This is on being an I'm not Krista Tippett. I'm Pico Eyre. I'm a writer and a traveler

and a former guest on this show and today I'm seeing if I can turn the tables a little

by asking some questions of Krista Tippett. Krista is the author of Becoming Wise and

Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. I spoke with her recently about her New York

Times bestselling book at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Our conversation

was so fun and so illuminating we thought we might share it with all of you.

One morning last year I woke up in Orange County, promising beginning and I had to fly

out of LAX before lunchtime but on my way to the airport I had to go to a radio station

for an interview that had been scheduled almost a year before. So I found myself nosing

through this dystopian wilderness of mini malls and parking lots and warehouses in

Carver City and finally I located the radio station and I was feeling frazzled and exhausted

really not myself at all and of course worried about how I would get to the airport afterwards.

And somebody took me to a small dark room and they gave me a pair of headphones and very

soon a warm reassuring melodious voice of somebody I'd never met began talking to me.

And within maybe ten minutes I was saying things that I didn't even know I had inside

myself and I was saying things I might not have said to most of my closest friends. This

kind stranger seemed to have read every last word I'd ever written. She knew my thoughts

better than I knew them myself and usually when I go to a radio station I'm told we have

four minutes or maximum of six minutes so please will you talk in soundbites. In this instance

we had an uninterrupted 90 minutes and it really felt like an exploration and at the end

of the 90 minutes I had to tell this person I had never seen that this had been the most

soulful searching intimate conversation I could remember having and I think it's the

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