Panic World - What happened to Kanye?

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

America’s not doing so hot right now. Kanye West, on the other hand, hasn’t been well for quite some time. Akilah Hughes joins us again to discuss the idea that Kanye has always been a mirror for the American zeitgeist. What is about him, and about us, that makes that theory true? And, are we — both Kanye and the United States — totally doomed, or can we get better? Our guest Akilah Hughes is a writer, comedian, and reporter. You can find her work at https://itsakilahobviously.com, and follow her @akilahobviously on YouTube and X, or on Instagram @akilahh. Stay tuned for her new podcast coming out this month, How Is This Better? from COURIER. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: http://multitude.productions/ads. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grant did tell you what we're talking about today, correct? Like you, okay. I mean, maybe Grant told me, but I've forgotten because I have a cold. Okay. So, yeah, we're going to be talking about Kanye West today. Great. So I want to start with a simple question for you, not about Kanye West, but it will eventually involve him. Okay.

How would you say, like, America is doing right now, like as a country? Like, how, like hot on a scale of one to ten or just like? Sure. Yeah. Scale one to ten. Where are we? I'm saying we're around to like two. Like we're really limping.

We're limping. It's not looking good. Is it because of the gulags? It's the gulags. Is it the gulags? I think it's definitely influenced by the gulag. Hot take here. I don't think America's doing so well right now.

I thought you loved it. I thought you were like, we're killing it. And actually 10 more seasons, please. Look, when I voted for Trump the fourth time, by the way, I made that joke at a bar the other day. And then I realized that like that wasn't. clearly funny enough. And I then had to, like, well, someone overheard me, and I saw the look. And I was like, look, I'm totally kidding.

I did not illegally vote for Trump four times. I swear. Okay. Next question. On scale 1 and 10, like, how would you say Kanye West or Yee is doing? Oh, he's at like zero. He's really like at the lowest he's ever been. It's actually wild.

Like before the record deal, he was doing better is how I feel. In the middle of the car crash, he was doing better. Like, this is really bad. This is easily the worst time in his life. Yeah. So the reason I ask both these questions is because here at Panic World, we've been theorizing that those two things are connected. That Kanye West has always been this sort of mirror for America's zeitgeist.

And he still is today, even though we obviously don't like what he says and are horrified by it. For me and Grant, it feels like that's true. But I want to try to figure out why that is today. Why is he still this accurate mirror? What is it about him? What is it about us? What is about what his career's been like that gives him that ability to do this even now? Yeah.

So we're going to run through this theory. And I want to see if we can figure out exactly how these things are connected and why that's the case. And, you know, if that means that we're all just totally doomed. Yeah. I'm actually completely bought in. So let me try to make the argument, too. Okay, hold on. Hi, I'm Ryan Broderick. Welcome to Panic World. Sometimes throughout the episode, you'll be hearing from our producer, Grant Irving. I keep trying to tell him to stop, but he continues to pop in. This is a show about how the internet is warping our minds, our culture and eventually reality. Joining us today is the host of Rebel Spirit, the host of the upcoming show from Courier. How is this better? A second time Panic World guest, Akela Hughes. Welcome to the show. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Ryan. Hi, hi, Grant. Good to see you. Don't talk to him. Don't look at him. He's in his producer. Don't look at him. He's in his producer cage. Don't look at it. He'll rattle the bars if you look at it too much.

Just for the record, I've sent Ryan the text where to keep my job where I did tell you that we were talking about the most dangerous topic we've ever talked about. It's honestly amazing that this is the most dangerous topic because I know you both. And I'm like, not at the top. I wouldn't say it's the most dangerous, but it's definitely the most complicated. And so I want to start properly with when did you decide? side, all right, I'm out. Like, I don't like Kanye West anymore. When did you give out? It was, Life of Pablo had come out, but it was really, like, when he was certainly endorsing Trump at that point.

So I think Life of Pablo was, what, like early 2016, if I'm not mistaken. And then by that end of summer-ish, he was really going off the deep end. And, you know, I went to his concert. Well, he was headlining the Meadows Fest. in Queens. And this is an infamous performance because it was when Kim Kardashian was allegedly kidnapped in Paris

and he cut it off after two songs and left and we'd all been waiting all day for him to perform and also like there was no explanation for it and then we haven't really heard about it since sort of like that assassination attempt on Trump and I kind of just feel like we were all like... You think it was the same guy? You think it was the same team?

That's what he cut his team? It was the same department of the CIA that did both, you think? 100%. 100%. I'm putting on my tinfoil hat. But objectively, I think that, like, that sort of kicked off this beginning of the end of his career. And it was sort of shortly after that that he goes on TMZ and is like, black people wanted to be slaves. And it just gets worse and worse.

There's just this derailment of what I believed was genius. And now, you know, fast forward all these years, I have the merch from that show in my closet like a clan robe. I'm so embarrassed. Yeah, sure. I don't know what to do. You can't even throw it in the trash because what if somebody sees it? Because then they might, yeah, they might see it in your garbage. Yeah, no. I gave up a little later. I gave up with Donda one. You expected an album to be good. So I think that was the moment when I listened to it and I was like, oh, he's never going to make good music again. And at that point, I was like, because he hadn't gone full neo-Nazi either. And I was like, okay, like he's clearly

unwell, but if he can make good music, yeah, if you can make good music, fine. And it was the pandemic. So I was like, look, I'm unwell too. You know, maybe we both can come out of this. And now I'm like, no, he can never, there's, I, I effectively think of him as already being dead. Yeah. It's easier that way. Totally. It's like, just remember the good times when he was alive. Well, speaking of the good times, how did you learn about it? How did you, like, how did you, like, like enter your Kanye fandom. Like, what was it for you? What activated you?

I definitely remember the first time I heard through the wire. Like that, it was literally just like nothing sounds like this. Even at that point, he wasn't like a superstar, but I just remember watching it on like BET after school and being like, what is this? But my freshman year of college, I went to school. I started in 2005. But I'm 35, so don't do the math.

Like, it's just I skipped two grades. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was about to say. Okay. I thought we were the same age, but. Yeah. I'm older than you, right? No, we're the same age.

But you went to college two years young. which is humble brag, okay, cool flex. Small humble brag, but, you know, we all end up in the exact same place. Podcasting, that's right. Like all people, like all millennials were in a second recession podcasting. That's exactly right. 100%. But I just remember, like, going to school, like, that was the summer of Gold Digger.

And that was when it was obvious that it's like, this guy's not going away. Like, and it was also like Hurricane Katrina had just happened. So he's saying, you know, George Bush doesn't care about black people as he has this massive hit. It's like, he can't lose. He can't lose is how I felt. I think it's actually important to spend some time here before we get into his downfall because it's easy to forget now that for a certain age group, I mean, me, like literally laser targeted to my demographic, Kanye West meant a lot and in a unique way from other

celebrities at the time when he was coming up. I have a very personal connection to Connie West, actually. In fact, I would not be here. Yeah, he's my dad. We're all worried about him. I liked Kanye West's first two albums a lot, but like for me, they were kind of like, well, edited versions of the, those songs were like Bar and Bob Mitz for music or like school dance music, right? You know? Gold Digger was like school dance music.

100%. I get to college in 2007 and I wanted to be a music critic for the school paper. And the editor-in-chief was like, I don't know, do you have any ideas? And I was very big into BitTorrent and like stealing gigabytes of music, you know, every day. Wait, give me a month. Give me a month of 2007 because I know where you're going with this. Oh, this is important. So I had, I had access to both Curtis and graduation about a week early. And it was going to be the 9-11 album showdown. And so I wrote it as my first piece of the school paper and they put it online on their like dumb little website. And the hip-up blogs found it and it crashed the site. And then they were like, hey, you should write for us every week.

And then I changed my major to journalism. and that's how I ended up podcasting in my house right now. That's wild. That's actually, wow, so you must be down bad right now. Do you know? Well, I will never forget. I think it was the 2007 VMAs, and it's T-Pain and Connie West running up the staircase in Las Vegas

in, like, glow-in-the-dark tuxedos, and I was watching it being like, this is what cool is for me. Like, this is the definition of cool. And luckily, T-Pain, we still have T-Pain. T-Pain's great. And thank God we have T-Pain. I got my wisdom teeth removed,

listening to T-Pain's album, Three rings, incredible music to lose your wisdom teeth too. Yeah, and head, and doing Coachella, you know, like, I mean, he's still here. He's still here. Exactly. Exactly. So one last question for you. You started to orient you in the Kanye fandom.

What is your favorite era of Kanye West? I mean, that's almost impossible to say. Like, I feel like that's its own episode because. Grand put that in the document. I'm sorry, I asked that. Right. Because it's also, like, I think that, like, specifically for millennials, every era of Kanye corresponded to important moments in our life.

And so, like, for you, 2007, it's like I was working at Forever 21, rest in peace. And harder, better, faster, stronger, stronger is out that summer. And I just remember, like, the white kids there who didn't know Kanye being like, because we also had, okay, so a little bit of Forever 21 lore. Every month, there was a guy named DJ Brent who put out a CD. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what? DJ Brent. Okay.

I don't know if he's still active, but he was the DJ for all the Forever 21s, and we would get a new CD in the mail that would have, like, two hours of music maybe on it. And we would have to listen to it over and over again for the month. And so if you were eight hours, you were like, I know all the songs, I know the order of the songs, I'm tired of the songs. And I remember the moment that we first heard stronger on it, everybody was like, who is this? And I'm like, it's Kanye West.

And I just remember being like, I became God to these girls. So, like, important, because that's like, so. summer youth, I'm like 17. I'm working at the Perman 21, which is the Hot Girl store at the time, not just like a garbage bag store. And so it's like that mattered, but like recession era, I mean, or I guess like coming out of the recession into beautiful dark, twisted fantasy is also 808. I mean, like every single era.

Yeah. One of the great regrets of my life is I had a free ticket to the glow in the dark tour before Kid Cuddy got thrown off the tour for throwing a woman. It was Connie West, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cuddy, and they would close at the night. covering don't stop believing and I had a free ticket and I had a test the next day and I had homework and I didn't go and I've regretted it for the rest of my life. You want to hear my my big comedy regret. We can just do this forever. But I was dating a guy in New York in 2013 and he ended up dumping me like two days later which is very funny and it kind of corresponds.

But I was meeting his friends really for the first time and they were dorks and we had tickets to Jesus. So I'm like let's just wrap up the dinner like I'm trying to go. But he wanted me to talk to them for longer. We ended up missing. Kendrick Lamar opening for him because I was talking to these fucking losers. And then he dumped me to him like, you may be this Kendrick Lamar for these fucking talks. Oh, that's, that's rough. Okay, I feel, I don't, I'm not going to compare the two, but I feel good that you also have a deep regret surrounding Kanye West. That's important.

But let's talk about some things that Kanye West should regret. And we're going to start, I think, at the most, well, this is the most recent. Yeah, we're working backwards. We're going to, we're going to, we're opening, we're opening in me. Medias rest. So yeah, how did we go from the guy who's soundtracked, you know, millennial lives? The first time I ever had Sparks, if anyone remember Sparks, it was like a proto for loco, turns your tongue green. How do we go from that guy into who he is now, a guy who's rapping about being a cuck and singing Heil Hitler? But for me, this is just sort of a spillover from the

Super Bowl commercial, which was the moment where I was like, uh-oh. So let's start there. Yeah. For people who, you've seen it, you've seen this ad? Yeah. Okay. For people who haven't, I'll just do a quick explanation for you, which is that he's in a dentist chair. He says that he spent all of the money for the ad on new teeth, and he shot it on his iPhone,

and then he's like just got it like his website link there. And then when you went to the website, it was a $20 t-shirt that had a swastuck on it. Yeah. Yeah. Did you get one before? You know, I just didn't have 20 bucks at that point. So I just was like, you know, I'm strapped, unfortunately. Yeah, no, like, I was worried about the tariffs that I had heard were coming.

