Around a coffee table with tea, and the unhurried tone of two old friends. Krista Tippett and Berry Liberman sit with what is older than any technology: a nervous system, a species in distress, a century of institutions that no longer fit the world they were built to hold.
There’s a temptation, in a moment like this, to reach for collapse, to narrate ourselves into the ending. What’s offered here is something quieter, and harder: that despair, however justified it feels, is not a strategy. That the things our culture once called soft (interiority, attachment, intuition, conscience, the slow work of becoming whole) are in fact the hardest and most important things we carry.
What we call AI is, for now, a mirror. A student. A creation that has learned everything it knows from us. And we, flawed, distracted, often failing, are nevertheless the parents in the room.
“They have lost control of their creations.
And that creation is a mirror on us. It is a student on us.”
— Krista Tippett
“The mother is a metabolic lightning rod for the family system.”
— Berry Liberman
“Everything we’re talking about is everything the economy does not value. We’re really up against the market itself.”
— Berry Liberman
“The story we’re telling is the story we’re walking into.”
— Berry Liberman
“Living out of fear does not take us to the places in our bodies and our psyches and our imaginations where we need to go to grow up this technology, and grow ourselves up alongside it.”
— Krista Tippett
“We’re trying to leap ahead of our own developmental process.
We have this technology of the gods without the wisdom of the gods, or even the developmental capacity to tolerate the information flows.”
— Berry Liberman
“Shifting the question from what is happening to us,
to what is it calling us to.”
— Krista Tippett
Show Notes
Host, On Being · founder, The On Being Project
Peabody Award-winning host of On Being, Tippett has spent two decades drawing scientists, poets and theologians into long, generous conversations about what it means to be human. A former diplomat in divided Berlin, she founded The On Being Project and the Civil Conversations Project.
Co-founder, Small Giants Academy · publisher, Dumbo Feather
Co-founder and creative director of Small Giants Academy and publisher of Dumbo Feather magazine, Liberman has spent twenty years championing “conversations with extraordinary people” and an Australian ecosystem of regenerative business and impact investing.