July 11, 2024 • 31 mins
Mia and James take a deep dive into how Saudi Arabia's attempts to get returns on their investments led them to carry out a genocide in Yemen and an Esports tournament in Riyadh.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Esport's Oh god, okay, that was not a great intro.
They could hear the podcast that we do via log
with the is James. We're doing it. Do another be
a James episode? Yep, we're back.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
We wouldn't have a theme for our episodes. I feel like, yeah,
maybe it is Petro dollars.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I guess it is. Yeah, yeah, we vote to you
today by big fossil Fuel. You know, this entire episode
is is the what do you do with your fossil
fuel muddy episode? So we did an episode like a
year ago about sportswashing, and it has gotten much worse
since then, you know. So, so the big kind of
sports washing thing that's happening right now is this thing
(00:46):
called the Esports World Cup that the Saudi government is
putting on. It is going on right now. Barring unfathomable disaster,
it will still be going on by the time this
episode comes out. We we kind of talked about in
the last episode how Saudis have been getting into sports.
I mean it sort of starts with soccer. They said,
they start to e wwe, they get into tennis, They're
in golf, they're in boxing, they're in Formula one and
(01:09):
in the last like two years specifically, they've gotten really
really deep into esports. In twenty twenty two, they spent
one point five billion dollars wow to acquire face it
in e SL Gaming, which were two organizations that ran
esports leagues. Esports, by the way, are professional video game competition. Yeah,
(01:30):
people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five
in the morning to watch Korean StarCraft tournaments like I did. Yeah,
that's me. I fall into that category.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I feel like on this episode we have both the
sports washing angles covered because you have the sports washing
like regular sports angle, and I've had to do the
sports washing e sports angle.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, I have I know what you call them p
sports like physical sports, meat space sports.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I've been privy to a decent amount of sportswa washing
like uh, I raised a lot again and Iranian teams
when I was cycling those dudes one. So much sports
washing has just straight up like national state sponsored doping programs.
But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai, all these different petro
states and emirates will sponsor cycling teams, very very common
(02:19):
by Brunei another one, Yeah, I raise for.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Quebec once, which is not not a Petro state. Well
it's not I guess it's not a Petro state.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, they got big maple syrup behind them. Yeah,
in Catalonia, which again not a Petro state. But yeah,
it's very common in all kinds of professional sports, right,
because as sports has become more of like an entertainment industry,
it's become unfathomably expensive to own a sponsor a team
for like enthusiasts, and the value proposition isn't really there
(02:51):
for brand. I didn't think the amount that it costs
now to even a sport like cycling, which is not
a massive sporting global terms, right, football soccer for the
Americans out there, it's not worth it for many brands
to sponsoring entire cycling team millions and millions of euros.
But like, if you can use that cycling team to
launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that cycling team
(03:15):
could be what people think of when they hear about
your country, then maybe that is worth it. Right, And
when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you
don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, So the thing I want to do with this
episode is to get into why specifically the Saudis are
doing this right now, because again, like most countries do
sort of versions of this, right but again, you know,
that is one point two billion dollars they've thrown into
two StarCraft leagues that I primarily known them for StarCraft.
They do a bunch of stuff, but those things were
not worth one point five billion dollars, like, there's no way.
(03:47):
But most of the money that had been sponsoring this
stuff was crypto money, right, Okay, you know, but I
wanted to get into why this is sort of happening.
Something I think is very important to note going into
this is that the sort of league thing that's being
run right now is being run directly out of the
Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund,
So this is directly state money. So the Esports World
(04:09):
Cup that's happening right now has sixty million dollars in prizes,
which is unreal is an extraordinary amount of money split
around twenty one esports. There are thirty sports teams involved,
and I am going to read the names of every
single fucking one of them, because fuck you. Okay, let's
do It Fanatic, G two Sports, Guildy Sports, car Mine Corp,
(04:29):
Movie Star KOI actual, I've never heard of those ones.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Uh Ognis Mouvey Stides. I'm guessing it's Spanish. That's a
Spanish telephone network.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, probably, you know, there's a couple I don't know,
but like, these are like the largest esports teams in
the world. Okay, Nija's and Pajamas or NIP Team Lique,
which I'm really sad about because I was a Team
Liquid fan for a fucking decade and I'm no longer
one now because fuck this shit. Team Secret Team, Vitality,
tuns of Esports, Vertus Pro one hundred Thieves, Cloud nine,
Phase Clan, Gavin Glad Mediators, Energy E Sports, space Station Gaming, TSM,
(05:03):
Blacklist International, LGD Gaming, Jenny Sports, t One, Talent Esports,
Webo Gaming, for Real Esports, Loud Team, Falcons, Twist and Minds.
Fuck all of you for fucking doing this and doing
the super pr thing. There's been a backlash, and the
backlash is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state
(05:25):
homophobia and you know, I mean the fact that women
are not full citizens like miss such a Yeah, I
mean just are just straight up owned by their husbands, right,
Like that's that's that's how the sort of legal conservatorship works.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I'm not very familiar with esports, so I can be
there the podcast Grimace here competitions in esports like gender segregated?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Do people will compete together? Basically No, there are like
women's leagues, but like if you just if you want
to compete, you can just compete as soon you get
you don't get forced out by sexism. This is actually
a kind of big deal for StarCraft because about to
be four, but like probably the number two or number
three best StarCraft player in the US is Scarlett, who's
a trans woman, And I mean she's just in the
(06:07):
regular league, right like right, yeah? Are the turfs mad
about it? You know, it's funny inside the StarCraft community,
this was a huge thing for a long time, and
eventually the tides just turned against them because everyone likes
her because she's really good and she's also just like
a good person, and so they kind of I got
a watch over the years as they just kind of
got obliterated. Weirdly, the like regular turfs haven't really found
(06:29):
out about this, probably because StarCraft is I don't know,
too good of a game for them to be fucking
dealing with not understanding things has not stopped this. That's true.
That's true. It's kind of too obscure by this point.
But you know, like there's been a lot of real
concern for sort of queer players. There are a lot
of these teams, Like, right as they were announcing they
were going to the fucking Esports Well Cup, we're doing
(06:51):
all of these fucking Pride posts and talking about how
they're gonna let their players wear Pride jerseys. And it's like,
are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, you know, so they
physically pressed it Saudi Ara able to play. Yeah, yeah,
these these tournaments are happening physically in Riod. Okay, yeah,
you know this is this isn't the first one they've had.
They've had some other events before this too there, but
you know, like yeah, and yeah, think things are very
(07:12):
very bad. There was a well, a story that was
famous among trans people, but I don't ever think broke containment.
Was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was
tricked into going back to like see her family, and
her family just kidnapped her and locked her up, and
she killed herself Jesus, And this is not an uncommon thing.
