Wonder Dome

“You are ‘response-able.’ You’re responsible for your response.”

- Divya Agarwal

How do you decide what to do?

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes about our two modes of thinking: Instinct and cognition.

It’s a brilliant frame. But it leaves something out.

What does it feel like to slow down when your instincts are moving fast?

And what happens to both kinds of thinking when the body doing the thinking is wired on stimulants, depleted for effort, or running on three hours of sleep?

This was my first Dome conversation in almost six months. As we dropped in, I noticed an edge in me. I wanted it to go well.

So instead of pretending the edge wasn’t there, I named it.

Divya’s response reframed the whole conversation...

“The edge doesn’t have to go away. It can be hosted.”

Divya is the founder of Vivekam (Hindi for “discernment”), a leadership practice that obsesses over performance & longevity. She coaches senior leaders and brings 20+ years of yoga and embodiment practice to the work.

Throughout our conversation, we trace the three capacities Divya stands for:

• Discernment - knowing what you feel and choosing your response, with both the thinking mind and the body

• Calm - leading from the rest-and-digest nervous system, where creativity, relationship, and abundance live

• Vitality - aliveness that lasts; not symbolic strength built for show, but applied strength that sustains you through life’s ups & downs.

Along the way, Divya guides us through a box breathing practice you can do with us in real time.

Life will keep asking us to show up when nothing goes according to script. May this conversation help you meet it with vitality, calm, & discernment

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• Vivekam, Divya’s leadership practice - vivekam.co

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• The “Centenarian Decathlon” - Peter Attia’s framing (from his book Outlive) for working backward from the life you want at 100

• Thomas Hübl who Divya quotes on the three ways parents can respond to a child’s fear

• Viktor Frankl who is often quoted as saying “Between stimulus and response there is a space...”

• Aaron Cantor’s visit to the Dome (referenced in the conversation): #149 Moving With Enchanted Vision

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber

What might it mean to remake housing in America?

We need an estimated 5 million more homes by 2035. Nine years out. Clock ticking.

And that number alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

I’ve been attending town meetings in the small town where I live, and year after year, the financial picture is getting worse. We’re straining to pay for basic services. Teachers. Fire fighters. Police officers. Road repairs. Land conservation. Building maintenance. Water infrastructure.

In other words, the people, places, and services that turn a bunch of buildings & houses into an actual town.

And we’re far from alone. Towns all over the country are staring at the same math.

So we could, theoretically, churn out homes on an unprecedented scale… but what if they are poorly situated and poorly built?

What if they cost us more to upkeep than they return on the investment?

What if they push people even further apart, just when we most need to come together?

Housing done well is not just shelter. It is the foundation for family. For community. For shared survival and thriving. For civic engagement and civil discourse and civil disobedience.

In short: for America

Every time I bike through the suburban sprawl near my home, these numbers and questions and challenges swirl through my mind, and I think:

“We’re doing it wrong”

The size of homes. The sprawl of them. The cars everywhere. The relative absence of people out walking, talking, connecting. How much it costs us. Financially and interpersonally.

Then, one ride, I happened upon Emerson Green. Rows of houses, cars tucked in back, a shared green, mailboxes clustered together under an awning to keep off the rain.

It felt like a throwback and the future at once.

An old idea, made new.

Don’s team designed it.

Dan’s company built it.

Between them: decades of arguing, in brick and mortar and wood, that the old way of building neighborhoods isn’t nostalgia. It is better for people and the planet.

Here’s some of what we get into:

• Don’s near-exit from architecture: 18-hour days fussing over a bronze handrail profile while the bus he rode home passed real decay outside the window; and how discovering New Urbanism gave him a reason to start a firm to “make places, not buildings.”

• Dan’s origin as a seven-year-old building little cities out of matchbox cars, and the humbling first job designing floor tile patterns that he insists was never beneath the mission.

• The “brass-tacks” case for this approach, no idealism required: compact, walkable development throws off roughly ten times the tax revenue per acre compared to the the cul-de-sac model, and uses about 60% less infrastructure to do it.

• Why compressing a site plan is a craft, not a trick — “like putting it in the Xerox machine at 50%” — and what happens when developers try to fake the look without doing the work.

• Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, and Don’s argument that beauty in a building isn’t gauzy. It’s measurable, and it’s still doing its work long after the architect is gone.

• Whether a groundswell of good little neighborhoods is enough on its own, or whether we need something closer to Malmö, Sweden’s BO01; and what a shuttered prison site in New England might become instead.

Don shared a metaphor that really landed with me:

Architects can’t create community.

