Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Journal – "Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert"

Release Date: April 25, 2025

Introduction

In the April 25, 2025 episode of The Journal, hosted by Ryan Knutson alongside Rory Jones and Elliot Brown, the spotlight shines on NEOM—a colossal and ambitious project initiated by Saudi Arabia’s young leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). This episode delves into the inception, vision, challenges, and human stories behind NEOM, offering listeners an in-depth exploration of what could be the world’s most transformative urban development.

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1. NEOM’s Grand Vision and Announcement

The episode opens with a retrospective look at a pivotal moment in 2017 when Maria Bartiromo, broadcasting from a glitzy Riyadh investor conference, introduced NEOM to a global audience. MBS unveiled NEOM as a futuristic city built from scratch in the Saudi desert, aiming to redefine urban living.

Maria Bartiromo [00:11]: "Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to be with you this afternoon as we kick off a very special part of the program right now as we watch something of a revolution happening here in Saudi Arabia."

Ryan Knutson narrates the event, highlighting the grandeur of the announcement and the ambitious scope envisioned by MBS. MBS compared NEOM to the technological leap from a basic Nokia phone to a modern smartphone, symbolizing the transformative intent behind the project.

Rory Jones [02:07]: "MBS was going to transform cities the same way Apple transformed phones."

2. Addressing Saudi Arabia’s Challenges

Rory Jones elaborates on the socio-economic challenges NEOM aims to tackle. Saudi Arabia faces a young and rapidly growing population, with 70% under the age of 30, and an economy heavily reliant on oil, where 70% of jobs are government positions.

Rory Jones [07:05]: "The kingdom faced a number of challenges that really were almost like a sort of ticking time bomb for a country that they'd have to solve."

MBS recognized the unsustainable nature of an oil-dependent economy and the pressing need to diversify revenue streams and create employment opportunities in the private sector.

3. Social Reforms as a Foundation

To pave the way for NEOM, MBS initiated significant social reforms aimed at modernizing Saudi society. These reforms included granting women the right to drive, increasing female workforce participation, allowing mixed public socialization, and reopening cinemas after a 40-year hiatus.

Rory Jones [09:10]: "He opened cinemas for the first time in like 40 years, which was like a huge moment."

These changes were strategic, aiming to cultivate a consumer-driven economy by increasing disposable income and fostering a more liberal social environment.

4. NEOM’s Planning and Innovative Design

NEOM’s planning involved extensive collaboration with top management consulting firms like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Oliver Wyman, resulting in over 2,000 pages of planning documents filled with futuristic and sometimes sci-fi-like ideas.

Rory Jones [12:20]: "There are flying taxis, robots that would clean your house for you while you're out at work. Classes taught by hologram teachers, more Michelin-starred restaurants than anywhere else in the world."

Central to NEOM’s vision is “The Line,” a groundbreaking architectural feat described as two parallel skyscrapers stretching 1,600 feet into the air and extending 106 miles, housing approximately 9 million people. The design emphasizes sustainable living with mirrored glass facades that blend seamlessly with the desert landscape.

Elliot Brown [14:19]: "At its full vision, it's absolutely enormous. If you just look at the square footage as envisioned, it would have more square footage than all of New York City."

5. Human Stories: Building NEOM

The episode transitions to personal narratives from individuals who joined NEOM, highlighting both the allure and the challenges of such an unprecedented project.

• Andy Wirth’s Journey:

  Andy Wirth, an experienced ski resort executive from Montana, was drawn to NEOM by its commitment to sustainability and renewable energy. Tasked with developing Saudi Arabia’s first world-class ski resort in the desert, Andy faced significant logistical hurdles, including the lack of natural snowfall.

  Andy Wirth [22:32]: "There was a poetic irony in that. Saudi Arabia, world's greatest producer of oil for generations, that was going to fund this."

  Andy’s determination led him to discover reliable weather data, indicating potential for artificial snowmaking despite high costs, underscoring the project's blend of ambition and practical challenges.

• Tony Harris’s Educational Endeavor:

  Tony Harris, an educational consultant, was enticed by NEOM’s promise of creating a world-class education ecosystem. Empowered to define his role, Tony and his wife relocated with their family and pet to build NEOM’s education sector from the ground up.

  Tony Harris [24:27]: "The normal rule of thumb was take your highest paying job and add 30% to that."

  Tony’s experience revealed systemic inefficiencies within NEOM’s initial planning, prompting him to overrule convoluted models in favor of more streamlined, startup-like approaches.

