Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

We conclude the story of Saudi Arabia's blood-soaked crown prince, for now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also Media. And we're back. Welcome back to the Behind the Bastards, Mohammed bin Salman episodes, extravaganza. Woo! Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to introduce these episodes in an exciting way anymore. We're talking about bad people, the worst, and one of them is the current crown prince

of Saudi Arabia. When we left off last episode, he had started what was becoming a genocide in Yemen. He had partied with Pitbull, and he was orchestrating the downfall of his relative, Mohamed bin Nayef, who was the crown prince before him. How we doing, Dave? David Bell, our guest. I'm doing well. I'm doing very well, Robert.

I didn't have a new dream in between these episodes that I could tell you about. So it's just the same dream from before. Yeah, that same upsetting dream, sure. Yeah, it was a nice shower. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't sexual. That's good. The more you say it wasn't sexual, the more I believe it wasn't sexual. That's how telling someone something isn't sexual works. It was weird because, like, I don't dream about you often. Thank you. I wasn't thinking about the fact that we were recording today. And so I'm like, that's interesting. That's interesting that you made a cameo. See, now I am hurt. Why don't you dream about me often, date? I'm not worth dreaming about? Here's what I'll start doing. Thank you.

When I go to bed, I'll look at a photo of you every night. All right? That's good. Nothing weird about that. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. I will continue to have one dream about you per week where we captain the USS Enterprise together.

Oh, ooh. Yeah, yeah. We would do terrible things. We would. We would. That is not going to end well for anyone on board the ship. We would keep my go-to every time I'd be hit with like a moral dilemma or like a problem, I just go beam them into space.

Promises off. Moving on. Get those assholes into space right now. Yeah. Into space. Here we go. Just a trail of bodies. The Enterprise, that's the ship that keeps beaming people into space. Yeah.

They have one move. I just watched the new Starfleet Academy, the first two episodes. And it is missing that. there's all these bad guys. There's the guy from sideways on your shit. Just be him into space. Get his ass. Beam him into space.

Beam him into space. Yeah. So easy. Come on. Oh, God. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. In the middle of the night, Soskia awoke in a haze.

Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me. me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with saying, much good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming.

Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How to Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference.

Kick off the year with confidence, listen to How to Money on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Delarocha, a host of Sacred Lessons, a space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release.

If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up in your life, Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Deloach on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You know who else was in the classic movie Sideways, Dave?

Who? Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Uh-huh. That checks out. Yeah, he was one of the two male leads in Sideways. Pretty much, basically, close enough. Sure. So perhaps the key defining characteristic of Muhammad bin Salman that most explains his success

within the closed world of the Saudi royal family is simply the fact that he's got energy and he wants to do things. I cannot over-emphasize how lazy most of these guys are. I mean, that's America, too, at this point where it's like, well, are they 80? No? Okay, that's great. It's like, again, if you go into 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 and 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. give a fuck. Like, and it's like, well, yeah, you're going to have a career, Nicholas Cage. That was my Lily Rose Depp watching Nospheratu.

And I was like, oh, you're willing to like do weird shit. You don't get to fuck. Yeah. All right. Okay. We can work with that. Yeah. Yeah, you get to be a star.

Muhammad bin Salman is like the Lily Rose Depp of the Saudi royal family. You know, a lot of people, a lot of people have been saying that. Yeah. So in 2016, he continues both the war in Yemen and his conflict with Muhammad bin Nayef, and he launches a new war against one of the most powerful blocks in the kingdom, the religious police. Now, the Mutawa, or Haya, as they are also called, had been seen as almost untouchable by his predecessors, right? These are the police of vice and virtue. These are the guys who are going around making sure you're not disobeying, like, the religious law, right?

Fun police. Yeah, these are the literal fun police, right? And the men and 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 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 we're talking to each other about how annoying these fuckers were. Right. They're on the internet and they're like, hey, everybody else is having fun. Yeah. Like, we're learning about fun police. Yeah. In the man who would be king, Karen House describes the fun police's MO.

For decades, thousands of these men, often self-appointed members of the committee to promote virtue and prevent vice, had roamed Saudi streets carrying a long stick forcing women to cover their heads, hurting 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. And the waning year... Yeah, they're good after Pokemon cards.

Listen, it's if you're... I know it's not the same thing, but if you're starting a cult, right? One of the key things you've got to do to maintain that cult is make sure people are having fun, right? There's got to be something, right? Yeah. You just can't, like, if you're like, no Pokemon cards,

it's like, this is not going to last. If you're saying, no. Pokemon cards, but you can all wife swap. Then you might be able to keep a cult going. But if you're saying no wipe swapping and no Pokemon cards, what's going to keep people there? Yeah, right? You're out of business. Very fast. You're out of business. You got to at least get them on drugs or something, you know? Yeah, let them have the goddamn Pokemon cards. Yeah. To continue from that quote, in the waning years of the late King Abdullah's rule, the Haia had gotten completely out of control. Hearing music inside one family's car, the religious police chased the car until it rolled off an over

pass, killing the driver and injuring his wife and two young children. A few months later, two young Saudis died when Haya members, suspecting alcohol, chased the young men's car, bumping it at high speed, causing the car to roll off a bridge. The religious police fled the scene. Still, six members of the Haya were later acquitted off all charges. Saudis tweeted their anger on social media. The Haya are bloodthirsty. At Talal tweeted. At Nahar wrote, the Haya's situation is similar to many governmental entities in Saudi. They all need restructuring and fixing. So these guys are just a menace, right? Where it's like, they might be drunk, ram them off the road, you know? Like, they're cops. All cops are kind of more alike than different, right?

