SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

Readers,

Age eventually catches up with you. In my case, it comes in the form of a bad back, an increasingly grumpy disposition induced by a growing disorientation, and a sudden burst in anxious, existential desperation that has me furiously clawing for youthful activities, like wearing sneakers. On a completely unrelated note, I have recently created a new public-facing Instagram for all my Vulturious and NYMagian activities. Please and thank you. Anyway, as always, feel free to write to loop me in on what you’re up to and what you’re consuming: nicholas.quah@vulture.com.

ADVERTISER CONTENT

At some point over the past year, Kyla Scanlon seemed to be everywhere — at least on my feeds. I first heard her on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots last summer, tied to the release of her book In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work, which is a kind of economics primer for the TikTok generation. Recently, she surfaced on The Ezra Klein Show, expanding on a Substack post about the political juice of both Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump, a piece that had already ricocheted across my blogrolls and reading lists. Not long after, I spotted the more geriatric corners of my network sharing clips of her appearance on The Daily Show, the twenty-eight year old anointed as a kind of the economics spokesperson for her generation. 

Three’s a trend, I reckon. But it turned out that even before I was familiar with her name, I knew her coinage: “vibecession,” the shorthand for a downturn defined less by data than by collective mood that had become a favored crutch for journalists trying to communicate the strangeness of the current economy. Among younger, online audiences she was already a fixture; the reason she crossed my millennial radar, I suspect, is because she’d been anointed by the major shows of my generation. Such is the segmented nature of how recognition works in the New Media era. Which is to say, by the time she showed up on my feeds, she was probably already well-established news to everyone under 30. Officially an old, I was just the lagging indicator, still waiting for Bloomberg and New York Times’ institutional signals.

Scanlon’s platform has only kept growing. When we spoke, she had begun her West Coast day absurdly early with a 6 a.m. spot on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where she spoke on a panel that also included Andrew Ross Sorkin. Busy days like this are now routine. Between pumping out essays for her Substack and explainers for social media, where she’s increasingly turned her focus to the economy’s attentional and speculative aspects (which, at this point, feels like the whole thing based on how much it feels like a giant slot machine running off manic fumes), she is drafting her second book, developing a television project, and crisscrossing the country on a speaking tour. In This Economy? put her on the road in the first place, widening her audience. Paradoxically, all this activity has left her feeling as though she should be doing more.

Despite the rising profile, Scanlon is still settling into the role of professional “economics commentator,” a label now affixed to her with some permanence. She has only recently grown comfortable with it, even as she finds herself moderating conversations with central bankers like Mary Daly. A Kentucky native, she once pursued engineering for the sake of stability, before realizing economics could be both a viable career and a vessel for curiosity. That background lends her work an unvarnished normalcy. She’s often cast as a “Gen Z economist” — a tag she accepts more than resists, if only because it’s accurate. She is, after all, 28. “I talk to a lot of young people when I’m on the road with the book,” she says. “They read the newsletter, they ask questions, and I try to grapple with them.” And what she sees in the field, though, is a profession still reluctant to welcome outsiders. “A lot of times I go to these economics conferences, and people say, ‘Whoa, you’re young.’” But as I learned through our conversation, her vantage point isn’t just generational but unusually wide, expressed by media habits that range from podcasts to classic books to a newfound interest in proper cinema.

Podcast: Heavyweight

My first pick would be Heavyweight. It’s a show where the host, Jonathan Goldstein, generally works with an ordinary person to resolve a big, heavy moment or regret from their past. But he does it in this really incredible way, complete investigative journalism, tracking down the people involved and seeing if there’s a way to get closure. 

There’s one episode that really stuck with me about a woman who had been bullied badly in middle school. Decades later, she was still not able to get past it. He ends up working with her to reach out to those classmates, and things don’t resolve quite as neatly (another thing I like about this show), but it ends up in this really beautiful, poignant place. Covering the subjects I do, I rely on a lot of podcasts for informational purposes, but I do like listening to these stories of ordinary people — This American Life, things like that. They are sometimes as informative as the ‘news podcasts.’ It’s so wonderfully-produced, and I like spending time with the stories that are told.

Podcast: Philosophize This!

