Joe Rogan Experience #2447 - Mike Benz

1. 0:00 – 0:02

   Intro

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:02 – 7:25

   Epstein DOJ/FBI file release: why it took so long and who it implicates

   1. SPSpeaker0:02

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. [upbeat music]

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      ... All right, Mike Benz. What a day to have you in here, buddy. [laughing]

   3. MBMike Benz0:17

      [laughing] Kid in a candy shop. We hacked the government. We hacked the government's files, evidently. I mean, this is-- we have three and a half million files that it feels like we should not have. It would've been great to have had seven years ago, in 2019, when this was being litigated, but it's an incredible moment of transparency for how the world works, how governments interact with the private sector and funds, and it's just really cool to be a part of it.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:43

      What was the hold-up? What was the-- because it seemed like there was a lot of people that did not want these files released.

   5. MBMike Benz0:50

      Yeah. I've thought about this a lot. What we have access to now are internal documents from the Justice Department and the FBI that are normally, even though they're not classified, they are part of a criminal investigation, and so they're not normally disclosable to the public. Um, it could be the case that it kind of required a congressional bill to force this out. Like, when you-- if, if there's a internal investigation, and it's not a part of a court document that's entered into evidence, you can't just FOIA the Justice Department to get dirt on your political enemies because you think that they might be involved in something. Now, I don't know if it could've been done through an executive order around Epstein transparency, around the time of the first binders. Certainly, it looked like there was friction between the president and Thomas Massey over this issue. Um, but I don't, I don't know the details of what went down there, but the fact is, the bill passed four hundred and twenty-seven to one in the House.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:59

      Who's the one?

   7. MBMike Benz2:02

      [sighs] My recollection is that it was Randy Fine, but I might be wrong on that, so I don't want to smear-

   8. JRJoe Rogan2:09

      There was one person-

   9. MBMike Benz2:10

      Or imply anything unduly

   10. JRJoe Rogan2:11

       ... didn't want it released because they thought it would compromise the victims, right?

   11. MBMike Benz2:14

       [clears throat] Uh-

   12. JRJoe Rogan2:16

       At one point in time, at least.

   13. MBMike Benz2:18

       Yeah, I, I don't know what the, what the rationale, you know, is, and because I don't recall offhand who the one is, uh, I don't want to lean on that too much. But, uh, the fact is, is nobody wanted to be on the other side of this. I can't think of anything that both Republicans and Democrats voted on four hundred and twenty-seven to one and... Oh, I'm sorry, Clay Higgins. Sorry. Apologies to Randy Fine. Uh, yeah, so, um, there was the... I mean, there was obviously friction because this implicates everybody, Republicans and Democrats, uh, Americans and a dozen different foreign countries, uh, heads of major hedge funds and multinational corporations, donors to all political parties, major university and science institutions. Uh, I mean, almost every major player in world affairs was, in some way, either, either involved in or adjacent to this network, or the network tried to reach out to them because they were influential. And so, you know, there was kind of a mutually assured destruction around the Epstein hot potato for a decade now, which is that, [chuckles] out of power, the Republicans said, "Oh, the Democrats are-- don't want to disclose this because of the Clintons." And then the Trump administration gets into power, and there's a very slow, you know, reaction to the kind of disclosures that culminated in what happened this week. And so you had the Democrats saying: "Oh, they're not disclosing it because of, you know, Trump world and his associates." Meanwhile, they controlled the Justice Department and the FBI for four years and didn't release any. Uh, so, you know, it, it took an, a moment like this, and what's, what's really interesting about it is, this bill only compelled the disclosure, this law that passed in Congress, only compelled the disclosure of Justice Department r- originated files. Justice Department, by extension, FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department. It does not compel CIA-originated files. And, uh, one of the coolest moments of transparency we had last year in 2025, was when Tulsi Gabbard, as the, you know, ODNI, as the head of-- Director of Cen-- of National Intelligence, in charge of the whole intelligence community, spearheaded the, uh, JFK Files release, and we got basically fully unredacted documents. Now, I know there's a contest over how complete they are, but the fact is, is it was hundreds of thousands of files that had never been seen before, or unredacted versions of documents that had been fully or partially redacted for decades. The only reason that we have JFK, JFK files at all, is because in 1992, Congress passed a bill to force the CIA to start turning over documents. The law, I believe, was called the JFK Records Collection Act, and it forced, by law, the, uh, the CIA to establish this independent presidential assassination review board, that would review documents for declassification and compel, uh, you know, on the basis of that independent body. Given all of the intelligence intrigue around Epstein-... and the fact that it is, in my view, physically impossible over Epstein's 40-year career in intelligence adjacent work, that there was, that there's not Epstein files that are CIA originated. And we actually , you know, I, I saw this in the files that were just released. Jeffrey Epstein himself, twice FOIA'd, that's the Freedom of Information Act, uh, which, which is a law that I think came around in 1966, which allows any US citizen to ask a- any government agency for all public records that it has about anything. There are certain things that get blocked in that. This is-- There were a lot of FOIA fights about COVID. Uh, you know, Fauci famously, there's this exchange where, um, you know, one of the folks in Fauci world says that, uh, they learned cool tricks from the FOIA lady about how to get around requests. But the fact is, you can FOIA the CIA for records, uh, because it, that FOIA forces the CIA to give you decl- declassified or unclassified records, and if it's classified, it'll issue a Glomar. A "We cannot confirm or deny-

   14. JRJoe Rogan7:20

       Right.

   15. MBMike Benz7:20

       ... " the, you know, and the existence or non-existence of, you know, the classified information.

3. 7:25 – 9:20

   Why JFK files mattered: learning how covert ops actually work

   1. JRJoe Rogan7:25

      Can we-- Before we get any further, the JFK stuff, I never heard anything about it. I mean, I know the files came out, but there was no big revelations. There was no... N- Was, was there anything that came out of that, that was significant?

   2. MBMike Benz7:38

      I thought it was huge. I, I learned... I guess people are looking at the JFK files, most people are looking at it for clues as to who killed JFK.

   3. JRJoe Rogan7:51

      Right.

   4. MBMike Benz7:51

      And I know that there are many researchers who specialize in the JFK assassination, um, that have sharpened their theories, I suppose, on the basis of it in a useful way, for, for whatever it's worth. Uh, for me, I, you know, was never expecting to see a CIA document saying, uh, you know, [chuckles] "I, James Jesus Angleton, authorized the assassination of, of, uh-

   5. JRJoe Rogan8:19

      Of course

   6. MBMike Benz8:19

      ... the president of the United States." Uh, but the fact is, is what it revealed were all of these tangential and ancillary documents that showed the structure of intelligence work at a very fine and detailed level, the kind of revelations that really only come around once in a generation. There's a, there's a video online by Michael Parenti, who's a CIA whistleblower, around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s, and he says, "Pay attention to these hearings. This may be the last time for another 20, 30, 40 years that you ever get an inside look at the, at the detailed, like, you know, minutiae of a covert operation," because all this was being blasted on a congressional jumbotron with hearings, and formal congressional investigations, and public testimony. And there's-- I sort of look at the JFK files release like that.

4. 9:20 – 15:26

   Operation Mongoose/Condor and the mob: covert action logistics laid bare

   1. MBMike Benz9:20

      We got a very detailed look at everything that was happening around, effectively, Operation Mongoose, uh, it... th- because-

   2. JRJoe Rogan9:31

      Can you refresh my memory? What was Mongoose again?

   3. MBMike Benz9:33

      Yeah. So, so we ha-- So there was Operation Mongoose and Operation Condor, which were, which were related to the... Nominally, what you'll read is that they were related to the attempts by the CIA to, for Mongoose, for example, to, uh, destabilize the government of Cuba in order to induce a regime change. But because those efforts proved unsuccessful, they regionalized the conflict to, uh, do counter-communism work effectively, uh, throughout all of Latin America, the Caribbean, South America. And, uh, Operation Condor was effectively a kind of counter, counterinsurgency strategy to stop the rise of left-wing Marxist groups who were trying to throw off the yoke of American imperialism, so to speak, as they put it. And so you had a, a massive CIA operation to try to tilt the internal politics of basically every country south of the border, and we got incredibly just detail... I'll, I'll give you an example of one declassified document that's really wild. Uh, there, there's one document that, uh, is a CIA file with instructions to, uh, delete all physical copies of the document at the end, that describes how the agency had internally authorized an attempt to assassinate, you know, Castro by working through the Meyer Lansky syndicate and hiring two hitmen, uh, that were in Miami and then ha- but had contacts with the Cuban exile community liaisons within Cuba. And so this was a, this was a formal agency file that described how a CIA case officer made contact with people from the mob, organized crime, uh, with offers of pay- payoffs, with very detailed logistics. You can find this. I did a whole video on it, on my, the, like, ex sub- subscriber thing. I'll, I'll, I'll, you know, uh, put it on, on the top of my social media. But the... But it also describes a really interesting-... Jeffrey Epstein-like, uh, figure. Uh, Robert Mayhew was a CIA asset. The J- the JFK files, they describe how they got, uh, [exhales] they sponsored a, a movie to simulate, I believe it was the president of Indonesia, uh, having an affair with a blonde woman. They filmed a basically like a porno that would, uh, and cr- and cr- to create a tape, and they had very... They describe how they set up the, the room to make it look like it was, I think, in, in the presidential palace or some hotel room that was-- would have been in, in, uh, in that country, in order to create what's ef- effectively a sexual blackmail tape that c- could then be, uh, leaked to the press in order to discredit the president. And, you know, you look at these informal agency files, and on the one hand, you go, "Okay, that was the 1960s. That was the, that was the early 1960s. That was before there was any oversight on the CIA at all." It wasn't until the Church Committee hearings in 1975, 1976, that we even had congressional oversight of the CIA. There was no Senate Intelligence Committee. There was no House Intelligence Committee at the time. And at that point, assassinations had not been outlawed. I mean, the CIA was allowed to assassinate people. There, there's since been a ban on that. So you go, "Okay, that's 60 years ago." Uh, but the fact is, they did it. The fact is, is that is within the array of options that folks in covert operations saw as on the table.

   4. JRJoe Rogan13:54

      Working with the mob.

   5. MBMike Benz13:55

      Working with the mob. Now, but that goes back a long time. I, I found it totally unsurprising. It's one of these things, it's just kind of the general theme. It's shocked but not surprised. You know, it's like, "Holy crap, they, they put this in writing? Well, what are we doing here, guys?" [chuckles] And then... But you're like, "But I'm not surprised they did it because I know they were doing all these other things." The fact is, is the CIA was working with the mob before there was CIA. It-- Before it was done by the CIA, uh, work with, for example, the, the Italian mob was, was done through the Department of War in the nine-- really starting in the 1930s, and then especially in the 1940s, because they were the Central Intelligence Agency. Well, at the time, it was the OSS in the 1940s, but it would become the CIA. Their... One of their main logistical points of contact and allies for the resistance against Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini was cracking down both on the Vatican Church and on the Italian Mafia. And so, uh, there were strange bedfellows. There's a great book on this by Paul Williams. I think it was published in 2017. It's called Operation Gladio: The CIA, the Vatican, and the Mob. And it's... I, I recommend this book to everyone because it's a really, really detailed academic deep

5. 15:26 – 19:45

   Vatican Bank, offshore finance, and the ‘state-sponsored mafia’ model

   1. MBMike Benz15:26

      dive on this nexus between a religious institution, an intelligence agency, uh, an illegal organized crime syndicate that does all manner of black ops, and it especially focuses on the funding relationship. In fact, this just came out, and this sort of gets to the utility of these documents. There's an incredible document that just was released this week, where Larry Summers, who was the head of the US Treasury... So not only was he the head of Harvard University and the, and the head of the American money system, um, but he, [chuckles] he says to... He's trying to explain to Jeffrey Epstein kind of the, the politics of what's happening in the Vatican. And what he says to him is that what's, what's actually most important going on right now is what's happening with the Vatican Bank, which is kind of the, uh, the deep politics of the Vatican. And, uh, you know, I saw this email, and I just, you know, laughed and did a little, you know, twirly thing in my, in my chair because it's, it's totally unsurprising if you read, you know, that book, Operation Gladio, that I, that I mentioned. It, it traces 80 years of this because the, the Vatican Bank was the first offshore bank before offshore banking even existed. It was util-- There was an alliance with the Vatican Bank during World War II itself, with our Department of War and with organized crime outfits, at least according to the evidence that I find persuasive in this book and that, uh, appears to be validated by Italian court documents in the 1990s when all of this was litigated. Incidentally, that was when the mob was really prosecuted for the first time. But effectively, what happened was, is you had strange bedfellows. You had the United States, who wanted to get rid of Mussolini. You had the Vatican, who wanted to get rid of Mussolini, and you had organized crime, who wanted to get rid of Mussolini. And because organized crime is very deep in the logistics and unions, they control the ports, they control the s- the streets, they control safe houses. Um, and if they have allies in a bank, they are able to launder money effectively in order to do black market, you know, type trade. And if you have, for example, the support of the US government to facilitate that, that'll-- and there's protection offered to those organized crime groups, what, what you end up havening, having is effectively state-sponsored as-... a state-sponsored mafia with an untouchable bank. And at the time, the Vat-- because, and [chuckles] Larry Summers explains this to, to Jeffrey Epstein in very simple terms, which is, which is-- Yeah, here you go. "The most important change in the Vatican may not be Pope Benedict's sudden retirement, but change in leadership of the Institute for Works of Religion, the bank, the Vatican's bank. Because of the Vatican's status as a sovereign country, it's exempt from transparency rules of not only Italy, but of the European Union. This status allows its elite clients to evade any scrutiny in their money transfers. Last May, Vatican Bank president was fired after Italian authorities opened an investigation into a far-flung bri- bribery scheme." And he goes through this, but what's, what's important here is th- the British... W- when we think of offshore banking now, it's, it's usually associated with-

   2. JRJoe Rogan19:02

      Cayman Islands.

