 Hi everyone, welcome and thank you for joining us today. I'll start with introductions and there might be a few more people joining in the next couple of minutes as well. This brief intro, my name is Isabel Rosenbaum. I am a senior at Tufts studying Middle Eastern Studies Anthropology and I'm facilitating today's discussion on behalf of the Institute for Global Leadership and the Tufts Middle East Research Group, which is a student organization under the umbrella of the IGL as well. Many thanks to our speakers today, Bradley Hope and Justin Schek, authors of Blood and Oil, and to Jim Glazer and Matt Schek for connecting us and making this event possible. A brief overview of the format, the speakers will talk for about 15 minutes or so and then we'll open to questions. Please everyone send your questions in the Q&A below, should be like next to the chat on Zoom, and then I'll read out the Q&A kind of during, I'll read out the questions during the Q&A session. Okay, seems like we have more people coming in. Wonderful. Okay, as an overview of the book, Blood and Oil, Muhammad bin Salman's ruthless quest for global power, examines MBS's dramatic rise to Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. In their book, the authors investigate MBS's actions as both a political and economic leader of Saudi Arabia, including allegations of his extreme but brutality, such as the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi two years ago today. Hope and Schek also examine MBS's impact on U.S.-Saudi relations, rooted largely in military agreements and the oil trade. Bradley Hope, based in London, is the New York Times best-selling co-author of Billion Dollar Whale, and covers finance and malfeasance for the Wall Street Journal. Before that, he spent six years as Middle East correspondent. Hope is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Gerald Loeb Award winner. Justin Schek, or other author based in New York, has worked at the Wall Street Journal since 2007, covering white collar crime across four continents. He has been writing about Saudi Arabia since 2016. Schek is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Thank you both again, and I'll let you both take it from here. Oh, great. Thank you very much. I guess we can just sort of give a little bit of our perspective on the book, I mean, or on Muhammad bin Salman. Maybe just a little bit of background. So Justin and I are both, we both work at the Wall Street Journal, so we do a lot of business reporting. And that's kind of how we first got onto this story in the first place. I was newly arrived in London, and Justin had been here for a while covering oil. And around the time, around that time, the Aramco IPO was beginning to be a really big topic. And so Justin and I, we met for the first time actually, and we started working together on Aramco stories. And I think it's kind of a theme of our book that anything, anything that you touch or look into that relates to business in Saudi Arabia will quickly bring you to Muhammad bin Salman. He's really a businessman prince in a way that you don't often see in the Middle East, but in the Gulf. Of course, there are a lot of big businesses and sovereign wealth funds, but MBS, for some reason, has a really special interest in business. And so it was easy for us to sort of start following the money, which is kind of our philosophy. And from, from there, we got into increasingly, you know, I guess, broader stories, eventually Justin did a lot of stories about the some of the palace coup things going on around Muhammad bin Nayef, the crown prince before MBS. And, and eventually by the end, after the Khashoggi murder, we, we looked at each other and we sort of said, you know, we think there's a really tremendous opportunity here to, to look at these five years and kind of go back and go through it in a more slow, assiduous manner, because a lot of the things that were happening were so fast paced that it was hard to get a great sense of what was going on. And also what was true and what wasn't true. We had seen a couple of examples of things that looked like genuine divergence in the royal family from MBS that later turned out to be, you know, having sort of nefarious background or, or, or hidden interests. And so we wanted to really take a patient Wall Street Journal approach to understanding MBS. And so that's what we did. We spent a lot of time meeting people around the world, traveled to Saudi Arabia some. And, you know, I think the other thing that you would notice about our book is that this premise that MBS, what made him almost sort of inextricable or, or unable to be moved from Saudi Arabia, even after the Khashoggi murder, was that he became so enmeshed in the global financial system. He became the cornerstone investor of the Vision Fund, this $100 billion fund that single-handedly pushed up prices of technology companies around the world. He had all of the major consultants, all the big banks. And because he was so, and he, and he also under, underwrote this big infrastructure fund that was investing in the United States. And it turned out that all of those things, probably he didn't even realize what he was doing to some extent, made him really powerful in a way that no, no prince before had been as powerful. I think you could argue, if you look at the history of Saudi Arabia, that any time a prince sort of gets out of line or, you know, is too corrupt or whatever it might be, sometimes the brothers would get together and sort of change the succession. But it feels, if you look at Saudi Arabia today, that all of those kind of checks and balances, the systems that would allow that to happen are pretty much dismantled. And, and it seems almost kind of hard to imagine what would be the thing that could happen that would lead to MBS being unseated. And so, you know, this 35 year old guy basically has become in five years one of the most powerful leaders in the Middle East and recent memory. And we think it's a really fascinating story. I don't know if Justin, if you have some thoughts to something else you want to add. Yeah, you know, one of the, the things that we were, we were taken with was, you know, Saudi Arabia had been basically this sort of sleepy, inward looking country for decades that it pumped oil, it sold oil and it used the money to support its people and its royal family and whatever lifestyle they wanted to have. And the foundation of the U.S. relationship in Saudi Arabia, you know, the Kingdom's most important alliance was based on Saudi Arabia providing a steady amount of oil, keeping oil prices stable and exporting it to the U.S. And, you know, when we started to look back, you realize all of these things have changed, some of them because of Muhammad bin Salman, but a lot of it because of external factors. The fracking boom in the U.S. has made the U.S. a net exporter of oil. And so that foundational element of the relationship is not what it was before. At the same time, Muhammad bin Salman came in, decided that he needed to address the country's reliance on oil and get away from it. And so in doing that, he has really sort of reinvented the relationship with the U.S. It used to be a relationship held by old men in the State Department and the CIA and old men in the Saudi intelligence establishment. And he sort of blown that up. And just as the basis of the relationship used to be oil, it's now something different. It's him and Jared Kushner, the point people. And it's much more about geopolitics and regional approach to confronting Iran and less about the old way of doing things. And so this total reinvention of the relationship is something that we were really taken with when we got started on this. Yeah. And another thing I'd say is that, well, one thing that we try to do is not forgive or apologize for any of the decisions, but really to try to understand what was going on on the royal court side. What were the perceptions that were underlying certain decisions? And so when you look at it like that, your perspective of MBS can really shift from, even myself, I had a kind of perspective of him at the time of being sort of rash, emotional, you know, angry. And after reporting the book, I think one thing I came to a conclusion was that actually there was a lot of thinking going on behind all these