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 for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
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 that will be a multi part series
about Mohammed Ben Salomon, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,
and to talk about this. Obviously, the only guest we

(00:27):
could 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 Get Cracked,
David Bell. David, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Thanks for having me. Yeah, if anything, I'm gonna be
teaching you a thing or two.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, a lot of people don't know this. You live
for forty seven years in Saudi Arabia, that which is
impressive because you're not that old.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah no, no, that's several years. Yeah, several years more
than I have existed.

Speaker 4 (00:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
I think it's actually older than Mohammed Ben Solomon. 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 with these sort of
royal families.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
Of course, I do, like I said, expert, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Expert on Saudi Arabia. In addition to that, you and
I lived together for a period of time in the
in the late aughts. 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. Yes,
and you also co run the podcast network Gamefully Unemployed

(01:44):
with our also fellow former roommate and colleague Tom Ryman,
which hosts several of my favorite podcasts, including Fox Mulders,
a Maniac, and the new him Boos.

Speaker 4 (01:53):
Him Boos, which is about supernatural.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yes, it's your supernatural rewatch podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah, it's I even a rewatch. I've never seen Supernatural,
so it.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Used to watch for you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, it's me discovering those beautiful, beautiful boys, the Winchesters.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
And you're I didn't do it this year. I did
a big old basket costume for a 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 Moulder, I have lost my gun before
showing up at the party, or show up at the
party with like five or six fake guns and give

(02:34):
them the people, like accidentally drop them in people's laps.
If I see someone dress as a gondola player, maybe
point it at them. You know, all the Fox Molder classics.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Anywhere you can leave it, where kids can reach it
is preferable.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah, yeah, these are all classic Fox Molder tactics.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
I know. I'm if Fox Moulder really existed, you would
have done a six part series on.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Him well, because it would have been a congressional investigation,
and as the things that he did, like multiple of them,
like the Church Committee would have had like a Church committee.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
My favorite, not to deviate, but my favorite things.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
I've been rewatching the X Files recently because I'm always
rewatching the X Files.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Of course, as you are wont to do.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Yeah, 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 that blood was fake. So
he reaches down and he dabs it on his finger
and he tastes it and he goes, it'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 in a crime scene seeing blood and tasting it.

(03:43):
That would stop everything. Like that alone would be like, Mulder,
go home, What do you need to go to the
doctor here?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
If he's an FBI agent, like a beat cop would
kick you off the scene. Then what you just you
just tasted the blood. Get out of it.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
Yeah, even if it's fake blood, don't taste it.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Don't taste That's crazy stuff. 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 wrote.
And I was like, where did Where was Fox Molder's
dorm when he was canonically at Oxford?

Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yes, and he had sex on Sir Arthur Doyle's grave.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
And they were all like twenty and they were like,
who is that a graduate of Oxford? And I'm like, God,
damn it, you fucking children. You know who else is
a young bastard. Mohammad Salomon the crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

(04:41):
Well US two. But yes, so you've probably the listener obviously, Dave. Again,
as I stated, you're an expert on Saudi Arabia, internationally
recognized for the listeners who know less. Mohammad Ban Solomon
is the crown Prince and the current effective ruler of
Saudi Arabia. His dad is the king, but he's not

(05:02):
like super on the job right now, like what 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
you had that journalist bone saw to Jamal Kashogi from
the Washington Post almost certainly ordered a team of people

(05:24):
to have him killed and sawed up with the bone
saw in Turkey. Yeah, he's that guy. And NBS, as
he's generally called, is one of the most dangerous and
in some ways competent like bastards in the world today.
He's a world leader who has been generally very successful

(05:45):
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 credit

(06:08):
him as being extremely competent, at least kind of within
his broad remit right. He has put his fingers on
the scale to push anti democratic policies around the 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,

(06:32):
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 and 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 eighteenth century in a small
town on the Arabian Peninsula named Diria. In the mid

(06:56):
seventeen hundreds, there was a religious leader in that town
named Mohammad Abd al Wahab in the Arabian state of Najd,
who began preaching about the need to return to a
pure form of Islam. He was angry at what he
saw is the decadence and many moral compromises of the
Ottoman Cahliph, who had allowed such evils as relatively open

