The Rich Roll Podcast - Bryan Fogel: 'The Dissident' Filmmaker On The Global Surveillance State

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Growing surveillance states. Tech intrusions on privacy. Cyber warfare. International dissent. Assassination. In October 2018, beloved Washington Post journalist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered upon entering his country’s consulate in Istanbul. The perpetrator: the Saudi government. The reason: speaking truth to power. And yet, to this day, the Kingdom has yet to be held accountable for its actions. It’s a story that shocked the world. Filmmaker Bryan Fogel was compelled to better understand just how such an event could occur. What he discovered was truly Orwellian—and far more disturbing than you can possibly imagine. The result of this quest is The Dissident—a candid portrait of Khashoggi and the bone chilling events surrounding his murder that plays more like an international thriller than a documentary. Best known for Icarus—his Oscar winning exposé of Russia’s elaborate state-sponsored Olympic doping program—Bryan’s follow up is incendiary. Expanding on themes related to those explored in Icarus, it’s controversial. Placing himself and those portrayed on screen at great personal risk, it’s courageous. It’s also expertly crafted. Executed with precision. And a film more than deserving of Oscar consideration. Today Bryan takes us behind the scenes of The Dissident in a riveting tell-all conversation about the consequences of absolute power, global economics, citizen activism, and using your voice for change. Tracking Khashoggi’s trajectory from reformist journalist to dissident to target, this is a discussion about the sacrifice of human rights when they transgress the consolidation of economic and political authority. It’s about citizen activism. The rise of cyber warfare. And the weaponization of social media to both promote and commandeer global political narratives. It’s about Mohammad Bin Salman’s unchecked power in Saudi Arabia. And how international financial interests compromise political and economic relations with the Kingdom. Hollywood is not immune. In fact, Bryan is quite frank about how the industry that celebrated Icarus has snubbed The Dissident out of cowardice. Despite unanimous praise for the film after it’s Sundance premiere, every major distributor and streaming service (including Netflix, which released Icarus) declined to acquire the film due to the Kingdom’s influence over the entertainment business. Much like its protagonist, The Dissident was itself nearly dismembered. Nonetheless, the film will be available on-demand on January 8th. Not to be missed, it’s an Oscar-worthy documentary that demands your attention. One of the most important filmmakers of our time, it was an honor to reconvene with Bryan (check out our first conversation if you missed it). Strap in, because this conversation will leave you with more than a few important things to ponder. READ MORE: bit.ly/richroll572 WATCH: bit.ly/btyanfogel572 Peace + Plants, Rich

Khashoggi entered the consulate on October 2nd. Two weeks later, I think it was the 16th, Saudi Arabia finally admitted that he had, in fact, died inside that consulate. And I'm reading this story as I think many in the world began following this story in those two weeks. And, you know, each day it was another shocking allegation and that he had been dismembered and that the body was nowhere to be found and that they won't let him in the consulate. And following that story in those two weeks, in my mind, I was going, here was this story of a journalist. And not only that, he's a Washington Post journalist.

Oh, and he's fighting for free speech, and he's advocating for human rights, and he disagrees with his authoritarian government, and he's at essentially a war of words with the Crown Prince, and now he's been murdered. Maybe this is the next film I want to make. Human rights and freedom of speech isn't just in danger and being suppressed in places like Saudi Arabia. It's here in the United States.

That's Brian Fogel, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. So a couple of years ago, I hosted cyclist and filmmaker Brian Fogel on the show to talk about Icarus, his extraordinary expose of Russia's elaborate state-sponsored Olympic doping program. And that's a film that would land him an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2017. Well, Brian is back. He's got an incendiary follow-up.

It's called Dissident. And it's this candid portrait of Saudi Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the rather bone-chilling events surrounding his murder that plays as a film more like an international thriller than a documentary. It's definitely another Oscar contending mandatory must watch. And this conversation is going to rock you. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

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Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Brian Fogel. Of course, this conversation is organized around his latest work, The Dissident, Of course, this conversation is organized around his latest work, The Dissident, which premiered in limited theaters on December 25 and is available VOD on most streaming reformist journalist to ultimately dissident, this is also a discussion about free speech and the role of social media in both promoting and squelching it.

It's about the growing surveillance state, tech intrusions on privacy, cyber warfare, Mohammed bin Salman's consolidation of power in Saudi Arabia, and the complexity of international relations with the kingdom. It's also about how that realpolitik trickles down to Hollywood and how the dissident, despite being the talk of the town at last year's Sundance, proved almost too fraught for just about every film distribution company and very nearly never saw the light of day.

I think it's fair to say that Brian is one of the most important documentary filmmakers of our time. Please check out our first conversation, episode 328, if you missed it. And it was an honor to once again sit down with him. And I suspect this conversation is gonna leave you with more than a few important things to ponder.

So here we go. This is me and Brian Fogel. It's been a couple of years the last time I saw you was on the bike. It's good to be back in the same room with you, man. And a lot has happened in the last couple of years in your life. It's been a crazy trajectory for you.

Yeah, it's been an interesting few years. That's for sure. What was it like when you won the Oscar and you're up on that stage? I mean, that has to be one of the most surreal experiences you can imagine. It was March of 2018 and it was surreal. And what was interesting is leading up to that,

the months up to it, Icarus released on Netflix in August of 2017. And the Academy Awards was eight months later or seven months later. And Netflix had put a lot of energy behind essentially this award campaign. And I had never went through anything like this before. And so it was seven months of every day of my life,

you're waking up and here's your schedule for the day. Right. Here's your press. Here's where you're going. Here's your screenings. Here's where you're going. You know, and it was intense. And so, you know, the lead up into that was months and months of this, you know, kind of campaign.

But from the time we get nominated to actually going to the Academy Awards and there I'm there sitting there, I mean, it felt like there was an elephant on me. Like I wasn't at that point having fun because it just, it was amazing. And at the same time, the pressure because there was just, there was so much feeling for me at stake and Netflix and my partners and everything had put so much into it. And so we were all like, they're kind of like on pins and needles. And luckily they called the award for best documentary. I think it was like the third or fourth award of the night. Yeah, it was early in the night. Which was really, really good because like, you know, you're sitting there and, you know, they called Icarus. And I just remember like at that moment, I essentially had left my body.

I mean, it was just, you know, you're walking up on the stage there and, you know, there's, you know, this person, that person, everybody in the entertainment. That front row, just looking up at you. You've ever admired and you're sitting there going like, wow, I'm on stage at the Academy Awards with an Oscar in my hand and they handed me that Oscar and it's, I don't know how many pounds it's, it's like 12, 13 pounds or 10. I mean, it's, it's heavy. I was like, Whoa. I was like, you know, and, and yeah, it was completely surreal. And an actor won the statue, you know, you're led into this labyrinth underneath the Kodak Theater. And you come out of the labyrinth about an hour later

because they walk you through all these stations of photos. Right. And then a booth like, what was it like to win the Oscar? And all these kind of surreal things. And you emerge about an hour later. And as I kind of emerge out of the cavern about an hour later uh right where the backstage is um is uh i can't remember if it's is it joel or ethan cone who's married to francis mcdormand i think it's joel joel so uh joel is there and francis won the Academy Award that night for Best Actress.

And he goes to me, enjoy this. And he goes, yeah. He's like, because, you know, the odds are this is never going to happen again. And he tells me this crazy funny story about Sylvester Stallone that I won't repeat. And I just went, I'm like, this is so surreal. I just won an Academy Award. There's, I really should remember if it's Joel or Ethan Cohn, talking to me. Like, they're my favorite filmmakers of all time, you know.

And it was quite a night. That's pretty cool. And my parents were there too. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. The campaigning that goes into the Oscar season is bananas. It was quite a night. It's pretty cool. And my parents were there too. Oh, that's nice. The campaigning that goes into the Oscar season is bananas. There's so much at stake for these companies.

It is bananas. And what's interesting is in COVID now, it's so radically different because- You can't press the flash and go to all these lunches and all that kind of stuff. And all these screenings where, you know, with Icarus, you had, I don't even know, you know, 30, 40 screenings where small screenings and you're meeting people. And it was wonderful because I got to meet so many people, so many people that I looked up to who were filmmakers or documentarians or you name it. And so COVID has really, really changed that. But it was really intense because you're also there's like a playbook.

You've got your talking points and you've got your, you know, like the do's and the don'ts and what you're going to say and what you shouldn't say and how to answer a question. And everything was so like, it was intense. Yeah. It was intense. And the press I was doing, you know, you then kind of like, you know, you go do an interview. And then after the interview, it was like, okay, that was really good. But, you know, maybe change the next time you answer the question, do this. Well, I could, thinking back to when you did the podcast,

I mean, you're definitely lighter in your shoes today than you were on that day. There was a, we had just met, so we didn't know each other really, but there was a little bit more of a seriousness and maybe a sense that you were shouldering that kind of heavy responsibility at the time. Yeah, I just, I was, it was an interesting,

I remember going through that so well because I was enjoying it at the same time. I actually was, I was so stressed out because each one of these events, you do these events, then it was like, I actually was, I was so stressed out. Yeah. Because each one of these events, you do these events, then it was like, okay, was that okay? And then I'd like replay it in my mind and go like, did I answer a question the right way?

Or did I say something that was wrong? Your publicist is gonna call you and chew you out for, listen, if you're going on podcasts though, and you're talking for a couple hours, you know. It's, I mean, the entire lead up to the Oscars and just that whole season, I mean, it was so intense. And we had been nominated for a BAFTA. And so I'd been at the BAFTAs like two weeks before that,

and we didn't win. And so you come out at the BAFTAs like two weeks before that, and we didn't win. And so you come out of the BAFTAs, and you're feeling completely defeated. But you've got the Oscar nomination, and everybody at the time was going, well, don't worry about that. You still got the Oscars. And it was an incredible experience, but I can't tell you that I was like having fun during that period. And part of it really had to do with what Icarus was about. And that here, as this whole awards season is going, and Gregory Rechenkov, the whistleblower to this day,

is living in hiding in protective custody, is isolated. And so what was weighing on me also was that, okay, here I am having these experiences and being celebrated. And the guy who... Without him, that would not have been possible. This wouldn't have been possible without his evidence,

without that story. None of this would be happening. It's basically living in isolation in an undisclosed location under security, under the threat of his life. And here I am on this completely different trajectory now. And that really weighed on me, still weighs on me. Yeah, I mean, my first question, I mean, we're here to talk about the dissident,

your new film, but we can't get into that without hearing a little bit about how Gregory is doing. Like, are you in communication with him? Like what's the latest? I know he put this book out recently. He put his book out, which is his memoir of his life. And actually I can say this now his memoir of his life.

And actually I can say this now because by the time you hear this, it'll be known. It just won the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year, which is a very prestigious prize in the UK. So he just won the basically British Sportsbook of the Year award for the book. And yet the book still doesn't have a US publisher, which is bizarre. Yeah, I noticed that.

He self published it? No, it was published by Penguin Random House in the UK. And then we couldn't get a US deal for it. I was involved just as no financial stake, nothing, just trying to help facilitate. But the book's pretty amazing. And so that, you know, came out a couple months ago. But I'm not able to, you know, communicate directly with him. I don't have his phone number. I don't know where he lives. I don't want to know where he lives. But we've been able to stay in touch through his lawyers.

And he's doing okay. But he hasn't seen his family since he escaped Russia, which was in November of 2015. He went into protective custody in July of 2016. So we're, you know, four years in now, four and a half years in of essentially this guy living in isolation, in protection. And what's interesting is that in protection. And what's interesting is that the story has continued to evolve. When Icarus released in August 2017, Russia was still going to the Olympics. Five months later, basically because of what that film's impact had been on the world at that point and the global distribution that Netflix has, the Olympics, the IOC essentially had to do something. So even though at that point, the story had been in the

press and the media, it's very different. Okay, you see something on CNN or read something in the New York Times versus now you're emotionally connecting to a character and you're seeing this in a film, and you're realizing the extent of this fraud and kind of how bad it really was, the IOC, you know, decides to ban Russia from the Pyeongchang Olympic Games in 2018. And in the decision of the ban, even though the ban was largely ceremonial because Russia was then able to still compete, but not under their own flag. And the athletes were competing as Olympic athletes from Russia.