It happens to SIS women too sometimes when they try
(07:33):
to like get out of the country, sure is they'll
be kidnapped and like renditioned back.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, there have been some pretty good report on that. Yeah,
well linked them or something because it's too it'll be
too lanthly to go and do here.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, but I think I think kind of the weakness
of the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really
quite understand exactly why the Saudis are doing this. You know,
they understand that the Saudi government is incredibly repressive and
that it's you know, institutionally homophobic and it's instucially sexist.
It does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad
(08:06):
these people are. Like this is like the most feted
up state in the entire world. It is like it
is it is the fucking Cia state. And the rest
of this episode is going to be us running through
the exact sequence of stuff that caused the saudiast to
need to do all of this fucking pr bullshit, and
how the sort of structural economic cycle of funneling petro
(08:27):
dollars around has led to genocide and then also the
stupid fucking esports tournament for PR two things which I
not to say. But first, do you know who's probably
not a large enough company to have sponsored this tournament?
Although I can't promise that it's not KitKat or whatever
the fuck, hopean it is kit Kat. I would like
some kit cats if that is it. They're one of
(08:48):
the sponsors of this fucking Esports World Cup.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
You can't poway for a biscuit, KitKat your hate cookie.
I don't want you to hate Joclabar anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, it is the products and services of this podcast,
which hopefully are not supporting a genocide. But good god,
we copy show. Yeah, so we are back and we
are going to talk petro dollars. So Saudi wealth takes
(09:20):
a form of what are called petro dollars. Petro dollars
are in some sense, they're very very simple, right, It's
dollars that you get from selling oil. This is important
for a number of reasons. Though technically speaking, you can
sort of sell oil in other currencies now, but like
most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars,
and so around the world, dollars are one of the
(09:41):
things that if you are an economy, you need dollars
in order to get oil from people. So huge sinks
of American dollars from all across the world, you know,
from the US of the US import a lot of
oil flow into these sort of oil producing countries. These
are called petro dollars. The most obvious manifestation of this
in Saudi Arabia is the Country Solving Wealth Fund, which
has nine hundred billion dollars of assets. Right this is
(10:06):
an unfathomable amount of money. It is so much money
that it is a structural problem for the global economy
trying to figure out what the fuck you do with
this money. This is a problem that has caused disaster
around the world. It is something where I'm fond of
talking about on this show, but we're going to talk
about again because it's important here. In the seventies and eighties,
as sort of Opek realized that it could, you know,
(10:27):
use its sort of political power to gain enormous amounts
of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petro
dollars by controlling the price of oil. Suddenly they had,
you know that you have hundreds of billions of dollars
floating around and because this is capitalism, you can't just
sit on that money. You have to find a way
to turn that money into more money. But again, you know,
I mean just a Solfing wealth fund is almost a
trillion dollars, right, and so this is extremely hard and
(10:52):
it means that this money is constantly flowing around the
world trying to find a way to get returns on it,
you know. And in the modern era, these are things
like people remember we work but incredibly stupid dune From
the beginning office space rental scheme that went under that
that was a lot of that was funded by Saudi
money because studies had put an enormous amount of money
(11:12):
in this Japanese bank called soft Bank, and soft Bank
was trying to figure out what to do with this
unfathole amount of money, and they were like, Okay, what
if we fund the dumbest project of all time?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, it became a thing where they could fund it,
and like, just by them funding it, its stock price
would go up, even if it was like we work
a really shit idea.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, And this is something about global capital that I
don't think has been fully processed. Really. But the the sheer,
the sheer extent of capital concentration, right, the amount of
money that the richest people in the world and the
richest sort of families in the world in the sort
of Saudi case, right, you know, the Saudi Arabia is
a country where a family has access to the resources
(11:51):
of extremely wealthy nation state, right, And that being true
has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy
because you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this
for a long time in the tech sector, right, where
you don't have to fucking make money, like your revenue
stream can just be investor money, and you can coast
for a decade off of just taking money from the
(12:13):
Saudis who are like trying to find some way to
turn this money. And the more money. I think this
has downstream effects that don't we haven't even begun to
really understand yet, right. But very famously in the seventies
and eighties, there was all this money flowing around, and
what it was poured into was the Third Book debt crisis.
People bought state debt with it, and then these loans
(12:34):
were on it were on adjustable rates, onjustable interest rates.
So when the vulcar shock hit and the US like
massively increased interest rates. The interest rates on these loans
like skyrocketed, and suddenly, you know, you're paying like fifty
percent interest on a loan of like cephal billion dollars.
And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their
economies are destroyed. I mean, David Grab rememorably talks about
(12:55):
this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria. You know,
but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination.
Like programs are not that expensive, but they are a
little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of metag
Escar had to like pay off this IMF debt, they
had to get rid of the they got rid of
this mosquito programs, and there was a malaria outbreak and
it killed unfathomable numbers of people, and stuff like this
(13:18):
happened all over the world. And the source of all
of this, right, partially the source of this is these loans,
And partially the source of this is this these enormous
piles of petro dollars that you have to find some
way to sort of turn into more capital, right, And
you know, so there are sort of trademark things you
can do with this money. One of them is buying
a bunch of military equipment. Mostly what you're doing with
(13:40):
that is sort of buying American patronage. If you spend
enormous amount of money buying American tanks, and this is
you know something this out he has been doing for ages, right,
you spend a bunch of money on American defense contracts.
You know, you can sort of buy us protection and
guarantees that you know, for example, as it is going
to happen later in this episode, you can buy a
guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital. But
(14:00):
with the Saudis is that they have a lot of equipment,
but Saudi Arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army. If
they were, if they had an actual serious army, there
would be a coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely
well equipped kind of, but it's trained like shit, and
it's run by like just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks.
(14:20):
But you know, so that's like sort of one thing
you can do with this money. A lot of this
money ended up going into real estate, and there are
sort of cycles of this happening. The one that ain't
that's of concern to us is what happens after two
thousand and eight, in the sort of aftermath of two
thousand and eight, there are still places in the world where,
you know, you can park an extremely large amount of
(14:43):
money in real estate and have it be a relatively
liquid asset. If you have like property in a market
that is, you know, where the housing market is really
hot and prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly
get rid of it. And you can also there's liquidity,
there's sort of financial instruments you can do based off
of your ownership of real estate. And this is something
that drives the Saudis into a bunch of very very
(15:06):
I don't know if risky is exactly the right word,
but a bunch of moves in Many real estate that really,
truly we're about to not pay off. There's a very
good book about this, it's by Lisa Bloomy called Destroying Yemen,
which is about like a lot of the factors that
start the war in Yemen, and this this is one
of them.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
We can't really do a full recap of the Many
Civil War because that's that's its own seven hundred episode podcast, like,
oh god it is. Yeah, it's on a surface level,
it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any
granular detail on it, it's like the most complicated conflict
I've ever studied.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, I mean there's so many conflicts like this, right, Like, yeah,
civil war appreciates us.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
When I was studying Yemen in college, I longed for
the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War, Like this conflict
is nuts. Yeah, but for simplicity's sake. There's roughly ish
two factions. There are the sort of forces allied with
what's called the Coalition government, which is the government backed
by the Saudis, and then there are what's sort of
(16:10):
in the west become called the Huthis. I mean, it's
more complicated. It's all of this is enormously more complicated
than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these
alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of the things that
happens is that when when a government that is hostile
to the Saudis, which is like you know, the sort
of like unter a law like that, whole coalition is
very also to the Saudiast because the Saudis sucks shit.