What they can do is seed its coral reef.

Sink the structure, then let the life come find it.

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• Dan Gainsboro is the founder and CEO of NOW Communities in Concord: www.nowcommunities.com

• Don Powers founded Union Studio Architecture & Community Design, with offices in Providence and Philadelphia: unionstudioarch.com

• Emerson Green: www.emersongreen.com

• The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton: www.alaindebotton.com/architecture

• Soft City by David Sim: www.urbanandbeyond.com/books/soft-city

• Bo01, Malmö, Sweden: urbangreenbluegrids.com/projects/bo01-city-of-tomorrow-malmo-sweden

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

  Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber

“The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” — Nicholas Janni, quoting King Lear, by William Shakespeare

The word ‘chaos’ evokes a lot for me. It’s noise. Uncertainty. Violence.

It’s nature at her most intense. Society at its most fractured. Ambiguity down to the deepest level.

My first instinct, in times like these, is to duck and cover. And in most chaotic situations, that’s likely the right first move.

If you don’t survive, there’s no next move to make.

But if you’re weathering the storm well enough to stay in the game, what comes next?

Do you hunker down forever?

Or is there another posture to take?

Amy Elizabeth Fox and Nicholas Janni offer an inversion of “duck and cover”…

In times of chaos, we need leaders who can “stand and open”

Amy (a third-time guest in the Dome) co-founded and leads Mobius Executive Leadership. She is a senior student of Thomas Hübl and Patrick O’Connor.

Nicholas co-founded Matrix Development, teaches at Oxford and IMD, and wrote Leader as Healer, the UK’s Business Book of the Year in 2023.

Together they’ve just published Leading in Chaos, a deep meditation on what it means to lead in these times of global fracture.

Throughout our conversation, we trace their book’s two foundational pillars:

• Healing - engaging with and releasing past wounds; from our own life and from our collective past.

• Awakening - engaging with reality as it is; not from our desires or attachments, but from the source of our deep aliveness and awareness.

Everything we discuss is in service of this question:

Life is inviting each & every one of us to find out. May this conversation help us along the path…

Thanks for entering the Wonder Dome with us! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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• Leading in Chaos - Amy & Nicholas’s book — leadinginchaosbook.com

• Leader as Healer — Nicholas’s previous book, UK Business Book of the Year 2023 - www.nicholasjanni.com/book-leader-as-healer

• Mobius Executive Leadership — Amy’s firm, which is the standard-bearer for “best practice & next practice” in leadership development -

  www.mobiusleadership.com

• Amy’s previous visits to the Dome:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber

“Starting over is the American way.”
— Brandon Peele

As the country marks its 250th year, I welcome back my friend and brother Brandon Peele for a conversation about what it might mean for our nation to begin again.

Rather than greet the anniversary with fireworks and nostalgia, Brandon spent the last fifteen months on something much more powerful: a month-long caravan pilgrimage across America to hold up a mirror to the nation and ask, honestly:

This is who we are; who do we want to become?

Brandon Peele is an author, facilitator, and democracy builder devoted to the maturation of American life; a body of work that moves between men’s work and inner development, purpose and initiation, and the civic structures that hold a people together.

His pilgrimage traced four movements through the threads of American identity: the Haudenosaunee birthplace of democracy in western New York, the Civil Rights South, the indigenous soul of the West, and the modern American century.

It closed on July 9th — the birthday, as Brandon frames it, of the Second Republic — with a national assembly whose citizen participants co-authored a single document: A New Moral Vision for Our Next 250.

Our conversation traces two births of this country and ask whether it’s time for a third. We wander through democracy’s often-forgotten or erased indigenous roots, the difference between a broken covenant and a broken contract, and Brandon’s provocation that the most American act of all is to start over. To let go of what no longer works and re-found something truer, carrying forward the best of what we’ve already learned.

It’s a conversation that holds both grief and possibility: the parts of us that are jaded and tired, and the parts enlivened by the chance to try again. And it lands on a quieter truth: that no new political structure will hold unless we also do the inner work of growing up, getting off our screens and back onto our porches, into the close-up, neighbor-to-neighbor work of becoming the people a democracy actually requires.

(as read by Brandon during the conversation)

We pursue flourishing. We promote and protect life, liberty, inner growth, peace, and our fundamental interconnectedness, so that every person might attain not just a comfortable existence, but a fulfilling life.

We ensure dignity. Every citizen shall have shelter, food, water, health care, education, safety, and belonging — not as rewards for merit or employment, but as inalienable rights. A nation’s greatness is measured by what it guarantees to all, not by what it grants to few.

