It Could Happen Here - War and Petrodollars: The Story of the Saudi Esports World Cup

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Mia and James take a deep dive into how Saudi Arabia's attempts to get returns on their investments led them to carry out a genocide in Yemen and an Esports tournament in Riyadh.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and

it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech E-sports! Oh, God. Okay, that was not a great intro. Call zone media. have a theme for our episodes i feel like yeah maybe it is petrodollars i guess it is yeah yeah we brought to you today by big fossil fuel you know this entire episode is is the what do you

do with your fossil fuel money episode so we did an episode like a year ago about sports washing and it has gotten much worse since then yeah you know so so the the big kind of sports washing thing that's happening right now is this thing called the esports world cup that the saudi government is putting on okay it is going on right now barring unfathomable disaster it will still be going on by the time this episode comes out we kind of talked about in the last episode how the saudis have been getting into sports i mean it sort of starts with soccer they start doing wwe they get into tennis they're in golf they're in boxing they're in formula one in the last like two years specifically they've gotten really really deep into esports in 2022 they spent 1.5 billion dollars wow to acquire face it and esl gaming which were two organizations that ran esports leagues. Esports, by the way, are professional video game competition.

The people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five in the morning to watch Korean Starcraft tournaments like I did. Yeah, that's me. I fall into that category. Yeah, I feel like on this episode, we have both the sports washing angles covered because you have the sports washing like regular sports angle. And I've had to do the sports washing like regular sports angle and i've had to do the sports washing esports angle yeah i have i know what you would call them p sports like physical sports meet space sports uh yeah i've been privy to a decent amount of sports washing like uh i raced a lot against iranian teams when i was cycling uh those dudes weren't so much sports washing as just straight up like national state-sponsored

doping programs. But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai, all these different federal states and Emirates will sponsor cycling teams. Very, very common. Brunei, another one. I raced for Quebec once, which is not a federal state. Well, I guess it's not i

guess it's not a federal state yeah yeah yeah no they got big maple syrup behind them yeah and catalonia which again not a petro state but yeah it's very common in all kinds of professional sports right because as sports has become more of like an entertainment industry it's become unfathomably expensive to own and sponsor a team for like enthusiasts and the value proposition isn't really there for brands i don't think the amount that it costs now to even a sport like cycling which is not a massive sport in global terms right it's not football soccer for the americans out there it's not worth it for many brands to sponsor an entire cycling team, millions and millions of euros. But if you can use that cycling team to launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that cycling team can be what people think of when they hear

about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right? And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it yeah so the thing i want to do with this episode is to get into why specifically the saudis are doing this right now because again like most countries do yeah sort of versions of this right but again you know that is 1.2 billion dollars they've thrown into two starcraft leagues that i primarily know them for starcraft they do a bunch of stuff but those those things were not worth 1.5 billion dollars like there's no way but most of the money that had been sponsoring this stuff was crypto money right okay you know and but i wanted to get into why this is sort of happening something i think is very important to know going into this is that the sort of league thing that's being run

right now is being run directly out of the saudi sovereign wealth fund which is called public investment fund so this is directly state money so the esports world cup that's happening right now has 60 million dollars in prizes which is unreal yeah is a extraordinary amount of money split around 21 esports there are 30 esports teams involved i am going to read the names of every single fucking one of them because fuck you. Okay, let's do it. Fnatic, G2 Sports, Guild Esports, Carmine Corp, Movistar, KOI, actually I've never heard of those ones, OG, Nautis... Movistar, I'm guessing it's Spanish. That's a Spanish telephone network.

Yeah, probably. You know, there's a couple I don't know, but these are like the largest esports teams in the world. Okay. Ninjas in Pajamas or NIP, Team Liquid, which I'm really sad about because I was a Team Liquid fan for a fucking decade. And I'm no longer one now because fuck this shit. Team Secret.

Team Vitality. Tundra Esports. Virtus Pro. 100 Thieves. Cloud9. FaZe Clan. Gaming Gladiators. NRG Esports.

