The Truth About 'Dune'!

Stefan Molyneux

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Transcript

00:00:00 Hi, everybody. We are doing Dune the culture.

00:00:03 We are Dune.

00:00:04 Doing the Dune. We're doing the culture. We're doing the history.

00:00:07 First of all, you don't have to have read the books. You don't even have to have seen the movie

00:00:12 to make this incredibly valuable to you. We're going to break down the whole artistic process

00:00:17 and all the stuff that's not being talked about with regards to this story, which is considered

00:00:22 the most influential and successful and rich and deep and complex science fiction novel of all time

00:00:28 and also outside of the genre, just a science fiction is considered a fantastic book.

00:00:31 Yeah.

00:00:32 My history with Dune, I saw it, of course, around all the time when I was in my early teens.

00:00:38 You mean like the first movie?

00:00:40 No, no. The, oh, do you think I am? Oh, you mean the very first David Lynch movie?

00:00:46 Yeah.

00:00:46 Oh, yeah. No, no. Even before that, because the book was written, published in mid-60s, right?

00:00:50 Yeah.

00:00:50 So it was all around. It creeped me out. I would see it. I maybe flipped through a little bit and

00:00:55 I saw all these Arabic things and it's like, this is not my culture. My culture, my history is like

00:01:00 Knights of the Round Table. It's-

00:01:01 Lord of the Rings.

00:01:02 Lord of the Rings. It's Beowulf. It's all of that stuff. And I was really into the D&D. So I'm like,

00:01:07 well, why would I want this nonsense foreign desert story? Right. And I just, I can't honestly

00:01:12 remember if I even started to read it and didn't like it because I was in the library all the time

00:01:16 and it was everywhere. And it was a real phenomenon. None of my friends were into it. We

00:01:19 were all into Lord of the Rings and the European mythology. So I never read the books and I wasn't

00:01:25 going to watch the movies. But then we decided to, for reasons that passed-

00:01:30 Oh, because it was just kind of big and we were getting lots of questions about it.

00:01:33 Yeah.

00:01:33 Sure.

00:01:33 Well, and this is Sci-Fi's Lord of the Rings.

00:01:36 Very much so. Okay. So that's me, Steph. If you guys want to mention yourselves too.

00:01:42 I'm Jared. I've been working for the show about a year now, working with the show about a year now,

00:01:46 and I help out with research and things like that, wherever and however I can help doing

00:01:50 the thumbnails and such.

00:01:52 On to James.

00:01:54 No, on to me. Okay. Yeah. Izzy, child, you've probably heard me in other shows.

00:01:59 Yes.

00:02:00 I was the famous hand of the live stream.

00:02:03 And you, yeah, you watched it on a plane.

00:02:06 I did watch it on a plane. I had seen a video about Doom, about the movie, like reviewing it

00:02:11 and kind of going in depth about like the world building. I thought, "Hey, this is actually really

00:02:14 cool." So I kind of got into it. And then I happened to be on a plane flight and I saw that

00:02:19 they had the movie available to watch. And I was like, "Oh, I've been looking for this opportunity

00:02:22 forever." So I watched it. And then-

00:02:24 But with no sound, basically, right?

00:02:26 A while later-

00:02:27 This is my weird thing is usually I don't watch anything with any audio. Like if I'm watching a

00:02:38 video, I turn the subtitles on and I have either the audio completely off or I'm listening to

00:02:41 music through something else. So-

00:02:42 Oh, okay.

00:02:43 You're just a subtitle person.

00:02:45 I'm just a subtitle person. Because that also helps me, I think, decipher whether the movie

00:02:50 is actually good in a way. Because it's like, "Okay, maybe the audio makes it seem really cool,

00:02:54 but is it actually that cool?"

00:02:56 Or they manipulate the crap out of you with like the piano, soft piano sadness and the

00:03:00 "Bwaah!" of like scariness.

00:03:01 Yeah, like if I'm laughing at the audio without... Or if I'm laughing at the dialogue because

00:03:05 there's no music to guide me, then...

00:03:06 Right, right.

00:03:07 But that's not even just for movies, just also for like random videos and stuff. But yeah.

00:03:11 So now we've seen both the movies. We've all seen both the movies.

00:03:14 Yeah, I was hyped to see the second one after it came out.

00:03:15 James, you didn't read the book as a teen, right?

00:03:19 No, well, not as a teen. I read it in my... I want to say mid-20s or so. I don't have

00:03:25 so much of a love or really much of a hate for Dune. Just sort of... It's a thing.

00:03:29 I liked Lord of the Rings much more myself. But yeah, no, I wasn't going to watch... I don't

00:03:37 watch movies very much.

00:03:38 Right.

00:03:38 Lately, especially. I've never been much of a movie guy. But yeah, no, the opportunity to

00:03:42 look over the movies and get a sense of what's going on. Yeah. And it's a lot of...

00:03:48 Once you start digging into the things, it gets really deep.

00:03:51 Yeah, we're going super deep on this. And also, I remember that my friends who liked

00:03:57 D&D and Knights of the Round Table and all of this, they were all people I liked.

00:04:02 And the people who were into Dune were like, druggy weirdos. No offense.

00:04:07 No offense to those who've studied every bit of lore, because Izzy's a total lore junkie.

00:04:14 Right? If there's lore, it's like, can't help to you, right? It's really attractive.

00:04:18 Oh, yeah. And I definitely got into the lore of Dune.

00:04:20 Well, yeah, because this guy spent four years researching this book. He basically spent another

00:04:25 four or five years writing it. And then there was a bunch of edits. So basically, he spent almost a

00:04:30 decade to come out with the book. So he's lore king. He read, according to his son, and we'll

00:04:35 get into the son's biography, Frank Herbert read like 200 books, learned how to write Arabic

00:04:41 languages and think in Arabic and even Chinese or Mandarin and just went all in. And what we're

00:04:47 looking at here is some really, really deep stuff, because I'm almost like, why does this thing even

00:04:52 exist? Like I understand why Lord of the Rings exists, Tolkien loved playing with languages.

00:04:56 He also lost all of his friends in the First World War. And where to me, Dune is about sadism.

00:05:02 Yeah.

00:05:03 The Lord of the Rings is about sorrow. The elves are all leaving, it's the end of an era,

00:05:10 and they have battles they can't win. And of course, I mean, Tolkien knew a massive amount

00:05:14 of sorrow over the course of his life. So that all makes sense to me. And Dune is not something

00:05:21 that I understand. So we did do a lot of deep background. We've been talking about this for

00:05:25 a couple of days now, reading biographies and really getting in deep, because I'm like,

00:05:30 well, why does this even exist? Why is there this planet? He originally was going to set it on Mars.

00:05:34 But then he said, oh, people got too many associations with Mars, like the Orson Welles

00:05:38 thing and all of that. So he ended up making up this completely fictitious planet. Why does this

00:05:43 exist? Why was he so drawn to it? Now, so we've got a list of the names. We'll try to provide some

00:05:51 general descriptions about this. But we're not going to start with the story. We're going to

00:05:56 start with the writer. And I know this personally, as does Izzy, because we've both written things,

00:06:02 right? I write what I know. And so I write a lot of philosophical stuff. I write about childhood

00:06:08 stuff, and so on. Frustrated intellectuals. So you write what you know. And knowing that,

00:06:15 so the more vivid the world is that you're creating, the more personal it must be to you.

00:06:20 And the deeper it is to you and the more common other people's experience of whatever you're

00:06:26 unconsciously writing about, the more it connects with other people. If that makes sense. Izzy has

00:06:30 written what she knows, having murdered countless people on spaceships. She's written all of that.

00:06:34 All from first person experience. Basically a diary.

00:06:37 Absolutely. So are we going to make a case here about Frank Herber and his possible,

00:06:45 we don't know, his possible motivations for this, what was going on unconsciously? Because

00:06:50 to me, when I look at a movie, the first thing I look for is what's not there.

00:06:54 And what's not there is humanity, likable characters, depth of humor.

00:07:01 There's no children. There's no families. No warmth.

00:07:04 No warmth. There's a little bit between the father and Paul.

00:07:08 A glimpse. But then the father, who's warm and nice relative to everyone else,

00:07:13 immediately gets slaughtered. So what does that say?

00:07:17 Was there warmth between Chani and Paul?

00:07:20 A little bit here and there in the movie.

00:07:23 I mean, they seem so unromantic.

00:07:25 No, but obviously they kissed and stuff, but nothing seemed warm, really.

00:07:31 Yeah. I think they were kissing or just exchanging vital fluids in the desert.

00:07:35 But she also, Zendaya, and this is something I mentioned walking out of the movie,

00:07:40 she's like the angriest girlfriend in every movie I'm in.

00:07:43 She's always a loving person. She's always extremely angry.

00:07:47 She's always extremely angry. And I just thought it was kind of funny because oftentimes women are

00:07:52 the transmitters of religion, if not downright superstition. And you had all these women who

00:07:57 were really scientific and skeptical yelling at all these men who were really mystical and

00:08:01 religious. I'm like, "I'm not really sure." So the genesis of the story is Frank Herbert was

00:08:10 an incredibly frustrated writer. So there's this story, probably apocryphal, at the age of eight.

00:08:15 And we get into his childhood. He said, "I want to be an author. I want to be an author." But by

00:08:19 the time he got into his forties, he had nothing. He was making a couple of hundred bucks at best

00:08:22 a year from his writing and constant rejections. And he couldn't figure out what was going wrong.

00:08:27 He even had a mentor, Vance, who was going to co-write with him, who was a successful writer.

00:08:32 So obviously he had some charisma, but just a complete failure. And he wrote these haunting

00:08:35 poems about how his life was slipping by and he was achieving nothing. So what happened was he

00:08:41 heard about a story that the US government was stopping a desert. I think it was in California,

00:08:48 with some agricultural something, something.

00:08:50 Paul Yeah. So he hired a play and he flew out. He was

00:08:53 going to write about all of this for a magazine. And he started writing and he just had this

00:08:59 affinity to the desert and passion about the desert. So he started imagining a desert planet.

00:09:06 And that's sort of where he got the idea for the stories. And it kind of grew from there. But we're

00:09:13 going to go into Frank Herbert's childhood because the movie is chilling. It's sadistic, cold, cruel,

00:09:21 violence is everywhere. It's how everything is solved. It's either violence or manipulation,

00:09:28 like brutal kind of manipulation. So why would somebody create an inventor world like that?

00:09:34 So we have to look at this guy's childhood and this guy's life. And so we're going to start

00:09:40 even further back to his ancestry. So according to his, I think it was his grandmother, they were

00:09:46 descended from a concubine of Henry VIII. So when he writes about the fall of a house where there's

00:09:54 a noble, a concubine and a child, he's digging deep into family history. And it's just, it's

00:10:03 so much easier to write what you know, than to invent out of nothing. So he's got this family

00:10:10 history, his own grandparents were outright socialists, if not communists, who joined this

00:10:16 total hippie dippy, everyone owes everything, nonsense commune without prices. And it all

00:10:21 generally does, it decayed over the space of sort of five to eight years. And his grandparents ended

00:10:25 up running this store, which was okay. But they didn't make any particular success. So they were

00:10:31 drawn heavily to these leftist causes. And that's sort of where he came from. Frank Herbert himself

00:10:38 has claimed to have remembered when he was a year old, he walked under some table with a tablecloth.

00:10:43 And I mean, I remember around that age, I'm not going to say that's impossible. And the other

00:10:48 thing that was pretty important was two, two and a half years of age. And this says a lot about how

00:10:53 he was not protected. His own parents, the writer's own parents were these binge drinking,

00:10:59 constantly fighting on the brink of divorce, complete failures in business and just a mess.

00:11:06 And at the age of two and a half, Frank Herbert was almost killed, he almost lost his eye,

00:11:11 because he was attacked by a dog that was tied on a chain. Now, the dog clamped onto his face,

00:11:16 and he carried the scar all the way through his life. And the only reason that Frank Herbert lived

00:11:21 or didn't lose an eye was because he fell backwards from the attack. And the dog's chain

00:11:28 was too short for the dog to continue attacking him. Now, whether this so you've got some two

00:11:33 year old roaming around some crazy, violent dog, or maybe just maybe the kid who was two and a half

00:11:40 was poking the dog aggressive towards the dog, angry the dog. And that's what caused the attack.

00:11:44 Of course, we won't know. But that's pretty, pretty wild stuff. And we're going to tie that

00:11:50 into the book in a little bit. Then the next thing that we get is at the age of nine. He

00:11:56 well, no, there's no before that there was a native. So he's out there fishing, right? So he

00:12:00 was an outdoorsman completely. And he used a lot of his outdoor tricks and tips in in do like the

00:12:05 sand walking, which we'll get to later. So he's out there fishing, he's not having any luck. And

00:12:09 there's this middle aged Indian or native indigenous guy who becomes close friends with him

00:12:14 teaches him how to fish, and so on. And Frank Herbert is convinced that this guy is ostracized

00:12:19 from his own tribe, this native, because he lives in a smokehouse in the middle of nowhere alone.

00:12:25 And he says he's convinced that he did the native guy who's his friend was ostracized because he was

00:12:30 a murderer, and the tribe had kicked him out. And the guy had hinted about some bad things in his

00:12:34 past, but there was no absolute certainty of this. So becomes friends with that. And then he ends up

00:12:41 he has a little canoe, and he ends up going 200 miles in a round trip up and down the river at

00:12:48 the age of nine. Yeah. And he does this by hanging on to tugboats and just, you know, being I guess

00:12:53 it's like Marty McFly in with the skateboard on the back of the car, you know, and some of the

00:12:58 tugboat people liked him and let him stay and all of that. So he's doing literally mental stuff.

00:13:02 He also finds a bunch of wood in the river, tows it in cell and trades it for a sailboat,

00:13:07 which at the age of 15, he puts ballast in and he ends up sailing with a friend of his 2000 miles

00:13:12 almost to Alaska and they slept on their overturned boat on like a smaller overturned boat.

00:13:20 I don't know if it was that boat or a canoe or something like that, but so he's, he's got this

00:13:24 incredibly wild, uncared for, unconnected and, and frankly, enormously dangerous.

00:13:32 I absolutely hate it.

00:13:33 For, you know, go out, have your adventures, but not 200 miles away when you're nine.

00:13:38 That's, that's, that's crazy. And so, yeah, this sort of lack of connection and

00:13:46 lack of protection, I think kind of defines things a lot in, in the books.

00:13:52 So his own father was cruel and demanded silence, demanded silence from his children.

00:13:59 So his, his grand, the, the, the father of the writer of Dune would listen to his news shows

00:14:04 on the radio and everyone had to be perfectly silent, or there would be this verbal abuse,

00:14:11 torrents of anger, rage, and so on. Right. How dare you interrupt with all of this kind of stuff.

00:14:15 So, so, um, the Frank Herbert created this world where it's so brutal, right?

00:14:26 That there's no kindness. There's no love. And, and in fact, the only guy who does love anyone

00:14:31 is the Asian doctor who loves his wife. And the fact that he loves his wife and the bad guys

00:14:37 kidnap his wife is why he betrays the house of tradies. And so the only affection that is shown

00:14:42 is between killed.

00:14:43 Well, yeah. The only affection that's shown is, is the Paul's father to Paul.

00:14:48 Yeah.

00:14:48 And then Paul's father gets murdered in the whole house and everything gets wiped out.

00:14:53 Yeah.

00:14:53 So that's, hmm, affection. So great. Or it's the Asian doctor who destroys the house of

00:14:59 tradies by betraying them to the bad guys because he loves his wife.

00:15:02 And there's a little bit of affection between the, the Duke and his concubine. But again,

00:15:07 like that all becomes a tragedy, you know?

00:15:09 Right.

00:15:10 Right.

00:15:11 There's also some, there's some affection. It's more, you know, superior to subordinate,

00:15:15 but it's all from Paul to Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, who are his, he grew up around them and

00:15:23 they trained him in combat, but there's also a real bonding kind of affection, like uncles.

00:15:27 Yeah, there is, but there are also coaches who were quite brutal on him.

00:15:32 True.

00:15:33 Right.

00:15:33 No, very true. Very true.

00:15:34 Yeah. Who's, who's the Gurney? Gurney is the guy who trains Paul in the movie, right?

00:15:39 Yes. In that scene, he's not his normal training. His normal training partner is

00:15:43 Duncan Idaho, who's not present because he's went ahead to Iraq as Aquaman. Pretty much.

00:15:47 Okay. No, because it's Jason Momoa.

00:15:49 Yeah, Mr. Beard.

00:15:50 That's the other guy, right. And so, yeah, there's kind of an affection and loyalty,

00:15:54 but they, they're half killing him the whole time. And when Paul says, I don't feel like it,

00:15:59 it's like, "Why are you doing this?"

00:16:01 Combat comes to you and all of this kind of stuff.

00:16:03 No, no, no. Didn't his son say that that, that was very much him? Like,

00:16:07 "Oh, you're not in the mood." Like the wrong words would just kind of trigger.

00:16:11 So Frank Herbert, with his kids, his kids would occasionally say, "I'll try."

00:16:16 And this was a massive trigger word for Frank Herbert with regards to his own children. He

00:16:22 would like scream at them, you know, "Do or do not, there is no try." No, not Yoda style, but

00:16:27 he would be like trying to say, "I'll try or I'm going to give the shot as it's the mark of a loser."

00:16:31 It's weak.

00:16:33 That's a great point because so much of Dune inspired Star Wars, you know?

00:16:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:38 For sure.

00:16:38 And the bad guys win because they have no attachments to anyone or anything other than

00:16:43 power, right? So he's created this world and he's drawn to this world of the desert, the writer.

00:16:49 Now the desert, of course, is going to be harsh on kids because the resources are so

00:16:53 tight and life and death is like one sip of water away. So they have to be incredibly

00:16:58 harsh on their children. And the other novel where he wrote a bunch of other novels, but

00:17:02 another novel that he wrote, which he was fairly known for before Dune was, I can't remember the

00:17:07 name of it, but it basically was a novel about a submarine.

00:17:09 Under pressure.

00:17:10 Under pressure, yeah. And so the novel about the submarine is interesting because that's

00:17:14 another environment where death is just a moment. I think if you've ever seen the movie Dust Boat,

00:17:18 it's a German movie about a submarine. It's terrifying because, you know, one leak and

00:17:22 you're dead, right? And it's about a submarine in World War II and the German crew on it. It's

00:17:26 a really wild film. So he's created this environment. He's did this repeatedly where

00:17:32 death is one slip away and therefore you have to be very harsh on everyone because only violence

00:17:40 wins, only sadism and coldness and brutality wins. And the good people are idiots.

00:17:47 Yeah.

00:17:48 Now, again, I don't know if that's the case in the book, but what's the dad's name?

00:17:52 Leto.

00:17:53 Leto. Okay. So Leto, who's the dad, is nice. He's one of the nicer guys. He's the only vaguely

00:18:02 nice guy in the first part, I think, of the movie. So evidence for that, his son says,

00:18:08 "I don't want to be a Duke." Because the whiny Luke, well, I know Luke came later, but like the

00:18:14 whiny, "I don't want my destiny kid." Isn't that also in Star Wars? Not just Luke Skywalker, but

00:18:21 is it Anakin? Remember the guy from the meme who's talking to the girl and then she loses

00:18:27 her smile in that sort of, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Anakin Skywalker."

00:18:30 Hayden Christensen or something. It's Anakin?

00:18:33 Yeah.

00:18:33 Anakin also, wasn't he super whiny? I mean, I watched those movies so long ago and I think

00:18:37 I fell asleep through part of them, but he's like the super whiny, "I deny my destiny."

00:18:42 That's just something you have to say. You can't have a great man in modern shows.

00:18:46 Yeah, that's very much a facet of the movie.

00:18:48 Even Napoleon, which we did a review. Even Napoleon, the movie was like,

00:18:52 he's just some weird, rutting, strange, you can't have a great man. So in order to

00:18:58 sop to the masses, Paul, because in the books, Jared, you were saying, he like, "Yeah, Messiah,

00:19:04 sounds good." He's got some conflicts with some of these aspects, but it's not this big whiny,

00:19:09 "I don't want to be a pirate."

00:19:11 Yeah.

00:19:12 So two modes.

00:19:14 Money and then-

00:19:14 No, no, no.

00:19:15 Yeah, we were talking about this.

00:19:16 It's very much like, no, he wants... The issue in the book is that he wants to become as great as

00:19:22 his dad, but it's like, "Hey, I'm going to have to lead this great house." There's some scary

00:19:26 aspects of that, it's understandable, but he wants that. It's not like he's like, "Oh, I want to be

00:19:31 a pilot to this."

00:19:32 Yeah. Well, it seems a lot, I don't know, in the second movie, in Dune 2,

00:19:36 it seems like there was a sudden switch halfway through where he was like, "I don't know. I'm

00:19:41 kind of indecisive. I don't really want to do this." And then halfway through, he's like, "Heck

00:19:44 yeah, I'm a god." Right?

00:19:46 Oh, god. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:47 And it seemed like-

00:19:48 And there was no transition. The whole movie is him resisting it, and then it's off screen when

00:19:52 he changes his mind. And it all happens in about two seconds.

00:19:55 That's a pure contrivance of the movie.

00:19:58 To me, it's as bad as you don't know what happens to the ring at the end of Lord of the Rings. They

00:20:03 just go into a mountain, come out and say, "We won." It's like, "No, that's the whole movie."

00:20:07 It's him like, "I don't want to be a... Wait a minute. I do, I do."

00:20:10 And it's like, "What causes that transition? What happens?" I don't know. It drove me a little crazy.

00:20:15 Now, who do we think at this table, who at this table would be the best at imitating

00:20:20 Timothee Chalamet's two acting modes?

00:20:22 Oh, my gosh.

00:20:24 Izzy, would you like to give it a try?

00:20:25 No, I'm okay. I will pass this one.

00:20:27 Okay. I think I could do the murmuring. Maybe, Jared, you could do the other one?

00:20:31 Which... Wait, hold on. I think you got all of this stuff.

00:20:35 All right. So my imitation of Timothee Chalamet's audition.

00:20:40 "Yeah, I can talk really quietly and have no vocal content whatsoever."

00:20:46 That's all he's got. He's got two modes. There's absolutely nothing in between.

