#278 — The Man Who Will Be King
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with Ghamad bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, the crown prince and de facto ruler of the Islamic kingdom of Sahudi arabia, about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, his recent reforms in the country, and his vision for the 2030s. We also discuss his recent trip to Iran, his relationship with Israel, and why he's considered a bulwark against Islamic terrorism. And, of course, we talk about the war in Ukraine, the Finnland invasion of Finland, and much, much more. To access full episodes of the making sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe to the podcast, where you'll get access to the full archive of all previous episodes. If you're interested in subscribing to the Making sense Podcast, you can do so by becoming a member of the MHS subscriber feed. You'll get immediate access to all the latest episodes, as well as access to our most popular sub-series, "Making Sense." Subscribe to Making Sense wherever you get your podcasts, books, and other MHS content, including the latest podcasts, on all major podcast directories, and social medias, including Apple Podcasts, iReporters, Podcasts and the Arabic version of the New York Times' Arabic edition of the FT, The Arab Spectator. Subscribe today! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to makingsense.org/Our ad-free version of The Making Sense Podcast? Learn more about our sponsorships, including VIP VIPs, VIPs and VIPs worldwide, and get 20% off-site pricing, including our ad-only pricing plans, and VIP packages, including best deals, including a discount codes, and a chance to win our VIP membership offer, to receive a discount code, VIP discounts, and early access to future VIPs only available to VIPs Subscribe for future special offers, and more! Subscribe and subscribe to our special offer, using our VIP promo code: MHS VIPs Club? , making sense! , using our global listening to our newest podcast, Making Sense and much more? Learn about our new podcast, The Making sense by clicking here: making sense: , to become a fellow MHS Podcast . Thank you, Sam, Sam Harris
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy
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what we're doing here please consider becoming one welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam
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harris today i'm speaking with graham wood graham is a staff writer at the atlantic
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and he's the author of a wonderful book on the islamic state titled the way of the strangers
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encounters with the islamic state and today we're talking about muhammad bin salman otherwise known
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as mbs the crown prince and de facto ruler of saudi arabia we discuss the murder of jamal khashoggi
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the rather astounding imprisonment of saudi elites in the ritz carlton mbs's recent reforms in saudi
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arabia and his vision 2030 campaign saudi relations with israel the posture of the biden administration
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energy policy saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists the strange case of musa charantonio john walker lind
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the current condition of the islamic state and then graham and i talk about the war in ukraine
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and russian propaganda how finland has made itself invasion proof and other topics anyway graham is
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always great i hope you enjoy it and now i bring you graham wood
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i am here with graham wood graham thanks for joining me again sam it's good to be back so you
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have a cover article in the april issue of the atlantic titled absolute power on muhammad bin salman
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mbs the de facto ruler of saudi arabia and it's a fascinating profile on him and you sounds like you had a
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a very interesting trip let's uh i want to cover that and then we can cover some related issues
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but um you know mbs i think came to more or less everyone's attention in the aftermath of the
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khashoggi murder as uh ghoulish as that was uh which i'm sure we'll get to uh but it sounds like you
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interviewed him twice on this trip and let's track through that what you know before we jump into
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your actual experience here give me the short bio of mbs who who is he and and why should anyone care
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about him so mbs is first and foremost the son of his father who is king salman who's in his late
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80s and enjoying a very soft final few years as as king of saudi arabia and every one of the kings
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of saudi arabia since the founding king have been sons of king abdul aziz so they've just been getting
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older and older and mbs now 36 years old is the first of his generation to be in line for the throne
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for really in line for the throne he's almost certainly going to become king and so his father
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has put him in charge of the country for the last five years or so and he has been in charge of a
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great big modernizing effort trying to bring the country into the 21st or maybe at least the 20th
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century so integrating it with the global economy and reforming it in almost every way except for
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the political which is why he remains the uh he will remain when he's king the absolute monarch of
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saudi arabia yeah and he he's considered somewhat a bulwark against jihadism and we'll get into the
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details that there that's pretty interesting um and he's also a bulwark against iran from our point of
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view us being primarily the u.s we'll get into the the jihadism piece but what's your view of the
