David Bell details how Prince Mohammed bin Salman inherited a fractured Saudi state, tracing its roots to the 18th-century Wahhabi alliance and the 1932 kingdom founded by Abdul Aziz. The narrative highlights King Faisal's 1970s modernization attempts, his 1975 assassination, and the 1979 Grand Mosque siege that triggered a backlash against secular reforms. With weak successors like Khalid and Fahd fostering corruption, MBS now leverages oil wealth to enforce authoritarian crackdowns domestically while funding global anti-democratic policies, exemplified by the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Ultimately, this history reveals how religious hardliners and royal infighting created the volatile context for MBS's current tyrannical rule. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Special Episode on MBS00:06:26
Oh my goodness.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about the very worst people in all of history.
And we have a very special episode for you this week.
We are talking about, finally, we're going to give the first two episodes of what will be a multi-part series about Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
And to talk about this, obviously, the only guest we can bring on for this episode is a guy I think most people are aware of, one of the world's leading experts on Saudi Arabia, my former colleague at Cracked David Bell.
David, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, if anything, I'm going to be teaching you a thing or two.
Yeah, a lot of people don't know this.
You lived for 47 years in Saudi Arabia.
Which is impressive because you're not that old.
Yeah.
No, no, that's several years.
Several years more than I have existed.
Yeah, I think that's actually older than Muhammad bin Salman.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that's very good.
So you're more qualified to talk about the country than the king of the country.
Well, not the king.
He's he's not actually the king.
He's the crown prince and he's going to be the king and he's effectively ruling the country.
But you know, you know how it goes with these sort of royal families.
Of course I do.
Like I said, expert.
Yeah.
Expert on Saudi Arabia.
In addition to that, you and I lived together for a period of time in the late aughts.
We did.
We worked at Cracked Magazine together.
You are currently a writer and script polisher and finisher offer at Some More News and even More News.
Yes.
And you also co-run the podcast network Gamefully Unemployed with our also fellow former roommate and colleague Tom Ryman, which hosts several of my favorite podcasts, including Fox Mulder as a Maniac and the new Himboos.
Himboos, which is about Supernatural.
Yes, it's your Supernatural Rewatch podcast.
Yeah, it's not even a rewatch.
I've never seen Supernatural.
So it's just a watch for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's me discovering those beautiful, beautiful boys, the Winchesters.
And you're, I didn't do it this year.
I did a big LeBaska costume for Halloween this year, but I think next year I am going to do a Fox Mulder costume.
And I'm trying to pick between either just wearing the FBI like suit and having an empty holster, because as Fox Mulder, I have lost my gun before showing up at the party, or show up at the party with like five or six fake guns and give them to people.
Like hand, like accidentally drop them in people's laps.
If I see someone dressed as a gondola player, maybe point it at them, you know, all the Fox Mulder classics.
Anywhere you can leave it where kids can reach it is preferable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These are all classic Fox Mulder tactics.
I know.
If Fox Mulder really existed, you would have done a six-part series on him.
Well, yeah, because there would have been a congressional investigation into just the things that he did.
Yes.
Like multiple of them.
Like the church committee would have had like a church committee over his fucking favorite, not to deviate, but my favorite things.
I've been re-watching the X-Files recently because I'm always re-watching the X-Files.
Of course, as you are wont to do.
Yeah.
My favorite thing he's ever done, in my opinion, is they were at a crime scene where there's blood and he wanted to prove that blood was fake.
So he reaches down and he dabs it on his finger and he tastes it and he goes, yeah, it's sugar.
And it's like, that is just something you don't do.
I know it's small, but I can't get over the idea of being in a crime scene, seeing blood and tasting it.
That would stop everything.
Like that alone would be like, Mulder, go home.
What are you doing here?
You need to go to the doctor.
I don't care if he's an FBI agent.
Like a beat cop could kick you off the scene then.
What if you just tasted the blood?
Get out of here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even if it's fake blood, don't taste it.
Don't taste it.
It could be anything.
That's crazy stuff.
Yeah.
When I was at Oxford, they kept trying to show me, like, you know, oh, here's where Tolkien worked.
Here's where C.S. Lewis wrote.
And I was like, where was Fox Mulder's dorm when he was canonically at Oxford?
Yes.
And he had sex on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's grave.
And they were all like 20, and they were like, who?
Is that a graduate of Oxford?
And I'm like, god damn it.
Those young bastards.
You fucking children.
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10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Origins of the House of Saud00:02:32
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know who else is a young bastard?
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
Well, us too, but yes.
So you've probably, the listener, obviously Dave, again, as I stated, you're an expert on Saudi Arabia, internationally recognized.
For the listeners who know less, Mohammed bin Salman is the crown prince and the current effective ruler of Saudi Arabia.
His dad is the king, but he's not like super on the job right now.
Like most people tend to agree that his son is kind of the power behind the throne.
The thing you will probably know him best for if you were a casual reader of news in Saudi Arabia is that he's the guy who had that journalist bone sought.
Jamal Khashoggi from the Washington Post almost certainly ordered a team of people to have him killed and sawed up with the bone saw in Turkey.
Yeah, he's that guy.
And MBS, as he's generally called, is one of the most dangerous and in some ways competent bastards in the world today.
He's a world leader who has been generally very successful in pushing his specific ideology and his specific plans.
He's been running into increasing issues as he's gotten more power and as he's accumulated more power and as he's spent more time at the top.
But, you know, it's kind of one of those things where his overall level of success has been pretty great.
So you have to credit him as being extremely competent, at least kind of within his broad remit, right?
He has put his fingers on the scale to push anti-democratic policies around the globe using his influence and the amount of money that the Saudis have through their oil wealth.
And at home, he has mixed a series of dizzying reforms with unprecedented authoritarian crackdowns, often against members of his own family.
