Travel as a Force for Good: Curiosity, Trust, and the Courage to Leave the Nest

What happens when the thing that scares us is also the thing that sets us free?

In a recent episode of Leadership Story Talks, hosts Jerome Deroy and Julienne Ryan spoke with Joe Diaz, co-founder of Afar Media, about travel, transformation, and the belief that seeing the world more fully can help us live more openly. Afar was founded in 2009 on the idea that travel can make the world a better place, but Joe’s own relationship with travel began with something deeply personal: fear.

Before he built a media company around curiosity and global connection, Joe was a 21-year-old college student in Austin, Texas, driving home from an internship that was not speaking to him. He was restless, unsettled, and experiencing what he jokingly described as a midlife crisis at the age of 21. Beneath that discomfort was a deeper question about identity. His last name was Diaz. His father was born and raised in Spain. Spanish was part of his family heritage, yet Joe did not speak the language well.

Something in him wanted to change that. Something also made him afraid to leave home.

The Pain That Gets Our Attention

Joe explained that as a child, he had lived with a psoriasis-like skin condition that made him feel dependent on staying close to doctors, medications, and the familiar systems that helped him manage it. That condition created a fear of leaving the nest, a fear that stayed with him into young adulthood.

But another kind of pain had started to grow. The pain of not connecting with a part of himself that felt culturally essential began to outweigh the fear of leaving home. As Joe put it, humans pay attention to pain. When something hurts, we notice it. Eventually, the hurt of not speaking Spanish and not fully accessing that part of his identity became strong enough to move him.

One day, on the drive home from his internship, he pulled off the freeway and went to an STA Travel office. He sat in the parking lot, telling himself he was going to do it. Then he walked inside and told the travel agent that he wanted to go to Spain, live with a family that was not his own, and immerse himself in the language.

Seven days later, he was on a plane to Barcelona.

When Leaving Home Changes Everything

In Barcelona, Joe lived with a host family and faced the fear that had held him back for most of his life. Then, within a couple of weeks, something unexpected happened: the skin condition that had shaped so much of his caution simply disappeared.

The physical shift was remarkable, but the inner shift was even more important. Joe experienced firsthand that the things that seem big and scary from a distance can change once we move toward them. He learned that when we find the courage, or the outside force, to push us beyond our comfort zone, good things can happen.

Jerome noted how powerful it was that Joe did not simply offer the familiar leadership advice to “get out of your comfort zone.” He showed how that lesson was born in his own life. The message landed differently because it came through story. It was not an abstract principle. It was a lived experience.

That distinction matters. We often hear the language of growth, courage, and transformation, but stories show us what those words actually look like in a human life.

From Real Estate to Real Connection

Joe’s path to co-founding Afar was, as he described it, long and winding. After college, he joined Teach for America and spent three years teaching fifth, seventh, and eighth grade in Phoenix, Arizona. While teaching, he also began investing in real estate, thinking it might provide a path toward personal and financial growth.

But the work did not sit right with him. Finding fixer-uppers and flipping houses often meant trying to acquire properties below market value from people who were already going through difficult life circumstances: sickness, divorce, financial hardship, or other painful transitions. Joe found it hard to create true win-wins in that space. Eventually, he was honest with his business partner, and his partner was honest with him. It was 2006, the market was getting frothy, and if Joe wanted to exit, it was a good time.

Around that same period, the two men took trips together to South America and India. Their way of traveling was deliberately open-ended. They would buy a ticket into one city, a ticket out of another, and figure out the middle through conversations, introductions, and recommendations from friends. On a six-week trip to India, those introductions led them into people’s homes, businesses, and daily lives. They met people they would never have encountered through a more insulated form of travel.

At the end of that trip, sitting on a beach in Goa, they realized there was not really a home for the kind of traveler they were becoming: curious, open-minded, willing to stretch, and interested in the world not as a backdrop, but as a place of encounter.

The next day, the idea still felt right. That idea became Afar.

Off the Tour Bus and Into the Kitchen

For Joe, travel as a force for good begins with mindset. It requires curiosity, openness, and a willingness to move beyond comfort. When we visit a place, there can be a natural barrier between us and the world around us. Afar’s work is about helping travelers remove some of those barriers.

Joe described it as helping people get off the proverbial tour bus and into the kitchen. That image captures the difference between observing a place and entering into relationship with it. Travel is not only about what we can extract from a destination. It is also about what we can contribute, what we can learn, and how we can see the world through someone else’s eyes.

This is a different vision from the version of travel often sold through fantasy, luxury, or escape. Those things may have their place, but Joe is interested in the world as it really is, in all its color, complexity, and humanity. He is interested in travelers who want to meet people where they are, connect more deeply, and let the experience change how they see.

That does not always require a far-off destination. Joe pointed out that this mindset can begin the moment we walk out the front door. To be curious, open-minded, willing to stretch, and ready to connect is not only a way to travel. It is a way to live.