Space Station Gaming. TSM. Blacklist International. LGD Gaming. Jenny E Esports. T1. Talon Esports. Space Station Gaming, TSM, Blacklist International, LGD Gaming, Gen E eSports, T1, Talon eSports, Weibo Gaming, Faria eSports, Loud, Team Falcons, Twisted Minds, fuck all of you

for fucking doing this, doing this stupid PR thing. There's been a backlash, and the backlash is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state homophobia, and you know, I's institutionalized state homophobia and you know i mean the fact that women are not full citizens yeah like misogyny yeah i mean just are just straight up owned by their husbands right like that's that's that's how the sort

of legal conservatorship works i'm not very familiar with esports so i can be the podcast grimace here are competitions in esports like gender segregated do people all compete together basically no there are like women's leagues but like if you just if you want to compete you can just compete assuming you get you don't get forced out by sexism this is actually a kind of big deal for starcraft because you talked about this before but like probably the number two or number three best starcraft player in the u.s Scarlet, who's a trans woman. And I mean, she's just in the regular league, right? Right, yeah.

Are the TERFs mad about it? You know, it's funny. Inside the StarCraft community, this was a huge thing for a long time. And eventually, the tides just turned against them because everyone likes her because she's really good and she's also just a good person. And so they kind of... I got to watch over the years as they just kind of got obliterated uh weirdly the like regular turfs haven't really found out about this probably because starcraft is i don't know too good of a game for them to be fucking dealing with not understanding things has not stopped that's true that's true it's kind of too obscure by this

point but you know like there's been a lot of real concern for sort of queer players there a lot of these teams like right as they were announcing they were going to the fucking esports world cup were doing all of these fucking pride posts and talking about how they're gonna let their players wear pride jerseys and it's like are you fucking kidding me yeah you know so are they physically present in saudi arabia to play yeah yeah these these tournaments are happening physically in riyadh okay yeah you know this is this isn't the first one they've had they've had some other events before this too there but you know like yeah and yeah i think things are very very bad there was a well a story that was famous among trans people but i don't ever think broke containment was there's a saudi trans woman named eden who was tricked into going back to like see her family and her family just kidnapped her and

locked her up and she killed herself Jesus and this is not an uncommon thing um it happens to cis women too sometimes when they try to like get out of the country sure yeah is they'll be kidnapped and like renditioned back yeah there have been some pretty good reports on that yeah we'll link to them or something because it's too it'll be too lengthy to go into here yeah but i think i think kind of the weakness of the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really quite understand exactly why the saudis are doing this you know they understand that this the saudi government is incredibly repressive and that it's you know institutionally homophobic and it's institutionally sexist it does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad these people are like this is like the most fetted up state in the entire world it is like it is it is the fucking

cia state and the rest of this episode is going to be us running through the exact sequence of stuff that caused the saudis to need to do all of this fucking pr bullshit and how the sort of structural economic cycle of funneling petrodollars around has led to genocide and then also this stupid fucking esports tournament for pr two things which are not the same but first do you know who's probably not a large enough company to have sponsored this tournament although i can't promise that it's not kit kat or whatever the fuck hopefully it's kit kat i would like some kit kats if that is they're one of the sponsors of this fucking esports world cup you keep your wafer biscuit kit kat your hate cookie i don't want your hate chocolate bar anymore yeah it is the products and services of this podcast which hopefully

are not supporting a genocide but oh good god we copy show yep hey i'm jack peace thomas the host of a brand new black effect original series black lit the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature i'm jack peace thomas and i'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we are back and we are going to talk petrodollars. So Saudi wealth takes the form of what are called petrodollars. Petrodollars are, in some sense, they're very, very simple, right? It's dollars that you get from selling oil. This is important for a number of reasons, though. Technically speaking, you can sort of sell oil in other currencies now, but most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars. And so around the world, dollars are one of the things that if you are an economy, you need dollars in order to get oil from people. So huge sinks of American dollars from all across the world, from the US, because the US imports a lot of oil, flow into these sort of oil-producing countries. These are called petrodollars.