They cited Icarus and their reasoned decision. Wow. And so that was, the Olympics, I think were February, 2018. the Olympics, I think, were February 2018. And then at the time, there was the, still is, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, had put together this roadmap, which was,

okay, here's the three things that Russia needs to do to get reinstated into world sport. And one of them was that they were supposed to provide the LIMS data, which is the laboratory management system data of everything they had been that what was in this database was a ton of other doping violations and frauds that the urine swapping and the opening the bottles and all the other kind of stuff. And Rechenkov, Gregory had said, yeah, this is, there are tons and tons of cases in here

that I entered into the system as negative said, yeah, this is, you know, there are tons and tons of cases in here that, you know, that I entered into the system as negative that were actually positive, right? And here's what we did. So that was the first thing they had to turn over. The second thing for Russia's reinstatement was that they were going to accept the Richard McLaren report, which was after we brought the story public to the New York Times in May of 2016, Richard McLaren, the investigator who was brought in by the World Anti-Doping Agency

to investigate Rodchenkov's allegations, authors this report over the next year. And the report basically you know, basically, you know, goes down a rabbit hole of insanity of how big this fraud was. And it was all backed up through scientific data and researchers and forensic evidence, etc. And that Russia had to accept the McLaren report as fact, accept the McLaren report as fact, right? And the third thing was that there was going to be like a massive reform to the anti-doping system and that there'd be all this oversight and all this stuff, right? So they had set this as the three things that Russia had to do to get back in. And here we are basically two years later, it's now actually at like the

beginning of this year, right? And Russia still hadn't accepted the McLaren report, still hadn't returned over the limbs data, but WADA reinstates them into competition, basically just going back on their own word that this had to happen. The point of this story is that they finally turn over this LIMS data. And I don't want to mess up the date, but this was sometime around a year ago. They finally turn over the LIMS data. And in turning over the database, Russia had went in before they turned it over to WADA and had manipulated the entire database. But WADA already had the real database that Rechenkov had turned over to them

of what it was supposed to be, right? Right. And now the one that Russia's turns over has basically been completely manipulated to erase all these positives, to erase Rechenkov's evidence. But not only that, they had made notes into the database pretending to be Gregory writing these notes to basically blame the entire scandal again on Rechenkov. That this was all a big conspiracy that Rechenkov had acted as a sole practitioner. KGB, FSB had nothing to do with this. The state wasn't involved. And WADA goes, what is this, guys? Are you kidding me?

And so they basically re-ban Russia for another four years. And this is where it stands right now today. That's the current state. Russia is still suspended from international competition. Had the Olympics happened this last summer in 2020, the recommendation was WADA was going to be banned from the, or Russia was gonna be banned from the summer Olympic games.

We don't know if that was gonna happen because they were fighting that in the court of arbitration for sport. That was unresolved. And the IOC had made the decision. So where this stands right now, here we are essentially four years on but two years on from the Winter Games is Russia's continued to deny their reband, band again. As of right now, they're not going to the summer games if they were to happen in 2021. And Rechenkov is still, not only is he persona non grata, if you pull all the Russian media,

I mean, this guy is essentially the arch enemy of arch enemies in the overall history of the Russian Federation. And as long as Putin's in power, that will remain to be the case. I mean, we've heard reports from, you know, through his attorneys from CIA intelligence is that he is, you know, either number one or number two on Russia's kill list? About a year ago if you remember there were nine Russian agents that were kicked out of the country That actually Trump administration had discovered these nine basically secret agents that were working in the country and they kicked him out They were supposed to be I'm gonna botch this story, but apparently they were Russian diplomats and whatever,

but then the State Department determined they were spies, right? Right, so they were actually working on behalf of the FSB to come and sort of root out Rodchenko here in the States. Apparently three of those agents of these nine that were expelled from the United States were here hunting Rechenkov.

And there's been reports on Bellingcat, which is this investigative circle of journalists, that even when he was supposed to appear, Russia thought that he was gonna appear at these hearings in Luzon, Switzerland, which of course, he appeared via Skype or Zoom, but they thought that he was going to be there in person and there were agents that were in Luzon essentially waiting for him. There's all sorts of evidence that's been uncovered over the last few years of, they're hunting this guy.

That's so dark. And, you know, you look at Nalvani, the guy who was poisoned in Germany, whenever that was, five, six months ago, with Novichok and Skirpal, you know, which was in March of 2018 in the UK, the, you know, that poisoned him and his daughter, Lithonenko, and then all these other mysterious murders

and some that have been looked at as hangings and suicides and this, that, and the other. It is clear that Russia doesn't forget. Right, wow. So- How has this impacted you personally? Like, are you on the receiving end of some of these threats, veiled or otherwise?

I have, gratefully, I've never received a threat. And I've never received an email threat or a text message threat or social media threat. And the way that I've always looked at it myself is that, why would you shoot the messenger? And I think, Russia and you even hear Putin when they asked him about the scurple poisonings. And you can go look at interviews and they go, well, did you do this?

And he goes, no, I didn't do this. But treason is the highest crime and it should be punished. So, you know, basically I didn't do this. But, you know, if somebody did do this, this was warranted because treason is the highest crime. And I think, you know, and I can't speak for how, you know, Russia, but if you look at like even the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 or Skirpal, right, it was, these were acts of treason and Gregory is viewed as a traitor, a defector. And I would imagine that even Garry Kasparov

is on that list as a defector and a guy who was the pride of Russia, who has now come very, very public in the past several years against Putin. But hopefully I'm okay. And needless to say, I'm not planning any trips to Moscow anytime soon. Yeah, and now probably not Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, definitely not Saudi Arabia. I don't know what's happening now. Definitely not going to Saudi. It's a perfect segue into the new film because that's essentially an overlapping narrative with what you explore in the murder of Khashoggi. This idea of power unchecked, where whether it's Putin or MBS,

they kind of want you to know it's them without saying it's them because they wanna put the message out that they mean business. But perhaps there's also an under appreciation for the kind of global response and reaction to these events where there's a growing intolerance for this kind of thing. Like I suspect that MBS didn't anticipate

the level of outrage that he kind of invited upon himself as a result of all of this. Well, I don't think he expected that there was going to be a bug, a listening device in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Right. That was going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. I mean, just flat out what had happened in that consulate. So I don't think the Khashoggi murder was just horrifying,

but I don't think that MBS, when you go into the details of a case, it was so stupidly planned, and it was so brazen and outrageous. but obviously they couldn't have imagined that there was a listening device in the consulate, in the room that they decided to murder him in. And that's a whole story about that. Right, I mean, that was a big question. And before we get too deep into this, we should probably just synopsize the film a little bit

for people that aren't familiar. But what wasn't completely clear is how that recording transpired. Like who set that bug? How did that transcript get compiled? Like who hit record on what device and for what purpose? That basically records the entire process of murdering this journalist.

Well, what had happened, as I learned in making The Dissident, is they had decided, the Saudis, that they wanted to rendition Jamal Khashoggi back to the kingdom. the kingdom. He was writing in the Washington Post, not defending Trump and the Saudi regime. Trump was a huge ally. So he was speaking out against US-Saudi relations and Trump. He was working with a Saudi dissident in Canada, basically fighting Saudi Arabia's control of Twitter, which is all part of the film. And he had come out, you know, as speaking publicly that he didn't agree with a lot of parts of Mohammed bin Salman's vision 2030, which is his concept of how to reform the kingdom. But everything that Jamal was writing about, if you go back and read his Washington Post writings, or even read books that he had published in Arabic, he was a moderate. You couldn't even consider him a liberal. Right. At best, a reformist from inside the system.

Yeah, this was a moderate reformist who loved his country, who had no problem with the monarchy. He just believed because here was a guy who had been educated in the United States. He'd been coming to the U.S. and to the U.K. his whole life, you know, most of the time working for the Saudi royal family as somebody who was either, you know, not a diplomat, but a, you know, a liaison. He spoke fluent English or as a journalist for the kingdom writing about, you know, what was going on. And so this was a guy who really was entrenched in that system in the family. And so his defection from the kingdom was an insider who really knew what was going on there, knew these people. But he was portrayed all of a sudden in Western media as Muslim Brotherhood, as a terrorist sympathizer, as a guy who knew bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and all

this stuff. And this was not true. He was a moderate who loved his country, and what he was writing about wasn't like, you know, down with Saudi Arabia, MBS must be overthrown, you know, the royalty has no place, the monarchy must abdicate the throne. None of that was going on. This was a guy who was going, I love my country. We have a young prince who I believe is starting to lead the country down the wrong path. He's talking about reforms. He's talking about, okay, women can be able to drive, and there isn't going to be the guardian system where women have to check in with any man in the household who's 18 years or older to get permission to leave the house,

that any man in the household is 18 years or older to get permission to leave the house and all these things that Muhammad bin Salman was talking about changing in the kingdom. And at the same time, he's completely crushing opinions. He's crushing anybody who has anything critiquing of him. Just anybody who dares speaks anything other than this guy is essentially the chosen perfect monarch of all time. And so what Jamal was really writing about was, was, hey, we can do better. We can be better. And you can be a monarch and also be kind. better. We can be better. And you can be a monarch and also be kind. You can be a monarch and be compassionate. You can be, you know, a king or a prince and inspire your people rather than repress them. And that was the core of what he was doing. And that descent led to a place where, you know, had he stayed in Saudi Arabia, he surely would have been jailed.

And in leaving, he became hunted. And ultimately the decision was, you know, to murder him. Right. So historically the relationship between the monarchy and the press in Saudi Arabia is kind of hagiographic, right? Like your job is to basically speak kindly of what's happening in the government for the most part. Exactly.

He was able to still advocate for some level of reform within that construct and still covet favor with those in power. He kind of knew where that line was and how much he could push without transgressing it. But my sense is that over time, beginning with Arab Spring and kind of everything that happened after that, he started to get a little bit more active, pushing the buttons a little bit more, a little bit more, seeing where that line was. And at one point, he crosses it,

perhaps even unbeknownst to him. And there's this edict that comes down from the monarchy where they kind of disavow themselves of him, right? And then he realizes like, basically he's fucked. And he like catches a flight out of the kingdom like that night without telling anyone. Yeah, I mean. He could go back at some point,

but we all know he never did. He, you know, and you see in the film, we show some old clips of him and you see, you know, him speaking in English and appearing on, you know, on Western media speaking in English. And so here's this guy who had spent his whole life, you know, back and forth between the West and Saudi Arabia. But, you know, he's in the kingdom

and he starts essentially speaking out, not in any sort of like aggressive way, but basically tweeting or writing, hey, you know, I don't agree with this, or maybe this can be different. And this guy was listened to. He had 1.75 million followers on Twitter, which, you know, is a big number, especially in Saudi Arabia. And so he was very respected. So unlike, you know, let's say, you know, a young up and comer, this, that and the other, this was now a very respected journalist coming out with his thoughts or opinions, and somebody who knew the inside workings. And so Mohammed bin Salman had kind of put together this whole, I guess, army, as you'd call it, of people to basically see to it that there were no free speech or freedom of opinion in the kingdom.

one of the royal advisors, basically apparently comes up with this plan of how they are going to see to it that there is no free speech in the kingdom. And Saud reaches out to Jamal and tells him, don't write, don't tweet, don't talk. You're to remain silent. And basically, if you don't, we're gonna come and arrest you.

Right. And there's threats being made. And Jamal essentially makes a decision that he has to leave. He can't remain silent. And this decision we get into in the film, but, you know, he was, he was married. He had children. His kids were living in the United States at the time. I didn't know.

And two of the kids were in the US. One of the kids was in, was in Saudi, was my understanding. in Saudi was my understanding. And, you know, and he was happily married. And he makes this decision that he has to leave. And he has to leave, I think, for two reasons, as I understand it. And his friends, who, you know, who I got to know in the making of the film tell me is that the idea that he would sit there and be a lame duck and be silent and that his whole life was as a writer, was as a journalist, that now his voice was silenced was enough that it was so compelling

that he felt that it was better to leave the country than to stay with his family and be silenced. And of course, I think, you know, his family probably, you know, was not thrilled with that decision. And, you know, after he leaves, he comes to Washington. He gets a job being a global opinions writer for the Washington Post. And there's a story, and I certainly can't validate the truth of it because of, you know, for reasons. the Saudis come to his family, to his wife, and tell her that she has to divorce Jamal, because only a husband can grant a divorce from his wife in the kingdom. Women are not allowed to divorce. A man has to grant a woman the right to divorce. And apparently they brought her in and interrogated her and whatever,

and said, you're going to call your husband and tell him that he has to grant you a divorce. And he did. And he did because for her own good, so that they would leave the family alone. And so he now was in Washington and, you know, he was essentially isolated. Yeah. And that began the rebuilding of his life. It began essentially his ultimately finding of Hatija Jangas, the girl that, woman, that he decided that he was going to remarry.

And that led to him going into the consulate in Istanbul where he's murdered, because he had went there to seek marriage papers to prove that he was no longer married so that he can marry Hatice. It's devastating. The idea that he would leave his entire family behind knowing he would never see them again. Well, the kids were in Virginia and Washington, two of them at the time.

