Hi, everybody. Welcome to Becoming the People. I wonder if this is true for other people, but there are certain people whose work I read, I listen to them on podcasts when I can. I follow them on social media.

And I have kind of a running conversation with them happening only in my mind.

Kai Cheng Tom is one of those people for me.

She often shares things or writes pieces that I find deeply evocative, really challenging often for me.

They kind of challenge the edges or things that I've come to understand.

And she also writes with such a beauty and a tenderness that I feel compelled and somehow

capable of interrogating those edges or those

limits I had before. We also have a lot in common. We're both somatic practitioners. We are both

authors. We also work on issues of transformative justice. We work with groups and conflicts.

We work with organizations.

And so I think about her as a peer and teacher to me.

And this is the first time that we've ever had a conversation.

So you'll probably hear me being pretty geeked out about being able to share some space with her, to witness her, experience her. And I'm really, really grateful that I had this time to just ask even a fraction of the questions that I have for her. If you're not yet familiar with Kai Cheng

Tom, as I said, she's a somatic practitioner, she's a performance artist, she's a community

healer, and a lot of her work is about the revolutionary potential of radical love, and she focuses

on the intersection of social justice, pleasure activism, and transformative approaches to healing conflict.

She has a new book out called Falling Back in Love with Being Human.

It's a national bestseller in Canada.

And it's really, really a gorgeous book that I would encourage you to pick up, spend time with, make friends with. It's deeply intimate and

beautiful. In this conversation today, we explore all kinds of exciting and maybe dangerous

themes around monster making, harm and revenge, queerness and love, and I found it to be a really sweet and

exciting conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

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