Part One: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia

Robert sits down with David Bell to tell the life story of MBS, the crown prince and ruler behind the scenes of the Saudi Kingdom. (4 Part Series) See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Oh my goodness. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we have a very special episode for you this week. We are talking about, finally, we're going to give the first two episodes of will be a multi-part series about Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. And to talk about this, obviously, the only guest we can bring on for this episode is a guy I think most people are aware of, one of the world's leading experts on Saudi Arabia, my former colleague at Cracked, David Bell. David, welcome to the show.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Yeah, if anything, I'm gonna be teaching you a thing or two.

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot of people don't know this. You lived for 47 years in Saudi Arabia.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  That's

• 0:50Robert Evans?

  Which is impressive because you're not that old. Yeah.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  No, no, that's that's several years. Yeah, several years more than I have existed.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that's actually older than Mohammed bin Salman. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's very good. So you're more qualified to talk about the country than the king of the country. Well, not the king. He's not actually the king. He's the Crown Prince, and he's going to be the king, and he's effectively ruling the country. But you know, you know how it goes with with with these sort of royal families.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Of course I do. Like I said, expert.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, expert on Saudi Arabia. In addition to that, you and I lived together for a period of time in the in the late aughts.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  We worked, we worked at Cracked Magazine together. You are currently a writer and script polisher and finisher offer at Some More News and Even More News.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  And you also co-run the podcast network Gamefully Unemployed with our also fellow former roommate and colleague, Tom Ryman, which hosts several of my favorite podcasts, including Fox Mulder's The Maniac and the new Himboos.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Himboos, which is about supernatural.

• 1:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's your supernatural rewatch podcast.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not even a rewatch. I've never seen supernatural. So

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  It's just a watch for you. Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's me discovering those beautiful, beautiful boys, the Winchesters.

• 2:10Robert Evans?

  And you're, I didn't do it this year. I did a big Lebowski costume for Halloween this year, but I think next year I'm gonna do a Fox Mulder costume and I'm trying to pick between either just wearing the FBI like suit and having an empty holster because as Fox Mulder, I have lost my gun before showing up at the party.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  Or show up at the party with like five or six fake guns.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Leave them around.

• 2:34Robert Evans?

  Give them to people like, like accidentally drop them in people's laps. If I see someone dresses a gondola player, maybe point it at them, you know, all the Fox Mulder classics.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Anywhere you can leave it where kids can reach it is preferable.

• 2:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  These are all classic Fox Mulder tactics.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I know. I'm, if Fox Mulder really existed, you would have done a six-part series on him.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, because there would have been a congressional investigation into just the things that he did.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:04Robert Evans?

  Like multiple of them, like the church committee would have had like a church committee.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  My favorite, not to deviate, but my favorite things, I've been re-watching the X-Files recently because I'm always re-watching the X-Files.

• 3:18Robert Evans?

  Of course, as you are wont to do. Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  My favorite thing he's ever done, in my opinion, is they were at a crime scene where there's blood and he wanted to prove the blood was fake. So he reaches down and he dabs it on his finger and he tastes it and he goes, that's sugar. And it's like, that is just something you don't do. I know it's small, but I can't get over the idea of being at a crime scene, seeing blood and tasting it. That would stop everything. Like that alone would be like, Mulder, go home. You need to go home.

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  What are you doing here?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  You need to go to the doctor.

• 3:50Robert Evans?

  I don't care if he's an FBI agent, like a beat cop would kick you off the scene then.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:54Robert Evans?

  You just, you just tasted the blood? Get out of there.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Even if it's fake blood, don't taste it. Don't taste it. It could be anything.

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  That's crazy stuff.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  Um, I, when I was at Oxford, they kept trying to show me like, you know, oh, here's where Tolkien worked. Here's where C.S. Lewis rode. And I was like, where did, where was Fox Mulder's dorm when he was canonically at Oxford?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yes. And he had sex on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's grave.

• 4:20Robert Evans?

  And they were all like 20 and they were like, who? Is that a graduate of Oxford? And I'm like, ah, god damn it.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Those young bastards.

• 4:28Robert Evans?

  You fucking children.

• 4:31Speaker 02

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• 4:35Speaker 03

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• 5:05Robert Evans?

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• 5:49Robert Evans?

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• 6:13Robert Evans?

  You know who else is a young bastard?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:17Robert Evans?

  Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Well, us too, but yes. So, you've probably, listener, obviously, Dave, again, as I stated, you're an expert on Saudi Arabia, internationally recognized.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  For the listeners who know less, Mohammed bin Salman is the Crown Prince and the current effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. His dad is the king, but he's not like... Super on the job right now. Like, most people tend to agree that his son is kind of the power behind the throne. The thing you will probably know him best for, if you were a casual reader of news in Saudi Arabia, is that he's the guy who had that journalist bone sawed, Jamal Khashoggi, from the Washington Post, almost certainly ordered a team of people to have him killed and sawed up with the bone saw in Turkey. Yeah, he's that guy. And MBS, as he's generally called, is one of the most dangerous and, in some ways,

• 7:15Robert Evans?

  competent, like bastards in the world today. He's a world leader who has been generally very successful in pushing his specific ideology and his specific plans. He's been running into increasing issues as he's gotten more power and as he's accumulated more power and as he's spent more time at the top. But, you know, it's kind of one of those things where his overall level of success has been pretty great. So you have to, you have to credit him as being extremely competent, at least kind of within his broader mid, right? He has put his fingers on the scale to push anti-democratic policies around the

• 7:58Robert Evans?

  globe, using his influence and the amount of money that the Saudis have through their oil wealth. And at home, he has mixed a series of dizzying reforms with unprecedented authoritarian crackdowns, often against members of his own family. Now, before we discuss how he got to where he is today and what he's done with his time in power, we need to talk about the origins of his family, the House of Saud. As you might guess, the country of Saudi Arabia takes its name from the Saud family line, which has its origins in the 18th century, in a small town on the Arabian Peninsula named Diriyah. In the mid 1700s, there was a religious leader in that town named Mohammed Ibn Abd al-Wahab in the Arabian state of Najd,

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  who began preaching about the need to return to a pure form of Islam. He was angry at what he saw as the decadence and many moral compromises of the Ottoman Caliph, who had allowed such evils as relatively open socialization between unmarried men and women, and women to work in the world, right? Like, ladies were getting jobs in the Ottoman Empire, right? Particularly in the capital. Yeah, he was really unhappy about that. Like, women are making money? No! Um, he was also unhappy about a lot of art in the Ottoman world that depicted the human form, which you're not really supposed to do under the strictest interpretations of Islam. And he was unhappy about music. You're not supposed to have music, right?