   3. MBMike Benz19:03

      Cayman Islands, you know, Jersey, Man, uh, Panama, uh, you know, the-- but... Well, Panama's sort of a different story. But it, it's usually associated with these kind of small island countries that are formally, you know, kind of their own territory, their own sort of sovereign territory. You also see this within the United States in Indian-- Native American reservations, with these kind of autonomous zones that can be shielded from certain kinds of, um, you know, public disclosures that in a typical finance institution. Typ-

   4. JRJoe Rogan19:36

      That ha- that's going on with Native American banks?

   5. MBMike Benz19:38

      Well, yeah, this, this was actually part of-

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:40

      Is that connected to the casinos? 'Cause they have a lot of money from the casinos.

   7. MBMike Benz19:44

      Yeah.

6. 19:45 – 21:50

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   3. MBMike Benz21:12

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan21:12

      Wow!

   5. MBMike Benz21:13

      Yeah. In fact, if you watch The Octopus Murders, which I think was HBO or Netflix or o- or one of those-

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:18

      Heard it's great. I haven't seen it, but-

   7. MBMike Benz21:19

      Yeah

   8. JRJoe Rogan21:20

      ... I hear it's awesome.

   9. MBMike Benz21:20

      It's fantastic, and, you know, it, it, it goes through how this was used effectively by the NSA during the Promise Software scandal and the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, where y- you had basically the NSA and then the US government, uh, r- running money laundering effectively through, you know, casinos on, uh, uh, on Native American sovereign territory. But the, the fact is, is in

7. 21:50 – 31:12

   Opium-to-Iran-Contra pipeline: how covert wars get funded

   1. MBMike Benz21:50

      the 1940s, the Vatican Bank was really the only game in town. This traces back at the CIA level to a lawyer named Paul Helliwell, who was kind of the, the architect of, of money laundering for, for the CIA. And it, it didn't even start in... Well, really started with the, the attempt to try to stop Mao in the 1930s and 1940s. Uh, there was, there were the Opium Wars in the 1830s, where effectively the British Empire and, you know, the East India Trading Company were making ungodly amounts of money by selling opium to China. They would grow the opium on the Golden Crescent or India, and then they would sell it to China with the-- a huge customer base, which would bring in huge amounts of revenues to the British Crown. Uh, and then there were two opium wars that were fought in the 1830s and '50s, I believe, around then, or... And the Opium Wars were China's attempt to stop the import of opium into China because it had a huge, by that point, uh, opium addiction problem. Opium dens in China were a massive issue within the country. They tried to ban it, and the British Crown pried open the narcotics market through a military conquest of parts of China. That's how Britain got control of Hong Kong, which remains a major marco- narco-trafficking site connected to Jeffrey Epstein in very weird ways. I'll, I'll just sidebar that. Uh, but Mao rose to power to rej-- you know, uh, in the name of... His public campaign was about rejecting the century of humiliation between the 1830s and the 1930s. To support Chiang Kai-shek, uh, and the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalists against the Chinese Communists, the War Department couldn't get enough congressional allocations, taxpayer money, to support that, so they had to find some way to finance the forces that are now effectively Taiwan, because when they ultimately lost, they fled to the island of Formosa, which is now Taiwan. But they, they financed that initially, the War Department, the, the Chinese Nationalists, through the narcotics trade, through the, basically the narcotics cultivated in the Golden Triangle, and these operations continued in Cambodia and Laos and were a big part of the JFK-... expansion of, of covert operations. To this day, in Fort Bragg, the, you know, the Special Operations Training Center is called the JFK, uh, this was a massive expansion of small wars, covert action, instead of big military action, so it was mostly spearheaded by CIA rather than DoD or Department of War. But what happened was, is Paul Helliwell, in, in order to be able to traffic illegal narcotics, created a bunch of these CIA banking structures. One's called Castle Bank and Trust, uh, i- in the Cayman Islands, another one, uh, Nugan Hand in Australia. Uh, and when you have that, you know, friendly bank that's protected, then you can move drugs. This is this overworld-underworld alliance between intelligence and organized crime, because it-- basically, every intelligence operation is, is a... I don't wanna say every, but at the operational level, it's a crime. It's an act of, uh, sabotage, it's an act of subversion, it's an act of obstruction, it's an act of illegal surveillance. So, uh, in order to do a illegal crime, uh, y- you don't wanna do it yourself because then your fingerprints are on the gun. But if you know people who do illegal crimes for a living in an organized way and have experience in doing it, that allows you to be a very useful extension, and it gets justified in the name of national security. The illegal narcotics trade set up by Paul Helliwell, who would go on to be the main lawyer for Disney and set up Disney World in Orlando... You can look all this up. You can pull up Paul Helliwell's Wikipedia, or you can look at the history of Disney, or you can pull up Castle Bank and Trust. You can put any one of these up on screen. This is all fully declassified. Uh, and so they then took that model to South, South America and Latin America and the Caribbean during Operation Condor, Operation Mongoose. And this is part of what gave rive- gave rise to the Iran-Contra that spawned Jeffrey Epstein, which was the CIA got busted running a -- the same thing it did in, in 1940s China, which was a drugs for cash for guns operation. You cultivate dr-- You can't get enough money in USAID, you know. In, in the 1940s, USAID didn't even exist. You, you can't get enough money from U.S. taxpayer dollars. You can't get enough money from private donors who will draft off of the regime change for their own profit. So how do you get, how do you get your resistance rebels enough money? It's... That usually comes down to black market trade, whether that's diamonds in Africa, whether that's illegal mining activities in South America, or whether that's narcotics. And it's-- The, the best things to use for this kind of covert financing are small, fungible, physical materials that can be converted into large sums of cash. Uh, you know, for example, like a truck full of cocaine can fund an army. Uh, you know, a truck full of copper can't. And so you had this state-sanctioned drug trade, this state-sanctioned illegal weapons, logistics apparatus, and the state-sanctioned money laundering apparatus that started in the 1940s and was utilized throughout the entirety of, of the Cold War. The... On, on the mafia side, in the ni- Operation Gladio was this stay-behind network, is what they, what they said. Basically, these were, um, right-wing groups, m- many or some of which, uh, were kind of Nazi-adjacent, who hated communism. And so even though we fought against the Nazis and Mussolini and Hitler in World War II, there was a utility to preserving a certain homegrown domestic network that really hated communism, to assist us on the ground in the war against communism. And what you saw was, in Operation Gladio, this was a NATO-wide covert network, uh, alliance of networks, a network of networks, that in basically every one of the NATO countries, there was a cell or a number of cluster cells that were set up in order to covertly influence the domestic politics of the country. And if you look at the members of these cluster cells, there's some of them, [chuckles] you know, like Silvio Berlusconi was a part of the, the so-called P2 lounge, uh, that was-- that came up in the Operation Gladio files when the Italian government, uh, basically put, put all this on trial in the 1990s. And that structure is still used by intelligence today. If, if you go to my X feed and you look up, uh, for example, Anne Applebaum and the thread that I did on the Integrity Initiative, if you just put Integrity Initiative in, I can, I can show you what these cluster cells look like. Uh, and it's, it's a-- It's fascinating to look at the organizational structure of it. But I guess w- what I'm, what I'm getting to here is with, with the mob and the Vatican, at the... At that time, that was the only game in town for offshore banking, if you wanted to have a bank that had no oversight whatsoever. When the British lost the Suez Canal in 1957 and basically had to give up their empire, well, this is during decolonialization, the, the British Empire transitioned from a physical empire to a financial empire and moved heavily into offshore banking. That's how you got these kind of, you know-... BVI, British Virgi- Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, you know, Jersey, Man, all these kind of British offshore banking hubs, and with London as the capital of international finance, you, you'll-- the British Empire was el- was effectively able to maintain a comparable level of imperial vassal state control without having physical troops or ph- or physical territorial control. And so the Vatican Bank has lost a lot of its, uh, rank, I would say, in the international finance system since the 1940s because the market's so saturated now with offshore banking hubs. But th- that explains what's happening in this Larry Summers-Jeffrey Epstein exchange.

8. 31:12 – 41:26

   Pizzagate-style claims and FBI files: separating allegations from evidence

   1. JRJoe Rogan31:12

      One of the weirder things about these files is there's some stuff in there that you go, "Okay, one thing that we know happens is when something is true, a bunch of stuff gets attached to it that's both not true and also preposterous, that allows you to sort of dismiss all of it together."

   2. MBMike Benz31:32

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan31:32

      There's a lot of people thought about that with Pizzagate, and there's some stuff that I saw online that was like George W. Bush was, like, involved in ritual sacrifice or, you know, th- things, things along those lines, like killing babies and e- eating people and w- wild shit.

   4. MBMike Benz31:50

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan31:51

      What do you think that stuff is?

   6. MBMike Benz31:53

      I don't know. I, I don't-

   7. JRJoe Rogan31:54

      Do you think it really occurs?

   8. MBMike Benz31:57

      What I'll say is, this is a bad week to be a total Pizzagate denialist. Y- you ha- you, you would feel a lot more comfortable about it a week ago than you would this week. I don't particularly focus, or I don't wanna say care... I don't, I don't-- my knowledge set on it is a lot more limited on it because I don't think it's a central crux of, um, political influence. Uh, I don't know if it's kind of almost a inside joke in a certain way. Um, Jeffrey Epstein himself in these emails is unbelievably trolly. Y- you know, he'll, he'll say things that are the kind of, you know, shit posts you s- y- you say to a buddy or your, you know, your brother or something, that, uh, you don't m- mean.

   9. JRJoe Rogan32:55

      Right.

   10. MBMike Benz32:55

       You're, you know, it's tongue in-

   11. JRJoe Rogan32:55

       You're fucking around

   12. MBMike Benz32:56

       ... you're tongue in your cheek.

   13. JRJoe Rogan32:58

       Yeah.

   14. MBMike Benz32:58

       But you-- if, if you were a cynical, out to get you person who somehow obtained that text message, you'd say, "Oh, look, he said it!" And so, so there's a lot of that going on. But the fact is, is I have seen some... I've seen a lot of images shared, uh, w- around the time period of when Pizzagate was popping off in 2016, that all I'll say is it doesn't, it doesn't look good or easily explainable. At the same time, a lot of those screenshots I have not- you know, for, for most of these, for the things I've posted about or that I'm talking about here, I've gone to the Justice Department file, I've looked up the file number, I've confirmed whether or not the screenshot is actually what it is. For those, I have not yet, uh, but, uh, I would not... I wouldn't feel totally confident saying there's no there there. But that's, that's about as far as, as I can go on that. But-

   15. JRJoe Rogan33:59

       When you say images, what are you talking about?

   16. MBMike Benz34:01

       Well, there's a lot of... You know, if you look up "pizza," for example, it's just as a keyword search, y- you'll see... or "cheese" or something. Um, it looks like, you know, in the, in the DOJ database for these new files, uh, you'll see a lot of things of people talking about pizza in a way that-

   17. JRJoe Rogan34:23

       It seems like a code

   18. MBMike Benz34:23

       ... it's kind of impossible to-

   19. JRJoe Rogan34:26

       To imagine it's actually just pizza

   20. MBMike Benz34:29

       ... to, to do to pizza. That's about all I-

   21. JRJoe Rogan34:30

       Oh, okay.