Like a lot of people, I had a stage in my early twenties when I became  interested in figuring out the meaning of life and things like that (though, to be fair, I’m going through that now as well). I didn’t really have much opportunity to do an engaged study when I was in college. I had worked three jobs in college and had three majors, and so I didn’t make  a lot of time to read up on philosophy or big ideas outside of, like, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman and the other usual stuff that you’d naturally find in an econ major. So during the pandemic, I found  Philosophize This! and it totally changed my life. The host of the show, Stephen West, was a warehouse worker at one point who listened to a lot of philosophy audiobooks while on the job, and at some point he started turning all that he was ingesting into these beautifully-constructed episodes that are so accessible in terms of helping me think through a lot of these texts and ideas. 

Podcast: If Books Could Kill

The hosts, Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, tackle these airport books and big bestsellers that really shape pop culture, and they do an incredible amount of research before breaking them down. The episodes usually involve finding the cracks in the book, assessing what doesn’t hold up or what’s based on faulty reasoning or where ideas go wrong. In a way I guess I’m listening to it as an author, perhaps to get a sense of what not to do or possible issues with writing popular nonfiction, but sometimes they do make episodes where I’m like, Oh no, I really like that book.

There was one episode I remember about men are from mars, women are from venus, which was this book that ended up having a huge influence on gender dynamics during its time. The author was a womanizer in training, who was rolling with this MTV star named Mystery. He was a total character. But it was really interesting to listen to the episode to get a sense of (1) how the book was so certain in theory but (2) completely wild in practice - and that’s so many things! 

Movie: In the Name of the Father

In the Name of the Father is so good. It’s set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it’s about a man who’s pressured into taking the blame for a bombing and the pursuit of justice that follows from it. Incredible study of the legal system. Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic in it. I’ve been going through his filmography lately: The Last of the Mohicans, There Will Be Blood. It’s so great that he’s coming back from retirement!

I’m relatively new to the movie world. It just wasn’t a big part of the culture in the household I grew up in; outside of Liam Neeson stuff, my parents weren’t really into movies. I grew up reading a lot of books, mostly. But I recently found my way into it, and so I’ve started making a syllabus for myself, partly using Roger Ebert’s “The Great Movies,” and I’m having fun working my way through it, just saw Titanic and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Capote, etc  which are, also, pretty great.

Music: Alabaster DePlume

Have you ever heard of Alabaster DePlume? He’s a little unconventional. He has these beautiful songs where he uses Spoken Word and creates these really beautiful melodies. I like “Whiskey Story Time” and “I Don’t Know” that I find very lyrical and very fun – they just don’t sound like anything I’ve heard. When I’m really stressed out, I find it helpful to throw his music on and just pay attention to the phrases he uses and messages he bakes into his songs.

Book: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

This is one of my favorite books. It’s by Richard Bach, who’s written a lot of books about flight as a former pilot, and it’s kind of a fable about this seagull who really wants to fly despite everybody telling him, like, “you’re not going to be able to, you’re lame and dumb.’ But he does learn, and he teaches everyone else to fly, and the book then becomes what it looks like to have a figure who is so inspirational pass away and what happens when you forget why you’re doing something. It’s a nice reminder of what it takes to sustain belief and keep a message going beyond the leader.

Heated chatter about a new “AI podcast start-up” has been going around the podcast community, spurred by a Hollywood Reporter piece drawing attention to its existence. Inception Point AI, co-founded by the former Wondery chief operation officer Jeanine Wright, aims to build a roster of AI-generated hosts performing different levels of content functions. Some might handle simple tasks, like reading the weather. (Miss you, Mr. Lynch.) Others are meant to act as subject-specific personalities, producing influencer-style content. Like Soylent Green, they come adorned with perfectly bland-sounding names and shorthand identities that are supposed to make them more palatable and less depressing: Nigel Thistledown, a nature “expert”; Oly Bennet, an “off-beat” sports commentator; and Claire Delish, whose food focus suggests her to be a synthetic Samin Nosrat type. 

These creations are supposedly already out in the wild. Wright’s co-founder, William Corbin, who serves as CTO, told THR that Inception Point AI publishes more than 5,000 shows and more than 3,000 episodes a week; its content has supposedly garnered 10 million downloads since September 2023, when it started operating. But it’s difficult to catch any of the podcasts outside of the company’s official Instagram account, where you can spot a clip of an obviously synthetic Claire Delish deglazing a pot of something you can’t see. There’s a whiff of bullshit to the whole story, and it’s hard not to wonder if the company is actually real at all (which is the general feeling that AI has brought to the internet).