So I was like, I can't do. I also didn't know where it was made if it was going to be like surcharged. You know, you know, what was your sort of reaction to seeing this? Because I think this is like a pretty gnarly weird thing. Like this, this to me was sort of troubling. It was, I mean, sort of troubling is the understatement of the millennium. I mean, I just felt like, well he had already been so off the deep end for me that I was like you know let's just you know I don't want to go all the way back but like he ran for president at one point so like this is that I forgot about that actually

yeah I took a picture of that ballot for my Kentucky vote and I'm like why is Kanye was listening so like there were plenty of L's before this but I was like so he just he actively wants people to hate him like it's the only way that he can get attention and anymore. And like, that's real sad. Like, that's giving, like, oh, you need to be committed. The super a Super Bowl ad is like, you know, essentially one of like the most important remaining pieces of culture that exists. Yeah. Like, we don't really have a monoculture, but we have like Super Bowl ads with the Super Bowl and that's kind of it now. Yeah. And the idea of him like very visibly high on Nitris, like shooting an iPhone video to go on Twitter. With also, his teeth are made out of like metal. Yeah. Exactly. So forget that. So there's some. There's something so fascinating to me about him, like, compressing the prestige of a Super Bowl ad into this, like, very troubling, dark, weird thing he shot on his phone.

That does feel somehow like it sums up where we all are, which reminded me of this piece I've been thinking about on and off for over a decade. It was written around the release of my beautiful dark twist of fantasy, and it's by an author named Mike Bartel. And he basically makes the argument that up, like that part of Kanye West career, and you could argue actually going forward after that, he is effectively. trying to like harness the power of technology and like sort of obscuring his voice and obscuring samples and sort of like combining himself with capitalism as a way to like escape race escape like class escape his own body and I want to read you a quote because I think it's it's a really it's a great essay we're going to visit a few times in this episode but barthel writes connie his career is the story of one man joining and then transcending the organization becoming the ghost in the shell not in the

system, but of it. You flash forward 15 years, and he has just become content. He's just, like, he's just, it's so weird and dark to me, uh, twisted, if you will as well. Um, not a fantasy or at least not a positive fantasy. Yeah, the idea that like he has spent so much of his career curating and sort of trying to transcend like what America is and means using technology to see him then become like shit I see on X.com, the everything app, just like everything else, feels so indicative of where we are now. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I mean, just to that end, it's like seeing the internet become content when there was a time when it was art and it was like the thing transcending American culture and had so much potential. It's like, I see that as a

direct parallel because what a nightmare. Now I'm watching women make spaghetti in their sink for views. And it's just like, well, this used to be a place where I would click for hours because I was like, wow, someone made this in-depth website that teaches you how to do this thing. And it, like, you have to go there and you meet a thousand other people who've heard of it. And that's it, but it matters. And it's like now that doesn't exist. It's just like, you know, a bunch of AI voices telling me how I can pick zits out of my nose. Yeah, you can really see it when you jump ahead to something like Life of Pablo.

He was on this nothing has ever finished trend before everyone else. And I remember I was living in London when it came out and my roommate Luke and his now wife, we were all huge Kanye fans and we would go to parties and we would hear songs from it. But we started to realize that over like a month's time, we weren't hearing the same version of those songs

week to week because he was doing the thing where he was changing the Spotify upload. Wait, so you're saying like I maybe have even like retrofitted what I believe those songs sound like because I it's possible you've never actually heard the album yeah like the completed album makes people to die it blew my mind because I was like wait a minute like he is actually done he's sort of broken our concept of like what an album is and it's so crazy now because like you know a marvel movie will release a patch note and like change doctor strange as like appearance in Wanda vision or something yeah and like in in 2016

Connie West was saying, like, no, like, we're going to like roll out an album in different updates, like, like, updates. Like, we're going to do push updates to this thing. And I remember thinking at the time, like, that is so cool and so weird. And I think it was indicative of what was to come. The album released and the chaos of it was more of a statement than the album itself. It's a rough album, one I like, but I can, I can, you know, admit that it's a rough album. It's a little inconsistent throughout.

There are, like, moments that matter. I like to compare Connie West to Brian Wilson, the sort of singer-songwriter, sort of brain of the Beach Boys. And Life of Pablo to me has the same feeling as pet sounds where you listen to it and you're like, oh, this person's like having a nervous breakdown right now. Wow. Like, Life of Pablo to me sounds like a nervous break. It sounds, Life of Pablo to me. Not Donned, not Jesus. Life of Pablo is like the, like, the mania of a nervous breakdown to me.

Like, you're listening to him just like, this person is, like, out of control. What track? What track did you do? Yeah. How far end did you get before you were like, this is fucked? I mean, I guess the opening being like, you know, the weird preaching. It doesn't stop. I felt like I was like, it's just so sporadic. You're going from Taylor Swift's asshole to like, we don't want no devils. Like, it's like it has no center.

That's what I mean. I mean, the opening track, which I love, Ultra Light Beam, sounds like someone who, is going insane. Yeah. Like the whole album sounds like this disjointed maximalist thing that he's like updating in real time using streaming to do so, which is now so normalized that we don't even think about it being a big deal. But to set the stage for where we're headed with this episode, to circle back to Barthel's

essay, I want to read one more quote from it, which is Kanye plays into our fantasies by holding out the possibility that are glum everyday existence, the watered down one, the one you know, as the spoken intro to Dark Fantasy puts it, isn't the only game in town. There's something else out there, he says. But of course, there's not, or at least not yet. The only thing realer than real is what we make for ourselves. The only thing truer than true is the truth yet to come. And I feel like that's like up until maybe sometime between Pablo and Donda, that he is basically

sort of forcing, he's using technology to force reality to change. the playbook that like fascists have spent the last 15 years using. And it's just, it's all connected to me in a way that is so strange and frightening and odd. And so vibe check. How are you doing before we go to add break with all this? How are you feeling? I mean, I'm, I'm with it.

I'm with it. I think that you're making the case. Yeah. I mean, we haven't even gotten the grievance, but I'm right here with you. That's the other side of the coin. Well, right after an ad from our sponsors, Adidas, we will be back with more. Adidas and PornHub are our sponsors today and we'll be right back.

