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 spirit...
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On Being with Krista Tippett
On Being takes up the big questions of meaning with scientists and theologians, artists and teachers — some you know and others you'll love to meet. Each week a new discovery about the immen...
Episodes
20 of 985 episodes“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.” T...
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 invokin...
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 Ge...
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 come...
Gül Dölen — Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing
From Krista: The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality. This episod...
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 differen...
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...
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...
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. S...
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...
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...
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 ir...
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 fasc...
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...
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 i...
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. S...
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...
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 wh...
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...