She’s been called one of the most powerful women in the world by Forbes Magazine. Actress and activist Priyanka Chopra is undoubtedly one of the biggest stars of her generation, using her platform to invoke change and challenge the way we think. While Priyanka has always been an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusion, in this interview, she’s opening up about why it’s personal to her. For more information on her latest project, check out: Skinclusion.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you become a victim of it, there will always be burdens that hold you back.
And I choose not to be a victim of anything bad that's ever happened to me, including my father's death, including racism, including sexism, including lack of opportunity, anything.
I will not be a victim.
I choose to, you know, take my future in my own hands and mobilize myself in a way where I don't have that problem anymore.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz podcast. and this is the Dr. Oz podcast.
you She's been called one of the most powerful women in the world by Forbes magazine and was featured on the cover of Time magazine's coveted Time 100 issue, the 100 most powerful people in the world.
It's a big deal.
Former Miss World actress and activist Priyanka Chopra, Jonas now, they just got married, is undoubtedly one of the biggest stars of her generation.
And she recently captivated all of the world with her wedding to singer Nick Jonas and her famous friendship with Meghan Markle.
She's known for using our platform to invoke change and challenge the way we think.
And while Priyanka has always been an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusion, today she's opening up about why it's personal to her.
So let me start, Priyanka, with a similarity we have.
We were both raised by doctors.
Both your parents were physicians.
What made you decide to skip out on the family business, so to speak?
In fact, that's the one thing that I always knew I did not want to do.
I grew up, like, in the hospital with my parents, right?
I used to go with them when my mom used to go for rounds, and I used to hang out with the nurses.
The smell of, I don't know, the smell of hospitals just, like, really gets me, and I fainted when I saw blood, and I took biology in ninth grade, and they made me, we were doing, you know, we were, I think we were working on a, like, a pig or some sort of, what is that called?
Incision?
A specimen, a cadaver.
Yeah, that's what we were doing, and I fainted in class, and I was like, Mom, listen, I love you and everything, but I don't think I have the guts to be able to be a doctor.
It's like, I've seen what you guys do, it's the second closest thing to being God, I guess.
You know, it's incredible, and I don't think I have the strength to be able to do that.
What was your specialty?
My father.
He was a general surgeon.
My mother is a gynecologist and an ENT. And did they meet in medical school?
No, they didn't actually.
My dad was in the military and he was posted in this one city while my mom was working in a hospital.
They met at a party.
Oh my goodness.
But then they eventually ended up having their own business together and had their own hospital.
My mom still practices right now.
Now she does cosmetology.
So, and I'm going to get to cosmetology because you've become a world expert in the area for a bunch of reasons, but when your mom, who probably had some thoughts that maybe her daughter could become a doctor, as your father had, realized you might become an actress or a model, what did she think?
Did she ever sit you down and say, honey, are you really sure you want to do that?
It was actually the opposite.
I was raised in an environment where, yes, I was very academically drawn.
I wanted to become an aeronautical engineer.
I I studied physics and math, and when you come from such an academic family, I didn't know that entertainment was an option, even though my father was an entertainer as well.
They used to call him the singing surgeon, because he used to do all of these shows, and he was always singing, and he used to compose music, write his music, but he did that on an aside, because his job was to be a doctor.
And when I was raised in a very creative sort of environment, musical, My parents loved, my mom loved like the Doors and like the Beatles and Elvis and my dad would love like Lata Mangeshkar and listen to like Indian music.
So I always knew who was ruling the roost that day, depending on the music that I heard coming out of my parents' room.
So we were like super creative families.
So when I was 17 and I came back from the US, I went to high school here.
I was taking some pictures for a scholarship program for a university in Australia, and the photographer was like, oh, you're really pretty.
Can I take some more pictures?
And my teenage vanity kicked in, and I was like, yeah, of course, please.
My mom came with me because I was 17 and thought that those pictures were pretty, and my brother was 10 at the time.
They both had this idea of sending my photos in to Miss India.
And I'd never modeled before.
I'd never...
I mean, I was a full tomboy.
I didn't like heels, which is totally the opposite of what I am now.
But I went into this pageant, and I won it.
Then I won Miss World.
Then movie offers started coming to me, and I sat down with my dad one day, and we had a serious conversation about career.
And my father told me that, I never want you to have a what-if in your life.
I never want you to think that if I had tried it, what if I was amazing?
He's like, you were 18. Take a year, a year and a half.
If you're awful at acting, you can always go back to school.
And he just, it became, the problem became so simple that I just, in my entire life, I've had those wings because my parents have always told me, don't be afraid to try new things.
That's the only way you'll evolve and grow.
