Speaker 1: Also Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we're
Speaker 2: continue to talk about Mohammed Ben Salmon and the Saudi
Speaker 2: royal family with our guest David Bell. Welcome back to
Speaker 2: the show. Dave. It's been a little while between our
Speaker 2: first and last recordings. Yeah, been the first recording in
Speaker 2: this one, have you been?
Speaker 3: I got COVID not currently, but I got ice. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I also Robert.
Speaker 4: Last night, I had a dream about you, a dream
Speaker 4: about me. Okay, So my dream was that we were
Speaker 4: taking a shower together in b the suits and then.
Speaker 2: I had to that makes the TV appropriate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Then I had to poop in the dream and
Speaker 3: left the shower. Day, where are we building to here?
Speaker 3: This is the dream. This is the dream. And I
Speaker 3: went to the bathroom in dream?
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop
Speaker 4: in real life, so I was like, oh, thank god,
Speaker 4: that was just a dream. Yeah, I had to poop
Speaker 4: in the dream. So I left the shower and Alex
Speaker 4: Schmidty was in.
Speaker 2: The bathroom, our other old roommate.
Speaker 3: Making coffee in the bathroom and in the dream classic coffee.
Speaker 4: I should have started with the fact that I have
Speaker 4: terrible dreams, and that that was the dream.
Speaker 2: That doesn't sound like a good one.
Speaker 3: It wasn't bad, it was fine.
Speaker 2: I don't know that i'd call that fine. Well, Dave,
Speaker 2: thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream.
Speaker 2: I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it.
Speaker 2: Among our listener base. We were going to react normally
Speaker 2: to your shower story. Ah. You know who else reacts
Speaker 2: normally to things?
Speaker 3: Who me?
Speaker 2: The Saudi royal family, you know, because they're all they're
Speaker 2: basically aside from the billions and billions of dollars in
Speaker 2: oil money and the fact that they don't have to work,
Speaker 2: and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves them,
Speaker 2: you know, they're just down to earth, regular guys like
Speaker 2: Tim the Toolman Taylor from the show that maybe twenty
Speaker 2: percent of our audience remembers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the guy that the guy, the criminal guy.
Speaker 2: To me, Tim Allen, a simple everyman with who runs
Speaker 2: a television show out of his house. Anyway, So one
Speaker 2: of the few. As we've stated, most of like the
Speaker 2: young princes, are not super productive individuals, right, They're mostly
Speaker 2: spending their time kissing asked try and get like a
Speaker 2: better cut of the family fortune, doing as little as possible,
Speaker 2: and grafting off of like the money that should be
Speaker 2: going to support the Saudi state. There's a few exceptions
Speaker 2: to this rule, right, Mohammed bin Salmon, the subject of
Speaker 2: our episodes, is one. His father, the soon to be
Speaker 2: King Solomon, is another. And another one of the exceptions
Speaker 2: to this rule was Mohammed bin Nayef, born in Jedda
Speaker 2: at the end of August nineteen fifty nine. He had
Speaker 2: more more than a quarter century on his younger cousin.
Speaker 2: His father was Prince Niaf bin Abdulaziz, full son of
Speaker 2: the Great King Abdulaziz, and a full brother of two
Speaker 2: other kings, Fad and the new King Solomon. He was
Speaker 2: thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump
Speaker 2: than anyone ever thought that mohammadan Salmon was going to
Speaker 2: be right like, he just kind of seems like a
Speaker 2: much better bet as which one of these guys is
Speaker 2: going to actually like make it to the high seat.
Speaker 2: His father, Naif Been Abdulahziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince,
Speaker 2: and he'd risen to power first when his older brother,
Speaker 2: the Minister of the Interior was assassinated by that other
Speaker 2: prince who was angry about TV being legal. I know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of princes in this story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nief succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now
Speaker 2: working directly with the Wahabists, who traditionally had allied with
Speaker 2: the House of Saud in order to push their hardline
Speaker 2: fundamentalist policies. Prince Niaf became what the Brookings Institute described
Speaker 2: as an arch reactionary, and he was the orchestrator behind
Speaker 2: many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down
Speaker 2: on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism.
Speaker 2: That's the Black Prince right. He violently suppressed the movement
Speaker 2: to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy
Speaker 2: like in the UK, telling one interviewer, I don't want
Speaker 2: to be Queen Elizabeth, which who does.
Speaker 3: Who does you know what I might take it?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 3: She had, Yeah, well not now, she said, Corkis.
Speaker 5: You know this actually came up on Margaret kiljoy show
Speaker 5: before and we decided I would make a great Queen
Speaker 5: Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, that would be very effective.
Speaker 5: I would be I would be a great queen.
Speaker 1: I go mad with powers and I love corgies.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he earned the Black Prince earned his nickname because
Speaker 2: of how harsh his policies were to the non citizen
Speaker 2: worker population in the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when
Speaker 2: his so on NBN, we've got NBS and NBN and
Speaker 2: they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a
Speaker 2: public person, spurning his own country in favor of the West.
Speaker 2: So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's
Speaker 2: not interested in attending a school in the Arab world. Instead,
Speaker 2: he goes to like the oppositest part of the world
Speaker 2: he possibly can, Portland, Oregon. I know, Portland shows up,
Speaker 2: You're gonna ask what I was gonna guess, Berkeley.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, he goes to fucking NBN. Goes to Portland, Oregon
Speaker 2: for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and
Speaker 2: Portland State University. Incredible, Yeah, really funny. He does not
Speaker 2: graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a
Speaker 2: graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU. Neither is true.
Speaker 2: I can't even I can't even confirm that he got
Speaker 2: a degree. Everyone says he's got a BA right. The
Speaker 2: book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Sticks Dinsley claims
Speaker 2: that he studied for his master's degree in political science
Speaker 2: and graduated in nineteen eighty one, although again no one
Speaker 2: says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark
Speaker 2: at PSU and he got a degree, but nobody says
Speaker 2: where the degree is from, and we've confirmed it wasn't
Speaker 2: either of those colleges.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Lewis and Clark College. A guy that Mohammed bin
Speaker 2: Salmon sparred with came here. Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe not the best ad, so yeah, I don't know
Speaker 2: that he actually did graduate. Stigwrtes that he took quote
Speaker 2: courses on security issues with the FBI from nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: five to nineteen eighty eight and trained with Scotland Yard's
Speaker 2: Anti terrorist units in London from nineteen ninety two to
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four. In nineteen ninety four he began working
Speaker 2: regularly with his father, Interior Minister nief and Riyad, And
Speaker 2: I think this is a situation where he's probably not
Speaker 2: that great a student. I don't think you would have
Speaker 2: qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland
Speaker 2: yard based on his own merits, but because he's a
Speaker 2: prince and he's someone who is going to be a
Speaker 2: big part of the Saudi state. When he when he
Speaker 2: expresses I'm interested in anti terrorism work, right, I'm interested
Speaker 2: in like training with Western law enforcement organizations and counter terrorism.
Speaker 2: They're all like, well, this is our chance to have
Speaker 2: a man on the inside, right, this is our chance
Speaker 2: to have like a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like
Speaker 2: a spy, but a guy who's who we know, is
Speaker 2: like a friend to us, who we feel like we
Speaker 2: can trust. As opposed to this this regime is kind
Speaker 2: of a black box to us otherwise, Right.
Speaker 4: It helps, it helps with your credit, It just puts
Speaker 4: it's just a good I get it where it's like,
Speaker 4: all right, you might you might not be. It's like
Speaker 4: when The X Files had Stephen King wrote an episode
Speaker 4: and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show,
Speaker 4: the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King.
Speaker 3: Let's throw him on.
Speaker 2: And he didn't you know? That episode was the best.
Speaker 3: It was really. It was also heavily rewritten.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would have had to be Yeah. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: should have let Mohammed ban Naya write an episode of
Speaker 2: The X Files. Oh yes, he was training with the
Speaker 2: FBI in the nineties. He could have done it watching
Speaker 2: the X Files, right. Oh yeah, he mused to have
Speaker 2: an opinion on Fox Moulder. Oh yeah. So it's unclear
Speaker 2: to me how much the elder and younger Knif coordinated here,
Speaker 2: because remember his dad, the Black Prince, is this guy
Speaker 2: who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused
Speaker 2: on we need to crack down on anything that seems
Speaker 2: like someone having fun in the Kingdom, right, whereas his
Speaker 2: son is like, I'm friendly with the West, i went
Speaker 2: to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI's
Speaker 2: he's making he's putting out into the world, at least
Speaker 2: image of he's much more of a liberal guy. He's
Speaker 2: much less of a hard liner, right.