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geopolitical balancing act that uh we're doing or or may yet attempt to do between saudi arabia and
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iran well iran i mean this is part of the question about jihadism because iran is an avowedly jihadist
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state of a very different sort it's a shia jihadist state and saudi arabia although it's produced a very
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large number of sunni jihadists it has been an enemy of of iran since iran's conversion into a
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jihadist state in the late 1970s so when when we say that mbs is an enemy of jihadism and an enemy
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of iran that that is all that is all true with a few asterisks and it it's it's pretty important
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that you know that the united states uh has allies in the region who are who are opposed to iran
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moving against it now of course the issue is that it's an extremely imperfect ally that
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saudi arabia is is not a democracy doesn't share very many of our values and so any deal that we
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make with them as an ally against iran is going to be one that that we have to really pinch our noses
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and and and make so that's that's the sort of devil's bargain that we've had throughout the
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history of saudi arabia and pretty acutely with with mbs yeah yeah well so let's come to the man
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himself so that there's a passage in your article that jumped out at me again you you interviewed him
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twice and uh you wrote of this encounter difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about
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jumpily his voice vibrating at a higher frequency every minute or two he performed a complex motor tick
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a quick backward tilt of the head followed by a gulp like a pelican downing a fish he complained that he
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had endured injustice and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the
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standards of middle eastern rulers so this this is not an altogether flattering picture of the man
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and uh give me any more uh details you want there but i know that there was a a saudi response to your
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article which uh i'd like to discuss here what was how is all of this received yeah well first of all
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some of the words that you've just read out are not things to put it mildly that you could say if
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you're a saudi or if you were stuck in saudi arabia as i am not i'm not in saudi arabia anymore to
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describe the crown prince's evident neurological issues to describe his crackdown on descent all of
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these things are strictly forbidden and that is indeed part of the crackdown on descent so mbs for for years
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there has been you know saudis are very active on social media and there has been a number of taboo
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subjects and yeah the the physical health of the crown prince is one of them my experience with him
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was that just as i say in the piece that he's got a he's a man of immense power immense and almost
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completely unchecked power who has no experience of being told no i mean he has been crown prince
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and the ruler of a very very wealthy country for five years and before that he was the son of the
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extremely influential governor of riad province so this is a guy who's always had a lot of people
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around him saying you can do whatever you like and now has the power to really you know make his
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his his imagination run wild and some of those things are some of the things that he wants to
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do are i think it's fair to say good you know he he has reigned in the religious beliefs there's a
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number of freedoms that saudis have that they haven't had before but look if you spend any amount
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of time in a room with the guy you can tell that he is not socially or psychologically adjusted in a way
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that's familiar to you if you've spent most of your time among people who don't have
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this extremely bizarre and empowered background it doesn't mean that he can't you know talk to you
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intelligently or even in a friendly and pleasant way but look we're talking about someone who
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with the snap of his fingers can have people's heads cut off can change geopolitics and that's a
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really it's a really complicated place to to be in if you're 36 years old and have not really been
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trained as if anyone can be trained for that kind of power at all so it it really was once i ended up
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sitting in the room with him a couple times an experience unlike any i've ever had how concerned
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were you for your own security not very i mean i i knew jamal khashoggi personally i'd spoken to him
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just weeks before his death so i mean i i was let's remind people who jamal was in this context
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yeah jamal khashoggi was a long-time writer figure in the saudi government and in saudi media
