When Krista Tippett launched her first public radio program, Speaking of Faith, in 2001, the show centered on a few animating queries: What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? Who will we be to each other? Questions so painfully earnest that it’s hard to imagine them being asked then, let alone amid the cynical online discourse of the intervening years. And yet it worked. Soon she was presenting those grand existential questions to even grander guests, among them Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Maya Angelou. And it exploded in popularity. Renamed On Being with Krista Tippett, the show was broadcast on more than 400 stations nationwide and, as a podcast, was regularly downloaded millions of times a month.
That success suggests a cultural appetite for a type of exchange not so readily visible these days—one about wholesome ideas like hope and forgiveness. It also highlights Tippett’s unique ability to frame these conversations in a way that makes them feel relevant in today’s fraught world, even as she and her guests often try to imagine a different, more generous one. In that way, the show goes against our instinct to focus on the loudest and most divisive aspects of our culture. “This is one of the motivations for me in starting the show,” Tippett says. “How can we make goodness as riveting as evil and destruction?”
Earlier this month, Tippett, who is 61, broadcast the last episode of On Being as a weekly radio program. She plans to continue the show as a seasonal podcast, and to draw on the show’s archives for new projects, including “Quiet Conversations,” a series focused on exchanges in which participants change their minds about particularly divisive issues. “Because of the scope and the reach of On Being, we have this freedom to do really quiet small things,” says Tippett. Recently, she spoke with GQ about that transition and what she’s learned about looking for hope during times when it feels in short supply.
GQ: On Being sometimes seems like an outlier in today’s culture, in terms of its themes: patience, civility, mystery, asking questions rather than supplying answers. Why do you think it has resonated so deeply?
Tippett: It's not in the zeitgeist, but we're all lying to ourselves. It's essential. Not that we do this all the time but we need times and places [to do it], and to even create the capacity in ourselves to get quiet, to get grounded, to hold the complexity of what is before us—our culture has drawn us out of that. We’re impatient with complexity. We're so fixated on finding answers, solutions, resolutions, fixes, strategies.
And simple ones.
Or something we can implement now.
A hack.
A hack. Exactly. And I get that. But part of a way that happens, for me anyway, internally, is by taking the time and the deep thought. It's not what's being modeled or led at our highest levels of politics, which is where a lot of us were trained to look to see, what's the way forward? So that responsibility comes back to all of us. It's not just the politics that’s not working. It's all of our disciplines, including journalism. The forms have to be remade: healthcare, prisons, schools. That’s the thing we're all called to.
Do you have hope that we're going to get them back on the right track?
I think that hope is a muscle. The hope that I see to be transformative and modeled in very wise people who have shifted something in their world—civil rights leaders to [social justice activist] Bryan Stevenson to [labor activist] Ai-jen Poo—it's not [idealistic]. I don't use the word idealism. I don't use the word optimism. It's not wishful thinking. It's not assuming that things will turn out all right. It's an insistence, looking at the world straight on as it is and rejecting the idea that it has to be that way, and then throwing your light and your pragmatism as much as your spirit at [that]. What does it look like if you don't accept it? That's how I think of it.
You've written about how religion or spirituality can help us have a different kind of conversation, and about how the way we walk into our divisions is as much a testament to our faith as the beliefs we may have. Can you speak to the ways in which we might be able to have a different conversation, or hold things like division in a different way?
It starts humbly. I mean, these divisions have been [around for] so many years. There's so much complexity. It’s hard to think about something that’s an open-ended, long-term project. But what we can do—and what I try to do—is ask, can we create the spaces? We live in such a reactive moment. I think that has to do with social media, and the effect of the pandemic on our nervous systems. We're just really reactive. Cancel culture is a manifestation of that. At this point, the relationships that need to be formed for the larger tectonic shifts, and the conversations where people change their minds or get truly curious about the other side and just listen, we can't do that in public right now. So one of the things I'm going to be doing more in this next period is [what I’m calling] “quiet conversations.” The essential conversations, but not with publicity. What we can do is create spaces where what defies us doesn't define what can be possible.
It seems like you maintain a 30,000 foot view, to allow for these, to use your words, tectonic shifts. I'm curious what you have in your life that allows you to keep that distance and perspective.
