🎨 Creators, Visionaries, and Changemakers—This One’s for the Revolutionaries with a Paintbrush.

This week on The Optimist Project, Yara Shahidi welcomes celebrated artivist, author, and concept artist Nikkolas Smith for a powerful exploration of optimism through the lens of creativity, justice, and bold imagination.

From designing theme parks as a Disney Imagineer to creating iconic movie posters and illustrating best-selling children's books, Nikkolas has made a career of dreaming aloud. In this conversation, he shares how his signature Sunday Sketch series evolved into a public ritual of art-as-healing—and how optimism fuels his ability to honor lives, amplify marginalized voices, and spark social transformation.

We dive into the art of balancing engineering and expression, the deeply personal process behind The History of We, and why creating moments of pressure can still be rooted in joy. With reflections on empathy, representation, and the mural he painted in tribute to Chadwick Boseman, Nikkolas reminds us that art can be both protest and prayer.

🎨 Nikkolas challenges us to see optimism not as passive hope—but as an active call to reimagine what's possible.

What stories are you telling through your creativity? How are you expressing this through regular practice?

📩 We'd love to hear your story—DM us, send a voice note, or leave a message sharing your vision of optimism.

📲 @optimistprojectpod // The Optimist Project Podcast

✨ Executive Producer: @yarashahidi // Yara Shahidi

✨ Executive Producer: @chocolatemommyluv // Keri Salter-Shahidi

🎙 Guest: @nikkolas_smith // Nikkolas Smith

📚 Explore Nikkolas’s new book The History of We : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721499/the-history-of-we-by-nikkolas-smith/

📰 Read Nikkolas Smith's National Geographic Article about The History of We: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/nikkolas-smith-book-the-history-of-we

🎧 Tune in—because optimism builds bridges.

✨ Writers, Seekers, and Tender Truth-Tellers—This One’s for You.

This week on The Optimist Project, we’re joined by writer, poet, and spiritual curator Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of the transcendent digital space Black Liturgies.

Cole’s wisdom invites us to consider optimism not as loud hope but as sacred stillness—a quiet, rooted stance that makes room for contradiction, wonder, and doubt. In this profound conversation, she speaks with reverence and clarity about the spiritual life as one of complexity: where skepticism meets faith, and silence becomes presence.

We explore the birth of Black Liturgies, the discipline of noticing beauty in the mundane, and the delicate dance between public witness and private becoming. Cole shares stories of her ancestors, the role of ritual, and what it means to create from a place of embodied truth.

✨ Cole reminds us that optimism doesn’t erase despair—it sits beside it, breathes through it, and dares to imagine a world where our questions are held, not silenced.

What questions allow you to embrace the unknown? What beauty are you making space to witness?

📩 We want to hear from you—DM us, send a voice note, or leave us a message and share your version of optimism.

📲 @optimistprojectpod // The Optimist Project Podcast

✨ Executive Producer: @yarashahidi // Yara Shahidi

✨ Executive Producer: @chocolatemommyluv // Keri Salter-Shahidi

🎙 Guest: @colearthurriley //Cole Arthur Riley

📖 Book & Online Community: @blackliturgies // black liturgies

📞 Voicemail: (323) 761-0837

🎧 Tap in—because optimism, like ritual, is an act of return.