Kanye West dropped by “Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Thursday night to talk about everything. And we do mean everything, as the almost 22-minute interview about West’s career and positive relationship with President Trump somehow got around to coffee tables.
When Kimmel asked Yeezy if he ever regrets anything he says — or just puts it out there and there is no point in regretting it — West launched into a long-winded explanation about the past and regret and simulations and coffee tables. Yes, coffee tables.
“We get too caught up in the past and what everyone is saying and what everyone is tweeting. And sometimes you have to just be fearless enough to break the f–king simulation,” West said. “And when I mean simulation, this is what I mean by simulation — sorry, I know you guys wanted to clap, but everything I’m gonna say is going to be amazing.”
Here’s West’s full “coffee table simulation” explanation.
Here’s the idea why you’re in a simulation. Let’s start with acting, first of all. When a two-year-old screams in a restaurant, the entire restaurant screams, ‘Teach that kid how to act!’ We’re all unpaid actors in some giant script that we didn’t write. Simulation: a two-year-old jumps on a coffee table and someone says, ‘That’s a coffee table, don’t jump on that!’ So it went from being something that makes him feel like Superman, he’s got his cape on, to something where he has to think about — this person is like a family member he doesn’t like anyway — he’s two years old, he doesn’t give a s–t about a coffee or a table. And he’s starting to like calculate all these things. And by the time you are 40 years old, you’ve got a wall full of coffee tables calculating you into traffic, calculating you into your career choice, calculating you into this house, townhouse that’s not quite as big as the townhouse next [to it], and it just never works. That’s the simulation that I’m talking about. That’s what I mean when I say simulation.
“I think I understand what you’re saying, but I might not,” Kimmel tells West, adding that you also don’t want the two-year-old to get hurt.
“We are too protective,” West said. “We always don’t want someone to get hurt. Can you imagine me talking to my publicist before I said I’m going on TV again? [laughs]… I’m going on TV because it’s awesome! I love Jimmy, we can have a dialogue about the president and not a diatribe.”
Watch the full interview above, in which there is also a long pause that never gets an answer when Kimmel asks Kanye: “What makes you think Donald Trump cares about Black people — or any people at all?”