Frisky Business: Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza, and Journalistic Ethics

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konakova.
And I'm Nate Silver. Today on the show, we have an interesting pairing of topics.

We're going to talk about the A to Zs of holiday travel, planes, trains, and automobiles. I'm a big plane guy, it turns out.
Maria, a little more skeptical. And then speaking of Zs,

the journalist Olivia Nitzi was accused by fellow Double Z Ryan Lizza, her ex-fiancé, of various crimes against journalism. We will discuss those in an entertaining fashion.

Yes, some journalistic ethics coming right up. But first, yeah, let's talk about Thanksgiving travel as everyone plans their travel for the holidays that are coming up.

Nate, you traveled by plane. You went to Kansas City and I had Thanksgiving in Boston where I'm from with my family.
So I had all sorts of options. And you know what?

I actually thought about all of them

because as we talked about last year around this time, it can be really, really tricky to optimize holiday travel. So going to Boston is something that you would think is super easy, right?

Boston and New York, like what, three and a half hours, four hours, like pretty, pretty close.

Unfortunately, that's really not the case. So you have a few options, right? You can drive.
So that involves a lot of risk-reward trade-offs, car rental, and traffic.

You can fly, obviously, weather, you can be delayed. We know that there have been a lot of issues with flights in the last few months.
So that's the issue there.

And train seems to be the safest option. However, my last train ride to Boston, Nate, took seven and a half hours because within a...

half an hour of leaving Penn Station, New York, we hit something and then the train couldn't go above like 45 miles an hour for the rest of the trip. But they didn't tell us that.

They just kept saying that we'd be making up the time, and we never did.

And do you want to guess how much two train tickets were to Boston for Thanksgiving weekend? I bought these back in September. Luckily, I bought refundable ones, and I did get refunded.

Think about holiday travel Thanksgiving this weekend.

How much do you

just normal a seller ticket? I'd say they're like

$700 one way or something.

You're very close. So, for two people,

the tickets were $1,700

together.

And

that is just absolutely ludicrous, right? So you have all of these different things.

Did you pay it?

I did, but I did it as a backup.

Was the train full?

Yes, it was. So they can charge it.
They're doing it because they can.

And they do it because they know that there is really no viable good option. So we also had a car rental, which by the way was like a fraction of the cost, right?

The car rental for five days was like $500, something like that. Not an insignificant amount of money, but like.

Fine, you know, you're renting a car for five days. Now, the car rental though, you have your own issues.
One, will you actually have a car?

I don't know if we've talked about this on the show, but rental cars are really weird when it comes to reservations.

You make a reservation, but unlike a restaurant where you make a reservation and there's a table waiting for you, you can make a rental car reservation. You get there and there ain't any cars.

And they say, Yeah, sorry, we don't have any cars left right now, but you can wait. Look, I've had to wait for around four.

It's a capitalist economy. Yeah.
Do you want price fixing? I mean, most capitalists don't like that. No, no.
No, but like, what they think.

So we were booking tickets to Michigan to see my family for Christmas. And

yeah, from New York.

in coach. It's like 900 bucks or something, right?

And like, um, they figured out that that like when you have people who are desperate to get home for something right you can charge a lot of money and those lights will be full yeah absolutely absolutely and acela knows that it has kind of this cornered market because weather um in new england can be really bad right and if you need to be home for thanksgiving so we had flights as well which were much cheaper by the way we had a you know delta shuttle um reserved which you can cancel anytime um which were you know half the price of of the train but you also have the the notion of like, what if it snows, right?

What if the weather's bad? What if I get stuck on either side? Cars, you have a lot of control. And we had a great smooth trip there, but it took us seven hours to get back.

And I was actually wondering, you know, as we were driving, obviously there's the factor of just more people on the road, but I wonder if there are more accidents around the holidays because there are more bad drivers on the roads who don't usually drive, but who rent cars for this occasion and don't know what they're doing.

I'm assuming that that's.

You have this amateur hour issue with everything, right?

On the train, there's someone with an inordinate amount of luggage and at the airport, right? They're fucking kids everywhere, right? They slow things down the security line.

Look,

the answer is that from New York to DC, you take the train, New York to Boston, you fly.

You want to know why you fly, Maria? A couple of reasons. Why do you fly today? First of all, just look at the way that the Eastern Seaboard works, right?

We're actually pretty close here in New York as the crow-fies to Boston, right?

