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

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Robert and Dave continue with Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's early adult years and rise to power. 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 - Netflix.com/behindthebastards For clips and our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@BehindTheBastards See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we continue to talk about Muhammad bin Salman and the Saudi royal family with our guest, David Bell. Welcome back to the show, Dave. It's been a little while between our first and last recordings. Yeah. Between the first recording in this one. Have you been? I got COVID.

Not currently, but I got it. Yeah, I also, Robert last night, I had a dream about you. You had a dream about me. Say more. Upsetting. Okay, so my dream was that we were taking a shower together in bathing suits. Hot. That makes it TV appropriate.

Yep. Then I had to poop in the dream and left the shower. Dave. What are we? Where are we building to here? This is the dream. And I went to the bathroom. Is it the dream?

Yes, because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop in real life. So I was like, oh, thank God. That wasn't like. It's just a dream. Yeah. I had to poop in the dream, so I left the shower and Alex Schmitty was in the bathroom. Our other old roommate. Making coffee in the bathroom.

And that was the dream. Classic bathroom coffee. I should have started with the fact that I have terrible dreams. And that was the dream. That doesn't sound like a good one. It wasn't bad. It was fine. I don't know that I'd call that fine.

Well, Dave, thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream. I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it among our listener base. People who are going to react normally to your shower story. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. 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.

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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. 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. On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing. Hey, if they don't kill a cop and bury them, what are you going to do to me? What really happened to the missing deputy? Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert.

Listen to Valley of Shadows on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show contains information subject to, but not limited to personal takes, rumors, not so accurate stats, and plenty more. What's up, man? This your boy, Nav Green, from the Broken Play Podcast. Look, it's the end of the season, the playoffs are here.

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It's time to rebuild. Listen to Broken Play with Nav Green from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or whatever you get your podcast. You know who else reacts normally to things? Who? Me? The Saudi Royal Family, you know?

Because they're all, they're basically, aside from the billions and billions of dollars in oil money, and the fact that they don't have to work, and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves to them, you know, they're just down-to-earth regular guys like Tim the Toolman Taylor from the show that maybe 20% of our audience remembers. Yeah, the guy, the, the criminal guy, Tim Allen. Yeah, Tim Allen, a simple every man with a, who runs a television show out of his house. Anyway. So one of the few, as we've stated, most of like the young princes are not super productive

individuals, right? They're mostly spending their time kissing ass to try and get like a better cut of the family fortune, doing as little as possible and grafting off of like the money that should be going to support the Saudi state. There's a few exceptions to this rule, right? Muhammad bin Salman, the subject of our episodes is one, his father, the soon-to-be King Salman is another, and another one of the exceptions to this rule was Muhammad bin Nayef. Born in Jeddah at the end of August, 1959, he had more than a quarter century on his younger cousin.

His father was Prince Nayef bin Abdullahiz, full son of the great king Abdulaziz and a full brother of two other kings, Fad and the new King Salman. He was thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump than anyone ever thought that Muhammad bin Salman was going to be, right? Like, he just kind of seems like a much better bet as which one of these guys is going to actually like make it to the high seat. His father, Naif bin Abdulaziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince. And he'd risen to power first when his older brother, the minister of the interior, was assassinated by that other prince who was angry about TV being legal. I know there's a lot of princes in this story.

And they're all killing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Nayef succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now working directly with the Wahhabists, who traditionally had allied with the House of Saud in order to push their hardline fundamentalist policies. Prince Nayef became what the Brookings Institute described as an arch reactionary, and he was the orchestrator behind many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism. That's the black prince, right? He violently suppressed the movement to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy, like in the UK, telling one interviewer, I don't want to be Queen Elizabeth, which, who does?

Who does? You know what? I might take it. She had like a nice house. Yeah, well, not now. She had a nice house. She had some corgis, you know. This actually came up on Margaret Kilroy's show before, and we decided I would make a great Queen Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismiss.

mantle of marquis. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That would be very effective. I would be a great queen of. I'd go mad with power. And I love corgis. Yeah.

So he earned the black prince earned his nickname because of how harsh his policies were to the non-citizen worker population in the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when his son, M.B.N. We've got NBS and NBN and they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a public person spurning his own country in favor of the West. so he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's not interested in attending a school in the Arab world. Instead, he goes to, like, the opposites part of the world he possibly can.

Portland, Oregon. I know. I was going to guess Berkeley. Portland shows up. You're going to guess what? I was going to guess Berkeley. But, yeah, I was close. No.

He goes to fucking M.B.N. goes to Portland, Oregon for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and Portland State University. Incredible. Yeah, really funny. He does not graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU. Neither is true. I can't even confirm that he got a degree.

Everyone says he's got a BA, right? The book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Stig Stensley claims that he studied for his master's degree in political science and graduated in 1981. Although, again, no one says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark in PSU, and he got a degree, but nobody says where the degree is from. And we've confirmed it wasn't either of those colleges. I don't know. Yeah, Lewis and Clark College, a guy that Mohammed bin Salman Spard with came here. Yeah. I don't know, maybe not the best ad. So, yeah, I don't know that he actually did graduate. Stig writes that he took, quote, courses on security issues with the FBI for. from 1985 to 1988, and trained with Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist units in London from 1992 to 1994. In 1994, he began working regularly with his father, Interior Minister Naif, and Riyadh. And I think this is a situation where he's probably not that great a student. I don't think you would have qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland Yard

based on his own merits, but because he's a prince and he's someone who is going to be a big part of the Saudi state, when he expresses, I'm interested in anti-terrorism work, right? I'm interested in, like, training with Western law enforcement organizations and counterterrorism. They're all like, well, this is our chance to have a man on the inside, right? This is our chance to have, like, a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like a spy, but a guy who's, who we know is like a friend to us, who we feel like we can trust, as opposed to this regime's kind of a black box to us otherwise, right? It helps with your credit.

