Sam Harris speaks to Graeme Wood about Muhammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. They discuss the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of Saudi elites in the Ritz Carlton, the Vision 2030 campaign, relations with Israel, the posture of the Biden administration, energy policy, Saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists, the strange case of Musa Cerantonio, John Walker Lindh, the current condition of ISIS, the war in Ukraine, Russian propaganda, how Finland has made itself invasion-proof, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
you This is Sam Harris.
Today I'm speaking with Graham Wood.
Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he's the author of a wonderful book on the Islamic State titled, The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State.
And today we're talking about Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
We discuss the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the rather astounding imprisonment of Saudi elites in the Ritz Carlton, MBS's recent reforms in Saudi Arabia,
And his Vision 2030 campaign, Saudi relations with Israel, the posture of the Biden administration, energy policy, Saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists, the strange case of Moussa Charentonio, John Walker Lynd, the current condition of the Islamic State,
And then Graham and I talk about the war in Ukraine, and Russian propaganda, how Finland has made itself invasion-proof, and other topics.
Anyway, Graham is always great.
I hope you enjoy it.
And now I bring you Graham Wood.
I am here with Graham Wood.
Graham, thanks for joining me again.
Sam, it's good to be back.
So you have a cover article in the April issue of The Atlantic titled Absolute Power on Mohammed bin Salman MBS, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
And it's a fascinating profile on him and it sounds like you had a very interesting trip.
I want to cover that and then we can cover some related issues.
Yeah, MBS, I think, came to more or less everyone's attention in the aftermath of the Kishoji murder, as ghoulish as that was, which I'm sure we'll get to.
But it sounds like you interviewed him twice on this trip, and let's track through that.
Before we jump into your actual experience here, give me the short bio of MBS.
Who is he, and why should anyone care about him?
So MBS is first and foremost the son of his father, who is King Salman, who's in his late 80s and enjoying a very soft final few years as king of Saudi Arabia.
And every one of the kings of Saudi Arabia since the founding king have been sons of King Abdulaziz.
They've just been getting older and older, and MBS, now 36 years old, is the first of his generation to be in line for the throne, really in line for the throne.
He's almost certainly going to become king.
His father has put him in charge of the country for the last five years or so, And he has been in charge of a great big modernizing effort trying to bring the country into the 21st or maybe at least the 20th century.
So integrating it with the global economy and reforming it in almost every way except for the political, which is why he will remain, when he's king, the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, and he's considered somewhat a bulwark against jihadism.
And we'll get into the details there, that's pretty interesting.
And he's also a bulwark against Iran, from our point of view, us being primarily the U.S.
We'll get into the jihadism piece, but what's your view of the geopolitical balancing act that we're doing or may yet attempt to do between Saudi Arabia and Iran?
Well, Iran, I mean, this is part of the question about jihadism, because Iran is an avowedly jihadist state of a very different sort.
It's a Shia jihadist state.
And Saudi Arabia, although it's produced a very large number of Sunni jihadists, has been an enemy of Iran since Iran's conversion into a jihadist state in the late 1970s.
So when we say that MBS is an enemy of jihadism and an enemy of Iran, that is all true with a few asterisks.
And it's pretty important that the United States has allies in the region who are opposed to Iran moving against it.
Now, of course, the issue is that it's an extremely imperfect ally.
Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, doesn't share very many of our values, and so any deal that we make with them as an ally against Iran is going to be one that we have to really pinch our noses and make.
So that's the sort of devil's bargain that we've had throughout the history of Saudi Arabia and pretty acutely with MBS.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so, let's come to the man himself.
There's a passage in your article that jumped out at me.
Again, you interviewed him twice, and you wrote of this encounter.
Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice vibrating at a higher frequency.
Every minute or two, he performed a complex motor tick, a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish.
He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers.
So, this is not an altogether flattering picture of the man, and give me any more details you want there, but I know that there was a Saudi response to your article, which I'd like to discuss here.
How was all of this received?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, some of the words that you've just read out are not things, to put it mildly, that you could say if you're a Saudi or if you were stuck in Saudi Arabia, as I am not.
I'm not in Saudi Arabia anymore.
To describe the Crown Prince's evident neurological issues, to describe his crackdown on dissent, all of these things are strictly forbidden, and that is indeed part of the crackdown on dissent.
