Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia
Aired: 2026-01-27
Duration: 01:17:57


=== Welcome Back After COVID (02:58) ===

[00:00:01]  Cool zone media.
[00:00:05]  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we're continuing to talk about Muhammad bin Salman and the Saudi royal family with our guest, David Bell.
[00:00:16]  Welcome back to the show, Dave.
[00:00:17]  It's been a little while between our first and last recordings.
[00:00:21]  Oh, it's been the first recording of this one.
[00:00:23]  Have you been?
[00:00:23]  I got COVID.
[00:00:25]  Not currently, but I got it.
[00:00:26]  Nice.
[00:00:27]  Yeah, I also, Robert, last night, I had a dream about you.
[00:00:31]  You had a dream about me.
[00:00:32]  Way more.
[00:00:33]  Upsetting.
[00:00:34]  Okay.
[00:00:35]  So my dream was that we were taking a shower together in bathing suits.
[00:00:40]  Hot.
[00:00:41]  And then I had to.
[00:00:42]  That makes it TV appropriate.
[00:00:44]  Yep.
[00:00:44]  Then I had to poop in the dream and left the shower.
[00:00:48]  Dave.
[00:00:48]  Hey, Alex, where are we moving to here?
[00:00:51]  This is the dream.
[00:00:52]  This is the dream.
[00:00:52]  And I went to the bathroom.
[00:00:54]  Your dream isn't the dream.
[00:00:56]  Yes, because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop in real life.
[00:00:59]  So I was like, oh, thank God.
[00:01:00]  That wasn't life.
[00:01:01]  It's just a dream.
[00:01:02]  Yeah.
[00:01:02]  I had to poop in the dream.
[00:01:04]  So I left the shower and Alex Schmitty was in the bathroom.
[00:01:07]  Our other old roommate.
[00:01:08]  Making coffee in the bathroom.
[00:01:10]  And that was the dream.
[00:01:12]  Classic.
[00:01:12]  Oh, I should have started coffee.
[00:01:14]  I should have started with the fact that I have terrible dreams.
[00:01:18]  And that was the dream.
[00:01:19]  That doesn't sound like a good one.
[00:01:21]  It wasn't bad.
[00:01:22]  It was fine.
[00:01:24]  I don't know that I'd call that fine.
[00:01:25]  Well, Dave, thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream.
[00:01:28]  I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it among our listener base.
[00:01:33]  I'm sure people are going to react normally to your shower story.
[00:01:39]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:02:55]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:02:58]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.

