Bryan Fogel: 'The Dissident' Filmmaker On The Global Surveillance State

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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

• 1:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:23Rich Roll?

  That's Brian Fogel, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:37Rich Roll?

  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 The 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

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  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...

• 3:45Rich Roll?

  Okay, Brian Fogel. 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 platforms beginning January 8, and which, I promise you, is going to rock your world. Behind the story of Jamal Khashoggi himself and this trajectory that he goes on from 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...

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  Tech intrusions on privacy, cyber warfare, Mohammad 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.

• 5:09Rich Roll?

  And it was an honor to once again sit down with him. And I suspect this conversation is going to leave you with more than a few important things to ponder. So here we go. This is me and Brian Fogel.

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  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.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting few years, that's for sure.

• 5:44Rich Roll?

  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.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  It was March of 2018. And it was surreal. And what was interesting is, leading, leading up to that, the months up to it, Icarus released on Netflix in August of 2017. And the Academy Awards was, you know, eight months later, or seven months later. And Netflix had, you know, had put a lot of energy behind essentially this award campaign. And I'd 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.

• 6:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Here's your press, here's where you're going, here's your screenings, here's where you're go- you know, and it was intense.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  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, cause it, it just, it was amazing and at the same time, the pressure, because it was just, there was so much feeling for me at stake. And, um, and Netflix and my partners and everything had put so much into it.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And so, we were all like there, kind of like on pins and needles. And luckily, they called, uh, the award for best documentary, I think it was like the third or fourth award of the night.

• 7:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was early in the night.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Which was really, really good, because like, you know, you're, you're sitting there and, you know, they called Icarus. And I just remember like, uh, at that moment, I, I, I essentially had left my body. I mean, it was just, you know, you're, you're walking up on the stage there and, you know, there's, you know, this person, that person, everybody in the entertainment.

• 7:58Rich Roll?

  That front row, just looking up at you.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  You, you ever admired, and you're sitting there going like, wow, I'm, 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. It's like, you know, and, uh, and, uh-

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was completely surreal. And an actor won the statue. 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 like stations of photos.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  And then a booth like, what was it like to win the Oscar? And all these, you know, 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, right where the backstage is, is, I can't remember if it's, is it Joel or Ethan Cohn who's married to Frances McDormand?

• 9:05Rich Roll?

  I think it's Joel.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Joel. So Joel is there and Frances won the Academy Award that night for Best Actress. And, and he goes to me, enjoy this. And he goes, yeah, he's like, he's like, because, you know, the odds are this is never going to happen again.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And he tells me this, 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, it was quite a night.

• 9:50Rich Roll?

  It's pretty cool.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And my parents were there too.

• 9:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:54Rich Roll?

  The campaigning that goes into the Oscar season is bananas. There's so much at stake for these companies.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  It is bananas. And what's interesting is in COVID now, you know, it's so radically different.

• 10:11Rich Roll?

  Right. You can't press the flesh and go to all these lunches and all that kind of stuff.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  And all these screenings where, you know, with it, Chris, you had, I don't even know. You know, thirty, forty screenings were small screenings and you're meeting people. And, and it was wonderful because I, I got to meet so many people, so many people that I looked up to were filmmakers or documentarians or you, you name it. And so COVID has really, really changed that. But it was, it's really intense because you're, 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 gonna say and what you shouldn't say and, and how to answer a question.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And everything was so like, um, it was, it was intense.

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  It was intense and, uh, and the press I was doing, you know, you then kind of like, you know, you'd 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, you know?

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  Well, I could, you know, 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, you know, we had just met, so we didn't know each other really, but there was a, there was a, a little bit more of a seriousness and maybe a sense that you were shouldering that kind of heavy responsibility at the time.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I just, I was, uh, it was interesting. I, I remember going through that so well because, and I was enjoying it. At the same time, 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, did I answer a question the right way? Or did I say something that was wrong?

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  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?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  It's, um, I mean, the, the entire.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  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 of the BAFTAs and you're feeling like completely defeated.

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  But you've got the Oscar nomination and everybody at the time was going, well, don't worry about that. Or the, you know, 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 award season is going and Gregory Rachankov, the whistleblower to this day, is living in hiding in protective custody, is isolated.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And so what was weighing on me also was that, okay, here I am having these experiences and being celebrated. And the guy who...

• 13:38Rich Roll?

  Without him, that would not have been possible.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  This wouldn't have been possible without his evidence, without that story. None of this would be happening. Is basically living in isolation in an undisclosed location, under security, under the threat of his life. And, you know, here I am on this completely different trajectory now. And that really weighed on me, still weighs on me.

• 14:09Rich Roll?

  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's doing. Like, are you in communication with him? Like, what's the latest? I know he put this book out recently.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  He put his book out, which is his memoir of, you know, his, 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 Sports Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious prize in the UK. So he just won the basically British Sports Book of the Year award for the, for, 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, a US deal for it.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I was involved just as, no financial stake, nothing, just trying to, to help facilitate. But, the book's pretty amazing. And, and so that, you know, came out a couple of months ago. But, I'm not able to, you know, communicate directly with him. I don't, 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, you know, he's doing okay.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  But, he hasn't seen his family since, since he escaped Russia, which was in November of 2015. He went into protective custody in July of 2016.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  So we're, you know, four years in, four and a half years in of essentially this guy living in isolation, in protection. And what's interesting is that the story has continued to evolve. He, 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 Olympic, the IOC essentially had to do something. So even though at that point, the story had been in the press and

• 17:00Speaker 01

  the media, it, you know, 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 in their reasoned decision.

• 17:44Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And so that was, you know, 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 up to over the past, like, you know, decade kind of thing. Like, okay. We know you cheated, but you guys got to come clean and you need to provide this data

• 18:29Speaker 01

  because they had believed that, you know, 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 Rychenko, Gregory, had 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, turn over. The second thing for Russia's reinstatement was that they were going to accept the Richard

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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 Rychenko's allegations, authors this report over the next year. And the report, 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, right?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  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...

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Russia still hadn't accepted the McLaren report, still hadn't returned over the LEMS 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 LEMS data. And I don't want to mess up the date, but this is sometime around a year ago. They finally turned over the LEMS 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 Rychenko had turned over to them

• 21:04Speaker 01

  of what it was supposed to be, right? Right. And now, the one that Russia turns over has basically been completely manipulated to erase all these positives, to erase Rychenko'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 Rychenko, that this was all a big conspiracy, that Rychenko had acted as a sole practitioner. KGB, FSB had nothing to do with this. The state wasn't involved. And WADA goes,

• 21:40Speaker 01

  "What is this, guys? Are you kidding me?" And so they basically re-banned 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 or Russia was going to be banned from the Summer Olympic Games. We don't know if that was going to happen because they were fighting that in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Right, that was unresolved. And the IOC had made the decision. So where this stands right now, here we are, essentially four years on,

• 22:24Speaker 01

  but two years on from the Winter Games is Russia's continued to deny their...

