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

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

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.

Also Media. 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 Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. And to talk about this, obviously, the only guest we 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 at Cracked, David Bell. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, if anything, I'm going to be teaching you a thing

or two. Yeah, a lot of people don't know this. You live for 47 years in Saudi Arabia. That's true. Which is impressive because you're not that old. Yeah. No. No, that's several years. Yeah. Several years more than I have existed. Yeah, I think that's actually older than Muhammad bin Salman. Yeah, yeah. 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 how it goes with these sort of royal families. Of course I do. Like I said, expert. Yeah, expert on Saudi Arabia. In addition to that, you and I lived together for a period of time in the late aughts. We did. 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 with our also fellow former roommate and colleague Tom Reimman, which hosts several of my favorite podcasts, including Fox Mulder's A Maniac and the new Hymboos. Hemboos, which is about Supernatural. Yes, it's your Supernatural rewatch podcast. Yeah, it's not even a rewatch. I've never seen Supernatural. It's just a watch for you, yeah. Yeah, it's me discovering those beautiful, beautiful boys, the Winchesters. And you're, I didn't do it this year.

I did a Big Labaskin costume for Halloween this year, but I think next year I'm going to do a Fox Mulder costume. And I'm trying to pick between either just wearing the FBI, like, suit and having an empty holster, because as Fox Mulder, I have lost my gun before showing up at the party. Or show up at the party with, like, five or six. fake guns. Leave them around. Give them the people. Like accidentally drop them in people's laps. If I see someone dressed as a gondola player, maybe pointed at them, you know, all the Fox Mulder

classics. Anywhere you can leave it where kids can reach it is preferable. Yeah. Yeah. These are all classic Fox Molder tactics. I know. If Fox Mulder really existed, you would have done a six-part series on him. Well, yeah, because there would have been a congressional investigation.

into just the things that he did. Like, multiple of them. Like, the church committee would have had, like, a church committee. Or his fucking... My favorite... Not to deviate, but my favorite things... I've been rewatching the X-Files recently, because I'm always re-watching the X-Files.

Of course, as you are wont to do, 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 dabbs it on his... finger and he tastes it and he goes that's sugar and it's like that is just something you don't do i know it's small but i can't get over the idea of being in a crime scene seeing blood and tasting it that would stop everything like that alone would be like molder go home what are you doing you need to go to the doctor

i don't care if he's an fbi agent like a beat cop would kick you off the scene then what do you just you just tasted the blood get out of yeah yeah even if it's fake blood don't taste it don't taste it don't It could be anything. That's crazy stuff. Yeah. 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 was Fox Mulder's dorm when he was canonically at Oxford? Yes. And he had sex on Sir Arthur Cooner Doyle's grave. And they were all like 20. And they were like, who? Is that a graduate of Oxford? And I'm like, God damn it. Those young bastards.

You fucking children. Oh. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. You know who else is a young bastard? Mohamed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Well, us too, but yes. So you've probably, the listener, obviously Dave, again, as I stated, you're an expert on Saudi Arabia, internationally recognized.

That's correct. But for the listeners who know less, Mohamed bin Salman is the crown prince and the current effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. His dad is the king, but he's not like super on the job right now. Like most people tend to agree that his son is kind of the power behind the throne. The thing you will probably know him best for if you were a casual reader of news in Saudi Arabia is that he's the guy who had that journalist bone sawed. Jamal Khashoggi from the Washington Post almost certainly ordered a team of people to have him killed and sawed up with the bone saw in Turkey.

Yeah, he's that guy. And MBS, as he's generally called, is one of the most dangerous and in some ways competent, like bastards in the world today. He's a world leader who has been generally very successful in pushing his specific ideology and his specific plans. He's been running into increasing issues as he's gotten more power and as he's accumulated more power and as he's spent more time. at the top. But, you know, it's kind of one of those things where his overall level of success has been pretty great. So you have to credit 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 refaing. forms with unprecedented authoritarian crackdowns, often against members of his own family. Now, before we discuss how he got to where he is today and what he's done with his time 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 18th century, in a small town on the Arabian Peninsula named Dyria.

In the mid-1700s, there was a religious leader in that town. named Muhammad Ibn 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 as the decadence and many moral compromises of the Ottoman Caliph, who had allowed such evils as relatively open socialization between unmarried men and women and women to work in the world, right? Like, ladies were getting jobs in the Ottoman Empire, right? Particularly in the capital.

Yeah, he was really unhappy about it. that. Like, women are making money? No, no, no, no, no. He was also unhappy about a lot of art in the Ottoman world that's depicted the human form, which you're not really supposed to do under the strictest interpretations of Islam, and he was unhappy about music. You're not supposed to have music, right? 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? Really? all things that under, yeah, under the strictest interpretations of Islam, right?

Again, most Muslims that I have known, in most places in the Muslim world, you're going to encounter music, but not in the strict parts, right? Yeah, I mean, it's every religion, right? It's like the strictest parts are always ridiculous, and most people, even if they subscribe to that religion, are going through, and they're just like, yeah, we're not going to do that. Like, we'll have music. It's fine.

