Following his highly anticipated interview with Kanye West last month on his self-titled podcast, Joe Rogan sat down with comedian Tom Green to discuss the implications of calling Kanye West “crazy.”
Addressing the controversial comments West made in the past, Rogan said to Green that there is “great value in the way [Kanye] thinks.”
With his own interview with Kanye lasting over three hours, Rogan argued that a shorter interview would risk taking West out of context and lead to scrutiny, implying that some of his controversies in the past were a result in people capturing “soundbites ” of West that lead to people “missing who he really is.”
Criticizing people who claimed that West needed mental health treatment, Rogan continued: “When people try to medicate him, I think: if you have a choice between medicated, overweight Kanye who doesn’t get anything done and manic crazy Kanye who says wild sh*t, you want manic crazy Kanye, because manic crazy Kanye is the one who makes amazing music.”
“When you call it mental illness, that’s the problem,” Rogan continues.
“You think: “If you call it mental illness then you’ve got to give it medicine!” Do you really? Because that ‘mental illness’ is making some pretty amazing sh*t.”
“Whatever you call his “illness’ is just a particular style of thinking he has,” Rogan claimed. “It’s non-linear, wild, but also very focussed.”
With Rogan vehemently defending West, some called him out for making less-than-complimentary comments in the past. In a YouTube comment that got over 2.7k likes, one user said: “Joe really out here pretending like he didn’t call Kanye crazy.”
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Similarly, in another YouTube comment that got 1.5k likes, a user said: “Wasn’t Joe one of those people who called Kanye crazy?”
This isn’t the first time Rogan has been called out for his changing opinion on West. Earlier in November, fans accused Rogan of being “two-faced” after YouTuber Crying Shark compiled a video of old clips from Rogan’s own podcast to demonstrate his contrasting comments about West in the past.
Why do people call Kanye West “crazy”?
Kanye West – who since 2018 has preferred to go by “Ye” – has been under a lot of scrutiny this year after running a bizarre campaign for President during the 2020 elections.
Among other things, he told Rogan in his podcast that he wanted to be “leader of the free world” and also discussed how he “almost aborted” his first child North West in a South Carolina rally in mid-July this year.
Following this rally, he posted a series of Tweets accusing wife Kim Kardashian-West and mother-in-law Kris Jenner of trying to “lock [him] up”, likening his situation to 2017 horror film Get Out.
As he remained in his secluded ranch in Wyoming, Kardashian-West reminded fans of Kanye’s bipolar disorder diagnosis. Implying that he was going through a manic episode, she urged fans and the media to be “compassionate and understanding.”
While Kardashian-West and Kanye seem to have gotten their marriage back on track as of late, West has amassed further criticism after gifting wife Kim with a hologram of deceased father Robert Kardashian for her birthday.
The spoken hologram, which West wrote the script for, told Kardashian-West that her husband was a “genius”, which in turn reignited debate about Kanye West’s mental state.