=== The Big Problem with Lewis Clark (15:59) ===

[00:03:00]  That's so funny.
[00:03:01]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:03:09]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:17]  What's up, everyone?
[00:03:18]  I'm Ago Modern.
[00:03:19]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:03:23]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:03:26]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:03:28]  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.
[00:03:34]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:03:37]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:03:46]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:03:47]  There's a lot of life.
[00:03:49]  Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:04:00]  You know who else reacts normally to things?
[00:04:03]  Who?
[00:04:04]  Me?
[00:04:04]  The Saudi royal family, you know, because they're all basically, aside from the billions and billions of dollars in oil money and the fact that they don't have to work and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves to them, you know, they're just down-to-earth, regular guys like Tim the Toolman Taylor from the show that maybe 20% of our audience remembers.
[00:04:24]  Yeah, the guy, the guy, the criminal guy, Tim Allen, Tim Allen, a simple everyman who runs a television show out of his house.
[00:04:34]  Anyway, um, so one of the few, uh, as we've stated, most of like the young princes are not super productive individuals, right?
[00:04:45]  They're mostly spending their time kissing ass to try and get like a better cut of the family fortune, um, doing as little as possible and grafting off of like the money that should be going to support the Saudi state.
[00:04:58]  There's a few exceptions to this rule, right?
[00:05:02]  Uh, Muhammad bin Salman, the subject of our episodes, is one.
[00:05:05]  His father, the soon-to-be King Salman, is another.
[00:05:09]  And another one of the exceptions to this rule was Muhammad bin Nayef.
[00:05:12]  Born in Jeddah at the end of August 1959, he had more than a quarter century on his younger cousin.
[00:05:18]  His father was Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, full son of the great King Abdul Aziz and a full brother of two other kings, Fahd and the new King Salman.
[00:05:27]  He was thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump than anyone ever thought that Muhammad bin Salman was going to be, right?
[00:05:34]  Like he just kind of seems like a much better bet as which one of these guys is going to actually like make it to the high seat.
[00:05:43]  His father, Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince, and he'd risen to power first when his older brother, the Minister of the Interior, was assassinated by that other prince who was angry about TV being legal.
[00:05:55]  I know there's a lot of princes in this story.
[00:05:58]  And they're in the kitchen killing each other.
[00:05:59]  Yeah.
[00:06:00]  Yeah.
[00:06:01]  Nayef succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now working directly with the Wahhabists, who traditionally had allied with the House of Saud in order to push their hardline fundamentalist policies.
[00:06:13]  Prince Nayef became what the Brookings Institute described as an arch reactionary, and he was the orchestrator behind many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism.
[00:06:25]  That's the Black Prince, right?
[00:06:27]  He violently suppressed the movement to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy, like in the UK, telling one interviewer, I don't want to be Queen Elizabeth, which who does?
[00:06:37]  Who does?
[00:06:40]  You know what?
[00:06:41]  I might take it.
[00:06:44]  She had like a nice house.
[00:06:45]  She had, yeah, well, not now.
[00:06:47]  She had some corgis, you know.
[00:06:49]  This actually came up on Margaret Kildoy's show before, and we decided I would make a great Queen Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.
[00:06:58]  Yeah.
[00:06:58]  Oh, yeah, that would be very effective.
[00:07:01]  I would be a great Queen Elizabeth.
[00:07:02]  I'd go mad with power.
[00:07:03]  And I love corgis.
[00:07:05]  Yeah.
[00:07:07]  So he earned the black prince earned his nickname because of how harsh his policies were to the non-citizen worker population in the kingdom.
[00:07:14]  So it was noteworthy when his son, MBN, we've got MBS and NBN, and they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a public person spurning his own country in favor of the West.
[00:07:25]  So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia.
[00:07:28]  He's not interested in attending a school in the Arab world.
[00:07:32]  Instead, he goes to like the oppositest part of the world he possibly can.
[00:07:36]  Portland, Oregon.
[00:07:38]  I know Portland shows up.
[00:07:41]  You're going to ask what?
[00:07:43]  I was going to guess Berkeley.
[00:07:45]  Yeah, I was close.
[00:07:47]  He goes to fucking MBN, goes to Portland, Oregon for college.
[00:07:51]  He attends both Lewis and Clark College and Portland State University.
[00:07:55]  Incredible.
[00:07:57]  Yeah, really funny.
[00:07:58]  He does not graduate from either.
[00:08:01]  Most articles will say that he's a graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU.
[00:08:05]  Neither is true.
[00:08:06]  I can't even, I can't even confirm that he got a degree.
[00:08:10]  Everyone says he's got a BA, right?
[00:08:13]  The book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Stig Stinsley claims that he studied for his master's degree in political science and graduated in 1981.
[00:08:21]  Although, again, no one says where.
[00:08:24]  Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark and PSU and he got a degree, but nobody says where the degree is from.
[00:08:31]  And we've confirmed it wasn't either of those colleges.
[00:08:34]  I don't know.
[00:08:36]  Yeah, Lewis and Clark College, a guy that Mohammed bin Salman sparred with came here.
[00:08:41]  Yeah.
[00:08:42]  Yeah.
[00:08:42]  I don't know, maybe not the best ad.
[00:08:46]  So, yeah, I don't know that he actually did graduate.
[00:08:50]  Stig writes that he took, quote, courses on security issues with the FBI from 1985 to 1988 and trained with Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist units in London from 1992 to 1994.
[00:09:01]  In 1994, he began working regularly with his father, Interior Minister Naef in Riyadh.
[00:09:06]  And I think this is a situation where he's probably not that great a student.
[00:09:11]  I don't think he would have qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland Yard based on his own merits.
[00:09:17]  But because he's a prince and he's someone who is going to be a big part of the Saudi state, when he expresses, I'm interested in anti-terrorism work, right?
[00:09:26]  I'm interested in like training with Western law enforcement organizations and counterterrorism.
[00:09:31]  They're all like, well, this is our chance to have a man on the inside, right?
[00:09:35]  This is our chance to have like a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like a spy, but a guy who's who we know is like a friend to us, who we feel like we can trust, as opposed to this, this regime's kind of a black box to us otherwise, right?
[00:09:46]  It helps, it helps with your cred.
[00:09:48]  It just puts it's just good.
[00:09:50]  I get it, where it's like, all right, you might not, you might not be perfect.
[00:09:53]  It's like when the X-Files had Stephen King wrote an episode, and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show, the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King.
[00:09:59]  Let's throw him on.
[00:10:00]  And he didn't.
[00:10:01]  You know, that episode wasn't the best.
[00:10:02]  It was really, it was also heavily rewritten.
[00:10:05]  Yeah, it would have had to be.
[00:10:06]  Yeah.
[00:10:07]  Yeah.
[00:10:07]  It's been a haunted table.
[00:10:09]  Yeah, they should have let Mohamed bin Naef write an episode of The X-Files.
[00:10:12]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:13]  He was training with the FBI in the 90s.
[00:10:15]  He could have done it.
[00:10:16]  He must have been watching the X-Files, right?
[00:10:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:19]  He must have an opinion on Fox Mulder.
[00:10:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:23]  So it's unclear to me how much the elder and younger Naef coordinated here.
[00:10:28]  Because remember, his dad, the black prince, is this guy who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused on we need to crack down on anything that like seems like someone having fun in the kingdom, right?
[00:10:39]  Whereas his son is like, I'm friendly with the West.
[00:10:42]  I went to Portland for fucking college.
[00:10:44]  I'm training with the FBI.
[00:10:46]  He's making, he's putting out into the world, at least image of he's much more of a liberal guy.
[00:10:51]  He's much less of a hardliner, right?
[00:10:53]  I bet he knows where to get some great acid.
[00:10:57]  He probably did at one point.
[00:10:58]  Yeah.
[00:11:00]  Like there's several places in that list where I feel like he knows how to get good ass.
[00:11:05]  Yeah, the FBI Academy.
[00:11:06]  I bet they had some great shit.
[00:11:07]  Oh, yeah.
[00:11:11]  So it's hard to say to what extent is this, he and his dad are kind of working together and knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the West and can seem like he's modern and someone who can, you know, be arm in arm with the clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity.
[00:11:32]  But there do seem to have been some real clashes between them, right?
[00:11:36]  One of them is over the fact that his dad, the black prince, doesn't take seriously the dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
[00:11:44]  Like he keeps being told, hey, there's something brewing in your country.
[00:11:48]  And he's like, nah, I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going to be like two words that show up next to each other in the public imagination.
[00:11:58]  Per then analysis by the Brookings Institute, Nayef was conspicuously slow to recognize that Al-Qaeda posed a threat to the kingdom.
[00:12:05]  He had become friendly with bin Laden during the Russian-Afghan war when bin Laden was allied with the Mujahideen and viewed him as being exclusively focused on defeating the Soviets.
[00:12:13]  Nayef believed Al-Qaeda's reputation as a terrorist organization was a product of American propaganda and was sure that Al-Qaeda posed no real threat to the kingdom, a delusion he had in common with much of the royal family.
[00:12:24]  Prince Naeff was not popular with the CIA.
[00:12:26]  He was seen as uncooperative and for good reason.
[00:12:29]  In 1996, when Shiite terrorists bombed a U.S. Air Force base in Dahran and killed 19 Americans, the CIA asked Naef for information on the terrorists and their ties to Iran.
[00:12:38]  Despite the kingdom and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Naeff stonewalled the U.S. Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd attack Iran and he wanted to avoid war.
[00:12:48]  Bruce Rydell, author of that bookings piece, was a CIA analyst at the time, and he claims the general opinion over here is that Naeff was simply un-American, right?
[00:12:58]  And that's like, I don't want to like give too much credit to the analytic skills of the pre- or post-9-11 CIA, right?
[00:13:05]  For sure.
[00:13:06]  For sure.
[00:13:06]  So my assumption is that Bruce is like wrong about some part of the analysis there.
[00:13:11]  I think maybe it's just that he's not as much anti-American as he is like anti-having a problem.
[00:13:16]  And if Al-Qaeda is a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a problem.
[00:13:20]  Because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are close to bin Laden.
[00:13:24]  A lot of people in like the ruling class have been funneling money to him and organizations that are related to al-Qaeda.
[00:13:30]  And if they're really dangerous, then there's a big problem.
[00:13:33]  And there's just this, it may just be the deep human need to like not have a problem, right?
[00:13:38]  That's part of what's going on with Naef.
[00:13:40]  No one likes to start shit.
[00:13:42]  I get that.
[00:13:43]  Where it's like, maybe Obama, maybe he'll, you know, call him Obama Osama bin Laden.
[00:13:50]  Maybe he'll settle down.
[00:13:52]  Right.
[00:13:53]  He'll calm down.
[00:13:54]  Yeah.
[00:13:55]  And MBN has son.
[00:13:57]  Sorry, forgive me.
[00:13:58]  I'm, I'm, I'm less educated on like, what, where, what, like, what was Osama bin Laden's position before 9-11?
[00:14:05]  Like, I, oh, I mean, like, a lot of people only heard of him until after.
[00:14:09]  He bombed, I mean, he and Al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 93, I think it was, right?
[00:14:15]  Uh, okay, so he had a previous one.
[00:14:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:18]  Now, it's very clear to anyone paying attention that bin Laden is going to continue to be a problem for like the kingdom and its relations with the rest of the world.
[00:14:29]  Um, but there's this big doubt with a lot of guys.
[00:14:31]  It's like, are they really terrorists?
[00:14:33]  Is this the Americans making all this stuff up, right?
[00:14:37]  And the black prince's son, Mohammed bin Nayeff, MBN, seems to have been one of the rare people high up in the royal family because of his training with these Western agencies, who actually is like, no, Al-Qaeda is probably an issue, and they'll be an issue for us too, right?
[00:14:53]  His feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more in line with how the Americans are feeling, right?
[00:14:58]  And so he spends a lot of the 90s burnishing his credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies, being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family who sees things clearly that you can work with.
[00:15:10]  There's a big moment of conflict between the elder NIF and the CIA in 1998.
[00:15:16]  Vice President Al Gore goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia alongside Bruce Rydell, who's now working for the NSC.
[00:15:22]  They met both NAIFs and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack the U.S. consulate while they were there.
[00:15:31]  Up to that point, Al-Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right?
[00:15:36]  And so now, while Al Gore is in country, they bust a plan to attack the consulate while the U.S. vice president there.
[00:15:42]  And that really rattles people.
[00:15:44]  And suddenly, Mohammed bin Nayev is the only guy who's been saying, like, hey, we should be taking Al-Qaeda seriously.
[00:15:51]  And suddenly he gets a lot of attention as like, oh, maybe he was right.
[00:15:55]  Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time.
[00:15:57]  And we should be listening to this guy when it comes to security advice, right?
[00:16:02]  Yeah, going back to like, people don't like conflict, right?
[00:16:05]  And if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem.
[00:16:08]  That guy's a problem.
[00:16:09]  We'll go as long as we can up to the point where it's like, oh, wait, they're going to hurt me?
[00:16:14]  Oh, well, we got to do something about this.
[00:16:17]  Oh, my.
[00:16:18]  Oh, my goodness.
[00:16:19]  If Al Gore gets killed by Al-Qaeda while I'm in charge of security, that probably is the problem for me.
[00:16:25]  That's bad.
[00:16:25]  That's right.
[00:16:26]  Like, I probably don't do well afterwards.
[00:16:29]  Yeah, no, I'm finding a new career after that.
[00:16:32]  Yeah.
[00:16:33]  So in 1999, MBN is appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security.
[00:16:40]  By the fall of 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government to talk to about counterterrorism.
[00:16:47]  And then comes 9-11, right?
[00:16:50]  You know, you're well aware.
[00:16:52]  Yeah.
[00:16:52]  So basically, there were some big buildings in New York and then there weren't as a result of these guys who learned how to fly, but not all the way, right?
[00:17:05]  That's the brief description I would give them.
[00:17:07]  70% of how to fly.
[00:17:08]  Yeah.
[00:17:09]  Yeah.
[00:17:09]  70%.
[00:17:10]  Put that in the textbook.
[00:17:13]  Yeah.
[00:17:15]  That's basically what happened, right?
[00:17:17]  There were some other things.
[00:17:18]  Thanks.
[00:17:18]  You're not wrong.
[00:17:20]  That's what's so funny.
[00:17:22]  I hate to sound, listen, I hate to sound really old, but I'm realizing that there are young people now that do genuinely have to like learn about 9-11 in school now.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, we forgot.
[00:17:33]  Well, they did.
[00:17:34]  Yeah.
[00:17:35]  So they never knew.
[00:17:37]  Yeah.
[00:17:37]  A massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment, right?
[00:17:41]  This is as big a problem as it could possibly be because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.
[00:17:47]  Yeah, that's a pickle.
[00:17:48]  Kind of their deal, right?
[00:17:50]  Bush was rattling his saber at Iraq and they'd had fuck all to do with al-Qaeda.
[00:17:54]  Like right after the attacks, we start making, it starts becoming clear we're going to move on Iraq pretty soon.
[00:18:00]  They had WMDs, Roberts.
[00:18:03]  WMDs.
[00:18:04]  So obviously, if you're thinking about this from the perspective of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up Iraq and they had nothing to do with this.
[00:18:11]  We had a lot to do with this.
[00:18:13]  Not only were 15 of the 19 hijackers Saudi, but a lot of guys in the Saudi royal family were shuffling money to places that wound up getting to al-Qaeda, right?
[00:18:24]  One way or the other.
[00:18:25]  We're in a trouble.
[00:18:27]  And they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a big problem.
[00:18:29]  He's a big problem.
[00:18:30]  And then he hit somebody trade center.
[00:18:33]  Yeah.
[00:18:33]  Yeah.
[00:18:33]  And then you hit like the guy next to him because you wanted to hit that guy instead.
[00:18:38]  That's essentially it, right?
[00:18:39]  It's like, we already had a problem.
[00:18:41]  We didn't like Saddam for a while and we're like, that's it, Saddam.
[00:18:45]  The last straw.
[00:18:46]  You did it.
[00:18:47]  Yeah.
[00:18:48]  And so there's this worry that like, well, how do we know they're not going to fuck with us next, right?
[00:18:53]  Because we kind of, we actually have it coming a lot more than Iraq does.