00:20:52 It's either one. It's like having a volume that's binary. One or infinity. It's like,

00:20:58 murmuring you can barely hear an Oystat meme with the Russian national anthem played at

00:21:02 maximum volume with the sound burping. Oh, my gosh. That was crazy.

00:21:07 All right. This is Jared's quality on the games.

00:21:09 There you go. But that is very much what they've... Well, what Dune kind of is in and of itself.

00:21:14 It's either the subterfuge and plans within plans. We're going to kill people or like...

00:21:19 - Blazes from space. - Yeah.

00:21:21 People's heads. That was definitely in the movie. Is that also in the book?

00:21:24 What's that?

00:21:25 Like the two modes in the book is like...

00:21:27 - I don't know. - No, the book is way more subtle.

00:21:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I thought. Okay.

00:21:32 So Frank Herbert, he claimed to have an IQ of 190 based upon some tests in school.

00:21:42 I mean, I'm not going to argue with the guy. He obviously was very intelligent.

00:21:46 But then later on, he said that IQ wasn't like a big thing.

00:21:51 So this idea that you came from a higher status as this family did

00:21:55 and then collapsed down to a lower status, just by the by, this is also was my dad's

00:22:01 thing as well, but the house Molyneux, like we were all nobility and aristocrats and so on.

00:22:06 And he was quite obsessed with the fall of the house of Molyneux. He said,

00:22:08 "We have to restore the family's name. We have to restore our prominence."

00:22:13 Oh, good job doing that.

00:22:14 So my mom was like, "Dad, I have some good news and I have some bad news."

00:22:19 [laughter]

00:22:20 Prominence, yes.

00:22:21 Our name is prominence again. Remember, the bad news is we're Satan.

00:22:27 Yes.

00:22:30 So his parents were constantly starting and failing businesses.

00:22:35 Do you guys know anyone like this?

00:22:36 This is kind of a common thing for a lot of artists that their parents are like really

00:22:40 bad at business, but can't just have a regular job because their lives are too chaotic.

00:22:44 So they keep having these get-rich-quick schemes, and then it all collapses,

00:22:47 and it's a mess, and they have to move and flee their creditors.

00:22:50 This kind of instability is quite common among artists.

00:22:52 Well, yeah, and that was something that he reproduced.

00:22:54 Until the success of Dune, which was too late because his kids were already mostly grown.

00:23:00 Yeah, and they moved like 20 times to avoid bills.

00:23:02 Yeah, they moved like 20 times to avoid bills.

00:23:05 Okay, why would they?

00:23:06 So you want to give people that minor extra-

00:23:09 Yeah, so Frank Herbert, basically, he got married to a woman and had a kid named Penny,

00:23:14 and basically he went to the military and was, I don't remember why, but he was honorably just

00:23:20 discharged for an injury or something.

00:23:22 He tripped on a support rope for a tent and got a head injury.

00:23:26 Yeah, skill issue.

00:23:29 Can't walk blind.

00:23:30 I don't know how to walk, man.

00:23:31 I thought you could walk it.

00:23:32 Walk better.

00:23:33 The photographer, his idea, his whole point is to see things.

00:23:35 I'm really into details, except for where I'm walking, so I get a head injury.

00:23:40 Oh, no.

00:23:41 Maybe you had to explain some of the writing.

00:23:43 There's two key group phobias of dogs and tents over the course of his life.

00:23:48 All right, sorry.

00:23:49 And then he comes back to find his wife and child missing.

00:23:52 They're just gone.

00:23:53 They're gone.

00:23:53 So what kind of guy was he that his wife took their kid, just disappeared?

00:23:58 Imagine just being like, "Oh, crap, he's got a head injury.

00:24:00 Got to run before he's back."

00:24:01 Now, every time you and mom aren't home, obviously I have that same experience, but so far,

00:24:06 you've come back, which is good.

00:24:09 So far.

00:24:09 Right.

00:24:11 So he was constantly avoiding child support.

00:24:15 So oddly enough, he had a daughter named Penny to whom he barely gave...

00:24:20 A penny.

00:24:20 Thank you, Jared, for taking that one.

00:24:26 I couldn't complete it because my daughter was...

00:24:28 I'm sure.

00:24:28 I was watching my daughter solely for a body.

00:24:30 You have a knife.

00:24:31 Actually, yeah, why is there a knife on the back?

00:24:35 I think you just broke that for reasons of your own.

00:24:38 Is that a tooth of Chanteloupe?

00:24:40 I don't know.

00:24:40 It's a butter knife.

00:24:41 I would also say that it's blunt.

00:24:43 That's not going to stop.

00:24:45 What I mean is it's going to be more painful.

00:24:47 No, it's going to be a slow death.

00:24:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:49 She's going to sand me down to size.

00:24:51 She'll get through the shield.

00:24:52 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:24:53 Oh, oh, oh, oh.

00:24:54 No, don't get me to the hand-to-hand combat.

00:24:56 All right, all right, all right.

00:24:56 That's going to cut.

00:24:57 That's going to cut.

00:24:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:58 So his parents tried a variety of businesses.

00:25:00 The one that strikes me that I remember, and a lot of this comes from his son wrote a biography

00:25:06 of his father and their whole family and all of that.

00:25:08 So his parents in the middle of the depression, which of course was also within the war on

00:25:16 alcohol prohibition, started a dassal where I assume they were with alcohol served, which I

00:25:21 assume meant that they paid off the local cops and it was doing well, but they got into some

00:25:26 conflict with the people they started the business with.

00:25:28 What was the name of it?

00:25:30 There's something, uh, the Spanish castle.

00:25:32 Spanish castle.

00:25:32 Right.

00:25:33 So his parents got into some conflict with the people they started business with and

00:25:38 they raged quit.

00:25:39 They walked away from it.

00:25:40 They didn't ask for any payments.

00:25:41 They just raged quit.

00:25:42 And then the business completely succeeded and lasted until the sixties major bands played

00:25:47 there.

00:25:47 It was hugely successful and I assume hugely profitable.

00:25:51 So his parents walked away and then they started a, I think it's a gas station or convenience

00:25:56 store and ran it into the ground because they were drinking too much.

00:26:00 And maybe the drinking too much was why the other people had conflicts with them about

00:26:04 the business.

00:26:04 Or the drinking started because they were resentful about the success of the business.

00:26:09 They would know they were already drinkers, but according to the biography of the family,

00:26:13 it got worse.

00:26:14 It really escalated.

00:26:15 Right.

00:26:15 Like a lot of people, um, if you can't, if you drink, you can't handle your emotions.

00:26:19 And when you get emotions, you can't handle you drink even more.

00:26:22 And it becomes a vicious cycle.

00:26:23 And so for, for which childhood he had these extremes of like, they were drunk and they

00:26:28 didn't care.

00:26:28 He could do whatever he wanted.

00:26:29 Everything was okay.

00:26:30 And, but then also when they're sober and being parents, you know, they're just wildly

00:26:35 abusive and strict and authoritarian.

00:26:36 I don't know about straight.

00:26:38 That's when he said,

00:26:40 No, cause the dad's like, you can't talk.

00:26:41 You can't speak.

00:26:42 Well, that's just abusive.

00:26:43 I don't know if that's straight.

00:26:44 Because to me, and, and this, sorry, that's fair.

00:26:47 This is a minor shibboleth that I have, which is the people say strict and it's like, okay,

00:26:50 if you're that strict, why you're an alcoholic?

00:26:52 Like clearly you're a, you don't have any strictness with regards to yourself.

00:26:55 Strict for you, not for me.

00:26:56 Yeah.

00:26:57 Yeah.

00:26:58 Um, so yeah, so there's a Frank Herbert father to write is he moved 20 times to escape his

00:27:03 child support payments and the Freeman are.

00:27:05 Oh, nomads.

00:27:07 Nomads.

00:27:08 Right.

00:27:08 So this doesn't come, the people who are free are the people constantly on the move.

00:27:12 And, uh, it's also.

00:27:14 No, that's, that's all this man does is he, he like repaints these, these, uh, errors

00:27:18 and issues and evils as good.

00:27:20 And the writers are okay.

00:27:21 Right.

00:27:23 Right.

00:27:23 So he also was a guy who got now I, I like psychology and I obviously think it's very

00:27:31 interesting discipline, but there's a real dark side to it, which is where you can impugn

00:27:35 unconscious motives to anything.

00:27:37 Don't you?

00:27:37 So there was, uh, there's this story that you remember the one about the spit balls.

00:27:42 Yes.

00:27:43 Yeah.

00:27:43 So basically he had, he was shooting spit balls at people in class and stuff like that

00:27:48 because he was bored and he shot it at the teacher and it hit her back and she turned

00:27:52 around and she's like, who did that?

00:27:53 And no one said it, but all the kids looked to Frank and basically she's like, oh, I'll

00:27:58 deal with you after class or whatever.

00:28:00 And after class.

00:28:01 And he's terrified the whole time.

00:28:01 Yeah.

00:28:01 He's really scared.

00:28:02 And then after class she goes up and she's really mad at him and he goes, why are you

00:28:05 mad at me?

00:28:06 And then she shakes it.

00:28:07 She starts shaking him and he's just screaming like, I'm not mad at you.

00:28:09 And, uh.

00:28:12 So she kept repeating, I'm not mad at you while screaming at him.

00:28:14 It's like that thing.

00:28:15 Have you seen that video with the dogs where the guy screams the dog, I love you.

00:28:19 Right.

00:28:19 Oh yeah.

00:28:20 And the dog freaks out.

00:28:21 And then he, he pets the dog and he's like, you were the worst thing to ever exist.

00:28:25 No one loves you.

00:28:26 And the dog's all happy and stuff.

00:28:27 Cause again, the tone of voice, not the words.

00:28:30 Yeah.

00:28:30 Everyone thinks that it's about the dog.

00:28:32 It's about his own parenting.

00:28:33 But anyway, so.

00:28:34 It's like that.

00:28:35 It's like that little thing, just saying that people respond more to like, what's actually

00:28:38 being right.

00:28:40 Like, yeah, he was like with the dog experiment or whatever.

00:28:42 Right.

00:28:42 Yeah.

00:28:42 He was saying really things to the dog, but he was doing it in a nice manner of being

00:28:46 all friendly.

00:28:47 That's right.

00:28:48 The dog was like, okay.

00:28:49 And it's the same opposite with the, I love you.

00:28:51 Right.

00:28:51 And so she's screaming.

00:28:53 I'm not.

00:28:53 So this is when, as a kid, he says he discovered the unconscious that people could do the opposite

00:28:57 of what they're saying.

00:28:58 And he became an empiricist.

00:28:59 He says that you judge people by their actions, not their words.

00:29:03 Now the problem was though, that he got really into this Jungian stuff.

00:29:07 Now Jung is interesting and I owe some debt to him, but it can be a whole, but no bother

00:29:13 in terms of every time his kids would do something, he would interpret this as them as having

00:29:18 unconscious buried motives.

00:29:19 So there's no examples given in the book, but I assume it's something like, you're allowed

00:29:25 because you're angry at me for working on my book and you're trying to interrupt it

00:29:29 and get my attention because you're feeling rejected.

00:29:32 But like all as opposed to kids, sometimes I just laugh.

00:29:34 Yeah.

00:29:35 Right.

00:29:35 There was his granddaughter at one point, he was much older.

00:29:37 His granddaughter was riding a bike around and singing or yelling at the top of his lungs.

00:29:42 And he's like, quiet that kid down, that kind of stuff.

00:29:43 Right.

00:29:44 Even when he was old guy, he just, he never got over his, his hostility towards children

00:29:49 and their life or noise or energy.

00:29:52 So I assume like if, if these kids dropped something, he wouldn't say, Oh, an accident

00:29:57 or whatever.

00:29:58 Right.

00:29:58 He would say, you must be secretly angry at me because that was something I really liked

00:30:03 and you're acting out your ass.

00:30:04 So he would give these deep motivations to his kids for what I assume it just accidents

00:30:08 or could be.

00:30:09 Yeah.

00:30:10 And that's how do you deal with that as a kid?

00:30:12 You can't, you just, you just get into lost world or fog land or something like that.

00:30:17 God.

00:30:17 Yeah.

00:30:17 All right.

00:30:19 You come up with deep motivation later on.

00:30:23 Well, we're doing some deep motivations, but we've got some evidence here.

00:30:27 Okay.

00:30:27 I know for sure.

00:30:28 So because I wanted to get this right, and I'm sorry to be reading from this, this biography.

00:30:34 Uh, I think I kept the name of the biography in case you wanted to look it up.

00:30:37 Yeah.

00:30:37 Dreamers of June.

00:30:39 Yeah.

00:30:39 Brian Herbert is the son and it's called dreamer of June, the biography of Frank Herbert, which

00:30:43 came out in 2003, I think it is by the Torah publishing group.

00:30:46 It actually won a Hugo, which is a science fiction award or a literary award.

00:30:50 Okay.

00:30:52 So I'm going to read this.

00:30:53 It has over like 800 pages or something, doesn't it?

00:30:56 And yet the audio book, which I listened to a good chunk of is like 19 hours or something

00:31:00 like that.

00:31:01 So.

00:31:03 Yes.

00:31:03 Well, you know, the guy wrote long books.

00:31:05 So does his son.

00:31:06 So, um, I'm going to read this cause I wanted to get this right.

00:31:11 And who was it?

00:31:12 I think it was you, Jared, who got this connection with the black box.

00:31:16 Oh, absolutely.

00:31:16 Oh yeah.

00:31:17 Yeah.

00:31:18 So, uh, Jared, you want to talk about the black box for those who don't know what that is?

00:31:22 So in, in the book, in the story, in the movie, there's this black box that the Benny Chester,

00:31:27 it's the Reverend mothers, uh, used to test if someone has freewill self-control to a degree,

00:31:34 and they'll have someone put their hand in this box.

00:31:36 You don't know what's in it.

00:31:37 Or they'll tell you like it's pain in the box.

00:31:40 Yeah.

00:31:40 And you keep your hand in the box.

00:31:42 You have to keep your hand in the box.

00:31:43 And I've got a needle to your neck.

00:31:46 And if you take your hand out of the box, I'm going to kill you.

00:31:48 I'm going to pull, it's a poison needle.

00:31:50 Now I got to tell you, I find that really annoying.

00:31:52 Tell me more.

00:31:53 But sorry, is there more you wanted to say about the black box?

00:31:55 What's annoying?

00:31:56 I'll tell you what's annoying is it's not really free.

00:31:58 Well, if you've got to, if you're going to die, if you like it's, it's lame, it's like you can't

00:32:03 win.

00:32:03 Of course, you're going to keep your hand in the box because the alternative is to die.

00:32:06 It's all an excuse for abuse.

00:32:09 Well, I think it was you who make this connection once we, right.

00:32:14 Okay.

00:32:14 So, uh, this is from, uh, the sons.

00:32:19 Now it's true.

00:32:19 Yes.

00:32:20 It seems to be true because there are other people who verified it.

00:32:23 So the son writes, and I don't know how old the son is here, but he's young because he's

00:32:30 not in his teens yet.

00:32:31 So he's the kid is young.

00:32:32 This is the son talking about the guy who wrote to dad was by his own admission, a man

00:32:37 obsessed with turning over stones to see what would scurry out with unmasking lies.

00:32:42 This was evident in his dealings with his children.

00:32:46 Now I'm like, Oh, he's going to be really interrogating.

00:32:49 Oh, how interesting.

00:32:50 And it's like, no, no, no.

00:32:51 No, it's a new level.

00:32:53 Yeah.

00:32:53 The son says he had a world war two lie detector, a us Navy unit, a small black box with a dial.

00:33:03 It had ominous wires and a gray cuff that he wrapped tightly around my arm.

00:33:07 The first time he used the machine on me, he accused me of secretly hitting my brother

00:33:12 and he was going to get the truth out of me.

00:33:14 He said the lie detector always revealed falsehood, which was not, as I would learn later,

00:33:20 exactly the case.

00:33:21 Admittedly, I was lying about hitting my brother and the machine indicated this.

00:33:25 So I got a licking.

00:33:26 It's a beating.

00:33:27 I assume he goes on to say after that, he used the lie detector on me regularly and on Bruce

00:33:33 Bruce's, the youngest child who was later gay and died of AIDS in the early nineties.

00:33:38 It goes on to say, if anything came up such as an item missing from his desk or questions

00:33:43 about where I had been after school, he would say in a clipped voice, I'm putting you on

00:33:47 the lie detector.

00:33:49 Let's go with the other room.

00:33:50 What happened to Batman?

00:33:51 With that, he would grab my arm and lead me to the machine on the way.

00:33:57 I broke out in a sweat rehearsing what I would say and how it would say it.

00:34:01 Would he ask such and such?

00:34:02 My mind was a world full of terror.

00:34:05 The machine was kept in his study and he only brought it up when I was in trouble.

00:34:09 It was set up on a wooden table, but two straight back chairs pulled up to it.

00:34:12 One on each side, he pointed to one of the chairs and I slipped into it shaking, towering

00:34:18 over me.

00:34:19 He plugged the machine in and tapped it a couple of times for effect ostensibly to free

00:34:23 a sticky needle, a bare ceiling bulb through his hulking shadow across the table.

00:34:30 Okay.

00:34:30 So there's this kind of cliche that when you interrogate, there's a bare bulb, you know,

00:34:35 they don't even give you a shade because it's just some back dingy.

00:34:38 You know, that harsh light in your eye.

00:34:40 Roll up, sorry, roll up your left sleeve.

00:34:45 He said, gruffly, it's not Batman, is he?

00:34:47 It's an acting that gruffness.

00:34:49 Shaking, I complied and he wrapped the sensor cuff around my arm.

00:34:56 A stream of questions and accusatory statements ensued from him and like a prisoner,

00:35:00 undergoing the tortures of grand inquisitor talk about a perspiration poured from my brow.

00:35:05 So that's a reference to the Spanish inquisition where they would question you about your faith

00:35:09 and if you answered wrong, they'd kill you, but burn you to death.

00:35:15 Fun.

00:35:15 Dad was too smart and phrased every query in the precise way that put me in the worst

00:35:21 possible light.

00:35:21 After each question, he studied the machine intently and invariably pronounced me guilty

00:35:27 of something.

00:35:27 According to Howie Hanson, this is a half-native friend of his.

00:35:32 According to Howie Hanson, who disapproved of the use of the device on Bruce and me,

00:35:36 Dad had a way of rigging the machine to indicate that we were lying even when we were

00:35:40 telling the truth.

00:35:42 One day, my father would write of a young Paul Atreides in Dune, ordered to place his

00:35:47 hand into the blackness of a box in the ordeal of the Gom Jabar.

00:35:51 Paul was commanded not to withdraw his hand no matter how much pain he felt on penalty

00:35:55 of death from a poison needle held at his neck.

00:35:58 Terrified, the boy complied, pain throbbed up his arm, blah, blah, blah.

00:36:01 Okay, so that's interesting.

00:36:06 So, okay, he would paint me in the worst light.

00:36:09 Wasn't Frank Herbert also a journalist?

00:36:11 What did, how does that, did it, like, we just had a Don Lemon interview with the Elon

00:36:15 Musk, what is it, painting him in any kind of a good light?

00:36:18 - The worst possible light.

00:36:20 - Paint me in the worst light.

00:36:22 - Yeah.

00:36:22 - He's got this intelligent skill to just frame me as the worst thing ever, you know.

00:36:26 - Yeah.

00:36:27 So, and now, somebody mentioned, and I don't know if this is the case, Jared, you might

00:36:33 remember that the book opens with the Gom Jabar scene, like the beginning of Dune, is

00:36:38 that, or it's early on?

00:36:39 - I mean, it's very early on.

00:36:40 - Yes.

00:36:41 - I wouldn't say it's the introduction into the book, or the, like, but it's relatively

00:36:45 early in.

00:36:45 - Because I'm vaguely tempted to read it, because what I want to know in the book is

00:36:49 how quickly is he signaling to people that this is a book about sadism?

00:36:54 And cruelty to children, because Paul is 15 in the beginning, well, is he, because the

00:37:01 book takes place over quite a long time.

00:37:03 - And when you start on Caliban, this water world that's nice and comforting, and he's

00:37:08 the Duke's son.

00:37:10 - Oh, the one he talks about to angry girlfriend on the Dune cliff?

00:37:12 - Yes.

00:37:13 - Yes.

00:37:14 - Yeah, when he lives on the castle on the cliff.

00:37:17 - Izzy, I'm curious, like, what did, like, because you hadn't read the book, but what

00:37:20 did you think when you saw, like, the black box scene, you know?

00:37:24 - I was very confused.

00:37:26 - Yeah?

00:37:26 - I think in the movie, they did not explain what was going on very well, maybe it was

00:37:31 that, or maybe I couldn't make out what they were saying, because man, these people were

00:37:34 murmurous.

00:37:34 - And screamers.

00:37:36 - No, but you had the closed caption.

00:37:39 - No, yes, I did, but do you mean in Dune 2 or in Dune?

00:37:42 - Dune 1.

00:37:43 - Dune 1.

00:37:44 Yeah, I was a bit confused, I'm sorry, I thought you meant Dune 2.

00:37:46 - Because they did have a black box scene in Dune 2, I forgot about that.

00:37:49 - They did, yeah.

00:37:49 - They did, that's right.

00:37:50 - That's what I thought you meant.

00:37:51 - Oh, yeah, they did, sorry.

00:37:52 - But Dune 1, I was a bit confused, but it kind of, at the end, I was also like, what

00:37:57 do you mean, there's pain in the box?

00:37:59 Just like, you got, like, what do you, like, he can't take his hand out because he's gonna

00:38:03 get killed, obviously he's gonna take the pain, right?

00:38:05 - Yeah, they didn't explain that well, at least in the book, is it pain through nerve

00:38:08 induction.

00:38:09 - Yeah, yeah, so I kind of thought, I was a bit confused, but I was also like, okay.

00:38:12 - Yeah, yep, yep.

00:38:14 - But in Dune 2, they definitely did not explain it very well at all in Dune 2, like that scene,

00:38:21 and like, why?

00:38:21 - At some point, like, in Dune 2.

