will.i.am Opens Up: Depression, Creativity & ADHD!

We've been set up to fail. AI didn't do that. People did that. Now here's a tool for us to solve our problems ourself now.

Here we go.

Will.I.Am, drop the beats, El.

Yep.

Producer, singer, rapper. This man does it all.

Seven-time Grammy winner. One of the industry's biggest names. Man, that's lyrical.

(laughs)

When we started the Black Eyed Peas, no one believed in us. Now we're playing Super Bowls, World Cups, Grammies. You have to be hyper-creative. You can't grow anything without it.

But there's a cost to creativity, right? What's it like to be in your head?

I'm always thinking, analyzing everything. Get it, get it, go, go, make it, make it, ugh. That's not good. That's not healthy.

Why?

You make errors. You hurt people. I remember I got into like a, a dark period when I felt something that I've never felt before, this like distortion. People want you to fail, but the anxiety comes when you're worried about what people think, when it's things that are happening that you didn't control. You have to be optimistic. You have to arm yourself with optimism and purpose. That's what it's about. That path was the hardest path in my life.

This is a window into the mind of a creative, a divergent, an entrepreneur, artist, and visionary, someone we all know, but at the same time, someone we don't really know at all. If you're a creative, an artist, an entrepreneur, or someone with big ideas for the future, or just someone that's struggling to balance your professional ambitions with your personal pursuits, this conversation was meant to find you. Enjoy. Will, I am fascinated with people. That is why I started doing this many years ago, because I have... I, I've come to learn about myself that I have a real desire to understand people, because from that, I think I can understand myself, because I think at the kind of foundational level, w- w- we're all quite similar as human beings 'cause we're all related, if we go back far enough. So in a pursuit to understand you, I guess my first question is, um, what is, what is the context of Will that I need to know to understand the man that sat here in front of me today? The earliest context, the kind of kitchen that Will was, um, was, was conceived in, was, was, was cooked in at, at the earliest age?

You write songs?

No, I don't. I write a lot, but I don't write songs.

'Cause see, like, uh, I get interviewed a lot, but very rarely do you get interviewed by wordsmiths. Um, the kitchen I was stewed in, cooked in, pretty, uh... I like the visual of that.

Mm-hmm.

Um, because the chef would be my mom, and the kitchen would be the ghettos of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights specifically, and that was encouragement, acknowledgement of our individual... When I say our, my family, like we all have our little superpower. And my superpower was creativity, and creativity has always been my currency when I had no money. I clearly was like, "Ooh, look, Ma. Look what I made." "Willie, that's really good." "You really like that, Ma?" "Yeah." And I would... She would... Encouragement goes a long way. And then that type of encouragement from my mom that helped create self-belief, fearlessness to express, to share, to go in class and solve problems or raise my hand, "I got the answer to that," um, that's really what fueled, fueled me is my mom. "Let Willie solve it. Let Willie try to fix that," you know? "This radio's broken. Try to fix it." That type of stuff. My mom, salute.