How would you try to track down Kanye West? If you are John Safran, you just go to knock on his door. Having flown from Melbourne to Los Angeles with a vague interest in the rapper’s antisemitic remarks, Safran – a Jewish Australian comedian-journalist with a history of outlandish stunts, often mentioned in the same breath as Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson – arrived outside one of West’s properties, a mansion in Calabasas, California. He poked around until he found an old water bill addressed to West and, having gotten his bearings, set about meeting his neighbours.
“Is it fun living next to West?” Safran asks Ernie across the road. “No, it’s terrible,” Ernie says, rattling off a laundry list of quibbles over planning permissions and cars blocking traffic. But Gregg doesn’t mind him so much: West’s people invited his family to one of his church services, which “was really, really nice”.
West hasn’t been seen there for a while, it turns out – and neither have his security guards.
This is the kernel of Safran’s latest book, Squat, a freewheeling account of the week he spent squatting in West’s mansion. He calls this period “a writer’s retreat”; others would just call it trespassing. Safran initially had no plans to squat in West’s house – but, once he realises it is possible, the idea “ticks a lot of boxes when it comes to my personal interests: Nazis, hip-hop, book writing and snooping”. After stocking up on camping gear, he treks to the property, slips in an unlocked door and spends a strange week trying to better understand West’s psyche, all the while sleeping in the rapper’s bed and raiding the pantry.
Safran isn’t that worried about how West might react if or when he finds out a 52-year-old stranger from Australia squatted in his house and wrote a book about it. “I just pray that he has bigger fish to fry,” he says. “I mean, there’s obviously something wrong with me that I do this stuff.”
Safran’s glib summary of Squat makes sense if you’re familiar with his shtick: “Kanye West had come out in support of Hitler and I’m me.” If you aren’t, Safran has, in the name of good telly – and in the name of poking at cultural, political, religious and ethnic divides: tried to join the Ku Klux Kla; “married” a Muslim relative of Osama bin Laden; got crucified in the Philippines; wore blackface in the streets of Chicago; enlisted a Muslim cleric to put a fatwa on the Australian television host Rove McManus; and underwent an exorcism.
We meet at Safran’s synagogue in Melbourne, where he’s finishing an irreverent shoot in his “Ye-mulke”: a yarmulke made of an old Yeezy sneaker, West’s former fashion line with Adidas. That collaboration ended when West’s multiple antisemitic outbursts became too much for the label, as well as many other companies. West claimed his personal wealth crashed $2bn in a single day. He subsequently apologised “to the Jewish community” in Hebrew – then released a track stating that he couldn’t be antisemitic because he once “fucked a Jewish bitch”.
But, as Safran points out, even this part of the story is knottier than it seems: the Adidas founders, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, were members of the Nazi party and the company supplied shoes to the Wehrmacht before the factory was repurposed to make armaments. These are the “tangles” he likes, stories that are far more complicated than they first appear. “Another writer might think, ‘God, I wish Kanye was white, as that would make it easier to write about him being racist,’” Safran says. “I’m the opposite – it is more interesting because he is Black.”
***
After Safran stashes the Ye-mulke in his car, we head across the road for coffee. The server recognises him immediately; he tells us that he works at the church across the road from Safran’s synagogue.
“Hey, if you’d like to start a really exciting holy war,” Safran says, leaning in conspiratorily. “I know the rabbi.”
It’s remarkable how outlandish some of Safran’s efforts still are, 20 years on. Take the episode of John Safran’s Race Relations, his TV series about dating across cultures: he visits an Israeli sperm bank to make a donation but gets his Palestinian boom mic operator to masturbate into the cup instead. He then travels to the West Bank to donate his own sperm – their shared attempt to create “Jalestinian” children who would, presumably, heal divides. It was shocking in 2009 and it is shocking now.
“You know, I blame society for me breaking into Kanye West’s mansion,” he says now, faux-serious. “The signs were there. You could have stopped me.”
Safran has been a hip-hop fan since childhood (“I was possibly more into Public Enemy than the members of Public Enemy,” he writes), but he only became interested in West after the antisemitic outbursts. Why would the biggest rapper in the world go on Alex Jones’s show with a balaclava and a Bible to say “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler”? But Squat is about more than just West: it is also about the broader rise of antisemitism, the shared histories of Jewish Americans and Black Americans and also Safran’s own Jewishness.
