- On DJ Akademiks' podcast, Adin Ross revealed the details of his correspondence with Ye.
- Ross said that he was initially excited to have Ye on his stream.
The YouTuber Adin Ross went on DJ Akademiks' podcast "Off the Record" to describe the phone call with Kanye West that made him decide against inviting the musician to speak on his channel.
The 22-year-old influencer said he initially connected with West, who recently changed his legal name to Ye, after the rapper sent him a message on Instagram. The two spoke over the phone for 30 minutes, Ross told Akademiks.
Ross, who has 3 and 7 million followers on YouTube and Twitch, respectively, said he was at first excited to have West on his stream.
Before the white nationalist Nick Fuentes announced that Ross would interview West, the musician had recently sparked widespread condemnation for his volatile appearance on the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' show InfoWars, during which he praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. West had also previously gone on multiple antisemitic rants online and drawn derision for a slew of other controversies, including falsely claiming that George Floyd died from fentanyl.
"Come on my stream, we're gonna do crazy numbers bro, at least anywhere from 400-500,000 live viewers for sure," Ross said he told West on the phone. "We're breaking the internet."
After the call, Ross said he at one point texted West something that probably made him think Ross "was an enemy," he said. Ross said he told West that he was Jewish and to "come at whoever you're coming at directly" rather than his whole community.
"I can't have my platform come on and just say a bunch of shit about Jews," Ross told Allen.
The texts spurred another phone call from West, Ross said, who was more heated now.
"He called me up, and he basically just said like, 'Yo, you know, you Jews aren't going to tell me what I can and can't say,'" Ross said.
Ross told Allen that the two hadn't spoken since then, and the interview never happened.
Ross, who did not respond to Insider's request for comment, has a history of platforming controversy-ridden influencers like iShowSpeed, who was banned from Twitch for "sexual coercion or intimidation," and the misogynistic self-help guru Andrew Tate.