Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Share & Jailbait & Tell with Mike Schur and Jessica Smetana About this episode What did FaceTime cheating with RFK Jr. feel like? What does Olivia Nuzzi's MySpace song sound like? And what does Pablo have in common with Jeffrey Epstein? Plus: Bob Woodward's spoken-word rap album... and several cans of worms.
Further content:
• "Olivia Nuzzi Did It All for Love" (Jacob Bernstein) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/style/olivia-nuzzi-rfk-book-american-canto.html
• "How I Found Out" (Ryan Lizza) https://www.telos.news/p/part-1-how-i-found-out
• "American Canto: Read the Exclusive Excerpt" (Olivia Nuzzi) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/olivia-nuzzi-american-canto-excerpt
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? So the reason you're hearing and seeing me right now is because we have a bit of incredible news to share. Our show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode, "The Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree," which was, you know, the whole investigation into aspiration and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers, was also chosen as one of Apple Podcasts' Best Episodes of the Year. You can check both of those things out, the Best Shows and Best Episodes list, right now in the Apple Podcasts app. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making clear what "Apple time, Apple time" actually means. And today, you are going to find out what this sound is. He desired. He desired desiring.
0:44 Pablo Torre? He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. Right after this ad.
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2:32 Pablo Torre? So this is one of those episodes where I'm mad that we're taping it and I have to timestamp it. We're taping this at 11:38 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, November 19th, because as a matter of just what I have been excited to show both of you,
2:50 Pablo Torre? we are going to talk about the story that all of, I think, journalism and the media, political and otherwise, has been talking about. But are you familiar with the song?
3:01 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
3:02 Pablo Torre? Jess.
3:02 Speaker 04 What song?
3:03 Pablo Torre? Smetana, I'm Mike Schur.
3:04 Speaker 03 Just you saying that gives Mike's stomach hurt.
3:08 Pablo Torre? I don't know if the world's going to know the answer to my question by the time that this comes out, but the fact that you don't is why I wanted to do this.
3:17 Speaker 03 Oh, God.
3:35 Pablo Torre? You guys, you guys know each other. You guys passive-aggressively text each other.
3:40 Speaker 04 We're besties.
3:41 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. Never actually been in the same room, but we know each other very well.
3:45 Speaker 04 We've been in the same football stadium, though, Mike.
3:48 Speaker 03 That's true. We've both been in Notre Dame Stadium to see a Notre Dame game. Although, it should be noted that I was texting, I was there with my wife and my kids, and I texted Jess about something about how, about the in-stadium experience, which I found lacking. She and I texted back and forth a number of times, and then only much later did she mention that she was also in the stadium. And I was like, what? Like, you were also here? My son was visiting the school in part because he wants to see if that might be a place he wants to go. He specifically wants to potentially study sports journalism.
4:25 Speaker 03 And I was like, it would have been great if I could have introduced him to a working sports journalist. And she was like, oh, my bad.
4:31 Speaker 04 I, I.
4:31 Speaker 03 That was the end of the conversation.
4:32 Speaker 04 Honestly, like, it slipped my mind.
4:34 Speaker 03 That sounds about right.
4:34 Speaker 04 I thought that you would have just kind of assumed I was there. And that's why I was texting you about it. But then I realized that that would be a crazy assumption because it was like the Boise State game.
4:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. Why? Why? It was very, uh, very Smetana.
4:47 Pablo Torre? Let me ask you a question, Mike. How have you explained to your son the story that I am most excited to talk to you guys about? The story of the journalist Olivia Nuzzi? Nuzzi? Newsy?
4:58 Speaker 04 Okay, can I just give you a little bit of context here? I tried to look up how to pronounce her last name correctly before I came on today. And I went on YouTube, obviously. There was very conflicting reports. I was trying to hear herself say it. I listened to Al Franken's podcast from last year to hear how he said it, hoping she would introduce herself. No, he said Nuzzi. And then I, I scrub forward to see what she said about RFK Junior. But I don't want to skip ahead.
5:20 Pablo Torre? In the Mike's sureification of this story, which is both very, very funny and very, very, I would say, meaningful from a like, what the fuck is journalism anymore perspective? The pronunciation, I think Mike would write for her last name, is Newsy.
5:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's how I say it. I say Newsy. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that does seem like the right way to say those letters with, associated with that person.
5:46 Pablo Torre? Mike, can you explain what this story is? As a resident Hollywood screenwriter, what's the log line on this screenplay?
5:55 Speaker 03 I would say first that if this screenplay were turned into a, a studio executive, the first note would be like, way, way too over the top. You gotta simplify. You gotta strip out half of these characters. No one will believe this. I tried to make an organizational chart, which essentially turned into power rankings of like, who, of the people involved in the story. So Olivia Newsy, and correct me if I get any of this wrong. Olivia Newsy is a journalist. She's written for New York Magazine. She's written for a lot of very famous publications. I'll do this as simply as I can. She dated a long time ago, when she was very young, she dated Keith Olbermann. So she dated and I believe lived with Keith Olbermann. When he was 50 something and she was 20 something, they had a tumultuous
6:40 Speaker 03 affair. That relationship ended. Then she dated, Liza was next, I guess, right?
