Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part Four: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia About this episode We conclude the story of Saudi Arabia's blood-soaked crown prince, for now.
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0:06 Robert Evans? And we're back. Welcome back to the Behind the Bastards Mohammed bin Salman Episodes Extravaganza.
0:16 Speaker 01 Woo.
0:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to introduce these episodes in an exciting way anymore. We're talking about bad people, the worst, and one of them is the current Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. When we left off last episode, he had started what was becoming a genocide in Yemen. He had partied with Pitbull and he was orchestrating the downfall of his relative Mohammed bin Naif, who was the Crown Prince before him. How we doing, Dave? David Bell, our guest?
0:44 Speaker 01 I'm doing well. I'm doing very well, Robert.
0:48 Robert Evans? David Bell is doing Bell, or vice versa.
0:50 Speaker 01 I didn't have a new dream in between these episodes that I could tell you about.
0:53 Robert Evans? That's probably for the best.
0:54 Speaker 01 So it's just the same dream from before.
0:57 Robert Evans? Yeah, that same upsetting dream, sure.
0:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it just, it wasn't, it was a nice shower.
1:03 Robert Evans? It's upsetting dream to me a little bit.
1:05 Speaker 01 It wasn't sexual.
1:07 Robert Evans? That's good. The more you say it wasn't sexual, the more I believe it wasn't sexual. That's how telling someone something isn't sexual works.
1:15 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. It was weird because like, I don't dream about you often.
1:20 Robert Evans? Thank you.
1:21 Speaker 01 And I wasn't thinking about the fact that we were recording today.
1:24 Robert Evans? Uh-huh.
1:25 Speaker 01 And so I'm like, that's interesting. That's interesting that you made a cameo.
1:30 Robert Evans? See, now I am hurt. Why don't you dream about me often, Dave? Am I not worth dreaming about?
1:34 Speaker 01 Here's what I'll start doing.
1:35 Robert Evans? Thank you.
1:35 Speaker 01 When I go to bed, I'll look at a photo of you every night.
1:41 Robert Evans? That's good. That's, that's good.
1:43 Speaker 01 Nothing weird about that.
1:45 Robert Evans? Yeah, thank you, Dave. I will continue to have one dream about you per week where we captain the USS Enterprise together.
1:52 Speaker 01 Oh, ooh.
1:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah.
1:54 Speaker 01 We would do terrible things.
1:56 Robert Evans? We would. We would. That is not going to end well for anyone on board the ship.
2:01 Speaker 01 We would keep my go-to every time I'd be hit with like a moral dilemma or like a problem. I'd just go, beam them into space. Problem solved. Moving on.
2:10 Robert Evans? Get those assholes into space right now.
2:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. Into space. Here we go. Just a trail of bodies.
2:18 Robert Evans? The Enterprise is the ship that keeps beaming people into space.
2:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. They have that one move.
2:25 Robert Evans? I just watched the new Starfleet Academy, the first two episodes, and it is missing that wherever these, there's all these bad guys, there's the guy from Sideways on your ship, just beam him into space, get his ass, beam him into space.
2:38 Speaker 01 Beam him into space.
2:40 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:40 Speaker 01 So easy.
2:42 Robert Evans? Oh, God.
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4:23 Robert Evans? You know who else was in the classic movie Sideways, Dave?
4:27 Speaker 01 Who?
4:28 Robert Evans? Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
4:30 Speaker 01 Uh huh. That checks out.
4:31 Robert Evans? Yeah, he was the, he was one of the two male leads in Sideways.
4:37 Robert Evans? Pretty much, basically, close enough.
4:39 Speaker 01 Sure.
4:39 Robert Evans? So perhaps the key defining characteristic of Mohammed bin Salman that most explains his success within the closed world of the Saudi royal family is simply the fact that he's got energy and he wants to do things. I cannot overemphasize how lazy most of these guys are.
4:54 Speaker 01 I mean, that's America too, at this point where it's like, well, are they 80? No? Okay, that's great.
5:01 Robert Evans? It's, it's like, again, if you go to like nepotism with like the sons and daughters of like Hollywood royalty where when you get that one guy who's like, he's got the famous name and he's like, no, no, no, like I will cover my body in shit and roll around. Does the role want me to be covered in shit and squirming around like a grub? I'll do it. I don't give, I have no ego about this. I don't give a fuck. Like, and it's like, well, yeah, you're gonna have a career, Nicholas Cage.
5:24 Speaker 01 That was my Lily Rose Depp watching Nosferatu and I was like, oh, you're willing to like, do weird shit.
5:31 Robert Evans? You don't give a fuck. Yeah.
5:33 Speaker 01 All right.
5:33 Robert Evans? Okay.
5:34 Speaker 01 We can work with that.
5:35 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah, you get to be a star. Mohammed bin Salman is, is like the Lily Rose Depp of the Saudi royal family. You know, a lot of people, a lot of people have been saying that.
5:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:47 Robert Evans? So in 2016, he continues both the war in Yemen and his conflict with Mohammed bin Naif, and he launches a new war against one of the most powerful blocks in the kingdom, the religious police. Now, the Mutawwah, or Hayya, as they are also called, had been seen as almost untouchable by his predecessors, right? These are the police of vice and virtue. These are the guys who are going around making sure you're not disobeying like the religious law, right?
6:14 Speaker 01 Fun police.
6:15 Robert Evans? Yeah, these are, they're literally the literal fun police, right? And the men in his father's generation and MBN's generation would not fuck with these guys, right? Like, they were scared of them. They really wanted them in their corner. But by 2016, things had started to change. More than 65% of Saudis were under 30. And the young men of this generation had grown up with access to the internet and social media. They and their peers shared their frustration with the abuses of the religious police, right? That were talking to each other about how annoying these fuckers were, right?
6:47 Speaker 01 Right, they're on the internet, they're like, hey, everybody else is having fun.
6:51 Robert Evans? Yeah.
6:52 Speaker 01 Like, we're learning about fun.
6:54 Robert Evans? Yeah. In The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House describes the Fun Police's MO. For decades, thousands of these men, often self-appointed members of the committee to promote virtue and prevent vice, had roamed Saudi streets, carrying a long stick, forcing women to cover their heads, herding Saudis into the mosque at prayer time, ensuring all shops and stores locked their door for half an hour at prayer time, and that Western influence like Barbie dolls or Pokemon cards didn't pollute Saudi youth. In the waning year... Yeah, they're good after Pokemon cards.
7:24 Speaker 01 Listen, it's if you're, I know it's not the same thing, but if you, if you're starting a cult, right?
7:30 Robert Evans? Hmm.
7:30 Speaker 01 One of the key things you gotta do to maintain that cult is make sure people are having fun, right?
7:36 Robert Evans? There's gotta be something, right?
7:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, you just can't like, if you're like, no Pokemon cards, it's like, this is not going to last.
7:43 Robert Evans? If you're, if you're saying no Pokemon cards, but you can all wife swap, then you might be able to keep a cult going. But if you're saying no swipe, wife swapping and no Pokemon cards, what's gonna keep people there?
7:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:54 Robert Evans? Right?
7:54 Speaker 01 You're out of business, very bad.
7:55 Robert Evans? You're out of business. You gotta, you gotta at least get them on drugs or something, you know?
7:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, let them have the goddamn Pokemon cards.
8:02 Robert Evans? Yeah, to continue from that quote. In the waning years of the late King Abdullah's rule, the Hayya had gotten completely out of control. Hearing music inside one family's car, the religious police chased the car until it rolled off an overpass, killing the driver and injuring his wife and two young children. A few months later, two young Saudis died when Hayya members, suspecting alcohol, chased the young men's car, bumping it at high speed, causing the car to roll off a bridge. The religious police fled the scene. Still, six members of the Hayya were later acquitted of all charges. Saudis tweeted their anger on social media. "The Hayya are bloodthirsty." @Talal tweeted. @Naher wrote, "The Hayya's situation is similar to many governmental entities in Saudi. They all need restructuring and fixing." So these guys are just a menace, right?
