Why Kanye West is Running for President

So, what are you doing? You running for president? Uh, yes. What made you decide to do that? Aren't you busy enough? Clothing company, successful rapper, family man? It was something that God put on my heart back in 2015. A few days before the MTV Awards, it just hit me in the shower. And when I first thought of it, I just started laughing to myself. And all this joy came over my body, through my soul. I just felt that energy, I felt that spirit. So then two days later, I accepted the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Awards, the MTV Awards. Instead of performing my A-R-A-I-A hit songs, I gave just my perspective on award shows. But always, I knew at the end, I was going to tell people, I'm running for office. I'm running for president in 2020. And just to have the... It even took heart to say it in that context. And people were just like, oh, their minds were blown. And then I was hanging out with different... I had different friends that were... You know, some people in the music industry, some people, tech elites, different things like that. And they would really... You know, they just really took it as a joke. And they're telling me all these millions of reasons why I couldn't run for president. I remember running into Oprah two days, or one day after that. She's like, you don't want to be president. People just thought projecting, putting this on you. And I remember saying, one of my responses to one of the people, one of the naysayers was, well, I'll definitely be a billionaire by that time. And not that that's a reason why someone should become president. But as to say, at that time I was around $50 million in debt. And I knew I had the confidence that I would be able to turn that around. And now, just going into... I want to just give you... That's a clear answer. I know what you're saying. I don't want to go off on too much of a river. No, it's okay. What you're basically saying is, you know how to set goals, you know how to achieve them. But what was Oprah's rationale when she said, you don't want to be the president? What was she saying? Because remember when people were saying that's our next president? Remember when Trump got elected, they showed Oprah and they were saying... I believe it was like NBC tweeted it, this is our next president. A lot of people wanted Oprah to run. And they felt like if Trump could win, Oprah could win. When I saw Trump win, I was like, see, you can win if you're coming from outside of politics. I was young when Ronald Reagan was president. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California before he was the president. He had actually proven himself as a politician, at least somewhat. Which is an idea that people have thrown out at me to... To be governor of California? To be governor of California. Anyone's better than this guy. Just go ahead, start there. Give it a shot. Open things up again, man. But I think my calling is to be... I believe that my calling is to be the leader of the free world. I mean, if it's in God's plan that part of my path is to be the governor, then that's fine. But my calling is to be the leader of the free world. When you say this, when you say your calling is to be the leader of the free world, what does that mean to you? Does it mean do you have a plan that's different than the plans that have been implemented before? Does it mean that you have ideas? What kind of plan? The plan to be the leader. What would you do if you were the leader of the free world? What would be different about the way you would handle things? If that's your plan, what is it about that that is your calling? Why would you want to do that? What do you want to do differently if you were the leader of the free world? Well, there was a couple of questions in there. You said, why is that your calling? There's people who will say to me, they'll say, well, music is bigger than politics or more influential than politics, or celebrities are more influential. And I thought of it like if I was a pastor of a hundred thousand person church, but then I was also a captain, a sailor. And then we went to war and I said, I'm going to man this ship that has a thousand people, a thousand soldiers on it, because God is calling me to take this position, even though I'm the pastor for, you know, however big my audience is in hip hop, in music or as just an influencer or celebrity, or just as a dad and a husband in my house. The world is like there couldn't be a better time to put a visionary in the in the captain's chair. And that's not to say we haven't had visionaries be before. I'm not coming here to down any of the other. I'm not here to down Trump down Biden. I'm just here to express why. Why God has called me to take this position. So when you say a visionary, you think of yourself in terms of like as an artist, as a creator, someone who has these thoughts that they manifest in terms of music and art and creation and design, the things that you do. That's why you think you're different as a visionary. Yeah, I think that I think I'm different from I mean, we're all different. So I'm definitely different from everybody. We're all different from each other. I mean, I do bump into people that seem to be like the same character inside of it. It's like people before. Yeah. People play the same roles like I just met you before. You're just like the head of this company over here. You're the same kind of person. Yeah, you know, I mean, I manifest. I see things. I'm a great leader because I listen and I'm empathetic. And I feel the entire earth and I feel us as a species, as the human race. I sometimes people think of utopia as almost like a negative word. That's like we couldn't have that. But I do believe in world peace. Like the people hit me with the one of the things Oprah said is she said, you got a bone up on your foreign affairs. I remember this like because it's Oprah talking. I remember a lot of what the conversation was. The first thing she said was, you know, foreign affairs and foreign policies. Like just I think the reason why I say leader and that politician and not even specifically president is this is the time. You know, when the Constitution was written, that was an innovation. Now, the world is innovated all around our political system. 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.