decisions. Now, the one thing that hasn't changed is he was taking kind of bold rash actions sometimes without thinking through all the consequences down the line. That's for sure. But you know, for every big controversy from the kind of kidnapping of the Prime Minister of Lebanon to the murder of Khashoggi, there's a kind of an interesting story about how that came to be. And I guess since today is the anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi's murder, that's one we could talk about a little bit, which is that, and I think it's actually, I was reading some of the reviews about these documentaries that have been coming out today, I think they came out today, two of them. But Jamal Khashoggi was a very complicated figure. I actually first ran across him covering this big financial scandal called 1MDB involving a big Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. And in that scandal, at one point, one of the kind of co-conspirators persuades Jamal to fly to Malaysia and do a kind of a front page interview in Arab news about the Prime Minister of Malaysia. And it was all kind of, it had to do with doing favors for him on behalf of the people that sent him. And the one thing that was pretty shocking was that he got paid $100,000 kind of on the side to do that. So when it when, you know, it does kind of color your view a little bit, especially from an American point of view in journalism, that would be a career ending decision to make, you know, that would be considered corruption. But I think that's not to sort of take away from Jamal's intellectual perspective, but it does kind of change. It kind of leads you into a question of who is Jamal Khashoggi? And he's really one of these interesting characters that probably only comes out of Saudi Arabia or some of these Gulf countries where from one angle, he's really a palace insider, kind of like a PR person to some extent. You know, always trying to help explain Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world, even if some of those things he's trying to explain are a little bit untoward or very untoward. He has a kind of an intelligence related aspect. I mean, I don't mean to say that he was an intelligence officer, but he was obviously attached to the head of intelligence for a period of time doing work for him. And then as a journalist, he was writing things. And it was never clear who he was writing them on behalf of. Sometimes it was on behalf of a benefactor or a prince. Sometimes it was his own perspective. And so I think it's a bit so that's really important to understand as far as Saudi Arabia was concerned, this guy was on the payroll. He was his entire life's career was thanks to the royal family and and having access to them receiving an income from them. And as we depict in the book, you know, he started he the MBS era when it started really was highly polarized. You were either on his side or off of his side. And immediately Jamal who kind of liked to live in this kind of gray area between those two sides, sometimes, you know, pushing the boundaries on on what he thought was good for Saudi Arabia, but was not yet the Orthodox point of view. So the MBS kind of group started to see him very much as a kind of an opponent. And they tried to co-opt them tried to silence them and different things. And eventually he managed to get out. And it was there that he started doing a series of things that on the Saudi side really triggered a perspective that he was a bad guy. You know, he was speaking with the global opposition kind of dissident movement about Saudi Arabia and kind of coordinating with them. He was creating a pro-democracy NGO, something that is kind of anathema to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf kingdoms, because you know, they've obviously done a lot to try to push back any Arab spring style discussions. And he also was, as Justin found in his reporting, starting to work with the 9-11 plaintiffs against Saudi Arabia. So essentially helping them to build a better case that would seek damages from Saudi Arabia. So some of this stuff obviously wasn't all just Jamal pushing. He was pushing as they were pushing back on him. It was kind of a rapidly escalating affair. And then the one other thing to mention is that there's this recent case related to another Saudi official called Sad al-Jabri. And in that case, they did detail how Sad al-Jabri was asked to sort of create this Black Ops group to sort of start rendering princes back and that sort of thing. And so the killing of Jamal Shoji was the same team that he had created several years before. And they had done all kinds of things. One of them was render a prince back to Saudi Arabia who was causing trouble. And so it's really important to think this wasn't like sort of a haphazard team that was put together for this particular mission. This was a team that exists that was being used for off the books kind of Black Ops operations. And so in a way that kind of also explains a little bit more about MBS being responsible for this killing. The question of what orders he gave it will probably never understand fully or no for sure. But he is responsible in that he created this group and they were essentially acting as his personal private intelligence operation and doing clandestine operations outside the country as well. So I think it's really interesting and really important to see who was Jamal Shoji. What was the perceptions of Saudi Arabia? What does that tell you about Saudi Arabia? I'm not sure if Justin has some other thoughts on that. And I agree with that. And I think to zoom out a little bit, you know, something we felt was very important in our approach to the book in general and through the Shoji chapter in particular was to get out of the good guy, bad guy, black and white narrative that it's very easy to fall into when something so horrible happens. And, you know, our feeling was that when you start thinking about people for the good guys and bad guys, you're unable to understand people's motivations and you oversimplify. And so we tried as much as possible to understand how Muhammad bin Saman was making decisions and why he was making certain decisions. And, you know, in the Shoji case, he, you know, we talk a lot about killing a journalist, but this was more like killing someone they viewed as a traitor, someone who they viewed as having committed treason rather than someone who was experiencing his free opinions. And that doesn't, certainly doesn't make it any better. It's not an excuse. It's not mitigating, but it's helpful in understanding the way that Muhammad bin Saman has approached leading Saudi Arabia. And what I always say is that there are these two seemingly contradictory strands where on the one hand he's liberalized society, he's made it, okay, it's possible for women to drive, he's made it a much more free country in a lot of ways. And in other ways, politically, he's cracked down in a much more harsh fashion than any criticism. You know, people have been hauled in and interrogated and beaten as we've reported in the journal for criticizing him on Twitter. So it's a place that's become more free and less free simultaneously. And these things appear contradictory. But as we sort of got deeper down looking into this, and the conclusion that I drew, and Bradley may see this with different nuances, that this is a leader who has been really consistent in pursuing one goal, which is making sure that the al-Saud, the ruling family continue as the ruling family for perpetuity or for as long as possible, and that he'd be the next member of the family to be king. And so in doing that, you know, she saw this country that had been, you know, reliant on oil and a royal family that had gotten its legitimacy from the country's very conservative religious establishment as being things that couldn't last. You know, the oil, either the oil would run out or the demand for the oil would run out. And then, you know, also Saudi Arabia's population now is 60% of the population is under 30 years old. They've got the highest smartphone usage rate in the world and some of the highest social media penetration in the world. So you've got all these people who are in their 20s who were sitting around all day, looking at Instagram, seeing their peers in other wealthy countries, doing things like