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Ryan Eggensperger is a playwright, DJ, actor, and tour guide from Helena, Montana who has spent twenty years figuring out how to sit with a blank page without resenting it. He calls it carrying the zero — and it's a practice, not a concept: he does it every morning, and what surprised me most isn't that he does it but that he doesn't resent it.

We met when he was directing a play at my kids' school. One night we sat on the post office lawn until eleven, talking about boredom and presence and what it means to actually do the thing rather than prepare to do it. I didn't know yet that he'd been doing exactly that work every morning for decades.

We talk about the journal entry he wrote at twenty-eight — "No more mongrel genius" — that redirected his relationship to his own talent. We talk about edge work, and why the corporate version of it is "just a new name for Buddhism." We talk about Wind Cave in the Black Hills, where the earth breathes through a fourteen-inch hole at fifty degrees, and what it means to stand over that hole and feel it. We talk about his daily work with the blank page, the Instagram he deleted, and what carrying the zero actually feels like from the inside — not as aspiration but as practice.

And then, around the ninety-minute mark, he turned the whole thing inside out and asked me the question instead. That's in here too.

In this conversation:

• "No more mongrel genius" — the 2004 journal entry that changed everything
• Edge work, and why the corporate world finds a new name for Buddhism every couple of years
• How to sit with a blank page without resenting it
• Being a playwright and a DJ and an actor and a tour guide — and why that's different from mongrel genius
• Wind Cave in the Black Hills: the earth breathing through a fourteen-inch hole at fifty degrees
• The Instagram he deleted, and why
• What carrying the zero looks like on the other side of the performance
• The format inversion: around the ninety-minute mark, the guest asks the question instead

Find Ryan's work:

• SoundCloud (DJ Anatomy): soundcloud.com/user-367035900
• https://www.instagram.com/djanatomy/

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Jessie Rack is an ecologist, naturalist, and environmental educator passionate about communicating how the world works. Jessie has a PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut (for which she studied salamanders!) and diverse experiences in both formal and informal education. She taught writing at Princeton University, wrote for the NPR ScienceDesk, and is a AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador, one of 125 women in STEM fields chosen to be a science role model to middle school girls. Currently, she is a professor in the biology department at Northern Arizona University.

In this episode:

- The Iceland job interview at 9pm in midsummer daylight, in field gear, for a video call she thought was a phone call
- Why the offer of a tenure track position might be the thing she'd need to escape — the container of permanent employment as the scarier prospect
- Prions, AI, plant intelligence, jumping spiders, scorpions — how each functions as a probe for what the categories are doing when they start to break down
- "Everything is conscious or nothing is"
- The sentence in a scientific paper about scorpion eyes that made her write a poem
- A Princeton classroom assignment connecting pheromones to free will — and what happens when your students come out of it realizing nothing they do is free
- The difference between deference and respect, and why "I'm not scared of you" is the part that matters
- The psychic who looked into her eyes and saw only swirling chaos
- What "confidently irreverent" means from the inside

The Scorpion and the Stars — the poem she wrote after reading about scorpion eyes — is reproduced here with Jessie's permission.

The Scorpion and the Stars

“[Scorpions’] median eyes appear capable of image formation, and their lateral eyes can identify subtle changes in light magnitude. Both sets of eyes are highly sensitive to light and can putatively detect starlight against the background of the night sky.”

-from “Scorpion fluorescence and reaction to light,” Gaffin et al., 2012

The scorpion pauses on top of a flat rock

Midway through a nocturnal scuttle,

A foray to find delicious bugs to crunch.

Its legs still all at once. Its pedipalps—the great pinchers—lower, the coiled tail relaxes

In surprise.

Both sets of its eyes would widen if they could,

Except they’re held fast

In the chitinous rigidity of its exoskeleton.

It has, for the first time, noticed the stars.

It has no sense of distance, of space,

So the tiny sparkling points could be

Glowing insects for all it knows, could be

Some odd phosphorescent rock formation,

Could be a human-thing, inscrutable and meaningless.

But it senses something more,

Some feeling stirring in its tiny chest, its tube heart contracting powerfully,

Its copper-laced blood pumping with a new intensity.

The scorpion’s would-be prey skitters away across the sand

As the creature freezes, awestruck,

Feeling its size.

Not understanding, but understanding enough.

Fully present for the first time, somewhere in the desert night,

The distant stars reflected in its flat, pupilless, 

Wondering 

Arachnid eyes.