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Re-banned, banned again. As of right now, they're not going to the Summer Games if they were to happen in 2021. And Rychenko 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

• 22:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  of, in the overall history of the Russian Federation, I mean.

• 22:59Rich Roll?

  And as long as Putin's in power, that will remain to be the case.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  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 them 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?

• 23:39Rich Roll?

  Right, so they were actually working on behalf of the FSB to come and, and sort of root out Rychenko here in the States.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Apparently, three of those agents of these nine that were expelled from the United States were here hunting Rychenko. And there's been reports on Bellingcat, which is this investigative circle of journalists, that even when he was supposed to appear, they, Russia thought that he was gonna appear at these hearings in Luzon, Switzerland, which of course, you know, he appeared via like 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. You know, evidence that's been uncovered the last few years of, you know, they're, they're hunting this guy.

• 24:32Rich Roll?

  That's so dark.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, you look at, uh, Novani, the guy who was poisoned in Germany, uh, whenever that was, five, six months ago, um, with a Novichok and, and Skirpul, you know, uh, which was in March of 2018, uh, in the UK, the, you know, that poisoned him and his daughter, Lithanenko, um, and then all these other mysterious murders and some that have, you know, been looked at as hangings and, and suicides and this, that and the other. It is clear that, uh, you know, Russia doesn't forget.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  Right. Wow.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 25:10Rich Roll?

  How has this impacted you personally? Like, are you on the receiving end of some of these threats, veiled or otherwise?

• 25:18Speaker 01

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

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And he goes, no, I, I didn't do this, but treason is the highest crime and it should be punished.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  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, I can't speak for how, um, you know, Russia, but if you look at like even the poisoning of Alexander Lithanenko in 2006, um, or Skirpul, right? It was, these were acts of treason and Gregory is viewed as a traitor.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  A defector.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  You know, and I would imagine that even Gary Kasparov is on that list. You know, as a defector and a guy who was the pride of Russia, who has now, you know, come very, very public in the past several years, you know, against Putin. But hopefully, you know, I'm OK. And needless to say, I'm not planning any trips to Moscow anytime soon.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And now probably not Saudi Arabia.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely not Saudi Arabia.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  What's happening now?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely not.

• 27:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a perfect segue into the new film because that's essentially, you know, an overlapping narrative with what you explore in the murder of Khashoggi. This idea of, you know, 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 want to put the message out that they mean business. But perhaps there's also an underappreciation for the kind of global response and reaction to these events where there's a growing intolerance for this kind of thing.

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  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.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think he expected that there was going to be a bug, a listening device, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

• 28:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:04Rich Roll?

  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, you know, get compiled? Like, who hit record on what device and for what purpose? That basically records the entire process of murdering this journalist.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  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. He was writing in the Washington Post, you know, 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

• 30:18Speaker 01

  speaking publicly that he didn't agree with a lot of parts of Mohammad 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.

• 30:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  I mean, this was...

• 30:44Rich Roll?

  A best of reformist from inside the system.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  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 US and to the UK his whole life. You know, most of the time working for the Saudi royal family as, 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 of the family.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  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 this, 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. And all these things that Mohammad 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.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Critiquing of him, you know, just anybody who dares speaks anything other than this guy is essentially the chosen, perfect, you know, 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. 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 dissent led to a place where, you know, had he stayed in Saudi Arabia, he surely would have been jailed.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And in leaving, he became hunted. And ultimately, the decision was, you know, to murder him.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  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.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:00Rich Roll?

  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.

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  And he, like, catches a flight out of, out of the kingdom, like, that night without telling anyone. Thinking he could pop, he could go back at some point, but...

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 is 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

• 35:35Speaker 01

  agree with this," or "Maybe this can be different." And, um, 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 Mohammad bin Salman had kind of put together this whole, I guess, army, as you'd

• 36:15Speaker 01

  call it, of people to basically see to it that, you know, there were no free speech or freedom of opinion in the kingdom. And Saad Al-Khatani, who was one of the royal advisers, basically, apparently comes up with this plan of how they are going to, you know, see to it, you know, that there is no free speech in the kingdom. And Saad reaches out to Jamal and tells him, "Don't write, don't tweet, don't talk, you're to remain silent." And, um, and basically, if you don't, we're gonna, we're gonna come and arrest you. Right.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Um, and there's threats being made. And Jamal essentially makes a decision that he has to leave. He can't remain silent. And, 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 that. And, uh, two of the kids were in the US. One of the kids was in, was in Saudi, was my understanding. And, um, you know, and he was happily married. And he makes this decision that he has to leave.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Um, and he has to leave, I think, for two reasons, as, as I understand it. And his friends, uh, who, you know, who, who I got to know in the making of the film tell me is that, you know, the idea that, that he would sit there and be a lame duck and be silent. And, and that his whole life was as a writer, was as a journalist, was as a, you know, that now he was, his voice was silenced, was enough that it was so compelling that, that, that he felt that it was better to, to leave the country than to stay with his family and be silenced.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And of course, I think, you know, his family probably, you know, was not thrilled with that decision. And, uh, 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, for reasons. But apparently, um, 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.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  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 he was essentially isolated. And that began the rebuilding of his life. It began essentially his ultimately finding of Hatia Jangas,

• 39:50Speaker 01

  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 is murdered, because he had went there to seek marriage papers to prove that he was no longer married, so that he can marry Hatia.

• 40:10Rich Roll?

  It's devastating. The idea that he would leave his entire family behind, knowing he would never see them again.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  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

• 41:01Speaker 01

  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. It was our aunts, our uncles, our sisters, our brothers, our cousins 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

• 41:45Speaker 01

  shut up, we'll move past this, and we'll take the money.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  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 journalist to becoming, you know, essentially a full-blown dissident. So talk a little bit about how you structured the film, because it really does, I mean,

• 42:43Rich Roll?

  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.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. That's certainly how we, and, you know, 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.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  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, that when you're watching like a big thriller,

• 45:05Speaker 01

  gets you on the edge of your seat going, what's gonna 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 and is that there's a call to action behind it.