Allying with Religious Hardliners00:15:28
Now, before we discuss how he got to where he is today and what he's done with his time in power, we need to talk about the origins of his family, the House of Saud.
As you might guess, the country of Saudi Arabia takes its name from the Saud family line, which has its origins in the 18th century in a small town on the Arabian Peninsula named Diriya.
In the mid-1700s, there was a religious leader in that town named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian state of Najd, who began preaching about the need to return to a pure form of Islam.
He was angry at what he saw as the decadence and many moral compromises of the Ottoman caliph, who had allowed such evils as relatively open socialization between unmarried men and women and women to work in the world, right?
Like ladies were getting jobs in the Ottoman Empire, right?
Particularly in the capital.
Yeah, he was really unhappy about that.
Like women are making money.
No, He was also unhappy about a lot of art in the Ottoman world that depicted the human form, which you're not really supposed to do under the strictest interpretations of Islam.
And he was unhappy about music.
You're not supposed to have music, right?
There's certain kinds of what we would call music that just involves like harmonizing voices that are allowed, but you're not supposed to have like instruments, right?
These are all things that under, yeah, under the strictest interpretations of Islam, right?
Again, most Muslims that I have known and most places in the Muslim world, you're going to encounter music, but not in the strict parts, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's every religion, right?
It's like the strictest parts are always ridiculous.
And most people, even if they subscribe to that religion, are going through and they're just like, yeah, we're not going to do that.
Like, we'll have music.
It's fine.
Like, you can run into like people who are like American Christian anti-Muslim folks who will be like, well, you know, if you, if they're actually following their religion, they're not supposed to do this and this and this.
And it's like, well, if you were following the letter of the Bible, there's a lot of shit you shouldn't be doing that you're doing, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It feels like it's all kind of part of the same thing, whether it be like these people or, I don't know, the Heritage Foundation, where it's like, yeah, they're all the same kind of maniac.
You could see Wahhab as sort of like a heritage foundation maniac of his time, where he's like very minor compromises had been made with the hardest line version of the faith in order to like exist in the in the increasingly modern world.
And Wahhab was like, fuck that shit.
Like we need to go back, right?
Like we have, we have to returven.
You know, he's really one of those guys.
There's a lot of debate, and I am not a scholar of Islam on how theologically sound Wahhab's arguments are, right?
And this is not a podcast that doesn't matter for our purposes today.
What matters is that he had a lot of supporters.
And one of these supporters was his local emir, a guy named Muhammad ibn Saud, who is the kind of founder.
He's obviously not the first member of the House of Saud, but he is the guy who is generally seen as the founder of like the House of Saud as a modern political dynasty, right?
And Muhammad ibn Saud seems to have seen Wahhab as a useful tool for building a base of support.
Saud was an ambitious man.
The Arabia of his day was a scantly populated backwater with nomadic tribes who were constantly at each other's throats and too busy fighting to build a credible state.
In 1744, Wahhab, again, this guy is basically the leader of a militant extremist religious movement of his day.
He leads like a mob to destroy the tomb of one of the Prophet Muhammad's companions, framing it as an attack on idolatry, right?
If you've got a tomb that is like a venerated spot that's idol that's worshiping an idol, right?
And you're not supposed to do that under the strictest interpretations of the religion, you know, like that, that's kind of his argument is that people were worshiping the tomb as opposed to like you're only supposed to worship God.
The tomb is the place where his body is, though, right?
Right.
Yes.
Like, that just seems like, what are we going to do at that point?
Like, that just, I don't know, man.
That's, that's, that's, yeah, strict.
Yes.
It's strict.
That's exactly what it is, right?
Uh, he also stones a woman to death for alleged adultery.
Um, I'm pointing all this to you because, like, who knows what the turret, like, the standards of evidence back then were not high, right?
Um, and eventually he does a lot of shit like this, and Wahhab has to go on the run because people get angry at him for being a giant dick and for being an asshole.
Yeah, for being an asshole.
And when he goes on the run, Muhammad ibn Saud takes him in and he kind of welds his followers and this version of Orthodox Islam, which has this, it includes all of these strict returns to like old rules, but it also includes these new calls for Arab nationalism, right?
Which is an increasingly popular idea in the area, right?
At the time, Arabs are not governing themselves, they're under the rulership of a Turkish caliph in large part, right?
This is, we talk about this in the Lawrence of Arabia episodes.
This is going to culminate in the early 1900s in the Arab Revolution.
But this is kind of a lot of the origins of a lot of that stuff, right?
Is Wahhab is preaching that like we should be independent.
And Ibn Saud is like, okay, well, if I, this guy just wants to be a religious figurehead and he's willing to back my family as the ruling kings of an Arab kingdom, right?
And that's what I want for my family.
I don't want us to just be like local bigwigs.
I want us to be the kings of the Arab world.
In 1740, is Arab nationalism?
I assume that was very popular, right?
Like that idea.
Not yet.
It's starting to be because of Saud and Wahhab, right?
It starts to be popular.
It's going to be very popular in the 1900s, right?
But in 1745, they're kind of ahead of the curve, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
They're like the first punk bands.
Yeah.
I just think about how a lot of bad ideas will be couched in, you know, generally popular ideas or the idea that this system isn't working, where it's like, they're not wrong.
You know, it's like someone being like, hey, Twitter sucks.
Let me buy Twitter.
And then making Twitter even worse, where it's like, if you're exploiting like people's frustrations that are valid, you can sneak in all sorts of bullshit.
I guess is my point.
Is it like that?
It's yeah, it's kind of a and it's kind of a symbol of how there's not enough.
There's not enough just raw support for the idea of an independent Arab state.
So Saud has to kind of grab this crazy dude and his followers, who are angry about like women working and people playing music, to be like if they're angry about other things mostly, but they're willing to be angry about the thing i'm angry about and if I get them on my back they're crazy and they're willing to fight and die right.
So like It kind of makes sense to partner up with these insane motherfuckers.
