How Anna Sale invites listeners in

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

There’s this thing people say about podcasts, and they believe it. “Podcasts are intimate.” Because we listen to them right inside our heads, right? But guess what? They’re not. They’re intimate only to the degree with which we—the producers, the editors, the hosts—actually make them that way. And then, boy, can they ever be intimate.

Clip of Anna Sale

I interviewed Ellen Burstyn in 2014. And she had written a memoir, where she had written about when she was 18 years old, having an abortion that was not legal. And it was a terrible experience. And she told me during our interview, it doesn't go away. And I asked, did you go alone?

Elaine Appleton Grant

That’s Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex & Money. Widely called one of the best interviewers there is. Just listening to her, I want to tell her my darkest secrets, which is just like thousands of guests and millions of listeners over the last decade. Anna Sale is a master of the art of intimacy. And she has a lot to say about how she does it. 

Clip from Anna Sale

I want to make something that feels warm. And even if it's gonna maybe make some things bubble up while you're listening, that you feel like you're accompanied.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Stick with me…to learn how she asks blunt questions, how she thinks through the ethical dilemmas of asking people about stuff we don’t talk about; about how she navigates sharing highly personal stories in an enormously public forum. And also about how in all the noise, she continues to create and nurture an unshakeable community of listeners. And how you can too. 

This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved audio storyteller by pulling apart one episode at a time—together. I’m Elaine Appleton Grant.

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Elaine Appleton Grant: Storytellers, did you know that Sound Judgment is also a free newsletter? Every two weeks, get storytelling, hosting, and journalism strategies taken straight from the on-the-ground experiences of today’s best audio makers. Newsletters feature examples for you to try in your studio, essays on the challenges and rewards of this craft, and news about fellow audio creatives making the kind of work we all aspire to. Sign up, free, at soundjudgmentpodcast.com.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Anna, it is hard to imagine that there is a listener who has not heard of you or listened to Death, Sex & Money. But just in case, I want to start by saying that you've been hosting this show for WNYC since 2014. And it's a show about, as you say, the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. You're known as being one of the best interviewers there is—someone who elicits very personal stories while always preserving the dignity and worth of the person you're talking with, which is a remarkable balancing act.

Anna Sale

Thank you. That that means a lot. That's hard to do. I agree. And it's the North star. Yeah, thank you.

Elaine Appleton Grant

There's a speakers’ bureau, called Fresh Speakers. I love what they say about you. “Anna Sale is the guest you're afraid to invite but secretly crave at the dinner table.” What do you think of that? 

Anna Sale

I mean, I think so? Yes, I think I do add a little grist to dinner party conversation, but I hope in a way that makes people feel like it was a poppin’ conversation and not like things got weird.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I have this theory, that most of us really don't like to have uncomfortable conversations, but we love to listen to other people's uncomfortable conversations. What do you think about that?

Anna Sale

Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think there's a little bit of—you know, at Death, Sex & Money, we talk about things with that we don't often talk about in the public sphere. And maybe those are uncomfortable things? But what I've found…by creating the right spirit, what feels like it ought to be uncomfortable to talk about actually feels like really deep sharing. So I don't think of of Death, Sex & Money and what we do as necessarily having that provocative conversation that people want to listen in on. It's more just like—I want that feeling of exhale, of like, oh, yeah, it's not that hard to talk, we can admit that life takes money. And figuring out how to deal with money is hard. And people have different amounts of money. We don't have to pretend that we're all at the same level, which is what we pretend most of our lives, most of the time. So things like that. So I feel—certainly people like to listen in on uncomfortable conversations. And also, I think they want to have conversations around things that make them uncomfortable. And what I hope the show is a part of doing is giving all of us a little bit more permission to try.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I like that word permission. And I know that part of the show is sort of creating safety. Right? For everybody, probably, involved in the show: your guests, your team, your listeners.

