Hello Sunshine, Hey Mestie is today on the bright Side.
Activist, actor and podcaster Jamila Jamil is here to talk about feminism, body confidence, and why she just doesn't care about likability.
It's Friday, May seventeenth.
I'm Simone Voice, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine.
Okay, so it's Friday, Danielle. What are you looking forward to this weekend? You're still in New York right.
Yes, I'm looking forward to just walking and walking and walking the streets. It's so fun. I'm definitely going to watch some basketball. The playoffs are happening, and I'm going to a peoplehood class.
Simone. I think you're gonna love this.
What is a pupil hood class?
So it's a sixty minute class where you listen and the co founders there's two women who founded soul Cycle, who started this, and it's like a group conversation.
You go in for sixty minutes.
There's breathwork, there's music, and you practice listening.
Interesting. I'm very curious. I can't wait to listen to your experience on this.
I'm really excited about it because they've been focusing on physical health and wellness for so long, and they saw a gap in the marketplace for social wealth and connection. And I mean, I feel that's like my whole ethos. I was like, sign me up. So I can't wait. I'm going to report back. What are you looking forward to?
So this weekend, I'm actually going to be in Nashville on a retreat with a bunch of people that I don't know. I know one person who's going to be there. The rest is a mystery. I'm honestly a little bit nervous because it's going to be a lot of group therapy sessions and I'm getting a lot of listening, a lot of listening, a lot of sharing, which I don't always do that easily.
It's taken me a little while to warm up to that on this podcast.
Even so, I'm a little bit nervous, but I think it'll be a really good experience and I'm sure i'll learn a lot.
Those types of retreats are really rejuvenating when they're done, right.
Yeah, Yeah, I hope.
So, Danielle, you may not know that today is a holiday. M I don't know to what day is it? Today is National Graduation Tassel Day. I'm sure you had that marked on your calendar, as did all of our listeners.
That's like saying today is National Color Red Day. There's just so many days, so I kind of like this one though.
Well, it's the perfect opportunity to give a big bright side shout out to all the high school and college grads.
This is such an exciting time in your life. The best is yet to come.
I love grad time. It is such a happy time. It feels like.
So much is on the horizon.
I remember feeling so terrified when I was graduating because I didn't have a job.
Do you remember how you felt.
I hopped on a plane the day after graduation and moved to Los Angeles.
So I just did the same thing.
Yeah, I just I didn't allow myself to feel scared.
I just went what advice would you give twenty two year old Simon on graduation day?
Don't cry as much.
My friends and I we held this graduation dinner with all of our families. It was actually really epic, and I'm proud of us for pulling it off because we were not the best planners. So it was like, I don't know, forty people, you know, it was our group of friends and everyone's parents. And by the end of the night, me and my friend Christy were just sobbing. Like the whole night, we could not clog the tear ducks.
The tears just kept coming because we had such an incredible, rich social experience in college and we were so sad that it was ending.
That hit me like a brick wall.
Well, you loved your girlfriends in college too. You guys are super tight.
Yeah, we're super tight.
So but I think, on that note, realize that you'll still make incredible friends as you get older, and you'll still form really rich friendships even in adulthood.
How about you. What advice would you offer young Danielle.
There's a lot. I would say, put some of the spray tan away. It's too orange for you. No really, though, I actually wrote a role doll quote on my graduation I see a lot of people writing quotes on their hats nowadays too.
Mine was bedazzled. I still have it in my childhood.
Bedroom, and it's a roll doll quote. It says those who don't believe in magic will never find it. And I kind of stick by that, to be honest, because I really believe that, Like half the Battle of accomplishing anything is just believing that you can. And so I've always been a big believer in trying to find the magic.
I've been after it my whole life.
I guess I totally see that you absolutely have lived by that quote and you do have to be a little bit du Lulu.
That's the Sululu.
After the break, Jami Jamil tells us all about her activism and how she's promoting women's safety.
We're back with a very special guest.