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uh he had worked for the saudi government as a press attache in dc and in london and about the time
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that mbs came to power jamal's his patronage just dried up completely all the people who he was relying
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on to be his his champions within government were pushed aside in favor of mbs's people so jamal went
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into exile uh he got a column and wrote a few of a few columns for the washington post and in october
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2018 he went to istanbul whose government an islamist government was was supporting him
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and when he went into the the saudi consulate in istanbul he never came out and all we know is that
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he was murdered there at by henchmen of the crown prince and that his body's never been found
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probably was cut to smithereens and flushed away somewhere so when i went to see mbs of course i
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was thinking about the fact that you know the one of the most prominent saudis i knew before
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had been physically disintegrated at the behest of this guy and that that person was you know
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washington post writer a contributor to the washington post as i have been too so yeah i was
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of course it it crossed my mind who knows what's going to happen in this interaction on the other
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hand it's also just objectively true that that mbs and his reforms for saudi arabia were set back by
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years maybe permanently because of what he did to to jamal khashoggi he had no idea that this was going
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to be the the outcome of of that assassination and so to say the least if i disappeared into a meeting
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with mbs and you know never showed up again or or was you know next scene with fewer fingernails
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or toes than i came in with then that too would set back the the image of mbs as someone who can
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who can be dealt with and who can be understood by and and you know worked with by the west yeah we
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should say in this context that mbs denies having had anything to do with the the murder of khashoggi and
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he even denied however implausibly ever reading any of his articles and he said he said that khashoggi
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was not even in the top 1000 of people who he would want killed which was kind of an interesting
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way of framing his total non-involvement in this but so you publish this article and then you get
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some response from the saudis i think one of which included you will never be allowed in saudi arabia
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again well first tell me what happened there and and i'm just wondering if you have any security
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concerns subsequent to publishing this i mean we have quite famously again people may have forgotten
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this but you know mbs seems to have hacked jeff bezos's cell phone right i mean so it's like
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he can reach out and screw with people apparently at some distance what are your thoughts on that score
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yeah so the saudi response was at first they were unsure what to do with it because the the first
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thing to know about mbs is in the last few years is that he's been hiding so he has not spoken to the
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to the western media at all for two years until he spoke to me so they weren't really sure how
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this interview would be received and i think it it speaks to the either the obtuseness or maybe the
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incompetence of mbs's people that they didn't realize that the things that he said about khashoggi
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that he you know wasn't even in the top thousand people who mbs might want to kill that they didn't
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i don't think even realize how that was going to sound to people who were not you know people in
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the west who were accustomed to free media and not being threatened with with death by desert kings
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so i think that when i left i i didn't expect that the saudis would come after me in a physical way
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i thought there was a possibility maybe even a likelihood that my my phone was hacked so i took
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steps to to make sure that that didn't happen physically i felt pretty safe now in social media
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and in you know unofficial ways that that the saudis can can reach you or let you know that they're
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thinking about you there were plenty of reasons to see that to think that i i might be uh concerned
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about how things were going to go i mean there were videos that came out of saudi arabia with my
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picture and and jamal's asking oh is after this interview will graham would be the next jamal
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khashoggi no i didn't think that was going to happen but the saudis pretty soon after they read
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the piece digested it and figured out how it was going to be understood and noticed that there were
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things in it that that included unutterable statements about mbs and his reforms they started
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pushing really hard to sort of rewrite the article to pretend it said things that it didn't say