(07:16):
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. Nah.
He was also unhappy about a lot of art in
the Ottoman world that depicted the human form, which you're

(07:38):
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. There's 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. These
are all things that under yeah, under the strictest interpretations
of Islam. Right again, in most Muslims I have known,

(08:01):
in most places Muslims in the Muslim world, you're going
to encounter music, but not in the strict parts.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
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 gonna do that, Like well, yeah, it's fine.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Like you can run into like people who are like
American Christian anti Muslim folks who will be like, well,
you know, if they're actually following their religion, they're 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.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
You can see Wahab as sort of like a Heritage
Foundation maniac of his time, where he's like, very minor
compromises had been made with the hardest lined version of
the faith in order to like exist in the in
the increasingly modern world, and Wahab was like fuck that shit,
Like we need to go back right like we have,

(09:14):
we have to returven. You know, he's really one of
those guys. There's a lot of debate, and I am
not a scholar of Islam on how theologically sound Wahab's
arguments are right. And this is not a podcast. That
doesn't matter for our purposines today. What matters is that
he had a lot of supporters, and one of these

(09:34):
supporters was his local emir, a guy named Mohammad 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.

(09:58):
Saud was an ambitious man. The Arabia of his day
was a scantly populated backwater with nomadic tribes who were
constantly at each other's throats and too busy fighting to
build a credible state. In seventeen forty four, Wahab again,
this guy is basically the leader of a militant extremist
religious movement of his day. He leads like a mob

(10:18):
to destroy the tomb of one of the prophet Muhammad's companions,
framing his attack on idolatry. Right, if you've got if
you've got a tomb that is like a venerated spot,
that's id 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 arts, is
that people were worshiping the tomb as opposed to like,

(10:40):
you're only supposed to worship God.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
The tomb is the place where his body is though, right, right, yes,
Like that just seems like what are we gonna do
at that point? Like that just I don't know, man'
that's yeah, strict I.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Guess it's the point. That's exactly what it is. Right.
He also stones a woman to death for alleged adultery.
I'm pointing out, like who knows what the turn Like
the standards of evidence back then were not high, right,
And eventually he does a lot of shit like this,
and Wahab has to go on the run because people

(11:19):
get angry at him for being a giant dick and
yeah for being an asshole. And when he goes in
the run, Muhammed bin 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

(11:40):
new calls for Arab nationalism, right, which is an increasingly
popular idea in the in the area. Right 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 night in
hundreds in the Arab Revolution. But this is kind of

(12:03):
a lot of the origins of a lot of that stuff,
right is Wahab is preaching that, like we should be independent,
and even 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 that's what I want for
my family. I don't want us to just be like

(12:24):
local big wigs. I want us to be the Kings
of the Arab world in seventeen.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Forty is Arab nationalism? I assume that it was very popular, right,
like that idea.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yea, not yet, it's starting to be because of Saud
and Wahab, Right, it starts to be popular. It's going
to be very popular in the nineteen hundreds, right and
seventeen forty five they're kind of ahead of the curve, right, Okay, yeah,
they're like the first punk bands.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
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 you're exploiting, like

(13:14):
people's frustrations that are valid, you can sneak in all
sorts of bullshit.

Speaker 4 (13:20):
I guess this is my point. Is it like that?

Speaker 2 (13:23):
It's yeah, it's kind of 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

(13:44):
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 partner up with these these insane motherfuckers. It's
a lot Again, this happens all the time, right, Like
the religious right is largely a factor of like very rich,
rich people whose primary goal was to not be taxed

(14:06):
and to not have their workers have rights, who are 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 all on the bus, right, Yeah, that's kind of
how reactionary movements always work.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Yeah, it's just whoever's pissed off who can tolerate each other,
getting together and like.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's and again, there are some
legitimate grievances here Arabs are being persecuted by the Ottomans,
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 Soud has to find
these maniacs and kind of get them on his side.

