YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Hubbard

lines on the record: 79
first: 2020-03-23
most recent: 2020-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh yeah, of course. You'd had some of the activists who were best known for fighting for this, you know, rounded up and put in prison. At least one of them is still in jail and on trial. And, you know, I'm still in touch with her family and they're just basically wondering what's going to happen with the trial, when's it going to conclude? What is she going to be convicted of? MBS, he's had sort of this tendency for own goals. You know, if you follow soccer or with football as it's known outside of the United States, like there's this idea of the own goal where you sort of accidentally kick the ball into your own goal. And MBS has had kind of a surprising number of these. It's like, listen, if you're a Saudi leader, you have one chance in Saudi history to give women the right to drive. Like this is a PR coup. You can be the one to get credit for this. You know, the United States has been pushing for this for decades. You can be the guy to do it. And the next thing you do is go out and invent, you know, and like arrest a bunch of nonviolent activists, women activists. I mean, come on. Couldn't you have seen that that wasn't going to go over?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And as opposed to, say, President Trump has a very similar style, actually, but this guy has an ability to put everybody in jail without unilaterally, without any recourse. One of the things I found striking was you had Uber and other companies sort of over there at their various investment banking events that they have in Saudi Arabia and pushing the fact that women can drive. I remember, and they were adjailing the women who had been active to try to get that to happen at the same time, which was sort of a real disconnect and a problem for a lot of people who are watching it at the same time.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's not talking about popular participation in government. He's not even really talking about you as a citizen being able to express yourself on how you think things are going. And so you see this quite harsh crackdown on anybody who's critical of anything that he wants to do. There are repeated waves of arrest. We see intellectuals arrested, clerics arrested, activists arrested. And it really changes the mood inside Saudi Arabia where people basically realize, you know, if you want to talk about him, it better be positive or you better keep yourself quiet.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we're more than happy to sell them. And the next thing you know, you have Saudi pilots who don't really have the skills to hit targets and they're dropping bombs from incredibly high up. They're hitting schools, weddings, funerals, the civilian death toll sort of goes off the charts. And it's just, it becomes this really, really nasty war that they're involved in. So you have that rumbling in the background to this day. It's kind of gone up and down in terms of the level of the violence. But this, you know, after this many years, the Saudis are not really any closer to what they declare as victory than they were when they started. So there's that. At home, it becomes very clear that MBS is interested in social opening, and by that I mean, okay, he wants to have entertainment. He wants to have movie theaters, concerts. He wants women to have more ability to move around, loosen up the dress code. They can mingle a bit more with men and restaurants, coffee shops, but he is absolutely uninterested in any kind of political liberalization. This guy is not talking about democracy.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Purchases were made as a way of sort of confirming the alliance with the United States, but nobody ever really expected they would go to war with them.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think a lot of these nasty things that had been going on sort of begin to catch up with him. If you want to move chronologically, the first was the military intervention in Yemen. And I know that it's often portrayed as the Saudi war in Yemen. I mean, the war began before Saudi Arabia entered. It was originally a civil war. Basically, you had sort of a scrappy militant group from the northern part of the country get angry about their share of the government, and they stormed the capital. They took it over. you know, basically started to impose their own kind of rule on northern Yemen. The Saudis don't like them. And so they get together with a number of other Arab countries and they launch a military intervention, which becomes terrible very quickly. I mean, we basically realize that, you know, the United States has been selling billions and billions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia. We're talking high-tech jets, bombs, smart bombs, guidance kits. I mean, pretty much everything that you can think of, they're buying from the United States. And the idea was really that the Saudis would never use these things. It was kind of these.