Kevin Hart had Jay Z on his Peacock talk show Hart to Heart Thursday (July 14) as a guest. During Season 2 Episode 2, Hart and Jay-Z talked about how fatherhood has influenced the legendary rapper’s life.
Hart mentioned how he the rapper seems to be in a more “zen” position in life and claimed that fatherhood had a lot to do with that since assuming the father position requires taking time away from work or things outside of the children.
Jay-Z agreed and discussed how time is valuable and something that can be controlled. And how he had to learn to take time for his children when he became a father of Blue Ivy (10) and twins Rumi and Sir (5).
“Time is all you have,” he told the Peacock talk show host. “That’s the only thing we control. it’s how you spend your time. You’re reckless with your time before; you’re just all over the place…what are you leaving your house for?”
“Every second that you spend, you’re spending away from the development of these people that you brought here that you love more than anything in the world,” he added. “So, what are you going to spend that time on? That changed practically everything.”
The comedic actor then talked about how in life, there’s pain and how that pain is impactful. He used his relationship with his father as an example. The Night School actor said that while he’s not mad at his dad for not being around, he did think about the experiences he could’ve had if he was around. Jay-Z shared that his father wasn’t around much either, but it made him look at the situation from a different perspective.
“What was he going through?” The “Empire State of Mind” rapper asked. “When I took a further look, my uncle, his younger brother, got killed. So, he spent all his nights, like, looking for them and the cops, they didn’t do anything. So the killer’s like roaming the neighborhood. So he’s going out in the middle of the night and he’s looking for the, you know, the guy who killed his little brother. But he has a family. So my mom is looking at him like, ‘What you on?'”
“She don’t have the language or the tools to tell him, ‘Man, we love you. We don’t want nothing to happen to you. We need you,’ right? So how it comes out to her is, ‘Where the hell are you going? You got kids here.’ And how it sounds to him is, ‘You want me to choose between you and my baby brother? Who I was supposed to protect.”
He went further to explain that children without fathers around much feel the void but don’t factor in the possibility that fathers feel the void when they are required to be men and provide but have a world on the outside constantly beating them down.
Hart to Heart streams on Peacock.
