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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in
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every month to watch the show in person i wanted to be powerful and have influence because i wanted to prove
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people wrong you can't start the internet for very long without stumbling upon lily's sink lily
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i was born into the reality of being a disappointment right away there were
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rules about being a woman my mom did not grow up with queer culture so for me to
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expect her to operate from a place of my lived experience how is that math ever going to add up
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welcome to the first episode of a little late with lilly singh you got given a late night show when i said that you
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said i'm so sorry tell me why you said that because i don't think the thing was good
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the community that i did this show for is pissed at me because i nervously made a joke out of context and that broke my
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heart every day did you have anxiety at the time i developed it during season one of the show
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is the struggle worth it for me yes it is i believe in what i believe so much more than the hurt that i feel
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so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo usa edition i hope
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nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music]
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lily thank you for being here it's a real honor and we've got a mutual friend jay shelley who's really spoken so
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incredibly highly of you and then when i got a chance to delve into your story i became pretty fascinated by many things
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i want to start because i always i always believe that the foundation of everybody that i sit here with and also
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myself having studied some childhood psychology is their childhood so i guess the question i had for you is
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when you think about 10 year old lily and the lessons she had learned by that age about the world and life
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what were those lessons and where did she learn them from the lessons at the age of 10 i don't
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think were necessarily beneficial ones um i was
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born into the reality of being a disappointment right away being the second daughter in an indian family
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i was told in my adult life that my grandparents great grandparents and india didn't find out about my birth for
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about two weeks because they had said if it's not a sun is not worth calling home about so that really colored in a lot of
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my childhood because whether it was ridiculous things like oh you know girls aren't supposed to
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talk that much ridiculous things like girls aren't supposed to whistle whatever girls weren't supposed to do
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was very apparent to me from a really young age so the lessons i was taught that there were rules about being a
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woman there was expectations about being a woman and i had to fit that mold if i wanted to be
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not even accepted but if i want to make people proud i think more than anything i never felt like i wasn't accepted but if i wanted to be
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extraordinary in the eyes of people that were disappointed in me i had to fit the mold and so a lot of my upbringing was a
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little bit of this uh simultaneous i need to fit the mold but then this rebellious side of me
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being like but i don't want to and kind of negotiating that balance
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what you said about your grandparents wanting a boy and generally in an indian culture they're being a desire to have a boy how did that impact you
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i i read that you were a tomboy growing up yes yes yes yes i was obsessed with doing the rock johnson i loved wrestling
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i wore baggy clothes i rebelled in every such a way because of this expectation that was set upon me i think in my adult
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life i have learned and i don't think i knew this growing up i don't think i even knew this years ago i think this is a quite recent revelation
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that experience has put a very heavy chip on my shoulder that i carry in my adult life and i think for a lot of my
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life i was scared to admit that or i was embarrassed to admit that because no one wants to admit that they have this chip
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on their shoulder but now i fully embrace it that ship on the shoulder is for most of my life i always felt like i
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had to prove myself in every instance no matter what it was whether it was school
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grades whether it was my dancing ability whether it was how i could speak up at a family party no but in every instant i always felt
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like i had to prove myself worthy because i was born into this reality where
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being a girl is lesser in indian culture and that has followed me into my adult life and if you look at the pattern of everything i've done in my career i've
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only now connected the dots that the common thread between all of that is proving myself and so even when i started making
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youtube videos in 2010 a lot of people asked me why did you do that and i can give you the answer that i think people
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want to hear which was i wanted to create a path and no one else was doing what i was doing and sure that's all true to some extent but the real reason
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was i wanted to be powerful and to have influence because i
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wanted to prove people wrong i think that has always been that chip on my shoulder i wanted to prove that being a girl
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was worthy of celebration and so that has been a thing that has followed me so so that is truly the chip on my shoulder
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that now i'm just fully transparent about when i think about my own insecurities and the things i pursued at like 18
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years old they were all the opposite of the thing that invalidated me when i was a kid so when i was a kid only black kid
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in an all-white school parents with a broke family and a perfect white picket right you know neighborhood and so my
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pursuit in life was like if i had the things that i'd missed as a child if i had money and if i was i'd know famous
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or whatever then it would be filling some kind of childhood void i wonder when you said then i wanted to be
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powerful and have influence is that because you you didn't when you were younger as well is that part of it i think it's more so
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that the people who are the most powerful in my upbringing were men they were
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the men in my family the men at a family party that were in the corn they got to control a conversation what they said
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goes men notoriously in indian culture are the decision makers the powerful people
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and i know one thing that the men in and i don't want to paint all indian culture or men but i'm just saying as a kid it
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was evident to me that the uncles made the decisions they got to decide what was acceptable not acceptable and so i
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knew one thing that the men would understand was power money and influence
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and so i think i strived for a career that would give me those things so i could kind of prove a point to them
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being like you may not understand my value in any other way aside from money power and influence and to some extent i
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was not wrong i've done a lot of cool things in my life but the things that really
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made my dad and my uncles go wide-eyed were things like the forbes list where things like oh she's in a headline she
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has her own show those are the things that they understand to be of value and i'm not saying that's right or wrong and i'm not trying to dissect if it's right
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or wrong i just knew they would understand that and so for me to have an impact
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of course i want to help people of course i want to pave the path that's all true but those are not the things that the
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people that had power as a kid for me would understand they understand power money and influence so i would be lying to say that that wasn't a driving factor
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and you so you moved to la your youtube career starts really gaining traction you said it a second ago that you
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pursued youtube because of your very honest power and influence right but when you start on youtube there's no guarantee of power and influence right i
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know your first video did like 70 views or something crazy yeah yeah so when you started youtube a very
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strange thing to be doing back then recording yourself especially doing like funny stuff in your room or whatever for
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sure what what were you thinking like what was that yeah i was thinking a few things one was that i was always a very
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creative kid i was the kid that wanted to be the center of the dance circle at a family party i wanted i watched ace of
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cakes i wanted to bake cakes i wanted to be creative through any means necessary but i think i was convinced that
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creativity was a phase that it's something you do as a pastime as a kid your career shouldn't be creative you
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let go of that you get a real job et cetera et cetera when i was in university and i discovered youtube it was a glimpse of
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i could be creative as an as an adult i could express myself in a way that's like on
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my own terms there is no gatekeeper there's no rules this was something that i got to make the rules
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about i got to decide i built a little community of people that also were in a little bit of a dark place so i got this
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sense of connection that i wasn't getting in real life um and the real real talk of it is that i'm an obsessive
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person once i started making youtube videos i was obsessed with it i was obsessed with
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learning how to do it well exploring how else i could be creative learning how to get more views learning
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how to market myself i with everything i do i'm a very all or nothing person which has been
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a great pro but also very detrimental in my life um this type of obsessive personality especially if you you become
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obsessed about something that isn't fully aligned right which is possible right because there can be two conflicting forces the force can be i
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want to be really successful and then the other force can be saying well this isn't my purpose and they can surely come into it's also very
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problematic when you're obsessive over something that is governed by numbers
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that is a very dangerous combination when you're obsessive and your success is measured by views and subscribers and
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stats that is a bad recipe right there because i would actually be this is 2010 before youtube had a had
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very complex analytics now you can see and now you can you can know how many people with dogs on their laps are