While the book opens with a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, which Safran attended because NSW police had advised Jews not to go, Squat took shape long before Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October and the war in Gaza. Safran has been attending rallies in Australia for the last year but he couldn’t find a way to include this in Squat without it feeling “tacked on”.
“It is going to be interesting to have a book that’s coming into this sideways – looking at identity and how people pressure you to [explain], why are you a Jew?” he says.
His week in West’s mansion is not a fun one. He’s unnerved by the decor, which includes a room containing a mysterious pile of human-sized ragdolls. He sleeps poorly, in the rapper’s bed, and is terrified about being caught – by nosy neighbours, police or even West himself. He cooks up some old pasta using a bucket of rainwater. (That water bill he found? Unpaid.) He starts accidentally injuring himself in weird ways until his exhausted brain decides he’s cursed. “Am I no longer the guy who interviews the cranks?” he frets. “Have I become the crank?”
There is a sense that maybe Safran’s weird line of work is finally getting to him. “I realise I’d be short-changing myself if I justified this trespassing as nihilistic thrill-seeking,” he writes. “If I wanted that, I’d train surf. No. Kanye is playing with my family story for his art.”
***
Safran grew up in a culturally Jewish home in Melbourne. His father took him to synagogue on Fridays but, in terms of his beliefs, “played his cards close to his chest”. His mother’s side were once a very religious family in Poland, until the Holocaust. Only his grandparents survived; his mother was born in Uzbekistan as they fled Europe. “After that, for them, God was dead,” Safran says. Perhaps this was his first cultural faultline, which is now his bread and butter, he reflects: “A proudly Jewish family who also thinks God is dead – and with a pretty good argument for it.”
Before he was a name, Safran had never even made a prank phone call. But over years of television and radio work, John Safran developed John Safran the character: playful, fearless, confrontational. But in Squat he worries that decades of playing this version of himself has left him desensitised: “I was buying drinks for a Holocaust Revisionist, convinced I could have explained it to my grandmother if she was alive.”
He says: “I don’t know if my work is fun. It’s very stressful when I’m out there. I get scared. But when I am working, there’s a logic to it. Take approaching the Klan – I find that less scary than approaching someone on the street to ask for directions, because approaching the Klan is my job. Fear and obligation drives me – I just feel it is such an obnoxious squandering of resources if I don’t go there.”
It’s hard to know where Safran’s limit might be when “going there”. There’s a moment in Race Relations when one of Safran’s friends loses his temper over a stunt. “Even you have to have a fucking point where that’s enough,” the friend yells at him. It’s not that Safran doesn’t have boundaries; he’s just very willing to dip a toe over them for our entertainment. He’s more overtly gunning for laughs than Theroux, more in your face than Ronson. (The three men all know each other, he says: “You do seek each other out in this line of work.”)
Safran’s work has taken a physical toll. In 2022 he had a stent put in to address heart issues that were brought on, in part, by his decision to take up vaping and smoking for his book about big tobacco, Puff Piece: “I just thought, my book’s gonna be better if I’m addicted.” The world has changed a lot since he began knocking on doors: “Everything’s basically gonzo now because everyone’s got a smartphone and a YouTube channel. So it is not good enough just to be gonzo – I have to be the one that broke into Kanye’s house.”
Aside from his weird week in West’s mansion, Safran hurtles around Los Angeles and New York, trying his best to meet the rapper and Bianca Censori, West’s Australian partner. “I swear, everyone in Melbourne told me they had a connection to Bianca and not a single person could deliver,” he moans.
While he doesn’t meet West or Censori, he does manage to befriend West’s pastor in Los Angeles, has repeated run-ins with his staff and even tracks down the rabbi who – Safran hears on good authority – might have given West private lessons on Judaism.
In many ways, he thinks Squat is more interesting as a result of him not meeting West. “I wouldn’t have squatted in his mansion, and I can tell people think that’s LOL. So it worked out for the best.”
If he’d knocked on that door in Calabasas and West had answered, what would Safran have said? “I still don’t know, even now,” says Safran and shrugs, forever impish. “Hey, hold my Ye-mulke?”
Squat by John Safran is published by Penguin Random House on 22 October
