Front Burner - Flying cars, an artificial moon and Saudi Arabia's $500 billion vision for the future

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Saudi Arabia's "Neom" is a planned futuristic city-state in the desert. The project is said to include flying cars, gene editing, an island of robot dinosaurs, an artificial moon — and the most comprehensive surveillance state on earth. The Wall Street Journal has viewed planning documents that provide unprecedented access into the Gulf nation's plan to turn a formerly barren strip of desert into the most lucrative plot of land on earth. Today we'll talk to the Wall Street Journal's Justin Scheck, who broke the story about the Saudi Crown Prince's vision for the future, and what it tells us about the kingdom's place on the world stage.

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With secret labs and expert guests, co-hosts Oz Wallachian and Cara Price, talk about how new technology is changing everything, from falling in love to diagnosing cancer. Listen to Sleepwalkers on your favorite podcast app or wherever you get FrontBurner. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So earlier this week, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, and literally every paragraph blew my mind. It's about a $500 billion development project in Saudi Arabia, and it makes Toronto's sidewalk labs look like a grade school science fair project. This thing the Saudis want to build, it's called Neon.

It's a city built from scratch in the desert. want to build, it's called Neon. It's a city built from scratch in the desert. Their plans include flying cars, cloud seeding, genetic editing, robotic dinosaurs, glow-in-the-dark sand beaches, and an artificial moon, because I guess we need two moons now. And while a lot of these technologies haven't even been invented, the first phase is already under construction. The project is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS. Also, they're planning to watch everything you do in this surveillance state. Today, I'm talking to Justin Scheck of The Wall Street Journal. He's one of the reporters who got his hands on all sorts of NEON planning documents. This is Frontburner.

Justin, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. I'm hoping that we can start today with what is NEOM? So NEOM right now doesn't really exist yet. It's been referred to as a city or the land of the future by Saudi Arabia. We refer to it as a city-state, just to kind of put it into a context that people understand. But it's a project spearheaded by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to spend something like $500 billion building a new city-state from scratch that will be, they call it the land of the future. The idea is it would have, it would be a center for futuristic forward-looking technologies. It would be a place

that will attract the type of innovation that we have in Silicon Valley and entertainment production like we have in Hollywood. You can look at these ancient hills and see nothing. Or you can see nothing to hold you back. No set ways of thinking, no restrictions, no divisions, no excuses. Just endless potential. This is the blank page you need to write humanity's next chapter, Neom. And there will be a resort and it will all be the best in the world at all these things. And it will have flying automated cars to take people around and a project to make people smarter and stronger through genetic mutation.

And all of this will involve, you know, world class companies and people from all over the globe flocking to Saudi Arabia for this. Okay. So it's sort of like the Jetsons and kind of like limitless. I don't even know how to describe this. I know that they want to do robot dinosaurs. So it's also like Jurassic Park. Well, you know, to be fair, the full answer is that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who has been tasked by his father, the king, with remaking the country's economy and becoming less reliant on oil, has, you know, he realizes probably rightfully that, you know, oil has a limited future and that if Saudi Arabia is going to continue to grow as an economy and as a nation for, you know, the next century, they need to figure out some way of diversifying and having a, you know,

self-starting economy where there is a middle class and you have entrepreneurship and the kind of things that he sees in places like the U.S. and Canada. So then why create this city-state and not just reform Saudi Arabia that will have its own separate governance and its own rules starting from scratch. And all of it will basically report to him. The judiciary would report to the king, but he is, you know, he has a crown prince, he's doing a lot of what the king would normally do. So it's a place where he has 100% control and he can realize his vision without having to negotiate a truce with the clerical establishment, you know, the religious establishment, or with established government interests or the judiciary establishment.

He can start from scratch. So, and to be fair to him, he's trying to achieve this nation-building goal of getting away from oil that everyone agrees and everyone has long agreed Saudi Arabia needs to do, and he's taking the initiative to do it. Gulf nations need to branch out and kick their oil dependency. Diversify, says the International Monetary Fund. That warning comes as Saudi Arabia continues to work out how to sell around 5% of its state-run oil producer Aramco.

The question with so many things is in the execution and whether the way to achieve that goal is to have a place that will try to attract tourists through, as you said, you know, robot dinosaurs and robot kite surfing and robot martial arts and robot maids. I do want to unpack a little bit more of this vision. There was an idea for glow-in-the-dark sand and a second moon and cloud seeding, which would essentially make it rain on demand. Yeah. So to pull back a little bit, the story that we wrote about it was based on our access to a large volume of internal planning documents. So when they announced NEOM, what they said publicly has been in very broad, overarching terms. What we have been writing about

are the details of how they want to do it. And so, you know, the vision is to have this city that will attract people from all over the world. And, you know, the first phase is to build this resort area. And reported is the crown prince has said he wants the sand and the beach to glow. And I think the idea is like there's no glowing beach anywhere else anyone knows of. It'll be like people will come for unique things like that. They also, you know, in the planning documents talk about having some artificial moon that will, you know, be controlled by people there to have the moon could rise and fall when you want to have images projected on it. So there are these kind of over the top things like that. I think key visions will, you know, attract people

there just for the spectacle. Okay. And then I have to say, in the middle of all of this is this idea, which feels scary to me, that there will be scientists working on literal gene editing to try and make people physically stronger. Yes, that was a piece of it. And I think the idea is that the vision for this place is to have it be the vanguard of all types of innovation. And that includes technology, as we think of it with software, also medical innovation and the convergence there. And so what they discuss in the planning documents is having a project that's a joint venture with SoftBank, which is this large Japanese venture investing firm, Bank, which is this large Japanese venture investing firm, and having a project to create new genetic mutations to heighten human strength and intelligence.

And they are talking about spending $100 million a year on that. You mentioned these consultants. Who is involved in creating this vision? That's a big part of our story. The short answer is there were three consulting firms who prepared these documents and have been at the center of planning this project. One of them is Boston Consulting Group. The other is McKinsey & Company. And the third one is a consultancy called Oliver Wyman. And McKinsey has been in Saudi Arabia for around 40 years. And Boston Consulting has a deep relationship with the government. And this relationship with the consultants is really the essence of Neom,

but also at the center of one of the challenges that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, has, which is that Saudi Arabia is a very young country. And for a long time, it was a very, very poor region. And then relatively recently, it became a very, very rich region. There was very little time to build the institutions, physical institutions, government institutions, universities that countries that most developed economies have. Most economies the size of Saudi Arabia have had hundreds of years to kind of develop these things. Saudi Arabia went from having no money to having a lot of money. And because of that, there historically hasn't been

a large class of educated and accomplished people to draw on to do nation building projects. Okay. The people weren't there. The education wasn't there. And so Saudi Arabia for decades has relied on, you know, American oil engineers to start its oil company and on consultants like McKinsey to make government more efficient. And so, you know, MBS has talked about this. more efficient. And so, you know, MBS has talked about this. He's, you know, very aware that Saudi Arabia, he feels is over-reliant on foreigners and he wants to rely more on Saudi expertise.

But the fact of the matter is there just aren't enough people in Saudi Arabia with the training to do these huge projects all at once. So he relies on these foreign consultants. This is what I was thinking when I was reading your piece. You know, I couldn't help but think to myself, how one, how plausible is a lot of this stuff? And two, you know, are these consultants, maybe even fleecing Saudi Arabia here? Something a lot of people ask, and you know, we asked that to the Saudis and to the consultants. And you know, it's not something people want to take head on. You know, when we talked to a spokesperson who, you know, the Neom governance had hired, they said, no, they're not fleecing us. But the real concern here, I think, and this goes back to any monarchy, is that the monarch, or in this case, the crown prince, asks for blunt, honest advice.

Tell me the truth. But the people tasked with doing that are always afraid that if you're too blunt, maybe you'll get fired. And so it's a conflicted area. And I think it's not something that the crown prince is naive about. He's very aware that, and I think doesn't want to be relying so much on foreign expertise, but hasn't found a solution yet. Can we talk about the Crown Prince for a second, Mohammed bin Salman? It's largely thought that the limited reforms that MBS has made right now are sort of token. He lifted the ban on women driving, reintroduced public entertainment,

and curbed the power of the unpopular religious police. And there is a lot of evidence to suggest that he was involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist. And so, you know, how does that fit into this larger picture? This is something that it's taken me years to get my head around, is that his reforms are real. But part of the concern here is that in the U.S., where I'm from, I think in Canada, in the U.K., where I lived for a long time, social freedom or social liberalization and economic freedom and liberalization and political freedom and liberalization as part of the same whole. And these are all these things that these are all tied into one another. And so it has struck a lot of people who I've spoken to in the U.S. as they thought it was hypocritical that MBS will say, I'm creating new social freedoms and then lock people up for being government critics.

But from what I understand of the way he views things, it's a different approach, which is that I think he envisions a Saudi Arabia where women can drive and wear whatever they want, at least in some places, and maybe not have these guardianship laws anymore, which require a woman to get male guardians permission to travel, and maybe have movie theaters, which they've just reopened, and live music, and all of these trappings of sort of social freedom that we expect in a Western city, but to still have a system in place where it's an autocratic monarchy. And if you criticize the monarchy, you can suffer consequences. And the judiciary reports to the monarch, and they have complete control. And I think his vision does not see this political enfranchisement and democracy as having anything to do with social freedoms. He sees a country where he can dictate what you're free to do and what you're not free to do.

Okay. You know, what MBS is trying to do is, at least he said he's trying to do, is create a place where people have more social freedom and more economic freedom and more of an incentive to build companies from the ground up. Right. So long as they don't criticize him and fall in line with what he wants. Well, yeah, so long as they do what he wants, the way he wants it done, right? Which I think it's, you know,

you're free until you do something that upsets the monarch. So all of this sort of dystopian stuff aside, I know one of the challenges is that people already live in the area that Saudi Arabia has decided to locate NEOM. And can you tell me a little bit about where this area is and then how the project could displace, I understand it's tens of thousands of indigenous people? I understand it's tens of thousands of indigenous people. Yeah. So, you know, it's an area that's in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia. So on the west coast, you have the city of Jeddah, and it's about a 10-hour drive north of Jeddah, where it borders Jordan and is just across the Red Sea from Egypt, and, you know, not 30 miles or so from the israeli border so the area is

sparsely populated and very mountainous and the mountains go down to the sea you know there's a couple of small cities there there's some small towns there are people who are like largely nomadic historically have been in the area uh and there are people who are settled but a lot of them have been in the area for for you know generations you, it's an area that's like the size of Massachusetts. It's big. In order to build it, they feel, you know, the Saudi government feels like they need to move out about 20,000 people who are already there. And part of the reason to do it, I'm sure it has to do with the construction, but something that's articulated in the documents is that they want the people in Neom to have certain skills. And they want people who are cosmopolitan, who are highly educated.

Elite, essentially. Elite, yeah. And these are people who are like rural desert people. They're not elite. So they're planning to move out about 20,000 of them. They say some of them can be educated. There will be scholarships to educate some of them so they can have the skills necessary to live there. But the idea is that they're going to move about 20,000 of them. And Boston Consulting, the firm I mentioned before, has worked on the relocation plan to move them.