They're now back in Saudi Arabia. They decided in the aftermath of his murders that basically they had two choices as I best understand it. Choice one was fight for justice for their father, and the family would basically never be able to travel, be arrested, be ruined, right? Because how are you going to take on this kingdom? And you have so many cousins and relatives and aunts and uncles. So it was like, okay, either we're going to go fight for our father's death or we're going to essentially accept a payout. There's stories that the payout was in the tens of millions of dollars and remain silent and move on with our lives. And the family decided to go that route because it wasn't just about the kids.

that, you know, whatever war we rage or fight in trying to fight for justice for our father is putting every member of our family in danger. So I think ultimately the decision was made is, okay, we'll go back to Saudi, we'll shut up, we'll move past this, and we'll take the money. Mm-hmm. In the structure of the film, it's very interesting the way you kind of set this up. You have these two protagonists that are essentially on a collision course with each other. You've got Khashoggi and all the events that led ultimately to his murder. But in parallel with that, there's this other guy, Omar,

who's left the kingdom and is living in Montreal. And ultimately these two cross paths on this kind of trajectory that Khashoggi is on from reformist journalists to becoming, essentially a full blown dissident. So talk a little bit about how you structured the film because it really does, I mean, I haven't even said this yet,

but it's like the film is extraordinary. You did an unbelievable job. It's so compelling. And it plays very much like a narrative thriller. Like on some level, it's more like a Bourne movie than a documentary, like the score, all of the sound design, like every element of it is keeping you on pins and needles the whole time.

And there's like a gestalt, like a tempo to the movie that really is very hyper engaging and unusual for a documentary. Well, thank you. That's certainly how we and myself and my creative partners wanted the film to feel, sound, look, structured, is much like Icarus, but in this on a heightened level,

I looked at this story and said, okay, it's a thriller. It's all true, but this is a thriller. The murder, the story of why he's murdered, how he's murdered, all the forces at play, the characters. This is like a Bourne film. And so there was a very intentional construction cinematically in how we structured the film, paced the film, put the film together, and use these cinematic techniques that you would see in an enemy of a state or in those Bourne films or, you know, you name the kind of the spy thriller movie that were intentionally employed in the construction of this film while remaining true to being a documentary. I mean, everything in the film we shot, everything in the film is a fact. Everything in the film is researched and archived and backed by evidence. But structurally, my feeling as a filmmaker and my collaborators is I think if you can engage an audience visually through sound,

music, motion graphics, effects, all these kind of devices, then when you're watching like a big thriller, get you on the edge of your seat going, what's going to happen next? And if you can do that, and especially in the case of this story, that hopefully the come away from watching The Dissident isn't just that you're on the edge of your seat and you're having that kind of cinematic thriller-esque experience, but that it also leads to a call to action because you're emotionally impacted because you didn't just watch a piece of news, you went on a journey and that journey becomes very emotional, hopefully, in watching the film. And that leads, what my intention would be is that there's a call to

action behind it, that you come out of the film and you fall in love with Atisha Jangas, his fiance. You care about Omar Abdulaziz and that his brothers are still jailed in Saudi with no charges. And his friends are jailed in Saudi for two years without charges. And this guy lives in isolation, basically fighting the kingdom for freedom of speech.

in isolation, basically fighting, you know, the kingdom for freedom of speech. You understand the truth behind this and want to do something about it as you see, you know, the members of the G20 and the Trump administration essentially bury their head in the sand and condone this murder all for money. And so hopefully in the construction of the film, being a thriller, that it also leads to

a greater emotional response and that was kind of the intention. Yeah, I mean, I knew the story. I had read some of his pieces in the Washington Post. I had a familiarity with kind of the broader brushstrokes of what had transpired. What I was not aware of was one focus of the film being on the extent of their surveillance state

and how the Pegasus malware and the hacking of the phones and how all of that like played into how this whole thing unfolded. Yeah, it was, to back up, Khashoggi entered the consulate on October 2nd, basically two weeks later, I think it was the 16th, Saudi Arabia finally admitted that he had, in fact, died inside that consulate. And in the film, there's kind of the whole story of how that kind of unfolds and the pressure that Turkey put on Saudi Arabia to get them to ultimately confess because they had the audio.

And I had been following this story essentially from October 3rd. You know, Washington Post journalist vanishes inside of, you know, Saudi consulate in Istanbul. And I'm reading this story as I think many in the world began following this story in those two weeks. And each day it was another shocking allegation and that he had been dismembered and that the body was nowhere to be found and that they won't let him in the consulate. And there's a fiance.

And crazier excuses on behalf of the kingdom about what had happened. Yeah, and I'm reading this. And I remember, cause it was, I'm pretty sure it was October 16th, 17th. And I was in Rome at the time. I had been invited to speak for the Rome Film Festival. And I was with my fiance and I'd been following the story.

And as I started following that story in those two weeks, in my mind, I was going, maybe this is the next film I want to make this seems to have all these ingredients because I had been looking at that point for about a year for what that next story I wanted to take on what that next documentary I wanted to make was and I felt kind of a lot of pressure and burden coming out of Icarus that I wasn't going to go and direct a Disney film. I couldn't go, you know, whatever, make the Stevie Wonder documentary or whatever that was, you know, like, yeah, like, I was going to have to, at least in my mind, I wanted to see to it that I was taking on something that was

human rights, freedom of press, freedom of journalism, protecting a whistleblower, authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, all these kind of themes that as a storyteller, I wanted to be able to continue in that path. And here was this story of a journalist. And not only that, he's a Washington Post journalist. Oh, and he's fighting for free speech. And he's advocating for human rights. And he disagrees with his authoritarian government.

And he's at essentially a war words with the crown prince. And now he's been murdered. And I said, okay, this could be the one. And the question was, is, can I essentially get access to this story to be able to tell it in a manner that isn't going to be something that's archival? And there were three things that really hinged on it, which was one, there was the story of his fiancee emerging of the girl, you know, Hatice Cengiz who was waiting for him outside the consulate.

And I said, oh, wow, this is clearly the emotional cord of what this story is. I mean, the concept, I mean, which is unfathomable to me, it's unfathomable to anybody listening to this, that the person that you love, that you believe you're going to marry and spend your life with, walks into a consulate, an embassy,

to be murdered horrifically and that you're never going to see them again. And then at the same time become in Hadija's case, the center of a global media storm. And so all of a sudden you become famous and famous around the world to the point where you can't really even leave your house. Not because of something you did that you're proud of, but because the person that you loved

has met this horrific fate. And that to me was the first element that if I could get Hatice to work with me exclusively and share her story, the love story, that there would be a chance of being able to really tell the story. The second part of this was Omar Abdulaziz in Canada. And in the days following Khashoggi's murder and the admission that Saudi Arabia, you know, that he had died inside that consulate.

There's a story coming forward in the New York Times of this young Saudi dissident who was living in Montreal, Omar Abdelaziz, and he was saying, I know why Jamal was killed. In fact, I was hacked by Israeli cyber surveillance software called Pegasus owned by the NSO Corporation and that Saudi Arabia had hacked my phone using this software Pegasus. Jamal was hacked too. And because my phone had been hacked, they knew that Jamal Khashoggi and I had been working on a project to basically take over the narrative back onto Twitter, as you'll see in the film. And if you read about this, Saudi Arabia basically was manipulating, and still to this day, manipulating Twitter, which was the only platform in the kingdom where people could have freedom of speech and opinion because Twitter is a decentralized platform.

And if you create like different various Twitter accounts and you can create an account under a fake name or whatever you want, right? That you can voice expression. And this was how the Arab Spring came to pass also. And a big argument for why anonymity on Twitter is something to be protected so these dissident voices can be heard.

Exactly. And 80%, sorry to interrupt, the point that you make that I also didn't know is that 80% of Saudi Arabians are on Twitter, whereas in the United States, it's like 20% or something. Yeah, so Twitter, because the platform is this kind of decentralized information platform and because you can kind of, whatever,

you can have a VPN, you can create a Twitter account under whatever, your name is Bugs Bunny 21, right? It has become on a global level in repressive authoritarian regimes, ways that kind of like the resistance can communicate with each other. And the Arab Spring only was able to happen because of Twitter, because they were able to plan events, they were able to plan marches,

and Twitter became that platform for dissidents to basically assemble. And what these authoritarian regimes learned and these Arab governments, in the case of Saudi Arabia, basically a dictatorship, a monarchy, which is similar as it is in the Emirates and in Egypt, even though it's now, you know, it's technically not a monarchy, but it's a dictatorship, is that if you could control Twitter, if you could control the narrative on Twitter, you could crush freedom of speech, you could crush opinion, and that you can put forward your propaganda.

I mean, you even see this as happened in the Trump administration over the last four years, where Trump has used the authoritarian playbook of using Twitter to basically bring forward false information, whether it's about election fraud, whether about voter fraud, whether about, you know, voter fraud, whether it's about, you know, you name it, Trump has used Twitter as his platform to disseminate false information, lies, right? Well, these governments understand that Twitter can be used for that. And so Saudi Arabia puts together a plan to basically hire thousands and thousands and thousands of people in the kingdom to create false Twitter accounts and put forward onto Twitter these false goals of the kingdom.

Mohammed bin Salman is a great reformer. Mohammed bin Salman's vision 2030 is the best thing to ever happen to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is this, this, this, and this, right? And so Twitter is being flooded unbeknownst to the Saudi people with tens and tens of thousands of false tweets, all pro-government, all basically, you know, pushing forward this narrative. And at the same time, Saudi Arabia is spending, depending on who you talk to, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars with global PR agencies with the same thing, that Mohammed bin Salman is the greatest thing to ever happen to Saudi Arabia, right? Well, Omar Abdulaziz realizes that this is what is happening on Twitter in Saudi Arabia is not real. These accounts are not real.

These are fake accounts. These are accounts basically owned and controlled by the government of Saudi Arabia to put forward false opinions and lies and, you know, and false narratives about the kingdom. At the same time, what these accounts are doing is that anybody like, let's say, Omar Abdelaziz or Jamal Khashoggi puts forward a tweet saying, I disagree with Mohammed bin Salman. I think this, that these Saudi Twitter trolls or flies, this army of thousands, tens of thousands of people that have been hired to basically take control of Twitter, all of a sudden flood this dissenter's or person's Twitter account with,

screw you, you should die, this isn't true, right? And so suddenly their tweet is completely suppressed like it doesn't exist. And everything that is trending in the kingdom on Saudi Arabia is pro-government, pro-monarchy, pro-MBS. So Jamal and Omar are working on basically a plan that they call the bees army to take control of the flies, where they're going to basically do the same thing that the Saudis have been doing on Twitter, except they're going to get dissidents within the kingdom and everywhere for them to create tons and tons of fake Twitter accounts. But their fake Twitter accounts will be basically putting forward freedom of speech, human rights, right? And that ultimately this will be the war between the bees and the flies.

Right. That two can play at this game. You want to put forward your false propaganda? All right, we'll put forward the truth and we'll, you know, tell the people what's really happening. So because Omar's phone is hacked with Pegasus and because Jamal's phone is hacked with Pegasus, phone is hacked with Pegasus. And because Jamal's phone is hacked with Pegasus, Saudi Arabia knows what these two are up to, and that they are basically trying to reclaim control of Twitter. And this arguably is the biggest, probably single reason why they decide to murder Jamal. Because it's one thing that Jamal is writing in the Washington Post, which was negative.

But it's another thing if all of a sudden he and Omar and this army of dissidents, basically, can take back control of Twitter, and Twitter is the way that Saudi Arabia gets their news. This is so fundamental to the kingdom in their narrative. And in the hacking of the phone, they're able to understand that Jamal is not only just writing in the Washington Post, they're able to understand that he's now working with a known dissident to take back control of Twitter. And I think that this was probably the breaking point where they decided that he needed to be murdered. And they had tried to come to Canada and rendition Omar just months earlier.

Those two dudes show up and try to cajole him into returning with promises that he'll get his own TV show and that MBS loves him. But it's Khashoggi who's saying, don't do that. You don't wanna do that, it's a trap. That's right. And yet Khashoggi falls into the same trap and he falls into the same trap,

and the back steps, so they had agents basically came to Canada with Omar's brother in tow, basically as like a hostage, you know, like, hey, Omar, if you don't come back to Saudi Arabia and, you know, we love you, which of course was not true at all, you know, just know that we've got your brother. And Omar chooses not to go back to Saudi Arabia. And after making that decision,

they arrest his brothers, 19 years old, and the other brothers a couple years older. And they have remained in the Saudi prisoned, tortured without charges for the last two years. And 33 of his friends, just people that were linked to him, not dissidents, nothing, just by knowing Omar as basically this rendition tool of, hey, if you want your brothers to get out of jail, if you want your friends to get out of jail, you need to either be silent, you know, or you need to come back to Saudi Arabia where you're either gonna be imprisoned or be silenced, right? And so that Omar has not happened,

that Omar has continued to fight so. Yeah, is he still doing his YouTube show? I mean, I checked his Twitter account last night and he's got over a half million people now. Yeah, he's got a half a million followers. And what happens on his YouTube show is every time he posts an episode, the kingdom and their lawyers basically say

that whatever it is, there's like he's using copyrighted material. He's using news like things and they get it pulled down. And so then he has to put it up somewhere else and they get it pulled down. But if you go onto his YouTube station, you'll see that, you know, it gets pulled down, it goes back up and there's, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of followers that watch his essentially show, which is kind of like a, I don't know how you would best describe it, a Colbert, a Kimmel, a Fallon.

