Prince Mohammed bin Salman consolidated absolute power by crushing the Mutawa religious police in 2016, eliminating rival Mohammed bin Nayef, and seizing assets from detained elites at Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton. While rebranding Saudi Arabia with the $500 billion NEOM project and granting women driving rights, MBS orchestrated Jamal Khashoggi's brutal murder in Istanbul and tortured activists like Luane Al-Hathlul. Simultaneously, his Yemen campaign caused over 12,000 civilian deaths and a cholera epidemic affecting 800,000 people, revealing that these modernization facades mask a regime defined by systemic tyranny and genocide. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:14:58
Cool zone media.
And we're back.
Welcome back to the Behind the Bastards Mohammed bin Salman episodes extravaganza.
Woo!
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how to introduce these episodes in an exciting way anymore.
We're talking about bad people, the worst.
And one of them is the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
When we left off last episode, he had started what was becoming a genocide in Yemen.
He had partied with Pitbull, and he was orchestrating the downfall of his relative, Mohammed bin Nayef, who was the crown prince before him.
How we doing, Dave, David Bell, our guest?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing very well.
He's doing Bell.
I didn't have a new dream in between these episodes that I could tell you about.
That's probably the same dream from before.
Yeah, that same upsetting dream, sure.
Yeah, just it wasn't, it was a nice shower.
It's a setting dream to me a little bit.
It wasn't sexual.
That's good.
The more you say it wasn't sexual, the more I believe it wasn't sexual.
That's how telling someone something isn't sexual works.
It was weird because, like, I don't dream about you often.
Thank you.
I wasn't thinking about the fact that we were recording today.
And so I'm like, that's interesting.
That's interesting that you made a cameo.
See, now I'm hurt.
Why don't you dream about me often, Dave?
Am I not worth dreaming about?
Here's what I'll start doing.
Thank you.
When I go to bed, I'll look at a photo of you every night.
That's it.
That's good.
Nothing weird about that.
Yeah.
Thank you, Dave.
I will continue to have one dream about you per week where we captain the USS Enterprise together.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We would do terrible things.
We would.
We would.
That is not going to end well for anyone on board the ship.
We would keep my go-to.
Every time I'd be hit with like a moral dilemma or like a problem, I just go, beam them into space.
Problems.
Moving on.
Get those assholes into space right now.
Yeah.
Into space.
There we go.
Just a trail of bodies.
The Enterprise.
That's the ship that keeps beaming people into space.
Yeah.
The one move.
I just watched the new Starfleet Academy, the first two episodes, and it is missing that whenever there's all these bad guys, there's the guy from Sideways on your shoot.
Just beam into space.
Get his ass, beam him into space.
Beam him into space.
Yeah.
So easy.
Oh, God.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem, my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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 life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know who else was in the classic movie Sideways, Dave?
Who?
Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
Uh-huh.
That checks out.
Yeah, he was one of the two male leads in Sideways.
Pretty much, basically, close enough.
Sure.
So perhaps the key defining characteristic of Muhammad bin Salman that most explains his success within the closed world of the Saudi royal family is simply the fact that he's got energy and he wants to do things.
I cannot overemphasize how lazy most of these guys are.
I mean, that's America too at this point where it's like, well, are they 80?
No?
Okay, that's great.
It's like, again, if you go to like nepotism with like the sons and daughters of like Hollywood royalty, where when you get that one guy who's like, he's got the famous name and he's like, no, no, no.
Like I will cover my body in shit and roll around.
Does the role want me to be covered in shit and squirming around like a grub?
I'll do it.
I don't give.
I have no ego about this.
I don't give a fuck.
Like, and it's like, well, yeah, you're going to have a career, Nicholas.
That was my Lily Rose deck watching Noseferatu.
And I was like, oh, you're willing to like do it.
You don't give a fuck.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
We can work with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You get to be a star.
Muhammad bin Salman is like the Lily Rose dep of the Saudi royal family.
You know, a lot of people, a lot of people have been saying that.
Yeah.
So in 2016, he continues both the war in Yemen and his conflict with Muhammad bin Nayef, and he launches a new war against one of the most powerful blocs in the kingdom, the religious police.
Now, the Mutawa, or Haya, as they are also called, had been seen as almost untouchable by his predecessors, right?
These are the police of vice and virtue.
These are the guys who are going around making sure you're not disobeying like the religious law, right?
Fun police.
Yeah, they're literally the literal fun police, right?
And the men in his father's generation and MBN's generation would not fuck with these guys, right?
Like they were scared of them.
They really wanted them in their corner.
But by 2016, things had started to change.
More than 65% of Saudis were under 30.
And the young men of this generation had grown up with access to the internet and social media.
They and their peers shared their frustration with the abuses of the religious police, right?
They were talking to each other about how annoying these fuckers were, right?
Right.
They're on the internet and they're like, hey, everybody else is having fun.
Yeah.
Like, we are learning about fun police.
Yeah.
In The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House describes the fun police's MO.
For decades, thousands of these men, often self-appointed members of the committee to promote virtue and prevent vice, had roamed Saudi streets carrying a long stick, forcing women to cover their heads, herding Saudis into the mosque at prayer time, ensuring all shops and stores locked their door for half an hour at prayer time, and that Western influence like Barbie dolls or Pokemon cards didn't pollute Saudi youth.
In the waning years.
Yeah, they're good after Pokemon cards.
Listen, it's if you're, I know it's not the same thing, but if you, if you start a cult, right?
One of the key things you got to do to maintain that cult is make sure people are having fun, right?
There got to be something, right?
Yeah.
You just can't like, if you're like, no Pokemon cards, it's like, this is not going to last.
If you're saying no Pokemon cards, but you can all wife swap, then you might be able to keep a cult going.
But if you're saying no swipe, wipe swapping and no Pokemon cards, what's going to keep people there?
Yeah, right?
You're out of business.
Very.
You're out of business.
You got to at least get them on drugs or something, you know?
Yeah, let them have the goddamn Pokemon cards.
To continue from that quote, in the waning years of the late King Abdullah's rule, the Haya had gotten completely out of control.
Hearing music inside one family's car, the religious police chased the car until it rolled off an overpass, killing the driver and injuring his wife and two young children.
A few months later, two young Saudis died when Haya members, suspecting alcohol, chased the young men's car, bumping it at high speed, causing the car to roll off a bridge.
The religious police fled the scene.
Still, six members of the Haya were later acquitted off all charges.
Saudis tweeted their anger on social media.
The Haya are bloodthirsty, at Talal tweeted.
At Neher wrote, the Haya situation is similar to many governmental entities in Saudi.
They all need restructuring and fixing.
So these guys are just a menace, right?
Where it's like, they might be drunk.
Ram them off the road.
You know, like they're, they're cops.
All cops are kind of more alike than different, right?
It's, it's a happy family situation.
