Krista Tippett
Candid Q&A
At Empathy Lab, we acknowledge that the greatest gift we can give is the offering of our full selves. It’s one of many reasons we love speaking with experts and unlikely collaborators. It’s often the topics we didn’t anticipate that lead to the best conversations, including the one we had with Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, National Humanities medalist, and host of the deeply-loved On Being podcast, Krista Tippet.
Following a deep and delightful conversation with Lab founder Danielle Krettek Cobb, we opened the floor to the members of our Google community. The following is our candid Q&A. You can find our conversation on generous listening here and our discussion on beauty, civility and our lives with technology here.
Googler: What is the thought behind asking someone at the beginning of your podcast what is something from their childhood that is spiritually important to them?
Krista: So I almost always ask some version of the question of was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood? Just about everybody has a really interesting story there, whether it’s a story of absence or presence or something that was good or bad. The strategic reason I ask it is because of where it plants the question. The beginning is everything. If you get the beginning right, you can go places, and if you don’t, you’re always working really hard to get it on the rails.
The beginning is everything. If you get the beginning right, you can go places.
What I don’t want to do is start with how we present generally. We walk in with our credentials and what we know and what we’ve done. And it’s very chin up. And it’s performative. And that’s what we’re asked to do.
That question plants people. It’s not a question that anybody feels defensive about, because I’m not asking you to tell me about your spiritual life. That question would be designed to just make everybody uptight, including me. If you ask somebody that question [about their childhood], it takes them to a very soft searching place in their memory and in their body. It’s also, interestingly, a place where beautiful questions reside.
If I can invite people to be soft and searching right up front, then we probably are going to stay soft and searching.
And it’s interesting to me how many people, when they start reflecting on that part of their life, discover there’s some question they asked when they were 4 or 7 or 9 that ended up influencing the rest of their life. So it’s where to start, and then everything follows from there. If I can invite people to be soft and searching right up front, then we probably are going to stay soft and searching.
Googler: I used to work for the World Bank as an economist and then I moved to Silicon Valley. And here, people have the same intentions of saving the world. And it seems that the intentionality is right. People truly believe that what they are doing is doing good in the world. So if it’s not intentionality, where do we go wrong? And how can we fix this?
Krista: The scale of what the World Bank or Silicon Valley is working with is tremendous. I think that there’s something we’re waking up to a little late about how disconnected our view of the problems and, therefore, the solutions is.
And this is something about the post-enlightenment world. We were fascinated with the parts. And then we created this world of parts. So in every discipline, there’s this challenge. We have specialists for every part and we didn’t learn how to see the whole and all the interactions.
In some ways this is kind of a civilizational muscle of discernment. We actually have to start to think outside the frames that we inherited and see in a new way. Another piece of language that’s really important to me now is having moral imagination, and then, again, discernment.
There’s no prescription. It’s going to be different in every setting, but I think there are muscles we can build up and also ways we can help hold each other accountable.
Googler: I serve the manager and leader community, and my intention and goal is to support them through asking them questions, so I’m always on the lookout for really solid questions. But I’m seeing leaders struggle with how to listen to questions that are loaded. These leaders don’t have the answers, and they’re not necessarily responsible for the causes. So my question for you is, what advice do you have for our leaders for how to listen, respond, and be with what’s being asked of them right now?
Krista: I think, when you talk about loaded questions, then they’re not really questions, right? They’re arguments presented as questions. That just feels like a huge responsibility to answer that question. I think that what the world needs leaders in this sphere to be asking is, how will we shape these technologies to human purpose, to be good for us?
The world needs leaders in this sphere to be asking, how will we shape these technologies to human purpose, to be good for us?
These are the tools whereby we could start to think and act as a species — and we must if we’re going to tackle something like climate change, just to name one of our big challenges.
How can you rise to that challenge or take that on as a design question? Disrupt all the compartmentalization. Disrupt all these barriers and walls between all the different disciplines. We need to be talking to each other to wrap our arms around some of these big challenges.