We free ourselves from that which diminishes us. Prejudice and hatred have no rightful home here. We confront these forces continually without becoming them, for the means we choose shape the nation we become.

This is our promise to each other, renewed each generation.

Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber

• Bison Medicine Dispatch: Brandon’s weekly updates on this project, and where his docuseries The Call of the Nation begins dropping the first week of October.

• Bison Medicine: Brandon’s book, and the subject of his first visit to the Wonder Dome.

• Citizen University: collaborators on the pilgrimage and National Assembly.

• Brandon’s previous visit to the Dome:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber

Dearest Wonder Domers,

It’s been a minute! Happy Labor Day to those of you listening in from the States.

I went quiet for longer than planned as life shifted: team turnover, supporting my daughter through a difficult time, an extended stretch of travel for coaching and facilitation work, the chance to work alongside some incredible collaborators and organizational leaders, and a new project that is soooo close to coming to life (I’ll be sure to share more on that here when the project finally takes flight. Or perhaps I should say “breaks ground…”).

But I’m back now, filled with fresh energy. Building & hosting this podcast has had a massive positive impact on my work & life. I’m excited to see where it leads next.

The Dome is open again, for as long as it’s meant to be. Here is where my latest wonderings are headed:

• How does the quiet work of personal evolution move outward, through the organizational, communal, and political channels that shape our shared life?

• How does what’s stirring in your heart ripple into institutions, into communities, into the body politic?

• How do we walk the bridge between our soul’s work and our world’s structures?

Along the way, I’ll keep experimenting with the format:

• Bringing in more artists to share poetry & song.

• Inviting guest hosts to drive the conversation with me, steering things where I would likely never go alone.

• Bringing together past guests from different episodes to spark new connections & ideas.

• Walking out into the world & recording in the field, not just at my desk.

Here’s a sneak peek of coming conversations over the next few months:

• A longevity & mindfulness expert on the impact of these practices for leadership discernment.

• Two of the most established place makers in New England on the “architecture of community.”

• An experienced organizational leader on the power of kindness in organizational culture, and how most companies get kindness wrong.

• Two senior pioneers of leadership development sharing their deepest insights on leading through chaos.

• A rising star in the science fiction world on her latest novel, exploring the impact of violence and war on oppressed peoples.

• A global developer sharing her insights on the neuroscience of beautiful places.

• A negotiation expert on building the kind of trust that enables everyone to win.

• A reformed perfectionist who realized a fresh path towards purpose & impact when life hit him with a diagnosis that dramatically re-shaped his life.

And, going live this week, a scholar, activist, and spiritual pilgrim on establishing a new moral vision for the next 250 years of the American democratic experiment.

More soon. It’s good to be back.

-Andy

p.s. a big shout out of gratitude & respect for KD McTeigue who kept the Dome open & vibrant for well over two years. Thank you for all of your help, KD! Wishing you the best on the journey ahead

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Happy New Year Wonder Domers,

Welcome to 2026. I hope the holiday season was a nourishing one, and that you’re doing what you need to stay grounded and purposeful as the world continues to take us on this wild ride.

In 2025, the Wonder Dome hosted 26 conversations with 30+ incredible guests. These folks came from a multitude of distinguished disciplines, including the arts, sciences, literature, poetry, philosophy, spirituality, futurism, visual design, placemaking, and activism.

Each one of them served to remind me of our shared humanity amidst the political upheavals, violent conflicts, economic disruptions, and ecological losses facing our singularly beautiful and precious planetary home.

As the Wonder Dome team transitions into 2026, we’re taking a pause to prepare a new wave of thought-provoking, heart-opening interviews to add to this labor of love that is the Dome. We’ll be back online in the Spring.

Until then, we’ve pulled together ten of the most stimulating conversations of 2025, listed below in chronological order. It wasn’t easy, because honestly, each and everyone of these 26 conversations is rich with depth, meaning, and insight.

Somewhere in all of these, I hope you find the one that you most need right now, so you can make your way into this new year with a bit more compassion, courage, and curiosity.

1. #156 A Hospitable Space (with Parker Palmer and Ariel Burger)

   Through music, poetry, and reflections on humanity’s current moment, Parker and Ariel speak to being “awake” to the realities of hardship and suffering experienced by others; to be a witness rather than a spectator; and how through creation of “hospitable spaces” we can engage across even the most cavernous of divides.

