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March 21, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:19:03
The Truth About 'Dune'!
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Hi, everybody. We are doing Dune.
We are Dune.
Dune. Dune. Dune the Dune.
We're doing the culture. We're doing the history.
First of all, you don't have to have read the books.
You don't even have to have seen the movie to make this incredibly valuable to you.
We're going to break down the whole artistic process and all the stuff that's not being talked about.
With regards to this story, which is considered the most influential and successful and rich and deep and complex science fiction novel of all time.
And also outside of the genre, just a science fiction is considered a fantastic book.
Yeah. My history with Dune, I saw it, of course, around all the time when I was in my early teens.
I was a kid. You mean like the first movie?
No, no. The, uh, oh.
Do you think I am? Oh, you mean the very first David Lynch movie?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, no. Even before that, because the book was written, published in mid-60s, right?
Yeah. So it was all around.
It creeped me out. I would see it.
I maybe flipped through a little bit, and I saw all these Arabic things, and it's like, this is not my culture.
My culture, my history is like Knights of the Round Table.
Lord of the Rings. 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, well, why would I want this nonsense foreign desert story?
And I just can't honestly remember if I even started to read it and didn't like it.
Because I was in the library all the time and it was everywhere.
And it was a real phenomenon. Although none of my friends were into it.
We were all into Lord of the Rings and the European mythology.
So I never read the books and I wasn't going to watch the movies.
But then we decided to, for reasons that pass.
Oh, because it was just kind of big, and we were getting lots of questions about it.
Yeah, sure. And this is Sci-Fi's Lord of the Rings.
Very much so. Okay, so that's me, Steph.
If you guys want to mention yourselves too, I'm Jared.
I've been working for the show about a year now, working with the show about a year now, and I help out with research and things like that, wherever and however I can help, doing the thumbnails and such.
Onto James. Onto me?
Okay. Yeah, Izzy.
Child, you've probably heard me on other shows.
I was the famous hand of the livestream.
And you watched it on a plane.
I did watch it on a plane. I had seen a video about Doom, about the movie, like reviewing it and kind of going in depth about the world building.
I thought, hey, this is actually really cool.
So I kind of got into it. And then I happened to be on a plane flight.
And I saw that they had the movie available to watch.
And I was like, oh, I've been looking for this opportunity forever.
So I watched it. And then- But with no sound, basically, right?
A while later- So you missed all the- Yeah, this is my weird thing is usually I don't watch anything with any audio.
Like if I'm watching a video, I turn the subtitles on and I have either the audio completely off or I'm listening to music through something else.
Oh, okay. You're just a subtitled person.
I'm just a subtitled person.
Because that also helps me, I think, decipher whether the movie is actually good in a way.
Because it's like, okay, maybe the audio makes it seem really cool, but is it actually that cool?
Yeah. Or they manipulate the crap out of you with, like, the piano, soft piano, sadness, and the...
Yeah, like, if I'm laughing at the audio without...
Or if I'm laughing at the dialogue because there's no music to guide me, then...
Right, right. But that's not even just for movies, just also for, like, random videos and stuff, but...
Right. So now we've seen both the movies.
We've all seen both the movies.
Yeah, I was hyped to see the second one after it came out.
James, you didn't read the book as a teen, right?
No, well, not as a teen.
I read it in my, I want to say, mid-20s or so.
I don't have so much of a love or really much of a hate for Dune.
Just sort of, it's a thing.
I liked Lord of the Rings much more myself.
But yeah, no, I wasn't going to watch...
I don't watch movies very much.
Right. Lately, especially.
I've never been much a movie guy. But yeah, no, the opportunity to look over the movies and get a sense of what's going on.
Yeah. And it's a lot of...
Once you start digging into the things, it gets really deep.
Yeah, we're going super deep on this.
Yeah. Also, I remember that my friends who liked D&D and Knights of the Round Table and all of this, they were all people I liked.
And the people who were into Dune were, like, druggy weirdos.
No offense. No offense to those who've studied every bit of lore, because Izzy's a total lore junkie, right?
Like, if there's lore, it's, like...
Can it to you, right? Like, it's really attractive.
Oh, yeah. And I definitely got into the work, dude.
Well, yeah, because this guy spent four years researching this book.
He basically spent another four or five years writing it, and then there was a bunch of edits.
So I basically spent almost a decade to come out.
So, he's Lore King.
He read, according to his son, and we'll get into the son's biography, Frank Herbert wrote, read like 200 books, learned how to write Arabic languages and think in Arabic and even Chinese or Mandarin and just went all in.
And what we're looking at here Is some really, really deep stuff.
Because I'm almost like, why does this thing even exist?
Like, I understand why Lord of the Rings exists.
Tolkien loved playing with languages.
He also lost all of his friends in the First World War.
And where, to me, Dune is about sadism.
The Lord of the Rings is about sorrow.
You know, the elves are all leaving.
It's the end of an era.
And they have battles they can't win.
And, of course, I mean, Tolkien knew a massive amount of sorrow over the course of his life.
So that all makes sense to me.
And a dune is not something that I understand.
So we did do a lot of sort of deep background.
We've been talking about this for a couple of days now, reading biographies and really getting in deep.
Because I'm like, well, where does this even exist?
Why is there this planet?
He originally was going to set it on Mars.
But then he said, oh, people got too many associations with Mars, like the Orson Welles thing and all of that.
So he ended up making up this completely fictitious planet.
Why does this exist? Why was he so drawn?
Now, we've got a list of the names.
We'll try to provide some general descriptions about this.
But we're not going to start with the story.
We're going to start with the writer.
And I know this personally, as does Izzy, because we've both written things, right?
Yeah. I write what I know.
And so I write a lot of philosophical stuff.
I write about childhood stuff and so on.
Frustrated intellectuals.
So you write what you know.
And knowing that, so the more vivid the world is that you're creating, the more personal it must be to you.
And the more... The deeper it is to you and the more common other people's experience of whatever you're unconsciously writing about, the more it connects with other people.
Yes. If that makes sense. Izzy has written what she knows, having murdered countless people on spaceships.
Exactly. All from first-person experience.
Absolutely. Basically a diary. Absolutely.
So, we're going to make a case here about Frank Herber and his...
We don't know. There's possible motivations for this, what was going on unconsciously, because to me, when I look at a movie, the first thing I look for is what's not there.
And what's not there is humanity, likable characters, depth, humor.
There's no children. There's no families.
No warmth. A little bit between the father and Paul.
A glimpse, and that's...
But then the father, who's warm and nice relative to everyone else, immediately gets slaughtered.
Yeah. Right? So what does that say?
So it's... Was there warmth between Chani and Paul?
A little bit here and there in the movie.
I mean, they seem so unromantic.
Yeah, yeah. Well, he's got a destiny.
No, but obviously, like, they kiss and stuff, but it just nothing seemed warm, really.
Right. Yeah. I think they were...
Were they kissing or just exchanging vital fluids in the desert?
I don't know. But she also, Zendaya, and this is something I mentioned walking out of the movie, she's like the angriest girlfriend in every movie I'm in.
She's always a lot of interest, and she's always extremely angry.
She's always extremely angry, and I just thought it was kind of funny, because oftentimes women are the transmitters of religion, if not downright superstition, and hit all these women who were really scientific and skeptical, yelling at all these men who were really mystical and religious.
I'm like, I'm not really sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So...
The genesis of the story is Frank Herbert was an incredibly frustrated writer.
So, you know, there's this story probably apocryphal at the age of eight.
And we get into his childhood. He said, I want to be an author.
I want to be an author. But by the time he got into his 40s, he had nothing.
He was making a couple hundred bucks at best a year.
Oh, man. From his writing and constant rejections and he couldn't figure out what was going wrong.
He even had a mentor, Vance, who was going to co-write with him, who was a successful writer.
So, you know, obviously he had some charisma, but just a complete failure.
And he wrote these haunting poems about how his life was slipping by and he was achieving nothing.
So what happened was he heard about a story that the U.S. government was stopping a desert.
I think it was in California. Right.
With some agricultural...
Planting a certain... Yeah.
So he hired a plane.
He flew out. He was going to write about all of this for a magazine.
And he started writing.
And he just had this affinity to the desert and passion about the desert.
So he started imagining a desert planet.
And that's sort of where he got...
The idea for the stories, and it kind of grew from there.
But we're going to go into Frank Herbert's childhood, because the movie is chilling.
It's sadistic, cold, cruel.
Violence is everywhere.
It's how everything is solved.
It's either violence or manipulation, like brutal kind of manipulation, right?
So why would somebody create and invent a world like that?
So we have to look at this guy's childhood and this guy's life.
We're going to start even further back to his ancestry.
So according to his, I think it was his grandmother, they were descended from a concubine of Henry VIII. So when he writes about the fall of a house where there's a noble, a concubine, and a child, he's digging deep into family history.
And it's so much easier to write what you know than to invent out of nothing.
He's got this family history.
His own grandparents were outright socialists, if not communists, who joined this total hippy-dippy, everyone-ows-everything nonsense commune without prices.
And it all generally does.
It decayed over the space of sort of five to eight years, and his grandparents ended up running this store, which was okay, but they didn't make any particular success.
success. So they were drawn heavily to these leftist causes and that's sort of where he
came from. Frank Herbert himself has claimed to have remembered when he was a year old
he walked under some table with a tablecloth. I mean I remember around that age. I'm not
going to say that's impossible. And the other thing that was pretty important was two and
a half years of age and this says a lot about how he was not protected. His own parents,
the writer's own parents were these binge drinking, constantly fighting on the brink
of divorce, complete failures in business and just a mess.
And at the age of two and a half, Frank Herbert was almost killed.
He almost lost his eye because he was attacked by a dog that was tied on a chain.
Now, the dog clamped onto his face and he carried the scar all the way through his life.
And the only reason that Frank Herbert lived or didn't lose an eye was because he fell backwards from the attack and the dog's chain Was too short for the dog to continue attacking him.
Now, you've got some two-year-old roaming around some crazy, violent dog, or maybe, just maybe, the kid who was two and a half was poking the dog, aggressive towards the dog, angering the dog, and that's what caused the attack.
Of course, we won't know. But that's pretty wild stuff, and we're going to tie that into the book in a little bit.
Then the next thing that we get is, at the age of nine, he...
Well, no. So before that, there was a native.
So he's out there fishing, right?
So he was an outdoorsman completely.
And he used a lot of his outdoor tricks and tips in Dune, like the sand walking, which we'll get to later.
So he's out there fishing. He's not having any luck.
And there's this middle-aged Indian or native, indigenous guy who becomes close friends with him, teaches him how to fish.
Frank Herbert is convinced that this guy is ostracized from his own tribe, this native, because he lives in a smokehouse in the middle of nowhere alone.
He's convinced that the native guy, who's his friend, was ostracized because he was a murderer and the tribe had kicked him out.
The guy had hinted about some bad things in his past, but There was no absolute certainty of this.
So he becomes friends with that and then he ends up – he has a little canoe and he ends up going 200 miles in a round trip up and down the river at the age of nine.
And he does this by hanging on to tugboats and just, you know, being – I guess it's like Marty McFly with the skateboard on the back of the car, you know.
And some of the tugboat people liked him and let him stay and all of that.
So he's doing literally mental stuff.
He also finds a bunch of wood in the river, tows it in, and trades it for a sailboat, which at the age of 15, he puts ballast in and he ends up sailing with a friend of his 2,000 miles to Alaska.
Almost to Alaska, and they slept on their overturned boat, like a smaller overturned boat.
I don't know if it was that boat or a canoe or something like that.
So he's got this incredibly...
Wild, uncared for, unconnected, and frankly, enormously dangerous.
I'm a big one for, you know, go out, have your adventures, but not 200 miles away when you're nine.
That's crazy.
And so, yeah, this sort of lack of connection and lack of protection, I think, kind of defines things.
A lot in the books.
So, his own father was cruel and demanded silence.
Demanded silence from his children.
So, the father of the writer of Dune would listen to his news shows on the radio and everyone had to be perfectly silent or there would be this verbal abuse, torrents of anger, rage, and so on, right?
How dare you interrupt with all of this kind of stuff?
So... Frank Herbert created this world where it's so brutal, right?
There's no kindness, there's no love, and in fact, the only guy who does love anyone is the Asian doctor who loves his wife, and The fact that he loves his wife and the bad guys kidnap his wife is why he betrays the house Atreides.
And so the only affection that is shown is between...
Gets them killed. Well, yeah.
The only affection that's shown is Paul's father to Paul.
Yeah. And then Paul's father gets murdered in the whole house and everything gets wiped out.
So that's affection.
So great. Or it's the Asian doctor who destroys the House Atreides by betraying them to the bad guys because he loves his wife.
And there's a little bit of affection between the Duke and his concubine.
But again, like that all becomes a tragedy.
Right, right, right.
There's also some, there's some affection.
It's more, you know, superior to subordinate, but it's all from Paul to Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, who are his, you know, he grew up around them and they trained him in combat, but there's also a real bonding kind of affection, like uncles almost.
There is, but there are also coaches who are quite brutal on him.
True. No, very true.
Very true. Who's the… Gurney?