Jamila Jamil is an actor, TV personality, podcaster and activist. A true multi hyphenate, she spent years as a TV presenter in the UK before pivoting to acting in twenty sixteen. Listeners might know her from her role as to Hani Al Jamil in NBC's The Good Place, or from her Eyeway movement, which she created in twenty eighteen as a challenge to diet culture Danielle.
It's no exaggeration to say that Jamila has been super outspoken in her advocacy on a variety of issues, creating a radically inclusive platform for conversations about mental health, body confidence, and what it looks like to be a feminist in progress.
Jamila welcome to the bright Side.
Hello Jamila.
Before we jump into your incredible journey, we want to talk about Move your Mind. That's an event that you're holding in New York to promote women's safety, and this is on the heels of this horrific outbreak of assaults in New York City on men and women. But tell us a little bit about the purpose behind Move your Mind and what you hope to accomplish.
Move your Mind is a kind of social or cultural movement that is designed to democratize exercise. It is designed to help people who feel as though exercise has become far too intertwined with diet culture, and it's become so bastardized by the bloody diet industry that it means a lot of people feel demotivated. A lot of people feel unwelcoming exercise spaces. They don't want to wear the uniform of the little bra and the little shorts or the
tight leggings. And that's fine, that's fine if you want to wear those things, but a lot of people don't. A lot of people don't want to dress in that way, and they don't want to feel objectified.
They want to feel invisible.
A lot of people don't like the fact that now influencers film themselves at the gym in a way that other people can be seen in the background. Some influencers actually actively film other people at the gym to ridicule them in some way, you know, make fun of them.
And so it just doesn't feel like a safe space at all most gymnasiums, And unfortunately, the reason for the event in New York is that a gymnasium is one of the only places where women in particular might feel safer to exercise, because after the sun goes down, you can't go for that walk without the added stress of worrying about how you're going to get home alive. Getting home safe after sundown is a privilege for women, it's
not a right. And so I wanted to create a way that women could come together talk about this as the insane phenomenon that it is that we just live with as a norm. And I wanted to talk to a former Secret Service agent who's very, very focused and skilled around safety, and she's going to talk to us about safety and give us some tips on ways in which we would be able to immediately have a better chance of securing ourselves if in a state of combat
of any kind. And then when we're all like hyped up and ready to fucking fight, we're going to go on a big old walk in New York at night together. And if you don't want to talk to other people, you can just listen to your headphones and enjoy the feeling of walking at night with your headphones without having to have your keys digging into the sides of your fingers.
Yeah, you're tapping into this very real issue epidemic, a lack of safety for women, you know. According to research from the Office for National Statistics in the UK, one in two women fifty percent feel unsafe walking alone after dark in a busy place, compared to one in five men. I lift weights because it makes me feel strong, and it makes me feel safe in a world where women feel unsafe.
What do you do to feel strong?
Like?
What gives you strength?
I have enjoyed learning how to fight, and I like knowing that I have some skills to be able to kick the fucking shit out of someone if I need to. And my friends noticed after I did Marvel, because it was so much fight training involved five days a week, that my gait like the way I walk and the way I stand had changed, and I walked with my shoulders back and more confidence. Without even realizing it, I had less fear. In an uber I had less fear.
You know, obviously I will always be vulnerable, but generally knowing that I have some form because there's I understand the desire to be like We shouldn't have to do this. We shouldn't have to live like this. We shouldn't have to learn how to defend ourselves. We shouldn't have to carry mace on our key rings, we shouldn't have to have pepper spray, blah blah blah, rape alarm. It is exhausting. And also it's why we have to have such big handbags,
and that's annoying. So it's a form of discrimination we don't talk about. But while we wait to live in a world that is safer for women, we need to do something. We need some action to take this into our own hands. And there's no point saying, oh, this is so unfair on us. We can and we must say that, but we can't end there. We have to learn how to actually physically make ourselves safer. We can accept the victimhood, but we must not sit in it.
Yes, I refuse to feel disempowered while I'm waiting for the world to change.