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watching your videos like it's intense how many analytics you can get now back in the day that wasn't the case i would actually have my own spreadsheets like a
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crazy person just on my wall every day tracking okay how many views this video did this many subscribers
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there's people like an obsessive degree and i don't regret that because it
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got me great success but i've had to slowly unlearn a little bit of that to not go completely crazy in my adult life
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before that youtube phase with the spreadsheets and stuff like that did people consider you to be a lazy
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person did they do they like count you out one thing i can say is i've been called a lot of things in my life
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i have never been called lazy so when you were because that that phase before the youtube and the spreadsheets right
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what were you doing with your in your life at that phase so i was applying to grad school i had just finished
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graduating and i was applying to grad school and let me let me put an asterisk to my last comment i'm sure my parents
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would call me lazy from time to time it wasn't lazy as much it was as it was
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my heart is not in this thing so i do not i do not think it is worthy for me to put my energy into it that's what i was
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getting at yes which is how someone can go from being perceived by their parents or in my case by school as being i got
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kicked out of school for the same thing and then just years later they can see that i'm obsessed when something is in
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line with something has caught me like a fish on a home right exactly better or for worse maybe it's caught one of my insecurities and dragged me off into the
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future whatever but i just thought that was interesting that like maybe in that phase of your life others would look at you and go oh
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she's lost because the moment i walked into my parents room and i said i want to make youtube videos
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um what i actually was doing five minutes before that is i was right trying to write an essay to get into grad school and it was bad and i was
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like i'm not this makes no sense i don't even care about the outcome of this i closed my laptop right then and there and i said if i don't care about this
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i'm not gonna do well in this and so i really had to shift my focus somewhere else and that literally five minutes
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later i went to my parents room and i said i can't do this i want to try making videos on the
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internet and they were like say what now um this was in 2010 and they gave me the best advice ever and
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the best blessing ever which was you have a year so they also give me a bit of a ticking time bomb they said you have a year to try whatever you want to
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try whatever this youtube thing is you have a year and if it doesn't work out you will go to grad school and you will do exactly what you were doing five
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minutes ago and so i also had a bit of a a time period that i had to figure things out in which was a huge blessing
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because it made me every moment for that year work on making this pop off
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when you had that conversation with your parents how big were you on youtube if at all not that big not that big at all i think
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i had like my views were in the thousands probably okay um and this was 2010 like i said so i vividly remember
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when i hit 1 000 subscribers now your cat can meow and you will have like
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10 000 subscribers but this was a a lot of hustle to get to even a thousand i know this because i made a a
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justin bieber never seen every parody when thousands of breakfast i was like i've made it baby
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when you reflect now on the role that your parents were playing in your life like even then like having to go to them and then like granting you this year
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it all sounds incredibly like imprisoned you know what i mean yes i think for a lot for a lot of my
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teenage years my young adult years i probably viewed it like that i no longer do i've done a lot of work to try to
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figure out and respect my parents context which has really really helped me in their circumstances and really put
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value to it not just dismiss it so i actually think a lot of what they did although the moment didn't seem right
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and even now a little questionable sometimes it actually really helped me like this one year if they were so
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liberal to me and let me do whatever i might have not worked as hard in that one year to be honest you know and if they did not teach me
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the value of a lot of the things that they value i probably wouldn't be the person i am today so i actually don't hold that against them at all it's
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really interesting mo god a guy that came on this podcast said that when he used to work at google when they interviewed people and said would you
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erase the most traumatic or difficult moments of your life um
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knowing that it would erase all the lessons it taught you as well and everything that came with it would people do it 99 of people said they
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wouldn't no and there's an interesting thing about how we look back on our trauma because we also don't know the other outcome because it's interesting
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it's and i agree when people ask me in interviews what would you say to your younger self and what would you change i
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always say i wouldn't change anything because even those like horrible decisions those questionable moments
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they have all resulted in something really really great that's the exchange of the universe and that's just how things work magically um
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and it's interesting how knowing that right now i can sit here and tell you that i would not change anything about
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my past any trauma any pain even knowing that i will still sit here today and think
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that the pain i'm experiencing today is intolerable and not acknowledge that 10 years from now i will probably say the same thing
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about the pain i'm experiencing today something to always keep in mind we have this way of humans as humans of
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thinking that whatever pain we're experiencing right now is for sure definitely the worst pain and it cannot get worse it always does
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and we always think that it's still the worst pain when you were a kid you thought i remember when i was a kid my mom i said i couldn't get this shirt it
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said backstreet girls on it and i remember thinking this is the worst day of my life and my life is never gonna get worse than this i remember thinking
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that i'm gonna run away my mom hates me she won't let me be a backstreet girl how dare her and then years years later
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something else happened i thought that was the worst and we keep doing that as humans don't we we keep thinking that whatever this is today this is the worst
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that perspective completely true completely true been through it myself a million times i always say you know this is
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the current crisis always feels like the fatal one until hindsight tells you that the current one is the failure right um
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but what does even knowing that it still doesn't seem in my case to stop the
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current crisis feeling faithful it helps a little bit takes the edge off but when we're in the heart of
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the storm for whatever reason what else helps you to gain perspective on the situation i mean like really i
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don't mean like the advice that we give in our books and stuff i mean right what actually helps
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what actually helps me when i'm going through pain and i can't see myself coming out the other side
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is truly to i'm a very logical person in the sense that i always think about things through
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to the best of my ability facts or like diagrams i just have this brain that likes processing things and
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so i think about okay what is my success rate of getting through things
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it's actually 100 right now i sit here at 100 we all sit here everyone watching actually you sit at 100 right now no
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matter what yeah 100 is where you said that so i think about things through that lens but i also think about
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just is the struggle worth it and for me yes it is i believe in what i
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believe so much more than i the hurt that i feel and that's the balance i think we need to keep in check is it worth it is your struggle worth it and i
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think you really need to do the work to make that answer yes and i didn't always operate from a yes
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but i think now i do i believe i found my purpose and i know jay talks about this a lot but finding your
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purpose and what your purpose is on this planet helps you get to that yes so for me i think my
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my struggles are worth it i think the pain is worth it to get on the end you became
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a hugely i'm going to look back to that sort of topic in a section but to give the listeners a context you became a hugely hugely successful
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social media star creator whatever you want to call it um built one of the biggest youtube
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channels still to to this day some millions of millions of subscribers yeah that is uh that makes you in the 0.0
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whatever percent anomalies in the world so i hear the obsessive thing you said about the spreadsheets i guess that i
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thought for her to get there she must be pretty obsessed i walked in here and you were like ooh she has google doc written all over her well like there's like but
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we all i think at times in our lives probably look back and think i was also probably toxic obsessive you know
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because the things that i was ex you know especially when you're in the numbers business right and the metrics business so what else about you when you
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think about that phase of your life from 2000 and you know maybe 13 when you hit a million
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subs to where you hit 14 point whatever seven million subs what was it about lily outside of the
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obsessive part that made you such an anomaly through that phase of
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like career success in youtube this has required a lot of reflection
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because um i was trying to think recently what my purpose is going back to our
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previous conversation what is my purpose because i i thought my purpose was specific projects i would work on
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specific things in the industry and i kept thinking that's too small that's that's such a in the moment purpose like what is your greater purpose so i had to
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go look back through my life recently like what is the common thread here and the common thread between everything
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especially during this time period you're talking about can be summarized in one word and that is disrupter
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i think my purpose is to disrupt and i think i've done it continuously in my life from being a tomboy as a kid to