If you're, okay.
When I was a dishwasher, food stopped becoming food.
It was just this thing, right?
Where you're just like, I'm just doing this thing.
When you're a cop of any kind, people stop becoming people.
Right.
That's just what happens, which is why I don't know.
People should only be cops for like a few weeks at a time and then we swap it out.
If you're going to have cops, it should be a job where everyone is a cop for a little while.
Because you know what doesn't get enforced then is bullshit rules, right?
If everyone has to take him, you'll be like, wait, I got to enforce marijuana laws.
No.
I'm not doing that.
Not doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anything is better than having it just be like a job that a group of people hold and to protect their power need to like protect their right to continue doing it with even greater bloodthirstiness and anything.
Anyway, it's better.
Let's just make cats cops.
Just have to replace all cops with cats.
Especially every cat has a drone with a gun on it.
So when the cat needs to shoot somebody, the drone just starts firing.
Like whenever the cat gets angry, it just starts blasting.
Whenever the cat starts, it's just a pit stop cat compass.
Get down, get down.
The cat's angry.
Somebody took away its food bowl.
I mean, you're not wrong, but it's still better than what we have, right?
If protesters right now were instead of trying to fight squadrons of like armored police with tanks and machine guns, they were just a bunch of cats with robots firing blindly into the air because they hadn't been let out in long enough.
At least that's an easier problem to solve.
Mr. President, how did they get in here?
How did they overthrow the government?
Well, sir, they had raw salmon on them.
Fortunately, everything we could do.
Yeah, there's nothing.
So MBS's first move in his war against the religious police was to ban them from stopping or detaining Saudi citizens in public.
Great first start, right?
The thing that you were doing that was getting a lot of people killed, you just can't do anymore.
You're not allowed to just fuck with people in the world.
His predecessors had tried to curb the influence of religious hardliners, but failed.
Most famously blocking for six years an attempt by King Abdullah to make it legal for women to work in lingerie stores selling underwear to other women.
And like the religious, the hardliner clerics would be like, no, women can't work.
But then the problem is like, okay, so are men supposed to sell lingerie?
So we have lingerie.
But women can't work in the lot.
Like, yeah, you know, the lingerie industry was like, guys, please.
Come on, you got to give us something.
You're killing us.
What are we going?
We just want to sell you people underwear.
What is wrong here?
Yeah.
Where King Abdullah had been too frightened to confront the Matawa directly, Muhammad bin Salman simply ignored their protestations and used his father's absolute power to crush any opposition.
The public was wildly supportive of his actions, and conservatives found themselves alone.
Perhaps MBS's single most important quality was his ability to understand how the youth of Saudi Arabia felt.
It wasn't just the morality of police.
Regular citizens knew it was impossible to get anything done through the government without bribery.
The poor majority of the country were forced to watch while a handful of princes siphoned away the oil money that was supposed to be funding social programs and infrastructure, right?
Like people are pissed about this.
And so MBS has a lot of support as he sets about dismantling his enemies, the forces he saw as holding Saudi Arabia and his own ambition back.
He later said this of his decision to crack down on the religious police.
I am young.
I don't want 70% of the Saudi population to waste their lives trying to get rid of this.
We want to do it now, right?
And this is, we're going from like the genocide and the orchestrating internal fights with his family where he's the bad guy to like, no, he's, he's all, he's in the right side of this thing.
These guys suck.
It's a broken clock situation.
Yeah.
The only thing that will get rid of them is a strong, he's effectively the king, not literally, but is a strong regent who's being fucked.
That's not how we do things anymore.
Right.
I'm in char, right?
Like nothing else was going to fix this situation because of how Saudi Arabia works, right?
I'm not saying every country is this way.
We don't need a king to deal with the cops in our country.
We could just stop having them be immune to everything, but whatever.
Yeah, it's like when Trump gets something right, it's like, you don't have to hand it to him.
You know, yeah.
It's like, yeah, he is right.
Those, those little Japanese trucks are pretty sweet.
We should be able to buy those.
Yeah.
We don't need just F-350s.
We could use some little K's or whatever they're called.
Or the Korean, I forget which.
Those little bitty trucks.
We should use, we need little bitty trucks here.
He's right about that.
Yeah, we need little bitty trucks.
Yeah.
It's every anytime it's something truck related, he's got like a 50% chance of being right because he seems to just be a guy who periodically sees trucks and goes, ooh, those cool.
The guy seems to know trucks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think he knows he just likes them.
If he was like secretary of trucks, I'd be fine with that, you know?
Yeah.
It's like that video where he's inside that big dump truck or whatever, pretending to drive around.
And I'm like, no, that looked pretty fun.
I'd be making the little faces too.
Tense Christmas Truck Talk00:08:06
Like, who wouldn't do that?
Most human moment for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
By the end of two.
No, just getting rid of the fun police.
Anybody could have done it.
Anybody, everyone should have before him.
It's shocking that, but like, he's the guy who does it, right?
By the end of 2017, he had developed a somewhat earned reputation as a reformer.
But he was also the architect of what the international community was openly calling a humanitarian catastrophe and potentially an act of genocide.
A 2021 report by Muatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni human rights organization, concluded that by November of 2015, the kingdom was aware of a food insecurity crisis in the regions they were striking.
Over the next two years, MBS's Saudi-led coalition increasingly and purposefully used hunger as a weapon to try and force Houthi surrender.
Martha Mundi, an expert on Yemen, quotes a senior Saudi diplomat who described the coalition strategy this way: Once we control them, we will feed them.
Huh?
Is that the plan?
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't think that's a good plan.
Like you're the bad guys, right?
Like, first off, that's bad guy talk.
Yes.
I want to continue.
I want to continue by quoting from a 2025 article in the Journal for Genocide Research, Unnoticing Yemen.
A UN panel of experts similarly determined in a report published in January 2018 that the Saudi blockade is essentially using the threat of starvation as a bargaining tool and an instrument of war.
The Yemen Data Project, a major source of information about Yemen, has documented the persistence of the tendency of the Saudi coalition to target civilian places and infrastructure.
Almost a third of all coalition airstrikes throughout the war have been aimed at such targets, especially at farms.
Right?
So they are food is a weapon.
You know, that's that's a lot of people.
But not in a fun way.
Not in a fun way.
Not in a fun way, not like in a food fight way.
Yes, Dave.
Yeah.
Despite each new atrocity, there appeared to be no end in sight.
King Solomon had taken power and brought his son with him, but they'd inherited an utter mess of an economy.
Oil revenue accounted for 80% of the federal budget, but global oil prices had collapsed, leading to a 50% decline in revenue.
One of King Solomon's first moves was to bring in the kingdom's foreign currency reserves.
With a $100 billion budget deficit and the war in Yemen alone costing half a billion dollars a month, the World Bank estimated Saudi Arabia could only afford to go on for four years before running out of money.