8:45 Robert Evans? Where it's like, they might be drunk, ram them off the road, you know? Like, they're, they're cops. All cops are kinda more alike than different, right? It's, it's a happy family situation.
8:57 Speaker 01 If you're, okay. When I was a dishwasher. Food stopped becoming food. It was just this thing, right? Where you're just like, I'm just doing this thing. When you're a cop of any kind, people stop becoming people. It's just what happens. Which is why, I don't know. People should only be cops for like a few weeks at a time and then we swap it out.
9:22 Robert Evans? If you're gonna have cops, it should be a job where everyone is a cop for a little while. And because you know what doesn't get enforced then is bullshit rules. Right? If everyone has to take him, you're like, wait, I gotta, I gotta enforce marijuana laws? Nah.
9:35 Speaker 01 Nah, I'm not doing that.
9:36 Robert Evans? Not doing that. Yeah.
9:40 Robert Evans? Yeah, I, this, anything is better than having it just be like a job that a group of people hold. And to protect their power, need to like, protect their right to continue doing it with even greater bloodthirstiness. And by, anyway, whatever.
9:52 Speaker 01 Anything is better. Let's, you know what? Just make cats cops. Just cats just replace all cops with cats.
9:58 Robert Evans? Especially every cat has a drone with a gun on it. So when the cat needs to shoot somebody, the drone just starts firing. Like whenever the cat gets angry, it just starts blasting.
10:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'll be honest, this sounds like a bad plan, yes.
10:10 Robert Evans? Get down, get down. The cat's angry. Someone took away its food bowl.
10:15 Speaker 05 I mean, you're not wrong, but.
10:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:18 Speaker 05 I, I.
10:18 Robert Evans? It's still better than what we have, right? If protesters right now, we're, we're instead of trying to fight squadrons of like armored police with tanks and machine guns. They were just a bunch of cats with robots firing blindly into the air. Cause they hadn't been let out in long enough. At least that's an easier problem to solve.
10:34 Speaker 01 Mr. President, how did they get in here? How did they overthrow the government? Well, sir, they had raw salmon on them. Unfortunately, all everything.
10:45 Robert Evans? We can do.
10:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's nothing.
10:50 Robert Evans? So. MBS's first move in his war against the religious police was to ban them from stopping or detaining Saudi citizens in public. Great first start, right? The thing that you were doing that was getting a lot of people killed, you just can't do anymore.
11:03 Speaker 01 Still good.
11:03 Robert Evans? You're not allowed to just fuck with people in the world. His predecessors had tried to curb the influence of religious hardliners but failed, most famously blocking for six years an attempt by King Abdullah to make it legal for women to work in lingerie stores selling underwear to other women. And like the religious, the hardliner clerics would be like, no, women can't work. But then the problem is like, okay, so are men supposed to sell lingerie to women?
11:28 Speaker 01 So we have lingerie.
11:30 Robert Evans? Is that better?
11:31 Speaker 01 But women can't work in the, like, yeah, you know, the lingerie industry was like, guys, please.
11:37 Robert Evans? Guys, come on, you gotta give us something here.
11:40 Speaker 01 You're killing us.
11:42 Robert Evans? What do we got? We just want to sell you people underwear.
11:44 Speaker 01 I have a bunch of dudes in here.
11:47 Robert Evans? Yeah. Where King Abdullah had been too frightened to confront the Mutawwah directly, Mohammed bin Salman simply ignored their protestations and used his father's absolute power to crush any opposition. The public was wildly supportive of his actions, and conservatives found themselves alone. Perhaps MBS's single most important quality was his ability to understand how the youth of Saudi Arabia felt. It wasn't just the morality of police. Regular citizens knew it was impossible to get anything done through the government without bribery. The poor majority of the country were forced to watch while a handful of princes siphoned away the oil money that was supposed to be funding social programs and infrastructure, right? Like, people are pissed about this.
12:29 Robert Evans? And so, MBS has a lot of support as he sets about dismantling his enemies, the forces he saw as holding Saudi Arabia and his own ambition back. He later said this of his decision to crack down on the religious police. "I am young. I don't want 70% of the Saudi population to waste their lives trying to get rid of this. We want to do it now." Right? And this is, we're going from like the genocide and the orchestrating internal fights with his family where he's the bad guy to like, no, he's in the right side of this thing. These guys suck.
13:03 Speaker 01 Broken clock situation.
13:04 Robert Evans? Yeah, the only thing that will get rid of them is a strong, he's effectively the king, not literally, but is a strong regent who's being, fuck it, that's not how we do things anymore.
13:15 Speaker 01 Right.
13:15 Robert Evans? I'm in charge, right? Like, nothing else was going to fix the situation because of how Saudi Arabia works, right? I'm not saying every country is this way. We don't need a king to deal with the cops in our country. We could just stop having them be immune to everything, but whatever.
13:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like when Trump gets something right, it's like you don't have to hand it to him. You don't.
13:33 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's like, yeah, he is right. Those, those little Japanese trucks are pretty sweet. We should be able to buy those here.
13:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
13:39 Robert Evans? We don't need just F-350s. We could use some little Ks or whatever they're called. Or the Korean, I forget which, those little bitty trucks. We should, we need little bitty trucks here. He's right about that.
13:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, we need little bitty trucks.
13:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's every, anytime it's something truck related, he's got like a 50% chance of being right because he seems to just be a guy who periodically sees trucks and goes, ooh, those.
13:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, the guy seems to know trucks. Yeah, I would trust him.
14:03 Robert Evans? He just likes them.
14:05 Speaker 01 If he was like Secretary of Trucks, I'd be fine with that, you know?
14:08 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's like that video where he's inside that big dump truck or whatever, pretending to drive around and I'm like, no, that looked pretty fun. I'd be making the little faces too. Like, who wouldn't do that?
14:18 Speaker 01 Most human moment for him, yeah.
14:20 Robert Evans? Yeah. By the end of two.
14:24 Speaker 01 No, just getting rid of the fun police. Anybody could have done it, but.
14:27 Robert Evans? Anybody, and everyone should have before him. It's shocking that, but like, he's the guy who does it, right? By the end of 2017, he had developed a somewhat earned reputation as a reformer, but he was also the architect of what the international community was openly calling a humanitarian catastrophe and potentially an act of genocide. A 2021 report by Watana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni human rights organization, concluded that by November of 2015, the kingdom was aware of a food insecurity crisis in the regions they were striking. Over the next two years, MBS's Saudi-led coalition increasingly and purposefully used hunger as a weapon to try and force Houthi surrender. Martha Mundy, an expert on Yemen, quotes a senior Saudi diplomat who described the coalition's strategy
15:12 Robert Evans? this way, "Once we control them, we will feed them."
15:17 Speaker 01 Huh.
15:17 Robert Evans? Huh. Is that the plan, huh?
15:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:22 Robert Evans? Okay.
15:23 Speaker 01 I don't think that's a good plan.
15:24 Robert Evans? You know, you're the bad guys, right?
15:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:27 Robert Evans? Like, first off, that's bad guy talk.
15:30 Speaker 01 Yes, that's supervillain, yes.
15:32 Robert Evans? I want to continue by quoting from a 2025 article in the Journal for Genocide Research, "Unnoticing Yemen." "A UN panel of experts similarly determined in a report published in January 2018 that the Saudi blockade is essentially using the threat of starvation as a bargaining tool and an instrument of war. The Yemen Data Project, a major source of information about Yemen, has documented the persistence of the tendency of the Saudi coalition to target civilian places and infrastructure. Almost a third of all coalition airstrikes throughout the war have been aimed at such targets, especially at farms." Right? So they are, food is a weapon, you know? That's, that's, a lot of people do this, but not in a fun way, not in a fun way, not like in a food fight way. Yes, Dave.
16:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:15 Robert Evans? Despite each new atrocity, there appeared to be no end in sight. King Salman had taken power and brought his son with him, but they'd inherited an utter mess of an economy. Oil revenue accounted for 80% of the federal budget, but global oil prices had collapsed, leading to a 50% decline in revenue. One of King Salman's first moves was to bring in the kingdom's foreign currency reserves. With $100 billion budget deficit and the war in Yemen alone costing half a billion dollars a month, the World Bank estimated Saudi Arabia could only afford to go on for four years before running out of money. There was no way to begin tackling the problem without cutting benefits to Saudi citizens, much of this in the form of benefits to government employees. These cuts slashed the average Saudi man's income by around 50%.
16:58 Robert Evans? That's how, to the bone, because these people, all their jobs are fake, and all their jobs are like, oh, you know how to use a typewriter? There's an extra 20% to your salary, right? That's the stuff he's getting rid of.
17:10 Speaker 01 Right, we talked about that, where it's like, sorry, guys, nothing you do matters, so you're kind of, you know?
17:16 Robert Evans? And the country's falling apart now because of the war the prince launched.
17:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, we want to do this war, so we're gonna pay you less to do nothing. No one's a hero in this, I guess.
17:26 Robert Evans? No one's a hero.
17:28 Speaker 01 Also, I would be pissed. I'm like, listen, you promised me money to do nothing for a very long time.
17:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, you promised me money for nothing and the chicks for free, man. I don't have either. Yeah.
17:38 Speaker 01 Maybe I'm spoiled, but I don't want less money so you can go do a war.
17:42 Robert Evans? Yeah, and the chicks still aren't free, you know?
17:45 Speaker 01 No, no.
17:46 Robert Evans? We're not even allowed to play guitar. Well, actually, now we are. We are allowed to play the guitar now.
17:50 Speaker 01 That's something.
17:52 Robert Evans? It's something, right? In The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House writes, despite warnings from some of his ministers that economic growth would grind to a halt, MBS proceeded. To add insult to injury, the Saudi civil service minister took to television to accuse government employees of working only an hour a day. These cuts were paired with slashes to subsidized water, power, and gasoline. Fuel prices rose by 50%, bringing gas up to a horrifying 96 cents per gallon. One Saudi economist described the situation thusly, "We had Christmas every day and Grinch has stolen it."
18:22 Speaker 01 Again, no one's a hero.
18:24 Robert Evans? No one's a hero.
18:24 Speaker 01 It's like, shit, man, like.
18:27 Robert Evans? Should you have had Christmas every day? Is that a good way to run a country?
18:30 Speaker 01 Well, so I like, I'm all for living in a utopian society where it's Christmas every day.
18:37 Robert Evans? But not when it's being paid for by oil money.
18:40 Speaker 01 That's what I was gonna say.
18:41 Robert Evans? And it's only Christmas for a tiny chunk of the population.
18:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, where it's just this group at the cost of everybody else. That's not good. But I understand that it's, it's that sort of thing where everybody thinks they're the underdog of their own life. It doesn't matter how rich you are. You want more and you feel like you're not getting enough. So it's like, these people clearly were living in their little utopia. And then they're like, sorry, life has to get slightly realer for you.
19:07 Robert Evans? Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 01 And they're like, this is bullshit.
19:09 Robert Evans? Bullshit. You want me to do stuff?
19:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. No.
19:13 Robert Evans? So government spending was a huge problem, as was the fact that basically no citizens were working. But just annihilating everyone's income turned out to have negative impacts. By the start of 2017, economic growth was at 0.4%, a state of affairs most economists would describe as fucked up. Social media boiled with resentment. A protest movement began to bubble up, and on April 22 of 2017, King Salman was Forced to issue a royal decree declaring takesies backsies on all cuts and allowances, benefits and bonuses. The civil services minister was fired for insulting Saudi workers. And again, he is right. These guys are at most in a lot of cases doing an hour a day of work, you know?
19:54 Speaker 01 It's interesting because it's there's certain things in this that I admire and then certain things where I'm like, again, like, okay, like, I would love to not work much and get paid, but I also like, it's definitely a sign that things are going bad. I do wish more governments issued takesies backsies.
20:11 Robert Evans? Like they have a horrible policy. Yeah.
20:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're allowed to go, hey, everybody, oops.
20:17 Robert Evans? You know what? Department of Homeland Security was a mistake. We're taking away the TSA. Just get on planes now. We'll figure it out. You know, it works like the 90s again. Just run right up to the plane.
20:27 Speaker 01 Right, but but because that's not normalized, them doing that in this case is like, oh, you really fucked up, huh?
20:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, no, you made a mistake. You realized that you were about to be overthrown.
20:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:42 Robert Evans? MBS was not fired after this fuck up, but his popularity and reputation took a major hit. Perhaps one reason why it was so hard for Saudi citizens to accept any cuts to their benefits was that they'd seen the Al Saud family's personal finances balloon during the same period. And they have a point where it's like, yeah, you guys aren't really working, a lot of you, or you're doing barely a job compared to what you're getting paid for. But the Al Saud family is worth an insane amount of money and they do nothing at all. Right? Even as the government revenues have collapsed, they they continue to be the family net worth as this as the state's finances are in freefall. The Saud family net worth is 1.4 trillion dollars. So I get why these people are like, we gotta make cuts? Are you fucking kidding me?
21:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. Oh, the story, story of everything, right? Where it's like the rich people like, sorry, you're gonna have to tighten the belt. I mean, I need, I need my super yacht. Sorry.
21:38 Robert Evans? Look, man, if I don't like, I can only eat one piece of steak per cow and we've got to burn the rest of the cow. Not gonna ride on the same private jet twice.
21:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm not gonna cow share.
21:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, absolutely. Um, now I will say 1.4 trillion dollars is the net worth of the family. That is spread, there's 10, like more than 10,000 descendants. Now, it's not evenly split up, right?
22:02 Speaker 01 Right.
22:03 Robert Evans? But it is split up between them, you know, so it's not quite as insane, but it's still a lot, you know?
22:07 Speaker 01 So things, things are tense, right? It's like-
22:09 Robert Evans? Things are tense by mid 2017. Yeah.
22:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, cuz they basically, it's like, I don't know, it feels like the same vibes of if we were on a lifeboat. And I was like, sorry, I'm gonna shoot you cuz I want all the food. Also, I don't like you. And then you realize there's no bullets and you're like, sorry, never mind.
22:26 Robert Evans? You know what? That was just a test, just a test. Yeah, just testing you guys. See if you were ready to share with me in running this boat.
22:34 Speaker 01 They're not wrong, but it sounds like he, he, along with being like, we're cutting your money, but also by being like, and you deserve to have your money cut, like it's-
22:42 Robert Evans? Yeah.
22:43 Speaker 01 Like you're not doing anything, so.
22:45 Robert Evans? That's right. That's right. You're not doing anything, but you know who is doing something?
22:49 Speaker 01 Hmm. Nope. Sorry. I don't know.
22:53 Robert Evans? Sponsors of this podcast, they're doing hard work, you know, they're earning their pay. If you let them run Saudi Arabia, they'll, uh, they'll do it, you know? They'll run it, Saudi Arabia.
23:04 Speaker 01 They'll definitely do it.
23:06 Robert Evans? Yeah.
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25:46 Robert Evans? And we're back.
25:48 Speaker 01 I'd run it too, by the way.
25:49 Robert Evans? Good times. You'd run it too? Yeah, I bet you could run Saudi Arabia, Dave. Yeah, what's your first move?
25:55 Speaker 01 I don't know if I can do it. I'm just saying I will do it. If someone was like, "Do you want to do this?", I'd do it.
26:04 Robert Evans? Yeah.
26:05 Speaker 01 For at least a week, and then you'd never hear from me again.
26:08 Robert Evans? Yeah.
26:09 Speaker 01 I would be dead. It's, you know, but I'll do it.
26:13 Robert Evans? My first move, I'm changing the country's name.
26:16 Speaker 01 To what?
26:17 Robert Evans? From Saudi Arabia to free ecstasy town, you know?