You've got to loop all the way around through fucking

New Britain, Connecticut, and New Canaan, Connecticut, and all these places that's like not even really

optimized, the train track, right? But like, you've got to like go if you've got a fucking...

Providence and stuff like that, right? It is true. It is true.
It is not very efficient. You follow the coastline and the coastline is very loopy.

So the flight in the air is like literally about 30 or 40 minutes from New York to Boston, right? So that becomes an appearancation.

By the way, another thing about Boston, Boston, I'm not a big Boston guy. But I will say the most underrated airport in the country is Boston-Logan Airport.
It's a lot.

You go through that big dig and things like that, right? Yeah, no, and it actually, it makes a huge difference. I love Logan now.
And Logan is now a new airport.

There's actually, you can go to legal seafood in Logan. You can get clam chowder.
Sam

Have a Samuel Adams. They should sponsor us.
Have a Samuel Adams logger, depending on the time of day.

You absolutely can.

No, it's, you know, you're absolutely right that when you're thinking about just the time and the chances of like the maximization of time, I totally agree that the plane is the way to go.

The reason why I don't always fly is because I've been, so when I go to Boston, it's always around the holidays, right?

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, times when New England weather can be very unpredictable.

And that's so when you're doing this calculus, obviously, you have, as with any decision, you have a bunch of different variables, right? You have the time, which is huge, like maximizing time.

You have cost, obviously, which is important, but you also have what is the risk that I'm going to get there when I need to get there, right? Versus not. And

with the plane, you know, with the Delta shuttle, which is kind of the most efficient way to get to Boston, I have had canceled flights and delayed flights not infrequently, because the weather gets really shitty this time of year.

So that I think is the major risk.

Like, let's assume the price is the same with everything, but still, when it comes to airport travel, you also have to budget the time of how do I get to the airport? When do I get to the airport?

Yeah, people are a little phobic about, they're a little nitty

about some of the airport stuff. I hope our listeners know what nitty means, right?

You're risk-averse and neurotic. It's a poker term for someone who like folds too much, right?

Or just kind of, you know, Alan Kessler, if you know Alan Kessler, and the poker scene's a knit, for example.

That was, that was very inside baseball, but I love it, Nate. I'm here for it.
You don't need, there's actually a silver bullet in my newsletter.

There's like, when did you get to the airport calculator? People are very nitty about airport stuff, right? The fact is you can cut it pretty close if you want.

You know, the surveillance state has probably robbed us of all our privacy and dignity. However, it does lead to substantially faster lines at the TSA check-ins.
So we live to benefit from that.

There's a silver lining. You get through security faster.
Sure, you gave up all your privacy.

Yes. Look, it's a trade-off.
But like also, when you have those weather delays, the abtracts often aren't much better.

This is true, but they do get there. Right.
End of the day, it was just, you know, a choice between bad alternatives. But we both made it.
We both made it back, Nate.

When our listeners try to maximize their holiday travel for, you know, the upcoming holidays and for future years, obviously some of what we talked about is New England specific, but I think a lot of it is advice that you can kind of take.

No matter where you're traveling, which is obviously look at the time, look at the cost, look at your risk of actually getting there versus getting stuck and how important it is to you to get there at a specific time, at a specific day.

Because if you can afford to be delayed a little bit, then that's a totally different story.

And what you pointed out, Nate, I think is also important, which is you don't have to be that nitty these days.

People miss this a lot when they are calculating their flight or travel options, right?

How critical, how mission critical is it for you to be late or on time, I should say, right? Yeah,

that's a really important question that people really do not ask themselves often enough. They're like, oh, I don't want to be late.
But how, like, how close are you pushing your travel, right?

Like, if you need to be there by Thursday and you're traveling on Wednesday, right? Like you, you have a little bit of a window of flexibility.

If you're traveling Thursday morning, obviously, yeah, okay, you're fucked if you're delayed. So, so it's one of these things where you do need to figure it out.

There's a cascade of obligations, and how important your delay is changes depending on what you're doing.

The one other piece of advice I will give to our listeners is: if you are in the airport, they have oversold the flight and they are asking for volunteers and you are actually in a position to volunteer, do not accept their offer because they will be willing to up it to a pretty significant amount.

And if no one takes it within the first like 10 minutes, they start panicking.