6:45 Speaker 04 I think so, yeah.
6:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, Ryan Lizza.
6:47 Speaker 04 Because in his story that he wrote the other day, he mentioned that she had just come out of this.
6:51 Speaker 03 He had helped to get her out of the Olbermann thing, right. So Ryan Lizza, a journalist for The New Yorker, and she, they dated when, there's like a 20-year age gap there. She was in her mid-20s, he was in his late, or mid-40s. He was booted from The New Yorker for his own sexual misconduct situation that I'm not 100% familiar with.
7:16 Pablo Torre? Yep.
7:17 Speaker 03 Later, in 2024, Olivia Newsy did a profile on RFK Jr. and his long-shot bid for the presidency, and ended up having an emotional affair with him that was purely digital. Clarify, meaning like over the-
7:34 Speaker 04 Meaning the internet.
7:34 Speaker 03 Internet.
7:35 Speaker 04 Yes.
7:36 Speaker 03 He, of course, is married to Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, among other things. But they had a pretty explicit digital affair, which led to the dissolution of the relationship with Ryan Lizza.
7:50 Speaker 04 We're getting very close to six degrees of separation from Mike Schur here. I'd like to also-
7:54 Speaker 03 Oh, I-
7:55 Pablo Torre? The walls are closing in. As someone who used to fill in for Keith Olbermann on his ESPN2 show, Olbermann, I've-
8:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:03 Pablo Torre? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm basically, uh, yeah.
8:06 Speaker 03 You're close this to this, too, yeah.
8:07 Pablo Torre? I'm in a digital relationship with Keith Olbermann, in a more just, objective sense.
8:12 Speaker 03 So then, so that ends Ryan Lizza and Olivia Newsy's relationship, also ends her journalistic endeavors. And then she disappears. And then just a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a week ago, there's a, it's sort of like her comeback now, which is she has a glowing, maybe satirical, but maybe not, profile in The New York Times.
8:32 Pablo Torre? I don't think that was satirical.
8:33 Speaker 03 Called She Did It All For Love.
8:35 Speaker 04 Can we mention who it was written by?
8:37 Speaker 03 Oh, God, I forgot about this.
8:39 Speaker 04 Jacob Bernstein, the son of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein.
8:43 Speaker 03 Carl Bernstein's son, yes, that's right.
8:46 Pablo Torre? Right. This is now our Watergate as a related concern.
8:49 Speaker 04 Yes. Now Nixon is involved to just drag in another disgusting politician.
8:54 Speaker 03 It has all sorts of details in it about how she disappeared to Malibu and she's been writing poetry and she drives around Malibu in a white Mustang convertible and so forth. And this is all the precursor to the book that she wrote that is coming out now, which explains all of this in great detail. And then the-
9:10 Pablo Torre? You're not going to mention the title of the very, I would say, modest title of the book?
9:14 Speaker 04 American Canto.
9:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. Uh, American Canto.
9:19 Pablo Torre? Which is the reference, of course, to, you know, Dante, I suppose.
9:25 Speaker 03 I guess. Or Bel Canto by Anne Patches. No, no.
9:29 Pablo Torre? Or Jorge Cantu, the former Tampa Bay Rays infielder.
9:33 Speaker 03 The final blow is that on the eve of the publication of the book, Ryan Lizza puts a thing up on his Substack or whatever it is that he's writing now. And it involves, it's called like How I Found Out. And it tells this story of like her coming home from covering this presidential candidate and notes from her purse spilling out on the floor, you know, as notes do.
9:56 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
9:57 Pablo Torre? Can I read the kicker of Ryan Lizza's Substack post?
10:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
10:01 Pablo Torre? Which really did escalate the story from, "This is a thing that lives in group chats all across the media universe and its surrounding galaxies, too. We need to do an episode about this." Because to quote Ryan Lizza, "I was sure our relationship was over and certainly our book project was dead. She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates? I looked at the date on her aborted letter to Mark. March 5th, 2020, just a few days ago."
10:36 Pablo Torre? I called my agent. "We have a big problem," I said. "Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford."
10:45 Speaker 04 What a twist. He wrote this entire post as if it were revealing the behind the scenes story of the RFK affair, only to then have this last line twist that, no, she had a different affair with a candidate for president that she was covering, and it is also just a horrible guy.
11:05 Speaker 03 Well, also, it's like, and it did have the feeling of like, the post-credit scene of the Marvel movie, but instead of Thanos, it's Mark Sanford. And for those who had no idea who Mark Sanford was, that's kind of why it's amazing. It's just like, what the [bleep]? Mark Sanford?
11:23 Speaker 04 Let me read his Wikipedia subheaders. This is my favorite game to play. Okay, US House of Representatives, Governor of South Carolina, subheader, 2002 election, first term, 2006 election, second term, 2009 disappearance and extramarital affair, impeachment proceedings, censure, fallout from scandal, veto record, and then hiatus from politics.
11:44 Speaker 03 I mean, and now there's gonna be a new one, right? It's, it'll be a fair rumored affair. Yeah, personal life.
11:52 Pablo Torre? Mike's here also because he truly did create a character in one of his television shows based on Mark Sanford.