Why this corner of Saudi Arabia? For some context here, until the end of 2014, MBS was like, you know, who's the son of the crown prince? He was, you know, like he was one of the younger sons of the crown prince. He was someone who was ambitious and sort of an up and comer in Saudi Arabia, but didn't really have international power and international profile. All of a sudden, in early 2015, that changed. The prior king, King Abdullah, died. And Saman, MBS's father, was elevated to king. King Abdullah had been rumored close to death for months. The country was prepared for his passing. And very quickly, the king gave his young son, Mohammed, a lot of power over the economy and the military and over planning Saudi Arabia's future. All of a sudden, he's in this position to spend, basically to do whatever it takes to plan a future for Saudi Arabia

that would divorce it from the demise of the oil economy. And so in that context, what he has told people is that he was looking on Google Earth, on his computer, on a Google Earth map of the country. And he saw that this area, the Northwest, was largely uninhabited, had mountains and a beautiful seacoast. And he, you know, became like fascinated by it. And so he had someone flying there in a helicopter, and he landed the helicopter, and he was like, it kind of was inspired to, you know, to build the future of Saudi Arabia there. And also, you know, one contextual thing to understand is, you know, Saudi Arabia right now has the capital is Riyadh, which is in the center of the country and is historically very conservative.

And the oil production is largely in the east of the country. And Neom is being built north of Jeddah in the west. You know, it literally faces westward. And it is it's a place that is, you know, directed outward toward Europe and toward the U.S. and toward Canada and toward all these places where I think he wants more economic back and forth. Okay. It's incredible to think that that started with him perusing Google Maps. That's quite an interesting anecdote.

Can we talk to you about this issue of surveillance? So your reporting literally quotes the documents as saying, it will be a city where we can watch everything. documents as saying, it will be a city where we can watch everything. That subject came up several times in the documents. And most of the times they came up, it was the consultants reporting on discussions of board meetings with NEON. And the idea, I think, is that they were thinking of, what does the future look like? What can we do in the future that makes cities really livable? What do people want in cities? And one thing is they want safety. And how can we make a place the most safe as well? What if, you know, instead of having police go around looking for crime, we can just like make it so we can see what's happening all the time and like kind of make crime fighting automatic. know that they were discussing this with an ear toward how that would look in countries where, you know, civil liberties are like a major topic of discussion and concern all the time. I think

there might be an element of, you know, people want safety. So how can we make it the most safe? But yeah, the reaction we've heard from a lot of people in the US is that, oh, wow, this is going to be a surveillance state. Right. You know, they're also, there was talking there of, you know, using facial recognition technology and cameras, everyone in NEOM can be tracked in real time. Yeah. And part of that is security. But there was also part of that, which, you know, a couple people talked to me about, which is like, how would it be if you like you walked into the lobby of a hotel, the scene you got as you got in, someone came and greeted you by name and led you to your room, you didn't have to check in.

So it seems like this sort of seamless integration of moment to moment living with security. It's all kind of, they're not separate things. Right. And then at the same time, you think about how easy it would be then for this autocratic government to crack down on anything that they thought was dissent. Well, I didn't get the sense that they expected much dissent in Neom. The sense that you get from the documents from the people I speak to is that they expect it to be a place where people will move there because they want to be there and they'll love it. There's not a lot of talk about

that. They're just going to enjoy their flying cars and these fancy restaurants and the glow in the dark beach and the extra moon. It is a really utopian vision, like a very top-down utopian vision from a leader who seems to believe that if you just make the place the right way, everyone will be happy. I wish I could talk to you about this all day. I'm so appreciative for this conversation, which was fascinating. And yeah, thank you so much. I have to be honest, a little bit terrifying. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. So Saudi Arabia made headlines for another reason this week as well. One year after the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Kingdom's Journalists Association announced an annual media forum.

The first one is in November. They'll also be giving out an award. The director of the association said this was to, quote, cement Riyadh's name as the Arab media capital and will, quote, name as the Arab media capital and will, quote, boost the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's reputation as a leading country in the global political and economic arena. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Matt Alma, Mark Apollonio, Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, This was produced by Matt Alma, Mark Apollonio, Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, Ashley Mack, and Jackson Weaver.

Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our music is by Joseph Chabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm your host, Jamie Poisson. Have a wonderful weekend and see you next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.