So then you can, like, if they're offering $500, walk up to them and be like, I'll do it for $1,500 and first-class tickets or whatever it is.

And they'll say yes most of the time. So that's just a little travel hack for when your plans are a little bit flexible.

Is it like a prisoner's dilemma, though? Like that like I will undercut you. So we're saying that like passengers should collude

should collude to demand more. We yeah we what if the airline was like fuck you you're all grounded.
You motherfuckers you're all grounded. You're making us pay too much.

This is this is something that an airline may do

but but yes

issue

not gonna be taken off today it turns out this is true this is true the game theory of this can get complicated

And we'll be right back after this break.

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Nate,

let's get down and dirty and talk some even more inside baseball, inside New York, but not just New York, D.C., inside media, and inside the political, just realm of political reporting drama with the scandal

z, right? Is there an S there? Around Olivia Newtsie, Ryan Lizza, lots of people, RFK Jr., lots of people implicated.

Nate, do you want to give a little breakdown for our listeners who might not be aware of everything, or do you want me to do it? Yeah, you want to take turns?

I don't know, Maria.

All right.

Well, I can give you a little bit of background, which is that Olivia Newtsie was a star political reporter at New York Magazine who was known for her voice, for her access, for her scoops, and her scoops involved great

interviews with people like Mark Sanford and RFK Jr.

She became engaged to Ryan Lizza, who used to be a New Yorker writer.

He was fired from the New Yorker for alleged sexual misconduct, I guess.

And he was engaged to Olivia Nootsi.

Then it turned out that Olivia was having, we don't know, it's still unclear if it was ever physical or emotional, anyway, an improper relationship with one of her subjects while she was covering the elections, RFK Jr.

And she and Ryan Lizza split up. She was dismissed from New York Magazine.
She apparently then immediately started working on a book which has just come out.

She was hired by Vanity Fair and Ryan Lizza Lizzett himself launched a series of substack posts where he revealed that her alleged improprieties when it came to political reporting went far beyond RFK Jr., including an actual physical affair with one of her other subjects, Mark Sanford.

And I'm assuming that there will be more revelations because all of this stuff keeps coming out on a almost daily basis.

He's trying to maximize engagement with a serialized paywalled substack. And apparently it's working.
I think

he had like almost 800,000 reads of one of his substacks, something like that, which is good.

Huge numbers. That's crazy.

It's very good. Yeah, it's good.
It's good.

But anyway, so that's what's happening right now. And the reason why, by the way, this matters to more than New York media, D.C.

media, and Ryan is in D.C., Olivia is on the West Coast, is because it touches on issues of journalistic ethics, which we talked about last week in a very different context on this show, and ethics when it comes to political reporting, when it comes to access, when it comes to kind of just

how close you want to be to the people that you're writing about.

And this comes up not just with sexual impropriety, but with, you know, people who are really friendly with, you know, Silicon Valley tycoons and write about them, right?

Like this is a question that comes up very, very frequently outside of this, you know, sexual scandal that is titillating audiences. So So there are much broader questions here.

Yeah. Olivia Nootsie is the kind of

character that if like Aaron Sorkin wrote a movie about journalism, which I guess he did, he'd insert her in there and people would accuse him of being

misogynist.

Yes. I mean, so she

got her start working as like an intern for the Anthony Wiener.

Not only would people accuse Sorkin of being misogynist, but they'd accused him of being too on the nose, right, with this story. Like, I'm sorry, the irony.

The irony of her starting with Anthony Weiner is just hilarious. Please continue.
No, but her shtick has always kind of been like an excess

peddler or like kind of a gossip

peddler, right? Like, it's always an archetype that's existed within journalism, right? And in some ways, it's kind of a

throwback almost, right? Whereas like today, like journalists tend to be pretty,

you know, self-serious and things like that, which is good overall. I mean, I think the ethics in the industry have improved.
And I, you know, look, I

criticize journalists, but I will defend the profession. You are kind of like writing the first draft of history

in real time, right? You will get criticized by

partisan idiots, no matter what you say potentially. But she definitely is on this side where like,

okay, you're going to bend a few rules to gain more access, right? And, like, and Lysa kind of accused her too of, you know, helping RFK Jr. with PR, in essence, right?

The accusation, by the way, let's let's just put a finer point on it for people who aren't following along because this is important.

Ryan Lizza says that she allegedly would ask him and other sources about basically about opposition research that they had on RFK Jr. and that she would then feed that information back to him.