6. Execution Challenges and Reality Collisions

Despite the visionary plans, NEOM encountered substantial obstacles that threatened to derail its progress. Massive spending without proportional returns, logistical nightmares, and the sheer scale of the ambitions led to tensions among project leaders.

Tony Harris [31:07]: "We could not spend money quickly enough."

As the project progressed, it became evident that the financial and operational demands of NEOM might exceed Saudi Arabia’s capacity, casting doubts on the feasibility of achieving even a fraction of MBS’s grand vision.

Elliot Brown [31:24]: "I think we're sort of in the rapidly colliding with reality phase that's coming."

Conclusion and Teaser for Part 2

The Journal concludes Part 1 of its NEOM series by acknowledging the monumental gaps between NEOM’s futuristic aspirations and the practical realities on the ground. The episode sets the stage for Part 2, promising to delve deeper into the ongoing struggles and the potential unraveling of MBS’s desert utopia.

Ryan Knutson [31:32]: "Up in part two of our NEOM podcast. Coming tomorrow."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Maria Bartiromo [00:11]: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to be with you this afternoon... as we watch something of a revolution happening here in Saudi Arabia.”
• Rory Jones [07:05]: “The kingdom faced a number of challenges that really were almost like a sort of ticking time bomb...”
• Rory Jones [12:20]: “There are flying taxis, robots that would clean your house... classes taught by hologram teachers...”
• Elliot Brown [14:19]: “At its full vision, it's absolutely enormous... more square footage than all of New York City.”
• Andy Wirth [22:32]: “There was a poetic irony in that... Saudi Arabia... that was going to fund this.”
• Tony Harris [24:27]: “The normal rule of thumb was take your highest paying job and add 30% to that.”
• Elliot Brown [31:24]: “I think we're sort of in the rapidly colliding with reality phase that's coming.”

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Final Thoughts

This episode of The Journal provides a comprehensive look into NEOM’s ambitious plans, the visionary leadership driving it, and the tangible challenges it faces. Through engaging storytelling and firsthand accounts, the podcast paints a vivid picture of a city poised to redefine modern living—if it can overcome the significant hurdles ahead.

Stay tuned for Part 2: NEOM’s Unraveling Realities.

Transcript

[Maria Bartiromo]

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to be with you this afternoon as we kick off a very special part of the program right now as we watch something of a revolution happening here in Saudi Arabia.

[Ryan Knudson]

It was 2017 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Inside the conference hall of a splashy hotel, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo was kicking off Saudi Arabia's big investor conference, sometimes called Davos in the desert. Gathered beneath glittering chandeliers were the movers and shakers of the business world. They were there to witness a historic announcement.

[Maria Bartiromo]

Please welcome to the stage, ladies and gentlemen, His Royal Highness, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

[Ryan Knudson]

Addressing his audience in Arabic, Saudi Arabia's young leader, mbs, as he's known, unveiled plans for a place he called Neom. Neom was a futuristic new city that Saudi Arabia would build from scratch in the middle of the desert. A flashy video drove the idea home.

[Elliot Brown]

Here we see the birth of neom, the world's most ambitious project, a destination of the future, a vision that is becoming reality. We see a chance to design a better way of life with a blueprint for sustainable living.

[Rory Jones]

There's this big video of what the northwest of his country is going to look like. And Neom is going to. He's going to build Neom there and it's going to be this futuristic city.

[Ryan Knudson]

My colleague Rory Jones covers the Middle East. He remembers this announcement and what happened next.

[Rory Jones]

MBS pulls out two phones. One is like the. I think it's like a Nokia 6210 or something, you know, we all had in the 90s or something.

[Ryan Knudson]

Like the one you could put Snake on or whatever.

[Rory Jones]

Right? That's exactly right, yeah. And he pulls out an iPhone, smartphone, and he says, you know, he compares NEOM and the kingdom with the technological leap of those two phones.

[Elliot Brown]

The difference that is going to happen in Neom as a zone, as a city, is like the difference between this phone and this phone. This is what we're going to achieve in nio.

[Ryan Knudson]

Definitely MBS's message with Neom, he was going to transform cities the same way Apple transformed phones.