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  There are certain kinds of what we would call music that just involves like harmonizing voices that are allowed, but you're not supposed to have like instruments, right?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Really?

• 9:33Robert Evans?

  These are all things that under, yeah, under the strictest interpretations of Islam, right? Again, most Muslims that I have known and most Muslims in the Muslim world, you're going to encounter music, but not in the strict parts, right?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's every religion, right? Is like the strictest parts are always ridiculous. And most people, even if they subscribe to that religion are going through and they're just like, yeah, we're not going to do that. Like we'll have music. It's fine. Like.

• 10:01Robert Evans?

  It, you can run into like, um, people who are like American Christian anti-Muslim folks who will be like, well, you know, if you, if they're actually following their religion, they're not supposed to do this and this and this. And it's like, well, if you were following the letter of the Bible, there's a lot of shit you shouldn't be doing that you're doing, right?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it feels like it's all kind of part of the same thing, whether it be like these people or I don't know, the Heritage Foundation where it's like, yeah, they're all the same kind of maniac.

• 10:32Robert Evans?

  You could see Wahhab as sort of like a Heritage Foundation maniac of his time where he's like, very minor compromises had been made with the hardest line version of the faith in order to like, exist in the, in the increasingly modern world. And Wahhab was like, fuck that shit. Like we need to go back, right? Like we have, we have to return. You know, he, he's really one of those guys. There's a lot of debate, and I am not a scholar of Islam, uh, on how theologically sound Wahhab's arguments are, right? And this is not a podcast. That, that doesn't matter for the, for our purposes today. What matters is that. He had a lot of supporters and one of these supporters was his local emir,

• 11:16Robert Evans?

  a guy named Mohammed Ibn Saud, who is the kind of founder, he's obviously not the first member of the House of Saud, but he is the guy who is generally seen as the founder of like the House of Saud as a modern political dynasty, right? And Mohammed Ibn Saud seemed to, seems to have seen Wahab as a useful tool for building a base of support. Saud was an ambitious man. The Arabia of his day was a scantily populated backwater with nomadic tribes who were constantly at each other's throats and too busy fighting to build a credible state. In 1744, Wahab, again, this guy is basically the leader of a militant extremist religious movement of his day. He leads like a mob to destroy the tomb of one of the Prophet Mohammed's companions,

• 12:00Robert Evans?

  framing it as an attack on idolatry, right? If you, if you've got, if you've got a tomb that is like a venerated spot that's, that's worshiping an idol, right? And you're not supposed to do that under the strictest interpretations of the religion, you know? Like that, that's kind of his argument is that people, people were worshiping the tomb as opposed to like, you're only supposed to worship God.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  The tomb is the place where his body is though, right?

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  Right, yes.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Like, that just seems like, what are we gonna do at that point? Like, that, that just, I don't know, man. That's, that's, that's, yeah, strict, I guess.

• 12:37Robert Evans?

  It's strict. That's exactly what it is, right? He also stones a woman to death for alleged adultery. I'm pointing alleged here because like, who knows what the, like, the standards of evidence back then were not high, right? And eventually he, he does a lot of shit like this and Wahab has to go on the run because people get angry at him for being a giant dick.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  For being an asshole, yeah.

• 13:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, for being an asshole. And when he goes on the run, Muhammad Ibn Saud takes him in and he kind of welds his followers and this version of Orthodox Islam, which has this, it includes all of these strict returns to like old rules, but it also includes these new calls for Arab nationalism, right? Which is an increasingly popular idea in the, in the area, right? At, at the time, Arabs are not governing themselves. They're, they're under the rulership of a Turkish caliph in large part, right? This is, we talk about this in the Lawrence of Arabia episodes. This is going to culminate in the early 1900s in the Arab revolution. But this is kind of a lot of the origins of a lot of that stuff, right?

• 13:44Robert Evans?

  Is Wahhab is preaching that like, we should be independent. And Ibn Saud is like, okay, well, if I, this guy just wants to be a religious figurehead and he's willing to back my family as the ruling kings of an Arab kingdom, right? And, and that's what I want for my family. I don't want us to just be like local bigwigs. I want us to be the kings of the Arab world. In 1740.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Is Arab nationalism, I assume that was very popular, right? Like that idea.

• 14:14Robert Evans?

  Not yet. It's starting to be because of Saud and Wahhab, right? That starts to be popular. It's going to be very popular in the 1900s, right? But in 1745, they're kind of ahead of the curve, right?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. They're like the first punk bands.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just think about how a lot of bad ideas will be couched in, you know, generally popular ideas or the idea that this system isn't working where it's like, they're not wrong. You know, it's like someone being like, hey, Twitter sucks. Let me buy Twitter and then making Twitter even worse. Where it's like, if, if you're exploiting like people's frustrations that are valid, you can sneak in all sorts of bullshit, I guess is my point. Is it like that?

• 15:01Robert Evans?

  It's yeah, it's kind of a and it's kind of a symbol of how there's not enough. There's not enough just raw support for the idea of an independent Arab state. So Saud has to kind of grab this crazy dude and his followers who are angry about like women working and people playing music to be like, if they're angry about other things mostly, but they're willing to be angry about the thing I'm angry about. And if I get them on my back, they're crazy and they're willing to fight and die. Right? So like, it kind of makes sense to to to partner up with these these insane motherfuckers. It's a lot. Again, this happens all the time, right? Like the the religious right is largely a a factor of like very which rich people whose primary goal was to not be taxed and to not have their workers have rights.