   22. MBMike Benz34:30

       You know what I mean? Uh, but I, I don't-- to me, there's so much real-world provable things in there, and also so many kind of m- more real-world implications of allegations that are made in the files that kind of, uh, you know, should be explained. Uh, like, a common mistake that I see going around social media this week is people... It, it kind of gets to the reason that the FBI, uh, and the President was arguing that these files shouldn't be released in the first place, which is that people would take things out of context and wildly, uh, you know, and think things are true that are not, because they're baseless allegations made by, you know, some anonymous tipster. And b- but because it's in an FBI file, people will think it's true. Now, I don't think that's a reason not to release these. I'm extremely glad these were released. What I'm saying is, is I've seen that phenomenon, you know, run away and, a- and some of this I know is kind of, uh, baseless in terms of the factual evidence because some of the people... One of the confidential human sources, for example, that is cited... You know, the first day of the drop, there was this kind of bombshell claim, uh, in the... This, this is probably the most viral post the first day of the DOJ release, which was a confidential human source, a CHS, it means a FBI informant, uh, who the FBI internal memo describes how this confidential human source reported that Alan Dershowitz was a, uh, Mossad agent, and after every meeting, he goes back and tells his FB- his Mossad handlers, you know, w- what, what they talked about. And you go, "Oh, my God, it's an FBI in-"... confidential human source. Uh, the, the FBI wouldn't, you know, pay an informant unless they found them credible for this sort of thing. On the very next page of the files, it says: "President Trump..." I'm paraphrasing. You can pull this up if you, if, if, if you want. Um, you know, "President Trump is controlled by the government of Israel, and they have..." I forget, he says they have blackmail on her. So something to this effect. Now, I don't know whether either of those things are true or not. I don't know what... You know, any more than anybody else who's done research on this. Certainly, there's a lot of overlap between Dershowitz and the Israeli government and high-level Israeli officials. So in that sense, if that were to be reported, I don't know that it would be the m- w- who knows ab- about whether that's true or not? It's-- but it plays into a kind of confirmation bias that a lot of people have, and so when you see that in an FBI file, the first thing, your instinct is, if you're, you know, uh... If that's your journalism beat, is to, is to write all about it and get millions of views. And same thing, there's a MAGA civil war right now that's happening over issues around Israel. It's, you know, you say: "Oh, my God, it's been proven. The FBI knows that..." Well, uh, Ken Silva, who's a journalist, shortly after that, published, uh, a tweet containing a file that had much less engagement, where he said: "Actually, I, I actually have a copy of this document." And again, I'm, I'm paraphrasing here. Uh, where, uh, it matches that document file number, it's got the same text, and it looks like the, that confidential human source is Chuck Johnson. Now, I, I saw that, and I went: "Oh, my God!" Because o- one morning, I woke up to a text from that very person saying... This is about two years ago. I'd never met him, never talked to him, don't have his number. Somehow he got mine and messaged me on Signal to turn myself in because I'm going to prison. He then proceeded to look up, um, my ex-wife and make allegations that I was a Mossad agent because she was a, uh, hun- she was a, a prostitute from a, from a foreign country and involved in all these, you know, Mossad black ops-type things. Now, he didn't even get the name right. He found a, a different person with a similar spelling that, uh, you know, you know, was, I guess, busted for prostitution or something, and then makes these giant claims on social media that, uh, you know, I had been, like, married to a foreign spy prostitute or something. And then he goes on to message someone he thinks is my donor and threaten them to cut off funds, because if he doesn't, then I've made the intelligence community very angry, and they have deputized him to tell the person he thought was my donor, that the intelligence services of the United States of America will crush the businesses of someone he thought was my donor, if he doesn't cut off the funds he thought that person was giving to me, okay? This is that confidential human source, or at least according to the reporting of, of Ken Silva. Uh, the, the level of things that are untrue about that, uh, combined with the fact that this very person is going around, uh, saying that not-- he's not just an FBI informant, but that he actually can direct the intelligence agencies of the United States to crush someone's private practice if they don't change the, you know, their discretionary donations to someone. Like, that's the person you're saying...? That person's, uh, you know, comments to a FBI officer or, you know, a task force, prove these claims about Dershowitz and Trump? Uh, I mean, that's, that's ridiculous. I, I know firsthand that there's zero credibility to those claims. Now, they may be true or not, but the fact is, is, you know, there's, there's a lot of context to, to all of these. What is... Just because it's said in an FBI file does not make it true. We learned that lesson in Russiagate. We learned that lesson with the Steele dossier. Uh, but, you know, that-- I think that same sort of caution and prudence should be applied with these. Uh, and I think ultimately, the truth wins out on these things. It just, you know, takes longer than you might want to.

   23. JRJoe Rogan41:25

       [sighs]

9. 41:26 – 54:21

   ‘There are a million Epsteins’: fixers as the glue between government and private power

   1. JRJoe Rogan41:26

      It's so tangled. You know, the whole thing is just... I, I think everybody who looks at it realizes this is a rabbit hole that just goes to the center of the Earth, and there's so many people involved in it. What do- Here's, here's the big question that people ask: If there was a Jeffrey Epstein, and it seems like all these things he was involved in, is there a Jeffrey Epstein right now that we don't know about?

   2. MBMike Benz41:52

      There's a million of them.

   3. JRJoe Rogan41:53

      A million of them.

   4. MBMike Benz41:53

      I mean, this is why, this is why I, I find the con- this-- you know, this is not the core of what I focus on. Um, but I find it re- a really interesting field of study because it helps understand so many other US government institutions and the relationship between government and private business. Jeffrey Epstein is part of a class of what are effectively professional fixers, and this i- this is a, a kind of class of professional who sits-... not really within a particular government or private sector institution, but in the kind of sticky layer between them that connects them all. And I would say that, for example, people like Marc Rich, Bruce Rappaport, uh, and I can go through all these figures and who they are, Robert Mayhew, and these types, um, are just good case studies in how the intelligence world, the business community, uh, you know, uses-- Uh, like, let's take an example of Bruce Rappaport. And, and this is a-- You can pull up on screen if, uh, if you want. There's a, a great article, I think it's called, uh... I think it's from 1988 or 1991. It's called, uh, Intri- Intrigue in High Places, Oil Pipeline, Iraq, uh, and then just Bruce Rappaport. It's R-A-P-P. Yeah, here you go, uh, Pipeline Deal: Intrigue in High Places. And I'll, I'll describe what, what happens here in a second. In fact, there's a great YouTube video on this as well. Uh, if you look up, uh, Bruce, uh, just on, on YouTube, uh, Bruce Rappaport, 1988, there's a great kind of couple minute summary of all this. But effectively, what happened was... And let me start this by just-- Jeffrey Epstein got to Bear Stearns in 1966-- I'm sorry, 1976, and then worked there until 1980. Sorry, just because you have it on screen. Maybe, may- maybe, maybe I'll go through this first, and then I'll do the Jeff-- because the Jeffrey Epstein connections to it. So what happened here was, you had the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, and Henry Kissinger had a really great quote about this 'cause he asked: "What is the U.S. government strategy on this?" Because it's very convoluted. "And, you know, why are we, why are we giving weapons to Iran when the Iranian revolution just happened in 1979, that, you know, overthrew what was a U.S. government-friendly government that was partially installed by the CIA in 1953? We're-- We've now declared an international arms embargo on them. You know, we're, we're basically at war with the Ayatollahs. Why are we f- why are we giving them weapons and helping them, uh, you know, defeat Iraq?" And the, you know, the issue was, is we were also in a kind of, uh, w- war over regional hegemony and oil with, with Iraq. And so Henry Kissinger's quote was: "I-- My only wish is that both sides would lose-- could lose." And so w- what happened was, is because we didn't want Iraq to take over Iran and become effectively bigger than Saudi Arabia in the region, uh, we were f- we were funding the... and, and giving weapons to Iran to try to fend off the much bigger Iraqi army. And then at, at a certain point in this, uh, we, we began to back Iraq. We went back and forth, supporting Iran, Iraq. And so the, this-- Iraq, because of the em- embargoes on it, wanted to build a pipeline to get its oil out, and it was gonna pass through Jordan, and it was going to abut against the border of Israel. And a major CIA contractor and CIA-connected private business called Bechtel, highly, highly influential company. Uh, there's been many, many, many books written on Bechtel. Some of the-- Uh, and Bechtel is alive and well today. If there was a saga, for example, around the Stanford Internet Observatory, if around the censorship-industrial complex, when I, when I visited the Stanford Internet Observatory, and I went into the courtyard, the courtyard is sponsored by Bechtel. It's-- I think it's called the Bechtel Courtyard. Uh, and... But, but what happened was, is the Bechtel was promised by Iraq a billion-dollar contract in, in 1980, you know, '80s money, for constructing this pipeline. A- and the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House National Security Council, both, for geostrategic reasons, wanted this pipeline built. The problem was, is they were afraid the Israeli government was going to sabotage the pipeline because Iraq was very hostile to Israel, and there was a lot of tension between the Iraqi government and the Israeli government. And they were afraid that if Bechtel got this contract and built this pipeline, that Israel would some-- sa- you know, these pipelines are very fragile, and all it-- because it passes close to it, it's very possible that that would ha- that would happen, and it would destroy both the CIA's goal and the private profiteer, Bechtel's goal. So how do you solve that problem? Well, what, what the CIA did is... What the, what the National Security Council, which is the interagency that the CIA reports to, did, is they engaged a private fixer named Bruce Rappaport, who was a Swiss billionaire with close ties to the Israeli government, to back channel with the Israeli government, some sort of secret agreement that would guarantee that they would not sabotage the pipeline. And because the Attorney General of the United States... Now, again, think about this as well. As I'm saying this, think about Jeffrey Epstein, and think about the character of Bill Barr, for example, who started his career for seven years at the CIA, was highly involved in the CIA's Iran-Contra, and then was attorney general, both in the 1990s, during the-... Epstein-connected BCCI scandal and the, you know, when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or, or whatever happened to him. What ha- so what, what happens is, is, is Bruce Rappaport does indeed use his contacts with the Israeli government to, uh, strike an agreement that then allows, uh, the pro- would allow the project to be greenlit, but it triggers a special prosecutor's investigation of the attorney general himself, Ed Meese, because he, one of his friends, was alleged to be in on the deal. So they, they argued that effectively there were... That the, that through Bruce Rappaport, the attorney general was striking a secret agreement with Israel to profit himself, uh, uh, a massive conflict of interest. And what, what ended up happening is Bruce Rappaport, Rappaport stepped forward and said, "No, no, no, it wasn't to profit... The, the terms weren't to profit the friend. It was the, the terms we secretly reached with Israel is that they were going to get, like, a 30% cut on the revenue of the pipeline, and that's what secured the buy-in." But the fact is, is Bruce Rappaport was not, uh... The, now, [chuckles] the other part of this is that the National Security Council told the, basically the overseas development arm of, of the US government, a formal US government agency, to, uh, to put American taxpayer funds to help subsidize the pipeline, that, uh, the Bechtel pipeline, and that government agency did not want to put up, uh, something like $400 million of taxpayer funds on it because they thought Bruce Rappaport was a very shady, Epstein-like figure, who had all sorts of sordid, you know, details about his own past. So th- that government agency queried the CIA for all records about Bruce Rappaport, and the CIA gave them a limited hangout. They said, "Oh, you know, we only have a few documents that are responsive to it, and no red flags." As it turned out, what the special prosecutor compelled from the CIA is that they, they had a whole dirty dossier on Bruce Rappaport, and if they had given that to, to the US government agency, there wouldn't-- there couldn't have been support for the pipeline. Now, after all the scandal, the pipeline ended up not being built. But the, the point is, is here you have a, the same type of person as Jeffrey Epstein, the same regions and countries that are, you know, involved in a significant part of the Epstein saga. You have the same structure of the intelligence community, private businesses, and, you know, back-channel deals with government officials. But because, uh, there was no 201 file on Bruce Rappaport, he was not formally a CIA asset. He was, he was what, you know, what's called a, a liaison, a, a contact, a facilitator, a friend of the station. Doesn't work for the CIA. He's got his own hedge fund. He's got his own, you know, basically finance... You know, he'll invest in commodities or foreign exchange or private portfolio companies, but sometimes he'll work with the CIA, sometimes he won't. Depends on whether it's good for him. And in this case, he thought it was good for him to, to take this. Who knows what cut he himself got it on it? But the fact is, is here, here you have the same type of oper- you have every layer of this, from the Justice Department to the CIA, to the private financiers, to the, to the private companies, to real-world geopolitical action, and this ap- appears, in, in my view of it, to be exactly the model that Jeffrey Epstein, uh, himself replicated and, and was on parallel track with for his whole career. You know, he's... And, and I can, I can get into that, but, but does that make sense in terms of-

   5. JRJoe Rogan52:46

      Yeah

   6. MBMike Benz52:46

      ... like, the- this type of figure exists in basically in every country, in every industry, uh, and, you know, they're not all as prominent as Epstein, but s- I would argue people like Mark Rich, and at the time, Bruce Rappaport, kind of were. They don't all have, you know, these child sex trafficking-

   7. JRJoe Rogan53:07

      Yeah, that's the thing

   8. MBMike Benz53:08

      ... type things.

