Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia

Summary

Summary of "Behind the Bastards" – Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Host: Robert Evans (with James Stout and guest Dave, plus commentary from Joel, Matt, and others)
Original Air Date: January 27, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode continues the deep dive into Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the current Saudi crown prince, by examining the dynastic rivalries that allowed MBS to rise, the catastrophic Saudi intervention in Yemen he orchestrated, and the party-hard, out-of-touch lifestyle that has defined his ascent to power. There’s a strong focus on the rival MBS outmaneuvered—Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN)—and on the disastrous human consequences of the Yemen war.

The tone oscillates between dark humor and cutting criticism, with irreverent asides on pop culture and "butt bombs" balancing out the gravity of mass atrocities and corruption within the Saudi monarchy.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dynastic Rivalry: Mohammed bin Nayef vs. Mohammed bin Salman

• Background on Prince Nayef ("the Black Prince") and MBN

  • Prince Nayef, known for his harsh crackdowns and puritanical laws (05:00), was infamously repressive toward Saudi Arabia’s non-citizen workers.
  • His son, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), was presented as a more liberal, Western-friendly alternative, studying in Portland, Oregon (06:45), and training with the FBI and Scotland Yard.
  • Despite the official narrative, MBN's academic credentials are dodgy, and evidence suggests he rode his royal status through much of his Western training (06:56).

• MBN’s Role in Counterterrorism and the Al Qaeda Threat

  • MBN worked closely with US intelligence and played a pivotal role in recognizing Al Qaeda’s danger—even as his father underestimated it—helping to avert attacks like the 1998 US Consulate plot when Al Gore visited (13:14).
  • Became Saudi Arabia’s top man for security and a favorite of the CIA (15:31).

• Al Qaeda’s War on the Saudi Royals and MBN’s Heroic Image

  • MBN survived an assassination attempt involving a rectal bomb (27:08). The attempt left him injured—possibly suffering longer-term consequences—yet his legend grew, especially in the US.
  • "He put his ass on the line. He took someone else's ass in an explosion..." – Robert Evans (29:01)

2. MBS’s Power Play and the War in Yemen

• MBS’s Early Moves

  • Upon becoming king in 2015, King Salman rapidly removed MBN’s separate royal court, weakening his power base and signposting a preference for his own son, MBS (30:34).
  • Under rumors of Alzheimer’s, Salman ceded decision-making authority quickly to MBS, who became Defense Minister.
  • MBS sought to win prestige as a military leader, mirroring MBN’s anti-Al Qaeda reputation, by launching Saudi Arabia's direct military intervention in Yemen (33:33).

• Yemen: Rationale and Atrocities

  • MBS wanted a quick, victorious war to boost his image (35:48). He didn't consult his family or top officials before sending forces, hoping for glory and legitimacy.

  • The war soon degenerated into strikes on civilian targets—water, food, infrastructure—when quick victory failed to materialize (45:12).

    • "I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food. I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools." – Robert Evans (45:12)

  • The coalition, reliant on US support, began a blockade and economic war, causing mass famine and humanitarian catastrophe (62:34).

  • Notable: As civilian suffering climbed, MBS decamped for extravagant holidays—first to the Maldives with 150 "supermodels" and pop acts including Pitbull and Psy (47:39), then to the French Riviera, where he purchased a $550m yacht out from under Bill Gates (62:35).

• Resistance from MBN and the Power Shift

  • MBN, alarmed by the catastrophe, covertly sought US support to counter MBS (51:34). However, the US (under Obama) decided on a stance of non-involvement, refusing to back either prince in internecine Saudi power struggles (57:43).
  • MBS, meanwhile, built support with the UAE’s powerful MBZ, further isolating MBN (53:54).

• MBS's Ruthless Maneuvering

  • MBS used every dirty trick—undercutting MBN, getting his top aide fired (58:41), and blocking access to US officials—slowly tightening his grip on power.
  • There are suggestions MBN was hampered mentally and physically by injuries and painkiller dependence after the assassination attempt (59:47), leaving him unable to outplay MBS.

3. Satirical and Dark Comic Relief

• The episode is laced with banter and irreverence about pop culture, US foreign policy, and absurd details (such as Pitbull's STD check, or what one would say before detonating a "butt bomb").
• References include X-Files writing analogies, video game “pew pew” compared to war strategy, and meta jokes about South Park/ISIS vs. Simpsons/Al Qaeda.
• Extended joke: "If you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make sure it's a big one, because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt." – Dave (65:30)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote / Moment | |---------------|-----------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 06:45 | Robert Evans | "He goes to fucking–nbn goes to Portland, Oregon for college...attends Lewis & Clark and PSU." | | 15:31 | Robert Evans | "By fall 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government..." | | 27:08 | Robert Evans | "...the man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum...a bad assassination attempt." | | 27:34 | Dave | "[If] your ass exploded and everybody turned and went, 'Oh my God, what happened?'..." | | 29:01 | Robert Evans | "He put his ass on the line. He took someone else's ass in an explosion." | | 33:33 | Robert Evans | "If I want to kick this guy out of power...I need to develop a reputation as a war leader for our people." | | 45:12 | Robert Evans | "I guess we start bombing...water treatment facilities...hospitals and schools. That's where we go from there." | | 51:34 | Robert Evans | "His top aide...told DC he knew the king's son was an idiot and that the war in Yemen was a mistake." | | 53:54 | Robert Evans | "His most important early ally was...MBZ...who starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN." | | 57:43 | Robert Evans | "[John Kerry] was suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy...so instead they picked no one..." | | 62:35 | Robert Evans | "He comes across a 135-meter-long yacht...offered an estimated $550 million on the spot." | | 65:30 | Dave | "If you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt." |

---

Important Timestamps & Segments

• 03:02 – Satirical transition into broader discussion of the Saudi royal family and their privileged, "regular guy" image.
• 05:00 – 10:45 – Origins and education of MBN, versus his hardline father ("the Black Prince").
• 13:07 – 17:46 – Early Al Qaeda threats in Saudi Arabia, MBN's rise in counterterrorism, and differences in US/Saudi intelligence cooperation.
• 27:08 – 29:01 – The assassination attempt with a rectal bomb and its possible lasting effects on MBN.
• 33:33 – 45:14 – MBS's intervention in Yemen, rationale, execution, and breakdown.
• 45:12 – 51:17 – Escalation to attacks on civilian infrastructure in Yemen and MBS’s Maldives blowout.
• 62:34 – 64:48 – Blockade/famine in Yemen and MBS’s spontaneous $550 million yacht purchase.

---

Key Takeaways

• MBS rose to power not as an obviously qualified candidate, but as a ruthless master of palace intrigue who methodically isolated and neutralized his cousin MBN, often outmaneuvering both his rivals and Western officials.
• The Saudi intervention in Yemen, led by MBS, was initiated for personal and dynastic prestige, rapidly degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe with no military gain—serving as a case study in hubris and deadly incompetence.
• MBS’s lifestyle is a surreal juxtaposition: war crimes and mass suffering at home, while abroad he throws multi-million dollar parties with drugs, prostitutes, and international pop stars.
• The US relied on and lionized MBN but ultimately abandoned him, failing to see or stop the tide of MBS’s rise—a lesson in realpolitik and the bankruptcy of American influence.
• The episode wields dark comedy to emphasize the grotesque disconnect between the Saudi elite’s actions and the suffering they inflict, ending on a note of moral outrage (and butt jokes).