It's a happy family situation. If you're, okay, when I was a dishwasher, food stopped becoming food, it was just this thing, right? Where you're just like, I'm just doing this thing. When you're a cop of any kind, people stop becoming people. 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. If you're going to have cops, it should be a job where everyone is a cop for a little while. Because you know what doesn't get enforced then is bullshit rules, right? If everyone has to take him to be like, wait, I got to enforce marijuana loss.

No. Not doing that. Not doing that. Yeah. Yeah, anything is better than having it just be like a job that a group of people hold And to protect their power need to like protect their right to continue doing it with even greater bloodthirstiness and by anyone, whatever. Anything is better. Let's, you know what?

Just make cats cops. Just replace all cops of cats. Especially every cat has a drone with a gun on it. So when the cat needs to shoot somebody, the drone just starts firing. Like whenever the cat gets angry, it just starts blasting. Whenever the guy gets startled. This sounds like a bad play, get down, get down.

The cat's angry. Someone took away its food bowl. I mean, you're not wrong, but It's still better than what we have, right? If protesters right now, we're instead of trying to fight squadrons of like armored police with tanks and machine guns, there were just a bunch of cats with robots

firing blindly into the air because they hadn't been let out and long enough, at least that's an easier problem to solve. Mr. President, how did they get in here? How did they overthrow the government? Well, sir, they had raw salmon on them. Unfortunately, all everything. Yeah, there's nothing.

So MBS's first move in his war against the religious police was to ban them from stopping or detaining Saudi citizens in public. Great first start, right? The thing that you were doing that was getting a lot of people killed, you just can't do anymore. You're not allowed to just fuck with people in the world. his predecessors had tried to curb the influence of religious hardliners, but failed. Most famously blocking for six years an attempt by King Abdullah to make it legal for women to work in lingerie stores selling underwear to other women. And like the religious, the hardliner clerics would be like, no, women can't work. But then the problem is like, okay, so are men supposed to sell lingerie to women?

So we have lingerie. Is that better? But women can't work in the, like, yeah, you know the lingerie. industry was like, guys, please. Come on, you got to give us something here. Like, what are we got? We just want to sell you people underwear. What is wrong here?

What is wrong here? Yeah. Where King Abdullah had been too frightened to confront the Matawa directly, Muhammad bin Salman simply ignored their protestations and used his father's absolute power to crush any opposition. The public was wildly supportive of his actions, and conservatives found themselves alone. Perhaps MBS is single most important. quality was his ability to understand how the youth of Saudi Arabia felt.

It wasn't just the morality police. Regular citizens knew it was impossible to get anything done through the government without bribery. The poor majority of the country were forced to watch while a handful of princes siphoned away the oil money that was supposed to be funding social programs and infrastructure, right? Like, people are pissed about this. And so MBS has a lot of support as he sets about dismantling his enemies.

the forces he saw as holding Saudi Arabia and his own ambition back. He later said this of his decision to crack down on the religious police. I am young. I don't want 70% of the Saudi population to waste their lives trying to get rid of this. We want to do it now, right? And this is, we're going from like the genocide and the orchestrating internal fights with his family, where he's the bad guy to like, no, he's in the right side of this thing. These guys suck.

It's a broken clock situation. Yeah, the only thing that we'll get rid of them is a strong, he's effectively the king, not literally, but is a strong regent who's being going to, fuck it, that's not how we do things anymore. Right. I'm in charge, right? Like, nothing else was going to fix this situation because of how Saudi Arabia works, right? I'm not saying every country is this way.

We don't need a king to deal with the cops in our country. We could just stop having them be immune to everything. But whatever. By the end of- Yeah, it's like when Trump gets something right. It's like, you don't have to hand it to him. You know? Yeah.

It's like, yeah, he is right. Those little Japanese trucks are pretty sweet. We should be able to buy this here. Yeah, yeah. We don't need just F350s. We could use some little K's or whatever they're called. Or they're Korean. I forget which those little bitty trucks.

We should you. We need little bitty trucks here. He's right about that. Yeah, we need little bitty trucks. Yeah. It's every time 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.

Yeah. The guy seems to know trucks. Yeah. I would trust him. I don't think he just likes him. If he was like secretary of trucks, I'd be fine with that, you know? Yeah. It's like that video where he's inside that big dump truck or whatever,

pretending to drive around. And I'm like, no, that looked pretty fun. I'd be making the little faces too. Like, who wouldn't do that? Most human moment for him. Yeah. By the end of two. No, just getting rid of the fun police.

Anybody could have done it. But everybody, 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 Wattana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni human rights organization, concluded that by November of 2015, the kingdom was aware of a food insecurity crisis in the regions they were striking. Over the next two years,

MBS's Saudi-led coalition increasingly and purposefully used hunger as a weapon to try and force Houthi surrender. Martha Mundi, an expert on Yemen, quotes a senior Saudi diplomat who described the coalition strategy this way. Once we control them, we will feed them. Huh. Huh. Is that the plan, huh?

Yeah. Okay. I don't think that's a good plan. You know, you're the bad guys, right? Yeah. Like, first off, that's bad guy talk. Yes, that's super villain, yes. 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. Not in a fun way. Not in a fun way. Not in a fun way. Not like on a food fight way. Yes, Dave. Yeah.