2. #157 EcoResponsive Environments (with Prachi Rampuria and Soham De)

   Housing is one of the greatest adaptive challenges we currently face as a species. It’s also a key solution to many other complexities around population growth, community, civic engagement, and the ecological crisis. Prachi and Soham share another vision for what place making can be — one that calls for the building of a new ship to address today’s challenges with tomorrow’s solutions.

3. #161 Dreamtime of the Gods (with Eleanor Robins)

   Eleanor writes in service of imagination. A steward of dreams and stories, Eleanor studies the phenomena of the imaginal realm and how it shapes us and our relationship with reality. This one goes particularly deep, so listen from somewhere spacious and quiet.

4. #163 Generative Cultural Renewal (with Sousan Abadian and Ariana Abadian-Heifetz)

   In this special inter-generational episode, Sousan and Ariana — mother and daughter — join together to discuss cultural relativism; reducing our “trauma footprint”; and humanity’s need to refresh our culture and consciousness as we evolve towards a healthier collective wellbeing.

5. #167 Everyday Mysticism (with Robin Alfred)

   What does it mean to live a mystical life? Not on a mountaintop or in a monastery, but in the midst of work deadlines, childcare chaos, and the messiness of everyday life? Robin shares how we might apply the wisdom and presence of the mystics to our families, communities, and ourselves.

6. #169 Soul Journeys (with Owen & Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin)

   What are we for? This timeless question becomes the ground on which brothers Owen and Mícheál walk in this conversation. As musicians, poets, and teachers, they inherit and carry forward a lineage of song and story that reveals how art is not separate from life but a mirror of it—a way of giving voice to the unspoken parts of ourselves.

7. #170 The Flow of Power (with Dr. Annice Fisher and O.B. Amaechi)

   What is power? Where does it come from? How does power flow through our lives, our communities, and our choices? Annice and O.B. speak to how power is misused, how it can be reclaimed, and how each of us can channel it toward healing and justice.

8. #172 The Oracle in your Dreams (with Martin Boroson)

   What if every night, while you sleep, a deeper part of you is trying to speak? Martin invites us to consider dreams as nightly messages from the larger intelligence that lives through us — not random noise, but a form of guidance. Listen and wander through questions of consciousness, creativity, and what might happen if we let our dreams shape how we act, lead, and love.

9. #174 Radical Listening (Robert Biswas-Diener and Christian van Nieuwerburgh)

   Robert and Christian provide a framework for cultivating the most vital (and often neglected) skill of radical listening. In an increasingly divisive, distracted, and digitized world, it’s never been more essential to harness beyond a means of simply hearing words, but to co-create meaning and connection.

10. #175 Sacred Activism (with Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull)

    Nina and Eden delve into how to respond to ecological breakdown, political polarization, and personal loss not with despair, but with love and relational awareness, inviting us to see community and inter-being as the grounding force that holds us through times of crisis and possibility.

11. #179 The Art of Team Coaching (with Alexander Caillet)

    Alexander traces the roots of his craft back to his own origin story: a childhood marked by constant relocation, othering, and longing for belonging. It was as a student at Columbia that he discovered his calling in group dynamics, and his experience of feeling like an outsider looking in became the foundation for a career in helping others learn to belong with each other.

BONUS: I also had the distinct honor to guest on the fantastic Coaches Rising podcast, hosted by leading-edge coach and evocative interviewer Joel Monk. It was a meaningful and rich expression of my passion and mission as a coach. We explored the path to coaching mastery, including archetypal encounters, integrating wildness into coaching, using embodiment as a tool, and becoming a vessel for forces greater than yourself.

Check out our conversation here: “Including the Mythopoetic” with Andy Cahill.

Thank you for giving your precious attention to the Wonder Dome. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, and you have the means, please consider becoming a patron so we can continue to deepen and evolve this community space.

Subscribe now

Either way, know that every one of these conversations is a humble gift, and it wouldn’t be the same without you on the journey alongside us.

Go well & go bravely,

-Andy

“Mythology is not just humanities fluff […] it’s: do you dare to understand how things have been coded from first principles?”

-Rayner Jae Liu

In a time where chaos is the word on everyone’s lips, Andy sits down with Rayner Jae Liu in a vast and reflective conversation about how humans make meaning when our familiar paradigms begin to crumble.

Rayner is an evolutionary entrepreneur, executive coach, cultural psychologist, and systems strategist creating frameworks, platforms, and ecosystems that bridge inner transformation and systemic change for a complex age. He is a practitioner who moves between worlds: international relations and geopolitics, leadership development, systems and complexity theory, and mythological and archetypal thinking. In this episode, he invites us to reconsider chaos as a necessary force of disruption, revealing where our systems are no longer aligned with reality.