If the story and this company are legit, and there’s little reason to dispute THR at this point, the underlying logic of the enterprise is easy enough to grasp. Unlike pesky human influencers, who need things like a living wage and actual lived experience, AI hosts are cheaper to produce, are infinitely scalable in theory, and can be quickly spun up to cover an enormous range of topics. It doesn’t matter if each individual AI-generated personality has only, say, a hundred followers; if you have a roster of 10,000 such pseudo-podcasters, you have a million followers. Profit comes from flooding the field with AI-generated personalities and squeezing enough pennies and dimes out of each. In effect, the company resembles those old web operations that churned out hundreds of junky sites answering queries like “What time is the Super Bowl?” or “What’s the weather?” Useful in patches, perhaps, but collectively, they just clutter up the ecosystem and make the holistic experience of being online worse.

Inflection Point AI’s strategy, by definition, turns on the production of AI slop, though Wright, anticipating the criticism, dismissed the label in the THR report: “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites.” The irony of the word lazy is quite hard to miss. In preemptively defending the company, she also made a pretty bold claim about the personhood of artificial intelligence: “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.” (If we take Wright at her spoken beliefs, this should reasonably lead to the next logical question, recently posed by Wired’s Kylie Robison: Should AI get legal rights?)

Both of Wright's quotes here are kind of unhinged, but upon reflection, it makes sense that she would make these arguments. She’s speaking in the voice of pure capital. Whatever it takes to rationalize the value of her company — whatever helps secure funding, promise profits, and grow more wealthy — that’s the register she’s in. Such a voice is concerned only with the crudest metrics of value, indifferent to the human labor it undercuts, the passion real broadcasters and personalities bring to their craft, and the ecosystem it pollutes. And when you protest? The voice of pure capital hears you, and it calls you lazy.

Maybe that’s the real tell. In the media business, AI isn’t being sold as a creative breakthrough or even a listener-driven innovation. It’s being sold as efficiency: the endless multiplication of cheap, frictionless personalities. The endgame isn’t to make podcasts better, richer, or more fun. It’s to sand down the messy, unruly edges of human expression (you know, the thing that makes art art) with a factory line of infinitely replicable and perfectly compliant mannequins. The risk isn’t just that these synthetic hosts clutter the feed. It’s that they normalize the idea that this is what a voice is: bloodless, unthreatening. And once that idea sets in, the space for real people begins to shrink. What you get, eventually, is a soundscape drained of humanity, a culture in which the only thing left talking is capital itself, echoing endlessly, convincing you this counts as conversation

➽ For those who listened to the first season of Bear Brook, New Hampshire Public Radio’s stellar true crime audio documentary series — the cold case is finally closed, six years after the team’s reporting. But it has seemingly opened a new mystery.

➽ This Wired story from Taylor Lorenz has a very long afterlife, as far as chatter in my feeds are concerned: “A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers.” Lorenz is also this week’s guest on The Adam Friedland Show.

➽ This hour and a half-long YouTube essay, from the anonymous channel The Elephant Graveyard, about the psychological dynamics of Joe Rogan, the Austin comedy world that’s grafted around him, and the so-called “manosphere” is hypnotic, wry, and very good. 

➽ Gavin Newsom isn’t the only probable Democratic presidential candidate waging a run via podcast. Kentucky governor Andy Beshear has one too, and SiriusXM has added his self-titled to its roster. (Newsom’s is with iHeartMedia.)

➽ After Amazon’s reorganization of Wondery, it’s worth watching how new and recent projects are being shuffled around. One new project is getting a straightforward release: The Missing Sister, an investigative piece led by Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff about a murder of a 20-year-old Black British woman, Joy Morgan, by a fellow member of her cult-like Hebrew Israelite church, Israel United in Christ. Another is moved to Audible: Lawless Planet, a relatively new on-going show about “the scams, murders and cover-ups on the frontline of the climate crisis.”

➽ Like just about everyone else, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will soon have its own podcast, though unlike everyone else, it’s hosted by Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre fame. Actual details of what it is and release timeline is TBD, however.

➽ You know that tired bit about podcasts being recorded therapy sessions? Well, that overworked joke has just crossed into a whole other plane. Bella Freud, descendant of that Freud and who is primarily a fashion designer, also happens to host a podcast called Fashion Neurosis, which turns out to be one of the more visually striking video podcasts this side of an armchair. Rebecca Mead just profiled her at the New Yorker. (I should say: Fashion Neurosis is now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.)