• 45:50Speaker 01

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

• 46:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I knew the story. I had read some of his pieces in, in the Washington Post. I had a familiarity with kind of the, the broader brushstrokes of what had transpired. What I was not aware of was one focus of the film being on, on the extent of their surveillance state and how, you know, the, the Pegasus malware and the hacking of the phones and how all of that like played into how, how this whole thing unfolded.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, you know, to, to back up. Khashoggi entered the consulate on, 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.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  You know, Washington Post journalist vanishes inside of, you know, Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  Met with crazier and crazier excuses on behalf of the kingdom about what had happened.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm reading this. And I remember, because it was, I'm pretty sure it was October 16th, 17th. And I was in, I was in Rome at the time. I'd been invited to speak for the Rome Film Festival. And I was with my fiance and I'd been following this 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'd

• 49:19Speaker 01

  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, like, I was gonna have to, at least in my mind, I wanted to see what 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,

• 50:04Speaker 01

  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, and he's fighting for free speech, and he's advocating for human rights, and he disagrees with this authoritarian government, and he's at essentially a war awards with, you know, with the crown prince. And now he's been murdered. And I said, okay.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  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 fiance emerging, of the girl, you know, Hatisha Jengas, who was waiting for him outside the consulate. And I said, oh, wow, this is clearly the emotional chord of what this story is. I mean, the concept, I mean, which is unfathomable to me, it's unfathomable to anybody listening

• 51:19Speaker 01

  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, you know, to be murdered horrifically, and that you're never going to see them again. And then, at the same time, become, in Hatisha'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.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And that, to me, was the first element, that if I could get Hatisha to work with me exclusively and share her story, the love story, that there would be a chance of being able to really tell this story. The second part of this was Omar Abdulaziz in Canada, and in the days following Khashoggi's murder.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  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 Abdulaziz, 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

• 53:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:49Rich Roll?

  And a big argument for why anonymity on Twitter is something to be protected, so these dissident voices can be heard.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:59Rich Roll?

  And eighty percent, sorry to interrupt, eighty, the point that you make that I also didn't know is that eighty percent of Saudi Arabians are on Twitter, whereas in the United States, it's like twenty percent or something.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  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 BugsBunny21, 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, plan, you know? And Twitter became that platform for dissidents to basically assemble.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  And what these authoritarian regimes learned and these Arab governments, in the case of Saudi Arabia, you know, basically a dictatorship, a monarchy, which is as 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

• 55:41Speaker 01

  the authoritarian playbook of using Twitter to basically bring forward false information, whether it's about election 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

• 56:22Speaker 01

  onto Twitter these false goals of the kingdom. Mohammad bin Salman is a great reformer. Mohammad 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, you know, depending on who you talk to, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars with global PR agencies with the same thing, that Mohammad bin Salman is the greatest thing to ever happen to Saudi Arabia, right?

• 57:08Speaker 01

  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 Abdulaziz or Jamal Khashoggi puts forward a tweet saying, "I disagree with Mohammad bin Salman.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 called the bees army to take

• 58:30Speaker 01

  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

• 59:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:22Rich Roll?

  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 want to do that. It's a trap."

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  That's right. And yet, Khashoggi falls into the same trap. And he falls into the same trap. You know, the back step, 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.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  And after making that decision, they arrest his brothers, 19 years old, and the other brother's a couple of years older. And they have remained in a Saudi prison, 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."

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  You know, where you need to come back to Saudi Arabia where, you know, you're either going to be imprisoned or be silenced, right? And so that Omar has not happened, that Omar has continued to fight, so.

• 1:02:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, is he still doing his YouTube show? I mean, I checked his Twitter account last night. He's got over a half a million people now.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  They get it pulled down.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  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 on to his YouTube station, you'll see that, you know, it gets pulled down, it goes back up and, 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, you know.

• 1:02:56Rich Roll?

  It's like what Bassem Youssef did in Egypt. Are you familiar with him? He was sort of the Jon Stewart of Egypt.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  I've heard the name.

• 1:03:03Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, where Omar is 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. 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, then 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 also weaves in a lot of comedy into it and is doing like, even like sketches and things like that.

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  And, correct me if I'm wrong, but Jamal's murder seems to almost perfectly coincide with the bees actually succeeding in getting their, their message and their hashtags to trend number one on Twitter. Like those seem to almost happen at the exact same moment.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Simultaneously.

• 1:04:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that, 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, we're going to send a message. Hmm. And, and when you understand that, that their phones were hacked, right? Then, then as you'll see in the film and, and in understanding the story behind this, you can see how that, that danger grew.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, Jamal couldn't imagine, he couldn't believe that his own country could do that to him. And he had actually went about a, a month before his murder, because he was going back and forth between Washington DC and Istanbul where he's now with this, with Hatice Jengaz. 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 going to split their time. They were going to be together in Istanbul, then she'd come to Washington and study and

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  she, you know, 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 DC and actually met with the US ambassador at the time to, the Saudi ambassador to the US at the time, who was Mohammad bin Salman's brother, right? And he goes into the consulate in Washington DC, 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 them in Istanbul. You know, you want to marry a Turkish woman, you need to get them at the consulate in Istanbul."

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  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 them 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. You know, so they go, okay, now we got a shot at him.

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  Because they weren't, they weren't going to do it on American soil.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. They weren't going to do it on American soil.

• 1:07:03Rich Roll?

  And the two, the, the like bifurcation, like you're, you're going to 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.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  But he was nervous, like he brought Hadisha with him the first time, both times.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Both times.

• 1:07:23Rich Roll?

  Because he, he, he wasn't quite certain that it was going to be okay.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Well, not only that, he left his phones and his computer and everything with Hadisha. Cause the, both times that he went in, he basically left everything with, with her and said, hey, if something happens to me, here's Wadakhan Far's information, here's Yasen Akhtai'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, they're 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.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  And that gives them this week to essentially plan his murder. And he goes back a week, week later and, you know, when, when he was, was murdered. And, but clearly, you know, I mean, him leaving his devices with Hadisha, was even on his return back in, he, there was, I'm sure that part of him going like, okay, here's my phone, here's my this, and, and in the transcript of his murder.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, have his phones with him.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  And he even says, "My fiancee 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.

• 1:09:50Rich Roll?

  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, right? I think it was the 15th of October before they finally let the Turks into the consulate.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, thereabouts. Yeah.

• 1:10:12Rich Roll?

  Something like that.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  It was a good two weeks. And yeah, and in those two weeks, of course, they were able to clean up

• 1:10:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  the murder scene.

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  Not quite as well as they should have.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  No, I mean, they, they never found. What's interesting 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

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:29Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting because yeah, that's never explained in the film and I've never heard an explanation for who recorded it.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  And the Turks will never tell you how they got it. You know.