So MBS, for years, there has been, you know, Saudis are very active on social media, and there has been a number of taboo subjects.
And yeah, the physical health of the Crown Prince is one of them.
My experience with him was that, just as I say in the piece, that he's got a... he's a man of immense power, immense and almost completely unchecked power, who has no experience of being told no.
He has been crown prince and the ruler of a very, very wealthy country for five years.
And before that, he was the son of the extremely influential governor of Riyadh province.
So this is a guy who's always had a lot of people around him saying, you can do whatever you like, and now has the power to really, you know, make his, his, his imagination run wild.
And some of those things are some of the things that he wants to do are, are I think it's fair to say good.
You know, he has reigned in the religious beliefs.
There's a number of freedoms that Saudis have that they haven't had before.
But look, if you spend any amount of time in a room with the guy, you can tell that he is not socially or psychologically adjusted in a way.
That's familiar to you if you've spent most of your time among people who don't have this extremely bizarre and empowered background.
It doesn't mean that he can't, you know, talk to you intelligently or even in a friendly and pleasant way, but look, we're talking about someone who With the snap of his fingers, can have people's heads cut off, can change geopolitics, and that's a really complicated place to be in if you're 36 years old and have not really been trained, as if anyone can be trained for that kind of power at all.
So it really was, once I ended up sitting in the room with him a couple times, an experience unlike any I've ever had.
Hmm.
How concerned were you for your own security?
Not very.
I mean, I knew Jamal Khashoggi personally.
I'd spoken to him just weeks before his death.
So, I mean, I was... Let's remind people who Jamal was in this context.
Yeah.
Jamal Khashoggi was a longtime writer, figure in the Saudi government and in Saudi media.
He had worked for the Saudi government as a press attaché in DC and in London.
And about the time that MBS came to power, Jamal's patronage just dried up completely.
All the people who he was relying on to be his champions within government were pushed aside in favor of MBS's people.
So Jamal went into exile, He got a column and wrote a few columns for the Washington Post.
In October 2018, he went to Istanbul, whose government, an Islamist government, was supporting him.
When he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he never came out.
All we know is that he was murdered there by henchmen of the Crown Prince, and that his body has never been found.
It probably was cut to smithereens.
Flushed away somewhere.
So when I went to see MBS, of course I was thinking about the fact that, you know, one of the most prominent Saudis I knew before had been physically disintegrated at the behest of this guy.
And that that person was, you know, a Washington Post writer, a contributor to the Washington Post, as I have been too.
So yeah, of course, it crossed my mind.
Who knows what's going to happen in this interaction?
On the other hand, it's also just objectively true that MBS and his reforms for Saudi Arabia were set back by years, maybe permanently, because of what he did to Jamal Khashoggi.
He had no idea that this was going to be the outcome of that assassination.
And so, to say the least, if I disappeared into a meeting with MBS and never showed up again, or was next seen with fewer fingernails or toes than I came in with, Then that too would set back the image of MBS as someone who can be dealt with and who can be understood by and, you know, worked with by the West.
Yeah, we should say in this context that MBS denies having had anything to do with the murder of Khashoggi and he even denied, however implausibly, ever reading any of his articles.
And he said that Khashoggi was not even in the top 1,000 of people who he would want killed.
Which is kind of an interesting way of framing his total non-involvement in this.
So you publish this article, and then you get some response from the Saudis, I think one of which included, you will never be allowed in Saudi Arabia again.
First, tell me what happened there, and I'm just wondering if you have any security concerns subsequent to publishing this.
I mean, we have quite famously, again, people may have forgotten this, but You know, MBS seems to have hacked Jeff Bezos's cell phone, right?
I mean, so it's like he can reach out and screw with people, apparently, at some distance.
What are your thoughts on that score?
Yeah, so the Saudi response was at first they were unsure what to do with it because the first thing to know about MBS in the last few years is that he's been hiding.
So he has not spoken to the Western media at all for two years until he spoke to me.
So they weren't really sure how this interview would be received.
And I think it speaks to either the obtuseness or maybe the incompetence of MBS's people that they didn't realize that the things that he said about Khashoggi, that he wasn't even in the top thousand people who MBS might wanna kill, that they didn't, I don't think, even realize how that was gonna sound to people who were not, people in the West who were accustomed to free media and not being threatened with death by desert kings.
