Singer Jason Derulo engaged in a candid conversation with actor Dax Shepard, discussing money, their respective success and their own humble beginnings.
Derulo explained that when he was growing up, his family’s financial situation was in such bad shape that he and his brother would sometimes drink water mixed with sugar before bed so that their stomachs were full and they’d feel comfortable enough to fall asleep.
“It was very humble,” he said of his childhood on Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. “I never thought to myself ‘Are we broke?’ I think my parents did very good job of giving us a good enough life where we didn’t know that we were broke, but we actually were. We had some nights where, my brother and I – we created this thing – we’d call it sleep water. And all it was, was water and sugar. And when we were really, really hungry, we couldn’t fall asleep we would have this water and sugar so that it could ease our stomach and we could fall asleep.”
JASON DERULO DISHES ON BALANCING FAME, BUSINESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA: ‘I’M JUST CONTINUING TO DOMINATE’
He also said, “When I was a kid, my parents would fight all the time about money.”
“In the back of my mind, I’d be like. ‘I’m gonna fix this.’ I thought that I would be the savior of the problems that they had. And even with the money, there were still money problems,” he revealed.
Derulo grew up the youngest of three children in Florida to two immigrant parents from Haiti.
“They just really, really just started from the bottom. Where I think I started from the bottom, it was a totally different bottom,” Derulo said of his parents’ journey.
“Bottoms are all relative. You know, we all think we start from some sad story, there’s always a sadder story out there. But this one has a happy ending, and the whole family was able to come over, and this really, really is the land of opportunity, and I love this country for that.”
“We grew up in a very small house where all three shared one bedroom, until my sister was really fed up one day and she made the makeshift bedroom for her in the living room,” he explained.
“I’ve had so many things in my life. Things do not make you happy,” the “Whatcha Say” singer says of his circumstances now. “What makes you happy is being able to do the things that you love. What money is though, is freedom…. But it’s not happiness. Happiness really lies in what your passions are and where your love lies.”
Derulo has an estimated net worth of $16 million, per Celebrity Net Worth.
“I am currently in a, like, two-month spiral of just completely out of hand financial insecurity,” Shepard noted of his own situation.
“This new fear of, ‘I’m gonna somehow be broke or I’m gonna lose everything, podcasting is gonna be over, and there’s an actors strike and I’m not gonna act.’ It’s so foundationless, it’s preposterous,” he acknowledged of his financial fears.
The actor’s union, (SAG-AFTRA) joined the Writer’s Guild of America’s (WGA) strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on July 14. Both groups are currently advocating for a plethora of rights, including better pay and AI security.
“It’s not related to reality. It’s from growing up poor. I just can’t shake it. So like, to your point, you watch your parents fight about money, you think, ‘Money’s the problem.’ But money’s not the problem,” Shepard explained of his current rationale.
Shepard and his wife, actress Kristen Bell have a combined net worth of over $40 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.