What happened to Kanye?

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  Grant did tell you what we're talking about today, correct? Like, okay.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe Grant told me, but I've forgotten because I have a cold.

• 0:35Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so yeah, we're gonna be talking about Kanye West today.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Great.

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  So I want to start with a simple question for you, not about Kanye West, but it will, it will eventually involve him.

• 1:07Ryan Broderick?

  How would you say like, America is doing right now, like as a country? Like how, like hot or not?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  On a scale of one to 10, or just like?

• 1:13Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, yeah. Scale of one to 10, where are we?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  I'm saying we're around a like two. Like, we're really limping, we're limping, it's not looking good.

• 1:21Ryan Broderick?

  Is it because of the Gulags?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  It's the Gulags.

• 1:24Ryan Broderick?

  Is it the Gulags?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I think it's definitely influenced by the Gulag.

• 1:28Ryan Broderick?

  Hot take here, I don't think America's doing so well right now.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I thought you loved it. I thought you were like, we're killing it, and actually, 10 more seasons, please.

• 1:37Ryan Broderick?

  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 had like, realized that like, that wasn't clearly funny enough. And I then had 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.

• 1:56Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, next question. On a scale of one to 10, like, how would you say Kanye West or Yay is doing?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:15Ryan Broderick?

  Oh my god.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Easily the worst time in his like, life, yeah.

• 2:22Ryan Broderick?

  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 it about what his career's been like that that gives him that ability to do this even now?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56Ryan Broderick?

  So we're gonna 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.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm actually completely bought in, so let me let me try to make the argument too.

• 3:14Ryan Broderick?

  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, Akilah Hughes. Welcome to the show. Welcome.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Ryan. Hi, Grant. Good to see you.

• 3:42Ryan Broderick?

  Don't talk to him. Don't. He's in his producer. Don't look at him. He's in his producer cage. Don't look at him. He'll rattle the bars if you look at him too much.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  It's honestly amazing that this is the most dangerous topic, because I know you both.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Not at the top.

• 4:07Ryan Broderick?

  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, all right, I'm out? Like, I don't like Kanye West anymore. When did you give up?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  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 mistaken? And then by the end of summer-ish, he was really going off the deep end. And you know, I went to his concert. Well, it was a, 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.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:09Ryan Broderick?

  You think it was the same guy? You think it was the same? You think it was the same team? It was, it was the same, it was the same department of the CIA that did both, you think?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. 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 Klan robe. I'm so embarrassed.

• 5:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, sure.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I don't know what to do with it. You can't even throw it in the trash because what if somebody sees it?

• 5:50Ryan Broderick?

  Cause then they might, yeah, they might see it in your garbage. Yeah, I know. I, I gave up a little later. I gave up with Donda One.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  You, you expected an album to be good?

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  So I think that was the moment when I listened to it and I was like, oh, he's never gonna make good music again. And at that point, I was like, cause 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 he can make good music. Fine, and it was the pandemic, so I was like, look, I'm on well too. You know, maybe we both can come out of this.

• 6:25Ryan Broderick?

  And now I'm like, no, he can never, he, there's, I, I effectively think of him as already being dead.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:31Ryan Broderick?

  It's easier that way.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Totally. It's like, just remember the good times when he was alive.

• 6:36Ryan Broderick?

  Well, speaking of the good times, how, what, how did you learn about it? How, how did you like enter your Kanye fandom? Like, what was it for you? What activated you?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:04Ryan Broderick?

  Wow, yeah, I was about to say, okay, I thought we were the same age, but.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I'm older than you, right?

• 7:09Ryan Broderick?

  No, we're the same, we're the same age, but you went to college two years younger, which is humble brag, okay, cool flex.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Small humble brag, but you know, we all end up in the exact same place, so.

• 7:17Ryan Broderick?

  Podcasting, that's right. Like, all people, like, all millennials were in a second recession podcasting, that's exactly right.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. But I just remember, like, going to school, this, 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.

• 7:46Ryan Broderick?

  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 Kanye West, actually, uh, in fact, I would not be here. Yeah, he's my dad. Um, we're all worried about him.

• 8:13Ryan Broderick?

  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 barn pop myths for music or like school dance music, right? You know? Gold Digger was like school dance music.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 8:27Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Wait, give me a month. Give me a month of 2007 because I know where you're going with this.