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and then to to accentuate things that that mbs either didn't say at all or said quite differently
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and to de-emphasize the the the wilder stuff like the things that he said about khashoggi and then
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some of the things that he said probably more aggressively than he intended about his uh desire
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to rein in the jihadists and and religious police right right well as far as a raw expression of power
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you know and sociopathy it's hard to beat what he did in 2017 when he imprisoned some of the most
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powerful people in saudi arabia in the ritz carlton describe that episode what was happening there
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yeah the ritz carlton episode was one of the most amazing things that's happened in world politics for
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quite some time i i mean i've stayed in the ritz carlton i tried to i tried to order a pizza there
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and they they said there's a one on the menu that cost 250 bucks for a personal pizza so this is
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every inch of it is the ritz it's a five star six star i don't know if there's seven star but it would
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be at hotel and mbs suddenly like overnight turned his government into a a full prosecutorial machine
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where all sorts of people who including the richest most powerful people in the kingdom
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were taken to the ritz imprisoned there and then told we know you're corrupt you're going to make a
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deal with us you're going to give back let's say 90 of what you stole otherwise we'll turn it over to
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the prosecutors the real prosecutors not the ones who are nice and take you to the ritz but the people
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who take you to you know not seven star hotels but real jails and we'll see what they do with you
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so in other words he was willing to cut a deal with with various people who many of whom were
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members of his own family who he thought had been corrupt and he claimed had been corrupt and some of
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them almost certainly were so we're talking about people who who were accused of stealing literally
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billions of dollars from the saudi government and they were all told make a deal or or the consequences
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will be dire now of course you can phrase this in in different ways and the mbs would like to
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everybody to know that he was being gentle you know this is the nicest way to deal with this other
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autocracies let's say the people's republic of china would just shoot people in the back of the head
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uh they would just take that money there would be no ritz and i was told that his advisors
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presented that as one of the possibilities either just go and kill everybody who's been stealing from
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from the treasury or just kill a few people who are extremely prominent citizens instead he like he
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likes to put it i took the gentler route and allowed people to negotiate but of course there's no
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negotiating with the crown prince of saudi arabia he basically controls everything about what the
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saudi government does and so for the next month or so the saudi government did nothing but try to get
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as much dirt as possible on these people present them with dossiers of what they thought they had
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stolen and then tell them to cough up money so you find people like al-waleed bin talau who's the
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richest man in saudi arabia and sure enough he emerges from the ritz he seems unable to to travel
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anymore he made some deal whose terms he will not disclose and when he's been interviewed about what
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happened in the ritz his voice does not sound like the voice of a man who's at liberty to speak of
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of every detail so in other words even though it was the ritz they didn't make it easy on those who
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were interned there is he still unable to travel as far as we can tell i think he has traveled within
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the region so to to very stalwart saudi allies like the uae but al-waleed bin talal is someone who
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in the past you'd see in new york london yeah san tropez and now no no this is a man who's you know
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got not quite bezos level money but you know the order of magnitude would be like mike bloomberg money
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and now he can't go anywhere yeah and he's someone who i think i've seen profiled on 60 minutes and
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he's a very cosmopolitan person yeah he he owns like a big chunk of or has owned big chunks of
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things like twitter or and citibank he's like a major wheeler and dealer who's got friends in high
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places and so if you can twist the screws in a way that that gets him to be afraid of his of his
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future then that means yeah you've shown that you have real power now i i hasten to add again trying
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to put this in the saudi perspective for many saudis this was a really popular move imprisoning people