(16:32):
You know, suddenly the Saudis are looking at an enormous
amount of capital they've sunk into real estate that they
are you know, based on these like incredibly corrupt land
deals with the previous administration, which have been friendly to them.
They are looking at suddenly losing all this land. The
Saudis weren't the first people to come into sort of
the many real estate market right on the uae Omah
and a bunch of other states has sort of been
(16:52):
in there before. And so part of what a big
part of what this sort of this like what's called
the coalition is this like basic a bunch of these
assholes trying to protect their housing assets. Look, that's a
lot of what a lot of wars are if we're
on it.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's people trying to protect xoy assets, right like Unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, and it's not really seen in these terms in
the way that's covered, but that's a lot of what's
going on. And this produces one of the worst wars
of the twenty first century, which is saying something because
the twenty for centuries had a lot of really really
terrible wars. Yeah, we've had some reference, Yeah, and we're
going to get into what the Saudis were doing during
(17:32):
this war. After these products and services, we have returned
and the thing we're returning into is a really really
bleak war. So we said this kind of from the beginning, right,
the Saudi military is not very good. The Saudi's attempt
(17:56):
to sort of end the war by like rolling a
tank column over the border, it's just like I think
it's twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, in like the early period
of the war, they try to end up by just
rolling tanks, and tanks get obliterated because the Saudi army
isn't worth shit, right. All of their ground forces are
a joke. But their air force is very very well
(18:16):
equipped with a bunch of like incredibly modern US warplanes
that we sell them all the fucking time, and so
you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they
have the ability to do is just obliterate people with
air strikes. The kind of like terror air campaign that
they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar
with from Palestine. But they're doing air strikes on school
buses full of children. They're taking the American thing. They
(18:38):
are doing double tap drone strikes on weddings where they're
hitting a wedding and then when rescue workers come up,
they hit they hit the rescue workers with air strikes. Right,
I'm pretty sure it was young when they had the
triple tap fucking air strike where they did an airstrike
on someone's funeral, they didn't airstrike on the rescue workers,
and then when they had a funeral for those people,
they did air strike on fucking that. This is a
just unbelievably brutal war. And you know, I want to
(19:00):
get which we talked about, right, like there are some
there are some parts of the Saudi coalition that can
you know, field ground forces, right, that stuffs mostly the
sort of southern secessionist groups, and those people are not
really that loyal, so you know, so they have to
start importing infantry to try to fight the who thies,
(19:22):
and so they're importing a bunch of Colombian mercenaries. So
these are guys who've been like desk squad guys in Columbia.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
The Colombian guys are the new I was going to say,
the new Rhodesians. That it's a dark shadow to cost
and a group of human beings.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, it used.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
To be that when you were running into private military
contractors abroad, it would be people white folks from Africa, right,
like they call themselves Rhudesian South Africans, what have you.
Now you'll see a lot of like a lot of
private military contractors, like at the boots on the ground,
you know, infantry level of Colombians.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, And so that that's one of the sources they
went to. But then you know, part of the Saudi
coalition is the UAE, and the UAE has a lot
of very very close ties to militant groups in Sudance.
Specifically a group of militias that's now known the West
is the Rapid Response Forces. But these are the people
who did the genocide and are for and they are
(20:20):
like right now like doing a genocide in like in
Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control of
the country. And because the UAE is very very well
connected to these, one of the ways that the coalition
tries to get ground troops is by using troops who
were you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I
say troops, I mean child soldiers. The forces that they
(20:42):
are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use as
cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably believe,
I mean kind of funnily. A lot of these people
end up not fighting because they you know, they get
handed a rifle, will get thrown into Yemen and they
just immediately sell their guns. And I refused, but like,
you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit.
(21:02):
Like again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing
with is we are having the guys who did the dart,
who did the fucking Darfur genocide, kidnap fucking villagers from
Sudan like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use
them as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen
so they can like defend their fucking real estate assets.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah right, I think Friend of the Show Eric Prince
makes a uh makes an appearance in Yemen as well
his Triumvira of companies, which are the same company, right
Black waters Z.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah. Probably, I quite frankly don't remember that part, but
probably also Yeah, you can rely on EP to show
up in a situation I is. Yeah, I mean the
part of this we haven't gotten to yet is the
worst part of it, which is so this the Saudist
and the sort of coalition government they you know, they
do okay in the sort of southwest of the country
(21:53):
because the Southern Yemen secessions groups are well organized and
are good soldiers, even if they've sort of rebel and
there's this whole it's it's a whole mess. But in
the west of the country, everything is completely different, and
you know, they're they're basically getting their shit kicked in.
And in that theater, the Saudi's plan is we are
(22:14):
going to starve the country. So you know that the
Saudi the Saudis have naval assets. Nobody else really in
this war does, right, and they just set up a
blockade on like all of the ports on that side
of the country. We do not know how many people
get starved as a result of this. The last good
mortality figures I could I could find, this war is
still going on, by the way. I mean, fighting has
(22:37):
gotten a lot less intense since of twenty twenty one,
twenty twenty two, but I mean it's it's still going
The last good numbers that I can find suggest three
hundred and seventy seven thousand dead and it's probably way
way worse than that, because again we just don't know
how many people died in the famines that you know
that that the Saudi set off, and this was you know,
(22:57):
this was explicitly there there. They're planned here was to
just kill off the population of this part of Yemen
by starving them to death. You know, this is the genocide, right,
They were attempting to do a genocide. It doesn't work,
and it doesn't work because I mean, there's a number
of reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get
defeated militarily. Kuthi troops like take several cities like inside
(23:18):
of Saudi Arabia and like they like they march across
the border and take them, and you know, I mean
it's it's bad enough for the Saudis that like there's
a moment where it like it looks like they're going
to lose ri odd and the US has to step
in and be like no, like okay, you guys need
to fucking pull out of this shit. But that you
know that, and that that makes the war less bad,
(23:39):
you know, like the blockadees not still in place. But
this is the situation in twenty twenty two that we
walk into when when suddenly there's they're buying all these
esports companies that they have just attempted to commit a genocide, right,
they have just attempted to exterminate a vast part of
the population of Yemen. That's I think, like really the
true sort of heart of darkness, evil shit, right, Like
I don't know, it's like us and Cambodia is shit.