Together, Andy and Rayner explore what it means to live at the “edge” of dominant paradigms, asking how myth functions as a form of cultural source code, shaping how societies see, speak, and act. Drawing on Greek mythology (particularly the goddess Eris), Taoist ideas of balance and rebalancing, and lived experiences within global political systems, this conversation probes how sacred disruption can catalyze discernment, transformation, and new forms of leadership.

Show Notes:

• https://raynerjaeliu.com

• The New Paradigm Leadership Podcast with Rayner Jae Liu

• Eris and The 21st Century | Rayner Jae Liu

• Eris (mythology)

• Taoist philosophy

• René Descartes

• Systems theory

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

What is your fiercest hope for humanity?

“Convictions are beliefs strongly held. It’s responsibilities that have rebuilt societies.”

-Christopher Spicer

This week, Andy is joined by friend and neighbor Christopher Spicer — a writer, father, longtime human rights advocate, and recent candidate for Somerville City Councilor At-Large. He has served as Chair of the Somerville Human Rights Commission, participated in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, and is deeply shaped by the Catholic Worker tradition. His work centers on community listening, local democracy, and what he calls a “responsibility ethic” rooted in relationship rather than ideology.

This conversation unfolds at the intersection of local politics and spiritual practice as Andy and Christopher explore what it means to practice democracy not just at the ballot box, but in the everyday acts of neighboring, listening, and showing up for one another in times of fear, instability, and profound social change. Christopher reflects on his decision to run for office amid rising authoritarianism, ICE detentions impacting families in his community, and a housing crisis reshaping the fabric of Somerville.

Drawing from his work on the Somerville Human Rights Commission, his Catholic Worker roots, and years spent interviewing his neighbors block by block, Chris offers a grounded vision of civic life shaped less by ideological purity and more by responsibility, relationship, and care.

Show Notes:

• “Bringing ‘perspective of human rights’ to council named as aspiration for at-large candidate Spicer” by Sydney Wise (Cambridge Day)

• City of Somerville, MA Human Rights Commission

• Catholic Worker Movement

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

What is your fiercest hope for humanity?

“When you drop a team in the realm of process […] they’re one step closer to getting to the human dimension.”

-Alexander Caillet

Alexander Caillet is an internationally recognized organizational psychologist, consultant, and coach dedicated to helping organizations achieve high performance through powerful teaming. As the CEO of Corentus, Inc., Alexander has worked across more than 30 countries on five continents, bringing deep expertise in both leadership coaching and large-scale organizational transformation. Alexander makes visible the invisible dynamics and patterns that shape a team’s behavior, helping them see themselves and their operational styles with renewed clarity through blends of individual coaching with whole-team development.

In this episode, Alexander traces the roots of his craft back to his own origin story: a childhood marked by constant relocation, othering, and longing for belonging. It was as a student at Columbia studying organizational psychology that he discovered his calling in group dynamics, and his experience of feeling like an outsider looking in became the foundation for a career in helping others learn to belong with each other.

This is essential listening for coaches, leaders, team members, and anyone who’s ever wondered why group work often feels so hard — and how it could be so much better.

Show Notes:

• https://corentus.com

• The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

What is your fiercest hope for humanity?

“Service to others is my spiritual home.”

-Max Klau

This week Andy welcomes longtime friend, colleague, and returning Wonder Dome guest Dr. Max Klau. He’s an author, coach, developmental psychologist, and founder of the Center for Courageous Wholeness, who’s work sits at the intersection of inner development and systems change. His new book, Developing Servant Leadership at Scale: How to Do It and Why It Matters is part-memoir, part how-to guidebook that offers candid reflections on the challenges leaders face and the importance of engaging large numbers of people, both at scale and at a distance.

Max’s work explores how individuals and societies can confront both their “light” and their “shadow,” especially in an era of political toxicity, rising authoritarianism, and declining trust in institutions. Together with Andy, they grapple with what true servant-leadership requires of us, both individually and collectively; how leaders can stay anchored in values when stepping into a political arena rife with ego and fear; and a vision for an American civic life grounded in courageous wholeness.

Show Notes:

• https://www.maxklau.com

• https://www.centerforcourageouswholeness.org

• #33 The Inner Flame (with Max Klau)

• Developing Servant Leaders at Scale: How to Do It and Why It Matters by Max Klau

• Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert K. Greenleaf

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​

What is your fiercest hope for humanity?