On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.

Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry.

Conversations to live by.

With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett,

Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.

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20 episodes
Updated May 14

Episodes20

Newest first

May 14 · 1 hr 14 min
Michael Pollan — The Mystery of Consciousness
From Krista: Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears, is an exploration — with scientists and journalists and technologists and spiritual teachers — of what consciousness is, and is not, or might be: from the plants which have always fascinated him, to the new technologies which we are marveling at and fearing in equal measure. Do sentience, feeling, thought, or a sense of self amount to consciousness? Does it emerge from inside us? Or is it a force beyond us, in which we partake? Befor
May 7 · 1 hr 16 min
“The Fierce Urgency of Now” — Michelle Alexander and Lucas Johnson
From Krista: On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City called “A Time to Break Silence.” This is often referred to as his “Beyond Vietnam” Speech. His own allies criticized it as a risky departure from a focus on civil rights. But Dr. King had never seen his calling confined to those two words. The Vietnam War needed to end, he believed, and he needed to say that plain. And in the waging of this war — and all of its consequences for people at ho
March 26 · 1 hr 17 min
Shai Held — On Love, and Judaism
From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the
March 19 · 51 min
Jason Reynolds — On Hopelessness, the Virtue of Stamina, and Showing Grace to Ourselves
From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we've now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — "the arbiters and purveyors of the future" — a
March 12 · 1 hr 6 min
Arab Aramin, Robi Damelin, Liora Eilon, Mohamed Abu Jafar — Turning Unbearable Loss Into Ground of Shared Life
From Krista: A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in headlines. They are members of the Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum, a very special community. It's composed of hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli families, who despite having paid the highest price of the conflict between their peoples, choose to metabolize their loss as ground of shared suffering and possible reconciliation. I’m so grat
March 5 · 1 hr 8 min
Gül Dölen — Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing
From Krista: This episode is a journey inside what I've come to see as a parallel universe unfolding, where our species is unlocking knowledge about ourselves and capacities for radical healing of the most extreme trauma and distress. These findings are even giving rise to dramatic healing alliances across political and social lines that are inflamed in the culture at large. At universities and research laboratories around the U.S. and the world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding r
February 26 · 1 hr 9 min
Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
From Krista: These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, I was regrounded by this fierce and joyous conversation with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith. I invite you to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book: a technology
February 19 · 1 min
A New Season for a Tender New Year
Five new On Being episodes will begin to roll out next week … We begin with the delightful beloved poets (and friends) Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith in conversation together with Krista. We move on to the neuroscientist Gül Dölen; a community of Israelis and Palestinians who will expand your heart and moral imagination; philosopher rabbi Shai Held; and, because we can't get enough of him, a wonderful new sit-down with Krista and Jason Reynolds on hope in this time and in friendship with the young
Oct 3, 2025 · 50 min
Jane Goodall, In Memoriam — What It Means to Be Human
The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broadcast of her 2020 conversation with Krista. Jane Goodall began her epic work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest without even a college degree. The science she proceeded to do recalled modern western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. She spent the last decades of her life on the road, often with the young,
Jul 22, 2025 · 50 min
Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us
This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2
Jul 10, 2025 · 10 min
Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7
Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary
Jul 3, 2025 · 17 min
Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6
Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States. From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.” It is stunning to be prese
Jun 26, 2025 · 12 min
Joanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5
Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay
Jun 19, 2025 · 11 min
Ocean Vuong — Hope Portal, Episode 4
If hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating and singular person. The sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. And he is wise about the violence of language that is habitually, culturally instinctive — and how ch
Jun 12, 2025 · 9 min
Naomi Shihab Nye — Hope Portal, Episode 3
In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye is winsome and wise about how writing is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her. And it’s a companion to the way we are i
Jun 11, 2025 · 1 hr 6 min
Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam — When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing
The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets, who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present. "The amazing contemporaneity of this material," Walter Brueggemann says to Krista in this conversation from 2011, and we relive by relistening, "is that the issues are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and
Jun 5, 2025 · 13 min
adrienne maree brown — Hope Portal, Episode 2
adrienne maree brown shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living. In exploring the idea of hope — the meaning of it, the practice of it — it feels important to begin with someone who works to shift realities on the ground. Many words and phrases have been used to describe what she does and who she is, who she is to so many people, especial
May 29, 2025 · 13 min
Krista Tippett — Hope Portal, Episode 1
Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, we’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force o
May 22, 2025 · 33 min
Roberta Bondi — What is Prayer and How to Begin
Buried treasure from the On Being archive! Krista writes of this conversation from the earliest pre-history of On Being: In the years in which I was on a whole new spiritual and intellectual adventure that changed the direction of my life — years which led to the creation of this show — I befriended a delightful, brilliant, straight-talking theologian named Roberta Bondi. She’s now retired. At that point, she was on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. We were pl
May 15, 2025 · 1 hr 36 min
Yochi Fischer and Loaay Wattad — On Seeing the Trauma of the Other
This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Palestinian, Jews and Palestinians who continue to share life. We’re pleased to invite you now to overhear this particular conversation, with the permission of all involved. It centered around the matter of intergenerational trauma and healing — in a land in which the traumas of two peoples are terribly, inextricably intertwined. Yochi Fischer is a hist