Well, you mentioned safe Spaces a few minutes ago, and I've followed you on Instagram but also followed your career for a while, and I noticed that most people who rise to fame get famous for what they do, and then down the line choose something that they attach themselves to. Philanthropy wise, you got a megaphone and started yelling and talking about injustice and I was wondering if that was a choice back then or if there was any fear there.
No, And long before you knew I was speaking about things, I was speaking about it when I was well known in England. Like I've been very very vocal since I was about nineteen, but then really since I was twenty six. This career is something that I'm very very grateful for and I've had a lovely time and if it all ends tomorrow then it is what it is. But my identity is not attached to it. This is the core thing of my life is caring about justice and what
is fair and what is logical. When something doesn't make sense and something is clearly not working, then I have to, like a rat go after it me too happened and no one had ever asked me about anything other than my hair or my lipstick, and so suddenly someone was like, what do you think of the giant social infrastructures of the world, And then obviously mania came out.
But sometimes, you know.
It's sometimes we overshare, don't we when we're not used to sharing. Sometimes we don't know where the line is. All right, and I've learned now, But unfortunately too many people were listening at first. I did not expect so many people to listen so early on into me speaking my mind.
Maybe you were more famous than you understood at the time, but I agree. I liked what you said totally.
But you know, I wasn't standing with a million people in front of me, or its two million or three million, however many people I think four million people almost following me. If I was standing in front of a crowd that size, if I were standing in front of ten people, I
would have been more careful. But if you're in your bed and you're slightly stoned, or you have PMS, or you're just having a frustrating day on your own, it just doesn't feel like anything that's why we're such bastards to each other on the internet, because we're not able to see the person receive the information, and so it's very easy to speak without being careful, to dehumanize, to
not be empathetic. It escalates clumsiness, I think, and I think I was guilty of that, and I've now started to imagine three point eight million people standing in front of me every time I post or tweet.
Well, I actually think you've been on the receiving end of a lot of the things that you just mentioned. I think that people are really unfair to you on social media. I think people dehumanize you on social media. I think people reduce you to one dimension on social media and they fail to see your dimensionality in all of your multitudes. What is your relationship like with social media now? Are you able to disentangle your identity from it in the same way that you have with fame?
I feel like two things can be true at the same time, right, First of all, I think it's because people see only one dimension for themselves that they project any one dimension onto other people. Right, If they see a ceiling for themselves, they do not trust or like seeing someone else smash through ceilings.
They don't know what to do with it.
And if we aren't familiar with something, or if we fear something, it breeds hatred of that thing.
We see that all the time.
All the hatred that we see of minorities or anyone who's different always comes inherently from a fear of the unknown.
And there aren't a lot of public figures like me.
But I I think people were just like, she's doing this for attention, She's doing this to get ahead, she's doing this for brand deals.
Lol.
Do you know how many brand deals I've lost because I've been so vocal. It's not about that, But I think people don't trust celebrities. I think people inherently don't trust women. So that's one aspect of it, right. They don't know what to do with me, and they can't imagine that I would actually give a shit. But also I am quite annoying, so that's also fair. It doesn't mean I deserve the amount of shit I get. It doesn't mean I deserve to have lies smeared about me.
But we are in a time where you can no longer literally burn me at the stake. You can't take me out and shoot me, so you can kill my reputation, you can kill my credibility, and you can kill my will to persevere. And so that's what I think happens on the internet. I take some accountability. I have been a bit rude at times, but I also think we have a huge problem with women, and a lot of the shit I get comes from other women. And the nastiest things that have been said too and about me
have been from other women. And the worst lies spread about me have been from women who claim to be liberal feminists.
So what do we do about that?
Because that's obviously it is a big issue, and it's something that we've even talked about on this show.
What do you think is the solution there?