So, I think that when I left, I didn't expect that the Saudis would come after me in a physical way.
I thought there was a possibility, maybe even a likelihood, that my phone was hacked, so I took steps to make sure that that didn't happen.
Physically, I felt pretty safe.
Now, in social media, and in unofficial ways that the Saudis can reach you or let you know that they're thinking about you, There were plenty of reasons to think that I might be concerned about how things were going to go.
I mean, there were videos that came out of Saudi Arabia with my picture and Jamal's asking, after this interview, will Graham Wood be the next Jamal Khashoggi?
No, I didn't think that was going to happen.
But the Saudis, pretty soon after they read the piece, digested it and figured out how it was going to be understood and noticed that there were things in it that included unutterable statements about MBS and His reforms, they started pushing really hard to rewrite the article, to pretend it said things that it didn't say, and then to accentuate things that MBS either didn't say at all, or said quite differently, and to de-emphasize the
The wilder stuff, like the things that he said about Khashoggi, and then some of the things that he said probably more aggressively than he intended about his desire to bring in the jihadists and religious police.
Right, right.
Well, as far as a raw expression of power and sociopathy, it's hard to beat what he did in 2017 when he imprisoned some of the most powerful people in Saudi Arabia in the Ritz-Carlton.
Describe that episode, what was happening there.
Yeah, the Ritz-Carlton episode was one of the most amazing things that's happened in world politics for quite some time.
I've stayed in the Ritz-Carlton.
I tried to order a pizza there, and they said there's one on the menu that costs $250 for a personal pizza.
Every inch of it is the Ritz.
It's a five-star, six-star.
I don't know if there's seven-star, but it would be at a hotel.
And MBS suddenly, like overnight, turned his government into a full prosecutorial machine where all sorts of people, including the richest, most powerful people in the kingdom We're taken to the Ritz, imprisoned there, and then told, we know you're corrupt.
You're going to make a deal with us.
You're going to give back, let's say, 90% of what you stole.
Otherwise, we'll turn it over to the prosecutors, the real prosecutors, not the ones who are nice and take you to the Ritz, but the people who take you to, you know, not seven-star hotels, but real jails.
and we'll see what they do with you.
So in other words, he was willing to cut a deal with various people who, many of whom were members of his own family, who he thought had been corrupt, and he claimed had been corrupt.
And some of them almost certainly were.
So we're talking about people who were accused of stealing literally billions of dollars from the Saudi government.
And they were all told, make a deal or the consequences will be dire.
Now, of course, you can phrase this in different ways, and the MBS would like everybody to know that he was being gentle.
This is the nicest way to deal with this.
Other autocracies, let's say the People's Republic of China, would just Shoot people in the back of the head.
They would just take that money.
There would be no Ritz.
And I was told that his advisors presented that as one of the possibilities.
Either just go and kill everybody who's been stealing from the treasury, or just kill a few people who are extremely prominent citizens.
Instead, like he likes to put it, I took the gentler route and allowed people to negotiate.
But of course, there's no negotiating with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
He basically controls everything about what the Saudi government does.
And so for the next month or so, the Saudi government did nothing but try to get as much dirt as possible on these people, present them with dossiers of what they thought they'd stolen.
and then tell them to cough up money.
You find people like Al-Walid bin Talal, who's the richest man in Saudi Arabia.
Sure enough, he emerges from the Ritz.
He seems unable to travel anymore.
He made some deal whose terms he will not disclose.
When he's been interviewed about what happened in the Ritz, his voice does not sound like the voice of a man who's at liberty to speak of every detail.
In other words, even though it was the Ritz, they didn't make it easy on those who were interned there.
Is he still unable to travel?
As far as we can tell.
I think he has traveled within the region, so to very stalwart Saudi allies like the UAE.
But al-Walid bin Talal is someone who, in the past, you'd see in New York, London, Saint-Tropez.
And now, no, no.
This is a man who's got not quite Bezos-level money, but the order of magnitude would be like Mike Bloomberg money.
And now he can't go anywhere.
Yeah, and he's someone who I think I've seen profiled on 60 Minutes, and he's a very cosmopolitan person.
Yeah, he owns like a big chunk of, or has owned big chunks of things like Twitter and Citibank.
He's like a major wheeler and dealer who's got Friends in high places.
And so, if you can twist the screws in a way that gets him to be afraid of his future, then that means, yeah, you've shown that you have real power.