=== Fistfight in the Kingdom (02:59) ===

[00:18:59]  And obviously, you know, it's not just that bin Laden, the guy who plans the attack or does is seen as planning the attack is the man is a Saudi too.
[00:19:07]  But the black prince and most of his peers had scoffed at the idea that al-Qaeda was dangerous.
[00:19:11]  You know, it doesn't take a bright person to see that the royal family is in danger here.
[00:19:15]  MBN is the new blood.
[00:19:17]  He's not tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation.
[00:19:20]  He's got good connections to the U.S. government, particularly in the CIA and the FBI, and he starts using them.
[00:19:26]  And then in 2003, something happened that would electrify his career.
[00:19:30]  On February 14th, on the holy day of Ayd al-Adha, Osama bin Laden issued a communique through Al-Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the last caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies.
[00:19:42]  This mirrored their behavior supporting the U.S. and its wars against Muslims.
[00:19:46]  He predicted that the U.S. would use air bases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq.
[00:19:51]  The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the kingdom, or at least this was bin Laden announcing that he was widening the scope of the existing war to include the kingdom, right?
[00:20:00]  Al-Qaeda is now at war with the kingdom, at least with the kingdom's royal rulers.
[00:20:06]  In May, Al-Qaeda operatives launched an attack on a Riyadh compound where Western military advisers worked with Saudi officers.
[00:20:13]  Eight Americans and two Australians died, among others.
[00:20:16]  CIA Director George Tennett flew to the Saudi capital and warned the crown prince, Al-Qaeda is going to target your family next.
[00:20:24]  Just a few months later, Mohammed bin Nayef is made the number two man in the entire Ministry of the Interior.
[00:20:29]  It was a vote of confidence in his ability to orchestrate the kingdom's response to al-Qaeda and to effectively reform its security and intelligence agencies.
[00:20:38]  Tenet would later write that the CIA considered Mohammed bin Nayef its number one man in Saudi Arabia.
[00:20:43]  Rydell writes, MBN led the counteroffensive.
[00:20:46]  The interior ministry issued lists of the most wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists and then proceeded to hunt them down ruthlessly.
[00:20:52]  Whenever any of the men on a list were eliminated in firefights or ambushes, the ministry would update the list with the names of the next most wanted Al-Qaeda fighters.
[00:20:59]  It was a tough and dangerous time.
[00:21:01]  Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or at least sent their families away.
[00:21:05]  MBN was the face of the Saudi war on Al-Qaeda, appearing on television and then and in the newspapers to explain the threat the kingdom was facing.
[00:21:13]  So he becomes like the number the figure who is like leading the Saudi war effort against Al-Qaeda.
[00:21:19]  He's like both in propaganda, his face is everywhere.
[00:21:22]  And the West sees him as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this response to al-Qaeda violence in the country.
[00:21:28]  And within the royal family, he's seen as the guy who is protecting us from this like surge of violence from this dangerous and unpredictable network, right?
[00:21:36]  Like he's he's really, if you're looking at who's going to follow as like, who's going to be of this generation, like the guy who's in line to be king, Mohammed bin Nayef is looking like someone who might be crown prince and then king one day, right?
[00:21:51]  Like he's he's really distinguished himself far more than bin Salman has, who's really nothing at this point in time, right?

=== David Cohen and Talented People (05:25) ===

[00:21:58]  Right.
[00:21:58]  Yeah.
[00:21:59]  Um, no, he's gonna fight, he's gonna fight Osama bin Laden.
[00:22:02]  They're gonna fistfight in a volcano.
[00:22:04]  He's gonna fistfight bin Laden and make himself the king.
[00:22:07]  Yeah, as we know, kings are supposed to, as a king, defeat one dragon.
[00:22:11]  And Osama bin Laden's kind of a dragon, right?
[00:22:15]  Yeah.
[00:22:15]  Yeah.
[00:22:16]  You said he was the perceived designer of 9-11.
[00:22:19]  Does that mean like, was he like the Jon Favreau of it?
[00:22:23]  Like, was it like the oh, there's other people?
[00:22:24]  He's like the man, he's the Matt Groening of 9-11.
[00:22:27]  We're like, he's a lot of people.
[00:22:28]  Yeah, we're at least the same time.
[00:22:30]  He's like the other.
[00:22:31]  But he's not, like, Conan O'Brien has a lot more to do with planning 9-11 than Matt Groening, right?
[00:22:38]  If we're, if we're Simpsons name, yeah.
[00:22:41]  Yeah, like they were, yes, like he's in charge, but there were a lot of talented people under.
[00:22:46]  Yeah, there's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making the show work underneath it.
[00:22:50]  Yes.
[00:22:51]  Got it.
[00:22:52]  Who's the David X Cohen of Al-Qaeda?
[00:22:54]  Find out when we come back from, you know, this break.
[00:23:00]  That was a really good one.
[00:23:07]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:23:11]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:23:15]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:23:17]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:23:21]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:23:25]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:23:28]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:23:30]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:23:35]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:23:37]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:23:39]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:23:41]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:23:44]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:23:46]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:23:48]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:23:53]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:23:54]  Trust me, babe.
[00:23:55]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:05]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:24:11]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:24:15]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:24:21]  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.
[00:24:30]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:24:36]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:24:39]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:24:42]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:24:44]  That's so funny.
[00:24:45]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:24:53]  Say you love me.
[00:24:56]  You know I.
[00:24:58]  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.
[00:25:05]  What's up, everyone?
[00:25:06]  I'm Ago Modem.
[00:25:07]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:25:15]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:25:18]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:25:21]  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.
[00:25:26]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:25:29]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:25:30]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:25:33]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:25:38]  Yeah.
[00:25:38]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:25:41]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:25:43]  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.
[00:25:51]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:25:54]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:26:00]  Just hang in there.
[00:26:01]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:26:03]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:26:04]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:26:05]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:14]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:26:20]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:26:26]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:26:29]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:26:32]  I doctored the test once.
[00:26:34]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:26:37]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:26:41]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:26:44]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:26:46]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:26:48]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
[00:26:50]  My mind was blown.
[00:26:52]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:26:54]  This is Love Trap.
[00:26:56]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:26:58]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:27:02]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:27:09]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:27:13]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Laura Owens Indicted for Fraud (15:44) ===

