Yara Shahidi

speaker

333 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Yara Shahidi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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10% Happier with Dan Harris · When You Don't Know What You Actually Want: How To Say No, When To Say Yes, and The One Question That Cuts Through It | Yara Shahidi · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

But because I've built a life centered on honoring my interests, everything from the Glockenspiel to Octavia Butler, I walk excitedly towards what's next, because I know somewhere between the two lies my next adventure.

Hey, I'm Yara Shahidi.

I'm an actor, producer, and co-creator of The Optimist Project.

That, for me, came from just lived experience of being a teenager and being a young adult.

And I think there was a moment at 18 where I felt extremely hopeful.

I felt like I had just been given this new civic duty.

I could vote.

I had a voting initiative.

And I felt...

so hopeful because of the energy and synergy of my generation.

And I think realizing that the civic process and what happens in the world is so complicated, that was immediately followed by an era of being like, what am I doing?

And can you change anything?

And what really has impact?

And I'd have to say even going to college exacerbated that feeling because you sit so long or speaking for myself, I sat so long in a place of critique.

I'm in a social science.

All you do all day is read and critique and say, oh, I would have done this better.

I wonder why they didn't consider X, Y, Z in this conceit.

And so my era of pessimism luckily was short-lived, but I learned so much because what I realized outside looking in is that I got nothing done.

Was that even being hopeful and even slightly naive at times, I accomplished more than sitting in my pessimism and trying to account for all that could go wrong or why something would not work.

And I think that's what got me to even this pursuit of optimism, not as going back to being naive per se, but as saying,

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