So she was basically being a double agent in a sense. Yeah, look, journalists, believe it or not, despite the broad distrust that people in society have of journalists, right?

you know, they operate in the position of substantial trust, right? People disclose things then that they wouldn't disclose to anybody else, just taking the journalist's like word for it.

So yeah, as someone in the industry, then anytime like this undermines the credibility of future sources, then

we should be pissed about it, right? You know, one of the things that

Ryan Liz accused Nitzi of is like taking a source that is

off the record

and reporting it as though it's on background. People may or may not care about the distinction.
On background means that you can use what I have, but don't attribute it to me.

Off record means no, you can't use it. You can confirm it with another source, right? But like you can't use this at all without my permission.

And so, you know, that's as far as journalistic sins go, that's like, what's, I don't know, what's the more serious kind of sin in the Catholic Church? Do you know?

I don't, I don't know which sins are the most.

I have Dante's circles of hell.

We can talk about, you know, where the worst is. Is the inner circle the worst then, or like, or the outer?

The, the inner, the further down you go, it's a, you're descending. So the further

circle down is the worst. This is a couple of levels in

to hell, right? Like,

it's bad. Mostly it should blow up in your face because people shouldn't trust you to give you anything off the record.

And by the way, one thing people don't realize is like, people say, well, why would you even have a conversation if it's

off the record, right? Well, you know, first of all, sometimes it's the only condition under which a source would talk to a journalist at all.

You know, sometimes they would love to hear the story reported, but they have to be careful about getting their name on it. So they provide useful information.
Sometimes,

to your surprise, they might agree to go let you put things on the record later on if they come to trust you and it's persuasive, right?

So there's lots of reasons for doing this kind of thing, potentially. Absolutely.

I actually, you know, in my the reporting I'm doing right now for my book on cheating, I have a lot of people who are willing to tell me things off the record, but don't even want it on background because there are, you know, they don't want the repercussions, right?

And for some of the things, and this was true when I wrote about con artists, there are also nefarious elements at work, right?

Where people can be afraid for their safety, like they just don't think it's worth it. They don't want to kind of, they just don't want to get involved, right?

But they do want to talk to you a little bit by like confirming that, yes, this happened or venting that, yes, I got cheated or, you know, this kind of this, this took place.

But there's kind of a limit to what they're willing to say. And I'm more than happy to talk to people off the record, right?

Like, because then you at least get the outlines of the story and you can start trying to pull on other strings and you know the story exists and you have, you know, a source that will kind of potentially be helpful in the future so i think there are lots of reasons why you would talk off the record and the reason by the way that people are willing to talk to me nate is because i've never burned a source right like if you talk to me off the record it's going to be off the record if i tell you that i'm not going to use it i will not use it um and i think that that's so important because especially you know Reputation is hugely important in journalism, but especially now with so many different, you know,

attacks on the journalistic profession and distrust of the media, I think it's just integrity is incredibly important, right?

People need to be able to trust you and people need to be able to trust your reporting. And so that's kind of the other part of it, right?

It's both the fact that you burn sources, but also can I trust your reporting if your interests are not

to the kind of readers and to the story, but to protecting someone, promoting someone, if you say that you're actually reporting a story about someone, but you're doing PR, right?

Like that's very different because you're not disclosing your true motives. You're not disclosing your conflicts of interest, which we're always asked about.
Nate, I'm sure you are as well.

Whenever you write about anything, you know, you're asked, like, do you have any conflict of interest when you're writing about this, right?

Like, do you have any reason why you're not going to be an objective source on this?

If I am, you know, if I'm sleeping with someone, yeah, that's a conflict of interest. If I'm in love with them, that's also probably a conflict of interest.

And obviously, if I'm getting paid by them, like they're, they're endless conflicts of interest, but you have to disclose them.

Yeah, look, I mean, you know, like, I think maybe I'll sound like a conservative on this, right?

Like, you know, I think the biggest problem with journalists today is that, A, there can be a lot of groupthink. I think especially kind of in the pre, I don't know, in kind of the peak.

wokeness era that groupthink often leaned pretty far toward left or liberal tropes, especially on kind of like cultural issues, right?