[00:27:24]  We're back.
[00:27:25]  David X. Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of 9-11.
[00:27:29]  Yes, that's right.
[00:27:31]  Thank you.
[00:27:32]  You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto figures within Al-Qaeda.
[00:27:37]  Very easy to do.
[00:27:39]  You can graph all of the South Park guys onto a member of ISIS, you know?
[00:27:44]  That's just the way that's just the way things work.
[00:27:46]  I'm glad to know where they all stand.
[00:27:50]  Yeah.
[00:27:51]  Yeah, I would say like South Park has more of an ISIS vibe, whereas The Simpsons is more like an al-Qaeda kind of deal.
[00:27:57]  So ISIS is like two guys, like two guys.
[00:28:02]  And then like a small handful.
[00:28:04]  But the two guys do all of that.
[00:28:06]  I feel like we need some kind of org chart family tree type situation to get clarification.
[00:28:13]  Where does Family Guy fall in this matter, Robert?
[00:28:17]  Family Guy just is an act of terrorism.
[00:28:19]  I was going to say it's one to one.
[00:28:21]  Yeah, it's one to one.
[00:28:22]  So we're back and we're talking about Muhammad bin Nayev leading the kingdom's response to a surge of terrorism by Al-Qaeda inside the country.
[00:28:33]  Now, a major characteristic of Nayef's response was a commitment to avoiding the kind of collateral damage that would have made it look like the situation was totally out of control, right?
[00:28:43]  You don't want to be blowing up too many things or killing too many civilians as you search out for these al-Qaeda operatives because it makes it seem to the people like maybe the maybe the royal family has no idea what's going on.
[00:28:55]  Maybe you guys are completely out of your depth here, right?
[00:29:00]  You know, these days you can do all sorts of things to civilians, it seems, in the name of searching things.
[00:29:05]  But yes, generally, you don't want to do that.
[00:29:09]  You used to be able to, we used to be a proper country, you know?
[00:29:12]  Yeah.
[00:29:13]  So he distinguished himself from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on outreach to the families of dead al-Qaeda operatives.
[00:29:20]  Parents were told their children had been victims and received a degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout from their children's actions.
[00:29:27]  Rather than being suspected themselves and told that like your child is, you know, you should be ashamed of your kid.
[00:29:34]  They were told like, no, your kid was a victim of terrorism too, right?
[00:29:39]  And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists.
[00:29:42]  If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets, then more of them are going to be sympathetic to al-Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem.
[00:29:52]  Smart?
[00:29:52]  So he's trying, yeah, he doesn't want to do what the U.S. does.
[00:29:56]  I've used that excuse in my family before to get out of all sorts of things.
[00:30:02]  No, you guys are victims in this too.
[00:30:04]  Yeah.
[00:30:05]  His responses were generally seen as effective, reducing Al-Qaeda's influence in the kingdom.
[00:30:09]  Perhaps the best evidence of that was the fact that Bin Laden and company considered him a strategic target worth expending resources to take down.
[00:30:16]  Here's how Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on Mohammed bin Nayef's life.
[00:30:21]  That focus on engagement almost killed him.
[00:30:23]  In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with Al-Qaeda in Yemen announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to MBN in person.
[00:30:32]  The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him, and sat next to him.
[00:30:38]  The man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBM what were described at the time as light wounds.
[00:30:46]  Now, first off, that's rough.
[00:30:49]  A butt bomb?
[00:30:50]  That's bad.
[00:30:51]  That's a bad assassination attempt.
[00:30:54]  I was going to say, if you're right now, you're right next to him.
[00:30:59]  And you set off a butt bomb that to me, and then it doesn't hurt the person next to him.
[00:31:03]  What that sounds like without knowing more information is that your ass exploded and everybody turned and went, oh my God, what happened?
[00:31:11]  Are you okay?
[00:31:12]  And you're on the ground like, I need help.
[00:31:14]  My ass just exploded.
[00:31:16]  Like, I might even try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb.
[00:31:18]  I was just like, I don't know what happened.
[00:31:20]  An accident, an accident.
[00:31:22]  No, I think he blows into pieces because as a spoiler, the public note is that MBN was barely wounded.
[00:31:29]  There's a lot of evidence that he's pretty badly hurt by this.
[00:31:33]  That maybe he's actually never the same afterwards.
[00:31:36]  Again, when a man explodes first, the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a man's ass.
[00:31:42]  So among other things, you're going to get infected, right?
[00:31:45]  Like his guts and stuff are hitting, are getting, are piercing your body.
[00:31:50]  Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that.
[00:31:54]  A man's ass exploded next to me.
[00:31:57]  Like, that's all I'm talking about for the rest of my life.
[00:32:01]  Yeah, a really unique form of PTSD.
[00:32:04]  Yeah.
[00:32:05]  So the next year, MBN's forces expose an al-Qaeda plot to smuggle bombs into the U.S. via shipping containers.
[00:32:11]  The bombs are intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making MBN into a hero at home and within U.S. intelligence agencies.
[00:32:18]  He continued to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years, where he developed a close working relationship with CIA director David Petraeus.
[00:32:26]  He also got on tight with John Feiner, chief of staff for Secretary of State John Kerry.
[00:32:32]  He would later tell a reporter that MBN's people saved my butt more than once, which given what had just happened to MBN, may have been literally.
[00:32:41]  John Kerry's words, someone's going to butt-bomb him.
[00:32:44]  No, no, he literally saved my ass.
[00:32:47]  I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it.
[00:32:49]  Yeah.
[00:32:51]  I don't know if he meant that as a joke.
[00:32:53]  I don't know that John Kerry's that funny a man.
[00:32:55]  Yeah.
[00:32:56]  And then a terrorist somewhere is like, oh, I never thought to put the bomb in their butt.
[00:33:00]  In his butt.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:03]  Salmon comes to power as king in 2015, as we talked about last episode.
[00:33:08]  And he very quickly removes the guy who had been crown prince that the old king had wanted to succeed after King Salman.
[00:33:16]  And he makes Muhammad bin Nayef the crown prince.
[00:33:19]  And this is why, right?
[00:33:20]  MBN is the natural pick to be crown prince because he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort, right?
[00:33:28]  He's the guy who protected the country, who saved it from al-Qaeda.
[00:33:31]  He's put his ass.
[00:33:34]  He put his ass on the line.
[00:33:36]  He took someone else's ass in an explosion, right?
[00:33:39]  And a lot of Americans cheer this development as the best thing to happen to U.S. power in the Middle East for generations.
[00:33:45]  The CIA could hardly have handpicked a better successor.
[00:33:48]  Best of all, as they saw it, Naef was a legitimate hero in Saudi Arabia.
[00:33:52]  He wasn't someone whose reputation they had to prop up.
[00:33:55]  We don't have to make this guy into a puppet.
[00:33:57]  He's already a hero, right?
[00:33:59]  Right.
[00:34:00]  Yeah.
[00:34:01]  It's a great bet.
[00:34:03]  So April of 2015, Naef is made the crown prince.
[00:34:06]  And up through 2016, it doesn't seem like Muhammad bin Salman, who, again, is the subject of these episodes.
[00:34:13]  I know we've had to explain a lot of other guys.
[00:34:15]  He doesn't like he's got any chance of taking the crown or power for himself.
[00:34:20]  He's got real Jeb energy.
[00:34:22]  He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right?
[00:34:25]  Yeah, Jeb.
[00:34:26]  Yeah.
[00:34:26]  He's a real pleased collapse.
[00:34:28]  Got him managing the family office and everything like that.
[00:34:33]  And he's taking on a lot of power for himself, but he doesn't seem very special.
[00:34:38]  And MBN just seems unassailable, right?
[00:34:41]  Like, how could you possibly compete with this guy?
[00:34:43]  You're 20 years younger.
[00:34:45]  You've never survived an assassination attempt.
[00:34:48]  MBN is on like his third by this point.
[00:34:50]  You've never fought, prosecuted, a war successfully.
[00:34:53]  He's got all these friends in the West.
[00:34:55]  But there are already early warning signs for those who truly understood inner family power politics within the kingdom.
[00:35:01]  When he appointed MBN crown prince, King Solomon also collapsed in MBN's court because every one of these princes at this level has their own like royal office.
[00:35:11]  Salmon collapses his court into the main royal court.
[00:35:15]  And I think this is streamlined.
[00:35:18]  Like he frames this as we need to be more efficient.
[00:35:20]  So we need to like collapse all these courts together so that they work more effectively.
[00:35:25]  But the crown prince's royal court had always been seen as an important perk and a good way for an ascendant prince to build a base of power for his own future reign.
[00:35:34]  You're picking out people that you want to be loyal to you.
[00:35:37]  You're giving them early jobs, ways that they can make a fortune for themselves, right?
[00:35:42]  If you don't have control over your own royal court as crown prince, you're losing out on a way to like build power for yourself.
[00:35:51]  And the fact that Muhammad bin Salman is in charge of the royal court allows his 26-year younger son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals with court positions.
[00:36:01]  So you can see already there's some signs that maybe King Solomon doesn't intend for Mbien to ever actually take the throne, right?
[00:36:10]  That maybe he's setting his son up and kind of doing a fuck job on Mohammed bin Nayef.
[00:36:15]  Behind the scenes, people close to the royal family begin to whisper that even as he took on the crown, King Solomon was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's.
[00:36:24]  In this version of events, just as the king makes Mbien his official successor, he's starting to cede a lot of his power and decision-making to his younger son, Muhammad bin Salman, who he appoints as defense minister upon taking office, right?
[00:36:37]  That maybe MBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start because King Solomon's never all that competent to run anything.
[00:36:46]  So maybe from the jump, from the start of his dad's time as king, MBS is trying to figure out how can I get Mohammed bin Nayev out from being the crown prince, right?
[00:36:55]  And so he's orchestrating all of this, and he makes sure he gets the job as the minister of defense because he knows that I want to kick this guy out of power.
[00:37:03]  This guy has already developed a reputation as a war leader for our people.
[00:37:08]  So I need to develop a reputation as a war leader for our people.
[00:37:12]  And he wastes no time.
[00:37:14]  Yep, but he's going to do a lot worse bombs than that, Dave.
[00:37:18]  In March of 2015, Mohammed bin Salman orders Saudi forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war.
[00:37:26]  If you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a series of internecine conflicts since 1962.
[00:37:34]  There have been numerous different sides and coalitions, all backed by foreign powers over the course of these conflicts.
[00:37:39]  And throughout the last half century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders and princes who have advocated that the kingdom get more directly involved in the fighting.
[00:37:48]  The most recent phase of fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things, by the Arab Spring.
[00:37:53]  In 2011, mass protests forced the current president, a guy named Saleh, to resign.
[00:37:58]  His vice president took over for what was meant to be two years, during which time the government would be reorganized into a new federal system and elections would be held.
[00:38:07]  Well, attempts at working out a political arrangement failed.
[00:38:12]  This guy stays in power, and in a desperate attempt to deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies.
[00:38:18]  This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with the no longer seen as legitimate regime.
[00:38:24]  A rebel group called the Houthis was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation.
[00:38:28]  The Houthis are a religious minority.
[00:38:30]  They're from the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam, which is like 5% of the population.
[00:38:36]  Shmuel and Zohar Letterman describe their motivations in a article for the Journal of Genocide Research.
[00:38:41]  The Houthis protested against their political and economic marginalization, as well as the encroachment of Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine on the Saada province in northern Yemen where they were based.
[00:38:51]  So MBS's decision to intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct shock to a lot of his peers and family members.
[00:38:58]  His cousin, the still crown prince Nbian, wasn't informed ahead of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen.
[00:39:05]  And the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also isn't told ahead of time, right?
[00:39:10]  None of the people who should know know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this civil war.
[00:39:16]  And Saudi operations are going to rely heavily on the, right?
[00:39:18]  It's like he doesn't tell anybody before he does this.
[00:39:22]  Because he wants it to be his baby.
[00:39:24]  He thinks it's going to be a big success.
[00:39:26]  That like immediately we're going to kick the Houthis out.
[00:39:29]  We're going to stabilize the situation in Yemen.
[00:39:32]  And I want all the credit, right?
[00:39:34]  I don't want any of these guys to get credit.
[00:39:36]  Obviously, it's going to work quickly.
[00:39:38]  Because it always works quickly.
[00:39:41]  It's always fine.
[00:39:43]  Yeah, there's, man, it's a sickness.
[00:39:45]  Like, where you can, it resonates all the way, obviously, today, where world leaders are like, we have created a society where to be like respected, you have to go into somebody's country and start screwing around and then get all the credit.
[00:39:59]  And it never seems to work out like that way.
[00:40:04]  But I guess it does because we keep doing it.
[00:40:07]  We're going to invade Greenland or whatever, where it's just like, that's what world leaders do.
[00:40:12]  They start shit in other countries.
[00:40:13]  So I have to do it too if I want to seem like a world leader.
[00:40:18]  Yeah, it'll make me seem powerful.
[00:40:20]  It'll make me, I need to prove that I'm better than the last guy who couldn't do it successfully, right?
[00:40:25]  Should it should have just paid people to put bombs in their butts.
[00:40:28]  I know.
[00:40:32]  We're all seeing the wisdom of al-Qaeda here, right?
[00:40:34]  You know, simple goals in life.
[00:40:36]  If all you want is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal.
[00:40:42]  No one can take that from Al-Qaeda.
[00:40:44]  I have a question, Robert.
[00:40:45]  If you had a butt bomb in you, what would you say before you exploded it next to the person?
[00:40:51]  Hmm.
[00:40:53]  Because I've been thinking about this.
[00:40:55]  That's a good question, Dave.
[00:40:57]  I don't have a good retort in my head right now.
[00:41:00]  I do.
[00:41:00]  Okay, what's your Sophie?
[00:41:02]  Oh, crap.
[00:41:03]  Oh, that's good.
[00:41:05]  That's good.
[00:41:06]  I would casually turn to them and go, you ever eat ass before?
[00:41:09]  And then detonate it.
[00:41:12]  That's a really good one, Dave.
[00:41:13]  That's a good one, Dave.
[00:41:14]  That's a good one, Dave.
[00:41:17]  So the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in this civil war that does not involve it is that the ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help, right?
[00:41:27]  Which he kind, he had.
[00:41:30]  But the most obvious behind the scenes justification was that the Houthis had Iranian backing, right?
[00:41:35]  And MBS, along with most of his inner circle, believed the Houthis were nothing but a proxy for Iran, which is a mistake that a lot of world leaders make, which is like, these people are getting arms or maybe training from this other country that's my enemy.
[00:41:48]  They must not be a real group.
[00:41:49]  This must all be a fiction created by this other evil country, as opposed to like, well, the Houthis get stuff from Iran, but they have their own base of power.
[00:41:59]  They're their own movement.
[00:42:00]  They're doing a lot right, which is why they've gotten where they are.
[00:42:03]  And they're going to be a lot harder to destroy than you think as a result of all of that, right?
[00:42:09]  Now, that said, none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send forces into Yemen as almost his very first action upon getting into a position of power.
[00:42:18]  The Lederman brothers write that, quote, Mohammed bin Salman seems to have seen what he believed would be a short and easily won battle against the Houthis as an easy way to bolster his image as a military and political leader.
[00:42:29]  And I've come across several other analysts who say the same thing.
[00:42:32]  Nobody ever gives more detail than that.
[00:42:33]  And we don't have any quotes from behind the scenes or whatever.
[00:42:36]  He does not have a very porous office.
[00:42:38]  There's not a detailed, here's what was happening, you know, behind the people haven't written a dozen books about being inside his office at this time, right?
[00:42:46]  Because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works.
[00:42:48]  You'll get bone-sawed if you do that sort of thing.
[00:42:50]  You will.
[00:42:51]  So I'm left to assume that even these much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of detail from inside MBS's office, so to speak.
[00:43:00]  And this is one of the most frustrating parts of the story to me because there's not a really a sad, I don't have a good answer as to why did you think this would work, man?

