Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 54: Gulf State Vanity Projects

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

we kidnapped Séamus Malekafzali and held him hostage while we talked about the dumb shit rich saudis build check out Séamus's substack: https://malekafzali.substack.com/ slides: https://youtu.be/PW6lg-7L7yk patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp

Right. It's not called trash. It's called recycle bin. That's right. I always have trouble with that. Recycle bin future. What am I recycling? It's just data. What's more eco-conscious this way, Ross? A bunch of reference photos of the various national banks of the US. That's it.

Wait, how are you out of storage? I have given you so many storage devices in my life. Yeah, and we made a video podcast. Oh, yeah. Wow. You got to start deleting the old ones. You got to make like lost episodes. Oh, no. Oh, no. What, Ross?

Okay. I'm excited. Let me swap. And we just want to feel like recording. We just repost like the dead cast used to do. This is like, nah, we're not doing this. Okay. I believe everything is going. Everyone can see the thing, right? Yeah, I can see the thing.

I have a monster energy. I have a thing. I'm fine. Wait, hold on. Hold on. Let me actually see if I have enough space on my computer. Oh, Christ. This thing is like 100 gigabytes of storage. It's not great. That's so goddamn depressing.

At least you can hear you. 100 hours worth of recording. I have 50 gigs. I have 50 gigs. 46.3 terabytes available on the server. God, I'm so fucking jealous. Good for you, Liam. Thank you, Ross.

How many hard drives have I given you? So many hard drives, Ross. And what do you do with them? You squandered them. Just like you squandered your head. And you disappoint your father. You just like your father. He's not at all like his father.

That's the funny part. Okay. I guess we're podcasting now. Yeah, I guess we are. Yeah. Okay, let's go for it. All right. What is a podcast? This thing that we're doing right now.

This is a podcast called, Well, There's Your Problem. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters which also has slides. I am Justin Rosnick, the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him.

Okay. I'm Alice Gordwell-Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Liam. Hey, that's me. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he, him.

Hi, I'm Shamus Malik Afsili. I'm a reporter and my pronouns are he, him. Oh, yeah. We got a guest. We got a guest. We got a guest who's talking about. I just felt I should explain I'm not on this podcast regularly.

I don't know if any new listeners here think I'm here. No, I'm not. Very well, there's your problem. Welcome to Shamus. It has been on Trash Teacher a bunch of times because we're going to talk about Gulf State mega projects.

Yes. We're going to talk about all the wonderful things happening in or around the Persian Gulf with regard to sometimes building things. But usually getting halfway through and giving up. So, you know, but first we have to do the goddamn news. Yeah, I got the right job this time. Look at you.

I'm learning. Oh, shit. Where did you find this picture? Where did you find this picture? Who told you? I told you, do not post this on the Internet. Lots. I'm very disappointed.

OK, we got to we got to talk about Marjorie Taylor Green, who is a freshman congressional representative from Georgia's 14th district. Some Facebook posts of hers resurfaced recently. Where she alleged the existence of a Jewish space laser. I want to clarify, as the only Jewish person on this podcast, it is real, folks. I do got to say to that one guy on Twitter

who's been pissing me off all day by trying to be an edgy Nazi, but he's not so good at it. Specifically, I will and you'll probably have to bleep this. I will take the Jewish space laser and your nuts clean off your body. So that's right. Marjorie Taylor Green said in a Facebook post two years ago that there was a nefarious plot afoot where a Rothschild owned space laser was being used to start wildfires in California

in order to clear space for high speed rail. 00:04:58,960 --> 00:05:00,880 I'm just thinking about the like energy, sort of the energy cost of that. We did the estimates. OK, we're going to do rods for the gods. But yeah, there's so many easy ways to start like California. Northern California by this point is like kindling entirely.

And yet and yet you guys looked at this and you said, no, we're going to be extra. We're going to do a space laser. And I appreciate that. I love that. Thank you. You know, we I will at the next cabal meeting, I will pass along your feedback.

Now, you're Muslim, so I'll probably get thrown in gulag. But yeah, wouldn't it be rods from God singular? Yeah, it was just God. Yeah, that's why we went with the laser because we could only have one rod. There's only one God. You know how it works out. Talmud forbids us from, you know, multiple rod gods.

So we figured I fucking space laser, right? You know, you go do the estimates, you go talk to Rabbi Herschel and he's just off. Well, the concept of it had to say about this. And then you're on the phone to the fucking hedge funds and being like, guys, we have to fucking cover. And they're just like, no, we don't. You don't even come to shul.

And then you're calling your mama at 2 a.m. and being like, mom, can I please borrow 200 billion dollars? I need a split laser. I was just like, how come you never visit me? I've got the abominance, but we never saw you again. And I'm just out of here at 2 a.m. talking to some asshole, you know, New York rabbi who thinks he's fucking better than me.

No, no, no. OK, we went with the space laser. You're welcome. Why not? Why not have locks from the gods? I don't like locks. I think I might have a two on those. I'm thinking you drop a giant bagel from orbit

and it sort of rolls across the landscape, right? Thereby clearing a linear path for high speed rail. Was this like your flying crowbar idea where we figured you could just drop shit out the back if I think was moving fast enough and that could be an effective bomber? Yes, but this one is a bagel. Who likes unleavened bread now?

Try your leavened houses. I hate to bring this back to earth necessarily, but I am I am always kind of intrigued by the Jewish space laser thing, because like KKK guys talk about it, like a pretty substantial amount. And like the rough strands are kind of like shady and all that.

Like you don't see what they do. But if they are like a space laser, it would be like kind of obvious to see. That's bad. Do I look up? There's a giant laser coming down and then nobody sees it. There's no video of it.

But we're just supposed to assume that there's this giant thing up in space that you can't see. These are super laser. You can't see. These are the people who honestly believe the sky is a shield planted by the government so that you can't see God.

Oh, yeah. They got the pharmacist. Yeah, the pharmacist who like destroyed a bunch of COVID vaccine doses said that he thought that the sky was fake. Yeah. Is it what what? He said that he thought it was like it was designed

so that you couldn't look up and see God. Oh, is that like a biblical Furman thing? Yeah, I thought that God made the Furman though. Yeah. No, that was the government. Actually, that was us too. You're welcome. We got there first and we thought,

oh, one God, no one else should be able to look at him. But for the right price, I can get you through the Furman. There's a side entrance somewhere and you're going to walk up a bunch of stairs and it's like, yep, you can see God. Yeah, he's smaller than you expected. It's just escalator land.

Dante's Inferno would have taken a lot less time if we had installed the elevators and the escalators. They install they install one of those elevators that runs on Sabbath mode. Oh, yeah, that was the fucking worst, dude. You're just in there and you're like looking around being like, yeah, I know these are kind of my people, but they're not really my people.

And I wish you wouldn't. And I wish I didn't have to stop at every fucking floor. And they're like at some rabbi is just like, oh, do you want to come to synagogue with me and my family? And you're like, no, dude, I want to snort a bunch of coke, drink too much beer, eat some fucking pizza and pass out. That's what God intended for us. You're just adding extra steps.

So I think in summation, I wish we lived in this world where there was a Jewish space laser. Thank you. I will pass that along. Yeah, it'll be cool. Also, I thought she like, I didn't know that it was a KKK thing before her. I thought she invented it. But no, none of her like weirdness is original.

Very, very derivative. Yeah, it's very unfortunate. But no, Jewish space laser is unfortunately more widespread than I think most people think. We'll get you. Have no fear. All right. So I wanted to, this episode's called Gulf State Vanity Projects.

I kind of wanted to first define what's a vanity project, right? Why is the Comcast Tower sideways? Because that's the only way I could fit it on the slide. Oh, okay. No, it's a radical new approach for building skyscrapers. You just take 170 kilometers line in one direction. It's a radical new approach to making slides, which is that I had a couple of beers when I put this one together.

Stories from wayside school. Yes. This whole thing is going to kind of be like that. So like, okay, I guess some examples of vanity projects. Here's some right in Philly, right? Stuff like, I'm going to say convention centers, stadiums, skyscrapers, casinos, stuff like that. Large impressive structures that have sort of questionable returns on investment, right?

You sort of do these structures to say, you've made it, you're here, you're a real organization city, whatever, rather than maybe purposes of sound investing or economy of construction, right? Yeah, we talked about the World Trade Centers on 9-11, building a World Trade Center is kind of one of these. Yes. Sometimes you deal with private money, sometimes corporations con a local government to doing tax subsidies, right? So they can do the vanity project at no risk.

That's every stadium. So I thought maybe we'd look at a few recent ones that are close to home by America's closest analog to an absolute monarch that's Andrew Cuomo. Oh yeah, I saw these. Oh God, there was a gaudy fucking thing on the planet. Jesus. Two that were sort of forced through by Andrew Cuomo over the past decade. We had the Oculus at the World Trade Center Transportation Center, right?

This is Santiago Calatrava building. So of course it was a giant, it ran over budget and it was just generally miserable for everyone to put together. But they built this large impressive supposedly a train station. What it actually is is a mall and there's sort of a train station tucked away in a corner, right? That's so fucking depressing. That's all stations now. We talked about this with Houston.

Although, fun fact, we talked about this on the, God, I think it might have been the King's Cross fire, but we talked about Houston station getting remodeled and they're just not doing that anymore. So that's cool. Yeah. So we can't even in Britain, we can't even finish our mega projects. Well, you're in good company. Another one is the Moynihan train hall that just got finished a couple of weeks ago.

And this is sort of, it's a nicer train hall for Penn station, except that whenever you leave a train, you end up in the normal Penn station and not this one. You have to actively seek out this train hall to experience it, rather than using them. 00:13:08,880 --> 00:13:09,600 This is sort of- If you're a big fan of arches, then you can go and experience this one. It's like, it's tucked away in a corner. It doesn't solve any of the problems that actually the station has in terms of circulation.

This is again, it doesn't do anything, but it looks nice. I do believe though, that this one would be worse for sleeping in, say at 4.30 in the morning. After you and your idiot friend missed the last train back to Philly, and therefore you're just sitting there eating Russian pizza at 4am until they kick you out. Russian pizza? Russian pizza. Keep Russian pizza. There's a weird pizza place at Penn station run by Russians.

Roz and I went to the Harvard Yale game in New Haven, Connecticut. And then we came back to New York, and we got a few beers. And then a few beers turned into a few more beers. And then it was 1am, and we realized we had missed the train. So we spent all night on, we took the A line all the way out to Rockaway, and then it started lightning and thundering on the beach. So Roz got scared, and then we had to take the A line all the way fucking back into Manhattan. And then we had nowhere to go for like an hour and a half.

So we sat there and fell asleep against a pillar. And then some cops came and bothered us for no good fucking reason. And we had to explain that we were waiting for the train, and thank God because we're white, they were just like, oh, okay. And then we got on the train. What are you doing here loitering in a train station? I'm waiting for a train. The one good place you should be allowed to like loiter with no questions.

I slept in European train stations for a week and no one said shit to me. But again, great privilege coming in handy there. Yes. So I will say I couldn't take a nap in the Moynihan train hall. Not so well. I don't think it's going to say there's no seating. Fucking ridiculous. Very need to sit to wait for their trains.

Very dumb. But let's get to where we're supposed to go in this podcast, which is the Persian Gulf. All right, I'll bite. Where is that? You see where it says Persian Gulf right here? That's where it is. Next to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Hey, we did this without drinks well this time. Yeah, we have a different well this time. So I thought we'd start by talking a little bit about oil production. Right. So let's say we have an idealized anarcho-capitalist fantasy laissez-faire capitalist system, right? How would oil production work? Well, you and your child slaves would drill and would sink an oil well yourself.

Right. And then you would take that oil and you would you would sell it to like a more successful anarcho-capitalist. Of course, yes. But you'd have many oil producers also using their child slaves to also sink oil wells, right? And they'd be then having to compete on price with each other, right? And this drives down the price of oil to just underneath the cost of production at some point, right?

At which point the largest oil producers with the greatest economies of scale can easily force the small producers out of business, since oil is very fungible, right? There's not a lot of benefit to getting a specific kind of oil over another specific type of crude oil. I mean, there's some differences, but that's beyond the scope of this podcast, right? There's not really room for a boutique oil production company, right? Yeah. Oh, you have a little faith.

Me and my artisanal well-sinking company, we're going to get you like a little fucking like plastic thing of Brent crude that you can keep on your desk and like slosh around. And we'll spell it O-E-L. Yeah. So fuck with you. Oiler, but it's spelled like oil off. Are you from Birmingham? Yeah, earlier.

You know, as a result of this, after a short period of chaos in the oil market, either a monopoly or a cartel of large producers of oil emerges and they go on to monopolize oil production in other markets and crowd out competition and you get standard oil, right? Capitalism is so fucking good, man. Yeah. And this happens very quickly. Everything I just said happened in just over a couple years in the sort of post-bellum oil boom in Northwest Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, right?

You know, and at this point, instead of oil producers competing with each other, you've got the big cartel of oil companies negotiating prices with a few large customers in favorite railroads, which transport the product and they're setting prices arbitrarily for everyone else, right? And, you know, you wield so much market power that you're hated by everyone and you get broken up by the government in 1911 into several smaller companies that continue to run the same cartel just informally and you start to seek new sources of product abroad, where monopoly is more tolerated, right?

So, the Standard Oil Company of California, this is no longer hypothetical. This is what actually happened. Okay. Abandoning this extended metaphor. Yeah. In reality, everything, the only thing that didn't happen there, I guess they did, they had child labor, they didn't have child slaves. Tomato, tomato, bud.

Yeah, we apologize formally to the former Standard Oil Company. The former Standard Oil Company of California for implying that they had a rough body and child slave system instead of merely a child labor system. Listen, you know, the contract is sacred. Those kids entered into a contract freely. So, you know, the Standard Oil Company of California looked to the recently formed and at that time, fairly poor kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is an absolute monarchy, reliant on revenue from the Hajj and a tiny bit of crappy agriculture.

And they were like, well, this is a desert, there may be oil here, right? You know, so Saudi Arabia granted a concession to the American Arabian Oil Company in 1933. In 1938, they struck the largest. Or Ramco, if you want, to keep that name in the forefront of your mind. So, in 1938, they struck the largest oil reserve yet known at Goar, right? I don't know if I pronounced that right. This is, this is, I think right on this podcast anyway. I would have to see the original.

Yeah. This is, this is Dam Man Well, number seven, the first product. Dam Man Well. Damn, man. Damn. It was crazy, though. It's the first productive well in Saudi Arabia. It's somewhere right around here-ish, right?

You know, so they start ramping up production in the, in Saudi Arabia over time, while various factions of former standard oil squabbled over the precise division of ownership to maintain their cartel. And suddenly the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, found itself with a lot of what are called petrodollars, right? Yeah, the best of the regular dollars, because they come pre-washed in petrol. Yes. You know, so it's so named because the United States, you know, pays for oil in dollars.

And when you're receiving a whole lot of dollars, like on this scale, you can't really go down to the airport and go to the courage to exchange place and, you know, trade them in for local currency. Right. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. So, you know, and because the House of Saud is an absolute monarchy, they immediately spend all their petrodollars on bullshit and go into a lot of debt. Okay. That's how it happens, yeah.

So I'll cut a really long story short here because I was researching this and it was fascinating, but I was like, I gotta keep the introduction kind of short. King Ibn Sa'd started running out of cash. He's threatened to nationalize Aramco if they didn't split profits with him 50-50. The various investors in Aramco did not like this idea. No, threatening to nationalize your state oil company is the kind of shit that gets you suicided with a bunch of bullets in the back of the head, yeah. Yeah, it gets you killed, yeah.