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being outspoken in a room full of uncles to getting into the entertainment industry not through an agent not
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through moving to la but through youtube where there are no gatekeepers from the first late night host wherever that
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historic moment was like i continuously feel the need to disrupt not because i am actively trying to disrupt because it
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is just who i am as a person and i know this even on the personal side um
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the first openly queer person to host a late night show the first woman of color first i've just been associated with so many firsts
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and i used to hate it like i used to i remember thinking and telling my therapist i don't want to be the first i don't
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want to be the first anymore i hate being the first i don't want the pressure of all this i just want to do what i love doing
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and my therapist joked and said yeah you need to pick a cause you got a lot of things going you have to pick an issue but i have since embraced that instead
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of looking at it as a thing that i hate about myself and i want to change about myself and that causes me stress i haven't accepted that
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it is my purpose to disrupt it is just how i am built i am built to break systems and molds again not because i'm
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actively trying to stir the pot but because it is just how my brain and my being operates i have to break molds
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so when you ask me that question between that time period what was it about lily it's that lily always would ask the
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question of how else can this be done and why isn't this being done this way and maybe there's a different way of doing it and when she gets told that
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this is the way things usually are done i just simply do not accept that i everyone on my team knows that's the
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worst thing you can say to like this is how things are traditionally done i just don't accept that with anything
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clearly you're someone who's built a lot of evidence that the look you just gave me is the look my parents give me just like no yeah do you know there was so
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much going on in my head and then i was thinking about different ways to take that and different feelings i got from that yeah one of them honestly was like
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especially hearing the obsessive thing listen when i ask these questions i'm not because i think because i relate to so much of what you're saying yeah i'm
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asking the questions to to pick dig deeper not because i no i love it i love it but it's just
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the look is like my parents looking at me like yeah right she likes to distract her yeah because my brain went my brain
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went oh my she's so even when you were delivering it so passionate that i felt i was like
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that's exhausting to be obsessed it's exhausting on the other hand i was thinking
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why is your brain wired to disrupt things like why so i understand the from an innovation perspective it's going to
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be fruitful you're going to create new things but why is that your predisposition is it going back to your
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childhood and saying i think still like the system i have asked that question to myself as well why is that no matter and
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this is where it can be to a detriment sometimes because sometimes i'll take simple simple tasks that are don't need that much effort but i will make it so
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i'm disrupting even those small small things maybe there's a different way to throw a party maybe there's a different way to have a friendship maybe there's a
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different way to decorate my house and every aspect i have to disrupt and it is exhausting it's absolutely exhausting
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and i've tried to figure out why why what is it in me i'm still trying to figure it out but i think
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from my work thus far i've determined that it's just that from the moment i was born i was already a disruption i
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was already that and i think that's just me stepping into my power fully embracing that's who i am and being like fine i'm not gonna
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reject that i am going to fully embrace that's my purpose in life because another thing is
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you know when you ask me about the chip on my shoulder the part of the story i didn't say is that i actually did come out the other
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end so in my adult life when i announced my first world tour after becoming a youtube success i very purposely
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announced it in india i was like i want to announce the tour in india i want the first stops to be in india i know that's
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where you know my great-grandparents are now that's where my parents are from i know it'll mean the most there to have the biggest impact so after i announced
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that tour i went and did the eight-hour drive to visit my grandfather for the first time in my adult life i had never
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met him as an adult before and this was the the grandfather where and i
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hold nothing against him because i again i respect people's circumstances but he was the one that didn't want to hear
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about a daughter who didn't believe a a daughter in the family would be worthwhile he was standing outside of his house and
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greeted me with a flower garland and he said the words to me this is like an 80 year old indian man said the words to me
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i was wrong you have made this family more proud than anyone else could have ever done and he showed me all these
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newspaper clippings he had saved with me so that moment for me also validated
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what disruption can do it can make progress progress comes from disruption and
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breaking systems and so i think that for me was a very and i i remember it so vividly because it did leave such an
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impact on me but that for me was like look this is what disruption can do this is what the uncomfortable
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process results in and am i right in therefore concluding that that disrupt the the fuel of the
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disruption was that chip on your shoulder and it creates almost a bit of an injustice and a sense of anger in people
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that i've seen so many times in myself and thinking about my friend umar who's come comes from a somewhat similar
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background an indian guy went on to create a billion dollar company he he he grew up with this internal just almost
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frustration anger this sense of trying to correct an injustice and that manifests this chip on its shoulder and
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i guess life if you start with that predisposition and you go through life with that idea
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of like disrupting the status quo you will win and that will reinforce that yes so now imagine when i work with
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you if i came up with a conventional idea you know from 33 years of experience that the rewards are on the
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other side of the disruptive you know what we call first principle thinking when you go to the extra effort of
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thinking about something from fresh right and that's um it's that i also will be really honest i thought
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that that moment of uh my grandfather knows now he knows what's up he knows my name would
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eliminate the chip on my shoulder it didn't i don't think it will ever actually go away why um i'm still trying to figure
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that out i think it's because that same chip is still reinforced in so many other places in the world
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it's still that i'm was the only female late night host and so when i was at that seat in that table surrounded by
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men that chip was just reinforced it's like a neutron exactly so i think it keeps getting reinforced it was never
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just about my grandfather it was just about the system but that is also i would just say i have to get really
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honest and say that mixed with ego once you get a bit of success i think jay-z says success is the most addictive drug
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it is once you disrupt and it comes out the other end and you see how amazing it is you're like i just keep doing this i keep doing this i need to keep
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disrupting i need to that's been something i've had to really meditate on in my adult life is that
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when does that stop when does that desire just more and more and more and more disrupt disrupt when when when when
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does that stop yeah that can be the real enemy of happiness right absolutely yes happiness is often right here but we
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can't see it because we're still trying to chase it that way we're still trying to it's always the
00:25:14
it's in the future mentality you know happiness will come success will come these things will come maybe it's like
00:25:20
right now right even saying that there is not enough right now yeah because i say that
00:25:25
to a lot of people but still struggle with it you have to do a lot of work it's a lot of work it's not just where it's a lot of work and how you assign
00:25:31
value to yourself how you assign value to other things for most of my life i've hustled so i built an entire brand out
00:25:37
of hustling anyone that knows anything about me it's a hustle harder hustle she wrote how to be a boss or first book it's a
00:25:43
now over the past two years i've done the work to not hustle less i still work very very hard but it's what does all
00:25:49
this stuff actually mean what is the value you tied to this stuff is what you thought it was going to be i think you
00:25:54
can only learn that once you get there and you get it and you're like oh it's not giving me the feeling i thought it was going to give me and it probably never will because of this value we've
00:26:01
assigned to all this stuff have you gotten to the point where you you know that you are enough
00:26:07
who this is turning to therapy what did you think it was gonna be clearly never listen to this vodka okay i'm gonna
00:26:13
cancel my therapy appointment i saved myself 300 um we charge
00:26:20
um i am just now actively right now in the process of believing that
00:26:27
through writing my latest book my latest book was a lot about that it was about am i enough right now because i think i'll be honest it's a buzz word oh you
00:26:33
are enough like for example kids are born these days and we it's the first words we tell them are you enough you're not you're great just the way you are
00:26:40
i think we need to find the balance of hard work and spirituality of business and spirituality there's intersection of
00:26:46
these things where yes i think now i'm a full complete human being does that mean i don't have goals and aspirations i
00:26:51
don't want things i still have all of those things but i'm at the point right now where those things whether i have them or
00:26:58
don't have them will not impact the way i define myself see a lot of
00:27:03
my life i've defined myself as youtube sensation late night host actress who has this
00:27:10
role i am doing the work to realize that i'm actually a complete human being that has value aside from that and those things
00:27:16
are just cool things and experiences i get to do and i can strive to be great at them i can perfect my craft but i'm
00:27:22
not lesser if i don't have those things and i'm not more if i do have those things this is an active thing i'm working on
00:27:28
and when you get to that place if we are lucky enough in our lives to get to the place where we realize we're enough that's you know i had this really
00:27:34
interesting conflict in my life which i'm sure that listeners have heard about before where when someone said to me one day maybe
00:27:39
seven years ago they said you need to realize that you're already enough i remember thinking what a load of [ __ ] yep i'm not gonna get out of bed if i have that viewpoint i don't
00:27:46