00:38:23 - It was kind of pointless in Dune 2 when they were, when she said, put your hand in

00:38:27 the box to the bald guy.

00:38:28 - Sorry, you're gonna have to narrow that down a little bit, if the characters were

00:38:32 bald.

00:38:33 - The bald-faced, bald guy.

00:38:34 - Oh, the young guy, right?

00:38:34 - The young bald guy.

00:38:35 - The fade guy.

00:38:36 - The naked mole rat looking dude.

00:38:38 - Yeah.

00:38:38 - The son of Sting from the earlier movie.

00:38:40 - But yeah, that was when I was like, what's the point of this?

00:38:45 - You see, here's the thing too, if I was writing it, he would have pulled his hand

00:38:49 out like this.

00:38:50 - Yeah, yeah.

00:38:51 - Yeah, for context, giving the finger, yeah.

00:38:54 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.

00:38:56 So this is what, this is what the son writes about his father, he says, "Frank Herbert,

00:39:02 ever the psychoanalyst, might be surprised to realize that a major component of his own

00:39:06 behavior was mimicry of the subconscious variety.

00:39:10 He imitated the stern disciplinary measures taken against him by his father, who had

00:39:14 received them in turn from his own father.

00:39:16 It is interesting to note a curious habit that his father had while living in Burleigh

00:39:22 in the 1930s, a habit my father saw firsthand.

00:39:24 It seems that the old man enjoyed listening to the news on the radio, and when his

00:39:29 programs were on, no one could disturb him, and no one spoke at the risk of incurring

00:39:33 his ire.

00:39:34 Family members had to tiptoe around the house."

00:39:35 So when his son is talking about the lie detector, because that's appalling.

00:39:42 - Absolutely, good God.

00:39:43 - That's not having a temper.

00:39:45 - No.

00:39:46 - No.

00:39:46 - Right, that's cold, calculated, soul-destroying sadism.

00:39:50 - Yeah.

00:39:51 - Yes, straight up, like, I'd get physically abused as a kid, and that's like, you got

00:39:57 the pain, and then it's over, and it's terrible, like, to be sat down, like, you'd like-

00:40:01 - A whole ritual here.

00:40:02 - Nine or eight, like, shaking to get a strap put on him, and then to sit there as

00:40:06 someone's just, like, grilling your soul, your mind about what's going on.

00:40:10 - Yeah, that's like-

00:40:10 - That's like demonic, that's demonic.

00:40:12 Like, it's like a demonic possession, you're looking at somebody, and he was quite a big,

00:40:16 imposing guy, the dad, right?

00:40:18 - No, he said he's terrified of the way his dad looked, and if he, like, one eye was

00:40:22 twitching.

00:40:22 - He keeps talking about his creepy eyes.

00:40:25 - Yeah, yeah.

00:40:26 - Like, in the biography, just when we were reading it in the car yesterday, it was like,

00:40:30 everything was like, it seemed like every couple of paragraphs, he was saying something

00:40:34 about his creepy blue eyes, which is something.

00:40:36 - Yeah, right.

00:40:37 - So, it really tells you that he has, like, these dead eyes, I think, so.

00:40:39 - And he frankly did have blue eyes, and of course, all of the Freeman, they have blue

00:40:44 eyes, right?

00:40:44 - Super blue.

00:40:44 - Super blue, right, so, oh my gosh.

00:40:47 So, he says, "The lie," this is the son, "The lie detector was a complete admission

00:40:51 of failure on my father's part as a parent.

00:40:54 He couldn't communicate with his sons, having taken the time to bond with us, to learn what

00:40:59 made us tick.

00:40:59 Instead, he tried to crush our will and spirit.

00:41:02 There could be no deviation from the rules he prescribed.

00:41:05 The environment around him had to be absolute serenity to keep his mind in order so that

00:41:09 he might create his great work."

00:41:10 Izzy, do you remember what the kids was like, what the kid's life was like when he was working

00:41:17 on the 10 years that he was working on Dune?

00:41:19 - Oh, yeah, so the kids were not let in the house.

00:41:22 - Couldn't, there's no key.

00:41:23 - No, but here's the thing, and then later we found out that he only wrote from 12 a.m.

00:41:29 to 8 a.m.

00:41:30 So, basically, he sat inside all day and never let his kids inside, and he went under the

00:41:34 premise that he was writing, but he never actually wrote.

00:41:36 - Yeah, yeah, and maybe he was doing research, but he would not let his kids in the house,

00:41:43 had to be absolute silence.

00:41:44 - Well, I think it'd be tough, you know, 'cause you don't have, like, it's not like he has

00:41:47 an online computer that he can do research on.

00:41:49 Wouldn't he have to go to libraries and find new papers and books?

00:41:50 - Or he would get a bunch of books and read them at home.

00:41:52 - Yeah, I guess.

00:41:52 - Or sleeping during that time, because he's working all night, right?

00:41:56 - Right, right, right.

00:41:57 - He better be quite intense.

00:41:58 - So, yeah, that stuff is just, it's crazy.

00:42:03 - Well, and he's creating this environment where it's like there's ultra-isolation with

00:42:06 people all, with people around.

00:42:08 - Right, right, right.

00:42:08 - So, he says, so Penny was the first daughter from his first marriage.

00:42:14 Now, Penny came to live with him 'cause he was out of money, he couldn't pay the alimony

00:42:18 or child support, and therefore Penny came to live with him, I think, when he was in

00:42:22 her mid to late teens.

00:42:23 And the son says, "I never saw dad lift a finger against Penny, who came to stay with

00:42:28 us that summer."

00:42:28 One time he did get into a battle of wills with a tall, blonde teenager.

00:42:32 He insisted that she eat her dessert and then rubbed it into her hair when she refused to

00:42:38 do so.

00:42:38 For the most part, she didn't receive the brunt of his anger, which in its most severe

00:42:42 form became physical.

00:42:44 I think he felt boys could and should take more punishment in order to make men out of

00:42:48 us, right?

00:42:49 So, we talked about this before, Roman's argument in "My Novel Future," right?

00:42:53 - Yep.

00:42:53 - That civilization just makes you soft and you're easily pushed over.

00:42:57 Now, and it's interesting, it's fascinating to me, the gender swap, right?

00:43:03 The gender swap 'cause the lie detector was administered by the father.

00:43:09 - Oh.

00:43:10 - But who administers it in the book?

00:43:12 - The Bene Gesserit.

00:43:13 - The mother.

00:43:14 Now, the Bene Gesserit are modeled, according to "The Sun," on Frank Herbert had a bunch

00:43:20 of aunts who really, really worked very hard to convert him to Roman Catholicism, which

00:43:25 he resisted.

00:43:25 And this is why, so it's interesting to me in the movie that the women are all skeptical

00:43:30 and the men are all religious when it was the women who tried to--

00:43:32 - Yeah, he gender swapped everyone.

00:43:34 - Yeah, and so, and the Bene Gesserit, okay, Gesserit is modeled after Jesuit, right?

00:43:39 And the Bene Gesserit, they always struck me as having a little bit of Judaism in them

00:43:44 as well with the matriarchy and all that kind of stuff.

00:43:46 But it's interesting, the gender swap, like, what does that mean?

00:43:51 - He's just trying to blame women for it.

00:43:54 - Right, now that's always fair, right, and just, though.

00:43:58 - You guys, okay.

00:44:00 - That's what I'm saying.

00:44:03 - Yeah, it's the thing, so you cross your hands like this, put your thumbs up, and then

00:44:07 put your fingers forward.

00:44:07 - So I'll do that, and then just give me six months to get some abs, and then we'll just

00:44:11 complete the picture.

00:44:11 - So put your hands on the table, 'cause you gotta have a man spread with the arms.

00:44:14 - Yeah, yeah.

00:44:14 - And then, you gotta, yeah, you gotta put your thumbs back.

00:44:19 - Four cigars through every ear.

00:44:21 - Push your thumbs back as hard as you can.

00:44:23 - Right, no, that doesn't happen.

00:44:24 - Nice.

00:44:25 - Right, no, so do you think he's just transferring it to women to blame the women?

00:44:30 Is he secretly mad at his own mom?

00:44:31 At the women who choose these violent guys to have children with, or these sadistic,

00:44:35 is he saying there's female responsibility that he's not conscious of, or is he just

00:44:39 blaming the women?

00:44:40 - He hates his wife, or his ex-wife, 'cause he wouldn't pay child support.

00:44:43 - Right, right.

00:44:43 - He doesn't like women, so he's gonna blame women, probably.

00:44:46 - Right, but he also, I mean, he also is gonna hate men, too, because of, or, and I'm not

00:44:51 sure how exactly this comes in, but a lot of the thing, they show this a little bit

00:44:55 in the movie, it's much more in the book, where women are the ones that can, you know,

00:44:59 have a ton of power, and they can control, like the Bene Gesserit in particular, they're

00:45:05 able to convert the poison, that's like the Dune II stuff.

00:45:09 - Yeah, yeah.

00:45:09 - Oh, the blue, the water of life.

00:45:13 - Yeah, yeah.

00:45:13 But also, if they can control whether, the gender of the child.

00:45:16 - Right.

00:45:17 - Throughout the whole, the series of the books, the women are the ones that have power.

00:45:20 - Oh, I'm sorry, and--

00:45:22 - Like, don't get me wrong, like, at one point, there's like a Goddenberg and all that,

00:45:26 and Paul's this, you know, the superhuman, you know, but the women are the ones that

00:45:31 have lasting power throughout the whole situation.

00:45:34 - Oh, true.

00:45:34 - And then the ones that plan and plan, they control who, like the gene, genetic lines,

00:45:38 and all that.

00:45:38 - So his grandmother, sorry to interrupt, James, but his grandmother as well was kind

00:45:41 of autistic, could do incredible math in her head, was incredibly logical, brilliant, but

00:45:46 was this mountain woman.

00:45:48 So apparently, they're these super logical creatures who show up later in Dune, and he

00:45:52 based that on his grandmother, but sorry, James, you go.

00:45:54 - Yeah, and the final point in that whole thing of, you know, hating men, at least,

00:46:00 'cause he hates everybody, essentially, right?

00:46:02 But hating men is that, Benegasur in particular, the women are the only ones who are strong

00:46:10 enough to do the water of life thing, the only ones strong enough to go to the Gamjabar.

00:46:14 - Right.

00:46:15 - So the Gamjabar thing, it's a whole test of whether, you know, you can be, you have

00:46:19 this potential, and so there's like almost an effective ban on putting men into it, 'cause

00:46:24 it will kill them.

00:46:25 - Right.

00:46:25 - That's the whole story.

00:46:26 - So the whole culture is run by the women, and the poison excludes the men from participating

00:46:31 in those rituals?

00:46:32 - With the one exception of the Kwisatz.

00:46:34 - Yeah, yeah, that's the exception.

00:46:35 - What's that?

00:46:36 - Sorry, did you hear that?

00:46:37 - The Kwisatz.

00:46:37 - Is that a stroke?

00:46:38 What is that possession what's happening over at your vocal cords there?

00:46:41 - The Kwisatz Hanrak.

00:46:43 - What is that?

00:46:45 - Sorry, I've ran out of imaginary language here.

00:46:48 - That's not a character, that was, so that's what they say that Paul was destined to become

00:46:53 or be, the Benegasur are trying to birth a male version of them who can see the future

00:46:58 and the past.

00:46:58 - Right, if the Messiah.

00:46:59 - The Messiah, all that stuff, yeah.

00:47:01 - The universe is, and they don't miss a beat, like the universe is super mean, like they're

00:47:06 very explicit about that.

00:47:07 - Yes, yes, 'cause we all get the subtlety of, oh, it's a desert religion, like they

00:47:13 all are, like Islam and Judaism and Christianity, all desert-formed religions, so if you're

00:47:18 gonna have a Messiah, you gotta have some sand.

00:47:20 - But here's the difference, all right, now we know Herbert had like communist friends

00:47:24 and relatives and stuff like that, and this-

00:47:26 - Well, he was a socialist whether they were communist or not, but-

00:47:29 - No, no, he had this communist Jewish guy that would come over to the house who was

00:47:33 a friend.

00:47:34 - He, though the artist guy, but he, you know, so the communist socialist thing was a bit

00:47:39 of a blend back then, and I'm just cautious because some people would say I'm a democratic

00:47:45 socialist, communism is bad, but definitely hard left for sure, like his grandparents

00:47:50 were hard left in this commune and all that, right?

00:47:52 - Okay, so the Benegasur are trying to breed the perfect man, but they want to control

00:47:59 him, and now do they, how do they control people?

00:48:02 - So then what, so for example, they, like Fayed Rautha was supposed to be like the next

00:48:07 effort at creating the Kweezat Tadoracht.

00:48:09 - Okay, sorry, we've gone all, who's Fayed, what?

00:48:11 - The baron's nephew.

00:48:13 - Oh, yes, the naked mole-rat guy.

00:48:14 - Oh, yes, yes, yes.

00:48:15 - Okay, what's a good name for him that's gonna be naked mole-rat guy?

00:48:20 - I'm down with that, I'll remember that one.

00:48:22 - What about the big fat old one, the emperor?

00:48:24 - Yes.

00:48:24 - What do we call him?

00:48:25 - Oh, no, no, that's the baron.

00:48:26 - That's baron, okay, yeah.

00:48:28 - Baron who couldn't have kids, therefore he's?

00:48:30 - Baron.

00:48:31 - Baron, got it, very subtle.

00:48:32 - But I'm sorry, I'm gonna get some of that, and we're communists always trying to do,

00:48:36 they're trying to breed the perfect, you know, work beast, but they want to control it.

00:48:40 - Well, and the communists win through language initially, right?

00:48:46 - Ooh.

00:48:47 - They stir up all this resentment, because the movie opened, and I'm like, I tell you,

00:48:51 just my first experience sitting down to watch the first one, right?

00:48:54 - Mm-hmm.

00:48:54 - So it's like, oh, we're gonna have some science fiction, and what's the very first scene?

00:48:59 You have to learn how to control other people's brain with your magic voice.

00:49:04 That's the very first scene, is the mom trying to get the son.

00:49:08 - Good point.

00:49:09 - And I'm like, so this is not science fiction.

00:49:11 We're just back into random drug-laced marijuana,

00:49:14 Mexico peyote nonsense about mind control, right?

00:49:18 So it's not science fiction.

00:49:20 - But now, okay, well, let me give the devil's advocate here a bit of like,

00:49:24 they're super trained, and they condition people, and she's conditioned Paul, you know,

00:49:29 and she's an expert at reading human beings and their body language, and what can I say?

00:49:34 - I get it.

00:49:35 It's fast-forward propaganda, but that's the whole communist thing, right?

00:49:38 It's becoming, and we just control people through language, through magic.

00:49:42 And actually, Frank Herbert referred to his wife as a white witch,

00:49:46 and said he could never win games of negotiation with her or games of bluffing with her,

00:49:51 because she had these witchy powers.

00:49:52 And he was kind of half serious about this, so he viewed his wife as a witch.

00:49:54 And so, you know, again, not a lot of science in it,

00:49:59 because I was just at the beginning, I'm like, oh, okay, so this is just the force.

00:50:02 - It's a fantasy book.

00:50:03 - Yeah, it's fantasy, and of course it's fantasy.

00:50:06 And we'll get to the worms, the sand worms, who are the dragons of the desert.

00:50:11 - Science fiction.

00:50:12 - Everybody fights with shorts and shields, and you know, like it's all,

00:50:15 so it's fantasy, it's magic and fantasy.

00:50:18 But at the beginning, I was like, okay, so what does this mean, these words of command,

00:50:22 that the mother is teaching the son, right?

00:50:27 - Well, the dad's off the hook for all this.

00:50:29 - Well, yeah, because the dad doesn't have the words of command, right?

00:50:31 It's mother to son.

00:50:32 - Yes.

00:50:34 - Because he doesn't, right?

00:50:34 - Yep.

00:50:35 - Otherwise he'd say, I don't know, stop blowing up my friends,

00:50:38 when the attack, when the Harkonnen comes.

00:50:39 - Hmm.

00:50:40 - So is he saying that verbal abuse is maternal?

00:50:45 Because the words of command are terrifying, and they force people to do things,

00:50:49 which is parent to child.

00:50:50 - And the women have that power.

00:50:52 - So the women have the power of verbal abuse.

00:50:55 - Hmm.

00:50:56 - Now, Izzy, as a female,

00:50:58 would you say that women are better at wielding language to her people?

00:51:05 - Yeah, a lot better.

00:51:06 - How much better?

00:51:08 - Much.

00:51:08 - Double?

00:51:10 - Triple.

00:51:11 - Quadruple?

00:51:12 - Esquip escalé.

00:51:14 - Right, so now, the verbal abuse is interesting because it all seems to be paternal.

00:51:20 So there's an example here of, we see lots of examples of Frank Herbert being abusive,

00:51:26 like psycho abusive.

00:51:27 And now there's a bit about his mom, Frank Herbert's wife.

00:51:33 "Despite our chronic poverty," this is in the book,

00:51:35 "Mom was exceedingly proper about etiquette, a carryover from her maternal grandmother.

00:51:39 One time Penny brought a loaf of bread in its wrapper to the dinner table,

00:51:44 and my mother hurled the loaf across the table.

00:51:46 Mom taught us the proper technique of holding silverware and of sitting up straight as we ate.

00:51:51 We were told not to slurp drinks or soup."

00:51:53 That was my father, too, don't slurp, right?

00:51:55 - You know, I have a glass of water right here.

00:51:58 I'm so tempted to go right into the microphone.

00:52:02 - And bowls were always to be tipped away when we spooned the last of the soup,

00:52:06 never towards us.

00:52:07 "A well-mannered person is never eager to eat," she said.

00:52:12 So that's interesting.

00:52:13 "Hurled the loaf," so the reason why it's bad to the wrapper

00:52:16 is it's supposed to be fresh baked.

00:52:17 A wrapper is lower class 'cause you bring it to the supermarket, right?

00:52:20 So that's pretty wild.

00:52:23 So she's obviously quite violent, like she hurls the loaf, right?

00:52:28 So I don't know, he talks a lot about his dad,

00:52:32 of course the book's about his dad,

00:52:34 but there's not much in it about the mom

00:52:36 other than some affection between the parents.

00:52:39 So, yeah, I think, Izzy, I think you're right.

00:52:43 I think he's shifting the blame for the abuse to the women

00:52:47 'cause the men fight honestly and openly.

00:52:49 Is that fair?

00:52:50 - With the exception of the Harkonnen,

00:52:52 like plans within plans, scheming and-

00:52:55 - And the betrayal.

00:52:56 - The honorable men fight honestly and openly,

00:52:59 like when Paul wants to join the Framon,

00:53:01 he's got to kill that black guy.

00:53:02 - That's Jamis, yeah.

00:53:03 - What's his?

00:53:04 - Jamis.

00:53:04 - Oh, I thought you said pajamas.

00:53:06 - Pajamas.

00:53:06 - It is pajamas.

00:53:08 Quite a thrill.

00:53:08 (laughing)

00:53:10 So, but the females see, they manipulate,

00:53:14 there's one who seduces the bald-faced mole rat guy.

00:53:17 And so there's a lot of behind the scenes manipulation

00:53:20 and "The Daughter's Emperor" starts off the second movie with,

00:53:26 I mean, I don't mean to insult the movie

00:53:29 'cause it's a lot of work and they did,

00:53:31 visually it's very cool.

00:53:32 - They did do a good job.

00:53:33 - They did, and the audio is something that I think

00:53:36 has rearranged my skeletal structure.

00:53:37 (imitates growling)

00:53:38 Oh yeah, it's like, I'm burping,

00:53:41 I'm giving birth to, and I'm doing three.

00:53:43 - And it's two extremes of like that.

00:53:45 (imitates growling)

00:53:47 - Like, I do these movies,

00:53:50 like when I go to movies, I have ear protectors.

00:53:52 Like I have to, because,

00:53:54 and then I take them out for the dialogue

00:53:55 and I'm waiting just for them to go back in.

00:53:57 It's kind of distracting.

00:53:58 I was like, you know, fingers, fingers, I didn't have those.

00:54:01 - Oh yeah.

00:54:01 - But I found I actually got most of the music

00:54:03 through my chest cavity.

00:54:04 - You know, I didn't use ear protection

00:54:06 and I didn't, it wasn't actually that loud.

00:54:08 Like it was pretty loud.

00:54:09 - Right.

00:54:10 - It's just that the bass was so high.

00:54:12 - Yeah.

00:54:12 - That like, you feel like the vibration of everything

00:54:16 makes you think it's really, really loud.

00:54:17 - Yeah, my spleen is now on my shoulder.

00:54:19 - I was not aware that that was possible,

00:54:22 but that's where it is.

00:54:22 - Another point on the woman thing,

00:54:25 it starts from Frank Herbert's life.

00:54:26 I think we touched on this earlier with,

00:54:28 or maybe we didn't touch on this yet,

00:54:30 with his first wife, she disappears,

00:54:34 but then later she comes after him with,

00:54:36 you know, repeatedly lawyers and hounding

00:54:38 and hounding, hounding, well, hounding, I mean,

00:54:40 you know, not make him a good kid.

00:54:42 - Yeah.

00:54:42 - Yeah, yeah.

00:54:43 And that's why they move around all the time.

00:54:45 - Yeah.

00:54:46 - That's what.

00:54:46 - Oh, so maybe the verbal abuse is her with the lawyers

00:54:49 'cause they'd always get phone calls and letters

00:54:51 and it will always be language based.

00:54:52 - A lot of language coming after you.

00:54:53 - Yeah, yeah.

00:54:54 - And using men to go after.

00:54:57 - Yeah.

00:54:57 - But I do think, I do think though that Izzy's right,

00:55:00 that he's just like, yeah, it's the women.

00:55:02 - It's the women who torture the children.

00:55:04 - Yeah, I would never.

00:55:05 - I would never.

00:55:06 - I would never.

00:55:07 - And he did say, he said to his son

00:55:08 that he most identifies with Duke Leto.

00:55:12 - No, no, I thought it was Stilbar.

00:55:13 - Wait, Stilbar, okay, we'll get to that.

00:55:15 Yeah, you're right, I could be wrong about that.

00:55:17 All right, so here's another thing that they said.