starting new companies, having a wide variety of careers to choose from, going to the movies, going to concerts, going on a date with a member of the opposite sex. And all of these things were not allowed to do in Saudi Arabia. It was very little economic opportunity. There wasn't really a vibrant job market. It was hard to start a company, it was hard to, especially start a tech company, which is what a lot of people, Mohammed bin Salman's generation, seemed interested in. And live music was banned. There were all these basic things you couldn't do. And Mohammed bin Salman determined that in the future, legitimacy for his family couldn't come from this very conservative religious establishment that was behind this constrained society. It was going to have to come from the young people of the country. And the way that he was going to get up legitimacy was to create more social and economic opportunity for them. And so this was a huge shift for a country that for almost a century had basically been doing things the same way. He decided everything needed to change and needed to change right now. And in the course of doing that, he's been very conscious about his own image and making himself look like someone who does kingly things. So a couple of months after he became the leader of the military, he invaded Yemen. It was the first, in modern history, the first offensive by Saudi Arabia, the first time they took the lead in going after another country. It has not worked out well. It's been a horrible source of death and destruction of brutality and famine and disease. But it was done very much with his image in mind of someone who's going to be proactive. Similarly, allowing them to drive, going out, visiting America, and becoming the biggest investor in Silicon Valley. These things do have political and outward purposes, but they're also geared toward helping his image at home show members of his family and the people of his country that he's someone who's taking a leadership role. And the crowning example of that is probably when he brought Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia and Trump's first overseas visit as president. It was to show that in this reinvented relationship with the US, Muhammad bin Saman was the key person. Yeah. The other thing that's really fascinating about MBS is maybe something about our time we live in where everything that happens, it seems like it's so crazy you couldn't make it up. But MBS is also just such a strange kind of mixture of highly familiar millennial. He plays video games, like him and his friends get together on a big screen and play first person shooter games. And we talked in the book about how he has had like a long time love of the game Age of Empires. He watches things like Walking Dead and Game of Thrones and has kind of witty comments about those shows. Then on the other hand, he's actually living out a real life Game of Thrones, you know, going after his cousins, you know, having secret spying operations on members of his family, detaining people in the five star hotel, you know, for some of them for months at a time. It's just, it's almost very difficult to understand how this could be, you know, and a lot of what we came across was that it was really not meant to be by any means. There was, it was kind of one of those perfect storm events where a couple of his uncles died very quickly, they weren't expected to die so quickly, then suddenly his dad became, he was sort of fourth in line, suddenly he was second in line. And then even MBS himself through his personality was willing to upend this very hierarchical system inside of you, but where age matters most. So he jumped over all of his half brothers, many of them are, have a much more illustrious background. One of them was the first Arab astronaut, another one of them is as a PhD from Oxford, and another one is an oil expert, you know, all of them would seem on the surface to be the most capable types to become a king and sort of take us into the next generation. But MBS, in a way that not dissimilar to what we see with people like Donald Trump, where you just would never have expected that they would be the sort of people to rise up to the top. And I think that it's interesting to look at him alongside Donald Trump. And another interesting thing maybe Justin can talk about a little bit more is we really had the perspective the more we looked into it that Donald Trump got the shorter end of the bargain that MBS really gained a lot more than the Trump side did. Yeah, I mean to get into that, that relationship, you know, to jump off what Bradley was saying is, you know, MBS was a guy who was not destined to be, to be next in line for the throne required a combination of, you know, it's a good luck with some uncles dying, but you know, some uncles older than his father died, putting his father next in line, but also he was very adept at maneuvering within the royal family. And that meant, you know, forcing out cousins who seemed to be more powerful. It meant starting to gain a reputation for being effective and also being brutal within other people in the royal family. And that that image building was, you know, where I mentioned before is when we come to the Trump thing where, you know, early on, right after the election, when Trump won Trump's closest advisors, you know, people like Kushner and, you know, importantly, Steve Bannon really wanted Trump to make some sort of bold statement that the U.S. is going to do foreign policy in a different way. The U.S. is going to relate to the Middle East in a different way. And the Iran deal negotiating with an enemy was not the way that the Trump administration wanted to be seen. At the same time, you had Mohamed bin Saman in Saudi Arabia and Mohamed bin Zayed, who his counterpart in the UAE, who had very close connections in Washington, pushing the U.S. to take a more aggressive stance toward Iran and to embrace this access of, you know, U.S., Saudi Arabia, UAE, and eventually Israel as something, you know, in opposition to Iran. And this was something that Trump saw as very attractive. It would show that he was tough. It would show that he was different from Obama. And they planned this visit where, you know, the Trump, as we read about in the book, the Trump White House was extraordinarily disorganized in planning the visit, where they relied on a volunteer advance man to figure out key elements of what business deals the two sides were going to announce and that Trump and the king would announce. And there was just a lot of sort of disorganization in the U.S., which allowed Mohamed bin Saman to very carefully lay out this trip where, you know, everything would be waiting for Trump. The Harlem Globetrotters were there. They brought Toby Keith, the country singer, and then when they found, and he was going to be sort of surprised Trump playing in a museum in ancient, ancient, 100-year-old Saudi, Saudi fort. And then when they found out, you know, last minute that Trump hates Toby Keith, they moved Toby Keith to a different performance in Riyadh for the public. And sort of everything was catered to Trump's needs. And we read about how they somehow convinced Trump against the advice of some of the State Department people to go to a meeting of most of the leaders of the world's Muslim countries. And Trump didn't recognize a lot of the people there. And they went around pouring tea from a coffee from a traditional Arabian teapot. They poured Trump Diet Coke from the teapot. So, you know, every little detail was completely catered to make him feel special and to make him feel like he was the king. And it may have made Trump feel good, but it's unclear what the U.S. got out of that. The U.S. already had the Saudi relationship and really kind of could afford to take it for granted because Saudi Arabia needed the U.S. What Muhammad bin Salman got out of that was showing his people and showing the Arab world and showing the Gulf that he is now the point person with the U.S. And he's the custodian of the U.S. relationship. And if you want to get to the White House, you need to go through him. So, it really helped build up his power. It didn't really do anything for the U.S. I think also Trump got something else out of it, didn't he? A few gifts? Like a white tiger, like a white tiger for a cloak or something? I think there was a dual encrusted sword as well. And it was all reported through the proper channels of reporting gifts. But it was literally lavishing him with gold and jewels to make him feel special. Yeah. Great. Thank you both. I think we're going to move into the question and answer session now. And just to restate for the people who joined us a bit late, please submit your questions through the Q&A feature to be at the bottom of your screen, Zoom, and send them in. And then I'll read them out. And our first question we have is, how is MBS and Saudi Arabia watching the U.S. election? Do you think the U.S.