The Active Voice: Suleika Jaouad and Yung Pueblo—full transcript

Read the full transcript from this week’s podcast episode

Suleika: I am so excited for so many reasons to dive into conversation with you. But in preparing for this, I noticed that we both have had very unconventional paths to our writing lives. When I graduated from college in 2010, I felt—I think like a lot of first-generation Americans—this pressure to do something practical. And so I ended up working as a paralegal and thinking that maybe I might go to law school. And it was a very short-lived attempt at a certain kind of American dream for two reasons. One was that I was a complete hot mess at that point in my life. I was totally lost. I’d had this mysterious itch for a number of months, and it wasn’t some metaphorical itch to travel the world or some other quarter-life crisis. It was a real claw-at-your-skin, keep-you-up-at-night itch.

And the other reason that that pursuit of a certain kind of American dream was short-lived for me was because almost exactly a year after graduation, I found out that I had been diagnosed with a really aggressive form of leukemia, and that the odds of long-term survival were not in my favor. And so pretty much overnight, my world imploded. I lost my job. I lost my apartment. I lost my independence, and maybe worst of all my sense of identity. And I found myself back in New York shuttling between my childhood bedroom and the hospital where I ended up spending much of that next year in isolation.

And for me, this chamber of isolation was obviously really challenging, especially at an age where you’re watching your friends on Instagram and on Facebook traveling the world, and going to parties, and dating, and all the other big and small milestones of young adulthood. And meanwhile, I felt profoundly stuck. I couldn’t do anything. I certainly couldn’t have a typical job or do any of the normal young-people things. And in a weird way, as angry and as terrified as I was, there was a kind of liberation that came with the implosion of all the expectation. The person I’d been, the short- and long-term dreams I’d had, all of that was gone. And I felt this sense of being stripped completely bare and peeled open to the world.

And within that isolation, I first dealt with it by watching every episode of Grey’s Anatomy ever made, which is a lot of episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. But the other way that I began to fill those hours was through journaling. And I love to journal so much, because it’s this rare space where you get to write for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good writer. It doesn’t matter how you use punctuation. You get to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self.

And to make a very long story short, that journal led me to writing a blog, which led me to my first writing job, which was a column I wrote for the New York Times called “Life Interrupted,” where I became a journalist, not in the way that I’d expected, but where I got the chance to report from the front lines of my hospital bed. 

Diego: One, thank you so much for just opening your heart and telling us that story. I can feel it. You had to overcome so much to be here, and I’m really grateful for that. I think it’s strange, we both graduated 2010. So, I also graduated 2010.

Suleika: Right after the recession.

Diego: Right after. It was really hard to find a job, and I was an absolute mess. I was just shattered on the inside and was totally oblivious to that. So the backstory of that is that I was born in Ecuador, in Guayaquil. My family decided to move to the United States when I was about four years old. And what we ended up moving for was opportunity, but what we arrived to was just extraordinary poverty. So growing up in Boston, my mom cleaned houses. My dad worked at a supermarket, and we were stuck in the classic American poverty trap. And that created such a heightened sense of scarcity, stress, tension. My parents were constantly fighting, trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for rent. And going through that, I tried to play as if I was strong, but I didn’t notice how much that was really impacting me.

And when I got to college, it started manifesting into just these really nasty habits of constantly intoxicating myself, constantly going out, trying so many different drugs and just doing anything I could to run away from myself. And when I left college, I still hadn’t really realized what I was doing. And I hit this rock-bottom point in the summer of 2011 where I almost lost my life, and I had just done so many drugs that my body just could not keep going. And what I ended up realizing in that moment was that what got me there was lying to myself. And I thought, “Okay, if I’ve been lying to myself, maybe if I tell myself the truth, I can pull myself out of this.”

And that ended up taking me on this one-year journey where I just started trying to do the opposite of everything I was doing beforehand. Not just telling myself the truth, but trying to build positive habits, trying to reform my relationships with my now-wife and my parents and my brother and sister, my friends. Because at that point, all of my interactions and my relationships were just really superficial. And in the summer of 2012, I did my first silent 10-day Vipassana meditation course. And that just shook me awake, and it brought a level of healing that I didn’t know was possible and I didn’t really believe was possible. And I did a few more courses, and I think it was after I did my third silent 10-day course, I felt this stream of creativity just open up. I was like, “Well, let me write about what I’m understanding,” knowing that I can still learn more. And that’s where this whole idea of Yung Pueblo started coming together, and I started sharing on Instagram, and that’s snowballed into what it is today.

