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Chapter 04 2026 Coming Soon

Despair Is Not a Strategy

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.

Coming Soon
“They have lost control of their creations.
And that creation is a mirror on us. It is a student on us.”

— 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

Around the table

Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett

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.

Berry Liberman

Berry Liberman

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.

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