A discussion with Anna Sale, host of WNYC’s new hit interview podcast “Death, Sex & Money”. 

by Kaylen Ralph

“Death, Sex & Money” is about death, sex and money. But the themes these topics breed warrant conversations infinitely more nuanced than what might initially come to mind. Anna Sale’s new interview podcast is a platform through which even the most far-flung stories orbiting these larger topics can be discussed intimately, frankly and candidly. Shortly after its release in early May, Sale’s podcast shot to the top of the iTunes charts. A particularly raw and entertaining story about Sale’s own love life, and how retired U.S. Senator Al Simpson and his wife Ann were commissioned to intervene in her most recent relationship, was included in the May 9 episode of “This American Life,” and “Death, Sex & Money” has been getting more attention ever since. Produced by WNYC (New York City’s public radio station), this podcast succeeds at being a show that transcends race, gender, class and geographic location. It blends elements of the tried and true storytelling podcast format with Sale’s gift for asking the right people the right questions in order to get the heart of a person’s individual experience; her interviews reveal the universality in seemingly autonomous experiences.

New episodes of “Death, Sex & Money” are released every other Wednesday. Today’s episode, “I Married the Gay Father of My Child,” is available now, both on the show’s website, and as a free download from iTunes.

I had the opportunity to talk with Sale about her inspiration for the show, how her background in political reporting lends itself to asking the tough questions, and how audio podcasting is also in need of more women. Kaylen Ralph: Your journalistic background is totally rooted in political reporting. You reported on the 2012 presidential election as well as the 2013 New York City mayoral race. I think it’s interesting that the three topics your podcast revolves around (Death, Sex & Money) are all things that kind of inundate modern politics (at least the money and sex). Is that something you considered at all when starting the show? Was it an inspiration in any way?

Anna Sale: I feel like, yes absolutely, the show was inspired by my time covering politics because so much of what candidates say on the campaign trail and what political consultants will say to you, it’s like they talk at this level of talking points–talking about things that people care about but not really about the things that people care about. So I was really struck by that disconnect, that I would be out talking to voters whether it was in Iowa or Ohio or Florida during the presidential election or different boroughs in New York City, and people have real questions about what their future looks like. It wasn’t just about whether they’re going to pay higher taxes or not, but it was questions about what’s going on with the middle class in America.  Like, why do I feel like so much is changing and no one is really explaining why or how or what’s next? And so, the show is kind of an attempt to do these very personal interviews where people tell stories about the details of their lives, but in a way, my hope is that it makes people feel less alone in navigating a lot of these big cultural shifts that are happening right now. Both economically and the way families are structured, and what we were taught to expect as far as the American dream and then what’s really the reality for all sorts of different generations; we’re in flux. To hear someone talk about that intimately on a podcast, the hope was that it would make people feel like they weren’t the only ones going through this and having these questions. If they’re tired of what they’re going through, they can get a breath of fresh air on sites such as 겜블시티 파워볼.

KR: I think the idea of an “interview podcast,” specifically, is really interesting. Where you know you’ll always be hearing from someone different.

AS: Yeah, and that was like just thinking about where we fit. I love storytelling podcasts, This American Life and the Moth and Radiolab and all of the really exciting ways that audio producers are figuring out how to tell stories, and how that’s an exciting frontier right now. The intimacy of hearing a conversation between two people, or three people, that’s what I wanted for my podcast, that feeling of people sitting around and talking about the most important things.

KR: Regarding the premise of your show, do you think that our society’s collective cultural aversion to frank discussions about these topics affects the way they’re objectively covered when it comes to policy? I’m talking Title IX, our national debt, the death penalty…how far reaching, and how lasting, is our country’s fears about these issues?

AS: I want to make the connection between policy and big shifts to people’s lives. When you cover politics, if you’re doing a story about student loan debt, you’ll have a little story at the top of the article about a 22-year-old who has $100,000 in debt and how that’s affecting his or her ability to make her car payments each month. And then the story becomes, ‘Oh, there’s student loan debt and credit card debt in the country,” and then it just becomes about these really big things. I think that experience of that 22-year-old who graduated with a college degree and now realizes that she doesn’t have enough money to cover her rent, her car payments and even the thought of saving for retirement, if that’s her first experience when she’s first entering the job market, it’s worth a little bit more time to say, ‘What are your choices now? How do you make the decisions?’ I think so often when you don’t get to know the people involved in these stories, it’s very easy to come to policy debates with a lot of judgments and distance.  I think that there are these difficult conversations happening among friends or inside families and different communities, but everything is so divided that I think that trying to create a space where we’re just listening to each other a little more closely, that’s my hope. We can also get all your questions answered about children’s ISAs.

KR: Recently on The Riveter, we published an early excerpt of reporter Justine Griffin’s massive longform narrative  about the egg donor industry, and her personal experience as one. Sophia Amoruso’s #GIRLBOSS was released this month, a memoir almost entirely about building a business and obviously money comes up a lot; it’s already sold more than 15,000 copies. Both Griffin and Amoruso are considered “millennial” women. Do you think that the millennial generation is more inclined to openly talk about some of these taboo issues?

