Why Anna Sale Started Death, Sex & Money—and Where the Show Is Going Next

Death, Sex & Money lives: The long-running interview show hosted by Anna Sale debuts its first new episode at Slate today, April 16.

Over the past 10 years, episodes of Death, Sex & Money have featured all manner of celebrities, from Jane Fonda and Kevin Bacon to Sonia Sotomayor, Madeleine Albright, and Gloria Steinem. But DSM guests are more often nonfamous people—Uber drivers, people whose pets died, a woman and her husband talking about how they handle her psychotic episodes. The show is officially relaunching at Slate with a conversation with a woman who was diagnosed as a sociopath in her early 20s. Listeners can also look forward to an episode where Sale interviews a self-described witch, whose work, Sale says, was “really comforting and interesting to me when I was going through my own big questions about what was going to happen in my professional life.”

“We have a sort of very specific thing that we say we’re doing week in and week out,” says Sale, “which is exploring the parts of life that can make each of us feel isolated, alone, alienated, uncertain, and we try to have a more open conversation about those things.”

I flipped the script on Sale, interviewing the interviewer herself about the origins of the show, how it’s changing—and not changing!—in its new era, and how we all can have more tough, meaningful conversations in our lives. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How did you come up with the pitch for the show, originally?

It was a combination of two things. I was a politics reporter for a long time before I pitched this, and I was often talking to voters on campaign trails, and these were the kinds of stories that I would hear when I would ask someone very sort of open questions like, How do you think things are going in the country? Do you think they’re going well? Do you think they’re tough? And who are you going to vote for? And I would start to hear these really kind of textured stories of what was going on in people’s lives. And then I would have to cut them down to a sound bite or two to write stories about what was happening in the polls, for example. I started to think: What would it be like if the point of my journalism was to make those stories the main idea, the main focus.

There was also a real sort of personal need for me. At the time I pitched the show I was in my early 30s, I was divorced, I was living in New York City, I had a lot of questions about what I wanted my career to look like and what kind of money I could expect to make on my own now as a divorced person, and I really just wanted to have more conversations with people, to collect more information. I felt like I needed more guides.

Your interviews on the show sound so just natural and cozy. As a listener, it feels like we’re all in a living room, and this conversation happens to be unfolding next to me. But I know that so much work goes into making it sound like that.

When we were coming to Slate, someone described the sound of the show as really beautiful, no-makeup makeup. I thought that was such a big compliment.

Yes! You don’t wake up and look like that, but it looks like you could have. 

There are so many pieces that go into it and it’s a great team that I get to work with at Slate. One of the main things that I really rely on as an interviewer is our interview preps; a producer will do a pre-interview. I like to have a timeline of the person’s life in front of me, from birth to where we are today, and with everything from professional highlights. Like if it’s an actor, when their first movie came out, when they won their Oscar, etc. Or if it’s not a famous person, when they finished college, when they moved away from where they grew up, that kind of thing. Because what I do when I’m thinking about questions is I look for those little gaps in the timeline that suggest a moment of transition or something that we can dig into where there might be a set of moments or a particular scene where something happened that I want to hear the guest describe to us to kind of transport all of us there to that moment.

During the recording, I think the most important thing with our show is I do this little thing at the top where I tell the person: Here’s what the name of the show is, here’s what we’re doing, we talk about things that all of us go through but don’t talk about enough. It might sound like a scary name for a show, but our interviews are not meant to be needlessly provocative. They’re about digging in to help all of us feel less alone.

So you talk to people who are going through transitions in their life or about transitions in their life often. And Death, Sex & Money, of course recently went through a transition. What was it like having the show sunsetted at one media company and then finding a new home for it?

We can say canceled. We can use the word most people use.

Canceled, OK.

It was really emotional on so many fronts. It was not only, this has been the way that I’ve done my work for 10 years, and I am very proud of the show. I feel very invested in the show. I like making it, it’s fun. And also it was my job and it was the job of the Death, Sex & Money team. It’s the way we support ourselves and pay for our housing and support our families. So it was a really emotional transition to go through.

I was really freaked out at first, and then I had the idea while unloading the dishwasher at my house of having a funeral for the show, and it made me smile and kind of get really excited because I was like, Oh, what I love about this idea is I do really believe that our failure to properly recognize endings and be sad, and all the vulnerability that comes with that, I think our failure to do that as a society is why parts of our society and the way it functions are so messed up. So we started making plans for a funeral live event, which we did in New York City in December. It was really a beautiful occasion.