• 1:11:38Rich Roll?

  That prosecutor is like a badass.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  He is like out of like a Bond film, isn't he?

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  I know. And his accent is like unbelievable.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  I mean, he is every filmmaker's dream and he, 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, you know, I think he carries a heavy burden with this case in particular.

• 1:12:12Rich Roll?

  In the wake of all of this becoming global news, you have MBS back in the kingdom trying to figure out how he's going to 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, his personal pictures got leaked. Was it The Post? The New York Post?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it was the, uh, like the Inquirer.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, it was Inquirer, yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, and basically, uh, there were stories coming out that Bezos is having an affair and that, uh, and that there's photos that were essentially going to be, you know, published of like selfies that he had sent to Lauren Sanchez and there was even apparently nude or, you know.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  And then he pulls like the baller move of the century by getting ahead of it and making all of that available.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Right. He basically puts together this post on Medium going, here's what's happened. I was hacked. My phone was hacked. And I'm not going to 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 owns the Washington Post. And in the fallout of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, right? Khashoggi wrote for the Post.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  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 journalist enters consulate in Istanbul killed, right? It would have fallen on deaf ears. But because it's an American paper, the, you know, New York Times, Washington Post, right? And they're putting forward this story that it's not just a, it's not Saudi journalist, it's a Washington Post journalist. So now Jamal is essentially an American. And this catches the world's attention.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Had he not been a Washington Post journalist, because in all the news, it wasn't Saudi journalist, 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?

• 1:15:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  And MBS, in his mind, is going, well, hey, Jeff Bezos, you own the Washington Post. You can make this stop.

• 1:16:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, kill it. And behind the scenes, those guys had been in communication with each other.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:13Rich Roll?

  Because MBS was trying to get Amazon up on its feet in the Kingdom.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Right. So they had, 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 gonna do with the Kingdom. And, and lo and behold, MBS hacks Bezos's phone with Pegasus, but, or we think it's Pegasus, but he had actually been hacked before the Khashoggi murder.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  So he had been sending Bezos's 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. And so in the fallout of the Khashoggi murder, as all of a sudden Bezos's affair is being leaked to the public.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  You know, Bezos brings on an investigation team of, you know, forensic cyber examiners who go into his devices and they're watching the data stream out of his phone.

• 1:17:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  And linking it to a server known to be a Saudi server, you know. And so, you know, you go, okay, well, how else was this information coming public? Uh, it was clear that, that, you know, that he had been hacked. Um, and, uh, yeah, so, you know, you go, okay, if you can hack the richest man in the world.

• 1:17:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Who can't you get?

• 1:18:00Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's the kind of scary message that you leave everyone with, like, nobody is out of bounds here.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Nobody is out of bounds and, and I think one of the, 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 Nipetya virus a couple of years ago in the Ukraine. There 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

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  in the world's history so far against Ukraine because it crippled all the global shipping agencies, it crippled FedEx, it basically infected their systems and brought down, you know, 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. You know, there was an idea a few years ago, okay, you know, Apple and the government trying to get Apple to turn over codes and stuff. They don't need that anymore.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  There is 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. You know? So, okay, so Israel and NSO sells Pegasus to the Saudis, right? And you go, well, why would Israel want Saudi Arabia to have this hacking technology?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Well, not only is lucrative and they're paying millions of dollars 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, you know, with what, you know, our

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  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, and this is a completely unregulated part of, of the cyber landscape, that there is no regulation in this regard, other than, you know, the United States knows that the

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Saudis have this technology and they know the Emirates have this technology and the Emirates knows that, you know, other countries have this technology.

• 1:21:46Rich Roll?

  And the ability to destabilize geopolitics and do it essentially invisibly is so potent and frightening, right? And what, what's interesting about this is it shares a common theme with, 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 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

• 1:22:31Rich Roll?

  alone preemptively get in front of it.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a, 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, like Google, right? Okay, so Google buys Nest cameras, right? And so now if you have a Nest camera...

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  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, you know, whether that's Facebook and Instagram

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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?

• 1:24:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Why on my Instagram feed are resorts in the Bahamas coming up? And yet, there they are.

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  The scarier thing is when you just say it out loud, you don't do a search and then you get the ads.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Right. Siri, Google Assistant, all that stuff. So, you know, you have like Sono 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 saying, buy the Led Zeppelin, you know, box set.

• 1:24:53Rich Roll?

  When you, when you interviewed the cybersecurity expert dude that, that kind of figured out that Omar's phone had been hacked, did you have him look at your phone?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  John Railton Scott, yes. Yeah, I've had my devices looked at. I have a monitoring device on my phone, which is actually

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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,

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  whatever it is, kind of global satellites and servers, you know? Google and, uh, 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? Or pinging this, this server connected to a satellite, whatever the technical thing of it I'm messing up, but right? But it's not that many. Like, so, okay, if we're going on Amazon, right? It's, it's going there. Or no matter what that search is, because our search engines, right?

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  It's like, okay, it's Google, it's Safari, it's, uh, 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, right? Are ultimately going through these different massive infrastructure, you know, servers, satellites. So the way that they figure out if you've been hacked is if all of a sudden.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  There's information coming from your phone to essentially a satellite server, right? 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, 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.

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, 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. If you go in and research, you know, the Citizen Lab out of Canada, out of, out of

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Toronto, the Monks 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.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  As not being part of, you know, all these ones that are legitimate, right? Where your traffic would flow from Apple, right? Or, or Google. And in identifying these servers, they were able to start identifying

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  the use of these servers. And, 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.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  And so I guess the, the back end of this is understanding what all these servers are, where they are, and they're, they're always changing too. So the, 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.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  And if that doesn't show up 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, you know, substances and that you're only gonna, you're, you know, 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.

• 1:31:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It is really frightening.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Unbelievably, yeah.

• 1:31:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  Amazingly, in the wake of all of this, we see politicians, you know, standing up, calling for, you know, 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, you know, 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?

