Jon Lovett

The podcast host doesn't seem particularly comfortable with being a public figure. So why did he go on Survivor?

- JASON P. FRANK

JON Lovett doesn't like birthday attention. Sitting in a SiriusXM studio, he concedes that birthdays are "a fun opportunity to get your friends together," but having all those eyes on him makes him uncomfortable. It's a bit odd to hear a man who hosts two podcasts-including one he just taped in this very studio discuss his uneasy relationship to attention. It's even odder given he has just returned from filming the upcoming season of Survivor.

Lovett properly entered the public eye in 2008, when, after trying standup in New York and then working as a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton when she was a New York senator, he was hired as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama. After spending a term in Washington, D.C., with the Obama administration, he went to Hollywood and co-created 1600 Penn—a short-lived network sitcom about a fictional First Family that prompted our critic to write, “What’s onscreen is so tepid and unimaginative that it practically compelled my mind to wander.”

Still, Lovett stayed in L.A., and he and fellow former Obama staffers Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, and Dan Pfeiffer started a limited-run podcast for The Ringer covering the 2016 election called Keepin’ It 1600. After Trump was elected, they went out on their own with Pod Save America. It was immediately successful—post-Obama, it turned out, liberals were eager to listen to a bunch of his former staffers talk about how to get the country back on track (and shout a bit about bad Republican behavior). In the years since, PSA has grown to be just one part of the larger Crooked Media, headed up by Vietor, Favreau, and Lovett.