It's like what Bassem Youssef did in Egypt. Are you familiar with him? He was sort of the Jon Stewart of Egypt. I've heard the name. Leading up to Arab Spring. He lives in the US now and he's been on the podcast, but it's a similar kind of situation. Yeah, where Omar's the first guy to kind of create a show,

which is criticizing the kingdom, making jokes. He's taking kind of like looking at like US style talk shows. Right. And, and does this show as often as he can looking at all the Saudi daily news and looking at all the Saudi Twitter feeds and all the false narratives that he puts together this show going like, okay, that's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. That's a lie. And, and also weaves in a lot of comedy into it and is doing like, even like sketches and things like that. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Jamal's murder seems to almost perfectly coincide with the bees actually succeeding in getting their message and their hashtags

to trend number one on Twitter. Like those seem to almost happen at the exact same moment. Simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't believe that that was an accident. It was, as this was taking steam, I think the decision was made within the kingdom of we're going to send a message.

And when you understand that their phones were hacked, then as you'll see in the film and in understanding the story behind this, you can see how that danger grew. And I think, Jamal couldn't imagine, he couldn't believe that his own country could do that to him. And he had actually went about a month before his murder

because he was going back and forth between Washington, D.C. and Istanbul where he's now with Hatice Cengiz. Yeah, Hatice lives there, right? Right. And so they had decided that they were going to have a life in both places. He bought an apartment or a condo for them in Istanbul and they were gonna split their time.

They were gonna be together in Istanbul, then she'd come to Washington and study. And he'd go back to Istanbul. So he had bought a place for them in Istanbul. And he had originally went to the consulate in Washington, D.C. and actually met with the U.S. ambassador at the time to – the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. at the time, who was Mohammed bin Salman's brother, right? And he goes into the consulate in Washington, D.C. asking for these marriage papers. And they say, we're happy to give you these papers,

no problem at all, but you need to get him in Istanbul. You know, you want to marry a Turkish woman, you need to get him at the consulate in Istanbul, right? So he comes out of this meeting in Washington, kind of being welcomed. He's, you know, met with the prince's brother who he already knew, right? And he's assured everything's fine, no big deal. You just need to go get him in Istanbul. So when he goes into the consulate in Istanbul the first time, they welcome him. They're nice to him.

But they say, oh, hey, we need to prepare these papers. But they knew that he was going to be coming to that consulate in Istanbul already. So they go, okay, now we got a shot at them. Because they weren't gonna do it on American soil. Exactly. They weren't gonna do it on American soil. And the two, the like bifurcation, like you're gonna have to come back in five days,

allowed them to get their plan in motion and get these guys out from the kingdom to be in the consulate when he arrived. Exactly. But he was nervous. Like he brought Hadishah with him the first time, both times. Both times. Because he wasn't quite certain that it was gonna be okay.

Well, not only that, he left his phones and his computer and everything with Hatisha because the Both times that he went in He basically left everything with with her and said hey if something happens to me Here's a lot of confers information here's Yassin act eyes information here, you know Here's a lot of Khanfar's information.

Here's Yasin Akhtar's information. Here, you know, here's these people to call. And so, you know, he goes in the first time and they're nice to him, but warm to him. And they say, no problem, Jamal, we'll give you the paperwork. We just need a few days. Come back in a week. And so he leaves kind of going, okay, everything's okay. And that gives them this week to essentially plan his murder. And he goes back a week later when he was murdered.

But clearly, I mean, him leaving his devices with Atesia was even on his return back in. There was, I'm sure, that part of him going like, okay, here's my phone, here's my this. And in the transcript of his murder, which we have in the film, and to this day that transcript has not been released. There's only a few people in the world that have it. It's CIA, British intelligence, the French, the Turks, of course, and me. And there's a whole story behind how I finally obtained the transcript.

And in this transcript, he makes note that he doesn't have his phones on him. He's asked to send a message to his son telling him that he's okay and that if he doesn't hear from him for a few days, not to worry. And he doesn't, you know't have his phones with him. And he even says, my fiance is waiting for me outside. And so those devices and his computer and everything were brought into evidence. And I've been told that they did find Pegasus on those devices. The transcript is horrific.

I mean, it's gut wrenching. What's interesting is the Saudis were able to delay the investigation for something like two weeks. I think it was the 15th of October before they finally let the Turks into the consulate. Yeah, thereabouts. Yeah, it was a good two weeks and yeah. And in those two weeks, of course,

they were able to clean up the murder scene. Not quite as well as they should have. No, I mean, they never found, what's interesting and in the transcript also is in the, and I don't get into this in the film in great detail, but in the five or six days from the time he first enters the consulate and then goes back and returns, Saudi Arabia puts this mission into kind of high motion

and they actually bring two different teams there ahead of the murder. One of the teams, two days before he's murdered is to sweep the consulate for listening devices for bugs and they don't find one. And the listening device was only in this one room where they had secure communications. And we still don't know to this day

how that listening device got there, whose device it was, was it the Turks? Was it another country who handed it over to the Turks? Not sure. That's super interesting. Cause yeah, that's never explained in the film and never heard an explanation for who recorded it. And the Turks will never tell you how they got it.

You know? That prosecutor is like a bad-ass. He is like out of like a Bond film, isn't he? I know. And his accent is like unbelievable. I mean, he's every filmmaker's dream and the, you know, he's never spoke on camera about the crime to this day. I don't think there's a single interview out there of him

other than what you'll see in the dissident. And I think he carries a heavy burden with this case in particular. burden with this case in particular. In the wake of all of this becoming global news, you have MBS back in the kingdom trying to figure out how he's gonna control this narrative that is quickly eluding his ability to manipulate, right? Which gets us into the Pegasus hack of Bezos's phone, which is fascinating.

We all remember when, you know, his personal pictures got leaked. Was it the post, the New York Post published those? It was the, like the inquire. Oh, it was the inquire, yeah. And basically there were stories coming out that Bezos is having an affair and that there's photos that were essentially gonna be,

published of like selfies that he had sent to Lauren Sanchez and there was even apparently a nude or, you know. And then he pulls like the baller move of the century by getting ahead of it and making all of that available. Right. He basically puts together this post on a medium going, here's what's happened. I was hacked.

My phone was hacked. And I'm not gonna be blackmailed. And they were trying to blackmail me. And this is all a blackmail extortion attempt because I own the Washington Post and the Saudis are mad at me because they, Saudi Arabia, to back up, Bezos onto Washington Post, and in the fallout of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, right, Khashoggi wrote for the Post. So the Post has the biggest knife in the fight, and they are pushing this story forward.

And the fascinating thing behind the Khashoggi murder, but what got the world involved was had Jamal been painted in the press and the media as Saudi journalists enters consulate in Istanbul killed, right? It would have fallen on deaf ears. But because it's an American paper, the New York Times, Washington Post, right? New York Times, Washington Post, right? And they're putting forward this story that it's not just a, it's not a Saudi journalist, it's a Washington Post journalist. So now Jamal is essentially an American and this catches the world's attention. Had he not been a Washington Post journalist, because in all the news, it wasn't Saudi journalists, it was Washington Post journalist because in all the news it wasn't Saudi journalists. It was Washington Post journalist and here's this publication that he had worked for right and

That's what caught the world's attention. It was a Washington Post journalist and so what MBS couldn't you know, I guess separate in his mind is the idea that you can own a newspaper and not have control of the newspaper, right? Right. So just because you own the New York Times doesn't mean in the United States that you control the New York Times. If you're a free paper, right, you don't have control over what the paper actually writes. You can, you know, I'm sure there's whatever. I mean, for Fox News is basically putting paper actually writes. You can, you know, I'm sure there's whatever. I mean, for Fox News, it's basically putting forward its thing.

But ultimately, there is still a freedom of press there. So the Washington Post is pushing this forward, this story forward globally and making the Khashoggi murder, you know, a huge, huge global story. They're running ads in the paper, full-page ads in the paper behind the murder. They're putting up billboards. They are, you know, the Washington Post is not letting this story die. And MBS in his mind is going,

well, hey, Jeff Bezos, you own the Washington Post. You can make this stop. Yeah, kill it. And behind the scenes, those guys had been in communication with each other because MBS was trying to get Amazon up on its feet in the kingdom. Right. So they had business dealings together.

There was a whole deal for, I don't know, billions of dollars of a cloud server that Amazon was going to do with the kingdom. And lo and behold, MBS hacks Bezos' phone with Pegasus, or we think it's Pegasus. But he had actually been hacked before the Khashoggi murder. So he had been sending Bezos' messages, and all of a sudden Bezos gets this video message of like a soccer match in Saudi Arabia versus I can't remember, Norway. And Bezos clicks on this message. And it's like, huh, what is this message? You know, he's kind of perplexed by it. But lo and behold, that was hacking his phone. hacking his phone. And so in the fallout of the Khashoggi murder,

as all of a sudden Bezos' affair is being leaked to the public, Bezos brings on an investigation team of forensic cyber examiners who go into his devices and they're watching the data stream out of his phone and linking it to a server known to be a Saudi server. And so, you go, okay, well, how else was this information coming public?

It was clear that he had been hacked. And yeah, so you go, okay, if you can hack the richest man in the world, who can't you get? I mean, that's the kind of scary message that you leave everyone with. Like nobody is out of bounds here. Nobody is out of bounds.

And I think one of the themes in the film is the battlegrounds of the world right now are not being fought with weapons. It's being fought in cyber sphere. And these are the biggest weapons in the world right now. You look at the Nepechia virus a couple of years ago in the Ukraine, that was a Russian virus that shut down the entire power grids in the Ukraine and basically completely hobbled the Ukraine and all these major shipping companies.

Andy Greenberg writes about this in his book called Sandworm. And a lot of people don't know this story, but this was the single biggest cyber attack in the world's history so far against the Ukraine because it crippled all the global shipping agencies. It crippled FedEx. It basically infected their systems and brought down these companies to their knees for this period of time and cost billions and billions of dollars. And to this day, people don't even realize what happened.

And this was a cyber attack. Or in the case of these cyber firms like NSO, is what you read and what you learn is that there is hacking software. There was an idea a few years ago, okay, Apple and the government trying to get Apple to turn over codes and stuff. They don't need that anymore. trying to get Apple to turn over codes and stuff. They don't need that anymore. There's now private software being developed by private companies. In this case, this is a company called NSO out of Israel. All of these sales have to get approved by the Israeli government. But Israel basically is allowing the sale of this software to pretty much any government in the world,

because when they sell this software, Israeli intelligence is also gaining insight into who each one of these companies wants to hack. So, okay, say Israel and NSO sells Pegasus to the Saudis, right? And you go, well, why would Israel want Saudi Arabia to have this hacking technology? Well, not only is lucrative and they're paying millions of dollars per, you know, for these licenses, but on the back end, right, NSO and Israeli intelligence are able to know who Saudi Arabia is hacking, who they're after, what they're... So, I mean, it's just, it's really nutty. But what you understand is that this technology

is also now in private hands. And much like what Snowden unveiled to the world with what our government was doing and what the NSA was doing in listening into people's devices and, you know, and all the information he brought forward. What you're seeing is that this is even much worse than we can imagine because governments around the world essentially with just somebody's phone number can go in and hack somebody's device, take control of that device, know everything about that person. And this is a completely unregulated part of the cyber landscape, that there is no regulation in this regard

other than the United States knows that the Saudis have this technology and they know the Emirates have this technology and the Emirates knows that other countries have this technology. And the ability to destabilize geopolitics and do it essentially invisibly is so potent and frightening, right?

And what's interesting about this is it shares a common theme with Icarus in that this search for a competitive advantage creates a situation in which the advantage is always ahead of the detection method, right? In the sense that doping is always ahead of the detection method, right? In the sense that doping is always kind of two steps ahead of our ability to detect it and creates this, you know, this sort of tension between those two competing entities.

Here we have cyber warfare just miles ahead of our ability to even understand it, let alone preemptively get in front of it. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting analogy. I never really thought about it that way. And that's a really good and interesting analogy, which is, I think what we see as a society in technology is every time we have this, a newer technology, another thing unleashed,

it's incredible in some sense. And on the same hand, it's that more invasive and invasive technique. And you can look at this across all these platforms, even like Google, right? Okay, so Google buys Nest cameras, right? And so now if you have a Nest camera, the only way to actually have other people have access to the Nest is to integrate it in through Google Home, right? But your Google Home account is linked to your Gmail account.

And your Gmail account and your Google account is linked to all your web searches and everything. I mean, so you go, oh, my God, what kind of information does Google have on me? They have access to my home. They have access to my cameras. They have access, you know, if you're Ring or Nest, right? They have access to my security systems. They have access to my web searches. They have access to my emails. They have that, right?

And so you have, A, these companies, whether that's Facebook and Instagram. And I mean, the other day I was literally thinking of going and taking a trip and was trying to figure out where to go. And I did a search for like the Bahamas, right? And all of a sudden on my Instagram yesterday, I'm getting ads about resorts in the Bahamas. I'm literally going, what? Why on my Instagram feed are resorts in the Bahamas coming up? And yet there they are.

