Around a coffee table with tea, Eleanor sits with Krista Tippett and Berry Liberman over what is older than any technology: our collective nervous system.
Even our newest rebellions carry an old ache: crypto as punk money, AI as the solution to ourselves, or perhaps the mother made flawless.
The temptation is to narrate ourselves into the ending: infinite abundance or dystopian chaos. What’s offered here is quieter, harder: that despair, however justified, is not a strategy. That the things our culture called soft (interiority, attachment, conscience, the slow work of becoming whole) are the hardest things we carry, and they’re calling us forward.
AI is, for now, a mirror. A student that has learned everything it knows from us. And we, however flawed, are 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.
Read · On Being
A gathering of voices on the intelligence that lives in bodies, relationships and place, the kind formed through holding and being held. A counterweight to the fantasy of a mind without a nervous system.
Listen · On Being · Mary Oliver
The poet on attention as the beginning of devotion, and on a life spent noticing. A reminder that interiority and wonder are not soft indulgences but disciplines, the slow moral formation that no machine can do for us.
Watch · Rutger Bregman
Twenty years ago, climate denial was a problem of the right. Today, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the consequences could be even more disastrous. A case against looking away, and for taking the stakes seriously enough to act.