---

Conclusion

This episode paints a scathing, darkly humorous portrait of Mohammed bin Salman’s rise—intertwining palace intrigue, catastrophic war, and grotesque excess—while sharply critiquing the failures and hypocrisies of US foreign policy and the inefficacy of liberal “reformers” like MBN within autocratic systems.

In Robert Evans’ words:
"If you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt." (65:30)
A crude, darkly comic metaphor for the Saudi monarchy’s self-destructive trajectory—and perhaps the broader failures of power unchecked.

---

For those who haven't listened, this episode offers a shocking, tragic, and often absurd look at modern Saudi tyranny, with enough context, humor, and righteous anger to illuminate the grim realities behind the monarchy’s glittering façade.

Transcript

[James Stout]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, the podcast where we continue to talk about Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family with our guest, David Bell. Welcome back to the show, Dave. It's been a little while between our first and last recordings. Between the first recording and this one. How have you been?

[Dave]

I got Covid. Not currently, but I got it. Yeah, I also. Robert, last night I had a dream about you.

[Robert Evans]

You had a dream about me? Way more upsetting.

[Dave]

Okay. So my dream was that we were taking a shower together in bathing suits.

[Robert Evans]

Hot.

[Dave]

And then I had to.

[Robert Evans]

That makes it TV appropriate.

[Dave]

Yep. Then I had to poop in the dream and left the shower. Hey, Dave.

[Robert Evans]

Dave. Where are we building to here?

[Dave]

This is the dream. This is the dream. And I went to the bathroom.

[James Stout]

Is it the dream?

[Robert Evans]

Is it the dream?

[Dave]

Yes. Because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop in real life. So I was like, oh, thank God.

[Robert Evans]

That wasn't like, it's just a dream.

[Dave]

Yeah, I had to poop in the dream. So I left the shower and Alex Schmitty was in the bathroom, our other old roommate, making coffee in the bathroom. And that was the dream.

[Robert Evans]

Classic bathroom coffee.

[Dave]

I should have started with the fact that I have terrible dreams. And that was the dream.

[Robert Evans]

That doesn't sound like a good one.

[Dave]

It wasn't bad. It was fine.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know that I'd call that fine. Well, Dave, thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream. I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it. Among our listener base, people who are going to react normally to your shower story.

[James Stout]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Joel]

Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How To Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to how to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

What if mind control is real?

[Robert Evans]

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

[James Stout]

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

[Robert Evans]

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

[James Stout]

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

[Dave]

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

[James Stout]

Can you get someone to join your cult?

[Matt]

NLP was used on me to access.

[James Stout]

My subconscious mind games. A new podcast exploring nlp, AKA neuro linguistics, linguistic programming. Is it a self help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

You know who else reacts normally to things?

[Dave]

Who? Me.

[Robert Evans]

The Saudi royal family. You know, cause they're all. They're basically. Aside from the billions and billions of dollars in oil money and the fact that they don't have to work and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves to them. You know, they're just down to earth. Regular guys like Tim the Toolman Taylor from the show that maybe 20% of our audience remembers.

[Dave]

Yeah, the guy that. The guy, the criminal guy. Tim Allen.

[Robert Evans]

Tim Allen, a simple everyman with a. Who runs a television show out of his house. Anyway, so one of the few, as we've stated most of, like the. The young princes are not super productive individuals, right? They're mostly spending their time kissing ass to try and get like a better cut of the family fortune. Doing as little as possible and grafting off of like the money that should be going to support the Saudi state. There's a few exceptions to this rule, right? Mohammed bin Salman, the subject of our episodes is one. His father, the soon to be King Salman, is another. And another one of the exceptions to this rule was Muhammad bin Nayef. Born in Jeddah at the end of August 1959, he had more than a quarter century on his younger cousin. His father was Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, full son of the great King Abdulaziz and a full brother of two other kings, Fahd and the new King Salman. He was thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump than anyone ever thought that Muhammad bin Salman was going to be. Right? Like, he just kind of seems like a much better bet as which one of these guys is going to actually like make it to the high seat. His father, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince. And he'd risen to power first when his older brother, the Minister of the Interior, was assassinated by that other prince who was angry about TV being legal. I know there's a lot of princes.

[Dave]

In this story and they're all killing each other. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Nayef succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now working directly with the Wahhabists, who traditionally had allied with The House of Saud in order to push their hardline fundamentalist policies. Prince Nayef became what the Brookings Institute described as an arch reactionary. And he was the orchestrator behind many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism. That's the Black Prince. Right. He violently suppressed the movement to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy, like in the uk. Telling one interviewer, I don't want to be Queen Elizabeth. Which. Who does?

[Dave]

Who does? I, I. You know what? I, I might take it. She had like a nice house. She had. Yeah, well, not now.

[Robert Evans]

She had a nice house. She had some corgis.

[James Stout]

You know, like this actually came up on Margaret Killjoy's show before. And we decided I would make a great Queen Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah, that would be very effective.

[James Stout]

I would be sure I would be a great Queen Elizabeth.

[Dave]

I'd go mad with power.

[James Stout]

And I love corgis.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So he earned. The Black Prince earned his nickname because of how harsh his policies were to the non citizen worker population in the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when his son, nbn, we've got NBS and NBN and they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a public person spurning his own country in favor of the West. So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's not interested in attending a school in the Arab world. Instead he goes to like the oppositest part of the world he possibly can. Portland, Oregon. I know, I was gonna guess while Portland shows up. You're gonna guess what?

[Dave]

I was gonna guess Berkeley, but yeah, I was close.

[Robert Evans]

No, he goes to fucking nbn. Goes to Portland, Oregon for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and Portland State University.

[Dave]

Incredible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, really funny. He does not graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a graduate of Lewis and Clark or of psu. Not. Neither is true. I can't even confirm that he got a degree. Everyone says he's got a ba, Right? The book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Stig Stinsley claims that he studied for his master's degree in political science and graduated in 1981. Although again, no one says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark at PSU and he got a degree, but nobody says where the degree is from. And we've confirmed it wasn't either of those colleges. I don't know. Yeah, Lewis and Clark College. A guy that Mohammed Bin Salman sparred with. Came here. Yeah.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. Maybe not the best ad. So, yeah, I don't know that he actually did graduate. Stig writes that he took, quote, courses on security issues with the FBI from 1985 to 1988 and trained with Scotland Yards anti terrorist units in London from 1992 to 1994. In 1994, he began working regularly with his father, Interior Minister Nayef, in Riyadh. And I think this is a situation where he's probably not that great a student. I don't think he would have qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland Yard based on his own merits, but because he's a prince and he's someone who is going to be a big part of the Saudi state. When he, when he expresses, I'm interested in anti terrorism work. Right. I'm interested in, like, training with Western law enforcement organizations and counterterrorism. They're all like, well, this is our chance to have a man on the inside. Right. This is our chance to have, like a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like a spy, but a guy who's. Who we know is like a friend to us, who we feel like we can trust as opposed to this. This regime's kind of a black box to us otherwise. Right.

[Dave]

It helps. It helps with your credit. It's just good. I get it where it's like, all right, you might not be perfect. It's like when the X Files had Stephen King wrote an episode and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show, the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King. Let's throw him on there.

[Robert Evans]

And he didn't. You know, that episode wasn't the best.

[Dave]

It was really. It was also heavily rewritten.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It would have had to be. Yeah, yeah.

[Dave]

It's about a haunted doll.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They should have let Mohammed bin Nayef write an episode of the X Files, you know?

[Dave]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He was training with the FBI in the 90s. He could have done it. He must have been good watching the X Files, right?

[Dave]

Oh, yeah. Weren't we on.