The scarier thing is when you just say it out loud, you don't do a search and then you get the ads. Right, Siri, Google Assistant, all that stuff. So, you know, you have like Sonos speakers and you hook it up to your Google Assistant and you go, hey, Google, play Led Zeppelin, right? And then the next thing you're doing, you're seeing buy the Led Zeppelin, you know, box set.

The next thing you're doing, you're seeing by the Led Zeppelin box set. When you interviewed the cyber security expert dude that kind of figured out that Omar's phone had been hacked, did you have him look at your phone? John Railton Scott, yes. Yeah. Yeah, I've had my devices looked at. I've had my devices looked at.

I have a monitoring device on my phone, which is actually, hopefully, would show if all of a sudden my phone starts pinging towers that it isn't supposed to ping. So the way that they look to figure out if you've been hacked, right? Is it's not like, oh, you've got some virus in your phone. And like, I think the way that most people think about, oh, I've been hacked or I'm getting malware of crashing.

The way that cybersecurity experts look at where you've been, if you've been hacked, is apparently our phones really only communicate to a handful. And I don't know what that handful is, whether that's 100, 200, whatever it is, kind of global satellites and servers, you know, it is kind of global satellites and servers, you know, Google and Apple and Amazon and all these different servers and satellites that essentially are in control of all data and communications, right? So your phone is pinging like this satellite, right? So your phone is pinging like this satellite or pinging this server connected to a satellite, whatever the technical thing of it I'm messing up. But it's not that many.

So, okay, if we're going on Amazon, it's going there. Or no matter what that search is, because our search engines, right? No matter what that search is, because our search engines, right? It's like, okay, it's Google, it's Safari, it's whatever that is, Firefox or something like that. And so everything that we're doing on our phones or our Apple or our Androids, right? Are ultimately going through these different massive infrastructure, you know, servers, satellites. infrastructure, servers, satellites. So the way that they figure out if you've been hacked is if all of a sudden there's information coming from your phone to essentially a satellite server that is not part of one of these big servers, because there's no reason why your phone would be communicating with that server. And if what they're watching when they are looking at your phone is all of a sudden you have data being

extracted out of your phone, that your uploads are much more than your downloads, because why would your uploads be more than your downloads, right? You're downloading information to your phone, not uploading information out of your phone. And it's communicating with one of these servers, which they don't know. That's how they're looking at whether or not a hack has happened. Well, it would seem relatively elementary to have an app that could run a diagnostic on that and let you know if something is awry? Well, it's more complicated than that now, because basically you would need to, as like John Relton Scott, who is the Citizen Lab in Canada,

and they're the ones who figured out that Omar had been hacked with Pegasus. And the way that they figured out that Omar had been hacked with Pegasus, and they actually are one of the people, if not the people, that discovered Pegasus. And they've published other hacks of Pegasus and other people who've been targeted. Lab out of Canada, out of Toronto, the Munk School in Toronto is where they're funded, is they, in their research, were basically looking at, you know, information streaming to these servers that they identified as not being part of, you know,

all these ones that are legitimate, right? Where your traffic would flow from Apple, right? Or Google. And in identifying these servers, they were able to start identifying the use of these servers. And so in the case of Omar, when they got his device, they were seeing that essentially there was a device in Canada, right, communicating with one of these servers that they

had deemed to be owned, to be a Saudi server that they believe was using, you know, Pegasus software. that they believe was using Pegasus software. And so I guess the back end of this is understanding what all these servers are, where they are, and they're always changing too. So the game, kind of like the doping thing that you say, is that it's always, you're only as good as you were today, but if a new substance comes out that's unable to avoid detection or a new super drug, right?

Well, you wouldn't test positive even though you're positive because it's undetectable, which is much like, okay, you're going to test for breast cancer, right? Well, the test for breast cancer is this test, right? You're gonna test this, this, and this. And if that doesn't show up, then well, then you don't have breast cancer. But if there's a new strain of breast cancer, which they haven't developed a test for

or that they don't know about yet, right? You would test negative for breast cancer, even though you might have breast cancer, hypothetically or for anything. Well, the same applies to doping in substances and that you're only gonna, you can't detect something unless you're being tested for that.

And the same in the world of cyber and hacking is that, okay, they're gonna plug in all the known variables, but if there's a new variable, a new server, a new technology, a new, right? They're not gonna know if you've been hacked. Yeah, it is really frightening. Unbelievably, yeah, yeah. Amazingly in the wake of all of this,

we see politicians standing up, calling for action to do the right thing. And we're talking about people like Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, right? And yet we then see, you kind of conclude the film with Trump vetoing any kind of deleterious action that would harm the kingdom. So where does that leave us like geopolitically?

Like what do you make of how this whole thing kind of shook out? Well, to backtrack into that, what we see in the film is that there has been no punishment for Saudi Arabia for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. There has been no meaningful sanctions taken, not only in the United States, but by all members of the G20. but by all members of the G20. And what we see was there was bipartisan support from both the Republicans and the Democrat to have sanctions to stop weapons sales to Saudi, to basically attempt to stop the war in Yemen. And that ultimately the Trump administration vetoed all these actions. And in Bob Woodard's book that he just published

where he had recorded all these conversations with Trump, Trump actually flat out said, and has said, "'I saved MBS's ass.'" So this is actually something that Trump is proud of, that he basically protected the relationship with himself or the United States, however you want to look at it, in Saudi Arabia by not punishing Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi

or in stopping weapon sales or standing up against the war in Yemen. So this is something that the Trump administration is very proud of, despite what you've seen as bipartisan support in the United States, to basically take action to reassess the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. Joe Biden actually on the second year anniversary of Jamal's murder, which just passed on October 2nd, put out a statement saying, if I'm elected president, he's now been elected president. One of the things that I'll be doing is reassessing the U.S.-Saudi relationship, looking at sanctions, looking at action. And, you know, and he basically sent out a tweet,

you know, like justice for Jamal. And even since he's been president-elect, he's said again that he is planning to, you know, really dive into U.S.-Saudi relations in light of all their human rights abuses and what's happening in the kingdom. So there appears to possibly be some sort of positive outcome coming from this. But to date, you have seen no member state of the G20 or the United States take any action against this. And this really just speaks to, I think, the global economic relationship of Saudi Arabia and the world. Unlike, you know, let's say a country, you know, even like Russia, right, where the economic stakes are not as high because of the investment.

What we see out of the kingdom is because Saudi Arabia has the single largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, meaning that they have more money to invest into other essentially countries and buy stuff in any other country. And they are so liquid in their investments. They're also basically, you know, all the money in SoftBank, the world's largest hedge fund is Saudi money, right? That not just governments, but companies around the world don't know how to say no to the investment.

And in case of this film. Yeah, which that leads me into the question around distribution of this movie and how you financed it. We have fought a real uphill battle. In the making of the film, the Human Rights Foundation, Thor Halverson, who started the foundation, Gary Kasparov is its CEO, decided to fund the film because the Human Rights Foundation actually had invited Jamal Khashoggi to one of its freedom forums called the Oslo Freedom Forum that they host every year in Oslo, where they bring together dissidents from all over the world that have either fled their countries or escaped from their countries to come and speak about these oppressive regimes and what's going on in their country.

And so the work of the Human Rights Foundation aligns with this film, and they have helped to fund and give voice to dissidents all over the world from oppressive regimes and fighting for freedom of speech and democracies and whether it's the Uyghurs in China or whether it's what's been going on in Venezuela or whether it's what's been going on in Venezuela or whether it's oppression in Russia or you name it. The Human Rights Foundation and their mandate is basically

to try to protect human rights and freedom of speech and democracies and fight against authoritarian dictatorships. And so when I decided I wanted to make this film, Thor Halvorsen and I met through a mutual friend. And he said, I actually met Jamal. He was at the Oslo Freedom Forum back in May, and he was murdered in October. And we've been talking to Omar Abdulaziz

to invite him to an Oslo Freedom Forum and Iyad al-Baghdadi who you see in the film who's another dissident actually has spoken many times at the Oslo Freedom Forums and involved with the Human Rights Foundation. You know, we'd love to do this. And so they came in and back the film and I've been my partners in making the film.

And we premiered the film at Sundance, which so crazy that that was nine, 10 months ago. And it was just before COVID. It was like the last hurrah. Just before COVID, it was literally, yeah, exactly. As soon as you got home clamp down. Boom, and apparently Sundance now turns out to be like a super spreader event, right?

Right, that's right. And at our premiere there is Hillary Clinton came to the premiere and Alec Baldwin. And each time we show at Sundance, we have standing ovations. And the most incredible reviews I've ever read from the trades and the critics that were there. I was really taken back by them. and we come out of Sundance on the top 10 films of Hollywood Reporter and the top 10 variety and the top eight of AP and all these incredible accolades

to not a single offer of distribution, not one. That speaks louder than words. Not a penny being offered for the film, not a dollar, nothing. That is so crazy. a penny being offered for the film, not a dollar, nothing. That is so crazy. And here is the company that I did Icarus with that I believe is my partners, silence. Here's Amazon and Jeff Bezos and me believing that, well, Bezos would have a knife in this fight.

Yeah, you'd think he'd be the number one choice. Silence. And every one of the major global streamers, global media, entertainment companies, studios that could have acquired and given life to this film, silence. and given life to this film, silence. And what we see here is essentially that the dollar, the Saudi investment, the potential to grow in that region, to gain subscribers into Saudi Arabia. And here, Netflix took off Hasan Minhaj's show for criticizing MBS.

They pulled like a whole episode, right? They pulled a whole episode and just a few weeks ago, they announced an eight slate deal with Saudi Arabia. Is Saudi Arabia invested in Netflix? Are they an equity partner in that company? I have no idea. But I think what we see, and it speaks not just to Netflix, it's across the board, is that human rights and freedom of speech isn't just in danger and being suppressed in places like Saudi Arabia. have the ability to disseminate information, that have the ability for a global audience to see something and learn and take action and stand up against forces like this and bring about change,

are choosing their business interests and economic interests and their shareholder interests over what their audiences actually would want to see or would want to see on top of seeing love is blind. And so it's a very, we're in a moment here where these companies have grown so big and so powerful and we're in this huge global landscape. Whereas years ago, you could go, okay, hey, you're a company and you're just distributing the film for the United States. So you're like, okay, we can put this out in the United States, no problem. But now the formula is global. And so nobody wants to put something out with an idea that, oh, you might upset China. You might upset Russia, you might upset Saudi, you might upset Egypt, you might upset Brazil, you might wherever you call it. And so the appetite for content that actually is taking on subject matter such as this over the last couple years has been completely and utterly

diminished. And these companies are now operating much in the way of like a government where you're going, okay, do we punish the murder of Alexander Litinenko? Well, if we do that, what are we doing? Are we starting a war with Russia? No, we're not going to do that. Are we going to stop doing business with Russia? No, we're not going to do that. Are we going to sanction Russia to the tune of gazillions of dollars so that it hurts our economies? No, we're not going to do that. So ultimately we go, all right, we'll let you get away with murdering this dissident on foreign soil. We'll let you get away with murdering this dissident on foreign soil.

And just like what has happened in the Khashoggi murder, where essentially they've been able to get away with it because of the amount of money and business and ago, Amazon announced that they were acquiring Souk. Souk was essentially the Amazon of Saudi Arabia, right? Right. So now Amazon owns Souk, so Amazon controls, right? Commerce in the kingdom. Commerce in the kingdom. Wow. Right? Commerce in the kingdom. Commerce in the kingdom.

Wow. And so ultimately the decision was, okay, acquire the dissident or continue our billions of dollars of business that we're gonna do in the kingdom. Yeah, it's not a difficult economic decision to make. And it's amazing that we can all rally around a free speech issue when it's confronted with a government

that is trying to clamp down on it by way of laws, right? But here we are in the West where we technically have freedom of speech and yet economic interests are creating this unbelievable chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas. And it's happening right underneath our eyes. We're seeing this progressive restriction as a result of those economic tectonic plates,

but also from the people themselves. It's like we're policing ourselves when it comes to free speech. So it's a very different conversation around free speech than that which we're talking about when we look at places like Saudi Arabia. Well, I have many friends who will go unnamed that had various projects in development

with these major media companies that looked at things from on human rights levels, in development with these major media companies that looked at things from, on human rights levels, on political levels, on stories such as this, and that these global streamers have all basically said, "'No, we're not gonna do these stories anymore.'" I have heard stories of unnamed companies, but among these companies that basically have had shareholder meetings, or they have discussed in these meetings that

anything that is political, anything that were to, you know, take on the Trump administration, or were to take on China, or were to, you know, go against, you name it, we're no longer interested in. And the reason being is because the growth in these regions, right, is more important than the human rights in these regions. And so, you know, ultimately, if you can expand, let's say, and have millions of subscribers in Saudi Arabia, a wealthy country, and have all this revenue from Saudi Arabia versus showing these awful human rights abuses in the country, well, you're going to take the money over what is ethics and morality. And I think it's been a rude awakening to me as a filmmaker and as an activist to think that this is kind of happening because I view that those who have wealth and power in a perfect world, especially in the Western world, should be the ones who are standing up

and having the strength to shed light for the world into places where people are being oppressed or suppressed. And just like you see with the NBA in China or ESPN in China, being able to walk away from all these abuses or what China has been doing in Hong Kong, yet all these companies are still doing business with China, despite them trying to turn Hong Kong into a dictatorship, right? And yet nobody's willing to stop doing business with them. And we're seeing this across the board and it's disheartening for someone like me

who wants to continue to make films like this and bring stories like this forward, having to struggle to make films like this and bring stories like this forward, having to struggle to have this content scene. And I would have thought that having had the honor of winning an Academy Award would have changed that. Right, given you a little bit more latitude and doors swinging wide open at Netflix. You would think,

but that is not the case. And then on the other hand, you can see this from a company's perspective, right? You watch in the dissident, how Jeff Bezos is able to be hacked. You watch how somebody is able to be chopped up and murdered. So if you're that company, right, on the flip side, you can imagine those internal conversations of going like, I don't want them to hack us. I don't want them to hack my company. I don't want them to take

down my servers. I don't want them to launch a Twitter campaign against us. I don't want them to take down my servers. I don't want them to launch a Twitter campaign against us. I don't want it, you know? Right, and not that you need to covet favor with MBS, but no need to antagonize him when there's so much business opportunity to be had potentially in the future. Right, and there's so much risk to be had by taking that on.