You can run into 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 not supposed to do this and this and this. And it's like, well, if you were following the letter of the Bible, there's a lot of shit you shouldn't be doing that you're doing, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 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. 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 increasingly modern world. And Wahab was like, fuck that shit. Like, we need to go back, right? Like, we have to returvan. 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 purposes today. What matters is that he had a lot of supporters. And one of these supporters was his local emir, a guy named Muhammad Ibn Saad, 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 like, the House of Saud, as a a modern political dynasty, right? And Mahabin Ibn Saud seems to have seen Wahab as a useful tool for building a base of support.

Saud was an ambitious man. The Arabia of his day was a scantly populated backwater, with nomadic tribes who were constantly at each other's throats and too busy fighting to build a credible state. In 1744, Wahab, again, this guy is basically the leader of a militant extremist religious movement of his day. he leads like a mob to destroy the tomb of one of the Prophet Muhammad's companions, framing it as an attack on idolatry, right? If you've got a tomb that is like a venerated spot that's worshipping an idol, right? And you're not supposed to do that under the strictest interpretations of the religion.

You know, like that's kind of his argument is that people were worshipping the tomb as opposed to like, you're only supposed to worship God. The tomb is the place where his body is, though, right? Right, yes. Like, that just seems like, what are we going to do at that point? Like, that just, I don't know, man. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah, strict, I guess. Yes, it's the point here. That's exactly what it is, right?

He also stones a woman to death for alleged adultery. I'm pointing out of light here, because, like, who knows what the term, like, the standards of evidence back then were not high, right? And eventually, he, he does a lot of show. like this, and Wahab has to go on the run because people get angry at him for being a giant dick. For being an asshole, yeah. Yeah, for being an asshole.

And when he goes on the run, Muhammad Ibn Saud takes him in, and he kind of welds his followers and this version of Orthodox Islam, which has this, it includes all of these strict returns to like old rules, but it also includes these new calls

for Arab nationalism, right? Which is an increasingly popular idea in the, in the area, right? At the time, Arabs are not governing themselves. They're under the rulership of a Turkish caliph in large part, right? This is, we talk about this in the Lawrence of Arabia episodes. This is going to culminate in the early 1900s in the Arab revolution. But this is kind of a lot of the origins of that stuff, right? Is Wahab is preaching that like, we should be independent. And I bin Saoud 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 local bigwigs. I want us to be the kings of the Arab world. In 1740, hmm. Is Arab nationalism? I assume that it was very popular, right? Like that idea. Not yet. It's starting to be. Because of Saud and Wahab, right? That starts to be popular. It's going to be very popular in the 1900s, right? In 1745, they're kind of ahead of the curve, right? Okay. Yeah.

They're like the first punk bands. Yeah, I just think about how a lot of bad ideas will be couched in, you know, generally popular ideas or the idea that this system isn't working where it's like they're not wrong. You know, it's like someone being like, hey, Twitter sucks. Let me buy Twitter. And then making Twitter even worse, where it's like, if you're exploiting like people's frustrations that are valid.

You can sneak in all sorts of bullshit, I guess is my point. Is it like that? Yeah, it's kind of a, and it's kind of a symbol of how there's not enough, there's not enough just raw support for the idea of an independent Arab state. So, Saud has to kind of grab this crazy dude and his followers who are angry about, like, women working and people playing music to be like, if they're angry about other things mostly, but they're willing to be angry about the thing I'm angry about. And if I get them on my back, they're crazy and they're willing to fight and die.

Right. So like, it kind of makes sense to partner up with these insane motherfuckers. It's a lot, again, this happens all the time, right? The religious right is largely a factor of like very rich people whose primary goal was to not be taxed and to not have their workers have rights who are like, oh, these people are angry about like women wearing skirts and getting a. abortions. Well, if they're anger about taxes, too, or if I can get them to oppose taxes, too, then like, yeah, throw them on the bus, right? Yeah. That's kind of how reactionary movements always work. Yeah, it's just whoever's pissed off who can tolerate each other getting together and being like, yeah, we can all, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's, 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, Saud has to find these maniacs and kind of get them on his side. So for about half a century, in 1745, they establish what is technically a country. It's really just like a city state based around the city of Derea, which is today kind of like a suburb of Riyadh, right? Riyadh is the current capital of Saudi Arabia. So basically that region, what is today, the capital of Saudi Arabia, they have like a micro state that is ruled by the Saud family and is a semi- an independent Saudi state, right? That exists in 1745 for about 50 years, a little bit more than half a century, right?