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 a hundred billion dollar budget deficit and the war in Yemen alone costing half a billion dollars a month, the World Bank estimated Saudi Arabia could only afford to go on for four years before running out of money. There was no way to begin tackling the problem without cutting benefits to Saudi citizens, much of this in the form of benefits to government employees. These cuts slashed the average Saudi man's income by around 50%. That's how to the bone

Because these people All their jobs are fake And all their jobs are like Oh you know to use a typewriter There's an extra 20% to your salary Right that's the stuff he's getting rid of We talked about that Where it's like sorry guys

Nothing you do matters So you're kind of you know And the country's falling apart now Because of the war The Prince launched in part We want to do this war So we're going to pay you less to do nothing No one's a hero in this I guess

No one's a hero But also, I would be pissed. I'm like, listen, you promised me money to do nothing for a very long time. Yeah, you promised me money for nothing. And the chicks for free, man. I don't have either. Yeah. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I don't want less money so you can go do a war.

Yeah, and the chicks still aren't free, you know? No. No. We're not even allowed to play guitar. Well, actually, now we are. We are allowed to play the guitar now. That's something. It's something, right?

In the man who would be king, Karen House writes, Despite warnings from some of his ministers that economic growth would grind to a halt, MBS proceeded. To add insult to injury, the Saudi civil service minister took to television to accuse government employees of working only an hour a day. These cuts were paired with slashes to subsidized water, power, and gasoline. Fuel prices rose by 50 percent, bringing gas up to a horrifying 96 cents per gallon. One Saudi economist described the situation thusly. We had Christmas every day, and Gridge has stolen it. Again, no one's a hero.

No one's a hero. Because it's like, shit, man. Should you have had Christmas every day? Is that a good way to run a country? Well, so I'm like, I'm all for living in a utopian society where it's Christmas every day. But not when it's being paid for by oil money. That's what I was going to say. And it's only Christmas for a tiny chunk of the population.

Yeah, where it's just this group at the cost of everybody else. That's not good. But I understand that it's that sort of thing where everybody thinks of the underdog of their own life. It doesn't matter how rich you are. You want more and you feel like you're not getting enough. So it's like these people clearly were living in their little utopia. And then they're like, sorry, life has to get slightly realer for you. And they're like, this is bullshit. Bullshit. You want me to do stuff? Yeah. No. So government spending was a huge problem, as was the fact that basically no citizens were working. But just annihilating everyone's income turned out to have negative impacts. By the

start of 2017, economic growth was at 0.4%, a state of affairs most economists would describe as, fucked up. Social media boiled with resentment. A protest movement began to bubble up. And on April 22nd of 2017, King Salman was forced to issue a royal decree declaring, takes these backsees on all cuts and allowances, benefits, and bonuses. The civil services minister was fired for insulting Saudi workers. And again, he's right. These guys are, at most in a lot of cases, doing an hour a day of work, you know? It's interesting because there's certain things in this that I admire and then certain things where I'm like, again, like, okay, like I would love to not work much and get paid.

But I also, like, it's definitely a sign that things are going bad. I do wish more governments issued take seas back seas. Like I've reached more government. Yeah. Yeah, we're allowed to go, hey, everybody. Oops. You know what? Department of Homeland Security was a mistake.

Yeah. taking away the TSA, just get on planes now, we'll figure it out, you know? Yeah. It works like the 90s again. Just run right up to the plane, you know? Right, but because that's not normalized, them doing that in this case is like, oh, you really fucked up, huh? Yeah, no, you made a mistake.

You realized that you were about to be overthrown. Yeah. MBS was not fired after this fuck up, but his popularity and reputation took a major hit. Perhaps one reason why it was so hard for Saudi Sussie's. citizens to accept any cuts to their benefits was that they'd seen the Al-Saud family's personal finances ballooned during the same period. And they have a point where it's like, yeah, you guys aren't really working a lot of you or you're doing barely a job compared to what you're getting paid for. But the Al-Saud family is worth an insane amount of money and they do

nothing at all, right? Even as the government revenues have collapsed, they continue to be the family net worth as the state's finances are in free fall. The Soud family net worth is $1.4 trillion. So I get why these people are like, we got to make cuts? Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Oh, the story of everything, right? Where it's like the rich people are like, sorry, you're going to have to tighten the belt. I mean, I need my super yacht.

Yeah. Look, man, if I don't, like, I can only eat one piece of steak per cow and we've got to burn the rest of the cow. And I'm simply not going to write on the same private jet twice. Yeah, I'm not going to count. share. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I will say $1.4 trillion is the net worth of the family. That is spread, there's more than 10,000 descendants. Now, it's not evenly split up, right? But it is split up between them, you know, so it's not quite as insane, but it's still a lot, you know? So things, things are tense, right?

It's like- Things are tense by mid-2017, yeah. Yeah, because they basically, it's like, I don't know, it feels like the same vibes of if we were on a lifeboat. And I was like, sorry. I'm going to shoot you because 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. 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. They're not wrong, but it sounds like 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, like you're not doing anything. That's right. That's right.

You're not doing anything. But you know who is doing something. Nope. Sorry. I don't know. Sponsors of this podcast, they're doing hard work. You know, they're earning their pay. If you let them run Saudi Arabia, they'll do it, you know? They'll run it Saudi Arabia. They'll definitely do it.

Yeah. In the middle of the night, Sasquia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home.

That's your husband. So keep this secret for so many years. He's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage. But it's also the story of one woman who was. done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who prays on vulnerable and trusting people.

Your predator, Michael Leavengood. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.

Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP, might actually work. This is wild.

Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New Year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt, and I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, Director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January guys everywhere make the same resolution.

Get stronger, work harder, fix, what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Polter, a psychologist with over 30 years' experience, helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and some compassion.

If you want this to be the year, you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath. Listen to the mailroom on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. And we're back. I'd run it too, by the way. Food times. You'd run it too? Yeah, I bet you could run Saturday, maybe a Dave. Yeah, what's your first move?