(24:02):
But you know there's stuff that got more media attention too,
which was like in a lot of ways more harmful
to them because that the pr from it. But one
of the things I think people have forgotten now because
this was six years ago, is that in twenty eighteen,
they kidnapped and then killed a Washington Post columnist named
Jamal kas Shogi. Yeah, by tricking him into going into
(24:22):
a consulate, killing him, carving his body up with a
bone saw. And we're pretty sure the way that they
got the body out of the consulate was by stuffing
the fucking again bone saled parts of his body into
embassy bags and a diplomatic community and walking them out
of the embassy.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, this is one of those things that I should
never be forgotten, right, Like, yeah, he was a citizen right,
was he a green cod hode?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I'm not one hundred percent sure, but this is obviously
like a fucking unbelievable crime. I think I wish that,
you know, the fact that they were doing fucking air
strikes school buses had gotten as much attention as this did.
But you know, for for a long time, right like
in the late twenty tens and the early twenty twenties.
(25:09):
And this this was an issue in the twenty twenty
presidential campaigns because you know, I mean, Trump fucking went
and touched the orb with Muhammed bin Salman, who's the
Crown Prince of now Well at the time, was known
as Mohammad been bone saw because she just trade up
ordered this guy to be fucking bone salved, you know.
But like that, it was. It was a real sort
(25:30):
of issue. And this is the reputation that the Saudi
government has that causes them to kind of go really
really hard into the into this esports angle. And there's
one last kind of angle to this, which is like
the worst kept secret in the oil of the oil market,
is that the Saudi's are running out of oil. It's
like it's it's technically a secret, but it's like everyone
(25:50):
knows this, Like every everyone knows that a lot of
sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Ramco is
not their oil, it's their labels and other people's And
people have known this for a long time, and the
South's obviously know it. And so the trick they have
to pull right in order to continue to be this
fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA,
(26:13):
is to find something else to base their economy on.
And their plan has been a lot of like they're
trying to do just tech bullshit. We're not going to
get into da because that's its own thing. I'm so sad.
I'm so sad to be talking about the line. Sorry,
the lives. Yeah, they're trying to build a city that
is a lot of aligned. Yeah, that is also a city, a.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Really really long city is aligned. That's going to be
their tech thing. You may sound like we're ever simplifying this,
We are not. No, it is they are trying to
build a city that is aligned.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
It's not going to get built. What it has done
is they've absolutely destroyed the lives of a bunch of
sort of people who are just like farmers and cattle
like herders, like some of the metic cattle herders and
people who've been there for a really long time have
had their land taken away from them and their lives
have been destroyed by it. So you know. But the
thing is that in order for them to try to
do their tech pivot, they have to fix the reputation people.
(27:04):
They cannot be the state that is you remembered for
like bone sawing a journalist and attempting to start of
an entire population and doing air strikes and school buses. Right,
this can't be the reputation they have.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
This is it Vision twenty thirty or Plan twenty thirty
or some big Yeah. Yeah, for their like rehabilitation and
diversification of their income. But like posts Jamal Kashogi, a
lot of big companies like we can't be like like
companies like Google, right, and like big big tech companies, Yeah,
kind of took a noticeable step back.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
And so this has been why they've been going into sports,
because they can throw around, like we're talking nine hundred
billion dollars of assets, right, they can just swamp a sport, right,
especially something like esports where people are not very well paid.
There's not that much money sources of income or ten us,
they could just sort of buy off these entire industries
and it's kind of and it's working. And part of
the reason that it's working is that, you know, the
(27:58):
focus is on and like, I understand why people are
doing this, but the focus has been on the fact
that set like the Saudi government is, you know, is
sexist and homophobic, and that's true. But if that's the
reputation that the Saudis have, that is a win for
them because a they'll be able to find people who
agree with those views, and b nobody's talking about again
(28:19):
the fact that they fucking they did an airstrike on
a school bus, like the bodies of children and their
fucking school bags were flying over. Like they've been able
to sort of avoid any kind of more reckoning with
this because people are off talking about other stuff. And
if this keeps working like it's going to work, they're
(28:41):
going to be a country that killed three hundred and
seventy thousand people and probably more.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I think also, like one of the reasons they've been
able to get away with this is that ah media
has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of Muslim
people in the Middle East. Yeah, for twenty plus years, right,
so a lot of people's entire of media consumption. Every
day we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people in
(29:06):
the Middle East, and it's just, yeah, it's the background
noise in US media.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I want to watch one more thing they did
that wasn't the script, but I need to fucking talk
about because it's one of my formative political experiences. Was
So when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest
uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest
uprising in twenty eleven. There's antempt to knock off the
monarchy of Bahrain, and they probably could have won. The
kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably the bravest,
(29:30):
on of the bravest people I've ever seen. And the
Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests and
fucking keep the government intact and for I mean years,
for you, I mean like a decade afterwards. Every once
in a while, you'd get a video coming like that
came out of like the of these kids dressed in
all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting at
them with molotovs. Right, I've never seen anything. I've never
(29:51):
seen anything like it. Like, there's some of the bravest
people in the world, and the Saudis fucking rolled tanks
into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking esports companies,
those are the people whose money you're taking, right you
you were, you were taking the money of a bunch
of people who rolled tanks into the country, whose people
wanted fucking democracy. And yeah, that's that's all I got
(30:12):
about this. I'm extremely angry about all of this, and yeah,
fuck them.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, if I can say from a perspective of someone
who's been paid to do sports for a decent amount
of my life, yeah, you make shit money, but like
it's so much better to not make shit choices as well,
And like that goes way beyond like not cheating and
the manifest ways of people cheating in sports, but also
just like you don't compromising to the way more important
(30:43):
than like playing, right, Like sports are supposed to be fun,
and if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for
things that are terrible, like you're gonna be miserable in
your fucking forties anyway, because your body will fall apart like,
don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yeah, and one last thing I want to address because
one of the defenses that Saudi people have been rolling
out is this like, oh, you guys don't respect Muslim culture,
like because because the main line of complaint has been
about sort of about homophobia and sexism, and it's like, yeah, man,
those fucking children in their school busses were Muslim to like,
fuck you.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, the people in Bahrain are Muslim too, right, the
people who yeah, bodies were all over the streets because
they asked for a chance to have some say and
how the country with run like that.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It's just you don't get to do that. Yeah. So
this has been nickeld happen here. Fuck every single one
of the scenes that is fucking doing this ship fucking ball. Yeah,
Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Esport's Oh god, okay, that was not a great intro.