11:58 Speaker 04 Oh, I didn't know this.
11:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. There was a guy named Councilman Dexhart.
12:03 Speaker 04 Creed.
12:04 Speaker 03 Who, uh... Councilman Dexhart was a, was a city councillor in Pawnee, uh, who was, the bit was just that he was constantly, uh, having and then admitting to, happily admitting to various scandals. And it was based on Sanford, and with the first time you see him, he's giving a press conference where he talks about how he's apologizing for this and he's apologizing for that.
12:28 Speaker 05 I wasn't just having sex. I was making love. To a beautiful woman and her boyfriend and a third person whose name I never learned. It was wrong of me to say I was building houses for the underprivileged when I was actually having four-way sex in a cave in Brazil.
12:48 Pablo Torre? It was based entirely on Sanford, who at the time we thought was the funniest version of those guys because the lie was so outrageous and so egregious. He was around for the entire run of the show, basically. I mean, that's a trustworthy man of God. But we cast that actor because he vaguely looked like Mark Sanford. Yeah. So basically, the spokesperson for Mark Sanford had to say to the press that the disappeared congressman from South Carolina was hiking the Appalachian Trail. That's where he was. That's why he couldn't get back to any of you assembled Americans. And it turned out, yeah, he was just [BLEEP] his mistress in Argentina.
13:30 Speaker 04 As one does.
13:31 Pablo Torre? As one does. The thing about reading Ryan Lizza's post, by the way, it activated in me like the nostalgia for, finally, we have a media scandal worthy of the extremely internet adult brains of everybody who works in and around journalism. Because these are two real writers. I want to acknowledge this. Frankly, until the excerpt from her book, which is excerpted in Vanity Fair where Olivia Nuzzi now works, I did consider her as a writer to be a very compelling and interesting person. Like, the [BLEEP] she was doing for New York Magazine, Mike, as a matter of covering Trump and the campaign trail, all of it is relevant, especially because she was seen as something
14:14 Pablo Torre? of a whisperer for these freaks who would get them to say things to her that they weren't saying to anybody else. And now we have this context via Ryan Lizza, her ex, who also did political coverage for The New Yorker, the most serious hallowed of all of these places, you could argue.
14:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, she was sort of a, like a younger, like sort of glammed up Isaac Chotiner in a way, where it's like she would get people to say things and admit things over the course of conversations that just didn't seem like they would be admitted to anyone else or spoken aloud to anyone else. I really liked her writing. I thought it was really fun. It was a sort of intersection. It wasn't hardcore, serious, you know, political writing necessarily, but it was political writing for the 21st century. Politics has become more than ever a cult of personality, and I'm gonna find a personality and sort of like spend time with them and write about what I think makes them compelling or interesting.
15:13 Speaker 03 And she was really good at it. And now, you know, now you've got to go back and retroactively question all of the things you ever read that she wrote.
15:20 Speaker 04 Well, I find that difficult to believe, given the recent excerpts of her writing that I've read. And I must admit, I was not really reading a lot of her work in the lead up to the 2016 election. I was not really working in media yet at that point. But once I was working in media, I realized she is sort of a media main character of a lot of newsrooms. I was working at Vox right out of college, and certainly her name came up all the time. But I wouldn't necessarily say I read a lot of her work. Now, since the scandal has broken, I have read excerpts from her book, and even an excerpt from a story she wrote about Donald Trump last year. And I have to say, as someone who-
15:58 Speaker 03 As the control group in this experiment, Jess.
16:00 Speaker 04 As the control group.
16:01 Speaker 03 What are you experiencing?
16:03 Speaker 04 Her writing is kind of bad.
16:07 Speaker 03 Do you have evidence for your claims?
16:09 Speaker 04 This is from a article about Donald Trump in 2024. I read this in Jeremy Fassler's Medium post about her, where I also learned that she was an intern on Anthony Weiner's failed campaign back in the day when she was a lot younger. But here is the excerpt. This is after his assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, PA. "An ear had never before been so important, so burdened. An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence, as it had not been in more than half a century. Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less, except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion
16:51 Speaker 04 that resembled not a crucifixion wound, but the distant aftermath of a sunburn."
16:57 Pablo Torre? See, here's the thing about that passage. When I read it at the time, I was like, this feels, this actually felt partly satirical. As in, it was like-
17:09 Speaker 04 Tongue in cheek.
17:09 Pablo Torre? Tongue in cheek, better term. It felt tongue in cheek because it was all about the dramatization of, the performance of Trump surviving this near-death experience. I will admit, though, that what I saw as a tongue firmly in a cheek, when she was being edited in New York Magazine, when I read the excerpt of her book, and books are famously less edited, it did seem to sound very strange, a contextually. It sounded tongueless. It was just like, oh, this is, this is, I mean, can I read you the part of her book?
17:46 Speaker 04 About the worm?
17:47 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
17:47 Speaker 04 Yeah. Exactly. Do you want me to read the worm passage?
17:51 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah, you should read that one.
17:52 Speaker 04 Okay, I'll read this one then. "I did not like to think about it, just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman. He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know what would be better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. 'Baby, don't worry,' he said. 'It's not a worm.' A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by the New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all." He sighed. "It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that
18:36 Speaker 04 was not a worm in his brain."
