Charlamagne Tha God was a guest on Wednesday night’s (October 24) episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Almost immediately, the ever-persistent host asked Charlamagne about the mental health conversation he was supposed to have with Kanye West last week. The Breakfast Club co-host ended up canceling the sold-out event.
“Me and Kanye have a relationship — not as close as he and Trump — but we have a relationship,” he explains. “In every interview he’s done in the past he’s always talked about his mental health. He always talked about being bi-polar and being on medications.”
Charlamagne went on to explain he felt people were ignoring the elephant in the room — ‘Ye being off his meds.
“When I saw him at the White House, he said he wasn’t on his meds, he had gotten misdiagnosed, he didn’t have bi-polar, it was sleep deprivation,” he continues. “I was just like, ‘Eh, I think he needs to figure that out.’
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“For what I’m trying to do, which is like elevate the conversation about mental health in the black community and try to eradicate the stigma around mental health, I just didn’t think it would be a good conversation. It would be a distraction.”
Colbert asks him how long it took for Charlamagne to cancel the event after his White House run-in with ‘Ye.
“I took a day because I didn’t want it to be a knee-jerk reaction,” he says.
From there, Charlamagne explains ‘Ye’s team was “relieved” he was canceling the event. The only catch? He had to tell ‘Ye himself.
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“We just had the conversation,” he says. “We actually had the conversation when he was in Uganda ’cause he was scheduled to come home that Tuesday night, which he still did, so I told him that weekend.”
Watch the full interview up top.