00:05:14.780It says nothing about, like, her as a person.
00:05:17.240There's no, like, basic biographical information in this book.
00:05:20.260It has, like, speaking of horrible metaphors, in the New York Times I mentioned, like, she wrote a lot of it on the Notes app while she was hiking.
00:05:27.600And you really get the sense she's like—
00:05:30.660She's like, I came across a rattlesnake on the trail and it made me think of how truth and lies are wrapped up with each other like a rattlesnake. And you're like, this doesn't do anything. This isn't smart. You're just like coming across random things and then trying to make it a metaphor. But it's like you have to actually say something for this to be useful.
00:05:49.120So this book is Olivia Nuzzi's autobiographical account really of her time as a journalist over the past 10 years of the Trump era and then sort of most notably of her affair with a man she calls the politician.
00:06:07.780Who could guess? Who could even guess who it is?
00:06:09.420RFK Jr., the current health and human services secretary who is destroying America's health infrastructure.
00:06:15.860The only clue to his identity she gives us is his uncle was JFK.
00:08:03.260You know, she was sort of a name that I would come across, and sometimes I liked what she wrote.
00:08:07.980Sometimes I didn't like what she wrote.
00:08:09.480It was a kind of journalism I didn't spend a ton of time on.
00:08:13.180She was a campaign journalist, and that's often something that, like, you know, I read the first three paragraphs, and then, like, my eyes glaze over.
00:08:19.520I'm like, okay, you followed Chris Christie to a Waffle House in Canton, Ohio.
00:08:30.620The thing that really set her apart was the fact that, like, she clearly sort of had a hand in shaping the narratives around the 2024 election, which then made it pretty spicy to find out that she was sexting RFK the entire time.
00:08:44.580And then, yeah, and then everyone was clowning on this book.
00:08:48.560The rituals around this book have been quite interesting.
00:08:50.800I mean, it's fair to say that it has gone over like a turd in a hot tub, is I think the way I'd put it, since we're sticking with metaphors.
00:09:02.280If the Thomas Chatterton Williams book was greeted with a collective shrug, that has not been true of this.
00:09:07.640Yeah, this was like epic hack for the entire U.S. media system.
00:09:11.700What's so interesting about it, too, is that it was totally accepted by kind of the literary establishment before it came out, right?
00:09:17.760She got an excerpt published in Vanity Fair, which is extremely prestigious.
00:09:20.220She had a job as the West Coast editor, whatever the fuck that means of entity fair before this came out. The New York Times wrote a like slobbering profile of her before this came out where the author in the comments was like, she's such a brilliant person and a brilliant writer, just totally glazing her.
00:09:34.280The minute people like ordinary people see the text of the book, there's like, this is fucking gibberish. Nobody wants this at all. It was like only people who run magazines who seem to think that this woman is a talented writer or has anything interesting to say.0.59
00:09:47.360And to me, that feels like that's really what the story is about, is that this person, like, whose journalism I do not think yielded any interesting insight. She had access to people like Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani. Like, she goes to lunch with these people and she hangs out with them, but she doesn't have any insights about policy. She's just like, oh, when you shake his hand, Donald Trump's hands are, like, wet and slimy. Okay, but that doesn't really tell me anything.
00:10:13.460Like, this doesn't, like, I guess I'm supposed to be marveling at how much access to these people you have.0.97
00:10:17.780But also, I didn't fucking learn anything about American politics.0.94
00:10:20.140I don't respect this kind of work.0.97
00:10:21.780And then she comes out with this book that is, like, even more vapid than the kind of work she produces when she's being overseen by editors.
00:10:28.140And the whole country, I mean, you guys saw it only sold something like 1,200 copies the first week.
00:10:32.840I'm sure that's tapered off even more.
00:10:34.700I think basically everybody who read this book reviewed it or talked about it on a podcast.
00:10:39.080There's been 1,200 podcast episodes about it.
00:10:53.680And they like invented a job for her, which New York Magazine did.0.99
00:10:56.020Like this happens again and again where high level people at the top of these organizations invent roles for Olivia Nuzzi because they believe she is so talented that we have to carve out a special job for her.
00:11:06.280And then she produces work that is not interesting.0.99
00:11:08.060Or because she's having sex with somebody powerful who gets her a job. I think that might be a little bit more of a shortcut to like explanation of how she got to cover presidential politics at the Daily Beast as her first journalism job, which does seem to be what she did.