18:38 Pablo Torre? Can I give you the part that I read, that I was like, oh, this is the other, the other thing? And I should, I should say that this was sent to me with the, with the Twitter caption, "Did the worm write this?"
18:50 Pablo Torre? Quote.
18:53 Pablo Torre? Like all men, but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet, but a bird. It was not about a chase, but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze, the giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this, just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.
19:29 Pablo Torre? Yo, that worm is horny, though.
19:33 Speaker 03 Well, this, okay. Going back to this tongue-in-cheek thing, right? Like, part of what I think made her readable in my mind and what I legitimately enjoyed was that she seemed to understand that political writing was no longer Woodward and Bernstein, but was essentially a celebrity profile, that it was all, that everything has just become a celebrity profile. And she had this kind of, like, faux poetic style that sort of put, it was like, yeah, this is how these people should be covered. Donald Trump isn't a politician. Donald Trump is a celebrity who is trying to run for office. And so, the writing kind of, in its, in its, like, glossiness and sort of, like, slightly
20:18 Speaker 03 over-the-top wrought prose matched the vibe of the country and it matched the vibe of these politicians. It's performative. Politics is so performative now, and she is a performative journalist. And so, it just worked. Like, that's why I liked her writing. I was like, yes, this is the kind of writing that matches what we're seeing in the politicians themselves.
20:40 Speaker 04 You've convinced me. This is a good case for me recanting my, her writing is bad.
20:46 Speaker 03 American recanto.
20:47 Speaker 04 Her writing is, American recanto. Her writing is not for me, but I do appreciate if it is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek.
20:59 Speaker 04 Wormenhead, what she's trying to go for.
21:03 Pablo Torre? And this is now where it gets very like, okay, you're doing way too much is that when it comes to her book, you sort of get, I think, a more performative version of what I used to think was like, oh, someone who was paying homage to like Hunter Thompson, or like a gonzo journalist who embedded with these freaks and came away with the ability to channel their voice. And now, when it comes to the voice being channeled, I think of [bleep] RFK and his actual voice. And I'm just like, what, what was FaceTime cheating with RFK actually even like? Who was she writing for? It all changes now in retrospect.
21:43 Speaker 04 And it is also the profession where you don't get a fool me once, shame on you, whatever. Like, you sleep with one source who is running for president and you would think that would be career ending. And yet she lands with a cushy West Coast editor Vanity Fair job afterwards before the allegations of this other affair came out.
22:01 Pablo Torre? And that part, Mike, is where I'm just like, as somebody who has critiqued journalism on the internet for years and is also apparently raising a child who's interested in the premise of it, I think that this is on some level both extremely funny and also infuriating, like that this is how this actually happened in real life.
22:24 Speaker 03 Well, again, the last time I was on your podcast, I quoted you to you, and I'll do it again. It's your observation that shamelessness is a market inefficiency these days.
22:34 Speaker 04 You know, you know who else said that, by the way? Jeffrey Epstein in one of his emails about Donald Trump.
22:39 Speaker 03 Aye.
22:40 Speaker 04 Whatever.
22:41 Speaker 03 Yet another thing that Pablo and Jeffrey Epstein have.
22:44 Speaker 04 I was gonna say you and Jeffrey Epstein.
22:46 Pablo Torre? We're gonna need to find that quote before.
22:48 Speaker 04 I'll find it, hang on.
22:49 Speaker 03 Actually, I regret asking Jess to do that, but. Here's the moment from the culture that rang in my ears. Do you remember, I don't know if you saw it, but when George Santos, right after being expelled from Congress, went on Ziway's show?
23:01 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
23:02 Speaker 03 And, which is incredible. It's an incredible 20 minutes. And she says, Ziway says to him. She's making a joke about like, how do we get you to go away? Like, what is, how, what could we do to get you to go away? And he was like, nothing, you'll never get me to go away. And she was like, I think the way to get you to go away is to stop inviting you onto my, onto my shows, right? And he smiles this incredibly insouciant smile. And he says, but you can't, because people want the content. And I think about that all the time. And when this story broke, you just watched the machine rev up. You watched the gears heat up and start churning.
23:44 Speaker 03 And then like after Ryan Lizza publishes this thing, Keith Olbermann weighs in from the rafters. And then other people write to him and they say, hey, man, maybe sit this one out. And then he responds to them and you just watch as the eddies just ripple out in every direction. And it's just generating think piece after think piece after article, after response, after blog post, after Substack post, and it will never end. And that's what Olivia Newsy understands. We are eating it up.
24:15 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the penalty, such as there will be one, will be effectively, and I'm, I don't even know if it will happen, right? I don't know if Vanity Fair necessarily cares in its sort of reimagined state that their West Coast editor has had affairs with two presidential candidates, as Jess has pointed out.
24:30 Speaker 04 That she was covering.
24:31 Pablo Torre? That she was covering as a political journalist. I genuinely don't know.
24:34 Speaker 03 That we know of, by the way, that we know of.
24:36 Pablo Torre? Only in part one of Ryan Lizza's Substack series.
24:40 Speaker 04 The next one's about Michael Bloomberg.
