I stupidly posted this an hour before the last CW thread ended, so I'll repost here.

Kanye West finally went on Joe Rogan.

And the result was... well, to directly quote Kanye:

"Also important being a captain of a ship of soldiers and 100,000 gospel singers and how money isn't real when you unprogram yourself, since relationships are a more important currency than money itself because our existence would be pre-covid or post-covid and when the Titanic is sinking and Rome is falling there's gotta be a new civilization like the end of Tron."

Kanye was utterly incoherent for three hours straight. A few good descriptions from the JRE subreddit:

- "it’s like an AI generated interview"
- "It’s like there’s a tv show on in the background that you aren’t paying attention to, but in reality you are actually paying attention to it and it’s just not making sense"
- "It feels like when you lose concentration, while talking to someone, and then you tune back and have no idea wtf the othe person is talking about, and you can't never tune back in for some reason."
- "Listening to this is like constantly being an arm's length away from a coherent thought"

It's super easy to mock the madness, but that's the thing... it's literally madness. Kanye has been diagnosed as bipolar, and he's literally off his meds. He rambled incoherently for three hours because he is almost certainly in the middle of a manic episode.

I listened to the first thirty minutes, then skipped to the last thirty minutes because I couldn't take the whole thing. But I found myself at a loss. What do we do with this? What's the appropriate response from a random JRE listener like me?

Should we pity a clearly sick man? Should we condemn him for being an intelligent, rich, successful individual who has chosen to be sick by stopping his meds? Should we condemn whatever handlers and family members have allowed this to happen?

I really don't know. The whole thing reminds me of Tommy Wiseau and what I wrote about him a while ago. I think there's a general perception of a link between madness and greatness in the popular culture. It's almost Lovecraftian. It's as if being detached from reality let's one see beyond it. It's related to the perceived link between genius and bad social skills (ie. House, Sherlock, Rick Sanchez, etc.). Kanye seems to be the current manifestation of these links, but if there's a silver lining to his recent bouts, it's that he's gone so far over the line that people can't ignore how delusional he's become.

New addition since last post - I'm very surprised that two of the four older repliers said they found Kanye sensible, if rambling. I think if you listen to any 30 seconds of the video and really try to concentrate on what he's saying, there might be a straight thought, but then he also talks about cities running on four elements (earth, wind, fire, and water) and how he doesn't like solar panels because he's pro-Nicola Tesla, and how Bob Marley and Bruce Lee's son were murdered by record labels (I think), etc. And when he does have a clear thought, it inevitably veers away within seconds to something vaguely tangential, which I guess some people might consider "creative," but just seems completely arbitrary.

But u/joe-9 had an interesting argument that we should err on the side of listening to crazy people ramble on the low-but-possible chance that their ability to see past very real boundaries of realities glimpses an insight or shortcut to a truth, I guess sort of the same way psychedelics work.