need to strive for anything [ __ ] get out my office right and then upon reflecting on that writing my book
00:27:51
whatever i realized that my thought that knowing you're enough inhibits ambition is actually false what it does knowing your
00:27:58
enough kills fake ambition the minute i knew i started to get closer to realizing that i was enough my ambitions
00:28:03
were all things that i actually wanted that were actually in line with my so it's this weird paradox of when you know you're enough it doesn't inhibit
00:28:09
ambition it's the foundation of real ambition it gives you a lot of clarity i think and you're absolutely correct
00:28:16
because when you don't feel like you're enough everything feels important
00:28:21
everything feels like something you have to obtain everything feels like a challenge you know when i didn't feel like i was enough and i felt like i am
00:28:27
the late night host i am this actor i i am my job this is what defines me if anyone asks me who i was i would never
00:28:33
answer as i'm patient friend i'm a nice i would be like i'm in this show i mean that's how i would
00:28:40
or i would define myself by my struggles which is another whole thing not by ever my potential i would never say i'm someone who's gonna change the world
00:28:47
because of xyz i would say i'm someone who had a really tough childhood we either define ourselves by our struggles or by these other external validations
00:28:54
and accolades that we think are important when i did that i would care so much for
00:28:59
me what was so important was i need to prove this troll wrong on the internet i need to that's that's my priority i need
00:29:04
to prove this troll wrong i need to get this rating i need to and then the second i was like you know what
00:29:10
my purpose is to disrupt uh i know what my values i'm a complete person already suddenly that stuff became way less
00:29:16
important to me suddenly i was like oh actually my priority is going to be
00:29:22
i want to tell stories that i think are really meaningful i'm not saying that it has to
00:29:27
be a box office breaker in that i'm saying i just wanna tell stories that are important you things
00:29:33
become a little more clear when you accept you make space for priorities to become clear when you stop pretending
00:29:38
that all this other stuff is important so i totally agree that is something i struggled with where i thought and i think that was my resistance against it
00:29:45
when people would tell me you're enough and when they just tell kids they're like no that kid's gonna grow up and they're not gonna they're not gonna
00:29:50
become anything if you just tell them they're enough again i still think that there's a intersection between hustling and
00:29:56
spirituality i don't think we have to pick one or the other i really don't i think there's a way for both of those things to co-exist but i do it has
00:30:03
become apparent to me that being mindful feeling like you're enough
00:30:08
it actually allows you to hustle with more clarity i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as the seasons
00:30:15
have begun to change so has my diet and um right now i'm going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a
00:30:21
lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last
00:30:27
four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two months i go to the gym about 80 of the
00:30:34
time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker online that we all use together we call
00:30:39
it fitness blockchain and i'm currently at 81 percent um so 81 of the days i've
00:30:45
done a workout in the last 150 days right so i'm going to the gym about six
00:30:51
times a week that's been a little bit impacted by the derivative live tour but i'm trying to stick to it
00:30:56
and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the
00:31:05
heel protein shake thank you hill for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which is the one
00:31:11
my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one you know when people are saying
00:31:17
oh you need to get this rating and you're thinking well i'm going to prove them wrong and whatever and you're getting dragged by external you know
00:31:22
measurements or validation and then you get to the point where you say you know what i actually just want to tell stories people reach that crossroads a lot in
00:31:28
their life where they've kind of like built an identity in your case tens of millions of followers by doing something
00:31:35
and then you know in other people's cases it could be they're working in as a lawyer and then they they catch sight
00:31:40
of what their purpose might be and at that crossroads life says to you if you go down that route you're going to lose
00:31:47
a lot of this stuff that you've built i know it's not aligned with you but you're going to lose friends a network
00:31:54
an identity don't go down that road right and you face that so clearly in your life that crossroads
00:32:00
and even leaving youtube you know when you have 14 million
00:32:06
you have your damn mind yeah but yeah totally but tell me so like at that crossroads in life what advice would you
00:32:12
give to people when in your case you're one of the ones that really had you know i don't want to say a lot to
00:32:17
lose because that's a presumption right so it's like the public would think that you had a lot to lose by taking a different route
00:32:23
right you're absolutely correct i think one of the reasons i for so long kept holding
00:32:29
on to the strings of youtube to be like no i want to do other stuff but i'm still going to do this i want to do that stuff but i'm still going to make these videos i'm still going to dress up as my
00:32:35
parents was that it was that i didn't want to lose this traction i had this audience i had this instant
00:32:40
gratification i had of having this massive audience at my fingertips i also to be honest i was scared of this
00:32:47
term relevancy i think relevancy is used as currency these days like you're not relevant so you're worth less now and we
00:32:53
have this this way to measure people based on relevancy this can be summarized in one easy sentence
00:32:59
which is you cannot expect to grow and also stay the same it just cannot happen you have to make
00:33:06
room for growth and so in order for me to fulfill my ambitions
00:33:11
of i want to do stuff with movies and tvs and i want to i want to just do all this other stuff that is me growing in
00:33:17
my craft i cannot stay the same i can you have to make space for that you know
00:33:22
i also always think about if i have again going me going back to diagrams and the way my brain thinks if i have
00:33:28
100 energy at the start of a day i can only spend 100 energy no more energy is coming i you have a hundred so where are
00:33:34
you going to put that energy it can be to old habits it can be to holding on to the relevancy but then that limits how
00:33:42
much energy is left for growth so it really is just a decision you have to make of making room for growth
00:33:47
and when you did make that decision back in 2019 to to was it 2019 you left youtube
00:33:54
i still ok yeah but yeah i think around 2009 to where i stopped consistently uploading
00:33:59
videos yes so um when i read about why you left youtube there was clearly some symptoms of life
00:34:06
saying to you you're [ __ ] up here in some way what were those symptoms i think doing things because you feel
00:34:14
like you have to doing things because you feel like you owe people doing things that you're not really passionate about um and feeling like you don't you
00:34:21
haven't given yourself permission to grow and how does it emotionally feel um
00:34:26
stagnant i felt like i was trapped i felt like i owed people
00:34:32
this version of myself that was stuck in space and that was not allowed to grow i felt not creative i felt um
00:34:39
not free and i felt like even though i what i loved about youtube
00:34:46
was freedom i can post whatever i want whenever i want there's no gatekeepers i felt trapped in that system it became
00:34:52
the exact opposite of what i loved about youtube which was you have to serve every monday and thursday you have to post a video you have to appease these
00:34:57
fans it has to be like this has to be this long if it is the algorithm it became the exact same thing i never wanted in the first place which was to
00:35:03
be trapped in something like that and so um it just it stopped feeling right to
00:35:08
me it stopped feeling like a place that i could grow and learn and thrive the lily that i would see on camera at that point in the lead up to you deciding to
00:35:14
depart versus the lily that would be there right after you stopped recording tell me the difference between those two
00:35:20
people yeah she's just as weird in both instances i can tell you that she's just as weird she's just as quirky but one of them was definitely a bit more
00:35:26
performative pretending to be a little bit more passionate than she was
00:35:31
pretending not to be tired and exhausted and pretending to be excited about what she was doing i think after i turned off the camera i was like oh god i gotta
00:35:39
edit this thing i gotta do this thing i gotta go through these there was no growth it was just such a repetitive pattern and
00:35:45
as a creative i didn't want that that's if i wanted that i would have just done the grad school thing right
00:35:51
and then obviously you get this big um opportunity which is well written about and i've watched the episodes i've
00:35:57
watched season one and season two first grapes no no why did you say i'm so sorry
00:36:02
so first of all the context of the for people that don't know so you got given a late night show you were the first woman of color
00:36:08
to be like over 30 years yet and over 30 is to be led into that boys club on a major network
00:36:15
when i said that you said i'm so sorry tell me why you said that because i don't think the thing was good
00:36:20
and i'm not necessarily proud of it you know when i
00:36:25
got the show again me being the streptor the whole first season the the advertising was
00:36:31
we're gonna break the mold we're knocking down the doors of late night we're gonna do things differently and then i proceeded to do things pretty
00:36:36
much exactly how they've always been done why um because for the first time in my life i was in a
00:36:43
situation where i could not call the shots i couldn't make the decisions i didn't
00:36:49
have the resources to do things differently the system is not built to do the issue the system is not built to do things differently
00:36:55
it's hard to do things differently when you're told okay so the episode has to be exactly 22 minutes and 23 seconds it
00:37:00
has to be that amount of time can't be a second over it cannot be under the acts have to be broken down like this because
00:37:05
our commercials have to go in these time things so you had a joke that went there can't go there anymore you have to do it like this oh you're following jimmy and
00:37:13
seth and the audience is kind of used to their formats you can do things differently but it has to start with a monologue so you have to come out you
00:37:19
have to hit the mark you have to do the monologue so many times when i did that monologue which was the worst part of the show it
00:37:25
was like a 10 minute monologue of mediocre jokes because i had a
00:37:30
tiny writer's room and very few resources this is to no discredit to the writers i just had such few writers that
00:37:36
were too overworked there were episodes where i would miss the mark and i would mess up and it was the best part
00:37:42
of the show and i would have to do it again to get it right and i would always think why can't we just put the mess up on air
00:37:49
the best part of the show even beyond that was before we were even rolling i would go out and i would warm up the audience and i would just riff with them
00:37:55
and talk some jokes and it would be so just natural and funny and you would
00:38:00
never see that in the show why we didn't have enough cameras to shoot the audience so
00:38:06
we couldn't put it in the show so the system was not built for breaking the mold
00:38:12
at that time did your gut tell you something was wrong absolutely from day one i thought
00:38:18
this is going to be very hard it's gonna be very hard to make something that i'm proud of here and i
00:38:26
when what i hated about it was the proudness and the pride was of something superficial i was proud of the headline i was proud of the historic nature of it
00:38:33
i was proud that i got to make history but none of the work could back it up and that broke
00:38:39
my heart every day to know that i'm just riding this headline and i'm not going to be able to deliver on this there was
00:38:44
episodes i visually remember this there was a several episodes where i would be with my we didn't even have a showrunner it was
00:38:50
my head of development for my production company who acted as the showrunner for the show and i would be walking and the
00:38:56
show would be starting in five minutes and we would be going over the monologue and i looked at her one and i said this is not funny
00:39:02
and this is not good and i don't want to go out there and i don't want to have to pretend it is
00:39:08
and she looked at me and she said it's a quantity game it's not a quality game and that broke my heart because
00:39:14
late night is a quantity game it's i shot 96 episodes in three months and i don't want to come across if i'm
00:39:20
complaining and all this but i'm trying to highlight that it was very difficult for me to go into
00:39:26
the system being the control freak guy and being the disrupter and just try everything to disrupt it and it's just
00:39:32
too rock solid to be disrupted i asked these questions in part because i've just joined a show called dragon's
00:39:38
den okay which is like shark tank yeah yeah five of us that investor walks in and since then i've been offered a lot
00:39:44
more shows right and i mean you've been there right loads of [ __ ] loads of proofs coming in for shows
00:39:50
big promises whatever and some of them are really tempting because it says oh you're gonna be on netflix but then my gut says to me
00:39:57
that's a [ __ ] show though that is a piece of [ __ ] so i'm asking from a perspective of advice when you find
00:40:02
yourself in the in the shadow in the shadow of a great temptation i'm you know steve butler might be the first whatever whatever
00:40:08