It just put, it's just good. I get it where it's like, all right, you might not. You might not be per- it's like when the X-Files had Stephen King wrote an episode and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show, the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King. Let's throw him on there. And he didn't. You know, that episode wasn't best. It was really, it was also heavily rewritten. Yeah, it would have had to be. Yeah. It's about a haunted doll. Yeah, they should have let Mohammed bin Naif write an episode of the X-Files. He was, you know? He was training with the FBI in the 90s. He could have done it. He must have been watching the X-Files, right? Oh, yeah. Weren't we all? He must have an opinion on Fox Molder. Yeah. So it's unclear to me how much the elder and younger Nyev coordinated here, because remember his dad, the black prince, is this guy who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused on, we need to crack down on anything that seems like someone having fun in the kingdom, right?

Whereas his son is like, I'm friendly with the West. I went to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI. He's making, he's putting out into the world at least image of he's much more of a liberal guy. He's much less of a hardliner, right? I bet he knows where to get some great acid. He probably did at one point. Yeah. Like there's several places in that list where I feel like he knows how to get good asses. Yeah, the FBI Academy. I bet they had some great shit. Oh, yeah. So it's hard to say, to what extent is this, he and his dad are kind of working together

knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the West and can seem like he's modern and someone who can, you know, give him arm in arm with the clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity. But there do seem to have been some real clashes between them, right? One of them is over the fact that his dad, the black prince, doesn't take seriously the dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Like he keeps being told, hey, there's something brewing in your country. And he's like, nah, I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going to be like two words that show up next to each other in the public imagination.

Per that analysis by the Brookings Institute, Nayef was conspicuously slow to recognize that al-Qaeda posed a threat to the kingdom. He'd become friendly with bin Laden during the Russian Afghan war when bin Laden was allied with the Mujahideen and viewed him as being exclusively focused on defeating the Soviets. Nayef believed al-Qaeda's reputation as a terrorist organization was a product of American propaganda and was sure that al-Qaeda posed no real threat to the kingdom, a delusion he had in common with much of the royal family. Prince Naif was not popular with the CIA. He was seen as uncooperative and for good reason. In 1996, when Shiite terrorists bombed a U.S. Air Force base in Dharan and killed 19 Americans, the CIA asked Nyaf for information on the terrorists and their ties to Iran, despite the kingdom in Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals,

Nayef Stonewalled the U.S. Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd attack Iran, and he wanted to avoid war. Bruce Rydell, author of that bookings piece, was an CIA analyst at the time, and he claims the general opinion over here is that Nayef was simply an American, right? And that's like, I don't want to, like, give too much credit to the analytic skills of the pre-or post-9-11 CIA, right? For sure, for sure. So my assumption is that Bruce is, like, wrong about some part of the analysis there. I think maybe it's just that he's not as much anti-American as he is like anti-having a problem. And if al-Qaeda is a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a problem.

Because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are close to bin Laden. A lot of people in like the ruling class have been funneling money to him and organizations that are related to al-Qaeda. And if they're really dangerous, then there's a big problem. And there's just this, it may just be the deep human need to like not have a problem, right? That's part of what's going on with NIA here. No one likes to start shit. I get that. Yeah.

Maybe Obama, maybe he'll, you know. Call him Obama. Osama bin Laden. Maybe he'll settle down. Right. He'll calm down. Yeah. And I'm,

sorry, forgive me. I'm, I'm less educated on like, what, where, like, what was Osama bin Laden's position before 9-11? Like,

I, like a lot of people only heard of him until after. He bombed. I mean, he and al-Qaeda bombed the world train sitter in 93, I think it was, right? Okay. So he had a previous hit. Oh, yeah.

Now, it's very clear to anyone paying attention that bin Laden is going to continue to be a problem for like the kingdom and its relations with the rest of the world. But there's this big doubt with a lot of guys. It's like, are they really terrorists? Is this the, are the Americans making all this stuff up, right? And the Black Princess son, Muhammad bin Nayef, Mb.N., seems to have been one of the rare people high up in the royal family because of his training with these Western agencies who actually is like, no, Al-Qaeda's probably an issue. And they'll be an issue for us, too, right? His feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more in line with how the Americans are feeling, right? And so he spends a lot of the 90s, burnishing his credentials and relationships with the Americans who staffed security agencies being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family who sees things clearly that you can work with. There's a big moment of conflict between the elder Naif and the CIA in 1998. Vice President Al Gore goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia

alongside Bruce Raidel, who's now working for the NSC. They met both Naifs and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack the U.S. consulate while they were there. Up to that point, Al-Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right? And so now, while Al-Ghora's in country, they bust a plan to attack the consulate while the U.S. Vice President there, and that really rattles people. And suddenly, Muhammad bin Nayef is the only guy who's been saying, like, hey, we should be taking Al-Qaeda seriously. And suddenly he gets a lot of attention as like, oh, maybe he was right. Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time. And we should be listening to this guy when it comes to security advice, right? It's, yeah, going back to, like,

people don't like conflict, right? And if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem, that guy's a problem, we'll go as long as we can up to the point where it's like, oh, wait, they're going to hurt me. Oh, well, we got to do something about this. Oh, my, oh, my goodness. If Al Gore gets killed by Al Qaeda, while I'm in charge of security, that probably is a problem for me. That's bad. That looks bad. Like, I probably don't do well afterwards.

Yeah, no, I'm finding a new career after that. Yeah. So in 1999, MBN is appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security. By the fall of 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government to talk to about counterterrorism. And then comes 9-11, right? You know, you're well aware. Yeah, so basically, there were some big buildings in New York, and then there weren't as a result of these guys who learned. how to fly, but not all the way, right?

That's the brief description I would give them 9-11. 70% of how to fly, yeah. Yeah, 70%. Put that in the textbook. Yeah. That's basically what happened, right? There were some other things going on. Like, you're not wrong.

That's what's so funny. I hate to sound really old, but I'm realizing that there are young people now that do genuinely have to, like, learn about 9-11 in school now. Yeah, we forgot. Well, they did. Yeah. So the attacks caused a massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment, right? This is as big a problem as it could possibly be because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.

Yeah, that's a pickle. Kind of their deal, right? Bush was rattling his saber at Iraq, and they'd had fuck all to do with al-Qaeda. Like, right after the attacks, we start making, it starts becoming clear we're going to move on Iraq pretty soon. They had WMDs, Robert. WMDs. So obviously, if you're thinking about this from the respect of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up Iraq and they had nothing to do with this.