I don't know if I can do it. I'm just saying I will do it if someone was like, do you want to do this. I'd do it for at least a week. And then you'd never hear from me again. Yeah. I would be dead. It's, it's, you know, but I'll do it. My first move, I'm changing the country's name.

To what? From Saudi Arabia to free ecstasy town, you know? Ooh. And we just let the tourist dollars flood in. We let those Germans and Spaniards come on over. You know, someone will provide the ecstasy. That's not my job. They're in free ecstasy town right now.

Zero downsides. That's so smart. What if, okay, hold on. What if, like, I named my apartment that? Like, and put it on, like, got it on, like, Google Maps as, like, free ecstasy town. Because you're right is that if you do that and then people show up, eventually. There will be free ecstasy. Exactly.

It's a problem that solves itself. in like two weeks and start the episode, so our friend David Bell has been rated by the DEA. He flew too close to the sun. That's just so smart. I don't know. That's such a smart idea. I think it'll work. I think it'll work.

Anyway, ads. And we're back. Oh, we did. Are we back from ads? Yeah, I thought. What's wrong with me? Too much ecstasy. By mid-2017, the King's son was in a very mixed position politically.

He'd earned accolades as a reformer for his hobbling of the religious police and his seeming support for some social liberalization, but he was also the author of an unpopular austerity policy. The king and his son faced increasing resistance, both from the populace and within their own family. MBN, who had made no secret of his critiques of MBS's policies, was an obvious rallying point for resistance. And so on June 21st, 2017, Mohamed bin Salman acted to take him down. Karen House writes, that fateful evening of June 21st, 2017, Mbien was called to a palace in Mecca. Once there, his guards were forbidden to accompany him inside. All phones were surrendered to palace guards. Embion was taken to a room where Turkey al-Sheikh, a contemporary

and friend of MBS, and now minister of the General Entertainment Authority, and others began bullying him to resign. Denied contact with his men and the painkillers to which he was said to be addicted, he finally succumbed early the next morning. After Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca, urged him to obey the king. So that's how he gets rid of his cousin. Yeah. Wow Wow. That's

That was abrupt Yeah, yeah It was super abrupt Yeah And by the way That fella Turkey al-Sheek Who is handling like The torturing of Muhammad bin Nayef

Like cutting him off from his guards And his painkillers And like forcing him to resign The guy who handles all that Do you know what he got more fan He's become famous for doing more recently Oh no Maybe a hint

He's the Minister of the General Entertainment Authority What did he do? He's the guy who ran the Riyadh Comedy Festival that all our favorite comedians before death. Oh my God. Yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah.

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 $6 million. I mean, not surprised, I guess. I don't know. Nah.

Who else was Louis C.K. at that? Yeah, I think he was. Yeah, pretty sure he was. Yeah. It's the Simpsons moment with the burlesque house. And Barney comes out. And they're like, oh, Barney. It's that where, like, Louis C.K. at there, I'm like, yeah. Yeah. No one was shocked, I guess. Yeah, it's what I don't feel any worse about Louis C.K. or about Dave Chappelle that I did previously. I both feel about like, yeah. Yeah, I bet they, if you told me some comedians took millions of dollars from the Saudi Royal

family, those would have been my two first guesses. Right. Not shocked. I wouldn't be surprised by a lot of comedians, frankly, because you're a comedian. I don't know. It's the same with pit bull at that thing where I'm just like, I don't like it, but I'm, I guess I'm not surprised by it. I'm a little surprised by the well, because I think most people, if you say, like,

you want to make $6 million for a day's work, you have to make peace with working for a really bad man, but all you have to do is something otherwise innocuous. most people will do it, which isn't good. It's just $6 million. But if you have a lot of six millions of dollars, that's what's where it's like, what? Like, you're not starving. You don't have to pay for your mom's dialysis, Dave Sheffel.

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, yeah, man, you still had student loans. I don't know. I get it. Yeah. Can I have some, I guess? Yeah.

But yeah, when it's an already rich person, it's just like, I don't know. Like Pit bull didn't need that. Yeah. But that's rich people. That's how you get that rich. So to the international public, it seemed as if the era parent and most powerful man in the Saudi security state had completely collapsed overnight as a center of power. Now, as we've covered, Muhammad bin Nayef's position had been degrading for years, right?

He was not totally well. He did not have a grip on things. and MBS had been slowly cutting him off from his sources of power for several years at this point. So this is the result of a fairly long family conflict. For most of the 21st century, Saudi Arabia had been ruled not just by the king, but by the black prince and another senior prince, a guy named Sultan, who headed the defense ministry before MBS. All three of these men died between 2012 and 2016.

So now 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 Nyev and the other Crown princes who might have acted as barriers to their total power were gone. They are the ones running everything. There are no other major power centers. They've done this in about two years, right? So this is a very successful consolidation of power. Yeah, that's some Game of Throne shit. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Now all they had to do was discipline a squabbling cadre of lesser princes and officials, some of whom had supported rival princes,

and others of whom may have eventually represented a threat themselves. More to the point, they were all corrupt, and King and Prince Salman both knew their continued support would hinge on being seen as fighting corruption. In the fall of 2017, Muhammad 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. Hey. What a reformer. Huge move. What a feminist icon, Muhammad bin Salman. It really is like if you have a society where, like, I don't know, people are running around stabbing other people randomly all the time as policy.