whatever but i but i look at what's going on the system in which i would be
00:40:13
operating as you did what advice would you give to me based on the lesson you've learned in
00:40:18
hindsight i will answer this question by telling you exactly that the lesson i learned which is
00:40:25
it wasn't until the show finished that i really had to reflect on that experience be like what am i gonna do differently
00:40:30
you see when i was offered the show the first time it was brought to me i actually said no people don't know this i said no
00:40:36
and it disappeared for like a month and it came back to me again and i thought okay the universe is sending this back
00:40:42
to me again let me let me evaluate this the reason i said no first was because i never grew up with the dream of being a
00:40:49
late night host i know some people have that experience where they're like i grew up with late night television watched every night
00:40:54
i don't think my mom could tell you what jimmy's last name is like she they never watched late night they i never grew up
00:41:00
with that experience so it wasn't my desire it wasn't my passion to be a host um so that's why i said no but when it
00:41:06
came back around and it was explained to me the historic nature of this three things came into play one my sense
00:41:11
of responsibility and duty and to my ego those things together i was like i want to be part of this historic moment that
00:41:17
would be really cool also i have a responsibility for this because what if i say no and it goes to someone else then this history is never even made and
00:41:23
we never even got this shot so all of these reasons that i thought were so valuable and valid is why i said yes i was naive
00:41:30
to think that that would be enough to get me through those long shoot days it wasn't because i would come home at the
00:41:36
end of 96 episodes in three months broken and i would think
00:41:42
that was not fun and i didn't enjoy that and i have no memory or no positive thought
00:41:48
to even show for that hard work i learned the value of having fun
00:41:53
and doing things you're passionate about i believe more than anything else those are the things that actually contribute
00:41:59
to longevity more than anything else even money ask any person with a lot of money
00:42:05
you'll go tired of money you'll go tired of buying things you will never grow tired of having fun and being passionate
00:42:11
about something and so since i wrapped that show any project that comes to my desk now
00:42:17
my agents will be on the phone and we'll talk about the money for a while we'll talk about the schedule for a while and then i'll dedicate an amount of time
00:42:23
i'll say okay now we're going to talk about if i'm going to have fun and if these people are actually nice to work with and do i even care about this do i
00:42:30
care about this and what is this do i even care about the message here what this is saying if my answers are no
00:42:35
my definition of success right now is that i will not say yes to it i have to have fun right now where i am or i'm not
00:42:41
successful so that's my advice to you is don't undervalue fun and passion because
00:42:47
those you will never go tired of those things it makes it even more difficult in that
00:42:53
situation where you're coming home after filming those nuts by the way which is a ridiculous number of anything
00:42:58
this should do the math for everyone that's two to three episodes a day and traditionally late night house do
00:43:04
one a day so you're coming home exhausted after doing something that you didn't find fun right and then
00:43:10
the exacerbating factor of all of that which i i reflect on and i say to myself steve you've been able to deal with this
00:43:15
part as well is the show was by some people well-received but by others heavily criticized
00:43:21
specifically the community which is the youtube community you'd come from people made very hurtful very
00:43:28
shallow criticisms sometimes your personal criticisms about you in the show yeah
00:43:35
unless you're the superwoman which is the pseudonym i think he used to go under that has got to
00:43:42
doing something you don't enjoy that is not aligned with you and then being criticized for it
00:43:47
is like the holy trinity of a bad place to be right 100 even you saying this has
00:43:52
given me a fourth pimple on my cheek and i'm sweating because it does it does evoke an emotional response out of me
00:43:58
and it's not just the youtube community it was the south asian community that i got critics from it was a queer community that chris says
00:44:04
every and every community there was people not all but there were some people that were criticizing me that's a really hard pill to swallow when i just
00:44:11
finished telling you that part of the reason i said yes to the show was to help pave a path i felt a responsibility
00:44:16
to communities the tough part about being a minority anything is that so many people are counting on
00:44:24
you to reflect their experience the best you can do is reflect your own the best
00:44:29
i could have ever done is talk about my experience and my lived circumstances
00:44:34
that's never going to satisfy over a billion south asian people queer people women that's half of the
00:44:40
population right there there's no way and that's the hard pill to swallow to know that you can go out there try your best and still because you're the only
00:44:47
one people are going to criticize you i think that is not discussed enough about why it's so hard to break through it's
00:44:54
because so many people are counting on you it's an unrealistic expectation i also had to
00:45:00
and this is way easier said than done and i'm still working on it i had to learn
00:45:06
not and i mean this with love but i mean this very bluntly not to take advice from people giving it from inside their
00:45:12
comfort zone the amount of people especially on youtube that would
00:45:17
criticize the jokes on my show the delivery on my show the sound quality of my show without ever
00:45:24
never having stepped foot into a late night studio as a logical person i have to i have to
00:45:31
shut that down because that's the equivalent of me watching basketball and being like you missed that three-point shot oh my god i
00:45:38
could never make that shot so i really had to retrain my brain to
00:45:44
take away value from certain people and add value if jimmy fallon wanted to give me critique on my show i would have been all ears and taken notes and been like
00:45:50
thank you so much but if some person on the internet has never done this i simply cannot take their critique
00:45:56
seriously and i know some people hear that and they think that's a really perhaps
00:46:01
snobby way of looking at things but not really no practically speaking you cannot take advice from people
00:46:07
who are doing it from inside their comfort zone because they actually don't know what they're talking about in that period and especially in this
00:46:14
sort of the cloud of that criticism was there a particular day where you go that was my hardest day emotionally how
00:46:20
i felt where it all just got because i've had those moments in my life where all the factors just line up on one
00:46:25
particular day and i think yeah yeah this one's hard to talk about but for the sake of having honest conversation
00:46:31
in my first season the first season was by far way tougher than the second the second i
00:46:38
tried to make it more fun i put more of my team into the staff i trust but the first season was really tough this was
00:46:43
the 96 episodes in three months i talked of this was um we didn't even have a show runner
00:46:48
we had half a dozen writers which is half of what usually late night shows have i was just worked
00:46:55
to such an extreme like my from morning to night was just at that studio i was a writer i was trying to produce i was
00:47:02
trying to host i was just in such a bad state and one of the tasks that was on my plate
00:47:08
because of me i said i had to do this was i had to watch every single episode before it would air so at the end of a
00:47:14
shoot day at like 10 p.m i would sit alone in that studio and i'd watch the episode to be like
00:47:20
is this good and then one of the eps said you don't need to do this we can watch the show for you take
00:47:27
this off your plate and after much convincing i was like you know what today i'm so tired i'm not gonna watch this
00:47:33
episode this episode was my interview with jessica alba and even though it was not the first
00:47:40
episode to air it was the first one we shot because we shot out of watch was the very first episode we shot i'm
00:47:45
obviously so nervous i'm so new to this i'm trying to be funny jessica alba had made a comment about
00:47:51
her kids and how they tied towels on their head with cherby twists and in an effort to try to be funny and try
00:47:58
to sound personable and make her kids not embarrassed i said oh i have lots of friends that tie turbans and in my head
00:48:04
when i said it i was like it's the coolest thing ever there's nothing to be embarrassed about like i'm so familiar of course not hearing the sentence of
00:48:12
towels on heads and turbans in the same sentence and how that could be really problematic historically
00:48:17
that was the one and only episode i did not watch before it aired the one out of 96 episodes and the very next day i was
00:48:25
getting dragged on twitter the sick community was so upset at me i apologized profusely
00:48:32
and i remember that day i was just the lowest i've ever been where i thought
00:48:37
the community that i did this show for is pissed at me because i nervously made
00:48:42
a joke out of context i didn't watch that one episode so i beat myself up about that and then i
00:48:48
watched every single episode after that again and tortured myself all over again but that was really tough for me to to
00:48:55
to feel like i let so many people down to feel that i didn't get the benefit of the doubt of just being a human being that was nervous and misspoke and to
00:49:02
also have this idea validated in my brain that oh if you don't do 300 if you don't
00:49:07
watch every episode if you don't do every job it's gonna come back to bite you so that was a very unhealthy moment
00:49:12
for me um and that was a really tough day if i was a flow on the wall that day in your room in your bedroom what would
00:49:19
i have seen a lot of crying i think i cried though like in my green room that day
00:49:24
i remember my friend actually came to visit me because he was like oh i know you're in bad state i didn't even realize he was there i was just staring
00:49:30
into space the whole day just i just felt like crap the whole day
00:49:35
for weeks i still do talking about it i still feel like crap did you have anxiety at the time i
00:49:40
developed it during season one of the show she developed here i never was an anxious person
00:49:45
um i think 2019 this show maybe even leading up to
00:49:51
the show i definitely developed anxiety for sure where i would like be in my green room not
00:49:57
being able to control my body's responses not being able to control my thoughts like that definitely
00:50:02
was something that developed during that first season of late night and then the second season you enjoyed it much more i enjoyed it much more
00:50:09
because i was able to make some changes i thought we're not gonna shoot a studio i'm gonna shoot in a house i'm not gonna
00:50:15
do a monologue i'm gonna do a rant these things alleviated some of the pressure from me um did i still think it was the
00:50:21
most amazing thing we ever made no i thought it was better but the thing is people had already made up their mind
00:50:26
after the first season after that first season because it wasn't instantly which is another tough thing about any new voice trying to do
00:50:33
every anything if you don't impress people right away they're giving up on you
00:50:38
like the second season of the show i truly believe if that was the first
00:50:43
season of the show people would have been like oh she actually broke the mall she's doing something different but you can't get
00:50:49
there you gotta go through the process trial and error you gotta every show in history has taken many seasons to find
00:50:55
his voice and find its footing but it's the when you are a minority you're just not given the benefit of the
00:51:00
doubt you know there's something that i really take away from this as well which kind of goes back to the first question i asked
00:51:06
on the topic which is um that even in the face of like temptation i need to make sure that i hold on to my values my
00:51:12
professional you know my personal values and you know people offering me a netflix show whatever if it compromises
00:51:19
my like creative and personal values then i have to say no regardless of temptation until they are going to allow
00:51:26
me to do it in line with who who i am like the creativity that you have that made you successful
00:51:31
may i offer you a please a devil's advocate perspective here because i've also had this conversation my brain lots
00:51:36
and lots of times i wish that
00:51:43
i'm just i'm going to speak from the south asian experience specifically as well because that's my lived experience but i wish we could hold out for when we're allowed
00:51:50
to do things exactly how we want to for them to get done i truly believe if we were to all do
00:51:55
that nothing would get made and i think that everything is progress
00:52:01
and so i think it's balancing the line of like i want to be true to my passion my vision but there is a little bit of
00:52:06
compromise i have found has to happen and as painful as it is that's why i don't regret the late night show i think
00:52:11
that compromise had to happen because when you when i'm in rooms right now with my production company and i'm
00:52:18
having meetings with netflix and the hulu's and all these people the room of people giving me notes
00:52:24
do not look like me they still do not so the option i have is to
00:52:30
mold the show into a way that is slightly palatable for them so it gets made so that another show like this could
00:52:36
potentially get made and i use never have i ever as an example the historic show on netflix is number one in 30
00:52:41
countries because of that show other shows like that will get green light other south asian stories will get greenlit because of that show so that
00:52:47
show has proved to be a great path paper for sure
00:52:54