We had a lot to do with this. Not only were 15 of the 19 hijackers Saudi, but a lot of guys in the Saudi royal family were shuffling money to places that wound up getting to al-Qaeda, right? One way or the other. We could be in trouble. And they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a big problem. he's a big problem.

And then he hit somebody. Trade Center. Yeah. And then you hit like the guy next to him because you wanted to hit that guy instead. That's essentially it, right? It's like, we already had a problem. We didn't like Saddam for a while. And we're like, that's it, Saddam.

Last straw. You did it. Yeah. And so there's this worry that like, well, how do we know they're not going to fuck with us next? Right? Because we actually have it coming a lot more than Iraq does. And obviously, you know, it's not just that bin Laden, the guy who plans the attack or is seen as planning the attack as the man is a Saudi too, but the black prince and most of his peers had scoffed at the idea that al-Qaeda was dangerous. You know, it doesn't take a bright person to see that the royal family is in danger here.

M. B.N. is the new blood. He's not tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation. He's got good connections to the U.S. government, particularly in the CIA and the FBI. And he starts using them. And then in 2003, something happened that would electrify his career. On February 14th, on the holy day of Aid al-Ada, Osama bin Laden issued a communique through Al-Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the last caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies. This mirrored their behavior supporting the U.S. and its wars against Muslims. He predicted that the U.S. would use airbases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq. The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the kingdom,

or at least this was Bin Laden announcing that he was widening the scope of the existing war to include the kingdom, right? Al-Qaeda is now at war with the kingdom, at least with the kingdom's royal rulers. In May, al-Qaeda operatives launched an attack on a Riyadh compound where Western military advisors worked with Saudi officers. Eight Americans and two Australians died, among others. CIA director George Tenet flew to the Saudi capital and warned the crown prince, Al-Qaeda is going to target your family next.

Just a few months later, Muhammad bin Nayef has made the number two man in the entire ministry of the interior. It was a vote of confidence in his ability to orchestrate the kingdom's response to al-Qaeda and to effectively reform its security and intelligence agencies. Tenet would later write that the CIA considered Muhammad bin Nayef its number one man in Saudi Arabia. Rydell writes, MBN led the counter-offensive. The Interior Ministry issued lists of the most wanted al-Qaeda terrorists

and then proceeded to hunt them down ruthlessly, whenever any of the men on a list were eliminated in firefights or ambushes, the ministry would update the list with the names of the next most wanted al-Qaeda fighters. It was a tough and dangerous time. Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or at least sent their families away. M.B.N. was the face of the Saudi war on al-Qaeda, appearing on television and in the newspapers to explain the threat the kingdom was facing. So he becomes like the figure who is like leading the Saudi war effort against al-Qaeda.

He's like both in propaganda, his faces, everywhere, and the West sees him as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this response to al-Qaeda violence in the country. And within the royal family, he's seen as the guy who is protecting us from this, like, surge of violence, from this dangerous and unpredictable network, right? Like, he's really, if you're looking at who's going to follow as like, who's going to be of this generation, like the guy who's in line to be king. Mahama Mn Mnayev is looking like someone who might be crown prince and then king one day, right? Like, he's, he's really distinguished himself.

Far more than bin Salman has, he's really nothing at this point in time, right? Right. Yeah. No, he's going to fight Osama bin Laden. They're going to fist fight on a volcano. He's going to fist fight bin Laden and make himself the king. Yeah.

As we know, kings are supposed to, you're supposed to as a king defeat one dragon. And Osama, Osama bin Laden's kind of a dragon, right? Yeah. Yeah. You said he was the perceived designer of 9-11? Does that mean, like, was he like the John Favreau of it? Like, was it like, oh, there's other people above him? He's the Matt Groening of 9-11.

We're like, he's like the basic idea. But he's not, like, Conan O'Brien has a lot more to do with planning 9-11 than Matt graining, right? If we're Simpsonsing. Yeah. Yeah, like, there were, yes. Like, he's in charge, but there were a lot of talented people under. Yeah, there's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making, making the show.

show work underneath it. Yes. Got it. Who's the David X. Cohen of Al-Qaeda? Find out would we come back from, you know, this break. That was a really good one. 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. 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. A new year doesn't mean erasing who you were. It means honoring what you've survived and choosing how you want to grow.

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Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Delocha and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Hey, what's up y'all? This is Questlove recently. I had the opportunity to sit down with ASEAP Rocky ahead of his album release. Don't be dumb. He reflects on his journey from his Harlem Roots to global icon status, discovering the hip-hop origin of his name. The ledge was on the TV. Raq Kim had the bucket hat, King Gold join on. The pos is like, that's Raq Kim. That's who you named after.

I just was like, my swag. Rocky offers a window into not only a boundary-breaking artist, but as a man committed to fusing creative ideas, community, and remaining unapologetically himself. Have you ever gotten roasted for any of your outfits? For sure. Some people don't be getting to vision. Look, they can roast.

me, they could cook me, they could deep fried me, they can saute, whatever they want. There's nobody who can't be with my fashion sense and my taste is impeccable. I'm just like, I impress myself a lot. It's an amazing conversation. One, you definitely don't want to miss. So listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. We're back. David X. Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of 9-11.

Okay. That's right. Thank you. You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto figures within Al Qaeda. Very easy to do. You can graph all of the South Park guys onto a member of ISIS, you know? That's just the way things work. I'm glad to know, like, where they all stand.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say like South Park has more of an ISIS vibe, whereas the Simpsons is more like an Al-Qaeda kind of deal. So ISIS is like two guys. like two guys and then like a small handful but the two guys do all the voices and stuff. Sure.

Some kind of org chart family tree type situation to get clarification. Where does family guy fall in this matter, Robert? Family guy just is an act of terrorism. I was going to say it's one to one. Yeah, it's one to one. So we're back and we're talking about Mahama Binai F, leading the kingdom's response to a surge of terrorism by al-Qaeda inside the country. Now, a major characteristic of Nyef's response was a commitment to avoiding the kind of collateral

damage that would have made it look like the situation was totally out of control, right? You don't want to be blowing up too many things or killing too many civilians as you search out for these al-Qaeda operatives because it makes it seem to the people like maybe the royal family has no idea what's going on. Maybe you guys are completely out of your depth here, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, these days you can do all sorts of things to civilians, it seems, in the name of searching things. But yes. Yes. Generally, you don't want to do that. You used to be able to, we used to be a proper country, you know? Yeah. So he distinguished himself from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on outreach to the families of dead al-Qaeda

operatives. Parents were told their children had been victims and received a degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout from their children's actions, rather than being suspected themselves and told that, like, your child is, you know, you should be ashamed of your kid. They were told, like, no, your kid was a victim of terrorism, too, right? And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists. If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets, then more of them are going to be sympathetic to al-Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem.