There was no way to begin tackling the problem without cutting benefits to Saudi citizens, much of this in the form of benefits to government employees.
These cuts slashed the average Saudi man's income by around 50%.
That's how to the bone because these people, all their jobs are fake and all their jobs are like, oh, you know how to use a typewriter.
There's an extra 20% to your salary, right?
That's the stuff he's getting.
We talked about that, where it's like, sorry, guys, nothing you do matters.
So you're kind of, you know.
And the country's fallen apart now because of the war the prince launched.
Yeah, we want to do this war, so we're going to pay you less to do nothing.
No one's a hero in this, I guess.
No one's a hero.
Also, I would be pissed.
I'm like, listen, you promised me money to do nothing for a very long time.
Yeah, you promised me money for nothing and the chicks for free, man.
I don't have exactly.
Yeah.
Maybe I'm spoiled, but I don't want less money so you can go do a war.
Yeah, and the chicks still aren't free, you know?
No.
No, we're not even allowed to play guitar.
Well, actually, now we are.
We are allowed to play the guitar now.
That's something.
It's something, right?
In The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House writes: Despite warnings from some of his ministers that economic growth would grind to a halt, MBS proceeded.
To add insult to injury, the Saudi civil service minister took to television to accuse government employees of working only an hour a day.
These cuts were paired with slashes to subsidize water, power, and gasoline.
Fuel prices rose by 50%, bringing gas up to a horrifying 96 cents per gallon.
One Saudi economist described the situation thusly.
We had Christmas every day and Grinch has stolen it.
Again, Noah's a hero.
Noah's a hero.
Like, shit, man.
Like.
Should you have had Christmas every day?
Is that a good way to run a country?
So I like, I'm all for living in a utopian society where it's Christmas every day.
But not that it's being paid for by oil money because it's only Christmas for a tiny chunk of the population.
Yeah, where it's just this group at the cost of everybody else.
That's not good.
But I understand that it's, it's that sort of thing where everybody thinks they're the underdog of their own life.
It doesn't matter how rich you are.
You want more and you feel like you're not getting enough.
So it's like these people clearly were living in their little utopia.
And then they're like, sorry, life has to get slightly realer for you.
And they're like, this is bullshit.
Bullshit.
You want me to do stuff?
Yeah.
No.
So government spending was a huge problem, as was the fact that basically no citizens were working.
But just annihilating everyone's income turned out to have negative impacts.
By the start of 2017, economic growth was at 0.4%, a state of affairs most economists would describe as fucked up.
Social media boiled with resentment.
A protest movement began to bubble up.
And on April 22nd of 2017, King Solomon was forced to issue a royal decree declaring takes these backseas on all cuts and allowances, benefits, and bonuses.
The civil services minister was fired for insulting Saudi workers.
And again, he's right.
These guys are at most in a lot of cases doing an hour a day of work.
You know?
It's interesting because there's certain things in this that I admire and then certain things where I'm like, again, like, okay, like, I would love to not work much and get paid.
But I also like, it's definitely a sign that things are going bad.
I do wish more governments issued takesies backseas.
Like, I'd say that's a good policy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're allowed to go, hey, everybody.
Oops.
You know what?
Department of Homeland Security was a mistake.
You're taking away the TSA.
Just get on planes now.
We'll figure it out.
You know, it works like the 90s again.
Just run right up to the plane.
Right.
But because that's not normalized, them doing that in this case is like, oh, you really fucked up, huh?
Yeah.
No, you made a mistake.
You realized that you were about to be overthrown.
Yeah.
MBS was not fired after this fuck up, but his popularity and reputation took a major hit.
Perhaps one reason why it was so hard for Saudi citizens to accept any cuts to their benefits was that they'd seen the Al Saud family's personal finances balloon during the same period.
And they have a point where it's like, yeah, you guys aren't really working, a lot of you, or you're doing barely a job compared to what you're getting paid for.
But the Al Saud family is worth an insane amount of money and they do nothing at all.
Right.
Even as the government revenues have collapsed, they continue to be the family net worth as the state's finances are in free fall.
The Saud family net worth is $1.4 trillion.
So I get why these people are like, we got to make cuts.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Yeah.
The story of everything, right?
Where it's like the rich people are like, sorry, you're going to have to tighten the belt.
Yes.
I mean, I need my super yacht.
Sorry.
Look, man, if I don't, like, I can only eat one piece of steak per cow and we've got to burn the rest of the cow.
And I'm simply not going to ride on the same private jet twice.
Yeah.
I'm getting a cow share.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, I will say $1.4 trillion is the net worth of the family.
That is spread.
There's more than 10,000 descendants.
Now, it's not evenly split up, right?
But it is split up between them, you know, so it's not quite as insane, but it's still a lot, you know?
So things are tense, right?
It's like things are tense by mid-2017.
Yeah.
Yeah, because they basically, it's like, I don't know.
It feels like the same vibes of if we were on a lifeboat and I was like, sorry, I'm gonna shoot you because I want all the food.
Also, I don't like you.
Lifeboat Ethics and Redistribution00:04:44
And then you realize there's no bullets and you're like, sorry, never mind.
You know what?
That was right.
It's just a test.
Just a test.
Yeah, just testing you guys.
See if you're ready to share with me in running this boat.
They're not wrong, but it sounds like he, he, along with being like, we're cutting your money, but also by being like, and you deserve to have your money cut.
Like, it's, yeah, like, you're not doing anything.
So that's right.
That's right.
You're not doing anything, but you know who is doing something.
Nope.
Sorry.
I don't know.
Sponsors of this podcast, they're doing hard work.
You know, they're earning their pay.
If you let them run Saudi Arabia, they'll do it.
You know, they'll run it, Saudi Arabia.
They'll definitely do it.
Yeah.
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.
I 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.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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.
That's so funny.
Sherry 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.
What's up everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
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 they 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.
Will Farrell's Libertarian City00:15:31
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
I'd run it too, by the way.
Food times.
You'd run it too?
Yeah, I bet you could run it.
Saudi Arabia.
Dave.
Yeah.
What's your first move?
I don't know if I can do it.
I'm just saying I will do it.
If someone was like, do you want to do this?
I'd do it.
Yeah.
For at least a week, and then you'd never hear from me again.
Yeah.
I would be dead.
It's, it's, it's, you know, but I'll do it.
My first move, I'm changing the country's name.
To what?
From Saudi Arabia to free ecstasy town, you know?
And we just let the tourist dollars flood in.
We let those Germans and Spaniards come on over.
You know, someone will provide the ecstasy.
That's not my job.
They're in free ecstasy town right now.
Zero downsides.
That's so smart.
What if, okay, hold on.
What if like I named my apartment that?
Like and put it on, like, got it, got it on like Google Maps as like free ecstasy town.
