Anna Sale

speaker

304 appearances 8 recordings 5 series first heard Oct 2024 last heard 28 May

Anna Sale’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Search Engine · Death, Sex & Money x Search Engine · 10 Oct 2024 podcast

Well, the way I experience it is, you know, I was raised in West Virginia. I am a polite person. I am eager to please socially. And so it feels like this moment where I kind of like flip around my cards and say, like, I've got a little punk rock edge to me. And so then that can be fun in social situations, especially where it's a little bit more buttoned up or stuffy.

I mean, a lot has changed. I would say that the origin story for me of wanting to make a show about the most important building blocks of our lives or the ones that we can't avoid is that I was desperately looking for guides at the point where I started the show. You know, I was 33, 34. I was divorced. I was living in New York. We were working in the same building together.

You know, it was a time where I was like... I don't really know what I'm doing here and I just want to have conversations with people where I don't feel so alone in not knowing what I'm doing here and to feel reassurance that it's something you figure out along the way. And Then over the course of the last 10 years, I got married. I became a parent. I've got two kids. I cross country.

I live in a house. I have two dogs. My life is characterized by stability right now. Like I'm living out the consequences of some really big choices I made in my early adulthood. And so now I think this is also a response to the political climate and what's shifted over the last 10 years. I'm really interested in...

And ambiguity and uncertainty and having conversations that add complexity rather than certainty, it serves each of us and it also is going to serve how we have to make decisions together.

This is Death, Sex, and Money. The show from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I'm Anna Saleh. In 2014, Jim Harris was 32 years old and kite skiing on a South American ice cap. The wind would catch the kite and pull him forward. But then the wind changed and dropped him hard.

Jim injured his spine, and then about eight months into his rehabilitation, he found himself having another profound physical experience, again set against a beautiful outdoor backdrop, this time soundtracked by a live jam band. A friend had invited Jim to an outdoor music festival, and by then he'd recovered the ability to walk with a walker.

But standing and moving around a lot was still exhausting and physically awkward. But he didn't want to miss out. And then when he got there, someone offered him a chocolate bar, a psilocybin mushroom chocolate bar, and Jim didn't want to miss out on that either.

And what did you notice about how it felt in your body?

Jim grew up in Ohio and often felt like an outsider. He wasn't a sports guy. He didn't like the competitive dynamic. So he mostly adventured outside, on his own or with just his family. When he went to college in Montana, Jim finally found a community where it felt like he fit.

And he made outdoor adventuring into his work, too. In his early 20s, Jim taught mountaineering courses and then was hired by places like National Geographic and Powder Magazine to document his wilderness travels all over the world, doing things like hiking remote mountains, backcountry river rafting, and snow kiting.

So on the one hand, I'm imagining it feels like you're sort of, I don't know, like tapping into this force that's bigger than you.

But also that you're not in control, right? Necessarily? Like it's surrender too.

I've never like considered like a river current and the wind being, you know, cousins of forces that you can kind of appreciate and tap into. I like that. How old were you when you were injured?

So it was wintertime in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern hemisphere?

Jim was with a small group of friends near the Chile-Argentina border. They planned to ski the Patagonian ice cap with the help of snow kites.

I see. So it wasn't like you're going out. It was to cover ground. It was like a rope tow.

Yeah. And what happened on the run when you got injured?

When you woke up, you were face up?

And after you regained consciousness, how long were you alone?

Showing 241–260 of 304 · page 13 of 16