Like, you know, an age where journalists are a little bit more mercenary, kind of in a figurative sense, I think is

okay, right? It's like, I abide by a certain set of rules. But if you don't abide by those rules,

then

yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty bad, right? I, you know, I think in practice, it's like not why

So many Americans distrust journalists, right? I think in general, it's like a,

I think journalism has fucked up in a lot of ways, right?

But also they're accused of always carrying water for politicians of different kinds. We can debate like how true that is or not, right? But it's like, it's a difficult, it's a difficult job.

It is a difficult job. And when it comes to powerful people, right? It doesn't have to be politicians.
It can be, you know, titans of industry, tech moguls. It doesn't really matter.

But people who wield a lot of power,

you have to kind of walk a line between

being a good journalist and having access to them.

And there are the journalists who say, yeah, I'm not going to ask as many hardball questions because I want to be able to get these interviews in the future.

And if I become known as someone who eviscerates people, I'm not going to.

The counterpart to that is that there are all these brilliant journalists who ask hardball questions and who still get access, right? So it's not an either-or situation.

It just depends on how good you are and how talented you are. Yeah, you know, so one extreme, right, is like Michael Wolf is a journalist who

was advising Jeffrey Epstein on PR strategy, right? I think that's fucking insane. But

Michael Wolf is somebody who I don't think would ever tell you that he's totally above board, right? He'd say that I'm an access peddler, right?

In that sense, I'm telling you what I am, right? I'm transparent about it.

But I wanted to get scoops of information that like other people might

not, right? Um,

you know, that's a more extreme form of it, right?

You know, the, the one that I think is more above board and someone who deeply has my respect is like, you know, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who has covered Trump for years and years and years, going back to like the New York City beat for the daily she used to work at and things like that, right?

And like, that's a little more complicated, right?

If you cultivate a relationship, I mean, sometimes, you know, this also exists, by the way, in like a lower stakes context like sports media, for instance, where like sometimes you might have

what are sometimes called like beat sweeteners, right? Like maybe the

the general manager is trying to send a message to like one of his players, right? And the journalist kind of reports a story that like,

you know, so-and-so is on the outs or so-and-so is being considered being traded, right?

And you're kind of, it's, you know, you're laundering a PR message kind of coded as journalism or things like that, right? In exchange for like getting like the

scoop

later on, right? When there's a big trade, you're the first to know it, right? When someone gets fired, you're the first to know it.

If you have a source who doesn't give a lot of interviews to principals and you get that interview, so it's it can be like a little bit transactional, but but you know, the transparency is a big part of it.

When you have your own newsletter, it's easier to be transparent and say, Okay, I do this and that and the other, and here's what I believe, and here are my rules. But yeah, I think journalists are

probably more ethical than they've ever been about kind of the journalism handbook rules, right? I think they're also

biased. And some of that bias comes from the fact that like that there are fewer and fewer traditional journalists that like you're kind of selecting for people who,

you know, it's not, you know, if you go back and like look at journalists from like the 1980s or something, right? It was kind of almost like a working class profession, right?

Now it's like exclusively kind of like the ranks of like the college educated in part because like, you know, um, it's a tough career

starting out, at least. It's a tough career after that, unless you become a real star, in which case there is some money or real money, right?

So, you kind of have to be from like almost like a privileged background to like to tolerate, you know, living in a big city and, and,

and having these kind of low incomes often early in life.

Yeah, it is interesting. I don't know, um, Nate, if you've ever read Robert Carroll's memoirs of how he got into journalism, but

there's a very funny story how his kind of first

big job, he was hired as a joke because the editor would never hire anyone from like an Ivy League background or who was well educated because he, you know, he had this kind of notion that like to be a good journalist, you had to be able to kind of get your feet on the ground, work hard, kind of get your hands dirty, Like those boys from like well-educated families couldn't hack it.

And Robert Caro went to Princeton.

And while this editor was on vacation, his staff decided to play a practical joke on him and hired Caro, this Princeton graduate, who like he would never have hired otherwise.

And obviously, Caro became a superstar and is probably one of the most respected names in journalism.

By the way, Nate, someone who has also kind of traded on access to be able to kind of craft these stories that no one else could get, like the guy was able to get access to Robert Moses, right, that nobody could gain access to.

And believe me, he did not paint a very sympathetic portrait at the end of the day in the power broker, which was, you know, kind of this absolute feat of journalism.

But Moses gave him access for a long time. And the reason I love this story, Caro couldn't get to Moses originally, right?

