Alex Gibney's Documentary Work is Proof that "Truth is Always Stranger than Fiction"
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And I think I would go crazy if I just had to do the political stuff. I tell people that a lot where they say to me, like, what can I do to feel different and better? I'm like, shut off the TV, get off social media, take Twitter off your phone. That's right. Have a thing in the real world, even though we're in a, even though the world may be on fire, have a thing in the real world that you do that you love. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal...

Any conservative America of America. Good night and good luck.

Hey folks, it's Rick Wilson. Welcome back to the Lincoln Project Podcast. As always, I am your host and I'm joined today by a very fascinating guy. Alex Gibney is one of the most prolific and insightful documentary filmmakers out there today. And I wanted to talk to Alex today, not only about where he sees the role of filmmaking and narrative, because we work in different formats. He works in the longer explanatory format. We work in the shorter punch in the face format.

But a lot of the stuff that Alex has dug into, it's politics, it's culture, it's an approach to...

it's an approach to looking at our moments that we're in this chaotic era that I find really compelling. And I wanted to talk to you first, Alex, about your newest project, which is the BB Files, your most recent project. Because as somebody who

was working on some Israeli politics a few years ago. While this was happening with Netanyahu, there was a, in this, guys, a sprawling corruption trial, which I'll let Alex talk about here. There was an expectation inside Israeli politics was, we got him now, can't escape this one. And yet he did. Alex, talk to us about the BB files and about this remarkable footage that you were sent. And walk us through

where Netanyahu stood then and where he stands now in terms of being the ultimate political survivor. Sure. Well, The BB Files is a film that I produced and is directed by a woman named Alexis Bloom, a longtime colleague of mine.

The whole thing started when I got a message on Signal from somebody who said, I've got some material I think you'll really be interested in. Now, I get those messages from time to time. And usually they don't amount to much. However, in this case, I pulled at the thread and lo and behold, what the source had was about a thousand hours

of police interrogation videos related to the Benjamin Netanyahu corruption case. And they included interviews with Netanyahu, Netanyahu's wife, Sarah, his son, Yair, as well as a whole host of Israeli officials. And this is a corruption case, um,

that related to how he was using his office for personal enrichment, pure and simple. And sometimes they related to things like very expensive champagne, very expensive cigars, jewelry for Sarah. And in other cases, they represented trading enormous regulatory favors to people who could help Netanyahu burnish his office

in the media. So that was kind of the essence of the case. And so when we got this material, which was really extraordinary and also showed Netanyahu in a light that was considerably more venal than the image of the grand statesman that he likes to project, it seemed a project well worth taking on. Mind you, I got this material in...

March or so of 2023. This was prior to 10-7. So when 10-7 happened, we took a pause and wondered exactly how this would reckon with our project. Over time, we invested into a narrative that really related to Netanyahu's unbelievably

attempts to avoid a legal reckoning and in so doing, to engage the Middle East in a kind of forever war. That became...

Well, it's the conclusion of the film, but it's based on the testimony from former Shin Bet officers and former diplomats and so forth and so on that what Netanyahu is doing is he keeps wrapping himself in the mantle of the person who's protecting the security of Israel, even though we make a point that he was the one who had funded or allowed for the funding of Hamas in order to destabilize, you know, Israel.

the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. But that's the essence of the film. It's really about how a guy is desperately trying to avoid a legal reckoning and to cling to power no matter what, and the consequences are horrific. You know, it's funny because I talked to someone who, former Israeli intelligence person, now a pretty significant business leader in the country, who after October 7th just said,

He was very cynical about it. And he said he was he was at his home in California. It was half the year in Israel, part of the year in California. And he said, because I'm going to tell you, because the saddest thing about this is I promise you, Bibi will have known all about this. He will have known this was coming. There would have been intelligence indicators. He goes and he goes, I've known him for 40 years. He will absolutely have known this was coming and nothing could have been better for him in the timing of his trials, of his political moment.