26:20 Speaker 01 Ooh.
26:21 Robert Evans? And we just let the tourist dollars flood in. We let those Germans and Spaniards come on over. You know, someone will provide the ecstasy. That's not my job. Uh, they're in free ecstasy town right now. Zero downsides.
26:33 Speaker 01 That's so smart. What if, okay, hold on. What if like I named my apartment that? Like, and put it on like, got it, got it on like Google Maps. It's like free ecstasy town. Because you're right, is that if you do that and then people show up, eventually.
26:49 Robert Evans? There will be free ecstasy.
26:50 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's a problem that solves itself.
26:53 Robert Evans? I'm gonna come back in like two weeks and start the episode. So our friend David Bell has been raided by the DEA.
26:59 Robert Evans? He flew too close to the sun.
27:01 Speaker 01 That's just so smart. I don't know. That's such a smart idea.
27:04 Robert Evans? I, I, I think it'll work. I think it'll work. Anyway, ads. And we're back. Oh, we did. Are we back from ads?
27:12 Speaker 05 We were back.
27:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I thought.
27:13 Robert Evans? What's wrong with me? What's wrong?
27:14 Speaker 01 Too much ecstasy.
27:15 Robert Evans? By mid 2017, the king's son was in a very mixed position politically. He'd earned accolades as a reformer for his hobbling of the religious police and his seeming support for some social liberalization. But he was also the author of an unpopular austerity policy. The king and his son faced increasing resistance, both from the populace and within their own family. Mbn, who'd made no secret of his critiques of MBS's policies, was an obvious rallying point for resistance. And so on June 21st, 2017, Mohammed bin Salman acted to take him down. Karen House writes, "That fateful evening of June 21st, 2017, Mbn was called to a palace in Mecca. Once there, his guards were forbidden to accompany him inside. All phones were surrendered to palace guards.
27:58 Robert Evans? Mbn was taken to a room where Turki Al Ashiq, a contemporary and friend of MBS and now Minister of the General Entertainment Authority and others, began bullying him to resign. Denied contact with his men and the painkillers to which he was said to be addicted, he finally succumbed early the next morning after Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca, urged him to obey the king."
28:18 Speaker 01 Huh.
28:19 Robert Evans? So that's how he gets rid of his cousin. Yeah.
28:22 Speaker 01 Wow.
28:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:26 Robert Evans? Sheesh.
28:27 Speaker 01 That's abrupt.
28:29 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, it was. It was super abrupt. Yeah. And by the way, that fellow, Turkey Alashik, who is handling like the torturing of Mohammed bin Neef, like, cutting him off from his guards and his painkillers and like forcing him to resign, the guy who handles all that, do you know what he got more fa- he's become famous for doing more recently?
28:48 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
28:48 Robert Evans? Maybe a hint, he's the minister of the General Entertainment Authority.
28:53 Speaker 01 What did he do?
28:54 Robert Evans? He's the guy who ran the Riyadh Comedy Festival that all our favorite comedians performed at.
28:58 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
29:00 Robert Evans? Yeah, baby.
29:03 Robert Evans? Yeah.
29:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:05 Robert Evans? He's not only in charge of entertainment within the kingdom, he's been Salman's Hatchet Man. Yes. Yeah, he has a whole prison named after him. Yes, the guy who paid Dave Chappelle six million dollars.
29:15 Speaker 01 I mean, not surprised, I guess. I don't know.
29:20 Robert Evans? Nah.
29:21 Speaker 01 Did, who else was that? Was Louis CK at that?
29:23 Robert Evans? Yeah, I think he was. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he was. Yeah.
29:26 Speaker 01 It's, it's the Simpsons moment with the burlesque house and Barney comes out and they're like, oh, Barney. It's that where like Louis CK at there, I'm like, yeah, yeah. No one was shocked, I guess.
29:38 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's what, I don't feel any worse about Louis CK or about Dave Chappelle than I did previously. I both feel about like, yeah, yeah, I bet they, if you told me some comedians took millions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, those would have been my two first guesses.
29:53 Speaker 01 Right.
29:54 Robert Evans? Not shocked.
29:55 Speaker 01 I wouldn't be surprised by a lot of comedians, frankly, because
29:58 Robert Evans? No.
29:58 Speaker 01 You're, you're a comedian. I don't know. It's the same with Pitbull at that thing where I'm just like, I don't like it, but I'm, I guess I'm not surprised by it.
30:08 Robert Evans? I'm a little surprised by the well, because I think most people, if you say like you want to make six million dollars for a day's work, you have to make peace with working for a really bad man. But all you have to do is something otherwise innocuous. Most people will do it, which isn't good. It's just six million dollars. But if you have a lot of six millions of dollars.
30:27 Speaker 01 That's what I was about to say.
30:28 Robert Evans? That's where it's like, what? Like, you're not starving? You don't have to pay for your, your mom's dialysis, Dave Chappelle?
30:36 Speaker 01 And that's the thing, if most people was like, I did it, I wouldn't be like, I'm disappointed in you. I'd say.
30:42 Robert Evans? It's like, yeah, man, you still had student loans. I don't know. I get it.
30:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. Can I have some, I guess?
30:47 Robert Evans? Yeah.
30:48 Speaker 01 But yeah, when it's an already rich person, it's just like.
30:52 Robert Evans? Like pitbull didn't need that. Yeah.
30:54 Speaker 01 But that's rich people. I don't know.
30:57 Robert Evans? That's rich people. That's how you get that rich. So to the international public, it seemed as if the heir apparent and most powerful man in the Saudi security state had completely collapsed overnight as a center of power. Now, as we've covered, Mohammed bin Naeef's position had been degrading for years, right? He was not totally well. He did not have a grip on things and MBS had been slowly cutting him off from his sources of power for several years at this point. So this is the result of a fairly long family conflict. For most of the 21st century, Saudi Arabia had been ruled not just by the king, but by the black prince and another senior prince, a guy named Sultan, who headed the Defense Ministry before MBS. All three of these men died between 2012
31:39 Robert Evans? and 2016. So now, a year, just like two years into King Salman's being the king, right? In 2017, he and his father have neutered the clerics and the religious police. They've eliminated Crown Prince Naeef and the other Crown Princes who might have acted as barriers to their total power were gone. They are the ones running everything. There are no other major power centers. They've done this in about two years, right? So this is a very successful consolidation of power.
32:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's some Game of Thrones shit. Like that's-
32:09 Robert Evans? Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Now, all they had to do was discipline a squabbling cadre of lesser princes and officials, some of whom had supported rival princes and others who of whom may have eventually represented a threat themselves. More to the point, they were all corrupt and King and Prince Salman both knew their continued support would hinge on being seen as fighting corruption. In the fall of 2017, Mohammed bin Salman spoke before a major investment conference in Riyadh that had earned a reputation for being the Davos of the desert. In a bid to attract foreign investment into the kingdom, he deliberately played down the country's connection to Wahhabism and announced that by June of 2018, Saudi Arabia would finally allow women to drive.
32:51 Speaker 01 Hey.
32:51 Robert Evans? What a reformer. Huge move. What a feminist icon. Mohammed bin Salman.
32:58 Speaker 01 It really is like if you have a society where like, I don't know, people are running around stabbing other people randomly all the time. It's policy.
33:06 Robert Evans? Like, like the United Kingdom. Sure. Yeah.
33:09 Speaker 01 And then a leader shows up and they're like, number one.
33:11 Robert Evans? No stabbing.
33:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. We would, it didn't, it wouldn't matter how like not progressive they were. We'd be like, good for them. I like them. I'm going to vote for them. Like, it's just, yeah, really low bar is my point.
33:25 Robert Evans? Extremely low bar. The, the bar is in the fucking below the toilet. It has been flushed into the sewer, right? Um, so this is also not quite the promise that it seems. Now he avoids bringing up and nobody present feels pressed to ask about the Saudi women's rights activists who are already imprisoned for campaigning for their right to drive. On stage at the Davos, like there's already women, nobody's like, what about them? Are they getting out? And MBS doesn't say shit about that. The next thing he brings up onstage at the Davos of the Desert event is an exciting, history-making new project, NEOM, or N E O M, a city built as a one Titanic wall stretching
34:10 Robert Evans? from the Red Sea to the mountains.