00:11:23.020I cannot say that. You can say that. As a feminist, you can say that. I'm not going to say that. It sounds too bad.
00:11:27.680Well, I mean, like, I am a person with a little bit of experience thinking about the way that women are treated in the media.0.99
00:11:36.860And it is not that people with no talent get handed jobs because they're fucking some old guy.0.96
00:11:45.540It's that there's a million people with talent.0.98
00:12:44.600Obermann started as a sports commentator and then reinvented himself as a kind of anti-Bush truth teller during the Bush administration.
00:12:54.120Very annoying, very sanctimonious, and then kind of disappeared.
00:12:59.240He does the thing that men always do when they're very confident that nothing that they've done is wrong, which is emphasize that she was 18.
00:13:08.020He really repeatedly returns to the claim that she was 18 when he moved her out of her, you know, alcoholic tragedy, laid in a childhood home in New Jersey, installed her in an apartment in Manhattan, bought her a bunch of fancy clothes and started paying her tuition to go to college.
00:13:28.220So she was, at a very young age, completely financially dependent on a dramatically older man who was expecting sex from her.
00:15:02.100She moves to New York Magazine and spends a big chunk of her career at New York Magazine where she's writing, as you guys have alluded to, these kind of like more atmospheric takes on the Trump administration.
00:15:13.260She is legitimately very well sourced in the Trump one White House.
00:15:19.500And she is very good at pumping out these, like, long-form, chatty magazine articles that give you a sense of what the social life and vibe and sort of ethos of the Trump White House is.
00:15:33.320What she's not really good at doing is being like, they're going to, you know, do this with the Ukrainian aid, right?
00:17:34.900And, you know, she is a little less well-sourced in the Biden administration.
00:17:40.080She's not really doing so many of the like splashy long form takes.
00:17:44.760But in 2024, pretty quickly after that disastrous debate of Joe Biden, Olivia Nuzzi comes out with this article where she talks about how old Biden is.
00:17:56.200and suggests that his aides are trying to cover up his infirmity from the public.
00:18:04.440And that does open the floodgates of people sort of like,0.98
00:18:07.600there's like a lot of like cover your ass journalism about Biden's age
00:18:10.840in the summer of 2024 and spring of 2024,0.97
00:18:13.460especially after that debate where he was like so ostentatiously incompetent.
00:18:18.940And then later that summer, it comes out, you know,
00:18:22.800Meanwhile, like, Nuzi is continuing to cover the 2024 presidential campaign, not just Biden, but she writes a profile of RFK Jr. for New York Magazine, which is weird because New York Magazine had already published a profile of RFK Jr.
00:18:38.260They had commissioned Rebecca Tracer, a very talented, like, more analytical political writer, to do a profile of RFK, which she did.
00:18:46.520And they published, I think they put it on the cover.
00:18:48.220But then apparently, like, Nuzi lobbied for this other profile.
00:19:36.360Like, a prominent national-level political journalist is having a sexual relationship with one of the candidates as they're negotiating a role in the Trump administration.
00:19:45.000Like, it's a genuine, like, I know this kind of gets covered as a gossip thing, and I think the tabloids covered it as, like, a sex thing.
00:19:50.560But it's like a huge journalistic ethics story.
00:19:52.900It's like one of the biggest ones since Stephen Glass.
00:19:54.800It's like a huge deal that has happened.
00:19:57.060And it's also coming at a moment where, like, first of all, I think there wouldn't have been quite as much emotional investment in Nozzi's downfall if people didn't really kind of suspect that she was a little bit conservative-leading anyway.
00:20:10.940The fact that she was very, very well-sourced in the first Trump administration and much less sourced in the Biden administration implied, I think, to a lot of people that she was more at ease with Republicans.
00:20:19.780And she wrote a very glowing profile of Trump in November of 2024, right before the election. I mean, she wrote this, like, humanizing profile. And when she posted it, she was like, people say we shouldn't be humanizing him, but I think it's important to humanize him. So she openly was saying, like, I'm going to try to make Trump a three-dimensional person a month before the fucking election where he wins and her essentially boyfriend gets installed in his administration.
00:20:43.200Like, to me, the whole kind of ethics angle has all been about, like, was she trying to help RFK's campaign, which I think he was always going to drop out.
00:20:50.580But, like, she was helping Trump's campaign at a time when he was negotiating for a role in the administration.
00:20:56.360Her boyfriend would have been unemployed if Trump didn't win, and he would have been employed if Trump won.