Yeah, there's definitely there's some back room dealings going on here, which I don't fully understand. The U.S. government swooped in with something called the golden gimmick, right? So the government would give Aramco and Aramco at this point was owned by Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York and Texaco. They would give those companies tax credits equal to the profit share they were given to giving to the king, right? Well, I mean, the short answer is like the Saudis successfully bought more of the U.S.

than the U.S. wanted to coup them. And you know, that's the house of Saud's like real sort of earning of their fortune, right? It's like, instead of somebody like, say, Mossadik in Iran, right, it turns out you can just call these people up on the phone and say, hey, do you want several million dollars to not coup me? And they tend to say, yes. Yeah, I'm not sure why you didn't think of that before. And it's like, I mean, if you consider just buying up everything in the United States

and then they won't coup you, we'll get to that in a second. That sounds verbose. The Venezuelan social democratic government starts forming, starts the process to form something called OPEC, right? The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is basically an oil cartel, which was based on the Texas Railroad Commission. Yes. Texas Railroad Commissioner is probably the most powerful elected office in the United States.

The Texas Railroad Commissioner could theoretically unilaterally shut down oil production in the U.S. Good Lord. Yeah, I know, right? There's your fucking shadow government, you know. Fuck the Jewish space laser. It's one... Who is the Texas Railroad Commissioner?

I'm going to find out this guy, because I've been playing Hitman 3 all week, and it's made my brain as perfectly smooth as a cantaloupe. Texas Railroad Commissioner. Actually, don't regulate railroads anymore. I think the last... No, they don't. Yeah. And there's two of them.

They do cover imports and exports, like letters of credit, too. When I worked for Capital One, yes. Jill working in finance, who could believe it? I had to deal with the Texas Railroad Commission quite a bit, and they are the most fun-sucking group of assholes I could ever imagine. Genuinely looking at them, a more shadow government group I could not imagine. Like, they all have two nice teeth. Two of them have goatees.

It's just... It's real bad. Are any of them wearing a bollow tie? No. No, no. That's something. One of them's wearing pinstripes, man. That's how you know it's some deep state shit.

Roz. I was just thinking, I was thinking, you know, I'd be like a relaxed, you know, Texas style affair. No, it's buttoned down, boring, fucking shitty. Like, I was thinking this would be a jeans and sport code type thing, but I guess not. Maybe a big, big 10-gallon hat, too. I guess not.

You know, limousine with the big long horn on front, you know. It's like diva dope limousine, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You get a link to this. Everyone just calls you boss, and then you're surname. So, Venezuela encourages the House of Saad to join OPEC, right, and nationalize its production. You know, yeah, exactly.

House of Saad here doing praxis by nationalizing their oil, right? Congratulations to the first person in human history to say that sentence. So, Saudi Arabia joins OPEC. They start buying up large parts of the Ramco. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War happens between Egypt, Syria, and Israel, and everyone else. OPEC supports Egypt and Syria by doing an oil embargo against America and Western Europe, which results in chaos and pandemonium, right? Oil prices skyrocket.

There's lines at gas stations. An actual riot broke out in the middle of Levitown, Pennsylvania. They started banning driving on Sundays, and horror of horrors. There were serious policy proposals that the United States do. Crazy things like electrify railroads and build public transportation, right? The damn near made the United States a better country by accident. But we were rescued by Israel pulling back across the Suez Canal, right? Yeah, before I get canceled again for being a Zionist in courts, that was a joke.

That was a joke. What you're doing is just like doing Zionism as acceleration. I was about to say it. You just did more Zionism. We would have better public transportation in the United States. The IDF rolls into Cairo. Big domino. You can get an electric train from fucking Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh.

If only, Alice. If only, right? So we could get it partially there. At this point, at this point, Saudi Arabia moves to buy the rest of the Ramco with all its new petrodollars from the spike in oil prices. At this point, they become an oil company with a vestigial state attached to it, right? This is where I want to kind of talk about what the petrodollar is, right? If I'm getting the politics wrong, Seamus, please step in and interrupt me.

All right. Go for it. I wanted to explain petrodollar recycling the best way I thought was to use a metaphor, which is the House of Sod is a lot like a podcast with a Patreon, right? Okay. I'm listening. You were so proud of this bit. I know, right?

Let's look at our hypothetical podcast. I'm going to call it Chapo Trap House of Sod. All I want to be has been Salman. Yes. If you're listening to the audio only part of this podcast or version of this podcast, you're missing the... It's such a shame that it would be shameless copyright infringement to sell a shirt with that on it because I passly want one.

Yeah, we get sued. We get sued by Chapo Trap House. I could fight, Chris. So there's some similarities between podcasting and oil extraction, right? Oh, boy. Oil extraction. What do you do? Buy a pipe.

You stick it in a hole in the ground, right? And oil comes out on its own real easy, right? Podcasting is similar. You buy a microphone. You stick it in your face hole, right? And the content comes out on its own, right? Oh, yeah. You think we can control this?

No, we'd just be doing this to dead mics. So the content's very cheap to produce and thus can be sold for a very cheap price and production to be scaled up and down easily. And demand only seems to be increasing, right? So this is good. You're making a bunch of money. You want to reinvest some of that money into the podcast, right? Maybe you buy new microphones.

Maybe you improve your recording room setup. Maybe you get a more powerful workstation. Ah, crap. I moved. Talking of which. You know, you accidentally switched all the slides there. Where was I? Maybe you buy a commercial.

As you can see, we have done none of this. Yeah, maybe you buy a commercial Adobe license or something. But there's only so much you can do to invest in a podcast production values. You know, podcasting is inherently cheap business, right? You know, next option you have is you can buy a lot of dumb shit. You know, maybe you can buy like a nice car. Maybe you can buy your gamer PC with a big gamer chair. Sword.

Get a bigger apartment. Yeah, get a sword. Shut the fuck up. Okay. I had this before. I did literally buy a sword last month because of this podcast. So in the house of south, have that in common. We just got to get you guys some and we can do the fucking sword dance.

Oh, shit. Yeah, we need to get an orb. We just do. Oh, I can borrow one from the cabal. He's got an old storage. Yeah. Yeah, I'll just have to go. Ross, you're Catholic.

So you got to be the sacrificial lamb, baby boy. You, you are going to die in the process of doing this, but Lord, that's a sacrifice of willing to make, you know. So again, you sort of run into a limit with the amount of money you can spend on yourself. Eventually, if you don't want this money just sitting around, you go like invest it or donate the charities or whatever. And this is where podcasting actually becomes a little different from oil extraction in Saudi Arabia, right?

Oh, I'm still following. Yeah, you know, Patreon or PayPal pays out in your local currency. Oil is paid for in dollars. This is for complex reasons and Henry Kissinger. For a commercial scale, you can't really do currency exchange like you can with PayPal. So that means when you're receiving money for your oil in dollars, you have to buy things with dollars, right? So this results in petrodollar recycling money.

It's not money laundering because it's legal. When we pay Saudi Arabia in dollars for oil, the Saudis have to go and buy things with dollars. So they invest in companies which can make use of dollars, right? So, you know, in the first oil shock of the late 70s, the Saudis made a whole lot of money and all that money was recycled right back to the United States and they just bought a bunch of treasury bonds, right? They also bought, you know, real estate, stocks, bonds, luxury goods, etc., etc., right? Not so much was invested into Saudi Arabia itself because Saudi Arabia, again, is like

a podcast. There's at this point in its development. It's three guys in game of chess. At this point in the development of Saudi Arabia, the population was pretty low. There was underdeveloped infrastructure. So there was only so much money you could spend domestically, right? Even on improvements, just because of the pace of the infrastructure required, right? You can't build a highway until you have asphalt.

You can't make asphalt without a hot mix plant. You got to import the hot mix plant from the West somehow, which means you need a port, right? How do you build the port? Well, you need some asphalt, right? So, you know, you can't quite invest. It's harder to invest in an area with underdeveloped infrastructure. There's only so much money you can throw at it, right? You keep running into different limiting factors.

Yeah. So, you know, at this point, I think in the 70s, the only substantial non-oil infrastructure in the country was a railroad from Daman to Riyadh, right? Which the king got a lot of shit for building because all the other Saudi royals were like, no, that's a dumb idea. You should spend this on girls and cars, not a railroad. One of us, one of us. But yeah, there's not so many internal improvements.

You couldn't do so much, even if you had all the money in the world to throw out the problem. You know, the limiting factor here is sort of time and resources rather than money, right? They also spent a lot of money on some unsavory shit we'll get to later. Journalists moonwalking out of Conchiller. Yes, right. So, the first round of cash is sort of tempered by stagflation and mostly resulted in investments in Western firms. But decade later, a much more industrialized Saudi Arabia

reaps the benefits of another spike in the price of oil and decided to try and invest it domestically in incredibly stupid ways, which is what we're going to talk about today. And 30 minutes through the intro. Oh, God, 37 minutes. Shame if I'm so sorry for getting you into this. Yeah. No, no, it's fine.

I'm learning a lot about how podcasts can be extrapolated onto the world. Yeah, they start a similar process is happening in Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, or Qatar, whatever it's called, Kuwait. So on and so forth. It gives a shit. Yeah. It's a lot of a lot of different interpretations. And then also like a podcast, the House of Saud.

You have to bring in migrant laborers to tell your work. Exactly, right? Much much like podcast hosts, the members of the House of Saud don't like to work. So instead, they have guests come on the show to fill time. And then afterwards, they don't even know how to do it. And then afterwards, they don't even pay them despite gaining value through the knowledge and labor of the guests. Right?

I pay our guests. I pay the guest ride bonus episodes. Can't hold that against me. I do that. I do that all the way up, all the way up. Thank you to progressive reformist Prince Liam. We're going to have to go back and retroactively pay all the bonus episode guests. Cut that out.

Cut that out. Cut that out. If they start learning that we might pay them, they're all going to want to. This is a good point. Yeah. Do not, my friends, become addicted to money. However, petrochemicals will get there. Gulf states work the same way rather than put their own population to work in Saudi Arabia,

Dubai, UAE, other places they use the kafala system where guest workers are sponsored by contractors and construction companies that come in, do the work of putting buildings up, but then theoretically they can leave. And until fairly recently, if you came in as a guest worker, a lot of times your passport was confiscated on arriving and workers required explicit permission from employers to leave the country, switch jobs, so on and so forth. Right? This is an economic system which rhymes with slavery.

Yes, that's a word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could have said bravery, but I didn't want to make the joke too obscure. So most of these guest workers come from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and some other Middle East countries as well as East Asian. And it's, you know, this has been sort of loosened up recently, right? But it's still not good, right? And I know at least Saudi Arabia still has an exit visa system.

And construction workers get it pretty bad. Domestic workers get it real bad under the system. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can just get disappeared, you know, by anyone. Yeah, and I also should mention to anybody listening or watching who doesn't quite like get the scale of it, in the UAE, like just as an example, the country itself is only 11% Emirati, 60% of the country is from the Indian subcontinent. Oh, yeah.

And they don't have citizenship. They are slave states in all meaningful senses of the word. And the fun thing about being Emirati or being Qatari or being Saudi even is that for a lot of people, there's less true in Saudi because a larger population, but especially in some of these really small states, like basically you get paid a universal basic income and not at all a low one to just be Emirati, just to kind of keep you around instead of like you fuck off to London and you know, do whatever there you open a bar with a play pit. You like, no, but like you end up with like vast subsidies to do everything and just kind of to

exist in this aristocracy, which is cool. I'm just thinking like once your population of disempowered workers really reaches more than 60% of your population, I'm thinking something might happen that rhymes with that Bayesian revolution. Well, like this is the fun thing, right? Is that like every time you see a think tank that's just like kind of slavering for, you know, ladies start your engines, moderate democracy, Clinton style in Saudi Arabia, it's all at, you know, the UAE or wherever else.

It's like, will the Saudi population or the Emirati population rise up if the government stops being able to pay them $100,000 a month to like drive in circles? And it's like, they're not going to stop doing that, man. Yeah. So anyway, let's let's let's let's talk about some of the some of the dumb shit they've done with their money. Right. I thought we'd start with the classic, which is Dubai. The greatest city in the world. Oh, yeah. So do we have any photos in this presentation of what Dubai used to look like back in the 1970s? Three Khrushchevkas on one road, which was not paved.

There's also a building for a Toyota had a building there, I think. Shit, I should have put that in. It's like Dubai is a city in the United Arab Emirates. It's in Emirates itself. It was a small trading post established in the 1700s. They discovered oil in 1966. They got some offshore platforms going afterwards, right? They start moving to diversify the economy fairly early on. They build ports and roads and so on and so forth. Active union creates the modern UAE, December 1971. They start trying to attract Western businesses in by doing like that. What they call the Jebel Ali free economic zone, right? The idea is, if you move your company here,

we won't tax you. Right. So also, we will just sort of take this entire desert and build a large mall over it, both for like Emirates who be shopping because we pay them to and also for Westerners who also love to be shopping. Look, I mean, who can blame them? Everyone loves to be shopping. That's right. People be shopping. People do be shopping. During the first Gulf War, the oil prices started going up. The Emirates started spending it all on thumb shit via the state-owned development company called Nekeel Red. So Dubai has grown rapidly since then. Today is an enormous city. Any guesses as to like a comparable American metro area to Dubai? I know that. I know this is a trick because the Dubai metro populate like there's

almost absolutely nothing outside of the city. It's like the city of London. Like nobody fucking lives there. Oh, it's got to be less. I'm going to say some like some like Pittsburgh, some like Philadelphia. No, it's smaller than Philadelphia, not bigger than Pittsburgh, smaller than Philadelphia. So I was in the right direction, but like I went a little bit too. Yeah. Okay. Dubai is a little bigger than Cleveland, a little smaller than Detroit. Jesus. So let's see what are they spending all their money? What could Cleveland have if it were still an oil town? Well, I mean, personally, one of the things that I would do is I would build more than four desalination plants that my entire city relies on for fresh water

and which are like very prominent on the coast and very vulnerable to say Iran just doing whatever the fuck they want to them. See, there's something much more basic than that, which they didn't spend money on. So if you have an influx of cash, you know, you might build public transportation, water and sewage systems, keep the roads paved, build good workforce housing, get people indoor, plumbing and air conditioning, maybe invest in some sustainable energy and water systems. And of course, in Dubai, instead, they build ultra luxury hotels, right? Class A office space, the middle of a dumb in big, dumb towers, the middle of nowhere, they buy their police department Bugatti's, right? Oh, special interest triggered. I fucking love Gulf state cop cars are my favorite

shit because a like a new car will not come out without some fucking dipshit fail. Some who has been installed as like kernel of the police of that Emirates being like, yeah, I'll take 50 just slap a light on the top of it and it fucking rules. I love it. But in the meantime, they didn't build a sewage system. And I shit in my lamb because this is this is this is a video you can look it up on YouTube of the Dubai poop truck convoys. I thought those were also going in, but that's shit going out. That's poop going out. Yes, good Lord. They have to they have to truck all that. I think they've started work on a sewage system. But for a long time, all these fancy hotels,

office buildings, apartment condo complexes, they all had like basically sewage retention tanks underneath. I hate to I hate to do the thing at all that we always do. Right. But what we're looking at here is a series of large containers of liquids, right, that are all going to the same place from the same place in several in several hundred different autonomous vehicles that have been on the same route. Build a train. No, that's what a train is. Alice. No, you move sewage in pipes. But you could do that too. But like evening, there's an intermediate step. Do the fucking train. Do the train. Yes, you know there are poop. There is actually a train of treated solid waste that used to come down on on the East Coast from New York City.