The most obvious manifestation of this in Saudi Arabia is the country's sovereign wealth fund, which has $900 billion of assets. Right. This is an unfathomable amount of money. It is so much money that it is a structural problem for the global economy, trying to figure out what the fuck you do with this money. It is so much money that it is a structural problem for the global economy trying to figure out what the fuck you do with this money. This is a problem that has caused disaster around the world. It's something where I'm fond of talking about on this show, but we're

going to talk about again because it's important here. In the 70s and 80s, as sort of OPEC realized that it could, you know, use its sort of political power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petrodollars by controlling the price of oil suddenly they had you know that you have hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and because this is capitalism you can't just sit on that money you have to find a way to turn that money into more money but again you know i mean just the sovereign wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars right and so this is extremely hard and it means that this money is constantly flowing around the world trying to find a way to get returns on it you know and and in the modern era these are things

like people remember we work oh yeah an incredibly stupid dune from the beginning office space rental scheme that went under that that was a lot of that was funded by by saudi money because saudi put an enormous amount of money in this Japanese bank called SoftBank. And SoftBank was trying to figure out what to do with this unfathomable amount of money. And they were like, okay, what if we fund the dumbest project of all time? Yeah, it became a thing where they could fund it and just by them funding it, its stock price would go up. Even if it was like WeWork, a really shit idea. Yeah, and this is something about global capital

that i i don't think has been fully processed really but the the the sheer the sheer extent of capital concentration right the amount of money that the richest people in the world and the richest sort of families in the world the sort of saudi case right you know i mean like saudi arabia is a country where a family has access to the resources of an extremely wealthy nation-state, right? And that being true has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because we've been seeing the consequences of this for a long time in the tech sector, right? Where you don't have to fucking make money. Your revenue stream can just be investor money, and you can coast a decade yeah off of just taking money from the saudis who are like trying to find some way to turn this money into more money i think this has

downstream effects that we don't we haven't even begun to really understand yet right but very famously in the 70s and 80s there was all this money flowing around and what it was poured into was the third world debt crisis people bought state debt with it and then these loans were on it were on adjustable rates on adjustable interest rates so when uh the volcker shock hit and the u.s like massively increased interest rates the interest rates on these loans like skyrocketed suddenly you know you're paying like 50 interest on a loan of like several billion dollars and all of these countries are just systematically looted their economies are destroyed i mean david gray rememberably talks about this thing in madagascar where madagascar had eliminated malaria you know but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination

like programs they're not that expensive but they are a little bit expensive and when the fucking government of madagascar had to like pay off this IMF debt they had to get rid of the uh they got rid of these mosquito programs and there was a and there was a malaria outbreak and it killed unfathomable numbers of people and stuff like this happened all over the world and the source of all of this right partially the source of this is these loans and partially the source of this is this these enormous piles of petrodollars you have to find some way to sort of turn into more capital right and you know so there are sort of trademark things you can do with this money um one of them is buying a bunch of military equipment

mostly what you're doing with that is sort of buying american patronage if you spend enormous amount of money buying american tanks and this is you know something that saudi's been doing for ages right you spend a bunch of money on american defense contracts you know you can sort of buy u.s protection and guarantees that you know for example as is going to happen later in this episode you can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital but the thing with the saudis is that they have a lot of equipment but the saudi saudi arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army right if they were if they had an actual serious army there would be a coup tomorrow so their army is extremely well equipped kind of but it's trained like shit and it's run by like just dipshits intentionally so that it

sucks but you know so that's like sort of one thing you can do with this money a lot of this money ended up going into real estate and there are sort of cycles of this happening the one that ain't that's of concern to us is what happens after 2008 in the sort of aftermath of of 2008 there are still places in the world where you know you can park an extremely large amount of money in real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset if you have like property in a market that is you know where the housing market is really hot and prices are increasing rapidly you can pretty quickly get rid of it you can also there's liquidity there's sort of financial instruments you can do based off of your ownership of real