**Also mentioned:**
- Franny Choi's "Turing Test"
- Zoë Schlanger, *The Light Eaters*
- "The Comforts of Horror" — Jessie's unpublished essay on science communication and horror films; watch this space...

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Gwyneth Hagan grew up moving. Air Force family — eight, nine, ten different schools, no one place long enough to put down roots. What she could count on was this: finding some small natural space wherever she landed, some patch of grass or stand of trees, and letting that be enough. Later, she dropped out of college, drove across the country, and spent a year on an organic farm in coastal Maine with no electricity and no running water. It was there — watching a spider cross a field with an egg sack on its back, going somewhere with such care — that she decided to become a teacher.

What came from that decision: a decade at EL Education, where she worked as a school designer, helped build the architecture for professional learning, and watched an organization she loved make the transition every mission-driven organization eventually has to make. From forty people on a shared vision to a system that could be communicated to people who hadn't lived it. From oral tradition to written codification. From wildness to clarity.

*Wild Design for Learning* is her answer to what gets lost in that transition — and what it would look like to get it back. The book, organized around six patterns from the natural world (spirals, waves, fractals, fractures, bubbles, symmetry), publishes in fall 2026. Pre-orders open in June.

In this conversation: what EL was at forty people; what clarity costs; what the forest offers that the factory cannot; why artists have something to teach that educators don't; and what the doubt looks like right now, from the inside, when you've put the most essential part of yourself into a book and are about to let it go.

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NOTES FROM GWYNETH

- Visual Thinking Strategies come from the work of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Philip Yenawineare

- The full quote about complexity from Charles Mingus (accidentally attributed to Thelonius Monk in the episode): “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that's creativity.”

- Along the same lines, from Oliver Wendell Holmes: "For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have."

- The Substack article related to complexity and root cause analysis Gwenyth referenced.

- Gwyneth's thinking about planning and presence was informed by adrienne maree brown’s book called Holding Change.

...you can learn more about Gwyneth's extraordinary work on her substack & her website.

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Steve Filosa spent twenty years running Prep@Pingree, a scholarship, academic enrichment, and jobs program in Essex, Massachusetts. The program's premise was simple and counter-cultural: serve kids through long-term relational commitment rather than high-altitude, short-term intervention. Not something that scales. Something that works. By design, Steve built it to replace himself. Eventually, he did.

What came next surprised him. He expected to help other organizations build more Prep at Pingrees. He didn't expect that a significant part of his practice would turn out to be working with donors — people with resources to give and no one to think alongside them about how to give intentionally.

Six years in, Steve talks about uncertainty in a way that doesn't come from a framework. It comes from experience: starting a program in 2001 under enormous national headwinds, committing to something again at fifty with no safety net, and discovering both times that the net appeared.

In this conversation: what he didn't anticipate about building Prep@Pingree; why he thinks TFA-style interventions tend to serve their participants more than the kids they're there for; what changed in the final decade that made handing over the keys feel like relief; what the hardest thing to teach a board is; what year six looks like compared to year one; and what "peace" actually means when you've stopped needing to have all the answers.

IN THIS EPISODE

• What Prep@Pingree was — and why it was built not to scale
• The "100% admission rate" — why Steve bragged about the one number nobody bragged about
• The teaching hospital model: experienced teachers who wanted to train the next generation
• How alumni became the jet fuel
• Handing over the keys: what changed in the last decade
• From program director to consultant: the part he didn't see coming (donor clients)
• What the hardest thing to teach a board is
• Year one vs. year six: what changes when you hang a shingle
• The Goethe quote one of his first clients gave him — and whether it turned out to be true
• What "peace" actually feels like: the texture of not needing to know
• "Is Steve still talking?"

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Bio:

Michael Rohd has spent thirty-five years asking the same question from increasingly systemic angles: what does it take for people who don't usually talk to each other to actually talk, and what happens when they do?

He started in 1991, running theater workshops on the secret fifth floor of a Washington DC homeless shelter — a hidden HIV clinic where people sought care anonymously because being seen there put them at risk. He didn't know yet that what he was building had a name. A decade later, he co-founded Sojourn Theatre in Portland, spent nine years at Northwestern University, then moved to ASU before joining the University of Montana in 2022 to found the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination. His book, *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue*, has been widely translated and remains the field manual for applied civic theater practice in the US.