They could hear the podcast that we do via log
with the is James. We're doing it. Do another be
a James episode? Yep, we're back.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
We wouldn't have a theme for our episodes. I feel like, yeah,
maybe it is Petro dollars.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I guess it is. Yeah, yeah, we vote to you
today by big fossil Fuel. You know, this entire episode
is is the what do you do with your fossil
fuel muddy episode? So we did an episode like a
year ago about sportswashing, and it has gotten much worse
since then, you know. So, so the big kind of
sports washing thing that's happening right now is this thing
(00:46):
called the Esports World Cup that the Saudi government is
putting on. It is going on right now. Barring unfathomable disaster,
it will still be going on by the time this
episode comes out. We we kind of talked about in
the last episode how Saudis have been getting into sports.
I mean it sort of starts with soccer. They said,
they start to e wwe, they get into tennis, They're
in golf, they're in boxing, they're in Formula one and
(01:09):
in the last like two years specifically, they've gotten really
really deep into esports. In twenty twenty two, they spent
one point five billion dollars wow to acquire face it
in e SL Gaming, which were two organizations that ran
esports leagues. Esports, by the way, are professional video game competition. Yeah,
(01:30):
people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five
in the morning to watch Korean StarCraft tournaments like I did. Yeah,
that's me. I fall into that category.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I feel like on this episode we have both the
sports washing angles covered because you have the sports washing
like regular sports angle, and I've had to do the
sports washing e sports angle.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, I have I know what you call them p
sports like physical sports, meat space sports.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I've been privy to a decent amount of sportswa washing
like uh, I raised a lot again and Iranian teams
when I was cycling those dudes one. So much sports
washing has just straight up like national state sponsored doping programs.
But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai, all these different petro
states and emirates will sponsor cycling teams, very very common
(02:19):
by Brunei another one, Yeah, I raise for.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Quebec once, which is not not a Petro state. Well
it's not I guess it's not a Petro state.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, yeah, they got big maple syrup behind them. Yeah,
in Catalonia, which again not a Petro state. But yeah,
it's very common in all kinds of professional sports, right,
because as sports has become more of like an entertainment industry,
it's become unfathomably expensive to own a sponsor a team
for like enthusiasts, and the value proposition isn't really there
(02:51):
for brand. I didn't think the amount that it costs
now to even a sport like cycling, which is not
a massive sporting global terms, right, football soccer for the
Americans out there, it's not worth it for many brands
to sponsoring entire cycling team millions and millions of euros.
But like, if you can use that cycling team to
launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that cycling team
(03:15):
could be what people think of when they hear about
your country, then maybe that is worth it. Right, And
when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you
don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, So the thing I want to do with this
episode is to get into why specifically the Saudis are
doing this right now, because again, like most countries do
sort of versions of this, right but again, you know,
that is one point two billion dollars they've thrown into
two StarCraft leagues that I primarily known them for StarCraft.
They do a bunch of stuff, but those things were
not worth one point five billion dollars, like, there's no way.
(03:47):
But most of the money that had been sponsoring this
stuff was crypto money, right, Okay, you know, but I
wanted to get into why this is sort of happening.
Something I think is very important to note going into
this is that the sort of league thing that's being
run right now is being run directly out of the
Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund,
So this is directly state money. So the Esports World
(04:09):
Cup that's happening right now has sixty million dollars in prizes,
which is unreal is an extraordinary amount of money split
around twenty one esports. There are thirty sports teams involved,
and I am going to read the names of every
single fucking one of them, because fuck you. Okay, let's
do It Fanatic, G two Sports, Guildy Sports, car Mine Corp,
(04:29):
Movie Star KOI actual, I've never heard of those ones.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Uh Ognis Mouvey Stides. I'm guessing it's Spanish. That's a
Spanish telephone network.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, probably, you know, there's a couple I don't know,
but like, these are like the largest esports teams in
the world. Okay, Nija's and Pajamas or NIP Team Lique,
which I'm really sad about because I was a Team
Liquid fan for a fucking decade and I'm no longer
one now because fuck this shit. Team Secret Team, Vitality,
tuns of Esports, Vertus Pro one hundred Thieves, Cloud nine,
Phase Clan, Gavin Glad Mediators, Energy E Sports, space Station Gaming, TSM,
(05:03):
Blacklist International, LGD Gaming, Jenny Sports, t One, Talent Esports,
Webo Gaming, for Real Esports, Loud Team, Falcons, Twist and Minds.
Fuck all of you for fucking doing this and doing
the super pr thing. There's been a backlash, and the
backlash is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state
(05:25):
homophobia and you know, I mean the fact that women
are not full citizens like miss such a Yeah, I
mean just are just straight up owned by their husbands, right,
Like that's that's that's how the sort of legal conservatorship works.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I'm not very familiar with esports, so I can be
there the podcast Grimace here competitions in esports like gender segregated?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Do people will compete together? Basically No, there are like
women's leagues, but like if you just if you want
to compete, you can just compete as soon you get
you don't get forced out by sexism. This is actually
a kind of big deal for StarCraft because about to
be four, but like probably the number two or number
three best StarCraft player in the US is Scarlett, who's
a trans woman, And I mean she's just in the
(06:07):
regular league, right like right, yeah? Are the turfs mad
about it? You know, it's funny inside the StarCraft community,
this was a huge thing for a long time, and
eventually the tides just turned against them because everyone likes
her because she's really good and she's also just like
a good person, and so they kind of I got
a watch over the years as they just kind of
got obliterated. Weirdly, the like regular turfs haven't really found
(06:29):
out about this, probably because StarCraft is I don't know,
too good of a game for them to be fucking
dealing with not understanding things has not stopped this. That's true.
That's true. It's kind of too obscure by this point.
But you know, like there's been a lot of real
concern for sort of queer players. There are a lot
of these teams, Like, right as they were announcing they
were going to the fucking Esports Well Cup, we're doing
(06:51):
all of these fucking Pride posts and talking about how
they're gonna let their players wear Pride jerseys. And it's like,
are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, you know, so they
physically pressed it Saudi Ara able to play. Yeah, yeah,
these these tournaments are happening physically in Riod. Okay, yeah,
you know this is this isn't the first one they've had.
They've had some other events before this too there, but
you know, like yeah, and yeah, think things are very
(07:12):
very bad. There was a well, a story that was
famous among trans people, but I don't ever think broke containment.
Was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was
tricked into going back to like see her family, and
her family just kidnapped her and locked her up, and
she killed herself Jesus, And this is not an uncommon thing.