(14:53):
So for about half a century. In seventeen forty five,
they establish what is technically a country. It's really just
like a city state based around the city of Derriya,
which is today kind of like a suburb of Riod. Right.
Riada 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

(15:15):
the Saud family and is a semi an independent Saudi state.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
That exists in seventeen forty five for about fifty years,
a little bit more than half a century, right, a
little more than fifty 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 eighteen nineteen. Yeah,

(15:40):
pretty good. Better than I probably would have done if
I tried to make a breakaway.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
Saf I, mine will be done in an afternoon, Like
it won't even last a day.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, Yeah, I really wish you'd been able to get
hold of those nuclear missiles day, but unfortunately, without them,
you're unlikely to secede from the United States.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
How they take you seriously?

Speaker 2 (16:02):
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 Darrea until in eighteen nineteen.
This kind of like the black and white teachings that
Wahabism are preaching, leads to increasing conflicts with the Ottomans.
The Alsaud rulers of the country run into a version

(16:24):
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 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

(16:45):
crazy guys. You have to do some crazy shit.

Speaker 4 (16:47):
Right, that's what you signed up for.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, don't you believe the crazy stuff?

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Well this is sorry, this is just parallelling 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, no,

(17:12):
this is like kind of a grit So we are
just what money, yeah, exactly, like.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
You don't understand, we're just trying not to pay a
lot of taxis. Yeah, it's a weird mix.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
In this case, the Wahabis believe that God wanted them
to occupy Mecca and Medina and to sack Carbala, which
is a town in a rock, and destroy a tomb
for Mohammad's grandson, which again people were like going to
to pray basically, right, this is the kind of thing
the automance were kind of fine with ignoring them. Well,

(17:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yeah, it's like a cult, right, is like we all
want to wear robes and like do drugs.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
And hang out and then they're like why not, all.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Didn't you guys believe in the cult? Shit? Not that much?

Speaker 1 (18:20):
Right?

Speaker 3 (18:20):
It was in the terms and agreements, like did you
not read them? Like this was where it was heading.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, So the uh the Wahabas accused the Ottoman governors
of the state of not respecting Sharia law, which forbade idolatry.
And the Ottomans don't react well with 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

(18:47):
first Saudi state gets crushed by Ottoman arms. Their capital
at Darria 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 into played for
three days before being thrown into the sea, which is,
you know, one way to handle an insurrection.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
Yeah, did it work?

Speaker 1 (19:09):
Not?

Speaker 2 (19:09):
In the long run, not in the long run, but
you know points for trying. If this out family was
good at one thing, it was the fact that they
were really good at making more of themselves. Right. This
is continues to be a strength of this family to
the modern day. Despite the Ottoman Empire's best efforts, a
prince managed to get free of their dragnet and survived

(19:31):
to rebuild the family movement. This guy was Turkey bin
Abdullah bin Mohammad al Saud, and he fought against the
Ottomans to Fenderia, 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 Ibrahim al Kamis says this about the man.

(19:52):
Turkey vowed to himself to stand firm in the face
of enemies and to fight in battle, even if alone,
carrying his sword al Azrib, which he referred to in
his famish poem. If every friend forsakes their friend, I
will carry all reab as a steadfast companion. Right. Basically,
if I don't have any other friends, at least I've
got my knife, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Yeah, that's pretty bad ass, right, you can get gangster.
Yeah 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?

Speaker 4 (20:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah? Are the family, Yes, they're they're charismatic like the
Scars Guards. One of them was in the the series
and or like the Scars Guards. Yes you can uh yeah,
the Al Saud families every.

Speaker 4 (20:43):
Time one yeah, got it?

Speaker 2 (20:46):
So uh. In eighteen twenty four, this this guy Turkey,
the kind of like inheritor of the Al Saud family,
establishes the second Saudi State, moving the capital to Riyad
proper and governing there for about ten years. Near the
end of eighteen thirty four, while he's kind of consolidating
his power, he's fighting a series of battles against his rivals,

(21:07):
and you know, he's got to fight the Ottomans. But
a lot of his rivals are members of his own family, right,
because it's a big family and they're not all in
agreement about who should be in charge. And near the
end of eighteen thirty four, after about ten years of
governing this revitalized Saudi State, Turkey is ambushed while leaving
his mosque and slain by three assassins who had been