00:21:01.120And so just the extremely basic incentives of her as a campaign journalist at that time were really clear, and she totally admits to this in the book.
00:21:08.240She's like helping him negotiate his role in the Trump administration while she's writing this piece, Humanizing Trump.
00:21:14.900I think that's fair. And I also think that part of what is so sticky about the Nuzzi story is that we're in a moment where there's like a big distrust of media and a big distrust of elites.0.79
00:21:26.500Like this is, in fact, like the trend in American life that brought Donald Trump to power and is now sort of like turning on him and the sort of corruption of elites, their indifference to morality, their incestuous relationships.0.75
00:21:42.460Like, this is also what animates a lot of outrage at the Epstein stuff, I think, even more than the, like, actual trafficking of children in that story is, like, people are really mad at how corrupt the rich are and how corrupt the powerful are and how they're all fucking friends with each other in ways that create these conflicts of interest.
00:22:09.360It really crystallizes in metaphor something that people sort of understand in spirit, just like, oh, my God, they're all in bed together, right?
00:22:20.080There's no commitment to principle among these people.
00:22:23.500There's like a commitment to self-interest and to protecting their friends and to like maintaining their status within this club.
00:22:32.100And also it is a very sexist trope, like the journalist who sleeps with her sources.
00:22:35.720Like, it happens to be true in this case. But also the fact that it was like a ready narrative for people to draw on was also kind of helped because it's just like it's an archetype that, you know, even if in general that archetype is false, it just happens to be true in this case.
00:22:49.180Yeah, no, she made other female journalists look really, really bad.0.99
00:22:52.680And now, like, gender critiques of this story have focused on defending Nuzi from sexism in the critiques of her, right?
00:23:00.960And, like, there's this kind of simplistic reductive thing.
00:23:02.940It's like, well, either sexism is a real presence in this discourse and therefore she didn't do anything wrong or she did something wrong and therefore none of the criticisms of her contain sexism.
00:23:15.180I think that's kind of a false dichotomy.
00:23:16.440I think sexism can inflect the discourses or the thinking or the language of people who have, like, legitimate grievances, and I don't think you have to be a good person to be victimized by sexism.
00:23:31.720I think, like, sexism is wielded at bad people, bad women, like, all the time.
00:23:36.720But, like, there's kind of one that's like, oh, don't go after the woman for the sexual transgression that is sexist.0.99
00:24:03.120Also, I think the way the tabloids covered it, too, if you read the old, like, New York Post coverage, especially, like, right after the scandal broke, a lot of it was just people being scandalized by the fact that a grown woman was sexting.0.99
00:24:12.980it's like she was sending nudes and like that's extremely common behavior these days just0.97
00:24:18.300descriptively it's common i think sexting is fun and wholesome i don't really give a shit that she0.96
00:24:22.340was sexting i care about who she was sexting what she was getting in exchange like there was all0.97
00:24:26.900this also this weird parsing of like did they have sex did they not have sex i don't care i think
00:24:30.960they were clearly carrying on an emotional and sexual relationship whatever form that took and
00:24:35.120so the fact that she was having a sexual relationship with one of the candidates while
00:24:38.100covering the campaign is just kind of like i don't necessarily need to know the details about that but
00:24:42.140But, like, the scandalous part is not that, like, a grown woman was sexting.0.99
00:24:45.380I really don't give a shit about that.0.99
00:24:57.540Nobody is sexting RFK Jr. who either respects themselves or deserves mine, you know?
00:25:02.320And I think also, like, sexting your sources as a journalist who's supposed to be holding these people to account is wrong.
00:25:08.760But, like, this brings me back to the other gendered aspect of this, which is that, like, it's scab behavior, right? To, like, trade sex for professional advancement, the way that, like, Nozzy seems to have been doing, at least in this episode, puts other women in your field in a position where that is presumed acceptable, like an acceptable thing to demand of them or something that other people are going to suspect them of doing.
00:25:32.740It's like, it's scab shit, right? You have a degree of responsibility to other women to not trade on your own sex and gender in ways that enable the further degradation of other women based on sex and gender lines, right? And like, I think she failed that responsibility to us.0.98
00:25:52.340It makes sexters look bad. It's making all of us out here, you know, just standing up for people who sexed appropriately with appropriate people. Don't throw me under the bus.
00:25:59.880Yes, the female and horny communities are both victimized here, yeah.0.99
00:26:05.680But with RFK Jr., you also never know, are you sexting him or are you sexting the brain worm, man?0.99