00:55:19 So it's almost like a cliche,

00:55:22 the Grinch who killed Christmas, right?

00:55:24 That's like the killing Christmas is like the worst thing

00:55:27 you can do to children.

00:55:28 - Oh God, yeah.

00:55:30 - He says, so he writes, early in December,

00:55:32 my father made a startling announcement.

00:55:34 He said we would no longer celebrate Christmas

00:55:36 on Christmas day.

00:55:37 It said we will wait until 12th night, January the 6th,

00:55:39 the way it was done in Mexico for children,

00:55:41 except in our case, it would apply to the entire family.

00:55:43 He wanted to explain that the Epiphany, January 6th,

00:55:46 was an important Christian religious holiday,

00:55:48 represented the day the manifestation of Jesus Christ

00:55:52 appeared before the Magi, the Magi.

00:55:54 So yeah, no Christmas for you kids.

00:55:57 That's weird.

00:55:58 - No, instead we're gonna storm the Capitol.

00:56:00 - Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

00:56:01 Wait, what, I'm sorry?

00:56:02 - They said instead we're gonna storm the Capitol

00:56:04 or whatever, the White House, whatever it's called.

00:56:06 - Oh, right.

00:56:07 (laughing)

00:56:10 - So, I mean.

00:56:12 - Yeah, so he basically killed Christmas

00:56:14 and that's kind of rough for kids because, you know,

00:56:16 everyone's out, you give them Christmas and, right?

00:56:18 And also his kids could never bring friends over

00:56:20 because his father would be working,

00:56:22 would scream at everyone, lock them out of the house.

00:56:23 - Yeah, yeah.

00:56:24 - Oh God, then that's humiliating.

00:56:25 - Oh, do you remember the story of the younger brother

00:56:27 who ran away?

00:56:28 - No.

00:56:29 - Oh yeah, do you, I just wanna,

00:56:32 I've been doing a lot of talking.

00:56:33 - He ran, so the younger brother.

00:56:35 - Bruce, was it Bruce?

00:56:36 - Bruce, yeah, and during the day, like they couldn't come in,

00:56:38 the doors were locked, yada, yada.

00:56:39 And so he was angry about this.

00:56:41 The younger son, Bruce, ran into the woods

00:56:44 to like basically kind of run away.

00:56:45 - Okay.

00:56:46 - And then as night came about, he was so afraid of going home.

00:56:49 - But he knew he couldn't stay in,

00:56:51 he was more afraid of staying in the woods.

00:56:53 - Yeah, yeah, but he had to go home.

00:56:55 He was afraid of going home.

00:56:56 So he went to the police and made up this story

00:56:58 about how he had been kidnapped.

00:57:00 - Yeah.

00:57:00 - Which could have also been a confession

00:57:03 that he had been kidnapped at one point.

00:57:05 - Well, if he's stuck outside, get in trouble.

00:57:08 - Yeah.

00:57:08 - They get raid on, they know they don't have any protection.

00:57:11 So maybe it was a real thing that happened,

00:57:12 but he made up this whole story, went to the police,

00:57:14 filed the report, the police are like,

00:57:15 "We're gonna investigate this," and so on.

00:57:17 - Yeah.

00:57:18 - And then what happened when he got home?

00:57:19 - Strapped to the machine.

00:57:21 - God.

00:57:22 - Oh no, actually, he think he said,

00:57:24 he said you're lying or something like that,

00:57:26 but he wasn't punished too badly, but.

00:57:27 - He was grounded, I think.

00:57:29 - Yeah.

00:57:29 - So in 1961, says the son, dad went on a health food binge,

00:57:34 stuck in the shelves and refrigerator

00:57:35 with an array of foods that Brutus and I loathed,

00:57:37 including oriental herbs, tofu, and beef tongue.

00:57:41 - Beef tongue.

00:57:42 - Convinced that beef tongue provided more nutrients

00:57:44 and proteins than any other form of meat.

00:57:46 He forced us to eat the foul substance in a variety of forms,

00:57:49 including tongue sandwiches with mayonnaise on the bread

00:57:52 and tongue stew, both of which made me gag worse

00:57:56 than green clam guts.

00:57:57 I don't know what green clam guts is.

00:57:59 I hated any form of tongue, especially the texture

00:58:02 of the meat, which had sickening little bumps on it.

00:58:04 - Yuck.

00:58:04 - I find that quite vivid because a tongue lashing

00:58:08 punishment through verbal abuse and forcing you

00:58:11 to eat a tongue, it's again, to me,

00:58:13 it's an unconscious way of just dominating

00:58:15 through language or through verbal stuff.

00:58:17 - There's some special sadism.

00:58:19 And I don't know, like now this is in the 1984 version

00:58:21 of the movie, but there is a scene where a character

00:58:24 rips the tongue out of a cow and takes a big bite.

00:58:26 - Oh, is that right?

00:58:27 And wasn't the tongue stuff on James...

00:58:30 What's the guy's name?

00:58:35 - Corden.

00:58:35 - James Corden, is it Corden?

00:58:37 - I don't know, that's the name you'd touch.

00:58:38 - He did the Tonight Show.

00:58:40 Cordroy, James.

00:58:42 - You're not talking about...

00:58:44 - Jimmy Fallon?

00:58:45 - No, sorry, it's the guy who did Spill Your Guts

00:58:48 or Fill Your Guts, where he has the horrible food

00:58:52 in a circle that goes around.

00:58:53 - Yeah.

00:58:54 - James Cordroy or something like that.

00:58:56 Anyway, so celebrities are given these horrible foods

00:58:58 that they either have to tell the truth about something

00:59:00 they don't want to tell the truth about.

00:59:01 - They did have beef tongue.

00:59:02 - And they have cow tongue, and it's considered so vile

00:59:04 that it's like punishment food.

00:59:05 - Oh yeah, and they had other stuff, like to compare it,

00:59:08 the other things on the table, they had,

00:59:10 I think it was cricket pudding, ants and yogurt,

00:59:17 and just a whole bunch of foul stuff.

00:59:19 - It's just the most horrendous stuff.

00:59:20 - That's what it was compared to.

00:59:21 - I will not eat the bugs.

00:59:22 - Yeah.

00:59:23 (laughing)

00:59:24 - So he also, so I try not to get too repulsed

00:59:28 by science fiction and fantasy authors,

00:59:30 but it's pretty tough.

00:59:31 - Are they just the worst people in the world?

00:59:33 - It's really hard to argue that they're not

00:59:36 the worst people in the world.

00:59:37 I'm thinking of Zimmerman Bradley.

00:59:39 So he says, "A number of famous and soon to be famous

00:59:41 science fiction writers visited our homes in San Francisco,

00:59:43 including Robert Heinlein, Paul Anderson,

00:59:46 Jack Vance, and Isaac Asimov."

00:59:48 - Yeah.

00:59:48 - Isaac Asimov, possibly the worst parent

00:59:50 in the history of the world,

00:59:51 which we'll get into another time.

00:59:53 But these are all guys who come over.

00:59:54 Do they not notice that the children are terrified?

00:59:56 Do they not say?

00:59:57 - Do they not notice that the children are terrified?

00:59:59 - They're probably on the floor.

01:00:00 - Yeah, right.

01:00:02 Hey, the kids are hungry,

01:00:03 scratching on the window with these guys.

01:00:05 But let's discuss story ideas more.

01:00:07 - Scratching on the window because being eager to eat

01:00:09 is being peasantly.

01:00:10 (laughing)

01:00:11 - Right, absolutely right.

01:00:13 - Absolutely right.

01:00:14 - They're fear of food in case it gets rubbed in their hair.

01:00:17 - You must not have fear of your--

01:00:19 - Yeah, and just to go back to that,

01:00:20 like James, I think you said this earlier,

01:00:22 one of you did, but it was like,

01:00:23 what teenage girl wants to eat dessert, right?

01:00:26 - Oh, right, right.

01:00:26 - Especially back in those days

01:00:28 when it was like more important to be skinny and stuff.

01:00:30 - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:31 - Oh my gosh.

01:00:33 - And messing with their hair.

01:00:34 - So all of these guys,

01:00:35 they're so empty, soulless, and ambitious

01:00:37 that they're all just over there chatting and talking away.

01:00:39 And does nobody seem to notice?

01:00:42 I mean, maybe they did and said something.

01:00:44 I don't know, but I mean, I don't know.

01:00:46 - Well, Indian Howie did.

01:00:47 - Indian Howie.

01:00:48 - Was that his name, Indian Howie?

01:00:50 Or was it the other guy who was Indian?

01:00:52 - His name wasn't Indian.

01:00:53 - No, it was.

01:00:54 There was something.

01:00:55 - No, no, that was his nickname was Indian.

01:00:59 No, you're right.

01:00:59 - I was right.

01:01:00 - Sorry, just to, sorry, you're right, Izzy.

01:01:02 And Jared, you were also right.

01:01:04 According to the book, my father once told me

01:01:06 he felt he was most like the Fralin leader, Stilgar.

01:01:08 This surprised me until I realized

01:01:11 that Stilgar was the equivalent

01:01:12 of a Native American leader in the story,

01:01:14 a person who defended time-honored ways

01:01:15 that did not harm the ecology of the planet.

01:01:18 - I was just looking at the Dune character sheet

01:01:20 for Indian Deli.

01:01:21 - Oh, no, this is a really good one.

01:01:24 - Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

01:01:24 All right, so should we get to the-

01:01:27 - Hold on, either it was Indian Howie

01:01:30 or it was the Indian guy he was friends with as a kid

01:01:33 who was called Indian something and then his name.

01:01:35 - Yeah, maybe.

01:01:36 - Yeah, I remember that.

01:01:36 - I thought I heard that, but I don't remember.

01:01:38 - You were saying, you made a joke saying like,

01:01:40 wow, is everything in his life have such obvious names?

01:01:42 Like even in Dune and in his life.

01:01:44 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:01:47 - But Howie did say, you're treating your kids too rough

01:01:50 and he basically said, I'm gonna raise them how I want.

01:01:54 - So this is, yeah, so I'll give you this bit

01:01:56 'cause this is important

01:01:57 because this guy's all about the natives

01:02:00 and all about living in harmony

01:02:02 and he respects the native culture

01:02:04 and the blah, blah, blah, right?

01:02:05 So the song says in the biography of his father,

01:02:08 whenever my parents had friends over to the house,

01:02:10 I sometimes tried to participate in adult conversations.

01:02:12 Typically it was after dinner

01:02:14 with everyone sitting in the living room

01:02:15 by a cozy fireplace.

01:02:16 Too often my inadequate contributions irritated dad

01:02:20 and he would send me out of the room.

01:02:21 My status in the household, Howie told me later,

01:02:25 now Howie was a friend of his father's

01:02:26 from the teenage years who was half native.

01:02:28 My status in the household, Howie told me later,

01:02:31 was not dissimilar to that of a dog or a human subspecies.

01:02:34 If I didn't please the master, I was dispatched from sight.

01:02:38 After seeing my father do this to me more than once,

01:02:42 Howie finally told him it was a big mistake

01:02:44 that he should let me participate and Bruce as well.

01:02:46 If he didn't, Howie cautioned,

01:02:47 the boys would never bond with their farm.

01:02:49 Dad listened attentively to his friend,

01:02:51 but said he would raise the boys as he saw fit.

01:02:54 We would grow up on our own if need be, as he had.

01:02:56 It would be good for us.

01:02:57 He refused to change.

01:02:58 And how ironic it was that this man,

01:03:00 who one day would communicate effectively

01:03:02 with millions of people through his writing,

01:03:04 could not communicate with his own children.

01:03:06 I don't think that's the irony.

01:03:07 The irony is I respect the native culture

01:03:09 until the natives tell me to be slightly nicer

01:03:11 to my children, in which case,

01:03:13 to heck with you, I'm going to do it my own way.

01:03:15 What does it say that the natives are like,

01:03:16 man, you're harsh with your kids?

01:03:17 Because the native population

01:03:18 is not always super great to their own kids.

01:03:20 So, yeah.

01:03:21 Man, if the natives are telling you,

01:03:22 it's probably important.

01:03:23 It's probably quite important, right?

01:03:25 Ah, let's see here.

01:03:28 All right, and we're back.

01:03:35 We actually took a slight bio break.

01:03:38 Because basically we're reviewing a desert movie

01:03:41 while washing our own body fluids.

01:03:43 So, just before I was about to say a break,

01:03:46 you handed a note saying,

01:03:47 "Can we take a break? Can we have a pause?"

01:03:49 Because while we're talking about sadism,

01:03:52 we figured better not to torture our own bladders.

01:03:55 Okay, so we had our break.

01:03:57 And while we had the break,

01:03:58 I was sort of thinking about how

01:03:59 the son has the example of Frank Herbert's first wife,

01:04:04 who put up with nothing.

01:04:05 She left.

01:04:06 She handed him for child support.

01:04:09 She stood up to him.

01:04:10 Now, she probably wasn't a great person.

01:04:11 I don't know.

01:04:12 But she had the example of the woman

01:04:15 who would not put up with this abuser.

01:04:17 Yes.

01:04:18 And then he had the example of his own mother, who did.

01:04:20 Yeah.

01:04:21 Right?

01:04:22 Because the mother has to know

01:04:23 that the kids are being psychologically,

01:04:26 emotionally, and physically tortured.

01:04:28 The mother believes she was a white witch.

01:04:30 I don't think she really cares.

01:04:31 Right.

01:04:32 But as a white witch,

01:04:35 the dryads would tell her.

01:04:37 Right, of course.

01:04:37 Because the nymphs would inform upon the evils

01:04:40 that were being done.

01:04:41 And how and why it was okay.

01:04:43 So a couple of other things I wanted to mention,

01:04:47 and we'll get to some of the last big, big themes.

01:04:50 There is much of the outdoors man, Frank Herbert,

01:04:54 in Dune, the technique of sand walking,

01:04:55 in which a person moves without producing a rhythm

01:04:57 that might attract giant worms,

01:04:58 is a teaching my father learned in his childhood.

01:05:01 The hunter moved silently and downwind from wild games,

01:05:04 so as not to alert the prey of his presence.

01:05:06 The fisherman does not make a disturbance

01:05:07 in or near the water for fear of frightening away the fish.

01:05:10 And be quiet or the sand worm will eat you,

01:05:16 is tiptoe around,

01:05:19 like they literally earlier say,

01:05:20 with regards to his own father,

01:05:22 listening to the radio shows,

01:05:23 everyone had to tiptoe around, right?

01:05:25 Yeah.

01:05:25 So it means don't make a sound

01:05:27 or your father's rage will destroy you.

01:05:30 Don't, like tiptoe around on the sand.

01:05:31 And of course, the sand is a metaphor

01:05:34 for an unstable personality, right?

01:05:36 Ooh, I didn't think about that.

01:05:38 It's constantly shifting sands, right?

01:05:39 Shifting sands.

01:05:40 It's dry, it'll kill you, it's unstable.

01:05:42 And the sandworm comes along, you sink in, right?

01:05:45 The ground, even the very ground becomes unstable.

01:05:47 And that feeling of falling through the ground

01:05:49 can happen to people who are in the presence of great terror, right?

01:05:51 Yeah.

01:05:52 So the sandworm is rage.

01:05:55 And you knew this because of your lore thing

01:05:59 from the Dune series, Jeremy.

01:06:01 What were the sandworms, old sandworms were called?

01:06:03 Oh, old man of the desert.

01:06:05 Old man of the desert, right?

01:06:07 Yeah.

01:06:08 Also, I know this may sound-

01:06:09 And they were gods and mystical.

01:06:11 Ancestral.

01:06:12 The sandworms are-

01:06:15 Absolutely.

01:06:15 They have consciousness?

01:06:16 No, but they're to the Fremen, they projected God.

01:06:19 Oh, they're like mystical things, right?

01:06:20 No, like the Egyptians viewed the crocodiles or alligators,

01:06:23 or whatever they were, as gods.

01:06:24 Oh, they're the cats, right?

01:06:25 Yeah, the cats and stuff.

01:06:26 So.

01:06:27 Now, if you'll give me a tiny limb in which to extend myself,

01:06:31 and I'm going to see how much Izzy's eyes rolls here.

01:06:35 Yeah, we go out here.

01:06:36 So if I look at desert, right?

01:06:38 Well, first of all, what?

01:06:39 If you're going to try and connect this to the bread pudding, I'm about to leave.

01:06:44 No, no, so he comes to desert into his child's hair.

01:06:49 Desert, no.

01:06:50 No.

01:06:50 So why does desert have such resonance for Frank Herbert?

01:06:54 Well, there's a lot about sociopathy, coldness, rage, instability,

01:06:59 but he was neglected as a child.

01:07:03 Uh-huh.

01:07:03 Right?

01:07:04 What is another use of the word desert?

01:07:07 To desert.

01:07:08 To desert someone.

01:07:09 Right, to abandon.

01:07:10 To abandon.

01:07:11 So he was abandoned as a child to very harsh elements, right?

01:07:15 Because he couldn't go home because his parents were drinking.

01:07:17 So he was out in nature all the time where he got bitten by a dog,

01:07:20 and I assume almost died in a variety of other adventures.

01:07:23 Yes, he almost drowned trying to swim across a channel.

01:07:26 So he was deserted by his parents, and therefore he had to desert his house.

01:07:33 Yeah.

01:07:35 And he was drawn to the desert.

01:07:36 So I'm just, the words play a lot in our brains in a variety of ways.

01:07:41 Sorry, Jared, you're going to say something.

01:07:42 And a desert is a kind of like environmental nothingness.

01:07:46 Yeah.

01:07:47 It's a void that you could actually quote-unquote exist in.

01:07:52 It's complete extremes.

01:07:53 It's scorching during the day, freezing at night.

01:07:56 Which is the rollercoaster personality.

01:07:58 I'd be crazy at it.

01:07:59 I'd be crazy at it.

01:07:59 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:00 It's completely still until there's a sandworm which rages out of almost nowhere.

01:08:04 Well, and-

01:08:05 It's death.

01:08:06 Obviously, because water is life.

01:08:08 That's constantly referred to.

01:08:10 And so the desert is the opposite of water, and the desert is death.

01:08:14 So to be deserted is to die.

01:08:15 And how many times have I made the case that neglect is just about the worst form of neglect?

01:08:19 Yes.

01:08:19 Because it's a death sentence.

01:08:20 Yeah.

01:08:21 And who are the people that are good and survive in this environment?

01:08:25 The Fremen, right?

01:08:26 You know.

01:08:27 Right.

01:08:27 And why did the novel resonate so much with so many people?

01:08:33 Because the '60s and the '70s in particular, the novel took a while to really hit its popularity.

01:08:39 But the Latchkey kids were deserted.

01:08:43 [laughter]

01:08:44 No, I don't know.

01:08:45 My generation was the first generation, really, of Latchkey kids.

01:08:48 You came home and there was nothing.

01:08:50 No one.

01:08:50 Nothing.

01:08:51 Yeah.

01:08:51 And so the fact that there's this deserting, that there is isolation, that the children are

01:08:57 unprotected, right?

01:08:58 Yeah.

01:08:59 Like all-

01:09:00 I mean, they basically-

01:09:01 He lost his father to death and he lost his mother to the Bene Gesserit, right?

01:09:06 Yeah.

01:09:07 Yeah.

01:09:07 His mother was basically inducted into this goddess, queen-y thing, this nuns from hell

01:09:14 thing.

01:09:14 And now he did have his mother available to give him some kind of feedback, but it was

01:09:19 no longer for him.

01:09:20 It was for the Messiah.

01:09:21 She was advising the Messiah, not her son, on how to live.

01:09:24 Right.

01:09:25 Yeah.

01:09:25 And the mother did, like, she didn't obey the Bene Gesserit and what they told her to do.

01:09:29 Yeah.

01:09:29 But it wasn't necessarily out of love for the dude because she also had this vanity of

01:09:36 thinking she could birth the universe's super being, you know?

01:09:40 Right.

01:09:42 Grandiosity is all over the place.

01:09:45 Now you could say, but he had reason for grandiosity because he wrote such a great book or such

01:09:48 a famous book or whatever, right?

01:09:50 All right.

01:09:51 Chapter House Dune, we're jumping around here.

01:09:54 The sixth volume of the series, Reverend Mother Dorthuldjangmur used an aphorism-

01:09:59 A what?

01:09:59 D-O-R-T-U-J-L-A.

01:10:03 Dorthuldja.

01:10:05 Dorthuldjan.

01:10:06 Okay.

01:10:07 Used an aphorism familiar long before the publication of Dune.

01:10:09 "Never damage your own nest."

01:10:11 That was Frank Herbert speaking, of course, since he believed we were doing precisely

01:10:14 that to the earth.

01:10:14 Oh, Lord.

01:10:15 Okay.

01:10:15 I don't want to go off on a rant here, but I got to tell you that the relationship between

01:10:23 child abuse and environmentalism is, to me, 100%.

01:10:26 100%.

01:10:29 And the fact that child abuse escalated with the abandonment of the nuclear family and

01:10:34 women staying home in the '60s, that coincided with the environmental movement.

01:10:38 It's a form of virtue signaling where you take your own destruction of your children,

01:10:44 project it onto the earth, and then claim to care about the earth.

01:10:46 So if you look at the huge traumas that are being inflicted on children right now about

01:10:52 global warming, you're all going to die, everything's going to be underwater, right?

01:10:56 So child abuse and environmentalism have gone hand in hand since the beginning of

01:11:00 environmentalism, as far as I can tell.

01:11:02 And so the fact that this guy is like, "Well, I care so much about the earth, but I'm a

01:11:07 complete sadist to my own children."

01:11:09 But the earth, though.

01:11:10 But the rocks.

01:11:12 "Never damage your own nest."

01:11:14 Yeah, it's very important, but he's torturing his own children.

01:11:18 Oh, just a really bad...

01:11:20 So you were going to say something?

01:11:21 Use the eggs as a poison container, though.

01:11:22 Yeah.

01:11:23 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:24 You care more about the nest than you care about the eggs.

01:11:26 Yeah.

01:11:26 Well, no, it's just that it's an excuse to abuse the kids and perpetuate that, and to

01:11:32 make it a virtue.

01:11:33 Like, it's Roman.

01:11:34 It's Roman writ large.