It's a lot.
Again, this happens all the time, right?
Like the religious right is largely a factor of like very rich people whose primary goal was to not be taxed and to not have their workers have rights who were like, oh, these people are angry about like women wearing skirts and getting abortions.
Well, if they're angry about taxes too, if I can get them to oppose taxes too, then like, yeah, throw them on the bus, right?
Yeah.
That's kind of how reactionary movements always work.
Yeah, it's just whoever's pissed off who can tolerate each other getting together.
And like we can all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's again, there are some legitimate grievances here.
Arabs are being persecuted by the Ottomans.
But there's a lot of like, there's not enough persecution for there to be a large enough movement to cause a revolt on its own.
So Saud has to find these maniacs and kind of get them on his side.
So for about half a century, in 1745, they establish what is technically a country.
It's really just like a city-state based around the city of Dariya, which is today kind of like a suburb of Riyadh, right?
Riyadh is the current capital of Saudi Arabia.
So basically that region, what is today the capital of Saudi Arabia, they have like a micro-state that is ruled by the Saud family and is a semi-independent, an independent Saudi state, right?
That exists in 1745 for about 50 years, a little bit more than half a century, right?
A little more than 50 years.
So that's a pretty good job, right?
Like they're able to kind of like make their own country for like two generations almost until in 1819.
Yeah, pretty good.
Better than I probably would have done if I tried to make a breakaway state.
Mine will be done in an afternoon.
Like it won't even last a day.
Yeah, yeah.
I really wish you'd been able to get hold of those nuclear missiles, Dave, but unfortunately without them, you're unlikely to secede from the United States.
Saudi Tech You Seriously.
Yeah, yeah, we all learned that lesson from North Korea.
So for half a century or so, the Saud family rules their new country from Daria until in 1819.
This kind of like the black and white teachings that Wahhabism are preaching leads to increasing conflicts with the Ottomans.
The Al Saud rulers of the country run into a version of the same problem that afflicts any authoritarians who ally with crazy religious hardliners, which is that sooner or later, they're going to try to get you to do crazy stuff for them because they think that's what God wants, right?
Like if you, if you hit yourself to these guys, they're going to make demands increasingly that you like, you have to do some crazy stuff, right?
Like you're on team crazy guys.
You have to do some crazy shit, right?
That's what you signed up for.
Yeah.
Don't you believe the crazy stuff?
Well, this is sorry.
This is just paralleling because, you know, obviously it's on my mind a lot.
But today where it's like, it feels like a lot of the far right that you have the grifters and then you have the true believers, right?
The people who are like, no, we're going to unmask the deep state and get all the pedophiles.
And then the other people are like, no, no, no, no.
This is like kind of a gris.
No, we are the deep state pedophiles.
We just want money.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, you don't understand.
Just trying not to pay a lot of taxes.
Yeah.
It's a weird mix.
In this case, the Wahhabists believed that God wanted them to occupy Mecca and Medina and to sack Karbala, which is a town in Iraq, and destroy a tomb for Muhammad's grandson, which again, people were like going to to pray, basically, right?
This is the kind of thing the Ottomans were kind of fine with ignoring them while they were just running this backwater, but now they're trying to take the capital city of the faith and sack a random town and also take the second city of the faith.
And that's just too you're getting too busy, right?
And you don't have the ability to actually, yeah, it's like a cult, right?
It's like, we all want to wear robes and like do drugs and hang out.
And then they're like, why not?
All right.
Yeah.
And then it's suddenly like, all right, everybody take a dagger and we're going to stab ourselves.
And you're like, well, no, I don't want to do that.
Didn't you guys believe in the cult shit?
Not that much.
Right.
It was in the terms, terms and agreements.
Like, did you not read them?
Like, this was where it was heading.
Yeah.
So the Wahhabists accuse the Ottoman governors of the state of not respecting Sharia law, which forbade idolatry.
And the Ottomans don't react well to this.
And unlike the Saudis, they have an army, like a big army, because they're an empire.
They're not like a good empire, but they're bigger than this backwater little town.
So the first Saudi state gets crushed by Ottoman arms.
Their capital at Daria was destroyed, and the Saud in charge is taken to Constantinople, where his head gets cut off.
His body is posed holding the severed head and displayed for three days before being thrown into the sea, which is, you know, one way to handle an insurrection.
Yeah, did it work?
Yeah, not in the long run.
Not in the long run.
But, you know, points for trying.
If the Saud family was good at one thing, it was the fact that they were really good at making more of themselves, right?
This continues to be a strength of this family to the modern day.
Despite the Ottoman Empire's best efforts, a prince managed to get free of their dragnet and survived to rebuild the family movement.
This guy was Turkey bin Abdullah bin Muhammad Al Saud, and he fought against the Ottomans to defend Daria, escaping after his son and two of his brothers were killed.
He spends five years in exile in the desert, rebuilding an army and gathering followers to his banner.
Biographer Ibrahim Al-Kamis says this about the man.
Turkey vowed to himself to stand firm in the face of enemies and to fight in battle, even if alone, carrying his sword, Al-Ajrib, which he referred to in his famous poem.
If every friend forsakes their friend, I will carry Al-Ajrib as a steadfast companion, right?
Basically, if I don't have any other friends, at least I've got my knife.
Which is pretty cool.
Yeah, that's pretty badass, right?
You can get a tattoo of that.
He's a gangster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm like, you said they like, there's a lot of them.
I started picturing the Scars Guards.
Like, is it like that?
Where if you strike down two, there's be three more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And are they like charismatic?
Yes.
They're charismatic like the Scars Guards.
One of them was in the series Andor like the Skarsguards.
Yes.
Yeah.
The Al Saud family is everyone.
Yeah.
Got it.
So in 1824, this guy, Turkey, the kind of like inheritor of the Al Saud family, establishes a second Saudi state, moving the capital to Riyadh proper and governing there for about 10 years.