• 15:47Robert Evans?

  Who were like, oh, these people are angry about like women wearing skirts and getting abortions? Well, if they're angry about taxes too, if I can get them to oppose taxes too, then like, yeah, throw them on the bus, right?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  Um, that's kind of how reactionary movements always work.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just whoever's pissed off who can tolerate each other getting together.

• 16:08Robert Evans?

  And likes to hurt people.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  We can all, yeah.

• 16:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And and that's again, there are some legitimate grievances here. Arabs are being persecuted by the Ottomans.

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  But there's a lot of like, there's not enough persecution for there to be a large enough movement to cause a revolt on its own. So Saud has to find these maniacs and kind of get them on his side. So for about half a century in 1745, they establish what is technically a country. It's really just like a city state based around the city of Dheria, which is today kind of like a suburb of Riyadh, right? Riyadh is the current capital of Saudi Arabia. So basically, that region, what is today the capital of Saudi Arabia, they have like a micro state that is ruled by the Saud family and is a semi independent, an independent Saudi state, right? That exists in 1745 for about 50 years, a little, a little bit more than half a century, right?

• 17:05Robert Evans?

  A little more than 50 years. So that's a pretty good job, right? Like, they're able to kind of like make their own country for like two generations almost until in 1819. Yeah, pretty good, better than I probably would have done if I tried to make a breakaway state.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Mine will be done in an afternoon, like it won't even last a day.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I really wish you'd been able to get hold of those nuclear missiles, Dave, but unfortunately, without them, you're unlikely to secede from the United States.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  That's how they take you seriously.

• 17:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, we all learned that lesson from North Korea. So for half a century or so, the Saud family rules their new country from Daria until in 1819, this kind of like the black and white teachings that Wahhabism are preaching leads to increasing conflicts with the Ottomans. The Al Saud rulers of the country run into a version of the same problem that afflicts any authoritarians who ally with crazy religious hardliners, which is that sooner or later, they're going to try to get you to do crazy stuff for them because they think that's what God wants, right? Like if you if you hit yourself to these guys, they're going to make demands increasingly that you like, you have to do some crazy stuff, right? Like you're on Team Crazy Guys, you have to do some crazy shit, right?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  That's what you signed up for.

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, don't you believe the crazy stuff?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Well, this is sorry, this is just paralleling, because you know, obviously, it's on my mind a lot. But today, where it's like, it feels like a lot of the far right, that you have the grifters, and then you have the true believers, right? The people who are like, no, we're gonna unmask the deep state and get all the pedophiles. And then the other people are like, no, no, no, this is like, kind of a grift.

• 18:52Robert Evans?

  No, we are the deep state pedophiles. We just want money.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, you don't understand, we're just trying not to pay a lot of taxes.

• 19:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  It's a weird mix.

• 19:05Robert Evans?

  In this case, the Wahhabists believe that God wanted them to occupy Mecca and Medina and to sack Karbala, which is a town in Iraq, and destroy a tomb for Mohammed's grandson, which again, people were like, going to to pray, basically, right? This is the kind of thing, the Ottomans were kind of fine with ignoring them while they were just running this backwater. But now they're trying to take the capital city of the faith and sack a random town and also take the second city of the faith. And that's just too, you're getting too busy, right? And you don't have the ability to actually.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  It's like a cult, right? Is like, we all want to wear robes and like do drugs and hang out. And then they're like, all right. Yeah. And then it's suddenly like, all right, everybody take a dagger and we're gonna stab ourselves. And you're like, well, no, I don't want to do

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  that. Did you guys believe in the cult shit? Not that much.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right. It was in the terms, terms and agreements. Like, did you not read them? Like, this was where it was heading.

• 20:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, the, uh, the Wahhabists accuse the Ottoman governors of the state of not respecting Sharia law, which forbade idolatry. And the Ottomans don't react well to this. And unlike the Saudis, they have an army, like a big army, because they're an empire. They're not like a good empire, but they're bigger than this backwater little town. So, the first Saudi state gets crushed by Ottoman arms. Their capital at Dheria was destroyed, and the Saud in charge is taken to Constantinople, where his head gets cut off. His body is posed, holding the severed head and displayed for three days before being thrown into the sea. Uh, which is, you know, one way to handle an insurrection.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did it work?

• 20:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not in the long run. Not in the long run. Um, but, uh, you know, points for trying. If the Saud family was good at one thing, it, it was the fact that they, they were really good at making more of themselves, right? This is, this is continues to be a strength of this family to the, the modern day. Despite the Ottoman Empire's best efforts, a prince managed to get free of their dragnet and survive to rebuild the family movement. This guy was Turkey bin Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Saud, and he fought against the Ottomans to defend Dheria, escaping after his son and two of his brothers were killed. He spends five years in exile in the desert, rebuilding an army and gathering followers to his banner. Biographer

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  Ibrahim al-Khamis says this about the man. Turkey vowed to himself to stand firm in the face of enemies and to fight in battle even if alone, carrying his sword, al-Ajri, which he referred to in his famous poem. If every friend forsakes their friend, I will carry al-Ajri as a steadfast companion. Right? Basically, if I don't have any other friends, at least I've got my knife. Um, which is pretty cool.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty badass, right? You can get a tattoo of that.

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  Gangster. Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm like, you said they like, there's a lot of them. I start picturing the scars guards. Like, is it like that, where if you strike down two, there'll just be three more?

• 22:05Robert Evans?

  Comparison. Yeah. Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  All right. And are they like charismatic like that?

• 22:09Robert Evans?