01:11:36 Yeah.

01:11:36 The character from the future.

01:11:38 Just to follow up on what we're saying about the kids.

01:11:43 So he says, "During the period when mom was working in downtown San Francisco and dad

01:11:47 was writing the most difficult segments of Dune, he became increasingly irritable and

01:11:51 more intolerant than ever of the slightest interruption to his concentration.

01:11:55 It reached the extreme where he took the house keys away from Bruce and me and told us he

01:12:00 was going to write inside a locked house.

01:12:02 We were commanded to go elsewhere after school, and he didn't seem to care where.

01:12:06 Dad and Bruce got into a big row over this, and dad yanked a string with a house key off

01:12:10 it on Bruce's neck.

01:12:13 Prior to that, my brother had been in the habit of coming into the house after school

01:12:16 to make a sandwich.

01:12:17 So unhappy with the way dad was treating him, Bruce ran away, walking more than 25 miles.

01:12:21 Only 11 years old, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Barron County and hit in a creek

01:12:25 bed for several hours.

01:12:26 The more he thought about his predicament, however, the more Bruce realized how cold,

01:12:31 lonely, and hungry he would be if he didn't return home, and he realized how angry dad

01:12:34 would be at him for yet another interruption to his writing process.

01:12:37 It must be understood that the son of a writer is not without creative energies of his own."

01:12:43 Now, this is where he tries to make it a little bit funny, and this is really quite tragic.

01:12:47 Yeah, this is not the time for humor, buddy.

01:12:49 "To avoid dad's wrath, my little brother came up with a wild, rather ingenious tale.

01:12:53 He contacted the nearest police precinct in Barron County and reported in a state of feigned

01:12:57 hysteria that he'd been kidnapped by two men and thrown into the back of a laundry truck."

01:13:02 Laundry truck is a nice detail.

01:13:05 That's what sells it.

01:13:06 You know, that's the fiction writer.

01:13:07 That's the lore.

01:13:08 Not just a van, a laundry truck.

01:13:11 "It was only through good fortune," he said, "that he was able to escape.

01:13:15 The police believed Bruce and had him go through the books of mugshots in an attempt to find

01:13:19 the bad guys.

01:13:20 Dad and mom were contacted, and they drove to the police station.

01:13:23 A detective there assured Mr. and Mrs. Herbert that he would investigate the case thoroughly

01:13:26 and would find whoever had done this terrible thing.

01:13:28 Their son was fortunate to be alive, he said.

01:13:31 In our San Francisco house, we had a number of large brown corduroy pillows, triangular

01:13:38 in shape, which we used to lean against while reading or while watching the little black

01:13:42 and white television.

01:13:43 They were foam-filled.

01:13:44 Bruce had one on his bed.

01:13:45 After coming home from the police station, he went to his room and lay on the bed with

01:13:48 his head on the big pillow.

01:13:49 It was quiet in the house.

01:13:51 Then he heard familiar footsteps on the hardwood of the hallway, and his pulse raced.

01:13:55 "James!"

01:13:57 "I know your footsteps, old man."

01:13:58 "Oh, is that?"

01:14:00 "Oh, yeah!"

01:14:01 "That was in the movie."

01:14:02 "Oh, well done, well done.

01:14:04 Yes, yes."

01:14:04 Dad opened the bedroom door, stared at Bruce, and said, "You were lying, weren't you?"

01:14:10 "I can't!"

01:14:12 "Izzy, this is serious stuff.

01:14:14 This is a child in great fear."

01:14:16 "Okay, Batman."

01:14:18 "Okay, Batman!"

01:14:20 And under the piercing, see-it-all stare, Bruce coughed.

01:14:23 He felt his eyes burning, expected to see his father pull off the white leather belt

01:14:27 and administer the usual.

01:14:28 But Dad said in a calm tone, "I'm not going to spank you this time, but you're grounded

01:14:32 for two weeks."

01:14:32 "Hold on, hold on.

01:14:33 I'm not going to spank you this time."

01:14:35 "I'm not going to spank you this time, but you're grounded for two weeks.

01:14:38 Come straight home after school every day and do extra chores."

01:14:40 This is a funny thing that I don't understand about abusers.

01:14:46 That sometimes when I had done the "worst thing" and expected a huge punishment, I

01:14:51 got virtually nothing.

01:14:52 Right.

01:14:53 I experienced that with my brother.

01:14:54 What is the story with that?

01:14:55 Like, Frank Herbert would get insane if somebody had crumbs in the honey.

01:15:02 Yeah.

01:15:03 And he would lecture everyone and berate everyone because they put crumbs in the honey.

01:15:07 Yeah, I'm kind of with him for that.

01:15:09 It's the pullback so that you can...

01:15:13 It's the pullback so that they can continue the abuse and be even more abusive.

01:15:16 Or is it just the unpredictability?

01:15:17 I think it's...

01:15:18 But that's part of the abuse.

01:15:19 That's... yeah, it's so that you always keep you on your toes.

01:15:22 So I remember me and my older brother, my younger brother was not nearly as scared of

01:15:26 our dad.

01:15:27 And he would do insane things that me and my older brother would look at each other and

01:15:30 be like, "Oh man, he's done.

01:15:32 He's done for."

01:15:33 And just either get ignored or made a joke of.

01:15:35 And it's like, "What the hell was that?"

01:15:38 Right.

01:15:39 You get conditioned to expect a horrible, horrible thing.

01:15:44 Yeah.

01:15:44 There was one...

01:15:45 It was a kind of gaslighting too.

01:15:46 It's like, "Oh, you know, ridiculous.

01:15:48 It was never like that."

01:15:49 Yeah.

01:15:49 So there was one time, last few days, my brother and I came home from school.

01:15:53 My brother had this...

01:15:54 He's a friend with him.

01:15:56 And I was...

01:15:57 We weren't supposed to have other kids in the house when parents weren't home.

01:16:01 Yeah.

01:16:02 I mean, maybe sensible, whatever.

01:16:04 Anyways, so I'd gotten in and I was holding the window closed because I was the older

01:16:09 brother and my brother and his friend were pushing and my brother put his hands through

01:16:15 pains and shattered everywhere.

01:16:17 So of course, his friend took off.

01:16:20 I ran to the mirror and I saw that I had, you know, I was gotten some, you know, whatever

01:16:27 just on my face, some blood on my face.

01:16:29 And so I was really just almost hysterical there.

01:16:32 I think it was like maybe 11 or so.

01:16:34 And of course, in my mind, not only did I get wounded, but of course we're dead.

01:16:38 We broke a window.

01:16:39 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:39 And because...

01:16:40 They're going to blame you because you have all the glass and stuff.

01:16:42 Well, my brother apparently got a shard of glass near his wrist.

01:16:45 And so later on, I think I remember called the story and my brother was like, "Well,

01:16:53 you were freaking out.

01:16:54 All you had was a couple of things on your face and I had something that could have been

01:16:57 serious injury in my wrist."

01:17:01 But it was like, I don't remember getting massively punished for that.

01:17:05 Yeah.

01:17:05 Really.

01:17:05 It was just, you know, like this horrible, however long it was before my father came

01:17:10 home and saw the broken window.

01:17:11 And yet nothing.

01:17:13 Nothing that you remember, right?

01:17:15 Yeah, I don't remember anything.

01:17:16 I remember the fear of that.

01:17:18 Yeah, my mom beat me up over like leaving a little white ring on a table, little table.

01:17:24 Yeah.

01:17:25 And I won't get into the details of why, when my mother had to come and pick me up

01:17:28 from a police station.

01:17:30 Yeah.

01:17:31 She was fine.

01:17:32 No punishment.

01:17:34 I mean, yeah, I don't understand.

01:17:36 I don't understand.

01:17:36 Because I don't want to understand this mindset, but I don't understand why.

01:17:41 Is it because, well, clearly I've broken my kids now.

01:17:44 They're so terrified of me that they're running away and inventing stories and talking to

01:17:47 the police.

01:17:48 My work here is done.

01:17:49 Yes.

01:17:49 Yeah, I've broken them.

01:17:51 I don't know.

01:17:51 It's weird.

01:17:52 I think it's the perpetuation of the abuse.

01:17:54 Kind of thing.

01:17:55 Yeah.

01:17:55 The archetypal stuff.

01:17:59 Now I'm old enough now that these stories are eye rollingly predictable.

01:18:05 Okay.

01:18:06 The man who fights his destiny.

01:18:08 I wonder if he's going to end up embracing his destiny.

01:18:11 It's a great mystery to me.

01:18:14 Okay.

01:18:15 So this is from the book.

01:18:17 The characters fit classical archetypes from mythology.

01:18:19 Paul is the hero prince on a quest as described by young Campbell and Lord Raglan, whoever

01:18:27 that is.

01:18:27 One of the books my father studied, Raglan's The Hero, published in 1936, outlined 22

01:18:32 steps followed by classic heroes.

01:18:34 And I've got to tell you, this is kind of depressing that if you just follow, because

01:18:37 I know that George Lucas, the Star Wars guy consulted with Joseph Campbell here over a

01:18:42 thousand faces and specifically tailored his story to the hero journey myth.

01:18:48 Right.

01:18:49 Right.

01:18:49 So, and I thought this was really interesting.

01:18:51 22 steps.

01:18:54 We won't go through each of them.

01:18:55 Right.

01:18:56 These included all of which closely approximate the life of Paul Maldive.

01:19:00 A, the hero's father is a King, a Duke in Paul's case.

01:19:05 B, the circumstances of his conception are unusual.

01:19:10 It's two tortoises.

01:19:11 Oh, sorry.

01:19:13 I know from a petting zoo.

01:19:15 Anyway, so what was his, because his mother was a concubine, is that?

01:19:21 Yes.

01:19:22 That's his unusual thing.

01:19:24 Okay.

01:19:24 Were there any other unusual?

01:19:25 I don't think there were other.

01:19:26 Ben and Jessica, which lady, the witch is right.

01:19:30 Sure.

01:19:31 All right.

01:19:31 But that would have been normal for a Duke.

01:19:32 It's unusual for us reading a book about.

01:19:36 Yeah.

01:19:37 All right.

01:19:37 So he is reputed to be the son of a God.

01:19:41 Paul is reputed to be a returning God of a side.

01:19:43 An attempt is made to kill him at birth.

01:19:46 In Paul's case, the attempt occurred in his youth.

01:19:48 After a victory over the King and or a giant dragon or wild beast, he marries a princess.

01:19:56 Mm.

01:19:56 Which he does, right?

01:19:58 Yep.

01:19:59 And becomes King and so on.

01:20:01 Right.

01:20:01 So yeah, this is a very.

01:20:03 Pretty typical archetype.

01:20:05 Yeah.

01:20:05 The Dune is a modern day conglomeration of familiar myths, a tale of heroism and great

01:20:11 sandworms guarding a precious treasure of Melange, the geriatric spice.

01:20:15 The planet Dune features thousand foot long worms that live for untold years.

01:20:19 Ferocious dragon like monsters who have great teeth and a and bellows breath of cinnamon.

01:20:26 Which also reminds me of what Izzy was putting on her cookies yesterday,

01:20:32 which caused me to bellow breaths of cinnamon.

01:20:35 And pumpkin.

01:20:38 This is the pearl of great price myth in the Bible.

01:20:43 A parable described a man who obtained a great treasure and then kept it hidden.

01:20:46 This parable was linked to mythological stories of protected treasure, such as the golden fleece

01:20:50 of the sacred ram sacrificed to Zeus given by Freixas to his wife's father, a nail to an oak

01:20:54 tree where it was guarded by a dragon that never slept.

01:20:56 Yeah.

01:20:57 Now, it's also interesting that at the bottom of a bottle of mescal, an intoxicating Mexican

01:21:04 beverage is a tiny worm which is said to contain so much essence that people have been known to

01:21:09 hallucinate after consuming it.

01:21:10 My father, of course, spends considerable time in Mexico.

01:21:15 Oh, that's a thought I had about them switching the Christmas to this Mexican time period.

01:21:20 Another way of like none of your heritage.

01:21:23 None of your European heritage stuff.

01:21:24 We go on full on Mexican, right?

01:21:26 Yep.

01:21:26 Right.

01:21:27 Which kind of alludes to why the story might be popular these days.

01:21:31 Yeah.

01:21:33 So I know from my own experience as a writer, how easy it is to block a story that the publishers

01:21:38 don't like.

01:21:39 Yeah.

01:21:39 Right.

01:21:40 Because I always got immense praise for my writing from people who gave reviews on it.

01:21:45 But the publishers hated it with a burning passion of a thousand cents.

01:21:50 Yeah.

01:21:50 So my question is, okay, why was Dune allowed through?

01:21:53 It has to be something harmful to culture if it's allowed through.

01:21:56 That's just a basic fact of, I mean, were the hard leftists in charge of the publishing

01:22:00 industry in the '60s?

01:22:02 I think they were.

01:22:03 Probably.

01:22:04 No, of course, the other thing is too that Dune was finally published by a company that

01:22:07 published car repair manuals.

01:22:09 So—

01:22:09 Although to be fair, Dune was turned down 20 times.

01:22:12 Kind of, kind of.

01:22:14 So he goes into this story about that.

01:22:17 So a lot of publishers said, "We really love it, but we don't know how to market it," or

01:22:20 "We really love it, but it's too long and it's going to be too expensive to publish.

01:22:23 We don't want to take the risk."

01:22:24 They all, a lot of them loved it, but they just, for various reasons—

01:22:27 Like it was fun and they didn't think it would make enough profit to be worth it kind of thing.

01:22:30 Right, right.

01:22:30 And the guy who, one of the guys who turned it down said, "This is probably the biggest

01:22:33 mistake I'm going to make, but I'm going to turn it down for it."

01:22:35 So, but it wasn't because they hated the writing or anything like that.

01:22:38 So—

01:22:38 Okay.

01:22:39 But even, even, even let's say somebody publishes it, right?

01:22:42 And the people who want to corrupt the culture don't like it.

01:22:47 They would simply shame everyone and associate it with nerdiness or make losers out of it.

01:22:54 Like they would just simply oppose it in every conceivable way, but it was very much embraced

01:22:57 by the culture.

01:22:58 Yeah.

01:22:59 Or the people in charge of the culture who don't have the West's best interest at heart,

01:23:03 I guess we could say, right?

01:23:04 Yeah.

01:23:04 At least in its current form.

01:23:06 That's fair.

01:23:06 So my question is, I mean, we know how it harmed, how does it harm the culture?

01:23:12 Well, it's saying that sadism and cruelty are superior and can only be combated by psychosis

01:23:24 because Paul is psychotic.

01:23:27 He thinks he's a god.

01:23:29 Yeah.

01:23:29 Now, of course, and now I don't know if this is in the book, but in the movie,

01:23:33 okay, I go from having vague dreams about the future, which could mean anything.

01:23:38 There are people starving.

01:23:40 There's a holy war.

01:23:41 What does that mean?

01:23:42 Two, oh, I know exactly everything about your family history and your mother who lost an

01:23:46 eyeball transferring.

01:23:47 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:23:48 Remember the guy?

01:23:49 Yeah.

01:23:49 I was a bit confused.

01:23:50 And I'm like, how do you know everything?

01:23:52 He's gone from like general vision guy to specific circus freak, psychic guy.

01:24:01 Yeah.

01:24:01 You know, I know you have a mold in your inner thought, like this kind of stuff, right?

01:24:05 It becomes apolitical almost, but that's one of the things that finally convinces everyone.

01:24:10 But if somebody thinks they're a god, they're psychotic.

01:24:14 Yeah.

01:24:17 Right?

01:24:18 I mean, if we just look at it in purely secular terms, right?

01:24:20 Now, there was, other than the words of command, was there any other magic

01:24:25 in the stories?

01:24:29 If there's mysticism, I mean, the spice, the drugs, like extending your life,

01:24:34 your consciousness, that kind of stuff.

01:24:36 But drugs do affect your consciousness.

01:24:38 Yeah.

01:24:38 In a positive way.

01:24:40 Well, no, no, I guess, well, no, some people would say yes.

01:24:42 I mean, the Beatles were very creative under drugs.

01:24:44 Yeah.

01:24:44 A lot of songwriters.

01:24:45 A lot of people have used drugs, sadly, to very great creative effect.

01:24:49 And he also, sorry, Frank Herbert also used drugs, not a lot, but he did partake of

01:24:56 mind altering substances and was also into the drug called Buddhism, which he got from Alan Watts,

01:25:00 who was one of the big hit writers.

01:25:01 That's not a drug.

01:25:02 I mean, that's a really-

01:25:02 No, but it does sort of-

01:25:03 Oh, it's a mind drug in a way.

01:25:04 Right, right.

01:25:05 Okay.

01:25:06 But the magic in terms of the drug use is the spice itself is used to allow these

01:25:14 navigators and the space folding thing to actually specifically and accurately

01:25:21 find their way through the stellar space, right?

01:25:24 Yeah.

01:25:24 Right.

01:25:25 They're predicting the future on a short scale to be able to do that.

01:25:28 Yeah.

01:25:28 So that's completely magic.

01:25:30 Because Lorde knows that drunk driving is the way to go.

01:25:32 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:32 I mean, so-

01:25:34 So it's one thing to be drunk driving, but do you want to really craft interstellar

01:25:38 vehicles traveling faster than light on mind altering drugs?

01:25:42 Yeah, but he's not drunk driving.

01:25:43 It's all natural, man.

01:25:44 It's not drunk driving if you only drink at Starblights.

01:25:47 Sorry, I'm just writing down this as the new family motto.

01:25:53 Yeah, I'm going to add this.

01:25:55 It's beautiful.

01:25:56 It's beautiful.

01:25:57 Okay.

01:25:58 So I was really struck because in the movie, and this has been, I think, it's certainly in

01:26:06 the book, I'm sure it's described this way.

01:26:07 These giant monsters have these giant teeth that swallow you, right?

01:26:11 And that this to me would be a child's view of the dog attacking him.

01:26:14 I think that that's probably where he gets some of the power of the sandworms.

01:26:17 And I think, Jared, you made this connection, which I thought was great in that the dog,

01:26:24 he only survived the dog attack when he was two and a half, the rider, because the dog was at

01:26:28 the end of his chain.

01:26:29 Oh, the chain.

01:26:29 And how do they control the sandworms?

01:26:31 It's not necessarily a chain.

01:26:33 It's like a hook.

01:26:34 They throw into the sandworm scales, keep it open, but they're essentially holding it at bay.

01:26:38 Right.

01:26:38 You know, where it can't go back underground.

01:26:40 Right.

01:26:41 Yeah.

01:26:41 And it's interesting that the dog is kept from killing him by the chain, and he kept his own

01:26:50 murderousness to some degree at bay by channeling it into art.

01:26:52 Because in art, everyone, in his art, everyone's murdering each other.

01:26:56 But he channeled some of his murderous impulses into his own art, I would assume, right?

01:27:02 Mm-hmm.

01:27:02 So what I don't like about it, of course, is that the good guys lose, and you only win

01:27:09 by losing your mind.

01:27:11 Like, you only win by becoming crazier than the crazy people.

01:27:17 Well, and thriving in this hostile environment.

01:27:19 Like, that's a virtue.

01:27:20 But that doesn't make him a god.

01:27:24 I don't—this is the thing that annoyed me about the second movie.

01:27:26 I don't know when he's like, "Yeah, I'm a god."

01:27:28 But you didn't notice that either, right?

01:27:31 Yeah, it was kind of—it seemed like I was just kind of watching, and then suddenly he's

01:27:34 like embracing me.

01:27:35 He's like, "I'm better than all of you!"

01:27:36 And it's like, "Wait, what?"

01:27:38 They allude to it a little bit in the sense that when he first encounters Spice for the

01:27:42 first time, I think he's 15, and it immediately has an effect on him.

01:27:47 Because it does on everyone.

01:27:48 It's a mind-altering effect.

01:27:48 Well, it does on everyone, but he's going to be the Quisadzotorok, you know, so it's

01:27:51 special with him.

01:27:52 Right.

01:27:53 But then when he lives with the Fremen, there's Spice in everything.

01:27:55 It's in the food, it's all over the place, he's swimming in it, and so it hasn't

01:27:59 even—

01:27:59 There's Spice on his girlfriend.

01:28:00 Essentially, right?

01:28:02 And so it has a much greater effect on him.

01:28:04 Right.

01:28:05 It's like that quote from Rio, "Keep it spicy."

01:28:08 Anyway, so I want to know the worms.

01:28:14 So the worms that—you said dragons.

01:28:15 Oh, the sci-fi dragons.

01:28:16 The sci-fi dragons.

01:28:18 So the worms are obviously anger that can be harnessed, because they do harness the

01:28:26 worms.

01:28:26 Fear is the mind-killer.

01:28:29 He's all about that.

01:28:29 This is the big quote that I've heard from him.

01:28:31 "Oh, it's not the power corrupts, power attracts corrupt people."

01:28:34 Of course, but here's the thing, too.

01:28:35 He absolutely abused his power over his children, so he's confessing to be utterly

01:28:38 corrupt.

01:28:38 Oh, yeah.

01:28:39 Okay, so this is just coming to me.

01:28:42 Yeah, let's do it live.

01:28:44 All right.

01:28:44 Worms, psychology, old man, ancestors.

01:28:48 Your gut feeling.

01:28:49 What is your gut?

01:28:50 It's a big worm.

01:28:52 Oh, like your intestines?

01:28:53 Your intestines.

01:28:54 Yeah.

01:28:54 Oh, yeah.

01:28:55 And like these are the old men of the desert.

01:28:57 And what are your natural instincts?

01:28:59 The ancestral people can tell you, you know, stupid white man, you've lost the way.

01:29:03 Except when the ancestors tell you to be nicer to your children.

01:29:06 The other thing, too, is that when he first—he died of pancreatic cancer quite young, in

01:29:12 his 60s.

01:29:13 Yeah, he was like 66 or something.

01:29:15 And for some time beforehand, he thought he had intestinal parasites that he'd picked

01:29:20 up.

01:29:20 That's why his stomach was hurting.

01:29:21 Intestinal parasites that he'd picked up from Mexico, and then he was misdiagnosed.

01:29:25 Yeah, maybe it's because he was drinking the worms at the bottom of vodka.