It was probably about a month later that we learned that Slate was going to be a place where we were going to get to keep making the show. So then we had a live event that was a revival. So I think that really helped me creatively and also emotionally to kind of go through this process, which is the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

What was the moment when you were like, Yes, we are going to Slate? I remember exactly where I was in the apartment I was living in at the time when I got a call saying, “You have a job at Slate.” What was the moment for you?

I didn’t have a moment because it was kind of like a courtship process. Because it wasn’t just one person getting hired, it was a whole podcast and all of the archives that we’d made, and figuring out who from WNYC was going to be able to come and work with Slate with me on the show. It was a process, but that’s the business-side answer. The really fun part of getting to know Slate better was having a series of Zooms and conversations with people at different levels of the organization, and I just noticed at the end of every call, I was in a good mood, I was stimulated, I was excited, I was impressed at the way people were prepared and organized. If meetings should have an agenda, it had an agenda, and it ended on time. I just was like, Oh, this seems like people are fun and also doing their jobs.

“We’re fun and we get our jobs done” is a very good tagline for Slate. We should put that in our recruitment materials. 

It’s very special to have a collection of very smart people who get excited about ideas. But it doesn’t feel competitive. It feels very collegial and collaborative, and that’s special. That doesn’t happen in every place.

Let me go back to one of the core elements of the show—tough transitions. Before you started the show, you were in a marriage that you were contemplating the end of. You’ve written about turning to Google for answers on whether to stay, and what to do if you did get divorced. But of course … that’s not a thing you can get answered with Google! Conversations with family, friends, mentors, were what helped you through, and out, instead.

How has making the show for all these years influenced your view of relationships, and how do you think about them now?

I would say it’s not just in relationships. When I started the show, I was really curious about things like How do people build a life, and How do you make the right choices to build that life that you want? And as I’ve made the show, I’ve just come to appreciate how much the choices we make come with trade-offs, and that there’s very rarely a right or wrong move. So much of life is in gray areas and in ambivalence, and I feel like I’ve become much more—I feel like, rather than should I do this or should I do that, like that instinct that took me to Google, I’m much more like a “both/and” person. It’s like, how do I have this and how do I have that? And then in those places where they’re in conflict, are there ways that I can adjust how I’m thinking about it or what do I need to let down for a season and I can pick it back up later? All these life lessons are partially from making the show for the last 10 years, but also from getting married again and becoming a parent to two kids. I’ve had to grapple more with the limits of my own control.

So the show has had a death, and you had a revival, and now you’re at Slate. Has anything about the DNA of the show changed or evolved?

I’m going to go back to my “both/and” answer: The show is both what the show has always been and it feels like we are thinking a lot about what we care about and what we want to put in the world in 2024 America. So, we aren’t a new show, per se, but on our show we think seriously about how we each build on our own lives and what our relationship is to community. I think that’s a consistent theme. For myself, I’m 10 years older now than when the show started. I’m 43, I have two kids, they’re in elementary school, I’m married. I’m at a life phase where I don’t have a lot of urgent life-path questions, but I do have a real deep concern about how we engage in community and in our democracy.

That sounds really lofty, but it’s like the pandemic made us all apart and it made us all less good at talking in real life and dealing with complex questions and problems relationally. And that’s what life takes. I hope our show is fun for people to listen to and they like what they learn, but I also hope it’s modeling a way of not being afraid to engage relationally on complex issues and complex life moments because that’s what it takes to live together.

My final question, and I know that this is a huge one, but just for the short one-tip answer, what would you say to someone who is like, OK, I’m up for having harder conversations with people around me, how am I going to start doing that?

I think you think for yourself about where that impulse is coming from, what the need is. Then start with one person and say, “I want to talk.” Tell them why you want to talk about this thing you’ve been avoiding, and see what happens. You can go slow.

In hard conversations, when they come up for me to this day, I can tell when I get either defensive or I get overcome with emotion, I speed up. And what I’ve learned from interviewing is pacing is just so key. Let yourself breathe. If somebody says something that’s stopped you and surprised you, you can repeat the thing that they’ve just said, the sentence or the word, and take a breath. Just give yourself time.

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