  Yes, um, they're charismatic like the Skarsgård's. One of them was in the series Andor, like the Skarsgård's. Yes, you can, uh, yeah, the Al Saud family is everywhere. Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  So, uh, in 1824, this, this guy, Turkey, the kind of like inheritor of the Al Saud family establishes a second Saudi state, moving the capital to Riyadh proper and governing there for about 10 years. Near the end of 1834, while he's kind of consolidating his power, he's fighting a series of battles against his rivals. And, you know, he's got to fight the Ottomans, but a lot of his rivals are members of his own family, right? Cause it's a big family and they're not all in agreement about who should be in charge. And near the end of 1834, after about 10 years of governing this revitalized Saudi state, uh, Turkey is ambushed while leaving his mosque and slain by three assassins who

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  had been hired by his second cousin, Mashar bin Abdul Rahman, who tried to make himself the new Imam. Turkey's son Faisal returned home immediately after this and put an end to the insurrection, although fighting would continue for another decade. This is going to be a common feature of the second Saudi state, right? Is that they're, they're all fighting each other, right? That's kind of their biggest enemy. And honestly, even up to the modern day, the Saudi royal family spends a lot of time killing other members of the Saudi royal family. It's kind of one of their great pastimes.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Well, you gotta have a pastime. I mean, that's the thing about power, right? Is like never enough, right? So like,

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  No.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  It'll just keep whittling down more and more. So if there's a family in power, it's like, well, who in the family is in power? And then you have your own little power struggle within that family.

• 23:59Robert Evans?

  You never have enough power, but you're gonna have too many cousins, right? That's kind of the rule.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Sorry, I have, uh, I have eight uncles and aunts, so I have a lot, I'm just on one side and we're always trying to kill each other.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I got a couple of them. They keep coming at me, but I'm very careful.

• 24:20Robert Evans?

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• 25:00Robert Evans?

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• 25:59Robert Evans?

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• 26:10Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Turkey alone creates about four branches of the Saudi royal family, just one of which, the Al-Faisal, contained several thousand male descendants by the late 20th century. So that's like how prolific this family is. Is this one guy, because of how many kids he has, creates four branches of the family that are like thousands of people strong today? This brings us to what will become a pattern within the House of Saud, which is the sheer number of these guys. ...causes a constant problem with political turnover as there are always more princes and other royals who hate each other and think they really ought to be the branch of the family that's in charge. The second Saudi state ultimately collapses in 1891 as a

• 26:55Robert Evans?

  civil war within the house leads to their defeat by the Al Rashid tribe and the destruction of the country. For more than a decade, the Al Saud family struggles to regain their lost glory. Many of them, like Abdul Aziz Al Saud, grandfather of Mohammed bin Salman, the guy we're talking about in these episodes, went into exile in places like Kuwait. Abdul Aziz is probably the most significant member of the House of Saud, right? He is the guy who establishes the modern Saudi state. Like I said, he goes into exile in Kuwait and he returns to Arabia in 1902 with an army, right? He spent his time gathering power, he gets a bunch of desert warriors to his banner, and he shows up in the early 1900s

• 27:35Robert Evans?

  intent on re-establishing the Saudi state for a third time. He carries out a daring early morning assault on a fort near Riyadh called Mazmuk. They take the fort, kill the governor, who was a member of the hated Al Rashid tribe, and they retake Riyadh. In her book, The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House writes, quote, "Once again, he used religion just as his ancestors had to help the Al Saud reconquer Arabia. He convinced the Bedouin to congregate in agricultural villages and adopt a sedentary life focused on puritanical Islam promoted by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Imam taught that belonging to the Ummah, or a community of believers, took precedence over other social bonds, including tribe. Anyone who made a judgment based on anything other than the Quran was

• 28:20Robert Evans?

  a non-believer. Still, it took Abdul Aziz over 30 years to subdue and unite warring tribes under his rule. In 1932, he announced the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." Now, this is a very short summary of a lot of complex history, but it gets across the key bullet points that are going to be important for our purposes. The House of Saud spends about 300 years viewing the Arabian Peninsula as theirs, and they repeatedly tried to make that so. They create a series of states, which often fail due to infighting until they succeed. And they are always backed in power by an alliance with religious hardliners, generally today called Wahhabists, who help them secure their power. And the main threat to said power over the years has been their inability to stop killing each other, right?

• 29:04Robert Evans?

  These are all traits of the Saudi state up till the present day. The other key point here is that Saudi kings and princes have varied wildly in their competency and efficacy. Abdulaziz is very good. He's probably the best Saudi king in terms of his actual level of competency. He is the really, really on the ball leader who establishes the state. When he takes power in 1932, Saudi Arabia is a poor country and most of its citizens live lives that are barely changed from the way Bedouins had been living for hundreds of years. The government maintained what control it could by doling out government salaries and bribes to tribal leaders to keep them loyal. This tapped the state treasury almost to the breaking point.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  Abdulaziz was able to put through some minor infrastructure improvements, but his only real sources of state income in the early period for the state are money that comes from pilgrims visiting Mecca for the Hajj and the Zakat, which is a tax paid by non-Muslims who live in the country. Britain also provided a stipend because of their role in helping to establish the Saudi state, so long as Abdulaziz could be relied upon to use his forces to crush fundamentalists who tried to launch insurrections in the places like Iraq, which were still controlled by the British Empire. By the late 1930s, this whole house of cards is in danger of collapse. Abdulaziz has done kind of the impossible, but he's had to make a lot of compromises in order to do it. He's had to kind of throw a lot of his hardline followers under the bus by allowing unbelievers

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  to control chunks of the Muslim world, including Iraq. And there's not really any money in the Saudi state yet because oil isn't worth much and they don't know that Saudi Arabia has it at the moment. It's a mark of his desperation that Abdulaziz sells Standard Oil of California a concession to drill in his country for just 50,000 pounds, when his finance minister balks Abdulaziz tells him, "Put your faith in God and sign." And that works out. That winds up being a really fucking good bet. Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  This is like, this is like 90s Marvel where they're like, "We don't know what we have yet. We're just selling it off to whoever."

• 31:06Robert Evans?

  We'll give you a $20 for this Iron Man character. Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And they're just, it's tourism? Did I hear that correctly?

• 31:16Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, it's drilling, it's drilling.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Well, there's also religious people coming there.

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for Mecca and Medina, right? Like, because you have, Muslims are supposed to, if they can, go to Mecca, right, to do the Hajj, at least once in their lives. And that brings in some money to the state, but you only get so much money from that.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  It's not Florida, it's not Florida where they're like, all right, we got this one thing going on for us. That's just a little side, little side hustle.