So he's trying, yeah, he doesn't want to do what the U.S. does everywhere. I've used that excuse on my family before to get out of all sorts of things. No, you guys are victims in this too. Yeah. Yeah. His responses were generally seen as effective, reducing al-Qaeda's influence in the kingdom. Perhaps the best evidence of that was the fact that Bin Laden and company considered him a strategic target worth expending resources to take down. Here's how Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on a Muhammad bin Nayef's life. That focus on engagement almost killed him. In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with al-Qaeda in Yemen

announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to M. B.N. in person. The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him and sat next to him. The man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBM what were described at the time as light wounds. Now, first off, that's rough. That's bad. that's a bad assassination attempt. I was going to say, if you're right next to you, yeah, you're right next to him.

And you set off a butt bomb, that to me, and then it doesn't hurt the person next to him, what that sounds like without knowing more information is that your ass exploded. And everybody turned and went, oh my God, what happened? Are you okay? And you're on the ground like, I need help. My ass just exploded. Like, I might even try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb. I was just like, I don't know what happened.

An accident, an accident. No, I think he blows into pieces because as a spoiler, the public note is that MBN was barely wounded. He's, there's a lot of evidence that he's pretty badly hurt by this. That maybe he's actually never the same afterwards. Again, when a man explodes ass first, the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a man's ass. So among other things, you're going to get infected, right? Like his guts and stuff are hitting, are piercing your body. Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that.

A man's ass exploded next to me. That's all I'm talking about for the rest of my life. Yeah, a really unique form of PTSD. So the next year, MBN's force is exposed an al-Qaeda plot to smuggle bombs into the U.S. via shipping containers. The bombs are intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making MBN into a hero at home and within U.S. intelligence agencies. He continued to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years, where he developed a close working relationship with CIA director David Petraeus.

He also got on tight with John Finer, Chief of Staff for Secretary of State John Kerry. He would later tell a reporter that M.B.N.'s people saved my butt more than once, which, given what had just happened to M.B.N. John Kerry's worried someone's going to butt bomb him? No, no, he literally saved my ass. I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it. Yeah. I don't know if he meant that as a joke.

I don't know that John carries that funny a man. Yeah. And then a terrorist somewhere is like, oh, I never thought to put the bomb in their butt. In his butt. Yeah. Salman comes to power as King in 2015, as we talked about last episode. And he very quickly removes the guy who had been crowned prince that the old king had wanted to succeed after King Salmon. and he makes Muhammad bin Nayef, the crown prince.

And this is why, right? M. B.N. is the natural pick to be crown prince because he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort, right? He's the guy who protected the country, who saved it from al-Qaeda. Put his ass on the line. He put his ass on the line. He took someone else's ass in an explosion, right? And a lot of Americans cheer this development is the best thing to happen to U.S. power in the

Middle East for generations. The CIA could hardly have handpicked a better successor. Best of all, as they saw it, Nyef was a legitimate hero in Saudi Arabia. He wasn't someone whose reputation they had to prop up. We don't have to make this guy into a puppet. He's already a hero, right? Right. Yeah.

It's a great bet. So April of 2015, Nyef has made the crown prince. And up through 2016, it doesn't seem like Muhammad bin Salman, who, again, is the subject of these episodes. I know we've had to explain a lot of other guys. he doesn't like he's got any chance of taking the crown or power for himself. He's got real Jeb energy. He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right? Yeah, Jeb!

Yeah, it's a real please clap, Sitch. Got him managing the family, like, office and everything like that. And he's taking on a lot of power for himself, but he doesn't seem very special. And MBN just seems unassailable, right? Like, how could you possibly compete with this guy? you're 20 years younger, you've never survived an assassination attempt. Mbien is unlike his third by this point. You've never fought prosecuted a war successful. He's got all these friends in the West. But there are already early warning signs for those who truly understood inter-family power politics within the kingdom. When he appointed Mbin crown prince, King Salman also collapsed in Mbian's court, because every one of these princes at this level has their own royal office. Salman collapses his court into the main royal court. And I think this is streamlined. He frames it says we need to be more efficient. So we need to like collapse all these courts together so that they work more effectively.

But the Crown Prince's royal court had always been seen as an important perk in a good way for an ascendant prince to build a base of power for his own future reign. You're picking out people that you want to be loyal to you, you giving them early jobs, ways that they can make a fortune for themselves, right, if you don't have control over your own royal court as crown prince, you're losing out on a way to like build power for yourself. And the fact that Muhammadman Salman is in charge of the royal court allows his 26-year younger son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals with court positions. So you can see already there's some signs that maybe King Salman doesn't intend for Mbion to ever actually take the throne, right? That maybe he's,

setting his son up and kind of doing a fuck job on Muhammad Mnayev. Behind the scenes, people close to the royal family begin to whisper that even as he took on the crown, King Salman was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. In this version of events, just as the king makes Mbian his official successor, he's starting to cede a lot of his power and decision-making to his younger son, Muhammad bin Salman, who he appoints as defense minister upon taking office, right? That maybe MBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start, because King Solomon's never all that competent to run anything. So maybe from the jump,

from the start of his dad's time is king, MBS is trying to figure out how can I get Muhammad bin Nayef out from being the crown prince, right? And so he's orchestrating all of this. And he makes sure he gets the job as the Minister of Defense, because he knows that I want to kick this guy out of power. This guy has already developed a reputation as a war leader for our people. So I need to develop a reputation as a war leader for our people. And he wastes no time. Yep, but he's got to do a lot worse bombs than that, Dave. Right. In March of 2015, Muhammad bin Salman orders Saudi forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war. If you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a series of internecine conflicts since

1962. There have been numerous different sides and coalitions all backed by foreign powers over the course of these conflicts. And throughout the last half century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders and princes who had advocated that the kingdom get more directly involved in the fighting. The most recent phase of fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things, by the Arab Spring. In 2011, mass protests forced the current president, a guy named Sala, to resign. His vice president took over for what was meant to be two years, during which time the government would be reorganized into a new federal system and elections would be held. Well, Attempts at working out a political arrangement failed.

