There was an instant sense of shock, excitement, and confusion for Pod Save America fans when the trailer for the upcoming 47th season of Survivor dropped in May.
Among the contestants was that podcast’s co-host, former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, sitting in the middle of the Fiji jungle wearing a colorful Survivor headband across his forehead. “I have no outdoor skills. What am I doing here?” Lovett asks in the clip. “I went camping as a Cub Scout—I threw up and went home.”
In this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Lovett explains that he was one of the many people who “rediscovered” Survivor during the pandemic, binging season after season at home and wondering what it would be like to compete himself. On a lark, he submitted a self-taped audition video and got accepted. Before long, he was secretly flying across the world to join the Season 47 cast, while his podcast listeners thought he was merely on some sort of extended vacation.
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But, he reveals to me during our conversation, he had a more noble goal in mind.
“There is something about a show that is ultimately an experiment in democracy that people are being drawn to as they question whether or not our democracy will survive,” he says. “You have this show where a group of people are set against each other as enemies, and they come together and they hash out their differences, and they vote. What are the rules by which they decide who the best candidate is? They decide that, too. Which is a great metaphor, I think, for politics.”
Lovett says he liked the idea of “being part of that experiment in democracy in the run-up to this election, and perhaps having the chance, through this show, to talk about democracy with people that maybe care about democracy but hate politics.”
It’s only been a couple of months since he filmed the season, which will premiere on CBS Sept. 18. But given just how much news has happened since he’s been back, it already feels like ancient history. Among the stories he completely missed—and then learned about, hilariously, in real time on Pod Save America—was the Justice Samuel Alito “Stop the Steal” flag debacle. “I can’t believe we’ve moved on from that,” Lovett says, still in disbelief.
“I’m in this period of time between doing this strange thing of being on Survivor and Survivor airing,” he says. “One feels like it’s forever ago, and one feels like it’s forever from now, and I'm just taking it day by day. I’m trying to survive here off the island as much as I tried to survive on.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