It happens to SIS women too sometimes when they try
(07:33):
to like get out of the country, sure is they'll
be kidnapped and like renditioned back.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, there have been some pretty good report on that. Yeah,
well linked them or something because it's too it'll be
too lanthly to go and do here.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, but I think I think kind of the weakness
of the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really
quite understand exactly why the Saudis are doing this. You know,
they understand that the Saudi government is incredibly repressive and
that it's you know, institutionally homophobic and it's instucially sexist.
It does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad
(08:06):
these people are. Like this is like the most feted
up state in the entire world. It is like it
is it is the fucking Cia state. And the rest
of this episode is going to be us running through
the exact sequence of stuff that caused the saudiast to
need to do all of this fucking pr bullshit, and
how the sort of structural economic cycle of funneling petro
(08:27):
dollars around has led to genocide and then also the
stupid fucking esports tournament for PR two things which I
not to say. But first, do you know who's probably
not a large enough company to have sponsored this tournament?
Although I can't promise that it's not KitKat or whatever
the fuck, hopean it is kit Kat. I would like
some kit cats if that is it. They're one of
(08:48):
the sponsors of this fucking Esports World Cup.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
You can't poway for a biscuit, KitKat your hate cookie.
I don't want you to hate Joclabar anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, it is the products and services of this podcast,
which hopefully are not supporting a genocide. But good god,
we copy show. Yeah, so we are back and we
are going to talk petro dollars. So Saudi wealth takes
(09:20):
a form of what are called petro dollars. Petro dollars
are in some sense, they're very very simple, right, It's
dollars that you get from selling oil. This is important
for a number of reasons. Though technically speaking, you can
sort of sell oil in other currencies now, but like
most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars,
and so around the world, dollars are one of the
(09:41):
things that if you are an economy, you need dollars
in order to get oil from people. So huge sinks
of American dollars from all across the world, you know,
from the US of the US import a lot of
oil flow into these sort of oil producing countries. These
are called petro dollars. The most obvious manifestation of this
in Saudi Arabia is the Country Solving Wealth Fund, which
has nine hundred billion dollars of assets. Right this is
(10:06):
an unfathomable amount of money. It is so much money
that it is a structural problem for the global economy
trying to figure out what the fuck you do with
this money. This is a problem that has caused disaster
around the world. It is something where I'm fond of
talking about on this show, but we're going to talk
about again because it's important here. In the seventies and eighties,
as sort of Opek realized that it could, you know,
(10:27):
use its sort of political power to gain enormous amounts
of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petro
dollars by controlling the price of oil. Suddenly they had,
you know that you have hundreds of billions of dollars
floating around and because this is capitalism, you can't just
sit on that money. You have to find a way
to turn that money into more money. But again, you know,
I mean just a Solfing wealth fund is almost a
trillion dollars, right, and so this is extremely hard and
(10:52):
it means that this money is constantly flowing around the
world trying to find a way to get returns on it,
you know. And in the modern era, these are things
like people remember we work but incredibly stupid dune From
the beginning office space rental scheme that went under that
that was a lot of that was funded by Saudi
money because studies had put an enormous amount of money
(11:12):
in this Japanese bank called soft Bank, and soft Bank
was trying to figure out what to do with this
unfathole amount of money, and they were like, Okay, what
if we fund the dumbest project of all time?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, it became a thing where they could fund it,
and like, just by them funding it, its stock price
would go up, even if it was like we work
a really shit idea.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, And this is something about global capital that I
don't think has been fully processed. Really. But the the sheer,
the sheer extent of capital concentration, right, the amount of
money that the richest people in the world and the
richest sort of families in the world in the sort
of Saudi case, right, you know, the Saudi Arabia is
a country where a family has access to the resources
(11:51):
of extremely wealthy nation state, right, And that being true
has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy
because you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this
for a long time in the tech sector, right, where
you don't have to fucking make money, like your revenue
stream can just be investor money, and you can coast
for a decade off of just taking money from the
(12:13):
Saudis who are like trying to find some way to
turn this money. And the more money. I think this
has downstream effects that don't we haven't even begun to
really understand yet, right. But very famously in the seventies
and eighties, there was all this money flowing around, and
what it was poured into was the Third Book debt crisis.
People bought state debt with it, and then these loans
(12:34):
were on it were on adjustable rates, onjustable interest rates.
So when the vulcar shock hit and the US like
massively increased interest rates. The interest rates on these loans
like skyrocketed, and suddenly, you know, you're paying like fifty
percent interest on a loan of like cephal billion dollars.
And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their
economies are destroyed. I mean, David Grab rememorably talks about
(12:55):
this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria. You know,
but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination.
Like programs are not that expensive, but they are a
little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of metag
Escar had to like pay off this IMF debt, they
had to get rid of the they got rid of
this mosquito programs, and there was a malaria outbreak and
it killed unfathomable numbers of people, and stuff like this
(13:18):
happened all over the world. And the source of all
of this, right, partially the source of this is these loans,
And partially the source of this is this these enormous
piles of petro dollars that you have to find some
way to sort of turn into more capital, right, And
you know, so there are sort of trademark things you
can do with this money. One of them is buying
a bunch of military equipment. Mostly what you're doing with
(13:40):
that is sort of buying American patronage. If you spend
enormous amount of money buying American tanks, and this is
you know something this out he has been doing for ages, right,
you spend a bunch of money on American defense contracts.
You know, you can sort of buy us protection and
guarantees that you know, for example, as it is going
to happen later in this episode, you can buy a
guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital. But
(14:00):
with the Saudis is that they have a lot of equipment,
but Saudi Arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army. If
they were, if they had an actual serious army, there
would be a coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely
well equipped kind of, but it's trained like shit, and
it's run by like just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks.
(14:20):
But you know, so that's like sort of one thing
you can do with this money. A lot of this
money ended up going into real estate, and there are
sort of cycles of this happening. The one that ain't
that's of concern to us is what happens after two
thousand and eight, in the sort of aftermath of two
thousand and eight, there are still places in the world where,
you know, you can park an extremely large amount of
(14:43):
money in real estate and have it be a relatively
liquid asset. If you have like property in a market
that is, you know, where the housing market is really
hot and prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly
get rid of it. And you can also there's liquidity,
there's sort of financial instruments you can do based off
of your ownership of real estate. And this is something
that drives the Saudis into a bunch of very very
(15:06):
I don't know if risky is exactly the right word,
but a bunch of moves in Many real estate that really,
truly we're about to not pay off. There's a very
good book about this, it's by Lisa Bloomy called Destroying Yemen,
which is about like a lot of the factors that
start the war in Yemen, and this this is one
of them.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
We can't really do a full recap of the Many
Civil War because that's that's its own seven hundred episode podcast, like,
oh god it is. Yeah, it's on a surface level,
it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any
granular detail on it, it's like the most complicated conflict
I've ever studied.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, I mean there's so many conflicts like this, right, Like, yeah,
civil war appreciates us.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
When I was studying Yemen in college, I longed for
the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War, Like this conflict
is nuts. Yeah, but for simplicity's sake. There's roughly ish
two factions. There are the sort of forces allied with
what's called the Coalition government, which is the government backed
by the Saudis, and then there are what's sort of
(16:10):
in the west become called the Huthis. I mean, it's
more complicated. It's all of this is enormously more complicated
than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these
alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of the things that
happens is that when when a government that is hostile
to the Saudis, which is like you know, the sort
of like unter a law like that, whole coalition is
very also to the Saudiast because the Saudis sucks shit.
