A podcast about the stories that shape reality
A podcast about the stories that shape reality
After more than 15,000 hours coaching clients one-on-one, I am certain they can.
Each episode of Personal Kosmology traces one seeker's journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that broke them open, and the questions they're still living. I'm drawn to people who didn't just change their minds, but rebuilt their lives around what they found. In their stories, you may recognize your own.
Every person lives inside a kosmology: a story about who they are, what is real, what matters, and what they owe the world. These stories bind us, and they divide us. Personal Kosmology is a podcast that listens to them, one life at a time, in search of something deep enough to share.
Each of us inherits a world before we know we have inherited anything.
We are taught what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, what is shameful, what is possible, what is sacred, what is nonsense, what is worth wanting, what to fear, and what to do.
Long before we form our own philosophy, we are living inside one.
These stories give us belonging, identity, direction, and meaning. But every story also draws a boundary around what it can see, value, and include. Every in-group generates an out-group.
To become wiser stewards of this beautiful rock flying through space, we will need more than better technologies. We will need better stories about what human beings are, what the world is, and what is worth serving. The goal is not to erase our differences, but to discover stories deep enough to hold them.
Cosmology with a C is the story of the external universe. Kosmology with a K includes the stories we live inside.
Cosmology usually points to the physical universe: stars, galaxies, matter, time. Kosmology is an archaic revival, a way of pointing back toward kosmos: world, order, harmony, and meaningful arrangement. As I am using it, Kosmology includes the outer universe, but also the inner one: consciousness, meaning, morality, beauty, longing, suffering, love, and the felt sense of being alive.
This is not just a podcast about what people believe. It is about how they came to believe what they believe, what those beliefs have cost them, what they have given them, and how those beliefs continue to evolve.
That is the premise of Personal Kosmology: the biggest questions, asked in the most personal way possible; conversations at the intersection of science, spirituality, and personal experience.
Religion still coheres billions of people. It gives language to grief, beauty, sacrifice, morality, and the sacred. But religious stories often bind one community by distinguishing it from another.
Some call science a new religion. Science gives us one of humanity's most powerful universal stories. It tells us about matter, energy, evolution, galaxies, bodies, brains, and deep time. But science, by design, is less equipped to tell us what is sacred, what is beautiful, what is worth loving, or how we should live.
The tension between science and spirituality is a gift we are struggling to unwrap.
For most of history, religion held the power and science fought for air. Today the positions have reversed: "science is real" has become its own dogma, a way of dismissing what is not yet consensus. Each story carries truth the other can't see.
Modernity did something necessary: it separated science from religion, church from state, fact from dogma. But separation is not the final stage of maturity. What has been differentiated must now be integrated; brought back into wiser relationship.
Technology alone cannot solve the problems technology creates. Our power has outpaced our wisdom. Intelligence needs conscience. Innovation needs orientation. Beauty is not decoration; often it is our best guide.
I am not searching for a new religion or a universal ideology, but for a deeper story, one capable of honoring both the subjective and the objective, both individuality and interdependence. That story will not be delivered by a prophet, an institution, or an argument. I think it arrives through conversations. This podcast is here to host them.
Each conversation is one point of light. Alone, a single life can seem private, idiosyncratic, even strange. But when enough lives are placed beside one another, patterns begin to appear. A constellation forms. The point is not to make every star the same. The point is to see what becomes visible between them when they are held together.
Each episode will be a long-form conversation organized around three themes.
What were they taught to believe was good, true, and beautiful? What was sacred? What was shameful? What was possible? What was never questioned?
These may come through awe, grief, trauma, psychedelics, falling in love, failure, illness, parenthood, scientific wonder, alien encounters, spiritual experience, beauty, death, or success that did not satisfy.
What do they still wonder about? What do they no longer dismiss? What do they hope is true? What do they fear may be true? What mysteries are they currently living?
The conversations will move through science, spirituality, religion, psychedelics, psychology, metaphysics, cosmology, trauma, money, sex, power, psychics, aliens, grief, beauty, and death. Nothing is outside the inquiry. But the tone will not be solemn. I intend these conversations to be intimate, serious, playful, strange, and alive.
This is not a declaration of fixed beliefs. It is an exploration of how beliefs are inherited, tested, broken open, revised, and lived.
For a while, I imagined this project under the name After Atheism. That name still points to part of my own story and is the title of the book I am writing about it. It names a movement beyond a worldview in which the sacred had become unavailable, unbelievable, and embarrassing.
In my twenties, I had a profound spiritual experience that did not fit inside the world I had inherited. I could neither dismiss it nor make sense of it. That rupture became part of a dark night that lasted for years full of depression during which I came frighteningly close to ending my life.
Learning to hold experiences that my existing worldview could not explain changed the course of my life. Helping other people navigate those moments, when an old story collapses and a new one has not yet formed, became an animating force behind my work.
But the deeper I got into this project, the more I realized the podcast is not ultimately about my story. It is about everyone's.
For almost two decades, my work has happened behind closed doors.
As a coach focused on personal and professional transformation, I have sat with people at the edges of their ambition, grief, power, longing, confusion, success, shame, love, and becoming.
People do not simply have beliefs. They construct and deconstruct them in every moment. Their beliefs empower them, limit them, protect them, orient them, wound them, and sometimes give them the courage to become someone new.
In private, I get to witness a rare kind of beauty: the moment someone tells their truth more plainly than they ever have before; the moment an inherited story begins to loosen; the moment something more honest, alive, and whole begins to emerge.
I want to share that beauty.
And honestly, that scares me.
My clients are often rich, powerful, and in the public eye. I am used to being the person behind the scenes. My work is intimate, and protected. It is not unusual for people I have just met to tell me something they have rarely, or never, said out loud. Over time, I have come to trust this as one of my gifts. I hold space for what longs to be shared and I can often sense the pattern beneath the thread: the belief underneath the story, the wound below the strategy, the longing driving the achievement, the question betraying the professed certainty.
I listen for the place where someone's current story stops working, and where a deeper truth is trying to come through.
I am not sure "coaching in public" is the right phrase. These conversations are not coaching sessions, and my guests are mostly not clients. But I am bringing something I have spent my life practicing into public: the art of listening for what is most true, most alive, and most ready to evolve.
I want to welcome people into the conversations that matter most and encourage the kind of vulnerability that helps us see one another more fully.
My hope is that listeners will not only hear the kosmologies of my guests. They will begin to notice their own. What did I inherit? What have I outgrown? What remains sacred to me? What story am I still living inside?
I am less interested in the next guru than in the next community; less interested in one enlightened voice than in a constellation of voices learning how to hear one another and see themselves in each another.
We cannot find harmony without a chorus.
Personal Kosmology is the container for that search: a constellation of voices exploring the biggest questions in the most personal way possible.
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