And it’s been interesting because I tell people, often healing feels like first and primary, but one of the most consistent outcomes that I’ve seen from healing is a burst of creativity, whether you’re a writer or a musician or if you’re even a dentist or an architect or whatever. 

Suleika: I feel I couldn’t agree more. We live in a culture that is so afraid of discomfort. We think of pain as a bad thing. We think of discomfort as something that needs to be fixed, and that was also my mentality. And there are so many ways to numb and dodge and plaster over pain. And we also live in a culture that upholds the hero’s journey. You’re meant to return from the hardest moments of your life stronger and braver and more of a warrior for what you’ve been through. And I’ve always struggled with that kind of language, because I think for me, I’ve arrived at a point where I don’t want to have tough skin. I want to have porous skin. I want to feel the things that are happening to me, the terrible things, the beautiful things. I want to be open to it all. And I think for me, creativity was the vehicle to getting to that place. Instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it, perhaps even having the opportunity to alchemize it into something interesting or useful or maybe even beautiful. 

Diego: And I often tell people, you don’t know who you’re going to help. You don’t know. Whether you want to write one blog post or maintain a small Substack or you want to write a book or create an audience, whatever it is, you do not know who you’re going to help or the lives you may even save. So if you have something that needs to get out there, do us a service of getting it out there. 

One thing I’m really curious about that I would love if you can give us more details on, when I was looking at your Chat on Substack, people are just so hyped-up. They’re just revealing their hearts in this giant chat room. And I guess, can you let us know what was the impetus for this 30-day journaling? And I think, why do you think it sparked so many hearts? 

Suleika: So, my newsletter was born in a very unconventional way. In the beginning of the pandemic, in the very early days of lockdown, so much of it felt familiar to me, especially having gone through a bone marrow transplant, having had to wear a mask everywhere I went, to be conscious of germs, to stay on house arrest. And I started thinking about what had helped me through that long season of isolation, which was, of course, journaling, and how to bring that to a bigger audience. And so I began reaching out to different writers and artists and community leaders and just interesting people that I knew asking them to contribute a short little essay and a journaling prompt. And to my surprise, within about 48 hours, we had over 40,000 people signed up for the Isolation Journals, at which point I went, “Shit. What do I do with this? How do I keep this going? I don’t even really know what a newsletter is.”

I think part of why this project has had resonance is because we don’t try to create things from a mountaintop of experience or wisdom. We try to stay very low to the ground to examine what’s not working in our lives, to try to find creative antidotes to that and to craft them collectively. I try to walk the walk as much as I can. I write as vulnerably as I can, because I’m inviting other people to do the same. And I really believe that when you lead with that kind of unvarnished vulnerability, it creates a reverberation where vulnerability begets more vulnerability, begets more vulnerability.

And so for me, the newsletter is this ancient form that goes back to the Romans, but it’s also not a one-way letter to the world. I’m interested in making it into a conversation where there’s circularity, whether that’s happening in the comment section or in the chat.

Diego: I remember opening my Substack and realizing, this is fantastic. I have space to write. But it took a lot of me building up my courage to be like, “Okay, let me expand my format.” I’d been so used to this hyper-minimalistic format that I really love. I think there’s a beauty to minimalism, but I didn’t want to get trapped in a particular structure. So when I started just really letting loose on Substack and really sharing in much greater depth, I realized that, I think through that, I realized that I was actually also a nonfiction writer. I don’t just write poetry and prose. I can actually write nonfiction.

And I think a lot of, I would say a good portion of the book that I just released, Lighter, I would say about 10% to 15% of it was actually on Substack before, and it was material that I was testing. And I like that aspect about the way writers can exist today is you give an idea to your audience, and they give you immediate feedback. They’re like, “Oh, I love this.” Or “What about this? Have you thought about it this way?” And it’s like, “Oh, of course.” And you just keep evolving ideas, even to a faster extent and much more collectively, which I think is quite beautiful. And I would not have been able to feel as good about Lighter if it weren’t for that opportunity that I had to just play on Substack, which is really cool.

