Around a coffee table with tea, and the unhurried tone of two old friends. Eleanor is joined by Krista Tippett and Berry Liberman to sit with what is older than any technology: a nervous system, a species in distress and 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.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

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Guests:

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

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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A collision of two ideas that don't usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. Alexander Beiner and Catriona Wallace sit with what is arriving, drawing on psychedelics and animism: a new kind of intelligence even its makers don't fully understand, and the ancient questions it stirs in us.

Most conversations about AI stay safely in the language of tools and use-cases. What's offered here is something stranger and perhaps says more about us than about the machine. Are we pouring our oldest longing into cobalt, lithium, and silicon, and mistaking the echo for a voice? Our culture's hunger for meaning is finding shape in a place we never expected to be sacred.

The deeper question is not whether AI will save us or destroy us. Both stories are inversions of the same old myth. The real question is what this moment reveals about the longing we've been carrying, and what we're prepared to do with what we find.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

Alexander Beiner

Writer · essayist · co-founder of Rebel Wisdom

A British writer and essayist, Beiner co-founded Rebel Wisdom, the dialogue platform that mapped the “sensemaking” scene around figures like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. His 2023 book The Bigger Picture draws on psychedelics, ecology and AI to argue we are living through a civilisational meaning crisis.

Catriona Wallace

AI ethicist · founder, Responsible Metaverse Alliance

An Australian AI ethics professor, entrepreneur and Order of Australia recipient, Wallace founded Flamingo AI — the second woman-led company to list on the ASX — and now chairs the Responsible Metaverse Alliance. She is an Adjunct Professor at AGSM and a globally cited voice on responsible AI.

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Author and journalist Sarah Wilson, philosopher AC Grayling and existential risk researcher Luke Kemp bring three vantage points to the same unravelling. Civilisations have always fallen like great Goliaths, but this one is global, and the weapons in its hands are totalising: nuclear, algorithmic, atmospheric.

Compounding these weapons is the logic that wields them. A handful of actors locked in a race no one wins, and the assumption that whatever can be built should be.

The question is not whether we are in collapse, but what survives it. We are far better cooperating than competing in the face of this leviathan, change that draws its force from the ground up as much as from coordination across borders. This is the fork. Small right moves are contagious, and no one is coming to save us. We are the adults in the room.

To be human is to be attuned to the living world, both magnificent and destructive. Untether from the mythology of more, and the system collapsing us may be the one we outlast.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

Guests

Luke Kemp

Research affiliate · Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge

A research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and author of the recent Goliath’s Curse. Kemp has lectured in economics and human geography, and has advised the World Health Organization, the Australian Parliament, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and many other institutions. His research has been covered by The New York Times, the BBC and The New Yorker.

Sarah Wilson

Author and social philosopher · host, Wild podcast

A multi-New York Times bestselling author and social philosopher, Wilson founded the global I Quit Sugar movement and wrote First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and This One Wild and Precious Life. She now explores modern philosophy, existential risk and climate change through her recent book I Eat the Stars, the Wild podcast and her Substack. Sarah lives nomadically between Paris and Sydney.

A.C. Grayling

Philosopher · Principal, Northeastern University London

A British philosopher and Principal of Northeastern University London, Grayling is the author of more than thirty books on philosophy, ethics and democracy, including Democracy and Its Crisis, Who Owns the Moon? and the 2025 Discriminations. A prominent public intellectual, he has long argued that representative democracy is structurally failing, and that stewarding civilisation through this moment requires concrete institutional reform, not despair.

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