And it's interesting because there is a Trumpian nature to Bibi, I think, that has been sort of underplayed. I think you're right. He's always playing the role of protector of the country, but he's always generating some of the chaos that he then pretends to have to protect people from. Yes. And I think the Trumpian parallels are enormous. Also, the parallel of trying to avoid illegal reckoning. And that is what propels the political project.

and also personal enrichment and a tendency toward authoritarian rule and forming alliances with, in Bibi's case, with extreme

right wing forces in order to be able to stay in power. Yeah, that's always been the sort of, I think, air gap that Americans don't understand Israeli politics is the presence of all these hard right religious micro parties that make up parts of the coalition that he's able to keep pasting together over time.

And aside from a brief little moment there, he's been in power now for how many years? It's like 30 years almost or something like that. Yeah. 17, I think, all told. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. But he is... I just think this is such an important film because we are in this moment where...

where Trump is proposing something that I think even Netanyahu, and he's got a good poker face, but even he, when Trump said, oh, we're going to take over Gaza and we're going to pave it, turn it into a resort. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. Even Netanyahu had a moment where there was a couple of tells. Like he looked down at the podium because I don't think even he expected that one to pop up.

No, I think it popped up in the moment. I mean, obviously, you know, rattling in Trump's head was the chitchat from Jared Kushner about what a great location this is, real estate location, location, location. So, you know, he without any

of consequence, it pops up into his head. Yeah, sure, we'll clean it out, get all those people out of there, we'll build it up into a really nice place. It'll look like Trump Tower. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, I want to...

We'll talk a little bit about the topicality of the doc stuff that you do, because it looks like you have a fairly aggressive event to production window that unlike some documentary filmmakers who work over these long haul stretches, I mean, you've done stuff contemporaneously about Russian interference in 2016, the COVID crisis.

You know, what is it that, how do you, how do you make a selection? What is your creative like instinct lead you to when you see a big event coming right, you know, ahead of us, how do you pick the topics that you're going to make, make a doc on? Well, sometimes they pick me, but, um, but, uh, and I would, I would draw a distinction between the COVID film that you cited, which was called totally under control, really about Trump's handling of the COVID crisis. Um,

That was one that was by intent rushed through production extremely fast. I think it took us all of three months to make that film and we were making it during COVID. So it had to be done with all of these kind of COVID restrictions. Right. There was a lot of remote stuff in that. That's right. That's right. With the plastic sheeting and everything.

We had a COVID cam, which we literally delivered to people's doors, you know, so that no human interface would happen. We would take it, they would turn it on, and then we would talk to them remotely. That was a bit different. You know, to be honest, usually the films that I take on have something to do with the current moment, but are also designed to stand the test of time. And the Netanyahu one was about corruption.

And indeed, we took it on without knowing that there was going to be this kind of a 10-7 attack or the kind of carnage in Gaza that was ultimately going to happen. We were interested at the time in what was going on in terms of the protests over Netanyahu's attempts to sort of capture the judiciary, another parallel with Trump. So I think that generally speaking, there's a kind of rough sense of the zeitgeist that

that I have. But truth be told, my projects tend to take a year or more in the making. But we're always attentive to events. And even in the cutting room, the films are changing as events change. So it's a tricky balance. I think one of the things, I think the first time I sort of

thought, oh, that's Alex Gibney, was on Going Clear on Scientology. You've handled a lot of controversial subjects. Where were they on the scale of difficulty to deal with? Because I've heard so many stories of people who cross Scientology, whether it's in writing, whether it's journalism or books or documentaries, where the pressure campaign there feels like it's coming from a nation state.

Yeah, well, they had a reputation of being bullies and in some cases going after journalists very hard. Sure. So much so that they would literally drive them insane. And they had launched, I believe, the biggest media lawsuit in history against –

Time, Inc. And and but that then gave them cred. So they could always threaten to sue and people would generally back down. And it was interesting. You mentioned Scientology because they were tough adversaries and and they did come after me in a number of ways. Me and Lawrence Wright, who was the author of the book, Going Clear.