AS: It is really interesting, when I was piloting for awhile and doing interviews and having no real sense of who the audience would be, just getting feedback from the first episodes we’ve done has been super fascinating because I feel like I’m hearing a lot of stories about death from baby boomers and people who are taking care of aging parents, which makes sense because that group of Americans is so large and aging–questions about sex and relationships and balancing the priorities of a relationship rather than starting a professional career, I’m hearing from younger listeners. I think you are right, my sense is that younger listeners who are college-aged or just out of college or in their 20s, they’ve been primed to share certain things about their personal lives just through growing up with social media. The line about what’s private and public has been a little bit more permeable for younger people as they become adults. I think that there is a willingness, but I think that everybody has a hunger, no matter what their age is, to listen in on some of this stuff. But I would say the willingness to talk about very personal things, maybe younger people are more willing to go there.

KR: You’ve pretty much spent the majority of your professional career working in radio, correct?

AS: Yes, I grew up in West Virginia and I went to Stanford and then moved back to West Virginia and that’s where I started in public radio. I started covering everything from coal mine disasters and the West Virginia legislature and political campaigns in West Virginia, and was there and moved to Connecticut and covered state politics there, and then I’ve been at WNYC and in New York for almost five years. So, always in public media as a journalist.

KR: Do you think there is a shortage of women working in radio? It’s a well-documented problem in other genres of journalism, but what about radio?

AS: Most often in the newsrooms I’ve worked in there’s been more women reporters than men. I think that is still the case at WNYC, a lot of women editors and a lot of women in decision-making roles in newsrooms. And I think part of that is the legacy of NPR and Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts, the leadership roles they had early on as NPR was getting set up. But where there is a disparity and what I hear audio producers talk about a lot, is when you look at podcasting, it is so male-dominated, who hosts podcasts. That was definitely something that I was interested in and WNYC was interested in with starting my podcast was just to get some more women-hosted podcasts out there, because when you look at the iTunes top charts, it is just totally dominated by men.

KR: That’s awesome. Have women responded to that? Aspiring female podcasters?

AS: Yeah, it’s been neat. My sense is that the audience is a mix of women and men but I have gotten a lot of emails from young women journalists who were really excited to see a woman host a podcast get some attention. And that’s been really gratifying because it’s one of those things, once you show people who are investing in podcasts that there’s an audience for something that’s hosted by a woman. Terry Gross has demonstrated this for decades, but just getting some more woman voices out there is really great. I’ve had some men who listen to the podcast say to me, ‘You know, you’re asking questions that never would have occurred to me to ask.’ And I just think that’s nice, it’s a nice affirmation that I’m approaching these questions and interviews with a slightly different angle because I am a woman and that’s part of the proud history of feminists in newsrooms. I interviewed Ellen Goodman who used to a columnist for the Boston Globe (she won a Pulitzer Prize and she used to be one of my heroes growing up) and she talked about writing op-eds in the 70s. Up to that point columns about feelings and about family didn’t fit on the op-ed page. And now look at David Brooks in the New York Times– all of his columns are about family and values, so it’s neat to see how women journalists have reshaped that landscape.

KR: I’m really glad you said that, because I wanted to ask you…this is on my mind, I was curious if you thought that as a woman if you brought a certain perspective to the topics of death, sex and money, and it seems like you do. I think women are leery of admitting to having a certain gift for storytelling.

AS: It’s also like, I’m a divorced woman in my mid-30s, so when I’m talking to people about relationships and family decisions and whether they had kids or how they had kids or if they changed their name, that’s all stuff that I’ve had to think about. And that, you know, a man my age hasn’t had to think about with the same urgency, because of course, that’s the secret about this podcast. I want to ask people how they’ve done this because I want to figure this out myself.

KR: Your subjects in the first few episodes have been so eclectic and varied. Once you came up with the concept for the show, how did you decide who you would feature, and what universal truths you’d attempt to draw from your interviews with them?

AS: We made the decision early on that we wanted our guests to both be celebrities and everyday people who weren’t well-known. So it was a mix, because part of the argument of “Death, Sex & Money” is that everybody deals with these issues, no matter who you are. What I have been proud of in the first episodes is that there’s some variation in race, there’s some differentiation in class, there’s some variation in where people are coming from geographically, because those are all things that are important to me. I grew up in West Virginia, so talking to people who are not always in the top of mind in the media, those people are important to me. So, it is tricky figuring out, ‘Ok I’m going to do an episode about death, sex and money, who should be the guest?’ And it’s about partially who is willing to talk about something that they’ve gone through that is candid.

The episode about my love life, and Al and Ann Simpson, that was just an amazing blessing in my life. I was going through a difficult time in my love life and my boyfriend Arthur reached out to them for help because it was a great story and they were very open about what they’ve gone through in their life. So the decision to that episode was, Al and Anne Simpson have so much to say and share, but I was going to put myself out there so that the listeners knew, these are some basics facts about where I’m coming from, these are some things that I’m trying to sort through, as a way to indicate to the audience, it’s okay if you don’t have all the answers or have everything together, because I don’t either. When you start from saying, ‘I want to talk about the things that we don’t really think about a lot, and need to talk about more, that is a lot. There’s a lot there. It’s not been hard to come up with story ideas.’

Anna Sale is the host of WNYC’s “Death, Sex & Money” podcast. You can find archives of the show’s episodes on iTunes and WNYC’s website, and follow Sale on Twitter @annasale.

Kaylen Ralph is The Riveter‘s co-founder and co-editor. Follow her on Twitter @kaylenralph. 

Top photo by Amy Pearl.