Speaker 3: I bet he knows where to get some great ascid.
Speaker 2: He probably did at one point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, there's several places in that list where I
Speaker 4: feel like he.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the FBI academy, I bet they had some great shit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, So it's hard to say to what extent
Speaker 2: is this, he and his dad are kind of working together,
Speaker 2: knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach
Speaker 2: out to the West and can seem like he's modern
Speaker 2: and someone who can get arm in arm with the
Speaker 2: clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying
Speaker 2: to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity.
Speaker 2: But there do seem to have been some real clashes
Speaker 2: between them right One of them is over the fact
Speaker 2: that his dad, the Black Prince, doesn't take seriously the
Speaker 2: dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Like he keeps being told, hey,
Speaker 2: there's something brewing in your country, and he's like, nah,
Speaker 2: I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going
Speaker 2: to be like two words that show up next to
Speaker 2: each other in the public imagination. Per that analysis by
Speaker 2: the Brookings Institute, Naief was conspicuously slow to recognize that
Speaker 2: al Qaeda posed a threat to the Kingdom. He'd become
Speaker 2: friendly with bin Laden during the Russian Afghan War, when
Speaker 2: bin Laden was allied with the Musjahdeen and viewed him
Speaker 2: as being exclusively focused on defeeding the Soviets. Naieff believed
Speaker 2: al Qaida's reputation as a terrorist organization a product of
Speaker 2: American propaganda, and was sure that all Kaita posed no
Speaker 2: real threat to the Kingdom, a delusion he had in
Speaker 2: common with much of the royal family. Prince Niaff was
Speaker 2: not popular with the CIA. He was seen as uncooperative,
Speaker 2: and for good reason. In nineteen ninety six, when chait
Speaker 2: terrorists bombed a US Air Force base in Dahran and
Speaker 2: killed nineteen Americans, the CIA asked Niaf for information on
Speaker 2: the terrorists and their ties to Iran. Despite the Kingdom
Speaker 2: and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Niaf stonewalled
Speaker 2: the US. Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd
Speaker 2: attack Iran and he wanted to avoid war. Bruce Rydell,
Speaker 2: author of that bookings piece, was an CIA analyst at
Speaker 2: the time, and he claims the general opinion over here
Speaker 2: is that Niff was simply an American, right, and that's like,
Speaker 2: I don't want to give too much credit to the
Speaker 2: analytics skills of the pre or post nine to eleven
Speaker 2: CIA right, for.
Speaker 3: Sure, for sure.
Speaker 2: So my assumption is that Bruce is like rog about
Speaker 2: some part of the analysis there. I think maybe it's
Speaker 2: just that he's not as much anti American as he is,
Speaker 2: like anti having a problem, and if al Qaeda is
Speaker 2: a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a
Speaker 2: problem because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are
Speaker 2: close to Bin Law and a lot of people in
Speaker 2: like the ruling class, have been funneling money to him
Speaker 2: and organizations that are related to al Qaida, And if
Speaker 2: they're really dangerous, then the there's a big problem. And
Speaker 2: there's just this. It may just be the deep human
Speaker 2: need to like not have a problem, right, That's part
Speaker 2: of what's going on with night.
Speaker 3: No one likes to start shit.
Speaker 4: I get that where it's like, yeah, maybe Obama, maybe
Speaker 4: he'll you know, yeah, call him Obama, Osama bin Lawn.
Speaker 3: Maybe he'll settle.
Speaker 2: Down, right, he'll calm down. Yeah, and n.
Speaker 4: Sorry forgive me. I'm I'm less educated on like what where?
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 4: Like what was osamavid Lan's position before nine eleven? Like,
Speaker 4: I oh, I mean like a lot of people only
Speaker 4: heard of him until after.
Speaker 2: He bombed I mean he and al Kaida bombed the
Speaker 2: world tradinges that are in ninety three. I think it
Speaker 2: was right, Okay, oh yeah, Now it's very clear to
Speaker 2: anyone paying attention that Bin Laden is going to continue
Speaker 2: to be a problem for like the Kingdom and its
Speaker 2: relations with the rest of the world. But there's this
Speaker 2: big doubt with a lot of guys is like, are
Speaker 2: they really terrorists? Is this the Are the Americans making
Speaker 2: all this stuff up?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And the Black Prince's son, Mohammad bin nief INBN seems
Speaker 2: to have been one of the rare people high up
Speaker 2: in the royal family because of his training with these
Speaker 2: Western agencies. Who actually is like, no, Al Qaeda is
Speaker 2: probably an issue, and there'll be an issue for us too.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: His feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more
Speaker 2: in line with how the Americans are feeling, right, and
Speaker 2: so he spends a lot of the nineties burnishing his
Speaker 2: credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies,
Speaker 2: being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family
Speaker 2: who sees things clearly that you can work with. There's
Speaker 2: a big moment of conflict between the Elder Naif and
Speaker 2: the CIA. In nineteen ninety eight, Vice President Al Gore
Speaker 2: goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia alongside Bruce Rydell,
Speaker 2: who's now working for the NSC they met both Naifs
Speaker 2: and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of
Speaker 2: the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack
Speaker 2: the US consulate while they were there. Up to that point,
Speaker 2: al Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right,
Speaker 2: And so now while al Gore is in country, they
Speaker 2: bust a plan to attack the consulate while the US
Speaker 2: Vice President there, and that really rattles people. And suddenly
Speaker 2: Mohammad bin Naief is the only guy who's been saying like, hey,
Speaker 2: we should be taking al Kaeda seriously, and suddenly he
Speaker 2: gets a lot of attention, is like, oh, maybe he
Speaker 2: was right. Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time,
Speaker 2: and we should be listening to this guy when it
Speaker 2: comes to security advice. Right.
Speaker 4: It's yeah, going back to like people are all like conflict, right,
Speaker 4: and if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem,
Speaker 4: that guy's a problem. Will go as long as we
Speaker 4: can up to the point where it's like, oh wait,
Speaker 4: they're going to hurt me.
Speaker 3: Oh well, we got to do something about this. Oh lie,
Speaker 3: oh my good.
Speaker 2: If al Gore gets killed by al Qaeda while I
Speaker 2: am in charge of security, that probably is the problem
Speaker 2: for me. That's bad that like, I probably don't do
Speaker 2: well afterwards.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I'm finding a new career after that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in nineteen ninety nine, MBN is appointed to
Speaker 2: the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security.
Speaker 2: By the fall of two thousand and one, he was
Speaker 2: considered by many experts to be the number one guy
Speaker 2: in the Saudi government to talk to you about counter terrorism.
Speaker 2: And then comes nine to eleven. Right, you know you're
Speaker 2: well aware. Yeah, So basically there were some big buildings
Speaker 2: in New York and then there weren't as a result
Speaker 2: of these guys who learned how to fly, but not
Speaker 2: all the way. Right, that's the that's the brief description
Speaker 2: I would give se yeah, yeah, seventy.
Speaker 1: But the test.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's basically what happened. Right, there were some other.
Speaker 1: Thanksging not wrong. That's what's funny.
Speaker 4: I hate to sound listen, I hate to sound really old,
Speaker 4: but I'm realizing that there are young people now that
Speaker 4: do genuinely have to like learn about nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, we forgot, well they did. Yeah, so they
Speaker 2: cause a massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment. Right,
Speaker 2: this is as big a problem as it could possibly be,
Speaker 2: because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: a kind of their deal, right, Bush was rattling his
Speaker 2: saber at Iraq and they'd had fuck all to do
Speaker 2: with all Kainda. Like right after the attacks, we start
Speaker 2: making it starts becoming clear we're going to move on
Speaker 2: a rack. Pretty soon.
Speaker 3: They had WMD's Roberts.
Speaker 2: So obviously, if you're thinking about this from the respect
Speaker 2: of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up a
Speaker 2: rock and they had nothing to do with this. We
Speaker 2: had a lot to do with this. Not only were
Speaker 2: fifteen and the nineteen hijackers Saudi, but a lot of
Speaker 2: guys in the Saudi royal family. We're shuffling money to
Speaker 2: places that wound up getting to Al Qaida right one
Speaker 2: where or the other.