Gurney is the guy who trains Paul in the movie, right?
Yes. In that scene.
He's not his normal training.
His normal training partner is not present because he went ahead to Arrakis.
Aquaman. Pretty much.
Okay. No, because it's Jason Momoa.
Yeah, Mr. Beard. Yeah, yeah.
Right. And so, yeah, there's kind of an affection and a loyalty, but they're half killing them the whole time.
And when Paul says, I don't feel like it, it's like… Oh, you better...
Combat comes to you and all of this kind of stuff.
And then his son say that that was very much him.
Like, oh, you're not in the mood.
Like, the wrong words would just kind of trigger.
So Frank Herbert with his kids, his kids would occasionally say, I'll try.
And this was a massive trigger word for Frank Herbert with regards to his own children.
He would like scream at them, you know, do or do or not.
There is no try. No, not Yoda style.
But 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.
It's weak. That's a great point because so much of Dune inspired Star Wars, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. And the bad guys win because they have no attachments to anyone or anything other than power, right?
Right. So he's created this world and he's drawn to this world of the desert, the writer, right?
Now, the desert, of course, is going to be harsh on kids because the resources are so tight and life and death is like one sip of water away, so they have to be incredibly harsh on their children.
And the other novel where he wrote a bunch of other novels, Another novel that he wrote, which he was fairly known for before Dune, was, I can't remember the name of it, but basically it was a novel about a submarine.
Under Pressure. Under Pressure, yeah.
And so the novel about the submarine is interesting because that's another environment where death is just a moment.
If you've ever seen the movie Das Boot, it's a German movie about a submarine.
It's terrifying. Because, you know, one leak and you're dead, right?
And it's about a submarine in World War II and the German crew on it.
It's a really wild film. So he's created this environment.
He did this repeatedly where death is one slip away and therefore you have to be very harsh on everyone because only violence wins, only sadism and coldness and brutality wins.
And the good people are idiots.
Yeah. Now again, I don't know if that's the case in the book, but what's the dad's name?
Lito. Lito.
Okay, so Lito, who's the dad, is nice.
He's one of the nicer guys.
He's the only vaguely nice guy in the first part, I think, of the movie.
So evidence for that, his son says, I don't want to be a Duke.
Because the whiny Luke inspired, well, I know Luke came later, but like the whiny I don't want my destiny kid.
Yeah. Isn't that also in Star Wars?
Not just Luke Skywalker, but...
Is it Anakin? Remember the guy from the meme who's like talking to the girl and then she loses her smile and that sort of...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Anakin Skywalker.
Hayden Christensen. It's Anakin.
Anakin also, wasn't he super whiny?
I mean, I watched those movies so long ago and I think I fell asleep through part of them.
But he's like the super whiny, I deny my destiny.
That's just something you have to say.
You can't have a great man in modern shows.
Yeah, that's very much a facet of the movie.
Even Napoleon, which we did a review.
Even Napoleon, like, the movie was like, he's just some weird, rutting, strange, like, you just, you can't have a great man.
So, in order to sop to the masses, you can't, Paul, because in the books, Jared, you were saying, he like, yeah, Messiah, sounds good.
Like, he's got some conflicts with some of these aspects, but it's not this big, like, whiny thing.
I don't want to be a pirate.
Two modes.
The issue in the book is that he wants to become as great as his dad, but it's like, hey, I'm going to have to lead this great house.
There's some scary aspects of that.
It's understandable, but he wants that.
It's not like he's like, oh, I want to be a pilot to this.
Yeah. Well, it seems a lot.
I don't know. In the second movie, in Dune 2, it seemed like there was a sudden switch halfway through where he was like, I don't know.
I'm kind of indecisive.
I don't really want to do this.
And then halfway through, he's like, heck yeah, I'm a god, right?
Oh, god. It seemed like, you know.
There was no transition. The movie is still resisting it, and then it's off screen when he changes his mind.
And it all happens in about two seconds.
That's a pure contrivance of the movie.
Yeah. To me, it's as bad as like, you don't know what happens to the ring at the end of Lord of the Rings.
They just go into a mountain and come out and say, we won.
It's like, no, that's the whole movie.
It's him like, I don't want to be a, wait a minute.
I do, I do. And it's like, what causes that transition?
What happens? I don't know. It drives me a little crazy.
Now, who do we think at this table, who at this table would be the best at imitating Timothee Chalamet's two acting modes?
Oh my gosh. Izzy, would you like to give it a try?
No, I'm okay. I will pass this one.
Okay. I think I could do the murmuring.
Maybe, Jared, you could do the other one?
Wait, hold on.
I think you got a lot of this stuff.
All right. My invitation of Timothy Chalamet's audition.
Ahem. Ahem.
Yeah, I can talk really quietly and no vocal content whatsoever.
That's all he's got. He's got two moments.
There's absolutely nothing in between.
It's either one, it's like having a volume that's binary, one or infinity.
It's like murmuring you can barely hear and always that meme of the Russian national anthem played at like maximum volume with the sound burping.
Oh my gosh. That was crazy.
All right. There's Jared's quality on the games.
There you go. But that is very much what they've...
Well, what Dune kind of is in and of itself.
It's like this... It's either this subterfuge in plans within plans.
We're going to kill people or like...
Blazes from space in people's heads.
That was definitely in the movie.
Is that also in the book? It's like...
What's that? Like the two modes in the book is like...
No, the book is way more subtle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I thought. Okay.
So Frank Herbert, he claimed to have an IQ of 190 based upon some tests in school.
I mean, I'm not going to argue with the guy.
He obviously was very intelligent.
But then later on, he said that IQ wasn't like a big thing.
So this idea that you came from a higher status as this family did
And then collapsed down to a lower status just by the by this is also was my dad's thing as well
But the house Molineux like we were all nobility and aristocrats and so on and he was quite obsessed with the fall of the
house Of mine. He said we have to restore the family's name. We
have to we have to restore our prominence Oh good job doing that. So my my it was like dad. I have
some good news news and I have some bad news.
My name is Providence, yes. My name is Providence again.
We're going to remember what the bad news is.
We're Satan. Yes.
So his parents were constantly starting and failing businesses.
Do you guys know what he wanted? I like this.
This is kind of a common thing for a lot of artists that their parents are like really bad at business but can't just have a regular job because their lives are too chaotic.
So they keep having these get-rich-quick schemes and then it all collapses and it's a mess and they have to move and flee their creditors.
This kind of instability is quite common among artists.
Well, yeah, and that was something that he reproduced.
Until the success of June, yeah, which was too late because his kids were already mostly grown.
Didn't they move like 20 times to avoid bills?
Yeah, they moved like 20 times to avoid bills.
So do you want to give people that in mind?
Yeah, so Frank Herbert basically, he got married to a woman and had a kid named Penny.
And basically he went to the military.
And was, I don't remember why, but he was honorably just discharged for an injury or something.
He tripped on a support rope for a tent and got a head injury.
Yeah, skill issue. Can't walk better.
I had to walk, man. I thought you could walk it.
Walk better. A photographer, his idea, his whole point is to see things.
I'm really into details, except for where I'm walking, so I get a head injury.
Oh no. Maybe you had to explain some of the writing.
He grew phobias of dogs and tits over the course of his life.
All right, sorry. And then he comes back to find his wife and child missing.
They're just gone. They're gone.
So what kind of guy was he that his wife took their care, just disappeared?
Imagine just being like, oh crap, he's got a head injury, gotta run before he's back.
Now, every time you and mom aren't home, obviously I have that same experience, but so far...
You've come back, which is good.
So far. So he was constantly avoiding child support.
So oddly enough, he had a daughter named Penny to whom he barely gave a penny.
Thank you, Jared, for taking that bullet.
Because I couldn't complete it because my daughter was...
I'm sure. I was watching my daughter solely for a body.
I have a knife. Actually, yeah, why is it a knife?
I think you two have brought that for reasons of your own.
Is that a tooth of shahaloo?
I don't know. It's a butter knife.
I would also say that it's blunt.
That's not going to stop. What I mean is it's going to be more painful.
No, it's going to be a slow death.
Yeah, yeah. She's going to sand me down to size.
Don't get through the shield. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, oh, oh.
No, don't get me to the hand-to-hand combat.
That's going to come. That's going to come.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So his parents tried a variety of businesses.
The one that strikes me that I remember, and a lot of this comes from his son wrote a biography of his father and their whole family and all of that.
Yeah. His parents, in the middle of the Depression, which of course was also within the war on alcohol prohibition, started a dance hall, where I assume they were alcohol served, which I assume meant that they paid off the local cops.
And it was doing well, but they got into some conflict with the people they started the business with.
What was the name of it? The Spanish Castle.
Yeah, the Spanish Castle, right.
So his parents got into some conflict with the people they started the business with and they rage quit.
They walked away from it.
They didn't ask for any payments.
They just rage quit. And then the business completely succeeded and lasted until the 60s.
Major bands played there.
It was hugely successful and I assume hugely profitable.
So his parents walked away and then they started a gas station or convenience store.
And ran it into the ground because they were drinking too much.
And maybe the drinking too much was why the other people had conflicts with them about the business.
Or the drinking started because they were resentful about the success of the business.
Right. Well, no, they were already drinkers, but according to the biography of the family- It probably got worse, right?
It really escalated, right?
Like a lot of people, if you can't- If you drink, you can't handle your emotions.
And when you get emotions you can't handle, you drink even more and it becomes a vicious cycle.
And so, for Herbert's childhood, he had these extremes of like they were drunk and they didn't care.
He could do whatever he wanted. Everything was okay.
But then also when they're sober and being parents, you know, they're just wildly abusive and strict and authoritarian.
Yeah. I don't know about strict.
That's what he said. No, because the dad's like, you can't talk, you can't speak.
Well, that's just abusive. I don't know that that's strict.
Because to me, and sorry, that's fair.
This is a minor shibboleth that I have, which is that people say strict.
And it's like, okay, if you're that strict, why are you an alcoholic?
Like, clearly you're an idiot. You don't have any strictness with regards to yourself.
Strict for you, not for me.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so there's a Frank Herbert, Father DeLore, as you write, is he moved 20 times to escape his child support payments.
And the freemen are...
Oh, nomads. Nomads, right?
So this doesn't come. The people who are free are the people constantly on the move.
And it's also...
That's all this man does is he repaints these errors and issues and evils as good and the rights and okay.
Right, right. So...
He also was a guy who got – now, I like psychology, and I obviously think it's a very interesting discipline, but there's a real downside to it, which is where you can impugn unconscious motives to anything.
So there was this story – do you remember the one about the spitballs?
Yes. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so basically he had...
He was shooting spitballs at people in class and stuff like that because he was bored.
And he shot it at the teacher and it hit her back.
And she turned around and she's like, who did that?
And no one said it, but all the kids looked to Frank.
Right. And basically she's like, oh, I'll deal with you after class or whatever.
And after class... And he's terrified the whole thing.
Yeah, he's really scared. And then after class she goes up and she's really mad at him and he goes, why are you mad at me?
And then she shakes it. She starts shaking him and he's just screaming like, I'm not mad at you.
And, uh... So she kept repeating, I'm not mad at you, while screaming at him.
Have you seen that video with the dogs, where the guy screams at the dog, I love you, right?
And the dog freaks out, and then he pets the dog, and he's like, you were the worst thing to ever exist.
No one loves you, and the dog's all happy and stuff, because again, it's the tone of voice, not the words.
Everyone thinks that it's about the dog.
It's about his own parenting. But anyway...
It's like that little thing just saying that people respond more to what's actually being...
With the dog experiment or whatever, right?
Yeah, he was saying really things to the dog, but he was doing it in a nice manner and being all friendly.
So the dog was like, okay.
And it's the same opposite with the, I love you, right?
And screaming, so... So this is when, as a kid, he says he discovered the unconscious, that people could do the opposite of what they're saying, and he became an empiricist, he says, that you judge people by their actions, not their words.
Now, the problem was, though, that he got really into this Jungian stuff.
Now, Jung is interesting, and I owe some debt to him, but it can be a hole but no bottom in terms of every time his kids would do something, he would interpret them as having unconscious buried motives.
So there's no examples given in the book, but I assume it's something like, you're loud because you're angry at me for working on my book, and you're trying to interrupt it and get my attention because you're feeling rejected, as opposed to kids sometimes are just loud.
There was his granddaughter, when he was much older, his granddaughter was riding a bike around and singing or yelling at the top of his lungs, and he's like...
Light that kid down, that kind of stuff, right?
Even when he was an old guy, he never got over his hostility towards children and their life or noise or energy.
So I assume if his kids dropped something, he wouldn't say, oh, an accident or whatever, right?
He would say, you must be secretly angry at me because that was something I really liked and you're acting out.
So he would give these deep Motivations to his kids for what I assume are just accidents, or could be.
And how do you deal with that as a kid?
You can't. You just get into Lost World or Fogland or something like that.
Good God. Yeah. All right.
You come up with deep motivations later on.
Well, we're doing some deep motivations, but we've got some evidence here.
Yeah, I know for sure. So, because I wanted to get this right, and I'm sorry to be reading from this biography...
I think I kept the name of the biography in case you wanted to look it up.
Dreamer of Dune.
Yeah, Brian Herbert is the son, and it's called Dreamer of Dune, the biography of Frank Herbert, which came out in 2003, I think it is, by the Tor Publishing Group.
It actually won a Hugo, which is a science fiction award or a literary award.
Okay, so I'm going to read this.
It has over like 800 pages or something, doesn't it?
The audiobook, which I listened to a good chunk of, is like 19 hours or something like that.
Yes. Well, you know, the guy wrote long books, so does his son.
So, I'm going to read this because I wanted to get this right.
And who was it? I think it was you, Jared, who got this connection with the black box.
Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. So, Jared, do you want to talk about the black box for those who don't know what that is?
So, in the book, in the story, in the movie, there's this black box that the Benny Chester, the Reverend Mothers, use to test if someone has free will, self-control to a degree, and they'll have someone put their hand in this box.
You don't know what's in it, or they'll tell you, like, it's pain in the box.
Yeah. And you have to keep your hand in the box.
You have to keep your hand in the box, and I've got a needle to your neck.
And if you take your hand out of the box, I'm going to kill you.
It's a poison needle. Now, I've got to tell you, I find that really annoying.
Tell me more. Sorry, is there more you wanted to say about the black box?
What's annoying? I'll tell you what's annoying is, it's not really free will if you're going to die.
It's lame. It's like you can't win.
Who else are you going to keep your hand in the box?
Because the alternative is to die.
It's all an excuse for abuse.
Well, that is the case.
And I think it was you who made this connection once we...
Okay, so this is from the sons.
Now, is this true? Yes, it seems to be true because there are other people who verified it.
So the son writes, and I don't know how old the son is here, but he's young because he's not in his teens yet.
So the kid is young. This is the son talking about the guy he wrote to.
Dad was, by his own admission, a man obsessed with turning over stones to see what would scurry out with unmasking lies.
This was evident in his dealings with his children.
Now, I'm like, oh, he's going to be really interrogating.
Oh, how interesting. And it's like, no, no, no.
No, this is a new level.
The son says he had a World War II lie detector, a U.S. Navy unit, a small black box.
With a dial, it had ominous wires and a gray cuff that he wrapped tightly around my arm.
The first time he used the machine on me, he accused me of secretly hitting my brother, and he was going to get the truth out of me.
He said the lie detector always revealed falsehood, which was not, as I would learn later, exactly the case.
Admittedly, I was lying about hitting my brother, and the machine indicated this, so I got a licking.
It's a beating issue. After that, he used the lie detector on me regularly and on Bruce.
Bruce is the youngest child, who was later gay and died of AIDS in the early 90s.
He goes on to say, if anything came up, such as an item missing from his desk, or questions about where I had been after school, he would say in a clipped voice, I'm putting you on the lie detector.
Let's go in the other room.
What happened to Batman? With that, he would grab my arm and lead me to the machine.
On the way, I broke out in a sweat, rehearsing what I would say and how I would say it.
Would he ask such and such?
My mind was a whirl full of terror.
The machine was kept in his study, and he only brought it out when I was in trouble.
It was set up on a wooden table with two straight back chairs pulled up to it, one on each side.
He pointed to one of the chairs, and I slipped into it, shaking.
Towering over me, he plugged the machine in and tapped it a couple of times for effect, ostensibly to free a sticky needle.
A bare ceiling bulb threw his hulking shadow across the table.
Okay. So there's this kind of cliche that when you interrogate people, there's a bear bulb.
You know, they don't even give you a shade because it's just some back dingy.
The one that's harsh light in your eyes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Roll up.
Sorry. Roll up your left sleeve.
He said, gruffly.
It's not Batman, Izzy.
It's an acting, the gruffness.
You're just being gruffly. Shaking, I complied, and he wrapped the sensor cuff around my arm.
A stream of questions and accusatory statements ensued from him, and like a prisoner, undergoing the tortures of grand inquisitive Torquemada perspiration poured from my brow.
So that's a reference to the Spanish Inquisition, where they would question you about your faith, and if you answered wrong, they'd kill you, but burn you to death.
Fun. Dad was too smart and phrased every query in the precise way that put me in the worst possible light.
After each question, he studied the machine intently and invariably pronounced me guilty of something.
According to Howie Hansen, this is a half-native friend of his, according to Howie Hansen, who disapproved of the use of the device on Bruce and me, Dad had a way of rigging the machine to indicate that we were lying, even when we were telling the truth.
One day, my father would write of a young Paul Atreides in Dune, ordered to place his hand into the blackness of a box in the ordeal of the Gom Jabbar.
Paul was commanded not to withdraw his hand no matter how much pain he felt on penalty of death from a poison lethal held at his neck.
Terrified, the boy complied.
Pain throbbed up his arm, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so, uh, that's, uh, interesting.
So, okay, he would paint me in the worst light.
Wasn't Frank Herbert also a journalist?
We just had a Don Lemon interview with Elon Musk.
What is it? Painting him in any kind of good light?
The worst possible light.
He's like, he's got this intelligent skill to just frame me as the worst thing ever.
Yeah. So, and now, somebody mentioned, and I don't know if this is the case, Jared, you might remember, that the book opens with the Gom Javar scene.
Like, the beginning of Dune, is that?
Or it's early on? I mean, it's very early on, right?
Yes. I wouldn't say it's the introduction into the book, but it's relatively early.
Because I'm vaguely tempted to read it, because what I want to know in the book is how quickly is he signaling to people that this is a book about sadism?
And cruelty to children, because Paul is 15 in the beginning.
Of course, the book takes place over quite a long time.
And when you start on Caliban, this water world that's nice and comforting, and he's the duke's son.
Oh, the one he talks about to Angry Girlfriend on the dune cliff?
Yes. Yeah, where he lives on the castle on the cliff.
Izzy, I'm curious, because you hadn't read the book, but what did you think when you saw the black box scene?
I was very confused.
Yeah? I think in the movie, they did not explain what was going on very well.
Maybe it was that, or maybe I couldn't make out what they were saying, because, man, these people were murmurers.
And screamers. No, but you had the closed caption.
No, yes, I did. But do you mean in Dune 2 or in Dune?
Dune 1. Dune 1.
Yeah, I was a bit confused.
I'm sorry, I thought you meant Dune 2.
Because they did have a black box scene in Dune 2.
I forgot about that. They did, yeah.
That's what I thought you meant.
But Dune 1, I was a bit confused, but it kind of, at the end, I was also like, What do you mean, there's pain in the box?
He can't take his hand out because he's going to get killed.
Obviously, he's going to take the pain, right?
Yeah. They didn't explain that well, at least in the book.
Pain through nerve induction.
Yeah, yeah. So I kind of thought, I was a bit confused, but I was also like, okay.
Yeah, yep, yep. But in Dune 2, they definitely did not explain it very well at all.
In Dune 2, like that scene.
And like, why? I mean, like...
At some point, like...
It was kind of pointless in Dune 2 when they were...
When she said, put your hand in the box to the bald guy.
Sorry, you're going to have to narrow that down a little bit after the characters were bald.
The bald-faced bald guy. Oh, the young guy, right?
The young bald guy. The fade guy.
The naked, more rat-looking dude.
Yeah. The son of Sting from the earlier movies.
Yeah. But yeah, that was when I was like, what's the point of this?
You see, here's the thing, too.
If I was writing it, he would have pulled his hand out like this.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for context, giving the finger, yeah.
So, this is what...
This is what the son writes about his father.
He says, Frank Herbert, ever the psychoanalyst, might be surprised to realize that a major component of his own behavior was mimicry of the subconscious variety.
He imitated the stern disciplinary measures taken against him by his father who had received them in turn from his
own father It is interesting to note a curious habit that his father
had while living in Burley in the 1930s a habit My father saw firsthand
It seems that the old man enjoyed listening to the news on the radio and when his programs were on no one could
disturb him And no one spoke at the risk of incurring his ire
Family members had to tiptoe around the house so
When his son is talking about the lie detector because it's appalling.
Absolutely. Good God.
That's not having a temper.
No. No. Right?
That's cold, calculated, soul-destroying sadism.
Yes. Straight up. Like, I'd get...
Physically abused as a kid.
And that's like, you got the pain and then it's over and it's terrible.
Like to be, to sat down the kid, like nine or eight, like shaking to get a strap put on him.
And then to sit there as someone's just like grilling your soul, your mind about what's going on.
That's like demonic. That's demonic.
It's like a demonic possession.
You're looking at somebody and he was quite a big imposing guy, the dad, right?
No, he said he's terrified of the way his dad looked.
Like one eye would twitch.
He keeps talking about his creepy eyes.
Like in the biography, just when we were reading it in the car yesterday, it was like, everything was like, it seemed like every couple paragraphs, he was saying something about his creepy blue eyes, which is something.
It really tells you that he has like these dead eyes, I think.
And Frank did have blue eyes.
And of course, all of the Fremen, they have blue eyes.
Super blue. Super blue, right.
Oh my gosh. So he says, this is the son.
The lie detector was a complete admission of failure on my father's part as a parent.
He couldn't communicate with his sons, hadn't taken the time to bond with us to learn what made us tick.
Instead, he tried to crush our will and spirit.
There could be no deviation from the rules he prescribed.
The environment around him had to be absolute serenity to keep his mind in order so that he might create his great work.
Izzy, do you remember what the kids' life was like when he was working on the 10 years that he was working on Dune?
Oh yeah, so the kids were not let in the house.
They had no key. No, but here's the thing.
Later we found out that he only wrote from 12 a.m.
to 8 a.m. So basically he sat inside all day and never let his kids inside under the premise that he was writing, but he never actually wrote.
Yeah, yeah.
And maybe he was doing research, but he would not let his kids in the house.
There had to be absolute silence. Well, actually, it would be tough, you know, because you don't have, like, it's not like he has an online computer that he can do research on.
Wouldn't he have to go to libraries and find new papers?
But he would get a bunch of books and read them at home.
Yeah, I guess. Or sleeping during that time, because he's working from midnight to eight.
Right, right, right. You better be quiet until you have sleep at night.
Yeah. So yeah, that stuff is just, it's crazy.
It's crazy. He's creating this environment where it's like there's ultra-isolation with people around.
Right, right, right. So Penny was the first daughter from his first marriage.
Now Penny came to live with him because he was out of money.
He couldn't pay the alimony or child support.
And therefore Penny came to live with him, I think, when he was in her mid to late teens.
And the son says, I never saw dad lift a finger against Penny who came to stay with us that summer.
One time he did get into a battle of wills with the tall blonde teenager.
He insisted that she eat her dessert and then rubbed it into her hair when she refused to do so.
For the most part, she didn't receive the brunt of his anger, which in its most severe form became physical.
I think he felt boys could and should take more punishment in order to make men out of us, right?
So we talked about this before, Roman's argument in my novel, The Future, right?
That civilization just makes you soft and you're easily pushed over.
And it's interesting, it's fascinating to me, the gender swap, right?
The gender swap, because...
The lie detector was administered by the father.
But who administers it in the book?
The Bene Gesserit. The mother.
Now, the Bene Gesserit are modeled, according to the son, on Frank Herbert had a bunch of aunts who really, really worked very hard to convert him to Roman Catholicism, which he resisted.
And this is why, so it's interesting to me in the movie that the women are all skeptical and the men are all religious, when it was the women who tried to...
Yeah, he gendered all Jesuits.
Yeah, and so, and the Bene Gesserit, okay, Jesuit is modeled after Jesuits, right?
And the Bene Gesserit, they always struck me as having a little bit of Judaism in them as well, with the matriarchy and all that kind of stuff.
But it's interesting, the gender swap.
Like, what does that mean?
He's just trying to blame women for it.
Right. Now, that's always fair, right, and just, though.
Yeah, it's the thing.
So, you cross your hands like this, put your thumbs up, and then put your fingers...
So, I'll do that, and then just give me six months to get some abs, and then we'll just complete the picture.
So, put your hands on the table, because you've got to have, like, the man spread with the arms.
Yeah, yeah. And then, like, you've got to, yeah.
And then you've got to put your thumbs back.
Four cigars through every ear and push your thumbs back as far as you can.
Right. No, that doesn't happen.
Nice. Right. No, so do you think he's just transferring it to women to blame the women?
Is he secretly mad at his own mom?
Is the women who choose these violent guys to have children with or these sadistic guys?
Is he saying there's female responsibility that he's not conscious of or is he just blaming the women?
He hates his wife or his ex-wife because he wouldn't pay child support.
Right, right. He doesn't like women, so he's going to blame women probably.
But he also is going to hate men too because of...
I'm not sure how exactly this comes in, but a lot of the things...
They show this a little bit in the movie.
It's much more in the book where women are the ones that can have a ton of power and they can control...
Like the Bene Gesser in particular, they're able to convert the poison.
That's like the... The Dune 2 stuff?
Yeah, yeah. Oh, the blue- The water of light.
The water of light, yeah. But also, they can control whether the gender of the child.
Right. Throughout the whole series of the books, the women are the ones that have power.
Oh, I'm sorry, and- Like, don't get me wrong.
Like, at one point, there's like a garden burr and all that, and Paul's this, you know, the superhuman.
Yeah. But the women are the one that have lasting power throughout the whole.
And the ones that plan and plan, they control the gene, genetic lines.
Well, his grandmother, sorry to interrupt James, but his grandmother as well was kind of autistic, could do incredible math in her head.
I didn't know about that. It was incredibly logical.
Brilliant, but was this mountain woman.
So apparently they're these super logical creatures who show up later in Dune, and he based that on his grandmother.
Sorry, James. Yeah, and the final point in that whole thing of...
You know, hating men, at least.
He hates everybody, essentially, right?
But hating men is that, the Bene Gesserit in particular, the women are the only ones who are strong enough to do the Water of Life thing.
They're the only ones strong enough to go to the Gamja Bar.
So the Gamja Bar thing is a whole test of whether you have this potential.
So there's almost an effective ban on putting men into it because it will kill them.
That's the whole story. So the whole culture is run by the women, and the poison excludes the men from participating in those rituals?
With the one exception of the Kwisatz.
Yeah, yeah, that's the exception.
What's that? The Kwisatz.
Is that a stroke? What is that possession?
What's happening over your vocal cords there?
The Kwisatz.
What is that? Sorry, I ran out of imaginary language here.
That's not a character. So that's what they say that Paul was destined to become or be.
The Bene Gesser are trying to birth a male version of them who can see the future and the past.
It's the Messiah. The Messiah, all that stuff.
Yeah, the universe is...
They don't miss a beat. Like, the universe is super mean.
Like, they're very explicit about that.
Yes. Yes, because we all get the subtlety of, oh, it's a desert religion.
Like, they all are! Like, Islam and Judaism and Christianity, all desert-formed religions.
So, if you've got to have a Messiah, you've got to have some sand.
But here's the difference. Now, we know Herbert had, like, communist friends and relatives and stuff like that.
Well, it was a socialist, whether they were communist or not.
No, no. He had this communist Jewish guy that would come over to the house who was a friend.
Although the artist guy.
But he, you know, so the communist socialist thing was a bit of a blend back then.
And I'm just cautious because...
Some people would say, I'm a democratic socialist.
Fair. Communism is bad, but definitely hard left, for sure.
Yeah. Like, his grandparents were hard left in his commune and all that, right?
So the Bene Gesserit are trying to breed the perfect man, but they want to control him.
And now, how do they control people?
So, for example, Fade Rotha was supposed to be the next effort at creating the Kweza Tadaract.
Okay, sorry, we've gone all...
Who's Fade what?
The Baron's nephew.
Naked mole rat guy. Oh, yes, yes, yes.
What's a good name for him that's going to be naked mole rat guy?
I'm down with that. I'll remember that one.
What about the big fat old one?
The Emperor? Yes.
No, no, that's the Baron. That's Barron.
Barron, okay, yeah. Barron who couldn't have kids, therefore he's...
Barron. Barron, got it.
Now... Subtle. But I'm sorry, but...
And what are communists always trying to do?
They're trying to breed the perfect, you know, work beast, but they want to control it.
Well, and the communists...
Win through language, initially, right?
They stir up all this resentment.
Because the movie opened, and I'm like, I tell you, just my first experience sitting down to watch the first one, right?
So it's like, oh, we're going to have some science fiction.
And what's the very first scene?
You have to learn how to control other people's brain with your magic voice.
That's the very first scene, is the mom trying to get the son.
And I'm like, so this is not science fiction.
We're just back into random drug-laced marijuana, Mexico peyote nonsense about mind control, right?
So it's not science fiction.
But now, okay, well, let me give the devil's advocate here a bit of like they're super trained and they condition people.
And she's conditioned Paul, you know, and she's an expert at reading human beings and their body language.
And what can I say?
I get it. It's fast forward propaganda, but that's the whole communist thing, right?
It's we come in and we just control people through language, through magic.
And actually, Frank Herbert referred to his wife as a white witch.
And said he could never end games of negotiation with her or games of bluffing with her because she had these witchy powers.
He was kind of half serious about this, so he viewed his wife as a witch.
And so, you know, again, not a lot of science.
Because I was just at the beginning, I was like, oh, okay, so this is just the Force.
It's a fantasy book. Yeah, it's fantasy.
And of course, it's fantasy.
And we'll get to the worms, the sandworms who are the dragons of the desert.
Science fiction. Everybody fights with shorts and shields and, you know, like it's all...
So it's fantasy.
It's magic and fantasy.
But at the beginning, I was like, okay, so what does this mean, these words of command?
That the mother is teaching the son.
Right? Well, the dad's off the hook for all this.
Well, yeah, because the dad doesn't have the words of command, right?
It's mother to son. So, yes.
Because he doesn't, right? Yep. Otherwise, he'd say, I don't know, stop blowing up my friends when the attack from the Harkonnen comes.
So, is he saying that verbal abuse is maternal?
Because the words of command are terrifying, and they force people to do things, which is parent to child.
And the women have that power. So the women have the power of verbal abuse.
Now, Izzy, as a female, would you say that women are better at wielding language to hurt people?
Yeah, a lot better. How much better?
Much. Double?
Triple. Quadruple?
Skip Escalé.
Right. So now, but the verbal abuse is interesting because it all seems to be paternal.
So there's an example here of, we see lots of examples of Frank Herbert being abusive, like psycho-abusive.
And Now, there's a bit about his mom, Frank Herbert's wife.
Despite our chronic poverty, this is in the book, mom was exceedingly proper about etiquette, a carryover from her maternal grandmother.
One time, Penny brought a loaf of bread in its wrapper to the dinner table, and my mother hurled the loaf across the table.
Mom taught us the proper technique of holding silverware and of sitting up straight as we ate.
We were told not to slurp drinks or soup.
That was my father, too. Don't slurp, right?
You know, I have a glass of water right here.
I'm so tempted to go right into the microphone.
And bowls were always to be tipped away when we spooned the last of the soup, never towards us.
A round-minded person is never eager to eat, she said.
So that's interesting.
So the reason why it's bad to the wrapper is it's supposed to be fresh baked.
A wrapper is lower class because you bring it to the supermarket, right?
So that's pretty wild.
So she's obviously quite violent, like she hurls the loaf, right?
Mm-hmm. So I don't know.
He talks a lot about his dad.
Of course, the book's about his dad, but there's not much in it about the mom other than some affection between the parents.
So, yeah, I think, Izzy, I think you're right.
I think he's shifting the blame for the abuse to the women because the men fight honestly and openly.
Is that fair? With the exception of the Harkonnen.
Like plans within plans, scheming and- And the betrayals.
All kinds of the honorable men.
Yeah. Quite honestly and openly.
Like when Paul wants to join the Fremen, he's got to kill that black guy.
That's Jamas. Yeah. What's his?
Jamas? Oh, I thought you said pajamas.
Pajamas. In his pajamas.
Quite a thrill. So, but the females see, they manipulate, there's one who seduces the bald-faced mole rat guy, and so there's a lot of behind-the-scenes manipulation, and the daughter's emperor starts off the second movie with, I mean, there's I don't mean to insult the movie because it's a lot of work.
Visually, it's very cool. They did do a good job.
They did. And the audio is something that I think has rearranged my skeletal structure.
Oh, yeah. It's like, I'm burping.
I'm giving birth to Dune 3.
It's two extremes of like that.
I do these movies.
When I go to movies, I have ear protectors.
Like, I have to because...
And then I take them out for the dialogue and I'm waiting just for them to go back in.
It's kind of distracting. I was like, you know, fingers and fingers.
I didn't have ears. But I found I actually got most of the music through my chest cavity.
You know, I didn't use ear protection and I didn't...
It wasn't actually that loud.
Like, it was pretty loud. It's just that the bass was so high that, like...
You feel like the vibration of everything makes you think it's really, really loud.
Yeah, my spleen is now on my shoulder.
I was not aware that that was possible, but that's where it is.
Another point on the woman thing, as far as from Frank Herbert's life, I think we touched on this earlier with, or maybe we didn't touch on this yet, with his first wife.
She disappears, but then later she comes after him with, you know, repeatedly lawyers and hounding and hounding and hounding.
Well, hounding, I mean, not make him a big kid.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why they moved around all the time.
Yeah. Oh, so maybe the verbal abuse is hurt with the lawyers, because they'd always get phone calls and letters, and it'd always be language-based attacks.
A lot of language coming after you.
Yeah, yeah. And using men to go after.
Yeah. But I do think, though, that Izzy's right, that he's just like, yeah, it's the women.
It's the women who torture the children.
Yeah, I would never. I would never.
And he did say, he said to his son that he most identifies with Duke Leto.
No, no, I thought it was Stilgar.
Wait, Stilgar. Okay, we'll get to that.
Yeah, you're right. I could be wrong about that.
All right. So here's another thing that they said.
So it's almost like a cliche, the Grinch who killed Christmas.
Right? That's like, the killing Christmas is like the worst thing you can do to children.
He says, so he writes, early in December, my father made a startling announcement.
He said we would no longer celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day.
Instead, we would wait until 12th night, January the 6th, the way it was done in Mexico for children, except in our case, it would apply to the entire family.
He wanted to explain that the Epiphany, January 6th, was an important Christian religious holiday, representing the day The manifestation of Jesus Christ appeared before the Magi, the Maga.
So, yeah. No Christmas for you kids.
That's weird. No, it said we're going to storm the Capitol.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right.
That's right. Wait, what? I'm sorry? They said instead we're going to storm the Capitol or whatever.
Yeah. The White House, whatever it's called.
Oh, right. So...
Yeah, so he basically killed Christmas.
And that's kind of rough for kids.
Because, you know, everyone's... And also, his kids could never bring friends over.
Because his father would be working and would scream at everyone and lock them out of the house.
Oh, God. Do you remember the story of the younger brother who ran away?
No. Oh, yeah.
I've been doing a lot of talking.
So the younger brother...
Bruce. Was it Bruce? Bruce.
And during the day, they couldn't come in.
The doors were locked, yada, yada.
And so he was angry about this.
The younger son, Bruce, ran into the woods to basically kind of run away.
And then as night came about, he was so afraid of going home But he knew he couldn't stay in there.
He was more afraid of staying in the woods.
Yeah. Yeah. But he had to go home.
He was afraid of going home. So we went to the police and made up this story about how he had been kidnapped.
Yeah. Which could have also been a confession that he had been kidnapped at one point.
Well, if kids stuck outside, get in trouble.
They get preyed on. They know they don't have any protection.
So maybe it was a real thing that happened.
But he made up this whole story.
Went to the police, filed the report.
The police are like, we're going to investigate this and so on.
Yeah. And then what happened when he got home?
Strapped to the machine! God!
Oh, no, actually, he thinks he said you're lying or something like that, but he wasn't punished too badly.
He was grounded, I think.
Yeah. So, in 1961, says the son, Dad went on a health food binge stuck in the shelves in the refrigerator with an array of foods that Bruce and I loathed, including oriental herbs, tofu, and beef time.
Convinced that beef tongue provided more nutrients and proteins than any other form of meat, he forced us to eat the foul substance in a variety of forms, including tongue sandwiches with mayonnaise on the bread and tongue stew, both of which made me gag worse than green clam guts.
I don't know what green clam guts is.
I hated any form of tongue, especially the texture of the meat which had sickening little bumps on it.
Yuck. I find that quite vivid because a tongue lashing, punishment through verbal abuse and forcing you to eat a tongue, it's again, to me, it's an unconscious way of just dominating through language or through verbal stuff.
There's some special sadism.
And I don't know, like, now this is in the 1984 version of the movie, but there is a scene where a character rips the tongue out of a cow and takes a big bite.
Oh, is that right? Yeah. And wasn't the tongue stuff on James...
What's the guy's name?
James Corden? Is it Corden?
I don't know. He did The Tonight Show.
Corduroy, James. Yeah, you're talking about...
Jimmy Fallon? No, sorry.
It's the guy who did Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts, where he has the horrible food in a circle that goes around.
Yeah. James Cordroy or something like that.
Anyway, so celebrities are given these horrible foods that they either have to tell the truth about something they don't want to tell the truth about.
They did have beef tongue. And they have cow tongue.
And it's considered so vile that it's like punishment food.
Oh, yeah. And they had other stuff.
Like, to compare it, the other things on, like, the table they had...
I think it was cricket pudding, ants, and yogurt, and just a whole bunch of foul stuff.
That's what it was compared to.
I will not eat the bugs.
Yeah. So, I try not to get too repulsed by science fiction and fantasy authors, but it's pretty tough.
All right. Are they just the worst people in the world?
It's really hard to argue that they're not the worst people in the world.
I'm thinking of Zimmerman Bradley.
So he says, a number of famous and soon-to-be-famous science fiction writers visited our homes in San Francisco, including Robert Heinlein.
Paul Anderson, Jack Vance, and Isaac Asimov.
Isaac Asimov, possibly the worst parent in the history of the world, which we'll get into another time.
But these are all guys who come over.
Do they not notice that the children are terrified?
Do they not say... Do they not notice that the children are not locked outside?