Anna Sale

Yeah, and I think safety—I don't call the show a quote unquote, safe space. I think what you said, dignity, is really at the heart of it. It's not like I'm not going to have curiosity or make you say more; if there's something that I'm not quite getting, I'm going to poke. But I'm going to do it with the intention of of making you feel like I'm doing it out of a respectful desire to understand even if I disagree, or I imagine a listener might disagree.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right, right.

When I invited a guest on Sound Judgment, I ask them to share an episode of their show that they either loved making or found very challenging. And the episode that you gave us was released in August of this year, 2023. It's called Bells and Bills: The Price You Paid For Your Wedding. Tell me the story of how this episode came about to begin with.

Anna Sale

I believe it was originally pitched by our producer, Zoe Azulay. And she's just a student of the wedding industrial complex, and is interested in how weddings get pulled off, and the very different ways families think about what's the proper way to celebrate the beginning of a marriage. And as she was thinking about what kind of stories we want from listeners, she got really interested in wanting to hear from either people who were just on the verge of having their weddings, or people who had very recently had their weddings, mostly because just the cost of weddings along with inflation, pre-COVID versus post-COVID, it's a different universe. So pulling off a $20,000 wedding, if you're inviting people and doing the things that wedding events take—flowers, caterers etc—that's really hard to do. So we wanted to catch people as they were reckoning with the real cost of things in this moment. And hear about why they were making the choices they were making.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah, you know, I actually got married two years ago. Yeah.

Anna Sale

Congratulations. Did you have sticker shock?

Elaine Appleton Grant

I did. I am embarrassed to say this. But it was still the tail end of COVID. We had it outdoors, I think there were 20 people, including the two of us. And we had to say to our out of state family and friends, it's still COVID—we don't dare invite you because it could shut down at any moment. And that helped with the cost. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I want to play a clip from early in this episode, because it surprised me, although in retrospect, I think it should not have.

Clip from Death, Sex & Money

Sierra: Yeah, I remember when we did our invite list, I think Devin had about 150 people?

Anna Sale: So how many guests did you have for your wedding?

Devin: I think 17.

Sierra: I think it was 17 including us, babe.

Anna Sale: Devin and Sierra are both in their late 20s, and those aren’t their real names. Because we talked about money, family relations, and inlaws, many people asked to shield their identities for this episode.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So that was the part that actually surprised me, was the anonymity, because when I went into it, I was like, Oh, it's a story about weddings. And you know, the cost of weddings. I didn't realize that it would be this cloak and dagger thing. But then it made sense. So—on one hand, people send in voice memos saying, I want to talk about this. And then people wanted anonymity. So you run into this all the time. Talk about navigating finding great sources, and then dealing with their worries about being public.

Anna Sale

Yeah, the other dimension I would add to it is, I think it's especially kind of strange in podcasting. Because, you know, we tell a lot of stories with the participation of our listeners. So people who know the show, who feel like they're a part of our community, and I think who kind of bring a sensibility of, I'm coming into the clubhouse to share what I've gone through. In the sense of—this is a little bit of a protected place. And at the same time, we're making a digital journalism product that goes up online, on the Internet, with a transcript. If you use your first and last name, it will be Googleable. And so we think a lot about that, and make sure our listeners are kind of thinking that through. And we are a journalistic team. So we also have to have in mind, if we're changing names and shielding people's identities, we also want to be confident that what they're telling  us is not untrue. So there's all these things happening. 