Because you're right, is that if you do that and then people show up, eventually there will be free ecstasy.
Exactly.
It's a problem that's going to come back in like two weeks and start the episode.
So our friend David Bell's been raided by the DEA.
He flew too close to the sun.
That's just so smart.
I don't know.
That's such a smart idea.
I think it'll work.
I think it'll work.
Anyway, ads.
And we already did ads.
Oh, we did.
Are we back from ads?
We were back.
Yeah, I thought.
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with you?
Too much ecstasy.
By mid-2017, the king's son was in a very mixed position politically.
He'd earned accolades as a reformer for his hobbling of the religious police and his seeming support for some social liberalization.
But he was also the author of an unpopular austerity policy.
The king and his son faced increasing resistance, both from the populace and within their own family.
MBN, who'd made no secret of his critiques of MBS's policies, was an obvious rallying point for resistance.
And so on June 21st, 2017, Mohammed bin Salman acted to take him down.
Karen House writes, That fateful evening of June 21st, 2017, MBN was called to a palace in Mecca.
Once there, his guards were forbidden to accompany him inside.
All phones were surrendered to palace guards.
MBN was taken to a room where Turki al-Ashik, a contemporary and friend of MBS and now minister of the General Entertainment Authority and others began bullying him to resign.
Denied contact with his men and the painkillers to which he was said to be addicted, he finally succumbed early the next morning after Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca, urged him to obey the king.
So that's how he gets rid of his cousin.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wait, sheesh.
That's abrupt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was.
It was super abrupt.
Yeah.
And by the way, that fella, Turkey al-Ashik, who is handling like the torturing of Muhammad bin Nayef, like cutting him off from his guards and his painkillers and like forcing him to resign, the guy who handles all that.
Do you know what he got more faith?
He's become famous for doing more recently.
Oh, no.
Give me a hint.
He's the minister of the General Entertainment Authority.
What did he do?
He's the guy who ran the Riyadh Comedy Festival that all our favorite comedians were doing.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, baby.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's not only in charge of entertainment within the kingdom, he's been Solomon's hatchet man.
Yes.
Yeah.
He has a whole prison named after him.
Yes, the guy who paid Dave Chappelle $6 million.
I mean, not surprised, I guess.
I don't know.
Nah.
Who else was that?
Was Louis C.K. at that?
Yeah, I think he was.
Yeah, pretty sure he was.
It's the Simpsons moment with the burlesque house, and Barney comes out and they're like, oh, Barney.
It's that where like Louis C.K. at there, I'm like, yeah, yeah.
No one was shocked, I guess.
Yeah, it's what I don't feel any worse about Louis C.K. or about Dave Chappelle than I did previously.
I both feel about like, yeah, yeah, I bet they, if you told me some comedians took millions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, those would have been my two first guesses.
Right.
I'm not shocked.
I wouldn't be surprised by a lot of comedians, frankly, because you're a comedian.
I don't know.
It's the same with Pitbull at that thing where I'm just like, I don't like it, but I'm, I guess I'm not surprised by it.
I'm a little surprised by the wealth, because I think most people, if you say, like, you want to make $6 million for a day's work, you have to make peace with working for a really bad man.
But all you have to do is something otherwise innocuous.
Most people will do it, which isn't good.
It's just $6 million.
But if you have a lot of $6 millions of dollars, that's what I was about to say.
That's where it's like, what?
Like, you're not starving.
You don't have to pay for your mom's dialysis, Dave Chappelle.
And that's the, if most people was like, I did it, I wouldn't be like, I'm disappointed in you.
I'd say.
It's like, yeah, I mean, you still had student loans.
I don't know.
I get it.
Yeah.
Can I have some, I guess?
Yeah.
But yeah, when it's an already rich person, it's just like, like, people didn't need that.
Yeah.
But that's rich people.
I don't know.
That's rich people.
That's how you get that rich.
So to the international public, it seemed as if the heir apparent and most powerful man in the Saudi security state had completely collapsed overnight as a center of power.
Now, as we've covered, Mohammed bin Nayeff's position had been degrading for years, right?
He was not totally well.
He did not have a grip on things.
And MBS had been slowly cutting him off from his sources of power for several years at this point.
So this is the result of a fairly long family conflict.
For most of the 21st century, Saudi Arabia had been ruled not just by the king, but by the black prince and another senior prince, a guy named Sultan, who headed the defense ministry before MBS.
All three of these men died between 2012 and 2016.
So now, a year, just like two years into King Solomon's being the king, right, in 2017, he and his father have neutered the clerics and the religious police.
They've eliminated Crown Prince Nayef, and the other crown princes who might have acted as barriers to their total power were gone.
They are the ones running everything.
There are no other major power centers.
They've done this in about two years, right?
So this is a very successful consolidation of power.
Yeah, it's some game of throne shit.
Yeah, it really is.
Yeah.
Now all they had to do was discipline a squabbling cadre of lesser princes and officials, some of whom had supported rival princes and others of whom may have eventually represented a threat themselves.
More to the point, they were all corrupt, and King and Prince Solomon both knew their continued support would hinge on being seen as fighting corruption.
In the fall of 2017, Mohammed bin Salman spoke before a major investment conference in Riyadh that had earned a reputation for being the Davos of the desert.
In a bid to attract foreign investment into the kingdom, he deliberately played down the country's connection to Wahhabism and announced that by June of 2018, Saudi Arabia would finally allow women to drive.
What a reformer.
Huge move.
What a feminist icon.
Mohammed bin Salman.
It really is like if you have a society where like, I don't know, people are running around stabbing other people randomly all the time as policy.
Like the United Kingdom, sure.
Yeah.
And then a leader shows up and they're like, number one.
Stabbing.
Yeah.
It wouldn't matter how like not progressive they were.
We'd be like, good for them.
I like them.
I'm going to vote for them.
Like, it's just, yeah, really low bar is my point.
Extremely low bar.
The bar is in the fucking below the toilet.
It has been flushed into the sewer, right?
Yeah.
So this is also not quite the promise that it seems.
Now, he avoids bringing up, and nobody present feels pressed to ask, about the Saudi women's rights activists who are already in prison for campaigning for the right to drive on stage at the Davos.
Like, there's already women in prison.
Nobody's like, what about them?
Are they getting out?
And MBS doesn't say shit about that.
The next thing he brings up on stage at the Davos of the Desert event is an exciting history-making new project, NEOM, or N-E-O-M, a city built as a one-titanic wall stretching from the Red Sea to the mountains.
It's a dress.
It's a wall-sized skyscraper, covered in solar panels.
The inside is a whole climate-controlled city.
People, it's going to be like the perfect living place for human beings, an arcology, wall town, right?
Per the book, MBS, quote, businessmen would write the laws and entice the world's top minds to innovate on Saudi soil.