Danielle: I’d add that we tend to think very fast, and we tend to be very reactive because there’s so much at stake, and it’s all happening right now. There’s a lot on the line, and the listening, the silence, and the patience, I think, is how we get to know the things about humanity that will never change.
When we stop and think about the way that we are, as people together, and what it means to live in a particular way that we can all be proud of and that feels like it is about human flourishing and civility and the space that includes all of us, those are harder questions. We’re not all necessarily in the practice of that, even personally. Just encouraging and having those conversations here, making space for that, that’s the beginning of all of it.
Krista: I don’t think anybody who started any of these companies wanted to be changing human nature, right? That’s not what anybody set out to do. But that’s what’s happened.
A lot of the terrible reckonings we’re having now — even around things that we thought we’d made great progress on socially, like racial dynamics and gender dynamics — 50 years ago, there were beautiful movements and a lot of laws changed. And we kind of came into the 21st century thinking, we cracked this. We can keep getting better at it, but we basically did this. And we hadn’t.
History always repeats itself until you know yourself.
One way I analyze that is that we have this idea that, if you know history, it won’t repeat itself, but the truth is, actually, that history always repeats itself until you know yourself.
We changed laws, but we didn’t change ourselves.
It’s terrible to wake up to the fact that we were so much less farther along than we thought, but the beautiful thing is we actually now know. We have knowledge that can be a form of power. And you are working in a sphere that is actively engaging our brains, actively involved in our inner lives as well as our outer lives. So again, I would say, take that as a creative challenge, a generative challenge.
Danielle: One of the things that’s come up a few times here is the poetry, the art, the space of the heart, and the wisdom traditions, things that I think live very much in the spirits of many people that are in all of these places. What do you think we all need to learn from those traditions? All of these ancient human languages of our souls, what place do they have in this space? How can we invite them in?
Krista: Well, this is the part of the human enterprise where we try to think about what our soul is and what our heart is and, actually, what the fullness of our humanity is, because these are also the parts of the human enterprise where we are actually honest about how complicated and messy we are.
The technocratic 20th century wanted to think that we could just bracket those things out, and you could check your personal life at the door. And we wouldn’t bring messy things into the public sphere. And it didn’t work that way. And now, we’re in this moment — I think this has something to do with technology and just how rapidly things have shifted — that everything that we’ve been thinking was such a rational discipline are just the thinnest of veneers over the human drama.
And again, it’s really messy and uncomfortable, but I think that we have to address it in order to do all the other work. And these are the parts of the human enterprise where that [messy emotionality] has been investigated and where, again, spiritual technologies have been developed, and that’s there for us.
Danielle: I love how, in your book, you said that it was comforting to you, as you spoke to all of these great scientists and minds to know that black holes are easy, and humans and the human condition is so perplexing for us.
Krista: Astrophysicists will tell you that nothing they’re working with, no black hole, is as complex as any living organism, not just human beings.
Googler: When you prepare for an interview, you kind of stalk the person, right? I’m curious about the correlation with things like trust and what you believe engenders trust, and what you believe actually builds rapport. What are the human things that you’ve found that build rapport? Why aren’t you creepy, essentially?
Krista: I have actually thought about how the internet has changed the work I do. When I first started, 15 years ago, I was spending a lot of time in libraries, and honestly, I don’t know how else I was finding things. But of course now there’s an abundance of information on anybody and I can also find things people said 20 years ago that they totally forgot that they said. And that’s a really great moment in an interview where you take them to a place in themselves they haven’t been for a while.
People often say that it was like I gave them a gift of themselves.
Why does it not feel like stalking? Because it’s appreciative. People often say that it was like I gave them a gift of themselves. I gave them an opportunity to say things they’d never even said to themselves before.
I do that by knowing so well how they think and honoring that, that then we can start in a really deep place and go from there. I think, maybe, the honoring word is important.
Danielle: And that deep place that you hold for them to return to and share and open up themselves, I think that human quality of creating that space, that genuine curiosity, that authentic moment that’s being created out of hospitality — it would be curious to see what changes when those values come alive in the space with technology.