01:29:28 I would assume so, right?

01:29:29 I would assume so.

01:29:30 Well, man, I was going to say something intelligent, too, but I completely forgot.

01:29:34 We were talking just before you brought up the intestinal worm thing.

01:29:40 We were saying something about—what were we saying right before that?

01:29:44 We were talking about the worms being anger, your ancestors' rage, harnessing them with

01:29:50 the chains, the dog—

01:29:51 Oh, power corrupts.

01:29:52 Power corrupts.

01:29:53 So, I think really the only way—he was saying that people basically who are corrupt will

01:29:58 be drawn to power.

01:30:00 So, I think he was very corrupt, because obviously he didn't have kids to spend time with them

01:30:04 or do anything like that.

01:30:05 He only had kids so that he could have power over them.

01:30:08 So, you know, a lot of people will become politicians and stuff like that if they want

01:30:13 power, but for him, I think he just had kids to have power.

01:30:16 Great for him.

01:30:16 Oh, that's why he would have died at the child support payments, too, because he didn't

01:30:20 have power over his daughter.

01:30:21 Yeah.

01:30:21 Also, he did have power over his daughter, because he denied her the money.

01:30:26 Well, yeah, that's the thing.

01:30:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:30:28 Sorry, Jared, do you have a second?

01:30:29 And the son that didn't obey him and carry on his legacy, offed himself in a way.

01:30:36 And the other son carries on his legacy and becomes an apologist for his life, essentially.

01:30:42 Yeah.

01:30:43 Another question, kind of foundational to me.

01:30:48 So, House Harkonnen has many, many people.

01:30:53 Yes.

01:30:53 I didn't like the "the whiter you are, the more evil you are."

01:30:58 That just seems to be kind of attractive.

01:30:59 Yeah, come on, those guys were like ghosts.

01:31:01 They're like albino glow sticks.

01:31:03 Just imagine how it would have been if it was different.

01:31:05 Like, imagine if they had been ghostly dark blue or dark brown or something.

01:31:10 And it would have been like, "Oh, and you're the bad guys?

01:31:12 That's racist."

01:31:12 If we could fashion people from the bald calves of babies.

01:31:17 And also that they were hairless, because I think whites go bald more quickly or more often.

01:31:23 So, just that to me was like-

01:31:24 But yeah, I think the hairless is probably not the biggest clue.

01:31:26 I think the biggest clue to that being white is that they are white.

01:31:28 They were just, they were ultra white.

01:31:30 It's like, you couldn't be more on the nose.

01:31:32 Right.

01:31:32 Like, white people, "Bird!"

01:31:34 Yeah, yeah, that was not ideal, of course, right?

01:31:37 But, so, there's, but there's tons of them, right?

01:31:42 Yeah.

01:31:43 So, one of the things, if you are a house of nobility,

01:31:46 one of the things you need is a bunch of spare parts, right?

01:31:50 Yeah.

01:31:50 So, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:31:52 No, no, there's a war or something, and a lot of people get like that.

01:31:54 You're gonna die, you need a few backups.

01:31:55 And other people rule the kingdom.

01:31:56 Right, what do they always say?

01:31:57 You need two sons, an heir and a spare.

01:31:59 Yeah.

01:31:59 Right?

01:32:00 And wasn't Harry's biography, his autobiography was called The Spare or Spare or something like

01:32:06 that because he was the leftover, right?

01:32:07 Yeah.

01:32:08 Because his older brother, William, was going to be the king, and he was the spare.

01:32:11 Oh.

01:32:11 So, you need an heir and a spare.

01:32:13 So, clearly, the dad, Leto, is fertile because he can produce a kit with the concubine,

01:32:18 with Thor, the prostitute.

01:32:20 Yeah.

01:32:21 So, why does he only got one kit?

01:32:24 Yeah, that's never a problem.

01:32:26 Like, there's only three people in the entire house.

01:32:29 And it's the dad, there's the concubine, and the whiny kid.

01:32:33 Yeah.

01:32:34 Like, there's nobody else.

01:32:35 This makes no sense to me.

01:32:36 How could you possibly be?

01:32:37 Yeah, he's only pregnant.

01:32:38 It's not like he needs a wife because he had the kid with the concubine.

01:32:41 Just have more kids with the concubine.

01:32:43 Yeah.

01:32:43 I mean, she's pregnant again, right?

01:32:45 Have more concubines.

01:32:46 Oh, that's have more concubines.

01:32:47 I'm super wealthy.

01:32:48 Yeah.

01:32:49 Pretty good looking.

01:32:50 I'm fertile.

01:32:51 I'm just going to have sex once.

01:32:52 Well, and plus 15, they had opportunities to, you know.

01:32:56 Now, who's she pregnant with?

01:32:57 Ola, the daughter.

01:32:59 And that's from the dad, right?

01:33:00 From the dad, yes.

01:33:01 In the movie, the daughter's not born, but in the story, the daughter is born when the

01:33:06 mother drinks the water of life and becomes pregnant.

01:33:08 And she's born with all the memories of the past reverend mothers, right?

01:33:11 Yeah.

01:33:11 Also, do the Bene Gesserit have skylights where their belly buttons are?

01:33:14 Oh, good question for me, because they have a-

01:33:17 It's not just the Bene Gesserit.

01:33:18 All women do.

01:33:19 Don't worry about it.

01:33:19 I didn't know this.

01:33:21 I've not seen this in any documentary I've ever seen.

01:33:23 But I thought you had a good memory from when you were young.

01:33:25 Oh, yes, that's right.

01:33:28 Mommy's skylight.

01:33:30 No, because there's literally light in the fetus.

01:33:33 The fetus is in the belly, and there's spotlights coming in to light up the face.

01:33:38 You know what?

01:33:38 I'm going to get-

01:33:38 Did she swallow a flashlight?

01:33:40 What is happening?

01:33:41 I had to leave that to the movie as creative, because I found it interesting that they actually

01:33:46 showed a realistic depiction of a fetus, of a human being in a womb.

01:33:52 Saying it was a human.

01:33:53 Yeah.

01:33:53 Yeah, that's a lot of anti-abortion, right?

01:33:55 Because that's going to be triggering for some people that are okay with nuking that.

01:33:58 Right.

01:33:59 So, here's the other thing.

01:34:00 So, House Atreides, the three of us.

01:34:03 And so, the dad, the son, and the concubine, there's only three of them.

01:34:11 So, let's put them in charge of the most valuable thing in the known universe.

01:34:15 And that just makes no sense.

01:34:16 The other thing, too.

01:34:16 So, the second movie starts, and I'm like-

01:34:19 So, the first movie starts with magic.

01:34:21 The second movie starts with a completely retarded statement, which is the daughter

01:34:24 of the emperor saying, "None could have foreseen this."

01:34:30 And it's like, okay, okay, okay, all right.

01:34:32 So, imagine that, let's say, the four of us.

01:34:37 What we decide to do is we decide to displace the most violent MS-13 crime gang in the

01:34:43 neighborhood, and we're just going to be nice to all the new people, right?

01:34:46 And then we're like, "No one could have foreseen that there might be blowback from

01:34:51 the most evil Harkonnen when they've been displaced from the most valuable place in

01:34:55 the known universe."

01:34:56 And it's like, "Of course there's going to be blowback."

01:34:58 Yeah.

01:34:58 Like, no one could-

01:35:00 Naked mole rats are mean.

01:35:01 Sorry?

01:35:01 Naked mole rats are mean.

01:35:02 Naked mole rats are mean.

01:35:04 Let's write that one down.

01:35:04 Maybe that's the new-

01:35:05 I'm going to put-

01:35:06 I've been making a list of quotes from this show.

01:35:09 We've got a thumbnail.

01:35:10 Well, and in the movie, it's alluded to as well, like, "This is a trap.

01:35:14 We know it's a trap.

01:35:15 Well, why are we still going?"

01:35:16 And it's like, "Well, we must honor."

01:35:19 I forget the exact-

01:35:20 Yeah, it's something like, you know, it's the call of the duty to honor.

01:35:23 Yeah, so, to be good, or to because good, he's nice to his son, and he says to the

01:35:27 Fremen, "You can be your own thing."

01:35:29 So, to be good is to be completely retarded and vulnerable to all attacks from outside

01:35:33 and have no idea what's coming.

01:35:34 And what they're saying, too, I can recall this now as well.

01:35:37 They give it credit, that they're saying, like, "We're prepared.

01:35:39 We know it's a trap, so that's the first step in avoiding the trap."

01:35:42 No, the first step in avoiding the trap is going to wipe out the Harkonnen, isn't it?

01:35:47 I guess that one alluded to them.

01:35:52 One thing that's necessary, too, is the whole point of the family atomics-

01:35:55 Sorry, I'm jumping a bit around the story.

01:35:57 It's the last straw to defend your household.

01:36:00 How come they weren't used?

01:36:02 Right.

01:36:03 Yeah.

01:36:03 Here's the other thing, too.

01:36:04 You have a whole defense system that apparently can just be undone by one guy who can be compromised.

01:36:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:36:11 There's no backup, no redundancies, nobody's guarding the shields.

01:36:15 Like, apparently, just one guy can get his wife kidnapped, and that's the destruction.

01:36:19 How on earth does the house last 10,000 years if you have a giant hole in your armor called,

01:36:24 "One guy can get compromised, and your entire house can be destroyed."

01:36:27 Sorry, James, you've got a second.

01:36:28 I mean, this is circling back to one of the things that Jared and I talked about when

01:36:32 we watched the part one a week or so ago.

01:36:37 I just realized, "Man, House Atreides has the worst intelligence ever."

01:36:42 It's absolutely-

01:36:44 Now, do you mean spy intelligence?

01:36:45 Yeah, like military intelligence, spy intelligence.

01:36:47 How do you go into the whole thing with the doctor?

01:36:51 Certainly, to know he has a wife.

01:36:56 What happened to her?

01:36:56 She's gone.

01:36:58 Yeah, it's like, "Okay, so we should keep an eye on this guy."

01:37:00 And what if you notice the guy is just totally haunted because his wife's gone?

01:37:03 No kidding.

01:37:04 No kidding.

01:37:04 Why don't we notice the thing?

01:37:05 His mom is this Benny Jezret can read people's body language, knows exactly what's going on.

01:37:10 She's not going to know that this guy that's spending intimate time with her son, you've

01:37:15 got to thaw out.

01:37:15 Well, no, because it's like, "Paul Atreides can see the future.

01:37:19 He knows what's happening down the road.

01:37:21 He can catch tiny little drones that are going to kill him,

01:37:25 but he has no idea that his personal intimate family doctor's wife has been kidnapped.

01:37:30 No idea whatsoever.

01:37:31 You seem a little bit preoccupied, doctor.

01:37:36 Oh, no.

01:37:36 This is the maddening thing about this.

01:37:39 This is a trauma narrative, a trauma environment and story where this guy, it's wildly about

01:37:45 this minutiae and detail and plans within plans and we're figuring all these little

01:37:50 details out, but the glaring obviousness of human emotion, connection, warmth is lost

01:37:56 on everyone.

01:37:57 Well, how much empathy did Frank Herbert have?

01:38:00 How much understanding of human nature did he have?

01:38:03 All he did was manipulate and bully and intimidate and terrorize.

01:38:07 Empathy for this abstract thing called nature, which is not empathy at all because you don't

01:38:14 actually have to interact with nature.

01:38:17 He would never imagine that Paul would notice that the doctor was traumatized because he

01:38:25 enjoyed his son's trauma.

01:38:26 How could he possibly understand that you would notice something like that?

01:38:30 Unless Paul is completely cold and alien and weird, in which case, why do I care who wins?

01:38:36 It's just one mafia family fighting another mafia family.

01:38:38 The other example, there's probably a bunch of them and I know that the books do touch

01:38:43 on this a bit more.

01:38:44 They flesh this out more, but in the context of the movie itself, the other glaring intelligence

01:38:51 failure on my part, that's all.

01:38:52 They finally get to Arrakis, ignoring all the rest of it.

01:38:55 They get to Arrakis and there's evidence of harpoon sabotage.

01:38:59 One of the carry-alls doesn't grab the thing.

01:39:03 So after they lose the harvester, but the Duke manages to save all of the people who

01:39:07 were on the harvester, which is his nobility.

01:39:09 I don't care about the harvester.

01:39:11 I don't care about the spice.

01:39:12 I want these people to be-

01:39:13 I want to protect the people, but I'm not going to notice giant spaceships accumulating

01:39:17 over my own planet that are about to kill me.

01:39:19 Well, but before that happens, they go to the emperor's adjutant, whatever the name

01:39:24 of that person is, the woman with the blue eyes who was actually a man, it's a fan, Lea

01:39:28 Kynes.

01:39:29 So they go to Lea and she's like, "Are you going to tell the emperor that there's been

01:39:37 sabotage and all this other stuff?"

01:39:38 She's like, "I'm just, you know, the emperor's- reduce our load of spice that we have to

01:39:43 give."

01:39:44 And she's like, "The quota is the quota."

01:39:47 You know?

01:39:48 And they're not like at that moment, it's like, "Okay, we've missed everything up

01:39:50 and up, but this, this, this, this, something stinks."

01:39:52 - Well, yeah.

01:39:53 - And they're like, "Don't you notice these things?"

01:39:55 And she's like, and I think she does kind of allude to them, like, "I'm not allowed

01:39:59 to notice."

01:39:59 She says that afterwards.

01:40:02 Initially, she's like, "I'm here to be impartial."

01:40:04 You know?

01:40:04 Yeah.

01:40:04 But it's like, "Okay, but I'm not going to communicate anything.

01:40:07 You guys have- you have to get the- it doesn't matter.

01:40:10 You get the quota."

01:40:11 And it's like, "Okay, so there's- this has got to be a setup.

01:40:13 There's got to be a trap."

01:40:14 And like you said, "We don't notice things are coming in over our heads."

01:40:18 - Giant spaceships.

01:40:18 - Yeah, yeah.

01:40:19 That's more obvious.

01:40:20 - Now that, okay, that was-

01:40:22 - In the movie.

01:40:24 But even in the movie, there's not satellites over Arrakis, ostensibly.

01:40:28 And-

01:40:29 - But why would there not be satellites over Arrakis?

01:40:32 - Well, actually, you know what?

01:40:33 They don't explain that well.

01:40:34 And they don't explain that at all in the movie.

01:40:35 That's fair.

01:40:36 - And then, sorry, and the last thing, because I know you're going to mention this about the

01:40:39 satellites, because it's like, how can you not track people in the desert?

01:40:42 You're literally leaving footprints everywhere.

01:40:44 Now, is it your point about the storms?

01:40:46 - Yeah, well, probably number one, they had storms.

01:40:48 So number two, I think this was in the book, is they had carpets that they would carry

01:40:52 behind them.

01:40:52 - Drag behind.

01:40:53 - Or drag behind them.

01:40:54 And it would cover over their footsteps.

01:40:55 Now, obviously, if you're looking at it, it's going to look a bit odd.

01:40:58 But, you know, a bit of a dust of wind blowing, it is going to be all covered.

01:41:02 - Magic carpets.

01:41:03 - Yeah, yeah.

01:41:04 - Especially if you hit them with bombs, you would create the bombing.

01:41:06 - No, what about this aspect?

01:41:08 Their space travel is full space.

01:41:10 So essentially, like, they don't have to like...

01:41:12 - They just materialize.

01:41:13 - Yeah, they just pop up and like unload a bunch of ships.

01:41:16 So it's like, hey, what do you like?

01:41:16 - But they would know all of that.

01:41:18 And they would have to have instant laser things to hit the ships within orbit, because

01:41:23 you can just materialize.

01:41:24 - They have shields over the house, over like, over the city, essentially.

01:41:29 - No, I get that.

01:41:30 - And that's where the doctor dropped their sabotage, their shields.

01:41:33 - Right.

01:41:33 - Yeah, it's like a lot of these things, I know that a lot of these things are explained

01:41:38 in the book itself.

01:41:39 But in the context of the movie, it's like, there's a lot that's not there.

01:41:41 And it's like...

01:41:41 - I think the movie...

01:41:42 - Oh, there's huge problems.

01:41:44 - But they needed more time for the desert shots.

01:41:47 - Well, here's the thing, right?

01:41:49 - And the "Ahh!" music.

01:41:50 - This movie was like two and a half hours.

01:41:53 - Yeah, yeah.

01:41:54 - And...

01:41:54 - They didn't need it longer.

01:41:55 - No, I think, you know, take out 20 minutes of desert shots.

01:41:59 I mean, yeah, they're cool.

01:42:00 But put 20 more minutes into story building and explanation and realism and stuff like

01:42:05 that.

01:42:06 Because obviously, okay, it's sci-fi.

01:42:09 It doesn't have to be the most realistic, you know, no one's expecting like...

01:42:11 But I mean, do a bit better.

01:42:14 - But at least you know how to explain it.

01:42:16 - Like, this guy, didn't he start dreaming of like making a "Dune" movie since he was

01:42:21 13 and this was the best he could do?

01:42:22 - The director?

01:42:24 - Director.

01:42:24 - The director said, Villeneuve, he said he started storyboarding at 13.

01:42:29 - At 13.

01:42:29 - Yeah.

01:42:29 - And this was the best he could do?

01:42:31 What did he storyboard?

01:42:32 Some drawings of deserts?

01:42:33 - What hand-waving?

01:42:34 - Just my personal conniption, like he just wildly changed so much in the narrative.

01:42:39 Like, dude, like...

01:42:40 - It's the same story anymore.

01:42:41 - I think it includes "Scowling Girlfriend" as well.

01:42:43 - Sorry?

01:42:43 - Yeah.

01:42:44 - The storyboard included "Scowling Girlfriend".

01:42:46 - Oh, this is...

01:42:46 - Okay, listen, Daya.

01:42:48 - I've got...

01:42:48 - After the long house, Paul.

01:42:49 - Every time I see her, she's got to be the least charismatic actress I know of.

01:42:54 - Yeah.

01:42:54 - Every time I see...

01:42:55 There's nothing likable about her.

01:42:56 And why does she look like she's nine?

01:42:58 - Hm.

01:43:00 - When she wears makeup, and she wears a lot of makeup when she wears makeup.

01:43:03 - Yeah.

01:43:04 - She looks like 20.

01:43:05 In this movie, she looks 12.

01:43:06 - Well, the act is 24.

01:43:08 - No way.

01:43:09 - No, no, the male act.

01:43:10 I'm sorry, Timothee Chalamet, 24.

01:43:12 Supposed to be 15 in the book.

01:43:13 - He looks 17 in the movie, I think.

01:43:14 - Yeah, yeah.

01:43:15 - But Chani Zendaya looked like 12, in my opinion.

01:43:20 Like, she looks really young.

01:43:22 - Well, and this...

01:43:23 - And also, compared to the original, like in movie one,

01:43:27 she only had like 10 minutes of screen time or something crazy, right?

01:43:30 In this movie, it changed completely.

01:43:32 It seemed like she was half a main character.

01:43:34 - Good, yeah.

01:43:34 - And for what?

01:43:35 Like, what did she add?

01:43:36 - Well, it's a shame.

01:43:39 The shame to the dudes.

01:43:40 - Yeah.

01:43:42 - But I just don't get the relationship.

01:43:43 - To be disappointed is better than angry.

01:43:44 - Why would you do this to your kids?

01:43:45 - Show me anger.

01:43:45 - He's this royal prophet of goodness, and he's gonna choose some random ugly 12-year-old?

01:43:51 - Hm.

01:43:51 - Well, not like a desert...

01:43:56 Well, actually, now, okay, at least in the book, she's the daughter of Liet Kynes,

01:44:00 who's like the imperial planetologist and leader of the Fremen.

01:44:03 So she's kind of a princess.

01:44:04 - What?

01:44:04 - Yeah.

01:44:05 - Yeah?

01:44:06 Now, that is actually mentioned in the movie, that Liet Kynes is the leader of the Fremen.

01:44:10 - The black woman who was the planetologist?

01:44:14 - Planetologist?

01:44:15 - Yes.

01:44:15 - Okay.

01:44:15 - Was secretly the leader of the Fremen.

01:44:18 - Really?

01:44:19 - Mm-hmm.

01:44:19 - Okay, I must've missed that.

01:44:20 'Cause that character just kind of faded in and out, and I was like...

01:44:23 - Yeah, and they did a terrible job of explaining these relationships and stuff.

01:44:26 And also...

01:44:27 - So that's... So wait, Zendaya's her daughter?

01:44:29 - Yeah.

01:44:30 - All right.

01:44:32 - Yep.

01:44:32 - Okay.

01:44:33 - The races are not anything I'm familiar with.

01:44:35 - Okay. Well, I don't know. Who knows, right?

01:44:37 - It's just like the Little Mermaid movie, where the white guy had like seven daughters,

01:44:41 and they were all different races.

01:44:42 - All different races, yeah, yeah.

01:44:42 - Yeah.

01:44:42 - Yep.

01:44:44 - Oh, man.

01:44:44 - Well, then they didn't have a race.

01:44:45 - Just gender-stitioned.

01:44:46 - Obviously.

01:44:48 - Okay, so...

01:44:49 - That's just...

01:44:50 - Yeah, so none of that particularly made sense.

01:44:54 Now, I know that there's a suspension of disbelief, I get all of that, right?

01:44:58 And they never explained why they had to walk into Mordor rather than just take the eagles.

01:45:04 - Right.

01:45:04 - Now, of course, the answer to that is that the Nazgul would kill the eagles,

01:45:07 so they had to go by foot.

01:45:08 But that wasn't explained in the book that maybe...

01:45:11 - But there's some things that also need to...

01:45:12 Obviously, every story is gonna have some things that don't add up.

01:45:16 But if it's something like that, there's also things that you're supposed to figure out

01:45:20 yourself and it isn't supposed to be.

01:45:21 - Yeah, yeah.

01:45:22 - Not everything should be explained in the story.

01:45:24 Some things are good for theorizing and coming up with your own ideas.

01:45:28 - That's fair, yeah.

01:45:28 - Just as long as there is actually a reason when you're writing it,

01:45:31 you may not have to explain it.

01:45:32 That's what I think, but...

01:45:32 - Yeah, I agree with that.