Now, I hasten to add, again, trying to put this in the Saudi perspective, for many Saudis, this was a really popular move, imprisoning people in the Ritz, because they correctly, Saudis, ordinary Saudis, correctly saw their government as extremely corrupt.
That people were just taking money and, you know, between 5 and 10% of the Saudi national budget just goes to stipends for princes.
So if you're an ordinary Saudi and you see that, then you have reason to believe that the government is not on your side and is being just milked constantly by powerful people.
And so, what they saw was the Crown Prince finally doing something about that.
And so, from what looks to us like a really bizarre way to siphon money out of powerful people, looks to a lot of Saudis like something that was a long time coming.
Right.
And it's also this quintessential strongman move.
I mean, it's just the, you know, Tony Soprano as Crown Prince, or it's right out of a Godfather movie.
He also shows a kind of capriciousness in the way he wields power, which you describe, which is frankly a little baffling, but I think you actually dissect the psychology of it.
He will imprison people, you know, activists and reformers, For calling for things which he then enacts.
Like, I think the woman who was most responsible for advocating that women be allowed to drive, correct me if I'm wrong, but she was thrown in prison and he still changed the laws, you know, thereafter allowing women to drive, but decided to imprison the most vocal activist for that reform.
And he's done that on other points.
So, I mean, this is just kind of, I mean, it is sadistic behavior, but how do you think of it?
What's the rationale?
Yeah, it looks sadistic and capricious.
And, you know, when it happened, when this female activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, was thrown in prison, the way that it was read by most people was that MBS is opposed to female driving, which has been illegal in Saudi Arabia for some time now.
And it appeared to a lot of people like, okay, so his reforms, his reigning in the extremely conservative religious clerics, that's fake because he's not allowing women to drive.
And then it turns out just very soon afterward, he allows women to drive.
And he says now he wanted to change the law earlier.
He wanted women to be able to drive long before Loujain al-Hathloul was imprisoned for calling for that.
So why would he imprison someone who's calling for something that he himself was pushing for from the inside?
And the answer is actually pretty simple.
It's that it's not as she claimed that women have the right to drive because they're equal to men.
It's that women have the right to drive for the same reason that Saudis have any rights, which is that the king or the ruler of the country grants them those rights.
They have no rights otherwise.
And so for her to say women inherently have this right actually was a direct threat against the kind of theory of the state that MBS represents.
So you can say a lot of things.
What you cannot say is that you have rights that don't flow from the monarch himself.
And if you suggest that, then it's almost tantamount to treason.
By the way, when Loujain was locked up.
Her family has told me she's not allowed to speak, although she's technically free in Saudi Arabia right now.
They did not take her to the Ritz.
They put her in prison.
They had people visit her, torture her, threaten her.
And this is not too long before Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered.
There was someone from MBS's own circle who came to her and said, what we're going to do to you, no one will ever hear about.
Your body, parts of it, will be thrown in the sewer.
So, a very Khashoggi-like threat made before the famous case.
So, it was not just a slap on the wrist for someone who mildly offended the Crown Prince.
It was someone who agreed with the Crown Prince about the gist of the policy and who was being threatened with death and dismemberment.
What is the logic of torturing a prisoner out of whom you're not trying to get any information?
I'm just assuming that was not the motive.
What's going on there, do you think?
Now that we're attempting to enter the mindstream of sadists, what's happening there?
Well, I think, first of all, a sadist will do it because he likes it.
That's part one.
Part two is, you can torture people into giving you confessions, you can torture people to deter others.
In the case of Lou Jane and most of the other people who have been dissenting in any way from MBS's policies, What they've been trying to do is get them to admit that they are on Team Qatar.
The state of Qatar has been at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia for a few years now.
Saudi Arabia has even had basically a blockade of Qatar that expired last year.
But that for years, MBS, the official line of MBS and of Saudi Arabia, was that Qatar is a terrorist state that's trying to destroy Saudi Arabia and trying to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in its place.
So they have imputed to Loujain and to others the motive of working on behalf of Qatar, trying to besmirch the name of Saudi Arabia and trying to work for the Muslim Brotherhood or some other combination of nefarious forces on the inside.
And I think by torturing people, that's one of the goals, is to get people to admit that.
Okay.