• 8:45Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, this is important. So I had, I had access to both Curtis and graduation about a week early. And it was gonna be the nine 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 hop 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.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  That's wild. That's actually, wow. So you must be down bad right now.

• 9:20Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I will never forget, I think it was the 2007 VMAs and it's T-Pain and Kanye 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. 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 to.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and head and doing Coachella, you know, like, I mean, he's, he's still here. He's still.

• 9:48Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Exactly. So one last question for you to sort of orient your, you in the Kanye fandom. What is your favorite era of Kanye West?

• 9:57Speaker 02

  I mean, that's almost impossible to say. Like, I feel like that's its own episode because.

• 10:01Ryan Broderick?

  Grant put that in the document. I'm sorry I asked that.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Right. Cause 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.

• 10:34Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  DJ Brent.

• 10:37Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  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 worked 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 summer, youth, I'm like 17, I'm working at Forever 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

• 11:21Speaker 02

  into Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is also 808s. I mean, like every single era.

• 11:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, one of the great regrets of my life is I had a free ticket to the Glow in the Dark Tour before Kid Cudi got thrown off the tour for throwing a woman. It was Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cudi, 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.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  You want to hear my, my big Kanye regret? We could 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 Yeezus, so I'm like, let's just wrap up the dinner, like I'm trying to go. But he wanted me to like, talk to them for longer. We ended up missing Kendrick Lamar opening for him.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Because I was talking to these fucking losers. And then he dumped me and I'm like, "You made me miss Kendrick Lamar for these fucking talks."

• 12:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that's, that's rough. Okay, I feel, I don't, I don't, I'm not gonna 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 gonna start, I think, at the most rea- well, this is the most recent, I think. Yeah, we're working backwards. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're opening, we're opening in media's rest. So, yeah, how did we go from the guy who soundtracked, you know, millennial lives? The first time I ever had Sparks, uh, if anyone remembers Sparks, it was like a proto Four Loko. Turns your tongue green. Uh, how did 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,

• 13:01Ryan Broderick?

  which was the moment where I was like, "Uh-oh." So let's start there.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:06Ryan Broderick?

  Um, for people who, you've seen it? You've seen this ad?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:09Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Uh, 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, uh, like, his website link there. And, uh, then, uh, when he went to the website, uh, it was a $20 t-shirt that had a swastika on it.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Um, did you get one before?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  You know, I just didn't have 20 bucks at that point, so I, I just was like, you know, I'm strapped, unfortunately.

• 13:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, like, I was worried about the tariffs that I'd heard were coming, so I was like, I can't do, I also didn't know where it was made, if it was gonna be like, surcharged, yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  You know?

• 13:48Ryan Broderick?

  Um, you know, what was your, what was your sort of reaction to seeing this? Cause I think this is like a pretty gnarly weird thing. Like, this, this to me was sort of troubling.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  It was, I mean, sort of troubling is the understatement of the millennium. I mean, I just felt like...

• 14:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:15Ryan Broderick?

  I forgot about that, actually.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  I took a picture of that ballot in for my Kentucky vote and I'm like, why is Kanye?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  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 anymore. And like, that's real sad. Like, that's giving like, oh, you need to be committed.

• 14:40Ryan Broderick?

  The Super Bowl ad is like, you know, essentially one of like, the most important remaining pieces of culture that exists.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:46Ryan Broderick?

  Like, we don't really have a monoculture, but we have like, Super Bowl ads, we have the Super Bowl, and that's kind of it now.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:51Ryan Broderick?

  And the idea of him like, very visibly high on nitrous, like, shooting an iPhone video to go on Twitter.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  With also his teeth are made out of like, metal.

• 15:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Forget that.

• 15:04Ryan Broderick?

  There's something so fascinating 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 Twisted Fantasy, and it's by an author named Mike Bartel. And he basically makes the argument that up, like, that part of Kanye West's 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

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  think it's, it's a really, it's a great essay, we're going to visit it a few times in this episode, but Bartel writes, Kanye's 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, it's so weird and dark to me, twisted, if you will, as well.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Not a fantasy, or at least not a positive fantasy.

• 16:19Ryan Broderick?

  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...

• 16:33Ryan Broderick?

  Shit I see on X.com, the everything app, just like everything else.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:38Ryan Broderick?

  Feels so indicative of where we are now. You know what I mean?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  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 you.