Speaker 4: And they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a
Speaker 4: big problem. He's a big problem. And then he hit
Speaker 4: d Trade Center. Yeah yeah, and then you hit like
Speaker 4: the guy next to him because you wanted to hit
Speaker 4: that guy instead. That's essentially it, right, It's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: we already had a problem. We didn't like Saddam for
Speaker 4: a while, and we were like that says Adam, last straw,
Speaker 4: you did it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so there's this worry that like, well, how
Speaker 2: do we know they're not going to fuck with us next, right,
Speaker 2: because we kind of we actually have it coming a
Speaker 2: lot more than erect us. And obviously, you know, it's
Speaker 2: not just that bin Laden, the guy who plans the
Speaker 2: attack or does is seen as planning the attack, is
Speaker 2: the man is a Saudi too. But the Black Prince
Speaker 2: in most of his peers had scoffed at the idea
Speaker 2: that al Kaida was dangerous. You know, it doesn't take
Speaker 2: a bright person to see if the Royal family is
Speaker 2: in danger. Here Mbn is the new blood. He's not
Speaker 2: tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation.
Speaker 2: He's got good connections to US government, particularly in the
Speaker 2: CIA and the FBI, and he starts using them. And
Speaker 2: then in two thousand and three something happened that would
Speaker 2: electrify his career. On February fourteenth, on the holy day
Speaker 2: of ida A Lada Osama, bin Laden issued a communicate
Speaker 2: through al Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the
Speaker 2: Last Caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies.
Speaker 2: This mirrored their behavior supporting the US and its wars
Speaker 2: against Muslims. He predicted that the US would use air
Speaker 2: bases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq.
Speaker 2: The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the Kingdom,
Speaker 2: or at least this has been laden announcing that he
Speaker 2: was widening the scope of the existing war to include
Speaker 2: the Kingdom. Right, al Qaeda is now at war with
Speaker 2: the Kingdom, at least with the Kingdom's royal rulers. In May,
Speaker 2: al Qaida operatives launched an attack on a Riyad compound
Speaker 2: where Western military advisers worked with Saudi officers. Eight Americans
Speaker 2: and two Australians died, among others. CIA director George Tennett
Speaker 2: flew to the Saudi capital and warned the Crown Prince,
Speaker 2: al Qaeda is going to target your family next. Just
Speaker 2: a few months later, Mohammad ban Nayaf has made the
Speaker 2: number two man in the entire Ministry of the Interior.
Speaker 2: It was a vote of confidence in his ability to
Speaker 2: orchestrate the Kingdom's response to al Qaeda and to effectively
Speaker 2: reform its security and intelligence agencies. TenneT would later write
Speaker 2: that the Cia considered Mohammad bin Nayef its number one
Speaker 2: man in Saudi Arabia. Right Dell writes, Mbin led the
Speaker 2: counter offensive. The Interior Ministry issued lists of the most
Speaker 2: wanted al Qaeda terrorists and then proceeded to hunt them
Speaker 2: down ruthlessly. Whenever any of the men on a list
Speaker 2: were eliminated in firefights or ambushes, the ministry would update
Speaker 2: the list with the names of the next most wanted
Speaker 2: al Qaida fighters. It was a tough and dangerous time.
Speaker 2: Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or
Speaker 2: at least sent their families away. Mbin was the face
Speaker 2: of the Saudi war on al Qaida, appearing on television
Speaker 2: and in the newspapers to explain the threat the kingdom
Speaker 2: was facing. So he becomes like the figure who is
Speaker 2: like leading the Saudi war effort against al Qaeda. He's
Speaker 2: like both in propaganda, his face is everywhere and the
Speaker 2: West season as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this
Speaker 2: response to al Qaeda violence in the country and within
Speaker 2: the royal family. He's seen as the guy who is
Speaker 2: protecting us from this like surge of violence, from this
Speaker 2: dangerous and unpredictable network, right, Like he's he's really if
Speaker 2: you're looking at who's going to follow as like who's
Speaker 2: going to be of this generation, Like the guy who's
Speaker 2: in line to be king Mohammed and Nif is looking
Speaker 2: like someone who might be crown prince and then king
Speaker 2: one day. Right, Like he's he's really distinguished himself, far
Speaker 2: more than Ben Salomon has. He's really nothing at this
Speaker 2: point in time, right.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, Now he's gonna fight. He's gonna fight. Oh
Speaker 3: some of the they're gonna fist fight.
Speaker 2: He's gonna fist fight Bin Laden and make himself the king. Yeah,
Speaker 2: as as we know, kings are supposed you're supposed to
Speaker 2: as a king defeat one dragon and Mohamus ban Lad's
Speaker 2: kind of a dragon, right yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, said he was the perceived designer of nine to eleven?
Speaker 4: Does that mean like was he like the Jon Favreau
Speaker 4: of it? Like was it like that? Oh, there's other
Speaker 4: people like.
Speaker 2: He's the Matt Groining of nine to eleven. We're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but he's not. Like Conan O'Brien has a lot more
Speaker 2: to do with planning nine to eleven than than than
Speaker 2: than Matt Graining. Right, If we're if we're Simpson's name.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like they were, Yes, Like he's in charge, but
Speaker 4: there were a lot of talented people under.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making making
Speaker 2: the show work underneath him.
Speaker 3: Yes, you got it.
Speaker 2: Who's the David X Cohen of al Qaida? Find out
Speaker 2: would we come back from?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: You know this break.
Speaker 5: That was a really good one.
Speaker 2: We're back. David X Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Speaker 2: of of nine to eleven. Okay, that's right.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto
Speaker 2: figures within al Qaeda, very easy to do. You can
Speaker 2: you can graph all of the all of the South
Speaker 2: Park guys onto a member of Isis. You know, that's
Speaker 2: just the way, that's just the way things work.
Speaker 5: I'm glad to know, like where they all stand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would say like South Park has more
Speaker 2: of an Isis vibe, well, where whereas the Simpsons is
Speaker 2: more like an al Qaeda kind of deal.
Speaker 4: So Isis is like two guys, like two guys and
Speaker 4: then and then like a small handful, but the two guys.
Speaker 5: Like some kind of org chart family tree type situation.
Speaker 5: To get clarification, where where does family guy fall in
Speaker 5: in this matter?
Speaker 2: Robert family guy just is an act of terrorism.
Speaker 3: So gonna say it's one to one.
Speaker 2: Just Ye, it's one to one. So we're back and
Speaker 2: we're talking about Muhammadan Naief leading the Kingdom's response to
Speaker 2: a surge of terrorism by al Qaeda in side the country. Now,
Speaker 2: a major characteristic of Naief's response was a commitment to
Speaker 2: avoiding the kind of collateral damage that would have made
Speaker 2: light it looked like the situation was totally out of control. Right,
Speaker 2: You don't want to be blowing up too many things
Speaker 2: or killing too many civilians as you search out for
Speaker 2: these al Qaida operatives, because it makes it seem to
Speaker 2: the people like maybe maybe the royal family has no
Speaker 2: idea what's going on. Maybe you guys are completely out
Speaker 2: of your depth here, right.
Speaker 5: He.
Speaker 4: You know, these days you can do all sorts of
Speaker 4: things to civilians, it seems in the name searching things.
Speaker 4: But yes, yes, generally you don't want to do that.
Speaker 2: You used to be able to We used to be
Speaker 2: a proper country, you know. Yeah, So he distinguished himself
Speaker 2: from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on
Speaker 2: outreach to the families of dead al Kaida operatives. Parents
Speaker 2: were told their children had been victims and received a
Speaker 2: degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout
Speaker 2: from their children's actions, rather than being suspected themselves and
Speaker 2: told that like your child is you know, you should
Speaker 2: be ashamed of your kid. They were told like, no,
Speaker 2: you're your kid was a victim of terrorism too, right,
Speaker 2: And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists.
Speaker 2: If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets,
Speaker 2: then more of them are going to be sympathetic to
Speaker 2: al Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem. U.
Speaker 2: So he's trying, Yeah, he doesn't want to do what
Speaker 2: the US does.
Speaker 3: Also, I've used that excuse in my family before, Yeah,
Speaker 3: to get out of all sorts of things.
Speaker 2: No, you guys here victims in this too. Yeah. His
Speaker 2: responses were generally seen as effective reducing al Qaeda's influence
Speaker 2: in the Kingdom. Perhaps the best evidence of that was
Speaker 2: the fact that ben Lauden and company considered him a
Speaker 2: strategic target worth expending resources to take down. Here's how
Speaker 2: Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on Mohammed Banya's life.