-Saudi relationship will change if U.P. Biden is elected? Well, I'll answer first. I think that the Gulf states in general are not feeling super nervous because despite the kind of noises you hear from elected officials in the U.S., this is not a relationship that's easily sort of severed. I mean, we really treat our, as an American government, we really treat the Gulf countries with kid gloves. And we give them a lot of leeway. Of course, there's extremely outrageous things have gone on, and there'll be pressure on them if Biden is elected. Probably new kinds of pressure or increased pressure. But I really, I personally am skeptical that anyone's going to be shaking up the relationship. And if Trump is re-elected, it's probably, they would probably prefer that in the Gulf states because he's someone they can deal with very well. They don't have to go through the bureaucracy of the State Department, intelligence. They can go straight to the Senate law or to the president himself through his advisors. And there's really just nothing better than having direct access because they can make their persuade, they can make their points and be persuasive directly with the principle. Somebody who doesn't necessarily, neither he nor Jared Kushner are steeped in any kind of history of the region or or do they have, and they have that extremely transactional point of view. It's easy for Gulf leaders to think transactionally. That's how they do foreign policy traditionally. Often, their relationships around the world are underwritten by aid and money. So if somebody comes to them and says, look, if you want this, then you got to do that, that sounds great to them. That's much easier for them than to say, if you want a better relationship with us, you need to improve human rights, have some, you know, first tentative steps towards democracy and that kind of thing. Because they think they're doing things the Saudi way and that nobody should be telling them what to do. That they have a different social contract with Saudis. Obviously, everybody that MBS has gone after has been a Saudi person. Those people, he sees them as having different obligations to the Saudi state than other citizens have to their states. And so he doesn't want to be told how to how to change things or do things and that Saudi Arabia has an independent system and all that sort of thing. So I think they much prefer Trump, but I think with Biden, they could just buy their time, so to speak, because presidents come and go, but MBS at 35, if he became the king today and he follows in the footsteps of his uncles before him, he could be the king for 50 years and there's a lot of presidents in that time. Yeah, and I would add to that that Biden's foreign policy people are known quantity for MBS and he, I think certainly we prefer Trump victory, but during the Obama administration, a lot of people working for Biden knew MBS personally and knew what was happening. And I think it really deeply angered MBS that the US would make a deal with Iran, but they never cut off relations. There was tension and there was some level of frustration, but I think it's not like Biden would come in and cut off Saudi Arabia. It's more Biden would come in and start criticizing MBS for some of the things that have gone wrong and that we would view as brutality here the way Hillary Clinton did during the Obama administration and Mohammed bin Salman would probably be very angry and he would lash out again as he has, you know, verbally, but there wasn't really a meaningful sense of the alliance dissolving. There's just too much trillions for Saudi Arabia to cast out the US. Thank you. We have another question related to that, which is if elected, what advice would you give to a Biden administration regarding US Saudi Arabia relations? Well, I think it depends on, I guess it really depends on if you have a kind of principles led foreign policy approach or kind of a real politic approach. I think if you have a real politic approach, which I think maybe I would tend towards, I think engagement with Saudi Arabia is actually has a great potential for having effect because Mohammed bin Salman, he is somebody who loves America, its culture. It was one of his great privileges to kind of wander around, Los Angeles and meet all these tech entrepreneurs. That's the things he cares about. He doesn't care about necessarily, you know, if you were to go through his list of priorities, it would be technology, business, things like that. And then down further on, it'd be sort of like religious dogma or things that maybe were in different order in previous kings, in the eyes of different kings before him. So I think he's somebody that could become, in a way, could be engaged with very effectively, more effectively than people realize, but it's going to take a lot of swallowing of those principles because there's obviously this this feeling that many people have that Saudi Arabia has gotten away with murder, so to speak, and has really caused a lot of damage and a lot of death, destruction in Yemen, that sort of thing. So I think it's going to be hard to do that. But I think my advice would be speak to them in the language that MBS speaks, what he's interested in. And I think you'll find a very interested willing partner to engage. Thank you, Bradley. And on the note of Yemen, we have a question of what do you think will happen in Yemen next? It's specifically with Saudia's involvement. I mean, it's hard. They've been trying to extricate themselves from that for a while, and it's like become this horrible quagmire where Mohammed bin Saman went into Yemen with, you know, some, your support might be an overstatement, but with the test of approval of the U.S. in what he, you know, thought was a proxy war against Iran. And he told people in the U.S. and in Saudi Arabia that, you know, give us three weeks, we're going to bomb them out in three weeks. And the Houthi rebels in Yemen are people who, you know, actually like believe in something and they're willing to really like risk their life fighting, whereas the Saudi UAE coalition is, you know, it's a little bit different. They're, you know, as has been reported in the New York Times, they're relying on young soldiers brought in from Sudan, which is essentially mercenary soldiers. There are organizational issues. There's sort of a fighting force. It isn't really a cohesive force. And then as we write the book, and as we're well documented, there were just real technical problems with the bombing campaign as well, where, you know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of jets and a lot of bombs, but they don't always get all of the technology rights. You have the situation where the U.S. was giving them bombing coordinates, but the ground to air radios didn't always work. So you had Saudi military officials on the ground calling in bombing coordinates on the pilot cell phones, which led to problems with, you know, bombing civilians and bombing things that shouldn't be bombed, which is to say the problems started out pretty bad and have escalated since then. And there's not an easy way for Muhammad bin Salman to get out in a way that saves face for him, because he went in there to defeat what he said was a threat in the southern border. He's clearly not defeated them. And so to end the war is sort of an admission of weakness by him. So I don't really know what happens next. I don't really see a way that he can achieve his goal of being able to proclaim victory and also extricating Saudi Arabia from it. Thank you. And next, we have a couple of questions both related to what you both think might happen with Saudi policy in relation to Israel, considering the