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

Like, it won't even last a day. Yeah, yeah. I really wish you'd been able to get hold of those nuclear missiles, Dave. But unfortunately, without them, you're unlikely to succeed from the United States. That's how they take you seriously. 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 until in 1819, this kind of like the black and white teachings that Wahhabism are preaching

leads to increasing conflicts with the Ottomans. The Al-Saud rulers of the country run into a version of the same problem that afflicts any authoritarian who ally with crazy religious hardliners, which is that sooner or later, they're going to try to get you to do crazy stuff for them because they think that's what God wants, right? Like, if you hit yourself to these guys, they're going to make. demands increasingly that you like, you have to do some crazy stuff, right? Like, you're on team crazy guys. You have to do some crazy shit, right? That's what you signed up for. Yeah. Don't you

believe the crazy stuff? Well, this is, sorry, this is just paralleling, because, you know, obviously it's on my mind a lot, but today where it's like it feels like a lot of the far right, that you have the grifters and then you have the true believers, right? The people who are like, no, we're going to unmask the deep state and get all the pedophiles. And then the other people are like, no, no, no, no, this is like kind of a griff. No, we are the deep state pedophiles. We just want money. Yeah, exactly.

Like, you don't understand. We're just trying not to pay a lot of taxes. Yeah. It's a weird mix. In this case, the Wahhabists believe that God wanted them to occupy Mecca and Medina and to sack Karbala, which is a town in Iraq, and destroy a tomb for Muhammad's grandson, which, again, people were like going to to pray, basically, right? This is the kind of thing.

The Ottomans were kind of fine with ignoring them while they were just running this backwater, but now they're trying to take the capital city of the faith and sack a random town and also take the second city of the faith. And that's just too, you're getting too busy, right? And you don't have the ability to actually... It's like a cult, right? It's like, we all want to wear robes. and, like, do drugs and hang out.

And then they're like, why not? All right. Yeah. And then it's suddenly like, all right, everybody take a dagger and we're going to stab ourselves. And you're like, well, no, I don't want to do that. Didn't you guys believe in the cult shit? Not that much. Right.

It was in the terms and agreements. Like, did you not read them? Like, this was where it was heading. Yeah. So the Wahhabists accused the Ottoman governors of the state of not respecting Sharia law, which forbade idolatry. and the Ottomans don't react well to this. And unlike the Saudis, they have an army, like a big army, because they're an empire.

They're not like a good empire, but they're bigger than this backwater little town. So the first Saudi state gets crushed by Ottoman arms. Their capital at Dorea was destroyed, and the Saud in charge is taken to Constantinople, where his head gets cut off. His body is posed holding the severed head and displayed for three days before being thrown into the sea, which is, you know, one way to handle an incident. insurrection. Yeah, did it work? Not in the long run, not in the long run. But, you know, points for trying. If the South family was good at one thing, it was the fact that they were really

good at making more of themselves, right? This 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 to rebuild the family movement. This guy was Turkey bin Abdullah. bin Muhammad al-Saud, and he fought against the Ottomans to defend Dorea, 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.

Turkey vowed to himself to stand firm in the face of enemies and to fight in battle even if alone, carrying his sword, al-Ajrib, which he referred to in his famous poem. If every friend forsakes their friend, I will carry al-Ajrib as a steadfast. fast companion, right? Basically, if I don't have any other friends, at least I've got my knife, which is pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty badass, right? You can get a tattoo of that. It's a gangster, yeah.

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

Yes. They're charismatic like the Scarsguards. One of them was in the series Andor, like the Scars Guards. Yes, you can, yeah, the Al-Saud families everywhere. Yeah. Got it. So in 1824, this guy, Turkey, the kind of like inheritor of the Al-Saud family, establishes a second Saudi state, moving the capital to Riyadh proper and governing there for about 10 years.

Near the end of 1834, while he's kind of consolidated in his power, he's fighting a series of battles against his rivals. And, you know, he's got to fight the Ottomans, but a lot of his rivals are members of his own family, right? Because it's a big family, and they're not all in agreement about who should be in charge. And near the end of 1834, after about 10 years of governing this revitalized Saudi state, Turkey is ambushed while leaving his mosque and slain by three assassins who had been hired by his second cousin, Mishari bin Abdul Rahman, who tried to make himself the new Imam. Turkey's son Faisal, returned home immediately after this and put an into 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? 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. Well, you've got to have a pastime. I mean, 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 you never have enough power but you can have too many cousins right like that's kind of the rule yeah sorry i have uh i have eight uncles and aunts so i have a lot just on one side and we're always trying to kill each other yeah Exactly, exactly. I got a couple of them. They keep coming at me, but I'm very careful. Yeah, you have a lot of landmines in your yard. Speaking of killing your cousins, maybe our sponsors will help you do that. Or not, if you like them.

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We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork and solving these crazy crimes. come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members. Come be a part of my zone 7 while building yours. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So Turkey alone creates about four break. branches of the new of the Saudi royal family, just one of which the Al-Faisal contains several

thousand male descendants by the late 20th century. So that's like how prolific this family is. Is this one guy, because of how many kids he has, creates four branches of the family that are like thousands of people strong today. This brings us to what will become a pattern within the House of South, which is the sheer number of these guys causes a constant problem with political turnover, as there are always more princes and other royals who hate each other and think they really ought to be the branch of the family that's in charge. The second Saudi state ultimately collapses in 1891 as a civil war within the house leads to their defeat by the al-Rashid tribe and the destruction of the country.