To me, I feel quite comfortable as a journalist, withholding identifying details of people that I'm interviewing from the listener, for privacy reasons. I feel very comfortable. If that's something a guest feels like it's important to them, whether it's because sometimes they're talking about a relationship that ended badly and they might not feel safe. Sometimes they have kids, and they're talking about something that involves their family, and they don't want their kids necessarily to stumble upon it eight years from now, when they Google their mom. Sometimes it can be something like, I'm talking really openly about my money worries, and how much money I have and how much debt I have. And I don't want an employer to Google my name and look that up. Or I just don't want—this is private stuff, and I want to talk candidly about the emotions around it, but I don't necessarily want it to be part of my digital record online. And so I think those are all really legitimate reasons. It does mean that when we change names, when we change a first name we will tell our listeners we're changing a name. We don't swap in—we don't take protecting the identity of our listeners—we don't extend that to the idea of like, maybe we could make up something! We don't bring fictional elements into our journalism. But I feel quite comfortable—particularly given the nature of the kind of storytelling we do to—to have conversations with our guests about what it's going to mean about what is exposed, about what they share with us.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So there are a lot of voices in this episode. It's crowd sourced from your listeners. I want to start with Devin and Sierra, they purchased this wedding package called a micro wedding. And here they are talking about what their wedding felt like. 

Clip from Death, Sex & Money

Devin: The intimacy was overwhelming. I mean, as a guy that doesn’t cry a lot, I don’t think I could stop crying.

Anna: And about how much do you think your wedding celebration cost, all in?

Devin: I think it was about twelve or thirteen thousand dollars.

Anna: That still seems like a lot for something called “micro.”

Devin: Right.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So that's just a great moment. And that response is funny. And it's clear that they think it's also funny. Do you have anything to say about how you think about balancing humor with serious conversations about things?

Anna Sale

Yeah, I think that I—I like that about the way that our interviews go. I don't think consciously, oh, here's a moment when I need to turn the camera back on me and make a joke. I think, for me, it's much more sort of rhythmic and pacing when someone's talking, if they're telling a long story… Something I do a lot is repeat back a word, do a callback from something they've said before. And then I feel like what it does for the listener and for the guest is it's like, did you get that? Here's the throughline. And also to the listener I'm saying, I heard you and was listening to what you were saying. I think of it like maybe bolding the sentence or underlining it. And I often do that with a—maybe with a laugh or something, I hope in a way that is letting the listener also appreciate the absurdity of some of what comes with difficult things. Not in a way of making light or just being dismissive, but—you know, that moment, twelve or thirteen thousand dollars. Where you're thinking about wedding budgets, you're like, Oh, that's not an expensive wedding. And then if you think—it's called a micro wedding, and it still costs more than ten grand? Like, that's some money.

Elaine Appleton Grant

A micro wedding should be a couple thousand dollars—I mean, micro sounds tiny.

Anna Sale

Micro, right? Teeny. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah, and you know, I noticed that. I was wondering in post, are you making those choices to have some fun at the beginning, so that listeners will feel like, okay, maybe we're going to talk about some serious stuff, but it's not going to be heavy right away. We're going to get a tone. And point out—the laughing at the absurdity of the industry, the wedding industry?

Anna Sale

I saw George Saunders talk about writing, and he was talking about how he talks with writing students about finding their voice and he describes it basically as paying attention to how you in particular use your charm. What happens when you are trying to sort of endear yourself, or getting somebody to open up, or connect with somebody. And when I hear that moment about micro, that's like me, using my version of charm, it’s like—that's my voice right there.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What does that phrase mean to you? It means something different to everybody—finding your voice.

Anna Sale

To me, it's about your aesthetic sensibility, your taste. If we're extending the metaphor of—when you're creating a podcast, you're creating a clubhouse, right? And different podcasts have different numbers of doors, some have secret codes at the front, you know, that you have to get in because they use weird acronyms and things. So you feel like you're part of an in-club. Some are, you know, very designed to feel very open and inviting to all. I think of my sensibility and the sensibility that I'm proud of that Death, Sex & Money has is this kind of—the doors open, and there's like a porch, and you feel like you can walk in and also that you're not quite sure who's going to be sitting around the circle inside. So it's sensibility, it’s journalistic vision. And it's also the vibe. I want to make something that feels warm. And even if it's gonna maybe make some things bubble up while you're listening, that you feel like you're accompanied.

Elaine Appleton Grant

In some ways, it's easy to look back on a very successful podcast that—I mean, has been on the air for almost ten years, which is shocking in and of itself. Congratulations. That’s amazing.

Anna Sale

I know. So old. It’s a middle-aged podcast, I know.

Elaine Appleton Grant

But in some ways, it's easy to look back and say, Well, of course it has this sort of clubhouse, this community feel. But there are a lot of people starting out, saying, I want to create a community. What would you say to them about the things that work and don't work? 

Anna Sale

I think the simplest thing that we have done, that I feel like maybe is a step that some people skip, is…if you ask your listeners to do something—whether it's email you, or send you a voice memo, or send you story ideas—you have to show them that you listened to what they sent you. You have to model back to the listeners: We're doing this episode about wedding and wedding costs! We're still taking your stories! Here's what Anna in Berkeley said about how she was shocked about her budget! Thirty second clip, and then ask again. And it just makes you feel like, oh, I won't be the only one calling in and they're actually listening. And oh, that story that that person shared was kind of funny. I had a really different experience. Let me add that. That's not something we invented. It's something that talk radio knows quite well. If you're opening the phones, the phones don't really fill up until you take your first call. The listeners have to see, you're going to actually listen to me if I take this step. And then I'm still really interested and feel like it's a challenge to figure out—how do we figure out new ways continually to make it a reciprocal relationship? What we're asking our listeners to do, basically, is when we put a new episode in the feed, that they press play. That's the metric that gets tracked. And I don't find that to be enough. But I find the other forms of relationship to be much more difficult to measure, much more difficult to scale. But that's what's gonna make the listener feel like this isn't just one of the eight podcasts I listen to regularly. I actually feel like I have a relationship with this team who makes this thing, and I'm bought in.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Have you tried anything that didn't work?

Anna Sale

Oh, yeah. 100%. I mean, I don't think of these things as failures, Elaine, but definitely things where people…you know, like in the—maybe it was the first year of the show, everything was fresh. And I was just like, Let's see what happens. I remember I went out to Portland, Oregon to be on the show Live Wire, hosted by Luke Burbank. And I was like, Oh, I bet we have some listeners in Portland. What if we say at the top of a show, Anna's going to be on this street corner at 2pm. And if anybody likes to go for a jog, she's gonna jog to an ice cream place. And she's gonna bring sweatbands, and I did. And I will tell you, Elaine, when I was in my hotel room getting into my sneakers and collecting the sweatbands to take to that street corner, I was like, What am I doing? This is like—number one, is this safe? Number two, what if no one comes? Like, why am I doing this? And I did it. And it was actually amazing. I have glorious memories of the first listener who showed up, and in my memory he had discovered the show and he did some kind of like house painting or construction work for job. And he was describing listening to the show while he did this work, and then somebody else showed up who was a seasonal firefighter, and somebody else showed up who was interested in getting into audio. And we all went for a two-mile jog to an ice cream place and then visited. But it wasn't a huge event. Right? It was—it was high touch, but not high impact. That was the kind of freewheeling, let's-try-this thing that existed on our show, and—maybe the internet feeling kind of fun, more fun? enabled us to say, let's try this. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah. Well, I mean, I can see how that would actually sort of go to that clubhouse mentality. Even if you got five people jogging with you, I can see how somehow there'd be an intangible benefit to that, even if it's not something that a marketing team would say, oh, yeah, that was—you know, it had an ROI. But I like it. I like it. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Let's switch now to another guest on this episode. This is a woman you call Vanessa. Her wedding to her husband Devon cost so much money that she actually wouldn't tell you how much. They had 180 guests in New York City. I believe this is the woman who called you like a week before she got married. Was really fraught. So let's take a listen to that.

Clip from Death, Sex & Money

Anna: And when you say it got complicated, can you give me a few examples of moments where you were like, This is really hard?

Vanessa: Well, the guest list was definitely a struggle, of who could invite how many people, and family versus friends, and trying to navigate what was deemed quote unquote fair. Quickly it would get very heated between me and my parents.

Anna: And when you say that things got heated in your family, what’s that look like, when there’s conflict?

Vanessa: Yelling.

Anna: Yelling. Uh huh. 

Vanessa: And then maybe no one’s talking to each other.

Anna: Uh huh. And who…is it all three of you yelling? 

Vanessa: Mostly me and my mom yelling at each other.

Anna: And if you were going to articulate what your mother’s point of view on something like the guest list is, how did she describe about what was important to her?

Vanessa: You know, it was—this is—we’re throwing this. Like, we…like, basically—you know, just because it’s your wedding, it’s also our event.

Anna: Because of the money.

Vanessa: Yeah. I mean, it was true.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What does that feel like, to listen back to that?

Anna Sale

Oh, I love that tape. I love that it's a very personal concrete story about the question of what does it mean when two adults are marrying and their families are invested in how the rituals of this wedding are going to occur.. And from the mother's point of view, according to Vanessa, it's like, I want to have my friends there as much as we want to have all of your college friends—and then the battles around that, specifically how they had those battles, I find also quite interesting, because families deal with conflict in lots of different ways.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Way back in 2014, Fast Company did a story about you. And the headline was “The Queen of the Awkward Pause.” And there's a lot of those pauses in there where you're just going, Mmm hmm. Uh huh. And then there's some silence. And then she says something else revelatory. So I had Julia Barton on the show last season. She's the executive editor at Pushkin. And she said producers need to leave some work for the listener to do. What does that phrase mean to you?

Anna Sale

To me, it means—the first thing I thought of, before I started developing Death, Sex & Money with WNYC, I did a Moth-style storytelling workshop in New York City with this great storyteller and teacher named Adam Wade.

The thing that I really learned from Adam, that I loved and kind of think about not just in endings of the episodes, but in tracking and how much narration you need to give to the listener—he would be like, say you got to the end of a story. And then you—there were—in the first draft, you would say, And so that's when I learned that I could go on a jog with a bunch of people who listen to my podcast. He's like, don't tie up a bow! Take it off! You don't need a bow at the end! The listener can follow. Maybe leave with another kind of hanging thought, and then a little space, and maybe music, if that's the style of your show, for it to land. And the listener can go, mmm, oh, yeah—you know? I can trust the listener to make connections that we're setting up for them. So they feel like they're kind of hopping from stone to stone to get across the bog. Instead of being like, Did you see that stone? Here's the next stone.

Elaine Appleton Grant

And you do that so well, in that passage, throughout it, with, Mmm. Uh huh. You know, just those little restrained—you're just listening. And you're not going to help this person out by asking the next question.

Anna Sale

You know, another thing that—when you listen to a lot of podcasts, you learn different hosts’ styles of what are the odd sounds that they make to indicate to the listener and to the guest that they're listening to them in real time. So like, Oh, hmm. Huh. There's various ways you can do it so you could signal to the person you're interviewing, here's what I want you to say more of. You pick your spots, for when you say, Oh, wait, that. Tell me more about that. Or when you ask the big question that's, like, I imagine that might have brought up a mix of this and this and is that correct? And, you know, where you sort of present a thesis and then ask if that resonates with them. But you can't do that every time. You've got to sort of pull them out before you say, here's what I'm hearing, basically.

Elaine Appleton Grant

You wrote this great Transom blog post a couple years ago. One of the things that you said, which I loved, is—you said, your guests and your listeners are expecting the hard question. Don’t wimp out. Tell me about a time when you knew you had a really hard question to ask and you almost did wimp out—and in the end, you asked it.

Anna Sale

Well, it's funny, because this is the part of me that I don't fully understand, but I feel grateful for. Because I—that's not been a problem for me. But I notice when it's a problem for other people. Or the other thing I notice is when it's clear that a host or an interviewer had an awkward moment, and they maybe had to confront somebody or a guest or a source about something, and they cut out and go to tracking, and then they come back to the guest or source responding. I'm like, mmm, that was a wimpy choice, too. Show us—I want to hear you doing what you're asking this guest to do, which is find your way with words. And, to me, it goes back so much to mission and objective of being a news reporter? I was trained going to press conferences at state capitals. If you came back to the newsroom and didn't have clarity on that one thing where—the press release was very vague about where this money was gonna come from, and if you hadn't asked—you were gonna have to figure that out. So, I've always really taken that sense of I am here to get this information for my listeners. I do take care to—say it's about something that's about a very difficult traumatic event, that someone knows, that is a part of a memoir, they wrote, but maybe they haven't talked about it out loud all that often. I think about beforehand, what's the question I want to ask that's not just going to sound like, will you retell that terrible story?

I interviewed Ellen Burstyn in 2014. And she had written a memoir, where she had written about when she was 18 years old, having an abortion that was not legal. And it was a terrible experience. And she told me during our interview, it doesn't go away. And I asked, did you go alone? And yes, in fact, she was all alone, when she was a teenager, trying to figure out how to get out of this situation. And so that told you what else was going on, that affected the trauma, also that she's had to figure out how to carry with her all on her own. 

When I ask about something really difficult, I want to either—sort of like ask my guests to help me understand a little bit more about that scene, and understand the dimensions of why something was hard. And there's ways in which sharing about difficult things can add some lightness and relief. And there's also ways if done poorly where you're simply making it all worse. So asking the hard question, while I think you should do it, you also need to do it with care.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Do you have any regrets?

Anna Sale 

Oh, yeah. You know, I've been a journalist since 2005. I don't think I've always been the kind of journalist that I want to be. But I do take repair seriously. We are working on an episode right now. There's been this wonderful guest on the show over the years, named Lawrence Bartley. And he's been on the show maybe four or five times. I’ve sort of tracked the story of him and his family. And I first interviewed him when he was incarcerated at Sing Sing in upstate New York, and he'd been in prison since he was a teenager, and was in his early 40s when we first did our interview. He’s since gotten out on parole; he now is a journalist and helps the Marshall Project figure out how to package all of their great reporting about criminal justice for incarcerated audiences. And so I wanted to catch up with him.

And so in this latest conversation I had with Lawrence, where we were talking about journalism, and what it is to be interviewed by somebody who doesn't have intimate contact with the criminal justice system. And now what he tries to bring, as someone who has had intimate contact with the criminal justice system, like what he thinks he brings to interviews that weren't present in ours. And then when we were taping, it became clear to me that the first title of our first episode was something that bothered him.

Clip from Death, Sex & Money

Anna Sale: In 2014, we titled Death, Sex & Money’s first episode with Lawrence “I Killed Someone. Now I Have Three Kids.” That’s what Lawrence was mentioning, when we were catching up in a phone call earlier this spring.

Anna Sale: And I remember, I got off the phone with you and I Googled your name, and I hadn’t done that. And I noticed that what comes up with your name is your work with The Marshall Project, and then very high up is that episode that we did together, that’s an episode that I feel like is quite nuanced. But the title was not. The original title was not. And I—I felt this real shame as a journalist for having not thought through…a decision in 2014 that we made quickly when we were deciding what the episode title ought to be, and to post it so it was ready to go on the podcast feed—not thinking through, this is a digital media product…

Anna Sale

And it wasn't inaccurate. It also, I don't think, captured what I think is special about that episode, which is like—this is a man who went to prison, has been arrested since he was 17, who did fatherhood classes in prison, became a father to two young boys who are now teenagers… And so I talked with him about—I was like, I've decided that we need to change that episode title. And now it's “Becoming a Father in Prison.” And we put a correction and said that we've updated the title. And I feel very comfortable with that as a journalist. The choices I made in 2014…I've changed how I think about things. I understand Google results. And I understand that there are a lot of nouns that you could use to describe people, and what you choose to lead with can have a huge effect on people's lives. 

Maybe regret is one of the things that I feel. I understand why 2014 Anna made the choices that we did with our production team about what to title it. And I also feel really clear that you can change things. If you feel like they're creating more harm than you recognized at the time, or creating harm that you didn't recognize at the time.