Because Moses wouldn't, you know, Moses knew what was good for him and didn't want to talk to him. And so Karo just drew circles of like, who, you know, who can I get to?

Because Moses would say, like, you know, no one in my family can talk to you. Like, he would basically prevent people from talking to him.

And so Karo like went out and out and out and finally got people who would talk to him. And then once some people talked to him, more people talked to him.

And then eventually Moses was like, shit, all these people are talking to him. I better talk to him.

And

that's how you do it, right? Like, that's good journalism.

Not saying like, I'll, you know, I'll treat you nicely and I'll point a rosy picture.

Yeah, look, obviously one technique you can use is saying, well, I've talked to all the other principals for this story, right?

And so, you know, I want to make sure that your viewpoint is adequately represented. Can I, at the very least, run these things by you kind of thing, right?

You know, I have definitely experienced things where like,

if you don't talk to a journalist, it feels like your treatment can be worse, right? Like I don't know if it's quite like retaliation or things like that, right?

But they might have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. You know, on the other hand, like,

you know, like journalists can very much cherry-pick stories. And if you give them 20 minutes worth of an interview, right, then,

you know, maybe one or two quotes will appear in the story, right? So I'm actually pretty guarded about like which journalists I talk to on the record or off the record, right?

In part because I'm like, okay, say what you want. And if you're full of shift, then I'll blast you on my Substack or on Twitter, right?

And if you do a good job, then I'll link to it and complement the story. Right.

You know, look, one other thing that helps Nutsie to bring this story back a little bit

because most journalists do lean liberal, democratic, progressive, left, whatever you want to call it. If you're someone who is seen as

friendly enough toward non-liberals, whether in the form of RFK Jr. or the kind of Trump MAGA clan, right?

That presents a comparative advantage, potentially, right?

It's like you're going to have access to these people and like, and kind of how much you're, I mean, one thing about this too is like, how much you're kind of like pantomiming being in with this kind of rebellious, I guess, MAGA crowd versus it, you know, pantomiming versus it being real.

I mean, sometimes people kind of trade on that ambiguity

a little bit, right? Like, I mean, you know, Trump has taken some very

funny lines, right? You know,

Pete Hagseth, you know, was a Fox News. I don't know if you call him a journalist exactly.
Now he's the Secretary of War, apparently committing, alleged, allegedly committing some war crimes on these,

you know, drug smuggling books. Allegedly, you know,

I don't know why you wouldn't trust a former Fox News correspondent with a drinking problem, but allegedly, allegedly, allegedly Pushkin lawyers.

But yeah, so the lines can be blurry.

Yeah, no, they absolutely can.

And we'll be back right after this.

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One of the things that we've been careful about in this conversation, but I'm just going to call it out now,

is is that, you know, we've focused on kind of these broader issues as opposed to like the sexualization of this, of the thing, right? Where like she allegedly slept with

Sanford, Mark Sanford,

according to Lizza,

and, you know, sent sexs and all of these things to RFK Jr.

And I think that that's actually like as a female, that really pisses me off because there are all these tropes, right, in media that, oh, like,

who would you sleep with to get to where you are? And like, you know, so I hate when people actually do that because it's so rare.

Like, I don't actually think that, you know, this, this does not happen. And by the way, Olivia.

Over,

I think this was like a decade ago when House of Cards was on air.

If you remember, this was a show with Kevin Spacey, also,

who

then disappeared and was written off off the show after sexual misconduct allegations came out about him.

But there was a plot line, I believe this was the first season, where he ended up, you know, sleeping with a journalist. They had a mutually beneficial relationship.

And Olivia Newtsi tweeted out a photograph of this journalist and said, why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?

And this is a tweet that people then, you know, dredged up in the last month being like, hey, Olivia, you know, this is very interesting.

And so I just, I do want to kind of point out that this, in this particular case, like even more lines were crossed. And as a woman, like,

it really just, it really upsets me. But the heart of the story doesn't have anything to do with that.
And I think that there was a lot of impropriety even before we talk about the sexual impropriety.

And there doesn't have to be anything sexual with all of the things that we've been talking about, right?

With how you peddle access, how you walk that ethical line, and whether or not you're transparent about it right because you can absolutely report about people you're friends with if you say hey you know like i'm writing a piece about nate silver we're co-hosts of a podcast and we're friends right and we've known each other for years so those are all my disclaimers and here's our interview right like that's perfectly okay i've interviewed you you've interviewed me like that's cool right

as long as but if i said i've never spoken to nate in my life like this is a completely professional thing right And I am going to give you an the unvarnished truth behind the silver bulletin, then that's a little bit disingenuous.