Suleika: The beautiful thing about being at Substack is we get to grow with the platform, and we get to test out these new things. I don’t think I’d ever used Chat until this month. I don’t even know if it existed. So we’re constantly reinventing and growing, and that’s what makes it fun and exciting for people like us on the creator side.

So in the spirit of community, we both opened this conversation up to the community and sourced questions from our people. So I have a question from Maggie Tarbox, I hope I’m pronouncing her last name correctly. And she asks, “I’m wondering about protecting creativity from burnout, critics, messaging that without a profit there is no purpose. What small steps can we take to push back against hustle culture and create with no expectations?” And the reason I thought of this question is that we both arrived at our creativity first and foremost as a means of survival and as a means of healing. And it sounds like the professional success was almost incidental to that. And I’m curious how if you’ve managed to maintain the healing core of creativity when it also becomes your day job and when inevitably, to go back to her question, it opens up this really sacred practice to the powers of capitalism and everything that comes with it.

Diego: Hustling for money.

Suleika: That’s a different podcast.

Diego: I love that question. I think there’s a particular importance, instead of positioning yourself like... We all have responsibilities. We all have people we need to take care of, ourselves and the ones we love. But there’s a beautiful thing where if you find your way to serve, to serve people, then I really believe in some manner the universe will take care of you, whether that’s monetarily or whatnot. So from giving, you will get. And I’ve found that my initial inspiration, which is still the same, is just to hopefully inspire people to find some way to heal themselves. I don’t care what you do. You don’t have to meditate in the same tradition as I do. I’ve found something that works for me and it works great, but it’s not the same thing that’s going to heal every single individual in the world.

But there are so many tools out there. We really live in a special time. But what I have found personally in my journey is that to stay true to that conviction, to keep writing things that I want to write, not what other people want me to write, like publishers or agents because they have an idea. They’re like, “Oh, this. If you do this, this will be really famous.” And it’s like, “No. I want to do what clicks with my intuition, and also what I feel is next for my audience and what I know is a medium that will connect with them.”

So one is doubling down on that conviction, and the other side of it is: relentlessly heal yourself. That has to be probably the number one most important thing, because whether you experience serious trauma or not, you have definitely experienced moments of strong emotion. And those moments leave an imprint on the mind. So whether we are aware of it or not, those past imprints are affecting the way we think, the way we perceive, the way we act, and there is room for your mind to become lighter. So when you do not allow other people to take that healing space away from you, and you’re like, “This is the space. I’m going to pay attention to how I want to do this unbinding work in my own way,” then it makes it easier to stay true to that original mission.

Suleika: I know from looking back at the last 15 years of my career that, oddly enough, my most successful projects were the ones that were never intended to be for the public at all, from that journal that much later became a column, from this newsletter that was supposed to be a 30-day thing and that’s it. And then tapped into something that I decided to follow.

Last year, I found out my leukemia was back, and when I was in the hospital, I was on medication that made it really hard for me to read. So to write, I was using dictation, but I started painting just for myself purely for fun. And that has become the premise of the book I’m working on now, which is a book of paintings and essays. And so I try to create unstructured time and space for those things to emerge. If I’m constantly hustling, constantly working, there is no room for new creative ideas to be born.

I go so far as to lock my phone and my mailbox until I’m done with my creative work, because I struggle with self-discipline that I have to feel alone in my mind in order to really hear my thoughts. And sometimes that requires extreme measures. I also have a Post-it on my desk that says, “If you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself.” And the only way for me to arrive at that latter part is to have the quiet to hear those things.

Diego: And it’s interesting, because the people we work with, they do love us, but they have their own missions of what they think is really important, and if you let them, they’ll just fill up all of your time, all of it. And so creating those boundaries with even our teams and our agents and publishers and all this stuff, it feels really important. And I’ve seen it not work out for people where, because they don’t create times of isolation for themselves to really rejuvenate and listen to themselves, they burn out. They stop writing. And I’ve seen a number of even great writers in my time just blip out because they just don’t have their process down. They don’t have their boundaries down, or their mission gets too convoluted and too wrapped up in the machine that they go off in another direction, and it’s tough to see that.

I wanted to ask you, so from just reading your material: you got married, you had a bone marrow transplant, you lost your beloved dog, and you turned to watercolor painting all in a matter of weeks. So that’s a lot. That’s a lot of ups and downs. But I’m really curious, what have you learned? What are some lessons that you can impart on us from all of those rapid changes?