24:44 Pablo Torre? The thing that would be the penalty is banishment from the industry, which can't even truly reward economically the journalist, who would otherwise be conflicted about like, what am I gonna lose here? It's just obviously economically the right choice, not that she even planned it this way, to pivot towards being the main character, who you then want to hear more from because what she has done is anti-journalistic. Like, that is more financially rewarding than whatever job at any publication would be. And that's partly why all of this is both very funny, but also infuriating.
25:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's the world of the internet where bad is the same as good and rage is the same as joy and anger is the same as happiness.
25:35 Speaker 04 And celebrity is the same as credibility, too.
25:38 Speaker 03 Exactly, exactly. Well put. Notoriety is better than quality.
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27:33 Pablo Torre? The question, though, is like, who gets attracted to these jobs? Like, who wants to do these jobs anymore? And so in politics, you have a very clear model for like, the influencer, corrupt, very transparent fraud, who just can ride the wave of attention toward something like actual power. In journalism, let's be clear, there have always been, I would say, um, ego monsters and transparent frauds. And some may think that I am exactly that, as a related concern. But what's happening in terms of who gets attracted to be in media is now a function of what does media even mean anymore?
28:13 Pablo Torre? And so the thing in Olivia Nuzzi's pre-political journalism resume, pre-working for Anthony Weiner, by the way, on his campaign staff, is the thing that I was curious if you guys have seen. Because she, as I believe Ryan Lizza mentioned, was a child actor that was mentioned in his Substack post. But did you know that she also was an aspiring pop star?
28:45 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
29:42 Pablo Torre? I mean, there's a lot more. There's a lot more.
29:51 Pablo Torre? Oh my god. It goes on like that for a while. I'd like to introduce you to Livy. This is her MySpace page that has been found on the Internet Archive, the official MySpace page. And Olivia, when she was 16, wrote a song that she released and recorded called Jailbait.
30:14 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
30:15 Pablo Torre? There's a deep textual analysis that I don't even think we need to do because it seems a bit obvious as to what it is. But the quote, "Bad things happen when you hear my name. Deny your attraction, but I've got no shame. 16 will get you 20. Don't even think about it because, baby, I'm not your girlfriend, not the girl next door, not your girlfriend. I'll give you just enough then leave you wanting more. Jailbait, I'm jailbait. You try to stay away, but you can't obey."
30:43 Speaker 03 Is she in front of like a New York electronics store with the metal grate down?
30:48 Speaker 04 Yes, I think so.
30:50 Speaker 03 Is that what that is? But she's like, it's the closest she could come to finding a place that looked like a prison?
30:55 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say, because I know that this was done years ago, I can't declaratively say that it is what I think it is, which is a legal vape store in New York City in 2025.
31:06 Speaker 04 That's what it looks like. You need the GeoGusser guy to get the reflection of those buildings off of the window.
31:11 Pablo Torre? We'll get rainballed on this. But Jess, could you read her about page?
31:16 Speaker 04 Sure, this is on MySpace.
31:18 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
31:19 Speaker 04 "The day that Madonna released erotica, the day that Andy Warhol made his first film, the day that Freddie Mercury sang his last note, the day that Judy Garland conceived Liza Minnelli, the day that Britney Spears told you to hit it one more time, the day that Cher first met a sequin, the day that Candy Darling took her last breath, the day that Mick Jagger first strut across the stage, the day that Pamela Anderson was introduced to silicone, the day that David Bowie sang Lady Stardust, the day that Michael Jackson first slipped on a white glove, was the day that Livy was born. Livy is a 16-year-old singer-songwriter and actress, a former Wilhelmina model. She has appeared in various commercials, films, television programs, and print ads since her start in the business at the age of five. Influenced by pop stars, rock stars, rap stars, movie stars, and tabloid stars,
32:04 Speaker 04 Livy is prepared to explode onto the music scene and dominate the pop world."
32:09 Pablo Torre? She's in the proud tradition of all of these great artists who did stuff. But even in that, right, there is some like...
32:18 Pablo Torre? Precocious cultural literacy that seems like it's trending towards being satirical, but also isn't?
32:28 Speaker 03 My view, this changes a lot, I would say, in real time. I'm recalibrating because now what I think this is, is the specific contemporary disease of everyone is a star. And that this is a person who clearly like craved fame and stardom from a very early age. And at 16 is comparing herself to Andy Warhol and David Bowie and Michael Jackson. And then when that mindset is like transported into the brain, into the career of a journalist, then it's like, her goal is not to break the story or to uncover the truth.
33:12 Speaker 03 Her goal is to use whatever the job is that she's doing to make herself into the David Bowie or Michael Jackson or of that. And so that's the, this is the thing that a lot of journalist friends of mine have been saying, which is like, the divide here is that they were raised to know, to understand that you are never the story. And Olivia Nuzzi is clearly was like, how do I get to be the story? I am the star. I'm not the person doing the profile. I'm the person someone else does the profile of.