recent normalization between UAE and Bahrain. I think, you know, there was actually a really good story by our colleagues in the Wall Street Journal that described that MBS is kind of not weighed down by a deep interest in the history of these grievances. His father, on the other hand, has a very different perspective. He was kind of very close with the Palestinians historically, even joking to people that he was sort of the PLO's representative in Riyadh. He was obviously sympathetic to the cause and has remained loyal and believes that as the custodian of the two holy cities that there is a kind of principled stand that Saudi Arabia has to maintain. But Muhammad bin Salman is willing to, you know, basically do deals because he wants to see impact. This is a hundred year, this is a hundred year problem that hasn't really gone anywhere. And so I think he looks at that and with a kind of a brutal perspective that if you can't solve it in a hundred years, you're not going to solve it with a few more years of holding the same line that you've already held. So he wants to do deals, take opportunities. And in some ways, it seems like he sort of, there's a very strong sense that he's given his neighbors leeway to go for it, especially Bahrain, which really relies a lot on Saudi Arabia. There's no way that Bahrain would by itself pursue such a foreign policy without sort of a approval from Saudi Arabia. And the UAE is obviously an independent country, but they would be doing things in conjunction. You know, they're very closely connected. So I think, it seems pretty likely that, especially in the next few years, if Muhammad bin Salman is to rise to become the king, then he'll have a much freer reign to make those decisions. In the meantime, there's a kind of subtle thing going on in Saudi Arabia and in the Middle East in general, Saudi Arabia controls a lot of the TV channels that people watch all over the Middle East. And they've been sort of quietly slowly adding in some new content. You know, in the Ramadan soap operas, there's a Jewish Bahraini character in one of them, I remember. These are things that weren't really happening before. And it kind of, I think there's a view, a very paternalistic view in a lot of the Gulf states that they have to kind of slowly change perspectives through these quasi private institutions. You know, there's more articles in the newspaper that talk about Israel. There's different terms used. They're probably in the early stages of trying to change some of the textbooks and get rid of some of the more incendiary things. So that's kind of my perspective. Yeah, and a much more practical, you know, immediate level. I think there's a concern that, you know, I think, I think Keeq Salman is very reluctant to do anything recognizing Israel, but there's a concern that if Saudi Arabia does, they can't really trust Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia would need to get something out of him. That's more than just now we're friends. And so, you know, when the UAE announced that they were recognizing Israel, they said they were going to stop settlements, then Netanyahu came out and interviewed surely after he said, oh, we're not stopping settlements, we're just suspending them. Which in Saudi Arabia, a lot of people around the royal court saw that as almost reneging on the deals, Netanyahu getting what he wanted out of the UAE and then saying, well, no, we're not going to stop it. We're going to suspend it. And that would be very embarrassing for Mohammed bin Salman to be something like that. And I think within Saudi Arabia, among, you know, people older than 40 years old, they're still probably under, they're still feeling like we don't want to have the, we don't want to need the permission of the Israelis to go pray in Jerusalem. You know, the Palestinians aside, there's still the issue of, you know, the third holy aside in Islam is under the control of the Israelis. And so, agreeing to some sort to recognize the country without some sort of fundamental change that Mohammed bin Salman can announce as a victory for Muslims is hard to see happening. But you never know. I mean, he surprised us all before with many things. So it could happen tonight. I mean, one other small comment is that obviously, if he, so, so far the UAE and Bahrain have normalized relations, there's been some kind of public events. There was the UAE foreign minister showed up in Washington to shake hands or to be there with Netanyahu. I think it's very important because to me with that signals, and this is not like a guaranteed thing, but what his signals is, they're holding off on the person, the Gulf leader that shakes hands with the leader of Israel, that they're kind of saving that one. Because, and I think in some ways Mohammed bin Salman needs that as, because his, his star has fallen so precipitously after all of these tragedies, especially the Khashoggi murder, that he needs something that kind of really resets his image. And I think there's a kind of realistic perspective inside of me about that, that if he was the one to kind of be the first one since Anwar Sadat to do that, it would really signal to a big portion of Americans that this is somebody that they can appreciate, that he did that, or that he's, you know, that the portion of Americans who really feel strongly about Israel. And it's also just a big moment, you know, it's just a big moment in the, in the, in the 100 year Israel-Palestinian issues. And so I think they're sort of holding back on some of the big stuff with the hopes that this is kind of the prologue because something bigger. Thank you. Another question related to the Khashoggi murder is how has the, or has the public fallout from the Khashoggi murder changed how NBS does things or has nothing really changed? I think he was chased, chased by, by it in the sense that putting aside the question of did he say kill this man or did he say take care of this man and someone killed him, putting that aside, I think he was very surprised by the international reaction. I think the way he saw it is I had this problematic Saudi who I view as a trader and my people dealt with him and whether or not they dealt him in a way that he wanted, he viewed it as a domestic issue. And I think he was surprised that the world viewed it as a crime against humanity as an outrage. And, you know, some of the messaging that came out of the Royal Court, you know, the foreign minister went on TV and, you know, sort of what about it and what about Abu Ghraib, what about this and that? You know, and we heard a lot of that coming out of people in and close to the Royal Court. So, you know, what about the things the U.S. did? What about this and that, which is sort of beside the point. And I think, you know, that was a symptom of Mohammed Bin Salman sort of surprise that the world was coming down on him for this. And, you know, someone, we mentioned in the book that he told someone we spoke to afterwards, like, oh my God, now the world sees me as a journalist killer. I don't want to be seen as a journalist killer. The idea being he's so concerned about his image, so concerned about cultivating this image as a kingly person to be seen as someone who's rash and who is angry and who's petty is not the image he wanted. So, I think it's given him reason to, you know, move very slowly when he does things that would look to us like brutal. Like, you know, we recount in the book that same team that went and murdered Khashoggi, what, you know, was doing all sorts of stuff, including, you know, kidnapping a prince who was a vocal critic and bringing him back to Saudi Arabia. And that type of behavior, you know, seems to be done in a less public way. But it's the wrong way of saying, you know, I think it's given him a lot of second thoughts, but in terms of the way he actually does things, I don't know that big picture he's changing the way he does big things. Yeah, and I think also he's not trying, he's not sort of saying, oh, well, I overstepped and I'm going to be meeker now. Instead, I think he looks around the world and he sees, look at what China is doing with the Uighurs and look at the kind of, there's, of course, there's an uproar, but nobody's sort of demanding that the world stop speaking to Xi Jinping in the same way that is a kind of a matter of