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Kathryn Cornelius has been a performance artist with shows in Berlin, Rome, Naples, Buenos Aires. She's been a consultant at a major international firm and the founder of Whole Human Alchemy, a practice she built on breathwork, internal family systems work, and twenty-five years of moving between art, enterprise, and her own hard-won recovery. She has been through things that are harder to name than any of that — what she calls, without drama, "movie-level shit."

She and I knew each other at Georgetown more than twenty years ago, in the years when high theory got malleable at three in the morning. Then we didn't speak for two decades. We recorded this across two sessions.

We talk about the difference between discipline as punishment and discipline as devotion; a question about faith asked on a porch in New Hampshire at three in the morning; a crime in Spain; and what it looks like to choose to be here.

Also: I stopped hosting somewhere in the second session, and it turned into a different kind of conversation.

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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.