This guy stays in power, and in a desperate attempt to deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies. This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with the no longer seen as legitimate regime. A rebel group called the Houthis was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation. The Houthis are a religious minority. They're from the Zadhi sect of Shia Islam, which is like 5% of the population. Shmul and Zohar Letterman described their most. motivations and an article for the Journal of Genocide Research. The Houthis protested against their political and economic marginalization, as well as the

encroachment of Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine on the Sada province in northern Yemen where they were based. So MBS's decision to intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct shock to a lot of his peers and family members. His cousin, the still crown prince NBN, wasn't informed ahead of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen, and the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also, you isn't told ahead of time, right? None of the people who should know, know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this civil war. And Saudi operations are going to rely heavily on the

guy. Right. It's like he doesn't tell anybody before he does this. Because he wants it to be his baby. He thinks it's going to be a big success that like immediately we're going to, we're going to kick the huthies out, we're going to stabilize the situation in Yemen. And I want all the credit, right? Right. I don't want any of these guys to get credit. Obviously, it's going to work quickly. Because it always works quickly. It's always fine. Yeah, there's a man, it's a sickness, like, where you can, it resonates all the way, obviously, today where world leaders are like, we have created a society where to be, like, respected, you have to go into somebody's country

and start screwing around and then get all the credit. And it never seems to work out, like, that way. But I guess it does, because we keep doing it. We're going to invade Greenland or whatever, where it's just like, that's what world leaders do. They start shit in other countries, so I have to do it too if I want to seem like a world leader. Yeah, it's stupid. It'll make me seem powerful. It'll make me, I need to prove that I'm better than the last guy who couldn't do it successfully, right?

Should it just paid people to put bombs in their butts? I know. And have like 10 bus bombs. We're all seeing the wisdom of Al-Qaeda here, right? You know, simple goals in life. if all you want is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal. No one can take that from Al-Qaeda.

I have a question, Robert. If you had a butt bomb in you, what would you say before you exploded it next to the person? Because I've been thinking about this. That's a good question, Dave. I don't have a good retort in my head right now. I do. What's yours? Sophie.

Oh, crap. Oh, that's good. That's good. I would casually turn to them and go, you ever eat ass before? And then detonated. That's a really good one, Dave. That's a good one, Dave. That's a good one, Dave.

So the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in the civil war that does not involve it is that the ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help, right? Which he kind, he had, but the most obvious behind the scenes justification was that the Houthis had Iranian backing, right? and MBS, along with most of his inner circle, believe the Houthis were nothing but a proxy for Iran, which is a mistake that a lot of world leaders make, which is like, these people are getting arms or maybe training from this other country that's my enemy. They must not be a real group.

This must all be a fiction created by this other evil country, as opposed to like, well, the Houthis get stuff from Iran, but they have their own base of power. They're their own movement. They're doing a lot right, which is why they've gotten where they are, and they're going to be a lot harder to destroy. than you think as a result of all of that, right? Now, that said, none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send forces into Yemen as almost

his very first action upon getting into a position of power. The Leaderman Brothers write that, quote, Muhammad bin Salman seems to have seen what he believed would be a short and easily won battle against the Houthis as an easy way to bolster his images as a military and political leader. And I've come across several other analysts who say the same thing. Nobody ever gives more detail than that, and we don't have any quotes from behind the scenes. or whatever. He does not have a very porous office. There's not a detailed, here's what was happening. People haven't written a dozen books about being inside his office at this time, right? Because that's

just not how Saudi Arabia works. You'll get bone sought if you do that sort of thing. You will. So I'm left to assume that even these much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of detail from inside MBS's office, so to speak. And this is one of the most frustrating parts of the story to me because there's not a really a sad, I don't have a good answer as to, why did you think this would work, man? He'd grown up and he, there were a good reason to think a guy like MBS who seems to be relatively smart should have known this was a bad idea. He grew up watching the U.S. fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? Like, you saw this fail. We, we, in the previous podcast, we talked about, like, you know, teachers weren't allowed to, like, give him bad grades.

He's not, no one can say no to him. It's, it's, this is, it's a, it's a sickness. It's like, if you spend your life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you, by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah, it'll all work out, won't it, you know? What else would, like every, every thing has told me that. So, yeah. Yeah. Huber.

Yeah, so he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this never hasn't worked in recent memory. He doesn't pay attention to the fact that Gibbons dysfunction, was spurred on by the Iraq war. The Houthis attacked former President Saleh for having supported the U.S. during the early years of the global war on terror. Somehow MBS seems to have convinced himself that using a mix of air power and mostly foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory against a group he thought was nothing more than an Iranian cutout.

This would be proven disastrously wrong. And without any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that Muhammad and Salman made a really bad decision because he was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was making a mistake. Most sources do seem to agree that he was the deciding and leading voice in Saudi Arabia going to war. Yemeni human rights activists, Barra Shaban, expressed to the Middle East eye his opinion that Saudi Arabia would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war no matter who was

in power. But MBS made it certain that that involvement would be direct military, right? They would have done something. They would have tried to send some money. They would have tried to, you know, send some form of aid. they would have tried to bribe an official or whatever, but because it was MBS, it was made a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers and planes

and try to intervene directly and militarily. If it weren't for bin Salman, Saudi Arabia might have influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups. Instead, it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of vicious air strikes. For the first few months, the Saudi coalition carried out strikes on mostly military targets.

They learned a version of the lesson the U.S. is currently failing to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden, which is that you can't destroy a group like the Houthis just by carrying out air strikes. You can't bomb them away. It's really hard to bomb people away when they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff. There's caves. There's bunkers. There's just hiding under the fucking sand, you know? Like, it's hard to kill people that way as much as you need to. Yeah. It feels like it's every people is unique where if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they know it better than anybody.