His current project — State of Mind, done in partnership with Montana Repertory Theater — is a touring theater and public dialogue residency on behavioral health that has now reached 37 Montana communities and more than 2,700 participants. Montana has ranked in the top five states for suicide for thirty consecutive years. The work is not incidental.

In this conversation: what kills civic imagination (certainty is first on the list), what a well-designed facilitation process makes possible that a badly designed one doesn't, why theater can't change people's deeply held beliefs but can be a gymnasium for practicing courage, what students in rural Montana keep telling adults about adult behavior, the moment a Great Falls school board meeting stopped because board members were moved to tears, and what you do with thirty years of witnessing.

---

In this episode:

- The origin story: HIV workshops on a secret fifth floor in 1991
- Dwight Conquergood and the ethics of working as an outsider in communities not your own
- Augusto Boal and the discovery that someone else was already doing adjacent work
- What kills civic imagination: certainty, lack of trust, no analysis of power, racism and exclusion
- Process design: what a well-designed facilitation makes possible
- What theater can't do — and why Rohd is careful not to overclaim
- State of Mind: 37 communities, care commitments, and what young people keep saying about adults
- The Great Falls moment: a school board meeting halted by student testimony
- The most surprising finding: students surfacing adult drinking, drug use, and modeling as the obstacle to their own wellbeing
- What you do with thirty years of bearing witness

---

Links:

- Michael Rohd's article on the Malta 2.0 residency (with photographs): https://michaelrohd.substack.com/p/state-of-mind-20-malta-montana
- Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana: https://www.umcivicimagination.com/
- State of Mind project: https://www.headwatersmt.org/stateofmind-mentalhealth/
- *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue* by Michael Rohd: https://www.heinemann.com/products/e00002.aspx
- Augusto Boal, *Games for Actors and Non-Actors*: https://www.amazon.com/Games-Actors-Non-Actors-Augusto-Boal/dp/0415267080

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Dr. Salmaan Kamal is an internal medicine physician and addiction specialist at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles, where he cares for veterans experiencing homelessness. At every major crossroads — leaving Alabama for Princeton, returning home for medical school, turning down an Ivy League fellowship — he chose proximity to need and to family over prestige. In this conversation, we trace that pattern and what it taught him about trusting his own instincts. We talk about what happens when his daughter was born at 23 weeks and how surviving that changed the scale of everything that followed. And we get into the daily discipline of putting the phone away at six in the evening — what that discomfort actually feels like, and what's on the other side of it. Salmaan is one of the most thoughtful people I know. This conversation is about what it costs to stay that way.

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Salmaan Kamal, MD, was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and he attended Princeton University with a focus on global health and health policy. After graduation, Kamal worked as a policy associate at the National Coalition on Health Care in Washington, D.C., where he advocated for policy reform that improved value in the U.S. health care system.

Kamal attended medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where he led the student-run free clinic for the uninsured. He completed internal medicine residency and chief residency at UAB Hospital, where he completed the Society of General Internal Medicine's Leadership in Health Policy Program. After residency, he completed the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program, a health services research and public health fellowship. His work focuses on improving care for people with a history of homelessness, addiction, and criminal legal system involvement. He currently cares for people experiencing homelessness at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.

For more on some of Salmaan's work: https://youtu.be/VG3R6XNC1Qk?si=_MNIzk2xDRqBMB4J and https://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/our-work/health-equity-challenge/finalists/2024/salmaan-kamal

In this episode:

- Growing up in Tuscaloosa with two physician parents — and the family intervention that sent him to Princeton instead of Alabama
- The moment in the operating room when he realized he was the only one looking at the clock
- A cold email, a twenty-minute walk across campus, and finding his people
- What it means to choose a safety-net hospital over a bigger name — again and again
- His daughter's birth at 23 weeks, and how "this is not the hardest thing we've done" became a family compass
- Putting the phone away at six — what boredom actually feels like, and why productivity was the permission structure to start
- The question he's sitting with now: what happens when the constraint disappears and work becomes optional again
- What he'd build if he trusted himself completelyDr. Salmaan Kamal, MD, was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and he attended Princeton University with a focus on global health and health policy.

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Alison Dilworth is a Philadelphia-based artist, muralist, and shrine-maker whose work spans the profoundly private and the intensely public. She is also someone who has spent her adult life thinking about what it costs to hold things — grief, love, other people's stories, a kid running toward traffic — and what it means to be genuinely present to any of it.