• 31:43Robert Evans?

  It's a little side, it's not the kind of side hustle that having most of the world's oil is, right? Which is going to be kind of their big hustle. Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  If I could choose between one or the other, I guess I would go for the world's oil.

• 31:57Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, and that's going to work out for them. Per the book MBS by Ben Hubbard, quote, "The discovery of oil in 1938 attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies, and representatives of Western governments seeking access to the kingdom's black gold, including the United States. In a secret meeting in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal, the two leaders hit it off, laying the groundwork for a lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in exchange for American protection from foreign attacks." Now, this is the root-

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Funny how leaders always hit it off.

• 32:33Robert Evans?

  They sure seem to, right? Wow, the rich guy in charge of this country likes this other rich guy, huh?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you like money and power, and they're like, yeah, me too. It's like, cool.

• 32:42Robert Evans?

  You were born into money, me too. Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  And this is, it kind of starts with FDR, the very close relationship to this day that Saudi Arabia and the United States enjoy, like, starts here. And from this point forward, money begins flowing into the peninsula in its millions, in its tens of millions, and eventually tens of billions. At the start of the Third Saudi State, King Abdulaziz had agreed to curb the spread of fundamentalist Islam to maintain the favor of European colonizing powers. But now Saudi Arabia has money, and the Saudi royal family starts investing piles of it into spreading Wahhabist teachings around the world. Saudi Aramco, soon the world's most valuable company by a mile, this isn't the case today, but it is- Going to be the case for quite a while allows the royal family to accumulate vast fortunes.

• 33:30Robert Evans?

  This helps fund the further expansion of the family. King Abdulaziz married some 18 women and fathered more than 60 children. The next generation of his family would be freed from material concerns that had dominated their forbearers lives. Oil money provided stipends to the many hundreds of royal children, right? This is like how Saudi royals live from now on. There's money coming into the state and a big chunk of it gets earmarked for the members of the House of Saud, right? Vast fortunes of what should have been state funds start disappearing into the pockets of different royal family members as grift and graft become an increasingly accepted pastime. Large numbers of Saudi men, even outside of the family, are given government jobs that are themselves basically bribes

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  to keep anyone from complaining about the endemic corruption, right? So the Saudi royal family are all living luxurious lives for doing nothing, or at least lots of the Saudi royal family are. And regular Saudis get jobs that they basically have to do almost nothing, right? In order to get enough money to live, yeah.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That's the thing about like corruption or like trying to run it. Like you have to make enough people happy, right? And otherwise it's just not going to last. So at some point, you know, enough people who like, who matter, I guess, to staying in power have to be happy with it.

• 34:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and the first group that the family is concerned with is the other members of the family, right? The princes lower down the line who, these are the guys who, if they were uncomfortable and they had to struggle, might become rivals for power, right? So part of why you make sure they all get something is that then none of them want to rock the boat, which has been a continuing problem in the family. Ben Hubbard describes the state of like the Saudi royal family's basic welfare fund. Quote, "There were thousands of them, all subsidized by the Saudi state. In 1996, an American diplomat visited the office that distributed their monthly stipends and found a stream of servants picking up their master's allowances, which varied based on their status. The sons and daughters of King Abdulaziz."

• 35:35Robert Evans?

  Received received $270,000, his grandchildren up to 27,000 and his great grandchildren 13,000. The most distant relatives got $800. Princes also got million dollar bonuses to build their palaces when they got married, as well as perks for having children. The diplomat estimated that the stipends cost the state more than $2 billion per year, but that was merely a guess. Much of that money trickled into society to earn the royals the loyalty of the population. One of Salman's sons said he spent more than $1 million of his own money during the holy month of Ramadan, hosting feasts for his subjects. But the royals still had large commanding fleets of yachts, building palaces from Los Angeles to Monaco and taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms in the communities where they landed.

• 36:19Robert Evans?

  So they're doing pretty good, even though about 40% of the country lives in poverty and about 40% of the Saudi youth are unemployed, right? All of these princes are fairly comfortable. Right. Again, enough people, just enough. Enough people. And one of the things that's remarkable at the Saudi state is how few Saudis actually have to work, right? The majority of jobs in the country are done by foreign workers who are brought in and often, some of them are very close, it's a mix. You have some of them are like Western workers who are paid pretty well by like Saudi Aramco, but the largest number of them are very close to slaves. And 90% of the private sector labor force is foreign born in Saudi Arabia by the 21st century,

• 37:04Robert Evans?

  which is crazy, right? Like that, that, that's like an unsustainable situation unless you've got all of this oil money sloshing in. The royal family increasingly starts to exist as a subculture within broader Saudi society. The constant infighting and sometimes deadly conflicts mean that the vast majority of royals know they're in potential danger anytime they attend a family gathering. It becomes the norm for everyone to memorize each other's birthdays so that they would all know at a glance who in the room was most senior and thus who they had to show deference to, right? Like you have to always be careful to make sure that you're not seen as like looking to get one up on your betters because that could be dangerous to you.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Right. See, that's, that's what the scars guards don't have to worry about because they know who's in charge at any given point. Like that's, that's

• 37:50Robert Evans?

  Definitely not Bill. Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And there's not too, too many of them. That's part of the secret too. I feel like.

• 37:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Stellan, unlike, unlike the King Salman, Stellan does not keep a prison for members of his family who displeased him. Right?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know that.

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  So far as we're aware of, right? Right. That's a good point. There's a couple scars guards unaccounted for as far as I, as far as I'm concerned. King Abdulaziz establishes another key precedent for the House of Saud, taking bloody vengeance upon their enemies. Early in his reign, several of the king's cousins put together an army to threaten Riyadh as part of a play to shift power to a different branch of the family. Abdulaziz smashes the army rather than negotiate, and his brutality convinces the village of Leila, where a lot of these guys had been like based to surrender, and the king condemns 19 leaders of the rebellion to death. He immediately issues a 24 hour stay of execution, not as an act of mercy, but so his men can erect a gallows at the entrance of the town and kill them all publicly.