• 17:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you can really see it when you jump ahead to something like Life of Pablo. He was on this nothing is 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.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Wait, so you're saying like I maybe have even like retrofitted what I believe those songs sound like because I.

• 17:58Ryan Broderick?

  It's possible you've never actually heard the album. Yeah. Like the completed album.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Makes me want to die.

• 18:05Ryan Broderick?

  It blew my mind because I was like, wait a minute, like he has 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's like appearance in WandaVision or something.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:20Ryan Broderick?

  And like in, in 2016, Kanye West was saying like, no, like we're gonna like roll out an album in different up like, like updates, like we're gonna 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.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  It's a little inconsistent throughout. There are like moments that matter.

• 18:55Ryan Broderick?

  I like to compare Kanye 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.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:09Ryan Broderick?

  Like, Life of Pablo to me, sounds like a nervous break. It sounds, Life of Pablo to me. Not Donda, not Yeezus. Life of Pablo is like the, like the mania of a nervous breakdown to me. Like you're listening to it and you're just like, this person is like out of control.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  What, what track did that do?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah. How far in did you get before you were like, this is fucked? I mean, I guess the opening being like, you know, the weird preaching.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  I, 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, it's like, it has no center.

• 19:45Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I mean. I mean, the opening track, which I love, Ultra Light Beam. Sounds like someone who is going insane.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:54Ryan Broderick?

  Like it, it, 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 Barthol's essay, I want to read one more quote from it, which is Kanye plays into our fantasies by holding out the possibility that our glum everyday existence, the watered down one, the one you know, as spoken, uh, 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

• 20:36Ryan Broderick?

  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, it's all connected to me in a way that is so strange and frightening and odd. And so vibe check, how you, how you doing before we go to ad break with all this? Are you, how are you feeling?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  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 into grievance, but I'm right here with you. That's the, the other side of the coin.

• 21:17Ryan Broderick?

  Well, uh, right after, uh, an ad from our sponsors Adidas, uh, we will be back with more.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Adidas.

• 21:29Ryan Broderick?

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• 21:34Speaker 02

  Pornhub, do the do.

• 21:38Speaker 00

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• 22:24Ryan Broderick?

  He's, I mean, he claims he's launching a porn site, which I just feels like a crime waiting to happen. Like

• 22:30Speaker 02

  It seems like a crime that has happened that he filmed.

• 22:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, yeah, I mean, there's an argument to be made that like he was trafficking a woman in public for like a couple of years. Um, okay. So two constants of pop culture over the last 15 years has been, uh, you know, what the hell's going on with America and what's the hell's going on with Kanye West. I want to run through a little timeline and kind of line up his transformation with his internet usage and, you know, all of our internet usage and see where that takes us. So let's hit 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. Uh, we both agree like that fucks super hard, right?

• 23:11Speaker 02

  It's still fucks hard. I'm sorry, that's amazing thing to say on a telethon across every channel in America.

• 23:19Ryan Broderick?

  Cause he also wasn't wrong and George Bush later said worst moment of his presidency, which also because that guy got hit in the head with a shoe.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Maybe change Mike Myers, you know what I mean? Cause Mike Myers is standing next to him.

• 23:31Ryan Broderick?

  I can't remember like a movie with Mike Myers that mattered after that, actually.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 23:35Ryan Broderick?

  That is a, it is a, it is a fascinating moment in time. So 2007, 2008, uh, he becomes GQ's man of the year. And he, uh, kinda rare for him, he starts to brag a bit. So he says in that issue, um, this, oh man, this quote is so good, actually. I am the number one human being in music.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Human of the year.

• 24:04Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  That sounds a lot like Donald Trump today.

• 24:18Ryan Broderick?

  Hit on it. I mean, they are very thematically linked, I think in ways that are, that are fascinating and, and complicated. That November, his, uh, his mom, Donda dies. Uh, he then breaks up with his fiance. He makes eight away in heartbreak, uh, effectively jumpstarting Drake's entire career.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, summer 2008, um, he's booed, uh, 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 Kanye's blog to read for you. Actually, do you want to read this one?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:54Ryan Broderick?

  So this is Kanye West blogging in 2008 about showing up to Bonnaroo at 4:30 in the morning.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  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 Bonnaroo 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.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Shout out to the brands.

• 25:29Ryan Broderick?