scale. He's saying, this is like a huge thing and I'm just, I did this one thing. I mean, that's kind of a simplified version of what's going on. But he, I think he thinks the way that I have to be is actually not any meeker than I was before. So if you look at things like the oil war that he started at the beginning of the COVID crisis, that, that probably served different purposes. I would argue that one of the purposes it showed was that Saudi Arabia isn't some sort of a country that you can sort of sanction. You can't just sort of say, oh, Saudi Arabia, you're out of the fold now because we didn't like how you behaved. He wanted to show Saudi Arabia is an integral part of the world powers. And we can change your economies. We can change the price of oil. And, and so, so keep us in mind, you know, don't think of us as some sort of, you know, a country that doesn't have global import that you can really sanction and pressure. And so I think there's, there's no reason to think that MBS will be any, any less bold and decisive. Obviously, I would say it's unlikely he would try to do the same things in this, in the future that he's done in the past. He might do something in the same category, you know, and I think he'll still have a very, you know, he's, I think there's a, there's an element about him and about his time right now, especially of a feeling of vulnerability, even though he has all the power you can imagine and he's more power than anyone's had in since the founder. There's a, there's a, there's a kind of sense of a paranoia about threats around every corner. And so I think, you know, if I was a Saudi dissident, I wouldn't feel more comfortable than I did before, but I would, you know, I think he's unlikely to sort of engage in the exact same tactics, but we can expect him to remain MBS, you know. Thank you, Radley. And then we have another question of his foreign relations. Can you speak to the relationship MBS has developed with China and Russia and how his approach may differ from that of his predecessors? I'll just say one thing, Justin, that seems like a kind of a follow-up to what we were just saying, like he's hedging by, you know, China is a country that has traditionally dealt with Saudi Arabia in this transactional way. They're not trying to impose the Saudi, the Chinese view of communism on Saudi Arabia, but they're also not, they're also not telling them to change what they're doing. They're saying, okay, that's how you do things. Well, this is how we do our things. Let's work together on mutual topics. And so that kind of thing makes the U.S. nervous and same for Russia is they don't want to lose Saudi to the other side. So that, again, goes to this idea that it's part of his strategic gamemanship of, even though he prefers the U.S., and he's more inclined that direction, if people put too much pressure on him, he's saying, look, I've got options. And we had a story in the journal about how he's got sort of a facility that seems to be refining yellow cake, you know, a precursor to creating nuclear energy or a nuclear weapon. And so that kind of stuff is probably, he probably knows this stuff's going to get uncovered and get discovered by foreign intelligence. And it just signals to them that MBS is not someone to take lightly, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think on that, you know, I think China is much more important than Russia. And we write in the book, you know, fairly early on after his father became king, Muhammad, but someone went and did a meeting with Putin. And I think came away from it fairly dismayed, because there's really not as much to gain. Russia, something Russia, China and the U.S. are all in equal footing. Russia is a much smaller economy. It has much less power. The only main upside of an alliance with Russia, there are two, one of them is trying to stabilize oil price, where they've been at each other's throats and that. And the other one is antagonizing the U.S. But there's not a lot to be gained, other than, you know, outside of oil price and the long-term relationship with Russia, the way there is with China or the U.S. If it was China, that's a, there is, you know, a case could be made that Saudi Arabia could turn itself more toward China. And in that, in some way pressure the U.S. And that could be, you know, investing money in China or getting Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia, which momentous amount has been unable to get from the U.S. in a meaningful way. But I think, you know, the U.S. relationship is established. And there are, you know, financial ties and there are major weapon sales. And I think, you know, in realistic terms, there's much more to be gained by, you know, trying to strengthen the U.S. relationship than turning toward another country. Thank you. And in terms of the relationship with Turkey, what is NBS's perception of Turkey and how does Turkey play into the U.S.-Iran-Saudi dynamic? Turkey, I'll take that first. Bradley probably has some to add. I mean, the Turkey relationship is fascinating. And to go back in time a little bit, there's been tension between Turkey and Saudi Arabia going back years. And I think President Erdogan in Turkey was very frustrated with King Abdullah, the prior king of Saudi Arabia, and felt like the relationship had really deteriorated. And I think was very optimistic when King Salman came in that they could, you know, have some level of a more workable relationship, even if it's just more workable economic relationship. And pretty quickly, it became apparent to Erdogan that Mohammed bin Salman was an obstacle to that. NBS was skeptical of Turkey, skeptical of Turkey's relationship with Qatar, which is, you know, another regional antagonist skeptical of Turkey and Iran maybe having similar interests. And NBS was not going to, you know, be an easy friend. And so when the Khashoggi murder happens, Turkey very strategically starts dribbling out information that it collected from, you know, wiretaps in the consulate, that A, show that Khashoggi was murdered, and B, each time the Saudi government comes out and makes a statement, the Erdogan government would come out with something contradictory, with evidence to contradict it. And it was seen in the short term as, you know, the Turkey sort of went up in Saudi Arabia and embarrassing them. And what we write is that it was meant largely to undermine Mohammed bin Salman. And through a back channel, Erdogan's people were trying to convince Salman to take some power away from Mohammed bin Salman and to sort of take away his influence in relations with Turkey. And it looked like the Turks were winning. They made a convincing case to the world that Mohammed bin Salman's people were brutal murderers and that NBS was behind it. But after all that, NBS comes out of it, if anything more powerful than he was before, Erdogan didn't get anything from Saudi Arabia on that. And now you have these two major powers in the region that continue to be antagonistic. And so I don't see any reason to believe that NBS would soften its stance for Turkey now, if only because again, it would make him look weak. I think now, you know, it's up to Erdogan to decide if he wants to sort of come with some kind of appeasement or some way of making things better. Thank you. One of the questions that Human Rights Watch has posed is why is criticizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman criminalized as terrorism in Saudi Arabia? Well, I think actually, criticism of criticism in Saudi Arabia is a very interesting topic because there's even I think it even happened the other day that there was there was a decriminalization of a certain kind of criticism of the government. But basically, what's happened is they they've started that NBS will totally tolerate people going on Twitter and Facebook and whatever and saying the water authority of Saudi Arabia is a joke like they the new system that they just rolled out is terrible and it costs more and it's not efficient. But what he won't tolerate in any way is is a few things. One of them is criticism of the royal family itself or it's it's it's kind of claim to the throne or it's often it's legitimacy as the as the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. He has been extremely sensitive about things like criticizing the