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  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. And what we see was there was bipartisan support from both the Republicans and the Democrats to have sanctions to stop weapons sales to Saudi, to basically, you know, attempt to stop the war in Yemen.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  And that ultimately, the Trump administration vetoed all these actions. And in Bob Warder's book that he just published, where he had recorded all these conversations with Trump, Trump actually flat out said, and he 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, or however you want to look at it, and Saudi Arabia, by not punishing Mohammad bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, or in stopping weapons sales, or standing up against the war in Yemen. So, you know, this is something that, you know, the Trump administration is very proud

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Joe Biden, actually, on the second year anniversary of Jamal's murder, which just passed on October 2nd, put out a statement saying, you know, if I'm elected president, he's now been elected president, one of the things that I'll be doing is reassessing the US-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 US-Saudi relations in light of all their human rights abuses and what's happening in the Kingdom.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  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

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:35:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, which, that leads me into the question around distribution of this movie and how you financed it.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  We have fought a real uphill battle.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  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 are escaped from their countries, or, you know, to come and speak about these oppressive regimes and what's going on in their country.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  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 Ugars in China, 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

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  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 Halverson 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, you know, we've been talking to Omar Abdulaziz to invite him to an Oslo Freedom Forum, and Iad 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."

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  And so, they came in and backed the film, and had been my partners in making the film.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  And we premiered the film at Sundance, which is so crazy that that was nine, 10 months ago. And it was just before COVID.

• 1:38:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  It was like the last hurrah.

• 1:38:31Rich Roll?

  Just before, it was literally, yeah, exactly. As soon as you got home, clamp down.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Boom. And apparently Sundance now turns out to be like a super spreader event, right?

• 1:38:40Rich Roll?

  Right, that's right.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  And the most incredible reviews I've, I've ever read from, you know, the trades and the critics that were there, I was really taken back by them. And, and we come out of Sundance on, you know, the top 10 films of Hollywood Reporter and the top 10 variety and the top eight of AP and all these, you know, incredible accolades to not a single offer of distribution, not one.

• 1:39:26Rich Roll?

  That speaks louder than words.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Not a penny being offered for the film, not a dollar, nothing.

• 1:39:36Rich Roll?

  That is so crazy.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  And here is, you know, the company that I did Icarus with, that I believe is my partners,

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  silence.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Here's Amazon and Jeff Bezos and me believing that, well, Bezos would have a knife in this fight.

• 1:39:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you'd think he'd be the number one choice.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  And what we see here is essentially that

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  the dollar, the Saudi investment, the potential to grow in that region, to gain subscribers into Saudi Arabia. Here, you know, Netflix took off Hasan Minhaj's show for criticizing MBS.

• 1:40:37Rich Roll?

  They pulled like a whole episode, right?

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  They pulled a whole episode and just a few weeks ago, they announced a an eight slate deal with Saudi Arabia.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  And is Saudi Arabia invested in Netflix? Are they an equity partner in that company?

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  I have no idea. But I, I, I think what we see, and it speaks not just to Netflix, it's not, it's, it's across the board. Is that

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  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 where essentially our economic interests and these interests of these massive companies that 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.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Or would want to see on top of seeing Love is Blind. And so it's a, it's a, 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, is global.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  And so, nobody wants to put something out with the 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 of years has been completely and utterly diminished. And, 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 Litvinenko? Well, if we do that, what are we doing?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Are we sending, 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. 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, and investment. We're seeing this stretch way beyond governments. And it's now in these media companies and corporations where a couple of months ago, Amazon announced that they were acquiring Sook.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Sook was essentially the Amazon of Saudi Arabia. Right? So now, Amazon owns Sook, so Amazon controls, right?

• 1:44:09Rich Roll?

  Commerce in the kingdom.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Commerce in the kingdom. And so ultimately, the decision was, okay, acquire the dissident.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Or continue our billions of dollars of business that we're gonna do in the kingdom.

• 1:44:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  We'll do the business in the kingdom.

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  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, with, you know, a government that is, you know, trying to clamp down on it through, you know, 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.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  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, you know, we're talking about when we look at places like Saudi Arabia.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  I have many friends who will go unnamed that had various projects in development with these major media companies that looked at things from, you know, 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 where they have discussed in these meetings that anything

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  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, and the reason being is because the growth in these regions, right?

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  that this is kind of happening. Because I view that those who have wealth and power in a perfect world, and 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's been doing in Hong Kong, yet all these companies

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  are still doing business with China, despite them trying to turn Hong Kong into, you know, 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 have this content seen. And I would have thought that having had the honor of winning an Academy Award would have changed that.

• 1:48:30Rich Roll?

  Right, given you a little bit more latitude and doors swinging wide open at Netflix.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  You would think.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  But that is not the case. And then, on the other hand, you can see this from a company's perspective, right? You're watching 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 it," you know?

• 1:49:17Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Right. And there's so much risk to be had by taking that on.

• 1:49:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  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 analysis 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 XYZ can happen. Another filmmaker I admire, Ryan White, who did The Keepers, did a film this year called Assassins.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Nobody has stepped up on a global level to distribute this. It's being distributed by a small distributor and I've never heard of it. Yep, it's a great film. And again, he was that Sundance and the story is the exact story of The Dissident, which is all of these global streamers and here Ryan had 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 going like, okay, they hacked Sony, they messed them up, screw it.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  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 how, what this is. Not for us. We don't want the risk. 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, that allows this. But the counter to this is Briar Cliff Entertainment, Tom Ortenberg,

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  who was running Lionsgate and then Open Road and, and did Spotlight, and did Crash and did Fahrenheit 9/11. And has been a real champion for, you know, for, for difficult films that, you know, came forward, you know, about six months ago and acquired the film. And so The Dissident, we had planned that it was going to come out into theaters. It was going to go on a thousand screens on October 2nd. And of course with COVID, that

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  That wasn't gonna 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. 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 Firestick and Comcast and DirecTV and all those places. So I'm optimistic that, you know, it'll, it'll find its way.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  It won't, it's not gonna be in front of, you know, a couple hundred million subscribers with a subscription to Netflix, but it will make its way into the world.

• 1:53:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it'll find its way. And so the December 25th limited release is, you know, on the, 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?

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  That's my understanding, yes.

• 1:53:49Rich Roll?

  Right. And then it'll be available after that.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  January 8th. And luckily, our, our partnership with the, I guess they call it P VOD, paid on-demand, company Vertical is, you know, for, 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, all of the rules are changing now. And so we're able to come into theaters on December 25th and be available for on-demand on, on January 8th. So, you know, excited for the film to, to be seen, because I, I really...

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  I just, Hatisha Jang 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, you know, I'm still involved in this on a daily basis.

• 1:54:56Rich Roll?

  Hatisha came to Sundance, right?

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  She came to Sundance, yeah.

• 1:54:59Rich Roll?

  She's still living in Istanbul?

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  She's in Istanbul. She had, she had got a place from Washington DC. Had, 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.

• 1:55:33Rich Roll?

  Where does the UN sit with all of this? I mean, a big part of the narrative of the film is kind of, you know, their, their own sort of investigation into what occurred. And then Hatisha's testimony, you know, before the council. But what is their power to do anything? And kind of where do they sit with the whole affair?