  The inclusion of the MacBook Air to me like elevates that to like a like, I mean, it is also, like you said, it's very Trump. It's like very like, I hate, I like, I hate Diet Coke, but I'll keep drinking that garbage. Like it's, it's just very.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  You wanted all caps on Truth Social is how I feel.

• 25:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Um, two weeks later, he blogs again, getting mad at a magazine article that had been published a year before.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  They're like, we've moved on, sir.

• 25:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no. And he writes, this isn't true and it bothered 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.

• 26:15Ryan Broderick?

  Instead, I was made out to be Ben Stiller's character in the movie Dodgeball with.

• 26:29Ryan Broderick?

  I was, I was made out to be Ben Stiller's character in the movie Dodgeball with a huge pic of him wrestling a bull in his office.

• 26:36Speaker 02

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

• 26:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's, he's just like, he doesn't know the name of the character. It's just Ben Stiller. He's, he's, he's, 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, of his time. 2009, South Park does the gay fish episode. Uh, he gets mad. He blogs about it in all caps. Uh, I'm gonna give this one to you in all caps. Uh, you can, you can, you can make that however you want.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  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 and career. Uh, 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 will happen to me.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  God, this is what a diary is for.

• 27:59Ryan Broderick?

  But that's it. He's like, this is exactly what blogging was made for. It's just like airing your personal grievances and then using it as like a therapy device that everyone can look into. It's, it's so beautiful.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  As long as people think I act like a bitch this time, it will happen to me. I'm putting that in my diary.

• 28:21Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, about six months later, in the fall of 2009, uh, 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 gonna, I'm gonna read this one because I really, I really want to read this one. And it, 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.

• 29:01Ryan Broderick?

  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 outcasts 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, they made up after that. It was all fine.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep, yep. Yeah.

• 29:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I think that might've been his actual breaking point historically.

• 29:32Ryan Broderick?

  I think that argument is correct. Uh, 2009, based on our timeline, 2018 to 2009 is sort of the moment when he, 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.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or at least like, yeah, it's really expressing and he becomes kind of like, the religious part starts to come out.

• 30:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Cause 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, this is when it's starting to spin out of control. And what's fascinating is like we're, 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.

• 30:38Ryan Broderick?

  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, Kanye 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?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think that, um, it's the first time really where you see this backlash to fame where the famous person then has a platform to yell back. And I think that

• 31:13Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that is fascinating.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, where it's like, usually, you know, in the eighties, it's like they would either kill themselves, Milli Vanilli, or they would just like, you've never heard why.

• 31:26Ryan Broderick?

  Did Milli Vanilli kill themselves?

• 31:27Speaker 02

  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, Tonya Harding.

• 31:36Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  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 like, 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, the case before. I really don't. And like, maybe someone in the, you know, who listens to this can correct me, but I feel like that is what is happening now. Where it's like, Donald Trump, I, so I have a Getty Images account and there's like Viacom is one of their partners. And so they have all this

• 32:17Ryan Broderick?

  humble brag.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. It is, it's 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, um, 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.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  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 Chapel Rome doesn't get there, but I think that like, it's not.

• 33:13Ryan Broderick?

  Don't bring her up on this show. We can't, we can't take that heat.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  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, like indicative of, oh, you're not going to be able to handle this. Like, the thing is like, you're supposed, and when we were growing up, when I was a kid in the nineties, famous people were in many ways untouchable. There were critiques, but they weren't talking to critics directly. Now it's like, oh, I, 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.

• 33:53Ryan Broderick?

  I'm, I'm so, for years, I have been like struggling to like 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.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:10Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Right. And I also think that like 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.

• 34:51Ryan Broderick?

  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 chipmunking 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 hop at the time. And that became part of his brand. It became part of who he is. It became part of his process. And what 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.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:25Ryan Broderick?

  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 at that album now, if you play this out.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:46Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  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 do- that we're all used to being there. It's like right before the fall of Rome, right? Like, like he's doing this digital, everything all at, all at once thing that the internet is about to do. But he's still able to make it coherent.

• 36:21Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, there's the story about Nicki Minaj recording it where he's got a laptop full of, open, full of tabs with classical art and pornography. And he's just cycling through the tabs, talking about like, make the song sound like this. Which is like a-

• 36:34Speaker 03

  And she does.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  And it did.

• 36:38Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, he got good results there, 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.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:46Ryan Broderick?

  In a recording studio.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  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?

• 36:55Ryan Broderick?