(21:28):
hired by his second cousin, Mishari bin Abdul Rahman, who
tried to make himself the new a mom. 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 all fighting each other, right,

(21:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
H Well, you gotta have a pastime. I mean.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
That's the thing about power, right, is like never enough right, So,
like no, 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.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
You never have enough power. But you can have too
many cousins, right, that's kind.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Of yeah, sorry, I have I have eight uncles and notts,
so I have a lot just on one side, and
we're always trying to kill each other.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 4 (22:37):
I got a couple of them. They keep coming at me,
but I'm very careful.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah, you have a lot of land mines in your yard.
Speaking of killing your cousins, maybe our sponsors will help
you do that or not if you like them. And
we're back. So Turkey alone creates about four branches of

(23:05):
the of the Saudi royal family, just one of which
the Al Faisal, contains several thousand male descendants by the
late twentieth 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

(23:27):
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 eighteen ninety one
as a civil war within the house leads to their
defeat by the al Rashid tribe and the destruction of

(23:47):
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 and like Kuwait. Abdulaziz 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,

(24:10):
he goes into exile in Kuwait, and he returns to
Arabia in nineteen oh two with an army. Right. He
spent his time gathering power. He gives a bunch of
desert warriors to his banner, and he shows up in
the early nineteen hundreds intent on re establishing the Saudi
state for a third time. He carries out a daring
early morning assault on a fort near Riyad called Masmak.

(24:32):
They take the fort, kill the governor, who was a
member of the hated Al Rashid tribe, and they retake Ryad.
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

(24:55):
Mohammad ibn Abd al Wahab. The imam tat that belonged
to the Uma or kamuneity of believers took precedence over
other social bonds, including tribe. Anyone who made a judgment
based on anything other than the Quran was a non believer. Still,
it took Abdullahzis over thirty years to subdue and unite
warring tribes under his rule. In nineteen thirty two, he

(25:15):
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 three hundred years viewing the
Arabian peninsula as theirs, and they repeatedly try to make
that so. They create a series of states which often

(25:35):
failed due to in fighting until they succeed, and they
are always backed in power by an alliance with religious
hardliners generally today called Wahabists, 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,
these are all traits of the Saudi state up till
the present day. The other key point here is that

(25:57):
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 nineteen thirty two.
Saudi Arabia is a poor country, and most of its

(26:18):
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. Abdulaziz
was able to put through some minor infrastructure improvements, but
his only real sources of state income in the early

(26:39):
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 try to launch insurrections in the places like
a which were still controlled by the British Empire by

(27:02):
the late nineteen thirties, 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 to control chunks of the Muslim world, including
a rock. And there's not really any money in the
Saudi State yet because oil isn't worth much and they

(27:25):
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 fifty thousand pounds when his finance minister bulks
Abdulaziz tells him put your faith in God and sign
and that works out that why's up being a really

(27:46):
fucking good bet.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah, this is like, this is like nineties Marvel, where
they're like, we don't know what we have yet, we're
just selling it off to whoever.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
We'll give you twenty dollars for this Iron Man character.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just it's tourism. Did I hear that correctly?

Speaker 2 (28:03):
No? No, no, no, it's drilling. It's drilling.

Speaker 4 (28:06):
Well, there's also religious people coming there.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Oh yeah, yeah, to Mecca and Medina, right, like, because
you have Muslims are supposed to if they can go
to Mecca, right to do the highs at least once
in their lives, and that brings in some money to
the state. But you only get so much money from that.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
It's not Florida.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
It's not Florida where they're like, all right, we got
this one thing going on for us.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
That's just a little side, little side hustle.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
It's a little size. 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 oh yeah, with
their big hustle. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
If I could choose between one or the other, I
guess I would go for the world's oil, right.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, and that that's going to work out for them.
Per the book NBS by Ben Hubbard, quote, the discovery
of oil in nineteen thirty eight attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies,
and representatives of Western government seeking access to the Kingdom's
black gold and claning. The United States In a secret
meeting in nineteen forty five between President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the sus Canal,

(29:08):
the two leaders headed off, laying the groundwork for a
lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in
exchange for American protection from foreign attacks.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
Now, this is funny how leaders always hit it off.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
They seem to right, Wow, the rich guy at charge
to this country, like this other rich.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
Guy, huh yeah, you like money and power, and like, yeah,
me too.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
It's like cool, you was born in money, me too.