That is a really good question, and I don't think anybody's ever asked me that question in exactly that way. I think it has two layers. I have this life that people know, with On Being—and then I had this past life in Cold War Berlin. It was a really defining thing to live through. I had all these different visas—for being a journalist, and dating a British journalist who lived in East Berlin, then when I went to work with the State Department, I had a diplomatic visa. As much as anybody I knew, I lived on both sides of the wall. So I inhabited a world that utterly and completely changed. The East Berlin I knew vanished. Right up until the wall came down, it was inconceivable that that could happen. It started shifting, but that was not within our imagination. What really imprinted on me afterwards was how we couldn't think big enough to take in reality, to take in what was possible. Our imaginations are constricted by what we could see. It gave me this deep, embodied understanding that there's more to reality than we can see, and more change possible than we can imagine. That has been with me all these years. I thought you only get once in a lifetime to have that [type of] before-and-after. I feel like now, with the pandemic and these last few years, we're in another before-and-after.
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This 30,000-feet view certainly probably was planted there in Berlin, but it's been absolutely reinforced by this life of conversation. It is helpful in keeping this hope muscle to flex, when that seems perhaps ridiculous, right? It seems to fly in the face of the facts. But across the years I've interviewed so many people who have, in their way, shifted the world on its axis. That always unfolds over time. And it's not visible. You do the right thing. You ask that “what if” question, "What if the world could be this way?" So now it’s almost like I have this constellation, this demonstration through all these lives, that this is how you make change. You do it for the long haul. And you actually do have to have a muscle of investing in the possibility of what feels unimaginable right now.
Do you have daily practices and habits that help you exercise that muscle?
No. For me, I keep having the conversations. I just interviewed Gal Beckerman, who wrote this book called The Quiet Before. And that's so much a description of our world, because what is dysfunctional is so noisy. It's almost like we live in this parallel reality, because most people I know—and you know, and most people everybody knows—are not living that way, on the left or the right. But we don't tell that story. There are a lot of people completely contrary to the prevailing narrative, who are building, and creating… All of us who see it, or even take parts of it, have to kind of throw ourselves behind making it more real and more visible. That's what I do in my conversations.
One of the criticisms that gets lobbed at these conversations is that they’re too—and I know you just said you don’t like this word—idealistic, and perhaps not as important as conversations about politics or policy. You worked in Berlin in the 1980s and you saw geopolitics up close and personal, what it can do and the effect it can have on people’s lives. And yet you still came away to have these conversations. So you seem uniquely suited to respond to someone who’s skeptical, who says, why do these conversations matter?
We have a bias—which I also inherited, it’s in our education—to take what is dysfunctional and catastrophic and frightening and failing more seriously than what works well and what is quietly flourishing. The bias is a really powerful one. We're learning about our bodies and brains—which is an incredible frontier. They're so mobilized by threat or fear. There's a level at which we're so sophisticated, and then there's this animal creature. We don’t investigate: what is generative? This is one of the motivations for me in starting the show. The question for me in the beginning is, how can we make goodness as riveting as evil and destruction?
There has never been a more magnificent time, in terms of what science is showing us about the cosmos and ourselves. We're getting interested in the ocean for the first time, which is most of the planet. We're the generation that has heard black holes colliding—and we just don't let that in! A part of that is the way we're wired and the way we've been educated: not to take in the fullness, the reality, and the complexity of what is happening that is generative, that is redemptive, that doesn't cancel out that the terrible story of our time but it stands alongside it.
Most PopularI love science fiction and I almost feel like a science fiction perspective is becoming more and more rational now. In science fiction, or even at the far edges of quantum physics, you hold this idea that there are parallel universes; that there are equal realities that may be wildly divergent. Because I have trained my eyes on this, I'm looking for it, I see it. There's a phrase that came out of a study about the incredible health benefits from an intentional practice of gratitude: Take in the good. It’s not even about getting more optimistic. It's just saying, I'm going to attend to that. I'm going to give that my attention. Maybe that's the spiritual practice. That has become a discipline [for me]. What we practice becomes instinctive.
Have you had a moment recently where you attended to something in that way?
My interview with Adrienne Maree Brown was so invigorating for me. She has a world of followers, people who are making a total paradigm shift in terms of thinking about how things are structured, how change happens, how vitality works. The vocabulary that she has includes applying the notion of fractals—which comes from mathematics—to social realities to an analysis of social crises, or includes what we're learning about how ecosystems work in the natural world and applying that to power societies to function. I really think that is going to be the vocabulary a few decades from now, but right now it's emergent. I may not see it. There's something about that that I find liberating.
The change that we need is generational. I feel like the most important things that I'm working for—these “quiet conversations” that I talked about, these tools for the art of living that we want to create, or even the long-term effect of our content out in the world—I won't necessarily see this come to completion. I don't necessarily expect that I live to see an evolved world, even if it goes well. Something that’s winsome in the spiritual tradition is that we control our intention. What we control is the intention we set, and do our best to adhere to and to keep circling back to it because we will get distracted. And also the quality and care we put into living that fully. We don't control the effects. You just have to trust that you put that out in the world.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQQ&A