But what Mike Rinder, who was recently passed away, who is the who's kind of the head of of PR or really attack PR for Scientology, told me early on in the project, he said, Alex, they're going to try to get inside your head.

Don't let them. In other words, they create a scenario whereby you think there's a Scientologist on every corner. There really isn't. But they do that impression and they and they go to great lengths to to try to make that happen. So that's really it. I mean, they threatened to sue, but they never did sue. Obviously, whenever you sue, you open yourself up to discovery. Right. And that's the last thing they want to play.

That's right. So you do a fair number of things in politics and in looking at the things that are affecting the political national culture.

You also touch on sports fairly frequently in the course. I enjoy that. Yeah, I enjoy that. There's a friend of mine, a guy you would know, David Halberstam. Of course, yeah. And David had a rhythm to his book career, which was he would always do the big book,

the best, the brightest, the reckoning. And he'd always juxtapose that with a sports book, the breaks of the game, amateurs, so forth and so on. I love that idea. And so, you know, in between the political stuff, I do sports docs and also music docs. I really enjoy them a lot. And

And I invest a great deal of my time. And I think I would go crazy if I just had to do the political stuff. I tell people that a lot where they say to me, like, what can I do to feel different and better? I'm like, shut off the TV, get off social media, take Twitter off your phone. That's right. Have a thing in the real world, even though we're in a, even though the world may be on fire, have a thing in the real world that you do that you love. We'll be right back.

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And now, back to the show. Or that demands your focus, that demands your attention. I think that's a work-work balance instead of a work-life balance question. By the way, you mentioned Lawrence Wright. I want to loop back on one thing. I thought that the Looming Tower series you guys did, based on Lawrence's unbelievably terrific book about the origin story of Al-Qaeda, I thought that was terrific. I thought that was a...

What did you guys do? 2020 or something like that? 2018, somewhere in there? Yeah, I think it was like 2018 or 2019. Okay, okay. It was definitely pre-COVID. Yeah, and it just, I remember watching it at the time and I was like, you know, this story would have contextualized a lot of things. And I wish more of my Republican colleagues had read Looming Tower before.

back in the beginning of the war rather than at the end of the war because by the point by the time you guys put that that series out it was basically we were on the very tail end of all the the you know the the active part of it after all the damage had been sort of cooked into the system so what are you what are you looking forward to doing next alex

Well, weirdly, I mean, you talk about being on top of the news. I mean, I've just finished two films for HBO about the role of money in politics. Couldn't be more on point for right now. And for the last two years, I've also been working on a documentary on Elon Musk. So let's talk about that a little bit and not to do spoilers. Yeah.

He is a guy who, if Americans knew who he was three years ago, it was Tesla guy, PayPal guy, Rocket guy. Are the things that you're learning in that film or learned during that consonant with what you're seeing now? Or has he reached a new level of drunk on power that we just haven't understood before?

First of all, I should preface this by saying I'm still working on the film. So what I have to say is kind of like general point from the standpoint of what I'm seeing so far and what research has led me to understand to this point. So still working and obviously the story is ongoing. But here's what I would say. I say that this present moment

a lot can be understood within the context of past is prologue. In other words, a lot of the patterns that you see now are patterns that he engaged in rather recklessly, I would say, over the course of his career. I mean, it is true that Tesla is an extraordinarily valuable company, but it's mostly valuable because of the enormous impact

the high level of its stock price, which exceeds all other car companies in the world combined. Right. But I would argue not so potent when it comes to economic fundamentals. Sure. And indeed has a lot of serious, serious problems. But if you if you look at his career over time and then the so

At Tesla, he became famous for firing people summarily all the time, but not necessarily in a good way. That's the one thing he, by the way, shares with Donald Trump. You're fired, right? Right. And to some extent, everybody, you know, hunkers down and says, yeah, he's a tough businessman and he's going to fire people. And that's good. Well, it's not always good. If you fire all the air traffic controllers at O'Hare at the same time, that's not a good outcome. No, that's going to turn bad quick. Yeah.