Planning for a post-carbon future and taking advantage of the Saudi sun, the city would be powered by solar energies and staffed by so many robots that they might outnumber the human inhabitants.
Neom, Mohammed bin Salman said, would cost $500 billion and be a place for dreamers.
It was not an economic development project, but a civilizational leap for humanity.
At that point, the lights dimmed and a video like this one played.
And Sophie's gonna display that for you now, Dave.
Ah, sweet.
For too long, humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature.
Now, a revolution in civilization is taking place.
Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint.
Cram it.
Designing to protect and enhance nature.
The line will be home to 9 million residents and will be built with a footprint of just 34 square kilometers.
And we are designing it to provide a healthier, more sustainable quality of life.
The line's communities are organized in three dimensions.
Man, now, so I love that they're like, too long have cities not been wall-based.
Not been big walls.
Also, cities don't live in harmony with nature.
Unlike a giant line.
Right.
Unlike a huge silver wall that cuts off birds from their migratory pattern.
Oh, yeah.
Birds are going to be smacking into that thing.
It's so tough because, like, when I first heard of Wall City, right, I'm like, that's cool and cyberpunk.
And like, that's fun.
Then watching that ad where they take a city and cram it, I was like, oh, right.
That's scapian.
That's, that's, that's Blade Runner.
Right.
And it's, there's some like bits of wisdom in that, like, denser urban developments are a lot easier on the environment than sprawling ones.
Sure, there's probably a future.
One of the suggested futures of how we would build cities is that they are denser, which doesn't mean of low quality, but like that they're that you have all like there's a lot more space for nature.
No one is suggesting a giant wall hundreds of feet high and dozens of miles long.
Like, I mean, I guess that's an insane thing to build.
It's neat because it's like what Blade Runner would have lived in.
This is the thing.
This is the issue I have with everything from the goddamn cyber truck to this, which is that I love this aesthetic.
I'm not embarrassed to say this.
I love the look of the cyber truck.
I love that bullshit futurist aesthetic.
I know it looks like shit objectively, but all these dildos, it's the same problem, which is like they're like, I want to make a world like Star Trek.
And I think, oh, okay.
So, number one, we get rid of money.
And they're like, no, robots.
And it's like, no, just a lot of robots.
Yeah, we just robots and tall.
Right.
They want to make it look like Star Trek.
They don't want to actually make it Star Trek.
No.
Where it's actually like, oh, we eliminate like money and we pour a bunch of efforts into medicine and lifting up the lower classes.
No, none of that.
We just want fucking cool, smooth things.
And like, I get it.
So do I, but I'd rather have the other stuff first.
Yeah.
So like, wouldn't we all?
Yeah, wall city.
I'm like, I guess.
I mean, I, there's too many of us.
We should stay out of nature's way.
But yeah, it's who's doing it.
And again, it's clearly that they're just like, they started with like he clearly someone who's like, wall city, that's cool, right?
And then that's a great idea.
And they went from there.
We may do a dedicated episode about this later because we didn't have time in this, but this is impossible.
The project is already run into terminal issues.
Like it is cost overflows are massive.
The kingdom's financial situation today is still not good.
Because again, every effort to transition off of being entirely reliant on oil money has failed.
And they never really got over a lot of these central issues that were massive problems for the country when MBS took power.
Like they've been patching over them, but there's still problems.
And the goal was to get a bunch of foreign investment to make this thing possible.
Again, they were looking at $500 billion.
And it's likely it'll cost way more than that if they were to actually finish this thing.
They've dug a bunch of holes.
They've started construction.
It's never going to get built.
It's impossible.
They're starting with the conclusion and not getting there.
It's again, like the cyber truck, I think, looks cool, but it's clear that he started with the look and then the insides are shit and don't make any sense.
So it's like, you're not starting with that fundamental idea of like, how do people live?
How should we, how should we build a city more efficiently?
It started with what if wall make that we're going to build the city of the future where like a modern society, you know, built by businessmen, all of the world's innovators will want to live here.
It's like, but like alcohol still illegal and women can't like don't have to get first.
This is like a very non-original idea.
Man's like, what if I start a city?
What if I make my own town?
Like that, that's a very common thing, I fear.
And if you meet that guy, go, please leave me alone and then tase them.
It's a, it's a teenager's dream where it's like, I, you draw a character where you're like, and he has a cool sword and he's not like cool armor.
And then you think of like, what's his personality?
Like you're going backwards, right?
Where you're like, and it's that, where they're just like, cool, wall city, but our, our, our actual, what they said, designed by businessmen, the laws.
Imagine meeting that guy at a bar.
Yeah, designed by businessmen, yes.
Just imagine him meeting that guy, not knowing anything about him.
And the guy comes up to you and is like, yeah, I'm going to build this city, the line.
It's just like one really big wall.
Right.
You'd be like, please get away from me.
You're terrifying.
I'd be like, are you Peter Thiel?
Are you Peter Thiel right now?
No, it's like classic libertarian shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is such a libertarian boat city.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Poop City and Tomorrow Land00:02:13
I again, I'm not.
Yeah.
Which again could be cool if it was not just like every single time it's like the worst people in the world are like, I would live on a boat if it was like a pirate radio kind of situation because that movie rips.
But I'm simply not going to live on a boat with a bunch of Bitcoin guys.
I'd rather like that's the thing is like I if okay, if we can't get the good futuristic stuff, I still would be, it would be cool if my house looked neat, you know?
Like if I had some cyberpunk brutalist house, like that's something at least.
But it the best version of this has ever been Walt Disney designing Epcot and being like, I'm going to make a future city.
And then it got too hard.
And he's like, you know what?
I'm going to make a theme park.
Yeah.
It's he loses goals, you know?
He was like, okay, I'm not the guy to make a future city, the experimental prototype city of tomorrow.
Turns out that sucks ass.
Yeah, I'll just put some fucking rides in there.
He's like, he's like, not tomorrow, but tomorrow land.
Yeah.
Like, good on him.
As we've famous good guy, Walt Disney.
Famous good guy.
The real hero of these episodes.
It's a nice reminder that these rich dildos have been trying to make cities for a while.
Because they all want to prove they can do it better.
They all want to prove they know what's wrong with society.
But what none of them understand.
And so why this is impossible is that it's hard to make a good city or a good country because people are messy and don't get along.
And if your whole thing is, I don't understand people or like to listen to them, you're going to fail.
It's that.
And it's also like Disney famously was also like, you know what I hate?
Zoning laws.
These rich people, they also just don't like following the rules of law.
So they're like, oh, what if I made a city?
And then it's everybody will love my cool city.
And then everybody has to do what I say.
Yeah.
And then you forget to have any measures to prevent the outbreak of cholera.
Right.
So everybody dies of cholera.
It's why every libertarian city, I feel like every pitch falls apart when you go, okay.
And what do you think the age of consent will be there?