Speaker 2: That focus on engagement almost killed him. In two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker
Speaker 2: who was hiding out with al Qaida and Yeman, announced
Speaker 2: that he wanted to return to the Kingdom and surrender
Speaker 2: to Mbien in person. The Prince received the man in
Speaker 2: his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid
Speaker 2: humiliating him, and sat next to him. The man detonated
Speaker 2: a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving
Speaker 2: MBM what we're described at the time as light wounds. Now,
Speaker 2: first off, that's rough, but bomb bad. That's a bad
Speaker 2: assassination attempt.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, if you're asked.
Speaker 2: First, next to you, Yeah, you're right next to him.
Speaker 4: And you set off a butt bomb. That to me,
Speaker 4: and then it doesn't hurt the person next to him.
Speaker 4: What that sounds like without knowing more information, is that
Speaker 4: your ass exploded and everybody turned and went, oh my god,
Speaker 4: what happened?
Speaker 3: Are you okay? And you're on the ground like I
Speaker 3: need help, My ass just exploded. Like I might even
Speaker 3: try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb. I was
Speaker 3: just like, I don't know what happened.
Speaker 2: An accident, an accident, No, I think he blows into
Speaker 2: pieces because as a spoiler, the public note is that
Speaker 2: MBN was barely wounded. He's there's a lot of evidence
Speaker 2: that he's pretty bad hurt by this, that maybe he's
Speaker 2: actually never the same afterwards. Again, when a man explodes ass, first,
Speaker 2: you're the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a
Speaker 2: man's ass, So among other things, you're gonna get infected, right,
Speaker 2: like his guts and stuff for hitting are getting or
Speaker 2: piercing your body.
Speaker 4: Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that,
Speaker 4: a man's ass exploded next to me.
Speaker 3: Like, That's all I'm talking about for the rest of
Speaker 3: my life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a really unique form of PTSD. So the next year,
Speaker 2: mbn's force is exposed and I'll Kita plot to smuggle
Speaker 2: bombs into the US via shipping containers. The bombs are
Speaker 2: intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making NBN into a
Speaker 2: hero at home and within US intelligence agencies. He continued
Speaker 2: to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years,
Speaker 2: where he developed a close working relationship with CIA Director
Speaker 2: David Petraeus. He also got on tight with John Finer,
Speaker 2: chief of staff for Secretary of State John Cai He
Speaker 2: would later tell a reporter that Inmbian's people saved my
Speaker 2: butt more than once, which given what had just happened
Speaker 2: to NBA John Carreys, where someone's gonna butt bomb him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he literally saved my ass.
Speaker 3: I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if he meant that as a joke.
Speaker 2: I don't know that John carries that funny a man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then a terra somewhere is like, oh, I
Speaker 4: never thought to put the bomb in there, but.
Speaker 2: In his butt.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Salmon comes to power as king in twenty fifteen, as
Speaker 2: we talked about last episode, and he very quickly removes
Speaker 2: the guy who had been crown Prince that the old
Speaker 2: king had wanted to succeed after King Salomon, and he
Speaker 2: makes mohammedd b Nayef the crown prince. And this is why, right,
Speaker 2: Mbian is the natural pick to be crown prince, because
Speaker 2: he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort. Right,
Speaker 2: he's the guy who protected the country, who saved it
Speaker 2: from al Qaide.
Speaker 3: He's his asshole pick.
Speaker 2: He put his ass on the line. He took someone
Speaker 2: else's ass in an explosion right, and a lot of
Speaker 2: Americans cheer. This development is the best thing to happen
Speaker 2: to US power in the Middle East for generations. The
Speaker 2: CIA could hardly have hand picked a better successor. Best
Speaker 2: of all, as they saw it, Nief was a legitimate
Speaker 2: hero in Saudi Arabia. He wasn't someone whose reputation they
Speaker 2: had to prop up. We don't have to make this
Speaker 2: guy into a puppet. He's already a hero, right right,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a great bet. So April of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: Naieff has made the crown prince and up through twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: it doesn't seem like Mohammed bin Salman, who again is
Speaker 2: the subject of these episodes, and we've had to explain
Speaker 2: a lot of other guys. He doesn't like he's got
Speaker 2: any chance of taking the crown or power for himself.
Speaker 3: He's got real Jeb energy.
Speaker 2: He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: je yeah, real Please got him managing the family like
Speaker 2: office and everything like that, and he's taking on a
Speaker 2: lot of power for himself. But he doesn't seem very special.
Speaker 2: And MBN just seems unassailable, right, Like, how could you
Speaker 2: possibly compete with this guy. You're twenty years younger. You've
Speaker 2: never survived an assassination attempt. MBN is on like his
Speaker 2: third by this point. You've never fought, prosecuted a war successful.
Speaker 2: He's got all these friends in the West. But there
Speaker 2: are already early warning signs for those who truly understood
Speaker 2: inner family power politics within the kingdom. When he appointed
Speaker 2: MBN Crown Prince, King Solomon also collapsed in Mbien's court,
Speaker 2: because every one of these princes at this level has
Speaker 2: their own like royal office. Salmon collapses his court into
Speaker 2: the main royal court. And I think this is streamlined
Speaker 2: like he frames it, says, we need to be more efficient,
Speaker 2: so we need to like collapse all these courts together
Speaker 2: so that they work more effectively. But the crown prince's
Speaker 2: royal court had always been seen as an important perk
Speaker 2: in a good way for an ascendant prince to build
Speaker 2: a base power for his own future reign. You're picking
Speaker 2: out people that you want to be loyal to you.
Speaker 2: You giving them early jobs ways that they can make
Speaker 2: a fortune for themselves. Right, if you don't have control
Speaker 2: over your own royal court as crown prince, you're losing
Speaker 2: out on a way to like build power for yourself,
Speaker 2: and the fact that Mohammed Man Salmon is in charge
Speaker 2: of the royal court allows his twenty six year younger
Speaker 2: son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals
Speaker 2: with court positions. So you can see already there's some
Speaker 2: signs that maybe King Solomon doesn't intend for Mbian to
Speaker 2: ever actually take the throne, right, that maybe he's setting
Speaker 2: his son up and kind of doing a fuck job
Speaker 2: on Mohammed Man Nayef. Behind the scenes, people close to
Speaker 2: the royal family begin to whisper that even as he
Speaker 2: took on the crown, King Solomon was suffering from the
Speaker 2: early stages of Alzheimer's. In this version of events, just
Speaker 2: as the king makes Mbian his official successor, he's starting
Speaker 2: to seed a lot of his power and decision making
Speaker 2: to his younger son Mohammad b and Salomon, who he
Speaker 2: appoints as defense minister upon taking office. Right that, maybe
Speaker 2: NBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start,
Speaker 2: because King Solomon's never all that competent to run anything,
Speaker 2: So maybe from the jump, from the start of his
Speaker 2: dad's time as king, NBS is trying to figure out
Speaker 2: how can I get Mohammad Banayev out from being the
Speaker 2: crown prince right, And so he's orchestrating all of this,
Speaker 2: and he makes sure he gets the job as the
Speaker 2: Minister of Defense because he knows that I want to
Speaker 2: kick this guy out of power. This guy has already
Speaker 2: developed a reputation as a war leader for our people,
Speaker 2: so I need to develop a reputation as a war
Speaker 2: leader for our people. And he wastes no time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but he's got to do a lot worse bombs than that, Dave.
Speaker 2: In March of twenty fifteen, Mohammad and Salomon orders Saudi
Speaker 2: forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war. If
Speaker 2: you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's
Speaker 2: important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a
Speaker 2: series of internescing Conft since nineteen sixty two. There have
Speaker 2: been numerous different sides and coalitions, all backed by foreign powers.
Speaker 2: Over the course of these conflicts, and throughout the last
Speaker 2: half century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders
Speaker 2: and princes who had advocated that the kingdom get more
Speaker 2: directly involved in the fighting. The most recent phase of
Speaker 2: fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things,
Speaker 2: by the Arab Spring. In twenty eleven, mass protests forced
Speaker 2: the current president, a guy named Salah, to resign. His
Speaker 2: vice president took over for what was meant to be
Speaker 2: two years, during which time the government would be reorganized
Speaker 2: into a new federal system and elections would be held.
Speaker 2: Well attempts at working out a political arrangement failed, this
Speaker 2: guy stays in power, and in a desperate attempt to
Speaker 2: deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies.