Speaker 4 (29:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
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,
and 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 a fundamentalist Islam to

(29:56):
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 Wahabist 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. This helps fund the further

(30:19):
expansion of the family. King Abdulaziz married some eighteen women
and fathered more than sixty children. The next generation of
his family would be freed from the 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, Juan, there's money coming

(30:39):
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 elves basically bribes to keep

(31:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Yeah, that's the thing about like corruption or like, yeah,
trying to run like you have to make enough people happy, right,
otherwise it's just not gonna 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.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
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

(32:01):
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 nineteen ninety six, 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 received

(32:24):
two hundred and seventy thousand dollars, his grandchildren up to
twenty seven thousand, and his great grandchildren thirteen thousand. The
most distant relatives got eight hundred dollars. 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 two billion
dollars per year, but that was merely a guess. Much

(32:44):
of that money trickled into society to earn the royals
the loyalty of the population. One of Salmon's sons said
he spent more than a million dollars of his own
money during the holy month of Ramadan hosting feasts for
his subjects. But the royal still had large commanding fleets
of yachts, building palaces from Lasts Angeles to Monaco, and
taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms

(33:04):
in the communities where they landed. So they're doing pretty good,
even though about forty percent of the country lives in
poverty and about forty percent of the Saudi youth are unemployed. Right,
all of these princes are are fairly comfortable.

Speaker 4 (33:18):
Right. Again, enough people, just enough enough people.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
And one of the things that is 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 colo. 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

(33:43):
them are very close to slaves, and ninety percent of
the private sector labor force is foreign born in Saudi
Arabia by the twenty first century, which is crazy, right
like that that that's like an unsustainable situation unless you've
got all of this oil money. Slashing in the royal
family increasingly starts to exist as a subculture within broader

(34:04):
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

(34:26):
looking to get one up on your betters, because that
could be dangerous to you.

Speaker 4 (34:30):
Right See.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Like that's that's definitely not Bill, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah, exactly, And there's not too too many of them.
That's part of the secret too.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
I feel like, yeah, Stellin, unlike Unlike the King, Solomon
Stellin does not keep a prison for members of his
family who displease him. Right, well, we don't know that,
so sure we're aware of right right, that's a good point.
Now there's a couple of scars guards accounted for as
far as I'm as far as I'm concerned, King of
Dulazes establishes another key precedent for the House of Saud,

(35:07):
taking bloody vengeance upon their enemies. Early in his reign,
several of the king's cousins put together an army to
threaten Riad 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 Leilah, where a lot of these guys had been
like base, to surrender, and the king condemns nineteen leaders

(35:28):
of the rebellion to death. He immediately issues a twenty
four hour stay of execution, not as an act of mercy,
but so his men can direct a gallows at the
entrance of the town and kill them all publicly 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 eighteen have been killed, the king pardons

(35:48):
the nineteenth man and orders him to go tell his
friends and family members about the just and vengeance of
King Abdulaziz. Right, yeah, go tell everybody. I could have
killed you, but I didn't.

Speaker 3 (35:58):
Well, hold on, I'm saying he made a public execution. Yeah,
and then he saved the last person. Who is like,
go tell people what happened here. 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.

Speaker 4 (36:14):
But obviously I'm not gonna argue, Right, I'm not gonna argue.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
I'll be like, yeah, I'll totally tell everybody about Yes, sure, man,
it still seems redne It just seems redundant. I think
you could have killed that guy and his family would
have known.

Speaker 4 (36:29):
But it's fine.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
I'm not going to back seat. I'm not gonna get
it for this king. But yeah, salmon been. Abdulaziz al
Saud was born into this increasingly weird and isolated world
in nineteen thirty five. This is Muhammed bin Salmon the
subject different episodes.