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Well, this was another kind of Icarus analogy 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 that they basically can't do anything.

• 1:56:17Rich Roll?

  They're like the security guard in the neighborhood who drives around but is kind of feckless.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're the guys that go like, okay, these guys are cheating. But yeah, we have no power to punish them, you know? And, and so that was the amazing thing that I, I saw, you know, in, in, in Icarus and the story of Rychenko 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 of with the UN.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  So in, in, in the film, you see Agnes Calamard, who is the, who is a special repertoire of the 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.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  But she doesn't 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 committees that are able to launch investigations, that the UN will either provide a budget for, and then ultimately let them speak. So Agnes does an entire investigation of the Khashoggi 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

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  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, Human Rights Council. Unbelievable. But Saudi Arabia is. So, so, so Agnes presents her finding to the Khashoggi murders, you see in the film, to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  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, you know, just weeks ago, a week ago, in Riyadh.

• 2:00:08Rich Roll?

  So when Hadjia is testifying, that's not in front of the General Assembly, that's in front of the Human Rights Council. And you see

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:00:18Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:00:27Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  a very special permission to go in there with our cameras to film Agnes's testimony and Hadjia speaking in front of the United Nations, you know, Human Rights Committee, asking for justice for Jamal. And as she

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  Goes to speak, the two Saudis that were there representing Saudi Arabia on this matter, literally get up and walked out the door.

• 2:01:35Rich Roll?

  So that did happen.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  That did happen.

• 2:01:37Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:01:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  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 Hatia goes to give her two minutes, I can't remember, three minutes of, of asking for justice. And as she goes to speak, the two Saudi representatives get up and walk out the door.

• 2:02:19Rich Roll?

  It's insane.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 2:02:21Rich Roll?

  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?

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Um, no. And I, there was a question, um, I don't go to Saudi Arabia for the film and I don't.

• 2:02:42Rich Roll?

  I noticed that. Have you ever been there?

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  And I don't interview any Saudi, you know, MBS or, or, you know, uh, whatever.

• 2:02:56Rich Roll?

  Did you ever reach out to any of those guys like?

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  No. And the reason why is, um, much like Icarus, um, I had Gregory Rychenko. Rychenko 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, I mean, you know what I mean?

• 2:03:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  Like the evidence is, when you look at what he brought forward, you.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  There's no denying, it is what it is. And all the investigations 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, you know, the untold story behind this murder. But, to go and, let's say, interview Mohammad bin Salman, right? You already know what that interview is. Did you do it? No. Did you know about it? No.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  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 know, you're risking your life. And three, basically bringing propaganda and rhetoric into something. I didn't want to 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 Grigory Rychenko and the allegations. You can watch his conferences.

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  He's made multiple statements. He's said that Grigory is a member of US intelligence, that he's a spy, that he is a traitor, that he is crazy, that he belongs in a mental asylum, I mean...

• 2:05:19Rich Roll?

  And you're not gonna catch him in a gotcha moment. It's all well documented.

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  So, great, so I go and interview Putin, and what's he gonna tell me? He's gonna tell me, A, I didn't do it, B, these are a bunch of lies, and C, Grigory 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?

• 2:05:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's going to 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 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 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.

• 2:06:29Rich Roll?

  Like, how does that play out? Does the money always win?

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Well, the year, the Davos in the Desert is MBS's annual, basically, investment forum to bring together world investment leaders, CEOs of major 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, you

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  know, kind of, what's that word, culpable deniability or something?

• 2:07:20Rich Roll?

  We can't be seen here, but we actually still want to be in business with you.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  The head of Goldman Sachs couldn't be there, but his third in charge was there, you know?

• 2:07:28Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  But this past year, they all came back.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  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. I think he's 35 now, right? 34. And he realizes that the future of his country is basically not as being the world's oil supplier

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  as Tesla and, you know, electric cars and all this stuff is gaining and gaining and gaining. And companies like Neo in China, you know, is the Tesla rival. I mean, their stock is up, I don't know, 10,000% this year, right? So, we see this future of energy unfolding. And so arguably, over the next 10, 20 years, 30, 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

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  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...

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

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

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  So clearly MBS is, 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 Ramco 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, 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, you know, Saudi Ramco's worth like, I don't know, 1.7 trillion. Wow.

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  Or something like that. But that was the ability for, again, for others to invest in Saudi, in Saudi Arabia. You look at these, the oil war that they created with, with Russia this past year, which has led to this, you know, basically the loyal, lowest oil prices we've seen in a generation, was again, basically how to infuse the kingdom with cash and, and basically, you know, expedite the, their oil supply to basically flood money. You know, it's just, these are all ways that MBS is trying to diversify the

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  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 many of the things that MBS was doing was positive. At the same hand, you have Loujane Hatoul, the female activist who basically advocated for women to drive in Saudi Arabia on trial, right now in Saudi Arabia.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:12:21Rich Roll?

  Wow. So even though that's now legal, she's being tried for basically instigating what is now law.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:12:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  And access the 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.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  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 Rich Roll. 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.

• 2:14:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  This is going to be a national, international database.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  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 in the, in, 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, that was the spread of, of, of Christianity throughout the world.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  And this is going to be essentially our new reality. For better, for better or for worse.

• 2:15:07Rich Roll?

  And with that, tracking every single place that you go, and that gets added to some database.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:15:12Rich Roll?

  And, you know, 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.

• 2:15:24Rich Roll?

  How long you're there, when you, when you enter and when you depart.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  What is nutty is, we're already dealing with this in the, you know, okay, we, you know, okay, Google has a lot of data. Facebook has a lot of data. Our 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, Brian went. But we in our minds don't go, oh, our government knows that.

• 2:15:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  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 gonna know whether or not I shop at Gucci, or whether I shop at Costco. They're gonna know if I ate dinner at Nobu, or if I went to McDonald's. They're

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  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 gonna happen with this COVID vaccine, that it can actually be, right, 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.

• 2:17:05Rich Roll?

  There's gotta be an analog solution to that somehow, though.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:16Rich Roll?

  That'll have like a chip in it or something.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, this, this, 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.

• 2:18:05Rich Roll?

  You're gonna have to establish it.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  And, and this is a national, international protocol, meaning, okay, you arrive in Switzerland.

• 2:18:12Rich Roll?

  Western borders.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Boom. You, 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.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  Right? You're gonna have to show that you've been vaccinated. And so now, Brian and Rich Roll and every person on the planet, unless you're living in a tribal village in Africa, right?