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, he really saw this as, you know, he wanted to bring these people to Saudi Arabia. I think he sort of hoped that maybe we can get Facebook to open an office. Maybe we get Amazon to open up a data center. Maybe we can get Google to do something else. He really saw this sort of bringing these people to Saudi Arabia as part of his master plan for what he wanted to change in the country. And there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm about it. I mean, everybody from Bill Gates to Richard Branson to, you know, there were a lot of people who were willing to sit with him and listen to him and get excited about his ideas. The problem is, if we want to get to this already, that there were a lot of other sort of nasty things happening back home that I think people like me who were sitting in the Middle East were paying a lot of attention to, but people who were sitting on the perhaps east and west coast of the United States were not paying as much attention to.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In March 2018, he takes this massive, he does two massive trips. First, he goes to the UK. He meets with the Queen, he meets with the heads of MI5, MI6, he goes to Parliament, meets the foreign ministry, sort of meets everybody across the board, is very well received, and then he flies to the United States for this absolutely remarkable trip. He spends a number of weeks. He goes to five states plus the District of Columbia. He meets with three former presidents. He meets with a sitting president in the Oval Office, and he meets with everybody, almost everybody you can think of from the business tech community. I mean, in Manhattan, he meets Mike Bloomberg at Starbucks, and they have a coffee together. Then he flies out to Seattle, and he sees Bill Gates, and he takes a walk with Bill Gates, and then he goes to MIT. He goes to Harvard. He meets with Oprah. He goes to Silicon Valley. He visits Google. He visits Faithbook. I mean, he goes everywhere. And then he flies down to Hollywood of all places. And, you know, Hollywood, in a way, sort of represents everything.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so in June 2016, he takes a trip to the United States and he goes to Facebook. He meets with Mark Zuckerberg. They release photos of him sitting and chatting with Mark Zuckerberg. He puts on this VR headset and these photos go crazy in Saudi Arabia. This young Saudis have never seen a senior member of the royal family meet with someone like Mark Zuckerberg for one and then be excited about new technology. I mean, this guy here he is trying out this new headset and we're going to, you know, and so they sort of feel like, wow, maybe this is going to be the guy who brings us this breath of fresh air. So anyway, this goes on and on and on. I think the peak for Muhammad bin Salman so far.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, there was Buzz all over the place. I mean, you know, people were very excited about this idea. You had a number of very high-profile correspondence columnists who went and met with him who wrote sort of these glowing pieces about how this guy was going to change everything. You definitely had a lot of excitement and international business community. This guy's going to do things different and it's going to open up all these new possibilities. And I mean, you can almost graph this. Maybe we don't want to get ahead of ourselves in the story, but you can almost graph this, that sort of he comes on the scene in 2015 and he kind of goes up, up, up, up, up. And I think the high point is really March 2018. And then the decline begins. I mean, I don't know if you want to map the whole thing out. No, go ahead. Tell me.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that scene is a good thing for us to fresh air. I recall sort of profiles and the concepts of him. I'd been approached by a lot of Silicon Valley people that said, this guy's for real. This is really interesting. And of course, he wanted to find, you know, there had been previous Saudis who had invested in Twitter, Saudi princes, who had done that, but they were very excited about the opening of Saudi Arabia making investments there and things like that. So he was seen as a breath of fresh air, correct?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, MBS sees all this happening and says, okay, well, we need to find a way to diversify the economy. We need more sectors than oil. We need to do all these different things, open up the society and entertainment and movie theaters and women driving. And so he really tries to jump in and do all these things at once.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kings that you'd had. I mean, he came in as first deputy crown prince and then crown prince just thinking that this place needs to change. We can't continue to be like this. This is not the lifestyle that I want to have. It's not the lifestyle that people of my generation want to have. And the economic realities were harsh. You know, we had gone from seeing oil at $140 a barrel and then he comes in in 2015 when the prices starting to decline and it's been safely below 100 ever since. Now it's what? Somewhere around 30, 35. It's much, much lower than that. So, you know, they used to be able to do a lot of these things because they had huge amounts of money and so they could just sort of, you know, spend it on the population and keep people happy. And eventually that calculus flipped. You had oil prices were low, which crunched the budget. And you have a huge population. Now there's 22 million Saudis, about two-thirds of them are underage 30. And so the old calculation just doesn't work anymore. The government cannot afford to employ all of these people.