Pornhub, do the do. He's, I mean, he claims he's launching a porn site, which just feels like a crime waiting to happen. It seems like a crime that has happened that he filmed. Well, yeah, I mean, there's an argument you made that he was trafficking a woman in public for like a couple years. Okay, so two constants of pop culture over the last 15 years has been, you know, what the hell's going on with America and what the hell's going on with Kanye West. I want to run through a little timeline and kind of line up his transformation with this internet usage and, you know, all of our internet usage and see where that takes us. So let's at a baseline before we were all online like we are now. You started this with the Katrina Benefit concert where he says George Bush doesn't care about black people.

I comment. We both agree, like, that fucks super hard, right? It's still fucks hard. Like, I'm sorry, that's an amazing thing to say on a telethon across every channel in America. Yeah, because he also wasn't wrong. And George Bush later said, worst moment of his presidency, which all sorts. Because that guy got hit in the head with a shoe. And maybe changed Mike Myers, you know what I mean?

Because Mike Myers is standing next to him. I can't remember like a movie with Mike Myers that mattered after that actually. Nope. That is a, it is a fascinating moment in time. So 2007, 2008, he becomes GQ's man of the year. And he kind of rare for him, he starts to brag a bit. So he says in that issue, this, oh man, this quote is so good, actually. I am the number one human being in music.

Human of the year. That means any person that's living or breathing is number two Because I'm number one now You are in the presence of the champion Bow in the presence of greatness That sounds a lot like Donald Trump today It on it I mean they are very thematically linked I think

In ways that are fascinating and complicated That November his mom Donda dies He then breaks up with his fiance He makes a weight and heartbreak effectively jump-starting Drake's entire career. Yeah. Yeah. Summer 2008, he's booed for showing up very late to Bonnaroo.

So Kanye is blogging the way we would all eventually be tweeting. And we have so many good sections of Connie's blog to read for you. Actually, do you want to read this one? Yeah. So this is Kanye West, blogging in 2008, about showing up to Bonarue at 4,000. 30 in the morning. Kanye says, I understand if people don't like me because I like me or if people think tight clothes look gay or people say I run my mouth too much.

But this Bonnery thing is the worst insult I've ever had in my life. This is the most offended I've ever been. This is the maddest I will ever be. I'm typing so fucking hard. I might break my fucking MacBook Air. Shout out to friends. The inclusion of the MacBook Air to me. like elevates that to like a let like I mean it is also like you said it's very trump it's like very like

like I hate I hate Diet Coke but I'll keep drinking that garbage like it's just very you want all caps on truth social is how I feel yes um two weeks later he blogs again getting mad at a magazine article that had been published a year before they're like we moved on circus yeah no and he writes this isn't true and it bothers me greatly because people think I'm so, so, so cocky that I would have something like that. I'm just a regular guy with cool stuff in his crib, but instead I was made out to be instead I was made out to be Ben Stiller's character in the movie Dodgeball with I was made out to be Benzler's character in the movie Dodgeball with a huge pick of him wrestling a bull in his

office. I love that he always has to have a very specific reference. It's never just like you could say, you said I was. a bad person. It was, you called me basically not the name of the character. Yeah, he's, he's just like, he doesn't know the name of the character. He's just, he's just, you know,

like when people say like, what does it mean to understand technology and understand culture? And it's like, in 2008, that's, this is, this is so ahead of its time. He's, he's 10 years ahead of its time. Mm-hmm. 2009, South Park does the gay fish episode. He gets mad. He blogs about it in all caps.

I'm going to give this one to you in all caps. You can make that however you want. Kanye says, South Park murdered me last night, and it's pretty funny. It hurts my feelings, but what can you expect from South Park? I actually have been working on my ego, though. Having the crazy ego is played out at this point in my life. career.

And then he goes on to say, I need to just get past myself. Drop the bravado and just make dope product. Everything is not that serious. As long as people think I act like a bitch this type of shit, what happened to me? This is what a diary is for. But that's it. He's like, this is exactly what blogging was made for.

It was just like airing your personal grievances and then using it as like a therapy device that everyone can look into. It's so beautiful. As long as people think I act like a bitch, this type of shit will happen to me. I'm putting that in my diary. About six months later, in the fall of 2009, Taylor Swift's, you belong with me, beats Beyonce's single ladies. Kanye has a problem with that.

Obama calls Kanye West a jackass. And then Kanye West, on his blog, writes an apology, and I'm going to read this one because I really, I really want to read this one. And it is also in all caps, okay? I'm so sorry to Taylor Swift and her fans and her mom. I spoke to her mother right after and she said the same thing my mother would have said. She's very talented. I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and she's in the bleachers. I'm in the wrong for going on stage and taking away from her moment. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff and then he ends it with, I gave my awards to Outcast when they deserved it

over me. That's what it is. I'm not crazy, y'all. I'm just real. Sorry for that. Really feel bad for Taylor and I'm sincerely sorry, much respect. And as we know, they made up after that. It was all fine. Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. Yeah. I think that might have been his actual breaking point historically. I think that argument is correct. To you, 2009, based on our timeline, 2008 and 2009, is sort of the moment when he is sort of beginning to like start his techno vomit. Like he's sort of just like nonstop posting and stunts and sort of like culture jacking. But he's also going through like intense personal tragedy. And I believe based on what I've sort of understood from the genius documentary, this is also when his bipolar starts to manifest.

Yeah. Or at least like, yeah, it's really expressing. he becomes kind of like, the religious part starts to come back. Yeah, because I think according to that documentary, like, his mother was kind of the calming influence on the personality disorder and sort of the mental health issues that he had already had. And this is when it's starting to spin out of control. And what's fascinating is, like, we're reading these things and they're funny and they

are funny. And we can say that they're funny because they are funny. But they're also just like the way, like the president talks on the internet. And there is something there. And I don't know. I don't know what to make of that, actually. Like, I have these feelings that, like, okay, Connie West is projecting the future of American culture in this messy, chaotic, really strange way.