Right. And I think that that equation there's so much risk to be had by taking that on. And I think that that equation, ultimately, I don't think the word is bad decision-making, I think leads into risk assessment analysis. And each one of these companies or corporations, there's risk assessment. And that risk assessment announcement is okay. On one hand, whatever,

hundreds of millions of people will see the film and there'll be accolades and there'll be this, that and the other. On the other hand, maybe X, Y, Z can happen. Another filmmaker I admire, Ryan White, who did The Keepers, did a film this year called Assassins. And it's on the murder of Kim Jong-il's half-brother in Malaysia by the two women that basically poisoned him at the airport, right?

And you go, it's North Korea. Again, Ryan's film, nobody has stepped up on a global level to distribute this. It's being distributed by a small distributor. I've never heard of it. Yeah. It's a great film. And again, he was at Sundance. And the story is the exact story of A Dissonant, which is all of these global streamers.

And here, Ryan had had tremendous success these global streamers and here, Ryan, it had tremendous success with the Keepers and Netflix, right? And ultimately they went, oh, well, the Sony hack, right? Was the North Koreans. And that was really embarrassing for Sony. And this was over a film, The Interview, which was a comedy. And so all these global streamers are going like, okay, they hacked Sony, they messed

them up, screw it. It doesn't matter that Assassins is an important film. It doesn't matter that it's inside into North Korea. It doesn't matter that it shows what this is. Not for us. We don't want And so I think there has to be a reimagining for storytellers or activists that want to see to it that their content can be globally seen. And maybe a new platform is ultimately created that allows us, but the counter to this is Briarcliff Entertainment, Tom Ortenberg, who was running Lionsgate and then Open Road and did Spotlight and did Crash and did Fahrenheit 911 and has been a real champion for difficult films and has been a real champion for difficult films that came forward about six months ago

and acquired the film. And so the Dissident, we had planned that it was gonna come out into theaters. It was gonna go on a thousand screens on October 2nd. And of course with COVID COVID, that wasn't going to happen. So then we changed the plan again to December 18th. And we're still in COVID, so that's not happening. So now it's coming out in limited theaters where theaters are open December 25th. in limited theaters where theaters are open December 25th. And on January 8th, it will launch across all on-demand platforms where people can rent the movie.

So it will be on iTunes. It will be on Amazon for purchase. It will be on Xbox and Roku and Fire Stick and Comcast and DirecTV and all those places. So I'm optimistic that it'll find its way. It's not gonna be in front of a couple hundred million subscribers with a subscription to Netflix, but it will make its way into the world.

Yeah, it'll find its way. And so the December 25th limited release is, you know, before the year turns over is for Oscar consideration, right? Isn't that still the thing? It has to premiere in a theatrical way before? That's my understanding, yes. Yeah, I think so, right.

And then it'll be available after that. January 8th. And luckily our partnership with the, I guess they call it PVOD, paid on demand company, Vertical is, for the longest time, I think it was a 45 day window. You couldn't, if you launched in a theater, you couldn't have it on demand within 45 days,

but with covid right um all of the rules are changing now and so we're able to come into theaters on december 25th and be available uh for on demand on on uh on january 8th so you know excited for the film to to be seen because i I really, I just, Hatija Jenga is Jamal's fiance. I mean, she's become like a sister to me. And for me, this film has gone so far beyond making a film. I just feel so personally connected to the story.

And as an activist, I'm still involved in this on a daily basis. Hatice came to Sundance, right? She came to Sundance, yeah. She's still living in Istanbul? She's in Istanbul. She had got a place in Washington, D.C., was starting her foundation to seek justice for Jamal, and then COVID happened. And she went back to Istanbul, and she's been there since. So hopefully on the other side of COVID, she'll come back to Washington and

resume work. And hopefully with the Biden administration, there'll be a much warmer reception to the advocacy and human rights work that she's seeking to do. Where does the UN sit with all of this? I mean, a big part of the narrative of the film is kind of their own sort of investigation into what occurred and then Hadija's testimony before the council, but what is their power to do anything and kind of where do they sit with the whole affair?

Well, this was another kind of Icarus analogy if I could make, is I had always viewed that the World Anti-Doping Agency had authority. And what I came to understand is that their job is basically to just observe and report and be lame duck. And they basically can't do anything. They're like the security guard in the neighborhood who drives around but is kind of feckless.

Exactly. They're the guys that go like, okay, these guys are cheating. But, yeah, we have no power to punish them. power to punish them, you know? And so that was the amazing thing that I saw, you know, in Icarus and the story of Verchenkov and this cheating is, okay, you have this global regulator of world sport that also has no power to actually really do anything and enact punishments. And that the power is actually within the sporting federations themselves and within the Olympics and this, that, and the other. And that WADA is really just the guy out there

is like the watchdog pointing a finger, but they're like a mall cop, right? Well, I've found this same thing to be the case with the UN. So in the film, you see Agnes Callimard, who is a special repertoire of United Nations. She's a character. An investigator.

She's French, but she also teaches at Columbia. And so on the outset, you go, okay, Agnes is the UN. She's actually not. She's a special repertoire to the United Nations, meaning that she has been given permission by the United Nations to launch an investigation, her own independent investigation under the umbrella of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

But she doesn't actually work for the UN? She's like a contractor? It's complicated. There's all these special reper actually work for the UN? She's like a contractor? It's complicated. There's all these special repertoires of the UN of their different murder, presents her finding to the United Nations Human Rights Council. But the Human Rights Council is kind of like WADA. They're just there to observe and report. They have no power, right? And the United States under Trump actually removed themselves from the United Nations, from the UN Human Rights

Committee. If you can imagine it, the United States no longer has a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council. How is that possible? How is that possible? Trump pulled us out of the,

we're no longer part of the United Nations. That's outrageous. Human Rights Council. Unbelievable. But Saudi Arabia is. So Agnes presents her finding to the Khashoggi murders you see in the film

to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. But like WADA, the only thing that they can do is really observe and report. And ultimately, the UN, the General Assembly, the Security Council, have to take it up to do something about it. And so the Human Rights Committee doesn't have the power. And ultimately, despite the evidence, despite the report, despite the intelligence and the CIA and British intelligence and the transcript

and the audio and everything else, the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council has not taken up this investigation and has not sanctioned Saudi Arabia and has done nothing to take action against Saudi Arabia. And not only that, you saw the G20 just hosted, just weeks ago, week ago, in Riyadh. So when Hadija is testifying,

that's not in front of the General Assembly, that's in front of the Human Rights Council. And you see- That's right. The Saudi contingent just basically get up and leave in the middle of that. And there's no penalty for that or any kind of repercussions. It was startling.

And I think again, so we were allowed, which is kind of unheard of, to have a film camera, film cameras, within the United Nations, let alone in an official United Nations Human Rights Committee meeting. But we were connected through Agnes and we got in touch with their communications office

and essentially they were like, okay, this is important, we'll let you come film this. And so we were granted a very special permission to go in there with our cameras to film Agnes' testimony and Hatija speaking in front of the United Nations with our cameras to film Agnes's testimony and Hatija speaking in front of the United Nations, Human Rights Committee asking for justice for Jamal.

And as she goes to speak, the two Saudis that were there representing Saudi Arabia on this matter, literally get up and walked out the door. So that did happen. That did happen. At that time, because when I was watching, I was like, I was wondering, I was like, I wonder if Brian edited this to make it look like

they got up in the middle when actually they left at the end. No. Wow. That happened in real time. It was unbelievable. Literally watching the Saudis not only deny any responsibility, say that this is a Saudi matter, but then Hatice goes to give her two minutes, I can't remember, three minutes of asking for justice. And as she goes to speak, the two Saudi representatives get up and walk out the door.

It's insane. Insane. Wow. Was there anybody that you wish you could have interviewed on camera that you just couldn't get to that would have made the story filled in some gaps? No.

And there was a question. I don't go to Saudi Arabia for the film and I don't. I noticed that, have you ever been there? No. And I don't interview any Saudi, you know, MBS or, you know, whatever. Did you ever reach out to any of those guys? No.

And the reason why is much like Icarus, I had Gregory Rechenkov. Rechenkov was a whistleblower. His evidence was solid. The diaries, everything that he had brought forward was solid, had been proven forensically, proven through the McLaren Report, proven through the New York Times, proven, you know what I mean? Right.

The evidence is, when you look at what he brought forward, there's no denying. It is what it is. And all the investigation surrounded it proved it. So in this case of the Khashoggi murder, right, what was important to me was to get the evidence from the Turkish, which I got, hear about the investigation and why this is 100% to be believed and is an open and shut case, which is in the film, to get all of that, to basically present this story in a way of the untold story behind this murder. But to go and, let's say, interview Mohammed bin Salman, right?

You already know what that interview is. Did you do it? No. Did you know about it? No. Who did it? I don't know. I mean, there was nothing to be gained by doing two things. One, alerting Saudi Arabia that I was making the film. Two, trying to go to Saudi Arabia where you're risking your life. And three, basically bringing propaganda and rhetoric into something. I didn't wanna lend voice to that because that's not true. So to me, it was inconsequential to the narrative of the film

just like, okay, let's say I would have been able to interview Putin and ask him, well, I know what Putin has to say about Gregory Rechenkov and the allegations. You can watch his conferences. He's made multiple statements. He said that Gregory is a member of U.S. intelligence, that he's a spy, that he is a traitor, that he is crazy, that he belongs in a mental asylum. I mean – And you're not going to catch him in a gotcha moment. Right, right.

It's all well documented. So great. So I go and interview Putin and what's he going to tell me? He's going to tell me, A, I didn't do it. B, these are a bunch of lies. And C, Gregory is insane. I mean this is – so I already know what MBS is gonna say. So what is the point of lending further credence

to a false narrative when it's really not what the story is? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how everything plays out with MBS. I mean, the arc being that he sort of originally positions himself as somewhat of a reformer I mean, the arc being that he sort of originally positions himself as somewhat of a reformer and is able to kind of

covet global popular opinion. Then we kind of see that perhaps he's not that, but he's got his, he's sort of planting his flag with his vision 2030 and this Davos in the desert thing that ends up becoming kind of like a debacle, right? So on some level, there's a backing up of the global community who is reticent to be, you know, too involved with this guy.

And yet there's so much money involved and so much opportunity, those two things being at odds with each other. Like, how does that play out? Does the money always win? Well, the year, the Davos in the desert is MBS's annual basically investment form to bring together world investment leaders,

CEOs of major, you know, Fortune 500 and global companies to basically come and get investment from Saudi Arabia or to put investment into Saudi Arabia. And two years ago, right after the Khashoggi murder, many of these corporations, business leaders, governments, whatever, didn't come to Riyadh. They pulled out, but they still set like their third in charge, fourth in charge, kind of what's that word?

Culpable deniability or something. We can't be seen here, but we actually still wanna be in business with you. The head of Goldman Sachs couldn't be there, but his third in charge was there. I see. But this past year, they all came back. they all came back.

They all came back. So, you know, the money's too big. It's just, it's too much to walk away from. The investment is too big. The cash is too much. And Saudi Arabia's future essentially relies on no longer being dependent on oil, right? Right. So in that regard, NBS is a great reformer, meaning, okay, he is a young prince.

He's 35 now, right? 34. right 34 and He realizes that the future of his country is basically not as being the world's oil supplier as Tesla and you know electric cars and all this stuff is is gaining and gaining and gaining and Companies like NIO and China, you know is the Tesla rival. I mean their stock is up. I don't know 10,000 percent this year, right? So we see this future of energy unfolding. And so arguably over the next 10, 20 years, right?

