The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck **Longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award** From award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope (coauthor of Billion Dollar Whale), this revelatory look at the world's most powerful ruling family reveals how a rift within Saudi Arabian royalty produced Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a charismatic leader with a ruthless streak. Thirty-five-year-old Mohammed bin Salman's sudden rise stunned the world. Political and business leaders such as former UK prime minister Tony Blair and WME chairman Ari Emanuel flew out to meet with the crown prince and came away convinced that his desire to reform the kingdom was sincere. He spoke passionately about bringing women into the workforce and toning down Saudi Arabia's restrictive Islamic law. He lifted the ban on women driving and explored investments in Silicon Valley. But MBS began to betray an erratic interior beneath the polish laid on by scores of consultants and public relations experts like McKinsey & Company. The allegations of his extreme brutality and excess began to slip out, including that he ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. While stamping out dissent by holding three hundred people, including prominent members of the Saudi royal family, in the Ritz-Carlton hotel and elsewhere for months, he continued to exhibit his extreme wealth, including buying a $70 million chateau in Europe and one of the world's most expensive yachts. It seemed that he did not understand nor care about how the outside world would react to his displays of autocratic muscle-what mattered was the flex. Blood and Oil is a gripping work of investigative journalism about one of the world's most decisive and dangerous new leaders. Hope and Scheck show how MBS's precipitous rise coincided with the fraying of the simple bargain that had been at the head of U.S.-Saudi relations for more than eighty years: oil in exchange for military protection. Caught in his net are well-known US bankers, Hollywood figures, and politicians, all eager to help the charming and crafty crown prince. The Middle East is already a volatile region. Add to the mix an ambitious prince with extraordinary powers, hunger for lucre, a tight relationship with the White House through President Trump's son in law Jared Kushner, and an apparent willingness to break anything -- and anyone -- that gets in the way of his vision, and the stakes of his rise are bracing. If his bid fails, Saudi Arabia has the potential to become an unstable failed state and a magnet for Islamic extremists. And if his bid to transform his country succeeds, even in part, it will have reverberations around the world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this was here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my god we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to thecvpn.com, chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com.

There's only nine podcasts there. I mean, like, how many podcasts do you need, people? But there's nine there if you want them. If you want to see the video version of this interview, you can go to youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss, and you can see all the brilliant authors we've had on over there as well. And on that, you can hit that bell notification button so you get all the different notifications of all the great authors we have on

and everything we're doing. You can also go to Amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can see our shop that we have there of all the books of all the wonderful authors we have on the Chris Voss show. You can take your credit card there, swipe it, and you can buy all the books from Amazon, and you'll be so much more smarter and better looking for that as well. Today, we have on one of the brilliant co-authors of the book Blood and Oil, Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power. The two authors are Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope. We have Justin here today. And Justin is a, well, they're both actually with the Wall Street Journal, I should say. Justin is based in New York. He worked with the Wall Street

Journal since 2007, covering white-collar crime across four continents. He's been writing about Saudi Arabia since 2016. Justin is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Justin? I'm well. Happy to be here. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

We appreciate that. And congratulations on the new book. This came out, I believe, September 1st? Yeah. Yeah, thanks. There you go. And it's definitely topical. We'll get into some of the different news stories.

But, Justin, if you could give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs. Yeah, so the best place to find the book is probably Amazon, Blood & Oil, or Hachette, H-A-C-H-E-T-T-E.com is our publisher. And there's a page there where you can buy it also at your local bookstore. Now, you cover a lot of Saudi Arabia, like we mentioned, for a long time. What motivated you to write this book about MBS? I've been based in London. I've been writing about oil and working on various sort of investigative stories for years.

And I spent a couple of years on a sort of far-flung story about the drug trade between India and West Africa. And sort of coming out of that, I was – you leave behind a big project. And my editor at the time had said, you know, Saudi Arabia is at the cusp of something really, really different. And the news had just come out that this prince who like no one had heard of a year earlier, Mohammed bin Salman, who was the son of the new king, wanted to take the Saudi state oil company, which is like the world's biggest company by revenue, and probably the world's most profitable company. And he wanted to do an IPO. you have to like sell shares of it in the international market and so you know i i had covered energy for years we really didn't have a history covering saudi

arabia and my editor was like you know we need some sort of investigative coverage like digs into like what is this company and go from there and i sort of like you know kicked in the screen because that's what a reporter does when when your editor tells you to do something but you know within a couple of weeks bradley who does have more of a history in the middle east and i realize that there's a really deep and uh complicated international story to be told and you know we started by our way in was by looking at the oil company. But, you know, from the company, it's not too far to get to the government, and then to the royal family, and then to, you know, the halls of the palace where, you know,