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in the ritz because they correctly saudis ordinary saudis correctly saw their government as extremely
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corrupt that that people were just taking money and you know like between five and ten percent of
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the saudi national budget just goes to stipends for princes so if you're an ordinary saudi and you see
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that then you have reason to believe that the government is not on your side is is being just milked
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constantly by powerful people and so what they saw was the crown prince finally doing something about
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that and so from what looks to us like a really bizarre way to to siphon money out of powerful
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people looks to a lot of saudis like something that was a long time coming right and it's also this
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quintessential strong man move i mean it's just the you know tony soprano as crown prince or he's right
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of a of a godfather movie and he he also shows a kind of capriciousness in the way he wields power
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which um you describe which is frankly a little baffling but i think you actually dissect the
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psychology of it he will imprison people you know activists and reformers for calling for things which
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he then enacts like i think the woman who was most responsible for advocating that women be allowed
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to drive correct me if i'm wrong but she was thrown in prison and he still changed the laws you know
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thereafter allowing women to drive but decided to imprison the the most vocal activist for that reform
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and he's done that on other points so i mean this is just kind of i mean it is sadistic behavior but
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how do you think of it what's the rationale yeah it looks sadistic and capricious and you know when
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it happened when this female activist lujain al-hatlul was thrown in prison the way that it was read by
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most people was that mbs is opposed to female driving which has been illegal in saudi arabia for for some
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time now and it it appeared to a lot of people like okay so his reforms his his reigning in the
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extremely conservative religious clerics that's fake because he's not allowing women to drive and
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then it turns out just very soon afterward he allows women to drive and he says now he wanted to make let
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he wanted to change the law the law earlier he wanted women to be able to drive long before lujain al-hatlul
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was imprisoned for for for calling for that so why would he imprison someone who's calling for
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something that he himself was pushing for from the inside and the answer is actually pretty simple
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it's that it's not as she claimed that women have the right to drive because they're equal to men
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it's that women have the right to drive for the same reason that saudis have any rights which is
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that the king or the ruler of the country grants them those rights they have no rights otherwise and
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so for for her to say women inherently have this right actually was a direct threat against the kind
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of theory of the state that mbs represents so you can say a lot of things what you cannot say
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is that you have rights that that don't flow from the monarch himself and if you suggest that then
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it's almost tantamount to treason by the way when lujain was was locked up her family has told me
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she's not allowed to speak although she's she's technically free in saudi arabia right now they did
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not take her to the ritz they put her in prison they had people visit her torture her threaten her
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and this is not too long before jamal khashoggi was killed and dismembered there was someone from mbs's
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own circle who came to her and said what we're going to do to you no one will ever hear about
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your body parts of it will be thrown in the sewer so a very khashoggi like threat made you know before
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the the famous case so it was not just a slap on the wrist for someone who mildly offended the crown
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prince it was someone who agreed with the crown prince about the gist of the policy and who was
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being threatened with death and dismemberment what is the logic of torturing a prisoner out of whom
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you're not trying to get any information i'm just assuming that was not the motive i mean what do
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you what's going on there do you think just as a now that we're attempting to enter the mindstream of
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sadists what's happening there well i mean i think first of all a sadist will do it because he likes it
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that's part one part two is i you can torture people into giving you confessions you can torture
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people to deter others in the case of lujain and most of the other people who have been dissenting in
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any way from mbs's policies what they've been trying to do is get them to admit that they are
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on team cutter so the state of cutter has been at loggerheads with saudi arabia for a few years now