Like the United Kingdom, sure. Yeah. And then a leader shows up and they're like, number. No stabbing. 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. Extremely low bar. The, the bar is in the fucking below the toilet. It has been flushed into the sewer, right? Yeah. So this is also not quite the promise that it seems. Now, he avoids bringing up. And nobody present feels pressed to ask about the Saudi women's rights activists who are already imprisoned for campaigning for their right to drive. On stage at the Davos, like, there's already women in prison. Nobody's like, what about them?

Are they getting out? And MBS doesn't say shit about that. The next thing he brings up on stage at the Davos of the Desert event is an exciting history-making new project, Neom or N-E-O-M, a city built as a one titanic wall stretching from the Red Sea to the mountains. I heard of this. It's a huge wall-sized skyscraper, covered in solar panels. The inside is a whole climate-controlled city.

It's going to be like the perfect living place for human beings. In our college. Walltown, right? Per the book MBS, quote, businessmen would write the laws and entice the world's top minds to innovate on Saudi soil. Planning for a post-carbon future and taking advantage of the Saudi sun, the city would be powered by solar energy,

and staffed by so many robots that they might outnumber the human inhabitants. Neom, Muhammad 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 going to display that for you now, Dave. Ah, sweet. For too long, humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature. Now,

a revolution in civilization is taking place. Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint. Cram it! Cram the city! To protect and enhance nature. The line will be home to 9 million residents and will be

built with a footprint of just 34 square kilometers. And we are designing it to provide a healthier, more sustainable quality of life. The line's communities are organized in Three Dimensions. Man, so I love that they're like too long have cities not been wall based.

There's not been big walls. Also, cities don't live in harmony with nature. Unlike a giant line. Right. Like a huge silver wall that cuts off birds from their migratory pattern. Oh yeah. Birds are going to be smacking into that thing. It's so tough because like, when I first heard of Wall City, right?

I'm like, that's cool in 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 a stupian. That's blade runner. Right. And 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 dinser, 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. It's neat because it's like what Blade Runner would have lived in. This is the thing.

This is the issue I have with everything from the goddamn cyber truck to this, which is that I love this. I'm not embarrassed to say this. I love the look at the cyber truck. I love that bullshit futurist aesthetic. I know it looks like shit, objectively. But all these dildos, it's the same problem, which is like, they're like, I want to make a world like Star Trek. And I think, oh, okay.

So number one, we get rid of money. And they're like, no, robots. And it's like, no. Just a lot of robots. Yeah, we just want to make it. A lot of robots and tall. Right. They want to make it look like Star Trek.

They don't want to actually make it Star Trek. where it's actually like, oh, we eliminate like money and we pour a bunch of efforts into medicine and lifting up the lower classes. No, none of that. We just want fucking cool, smooth things. And like, I get it. So do I. But I'd rather have the other stuff first. Yeah.

Wouldn't we all? Yeah, Wall City. I'm like, I guess. I mean, 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, clearly someone who's like, Wall City, that's cool, right?

That's a great idea. They went from there. We may do a dedicated episode about this later because we didn't have time in this, but this is impossible. The project is already run into terminal issues. Like, it is cost overflows are massive. The Kingdom's financial situation today is still not good, because, again, you know, Again, every effort to transition off of being entirely reliance on oil money has failed,

and they never really got over a lot of these central issues that were massive problems for the country when MBS took power. Like they've been patching over them, but there's still problems. And the goal was to get a bunch of foreign investment to make this thing possible. Again, they were looking at $500 billion, and it's likely it'll cost way more than that if they were to actually finish this thing. they've dug a bunch of holes, they've started construction, it's never going to get built. It's impossible.

They're starting with the conclusion and not getting there. It's, again, like the cyber truck, I think looks cool, but it's clear that he started with the look and then the insides are shit and don't make any sense. So it's like you're not starting with that fundamental idea of like, how do people live? How should we build a city more efficiently? It started with what if wall make that work. We're going to build the city of the future. where like a modern society, you know, built by businessmen, all of the world's innovators will want to live here. It's like, but like alcohol is still illegal and women can't, like, don't have, right?

This is like a very non-original idea. Man's like, what if I start a city? What if I make my own town? Like that's a very common thing, I fear. And if you meet that guy, go, please leave me alone and then take it. them. It's a, it's a teenager's dream where it's like, you draw a character where you're like, and he has a cool sword and he's not like cool armor. And then you think of like, what's his personality? Like you're going backwards, right? Where you're like, and it's that where they're just

like cool Wall City. But our, our actual, what they said designed by businessmen? The laws? Imagine meeting that guy at a bar. Yeah, designed by businessman. Yes. Just imagine a meeting that guy, Not knowing anything about him And the guy comes up to you and is like, yeah, I'm going to build this city, the line. It's just like one really big wall. Right. You'd be like, please get away from me.

You're terrifying. I'd be like, are you Peter Thiel? Are you Peter Thiel right now? No, it's like classic libertarian shit. Yeah. Yeah. It is such a libertarian boat city. Oh my God.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not... Which, again, it could be cool if it was not just like every single time. It's like the worst people in the world are like...

No, I would live on a boat if it was like a pirate radio kind of situation because that movie rips. But I'm simply not going to live on a boat with a bunch of Bitcoin guys. I'd rather... Like, that's the thing is like, 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. 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. Yeah. It's goals, you know? He was like, okay, I'm not the guy to make a future city,

the experimental prototype city of tomorrow. Turns out that sucks ass. Yeah, I'll just put some fucking rides in there. He's like not tomorrow. but tomorrow land. Yeah. Like, good on him. As we've...

Famous good guy, Walt Disney. Famous good guy. The real hero of these episodes. It's a nice reminder that these rich dildos have been trying to make cities for a while. Because they all want to prove

they can do it better. They want to prove they know what's wrong with society. But what none of them understand, and so why this is impossible, is that it's hard to make a good city or a good country because people are messy and don't get along. And if your whole thing is I don't understand people or like to listen to them, you're going to fail.

