Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh argue Kanye West's erratic behavior stems from untreated bipolar disorder exacerbated by his massive ego, citing his risky Gap deal and reliance on entities needing his fame. They suggest record labels profit by pushing him into manic states for sales while he stops medication like lithium to maintain creative intensity, leaving Kim Kardashian to manage his chaos without financial reward. Ultimately, the hosts imply West is trapped in a cycle where his illness drives industry profits, challenging fans to decide whether supporting him enables destructive behavior or sustains an artistic genius. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why Mental Illness Pops Up00:03:43
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Man, we were talking to, we were thinking about doing the piece this week on Kanye.
That's what I was thinking you could do.
We were gonna.
Right.
And we're gonna do it based on Kanye using a mental illness or faking a mental illness, this, that, the other.
And then we started to like have conversations with some people.
I gotta keep them nameless.
And they basically all came out and they said, this guy is severely mentally ill.
Severely bipolar.
Like, you only, the argument we were making is, why do these bouts of mental illness only pop up when he's got to promote some shit?
And he goes, no, no, those are the ones that you hear about.
It's happening all the fucking time.
Nonstop.
And it often happens a lot after he gets something massive because it emboldens him and it emboldens his sense of self and his ego.
And then he goes, I don't need these meds.
And he goes off of it and dives deeper into the mental illness.
But I mean, the things that we were telling, the most glaring and obvious point as to how you know that this is mental illness is this gap deal is worth potentially billions of dollars.
Yeah.
His album sales will make him pennies.
Yeah.
He's potentially willing to throw away the gap deal to promote this album.
That's mental illness.
Yeah.
And once it was put in, you know what I'm saying?
Like once it was put in front of me like that.
Yeah, it's interesting because I'm dead ass.
I was looking at his tweets, whatever, two nights ago, and I'm like, this is the most sane he's ever sounded to me.
I don't want my daughter to do porn.
I got to get divorced from this Kardashian.
I was like, yeah, these are, you're finally sounding crazy.
Sounds realistic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now you sound not crazy.
But if you're risking saying anything, Harriet Tubman just worked for a different white person.
She didn't free any slaves or whatever.
Like that could fuck up a gap deal.
Gap is a massive company that is signing with you.
You're not a musician as much as you are a fashion icon anymore.
You're not fucking that up.
For, yeah, for music.
Also, another thing that we came across in our research about this is the only people that he works with are people that need something from him.
And not only people, corporations.
Gap was fucked.
Gap was doing horribly.
So they're willing to take the risk of working with a mentally ill person, a severely mentally ill person.
And what happens?
The stock goes through the roof the second they announce it.
Adidas was not doing well.
So they're like, fuck it, I'll risk it.
Anybody who enables a mental illness, setting up these rallies in South Carolina, working with him at the studio, all these things, they're not Dr. Dre.
They're unnamed guys that need the push.
They're fucking designer.
You know what I mean?
They're these rappers that need a shot of adrenaline in their system that Kanye can provide.
Who are the people that he used to work with that you don't see him having a relationship anymore?
Jay-Z.
Jay-Z.
I bet we could look through all his close contacts and every single one of them needs Kanye.
Kanye doesn't need them.
Yeah.
And that's the sign of someone who's like truly battling with mental illness because you push the people away that can check you and you push the people away that try to check you.
We heard, not to count you, but we heard that Kim wasn't going there to get him locked up.
We heard Kim was going there with a doctor just to make sure he was okay.
There was no plans of like putting him in a mental institution or any of that kind of shit.
Unchecked Manic Highs Drive Creativity00:04:16
But what happens is when you're in that heightened state of paranoia, when the mental illness, that like bipolar break is serious, you are supremely paranoid.
So you are going to think in the most chaotic of ways.
We should even talk to Kanishka about this.
I bet it's all just part of the disease and it's like the most normal behavior within the disease.
Yeah.
But why would I was going to say, because I was saying, Kanye, not like I was the first person to say it, but again, we have a friend who's bipolar.
I saw him go through an episode a couple of times.
By the second time, probably seven or eight years ago, one thing he said to me that stuck with me, but first I started seeing Kanye do similar shit of like a manic high.
And I was like, oh, this seems very bipolar.
And a lot of people scoffed at it at the time.
And now he's on a manic high.
And what I remember, and Kanishk was like, no, he's not.
And I was like, that's why I scoffed when he said, bring him on.
But what my friend said when he was going through a manic high is he goes, if you had just let me create uninterrupted, I'm telling you, I would have created brilliant shit.
And I was like, yeah, okay, sure thing, man.
You're saying that because you're here and you're you and you're going through it.
But maybe Kanye, what's allowed him to put out the prolific shit is he has manic highs that are unchecked.