Messy People and Zoning Laws00:05:31
Yeah.
Like, because it's always a dark answer.
See, that's why the age of consent, like, what's going to, who's going to be in charge of the poop?
What's going to happen with the poop?
You know, where's the poop going?
Right.
Where's the poop going?
Yeah.
That's the, if you're ever hanging out in like an alternate living situation or where someone's trying to like build their own community and the first thing they show you or close to the first thing isn't, and here's our toilet solution.
Those people are going to fail.
Right.
You know?
Unless it's all around poop city.
Unless it's poop city.
My idea for a city.
It's all poop oriented.
There you go, Dave.
Yep.
And you take showers with your buddies.
Okay.
Sorry.
Wow.
Sorry.
Thanks, Dave.
So two weeks after going on this slightly fevered Steve Jobs style rant about how the future was a big line city in a country where most people didn't think TV should be legal.
Mohammed bin Salman, well, powerful people didn't think TV should be legal.
Mohammed bin Salman launched his final gambit towards consolidating absolute power.
He'd spent the days since the big Davos in the desert event, sending his secret police out to arrest and transport hundreds of the most powerful people in the kingdom to one location.
And this included multiple members of the royal family, as well as billionaire financiers who had helped to build the nation's economy.
These men were taken to the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, one of the finest hotels in the world.
It was locked down for normal business.
Its staff was replaced by security officers and secret policemen.
Guests were made to surrender their cell phones and devices.
They were separated from their guards and sometimes vast fortunes.
One of these men was Prince Al-Walid bin Talal.
He was the most famous businessman in the kingdom, a billionaire great-grandson of King Abdul Aziz.
Prince Al-Walid was as protected a nobleman as you could imagine.
He was called by the royal court one morning and ordered to visit the king.
Another billionaire, Walid Al-Ibrahim, had found himself in the same situation a day before.
So these are guys who should not have been vulnerable to something like this, right?
But the reality is, and King Salman knows this, these guys are not as rich in reality as they seem to be on paper, because for decades, they'd relied on the Saudi state purse and public funds to prop up their bad investments and smooth over any mistakes they made.
And all of the richest people in Saudi Arabia were doing this.
This is part of why the economy was in the shitter: these guys start making bad bets and they're using the kingdom as a checkbook to cover their asses.
So, this mass detainment that King Salman orchestrates of all these guys sends a message: none of you are untouchable anymore.
And I want to quote from a summary of what happened from an NBC report by Dan DeLuce, Ken Delanian, and Robert Windrum.
The involuntary guests were told they had to sign away large chunks of their assets to be released.
The detention involved both psychological abuse and, in some cases, torture, current and former U.S. officials say.
The move, described by Saudi authorities as a crackdown on rampant corruption, allowed the crown prince to tighten his grip and sent a shockwave through the kingdom as elites.
This was a shakedown operation and a power consolidation operation, said one former senior U.S. official who was in office at the time.
The Ritz detentions were designed to remind people going forward that their wealth and their well-being would depend on the crown prince and not on anything else, which is why it was so upsetting for many in the royal family, said the former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
What was that a quote from?
This is from an NBC report.
I just love involuntary guest.
Perfect journalists.
Yeah, yeah.
Voluntary guest of the Ritz-Carlton.
Yes.
May have been tortured.
Involuntary guest.
We just call them prisoners at this point.
So this is what brings us to Mohammed bin Salman's most notorious crime, although certainly not his worst, the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Now, Jamal, if you haven't heard much about this guy, he came from almost as rarefied a social circle as Mohammed bin Salman himself.
His grandfather, a doctor, had treated MBS's grandfather, the king.
He was a close relative to billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was involved in like 80% of the shady deals that took place in the 1990s.
Jamal got involved in the Muslim Brotherhood while in college, and he worked as a journalist for an English language paper out of Jeddah once he graduated.
He winds up on the ground floor of reporting on the Mujahideen's resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Khashoggi arguably crossed the line from reporter to participant during at least one part of the conflict.
He became a well-known figure within the world of Islamic militancy and secured an invitation to talk with another influential Saudi militant, Osama bin Laden.
Right?
So, this is a journalist who's reporting on this, you know, jihad against the Soviets.
He, at least at one point, crosses from being a journalist to being a combatant.
And as a result, he has a lot of clout with these other militants.
And so he gets to hang out with bin Laden.
Now, ultimately, Khashoggi winds up disillusioned by the failure of the revolution in Afghanistan.
He had been a guy who had hoped we'll create something better than what had existed before if we can keep the Soviets out.
And instead, we get the Taliban.
And Khashoggi's not delusional.
He can see the Taliban as bad.
And so he comes home being like, well, that didn't fucking work, right?
Shit.
What do I do with my life now?
It's tough.
It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban.
Yeah.
It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban.
Nobody wants that to happen to their buddies, Dave.
Disillusionment with the Taliban00:04:48
No.
I'm happy that you've continued writing for the internet as opposed to becoming the Taliban.
No, I had that crossroads, but yeah.
It would have been logistically confusing, too.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So when he returns home to Saudi Arabia, he's arguably the most influential journalist in the kingdom.
He's one of them.
And he's developed close working relationships with several highly placed members of the royal family.
And he spends the next couple of decades as both an influential critic and pillar of the power system.
So he is integrated tightly within kind of the upper strata of Saudi Arabia.
He's very well regarded.
He's also someone who can periodically critique what decisions that are being made by the powerful in Saudi Arabia.
And he sees himself as like a mouthpiece for the poor in Saudi Arabia, for the working class as a result of that.
He can occasionally speak some truth to power, right?
Or speak truth to the rest of the world about what's going on in Saudi Arabia.
That's at least how you'll see this guy written about.
Speaking of people who speak truth to power, these ads will speak truth to the greatest power in the world, your wallet.
Wow.
Not my wallet.
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.
I 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.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, woo, woo.
Woo.
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 it.
I know it's a place they 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.
Khashoggi Expresses Support for Reforms00:15:18
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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So, Jamal Khashoggi, after a period of time as one of the more influential journalists in Saudi Arabia, is going to do kind of the most dangerous thing you can do in the kingdom, which is express support for reforms that everyone knows are necessary, but that the crown prince and king haven't embraced yet, right?
He's going to be ahead of the curve on some important things, and that's going to make him a lot of enemies.
Ben Hubbard writes, He was appointed editor of Al Wattan newspaper and used it to push for women's rights while criticizing the role of the religious establishment.
He didn't last long.
After al-Qaeda bombings killed 25 people in Riyadh in 2003, Khashoggi pinned an editorial attacking not only the terrorists, but the clerics who gave them power.
Jamal wound up driven to the United States, where he would live at time through the coming years whenever things got too hot for him back in the kingdom.
He was, predictably, a big supporter of the Arab Spring, which further caused consternation among the powerful.
