You could try running in verbose mode:
pod install --verbose
That’ll show you what cocoa pods are up to:
Setting up CocoaPods master repo
Cloning spec repo `master` from `https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git` (branch `master`)
$ /usr/bin/git clone 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git' master
Cloning into 'master'...
For me the above step took quite a long time as the repo (Dec 2016) is now 1.1 GB