Hello.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to January 9, 2026.

This is Sumi.

And this episode is a special episode because I know that we have been on and off for quite a while and I have been going through a lot of personal struggles and especially figuring out how to maintain this, chasing my dream of building a music career idea in the midst of such a chaotic, real political and cultural moment that I keep feeling I need to be paying more attention to and doing something more about.

It's really hard to maintain feelings of joy and excitement about our own personal goals and dreams when we see in front of us literal public executions by the government in the middle of the day, people getting kidnapped and the climate disasters, and then worries about AI taking over and gun violence and world international invasions and, you know, worries about the economy.

And it's.

I think in this moment, we're living through a really intense time and a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed, frozen, cynical and like, emotionally hijacked.

And so I've been thinking a lot about, like, okay, how do I.

How do we manage those two conflicting things?

And I know a few things.

One that avoiding reality does not help, but neither does checking out from it.

Right?

We need to find a way to be plugged in, to be aware of what's going on, emotionally regulate ourselves, and then decide how we wanna help and how we wanna go on creating joy and living our lives as well.

So I am officially rebranding this podcast to Creating Amid Chaos or Creating in Chaos.

I still have to decide.

And I think that, you know, it's the same podcast.

It's following my music journey.

It's following my journey building a music career here in LA since my transition after selling my government contracting company.

But it's with a new twist.

I'm still going to be providing, you know, talking about my challenges and how it's going and how I'm overcoming things, but also plugging into how we can, as a community, still create and still find joy and still crucially maintain our humanity in the middle of this political moment.

And I truly believe a few things.

One is that just the act of art and creation and creativity innately fights fascism.

And I think we in history, that has been proven.

And so that's why I am not worried at all that art is not a worthwhile pursuit in this moment.

It is, in fact, the most worthwhile pursuit.

But while creating art, it's important to plug ourselves into the bigger picture.

And that's what I'm taking a stand for.

We won't want to let the Bigger picture, collapse us.

But we don't want to be writing meaningless art either.

The art, as artists that we're creating needs to be reflective of the bigger cultural and political and social moment that we're living in.

And it always has.

Any true artist has always taken on that as their calling.

And so I'm super excited to step into that moment for myself.

So, okay.

Another thing is that joy is resistance, right?

And expression fuels acceptance.

I feel like those three things are kind of the core pillars of my belief system that it's critical to have joy.

Joy is not denial.

Joy is not disengagement.

But joy is nervous system regulation.

And then it allows us to stay present, think clearly, stay connected to our humanity, create, make beautiful things, make this world a more beautiful place, and have enough emotional capacity and bandwidth left to make a difference where we can actually impact change.

Whether that's speaking up, speaking out, staying together in community with other change makers, donating, voting, talking about these issues to encourage public discourse, to inform hearts and minds.

It's all so important.

All of these pieces are such an important part of this moment that we're living in.

We don't look away, but we also don't drown.

What will this podcast be going forward?

A real time documentation of me building a music career.

Yes.

Weekly progress wins, setbacks, mindsets, progress.

And it will now also include processing the political and cultural moment that we're in, how to keep creating when the world feels unstable.

And I'm so excited to offer these thoughts and share what I'm doing and create community around this because.

Because I don't think, you know, as much as I try to avoid.

I don't know if I've mentioned this or if you listening know this, but like, I.

Everything about my past, everything about my experience lends itself to this moment.

You know that famous Steve Jobs quote that you can only connect the dots looking backwards, not forward, meaning you don't know why something is happening, happening to you in your life.

When it's happening, it takes time.

And after, after time passes and you look back, you can say, oh, I understand now what that experience offered me.

I understand why I had to go through that.

Or I understand why my career took this really seemingly random trajectory.

Like, I sometimes look at my career and I'm like, I grew up in D.C. d.C. Is a very politically focused place, right?

Everybody understands government.

Everybody either works in politics, on the Hill, or as a government contractor.

And because of that, you understand government's role in society.

You understand how much policies actually affect daily Life, Right?

So I grew up with that background, and I grew a government contracting company that was the company I had and sold.

And then I went to.

I got a master's in public policy at the School of Government, Harvard School of Government, the premier institution I heard from world leaders five feet away from me.

You understand how change happens, how hard it is, right, to actually get things done a lot of the times, but how important it is and how that's really the only way forward.

And so I sometimes think how.

How interesting that after doing all of that, I decided to, like, do a complete 180 and start a music career.

Right.

But reflecting on that now, it makes so much sense.

It's like, no.

I am called as an artist to speak out about the most important things.

And it's because of that experience that I understand how to interpret what's going on right now in a way that makes sense.

And I feel almost a responsibility to do that.

And that's why inside my music career itself, I'm starting, you know, a couple.

I'm launching a couple.

Well, the albums that I'm working on right now.

Well, the main album that I'm working on is called American Dream.

And it is about this idea of the American Dream and what it means to be an American today and what the American Dream meant for, you know, centuries, and how there's so many angles with which to approach this, the idealistic idea of the American Dream, the realities of the American Dream globally, what it meant for my immigrant parents, and just all sorts of things.

So I'm really excited to tackle that in music and also bring us in community together as artists and creators and entrepreneurs or whoever you are, and understand how to.

Not understand how to, but, like, help inform the discourse and how to keep creating amidst the chaos.

So we're rebranding the podcast from Dream Life Club to Creating Amidst Chaos.

And, yeah, I think it's going to be a really, really beautiful space.

So stay tuned.

I'm currently working on the American Dream album.

I've actually written four songs on it already.

And I think it's important to just keep joy alive, keep connected to humanity, and.

And keep creating amidst chaos.

Love you guys, and I'll see you next week.