's definition: "If you're sitting at work but you were out until 4 a.m., you're unwell." The word itself may have originated with Sofia Franklyn on an early Call Her Daddy episode. Cooper took it and built an empire around it.

Notice the psychology of that branding choice. A Type 7's core fear is being trapped in pain. Naming your entire business after a word that means "not okay" is either genuine growth, sitting with discomfort instead of fleeing it, or the ultimate reframe: packaging the thing you fear most so attractively that it stops feeling like a threat.

By 2026, "Unwell" has evolved from a brand into a business conglomerate. A three-year SiriusXM deal reported at up to $125 million. A beverage line at Target. A creative agency. A Hulu dating show. A $3 million sponsorship making Unwell Hydration the official partner of the National Women's Soccer League, a full-circle moment for the D1 soccer player whose coach refused to say her name.

Her company employs close to 100 people. She turned down an $8 million brand deal because she "didn't believe in putting my face next to it." Her reasoning: "I think it's important to say no to shit, because then you just lose your f***ing credibility."

She told the Hollywood Reporter: "There's loyalty, but this is also business, and I'm a motherfucker when it comes to business." Her hiring philosophy: "If you're not trying to take my job, then I don't want you at the company."

Her therapist recommends she take baths to decompress. She and Matt's version of "turning off" on vacation is spending three to four hours a day brainstorming new ideas. She finds genuine happiness in it. For her, rest and creation are the same thing, which is either a gift or a warning, depending on the decade.

After the SiriusXM deal, Alex bought her parents a house in Los Angeles, a New England-style home about fifteen minutes from her own place. Her father, the man who first put a headset on her in that Flyers control room, now lives close enough to watch what she built with it.

"Buying them a house is the least I could f***ing do," she told CNBC, "because they sacrificed financially, emotionally, and they sacrificed with my other siblings in moments for me."

Kathryn and Grant, the older sister and brother she rarely mentions publicly, gave up parental time and attention so the youngest could chase what she was chasing. A Type 7's forward motion always has a wake.

When the Pattern Repeats

The Sofia split is well-documented. The Alix Earle split is still unfolding.

When lifestyle influencer Earle signed with The Unwell Network in September 2023, it looked like a perfect pairing. At the TIME 100 event a month later, Alex praised her publicly: "She's a beast. She has a work ethic that I've never seen and I'm so proud of her."

The business structure mattered more than the compliments. Under Cooper's $125 million SiriusXM deal, SiriusXM paid Cooper, and Cooper paid the hosts in her network. Earle's compensation flowed through the woman who called her a beast.

By early 2025, the relationship had soured. Earle's father got involved in her business decisions and, per insiders, "did not like what Unwell was doing." Earle skipped Unwell's high-profile Super Bowl party in New Orleans despite being in town. By February, Variety reported "Hot Mess" had dropped from the network. Earle paused podcasting entirely, saying she "can't get into the details."

Alex's response on Instagram: "Alix not being able to podcast has nothing to do with Unwell. Unwell gave her everything back. She owns her IP."

Sources told a different story. Insiders said Earle "felt taken advantage of." That the two had "clashed over business, and their friendship is over because of it."

Earle's own response, months later, when a fan asked what happened with Alex Cooper: "How much time do you have?"

The role reversal matters. In 2020, Cooper was the talent fighting for fair treatment under someone else's deal. By 2025, she was the boss whose talent felt constrained.

Two partnerships. Two public splits. The same dynamic: intense alignment, then friction, then forward motion without repair. The pattern isn't malice. It's momentum. When you're always moving forward, the people calling after you sound further and further away.

The Independent Woman Who Learned to Stay

She met Matt Kaplan during a pandemic Zoom call in July 2020. He was the founder of ACE Entertainment, the producer behind "To All the Boys I've Loved Before." She saw his face on screen and thought: "Wow, this producer is very handsome. But stay focused, Alex."

Fans would know him only as "Mr. Sexy Zoom Man."

What followed might be the hardest thing Alex Cooper has done. Not building an empire. Learning to let someone love her.

Cooper has been in individual therapy for years, not just couples work. She told Dax Shepard she watches the Showtime series "Couples Therapy" like a sport, studying Dr. Orna Guralnik's technique the way her father studied game tape. She's described therapy as aspirational, not just maintenance: "It's sexier and it's more appealing, in my opinion, in dating and life, if you are working on yourself constantly."

Her mother, the school psychologist, had drawn a boundary early: "I need to be your mom. I cannot be your therapist and your mom." That forced Alex to find her own container.

In a 2025 podcast episode with Dr. Guralnik, Cooper revealed she and Matt went to therapy early in their relationship. The core issue: Matt was ready to build a life together. Alex interpreted his genuine care as controlling, because every man before him had used "caring" as a lever. She thought committing to someone meant losing herself.

"I always used to say, 'I'm never getting married,'" she told Vogue. "I thought it would threaten my independence. No man should be able to say that I'm his."

What changed wasn't just Matt. It was the realization that her resistance to intimacy ran the same program as everything else: keep moving, keep control, never be trapped. The woman who built a career on forward motion chose to be still.

Their April 2024 wedding in Riviera Maya, Mexico told the rest. Alex walked herself down the aisle: "I really rejected the concept of being walked down by a man to be handed to another man. My mom also walked herself down the aisle, so in a sense, we are creating our own tradition for the women in our family."

Her parents tried to give a speech. Her mother, the school psychologist who always had the perfect insight, couldn't get her papers together. Her father felt the anxiety and froze too. They stood at the microphone for seven minutes. The speech never happened.

Alex's mom later said: "The worst parts of weddings are always the thing that people talk about."

The entire wedding party ended the night swimming in the ocean in their formal attire.

Then came the harder conversation. In June 2025, Alex opened up about delaying motherhood. She and Matt had planned to start trying in summer 2024. After going off birth control, which she'd been on since age 16, she experienced physical struggles and career doubts.

"I just felt in my body that I want to grind at work and I want to be selfish a little longer. I wanna enjoy what I've worked so f***ing hard for."

The desire for more clashing with the fear of losing freedom. She said it out loud instead of sprinting past it. That's the growth.

What Would Happen If You Stopped?

Here is a woman who was bullied until she lost consciousness and kept it secret. Who was harassed by a coach who refused to say her name and stayed silent for a decade. Who lost a business partner and a protegee in the process of never stopping.

And then she built a $125 million empire on the act of speaking.

Every wound became content. Every betrayal became a pivot. Every moment of pain became fuel for the next expansion. The pattern works. The deals keep getting bigger. The audience keeps growing.

But the documentary raises a question it can't quite answer: is publicly sharing trauma the same as processing it? Or is it another version of the same pattern, turning pain into content, using momentum as a substitute for stillness?

Real growth for a Type 7 isn't choosing between depth and forward motion. It's holding both at the same time.

The most revealing thing about Alex Cooper isn't the empire or the podcast numbers. It's the therapy, individual and couples, ongoing for years. The moment she realized she was pushing Matt away, not because he was wrong for her, but because letting someone in felt like losing control. She almost destroyed the best relationship of her life with the same instinct that built her career.

She caught it. She stayed. That might be more impressive than any deal she's ever closed.

The girl who used to sit in her dad's control room wearing a miniature headset now runs a control room of her own. The difference is what she's choosing to broadcast.

If you recognize her pattern, the reflex to turn pain into a project, to outrun discomfort with the next venture, to mistake motion for progress, then you already know the question: what would happen if you stopped?

Most of us can't answer it either.

If you want to decode patterns like these in yourself and the people around you, explore our questions section.

Disclaimer This analysis of Alex Cooper's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect her actual personality type.