Now, definitely sometimes it's trash because nobody can check him, but also he just gets to create out there in fucking Wyoming.
And maybe sometimes that's where the brilliance comes from is a manic high.
Some people say that he goes off the meds when he wants to start creating music.
Because yeah, the meds just dull you.
And what a crazy thing that is that anytime you're happy, you start thinking, fuck, am I having a manic high?
Am I doing this?
I'm going to change my medication.
We all think about taking drugs to fix something that doesn't feel good.
I feel depressed.
This drug lifts me up.
We never look at feeling too good as a problem.
And that's what bipolar medication a lot of times does.
Like if you're on lithium or something, it's just a mood stabilizer.
So it doesn't let you go too low, but it also doesn't let you go too high.
But imagine feeling high to the point where you can, some people say that they can actually like feel colors.
Yeah.
Right.
Like imagine feeling that level of good and then taking a pill that's going to make you feel worse.
Right.
Nobody wants to take a drug that makes you feel worse.
Matter of fact, if you do have a bad experience with drugs, meaning they make you feel worse, like I had with mushrooms, I'm like, I ain't taking that shit.
Exactly.
So imagine the discipline that it must take.
Yeah.
Every time you start to feel good, you go, uh-oh, gotta take my meds.
I gotta take my medication.
And it's specifically called a mood stabilizer.
So like if I took Allegra for allergies and I started sneezing more, I'd be like, I feel worse for the exact thing it's supposed to help.
Fuck you.
I'm not taking these meds.
Here is a medicine that's supposed to make my emotions more stable, my mood more stable, make me more emotionally healthy, but I feel emotionally less healthy.
Fuck the meds.
And imagine this.
Imagine you worked at UPS or something like that, right?
Where you don't rely on your feelings in order to do the job effectively, right?
Yeah.
You could maybe take that.
Yeah.
That's understandable.
Now imagine you work in a field where your feelings drive your creativity and your art.
You need to feel excited and inspired in order to create.
Yeah.
And this pill removes the fucking furnace that warms up the creative place in the world.
The universal true.
You can feel really sad and depressed and put out beautiful music.
Feel.
You just need to feel.
And that won't let you feel because you can't get a manic low either because the manic low is scary because you might kill yourself, whatever.
The manic high is scary because you feel like I'm invincible.
But it'll stabilize.
It'll take away the manic low.
I can't even put out like fucking Nirvana or whatever these things.
Imagine neutral music.
Kid Cuddy ain't a star with neutral music.
Exactly.
Nobody wants to listen to neutral, right?
We're down listening to some shit that's super sad.
We're down to listening to some shit that's super happy.
But that middle ground, like nobody wants to listen to Adele's song if it's like, hello?
Okay, it's reasonable.
You're not there.
That's cool.
You don't call it.
Can I leave a message?
Yeah, call me back whenever it works for you.
That's why we don't want that.
Give us the fucking extremes.
Give us the feels.
We want to feel.
He creates music that makes you fucking feel.
And if he's feeling the strongest, the most heightened feelings without the meds.
And low-key, I'm curious how often these record labels and these touring companies and these people in his camp come to him and they go, well, yo, we need another album.
Yo, maybe it's time to tour again.
Drama Keeps The Show Afloat00:06:46
They know what he got to do, not to take away his accountability, but they know what he's got to do in order to create this shit that they could profit off of.
And they know what putting him in that position is going to make him do.
They're basically going, hey, can you get off the drugs now?
Like, I'm not saying they're doing that exactly.
And he's a grown man.
He got to be accountable for his interactions.
But I have enough mental illness in my family where it's like, it's really hard to keep mentally ill people accountable, man.
The people around you need to play a huge part in your life.
And I kind of think they do.
Like, we kind of heard, but I feel bad for Kim.
Yo, like, Kim, and it's funny, I've never felt bad for a Kardashian MD in my life.
Yo, listen.
Listen to me for the first time.
Go ahead.
Listen to this.
I feel bad for Kim because she seems like a woman who just wanted to be in love, be in a relationship, start a family.
Like she's not really doing the antics that she used to do as much.
And she's just tasked with keeping the family together and making sure Kanye doesn't explode their family dynamic.
Like she has to deal with his manics up and down way more than we even see.
And you never see her like lash out at Kanye.
It's always like, hey, guys, just, you know, he's dealing with something.
Have some patience for him, whatever the case is.
Like, that takes a lot.
Son, I'm sorry.
For a girl who has the money and the resource she has, I don't know why she hasn't like, fuck this motherfucker.
Exactly.
I understand the gold digger, right?
That needs Kanye.
You got to enable him because that's your lifestyle too.
Kim might have more money than Kanye.
Who knows if she doesn't?
But Kim was floating Kanye.
Kanye was $53 million in debt.
She was paying all the bills, everything.
