Faith with Cassian Bellino →

Published June 12  ·  All posts on Jun 12

What happens when faith, logic, and vulnerability collide in a personal search for truth?

Cassian Bellino has turned personal doubt into a public quest for answers interviewing scholars about Christianity.

I think just, over time, you really understand that God invites these questions because He doesn’t want us to live blindly or have blind faith.

~ Cassian Bellino (36:55)

The conversation explores the origin and evolution of Cassian’s podcast, Biblically Speaking, focused on asking scholars direct, often difficult questions about Christianity. It begins with her internal conflict—wanting to live as a Christian while not fully understanding or agreeing with the faith—and follows her decision to start a podcast to resolve those doubts through dialogue. Cassian’s podcast is a place for intellectual exploration, built from personal curiosity and a desire for logical clarity rather than blind faith.

The discussion touches on content strategy, emotional challenges, and the mechanics of sustaining a solo creative endeavor. Cassian recounts her journey through building community platforms, hiring coaches, learning software systems, and dealing with burnout. Marketing, guest outreach, and pre-call preparation processes are shared in detail, alongside reflections on episodes that felt like failures but later proved meaningful to listeners. Throughout, the conversation centers on the power of asking questions and trusting intuition to guide the creative process.

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First judgements →

Published June 12  ·  All posts on Jun 12  ·  

[R]eject the first judgements and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are so often rooted in fear. […] This is radically different from how we’ve been taught to act. Be realistic, we’re told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the “other” party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It’s this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Root Glen →

Published June 11  ·  All posts on Jun 11

There were several days with rain during a recent visit to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Lots of rain makes for gorge-ous greens and roaring streams. Here, in Root Glen.

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Desperation →

Published June 10  ·  All posts on Jun 10  ·  

People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.

~ Henry Rollins

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A peony in bloom →

Published June 9  ·  All posts on Jun 9

My wife is a Peony hybridizer—she’s really interested in growing, and creating new, Peonies. We recently visited the spectacular (even caveman-me could see that) collection of Peonies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. I took one—exactly one!—photo of a Peony. She took a “few” more than I did.

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Between the two →

Published June 8  ·  All posts on Jun 8  ·  

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

~ Steven Pressfield, from Writing Wednesdays: The Unlived Life

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For me there’s a huge tension between those two. I see so many things that I want to do—and I don’t mean binge-watch TV shows. I imagine something I’d like to write—for example, a weekly, emailed publication for paying subscribers—and the complexity of creating it overwhelms me. The writing is the easy part; Or, am I deluding myself? The only salve I’ve found is to remind myself over and over and over that I consistently overestimate what I can get done in a day, and underestimate what I can get done in a lifetime.

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2,800 weeks of progress →

Published June 7  ·  All posts on Jun 7  ·  

All original parts, some wear. As I’m starting to look for opportunities to coach in movement spaces, a headshot is a requisite.

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Self-conceit →

Published June 6  ·  All posts on Jun 6  ·  

Peole who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

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Within, not across →

Published June 5  ·  All posts on Jun 5  ·  

Claude and I discussed it, and my theory (Claude is giving me full credit) is an LLM of this sort is not a communications medium at all. There’s no way for a human to put a new idea directly into it and no way to send that message to another human. Instead, my take is that Claude brings us everything it knows, and that its function is to help us go within, not across.

~ Seth Godin, from Across and within | Seth’s Blog

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A slightly longer than usual blog post from Godin making the interesting point differentiating across time, versus across space (just normal space, not outer space.) I know I find “talking” with LLMs very helpful for various reasons. I think the biggest is that it is (or at least “feels like”) one-on-one communication; It’s very much not social media where I always feel like I’m serving corporate masters by making grist for their mills.

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One change →

Published June 4  ·  All posts on Jun 4

There’s a pretty obvious incentive at play when companies have the ability to unilaterally alter how their products work after you buy them and you are legally prohibited to change how the product works after you buy them. This is the first lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

~ Cory Doctorow, from Pluralistic: Brother makes a demon-haunted printer

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There are many wrongs to right in the world. This one “small” legal wrinkle doesn’t seem like a big deal at first glance. And then…

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