The Wonder Dome

"Just 10 hours without social interaction has the same neural response in the brain as hunger... It's not a luxury. It's actually a biological, physiological human need."
-Ellen Buckley
What does it mean to build for the future? For humans of all walks of life, as we navigate climate change, political upheaval, and economic breakdown? Especially when many of us live in relative isolation?
I am more and more convinced that key part of the answer is housing. So I’m on a quest to find the smartest, most badass people already doing it and learn from them!
Ellen Buckley is unequivocally one of those people.
She started in real estate at 14, carrying deeds to the courthouse for her grandfather’s law firm.
At 17 she talked her way onto a construction crew as a laborer (the only woman).
Then she studied architecture at the University of Miami, historic preservation at Penn, and real estate finance at Wharton.
Today she has roughly $16 billion of real estate value across the Northeast, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Asia.
Here’s some of what we get into in our conversation:
* The article that changed her path - How loneliness reshapes the brain. Loneliness is a biological need with downstream links to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and mortality.
* The built environment isn’t passive - The moment early in her career when she watched an owner cut the wrong things for budget reasons and thought, “I need to be in that seat.”
* People, place, and partners - Profitability is the baseline. It isn’t the whole point.
* Tuning places for light, shade, and noise - And why developers only study noise when code forces them to.
* The path, the workshop, and the hearth - Three elements every project in her new platform must have, for movement, meaning & tinkering, and shared meals.
* Ceres - Her culinary-centric community in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. Building on just 28 of 94 acres, with trails, foraging, orchards, and kitchen gardens outside every door.
* The hospital wing redesigned for daylight and greenery - Patients healed faster, and the investment paid back quickly. Profit and people aren’t in opposition.
* Neuroplasticity and aging - Becca Levy’s Breaking the Age Code, and the story of a man in his 70s who memorized Paradise Lost, an epic 80,000(!) word poem.
* Plus her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs - ask the questions and pursue the answers, even when everyone else stops paying attention.
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Show Notes
* Prospera Real Estate Collective - prosperaco.com
* Ceres, Chattahoochee Hills, GA - cereschatthills.com
* How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain [link]
* Breaking the Age Code by Becca Levy - becca-levy.com/the-book
* Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory [link]
* Tinker Dabble Doodle Try by Dr. Srini Pillay (another Wonder Dome guest!) [link]
* Paradise Lost by John Miltion - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost
Connect with Andy:
* Andy on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/
* The Dome on Instagram - https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast


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The workplace is filled with human beings, not just job titles.
-Jamie Graceffa
When you hear the word kindness, what comes to mind?
In our personal lives, it seems to me to be essential. Most of us want our partners, friends, and neighbors to be kind. The golden thread that holds a relationship together is rooted in kindness: listening, care, generosity, understanding.
And it requires strength and commitment. When I’m tired, sick, under-slept, or overwhelmed, I have to pay more attention to act with kindness. Being an irritable jerk is actually quite a lot easier! :-)
But at work, the word kindness can trigger a strange allergic reaction.
Jamie Graceffa is a talent leader who has spent years on organizational culture, and on the things that don’t show up on the P&L but make all the difference. When he brings up the subject, people often roll their eyes and fold their arms and use words like “weak,” ‘fluffy,’ ‘soft,’ and ‘squishy.’
As you know by now, I’m a word nerd, so I went digging. “Kind” comes from the old English & German for kin.
Do you see the strength at the root of the word? It’s connective. Family. Relations. Tribe members. Neighbors. It binds us together as one.
When we say humankind, it doesn’t mean “human-fluff!”
Yet so many of us are stuck in places where kindness is laughed at, ignored, or treated as a nice-to-have.
Jamie is here to upend that dusty, old narrative.
Here’s some of what we get into:
* Nice vs. mean vs. kind - When a colleague makes a mistake, “nice” says nothing to them and talks to everyone else. “Mean” shames them and leaves a scar they carry home at 2am. “Kind” gives honest feedback and supports the learning journey ahead.
* The cost of festering - The absence of kindness isn’t neutral. It festers, and festering costs teams real money: attrition, quiet quitting, customers caught between groups who work around each other instead of with each other.
* Why kindness shouldn’t feel like spotting Bigfoot in your backyard - Jamie’s story of helping two older women pick up spilled pomegranate seeds at BJ’s, and their reaction that followed.
* Kind Cards - The 54-card deck Jamie wrote when he was asked to lead culture and inclusion in 2020 and couldn’t find a tool that put kindness at work into practice.
* The two wild cards - Self-kindness, and removing the barriers that keep you from taking care of yourself. Plus why senior leaders and CEOs are employees too, and lonelier than we think.
* Strategic kindness - Riffing on Adam Grant’s Give and Take, and why civility isn’t the peak of the mountain, but sometimes it’s the base camp you need: “Let’s get to civility because we need to repair. And then let’s get to kindness.”
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Show Notes
* Kind Cards - www.getkindcards.com
* Jamie Graceffa on LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-graceffa
* Give and Take by Adam Grant - www.adamgrant.net/book/give-and-take
Connect with Andy:
* LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill
* Instagram: instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​
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“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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Show Notes
* 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
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Connect with Andy:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/
* Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​
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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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Show Notes
* 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
Connect with Andy:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/
* Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​
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“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:
What becomes possible if we manage to stand upright and stay open hearted in times of chaos?
Life is inviting each & every one of us to find out. May this conversation help us along the path…
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Show Notes
* 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:
https://wonderdome.substack.com/p/129-trauma-informed-leadership-with-ff3
https://wonderdome.substack.com/p/140-the-transformed-leader-with-amy
Connect with Andy:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjcahill/
* Instagram: https://instagram.com/wonderdomepodcast​
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Wonder Dome is 100% listener-supported. To receive new posts and keep the Dome humming, become a free or paid subscriber


Get full access to Wonder Dome at wonderdome.substack.com/subscribe