   9. JRJoe Rogan53:08

      This is the thing, is like, it, what he was connected with, w- w- it makes me wonder, like, if he didn't have that sick thing where he liked underage girls, like, if he'd never gotten arrested, which, which was what? 2008 or something? What-- When did he initially get arrested?

   10. MBMike Benz53:26

       Uh, 2006, but-

   11. JRJoe Rogan53:27

       2006.

   12. MBMike Benz53:27

       But the, but he, he was, uh... Yeah, the plea deal was 2008. Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan53:31

       So if that hadn't happened, like, if you just got a guy who's getting of-age prostitutes, we'd probably never hear about this.

   14. MBMike Benz53:41

       Yeah. And-

   15. JRJoe Rogan53:44

       This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. To level up your business, you've got to level up your website, and Squarespace does the heavy lifting for you. Even I use it to power my website, joerogan.com is powered by Squarespace. Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, professionally showcase your offerings, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. Head to squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's crazy!

10. 54:21 – 1:13:50

    BCCI, Bear Stearns, and the Safari Club: building the off-the-books ‘Enterprise’

    1. MBMike Benz54:21

       And you can imagine very easily why... Because Epstein was involved in fraudulent financial activities his entire career. Uh, he was under SEC investigation at Bear Stearns in 1980.... when he was, uh, involved in a deal, I think it was St. Joe's Mineral Company, which is, um, owned by Seagram's, which is, y- you know, owned by the, the Bronfman family. Uh, he, he got in trouble with the SEC at that time. He then, as soon as he got in trouble, he left Bear Stearns and went out on his own, but then worked effectively at Bear Stearns off the book for the next decade. According to his own testimony, he had a continuous relationship with Bear Stearns for, you know, I think he said thirty-one years. It was basically from the moment, you know, from, from the 1970s, 1976 until 2007, 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed while Jeffrey Epstein was in jail. Um, but then Jeffrey Epstein, in -- it ap- it appears to me almost impossible that Jeffrey Epstein was not working on BCCI pipeline deals while he was at Bear Stearns. BC-- Bear Stearns was one of the, was one of the three biggest, uh, clearinghouses for, for BCCI transactions. BCCI is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Sometimes people call it the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. Uh, it's, it's, it's an incredible saga of CIA banking gone wrong. It's, it's a bank that was started in Pakistan in 1972 and then grew to be the CIA's main way to covertly back the Mujahideen against the, the Russians during the Cold War. So we backed Osama Bin Laden, the CIA. We backed the, uh, you know, Islamic Mujahideen, the, the radicals who became Al-Qaeda and ISIS, uh, with billions of dollars of CIA and MI6 and Israeli and Saudi-facilitated, um, you know, co-support and financial, uh, funds, uh, in order to do a Cold War operation. Just like we talked about with strange bedfellows, uh, you know, get, uh, backing right-wing organized crime to stop left-wing communism. We did the same thing in Afghanistan, uh, through, you know, these-- the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to run -- covertly run guns to the Mujahideen. In fact, you can... There's a great YouTube video that I always like to play so that you can see it for yourself. Uh, it's, it's really short. You can look up 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski dropping out of a helicopter to tell the Mujahideen that, uh, both God and the United States government is on their side. And the reason this clip I, I always think is so f- fun to play is because this was the very moment in 1979 that Jeffrey Epstein a, appears to have been, uh, involved in the BCCI financing of this very operation. So if you, if you turn the volume up and you start at the beginning.

    2. SPSpeaker57:43

       ... revealing America's role. [helicopter roaring] US National Security Advisor, Brzezinski, flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border, near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.

    3. SPSpeaker58:06

       We know of their deep belief in God-

    4. SPSpeaker58:09

       ...

    5. SPSpeaker58:09

       - and we are confident that their struggle will succeed.

    6. SPSpeaker58:13

       [speaking foreign language]

    7. SPSpeaker58:17

       You know, that land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail, and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right, and God is on your side. [clapping]

    8. MBMike Benz58:34

       Now, that is, that is the national security advisor of the United States of America. The national security advisor is the highest post in the cabinet. It is the person the president talks to every day. All intelligence, war, military, and statecraft goes through the national security advisor. That is the numero uno. And he personally, in 1979, you know, this didn't come out until years later, but we were covertly doing this. So to do a covert operation, and this is why I focus on the money side of Epstein from the 1970s to present, because the money in any covert operation is the most essential part. It's the only thing that is irreplaceable, and that if you don't have it, everything goes away. You lose one person, find another one. Uh, you, uh, you know, you lose one, uh, you know, logistics hub, can create another one with money. You lose money, you lose everything. You lose your ability to pay your informants. You lose your ability to bribe government officials. You lose your ability to, uh, you know, win the support of local institutions. You-- We lost Vietnam, not really so much because we lost, you know, at the, the kinetic war level, but because we lost the ability to fund it, because it got defunded. So we, we literally couldn't do it anymore. And the-- there's another great clip just to show how sophisticated CIA money laundering was even by the 1960s. Sorry, I'll, I'll stop doing this after, you know, running around clip to clip after, after this, or I'll, I'll chill on it. But if you, if you go to my X account, you can also find this on YouTube. Um, there's a great... I believe it was CBS, uh, in, in the 1960s. It's called In the Pay, uh, I think it's called In the Pay of the CIA or In the, uh, it's-- But if you type in CIA money laundering, you'll see this, this great clip about how sophisticated CIA money laundering was already by the 1950s and '60s. And the-... That, 'cause everything the CIA does has to be laundered. It's a spy agency. If it writes a check, if it doesn't conceal the origins of the money, gig's up. So everything that is CIA has to move through some sort of money laundering mechanism. Well, you know, to, to kind of, I guess, [lips smack] uh, borrow a phrase from, from the president, "Somebody's doing the money laundering." You need a-- You need outside contacts who do not work at the agency or necessarily for the agency to facilitate that money laundering, and that was done through, for example, the Pakistanis with, uh, BCCI, as well as contacts in, in London. That is what I believe Jeffrey Epstein was doing his entire career after that, from Towers Financial to his tenure with Leslie Wexner, uh, to kind of the way I think that he helped model the Clinton Foundation itself with the Clintons in the early 2000s. Uh, and his expertise in that, I think, is, is what made him useful. Really not-- Well, it's more the, the connections of, I guess, uh, you know, donors and billionaires around him that made him the most useful. But the fact is, is he specialized... When he went out on his own, formally, he leaves Bear Stearns in 1981 and starts a one-man group called Intercontinental Assets Group, o- out of his New York City apartment. He's not even 30 years old. Right away, he gets big-level clients like Adnan Khashoggi, who is the, uh, at the time, was alleged to be the world's richest man. He was the Saudi arms dealer, and to give an impression of how significant this figure was in the, uh, weapons trade, he was -- he, he earned more in commissions from Lockheed Martin, uh, Boeing, and I think one of the other big military contractors, than every other commissions agent in the entire world combined. That's why, you know, there were rumors that he was the world's richest man. He-- In fact, we actually had legislation passed because of how influential he was. He was the one who, in 1983, uh, flew to the National Security Council, to the White House, um, to orchestrate the Iran-Contra affair. He was the Saudi middleman, uh, that was part of this operation where the United States, uh, used the Saudi middleman, Adnan Khashoggi, to, uh, run guns to Israeli contacts to smuggle into Iran to fight off the Iraqis. I know it's a bit of a long sequence, but effectively, you can think of it as the United States and Israel with Saudi Arabia in the middle. Now, Adnan Khashoggi was one of the major clients of the CIA's BCCI bank, and he was the host of the CIA's offshore operation that was created in 1976, called the Safari Club. Uh, in, in 1975, 1976, when the CIA started getting handcuffs put on it with the Church committee hearings, Jeffrey Epstein starts his career at Bear Stearns in 1976, the very moment of the biggest shake-up of the CIA in CIA history. At, at that moment, the Church committee hearings were ongoing, and the public was seeing, you know, uh, Colby and Angleton holding up a heart attack gun, uh, you know, how the CIA can kill someone and make it look like they died organically of a heart attack. Operation Chaos had just broke about the CIA funding student groups on American college campuses. COINTEL broke. Uh, MKUltra broke. It was one house of horrors after another on everybody's TV that only had three news stations. And so Democrats were completely fired up about getting rid of the CIA or putting massive handcuffs on it, which is, which is what they did. They created, effectively, what's now the Senate and House Intelligence Committee, so there's oversight of the CIA by the, the people's representatives. The, um, the first year Carter was in office in 1977, went through the, what was called the Halloween Massacre, fired 30% of all CIA operations, uh, personnel. They massively cut funding. And so in response to this, you had a set of stakeholders who wanted that CIA dirty work to still be doable, but they didn't have the legal authorization to run it out of the CIA. So what they did is they took the same group of international partners that they had been-- that the CIA had been working with. That includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK, France, at the time, Iran, because this was before the 1979 Iranian revolution. They were all a part of this thing called the Safari Club, which got its name from the M- uh, Mount Safari. It was basically a resort club in Kenya, which was the main hub. Just like Colombia, for example, is kind of the main-- was the main US government hub for logistics. It was kind of a foothold, it, for our ability to do work in Venezuela or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Brazil. In Africa, Kenya was our main stronghold. And so, but Adnan Khashoggi ran that. This was basically a seven, eight-country, joint covert operations intelligence network, and it was informal. It wasn't technically the CIA, uh, and it was set up in which-- You can pull the Wikipedia for this, actually. It-- Just so you don't need to take my word for it. Like, literally, the sanitized Wikipedia will, will tell you everything that I'm, I'm saying here. And it ended up-- That network ended up becoming one of the main-... Yeah, yeah. So if you start at the top, you'll see that, that-- there it is on the right, the Fire Club. It was a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations in Africa. Now, what they're leaving out here is that it was also Asia. It played a huge role in Pakistan and, uh, Afghanistan, and the like. But these were all these different countries' attempt to offset the restrictions that the Democrats had put on the CIA. When Reagan gets back to power in 1981, you still have these handcuffs on the, on the CIA. You still have the, the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. The Democrats did... You know, so there was an international arms embargo. First of all, in 1979, the Iranian Revolution happens, and it's blamed on the CIA being cut back. The CIA helped install the Shah in 1953. They argued that if Jimmy Carter hadn't destroyed the CIA, we would still have Iran as a friendly country. "We could have stopped this. We could have nipped it in the bud. We could have had people on the ground. It's Jimmy Carter's fault that he, that he cut the CIA, that we're in this disaster with the world's third largest reserve of, of oil and gas, and this hugely geostrategic country now being an enemy of America rather than a friend." The, the-- So an international arms embargo was put on Iran, but then Iraq threatened to invade it, and we didn't want Iraq to take it over. So we had to get... We had to do something illegal if we wanted to help Iran, and it was against international law to give them weapons, but if we didn't give them weapons, it was perceived massive geostrategic, geopolitical earthquake that we'd live with for centuries. So you had to do one illegal action with, with the gun running, and then there was an interparty dispute. The Democrats at that time, uh, the majority did not want to do intervention in Nicaragua. Uh, there was a in-party power, uh, called the, the Sandinista government, and there was a c- a, a rebel faction called the Contras. And Republican donors and stakeholders had a, had interest in Nicaragua and wanted to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government. But there was a party dispute. Democrat donors didn't profit from that, and they, at the time, had a fairly robust anti-imperialism kind of mindset and were sick of CIA regime change in-- by the early 1980s, after everything that ca-- was disclosed in just the previous years. So Republicans wanted to overthrow the Nicaraguan governments; Democrats didn't. Democrats had a House majority, and they passed something called the Boland Amendment, which forbade any US government funds from going to support the Contras. So this put the, the Republicans in a pickle. By the way, this is what's happening kind of today around Ukraine if you flip the parties. A hundred percent of Democrats vote for Ukraine funding. The Republican Party is split about it. This is... The inverse of that was happening in the early 1980s. A hundred percent of Republicans wanted to fund the Contras against what they called the Soviet-aligned Sa- uh, Sandinistas, and the Democrats were split. But, but they successfully passed this Boland Amendment, so the CIA was in a pickle. How do you run guns to Iran when it's against international law? And how do you fund the Contras when it's illegal to spend US government money to fund them? And, uh, so what they came up with is effectively the structure -- I think it's the most useful structure for understanding, uh, American statecraft and intelligence activity to this day. What, what they came up with is what they called a structure called the enterprise, which the CIA Director, Bill Casey, referred to as a private, self-sustained, off-the-shelf, standalone entity that did not exist within the US government, but ex- but was instead, it comprised... The money came from outside fixers, who would then effectively channel donor money and black market trade to fund the Contras. So the money didn't come from US taxpayers. It didn't come from USAID. It didn't come from an allocation from the US Department of War or, or foreign assistance from the Department of State. As it turned out, the money came from, you know, cocaine and, uh, and a couple of other things, but, uh, you know, th- this was the, you know, the famous-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:11:57

       Freeway Ricky Ross.