And I did my first movie, won a bunch of awards, never like looked back, I guess.
It just sort of, my destiny provided my vocation.
You know, you're humble in the process, but I'm quite certain along the way there were challenges and difficulties, and I suspect there were times you may have called your parents and said, am I sure I'm in the right spot?
And not so much because you weren't beautiful enough to become Miss India and Miss everything, but...
More because you may have been around people you didn't think were challenging you or you were exposed to things that you may not have felt were the best for your overall spiritual and mental health growth.
Did that happen in a fast-paced field that's notorious for having some bad influencers?
I mean, I think in life, there's no world in which you could live in a perfectly utopian world, right?
There's gonna be bad and there's gonna be good.
There's gonna be bad experiences and good experiences.
But the good thing about the bad ones are that the only place to go is up.
And I think that I've always been, yes, there have been troubling times and there have been crazy ups and downs that have happened to me, but I'm a glass half full kind of girl.
I always believe in, you know, you learn from mistakes, you learn from troubling times, but if you become a victim of it, there'll always be burdens that hold you back.
And I choose not to be a victim of anything.
Anything bad that's ever happened to me, including my father's death, including racism, including sexism, including lack of opportunity, anything.
I will not be a victim.
I choose to take my future in my own hands and mobilize myself in a way where I don't have that problem anymore.
I'm producing my own movies.
I am creating things around me that make me empowered enough where that never happens to me again.
Because I don't allow myself to forget the feeling.
There's lots more when we come back.
Well, let's get practical about this.
So you're the biggest star in Bollywood, which, you know, having been to India and traveled throughout the part of the world quite a bit, it's superstar status.
You can't walk through the streets.
Then you come to Hollywood, you take a whole, it's like going to a different planet.
What did you learn about yourself as you made that transition?
And it's no longer a home game for you either.
You've got to really play and win in a different league.
Well, the biggest thing was that after being in entertainment for about 15 years, To walk into a different country and have, you know, to start all over again from complete scratch and to have to...
I remember when Quantico was coming out, which was my first acting job in the US, I was petrified the day it released because I was the first South Asian female lead ever on network TV and we were in 2017 or 16 at that time.
And I was like, oh man, if I mess this up, I'm going to mess it up for all my people.
And the pressure of that was...
The billion people at risk.
1.7 billion people at risk.
I put that responsibility on myself because it's true.
And I remember when I went to high school in the U.S., I didn't see anyone on television that looked like me except Appu from The Simpsons.
And I hated him.
Because he didn't sound like me.
He didn't think like me.
And he was just a stereotype of what all my school friends thought I was.
Everyone asked me, why don't you speak like Apu?
Why don't you speak like this?
It was the bane of my life at that point.
So when I came into entertainment and I was moving towards the U.S., I was very, very clear about the fact that this is bigger than who I am.
What I'm doing, what I'm striving to do, When I'm talking about inclusion and being part of Hollywood in a mainstream way, hopefully with me doing it, it'll create the opportunity for people to be able to see that just because I'm a Bollywood actor doesn't mean that I can only do a type of thing.
Bollywood has become a genre.
How is it a genre?
I saw popcorn at Whole Foods in Bollywood flavor.
How is it a flavor?
It's like, what would be the flavor of Hollywood?
It's crazy.
So, I mean, it's those kind of stereotypes also that I've really taken upon myself to shatter, to fight.
Bollywood is not a genre.
We're one of the biggest movie-making industries in the world.
We produce about thousands of movies a year in different genres completely, action, drama, musicals, all of it, just like Hollywood is.
And I am extremely privileged to be able to now work in both the biggest movie industries in the world.
Well, you've been very vocal, and you're beautifully articulating it here, about the fight for inclusion and diversity throughout your expansive career.
And you've termed it unconscious bias.
I think, as a physician, I'll speak to this.
I think it's hard to be aware of things you've never experienced.
So it's the right way to phrase it.
How has this affected you?
You mentioned skin color.
It's an example.
But everything, cultural attitudes, expectations...
A big reason why I'm having this conversation is because when we talk about diversity and inclusion, it is not just about different looking people on a billboard.
That's not diversity.
Diversity is changing of mindsets, changing of attitudes.
And inclusion is, whether it is gender, whether it is religion, whether it is ethnicity, whether it is race, whether it is choices, opinions, That is the beauty of living in a democracy, that we can all be totally different.
But what we're doing in society is we're afraid of differences so much, and that's what affected me, is when you see someone that looks different, that has come from a part of the world that you don't know, or does not maybe understand the humor, or speaks differently, or whatever it might be, the first thing that most people do is they're afraid to ask the question, that I don't know if I'll offend this person, that I don't have enough knowledge.