On top of it's that realization that it's like, it seems like world leaders have just as much like knowledge as I do about how to do a war where I'm like, yeah, I like the movie Top Gun. Let's just do that. Let's just do like pew, pew. As opposed to like the boring thing, you know, don't do the boring thing. Don't like fund groups that that you want to, you know, prevail. No, no, you just, we got all these cool little machines and stuff.

Let's send them in. Like, it's everybody wants to do Pew Pew. stuff. Yeah. Everybody wants to do PewPew stuff. Nobody actually knows how to do PewPew stuff. Yeah. It's, I mean, the best way to win a war is to avoid getting involved entirely. And the next best way to win a war is to sit on your ass while your opponent bombs the country into ruins and then come up afterwards and be like, still alive, motherfucker. Those are, broadly speaking, the two best strategies. Oh yeah, don't get into war. It's great. Like, I've gone over 40 years now without getting into a war. Yeah, not you invaded any country. And there's been temptations, you know.

Oh, God, yeah, I've had every reason to. But like, nope. I did. I invaded Belgium once kind of accidentally, but, but I wound up on a train to Germany the next night, so it was okay. Speaking of invasions, why don't you let these ads invade your mental state? 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.

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I'm just like, I impress myself a lot. It's an amazing conversation. One, you definitely don't want to miss. So listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So, Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific airstrikes by August of 2015. It has become clear that things are not trending towards a quick and easy win for Muhammad bin Salman and his coalition. In fact, several of his wannabe coalition partners had backed out at the last minute.

these were guys he had relied on to provide infantry because the Saudi Arabian army not great and it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young men into a meat grinder. He was really hoping some other young men would do that job. And he winds up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do a lot of the grunt work for him, which is not a great call for either, a white variety of reasons. As the summer reaches its apex, the leaderman's right, quote, a shift could be discerned from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals, and similar crucial civilian institutions.

Right. So as soon as it becomes like, oh, they're not going to just disappear because we've started bombing them. And we don't actually know where to keep bombing. Like, I struck what we're supposed to be all the military targets and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military. I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food. I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools, you know?

Like, that's where we go from there. It's like, well, I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now. Right. Yeah, we did a bad job. Which doesn't make the Houthis less popular, right? The Houthis are more popular now that you're killing society. Yeah, let's make them victims now. Let's just make them like, yeah.

Heroes, essentially. As opposed to what he should have done is just set up an entire fake city like 50 miles down the road from the Capitol and be like, hey, free Gatorade, you know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city. Why don't you guys just come to, we're not fighting. We got no desire to fight, you know, but you know what we have? Hamburgers. So like a blazing saddle situation?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that. You know? I feel like that would work in a lot of wars, as opposed to doing the whole invasion thing. I think we should at least try to do things like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people. run into the rocks, you know? Yeah, yeah. What if we had just set up a second Iraq and told everybody, look, you can stay living under

the old Iraq, but the new Iraq free cable. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know? I do it. It's right next door. Come on over. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Suddenly Saddam doesn't even have a country anymore. What's he going to do, you know? Right. Right romance novels. Exactly. He'd actually have been very happy.

It'd have been a much happier man. He was tired of big. the leader of Iraq at that point. So right as this shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying to strike at military targets or just trying to kill civil society in Yemen, Muhammad bin Salman decides, well, that's a good day's work. I think I've earned a vacation. Boy, a lot of work fucking up a war.

I'm going to go party. You guys keep blowing up some hospitals or something while I'm gone, okay? So he gathers a tight assortment of all of his best friends. leave the capital of Riyadh to party in the Maldives. His people rent out the entire Vela Resort, which had 50 villas and a private coral reef of its own. The hotel's regular employees were paid $5,000 each for one month of work on the condition that they not bring their smartphones or talk to anyone else about what they saw while they were there. Even with this agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants to manage the hotel instead, so none of these

guys, most of these guys don't even get to work while the prince is there. Because as a spoiler, they're bringing a shitload of drugs and prostitutes. Right? To party in the mall. They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed to do under Wahhabist Islam. It's wild how rich people are different species and yet the same species too. Yeah. You can do all that at a motel six. You can. You can. Yeah. So he invites this insane guest list about a dozen of his personal friends. Do we have names? These are like his friends. These are people. Now, we do have some names.

He invites 150 Brazilian and Russian supermodels. Each is scanned for STDs and then taken to private lodgings on the island. That sounds really scary. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Per the Africa report, to keep these demanding guests entertained, there were concerts

featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star, Si, and Dutch DJ Afro Jack. Mr. Worldwide, what are you doing there, Pitbull? Pit bulls in the house. He's getting paid. He's getting paid money. He's getting paid. He's getting paid, buddy. I know to be not a good person.

Don't know anything about DJ Afro Jack. I am not. But he's a DJ. He's Dutch too. Stereotyping, so sorry, DJs of the world. But Mr. Worldwide. Mr. Worldwide. Buddy.

That's right, baby. Yeah. Mr. Worldwide, 150, quote unquote supermodels and Muhammad bin Salman and his best friends all partying on a night Did they check the talent for STDs or was that just was that just the supermodels?

They checked Pitbull for SDDs and the test came back, yes. I'd like to think Korean pop star Cy got a full inspection. It turns out Sai was just full, every cell of his body was chlamydia. He's not even a person. He's a sentient colony of chlamydia. Which, you know, makes sense based on this music.

So while thousands die horrific deaths from U.S. bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, MBS and his inner circle partied. My favorite detail from this blowout was that one night MBS got up on stage during DJ Afrojack's set and took over his turntables. Jesus Christ. There's no way he was good. He can't have been good. No, but like, you don't do that. Not chill, bad vibes. What happened?

The DJ gets pissed off. I'm going to guess everyone at the party's pissed off and no one's allowed to say anything. I'm going to guess MBS is also coked to the gills during this, right? These guys are flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder and probably whatever I'm in gay. Yeah. It makes anybody say, I could DJ. Like that's what cocaine. That's what cocaine's for.