[Robert Evans]

He must have an opinion on Fox Mulder.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it's unclear to me how much the elder and younger naif coordinated here because, remember, his dad, the Black Prince, is this guy who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused on, we need to crack down on anything that, like, seems like someone having fun in the Kingdom. Right. Whereas his son is like, I'm friendly with the West. I went to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI. He's. He's making. He. He's putting out into the world, at least, image of. He's much more of a liberal guy. He's much less of a hardliner. Right.

[Dave]

I bet he knows where to get some great acid.

[Robert Evans]

He probably did at one point.

[Dave]

Yeah. Like, there's several places in that list where I feel like he knows how to get good ass.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The FBI Academy. I bet they had some great shit.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it's hard to say to what extent is this. He and his dad are kind of working together, knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the west and can seem like he's modern and someone who can, you know, be arm in arm with the clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity. But there do seem to have been some real clashes between them. Right. One of them is over the fact that his dad, the Black Prince, doesn't take seriously the dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Like, he keeps being told, hey, there's something brewing in your country. And he's like, nah, I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going to be like two words that show up next to each other in the public imagination. Per that analysis by the Brookings Institute, Nayef was conspicuously slow to recognize that Al Qaeda posed a threat to the Kingdom. He had become friendly with bin Laden during the Russian Afghan war, when bin Laden was allied with the Mujahideen and viewed him as being exclusively focused on defeating the Soviets. Nayef believed Al Qaeda's reputation as a terrorist organization was a product of American propaganda and was sure that Al Qaeda posed no real threat to the Kingdom of a delusion he had in common with much of the royal family. Prince Nayef was not popular with the CIA. He was seen as uncooperative and for good reason. In 1996, when Shiite terrorists bombed a US Air Force base in Dhahran and killed 19Americans, the CIA asked Nayef for information on the terrorists and their ties to Iran. Despite the kingdom and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Nayef stonewalled the U.S. our understanding is that he was afraid we'd attack Iran and he wanted to avoid war. Bruce Riedel, author of that Bookings piece, was a CIA analyst at the time, and he claims the general opinion over here is that Nyef was simply un American. Right. And that's like, I don't want to like, give too much credit to the analytic skills of the Pre or post 911 CIA. Right, for sure.

[Dave]

For sure.

[Robert Evans]

So my assumption is that Bruce is like, wrong about some part of the analysis there. I think maybe it's just that he's not as much anti American as he is, like, anti. Having a problem. And if Al Qaeda is a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a problem because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are close to bin Laden. A lot of people in, like, the ruling class have been funneling money to him and organizations that are related to Al Qaeda. And if they're really dangerous, then there's a big problem. And there's just this. It may just be the deep human need to like, not have a problem. Right. That's part of what's going on with Nayak. Yeah.

[Dave]

No one likes to start shit. I get that. Where it's like, maybe Obama, maybe he'll, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Call him Obama. Osama bin Laden. Maybe he'll settle down.

[Robert Evans]

Right? He'll calm down. Yeah. And imbibe in his son.

[Dave]

Sorry, forgive me, I'm. I'm less educated on like, what, where. Like, what was Osama bin Laden's position before 9 11? Like, I. Oh, I mean, like, a lot of people only heard of him.

[Robert Evans]

Until after he bombed. I mean, he and Al Qaeda bombed the World train Center in 93. I think it was. Right.

[Dave]

Okay, so he had a previous hit.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Now it's very clear to anyone paying attention that bin Laden is gonna continue to be a problem for like, the, the. The kingdom and its relations with the rest of the world. But there's this big doubt with a lot of guys. It's like, are they really terrorists? Is this the. Are the Americans making all this stuff up? Right. And the Black Prince's son, Mohammed bin Nayef, NBN seems to have been one of the rare people high up in the royal family because of his training with these Western agencies, who actually is like, no, Al Qaeda is probably an issue, and they'll be an issue for us too. Right. His, his feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more in line with how the Americans are feeling. Right. And so he spends a lot of the 90s burnishing his credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies being like, look, I'm the guy in, in the royal family who sees things clearly that you can work with. There's a big moment of conflict between the elder NAIF and the CIA. In 1998, Vice President Al Gore goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia Alongside Bruce Riedel, who's now working for the nsc. They met both naifs and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack the US Consulate while they were there. Up to that point, Al Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom. Right. And so now, while Al Gore is in country, they bust a plan to attack the consulate while the US Vice president there. And that really rattles people. And suddenly Mohammed bin Nayef is the only guy who's been saying, like, hey, we should be taking Al Qaeda seriously. And suddenly he gets a lot of attention, is like, oh, maybe he was right. Maybe NBN has been correct all of the time and we should be listening to this guy. When it comes to security advice. Right. It's.

[Dave]

Yeah. Going back to, like, people don't like conflict. Right. And if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem, that guy's a problem, we'll go as long as we can up to the point where it's like, oh, wait, they're going to hurt me. Oh, well, we got to do something about this. Oh, my. Oh, my goodness.

[Robert Evans]

Al Gore gets killed by Al Qaeda while I am in charge of security. That probably is a problem for me. That's bad that, like, I probably don't do well afterwards. Yeah.

[Dave]

No, I'm finding a new career after that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So in 1999, MBN is appointed to the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security. By the fall of 2001, he was considered by many experts to be the number one guy in the Saudi government to talk to about counterterrorism. And then comes 9 11. Right. You know, you're well aware. Yeah. So basically, there were some big buildings in New York, and then there weren't as a result of these guys who learned how to fly. But not all the way. Right. That's the brief description I would give them.

[Dave]

70% of how to fly. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, 70%.

[James Stout]

Put that in the textbook.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That's basically what happened. Right. There were some other things going on.

[James Stout]

They're not wrong. That's what's so funny.

[Dave]

I hate to sound. Listen, I hate to sound really old, but I'm realizing that there are young people now that do genuinely have to, like, learn about 911 in school now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we forgot. Well, they did.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So they never knew. A massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment. Right. This is as big a problem as it could possibly be because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's a Pickle kind of their deal, right? Bush was rattling his saber at Iraq and they'd had four, all to do with Al Qaeda. Like right after the attacks, we start making. It starts becoming clear we're going to move on Iraq.

[Dave]

Pretty soon they had WMDs, Robert, WMDs.

[Robert Evans]

So obviously, if you're thinking about this from the perspective of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up Iraq. And they had nothing to do with this. We had a lot to do with this. Not only were 15 in the 19 hijackers Saudi, but a lot of guys in the Saudi royal family were. We're shuffling money to places that wound up getting to Al Qaeda, right? One way or the other, we're in a. We could be in trouble.

[Dave]

And they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a big problem. He's a big problem. And then he just hit somebody.

[Robert Evans]

Trade center.

