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Cape Town – Jaden, 18, and 15-year-old Willow Smith look almost identical on the cover of Interview magazine.
The influential brother and sister sat down with Pharrell Williams to shed light on living in society today through their eyes.
Here are 5 things we learnt when Pharrell interviewed Jaden and willow for Interview magazine:
1. Social media is fast becoming a platform to change the world
Willow: “People, like me and Jaden, want to utilise social media to elevate the consciousness of those people who feel like all they want from social media is to be famous.
“Like, you can actually be a voice. You can actually say something that's inspiring.”
Jaden: “People are trying to be happy in the wrong ways—with money or with different things that are not true happiness.
“I feel like that's why it's very important to educate people on different things while you are actually on social media.”
2. They admire their parents a great deal
Willow: “Growing up, all I saw was my parents trying to be the best people they could be, and people coming to them for wisdom, coming to them for guidance, and them not putting themselves on a pedestal, but literally being face-to-face with these people and saying, ‘I'm no better than you, but the fact that you're coming to me to reach some sort of enlightenment or to shine a light on something, that makes me feel love and gratitude for you.’
“What my parents have given to me is not anything that has to do with money or success or anything that society says people should be focusing on—it's something spiritual that only certain people can grasp and accept.”
Jaden: “My parents are definitely my biggest role models. And that's where me and Willow both pull all of our inspiration from to change the world. It all comes from a concept of affecting the world in a positive way and leaving it better than it was than when we came."
3. They are ridiculously close
Willow: “I could've spent my entire childhood like, 'I have to love this person.' And it becomes a chore. But our parents were never like, ‘You have to love them.’ It was more like, ‘You have your life. He has his life. And when you guys want to come together that's up to you...’
“And throughout us realising ourselves and realising each other, we just opened our eyes and were like, ‘Damn, you are the yin to my yang.’”
4. They’re really good at keeping their private lives private
Jaden: “How people look at us in public is not how we actually are in private. It's just that we choose not to tell everyone everything.
“We don't like people to really know what's happening with us or what we're into. The only thing that we want to keep people updated with is that we want to keep the kids that are following us, the kids that are looking up to us updated on what we're learning and what we're thinking about life.”
5. Where do they see themselves in ten years from now?
Willow: “I see myself in the mountains somewhere in a tent cooking a squirrel.”
Jaden: “Gone.”