For more than a decade, the Al-Saud family struggles to regain their lost glory. Many of them, like Abdul Aziz al-Saud, grandfather of Muhammad bin Salman, the guy we're talking about in these episodes, went into exile in places 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, he goes into exile in Kuwait, and he returns to Arabia in 1902 with an army, right? He spent his time gathering power. He gets a bunch of desert warriors to his banner, and he shows up in the early 1900s intent on reestablishing the Saudi state for a third time.

He carries out a daring early morning assault on a fort near Riyadh, called Mazmak, they take the fort, kill the governor, who was a member of the hated Al-Rashid tribe, and they retake Riyadh. In her book, The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House writes, quote, once again, he used religion just as his ancestors had to help the Al-Saud reconquer Arabia. He convinced the Bedouin to congregate in agricultural villages and adopt a sedentary life focused on puritanical Islam, promoted by Mahab bin Abd al-Wahab. The Imam taught that belonging to the Ummah, or a community of believers, took precedence over other social bonds, including tribe.

Anyone who made a judgment based on anything other than the Quran was a non-believer. Still, it took Abdulaziz over 30 years to subdue and unite warring tribes under his rule. In 1932, he announced the creation of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Now, this is a very short summary of a lot of complex history, but it gets across the key bullet points that are going to be important for our purposes. The House of Saud spends about 300 years viewing the Arabian Peninsula as theirs, and they repeatedly try to make that so. They create a series of states which often fail due to in fighting until they succeed.

And they are always backed in power by an alliance with religious hardliners, generally today called Wahhabists who help them secure their power. And the main threat to said power over the years has been their inability to stop killing each other, right? These are all traits of the Saudi state up till the present day. The other key point here is that Saudi kings and princes have varied wildly in their competence, and efficacy. Abdulaziz is very good. He's probably the best Saudi king in terms of his actual level of competency. He is the really, really on the ball leader who establishes the state.

When he takes power in 1932, Saudi Arabia is a poor country, and most of its citizens live lives that are barely changed from the way Bedouins had been living for hundreds of years. The government maintained what control it could by doling out government salaries and bribes to tribal leaders to keep them loyal. This tapped the state treasury almost to the breaking point. Abdulaziz was able to put through some minor infrastructure improvements, but as only real sources of state income in the early period for the state are money that comes from pilgrims visiting Mecca for the Hajj and the Zakat, which is a tax paid by non-Muslims who live in the country. Britain also provided a stipend because of their role in helping to establish the Saudi state,

so long as Abdulaziz could be relied upon to use this forces to crush fundamentalists to try to launch insurrections in the places like Iraq, which were still controlled by the British Empire. By the late 1930s, this whole house of cards is in danger of collapse. Abdulaziz has done kind of the impossible, but he's had to make a lot of compromises in order to do it. He's had to kind of throw a lot of his hardline followers onto the bus by allowing unbelievers to control chunks of the Muslim world, including Iraq. And there's not really any money in the Saudi state yet because oil isn't worth much, and they don't know that Saudi Arabia has it at the moment. It's a mark of his desperation that Abdulaziz sells standard oil of California a concession to drill in his country for just 50,000 pounds.

When his finance minister balks, Abdulaziz tells him, put your faith in God in sign. And that works out. That winds up being a really fucking good bet. Yeah. This is like 90s Marvel where they're like, we don't know what we have yet. We're just selling it off to whoever. We'll give you $20 for this Ironman character. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And they're just, it's tourism? Did I hear that correctly? No, no, no, no. It's drilling. It's drilling. Well, there's also religious people coming there. 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 Hajj, at least once in their lives. And that brings in some money to the state. But you only get so much money from that. It's not Florida. It's not Florida where they're like, all right, we got this one thing going on for us. That's just a little side hustle. It's a little side. It's not the kind of side hustle that having most of the world's oil is, right? Which is going to be kind of their big hustle. Yeah. If I could choose between one or the other, I guess I would go for the world's oil.

Right. Yeah. And that's going to work out for them. Per the book MBS by Ben Hubbard, quote, The discovery of oil in 1938 attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies, and representatives of Western governments seeking access to the kingdom's black gold, including the United States. In a secret meeting in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal, the two leaders hit it off, laying the groundwork for a lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in exchange for American protection from foreign attacks. Now, this is the root. It's funny how leaders always hit it off. They sure seem to, right? Wow, the rich guy in charge of this country likes this other rich guy, huh? Yeah, you like money and power?