[Rory Jones]

MBS wanted to create this place that was going to be a mix of the French Riviera, where people would go on vacation there, and it was going to have touches of Silicon Valley. Companies are going to want to set up there and create businesses of the future. And then it was going to have splashes of Dubai, whereas this sort of melting pot of different cultures. And so, yeah, I remember hearing about Neom and thinking, wow, like, this is like a huge, huge change But I also remember thinking, like, I'm not quite sure what this is.

[Ryan Knudson]

Rory had questions. What exactly was NEOM going to be? Who would build it? And how quickly could Saudi Arabia and MBS actually pull this off? So he and a team of Wall Street Journal reporters started digging. Over the past seven years, they've talked to dozens of people who moved to the Saudi desert to work on neom, and they've pored over thousands of pages of internal documents. What do you find most interesting about the NEOM story?

[Rory Jones]

I find everything interesting about the NEOM story is the ambition. Like, it is a very, very ambitious project. It's one of the world's most ambitious projects. It is currently the world's biggest construction project. And so, you know, you could throw as many superlatives at it as you want, but it's a big deal.

[Ryan Knudson]

But their reporting shows that the project is years behind schedule and projected to be trillions of dollars over. And MBS's dream of a desert utopia is looking more like a nightmare. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, April 25th. Over the next two episodes, we'll be telling the story of neon. This is part one. Skiing in the desert.

[Maria Bartiromo]

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[Ryan Knudson]

We asked for an interview with a NEOM representative for this podcast, but NEOM declined. In a statement, a NEOM spokeswoman said the project had started the year on, quote, a positive footing. She noted that like any large project, NEOM continues to make changes to ensure its long term success. She also said that NEOM is, quote, unprecedented in terms of ambition and scale. This is how NEOM supporters have often described it, as a breathtakingly ambitious, even utopian project. NEOM would be the next stage of human development, an experiment and a better way of living. But NEOM was also supposed to be something else. A practical solution to some of the kingdom's most pressing problems.

[Maria Bartiromo]

Well, a royal shakeup in Saudi Arabia. King Salman has promoted his 31 year old son to become Crown Prince of the kingdom.

[Ryan Knudson]

Mohammed bin Salman, MBS was still in his early 30s when he assumed de facto control of Saudi Arabia. His father, King Salman, named him Crown Prince in 2017. From the beginning, MBS was well aware that leading his country into the future would be a tough brief.

[Rory Jones]

The kingdom faced a number of challenges that really were almost like a sort of ticking time bomb for a country that they'd have to solve.

[Ryan Knudson]

Problem number one was demographic. Saudi Arabia's population was young and growing.

[Rory Jones]

70% of the kingdom's population were under 30. So MbS had to find ways to employ those people.

[Ryan Knudson]

But that would be difficult because of problem two.

[Rory Jones]

70% of Saudis were also employed by the government at that point. And why was that? Is because most of Saudi Arabia's revenues at the time were derived from oil.

[Ryan Knudson]

Oil. If you had a job in Saudi Arabia, you likely either worked for the state run oil company or your government job. Let's say a teacher was paid using oil money. Oil was what made the Saudi state run. It was oil all the way down. And MBS knew it couldn't last.

[Elliot Brown]

We have a case of oil addiction in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the part of everyone. It's a serious issue. It's disrupted the development of many sectors. In years past.

[Rory Jones]

He could see on the horizon a time when the demand for oil would dry up. And so he understood that he needed to diversify his economy. He needed to diversify the government's revenue streams. He needed to create jobs for all these young people in his country. And he needed to get more people out of the public sector into the private sector.

[Ryan Knudson]

MBS started to tackle some of these big economic problems with social reforms. When he came to power, men and women weren't allowed to socialize in public. Less than 20% of the workforce were women. And there wasn't much popular entertainment to speak of. MBS began to change that. A big day for women in Saudi Arabia allowed behind the wheel for the first time as the world's last. He allowed women to drive and made it easier for them to enter the workforce.

[Rory Jones]

He allowed men and women to mix freely in public. He opened cinemas for the first time in like 40 years, which was like a huge moment.

[Maria Bartiromo]

The Hollywood film Black Panther is the.

[Rory Jones]

First movie to be screened at an AMC entertainment theater in Riyadh.

[Ryan Knudson]

Because how do you build a consumer economy, give people stuff to spend their money on? MBS's social reforms could only go so far. Though this was still Saudi Arabia, it was still a bastion of conservative Islam still governed by sharia law.