Speaker 2: This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with a no longer
Speaker 2: scene as legitimate regime, A rebel group called the Huthis
Speaker 2: was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation. The
Speaker 2: Huthis are a religious minority. They're from the Zadi sect
Speaker 2: of Shia Islam, which is like five percent of the population.
Speaker 2: Schmul and Zohar Letterman describe their motivations and adjourned article
Speaker 2: for the Journal of Genocide Research. The Huthis protested against
Speaker 2: their political and economic marginalization, as well as the encroachment
Speaker 2: of Saudi Wahabi religious doctrine on the Sada province in
Speaker 2: northern Yemen where they were based. So NBS's decision to
Speaker 2: intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct
Speaker 2: shock to a lot of his peers and family members.
Speaker 2: His cousin, the still crown Prince INBN, wasn't informed ahead
Speaker 2: of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen, and
Speaker 2: the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also isn't
Speaker 2: told ahead of time, right, none of the people who
Speaker 2: should know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this
Speaker 2: civil war and Saudi operations are going to rely heavily
Speaker 2: on the right. It's like he doesn't tell anybody before
Speaker 2: he does this because he wants it to be his baby.
Speaker 2: He thinks it's going to be a big success that
Speaker 2: like immediately we're gonna kick the Huthis out, We're gonna
Speaker 2: stabilize the situation in Yemen. And I want all the credit,
Speaker 2: right right, I don't want any of these guys to
Speaker 2: get credit. Obviously, it's gonna work quickly, because it always
Speaker 2: works quickly.
Speaker 4: It's always fine. Yeah, there's man, it's a sickness like
Speaker 4: where you can get resumes all the way. Obviously, today
Speaker 4: where world leaders are like, we have created a society
Speaker 4: where to be like respected, you have to go into
Speaker 4: somebody's country and start screwing around and then get all
Speaker 4: the credit.
Speaker 3: And it never seems to work out like that way,
Speaker 3: but I guess it does because we keep doing it.
Speaker 3: We're gonna invade Greenland or whatever where. It's just like,
Speaker 3: that's what world leaders do. They start shit in other countries.
Speaker 3: So I have to do it too if I want
Speaker 3: to seem like a world leader.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it'll make me seem powerful, It'll make me.
Speaker 2: I need to prove that I'm better than the last
Speaker 2: guy who couldn't do it successfully?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Should it should have just paid people to put bombs
Speaker 4: in their butts.
Speaker 2: We're all seeing the wisdom of al Kaieda here, right.
Speaker 2: You know, simple goals in life. If all you want
Speaker 2: is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and
Speaker 2: detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal.
Speaker 2: No one can take that from al Qaeda.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I have a question, Robert, if you had a butt
Speaker 4: bomb and you what would you say before you exploded
Speaker 4: it next to the person.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, Because I've been.
Speaker 2: That's a good question, Dave, I don't have a good
Speaker 2: retort in my head right now, Okay, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Oh crap, Oh that's good, that's good.
Speaker 4: I would, I would, I would casually turn them and
Speaker 4: go you ever eat asked before?
Speaker 3: And then.
Speaker 2: That's a really good one day. That's a good one, Dave. So,
Speaker 2: the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in the
Speaker 2: civil war that does not involve it is that the
Speaker 2: ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help, right,
Speaker 2: which he kind of he had. But the most obvious
Speaker 2: behind the scene Mean's justification was that the Huthis had
Speaker 2: Iranian backing, right, and MBS, along with most of his
Speaker 2: inner circle, believe the Houthis were nothing but a proxy
Speaker 2: for Iran, which is a probably a mistake that a
Speaker 2: lot of world leaders make, which is like, these people
Speaker 2: are getting arms or maybe training from this other country
Speaker 2: that's my enemy. They must not be a real group.
Speaker 2: This must all be a fiction created by this other
Speaker 2: evil country, as opposed to like, well, the Huthis get
Speaker 2: stuff from Iran, but they have their own base of power,
Speaker 2: they're their own movement. They're doing a lot right, which
Speaker 2: is why they've gotten where they are and they're going
Speaker 2: to be a lot harder to destroy than you think
Speaker 2: as a result of all of that. Right now, that said,
Speaker 2: none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send
Speaker 2: forces into Yemen. Was almost his very first action upon
Speaker 2: getting into a position of power. The Leaderman Brothers write
Speaker 2: that quote, Mohammed ben Salmon seems to have seen what
Speaker 2: he believed would be a short and easily won battle
Speaker 2: against the Huthis as an easy way to bolster his
Speaker 2: images in military and political leader. And I've come across
Speaker 2: several other analysts who say the same thing. Nobody ever
Speaker 2: gives more detail than that, And we don't have any
Speaker 2: quotes from behind the scenes or whatever. He does not
Speaker 2: have a very porous office. There's not a detailed here's
Speaker 2: what was happening, you know, behind the people haven't written
Speaker 2: a dozen books about being inside his office at this time,
Speaker 2: right because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works. You'll
Speaker 2: get bone sawed if you do that sort of thing,
Speaker 2: you will. So I'm left to assume that even these
Speaker 2: much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of
Speaker 2: detail from inside NBS's office, so to speak. And this
Speaker 2: is one of the most frustrating parts of the story
Speaker 2: to me, because there's not really a set. I don't
Speaker 2: have a good answer as to why did you think
Speaker 2: this would work? Man, he'd grown up and there were
Speaker 2: a good reason to think a guy like NBS, who
Speaker 2: seems to be relatively smart, should have known this was
Speaker 2: a bad idea. He grew up watching the US fail
Speaker 2: in Iraq and Afghanistan, right like you saw this fail.
Speaker 4: We in the previous podcast we talked about like you know,
Speaker 4: teachers weren't allowed to like give him back grase, no
Speaker 4: one can say no to him. It's it's and this
Speaker 4: is it's a sickness. It's like if you spend your
Speaker 4: life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you,
Speaker 4: by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: it'll all work out, won't it. You know what else
Speaker 4: would like everything has told me that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, humor yeah.
Speaker 2: So he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this
Speaker 2: never hasn't worked in recent memory. He doesn't pay attention
Speaker 2: to the fact that gibbons dysfunction was spurred on by
Speaker 2: the Iraq War. The Huthi's attacked former President Salah for
Speaker 2: having supported the US during the early years of the
Speaker 2: Global War on Terror. Somehow MBS seems to have convinced
Speaker 2: himself that using a mix of air power and mostly
Speaker 2: foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory
Speaker 2: against a group he thought was nothing more than an
Speaker 2: Iranian cutout. This would be proven disastrously wrong, and without
Speaker 2: any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that
Speaker 2: Mohammad and Salmon made a really bad decision because he
Speaker 2: was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was
Speaker 2: making a mistake. Most sources do seem to agree that
Speaker 2: he was the deciple and leading voice in Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: going to war. Many human rights activists Bara Chabon expressed
Speaker 2: to the Middle East IE his opinion that Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war no
Speaker 2: matter who was in power, but NBS made it certain
Speaker 2: that that involvement would be direct military. Right, they would
Speaker 2: have done something. They would have tried to send some money,
Speaker 2: They would have tried to, you know, since some form
Speaker 2: of a they would have tried to bribe an official
Speaker 2: or whatever. But because it was MBS, it was made
Speaker 2: a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers
Speaker 2: and planes and try to intervene directly and militarily. Quote,
Speaker 2: if it weren't for Ben Salomon, Saudi Arabia might have
Speaker 2: influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups. Instead,
Speaker 2: it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of
Speaker 2: vicious air strikes. For the first few months, the Saudi
Speaker 2: coalition carried out strikes on mostly military targets. They learned
Speaker 2: a version of the lesson the US is currently failing
Speaker 2: to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden,
Speaker 2: which is that you can't destroy a group like the
Speaker 2: Huthis just by carrying out air strikes. You can't bomb
Speaker 2: them away. It's really hard to bomb people away when
Speaker 2: they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff.
Speaker 2: There's caves, there's bunkers, there's just hiding under the fucking sand.
Speaker 2: You know, Like, it's hard to kill people that way
Speaker 2: as much as you need to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it feels like it's every people as unique, where
Speaker 4: if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they
Speaker 4: know it better than anybody. On top of it's that
Speaker 4: realization that it's like it seems like world leaders have
Speaker 4: just as much like knowledge as I do about how
Speaker 4: to do a war, where I'm like, yeah, I like
Speaker 4: the movie top Gun.
Speaker 3: Let's just do that.