But I don't know, like, what is, like, what help me here? Like, what does that mean? Yeah, you know, I think that it's the first time, really, where you see this backlash to face. where the famous person then has a platform to yell back. And I think that... Oh, that is fascinating. Yeah, where it's like, usually, you know, in the 80s, it's like they would either kill themselves, Millie Vanilli,

or they would just like, you never heard why. Did Millie Vanilla really? One of the guys. Yeah. And it's like, I think that... Or, you know, like there's this backlash and it's like, they just go away forever, Tanya Harding. I think that there is this moment now where it becomes indignance, and that is only exacerbated

by the fact that they have a platform where people can respond in real time. And so I think that there can be no real personal growth in fame after this point because it's endless commentary that he is then feeding into by responding. Whereas, like, it just, I don't think that that was the case before. I really don't. And like maybe someone in the, you know, who listen to this can correct me, but I feel like that is what is happening now where it's like Donald Trump. So I have a Getty Images account and there's like Viacom is one of their partners. And so they have all this.

Humble brag. Yeah, right? It is the only thing that makes me feel rich. And I, you know, they have all this old footage from the MTV VMAs with Donald Trump with Melania there in the like sort of, you know, apprentice era. and he's just a guy from a reality show. No one's making a deal. No one's really pressing him on anything. It's fine.

And I'm like, that's not the same person. Like, it's actually like watching a different person. And I'm like, oh, he didn't feel persecuted. And everybody wasn't saying he was this horrible thing. And then, you know, then comes the court cases where he's losing. And then it just like becomes more and more and more. And I think that like if he didn't have, you know, if there was not a Twitter where he could respond to it all the time, he would have just fucked off. same with Kanye

I think that like it's this access problem that makes famous people delusional and I would also say like I would like to hope that Chapparone doesn't get there but I think that like it's not Don't bring her up on this show We can't we can't take that heat We can't

I'm just saying that like it's already so responsive to critique online in a way that is so to me indicative of Oh you're not going to be able to handle this Like the thing is like you're supposed in it when we were growing up when I was a kid in the 90s Famous people were in many ways untouchable there were critiques, but they weren't talking to critics directly Now it's like oh it's my job to fight back and prove I'm worth something and it's like oh well the level of delusion you have to get to

To fight everybody it's looking bad I'm I'm so For years I have been like struggling to articulate what this is, and I think you cracked it. Especially if you compare it to the Hurricane Katrina thing where he's on TV. Yeah. And because that's the access point. But then after that, he gets a blog, and then after that, he gets a Twitter account. And so it's like any moment, any off-ramp moment as his mental health spirals, as his, like, personal life gets messier, that he could have taken, he doesn't because he doesn't have to.

Right. And I also think that it's an exposure to, like, I think that, you know, in the past, it's like, we'll just shield our celebrity that we represent, our like posse, whatever. We'll shield them from that criticism. It is not their business because, like, their job is to make a thing. Now their job is to talk to the people all the time. And that's only increasingly become the job of celebrity. And he was so early to it. His relationship with tech and trends was so different than what we were used to. His breakout was, you know, through Chip, munking beats is what they would call it. And he was using tech when it was new to sort of transcend what was possible with hip-up at the time. And that became part of his brand. It became part of who he is. It became part of his process. And when I think this is showing is every time he had an opportunity to reach out, every time there was a way to speak to people directly, he would embrace it. He was very early to that idea. And I mean, you could even argue he was very desperate to do that. Right. But there's this posting pause, which I think is also interesting. After all the trauma that led to 808 and everything leading up to the South Park thing, for a while he does leave the public eye.

He's not posting as much. He basically goes dark in 2010. And that was when he was making my beautiful dark twisted fantasy. And looking back of that album now, if you play this out, he had this moment before it ate his brain and then destroyed all of us where he could sort of actually express it. Like on that album, you do get this glimpse of the maximalism that is now the defining characteristic of everything. Yeah. It's such a specific time where he's online being watched all the time, but we have yet to have smartphones in our pockets that are, that we're all used to being there.

It's like right before the fall of Rome, right? Like he's doing this digital everything all at once thing that the internet is about to do, but he's still able to make it coherent. I mean, there's a story about Nikki Minaj recording it where he's got a laptop full of open, full of tabs with classical art and pull. pornography and he's just cycling through the tabs talking about like make the song sound like this which is like a fascinating idea I mean he got good results in her but like yeah I mean like in retrospect that's an insane thing to do like that's a really frightening weird thing to do to like a young

woman yeah in a recording studio right also like just imagine if that was any job where they're like so this is what it feels like and I'm like can you stop showing it he tried he did that again in Adidas. He pulled out a bunch of pornography and did it was like, but it kind of worked twice. It's like the shoes, the shoes were in. There's something there, right, of like him being so internet brained and like specifically like gooner porn brand. They're like he's having feelings watching pornography, but he can't like express them without just being like, make it feel like the way I feel when I watch this porn video. That is there is something there. I agree. I don't know what it is, but there's something there. I mean, like, this is, I would say probably the peak of his career.

It's the thing that breaks everything because he's chasing that forever, which is why you keep bringing up porn, you know, in classical arts when you're meeting with people because you're trying to replicate that feeling again. And I think that when you get diminishing returns, the only thing that feels related is reaction at all. It also, in many ways, was this peak of Internet, where it's like, we, everyone is starting to understand how to use it at the same time. And there's this guy who feels like he's in the future.

And so now he has far more eyes on him than he's ever had. And instead of that being an empowering force, it's like, you know, this double-edged sword. 2010 is like the last moment I felt like the world was offline. Yeah. Like and then from like 2011 onward all of my memories involved technology to some degree after that moment we all started to come into the The dystopia that Kanye had sort of been having fun in before that point you know he's he's posting a lot he is making a lot of like genuinely Historic important impactful music yes But I just thought you were gonna say tweets that's why I started laughing because

Because that's like the one about the water bottles. The one about the water bottles. So our mutual acquaintance, Brian Feldman, spent years trying to track down the YouTube video referenced in my favorite Kanye West tweet, which is from 2011. And it reads, no way spirited away is better than Akira. No way.

Sorry, was just looking at a YouTube of top 10 anime films. And Brian Feldman, I think, spent many years trying to find the exact YouTube video that pissed off Connie West in 2011. It's also, It excites me to know that Kanye has an actual YouTube account where he watches videos. I love the idea that he, like, clearly typed in top ten anime films and then, like,

watch, like, some kid. But see, and that's the thing. Like, he, his understanding of technology is so innate. And so, like, part of his whole deal that as the 2010s progress, it also starts to curdle. So you end up getting, I mean, Yisus drops in what? Yusus drops in 2013. So basically, like, going into the year that births. Gamergate that starts the Donald Trump like murmurs of becoming president.