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think even people who don't like Muhammad bin Sadman or don't like what he's done, pretty much everybody agrees that Saudi Arabia was ripe for a change. This was a place that had been, you know, sort of governed according to, you know, it's ruled by a rule family. It's one of the few remaining absolute monarchies in the entire world. It has a very close political system. It has an economy that's almost entirely dependent on oil. And every sector of the economy goes back to oil in some way or another. Social life was governed by an incredibly strict interpretation of Islam that kept men and women very segregated in public places. It, you know, didn't, you know, you did not have music. You didn't have theater. Arts were looked down upon. I mean, it was a very, you know, there was this obviously the long term, longstanding ban on women driving. I mean, this was a place that was really a lot of people, I think, inside and outside of Saudi Arabia felt like it was time for a change. And there's every reason to believe that that's how MBS felt, that he, you know, unlike many of the older.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why change? This was something that Saudi Arabia had sort of been this sort of traditional place. And suddenly he wanted to come in and make it. And that's why he was so well liked initially, correct? Because this was the guy who was going to change everything and make it modernize Saudi Arabia because when the oil money goes away, they need to have a whole new direction, correct?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you hear various things. I mean, people who spend a lot of time with them say this is somebody who has tremendous self-confidence. He is incredibly confident that he knows what needs to be done and that he knows how to do it. He loves foreign consultants. And so, you know, from the moment that he came in, he spent huge amounts of money bringing in people from pretty much every consulting firm that you can think of. You had people from Booze looking at Booz Allen, which is now called Strategy and I believe looking at the military. You had McKinsey coming, Boston Consulting Group, pretty much everybody that you can think of coming in, studying various parts of Saudi economy, Saudi society, what needs to change, how are we going to do it, producing various reports. And he just places enormous stock in these people to try to figure out what needs to change in Saudi Arabia and how to do it.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And Sonman, for whatever reason, when he becomes king, he decides that of all of his sons and of all the other princes in the royal family, he could have really chosen anybody that he wanted. He, for whatever reason, chose Muhammad bin Sadman.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is kind of like the Jared Kushner of Saudi Arabia, right? Just he's just there and he's been given these enormous portfolios of power because his father was made king, which nobody thought he was good. He was the brother of the king who died before him. So he's closest to the person who now suddenly finds himself king.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until suddenly in 2015, King Abdullah, the previous monarch, dies, King Salman becomes king, and MBS shows up and very quickly just starts getting these massive portfolios. He's named the Minister of Defense shortly after that. He launches a new military intervention in Yemen. He's put at the head of the board of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil monopoly, which is really the kingdom's economic crown jewel. The fundamental engine of the Saudi economy, and he's given oversight of it.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So these would be MBS's older half-brothers. These are the sons of Selman's first wife. So MBS basically doesn't do any of that. He grows up in Riyadh. He's very, very close to his father. He basically shadows his father, and this is his education. He works for him sort of in an unofficial capacity while he's the governor of Riyadh. And in my estimation, this is what gave him a very deep understanding of Saudi society. His father is receiving people all the time. He's the prince of this big province. So you've got clerics coming in. You have business people coming in. You have other members of the royal family coming in. You've got tribal figures coming in. And MBS sits there and watches all of this. And I think that game...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he's one of the second generation but very low down the totem pole. So he spent most of his life as the governor of Riyadh province, which is not an incredibly prestigious job, but it was one that allowed him to get a very good index on Saudi society. And this is really where MBS gets his education. MBS has a number of older half-brothers who are very accomplished. One of them was the first Arab astronaut. He flew on the space shuttle discovery. Another one has a PhD from Oxford. Other ones ran media companies. One of them was part of an upset at the Kentucky Derby when he bought a horse race. He bought a thoroughbred a few weeks before it won the race. I mean, these are people that were out in the world doing things were well known. MBS doesn't really have any.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely thousands of princes. And if you look inside of, so anyway, so the story for MBS really starts with his father, Sunman. So Salman is one of the sons of the king who founded Saudi Arabia in 1932, which gives him a very senior status.