And they're like, yeah, me too. It's like, cool. You were born into money. Me too. Yeah. 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 in its tens of millions and eventually tens of billions. At the start of the third Saudi state, King Abdulaziz had agreed to curb the spread of fundamentalist Islam to maintain the favor of European colonizing powers. But now Saudi Arabia has money, and the Saudi royal family starts investing piles of it into spreading Wahhabist teachings around the world. Saudi Aramco, soon the world's most valuable company by a mile,

this isn't the case today, but it is going to be the case for quite a while, allows the royal family to accumulate vast fortunes. This helps fund the further expansion of the family. King Abdulaziz married some 18 women and fathered more than 60 children. The next generation of his family would be freed from material concerns that had dominated their forebearers' lives. Oil money provided stipends to the many hundreds of royal children, right? This is like how Saudi royals live from now on.

There's money coming into the state, and a big chunk of it gets earmarked for the members of the House of Saud, right? vast fortunes of what should have been state funds start disappearing into the pockets of different royal family members as grift and graft become an increasingly accepted pastime. Large numbers of Saudi men, even outside of the family, are given government jobs that are themselves basically bribes to keep anyone from complaining about the endemic corruption, right? So the Saudi royal family are all living luxurious lives for doing nothing, or at least lots of the Saudi royal family are.

and regular Saudis get jobs that they basically have to do almost nothing, right, in order to get enough money to live. Yeah. That's the thing about, like, corruption or, like, trying to run. Like, you have to make enough people happy, right? Otherwise, it's just not going to last. So at some point, you know, enough people who, like, who matter, I guess, to staying in power have to be happy with it. Yeah. And the first group that the family is concerned with is the other members of the family, right?

The princes lower down the line who, these are the guys who, if they were uncomfortable and they had to struggle, might become rivals for power, right? So part of why you make sure they all get something is that then none of them want to rock the boat, which has been a continuing problem in the family. Ben Hubbard describes the state of, like, the Saudi royal family's basic welfare fund. quote, there were thousands of them, all subsidized by the Saudi state. In 1996, an American diplomat visited the office that distributed their monthly stipends and found a stream of servants picking up their master's allowances, which varied based on their status. The sons and daughters of King Abdulaziz received $270,000, his grandchildren up to $27,000,

and his great-grandchildren 13,000. The most distant relatives got $800. Princes also got million-dollar bonuses to build their palaces when they got married, as well as perks for having children. The diplomat estimated that the stipends cost the state more than $2 billion per year, but that was merely a guess. Much of that money trickled into society to earn the royals the loyalty of the population. One of Salman's son 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 Los Angeles to Monaco, and taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms in the communities where they landed. So they're doing pretty good, even though about 40% of the country lives in poverty and about 40% of the Saudi youth are unemployed, right? All of these princes are fairly comfortable. Right.

Again, enough people. Just enough. Enough people. And one of the things that's remarkable at the Saudi state is how few Saudis actually have to work, right? The majority of jobs in the country are done by foreign workers who are brought in. And often, some of them are very close. It's a mixed. You have some of them are like Western workers who are paid pretty well by like Saudi

Aramco, but the largest number of them are very close to slaves. And 90% of the private sector labor force is foreign born in Saudi Arabia by the 21st century, which is crazy, right? Yeah. Like that's like an unsustainable situation unless you've got all of this oil money sloshing in. The royal family increasingly starts to exist as a subculture within broader Saudi society. The constant infighting and sometimes deadly conflicts mean that the vast majority of royals know they're in potential danger anytime they attend a family gathering. It becomes the norm for

everyone to memorize each other's birthdays so that they would all know at a glance who in the room was most senior and thus who they had to show deference to, right? You have to always be careful to make sure that you're not seen as like looking to get one up on your betters because that could be dangerous to you. Right. See, that's what the scars guys don't have to worry about because they know who's in charge at any given point. Like that's, that's, that's, definitely not, Bill. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there's not too, too many of them. That's part of the secret, too, I feel like. Yeah, Stellan, unlike, unlike the King Salman, Stellan does not keep a prison for members of his family who displease him, right? Well, we don't know that for sure. So far as we're aware of,

right? Right. That's a good point. There's a couple of scars guards unaccounted for as far as I've, As far as I'm concerned. King Abdulaziz establishes another key precedent for the House of Saud, taking bloody vengeance upon their enemies. Early in his reign, several of the king's cousins put together an army to threaten Riyadh as part of a play to shift power to a different branch of the family. Abdulaziz smashes the army rather than negotiate, and his brutality convinces the village of Lela where a lot of these guys had been like base to surrender, and the king condemns

19 leaders of the rebellion to death. He immediately issues a 24-hour. stay of execution, not as an act of mercy, but so his men can erect a gallows at the entrance of the town and kill them all publicly. By dawn, the next day, he has the rebels beheaded in pairs, each person killed by a black enslaved man with a sword. After the first 18 have been killed, the king pardons the 19th man and orders him to go tell his friends and family members about the justs and vengeance of King Abdulaziz. Right? Yeah, go tell everybody, I could it killed you, but I didn't.

