| Pod Save America | |
| Updates: | Thrice weekly (Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday) |
| Length: | 41–96 minutes |
| Language: | English |
| Related Shows: | Pod Save the World |
| Provider: | Crooked Media |
Pod Save America is an American liberal/progressive political podcast developed and distributed by Crooked Media.[1] [2] [3] The podcast debuted in January 2017 and airs three times per week, hosted by a rotating cast of former Barack Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer.[4] [5] [6]
It is the flagship podcast of Crooked Media, a media company founded by Favreau, Vietor, and Lovett.[7] The show averages more than 1.5 million listeners an episode, and has been downloaded more than 120 million times as of November 2017.[8]
Four Pod Save America one-hour HBO TV specials aired in fall 2018 to cover the U.S. midterm elections.[9] [10] Crooked Media also films the podcasts and releases them on their YouTube channel.[11]
The podcast debuted in January 2017 as a successor to Keepin' it 1600, a political podcast produced by Bill Simmons' The Ringer and hosted by Favreau, Vietor, Lovett, and Pfeiffer which ran from March to December 2016. Pod Save America maintained the basic format of its predecessor.[12]
In an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher, the hosts have stated that, rather than continue the previous podcast, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States spurred them to create a progressive media company with a network of podcasts.[13] They also wanted to be able to do have the freedom to do more activism.[14] A goal is to inform their millions of fans and viewers that trust them as a reliable source.
In the fall of 2017, Crooked Media took the podcast on its first live tour, Pod Tours America. Live shows were recorded and released as podcasts.[15] An international tour, Pod Tours the World, was announced for 2018, with live shows in Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, and London.[16]
The podcast typically covers recent news items relating to politics, including the Trump administration, the US government and the Democratic Party, as well as progressive grassroots activism.[17]
The show typically features interviews with politicians, activists and journalists, including Obama's last interview as president.[18] Other guests have included President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton[19] and senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Chris Murphy. They have interviewed several former 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sanders, Booker, Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Marianne Williamson, and Amy Klobuchar.[20]
The show averages more than 1.5 million listeners an episode, and had been downloaded more than 120 million times by November 2017.
The New York Times described the podcast as "one of the big breakout hits of the nascent resistance movement", and "the left's answer to conservative talk radio... with a shoestring budget and no organizational backing, its hosts seem to have created something that liberals have spent almost two decades, and hundreds of millions of dollars, futilely searching for".
The San Francisco Chronicle called it "one of the nation's most popular podcasts".[21] GQ called it one of the "most popular strategies for coping with the looming death of the republic".[22]
Newsweek wrote that the show's hosts "do something far more rare [than political analysis], which is to make politics entertaining and even fun, without ever downplaying what they see as the threat posed to American democracy by the man elected to defend it."[23]