Right. So so so I think I think that's one of the things. And obviously, the other thing one needs to know is that the success of Tesla, to a great extent, was due to reward hacking by getting money from the federal government. That's a lot of what people don't really properly understand, both in the form of loans, subsidies, etc.

Carbon credits. Carbon credits, correct. Without those, Tesla doesn't really make its first profit and would be an even more marginally profitable company than it is now. So that needs to be understood. And then when you get into something like Twitter, which was bought more or less on a whim. Right.

And also he goes in and applies the same kind of human resources strategy that he's now applying to the federal government, which is to say, fire everybody. In other words, take a percentage. Let's fire 75% of the people. What could possibly go wrong? And, you know, people forget, but Twitter lost, I believe it was 80% of its value. Right.

From the moment that Musk bought it to, it's a little bit different now because the value of all his companies has increased enormously because he's back in the pocket. And the pocket is he has, you know, he has a pipeline to the federal treasury right now. Oh, yes.

And so as a result, if you're a money person, you realize, oh, well, you know, the president of the United States is giving him almost unlimited power and opening up the bank account to him. So that's a good investment. But it's an investment, you know, sort of like you would invest in Al Capone, Chicago. Right, right. I had a Silicon Valley person tell me about a year and a half ago.

He didn't really predict Elon jumping into bed with Trump as aggressively, but he said if Trump wins again, Elon will be in terrific shape to be able to say, when I take SpaceX public, which that will be an extraordinarily valuable company, dwarfing Twitter and Tesla, right?

You know, that there would be a lot of people who would handle him with kid gloves in the financial markets and the political markets to get into that deal, to get into Tesla's or I mean, SpaceX's IPO. And and I think that is I think there's something about Musk that that with me that.

He's a great operator, a manipulator of the financial side of the equation more than a technologist or an engineer. We'll be right back. And now, back to the show. I think what he is, is a bullshitter. But a very, very good one. I mean, that's his strength. Right. You know, that he spins a story. Because Tesla is a classic example.

The only reason that Tesla's stock is where it is, is that people somehow believe almost in a religious context that because Elon is a genius, another thing which I think is way overblown, that somehow he's going to take that company to some mythical promised land.

that has no basis as yet in reality. So I think his ability to weave a story about himself is very powerful. That may be his greatest skill, that and a high tolerance for risk. But the other thing that relates to both Trump and also Bibi

which is interesting in this moment, is that if you want to look for the turn, and people are always looking for the political turn, was it the woke mind virus? Is that why he became so pro-MAGA? And I think the reason had something more to do with the fact that

both in terms of regulatory actions against his company and also criminal investigations into himself, he was facing possible prison time and also an enormous number of, you know, adverse consequences to all of his companies. So by throwing his weight behind Trump,

He who's only interested in personal loyalty. He can now end all of those investigations. Sure. Yeah. The SEC slate will be wiped clean if it hasn't been already. Yeah, it's more than the SEC slate. But yes, the SEC investigation was one. It was a criminal investigation. That was the one I think that had that probably would have worried his attorneys the most because the criminal liability there.