(16:32):
You know, suddenly the Saudis are looking at an enormous
amount of capital they've sunk into real estate that they
are you know, based on these like incredibly corrupt land
deals with the previous administration, which have been friendly to them.
They are looking at suddenly losing all this land. The
Saudis weren't the first people to come into sort of
the many real estate market right on the uae Omah
and a bunch of other states has sort of been
(16:52):
in there before. And so part of what a big
part of what this sort of this like what's called
the coalition is this like basic a bunch of these
assholes trying to protect their housing assets. Look, that's a
lot of what a lot of wars are if we're
on it.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's people trying to protect xoy assets, right like Unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, and it's not really seen in these terms in
the way that's covered, but that's a lot of what's
going on. And this produces one of the worst wars
of the twenty first century, which is saying something because
the twenty for centuries had a lot of really really
terrible wars. Yeah, we've had some reference, Yeah, and we're
going to get into what the Saudis were doing during
(17:32):
this war. After these products and services, we have returned
and the thing we're returning into is a really really
bleak war. So we said this kind of from the beginning, right,
the Saudi military is not very good. The Saudi's attempt
(17:56):
to sort of end the war by like rolling a
tank column over the border, it's just like I think
it's twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, in like the early period
of the war, they try to end up by just
rolling tanks, and tanks get obliterated because the Saudi army
isn't worth shit, right. All of their ground forces are
a joke. But their air force is very very well
(18:16):
equipped with a bunch of like incredibly modern US warplanes
that we sell them all the fucking time, and so
you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they
have the ability to do is just obliterate people with
air strikes. The kind of like terror air campaign that
they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar
with from Palestine. But they're doing air strikes on school
buses full of children. They're taking the American thing. They
(18:38):
are doing double tap drone strikes on weddings where they're
hitting a wedding and then when rescue workers come up,
they hit they hit the rescue workers with air strikes. Right,
I'm pretty sure it was young when they had the
triple tap fucking air strike where they did an airstrike
on someone's funeral, they didn't airstrike on the rescue workers,
and then when they had a funeral for those people,
they did air strike on fucking that. This is a
just unbelievably brutal war. And you know, I want to
(19:00):
get which we talked about, right, like there are some
there are some parts of the Saudi coalition that can
you know, field ground forces, right, that stuffs mostly the
sort of southern secessionist groups, and those people are not
really that loyal, so you know, so they have to
start importing infantry to try to fight the who thies,
(19:22):
and so they're importing a bunch of Colombian mercenaries. So
these are guys who've been like desk squad guys in Columbia.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
The Colombian guys are the new I was going to say,
the new Rhodesians. That it's a dark shadow to cost
and a group of human beings.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, it used.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
To be that when you were running into private military
contractors abroad, it would be people white folks from Africa, right,
like they call themselves Rhudesian South Africans, what have you.
Now you'll see a lot of like a lot of
private military contractors, like at the boots on the ground,
you know, infantry level of Colombians.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, And so that that's one of the sources they
went to. But then you know, part of the Saudi
coalition is the UAE, and the UAE has a lot
of very very close ties to militant groups in Sudance.
Specifically a group of militias that's now known the West
is the Rapid Response Forces. But these are the people
who did the genocide and are for and they are
(20:20):
like right now like doing a genocide in like in
Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control of
the country. And because the UAE is very very well
connected to these, one of the ways that the coalition
tries to get ground troops is by using troops who
were you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I
say troops, I mean child soldiers. The forces that they
(20:42):
are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use as
cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably believe,
I mean kind of funnily. A lot of these people
end up not fighting because they you know, they get
handed a rifle, will get thrown into Yemen and they
just immediately sell their guns. And I refused, but like,
you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit.
(21:02):
Like again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing
with is we are having the guys who did the dart,
who did the fucking Darfur genocide, kidnap fucking villagers from
Sudan like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use
them as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen
so they can like defend their fucking real estate assets.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah right, I think Friend of the Show Eric Prince
makes a uh makes an appearance in Yemen as well
his Triumvira of companies, which are the same company, right
Black waters Z.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah. Probably, I quite frankly don't remember that part, but
probably also Yeah, you can rely on EP to show
up in a situation I is. Yeah, I mean the
part of this we haven't gotten to yet is the
worst part of it, which is so this the Saudist
and the sort of coalition government they you know, they
do okay in the sort of southwest of the country
(21:53):
because the Southern Yemen secessions groups are well organized and
are good soldiers, even if they've sort of rebel and
there's this whole it's it's a whole mess. But in
the west of the country, everything is completely different, and
you know, they're they're basically getting their shit kicked in.
And in that theater, the Saudi's plan is we are
(22:14):
going to starve the country. So you know that the
Saudi the Saudis have naval assets. Nobody else really in
this war does, right, and they just set up a
blockade on like all of the ports on that side
of the country. We do not know how many people
get starved as a result of this. The last good
mortality figures I could I could find, this war is
still going on, by the way. I mean, fighting has
(22:37):
gotten a lot less intense since of twenty twenty one,
twenty twenty two, but I mean it's it's still going
The last good numbers that I can find suggest three
hundred and seventy seven thousand dead and it's probably way
way worse than that, because again we just don't know
how many people died in the famines that you know
that that the Saudi set off, and this was you know,
(22:57):
this was explicitly there there. They're planned here was to
just kill off the population of this part of Yemen
by starving them to death. You know, this is the genocide, right,
They were attempting to do a genocide. It doesn't work,
and it doesn't work because I mean, there's a number
of reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get
defeated militarily. Kuthi troops like take several cities like inside
(23:18):
of Saudi Arabia and like they like they march across
the border and take them, and you know, I mean
it's it's bad enough for the Saudis that like there's
a moment where it like it looks like they're going
to lose ri odd and the US has to step
in and be like no, like okay, you guys need
to fucking pull out of this shit. But that you
know that, and that that makes the war less bad,
(23:39):
you know, like the blockadees not still in place. But
this is the situation in twenty twenty two that we
walk into when when suddenly there's they're buying all these
esports companies that they have just attempted to commit a genocide, right,
they have just attempted to exterminate a vast part of
the population of Yemen. That's I think, like really the
true sort of heart of darkness, evil shit, right, Like
I don't know, it's like us and Cambodia is shit.
