Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Jeddah Tower

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

The Jeddah Tower is set to be the tallest building in the world. If it ever gets finished. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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the tallest building in the world. Yeah, it's going to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop. So let's go back to 2008. There was a billionaire investor named Prince, Al-Aid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. And I think his goal was to make the Burj Khalifa look like poop. He was like, I want to make one taller. I want to build a city and around it called the Jeddah Economic City.

Terrible name. Yeah. And basically, like, they wanted to compete with Dubai, but in Saudi Arabia. Right, because Dubai is in the UAE. And he wanted to build the first skyscraper to reach over 3,280 feet or higher. And for those of us in the United States and for our friends in Liberia, that is a kilometer. So this would be the first kilometer high building, which is mind-bogglingly tall.

And he's doing it, baby. In 2000, well, I guess they made it up to 2018. Before... Oh, no, year. I was thinking feet. Right, no, the year. Yeah, that was a little confusing. I'm sorry about that.

That's right. Especially when you know the construction history of the tower. But no, they made it up to 2018, the year. CE, I guess I should have said. Before they had to halt construction thanks to a bunch of different stuff. That's right.

You know, it's the way you said it, when you said they went all the way up to 2018. You know, brick by brick all the way to 2018. Big year. So, yeah, construction pause in 2018. We'll talk about why here in a minute, and also COVID had a big dent in it. The Birch Caliphah is the current tallest building at 2717 feet tall. The year? Oh, no. If you're wondering about the eventual kilometer high building, the Jetta Tower, If you remember our beloved twin towers here in the United States, it'll be about twice the size of those,

which is astonishing to think about. Also, I mean, for a little closer to home, if you don't live in New York, the average two-story house is about 20 to 25 feet tall for comparison. How many Big Macs? I looked and I was like, I'm not doing this. Yeah, that's over. It was designed both Birge Khalifa and the Jeddah Tower

by an American architect named Adrian Smith. Did not know that. Yeah, and they're both, you know, it's not a copycat of the Birch Khalifa, but it's definitely similar in structure because what Adrian Smith reckoned and figured out was that making a building that tall as a triangle as a Y shape instead of a square instead of a box or a rectangle is a lot safer for, like, you know, he did wind tunnel testing and stuff like that. It was like, this thing is going to meet the wind in a safer way.

Yeah, it gets awfully windy the higher up you go. And if you're like wind shear in buildings, that sounds interesting. I could not recommend more a 1995 New Yorker article called the 59-story crisis about when the city bank. I've talked about it before. I don't know when. Yeah. But when the city bank building in the 70s was built and occupied and the engineer or architect figured out like, oh, God, like basically I forgot to carry the one. Get everyone out of there?

They had to figure out how to shore it up before a hurricane hit. Oh, geez. That was like on its way, basically. It's a really, really great article. I guess at the time they would have brought in Bruce Willis to solve that problem. That's right. Yeah, man, I've got to read that. That sounds great.

It is so greatly suspenseful. It's just a wonderful article, one of the best ever. Awesome. So the Birj Khalifa, one of the differences is that one tapers in different stages at different sections. But the Jeddah Tower is sort of one big triangle. It's going to be one continuously tapering tower. Right. And literally sort of piercing the clouds at one point.

Yeah, I saw that Adrian Smith was inspired by how palm leaves stick up from the top of a tree before they unfurl. Cool. And I looked at a picture. I'm like, yep, that looks like the Jeddah Tower. Oh, awesome. So you want to take a little break and come back and talk about, I don't know, the Jeddah Tower some more? Yeah, let's do it. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong. Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.

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Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target.

He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So we're going to just give you a few nuts and bolts appropriately about the jetta tower. The big showstopper there will be the observation tower, open air observation tower, which is terrifying. It'll be at 2,187 feet. They were going to have a helipad on it, or it was supposedly supposed to be a helipad, I think, and architects were like, he can't

out here and you can't land a helicopter on something that high out here. That's not a good idea. So we'll make it an observation deck. We'll just tell everybody to ignore the giant H in the circle on the deck. Exactly. Stand in the center of that. So, yeah, I mean, I don't like heights, but I would check that out if I ever found myself in Jeddah. Yeah, maybe. By the way, Jedda is actually already a town there on the Red Sea. There was a guy who was interviewed in this How Stuff Works article, maybe Architectural Digest,

where he said, like, this is not a place where you would normally live, which I think is kind of mean to people who live in Jedda, But I get his point. It's not like Jeddah Economic City. But it's claimed of fame, as far as I know, is that it is the tomb. It holds the tomb of Eve, Eve of Garden of Eden fame. And they think that, yes, and they think that Jedda is the, like, is a derivation of Jada, which means grandmother. Okay.

That's some Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff right there. Wow. All right. My mind is kind of blown. Yeah, it blew mine too. I just couldn't not share it. All right. This might blow your mind, too.

The Jetta Tower, at least according to its original plans, who knows what's going to end up happening. We'll have about 80,000 tons of steel. 59 ultra-high-speed elevators, eight escalators, seven double-decker elevators. I think if you're going up to that observatory in Terrace, you're going to go at about 32 feet per second. which is pretty fast, and it's a mixed-use space. It's going to, the bottom third is going to be office space. There's going to be a luxury hotel. And then the 167 highest floors, which sounds crazy to say, will be apartments.

And, of course, I'm sure some very rich chic or somebody will own that penthouse at the crown of the whole thing. Yeah, I found some pictures, some renderings of it. And I'm like, me, I mean, you could find the exact same thing in Miami or, or Rio or it just looks like whatever. Yeah. I mean, the tower itself is going to be amazing. But yeah, it's just, you know, when you have that much space and that much wealth, there's only so much you can do.

Yeah, agreed. The original name was the kingdom tower, and they broke ground in April of 2013. It took more than a year just to lay the foundation. And they have these concrete pilings, 10 feet in diameter, longer than a football field that go down very, very, very deep into the earth. And because of these delays, you know, they had to stop in 2017 when there was a political crisis in Saudi Arabia. There was a move to sort of consolidate power in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had a big anti-corruption purge where he arrested 11 Saudi princes, one of which was the financial backer of the Jetta Tower and some of the partners in the Saudi bin Laden group. So because of that in COVID, it halted for a lot of years and I think like five years.

And I was watching this YouTube video where they basically said, like, when that happens in a place like this, like you usually tear it down and start over because, you know, sand damage, salt damage, just corrosion to steel and corrosion to the concrete probably makes it very unsafe moving forward. But apparently they had the foresight to install these underground sensors in those pilings. And they could get readings that apparently said, like, we're all good down here. Yeah, that's amazing. That is some foresight. You were telling me about that, and you hadn't got to the part where they had the sensors. And I was like, please tell me that they are not just building on top of an unsafe structure or they're going to have to tear the whole thing down and start over. But nope, you really came through with the great positive twist at the end. Yeah, well, they eventually restarted after COVID, I think in 23 of September 2020, is when they finally restarted. said in in 2023, it would be another

four or five years. But in 2025, just over a year ago, 60 of the 167 floors have been built.

And this year, in January, they passed just recently the 80 floor mark. Yeah, so they're almost halfway there.

There is, they're thinking that they might be done in the next couple of years. Yeah, I don't know, but, I mean,

I did, the YouTube video also said that they are going at like break-neck pace now. Yeah, that's,

you don't really, want to do that when you're building the world's tallest building, but who knows? I agree. Also, a little fact, if you were like Prince Mohammed bin Solomon, he sounds kind of familiar. Yeah. When he did that anti-corruption purge, that was the same time that he ordered Jamal Khashoggi, the colonist and dissident, murdered. That's right. Yet he was still welcomed into our White House.

Wow. So you got anything else? I have nothing else. We'll see what happens with the Jeddah Tower. I mean, it looks like it'll be finished. You know, I don't know, about four or five years from 2023, but we'll see. Yeah. And sorry to all the people who saw this short stuff title, Jeddah Tower,

and we're like, they better not bring the White House into this. Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.