That's right. You covered, you did a doc about another sort of Silicon Valley hustler. Elizabeth Holmes? Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos. My favorite story about that was a friend of mine was at Sun Valley and Rupert was on a golf cart with her. And

And someone asked Rupert, like, who was that? He goes, I have no fucking idea, but I want to do it. But I'm going to give a $25 million, some kind of company with blood. Well, this is the thing that always floors me. Like, you know, we think or we're taught that when it comes to business, there is an extraordinarily rigorous scientific process.

that goes into the calculation of risk and reward. Basically a bunch of rich people sitting around saying, yeah, okay, I'll give you a billion dollars. Sure. What the fuck? Um, and, uh, and that was certainly the case with Elizabeth Holmes. She had spun a story to people that people wanted to believe in. And that was enough. I mean, I think I can't remember now precisely how much, uh,

Murdoch invested. I think it was 20 or 25. It was not. No, no, it was more than that. Oh, okay. It was over $100,000. It was certainly not nothing. It was not nothing. But, but,

I wonder sometimes like how much of the Silicon Valley stuff that we see these companies that are the thing and they disappear. How many more Musks and Holmeses are out there? And I wonder sometimes, you know, maybe I think the AI bubble is probably creating a lot of those people right now that we will eventually see them, you know, crash and burn. Yeah.

But that strikes me as like a, not to tell you your business, but that strikes me as a storyline about this new gilded age of American money where a big part of it is based on bullshit.

Yeah, it's based on speculation. I mean, and that's why there's such an obsession by Musk, for example, in terms of being known as the founder of Tesla, which he's not. Or SpaceX, for that matter. Or SpaceX, correct. So, but the founders get the cash, right? He gets the best stock position. And let's also remember that he was tossed out of his first two companies. Mm-hmm.

Only in Silicon Valley. It's like if you're a policeman or a fireman or a nurse, you know, if you get tossed out, you don't fail up. They don't give you a big bucket of cash on your way out. Right. But in Silicon Valley, that's apparently the way it works. Yeah, it you don't you don't get punished. You get you get a fine.

You get rewarded. You get a very beautiful golden parachute and you get, yeah. And you get, Oh, he's an innovator. And, and yeah, it just, I think you're right. That, that idea of rigor in businesses is culturally in people's heads, that there is some sort of seriousness and consistency and, um,

and and structure in corporate america that it may exist in parts of it still but there is a sort of i mean silicon valley is the wild west and frankly a lot of private equity now is also the wild west where they are they are buying everything they believe to be monetizable in the end and trying to to race for the finish line so alex let me ask you this i know we're getting short on time here what is it that that your career in making these documentary films has taught you about

about the American character? I mean, that's a big question. You know, most of the films that I do have to do with power and abuse of power. And one of the things I've learned about that is something an old political science professor used to tell me, which is that economic actors are not rational, they're rationalizers.

which is a way of saying that usually behind every great crime is some kind of mission that allows the perp to sleep well at night. And so there's a kind of grand vision that is there to hide the malfeasance. So that's one thing I've learned. The other thing I've learned about the American character, and this is something I actually learned more from Hunter Thompson, who I also did a film about, was that the American character is both very...

admirable and idealistic and also very dark. In America, we have the extremes, the enormous sense of possibility and promise and a kind of murderous instinct that doesn't want to be chained by any restraint. That, I think, is something that, and the country tends to swing between these poles. So that's one thing I've learned about the American character.

Well, it is, it is a, it is a, you, you have a fascinating life because you're able to tell these stories. I mean, it's swing some between fiction and, and, and documentary stuff, but it's,

that I think are always relevant to the moment. I always enjoy your work. I want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. And anything else folks need to know, anything where they should follow you on social media or any other projects you want to... Follow me on social media. I'm still on X. I call it Twitter still. And also on Blue Sky. Excellent.

And the BB files you can watch on jolt.film. Nice. It wasn't on a regular streamer, but it's there for you to see. All right. Folks, thanks again, Alex, for coming on. Folks, we'll see you again on the next episode of the Lincoln Project Podcast.

The Lincoln Project Podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive produced by Whitney Hayes, Ben Howe, and Joey Wartner Cheney. Produced by Whitney Hayes. Edited by Riley Mayne. Hey folks, if you want to support The Lincoln Project's work against Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and this MAGA craziness,

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