And we've created a sort of environment in the world where instead of embracing differences or instead of being curious about something that we don't know about, we sort of are wary of it and we step back, you know?
And that creates distance.
And as a society, I feel like, is that really the world that we want our kids to come in?
I'm thinking about a family soon, and I don't want my kids to have to talk about diversity.
That should be their normal.
Inclusion should be their habit.
We need to create a safer world where people feel like different people are not scary.
Like when we pick up the newspapers, every day you read about some crazy form of violence that's happening because my God is better than your God.
Your country is better than my country.
It's so basic that we've forgotten humanity in all of this.
What I love that you've done is you've captivated the world with the coolness of, it's not even so much diversity, which I always worry about is about being different, but variability.
So for example, when you went off to Mumbai and married Nick, Nick Jonas, which, you know, an incredible event, that changes our cultural expectations.
In your own mind, what was a memorable moment of that day that you think might influence people, or at least influences you, about how variability plays into this?
It's so interesting that you said that because that event definitely changed my life, obviously because I got married, but more than that, I think it opened my mind up to the possibilities of cross-pollination of cultures.
Like when I saw Nick's family, our friends from America, come down into India, experience the India that I knew, experience the magic of the hospitality and the The ancient culture that we come from and the history and the joys of the traditions and how embracing everyone was to that, including my husband, just showed to me that the world just needs to be educated and we just need to become a little bit more tolerant of each other.
And all of it comes from, I think, insecurities and being afraid of something new.
And is that the kind of world that we've created around each other, that we're not as fearless anymore?
And we're so wary.
That cultural exchange with the internet being what it is, it's so easy for us to understand the world and understand different people.
And we need to use the internet for what it is made for, which was actually bringing the world together instead of driving us apart.
More questions after the break.
I think the world is designed to have people like you change it...
And you're doing it, I mean, so passionate about this whole process.
You've joined an initiative called SkinClusion.
And I'd love to understand why this is such a personal project for you.
Well, I am a woman.
I am about beauty.
Beauty to me, and self-care is something that's very important to me.
I'm also an actor.
It's part of my job.
So, I found out a new stat, you might call it, recently, that there's this I have a spectrum called the Fitzpatrick spectrum, which reduces all the world's different skin tones into six.
So one, two, three, four, five, six.
I am a four.
And most skincare products that are out there in the market only do clinical research and testing on skin types one, two, and three, maybe four.
So most of the time, I'm not included.
I am not considered.
And I love the fact that Obagi has been doing clinical research on all six skin types for about 30 years, before the conversation on diversity was even the check in the box that everyone wants now.
So I love skin-clusion as an idea, first of all as a name, that everyone's skin is important.
Every consumer matters.
And taking off from the fact that I felt not included as soon as I found out about this, I can imagine.
Obagi is literally calling out the industry and saying, why is someone else's money more important than someone else's based on their skin type?
Why will every consumer not get what they're paying for?
And I think that's a really, really important thing to do.
We need to be audacious.
We need to be bold.
We need to be demanding about inclusion.
It cannot be something that's going to happen on its own.
We have cultural biases for years and unconscious, so most of them unconscious, that have That exist in society and the only way to break that is actually speak logic and with clarity and say that diversity and inclusion is the name of the game.
Look around you.
There is not one type of people anymore.
And if we don't include all kinds of people in our lives, expand our friend circle, get to know different cultures, then the violence that we're seeing in the world is only going to become bigger because we're just creating differences.
Prenka, thank you very much.
I love the way you tied it all together.
And Lisa, let me just, if I can, I want you to comment on some of the things that Prenka has mentioned to us.
She jokingly said her father was a singing surgeon.
I couldn't help but comment on the fact that your dad was known as the rock doc.
Yep.
Music and surgery.
I don't know what those two have in common, but something's going on.
Share with Prank and everybody the story of your dad and how he ended up being deemed rock doc by Rolling Stone magazine.
This is back around 1970. Yeah.
It was probably...
1970, exactly, when he was playing rock music in the OR, just to keep, I guess, keep things moving along.
And it hadn't been done a lot back then.
No one had done it.
And I tell you, in surgery, nowadays, we all play music, and we change the kind of music, depending on what's going on in the case, right?
If you've got to get going, you can play something a bit more hip-hop-y.
What if the patient hates the kind of music you're playing?
I'm just wondering, right?
Well, it was that fear that actually prompted me for the first time to play audio tapes in the operating room for the patients.
We'd put headsets on them.
In the very beginning, remember the old Sony Walkman?
We'd put them in their ears so the patient would hear their own music, stuff that they liked.