(24:02):
But you know there's stuff that got more media attention too,
which was like in a lot of ways more harmful
to them because that the pr from it. But one
of the things I think people have forgotten now because
this was six years ago, is that in twenty eighteen,
they kidnapped and then killed a Washington Post columnist named
Jamal kas Shogi. Yeah, by tricking him into going into
(24:22):
a consulate, killing him, carving his body up with a
bone saw. And we're pretty sure the way that they
got the body out of the consulate was by stuffing
the fucking again bone saled parts of his body into
embassy bags and a diplomatic community and walking them out
of the embassy.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, this is one of those things that I should
never be forgotten, right, Like, yeah, he was a citizen right,
was he a green cod hode?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I'm not one hundred percent sure, but this is obviously
like a fucking unbelievable crime. I think I wish that,
you know, the fact that they were doing fucking air
strikes school buses had gotten as much attention as this did.
But you know, for for a long time, right like
in the late twenty tens and the early twenty twenties.
(25:09):
And this this was an issue in the twenty twenty
presidential campaigns because you know, I mean, Trump fucking went
and touched the orb with Muhammed bin Salman, who's the
Crown Prince of now Well at the time, was known
as Mohammad been bone saw because she just trade up
ordered this guy to be fucking bone salved, you know.
But like that, it was. It was a real sort
(25:30):
of issue. And this is the reputation that the Saudi
government has that causes them to kind of go really
really hard into the into this esports angle. And there's
one last kind of angle to this, which is like
the worst kept secret in the oil of the oil market,
is that the Saudi's are running out of oil. It's
like it's it's technically a secret, but it's like everyone
(25:50):
knows this, Like every everyone knows that a lot of
sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Ramco is
not their oil, it's their labels and other people's And
people have known this for a long time, and the
South's obviously know it. And so the trick they have
to pull right in order to continue to be this
fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA,
(26:13):
is to find something else to base their economy on.
And their plan has been a lot of like they're
trying to do just tech bullshit. We're not going to
get into da because that's its own thing. I'm so sad.
I'm so sad to be talking about the line. Sorry,
the lives. Yeah, they're trying to build a city that
is a lot of aligned. Yeah, that is also a city, a.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Really really long city is aligned. That's going to be
their tech thing. You may sound like we're ever simplifying this,
We are not. No, it is they are trying to
build a city that is aligned.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
It's not going to get built. What it has done
is they've absolutely destroyed the lives of a bunch of
sort of people who are just like farmers and cattle
like herders, like some of the metic cattle herders and
people who've been there for a really long time have
had their land taken away from them and their lives
have been destroyed by it. So you know. But the
thing is that in order for them to try to
do their tech pivot, they have to fix the reputation people.
(27:04):
They cannot be the state that is you remembered for
like bone sawing a journalist and attempting to start of
an entire population and doing air strikes and school buses. Right,
this can't be the reputation they have.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
This is it Vision twenty thirty or Plan twenty thirty
or some big Yeah. Yeah, for their like rehabilitation and
diversification of their income. But like posts Jamal Kashogi, a
lot of big companies like we can't be like like
companies like Google, right, and like big big tech companies, Yeah,
kind of took a noticeable step back.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
And so this has been why they've been going into sports,
because they can throw around, like we're talking nine hundred
billion dollars of assets, right, they can just swamp a sport, right,
especially something like esports where people are not very well paid.
There's not that much money sources of income or ten us,
they could just sort of buy off these entire industries
and it's kind of and it's working. And part of
the reason that it's working is that, you know, the
(27:58):
focus is on and like, I understand why people are
doing this, but the focus has been on the fact
that set like the Saudi government is, you know, is
sexist and homophobic, and that's true. But if that's the
reputation that the Saudis have, that is a win for
them because a they'll be able to find people who
agree with those views, and b nobody's talking about again
(28:19):
the fact that they fucking they did an airstrike on
a school bus, like the bodies of children and their
fucking school bags were flying over. Like they've been able
to sort of avoid any kind of more reckoning with
this because people are off talking about other stuff. And
if this keeps working like it's going to work, they're
(28:41):
going to be a country that killed three hundred and
seventy thousand people and probably more.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I think also, like one of the reasons they've been
able to get away with this is that ah media
has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of Muslim
people in the Middle East. Yeah, for twenty plus years, right,
so a lot of people's entire of media consumption. Every
day we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people in
(29:06):
the Middle East, and it's just, yeah, it's the background
noise in US media.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I want to watch one more thing they did
that wasn't the script, but I need to fucking talk
about because it's one of my formative political experiences. Was
So when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest
uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest
uprising in twenty eleven. There's antempt to knock off the
monarchy of Bahrain, and they probably could have won. The
kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably the bravest,
(29:30):
on of the bravest people I've ever seen. And the
Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests and
fucking keep the government intact and for I mean years,
for you, I mean like a decade afterwards. Every once
in a while, you'd get a video coming like that
came out of like the of these kids dressed in
all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting at
them with molotovs. Right, I've never seen anything. I've never
(29:51):
seen anything like it. Like, there's some of the bravest
people in the world, and the Saudis fucking rolled tanks
into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking esports companies,
those are the people whose money you're taking, right you
you were, you were taking the money of a bunch
of people who rolled tanks into the country, whose people
wanted fucking democracy. And yeah, that's that's all I got
(30:12):
about this. I'm extremely angry about all of this, and yeah,
fuck them.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, if I can say from a perspective of someone
who's been paid to do sports for a decent amount
of my life, yeah, you make shit money, but like
it's so much better to not make shit choices as well,
And like that goes way beyond like not cheating and
the manifest ways of people cheating in sports, but also
just like you don't compromising to the way more important
(30:43):
than like playing, right, Like sports are supposed to be fun,
and if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for
things that are terrible, like you're gonna be miserable in
your fucking forties anyway, because your body will fall apart like,
don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yeah, and one last thing I want to address because
one of the defenses that Saudi people have been rolling
out is this like, oh, you guys don't respect Muslim culture,
like because because the main line of complaint has been
about sort of about homophobia and sexism, and it's like, yeah, man,
those fucking children in their school busses were Muslim to like,
fuck you.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, the people in Bahrain are Muslim too, right, the
people who yeah, bodies were all over the streets because
they asked for a chance to have some say and
how the country with run like that.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It's just you don't get to do that. Yeah. So
this has been nickeld happen here. Fuck every single one
of the scenes that is fucking doing this ship fucking ball. Yeah,
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