I think the beginning of the solution has always been has already started, in that we've started to realize that we have been ultimately turned against each other. We have a scarcity mindset. We do feel threatened by each other, and that you know in a way that men don't. Men feel competitive with each other, but not as threatened by one another because they don't have a scarcity of mindset of that there's only a finite amount of space
for all of us. And so I think the conversations are starting and we are starting to understand that there is so much benefit and beauty to women collaborating with one another. And I think that's why I'm putting on these community events, and it's kind of becoming one of the biggest and most important parts of my career is just putting on these events of bringing women together and realizing we're all in the same fucking boat.
Let's give each other a fucking break.
I think the other part of this walk that you are creating it comes out of the heart of eyeweight, which is something that has personally really impacted me. I'll never forget when it came out. I saw Emmy Rossum do hers? Was that what the first one?
She was the first celebrity to do hers.
There were many thousands of women who did it first, but Emmy was the first person who made it cool for celebrities to do it, and then other people started to join in.
So I saw her, and for anybody who doesn't know, people put little blurbs about all of the things that they were aside from their weight, they were bold, they were smart, they were strong, they were a mother, etc. And it's now really turned into more than a platform. I think it's turned into a community of women who believe the same things that you do. And it came after a meme of people guessing the Kardashian's weight and
then shaming them for it. And I've always wondered why that photo was the final straw for you.
I think it was just that they are a family of business women. And you would never see a family of business men, or any men in almost any area other than the UFC with their weights written across their body. You would see their net worth, you would see metrics of what they have achieved, how many awards they've won. You would never We have no idea what men weigh, and we don't care, but we are obsessed with the
number on that scale. And I just I can't believe that, twenty years after I first developed an eating disorder from having been put on a scale by an English teacher in front of my class, wow, because she was substituting for the math teacher, and she thought it would be an amazing idea to weigh a bunch of teenage girls in front of each other to teach us how to collate data for a pie chart. And I think triggered
about thirty eating disorders that night. But twenty years after I was taught explicitly that there was value attached to how low the number on the scale is, we're still getting that information so explicitly online and I didn't even have to search for it. At least in the nineties, I'd go and buy a magazine that would make my eating disorder worse.
Now it finds me.
We're taking a quick break, but we'll be right back with Jamilah Jamil, And we're back with Jamila jamil. You know, I saw you interview Gloria Steinem in downtown LA and it was one of my favorite nights of the year, and I wrote.
Down my favorite nights of my life.
I remember you saying that, and I wrote down some of your quotes from that night. But you wrote, I don't give a fuck about being liked, and you meant it. People say that and don't mean it. I could feel that you meant it. Was there a watershed moment or point where you just shed likability.
I don't know.
I don't remember a time where I ever thought it was important to be liked by anyone that I didn't like. I want to be liked by the people I like, because then I want to spend time with them and I want them to be my friends.
Please.
But if I don't like someone, it feels ridiculous for me. It just feels absurd to you my energy in a way that men just again don't really have to use. I was raised with a big brother, so I just watched what he did, and no one was ever telling him to be likable. Everyone saw his strength, his aggression, sometimes even as assertive, and so you know, I never grew up feeling an affinity with what I was told quote unquote femininity is. It doesn't mean that I don't
think it was in a kind of dysphoric way. It was in a sensible way of like well on Earth, when I have a different set of rules, that's ridiculous. But it means that I've got a lot of free space in my head because I'm not tap dancing for other people, I'm able to just be myself. And also, I really don't want to be liked or disliked for who I'm not. I'd rather be liked and disliked for who I am, and that just feels more sensible to me.
It does for me too lake. That does that make me sound really cold? No?
I think you just have a new boat there for us. I love her. You know, it seems to me that the Jamila that we see in front of the camera is the same Jamila behind the camera. Is there something that we wouldn't see about you at first glance that's so central to who you are?
Yes, I'm much nicer in person. Still come.
Yeah, I'm much nicer in person than I am publicly because it's brutal to be a woman in a public space, and so I have to have some sort of thorns all over me, like a porcupine. And so when I hear that people are intimidated barmy, I love it because then they won't find out how much of a pussy I am, and they'll just be too afraid to approach me.