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the book, and I think I was able to sort of get a pretty good picture of that, many, many Saudi princes go abroad for education. Many, many Saudi princes spend a lot of time abroad for various things, for pleasure, for fun. You know, they own properties in the south of France or they own properties in Mayfair in London and they go there for the summers. So many”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started working on this, I mean, I was a bit amazed at how little we knew about my, and I don't mean just me, but I think sort of what was in the public record about Muhammad bin Sadman before he showed up in 2015, you know, anywhere else in the world, have you had a force come to power like this, a crown prince, a deputy crown prince, a young prime minister, for example, or suddenly had like launched a war, launched a massive social and economic reform program for his country, become one of the sort of senior members of the board of the state oil company. We would all be wondering who the heck is this person? Where did they come from? You would have investigative reporters going back to their hometown asking around trying to find the first girlfriend, the old friends, the high school teacher, first employer, what do we know about this person? Because it's Saudi Arabia and it's an absolute monarchy, almost none of this happened. And so for the first few years, he was around, we didn't really know anything about this guy. So it was something that I really felt the need to dig in.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's talk about who he is. What's really interesting about this book, which I don't think we'll realize, and I didn't actually, and I do cover him quite a bit in terms of his relations with tech people, was that he is sort of a creature of Saudi Arabia, most of the princes. And try to explain how he got to power very briefly. It's a long story, but who his father is, how his father got to power, and then how he's different from the other princes, which I think is because he's Saudi Arabian born and bred, essentially.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These events really sort of made everybody wake up and say, Holy cow, like this is somebody we have not seen before. And so basically realized, no, the book needs to not be about Saudi Arabia. It needs to be specifically about Muhammad bin Salman. People want to know who this guy is, where did he come from? What is he up to? What are we going to expect to him? And what is he trying to do? So that's when I really sort of focused in on him.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I had started writing about Saudi Arabia, I was a bit frustrated about sort of how few good books there are about Saudi society, about Saudi culture and politics, things like that. There's just not a lot written about the place compared to many other countries in the Middle East. You know, I sort of talked about that idea. There was sort of mild interest here and there. Oh, maybe Saudi Arabia, I don't know. And then by 2017, I would say after the sort of kidnapping and forced resignation of Sadharidi, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and then the infamous lockup at the Ritz, both of which we can talk about if you're interested.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the project evolved over time. My original kind of idea was much less controversial and I would say much less confrontational. I had started covering Saudi Arabia in 2013 under the previous monarch. I kept, you know, and so then I already had two years of experience with the kingdom before MBS showed up on the scene in early 2015. And then very quickly we realized, you know, this guy is unique. This is a kind of character, a kind of force that we don't see very often in the world, much less in the Middle East. It was in 2016 that I access for journalists to Saudi Arabia is always a major issue. They historically have made it pretty difficult for people to get in. In 2016, for various reasons, I suddenly found myself with a five-year multi-entry visa to Saudi Arabia. And so I started thinking, okay, well, I live in Beirut. Saudi Arabia is like a three-hour flight away. I'm going to be, you know, if this visa lasts, I can go and come and I can, you know, for the next five years, I should do a book.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who can't decide whether I'd rather go to Saudi Arabia and antagonize the Crown Prince or spend the rest of my life with Peter Thiel as my roommate. But in my spare time, I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Reco Deco, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Joining us today from Lebanon is Ben Hubbard, the Beirut Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He's also the author of a new book called MBS, The Rise to Power of Mohamed bin Salman. MBS is, of course, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and has become a major investor in several global tech companies through SoftBank's Vision Fund, including Uber. He recently achieved public notoriety in America in 2018, however, when he was linked to the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Most recently, he was blamed for the hacking of Amazon's CEOs Jeff Bezos' phone. So there's a lot to talk about here, not just in tech.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT