Can Pop Culture Cure a Broken Heart? w/ Anna Sale
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anna Sale hosts one of our favorite podcasts (and probably yours too) Death, Sex & Money.
In honor of her show, Sam and Anna roundup their picks for the best movies, tv shows, music and books all about (you guessed it!) death, sex and money. Together they get into the timeless lessons on grief in The Lion King, why Bonnie Raitt’s catalog is the ultimate remedy for heartbreak, and some surprisingly racy Aretha Franklin lyrics. Plus, Anna shares where she found joy this summer.
Want more of Anna Sale’s musings? Check out her Substack From Somewhere.
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The Sam Sanders Show is a production of KCRW and Sam Sanders Productions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, it is the season of giving. Get that warm, fuzzy feeling. Make a donation, |
| 0:06.2 | pick out some cozy KCRW merch, or send meals to local food banks. Donate now at kCRW.com |
| 0:13.6 | slash give. |
| 0:20.3 | Hey, y'all, it's the Sam Sanders show from KCRW with big questions and hot takes on the pop culture we love. |
| 0:28.4 | Thank you so much for listening. |
| 0:31.6 | This week, I'm joined by one of my favorite podcast hosts of all time. |
| 0:35.9 | For more than a decade, she has hosted the hit podcast, Death, Sex, and Money. |
| 0:40.6 | We say it's a show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. |
| 0:45.5 | And we have just run with all that can be contained inside of that. |
| 0:51.6 | That's Death, Sex, and money host, Anna Sail. |
| 0:54.9 | For our chat this episode, in honor of her podcast, we're going to do a big pop culture |
| 1:01.0 | roundup and road trip through themes of death and sex and money. |
| 1:07.7 | Anna and I are both going to share our picks, movies and TV and books and music that |
| 1:12.9 | fit into those themes, those big themes. Spoiler alert, Bonnie Rae comes up in this chat a lot. |
| 1:20.1 | Just to be clear, when we think about sex, I think about divorce and you think about heartbreak. |
| 1:27.6 | That's sad. |
| 1:29.7 | All right, a lot of good stuff in this one. |
| 1:31.8 | I honestly didn't want our conversation to end. |
| 1:34.9 | Here's Anna's Sale on death, sex, money, and pop culture. |
| 1:40.0 | Let's get into it. |
| 1:43.6 | When I hit you up, I kind of was just like, I have this crazy idea. |
| 1:49.4 | Maybe it'll work. |
... |
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