I think it went down somewhere in like Georgia, Alabama. They don't do this. Yeah, because it got stuck a few years ago. Remember that? Yeah. And people were mad because it was just sitting on a siding for like three weeks. There's no sewage train anymore. There is still a trash train, though. So, you know, this is already expensive stuff. They decided to do it in a particularly dumb and expensive way, which is of course land reclamation. You live in a desert. You live in a desert. You live in a desert. You can go in. You can go in. I forgot about these for a while, just because I knew that they built, I mean, they built all these like the world islands.

The issue is that like the palm jibbalali, like that, you can drive on. But the world islands, you have to like take a boat out there. And there's literally nothing on it. And it's not connected to anything. So who's going to live there? Just like outright when they can just live anywhere else in the city. And it's like hard enough, you know, to get there if you're just trying to travel there. If you're trying to build shit on there, like taking my concrete mixer across and digging. Yeah, exactly. So I guess we'll talk about the land reclamation projects first, because these these have been embarrassing. You know, there's a good reason why you might do land reclamation in the desert, right? You know, so if you're the further you

go inland, the hotter it is, right? You stay near the water, you can, you know, get cooler temperatures, stuff like that. In the past, they sort of mitigated this through traditional development patterns, like old Dubai, which is like right around here is a bunch of four to five story mixed use buildings with very narrow streets, right? So you had a lot of shade. But you know, this is the year we're talking about the year 2000 when Dubai really took off. Yeah. And you've got to like, because you're trying to emulate these sort of things to bring Westerners in, you've got to do like glass and steel skyscrapers all the time. Yes. That's what you want in the desert is to build a giant greenhouse.

Yeah. So, you know, that doesn't look modern. You're not going to impress those Westerners. So you got to start building out in the sea. The first scheme for this was the Palm Islands. They were going to build three of them, right? Get that. The Palm Jamira, that's this guy, Palm Jebel Ali, right? Again, this guy. And then the Palm Dara, Dara, Dara, I don't know, which is you may notice they haven't finished that one. Seems like a problem. Yes. So they get to work. They hire some Dutch firms to come in and start doing land reclamation, right? Oh, we've hired Johannes vonk. Yeah, Johannes vonk, dredging company. Yeah, we got to back up this giant truck of shoe polish.

Yes. This is the used shoe polish. Just using this fill. They finished two of the Palm Islands fairly quickly and then they ran out of money for the third one, right? And then they managed to sell all the housing on the Palm Jamira, right? So this is fully, this is almost fully built out today. It's like a highway that runs down the middle. There's a monorail. There's some luxury hotels along the spine here. And they built a bunch of villas on the fawns. And one of the things is they wound up having to reduce lot sizes after they sold everything to finance the project. And everyone got really mad. Like everyone who bought a house out there was like, Oh, I was supposed to have a, I don't know, like a 45 foot

wide lot. And now I have a 40 foot wide lot. Wait, hold up. Does the world, right, as it is, have a giant sword under Africa? I think that's supposed to be Antarctica, but they couldn't figure out, like, did they want, like they're doing it on like a, on like a Mercator projection thing, but they didn't think about just like not doing Antarctica on it. It's so stupid. It's very dumb. That's bad, folks. We're also going to do the worst projection possible to do our stupid project. Oh my God. Jesus. Who wants to live on the Antarctica strip? I mean, it's the biggest one, but also like you have to tell people that it's just like the part of Antarctica you see on the

Mercator projection and not the actual Antarctica. All of the Greenland's just straight up bigger than North America. That's not as, oh, yeah. These, these, these, the land reclamation for these was finished, at least for the two that were finished in like, I don't know, 2008 or so. And the Palm Jebel Ali has not been built on yet. There's nothing there. Oh boy. 12 years later. Really making progress. The one they did build on, because they encircled the sea in land, it just became a mosquito breeding ground. Oh boy. You made an artificial lagoon. So they had to, they had to start blasting like holes in, in the, in sort of the arc that goes around it to get some tidal flow in there. I'm surprised they even did that instead of just

like fucking spraying it down with DDT every morning. Get the DDT. We use that. We use the poop trucks as DDT trucks in the after when they come back. That way you have more efficiency. Yeah, that's right. In addition to that, as we alluded to, we have the idea to build a bunch of islands in the shape of the world. Uh-huh. Oh God, it's even worse up close. Oh, that's, what's, whoa, boy, what is going on with North America? Why is it two of them? Why is, why is Florida gone? Where's Newfoundland? Why is Mexico one island? Where's all of the Maritimes? Oh my God. This is, this is, Australia is just completely fucked. Why is Antarctica also,

is that three pieces? Why is Australia the only one that's marked? Why is New Zealand like bigger than almost any other islands? Why is it above Australia? I want to go live on the England blob, you know, like just right there. Oh yeah, I can barely see it because it's just like a dot. They got, they got, I will say they got, they somehow got, like they got South America, like almost right. Yeah, that's the only one that looks at that right. It looks just, wait, wait, wait, hold up. Look at the bottom of South America, right? Look at that one protrusion out to the right. Are those the fucking Falklands? Yes, this is, this is the Falklands right here.

Just me and an Argentinian man in a fistfight for property title of that one tiny island, representative of another set of tiny islands. My God. There's just one sheep on there. Just getting heat stroke. This sheep just fainted. I kind of disillusioned by the idea of Greenland being several islands and not just one big, like the biggest dickiest neighbor on the, in the neighborhood, of course lives on

fucking Greenland. I am, I am wondering about this mansion that's pictured right here. I'm assuming that they did not dig out a suit system below this. Does this helipad double as a putting green? They have to ferry the poop truck out there. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Jesus. Because it looks like it does. This is a hit man level.

This is a hit man level. I can see a helipad. I can see a helipad. Yeah. Does that double as a putting green? They hauled the poop truck in with a Sikorsky's guide. Yeah. A V-22. A V-22. They drop it like a Hummer. So.

Enjoy your septic system, folks. Just crater bombing some dudes' houses here. Because they were going to build these islands and then investors were going to flock to buy up the islands and build luxury developments on there, right? You know, these islands in the shape of the world, right? You know, and they build villas or luxury hotels or other bullshit on them, despite the fact you can only get there with a small boat or a helicopter. They got the Dutch out to do more dredging.

They started this in 2003. They finished in 2008. Now, one of the funny things is they managed to sell almost all the islands, right? Oh, wow, really? Yeah. Yeah, they managed to sell them. That's actually astounds me. Yeah, astounds the investor's problem. No, no one's really, no one's really built on them.

There's some some project, I believe, as of 2014 underway over here called Heart of Europe, right? What? And how can they tell? Well, the idea is they would this is this is like a European themed vacation destination. Just go to Europe. I love to go to Europe. Yeah, you can just go to Europe. Like if you have a Emirati like like passport, you can go to Europe.

And if you're a European looking to vacation, like just go to Europe. You're already there. Just go to the dead you've been hanging out. Yeah. Spain is warm. Yes. It's not 120 degrees. Like, oh my god.

They keep trying to bring Europe to Dubai. Is it a fuck? Is it Dubai or Abu Dhabi that has the like Louvre franchise museum? The Louvre of Abu Dhabi, the Louvre of Abu Dhabi. Oh, yes. Yeah. The thing is, I've seen the artifacts inside of the Louvre of Abu Dhabi. Truly, it is the coolest looking museum I've ever seen with the least amount of interesting

things that has ever been put inside a museum. Like it's really lame. That's a barber. Yeah. Well, the I think I think this mansion down here, I didn't write down what it was. I want to say it's like belongs to Michael Schumacher or something. Oh, of course.

And I guess these two tanks over here are probably where the poop is stored. It's a big silo full of Michael Schumacher's shit. Yes. Again, this is a surprising financial success for the state developer, Nakeel, because they unloaded almost all these islands right before the financial crash. I think we're thrown clear of the wreck. That's beautiful. If you have infinity money to make dumb bets, you could just win big on the dumbest one.

Yes. All right. So the other thing you do to impress people is to build really tall buildings, right? And these buildings are all exclusively luxury housing and high-rand office space, right? In the early 2000s, there were more than a couple of tallest buildings in the world planned for Dubai. This is like a set of skyscrapers near the Dubai marina. Every single one of these is over a thousand feet tall.

So. Thank God. Of course, the famous one is the Burj Khalifa. Known as the Burj Dubai while it was being built, right? It sort of got through on pure dumb luck, right? They started construction in 2004 and they were too far along to cancel it in 2008. The building topped out in 2009 and opened in 2010, right? You know, this is an incredible achievement in structural engineering and elevator management,

which is the real hard problem with skyscrapers. How do they do that? Do they just do like skylovers like the World Trade Center did or what? I would imagine so. I don't know how the elevator system works. I remember there's a, you know how Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Mile High City? Yes. And he didn't have a solution to the elevator problem.

So he sort of just wrote in, no, he wrote in like the margin. Oh, well, we won't have problems with elevators because we'll have atomic elevators. How does that solve this? You just get in a fucking rocket sled that accelerates you and then they scrape you off the ceiling when you get to the floor you want to go to. Vertical circulation. Fun fact about this building. I think everything above about here is just architectural.

There's no occupiable space up here. You know, this is what I would call a quintessential vanity skyscraper. It's a very tall tower on a very large lot. While back, I sort of ran the numbers on the floor space. You could get the same amount of floor space on the lot that the building sits on. If you built just a series of large, low, six-story buildings. Yeah, but it's boring though. Yeah, you can't bring a world record.

You can't see Roger Federer play a game of tennis on top of a grassed-over helipad on the top of a six-story building. Yeah, it could. It would just be very tiny. Yeah, and also it's boring. This building is 828 meters tall or 27, 17 feet. Top floor is 1921 feet up there. Oh, that's bullshit.

Yeah. That's 800 fucking feet missing. That's 800 feet of pure structural bullshit. Dog, pure structure. That's a dog. Yeah. It's a dog. Big dong.

So one of the fun things is they can light it up with graphics at night. So you can say... Oh, good. My PC does that. Yeah, we put in a pair of cat ears on top of the thing. Oh, is that the... That one on the end. The Itzboi.

I want to say, I couldn't be wrong about this. I want to say the son of a Syrian rebel leader who now lives in Dubai, paid for them to announce his gender of his son on the Burj Khalifa. And it was something like... It's something like $50,000 to do it, which I would thought was way too inexpensive. Yeah, I was about to say that's pretty reasonable for what it is. Yeah.

All right. New feel. So you're telling me I can just put anything I want up there for $50,000. All right, let's go. Let's go. Make it happen. That's about to say. We're going to need a couple of Mike Bloombergs to sign up,

so we can do this once a month. So yeah, you've got the Avengers here. We've got America. We've got India. We've got the gender reveal. Next to it, they built a Dubai mall. Oh, cool. Yeah, which is something like the second largest mall in the world by land area,

but the 20th largest by leasable area. It's a little bit bigger than King of Prussia mall by leasable area. It's the same size as the West Edmonton mall in Alberta. As soon as you start doing more comparisons, it's like, yeah, no. Look, it's a big mall. It's not that big, right? Yeah, you could go to Alberta for this. You could go down the road for that.

You could go to King of Prussia. Yeah. King of Prussia. They've got a VR theme park in their 22 screen cinema. They've got a haunted house. They've got a dinosaur in there, like a fossil one. They've got a rainforest cafe as well. They do have rainforest cafe, yeah.

The Costa Concordia episode all over again. Well, you think this is going to fucking cap size because it's too big? No, just do you remember the obscene list of features that I was pointing out? Oh, the fifth swimming pool, and you were like, yeah, this deserves to sink. Yeah, this, you know, of all the buildings to know, you know, I'm not going to make that joke. Here's a fountain. Here's a fountain inside the mall, which I believe flooded it two years ago. Are those actual fucking people?

Are those acrobats? No, those are just statues. I think those are sculptures. I don't think. Oh, that's bullshit. You've got that fucking money. I mean, it's pretty wide. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

They're the actual people. You thought that, like, somebody paid a fucking Cirque du Soleil person? Look at the fucking building. Yeah, so I don't think that is real. I don't think that's a problem. Dubai can obviously pay for that to happen. The issue is that if you look at that photo, like, just use your head. It doesn't look like those are real people.

They're entirely white. My job is to get covered in an entirely white foundation. Look, I thought our boy on the left was on some sort of tether road. You see, God, it's tripped on man that for me. Okay. I want to say, and I want to say, I did get confused at first when I was doing a bit of research on this. I thought that the ski resort that's in there, it's like something like 25,000 square feet.

Excuse me? That's not even that big. No, no, no. But that's on the Dubai Mall. That's in the other mall, the Emirates, which is nearby, which is also one of the largest shopping malls in the entire world. There's probably also not that much bigger than West Edmonton Mall. Oh, it's probably smaller.

And we have a Gucci store now. Yeah, but the mall of the Emirates, I mean, it is what it is, what it sounds like. I don't know if that's in the slides here, but the ski, it has a ski slope. It has a, excuse me now, what is the thing that you use to like the elevator to get up there? Ski lift. Oh my God, that was so stupid. I forgot that. There is a ski lift in there.

That's just the entirely enclosed space where it is like constantly under, I think it's like two degrees Celsius, like one below Celsius in the middle of fucking Dubai. And it's constantly this temperature. They're about to say, I mean, the new thing is like indoor ski slopes on malls. I know that the big thing in the middle lands has one up in New Jersey. They just installed an indoor ski slope or it's been there for six or seven years. It's just that they've taken that law. The project was in development hell for six or seven years.

And now they're starting to work on it again. That'll be a whole episode at some point. This is such a cursed vibe to look at. This is like an upsetting picture to perceive, just because like the whole mall vibe is so bad. And you know, it just fucking goes on forever. Here's something you don't see in many malls, which is the Dubai mall has a model of the Dubai mall in it. Oh, okay. I do like a nice scale model to be fair. Looks pretty nice.

Looks pretty nice. This is supposed to show like the completed area around the mall, which of course is not finished yet. No word on if this mall has another mall inside it, a smaller one. I don't know. I always thought it was cool when you went to like museums and stuff and I had dioramas like this. A little tiny one. They have a Woolworth's.

Here are some men with bagpipes playing Scotland the Brave in the mall. Oh, they have something from Leo. I both need to hear audio and need nothing more than to never hear the audio. I don't know why this is just on Wikipedia. I was like, oh yeah, I'll put some memoradies with bagpipes in here. Why not? Um, now let's look at some of their luxury condo developments. This is one I remember back on Skyscraper page back in 2010 or so.

People got real excited about this. This is called, this is one of the first round of tallest buildings they were trying to get built. Or excuse me, the second round of tallest buildings they were trying to get built. The first round mostly got finished. They had a second and more aggressive round around 2007 and 2008, which predictably did not go well. They got the first Khalifa out of it and like nothing else, right? We can do it.

We can do a tall building. We should do more tall buildings, right? This building is called the Pentominium. Okay, of course. That sounds like a bad Midwestern Evo band. The Pentominium, the idea is every condo is a penthouse, hence Pentominium. That's cheating. Yeah, that's fucking cheating.

