You’re Going to Die: The Podcast

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 Magic: Conversations with the Unseen...

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, & maybe breathe a little more freel...

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 Associate Produced by Jordan Edelheit S...

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 purpose. Yrsa’s work lives at the i...

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 author of Attuned: Practicing Int...

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 condition. There is always the body — i...

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 from the University of Arizona and ...

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 begsions' website: https://www.beng...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer and therapist, Prentis Hemphill. They are the Founder and Director of The Embodiment Institute and The Black Embodiment Initiative, and host of the podcast “Becoming the People.” For the last ten years, Prentis has practiced and taught somatics in social movement organizations and offered embodied practice ...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Clover Stroud, a Sunday Times bestselling writer, journalist and host of her own podcast, Tiny Acts of Bravery. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild & Sleepless Nights: A Mother's Story and third book The Red of My Blood were instant Sunday Times bestsellers and rated ‘best books of the year.' Her fourt...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with culture activist and author Stephen Jenkinson. Jenkinson teaches internationally, is the author of seven books, and was the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. Apprenticed to a master storyteller as a young man, he has worked extensively with dying people and their families. He is former programme director in a major...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with friends and writers Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik as they talk about the promise they made, and kept, with their friend Ann Alejandro, to pull together, from thousands of her pages of writing left in their care, the new book I know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, an extraordinary collection of writing put together by longtime literary friends i...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with beloved friend, singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Scott Elliott Ferreter as they talk about his new album Trying Time, an album he didn't expect to be "about" death, but which actually has 9 out of 11 songs about either impermanence, death, his dead dad, his dead, or crying... They also talk about how Scott forgot Ned's birthday and how Scott thinks about Ned's death ...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Aerin Dunford, Lead Weaver of The Emergence Network (ten), a planetary network of care and inquiry gesturing towards new assemblages of response-ability during moments when the ways that we think about and address the troubling crises of our times are increasingly a part of those crises. This episode is released in anticipation of, and as invitation to, ten's Becoming Monster Festival, ha...

This conversation originally aired August 31st, 2023. Join us ONLINE Monday, October 28th from 4-5:45pm Pacific, for a virtual screening of “The Last Ecstatic Days,” followed by ​Q&A with Scott Kirschenbaum, Director of ​"The Last Ecstatic Days​," and Aditi Sethi, Executive Director, Center for Conscious Living and Dying and one of the film’s subjects​. Facilitated by Ned Buskirk, Executive Director ​at You're Going to Die &...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with Humanist Chaplain D.S. Moss, as they talk about the journey through life & loss that led to his mortality-influenced work in the world, including his experience of providing months of spiritual care to death row inmate, Phillip Hancock, holding space for him at the time of his execution by lethal injection. D.S. Moss' New York Times' "An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Fin...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with playwright and writer-across-disciplines Heidi Kraay, as they talk about her book 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, and the grief, loss, & life that led to its being in the world. heidi's website: https://www.heidikraay.com/ book - 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle: https://modernmythographerpress.com/home-1 Produced by Nick Jaina Associate Produced by Jordan Edelheit Soundscaping by Nick...

Join host Ned Buskirk in a creatively conscious mortality conversation with Chicagoan musician, author, and actor Tim Kinsella, whose previous bands include Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz, Owls, and now makes albums w/his wife Jenny Pulse for the Kill Rock Stars label.  tim kinsella's ig: https://www.instagram.com/gootiming/ tim kinsella & jenny pulse's website: https://bio.site/kinsella_pulse Produced by Nick Jaina Associate Prod...

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with indie musician and singer-songwriter Caitlin Jemma. Her newest album A Wider View is inspired by themes such as death, generational heartbreak, forgiveness, transformation, compassion, and true love, exploring the larger perspective we gain when someone we love passes and how embracing your mortality can inspire a life full of purpose. caitlin jemma’s website: https://www.caitlinjemma.co...