34:12 Speaker 01 I heard of this.
34:13 Robert Evans? It's a huge wall-sized skyscraper covered in solar panels. The inside is a whole climate-controlled city. People, it's going to be like the, the perfect living place for human beings, an archology. Wall town, right?
34:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:28 Robert Evans? Per the book MBS, quote, businessmen would write the laws and entice the world's top minds to innovate on Saudi soil. Planning for a post-carbon future and taking advantage of the Saudi sun, the city would be powered by solar energies and staffed by so many robots that they might outnumber the human inhabitants. NEOM, Mohammed bin Salman said, would cost $500 billion and be a place for dreamers. It was not an economic development project, but a civilizational leap for humanity. At that point, the lights dimmed and a video like this one played. And Sophie's gonna, gonna display that for you now, Dave.
35:02 Speaker 01 Ah, sweet.
35:05 Speaker 07 For too long, humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature. Now, a revolution in civilization is taking place. Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint.
35:20 Speaker 01 Cram it, cram the city.
35:22 Speaker 07 Designing to protect and enhance nature. The Line will be home to nine million residents and will be built with a footprint of just 34 square kilometers. And we are designing it to provide a healthier, more sustainable quality of life. The Line's communities are organized in three dimensions.
35:43 Speaker 01 Man, so I love that they're like, "Too long have cities not been wall-based."
35:48 Robert Evans? Not been big walls. Also, cities don't live in harmony with nature, unlike a giant line.
35:55 Speaker 01 Right.
35:56 Robert Evans? Unlike this huge silver wall that cuts off birds from their migratory pattern.
36:01 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, birds are gonna be smacking into that thing. It's so tough because like, when I first heard of Wall City, right, I'm like, "That's cool and cyberpunk and like, that's fun." Then watching that ad where they take a city and cram it, I was like, "Oh, right. That's dystopian. That's Blade Runner, right."
36:21 Robert Evans? And it's, there's some like bits of wisdom in that like denser urban developments are a lot easier on the environment than sprawling ones. Sure, there's probably a future. One of the suggested futures of how we would build cities is that they are denser, which doesn't mean of low quality, but like that there, that you have, like, there's a lot more space for nature. No one is suggesting a giant wall hundreds of feet high and dozens of miles long. Like, that's an insane thing to build.
36:53 Speaker 01 It's neat because it's like what Blade Runner would have lived in. This is the thing. This is the issue I have with everything from the goddamn Cybertruck to this, which is that I love this aesthetic. I'm not embarrassed to say this. I love the look of the Cybertruck. I love that bullshit futurist aesthetic. I know it looks like shit objectively. Um, but all these dildos, it's the same problem, which is like, they're like, I want to make a world like Star Trek. And I think, oh, okay. So number one, we get rid of money and they're like, no robots. And it's like, no.
37:27 Robert Evans? Just a lot of robots.
37:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, we just want to make it.
37:29 Robert Evans? A lot of robots and tall.
37:31 Speaker 01 Right. They want to make it look like Star Trek. They don't want to actually make it Star Trek.
37:37 Robert Evans? No.
37:38 Speaker 01 Where it's actually like, oh, we, we eliminate like, um, money and we, we pour a bunch of efforts into medicine and lifting up the lower classes. No, none of that. We just want fucking cool, smooth things. And like, I get it. So do I, but I'd rather have the other stuff first.
37:59 Robert Evans? Yeah. Wouldn't we all?
38:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Wall City. I'm like, I guess, I mean, I, there's too many of us. We should stay out of nature's way. But yeah, it's who's doing it? And again, it's clearly that they're just like, they started with, like, he clearly someone who's like, well, city, that's cool. Right. And then.
38:18 Robert Evans? That's a great idea.
38:20 Speaker 01 And they went from there.
38:21 Robert Evans? We may do a dedicated episode about this later because we didn't have time in this, but this is impossible. The project is already ran, run into terminal issues, like it is cost overflows are massive. The kingdom's financial situation today is still not good because again, every effort to transition off of being entirely reliant on oil money has failed and they never really got over a lot of these central issues that were, were massive problems for the country. When MBS took power, like they've been patching over them, but there's still problems. And the goal was to get a bunch of foreign investment to make this thing possible. Again, they were looking at $500 billion and it's likely it'll cost way more than that if they were to actually finish this thing.
39:05 Robert Evans? They've dug a bunch of holes. They've started construction. It's never going to get built. It's impossible.
39:11 Speaker 01 They're starting with the, the conclusion and not getting there. It's again, like the cyber truck, I think, looks cool, but it's clear that he started with the look. And then the insides are shit and don't make any sense. So it's like, you're not starting with that fundamental idea of like, how do people live? How should we, how should we build a city more efficiently? It started with, what if wall?
39:33 Robert Evans? We're going to build the city of the future. We're like a, a modern society, you know, built by businessmen. All of the world's innovators will want to live here. It's like, but like alcohol is still illegal and women can't like,
39:47 Speaker 01 Get your shit together first.
39:48 Speaker 05 This is like a very non-original idea. A man's like, what if I start a city? What if I make my own town? Like that, that's a very common thing, I fear. And if you meet that guy, go, please leave me alone and then tase them.
40:06 Speaker 01 It's a, it's a teenager's dream where it's like, I, you draw a character where you're like, and he has a cool sword. And he's not like cool armor. And then you think of like, what's his personality? Like you're, you're going backwards, right? Where you're like, and it's that where they're just like, cool wall city. But our, our, our actual, what they said, designed by businessmen, the laws?
40:29 Speaker 05 Imagine meeting that guy at a bar.
40:31 Robert Evans? Designed by businessmen, yes.
40:32 Speaker 05 Just imagine a meeting that guy, not knowing anything about him. And the guy comes up to you and is like, yeah, I'm gonna build this, uh, city, the line. It's just like one really big wall.
40:45 Speaker 01 Right.
40:46 Speaker 05 You'd be like, please get away from me. You're terrifying.
40:50 Speaker 01 I'd be like, are you Peter Thiel? Are you Peter Thiel right now?
40:53 Speaker 05 It's like classic libertarian shit. Yeah.
40:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:56 Robert Evans? It is such a libertarian boat city.
40:59 Speaker 05 Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
41:02 Speaker 01 I, again, I'm not.
41:04 Speaker 05 Which, which again, could be cool if it was not just like every single time. It's like the worst people in the world are like.
41:12 Robert Evans? No, I would, I would live on a boat if it was like a pirate radio kind of situation. Cause that movie rips, but I'm simply not gonna live on a boat with a bunch of Bitcoin guys.
41:21 Speaker 01 I'd rather like, that's the thing is like, I if, okay, if we can't get the good futuristic stuff, I still would be, it would be cool if my house looked neat, you know? Like if I had some cyberpunk brutalist house, like that's something at least, but it, the best version of this has ever been Walt Disney designing Epcot and being like, I'm gonna make a future city. And then it got too hard and he's like, you know what? I'm gonna make a theme park.
41:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:49 Speaker 01 It's he low, he's goals, you know, he was like, okay, I'm not the guy to make a future city, the experimental prototype city of tomorrow.
41:57 Robert Evans? Turns out that sucks ass.
41:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'll just put some fucking rides in there.
42:01 Speaker 05 He's like, yeah, he's like, not tomorrow, but Tomorrowland.
42:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. Like, good on him.
42:10 Robert Evans? As we've.
42:11 Speaker 05 Famous good guy Walt Disney.
42:13 Speaker 01 Famous good guy.
42:15 Robert Evans? The real hero of these episodes.
42:17 Speaker 01 It's a nice reminder that these rich dildos have been trying to make cities.
42:21 Speaker 05 Forever.