=== Best Way to Win War (03:48) ===

[00:43:08]  He'd grown up and he, there were good reasons to think a guy like MBS, who seems to be relatively smart, should have known this was a bad idea.
[00:43:15]  He grew up watching the U.S. fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
[00:43:19]  Like, you saw this fail.
[00:43:22]  In the previous podcast, we talked about like, you know, teachers weren't allowed to like give him bad grades.
[00:43:29]  No one can say no to him.
[00:43:31]  It's, it's, this is, it's a, it's a sickness.
[00:43:34]  It's like, if you spend your life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you, by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah, it'll all work out, won't it?
[00:43:44]  You know?
[00:43:45]  What else would like every thing has told me that?
[00:43:49]  So, yeah.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  Huborous.
[00:43:52]  Yeah.
[00:43:52]  So he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this never hasn't worked in recent memory.
[00:43:56]  He doesn't pay attention to the fact that Gibbon's dysfunction was spurred on by the Iraq war.
[00:44:00]  The Houthis attacked former President Saleh for having supported the U.S. during the early years of the global war on terror.
[00:44:06]  Somehow MBS seems to have convinced himself that using a mix of air power and mostly foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory against a group he thought was nothing more than an Iranian cutout.
[00:44:17]  This would be proven disastrously wrong.
[00:44:19]  And without any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that Mohammed bin Salman made a really bad decision because he was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was making a mistake.
[00:44:29]  Most sources do seem to agree that he was the deciding and leading voice in Saudi Arabia going to war.
[00:44:35]  Yemeni human rights activist Bara Shaban expressed to the Middle East Eye his opinion that Saudi Arabia would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war, no matter who was in power.
[00:44:45]  But MBS made it certain that that involvement would be direct military, right?
[00:44:49]  They would have done something.
[00:44:50]  They would have tried to send some money.
[00:44:52]  They would have tried to, you know, send some form of aid.
[00:44:55]  They would have tried to bribe an official or whatever.
[00:44:58]  But because it was MBS, it was made a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers and planes and try to intervene directly and militarily.
[00:45:06]  Quote, if it weren't for bin Salman, Saudi Arabia might have influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups.
[00:45:12]  Instead, it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of vicious airstrikes.
[00:45:16]  For the first few months, the Saudi coalition carried out strikes on mostly military targets.
[00:45:21]  They learned a version of the lesson the U.S. is currently failing to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden, which is that you can't destroy a group like the Houthis just by carrying out airstrikes.
[00:45:31]  You can't bomb them away.
[00:45:32]  It's really hard to bomb people away when they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff.
[00:45:38]  There's caves.
[00:45:39]  There's bunkers.
[00:45:41]  There's just hiding under the fucking sand.
[00:45:43]  You know, like it's hard to kill people that way as much as you need to.
[00:45:50]  It feels like it's every people is unique, where if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they know it better than anybody.
[00:45:56]  On top of it's that realization that it's like, it seems like world leaders have just as much like knowledge as I do about how to do a war where I'm like, yeah, I like the movie Top Gun.
[00:46:07]  Let's just do that.
[00:46:08]  Let's just do like pew-pew as opposed to like the boring thing.
[00:46:12]  You know, don't do the boring thing.
[00:46:13]  Don't like fund groups that you want to, you know, prevail.
[00:46:17]  No, no, you just, we got all these cool little machines and stuff.
[00:46:21]  Let's send them in.
[00:46:22]  Like it's everybody wants to do pew pew stuff.
[00:46:25]  Yeah, everybody wants to do pew pew stuff.
[00:46:28]  Nobody actually knows how to do pew pew stuff.
[00:46:30]  Yeah.
[00:46:31]  It's, I mean, the best way to win a war is to avoid getting involved entirely.
[00:46:37]  And the next best way to win a war is to sit on your ass while your opponent bombs the country into ruins and then come up afterwards and be like, still alive, motherfucker.
[00:46:51]  Those are, broadly speaking, the two best strategies.
[00:46:55]  Oh, yeah.
[00:46:55]  Don't get into wars.