[Rory Jones]

So he's also thinking about, well, is there anywhere in the kingdom that I can just start with a blank canvas? And so as the story goes, he's looking at a map of Saudi Arabia and he's looking at all the different area of his country and he sees that there is this part of northwest Saudi Arabia where it's vastly populated.

[Ryan Knudson]

Here's MBS in a discovery channel documentary talking about the genesis of neom northwest of Saudi Arabia, untouched, almost empty. It have mix of topography, mountains, valleys, oasis, dunes, beaches, islands, corals from skiing till diving.

[Maria Bartiromo]

That's the place.

[Rory Jones]

And he understands that it has a lot of the natural ingredients to make a new exciting city state within his kingdom.

[Ryan Knudson]

The area MBS was planning to develop was huge, roughly the size of Massachusetts. And it wasn't a completely blank slate. There were villages there and native tribes who'd been calling the area home for generations. They'd need to be relocated by force if necessary. But for an authoritarian ruler like mbs, that didn't present much of an impediment. No, this area was a place where he could enact the radical changes the rest of Saudi Arabia wasn't ready for. In neom, foreigners would be welcome. It would have its own business friendly legal system. It would be a home for new industries. Tourism, media, biotech, clean energy that could help diversify the Saudi economy. And it would be more socially liberal. Women could wear bikinis at the beach. There were even discussions about allowing alcohol. And so mbs went to the people you go to to turn lofty, fantastical visions into reality. Management consultants.

[Rory Jones]

Neon brought in McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Oliver Wyman. Like a who's who of the management consulting world. Part of the reason he turns to management consultants is because there wasn't a lot of expertise in particular industries that he wanted to create. At neom. There wasn't really a tourism industry, there wasn't a tech industry. And so he needs outside expertise to try to help him deliver on this vision. And what these management consultants do is they put all their ideas together down in more than like 2,000 pages of planning documents for what neon might might look like.

[Ryan Knudson]

It's more than 2,000 pages of wow.

[Rory Jones]

Yeah, it was like the wall street journal got access to these in around 2019. And I remember, the first thing I remember thinking is, how am I going to get through all these, you know, these 2,000 pages to read all this stuff?

[Ryan Knudson]

Those 2,000 pages are not a plan for neom per se. It's more like a brainstorming document of every conceivable amenity a city of the future could possibly have. And some of these ideas are straight out of sci fi.

[Rory Jones]

There's an idea for like a Jurassic park, like a theme park of robot dinosaurs.

[Ryan Knudson]

There are flying taxis, robots that would.

[Rory Jones]

Clean your house for you while you're out at work.

[Ryan Knudson]

Classes taught by hologram teachers, more Michelin.

[Rory Jones]

Starred restaurants than anywhere else in the world.

[Ryan Knudson]

Some of the wildest ideas came from MBS himself.

[Rory Jones]

These documents show how he, in board meetings is like putting forward ideas for what he wants. You know, he wants a beach that will glow like your watch glows in the dark. And he's also keen on this idea of a moon that can rise with drones every night at NEOM and become this sort of showpiece.

[Ryan Knudson]

This sounds like Las Vegas on acid.

[Rory Jones]

That is a great way of describing it. Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Knudson]

In the end, the plans for NEOM roughly coalesced around five key developments, each with an appropriately dramatic name. There was Magna Neom's string of luxury beachfront hotels. Sindalah, an island with a cluster of resorts. Oxagon, a port on the Red Sea. Trojena, a mountain resort. And then there was neom's centerpiece, the actual city, part of this futuristic city state. It was called the Line.

[Elliot Brown]

This is a wild idea.

[Ryan Knudson]

My colleague Elliot Brown spent years covering real estate. The Line is unlike any building he's ever seen, or even ever dreamed about, for that matter.

[Elliot Brown]

At its full vision, it's absolutely enormous. If you just look at the square footage as envisioned, it would have more square footage than all of New York City.

[Ryan Knudson]

The Line is a skyscraper, or rather two skyscrapers running parallel to each other. Each tower would stretch 1600ft into the air, taller than the Empire State Building, and also run for 106 miles, roughly the length of Connecticut. Yes, that is two skyscrapers side by side running for 106 miles. In pictures, it's undeniably striking. Breathtaking almost. The outside of the building would be covered with mirrored glass so that it reflects the desert landscape, blurring the line where the structure ends and nature begins. The entire complex would house around 9 million people, but people would live inside of it like you wouldn't have open air.

