#2272 - Mike Benz

Mike Benz (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_3 (0:06)

Shrink by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Good to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

I've been looking forward to this one.

Mike Benz (0:15)

Me, too.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

All night, I was like, ooh, tomorrow is going to be a good one. For you, it must have been very exciting to have the vault opened and to get a peek into the machine, because you've been describing this. The last time you were on the podcast, you went into depth about USAID. And it's very curious why they chose USAID as the first organization for DOJ to investigate, because it seems like they were the ones that resisted the most.

Mike Benz (0:42)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the joke that I tell here is it's like what they tell you to do your first day of prison is you go in, you walk up to the meanest, baddest SOB, and you punch them right in the mouth. I mean, that's basically what's happened here with the White House's first target being USAID, because USAID opens up the entire world of the blob, the foreign policy establishment, and its weaponization of what are supposed to be foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks operations against domestic opponents.

Joe Rogan (1:12)

And when it all got opened and you started to see the numbers and the different organizations and NGOs that were getting them, was anything surprising to you or was this all what you expected?

Mike Benz (1:23)

No, in fact, I think we're at the tip of the iceberg and what people are going to see on this is going to completely reorient their mental map of how they think the world works, how they think American power projects into the institutions. And I think the calls for reform are going to get louder and louder as people realize the reality that's been constructed around them is downstream of something that was started very long ago when American statecraft, to manage the American empire for the benefit of the American people, began to warp and distort every institution in American life, from the media to now the social media companies, to the unions, to the universities and academics, to the NGOs and think tanks, to the prosecutors, to our conception of terrorism, to our conception of activity in the drug trade, to our, you know, what we're really doing with public health programs and the medical establishment and what drives that, you know, all the way into poverty relief and you name it. I mean, every institution is instrumentalized by this apparatus, supposedly to help us, but really starting, this has been done in US history before. This happened against the left, against the Democrats in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA and, you know, to an extent, its sister orgs like USAID and whatnot were pumping money into domestic politics to stop the anti-Vietnam War movement. And this led to the reforms of the late 1970s, the Church Committee hearing, the Pike Committee hearing, the establishment of a Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee for oversight.

But even that was a very small glimpse into the window. I mean, the analogy I give here is like the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, you know, the Chronicles of Narnia where there's this whole cinematic universe. You're living in this house and there's this closet in the back of a wardrobe. And if you never walk through it, you never see that whole world. You can live your whole life without seeing it. But when you open that door and you step into it, you see there's an entire other universe here that's been right next to you this whole time.

Joe Rogan (3:43)

When you first started working for the State Department, did you have any inclination that you were going to get involved in? Did you have any inclination that this was going on? Like, did you know already?

Mike Benz (3:54)

Yeah, definitely.

Joe Rogan (3:55)

You already knew?

Mike Benz (3:56)

Yeah, definitely. I had already been working on this for many years.

Joe Rogan (3:59)

When did you first discover it?

Mike Benz (4:01)

Around August 2016 I was deeply passionate about the Internet censorship issue.

And, you know, I had some weird experiences playing chess as a kid, where, you know, I sort of came of age when Gary Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, and AI took over, you know, really took the spirit out of a lot of the chess world. And it was apparent to me as a kid that these AI sensors, these AI chess engines were going to outcompete humans. But when I was young, the sort of older people in the room were in denial about it. And when I saw that same thing in 2016, with the development of AI censorship superweapons, you know, I called those weapons of mass deletion, that they would be like weapons of mass destruction, but for speech. You know, a few lines of code would allow you to destroy entire political movements, governments, narratives. There'd be no escape from it. We would permanently change the face of political warfare or domestic politics. You don't need a standing army of 100,000 censors if you just have one, you know, machine learning, you know, just ingested database, you know, of 900 million tweets that you can ingest and then make this sophisticated narrative network map of all the different key words and concepts you want to censor. And to me, that was like this free speech version or the censorship version of the atom bomb. So I started that quest in 2016, but very quickly that research and the process of trying to write that showed these international networks immediately. I mean, the NLP, the natural language processing sort of backbone of this was all being sponsored by DARPA. And to be able to monitor the speech of ISIS or extremist or terrorist groups. And when I saw that coming home and being advocated here, I spent my whole day, morning, noon, night, 20 hours a day, basically, chronicling, archiving. That's how I know so many of these characters is because I feel like I know them better than my own friends and family, having spent so many years watching this all, you know, develop.