    10. MBMike Benz1:11:57

        Yeah. Gary Webb-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:11:59

        Yeah.

    12. MBMike Benz1:11:59

        ... you know, John Kerry. Uh, and [chuckles] the-- this was the soup that Jeffrey Epstein was, was coming up in. And a f-- you know, a funny story related to this is that the, the main airline used to transport the drugs and guns in the drugs for cash for guns operation, was a CIA proprietary airline called Southern Air Transport. Uh, Southern Air Transport was, [chuckles] was the s- proprietary CIA airline, meaning it was owned and operated exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency, and it was the, you know, the airliner that all these aircraft went, uh, moved through. [clears throat] Iran-Contra was basically the early 1980s up until, like, the mid-late 1980s. In 19-- It was, it was based in Miami. In 1994-... Southern Air Transport, the CIA proprietary airline, which in the intervening time was spun out to not be owned by the CIA, but rather to be owned by someone who had worked for the CIA. Uh, at the time, it was owned by the CIA, so, you know, pretty thin layer there. But it moved from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, primarily to service the limited-

    13. SPSpeaker1:13:25

        Oh, I know all about this, Joe. [laughing]

    14. MBMike Benz1:13:27

        I've, I've a, I have a video on this, and in fact-

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:13:30

        Look over at Jay, because he's obsessed.

    16. MBMike Benz1:13:32

        Yeah, and in fact-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:13:33

        He's obsessed with Patel.

    18. SPSpeaker1:13:34

        Yeah, I probably told you about this five years ago.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:13:35

        Yeah. [chuckles]

    20. MBMike Benz1:13:36

        Yeah.

    21. SPSpeaker1:13:37

        Okay.

    22. MBMike Benz1:13:37

        Well, well, there's a great article, I think, uh, Spook Air-

    23. SPSpeaker1:13:40

        Yeah

    24. MBMike Benz1:13:40

        ... and, um, you know, o-o-on this, but, uh-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:13:44

        How many roads lead back to Ohio?

    26. SPSpeaker1:13:46

        Uh, um, m-most? [chuckles]

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:13:50

        Most, if not all.

    28. MBMike Benz1:13:50

        [chuckles]

11. 1:13:50 – 1:30:40

    Drugs, Mexico, and Fast and Furious: modern echoes of covert-criminal symbiosis

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:13:50

       What is, what is this connection with Ohio?

    2. MBMike Benz1:13:55

       Well, Ohio was w-- you know, if you remember, kind of the origins of, of organized crime in the United States really goes back to the Prohibition era, when you had this Midwestern mafia syndicate around Cincinnati, and then it moved into Dayton and Columbus, and adjacent to Chicago, and th- this whole sort of hub around Prohibition, and then Prohibition was nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty-three. When Prohibition ended, all these networks went from black market alcohol to black market drugs. Because it was no longer black market, they c- no longer had a business smuggling alcohol, so they, they moved into the narcotics space. And-

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:14:43

       Which ones? Which, which narcotics?

    4. MBMike Benz1:14:46

       Well, uh, it was primarily opium in the 1930s. This was part of-

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:14:53

       Opium, really?

    6. MBMike Benz1:14:54

       Well, yeah, if you... Because in the 1930s was when you had this, you know, as we discussed, the Department of War's alliance with Chiang Kai-shek and the, and the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalists. The, the supply for, you know, uh, the, the supply for heroin, for example, or, you know, opium, it comes from Asia. It comes from the Golden Crescent, the Golden Triangle. And the way this logistics chain moved was, our CIA War Department-backed rebel groups in Asia, they sat territorially on the Golden Triangle. They would cultivate the opium. They would basically fly it out on military aircraft. Uh, it went to Europe for processing in, uh, you know, F- France was one of the main... Uh, you know, this, this kind of French Connection saga, which, again, Jeffrey Epstein is weirdly connected to, and I can tell you about that if you're interested. And then it would go to the basically Italian mafia folks for the transshipment, and you had Italian mafia-controlled docks and ports in the United States, in New York and New Jersey. And you had, you know, CIA-protected Italian mafia groups in southern Italy, which at the time were national security protected, because they were our allies against the communists. And so you had this, this drug trade to support foreign policy imperatives, and y- you can do that... You can run that exercise with pretty much every drug on planet Earth at this point. And it makes it very difficult to stop the drug trade, because by stopping the drug trade, you are- you're running up against something that your own government considers a perhaps unfortunate but necessary logistics hub for the money.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:16:52

       Do you think that's happening right now with Mexico?

    8. MBMike Benz1:16:54

       Yeah.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:16:56

       Whoa!

    10. MBMike Benz1:16:58

        Well, I mean, think about this: Fast and Furious.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:17:01

        Yeah.

    12. MBMike Benz1:17:01

        It wasn't that long ago.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:17:02

        The Fast and Furious story is fucking bananas. Tell it to people that don't know, because just the idea that they proposed this and implemented it is so fucking crazy.

    14. MBMike Benz1:17:15

        Yeah. Well, so this was a scandal during the Obama administration. Eric Holder was the Attorney General of the United States. He had to step down because he was held in contempt of Congress for jumping on the grenade and not turning over the Fast and Furious files. Um, earth to Congress, note to Congress, who wants to be a hero, by the way? Um, you can do the same thing with the Epstein bill, with the Fast and Furious files. Uh, I think everybody in this war on drugs that w- you know, we're so gung ho about, we just captured the president of Venezuela over drugs, it would be awfully nice if you compelled the Justice Department and FBI to turn over the Justice Department and FBI-run Fast and Furious files. But what happened was, is... And I believe this had interagency approval, meaning the, the White House signed off on it, the Central Intelligence Agency signed off on it, the Department of Defense signed off on it, the State Department signed off on it, the FBI and ATF signed off on it. This was a gun-running operation to send guns to the Sinaloa Cartel, to, uh, to have them be able to successfully win a narco drug war against the Los Zetas Cartel. The Los Zetas Cartel was pilfering oil pipelines. Uh, remember, Mexico, the oil wealth of the United States is vastly disproportionately concentrated in Texas, in West Texas and southern Texas, wh- where it shares oil fields with Mexico, effectively. Those, those oil fields go into M- Mexico is replete with oil, and there are many partnerships between United States oil companies and the Mexican government.... uh, PEMEX and, and all the different, you know, kind of private, private lines, and this is a big point of geopolitical contention. But the fact is, is one of the things that organized crime groups do in order to get money for their own syndicate, because they've got effectively military control of a territory, is if a pipeline runs through that territory, they can simply cut open the pipeline and steal the oil. This is, for example, what, you know, was happening with our CIA-backed, uh, rebel groups in Syria, were taking the oil. I mean, we would literally, you know, our, our spunky, moderate rebels would, you know, literally cut open Syrian pipelines and take the oil, and this was one of the ways to support it. You know, you can support it with drugs, you can support it with black market oil. And by the way, I-- while I'm on the topic, uh, if you, if you pull up, and I had this on my, my X, if you type in, uh, institute, uh, Institute for Peace, or ins- uh, just type in institute, peace, drugs. The, the, the US government, the US Institute for Peace, told the Taliban not to shut down the drug trade after they took power in twenty twenty-two. They said it would have a devastating, uh, you know, negative impact on the eco-- you know, the, the local economy if they didn't keep growing, what was then, you know, ninety, ninety-five percent of the... Well, yeah, if you-- Well, I think click the next image. Uh, wait, next image. Yeah, here you go. So this is a, this is a... You know, we give the US Institute of Peace, at the time, we gave them fifty-five million dollars a year. It-- The US Institute of Peace was created by Act of Congress in nineteen eighty-four.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:20:49

        This headline is wild. "The Taliban's successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world."

    16. MBMike Benz1:20:56

        Yes. [chuckles] Right. Right. So-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:21:00

        Wow!

    18. MBMike Benz1:21:01

        Now, remember, just about, you know, um, [exhales] the Taliban had just taken back power. That happened in the, you know, in the early Biden administration. The Taliban, if folks recall, cut... So we, the CIA, was help-- and, and the US military, as well as their allies and with regional allies, were cultivating the opium on the Golden Crescent for a noble cause, to win the Cold War against the evil Soviets. T- this was a big part of the funding for the Mujahideen, and this was one of the big scandals that ended up enveloping BCCI, the CIA's bank, because it was the way-- because it was non-compliant with any banking regulations, it all moved offshore. The drug money, the, the drug logistics chain that the CIA built for the Mujahideen then moved through the m- drugs money laundering chain at the CIA bank, and this apparatus had scaled for twenty years by the, by the late nineteen nineties, when the Taliban, like the Chinese, wanted to shut it down when the Taliban took power in the nineteen nineties. And they did that. They cut the opium down to effectively zero in nineteen ninety-nine, and this is all open source. In two... And then, you know, we, we invade Afghanistan in, [exhales] you know, uh, two thousand and one, two thousand and three. Uh, it becomes a US military occupied zone, and it goes from zero percent of the world's heroin to ninety-five percent of the, of the world's heroin, all under US military occupation. In fact, we installed their dictator, um, you know, who, [chuckles] whose brother was, uh, was the main drug kingpin of the whole country. Uh, it, it's-- And some of this moved through, um, some of this moved through the Cold War, CIA-backed, uh, uh, Turkish Grey Wolves outfit. And, uh, there's a funny quote, I think, in the Michael Hastings article on, uh, Stanley McChrystal, where Stanley McChrystal's team refers to, um, Hamid Karzai's funny little hat that he wore. Hamid Karzai was the CIA-installed, uh, you know, strongman, uh, after we, we took over Afghanistan. He referred to his hat as the Grey Wolves' vagina. I mean, the-- basically saying, like, this is the, you know, the drug logistics orifice. But l- leaving that aside, what, what I'm, what I'm getting to is, is you, you have this, this banking network, you have all these logistics chains. Jeffrey Epstein, his first ten y- when-- his come up is made through this, through this whole network. It turns out that Bear Stearns, you know, opened a trading desk with... to, to clear BCCI transactions in nineteen seventy, nineteen seventy-eight. Um, Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, the person who, who actually recruited him to apply to Bear Stearns, was a guy named Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg then was a senior executive at the time, and then, I think in nineteen seventy-eight or nineteen seventy-nine, he becomes CEO, so the head of Bear Stearns. So Jeff-- And he sets Jeffrey Epstein up with his daughter. So Jeffrey Epstein is a, is a young kid. People wonder, how did Jeffrey Epstein make partner at Bear Stearns so fast? Well, there's a couple explanations. You know, one is, the guy who brought him into the firm quickly became CEO thereafter, and Jeffrey Epstein was dating his daughter. The New York Times actually reported this about a, a month and a half ago, uh, by getting the insider testimony of a dozen people who worked at, who worked at Bear Stearns at the time. And-... So, you know, he's dating the boss's daughter, but also Ace Greenberg, as the CEO, would have to approve all of these transactions, and it looks like was involved in, you know, these, these clearinghouse activities. What happened was, is, uh, Bear Stearns cleared about thirteen billion dollars worth of BCCI transactions, and it looks like these transactions were involved in the very same Adnan Khashoggi, so Saudi, and Doug Lease, who was a British arms dealer, that Jeffrey Epstein was flying to London to meet with and working with all those years. Uh, w- and they, and B- and Bear Stearns was doing it through this entity called CapCom, which was what the, uh, the Senate report on the BCCI scandal referred to as the bank within the bank of BCCI, so kind of the inner sanctum of... Now, that CapCom was, was owned by Kamal Adham, who was the head of-- he was the chief spy for Saudi Arabia. So he was-- So Bear Stearns-- The New York Times reports based on a dozen of these, you know, insider, uh, you know, testimonies. They got, like, three of Epste- Epstein's bosses on the record to talk about, you know, what he was doing there. Amazingly, The New York Times does not mention a single deal name in the entire twenty thousand-word report.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:26:33

        Why do you think that is?

    20. MBMike Benz1:26:39

        It might not be news fit to print. Also, they just m- I, I'll-- I can be charitable and say they might, they just might not know. They might think that, you know, uh... I don't think that The New York Times has a pinky of the specialization in Jeffrey Epstein cinematic universe knowledge, uh, that your random anonymous egg account on X has. So they might not know about, uh, Bear Stearns doing BCCI transactions. They might not know what, uh... You know, if, if you don't know the material, you don't necessarily know what to ask. That's me being charitable. Uh, also, the, you know, some of the witnesses may have said that they don't wanna talk about specific deal names because that would tarnish, you know, the folks involved in that deal for association with Jeffrey Epstein. There could be a lot of reasons. I'm trying to be charitable here.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:27:37

        Yeah.

    22. MBMike Benz1:27:38

        But, but the fact is, is they all said Jeffrey Epstein moved up so fast because he was dating the boss's daughter, and he was put on the biggest and most lucrative deals very quickly within the firm. Um, and given the inc- the incredible volume that Bear Stearns is-- appears to have m- been moving through BCCI, and BCCI being, you know, the hottest ticket in, in town then in the late 1970s, it was literally the main vehicle for the US government to covertly launder funds. Uh, CapCom, according to the Senate Intelligence report and the Justice Department investigations, was the main vehicle for funding the Mujahideen, fifty percent of those trades, and they, they laundered it illegally, what, wh- which requires, uh, a brokerage, uh, you know, a clearinghouse to, to prove it. You know, the, the way this is set up is you have a, you have a bank, you've, you've got a, a money launderer, and you've got a clearinghouse. The bank was the CIA bank, BCCI. The money launderer was, you know, the CIA's literal direct partner in this, the Saudis. CapCom was run by the chief Saudi spymaster, and then in 1982, Jeffrey Epstein obtained a fake Saudi passport... Uh, sorry, it was a fake Austrian passport because that was a big loophole passport during the Cold War for spies, but said his residence was Saudi Arabia. We didn't find this out until 2019, when his safe was raided. But that exact time, Jeffrey Epstein has this fake Saudi passport, and it's, it's being done to support the CIA-backed rebel group, the, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. But that requires a clearinghouse to clear those money laundering trades. They were using these mirrored commodities trades, which is this, you know, technique of basically, you know, uh, selling to yourself to, to make money look clean so that it looks like, um, you know, profit and, you know, l- looks like you, you know, won or lost it in a market trade rather than through drug money. And then they were then sending that on, you know, to, uh, to the Mujahideen. But the fact is, is at the same time that that was happening, Adnan Khashoggi, who would become Jeffrey Epstein's client in the 1980s when he went on his own, was the one facilitating the weapons. You have this drugs for cash for guns. The person-- So the, so the bank that's moving the-- that's turning the drugs into clean cash, that the head of the, you know, Saud- the Saudi spymaster is running that part of the, you know, banking side. And then you've got the Saudi, Saudi arms dealer, who is moving it illegally into Iran, working hand in

12. 1:30:40 – 1:42:51

    Epstein’s prosecutions, CIA interference precedents, and the ‘limited hangout’ pattern

    1. MBMike Benz1:30:40

       glove with the CIA and the National Security Council the whole time. You have a, you have a illegal financial enterprise protected at the highest level by the United States government, the US intelligence services, and by proxy, the Justice Department itself. Can you imagine the Justice Department prosecuting it while that operation was ongoing? Any defendant... You know, here's a-- y- you asked what, what are the, what are the great reveals in, uh, in, in the JFK files, and-... I'd be remiss if I, if I didn't bring up the, the case of R- Rolando Masferr. There's an incredible document in the JFK files that, that Tulsi Gabbard released last year, which is a CIA document that describes, I think the quote is, "massive damage," if the s- if the, uh, Justice Department pursues a criminal case against a guy named Rolando Masferr. If you just type in Rolando Masferr, JFK files twenty twenty-five release, uh, or, like, massive damage or something like that, you'll, you'll see this. It's an unbelievably incredible document. What it documents is that there was a dispute between the CIA and the State Department. The State Department sets foreign policy. The CIA is not-- is supposed to serve covertly the, the, the State Department. The, the CIA is the junior seat at the table. Nobody ever goes from being s- s-, you know, uh, head of the State Department to head of the CIA. That's a, that's a demotion. The CIA is supposed to be kind of the... Yeah, I use, like, the, uh, you know, Sopranos reference. S- you know, Silvio comes in and, and sh- you know, shakes down the hairdresser shop or whatever, for the money it owes the family. If you are that hairdresser, it's easy to think that Silvio runs the mafia, because he's the one who shows up at your house, breaks your windows, breaks your knust-- your knuckles, and takes your money. But Silvio's not doing that because he runs it. He's doing it because the person setting the policy of the enterprise, Tony, is the boss of it. The way it's supposed to work is the State Department sets policy, and the CIA does or organizes the plausibly deniable dirty work to achieve it, if that is necessary f- to achieve that foreign policy. This is why there was a lot of debate in 1948 about whether the CIA should even take on this role. This is this great 1948 George Kennan memo that says, "Maybe we should do-- have a office within the State Department called the inaug-- uh, called the, you know, Bureau of Organized Political Warfare." And then two months later, they decided the CIA would, uh, you know, would, would take that. But the fact is, is it's basically a State Department function, but CIA is supposed to defer to State. But what happened was, is there was a factional dispute between State and CIA over, over Cuba policy. The, uh, the State Department wanted-- thought that the CIA-backed rebel groups in Miami were being too aggressive and too, uh, too provocative, uh, too hot-headed, you know, doing acts of terrorism and sorts of things that looked bad to the international community. JFK was trying to rein them in, but the CIA, the careers and folks there, wanted to take a more aggressive posture. And so one of the CIA's key assets and ringleaders had a logistics hub with a massive CIA-backed Cuban exile community network at that time in the early 1960s in Miami. Uh, wanted-- thought that JFK was being too impatient, too cautious. They wanted to invade, basically, a section of Haiti, uh, f- departing from Miami, to use that as a base to then do kinetic attacks against Cuba. The State Department learned that this CIA-backed network, led by Rolando Masferr, was going to do this and stopped it. They had a Customs and Border agent, basically, who was, like, manning the docks and caught them as, like, three hundred of them were, you know, departing to try to take over a part of, of Haiti to do this. And then the State Department directed the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Rolando Masferr. In steps the CIA, and, you know, if you, if you can find this memo, um, you know, it's M-A-S, you know, ferr. I think it's F-E-R-R-U-R, Rolando Masferr. It's, uh-

    2. SPSpeaker1:35:15

       His name's on it. I don't know if-

    3. MBMike Benz1:35:17

       If you-- if, it... The, the title of it is, is, like, massive damage that would, that would accrue. Uh, you can probably also just find it on, or just... Yes, what or j- yeah, massive damage. There we go. Estimate of damage which could accrue to CIA Miami through prosecution of the Rolando Masferr Haitian invasion group. Again, we just learned the existence of this document last year. This is from nineteen-- the 1960s. Now, it says, "The decision by the Justice Department to seek a grand jury indictment against Rolando Masferr and certain of his associates is a potentially explosive matter, which could result in extensive damage to CIA activities in Miami. Recent adverse publicity on the national scene and in the Miami area have added substantially to the already sizable embarrassment potential." Can you imagine what these memos look like for Jeffrey Epstein? "Some of the main sectors of danger to CIA equities are described below. Basic national publicity regarding student and foundation topics have already attracted attention of the local press to the CIA in general. Usually, any reference to CIA covert activities leads to-- leads press to check files for references of any such activities locally. However, before this action can be taken, the story regarding..." And then he goes over the Pa- you know, Pan Am Foundation, the University of Miami, which was w- what hosted JM/Wave. The University of Miami, then, the CIA's largest station house in the world, it was called JM/Wave, was hosted in a facility off of the University of Miami campus. Uh, again, the biggest CIA station house in the entire world. Uh, the CIA, uh... So it goes on to say that, uh, okay, there have been all these w- The top paragraph is saying, "We're under a lot of pressure, Justice Department. The, the public is already losing support for the CIA because of all these other disclosures, and it will be disastrous if you, if, if you pursue the prosecution of him, because Rolando Masferr is gonna squeal." So I think if you go down to the next page-... He says, uh, "As has been the case for the past six years," and then he says, basically, "The CIA has been working with the head of-- the president and treasurer of the University of Miami. Uh, they're extending the, the, you know, uh, cooperation and all this." So basically, all these touch points that Rolando Masfer's network connects to will be exposed, and they go over all these, what were previously redacted CIA cutouts in the area. And then he goes on, the, the memo says: Even if the above circumstances do not exist, um, uh, we would remain concerned regarding the possible effects of the prosecution on the Masfer group. Although no station agents or persons with whom the Miami station has contractual arrangements are among the persons arrested or those who will be prosecuted, it will be very easy for the defense to drag CIA Miami into the case. The defense has only to obtain testimony, true or perjured, [chuckles] they conceivably true, from one of the defendants, or summon as defense witnesses, one or more disaffected former agents of the CIA station in order to begin a chain reaction, surfacing such detail and rumor concening, concerning CIA operations against the Cuban target. Given the sizable reduction of infiltration and actually a general feeling of frustration and lack of support for Cuban freedom attributed to passive US policy, um, basically saying it would undermine our, you know, entire operation against Cuba and the American people's support for it, if the Justice Department indicts these people who just committed this crime, because they can very... The, they're-- the whole network is CIA, and they can just call to the stand that the, their friends and associates had been talking with the CIA about this well before they had done it, and there'll be a massive scandal. Now, that's just one example here, and what goes on to happen is there's a negotiation between the State Department and CIA about whether to bring the case, how to bring the case, how to shape... There's a follow-up memo on this, which is totally incredible. Uh, that, I think, is more of the logistics on this. The agreement they reach is that the State Department wins nominally. They do bring the prosecution, but they bring it in a highly limited and tepid way, and they agree to the CIA's demands to limit lines of inquiry, to, uh, to, uh, file motions, uh, against entering anything into discovery that might, uh, basically reveal the CIA networks in, in this. And they agree to have a CIA general counsel person on the prosecution team in order to personally make sure that the Justice Department stays in line, and if something looks like... If, if the judge grants discovery for something that might reveal the CIA's role in it, dr- you know, drop that line of prosecution so that it can't be entered into evidence. And this, this is, this is what you see time and again, is the, is how these networks get protected, whether it's drug cases, whether it's, you know, uh, foreign policy scandal cases, whether it's money laundering cases. I believe in the Mark Rich case, part of the... I think his lawyer s- uh, uh, cited at one point, or maybe it was, uh, in his pardon application, the work that he had done for, for US intelligence services as part of the reason that he should be granted leniency. But the, the point I'm getting to here is, given Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in the BCCI network, given Jeffrey's involvement in the 1990s with all the foreign policy activities happening in the Middle East at that time, given Jeffrey Epstein's, you know, in- involvement through, you know, the, the early 2000s Clinton era and everything, given his involvement in everything from Israeli to Saudi to British to French high-level government officials, can you-- Jeffrey Epstein was investigated by the, the SEC in the, in the 1980s. He was one, he was one of the two people, uh, who part... Who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history at the time, at, in the United States, the Towers Financial collapse. Epstein's business partner goes to jail for, like, thirty years or twenty years or whatever, uh, but Epstein skates completely free. Uh, Epstein gets involved in this huge fraud in the US Virgin Islands with this, you know, like, billion-dollar fraud case in the US Virgin Islands, never prosecuted for any of it. Why is that? Well, one is, you know, he may have con- we know in the US Virgin Islands case, he was sponsoring the campaigns, basically, of the politicians there. The prosecutors answer to the politicians. Could be that. But it-- I would be shocked if there, in forty years of this, Where's Waldo, Forrest Gump, he's always in the room, in forty years of American foreign policy and intelligence activity, you know, money sourcing for, that, uh, for all the crimes that Epstein committed, the concern was the same one they had with Rolando Masfer. "Don't bring the case, and if you do, bring it in a highly limited way." And that's exactly what happened in 2006, the first time he was indicted. Everybody was up in arms that it was a sweetheart plea deal. It limited... It, it gave protection to all con- co-conspirators, known and unknown. Uh, and, and it was swooped in quickly before, you know, there was a trial in full, so that lines of evidence couldn't be opened about the network.

13. 1:42:51 – 1:59:36

    Sex trafficking vs blackmail: why ‘girls juice deals’ may be the main driver

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:42:51

       It's just crazy that statutory rape is what took it all down, right? 'Cause it's, it's underaged hand jobs, right? That's what took it all down.

    2. MBMike Benz1:43:03

       [sighs] Yeah, I mean, I-- it's, well, it's seems to be what took Jeffrey Epstein down.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:43:07

       Kind of crazy.

    4. MBMike Benz1:43:10

       Even that is, has a really interesting geopolitical history. There was a similar scandal in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called DynCorp, which again, runs through this Adnan Khashoggi, kind of Middle Eastern network. Uh, DynCorp got in trouble-... Mm. Um, for trafficking, uh, facilitating the, the traffic, it was a, you know, major US military and CIA contractor for logistics and, uh, y- you know, institutional support and m- military assistance, uh, on the ground for the US military all over the world. They got in trouble, uh, m- moving... basically trafficking underage kids to Middle Eastern sheikhs. And I believe the w-- uh, in, in the early 2000s, and I believe the reason that was alleged by Congress that they did that was to juice the deals with them. That basically, you know, these, uh, these people who were critical, it's cr- you know, if you're operating on the ground in Kuwait or, you know, y- pick your Middle Eastern, you know, country, in order to serve your purpose for the US government, to be this outside, plausibly deniable, but extensively infrastructured, professional support outfit on the ground, you need the support of the local government. You need the support of the local high-level officials. They need to be happy, and there's several currencies for that. There's financial payoffs, and there's other things they might like, like parties and young women. Uh, you know, especially in places where th- you know, being with a very young female is not illegal. And so what DynCorp, I, I believe, got busted doing, and, you know, you can look up the DynCorp scandal here, was, was doing this, and I, you know, believe their argument was, "W- well, you wanted us to do this thing on the ground. You wanted us to help the US military and, you know, kind of covert support nodes that were, that were happening here. Uh, we had to do it somehow. Uh, you know, this is part of what helped us do that." I would not be surprised if the Epstein trafficking apparatus started, uh, with similar motivations. Not... You know, that it's not for, necessarily for blackmail, but because it makes clients or customers or, you know, VIP people happy. It makes the-- It makes them owe you something. It makes them want to get involved in a deal you do, even if the deal is not one they would ordinarily do, because they just want to stay close to you because you're their supplier of the thing... you know, of their vice, of the thing that they, you know, want but can't get. You know, if, if you're, if you're a, a 70-year-old billionaire, you can't walk into a bar and... L- leave aside the underage thing. You can't walk into a bar, you know, and, you know, meet an 18-year-old who's g- you know, w- I pres- I presume... Y- you know, these things are facilitated at, at private parties, and it needs to-- you know, for a lot of these guys, it has to be discreet. You know, they've got wives, they've got reputations. And, you know, th- there's an aspect of this that plays out at every institution. I, I worked at a New York law firm, and, you know, there's... You know, there's, there's ways that you can make partner. Uh, you know, at least this was kind of the vibe that I felt like some people make partner 'cause they're really good technically at what they do. They're just amazing. They're just technical whizzes on the minutiae of how to structure a merger or acquisition. They, you know, they're just really great at structuring an offshore banking transaction, or they're really-- they just know absolutely everything about tax law. There's some people who move up because of nepotism. You know, they're the bro- brother and the, the son-in-law of a, of a major partner. There's some people who make partner because they know one-- they brought in one client who's just a really big main, uh, rainmaker. And there are some people who move up because they open doors to partners while they're associates. They introduce them to someone. They host events. They've got, you know, tickets to exclusive things, and the partners just like being around that person because they get access to that person, uh, i- in a currency that they can't get on their own, and that includes hosting c- you know, cool, exotic parties, having, you know, attractive women. I, I, I've never been convinced that the central role of the Epstein young girl, uh... in my view, sidebar of, of the Epstein money laundering story, is, uh, is that it was for blackmail. I-- And part of this is because the moment Je- Jeffrey Epstein formally, officially threatens somebody with blackmail, and that person tells his wife, and that wife tells her friends, and that gets out to somebody else that knows Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's access goes away overnight. That's the sort of thing that even a rumor of that spreading, and nobody else is gonna wanna do business with him.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:48:46

       So you think people just assume it's blackmail because that is how you would blackmail someone, especially underage girls?

    6. MBMike Benz1:48:54

       I think it is very possible that there could have been indirect blackmail, meaning Epstein passes it on to an intelligence service, to a, you know, to a corporate espionage client or something, um, and they use that for their own purposes. But even then... I, I mean, imagine, for example, if, you know, like on the Bill Gates thing, like th- there was an e-- you know, Bill Gates gets an email: "I have a video of you sleeping with this person," and-... y- you know, uh, or somebody much lower level, the moment they send that to the press, if, you know, in order to d- they figure they have nothing to lose. I mean, there's not been anybody in the seven years that's transpired who said, "I've been- I was personally blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein." I think d- 'cause the moment you do that, nobody comes to your parties anymore. Nobody... You lose all the access, you lose all the deal flow, you lose all the goodwill that you've generated because this rumor... People are very risk-averse, especially at that level.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:50:02

       Right, but just to have it over their head and never use it, though.

    8. MBMike Benz1:50:07

       Right. Well, I think w- I think that what you could have is, because he does his own nefarious stuff, he could compile it so that if they ever go out-- if they ever threaten him with something, he's now got something on them. And I've seen some correspondence that, y- you know, in the files, that, that, that looks like that might not be an impossible scenario.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:50:31

       Do you think that's how Jeffrey Epstein got in that position in the first place, that they knew he had this kink?

    10. MBMike Benz1:50:37

        No, not at all. I mean, Aman Khashoggi had the same thing. Aman Khashoggi was running around with dozens of young and, uh, you know, apparently underage girls, it... you know, the whole time. I think that Jeffrey Epstein probably learned, you know, how powerful that can be through, through that network. Seeing that that's, that's what powerful people do, uh, that gives them something that gets them a lot of local influence and gets- wins them a lot of favor. I-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:51:07

        That's a very specific illicit desire, to want underage people.

    12. MBMike Benz1:51:13

        Well, I very-

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:51:14

        How do you even find out that someone's into that?

    14. MBMike Benz1:51:16

        Well, I don't think that the majority or anything close to it of, of the women were technically... I mean, I think it was largely-

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:51:26

        Young

    16. MBMike Benz1:51:27

        ... very young. Um, you know, barely legal, so to speak. But, uh... And I know that there were cases of underage, but I, you know, I think it's-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:51:35

        Most of it, it was just girls.

    18. MBMike Benz1:51:36

        Most of it was just very, very young, but not, not like-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:51:40

        Like 20-year-old girls-

    20. MBMike Benz1:51:40

        Yeah, not like 13-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:51:41

        ... 18-year-old girls

    22. MBMike Benz1:51:42

        ... type, type thing. And then, yeah, y- b- remember, 'cause this is an international enterprise, and many of the clients are like, uh, you know, in countries that don't necessarily have the same norms about that-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:51:55

        Right

    24. MBMike Benz1:51:55

        ... that we do. Um, you can very easily see someone getting involved in that just because girls juice deals. And, uh, so I d- I don't think that Epstein... I've not seen evidence, and y- in my view, you don't need any of that to understand the core part of the Epstein story that has relevance to, to your life today in terms of your own government and the workings of power and corporate finance and the like. But w- I, I, I do think that girls juice deals, and the fact that he had the coolest parties on a private island with the hottest girls is something that makes-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:52:33

        Also, brought in a lot of intellectuals, stimulating conversations, scientists, all these very interesting people, so that was part of the thing, right? That was the draw.

    26. MBMike Benz1:52:43

        Try hosting a cool party as a guy with that... with, with a bad ratio, so to speak, uh, or-

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:52:52

        Sausage party.

    28. MBMike Benz1:52:53

        With a sausage party. And it- when you develop a reputation for having attractive women at the parties you host, you become, uh, an im- you become an im- an important person to know in the network.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:53:05

        Right.

    30. MBMike Benz1:53:05

        Because basically, every male has that- has a desire for attractive women. Not saying underage, obviously. But that is, like, a universal biological desire for men to be- want to be around attractive women. And-
14. 1:59:36 – 2:08:21

    CIA FOIA ‘Glomar’ and the next transparency target: CIA-originated Epstein files

    1. MBMike Benz1:59:36

       And this gets back to in 1999, I, I mentioned, Jeffrey Epstein FOIA'd the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 for all records about himself, and then he did it again in 2011. Now, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure at all in 1999. He didn't come into public awareness, public attention until 2001, 2002, when he started flying b- when he flew Bill Clin- Bill Clinton around, post-presidency Bill Clinton around, uh, on his Africa tour, around the time of the start of the Clinton Foundation. And everyone was wondering, "Whoa, who's, who's this eccentric billionaire who, uh, is personally flying around on his private jet, the President of the United States for the past eight years?" And that's when, you know, the Jeffrey Epstein celebrity story started. But he was a, he was a private figure in 1999, when he FOIA'd the Central Intelligence Agency for records. And, and the, and we just learned this in the files this week. The, the s- the response, we don't actually have the underlying... W- what's, what's in the files is a 2011 FOIA response to Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer. Jeffrey Epstein did this through his lawyer using the Privacy Act. This is a way to basically kind of anonymously FOIA the, the CIA to, uh, basically keep communications between the CIA and your lawyer for information you're entitled to under the Privacy Act about, about yourself. And we don't have the underlying letter in the files, tragically, and for whatever reason. But we d- uh, but what we do have... 'cause I would expect that to be an enclosure to the CIA response. But the fact is, is anybody who wants to be a hero right now, and I have it up on my, on my X account, I have, in the thread that, that I did on this, the referen- the file reference numbers.... These are not classified documents. FOIA responses are not classified. So anybody right now can FOIA the Central Intelligence Agency for all records and communications related to the CIA's written communications with Jeffrey Epstein via his lawyer, both in nineteen ninety-nine, two thousand and eleven. But the two thousand and eleven, what it says is: "We have received your request for your client, Jeffrey Epstein's, uh, you know, uh, records search under the Freedom of Information Act. Uh, we've granted the request to search for all open and acknowledged agency affiliations between Jeffrey Epstein and the CIA. Uh, we have run that search, and the answer is no documents are responsive to the request." And then it says in the next paragraph: "With respect to your request that touches on classified, uh, classified documents, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of, of any such documents, so you can consider this a partial denial of your FOIA request." Now, what's so interesting about that is you may think, if you read that, that Jeffrey Epstein, uh, you know, just requested any public-facing links between him and the CIA, um, or, uh, you know, what-- just a general, you know, uh, what do you have on me that the public can search just to see? First of all, the fact that he did that alone twice, in nineteen ninety-nine, two thousand and eleven, says something. But the-- You might think, okay, well, he just wants to know if other people might think that he's CIA. You know, he's, he's moving up in the world in nineteen ninety-nine. He's about to be a, a massive public figure. He wants to know if other people, FOIA, the CIA, for records on him, what they will see. And, but that-- it turns out that response to a FOIA, partial granting of the FOIA to look for open and acknowledged agency links and partial Glomar, uh, can neither confirm nor deny existence/non-existence, is a stock CIA FOIA response whenever you FOIA the CIA for someone's personnel files. Which leads to the question... Because the fact that the CIA says, "We, we are-- Consider this a denial of your request for classified, for things that touch on classified matters," means that he asked-- He, he didn't just ask for all open and, and acknowledged links between the CIA and himself. He asked for something, and whatever that thing was, it touched on something classified. There would have been no Glomar if, if-- There would have been nothing to deny about the request if it had only been limited to open and acknowledged links. To me, this is a bombshell and should prompt Ro Khanna and, and Thomas Massie, and the four hundred and twenty-seven members of the House of Representatives, and a hundred percent of the US Senate to pass a, uh, the same bill that the United States Congress did in nineteen ninety-two for, for all, for the JFK, uh, you know, Records Collection Act, when the CIA was forced by law to stand up an independent auditing body to review all classified records relating to the JFK assassination for the first time ever, and then declassify them over months and years through the work of that independent board. The, the existence of, of this correspondence we just learned about this week alone, should prompt a four hundred and twenty-seven to one and a hundred percent Senate to do the same thing they just did with the OJ files for CIA-originated files. That's actionable immediately. Who's gonna wanna be on the other side of that in Congress? No, the CIA's records about Jeffrey Epstein, prolific child sex trap, how-however you want, you know, whatever you see in the Rorschach inkblot test of, of the Epstein universe, um, I think it'd be very hard to be, if that bill gets introduced, for a sitting member of Congress to be on the other side of it. I think it would pass, and it would legally compel the CIA to turn over what I think are quite possibly, arguably very likely, forty years of CIA documents referencing Epstein. The CIA would not be doing its job if it didn't have records about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was a counterintelligence threat with all the foreign countries that he was dealing with, if he, if he had been a double agent sort of thing. The CIA would not be doing its job if it was not keeping tab. The C-- Epstein's network was a key financial and logistics hubs in highly geopolitical, sensitive areas of operation of the CIA. The economics division of the CIA, let alone, you know, the operations division, is gonna have to, you know, uh, keep, uh, analysts informed about money flows in those countries. And when you add, and then you add in the fact that he represented Anand Khashoggi's money, who was the CIA's main point person for ten years, uh, the c- the literal central linchpin, and his money is being handled, there's no way. And you would now have a legal mechanism to enforce CIA declassification if Congress forces it. Now, the other part of it is, okay, why hasn't the CIA turned this over before? You could argue it's a Orlando Masfer case. It would embarrass the agency. It would mean in Congress, their funding is gonna get decimated because it, they're, they're toxic. You can argue it's foreign governments that don't want the... But part of it is the CIA is not allowed to do this unless the Congress forces them. These are classified documents. I mean, it could-... you know, charitably volunteer to ODNI, uh, by conducting, you know, an internal task force, uh, that voluntarily, y- you know, asks Tulsi Gabbard to declassify these. Uh, I wouldn't hold your breath on that, but this is immediately actionable, and it would solve the mystery. All we need is one brave member of Congress to get the ball r- rolling and stand up that bill, and you can just copy-paste the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act, and just substitute JFK for Jeffrey Epstein.

