Richard Fidler

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When I told my friends and my wife that John Safran was coming back on Conversations, they all said to me various versions of, what's he done now?

Well, I'll tell you what he's done now.

John Safran, Australian gonzo author and documentary maker, has spent a week or so in what he calls a writer's residency in a mansion in Los Angeles.

And not just any mansion.

It's a mansion that belongs to Kanye West.

Kanye West, one of the biggest-selling, most critically acclaimed hip-hop artists of all time.

He's also a major figure in street fashion.

He's become so wealthy and powerful, he's got people who can turn his slightest whims into reality.

Sort of.

At one point, Kanye West was worth something close to $2 billion.

But then he made the transition from celebrity eccentric to seriously out there.

John Safran became interested in Kanye West, who now calls himself Yee, when he saw a clip of him on the Alex Jones show, wearing a black eyeless balaclava, denying the Holocaust and speaking in defence of Adolf Hitler as a human being.

Kanye then said that black people like him can't be anti-Semitic because they're actually Jewish.

And so John went to LA to ask Kanye, or Yee, what gives?

And so he spent a week in one of Kanye's mansions, an abandoned mansion, that John entered uninvited.

And John squatted in that weird blue empty house with no running water and a vulture in the roof.

hoped he would actually run into the man.

This was a project that ticked quite a few boxes of John's personal obsessions.