It's a bit like my dog, Barreled. I have a small dog, and he barks and behaves like an aggressive maniac if he sees a really big dog, because he's hoping he can scare that dog away so that they don't actually end up in an altercation, because if they do, he will be that dog's dinner. And so I think
I'm a very gentle person. But it would be a privilege to be allowed to be totally soft and vulnerable publicly, because it's just like being dragged across a gutter by your pubic hair, being a woman with an opinion in a public eye. So that's the truth. We've had so many great analogies for a womanhood on the show today.
I'm sorry we'd have to right down visceral.
Yeah, that last one might be my favorite, Jamila, we got to let you go. But before we do, we've talked about your activism. We've talked about your passion for public safety and women feeling safe in public. We've talked about your advocacy around diet culture.
What is your next era?
I think this is my next era.
I think my new hyper focus is getting the world everyone exercising all the time, whenever they can, walking, moving together, not feeling self conscious while they do it. I would like to change the future of all marketing of all exercise, and I would like to make it an inclusive space because it is one of the most exclusionary spaces. And the idea of exclusive is so so bonkers to me because it means you're leaving people out deliberately deliberately, which
is just bad maths. That is bad business. Why would you ever shut anyone out? And so I hope that I can be part of the downfall of the exclusive being a good thing. I hope I can be a part of the downfall of the current state of exercise culture. And I hope I can be part of the uprising of people learning about their neurochemicals and the importance of
protecting this extraordinary computer in our brains. The fact that we know more about our iPhones or how to make a TikTok real then we know about what's actually happening in our brains at any one point is terrifying to me. And exercise is a pivotal start when it comes to that. So that's my you know, that's my new obsession and then I'll hopefully do a bit of TV and acting until then. But I'm writing currently about some of these subjects, and I hope to do, you know, documentaries and work
on this. And I think that if we could give people the tools to understand themselves, not just emotionally but literally physically and chemically, we could change the entire world. So that's the plan, and I'm also gonna, you know, eat lots of cake.
And cuddle with my dogs and boyfriend. We love their plan.
Jamila, I don't say this lately, but I've learned a lot from you. I really appreciate your advocacy. That's extremely kind of you, and I appreciate that. And I'm still learning, and I've been saying that from the beginning. You know, I'm a feminist in progress. I'm in everything in progress. So never take anything I say as gospel. But I'm happy to inspire you to think for yourself and to take ownership of your own decisions. And that's all I've
ever wanted. Jamila, thank you so much for joining us. This was a really heartfelt conversation.
Thank you for having me.
Jamila Jamil is an actor, activist, and the founder of Iway, a platform that advocates for radical inclusivity. You can listen to our podcast Iway wherever you get your podcasts.
That's it for today's show, and on Monday, author and longtime podcaster Norah mcinnernie joins us to talk all the things from ephemeral tattoos to dealing with grief and so much more. The bright Side is a production of Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, and is executive produced by Reese Witherspoon.
Production by Arcana Audio. Courtney Gilbert is our associate producer. Our producers are Steph Brown, Jessica Wank and a Olivia Briley.
Our engineer is PJ.
Shahamat, and our senior producers are Izzy Kinkania and Janis Yamoka.
Arcnna's executive producers are Francis Harlowe and Abby Ruzika.
Arcana's head of production is Matt Schultz.
Natalie Tulluck and Maureen Polo are the executive producers for Hello Sunshine.
Julia Weaver is the supervising producer, and Ali Perry is the executive producer for iHeart Podcasts. Tim Palazzola is our showrunner. This week's episodes were recorded by Graham Gibson, Jessica Crinchitch Bahied Fraser.
Our theme song is by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton lighthauser.
Special thanks to Connell Byrne and Will Pearson.
I'm Simone Boyce.
You can find me at Simone Boyce on Instagram and TikTok.
And I'm Danielle Robey on Instagram and TikTok.
That's r b A.
Y see you Monday Fam. Keep looking on the bright side.