Lovett or Leave It Presents: Bravo, America! (with Olivia Plath)

Lovett or Leave It

Crooked Media

Comedy, News

4.7 • 25.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Olivia Plath joins to talk about leaving Welcome to Plathville and leaving behind the fundamentalist Christian community in which she was raised. She shares what it’s like to leave a marriage that began on television when she was very young, why as a teen she felt she needed a gun to protect against a Hillary Clinton victory, and why she decided to talk more about the anger and abusive aspects of her relationship that did not end up on TLC. Olivia has been on a journey, much of it for the world to see, and it’s given her a fascinating perspective on reality TV, on what happens to kids when their parents seek fame, and what it’s been like to grow up in one world and then choose to live in another. In this special limited series, Lovett sits down with reality icons who helped lead a hostile takeover not just of television, but of our culture. In intimate and revealing conversations, Lovett and his guests explore the ways these shows blur the line between authenticity and performance, the compromises of putting your life on television, the reality-TV-ification of our politics, and the secrets that don't make it on screen. What have reality stars learned about themselves, about television, and about America? And what happens to a society when the only thing worse than being hated is being boring? These are the questions we are trying to answer - either here, or at the reunion.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I bought my first gun when I was 17 years old.
0:03.3	I wasn't legally old enough to buy a gun.
0:05.4	I gave my brother some cash and he bought it under the table.
0:07.8	And it's because my parents were telling us that if Hillary won the election,
0:11.2	she was going to turn the military on American people.
0:14.1	And we've got to stand up for ourselves.
0:15.9	And we don't know that they were wrong.
0:17.0	And were they wrong?
0:18.2	We never got to know.
0:19.1	No, we never found out. Hey, everybody, I'm John Lovett or L this is Love It or Leave It presents Bravo, America.
0:39.7	I'm sitting down with icons of reality TV because I love reality TV.
0:43.6	And also, because I don't believe you can understand politics in this moment if you don't get
0:47.4	the dynamics of reality television, the way in which performance and authenticity are intertwined,
0:52.8	the way in which drama is used to gain attention, and the way in which performance and authenticity are intertwined, the way in which drama is used to gain attention,
0:55.5	and the way in which the only thing worse than being a villain is being boring.
1:00.5	Trump gets this. Do Democrats, I don't think so.
1:03.5	Congresswoman Sarah McBride put it perfectly when we interviewed her on Pod Save America earlier this year.
1:09.0	Some of my colleagues are treating me the way
1:11.2	they are treating me for a couple of reasons. One, it's because they want attention, right? They want to
1:15.7	employ the strategies of a Bravo TV show to get attention in a body of 435 people, and the way to do
1:23.6	that is to pick a fight with someone and throw wine in their face. But this isn't just about politics. This is about the way in which reality TV has changed the
1:30.5	culture in which we live. And we are having incredible revealing in such interesting conversations
	...

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