It's that. And it's also like Disney famously was also like, you know what I hate? Zoning laws. These rich people, they also just don't like following the rules of law. So they're like, oh, what if I made a city? And then it's everybody will love my cool city. And then everybody has to do what I say. Yeah. and then you forget to have any measures to prevent the outbreak of cholera. Right. So everybody dies of cholera.

It's why every libertarian city, I feel like every pitch falls apart when you go, okay. And what do you think the age of consent will be there? Yeah. Like, because it's always a dark answer. See, that's why. The age of consent and like, who's going to be in charge of the poop? What's going to happen with the poop? You know?

Where's the poop going? Right. Where's the poop going? Yeah. If you ever hang it out in like an, 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? Yeah. Unless it's all around poop city. Unless it's poop city. My idea of her city. It's all poop-oriented. There you go, Dave. Yep.

And you take showers with your buddies. Okay. Sorry. Wow. Sorry. Thanks, Dave. So two weeks after going on this slightly fevered Steve Jobs-style rant about how the future was a big line city in a country where most people didn't think TV should be legal, Muhammad bin Salman, well, powerful people didn't think TV should be legal.

Muhammad 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 and Riyadh, one of the finest hotels in the world. Right. 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 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 Solomon 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 inmate. from an NBC report by Dan DeLuce,

Ken Delanian, and Robert Windram. The involuntary guests were told they had to sign away large chunks of their assets to be released. The detention involved both psychological abuse and in some cases torture, current and former U.S. officials say. The move, described by Saudi authorities as a crackdown on rampant corruption,

allowed the crown prince to tighten his grip and sent a shockwave through the kingdom as elites. This was a shakedown operation and a power consolidation operation, said one former senior U.S. official who was an officer. office at the time. The Ritz detentions were designed to remind people going forward that their wealth and their well-being would depend on the crown prince and not on anything else, which is why it was

so upsetting for many in the royal family, said the former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. What was that a quote from? This is from an NBC report. I just love involuntary guest. Perfect journalism speak. Voluntary guest of the Ritz Carlton, yes. May have been tortured. involuntary guest. You just call them prisoners at this point. But this is what brings us to Muhammad 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 Muhammad bin Salman himself. His grandfather, a doctor, had treated MBS his grandfather, the king. He was a close relative to billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was an involved in like 80% of the shady deals that took place in the 1990s. Jamal got involved in the Muslim Brotherhood while in college, and he worked as a journalist for an English-language paper out of Jetta once he graduated. He winds up on the ground floor of reporting on the Mujahideen's resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Keshoggi arguably crossed the line from reporter to participant during at least one part of the conflict. He became a well-known figure within the world of Islamic militancy and secured an invitation to talk with another influential Saudi militant, Osama bin Laden, right? So this is a journalist who's reporting on this, you know, jihad against the Soviets. He at least at one point crosses from being a journalist to being a combatant. And as a result, he has a lot of clout with these other militants. And so he gets to hang out with bin Laden. Now, ultimately, Khashoggi winds up disillusioned by the failure of the revolution in Afghanistan. He had been a guy who had hoped will create something better than what had existed before, if we can keep the Soviets out. And instead, we get the

Taliban. And Khashoggi's not delusional. He can see the Taliban 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? It's tough. It's tough. It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban. Yeah. It's tough when your buddies become the Taliban. Nobody wants that to happen to their buddies, Dave. No. I'm happy that you've continued writing for the internet as opposed to becoming the Taliban. Right. No, I had that crossroads, but yeah. It would have been logistically confusing, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So when he returns home to Saudi Arabia, he's arguably the most influential

journalist in the kingdom, he's one of them. And he's developed close working relationships with several highly placed members of the royal family. And he spends the next couple of decades as both an influential critic and pillar of the power system. So he is integrated tightly within kind of the upper strata of Saudi Arabia. He's very well regarded. He's also someone who can periodically critique what decisions that are being made by the powerful in Saudi Arabia. And he sees himself as like a mouthpiece for the poor in Saudi Arabia,

for the working class as a result of that. He can occasionally speak some truth to power, right? Or speak truth to the rest of the world about what's going on in Saudi Arabia. That's at least how you'll see this guy written about speaking of people who speak truth to power. These ads will speak truth to the greatest power in the world, your wallet. Wow. Not my wallet. Not, yeah.

In the middle of the night, Sasquia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. and immediately the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband.

So keep this secret for so many years. He's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who prays on vulnerable. trusting people. Your predator might go up and good. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions. to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?

NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune

and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP, might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New Year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel.

We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week, we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken.

But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Polter, a psychologist with over 30 years' experience, helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught the name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy. as in compassion.

If you want this to be the year, you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to the mailroom on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

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, Gashoggi pinned an editorial, attacking not only the terrorists, but the clerics who gave them power. Jamal wound up driven to the United States.

United States, where he would live at time through the coming years whenever things got too hot for him back in the kingdom. He was, predictably, a big supporter of the Arab Spring, which further caused consternation among the powerful. During the rise of ISIS, Khashoggi compared the terrorist movement's ideology to the kingdom's own Wahhabist beliefs. He initially supported Solomon as king, and was bullish on the reforms that he and MBS introduced against the religious police and endemic corruption. So when MBS first comes to power, Koshoggi'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.

Kishoggi 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. Koshoggi asked him, why don't you talk about any of this in public? If you're in favor of all these reforms, why won't you tell people about them? Why are we having this meeting in private? And MBS says in short, you can just write about what I've said here. Put it in the newspaper.