do i believe in my heart that that's the exact show the creators wanted to make and that they didn't have to no i think
00:52:59
they had to understand that progress has to be made so often when i'm in these rooms
00:53:06
i get irked and i think you're not understanding the cultural nuance i don't want to cave on this i don't want to explain to you what diwali
00:53:11
is i don't want to have to phrase this like this i have to ask myself the question is it better to hold my ground and have
00:53:18
the show not be made or is it better to get it made seventy percent of the way i wanted to
00:53:25
be made so that the next iteration of the show can be 80 and then 90 and then 100 that is the reality of minority
00:53:31
storytelling right now and i wish it wasn't but that's what it is so it's negotiating those that reality a little
00:53:37
bit as well and that's not just a just a minority storytelling thing that's like i was thinking about various
00:53:43
facets of life and business and negotiation when there are multiple factors at play there are stakeholders who have a say they're investors there's
00:53:50
a timeline that constrains you there's a limitation on resources right as you described all of these factors cause an
00:53:56
unavoidable compromise where you have to go you know but i guess it's that balancing act of like what are my non-negotiables
00:54:02
then what am i completely not willing to negotiate on um after the second season of the call you get a call saying that the show's not
00:54:08
going to be continued tell me about that day so
00:54:14
i'm gonna describe it as mutual although yes the network does control like what's what they're gonna put money towards or
00:54:19
not i was secretly hoping two things and they're both completely contradictory
00:54:25
half of me was like i know this show is a win for the community it has to keep going it has to
00:54:30
keep going or else it's going to be a fail for the community so i wanted it to keep going the second part of me was
00:54:36
i really hope this show doesn't keep going because i'm going to literally collapse and die if this keeps going
00:54:42
um and i always judge things by what my gut reaction is to them so when i got that call
00:54:49
my gut reaction was actual relief that's how i knew that it was the universe doing me a favor i would never do for
00:54:55
myself because if they let me i would have tortured myself for 10 more seasons honestly i would have the universe gave me something to never got myself
00:55:01
i got that call i felt a wave of relief knowing i would never have to torture
00:55:06
myself in that exact situation again but it also going back to what our purposes and getting clarity it made things a lot
00:55:12
more clear in my mind and in that moment i was able to see oh this has been a huge distraction from what i actually
00:55:20
care about and i actually want to do this was an obligation this was something i thought i had to do this is
00:55:25
not my passion it was never your passion never once did i say i wanted to be a late night host i did say i want to act
00:55:31
i did say i want to tell stories i want to produce all of those ambitions paused during the late night show i couldn't audition i couldn't do anything else i
00:55:38
literally sacrificed two years of my life for something that i didn't even want to do that's a sad sad thing that's
00:55:43
a sad realization so i think i was rewarded with a lot of clarity in that moment but what did your ego say in that
00:55:48
moment well obviously my ego was bruised of course my ego was bruised i didn't do i didn't do good enough if i had done
00:55:54
better um i've let people down i
00:56:00
should have gotten more seasons this is a bad look how do i make myself seem like a winner all of that stuff
00:56:06
yeah very honest yes same thing yeah i have things in my life at the moment where i'm in the exact same position where i'm like i don't
00:56:13
know if i love doing this but if i was fired from doing it or if they said they don't want
00:56:19
to continue i would be in the same conflict like i think there's certain things in my life that aren't aligned with me completely
00:56:24
but at the same time you kind of want to make sure it's done on your own terms and that's the ego right no one wants to be rejected no one wants to be canceled
00:56:30
no one wants to feel like they could not do something especially publicly
00:56:37
right it's not a private rejection it's a public it's a very public type of rejection so definitely my ego was
00:56:43
bruised um and i think more than anything
00:56:48
i learned from that experience that part of the problem is that i
00:56:53
easily put labels on myself and i think we do this to ourselves and do with other people as well i just kept calling
00:56:59
myself first late night host first this first late night host has to do this and i have to do this and that pressure like
00:57:04
i'm not just that i'm someone who tried really hard at this new thing and had to learn a new like all that contact
00:57:11
is it's worthwhile context so now when i think about myself through that context i have more compassion for myself
00:57:17
and it pains me that other people also didn't give me that context but i can't control other people i can control myself i do that to myself as harsh as
00:57:23
other people were to me i was way more harsh i had to put way more pressure on myself and since that experience i have also
00:57:29
learned to not label myself so i just got this new show this muppet show that
00:57:34
i was like wanted so badly and i was like oh my god i have to get this i have to get this is gonna be a life-changing
00:57:40
thing and the day i got it i had to have a talk with myself to be like you are not now
00:57:46
the lead of the muppet show that's not now your label you will not now describe yourself as this thing because then that's just gonna be the late night host
00:57:53
again it's going to be the youtube sensation again you are lilly you are a complete human being this is a cool
00:57:58
thing you get to do that's one of your goals great you get to do it you take experience but this is not now your definition i think part of that struggle
00:58:03
with late night was it just became every part of who i was and so people weren't criticizing the show they're criticizing
00:58:08
me they're criticizing every part of me and who i was and that's just a really unhealthy boundary amen you know and
00:58:16
people do that i've noticed i've done that more in my life when i didn't think i was enough so my identity or the label would make me make
00:58:23
sense to the world it would make me you know put me in a community i would become social media ceo and then the problem is
00:58:30
social media or any of these labels you described comes with a set of implicit instructions on how to behave and how to
00:58:36
be and how to act and that can be really imprisoning generally i wrote this chapter in my book called resisting your labels because of how imprisoning
00:58:42
they've been in my whole life and also you know as we're going to get on to with you now when i left my label so when i was no longer a social media ceo
00:58:49
i had a bit of an existential crisis and life goes well just go be another one again because that's what you are and i think that's when people have these like
00:58:54
midlife crises where they realize they spent the last 10 years or whatever being the label and not the person
00:59:00
you leave the late night show how was life like for the next year
00:59:06
well in the pandemic role exactly that was right around the time of the pandemic so i think that was
00:59:11
a very strange time because i couldn't bounce back into anything else really everything was shut down
00:59:17
and my plate was pretty empty because my gigs were cancelled my travels were canceled projects were canned everything
00:59:23
was paused so it was a very hard time to let go of something that was keeping you
00:59:28
busy and that was how you defined yourself through the pandemic and i think a lot of people can agree with this the
00:59:34
biggest silver lining was the work i was forced to do on myself and is when i wrote this second book be
00:59:39
a triangle because the thing about the pandemic was it wasn't just that i didn't know what to do with my time it was that was the first time i was
00:59:46
faced with the reality of me not believing i had any value because
00:59:52
i didn't have work and that was a sad scary realization for me it was the first time my schedule
00:59:58
allowed me to sit there and be like now i'm alone and i'm with my thoughts and i feel like i'm ceasing to exist as a
01:00:04
person because i don't have a purpose and i don't have value and that's really sad because that means every time work
01:00:10
goes away i will feel this way and that's not that's not what i want that's not setting me up for success
01:00:16
that's not setting me up for a spiritually happy life and so i did the work to really dive deep into my soul
01:00:21
and be like you're gonna figure this out and what i came to the conclusion of is that
01:00:27
i don't have any original thoughts when it comes to who i am as a person and what i
01:00:32
want out of life and what i value out of life everything i've operated on has been what people have told me whether
01:00:37
it's school whether it's my parents whether society i have never given thought into what it
01:00:43
is i actually want i never thought that was an option it sounds ridiculous to say but i guarantee you people that are
01:00:48
listening to this will actu actually also think and be like wait have have i ever done that ever stop to be like let
01:00:54
me work on myself like a project and let me actually think about life as it's the greatest project i'm ever going to work
01:00:59
on and so i vowed during the pound pandemic to create a
01:01:04
strong foundation for my life what does that mean because that's a fluff word and you know i hate fluff words i've already expressed i hate fluff words and
01:01:10
so how i define a foundation is i wanted to create a safe place in my mind that i could
01:01:17
return home to that was not connected to anything external and not connected to what was
01:01:23
happening in my life because my biggest fear was that the pandemic would be over and then i would have work stuff happening again
01:01:28
and then again i would just teeter to happy sad success fail whatever was happening in my life i would change to
01:01:34
my core and i didn't like that i wanted to create something that was true to me and no matter if i won 15 oscars from
01:01:39
tomorrow or i failed tomorrow that safe place in my mind would still exist and so that's what i did in this book i came
01:01:45
up with four things that i don't think will ever change in my life to make up the foundation of that safe place in my mind
01:01:52
and that's why you call it well good good good good question he's like so the illuminati
01:01:58
be a triangle yeah yeah so when i discovered that a foundation is what i needed to create i jumped onto google and i was just like how to build a
01:02:04
strong foundation foundation and google spit back the triangle because structurally
01:02:10
speaking the triangle is the strongest shape it has the strongest foundation out of any shape and then i started to
01:02:15
think about triangles a lot and i was like oh my my brain is very visual like i expressed and i think of things in diagrams and i started to visualize a
01:02:21
triangle and i thought the shape is actually really interesting because when you add to any other shape you
01:02:27
change the shape it turns into something else you add to a square becomes a rectangle you add to a circle it becomes
01:02:32
an oval you add to a triangle it stays a triangle it just becomes a bigger triangle and i thought that's
01:02:38
really interesting i want to build my life like that where no matter what happens what experiences come my way i'm still building on this foundation that
01:02:45
will not change because especially in this industry and all industries you could really easily lose yourself but what's
01:02:51
happening in your life but the goal is to create something that doesn't allow that to happen and the triangle is the
01:02:56
perfect shape for that and what is the what constitutes your foundation what are the ingredients of your foundation
01:03:02
if it was a recipe yeah so i talk about four things that make up the the foundation of my triangle i know the
01:03:07
hardest part of this book was figuring out what those four things are um and how i did it was i looked for
01:03:13
several months i looked at every struggle and issue or conflict in my life and i looked at it through the lens
01:03:18
of four things that was one way i determined them the second way was what are four things that will never ever change no matter what's
01:03:25
happening in my life so i came up with four pillars which are relationship to yourself relationship to the universe
01:03:32
understanding distraction and implementing design i think no matter where you are in your life who you are what job you have what country
01:03:38
you live in how old you are those four things are always true in your life and it is the lens to which you can look at
01:03:43
everything in your life through i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as you might
01:03:48
know crafted one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewelry brand and they make really meaningful pieces
01:03:55
of jewellery and this piece by crafted when i put it on for me it represents courage it represents ambition it
01:04:02
represents being calm and loving and respectful and nurturing while also being the antithesis of that seemingly
01:04:09
the antithesis of that which is um sometimes a little bit aggressive with my goals and determined and courageous
01:04:15
and brave the really wonderful thing about crafted jewelry is it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces
01:04:21
hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made on that point of distraction which i'm going to talk
01:04:27
about because it was it was a big part of your book and you you referenced there that you'd nev the pandemic was
01:04:32
the only time in your life where you'd really been forced to all the distraction fell away and you were left with yourself um so many
01:04:38
people that i know and i'm sure you'll you can relate to this um fill their lives with distraction and
01:04:44
noise and things and busyness to avoid stillness to avoid meditation or taking time to their for their own mind
01:04:50
you you've picked up meditation and breath work and things like that can you speak to me a little bit about the the