42:23 Robert Evans? Cause they all want to prove they can do it better. They all want to prove they know what's wrong with society. But what, what none of them understand, and so why this is impossible is that it's hard to make a good city or a good country because people are messy and don't get along. And if your whole thing is, I don't understand people or like to listen to them, you're gonna fail.
42:42 Speaker 01 It's that. And it's, it's also like Disney famously was also like, you know what I hate? Zoning laws. These rich people, they also just don't like following the rules of law. So they're like, oh, I, what if I made a city? And then it's, everybody will love my cool city. And then everybody has to do what I say.
43:02 Robert Evans? Yeah. And then you forget to have any measures to prevent the outbreak of cholera. And so everybody dies of cholera.
43:09 Speaker 01 It's why every libertarian city, I feel like every pitch falls apart when you go, okay, and what do you think the age of consent will be there?
43:16 Robert Evans? Yeah.
43:17 Speaker 01 Like, because it's always a dark answer. And you're like, see, that's why.
43:20 Robert Evans? The age of consent, like what's gonna, who's gonna be in charge of the poop? What's gonna happen with the poop? You know?
43:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:25 Robert Evans? Where's the poop going? Right?
43:27 Speaker 01 Where's the poop going?
43:29 Robert Evans? Yeah. That's the, if you ever hang. It out in like an alternate living situation or where someone's trying to like build their own community. And the first thing they show you or close to the first thing isn't, and here's our toilet solution. Those people are going to fail, right? You know?
43:44 Speaker 01 Yeah. Unless it's all around poop city.
43:47 Robert Evans? Unless it's poop city.
43:49 Speaker 01 My idea of a city, it's all poop oriented.
43:52 Robert Evans? There you go, Dave.
43:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. And you take showers with your buddies. Okay, sorry.
43:57 Robert Evans? Wow. Sorry. Thanks, Dave. So two weeks after going on this slightly fevered Steve Jobs style rant about how the future was a big lion city in a country where most people didn't think TV should be legal, Mohammed bin Salman, well, powerful people didn't think TV should be legal. Mohammed bin Salman launched his final gambit towards consolidating absolute power. He'd spent the days since the big Davos in the desert event, sending his secret police out to arrest and transport hundreds of the most powerful people in the kingdom to one location. And this included multiple members of the royal family, as well as billionaire financiers who had helped to build the nation's economy. These men were taken to the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, one of the finest hotels in the world. Right.
44:40 Robert Evans? It was locked down for normal business. Its staff was replaced by security officers and secret policemen. Guests were made to surrender their cell phones and devices. They were separated from their guards and sometimes vast fortunes. One of these men was Prince Al-Walid bin Talal. He was the most famous businessman in the kingdom, a billionaire great grandson of King Abdulaziz. Prince Al-Walid was as protected a nobleman as you could imagine. He was called by the royal court one morning and ordered to visit the king. Another billionaire, Walid al Ibrahim, had found himself in the same situation a day before. So these are guys who should not have been vulnerable to something like this, right? But the reality is, and King Salman knows this, these guys are not as
45:23 Robert Evans? rich in reality as they seem to be on paper, because for decades, they'd relied on the Saudi state purse and public funds to prop up their bad investments and smooth over any mistakes they made. And all of the richest people in Saudi Arabia were doing this. This is part of why the economy was in the shitter, is these guys start making bad bets and they're using the kingdom as a checkbook to cover their asses. So this mass detainment that King Salman orchestrates of all these guys sends a message. None of you are untouchable anymore. And I want to quote from a summary of what happened by an NBC, from an NBC report by Dan DeLuce, Ken Delanian, and Robert Windham. The involuntary guests were told they had to sign away large chunks of their assets to be released.
46:06 Robert Evans? The detention involved both psychological abuse and in some cases torture, current and former US officials say. The move, described by Saudi authorities as a crackdown on rampant corruption, allowed the Crown Prince to tighten his grip and sent a shockwave through the kingdom's elites. "This was a shakedown operation and a power consolidation operation," said one former senior US official who was in office at the time. "The Ritz detentions were designed to remind people going forward that their wealth and their well-being would depend on the Crown Prince and not on anything else, which is why it was so upsetting for many in the royal family," said the former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
46:40 Speaker 01 What was that a quote from?
46:43 Robert Evans? This is from an NBC report.
46:45 Speaker 01 I just love involuntary guest. Perfect journalism speak.
46:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. Involuntary guest of the Ritz Carlton, yes. May have been tortured involuntary guest. We can just call them prisoners at this point. But this is what brings us to Mohammed bin Salman's most notorious crime, although certainly not his worst, the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now Jamal, if you haven't heard much about this guy, he came from almost as rarefied a social circle as Mohammed bin Salman himself. His grandfather, a doctor, had treated MBS's grandfather, the king. He was a close relative to billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was involved in like 80% of the shady deals that took place in the 1990s. Jamal got involved in the Muslim Brotherhood while in college and he worked as a journalist
47:34 Robert Evans? for an English-language paper out of Jeddah once he graduated. He winds up on the ground floor of reporting on the Mujahideen's resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Khashoggi arguably crossed the line from reporter to participant during at least one part of the conflict. He became a well-known figure within the world of Islamic militancy and secured an invitation to talk with another influential Saudi militant, Osama bin Laden, right? So this is a journalist who's reporting on this jihad against the Soviets. He at least at one point crosses from being a journalist to being a combatant and as a result, he has a lot of clout. With these other militants. And so he gets to hang out with Bin Laden.
48:14 Robert Evans? Now, ultimately, Khashoggi winds up disillusioned by the failure of the revolution in Afghanistan. He had been a guy who had hoped we'll create something better than what had existed before. If we can kick the Soviets out. And instead, we get the Taliban. And Khashoggi's not delusional. He can see the Taliban is bad. And so he comes home being like, well, that didn't fucking work, right? Shit, what do I do with my life now?
48:41 Speaker 01 It's tough. It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban. Yeah.
48:44 Robert Evans? It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban. Nobody wants that to happen to their buddies, Dave.
48:48 Speaker 01 No.
48:48 Robert Evans? I'm happy that you've continued writing for the internet as opposed to becoming the Taliban.
48:53 Speaker 01 Right. No, I had that crossroads, but yeah.
48:56 Robert Evans? It would have been logistically confusing, too. Yeah.
48:58 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
48:59 Robert Evans? Yeah. So when he returns home to Saudi Arabia, he's arguably the most influential journalist in the kingdom. He's one of them. And he's developed close working relationships with several highly placed members of the royal family. And he spends the next couple of decades as both an influential critic and pillar of the power system. So he is integrated tightly within kind of the upper strata of Saudi Arabia. He's very well regarded. He's also someone who can periodically critique what decisions that are being made by the powerful in Saudi Arabia. And he sees himself as like a mouthpiece for the poor in Saudi Arabia, for the working class as a result of that. I can, he can occasionally speak some truth to power, right? Or speak truth to the rest of the world about what's going on in Saudi Arabia.
49:42 Robert Evans? That's at least how you'll see this guy written about. Speaking of people who speak truth to power. These ads will speak truth to the greatest power in the world: your wallet.
49:53 Speaker 05 Wow.
49:55 Speaker 01 Not my wallet.
49:56 Robert Evans? Not, yeah.
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52:11 Robert Evans? And we're back. So Jamal Khashoggi, after a period of time as one of the more influential journalists in Saudi Arabia, is going to do kind of the most dangerous thing you can do in the kingdom, which is express support for reforms that everyone knows are necessary, but that the crown prince and king haven't embraced yet, right? He's going to be ahead of the curve on some important things, and that's going to make him a lot of enemies. Ben Hubbard writes, "He was appointed editor of Al-Watan newspaper and used it to push for women's rights while criticizing the role of the religious establishment. He didn't last long. After Al Qaeda bombings killed 25 people in Riyadh in 2003, Khashoggi penned an editorial attacking not only the terrorists but the clerics who gave them power.