33:45 Pablo Torre? Well, look, I think that there is, there's a deeper conversation. And this is why I say, like, I think there is a bit of like new journalism, meaning like the school of new journalism that was more narrative in terms of like the magazine writers who came to power, who were, you know, again, the Joan Didion, like, we're going to imitate her and her voice. And that's going to be part of like the memes is like Joan Midian is a nickname that she has received. The point being that that school of new journalism in which the author, the reporter was also a character is one that I personally enjoy and have lately leaned into some, right? In terms of like, I'm a character in this story too.
34:24 Pablo Torre? But what this is, to Mike's point, Jess, to continue to read the about page, is something that is even more, I would say, like,
34:36 Pablo Torre? Weaponized, as the bio proceeds, "A visual conceptual artist with an addiction to pop music, Livy has recently collaborated with international chart topping producer Roy 'Royalty' Hamilton. Her piercing lyrical skills perfectly complemented Hamilton's in-your-face production, ultimately producing a fierce three-song demo. Creating a multimedia character for herself, Livy has dreamed up 'Emocative,' E-M-O-C-K-A-T-I-V-E, colon, 'The Life of a Pop Object,' a short film series shot on the streets of downtown New York City. With her creative partner, visual artist Eliza Brenn, Livy shows you the life of a loyal disciple of pop culture who has given up conventional life and engulfed herself in a world made of plastic."
35:21 Pablo Torre? Livy, in all caps, is a pop chorus. Livy is a rock ballad. Livy is a hip-hop beat. Livy is the past. Livy is the future. Livy is now, dot, dot, dot. And she's about to blow your mind. Pop gave me life, period.
35:39 Speaker 04 I have, I have a lot of thoughts. So, this is obviously the first time finding out about this character who then became this person, who is a very famous political writer, like we've mentioned. But my first thought in hearing just the lyrics of that song is we're talking about a person who's been in like multiple relationships with large age gaps. And the song is called Jailbait, and she releases it when she's a minor, and the lyrics are very clearly inappropriate. Like, I'm not making any allegations or anything like that, but this is just a really uncomfortable... This is like past the level of like, oh, this is funny and embarrassing. This is like an actual like crime that she's singing about,
36:24 Speaker 04 and it's just very uncomfortable.
36:26 Pablo Torre? I mean, but what she would argue perhaps is that this is art about crime.
36:32 Speaker 04 Yes, right.
36:32 Pablo Torre? That I am a commentary.
36:34 Speaker 04 The character, I suppose, yes.
36:35 Pablo Torre? But, but what, what you just pointed out is, I think, probably proof that we buried the lead, which is that, like, it is one thing to create art in which you are like sending up the premise of Jailbait and performing the theater of like what... Older men are into.
36:48 Speaker 04 Right.
36:49 Pablo Torre? Only to then, in real life, use your position as a journalist to get into various high-profile age gap relationships with way older politicians.
36:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I'm not alleging any of those are illegal either. I want to make that clear. As far as we understand, like, including with Keith Olbermann, occurred when she was in a debt.
37:09 Pablo Torre? Absolutely, absolutely. And by the way, as I always say on this show when I talk about Bill Balachek and Jordan Hudson, like fundamentally, not here to yucky your yum. If it is illegal yum, that's just your thing. But when you see it in the arc of this character.
37:25 Speaker 04 Right.
37:26 Pablo Torre? It's just like, well, this is a bit on the nose. Like, I don't think that, um, let's put it this way. If I was Mark Sanford and I was shown the MySpace page for Livy, I wouldn't feel great about what exactly is happening here, even as, as the active, powerful man in the relationship, I am also somebody who should be held to every form of account on the basis of my hypocrisy and also my influence and power.
37:57 Speaker 04 Right. Oh, man, there's a lot to unpack here. And I also, in a much broader sense, not even just particularly about Newsy, but maybe we can't have Woodward and Bernstein's anymore because we never would know what their MySpace pages would have said when they were in high school. And it would have been equally as potentially cringey.
38:19 Pablo Torre? Spoken word rap album.
38:22 Speaker 04 I mean, yeah.
38:23 Pablo Torre? Terrific.
38:24 Speaker 04 Mike, what are your, you've just been, you've just been a gay.
38:27 Pablo Torre? Mike's got into dad mode, I feel like. Mike is like now thinking as a parent and he's horrified by everything.
38:32 Speaker 04 This is shocking. I mean, it was like one thing to find out she had a fledgling pop career, but then the lyrics of the song have really stopped me in my tracks.
38:41 Speaker 03 Jess, I want to walk on eggshells very carefully here about what this implies or does not imply. But what I would say is that you get called stodgy and old very quickly when you start talking about stuff like this, but. I just feel like my philosophy of the world boils down to one very simple thing, which is that there are two industries that should never be for profit, and those are healthcare and journalism. It's like, these are two things that are just fundamental to the experience of living in a country like America, or should be, which is that we should know what's going on objectively. We should be able to go to the doctor and not go bankrupt. And forget that part of it, but as far as the news goes, it's like, the whole point
39:26 Speaker 03 of this was, in my mind, there's a wall between the people doing stuff and the people writing about that stuff, and the wall will never be cracked or broken. And also, the people who are doing things, the politicians and the athletes and whoever else, need to fear and respect the people who are the journalists covering them. The authority and the power has to reside in the people who are writing about the news. Because that's how you get freedom of the press, and that's how you get a well-informed public. And that has, first of all, the wall's broken down entirely, there's no wall anymore. And also, the relationship is entirely flipped, and now the politicians are telling the journalists what to say and what to do and what they can and can't do.