huge amounts of global power are, you know, fought over by like a few guys. And so we were writing on this for a couple of years and more and more, you know, we got from the company to the government to kind of the personal palace intrigue and realized at some point a couple of years ago, like there's a book here. This is someone who is taking this insular country and turning outward. He's become a military power and an economic power and an investing power, and it just sort of happened organically, if that makes sense. And in the book, you pretty much talk about his childhood, his rise to power. You set the stage of the environment in Saudi Arabia and how he comes pretty much to fruition and then

what he's done since then. Yeah, so the book really starts with this moment, like, to go back a little bit, to understand who this guy is, you know, a lot of the Saudi princes of his generation, the sons of kings or the sons of princes who are close to being king, are educated abroad, you know, in the U.S. or in Europe. And they have these sort of cosmopolitan upbringings. And this guy was educated completely in Saudi Arabia and spent his teenage years by the side of his father, who was governor of Riyadh province. It's the most conservative traditional part of Saudi Arabia.

Well, it's a conservative city. It's a capital. It's the family's center of power. So this guy's the son. He's, you know, a son of the second wife of a prince who seems very unlikely to be king. There's a couple of older brothers who are in between him and the throne. And he grows up like not, you know, not really expecting that there's any chance he could get near the throne. Then two of his father's older brothers die fairly unexpectedly.

His father is in line to become king next, but is in his 70s. And the older brother who's king, King Abdullah, dies at the end of 2014. And the crown's supposed to go to Prince Salman, Mohammed bin Salman's father. But the sons of Abdullah and the loyalists to King Abdullah knew that if Salman became king and Mohammed bin Salman gained power, they'd be cut out. They could lose all their power. They could lose much of their money. There could be even worse repercussions for them. So they started trying to undermine Salman.

There were rumors spread on Twitter that he had dementia. They tried to sort of engineer some succession plan where the crown would go down to one of Abdullah's sons. And all of that failed, largely because Mohammed bin Salman got wind of it and got in the way of it. And then the last ditch effort was to try to prevent him from being in the line of succession, which temporarily worked. You know, when his father became king, the crown prince was another old man, another brother, and the deputy crown prince was a cousin who was older and had a long relationship with the U.S. And in the, you know, years or so after Salman became king, that was all upended.

And, you know, in 2017, Muhammad Bitsoman, you know, physically imprisoned in a, in a, in a palace, his predecessor is crown prince, you know, in the middle of the night and forced the guy to resign so that he could become crown prince. So now while his father's king, he's the, he's in line for the throne, but it's really the day-to-day ruler of the kingdom. and the guy who's making all the big decisions the prologue of the book starts out with with how they how they how he pulls off that uh i guess semi-coup where they you know they say hey we we need to come back and talk to the boss and and like everyone's kind of like i don't know about this but they he literally sets up these hotels and everything to become prisons. And it's insane. He's like imprisoning billionaires, people that are used to, you know,

freely going around the world and have all this money. And it's quite the operation. Yeah, so Saudi Arabia for generations has been this really ossified, bureaucratic country where old men were in charge and they were afraid they were deeply afraid of any change and their fear was that any change at all could lessen the family's power their grip on the throne and create upheaval that would be bad and so over those those decades as you know the oil industry became bigger and bigger and oil money flooded into the country, there was kind of rampant corruption.

And their princes would bring in kind of well-connected Saudi businessmen and bring in international businessmen. So you could get a contract. As an American company, you could get a contract doing oil field services. You have to have a partner who's a Saudi, maybe a prince, maybe some well-connected businessman. That partner did nothing but got a huge amount of money, and so there was money

leaking out everywhere. Nobody did anything about it. One theme with Mohammed bin Salman is that he is okay with change. If he thinks change needs to be made, he wants to do it right now. He's done that in a number of contexts, but when he did,

he saw corruption as a problem. And to be, you know, fair to everyone, we write in detail about how he has enriched himself to an extravagant level on government money. So he's not against, you know, I don't think in principle he's against a powerful prince

getting rich from the government. He was just against so many people who didn't really have power doing it. And rather than try to, you know, do sort of the old-fashioned way of like, you know, saying, please stop doing this and the kind of, you know,

quietly behind the scenes trying to wind down the corruption, he, in a very effective moment of um of sort of creative exertion of power he took the ritz carlton which is you know it's a ritz carlton that's built in a building that was built to be a saudi palace it's like literally palatial hotel and he told the ritz um the government's going to need the facility for the time being cancel all reservations. And they changed the locks on the doors.

