Kanye West, 43, sat down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour-long chat on the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. The Yeezy mogul touched on a number of controversial topics during the interview, which dropped on October 24, including his comment about considering aborting his first-born child North West, 7, along with race, religion, and all things to do with his current Presidential bid. The “Famous” rapper even claimed that talk show icon Oprah tried to discourage him from running for POTUS.
Although he officially announced his bid on the Fourth of July this year, he first revealed he had his sights set on the White House while accepting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. Someone in the audience yelled “Kanye for president!” to which he replied, “And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.” Kanye explained to Joe he received a lot of negative feedback, even from high-profile figures like Oprah.
“I remember running into Oprah two days or one day after that, and she’s like you don’t want to be president,” Kanye began. When Joe asked him to elaborate, he said, “One of the things Oprah said is she said, ‘you got to bone up on your foreign affairs.’ I remember this, because it’s Oprah talking, so I’m gonna remember a lot of what the conversation was, but that’s the first thing she said was foreign affairs and foreign policies.”
During the lengthy interview, Kanye also explained that he “cried” on-stage when he talked about the decision he and Kim Kardashian, 40, made to keep their first baby. “People saw this clip of me crying and some people didn’t know what I was crying about. But I was crying about that there was a possible chance…that we — Kim and I — didn’t make the family that we have today. That’s my most family friendly way to word that,” he said. “The idea of [abortion] just tears me up inside, that I was a part of a culture that promotes this kind of thing,” he added, noting that the felt “too busy” to become a dad at the time.