Near the end of 1834, while he's kind of consolidating his power, he's fighting a series of battles against his rivals.
And, you know, he's got to fight the Ottomans, but a lot of his rivals are members of his own family, right?
Because it's a big family and they're not all in agreement about who should be in charge.
And near the end of 1834, after about 10 years of governing this revitalized Saudi state, Turkey is ambushed while leaving his mosque and slain by three assassins who had been hired by his second cousin, Mushari bin Abdul Rahman, who tried to make himself the new Imam.
Turkey's son Faisal returned home immediately after this and put an end to the insurrection, although fighting would continue for another decade.
This is going to be a common feature of the second Saudi state, right?
Is that they're all fighting each other, right?
That's kind of their biggest enemy.
And honestly, even up to the modern day, the Saudi royal family spends a lot of time killing other members of the Saudi royal family.
It's kind of one of their great pastimes.
Too Many Cousins Fighting00:05:21
Well, you got to have a pastime.
I mean, that's the thing about power, right?
It's like never enough, right?
So like, it'll just keep whittling down more and more.
So if there's a family in power, it's like, well, who in the family is in power?
And then you have your own little power struggle within that family.
You never have enough power, but you can have too many cousins, right?
That's kind of the thing.
Yeah.
Sorry, I have eight uncles and aunts.
So I have a lot just on one side.
And we're always trying to kill each other.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
I got a couple of them.
They keep coming at me, but I'm very careful.
Yeah, you have a lot of landmines in your yard.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, who did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of the flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
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How Saudi Royals Live00:14:20
So Turkey alone creates about four branches of the new Saudi royal family, just one of which, the Al-Faisal, contains several thousand male descendants by the late 20th century.
So that's like how prolific this family is.
Is this one guy, because of how many kids he has, creates four branches of the family that are like thousands of people strong today?
This brings us to what will become a pattern within the House of Saud, which is the sheer number of these guys causes a constant problem with political turnover, as there are always more princes and other royals who hate each other and think they really ought to be the branch of the family that's in charge.
The second Saudi state ultimately collapses in 1891 as a civil war within the house leads to their defeat by the al-Rashid tribe and the destruction of the country.
For more than a decade, the Al-Saud family struggles to regain their lost glory.
Many of them, like Abdul Aziz Al Saud, grandfather of Muhammad bin Salman, the guy we're talking about in these episodes, went into exile in places like Kuwait.
Abdul Aziz is probably the most significant member of the House of Saud, right?
He is the guy who establishes the modern Saudi state.
Like I said, he goes into exile in Kuwait and he returns to Arabia in 1902 with an army, right?
He spent his time gathering power.
He gets a bunch of desert warriors to his banner and he shows up in the early 1900s intent on re-establishing the Saudi state for a third time.
He carries out a daring early morning assault on a fort near Riyadh called Mazmak.
They take the fort, kill the governor, who was a member of the hated al-Rashid tribe, and they retake Riyadh.
In her book, The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House writes, quote, once again, he used religion just as his ancestors had to help the al-Saud reconquer Arabia.
He convinced the Bedouin to congregate in agricultural villages and adopt a sedentary life focused on puritanical Islam, promoted by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
The Imam taught that belonging to the Ummah, or a community of believers, took precedence over other social bonds, including tribe.
Anyone who made a judgment based on anything other than the Quran was a non-believer.
Still, it took Abdul Aziz over 30 years to subdue and unite warring tribes under his rule.
In 1932, he announced the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Now, this is a very short summary of a lot of complex history, but it gets across the key bullet points that are going to be important for our purposes.
The House of Saud spends about 300 years viewing the Arabian Peninsula as theirs, and they repeatedly try to make that so.
They create a series of states, which often fail due to infighting until they succeed.
And they are always backed in power by an alliance with religious hardliners, generally today called Wahhabists, who help them secure their power.
And the main threat to said power over the years has been their inability to stop killing each other, right?
These are all traits of the Saudi state up till the present day.
The other key point here is that Saudi kings and princes have varied wildly in their competency and efficacy.
Abdul Aziz is very good.
He's probably the best Saudi king in terms of his actual level of competency.
He is the really, really on-the-ball leader who establishes the state.
When he takes power in 1932, Saudi Arabia is a poor country, and most of its citizens live lives that are barely changed from the way Bedouins had been living for hundreds of years.
The government maintained what control it could by doling out government salaries and bribes to tribal leaders to keep them loyal.
This tapped the state treasury almost to the breaking point.
Abdulaziz was able to put through some minor infrastructure improvements, but his only real sources of state income in the early period for the state are money that comes from pilgrims visiting Mecca for the Hajj and the Zakat, which is a tax paid by non-Muslims who live in the country.
Britain also provided a stipend because of their role in helping to establish the Saudi state, so long as Abdul Aziz could be relied upon to use his forces to crush fundamentalists who tried to launch insurrections in the places like Iraq, which were still controlled by the British Empire.
By the late 1930s, this whole house of cards is in danger of collapse.
Abdul Aziz has done kind of the impossible, but he's had to make a lot of compromises in order to do it.
He's had to kind of throw a lot of his hardline followers under the bus by allowing unbelievers to control chunks of the Muslim world, including Iraq.
And there's not really any money in the Saudi state yet because oil isn't worth much, and they don't know that Saudi Arabia has it at the moment.
It's a mark of his desperation that Abdul Aziz sells Standard Oil of California a concession to drill in his country for just 50,000 pounds.
When his finance minister balks, Abdulaziz tells him, put your faith in God and sign.
And that works out.
That winds up being a really fucking good bet.
Yeah.
This is like 90s Marvel, where they're like, we don't know what we have yet.
We're just selling it off to whoever.
We'll give you $20 for this Iron Man character.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And they're just, it's tourism.
Did I hear that correctly?
No, no, no, no.
It's drilling.