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. And then you hit like the guy next to him because you wanted to hit that guy instead. That's essentially it, right? It's like, yeah, we already had a problem. We didn't like Saddam for a while. And we were like, that's it, Saddam, last straw. You did it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And so there's this worry that like, well, how do we know they're not going to fuck with us next, right? Because we kind of. We actually have it coming a lot more than Iraq does. And obviously, you know, it's not just that Bin Laden, the guy who plans the attack or does, is seen as planning the attack is. The man is a Saudi too. But the Black Prince and most of his peers had scoffed at the idea that Al Qaeda was dangerous. You know, it doesn't take a bit bright person to see that the royal family is in danger here. MBN is the new blood. He's not tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation. He's got good connections to the US government, particularly in the CIA and the FBI, and he starts using them. And then in 2003, something happened that would electrify his career. On February 14th, on the Holy day of Eid al Adha, Osama bin Laden issued a communique through Al Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the last caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies. This mirrored their behavior supporting the US and its wars against Muslims. He predicted that the US would use air bases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq. The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the kingdom. Or at least this was bin Laden announcing that he was widening the scope of the existing war to Include the kingdom. Right. Al Qaeda is now at war with the kingdom, at least with the kingdom's royal rulers. In May, Al Qaeda operatives launched an attack on a Riyadh compound where Western military advisors worked with Saudi officers. Eight Americans and two Australians died, among others. CIA Director George Tenet flew to the Saudi capital and warned the crown prince, al Qaeda is going to target your family next. Just a few months later, Mohammed bin Nayef is made the number two man in the entire Ministry of the Interior. It was a vote of confidence in his ability to orchestrate the kingdom's response to Al Qaeda and to effectively reform its security and intelligence agencies. Tenet would later write that the CIA considered Mohammed bin Nayef its number one man in Saudi Arabia. Raised, Riedel writes. Nbn led the counteroffensive. The Interior Ministry issued lists of the most wanted Al Qaeda terrorists and then proceeded to hunt them down ruthlessly. Whenever any of the men on a list were eliminated in firefights or ambushes, the ministry would update the list with the names of the next most wanted Al Qaeda fighters. It was a tough and dangerous time. Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or at least sent their families away. MBN was the face of the Saudi war on Al Qaeda, appearing on television and in the newspapers to explain the threat the Kingdom was facing. So he becomes like the number, the figure who is like leading the Saudi war effort against Al Qaeda. He's like both in propaganda, his face is everywhere. And the west sees him as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this response to Al Qaeda violence in the country and within the royal family. He's seen as the guy who is protecting us from this like surge of violence, from this dangerous and unpredictable network. Right. He's really, if you're looking at who's going to follow as like who's going to be of this generation, like the guy who's in line to be king. Mohammed bin Nayef is looking like someone who might be crown prince and then king one day. Right. Like he's really distinguished himself far more than bin Salman has. He's really nothing at this point in time. Right, Right.

[Dave]

Yeah. No, he's gonna fight Osama bin Laden. They're fist fight on a volcano.

[Robert Evans]

He's gonna fistfight bin Laden and make himself the king. Yeah. As we know, kings are supposed to. You're supposed to as a king def one dragon. And Osama bin Laden's kind of a dragon, right?

[Dave]

Yeah, yeah. You said he was the perceived designer of 9 11. Does that mean, like, was he, like, the Jon Favreau of it. Like, was it like, oh, there's other people above him.

[Robert Evans]

He's the Matt Groening of 9 11. Where, like, he.

[Dave]

Yeah. Where it's like, there's Simon and like, the other.

[Robert Evans]

But he's not like, Conan O' Brien has a lot more to do with planning 911 than Matt Groening. Right, right. If we're Simpsons Ning. Yeah.

[Dave]

Yeah. Like there were. Yes. Like he's in charge, but there were a lot of talented people under him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making the show work underneath it. Yes.

[Dave]

Got it.

[Robert Evans]

Who's the David X. Cohen of al Qaeda? Find out when we come back from, you know, this break.

[James Stout]

That was a really good one.

[Joel]

New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the how to money podcast. And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to how to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Matt]

What if mind control is real?

[Robert Evans]

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

[Matt]

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

[Robert Evans]

When you look at your car, you're.

[Joel]

Going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

[Matt]

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

[Dave]

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

[Matt]

Can you get someone to join your cult?

[Robert Evans]

NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.

[Matt]

Nlp, AKA neuro linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

[Dave]

It's about engineering consciousness.

[Matt]

Mind games is the story of nlp, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, nlp, might actually work.

[James Stout]

This is wild.

[Matt]

Listen to mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

We're back. David X. Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of 9 11. Okay. That's right.

[Dave]

Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto figures within Al Qaeda. Very easy to do. You can. You can graph all of The. All of the south park guys onto a member of isis. You know, that's just the way. That's just the way things work.

[James Stout]

I'm glad to know, like, where. Where they all stand.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Yeah. I would say, like, south park has more of an ISIS vibe while. Where. Whereas the Simpsons is more like an Al Qaeda kind of deal.

[Dave]

So ISIS is like two guys. Like, two guys. And then, like. And then like a small handful. But the two guys do all the.

[James Stout]

Voices and stuff, like share some kind of org chart, family tree type situation to get clarification. Where does Family Guy fall in this matter, Robert?

[Robert Evans]

Family Guy just is an act of terrorism.

[Dave]

I was going to say it's one to one. Just.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's one to one. So we're back, and we're talking about Muhammad bin Nayef leading the kingdom's response to a surge of terrorism by Al Qaeda inside the country. Now, a major characteristic of Nayef's response was a commitment to avoiding the kind of collateral damage that would have made it look like the situation was totally out of control. Right. You don't want to be blowing up too many things or killing too many civilians as you search out for these Al Qaeda operatives because it makes it seem to the people like maybe the. Maybe the royal family has no idea what's going on. Maybe you guys are completely out of your depth here. Right. He distinguishes himself.

[Dave]

You know, these days, you can do all sorts of things to civilians, it seems, in the name of searching things.

[Robert Evans]

But.

[Dave]

Yes, yes. Generally, you don't want to do that.

[Robert Evans]

You used to be able to. We used to be a proper country, you know.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So he distinguished himself from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on outreach to the families of dead Al Qaeda operatives. Parents were told their children had been victims and received a degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout from their children's actions, rather than being suspected themselves and told that, like, your child is, you know, you should be ashamed of your kid. They were told like, no, you're. Your kid was a victim of terrorism too. Right. And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists. If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets, then more of them are going to be sympathetic to Al Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem. Smart. So he's trying. Yeah. He doesn't want to do what the US does everywhere.

[Dave]

I've. I've used that excuse on my family before to get out of all sorts of things.

[Robert Evans]

No. You guys are victims in this too. Yeah. His responses were generally seen as effective, reducing Al Qaeda's influence in the kingdom. Perhaps the best evidence of that was the fact that bin Laden and company considered him a strategic target worth expending resources to take down. Here's how Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on Mohammed bin Nayef's life. That focus on engagement almost killed him. In 2009, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker who was hiding out with Al Qaeda in Yemen announced that he wanted to return to the kingdom and surrender to NBN in person. The prince received the man in his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid humiliating him, and sat next to him. The man detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving MBM what were described at the time as light wounds. Now, first off, that's rough, but bad. That's a bad assassination attempt.

[Dave]

When I was going to say, if.

[Robert Evans]

You'Re asked first next to, yeah, you're right next to him and you set.

[Dave]

Off a butt bomb, that to me. And then it doesn't hurt the person next to him. What that sounds like without knowing more information is that your ass exploded and everybody turned and went, oh, my God, what happened? Are you okay? And you're on the ground like, I need help. My ass just exploded. Like, I might even try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb. I was just like, I don't know what happened.

[Robert Evans]

An accident? An accident? No, I think he blows into pieces because as a spoiler, the public note is that MBN was barely wounded. There's a lot of evidence that he's pretty badly hurt by this, that maybe he's actually never the same afterwards. Again, when a man explodes first, the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a man's ass. So among other things, you're gonna get infected. Right? Like his guts and stuff are hitting. Are getting. Are piercing your body.