If you have stuff above you, it's not a penthouse. It is a 122-story building with 122 condos. Each one is 6,500 square feet and it was supposed to be 1,693 feet tall. I think if it were finished, it'd be the second tallest residential building in the world. I think some of the New York City pencil towers are now taller than this. They started building in July of 2008 and they made it 22 stories. Hopefully, numbers on the columns there. Yeah, and then they ran out of money.

Do we have any slides in here about the Dubai City Tower? Shit, which one is that? It was another proposed skyscraper in Dubai that was also announced in 2008 that never went anywhere. I think that might be the next slide because I think a lot of these buildings went under a lot of different names. That's the annoying part. All right, there. Let's see it. Let's see it. This is still there. This husk has been sitting here since 2011.

What are we going to do with this? All right, what else have we got? This is the Neck Heel Tower, which again, I think this may be the same as the City Tower. I'm not sure. No, it is slightly different, but it is also no less absurd looking. I'll bring up the City Tower after this one because it shocks me what the plan is for it. The idea here. How tall is this thing?

In 2003, they proposed this as a one-mile-high skyscraper. At some point, they scale it down to a kilometer high. It's all basically assignment. Incredibly, they got all the way through financing, design, site preparation. They were ready to start digging the foundation for this thing. It's going to be 200 floors with 154 elevators. They started a broke ground in early July 2008, or excuse me, earlier than that, early 2008. So now, it's just this big dirt lot next to a metro station that's named for it.

And this is all a consequence of the 2008 financial crash, right? Had that not happened, all of these would have been built and we'd have just been kept on keeping on. I was reading this and there are some financial analysts who have come up with this idea of the next announcement of the world's tallest building, or the construction of the world's tallest building, is an indicator that the economy is about to collapse. Well, I'm thinking about it because when were the Petronas towers first announced? That would have been right in time for...

Yeah, I think that would have been earlier though, right? We'll think about it. Empire State Building is a good example. Yeah, the Petronas towers are like late 90s, I think? Yeah, late, I want to say 1995, 96. Burj Khalifa was finished, topped out just after the financial collapse. Yeah, it's a good indicator, it works. Oh, I see this, yes. Jesus, okay. So the examples they give, right? Okay, the Singer Building and the MetLife Tower, 1908, right?

Stock crash in 1909. Forty Wall Street Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, right before 1929. World Trade Center and the Sears Tower opened the year before the 1973 stock market crash and the oil crisis. And then the only exception is the Petronas towers, because those opened after the 97 Asian crash. Oh, yeah. Thank God. So yeah, it works. Yeah. Sorry, anyway, this did not get built. We will talk about another one kilometer high tower that did get built.

Oh, before that, before that, may I please talk about the Dubai City Tower, even though this is not in the slides here. Okay, the Dubai City Tower did not get as far as the Naqil Tower. But it did have an incredibly ambitious idea. I'm going to put this image in the other Discord chat just so that you guys can have an idea of what it looks like. It would have looked like. Oh, Jesus, the fucking eye of Sauron. Oh, yeah, this looks like Magic the Gatherer. Yeah. So speaking of which, it would have required a lot of magic to actually function, because they announced it right when the financial crisis happened. And then they tried

to get it off the ground in some way. But when they were analyzing how it would have been built, because it would have been something like 2.4 kilometers high, it would have been three times as high as the current Burj Khalifa's height. And there were concerns brought to the people building it that, hey, at the top of this tower, there's going to be problems with oxygen. And we don't quite know how to fix it. There are proposals for maglev vertical maglev trains that take people up because of how fast it would need to be to be convenient. But they also had to speed limit them, if I remember correctly, because the pressure differential would cause serious inner ear problems if you went up too quick.

Yeah, it was a bit insane. And also, I want to say there was a square footage of the base of the tower would have been like one million square feet. It would have been just an immense thing just in the middle of Dubai. And of course, they decided to maybe cut their losses and just focus on the one tallest tower in the world that they were already building. Yeah, we'll do one. Well, they have another, another tallest tower they're trying to build now. I think that's later in the slides, though. Oh boy, I'm sure that bodes well for the economy. Yeah, I know. I know. This one seems to have financing lined up, which is worrying. So, you know, all right. So in the meantime, they did get a lot of regular skyscrapers built,

and a lot of them caught fire. Oh boy. Is this the torch? Is this the torch? It's the torch. We talked about this on the Grand Fair episode. So one of these, one of these, I think, I think this one is the Dubai torch. Or no, actually, these are both the same building. This is actually not the torch. The torch was briefly the world's tallest residential building and a caught fire in 2015, 2017, and most recently in 2019. Just doing towering Inferno fancams. Yeah, just three times. You know, it lives up to its name. This one, though, I didn't realize these were both the

same building. This is the address downtown Dubai. The address. Yeah. Is it spelled IUD, RIS? No, it's a spelled address, like where you live. Oh, it's literally just address. Okay. Oh, that's even, that's so dumb. Okay. It's attached to the Dubai mall. So I can go downstairs and go shopping. Yeah, exactly. Right. I can go downstairs and shop while the building burns down. So I'll wait for it to be over. Yeah, this caught fire in 2015. You can see this is, this is these, these, these sandwich panels, everyone likes to use for cladding. They're just not good. They catch fire and shit, right? Yeah, you shouldn't use flammable petroleum products to cover your buildings. What happened to like covering a building in like granite or

something? Or like even concrete, you know? They have granite rocks. Yes. I don't know. This is not out. Okay. This is, this is not a wise, not a wise decision to build buildings like this. It looks so modern and also it catches fire really easily. Oh my God, what on earth am I looking at? So they're still at this, right? Oh, no. This is, this, this is the Dubai creek tower, right? No, it's not. That's the fucking like AR Washington monument. Like, oh my God. It looks like, it looks like it is so thin that you can honestly like push it over. It's so thin you can see that it's being held up by cable stays. Yeah. It looks like like a cloak of some kind. But like, I don't think you should build a building

like that. I was about to say, I am suspicious of a guide mast, which is also occupiable by humans. I do not believe this is up to any modern building code, but I guess they can do whatever the hell they want there. It's their country. So this is, you know, this, this is said to be slightly taller than the Burj Khalifa, right? This is their new idea for the world's tallest building, right? And financing is lined up. You can see here, the foundation has been poured. The only reason this isn't higher is because they pause construction due to the coronavirus, right? And this is, of course, this is a Santiago Calatrava building. So I'm sure come, come out on time and on budget. Yeah. That guy, I want to do a whole episode on that guy. That's a bonus episode.

Yeah. So what else are they doing? In addition to tall buildings, they also wanted to build the world's largest airport. This is a picture of a circuit board. Or for a city the size of Cleveland. Wait, we don't think that they already have like a gigantic airport. Are they talking about building an entirely new one, not just an expansion? They were going to build a new one in addition to what we have built part of this airport, actually. Hold on. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven full size runways. I mean, I mean, it's not it's not impossible. Like, like I get the idea because Dubai is an incredibly popular, like, like transit destination

and like, like just a lot of planes go through it, but still seven. It's only it's only actually only six runways. I'm miscounting. Oh, that's exactly right. All right. Okay. I apologize. Yeah. The idea was this is Al Maktoum International Airport, you know, the biggest and greatest city in the world needs the biggest and greatest airport in the world, even bigger than Cleveland Hopkins. So eight terminal six runways supposed to handle 260 million passengers a year, plus 12 million tons of air freight. And they started building this in like 2008, they finished the

first runway and cargo terminal in 2010. And well, that's what it still is. I mean, it's just there's no foresight in this at all, because like, I remember the Istanbul Airport switch where they built an entirely new airport and then they finished it. And then once they finished it, that's when they opened it and they immediately moved every single other thing from the original established airport to that new one. I tried that too. Yeah. The Lodge L airport. Yeah. But like this, this, you, what is, what is the thinking behind it? Like, okay, we finished one runway. Let's open it up while there is already a massively more popular airport

that is still open. Who wants to fly through this? You gotta get the shit out on planes now. I believe this is mostly used as a cargo airport right now. There's a few commercial flights. They're mostly, they mostly, I think there's like a seasonal flight to Moscow. I love a career city with no mega projects. Of all, of all, of all, like, the places that you want to work in, like, there's a flight you can take to Moscow, like, in the summertime. You can get a, you can get a summer flight, probably a winter flight to Moscow, honestly, getting a nice illusion IL-86 or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, watch their way out of the wing as you're flying over.

It's immersive. It's immersive. This, this is experiencing similar problems to Montreal Mirabelle. You know, it's very far away from the city. No one wants to go there as bad transit connections. It's just, it doesn't work. And I mean, it's, it's very successful as a one runway cargo airport, right? But this is not the world's largest airport for the world's largest city that it was envisioned as. I do like what they've done with the taxiways though, that kind of lattice thing. It's very pretty. It does actually kind of look pretty, very pretty. I imagine be a very efficient design if they finished it. I also have no idea how they would like number the runways because they're all oriented the same way. Oh yeah. Shit. That's a

problem. You know what they don't have in the desert is wind. Oh my God. Yeah, you accidentally land on the wrong one. I feel like the ability of having like a gigantic desert you could build out to is that you can, you can position the runways any way you want. I think they should just like color code the runways. You know, just say land on the green one. Well, what else is going on in Dubai? Maybe just sort of look at the general sort of urban planning here. Oh, boy. One of the absolute worst things in the world. Six. Yes. These are those Khrushchev Sky as you mentioned earlier. The old apartment buildings. Yeah, they're still there because they don't fall down. Yeah, the three buildings that were there before. They don't fall down. The only way I can like

describe like how Dubai is built, you can see it's designed essentially like an American suburb, but instead of McMansions, you put skyscrapers in, right? It reminds me of coming into Toronto off the QEW. You're just like this is your balcony is just over like a 12 lane highway. How is this the luxury life you want? You just inhale all of that smog. It's perfect. You know, you can't really walk anywhere. There's public transit sort of. They got the Dubai Metro, which is like an automated metro, but it sort of goes in a straight line and nowhere else. Yeah, it's all taxis, right? Like there's no real bus system, right? No, no. I mean, the Dubai Metro, yeah, it connects the multiple walls. It goes to the

airport, but it doesn't. It's not, I struggle to figure out like who is it really for necessarily, because you can't go to all the tourist destinations anyway, even on it still. And it has like, it's weird because they added a class system to the metro. Like there's a first class metro car. There's a second class car. So you don't have to see the people. There's also a women's car. I'm keeping it, keeping it. That's unfortunately pretty standard in the Middle East. Like a lot of Iranian metros have the same thing. But you know, so you can't walk anywhere. Obviously, it's very hot, but even if you want to, if even you could tolerate the heat, even if it's a nice day, you can't walk anywhere.

And you know, obviously, this is really bad for the environment. All the trans, all transportation is by private car or by taxi. But I'm sure the very sustainable Dubai light bulb will offset that, right? Oh, are we talking about the Dubai light bulb? I forget. The Amir was like, you need to make a better light bulb. And then he mandated them in every building. Oh, yeah. And you can only get them in Dubai because like they won't sell them anywhere else. Probably the only good thing that ever came out of like, just being an absolute golf monarch is that in one place in the world, you can get it actually functionally light bulb. The architects hate it. Because it is, there are three Dubai light bulbs and they are mandated

for every installation in Dubai. Jesus. Good Lord. They look nice. You get to adapt every light fixture for them. But that's not to say folks in the United Arab Emirates aren't trying for sustainability. So we got to talk about Mazdar City. Oh, baby. Egotopia. Love this one. This is in Abu Dhabi, which is the Emirate next door, right? So the idea for Mazdar City, I think this is announced in 2006, right? They're going to build a fully sustainable eco city in the middle of the desert, right? It's going to have all renewable electricity. No cars. It'll have personalized mass transit, right? It's not a car. It's not a car. It's not a car. It's personal rapid transit, right? Sure you are. They'll have all these high efficiency buildings,

right? They'll have more traditional development patterns with the buildings close together. So there's more shade. So it's cooler so you can walk places, right? It's supposed to have 50,000 people with zero emissions, right? Again, this was announced 15 years ago in 2006. They started a construction and well, here's what it looks like now. Oh my God. You can see that. Yeah, it's going great. Yeah. They have some solar panels up here in the corner. That's good. I do like the stuff that already exists, which is like the tract housing for all the people who have to work in the various malls and stuff that's just like, yeah, you live in sector southeast 40 and you have to fucking drive to this mall where you work getting abused all day and then you drive

back. Yeah, cool. What they've seemed to have done, they gave up on the no cars idea. So they started also building wider streets, right? So they can get cars in there, right? They got a couple big parking lots in here. Everything else is just vacant. Yeah. Well, no, it's not all vacant because are we familiar with the AI university? Oh, well, this was recently announced at the end of last year. No, the beginning of last year. It was the Muhammad bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, which is supposed to be the flagship educational institution within Maastar City. Free housing, free tuition. You get a stipend looking for the best and the brightest. I have no idea if it's actually functioning, though, because there were some things that

happened very soon after it opened. So I don't know. A lot of this seems like you just show up to the place where this great thing is supposed to be happening and there's desert and a tumbleweed goes by. There's just nothing there. They have actually installed a PRT system here somehow. You can watch videos of it on YouTube. It goes from one end of a parking garage to another. It's pathetic. So this isn't your standard Ecotopia project. Lots of greenwashing, no substance. I am going to use the restroom and then we'll try and get through part two. Yeah, now doing an intermission. Yeah, I, dude, I love that there was a top gear bit where

heaven goes, I think, to the UAE or wherever. And he he was driving one of those fantastic and terrible Mercedes six by six. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he gets pulled over by a cop in like a Veyron police car. Just like, oh my, like, like this is just like people attack the West for our whatever decadence of moral decay. And I'm just like, listen, the cops here have four explorers. Now it would be tight to see a Veyron police car just blaze through traffic, but he's still got to do it at like 55. Pennsylvania like state trooper, but driving a big ass Veyron is a very strong bet. I will say the cops around here, I was I was getting ice cream a while ago. And my girlfriend and I had gone to this really good ice cream place in the Philly suburbs. It's the main,

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Pennsylvania suburbs, but the main line is is famous. It was built on the PRR's main line, so it's pretty wealthy. And this cop, this this old woman takes it right on red completely safely. And this cop in a fucking pickup. Now we are on Pennsylvania's main line, okay, Philly's main line. There's there's no reason for a cop to need a truck. None at all. And it's like a $70,000 like absolutely 50. That's going to have got 90 pairs of lights and just fucking blinding. And he's pulling over this a little and I'm just like, if we're not abolish the police, if you're no other reason that I'm fucking looking at this. I'm back. All right. Shamus, have you got any kind of time constraint? Let me know.

No, it's fine. I'm just waiting until I got ordered dinner at some point. But don't worry. It's fine. I was fine talking about I'm fine. I was eating on the microphone earlier and trying to mute myself so that I don't get like, that's my problem. I was doing my best to hit the mute button on Zancastra. And then it was just like, oh, no, okay, never mind. No, Ross loves editing that. Next time I'm going to find stuff that's more irrefacing sounding to eat. I'm going to get like some noodles or something like something really wet. All right. That's enough United Arab Emirates. Let's move on to Saudi Arabia. I said this on trash future, but I am seriously wondering like what happened to the orb.