They might like Vivaldi, and we've got Jay-Z playing in the OR. And then even within the OR, we'd have different kinds of music.
But in the dawn of surgery, when this was first being experimented with, It was your dad who would play rock music because he thought they kept the team coalesced.
They were doing heart surgery, which was really tough back then.
A lot of people not doing well, very long operations.
And it kept the energy of the room positive.
So someone noticed that he was doing this and they was getting great results.
They'd done the first heart transplant in the country in Houston at the time.
And he was practicing up in Philadelphia, which has got a lot of great music tradition, so people were sort of into it.
And Rolling Stone Magazine found that out.
In fact, I was playing my father-in-law, at least his dad, in Trivial Pursuit.
Do you remember this game?
Yeah.
Who won, Mehmet?
The question was, who was called Rock Doc by Rolling Stone Magazine?
Well, now you know who it was.
He was the answer.
How many people out there have played Trivial Pursuit with a person whose name was the answer to the question that they were competing on?
It wasn't fair.
I thought the fix was on.
Anyway, the other thing that the other parent could bring up was this whole what-if moment.
Because I remember with my father trying to figure out as I was going to medical school, because a lot of doctors are tempted to push their kids into medicine.
And for me, I was...
I was assumed I'd go into medicine.
But when Franco's dad said, hey, listen, this is a what-if moment.
I don't want you, for the rest of your life, regretting that you didn't go on and pursue a potential career in modeling or acting, because you can do that for a year or two and try it out.
If you don't like it, you can always go into medicine.
I mean, that's not dissimilar for some of the advice we give in our kids.
Yeah, I don't, so far, I don't think any of them have really been called to medicine.
It's not medicine, it's the what-if moment part of it, is take chances.
Oh, absolutely.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, if you're going to do something that's not a really high opportunity for a long-term career, do it now.
When you're 18 years old, 19 years old, take a chance.
Make your big mistakes when you're doing it.
Better to have taken the risk and failed than to wish that you had 30 years down the road.
And I think that those are the ways that you cope with the challenges in life, realize that these are transient.
And I was touched by, you know, it was hard for her when her father passed.
And I think those kinds of memories reinforced in her mind that he was always there for her, that he wanted her to do, even though it may have made him prouder at the time for her to be a doctor, if she needed the model first, and it turned out probably worked out well for the whole family there as well.
But of all the things that really caught my attention was this whole issue of the victim mentality, which There are many people who've been victimized, who've been hurt, who've been biased against skin color, sexual preference, many, many gender.
But not allowing yourself to be defined as a victim is an important part of Priyanka's story, which I think all of us should take note of.
Yeah, she's a really resilient, strong, proactive woman, and she's not going to let anything get in her way.
And that way you control your agenda.
You control your life story.
Otherwise, you spend most times defending why things didn't work out because you were a victim, as opposed to saying, yeah, maybe I won't succeed.
Maybe my odds of success are lower because I was victimized, but I'm not going to let anybody take away my chance to compete, my opportunity, whatever it might be, to get into the ring.
Well, you know, when you're victimized, it's a moment in time.
If you carry that attitude of victimization throughout your life, you're continuing to be, you know, bullied by those people.
You're giving them more power in your life than they deserve.
Exactly.
I think that's one of the reasons why her approach to diversity is so powerful.
It's really not even diversity, it's variety.
And when you speak about...
What that really requires is not just different billboards on sides of roads.
It's actually a whole mindset difference, which is hard for most of us to get our heads around.
I've struggled with it a lot because if I didn't grow up the way you grew up, how could I possibly know what it was like to grow up the way you grew up?
It's impossible to pretend that that's true, but what I could do is begin to change my mindset about the fact that there's going to always be inherent bias.
And just be thoughtful about it.
Recognize it's there.
Try not to magnify it if it's possible.
And be respectful about that.
At least energetically bring that to the equation.
Yeah.
I was with some guys the other day, actually, two days ago.
And they're talking about you and my dad, ironically.
And they're saying it would have to be impossible for a surgeon to be racist or have prejudice against people for differences.
Because as soon as you cut open the skin, we're exactly the same.
It's one of those telltale moments because there is no difference on the inside.
Although people for many years thought there was a difference.
But it's not even the conscious bias.
As Priyanka pointed out, it's the unconscious bias.
The differences that we have that you're not aware we have.
That leads you to believe certain things, which is, again, it's not a bad thing.
It's a good thing that those biases exist because that's why as a species we survive.
We're not all identical.
We don't make the same mistakes.
But respect the fact that there's another approach to it that you don't necessarily have the monopoly and good judgment on.