During the rise of ISIS, Khashoggi compared the terrorist movement's ideology to the kingdom's own Wahhabist beliefs.
He initially supported Solomon as king and was bullish on the reforms that he and MBS introduced against the religious police and endemic corruption.
So when MBS first comes to power, Khashoggi's a big backer because he sees this guy as kind of the answer to his prayers.
Someone who will stick up to the worst and most like conservative elements in our society, right?
This guy might be a sign of hope.
Khashoggi acted for a while as a dogged defender of the new king to international critics.
He was important enough to be included in a public meeting between Mohammed bin Salman and a group of clerics and intellectuals in 2016.
Ben Hubbard reports that MBS talked to the crowd about his plans for economic and political reform.
Khashoggi asked him, why don't you talk about any of this in public?
If you're in favor of all these reforms, why won't you tell people about them?
Why are we having this meeting in private?
And MBS says, in short, you can just write about what I've said here.
Put it in the newspaper.
Tell everybody what I'm saying, right?
I'm giving you permission to make this public, right?
Okay.
So Jamal is like, all right, I fucking will.
And he takes this as an invitation to report openly on the Prince's crusade to modernize the kingdom.
This would prove to be something of a mistake.
Man.
Because it's like, yeah, go right it.
I'd be like, do you really want that?
Never trust the prince when he's like, oh, I want a journalist to hold my feet to the fire.
Are you kidding me?
Accountability?
That's what kings love.
Man.
I mean, I'm not blaming him.
Like, it's just like, it's just like, you can see it all unfolding here.
Because I would do the same thing.
I'd go like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
In the fall of 2017, having silenced his most powerful detractors, MBS's security forces launched a crackdown on their little enemies.
80 dissidents were arrested.
Most were clerics who were either too conservative or too progressive.
The rest were political reformers and, as Ben Hubbard writes, individuals who had annoyed MBS and his aides in some way or another.
One was an economist who had questioned the wisdom of privatizing a Romco.
Another was a poet who had called on journalists to avoid harsh language in a dispute with Qatar.
So these are just guys getting arrested for bugging, you know, Turkey or Muhammad bin Salman, you know, for any reason.
I'm going to do my petty tour here, my asshole tour.
I've gotten rid of the big enemies.
One prominent detainee was a cleric named Salman Al-Auda.
In his younger days, he'd been an extreme fundamentalist and he'd spent time in prison for demeaning the royal family, arguing against their right to rule.
In more recent years, he'd become almost a progressive, hosting popular shows on YouTube and television and building a massive younger following on social media with generally positive, upbeat videos about Islam and modern life.
What really got him in trouble was his growing embrace of constitutional monarchy.
Al-Auda framed this as an attempt to help the kingdom and House of Saud avoid an Arab spring of their own.
He gently suggested that the government might try to listen to its people a little more rather than governing by the whims of Muhammad bin Salman and his ailing father.
He was arrested and has been held in solitary confinement from September of 2017 up to the present day.
His brother complained about the arrest on Twitter and has also been detained.
If his case ever comes to trial, he could get the death penalty, although given the fact that his health is deteriorated behind bars, that may not be, he could be dead now.
I don't think we know.
Wow.
There's a lot of guys like that.
The whole Ritz-Carlton affair was carried on in a very hush-hush manner by the kingdom security forces.
They obviously wanted everyone to know the broad strokes of what had gone down, and there were specific names they wanted publicized.
But the government never released a comprehensive list of names and only accused them vaguely of intelligence activities for the benefit of foreign parties and engaging in espionage while having contact with external entities.
The Muslim Brotherhood was named as a specific example.
Long-term consequences ranged from prison terms to home detention.
Some people were let go entirely with the equivalent of a warning.
Nearly all spent days or weeks detained at the writs without any charge or clear idea of what crimes they were expected to answer to.
Some were certainly executed, although it's impossible for us to make any clear estimates about how many people suffered want punishments.
The crime was bugging them.
It was the crime was bugging them.
Bugging him.
Yeah, bugging him or other people like you.
Yes, the two great crimes.
On June 24th, 2018, Saudi Arabia officially lifted its ban on women driving.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, fresh off being released from the writs, praised the move on social media and went on a public drive with his daughter and granddaughter.
He tweeted, There is no doubt that the thoughts of my brother Mohammed bin Salman led to this great result.
Women have now taken off, gotten their freedom.
That's all they needed was to drive.
That may mere weeks earlier, MBS's police had carried out a massive crackdown on women's rights activists.
Ten women and seven men at least were arrested over their work campaigning to end the driving ban that Muhammad himself, bin Salman himself, had ordered ended.
From an article in The Guardian, Amnesty said that according to three testimonies it obtained, some of the activists were repeatedly given electric shocks and flogged, leaving some unable to walk or stand properly.
In one instance, an activist was hung from the ceiling.
Another testimony said one of the detained women was subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks.
Jesus.
So these are like weeks before he ends the ban.
And their crime is not that they want the banned in.
The crime is that they're advocating, they're saying that the country's doing something wrong, that a law needs to change because it's wrong.
And that's criticism.
We can't have that.
No, sir.
It's just that.
It's that fucking vibe, right?
The like hashtag girl boss vibe, where it's like on top of just some of the worst things ever, where it just short circuits your brain, where they're like patting themselves on the back at the same time.
They're doing this.
Yeah, it's upsetting.
Yeah.
You hate to see it.
A Saudi female race car driver.
And again, there's this, there's weeks-long PR push in the wake of this.
A Saudi female race car driver is given her license in a grand ceremony in Riyadh and allowed to take a celebratory lap through the capital weeks before she would help to open the French Grand Prix.
Journalists were warned that she would not make any comment about women's rights.
This eloquently showcased bin Salman's attitude towards social progress.
He would do the minimum necessary, but he would also brutally punish anyone who made the mistake of embracing change before he did.
And he would expect to be right.
It's just, I'm going to give you what I give you, and you better not ask for more.
And you better not have asked for what I'm giving you previously.
Because he wants people to like him.
He wants to be worshipped.
Yeah, you're also going to praise me every step of the way.
You're going to be thanking me for what I've given you.
I mean, we had a discussion like that, you know, when we legalized weed, it became this thing of like, maybe we should let the people in jail for that.
Yeah.
Like, it's similar, but except if you say that, you'll be executed.
Right.
Yeah.
You shouldn't say that.
So, uh, yeah, Luane Al-Hathlul had gained notoriety in 2014 when she was arrested for trying to drive her car from the UAE into Saudi Arabia.
She was released after more than 70 days in prison the month after Salman was made king.
This was initially seen as a reason for optimism towards the new king and his son.
Al-Hathlul had continued to speak out against the kingdom's laws and participated in a major foreign documentary that criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record.
She'd been living overseas with her husband when she returned home in 2017 and was arrested as part of MBS's wider crackdown on dissent.