[Dave]

Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that. A man's ass exploded next to me. Like, that's all I'm talking about for the rest of my life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. A really unique form of PTSD.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So the next year, NBN's forces expose an Al Qaeda plot to smuggle bombs into the US Via shipping containers. The bombs are intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making NBN into a hero at home and within US Intelligence agencies. He continued to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years, where he developed a close working relationship with CIA Director David Petraeus. He also got on tight with John Finer, chief of staff For Secretary of State John Kerry. He would later tell a reporter that NBN's people saved my butt more than once. Which, given what had just happened to mbn, may have been literal. John Kerry's worried someone's gonna butt bomb him. No, no. He literally saved my ass.

[Dave]

I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know if he meant that as a joke. I don't know that John Garry's that funny a man.

[Dave]

Yeah. And then a terrorist somewhere is like, oh, I never thought to put the bomb in their butt.

[Robert Evans]

In his butt.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Salman comes to power as King In 2015, as we talked about last episode, and he very quickly removes the guy who had been crown prince that the old king had wanted to succeed after King Salman. And he makes Mohammed bin Nayef the crown prince. And this is why, right? NBN is the natural pick to be crown prince because he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort. Right. He's the guy who protected the country, who saved it from Al Qaeda. He's the one put his ass on the line. He put his ass on the line. He took someone else's ass in an explosion. Right. And a lot of Americans cheer this development as the best thing to happen, happen to US Power in the Middle East. For generations, the CIA could hardly have handpicked a better successor. Best of all, as they saw it, Nayef was a legitimate hero in Saudi Arabia. He wasn't someone whose reputation they had to prop up. We don't have to make this guy into a puppet. He's already a hero. Right? Right.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's a great bet. So April of 2015, Nayef is made the crown prince. And up through 2016, it doesn't seem like Mohammed bin Salman, who again, is the subject of these episodes, and we've had to explain a lot of other guys. He doesn't like he's got any chance of taking the crown or power for himself.

[Dave]

He's got real Jeb energy.

[Robert Evans]

He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right?

[Dave]

Yeah, Jeb, yeah. It's a real please clap sitch.

[Robert Evans]

Got him managing the family, like, office and everything like that. And he's taking on a lot of power for himself, but he doesn't seem very special. And NBN just seems unassailable. Right. Like, how could you possibly compete with this guy? You're 20 years younger. You've never survived an assassination attempt. NBN is on, like, his third by this point. You've never fought, prosecuted A war successfully. He's got all these friends in the West. But there are already early warning signs for those who truly understood inter family power politics within the kingdom. When he appointed Imbien crown Prince, King Salman also collapsed Imbien's court. Because every one of these princes at this level has their own, like, royal office. Salman collapses his court into the main royal court. And I think this is streamlined. Like, he frames this as we need to be more efficient, so we need to like, collapse all these courts together so that they work more effectively. But the Crown Prince's royal court had always been seen as an important perk and a good way for an ascendant prince to build a base of power for his own future reign. You're picking out people that you want to be loyal to you. You're giving them early jobs, ways that they can make a fortune for themselves. Right. If you don't have control over your own royal court as crown prince, you're losing out on a way to, like, build power for yourself. And the fact that Mohammed bin Salman is in charge of the royal court allows his 26 year younger son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals with court positions. So you can see already there's some signs that maybe King Salman doesn't intend for Imbian to ever actually take the throne. Right. That maybe he's setting his son up and kind of doing a fuck job on Mohammed Minayev. Behind the scenes, people close to the royal family begin to whisper, even that even as he took on the crown, King Salman was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. In this version of events, just as the king makes MBN his official successor, he's starting to cede a lot of his power and decision making to his younger son, Muhammad bin Salman, who he appoints as Defense Minister upon taking office. Right. That maybe MBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start because King Salman's never all that competent to run anything. So maybe from the jump from the start of his dad's time as king, MBS is trying to figure out, how can I get Muhammad bin Nayef out from being the crown prince? Right. And so he's orchestrating all of this and he makes sure he gets the job as the Minister of Defense because he knows that I want to kick this guy out of power. This guy has already developed a reputation as a war leader for our people, so I need to develop a reputation as a war leader for our people. And he has no time. Yep. But he's gotta do a Lot worse bombs than that, Dave.

[Dave]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

In March of 2015, Mohammed bin Salman orders Saudi forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war. If you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a series of internecine conflicts since 1960. There have been numerous different sides and coalitions, all backed by foreign powers. Over the course of these conflicts and throughout the last half century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders and princes who have advocated that the kingdom get more directly involved in the fighting. The most recent phase of fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things, by the Arab Spring. In 2011, mass protests forced the current president, a guy named Saleh, to resign. His vice president took over for what was meant to be two years, during which time the government would be reorganized into a new federal system and elections would be held. Well, attempts at working out a political arrangement failed. This guy stays in power. And in a desperate attempt to deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies. This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with the no longer seen as legitimate regime. A rebel group called the Houthis was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation. But the Houthis are a religious minority. They're from the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam, which is like 5% of the population. Shmuel and Zohar Lederman described their motivations in a journal article for the Journal of Genocide Research. The Houthis protested against their political and economic marginalization as well as the encroachment of Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine on the Sada Province in northern Yemen where they were based. So MBS's decision to intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct shock to a lot of his peers and family members. His cousin, the still Crown Prince nbn, wasn't informed ahead of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen. And the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also isn't told ahead of time. Right. None of the people who should know know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this civil war and Saudi operations are going to rely heavily on the right. It's like he doesn't tell anybody before he does this because he wants it to be his baby. He thinks it's going to be a big success. That, like, immediately we're going to. We're going to kick the Houthis out. We're going to stabilize the situation in Yemen, and I want all the credit. Right?

[Dave]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I don't want any of these guys to get credit. Obviously it's going to work quickly because.

[Dave]

It always works quickly. It's always fine. Yeah, there's. Man. It's a sickness, like, where you can. It resonates all the way. Obviously today where world leaders are like, we have created a society where to be, like, respected, you have to go into somebody's country and start screwing around and then get all the credit. And it never seems to work out like that way, but I guess it does because we keep doing it. We're gonna invade Greenland or whatever, where it's just like, that's what world leaders do. They start shit in other countries. So I have to do it too, if I want to seem like a world leader.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, stupid. It'll make me seem powerful. It'll make me. I need to prove that I'm better than the last guy who couldn't do it successfully. Right.

[Dave]

Should it should have just paid people to put bombs in their butts.

[Robert Evans]

I know.

[Dave]

And have like 10 butt bombs.

[Robert Evans]

We're all seeing the wisdom of Al Qaeda here, right? You know, simple goals in life. If all you want is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal. No one can take that from Al Qaeda.

[Dave]

I have a question, Robert. If you had a butt bomb in you, what would you say before you exploded it next to the person?

[Robert Evans]

Hmm.

[Dave]

Because I've been thinking about this.

[Robert Evans]

That's a good question, Dave. I don't have a good retort in my head right now. I do. Okay. What's yours? Sophie.

[James Stout]

Oh, crap.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, that's good. That's good.

[Dave]

I would casually turn to them and go, you ever eat ass before and then detonate it?

[Robert Evans]

That's a really good one, Dave. That's a good one, Dave. That's a good one, Dave. Dave. So the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in this civil war that does not involve it is that the ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help. Right? Which he kind. He had. But the most obvious behind the scenes justification was that the Houthis had Iranian backing. Right? And mbs, along with most of his inner circle, believed the Houthis were nothing but a proxy for Iran, which is a mistake that a lot of world leaders make, which is like, these people are getting arms or maybe training from this other country. That's my enemy. They must not be a real group. This must all be a fiction created by this other evil country. As opposed to, like, well, the Houthis get stuff from Iran. But they have their own base of power. They're their own movement. They're doing a lot right, which is why they've gotten where they are. And they're going to be a lot harder to destroy than you think as a result of all of that right now. That said, none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send forces into Yemen as almost his very first action upon getting into a position of power. The Liederman brothers write that quote. Mohammed bin Salman seems to have seen what he believed would be a short and easily won battle against the Houthis as an easy way to bolster his image as a military and political leader. And I've come across several other analysts who say the same thing. Nobody ever gives more detail than that. And we don't have any quotes from behind the scenes or whatever. He does not have a very porous officer. There's not a detailed. Here's what was happening. You know, behind the People haven't written a dozen books about being inside his office at this time. Right. Because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works. You'll get bone sawed if you do that sort of thing.