So, but as we said, on the other side of the balance, he is a genuine or semi-genuine reformer, or a genuine reformer whose reforms are, in some cases, are of ambiguous ethical import.
What is the Vision 2030 campaign, and in what ways is he reforming beyond allowing women to drive?
So, MBS's Vision 2030, it's capital V, Vision 2030, it's a branded plan that he came out with early in his reign, is a total effort to reform Saudi Arabia and turn it into a country that's basically normal.
I mean, it couldn't have been more tribal, pre-modern as of 10 years ago, and MBS said, all right, we're going to do it all in one go, peel off the band-aid, And allow all sorts of entertainment, all sorts of religious liberty, and get rid of corruption, and open up the economy to investment and to all sorts of new opportunities.
And we're going to do it all at once, so that by 2030, the transformation will basically be complete.
So, it's a pretty extraordinary plan.
I mean, I don't think Because it's being run by a possibly sociopathic autocrat that we should dismiss it too quickly.
Like, Saudi Arabia before, just to give a sense of what it was, it was not just corrupt.
I mean, there were all sorts of things that you just couldn't do there.
Women couldn't drive, for one thing.
Women couldn't travel.
There's a guardianship law that pretty much just said if you were a woman and you tried to show up at the airport with your passport and go somewhere, You would just be turned away.
You would have to have a male guardian, basically a babysitter from your family, who would allow you to go.
Otherwise, no.
There were no movie theaters.
There still is no drinking, although MBS strongly hinted that that would be in the future for Saudi Arabia.
And there were these religious police, these hairy guys in capri pants who would go around every major city and thwack at you with a stick if you weren't doing Islam in the way that they liked.
So this is a really, really backwards place.
I think even MBS himself would probably admit that.
And the idea of 2030 is that by 2030, Saudi Arabia will be like Dubai, only more so.
That it's going to be totally modern, have all the latest concerts and movies, and people will go there because they see it as the place where the economy is going to boom in the future.
All that MBS has been doing by his light is trying to make that happen.
He says, look, you can whine to me about political freedoms, but what Saudis want is Vision 2030 and maybe political freedom someday.
But for them, it's way more important that we no longer be a backward theocracy and that we be more like Dubai or some other modern state.
And he's opened relations with Israel, right?
Not officially.
So, the UAE and Bahrain have normalized relations with Israel, exchanged ambassadors, and Saudi Arabia hasn't done that yet.
Now, there's clearly contact between the two countries, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the next couple years.
The fact that Saudi Arabia has the holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina, and that the The transformation of the country into a more secular place, it just isn't complete.
So I think that's made it very difficult for relations to move quite as fast in the case of Israel.
But he told me pretty clearly that he sees Israel as a potential friend and not as an enemy, which in itself is a pretty wild thing to hear from a presumptive king of Saudi Arabia.
So, what do you think we, by we I mean, I guess the U.S.
here, should do in light of this?
Because currently the posture is overtly hostile between the Biden administration and MBS, and very much this is the knock-on effect of the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi.
And I think as you point out in the article, you know, we have an example of someone like Assad in Syria who was once celebrated for his modernizing tendencies.
What do you think, just to take it from the present forward, what do you think Biden's posture should be with respect to MBS and what he's doing?
Well, I think first of all, the Biden administration's posture toward MBS seems to be, we wish he didn't exist, and if there's a way for him to no longer be crown prince, we would like to see that happen.
So, this to me seems, especially after having gone to Saudi Arabia seven odd times during MBS's rule and seeing how entrenched he's gotten during that time, that posture toward MBS seems like total wishful thinking.
You know, one Saudi foreign policy guy said to me, look, if that's the Biden administration's view, then they need a psychiatrist.
They don't need an IR specialist.
So it's just not going to happen.
So My view is that, look, the Saudis, they are never going to be in their form of government, in their morality, compatible with mine.
You know, I'm an American liberal small d democrat who believes, you know, I believe in democracy and they're never going to be democratic in my lifetime.
That's my view.
So what I think we need to do is figure out what are the pathways that we can encourage that move Saudi Arabia in directions that satisfy us, realizing that it's never going to get all the way.
And there are some things that we can encourage, like the sort of new tolerance for religious minorities, which is still just barely starting.
So let's not get too excited about that quite yet.
But the transformation of Saudi Arabia into something other than an extremely conservative theocracy that winks at jihadism and maybe even encourages it.