[Elliot Brown]

The middle would essentially be a giant atrium. Some people get a window view looking out, other people get a window view looking in. And then there's this essentially 600 foot space between the buildings, where sometimes it's open air, sometimes it's parks sort of spliced between these buildings. You have some large venues, like you'd have a stadium suspended between the two towers. MBs often would tell people he wanted zero gravity architecture.

[Ryan Knudson]

What does that mean?

[Elliot Brown]

Like architecture that looks like it defies physics.

[Ryan Knudson]

The idea of building a city in a line that came from MBS's architects, but turning it into a skyscraper. MBS has said that was his idea.

[Elliot Brown]

You know, developers are generally always dreamers and when I cover real estate, they'd often come up with like crazy ideas for a building that looks like a corkscrew and goes 1,000ft up. But at the end of the day, they'd have to convince other investors and banks to give them the money to do it. And if you had a thousand foot corkscrew, you wouldn't find enough investors and banks to do it. So they don't never get built. This is a structure where you don't have those guardrails.

[Ryan Knudson]

That's because MBS is both the developer and the bank. MBS is the chair of NEOM's board. In addition to being the chair of every sub project within neom, he's also the chair of neom's main funder, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, home to about a trillion dollars of the country's oil wealth. If MBS wanted the line, he was in a good position to get it. The Saudi government and the Saudi Wealth Fund did not respond to requests for comment. But why does MBS need the line? Why not just build a fancy yet achievable city?

[Rory Jones]

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's, you know, early on in his, in the planning of neom, in a meeting, MBS goes to his urban planners. I want to build my pyramids. You know, he's essentially thinking about NEOM in the context of the pyramids of Giza which have been around for thousands of years. He wants to make that kind of physical mark on the land.

[Ryan Knudson]

So then it's not just about changing Saudi Arabia or even reinventing the idea of a city. It's also about ego.

[Rory Jones]

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. MBS does want to create this city state that drives economic change and reform in his kingdom and that allows the kingdom to diversify away from oil. But at the same time he wants to make his mark and he wants to do that in a very, very eye catching kind of way.

[Ryan Knudson]

MBS was aware that his plans for NEOM and Saudi Arabia were ambitious. He's often said that achieving even half of his ambitions would be a win and transformative for his country. But to achieve even a small percentage of the NEOM vision would require a massive effort and huge numbers of people willing to move to a remote corner of the desert to make it all real. That's coming up.

[Maria Bartiromo]

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[Ryan Knudson]

Beginning around 2020, hundreds and then thousands of people packed up their lives and moved to the Saudi desert to deliver Neom MBS's dream. One of them was Andy.

[Andy Wirth]

My name's Andy Wirth.

[Ryan Knudson]

And where are you from, Andy Worth?

[Andy Wirth]

I live in southwestern Montana, about 45 minutes west of Bozeman, Montana.

[Ryan Knudson]

Andy is an executive in his early 60s. For much of his career he ran ski resorts, big ones like Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows near Lake Tahoe.

[Andy Wirth]

And yeah, I love skiing. I love snowboarding, alpine skiing, backcountry skiing, Nordic skiing, skate skiing. Quite honestly, Ryan, I've never met a mountain, a horse, a dog, or a pair of skis I didn't like.

[Ryan Knudson]

Andy will tell you he's been very fortunate in his career. He's made enough money to only take on projects he really cares about. And in early 2020, he heard about one that seemed to fit that bill.

[Andy Wirth]

Out of the clear blue sky, as Forrest Gump would say. I got this note over LinkedIn. I think it was indicating there was some interest in having me come over to Saudi Arabia to work on this project called neom.

[Ryan Knudson]

What was neom, as you understood it from this initial pitch?

[Andy Wirth]

It was an effort to make more progressive the country, usher in a new era, if you will, for that country. I'm not too sure if there's any slogans like make Saudi Arabia great again, but nonetheless it was part of a vision that he had as the leader for that country to do many things in northwest Saudi Arabia.

[Ryan Knudson]

Among the things MBS wanted to do was develop neom's rocky Red Mountains. He and his advisors envisioned a luxury mountain destination with hiking, mountain biking, and, yes, skiing. Neom wanted to hire Andy to lead the mountain project and develop Saudi Arabia's very first world class ski resort. What was the issue that first came to your mind?

[Andy Wirth]

Well, snow, natural snowfall.

[Ryan Knudson]

It might surprise you to learn that the Saudi mountains do get a dusting of snow in the winter, not enough to ski on by a long shot. But to Andy, that wasn't a deal breaker.