Tell everybody what I'm saying, right? I'm giving you permission to make this public, right? Okay. So, Jamal is like, all right, I fucking will. And he takes this as an invitation to report openly on the Princess Crusade to modernize the kingdom. This would prove to be something of a mistake. Man. Because it's like, yeah, go write it.

I'd be like, do you really want that? Never trust the prince when he's like, oh, I want a journalist to hold my feet to the fire. Are you kidding me? Accountability? That's what Kings love. Man. I mean, I'm not blaming him. It's just like, you can see it all unfolding here.

Because I would do the same thing. I'd go like, oh, okay. Yeah, I'll write about it. guess. In the fall of 2017, having silenced his most powerful detractors, MBS's security forces launched a crackdown on their little enemies. 80 dissidents were arrested. Most were clerics who were either too conservative or too progressive. The rest were political reformers. And as Ben Hubbard writes, individuals who had annoyed MBS and his aides in some way or another, one was an economist who had questioned the wisdom of privatizing a romco. Another was a poet who had called on journalists to

avoid harsh language into dispute with Qatar. So these are just guys getting arrested for bugging, you know, Turkey or Muhammad bin Salman, you know, for any reason. I'm going to do my petty tour here, my asshole tour. I've gotten rid of the big enemies. One prominent detainee was a cleric named Salman al-Auda. In his younger days, he'd been an extreme fundamentalist, and he'd spent time in prison for demeaning the royal family, arguing against their right to rule.

In more recent years, he'd become almost. 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-Aud framed this as an attempt to help the kingdom and House of Saud avoid an Arab spring of their own. He gently suggested that the government might try to listen to its people a little more,

rather than governing by the whims of Muhammad bin Salman and his ailing father. He was arrested and has been held in solitary confinement from September of 2017 up to the present day. His brother complained about the arrest on Twitter and has also been detained. If his case ever comes to trial, he could get the death penalty, although given the fact that his health is deteriorated by in bars, that may not be, he could be dead now. I don't think we know. Wow. There's a lot of guys like that.

The whole Ritz-Carlton affair was carried on in a very hush-hush manner by the Kingdom Security Forces. they obviously wanted everyone to know the broad strokes of what had gone down, and there were specific names they wanted publicized, but the government never released a comprehensive list of names and only accused them vaguely of intelligence activities for the benefit of foreign parties and engaging in espionage while having contact with external entities. Their Muslim Brotherhood was named as a specific example. Long-term consequences ranged from prison terms to home detention.

Some people were let go entirely with the equivalent of a warning. Nearly all spent days or weeks detained at the writs without any charge or clear idea of what crimes they were expected to answer to. Some were certainly executed, although it's impossible for us to make any clear estimates about how many people suffered want punishments. The crime was bugging him. The crime was bugging him. Bugging him or other people like you. Yes, the two great crimes. On June 24, 2018, Saudi Arabia officially lifted its ban on women driving.

Prince Al-Walid 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, Muhammad bin Salman, led to this great result. Women have now taken off, gotten their freedom. That's all they needed was to drive. 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 Muhammad himself bin Salman himself had ordered ended. From an article in the Guardian, Amnesty said that according to three testimonies it obtained, some of the activists were repeatedly given electric shocks and flogged, leaving some unable to walk or stand properly. In one instance, an activist

was hung from the ceiling. Another testimony said one of the detained women was subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks. Jesus. So, this is like weeks before he ends the ban. And their crime is not that they want the band in. The crime is that they're advocating, they're saying that the country's

doing something wrong, that a law needs to change because it's wrong. And that's criticism. We can't have that. No, sir. It's just that, it's that fucking, that vibe, right? The, like, hashtag girl boss vibe, 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. Yeah, it's a setting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you hate to see it.

A Saudi female race car driver, and again, there's this, there's weeks long PR push in the wake of this. A Saudi female race car driver is given her license in a grand ceremony in Riyadh and allowed to take a celebratory lap through the capital, weeks before she would help to open the French Grand Prix. Journalists were warned that she would not make any comment about women's rights. This eloquently showcased 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.

Right. He's, I'm going to give you what I give you, and you better not ask for more. And you better not have asked for what I'm giving you previously. Because he wants people to like him. He wants to be worshipped. Yeah, you're also going to praise me every step of the way. You're going to be thanking me for what I've given you. I mean, we had a discussion like that, you know, when we legalized weed, it became this thing of like, maybe we should let the people in jail for that out.

Like, it's similar, but except if you say that, you'll be executed. Right, yeah, you shouldn't say that. So, yeah, Luane Al-Hathlul had gained notoriety in 2014 when she was arrested for trying to drive her car from the UAE into Saudi Arabia. She was released after more than 70 days in prison the month after Salman was made king. This was initially seen as a reason for optimism towards the new king and his son. Al-Hathlul had continued to speak out against the kingdom's laws and participated in a major foreign documentary that criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record. She'd been living overseas with her husband when she returned home in 2017 and was arrested as part of MBS's whiter crackdown on descent. She was released and expanded the scope of her activism, pushing her.

against the kingdom's guardianship laws, which made women basically legal minors in perpetuity. She was invited to speak at the U.N., where she directly called kingdom representatives out for denying the existence of guardianship laws. This was the straw that broke the camels back. A month after this, she was kidnapped from her home in Abu Dhabi and flown to Saudi Arabia. She was released after a month, but forbidden from leaving the country. Then, just before the driving ban was repealed, she was swept up in a mass arrest with other prominent women's rights activists.

