Kanye West tells Joe Rogan: 'My calling is to be the leader of the free world'

Minutes into Kanye West's three-hour podcast interview with Joe Rogan, the Jesus is King rapper answered the question a lot of people have been asking: why was he running for president of the United States?

“I believe my calling is to be the leader of the free world,” West said, explaining that the idea was “something God put on my heart back in 2015."

The Yeezy entrepreneur revealed that the idea to run in 2020 first occurred to him in the shower, days before the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, at which West received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.

During the interview with Rogan, which was posted on YouTube on Saturday, October 24, West said of when he first thought of throwing his hat into the ring: “I just started laughing to myself, all this joy came over my body, through my soul. I felt that energy, I felt that spirit."

West’s decision was met with criticism by “naysayers”, he said, with a number of high-profile figures asking him to reconsider by listing all the reasons he shouldn’t be president.

"I remember running into Oprah one or two days after that, she’s like, ‘You don’t want to be president,’" West recalled during the interview.

But the Grammy-award winning artist said he believed he had the confidence and vision to follow his decision through, giving his financial track record as an example of his resilience.

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"At that time I was around $50 million in debt, and I knew I had the confidence that I would be able to turn that around,” he said.

West went on to say there wasn't a better time "to put a visionary in the captain's chair." He explains: "I'm not here to down Trump or down Biden, I'm just here to express why God has called me to take this position. I'm a great leader because I listen and I'm empathetic. I do believe in world peace."

On why he was late to enter the 2020 presidential race, West blamed the pandemic and suffering from a “mild case” of the coronavirus, saying: “I remember I had the virus and I was sitting quarantined in my house, and my cousin texted me about being prepared to run for president. And I completely put it off to the side ’cause I was shivering, having the shakes, taking hot showers, eating soups. It threw everybody’s plans off.”

However, West doesn’t give a clear outline of what he plans to do if elected president.

West was asked by Rogan early on in the interview, what he would do “if you were the leader of the free world ... If that’s your plan, what is it about that that is your calling?”

West then went on to speak almost continually for the remainder of the three-hour podcast episode, pontificating on a range of ideas from "building a monastery that will then be the future of monasteries" to selling the Yeezy foam-rider for $20 because "money isn't real, so the world should eventually be free." Adding that when he talks "it's not a rant, it's a symphony of ideas."

"I think very three-dimensionally," the Jesus Walks rapper said. "I don't think in the black and white lines that I've been programmed to think in. And I think in full colour, so when I talk, I have to describe a thought in five ways."

In the podcast, West also touched upon a number of other topics, including his recent criticisms about how the music industry was unfair to artists.

"I'm not at war with the music industry. I'm just saying we need to innovate. When I posted my contracts, I had 10 contracts that kept putting me inside a labyrinth and things we don't need,” West said, referring to September when he posted photos of his record deals on Twitter.

"I'm the kind of person where I'm not trying to eliminate anyone's job. There's a way both parties can be happy. These deals can be flipped in a way that they're just more fair," he said. "The contracts are made to rape the artists."

West also broached a number of other subjects during the freewheeling episode, including the possibility that Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Bruce and Brandon Lee had been killed in a murder conspiracy.