Aramco IPO and questioning the underlying numbers and and even while the world was criticizing the numbers, if one Saudi did it, they would end up getting getting either questioned or imprisoned. And the other thing that's kind of again about perceptions is even if someone does something like makes a critical comment about the Aramco IPO, what's what's worse is that when the Saudis go and investigate and they see that you've had some interaction with a Turkish researcher or a Qatari researcher or something like that, then they throw into it this kind of like espionage and and and treason claims to it. So I think again it just goes to this perspective in Saudi Arabia, the way it works is all power is derived from the king. There's there's no greater power. The king can say all the laws in the past are now abolished and they can just be abolished because that that is where all authority comes is these decrees that come from the king and you can you could decree that all all previous decrees are undecreed. So it's not something that comes from like a governing document the way that you might find in in the US. So if I think it just comes down to this idea that you know you must respect this there's there is no there is no replacing this idea of the king's authority and and I also think MBS has one of his character I guess you'd call it a flaw is his overconfidence. You know now he's not somebody who just sort of barks out orders and everyone goes off and carries it out but when he approaches something like like the Aramco IPO or any kind of these reforms economic forms or social reforms he doesn't sort of uh have a he doesn't approach it with like a little bit of doubt he approaches it with 100 confidence that I am doing the right thing it may be the wrong thing but I'm doing the actual right thing by pursuing this and pushing it forward and and I think he had this perspective this kind of polarized perspective that anybody who was getting in the way of these necessary reforms was just an obstacle they were trying to in effect prevent their fellow countrymen from enjoying uh Saudi Arabia as a country in the future that if they don't make these reforms the royal family could explode and fall apart and have warring factions much like maybe historical Saudi Arabia or that you know become much less rich you know as a country because they they got stuck with only having oil and so I think it's one of the it goes back to that thing that Justin talked about before which is there's a very uh what seems contradictory but if you if you understand the background of it it doesn't seem that contradictory it just seems very politically illiberal you know I think that's really that's the key thing about Saudi Arabia thank you we have two questions related to Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil the first one what a global move away from oil towards green renewable energy sources mean for Saudi Arabia and related to that how are they doing in terms of developing technology as an attempt to minimize their dependence on oil and who are they likely to partner with in that endeavor the US or China those are your questions and those are foundational questions and I think you know if we go back 20 years uh everyone realized that one day Saudi Arabia's oil is going to run out but you know definitively it's a limited resource and 20 years ago the question is what are we going to do when the oil runs out but come to now and the question now is well what are we going to do if the demand for oil goes down so far that it's no longer you know the prices no longer high enough to support an entire nation so it's becoming much more immediate question so so yeah you know if there is a meaningful movement away from oil around the world it means Saudi Arabia's source of income is you know much less valuable and that the country needs to move much more quickly to alternative sources of income but as the second questioner um you know implies that effort to diversify the economy has produced a lot of spending by Saudi Arabia but not a lot of dividends for Saudi Arabia like um under the under the in the effort of trying to diversify away from oil and Muhammad bin Salman this IPO of a portion of stock in in the Saudi state oil company put the money into a sovereign wealth fund and then has been investing that money in things that are meant to diversify the economy the three and a half billion dollars he invested in uber has not diversified the Saudi economy the 40 billion plus he put into a venture capital fund with soft bank the vision fund hasn't diversified the economy it's invest it's inflated a tech bubble in silicon valley it's uh helped uh company it's helped be work become you know a problem it's funded some dog walking at companies it doesn't hasn't done anything to diversify the Saudi economy and so there's a real kind of basic question about like why does investing what used to be oil money in startups in other countries have anything to do with creating a real economy in Saudi Arabia so there hasn't really been progress in that what's more hopeful i think is this idea of creating more clarity in the legal system and in the regulatory systems around starting companies and trying to create a culture of entrepreneurship and there is evidence that that's working and there are Saudi startups that serve Saudi Arabia and employ Saudi people but they're small and it's moving slowly and one very basic problem there that doesn't get talked about a lot because it's kind of boring but Saudi Arabia doesn't really have taxes there there are some limited taxes here and there but it's not like a regular government in the west where we're used to where the government taxes companies and people and the the the more money a company or a person makes the more money the government gets and everyone has this incentive to have economic growth in fact in Saudi Arabia if i want to build like a shopping mall um the government you know i can build the shopping mall the government has to provide infrastructure it has to provide roads that's right street lights basic stuff like that if that happens in America government has an incentive to do that because it increases the tax base but in Saudi Arabia it's just more spending by the government so there's not this built-in incentive for economic development as we know it and then you know if the solution is to create a taxation system how do people feel about taxation in in an autocracy taxation in absolute monarchy i mean taxation without representation is like a a long-standing galling thing to people and i think mom had been so much is very aware that if you start imposing taxes on people of no say in their own governance you can quickly lose popularity so the answer is you know it's it's a work in progress and there's not been a lot of progress thank you another question of what precautions has Saudi Arabia taken since the Ramco drone strikes last September Justin you want to answer that one yeah i can yeah i mean like so many other things i'll answer by going backwards and try to move forward so under you know before Muhammad bin Salman under the system that exists in Saudi Arabia for decades there were three basic pieces of the military there was the royal guard which guards the king and there was the ministry of interior which is you know intelligence anti-terrorism his armed forces and there was the ministry of defense which was the the army and each was overseen by a different prince a different son of the founding king and it created sort of a balance of power it gave all the an incentive to all these brothers to work together and for nobody to try to consolidate too much because each one had an armed force the problem was that it created these silos where there wasn't great communication the ministry of interior is in charge of protecting the homeland the ministry of defense is in charge of the military and one might be gathering intelligence overseas one might be gathering domestic intelligence one might have the ability to fire defensive missiles one but they're not communicating with each other so Muhammad bin Salman wiped away those different factions and consolidated that so all the military arms are either under his control or under the control of people loyal to him but they didn't get rid of these these siloed structures