Speaker 4: Let's just do like puw pew as opposed to like
Speaker 4: the boring thing, you know, don't do the boring thing.
Speaker 4: Don't like fund groups that that you want to you know, prevail, No, no,
Speaker 4: you just we got all these cool little machines and stuff.
Speaker 4: Let's send them in. Like it's everybody wants to do
Speaker 4: pupu stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everybody wants to do pupu stuff. Nobody actually knows
Speaker 2: how to do pupu stuff. Yeah, it's I mean, the
Speaker 2: best way to win a war is to avoid getting
Speaker 2: involved entirely, and the next best way to win a
Speaker 2: war is to sit on your ass while your opponent
Speaker 2: bombs the country into ruins and then then come up
Speaker 2: afterwards and be like still live, motherfucker. Those are, broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: the two best strategies.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, don't get into warst Like I've gone yeah.
Speaker 3: Over forty years now without getting into a war.
Speaker 2: Yeah not. You invaded any country, and there's been temptations, you.
Speaker 3: Know, Oh god, yeah, I've had every reason to, but
Speaker 3: like I did.
Speaker 2: I invaded Belgian once kind of accidentally, but but I
Speaker 2: wound up on a train to Germany the next night,
Speaker 2: so it was okay. Speaking of invasions, why don't you
Speaker 2: let these ads invade your mental state? And we're back.
Speaker 2: So Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific air strikes. By
Speaker 2: August of twenty fifteen, it has become clear that things
Speaker 2: are not trending towards a quick and easy win for
Speaker 2: Mohammed ben Salmon and his coalition. In fact, several of
Speaker 2: his Wanta Be coalition partners had backed out at the
Speaker 2: last minute. These were guys he had relied on to
Speaker 2: provide infantries because the Saudi Arabian army not great and
Speaker 2: it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young
Speaker 2: men into a meat grinder. He was really hoping some
Speaker 2: other young men would do that job, and he winds
Speaker 2: up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do
Speaker 2: a lot of the gruntwork for him, which is not
Speaker 2: a great call for either a white variety of reasons.
Speaker 2: As the summer reaches its apex the Leaderman's right quote,
Speaker 2: a shift could be discerned from military and governmental to
Speaker 2: civilian and economic targets including water and transport, infrastructure, food
Speaker 2: production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals, and
Speaker 2: similar crucial civilian institutions. Right, so as soon as it
Speaker 2: becomes like, oh, they're not just disappeared because we've started
Speaker 2: bombing them and we don't actually know where to keep bombing,
Speaker 2: Like I struck what we're supposed to be all the
Speaker 2: military targets, and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military.
Speaker 2: I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food.
Speaker 2: I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I
Speaker 2: guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools, you know,
Speaker 2: like that's where we go from There is like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: where's less popular?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: But who these are more popular now that you're killing society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's make them victims. Now, let's just make them
Speaker 3: like yeah yeah here.
Speaker 2: As opposed to what he should have done is just
Speaker 2: set up an entire fake city, like fifty miles down
Speaker 2: the road from the capitol and be like, hey, free gatorade.
Speaker 2: You know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city.
Speaker 2: Why don't you guys just come to We're not fighting.
Speaker 2: We got no desire to fight, you know, but you
Speaker 2: know what, we have hamburgers.
Speaker 3: So like a blazing saddle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly like that, you know, I feel like
Speaker 2: that would work in a lot of wars. As opposed
Speaker 2: to doing the whole invasion thing.
Speaker 4: I think we should at least try to do things
Speaker 4: like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people run
Speaker 4: into the rocks, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what if we had just set up a
Speaker 2: second Iraq and told everybody, look, you can stay living
Speaker 2: under the old Iraq, but the new Iraq free cable.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, Iraq, come on over.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, suddenly said I doesn't even have a
Speaker 2: country anymore. What's he going to do? You know exactly?
Speaker 2: He'd actually have been very happy. It'd have been a
Speaker 2: much happier man. He was tired of being the leader
Speaker 2: of a rock at that point. So right as this
Speaker 2: shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying
Speaker 2: to strike in military targets to just trying to kill
Speaker 2: civil society uh in Yemen, Muhammad b and Salma decides, well,
Speaker 2: that's a good days work. I think, guy, I've earned
Speaker 2: a vacation. Boy, a lot of work fucking up a war.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go party. You guys keep blowing up some
Speaker 2: hospitals or something while I'm gone. Okay, So he gathers
Speaker 2: a tight assortment of all of his best friends and
Speaker 2: they leave the capital of Riod to party in the Maldeeps.
Speaker 2: His people rent out the entire Vila resort, which had
Speaker 2: fifty villas and a private coral reef of its own.
Speaker 2: The hotel's regular employees were paid five thousand dollars each
Speaker 2: for one month of work, on the condition that they
Speaker 2: not bring their smartphones or talk to anyone else about
Speaker 2: what they saw while they were there. Even with this
Speaker 2: agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants
Speaker 2: to manage the hotel instead, So none of these guys.
Speaker 2: Most of these guys don't even get to work while
Speaker 2: the prince is there because, as a spoiler, they're bringing
Speaker 2: a shitload of drugs and prostitutes right to party in
Speaker 2: them out. They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed
Speaker 2: to do under Wavist Islam.
Speaker 4: It's wild how rich people are a different species yet
Speaker 4: the same species too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you can do all that at a motel
Speaker 3: s cheap, you can.
Speaker 2: So he invites this insane guest list.
Speaker 1: We have names.
Speaker 2: These are like his friends, these are people he's now
Speaker 2: we do have some names. He invites one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty Brazilian in Russian supermodels. Each is scanned for STDs
Speaker 2: and then taken to private lodgings on the island.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Per the Africa Report. To keep these demanding guests entertained,
Speaker 2: there were concerts featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star PSI,
Speaker 2: and Dutch DJ Afrojack.
Speaker 1: Mister Worldwide.
Speaker 3: He's paid, he's getting skimming paid.
Speaker 5: Yeah, buddy, diet I know to be not a good person.
Speaker 5: Don't know anything about dbro Jack, but he's a DJ.
Speaker 5: He's stereotyping, stereotyping, So sorry, DJs of the world.
Speaker 2: But mister world Wide, mister worldwide, Yeah that's right, baby, yeah,
Speaker 2: mister worldwide. One hundred and fifty quote unquote supermodels and
Speaker 2: Mohammed Ben Solomon and his best friends all partying on
Speaker 2: an eye.
Speaker 5: Did they checked the talent for STDs or was that
Speaker 5: just was that just the supermodels.
Speaker 2: They checked Pitbull for STDs, and the test came back.
Speaker 5: Yes, I'd like I'd like to think Korean pop star
Speaker 5: side f.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It turns out Sigh was just for every cell
Speaker 2: of his body was chlamydia. He's not even a person,
Speaker 2: He's a sentient colony of chlamydia, which you know makes
Speaker 2: sense based on this music. So while thousands die horrific
Speaker 2: deaths from US bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, NBS and
Speaker 2: his inner circle partied. My favorite detail from this blowout
Speaker 2: was that one night NBS got up on stage during
Speaker 2: DJ Afrojack set and took aver his turntables.
Speaker 3: Jesus, there's no way to do this good.
Speaker 2: He can't have been good.
Speaker 5: No, but like, you don't do that.
Speaker 2: What happened? The DJ gets pissed off. I'm gonna guess
Speaker 2: everyone at the party's pissed off, and no one's allowed
Speaker 2: to say anything. I'm gonna guess NBS is also coked
Speaker 2: to the gills during this Right, these these guys are
Speaker 2: flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder, and probably, yeah.
Speaker 4: It makes anybody SAYDJ like that's what does.
Speaker 2: That's what cocaine's for. Obviously, no amount of threatening hotel
Speaker 2: staff is going to keep a party like this quiet
Speaker 2: and doing this is not a good look for a
Speaker 2: man who had just started a bloody war. That in
Speaker 2: a man about a year or so, people are gonna
Speaker 2: be talking about what Saudi Ribia is doing in Yemen
Speaker 2: as a genocide. Right, So, after less than a week,
Speaker 2: if I think what was meant to be like a
Speaker 2: month of partying, NBS was forced to pull up stakes
Speaker 2: and take his friends back home.
Speaker 3: Sorry, guys, we gotta go. I did a genocide.
Speaker 1: Uh, I.
Speaker 3: Know you guys.
Speaker 4: You guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying
Speaker 4: anything anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Bingham style, I'm so sorry, mister worldwide.
