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.

alivetothis.com

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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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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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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Honest but not despairing, we are here. From AI, energy and political power, the forces reshaping humanity are not separate crises, but interconnected conditions.

With barely six per cent of the world living in a full democracy and backsliding well underway, the conversation turns to what it now takes to hold one. They ask what an honest update to our institutions would require, from countering culture wars with uncommon ground to treating property as shelter for the next generation rather than an asset to be banked by this one.

Australia, as a middle power, has more room to act than it tends to admit.

Hosted by Eleanor Gammell.

Guests

Malcolm Turnbull

29th Prime Minister of Australia

Australia’s 29th Prime Minister (2015–2018) and former leader of the Liberal Party, Turnbull built a career as a barrister, journalist and tech investor before politics. Since leaving office he has written prolifically on climate, media power and the future of liberal democracy.

Ian Thorpe

Five-time Olympic gold medallist · founder, Fountain for Youth

One of Australia’s most decorated Olympians, Thorpe won five Olympic gold medals before retiring at 24 and reinventing himself as an advocate for Indigenous youth literacy and LGBTQ+ rights. His foundation partners with remote Aboriginal communities on early-childhood education.

Jess Scully

Writer, civic strategist · former Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney

A writer, curator and former Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney (2017–2021), Scully spent two decades championing creative industries, digital democracy and participatory governance. Her 2020 book Glimpses of Utopia gathered hopeful case studies of communities reinventing politics, work and care from the ground up.

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AI is reshaping our work, our decisions, the way we imagine what comes next. Underneath, something quieter is fraying. Our sense of connection, our trust, our capacity to make meaning together.

This series begins in that tension.

Ten chapters. Ten roundtables. Voices gathered not to perform certainty, but to meet what this moment is asking of us. What's breaking, what's at stake, and what it means to remain human in the midst of it all.

Convened by Eleanor Gammell, each conversation moves into the forces reshaping our minds, our relationships and our systems, and the quieter ways we might still find each other.

Eleanor's work focuses on systems dynamics and human futures spanning Small Giants Academy, TEDxSydney, MONA and The School of Life where she has co-created immersive experiences to engage with the interconnected crises and emergent possibilities of this moment.

www.alivetothis.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.