He has already made a album that has a single called Black Skinhead on it. Yeah. Yeah. And in 2015, at the VMAs, once again, he announces his 2020 presidential run. And this is only two months after Trump had announced his. Yeah. And that's when you start to see like, okay, like something is happening to people who post. Yes.

Like something is happening to our brains. Mm-hmm. And I say ours because it definitely happened to my time. Oh, I feel that way. I'm like, can I stop being on the internet? Right. And then a year later, he's tweeting nonstop in early 2016. He tweets, in all caps, Bill Cosby, innocent.

I don't know. I mean, is there, was there a, so you would say like this is sort of actually the moment around 2016 is when you fell off the Kanye bus. Yeah. Do you sort of remember, I mean, this is a funny question because it's basically the same as now, but like, what was the political, what were the political wins in 2016? Like, how did, what was the vibe? Oh, the vibe. I mean, I think that, like, it was the end of hope. I think it was like, in like, obviously in the sense of Obama being his brand.

But I also think that, like, the internet had sort of come to this place where, like, YouTube is sending gay kids. to the White House to interview the president and everything is a meme and BuzzFeed is like peak and like everything is sort of colorful and the internet is this connective tissue for the world and millennials kind of feel like we're out of the recession we are coming into like some kind of power girls is still on television like things are I've been watching clips of girls on X all day it's really good it's really good it's like damn they really nailed us and they did they got us And I think that, like, after that point, we entered this, like, dark era of, like, oh, that was stupid. We're so embarrassed.

Like, why did we think that, like, things were actually going to get better? Like, there was clearly some, you know, equal opposite reaction happening that none of us were paying attention to because things were just so good over here. And I just, I remember, like, that, obviously, you know, the fight song video being sort of like, oh, uh-oh. That was the peak for me. What the fuck is this? I mean, that song is good, though. I'm going to say. I'm totally fine.

You're fighting for fight song. I'm totally fine saying that I get amped up when I hear fight song. When I hear, when that chorus comes in, I get amped and I'm ready to vote for Hillary. I become red pills. I'm like maybe actually kind of at some points. You're, you're, you're marching in Charlottesville every time you hear fight song. I'm wearing khakis. I look down and the khakis are on my body.

And I'm like, you know what? I don't know. I just think the black people have gotten a little high phone. You know what? This is my mistake for bringing up FightSong. We're going down a really dark path here. I'm swerving. I'm swerving by taking us back to our timeline,

finishing our sort of timeline here. In November 2016, Kahn US ends a concert saying that if he had voted, he would have voted for Trump. Yeah. And then this is the tour where he cancels it because of Kim Kardashian, allegedly being robbed, which I did not realize it was a conspiracy theory.

But that is funny. The photos are really clear. It's sort of like a moon landing type conspiracy where you're like, that's weird. It seems like they took a lot of these photos and picked the best ones. They facetuned her body to be T for the kidnapping. I hadn't thought about whether the photos are touched up or not. Okay, Grant, put that down for a future episode. We've got to look into that one.

And then in the end of 2016, Connie goes to Trump Tower. And that is the moment when you, I think, rightfully were like, this is not going to get better for both America and Kanye West. This thing that was happening between, let's say, 2007 and 2015 that, like, in the midst of the Obama magic and the, like, soft millennial features, selfie stick, BuzzFeed dance decade. We did not, you know, grumpy, the era of grumpy cat and little bub, we did not. Little Bob. Yeah, I love Little Bub. His owner once helped me translate the Boston Marathon Bombers YouTube channel from Russian into English. So a little Bubbs sat on my lap and we went through the Boston Marathon Bombers YouTube page together.

Jesus. Yeah, that's what you. Your lore is insane. Those are just things you could do in the 2010. Like, no one could stop you. But this is the moment when the process that you're describing, I think we were not as a culture, as a country, understanding what the two-way street, the unlimited access of the internet was doing to the most megalomaniacal people, Kanye at the top of that list with Donald Trump. But also, I think with everybody, this idea that everyone has a voice and we'd spent a

decade being like, great, yeah, everyone has a voice, fight song. And then you're like, oh, no, everyone has a voice. Uh-oh. Yeah. And like, you can't turn it on. Why aren't these bad people talking so loud? Turn them down. And they're like, we can't turn them down because that would make.

as a publisher, so we can't possibly say. We're a platisher. We're a platform and a publisher come up. We're a platisher. Yeah. But we're not responsible for anything that's said here. And it's like, okay. Yeah.

Do we think that, like, to put like a real pin in it, it was that he was realizing, oh, everyone's having a voice. And that means I have to get even louder at each stage. And the natural conclusion of getting louder is like Nazi T-shirts. If you make the argument that the George W. Bush doesn't care about black people. and the Taylor Swift VMA's incident are effectively Kanye being Kanye, quote unquote, in mass media.

And if you were him and you looked at the reaction when you did that, I think your natural impulse would be like, one, they're all in cahoots against me. They're like they all hate me. They don't like me. And two, I should seek out ways to make sure that like the next time I act the way I feel like I should act,

no one can stop me. And I think if you follow that trajectory with someone whose mind is also like not getting the help it needs. Yeah, the end point is doing nitrous and selling like swastika t-shirts. I think that you're right. I think that like the voices, you know, it's not just that everyone has a voice, but now everybody's voice matters in some way. Like it isn't just like, oh, that's noise and I can ignore it. It's, oh, well, now there's louder backlash or there's more of a consensus.

And I have to react to that. Whereas before it was just sort of like some people are saying and like that, you know, could be gone tomorrow. I think that like it is the fact that like the everyone having the voice is now reality and life. And so you kind of have to care. Like you don't get to turn it off and be like when I went to have dinner at Applebee's and no one there was talking about it. It's like they're talking about it. And after our next ad break brought to you by truth social.com. We are do the do.