[Dave]

You will.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm left to assume that even these much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of detail from inside MBS's office, so to speak. And this is one of the most frustrating parts of the story to me because there's not a really a set. I don't have a good answer as to. Why did you think this would work? Man, he'd grown up and he. There were good reason to think a guy like MBS, who seems to be relatively smart should have known this was a bad idea. He grew up watching the US Fail in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right. Like, you saw this fail.

[Dave]

We, we. In the previous podcast, we talked about, like, you know, teachers weren't allowed to, like, give him bad grades.

[Robert Evans]

He's not.

[Dave]

No one can say no to him. It's a sickness. It's like if you spend your life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you, by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah, it'll all work out, won't it? You know what else would? Like, everything has told me that. So, yeah, yeah. Hubris.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this never hasn't worked in recent memory. He doesn't pay attention to the fact that Gibbon's dysfunction was spurred on by the Iraq war. The Houthis attacked former President Saleh, having supported The US during the early years of the global war on terror. Somehow MBS seems to have convinced himself that using a mix of air power and mostly foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory against a group he thought was nothing more than an Iranian cutout. This would be proven disastrously wrong. And without any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that Mohammed bin Salman made a really bad decision because he was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was making a mistake. Most sources do seem to agree that he was the deciding and leading voice in Saudi Arabia going to war. Yemeni human rights activist Bara Shaban expressed to the Middle east eye his opinion that Saudi Arabia would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war, no matter who was in power. But MBS made it certain that that involvement would be direct military. Right. They would have done something. They would have tried to send some money. They would have tried to, you know, since some form of aid. They would have tried to bribe an official or whatever. But because it was mbs, it was made a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers and planes and try to intervene directly and militarily. If it weren't for bin Salman, Saudi Arabia might have influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups. Instead, it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of vicious airstrikes. For the first few months, the Saudi coalition carried out strikes on mostly military targets. They learned a version of the lesson the US is currently failing to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden, which is that you can't destroy a group like the Houthis just by carrying out airstrikes. You can't bomb them away. It's really hard to bomb people away when they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff. There's caves, there's bunkers, there's just hiding under the fucking sand, you know, like, it's hard to kill people that way as much as you need to.

[Dave]

Yeah, it feels like it's every people is unique, where if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they know it better than anybody. On top of it's that realization that it's like, like, it seems like world leaders have just as much, like, knowledge as I do about how to do a war where I'm like, yeah, I like the movie Top Gun. Let's just do that. Let's just do like, Pew, Pew. As opposed to, like the boring thing, you know, don't do the boring thing. Don't, like, fund groups that, that you want to, you know, prevail. No, no, you just. We got all these cool little machines and stuff. Let's send them in. Like, it's. Everybody wants to do pew, pew stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, everybody wants to do pew, pew stuff. Nobody actually knows how to do pew pew stuff. Yeah, it's. I mean, the best way to win a war is to avoid getting involved entirely. And the next best way to win a war is to sit on your ass while your opponent bombs the country into ruins and then, then come up afterwards and be like, still alive, motherfucker. Those are, broadly speaking, the two best strategies.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah, don't get into war is great. I've gone over 40 years now without getting into a war.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you have invaded any country and there's been temptations, you know.

[Dave]

Oh, God, yeah, I've had every reason.

[Robert Evans]

To, but, like, I invaded Belgium once, kind of accidentally, but I wound up on a train to Germany the next night, so it was okay. Speaking of invasions, why don't you let these ads invade your mental state? And we're back. So Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific airstrikes. By August of 2015, it has become clear that things are not trending towards a quick and easy win for Mohammed bin Salman and his coalition. In fact, several of his wannabe coalition partners had backed out at the last minute. These were guys he had relied on to provide infantry because the Saudi Arabian army, not great. And it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young men into a meat grinder. He was really hoping some other young men would do that job. And he winds up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do a lot of the grunt work for him, which is not a great call for either. A wide variety of reasons. As the summer reaches its apex, the Liederman's write quote, a shift could be discerned from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals, and similar crucial civilian institutions. Right. So as soon as it becomes clear, like, oh, they're not going to just disappear because we've started bombing them and we don't actually know where to keep bombing. Like, I struck what were supposed to be all the military targets, and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military. I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food. I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools. You know, like, that's where we go from there is like, well, I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now, right?

[Dave]

Yeah, we did a bad job.

[Robert Evans]

Less popular. Right. The Houthis are more popular now that you're killing society.

[Dave]

Yeah, let's make them victims now. Let's just make them, like, yeah, heroes, essentially.

[Robert Evans]

As opposed to. What he should have done is just set up an entire fake city like 50 miles down the road from the capital and be like, hey, free Gatorade. You know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city. Why don't you guys just come to. We're not fighting. We got no desire to fight, you know, but you know what we have? Hamburgers.

[Dave]

So, like a blazing saddle situation.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that. You know, I feel like that would work in a lot of wars. As opposed to doing the whole invasion.

[Dave]

Thing, I think we should at least try to do things like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people run into the rocks, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. What if we had just set up a second Iraq and told everybody, look, you can stay living under the old Iraq, but the new Iraq, free cable.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You know, I do it right. Come on over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Suddenly, Saddam doesn't even have a country anymore. What's he going to do, you know?

[James Stout]

Romance novels.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. He'd actually have been very happy. It had been a much happier man. He was tired of being the leader of Iraq at that point. So right as this shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying to strike at military targets or just trying to kill civil society in Yemen, Mohammed bin Salman decides, well, that's a good day's work. I think I've earned a vacation. Boy, lot of work fucking up a war. I'm gonna go party. You guys keep blowing up some hospitals or something while I'm gone. Okay? So he gathers a tight assortment of all of his best friends, and they leave the capital of Riyadh to party in the Maldives. His people rent out the entire villa resort, which had 50 villas and a private coral reef of its own. The hotel's regular employees were paid $5,000 each for one month of work on the condition that they not bring their smartphones or talk to anyone else about what they saw while they were there. Even with this agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants to manage the hotel instead. So none of these guys. Most of these guys don't even get to work while the prince is there because as a spoiler, they're bringing a shitload of drugs and prostitutes. Yeah, right. To party in the mo. They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed to do under wahhabist. Islam.

[Dave]

It's wild how rich people are a different species and yet the same species too. Because you can do all that at a Motel 6 for way cheaper.

[Robert Evans]

You can. So he invites this insane guest list, about a dozen of his personal friends.

[James Stout]

So we have names.

[Robert Evans]

These are like his friends. These are people he's. Now we do have some names. He invites 150 Brazilian and Russian supermodels. Each is scanned for STDs and then taken to private lodgings on the island.

[James Stout]

That's really scary. Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay.

[Robert Evans]

Per the Africa report, to keep these demanding guests entertained, there were concerts featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star psy, and Dutch DJ Afrojack.

[James Stout]

Mr. Worldwide. What are you doing there, Pitbull?