Yeah, a lot bit disingenuous. I don't know how much sleeping around there is

between journalists and sources in the industry. I mean, I would, I, my,

my default would be to say it's not

that common, right? But I've never been on like a beat, right? Like if you're going out and

reporting on the campaign campaign trail, right?

There's probably some hankypecky there among reporters, certainly, right? You're kind of in this, I was going to say Stockholm Syndrome situation, right?

But you know, you can meet Treasurer in Iowa and New Hampshire for months at a time. They're younger people that are kind of younger campaign staffers, but not with the

not with the principles of the story, not with the RFK juniors and Mark Sanfords. And

yeah, but look, I mean, there's like too much of a fucking like

digital footprint now, too. You know what I mean?

But some people live for the drama, you know, some people love to get

discovered. Like, I'd imagine that, like, Olivia Newtsie is not, like,

not terribly unhappy right now. I don't know.
She has a plus-you job at Vanity Fair.

I assume she'll lose that job, right? But she'll start a who knows. She'll start a sub stack.

And people will subscribe to it.

Did you read RFK Jr.'s erotic poetry?

I did. We would like you to not give us a one-star rating, so we're not going to therefore repeat the RFK Jr.

I unfortunately read the poetry, and I'm sorry that I did because I can't. It's one of those things that once you read, you can't unread.
Like once you see something, you can't unsee it.

And sometimes you just wish you could. It's now in my brain.
But yes. So this whole thing,

you know, is

problematic on a lot of levels. And by the way, though, Nate, I think it shows that we're in a very different journalistic era than we were, like even five years ago.

The fact that, you know, people are like, oh, like Olivia was canceled. No, she wasn't.
Like she got let go from New York Magazine. Now she has a best-selling book and, you know, is at Vanity Fair.

So like, you know, they're there.

There's a very interesting standard being used here. And I'm very curious to see if she's going to hold on to her job.

And if not, what's going to be next, because I do think that we are living at a time where journalistic ethics are incredibly important.

And being someone who people can look to and say, okay, this is someone who is ethical. I can trust what they say.
I can trust talking to them, right? That they're not going to misrepresent me.

They're not going to quote me out of context. They're not going to do something underhanded.
I think that that currency has always been important, but it's

even more important right now when it's hard to kind of trust your eyes and ears. And so I hope that the media and that I hope that everyone behaves accordingly.

And I do think that for the most part, journalists do behave accordingly.

Yeah, look, I mean, she might have, I was going to say, you know, look, in an earlier era, then she'd be, um, I was going to say blackball, but like, I don't think it's really blackballing.

Like the, you know, if I were working for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the, or the, even the New York Post or whatever, right, I would, I would not hire her.

There are too many checker things on their resume now by far, right?

But you know, they don't gatekeep as much as they once did.

I do wonder somebody who kind of like who relies on

access and juicy, gossipy tidbits, right?

You know, sometimes sometimes the writing and the thinking isn't interesting enough on its own. People don't seem to have like, she wrote a memoir.

People don't seem to like the writing in that memoir. I didn't read the memoir, but I did read Olivia Nootsi's excerpt in Vanity Fair, and it was unreadable.
Just the writing was very, very bad.

And it was very hard oftentimes for me to follow what was going on. I think her writing in New York Magazine, she had great writing there.
And maybe it's her, maybe it's her editors.

Because by the way, as we wrap up, shout out to good editors everywhere who can make writing so much better. You know,

this is why the good outlets are good, right? They hire very good people who can make your writing shine.

On that note, I think this will not be a political slash journalistic scandal podcast going forward, but I do think that it's really- It's really important to cover. You never know.
You never know.

Yeah, maybe, you know, if this is our most popular episode today, maybe we're just going to do a whole pivot.

But it does cover a lot of really interesting questions that are risky business adjacent and, you know, important things that Nate and I both have to ask ourselves and deal with all the time.

If you followed my advice and you're flying to Boston, you're already there. You're already on the descent.
They're telling you to put your laptop away, right?

So we should probably, we should probably get going, Maria. All right.
Sounds good.

Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.
Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova. And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.
Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit. Lydia Jean Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.
If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.

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