It's drilling.
Well, there's also religious people coming there.
Oh, yeah, yeah, to Mecca and Medina, right?
Like, because you have Muslims are supposed to, if they can, go to Mecca, right, to do the Hajj at least once in their lives.
And that brings in some money to the state.
But you only get so much money from that.
It's not Florida.
It's not Florida where they're like, all right, we got this one thing going on for us.
That's just a little side, little side hustle.
It's a little side.
It's not the kind of side hustle that having most of the world's oil is, right?
Which is going to be kind of their big hustle.
Yeah.
If I could choose between one or the other, I guess I would go for the world's oil.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's going to work out for them.
Per the book MBS by Ben Hubbard, quote: The discovery of oil in 1938 attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies, and representatives of Western governments seeking access to the kingdom's black gold, including the United States.
In a secret meeting in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal, the two leaders hit it off, laying the groundwork for a lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in exchange for American protection from foreign attacks.
Now, this is funny how leaders always hit it off.
They sure seem to, right?
Wow, the rich guy in charge of this country likes this other rich guy, huh?
Yeah, you like money and power?
And they're like, yeah, me too.
It's like, cool.
You were born into money.
Me too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is, it kind of starts with FDR.
The very close relationship to this day that Saudi Arabia and the United States enjoy, like starts here.
And from this point forward, money begins flowing into the peninsula in its millions and its tens of millions and eventually tens of billions.
At the start of the third Saudi state, King Abdulaziz had agreed to curb the spread of fundamentalist Islam to maintain the favor of European colonizing powers.
But now Saudi Arabia has money, and the Saudi royal family starts investing piles of it into spreading Wahhabist teachings around the world.
Saudi Aramco, soon the world's most valuable company by a mile, this isn't the case today, but it is going to be the case for quite a while, allows the royal family to accumulate vast fortunes.
This helps fund the further expansion of the family.
King Abdul Aziz married some 18 women and fathered more than 60 children.
The next generation of his family would be freed from the material concerns that had dominated their forebearers' lives.
Oil money provided stipends to the many hundreds of royal children, right?
This is like how Saudi royals live from now on.
There's money coming into the state, and a big chunk of it gets earmarked for the members of the House of Saud, right?
Vast fortunes of what should have been state funds start disappearing into the pockets of different royal family members as grift and graft become an increasingly accepted pastime.
Large numbers of Saudi men, even outside of the family, are given government jobs that are themselves basically bribes to keep anyone from complaining about the indemit corruption, right?
So the Saudi royal family are all living luxurious lives for doing nothing, or at least lots of the Saudi royal family are.
And regular Saudis get jobs that they basically have to do almost nothing, right?
In order to get enough money to live.
Yeah.
That's the thing about like corruption or like trying to run.
Like you have to make enough people happy, right?
Otherwise, it's just not going to last.
So at some point, you know, enough people who like who matter, I guess, to staying in power have to be happy with it.
Yeah.
And the first group that the family is concerned with is the other members of the family, right?
The princes lower down the line, who these are the guys who, if they were uncomfortable and they had to struggle, might become rivals for power, right?
So part of why you make sure they all get something is that then none of them want to rock the boat, which has been a continuing problem in the family.
Ben Hubbard describes the state of like the Saudi royal family's basic welfare fund.
Quote, there were thousands of them, all subsidized by the Saudi state.
In 1996, an American diplomat visited the office that distributed their monthly stipends and found a stream of servants picking up their master's allowances, which varied based on their status.
The sons and daughters of King Abdulaziz received $270,000, his grandchildren up to $27,000, and his great-grandchildren $13,000.
The most distant relatives got $800.
Princes also got million-dollar bonuses to build their palaces when they got married, as well as perks for having children.
The diplomat estimated that the stipends cost the state more than $2 billion per year, but that was merely a guess.
Much of that money trickled into society to earn the royals the loyalty of the population.
One of Salman's sons said he spent more than a million dollars of his own money during the holy month of Ramadan, hosting feasts for his subjects.
But the royals still had large commanding fleets of yachts, building palaces from Los Angeles to Monaco and taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms in the communities where they landed.
So they're doing pretty good.
Even though about 40% of the country lives in poverty and about 40% of the Saudi youth are unemployed, right?
All of these princes are fairly comfortable.
Right.
Again, enough people.
Just enough.
Enough people.
And one of the things that's remarkable about the Saudi state is how few Saudis actually have to work, right?
The majority of jobs in the country are done by foreign workers who are brought in.
And often some of them are very close.
It's a mix.
You have some of them are like Western workers who are paid pretty well by like Saudi Aramco, but the largest number of them are very close to slaves.
And 90% of the private sector labor force is foreign-born in Saudi Arabia by the 21st century, which is crazy, right?
Like that, that's like an unsustainable situation unless you've got all of this oil money sloshing in.
The royal family increasingly starts to exist as a subculture within broader Saudi society.
The constant infighting and sometimes deadly conflicts mean that the vast majority of royals know they're in potential danger anytime they attend a family gathering.
It becomes the norm for everyone to memorize each other's birthdays so that they would all know at a glance who in the room was most senior and thus who they had to show deference to, right?
Like you have to always be careful to make sure that you're not seen as like looking to get one up on your betters because that could be dangerous to you.
Right.
See, that's what the Scars guards don't have to worry about because they know who's in charge at any given point.
Like that's that's on that.
Definitely not Bill.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's not too, too many of them.
That's part of the secret too, I feel like.
Yeah, Stellan, unlike the King Salman, Stellan does not keep a prison for members of his family who displease him, right?
Well, we don't know that for a while.
So far as we're aware of, right?
Right.
That's a good point.
There's a couple Scars guards unaccounted for, as far as I'm concerned.
King Abdul Aziz establishes another key precedent for the House of Saud, taking bloody vengeance upon their enemies.