Speaker 1: We can rage later.
Speaker 5: I'm too busy committing mass murdered genoside.
Speaker 4: I feel like side they probably have contracts around that
Speaker 4: where they're like, okay, they've done a genocide. You never
Speaker 4: hear about, like I wish just once. I want to
Speaker 4: hear about like James Taylor being at one of these.
Speaker 4: It's never changed Taylor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, James Taylor, or uh fucking and and yeah,
Speaker 2: sure you're in the Saudi royal family. Why not. Civilian
Speaker 2: casualties mount as the war drags on. The coalition was
Speaker 2: successful in pushing the Houthies back from their furthest gains
Speaker 2: in southern Yemen, but no matter how much they bombed,
Speaker 2: they couldn't make any headway against the capitol or any
Speaker 2: of the other major cities the Houthis controlled. The Saudi
Speaker 2: war effort was utterly reliant upon the US. The bombs
Speaker 2: they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as
Speaker 2: were the planes flown by Saudi pilots. American political support
Speaker 2: was also crucial to the Saudi war effort. NBS had
Speaker 2: justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Huthi resistance
Speaker 2: would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months.
Speaker 2: As it became increasingly clear this was a fantasy, resistance
Speaker 2: began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power.
Speaker 2: Mohammed ban Naya sent his top aide in Chief of Staff,
Speaker 2: Sad al Jabri, to DC to inform his American friends
Speaker 2: that he knew the King's son was an idiot and
Speaker 2: that the war in Yemen was a mistake. The feeling
Speaker 2: one gets is that he was fishing for approval from
Speaker 2: someone in the State Department. If he had an outright
Speaker 2: power struggle with NBS.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Hey, I know this is dumb. This war is dumb.
Speaker 2: You guys hate this too. Right, if there's a power struggle,
Speaker 2: are you going to be on my side or are
Speaker 2: you going to back Mohammed Ben Salmon?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass
Speaker 2: watching the war turn against him. He gets hard to
Speaker 2: work finding foreign allies too, instead of heading straight to
Speaker 2: the White House, though he looks closer to home at
Speaker 2: the UAE. His most important early ally was Sheik Mohammad
Speaker 2: Benzayad al Nayon generally agreed to be the guy calling
Speaker 2: most of the shots and the Emirates we'll just call
Speaker 2: him MBZ because everyone else does two and MBZ does
Speaker 2: not like MBN.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: A common story you'll come across is that, during one meeting,
Speaker 2: MBZ told MBN that his father, the Dark Prince, was
Speaker 2: so clumsy he proved Darwin was right, which is a
Speaker 2: kind of blasphemer you can only get away with if
Speaker 2: you're a shake. We're not even supposed to like Darwin
Speaker 2: all that much.
Speaker 3: Like, what are you doing? Man?
Speaker 2: But Mbz's in charge of his own country. Basically, he
Speaker 2: doesn't have to abide by the rules, and so he
Speaker 2: starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN and
Speaker 2: they both want to take this fucker down their courts
Speaker 2: organize a camping trip in the desert where they become
Speaker 2: fast friends, and they start to strategize a way to
Speaker 2: take out Mohammad Ben Salmon's older cousin. Mbz's first act
Speaker 2: in this new alliance was to start reaching out to
Speaker 2: his American friends and talking up Mohammed Ben Salmon. This
Speaker 2: is enough of a success that people in the Obama
Speaker 2: White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer
Speaker 2: to get close to the King's son in case he
Speaker 2: winds up accruing more power. Like so many important things
Speaker 2: during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because
Speaker 2: no one was interested or had time to do the job.
Speaker 2: Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines. John Kerry
Speaker 2: was suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy.
Speaker 2: Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, was MBS's natural counterpart,
Speaker 2: but wasn't interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed but
Speaker 2: deemed too old, so instead they picked no one to
Speaker 2: do this important job. And so there's no one in.
Speaker 1: The Sorry, they were like, let's have jaw Uncarrie.
Speaker 2: John Carrey be this kid's print.
Speaker 3: I would love to watch Jean Carrey party with this guy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: video games.
Speaker 2: Like John Carrey comes in with like a copy of
Speaker 2: Halo and a six pack.
Speaker 4: He's like, hey bro, yeah, And again they settled on
Speaker 4: No One and they're like, that's better than John Carrey
Speaker 4: or or Joe Bidenery, like.
Speaker 5: John Kerrey or that that old guy you know.
Speaker 2: Not likes for a job as important as being this
Speaker 2: kid's friend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then four seconds later they're like he should
Speaker 1: be president.
Speaker 2: He could do that job.
Speaker 4: I'll say this, I saw John Carrey once at a
Speaker 4: at a parade of Saint Patrick's Stay parade, and he
Speaker 4: was he was walking in the parade and he wasn't
Speaker 4: like a float or anything. It was just him walking
Speaker 4: surrounded by like dudes protecting him. And I'll say this,
Speaker 4: he was visible, blee drunk, So I think he would
Speaker 4: have parties.
Speaker 1: All right, mister world, Why the.
Speaker 2: Coolest story about John Carrey I've ever heard?
Speaker 5: Sorry, John carry, I didn't know. I didn't know your game.
Speaker 2: Was unfamiliar with your that's good to know. Wow, we
Speaker 2: could get get him on an island with Pitt Bull
Speaker 2: in one hundred and fifty supermodels. See what he gets
Speaker 2: up to.
Speaker 1: Gonna need your STD checks though, John Kerry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, you don't want to do that. You don't
Speaker 2: want to know where he's been. So my favorite aspect
Speaker 2: of this, just in terms of the overall competency of
Speaker 2: the Obama administration and foreign policy, was this. They start
Speaker 2: to get hints that, oh, this kid's going to be important.
Speaker 2: We probably want him on our side. We should have
Speaker 2: someone like be his friend, and then they have decided, Nah,
Speaker 2: that's too hard, We'll have no one be his friend.
Speaker 2: You know what administration does find someone to be Mohammed
Speaker 2: Ben Salmon's friend is the Trump administration. They picked Jared Kushner,
Speaker 2: and Kushner gets very close to NBS because they pay
Speaker 2: attention to stuff like this. It's just one of these, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there are actual areas in which the Trump administration was
Speaker 2: more competent than the Obama administration. One of them was
Speaker 2: knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters
Speaker 2: when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 4: It's still like, all right, I get it. That are
Speaker 4: similar ages but you can't party with Kushner. That's like
Speaker 4: partying with a haunted clock. It's just like there's nothing there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with NBS. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Kushner looks.
Speaker 5: Like the skeleton of a fish. Yeah, And they're like
Speaker 5: that guy, that's the guy.
Speaker 4: Guy.
Speaker 5: I have the thought like once a month where I
Speaker 5: think back to the time like early twenty sixteen, where
Speaker 5: Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's gonna create peace in the
Speaker 5: Middle East, that's what he's working on.
Speaker 1: Like, guy, this guy went to Jared.
Speaker 3: Oh Man.
Speaker 2: So, and this is where kind of the fact that
Speaker 2: Mohammad ban Naief immediately goes to his friends in America
Speaker 2: and in the Obama administration is like, look, if I
Speaker 2: have a fight with this guy, do you have my back?
Speaker 2: And they're kind of going to be like, we're not
Speaker 2: going to get involved in any fights, right, Whereas Mahmad
Speaker 2: Man Salmon's strategy is I'm going to start making allies
Speaker 2: close to home, with people that with like that who
Speaker 2: will actually back me right, who have power, who are
Speaker 2: near us, and who will support me because they see
Speaker 2: a benefit in it. I know the US isn't going
Speaker 2: to take a side in this. I know when we
Speaker 2: have a power struggle, they don't care. So I'm not
Speaker 2: going to waste my time trying to get them on
Speaker 2: my side. I'm going to get allies who will actually
Speaker 2: support me. And so while MBN is trusting that, like, well,
Speaker 2: I've spent my whole life building all these connections with
Speaker 2: the security apparatus in the United States, Surely they'll back
Speaker 2: me if push comes to shove, because they want me
Speaker 2: in power. He learns the less, like, you actually can't
Speaker 2: trust the US for anything, Bro, We're terrible friends. We
Speaker 2: don't have your back, we don't have our own back, Like,
Speaker 2: we're not gonna do shit for you, homie. And as
Speaker 2: soon as this message comes out, because Carrie sends a
Speaker 2: message to both Mohammed bin Salomon and mohammadan Nif that like,
Speaker 2: we're not going to intervene in any power struggles between
Speaker 2: Saudi princes, Mohammad bin Salomon takes this as a go
Speaker 2: ahead or at least confirmation that no one's gonna stop
Speaker 2: him from taking down his older cousin, and he uses
Speaker 2: the fact that Nief had sent his aid al Jabri
Speaker 2: to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get
Speaker 2: al Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Solomon's son,
Speaker 2: which leaves Nief isolated. He's now kicked out one of
Speaker 2: Mohammad NIAF's chief supporters, right, and so now he's down
Speaker 2: a man, the Africa Report summarizes. In September, Nif and
Speaker 2: AlJabri learned on live TV of King Solomon's plans to
Speaker 2: fire the latter, thereby depriving the Interior Minister of his
Speaker 2: closest aid. A few weeks later, Nief was getting ready
Speaker 2: to welcome the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westfall,
Speaker 2: when the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team and Jedda.