Suleika: I want to be very careful to make clear that I don’t think a life-threatening event necessarily leads to insight or necessarily leads to revelation. That shit is hard. It brings you down to your knees. But I do think that in response to an inciting event, we have an opportunity in terms of how we choose to respond to it.

And so for me, that sense of agency has been, for a lot of this year, the only agency I’ve had. I’ve had to cede so much of my life to treatment protocols, to side effects. I’ve had to slow everything down. I had so many plans before my relapse, so many goals, so many dreams that are now deferred. And instead of living in that heartbreak and in that disappointment and allowing myself to become embittered, I decided and made a very conscious choice—and it’s not just something I did once, it’s something I have to choose every single day—to see this clearing that’s happened in my life and to pay attention to what new things are emerging within that clearing.

For much of this year, I had maybe two or three hours of usable energy every day. And when that happens, you have to get really judicious about what you want to do in those two to three hours and who you want to spend it with. There wasn’t time for any superficial fluff. And for me, that looked like writing my newsletter, because that sense of community is so crucial to me. That creative community is really the lifeblood of how I live and what I do.

And it also meant allowing myself to re-enter “beginner’s mind” in the form of painting. I didn’t want to feel pressure to be good, to make something into something usable or profitable or whatever. I just wanted to be able to play. And I’ve tried to, given that this whole year has been unexpected, to embrace the unexpected and to allow that to flower in every area of my life, in my career and my relationships to my friends, and the ways that I choose to fill my time. So yeah, I think living in that ocean of not knowing, living in uncertainty, is one of the hardest things for all of us to do. And I’ve tried to the best of my ability to surf those waves with a sense of wonder and to pay attention to what’s shifting around me.

Diego: Thank you so much for giving us... I feel like just being with you and spending time is just filling me up on the inside.

Suleika: I feel the same way.

Diego: Yeah, it’s so nice. And so just inspiring to see where all this inspiration and creativity comes from, and to see that you openly sharing your journey with us—I can’t even imagine how many people you’re helping, because that’s something that we often don’t get clearly from the internet and social media. It’s the tough aspects of life that are happening all the time, and also often what we do get is the more dramatized, extreme forms of things that are happening, whether that’s good or bad, but not the nitty-gritty everyday: I’m dealing with a sickness. I’m dealing with standing up. I’m dealing with this moment where, how can I keep putting one foot in front of the other? And it’s just interesting what we can evolve into.

Suleika: I think living in community, whatever that means—and for me, it’s living in a virtual creative community right now, because this is one of the first in-person things I’ve been able to do in a long time—is a big part of that. It’s both, on the one hand, holding close the you that only you can be, and the sacred gifts that only you can bring to the world because nobody else has grown up with your life and your ancestral lineage and your experiences, while also holding equally close the fact that we are not remarkable. Our stories are the same stories, and confronting my mortality in the last year is something maybe that I’ve had to do in a more acute way, especially at the age of 34, but it’s something we all are going to have to do. Death always feels like a plot twist, and yet it is the one thing that is an absolute certainty. And as disconcerting as that is, it turns out it’s not such a bad way to live either, to hold that knowledge close to your heart.

Diego: There’s something you said that really struck me about hitting the extreme points of life, hitting that rock bottom, almost losing your life, and not using that. That’s not a necessity. And I try to... I’ve been hitting at the same message from a different angle, where I try to let people know some of the most evolved, powerful, wise people that I’ve met have not had a dramatic beginning. And I think that’s something that is important to realize, because we don’t want to make our journey match up with somebody that we admire or we think it has to be this way. And I definitely went through my rock-bottom moment, but my wife, who’s a lot wiser than I am, she had a smooth entrance into spirituality and meditation, and she didn’t need a rock-bottom moment. She just needed that inner calling to bring her somewhere. And I think it’s important to allow our journeys to be diverse and to be their own.

So, I got one community question that I thought was really valuable, and I’m curious to hear how you overcome this. But you have been writing for years, and you write consistently. So how do you make sure that your writing is not mechanical and that it’s still coming from the heart? 

Suleika: It’s an interesting question, because I’ve actually never felt that way. Every time I write anything, I feel like I have no idea how to write, whether it’s an email or a text message or a book. I’m like, “What is this sentence? What are words?” And part of that... so, English is my second language.