Resisting the Perfect Trip

Julienne raised one of the great truths of travel: sometimes the jewel of the experience is getting lost. It is the spontaneous conversation, the wrong turn, the unplanned street, the moment when you have to figure something out.

Joe agreed. Too often, travelers plan major trips as though perfection were the goal. Every moment is supposed to be seamless, curated, and controlled. But travel, like life, is not perfect. Things go wrong. Plans shift. People get lost. And sometimes those are the very moments that become unforgettable.

There is a difference between creating an excellent experience and manufacturing a perfect one. Perfection can become sterile. It can keep us inside a version of travel that is overly protected and overly managed. The deeper experience often comes when we leave enough room for surprise.

The day may not go the way we imagined when we woke up. But that is part of the power of travel. It gives life a chance to interrupt our plans.

Travel as Education

From the beginning, Afar was more than a magazine. Joe and his co-founder also created Learning Afar, a nonprofit built on the belief that travel is one of the best forms of education. The program has helped send U.S. high school students on international trips designed to open their eyes and expand their sense of the world.

Joe saw the importance of this firsthand as a teacher in South Phoenix. Many of his students had not had the opportunity to travel beyond a small radius of their neighborhood. One student, whose family had the means to take her to places like the Grand Canyon or the California coast, interacted with the world differently. Joe attributed part of that difference to her exposure to places beyond the familiar.

That experience stayed with him. Afar has since helped send more than 1,500 students on trips, supported by millions of dollars in contributions. For Joe, the larger question is powerful: what would the country feel like if a million American high school students had access to that kind of experience?

What might change if more young people could meet others where they are, see how they live, understand what they care about, and recognize the humanity that exists beyond the boundaries of their own communities?

Less “Those People,” More “Us”

As the conversation deepened, Joe spoke directly about the way travel can counter the vilification of others. We live in a time when it is easy to turn people into abstractions, categories, or enemies. Distance makes that easier. Lack of contact makes it easier still.

Travel, at its best, makes abstraction harder. It puts faces, homes, voices, meals, gestures, and stories where stereotypes used to be. It gives us a fuller understanding of other people’s lives, and in the process, it can uncover parts of ourselves we did not know were there.

Julienne put it beautifully: less “those people,” more “us.”

That is also where travel and storytelling meet. When we hear where someone comes from, who their grandparents were, what their family carried, what they love, what they fear, and what they hope for, we begin to make connections. Even across language, culture, and geography, we recognize something familiar.

The goal is not to erase difference. The goal is to encounter difference with enough attention that it expands our understanding of belonging.

Through the Front Door

Joe acknowledged that if Afar wants to share this deeper vision of travel, it cannot feel like homework. People do not pick up a travel magazine because they want a textbook. They are looking for inspiration, joy, hope, beauty, and interest. The work, then, is to meet people at a front door they recognize and then lead them somewhere that might change them.

That idea has stayed with Joe since Afar’s early days. A former editor described it as walking people through a front door they know so that you can take them out a side door that blows their mind.

That is also a useful lesson for anyone trying to communicate something meaningful. If we want people to care, we need to begin where they are. We need to understand what invites them in before we ask them to go somewhere deeper.

Story does that. It creates the front door. It makes ideas feel human enough to enter.

The First Elbow to Grab

Toward the end of the episode, Joe shared a story from Afar’s “Spin the Globe” series. The idea was simple and bold: send a writer to a randomly selected country without telling them where they were going until the day before the trip. Afar would edit the words, but not the experience.

One of those trips sent writer Ryan Knighton to Cairo. Ryan is blind, and Cairo is not an easy city to navigate. The sidewalks are uneven, traffic is chaotic, and accessibility is limited. Afar was nervous enough to call Ryan’s wife before sending him. Her answer was simple: send him.

Ryan went and had an incredible experience. When he returned, Joe asked him what the first thing was that he did when he got off a plane in a place like that.

Ryan’s answer was unforgettable: he looked for the first elbow to grab.

For Joe, that became a powerful image of trust. To put your hand on a stranger’s arm and trust them to help you begin your journey is not weakness. It is a superpower. It is a way of moving through the world that assumes people are more likely to help than harm.

Despite what we see in the news or in our social media feeds, Joe believes most of the world is here to help us. Most people want to help us get to the next step, prepare for the journey, and continue on our path. If we keep that belief front and center, it changes the way we approach travel, life, and one another.

The Journey Beyond Comfort

Joe’s story began with a young man afraid to leave home and ended with a vision of travel as connection, education, trust, and global understanding. The through line is clear. The journey that transformed him became the foundation for the work he now does in the world.

Travel, in this sense, is not simply movement from one place to another. It is a practice of curiosity. It is a willingness to be changed. It is the courage to let go of perfection and enter the unknown with enough openness to be surprised.

And sometimes, it begins with a single decision: to pull off the freeway, walk into the travel office, and say yes to the part of yourself that has been waiting to be heard.