#1052 - Mick West

Joe Rogan (0:03)

4, 3, 2, 1 Yes, Mick West, we are live.

Mick West (0:08)

Finally.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Are you ready?

Mick West (0:09)

I am ready, let's do it.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Dude, you're getting a lot of heat online from all these... It's all the Flat Earth people and the Chemtrail people. Those are the people that are mad at you the most.

Mick West (0:18)

Yeah, that's my specialty, Chemtrails and Flat Earth.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Yeah, well, that's... I asked people, which is...

This is hilarious. I asked people online, I said, Mick West from Metabunk is going to be here. What would you like me to debunk? And one of the first ones was Chemtrails, because you cannot debunk it. It's real.

Dun, dun, dun. I would say this to anybody who thinks that.

That has got to be the most ineffective government program of all time. Like, you ask people what they're doing by spraying things in the sky, and the number one thing they'll say is weather control. Weather control is one. Well, they don't have any fucking control of the weather, because if they did, they'd make it rain all over Santa Barbara and stop these fires. I mean, there's hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage going on right now. There's a fire that's bigger than the city of Washington, DC.

Mick West (1:11)

They think they're making those fires. They think that that's part of the conspiracy. Anything that happens is always part of the conspiracy.

Joe Rogan (1:18)

What do you think it is? Like, what is it with conspiracies?

Like, why are they so attractive to people? There's something going on with people, right?

Mick West (1:28)

Yeah. I think I've been looking into this a lot.

I bet you have.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

Especially since you're a government shell.

Mick West (1:37)

Well, I'm doing research with a book I'm writing, which is called Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and it's about how people get into the rabbit hole and how people get out of the rabbit hole. So the whole thing is about the rabbit hole, which is something basically people get sucked into. And I think people do a lot of research into the reasons behind people getting into conspiracy theories, like the psychological reasons and the personality reasons and things like that.

But I think most conspiracy theorists are just regular people. They're just ordinary people who get sucked into something.

Joe Rogan (2:06)

And why do you think that is?

Mick West (2:08)

Just from talking to them.

They tell me like their origin stories, their origin stories essentially, and they tell me what happened to them when they got into conspiracy theories. And it nearly always starts with them looking at some video, and now, nowadays, it starts with them looking at some video, and then they just get sucked in. And then they start looking at another video and another video and another video, and Facebook and YouTube is feeding them these videos because once you start going down that road, you just can't, you can't change your trajectory.

Joe Rogan (2:41)

Right.

It's hard to treat. YouTube, since they instigated this autoplay thing or instituted this autoplay thing, or the next video plays immediately and they're all related, I think that's definitely been a thing with people. And also like the suggestions on the right hand side, if you're watching one video on a particular subject.

Mick West (3:02)

Yeah, I was doing some experiments with that. I set up like a completely blank YouTube account, and I would just go in there and type in one thing, like contrails.

And of course, when you look at contrails on YouTube, like half the videos you're going to get are going to be chemtrail videos. And so if the first video you click on is a chemtrail video, then that just sets you down that road.

Joe Rogan (3:21)

Well, I remember this was in the days, I think, before YouTube.

This was in the days when maybe YouTube was around, but it just wasn't that popular. I remember me and my friend Eddie were high as fuck, and we're talking to my neighbor, and there was some plane that was flying over, and we were wondering why the clouds coming from behind this plane stood so long. So I asked him, I used to have this neighbor, I used to call him Bling Bling, because Bling Bling was incapable of talking about anything other than objects.

Like, all we talked about was, that's a nice car, is that a new car? Where'd you get that watch? Like, that was Bling Bling. All Bling Bling wanted to talk about was, like, material possessions.