Yara Shahidi
speaker
547 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 10 Apr
Yara Shahidi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think a lot of it is that feeling of when I get a wave of excitement, it's like, oh, that's interesting. That means that my curiosity is piqued. A lot of, I think, what I'm interested in tackling next comes from a wave of curiosity. Like, for some reason, this has grabbed my attention. I really couldn't tell you why. It's not because, oh, it's the logical next step. I think whether that be...
you know, the podcast starting as conversations. And then I think I wrote the name, The Optimist Project on like a random hotel, like a little pen and pad they had at the bedside. And then the analytical side starts of like, okay, how do we bring this into the world? But I think, yeah, a lot of it comes from that just kind of wave of, oh, I'm really curious by this.
This keeps grabbing my attention. And if it's grabbing my attention, it must mean something. And it really ranges from even, As random as it may seem for my kind of endorsement deals and fashion side, I remember at some random day, I was 18 and wrote down every deal that I wanted to have.
And I don't typically think that way of being like, oh, I'm going to get this deal with this shoe company, this deal with this. But I just written down a list. And I think two years later, I was like, oh, we did it all.
Yeah. But I think that's what's nice about the fact that our team is also aligned in how we think and that it's like all of us get these waves of curiosity and then we bring in the analytics to be like, now how are we going about it? And so it truly starts as a vision board. It starts as like, oh, what do we see?
So much of my path has truly been defined by honoring that random thought, honoring that feeling. I think going to school, I talked about it in that TED Talk, but going to school for me
was honoring a distraction, especially within the scope of the industry and the idea that it's really unheard of to take that amount of time out of your career to go focus on a degree that you don't need for your career, because I didn't go to study acting. I think it was... what allowed me to enjoy acting again, too, because I needed that balance. I'd always loved what we do.
But again, going from a world where it was very strategic that we lived full lives and then we'd go act now and then to suddenly being a life where it's like, oh, this is what we do for eight months. And then those couple months down are about promoting the thing that you did. There's no downtime. And then you go back into it.
Yeah, school was that necessary balance and counterpoint of here's a world where... Almost to an extreme, no one cares about what you're doing in the world. Every counselor I had was like, I really could care less about you being on television.
Yeah, the amount of people that even told me, come back later when you're not working. And I was like, hey... Six-year contract, friends, that's not happening anytime soon. It's now or never for me. But, yeah, I was in an environment where they prioritized who I was as a student.
And I think acting meant that school also had a balancing point because I think it's very easy to be in a cute little liberal arts environment with your books and feel like you solved the world. Yeah.
Yeah. So it was also nice to have a business side to what I was doing to be like, oh, but I also get to go make things in the world. I go think about things in the world. I go make things in the world. And it was nice after being in a space of just making things in the world to go think about things.
Yeah.
I think it's why alignment has been the word of the hour. Because even how we selected my team. So when me... And mommy and my prior manager walked in to take all of the big meetings with, you have WME, UTA, CAA, other talent agencies. I was 16 and I already knew I wanted to go to school. I'd been talking about it forever, but I knew I wanted to go to college.
Yeah, I knew I wanted to go to college because even my high school career, we chose a program that wasn't even meant for actors so that I could maintain my full AP schedule, even though I was distance learning. And so when we took those meetings, I was very clear about, hey, I plan on going to school in the next year, year and a half.
It was so telling. It was so telling because many people had the general reaction of like, oh, yeah, we had an actor trying to go to school and I sent him all the scripts that he was missing out on and he dropped out in the semester. And for me, CAA and particularly the team that I have, they were the first ones in the room immediately to be excited about it. To really want that for me.
And it's even funny to be out of school now and to think about certain team members who I love that waited patiently, as I said, no to pretty much everything. Because I was like, I'm going to complete my obligation and my commitment to seeing through Grown-ish as an actor and as a producer. But other than that, I wasn't taking on anything new.
And so that was made possible because I think by the time it was released, time to go to school and make that decision, I was surrounded by people that understood and surrounded by people that were excited. But I think it did take a lot of weeding out early on of, yeah, those conversations of people that are like, yeah, why school? I mean, having
a career, honestly, was the most kind of privileged way to get into college because I was able to think about where my curiosities were.
And I had so many friends because, like you're saying, because of the expense of it, because so many times, especially as like black and brown students, you're dealing with the reality like this may not even translate to a job offer, this Ivy League degree of mine. And so many friends have to prioritize what makes the best job offer, what makes the best resume.
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