Yeah. Obviously, no amount of threatening hotel staff is going to keep a party like this quiet. And doing this is not a good look for a man who had just started a bloody war that in about a year or so, people are going to be talking about what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen as a genocide, right? So after less than a week, if I think what was meant to be like a month of partying, MBS was forced to pull up stakes and take his friends back home. Sorry, guys, we got to go. I did a genocide.

Sorry. I got a guy on this genocide. I know. You guys, you guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying anything anymore. Like, I'm so sorry. Yeah. Sorry, Pitbull. I'm so sorry, Mr. Gangham style. I'm so sorry, Mr. Worldwide. We can rage later. I'm too busy committing mass murder genocide. If they drop Pitbull on Yemen.

Oh, my God. I feel like, Cy, people, they probably. They probably have contracts around that where they're like, okay, if they've done a genocide, you never hear about, like, I wish just once I want to hear about like James Taylor being at one of these. It's never James Taylor. Yeah, yeah, James Taylor or fucking, um, uh, uh, uh, Anya, sure, India playing for the Saudi royal family. Why not? Civilian casualties mount as the war drags on. The coalition was successful in pushing the Houthis back from their furthest game. in southern Yemen, but no matter how much they bombed, they couldn't make any headway against the capital or any of the other major cities the Houthis controlled. The Saudi war effort was utterly

reliant upon the U.S. The bombs they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as were the planes flown by Saudi pilots. American political support was also crucial to the Saudi war effort. MBS had justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Houthi resistance would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months. As it became increasingly clear this was a fantasy, resistance began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power. Muhammad bin Nayef sent his top aide and chief of staff Sad al-Jabri to D.C. to inform his American friends that he knew the king's son was an idiot and that the war in Yemen was a mistake. The feeling one gets is that he was fishing for approval from someone in the State Department if he had an outright power struggle with MBS, right? Hey,

I know this is dumb, this war is dumb. You guys hate this too, right? If There's a power struggle. Are you going to be on my side or are you going to back Muhammad bin Salman, right? And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass watching the war turn against him. He gets hard to work finding foreign allies, too. Instead of heading straight to the White House, though, he looks closer to home at the UAE. His most important early ally was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayad al-Nayon, generally agreed to be the guy calling most of the shots in the Emirates. We'll just call him MBZ because everyone else does too. And MbZ does not. And MbZ does not. And Mbz does not. not like MBN, right? A common story you'll come across is that during one meeting, MbZ, told MbN that his father, the dark prince, was so clumsy he proved Darwin was right, which is the kind of blasphemy you can only get away with if you're a shake. We're not even supposed to like Darwin all that much.

Right. What are you doing, man? But MBZ is in charge of his own country, basically. He doesn't have to abide by the rules. And so he starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN, and they both want to take this fucker down. Their courts organize a camping trip in the desert where they become fast friends, and they start to strategize a way to take out Muhammad bin Salman's older cousin.

MBZ's first act in this new alliance was to start reaching out to his American friends and talking up Muhammad bin Salman. This is enough of a success that people in the Obama White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer to get close to the king's son in case he winds up accruing more power. Like so many important things during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because no one was interested or had time to do the job. Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines. John Kerry was suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy. Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, was MBS's natural counterpart, but wasn't interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed,

but deemed too old. So instead they picked no one to do this important job, and so there's no one in the U.S. Sorry, they were like, let's have John Kerry. Let's have John Kerry be this kid's friend. I would love to watch John Kerry party with this guy. Yeah. Pit bull there. John Kerry. Because MBS loves video games.

John Kerry comes in with like a copy of Halo and a six pack. He's like, hey, bro. Yeah. You win a game? They settled on no one. And they're like, that's better than John Kerry or Joe Biden. They're like John Kerry or that old guy. You know.

Yeah. You can't trust him for a job as important as being this kid's friend. Yeah. And then four seconds later, they're like, he should be president. He could do that job. I'll say this. I saw John Kerry once at a parade. And St. Patrick's Day parade.

And he was walking in the parade. And it wasn't like a float or anything. It was just him walking surrounded by like dudes protecting him. And I'll say this. He was visibly drunk. So I think he would have partied. All right. John Kerry, the new Mr. Worldwide?

That's the coolest story about John Kerry I've ever heard. Sorry, John Kerry. I didn't know your game. He parties. Unfamiliar. That's good to know. Wow. We could get him on an island with Pitbull and 150 supermodels.

See what he gets up to. Yeah. Gonna need your SDD check though, John Kerry. Yeah, no, you don't want to do that. You don't want to know where he's been. So my favorite aspect of this, just in terms of the overall competency of the Obama administration and foreign policy, was they start to get hints that, oh, this kid's going to be important. We probably want him on our side. We should have someone like be his friend.

And then they have decided, nah, that's too hard. We'll have no one be his friend. You know what administration does find someone to be Muhammad bin Salman's friend, is the Trump administration? They pick Jared Kushner, and Kushner gets very close to MBS because they pay attention to stuff like this. It's just one of these like, yeah, there are actual areas in which the Trump administration was more competent than the Obama administration. One of them was knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia. It's still like, all right, I get it. Similar ages.

But you can't party with Kushner. That's like partying with a haunted clock. It's just like there's nothing. I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with MBS. Yeah. Jared Kushner looks like the skeleton of a fish. Yeah, he does. And they're like, that guy.

That's the guy. That's our prime. I have the thought like once a month where I think back to the time like early 2016 where Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's going to create peace in the Middle East. That's what he's working on. You're like, fishedilting guy? This guy. You went to Jared.

Oh, man. Me. So, and this is where kind of the fact that Muhammad bin Nayef immediately goes to his friends in America and in the Obama administration is like, look, if I have a fight with this guy, do you have my back? And they're kind of going to be like, we're not going to get involved in any fights, right? Whereas Mohammed bin Salman's strategy is I'm going to start making allies close to home with people that, with like, that who will actually back me? right, who have power, who are near us, and who will support me because they see a benefit in it. I know the U.S. isn't going to take a side in this.

I know when we have a power struggle, they don't care. So I'm not going to waste my time trying to get them on my side. I'm going to get allies who will actually support me. And so while MBN is trusting that, like, well, I've spent my whole life building all these connections with the security apparatus in the United States, surely they'll back me if push comes to shove because they want me in power, he learns the lesson like, you actually can't trust the U.S. for anything, bro.

