Vanessa Grigoriadis on Fame, Cults, Epstein, and the Death of Magazines

Vanessa Grigoriadis — one of the most distinctive magazine writers of her generation — joins Lachlan Cartwright for a sharp, funny, and revealing look at how celebrity, journalism, podcasting, and culture have transformed over the past two decades.

From Rolling Stone and New York Magazine to Campsite Media, Vanessa traces how the magazine industry became a “Titanic,” how she helped pioneer the boom in narrative podcasts, and why serialized audio storytelling is now collapsing under its own economics. She breaks down the making of her new limited-series on NXIVM’s Allison Mack, why it was so hard to sell, and the surprising place it finally landed.

The conversation also dives into the weirdness of modern media — TikTok fame, AI-generated podcasts, the Rogan effect, the death of the celebrity profile, the resurgence of Epstein reporting, and the ethics of interviewing powerful people. This is one of the most wide-ranging and brutally honest media conversations on The Breaker Pod to date.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Welcome to The Breaker Pod at Seahorse, Union Square

01:10 – Vanessa Grigoriadis on leaving magazines for podcasting

02:10 – Selling spoken features in 2019 and the podcast gold rush

03:20 – Limited-series podcasts and the crash of the bubble

04:00 – The Allison Mack project and how the deal finally sold

05:15 – Why serialized storytelling is struggling

06:20 – The Rogan phenomenon and first-mover advantage

07:10 – Crime Junkie, Call Her Daddy, and the new audio power players

08:20 – Why making money in podcasting is brutally hard

09:10 – Merch, live events, Substack: the new media ecosystem

10:30 – Shopping the NXIVM project and why Americans didn’t bite

12:00 – Why Canadians bought the show

13:10 – Journalism vs. documentary and why tape gathering is dying

14:00 – AI podcasts and the 175,000-episode flood

16:00 – The future of YouTube creators and longform conversation

17:10 – How Vanessa chooses profile subjects

18:00 – Early magazine days: Carl Lagerfeld, Paris Hilton, and access

19:20 – Celebrity culture in the TikTok era

20:10 – The death of the real celebrity profile

22:00 – The red-rope era of journalism

23:15 – Will print die? Why magazines still matter

24:50 – Epstein reporting and the story that won’t die

26:40 – Public records, Florida law, and early Epstein coverage

28:10 – Why the Epstein story resurges every election cycle

29:30 – Best interview, worst interview, and the one that got away

31:40 – Lies, tape recorders, and protecting credibility

33:10 – How public personas diverge from reality

34:40 – Regrets, write-arounds, and the ethics of profiling

36:00 – Final thoughts and closing

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