Like I've never seen a photo of the orb after that. It was they used it to open the fucking like, I don't know. It was a far too extreme for posting. We're like 500 guys in town, essentially, sort of like sit on fucking computers, threatening to 911 Canada. It's probably still there. It's just like an art installation now. I imagine it's in like a closet collecting dust. They put it in the giant warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. I guess I can talk about this now since I don't think it's happening, but we genuinely,

like we reached out to people in Hollywood trying to get the golden arm from the Quibi show about the woman with the golden arm just to put it in our studio. And like we were in serious talks. Like we had people who were on the phone with people who were like, oh, yeah, no, I can get you the golden arm. Give me a week and I'll have you the golden arm. We don't have the golden arm. But like if you have a lead on the orb, please, give us the orb. We talked about some of the economic and political context earlier. Saudi Arabia's home of the holy sites in Islam, like Mecca, which is where the Qabai is, right? Got to fucking get that one out again. Yeah, you got to get the cube, right?

And there's something called recently, there's been an initiative called the Asadi 2030 project, which is 2030. It's my favorite thing in the world. Yeah, it was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman started that. We'll talk about him. My favorite thing about Vision 2030 is that like that pun was so clearly a McKinsey suggestion and nobody thought to realize that 2030 vision is worse than 2020. So one of the things they've been doing recently is spending oil money on getting Saudi Arabia off oil, which I guess is good, right? And they've been talking or something about liberalization of the country's restrictive rights.

All of the Westerners don't want to come here because they're afraid that they will be arrested for all of their various crimes against Islam. We're showing some ankle. Yeah, so we're going to change this maybe, but probably not for the locals, especially if they do any kind of like dissent, but otherwise. But otherwise, you know, they want to give off this impression that they're not so Wahabist, right? So we have to talk about what is Wahabism? I mean, I can help with this part. Yeah, okay, yeah. I mean, there was a scholar, Abdul Wahab, back in the 19th century, that attempted to create a movement based on ideas, this kind of comparison, but kind of ultra orthodox ideals.

It is probably the best like comparison that I can make. One of his more like, famous, I want to maybe I don't know if that's the right word is the idea of infamous, maybe is the 10 criteria for expulsion from Islam, which is talking about like the idolatry. You do not fave MBS's Insta posts. Yeah, I mean, like it was just it was really but it's these are things that like you could very easily fall into. And so it created a very, very conservative mindset. And thus, it kind of became something of a popular movement within Saudi Arabia. And that became a bit of a problem later on. Well, because Wahab threw in his lot with him in Saudi early and was like

repaid for this with like the the lasting allegiance of the House of Saud and also his like his birthplace becoming a sort of large tourist attraction thing, which they're now trying to build. Just very funny. Oh, yeah, I mean, he would have fucking hated that. Yeah, right. Like that. I forget the name of the town, but it had like the original like Saudi Palace back when they were still like regional regional Kings. And yeah, no, they've just been throwing money at this for for tourism. And at the same time, sort of demolishing any historical site, they can get their hands on a Mecca or Medina. But like, yeah, no, it rules. Yeah. And this sort of radical iconoclasm they practiced is not not and not very popular in

like the wider Islamic world. You know, because they started they started tearing shit down pretty early on, like in the in the 1700s, shit. Well, they tried to demolish the the green dome on the Masjid al-Nabawi. And that like there was like there was genuine feeling that like, oh, hey, the rest of the Muslim world may just come and kill us if we do this. So we probably shouldn't. We shouldn't demolish this one dome. Everything else open season. Yeah. And I what I have on the screen here, let me let me go through the notes again. So I remember what I have on the screen here. I believe this is a set of mausoleums for early rank Islam. What? For for early Islamic figures, right? And these are all demolished in the 1700s. And then the

the Ottomans invaded and put the buildings back up. And then the Saudis came back in 1925 and tore them all down again. I mean, it works. Also, the other thing is, I cannot stress enough the the extent of sort of spite that goes into this religiously, like, it's not just a sort of like, oh, we we worry for your well being that you might accidentally do idolatry. It's a it's a highly ideological project. Are they demolished? God, they demolished one of Muhammad's wives' houses in Medina, and they put a toilet block on it purely as like, just just to send the message, you know. So there was also like a big I remember this story from back when I was like really religious back in high school. A preacher told me about when I have no idea if this is true,

but he told me very, very like passionately about one of the caliphs. He tried to destroy the pyramids because he was he was he was informed that it was in fact because it was sealed. So like you couldn't figure out for sure. But like he found out that it was an idolatrous like tomb. So he like there is there is a and I look this up there is a pyramid with a giant hole in it where they tried to drill into it back in the day because they thought because like it's a big it was a big thing. Yes, this is like a genuine like problem with with Wahabas. If you really want to annoy Wahabas and Salafi is more generally, you can simply say why didn't the Sahaba destroy the pyramids? Because that that guaranteed I mean, I mean, Alice is joking. But like it's a thing.

Like if you if you talk about the pyramids in the Sahaba, like people will get mad. Yeah, because either they saw them and they didn't care or which is like unacceptable because it means that you can build this stuff and they thought it was fine. Or it means that they saw it tried to destroy and weren't able to which is even worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Therefore you you get my favorite memory TV thing which is of some some Egyptian crank going on Islamic TV and saying if I was president, the first thing I would do is I would order the army to blow up the pyramids. It's wonderful. It would not it would be very difficult to blow up the pyramids without also blowing up Cairo. It's a bit gigantic. Like a shapes charge that only goes in one direction.

It's a giant heap of rock. You know, it's just a mountain. It's just a mountain, right? You know, you would need nuclear weaponry to blow it up. But like this is my favorite thing like not to take some another huge digression. But like when people when people go like, Oh, how did all of these different cultures in, you know, fucking in Asia and in North Africa and in sub-Saharan Africa and in Mesoamerica build pyramids and why are they all still there? Because that's how you build something that doesn't fall down for a long time. Yes. It just kind of stays up on its own. So you got this you got this situation where you have this this Wahhabist kingdom which is in control of all the holiest sites of Islam and who is skeptical about the wider Islamic world

being really Islamic, you know, ultra-orthodox. Especially Shia, but like everybody else too. Oh, you're not Jewish. I don't think you're Jewish because you don't have nine kids by the time you're 25. And why don't you have a shot? Shut the fuck up. I don't think you're Jewish. I don't think you're Jewish. That's my favorite fucking stuff to pull on those people because they've never heard that shit before. And they're all just like, What do you mean? I'm not Jewish. Look at my funny hat and pay. I'm drinking, man. One of the things they start doing in the in the mid 20th century is they start exporting Wahhabist theology via diplomacy, education, investments on and so forth, something some people call

petrol. Yeah, I hate to go out of the tangent here, but like I think I think I just want to explain this one. Explain this stuff is ubiquitous. Like my mosque in Eugene, Oregon, like just middle of middle fucking nowhere, Central Oregon, the entire library was staffed basically with books that had been shipped from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, like literally literally anyone. The Quran that I have nearest to me is I can get it off the top of this filing cabinet. The Noble Quran English translation and the meanings of its commentary from the custodian of the two holy mosques King Fahd. And literally the tough seer in this is fantastic because it's the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever read because every instance of the word

like they where it's in a bad thing is somebody has inserted in the English translation in brackets Jews. So it'll be like, oh, they denied a lot. They Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews. I know, but they genuinely they will fuck man. And like the other thing which ties this back into mega project is that the other big way of exporting Wahhabism is not just like individual books or individual libraries, it's that you build these massive statement mosques. So like you build the King Fahd Memorial Mosque in whichever country wants it. And it's going to be at this gigantic mosque. It's actually too big for what it's supposed to be doing. But it's there to send a message. And the message is, hey, I look like a fucking spaceship that has just landed.

And yeah, no, this is this is what Islam is now. So it's cool. You know, it's good, I think. So this is this is this is an issue which every Muslim faces, which is that these these dumb asses in Saudi Arabia are like controlling the narrative everywhere. And Liam told me to put this up here. Don't confuse it with wasabism. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that you like my visual gags. So anyway, what's this in mind about the sort of iconic classic attitude they have? Let's see what they've done to Mecca.

We're going to talk about the fucking clock tower, baby. My favorite thing in the world makes me so fucking angry, man. Like, I mean, yeah, it's infuriating and literally everybody hates it. But I remember, oh, I remember talking to no, no, sorry, not talking to you. I remember when ISIS fighters used to be like on Twitter, like really, yeah, before they purged them. Yeah. Before they purged them. And there was an ISIS fighter who specifically talked about this clock tower and said that once we conquered Saudi Arabia, the first thing we're doing is like taking this thing down. It's like, it's really like the worst person you know, just made a great

point. Yeah, we're almost to literal ISIS fighters have the same opinion on this. Like, they all hate it. Like, it's, it's, it's ugly. It's horrifying. It's truly deranged. Here's a controversial opinion. If this were anywhere else, I don't think it would be a bad building. No, no, I agree. I agree. The thing is, is that like, it's supposed to be like, it's mecca. Yeah. It's not Las Vegas. You can kind of see, you'll see it in the next slide better, but in this slide on the left there, the, the arches you see on the bottom, the colonel, that's the Masjid al-Haram, right? That's like, so what, where you're putting this is in itself, like, like I was saying with the, the toilet box means that it's an active spite, right? It's,

it's very deliberate and it's very consciously sending a message about what you want Islam to be and what you want Islam to be is Las Vegas. Yes. It's, it's very bad. Folks, folks, very bad. I, I hate to tell you. Yeah. Uh, thank God, no one would do this to my holy sites or whatever. Yeah. I do. Oh God, I remember like the fucking just being in Israel and being it like the, the church of the Holy Sepulchre and even just outside the Western wall and it feeling very much like, I know it's a tourist, like obviously it's a holy site, but it's also a tourist attraction and it even like being like, look at like, and I'm not, I want to stress, I'm not a very religiously observant Jew, but I was just like looking at people funny who were like, like vendors who

obviously are there to make money and I'm like, are you selling tourist trap shit? Like I felt like the religious police and I didn't want to be doing that. And I just like, I can't imagine like going to one of my holy sites and turning and looking across the street and seeing this shit without thinking, yeah, maybe we should kick it down a few. It's not just that it's, it's offensive, right? It's that it's, it's profane specifically. Yeah. The first where they came to mind was tacky, but I feel like profane is a far better fit because it's just a giant middle finger. It even looks like one. It wouldn't be a good building in Las Vegas though. What we've got to do, this is the program, right? We do the same thing as the first London bridge.

We dismantle it brick by brick and we rebuild it in Vegas. Yeah. It's not certain to us, dude. We'll put it up right next to the Comcast Tower because the fucking Eagles again. All right. So here's the deal. We'll hang two Eagles jerseys off that giant moon. Here's the deal with the Abraaj Al Bayat, right? The hotel is built on the site of an 18th century fort in Ottoman fort. That's this guy right here. Of course, they completely obliterated for the construction. The Turks complained about this one. And, you know, the speaking of worst people you know, making a good friend. I'm looking at the aerial view now, and this is genuinely one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life. Saudi Affairs Minister Saleh al-Syke,

Saleh. Just keep going, buddy. No one has the right to interfere in what comes under the state's authority. And in reference to the Turks' complaints, he said there was a housing component to the plan, right? He said this building is intended to house pilgrims to Mecca. And this is in the interest of Muslims all over the world. How much is a room for like one night? A pilgrim. I remember looking this up, it's something like in the hundreds. I mean, there's a reason why you go in a tent with a group. It's supposed to be, not only is it cheap, it's much cheaper. It's about community and befriending your fellow Muslims. The first thing you do when you go on Hajj is you all dress the same so that everybody,

like there's no class or national distinctions. And then the second thing that happens when you go on Hajj is a bunch of Saudi cops go through your Instagram to make sure you're not sheer. And then the third thing is you pay a few hundred dollars for a room in the clock tower. Thank God. That's so fucking crass. I would know something about being crass. This is a 601 meter tall hotel. I believe when it was finished, it was the second tallest building in the world. I think it's the absolute largest hotel in the world. This is the largest clock case in the world. It lights up with LEDs too. Oh my God. That part is not the problem. That part is saying that looks cool when it gets at night. They can just shoot green and white LEDs up the

sides of this for whatever they want, which is cool. You see this, what's it? This sort of thing buttressing the clock, right? That is as tall as the clock tower at Westminster Palace, Big Ben. Jesus. Sending a message. Yeah. Oh my God. So at the bottom, there's a big ball in a parking garage. There's a hundred and twenty floors. There's some ungodly number of hotel rooms. Yeah, because if you want to go and see the carpet, the thing that you want to do after that is go across the street and get some Halal Starbucks. Yes. Oh, wait. Oh, there was a five guys near this hotel. Jesus fucking Christ. It's not a joke. If you look up Five Guys Mecca, it's in this exact place.

When we recorded the Trash Shoot Show episode about the line and Neon with Seamus. Well, it temporarily closed. Good news. My Zencaster name there was App Store in Carver, and I think it's only a matter of time. Okay. Oh, here. Okay. I'm revisiting this photo, and the Five Guys, even the Five Guys is like incredibly gaudy looking and gigantic. Like, oh my God. Is this the city of insanity? They have a quote from the San Jose Mercury News. I was about to say, yeah, do they have where are the potatoes from? Eighteen dollars. That's it. Bro, cheeseburger? Yeah, but it's like a good cheeseburger, though.

Is it $18 good? Well, for your benefit, you won't be able to get any of the bacon on it either, so. Oh, yeah. That's no. I was about to say, yeah, $18 for a bacon cheeseburger. Okay, but I guess you can't get the bacon. Yeah, that's an issue. What happened to you, man? You used to be with me in the United Against More Than $12 Burger Front. I don't know what the cost of living is in Mecca. Too high. I guess so, yeah. Well, it's all for tourists. Yeah, Mecca also has like an actual public transportation system, like a pretty extensive metro line as well. I think Riyadh just recently got one. Like, it's the cause of living comes

with some benefits. I mean, the cool thing is there is one genuinely cool infrastructural thing about Mecca and that is the metro purely because like what they do is like the resident population of Mecca is low enough that like during the harsh, the size of the metro in terms of like number of trains and trains per hour has to go up by like 50,000%. And so they just have, they literally just have like depots and depots and depots of empty trains waiting. And then at the moment they just flip the big switch and it's like, yeah, no, we turn this into like one of the world's largest public transit systems. $18 for a goddamn cheeseburger. That's tight. Don't get me wrong. I'm just, I'm fascinated by looking at all these fan picks

of the Mecca five guys. Like, I'm sorry to tell you this, but a five guys in France, like I've been there, like it's 18 euros. Like it's even more expensive. Y'all are fucking getting ripped off. It's this bad in the UK, too. Yeah. Five guys is not Halal in the UK, though, apparently. So that's interesting. I look at that on the five guys, five guys UK FA deal. Oh, Alice. No, I wonder if they, I wonder if they keep Halal in those no go zones I keep hearing so much about. It's easy to assume because KFC is Halal. Most McDonald's are Halal, like almost everything here is Halal. Yeah, no, but five guys apparently not. So oops.