  He did that again in Adidas. He pulled out a bunch of pornography in Adidas.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  But it kind of worked twice.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:01Ryan Broderick?

  It's like-

• 37:02Speaker 03

  The shoes, the shoes were in.

• 37:03Ryan Broderick?

  There is something there, right? Of like him being so internet brained and like specifically like gooner porn brained. That 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.

• 37:21Ryan Broderick?

  That is, there is something there. I agree. I don't know what it is, but there's something there.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  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, and 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.

• 38:10Ryan Broderick?

  2010 is like the, the last moment I felt like the, like the world was offline.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Ryan Broderick?

  Like, and then from like 2011 onward, all of my memories involve technology to some degree. After that moment, we all started to come into the dystopia that Kanye had sort of been having fun in before that point. You know, he is, he is posting a lot. He is making a lot of like genuinely historic, important, impactful music.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:47Ryan Broderick?

  But

• 38:48Speaker 02

  I just thought you were gonna say tweets. That's why I started laughing because I like the one about the water bottles.

• 38:52Ryan Broderick?

  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 YouTube, the exact YouTube video that pissed off Kanye West in 2011 enough to tweet that.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  It's also it excites me to know that Kanye has an actual YouTube account where he watches videos.

• 39:24Ryan Broderick?

  I love the idea that he like clearly typed in top 10 anime films and then like watched 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, Yeezus drops in what? Yeezus 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.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:01Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Ryan Broderick?

  And that's when you start to see like, okay, like something is happening to people who post.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:18Ryan Broderick?

  Like, like something is happening to our brains. And I say ours, because it definitely happened to my time.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  I feel that way. I'm like, God, can I stop being on the internet?

• 40:27Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Off the rails.

• 40:39Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, is there, was there, so you would say like, this is sort of actually the moment around 2016 is when you fell off the Kanye bus.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:49Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  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. Millennials kind of feel like we're out of the recession. We are coming into like some kind of power. Girls are still on television like things, things are

• 41:37Ryan Broderick?

  I've been watching clips of girls on X all day.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  It's really good.

• 41:42Ryan Broderick?

  It's really good. It's really good.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  It's like, damn, they really nailed us and

• 41:47Ryan Broderick?

  They did. They got us.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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.

• 42:14Ryan Broderick?

  That was the peak for me, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  What the fuck is this?

• 42:20Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, that song is good, though.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  I'm not that old, but

• 42:25Ryan Broderick?

  I'm, I'm totally fine.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  You're, you're fighting for fight song.

• 42:29Ryan Broderick?

  I'm totally fine saying that I get amped up when I hear a fight song. When I hear, when that chorus comes in, I get amped and I'm ready to vote for Hillary.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  I become red pills. I'm like, maybe actually at some points.

• 42:42Ryan Broderick?

  You, you're, you're, you're, you're marching in Charlottesville every time you hear a fight song.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  I'm wearing khakis. I look down and the khakis are on my body. And I'm like, you know what?

• 42:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. I just think the black people have gotten a little hyped up.

• 42:56Ryan Broderick?

  You know what? This is my mistake for bringing up fight song. 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, Kanye West ends a concert saying that if he had voted, he would have voted for Trump.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:13Ryan Broderick?

  And then this is the tour where he cancels it because of Kim Kardashian allegedly being robbed, which I did not realize was a conspiracy theory, but that is funny.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  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, they Facetuned her body to be tea for the kidnapping.

• 43:34Ryan Broderick?

  I hadn't thought about whether the photos are touched up or not. Okay, Grant, put that down for a future episode. We gotta look into that one. And then in the end of 2016, Kanye goes to Trump Tower. And that is the moment when

• 43:49Ryan Broderick?

  You, I think rightfully were like, this is not gonna get better for both America and Kanye West.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:55Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:08Ryan Broderick?

  Decade.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  However.

• 44:09Ryan Broderick?

  We did not.

• 44:11Ryan Broderick?

  You know, grumpy, the era of Grumpy Cat and Little Bub, we did not.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Little Bub.

• 44:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I love Little Bub. Um, his owner once helped me translate the Boston Marathon Bombers YouTube channel from Russian into English. So Little Bub sat on my lap and we went through the Boston Marathon Bombers YouTube page together.

• 44:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Your lore is insane.

• 44:33Ryan Broderick?