The reliance on oil is going to become less and less and less. So the only way that Saudi Arabia can survive is to take all of these trillions of dollars. Yeah, this massive liquidity and invest it globally. And put it to use globally, either to bring investment into the kingdom or to invest outside of the kingdom so that they have major stakes in this company or own, you know, whatever it is, hundreds of millions of shares of Uber, you know, all these different investments that they've made to either return investment to the kingdom because they're not going to get that from oil anymore, or to bring investment into the kingdom because it can, you know, it can grow.

And also to educate the Saudi people to basically be computer programmers, to build, to construct, to basically do what we've been doing here in the United States and other economies. Or what you see in the UAE. Right. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE are best friends. MBZ, in many cases, like MBS's like, you know, right, godfather, you know, like that MBS takes his direction from MBZ in the Emirates.

So clearly, MBS is right on that. And that's part of Vision 2030 is how to basically diversify the kingdom. One of the things he did was he brought Saudi Aramco public, which there was a lot of controversy over that because a lot of people didn't think that the state's oil company should be brought public. But I mean, they only sold like 5% of it. But in so doing overnight, they created, I think it's the second most valuable company in the world. Apple, I think has surpassed it now,

but it's Saudi Aramco's worth like, I don't know, 1.7 trillion or something like that. But that was the ability for, again, for others to invest in Saudi Arabia. You look at the oil war that they created with Russia this past year, which has led to this, basically the lowest oil prices we've seen in a generation was again, basically how to infuse the kingdom with cash

and basically expedite their oil supply to basically flood money. These are all ways that MBS is trying to diversify the kingdom and open it up to investment. And in many ways, there's a lot of positive things about this. And Jamal Khashoggi said that lot of positive things about this. And Jamal Khashoggi said that many of the things that MBS was doing was positive. At the same hand, you have Lujan Hatul, the female activist who basically advocated for women to drive in Saudi Arabia,

on trial right now in Saudi Arabia. And what is she on trial for? She's on trial for basically freedom of speech, even though now women are allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia because it was her idea and it was her basically pushing this. She was arrested and she sat in a prison for the last two years, tortured, and her trial is now going on in Saudi Arabia for, I don't remember what the exact charges are. It's like, you know, crimes against the state that basically she has spoke against the kingdom. Wow. So even though that's now legal, she's being tried for basically instigating what is now law. Right. It wasn't, you know, so, and so this has continued. So, you know, it's complicated. I was thinking off subject for a second,

but you talk about this cyber threat and like Pegasus. Right. And access to governments or these companies, you know, can have into our devices. And what's become clear to me, which I think we're going to see in the next several months, is that not only is that technology here, all of us on planet Earth are about to have this on our phones when you think about what's happened with covid and coronavirus right the only way out of this is a vaccine and arguably the only way out of this is that every single person on the planet can prove that they've been vaccinated so how are we going to be able to prove that we've been vaccinated? You can already see this.

There's going to be an app on our phones and every single place where we go, whether it's a restaurant, whether it's an airport, whether it's shopping at Costco, whether it's Whole Foods, whether it's walking into the door of a business, right? You're going to open up this app on your phone. They're going to scan it. It's going to show your photo. There's ritual. It's going to show the date he was vaccinated. It's going to show when he was vaccinated. It's going to show that he's COVID negative.

And then you're going to be allowed to enter the premises. Well, who's going to control this app? Our government. This is going to be a national international database. And I guarantee that as this vaccine rolls out within the next five, six months or whenever this is, the only way every single person on the planet in the Western world, at least to begin with, will have to make a decision. Do we want to go to a concert? Do we want to go fly on a plane? Do we want to go to a restaurant? Do we want to go to a store? Do we want to go

into the market? And the choice will be yes or no. Kind of much like, you know, what happened as Christianity, you know, made its way through the world, which was, you know, a gun or a knife to your head. Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Yes, you live. No, you die. I mean, that was the spread of Christianity throughout the world. And this is going to be essentially our new reality, for better or for worse. And with that, tracking every single place that you go, and that gets added to some database. Exactly. And to kind of quote the social dilemma, like we are the product and the data mining that can transpire when there's an app

that basically logs every single place that you go. Well, how long you're there, when you enter and when you depart. What is nutty is we're already dealing with this in the, okay, Google has a lot of data. Facebook has a lot of data or credit cards, right? You can go pull up the credit card statement and you can go, okay, Brian went here,

Brian went there, Brian went to this restaurant, but we in our minds don't go, oh, our government knows that. The government knows that whatever it is. I stayed at a Ramada Inn or I stayed at a Ritz-Carlton, right? We go, okay, our credit card company knows that, but our government doesn't know that. Well, starting basically right now,

our government and the international governments around the world are not only going to know everything about us, they're going to know every place we walk into. They're going to know whether or not I shop at Gucci or whether I shop at Costco. They're going to know if I ate dinner at Nobu or if I went to McDonald's, they're going to know everything about us, where we go, where we've been, where we travel, what airline we board, because that is the only way when you actually think about what's going to happen with this COVID vaccine, that it can actually be successful. Meaning, okay, you're going to have to show when you enter a place that you've been vaccinated.

And if you don't show you've been vaccinated, you're not gonna be able to go to the store. You're not gonna be able to get on the plane. You're not gonna be able to go anywhere. There's gotta be an analog solution to that somehow though. I doubt it. I mean, I think the analog solution is, oh, you don't have a smartphone.

So they're gonna give you like a driver's license. That'll have like a chip in it or something. But the driver's license is gonna be the same thing because they're gonna scan the driver's license and it's gonna go into the same database. Right. So I think, you know, we've been dealing with this for years,

but you know, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist. And so I don't view this as a conspiracy theory at all. And I don't view this as a, you know, oh, wow. But that big brother moment is truly upon us. I mean, it is here and it's not even the now. I mean, this is the moment is upon us. And when you look at what's going to happen over as the way that this vaccine rolls out and you just use common sense, you go, well, of course, this is what's going to happen. You're not gonna be able to enter a restaurant

unless you show you've been vaccinated. Yeah, you're gonna have to establish it. And this is a national international protocol, meaning, okay, you arrive in Switzerland, where's your app? Borders. Boom. Yeah. And this is gonna be global.

You go to a restaurant in Zurich, you're gonna scan the app. You go to a restaurant in Italy, you're gonna go anywhere in the world, right? You're gonna have to show that you've been vaccinated. And so now, Brian and Rich roll at every person on the planet, unless you're living in a tribal village in Africa, right? Everything we do, everywhere we go, everything we shop. And you think about this just in the case of like, anything, what this is, or, you know. The counter argument is gonna be similar

to the arguments that you heard with Snowden in that, oh, it's just metadata. We don't actually know anything about what you did specifically. We're just getting ones and zeros about whether people entering and leaving are healthy. I mean, I'm sure that'll be the response. Of course, unless they wanna know,

unless they go, we think- Hey, we're at the FBI, like we need to pull up Brian. We think John Smith might be whatever, running a fraudulent business. And then boom, at the end, instead of subpoenaing the credit card, subpoenaing the bank, subpoenas,

doing that whole process of investigation. So and so is running for office. Right. Let's pull him up. We don't like this guy. And you go, oh, whoa, this guy's staying at this place. He's on this airline, he's there. He's da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, clearly. When he gets behind a microphone, he says this instead.

Yeah. We can use that. I think- It's frightening, man. I think what is upon us now- What are we gonna do? It's minority report. It's all this stuff that we've seen for years and years in movies and science fiction and Blade Runner and 1984, movies and science fiction and Blade Runner and 1984,

which was, we latched on to 1984 as the theme of Icarus, because not only was that Gregory's favorite book, but it's that whole idea that Big Brother's watching, that you're never going to beat the system, that ultimately the system has the strength and the government is who is in charge. And, you know, you see this in The Dissident, where not only in the murder of Jamal, but but the aftermath of this, that there's no punishment and that my film doesn't get distributed by a major streamer and the government's not right. It's all these themes, this Orwellian theme of 1984.

And now we're seeing it in our lives. And I think COVID for better or for worse, cause we're all want to get back to our lives is- We're all gonna line up and sign up for it. Is that big brother moment. It is upon us. It is that true, true, true big brother moment. That's a very dystopian note to end this whole thing on.

But one thing we could do is, your movies always have a call to action too. Like how can somebody who sees the film or listens to this and feels inspired to get involved, like where do you direct that attention? Well, the Human Rights Foundation, the film was basically made through charitable donations. A lot of the marketing and advertising, again,

is being supported through charitable donations. And that's all coming from the Human Rights Foundation. So, you know, I think there's a couple ways to get involved. One doesn't involve, you know, any money. It's purely what we saw with the Arab Spring or what we see in great movements or Black Lives Matter or Me Too or any one of these movements that take action is they start at the, you know, at an individual level and it grows and grows and grows and voices are heard. And I think that in the case of this,

there's a way to have your voice heard, which is, you know, you send a letter to your Congressman, to your Senator, you go on their websites and you send an email and you say, Hey, you know, I want you to take action against human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. There should be punishment for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. There should be accountability. I don't condone you, Emmanuel Macron, or you, Justin Trudeau, or you name the person, right? Doing business with this country so long as they are beheading 800,

900 people a year for doing nothing more than tweeting. So long as women are sitting in jails because they advocated for the right to drive or people are being imprisoned simply for voicing an opinion, right? So there's that, and that is a call to action. The other of course, is looking at the Human Rights Foundation and either getting involved with them in a volunteer level or getting involved in a donation base because the work that they're doing

through the Office of Freedom Forum, and if you do a deep dive, I mean, it's countries all over the world that they are doing through the also freedom forum. And if you do a deep dive, I mean, it's, you know, countries all over the world that they are supporting dissidents. They are supporting people who have otherwise been forced to leave their country essentially for wanting free speech or have, you know,

or are family members of people who have been murdered in these countries for fighting for freedom of press or freedom of speech or human rights. So that's the other place to get involved. And then, I think as Biden takes office, I believe that there's a potential real kind of re-imagining of the US Saudi relations. And there's yet another way to get involved

in that sort of advocacy. And I mean, I think those are the ways to get involved and to make an impact. And hopefully, most powerfully is to see the film and to tell your friends about this film because that leads to change. What happened with Icarus was the film being on Netflix and being seen had a 10,000 times bigger impact than the New York Times, than CNN, than all of the stories and everything before it. Because all of a sudden, there was a global audience that could see this film. And that pressure led the IOC, the Olympic Committee to take action. And that is still survived to this day. And I believe that this film, if seen by enough people, can have the same effect on foreign policies all over the world regarding Saudi Arabia. And it's not so much about punishment for MBS. It's not, oh, does Mohammed bin Salman wind up in a jail?

That's unrealistic. But can this film lead to pressuring change that tens of thousands of people that are falsely jailed in Saudi prisons are released and allowed to have freedom of speech or allowed to voice their opinions on Twitter without fear of retribution? that that is possible, if enlightenment comes and sometimes a leader can become enlightened because he realizes that by oppressing opinions, doesn't really lead to any good, that you can actually be a kind leader, that you can be a good leader, that even if you're a king, it doesn't mean that you need to be a good leader, that even if you're a king, it doesn't mean that you need to be a bad king, you can be a good king.

And that's kind of my hope with this film. And that was kind of Khashoggi's whole thing early on. That was his whole thing. I mean, his last breath and everything was like, I mean, hey, I'm not calling for, you know, the French Revolution here. He wasn't, you know, he was not advocating, you know, to go round up the royals and behead them. Yeah. He was advocating.

The smallest of changes. That simply that the royal family opened up the system to more of a parliamentary system. But he believed, and he said this over and over again, that one man's opinion, the leadership of one person and only one person under any situation cannot be good. That the best leadership has to be, yes, there's a leader like a president, but that there are other voices that are heard. And what he saw and saw in the kingdom is that there was no other voice other than MBS. And what's outlined in the film also is the roundup at the Ritz-Carlton where he arrests all the other princes and businesses leaders and shakes them down for money. What he's done since taking power as a crown prince is basically, you know, lock up anybody who can oppose him, that he goes, hey, this is not the best way to lead. The best way to lead is through kindness,

through allowing other opinions and listening to other opinions. And ultimately not in service to the global, the sort of prosperity that he seeks and the approval of the global community upon which he's reliant upon if he wants to actualize his vision 2030. What's really strange is,

you know, the trip that he took to the United States, which was just months before the Khashoggi murder, I think, and I can be misquoted here. I think it was like March of 2018. And Khashoggi was murdered in October 2018. I'm pretty sure it was March, thereabouts. He comes to the United States, Mohammed bin Salman. And he had hired all these companies like McKinsey and all these huge consulting firms that he was paying hundreds of millions of dollars to basically promote him in Washington and among business leaders as the great reformer, as this

young prince, this great, you know, this guy is loved and he is so cool and he's hip. And even when he was in the United States, he was wearing a suit, right? And he wasn't wearing a headdress and he wasn't wearing the traditional Saudi garments, right? So it's like, okay, this is a enlightened Islam. This is an enlightened leader. He's Western, right? And that's how he presented himself. And he took these meetings with everybody from Obama to to Jeff Bezos, to Bill Gates, to, you know, on and on and on and on. Elon Musk, and they set up and he went to Washington and then he came to Los Angeles and took over the entire four seasons on Doheny, shut the entire hotel down. I mean,

like, I mean, what an ego. I mean, like, really? You needed to take the entire hotel, all whatever it is, 300 rooms, like... Did he do the thing where they fly in, you know, on their own jet and then have all their cars, like, in the cargo bay? Oh, yeah. I mean, when you've seen this guy... They roll out with the rolls royces i mean he's literally flying on like his own airbus right and not only is he on like his own airbus or whatever it is he's then got like fighter jets following him on the airbus you see that in the movie refueling him as he flies and then he lands and there's, and you know, whatever it is, there's the Airbus and then he's like got a 747. I mean, it's, it's the most, it is the most crazy, over the top, insane,

you know, you think our president or whatever, the secret service or something travels, you know, Air Force One, forget about it. I mean, this is, this is a thousand times that. I mean, this is insane. But I remember when he came to the US and there was that sense that this great reformer is here and things are gonna change. But where I was going with this is that consultants and security experts that I said is so apparently wherever he went,

so he locked himself up in this Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, and then he did the same thing in Silicon Valley. And he would not go meet with anybody. So all the meetings were hosted on his turf, right? And there were all these like silver briefcase that were being pulled in. And one of the guys in the film, the head cybersecurity guy who was running White House cybersecurity and FBI cybersecurity,

is that there is a lot of beliefs and apparently investigations that they believe that they were essentially using these meetings. He was getting the numbers, phone numbers of people like Jeff Bezos, right? And then- He could then deploy Pegasus on any phone. Deploy Pegasus.

