In this season of On Being and those to come, we are going to train the core human questions on the emerging “generative AI.” Beyond the hype and the doom, what is this new technology calling us to as human beings? What is our agency to shape it to human purpose, and how might it bring us — literally — to our senses? This inaugural conversation with Reid Hoffman is a wide and deep beginning foundation. He and Krista venture into unexpectedly relevant places, like the nature of friendship in huma...
Oct 05, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 1109•Transcript available on Metacast “Becoming other people” for a living, as Kerry Washington likes to describe her craft, turns out to be a revelatory lens on the high drama that is the human condition. As a “learning actor,” a kind of actor/anthropologist, she has brought elegance and moral rigor to all kinds of roles: as the uber-glamorous, tough-as-nails Olivia Pope on Scandal ; as the wife of Idi Amin and the wife of Ray Charles; from Little Fires Everywhere to Django Unchained . Just after Scandal ended seven triumphant seas...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 1108•Transcript available on Metacast We love the theologian Kate Bowler's allergy to every platitude and her wisdom and wit about the strange and messy fullness of what it means to be in a human body. She's best known for her 2018 book Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) — a poetic and powerful reflection on learning at age 35 that she had Stage IV colon cancer. From a reset on how to think about aging, to the new reality in our time of living with cancer as a chronic illness, to the telling of truths to our...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr•Ep 1107•Transcript available on Metacast This blessing is featured in Kate’s conversation with Krista, “ On Being in a Body .” It's published in her book The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days . Kate Bowler's beloved books include Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and most recently, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days . She is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, and made an early name in her field of American religious history with her 2013 book Blesse...
Sep 21, 2023•2 min•Ep 1107•Transcript available on Metacast A big conversation to live by starting NEXT WEEK — every Thursday — from September 21. Loss — and love. AI — and the intelligence that lives in our bodies. Kerry Washington, Kate Bowler, Reid Hoffman, Latanya Sweeney, Nick Cave, Baratunde Thurston … and more. Subscribe, tell your friends, and buckle your (metaphorical) seatbelts.
Sep 14, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Krista: I have been texting this exquisite poem from our archives to my beloveds. Perhaps it will touch you — hold you — as it is touching and holding me. ON ANOTHER PANEL ABOUT CLIMATE, THEY ASK ME TO SELL THE FUTURE AND ALL I'VE GOT IS A LOVE POEM To call the young Pakistani-American poet, Ayisha Siddiqa, a "climate activist" feels too simple. She describes herself as a storyteller and human rights and land defender. She is a climate advisor to the U.N. Secretary General, and was a 2023 T...
Jul 21, 2023•2 min•Ep 1106•Transcript available on Metacast Hello friends, it is a joy to introduce the new season of Poetry Unbound, which is underway. As Krista shares at the top, this episode has everything in it that makes Poetry Unbound such a gift in a noisy podcast world. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to Poetry Unbound for new episodes every Monday and Friday through July — and stay tuned for a new season of On Being this fall. We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem, “The Rungs,” and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throu...
Jun 08, 2023•16 min•Ep 1105•Transcript available on Metacast Pádraig makes an announcement, and we listen to a few lovely moments from the On Being season we've just brought into the world. We're inviting the beautiful humans who gather around On Being to partner in the vitality of the unfolding On Being Project in a new way. Our friend Maria Popova says it daringly, beautifully, and she's given us permission to adapt her equation. Giving = loving. Any amount of love and sustenance will be gratefully — indeed, gleefully — received. Learn more and make a g...
Apr 20, 2023•2 min•Ep 1104•Transcript available on Metacast We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a ren...
Apr 13, 2023•57 min•Ep 1103•Transcript available on Metacast An excerpt from the On Being episode, " To Be a Healer ." The extraordinary physician and public servant stilled a raucous room full of storytellers and podcasters with this offering at the 2023 On Air Fest. Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy . And he’s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World ....
Apr 13, 2023•3 min•Ep 1102•Transcript available on Metacast We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a ren...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 1101•Transcript available on Metacast "I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real." – Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor From Krista, about this week's show: It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she wa...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 1100•Transcript available on Metacast "I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real." – Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor From Krista, about this week's show: It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she wa...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep 1099•Transcript available on Metacast To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, startin...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 1098•Transcript available on Metacast There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher — for, as Janine Benyus puts it, "we are surrounded by geniuses." Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly "creating conditions con...
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 1097•Transcript available on Metacast The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room. This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation a...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 1096•Transcript available on Metacast In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep 1095•Transcript available on Metacast You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. The tec...
Mar 02, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 1094•Transcript available on Metacast You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. The tec...
Mar 02, 2023•2 hr 33 min•Ep 1093•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing episode of The Last of Us . But he is driven by passionate callings older and deeper than his public vocation as an actor and comedian. He works with wood, and he works with other people who work with their hands making beautiful, useful things. And this, it turns out, is also a primary source of his tethering in values. It's a source of a spiritual th...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr•Ep 1092•Transcript available on Metacast An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry — a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silence teaches us about being human at all times, but especially now. With an unexpected and exuberant mix of gravity and laughter — laughter of delight, and of blessed relief — this conversation holds not only what we have traversed these last years, but how we live forward. It unfolded at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, in collaboration with N...
Feb 16, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 1088•Transcript available on Metacast Ada Limón reads her poem, “ The Quiet Machine .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind . Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Brigh...
Feb 16, 2023•1 min•Ep 1089•Transcript available on Metacast Ada Limón reads her poem, “ A New National Anthem .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind . Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume B...
Feb 16, 2023•2 min•Ep 1091•Transcript available on Metacast Ada Limón reads her poem, “ Dead Stars .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind . Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead ...
Feb 16, 2023•2 min•Ep 1090•Transcript available on Metacast Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complicating the Narratives,” which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, “can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective l...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 1087•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as “moral sensory systems." H...
Feb 02, 2023•58 min•Ep 1086•Transcript available on Metacast We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and large...
Jan 26, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. "Some of us are called to be bridge people.. Some of us are call...
Nov 03, 2022•9 min•Ep 1085•Transcript available on Metacast We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level. "A long, reality-based view of time has...
Oct 27, 2022•13 min•Ep 1084•Transcript available on Metacast We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give. Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing. "If you are faithful to living a question...
Oct 20, 2022•8 min•Ep 1083•Transcript available on Metacast 