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saudi arabia has even even had a basically a blockade of cutter that expired last year but that for years
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mbs the official line of mbs and of saudi arabia was that cutter is a terrorist state that's trying to
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destroy saudi arabia and trying to put the muslim brotherhood in power in its place so they have
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imputed to lujain and to others the motive of of working on behalf of qatar trying to besmirch the
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name of saudi arabia and trying to work for the muslim brotherhood or some other combination of
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nefarious forces on the inside and i think by torturing people that's one of the goals is to to get
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people to admit that okay so but as we said on the other side of the balance he is a genuine or
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semi-genuine reformer or a genuine reformer whose reforms are in some cases are of ambiguous uh ethical
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import uh what what is the vision 2030 campaign and in what ways is he reforming beyond allowing women
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to drive so mbs is vision 2030 it's capital v vision 2030 it's a it's a a branded plan that he he came out with
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early in his reign is a total effort to reform saudi arabia and turn it into a country that's basically
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normal i mean it's it couldn't have been more tribal pre-modern as of 10 years ago and mbs said all right
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we're going to do it all in one go peel off the band-aid and allow all sorts of entertainment all
00:25:45.360
sorts of religious liberty and get rid of corruption and open up the economy to investment into all sorts
00:25:53.720
of new opportunities and we're going to do it all in all at once so that by 2030 the the transformation
00:25:59.160
will basically be complete so it's it's a pretty extraordinary plan i mean i i i don't think
00:26:06.480
because it's being run by a possibly sociopathic autocrat that we should dismiss it too quickly
00:26:13.040
like saudi arabia before just to give a sense of what it was it was it was not just corrupt i mean
00:26:19.680
there were all sorts of things that you just couldn't do there women couldn't drive for one
00:26:24.260
thing women couldn't travel there's a guardianship law that pretty much just said if you if you were a
00:26:29.000
woman and you tried to show up at the airport with your passport and go somewhere you would just be
00:26:32.540
turned away you you would have to have a male guardian basically a babysitter from your family
00:26:37.940
who would allow you to go otherwise otherwise no there were no movie theaters there still is no
00:26:44.080
drinking although mbs strongly hinted that that would be in the future for saudi arabia and there
00:26:50.180
were these religious police these hairy guys in capri pants who would would go around every major city
00:26:57.100
and thwack at you with a stick if you weren't doing islam in the way that they liked so this is a
00:27:04.020
really really backwards place i think even even mbs himself would probably admit that and the idea of
00:27:11.580
2030 is that by 2030 saudi arabia will be like dubai only more so that it's going to be totally modern
00:27:20.080
we'll have all the latest you know concerts and movies and people will go there because they they
00:27:26.320
see it as the the place where the economy is going to boom in the future and all that mbs has been
00:27:32.380
doing by his light is trying to make that happen he says look you can whine to me about political
00:27:38.160
freedoms but what saudis want is vision 2030 and you know maybe political freedom someday but for them
00:27:45.680
it's way more important that we no longer be a backward theocracy and that we'd be more like
00:27:51.220
like dubai or or you know some other modern state and he's opened relations with israel right not
00:27:58.740
officially so the uae and bahrain have have normalized relations with israel exchanged ambassadors
00:28:04.880
and saudi arabia hasn't done that yet now there's clearly contact between the between the two countries
00:28:11.980
and i i wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the next couple years the fact that saudi arabia has
00:28:17.400
the the holy places of islam mecca and medina and that the the transformation of the country into a
00:28:24.360
more secular place it just isn't complete so i i think that's made it made it very difficult for
00:28:29.760
relations to move quite as fast in the case of israel but you know he told me pretty clearly that he sees
00:28:35.620
israel as a potential friend and not as an enemy which in itself is a pretty wild
00:28:41.960
thing to hear from a presumptive king of saudi arabia so what do you think we by we i mean
00:28:48.980
i guess the u.s here should do in light of this because currently the posture is overtly hostile
00:28:56.280
between the biden administration and mbs and i mean very much this is the the knock-on effect of the
00:29:04.060
the murder and dismemberment of khashoggi and as i think you as you point out in the article
00:29:09.420
you know we have an example of someone like assad in syria who was once celebrated for his
00:29:16.040
his modernizing tendencies what do you think by even just to take it from the present forward
00:29:22.740
what do you think biden's posture should be with respect to mbs and what he's doing
00:29:28.500
well i think first of all the biden administration's posture toward mbs
00:29:33.500
seems to be we wish he didn't exist and if there's a way for him to no longer be crown
00:29:39.840
prince we would like to see that happen so it this to me seems especially after having gone to
00:29:46.360
saudi arabia seven odd times during mbs's rule and seeing how entrenched he's he's gotten during
00:29:53.540
during that time that posture toward mbs seems like total wishful thinking that is you know one
00:30:00.340
saudi foreign policy guy said to me look if that's the biden administration's view then they
00:30:07.100
need a psychiatrist they don't need an ir specialist so it's it's just not it's just not
00:30:12.620
going to happen so my view is that look that the saudis they are never going to be in their form of
00:30:21.000
government in their morality compatible with mine you know i i'm an american liberal small d democrat
00:30:27.980
