You’re Going to Die: The Podcast

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, a formerly incarcerated activist, owner of Re:Frame LLC, and the award-winning author of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He lives in Oakland, California where he coaches writers engage...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with Kazu Haga, trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. His work weaves together spiritual practice, trauma healing and nonviolent action to advance social change and move towards collective liberation. ka...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with ahlay blakely, a Seattle-based singer-songwriter and community grief practitioner whose work explores more-than-human kinship, ancestral memory, and collective lament through participatory song and ritual. Rooted in Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk lineages, her practice brings together decolonial inquiry, depth psychology, and ecological devotion to address t...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with poet and philosopher Mark Nepo, a teacher in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 50 years. With over a million copies sold, Mark has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. A beloved poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our ti...

"It was so monumentous. How do you live? I didn't know who I was. And this clear thought came to me: You have two choices here. You can curl up and become a bitter old woman, because it's not fair what happened to you. OR you can surrender - it's happened. And go forward, however you do, and walk that open-hearted path towards healing." - Dr. Kaye Cleave       in the wake of her daughter's death I...

In this episode of You're Going to Die: The Podcast host Ned Buskirk speaks with author and licensed psychotherapist Lisa Olivera. Highlighted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, and The Guardian, the writer, adoptee, mother, and creator of the Human Stuff newsletter has worked in schools, community-based mental health, and private practice. Her latest book, When the...

In this episode of You're Going to Die: The Podcast host Ned Buskirk speaks with the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo, internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, American Sunrise, which won a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award, and Conflict Resolution for H...

The man, the myth, the medicinally confronting conversationalist is BACK on You're Going to Die: The Podcast for his third guest spot! This time Ned Buskirk speaks with culture activist, worker, and author Stephen Jenkinson at the intersection of matrimony & mortality. As he’s done with money (Money and the Soul’s Desires), dying (Die Wise), elderhood (Come of Age) and pandemics (A Generation’...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with Dale Borglum, founder and director of the Hanuman Foundation Dying Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first residential facility in the United States to support conscious dying. He is the Executive Director of the Living/Dying Project, the co-author of Journey of Awakening: A Meditator’s Guidebook [with Ram Dass, Daniel Goleman and Dwarka Bonner], and has taught medit...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with the founder of Real Fun, Wow! , Daren Thomas Magee. An artist and writer best known for blending blunt honesty with compassion, his work centers on responsibility, creativity, and the quiet urgency of being alive, exploring how we navigate fear, meaning, and modern life without numbing out or looking away. daren thomas magee’s website: https://realfunwow.com/ instagram...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with poet, teacher, speaker, and writing facilitator Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her newest book: The Unfolding. Newest album: Risking Love. One-word mantra: Adjust. rosemerry wahtola trommer’s website: https://www.wordwoman.com/ blog: https:/...

In this week's episode of You're Going to Die: The Podcast, host Ned Buskirk "cry battles" and speaks with critically-acclaimed experimental underground electronic musician turned in-demand film and television composer Dan Deacon. Get episodes a week before everyone else by becoming a patron now at https://www.patreon.com/YG2D . dan deacon’s website: https://dandeacon.com/ "When I Was Done Dying"...

In this week's episode of You're Going to Die: The Podcast, host Ned Buskirk speaks with Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of 'Poetry Unbound' from On Being studios and the Poet in Residence with the Conflict and Cooperation Centre at Columbia University in New York City. In the last few years he's moved to New York, but tries to return to Belfast where he worked in Conflict Resolution for twenty y...

In the wake of Andrea Gibson's death on July 14th, 2025, Ned Buskirk speaks with their partner Megan Falley, about grieving their death, still finding moments to walk with lightness, the final moments of Andrea's life, and how Andrea, wherever they are, is supporting Megan even still... ‎Watch Come See Me in the Good Light on Apple TV: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/come-see-me-in-the-good-light/um...

In honor of Andrea Gibson, for their life and death on July 14th, 2025, we're resharing host Ned Buskirk's conversation them from January of 2022, including a new intro with host Ned Buskirk, producer Nick Jaina, and associate producer Jordan Edelheit, scored with more music from Nick Jaina, holding their laughter and tears on the chemo-brain railroad, talking about the record skipping parts of ou...

In the wake of Joanna Macy's death and with You're Going to Die's upcoming San Francisco event - A Wild Love for the World: An Evening Honoring Joanna Macy - host Ned Buskirk speaks with Lydia Violet Harutoonian, a scholar in Joanna Macy's work and a collaborator of Macy's for over 16 years. An Iranian-Armenian-American facilitator, public speaker, and musician, Lydia is devoted to inner and outer...

In our newest episode, host Ned Buskirk speaks with Stephen G. Post, one of the world’s leading scholars on altruism, love, compassion, and the science of giving. He is a best-selling author, professor of preventive medicine, and founding President of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, and the founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at t...

In the first episode of this season of You're Going to Die: The Podcast, Francis Weller reminds us to invoke the medicine of our ancestral lineage; consider this episode a deepening into that work. In our newest episode, host Ned Buskirk speaks with Perdita Finn, a descendant of gardeners and dirt-lovers and women who knew how to speak to the dead in the dark. She is the author of Take Back the Ma...

Join You're Going to Die: The Podcast host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Merrill Garbus of tUnE‑yArDs. Consider this a raw & honest invitation to step into the complexity of aliveness, even when it's hopeless, & burst into your own unique song. MUSIC AS MEDICINE: it doesn’t distract, but activate, so that we can feel all the things, hold them wholly, even when they're in conflict, &...

Psychotherapist, writer, & soul activist Francis Weller is back on You're Going to Die: The Podcast, talking with host Ned Buskirk about the saturation of sorrow we’re faced with in these new times on our planet - a time he calls, the The Long Dark - & discusses the medicine we'll need to live through it. francis weller’s website: https://www.francisweller.net/ Produced by  Nick Jaina Asso...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poet, performer, and the author of bone, The Terrible, and The Catch (available June 2025). She’s also the founder of the utter , a poetic neuroscience movement that fuses story, science, and sonic design to repair attention and support emotional health. Her mission is to help people live beyond their survival patterns and feel more—on...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator Thomas Hübl, PhD, who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has led large-scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma. He is the...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Korean American writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condi...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body. Her book The Grieving Brain was included on Oprah’s list of Best Books to Comfort a Grieving Friend. O’Connor holds a PhD in clinical psychology f...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with a song writer, theater maker and multi instrumentalist Shaun Bengson, one half of The Bengsons. Alongside his wife and collaborator Abigail Bengson, he has written a whole big gob of shows and performed them all over the place as well as composing music for dance, film and TV. Shaun and Abigail are raising two kids in their home bases of NYC and VT. the b...