40:11 Speaker 03 And that is just a very dangerous thing, and I know this is, there's a lot of tawdry tea being spilled here, and there's a lot of like, "Oh my god, can you believe this? This is hilarious, oh my god, incredible, ha ha ha, lol" going on. But this story, in its own little corner of the internet, is representative to me of like, this massive problem of just like, you get power, fame, money, and attention for doing the opposite of what you're supposed to do as a journalist. And I wondered what it was like to be a person who like, cares about essentially honest reporting, and to watch something like this unfold and just realize what an uphill battle we're all fighting, if we care about this stuff.
40:53 Pablo Torre? Look, my thing is, I am caught trying to do two things. One is see, uh...
41:01 Pablo Torre? Olivia Nuzzi and Livy, her former life as a teenager, as symptomatic of this larger movement and evolution in the incentive structure of what it means to be a person in journalism, which really is media, which really is just being a public figure at this point, as everybody is just flattened into just another thing, occupying the same space that The Rock is on your timeline.
41:26 Speaker 04 They're all in this vague influencer bucket.
41:29 Pablo Torre? Yeah, just like when I go to Things Now, I'm like, it is, I'm a creator.
41:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, right.
41:33 Pablo Torre? We're all creators. Mike is a creator. Jess, you're a creator. I am a creator. Livy is a creator. Donald Trump is a creator. We're all people with things that we want others to consume. And yet, the other thing I'm trying to do here is figure out how extreme is this character, such that it is not exactly symptomatic, but is this overwrought character that I do think I want to actually quote the press release for when it came to the announcement of her debut single, Jailbait. So according to the PR firm,
42:17 Pablo Torre? this is another thing you guys have not seen, March 7, 2010, the headline of this PR release is, "Livy Gives Us Something to Talk About."
42:28 Speaker 03 Oh, God.
42:29 Pablo Torre? "With the release of her debut single Jailbait, Livy Proves That It Is Still Possible to Shock." Period. This is how the press release begins. And these words are all in quotes. "Offensive, vapid, frothy, bubblegum, outrageous, morally bankrupt, and undeniably infectious." Dot, dot, dot. "These are just some of the words that have been used to describe jailbait and the not-get-legal mind behind it, 16-year-old singer-songwriter Livy." Quote, "I know that people are going to hear the song once, see my photo, and immediately come to the conclusion that I'm a brain-dead blow-up doll like so many Pop-Tarts before me. And that's great. It's fabulous," Livy says. "No intellect is necessary to listen to my music. It's pop, it's fun, it's danceable.
43:12 Pablo Torre? But at its core, this song is a social commentary." Dot, dot, dot. "It just happens to be insanely catchy." End quote. And he goes on to say, "Though just a teenager, Livy has had some experience in the world of entertainment. Beginning her career as a child model at the age of five, she quickly moved into acting, ultimately appearing in a succession of commercials, films, and television shows. The camera exposure had a profound effect on the young attention seeker. Livy became obsessed with Hollywood, MTV, and subsequently with pop music. Quote, "I'm in a lifelong love affair with pop." It's a genre that's looked down on. People say, quote, "You're not an artist because you're young and hot. You make catchy music and you wear thigh-high socks," end quote. But that's the point. We're all artists on some level.
43:54 Pablo Torre? It's just that not everyone has this insatiable need to act as a human mirror and push society's buttons. Luckily, I do have that need," end quote.
44:08 Speaker 03 So that's March 2010, you said?
44:10 Pablo Torre? That is March 7, 2010.
44:13 Speaker 03 So that's just for the record, one, almost one full year after Mark Sanford, a 50-year-old politician, admitted to having an extramarital affair instead of hiking on the Appalachian Trail and had to resign in scandal.
44:30 Pablo Torre? I mean, put that into your timeline.
44:32 Speaker 04 Yes.
44:32 Pablo Torre? Into your org chart.
44:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:35 Pablo Torre? But, but again, you just see, like...
44:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, like she's, she's like saying that she is creating a provocative character. So I guess maybe we shouldn't read too much into the lyrics and, and take any sort of meaning about her out of it, that she is trying to push buttons, I guess.
44:50 Pablo Torre? But I also think that when you see the, the way it's promoted, even like the release of a press statement about your art being like, "I am the mirror unto human society," declaring that at age 16 in a press release alongside this MySpace page, it just feels like, on some level, this fundamental blurring between, "I am a commentator on something and I am the thing that is being commented on."
45:15 Speaker 04 So let me bring up an anecdote from when I was in college. I'm around the same age as Olivia Nuzzi, so I, I'm curious if this ever came up in her studies as well. But I took a number of like journalism broadcast classes. And I remember always hearing, "If you want to get into this sideline reporting, broadcast journalism, whatever, and you are doing it because you want to become famous, you will not last very long. If you want to get into it because you like telling stories, because you like actually working, because you want to actually help..." People consume the sport or whatever the thing is in a digestible way and you like to report the news, then you will have a future in this because it's very hard. I don't know if that's a lesson that you can still teach people in college, that they
45:57 Speaker 04 will not be lasting long in the media world if they want to be the story. Because as we've seen time and time again, this seems like a really surefire way to not go away in this industry.