who believes you know i believe in democracy and they're never going to be democratic in my lifetime
00:30:32.900
that's my view so what i think we need to do is is is figure out what are the pathways that we can
00:30:40.140
encourage that move saudi arabia in directions that that satisfy us realizing that it's never going to
00:30:47.020
get all the way and there are some things that we can encourage like the sort of new tolerance for
00:30:53.000
religious minorities which is is still just barely starting so let's not get too excited about that
00:30:59.200
quite yet but the the the transformation of saudi arabia into something other than an extremely
00:31:05.240
conservative theocracy that that winks at jihadism and maybe even encourages it those are changes that
00:31:11.260
we should should encourage and then there's a very difficult calculus that we have to take into
00:31:17.260
account about the differences in values that we have and also about the sovereignty that we have to
00:31:22.080
guarantee to to other countries you know we don't have the the opportunity to just go in and by our
00:31:27.960
own fiat tell saudi arabia no longer to be saudi arabia we can encourage that and we can we can make
00:31:35.400
alliances that that are true to our values but we have to be realistic too about what's actually going
00:31:40.680
to happen in saudi arabia which most likely is going to be the ascent to the throne itself by mps in the
00:31:47.500
next few years and then barring his assassination or some you know unforeseen biological event his
00:31:54.660
remaining on that throne for 50 years so i think we need to see over the long haul how we can influence
00:32:01.240
him now the the comparison to bashar al-assad is i think an important one because i remember distinctly
00:32:08.320
when bashar al-assad came into power and there were hagiographic western biographies that came out about
00:32:14.460
him saying look this guy he trained in london he's an eye doctor he's a man of science hey we hear that
00:32:20.260
he listens to phil collins in his free time how bad could he be and of course the answer is apocalyptically
00:32:26.480
bad if you're in syria so phil collins is does not immunize you against becoming satan so i think in the
00:32:34.800
case of mbs you could still see that i mean he is way more he's way more repressive than his
00:32:43.800
predecessors and he might move further in that direction i'm pretty sure that he would prefer
00:32:51.260
not to i'm pretty sure that that he doesn't do this for fun uh he does it in ways that are
00:32:56.920
nonetheless inexcusable but if there's a way to encourage him to not do these things and to remain
00:33:03.740
in power and to execute the reforms that that he's talking about then we should find a way to do
00:33:09.360
that in the meantime though this is going to be you know yet another case where we are pinching our
00:33:15.780
nose and having to work with autocrats who are doing some pretty horrible stuff which you know in
00:33:20.700
the last month or two alone means you know he's executed literally dozens of people so there's there's
00:33:27.940
a very long distance to go before we can be you know proud of any of the compromises we might make
00:33:33.540
with him do we know anything about what would happen if we transition to alternative energy
00:33:40.240
at the fastest possible pace me like is the saudi economy diversified at all at this point or the
00:33:47.680
wealth of the principal rulers diversified enough so that the kingdom wouldn't collapse if oil suddenly
00:33:55.000
became next to worthless so i'll tell you a little bit about the saudi economy i i i drove around
00:34:02.620
saudi for weeks just got in a rental car and drove randomly and i could see that they were making
00:34:10.080
efforts to to saudi eyes to nationalize the economy which which basically means getting saudis to work
00:34:16.060
for the first time because the saudi economy for years has been pretty much sucking oil out of the
00:34:21.320
ground and selling it which they do very very well and usefully for the united states and others
00:34:28.040
so when driving around you could see saudis working in positions where they had clearly never worked
00:34:34.100
before in fact they'd never worked anywhere before so you'd go to like hotels and find saudis at the
00:34:39.440
front desk doing a hilariously piss poor job trying to check you in at the hotel and then you know some
00:34:47.080
egyptian guy who had probably done that job for the previous 15 years would eventually hear the
00:34:53.500
commotion at the front desk as as i was trying to check in and then say oh let me help you give you the
00:34:58.760
rate card or whatever i was asking for and so the ability of saudis to just turn on a dime from a
00:35:06.020
petro rentier state to in a diversified economy i think there's that's that's open to doubt and i
00:35:13.960
haven't seen it actually working although the effort is clearly there it's it's it's they're really
00:35:18.620
trying to make that happen but no for the foreseeable future saudi is going to get all of its leverage
00:35:24.160
and most of its money from sucking oil out of the ground and you know you can see that to this day
00:35:29.840
like mbs and his his stance toward putin where does he get any of his power it's because he has this
00:35:37.840
nearly unique ability to pump more or less oil according to his his wishes on that day so that's
00:35:44.520
going to continue to be to be the case and a turn toward alternative energy cannot possibly happen
00:35:49.660
fast enough to prevent him from having that kind of power okay so what of uh his fairly surreal
00:35:57.440
efforts to deprogram jihadists in prison how how and what do they consist and and what was your
00:36:05.680
interaction on that front this was something i did not expect at all so there's a very famous prison
00:36:12.360
in saudi arabia called higher prison just south of riad and uh one of mbs's advisors said why don't
00:36:18.460
you go take a look at higher and you know i i'm a big jihadism nerd spent a lot of time looking at
00:36:23.640
al-qaeda and isis so he said you'll find plenty of isis guys there who will be willing to talk to you
00:36:29.760
and uh it was true there were more al-qaeda than isis but there was both there what the saudis
00:36:37.280
were doing with them just defied belief though and i i say this all with a great big caveat that i was
00:36:44.200
speaking to people who were in prison and who the moment i left would be subject to the whims of
00:36:50.380
saudi government jailers so who knows what they really believed but i i will tell you was what
00:36:56.820
was actually happening on the ground which was that they had decided after years of trying jihadist
00:37:03.280
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