We're going to be talking about the world that is created when everyone has a voice and we don't want to think about what that means and what specifically that does to Kanye West and Donald Trump. Let's do a little check in. How do you feel? I mean, I feel okay. I feel like, you know, I'm fine. How are you doing? Honestly, I'm feeling a little relieved. I need to make sense of it.

and I've been trying to make sense of it. And actually, like, recording this episode has helped kind of make me understand a bit, like, why that happened. Yeah. It was like he was mainlining Elon Musk's Twitter, like about five years before it reached the rest of us. And the natural result is you end up selling a swastika shirt high on nitrous with Terminator Teeth. The internet is obviously causing an entire generation, especially of young men to become increasingly isolated and mentally ill. And the idea that someone who is, yeah, you're doing great. I'm fine.

You're literally killing it. And so I just, and that's what you need to hear on the internet all the time or else. Or I'll go crazy. Yeah. It's going to get bad. It's so much. Yeah, it's going to get really bad. But I think that like it is, it is sort of like to our own peril that we ignore the fact that there are mentally ill people who before the internet were already mentally ill and needed support who are on the internet being exposed to the same traumatizing sort of forces and expect and expect something different.

You know what I mean? of course this is a problem for everyone. He just is in a very specific position of being incredibly famous, incredibly rich, different than a lot of people in his own industry, had a lot of failure, I think, publicly, even with his successes. And so I think that, like, there's no excuse for this, but I do think that there is, like, a lot of cause and effect. Yeah, it's not so much that, like, he is, he is,

causing this. It's that there was an effect that the internet was clearly doing to him. And it was doing it to him faster and I think more more aggressively than the rest of us. Yes. In that sort of like peak late stage Obama era, the reaction to Kanye West being like, you know, publicly unwell, showing signs of online radicalization was to say like, oh, that's, you know, that's silly. You know, oh, he's voting for Trump. That's just Connie being Kanye. Yeah. And it's like if we had taken that more seriously at the time and not been so quick. quick to say he's the exception.

I, you know, like, the process that we've sort of tracked with him is the process that, like, a lot of young men have gone through. A lot of men have gone through. And, yeah, it's, it's such a bummer to see. I mean, it's like the Amanda Bind stuff from like that same time period where you're, you're so comfortable being like, you know, it's like what you just did at Chapel Rhone. You know, poor child. It's like how you just victimized Chapel Rhone.

Yes, chapel, come on. Rebel Spirit and I'll apologize. You hear that Chaperone fans? Please, please, please do not throw bricks in my window. Please do not come for me. I'm a 35-year-old man. Please don't come from me. Guys, if you can come for me, I just want you to know,

we're going to start dancing together because I like chaplain. You're not going to make me hate that girl. You not can put that on me. Pink Pony Club came on the other day, and I already had two glasses of wine, and I was really filling myself. It's a ball. It's a bomb.

Okay, so back to our timeline here, just a couple more spots. April 2018, Kanye goes full maga. He tweets that I forgot about this one. He tweets that he and Trump both have dragon energy which is kind of sick actually. I wish I had dragon energy. This is also

unfortunately when he says that slavery was a choice unfortunate choice of words and thoughts to share. Yeah, just a really just a really unfortunate kind of combination there. Now we get to Jesus King Donda Donda too. This is like this is the moment where I'm like this is never going to be good again.

He's like living in the stadium. Yeah, I remember this. It's like deep COVID. Yeah, he's living in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. He changes his name to Yay, which we haven't been using this episode because that just feels. That's just another symptom. I think like let's not encourage it. He's hanging out with a guy called DeBaby.

Yeah, he's not canceled. If you, I think even before, being canceled, like, if you're hanging out with an adult man that calls himself da baby, like, I don't know. Also, if all of his songs sound like Scooby-Doo, like, chase music, then like, maybe just question what you're doing, you know, just hang out with somebody who has doper beats. All of his music sounds like when, when they're running.

Yeah, exactly. They're just like a guy in a sheet, the sheet is billowing behind him, and they're just like, their feet are, like, going faster than their bodies are. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And by 2022, he is now, I think, completely and totally radicalized. There is no backing off of this. He's odd Alex Jones wearing, like, a face mask and praising Hitler.

He's wearing White Lives Matter shirts. He gets suspended on Twitter while Elon owns it, I believe, which is like pretty impressive. He's having dinner with Trump. And he is effectively being managed by Milianopoulos and Nicholas Fuentes. Yeah. He is now, like, he has connected himself to the main artery of fascism in America. And also, wait, around this time is this when the GOP tweets that they are now Kanye West, Donald Trump and Elon Musk? Yeah, which.

They should have been like comma, Bill Cosby. Yeah. Here's a, and here's a bunch of rapists also. Yeah, we're all of these guys. Yeah. We're every, hey, we're the GOP. We're every famous rapist. Yeah.

Trump 2024. We love famous rapists. Yeah. And none of you beeless rapists. Yeah. Just the already powerful ones. Yeah. So this is also when the genius dot comes out, which I, did you see it?

Oh, my God. I've seen it several times. I had an old roommate who would watch the Wolf of Wall Street and turn it off before things started going bad. And that's sort of how I feel about watching Genius. I'm like, let's just watch episode one where it's all ramping up. That's so funny. I used to have a friend who.

would sneak away from the bar. And he was doing it for like weeks. And finally I was like, yo, where are you going? Because you're like leaving for like a half hour and then you come back and he goes, oh yeah, I go to my apartment and I smoke a bowl and I watch the scene from Wolf of Wall Street

where they're dancing on the boat to get like psyched up for the rest of the night. And he was doing this without telling anybody for weeks. I'm telling you, this is in line with the psychosis for seeing. Yes, yes. I agree. I completely agree. Put something in that movie.

The genius doc to me, I think it fills in a lot of blanks. And anyone listening to this who wants a deeper dive, obviously, like, you should watch it. The part in when he's in Haiti in the compound wearing the bulletproof vest, that to me was like, oh. Yeah, it's that level. It's that level. Like, this is not, there's no recovery here. Yeah. And pitchfork had a really good review of the doc.