=== Invading Mental States Accidentally (04:18) ===

[00:46:56]  Great.
[00:46:57]  Like, I've gone over 40 years now without getting into a war.
[00:47:02]  Yeah.
[00:47:02]  Not you haven't invaded any country and there's been temptations, you know?
[00:47:06]  Oh, God.
[00:47:06]  Yeah.
[00:47:07]  I've had every reason to.
[00:47:09]  I invaded Belgium once, kind of accidentally, but I wound up on a train to Germany the next night, so it was okay.
[00:47:17]  Speaking of invasions, why don't you let these ads invade your mental state?
[00:47:28]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:47:32]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:47:36]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:47:38]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:47:42]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:47:46]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:47:49]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:47:52]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:47:56]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:47:58]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:48:00]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:48:02]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:48:05]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:48:07]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:48:09]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:48:14]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:48:15]  Trust me, babe.
[00:48:16]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:26]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:48:32]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:48:36]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:42]  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.
[00:48:51]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:57]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:49:00]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:49:03]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:49:05]  That's so funny.
[00:49:06]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:49:15]  Say you love me.
[00:49:17]  You know I.
[00:49:19]  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.
[00:49:26]  What's up, everyone?
[00:49:27]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:49:28]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:49:39]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:49:42]  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.
[00:49:47]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:49:50]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:49:51]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:49:54]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:49:59]  Yeah.
[00:49:59]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:50:02]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:50:04]  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.
[00:50:12]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:50:15]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:50:22]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:50:24]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:50:25]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:50:27]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:35]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:50:41]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:50:47]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:50:50]  You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
[00:50:54]  I doctored the test once.
[00:50:55]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:50:58]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:51:02]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:51:05]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:51:07]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:51:09]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marincini.
[00:51:11]  My mind was blown.
[00:51:13]  I'm Stephanie Young.