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's such an interesting example in the ethics of what we grapple with on a regular basis, big or small, and how these things last, sometimes. 

You've been interviewed a lot. But of course, you've interviewed thousands of times. Do you listen differently when you're being interviewed?

Anna Sale

I don't listen differently, but I try to participate in a different way. Like for example, as you've been talking to me, I've had a couple of different forks in the road where I'm like, Oh, I would like to understand more about getting married two years ago. Oh, I would like to understand more about New Hampshire Public Radio and magazines—It's like where I would wrest the controls for you to ask the follow-up question that I'm curious about. But I've chosen not to, for the most part.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What makes a great guest?

Anna Sale

I do love somebody who speaks with simple, one- or two-syllable words, creating very clear answers. I think about the joy of what it is to interview a poet or a songwriter, who speak in poems. I also—but then there can be somebody who's really scattered, who is fun to talk to because they'll be like, well, I thought this—and then I thought this! And they're like, ooh, you know,? It’s—they take you on a ride. So I don't think there's one way to be a great guest. But I do love a guest who just offers a turn of phrase that transforms the way I think about something.

Elaine Appleton Grant

In your mind, what does it take to become a beloved host?

Anna Sale

I don't know how to answer this question and not sound really presumptuous.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I’m being presumptuous for you. I take the burden.

Anna Sale

I feel very satisfied that the body of work we've made at Death, Sex & Money makes people feel invited in. It makes them feel accompanied. I think the way that I have tried to become a host that people feel some relationship with is kind of standing beside them? By modeling how I've—sometimes I'll include how some things happened—unfolded in my life. You're not the only one who's had a hard time figuring this thing out. Like rather than—you can be a beloved host by being the smartest person that anybody's ever heard talk about something, I have taken the approach of, we're all figuring this out, you want to come on in and join us?

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are today’s. 

1. Anna and her team hold two conflicting realities in their heads all the time: The show exists to talk about the things we normally keep private.  And…podcasts exist online, for all the world to consume—and Google to find. So be clear about your show’s values. Practice journalistic ethics, and also the specific principles around how you want to treat your guests. Know that you will deal with these kinds of human conflicts every day. 
2. How do you prep a guest? Before an interview, Anna shares how they plan to edit and use the interview. If a guest requests for anonymity, she may grant it in order to protect them. 
3. Fact-checking is always important, especially these days. But if you allow anonymity, it becomes even more so.
   
4. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this conversation is that Death, Sex & Money is one big, warm place, where listeners are invited in and welcomed. Anna is proud that she and her team make listeners feel accompanied, wherever they take them.
5. Your guests expect hard questions. Don’t wimp out. 

That’s all for today. It’s one thing, as a guest, to share private stories with a welcoming host like Anna. But what if you have been grappling with something so personal—and maybe humiliating—for a long time, and then you realize, so are millions of other people? How would you make a show about that?

Coming up next, we answer that question, with Ronald Young, Jr., the magnificent storyteller behind Weight for It. 

Clip of Ronald Young, Jr.

The real question you should be asking is, what would you be ashamed—who would you be ashamed to be seen with? Who would you be ashamed to be in love with? What would that actually even look like for you? And how would that change your behavior? 

Also, if you liked my conversation with Anna, you’ll love my interview with Snap Judgment’s Glynn Washington. The link’s in our show notes. You’ll also find a link to Death, Sex & Money there, along with ways to follow Anna Sale.

If you love Sound Judgment, help us grow our show. Visit soundjudgmentpodcast.com and click on Reviews—you can give us a five-star rating that’ll go to straight to Apple or Spotify in a heartbeat. And leave us a review on Apple. Answer this question: What’s one thing you’ll use in your own practice from this interview with Anna Sale? And thanks. 

Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Audrey Nelson is our production assistant. Sound design and editing by Kevin Kline. Podcast management by Tina Bassir.

See you next time, storytellers.