[Robert Evans]

Pitbull.

[Dave]

He's getting paid. He's getting paid money.

[Robert Evans]

He's getting paid.

[James Stout]

There, buddy. I know to be not a good person. Don't know anything about DJ Afrojack.

[Robert Evans]

I am not a good.

[James Stout]

But he's a DJ. He's stereotyping. Stereotyping. So sorry, DJs of the world. But Mr. Worldwide.

[Robert Evans]

Mr. Worldwide. Yeah, that's right, baby. Yeah. Mr. Worldwide. 150, quote unquote supermodels. And Mohammed bin Salman and his best friends all partying on an island.

[James Stout]

Did they check the talent for STDs or was that just. Was that just the supermodels?

[Robert Evans]

They checked Pitbull for STDs and the test came back yes.

[James Stout]

I'd like to think. I'd like to think Korean pop star Psy got a full inspection.

[Robert Evans]

It turns out Psy was just full. Every cell of his body was chlamydia. He's not even a person. He's a sentient colony of chlamydia, which, you know, makes sense based on this music. So while thousands die horrific deaths from US bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, MBS and his inner circle partied. My favorite detail from this blowout was that one night MBS got up on stage during DJ Afrojack's set and took over his turntables.

[Dave]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

There's no way he can do that.

[Matt]

No way.

[Dave]

He's good.

[Robert Evans]

He can't have been good.

[James Stout]

No, but, like, you don't do that. Bad vibes. What happened?

[Robert Evans]

The DJ gets pissed off. I mean, I guess everyone at the party is pissed off and no one's allowed to say anything. I'm gonna guess MBS is also coked to the gills during this. Right? These. These guys are flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder and probably whatever.

[Dave]

I mean, yeah, it makes Anybody say I could dj? Like, that's what DJ does.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That's what cocaine's for.

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Obviously, no amount of threatening hotel staff is going to keep a party like this quiet. And doing this is not a good look for a man who had just started a bloody war that in a ma. About a year or so, people are going to be talking about what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen as a genocide. Right. So after less than a week of, I think, what was meant to be like a month of partying, MBS was forced to pull up stakes and take his friends back home.

[Dave]

Sorry, guys, we got to go. I did a genocide.

[Robert Evans]

I got to go. Genocide.

[Dave]

I know you guys, you guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying anything anymore.

[James Stout]

Like, I'm so sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, sorry, Pitbull.

[James Stout]

I'm yelling timber on this party, gingham style. I'm so sorry, Mr. Worldwide. We can rage later. I'm too busy committing mass murder, genocide.

[Robert Evans]

If they're gonna have pitbull on Yemen.

[Dave]

Oh, my God, I feel like side pit bull. They. They probably have contracts around that where they're like, okay, if they've done a genocide, you never hear about, like, I wish just once I want to hear about, like, James Taylor being at one of these. It's never James Taylor.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, James Taylor. Or fucking Inya. Sure. In you playing for the Saudi royal family. Why not? Civilian casualties mount as the war drags on. The coalition was successful in pushing the Houthis back from their furthest gains in southern Yemen. But no matter how much they bombed, they couldn't make any headway against the capital or any of the other major cities the Houthis controlled. The Saudi war effort was utterly reliant upon the US the bombs they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as were the planes flown by Saudi pilots. American political support was also crucial to the Saudi war effort. MBS had justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Houthi resistance would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months. As it became increasingly clear this was a fantasy, resistance began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power. Mohammed bin Nayef sent his top aide and chief of staff, Saad Al Jabri to DC to inform his American friends that he knew the king's son was an idiot and that the war in Yemen was a mistake. The feeling one gets is that he was fishing for approval from someone in the State Department if he had an outright power struggle with mbs. Right? Hey, I know this is dumb. This war is dumb. You guys hate this too, right? If there's a power struggle, are you going to be on my side or are you going to back Mohammed bin Salman? Right. And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass watching the war turn against him. He gets hard to work finding foreign allies, too. Instead of heading straight to the White House, though, he looks closer to home. At the uae, his most important early ally was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan generally agreed to be the guy calling most of the shots in the Emirates. We'll just call him mbz, because everyone else does, too. And MBZ does not like mbn. Right. A common story you'll come across is that during one meeting, MBZ told NBN that his father, the Dark Prince, was so clumsy, he proved Darwin was right, which is the kind of blasphemy you can only get away with if you're a sheikh. We're not even supposed to like Darwin all that much. What are you doing, man? But MBZ is in charge of his own country, basically. He doesn't have to abide by the rules. And so he starts connecting with mbs because they both hate MBN and they both want to take this fucker down their courts, organize a camping trip in the desert where they become fast friends, and they start to strategize a way to take out Mohammed bin Salman's older cousin. MBZ's first act in this new alliance was to start reaching out to his American friends and talking up Mohammed bin Salman. This is enough of a success that people in the Obama White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer to get close to the king's son in case he winds up accruing more power. Like so many important things during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because no one was interested or had time to do the job. Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines. John Kerry was Suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy. Ash Carter, the Secretary of defense, was MBS's natural counterpart, but wasn't interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed but deemed too old. So instead, they picked no one to do this important job. And so there's no one in the us.

[James Stout]

Sorry. They were like, like, let's have John Carrey.

[Robert Evans]

Let's have John Kerry be this kid's friend.

[Dave]

I would love to watch Sean Kerry party with this guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dave]

Get a little video. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Because MBS loves video games. Like, John Carrey comes in with, like, a copy of Halo and a six pack, and he's like, hey, bro.

[Dave]

Yeah, you want a game? They settled on no one. And they're like, that's better than John Kerry or Joe Biden.

[James Stout]

They're like, john Kerry or that. That old guy, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Dave]

You can't trust him for a job.

[Robert Evans]

As important as being this kid's friend.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And then four seconds later, they're like, he should be president.

[Robert Evans]

He could do that job.

[Dave]

I'll say this. I saw John Kerry once at a. At a parade, St. Patrick's Day parade. And he was. He was walking in the parade, and it wasn't like a float or anything. It was just him walking, surrounded by, like, dudes protecting him. And I'll say this, he was visibly drunk, so I. I think he would have partied.

[James Stout]

All right, John Carrey, the new Mr. Worldwide.

[Robert Evans]

The coolest story about John Kerry I've ever heard.

[James Stout]

Sorry, John Kerry. I didn't know. I didn't know your game.

[Robert Evans]

I was unfamiliar with your. That's good to know. Wow. We could get him on an island with Pitbull and 150 supermodels, see what he gets up to.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Gonna need your STD check, though. John Kerry.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, you don't want to do that. You don't want to know where he's been. So my favorite aspect of this, just in terms of the overall competency of the Obama administration and foreign policy, was they start to get hints that, oh, this kid's gonna be important. We probably want him on our side. We should have someone, like, be his friend. And then they have decided, nah, that's too hard. We'll have no one be his friend. You know what administration does find someone to be Mohammed bin Salman's friend is the Trump administration. They pick Jared Kushner. And Kushner gets very close to MBS because they pay attention to stuff like this. It's just one of these, like, yeah, there are actual areas in which the. The Trump administration was more competent than the Obama administration. One of them was knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia.

[Dave]

It's still like, all right, I get it. Similar ages. But you can't party with Kushner. That's like partying with a haunted clock. It's just like, there's nothing there.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with mbs. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Jared Kushner looks like the skeleton of a fish.

[Dave]

Yeah, he does.

[James Stout]

And they're like, that guy. That's the guy.

[Robert Evans]

That guy.

