DEATH, SEX & MONEY: Anna Sale Talks About Hard Things

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Education

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A lot of us run away from tough conversations. Anna Sale runs toward them. For nearly a decade, as the host of the podcast “Death, Sex & Money,” she has been having searching conversations about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” Now, in her new book, “Let’s Talk About Hard Things,” she blends reportage and memoir to reveal how speaking openly (and listening attentively) can fortify our relationships. That may sound simple, but as one of the book’s reviewers observed, “As vaccinated people begin to have joyous reunions with friends and family, after a year of isolation and Zooms, many of us are realizing that we’ve forgotten how to talk about the easy things, let alone the hard ones.” In this conversation, Anna — with her trademark warmth, curiosity, and candor — reminds us how to have those difficult conversations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What can happen in conversations where you are building a relationship built on the idea
0:11.0	of like being there for one another?
0:14.0	I'm Rufus Griskum and this is the next big idea.
0:18.0	Today, what do your sex life, bank balance, and life expectancy have in common?
0:23.0	They're all hard to talk about unless you're in a sale.
0:30.0	I have had for many years an inclination to talk about subjects that make people uncomfortable.
0:49.0	In 1997, when I was in my late 20s, I launched a website called Nerf.com, the tagline,
0:56.0	literate smut. We published an account by guy in prison about prison sex,
1:01.0	an essay by the Surgeon General about masturbation.
1:04.0	We ran confessions of a male prostitute and a 28-year-old virgin.
1:09.0	And we published raw, beautiful photographs of naked women and men.
1:14.0	My parents suffice it to say, were mortified.
1:17.0	Their friends referred to me as Larry Flint.
1:20.0	Ten years later, my wife and I started a website for parents.
1:24.0	The impulse was similar, we thought.
1:27.0	This is a subject that people lie about, so let's dig into it.
1:30.0	Let's do some truth-telling.
1:32.0	Here's a clip from a TED talk that my wife, Alisa and I gave back in 2010.
1:38.0	It seems to us that when people start dissembling, people start lying about things.
1:42.0	That's when it gets really interesting. That's a subject that we want to kind of dive into.
1:46.0	And we've been surprised to find as young parents that they're almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex.
1:53.0	We really felt like what we kind of went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing.
	...

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