• 2:18:35Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  Everything we do, everywhere we go, everything we shop. And you think about this just in the case of like, you know, anything. What this is.

• 2:18:45Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Or, you know.

• 2:18:48Rich Roll?

  The counter argument is gonna be similar to the arguments that, that you heard with Snowden in that, oh, it's just metadata. We don't actually know anything about, you know, what you did specifically. We're just getting ones and zeros about whether people entering and leaving are healthy. Right? I mean, I'm sure that'll be the response.

• 2:19:11Speaker 01

  Of course, unless they wanna know, unless, unless they go, um.

• 2:19:17Rich Roll?

  Hey, we're at the FBI, like, we need to pull up Brian.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  We think John Smith might be, whatever, running a fraudulent business.

• 2:19:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:26Speaker 01

  And then boom, at the end, so instead of, instead of subpoenaing, the credit cards, subpoenaing the banks, subpoenas, and, you know, doing that whole process of an investigation.

• 2:19:38Rich Roll?

  Running for office, let's pull him up, we don't like this guy.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  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, clearly.

• 2:19:51Rich Roll?

  But when he, when he gets behind a microphone, he says this instead.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:55Rich Roll?

  We can use that.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  I think, I think what is, what is upon us now.

• 2:20:01Rich Roll?

  What are we gonna do?

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  It's Minority Report. It's, it's all this stuff that we've seen for years and years in, in movies and science fiction and Blade Runner and, and 1984, which was, you know, we latched on to 1984 as the theme of Icarus, because not only was that Gregory's famous, 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, is, is, is who is in charge. And, you know, you see this in The Dissident where.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  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 right, it's all these themes, this Orwellian theme of 1984. And now we're seeing it in our lives. And I think, and I think COVID, for better or for worse, because we all want to get back to our lives is

• 2:21:12Rich Roll?

  We're all gonna line up and sign up for it.

• 2:21:14Speaker 01

  Is that Big Brother moment. It is upon us. It is that true, true, true Big Brother moment.

• 2:21:20Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's a very dystopian note to end this whole thing on. But one thing we could do is, you know, your movies always have a call to action too. Like, how can somebody who's, who sees the film or listens to this and feels inspired to get involved, like, where do you direct that attention?

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  Well, we, you know, the Human Rights Foundation, every, everything, 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 of ways to get involved. One, doesn't involve, you know, any money. It's, it's, it's purely what we saw with the Arab Spring, or what we see in great movements,

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  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, you send a letter to your congressman, to your senator, you go on their, their websites and you send an email and you say, hey, you know, I want you to take, 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

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  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 at a volunteer

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  level, or getting involved in a donation base, because the work that they're doing through the Oz of 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, 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, you know, I think

• 2:24:22Speaker 01

  as, as Biden takes office, I believe that there's a potential real kind of reimagining of the US Saudi relations. And there's the, you know, yet another way to get involved in, in that sort of advocacy.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  And I mean, I think, I think those are, are the ways to, 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, 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. Cause all of a sudden, there was a global audience that could see this film and that pressure led the IOC, the Olympic

• 2:25:24Speaker 01

  Committee, to take action. And that has 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 Mohammad 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? I believe that that

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  is possible. You know, if enlightenment comes and sometimes, you know, a leader can become enlightened because he realizes that by, by oppressing opinions doesn't, 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 bad king. You can be a good king. And that's kind of my hope with this film.

• 2:26:41Rich Roll?

  And that was kind of Khashoggi's whole thing, early on, right?

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  That was his whole thing?

• 2:26:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  I mean, he, his last breath and everything was, you know, like, I mean, hey, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not calling for, you know, the French Revolution here.

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  He wasn't, you know, this, this, he was not advocating, you know, to go round up the royals and behead them.

• 2:27:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  He was advocating.

• 2:27:10Rich Roll?

  The smallest of changes.

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  That, 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 sees, saw in the kingdom is that there was no other voice other than MBS. And, and what's outlined in the film also is the roundup at the Ritz Carlton,

• 2:27:55Speaker 01

  where he arrests all the other princes and businesses leaders and shakes them down for money. What he's done since taking powers to crown prince is basically, you know, lock up anybody who can oppose him, that he goes, hey, this is, this is not the best way to lead. The best way to lead is, is through kindness, through allowing other opinions and listening to other opinions.

• 2:28:21Rich Roll?

  And ultimately not in service to, to, you know, 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.

• 2:28:38Speaker 01

  What's really strange is, um, you know, the trip that he took to the United States, which was just months before the Khashoggi murder, I think. And, and I can be misquoted here. I think it was like March of 2018. And Khashoggi was murdered in October 2018. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure it was March, thereabouts. He comes to the United States, Mohammad 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

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  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 enlightened leader, he's Western, right? And that's how he presented himself. And he took these meetings with everybody from Obama to Jeff Bezos, to Bill Gates,

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  to, you know, on and on and on and on, Elon Musk, you know, and they set up and he went to Washington. And then he came to Los Angeles and took over the entire Four Seasons on Doherty, 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?

• 2:30:25Rich Roll?

  Did he do the thing where they fly in, you know, on their own jet and then have all their cars, like in the car?

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, when you've seen this guy.

• 2:30:32Rich Roll?

  They roll out with the Rolls Royces?

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he's literally flying on like his own Airbus.

• 2:30:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:30:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:30:45Rich Roll?

  You see that in the movie.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  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, you know, this is insane.

• 2:31:16Rich Roll?

  But I remember when he came to the US and it was, you know, was this, there was that, that sense that, you know, this great reformer is here and things are going to change.

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  But where I was going with this is that consultants and security experts that I said is so apparently wherever he went.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  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 briefcases that were being pulled in and, and one of the, um, the guys in the film, um, the head, you know, cybersecurity guy who was running, uh, White House cybersecurity and FBI cybersecurity is that there is a lot of beliefs and apparently, you know, investigations that they believe

• 2:32:16Speaker 01

  that they were essentially using these meetings. He was getting the numbers, phone numbers of people like Jeff Bezos, right? And then-

• 2:32:27Rich Roll?

  He could then deploy Pegasus on any-

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  Deploy Pegasus. Because, because they, they, they were hacking Bezos months before the Khashoggi murder. So you wonder, who else did he get?

• 2:32:37Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Who else did he get? So these, these meetings, while they're for business, he was also using it to basically hack, uh, the phones of leaders all over the world.

• 2:32:50Rich Roll?

  Like, hey, let's stay in touch on WhatsApp.

• 2:32:52Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:32:59Rich Roll?

  Oh, shit. Yeah. You would think like after, after the Bezos thing, all those guys are like, you know, looking at their, getting somebody on their phone to make sure they're locked down.