We talk about what it means to make a shrine, and how that practice bleeds into everything else she makes. We talk about the difference between curiosity and bearing witness — and why that distinction matters more than it might seem. We talk about girlhood, about what it felt like to watch herself become visible to men before she had any framework for it, about the refusal that followed, and about the door she's walking through now on the other side of all that. We talk about a miscarriage, a snow cone, and a little girl named Dagitu who showed up at exactly the right moment without knowing why. And we talk about an elder neighbor with a shovel and a gaze that went straight through her.

Alison is one of the people who taught me — without trying to — that holding space is a real thing you can do in the world. Talking to her again after fifteen years was a genuine joy.

In this conversation:

• Making art in Philadelphia vs. New York — and why "time-rich" is the thing
• The handmade books that hold other people's stories and are never for anyone else
• What attention actually is, and what it means that it's been captured
• Curiosity as childlike wonder vs. bearing witness as ethical presence
• What it felt like to become visible to men as a girl, and the refusal that followed
• Pregnancy loss, the Magic Gardens, and Dagitu's snow cone
• Why she doesn't respect grownups — and why elders and children are the only ones worth being
• Perimenopause as threshold
• What it means to honor something invisible
• The Norris Holmes mural: Sky Woman, Eve, Alice, Miss Gloria — women who chose wisdom over safety
• Why the process is everything and the finished thing isn't hers anymore

...more of Alison's work: https://www.instagram.com/brainsoulface/

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The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.

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Adam Ekberg is a photographer whose work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Worcester Art Museum. His solo exhibition Minor Spectacles ran at the George Eastman Museum in 2023.

Adam and I met years ago when our kids were in forest school together in rural New Jersey — one of those places where you sign a waiver so your preschooler can use an axe. He's one of the most delightfully goofy people I know, and also one of the most serious artists I know. Those things are connected, and I wanted to understand how.

This conversation covers enormous ground. It begins with a barn fire — a four-year-old in spaceship pajamas holding a glow stick, watching hundreds of feet of flame erase something he took for granted was permanent. From there we move through the man across the street who taught Adam to watch ants for hours, through years of caring for people with HIV and AIDS in early-2000s Portland, to a night on a mountain in Maine when a disco ball, a flashlight, and a smoke machine produced the photograph that made everything snap into focus.

We talk about the game of Go and why clinging to what mattered fifty moves ago will kill you. About riding a bicycle at twelve miles an hour as a way of not quite being anywhere. About the difference between making something for real and making it in Photoshop — and whether that difference matters. About the pocket watch his dying friend gave him with a note that said have a different relationship to time.

And we talk about boredom — specifically, what lives on the other side of it. The land within all of our minds that opens up when you sit with the discomfort long enough to push through.

Fair warning: the range of this conversation goes from Bluey to Walter Benjamin.

(cover photo: A Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, courtesy of the artist and CLAMP, New York)

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Kanwal Matharu is a cornea surgeon, Fulbright scholar, and global health educator who has spent his career building pipelines between American academic medicine and under-resourced communities around the world. He's also my friend—we met when he was a freshman at Princeton and I was working in residential life, and I've watched him navigate the distance between idealism and institutions ever since.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to align your career with your faith, what he learned about strategy and relationships as a young trustee on Princeton's board, and why he's come to believe that "soft relations carry so much more weight" than procedural wins. We also talk about the costs of the path he's chosen—the isolation that comes with subspecialty training, a called-off engagement, and sitting cross-legged in borrowed slippers on his last day in Egypt, practicing patience after everything went sideways.

This is a conversation about service, sacrifice, and what it means to keep going when the story isn't as clean as you thought it would be.

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The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.

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What do you do when the people you're caring for can't give you certainty that you're doing it right?

Lynn Casteel Harper—minister, chaplain, and author of On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear—spent years with people living with dementia. Not trying to fix them or bring them back, but learning to read a different kind of language: silence that isn't empty, presence that doesn't require words, companionship that survives the loss of recognition.

This conversation is about what she learned in that work—about gentleness as a form of power rather than weakness, about staying present when certainty isn't available, and about what happens when you stop trying to eliminate uncertainty and start learning from it instead.

We talk about Hannah Arendt's distinction between power and violence, the Biosphere 2 trees that couldn't grow without wind, why she's writing "ungently" about gentleness, and the question that keeps coming up in these conversations: what are you loyal to that you didn't choose?

If achievement has brought you to questions your current framework can't answer, this might be for you.

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The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.