Early in his reign, several of the king's cousins put together an army to threaten Riyadh as part of a play to shift power to a different branch of the family.
Abdu'ulaziz smashes the army rather than negotiate, and his brutality convinces the village of Layla, where a lot of these guys had been like based to surrender.
And the king condemns 19 leaders of the rebellion to death.
He immediately issues a 24-hour stay of execution, not as an act of mercy, but so his men can erect a gallows at the entrance of the town and kill them all publicly.
By dawn, the next day, he has the rebels beheaded in pairs, each person killed by a black enslaved man with a sword.
After the first 18 have been killed, the king pardons the 19th man and orders him to go tell his friends and family members about the justice and vengeance of King Abdulaziz, right?
Yeah, go tell everybody I could have killed you, but I didn't.
Well, hold on.
You're saying he made a public execution?
Yeah.
And then he saved the last person.
It was like, go tell people what happened here.
Listen, I wouldn't say anything, but at the time, I'd be thinking, like, I think they'll know it's public.
But obviously, I'm not going to argue, right?
I'm not going to argue.
I'll be like, yeah, I'll totally tell everybody about this.
Sure, man.
But still, it just seems redundant.
I think you could have killed that guy and his family would have known, but it's fine.
I'm not going to backseat executives.
I'm not going to do it for this king.
Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was born into this increasingly weird and isolated world in 1935.
This is Muhammad bin Salman, the subject of our episode's dad, right?
So he comes into the world in 1935, which is about 10 years before the oil deal with FDR.
His early years are spent living the traditional way.
He's born before oil money becomes a thing in Saudi Arabia.
He's living in tents in the desert several months out of the year.
And he comes of age just as the house of Saud is flooded with oil money for the very first time.
King Abdul Aziz passes on in 1953, leaving a wealthy and powerful state after being born into exile.
Because he had grown up conscious of the fact that the internal struggle for power had shattered their last state, on his deathbed, Abdul Aziz begs his oldest son, Saud and Faisal, to join hands and swear to work together.
Salman Enters a Weird World00:15:18
And they totally swear to do that.
And then as soon as he dies, they start fighting with each other, right?
They're like, yeah, dad, we totally aren't going to fight over the throne.
Nicole, all right, let's get at it.
Oh, yeah, let's get the weapons out.
Yeah.
I've created an arena.
Like, I would make it official, right?
Yeah, yeah, a knife fight right in the right in the fucking hospital chamber.
Oh, yeah.
Um, King Saud rules for 11 years, and he is not good at it.
He is so corrupt that he has completely bankrupted the kingdom after a little over a decade.
His younger brothers, headed by Faisal, have to ally to force him to go to exile in Greece, at which point Faisal takes over.
Faisal is going to prove to be a much better king.
He's one of the most successful Saudi monarchs.
And in the 1970s, he embarks on an ambitious campaign to modernize the country and pull power away from the clerics.
For a brief moment, it seems as if the kingdom is bending to secular modernity, and it becomes increasingly normal to see women with their heads uncovered socializing with men who aren't relatives.
Televisions proliferate, and alcohol is common at parties hosted by members of the royal family, right?
The Saudi, at least the leaders of the Saudi royal family, are increasingly modern, and a lot of the religious hardliners seem to be losing power in the country.
Faisal's chief innovation is splitting control of the military between three different princes in order to reduce the odds of a successful coup, right?
You kind of make sure no one has all of the military in their hands and just trust that no group of three Saudi princes will ever trust each other enough to work together.
Yeah, it's very funny listening to this because it's like it seems like all governments sort of naturally settle into a certain way, right?
Where it's like, okay, we need to cool it with the religious stuff.
We need to allow people to just do whatever they want.
Oh, we need to spread out power so that it's not just like one person can make this decision.
Like, it's not one-to-one, but it's just funny hearing this of like, yeah, this is if you want to be in charge for a long amount of time in a functional way without everybody killing each other, it all kind of goes in this direction, it feels like.
Yeah.
To work.
Yep.
Yep.
In 1975, King Faisal is assassinated by his nephew in an act of vengeance for his brother, who had been executed by Faisal for protesting the king's decision to allow television in Saudi Arabia.
So there's always backlashes to the modernizing, right?
Dying for television to 1975 TV.
There's not even anything good on.
I kind of get it, but you could, if you told this person, like, don't worry, once the internet shows up, no one's going to give a shit about television.
Yeah, I don't think cheers is even on the air yet, man.
Right.
What were you fighting for?
God.
While all this is going on, Prince Solomon, MBS's father and the current king, is keeping his head down and avoiding making himself a target.
He'd been born the 25th of Abdulaziz's 36 sons.
And on paper, again, the 25th son of the now-dead king shouldn't get anywhere close to the throne, right?
Like, you've got a lot of guys have to die for that to ever become your job.
And he's not going to become the king until like 2015.
But he is distinguished from the start from a lot of his brothers and half-brothers by the fact that he is willing to actually work.
Like he's not scared of actually doing a real job, which gets him promoted.
Yeah.
They're Nepo babies, but he's like Jack Quaid.
Whereas, right?
Where like, yeah, you're a Nepo baby of a you're fine.
You're fine.
It's cool.
I'd say he's the Nicholas Cage of King Abdulaziz's son.
Oh, right.
Where he's like, he's definitely like he gets a head up because of who he is, but he's also in face-off, you know.
A lot of people don't know that about the current king of Saudi Arabia, that he was in the movie Face Off, but he was.
Good for him.
It's not impossible.
You can't prove he wasn't.
So when this guy's half-brothers and brothers, they're all fighting throughout this period of time for the choicest positions from which they can largely just shunt oil money into their own pockets while not doing anything.
Solomon, Prince Salman, actually works and he focuses on building a base of support.
He sits down with citizens who need his royal help and he makes deals with business interests in his area who provide him with support throughout his life.
And he gets invited by influential clerics to his court to discuss like religious things and whatnot.