Those are changes that we should encourage.
And then there's a very difficult calculus that we have to take into account about the differences in values that we have, and also about the sovereignty that we have to guarantee to other countries.
We don't have the opportunity to just go in And by our own fiat, tell Saudi Arabia no longer to be Saudi Arabia.
We can encourage that, and we can make alliances that are true to our values, but we have to be realistic too about what's actually going to happen in Saudi Arabia, which most likely is going to be the ascent to the throne itself by MPS in the next few years, and then barring his assassination or some unforeseen biological event, his remaining on that throne for 50 years.
I think we need to see over the long haul how we can influence him.
Now, the comparison to Bashar al-Assad is, I think, an important one because I remember distinctly when Bashar al-Assad came into power and there were hagiographic Western biographies that came out about him saying, look, this guy, he trained in London.
He's an eye doctor.
He's a man of science.
Hey, we hear that he listens to Phil Collins in his free time.
How bad could he be?
And of course, the answer is apocalypticly bad if you're in Syria.
So Phil Collins does not immunize you against becoming Satan.
So I think in the case of MBS, you could still see that.
I mean, he is way more, he's way more repressive than his predecessors, and he might move further in that direction.
I'm pretty sure that he would prefer not to.
I'm pretty sure that he doesn't do this for fun.
He does it in ways that are nonetheless inexcusable.
But if there's a way to encourage him to not do these things and to remain in power, And to execute the reforms that he's talking about, then we should find a way to do that.
In the meantime, though, this is going to be, you know, yet another case where we are pinching our nose and having to work with autocrats who are doing some pretty horrible stuff, which, you know, in the last month or two alone means, you know, he's executed literally dozens of people.
So there's a very long distance to go before we can be, you know, proud of any of the compromises we might make with him.
Do we know anything about what would happen if we transition to alternative energy at the fastest possible pace?
Is the Saudi economy diversified at all at this point, or the wealth of the principal rulers diversified enough so that the kingdom wouldn't collapse if oil suddenly became next to worthless?
So, I'll tell you a little bit about the Saudi economy.
I drove around Saudi for weeks, just got in a rental car and drove randomly, and I could see that they were making efforts to Saudi-ize, to nationalize the economy, which basically means getting Saudis to work for the first time, because the Saudi economy for years has been pretty much sucking oil out of the ground and selling it, which they do very, very well.
And usefully for the United States and others.
So when driving around, you could see Saudis working in positions where they had clearly never worked before.
In fact, they had never worked anywhere before.
So you'd go to like hotels and find Saudis at the front desk doing a hilariously piss poor job trying to check you in at the hotel.
And then, you know, some Egyptian guy who had probably done that job for the previous 15 years I would eventually hear the commotion at the front desk as I was trying to check in and then say, oh, let me help you and give you the rate card or whatever I was asking for.
And so the ability of Saudis to just turn on a dime from a petro-rentier state to a diversified economy, I think that's open to doubt.
And I haven't seen it actually working, although the effort is clearly there.
They're really trying to make that happen.
But no, for the foreseeable future, Saudi is going to get all of its leverage and most of its money from sucking oil out of the ground.
And, you know, you can see that to this day, like MBS and his stance toward Putin.
Where does he get any of his power?
It's because he has this nearly unique ability to pump more or less oil according to his wishes on that day.
So, that's going to continue to be the case, and a turn toward alternative energy cannot possibly happen fast enough to prevent him from having that kind of power.
Okay, so what of his fairly surreal efforts to deprogram jihadists in prison?
In what do they consist, and what was your interaction on that front?
This was something I did not expect at all.
So there's a very famous prison in Saudi Arabia called Hayyar Prison, just south of Riyadh.
And one of MBS's advisors said, why don't you go take a look at Haier?
And you know, I'm a big jihadism nerd, spent a lot of time looking at Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
He said, you'll find plenty of ISIS guys there who will be willing to talk to you.
And it was true.
There were more Al-Qaeda than ISIS, but there was both there.
What the Saudis were doing with them just defied belief, though.
And I say this all with a great big caveat that I was speaking to people who were in prison and who, the moment I left, would be subject to the whims of Saudi government jailers.
So, who knows what they really believed, but I will tell you what was actually happening on the ground, which was that they had decided, after years of trying jihadist de-programming, If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
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