And he rounded up hundreds of the country's most powerful business people. And some of them were princes. Some of them were independent businessmen. Some of them are, you know, Awali bin Talal, sort of the headliner. He was this prince who was co-ownowned the Four Seasons with Bill Gates. You know, he was like people of international repute. And he locked them in hotel rooms and told them,

you will pay back some or all of the money that I say you stole, or we'll just take everything and put you in prison. And, you know, there were reports of torture. There were all sorts of, you know, none of it was done in a way that's like, there's no precedent. There's no like kind of body of law for here's how we deal with corruption in Saudi Arabia. He sort of made it up as he went along. And the defense that a lot of these men had was King Abdullah said it

was okay, or King Fahd, the King before him, said it was okay for me to do this. And MBS said, well, then it was okay then. Now, now it's, it's retroactively not okay. So give me the money back. And it was a way of like trying to recruit money for the government, but also a way of showing like, basically like you need to do whatever I say, or else something really bad will happen to you no matter how powerful you think you are. And this seemed like a real siloing of power.

I mean, I think in the book you say that he used it to gain power over different divisions and everything else. I mean, this seems like a real power seize on his part. And before we get into the questions about good or bad or reform or not reform that everyone's asking, the most important thing to understand about his early years is that he is better than anyone else at maneuvering within the palace and within the Saudi royal family. And he outmaneuvered everyone.

And so, and largely because he was almost an outsider. He was from a younger generation. What he saw was a system where the sons of the kingdom's founder, his father, and three of his father's brothers, basically shared control over the most important government institutions.

One prince, who later became king, was in charge of the royal guard, which guards the king. Another was in charge of the Ministry of Interior, which is in charge of intelligence gathering and has military capabilities. Another was in charge of the defense ministry, which is the actual military.

And another one, his father, was in charge of Riyadh province, which is the center of the coalition between the royal family and the religious establishment, which was their power base. And he saw that this balance of power may have been good for stability in the past, but if he was going to, he didn't want stability anymore. He wants rapid change. If he was going to do that, he would need to consolidate that and take over each of these things that for decades had been controlled

by other branches of the family. And he managed to do that by outmaneuvering all these people. And as you mentioned, and it's in the book, I mean, there's a lot of palace intrigue. If you love palace intrigue, this is the book for you because there's just so many players and so many competitions. But what you guys really detail in the book is how one of the things he's really good at is being cunning. I remember Francis Ford Coppola talking about basically the three sons in the Godfather series. And when you look at Michael Corleone, Michael Corleone's the one who survives because he's the most cunning.

And so a lot of it maybe was a balance of seizing power and then enacting reforms all right you know the the real thing about looking at uh at him is the good bad and ugly and you go okay is he a good guy is he a bad guy or is he a mix of both yeah i mean that and we keep getting the question what i tell everyone is i have a stock answer which i think is actually a good answer um which is i think those questions are are relevant and there's so much is he a reformer or is he a dictator you know and i think a lot of that is not relevant the relevant question the relevant thing to understand is his goal is to maintain power and to maintain his family's control of saudi arabia and i think that's pretty much any

monarch has that as the big goal. And to be fair to him, he seems to truly believe that the best thing for Saudi Arabia and the Saudi people is for him to be in power. But the top priority is maintaining power. And so everything he does, everything he's done is with that in mind. So if you think of him not as, he does some things that make him look like a reformer and other things that make him look like a tyrant. If you think of it as someone whose top priority is maintaining control,

then there's consistency across all of this. So the reforms, he's really loosened these social restrictions that have been in place for decades. And they've been framed by Western journalists as reforms. He's reforming Saudi Arabia. He's modernizing Saudi Arabia. And I don't really think that's the way to look at it.

First off, I think, you know, the very kind of restrictive Saudi Arabia is itself a modern creation. There was not a precedent for it. But more importantly, the base of power for his family in Saudi Arabia was the religious establishment. And his grandfather conquered the area known as Saudi Arabia with a coalition of the family and their loyalists and these religious clerics who had fighters, fighters and camelback. And for really for hundreds of years, the Al Saud, the family, and this religious establishment were the kind of joint power over the region. And the Al Saud's power came from them. And the family felt his, you know, the older generation of the family felt like their legitimacy in the eyes of the Saudi people came from their allegiance or their alliance with the religious establishment. And Mohammed bin Salman realized

that, you know, that's changed because now Saudi Arabia's population, you know, about 60% of the population is under the age of 30. And they have the world's highest social media saturation. And so he sees, whereas maybe prior generations, when it was a country of 6 million people who were traditional and pious, may have said, well, if the religious establishments outside are the rulers, then they must be. This younger generation, they're on Twitter and they're on Facebook and they're on Instagram. And all day long, they're looking at their phones and seeing that in other wealthy countries,

their peers are going on dates and going to movies and going to concerts. And they couldn't do any of those things. There were no cinemas. There was no live music allowed. There were these religious police who if they saw a woman with ankles showing, you know, could arrest her.

