1095: The Making of America's Most Prominent Anti-Vaxxer

27:10But, you know, you've spent time with him. And I wonder if you could just give me a sense of what he's actually like as a human being, the degree to which the sort of mythic story he tells himself about himself is evident in his normal everyday interactions and his like sort of crusade against medical, you know, malpractice and corrupt institutions. and his interest in sort of an alternative lifestyle, at least health-wise, is tangible in his, you know, just in his day-to-day. I was struck by this one anecdote, which is, in my opinion, really gross. But he's situated on Air Force One, and we're going to get to why he was on Air Force One in a second.

27:57But National Guard stewards hand out reheated chicken quesadillas, which Kennedy declines in favor of the court of plain organic grass-fed yogurt, his body man had secured for him, which he's eating with a spoon. He later puts the spoon down in order to finish his yogurt in gulps directly from the container. Fucking disgusting, man, just eating quarts of plain grass-fed yogurt. I want you to tell me more. I wanted to know more about what this, like I know that we almost crossed paths at the gym once. RFK was wearing jeans and working out in jeans and that also seemed disgusting to me from just a bacteria standpoint, but what is he actually like this crusader in the flesh?

28:40Well, so yes, there are a bunch of different parts of that. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I think on the diet and health stuff, he is enormous and ripped. He's a guy in his 70s who looks like a comic book. I describe him as like a comic book character from a comic, you know, like a superhero character. He's enormously ripped. He takes testosterone replacement therapy, which helps grow the muscles, but he works out every day. deeply into weight training. He has a very peculiar diet. His wife has talked about how he will travel to restaurants with sauerkraut, which is a... Yeah. You know, to eat sauerkraut.

29:16It's great for the biome. Great for the biome. Also, you know, reduces your hunger. So it helps you... It does? Yeah. Vinegar will reduce your appetite. So I think that's the reason... You know, the fact that he was eating the plain yogurt whole, like with nothing... I mean, I'm a fan of plain yogurt, so I'm not knocking plain yogurt. I mean, so am I, but I don't gulp it from the container. Oh my God. But he also pops Zins regularly. So he takes the nicotine pouches. You know, he tans. He's a very darkly - He artificially tans. This is another thing he and Trump have in common. Yeah. I asked him about the nicotine and the tanning and he kind of got defensive.

29:56He said, look, I don't tell people to do what I do. I just tell people to get in shape. He told me he doesn't share his workout routines, although he does social media stuff of him doing pull-ups and things like that. But he doesn't go into detail about his own thing. And I think all this, he's got a very peculiar day-to-day way of living, which is almost like a devout way of living. He's going every day to a 12-step meeting. No matter where he is in the country, he's been doing it for years. He's taking calls in addition to his job from people he's mentoring. uh, uh, in that program on the, on the, how is he like the hero's journey thing?

30:35I think, so I, I try and describe it in the story, but he's a, he's a curious person. He's very well read. He's constantly quoting other things and, and sort of trying to demonstrate how well read he is, um, about philosophy, about ideas, about the enlightenment. I mean, all kinds of things like that. Um, but then also in my interactions with him, and I don't know if this is typical of other people, it was very hot and cold. Sometimes he'd be incredibly warm and joking and friendly with me. And then the next day he'd text me and say, I want to talk again. And he'd berate me about how I was tricking him and going against him.

31:15And so it was the process of going through my text messages. We'd be having very pleasant text exchanges about particular issues or ideas. And then the next one, I send him something. He'll say, no, you're basically, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're screwing me on this and, you know, start attacking me. And then I'd have to sort of walk it back and actually this is what I'm doing. And so I think that the, I describe it as like a ferocious drive. I think that translates into how he deals with other people as well. And he clearly had a goal in mind of our interactions of, he wanted to win the argument.

31:55He wanted me to describe in the magazine that he had won the argument. But he also wanted to protect himself from being, I mean, he described me as the scorpion in the scorpion and the frog story at one point of being tricked during the process. And so at times it was very tense. At times it was very friendly. And I think in some ways there is a similarity to Trump, who in my interactions with him, it's also been very similar, like sometimes incredibly warm and gracious. Oh, hi, Michael. So glad you called, you know, that kind of thing. And the next moment he's sending out a truth social about how I'm a liar.

32:38And then the next moment, you know, he's warm again. And there's a transactional quality to that. I think we call that an abusive relationship, Michael Scherer. But anyway. So this is a professional relationship. I don't mind being yelled at. You know what I mean? Like that kind of erratic, like very charming, warm, one minute and cold and combative and like emotionally or mentally. If my wife was treating me like that, I would be upset. It would not be a healthy relationship.

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34:18you talk about how he wants to win the argument and he wanted the magazine the atlantic to say he won the argument and i want to bring to the fore this question this quote he told you the entire purpose of science is to search for existential truths it's not subjective it should be objective i believe science is a place where you can find unity if you can get a conversation going. Okay. Like, but does he actually want unity? It sounds like he wants capitulation. It sounds like he wants you to agree with whatever he thinks. I mean, that seems to be, that was the feeling I got. It's not that he genuinely wants a conversation.

34:52I mean, and he keeps saying, I'll debate these doctors and scientists. And then they say, well, but no, he's the one that won't debate us. Like he actually has his little sheaf of bunk science and doesn't actually want to be challenged with real data. I mean, do you think he genuinely actually wants to find unity? That's a really complicated question. There has been a breakdown generally. I mean, we've been covering politics a long time. The political debate has eroded and collapsed over the last 20 years. And that is happening at a much more rapid rate right now in the medical community. The peg for it was COVID, the thing that made it accelerate everything, like the enormous anger about the trauma we all went through in COVID and how some of the advice, The official advice may not have been ideal at the time, but there is a total collapse of that most basic conversation that makes science work in the scientific community.

35:48And what's essentially happened is the established scientific community, which is mostly the science, scientists, right? The PhDs, the universities, the people who've run public health have kind of thrown up their hands and said, we can't deal with these people. and the sort of group of dissident scientists and trial lawyers like Kennedy, who have different ideas about these things, are deeply offended, are deeply aggrieved by that. And instead of actually these two groups of people meeting and trying to work it out, it's gotten worse. And Kennedy has a lot to blame for that. I mean, Kennedy's been going around the CDC firing people who disagree with him.

36:26He's not trying to have the conversation. At one point I said to him, Look, if you want to have this conversation, you run the CDC. Like, go to the CDC and sit down with these people. They'll meet with you. You employ them. And his response would be to say, well, a lot of them are biostitutes, which is a term he uses for - Bioprostitutes. Yeah, bioprostitutes. You know, just before I came on here, I was watching the Vaccine Advisory Committee hearing. It's going on right now at the CDC. and they just had like a 30, 40 minute testimony from a lawyer named Aaron Siri, who's very close to Kennedy, shares his views on vaccines.

37:07And there was nobody else presenting before the committee against Siri. So it's an again, and some members of the committee were really upset about that. And the organizers of the committee said, well, we invited these two people, they didn't come. But to this day, there's just a breakdown. Yeah. And I and I kind of like I can sympathize with both sides in terms of where they've been mistreated. But I do think and I if I had a message for the story, like the purpose of me sitting down for seven or more hours with Kennedy in conversation was to try and demonstrate that this is our way out. You know, the thing you didn't say is that when I was on the plane with him, it wasn't Air Force One.

37:50It was a it was another charter. While we were in the air, we found out Charlie Kirk had been shot. And it was just such a bizarre thing. And moments before we found out Kirk had been shot, Kennedy had been describing to me how his own security had come to him recently and said, like, the levels of threats against you are a whole other level. He said it was above the threshold of lethality. I don't know exactly what that meant. What does that mean? What does beyond lethality mean? Don't know. Some metaphysical, anyway. Yeah, I think it just meant worse. You know, that like the threats were getting worse.

38:23Well, you thought it seems about as bad as it could get. Anyway, anyway, we're not, we're not, we're not in secret service. But, but like that is the context in which all these conversations were happening. Almost everyone I talked to for this story had had death threats against them. And many people had said they had, I got called vaccinologists. They said, you know, they, they threatened to kill my kids. Well, but that's what I, I guess it's like, I understand we don't want anybody to get death threats, but the targeting of scientists, the targeting of Anthony Fauci began with With one side in particular, you know, it may have metastasized to become a sort of like bipartisan desire to execute people.

38:58But the real suggestion that public health officials were out there and co-opted and were doing bad things to the American public and should pay for it with their lives came from one side. Yeah, but I think that is true. There are radicals on both sides. So it's not like it's, you know, it's not blameless on any side now. But my point, I guess, is that that's less important now than trying to figure out a way to listen to each other again. Well, right. If we're going to have any scientific consensus on anything, give the American - There are two paths forward for us as a country here. We're stuck together right now, right?

39:34So either we head towards more civil conflict and violence or we try and understand our differences. We don't have to agree. We have to understand where each other are coming from. We have to understand what the actual specifics of the arguments are. You know, I spend 2000 words in the story going through specific studies to wrestle with some of Kennedy's ideas about vaccines. It's a little more laborious, but I think it is far more useful than just saying, oh, that guy's anti-vax. Because there are facts he brings to bear and you have to understand what those facts are. And then you have to present the alternate facts and then you have to weigh the value of these things.

40:14You have to understand where there are gaps in the science, which there are gaps in science right now, and why those haven't been investigated further. And I guess the thing I was hoping to accomplish with this story was to make the point that that conversation is broken down. Everyone is not to blame equally. I'm not saying that. But the only path forward is to try and reengage. But do you think he really wants to do that? I think that that was the suspense of the story. At the end of the story, I say to him, not to give away the ending, but at the end of the story, I say to him - Voiler alert.

40:49Everyone go read it. Right. But I say to him, what if you're wrong? What if you spend, he tells me he's going to spend billions of dollars investigating first year vaccines and their connections to autism and other neurodevelopmental chronic diseases. I say, what if you do all that and you don't find the thing you're looking for because it's not there? and if in the interim, because you've been doing all this, because you've been redoing the vaccine schedule and telling people vaccines may be dangerous without the evidence, people stop taking vaccines and more people are dying from bacteria and viruses than before.

41:24What if you're wrong? And his answer to me was, I would listen. We would listen, which was the answer I was hoping for the whole time. But then immediately he said, but here are the reasons I'm not going to be wrong. and and then he like started listing off the other five or six other points that he was making about so the the answer no one's like uh that's not gonna happen i won't be that's not gonna happen so no there's not an easy solution to this but i do think like there is a at least on the surface willingness to listen um and and i think it has to that we have to engage each other on So respectfully, like I watched his I've watched him on the hill.

42:05I've watched him when he's challenged. Nobody likes being backed into a corner. Nobody likes being publicly humiliated. Nothing about his behavior and his what he said on the record thus far suggests to me someone who's genuinely curious to look at the data that the medical profession and the scientific profession have amassed over the course of 10, 20, 30, 40 years. I mean, he just seems too far gone from that. And so much of his ego is tied up in being a crusader that if the thing he's crusading against turns out not to be an evil power that undermines his entire vision of his life and himself.

42:36So I feel like there's so many. There's enormous. Yeah. Enormous stakes for him riding on whether he's right or not. I agree with that. And I also totally agree. I mean, I've been to a number of those hearings on the Hill. They're humiliating for everyone involved. Yeah. I mean, to see him go be he just yells the senators and calls them names and calls them ridiculous. And then they say he's killing kids. And he says, no, you're killing kids. And well, but I think this is the issue and this is why it's hard to find some sort of like liminal space in which people can present their ideas in a non-confrontational way because we're talking about issues of life and death absolutely right like it's not it's not tax policy though economics are important this is literally like do i protect my child from this deadly disease or the deadly virus or not and i wonder you know because it's not as if kennedy struggled with autism in his own among his own children, at least as I know.

43:27From your article, it sounds like a group of activist moms whose children dealt with or deal with autism came up to him, basically kept at it and kept advocating for this sort of link between autism and vaccines that he eventually takes this up. But why is he so singularly focused on autism at the expense of these life-ending or life-threatening diseases that could roar back into existence if and when we stop vaccinating to get herd immunity. I mean, like, does the prospect of mass death from measles or hepatitis B not bother him in the same way that, I don't know, the exploding rates of autism do?

44:08So his answer to that would be, and I'm not endorsing this, but his answer to that would be - Yeah, yeah. No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to shoot the messenger, Michael. Yeah. His answer to that would be, you are not accounting for the enormous harm being done that is not being measured right now, that we don't know about, that has not been directly ascribed to the things we've done. He does not accept the idea that you said at the beginning, which I totally agree with, that the COVID vaccine saved lots of lives and obviously had an effect in the reduction of hospitalizations at the end of that pandemic.

44:43He doesn't accept that as a fact. He says, look, we don't know. We don't know. The data is chaotic. You have all these confounding things you have to look at. And so a lot of these arguments end up being in that space of having to wrestle with what this study said, what were the methodologies of this study, what does it mean? I think the other thing you have to say about Kennedy, though, is that a key part of his job as a trial lawyer, his other public work in this was always being the person. And this is also kind of, I think, gets back to the King Arthur tale, who saw a truth that other people didn't see and then was willing to courageously pursue it.

45:28So he's a guy who's written that Skakel, his cousin who was accused of murdering a woman and later released from prison, was innocent. He wrote a whole story about that. He's argued that Sirhan Sirhan, the person who shot his father, was not the sole shooter and that the shots that hit his father were actually shot by somebody else in the room based on the autopsy. He's raised the possibility the CIA was behind the shooting of Kennedy. I mean, there are a number of these. I mean, after the 2004 election, he wrote a long story for Rolling Stone about how the election had been stolen in part by voting machines in Ohio, which was then a liberal cause.

46:11I mean, that was a liberal democratic cause at the time. But all of these things have in common the idea that there is a truth out there that he perceives and that his role then is to bring it to the masses, that his role is to then share it with the rest of America and to fight courageously for that truth. And there is a sort of Kennedy-esque vibe to that, right? And I think that is for him trying to embody what I call the birthright, like the childhood he was born into that was then sort of stolen from him. I was so horrified by this conversation you have with Paul Offit. Because you're put in a ridiculously complicated position with Kennedy, right?

47:00Like on one hand, you're trying to better understand him. And the relationship between you two goes from, I mean, it's an unusual relationship where he's asking you to sort of mediate these vaccine debates in a way. and you both have his trust, but you're also an antagonist, depending on what day of the week it is. And you're also talking to the scientists who are, I think, in many ways, paying the price for Kennedy's crusade at HHS. So you talk to Paul Offit, who's a pediatrician who helped invent a rotavirus vaccine that's been massively effective around the world and who's been a frequent subject of attacks, courtesy of RFK and death threats.

47:36And you ask Offit if he sees a way to reverse the public's distrust in science, which is only growing exponentially while Kennedy's at HHS. And he says, I don't think there's any way to regain that trust other than have the viruses do the education and the bacteria do the education. And then people will realize they paid way too high a cost. To that, I say, fucking yikes. Is that where we are at, like basically people have to die or get very, very ill before they realize this guy was a charlatan. Yes, the experiment is happening now. I mean, Florida has said that they're no longer going to require vaccines for schools.

48:16Idaho has passed similar rules. The rate of non-medical, non-religious exemptions, I think it's actually non-medical exemptions for vaccines that parents say, I don't want to have my kids take this vaccine. They can come into kindergarten has been ticking higher. And Senator Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, who was the deciding vote for Kennedy, but is now really tangling with him behind the scenes and in public, very unhappy with where Kennedy is taking things. His office is tracking pertussis cases, whooping cough cases around the country. And they have a theory that I think the data is still too early to tell.

48:53So I say that in the story. I want to say that very clearly. Now, we don't know that this is the case. But but Cassidy's working hypothesis is you're going to have a greater increase in whooping cough cases among kids in red states, states that the Trump won than in states that that Harris won in the last election. So I think we're very much in a real experiment going forward. They just decided this week to the Vaccine Advisory Committee recommending that what has become a standard procedure, that as soon as a baby is born in the U.S., they get a hepatitis B vaccine, that that is no longer recommended.

49:34And almost certainly HHS is going to CDC and HHS is going to confirm that. And that will be the official federal recommendation. We don't know how that will change behavior. It doesn't mean that mothers can't get their babies vaccinated on the first day they're born or in the hospital when they're born. But it will likely lead to less babies being back, fewer babies being vaccinated. And the concern is that some mothers who have tested negative for hepatitis B or other family members will infect the baby. And we have seen, because of the hepatitis B vaccine, a real reduction in liver problems and hepatitis for Americans, and that that rate will start going back up.

50:17And if you listen to the Vaccine Advisory Committee hearing, there's a debate about what's going to happen. The people voting to get rid of this think it's going to be a good thing. The people voting against it think it's going to be a bad thing. But we're going to find out because it is happening, right? All this stuff is happening right now. Quite a fucking roll of the dice, Michael. Quite a fucking roll of the dice. We're going to jump to a quick break, but before we do, we got some quick housekeeping. The Trump administration is using the tragic shooting of two National Guard members to justify an immigration crackdown and shutting the door on refugees and asylum seekers.

50:52Really, just a wholesale reinvention of American immigration policy at a time when millions are seeking safety here in the United States. And so on the latest episode of my new show, Runaway Country, I unpack what is actually happening on the ground. I speak with an Afghan aid worker who helped the U.S. for years on the ground in Afghanistan and then escaped Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul and came to America on a green card for which he was vetted for months. And now, thanks to Trump, may get deported and sent back to the Taliban. his entire life and his family's life, everything is at stake.

51:33And then I sit down with my friend and former colleague, Joy Reid, to get into the MAGA playbook. Here is a hint. It doesn't end well for black and brown people. If you want to understand how all of this is shaping the direction of the country, don't miss this episode. Tune into Runaway Country on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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53:33I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the bear carcass. This is what's known in the podcasting industry as a hard pivot. The whale head, the brain worm. I mean, what was when you asked him about that stuff and you don't need to go into each one, but sort of how does he think that this is just like a smelly trail? that keeps following him from room to room? Does he have any, in the way that he owns his dark period and adolescence that Carolyn Kennedy, his cousin, so publicly brought up, I mean, does he, what does he say about the strange, abnormal, distressing behavior that he's exhibited as an adult?

54:15Well, I think first thing he would say is that all those stories which have been used to define him are an effort by the media to disqualify him, to distract from his arguments about science. So that's the first thing he would say. The second thing I think is that he doesn't, I mean, he is an unusual guy. He has an unusual relationship with animals. When he sees a whale on the beach, his thought is, let's bring it home. Or when he sees a bear on a country road that's been hit by a car, he thinks, oh, it would be funny if we put it in Central Park. Those aren't disputed stories. You know, he has lots of stories that are very strange.

54:55He's also, I think, you know, we should mention someone who doesn't claim to be cured of his addictions. I mean, he said that his brain is sort of like a formulation pharmacy, by which he meant that he can turn things like rock climbing or sex into a drug. And then he's kind of compulsive about chasing after them. I mean, there's a reason he's going every day to a 12-step meeting. It's not like this is a current constant struggle for him. And he's had enormous success. I mean, much more success than most heroin addicts of 14 years in sort of rebuilding his life. Right. You can look at him through the prism of being a Kennedy or being a heroin addict.

55:36And your estimation of his accomplishments, I think, is probably inversely proportional depending on which prism you look through. No, that's right. And you haven't mentioned the biggest story the last few weeks. Well, I was about to. You gave me that. You mentioned his addiction to sex. Yeah. And I know your colleague at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, read Olivia Knutzi's book. Olivia Knutzi is a journalist who reportedly had an affair. Well, I guess we don't have to say reportedly because she sort of owns up to it in her own book. And Helen in The Atlantic writes of the book and of the love triangle between Olivia Nuzzi, her ex-fiancee Ryan Lizza, who has populated his substack with various installments of his version of what happened, and RFK Jr.

56:23She writes, the only person in this story with real power is RFK Jr. And he is, I cannot believe I am typing this sentence, maintaining a dignified silence.

56:36What do you think? You're about to give me your thoughts on this scandal. Or whatever you want to say about it. I know you weren't interviewing him at the time that this broke. Is that right? Right. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned I mentioned to him while we were talking that I was going to put in the story stuff about his some of the sex scandals around him. I was going to mention the alleged affair with Nuzzi and the fact that she lost her job at the New York magazine. I mentioned also something that came out in Vanity Fair last year, a former babysitter of his 20 or 30 years younger said that of his children, none of his said that, you know, he had sort of propositioned her and groped her inappropriately.

57:23He apologized to her in a text message at the time. um i think the and and i the other thing i want to say is that even if i had known the details of what liza and nazi had written have written since when we were doing these interviews i don't think i would have focused on them so much um that wasn't the the curiosity i had i do think the fact that he still struggles with addiction including sex addiction is a central part of who he is yeah and i do mention that and so i think that's the way to understand it i mean this is a guy who, you know, he describes himself as having returned from hell, which is an unusual thing for someone to say.

58:06And I think the demons are still very present, right? Like that he, in a way that you and I probably don't have to struggle on a day-to-day basis, he does have to struggle. And so I asked him before we published, you know, if you want to comment on the Nuzzi stuff. And I think he has not commented at all. I mean, you know, she says he talked to her about it last year and sort of urged her to keep it quiet. And Lizza says - I need you to take a bullet for me, I think is - Right. And Lizza says he had a conversation with Kenny. So it's not that he's never talked about it, but his policy on this is just to keep going.

58:48And I mean, he said in his announcement speech when he ran for president in 2023, I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I'd be king of the world. I wasn't a choir boy. Yeah. Right. I wasn't a choir boy. So that is true. And that is still true. And once upon a time, if you had that many skeletons in your closet, you didn't get to be in public life. But Well, unless you were a Kennedy. I was going to say, there are a couple people that got away with it. Although their skeletons weren't public at the time. They came out later. Right, right. Private life, I should say. Who knew what would have happened if Marilyn Monroe had given a press conference in 1961?

59:29Or written a book called American Canto. Right. It would have been a different world. Yeah, he's returned from hell and is now bringing us to hell of his own creation. I mean, I do think it's an important story. It's such an, first of all, it's a great story. It's so well reported. Hats off to you on doing a very complicated thing. But it's also really important because when we look at the legacy of the Trump administration, there's going to be, it's going to have a long tail. And I think the distrust, the paranoia, the erosion of, you know, belief in our institutions is going to be one of the longer lasting ones.

1:00:07And what this is doing to medical institutions and science and facts and the central role RFK is playing in all of this is going to have a profound effect both in the near term in terms of the health of Americans and on our body politic in terms of whether, you know, half the country decides to believe what the federal government and its related institutions are saying. It's just he is a linchpin and this overhaul of the way we think about institutions writ large. So, you know, understanding him and how he grapples with it. And I guess the piece he's made in this crusade with actors he previously understood to be bad actors is like, I guess it's the work we need to do as citizens and voters and journalists.

1:00:55The only thing I would add is I think we're still early innings here. I mean, we're still in the first year of the second term. I think he plans to stay. He doesn't have the same problems as some of the other cabinet heads have right now. So there's no sign that he's leaving. The Republicans really do want to use this make America healthy again thing in the midterms next year. It's not clear at all to me how it's going to play. But they're going to lean into it. They're not going to lean away. And Kennedy has many more plans to continue, specifically on the vaccine stuff, which is the most, I mean, he's dismissed or fired or pushed out a quarter of the workforce at HHS.

1:01:32So that's a big thing. There's a lot of cut funding at NIH. I mean, there's other things we haven't talked about that are transforming the way medical research is done. But on the vaccine front, I think we have just begun to see these changes that he intends to make over the next couple of years. Oh, God help us all. I, you know where I am on this side of it. Michael, it is, like I said, it's a complicated thing to try and get the trust of the subject without necessarily co-signing on what the subject is espousing, the views he's espousing. And I think you do a really masterful job of giving, you know, a good look at a very central player in American life.

1:02:17So thank you for taking this time to chit-chat with me about all of it and put the visual of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gulping down a quart of plain yogurt. It's just a matter of course. Thank you for helping us understand that visual. Thanks for highlighting the story. Go to theatlantic.com and read it. Oh, it's so good. Everyone should read it. It's a very good read. Thanks for your time, Mike. It's great to see you. Thank you.

1:02:48That's our show for today. Thank you to Michael Scherer for joining. John, John, and Tommy will be back in your feeds on Tuesday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illich Frank, and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer.

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