You know, he's kind of making himself well known with the thinkers and doers in Saudi society.
He develops a reputation for seriousness and a relative lack of corruption, which is not to say he's not corrupt, but he's not like primarily motivated by money.
In fact, he's poor by the standards of the Saudi royal family.
He's not a poor man, but he's not like just in it to suck cash out of the family oil money.
He's doing stuff.
Right, the bar is low.
Yeah, exactly.
Just like Nicholas Cage was poor after he had to give all that money back to Mongolia for buying dinosaur bones illegally.
Exactly.
Where you're like, he's poor, but like, yeah, he's Nicholas.
He's Nicholas Cage poor.
He's just going to do a couple more face-offs, you know, and he's going to be fine.
Now, some of the fact that he like has financial issues has to do with the fact that he has a lot of kids, like his dad, although not a crazy amount of kids, but he's still pretty kid-having.
His first wife, Sultana, gives him five sons and one daughter.
Now, because their branch of the family can't count on a vast fortune of grafted oil money, Prince Salman raises his sons to be hard workers who, in a reversal from the norm for science of the royal family, actually grow up knowing how to do stuff.
His oldest son, Fat, went to school in the West and developed a deep understanding of how to communicate with Americans and Europeans.
His second son, Sultan, joined the Saudi Air Force and became the first Muslim in space as an astronaut on the shuttle Discovery in 1985.
His third son, Ahmed, studied mining in Colorado and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy and then enlisted in the Saudi Air Force.
His fourth son, Abdul Aziz, went to work in the oil industry and became an expert on modernizing Saudi energy extraction methods.
While his kids work diligently, the kingdom struggles.
In 1979, the country, still reeling from Faisal's assassination, endures another shock.
On November 20th, 1979, 50,000 worshipers crowded into the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
As the Imam finishes giving his blessings, hundreds of armed men begin rushing forward, firing into the air and forcing people away from the doors.
A gang of militants grabbed the Imam's microphone and held a dagger to his neck.
All 51 doors to the mosque are chained shut.
Thousands of people are taken prisoner.
Now, the guy responsible for this massive act of terrorism is Johaiman al-Oitabi, an anti-monarchy Islamist insurgent who had put together a small army of around 600 rebels.
He and his followers hated the House of Saud for allying with Christian infidels in order to make their fortunes and accused the royal family of betraying Islam.
Al-Otaibi and his followers also believe that one of the group's leaders, Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi.
For the sake of brevity, it's enough to know that the Mahdi is basically Islam's equivalent of the second coming.
He's a messianic figure whose arrival heralds the end of days.
So these guys have now taken the holy mosque and Saudi soldiers spend days trying to retake it.
But the rebels have a commanding position and they massacre anyone who comes close.
The Saudi government has to reach out to France and get the help of an elite unit of commandos.
And I'm going to quote next from Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower.
Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief formal ceremony, these French commandos.
The commandos pumped gas into underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued.
With casualties climbing, Saudi forces drilled holes into the courtyard and dropped grenades into the rooms below, indiscriminately killing many hostages, but driving the remaining rebels into more open areas where they could be picked off by sharpshooters.
That is so messy.
It's so messy in Western.
Like, first off, is it not worse to fake that they're Muslim now?
Like, is that not worse?
Any mission that starts with, okay, we're going to need you to pretend to convert to Islam.
I would be like, all right, let's take a step back here.
Let's look at the bigger plan first.
Did none of these French commanders go like, sir?
Yeah.
They're like, it's fine.
You can lie.
You can lie.
It's fine to lie.
It's apparently fine to lie.
Yeah.
And also the whole guest didn't work.
I just would drop grenades indiscriminately into the mosque.
Oh, God.
That's where they're like, do we like, what's the point in converting to then drop grenade?
Like, how is this?
Is Allah not angry at this?
Like, what rule book are they going by?
Like, I'm trying to think of the afterlife of like, who is checking things off of like, is it the airbud idea where they're like, well, there's no rule that says they can't do this according to our rules, you did.
I would imagine just an imam with like 40 cigarettes in his mouth reading the rule.
Yeah, yeah, it's fine.
It takes two bloody weeks.
It's nuts stuff.
It takes two bloody weeks for the rebels to surrender.
The so-called Mahdi is killed during the fighting, while Al-O-Taibi and nearly 70 of his followers are captured alive.
In total, about a thousand people die during the fighting, a mix of soldiers, civilian worshippers, and insurgents.
63 militants are ultimately beheaded for their parts in the attack.
The fallout from all of this is substantial, as Karen House writes in The Man Who Would Be King.
Saudi religious clerics actually felt sympathy for the militants occupying the mosque.
The Imam's sermon that very morning lamented the kingdom's moral decay, and the revolt's leader had studied with the Imam he now held captive.
His goal was to end what he saw as the Al Saud's tolerance of infidel innovations, like women working and mixing with women, or the government's tolerance of Shias, a sect of Islam that he and his fanatics saw as heretics, not Muslims.
The Wahhabis clerics, they find themselves in a tough position after this, right?
Their power is tied to the House of Saud, who has just made kind of the biggest compromise with hardline Islam imaginable.
You know, like, it's kind of, it's pretty tough to top that.
Yeah.
So this is rough.
The most prominent of these clerics issue a fatwa, which doubles down on the legitimacy of the House of Saud, but demands that the current rulers of the kingdom stop flouting the rules.
As Karen House writes of what would come in the future, no more movies, no more alcohol, no more women on television, no more gender mixing anywhere, no more soccer to distract youth from studying Allah's Holy Quran.
Almost overnight, everything changed in Saudi Arabia.
During my first visit in 1978, I attended a dinner at oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani's house in Jeddah, where men and women mixed.
Alcohol was plentiful, and after dinner, the minister and his guests watched a table feed of the 1978 World Cup soccer final between Argentina and the Netherlands.