And he realized, or he believed, or he decided that if this went on, it would lead to great discontent. Also, you couldn't get jobs. It was hard to start a company. And he realized that if he wanted legitimacy, his basic power would have to switch from the religious establishment to the country's burgeoning youth population. And so the social reforms have been done with that in mind. Some of the crackdown on dissent, you know, he allowed women to drive and locked up the activists who were calling for women to be

allowed to drive. And they seem contradictory, but actually they're not, because allowing women to drive is something to, you know, satisfy the people who he needs to be satisfied. And locking up the people who protested the government shows that if you in any way criticize me, you're going to go to jail. And it's all, you know, to the greater end of solidifying power. It's a really interesting balance. That's what I think that makes him most interesting or most curious. That's what I loved about the book and why I think a lot of people try and figure him out. Like Silicon Valley has

a huge love affair with him because of the money issue. And you guys talk about this in the book, how they have these huge tech dreams. It seems like they really want to compete with Dubai and build something bigger and better. They got rid of the morality police that were running around going, that skirt's too big. But like you say, there's that balance of almost like an authoritarian power. It's kind of almost like what Machiavellian advised in The Prince, where you have to be a benevolent king, but then you also have to have an iron fist,

and you have to balance the two. Yeah, we actually have a scene in the book when he's young, and he goes to visit a cleric who is now, who has since been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, and he talks about his admiration for Machiavelli, which was... Wow. Yeah, so, and to be fair to him,

I think this can be seen as his admiration for the tactical lessons he can learn, not necessarily saying he's unprincipled. But yeah, you know, there's a, I think the best light in which you can look at it, to be generous, is that let's, you know, assume he truly believes the best thing for the Saudi people is that he be in charge. To make sure he's in charge, he had to, he had to do a lot of things that, you know, in a country like the U.S. would, would see or iron fisted, as you put it. And, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that is very hard to accept for an American is

the prohibition on criticizing him. And that's not a traditional thing in Saudi Arabia. Historically, you could criticize the monarchy. And he's realized the power. He believes social media is extraordinarily powerful. He may think it's more powerful than it really is, but he believes that criticism of him and of his father on twitter is a huge problem and he's willing to put people in jail for that and that's like if putin and george washington married or something i don't know not a kid it really does seem uh like he's well-balanced. And I watched him for a long time, not in the depth that you guys have.

But I remember when, after the Khashoggi affair, and then I think it was Lindsey Graham was saying he was unstable and he was crazy and he was a madman. Some of our politicians were saying that. And the more I looked at him, the more I was like, I don't think this guy's a madman. He's not running around twidding at the mouth like Donald Trump. He's calculated.

Like, I can see the cunning and the calculation on him. Like, if I was around him, I don't know, I'd just probably crap my pants the whole time and smile at him and be like, I'm cool with you, man. No, I mean, look. And this is not a secret. Like, you know, over the course of reporting for the Wall Street Journal, we spent time with him. And, you know, your interaction with someone face-to-face can be – it's of limited – it really is of limited value.

You don't know what's inside someone. But from all of our work, I have seen the evidence that he's a madman. I think he's very – he's a planner. And he's a madman. I think he's very, he's a planner and he's organized and he has a very loyal organization of people. I mean, one of his greatest strengths

and greatest weaknesses is that for years, since before his father was king, he's prized loyalty over anything else. And so the people who became closest to him and the people he's most empowered

are defined by their loyalty, not necessarily their competence or knowledge or abilities. And so I think the things that have gone wrong, and Khashoggi is, you know, obviously it's an unspeakably horrible, unacceptable act. But, you know, Khashoggi has gone wrong. His campaign in Yemen where they've, you know, it's resulted in starvation and bombing, you know, schoolchildren and horrible atrocities. These, those problems aren't the result of madness.

They're the result of, like, mistakes or failures to do things right. They're not necessarily impetuous. So, you know, from what we've gathered about Khashoggi, you know, what MBS says is that he never gave an order to kill him. It was men working for him. They're the ones who did the killing, and it was unacceptable.

And, you know, I take responsibility because they were working for me, but I didn't say to kill him. The CIA determined that he likely gave an order to kill him. From what we can gather from their reporting, and based on, historically, Saudi Arabia doesn't kill someone in that situation.

Historically, Saudi Arabia kidnaps that person and brings it back to the kingdom. And we have a chapter in our book where the same guy who was in charge of the Khashoggi affair engineered the kidnapping of a prince who'd been criticizing Salman. And they, you know, put him on a plane. And this guy, Saud al-Qahtani, who was working directly for MBS, posed as the plane's captain. And, you know, they convinced the guy to get on the plane. And they brought him back to Saudi Arabia.

He hasn't been seen since. And so given that that's the way they tend to do things, it seems likely that what happened with Khashoggi is these guys were told to deal with it. They probably thought they had license to kill him. Maybe they were given explicit license to kill him, maybe implicit license to kill him. It seems like most likely the plan was to kidnap him, and they realized it would be harder than they thought, and so they just decided to kill him in the seems like most likely the plan was to kidnap him, and they realized it would be harder than they thought, so they just decided to kill him in the embassy,

or in the consulate. It's hard to tell if there was an explicit order or an implicit order, but whatever it was, these guys were working directly for MBS, and they felt like they had a license to kill this guy, so it doesn't really matter what the words were that he said. It matters that he's ultimately responsible for it.

I would agree with you. I would say he probably gave the order that, you know, he's ultimately responsible for it. I would agree with you. I would say he probably gave the order that said, look, either bring him back and either he walks back or he comes back in pieces. I mean, I kind of look at some, like a lot of these leaders I look at, like I've been a CEO of my own company since I was 18. I've had thousands of employees.

I look at things as to how I would run things if I ran a government. That sounds kind of scary the way I put that in there. My eyebrows are like, I would run things. But no, it's interesting to me. I can see the intimidation tactic of it. I believe, if I recall the reporting correctly, MBS was surprised at the blowback, or the Saudis were.

Well, yeah, I think they were, because I think the way they saw it initially was, he's a Saudi citizen. And I hesitate to draw parallels, but one way to understand how they look at it is, if we find there's a KGB agent in America, a Russian KGB agent in America, we send them back home. We deport the guy. But if we find there's an American working for the KGB, then it's treason, and the person gets tried and in prison. And so the difference is that they saw this as a Saudi. And for them, he was also someone who was intimately connected to the royal family.

He worked as a spokesman for the Saudi embassy in the U.S. and in the U.K. He was sort of of the royal court. So they saw this as one of their own who was now in America making them look bad to the citizens of Saudi Arabia's biggest ally. He was a Saudi, and so they could do as they wished with him. And so I think they were surprised that there was this incredible blowback where the world kind of rallied. Why did you kill an independent journalist? He's not an independent journalist.

He's a Saudi guy. He was criticizing us. And I think, you know, we mentioned in the book that, you know, MBS said to a person who was asking about this, he said, oh, look at this, now the world sees me as a journalist killer. The world sees me as a murderer. This is horrible. I think he, even if that's what he is, he doesn't want to be seen as that.

And I think, you know, sort of to go back, you know, you're talking about being a CEO of your own company. You are bound by the rules of America, the laws of America. He's in a monarchy, like he doesn't really have any laws or rules that apply to him. And not only there are, but really, like the king is the state and he's kind of making up his own rules. And I think through some of these, through Khashoggi and other things, it's been sort of a harsh lesson that, oh, the rest of the world has these rules that they get very, very angry if I break. Yeah. I think one of the miscalculations was, well, there were some factors to it, and I'm not dismissing the horror and the wrongness of it, but there were some factors to it. One of them was just the grotesque way that it went down,

the dismembering of him, being able to get the audio of what went on. It was stomach-turning. And then, you know, the guy's a Washington Post journalist. So, I mean, you know, you just took on the Washington Post and probably every journalist and press journalist in the world. He might have been a lot better off if they just kidnapped him and thrown him in a car and brought him back, and they probably would have had a whole lot less follow-up.

But the grisly details were what really – that just – that got everybody that got me especially when you listen to tape you realize his the the scenario of his his uh pending wife sitting up front waiting for him innocently thinking oh he's gonna come out we're gonna get married and you're just like oh my god the horror of and then to find out later what going on uh i mean so yeah like i think like you say maybe unintended consequences but but still yeah finding out you know finding out what's going on in the world on the theme of like sort of uh prizing loyalty over over aptitude everything you you talked about here the reason that stuff came out is his team, after the murder,

the Saudis were badly outmaneuvered by the Turks. First off, they don't realize that their concept is bugged, right? How do you not... Whether the bugs were Turkish or some other country, they don't realize

it's a bug, number one. Number two, MBS seemed to think that he could kind of, there was no way the Turks were going to in any way kind of gain a foothold over him. And what the Turks did is there had been tension between Turkey and Saman and MBS. And Erdogan, the president of Turkey, I think had wanted better relations and it was pretty tense.

And so Turkey tried to use this as sort of a way of like, well, look, why don't you, you know, there's some things you can do for us. Like do these things. We'll like kind of help, you know, keep us quiet. And the Saudis wouldn't cooperate.

So Turkey kept leaking out little bits. You know, there was a recorder to tape and then more detail on the audio. And it seemed like every day for several weeks it looked worse and worse and worse because the Turks were really good at outmaneuvering them. But, you know, it seemed like the Turks' goal was to try to get Salman, the king, to kind of take some power away from MBS, to push him aside. And I think in the eyes of the world,

the Turks won by kind of exposing his horror and making MBS look like a murderer. But ultimately, they lost because he has more power than ever. And so MBS is playing a long game where right now it looks really bad. And like in an electoral, in a democracy, we elect the president, this would be, you know, this is a horrible scandal, but he's looking, you know, 40 or 50 years down the road. And so MBS is, he could be king for 50 years. So, you know, I think that he can lose and sometimes still win. Yeah.

It's interesting what they can do in that country too as well. You saw right away they started buying the, I think at one point, they were kind of pseudo-holding hostage one of Khashoggi's children, and then they pretty much bought the family off. And I don't know how I feel about that. I remember reading the stories going, I don't know how i feel about that i remember the stories going i don't know you feel if you offer me 10 million you killed my dad but i don't know we can talk about it um but i mean i guess that once the tragedy has happened is what it is but i think at one point they were they were kind of holding someone in saudi arabia uh kind of like uh like one of the palatial things.

I was going to make a joke earlier, too, about the guys who got stuck at the Ritz-Carlton. They should at least be glad they didn't get stuck at Motel 6. So, you know, there's that. But your book is really timely. Saudi Arabia just handed down the final ruling, so I'm going to put that in quotes, in Jamal Khashogi's murder uh sentencing eight to prison terms and a lot of the death penalties that were going to be pending on these guys were downgraded because uh the family you know got paid and said and gave them forgiveness

i guess that's the whole it's a really freaking weird setup because you're just like the system right then the justice system there has a provision for you know blood money where if you have a family member who's murdered um you can reach an agreement with the the murderer to pay you some money and you know either get off or not be killed or have lesser charges and it's it's very foreign to us you know um it's very foreign to us, you know. It's also, again, a place where I think some of the rules or the laws are maybe not, are often, you know, interpretations of Islamic law. It's not like here, like the laws are a little more clear.

Like you look at your state laws, the sentencing guidelines, and it's not like that. Yeah. And what's interesting is, I was just reading, too, I can't remember who reported it. It might have been Wampo. They're reporting that there was a huge ramp-up. But I think, like you say, he's won in the end, because I don't know if he'll fully ever recover from the Khashoggi killings.

But it definitely sends a message to your enemies. Like, don't screw with me, man. You'll end up. Yeah, intentional or not, it's a very clear message. And, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's hard to imagine. And that will always be a stain for him. Partially because of the brutality, but partially because of the asymmetry between what the guy was doing

and what was done to him. You know, he was criticizing, he was criticizing people, people criticize people every day and then he gets head chopped off, you know? So, um, yeah, I, I agree, but it does send the message. I think it's very clear to people in Saudi Arabia right now. And as we've written, it's a case of people outside Saudi Arabia, like some of these dissidents who have their Twitter accounts hacked and remember had actually taken against them that, um, you know, you know, it can be very unsafe to question him, even gently.

Yeah. You know, recently, and I think you guys cover this in the book, he goes to war with Russia over oil and oil prices and oil control, doesn't he? I mean, this is one of the kind of like stunning world events that we've all forgotten about in the COVID times. But yeah, and it's another one of these sort of, you know, maybe giant miscalculations. But for several years, you know, the price of oil has been depressed for 2014. And for several years, Russia and the OPEC countries, which is basically Saudi Arabia, had this agreement that they were going to keep oil production down

to keep the price up. And it's this kind of difficult, it's just a tough situation because what everyone wants is for everyone else to produce less oil and make it sell more oil. And so the negotiation is always hard, but things got tense with Russia. And in his consolidation of power, MBS put one of his older brothers in charge of the oil ministry in Saudi Arabia. So he has a brother who is our half brother who's in charge of oil in the past. It was always, you know, a non-royal.

And so they got frustrated with Russia and decided, you know, we've had enough of haggling with Russia over trying to keep oil production low. We can weather low oil prices much better than they can. So we're going to screw them and we're just going to flood the world with oil. And so Saudi Arabia, like, you know, increased the production of oil, like drove the price down. It's a record oil price fall. And I think sort of miscalculated how Putin would react. And, you know, I think Putin and MBS are similar in the sense that it's very hard to pressure either of them.

Like when you try to back either of them into a corner, there's never any backing down. And, you know, Putin didn't back down, and eventually they all had to reach an agreement and come back to it. Out of a combination of anger and an expectation to be able to pressure Russia, they tanked the world oil

price, put a bunch of American fracking companies on the brink of extinction, and had all sorts of collateral effects that were not like of concern to them who actually won that battle because i mean i know putin basically sits on a giant gas station that's pretty much the russian economy yeah i know i mean it's such a hard question because again like you know putin's old and uh you know when putin's gone who knows what happens

with russian politics but MBS is young. Once he becomes king, he could reign for decades, but also he has his family's, he has the family rule at heart, so he's looking much further down the road. So in the short term,

it doesn't really look like Saudi Arabia won because they gave up a lot of money. They sold something that they could sell for a lot of money for very little money in huge volumes to reach a short-term political goal that they appear to have not reached. But in the long run, maybe there's value in showing the world. Something to understand, since the 70s, one of the tacit foundations of the American-Saudi alliance is that Saudi Arabia

will not screw with world oil supply. Since the oil embargo, the U.S. was very dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no matter what it is, but the idea was that Saudi Arabia is going to keep pumping oil no matter what political issues there are. And one message MBS is sending is like, you know what? I'm willing to screw with oil prices. I'm willing to upend oil prices i'm willing to

to upend the oil market in furtherance of my goals and that's a message you know similar to the kashobi thing that like you're communicating something to the rest of the world that could be of value for decades do you guys get in the book we had yesterday we had on uh seth abramson uh proof of corruption his third book in the trilogy. And we talked a little bit about the Saudis' interest in nuclear power plants with the Trump administration, Jared Kushner. And, of course, I believe they got some of the nuclear technology that puts them on the precipice of becoming nuclear power if they gear their stuff right.

Yeah, some of my colleagues in the journal have written recently that they're working on some uh non-public nuclear projects and so far it looks like power generation but you know like their biggest fear is iran you know it's it's nearby and they are long-standing enemies and when you talk to people in the Saudi royal court or in the UAE, their ally, they speak of the Persians. They don't talk about Iran. They talk about the Persians as if it's a people with a history

of having an empire that's long been at odds with the Arabs. They see it as a deep historical enmity. And the idea that Iran has nuclear weapons and Saudi Arabia is at a disadvantage is intolerable for them. So I think that it's hard to imagine they wouldn't be pursuing that.

Yeah. And I guess there's they wouldn't be pursuing that. Yeah. And I guess there's some details that go into that. I mean, we recently saw, I watched a video, I think last night, where it was Jared Kushner with his punchable face, I should mention. Very punchable face. Not that I would punch his face, but I'm just saying it's a very punchable face. He always reminds me of that Ack Ack dude from Martians Will Invade or whatever. But they were on the flight, that first

flight that now goes directly from Saudi Arabia to, I believe, Israel. And so that was kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think Krishna showed up watching the flight. So UAE recognized Israel, which is more symbolic than anything else.

It's not like, you know, there was this long-standing war between the United Arab Emirates and Israel itself. But, you know, UAE is Saudi Arabia's closest ally in the region. And UAE recognized Israel. And in that first flight, it flew through Saudi airspace. And Kusher went over there. And in a way, this is, you know, I think the Trump administration is framing it as like a giant foreign policy win for the U.S. I think what it looks like is the UAE, in a way,

was sort of sending out like a trial balloon to kind of see what reaction is in the Gulf region. And if it's not too, you know, if it wasn't too negative a reaction, I think, you know, Saudi Arabia would consider following, partially because they really have softened their approach to Israel. Because, you know, a generation ago, the Palestinian cause was of deep importance to the Saudis. And I think they got frustrated with, you know, with the Palestinians, I think they sort of lost interest. And at the same time, MBS has embraced Israeli military and

like intelligence technology. And there's been this sort of not so private, private relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel about sharing technology. And as we write in the book, you know, one of the big projects is a sort of city-state he's going to build from scratch in the Northwest. It's quite close to Israel, and they've had talks on bringing Israeli technology in there. So the idea of formalizing the relationship in the historical context sounds like insane and unthinkable, but really it wouldn't be that different from the status quo right now.

And it would also, if it came before the election, be something that Donald Trump could say, look what I have to show. I got Saudi Arabia to come to peace with Israel after all these decades. So it could be like a big kind of pre-election boost for him. Maybe we can have one of those Clinton moments where Assad, was it Assad?

And who was it? I forget the gentleman's name. I think it was assassinated. But they shook on the White House lawn. Remember that moment? It was like the biggest farce ever. It wasn't Assad. I don't know.

I don't remember. The old brain's going in the old age. Yeah, it's interesting. Maybe they see Iran as like, maybe we should just be better friends with Israel because we got Iran to deal with. Did you get that, Justin? Maybe, I think the audio broke up.

So maybe they just see Iran as a bigger enemy than Israel? That's precisely it. I mean, that's sort of what, in MBS's view of the world, Israel is not an enemy. Israel is someone with historical tension. Israel is an enemy, but Iran is a biggest enemy, and Iran is Israel's biggest enemy. And the enemy of my enemy has become a much more powerful thing now that, you know,

the Saudi-Iran tension is much more kind of visceral than it was before. You know, the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen is sort of a proxy war with Iran. So it's just become a lot. Iran has become much more of a priority than Israel. There you go. That's the, I love how you said that. The enemy of my enemy. It is, was there anything that surprised you in the book that stood out that you went, holy moly, a lot.

Like that's one of the reasons we wrote the book is because like everything, everything was really surprising. But one thing that we've written about and talked about a that it sort of outlined what his vision is for Saudi Arabia. So this is going to be a place where it has its own governance system. Every aspect of governance reports to him. The courts, law enforcement, everything reports up to MBS. And there's 100% surveillance of everyone there at all times. He wants an international population of highly educated people working in tech.

He wants to have like world-class resorts and industry and living. And he kind of wants it all in the same place. And it shows this vision he has for saudi arabia which is a place that simultaneously you know has the trappings of freedom with the security of like an iron-fisted monarchy and it's something that is you know hasn't i mean maybe china is even the model and china doesn't have the oil money china and that doesn't have that incredible you know per capita wealth but it's a model where you kind of have the freedom to make money and the freedom to you know eat out at a nice restaurant and to take a flying robot taxi but you don't have to say in your own governance, there's been no,

um, move to, to sort of give the Saudi people their own, um, any like self-determination. And to me, that's continually surprising, even though it's like the most basic defining factor there.

He's like Putin who cares and has empathy, wants something better for his country in the future, but he's like Putin who cares and has empathy, wants something better for his country in the future, but he's still Putin. Kind of like a mix of all this. So, any last things we need to know about your guys' great book? Yeah, you know, I think, something I think that

we often lose sight of, meaning Bradley and I, when we talk about it, is to us, at least, the story's so interesting, like the palace intrigue and what happens within Saudi Arabia, the decisions he makes to do things. But he's an incredibly important person internationally, especially in, well, you know, in sort of the geopolitics, but in business and in America as well. And that's, you know, another one of the most surprising things is, you know, his vision for Saudi Arabia is to move the country away

from its dependence on oil and create a diversified economy. And he thinks one way to do that is to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in international tech companies. So he's the world's biggest venture capitalist. And a lot of this tech bubble we see

where, you know, dog walking companies are getting tens of millions of dollars for dogs like you know so things that you look at and you're like like are you assuming that like like like like an unending infinite growth in the number of dogs and people who will pay a lot like these things are like on the surface like the value doesn't work out. That bubble is being pumped up with Saudi money. So many of these things we've seen in America,

especially in California, with these insane tech valuations, and WeWork is probably the poster child. These companies are like, you can't understand why they're so valuable, but all of a sudden,

they're everywhere. They're in our face. It's MBS's sort of belief that if he takes a huge amount of money and says, we're going to innovate, we're going to make a lot of money, that it can happen.

That's what's behind it. And that's something that I think is important to remember. Yeah, it's really interesting to watch because my background is Silicon Valley and tech and what we've always done on the show. I believe he owned a lot of investment into SoftBank. And, of course, SoftBank's crazy investments, especially with, like you mentioned we work over 40 billion dollars into the soft bank fund for the vision fund that is you know they're the ones that boosted we work and it was clear that it was an office rental company they decided it was a tech company and we know what happened there and

so yeah you know it was it's his his's his willingness to make these gigantic financial bets without, like, a whole lot of due diligence that has kind of had profound economic effects. Yeah, I really see him as a really smart guy. I don't see him as a crazy madman. I see him as calculating. Maybe he's cunning when he needs to be. I like what he's doing for Saudi Arabia. It seems to be bringing in the world.

You know, people aren't throwing rocks as much. Like, well, women can't drive, and they don't have rights. And I think he sees, too, as not only that's a good thing, but it helps him retain power because we've seen the Arab Spring, you know, uprisings that that overthrew a lot of these autocrats they're like he can't have anything and i get everything and you know he realizes much like the machiavellian prince that uh you've got a balance you've got to somehow create a balance between the two um i i think i wish the war in yemen would stop or at

least the trump administration would help stop it, which they won't. But that's a whole new bag of whatever. So there you go. Guys, pick up the book. It's available now from Amazon and other resources, Blood and Oil, Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck, who's been here with us today. I love the book. I mean, getting to understand this guy, and this guy's young.

He's going to be a player in the world for the next, I don't know, 70 years or whatever. Anything more you want to give us your plugs as we go out, Justin? No, no, that's it. No, there's much more in the book. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been enjoyable. Thank you. It's been a wonderful discussion, too, to get into this guy

because I just find him curious and more leaders. And, of course, I'm probably going to have to live with him, and hopefully I stay on his nice side. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it. Good night. Thank you very much, Justin. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in.

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