Speaker 4 (36:42):
Dad.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Right, So he comes into the world in nineteen thirty five,
which is about ten years before the oil deal with FDR.
His early years are spent living the traditional way. He's
born before oil money makes a thing 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

(37:05):
on in nineteen fifty three, leaving a wealthy and powerful
state after being born into exile because he had grown
up conscious of the fact that the internal struggle for
power had shattered their last state. On his deathbed, Abdulaziz
begs his oldest son 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

(37:25):
start fighting with each other. Right, They're like, yeah, Dad,
we totally aren't going to fight over the throne cold
all right, let's get let's let's get let's get at it.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Oh yeah, let's get the weapons out. Yeah, I'd created
an arena, like I would make it official, right.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, yeah, a knife fight right in the right in
the fucking hospital chamber.

Speaker 4 (37:44):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
King Saud rules for eleven 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. Faisil is going to prove to
be a much better king. He's one of the most
successful Saudi monarchs, and in the nineteen seventies he embarks

(38:08):
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. Television's proliferate,
and alcohol is common at parties hosted by members of
the royal family. Right the Saudi, at least the leaders

(38:30):
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 kind
of make sure no one has all of the military
in their hands and just trust that no group of

(38:51):
three Saudi princes will ever trust each other enough to
work together.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
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

(39:17):
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, yeah, to work.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yep, yep. In nineteen seventy five, King Faisal is assassinated
by his nephew in an act offingeance for his brother,
who'd been executed by Faisal for protesting the king's decision
to allow television in Saudi Arabia, So there's always backlashes
to the modern ISA, right.

Speaker 4 (39:48):
Man, like dying for television to stay.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
In television nineteen seventy five TV. There's not even anything
good on.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
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 gonna give a shit about television.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
I don't think Cheers is even on the air yet, Man, Ryan,
what were you fighting for?

Speaker 4 (40:10):
God?

Speaker 2 (40:13):
While all this is going on, Prince Solomon, NBS's father
in the current king is keeping his head down and
avoiding making himself a target. He'd been born the twenty
fifth of Abdullah Ziz's thirty six sons, and on paper
again the twenty fifth 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

(40:34):
to ever become your job. And he's not going to
become the king until like twenty fifteen. 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's promoted.

Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, they're Nepo babies, but he's like Jack Quaid, right,
We're like, yeah, you're a Neppo baby.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
You're fine, You're fine. It's creol.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
I'd say he's the nickel cage of King Abdulaziz ass 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 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 good
for him. It's not impossible. You can't prove it wasn't
so his When this guy's half brothers and brothers, they're

(41:22):
all fighting throughout this period of time for the choicest positions,
from which they can largely just shunt oil money into
their own pockets while not doing anything. Solomon, Prince Salmon
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

(41:43):
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 thinkers and doers
in Saudi society. He develops a reputation for seriousness and
a relative lack of corruption to say, he's not corrupt,
but he's not like primarily motivated by money. In fact,

(42:05):
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.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
He's doing something the bar is low.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, exactly, just like Nicholas Cage was poor after he
had to give all that money back to Mongolia for
buying dinosaur bones.

Speaker 4 (42:23):
I legally exactly where's poor?

Speaker 2 (42:26):
But like, yeah, he's just got to 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 a crazy
amount of kids, but he's still pretty kid having his
first wife, Sultana, gives him five sons and one daughter. Now,

(42:48):
because their branch of the family can't count on a
vast fortune of grafted oil money. Prince Salmon 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, Fought
went to school in the West and developed a deep
understanding of how to communicate with Americans and Europeans. His

(43:08):
second son, Sultan, joined the Saudi Air Force and became
the first Muslim in space as an astronaut on the
Shuttle Discovery in nineteen eighty five. 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

(43:31):
work diligently, the kingdom struggles. In nineteen seventy nine, the country,
still reeling from Feisal's assassination, endures another shock. On November twentieth,
nineteen seventy nine, fifty thousand worshippers crowded into the Grand
Mosque in Mecca. As the AmAm finishes giving his blessings,
hundreds of armed men begin rushing forward, firing into the
air and forcing people away from the doors. A gang