She was released and expanded the scope of her activism, pushing against the kingdom's guardianship laws, which made women basically legal minors in perpetuity.
She was invited to speak at the UN, where she directly called kingdom representatives out for denying the existence of guardianship laws.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back.
A month after this, she was kidnapped from her home in Abu Dhabi and flown to Saudi Arabia.
She was released after a month, but forbidden from leaving the country.
Then, just before the driving ban was repealed, she was swept up in a mass arrest with other prominent women's rights activists.
And this is like part of this big sweep that I had talked about just a second ago, right?
Punishments for these activists and their supporters ran the gamut from jail time to travel bans to torture.
The kingdom's captive news media embarked on a campaign of slandering the reputations of those incarcerated.
And some prisoners, including Al-Hath Lul, were tortured by officers of the Rapid Intervention Group.
This was a recently assembled team of black ops guys overseen by a guy named Saud al-Qatani and operated as the personal enforcers of Mohammed bin Salman.
Anyone who annoyed him was fair game for kidnapping, torture, and murder.
The women were kept in tiny rooms with covered windows.
They were taken to be interrogated and tortured frequently by men who mostly wanted to humiliate them.
They were sexually harassed a lot.
They were shocked with like cattle prods.
They were just beaten the old-fashioned way.
Elhathlul was waterboarded on several occasions.
Al-Qatani oversaw her torture directly sometimes.
He would threaten to rape her repeatedly and throw her body in the sewer.
This is the kind of stuff that they're doing.
And they're doing this during Ramadan.
He and his men are torturing her throughout the night, and they force her to eat after the sun comes up when she's not supposed to be eating.
So, yeah, this is pretty gross stuff, right?
I don't know, Robert, because Dave Chappelle said it's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia.
It's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia unless you're talking about the easier way to drive wokeness because of wokeness here.
They don't have to do that.
Yeah, Jesus fucking Christ.
That is horrific.
Yeah.
It would be operatives of the same rapid intervention group that Mohammed bin Salman called upon to murder now dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
He had written critically of the Prince's Ritz-Carlton kidnapping spree the previous year and about the ongoing detention of women's driving advocates.
What he didn't know was that mere months before MBS started his campaign to destroy dissent, he sent agents of his rapid intervention group, mostly military veterans, to the U.S. so they could train with a private security firm, the Tier One Group.
Per the New York Times, the mercenary firm, quote, is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.
The company says the training, including safe marksmanship and countering an attack, was defensive in nature and designed to better protect Saudi leaders.
One person familiar with the training said it also included work and surveillance.
Yes, the good men at Cerberus Capital Management have a private army that they're using Mohammed bin Salman's goon squad.
Rich people, for the longest time, it's the weirdest thing that how they're just like palant here.
Like they're just, you know what?
We're not going to even murder Ko.
Yeah, we're just, we're, let's call it like it is.
It's like the only honesty they have.
It's so weird.
Yeah, yeah.
My new capital management firm, I just shot a baby incorporated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Named after the time I shot a baby.
Holy shit.
It's great stuff.
So Khashoggi himself had fled Saudi Arabia in June of 2017, having seen the writing on the wall of the Ritz.
He had escalated his criticisms of the regime and NBS in particular and had launched a series of projects with the aim of collecting and amplifying foreign dissent against the government.
Because he was too clever to fly back into the country, Saudi operatives had to nab him overseas in order to stop his inconvenient criticisms.
Saud al-Qatani, NBS's trigger man, is known to have organized an effort to take the effort to take out Khashoggi.
They finally caught him in Turkey.
A 15-member intervention group team fell upon the journalist as he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, seeking papers to make his marriage to his fiancé official.
While she waited outside, the tame attacked him.
The kingdom would later claim their job was just to take him back to Saudi Arabia, but he resisted and so was injected with a large dose of something that killed him.
His body was then dismembered.
MBS, the government insisted, had no knowledge of any of this.
Subsequent investigations and reporting had revealed that one member of the negotiation team was a coroner, explicitly hired to dismember Mr. Khashoggi's corpse after he was killed, which would suggest they never wanted to take him alive, right?
You don't bring a coroner along if you think you're going to get this guy out of the building alive.
Who among us was like, we just want to talk to him.
Oh, damn it.
We dismembered him.
Yeah.
Ah, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Good God.
So we don't know exactly what went down in the room, but we have a pretty good idea.
And all of the evidence shows Mr. Khashoggi was assassinated, dismembered, and disposed of by a team that had been sent to Turkey to do just that.
All credible experts believe Muhammad bin Salman gave the orders.
And that's kind of where we leave things off.
There's more to say.
I mean, there's a lot more to get into the Trump years and stuff, but these are the broad strokes of how he came to be, where he is, right?
Our current president has even broken with the conclusions of his own CIA to insist that MBS is probably innocent.
And I don't know, do we trust the CIA or do we trust Donald Trump here?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's just a real like you've identified a bastard, but it really resonates of like the other all the people who fucking are doing business with this guy and being like, oh, it's great there.
Trump Doubts CIA on MBS00:05:09
It's just like, oh, fuck all those people.
Yep.
Because, you know, the tempo of operations in Yemen with Saudi Arabia is a lot lower than it was, but the damage from the peak of operations was catastrophic.
Per an article in Genocide Watch in 2021.
Saudi strikes have directly killed over 12,000 civilians.
Only half of hospitals continue to operate.
Saudi naval blockades have cut off food and supplies.
Thousands of children have died of starvation.
A cholera epidemic afflicted 800,000 civilians and killed thousands.
80% of the population depends on humanitarian relief.
The Yemeni archive and Oxfam report that the Saudi-led coalition has systematically destroyed 130 bridges essential for delivery of humanitarian aid.
Houthis have also prevented food aid from reaching populations in areas they control.
At least 233,000 civilians have died in Yemen's civil war.
Right.
So cool.
Horrific.
Not good person.
I will not be subscribing to the wall city.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, no, and I won't listen to his podcast when it comes out.
Yeah.
I was surprised because you talk about all these people who are just getting paid a lot of money and sitting around.
I was like, surely a lot of podcasts.
Yeah.
A lot of terrible podcasts.
Call it the Soudcast.
You know, you got a name right there.
Bam.
You did it.
Well, Dave.
Got to plug anything?
I don't know.
Okay.
Oh, Gamefully Unemployed.
That's the podcast network.
I co-run with Tom Ryman, and we talk about movies and TV and, you know, stuff like that.
The X-Files.
I am the head writer of Some More News, which is a, you know, it's like a new show on the YouTube.
And that's it for now.
Maybe more in the future someday.
I will be able to say other things.
That's it.
Excellent.
Very cool.
Well, everybody, say other things with us and to yourself and go away.
The episode's done.
Bye.
Get out of here.
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