We're terrible friends. We don't have your back. We don't have our own back. Like, we're not going to do shit for you, homie. And as soon as this message comes out, because Kerry sends a message to both Muhammad bin Salman and Mohammed bin Nayef that, like, we're not going to intervene in any power struggles

between Saudi princes. Muhammad bin Salman takes this as a go-ahead, or at least confirmation that no one's going to stop him from taking down his older cousin. And he uses the fact that Nayef had sent his aid Al-Jabri to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get Al-Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Salman's son, which leaves Nyef isolated. He's now kicked out one of Mohamed Nyev's chief supporters, right? And so now he's down a man. The Africa report summarizes, in September, Nyef and Al-Jabri learned on live TV of King Salman's plans to fire the latter,

thereby depriving the Interior Minister of his closest aid. A few weeks later, Nyev was getting ready to welcome the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westfall, when the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team in Jeddah. The king's son told Westfall that he needed to see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of time to meet with the crown prince afterwards. But that is not the way things went. MBS dragged out the Teta Tete for so long that the two men were unable to meet in the end. Right?

He's separating him now from his American friends. He's just kind of isolating him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter around Muhammad bin Nayef. Now, some analysts suspect that the wounds Mbien suffered in that 2009 assassination attempt were more significant than previously admitted. And so he's, that's why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to what his younger cousin's doing. That he's, he's got brain damage, basically, and he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of having this injury, and he's just not as functional as he used to be, right? So in addition to the fact that he's being outmaneuvered in part because he's just taken too much.

damage getting to this point in his career previously to hold up against someone like Muhammad bin Salman who's got his wits about him. Right. People are like your power's in jeopardy and he's like, his ass. His ass exploded. Right next to me. Can I have more Vicodin? Yeah.

So once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly clear that the crown prince does not have the energy or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival. The two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked circles around his older cousin. At one 2016 gathering, he surprised a group of American officials by announcing Israel is not our enemy. In the summer of 2016, MBS was in a better position than he had been the year before. Not in terms of overseas ventures. The war in Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe. After a year of failed strikes on military and then civilian infrastructure, the Houthis showed no signs of breaking

and still held to the capital city and the key port city. Per that article in the Journal of Genocide Studies, quote, When the Houthis still refused to surrender, the next stage, beginning in the autumn of 2016, was a full-fledged economic war in sealing off of the country. Sana Airport was closed off to all commercial flights and to persons requiring medical treatment abroad. Occasional blockades of Al-Hudaya Port were imposed, and the central bank of Yemen was moved to Aden, which made money transfers to Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government workers to be halted.

As Yemen imports over 70% of its food needs, these dips were devastating. MBS had now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the 21st century. As the siege locked into place, he opted for another vacation, this one on the French Riviera. During a stay at one port, oh yeah, yeah, no, he's, look, famine's starting out, the war is continuing to go terribly, I'm jitting off to France. He knows how to party. He knows how to party.

He's doing a tour of the ports, and while he's in one port, he happens across 135 meter-long yacht, the serene, owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Schaeffler. At the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for $5 million a week. He had fallen in love with the boat and was planning to buy it, but Muhammad bin Salman is not going to let him do that. Next, per the yachting world website, luxury launches.com, quote, MBS caught sight of the yacht. It wasn't docked for sale, but that didn't matter. The Saudi Crown Prince was instantly captivated, as Kevin Kainig tells us,

the Saudi prince didn't bother with negotiations or back and forth discussions. Instead, he simply sent an aide to speak with Sheffler and offered an estimated $550 million on the spot. The payment was made in a single wire transfer, and depending on the source, the deal was closed within 24 to 48 hours. Sheffler was told to pack up and leave immediately. Now, I do love that, like, yeah, he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yet. Yeah, and Bill Gates is, and they're like, God damn it.

I gotta find another yacht. Rich people are out of their minds. It's like the only lifestyle where you could be at a party. And it's like, yeah, what does that guy do? He's an actor. What's that guy do? Of genocides mostly. Genocides, he does genocides.

I don't know what number freaked me out more. 5 million a week or 550 million in one water transfer. Yeah, yeah. They're both insane. The guy making that transfer has to be sweating bullets, getting every number right. Like, Jesus. Now, it's unclear to me which of the yachts features MBS fell most in love with. It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine, something called a snow room, which is, I think, just a room where it snows.

So you can have snow? That's great. Or a cocaine lounge. It's in New England, man. It's fine. You can get all the snow rooms you want. A piano lounge, a movie theater, and multiple spas. And I don't know if he even cared about any of that.

Is the primary draw any of that, or is it just that Bill Gates wants it? And so, like, oh, this must be the best yacht for a rich asshole to own. I have to have it, right? It's that. It's that. As MBS enjoyed that new yacht smell, starvation was running rampant in Yemen. By December of 2016, charity organization saved the children estimated that a thousand children were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen. Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as 2016 ended,

but Muhammad bin Salman showed no signs of change in course. And that's part three. Sheesh. Mm-hmm. What did we learn? What are you feeling, Dave? Yeah, what did we learn? I mean, I learned a little thing about Pitbull.

Yeah, we all learned something about Mr. Worldwide. That name is literal and includes at least the Maldives. That doesn't surprise me, I guess. But I mostly learned that if you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt. I mean, that's interesting. It's an interesting thing to do. It's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt. I just thought of when tape was going pew-pew, that a good combination of the pew-pew joke and the ass-exploded joke would be to go, hey, pew-poo.

And the guy goes, pew-poo. And he goes, no, poo-poo. Sure. But I'm a child, but clearly I'm a child. I can't. I'm there too. I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with a lot of genocide and all I'm retaining is butt bomb from this. So, you know.

Yeah. That's more about me. Wow. Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug at the end here? Oh, right. Oh, geez. Yeah, I do podcasts. Cool.

There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-O-I. unemployed where I talk about movies, not genocide as much. I do also, I'm the headwriter for Some More News, which is about news. So just like Google Some More News or just Google News. You'll find me. I'll be there. And that's it. All right, everybody.

Buy James Stout's book. Buy James Stout's book. Yeah. And go to hell. I love you. Bye. Behind the Baster. is a production of CoolZone Media.

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