(43:52):
of militants grabbed the Amam's microphone and held the dagger
to his neck. All fifty one doors to the Mosque
are chained shut, thousands of people are taken prisoner now.
The guy responsible for this massive act of terrorism is
Johaiman al Hoititabi, an anti monarchy is Lamist insurgeon who
had put together a small army of around six hundred rebels.
He and his followers hated the House of Salad for

(44:14):
allying with Christian infidels in order to make their fortunes,
and accused the royal family of betraying Islam. Alo Taibi
and his followers also believe that one of the group's leaders,
Mohammad Abdullah al Katani, was the Mahdi. For the sake
of brevity, to know that the Mahdi is basically Islam's
equivalent of the Second Coming. He's a messianic figure whose
rival heralds the end of days. So these guys have

(44:36):
now taken the Holy Mosque and Saudi soldiers spend days
trying to retake it. 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,

(44:57):
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 in 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

(45:19):
off by sharpshooters.

Speaker 4 (45:21):
That is so messy.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
It's like, first off, is it not worse to fake
that they're Muslim?

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Now?

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Like, is that not worse?

Speaker 3 (45:32):
Any mission that starts with okay, we're gonna need you
to pretend to convert to Isla, I would be like,
all right, let's let's take a step back here and
let's look at the bigger plan. First, did none of
these French commandos go like, uh, sir, why They're like,
it's fine, you can lie.

Speaker 4 (45:48):
You can lie. It's fine a lie.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
It's apparently fine to lie. Yeah, and also though gus
did work, I guess we dropped grenades and discriminately into
the mosque.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
Oh god, that's what they're like, do we like, yeah,
what's the point of converting to that grenade?

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Like how is not angry at this?

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Like what what rule book are they going by?

Speaker 3 (46:10):
Like I'm trying to think of like the afterlife of
like who is checking things off of? Like is it
the air bud idea where they're like, yeah, well, there's
no rule that says they can't do this according to
our rules.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
I haven't imagine you're just in a mom with like
forty cigarettes in his mouth reading the Yeah it's fine.
It takes bloody weeks. It's not stuff. It takes two
bloody weeks for the rebels to surrender. The so called
Madi is killed during the fighting, while all O Tybee
and nearly seventy of his followers are captured alive. In total,

(46:43):
about a thousand people die during the fighting. A mix
of soldiers, civilian worshippers, and insurgents. Sixty three militants are
ultimately beheaded for their parts in the attack. The fallout
for 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
Amam's sermon that very morning lamented the kingdom's moral decay,

(47:06):
and the Revolts leader had studied with the AmAm he
now held captive. His goal was to end what he
saw as the Awl Saud's tolerance of infidel innovations like
women working and mixing with women, or the government's tolerance
of Shia is, a sective Islam that he and his
fanatics saw as heretics, not Muslims. The Wahabis, clerics, they
find themselves in a tough position after this right. Their
power is tied to the House of Saud, who's just

(47:28):
made kind of the biggest compromise with hardline is Lam imaginable,
you know, like it's kind of it's pretty tough to
top that.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
So this is rough the most prominent of these clerics
issue of Fatua, 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, no more soccer to just youth from

(48:00):
studying a laws Holy Koran. Almost overnight, everything changed in
Saudi Arabia. During my first visit in nineteen seventy eight,
I attended a dinner at Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani's
house in Jedda, where men and women mixed. Alcohol was plentiful,
and after dinner, the minister and his guests watched a
table feed of the nineteen seventy eight World Cup soccer
final between Argentina and the Netherlands, just the sort of

(48:21):
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 going to be
no more fun for a minute here, because we're going
to have our second ad break.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
That's a fun.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yeah, that's good, and we're back. Howre you feeling about
Saudi Arabia, Dave, it's going on yeah.

Speaker 4 (48:51):
Always.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
Like I said, I'm an expert on this, So everything
you're telling me are things I already are you already new?

Speaker 4 (48:58):
Yeah, I'm just humoring you, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
I'm like, it's like when you talk to it like
a kid about Star Wars, you know, and the kids
discovering things, and you're like, uh huh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
I'm just imagined 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 that they're like, Okay,
which country am I going into? All right, this is
the religion I am for the time being.