15. 2:08:21 – 2:19:26

    Epstein’s death, Bill Barr’s proximity, and why ‘100% certainty’ changes everything

    1. JRJoe Rogan2:08:21

       What's your take on the circumstances around his death?

    2. MBMike Benz2:08:27

       I don't know. I-

    3. JRJoe Rogan2:08:29

       It's weird that they took a guy who is one of the most high-profile defendants ever, and you put him in jail with a mass murderer.

    4. MBMike Benz2:08:38

       Yeah. Yep.

    5. JRJoe Rogan2:08:40

       Kinda crazy. You put him in jail with a cop who had killed drug dealers, a juiced-up, gigantic cop-

    6. MBMike Benz2:08:48

       Yeah

    7. JRJoe Rogan2:08:48

       ... who was obviously a psychopath, and then 18 days before he died, he complained that that guy tried to kill him.

    8. MBMike Benz2:08:55

       Yeah. Uh, I mean, it, it, it doesn't look good. I-

    9. JRJoe Rogan2:09:01

       It's just crazy that this guy wasn't in protective custody. It's crazy that the cameras go down. It's crazy that the footage that they've released is weird, 'cause it's missing, it's missing time.

    10. MBMike Benz2:09:14

        And it's crazy that it happened under the watch of an attorney general, who himself was so deeply embedded in the Epstein network his whole life. I mean, from the weird kind of coincidence of Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, and Jeffrey Epstein's Dalton School, to the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA during the Iran-Contra operation, that Jeffrey Epstein was- appears to have been doing the covert money laundering for. I mean, Jeffrey e- uh, Bill Barr was, like, s- seven years... Uh, he went to night law school, trained to be a lawyer while he was at the CIA, and then his, you know, main job was being the CIA's blocker and tackler to obs- obstruct. Uh, he was the, he was the CIA's point of contact to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal that Jeffrey Epstein was so deeply involved in. Uh, and was blamed in the press at the time for being the person at CIA, blocking Congress from seeing the CIA scan- th- documents that were so central to the scandal. Then he becomes the Attorney General of the United States, and he writes the pardons of the BCCI officials. And who was co-leading that investigation? Robert Mueller at the time. This is in the early 1990s, the first time, uh, Bill Barr. So, so [chuckles] you have the BCCI Bear Stearns multi-billion dollar operation, that appears to me that Jeffrey Epstein was working on, and then got- took the clients from that deal as his own personal clients when he went private on his own. And Bill Barr is who lets the people from the crooked CIA bank off the hook, and then he becomes attorney general again. Uh, you know, and, and in 2019, it's... He's the one in charge of the FBI. The FBI answers to the Justice Department. The FBI has the same relationship with, with Justice that the CIA has with State. You know, they're the investigative arm of the Justice Department. So, you know, I, I, I think if he-- I think it's hard to trust anyone on this, and I don't know w- you know, what kind of file set the Trump FBI inherited after, after all this time. Uh, it's, it's hard to make heads or tails of it. To me, I think getting answers on the things that are immediately actionable, you know, getting the CIA's direct correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, you know, that, that I mentioned. Uh, a, a congressional bill that forces that... Because if it comes out that there are effectively, uh, an, an entire avalanche of classified Epstein files, uh, dating back 40 years, and then you've got the CIA attorney gen- uh, it puts these things in a, in a very different light, depending on whether the thing that has generated so much smoke this whole time, uh, the allegation of protection by US government intelligence, and however many others, uh, to know that on physical paper, like we know that the CIA interfered in the Orlando Masferra trial, like we know that the CIA contracted out to mafia hitmen, an attempt to kill a foreign president, like we know that MKUltra actually was real. We, uh, we... These things, you can't scale... You know, think of things like a, like a Jenga tower. If, if, uh, if a foundational piece is not solid, you can scale a whole architecture of BS on top of it, and if that assumption falls away, this majestic-looking, you know, tapestry of just years and years of effort collapses, because the thing you assumed to be true, because it looked like there was so much smoke, to n- to know it to be true, that that is a solid piece, that you can put the next piece on top of, you know, it's, um... There's that quote, "99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze."

    11. JRJoe Rogan2:13:21

        What does that mean?

    12. MBMike Benz2:13:23

        It means when you're only 99% sure of something, you, you always have to agonize, "Well, what i- if it's not true, and it- and I think it is, and I build all this stuff on top of it, the 1% chance that that's not true, means, uh, it would be a real bitch for this- me to spend years of effort on this thing, for me to spend thousand- you know, millions of dollars, you know, on this thing, when it's based on an assumption that was only 99% likely to be true, but-... 1%, it may have been structured some way different. There might be something I missed in this. Whereas 100% is a breeze. Okay, it's automatic. You can-- And things like... This is why document drops like this are so vital. Not even necessarily because they have some single smoking gun that tells you who killed JFK or, you know, uh, w- what client Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to, but because it allows you to put down real Jenga pieces about what actually happened, and that process itself allows you to ask the questions that might get you to those answers.

    13. JRJoe Rogan2:14:42

        Hmm. That makes a lot of sense. Um, is there anything else you wanna add to this? [chuckles] I mean-

    14. MBMike Benz2:14:50

        Uh, yeah-

    15. JRJoe Rogan2:14:50

        -we could kinda go on for days.

    16. MBMike Benz2:14:52

        Yeah, yeah. I mean-

    17. JRJoe Rogan2:14:53

        You spend so much time on this stuff. How do you have that kind of an attention span? It's kinda nuts. I mean, I, I've followed some of your live streams, I'm like... First of all, your recall is insane.

    18. MBMike Benz2:15:06

        You know, I, I heard something once, which I think is really helpful. I don't think I'm special in any way like this. I think literally anyone can do this if you just kind of apply this kind of trick. I heard this once, it-- which is that, if you read a history book, don't just read it agnostically. Have a theory in mind about what you think this is and how it worked. Even if you are wrong about that theory, what you will find is that names, dates, locations, your brain will remember them forever because they're not... You know, if I'm, if I'm thinking about something that happened in, you know, uh, I don't know, like November 11th, 1983. Okay, if, if I see, like, that date on a driver's license card or something, um, and I have no theory of mind when I see that, I'm not gonna remember that five minutes from then. It's gonna be like remembering-- trying to remember a 11-string, you know, number, or, like, someone's cell phone or something, when you don't really know the person or you've nev-- you know, you haven't dialed it a million times. But if you have a theory of mind that you are indexing those things in relation to, what you find is that your, your brain keeps those in that index. So like, I, I've joked, like, because, you know, we've talked about this Iran-Contra affair, which was really the creation of this apparatus that we live under today, where because the CI got handcuffs put on it, everything had to become CIA to get around those handcuffs. The universities had to be, the pr- the foundations, the private philanthropic donors, you know, the... And this is what happened in the censorship-industrial complex. It was all wrapped around this. But what you find is, like, those dates mean something to you because they're, they're placed in relation to something else that happens. Uh, y- you know, I, I joke that, like, I index things by, you know, Iran-Contra often. Like, for example, if, if there's... When I was, you know, studying about BCCI, and I learned, "Okay, this happened in 1984," I don't just think about 1984 as a, an abstract thing. I think, "Okay, well, that means it happened after the meeting between Robert McFarlane and Adnan Khashoggi, but before the, uh, you know, the oil pipeline scandal of Ed Meese." And then so I remember that this thing happened on this date because I place it into that index, and anyone... I, I think it's, it's a-- I think it's something that anyone, you know... And I think people organically do it when they're really passionate about something. And, um, you know, this is an easy thing to be passionate about because it gets to the heart of networks that are the determining power structures of, of your life. When you look up, and then you look up at the thing that you're looking up at, and you look at, up at the thing, you know, above that, this, this is the network you see, whether it's in intelligence, military, statecraft, high finance, private philanthropies, universities, labor unions, scientific research. It doesn't mean it's, [exhales] you know, the Epstein network, so to speak, but it's, it's this, this layer of interconnected human networks. And I think it's an, an important history for the American people to have access to, so that they can make informed decisions about how they wanna change that world, how they can make informed decisions about what to vote for. They can make informed decisions about what kind of cur-- you know, industries that they're participating in, that they might wanna see reformed. And, uh, it's-- so it makes it easy to be passionate about, because if we can, if we can get a win here, it'll really change the world.

    19. JRJoe Rogan2:19:07

        Well, I think you do a great service, and I think your abilities are exceptional. I think you're selling yourself short a little bit. You're being a little self-deprecating, 'cause it's very unusual what you're able to do. And I, I think the, just the sheer amount of time that you've invested in this stuff is kind of mind-boggling.

16. 2:19:26 – 2:39:18

    From Epstein to governance: censorship, climate-finance power, and ‘15-minute city’ fears

    1. MBMike Benz2:19:26

       Well, what would you like to see in this? Like, if you, if you had a wish list, what are the things that are open threads or-

    2. JRJoe Rogan2:19:34

       Well, it, ch-- The, the real concern with me is that it's unfixable, and that this is just a standard w- way that our government has operated since the 1950s or whenever, and it can't be fixed, and that they'll just gloss over it. A new person will get into office and promise that they're gonna implement some reform, and it never happens, and that we just accept that over and over and over again.... That's the real fear. The real fear is that there's a slow capture of our democracy to the point where it's just a mere illusion. That's the real fear, and I think a lot of people think that we've already passed the point of no return on that. That's what scares the shit out of a lot of people. And then when you see, um, things that are happening in other countries, [lips smack] um, like particularly England, which is just rampant crackdown on free speech and with the, the arrests from people that are posting things on social media sites, and the implementations of, uh... There's a, a new thing that they tried to do, or I think they are doing, this concept of, uh, having a limited amount of time, so you can drive outside of a zone-

    3. MBMike Benz2:20:47

       Yeah

    4. JRJoe Rogan2:20:47

       ... and after that, you have to pay for it. That's a new thing, right?

    5. MBMike Benz2:20:50

       Yeah.

    6. JRJoe Rogan2:20:50

       I can send Jamie that.

    7. MBMike Benz2:20:51

       This smart cities type concept.

    8. JRJoe Rogan2:20:52

       Yeah. I can send this to you, Jamie, 'cause I just sent it to, uh, Konstantin, 'cause it's, uh, it, it appears to be real, and it's terrifying.

    9. MBMike Benz2:21:01

       Your carbon budget. [chuckles]

    10. JRJoe Rogan2:21:02

        Yeah, f- that's nuts. Well, look at what California's doing right now. What California is doing is, um, they are taking, uh-- or they're, they're moving forward with this, the idea that you have a, um, a, a tax on the amount of miles that you drive now.

    11. MBMike Benz2:21:21

        Yeah.

    12. JRJoe Rogan2:21:21

        So instead of just taxing gas like they've always done, now they're taxing you on the amount of miles that you drive. Well, you're already getting taxed on that. If you're driving more miles, you're spending more money on gas.

    13. MBMike Benz2:21:32

        Yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan2:21:32

        So you're getting-- You're spending more money on tax, but now they're taxing on top of that-

    15. MBMike Benz2:21:36

        Mm-hmm

    16. JRJoe Rogan2:21:36

        ... which is essentially they're stealing money.

    17. MBMike Benz2:21:38

        Yeah.

    18. JRJoe Rogan2:21:39

        Um, where can I find it? Uh, forward here. Here we go. Hold on a second. Jamie, you're on, uh, you're on Signal, right?

    19. JRJoe Rogan2:21:52

        Yeah. Uh, not... Yeah, I can get it to myself, though. [clears throat]

    20. MBMike Benz2:21:57

        It is really interesting how that whole thing-

    21. JRJoe Rogan2:21:59

        I sent it to you, Jamie, on Signal.

    22. MBMike Benz2:22:01

        The whole-- But, uh-

    23. JRJoe Rogan2:22:02

        But it's crazy that the, the California thing is bananas.

    24. JRJoe Rogan2:22:06

        It just says, "Wow!" And-

    25. JRJoe Rogan2:22:08

        That's it?

    26. JRJoe Rogan2:22:09

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan2:22:09

        Oh, it doesn't have the link?

    28. JRJoe Rogan2:22:10

        Doesn't have the link.

    29. JRJoe Rogan2:22:10

        Link. Okay, hold on.

    30. JRJoe Rogan2:22:12

        Sorry.

Episode duration: 2:39:19