01:45:34 - Like, I think, you know, the guy who wrote "War of the Rings" probably had an explanation as to

01:45:40 why they went on foot.

01:45:41 - But didn't put it in.

01:45:42 - But he didn't put it in, because he's like, "Look, think about it and you'll find it."

01:45:45 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:46 - All right, you ready to get goose bumps?

01:45:47 - Oh, God.

01:45:47 - Here we go, here we go.

01:45:48 - The suits, what are they called?

01:45:51 - The stillsuits.

01:45:52 - Stillsuits, okay.

01:45:53 So the stillsuits, you don't eliminate your own waste, you recycle it.

01:45:57 Your own waste goes back into you.

01:45:58 Cycle of generational trauma.

01:46:01 You never get to expunge your waste.

01:46:03 It just goes right back into you and fuels the next generation.

01:46:06 - That's your nourishment.

01:46:07 That's what keeps you alive.

01:46:08 - Yeah, what keeps you surviving in a harsh environment is re-traumatizing yourself with

01:46:13 your own waste.

01:46:14 - And it's a kind of wrapping and...

01:46:16 - Yeah.

01:46:17 - Yeah, yeah.

01:46:18 - And of course, drugs go up the nose, as does this thing.

01:46:20 - Oh, yeah, I know that.

01:46:21 - So yeah, I like the recycling of trauma stuff, I think is quite powerful.

01:46:25 And there's a reason why this resonates with so many people.

01:46:27 - And of course, I mean, it's a fair theory, at least, why Herbert would have been finding

01:46:34 so difficult and then shutting his children out of the house at a certain point to Dune,

01:46:37 because he's being re-traumatized by inflicting trauma through the book.

01:46:40 - Well, and the whole book is...

01:46:41 - Inflicting trauma on everyone else.

01:46:43 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:46:44 - So he's saying that violence is the solution to all conflicts, because violence and mysticism

01:46:51 is the solution to all conflicts.

01:46:52 Nobody reasons with anyone in the entire...

01:46:55 Everything is resolved through violence, right?

01:46:57 So he is training people through this book to view virtue as weakness and reasonableness

01:47:05 as suicide, and everything is resolved through psychosis and violence, which is how he resolved,

01:47:10 quote, "resolved things with his own children."

01:47:12 So I view the book as toxic, and this is probably why I avoided it to some degree as a kid.

01:47:18 It just seemed to me very alien, bizarre, unhealthy, unworldly.

01:47:21 And I said this because I saw the David Lynch movie in '85, and I was just like, "This is

01:47:27 insane.

01:47:28 This is horrible."

01:47:29 And it was ghastly to me.

01:47:31 And again, maybe we'll watch it at some point, but yeah, so maybe this is just recycled trauma.

01:47:38 - I had a different experience of it where I read the book when I was 15.

01:47:41 I had seen the movie when I was 13, played the old real-time strategy game when I was

01:47:45 nine, and that's how I found the story at all.

01:47:49 But I had a bad childhood in a lot of ways, and the book for me was partially that escape

01:47:56 kind of stuff.

01:47:57 And Nisi, we were chatting about this earlier where I was like, "What is it like with...

01:48:01 I'm curious if you want to share it now."

01:48:02 Like you come across a story, you're like, "Oh, this is interesting.

01:48:05 This is neat."

01:48:05 And then to see the background and stuff, the author, what's that like for you?

01:48:09 - For me, it's like I liked the Dune series.

01:48:12 I never got hugely into it because obviously I'd never read the books, but I watched a

01:48:15 bunch of videos on it, watched the movies, of course, right?

01:48:17 I thought it was a cool story.

01:48:19 And then it's like hearing about it just really ruins it.

01:48:22 - It is a cool story.

01:48:24 I mean, I go with that.

01:48:25 It is a neat story.

01:48:26 I mean, it's very much an archetype, and the visuals were cool.

01:48:29 The sword fights were cool, though they didn't...

01:48:30 - But I mean, even in the book, like not when there isn't that stuff, but...

01:48:33 - Right, right.

01:48:34 So this ruins it for you?

01:48:35 - Yeah, just like hearing everything, it's like, "Okay, well, great.

01:48:38 Now I can't."

01:48:38 - "Now I can't enjoy it."

01:48:39 - So now it's not a story.

01:48:41 Now it's just some guy's life put into a book.

01:48:43 And I don't care about some guy's life put into a book.

01:48:46 I want to hear a story.

01:48:46 - And yeah, so he...

01:48:48 Because he went to this alternate universe at the expense of his own children.

01:48:52 And this is all...

01:48:53 Like how far did he have to go to avoid empathizing with his children?

01:48:56 He had to go 10,000 years into the future on the other side of drugs to a planet that

01:49:02 doesn't exist.

01:49:02 Like this is where he had to go mentally just to avoid any potential empathy with his own

01:49:07 children.

01:49:08 - And I'm surprised the kids weren't more resentful of the Dune series.

01:49:12 Because, I mean, maybe the one guy who died of AIDS or whatever, but the other guy who

01:49:17 actually continued it after his dad died for the money.

01:49:20 And it's like, how could you not just hate the desert after all of this?

01:49:24 Like your dad basically abandoned you for the story and you're going to just be okay

01:49:28 with it?

01:49:28 - Because, like, if you have bad parents like that, do you hold them accountable and

01:49:33 responsible or do you continue the cycle?

01:49:35 - So yeah, a couple of thoughts to end up with.

01:49:38 The firming, it bothers me because there's no future.

01:49:40 There's no families, there's no husband, wife, there's no children.

01:49:43 Like they're all about their ancestors because they take the fluids of their ancestors,

01:49:48 pump them into this lake to recover the desert planet or something.

01:49:52 I'm not really sure how that's supposed to work.

01:49:54 But I do find it weird that there are no kids.

01:49:56 Now, movie directors don't want to work with kids in the desert.

01:50:00 It's dangerous, it's sunny, you know, like it could get sunburned or whatever, right?

01:50:04 So I get that in the movie, but, and you're saying, Jared, that in the books, there was

01:50:09 not much focus on kids.

01:50:10 They'd sort of float around in the background from time to time.

01:50:12 - There were books, or sorry, there were kids in the book, but yeah, no, I wouldn't say

01:50:17 very much.

01:50:17 - Not like main characters or anything like that?

01:50:21 - So yeah, so for me, it means he doesn't have to deal with parenting.

01:50:25 He can do weird things like this, this thumper technology that apparently the Bedouin have

01:50:30 this advanced technology, which makes no sense, whether they're manufacturing these things,

01:50:33 whether they get the materials.

01:50:34 - Yeah, like they don't have any other type of metal and stuff like that, except for that

01:50:37 really.

01:50:38 - They do explain that they use spice for everything and that they use it to make a

01:50:42 basically a plastic, a polymerization.

01:50:44 They do explain that in the book.

01:50:45 - Yeah.

01:50:47 - So the spice is basically everything.

01:50:49 - It's everything.

01:50:50 Yeah, you can do anything.

01:50:50 - It's old space time.

01:50:52 It's a food, it's a drug.

01:50:55 You can manufacture things.

01:50:57 It's a 3D printer.

01:50:58 It's magic, it's magic sauce.

01:51:00 - It's mana.

01:51:01 - Yeah.

01:51:02 - Yeah.

01:51:02 - Yeah, it's like the replica.

01:51:04 What do they call that in Star Trek?

01:51:05 The holodeck.

01:51:06 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:51:08 - Okay.

01:51:08 - Yeah.

01:51:08 - So the fact that these people are fighting for the future of their planet,

01:51:13 but have no children.

01:51:16 - Hmm.

01:51:17 - What?

01:51:18 - Yeah.

01:51:18 - The point of that.

01:51:19 - Well, now in the books, there are a lot of children and actually I'm thinking about this,

01:51:22 the second and third book deal, like one of them is literally children of Dune.

01:51:27 - Okay.

01:51:28 And so that's fine.

01:51:29 But in the movies, the director.

01:51:30 - Yes, absolutely.

01:51:31 - Just to get you to care, like we care so much about our own future.

01:51:35 We're going to kill and murder and die, but not have children.

01:51:38 - Yeah.

01:51:39 - We're not going to do it because that's a lot of work.

01:51:41 - That's.

01:51:41 - That's crazy.

01:51:42 - It's complicated.

01:51:43 - Right.

01:51:44 So that bothered me a smidge.

01:51:46 - But I think again, they did all this effort into the movie and I know it's a hassle to have

01:51:50 a bunch of kids on a movie set and stuff, right?

01:51:52 But if you are living in this scarce resource desert planet, right?

01:51:56 Don't you want to have backup and have kids and stuff like that?

01:51:59 - People die out of nowhere.

01:52:01 We're not going to replenish them.

01:52:02 - When the Fremen are definitely in our selected population,

01:52:05 there's much more communal living and all the hippie-dippie stuff.

01:52:09 - But then they should have a bunch of kids.

01:52:10 - Exactly.

01:52:11 Yeah.

01:52:11 Spray and pray.

01:52:12 They're literally in a threat environment.

01:52:16 - They are not Apex predators in this desert planet, right?

01:52:19 Like humans on Earth, yes, Apex predators.

01:52:21 They are not there.

01:52:22 So they should be having a lot of kids.

01:52:23 - I would take a sandworm on over the lecture.

01:52:25 - Sandworms would die.

01:52:28 - They would die.

01:52:28 They would just eat themselves, right?

01:52:30 - Yeah.

01:52:30 Well, also, what was it?

01:52:32 Yeah, again, just for realism of the movie, right?

01:52:36 If it was too much of a hassle to have a bunch of kids on the set,

01:52:39 just get actors who are teenagers who look younger, right?

01:52:43 And just do a bit of CGI to make their faces younger.

01:52:45 They even did the Indiana Jones one at the beginning.

01:52:47 - They made Harrison Ford look.

01:52:49 - They made him look like 30 years younger.

01:52:50 And obviously it wasn't amazing,

01:52:53 but just have them in the background, have a bunch of kids or whatever.

01:52:55 It doesn't have to be that big of a thing.

01:52:56 I bet you they could have done it pretty cheap.

01:52:58 - Yeah.

01:52:59 - Or just hire Zendaya to act like a 12-year-old.

01:53:02 - But that's also why this is fantasy,

01:53:05 because the Fremen are this R-selected population,

01:53:07 but they're also kind of like,

01:53:09 A, the apex predator of the planet.

01:53:11 - Yeah, yeah.

01:53:12 - Yeah, I mean, obviously he read "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T.E. Lawrence,

01:53:17 the Lawrence of Arabia guy,

01:53:18 about how he led the natives against, I think, the Ottomans or whatever, right?

01:53:21 So yeah, I mean, I get all of that,

01:53:24 but I just, I couldn't really care that much about the Fremen,

01:53:26 because they don't even care enough to have any families or kids.

01:53:30 And everyone's just kind of milling around in these undifferentiated burkas.

01:53:32 And it's like, I don't know, I'm supposed to really care?

01:53:35 And they're just mocking everyone.

01:53:36 And there's this tough guy, frat, get into the club kind of thing.

01:53:40 "You'll never be one of us."

01:53:41 Okay, you're one of us.

01:53:42 - I feel like, yeah, they definitely stretched the time

01:53:46 where it was like him trying to prove himself.

01:53:48 I think they stretched that on a bit long.

01:53:50 - Oh, good God.

01:53:50 - Well, 'cause all he had to do was wait for his psychic powers to manifest,

01:53:54 and you'd touch someone and find their history.

01:53:55 It's like, "Oh, that's good. Good for you."

01:53:58 And there was no earning that.

01:53:59 It just kind of happened out of nowhere.

01:54:00 So is it your point, I'm sorry, your point about,

01:54:04 wouldn't you resent the books that took your father away?

01:54:08 - Yeah, yeah.

01:54:10 - So he did dislike his father intensely,

01:54:13 from what I get from the biography when he was little.

01:54:17 But then he grew to love and respect his venerable and wise father and so on.

01:54:25 Interestingly enough, after the financial success of Duke,

01:54:28 he seemed to kind of flip a bit, right?

01:54:31 He seemed to kind of flip a bit and suddenly-

01:54:33 - Suddenly he doesn't hate his dad so much.

01:54:34 Also, his dad's getting old and has a lot of money and only one kid left.

01:54:38 - Right.

01:54:39 So, yeah, I don't know if there's any negative motives around all of that,

01:54:44 but he did seem to want to his father when his father became very successful.

01:54:47 Sorry, Jared, you can say.

01:54:48 - But there might be too much of a stretch.

01:54:50 You've pointed out that communists hate capitalism

01:54:52 because it stole mommy and daddy.

01:54:53 - Right.

01:54:53 - And there's stuff that as socialism goes on,

01:54:55 people are ending the transmission of their intergenerational wealth through,

01:54:59 what's the stuff called?

01:55:00 You gave your kids and you die?

01:55:01 - Inheritance.

01:55:02 - Inheritance.

01:55:02 - Oh, sorry, sorry.

01:55:03 - But yeah, they're ending inheritance.

01:55:05 Socialists are ending inheritance.

01:55:07 - Right.

01:55:07 - Which is part of the way that intergenerational trauma is transmitted

01:55:11 because I take the money and I forget what mommy and daddy did.

01:55:16 - And it's also how culture is transmitted.

01:55:18 I'm going to listen to mom and dad because they're going to give me inheritance.

01:55:20 - They're going to give you the inheritance.

01:55:20 - So like bribery for the continuation of culture.

01:55:23 - And there's no children.

01:55:24 So there's no one to give inheritance to.

01:55:26 - In Dune.

01:55:28 - In Dune, yeah, there are no children.

01:55:30 - Well, no, because the mother has the skylight fetus.

01:55:34 - Skylight fetus.

01:55:36 - That should be the name of the character, skylight fetus.

01:55:38 - There's no replacement rate.

01:55:40 - Right.

01:55:40 - There's no replacement rate.

01:55:42 - No.

01:55:42 - Yeah.

01:55:42 - Right.

01:55:43 And even the Harkonnen, the bald-faced mole rat guy,

01:55:47 his girlfriends are just cannibals.

01:55:48 - Yeah.

01:55:49 - Yeah.

01:55:50 - So, yeah.

01:55:51 I don't remember, like in the movie, I must have completely missed that they were cannibals.

01:55:54 Because like, I do think-

01:55:56 - He's literally holding up body parts.

01:55:57 - I don't even, I literally, maybe I went to get that.

01:55:59 - No, he's like, I'll bring you a heart and a spleen and a lung.

01:56:01 - And then he kills a guy.

01:56:03 Oh, also the Harkonnen, everyone who questions anyone in authority gets murdered.

01:56:06 - Dead, right.

01:56:07 - So that's not going to succeed.

01:56:08 - Which is a terrible strategy.

01:56:09 Like the Harkonnen are supposed to be smart.

01:56:11 And clearly they are because they look like remixed Megaminds.

01:56:14 And-

01:56:14 - Remixed Megaminds.

01:56:16 - I take that very personally, but go ahead.

01:56:17 - No, they literally are.

01:56:19 They're just like badly rendered.

01:56:20 But-

01:56:21 No, like, they're supposed to be smart.

01:56:25 And then they're like, okay, well, you know, we have a bunch of war and we're trying to invade

01:56:30 stuff and we need as much help from each other as we can get.

01:56:32 But you disrespect my opinion and disagree with me and you're murdered.

01:56:36 It's like, then no one's going to do it.

01:56:38 And if you make a bad decision, the entire planet's going to be killed.

01:56:40 - Entire wars have been lost because people were too frightened to speak up.

01:56:44 Right, this is one of the reasons why the British won.

01:56:46 I talked about this in my documentary on Hong Kong.

01:56:48 One of the reasons the British won against the Chinese was the Chinese were too nervous to send-

01:56:53 They pretended they'd won a battle because they didn't want the Emperor to get mad at

01:56:56 them for losing the battle.

01:56:57 So the Emperor didn't even get any early warning and they-

01:56:59 - Oh my gosh, it's crazy.

01:57:01 - Yeah, no, it's a terrible thing.

01:57:01 - So they had a bad battle going and then there's like two people left.

01:57:04 Yeah, but it went great.

01:57:05 They're just getting a bathroom break.

01:57:07 - We're hiding under the dock, but I think we're about to win.

01:57:10 So yeah, that bothered me that, because it's just, it was way too generic evil.

01:57:15 - Yeah.

01:57:16 And also the idea that all evil people look like slugs and they're just,

01:57:20 are all the good people look kind of noble and heroic.

01:57:22 That's just, you know, a lot of the evil people, like evil people know that.

01:57:25 So they constantly camouflage themselves as good looking people.

01:57:28 And all of the weird demonology among attractive people.

01:57:31 - Although to be fair, nowadays, it does seem to be coming a bit more true with all like

01:57:34 the crazy communists with their blue hair and nose piercings and stuff like that.

01:57:38 - Yeah, but the spokespeople for communism tend to be more charismatic.

01:57:41 Like there was like a guy, a singer, John Mellencamp.

01:57:45 - Yeah.

01:57:45 - Who was on a Bill Maher show waving around the communist manifesto.

01:57:49 And he's a pretty charismatic guy, although he says he's still an infant in his sixties.

01:57:52 But anyway, so the son, Brian and Bruce, right?

01:58:00 So the son, Brian ends up collaborating with his dad.

01:58:02 And I don't know, cause I didn't honestly, 19 hours, I couldn't make it through the whole

01:58:07 audio book, but I tried to go where it was relevant.

01:58:09 And I just read through a lot of the version.

01:58:15 So maybe he did have this big confrontation, but I don't think he did cause I never saw

01:58:19 it anywhere.

01:58:19 I've never heard it mentioned anywhere.

01:58:21 So he ends up working with his father.

01:58:22 Now his father gets his pancreatic cancer, as I mentioned, has stomach aches, doubled

01:58:28 over.

01:58:28 - But no, it's the same one in his stomach.

01:58:30 - Yeah, but they're working on a book, "The Man from Two Worlds" that they're collaborating on.

01:58:36 And they even do role plays to try and get the dialogue right.

01:58:39 They're constantly like working past midnight and night and day and his father's exhausted.

01:58:44 But the son-

01:58:45 - Oh, but he's working his dad to death pretty much, right?

01:58:47 - Well, again, I don't want to impugn any motives cause I don't know the guy, but I

01:58:50 could see a scenario where in sublimated anger towards his father is, "We're going to finish

01:58:55 this book, dad, let's go.

01:58:56 You know, this is going to be the best book ever.

01:58:58 It's going to be your legacy and like, keep working, keep working, keep working."

01:59:02 Even though he's sick.

01:59:03 Now he doesn't say, from what I've read, maybe it happened, right?

01:59:06 But what I've read, he doesn't say to his dad, "Look, you're not well.

01:59:09 Like we got to stop working on this, go straight to the doctor, get you."

01:59:12 Now, his father did get the test and he was misdiagnosed as dementia with Crohn's and stuff,

01:59:16 but he didn't say to his father, "Whatever you do, stop working on this book because

01:59:20 you're sick."

01:59:21 - And figure this out first.

01:59:22 - Right.

01:59:23 So the mom's already dead.

01:59:24 She died.

01:59:25 She was a smoker and took like 10 years off and on to die of lung cancer, which is pretty

01:59:28 brutal, of course.

01:59:29 - Should have healed herself with her white witch mantra.

01:59:31 - Yeah, I guess.

01:59:31 But the son, if he still was angry at his dad, you know, being really enthusiastic about

01:59:38 the labor that is not exactly helping his dad's health might be how it played out.

01:59:42 - Yeah.

01:59:42 - We tend to see this with like, you know, public figures, politicians that are just

01:59:49 sort of put out there and like, "Man, this guy is not well, you know, it's not doing

01:59:53 well."

01:59:53 - "What's gotta pain at these giant tumors coming out of his head?"

01:59:56 And he was like, "Gotta show up to vote."

01:59:58 Like, "Go spend time with your grandkids.

01:59:59 What are you, crazy?"

02:00:00 - Yeah.

02:00:01 Anyway, so I thought that was pretty rough and it's now becomes massive industry.

02:00:06 Like Dune is just...

02:00:07 - Yeah.

02:00:08 - I was reading through the list of all of the books.

02:00:10 There's like dozens of books and video games and short stories and...

02:00:13 - I knew Dune games coming out after the release of this movie, I heard.

02:00:16 - Is that right?

02:00:17 - Actually, we were just at the grocery store like two days ago and I picked up a magazine

02:00:21 on Dune because they had one and they were talking about like, "Oh, when Dune 3 releases

02:00:25 or like, what to expect for Dune 3?"

02:00:26 And they're like, "Oh, and here's the video game."

02:00:28 It's like, "Okay."

02:00:28 So it's still a big thing.

02:00:30 - Right.

02:00:30 - It's becoming a big thing again.

02:00:31 - And there was the 1985 movie.

02:00:33 - Yeah.

02:00:34 - In the early noughts, there was a miniseries.

02:00:36 - TV Spin Off, yeah.

02:00:37 - It was a sci-fi channel.

02:00:39 Yeah, TV miniseries.

02:00:40 It was bad.

02:00:41 - It was so bad.

02:00:42 - What was bad about it?

02:00:43 The sandworms managed to...

02:00:44 - It's just B-level, C-level acting and filming, essentially.

02:00:48 - Okay.

02:00:48 - It's like someone just like, "How cheaply can we get through this?"

02:00:51 And like, "Save the day."

02:00:52 - Yeah.

02:00:52 - The sandworm is just some centipede in the bottom of a jar or something.

02:00:55 - It was like, it's just bad CGI.

02:00:57 - Yeah, okay.

02:00:57 - Horrible bad.

02:00:58 - Two guys in one of those...

02:01:00 - Oh, the suits, yeah.

02:01:02 - No, like one of those, like, oh gosh, that big slinky twine.

02:01:06 - Yeah, yeah.

02:01:06 - Oh, no, it's coming down the stairs.

02:01:10 - There you go.

02:01:12 - Nice.

02:01:13 - Big, like, the stairs out of, like, not sandpaper, but like sandstone or something.

02:01:17 - Sandstone, yeah.

02:01:18 - You could probably get some Minecraft mod to do this.

02:01:20 - That's right.

02:01:22 - They show you on a beach and they've got the ocean in the background,

02:01:25 but you still hear the roar of the waves.

