Jubilee Media Founder Jason Y. Lee Shares Life Transformation Story at Smarter Faster Payments 2026

SAN DIEGO —Jason Y. Lee remembers coming home from kindergarten one day and telling his parents he wanted to be a cop. But, as Lee quickly found out, his life had a script, and that wasn’t in it.

“The script kind of went like this: Get good grades, go to a great college, get a good job, get married, make money, have kids, retire, and then—maybe then—you’ll be happy,” said Lee.

So rather than getting a badge he became an A student and got into the Ivy League school of his dreams, where the excitement soon began wearing off.

“It wasn’t that I was unhappy, but I wasn’t happy,” said Lee. Nevertheless, he pressed on with the script until Jan. 12, 2010, a day he said “changed my life forever” when a massive earthquake struck Haiti, and Lee knew he had to do something. That something was busking in a New York subway station to raise money for victims.

“For the very first time I was forced to live my life off script, off the script that was so clearly defined for me,” he told the April 27 luncheon keynote at Smarter Faster Payments 2026. Lee branched out into making videos and soon realized he had to flip the script and live his own life.

Today, Lee is the founder and CEO of Jubilee Media, a digital media company known for pushing boundaries. Jubilee is responsible for several popular internet shows including “Middle Ground” and “Odd One Out.”

Lee shared some of his life lessons with the Payments audience, including one he calls “pull the weeds.” He likened ideas and dreams to weeds—“not that they are meaningless or we have to kill them, but similar to weeds we’ll say, ‘One day I’ll look at those weeds, one day I’ll go explore that hobby, one day I’ll do that thing I’ve always wanted to do.’”

“Why not today?” he asked.

He also believes wholeheartedly that “purpose isn’t a destination, it’s a practice.”

“Every morning there’s a question that we should ask ourselves: Is what I’m doing today true to who I am?” said Lee. Some days the answer is yes; other days no. But, he added, “The goal isn’t to get to a place where we permanently check every box that we’ve figured it out. The point is actually to keep asking that question.”

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