Speaker 2: The King's son told west Fall that he needed to
Speaker 2: see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of
Speaker 2: time to meet with the Crown Prince afterwards. But that
Speaker 2: is not the way things went. MBS dragged out the
Speaker 2: Teta tet for so long that the two men were
Speaker 2: unable to meet in the end. Right, he's separating him
Speaker 2: now from his American friends. He's just kind of isolating
Speaker 2: him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter
Speaker 2: around Mohammad bin Nayef. Now, some analysts suspect that the
Speaker 2: wounds mbians suffered in that two thousand and nine assassination
Speaker 2: attempt were more significant than previously admitted, and so that's
Speaker 2: why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to
Speaker 2: what his younger cousin's doing. That he's got brain damage basically,
Speaker 2: and he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of
Speaker 2: having this injury, and he's just not as functional as
Speaker 2: he used to be. Right So, in addition to the
Speaker 2: fact that he's being out maneuvered in part because he's
Speaker 2: just taken too much damage getting to this point in
Speaker 2: his career previously to hold up against someone like muham
Speaker 2: and Ben Salomon, who's got his wits about him right
Speaker 2: whether or like.
Speaker 4: Your powers in jeopardy, and he's like his ass's.
Speaker 2: Explode eloded right next to me. Can I have more vicotin?
Speaker 2: So once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly
Speaker 2: clear that the Crown Prince does not have the energy
Speaker 2: or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival. The
Speaker 2: two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked
Speaker 2: circles around his older cousin. At one twenty sixteen gathering,
Speaker 2: he surprised a group of American officials by announcing Israel
Speaker 2: is not our enemy. In the summer of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: MBS was in a better position than he had been
Speaker 2: the year before, not in terms of overseas ventures. The
Speaker 2: war and Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by
Speaker 2: this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into
Speaker 2: a humanitarian catastrophe. After a year of failed strikes on
Speaker 2: military and then civilian infrastructure, the Huthi showed no signs
Speaker 2: of breaking and still held to the capital city and
Speaker 2: the key port city. Per that article in the Journal
Speaker 2: of Genocide Studies quote when the Houthi still refused to surrender.
Speaker 2: The next stage, beginning in the autumn of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: was a full fledged economic war and sealing off of
Speaker 2: the country. Sana Airport was closed off to all commercial
Speaker 2: flights into persons requiring medical treatment abroad. Occasional blockades of
Speaker 2: Al Hudaya Port were imposed, and the Central Bank of
Speaker 2: Yemen was moved to Auden, which made money transfers to
Speaker 2: Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government
Speaker 2: workers to be halted. As Yemen imports over seventy percent
Speaker 2: of its food needs, these STIPs were devastating. NBS had
Speaker 2: now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the
Speaker 2: twenty first century. As the siege locked into place, he
Speaker 2: opted for another vacation, this one on the French Riviera.
Speaker 2: During a stay, at one point, oh yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: he's look famine starting out. The war is continuing to
Speaker 2: go terribly. I'm hat jitting off to France to party.
Speaker 2: He knows how to party. He's doing a tour of
Speaker 2: the ports. And while he's in one port, he happens
Speaker 2: across one hundred and thirty five meter long yacht, the Serene,
Speaker 2: owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Scheffler. At
Speaker 2: the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for five
Speaker 2: million dollars a week. He had fallen in love with
Speaker 2: the boat and was planning to buy it, but Mohammed
Speaker 2: Ben Salmon is not going to let him do that. Next,
Speaker 2: per the yachting world website Luxury Launches dot Com quote,
Speaker 2: NBS caught sight of the yacht. It wasn't docked for sale,
Speaker 2: but that didn't matter. The Saudi Crown Prince was instantly captivated.
Speaker 2: As Kevin Kanig tells it, the Saudi Prince didn't bother
Speaker 2: with negotiations or back and forth discussions. Instead, he simply
Speaker 2: sent an aid to speak with Scheffler and offered an
Speaker 2: estimated five hundred and fifty million dollars on the spot.
Speaker 2: The payment was made in a single wire transfer, and
Speaker 2: depending on the source, the deal was closed within twenty
Speaker 2: four to forty eight hours. Scheffler was told to pack
Speaker 2: up and leave immediately. Now I do love that, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Bill Gates isn't there, Like God, damn it. Ye,
Speaker 4: rich people are out of their minds. It's like the
Speaker 4: only lifestyle where you could be at a party and
Speaker 4: it's like, yeah, what's that guy do?
Speaker 3: He's an actor? What's that guy though? Of genocides mostides.
Speaker 5: I don't know what number freaked me out more five
Speaker 5: million a week or five hundred and fifty million in
Speaker 5: one wire transfer?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's the guy. Has to be sweating bullets
Speaker 2: getting every number like Jesus. Now, it's unclear to me
Speaker 2: which of the yachts features NBS fell most in loved with.
Speaker 2: It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine,
Speaker 2: something called a snow room, which is I think just
Speaker 2: a room where it snows so you can have snow.
Speaker 3: That's great.
Speaker 1: I mean just or a cocaine lounge.
Speaker 3: In New England.
Speaker 2: Man, Yeah, a piano lounge, a movie theater and multiple spas.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if he even cared about any
Speaker 2: of that. Is the primary draw that any of that?
Speaker 2: Or is it just that Bill Gates wants it and
Speaker 2: so like, oh, this must be the best yacht for
Speaker 2: a rich jassalty own. I have to have it right.
Speaker 3: It's that.
Speaker 2: It's that. As NBS enjoyed that new yacht, smell, starvation
Speaker 2: was running rampant in Yemen. By December of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: Charity organization Save the Children estimated that a thousand children
Speaker 2: were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen.
Speaker 2: Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as twenty sixteen ended,
Speaker 2: but Mohammed Ben Salomon showed no signs of change in course.
Speaker 2: And that's part three. She mm hmm, what did we learn,
Speaker 2: feeling Dave? Yeah, what did we learn.
Speaker 5: I mean, I learned a little thing about Pitbull.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we all learned something about mister Worldwide. That name
Speaker 2: is literal. It includes at least the Maldives.
Speaker 4: I that doesn't surprise me, I guess. But I mostly
Speaker 4: learned that if you're gonna put a bomb in your butt,
Speaker 4: make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing
Speaker 4: if you just explode your own butt. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: that's interesting, because it.
Speaker 2: All for nothing if you just explode your own butt.
Speaker 5: I just thought of when tape was going pew pew,
Speaker 5: that a good A good combination of the pew pew
Speaker 5: joke and the ass exploding joke would be to go, hey,
Speaker 5: pew pew and the guy goes pew pew and he
Speaker 5: goes no.
Speaker 2: Poo pooh. Sure, clearly I'm a child.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm there too.
Speaker 4: I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with
Speaker 4: a lot of genocide, and all I'm retaining is butt
Speaker 4: bomb from this, so you know, yeah, that's more about me.
Speaker 5: Wow, Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug
Speaker 5: at the end here?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Oh geez, yeah, I do podcasts.
Speaker 5: Cool.
Speaker 4: There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed g A M. E
Speaker 4: f U l O I unemployed where I talk about movies,
Speaker 4: not uh not genocide as much I do. Also, I'm
Speaker 4: the head writer for some More News, which is about news.
Speaker 4: So just like Google some News or just Google News,
Speaker 4: feel fine me, I'll be there. Uh And that's it
Speaker 4: all right, Everybody.
Speaker 1: By James Stout's Book.
Speaker 2: By James Stout's book again, Good to Hell, I Love
Speaker 2: You Bye.
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