02:01:27 - Oh, yeah.

02:01:27 - Nice.

02:01:28 Or you get the horses with the guy in the front and the back just covered in sand.

02:01:32 - There you go.

02:01:33 - Right, nice.

02:01:35 - Oh my gosh.

02:01:36 - Or it's a close-up of one of the penguins with the teeth,

02:01:38 the surprise teeth in the penguin's mouth.

02:01:41 - Or the geese.

02:01:41 - Is it geese? Surprise geese that you can get a close-up of the goose and stuff like that.

02:01:45 - We could probably recreate this with Magpie.

02:01:47 He was, like, hissing earlier today.

02:01:48 He's got some big teeth.

02:01:49 - I can bring it out of him.

02:01:52 - You have a special way with those things.

02:01:55 - Nice, sandpaper everywhere.

02:01:57 Some curly straws up your nose.

02:01:58 Perfect.

02:02:00 - Oh my gosh.

02:02:00 - All right.

02:02:01 All right, so listen, I appreciate everyone's time.

02:02:04 Is there anything anybody wanted to mention at the end here?

02:02:06 - I'm going to rage at the environmentalism and Frank Herbert's hippy-dippiness.

02:02:12 - Yeah.

02:02:13 - Because this is the stuff no one's going to talk about.

02:02:16 Like I said, it's going to be this big story that goes on, it's impacting the world,

02:02:22 and these are the kind of conversations that people aren't going to be talking about.

02:02:24 - Well, he's not canceled for being a rampant child abuser.

02:02:27 Like, I'm canceled, right?

02:02:29 But he's not canceled for being a rampant child abuser.

02:02:31 Nobody cares.

02:02:31 So is Kea.

02:02:32 - I was saying, I think it's, what I was just realizing is it had this huge thing in like the,

02:02:36 what was it, the 60s?

02:02:37 - 60s and 70s, yeah.

02:02:38 - The 60s and 70s, revived again in the 80s and, well, 90s and fairly early 2000s, right?

02:02:43 And it seems like every 20 years, the series just gets revived.

02:02:48 - New generation.

02:02:49 - And now the new generation, Gen Z and Gen A, is being revived for, right?

02:02:54 With the two new movies coming out.

02:02:55 One, I think the last one was like 2020 or something, it came out.

02:02:58 But I just think that's really interesting.

02:02:59 Like something about this story is so, fits the narrative so well that the companies keep

02:03:06 reviving it for each generation and making it a trademark.

02:03:08 - Right.

02:03:09 - And that's what, there is something interesting within it.

02:03:12 There's something interesting about it that it is, it's a story that is so popular that's been,

02:03:16 there's something about it compelling to people.

02:03:18 Now, you asked early on, what's the purpose of the story?

02:03:21 It was like, why does this exist?

02:03:22 - Why did, why in this moment in history did, in a sense, Middle Eastern

02:03:27 death cult murder fest stories come front and center?

02:03:31 And everyone's like, yeah, it's great.

02:03:32 Like, why did we lose our own stories and basically have this incursion?

02:03:37 Because he studied all of these foreign texts, foreign languages, Chinese, Middle Eastern.

02:03:40 - Like he went all out for this.

02:03:41 - He went like total outgrew preference, forgot it, he wrote a mix.

02:03:44 - This is like the Atlas Shrugged of sci-fi.

02:03:46 - Yeah, very much so.

02:03:47 - Oh yeah, that's a good one.

02:03:48 - Right.

02:03:49 - Like just, cause she spent like 11 years on it, doing research and stuff and became a

02:03:53 whole architect just to make it.

02:03:54 - Well, that's for the earlier book.

02:03:56 But yeah, yeah, for sure, she went all in.

02:03:57 So yeah, that's to me, the big question, what trauma was happening that people will get

02:04:06 into this story rather than a story about healing, which is something like Lord of the

02:04:10 Rings.

02:04:10 Lord of the Rings is a story of healing.

02:04:12 - Well, yeah, I think it was very divided.

02:04:13 Like maybe the nicer people would go to Lord of the Rings.

02:04:17 - Lord of the Rings.

02:04:17 - And Jared.

02:04:18 - And then the same people, or not meaner exactly, but just people with different traumas

02:04:22 and stuff like that would attach onto this.

02:04:24 - Well, your trauma, Jared, was it coldness?

02:04:28 Was it?

02:04:28 - No, it was more like overt aggression.

02:04:31 - Overt aggression, okay.

02:04:33 - Yeah.

02:04:33 - So that would be in the story.

02:04:35 - But very much like, oh, there's that in the story and also the like, you know, control

02:04:40 yourself, control your, like, don't attract the worm, be quiet, walk on eggshells.

02:04:45 - Right, right, right.

02:04:45 - Get the rage of the old man.

02:04:46 - Yeah, it is very much walk on eggshells, that whole specified walk they have.

02:04:50 - Yeah, yeah.

02:04:50 - Right?

02:04:51 That you have to keep it, you can't be the same all the time, like very rhythmic kind of.

02:04:55 - And it's funny because tiptoeing is because you're prey, but the actual tiptoeing that

02:05:01 he learned from the native guy was because you're the predator.

02:05:04 - Yeah, yeah.

02:05:04 - So it was a kind of flip on that, because you've got to not be, like animals can't notice

02:05:08 that you're hunting them, whereas in the sandworms are hunting and so were the parents with this

02:05:12 aggression, right?

02:05:12 - Yeah, and to rephrase what I said earlier, I think I said nice, but I don't think that

02:05:15 was quite the right word.

02:05:16 Like I said, the nicer people were into Lord of the Rings.

02:05:18 I don't think that's it.

02:05:19 I think the better way to describe it or say it would be like, maybe people who were looking

02:05:25 more for a way to hide from their trauma and stuff like that would go more to the Lord

02:05:30 of the Rings, or not hide, but like find an escape from it, whereas I think Dune more

02:05:34 embraces it, I think.

02:05:36 - I was seemingly conscious aware that part of what appealed to me about Dune was this

02:05:43 like, wrap up your trauma kind of world or justify or explore your trauma kind of world.

02:05:49 - No, this is a world where it's not trauma, right?

02:05:52 So Frank, I was--

02:05:53 - I personally--

02:05:54 - He created a world where, this is Roman's argument from again, from the future.

02:05:57 He created a world where brutalizing your children is not trauma.

02:06:02 - It is, yeah.

02:06:02 - It's the only way they survive.

02:06:04 It is good parenting to traumatize your children.

02:06:07 And the only guy who doesn't traumatize his child gets killed.

02:06:10 So he's the bad guy and his child is abandoned to the desert and then has to become a murderer

02:06:16 in order to survive by joining the big--

02:06:17 - Well, yeah.

02:06:17 - And the guy to join the Fremen.

02:06:19 So Frank Herbert created an entire world where his brutal parenting was entirely right and

02:06:24 justified.

02:06:25 And he fled from his real parenting into this world to justify what his father did to him,

02:06:30 what his father's father did to his father, and what he did to his children.

02:06:33 That's the whole point.

02:06:35 And that's spreading the world where it's not child abuse.

02:06:38 It's not child abuse in the same way that not letting your children lay on the couch

02:06:42 and eat sugar all day.

02:06:43 That's not child abuse.

02:06:44 That's actually, you don't want your kids to do that.

02:06:46 It's not healthy for them, right?

02:06:47 So he's creating a world where if you brutalize your children, you're a good parent.

02:06:52 - Yeah.

02:06:53 And all right, now you guys know me.

02:06:55 We've gotten to know each other and chat about a lot of stuff.

02:06:57 I've always said I have a conflicted relationship with the art that I grew up with because I

02:07:02 appreciated it for what it was at the time, or I liked it for some reason at the time.

02:07:06 But as I would get older, I'd look back at it and be like, "This isn't good stuff.

02:07:10 This isn't really, there's something going on here that like, there's a reason I like this,

02:07:14 and there's not a message in here that's moral, objective, ethics, that kind of stuff that

02:07:18 really appeals to me."

02:07:19 - It doesn't warm your heart.

02:07:20 This does not warm your heart.

02:07:22 - Yeah.

02:07:22 - If there's psychosis and violence is the only solution.

02:07:27 - And for the appeal to do, in retrospect, like I'm trying to get back into the head of my

02:07:33 15-year-old self and what I felt at the time and what was intriguing about it,

02:07:36 it was the proposition that my trauma makes me better.

02:07:41 - Or, "I can survive this trauma.

02:07:44 I will be the Kwisatz Haas.

02:07:45 I will be the universe's super being.

02:07:46 I will survive this.

02:07:47 It'll make me this greater person."

02:07:50 - Right.

02:07:51 But he has, in order to become a super being, Paul has to reject any possibility of empathy.

02:07:56 - Yeah.

02:07:57 - He has to kick his girlfriend to the curb.

02:07:59 He has to kill indiscriminately.

02:08:01 He has to embrace a holy war.

02:08:02 He has to accept the death of billions of people through starvation and violence.

02:08:07 He has to murder empathy within himself, and then he transcends to godhood, right?

02:08:12 Which is basically-

02:08:14 - Basically, he has to become evil.

02:08:15 - Yeah, he has to become evil, and evil is all-powerful in this universe.

02:08:18 - Yeah, because power corrupts and power-

02:08:20 - Like the Harkonnen just want spice.

02:08:21 He's going to do a whole holy war.

02:08:23 The Harkonnen, in a sense, are less evil because they just want spice.

02:08:27 - They'll just keep the status quo.

02:08:29 Yeah.

02:08:29 - Yeah, they'll just still kill people to get some spice, but they're not out there

02:08:32 causing the death of billions of people in a holy war.

02:08:34 - Yeah.

02:08:36 - Now, there's a famous quote from Frank Herbert, and it was something that was

02:08:40 appealing to me as a kid, too, is that it's not that power corrupts,

02:08:44 it's that power is magnetic to the corruptible.

02:08:46 - Yeah.

02:08:46 - Which is a great quote about governments and politicians, and he grew up,

02:08:49 there's interviews where he's skeptical of government and things like,

02:08:53 "Man, it's just bad that we get away from that."

02:08:54 And even, oddly enough, didn't he talk about, like,

02:08:56 "We're getting away from the founding of our country and our tradition,"

02:08:59 and some of those things, to be someone who drew the culture so far away from it.

02:09:03 - He was very interested in abstract topics that didn't require him to

02:09:06 change his own abusive behavior.

02:09:07 - Yeah.

02:09:08 - Government, nature, ecology, the natives, blah, blah, blah, right?

02:09:12 All the natives is being so badly mistreated.

02:09:14 It's like, "You've got kids starving to death outside, and you put them, like,

02:09:19 as hard starving to death because they can't eat."

02:09:21 - Well, I wanted to point this out, too, that there's a lot of anarchists and libertarians

02:09:24 who would find a good, like, anti-state narrative in their book, and it's like,

02:09:29 "No, no, the state begins at home with the childhood, and this is a story apologizing,

02:09:33 apologetics for bad parenting, which is just going to propagate the state."

02:09:36 - Justification and saying that good parenting is bad parenting,

02:09:39 and bad parenting is good parenting.

02:09:40 - Yeah, exactly.

02:09:41 - It's completely universal.

02:09:42 - Yeah, exactly.

02:09:42 - Yeah.

02:09:42 - And all you need is magic, spice, and psychosis, and his worldview becomes perfect.

02:09:47 - It's some cinnamon.

02:09:48 - It's some cinnamon, that's right.

02:09:49 - And has anyone ever met a libertarian that embraces a drug or two here or there?

02:09:53 - That would be crazy.

02:09:56 - And Lord knows libertarians totally warmed to peaceful parenting because that's something you

02:10:00 can actually affect and do for the better. So, yeah.

02:10:04 - Just all talk.

02:10:05 - So, I think for me, my mother certainly was violent, but not sadistic. Never got that sent.

02:10:13 - That's what I've heard, I don't think so.

02:10:16 - Yeah, she erupted in anger. She had no control over her own emotions,

02:10:19 but she would never in a billion years have hooked me up to a lie detector.

02:10:22 Like this wouldn't even have crossed her mind as a thing to do. So, I think in the chaos,

02:10:27 I was repelled by the sadism of doom because that was not my experience.

02:10:33 - Interesting.

02:10:34 - But if you, because there were no morals in my mother's anger. She's just angry, right?

02:10:39 She'd just get full of rage, blow up, calm down, nothing over dessert. So, it was random eruptions.

02:10:45 - Yeah.

02:10:46 - It was not, there was nothing moral in my mother's aggression.

02:10:48 - She never painted like, you know, "Oh, you're a bad kid."

02:10:51 - No.

02:10:51 - She was just like, you know, she would see something, she'd rage, she'd be violent,

02:10:56 but there was never some big moral message.

02:10:58 - Mysticism in a way, and it wasn't the moral.

02:11:00 - No, even the mysticism, it wasn't like you're offending the universe. It wasn't like you're

02:11:04 a bad person. It was just, it was the violence that you would get from a scratching cat.

02:11:08 - Yeah.

02:11:09 - There's no moral lesson in it. Were you morally instructed by Izzy's ducks?

02:11:14 - No, I mean, Mellon gave me some instructions.

02:11:17 - There was some pretty direct...

02:11:19 - No, you're just, you're dealing with natural, I got no more moral lessons from my mother's

02:11:24 violence than from a bad storm that destroys some property of mine.

02:11:27 - Yeah, yeah.

02:11:28 - Right? So, for me, the conscious sadism and control, and I can't comprehend that,

02:11:38 if that makes sense.

02:11:38 - I got that.

02:11:39 - So, you're a bad kid, I'm educating you, I'm making you better, I'm disciplining you,

02:11:47 I'm teaching you how to live, I'm helping you survive, whatever, not...

02:11:50 - This is for your own good, implicitly.

02:11:52 - I got, now, a little bit in boarding school, there was that kind of stuff, but boarding school

02:11:56 was just Nietzschean will to power stuff. We can do this, so we're going to hit you with a cane.

02:11:59 I didn't grow up with anybody who I believed had any moral lessons for me, which is where UPB

02:12:06 comes from a blank slate, because I didn't have anybody I believed in, the church, the teachers,

02:12:12 the headmasters, my mother, my father, none of them had any moral lessons that meant anything

02:12:16 to me. And here's a similarity I had with Frank Herbert in that sense, which is he's

02:12:20 reproducing his trauma through his stories, which appealed to me. And, again, I didn't believe my

02:12:28 dad's moral castigating, and I didn't embrace, "Yeah, you're the worst."

02:12:33 - "You're right, I am."

02:12:33 - "You're a good thing." Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was the subject of it, but also incredibly

02:12:37 conflicted and confused with it, and lots of... And this Lord of the Flies child out in the wild

02:12:46 world, especially 15, around the time I get this book, I'm in that world. I'm spending,

02:12:51 from about the age of 13, I'm spending time more with my peers than at home, and we're just

02:12:56 wandering around, whether it's- - Because you don't want to be home.

02:12:58 - The forest or whatever, suburbs, neighborhoods, cities, we're wandering around. And yes,

02:13:03 we're absolutely not home, and it is very much this just wild-

02:13:06 - I was out there crossing train bridges at night, 300 feet off the ground, because I didn't want to

02:13:11 be home that badly. And that's what my friends wanted to do, and the alternative was to go home.

02:13:15 Let's go. - And violence was very much part of a

02:13:19 regular topic of conversation. - But were your parents' punishments

02:13:24 cold and sadistic in this kind of way, like with the lie detector?

02:13:28 - Not that bad. - No, no, but in that vein?

02:13:32 - Because there could be proximal stuff of sadistic torture, where, like,

02:13:35 stand in that corner for a good, and I don't know if you've ever been forced to stand in a corner,

02:13:40 but at a certain point, and it's humiliating. - Of course, yeah, but the status cap that they

02:13:44 used to have in school. - Because that didn't happen when I was a

02:13:46 toddler, but when I'd be like 13, 14, 15, those ages, stand in a corner, it's humiliating.

02:13:53 - Yeah. - And at some point,

02:13:55 you're standing there so long, I don't know if any of you guys have ever-

02:13:57 - Back hurts, your knees hurt. - No, the blood pools in your legs,

02:14:01 and it just itches, it hurts, and you're getting a fresh stand in the corner, and if your nose isn't

02:14:07 touching the corner- - Oh, is that still?

02:14:09 - Yeah. - Yeah, my mother would never have done that.

02:14:11 - You're just breathing your own breath back and recycling your own stuff.

02:14:15 - Oh, God. - Like the dune, like the suit.

02:14:18 - Yep. - You're breathing your own waste.

02:14:20 - Yeah. - You're not just a poison container,

02:14:23 you are living, recycling. - Yeah, so my mother would never have done

02:14:28 that, and I never experienced any punishments like that.

02:14:30 - God. - So that's really conscious,

02:14:32 and you're staying there because- - No, no, no, Sarah, here's the thing,

02:14:34 that was painted as a good thing, that was the gentler parenting.

02:14:41 - It's just a timeout. - Yeah.

02:14:43 - Right, it's not, you're just clean out, right? - Yeah, well, at least you're not getting a whipping.

02:14:47 - And did you get that kind of controlled, like where it's a whole ritual, like the take off the

02:14:54 belts, the clean- - Oh, absolutely.

02:14:55 - Okay, so my mother would never do anything like that, she'd lash out, but it was no ritual involved.

02:14:59 - It's interesting, 'cause you had a revulsion to it, Seth, Jared, you had a real draw to it.

02:15:05 - Oh, yes. - And for me,

02:15:07 it sort of kind of glanced off, I was in my 20s, of course, I wasn't a kid when I came across it,

02:15:11 but for me, it was kind of in between the two, and also the other thing is that I'm in a much more

02:15:20 of a limited category, or a much smaller category of parents who had the divorce,

02:15:24 where the kids stay with the father. - Oh, right.

02:15:27 - I have a different perspective on divorce and all this other stuff, where my mom,

02:15:33 I've mentioned this before, lived a mile away, barely saw her, as far as punishment, abuse,

02:15:38 verbal, emotional, physical, when I was very young, and by the time parents started fighting

02:15:45 more with each other, it kind of got ignored, I didn't have very many peers that I bonded with

02:15:51 at all, so I was very isolated in that way. - Right.

02:15:54 - Well, abuse, that's isolate, 'cause you can't have people over.

02:15:57 - Yeah, well, can't have people over, we never had people over our house, never had kids.

02:16:01 - Adult friends, did you have parents? - I would say rarely.

02:16:05 - Okay. - Rarely did that.

02:16:07 I mean, maybe when I was very, very young, when they would have the parties, and then,

02:16:09 those things with my father, where they, my father made certain changes around his life,

02:16:16 they used to be substance abusers, at least alcohol, I know for sure, my father said,

02:16:22 "I think I'm an alcoholic," and I think it was a Chuck Colson was the fellow that he identified

02:16:28 with or read about, back in the 80s, was born again, Billy Graham type area.

02:16:32 - Mm. - So, started there,

02:16:35 and then he later became born again. So, with him, I would say with both my parents, it was much more

02:16:43 in the moment of wackier, now, they didn't go to the point of, like, with your mom, Steph,

02:16:49 where you describe later on, "Oh, we'll just get some ice cream." So, it was much more--

02:16:53 - Get grounded, let's go to a movie. - Yeah, it wasn't like that for me.

02:16:56 It was much more, you get punished, and home is just sucks. There's no fun, there's no light.

02:17:05 - Even after the punishment's over? - It was just never fun out.

02:17:09 - Okay. - Never, never, I mean,

02:17:11 okay, I'm not saying it was never, like, it was all dark, but it was like, maybe a few points here

02:17:15 and there, but it wasn't like this flip of, like, I believed I was bad. I also knew that my father

02:17:23 was a liar, like, from when I was a very young age. - So, you had that double think, right?

02:17:26 - Yeah, kind of. - He's telling me I'm bad,

02:17:27 I am bad, and he's a liar. - Yeah, yeah.

02:17:29 - And my parents have, I don't trust my parents for anything, but yeah, I can't do anything without.

02:17:34 - So, then, doom would have been too consistent for you?

02:17:36 - Oh, my God. - No, 'cause doom is consistently sadistic.

02:17:40 - It's a bit on the-- - Everything is violence,

02:17:41 everything is resolved through violence or manipulation, mysticism, bullying.

02:17:45 - Yeah, I kind of had to have that split, you know?

02:17:47 - Okay, so, doom would have tried to win one case or the other, and you had to have that

02:17:52 ambivalence to survive. - For sure.

02:17:53 - I mean, you've known me for a long time, I'd be probably pretty consistent with,

02:17:56 you know, 'cause you've known me. - Interesting.

02:17:59 - Okay, good, good. Well, I'm curious how many people we're gonna help,

02:18:04 annoy, enrage, as usual. - Yeah.

02:18:06 - But I really do appreciate everyone's time and the work that we did into getting all this

02:18:11 information, which was great. And, of course, freedomain.com/donate to help out the show,

02:18:15 like, share, subscribe. - Yes.

02:18:16 - Absolutely. - Share the ideas.

02:18:18 - You better. - If we're too spicy.

02:18:20 Yeah, if we're too spicy to share directly, just share the ideas, that would be great,

02:18:23 and I look forward to-- - Can't be too spicy,

02:18:25 we all have to spice. - That's right.

02:18:27 It would be interesting to see what people think of with regards to this analysis, because

02:18:31 if we really wanna grit our teeth, we'll do Isaac Asimov or--

02:18:35 - Oh, my. - Marian Zimmerman or all these

02:18:38 other creeps. - Well, what would also be

02:18:39 interesting is at some point, if we wanted to do like the Lord of the Rings--

02:18:42 - The Tolkien one, right? - Yeah, looking into Tolkien and his life,

02:18:45 because I think, I remember in the last time we were in the car reading the biography,

02:18:49 it was pretty interesting and fun, so. - Is this just revenge, like,

02:18:52 we ruined Dune for you, and now you wanna-- - Fair, very fair.

02:18:56 All right, well, thanks, everyone. - I think you understand.

02:18:58 - I'm just being sadistic. - Have a great afternoon with

02:19:02 us, and look forward to your feedback. - See ya.

02:19:04 - Bye. - See ya, bye.

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