https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7_qojiXsycw
Given your career views, pressures from opposition, life, career, and need for personal development, how do you turn it off and recharge? What’s your outlet? I think my outlet… I’ve always had two outlets probably. Well, maybe three. Friendship, creative endeavor, and family. And part and parcel, that obviously is my relationship with you at the center of that. And that’s a central relationship. And when I was at Harvard working hard, it was always a relief fundamentally to come home. And it was Little Haven by Blue Heaven, that song we listen to all the time. It was a haven. And the kids were too, because the kids are… Little kids are ridiculously fun. You know, I mean, you got to kind of put a little box around them. That’s a walled garden, by the way. And then they’re delightful, right? They remind you of the beauty of existence and the inexhaustible nature of reality. You can see that right through kids’ eyes. And you know, that’s how they pay you for taking care of them. And so that is rejuvenating. You know, I know kids make you old, but they keep you young too. And so I would say that’s probably right. Family first. Probably my relationship with you. That’s probably the foundation. And then kids. And it’s not like the kids are less important. They’re probably more important because they’re younger, you know? But that wouldn’t be possible without the relationship that we have. And then there’s a circle of people around that that are crucially important. That’s one domain. And so a source of sanity, that’s for sure. And then certainly the creative domain. That’s definitely another one for me. And you know, Tammy and I were talking today with my son about what we might like to do as the years progress. And God only knows how the years are going to progress. That’s a tough nut to crack. But we basically decided today, again, what we’re talking about right now is that if we had our choice, insofar as we have a choice, we would concentrate on being close to our relationship, do what we could on the creative front. And just from a personal perspective, you know, independent of social obligation, that would be an eternal spring, so to speak. And so that seems about right. You know, it’s been tricky to manage, but it’s tricky to manage for everyone, you know, to get this right. I have an obsessive mind. And it’s always been a challenge for me to not think flat out 100% of the time. You know, when I was writing my book, Maps of Meaning, out of which most of what I’ve talked about publicly came, I really was thinking about that from the time I woke up till the time I went to sleep, flat out at a sort of Ben Shapiro rate all the time, you know. And that was actually hard to shut off. I could shut it off with alcohol, and I could shut it off with weightlifting, and the alcohol wasn’t such a good idea, so I quit doing that after a while. And I shut it off with you, so, and the kids. So that’s good, because you need to take a break, you know, when you’re, even if you’re working on something that you think is more worthwhile than anything else you could work on, that is one thing I’ve tried to do in my life, is I tried to make the central focus of my creative, intellectual endeavour the hardest problem I could conceive of, and that was the problem of malevolence, fundamentally, and I’ve really been working on that ever since I was 13. So, you know, and then you have the opposite of malevolence to give you some respite from that, and that’s certainly play with kids, man, for sure. That’s the opposite of malevolence and tyranny, that’s for sure, and play period, you know. And I think we’ve, we know that more, you and me too, we know that more than we did. We’ve always been, we’ve always had that element to our relationship. Oh, especially because we’ve known each other since we were eight. Yes, that certainly helps. Because we were actually good at it back then, probably. Yeah, pretty good at it. Yeah, we played together a lot, you know, and that was great. She was a very popular kid. With Jordan, especially. Yeah, yeah, there’s a pretty good competition for you, even when you were like eight, so. Thank God it was just other eight-year-olds. Yeah, ha ha. Thank you.