[James Stout]

I have the thought, like, once a month, where. I think back to the time, like early 2016, where. Where Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's gonna create peace in the Middle East. That's what he's working on. You're like, really interesting guy.

[Robert Evans]

He went to Jared. Oh, man. So, and this is where kind of the, the fact that Mohammed bin Nayef immediately goes to his friends in America and in the OB is like, look, if I have a fight with this guy, do you have my back? And they're kind of going to be like, we're not going to get involved in any fights. Right? Whereas Mohammed bin Salman's strategy is I'm going to start making allies close to home with people who will actually back me. Right? Who have power, who are near us, and who will support me because they see a benefit in it. I know the US Isn't going to take a side in this. I know when we have a power struggle, they don't care. So I'm not going to waste my time trying to get them on my side. I'm gonna get allies who will actually support me. And so while NBN is trusting that, like, well, I've spent my whole life building all these connections with the security apparatus in the United States. Surely they'll back me if push comes to shove because they want me in power. He learns the lesson. Like, you actually can't trust the US for anything, bro. We're terrible friends. We don't have your back. We don't have our own back. Like, we're not gonna do shit for you, homie. And as soon as this message comes out, because Kerry sends a message to both Muhammad bin Salman and Mohammed bin Nayef that, like, we're not going to intervene in any power struggles between Saudi princes. Mohammed bin Salman takes this as a go ahead, or at least confirmation that no one's going to stop him from taking down his older cousin. And he uses the fact that Nayef had sent his aide Al Jabri to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get Al Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Salman's son. Which leaves Nayef isolated. He's now kicked out one of Muhammad bin Nayef's chief supporters. Right. And so now he's down a man. The Afrika Report summarizes. In September, Nayef and Al Jabri learned on live TV of King Salman's plans to fire the latter, thereby depriving the Interior minister of his closest aid. A few weeks later, Nayef was getting ready to welcome the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Joseph Westphal. When the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team in Jeddah, the king's son told Westfall that he needed to see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of time to meet with the Crown Prince afterwards. But that is not the way things went. MBS dragged out the tete a tete for so long that the two men were unable to meet in the end. Right. He's, he's separating him now from his American friends. He's just kind of isolating him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter around Muhammad bin Nayef. Now, some analysts suspect that the wounds Imbian suffered in that 2009 assassination attempt were more significant than previously admitted. And so he's, that's why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to what his younger cousin's doing, that he's got brain damage, basically, and he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of having this injury. And he's just not as functional as he used to be. Right. So in addition to the fact that he's being outmaneuvered in part because he's just taken too much damage getting to this point in his career previously to hold up against someone like Mohammed bin Salman who's got his wits about him.

[Dave]

Right, Whether or not your power's in jeopardy and he's like his ass.

[Robert Evans]

Right next to me. Can I have more Vicodin?

[Dave]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly clear that the Crown Prince does not have the energy or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival. The two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked circles around his older Cousin. At one 2016 gathering, he surprised a group of American officials by announcing, israel is not our enemy. In the summer of 2016, MBS was in a better position than he had been the year before. Not in terms of overseas ventures. The war in Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe. After a year of failed strikes on military and then civilian infrastructure, the Houthis showed no signs of breaking and still held to the capital city and the key port city, per that article in the Journal of Genocide Studies, quote, when the Houthis still refused to surrender, the next stage, beginning in the autumn of 2016, was a full fledged economic war and sealing off of the country. Sana' a Airport was closed off to all commercial flights and to persons requiring medical treatment abroad. Occasional blockades of Al Hudaya port were imposed and the Central bank of Yemen was moved to Aden, which made money transfers to Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government workers to be halted. As Yemen imports over 70% of the its food needs, these dips were devastating. MBS had now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the 21st century. As the siege locked into place, he opted for another vacation, this one on the French Riviera. During his stay at one point. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, he's, look, famine starting out, the war is continuing to go terribly. I'm jitting off to France.

[Dave]

He knows how to party.

[Robert Evans]

He knows how to party. He's doing a tour of the ports and while he's in one port, he happens across 135 meter long yacht, the Serene, owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Scheffler. At the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for $5 million a week. He had fallen in love with the boat and was planning to buy it. But Mohammed Bin Salman is not going to let him do that. Next. Per the Yachting World website Luxurylaunches.com's CBS caught sight of the yacht. It wasn't docked for sale, but that didn't matter. The Saudi Crown prince was instantly captivated. As Kevin Koenig tells it, the Saudi prince didn't bother with negotiations or back and forth discussions. Instead, he simply sent an aide to speak with Scheffler and offered an estimated $550 million on the spot. The payment was made in a single wire transfer and depending on the source, the deal was closed within 24 to 48 hours. Scheffler was told to pack up and leave immediately. Now I do love that. Like, yeah, he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yacht.

[Dave]

Yeah. And Bill Gates sitting there like, God damn it, I gotta find another guy. Rich people, rich people are out of their minds. It's like the only lifestyle where you could be at a party and it's like, yeah, what does that guy do? He's an actor. What's that guy do? Oh, genocides, mostly.

[Robert Evans]

Genocides.

[James Stout]

I don't know what number freaked me out more, 5 million a week or 550 million in one wire transfer.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's just the guy making that transfer. Has to be sweating bullets, getting every number right. Like, Jesus. Now it's unclear to me which of the yacht's features MBS fell most in love with. It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine, something called a snow room, which is I think just a room where it snows so you can have snow.

[Dave]

That's great.

[James Stout]

Or a cocaine lounge, one to the other.

[Dave]

It's in New England, man. It's fine. You can get all the stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Piano lounge, a movie theater, and multiple spas. And I don't know if he even cared about any of that. Is the primary draw any of that? Or is it just that Bill Gates wants it and so, like, oh, this must be the best yacht for a rich asshole to own. I have to have it, right?

[Dave]

It's that.

[Robert Evans]

It's that. As MBS enjoyed that new yacht smell, starvation was running rampant in Yemen. By December of 2016, charity organization Save the Children estimated that 1,000 children were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen. Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as 2016 ended. But Mohammed bin Salman showed no signs of change in course. And that's part three. Sheesh. Mm.

[Dave]

What did we learn?

[Robert Evans]

How you feeling, Dave? Yeah, what did we learn?

[James Stout]

I mean, I learned a little thing about Pitbull.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we all Learned something about Mr. Worldwide. That name is literal and includes at least the Maldives.

[Dave]

I. That doesn't surprise me, I guess. But I mostly learned that if you're going to put a bomb in your butt, make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing if you just explode your own. But I mean, that's. That's interesting.

[Robert Evans]

It's all for nothing if you just explode your own butt.

[James Stout]

I just thought of when tape was going, pew, pew. That a good. A good combination of the pew pew joke and the ass exploding joke would be to go, hey, pew, pew. And the guy goes, pew pew. And he goes, no poo Poo.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. But clearly I'm a child.

[Dave]

Yeah, I'm there too. I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with a lot of genocide, and all I'm retaining is butt bombs from this. So, you know. Yeah, that's more about me.

[James Stout]

Wow. Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug at the end here?

[Dave]

Oh, right. Oh, geez. Yeah, I do podcasts. Cool. There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed. G A M E F U L L Y. Unemployed, where I talk about movies, not. Not genocide as much. I do. Also, I'm the head writer for Some more News, which is about news. So just like Google some more news or just Google news. You'll find me, I'll be there. And that's it.

[James Stout]

All right, everybody, buy James Stout's book.

[Robert Evans]

Buy James Stout's book and go to hell. I love you. Bye.

[James Stout]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com BehindTheBastards we love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking, this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.