01:04:55
impact that's had on on you specifically breath work because i'm getting a little bit more into this at the moment yeah
01:05:01
when i read that you'd start doing it i thought and i'm still let me preface by saying i'm so novice and there's much to learn
01:05:06
i'm just starting my journey with really getting into meditation and breath work but i um over the past year
01:05:13
started to have so this is from like a scientific point of view before i even hit the spiritual point of view i started to have panic
01:05:20
attacks which i thought i knew what they were i think most people who have not had a panic attack they think it's the
01:05:26
same as an anxiety attack they think it's like oh you're really stressed and you don't know how to deal with what's happening in your life that's what i
01:05:31
thought a panic attack was until i had a panic attack and i'm like i was very different the first time it happened i just missed it because i was like i don't know what
01:05:37
that was the second time it happened i was like this is a reoccurring thing i was talking to my friend and we were talking about something so
01:05:43
unrelated it was like he was telling me a funny story about work and suddenly in my brain i started to get outside my body like i
01:05:50
was watching myself and i started to have these really strange thoughts like
01:05:56
i think i'm gonna take my head and slam it against the table for no apparent reason and i'm not
01:06:02
gonna be able to stop myself and then i started spiraling i'm like and then i'm gonna have to call the ambulance and i'm gonna be bleeding and everyone's gonna
01:06:08
be and then it's just like you progressively are just spiraling to being sure that you're gonna smack your
01:06:13
head against the table and nothing you say can change your mind this is a minute of just completely irrational
01:06:19
dangerous thought and then suddenly i was like oh wait no
01:06:24
no i can i can stop myself from hitting my head on the table of course i can stop myself that is a panic attack it's happened once before
01:06:31
to me when i was driving and i was like i'm going to drive off this cliff and there's nothing i can do that's going to stop me i won't be able to control
01:06:36
myself it's going to happen when that sort of happened i talked to my therapist about it and she explained to me that as someone
01:06:42
who always operates on 10 because i'm always just working really hard and i'm always thinking about the
01:06:48
next thing i'm an all-or-nothing dead person i have an obsessive personality that some things can trigger my nervous
01:06:54
system just go a little bit into overdrive and that's the body's response it's it's going into overdrive your nervous system doesn't know what to do
01:07:01
breath work really helps with that it's just bringing your nervous system back down to a state that's not not an 11
01:07:07
you're bringing it back down so from a scientific point of view breath work has been my saving grace to just health
01:07:12
having said that from spirituality it's just my belief of you know i talk about these pillars and i talk about a
01:07:17
connection with yourself meditation is you making time for the partnership with
01:07:24
yourself you know i believe we're all in a relationship to ourself whether we want to acknowledge it or not most of us are bad partners to ourselves we don't
01:07:30
make time for ourselves we don't listen to ourselves um if anyone treated us how we treat
01:07:36
ourselves we would not be in a relationship with that person probably so meditation is more than anything else
01:07:41
it's not about religion it's not about doing something so specifically it's about making time to be in a relationship with yourself and that's
01:07:47
something i really really value and i think that's a huge form of self-love so from a spiritual point of view also
01:07:52
meditation is my everything some people are really avoidant of like that time with themselves though i think it is
01:07:58
because sometimes when i talk about meditation the a common response i get is oh i'm not good at that that doesn't
01:08:04
work for me and i ask why and they say well i i can't turn my brain off i have all these thoughts that go in my brain
01:08:10
and then so i'm not doing it right and my response to them is who says that's not right maybe what you need is to hear those
01:08:15
thoughts maybe you've not given your brain a chance to get those thoughts out and what you need during meditation is to hear those thoughts who says that's
01:08:21
wrong the only thing meditation the only i'd say if there's one rule of meditation is
01:08:26
just spending time with yourself whether that's you hearing these thoughts that are uncomfortable it's not about problem solving it's not about
01:08:32
solving everything it's just about giving time to yourself allowing yourself the space and energy to be like i care about myself i dedicated these 15
01:08:39
20 minutes to hearing myself out that is the only only thing
01:08:44
in the book as well i think chapter six you start you talked a little bit about your difficulties with making friends as
01:08:49
an adult yes uh yes so um one of the things that i have come to
01:08:56
terms with is that i like i've been mentioning i'm a very all or nothing type person across the board and it has
01:09:01
been good in some instances because it has allowed me success in my career but is bad in some instances because
01:09:07
when human things don't live up to my expectation i write them off in situations where i don't have to
01:09:13
um i'm throwing a party uh this party has to be the best everyone that rsvp has to show up and if
01:09:19
they and so i'll throw this amazing party that everyone has fun at but if one person didn't show up that said they
01:09:24
were gonna show up in my brain i go well it was nothing it wasn't good it
01:09:30
wasn't exactly what i thought if it's all or nothing there's no middle i have learned that that is not healthy and
01:09:37
that it and that that also hinders me because there will be no joy and there'll be no celebration there'll be no progress if you're all or nothing i
01:09:43
did that with friendships i told this to jay jay is my friend in l.a but for a long time i struggled
01:09:49
because my definition of friendship was all which meant you have to know me since i was a kid you have to know me
01:09:54
before i was famous you have to know me before all of these things so that's a true friend and so my definition of friendship was very rigid
01:10:01
and so when i met jay later on in my life i struggled with that because i was like he's such a good friend he's so supportive but ah he didn't know me like
01:10:08
how my other friends know me from back in toronto so i i don't really know if this is a real french no you gotta let
01:10:13
go of these definitions and these labels we put on things and and be a little more organic with things
01:10:19
because that's where humans lie in that compromised organic space when i heard the thing the analogy you
01:10:25
gave about the party one person not showing up and you being like well yeah it's not perfect yeah um that sounded
01:10:30
probably like also the underlying reason why you were so successful yeah that's what i'm
01:10:35
saying so that's why it's been so hard to challenge that belief because it has served me so well so i think now what
01:10:42
i'm learning is when that serves me and when it doesn't that's actually been a lot of my work in this book it's not
01:10:49
being mad at myself or having certain thought patterns and not trying to completely do a 180 and be like now i'm
01:10:54
not that person anymore it is learning which ideas serve me well in certain circumstances
01:10:59
and which ones do not it's unlearning this idea that i have to be one thing all the time for example
01:11:06
speaking of labels i call myself a hustler i hustle really hard as i hold my whole brand and i found that on days when i was lazy and i felt like just so
01:11:12
tired there would be a lot of resistance in my brain because i wasn't living up to my own label i was
01:11:18
doing the opposite of this label i put on myself but i've learned you cannot be everything all the time we exist on
01:11:25
various places on various spectrums and so it's not about changing who you are as a person it's about learning what ideas serve you well in certain
01:11:31
circumstances and which ones do not and then on and off on and off on
01:11:36
have you got a lot of friends people might think i have a lot of friends i wouldn't say i have a lot of
01:11:42
friends i think i have a good number of friends and it depends how i define friend people that i can call just to call and
01:11:50
ask how they are without an agenda for the phone call like five
01:11:56
four five i think that's a good number i'm not mad at that number
01:12:01
yeah i mean it's a good number i think especially as we get older i mean jay we're talking about jay shetty by the way um me and jay were talking about
01:12:07
this the other day about how when when you get older in life as well the the amount of friends you have it becomes increasingly harder you don't have the
01:12:13
work thing you don't have the university school whatever so really it's more about depth and quantity as opposed to
01:12:18
your producer it's also a little bit about um at least in my experience
01:12:24
watching the adults in my life as a kid they never prioritize friendship and they never place value in friendship and
01:12:30
so i believe for a long time that as you grow up you need to value the companion you have as a partner and
01:12:36
that takes the place of friendship and you don't have time for friendship because you have a job i have since unsubscribed to that idea
01:12:42
um i never saw anyone value friendship that doesn't mean i can't value friendship as an adult and i've actually learned this from jj is very good at maintaining
01:12:49
friendships jay's the type of person that will message you with no agenda you're like hey just checking in just saying hi so i've started to reciprocate
01:12:54
that to him and call him and facetime him just be what's up but that's something i had to actively learn because growing up i don't think i
01:13:01
could name one adult that was like i'm going to go out with my friends were you comfortable with friendship in
01:13:07
both platonic and romantic were you comfortable with it because i remember think because i grew up in a
01:13:13
similar way i genuinely would cringe and feel deeply uncomfortable when someone said the word best friend oh i don't use the term best for anyone today even
01:13:19
today i tell you this steve is my best friend and my body oh my god i'm so glad you said this because everyone knows i
01:13:25
do not use unless you're talking about my dog who can do no wrong i do not use the term best friend because i do have
01:13:30
this little bit of like cringe-ness where i'm like that means i rely on you and work with the head and i don't know if i want that so there is a
01:13:36
little bit of work to be done there still um but yeah that's interesting i thought that was only me no yeah i think i said
01:13:43
this to a couple of guests and you're the first one to 100 100 people that are like oh they're my best friend i'm like
01:13:48
oh it sounds dangerous but that i i've learned that with that comes a commitment issue romantically so i i
01:13:54
also would run from any prospect of sort of romantic commitment because that also it felt like a bird trapped in a cage it felt like
01:14:00
prison to me so in the same way that friendship was just like yeah i think it's because my parents weren't affectionate they weren't affectionate
01:14:06
at all to be honest we didn't have that very close relationship that a lot of my white friends did i don't even call my
01:14:12
mum and dad mum and dad i call them by their names i mean you probably can't do it no i could never did i get slapped up in the face if i did that it was just a
01:14:18
distance also what it is is you know i talk a lot in the book about unsubscribing to ideas that do not serve
01:14:24
us but i encourage people to look at everything in their life as an idea
01:14:29
a lot of things we think are fact and our rules are just ideas they're still just ideas so what we even think of
01:14:35
friendship's supposed to look like what we think a relationship is supposed to look like how we think a romantic relationship is supposed to be those are
01:14:41
all just ideas and i think because i thought they were facts like it has to look one way i resisted that a lot just
01:14:46
like i did with friendship i just told you with a romantic relationship i do the same thing that means that you have to sacrifice a lot there's a lot of
01:14:52
compromise you can design any relationship the way you want as long as two people are on the same page so i
01:14:57
encourage everyone to think about that i think what has really helped me get over some of the anxiety with commitment relationships is it doesn't have to be
01:15:04
this idea of what i think it doesn't need to be this one way i can design one that works for me and someone else as
01:15:09
long as we're on the same page i'm trying to figure out where to go with this because i want to go down the relationship route but i'm also gonna
01:15:16
there's a there's a point you're talking about unsubscribing from ideas one of the ideas you talk about unsubscribing from in the book in chapter three is
01:15:21
about the the idea of success and what that is and the definition of it if lily at 60 years old told me she was
01:15:27
successful what would that mean see if you asked me this years ago i
01:15:34
would have answered this question in relation to accolades i would have
01:15:39
said numbers i would have said oh that means she's made had made several movies that are box office hits
01:15:45
now my answer and i it's been a hard journey to get here but genuinely my answer is that at 60 year old 60 years
01:15:54
old i still fully understand and believe i'm a complete human being and everything that has happened is just
01:15:59
extra cool stuff my goal is to never write another book truly
01:16:04
i know i said that after my first book and i'm saying it again right now my goal is that this book can be can be the
01:16:09
blueprint for that safe place in my life forever that i never have to
01:16:15
make another blueprint that is true if i never write another book again that means that i was successful in this week
01:16:21
so truly 60 years from now i want to know that i'm fully complete and anything that would have happened or didn't happen was just life experiences