So this starts with Kanye talking, okay? She goes, have you? guys ever been like locked up in handcuffs and put into a hospital because your brain was too big for your skull Kanye asks at one point rattling the unholy calm of the potential of the potential real estate partners in his company who look freshly arrived from human blood transfusions no okay well i have conier goes on to tell these men that he took medication so he could turn alien into english and grows increasingly belligerent and incoherent. As the developers behold him with cool, moneyed contempt, Cudy, his friend who produces the documentary,

does the only decent thing he cuts the camera off. And to kind of fit it with your theory that you put forward in the second act, because of technology, Kanye can just never turn the camera off. He can just turn it back on. Right, right. And I mean, something else that I've just been sort of thinking about mulling and who knows if this is co-cony, hear it, so just go with me on the ride, is that when we first started, you know, if we look at

the sort of 2009 era, there's maybe 10 people who have a million followers on the internet. Like, it's not a big place. And as the internet grows and there are more eyes, people are doing bigger and more insane things to maintain that and to grow that. And I think that, like, it's a weird argument for a smaller internet, but I'm like, I do think the problem is we're all on there. I think that the more eyes staring at somebody, they're just going to perform whatever they think will get them positive, negative, whatever attention. And I think that that's true for the GOP right now. It's why they're posting out memes of people getting deported in like a chat GPT, Studio Ghibli ripoff style.

Yeah. It's not because that's like informative or like good politics. It's because people are going to see that and react to it. And they're addicted to their reaction. And I think that like when you have someone who's already so isolated and unwell and the only like they're closer to the internet than they are to people in their real life, like what do we expect? And to go all the way back to sort of the the Mark Barthel essay, it's such a tragedy because like he is clearly using technology on his early albums to. And he's talked, I mean, he has talked about how graduation in particular was not a hip hop album. It was a stadium rock album, and he was going to be the first black man in America who could make stadium music.

And he was going to, and he does that with vocoders. He does that with sampling techniques that did not really exist in pop music before. He does that by sampling daft punk. He does that by embracing technology to transcend the limitations of his race, of his class. And it puts them on this path that now we're all kind of part of where the technology that we believed could help. us transcend the bullshit of our daily lives of our humanity has made us all insane neo-Nazis. Yes. And I think it also tracks that like that's why millennials are the only ones who are voting more progressive. I think that like, and part of that is like, I mean, another sort of aside.

But I think that like we, we knew how to use the internet, but also we were there when people were afraid of the consequences of using it incorrectly. Like there could be this backlash. And I think that boomers relate to that. They just showed up to start fighting. They just came They're swinging at whoever, about whatever. And then I think young kids just have only been in this era of it. Yeah, I mean, I think of Gen Z as the Lurker generation. They don't actually make a lot of content, but to stare into the void for their entire lives, like, yeah. I mean, I really do think that they're stunted in a way.

And to me, it's really sad because it does sort of like remind you of the promise of the internet where it's like, I think that there was a time where this was such a uniting force. There was a time when I moved to New York, like most of the people I knew in New York I knew from the Internet. Yeah. And it was safe and wonderful and they were smart and like incredible people and we're still friends. And I'm like, I don't want the kids today to meet each other. No, I don't plan of crime. Yeah.

I mean, there is a story of the promise of technology and the sort of like shirking of that promise. And you can see it in everything we've been talking about today. but, you know, what we are talking about has been pretty dark. So I do want to say, you know, I want to give Kanye credit. Yeah. Because in 2020, I mean, I'm like, yeah, go for it, man. I'm over here. In 2023, he said that Jonah Hill made him like Jewish people again after he watched 21 Jump Street.

So that was in March of 2023. And then in May of 2020, three, Kanya hired Milo Yonoplas to effectively be. be his assistant. So it didn't really stick. But if we can get him to watch 22 Drum Street, maybe we can fix this whole thing. I think if someone just took his phone, I mean, he's like, he's a cult leader, but I think he should be, there's got to be a cult that just takes him away from all of this that, like, reprograms, right? I mean, this is a conversation that we have circled back to several times on this show over the last couple weeks and months, which is like, how do you de-radicalize? I don't know. Like, do you think that,

Do you think there's an off switch for something like this for someone like him? The problem is the feedback loop. And like if you're always doing something for the reaction, it's like you have to cut off the reaction. And I still think that that's true for Donald Trump. I think that like all of this is a, I'm going to do like, I think this second administration lives for the reaction. Yes. I don't think that they even necessarily believe their own bullshit so much as they're like,

well, everyone's talking about it. And it's how they get out of issues, right? Like we have Signalgate and then suddenly they're like, well, let's just start deporting people to a death camp and now we're not talking about this huge issue with national security. We're talking about due process. And it's like, right. Like if you can control reactions and it is this sort of like, I don't know, I think you have to just get away from them.

Like I think if Republicans didn't have access to the internet anymore, they'd have to go back to being regular people. Yeah. Social media platforms in the beginning of the 2010s, we're all saying like, not only are we going to connect the world, but we can change. the nature of reality by doing so and what they either did anticipate and didn't care about or didn't anticipate was that there were people powerful enough and unwell enough and isolated and lonely enough to be like yes i will do that yeah and didn't think like what that would mean and so yeah like the

republican party right now is is using a feedback loop of executive orders and constitutional crimes and and all kinds of sort of like bad faith bullshit to distract and, you know, scatter any kind of resistance. And they're not passing laws in the same way that someone like Kanye West is not really making music anymore. Because once you get totally sucked into the feedback loop, the feedback loop becomes the job. Yeah, that's it. There's nothing else. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, it's not that different from like the fears that like AI content will poison AI. by like creating like a feedback loop. Yeah. And he is effectively like if you buy into the idea that like he has spent his entire career trying to transcend the limitations of a normal man to be, you know, what he said, the greatest living man in music of all time or whatever, you can't transcend your own humanity. Like it's not possible. Like technology cannot let you do it.

It feels like the signal is just sort of feeding back into itself over and over and over as as it corrupts, actually. Yeah. Oh, that's so dark. It's so sad. Yeah. Ask me how I'm feeling again. I feel sad.

Yeah. Pretty sure that means it's a wrap. Where can people follow you online? You can find me on Blue Sky, Insta, YouTube, and my new show. How is this better from Courier? It's coming out this May. So I'm all over the place. Panic World is a Garbage Day production.

Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written. and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our derange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash panic world. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude. production slash ads. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer,

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