Well, hold on. You're saying he made a public execution. Yeah. And then he saved the last person. It was like, go tell people what happened here. I wouldn't, listen, I wouldn't say anything, but at the time I'd be thinking, like, I think they'll know it's public. But obviously, I'm not going to argue. I'm not going to argue. I'm not going to argue. I'll be like, yeah, I'll totally tell everybody about this. Sure, man. But still, seems redundant. It just seems redundant. I think you could have killed that. guy and his family would have known, but it's fine. I'm not going to backseat execute for this king, but yeah.

Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was born into this increasingly weird and isolated world in 1935. This is Muhammad bin Salman, the subject of our episode's dad, right? So he comes into the world in 1935, which is about 10 years before the oil deal with FDR. His early years are spent living the traditional way. He's born before oil money becomes a thing in Saudi Arabia. he's living in tents in the desert several months out of the year, and he comes of age just as the house of Saud is flooded with oil money for the very first time. King Abdulaziz passes on in

1953, leaving a wealthy and powerful state after being born into exile. Because he had grown up conscious of the fact that the internal struggle for power had shattered their last state, on his death bet, 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 still, start fighting with each other, right? They're like, yeah, dad, we totally aren't going to fight over the throne. Is he cold? All right, let's get, let's get, let's get, let's get at it. Oh, yeah, let's get the weapons out. Yeah. I'd create it an arena. Like, I would make an official, right? Yeah, yeah, a knife fight, right in the, right in the fucking hospital chamber. Oh, yeah.

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

parties hosted by members of the royal family, right? The Saudi, at least the leaders of the Saudi royal family are increasingly, like, modern, and a lot of the religious hardliners seem to be losing power in the country. Faisal's chief innovation is splitting control of the military between three different princes in order to reduce the odds of a successful coup, right? You kind of make sure no one has all of the military in their hands and just trust that no group of three Saudi princes will ever trust each other enough to work together. Yeah. It's very funny listening to this because it's like, it seems like all governments sort of naturally settle into a certain way, right?

Where it's like, okay, we need to cool it with the religious stuff. We need to allow people to just do whatever they want. Oh, we need to spread out power. So it's not just like one person can make this decision. Like it's not one to one, but it's just funny hearing this of like, yeah, this is, if you want to be in charge for a long amount of time and a function, way without everybody killing each other. It all kind of goes in this direction, it feels like. Yeah. To work? Yep. Yep. In 1975, King Faisal is assassinated by his nephew in an act of vengeance for

his brother who had been executed by Faisal for protesting in the king's decision to allow television in Saudi Arabia. So there's always backlashes to the modernizing, right? Oh, man. Dying for television to stop television. Dying to television. It's a 1975 TV. There's not even anything good on.

I kind of get it, but you could, if you told this person, like, don't worry, once the internet shows up, no one's going to give a shit about television. Yeah, I don't think Cheers is even on the air yet, man. What were you fighting for? God. While all this is going on, Prince Solomon, MBS's father and the current king, is keeping his head down and avoiding making himself a target. He'd been born the 25th of a... Abdulaziz's 36 sons. And on paper, again, the 25th son of the now-dead king shouldn't get anywhere close to the throne, right?

Like, you've got a lot of guys have to die for that to ever become your job. And he's not going to become the king until, like, 2015. But he is distinguished from the start from a lot of his brothers and half-brothers by the fact that he is willing to actually work. Like, he's not scared of actually doing a real job, which gets him promoted. Yeah. They're Nepo babies, but he's like Jack Quaid. Right, right. Where like, yeah, you're a nepo baby, you're fine, you're fine.

I'd say he's the Nicholas Cage of King Abdulaziz's sons, right? Where he's like, he's definitely like, he gets a head up because of who he is. But he's also in face off, you know? Yeah. 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. Yeah, good for him. It's not impossible.

You can't prove he wasn't. So when his, when this guy's half-brothers' and brothers, they're all fighting throughout this period of time for the choices positions from which they can largely just shunt oil money into their own pockets while not doing anything, Saldman, Prince Sald, actually works, and he focuses on building a base of support. He sits down with citizens who need his royal help, and he makes deals with business interests in his area who provide him with support throughout his life, and he gets invited by influential clerics to his court to discuss, like, religious things and whatnot. You know, he's 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. Which is not to say he's not corrupt, but he's not like primarily motivated by money. In fact, he's poor by the standards of the Saudi royal family. He's not a poor man, but he's not like just in it to suck cash out of the family oil money. He's doing stuff. Right. The bar is low. Yeah, exactly.

Just like Nicholas Cage was poor after he had to give all that money. back to Mongolia for buying dinosaur bones legally. Exactly. Where you're like he's poor, but like, he's Nicholas Page poor. He's just going to do a couple more face-offs, you know, and he's going to 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, because their branch of the family can't count on a.

vast fortune of grafted oil money, Prince Salman raises his sons to be hard workers, who, in a reversal from the norm for science of the royal family, actually grow up knowing how to do stuff. His oldest son, Fad, went to school in the West and developed a deep understanding of how to communicate with Americans and Europeans. His second son, Sultan, joined the Saudi Air Force and became the first Muslim in space as an astronaut on the shuttle discovery in 1985. His third son, Ahmed, studied mining in Colorado and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy. and then enlisted in the Saudi Air Force. His fourth son, Abdulaziz, went to work in the oil

industry and became an expert on modernizing Saudi energy extraction methods. While his kids work diligently, the kingdom struggles. In 1979, the country still reeling from Faisal's assassination, endures another shock. On November 20, 1979, 50,000 worshippers crowded into the grand mosque in Mecca. As the Imam finishes giving his blessings, hundreds of armed men begin rushing forward, firing into the air and forcing people away from the doors. A gang of militants grabbed the imam's microphone and held a dagger to his neck. All 51 doors to the mosque are chained shut. Thousands of people are taken prisoner.

Now, the guy responsible for this massive act of terrorism is Johayman al-Oythabi, an anti-monarchy Islamist insurgent who had put together a small army of around 600 rebels. He and his followers hated the House of Saud for allying with Christian infidels in order to make their fortunes, and accused the royal family of betraying Islam. Al-Taibe and his followers also believe that one of the group's leaders, Muhammad Abdullah al-Qatani, was the Madi. For the sake of brevity, it's enough to know that the Madi is basically Islam's equivalent of the Second Coming.

He's a messianic figure whose arrival heralds the end of days. So these guys have now taken the Holy Mosque, and Saudi soldiers spend days trying to retake it. But the rebels have a commanding position, and they massacre anyone who comes close. The Saudi government has to reach out to France, and get the help of an elite unit of commandos. And I'm going to quote next from Lawrence Wright's book,

The Looming Tower. Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the Holy City, they converted to Islam in a brief formal ceremony, these French commandos. The commandos pumped gas into underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued. With casualties climbing,

Saudi forces drilled holes 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 off by sharpshooters. That is so messy. It's such a messy. Like, first off, is it not worse to fake that they're Muslim now?

Like, is that not worse? Any mission that starts with, okay, we're going to need you to pretend to convert to Islam. I would be like, all right, let's take a step back here. Let's look at the bigger plan first. Did none of these French commanders go like, sir? Yeah. What? They're like, it's fine.

You can lie. You can lie. It's fine to lie. It's apparently fine to lie. Yeah. And also, though, guest didn't work. I just, we drop grenades indiscriminately into the mosque. Oh, God.

That's where they're like, do we, like, what's the point in converting to then drop grenade? Like, how is that? Is that not angry at this? Like, what rule book are they going by? Like, I'm trying to think of, like, the afterlife of, like, who is checking things off of, like, is it the air bud idea where they're like Yeah Well there's no rule that says they can't do this according to our rules you did it

I'm just in a mom with like 40 cigarettes in his mouth reading the road Yeah it's fine Yeah It takes two bloody weeks It's nuts stuff It takes two bloody weeks for the rebels to surrender The so-called Madi is killed during the fighting While Al-Otibe and nearly 70 of his followers are captured alive

In total about a thousand people die during the fighting a mix of soldiers, civilian worshippers, and insurgents. 63 militants are ultimately beheaded for their parts in the attack. The fallout from all of this is substantial, as Karenhaus writes in The Man Who Would Be King. Saudi religious clerics actually felt sympathy for the militants occupying the mosque. The Imam's sermon that very morning lamented the kingdom's moral decay, and the revolt's leader had studied with the Imam he now held captive. His goal was to end what he saw as the Al-Saud's tolerance of infidel innovations,

like women working and mixing with women or the government's tolerance of Shias, a sect of Islam that he and his fanatic saw as heretics, not Muslims. The Wahhabist clerics, they find themselves in a tough position after this, right? Their power is tied to the House of Saud, who's just made kind of the biggest compromise

with hardline Islam imaginable. You know? Like, it's kind of, it's pretty tough to top that. Yeah. So this is rough. The most prominent of these clerics issue a fatwa, which doubles down on the legitimacy of the House of Saud, but demands that the current rulers of the kingdom stop flouting the rules.

As Karen House writes of what would come in the future, no more movies, no more alcohol, no more women on television, no more gender mixing anywhere, no more soccer to distract youth from studying Allah's holy Quran. Almost overnight, everything changed in Saudi Arabia. During my first visit in 1978, I attended a dinner at oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani's house in Jeddah, where men and women mixed.

Alcohol was plentiful, and after dinner, the minister and his guests watched a table feed of the 1978 World Cup soccer final between Argentina and the Netherlands, just the sort of evening deplored by religious clerics. So no more fun. No more fun is going to be the rule in Saudi Arabia after this point, but there's also going to be no more fun for a minute here because we're going to have our second ad break. That's our fun. Yeah, that's good. You want to know what my evenings actually look like? homework questions. Someone needs a permission slip signed. The dog's begging for a walk, someone's yelling for a snack. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I'm supposed to figure out

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So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me. in the midst of conversion therapy, to shine a light on what the X-game movement does to people, and the pain it continues to cause. I had lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight. It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult. And as I look, too, at the harm I did from within it.

Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place. It's a way of life. Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey. We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years

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you get your podcast. And we're back. How are you feeling about Saudi Arabia, Dave? It's going good. Yeah. Always. Like I said, I'm an expert on this. So everything you're telling me are things I already are already new.

Yeah. I'm just, I'm humoring you. You know, it's like when you talk to like a kid about Star Wars, you know, and the kids discovering things. And you're like, uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm just imagining now in like the, in the international, like,

anti-terrorist commando handbook. They're like that one character in the mummy where they just have a bunch of different religious symbols on necklaces. They're like, okay, which country am I going into? All right, this is the religion I am for the time being. It's tough, man. When you inject money into any situation, everybody in that situation loses their goddamn minds. 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. They lose their minds. A lot of why Saudi Arabia is so fucked up in like the religious ways that it is and

has been from most of the modern era. It comes down to the fact that they were following a pretty natural path of people being like, I don't know, we're rich now. Do we need to abide by all of these crazy religious strictures? Like, we're okay being Muslim. We don't have to be such hardliners about all of the bat shit stuff. And then there's this hideous terrorist attack. And the government responds in, like, the worst way they possibly could.

They're like, terrorism wins. Yeah. So many people would be like, okay, but we're going to become assholes again. Don't worry. We did drop grenades in the mosque. Yeah. We understand that's a problem. But women will no longer get to be on television.

Are you cool with us now? Can we keep being rich? Yeah. And it turns out, yeah. It just, I don't know. You just, it's that battle between, like, I get the idea. of having a set of beliefs. Not necessarily these beliefs,

but beliefs that you're like, you stand by and you have certain rules in your life. When you try to apply that to a country, it always gets messy where it's like, no, I need everybody be doing this stuff. Meanwhile, the country is like, we just want to have like good relations with our neighbors and prosper and make money

or make a stupid amount of money in this case. And it's just like, it's just not going to work. These, all these factors are not going to work. Or maybe they do. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, I mean, it's going to work because of the amount of money behind them.

It's going to work longer than it probably should have, right? That's true. It's like, it's like going to like Prince's house where you're like, he has enough money that you can, he also can have like weird rules at his house, right? Everybody's just going to go like, all right, fine. Yeah, sure, Prince. I mean, I get to hang out at your house, so that seems cool. Yeah, exactly.

It's also a case where like, okay, so you had French commandos fake being Muslim and then drop grenades in the holiest mosque. And the consequence of this is women don't get to be on TV anymore. Okay. Weird. Weird. Hitting the main problem. Okay. So for the next 20 years in change after this point, fundamentalist Islam becomes more and more entrenched in Saudi Arabia, as is the power of the religious police to punish men and women who violated even the smallest rules.

Karen notes that before 1979 it had been acceptable for foreign women especially to go about their business without their heads covered. This becomes impossible by the start of the 1980s. As the clerics crack down, the House of Saud goes through a spate of particularly weak and incompetent kings. King Faisal is followed by King Khalid, who wanted the job so little that he hands power right away to his son the crown prince, who succeeds him in 1982. This guy, King Fad, was more interested in chilling on his yacht than governing, and he half-asses the job himself. until he has a stroke in 1995. It was into this Saudi Arabia,

saddled with a series of basket case kings and riven with financial corruption, straining under the weight of increasingly radical and restrictive religious laws, that the subject of our episodes for this week and next week, Muhammad bin Salman, is born on August 31, 1985. And we will talk about his life and how he comes to power in subsequent episodes.

But Dave, this has been part one. You're introduced. Sorry, I didn't realize I'm older than him. Yes, yes, you are. That is a bummer. He's a little older than me, but not much. Yeah, he could have us killed today, and he's younger. He's had a lot of people killed. He's had a lot of people killed, you know? I feel like I could take him in a straight fight, but yeah, he does have planes and stuff, and I don't have planes. Right, not yet. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah. It's like learning that Finn Wolfhard was born after 9-11 where it's just like, man, I haven't done shit with my life.

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

Yeah, he's too. They wouldn't want to be scared of his name with you. You were like, no, they wouldn't want to risk Finn Wolfhard. No. His name is Finn Wolfhard. They wouldn't take that danger. Yeah. Anyway.

Anyway. what were you saying something about a podcast where can people find you on the inner web dot com i can be reached at uh so just google um gamefully unemployed g a m e f ull l y unemployed uh like robert like you said it's a movie podcast it's just bitching about movies very low stakes uh but fun and then yeah we have like our patreon where we have a bunch of extra stuff. We've made like 2000 podcasts. It's too many, uh, but you can find that. I'm the head writer at Some More News. Again, Google Some More News, completely different vibe than the movie podcast thing. So if you like politics, uh, and like Doom or you like people complaining

about Marvel movies, uh, I got, I got you covered for those two things. So check that out. 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? Get on the road. Close your eyes, drift off, fall asleep. You know? Yeah. Let, you know, like let instinct guide you. Yeah. It'll be fine. Yeah. Bye. more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New

episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.