All right. It's been a while since I've eaten one. So, so you can see here the relationship of the hotel to the mosque, the Masjid, oh, Haram. And we should talk a little bit about this building, right? Because as you can see, there is a large construction site over here, right there. Yeah, what's planned there? I actually have no idea. So they're going to expand the mosque some more. They are expanding the mosque. One of the problems with the Hajj is that a lot of people show up at once to do all the same things at the same time, right? Yeah, I mean, if it would be perhaps reasonable to say now that there are well north of a billion Muslims, it's perhaps not like as required for the benefits

of public safety to do all of this stuff at the same time together in the same place, every time completely inflexibly, unless, for instance, you had bet heavily on a totally inflexible form of Islamic theology that requires you to do everything the way the Sahaba did or else. Because if you did that, then you really might screw yourself over infrastructurally, but luckily we dodged that bullet. No, so instead we're going to, they need to, you know, since everyone's coming in at once, I'm being the Hajj is not the world's largest mass migration, but it is the world's largest mass migration to one place. There's some like some of the Hindu religious festivals for the Ganges have more people just overall. It's just spread out a

little bit more than just like one location in the middle of a city. Thanksgiving is like 20 times bigger. Oh, Chinese Lunar Festival, Chai Spring Festival rather. That's the biggest one because that's a lot of people going to a lot of different places. Yeah, they're all going from the cities rather than as opposed to 1.2 billion people just all showed up in the same city and you can't eat bacon. Oh, thank you. This is like two or three, I think, million people show up for this one leak, for the Hajj every year. I want to say offhand, I'm not sure if that's wrong. Sounds about right. You know, thus this mosque has had to have been expanded a couple of times over the years, but the latest expansion is unprecedented and pretty wild.

Yeah, they're more than doubling the size of it. Yeah. So I thought we'd start with like looking at a history of the mosque. Wait, you said two to three million, right? And I'm sorry, forgive my ignorance, but how long, how long are you, I guess, there for? It seems just a couple of weeks. I think even less than that. No, I was just curious as to like the idea of, you talked about being inflexible and I know that there's been some tension with Saudi Arabia and everybody else about everything, but just the idea of trying to now price squeeze people out of Hajj. I was wondering if that's like a sort of just not intentional, but sort of a happy byproduct. Oh, 100%. And listen, I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, it was better

in the old days because in the olden days, it used to be a valid career that you would just kind of rob people on the way there. That used to be like a career path that you wait, you wait for some rich people to go past and then you stick them up. But like, no, this is like even a Sims has taken a dump. But no, it's absolutely like this, this is a benefit because the Hajj is a political tool to Saudi leaders and it means that you can like, you can show favor and disfavor by limiting the number of pilgrims going in and coming out and so on, so on, so on. Yeah. Like, are there quotas based on nationality? Not officially, but they have to issue the visas. So in practice, yes, like if you were sheer and you want to go on Hajj, you are having a difficult time.

There's a few Muslim groups they've unilaterally declared are not Muslim. That feels like cheating. Although again, I do sometimes envy the Catholic Church and their ability to simply kick people out because I always thought Judaism should go back to the days of we just all get together in one room and sort of shot and you know, Jamie didn't or whoever. We cautiously kick Epstein out. I mean, the thing is right, like another thing I want to talk about, which is like related to the sort of Wahabist like push diplomatically is that like, in order to get a Hajj visa, generally what you need or one of the things that you need is you'll need like a letter from your Imam, right? That just says, yeah, they are Muslim. They go to this mosque. And

obviously that's very easy then to say, oh, they go to this mosque, the King Fahd Morial Mosque that is okay by Saudi Arabia. But if it comes from like, I don't know the fucking, you know, Al-Nur or Al-Fukar mosque that isn't, then you can be like, yeah, no, we're not going to give you the visa. I thought like, isn't Islam is like decentralized though, right? Yeah, despite the best efforts of the King of Saudi Arabia, yes. They're trying to turn it into a Catholic church thing, but like it's not. It's like, I thought everyone was like doing their own teachings. It was more closer to Protestantism than Catholicism. This was my understanding.

It was a whole different discussion. They've been trying to do that with like the Caliphate thing, but that didn't work out too well a couple years ago. The short answer is, especially in relation to the Hajj, that like, even it's most centralized when you had, you know, an Ottoman who was nominally a Caliph that like an effective sort of border control and surveillance for people going on the Hajj was like beyond their wildest dreams. That just wasn't possible. They couldn't keep Richard Burton out. And he was just like a British guy pretending to be Afghan so he could sneak in and see what the like the cool people were up to. So that's one of the weird things about, you know, Mecca is a whole city,

which is at least nominally walled off to non-Muslims. They have like science on the highways leading to Mecca, like non-Muslims must exit. Yeah. How could they? Do you get stopped? See, literally, yeah, it was like a Saudi border guard checkpoint. I was like, I could probably fake it as Chechdian, but like, I got the North Caucasus beard going on, but like,

yeah, what you're going to need is you're going to need like a fake letter of credential from Ramzan Khadarov. And then can you get me one of those? I mean, probably. Yeah, I can just. Yo, I'll talk to my Hebrews in Hollywood and see if we can hook you up with that gold arm. This is interfaith dialogue. I was about to say, we have a good interfaith podcast going. All right. So I thought we'd start by like kind of looking at the masjid over time, right? So I think we'd start with the masjid al-haram classic right here, right?

Same great tastes. Same great tastes, less filling. This is, these are Ottoman-era porticoes surrounding the Kaba, right? You can see there is sort of a, am I pronouncing that wrong? Because this is the Kaba. It's a Kaba, okay. I'm going to call it the Kaba now. You can just call it the cube. It just means the cube.

The cube, all right. You know, so you got a rectangular courtyard surrounding the cube. You got these sort of traditional Islamic porticoes. You've got like the sort of, I want to say, peristyle hall is the word, but that's Egyptian. Close enough. Right. Part of the hajj is you circle the cube seven times, right? So, you know, you need this big space so everyone can do that comfortably, right? Now, as once Saudi Arabia takes over, there's more Muslims. They start trying to expand this stuff, right?

So, the bulk of the masjid actually dates from the 1970s. And it kind of looks not to be disrespectful. This is the first expansion, modern expansion. This is the bulk of the building you're familiar with now is built then. You can see the Ottoman porticoes, they've been painted blue. They demolish a lot of the Ottoman porticoes. They start putting up these, this taller area, right? They pave around the Kaba so that you're not like just kicking off a bunch of dust doing to us.

They also demolish a lot of buildings surrounding the mosque so they can have more room. They put in the minarets. This is the bulk of how the building has generally been portrayed. Popular conception of the building is the Saudi-era expansion, the first one, right? So, this guy right here, right? Now, note, compared to the pictures we showed before, note all the buildings where people live and do commerce, which are so close up to the mosque, right? Yeah, I'm looking at these and I'm thinking all of these need to be 400 floors higher.

Yeah, that was about to say. That definitely improve it is if we demolished everything and made this bigger and maybe put some parking lots in. So, the mosque was already over capacity by the 2000s, so they're like, well, we need to do more expansions. Let's go demolish people's houses to do that, right? So, here's a good picture from 2014. Yeah, if you have social anxiety, Islam is not a good religion for you in a lot of ways. This was when the big expansion was at its most disruptive. They actually put in two elevated platforms so you could circle the Kaaba at different levels

to handle the extra people. This is already kind of a thing with the pillars that you have to stone. This is the future is just like this sort of concourse is going to be 50 stories high. It's going to be enclosed, entirely air conditioned, and you're just going to have to lean out over the edge. It's cool. This is my thing. I figure you're supposed to circle seven times. It's like the first couple you're outside the second of your inside afterwards. I don't know why they do a spiral ramp. I think that would make sense. If we're going to continue altering the building,

you may as well. But anyway, this is 2014, but you can see all these tower cranes over here because that's how big the expansion is. Now, this is sort of the before, right? Pay attention to this neighborhood up here because you can see already down here, this is where the big hotel is being built. You see there's a mountain here, there's a highway that goes through a tunnel, lots of buildings, lots of people live here. I believe Mecca has the highest proportion of non Saudis living in it of any city in Saudi Arabia, which I guess is why they can do things like this. So you can see a lot of buildings have disappeared for new skyscrapers. Here's the

hotel finish. There's another building next to it. You can see this series. These are probably all 40, 50 story buildings over here. The mosque expansion, which I don't understand the plan of this building at all, right? Yeah, it seems to be increasing the actual, yeah, but why not just like... I figured I thought the capacity problem was going around the Kaba as opposed to whatever the hell they're doing with this, which appears to be for viewing the Kaba, but not going around. I guess what they're thinking is... I feel like that was not the problem before. Yeah, I feel like what they're doing is they're building these massive prayer halls because you can see that like angled towards the Kaba and then you just stay in there

and pray until they fucking like clear enough people through that you can go and you can go and do toe off. Yeah, I can see that thing again. Oh, it's visiting the Sistine Chapel. They'll give you 10 goddamn minutes to see. Yeah, exactly. You get a crick in your neck and you come out of it and you feel like your religious experience has been sort of thoroughly commodified. Yeah, I've been to the Vatican Museums and I don't recommend it. It's fucking nice. Just too many goddamn people. It's like, you know, you shuffle past these incredibly beautiful artworks, these priceless masterpieces that you've... You will never see art that's equivalent to it anywhere else in your

life and there's so many of them and you can't enjoy any of it because you're just crammed in there with a million other people and you can barely move. Oh, that's how I felt about the Western Wall, man. I was like, okay, like, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, have died over this whatever 300 foot long section of rock. This is pretty cool. And then it's just like, search lights and shit and you're just like, this feels very... I don't feel fulfilled by looking at this. And pay attention. We'll talk about something that's going on over here later. Art should make you feel something. Yeah. But one of the things about this expansion is it's very, very difficult to find out what they're

actually doing. I had to search far and wide to find a render of what the finished expansion will look like. But I did find it. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. It looks like something from like the Phantom Menace. Yeah. It's the defrost symbol on my GTI, if you look at it from a certain angle. It doesn't seem like they've done much about the capacity problems over here. That's all the same. What I do notice is that they have decided to build some very large minarets. Oh, yeah. You got to build tall. Otherwise, how would you even know that you're shouting? How do you exert your political influence if you don't have big tall dongs? These are probably both about 1500 feet tall.

The point of a minaret is that you broadcast the call to prayer from it. I don't think that people have a lot of problems knowing when to pray in Mecca. I remember the crane collapse that happened a couple of years ago in Mecca. This seems like all these expansions is just creating new scenarios for hundreds of people. Because one of the minarets collapse is the white problems with the prayer. If you think about the temporary concourse that they added, the three floors thing, there was a French guy a couple of years ago who committed suicide during the harsh, who jumped off of one of those. I don't know, man. It's not good. All things are very strange. I don't understand the purpose of this. If it's not, again, to

expand circulation at Chowk Point, it doesn't look like they've done very much for that at all. You could still have the classic Hajj stampede. Although that doesn't tend to happen, to my knowledge, it's never happened in the Masjid al-Huram itself. It's been mostly the stoning, which, again, is one of those things where they've just built a multi-level parking garage for people. To their credit, they have tried to build their way out of that one. Again, I think the solution here, just one man's opinion, may be more theological than engineering. There may be a theological solution here. Generally, I tend to think that if you're killing people to do this,

then maybe it's worth taking the preservation of life as a first order impulse here. But what do I know? Well, in addition to doing that, of course, they're also building more luxury condos adjacent to the mosque. It looks like the minister says they have for Blade Runner down to the lighting. My God. You get these two big hotel buildings over here. They're supposed to be like a gateway to the mosque. This is called Jabal Omar, a cluster of mixed-use towers. It's like, this render looks awful. I hope they don't build it. Oh, wait, they're already building it. Okay. Yeah. Looks great. Yeah, looks great. I want to know how many tower cranes are they using in this place?

It's just a forest of tower cranes right in front of you. At least you get a nice view operating one of those. You try not to think about the guy who has your passport and a safe. A tower crane operator is a prestige position. I don't think those are the guys. I don't think the tower crane operator is the guy with the confiscated passport. You think it's like a Swedish guy who's getting paid $100,000 a week? Yeah, so he can become Italian, yes. Taking Italian lessons with my passport or money. Oh, do you want to know another fun fact about the Masjid al-Huram, which is that because of the whole Only Muslims thing, in the 70s, there was a genuine, there was a terrorist incident. There was a hostage taking where a bunch of Iranians and the

Saudis will never shut up about this, ever. A bunch of like a handful of Iranians took hostages and seized the Masjid al-Huram. And because Saudi Arabia didn't have any like kind of like SWAT teams or whatever, because it was the 70s, what they did was they paid the French gendarmerie national, the Gens, to come in and do the like to retake the mosque. But before they did that, they had them all convert to Islam on a temporary basis. I'm surprised they didn't have some foreign legion guys who were already Muslim who could do that. Yeah, well, I guess maybe it was like a belt and suspenders thing. I imagine it would have maybe taken a bit more time to find out. I don't know if they want to spend a couple hours just

to figure it out. You're Muslim now. Come on, we want to make sure you're not the wrong kind of Muslim. So now this project is well underway. In fact, I think this is a picture from back in 2014, because you can see the big ring back here. But they're expanding this project now into King Abdul Aziz Road. Oh, my God, Jesus Christ. Dear Lord in heaven. What are the Shanzali Zay, but worst and also good. Oh, my God. This is an affront to God. That pair of hotel towers before with the archway that's up here. And now this is a grand promenade right after the mosque, right? Right. So this is like the grand pedestrianized avenue, but with like four stories of parking underneath. There's this nice urban fabric

all around, right? That was obviously all ripped out to build this shit. Again, this is a render, but I don't have a picture of the construction, but this is again also well underway. Oh, my God. I mean, like again, like, what is this now? This is the same street. Same thing. Looking like a mall. Looking like a mall again. Pedestrianized in air quotes. There's a highway underneath this. Is that a Targ Hoyer watch place in the render on the bottom left? Yes. What else do we have here? Is that a fucking Sparrow's? Is it a Sparrow? It just says signage.

Oh, classic placeholder render things. Just Targ Hoyer has one. Yeah, no, this is cool. I want to buy a $50,000 watch. I want to know how many people they kicked out of their houses to put this thing up. Oh, it's going to be a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. God, totally shameless. And if you hated the first hotel, you'll hate the other hotel they're putting up. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, my Jesus Christ. They're really leaning into the Star Wars people thing. Why is there so many helipads on this? Because the genuine answer, right, is that the Saudis in general, the Saudi elites, they don't like Mecca. They don't like spending time in Mecca. It makes them have to think about Islam, which they don't like doing. And so what they want to do

is both A, turn it into a theme park where you can buy a $50,000 watch and B, minimize the amount of time that you have to spend there. So you fly in, you do your harsh stuff in this highly prescribed Salafist manner. You buy your $50,000 watch and you get the fuck out back to where people who matter live in Riyadh or Jeddah or wherever else. And the top five floors of this building are supposed to be reserved for the Saudi royal family. This is in site preparation. I think they put this on hold back in 2008 or so, but I think they've resumed construction. Yeah, again, I cannot stress enough the amount of contempt which the House of Saud has for Islam as a practice and as a religion is, yeah, no. It's very difficult to find information on these

things, which is annoying. I believe this is called Abraj Kudai. It's a big hotel. It's actually, it's shorter than the other hotel. Oh, that's good. He wouldn't want to overshadow that. No, not with it. I mean, the dome is pretty sweet. It is. Again, I think these would be pretty good buildings in Las Vegas. Oh, yeah, Vegas. These things would be absolute showstoppers. Can you imagine getting like the Cinderella Castle hotel room there at the top of the dome? Like, dude, I'm in a desert. I think it'd be more of an Arabian nights themed hotel room, I would think. Again, we're all, again, we're just doing Hitman levels. I can only think of the world. I can only process it in the form of Hitman 3 now and this, yeah, no. So I'm going to be

climbing up the outside of that to knock a guy out and steal his clothes. Now, Becca's not the only place where they're doing dumb shit though. So let's talk about the Jeddah Tower. Before you talk about the tower, can I talk about the thing which was previous to this, their big thing in Jeddah, building an enormous flagpole. And that's absolutely the most desperate for attention state thing there is. Because like, you know, both careers have done it. Some of the like Central Asian countries have done this is you hire this one company to build you a really large flagpole. I think Jordan has one and a man too. You just like build this and you have the world's largest flag and it's a Saudi flag and it's very cool. I've seen a number of

very large Confederate flags in my lifetime. Yes. Yes, I too have been to the Virginia, North Carolina line. Yeah. So one of the problems is, of course, you can't show the West all your wonderful things in Mecca because the West is not Muslim, right? So you gotta figure out some cool vanity project outside of Mecca where you can like say, hey, come to Saudi Arabia, look at all our shit, right? So one of these is something called Jeddah Economic City, right? So all very wordy terms for these things they're putting up, right? This is a big stupid new development on the outskirts of Jeddah, which is a city on the Red Sea. Jeddah, what's our American comparison? Can you guess? It's a port, but it's not like a huge one. I'm just gonna say, fuck it, Portland.