=== Supermodels, Bombing, and Partying (15:31) ===

[00:51:15]  This is Love Trap.
[00:51:17]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:51:19]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:51:23]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:51:30]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:51:34]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:45]  And we're back.
[00:51:48]  So, Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific airstrikes.
[00:51:52]  By August of 2015, it has become clear that things are not trending towards a quick and easy win for Mohammed bin Salman and his coalition.
[00:52:00]  In fact, several of his wannabe coalition partners had backed out at the last minute.
[00:52:04]  These were guys he had relied on to provide infantry because the Saudi Arabian army, not great.
[00:52:10]  And it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young men into a meat grinder.
[00:52:15]  He was really hoping some other young men would do that job.
[00:52:19]  And he winds up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do a lot of the grunt work for him, which is not a great call for either, a wide variety of reasons.
[00:52:28]  As the summer reaches its apex, the leadermans write: quote, a shift could be discerned from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals, and similar crucial civilian institutions.
[00:52:44]  Right?
[00:52:45]  So, as soon as it becomes clear, like, oh, they're not going to just disappear because we've started bombing them.
[00:52:50]  And we don't actually know where to keep bombing.
[00:52:52]  Like, I struck what was supposed to be all the military targets, and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military.
[00:52:58]  I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food.
[00:53:01]  I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities.
[00:53:05]  I guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools, you know?
[00:53:09]  Like, that's where we go from there.
[00:53:10]  It's like, well, I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now.
[00:53:13]  Right.
[00:53:14]  Yeah.
[00:53:15]  The Houthis are less popular, right?
[00:53:16]  The Houthis are more popular now that you're killing society.
[00:53:20]  Yeah, let's make them victims now.
[00:53:22]  Let's just make them like heroes, essentially.
[00:53:26]  As opposed to what he should have done is just set up an entire fake city like 50 miles down the road from the capital and be like, hey, free Gatorade.
[00:53:36]  You know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city.
[00:53:39]  Why don't you guys just come to, we're not fighting.
[00:53:41]  We got no desire to fight, you know?
[00:53:43]  But you know what we have?
[00:53:44]  Hamburgers.
[00:53:46]  So like a blazing saddle situation.
[00:53:48]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:53:49]  Exactly like that.
[00:53:50]  You know, I feel like that would work in a lot of wars as opposed to doing the whole invasion thing.
[00:53:56]  I think we should at least try to do things like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people run into the rocks, you know?
[00:54:03]  Yeah.
[00:54:04]  Yeah.
[00:54:05]  What if we had just set up a second Iraq and told everybody, look, you can stay living under the old Iraq, but the new Iraq, free cable.
[00:54:13]  Yeah.
[00:54:15]  You know, it's right to Iraq.
[00:54:17]  Come on over.
[00:54:18]  Yeah.
[00:54:20]  Suddenly Saddam doesn't even have a country anymore.
[00:54:22]  What's he going to do?
[00:54:23]  You know?
[00:54:25]  Right?
[00:54:25]  Romance novels.
[00:54:26]  Exactly.
[00:54:27]  He'd actually have been very happy.
[00:54:28]  He'd have been a much happier man.
[00:54:30]  He was tired of being the leader of Iraq at that point.
[00:54:34]  So right as this shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying to strike at military targets to just trying to kill civil society in Yemen, Mohammed bin Salman decides, well, that's a good day's work.
[00:54:47]  I think I've earned a vacation.
[00:54:49]  Boy, a lot of work fucking up a war.
[00:54:53]  I'm going to go party.
[00:54:54]  You guys keep blowing up some hospitals or something while I'm gone, okay?
[00:54:58]  So he gathers a tight assortment of all of his best friends and they leave the capital of Riyadh to party in the Maldives.
[00:55:04]  His people rent out the entire Vela Resort, which had 50 villas and a private coral reef of its own.
[00:55:11]  The hotel's regular employees were paid $5,000 each for one month of work on the condition that they not bring their smartphones or talk to anyone else about what they saw while they were there.
[00:55:22]  Even with this agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants to manage the hotel instead.
[00:55:27]  So none of these guys, most of these guys don't even get to work while the prince is there because, as a spoiler, they're bringing a shitload of drugs and prostitutes to party in the mall.
[00:55:37]  They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed to do under Wahhabist Islam.
[00:55:41]  It's wild how rich people are a different species and yet the same species, too.
[00:55:45]  Because you can do all that at a Motel 6 way cheaper.
[00:55:49]  You can.
[00:55:50]  So he invites this insane guest list about a dozen of his friends.
[00:55:54]  Do we have names?
[00:55:56]  These are like his friends.
[00:55:57]  These are people he's now.
[00:55:58]  We do have some names.
[00:56:00]  He invites 150 Brazilian and Russian supermodels.
[00:56:03]  Each is scanned for STDs and then taken to private lodgings on the island.
[00:56:07]  That sounds really scary.
[00:56:09]  Okay.
[00:56:09]  Yeah.
[00:56:10]  Yeah.
[00:56:11]  Okay.
[00:56:12]  Per the Africa report.
[00:56:14]  To keep these demanding guests entertained, there were concerts featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star Sai, and Dutch DJ Afrojack.
[00:56:22]  Mr. Worldwide, what are you doing there?
[00:56:26]  Pitbull?
[00:56:28]  He's getting paid.
[00:56:29]  He's getting paid there, buddy.
[00:56:32]  Sai, I know to be not a good person.
[00:56:35]  Don't know anything about DJ Afrojack.
[00:56:38]  I am not a good person.
[00:56:39]  But he's a DJ.
[00:56:40]  He's stereotyping.
[00:56:43]  So sorry, DJs of the world.
[00:56:46]  But Mr. Worldwide.
[00:56:49]  Mr. Worldwide.
[00:56:51]  That's right, baby.
[00:56:53]  Yeah.
[00:56:54]  Mr. Worldwide, 150 quote-unquote supermodels and Muhammad bin Salman and his best friends.
[00:57:01]  Did they all partying on an island?
[00:57:04]  Did they check the talent for STDs, or was that just the supermodels?
[00:57:09]  They checked Pitbull for STDs and the test came back.
[00:57:12]  Yes.
[00:57:15]  I'd like to think Korean pop star Sai got a full inspection.
[00:57:21]  It turns out Sai was just full.
[00:57:23]  Every cell of his body was chlamydia.
[00:57:25]  He's not even a person.
[00:57:27]  He's a sentient colony of chlamydia.
[00:57:30]  Which, you know, makes sense based on this music.
[00:57:33]  So while thousands die horrific deaths from U.S. bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, MBS and his inner circle partied.
[00:57:40]  My favorite detail from this blowout was that one night MBS got up on stage during DJ Afrojack's set and took over his turntables.
[00:57:49]  Jesus Christ.
[00:57:50]  There's no way to do that.
[00:57:52]  He can't have been good.
[00:57:54]  No, but like you don't do that.
[00:57:59]  Document bad vibes.
[00:58:01]  What happened?
[00:58:03]  The DJ gets pissed off.
[00:58:04]  I mean I guess everyone at the party is pissed off and no one's allowed to say anything.
[00:58:08]  I'm going to guess MBS is also coked to the gills during this, right?
[00:58:13]  These guys are flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder and probably whatever.
[00:58:19]  I mean, yeah.
[00:58:20]  It makes anybody say, I could DJ.
[00:58:23]  Like that's what cocaine does.
[00:58:24]  That's what cocaine's for.
[00:58:26]  Yeah.
[00:58:27]  Obviously, no amount of threatening hotel staff is going to keep a party like this quiet.
[00:58:32]  And doing this is not a good look for a man who had just started a bloody war that in a man, about a year or so, people are going to be talking about what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen as a genocide, right?
[00:58:42]  So after less than a week of I think what was meant to be like a month of partying, MBS was forced to pull up stakes and take his friends back home.
[00:58:51]  Sorry, guys, we got to go.
[00:58:52]  I did a genocide.
[00:58:54]  Sorry.
[00:58:55]  I got to go.
[00:58:57]  I know.
[00:58:58]  You guys, you guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying anything anymore.
[00:59:02]  I'm so sorry.
[00:59:04]  Yeah.
[00:59:05]  Sorry, Pitbull.
[00:59:05]  I'm yelling timber on this party.
[00:59:08]  I'm so sorry, Mr. Worldwide.
[00:59:12]  We can rage later.
[00:59:14]  I'm too busy committing mass murder, genocide.
[00:59:18]  If they're going to have Pitbull.
[00:59:20]  They're going to rave on.
[00:59:21]  Oh, my God.
[00:59:22]  I feel like Sai people, they've probably been worse.
[00:59:25]  They probably have contracts around that where they're like, okay, if they've done a genocide.
[00:59:29]  You never hear about, like, I wish just once I want to hear about like James Taylor being at one of these.
[00:59:34]  It's never changed Taylor.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:36]  James Taylor or fucking for the Saudi royal family.
[00:59:45]  Why not?
[00:59:47]  Civilian casualties mount as the war drags on.
[00:59:50]  The coalition was successful in pushing the Houthis back from their furthest gains in southern Yemen, but no matter how much they bombed, they couldn't make any headway against the capital or any of the other major cities the Houthis controlled.
[01:00:02]  The Saudi war effort was utterly reliant upon the U.S.
[01:00:05]  The bombs they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as were the planes flown by Saudi pilots.
[01:00:11]  American political support was also crucial to the Saudi war effort.
[01:00:15]  MBS had justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Houthi resistance would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months.
[01:00:22]  As it became increasingly clear this was a fantasy, resistance began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power.
[01:00:28]  Mohammed bin Nayev sent his top aide and chief of staff, Saad al-Jabri, to DC to inform his American friends that he knew the king's son was an idiot and that the war in Yemen was a mistake.
[01:00:39]  The feeling one gets is that he was fishing for approval from someone in the State Department if he had an outright power struggle with MBS, right?
[01:00:46]  Hey, I know this is dumb.
[01:00:48]  This war is dumb.
[01:00:49]  You guys hate this too, right?
[01:00:51]  If there's a power struggle, are you going to be on my side or are you going to back Mohammed bin Salman, right?
[01:00:57]  And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass watching the war turn against him.
[01:01:01]  He gets hard to work finding foreign allies too.
[01:01:04]  Instead of heading straight to the White House, though, he looks closer to home at the UAE.
[01:01:09]  His most important early ally was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nayan, generally agreed to be the guy calling most of the shots in the Emirates.
[01:01:16]  We'll just call him MBZ because everyone else does too.
[01:01:20]  And MBZ does not like MBN, right?
[01:01:23]  A common story you'll come across is that during one meeting, MBZ told MBN that his father, the Dark Prince, was so clumsy he proved Darwin was right, which is the kind of blasphemy you can only get away with if you're a sheikh.
[01:01:35]  We're not even supposed to like Darwin all that much.
[01:01:39]  What are you doing, man?
[01:01:41]  But MBZ is in charge of his own country, basically.
[01:01:43]  He doesn't have to abide by the rules.
[01:01:45]  And so he starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN and they both want to take this fucker down.
[01:01:51]  Their courts organize a camping trip in the desert where they become fast friends and they start to strategize a way to take out Mohammed bin Salman's older cousin.
[01:01:59]  MBZ's first act in this new alliance was to start reaching out to his American friends and talking up Mohammed bin Salman.
[01:02:06]  This is enough of a success that people in the Obama White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer to get close to the king's son in case he winds up accruing more power.
[01:02:16]  Like so many important things during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because no one was interested or had time to do the jiab.
[01:02:23]  Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines.
[01:02:26]  John Kerry was suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy.
[01:02:30]  Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, was MBS's natural counterpart, but wasn't interested.
[01:02:35]  Vice President Joe Biden was disgusted, but deemed too old.
[01:02:40]  So instead, they picked no one to do this important job.
[01:02:43]  And so there's no one in the U.S. Sorry, they were like, let's have John Kerry.
[01:02:49]  Let's have John Kerry be this kid's friend.
[01:02:52]  I would love to watch Sean Kerry party with this guy.
[01:02:55]  Yeah, pick it into John.
[01:02:58]  Loves video games like that's John Kerry comes in with like a copy of Halo and a six-pack.
[01:03:02]  He's like, Hey, bro.
[01:03:04]  Yeah.
[01:03:04]  You want to go?
[01:03:06]  They settled on no one.
[01:03:08]  And they're like, That's better than John Kerry or Joe Biden.
[01:03:12]  They're like John Kerry or that old guy.
[01:03:16]  You know, not like trusted for a job as important as being this kid's friend.
[01:03:22]  Yeah.
[01:03:22]  And then four seconds later, they're like, he should be president.
[01:03:27]  He could do that job.
[01:03:29]  I'll say this.
[01:03:30]  I saw John Kerry once at a parade of the St. Patrick's Day parade.
[01:03:38]  And he was walking in the parade.
[01:03:40]  And it wasn't like a float or anything.
[01:03:42]  It was just him walking surrounded by like dudes protecting him.
[01:03:45]  And I'll say this.
[01:03:46]  He was visibly drunk.
[01:03:49]  So I think he would have partied.
[01:03:51]  All right.
[01:03:52]  John Kerry, the new Mr. Worldwide.
[01:03:56]  That's the coolest story about John Kerry I've ever heard.
[01:03:59]  Sorry, John Kerry.
[01:04:01]  I didn't know your game.
[01:04:02]  I was unfamiliar with your unfamiliar.
[01:04:05]  That's good to know.
[01:04:06]  Wow.
[01:04:07]  We could get him on an island with Pitbull and 150 supermodels.
[01:04:12]  See what he gets up to.
[01:04:13]  Yeah.
[01:04:14]  Gonna need your STD check, though, John Kerry.
[01:04:17]  Yeah, no, you don't want to do that.
[01:04:18]  You don't want to know where he's been.
[01:04:22]  So my favorite aspect of this, just in terms of the overall competency of the Obama administration and foreign policy, was this, they start to get hints that, oh, this kid's going to be important.
[01:04:32]  We probably want him on our side.
[01:04:34]  We should have someone like be his friend.
[01:04:36]  And then they have decide, nah, that's too hard.
[01:04:39]  We'll have no one be his friend.
[01:04:40]  You know what administration does find someone to be Mohamed bin Salman's friend is the Trump administration.
[01:04:46]  They pick Jared Kushner and Kushner gets very close to MBS because they pay attention to stuff like this.
[01:04:53]  It's just one of these like, yeah, there are actual areas in which the Trump administration was more competent than the Obama administration.
[01:05:00]  One of them was knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia.
[01:05:06]  It's still like, all right, I get it.
[01:05:08]  There are similar ages, but you can't party with Kushner.
[01:05:12]  That's like partying with a haunted clock.
[01:05:14]  It's just like, there's nothing there.
[01:05:17]  I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with MBS.
[01:05:20]  Yeah.
[01:05:20]  Jared Kushner looks like the skeleton of a fish.
[01:05:24]  Yeah, he does.
[01:05:25]  And they're like, that guy.
[01:05:27]  That's the guy.
[01:05:29]  I have the thought like once a month where I think back to the time, like early 2016, where Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's going to create peace in the Middle East.
[01:05:40]  That's what he's working on.
[01:05:42]  He's like, fish skills the guy?
[01:05:44]  This guy's went to Jared.
[01:05:48]  Oh, man.
[01:05:50]  So, and this is where kind of the fact that Mohammed bin Naef immediately goes to his friends in America and in the Obama administration is like, look, if I have a fight with this guy, do you have my back?
[01:06:03]  And they're kind of going to be like, we're not going to get involved in any fights.
[01:06:08]  Right.
[01:06:09]  Whereas Mohammed bin Solomon's strategy is I'm going to start making allies close to home with people who will actually back me, right?
[01:06:17]  Who have power, who are near us, and who will support me because they see a benefit in it.
[01:06:22]  I know the U.S. isn't going to take a side in this.
[01:06:25]  I know when we have a power struggle, they don't care.
[01:06:27]  So I'm not going to waste my time trying to get them on my side.
[01:06:31]  I'm going to get allies who will actually support me.
[01:06:34]  And so while MBN is trusting that, like, well, I've spent my whole life building all these connections with the security apparatus in the United States, surely they'll back me if push comes to shove because they want me in power.