[Andy Wirth]

It didn't deter me. It was really intriguing at a, call it a strategic level.

[Ryan Knudson]

But skiing wasn't what convinced Andy to sign on to neom.

[Andy Wirth]

Honestly, the intrigue of resort development was a bit of a shoulder shrug for me. What was a primary interest in what was really driving me was having Saudi Arabia, oil producing country for generations, fund what was ultimately a really remarkable project to demonstrate the value impact of doing now what we should have been doing a generation or two ago on the fight against climate change.

[Ryan Knudson]

That's because NEOM aimed to be a 100% renewable energy project.

[Andy Wirth]

And there was a poetic irony in that. Saudi Arabia, world's greatest producer of oil for generations, that was going to fund this.

[Ryan Knudson]

One of MBS's goals is to pivot the country away from oil. NEOM would be part of that. The project would be powered by wind and solar. It would pioneer green hydrogen production and it would do so on a massive scale. Andy hoped it would be a proof of concept for the world.

[Andy Wirth]

So I actually was digging on the contrarian nature of things. Counterintuitive, isn't it?

[Ryan Knudson]

He signed on to head neom's mountain sector. Another person who joined NEOM was Tony Harris. So what was the pitch?

[Tony Harris]

The pitch for neom?

[Ryan Knudson]

The pitch for you to join.

[Tony Harris]

Oh, Ryan. I mean, very straightforward. You can do whatever you want to do.

[Ryan Knudson]

Tony works in educational consulting and in education. You are thinking about programs, curriculums, how to make it better. Is that kind of yes?

[Tony Harris]

I'm thinking about how should we teach, what should we teach and why should we teach?

[Ryan Knudson]

Might seem odd that NEOM would recruit an educator. After all, it was primarily a massive construction project. But NEOM's leaders were looking to the future. If NEOM was going to be a world class city, it would need world class schools and experts to help build them. To Tony, neom's pitch was irresistible.

[Tony Harris]

Make up your own job title, make up your own job description and come and make sure that we are among the Foremost education ecosystems in the world. So who wouldn't want that? And let me not be coy with you. They were also paying a huge amount of money.

[Ryan Knudson]

That doesn't hurt. How much money?

[Tony Harris]

The normal rule of thumb was take your highest paying job and add 30% to that.

[Ryan Knudson]

Tony signed on to help run Neom's education sector. His wife, who's also an educator, joined Neom too. Soon they were on a plane headed to Saudi Arabia. They even took their yellow lab, Tanner. They flew to Riyadh, then to Tabuk before making the two hour drive to Neom. And what's the drive like? What do you see out the window?

[Tony Harris]

So I don't know when the last time you were in Utah, but it's a little bit like that.

[Ryan Knudson]

Mm.

[Tony Harris]

It's a desert. Not the sort of Lawrence of Arabia desert, but the sort of gravelly stone desert. It's quite mountainous, quite hilly. It's a scrabby place. You don't want to get out of the car. And then you arrive at the camp, and the very, very first thing that strikes you is it really does look like a forward military base.

[Ryan Knudson]

The camp was encircled by high security fencing. Inside were row upon row of identical white cabins. They kind of looked like mobile homes. This is where Neom's white collar workers lived.

[Tony Harris]

And then the other facilities. There was a big communal dining hall. There was a swimming pool, a little gym. There was a small shop, a barber, just enough to sort of keep you going.

[Ryan Knudson]

There was also another population of foreign workers at Neom, the laborers who would actually be building this new city. They were mostly from South Asia, and Tony and Andy didn't see much of them. They lived in separate, even more cramped camps. At neom, Tony hit the ground running.

[Tony Harris]

There was so much pressure to answer some basic questions, I soon found myself rolling up my sleeves and just putting out fires.

[Ryan Knudson]

What curriculum should they use? How many teachers should they hire? Neom's consultants had gotten a head start on some of those questions, like figuring out how big neom's student population would be. But Tony didn't find much use for their work.

[Tony Harris]

They had come up with this extremely complicated, convoluted Excel model, which would predict the number of kids that we were eventually going to have. We scrapped the whole thing and started all over again and built a model that actually could predict what we needed. And there were 10 other examples of things like that. But actually, from my perspective, this wasn't a problem. I know about startups. I've worked in many startups. I've Had a couple of startups myself and this is standard procedure, so this didn't bother me.