Because they were hacking Bezos months before the Khashoggi murder. So you wonder who else did he get? Wow. Who else did he get? So these meetings while they're for business, he was also using it to basically hack the phones of leaders all over the world.

Like, hey, let's stay in touch on WhatsApp. Right, right, right. Hey, whatever. Hey, Elon Musk. Nice to meet you on WhatsApp. Right, right, right. Hey, whatever. Hey, Elon Musk. Nice to meet you, Elon Musk. What's your number? Hey, what's your number? Right, you know?

Oh, shit. Yeah, you would think like after the Bezos thing, all those guys are like, you know, looking at their phone, getting somebody on their phone to make sure they're locked down. I don't, I certainly don't know that for a fact, but it would be a wise thing to do, I would say. Well, if all you wanted to do

is make documentaries about subjects like this, you would be able to do that for the rest of your life, I think. Even the idea of doing one around the vaccine or around Saudi investment and United States entertainment companies, the vaccine or around, you know, Saudi investment in, you know, United States entertainment companies, like there's no end to these threads that you can pull

on the themes that, you know, obviously speak to you. You know, I think that what will be interesting for me is this film has been really two full years of my life. It was a year and a half to make it. I'm still working on this every single day, you know, two years into it. And so these stories really take over my life. I mean, you know, cause Icarus was such a personal story and I'm still very, you know, involved.

They actually just passed in Congress and the Senate, the RADA, the Rechenkov Anti-Doping Act, just passed last week through the Senate. It's waiting for Trump's signature, which is- That's gotta be incredibly gratifying. Which is amazing. So Rechenkov actually has a law passed in him that the United States has passed

to basically try to manage global doping in sports because WADA is so ineffective and basically criminalizing this in the US courts. And there's all these logistics around it, but basically it makes it that if an athlete comes to the United States and if there's, you know, there's a Rechenkov anti-doping act just passed and Russia is still banned from global sport.

And so these, it's lived on. And so I think for me, it's really looking at stories that I think that I can tell that can possibly have a global impact, that can have a resonance behind it and live on. I'm hoping that the dissident and the story behind the murder of Jamal Khashoggi will be that. And certainly in other subject matter that I'm looking at. And I think that the hard thing and the question kind of becomes what is that future

in having material like this distributed? Because it is becoming more and more difficult. And just for example, and we talked about this, but had the Human Rights Foundation not come in and supported this film, it wouldn't have gotten made. I had went to all sorts of people before, you know, Thor and I meet up, and they were all scared to finance it, right? And so, when you have this

level of fear going on that is perpetuating societies, the question is, is what is that next story? And will that next story be able to be just told honestly. And that kind of leads into the whole, whether it's, you know, the false narratives going on around, you know, election fraud, or it's the false narratives that get put out of Russia or Saudi or anything else. I think it's becoming harder and harder to just have something just go, the truth is the truth is the truth. And we used to go, you'd pick up the New York Times and go, okay, it's the New York Times, it's the truth. And now you even have 50% of the country going, the New York Times is not the truth, the New York Times is fake news. And you go, okay, how does this come to a place

where this stops, where the news becomes the news again, truth becomes truth again, facts become facts again. And I don't have those answers. I mean, finding our way back to that is very difficult. And the irony being of course, that we've never had greater immediate access to more information and yet our level of trust in that information has never been lower.

Meanwhile, there's this squelching of expression that is making it more difficult for films that are endeavoring to tell the truth or shed light on a difficult truth like your own film. And how do we see our way forward from that? Like it does feel like somebody should put together a streaming platform that is just all about stories like this that are difficult.

And it's gotta be about the truth and the message and not about how it's gonna fare in the global marketplace or how are we gonna grow this streaming enterprise across the world and garner the investment from these problematic nation states? That needs to be done. I mean, there are philanthropists in the world, Lauren Pell Jobs funded Concordia,

Davis Guggenheim's company about a year ago. I mean, they still- Participant still exists, don't they? Are they- Yeah, but they're not doing very, they're basically no longer doing political content. And the problem with participant is that these models are financially based. are financially based. So participant is finding that, you know,

there's not whatever profit to be had in these models. So I've been told that they're shying away from a lot of this. So I think that, you know, what's gotta happen is, or the perfect world is you have a philanthropist, you know, whether it's someone like a Lauren Jobs perfect world is you have a philanthropist, whether it's someone like a Lauren Jobs or it's a Jack Dorsey who is, I feel like how he's handled Twitter and has been pretty cool.

And he's certainly pretty enlightened. He's a perfect candidate. I think he would be super interested in this idea. Right, Dorsey or maybe an Elon Musk, or even a Bill Gates that goes, okay, you know what? What am I gonna do with all this wealth? What are you gonna do with it? You can't, once you're worth more than whatever it is, a couple hundred million dollars, what are you gonna do with all this wealth? What are you going to do with it? You can't, once you're worth more

than whatever it is, a couple hundred million dollars, what are you going to do with it? If you got $10 billion, you're making a billion, $2 billion a year just on the interest on your billions. I mean, you can't spend it. I mean, even like Bill Gates, where you say, okay, his mandate is I'm giving away all my wealth. It doesn't matter how much he gives away. Every year, his wealth increases and increases. You're going like, wait, is I'm giving away all my wealth. It doesn't matter how much he gives away. Every year, his wealth increases and increases. You're going like, wait, but I thought you were giving it all away. But at the same time, Microsoft just keeps doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling. The guy can to give away

my wealth to help, you know, fight poverty in Africa, or just as much as I want to give away my wealth to fight, you know, research of vaccines or irrigation systems or this, that, and the other. Well, I want to give away my wealth to see to it that there is a global platform that is well-funded, well-financed, well-endowed, that you've got that, just like Netflix that you can go to and that there isn't so much of a financial model behind it as there is a philanthropic model behind it to see to it that stories like this get told. And to have consumers subscribe to it for a couple bucks

makes it economically viable. Right, exactly. I mean, if it's something where the guy's got to decide, okay, do I pay my $14.99 for Netflix or do I pay my $14.99 for whatever it is, truth? Well, that becomes difficult. But if it's a subscription that is whatever, $2.99, and you know that you're going to go on there and you're going to have all sorts of content that otherwise big media companies that are only looking at shareholder accountability, growth in the region, subscriber numbers, risk assessment of all these other things that make it impossible to do that kind of content.

And if you have something like that, that can be very, very powerful. All right, so all you billionaires out there listening, give Brian a call. Exactly. Right? I've thought about this many times and I do think that that is,

I do think that this is, I do think that this is, or will be the future of stories like the dissident. Because I don't see these global media companies changing. I mean, even if you look at a company, like let's say HBO a few years ago, well now it's, you know, Warner Media and AT&T. I mean, it's all interconnected. Yeah, it's a giant conglomerate.

So as these conglomerates take hold and you know, the Amazons of a world, everything becomes a risk assessment. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because the streaming, the streaming universe has, you do have to credit it with providing the opportunity for a lot of independent stories to be told and shared and celebrated in a way that would not have been possible

in the theatrical window model. So it has done, you know, like not as many people would have seen Icarus if it were not for Netflix, of course. It's like, you know, it's like, it's unbelievable the power of these platforms to help, you know, smaller filmmakers and stories that aren't gonna get greenlit, you know, to be in the multiplex.

And yet at the same time, there is this risk analysis that is having this squelching impact. Well, what you have is like in the case of Netflix, the Netflix that did Icarus three years ago is not the Netflix of today. It's a different company. That was a company that had 100 million subscribers versus 200 million subscribers.

That was a company that was very hungry at the time to show that it could be an awards contender, show that it could evolve beyond house of cards that it could evolve beyond House of Cards and it was a different company three years ago. And what happens for better or for worse, because look, I love Netflix. I mean, the majority of, I mean, Queen's Gambit that I just finished watching

is extraordinary. It's extraordinary. And there's so much extraordinary content on there. And I am sure that I will continue to do content, make content, and have content on Netflix. They're awesome. And they're amazing at what they do. I love them. They're awesome and they're amazing at what they do.

I love them. But on the other hand, because of how big they are and the growth that they've had and where they're at in the world right now, there is a whole other risk model that comes into it. you can't fault them either. Because if you're running that company, the burden that comes on top of that to grow, to have shareholder value, and to also not put your company at risk also becomes very, very hard. And so I don't have that answer to it because at the same time, I don't, I'm not angry at them.

I love them. I think they're amazing and I love what they're doing and I love the content and the form that they've provided for so many people and what they did for Icarus was outstanding and astounding. At the same time, there's a conundrum where something gets so big, that risk assessment will always get in the way or become a variable as to whether you do something or not. Yeah, we gotta end this thing.

Everybody, please go see this movie. It was very impactful for me. I've seen it twice. I was moved by it. Made me think it's a heavy film, but it also, like we said at the outset, definitely a thriller. You're on this roller coaster ride as this story unfolds

and you did this with a master stroke. Like it's extraordinary. So congratulations on the movie. It opens December 25th in limited theaters and then January 8th on your VOD platform. Exactly, it'll be available on demand to rent on basically all platforms beginning January 8th. Yeah, check it out.

And in theaters December 25th, if you have a theater open near you. Right, you can learn more about it at thedissident.com and you can find Brian pretty easily on the internet at Brian Fogle, right? Yeah, at Brian Fogle on Twitter, Instagram, I keep private, but if you add me, I'll make sure you're not a Saudi troll.

And then accept. You might not know, you know what I mean? You should know better than anyone. It's funny, yeah, I mean, I keep my accounts private because I very rarely, I don't have a lot of time for it, but then I'll click and I go, wait, this looks like a honey pot or something. You know, I click and it's like something. You must be, everything that comes in, you must think, do I really wanna wait, this looks like a honeypot or something. And I click and it's like something.

You must be, everything that comes in, you must think, do I really wanna click on this? I'm like, this doesn't look like a real person. Or something clicks in and I'm like, yeah, something's up here. What are we gonna do? Go ride our bikes. Yeah, let's go ride bikes.

How about that? Go ski, go ride bikes. Cool. That we will do? Go ride our bikes. Yeah, let's go ride bikes. How about that? Go ski, go ride bikes. Cool. That we will do for sure. Thank you, man. That was super powerful. So much respect for putting yourself out there in a really powerful way to forge positive change.

It's an example for me and how I think about how I interface with the world. And I know for so many people out there. So I appreciate you, my friend. Thanks Rich. It's good to be back on and talking to you again. Cool. You're amazing.

And any of you haven't seen Rich's new book, you have to get it. It's incredible. It's on my coffee table. Yeah, because you're in it. I am in it. He's in it. Cool, thank you.

Peace. Peace. Sobering, right? Courageous that Brian, super courageous. Please make a point of checking out the Dissident streaming VOD on most platforms starting January 8th. Give Brian a high five on the socials

at Brian Fogle on Twitter and Instagram. And be sure to check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. We have links up there to everything that we discussed and explored today. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, the single most impactful thing you can do is to just subscribe to the show

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at richroll.com slash donate. Today's show was produced and engineered as always by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the show was created by Blake Curtis. Graphics by Jessica Miranda. Portraits by Allie Rogers. Sponsored relationships are managed by DK David Kahn

and theme music by Tyler Trapper and Hari, my boys. Appreciate the love you guys. See you back here in a couple of days with a beautiful, beautiful conversation with my new best friend, Queer Eyes Karamo Brown. So good. Until then, speak your truth. Peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.