01:16:28
goals cool stuff but it's not i'm not lesser or more because of it relationships then romantic ones yes
01:16:35
have you been uh difficult to date difficult to find romantic love
01:16:42
probably absolutely i'm sure all of my exes right now were like do you have to think about
01:16:48
it absolutely if i asked your exes why it was you were you know in their
01:16:54
point of view why you were difficult what would be the common response the
01:16:59
most common response that a few things
01:17:05
one would be that i have an inability to forgive ooh i do
01:17:10
um that i am very transparent about this might scare people off but as soon as i
01:17:17
know i'm going to get into a relationship with someone i very honestly tell them i say one of my weaknesses is that if you lie
01:17:22
to me or wrong me and betray my trust it is very difficult for me to trust you again even if every part of me wants to
01:17:29
i will not be able to and i tell people this very very honestly where does that come from i'll tell you right now um i
01:17:36
didn't know first i thought it was like oh from my childhood from this was but no i think that's all a lie i think my inability to forgive people
01:17:43
stems from my inability to forgive myself i think that because i expect perfection
01:17:49
for myself and i for so long didn't give myself grace to be human i didn't give people grace to be human either and as
01:17:56
i've done the work to treat myself like more of a human and to be and to to have the inner dialogue of like it's okay
01:18:03
it's okay you don't always have to be performing you don't always have to be perfect you're allowed to be a human you're allowed to be lazy or allowed to be flawed the more i've done that work i
01:18:09
have given people permission to do that as well in my relationships i've noticed since writing this book one of the
01:18:14
biggest changes i've seen in my relationships is that i can actually forgive people now
01:18:20
and i think it's because i've learned to forgive myself i've learned to embrace humans for being
01:18:26
humans and that started with myself so that is something that nx would definitely say also with the fact that i have very high
01:18:32
expectations all of my exes will say i have absurdly high expectations ouch yeah
01:18:39
that's a tough one the expectation one are you in love now
01:18:44
i'm in love with myself which is the most important love i think
01:18:50
and i think that's perhaps why i was never a good partner before i don't think i was ever
01:18:56
unconditionally in love with myself my love for myself is always very conditional
01:19:02
always based on my performance always based on my ability to accomplish never just for like the
01:19:09
things that were me yeah you know you had such a high standard for yourself you talked about that obsessiveness and even that the
01:19:15
party if one person's not there it's not perfect are you saying that that same level of expectation would sometimes be mirrored
01:19:23
onto the person you would expect them to be 100 wildly ambitious or because i had this perspective i'm like why aren't you
01:19:28
changing the world why aren't you some of my past relationships definitely it would irk me if i was working
01:19:35
and the person i was with was not and i don't even mean had a job i mean if i'm working at two in the morning you should
01:19:41
be working at two in the morning we should both be equally as ambitious that i i notice that sounds ridiculous and i'm admitting that i was wrong and
01:19:46
that's not a good perspective to have but that's how i felt like i want someone equally as ambitious since then
01:19:52
what i have learned is that what i thought i wanted if i was actually dating someone that was just
01:19:57
like me that would be horrific me and jay talk about this all the time me and jay talk about how
01:20:03
both of us in some part of our life thought that we wanted to be with someone just like us me and jay are so
01:20:08
similar we in any time anyone is having a disagreement we take the same side we
01:20:14
always have the same perspective we're so similar and since meeting jay i've learned that oh if me and jay were in a relationship
01:20:19
we would kill each other we would actually hate each other because there's no balance there
01:20:25
you need someone to balance you out and bring something else to the table amen and i have fully acknowledged that now
01:20:32
and i think i was a little delusional in some of my past relationships thinking i wanted me but i don't who that no none of it you
01:20:39
might think you want that but you would kill that person you're totally right you know my girlfriend now is very much
01:20:44
in every way the opposite of me and that is in fact as you've described that is actually the value of our relationship is one plus one e will equal three when
01:20:51
we have different perspectives and healthy debates around things like that right um i've never asked anybody this question
01:20:57
before but oh my god i love it hit me what is the the one question because i when i saw that you've done it you know
01:21:03
you're on a book tour at the moment you've got a great book that's that's just come out april 14th yeah and on that i was watching you do all of these
01:21:08
interviews and doing some great shows and things and i was thinking to myself having been in this process over the
01:21:14
last week where everyone's asking you questions what is the most uncomfortable question
01:21:22
you think that i could ask you that would make me feel uncomfortable yeah
01:21:28
it can be a topic or a question you kind of already asked
01:21:33
it to be honest for me it's it i get very uncomfortable
01:21:38
when we talk about people critiquing things i worked very hard on because those are my babies my projects are my
01:21:46
babies and it to be just really blunt it hurts my
01:21:51
feelings and i think i thought for a long time i had to put on a facade that it doesn't hurt my feelings but it does
01:21:56
i think i am a sensitive artist in a lot of ways and so the question you asked about people
01:22:01
criticizing the show i think that is the most uncomfortable question you could probably ask aside from that
01:22:08
another really uncomfortable question i have been asked this though is
01:22:14
in the book i talk about my experience coming out to my parents and that is really uncomfortable because
01:22:22
i'll just be really honest a lot of times when anyone tells a story about their coming out experience people's instant reaction is you're right
01:22:28
everyone should have been very understanding you should have been cared for and nurtured accepted right away that is the default answer
01:22:34
it was a very difficult thing for me to do to go against that and in the book talk about how i was wrong in that moment
01:22:42
um because i didn't do that before i came out to my
01:22:47
parents i was offended by their
01:22:52
lack of instant accom accommodation and celebration they were very supportive they said everything that they knew how
01:22:58
to say at that time but because it was not instant celebration i judged them harshly for that and
01:23:04
that's a hard thing to admit when you're the one coming out because by
01:23:09
default like i said everyone thinks you're right and everyone thinks you should be celebrating accepted right away and to actually challenge that idea
01:23:14
and say no actually that's not where humans operate from this place of instant knowledge and accommodation it's
01:23:20
actually a learning process and we should meet in the middle and we should be compassionate that's not a popular
01:23:25
opinion i don't think and so that was difficult for me to talk about it's definitely the most
01:23:32
mature useful position and you've expressed at the very start of this conversation when you highlighted your parents context
01:23:39
in regards to the potentially the mistakes they made and the lessons they taught you before the age of 10. and you talk about that in the book as well
01:23:45
understanding the having empathy for their context right and how that formed their reaction to that situation i think
01:23:50
is just the most amazing place to be in because then you you don't i mean the first thing that comes to mind is you're not going to
01:23:56
walk around with resentment that they weren't you know they weren't perfect as you might see in like a fake movie or
01:24:01
something but also it i think you can have better communication when you when you are able to
01:24:07
lean into their world and understand them and and it tends to be the case you'll know because i haven't my mom's from nigeria i was born in africa like
01:24:14
in all facets of like the the first generation second generation immigrant story you actually tend to both want the
01:24:20
same thing mm-hmm so your parents would have different ways of going about it yeah right because as you say like often
01:24:25
they don't know about youtube so doctor or lawyer was the path to this the happy successful secure life right
01:24:33
and i think immigrants like i had to with my mom when i said i'm starting a business i'm never speaking to you ever
01:24:38
again you didn't speak for two years not just that i'm going to tell all your family not to speak to you sadness
01:24:44
having it took me a long time to get to the place you got to yeah it took me long too i also for two years was like
01:24:49
held again resentment against my parents um and i created that drift and that was how i learned this lesson and i
01:24:55
think it's also because the world today the internet today social media today it really really
01:25:01
encourages us to label situations conversations and things very easily right wrong cancelled you made a mistake
01:25:08
you cannot redeem yourself you are now bad you are now good that is not how humans operate it is not it is not a
01:25:15
realistic lens through which you should view humans you know to
01:25:20
expect people to know everything you know without having your lived experience is a really entitled place to
01:25:27
come from and i'm even going to challenge people online that cancel people for saying incorrect things and
01:25:33
behaving in incorrect ways and the person can apologize over and over again we don't accept apology we're creating a culture of expecting other people to
01:25:39
operate from our lived experiences how is that possible how is that remotely possible my mom did
01:25:45
not grow up with lady gaga bops she did not grow up with queer culture so for me to expect her to operate from
01:25:52
a place of my lived experience how is that math ever going to add up it's never going to and i know online we like
01:25:58
to sit on our high horse and think it will but it will never it will never add up
01:26:04
that's an unpopular opinion i'm sure on twitter but that's okay i will die on this hill no i think it's popular it's definitely a popular opinion here
01:26:09
because okay um so when you look off into your future you've got a lot going on movies disney plus there's all these other things
01:26:16
happening in your life now what is the next and i'm i'm scared of us sort of falling
01:26:22
into accolades and numbers and yeah accomplishments no that's not what is the next there's a time and place for those conversations i'm happy the goals
01:26:27
that i have for myself are um associated with elevating storytelling so i do
01:26:35
definitely want to be on screen and behind the camera and produce and write and start in stories that highly
01:26:41
underrepresented voices that is something i'm really passionate about because i believe stories make the world
01:26:46
go around stories are how i understand myself and other people and i think there's not every story has to be about
01:26:52
everyone but there should be stories for everyone and so i'm very passionate about that so and i just love being creative in that way so i think
01:26:59
acting producing i have a book club called lily's library that's all about south asian stories as
01:27:05
well that's just something i'm that's just what i'm most passionate about so i think most of my goals will align with that
01:27:11
lily thank you for writing such a great book and i think there's going to be so many people that are listening to this now that have heard the context of the
01:27:17
the journey that led up to you creating this book that might be having questions about their own foundation
01:27:22
and i also will say i don't know if you can see if anyone was watching this it's a short read it's a short concise and i
01:27:28
guarantee you you will hear my voice reading it to you because i've written it in that way
01:27:33
so how many pages is that anyway 93. neither you golf an hour an hour read no
01:27:39
it is it's really it's really digestible it's the type type of handbag book that you could travel with and really um if you're one of those people that doesn't
01:27:44
like tiny letters and thousands of pages this is definitely a book for you and it's written from such a place of as
01:27:50
you've expressed today self-awareness wisdom and vulnerability and those are always the best books because they are
01:27:56
the truest and the most necessary so thank you for creating a wonderful book we do have a closing tradition on
01:28:01
this point let's do it which is the previous guest that's the question for the next oh nice okay
01:28:07
how many times have you been properly in love
01:28:14
i'm gonna say perhaps
01:28:22
including in with myself three times and i'm not just thinking about love romantically i don't think love is just
01:28:29
romantically i think one time romantically i think one time with myself
01:28:35
and i think one time after writing this book truly truly truly
01:28:41
when i saw my mother for all the glory that she is like i have no problem saying i'm in love with my mom and the
01:28:46
person she is um i was gonna answer with a higher number
01:28:52
but for me what translated what i the synonym i used for properly was
01:28:58
how many times have i been in love where both people in the equation became better versions of themselves
01:29:06
and that's what eliminated a few of the a few of the numbers i think in every scenario i'm talking about both people
01:29:12
were better versions of themselves because of the love it's a beautiful answer yeah once
01:29:17
romantically it once romantically figure out which one of you
01:29:25
you know who you are thank you thank you thank you so much i appreciate this is such a joy thank you
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