Wale Speaks On Kai Cenat Not Recognizing Him: 'I Was Upset for, Like, 5 Days in a Row'

In an interview with Shannon Sharpe for his Club Shay Shay podcast, Wale reflected on his awkward encounter with Kai Cenat at the 2025 BET Awards, during which the streamer failed to recognize him. Wale was asked about his tweet in which he turned the awkward moment into an apparent advertisement for the Nintendo Switch. “You turned that into a Switch deal?” asked Sharpe. “No, but if you like it, I love it,” he laughed in response. “That was a recovery.” Sharpe recalled the time he presented the Daytime Emmys and how he struggled to recognize some of the people there because his area of expertise is sports.“I’ve been doing the music business like this, bro,” Wale said. “I don’t remember people, and then a lot of people take offense to that. So I get it, a little bit. I did play in the celebrity game with him the year before, but… Okay, it’s cool.” Sharpe suggested that Wale should’ve offered Cenat “a little grace” because he’s only 24 years old, which got a laugh from the rapper. “That’s the thing, now you got me,” Wale laughed. “Y’all acting like he was born two days ago. Okay, look. Alright, I got to be super careful, ‘cause motherfuckers is cold-blooded, man. I was upset for like five days in a row. So when he’s talking about mental health at the stream awards, I’m like, ‘Yes, mental health, you get it now.’” Wale continued: “Imagine giving your life to this game and then you go to the awards to just support the culture that you’ve been a part of for 13 years, and then somebody who asked you to play a video [game], like ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s play one day.’ ‘Cause you saw them last year, and then you online and everybody’s like, ‘Yo, Kai Cenat, he didn’t know who you was. That was funny.’” Because he said that Cenat failed to recognize who he was, in a room full of his peers no less, he decided to talk to him. “Through my vantage point, I’m just like, ‘Yo, that made me look crazy, bro,’” he continued. “But, I think the way that people saw it is like, ‘Yo!’” He then picked up a coach cushion and started to beat it, mimicking how he thought people perceived the interaction. “‘Fuck you! Ahhhhh! You 20-year-old!’” he laughed. “That’s what they acting like I did! And I’m like, yo, I’m just saying you made me look crazy. I feel uncomfortable in this room… At that moment, I’m like, ‘Damn, everybody making me the [business] on the internet, just because he didn’t know. I was just confused. And then when they said I press him, I was like, ‘Oh so that means I got to leave.’ Like, I got to go to my hotel for like a couple days. … I introduce myself at my meet and greets sometimes. That’s how I move, I don’t be like, ‘You have to know who I am!’” Wale added that he felt like Cenat was “downplaying” his association with him, and suggested that he could see his “influence” on how the streamer dresses. ”I’m not saying I influenced you, but your stylist got me on [their] vision board,” he added. “I just didn’t like how I felt in the moment.” Wale said that he felt compelled to say something, but doesn’t like how the interaction and his reaction to it was depicted online. If anything, he wanted to make it a “teachable moment,” to discuss the generational divide and how that happened. “He’s accepted a role, whether he really planned on it or not, to be one of the voices of hip-hop,” he concluded. “Whether you like stuff or not, we still have to preserve the culture. … I wish I would have handled it differently, but at the same time, I definitely thought it could be a teachable moment.” Earlier this year, Cenat seemingly failed to recognize Wale during an encounter at the 2025 BET Awards. At the time, Wale was gaming on his Nintendo Switch when Cenat walked past and greeted him to ask what he was playing. Cenat admitted to his audience he had no idea who he was talking to, but he later learned who it was from his chat and mispronounced the rapper’s name as “Wally,” which got a laugh from his crew as well as some corrections. After the interaction went viral, Wale commented on a post with a video of the moment and clarified that he didn’t know cameras were rolling. "This is crazy," wrote Wale at the time. "I didn't know we was bein filmed both times..we played in a celebrity football game last year ...I was reallly [sic] confused.

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