early enough and so when you know intelligence comes into one arm in the military that these missiles are coming in the arm in the military that is able to you know fire intercepting missiles didn't doesn't get a call in time so you have this so so everyone knew that abcape that this this oil installation was a target written about for more than 20 years in u.s. magazines abcape is a huge target by attacking it what Iran showed it wasn't a meaningful attack it didn't completely cripple the whole thing it was meaningful in the sense that Iran showed that we have the ability to do this and you know they very precisely took out a couple of small pieces of it that it was sort of a message saying you know if you keep trying to take the offensive here we can really mess things up for you so i think in response the Saudis have been trying to figure out more efficient ways to get the the military arms to communicate with each other and try to be more effective at preventing things but things that move so slowly that we haven't seen anything external we haven't seen anything from the u.s. it's a meaningful structural shift in the way they're doing things thank you and i'll just we have many more questions but due to time i'm just going to put forward a couple of them apologies to those who submitted questions they ended up not having time for um how would you describe the current Saudi Lebanese relationship i mean the one thing to remember about Saudi Arabia is that historically there's been this relationship of largesse you know both aid to Lebanon and other countries around the around the world and around the region and in exchange a kind of a half formed idea that those countries will sort of support Saudi Arabia and be there if Saudi Arabia calls for a favor but it was never it was never entirely precise what what Saudi Arabia was getting out of it and it was pretty precise what Lebanon was getting out of it they were getting money and also the other thing is um they would they would kind of get closer to people in those countries so obviously uh Saad Hariri his father Rafiq Hariri was was extremely close to Saudi Arabia royal family and it made his fortune in Saudi Arabia and to the point where he and all the children had Saudi passports as like secondary citizens so and they continue to derive all their personal income through their Saudi construction business called Saudi Oger and so I think what you've been seeing under MBS is a kind of a kind of brutal businessmen's approach to foreign policy so any country that's receiving money they can they have two options either they start doing things quid pro quo for the money so in the case of Lebanon it would you know the demand was confront Hezbollah more more robustly in exchange for the aid or you know or we'll find somebody else who will the other option they're offering to some countries like Egypt for example as they say look historically we give you all this money and you just do whatever you want with it now we want to give it to you but we want to direct it into a project that we retain some equity participation in so that we're making an investment in your country we're not just sort of handing you money and that's part of again this MBS businessmen's perspective to things like foreign policy as well as his own country's sort of development so I think the relationship is probably obviously bruised after the Hariri kidnapping incident which we did detail in the book but at the same time it's sort of this quite realistic perspective that they still need Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia still wants to have good relationship with them you know you don't hear a lot about the relationship lately thank you and zooming out a bit we have a question about the choice of title for the book in relation to the title of the book did you ever discuss the potential of blood and oil to perpetuate orientalist tropes of the Middle East I mean that's certainly a concern we have and I think it's a fair question and you know it's it's an interesting question for us because in a journalistic context you know we're sort of in there trying to like write about the things that people are doing and we especially we don't write about ideas that much we write about action and and individuals and so that's a question that's coming from the perspective a very worthy perspective an academic perspective that um I think the way to answer that is that you know we did think about that but ultimately we're writing a book about a guy who has lots and lots of money from oil and it's killed a lot of people and uh so I understand the question about orientalism but we went back and forth in the title a lot and we said you know what is going to resonate with potential readers to describe what the book is about and you know ultimately it's about like a guy who has a lot of blood and oil on his hands and so here we are you know I mean sometimes um it might might be an unsatisfactory shallow answer but you know I do believe that it's uh it's a legitimate one I think one thing I add to that is that you know in my experience the word Orientalist is sort of it's moved from a word that was an innovative kind of precise criticism under Said to become like a catchall phrase for if somebody doesn't like something about something that's from the Middle East for example then it's often is usually used the word Orientalist I would think that I would argue that our perspective in the book is not Orientalist at all because in no way do we sort of oversimplify or rely on cliches in fact every person in the book is a multi-dimensional person we we really endeavored to approach them the same way that we would if we were for example writing a book about uh the Trump presidency for example if we were to say the first four years of of Donald Trump's presidency and this is the story of that time we would have approached it in the exact same way that we approached this book and of course blood and oil it's it's meant to be sort of a provocative title which is what the purpose of a title and actually in journalism you notice that all critiques this is a personal experience all critiques are of headlines titles things like that less so the actual text because headlines and titles by their very nature have to summarize very quickly something and so I think also the other thing about blood and oil is that we meant it to be sort of also multi-dimensional when we say blood it's not just blood of people killed but also blood as in family blood because um a lot of what we detail in the book is this battle amongst the Al Saud family um that is a very real battle with a lot of a lot at stake and so it's it's this sort of idea of the dynastic blood as well and to answer you know the other thing that that was important to us to get out of is oftentimes Saudi Arabia is written about as a place that is uh is backward or is old-fashioned or is archaic in some way and something that that I hope that we address implicitly is that modern Saudi Arabia the Saudi Arabia up until 2015 before Muhammad bin Salman came in is a modern creation it's a creation of of oil and of the oil economy and so the Saudi Arabia that often gets written of as as archaic or backward actually working it was just a place with like very very strict religious rules and like a whole lot of oil money and you know I think we wanted to get out of some of these tropes and some of the these stereotypes about the way the about how the country is written about and get much more into the fact that it is a monarchy it's a place where a very small number of people hold power and help me write about the power dynamics between them and how they try to help remove each other and that's that's sort of the genesis that's where Muhammad bin Salman comes out of and how he emerges in the book. Great thank you so much both Justin and Bradley we're going to wrap up there today again apologies to the six other questions I have in the Q&A but to respect people's time we'll wrap up here. If anyone wants to reach us and we're happy to answer questions our emails are firstname.lastname at wsj.com so feel free to reach out with any questions we're happy we're eager to answer anything anyone wants to ask we both love to talk about the stuff. Great thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Thanks.