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I certainly don't know that for a fact, but it would be a, it'd be a wise thing to do, I would say.

• 2:33:18Rich Roll?

  Well, if all you wanted to do is make documentaries about subjects like this, you, you would be able to do that for the rest of your life, I think. You know, even the idea of doing one around 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.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  You know, I, I, I think that what will be interesting for me is this, 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, two years into it. And so these stories really take over my life. I mean, you know, because Icarus was such a personal story and, and I'm still very, you know, involved, they actually just passed in Congress and the Senate, the RADA, the

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  Rychenkov Anti-Doping Act, just passed last week through the Senate. It's waiting for Trump's signature.

• 2:34:32Rich Roll?

  That's gotta be incredibly gratifying.

• 2:34:35Speaker 01

  Which is amazing. So Rychenkov 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, it makes it that if an athlete comes to the United States and if there's, you know, there's Rychenkov Anti-Doping Act just, just passed. And, and Russia is still banned from global sport. And so these, it's, it's lived on. And so I think for me, it's really looking at stories that I think that I can tell that

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  can possibly have a, 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, that I'm looking at. And I think the, 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, you know, just for example, and we talked about this, but had the Human Rights Foundation not come in and supported this film?

• 2:36:01Speaker 01

  It wouldn't have gotten made.

• 2:36:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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?

• 2:36:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:36:54Speaker 01

  "The truth is the truth is the truth." And we used to go, you'd pick up a New York Times and go, "Okay, it's a New York Times, it's the truth."

• 2:37:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, 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,

• 2:38:10Rich Roll?

  or, you know, how are we gonna grow this streaming enterprise across the world and garner the investment from these problematic nation-states?

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  That needs to be done. I mean, you're, there are philanthropists in the world. Lauren Pal Jobs

• 2:38:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  funded Concordia, Davis Guggenheim's company about a year ago.

• 2:38:36Rich Roll?

  And Participant still exists, don't they?

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they're not doing, they're basically no longer doing political content. And, and the problem with Participant is that these models 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 gonna happen is, or the perfect world is you have a philanthropist, you know, whether it's someone like a Lauren Jobs, or it's a Jack Dorsey, who, you know,

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  who is, you know, I feel like how he's handled Twitter and, you know, has been pretty cool. And he's certainly pretty enlightened.

• 2:39:32Rich Roll?

  He's a perfect candidate. I think he would be super interested in this idea.

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  Right. Dorsey, or maybe an Elon Musk, or, you know, 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 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, but I thought you were giving it all away?

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  But at the same time, Microsoft just keeps doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling. The guy can't give away enough money fast enough.

• 2:40:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:26Speaker 01

  I mean, so, so ultimately, I think you look at one of these people or, or persons that go, you know,

• 2:40:37Speaker 01

  Just as much as I want to give away my wealth to help, you know, fight poverty in Africa, or just as much as I want to give away my, my wealth to fight, you know, research of vaccines, or, 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 app, just like Netflix, that you can go to, and that there isn't so much of a financial model

• 2:41:19Speaker 01

  behind it, as there is a philanthropic model behind it, to see to it that stories like this get told.

• 2:41:27Rich Roll?

  And to, you know, to have, have consumers subscribe to it for a couple bucks makes it, you know, economically viable.

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. I mean, if it's something where, you know, 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, you know? Well, that becomes difficult. But if it's a, but if it's a, you know, 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.

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  And if you have something like that, that can be very, very powerful.

• 2:42:21Rich Roll?

  All right. So all you billionaires out there listening, give Brian a call.

• 2:42:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:42:27Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 2:42:28Speaker 01

  I've thought about this many times, and I do think that that is, I do think that this is, or will be, the future of stories like The Dissonant. 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, it's all interconnected.

• 2:42:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a giant conglomerate.

• 2:42:59Speaker 01

  Right. So the, so as these conglomerates take hold, and, you know... The Amazons of a world, everything becomes a risk, a risk assessment.

• 2:43:12Rich Roll?

  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 going to get greenlit, you know, to be in the multiplex. And yet,

• 2:43:53Rich Roll?

  at the same time, there is this risk analysis that is having this squelching impact.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  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. You know, that was a company that had 100 million subscribers versus 200 million subscribers. That was a company that was very hungry at the, at the time to show that it could be an awards contender, show that it could, you know, evolve beyond, you know, House of Cards.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  And, and it was, it was a different company three years ago. And, and what happens, for better or for worse, because, look, I, 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, to do content, make content, and have content on Netflix. They're awesome. And they're amazing in 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.

• 2:45:21Speaker 01

  There is a whole other risk model that comes into it. And in many ways, 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 I don't, 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

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, 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. 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.

• 2:46:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. It'll be available on demand to rent on basically all platforms beginning January 8th.

• 2:47:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, check it out.

• 2:47:10Speaker 01

  And in theaters December 25th, if you have a theater open near you.

• 2:47:15Rich Roll?

  Right. You can learn more about it at thedissident.com, and you can find Brian pretty easily on the internet at Brian Fogel, right?

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, at Brian Fogel on Twitter or Instagram. I keep private, but if you add me, I'll make sure you're not a Saudi troll.

• 2:47:35Rich Roll?

  You might not know. You know what I mean? You should know better than anyone.

• 2:47:41Speaker 01

  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 honeypot or something. You know, I click and it's like some-

• 2:47:53Rich Roll?

  You must be. Everything that comes in, you must think, do I really want to click on this?

• 2:47:57Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm like, this doesn't look like a real person, you know, or, you know, or something clicks in and I'm like, uh, yeah, there's something's up here. What are we gonna do? Go ride our bikes?

• 2:48:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's go ride bikes. How about that?

• 2:48:12Speaker 01

  Go ski, go ride bikes.

• 2:48:15Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:48:15Speaker 01

  Get some sunshine.

• 2:48:16Rich Roll?

  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, it's, uh, 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.

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich. It's good to be back on and talking to you again.

• 2:48:38Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:48:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:48:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because you're in it.

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  I am in it.

• 2:48:49Rich Roll?

  He's in it. Yeah.

• 2:48:52Rich Roll?

  Cool. Thank you.

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:48:55Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:48:57Rich Roll?

  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 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. It will only take you a very brief moment, and it does help us out a lot. I love it when you share the show or your favorite episodes with friends on social media platforms. And how about Analog Vibe, too? And you can

• 2:49:41Rich Roll?

  support us on Patreon at richroll.com/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 Ali Rogers. Sponsor relationships are managed by DK David Khan. 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.