[Ryan Knudson]

Elsewhere at neom, Andy was also busy problem solving. Given the lack of snow, neom's consultants had suggested using a kind of synthetic material to ski on. It almost looked like carpet that could be rolled out along NEOM slopes.

[Andy Wirth]

It's basically picture 14 billion toothbrushes and that's the slope. I had skied on these kind of slopes and they're just not very desirable. I saw that as being we're going to have people ski for two hours and we'll never see them again. Ain't gonna work.

[Ryan Knudson]

Yeah.

[Andy Wirth]

But what we could do is something that is very creative, I think. What if we actually had real snow?

[Ryan Knudson]

But to figure out if this could work, Andy would need data, data he didn't have.

[Andy Wirth]

We didn't have any maps. The good maps you use for this kind of environment are lidar. It's basically very detail, accurate mapping. We are still working with Google Earth for goodness sakes.

[Ryan Knudson]

And so Andy threw on his hiking boots to see what he could learn about the region he'd been tasked with developing.

[Andy Wirth]

I spent a great deal of time on foot up there in the mountains as we were collecting LiDAR based maps. Hiking, climbing, climbing, hiking.

[Ryan Knudson]

On one of those hikes, Andy stopped by a small radar station operated by the Saudi Air Force. Turns out the staff there collected weather data.

[Andy Wirth]

So I had ambient temperature measurements every hour going back 25 years and also had humidity for the same thing. And so that was a goldmine.

[Ryan Knudson]

As far as snowmaking went. That data was actually encouraging. There were weeks during the winter when temperatures in Neom's mountains regularly dropped below freezing, at least for part of the day.

[Andy Wirth]

That was a surprise and very interesting.

[Ryan Knudson]

Tell people you're building a ski resort in Saudi Arabia and the eyebrows go up pretty fast. But here was evidence that it could actually work.

[Andy Wirth]

We were going to be able to ski in the neighborhood of four hours a day. Between December 10th and March 15th. Skiing might have been 6am to 10am and we'd have to make snow every night, every moment possible. And there'd be plenty of times where we wouldn't be able to. But these charts from the Royal Saudi Air Force indicated we could pull this off.

[Ryan Knudson]

It wouldn't come cheap though. Remember, this is the desert. They'd need to bring in water for snowmaking. Andy also needed these very special and very expensive snow making machines designed to create snow and warmer temperatures.

[Andy Wirth]

So when you do that math, it is financially not logical. It's in fact irrational. However, when one has access to unlimited capital, we could pull this off and that would be unique and special, so on and so forth.

[Ryan Knudson]

So it was sort of like this is wild, but it's possible.

[Andy Wirth]

Yeah, it's really effing wild, but possible.

[Ryan Knudson]

Andy told us he liked this part of the job. He liked figuring out how to do the impossible, how to ski in the desert. And there were Andy's and Tony's all across neom laying plans to suspend stadiums in the air, build green hydrogen plants, desalinate water, build skyscrapers the length of Connecticut. Neom's builders were dreaming big, but standing in between them and execution were massive challenges like runaway spending.

[Tony Harris]

We couldn't spend money quickly enough. We could not spend money quickly enough.

[Andy Wirth]

Bad bosses it was full on the Shining Jack Nicholson type stuff and the.

[Ryan Knudson]

Growing realization that all of this might be too expensive for even Saudi Arabia to afford. How would you describe the moment that we're in right now in the NEOM story?

[Elliot Brown]

I think we're sort of in the rapidly colliding with reality phase that's coming.

[Ryan Knudson]

Up in part two of our neom podcast. Coming tomorrow. Before we go, I just want to say that these two NEOM episodes will be my last for a while. I'm going out on paternity leave through the summer, but I'll be back on the show in the fall. That's all for today. Friday, April 25 this episode was produced by Annie Minoff and edited by Kathryn Brewer. Additional reporting in this episode by Stephen Kaelin, Summer Saeed and Justin Scheck. Fact checking by Kate Gallagher. The theme remix in today's episode is by Griffin Tanner. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Kathryn Brewer, Pia Gadkari, Carlos Garcia, Rachel Humphries, Sophie Kodner, Matt Kwong, Kate Linebaugh, Jessica Mendoza, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez De la Rosa C Sarah Platt, Allen Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhe, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zemis and me, Ryan Knudsen, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by so Wiley. Additional music this week by Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Taylor Tanner, so Wiley Audio Network, Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Additional fact checking this week by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.