She got to deal with this mentally ill motherfucker who won't stay on his meds when he offers no benefit to her besides being a family man.
She don't even monetize him on the show.
He barely on the show, right?
The keeping up with the Kardashian shit.
So while we're all sitting here going, oh, she's going to use this for next season, Chris Jenner is going to find a way.
He's not really on the show that much.
So literally, she's going through this to keep the family together.
So here's why I don't disagree.
Here's where I'm stubbornly still anti-Kardashian because I've locked into not liking them.
Yeah, yeah.
You have tons of go-go fans.
They're horrendous people, but they know whether he's on the show or not.
A lot of motherfuckers are going to watch the show to see how this unfolds behind the scenes.
That's fair.
Yes.
And I don't think maybe Kim.
I can see Kim based on little clips when I watch when my girl is around.
Oh, she's...
I can't.
I truly cannot do it.
I'll watch The Bachelor.
I'll watch a lot.
That one, I'm like, yeah, I can't be in the room.
I fucking hate this.
But she seems like she really does.
She just wants to be in love.
I get that to a degree.
I still think she co-signs a lot of Chris Jenner shit, but I think Chris Jenner is keenly aware that you need drama to keep this show afloat.
And this show might not make a ton of money, but it floats everything else.
It funnels into everything else we're doing now.
And I think when she sees things going off the rail, she is completely okay with it and willing to let it go.
She's like a record exec to me.
I think that's really reasonable.
I think it's reasonable.
But then look how Kanye was doing screenshots of him reaching out to Chris and she was just silent.
Yeah, but he's saying shit to her like easily gassed to light him and turn him up a little bit more.
Yeah, but why do you need to?
He's already put in the screenshot.
Yeah, no, I'm just saying it's like, I think they as a family just have his best intentions in mind right now.
How about it's a little bit of both.
It's probably somewhere in the middle bought into that system.
They were already monetizing their Kanye.
They are more than capable of creating drama.
They chopped off the dad's dick.
Yeah.
Right.
They made a whole fucking show about turning him into trance.
Yeah.
Right?
Every day, every Father's Day, they still post a picture wishing him happy Father's Day, even though now he's, it's like, they know what to do.
They know how to confuse us.
And a lot of it, I think, is done by them in the sense that, like, there's a lot of famous families out there.
None of them seem to have this level of drama every year.
Lamar Odom, Caitlin Jenner, the Kim gets robbed.
Kanye, Kanye the first time, Chris Humphreys.
It is always fucking something.
And when the show first started and they were just hanging out, did anybody really give a fuck?
Scott Disik, I think, is when they figured it out.
Because she'll watch old episodes.
I'll see, this guy's hilarious.
He's a party animal.
He's a drunk.
He's fun to watch.
The show is worth talking about when a guy comes and just causes chaos.
But he would cause the chaos.
And that's it.
Before that, I don't think anybody give a fuck about the show, really.
But once there's chaos, they realize, oh, this is the move.
Always needs to be chaos.
I feel to balance of both, but I actually feel bad for a Kardashians.
Yo, yeah, it's weird.
It's like, I feel bad for all parties involved.
And we literally were like, we're not going to grill this dude who's mentally ill because we don't get anything out of it.
The guy is fucking sick.
And he's got desperate people and companies around him that are enabling it so that they can profit.
And it's kind of fucking sad.
And I don't know exactly what to do.
I don't know what the solution is.
I don't think boycotting is the solution, but I don't think that if we continue to enable it, if we continue to support it, then people will continue to take advantage of him.
It's a really weird imprisonment that he's in.
He's imprisoned by the illness, but people are able to take advantage of him while he's in prison by it.
Yeah.
So it's like, I would like, I agree with you.
Boycotting is not the way, but what I chose to do, like when he had that spat on TMZ and slavery, it's a choice or whatever, like that bothered me to the point where it's like, hey, Kanye, I love you.
I love what you gave us.
I still listen to your old albums, but I'm not going to sign up for any of your new shit until like, because I feel that's going to enable him.
Like, oh, shit, if I keep acting like this, people are going to fuck with it.
And I think if more people did that, he may have to.
Yeah, the Kanye stands are doing him the biggest disservice.
Yep.
Yeah.
And it sucks because it's like, I love Kanye, man.
I have Yeezys.
I have all his albums, all that shit, but I've taken a stand.
I just like don't really pay attention to him anymore.
Yeah.
He needed to do a versus.
He needed to do a versus.
Kanye Drake versus would be the event of the fucking decade.
Nah, Drake Drake would destroy him and embarrass him at the same time.
Everybody said DMX is going to get destroyed by Snoop.
You don't think Kanye got 20 hits?
I don't have this shit in my pants, but when I come back, I want to have this.
Who does Kanye do versus against?
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