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47:26 Pablo Torre? At the end of every episode of Palatouria Finds Out, we go around the table and say what it is we found out today. And I think I'll start just because this has been an episode in which we are forced to, as the father of a daughter... I can't believe I waited this long to use that. As the father of a daughter, I am trying to be like very open minded about what a 16 year old young person thought they were trying to do artistically. And to then give them just sort of like this wide berth of like, yes, it is deeply embarrassing to be locked into a prison of an internet archived MySpace page that some podcaster dug up and then followed the trail of breadcrumbs towards a hidden SoundCloud for the producer
48:10 Pablo Torre? you worked on the song with and then unearthed the actual song entitled Jailbait. It is one thing to do that, and in a vacuum, I would not have done that just because Olivia is somebody who was writing for New York Magazine. But when you see her life, I think, in the context of this ongoing art project, this like, it's most generous, right? We could call it a journalism inspired art project in which she is sending up and mocking the compromised writers of yore, many of whom had, of course, relationships and dalliances with their sources in politics. That's not new. She didn't originate that.
48:49 Pablo Torre? But if you see her as this person, as this truly American figure who's trying to write and rewrite her own story to maximize impact and visibility and celebrity, as her 16 year old self tried to articulate, you see this whole song not as a thing in isolation, but as like the precursor to the ongoing experiment of American media in 2025. And I'm like, I think all of this is fair game. I think all of this is very funny. I think all of this, again, is infuriating because there are people who aren't doing it this way and they fundamentally are being left behind.
49:34 Speaker 04 What I found was the email from Thomas Landon, the New York Times reporter, who was embroiled recently in this Epstein email dump, to Jeffrey Epstein that said, "Actually, I don't think he or voters would care. Being effectively shameless is a pretty powerful weapon for a presidential candidate." And that was what I was referencing earlier. And that brings up another can of worms about a journalistic...
50:01 Pablo Torre? What's with all the worms?
50:04 Pablo Torre? What's with all the [bleep] worms?
50:06 Speaker 04 Journalistic sources.
50:08 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Oh, but a familiar, man, but yes.
50:12 Speaker 04 That's an episode for a later date.
50:14 Pablo Torre? It is, but just like what a source and the journalist in their private time do, such that one knows the game being played and the other doesn't.
50:23 Speaker 04 Yep.
50:23 Pablo Torre? And the question, Mike, I suppose, which is, that's a really, that is truly the beginning of another conversation. But like, who's being served there, right? Is the public winning if you're playing that private game? And that, I think, is also what this story is about, too.
50:37 Speaker 03 Look at the number of people that we already know. As we sit here, the Senate has voted to release the Epstein files. And who knows what has been done to them or what's been, what will have been redacted or removed or whatever. But look what we already know about the number of journalists who had this, like, during Trump won, before Trump won, all the Michael Wolfs and the Woodwards and all of these people at the New York Times and I'm sure other places, who absolutely knew this and credulously wrote front page story after front page story about what is, what's on Anthony Weiner's iPad? What are these Hillary Clinton emails?
51:19 Speaker 03 They were themselves emailing Jeffrey Epstein about Donald Trump. Like, that's mind blowing. And in at least some cases, we know for a fact Wolf and Woodward specifically just saved these things for their books. They saved them so that when they release their private, the beneficial, economically beneficial projects, they have the good stuff. And the course of history is perhaps changed. And that is unconscionable.
51:51 Pablo Torre? I do want to quote the kicker to the excerpt from American Canto here at the end. Because when I open my eyes, I see still the blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white.
52:07 Pablo Torre? I mean to tell you now, as best I can.
52:11 Pablo Torre? And scene.
52:13 Speaker 04 I thought it was gonna end with her, that's what the worm looks like. It's red, blue and white.
52:17 Pablo Torre? She was looking under a microscope.
52:22 Speaker 04 Oh, God.
52:23 Pablo Torre? Jesus Christ.
52:24 Speaker 04 This song is shocking. I'm still, I'm still...
52:27 Pablo Torre? Can we play that one more time?
52:28 Speaker 04 I'm blown away.
52:28 Pablo Torre? Can we play that song one more time?
52:30 Speaker 04 That was shocking. I'm most shocking.
52:31 Pablo Torre? Can we go out on that song?
52:48 Speaker 03 It's got a little, she went for a little gaga at the end there.
52:51 Pablo Torre? You guys are just gonna be walking around humming this to yourselves now.
52:54 Speaker 03 Can I just say, here's the most controversial take of the whole day? Low-key slaps.
52:59 Pablo Torre? You know what? You might even say that this song, Jess, is a bit of an earworm.
53:03 Speaker 04 No.
53:09 Pablo Torre? That's why we do this, guys. I'm so angry. That's why, yes, yes. That's why we podcast.
53:25 Pablo Torre? Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo, and we will talk to you next time.
Previous All-American Grift: We Investigated Trump's Favorite Sports Troll Next Wilt Chamberlain and the Conspiracy Factory (PTFO Vault) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated