Despite the chocolate rum, Sam Sanders was in good spirits.
“I can feel my alcohol,” he said. “I made a secret recording before I came in here.”
Sanders, a longtime radio and podcast host, sat in a conference room in New York Magazine’s lower Manhattan office, dutifully pushing his way through a drunken gauntlet. Someone had posted in Slack about the proliferation of celebrity-owned liquor brands, a topic, it was noted, that could lead to a prolific segment on “in it”, Sanders’ new pop culture podcast from New York, Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Now, it was 3:24 p.m. on a weekday in May, and Sanders, with the help of a few colleagues, was getting drunk all day in a blind taste test. The chocolate rum — SelvaRey, from kitschy pop and R&B star Bruno Mars — won the host mostly for its appropriately cheeky catchphrase, “Made in the jungle.”
“It’s hokey, and corny, and cheesy — but it works,” he said.
“Into It,” which debuted Thursday, enters a crowded talk show podcast room, distinguished by a deep bank of contributors — Vulture’s concern, previously largely lacking in podcasting — and a generous deluge of irreverence. Like “Culture Gabfest‘ and ‘Pop Culture Happy Hour,’ promises clever comments from critics about the week’s news and trends. As with “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” and “Love It Or Leave It,” in-studio games (the drink tasting will appear in a future episode) and phone calls from listeners will give a sense of dynamism. But the clearest indication of the show’s ambition is Sanders himself, previously best known as the founder of NPR’s pop culture podcast and radio show,”It’s been a minute.”
For Sanders, 37, “Into It” is both a reset and a moment of emancipation. He spent 12 years on public radio, first coming to prominence in the 2016 presidential election, as one of the original co-hosts of the “NPR Politics Podcast.” During that time, he says, he had honed a persona that felt cramped on public radio, but takes center stage on “Into It”: uncensored, uninhibited, and unhindered.
“Every year at NPR you could hear me pushing: What can you say? What can’t you say? How can you say it?Sanders said in a recent interview. “I didn’t want to think about that anymore. At some point it just became [Expletive] the line. I’m past that.”
On ‘It’s Been a Minute’, which began in 2017, Sanders attracted a loyal following with a combination of old-fashioned gravitas and frisky informality. He was a firm deliverer of hard news, keeping listeners informed about the Trump White House and the early pandemic. But the show leaned more on conversation than monologue. Sanders brought a sociable generosity and enthusiasm to group discussions and lengthy interviews — often conveyed with an audible “mmh” or “come on” or “talk about it” — reminiscent of the friend at the cookout you can’t wait to gossip or pity. to have.
Brent Baughman, a senior producer at NPR who developed “It’s Been a Minute” with Sanders, said he noted the host’s unusual effect on listeners while working on the “NPR Politics Podcast.” At an event for that show in 2016, fans wore homemade T-shirts printed with Sanders’ face.
“It was clear that he had a star power that transcended politics,” Baughman said. “People tuned in just because they loved him.”
Sanders’ candid, conspiratorial style infused “It’s Been a Minute” with a generative vein of unpredictability. Speaking in 2018 with the actor Brian Tyree Henryof the FX series “Atlanta”, he turned what could have been a by-number exchange by asking how Henry ordered are hash browns?.
The actor, who had complained about his inability to eat undisturbed at Waffle House, replied with a deadpan rhetorical pulse: “It’s none of your business.”
Sanders roared in protest, and both men dissolved into a fit of laughter. When Henry finally announced his order (“braised and covered,” with sautéed onions and melted American cheese), he followed it up with a surprisingly heartfelt tribute to the Georgia-based restaurant chain’s pluralistic appeal — also a haven for people-watching like potatoes. .
“That’s what I loved about Atlanta, man,” he said softly. “Every nook and cranny has something.”
The emergence of unusual paths for emotional sincerity has long been the subject of Sanders’ work. In his first job at NPR, as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009, he was drawn to subjects with an undertone of pathos. In 2016, following a fatal shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a year after a deadly shooting at a black church in Charleston, SC, Sanders caused a rare note of catharsis on the “NPR Politics Podcast.”
“You think about the mother who lost her life in Charleston — the reason she needed that safe space is because she’s not sure if her son would be killed for carrying a bag of Skittles,” he said. “The people at the Orlando club, the reason they need that safe space is because they’re not sure if they’re going to get beat up for kissing their boyfriend, or if they can keep their job because they’re gay. I hope we understand that many people in America, in this society, don’t feel safe every day.”
Born in Seguin, Texas, Sanders never expected to work as a journalist. He grew up in a strict Pentecostal family and once thought he would become a pastor. Spinning in his college days, he was preparing for a career as a campaign strategist or political fundraiser. It wasn’t until his senior year of a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government that he considered enrolling in NPR, which he and his mother had fallen in love with during hours-long drives to and from church. .
“It was a way to stay informed and get involved without getting involved in politics,” Sanders said.
He learned to report on the work at NPR and initially embraced the nonprofit’s strict rules regarding impartiality. A 2012 ethics handbook warned journalists to “transcend” how we feel on a topic and giving to our audience what we know about it, and what we don’t do.”
Even as he flirted to bring more of himself into his stories, Sanders remained wary of getting too personal. In his comments about the shooting at Pulse nightclub, he made no mention of his own sexuality. (Two years later, he discussed coming out as gay in an episode of “It’s Been a Minute.”) Like many journalists at long-time news outlets, he largely withheld his feelings about Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, avoiding the use of words like “racist” and “lie.”
“It took me years to get to the point where I felt comfortable sharing something personal in the middle of a story,” he said.
Sanders said he realized halfway through last year that he needed a fresh start. The announcement this spring of his departure from NPR came amid a spate of high-profile exits by other correspondents of color, including Audie Cornish, Noel King and Lulu Garcia-Navarro. (Garcia-Navarro joined The New York Times last fall.)
King, Garcia-Navarro and others had previously alleged wage differences among others in the organization between male and female hosts. NPR has said that improving diversity and equality is: his “top priority”, and pointed to competition from deep-pocketed rivals as an explanation for the departure.
While Sanders said “equality issues” were a factor in his decision, he added that the choice was largely personal, fueled by his desire for maximum creative freedom.
“I’ve spent a third of my life in that place and it still means a lot to me,” he said. “But I wanted the time and space to develop an identity that wasn’t ‘Sam Sanders from NPR’.”
In the first episode of ‘Into It’, Sanders was lithe and cheerful, a distance runner who got off to a slow start. Over the course of 30 minutes, he went through a series of games with Vulture colleagues highlighting the week’s concerns: Jennifer Lopez (“a human angel here on Earth”), Ben Affleck (“something dead behind his eyes”), Keke Palmer (“a breath of fresh air”).
The set-up of the show, about which Sanders has wide discretion, is deliberately flexible. His lengthy interviews are back in the mix (the first episode included a deep dive on Beyoncé with the journalist Danyel Smith) and he leaves room for what he calls “high jinks for the sake of high jinks,” like the celebrity tasting.
Most of the time, he says, he wants to talk about what feels right and invite others to do the same.
“I think the best I can offer is a place where you can recharge, learn, be entertained and then go out into the world with a little bit of relief,” Sanders said. “That’s what I’ve wanted from day 1 for my listeners.”