And this is like part of this big sweep that I had talked about just a second ago, right? Punishments for these activists and their supporters ran the gamut from jail time to travel bans to torture. The Kingdom's captive news media embarked on a campaign of slandering the reputations of those incarcerated. And some prisoners, including Al-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 Saoud al-Katani

and operated as the personal enforcers of Muhammad 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.

El Hathlul was waterboarded on several occasions. Al-Katani oversaw her torture directly sometimes. he would threaten to rape her repeatedly and throw her body in the sewer. This is the kind of stuff that they're doing. And they're doing this during Ramadan. He and his men are torturing her throughout the night. And they force her to eat after the sun comes up when she's not supposed to be eating. So, yeah, this is pretty gross stuff, right?

I don't know, Robert, because Dave Chappelle said it's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia. It's easier to talk in Saudi Arabia, unless you're a woman who wants to drive. Because of wokeness, because of wokenness here. They don't have weakness. Yeah, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. That is horrific. Yeah.

It would be operatives of the same rapid intervention group that Muhammad bin Salman called upon to murder now dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He had written critically if the prince's Ritz Carlton kidnapping spree the previous year and about the ongoing detention of women's driving advocates. What he didn't know was that mere months before MBS started his campaign to destroy dissent, he sent agents of his rapid intervention group, mostly military veterans, to the U.S. so they could train with a private security firm. The Tier 1 group, per the New York Times, the mercenary firm, quote,

is owned by the private equity firm's Cerberus Capital Management. The company says the training, including safe marksmanship, and countering an attack, was defensive in nature and designed to better protect Saudi leaders. One person familiar with the training said it also included work in surveillance. Yes, the good men at Cerberus Capital Management have a private army that they're using to train Muhammad bin Salman's Goon Squad. rich people for the longest time, it's the weirdest thing that how, how they're just like,

Palantir. Like, they're just, you know what, we're not going to even lie about that. Yeah, we're just, let's call it like it is. It's like the only honesty they have. It's so weird. Yeah, yeah. My new capital management firm, I just shot a baby incorporated. Yeah. Yeah, named after the time I shot a baby. Holy shit. It's great stuff. So, Khashoggi himself had fled Saudi Arabia in June of 2017, having seen the writing on the wall of the Ritz. He had escalated his criticisms of the regime, and NBS in particular, and had launched a series of projects with the aim of collecting and amplifying foreign descent 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-Katani, MBS's Trigger Man, is known to have organized the effort to take out Khashoggi. They finally caught him in Turkey. A 15-member intervention group team fell upon the journalist as he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, seeking papers to make his marriage to his fiancé official. While she waited outside, the tame attacked him. The kingdom would later claim their job was just to take him back to Saudi Arabia, but he resisted and so was injected with a large dose of something that killed him. His body was then dismembered.

MBS, the government insisted, had no knowledge of any of this. Subsequent investigations and reporting had revealed that one member of the negotiation team was a coroner, explicitly hired to dismembered Mr. Koshoggi's corpse after he was killed, which would suggest they never wanted to take him alive, right? You don't bring a coroner along if you think you're going to get this guy out of the building alive. Who among us was like, we just want to talk to him. Oh, damn it, we dismembered him. Yeah, ah, fuck, yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Good God. So we don't know exactly what went down in the room, but we have a pretty good idea. And all of the evidence shows Mr. Koshoggi was assassinated, dismembered, and disposed of by a team that had been sent to Turkey to do just that. All credible experts believe Muhammad bin Salman gave the orders. And that's kind of where we leave things off. There's more to say. I mean, there's a lot more to get into the Trump years and stuff.

But these are the broad strokes of how he came to be where he is, right? our current president has even broken with the conclusions of his own CIA to insist that MBS is probably innocent. And I don't know, do we trust the CIA or do we trust Donald Trump here? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just a real like, you've identified a bastard, but it really resonates of like the other bad. 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. Yep. Yep. Yep. Because, you know, the tempo of all. operations in Yemen with Saudi Arabia is a lot lower than it was. But the damage from the peak of operations was catastrophic. Per an article in Genocide Watch in 2021, Saudi strikes have directly killed over 12,000 civilians. Only half of hospitals continue to operate. Saudi naval blockades have cut off food and supplies.

Thousands of children have died of starvation. A cholera epidemic afflicted 800,000 civilians and killed thousands. 80% of the population depends on humanitarian relief. the Yemeni archive and Oxfam report that the Saudi-led coalition has systematically destroyed 130 bridges essential for delivery of humanitarian aid. Houthis have also prevented food aid from reaching populations in areas they control. At least 233,000 civilians have died in Yemen's civil war, right? So, cool.

Horrific. Not a good person. I will not be subscribing to the Wall City. Yeah. Sorry. No, no. And I won't listen to his podcast when it comes out. Yeah.

I was surprised because you're talking about all these people who are just getting paid a lot of money and sit around. I was like, surely a lot of podcasts. Yeah, a lot of terrible podcasts are coming out of this. Call it the soundcast, you know? You got a name right there. Bam, you did it. Mm-hmm. Well, Dave.

Got to plug anything? I don't know. Um, okay. Uh, oh, uh, game. Unemployed. That's the podcast network. I co-run with Tom Reimann and we talk about movies and TV and and you know stuff like that, the X-Files. I am the head writer of Some More News, which is a, you know, it's like a new show on the YouTube. And that's it for now, maybe more in the future someday. I will be able to say other things.

That's it. Excellent. Very cool. Well, everybody, say other things with us and to yourself and go away. The episode's done. Bye. Yeah. Get out of here.

Mm-hmm. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix. so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog

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