Bigger than Portland at all. I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say maybe it's like maybe like Milwaukee. I have no idea if Milwaukee is bigger than Portland. It is Llamas Colossus. It's a little smaller than Seattle, a little bigger than Minneapolis. 38 to 7, Seamus. 38 to 7. So the idea is they're building this big development on the outskirts of Jeddah. They're always building this shit on the outskirts. They never reinvest into the middle of their cities ever, you know, they're gonna build the tallest tower in the world called the Jeddah Tower, which will be one kilometer tall. Was it supposed to be the Kingdom Tower or did that name get

Kingdom Tower is an actual building in Riyadh, I believe. This seems very confusing. And Saudi, they have three names for stuff. It's dead king thing. It's kingdom thing. Yeah, I was right. I was right. I was right. It was previously known as a Kingdom Tower, but there is a separate tall skyscraper in Riyadh called the Kingdom Center, which is confusing. But now it's the Jeddah Tower. I guess they change it up a little bit. I'm just imagining like if we had a similar naming system in America, you have like the democracy tower. Well, you have the Kingdom Tower, though. I don't know if we have a stand on there. I guess the funniest thing you could do is like start naming stuff other than libraries and high

schools for recent former presidents. So like you just have like not even like a Trump Tower in the sense that like he puts his name on it, but like it's a publicly owned thing that you're calling the President Trump economic city. I had a cursed thought this morning, which was so you know, that you know, the company American LeFrance. Yeah, both fire trucks. Yeah, fire trucks. Yeah, I was thinking like, what if immediately after 9-11, they renamed it American LeFreedom? Oh, God. So after a lot of uncertainty with financing, they decided we're going to start, we're going to get this thing underway. They managed to get financing lined up. They started building the damn thing in March 2013. Of course, main contractor is podcast favorite,

Saudi Bin Laden Group. Yeah. Well, if you're doing contracting anywhere in the Middle East, you deal with Saudi Bin Laden Group. It is a massive company. In the defense of the Bin Laden family, a phrase I never thought I would say, Osama was not like a big deal within it ever. Like he was kind of a fail son. Yeah, exactly. He went off and he did his own thing. Literally the worst fail son in like world history. Yeah, he went off and he did his own thing in Afghanistan. And then he as Robert Fisk once wrote, put his army on the road to peace in Sudan. I'm 100% serious. You can look up this.

Google, I think the headline is, former Cold Warrior puts his army on the road to peace and it's about Osama Bin Laden building roads in Sudan. And meanwhile, while he was doing this, he was like, yeah, I'm just going to send a guy to blow up the USS Cole. Did that then 9-11. So, yeah. I think he would have probably done a little bit better for himself if they had podcasting back then. Somebody had a thing which is like, what's the weirdest celebrity encounter you've ever had on Twitter? And somebody said, I used to live in Islamabad and in the 90s. And Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard came to my house to make me turn my music down because we lived two doors down from him and it was too loud. So, I'm just going to get him kind of scolded for playing

fucking real big fish by Osama Bin Laden. What the hell? It was it? All right. So, he's two doors down, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And you're playing your music so loud he can, like either Osama Bin Laden is too sensitive or he had a point. Yeah. And they had a point where that noise can play. It was just that the cops broke in to deliver it. Is Osama Bin Laden a nimby? No. Yes, he's a nimby because that'll infuriate whoever posts this on numtats. No, I don't think Osama Bin Laden is a nimby because he was an engineer, right? That is true. He wasn't a pro when he built stuff. So, you know,

presumably he was not, he was not opposed to new development because he would make money off of it, right? I would say Osama Bin Laden is a yimby. Yes. You know what? Yes, that'll infuriate the numtats more. Yeah. You know what? 9-11 did? It cleared space for new development in lower Manhattan. That's true. I can't wait for someone to get real mad about that in the comments if I may get whatever two hours and twenty-seven minutes in. Yeah. All right. So anyway. We're getting through it. They started building this building, right? Hold on. Hold on, guys. Oh, I'm so sorry.

We've been recording this so, just listen to this at home. We've been recording this so long that a dinner that I ordered for well after this recording is ended is here. Okay. So, I need to go pick it up quickly. You guys can keep. Just remember to like, don't mute yourself when you're eating because the home's a little fast. Yeah, I know. This is exactly what I'm going to do. Okay. Okay. So, this is the part of the podcast where a lot of times it's sort of a musical interlude is a form of transition where we had to cut some dead air or irrelevant parts out, right? But because we upload to YouTube, I can't use any music because I'll get a copyright strike.

So, instead, just pretend there's some music here and that's what we're doing, right? Okay. So, back to the podcast with the understanding that some minutes elapsed in this area. So, hi. I'm Mohamed bin Salman and this is Jackass. What was that transition, man? I have to do, I'm Mohamed bin Salman. I have to do a bunch of unforced arrows. I have to kidnap the former prime minister of Lebanon. I have to occupy the top floor of the Riad Ritz and then just like electrocute a bunch of my uncles and bathtubs until they sign over all their money to me. It's a retreat for those who simply desire the royal treatment.

Because they're not even fucking fancy about it. They're just like, hey, guy, we're going to we're going to Trotsky here. It's so funny, right? That he's like unsubtle enough to just fully do the rubber hose treatment on people. But like it's in pursuit of like mashable articles about how Saudi Arabia is epic now. That's so funny to me. I'm looking at the royal suite on a go for us. Okay. So the 21st of June, 2017, Mohamed bin Salman becomes the deputy prime minister, which is the same as prime minister in Saudi Arabia. I should also point out that his dad, King Salman has pudding for brains by this point. He I've told this story before, but like a couple of years ago, and I mean a couple of years ago,

he got a diplomatic delegation from Libya and he asked them how Gaddafi was doing. He's not there. So he moves to consolidate power. He locks up hundreds of high ranking Saudis in the Riyadh, Ritz Carlton, rushed them up a bit, you know, for reasons. Yeah. Give me all your bank accounts. All these guys are his uncles, more or less, which is great. Right. Right. Yeah. It's about to say Uncle magic. It's just like torturing all of them. Slow western capital that was investing. That's going to be one awful family. Just like, hey, uncle whoever and he's just like, Hey, remember when you tried to electrocute me in

the bath with a gold plated toaster because I fucking. So western capital sort of gets apprehensive at this point, you know, they're starting to say, do we want to invest in this absolute monarchy that does purchase? I thought this was a modern progressive absolute monarchy. So another big event is, of course, the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, right? You know, they sort of beat the guy to death in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, if I recall correctly. Yeah. And then. Yeah, not just yet. They beat him up. They strangled him to death and then they cut up his dead body and then they got another guy who works in the embassy dress in his clothes and go outside. Pull the video and say that, hey, he left the embassy.

This is my favorite part, right? Like is that we found out about exactly how this went down because Turkish intelligence was bugging the Saudi embassy. And so they just released that once again, Erdogan being the worst person you know, makes a great point. And I mean, seriously, this is the power divide in the Muslim world at the moment is M. Do you like MBS or do you like Erdogan? Two gigantic pieces of shit in different ways. Anyway, but like my favorite detail about that type is the Saudi ambassador to Turkey is just like, hey, come on, guys, don't do this in my office. And they're just like sawing this guy apart. Like, come on. I just got this carpet, man. I think this became an international incident

solely because Khashoggi was a Washington Post contributor, right? Oh, yeah, otherwise don't want to give it a shit. And they barely give shit when they actually the reason why they thought they could get away with it is because Khashoggi was like, he was sort of an insider for the longest time. He like that they're an influential family or they were in Saudi Arabia. And so this is I think on MBS and this was seen as just like, well, I can torture a bunch of my uncles. I can kill this guy too. Nobody's going to give a shit. But what they didn't reckon with was sort of Western media solidarity with Western journalists. Yes. So like a lot of Western capital pulled out of Saudi Arabia like instantly,

right? Which is of course why the Jeddah Tower is perpetually stalled around 45 floors up. Oh, yeah. It reminds me of like how the the tower in Pyongyang looks. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just stood there and like all the windows were up and it just it's just impossible not to say and it's just kind of not surrounded by anything in particular. So it's just you kind of forced to look at it. But one of the things is, of course, capital has short memory. And supposedly, this is going to start work early this year. They're going to restart work on this thing. Saudi Arabia is back, baby. And what is back with? It's Neom. It's Neom. Neom.

Oh, I would love to tell you guys about Neom, mainly because we're two and a half hours in and this is the thing that they brought me on to talk about. Listen, our hogs will listen through anything. I know I'm sure. I was astounded to figure out that there are longer episodes in this much longer. Yeah. Neom is a it's a city out in Saudi Arabia's Northwest. They proposed a mega city that's I want to say 22 times the size of New York City and it's going to be basically all urbanized or at least it conflicts between saying that we're going to preserve a ton of nature and also it's going to be like amazingly futuristic and like like a cyberpunk type thing. Yeah, like in larger than some countries like Lebanon,

it's bigger than Lebanon, bigger than Israel. The idea is that it would be the city of the future. One million residents by 2030, there's going to be they don't say this publicly, but they do say in the McKinsey consulting documents that they want animatronic dinosaurs, that they want glow in the dark beaches. They want an artificial moon alongside the real moon. They want drone armies to do like constellations and like shows and do live streams like in space, like in the sky. They want to do like genetic engineering of humans. They want to do mech battles, right? That was one mech. But yes, mech battles. I was about to say they're going to do mech battles. They want to have robotic maids, just like like any like flying cars, obviously,

but everything, literally everything that you can think of is probably in those documents. But like is this also supposed to be like sort of they're making this a socially liberal special zone where like people can drink alcohol, women can drive cars. Well, women can drive cars now, finally in the year 2017, they could drive cars anywhere. But yeah, in Niamh, Niamh is supposed to have a separate judicial system for the rest of Saudi Arabid because right now they're still trying to catch up with the rest of the world. But in Niamh, theoretically, you wouldn't have to wait. You can just go there and there's alcohol and you can do whatever you want. That's supposed to be kind of appealing to investors.

I believe the idea is we plaster over society's flaws by having a lot of attractive Instagram influencers, right? That's one part of it. I know the influencers are kind of, they're doing stuff out in like Jeddah or Riyadh. But right now, what they're focused on is just bringing in like very, very rich bankers. And then once they have enough things you could theoretically go to, then you can bring in, you know, the Nicki Minaj, the Instagram people who have like five million followers, but you've never ever heard of it in your entire life. Yeah, Curve is Blurt is going to do a fucking live stream. Yeah, exactly. Chris Delcris is going to fucking, yeah. Dude, I want to be an Instagram influencer so fucking bad.

Yeah, you're going to have to change the spelling of your name to Leon. Yeah, there's actually a company called Bottomless that does, I'm going to talk about this because I'm never going to fucking do it, called Bottomless. And they provide a subscription coffee service. And they DM'd me on Twitter, telling me, you know, that if I did sponsored posts, I could get free coffee and this and that. And I haven't done it just because of obviously my commitment to you. To you dumb idiot. Setting my sights a little higher. Monster energy, call me. I will absolutely, I buy so much of your product. Absolutely podcast in like a monster energy branded fire suit, like a racing driver. Yeah, yo, you and me both, we're going to have to take turns with it.

They're really going to send us one. You can't podcast in a fire suit. No one will see the logos. Oh, I could podcast at anything. Good Lord. All right. So the first order of business was once they managed to line up a bunch of capital because everyone forgot about Khashoggi, right? You know, it's time to rev up the bulldozers. So they have to evict the people who already lived on the site of Neom. Oh, for God's sake. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the issue is, is that like, I mean, we talked about this earlier, like that there's a reason why they do all these developments out on the outskirts of the cities, because already no one lives there. You can kind of do whatever you want.

And there's really, you can just experiment. And there's not really a whole issue that you have to think about, like, where do people go necessarily. It doesn't always happen that way, but that's how it usually goes. But Neom by virtue of it being gigantic, like unfathomably large as a city, you kind of have to think about, okay, so the thought process of NBS was initially that he was on Google Earth and he saw an area of the country that was kind of underdeveloped. This is not a joke. Like, if you want to look at the Wall Street Journal piece, this is what they say is his thought process. But he doesn't record, he doesn't zoom in enough. Because I've looked on Google Earth, if you zoom in just a little bit, you can see if there are villages and towns

like buildings there. Yeah, people live there. Yeah, one click of the mouse wheel. They have names. If you just done that, maybe like, he would have thought about just making a slightly smaller meeting. I don't know. Maybe you could go around where people already live as opposed to on top of it. You know, yeah, there is a lot of vacant land, just not all of it is vacant. Yeah, the issue is that they have to start developing on the coastal areas first because no one wants to move into like the far interior of Saudi Arabia. But of course, because people live where water is, those tiny villages are by the coast, which they want to develop on. And I mean, these people don't live in like squalor or anything, like people in Riyadh

like to claim about them. They live in houses with like plumbing and streets and unlike Dubai. But of course, of course, these houses, like they just look like regular houses. They're not like a thousand feet tall skyscrapers that all the banks in the world have offices in. So they need to tear them down and need to tear them down like like soon. Yeah. And so something like 20,000 people need to be relocated to something that was a BBC estimate. And already one person has died resisting the kind of relocation. Quite a few people have been arrested as well, detained. People, tribal leaders have been paid off in order to denounce people who are resisting the other relocation. It's been a mess. It's been

a real mess, like unusually so for like a kind of Gulf mega development of this kind. Because usually both messes are purely monetary, typically. This one is very firmly human centered. It's like people, people don't like to be forcibly relocated, right? And there was Oh, no. I just imagine a podcasting from Neom and doing a stolen land acknowledgement, but like the stolen land was stolen like a month earlier. There was a lot to be with influencers too. When the 19 year old we've never heard of is in the suite next to ours. When the first guy was killed, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, when he was killed, there was a hashtag

talking about hashtag and Neom lines matter. Like they are kind of trying to adopt that language and attempt to appeal to people. But the issue is that, you know, Huwaiti tribe tribesmen, you know, they're not Western media sweethearts like Khashoggi was. So nobody really cares. That's not a therapy, right? Should have written more Washington public columns. They're like, I want to say Bedouin, right? Yeah, they're Bedouins, yeah. Yeah. And the Saudis have never liked them. And I guess they're certainly following through on not liking them by shooting anyone who resists relocation. So they can put up hypothetically a city or whatever this is. Yeah.