  Those are just things you could do in the 2010s. Like, no one could, you know, stop you. But this is the moment when the process that you're describing, I think, we were not,

• 44:42Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  And like, you can't turn it off.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Bad people talking so loud. Turn them down. And they're like, we can't turn them down because that would make us a publisher. So we can't possibly say.

• 45:18Ryan Broderick?

  We're a platisher. We're a platform and a publisher. We're a platisher.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, but we're not responsible for anything that's said here. And it's like, okay.

• 45:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:41Ryan Broderick?

  If you make the argument that the George W. Bush doesn't care about black people and the Taylor Swift VMAs 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 endpoint is doing nitrous and selling like swastika t-shirts. Akilah?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  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, the, everyone having the voice is now reality in 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.

• 47:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. And after our next ad break, brought to you by truthsocial.com. We are do the do. We're gonna 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.

• 47:30Speaker 00

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• 48:12Speaker 05

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• 48:17Ryan Broderick?

  Let's do a little check in. How are you feeling?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel okay. I feel like, you know, I'm fine. How are you doing?

• 48:26Ryan Broderick?

  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 to kind of make me understand a bit like why that happened.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:36Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  The internet is obviously causing an entire generation, especially of young men, to become increasingly isolated and mentally ill. And the idea that

• 48:54Ryan Broderick?

  Not me, though.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Is, yeah, you're doing great.

• 48:57Ryan Broderick?

  I'm fine.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  You're literally killing it. And so

• 49:01Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  And that's what you need to hear on the internet all the time, or else

• 49:04Ryan Broderick?

  Or I'll go crazy.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's gonna get bad.

• 49:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's gonna get really bad.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  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? Like, 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, I, there's no excuse for this, but I do think that there is like a lot of cause and effect.

• 49:54Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:08Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:20Ryan Broderick?

  You know, always voting for Trump. That's just Kanye being Kanye. Yeah. And it's like, if we had taken that more seriously at the time and not been so quick to say he's the exception. 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 Bynes stuff from like that same time period where you're so comfortable being like, you know, it's like what you just did to Chapel Rohn, you know, poor chap, it's like how you just victimized Chapel Rohn.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yes, Chapel, come on, rebel spirit, and I'll apologize.

• 50:58Ryan Broderick?

  You hear that Chapel Rohn fans? Please, please do not, please do not throw bricks in my window. Please do not come for me. I'm, I'm, I'm a 35 year old man. Please don't, please don't come for me.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Guys, if you come for me, I just want you to know, we're gonna start dancing together because I like chaplains. You're not gonna make me hate that girl. You're not gonna put that on me.

• 51:17Ryan Broderick?

  I, Pink Pony Club came on the other day and I had already had two glasses of wine and I was really feeling myself.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a pop.

• 51:24Ryan Broderick?

  It's a pop. 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.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:36Ryan Broderick?

  Which is kind of sick, actually. I wish I had dragon energy. This is also unfortunately when he says that slavery was a choice.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Unfortunate unfortunate choice of words and thoughts.

• 51:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Ryan Broderick?

  Really just a really unfortunate kind of combination there. Now we get to Jesus King, Donda, Donda 2. This is like, this is the moment where I'm like, this is never gonna be good again.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Sucks.

• 52:03Ryan Broderick?

  Um, he's like, living in the stadium.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember this.

• 52:07Ryan Broderick?

  Is 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, I don't know.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Just another symptom, but I think, like, let's not encourage it.

• 52:19Ryan Broderick?

  He's hanging out with a guy called DaBaby.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, who's now cancelled.

• 52:24Ryan Broderick?

  If you, I think, even before being cancelled, like, if you're hanging out with an adult man that calls himself DaBaby, like, I don't know.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:42Ryan Broderick?

  All of his music sounds like when, when they're running.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. They just have like a guy and a sheep, and the sheep is billowing behind him, and they're just like, their feet are like, going faster than their bodies are.

• 52:53Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 53:00Ryan Broderick?

  And by 2022, he is now, I think, completely and totally radicalized. There is no backing off of this. He's on 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 Milo Yiannopoulos and Nicolas Fuentes.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:27Ryan Broderick?

  He is now like, he's connected himself to the main artery of fascism in America, and

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Also, wait, around this time, is this when the GOP tweets that they are now Kanye West, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk?

• 53:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, which

• 53:42Speaker 02

  They should have been like, comma, Bill Cosby, comma, what's the

• 53:46Ryan Broderick?

