Joe Rogan on People Who Call Kanye West "Crazy"

The J.Rogan experience. How do you decide what you're going to ask people? You just go on with the flow, do you research on stuff? Because I really loved some of the questions you asked Kanye. I'm trying to remember what they were, but I mean, do you sort of plan it in advance, or are you kind of just sort of because? Well, with Kanye, we had talked about doing the podcast for a long time. But I was worried that he was going to come off in a negative way. I remember your first question was, why do you want to do this, right? I just thought he was running for president. Yeah, I thought it was such a great question, why do you want to run for president? Well, everybody would ask that question. Yeah, but it was just right into it. It was just great. Well, I'm a fan of his music. I've always been a fan of his music. And I think that the way he communicates his sort of manic style of thinking and constantly creating and doing things, it's why he's so successful. I mean, this stream of consciousness that he has is also why he's so prolific as an artist. I mean, all of his albums are good. He doesn't have a dud. You go from one album to the next, and they're all like, he's got this stream of creative ideas that are constantly running through his head. And he talks sometimes in these streams where they don't end. He goes from one subject to the next subject. And so I was curious as to how I was going to talk to him. And I wanted to make sure that we can do it in a way where other people are going to appreciate there's a great value in the way he thinks. And then if you get it in sound bites or you get it in some weird thing where he says something and people get mad at him and they boom or something like that, you're missing who he really is. Who he really is is him all day. It's not him in this 30-second chunk where you don't like what he said. Guess what? He probably doesn't like what he said either. Okay, he's fucking streaming. He's just going. He's running with these thoughts and ideas. But that's also why he can boil those thoughts and ideas down to these amazing fucking songs. That's what I wanted to get out of him while we were talking. Because people were trying to medicate him and people were trying to... And I'm like, if you have a choice between this medicated, overweight Kanye who doesn't get anything done or manic crazy Kanye, he says wild shit. You want manic crazy Kanye. Because manic crazy Kanye is the one who makes amazing music. And I've been around him. He's a nice guy, man. He's a really genuinely nice guy. And when the cameras are off, same thing. He's a nice guy with all the staff and everybody. He's cool. He's genuinely cool. But whatever you want to call mental illness, that's the problem. It's like when you call it mental illness, well, you've got to give it medicine. He's got mental illness. You've got to give him medicine. Do you really? Because that mental illness is making some pretty amazing shit. Right. Look at his fucking... Look at his catalog. Look at all the music he's made. That's all because of mental illness? No. Whatever you call an illness is a particular style of thinking that he has. That's sort of non-linear. It's wild and it's all over the place. But it's also very focused. I found in that interview, though, that I've seen him interviewed quite a bit. But that was one where everything you said made a lot of sense. He's certainly put a lot of thought into a lot of the stuff he was talking about, with everything from reorganizing the way civilization works. I know. That crazy? It takes a little bit of thinking to come up with how to reorganize the entire way civilization works. But that was one of the things that I thought was really good about the interviews. You do get a chance to see. This is not just a crazy person who buys his own bullshit. By the way, when he's like the braggy stuff that he kind of does and talks to himself, first of all, he's being honest about where he is. He's sort of reaffirming who he is. But also he jokes around. He was joking around about it. He was showing us this video that he had made for his wife, for his wife's birthday. It was really emotional. It was very beautiful because he made a hologram of her dad. And he wrote the script for all this. Oh, he did. Wow. Yeah. And he wrote the script for all the things that the hologram was telling her. It's really intense. You can do that now. They can take your voice. For you and I, it would be easy for them to do because there's hours and hours and hours of us talking. So they would take this voice. Can you imagine what they could do? They already have. They used me as an example for one of these companies in Canada. They used me as an example for how well this deep fake technology works because there's 1500 fucking plus podcasts of me that are three hours long. So you take these sounds that come out of my mouth and then you can make me say anything. Literally anything because every noise that I'm capable of making, I've made. So you use this catalog of sounds that my voice can make. And that's what he also did with that hologram because Robert Kardashian, there's all the cases and all the different times he's been interviewed on television. There's a great catalog of his voice. And you can have him speak to her. But even in then, like he has him say, you know, and your genius, genius husband. But he was laughing when he said it and showed it to us. He was laughing. He thought it was funny that he had them. He had Robert Kardashian call him a genius. Amazing genius husband. He thought it was funny. Like he's not just it's not just ego. It's not just crazy. It's also there's brilliance there. He's a complicated person. It's nice to hear that because like, you know, it's interesting. I don't know how the media can sort of reframe a person. Right. And take away nuance. Yeah. People are nuanced, man. People are really complicated. You decide to decide that a person is this person because of one sentence they said one time or because of one thing that they did where they maybe wish they didn't or because of one concert they did where people booed them or whatever you pick about Kanye that people decide he's this. People just love to put someone in a box and categorize them and just decide that they want to dismiss them. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.