• 38:51Robert Evans?

  By dawn the next day, he has the rebels beheaded in pairs, each person killed by a black enslaved man with a sword. After the first 18 have been killed, the king pardons the 19th man and orders him to go tell his friends and family members about the justice and vengeance of King Abdulaziz. Right? Yeah. Go tell everybody, I could have killed you, but I didn't.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Well, hold on. You're saying he made a public execution?

• 39:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And then he saved the last person who was like, go tell people what happened here. I, I wouldn't, I, listen, I wouldn't say anything, but at the time I'd be thinking like, I think they'll know it's public, but yeah, obviously I'm not gonna argue. I'm not gonna argue. I'll be like, yeah, I'll totally tell everybody. About this.

• 39:35Robert Evans?

  Sure, man.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  But still, it seems redundant. It just seems redundant. I think you could have killed that guy and his family would have known, but it's fine.

• 39:42Robert Evans?

  I'm not gonna backseat execute for this king, but yeah. Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud was born into this increasingly weird and isolated world in 1935. This is Mohammed bin Salman, the subject of our episode's dad, right? So he comes into the world in 1935, which is about 10 years before the oil deal with FDR. His early years are spent living the traditional way. He's born before oil money makes it that becomes a thing in Saudi Arabia. He's living in tents in the desert several months out of the year, and he comes of age just as the House of Saud is flooded with oil money for the very first time. King Abdulaziz passes on in 1953, leaving a wealthy and powerful state after being born into exile. But because he had grown up conscious of the fact that the internal struggle for

• 40:26Robert Evans?

  power had shattered their last state, on his deathbed, Abdulaziz begs his oldest sons, Saud and Faisal, to join hands and swear to work together. And they totally swear to do that. And then as soon as he dies, they start fighting with each other, right? They're like, yeah, dad, we totally aren't gonna fight over the throne. Is he cold? All right, let's get, let's get, let's get at it.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Let's get the weapons out.

• 40:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  I'd create an arena. Like, I would make it official, right?

• 40:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Knife fight, right in the, right in the fucking hospital chamber.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  Um, King Saud rules for 11 years, and he is not good at it. He is so corrupt that he has completely bankrupted the kingdom after a little over a decade. His younger brothers headed by Faisal have to ally to force him to go to exile in Greece, at which point Faisal takes over. Faisal is gonna prove to be a much better king. He's one of the most successful Saudi monarchs, and in the 1970s, he embarks on an ambitious campaign to modernize the country and pull power away from the clerics. For a brief moment, it seems as if the kingdom is bending to secular modernity, and it becomes increasingly normal to see women with their heads uncovered, socializing with men who aren't relatives. Televisions proliferate, and alcohol is common at parties hosted by members of the royal

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  family, right? The Saudi, at least the leaders of the Saudi royal family are increasingly, like, modern, and a lot of the religious hardliners seem to be losing power in the country. Faisal's chief innovation is splitting control of the military between three different princes in order to reduce the odds of a successful coup, right? You you kind of make sure no one has all of the military in their hands and just trust that no group of three Saudi princes will ever trust each other enough to work together.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's very funny listening to this because it's like, it seems like all governments sort of naturally settle into a certain way, right? Where it's like, okay, we need to cool it with the religious stuff. We need to allow people to just do whatever they want. Oh, we need to spread out power. So it's not just like one person can make this decision. Like, it's not one to one, but it's just funny hearing this of like, yeah, this is, if you want to be in charge for a long amount of time in a functional way, without everybody killing each other, it all kind of goes in this direction, it feels like.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  To work.

• 42:45Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. In 1975, King Faisal is assassinated by his nephew in an act of vengeance for his brother, who had been executed by Faisal for protesting the king's decision to allow television in Saudi Arabia. So there's always backlashes to the modernizing, right?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 43:02Robert Evans?

  Like.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Dying for television, to stop television.

• 43:05Robert Evans?

  1975 TV, there's not even anything good on.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I kind of get it, but you could, if you told this person like, don't worry, once the internet shows up, no one's going to give a shit about television.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think Cheers is even on the air yet, man.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:21Robert Evans?

  What what were you fighting for?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  God.

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  While all this is going on, Prince Salman, MBS's father and the current king, is keeping his head down and avoiding making himself a target. He'd been born the 25th of Abdulaziz's 36 sons, and on paper, again, the 25th son of the now dead king shouldn't get anywhere close to the throne, right? Like, you've got a lot of guys have to die for that to ever become your job. And he's not going to become the king until like 2015. But he is distinguished from the start from a lot of his brothers and half brothers by the fact that he is willing to actually work, like, he's not scared of actually doing a real job, which gets him promoted. Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  They're nepo babies, but he's like Jack Quaid.

• 44:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Where like, yeah, you're a nepo baby, but you're fine. You're fine. It's cool.

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  I'd say he's the Nicolas Cage of King Abdulaziz's sons, right? Where he's like, he's definitely like, he gets a head up because of who he is, but he's also in Face Off, you know?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:22Robert Evans?

  A lot of people don't know that about the current King of Saudi Arabia, that he was in the movie Face Off, but he was.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Oh, good for him.

• 44:28Robert Evans?

  It's not impossible. You can't prove he wasn't. So when his, when, when this guy's half brothers and brothers, they're all fighting throughout this period of time for the choicest positions, um, from which they can largely just shunt oil money into their own pockets while not doing anything. Salman, Prince Salman, actually works and he focuses on building a base of support. He sits down with citizens who need his royal help and he makes deals with business interests in his area who provide him with support throughout his life. And he gets invited by influential clerics to his court to discuss like religious things and whatnot. You know, he's, he's kind of making himself well-known with the, the thinkers and doers in Saudi society. He develops a reputation for seriousness and a relative lack of corruption.

• 45:12Robert Evans?

  Which is not to say he's not corrupt, but he's not like primarily motivated by money. In fact, he's poor by the standards of the Saudi royal family. He's not a poor man, but he's not like just in it to suck cash out of the family oil money. He's doing stuff.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Right. The bar, the bar is low.

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Just like Nicolas Cage was poor after he had to give all that money back to Mongolia for buying dinosaur bones illegally.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Where you're like, he's poor, but like, he's Nicolas Cage poor.

• 45:42Robert Evans?

  He's just gonna do a couple more face offs, you know, and he's gonna be fine. Now, some of the fact that he like has financial issues has to do with the fact that he has a lot of kids, like his dad, although not, not a crazy amount of kids, but he's, he's still pretty kid having. His first wife, Sultana, gives him five sons and one daughter. Now, because their branch of the family can't count on a vast fortune of grafted oil money, Prince Salman raises his sons to be hard workers who, in a reversal from the norm for science of the royal family, actually grow up knowing how to do stuff. His oldest son, Fat, went to school in the West and developed a deep understanding of how to communicate with Americans and Europeans. His second son, Sultan, joined the Saudi Air Force and became the first Muslim in

• 46:25Robert Evans?

  space as an astronaut on the shuttle Discovery in 1985. His third son, Ahmed, studied mining in Colorado and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy and then enlisted in the Saudi Air Force. His fourth son, Abdulaziz, went to work in the oil industry and became an expert on modernizing Saudi energy extraction methods. While his kids work diligently, the kingdom struggles. In 1979, the country, still reeling from Faisal's assassination, endures another shock. On November 20, 1979, 50,000 worshippers crowded into the grand mosque in Mecca. As the Imam finishes giving his blessings, hundreds of armed men begin rushing forward, firing into the air and forcing people away from the doors. A gang of militants grabbed the Imam's microphone and held a dagger to his neck.

• 47:09Robert Evans?

  All 51 doors to the mosque are chained shut. Thousands of people are taken prisoner. Now, the guy responsible for this massive act of terrorism is Joe Haiman Al Oitabi, an anti-monarchy Islamist insurgent who had put together a small army of around 600 rebels. He and his followers hated the House of Saud for allying with Christian infidels in order to make their fortunes, and accused the royal family of betraying Islam. Al Oitabi and his followers also believe that one of the group's leaders, Mohammed Abdullah Al Qatani, was the Mahdi. For the sake of brevity, it's enough to know that the Mahdi is basically Islam's equivalent of the second coming. He's a messianic figure whose arrival heralds the end of days. So, these guys have now taken the holy mosque, and Saudi soldiers spend days trying to retake it.

• 47:54Robert Evans?

  But the rebels have a commanding position, and they massacre anyone who comes close. The Saudi government has to reach out to France and get the help of an elite unit of commandos. And I'm going to quote next from Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower. Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief, formal ceremony, these French commandos. The commandos pumped gas into underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued. With casualties climbing, Saudi forces drilled holes into the courtyard and dropped grenades into the rooms below, indiscriminately killing many hostages, but driving the remaining rebels into more open areas where they could be picked off by sharpshooters.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  That is so messy.

• 48:35Robert Evans?

  It's such a messy. Like, first off, is it not worse to fake that they're Muslim now? Like, is that not worse?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Any mission that starts with, "Okay, we're gonna need you to pretend to convert to Islam." I would be like, "Hmm, all right, let's, let's take a step back here and let's look at the bigger plan first."

• 48:54Robert Evans?

  Did none of these French commanders go like, "Uh, sir?"

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, do I? They're like, "It's fine, you can lie, you can lie."

• 49:01Robert Evans?

  It's fine to lie, it's apparently fine to lie.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:05Robert Evans?

  And also, though, guess at work, I guess we drop grenades indiscriminately into the mosque. Oh, God.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  That's why they're like, "Do we, like, what, yeah, what's the point in converting? To then drop grenade, like, how is that?"

• 49:17Robert Evans?

  Is Allah not angry at this?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Like, what, what rulebook are they going by? Like, I'm trying to think of, like, the afterlife of, like, who is checking things off of, like, is it the airbud idea where they're like,

• 49:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  "Well, there's no rule that says they can't do this according to our rules." You did it.

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  I would imagine just a mom with, like, 40 cigarettes in his mouth, reading the "Yeah, yeah, it's fine."

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:42Robert Evans?

  Uh, it takes two bloody weeks. It's nut stuff. It takes two bloody weeks for the rebels to surrender. The so-called Mahdi is killed during the fighting, while Al-Othibi and nearly 70 of his followers are captured alive. In total, about 1,000 people die during the fighting, a mix of soldiers, civilian worshippers, and insurgents. 63 militants are ultimately beheaded for their parts in the attack. The fallout from all of this is substantial, as Karen House writes in "The Man Who Would Be King." Saudi religious clerics actually felt sympathy for the militants occupying the mosque. The Imam's sermon that very morning lamented the kingdom's moral decay, and the revolt's leader had studied with the Imam he now held captive. His goal was to end what he saw as the Al Saud's tolerance of infidel innovations,

• 50:26Robert Evans?

  like women working and mixing with women, or the government's tolerance of Shias, a sect of Islam that he and his fanatics saw as heretics, not Muslims. The Wahhabist clerics, they find themselves in a tough position after this, right? Their power is tied to the House of Saud, who's just made kind of the biggest compromise with hardline Islam imaginable. You know, like, it's kind of, it's, it's pretty tough to top that. Yeah. So this is rough. The most prominent of these clerics issue a fatwa, which doubles down on the legitimacy of the House of Saud, but demands that the current rulers of the kingdom stop flouting the rules. As Karen House writes of what would come in the future, "No more movies, no more alcohol, no more women on television, no more gender mixing anywhere,

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  no more soccer to distract youth from studying Allah's holy Quran." Almost overnight, everything changed in Saudi Arabia. During my first visit in 1978, I attended a dinner at oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani's house in Jeddah, where men and women mixed. Alcohol was plentiful, and after dinner, the minister and his guests watched a table feed of the 1978 World Cup soccer final between Argentina and the Netherlands, just the sort of evening deplored by religious clerics. So no more fun? No more fun is going to be the rule in Saudi Arabia after this point. But there's also gonna be no more fun for a minute here, because we're gonna have our second ad break. That's our fun. Yeah, that's good.

• 51:52Speaker 03

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• 52:22Robert Evans?

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• 53:21Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 53:32Robert Evans?

  And we're back. How are you feeling about Saudi Arabia, Dave? It's going good?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, always. Like I said, I'm an expert on this. So everything you're telling me are things I already knew.

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  I'm just, I'm humoring you, you know? I'm like, it's like when you talk to like a kid about Star Wars, you know? And the kid's discovering things and you're like, uh huh.

• 53:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:57Robert Evans?

  I'm just imagining now in like the, in the international like anti-terrorist commando handbook, they're like the, they're like that one character in The Mummy where they just have a bunch of different religious symbols on necklaces. They're like, okay, which country am I going into? All right, this is the religion I am for the time being.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  It's tough, man. When you inject money into any situation, everybody in that situation loses their goddamn minds.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's the one constant rule of the world is that as soon as people get access to billions of dollars in oil money, they go fucking crazy.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  They lose their minds.

• 54:33Robert Evans?

  A lot of why Saudi Arabia is so fucked up in like the religious ways that it is and has been for most of the modern era. Comes down to the fact that they were following a pretty natural path of people being like, I don't know, we're rich now. Do we need to abide by all of these crazy religious strictures? Like, we're okay being Muslim. We don't have to be such hardliners about all of the, the, batshit stuff. And then there's this hideous terrorist attack and the government responds in like, the worst way they possibly could.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  They're like terrorism wins.

• 55:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So many people are like, okay, but we're gonna become assholes again. Don't worry. We did drop grenades in the mosque. We, we understand that's a problem, but women will no longer get to be on television. Are you cool with us now? Can we keep being rich? Yeah. And it turns out, yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  It's just, I don't know. It, it, you just, it's that battle between like, I get the idea of having a set of beliefs, not necessarily these beliefs, but beliefs that you're like, you stand by and you have certain rules in your life. When you try to apply that to a country, it always gets messy where it's like, no, I, I need everybody be doing this stuff. Meanwhile, the country's like, we just want to have like, good relations with our neighbors and prosper and make money, or make a stupid amount of money in this case. And it's just like, it's just not gonna work. These, all these factors are not gonna work. Or maybe they do. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

• 56:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it's, it's going to work because of the amount of money behind them. It's gonna work longer than it probably should have, right?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  That's true. It's like, it's like going to like Prince's house where you're like, he has enough money that you could, he, he also can have like weird rules at his house, right? Everybody's just gonna go like, all right, fine.

• 56:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Sure, Prince. I mean, I get to hang out at your house. So that seems cool.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  It's also a case where like, okay, so you had French commandos fake being Muslim and then drop grenades in the holiest mosque. And the consequence of this is women don't get to be on TV anymore, huh? Okay. Yeah, that seems like you're really hitting the main problem. Okay. So for the next 20 years and change after this point, fundamentalist Islam becomes more and more entrenched in Saudi Arabia, as does the power of the religious police to punish men and women who violated even the smallest rules. Karen notes that before 1979, it had been acceptable for foreign women especially to go about their business without their heads covered. This becomes impossible by the start of the 1980s. As the clerics crack down, the House of Saud goes through a spate of particularly weak and incompetent kings. King Faisal is followed by King Khalid,

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  who wanted the job so little that he hands power right away to his son, the Crown Prince, who succeeds him in 1982. This guy, King Fad, was more interested in chilling on his yacht than governing, and he half asses the job himself until he has a stroke in 1995. It was into this Saudi Arabia, saddled with a series of basket case kings and riven with financial corruption, straining under the weight of increasingly radical and restrictive religious laws, that the subject of our episodes for this week and next week, Mohammed bin Salman is born on August 31st, 1985. And we will talk about his life and how he comes to power in the subsequent episodes. But Dave, this has been part one. You're introduced.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Sorry, I didn't realize I'm older than him.

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, you are. That is, that is a bummer. He's a little older than me, but not much.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he could have us killed today. And he's younger.

• 58:05Robert Evans?

  He's had a lot of people killed. He's had a lot of people killed, you know? I feel like I could take him in a straight fight. But yeah, he does have planes and stuff. And I don't have planes.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Right, not yet.

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  Not yet. Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  It's like learning that Finn Wolfhard was born after 9/11, where it's just like, man, I haven't done shit with my life.

• 58:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, it's also if we'd had a Finn Wolfhard in 2001, they never would have tried to take those towers. There would have been too high a chance that a Finn Wolfhard might have been on the planes, you know?

• 58:35Speaker 01

  He's too precious. Yeah.

• 58:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's too... They would... See, I was going to say, would they be scared of his name? Would you be like, no, they wouldn't want to risk Finn Wolfhard?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  No, his name is Finn Wolfhard.

• 58:45Robert Evans?

  They wouldn't take that danger?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:49Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Anyway. What were you saying? Something about a podcast?

• 58:54Robert Evans?

  Where can people find you on the innerweb.com?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  I can be reached at, uh, so just Google, um, game fully unemployed, G A M E F U L L Y unemployed. Uh, like Robert, like you said, it's a movie podcast. It's just bitching about movies, very low stakes, uh, but fun. And then, yeah, we have like our Patreon where we have a bunch of extra stuff. We've made like 2,000 podcasts. It's too many, uh, but you can find that. I'm the head writer at some more news. Again, Google some more news, completely different vibe than the movie podcast thing. So if you like politics, uh, and like doom,

• 59:40Speaker 01

  or you like people complaining about Marvel movies, uh, I got, I got you, I got you covered for those two things. So check that out.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, everybody, this has been behind the bastards. We will be back in due time, but until we're back, think about us every waking second. Don't think about driving. Close your eyes if you're driving right now, you know?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Robert Evans?

  Get on the road, close your eyes, drift off, fall asleep, you know?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yep. Let, you know, like let instinct guide you.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it'll be fine.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:00:43Robert Evans?

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• 1:01:43Speaker 07

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves?

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• 1:03:19Speaker 02

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