estate and this is something that drives the saudis into a bunch of very very i don't know if risky is exactly the right word but a bunch of moves in yemeni real estate that really truly were about to not pay off um there's a very good book about this uh it's by uh isa blumi called destroying yemen which is about like a lot of the factors that start the war in yemen and this is this is one of them right um we can't really do a full recap of the yemeni civil war because that's it's that's its own 700 episode podcast like oh god it is yeah it's on on a surface level it's not that complicated but the moment you get any granular detail on it it's like the most complicated conflict i've ever studied yeah i mean there's so many conflicts like this right like yeah civil war appreciator when i was studying

yemen in college i i i longed for the simplicity of the spanish civil war like this this conflict is nuts yeah but for simplicity's sake there's roughly ish two factions there are the sort of forces allied with what's called the coalition government which is the government backed by the saudis and then there are what's sort of in the west become called the houthis i mean it it's more complicated. All of this is enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. coalition is very hostile to the saudis because the saudis suck shit you know suddenly the saudis are looking at an enormous amount of capital they've sunk into real estate that they are you know based on these like incredibly corrupt land deals with the previous administration which have been friendly to them they are looking at suddenly losing all this land the saudis weren't

the first people to come into sort of the amendi real estate market right on the uae oman a bunch of other states had sort of been in there before and so part of what a big part of what this sort of this like what's called the coalition is is this like basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect their housing assets look that's a lot of what a lot of wars are if we're honest it's people trying to protect x or y assets right like unfortunately yeah and it's it's not really seen in these terms in the way that's covered but that's that's a lot of of what's going on and this produces one of the worst wars of the 21st century which is saying something because 21st century has had a lot of really really terrible wars yeah we've had some rough ones yeah and we're going to get into what the

saudis were doing during this war after these products and services. Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. and valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God,

things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists

to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We have returned, and the thing we're returning into is a really, really bleak war. So we said this kind of from the beginning, right? The Saudi military is not very good.

The Saudis attempt to sort of end the war by like rolling a tank column over the border it's just like i think it's 2014 2015 in like the early period of the war they try to end it by just rolling tanks and tanks get obliterated because the saudi army isn't worth shit right all of their ground forces are a joke but their air force is very very well equipped with a bunch of their like incredibly modern u.s warplanes that we sell them all the fucking time. And so, you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they have the ability to do is just obliterate people with airstrikes. The kind of like terror air campaign that they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine.

But they're doing airstrikes on school buses full of children. They're taking the American thing. They're doing doubleap drone strikes on weddings where they're hitting a wedding, and then when rescue workers come up, they hit the rescue workers with airstrikes, right? I'm pretty sure it was the end when they had the triple-tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on someone's funeral,

they did an airstrike on the rescue workers, and then when they had a funeral for those people, they did an airstrike on fucking that, right? This is a just unbelievably brutal war. And, you know know and again which we talked about right like there there are some there are some parts of the saudi coalition that can you know field ground forces right that stuff's mostly the sort of southern secessionist groups and those people are not really that loyal so you know so they have to start importing infantry to try to fight the Houthis.

And so they're importing a bunch of Colombian mercenaries. So these are guys who've been like death squad guys in Colombia. The Colombian guys are the new, I was going to say the new Rhodesians. That is a dark shadow to cast on a group of human beings. Yeah. It used to be that when you were running into private military contractors abroad it would be people white folks in from africa right like they call themselves rhodesian south africans what have you now you'll see a lot of like a lot of private military

contractors like at the boots on the ground you know know, infantry level of Colombians. Yeah. And so that's one of the sources they went to. But then, you know, part of the Saudi coalition is the UAE. And the UAE has a lot of very, very close ties to militant groups in Sudan, specifically a group of militias that's now known the West as the Rapid Response Forces. But these are the people who did the genocide in darfur yeah and they are like right now like doing a genocide in like in sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control of the country and because the uae is very very well connected to these one of the ways that the coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops who were you know kidnapped by these militias and when i say troops, I mean child soldiers.

The forces that they are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use as cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably bleak. Kind of funnily, a lot of these people end up not fighting because they get handed a rifle and get thrown into Yemen and they just immediately sell their guns

and refuse to fight. like you know but like that that's the kind of shit like again the kind of pure evil we are dealing with is we are having the guys who did the dark who did the fucking Darfur genocide kidnap fucking villagers from Sudan like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use them as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen so they can like defend their fucking real estate assets yeah right i think friend of the show eric prince makes a uh makes an appearance in yemen as well by his triumvirate of companies which are the same company right blackwater z yeah probably i quite frankly don't remember that part but

yeah you probably also yeah you can rely on ep to show up in a situation like this yeah i mean the part of this we haven't gotten to yet is the worst part of it which is so this the saudis and the sort of coalition government they you know they do okay in the sort of southwest of the country because the southern yemen secessionist groups are well organized and are good soldiers even if they eventually sort of rebel there's this whole it's it's a whole mess but in the west of the country everything is completely different and you know they're basically getting their shit kicked in and in that theater the the saudis plan is we are going to starve the country so you know and the saudi the saudis have naval assets nobody else really in this war

does right and they just set up a blockade on like all of the ports on that side of the country we do not know how many people get starved as a result of this um the last good mortality figures i could i could find this war is still going on by the way i mean fighting has gotten a lot less intense since sort of 2021 2022 but i mean it's still going um the last good numbers that i can find suggest 377 000 dead and it's probably way way worse than that because you know we just we just don't know how many people died in the famines that you know that that the saudi set off and this was you know this was explicitly their their their plan here was to

just kill off the population of this part of Yemen by starving them to death. You know, this is a genocide, right? They were attempting to do a genocide. It doesn't work, and it doesn't work because, I mean, there's a number of reasons why it doesn't work. Basically, they get defeated militarily. Houthi troops, like,

take several cities, like, inside of Saudi Arabia, like they like they march across the border and take them and you know I mean it's it's bad enough for the Saudis that like there's there's a moment where it like it looks like they're going to lose Riyadh and the U.S. has to step in and be like no like okay you guys need to fucking pull out of this shit but that you know that and that that makes the war less bad you know like the blockade's not still in place but this is the situation in 2022 that we walk into when when suddenly they're buying all these esports companies that they have just attempted to commit a genocide right they have just attempted to exterminate a vast part

of the population of yemen that's i think like really the true sort of heart of darkness evil shit right like i don't know it's like us and cambodia shit but you know there's stuff that got more media attention too which was like in a lot of ways more harmful to them because the pr from it but one of the things i think people have forgotten now because this was six years ago is that in 2018 they kidnapped and then killed a a washington post columnist named jamal kashogi yeah by tricking him into going into a consulate killing him carving his body up with a bone saw and we're pretty sure the way they got the body out of the consulate was by stuffing the fucking again bone-soled parts

of his body into into embassy bags in a diplomatic immunity and walking them out of the embassy yeah this is one of those things that like should never be forgotten right like yeah he says he was a citizen right was he a green card holder i'm not a hundred percent sure but this is obviously like a fucking unbelievable crime i think i i wish that you know the fact that they were doing fucking airstrikes on school buses had gotten as much attention as this did but you know for for for a long time right like in the late 2010s and the early 2020s i mean this this was this was an issue in the 2020 presidential campaigns because you know i mean trump fucking went and touched the orb with muhammad bin salman who's the the crown prince of now well at the time was known

as muhammad bin bonesaw because he just straight up ordered this guy to be fucking bonesawed you know but like that it was it was a real sort of issue and this is the reputation that the government has that causes them to kind of go really really hard into the into this esports angle and there there's one last kind of angle to this which is like the worst kept secret in the of the oil market is that the saudis are running out of oil it's like it's it's technically a secret but it's like everyone knows this like every everyone knows that a lot of sort of oil that's technically sold by saudi aramco is not their oil it's their labels and other people's oil and people have known this for a long time and the saudis obviously know it and so the trick

they have to pull right in order to continue to be this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the cia is to find something else to base their economy on and their plan has been a lot of like they're trying to do just tech bullshit we're not going to get into neon because that's its own thing i'm so sad i'm so sad not to be talking about the line i'm so sorry the lines yeah they're trying to build a city that is aligned yeah that is also a city a really really long city is aligned that's going to be their tech thing you may sound like we're oversimplifying this we are not no it is they are trying to build a city that is aligned it's not going to get built what it has done is they've absolutely destroyed the lives of a bunch of sort of people who are just like farmers and cattle like herders like somebody about a cattle herders people who've

been there for a really long time have had their land taken away from them and their lives have been destroyed by it so you know but the thing is in order for them to try to do their tech pivot they have to fix their reputation people they they cannot be the state that is remembered for like bone sawing a journalist and attempting to starve an entire population and doing airstrikes and school buses right this can't be the reputation they have this is it vision 2030 or plan 2030 or something yeah yeah for their like rehabilitation and diversification of their income but like post jamal khashoggi a lot of big companies were like we can't be like like companies like google right and like big big tech companies kind of took a noticeable step back and so this has been why they've been going

into sports because they can throw around like we're talking 900 billion dollars of assets right they can just swamp a sport right especially something like esports where people are not very well paid there's not that much money sources of income are tenuous they could just sort of buy off these entire industries and it's kind of and it's working and part of the reason that it's working is that you know the focus is on and like i understand why people are doing this but the focus has been on the fact that set like the saudi government is you know is sexist and homophobic and that's true but if that's the reputation that the saudis have that is a win for them because a they'll be able to find people who agree with those views and b nobody's talking about again again, the fact that they did an airstrike on a school bus.

Like the bodies of children and their fucking school bags were flying over. They've been able to sort of avoid any kind of moral reckoning with this because people are off talking about other stuff. And if this keeps working,'s it's going to work they're going to be a country that killed 370 000 people and probably more i think also like one of the reasons they've been able to get away with this is that our media has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of muslim people in the middle east yeah for 20 plus years right so a lot of people's entire life of media consumption every day we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people in the middle east and it's just yeah it's the background noise in u.s media yeah i want to mention one more thing

they did that wasn't the script but i need to fucking talk about because it's one of my formative political experiences was so when the arab started, one of the biggest uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest uprisings in 2011. There was an attempt to knock off the monarchy of Bahrain. And they probably could have won. The kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably some of the bravest people I've ever seen. And the Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain

to crush the protests and fucking keep the government intact. And for, I mean, years for you, I mean, like a decade afterwards, every once in a while, you'd get a video coming. Like that came out of like the,

of these kids dressed in all black, chasing down an armored vehicle. That's shooting at them with Molotovs. Right. I've never seen anything. I've never seen anything like it. Like there's some of the bravest people in the world and the Saudis fucking rolled tanks into their country to fucking crush them.

The, the fucking e-sports companies here. Those are the people whose money you're taking right you you were you were taking the money of a bunch of people who rolled tanks into a country whose people wanted fucking democracy and yeah that's that that that's all i got about this i'm extremely angry about all of this and yeah fuck them yeah if i can say from the perspective of someone who's you know been paid to do sports for a decent amount of my life okay yeah you make shit money but like it's so much better to not make shit choices as well and like that goes way beyond like not cheating and the manifest ways that people cheat in in sports but also just like get don't compromise things that are way more important than like playing right

like sports is supposed to be fun and if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for things that are terrible like you're going to be miserable in your fucking 40s anyway because your body will fall apart like don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well yeah and one last thing i want to address because one of the defenses that saudi people have been rolling out is this like oh you guys don't respect muslim culture like because because because the main line of complaint has been about sort of about homophobia and sexism and it's like yeah man those fucking children and their school bosses were muslim too like fuck you yeah the people in bahrain are muslim too right like the people who yeah bodies are all over

the streets because they asked for a chance to have some say in how the country was run like that's just you don't get to do that yeah so this has been it could happen here fuck every single one of the scenes that's fucking doing this shit fuck the ball yeah We'll see you next time. Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura.

I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

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