Just the sort of evening deplored by religious clerics.
So no more fun.
No more fun is going to be the rule in Saudi Arabia after this point, but there's also going to be no more fun for a minute here because we're going to have our second ad break.
That's her fun.
Yeah, that's good.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Playing Along Returns00:10:03
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
How are you feeling about Saudi Arabia, Dave?
It's going yeah, always.
Like I said, I'm an expert on this, so everything you're telling me are things I already already knew.
Yeah.
I'm just humoring you, you know.
I'm like, it's like when you talk to a kid about Star Wars, you know, and the kids discovering things, and you're like, uh-huh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm just imagining now in like the international like anti-terrorist commando handbook, they're like the they're like that one character in the mummy where they just have a bunch of different religious symbols on necklaces that they're like, okay, which country am I going into?
All right.
This is the religion I am for the time being.
It's tough, man.
When you inject money into any situation, everybody in that situation loses their goddamn minds.
Yeah.
That's the one constant rule of the world is that as soon as people get access to billions of dollars in oil money, they go fucking crazy.
They lose their minds.
A lot of why Saudi Arabia is so fucked up in like the religious ways that it is and has been for most of the modern era comes down to the fact that they were following a pretty natural path of people being like, I don't know, we're rich now.
Do we need to abide by all of these crazy religious strictures?
Like, we're okay being Muslim.
We don't have to be such hardliners about all of the batshit stuff.
And then there's this hideous terrorist attack, and the government responds in like the worst way they possibly could.
They're like, terrorism wins.
Yeah.
So many people will be like, okay, but we're going to become assholes again.
Don't worry.
We did drop grenades in the mosque.
We understand that's a problem, but women will no longer get to be on television.
Are you cool with us now?
Can we keep being rich?
Yeah.
And it turns out, yeah.
It just, I don't know.
You just, it's that battle between like, I get the idea of having a set of beliefs.
Uh, not necessarily these beliefs, but beliefs that you're like, you stand by and you have certain rules in your life.
When you have tried to apply that to a country, it always gets messy where it's like, no, I need everybody to be doing this stuff.
Meanwhile, the country is like, we just want to have like good relationship with our neighbors and prosper and make money or make a stupid amount of money in this case.
And it's just like, it's just not going to work.
These, all these factors are not going to work.
Or maybe they do.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, it's going to work because of the amount of money behind them.
It's going to work longer than it probably should have, right?
That's true.
It's like going to like Prince's house where you're like, he has enough money that he also can have like weird rules at his house, right?
Yeah.
Everybody's just going to go like, all right, fine.
Yeah, sure, Prince.
I mean, I get to hang out at your house.
So that seems cool.
Yeah, exactly.
It's also a case where, like, okay, so you had French commandos fake being a Muslim and then drop grenades in the holiest mosque.
And the consequence of this is women don't get to be on TV anymore, huh?
Okay.
Yeah, that seems like you're really hitting the main problem.
Okay.
So for the next 20 years and change after this point, fundamentalist Islam becomes more and more entrenched in Saudi Arabia, as is the power of the religious police to punish men and women who violated even the smallest rules.
Karen notes that before 1979, it had been acceptable for foreign women, especially to go about their business without their heads covered.
This becomes impossible by the start of the 1980s.
As the clerics crack down, the House of Saud goes through a spate of particularly weak and incompetent kings.
King Faisal is followed by King Khalid, who wanted the job so little that he hands power right away to his son, the Crown Prince, who succeeds him in 1982.
This guy, King Fahd, was more interested in chilling on his yacht than governing, and he half-asses the job himself until he has a stroke in 1995.
It was into this Saudi Arabia, saddled with a series of basket case kings and riven with financial corruption, straining under the weight of increasingly radical and restrictive religious laws, that the subject of our episodes for this week and next week, Muhammad bin Salman, is born on August 31st, 1985.
And we will talk about his life and how he comes to power in the subsequent episodes.
But, Dave, this has been part one.
You're introduced.
Sorry, I didn't realize I'm older than him.
That's yes, you are.
That is Sarah Halmer.
He's a little older than me, but not much.
Yeah, he could have us killed today.
And he's younger.
He's had a lot of people killed.
He's had a lot of people killed, you know?
Yeah.
I feel like I could take him in a straight fight, but yeah, he does have planes and stuff.
And I don't have planes.
Right, not yet.
Not yet.
Yeah.
It's like learning that Finn Wolfhard was born after 9-11, where it's just like, man, I haven't done shit with my life.
Yeah.
Well, it's also if we'd had a Finn Wolfhard in 2001, they never would have tried to take those towers.
There would have been too high a chance that a Finn Wolfhard might have been on the planes, you know?
He's too precious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's too they would see.
Would they be scared of his name with you?
We're like, no, they wouldn't want to risk Finn Wolfhard.
No.
They name his Finn Wolf.
They wouldn't take that danger.
Anyway.
Anyway.
What were you saying?
Something about a podcast?
Where can people find you on theinnerweb.com?
I can be reached at.
So just Google GameFully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-Y Unemployed.
Like Robert, like you said, it's a movie podcast.
It's just bitching about movies.
Very low stakes, but fun.
And then, yeah, we have like our Patreon where we have a bunch of extra stuff.
We've made like 2,000 podcasts.
It's too many.
But you can find that.
I'm the head writer at Some More News.
Again, Google Some More News.
Completely different vibe than the movie podcast thing.
So if you like politics and like doom, or you like people complaining about Marvel movies, I got you.
I got you covered for those two things.
So check that out.
Excellent.
Well, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards.
We will be back in due time.
But until we're back, think about us every waking second.
Don't think about driving.
Close your eyes if you're driving right now.
You know, get on the road, close your eyes, drift off, fall asleep, you know?
Yep.
Let, you know, like let instinct guide you.
Yeah, it'll be fine.
Yeah.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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