52:56 Robert Evans? Jamal wound up driven to the United States, where he would live at time through the coming years whenever things got too hot for him back in the kingdom. He was predictably a big supporter of the Arab Spring, which further caused consternation among the powerful. During the rise of ISIS, Khashoggi compared the terrorist movement's ideology to the kingdom's own Wahhabist beliefs. He initially supported Salman as king and was bullish on the reforms that he and MBS introduced against the religious police and endemic corruption. So when MBS first comes to power, Khashoggi's a big backer because he sees this guy as kind of the answer to his prayers. Someone who will stick up to the worst and most like conservative elements in our society, right? This guy might be a sign of hope.
53:38 Robert Evans? Khashoggi acted for a while as a dogged defender of the new king to international critics. He was important enough to be included in a public meeting between Mohammed bin Salman and a group of clerics and intellectuals in 2016. Ben Hubbard reports that MBS talked to the crowd about his plans for economic and political reform. Khashoggi asked him, "Why don't you talk about any of this in public? If you're in favor of all these reforms, why won't you tell people about them? Why are we having this meeting in private?" And MBS says in short, "You can just write about what I've said here. Put it in the newspaper. Tell everybody what I'm saying, right? I'm giving you permission to make this public, right?"
54:14 Speaker 01 Okay.
54:15 Robert Evans? So Jamal is like, "All right, I fucking will." And he takes this as an invitation to report openly on the prince's crusade to modernize the kingdom. This would prove to be something of a mistake.
54:25 Speaker 01 Man.
54:26 Robert Evans? [laughing]
54:29 Speaker 01 Because it's like, yeah, go write it. I'd be like, hmm, do you really want that?
54:35 Robert Evans? Never trust the prince when he's like, oh, I want a journalist to hold my feet to the fire. Are you kidding me? Accountability? That's what kings love.
54:44 Speaker 01 Man, I mean, I'm not blaming him. Like, it's just like, I, it's just like, you can see it all unfolding here. Because I would do the same thing. I'd go like, oh, okay.
54:54 Robert Evans? Okay, I'll do it, I guess.
54:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:57 Robert Evans? In the fall of 2017, having silenced his most powerful detractors, MBS's security forces launched a crackdown on their little enemies. Eighty dissidents were arrested. Most were clerics who were either too conservative or too progressive. The rest were political reformers, and, as Ben Hubbard writes, "individuals who had annoyed MBS and his aides in some way or another." One was an economist who had questioned the wisdom of privatizing a romco. Another was a poet who had called on journalists to avoid harsh language in a dispute with Qatar. So these are just guys getting arrested for bugging, you know, Turkey or Mohammed bin Salman, you know, for any reason.
55:35 Speaker 01 I'm going to do my petty tour here, my asshole tour.
55:39 Robert Evans? I've gotten rid of the big enemies. One prominent detainee was a cleric named Salman Al-Awda. In his younger days, he'd been an extreme fundamentalist, and he'd spent time in prison for demeaning the royal family, arguing against their right to rule. In more recent years, he'd become almost a progressive, hosting popular shows on YouTube and television, and building a massive younger following on social media with generally positive upbeat videos about Islam and modern life. What really got him in trouble was his growing embrace of constitutional monarchy. Al-Awda framed this as an attempt to help the kingdom and House of Saud avoid an Arab Spring of their own. He gently suggested that the government might try to listen to its people a little more, rather than governing by the whims
56:21 Robert Evans? of Mohammed bin Salman and his ailing father. He was arrested and has been held in solitary confinement from September of 2017 up to the present day. His brother complained about the arrest on Twitter and has also been detained. If his case ever comes to trial, he could get the death penalty, although given the fact that his health is deteriorated by and bars, that may not be, he could be dead now. I don't think we know.
56:45 Speaker 05 Wow.
56:45 Robert Evans? There's a lot of guys like that. The whole Ritz Carlton affair was carried on in a very hush, hush manner by the kingdom's security forces. They obviously wanted everyone to know the broad strokes of what had gone down, and there were specific names they wanted publicized. But the government never released a comprehensive list of names and only accused them vaguely of "intelligence activities for the benefit of foreign parties" and "engaging in espionage while having contact with external entities." The Muslim Brotherhood was named as a specific example. Long-term consequences ranged from prison terms to home detention. Some people were let go entirely with the equivalent of a warning. Nearly all spent days or weeks detained at the Ritz without any charge or clear idea of what crimes they were expected to answer to.
57:26 Robert Evans? Some were certainly executed, although it's impossible for us to make any clear estimates about how many people suffered what punishments.
57:34 Speaker 01 The crime was bugging them. It was bugging them.
57:37 Robert Evans? The crime was bugging them, bugging them. Yeah. Bugging them or other people like you. Yes. The two great crimes. On June 24th, 2018, Saudi Arabia officially lifted its ban on women driving. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, fresh off being released from the Ritz, praised the move on social media and went on a public drive with his daughter and granddaughter. He tweeted, "There is no doubt that the thoughts of my brother Mohammed bin Salman led to this great result. Women have now taken off, gotten their freedom." That's all they needed was to drive.
58:07 Speaker 01 God damn.
58:08 Robert Evans? But that May, mere weeks earlier, MBS's police had carried out a massive crackdown on women's rights activists. Ten women and seven men, at least, were arrested over their work campaigning to end the driving ban that Mohammed himself, bin Salman himself, had ordered ended. From an article in The Guardian, Amnesty said that according to three testimonies it obtained, some of the activists were repeatedly given electric shocks and flogged, leaving some unable to walk or stand properly. In one instance, an activist was hung from the ceiling. In other testimony, said one of the detained women was subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks.
58:42 Speaker 05 Jesus.
58:43 Robert Evans? So, these are, this is like weeks before he ends the ban. And their crime is not that they want the ban in, the crime is that they're advocating, they're saying that the country's doing something wrong, that a law needs to change because it's wrong. And that's criticism. We can't have that. No, sir.
59:01 Speaker 01 It's just that, it's that fucking, that vibe, right? The like hashtag girl boss vibe, uh, where it's like on top of just some of the, the worst things ever, where it's just short circuits your brain, where they're like patting themselves on the back at the same time they're doing this.
59:20 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's a setting.
59:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:22 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, you, you hate to see it. Um, a Saudi female race car driver, and again, there's this, there's weeks long PR push i- i- in the wake of this. A Saudi female race car driver is given her license in a grand ceremony in Riyadh and allowed to take a celebratory lap through the capital, weeks before she would help to open the French Grand Prix. Journalists were warned that she would not make any comment about women's rights. This eloquently showcased Ben Salman's attitude towards social progress. He would do the minimum necessary, but he would also brutally punish anyone who made the mistake of embracing change before he did. And he would expect to be, right?
1:00:00 Speaker 01 It's just, I'm gonna give you what I give you, and you better not ask for more.
1:00:04 Robert Evans? And you better not have asked for what I'm giving you previously.
1:00:08 Speaker 05 Because he wants people to like him. He wants, he wants to be worshipped.
1:00:12 Robert Evans? Yeah, you're also gonna praise me every step of the way. You're gonna be thanking me for what I've given you.
1:00:17 Speaker 01 I mean, we had a discussion like, you know, when we legalized weed, it became this thing of like, maybe we should let the people in jail for that out. Like, it's, it's similar, but except if you say that, you'll be executed.
