Krista Tippet’s guests offer bursts of wisdom for the person on the go
Becoming Wise is a podcast comprised of condensed conversations that host Krista Tippett has had during her career in journalism. The podcast is a part of the On Being Project, a cultural project based in Minneapolis that encompasses podcasts, public radio, and other various media types.
Spanning approximately 36 episodes, Tippett talks with a wide range of guests on a variety of subjects including vulnerability, anger, and healing, as well as more existential topics. From poets to scientists to religious leaders, each person she talks to manages to express their own personality, experiences, and philosophy of life in a way that feels like catching up with an old friend over coffee.
The podcast is incredibly accessible. Episodes range in length from four to 11 minutes. This time frame allows even the heaviest of topics to have a certain lightness to them. For example, Elie Wiesel speaks on the Holocaust in his episode, Evil, Forgiveness, and Prayer, but he does not speak particularly in depth and focuses much more on how it impacted his religious identity. The conversation doesn’t necessarily shy away from darker subjects, but because they are addressed with such immediacy and often shift into a more optimistic look, the listener never feels the need to take a break as they may with longer conversations.
Unfortunately, it is the briefness of these conversations that is the main sticking point when it comes to this podcast. It seems unfair to criticize one of its core ideas, as Tippett addressed the length of the podcast in season two’s preview that this format was the response to people asking for “shorter form distillations” of her larger conversations.
The conversations often feel like they are a highlight of a larger conversation that has the potential to last hours. Likewise, many of the topics covered feel like they need more than seven minutes for a true exploration on what the guest is trying to say. While it is nice to have a podcast to listen to on a coffee break — and the topics covered are interesting — the time feels like it is doing a disservice to what are likely important conversations that many people could learn from.
A longer time frame, even if it was just half an hour, would likely help with both the pacing and the absorption of information from topics that deserve a little more time to breathe. The bright side is that if the conversation snippets really do leave you with an itch to hear more of that particular conversation, they can be found as part of the On Being podcast, which updates regularly.
While there has not been an official announcement that the series is no longer being updated, it hasn’t released a new episode since mid-July 2019. It’s hard to tell if this means cancellation, given that there was a three-year hiatus between season one and season two. Despite that, the backlog of episodes focus on topics that still feel relevant in 2020, whether that be examining spirituality, politics, or science.
Overall, Becoming Wise is great if you want to hear short bursts of conversation that can spark your interest in an aspect of the human condition that can then be turned into personal research on academic sources or through self-improvement.