And so they killed this guy. They've relocated lots of other people, right? And it's like, well, what have they done since then? What does Neom look like now? Do we have some photos? Can we see it? This is the most recent satellite image I could find. Yeah, baby. So what we have here is an airstrip, right? It is an actual airport that you can go to. Yes. This is a very long runway. I believe it can take most airliners, right? Yeah. So they can go to the one parking spot. And then over here are a set of three royal palaces and two golf courses. Gotta go to the good real estate early. Yeah. And then there's some construction staging over here.

Cool. That's Neom. I mean, well, no, you're forgetting. There's also some town up here. If you look, if you look on the Google Maps, it's like it is like where they house the workers. And there is a there's a bank branch there and there's a dormitory and that is it. There is mostly just like empty streets. Not even a five guys. Oh my God. So one of the things, the most recent thing though that everyone wants to know about, despite all this Western investment, it seems like Mohammed bin Salman has had to scale down his plans for a mega city. But in addition to scale, he's only scaled them down in one dimension.

So I don't I don't know what inspired this. I'm going to speculate here. Back in the 1970s and late 1960s, there was an Italian radical architecture cooperative called Super Studio, right? An exhibit, I think, at one of the big architecture exhibitions at the time called the Continuous Monument, right? And this is a sort of commentary on a relationship between modernist urban totality. And there's a lot of academic language and like description to this that I don't understand, right? You can sort of see like it's like, you know, this continuous monument would encircle the world, you know, in this linear urban totality, right? So as best as I can tell, what happened was his MBS saw this thing and not understanding context or subtext or irony,

he said, yeah, I want that. Yeah, let's do that. So we get the line, the line, the idea is they're going to make 170 kilometer long linear city that goes from the coast, where the golf course is to the desert, where there isn't a golf course yet, but I'm sure they'll build one. One of their one of their arguments was old traditional cities couldn't cope with growth, because we've forgotten how to put up buildings, I guess. I am happy that I was placed on this podcast for this specific reason, because I've been wondering about this forever. So the idea is that this is going to be an innovative way. I agree, it's innovative. Nobody saw it before, because there's a reason why nobody saw it.

The public transportation system, like it's supposed to be the idea is that you could traverse the entire length of it within 20 minutes. Okay, very fast mag lift train. However, this seems extremely vulnerable to literally any problem. Because like the reason why you spread out a city is because you need to have like redundancy. Other places that you can go through redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. It seems incredibly inconvenient. No, it's not. It's very strange because yeah, 20 minutes end to end, right? So you need to go something like 300, 400 miles an hour to do that, but you need to average that, which means the top speed needs to be much higher, right? From an acceleration standpoint,

that seems dangerous to life and limb. I remember seeing something like, I mean, this would require faster trains than literally anywhere exists in service on earth right now. But there are faster trains in that, but they're extremely experimental. But theoretically, you would need to like figure this out at some point very quickly, like a 20th, like 23rd. We're bringing vacuum mag lives back. Well, if you look at the diagram, I believe they're assuming Elon Musk's Hyperloop works. And that's what that's going to be, right? Let's see if it pays off. And there's invisible layer of infrastructure here, which is like the service layer, and that'll be AI bullshit, moving your stuff, which means it'll

just be low paid workers. That's the same as AI, right? Yeah, they're not going to be able to fucking automate half of the shit that they want to. It's going to be a million Filipino maids in like one layer just getting beaten. It's great. I've seen two versions of this diagram. One here says AI enabled transport right here. Another one says Metro. It's the spine layer. I guess AI makes things go faster, right? Yeah. That's what they're studying in my style. If you AI something, it means it's better, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, that is the crux of like the selling point of the line in that everything is AI. Therefore, it's better. It's more streamlined. It's just you want to live there, but not necessarily. Like you need to go

beyond that, but does explain it. I don't think anyone's quite come to terms with the fact that AI doesn't exist like we don't have AI. I don't know. You have like the Google smart city is like the same thing. Like we don't actually have AI. We have like chatbot essentially like there are very sophisticated like automatic Metro systems out there. They're not AI. No, no, no. AI is when a computer talks to you in a sexy lady's voice, and the more it does that, the more AI it is. Oh my God. When I saw this diagram, all I could think of is like old 1920s diagrams of cities of the future, right? Yeah. Hell, yes. How you may live and travel in the city of 1950. Yeah. There's actually a few streets in New York City that if you look at a cross-section,

they're not too far off. The Zeppelin, though. Big fan of that. Missing the Zeppelins, right? None of these diagrams ever sort of gave us an idea of how they would handle intersections, right? Which I believe is something the line. They've fairly thought about it enough where they think, okay, yeah, yeah. We know the thing about intersections is what if we had a city where there are no intersections. Then it works. Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. These are the other news graphics on the air of news. God. I am wondering about the mountain part, because theoretically it's a straight line, but it's not flat like the coastal areas or the desert. It's a mountain range. Do you cut through it? Yeah. I think you're just going to have to

build a tunnel, yeah. Why not stop the line? Unfortunately, our mountain segment of the line is all built on the ground, and we've constructed the Society of Morlocks. So I think ideally the line would just keep going all the way around the earth. That's the natural end of the line as it just keeps going. So it's kind of an interesting thing. You look at this and it's like, well, what is going on? Is there any redeeming value here, or is it just grift? I think it's just grift. Yeah. What I theorize, which I think is the most funny possible theory, is that in the Wall Street Journal piece, initially, they were talking about

how McKinsey was talking to MBS and they were saying, hey, we're noticing that there's no street plan here for NEOM. Maybe it would be better for investors if they had a street plan that they could go off of and maybe think about the best thing. Then MBS got really angry and said, we don't need streets. In 2030, we will have flying cars. So my theory is, is because they've been building roads in the rest of NEOM, they had to compromise. And he'd said, okay, I still want a part of the city that has no streets, but it's going to be in a straight line. That was all that they gave them. Even if there's no cars, even if there's flying cars, you still need streets because you need to know where to put the windows on the buildings.

You need to know where people aren't going to put a building next to your building, so you can put a window there. It's all built like Katal Hayuk. It's like a neolithic mountain city. I'm confused. Is he just going to offer a huge plot of land for sale and just say, okay, you can just draw a line somewhere and you own that. And you have no concept of how that will interconnect with anything else. I have no idea how the ownership of NEOM is supposed to work. If it's just going to be like TikTok influencer houses or what. You're doing a highly centralised, highly centrally planned thing. And then presumably at some point, you're going to have to sign all of this over to landlords,

right? And like your various uncles and nephews and brothers and so on and so forth. And they're just going to do their own thing. What's to stop them from just being like, yeah, I'm just going to build my own development that's orthogonal to the line. I'm going to build a perpendicular line. So yeah, this is great. It's many competing lines. Isn't that what society is? I hope not. So like this is the paradigm of the Petra state is, you know, this highly sustainable supposedly city in the middle of the desert, which is basically a big TikTok house. So you're going to ask the question, what if this was like a nice Scandinavian social democracy?

How would they be spending their Petro dollars? Like probably just something like kind of maybe nicer looking slightly. It's going to be some other mega project, but it's going to be like sock them. Oh, okay. All right. All right. One slide only. I thought, I thought Justin was just being like, Hey, like, wouldn't it be crazy if like the Norwegians made it? No, no, he's got slide prepared. He's got, he's got things prepared for this. There's only two, there's only three significant slides left. All right. So, you know, Norway gets a lot of its money from oil. Here's a reindeer.

It's got, you know, they store up a lot of their oil money in a big fund is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, something like one. Oh, how much is it? You know, 1.4 trillion dollars. Oh, wow. I mean, the societies plan to get their sovereign wealth fund up by 2030s only by only to get it up to the 1 trillion. So, how come there's no stereotypes about fucking young Pearson coming up and buying all of your shit? You know, because the young Pearson has to wait for his pension. Oh, that's true. Has they owned something like 2.3% of all stocks in Europe? Yeah, I know, but nobody's making jokes about them doing it is my point because they don't

want to piss off their homage. You have too many Aventadors with the Norwegian guy. Getting pulled over by a Norwegian coffin of Bugasi Veyron. They, they use, there's $195,000 in that fund for every Norwegian. They use the stuff to, they just pay out pensions with it, really. Sometimes they plug up budget holes. They have a whole bunch of ethics rules where they're like, they don't invest in companies that build nuclear bombs or grow tobacco because severe and iron metal damage, blah, blah, blah. But that being said, they still have enough revenue left over that they still spend it on dumb shit. So, we're going to talk about European route E39. This goes from Denmark

to Christian sand Norway, or excuse me, through, through to Albert, no, to Trondheim, excuse me. Jesus left. Trondheim is up here, yeah. Wait, hang on one second, just one second, just one second, three hours. Yeah, this is, this is, this is incredible. I'm sorry, it's fine. I am intrigued with how like the path has been going. Like I watched like a seven hour movie like double days ago. Yeah, I was kind of, I've gone insane. This is the Irishman of podcasts. Honestly, we might, we might go over the runtime of the Irishman.

I heard you paint houses, but only with one line. So, one of the things about European route E39 in Norway, there's lots of ferries over fjords, right? Yeah. There's, I think 20 or 30, something like that. The Norwegian government has said, well, let's use our Petra dollars to get rid of these ferries, right? Well, the thing about fjords is they're very deep and they're very wide. So, it's impractical to build a bridge. So, they've decided to, there's a number of absurd engineering projects they're undertaking at a mind boggling scale, mostly tunnels. So, for instance, this is the RogFast. Putting all of my, my roulette tokens on future WTYP

Tunnel Fire episode. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, this is, this is just north of Stavanger, which is a mid-sized city in Norway. Mid-sized Norwegian city is a small city everywhere else. You know, this is a wide and tricky body of water. So, what they've decided to do, what they, what they have now is they have two tunnels. This is a tunnel here. There's another tunnel over here. And you go up here and you take a ferry. And what they decided to do is, well, for this segment of the route, we're going to build a 17 mile tunnel that's going to go out to this remote island that five people live on, and then it's going to keep going, right? But it also has a ramp to get up to that remote island.

This is so cool. Okay. You know what tunnels need is intersections. Oh. Yes. Like that undersea one with the jellyfish? Hell yeah. It's, it's, um, yeah, that's, that's Denmark in, um, Yeah, yeah. The Faroe Islands. I was thinking about, many people brought that up on your Faroe Islands post. Oh my God.

This is, oh my God, baby, man, you wrote these notes. This is true. So, this is a 17 mile road tunnel that will go 1286 feet underwater. Uh, and they started work on this in January, 2018. I don't understand why you would put your money into this. Like, I guess it's cool that you save a bit of time, but again, I don't, this is ridiculous. If road tunnels are a bad idea, I don't, I don't understand why, why they're doing this. Because you have too much money. It's from reindeer heads.

Because you have so much money. If you don't have enough money that you can physically spend. I think, I think, I think that's the thing. You can spend it on whatever. Yeah. That's the, that's the Elon Musk problem, right? Instead of building 10, that's the Elon Musk problem. Like, and I imagine it does work on an institutional scale.

Like Elon Musk, as we've discussed, could have like taken his whatever, 150 billion dollars and just fucked off already. But because at some point wealth simply does not matter. Like when you have 1.4 trillion dollars, you, you start doing stuff like, okay, I'm going to tie this all together. Right. And I'm going to have some closing thought here. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to say this as a way of closing out the episode to make.

Thank you, I'm going to make Justin close out the episode with this. And that is that we can think of all of this stuff as like a safety release valve for money. Like you have too much of it. It builds up in your society. You need to do something to get rid of it. And what you do is you build a bridge that nobody's going to drive on. You build a tunnel that's going to kill everyone who uses it. You build a city in 170 kilometers long line.

You build the world's largest flagpole. You do pretty much anything. You build the world's largest sex dildos to fuck yourself in the ass with. Anything in order to stop the petrodollars from building up and building up and building up. And then you sort of crash the economy. I mean, I guess the other option is you just plow it all into treasury bonds, which is not petrodollars, but in regular dollars, what China's been doing. But then the downside of that is you end up owning most of the U.S.

and you are then handcuffed to an idiot for the rest of your life, which is not good either. So, yes. I think that's so important that our economy is really cool. It works really well. I like the system that we have. Well, good podcast, everyone. So, this is under construction. Another one is trying to figure out how to build a submerged floating tunnel under some of these

fjords, which is either going to be anchored to the ground or it's going to be anchored by What happens when a guy runs a submarine into it? We don't know. Nothing good. I kind of look like the tunnels. We don't know. Just kind of look blank and confused. They're just like, what am I doing here?

Which ties into my question of Ross. What am I still doing here? We're finishing out the podcast. It's one less. We got the last slide. I love you, buddy. I love you, buddy. Even social democracies can't spam petrodollars responsibly.

It's a shitty thing to have. Leave it on the ground. Cool monster. Also abolish the profit most of in capitalism and stock trading. Exactly. So. Yep. Fuck you.

Sorry. Next time. All right. Sorry, guy. We'll get to the next episode. That's all right. I want to call Monero's Bridges. Shameless.

Thank you so much for sticking with us for a three hour, god damn podcast. Sorry, buddy. But it's sorry about that. You know, it's like Justin. Justin asked me, like, I want to see, like, at that hour and a half part. He said, like, do you have any time constraints? No, it's fine. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, no. Because like, I don't want to be rude. And I think, okay, like, I've only got a podcast. Unfortunately, you spoke to the only third of this podcast that would take that 100% literally. Also, we should do some self-promotion. Yeah.

It's an article about the line. You should plug that. Oh, yeah. Okay. If you are one of the three people who got to the end of this podcast. Congratulations. You're an host now. I have a sub stack that you could subscribe to for $5 a month.

I do a lot of reporting on like Middle Eastern affairs, stuff that you really aren't going to get from a lot of English speaking outlets. I go right to Richelanguage sources, get the stuff. The article that they invited me on for, and they discussed for 10 minutes, was Neon and the line. I wrote pretty extensively about the problems that's been going on there. It's called Neon, the line to oblivion. I'm not going to spell out my sub stack, because I'm going to be able to spell my own name before.

Go down. We'll put in the link. And you can go to that and subscribe. It would mean a lot to me. Well, we have now murdered you. Yes. I've been on this for... Yeah.

Yeah. My God. Jesus Christ. It was fun. I enjoyed myself. Never again. However. However.

Yeah. For the first and last time, only time. On, Well, There's Your Problem. Shame and smile. Absolutely. Thank you. So you've been on here almost as much time. You've been on a trash feature.

That's literally true. Total. I was... Oh, God. I was talking to Corinne before we started recording. And I said, it shouldn't run that long. I know Roz had trouble getting notes. And she said, you only say that.

The last one was an hour. It's going to be fine. I know, like, notes on this are going to be a pain in the ass. And I said, that's exactly what I said. Like a dumb asshole. And I said, we have a guest. Those always run longer. Maybe.

Maybe an hour, 45 minutes. I am looking at Zencaster right now. This is going to go very nearly as long as 9-11. And by the end of that, I was. And I love you very dearly, Roz. You're my best friend. Ready to beat you unconscious with a fight. All right.

Not a second longer. I'm calling it here. Time for death. We're done. This is the end of the podcast. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Is it the 83rd?

No, no. No. All right. It's the end of the slideshow. Good morning. Afternoon. I have a stomachache. All right.

All right. All right. We're done. We're going to start with Zencaster. If I can find it. Yeah. Thanks for coming out. Putting up with that.

All right. Oh, it's hilarious. All right. Oh, it's hilarious. All right. All right. Someone please slow. We've got to stop this recording.