Speaker 4 (49:25):
It's tough, man.

Speaker 3 (49:26):
When you inject money into any situation, everybody in that
situation loses their goddamn minds.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
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. 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

(49:53):
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 these crazy religious strictures? Like
we're okay being muscle, we don't have to be such
hardliners about all of the batshit stuff. And then there's
this hideous terrorist attack and the government responds in like
the worst way they possibly could whims.

Speaker 4 (50:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
So many people be like, okay, but we're gonna become
assholes again. Don't worry. We did drop grenades in the mosque.
We understand that it's a problem. But women will no
longer get to be on television. Are you cool with us?

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Now?

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Can we keep being rich?

Speaker 4 (50:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (50:31):
And it turns out, yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:34):
It's just I don't know.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
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 are, like you stand by and
you have certain rules in your life. When you tried
to apply that to a country, it always gets messy
where it's like, no, I need everybody be doing this stuff.

(50:57):
Meanwhile the country's like, we just want to have like
good relationship with our neighbors, and yeah, 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.

Speaker 4 (51:12):
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Yeah, I mean, 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, that's true.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
It's like it's like going to like Prince's house where
you're like, he has enough money that you could he
also can have like weird rules at his house, right, Yeah,
everybody's just gonna go like all right, fine.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Yeah, sure, Prince. I mean I get to hang out
at your house, so that seems cool.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
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 as women
don't get to be on TV anymore. Huh Okay, Yeah,
it seems clearly hitting the main problem. Okay, So for
the next twenty years in change. After this point, fundamentalist
is law becomes more and more entrenched in Saudi Arabia,

(52:00):
as is the power of the religious police to punish
men and women who violated even the smallest rules. Karen
notes that before nineteen seventy nine, 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 nineteen eighties 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, who

(52:24):
wanted the job so little that he hands power right
away to his son, the Crown Prince, who succeeds him
in nineteen eighty two. 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 nineteen ninety five. It was into this Saudi Arabia
sattled with a series of basket case kings and riven
with financial corruption straining under the weight of increasingly radical

(52:46):
and restrictive religious laws that the subject of our episodes
for this week and next week. Mohammed bin Salman is
born on August thirty first, nineteen eighty five, and we
will talk about his life and how he comes to
power in subsequent episodes. But Dave, it's been part one.
You're introduced.

Speaker 4 (53:04):
Sorry, I didn't realize I'm older than him.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yes, yes you are.

Speaker 4 (53:07):
That is.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
He's a little older than me, but not much.

Speaker 4 (53:12):
Yeah, he could have us killed today and he's younger.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
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 I don't have planes.

Speaker 4 (53:26):
Right, not yet yet.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Yeah, it's like learning that Finn wolf Hard was born
after nine to eleven, where it's just like, man, I
haven't done ship with my life.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Yeah. Well it's also if we'd had a Finn wolf
Heard in two thousand and one, they never would have
tried to take those towers. There would have been too
high a chance that a Finn Wolfhart might have been
on the planes.

Speaker 4 (53:46):
You know, he's too precious.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah, yeah, he's too They wouldn't they'd be scared of
his name with you were like, no, they wouldn't want
to risk fin wolf Hard take that danger anyway.

Speaker 4 (54:01):
Anyway, what were you saying something about a podcast?

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Where can people find you on the interweb dot com?

Speaker 3 (54:09):
I can be reached at so just Google Gamefully Unemployed,
Gamy f U l l Y unemployed like Robert, like
you said, it's a movie podcast. It's just bitching about movies,
very low stakes but fun. And then yeah, we have

(54:29):
like our Patreon where we have a bunch of extra stuff.
We've made like two thousand podcasts. It's too many, 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

(54:50):
and like doom, or you like people complaining about Marvel movies,
I got I got you, I got you covered for
those two things, so check that out.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
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,
you get on the road, close your eyes, drift off,
fall asleep, you know.

Speaker 4 (55:18):
Yep, let you know, like, let instinct guide you.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Yeah, it'll be fine.

Speaker 4 (55:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Bye.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot 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.

Speaker 2 (55:47):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards