It turns out that being the first person to be kicked off Survivor comes with some surprising silver linings.
Jon Lovett, the Pod Save America co-host and former Obama speechwriter, spoke about his early departure from the show on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Lovett and his Crooked Media co-founder Jon Favreau joined hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee to break down the vice presidential debate and give their verdict on the race to the election.
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But Lovett also shared some insights into his own experience with trying to win over some seriously unimpressed voters.
The surprisingly congenial showdown between JD Vance and Tim Walz was, according to Lovett, a “boring and yet also hair-raising experience.” Being on Survivor, on the other hand, wasn’t dull at all.
“I knew that I was in trouble because somebody on my tribe had a meltdown and then kind of turned on me,” Lovett said. He added that even though he did everything he could to turn the situation around, he “wasn’t caught off guard by being voted out.”
“They were choosing between two people, one of whom was no longer a threat, and that really kind of killed me,” Lovett said.
Despite the early departure, Lovett explained to Coles that doing the show was a “very fun” experience—even if contestants know they’re running the risk of being humiliated in front of a national audience.
“I enjoyed it and I actually have no regrets about it,” he continued. “My disappointment was not going home first because of how people reacted—actually the reaction was really great. It was fun. I was having a good time being out there, and it was like a silly crazy thing to do, and I was glad I got to do it.”
As well as getting paid “enough for a really nice weekend getaway” for doing the show, Lovett also talked up the nice time he had getting to spend a month in Fiji.
After getting voted out, he was holed up in a “run down resort” where other contestants eventually joined one by one as they too were booted from the show. “I read books,” Lovett said. “I played ping pong with people, and I had no internet, no nothing. I literally just read physical books and kind of thought about my life. Thought about my choices.”
A benefit of spending that month offline, he said, was that his attention span was “healed.”
“I will say though, when I turned my phone back on, the algorithm—it seemed like TikTok thought of me as a person who had like been a junkie but got sober,” Lovett joked. “And they were like a drug dealer outside a school. Like, ‘Oh, you think you can stay away from this? We saved the weirdest content for your brain till you got back—that’s right, this is a story about pooping and real estate!’”
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