Diego: Same.

Suleika: I learned English when I was six. And so I think I’m eternally in beginner’s mind with English. I’m very conscious and maybe self-conscious about my writing, even though I’ve really honed it and made it my craft. And I didn’t study creative writing. Everything I knew about writing was from reading. And the first time I took a real creative writing class was after I got my book deal. And the very first thing I did with the money that I got from my book deal was enroll in an MFA in literature, which is maybe the wrong order to do things in, but I’ve never done things in the right order.

But I also think that part of that is my process. I try to pick the form that fits the thing that I need to write, without worrying about if I’ve done it before or if it makes sense. I have to trick my brain into a more improvisational space. And this may sound highly inefficient, because it is, but I write most of my drafts by hand. I frequently write first drafts in my journal, because the journal is for me. It’s the space where I get to do whatever. Sometimes it’s a five-page meditation or whatever. Oftentimes, it’s a grocery list or a list of petty complaints that I’m having.

And so I try to create in a space where I feel like the stakes are really low. If I try to open a Word document on my computer and start writing like a real writer, all of my crap comes into the picture. And I also think the computer is where we do a lot of things—where we write emails, where we do our taxes. For me, it’s not a particularly creatively inspiring place.

Diego: Somewhat similarly to what you were describing, when I sit down and I’m going to write, if I’m going to write my next newsletter for Substack or if I’m going to tweet something or if I’m going to put something on Instagram, I often sit down, and I make sure that I have no plan. And I try to keep that mentality all the time, where it’s like, “I don’t know. Let’s see what comes out this time.”

I do think—for other people who are writers who are listening—I do think it’s really valuable to let yourself take time periods where you do write about the same topic again and again, because I have found... I remember there was a time period where 2017, 2018, I wrote a lot about letting go. And then I relaxed on the topic for a while, picked it back up in 2020, started writing about letting go again, and I realized there was a big evolution there. So let yourself say the same thing from different lenses, from different perspectives and magic happens sometimes.

Suleika: I’ll write those first drafts by hand, and then when I go to the computer, I try not to look at my first draft by hand and to just type what I remember, and the most important stuff rises to the top.

Okay. So I have a question from Catherine, who says, “I feel like my creativity has suffered over the past few years, with Instagram and social media as a whole, because I’m more concerned with other people’s output than my own. Instead of just sitting and letting my thoughts come, I consume other lives. At the same time, I’ve gotten so much creative input there, so many other creatives that inspire me. So my question for you, how do you deal with consuming social media? And what does that do to your creativity? 

Diego: Yes... The subconscious is quite sneaky, so you have to be really careful with what you consume. 

There’s this thing that I’ve learned from being on Instagram for a while, is there is a recipe for a hit. There’s a recipe for making things go viral. And a lot of that is just mimicking what’s trendy. So if you write a post about boundaries in 2021, yeah, it’s going to go viral. 

It’s challenging to not just do what you know will get you 100,000 likes, but to me, you can do that, but you’re not going to. That just isn’t what touches people’s heart. There’s a very big difference. Yes, it can get you a lot of likes, but it won’t necessarily get people interested enough to read your book. And a lot of knowing what makes a hit on Instagram or Twitter is just understanding what’s the popular topic in the moment and bringing it down to a bite-size one-line catchy thing. And what I find happening, particularly on Instagram, is that there’s a lot of mimicking, where it’s just people, they’re just saying the same thing. But that’s not what makes a writer or an author. And it’s fine to have those views too, to share something like that occasionally. But that’s something where I feel like a lot of the second-wave and third-wave generation of writers that emerge from Instagram, they stand out because they have their own voice.

Yeah, they’re still writing about these particular topics. We all want to know how to grow, how to heal, but their voice is distinct. It either was crafted or they have a knack for it. And there are authors like Brianna Pastor or Brianna Wiest, or my friend Rainbow Salt, a lot of them who are just, you can just feel their voice. It’s so clear, so inspiring, and they’re not doing any mimicking at all. They’re just telling you things from their perspective.

The reason that people stay, the reason people buy your books, the reason that people want to support you is because you’re relentlessly putting out your own version of things, your own side of things. 