1:00:31 Robert Evans? Right, yeah, you shouldn't say that. Um, so, uh, yeah, Louane Alhathloul had gained notoriety in 2014 when she was arrested for trying to drive her car from the UAE into Saudi Arabia. She was released after more than 70 days in prison the month after Salman was made king. This was initially seen as a reason for optimism towards the new king and his son. Uh, Alhathloul had continued to speak out against the kingdom's laws and participated in a major foreign documentary that criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record. She'd been living overseas with her husband when she returned home in 2017 and was arrested as part of MBS's wider crackdown on dec-. She was released and expanded the scope of her activism, pushing against the Kingdom's guardianship
1:01:16 Robert Evans? laws, which made women basically legal minors in perpetuity. She was invited to speak at the UN, where she directly called Kingdom representatives out for denying the existence of guardianship laws. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. A month after this, she was kidnapped from her home in Abu Dhabi and flown to Saudi Arabia. She was released after a month, but forbidden from leaving the country. Then, just before the driving ban was repealed, she was swept up in a mass arrest with other prominent women's rights activists. And this is like, part of this, this big sweep that I had talked about just a second ago, right? Punishments for these activists and their supporters ran the gamut from jail time to travel bans to torture. The Kingdom's captive news media embarked on a campaign of slandering the reputations of those incarcerated, and some
1:01:59 Robert Evans? prisoners, including Al-Hathlul, were tortured by officers of the Rapid Intervention Group. This was a recently assembled team of black ops guys overseen by a guy named Saud Al-Khatani, and operated as the personal enforcers of Mohammed bin Salman. Anyone who annoyed him was fair game for kidnapping, torture, and murder. The women were kept in tiny rooms with covered windows. They were taken to be interrogated and tortured frequently by men who mostly wanted to humiliate them. They were sexually harassed a lot. They were shocked with like cattle prods. They were just beaten the old fashioned way. Al-Hathlul was waterboarded on several occasions. Al-Khatani oversaw her torture directly. Sometimes he would threaten to rape her repeatedly and throw
1:02:42 Robert Evans? her body in the sewer. This is the kind of stuff that they're doing. And they're doing this during Ramadan. He and his men are torturing her throughout the night, and they force her to eat after the sun comes up, when she's not supposed to be eating. So yeah, this is pretty gross stuff, right?
1:03:00 Speaker 01 I don't know, Robert, because, because Dave Chappelle said it's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia.
1:03:05 Robert Evans? It's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia unless you're a woman who wants to drive.
1:03:08 Speaker 01 It's easier there because of wokeness, because of wokeness here.
1:03:10 Robert Evans? They don't have wokeness.
1:03:11 Speaker 01 Jesus fucking Christ. That is horrific.
1:03:14 Robert Evans? Yeah, it would be operatives of the same rapid intervention group that Mohammed bin Salman called upon to murder now dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He had written critically of the Prince's Ritz Carlton kidnapping spree the previous year and about the ongoing detention of women's driving advocates. What he didn't know was that mere months before MBS started his campaign to destroy dissent, he sent agents of his rapid intervention group, mostly military veterans, to the US so they could train with a private security firm, the Tier One Group. Per the New York Times, the mercenary firm, quote, "is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management." The company says the training, including safe marksmanship and countering an attack, was defensive in nature and designed to better protect Saudi leaders.
1:03:56 Robert Evans? One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance. Yes, sir, the good men at Cerberus Capital Management have a private army that they're using to train Mohammed bin Salman's goon squad.
1:04:08 Speaker 01 Rich people for the longest time, it's the weirdest thing that how, how they're just like talent here. Like they're, they're just, you know what? We're not gonna even lie about that. Yeah, we're just, we're, let's call it like it is. It's like the only honesty they have. It's so weird.
1:04:24 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. My new capital management firm, I Just Shot a Baby Incorporated.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, named after the time I shot a baby.
1:04:33 Speaker 01 Holy shit.
1:04:34 Robert Evans? It's great stuff. So, Khashoggi himself had fled Saudi Arabia in June of 2017, having seen the writing on the wall of the Ritz. He had escalated his criticisms of the regime, and MBS in particular, and had launched a series of projects with the aim of collecting and amplifying foreign dissent against the government. Because he was too clever to fly back into the country, Saudi operatives had to nab him overseas in order to stop his inconvenient criticisms. Saud Al Qatani, MBS's triggerman, is known to have organized an effort to take, the effort to take out Khashoggi. They finally caught him in Turkey. A 15-member intervention group team fell upon the journalist as he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, seeking papers to make his marriage to his fiancee official. While she waited outside, the team attacked him.
1:05:19 Robert Evans? The kingdom would later claim their job was just to take him back to Saudi Arabia, but- He resisted and so was injected with a large dose of something that killed him. His body was then dismembered. MBS, the government insisted, had no knowledge of any of this. Subsequent investigations and reporting had revealed that one member of the negotiation team was a coroner explicitly hired to dismembered Mr. Khashoggi's corpse after he was killed, which would suggest they never wanted to take him alive, right?
1:05:46 Speaker 01 Listen.
1:05:46 Robert Evans? You don't bring a coroner along if you think you're gonna get this guy out of the building alive.
1:05:50 Speaker 01 Who among us was like, we just wanna, we just wanna talk to him. Oh, damn it, we dismembered him.
1:05:57 Robert Evans? Yeah, ah, fuck, yeah.
1:06:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:01 Robert Evans? Yep.
1:06:01 Speaker 01 Good God.
1:06:03 Robert Evans? So we don't know exactly what went down in the room, but we have a pretty good idea. And all of the evidence shows Mr. Khashoggi was assassinated, dismembered, and disposed of by a team that had been sent to Turkey to do just that. All credible experts believe Mohammed bin Salman gave the orders. And that's kinda where we leave things off. There's more to say, I mean, there's a lot more to get into the, the Trump years and stuff, but these are the broad strokes of, of how he came to be where he is, right? Our current president has even broken with the conclusions of his own CIA to insist that MBS is probably innocent. And I don't know, do we trust the CIA or do we trust Donald Trump here?
1:06:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:40 Robert Evans? Um, yeah.
1:06:42 Speaker 01 No, it's just a real like, you've identified a bastard, but it really resonates of like the other all the people who fucking are doing business with this guy and being like, oh, it's great there. It's just like, oh, fuck all those people.
1:06:55 Robert Evans? Yep, yep, yep, because, you know, the tempo of operations in Yemen with Saudi Arabia is a lot lower than it was, but the damage from the peak of operations was catastrophic. Per an article in Genocide Watch in 2021, Saudi strikes have directly killed over 12,000 civilians. Only half of the hospitals continue to operate. Saudi naval blockades have cut off food and supplies. Thousands of children have died of starvation. A cholera epidemic afflicted 800,000 civilians and killed thousands. 80% of the population depends on humanitarian relief. The Ameni Archive and Oxfam report that the Saudi-led coalition has systematically destroyed 130 bridges essential for the delivery of humanitarian aid. Houthis have also prevented food aid from reaching populations in areas they control.
1:07:40 Robert Evans? At least 233,000 civilians have died in Yemen's civil war, right? So. Cool.
1:07:48 Speaker 05 Horrific.
1:07:49 Speaker 01 Not good person. I will not be subscribing to the wall city.
1:07:54 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:07:55 Speaker 01 Sorry.
1:07:56 Robert Evans? No, no, and I won't listen to his podcast when it comes out.
1:07:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. I was surprised because you talk about all these people who are just getting paid a lot of money and sitting around. I was like, surely a lot of podcasts. Yeah, a lot of terrible podcasts.
1:08:11 Robert Evans? Call it the sound cast, you know, you got a name right there.
1:08:14 Speaker 01 Bam, you did it.
1:08:16 Robert Evans? Mm hmm.
1:08:18 Robert Evans? Well, Dave, got to plug anything?
1:08:21 Speaker 01 I don't know. Um, okay. Uh, oh, uh, game fully unemployed. That's the podcast network. I co-run with Tom Ryman and we talk about movies and TV and, and, and, you know, stuff like that. The X-Files. Um, I am the head writer of some more news, which is a, you know, it's like a news show on the YouTube. Uh, and that's it for now. Maybe more in the future someday. I will be able to say other things. That's it.
1:08:57 Robert Evans? Excellent.
1:08:58 Speaker 05 Very cool.
1:08:59 Robert Evans? Well, everybody say other things with us and to yourself and go away. The episode's done.
1:09:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, get out of here.
1:09:07 Robert Evans? Mm hmm.
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Previous Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia Next It Could Happen Here Weekly 217 Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