=== Bill Gates and Port Tours (06:48) ===

[01:06:46]  He learns the lesson, like, you actually can't trust the U.S. for anything, bro.
[01:06:50]  We're terrible friends.
[01:06:52]  We don't have your back.
[01:06:53]  We don't have our own back.
[01:06:55]  Like, we're not going to do shit for you, homie.
[01:06:59]  And as soon as this message comes out, because Kerry sends a message to both Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Nayef, that, like, we're not going to intervene in any power struggles between Saudi princes, Muhammad bin Salman takes this as a go-ahead, or at least confirmation that no one's going to stop him from taking down his older cousin.
[01:07:16]  And he uses the fact that Naef had sent his aide, Al-Jabri, to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get Al-Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Solomon's son, which leaves Naef isolated.
[01:07:27]  He's now kicked out one of Mohammed bin Nayef's chief supporters, right?
[01:07:31]  And so now he's down a man.
[01:07:33]  The Africa report summarizes: In September, Nayef and Al-Jabri learned on live TV of King Solomon's plans to fire the latter, thereby depriving the Interior Minister of his closest aid.
[01:07:42]  A few weeks later, Nayef was getting ready to welcome the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westphal, when the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team in Jeddah.
[01:07:51]  The king's son told Westphal that he needed to see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of time to meet with the crown prince afterwards.
[01:07:57]  But that is not the way things went.
[01:07:59]  MBS dragged out the tete-tete for so long that the two men were unable to meet in the end.
[01:08:04]  Right?
[01:08:05]  He's separating him now from his American friends.
[01:08:08]  He's just kind of isolating him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter around Mohammed bin Nayev.
[01:08:14]  Now, some analysts suspect that the wounds MBN suffered in that 2009 assassination attempt were more significant than previously admitted.
[01:08:22]  And so he's that's why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to what his younger cousin's doing.
[01:08:28]  That he's got brain damage, basically, and he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of having this injury, and he's just not as functional as he used to be, right?
[01:08:37]  So, in addition to the fact that he's being outmaneuvered in part because he's just taken too much damage getting to this point in his career previously to hold up against someone like Mohammed bin Salman, who's got his wits about him.
[01:08:50]  Right.
[01:08:50]  People are like, your power's in jeopardy.
[01:08:52]  And he's like, his ass exploded right next to me.
[01:08:57]  Can I have more Vaikodon?
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:01]  So once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly clear that the crown prince does not have the energy or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival.
[01:09:08]  The two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked circles around his older cousin.
[01:09:14]  At one 2016 gathering, he surprised a group of American officials by announcing, Israel is not our enemy.
[01:09:20]  In the summer of 2016, MBS was in a better position than he had been the year before.
[01:09:25]  Not in terms of overseas ventures.
[01:09:27]  The war in Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe.
[01:09:34]  After a year of failed strikes on military and then civilian infrastructure, the Houthis showed no signs of breaking and still held to the capital city and the key port city.
[01:09:43]  Per that article in the Journal of Genocide Studies, quote, When the Houthis still refused to surrender, the next stage, beginning in the autumn of 2016, was a full-fledged economic war and sealing off of the country.
[01:09:54]  Sana airport was closed off to all commercial flights and to persons requiring medical treatment abroad.
[01:09:59]  Occasional blockades of Al-Hudaya port were imposed, and the Central Bank of Yemen was moved to Aden, which made money transfers to Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government workers to be halted.
[01:10:10]  As Yemen imports over 70% of its food needs, these stips were devastating.
[01:10:15]  MBS had now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the 21st century.
[01:10:19]  As the siege locked into place, he opted for another vacation, this one on the French Riviera.
[01:10:25]  During his stay at one port, oh, yeah, yeah, no, he's look, yeah, famine starting out.
[01:10:31]  The war is continuing to go terribly.
[01:10:33]  I'm jitting off to France.
[01:10:36]  He knows how to party.
[01:10:37]  He knows how to party.
[01:10:38]  He's doing a tour of the ports.
[01:10:39]  And while he's in one port, he happens across a 135-meter-long yacht, the Serene, owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Scheffler.
[01:10:48]  At the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for $5 million a week.
[01:10:53]  He had fallen in love with the boat and was planning to buy it, but Mohammed bin Salman is not going to let him do that.
[01:10:59]  Next, per the yachting world website luxury launches.com, quote, MBS caught sight of the yacht.
[01:11:06]  It wasn't docked for sale, but that didn't matter.
[01:11:08]  The Saudi crown prince was instantly captivated.
[01:11:11]  As Kevin Koenig tells it, the Saudi prince didn't bother with negotiations or back and forth discussions.
[01:11:16]  Instead, he simply sent an aide to speak with Scheffler and offered an estimated $550 million on the spot.
[01:11:22]  The payment was made in a single wire transfer, and depending on the source, the deal was closed within 24 to 48 hours.
[01:11:28]  Scheffler was told to pack up and leave immediately.
[01:11:31]  Now, I do love that, like, yeah, he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yacht.
[01:11:38]  Yeah.
[01:11:39]  And Bill Gates is in there, like, God damn it.
[01:11:42]  I gotta find another yacht.
[01:11:43]  Rich people are out of their minds.
[01:11:45]  It's like the only lifestyle where you could be at a party and it's like, yeah, what does that guy do?
[01:11:51]  He's an actor.
[01:11:51]  What's that guy do?
[01:11:52]  Oh, genocides, mostly.
[01:11:54]  Genocides.
[01:11:54]  He does genocide.
[01:11:56]  I don't know what number freaked me out more.
[01:11:58]  5 million a week or 550 million in one wire transfer.
[01:12:03]  Yeah.
[01:12:03]  Yeah, that's the guy making that trip.
[01:12:06]  That's like he has to be sweating bullets, getting every number like Jesus.
[01:12:12]  Now, it's unclear to me which of the yachts features MBS fell most in love with.
[01:12:17]  It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine, something called a snow room, which is, I think, just a room where it snows so you can have snow.
[01:12:28]  That's great.
[01:12:29]  I mean, or a cocaine lounge.
[01:12:32]  It's in New England, man.
[01:12:33]  It's fine.
[01:12:34]  You can get all the snow rooms.
[01:12:35]  You have a piano lounge, a movie theater, and multiple spas.
[01:12:39]  And I don't know if he even cared about any of that.
[01:12:41]  Is the primary draw that any of that?
[01:12:43]  Or is it just that Bill Gates wants it?
[01:12:45]  And so, like, oh, this must be the best yacht for a rich asshole to own.
[01:12:48]  I have to have it, right?
[01:12:50]  It's that.
[01:12:51]  It's that.
[01:12:52]  As MBS enjoyed that new yacht smell, starvation was running rampant in Yemen.
[01:12:56]  By December of 2016, charity organization Save the Children estimated that a thousand children were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen.
[01:13:05]  Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as 2016 ended, but Mohammed bin Salman showed no signs of changing course.
[01:13:13]  And that's part three.
[01:13:15]  Sheesh.
[01:13:18]  What did we learn?
[01:13:18]  How are you feeling, Dave?
[01:13:19]  Yeah, what did we learn?
[01:13:21]  I mean, I learned a little thing about Pitbull.
[01:13:25]  Yeah, we all learned something about Mr. Worldwide.
[01:13:28]  That name is literal and includes at least the Maldives.
[01:13:32]  That doesn't surprise me, I guess.

=== Exploding Butt Jokes on Netflix (04:22) ===

[01:13:35]  But I mostly learned that if you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt.
[01:13:44]  I mean, that's interesting.
[01:13:48]  It's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt.
[01:13:51]  I just thought of when Dave was going pew-pew, that a good, a good combination of the pew-pew joke and the ass-exploding joke would be to go, Hey, pew-pew.
[01:14:00]  And the guy goes, Pew-pew.
[01:14:01]  And he goes, No, poo-poo.
[01:14:05]  Sure, I'm a child, but clearly, I'm a child.
[01:14:09]  Yeah.
[01:14:10]  I'm there too.
[01:14:11]  I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with a lot of genocide, and all I'm retaining is butt bomb from this.
[01:14:18]  So, you know, yeah, that's more about me.
[01:14:23]  Wow.
[01:14:24]  Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug at the end here?
[01:14:26]  Oh, right.
[01:14:27]  Oh, geez.
[01:14:28]  Yeah, I do podcasts.
[01:14:30]  Cool.
[01:14:31]  There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-I Unemployed, where I talk about movies, not genocide as much.
[01:14:40]  I do also, I'm the head writer for Some More News, which is about news.
[01:14:46]  So just like Google Some More News or just Google News.
[01:14:50]  You'll find me.
[01:14:51]  I'll be there.
[01:14:52]  And that's it.
[01:14:54]  All right, everybody.
[01:14:55]  Bye, James Stout's book.
[01:14:58]  Buy James Stout's book.
[01:14:59]  Yeah.
[01:15:00]  And go to hell.
[01:15:01]  I love you.
[01:15:02]  Bye.
[01:15:07]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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[01:17:21]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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