And my relationship with social media now is one where, particularly with Instagram, is I’ll post, I’ll share something, and then I try not to keep it open. I try to use it as little as possible. And what I do get a lot of inspiration from is reading other people’s notes on Substack. I spend a lot of time reading things that I don’t write about. So I read a lot of science fiction. I read a lot of fiction. I read a lot of history, a lot of politics. I try to keep a global outlook, and I let these other areas influence me as opposed to the area that I’m writing in, if that makes sense.

I have a community question. I think when people saw that I was able to ask you questions, they took their shot.

Suleika: Uh-oh. Should I be nervous?

Diego: No, no. This is a good one. One person just wants to know, “Is there anything you can tell us about upcoming projects you’re working on? Any insight on what’s coming next?”

Suleika: Thank you for asking that. So, like I mentioned earlier, I cleared the whole deck this year. I was working on a different book idea. I had all kinds of plans and projects. I cleared everything just to see what would emerge. And so what’s emerged are these paintings. I mentioned this book I’m working on. Right now my working title is Drowning Practice, because “drowning practice” is what I feel like I’ve been doing every day this year. I’m also working on an Isolation Journals-inspired book called The Book of Prompts. And I’m very curious about the Substack-to-book pipeline and what that shift is looking like. And I’m about to attempt it, and it’ll be my summer project. I don’t know how much recycling we will do, although we will probably try to source some of those community prompts and essays. But I’m really excited to figure out what that looks like.

And I know I can’t be the only one. I think I saw the other day someone post a note saying that they’d just gotten their first Substack book deal through—

Diego: Oh, totally.

Suleika: —a mainstream publisher. And so I’m really excited. We were just talking about social media, about the possibilities that Substack is affording writers and people in other creative fields, not just to find a revenue stream that’s independent from social media platforms, that’s independent from sponsorships. But I’m also excited about the kind of creative work that’s emerging that wouldn’t have necessarily fit into a bite-size tweet or to an Instagram square. And I can’t wait to see what this burgeoning group of writers are going to do.

Diego: Substack is a revolution. It is something that I’ve been wanting to happen for a long time, because platforms—and really all those major platforms besides Substack—they attract you into creating content, but you don’t really get anything back. Or for most, you don’t get anything back or you get a little bit back. And to create a platform where you get, what, 90% back of whatever you make there, it is unfounded. It is incredible. 

What I ended up getting out of it was this community. Now there’s like this tight network of us who are just... I feel like these are the people who are really here for the ride and really trying to grow. And we’re going to support each other in that growth, between the newsletter for paid subscribers and the comments. But now that we have this chat room where we can all just talk about these really serious points of growth together, it’s like a dream come true to be able to be that connected in a way that doesn’t feel burdensome. It’s not the same as going through each direct message, and there being so many hundreds and hundreds of messages that you just can’t read them all day because they exhaust your energy. But something about the way that the Substack was designed, it just feels like a lighter lift. But you get so much more. And I think it’s wondrous. And I’m pretty excited to see the evolution of more podcasters coming on, not just being writers, but people who make videos and just seeing creators gravitate in this direction, because literally it’s becoming a place where it’s a real home for us.

Suleika: Yeah. Absolutely. And just to take it a step further, I’m also so excited to be in community with other fellow Substackers like you, and to get to learn from each other and to get to observe what everyone is doing. And it’s just so deeply inspiring and exciting for me. So I will end with the question you just posed me, which is what’s next for you?

Diego: I am going to release another book in October, October 10th. It’s a book called The Way Forward. And I haven’t really started the pre-order campaign yet, but it’s already on Amazon if you want to get a copy. And I’m really excited about this one, because this one culminates the trilogy that started with Inward. So, Inward and Clarity & Connection were short poetry and prose books. And The Way Forward is another short poetry and prose book. It’s about 230 pages. And the first book, Inward, was just about you and yourself and that personal growth aspect. And then Clarity & Connection was about you and yourself and other people, where obviously when you heal yourself, your connections with other people get deeper. And The Way Forward is about continuing that journey of growing, but also how do you stick with your values in an ever-changing world, a world that’s just constantly just tumultuous and changing so rapidly? So how do you stay true to yourself amidst all that change? So I’m pretty excited to deliver that one.

Suleika: Sign me up. I’m ready.

Diego: Thank you.

Suleika: Thank you so much. This was a joy.

Diego: Yeah, likewise. Thank you. This is like... My spirit feels full.

Suleika: I feel the same way.