  Here's a, and here's a bunch of rapists also, where all of these guys, yeah. We're every, we're, hey, we're the GOP. We're every famous rapist.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Well, you're not wrong.

• 54:01Ryan Broderick?

  Trump 2024. We love famous rapists.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and none of you B-list rapists.

• 54:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, just the, just the already powerful ones.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:11Ryan Broderick?

  So, this is also in the Genius doc comes out, which I, did you see it?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 54:16Ryan Broderick?

  Did you watch?

• 54:17Speaker 02

  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. Where I'm like, let's just watch episode one where it's all ramping up.

• 54:29Ryan Broderick?

  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? Cause 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 watched 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.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, this is, this is in line with the psychosis we're seeing.

• 54:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I agree. I completely agree.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  They put something in that movie.

• 55:03Ryan Broderick?

  The Genius doc to me, I think it fills in a lot of blanks and anyone listening to this who wants like a deeper dive, obviously, like you should watch it. The part in Haiti, when he's in Haiti in the compound wearing the bulletproof vest, that to me was like, oh.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's that level.

• 55:20Ryan Broderick?

  It's that level. Like this is not, there's no recovery here.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:25Ryan Broderick?

  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. Kanye 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, as the developers behold him with cool moneyed contempt, Cootie, his friend who produces the documentary, chose the only decent thing. He cuts the camera.

• 56:07Ryan Broderick?

  And to kind of fit it with your theory that you you you put forward in the second act. Because of technology, Kanye can just never turn the camera off.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:17Ryan Broderick?

  Turn or turn it back on.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Right, right. And I mean, something else that I've just been sort of thinking about mulling and who knows if this is coherent, 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 like the more eyes staring at somebody, they're just gonna perform whatever they think will get them

• 57:01Speaker 02

  positive, negative, whatever attention. And I think that that's true for the GOP right now. It's why they're, you know, posting out memes of people getting deported in like a chat GPT, Studio Ghibli ripoff style like

• 57:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  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 the 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?

• 57:36Ryan Broderick?

  And to go all the way back to sort of the the Mark Barthol 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 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 like, 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 like does that by embracing technology to transcend the limitations of his race, of his class.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 58:16Ryan Broderick?

  And it puts him on this path. That like 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.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  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 in, swinging at whoever, about whatever. And then I think young kids just have only been in, in this era of it.

• 59:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, I, 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.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I really do think that they're stunted in a way. And to me, it's really sad, because it like, 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. And like, 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. They're gonna like plan a crime.

• 59:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, there, there, 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. Cause in 2023.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm like, yeah, go for it, man. I'm, I'm over here.

• 1:00:03Ryan Broderick?

  In 2023, um, he said that, uh, Jonah Hill made him like Jewish people again after he watched 21 Jump Street. So, uh, that was in March of 2023. And then in May of 2023, Kanye hired Milo Yiannopoulos to effectively be his assistant. So it didn't really stick, but if we can get him to watch 22 Jump Street, maybe we can fix this whole thing.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  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 gotta be a cult that just takes him away from all of this that like reprograms, right?

• 1:00:39Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, this is a conversation that we have circled back to several times on this show over the last couple of weeks and months, uh, 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?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  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 gonna do, like, I think this second administration lives for the reaction.

• 1:01:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  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 Signal Gate 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, it, it is this sort of like, I don't know, I, 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.

• 1:01:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Social media platforms in the beginning of the 2010s were all saying like, not only are we gonna 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.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Ryan Broderick?

  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 all kinds of sort of like bad faith bullshit to distract and, uh, you know, scatter any kind of resistance.

• 1:02:26Ryan Broderick?

  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, that the feedback loop becomes the job. Yeah, that's it. There's nothing else.

• 1:02:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's not that different from like, the fears that like AI content will poison AI.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Ryan Broderick?

  By like, creating like, a feedback loop.

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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 it, as it corrupts.

• 1:03:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, that's so dark. So sad.

• 1:03:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  Ask me how I'm feeling again. I feel sad.

• 1:03:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Ryan Broderick?

  Pretty sure that means it's a wrap. Where can people follow you online?

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:03:41Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbageday.e-mail. 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 deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude@multitude-production/ads. For any other way you would like to give us money, or work with us, or promote us, or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bad guy, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you: chill out. Touch grass while you still can.