You’re Going to Die: The Podcast

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with Irish writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist Daragh Fleming. Based in Cork, his work spans literature, music, and performance, often exploring mental health, intimacy, and contemporary masculinity with honesty and emotional clarity. He is the author of A Brief Inhalation & Lonely Boy, with his newest book Maybe Things Do Work Out in the End: Poems on the Weight and Wonder of Being Aliveout April 2027.

Daragh Fleming's
ig: https://www.instagram.com/daraghfleming/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DaraghFlem/
MTDWOITE: POTWAWOBA pre-order: https://ebury.lnk.to/Maybethingsdoworkoutintheend
linker...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with multidisciplinary artist Fariha Róisín. Born in Ontario, Canada and raised in Sydney, Australia, their work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities. Featured in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue, they are the author of poetry collections How To Cure A Ghost (2019) and Survival Takes a Wild Imagination (2023), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), and Who Is Wellness For? (2022).

Fariha Róisín's
website: https://www.fariharoisin.com/
ig: https://www.instagram.com/fariha_roisin/
substack: http...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with DJ John Richards, the Morning Show Host at KEXP who has been instrumental in building community and providing a global soundtrack to listeners worldwide for over two decades. He’s renowned for curating the station’s hit “Runcast” and co-hosting “The Dr and the Dj” podcast alongside his spouse, Dr. Amy Lindsey. Beyond radio, John is a co-owner of the popular bar, Life on Mars, and a frequent public speaker, hosting benefits, and parties as well as addressing themes of grief and mental well-being. When not on the air or at the bar, he is a...

Host Ned Buskirk speaks with the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an...

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 engaged with the challenge of translating complex ideas into accessible narratives.

Emile Suotonye DeWeaver's
website: https://www.reframeconsults.com/
substack: https://emiledeweaver.substack.com/
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: https://thenewpress.org/bo...

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.

kazu gaga's
website: https://www.kazuhaga.com/
substack: https://kazuhaga.substack.com/
support: https://www.kazuhaga.com/support

Produced by Nick Jaina
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
Associate Produced by Jordan Edelheit
”YG2D...

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 the entanglements of trauma, extraction, and ecological rupture, expressed through community singing projects including WAILS: Songs for Grief and Anthems for an Apocalypse.

ahlay blakely's
anthems for an apocalypse: https://www.healingattheroots.com/anthemsforanapocalypse
wails album: http://www.healingattheroots.com/wailshome
Monthly...

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 time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” A cancer survivor, Mark writes and teaches from the heart, exploring what it means to have the life we want by being pre...

"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

In this episode of You're Going to Die: The Podcast host Ned Buskirk speaks with Dr. Kaye Cle...

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 Ache Remains, will be out this April. She lives in Northern California with her husband, daughter and two cats.

lisa olivera's
website: https://lisaolivera.com/
ig: https://www.instagram.com/_lisaolivera/<...

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 Holy Beings, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. In addition to poetry, she has published several award-winning children’s books, prose collections, plays, and two memoirs, including Crazy Brave, wh...

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’s Worth), in Matrimony Jenkinson finds a living heart in the debris field of contemporary culture, and now makes the case that radical hospitality, strangerhood and the old sacraments of trade together make the tr...

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 meditation since 1974. Dale lectures and gives workshops on the topics of meditation, healing, spiritual support for those with life-threatening illness, and on caregiving as spiritual practice.

dale borglum’s
website: http...

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: https://www.instagram.com/realfunwow/
real talk 1:1 sessions: https://realfunwow.com/products/real-talk-session

Produced by Nick Jaina
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
Associate Produced by Jordan Ed...

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://ahundredfallingveils.com/
daily poetry on Ritual: https://www.ritual.io/

Produced by Nick Jaina
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
Associate Produced by Jordan Edelheit
”YG2D Podcast Theme Song”...

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" | Off The Air | Adult Swim: https://youtu.be/TuJqUvBj4rE?si=JZ_p5-AyBmKMmsNY

Produced by Nick Jaina
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
Associate Produced by...

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 years. 2025 saw the release of two books: 'Kitchen Hymns' - a collection of his own poetry; and a second Poetry Unbound anthology.

Get episodes a we...

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/umc.cmc.27uh51l7oh3ghql2gxb6xvb1s

megan falley’s
website: https://www.meganfalley.com
newsletter, continued for Andrea Gibson - “Things That Don’t Suck”: h...

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 our lives’, the poetry of cancer, chronic disease, and panic attacks, and what it means to consider what’s available when faced with the hardest parts of being mortal.

andrea gibson’s
website: https...

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 ecological renewal and cultural healing, facilitating group work across many communities, weaving together systems of thinking, deep ecology, and emotional resilience in the face of global crisis.

She...

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 the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. His work bridges science, spirituality, and ethics with a mission to understand how unselfish love heals, uplifts, and transforms both individuals and cultures.

Stephen G...

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 World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. She teaches popular workshops on...

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 freely on the other side of the catharsis of a siren scream.

tune-yards’
NEW EP, Tell The Future With Your Body: https://tuneyards.ffm.to...

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
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
”YG2D Podcast Theme Song” by Nick Jaina
 “The Covenant” & “Pier 70” by Nick Jaina
Check o...

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 intersection of art, brain science, and healing.

yrsa daley-ward's
website: https://yrsadaleyward.squarespace.com/
substack: https://yrsadaleyward.substack.com/
instagram: https://www.in...

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 Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. He has served as an advisor and guest faculty for...

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 — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Whether the form 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 completed a post-doctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Her newest book, The Grieving Body: How the...

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.bengsons.com/
ig: https://www.instagram.com/thebengsons

Sonya Renee Taylor & The Bengsons - LIVE at...

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 during moments of social unrest and organizational upheaval. Their debut book “What it Takes to Heal” published June 2024 through Penguin Random House.

Prentis Hemphill's
website: https://prentishemphill.com/
book: https://prentishemphill.com/book
ig: https...

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 fourth memoir, The Giant on The Skyline, was published in May 2024. Originally from Oxfordshire, she is currently living in Washington DC with her husband and the yo...

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 Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. He has Masters' degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work). In 2023 Stephen...

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 in tribute to a third, who died in 2019 at the age of 64.

I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann...

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 all the time.

scott's
website: https://www.scottelliottferreter.com/|
ig: https://www.instagram.com/scottelliottferreter/
TRYING TIME Fundraiser: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects...

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, happening October 30th though November 3rd, 2024, a virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted with a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike) from around the planet...

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 & Andrew Ingall, Senior Programmer, ​Reimagine...

RSVP ​H​ERE: https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-last-ecstatic-days-a-virtual-screening-and-qa

aditi’s
website: https://www.aditisethimd.com/

Center for Conscious Living & Dying: htt...

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 Final Hours": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/us/an-atheist-chaplain-and-a-death-row-inmates-final-hours.html
End Well talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WRbe6-l...

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 Jaina
”YG2D Podcast Theme Song” by Nick Jaina

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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 Produced by Jordan Edelheit
Soundscaping by Nick Jaina
”YG2D Podcast Theme Song” by Nick Jaina
"WTF is Death?" b...

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.com/

Recorded at 3rd Street Studio - Rita House in Los Angeles: www.ritahouse.com/studio
Produced by Nick Jaina
Associate Produced by Jordan Edelheit
Sou...