Right. Hey, the kids are hungry, scratching on the window, and these guys are, let's discuss story ideas more.
Because being eager to eat is being peasantly.
Absolutely right.
They're a fear of food in case it gets rubbed in their hair.
You must not have fear.
Yeah, and just to go back to that, like James, I think you said this earlier, one of you did, but it was like, what teenage girl wants to eat dessert, right?
Especially back in those days when it was more important to be skinny and stuff.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
And messing with their hair. So all these guys, they're so empty, soulless, and ambitious that they're all just over there chatting and talking away.
And does nobody seem to notice?
I mean, maybe they did and said something.
I don't know, but I mean, I don't know.
Well, Mindy and Howie did. Was that his name, Indian Howie?
Or was it the other guy who was Indian?
His name wasn't Indian.
No, it wasn't. There was something.
No, no, his nickname was Indian.
No, you're right. I was right.
Sorry, you're right, Izzy.
And Jared, you were also right.
According to the book, my father once told me he felt he was most like the Fremen leader Stilgar.
This surprised me until I realized that Stilgar was the equivalent of a Native American leader in the story, a person who defended time-honored ways that did not harm the ecology of the planet.
I was just looking at the Dune character's sheet for Indian Deli.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Alright, so should we get to the...
Hold on. Either it was Indian Howie or it was the Indian guy he was friends with as a kid who was called Indian something and then his name.
Yeah, maybe. I thought I heard that.
You were saying, you made a joke saying like, wow, does everything in his life have such obvious names?
Like, even in Dune and in his life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um...
But Howie did say, you're treating your kids too rough, and he basically said, I'm going to raise them how I want.
So this is, yeah, so I'll give you this bit, because this is important, because this guy is all about the natives, and all about living in harmony, and he respects the native culture, and the blah, blah, blah, right?
So the son says in the biography of his father, whenever my parents had friends over to the house, I sometimes tried to participate in adult conversations.
Typically, it was after dinner with everyone sitting in the living room by a cozy fireplace.
Too often, my inadequate contributions irritated Dad and he would send me out of the room.
My status in the household, Howie told me later...
Now, Howie was a friend of his father's from the teenage years who was half-native.
My status in the household, Howie told me later, was not dissimilar to that of a dog or a human subspecies.
If I didn't please the master, I was dispatched from sight.
After seeing my father, We're good to go.
It was that this man, who one day would communicate effectively with millions of people through his writing, could not communicate with his own children.
I don't think that's the irony.
The irony is I respect the native culture until the natives tell me to be slightly nicer to my children, in which case, to heck with you, I'm going to do it my own way.
What does it say that the natives are like, man, you're harsh with your kids?
Because the native population is not always super great to their own kids, so...
Man, if the natives are telling you it's probably important.
It's probably quite important, right?
Ah, let's see here.
All right. And we're back.
We actually took a slight bio break because basically we're reviewing a desert movie while washing our own body fluids.
So just before I was about to say a break, you handed a note saying, can we take a break?
Can we have a pause? Because while we're talking about sadism, we figured better not to torture our own bladders.
Okay. So we had our break.
And while we had the break, I was sort of thinking about how The son has the example of Frank Herbert's first wife who put up with nothing.
She left. She handed him for child support.
She stood up to him. Now, she probably wasn't a great person.
I don't know. But she had the example of the woman who would not put up with this abuser.
Yes. And then he had the example of his own mother who did.
Yeah. Right? Because the mother has to know that the kids are being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured.
The mother believed she was a white witch.
I don't think she really cares.
Right. I mean, she's got some issues.
As a white witch, the dryads would tell her.
Right, of course. The nymphs would inform upon the eagles that were being done.
And how and why it was okay.
So, a couple of other things I wanted to mention, and we'll get to some of the last big, big themes.
There is much of the outdoors man, Frank Herbert, and Dune.
The technique of sand walking in which a person moves without producing a rhythm that might attract giant worms is a teaching my father learned in his childhood.
The hunter moved silently and downwind from wild games, who was not to alert the prey of his presence.
The fisherman does not make a disturbance in or near the water for fear of frightening by the fish.
Be quiet or the sand worm will eat you is tiptoe around.
Like they literally earlier say with regards to his own father listening to the radio shows, everyone had to tiptoe around, right?
Yeah. So it means don't make a sound or your father's rage will destroy you.
Don't tiptoe around on the sand.
And of course, the sand is a metaphor for an unstable personality, right?
Ooh, I didn't think about that!
It's constantly shifting sands, right?
Shifting sands. It's dry, it'll kill you, it's unstable.
And the sand when it comes along, you sink in, right?
Even the very ground becomes unstable.
And that feeling of falling through the ground can happen to people who are in the presence of great terror, right?
Yeah. So...
Sandworm is Rage.
And you knew this because of your lore thing from the Dune series, Jared.
What were the sandworms?
Old sandworms were called?
Oh, Old Man of the Desert.
Old Man of the Desert, right?
Yeah. Also, I know this may sound...
And there were gods in Mystically.
Ancestral. The sandworms are...
Absolutely. They have consciousness? No, but to the Fremen, they projected God.
Oh, they're like mystical things, right?
You know how the Egyptians viewed the crocodiles or alligators or whatever they were?
Oh, it's gods. Or the cats, right?
Yeah, the cats and stuff.
Now, if you'll give me a tiny limb in which to extend myself, and I'm going to see how much Izzy's eyes rolls here.
Yeah, we go out here.
So, if I look at dessert, right?
Well, first of all, what?
If you're going to try and connect this to the bread pudding, I'm about to leave.
No, no. So, dessert into his child's hair.
No. No. So, why does dessert have such resonance for Frank Herbert?
Well, there's a lot about sociopathy, coldness, rage, instability, but he was neglected as a child, right?
What is another use of the word dessert?
To desert someone. To abandon.
To abandon. So he was abandoned as a child to very harsh elements, right?
Because he couldn't go home because his parents were drinking.
So he was out in nature all the time where he got bitten by a dog and I assume almost died in a variety of other adventures.
Yes, he almost drowned trying to swim across a channel.
So he was deserted by his parents and therefore he had to desert his house.
Yeah. And he was drawn to the desert.
So I'm just, the words play a lot in our brains in a variety of ways.
Sorry, Jared, you're going to say that. And a desert is a kind of like environmental nothingness.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
It's a void that you could actually quote-unquote exist in.
It's complete extremes.
It's scorching during the day, freezing at night.
Which is the rollercoaster personality.
It's completely still until there's a sandworm which rages out of almost nowhere.
Well, and it's death.
Obviously, because water is life.
That's constantly referred to.
And so the desert is the opposite of water, and the desert is death.
So to be deserted is to die.
And how many times have I made the case that neglect is just about the worst form of a death because it's a death sentence?
And who are the people that are good and survive in this environment?
The Fremen, right? And why did the novel resonate so much with so many people?
Because The 60s and the 70s in particular, the novel took a while to really hit its popularity, but the latchkey kids were deserted.
My generation was the first generation, really, of latchkey kids.
You came home and there was nothing.
No one, nothing. And so the fact that there's this deserting, that there is isolation, that the children are unprotected, right?
Like all, I mean, they basically, he lost his father to death, and he lost his mother to the Bene Gesserit, right?
His mother was basically inducted into this This goddess, queenie thing, this nuns from hell thing.
And now he did have his mother available to give him some kind of feedback, but it was no longer for him.
It was for the Messiah.
She was advising the Messiah, not her son, on how to live.
Right. Yeah. And the mother did, like, she didn't obey the Bene Gesserit and what they told her to do.
Yeah. But it wasn't necessarily out of love for the Duke because she also had this vanity of thinking she could birth the universe's super being.
You know. Right.
Right. Grandiosity is all over the place.
Now, you could say, but he had reason for grandiosity because he wrote such a great book or such a famous book or whatever, right?
All right. Chapter House Dune.
We're jumping around here. The sixth volume of the series, Reverend Mother D'Artagnan used an aphrosis.
D-O-R-T-U-J-L-A. Tertullia.
Tertullian. Okay. Never damage your own nest.
That was Frank Herbert speaking, of course, since he believed we were doing precisely that to the earth.
Oh, Lord. I don't want to go off on a rant here, but I got to tell you that the relationship between child abuse and environmentalism is, to me, 100%.
100%. And the fact that child abuse escalated with the abandonment of the nuclear family and women staying home in the 60s, that coincided with the environmental movement.
It's a form of virtue signaling where you take your own Destruction of your children projected onto the earth and then claim to care about the earth.
So if you look at the huge traumas that are being inflicted on children right now about global warming, you're going to die, everything's going to be underwater, right?
So child abuse and environmentalism have gone hand in hand since the beginning of environmentalism, as far as I can tell.
And so the fact that this guy is like, well, I care so much about the earth.
But I'm a complete sadist to my own children.
But the earth, though.
But the rocks.
Never damage your own nest.
Yeah, it's very important.
But he's torturing his own children.
Oh, just a really bad...
So you were going to say something? Use the eggs as a poison container, though.
Yeah. You can hear more about the nest than you can do about the eggs.
Yeah. No, it's just that, like...
It's an excuse to abuse the kids and perpetuate that and to make it a virtue.
Like it's Roman. It's Roman writ large.
Yeah. The character from the future.
Just to follow up on what we're saying about the kids.
So he says, during the period when mom was working in downtown San Francisco and dad was writing the most difficult segments of Dune, he became increasingly irritable and more intolerant than ever of the slightest interruption to his concentration.
It reached the extreme where he took the house keys away from Bruce and me and told us he was going to write inside a locked house.
We were commanded to go elsewhere after school and he didn't seem to care where.
Dad and Bruce got into a big row over this and Dad yanked a string with a house key off it on Bruce's neck.
Prior to that my brother had been in the habit of coming into the house after school to make a sandwich.
So unhappy with the way Dad was treating him, Bruce ran away walking more than 25 miles.
Only 11 years old, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County and hid in a creek bed for several hours.
The more he thought about his predicament, however, the more Bruce realized how cold, lonely, and hungry he would be if he didn't return home.
And he realized how angry Dad would be at him for yet another interruption to his writing process.
Right. It must be understood that the son of a writer is not without creative energies of his own.
Now, this is where he tries to make it a little bit funny, and this is really quite tragic.
Yeah, this is not the time for humor, buddy.
To avoid Dad's wrath, my little brother came up with a wild, rather ingenious tale.
He contacted the nearest police precinct in Marin County and reported in a state of feigned hysteria that had been kidnapped by two men and thrown in the back of a laundry truck.
Laundry truck is a nice detail.
That's what sells it. You know, that's the fiction writer.
That's the lore. Not just a van, a laundry truck.
It was only through good fortune, he said, that he was able to escape.
The police believed Bruce and had him go through the books of mugshots in an attempt to find the bad guys.
Dad and Mom were contacted and they drove to the police station.
A detective there assured Mr.
and Mrs. Herbert that he would investigate the case thoroughly and would find whoever had done this terrible thing.
Their son was fortunate to be alive, he said.
In our San Francisco house, we had a number of large brown corduroy pillows, triangular in shape, which we used to lean against while reading or while watching the little black and white television.
They were foam-filled. Bruce had one on his bed.
After coming home from the police station, he went to his room and lay on the bed with his head on the big pillow.
It was quiet in the house. Then he heard familiar footsteps on the hardwood of the hallway, and his pulse raced.
James, I know your footsteps, old man.
Oh, is that? Oh, yeah.
That was in the movie. Oh, well done.
Well done. Yes, yes. Dad opened the bedroom door, stared at Bruce and said, You were lying, weren't you?
I can't. Izzy, this is serious stuff.
This is a child in great fear.
Okay, Batman.
Okay, Batman.
Under the piercing see it all stare, Bruce coughed.
He felt his eyes burning, expected to see his father pull off the white leather belt and administer the usual.
But dad said in a calm tone, I'm not gonna spank you this time, but you're grounded for
two weeks.
Hold on, hold on.
I'm not gonna spank you this time.
I'm not gonna spank you this time, but you're grounded for two weeks.
Come straight home after school every day and do extra chores.
This is a funny thing that I don't understand about abusers.
Mm-hmm.
That sometimes, when I had done the, quote, worst thing, And expect a huge punishment, I got virtually nothing.
Right. I experienced that with my brothers.
What is the story with that? The boys keep you on your toes.
Frank Herbert would get insane if somebody had crumbs in the honey.
Yeah. And he would lecture everyone and berate everyone because there were crumbs in the honey.
Yeah, I'm kind of with him for that, man.
It's the pullback so that you can...
It's the pullback so that they can continue the abuse and be even more abusive.
Or is it just the unpredictability?
I think it's- So that's part of the abuse.
Yeah, it's so that you always keep you on your toes.
So I remember me and my older brother, my younger brother was not nearly as scared of our dad.
And he would do insane things that me and my older brother would look at each other and be like, oh man, he's done.
He's done for. And just either get ignored or made a joke of.
And it's like- What the hell was that?
You get conditioned to expect a horrible, horrible thing.
There's a kind of gaslighting, too.
It's like, oh, you know, ridiculous. It was never like that.
Yeah, so there was one time, last few kids, you know, my brother and I came home from school.
My brother had a friend with him.
And I was, you know, we weren't supposed to have other kids in the house, you know, when parents weren't home.
I mean, maybe sensible, whatever.
Anyways, so I'd gotten in, and I was holding the window closed because I was the older brother.
And my brother and his friend were pushing, and my brother put his hands through panes and shattered everywhere.
So, of course, his friend took off.
I ran to the mirror, and I saw that I had, you know, gotten some...
Whatever, on my face.
Some blood on my face. And so I was really almost hysterical there.
I think it was like maybe 11 or so.
And of course, in my mind, not only is like I got wounded, but of course, we're dead.
We broke a window. They're going to blame you because you have all the glasses.
Well, my brother apparently got a shard of glass near his wrist.
And so later on, I think I recall this story.
And my brother was like, well, you were freaking out.
All you had was a couple of things on your face, and I had something that could have been, you know, like, nah, like, serious, like, serious injury in my wrist.
But it was like, you know, I don't remember getting, like, massively punished for that.
Yeah. Really. It was just, you know, like, this horrible, however long it was before my father came home and saw the broken window.
Mm-hmm. Again, nothing.
Nothing that you remember, right?
Yeah, I don't remember anything. I remember the fear of that.
Yeah, my mom beat me up over leaving a little white ring on a table.
And I won't get into the details of why.
When my mother had to come and pick me up from a police station, she was fine.
No punishment. I mean, yeah, I don't understand.
I don't understand. And I don't want to understand this mindset.
But I don't understand why.
Is it because, well, clearly I've broken my kids now.
They're so terrified of me that they're running away and inventing stories and talking to the police.
My work here is done. I've broken them.
I don't know. It's weird. I think it's the perpetuation of the abuse.
The archetypal stuff.
Now, I'm old enough now that these stories are eye-rollingly predictable.
Okay. The man who fights his destiny.
I wonder if he's going to end up embracing his destiny.
It's a great mystery to me.
Okay, so this is from the book.
The characters fit classical archetypes from mythology.
Paul is the hero prince on a quest.
As described by Jung, Campbell, and Lord Raglan, whoever that is, one of the books my father studied, Raglan's The Hero, published in 1936, outlined 22 steps followed by classic heroes.
And I've got to tell you, this is kind of depressing, that if you just follow, because I know that George Lucas, the Star Wars guy, consulted with Joseph Campbell, Hero of a Thousand Faces, and specifically tailored his story to the hero journey myth.
Right. And I thought this was really interesting.
22 steps. We won't go through each of them, right?
These included, all of which closely approximate the life of Paul Maudib.
A, the hero's father is a king, a duke in Paul's case.
B, the circumstances of his conception are unusual.
It's two tortoises.
Oh, sorry. Anyway, so what was his...
Because his mother was a concubine, is that...
Yes. That's his unusual thing?
Okay. Were there any other unusual?
I don't think there were other.
Uh, Bene Gesserit, witch lady.
The witches, right? Sure.
But that would have been normal for a duke, for like a royal.
It's unusual for us reading the book about, yeah.
All right. So, he is reputed to be the son of a god.
Paul is reputed to be a returning god or messiah.
An attempt is made to kill him at birth.
In Paul's case, the attempt occurred in his youth.
After victory over the king and or a giant dragon or wild beast, he marries a princess.
That's the sandworm. Which he does, right?
Yep. And becomes king!
And so on, right? Yeah.
Yeah, this is a very...
Pretty typical archetype.
Yeah. The Dune is a modern-day conglomeration of familiar myths, a tale of heroism and great sandworms guarding a precious treasure of melange, the geriatric spice.
The planet Dune features 1,000-foot-long worms that live for untold years, ferocious dragon-like monsters who have great teeth and a...
And bellows breath of cinnamon, which also reminds me of what Izzy was putting on her cookies yesterday, which caused me to bellow breaths of cinnamon.
And pumpkin. This is the pearl of great price myth.
In the Bible, a parable described a man who obtained a great treasure and then kept it hidden.
This parable was linked to mythological stories of protected treasures such as the golden fleece of the sacred ram sacrificed to Zeus, given by Phraxas to his wife's father and nailed to an oak tree where it was guarded by a dragon that never slept.
Yeah. Now, it's also interesting that at the bottom of a bottle of mescal, an intoxicating Mexican beverage, is a tiny worm which is said to contain so much essence that people have been known to hallucinate after consuming it.
My father, of course, spends considerable time in Mexico.
Oh, that's a thought I had about them switching the Christmas to this Mexican time period.
Yeah. It's another way of, like, none of your heritage.
None of your European heritage stuff would go on full-on Mexican, right?
Yep. Right.
Which kind of alludes to why the story might be popular these days.
Yeah. So I know from my own experience as a writer how easy it is to block a story that the publishers don't like.
Yeah. Because I always got immense praise for my writing from people who gave reviews on it.
But the publishers hated it with a burning passion of a thousand cents.
And so my question is, okay, why was Dune allowed through?
It has to be something harmful to the culture if it's allowed through.
Like, that's just a basic fact of, I mean, were the hard leftists in charge of the publishing industry in the 60s?
I think they were. Probably.
Now, of course, the other thing is, too, that Dune was finally published by a company that published car repair manuals.
Although to be fair, Dune was turned down 20 times.
Kind of, kind of. So he goes into this story about that.
So a lot of publishers said, we really love it, but we don't know how to market it.
Or we really love it, but it's too long and it's going to be too expensive to publish.
We don't want to take the rent. A lot of them loved it, but just for various reasons.
They didn't think it would make enough profit.
And one of the guys who turned it down said, this is probably the biggest mistake I'm going to make, but I'm going to turn it down.
But it wasn't because they hated the writing or anything like that.
But even, let's say, somebody publishes it, right?
The people who want to corrupt the culture don't like it.
They would simply shame everyone and associate it with nerdiness or make losers.
They would just simply oppose it in every conceivable way.
But it was very much embraced by the culture.
Or the people in charge of the culture who don't have the West's best interest at heart, I guess we could say.
At least in its current form.
That's fair. So my question is, I mean, we know how it harms.
How does it harm the culture? Well, it's saying that sadism and cruelty are superior and can only be combated by psychosis because Paul is psychotic.
He thinks he's a god.
Yeah. Now, of course, and now I don't know if this is in the book, but in the movie, Okay.
I go from having vague dreams about the future, which could mean anything.
There are people starving.
There's a holy war. What does that mean?
To, oh, I know exactly everything about your family history and your mother who lost an eyeball transferring.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Remember the guy?
I was a bit confused.
And I'm like, what? Like, how do you know everything?
He's gone from, like...
General vision guy to specific circus freak psychic guy.
I know you have a mole in your inner thigh.
This kind of stuff, right?
It becomes a parlor trick almost, but that's one of the things that finally convinces everyone.
But if somebody thinks they're a god, they're psychotic.
Yeah. I mean, if we just look at it in purely secular terms, right?
Now, there was, other than the words of command, was there any other magic in the stories?
Because there's mysticism.
I mean, the spice, the drugs, like extending your life, your consciousness, that kind of stuff.
But drugs do affect your consciousness.
In a positive way.
Well, no, no. Some people would say yes.
I mean, the Beatles were very creative under drugs.
Yeah, a lot of songwriters.
A lot of people have used drugs, sadly, to very great creative effect.
And he also, sorry, Frank Herbert also used drugs.
Not a lot, but he did partake of mind-altering substances and was also into the drug called Buddhism, which he got from Alan Watts, who was one of the big popular writers.
No, but it does sort of...
Oh, it's a mind drug in a way.
Right, right, okay. But the magic in terms of the drug use is the spice itself is used to allow these navigators and the space folding thing to actually specifically and accurately Find their way through the interstellar space, right? They're predicting the future on a short scale to be able to do that.
So that's completely magic.
Because Lord knows that drunk driving is the way to go.
So it's one thing to be drunk driving, but do you want to really craft interstellar vehicles traveling faster than light on mind-altering drugs?
It's all natural, man.
It's not drunk driving if you only drink at stoplights.
Sorry, I'm just writing down this as the new family motto.
Yeah, I'm going to add this.
It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
Okay, so I was really struck because in the movie, and this has been, I think, it's certainly in the book, I'm sure it's described this way, these giant monsters have these giant teeth that swallow you.
Right? And this, to me, would be a child's view of the dog attacking him.
I think that that's probably where he gets some of the power of the sandworms.
And I think, Jared, you made this connection, which I thought was great, in that The dog, he only survived the dog attack when he was two and a half, the rider, because the dog was at the end of his chain.
Oh, the chain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then how do they control the sandworms?
Well, they have, like, it's not necessarily a chain.
It's like a hook they throw into the sandworm scale and just keep it open.
But they're essentially holding it at bay, you know, where it can't go back underground.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that the dog is kept from killing him by the chain, and he kept his own murderousness to some degree at bay by channeling it into art.
Because in his art, everyone's murdering each other.
But he channeled some of his murderous impulses into his own art, I would assume.
So what I don't like about it, of course, is that the good guys lose, and you only win by losing your mind.
You only win by becoming crazier than the crazy people.
And thriving in this hostile environment.
That's a virtue. But that doesn't make him a god.
This is the thing that annoyed me about the second movie.
I don't know when he's like, yeah, I'm a god.
You didn't notice that either, right?
Yeah, it seemed like I was just kind of watching and then suddenly he's like embracing it.
He's like, I'm better than all of you!
And it's like, wait, what? They allude to it a little bit in the sense that when he first encounters Spice for the first time, I think he's 15, and it immediately has an effect on him.
Because it does on everyone. It's a mind-all.
Well, it does on everyone, but he's going to be the Kwisatz Haderach, you know, so it's special with him.
But then when he lives with the Fremen, there's spice in everything.
It's in the food. It's all over the place.
He's swimming in it, and so it hasn't even- There's spice on his girlfriend?
Essentially, right. And so it has a much greater effect on him.
Right. It's like that quote from Rio, keep it spicy.
Anyway, so- Okay, so I want to know the worms.
So the worms, you said dragons.
Oh, they're sci-fi dragons. They're sci-fi dragons.
So the worms are obviously anger that can be harnessed, because they do harness the worms.
Fear is the mind killer.
He's all about that. This is the big quote that I've heard from him.
It's, oh, it's not that power corrupts, power attracts corrupt people.
Of course, but here's the thing, too.
He absolutely abused his power over his children, so he's confessing to be utterly corrupt.
Oh, yeah. Okay, so this has just come to me.
Yeah, let's do it live.
All right. Worms, psychology, old man, ancestors.
Your gut feeling. What is your gut?
It's a big worm. Oh, like your intestines?
Your intestines. Oh, yeah.
And these are the old men of the desert.
Your natural instincts, the ancestral people, can tell you, stupid white man, you've lost the way.
Except when the ancestors tell you to be nice to your children.
The other thing, too, is that When he first, he died of pancreatic cancer, quite young, in his 60s.
Yeah, he was like 66. And for some time beforehand, he thought he had intestinal parasites that he'd picked up.
That's why his stomach was hurting.
Intestinal parasites that he'd picked up from Mexico, and then he was misdiagnosed.
Yeah, maybe it's because he was drinking the worms at the bottom of vodka.
I would assume so, right? I would assume so.
Well, man, I was going to say something intelligent too, but I completely forgot.
We were talking just before you brought up the intestinal worm thing.
We were saying something about, what were we saying right before that?
We were talking about the worms being anger, your ancestors' rage, harnessing them with the chains, the dogs.
Oh, the dog that corrupts. So I think really the only way, he was saying that people basically who are corrupt...
Will be drawn to power.
So I think he was very corrupt because obviously he didn't have kids to spend time with them or do anything like that.
He only had kids so that he could have power over them.
So, you know, a lot of people will become politicians and stuff like that if they want power.
But for him, I think he just had kids to have power.
Correct. Oh, that's why he would have died for child support payments, too, because he didn't have power over his daughter.
Also, he did have power over his daughter because he denied her the money.
And the son that didn't obey him and carry on his legacy offed himself, in a way, and the other son carries on his legacy and becomes an apologist for his life, essentially.
Yeah. Another question.
Kind of foundational to me.
So, House Harkonnen has many, many people.
Yes. Okay. I didn't like the...
The whiter you are, the more evil you are.
That just seems to be kind of attractive to this.
Yeah, like, come on. Those guys were, like, ghostly wild.
They're like albino glow sticks.
Just imagine how it would have been if it was different.
Like, imagine if they had been, like, ghostly dark blue or dark brown or something like that.
And they would have been like, oh, and you're the bad guys?
That's racist. Right. If we could fashion people from the bald calves of babies, it was like...
And also that they were hairless because, you know, I think whites go bald more quickly or more often.
So just that to me was like...
I think hairless is probably not the biggest clue.
I think the biggest clue to that being white is that they are white.
They were just... They were ultra white. It's like you couldn't be more on the nose.
Right. Like white people...
Yeah, yeah. That was not ideal, of course, right?
But... So this, but there's tons of them, right?
Yeah. So one of the things, if you are a house of nobility, one of the things you need is a bunch of spare parts.
If there's a war or something and a lot of people get like that, you need a few backups.
What do they always say? You need two sons, an heir and a spare.
And wasn't Harry's autobiography, his autobiography was called The Spare or Spare or something like that?
Because he was the leftover, right? Because his older brother William was going to be the king and he was the spare.
Oh. So you need an heir and a spare.
So clearly the dad, Leto, is fertile because he can produce a kid with the concubine, with Thor, the prostitute.
Yeah. So why has he only got one kid?
Yeah, that's never- Like, there's only three people in the entire house!
There's the dad, there's the concubine, and the whiny kid.
Yeah. Like, there's nobody else.
This makes no sense to me.
How could you possibly be...
Yeah, it's not like he needs a wife because he had the kid with the concubine.
Just have more kids with the concubine.
Yeah. I mean, she's pregnant again, right?
Have more concubines. Oh, let's have more concubines.
I'm super wealthy. Yeah.
Pretty good looking. I'm fertile.
I'm just going to have sex once.
Well, and Pulse 15, they had opportunities to, you know- Now, but who's she pregnant with?
Alia, the daughter. And that's from the dad, right?
From the dad, yes. And in the movie, the daughter's not born, but in the story, the daughter is born when the mother drinks the water of life.
And she's born with all the memories of the past Reverend Mothers.
Also, do the Bene Gesserit have skylights where their belly buttons are?
Oh, good question for me.
It's not just the Bene Gesserit.
All women do, don't worry about it.
I've not seen this in any documentary.
I thought you had a good memory from when you were young.
Oh, yes, that's right.
Mummy Skylight. No, because there's literally light in the fetus.
The fetus is in the belly and there's like spotlights coming in to light up the face.
Did she swallow a flashlight?
What is happening? I had to give that to the movie as creative because I found it interesting that they actually showed a realistic depiction of a fetus, of a human being in a womb saying it was a human.
Yeah, because that's going to be triggering for some people that are A-OK with nuking that.
Right. So here's the other thing.
So House Atreides, the three of us.
And so the dad, the son, and the concubine There's only three of them, so let's put them in charge of the most valuable thing in the known universe.
And that just makes no sense. The other thing too, so the second movie starts and I'm like, so the first movie starts with magic.
The second movie starts with a completely retarded statement, which is the daughter of the emperor saying, None could have foreseen this.
And it's like, okay, okay, okay, all right.
So imagine that, let's say, the four of us.
What we decide to do is we decide to displace the most violent MS-13 crime gang in the neighborhood, and we're just going to be nice to all the new people, right?
And then we're like, no one could have foreseen that there might be blowback from the most evil Harkonnen when they've been displaced from the most valuable place in the known universe.
And it's like, of course there's going to be blowback.
Naked mole rats are mean.
Sorry? Naked mole rats are mean.
Naked mole rats are mean.
Let's write that one down. Maybe that's the new one.
I've been making a list of quotes from this show.
We've got a thumbnail. And in the movie, it's alluded to as well, like, this is a trap.
We know it's a trap. Well, why are we still going?
And it's like, well, we must honor.
I forget the exact...
Yeah, it's something like, you know, the call of the duty to honor.
Yeah, so to be good... Because good, he's nice to his son, and he says to the Fremen, you can be your own thing.
So to be good is to be completely retarded and vulnerable to all attacks from outside and have no idea what's coming.
And what they're saying, too, I recall this now as well.
They get a credit that they're saying, like, we're prepared.
We know it's a trap, so that's the first step in avoiding the trap, you know?
Yeah. No, the first step in avoiding the trap is going to wipe out the Harkonnen, isn't it?
I guess that one eluded them.
The whole point of the family Atomics, sorry I'm jumping a bit around the story, is the last straw to defend your household.
How come they weren't used?
Right. Yeah. Here's the other thing, too.
You have a whole defense system that apparently can just be undone by one guy who can be compromised.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no backup, no redundancies.
Nobody's guarding the shields.
Like, apparently, just one guy can get his wife kidnapped, and that's the destruction.
How on earth does the house last 10,000 years if you have a giant...
Hold in your armor cold.
One guy can get compromised and your retirement house can be destroyed.
Sorry, James, you were going to say that. I mean, that's just sort of...
This is circling back to one of the things that Jared and I talked about when we watched the part one a week or so ago.
And I'm like, I just realized, man, House Atreides has the worst intelligence ever.
You know, it's absolutely...
Now, do you want spy intelligence?
Yeah, like military intelligence, spy intelligence.
Like, you know, how do you...
How do you go into, like, the whole thing with the doctor, right?
How is, like, certainly the Noah has a wife.
He has a wife. What happened to her?
Where'd she go? She's gone. Yeah, it's like, okay, so we should keep an eye on this guy.
I mean, did you notice the guy's just totally haunted because his wife's...
No kidding! No kidding!
Why did we not notice a thing? His mom says, Benny Jezret can, like, you know, read people's body language, knows exactly what's going on.
She's not going to know that this guy that's spending intimate time with her son...
You've got a thought. Well, no, because it's like Paul Atreides can see the future.
He knows what's happening down the road.
He can catch tiny little drones that are going to kill him, but he has no idea that his personal intimate family doctor's wife has been kidnapped.
No idea whatsoever.
You seem a little bit preoccupied, Doctor.
Oh, no. This is the maddening thing about this.
This is a trauma narrative, a trauma environment and story where this guy – it's wildly about this minutiae and detail and plans within plans and we're figuring all these little details out.
But the glaring obviousness of human emotion, connection, warmth is lost on everyone.
Yeah. Well, how much empathy did Frank Herbert have?
How much understanding of human nature did he have?
All he did was manipulate and bully and intimidate and terrorize.
No, empathy for this abstract thing called nature, which is not empathy at all because you don't actually have to interact with nature, right?
But he would never imagine that Paul would notice that the doctor was traumatized because he enjoyed his son's trauma, right?
How could he possibly understand that you would notice something like that?
Unless Paul is completely cold and alien and weird, in which case, why do I care who wins?
It's just one mafia family fighting another mafia family.
And the other example, I mean, there's probably a bunch of them, and I know that the books do sort of touch on this a bit more.
They sort of, they flesh this out more, but in the context of the movie itself, the other glaring intelligence failure that I thought of, when they finally get to Arrakis, ignoring all the rest of it, they get to Arrakis, and there's evidence of Harcon sabotage, you know, while the carryalls doesn't grab the thing.
And so after they lose the harvester, but they're The Duke manages to save all of the people who are on the harvester, which is his nobility, right?
He's like, I don't care about the harvester.
I don't care about the spice. I want these people to be...
I want to protect the people, but I'm not going to notice giant spaceships accumulating over my own planet that are about to kill me.
Well, but before that happens, you know, they go to the emperor sort of adjutant, whatever the name of that person is, the woman with the blue eyes, who was actually a man.
It's a fan. Leokines.
Leokines. So they go to Leot, and she's like, You know, she's like all kinds of like, are you going to tell the Emperor that there's been sabotage and all this other stuff?
And she's like, I'm just, you know, the Emperor's reduced our load of spice that we have to give.
And she's like, The quota is the quota, you know?
And they're not like, at that moment, it's like, okay, we've missed everything up and down, but this, this, this thing, something stinks.
And they're like, don't you notice these things?
And she's like, and I think she does kind of look to them like, I'm not allowed to notice.
You know, she says that afterwards.
Initially, she's like, I'm here to be impartial.
Yeah, but it's like, okay, but I'm not going to communicate anything.
You guys have, you have to get the, it doesn't matter, you get the quota.
And it's like, okay, so there's, this has got to be a setup.
There's got to be a trap. And like you said, we don't know if things are coming in over.
Giant spaceships. Yeah, yeah, that's more obvious.
Spaceships, not that, okay.
In the movie. In the movie, but even in the movie, there's not satellites over Arrakis, ostensibly.
But why would there not be satellites over Arrakis?
Well, actually, they don't explain that well, and they don't explain that at all in the movie.
That's fair. And sorry, and the last thing, because I know you're going to mention this about the satellites, because it's like, how can you not track people in the desert?
You're literally leaving footprints everywhere.
Now, is it your point about the storms?
Yeah, well, probably number one, they had storms.
So number two, I think this was in the book, is they had carpets that they would carry behind them.
Dried behind them. And it would cover over their footsteps.
Now, obviously, if you're looking at it, it's going to look a bit odd.
But, you know, a bit of a dust of wind blowing, and it's going to be all covered.
Magic carpets. Yeah, yeah.
Actually, if you hit them with bombs, you're carpet bombing.
No, what about this aspect? Their space travel is full space.
So, essentially, like, they don't have to, like...
They just materialize. Yeah, they just pop up and, like, unload a bunch of ships.
So, it's like, hey... But they would know all of that.
And they would have to have instant laser things to hit the ships with in orbit, because you can just materialize.
They have shields over the house, over the city, essentially.
And that's where the doctor dropped their, sabotaged their shields.
Right, right. Yeah, it's like, a lot of these things, I know that a lot of these things are explained in the book itself, but in the context of the movie, it's like there's a lot that's not there, and it's like...
I think the movie... Oh, there's huge plot holes.
But they needed more time for the desert shots.
This movie was like two and a half hours.
No, I think, you know, take out 20 minutes of desert shots.
I mean, yeah, they're cool, but put 20 more minutes into story building and explanation and realism and stuff like that.
Because obviously, okay, it's sci-fi.
It's sci-fi. It doesn't have to be the most realistic.
You know, no one's expecting like...
But, I mean, do a bit better.
Explains more. Like, this guy, didn't he start dreaming of, like, making a Dune movie since he was 13 and this was the best he could do?
The director? The director said Villeneuve, he said he started storyboarding.
At 13? At 13, yeah.
And this was the best he could do?
What did he storyboard?
Some drawings of deserts?
What handling of it? Just my personal conniption, like, he just wildly changed so much of the narrative.
Like, dude. It's the same story anymore.
I think it includes Scowling Girlfriend as well.
Sorry? Yeah. The storyboards included Scowling Girlfriend.
Oh. Okay.
I'm for the longhouse, Paul.
Every time I see her, she's got to be the least charismatic actress I know of.
Yeah. Every time I see her, there's nothing likable about her.
And why does she look like she's nine?
When she wears makeup, and she wears a lot of makeup when she wears makeup, she looks like 20.
In this movie, she looks 12.
Well, the act is 24.
No way. No, no, the male act.
I'm sorry, Timothee Chalamet, 24.
He looks 17 in a new movie, I think.
Yeah, yeah. Chani Zendaya looked like 12, in my opinion.
She looks really young.
And also, compared to the original, in movie one, she only had like 10 minutes of screen time or something crazy, right?
In this movie, it changed completely.
It seemed like she was half a main character.
And for what?
What did she add? Well, shame the dudes.
Yeah. But I just don't get the relationship.
Show me anger.
He's this royal prophet of goodness, and he's going to choose some random ugly 12-year-old?
Well, no, like a desert...
Well, actually, now, okay, at least in the book, she's the daughter of Leot Kynes, who's like the imperial planetologist and leader of the Fremen.
So she's kind of a princess. What?
Yeah. Yeah.
Now, that is actually mentioned in the movie, that Lea Kahn is the leader of the Fremen.
The black woman who was the planet...
The planetologist. Planetologist?
Yes. Okay. Was secretly the leader of the Fremen.
Really? Mm-hmm. Okay.
I must have missed that. Because that character just kind of faded in and out, and I was like...
Yeah. And they did a terrible job of explaining these relationships and stuff.
And also... So that's so...
Wait, Zendaya's her daughter?
Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Yep. Okay. The races are not happening.
Okay. Well, I don't know.
Who knows, right? It's like the Little Mermaid movement where the white guy had like seven daughters and they rolled different races.
Yeah, yeah. Yep.
Oh, man. Okay, so...
Yeah, so none of that particularly made sense.
Now, I know that there's a suspension of disbelief.
I get all of that, right?
And they never explained why they had to walk into Mordor rather than just take the eagles.
Now, of course, the answer to that is that the Nazgul would kill the eagles, so they had to go by foot.
But that wasn't explained.
But there's some things that also need to, you know, obviously every story is going to have some things that don't add up.
But if it's something like that, there's also things that you're supposed to figure out yourself and it isn't supposed to be.
Not everything should be explained in the story.
Some things are good for theorizing and coming up with your own ideas.
Just as long as there is actually a reason when you're writing it, you may not have to explain it.
That's what I think. Yeah, I agree with that.
Yeah. I think, you know, the guy who wrote One of the Rings probably had an explanation as to why they went on foot, but he didn't put it in because he's like, look, think about it and you'll find it.
All right, you ready to get goosebumps?
Here we go. The suits, what are they called?
Steel suits. Steel suits, okay.
So the steel suits, you don't eliminate your own waste, you recycle it.
Your own waste goes back into you.
Cycle of generational trauma.
You never get to expunge your waste.
It just goes right back into you and fuels the next generation.
That's your nourishment. That's what keeps you alive.
What keeps you surviving in a harsh environment is re-traumatizing yourself with your own waste.
And it's a kind of wrapping.
And, of course, drugs go up the nose, as does this thing.
Oh, yeah, I know that. So, yeah, I like the recycling of trauma stuff.
I think it's quite powerful.
And there's a reason why this resonates with so many people.
And of course, I mean, it's a fair theory, at least, why Herbert would have been finding it so difficult and then shutting his children out of the house at certain points in Dune, because he's being re-traumatized by inflicting trauma through the book.
Well, the whole book is...
Inflicting trauma on everyone else.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he's saying that violence is the solution to all conflicts.
Because violence and mysticism is the solution to all conflicts.
Nobody reasons with anyone in the entire...
Everything is resolved through violence, right?
So he is training people through this book to view virtue as weakness and reasonableness as suicide.
And everything is resolved through psychosis and violence, which is how he resolved, quote, resolved things with his own children.
So I view the book as toxic.
And this is probably why I avoided it to some degree as a kid.
It just seemed to me very alien, bizarre, unhealthy, unworldly.
And I said this because I saw the David Lynch movie in 85.
And I was just like, this is insane.
This is horrible. And it was ghastly to me.
And again, maybe we'll watch it at some point.
But yeah, so maybe this is just recycled trauma.
They had a different experience of it where I read the book when I was 15.
I had seen the movie when I was 13, played like the old real-time strategy game when I was 9.
And that's how I found the story at all.
But... I had a bad childhood in a lot of ways, and the book for me was kind of partially that escape.
We were chatting about this earlier, where I was like, what is it like with, I'm curious if you want to share it there, you come across a story like, oh, this is interesting, this is neat, and then to see the background and stuff, the author, what's that like for you?
For me, I liked the Dune series.
I never got hugely into it, because obviously I never read the books, but I watched a bunch of videos on it, watched the movies, of course, right?
I thought it was a cool story.
And then it's like hearing about it just really ruins it.
It is a cool story.
I mean, I go with that.
It is a neat story. I mean, it's very much an archetype.
And the visuals were cool.
The sword fights were cool, though they didn't.
But I mean, even in the book, like not when there isn't that stuff.
Right, right. So this ruins it for you?
Yeah, just like hearing everything.
It's like, okay, well, great. So now it's not a story.
Now it's just some guy's life put into a book.
And I don't care about some guy's life put into a book.
I want to hear a story. Because he went to this alternate universe at the expense of his own children.
How far did he have to go to avoid empathizing with his children?
He had to go 10,000 years into the future on the other side of drugs to a planet that doesn't exist.
This is where he had to go mentally just to avoid any potential empathy with his own children.
And I'm surprised the kids weren't more resentful of the Dune series.
Because, I mean, maybe the one guy who died of AIDS or whatever, but the other guy who actually continued it after his dad died for the money, and it's like, how could you not just hate the desert after all of this?
Like, your dad basically abandoned you for this story, and you're gonna just be okay with it?
Because, like, if you have bad parents like that, do you hold them accountable and responsible, or do you continue the cycle?
So yeah, a couple of thoughts to end up with.
The firmament bothers me because there's no future.
There's no families. There's no husband, wife.
There's no children. They're all about their ancestors because they take the fluids of their ancestors, pump them into this lake to recover the desert planet or something.
I'm not really sure how that's supposed to work.
But I do find it weird that there are no kids.
Movie directors don't want to work with kids in the desert.
It's dangerous. It's sunny.
You know, like, it could get sunburned or whatever, right?
So I get that in the movie, but...
And you're saying, Jared, that in the books there was not much focus on kids.
They'd sort of float around in the background from time to time.
There were books... Sorry, there were kids in the book, but...
Yeah, I would say very much for...
Not, like, main characters or anything like that?
So, yeah. So, for me...
It means he doesn't have to deal with parenting.
He can do weird things like this.
It's some technology that apparently the Bedouin have this advanced technology, which makes no sense.
Where are they manufacturing these things?
Where do they get the materials? Yeah, like they don't have any other type of metal and stuff like that.
They do explain that they use spice for everything and that they use it to make it basically a plastic, a polymerization.
They do explain that in the book.
So the spice is basically everything.
It's everything. Yeah, you can do anything.
Full space-time. It's a food.
It's a drug.
It can manufacture things.
It's a 3D printer. It's magic source.
It's mana. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like the replica.
What do they call that in Star Trek?
The holodeck. Yeah.
So the fact that these people are fighting for the future of their planet, But have no children.
What? What's the point of that?
Well, now, in the books, there are a lot of children.
And actually, I think about this, the second and third book deal, like, one of them is literally Children of Dune.
Okay. And so that's fine.
But in the movies, the director gets you to care.
It's like, we care so much about our own future.
We're going to kill and murder and die, but not have children.
We're not going to do it. Because, you know, that's a lot of work.
That's complicated. Right, so that bothered me a smidge.
But, you know, I think, again, they did all this effort into the movie, and I know it's a hassle to have a bunch of kids on a movie set and stuff, right?
But if you are living in this scarce resource desert planet, right, don't you want to have backup and have kids and stuff like that?
People die out of nowhere.
We're not going to replenish them.
Well, the front men are definitely in our selected population.
There's much more communal living and all the hippy-dippy stuff.
But then they should have a bunch of kids.
Exactly. Yeah, spray and pray.
They're literally in a threat environment.
They are not apex predators in this desert planet, right?
Like, humans on Earth, yes, apex predators.
They are not there, so they should be having a lot of kids, right?
I would take a sandworm on, though, with a lecture.
I think sandworms would die.
They would die. They would just eat themselves, right?
Yeah. Well, also, what was it?
Yeah, again, just for realism of the movie, right?
If it was too much of a hassle to have a bunch of kids on the set, just get actors who are teenagers who look younger, right?
And just do a bit of CGI to make their faces younger.
They even did the Indiana Jones one at the beginning.
They made him look like 30 years younger.
And obviously it wasn't amazing, but just have them in the background and have a bunch of kids or whatever.
It doesn't have to be that big of a thing.
I bet you they could have done it pretty cheap.
Or just hire Zendaya to act like a 12-year-old woman.
But that's also why this is fantasy, because the Fremen are a selected population, but they're also kind of like the apex predator of the planet.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he obviously, he read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Arabia guy, about how he led the natives against, I think, the Ottomans or whatever, right?
So, yeah, I mean, I get all of that, but I just, I couldn't really care that much about the Fremen because, the Fremen, because they don't even care enough to have any families or kids.
And everyone's just kind of milling around in these undifferentiated burqas.
And it's like, yeah, I don't know, I'm supposed to really care.
And they're just mocking everyone. And, you know, there's this tough guy, frat, you know, get into the club kind of thing.
You'll never be one of us. Okay, you're one of us.
I feel like, yeah, they definitely stretched the time where it was like him trying to prove himself.
I think they stretched that on a bit.
Oh, good God. Because all he had to do was wait for his psychic powers to manifest and you touch someone and find their history.
It's like, yeah, that's good. Good for you.
And there was no earning that. It just kind of happened out of nowhere.
So, is it your point?
Sorry, your point about Wouldn't you resent the books that took your father away?
So he did dislike his father intensely, from what I get from the biography when he was little.
But then he grew to love and respect his venerable and wise father and so on.
Interestingly enough, after the financial success of Duke, he seemed to flip a bit, right?
Yeah. He seemed to kind of flip a bit.
Suddenly, he doesn't hate his dad so much.
Also, his dad's getting old and has a lot of money and only one kid left.
Right. So, yeah, I don't know if there's any negative motives around all of that, but he did seem to warm to his father when his father became very successful.
Sorry, Jared, are you going to say? There might be too much of a stress.
You've pointed out that communists hate capitalism because it stole mommy and daddy.
And there's stuff as socialism goes on, people are ending the transmission of their intergenerational wealth through, what's this stuff called?
You give your kids and you die.
Is that tax? Oh, sorry.
But yeah, they're ending inheritance.
The socialists are ending inheritance.
Right. Which is part of the way that intergenerational trauma is transmitted because I take the money and I forget what mommy and daddy did.
And it's also how culture is transmitted.
I'm going to listen to mom and dad because they're going to give me the inheritance.
They're going to give me the inheritance. It's like bribery for the continuation of culture.
There's no children, so there's no one to give inheritance to.
In June. In June, yeah, there are no children.
Well, no, because the benefit of the mom has the Skylight fetus.
Mm-hmm. Skylight fetus?
That would be the name of the character, Skylight fetus.
There's no replacement rate.
Right. There's no replacement rate.
No. Yeah. Right. And even the Harakonin, the bald-faced mole rat guy, his girlfriends are just cannibals.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
I don't remember. Like, in the movie, I must have completely missed that they were cannibals.
Because, like... He's literally holding out body parts.
He's like, I'll bring you a heart and a spleen and a lung.
And then he kills a guy, also the Harkonnen, everyone who questions anyone in authority gets murdered.
So that's not going to succeed.
Which is a terrible strategy. The Harkonnen are supposed to be smart, and clearly they are, because they look like remixed megaminds.
I take that very personally, but go ahead.
No, they literally are. They're just badly rendered.
But... No, like, they're supposed to be smart, and then they're like, okay, well, you know, we have a bunch of war, and we're trying to invade stuff, and we need as much help from each other as we can get.
But you disrespect my opinion and disagree with me, and you're murdered.
It's like, then no one's going to do it, and if you make a bad decision, the entire planet's going to be killed.
Entire wars have been lost because people were too frightened to speak up.
This is one of the reasons why the British won.
I talked about this in my documentary on Hong Kong.
One of the reasons the British won against the Chinese was the Chinese were too nervous to send.
They pretended they'd won a battle because they didn't want the emperor to get mad at them for losing the battle.
So the emperor didn't even get any early warning.
Oh my gosh, that's crazy.
They had a battle, though, and then there was like two people left.
Yeah, it went great.
They're just getting a bathroom break.
We're hiding under the dark, but I think we're about to win.
So, yeah, that bothered me.
Because it was way too generic evil.
And also the idea that all evil people look like slurks.
All the good people look kind of noble and heroic.
That's just, you know, a lot of the evil people.
Evil people know that, so they constantly camouflage themselves as good-looking people.
And all of the weird demonology among attractive people...
Although, to be fair, nowadays, it does seem to be coming a bit more true with all, like, the crazy communists with their blue hair and nose piercings and stuff like that.
Yeah, but the spokespeople for communism tend to be more charismatic.
Like, there was a guy, a singer, John Mellencamp, who was on Bill Maher's show, waving around the Communist Manifesto, and he's a pretty charismatic guy, although he says he's still an infant in the 60s.
But anyway...
Aren't we all... So, the sun...
Brian? Brian and Bruce, right?
So the son, Brian, ends up collaborating with his dad.
And I don't know, because I didn't, honestly, 19 hours, I couldn't make it through the whole audiobook, but I tried to go where it was relevant.
And I just read through a lot of the print version.
So, maybe he did have this big confrontation, but I don't think he did, because I never saw it anywhere.
I've never heard it mentioned anywhere.
So, he ends up working with his father.
Now, his father gets this pancreatic cancer, as I mentioned, has stomach aches, doubled over.
But no, it's just a standalone in his stomach.
Yeah, but they're working on a book, The Man from Two Worlds, that they're collaborating on.
And they even do role plays to get the dialogue right.
They're constantly working past midnight and night and day, and his father's exhausted.
Oh, but he's working his dad to death pretty much, right?
Well, again, I don't want to impugn any motives because I don't know the guy.
Yeah, of course. But I could see a scenario wherein sublimated anger towards his father is, we're going to finish this book, Dad, let's go.
You know, this is going to be the best book ever.
It's going to be your legacy.
And like, keep working, keep working, keep working, even though he's sick.
Now, he doesn't say, from what I've read, maybe it happened, right?
But what I've read, he doesn't say to his dad, Look, you're not well.
We've got to stop working on this.
Go straight to the doctor. Now, his father did get the test, and he was misdiagnosed, as I mentioned, with Crohn's and stuff.
But he didn't say to his father, whatever you do, stop working on this book because you're sick.
And figure this out first. Right.
So the mom's already dead.
She was a smoker and took like 10 years off and on to die of lung cancer, which is pretty brutal, of course.
Should have healed herself with her white witch magic.
Yeah, I guess. But the son, if he still was angry at his dad...
You know, being really enthusiastic about the labor that is not exactly helping his dad's health might be how it played out.
Yeah. We tend to see this with, like, you know, public figures, politicians that are just sort of put out there and, like, man, this guy is not well.
You know, this guy's not doing well.
He had these giant tumors coming out of his head and he was like, gotta show up to vote!
Like, go spend time with your grandkids!
What, are you crazy? Yeah. Anyway, so I thought that was pretty rough and...
And it's now become this massive industry.
Like Dune is just...
I was reading through the list of all of the books.
There's like dozens of books and video games and short stories.
A new Dune game is coming out after the release of this movie, I heard.
Is that right? Actually, we were just at the grocery store like two days ago and I picked up a magazine on Dune because they had one and they were talking about like, oh, when Dune 3 releases or like what to expect for Dune 3 and they're like, oh, and here's the video game.
It's like, okay. So it's still a big thing.
It's becoming a big thing again.
And there was the 1985 movie.
Yep. In the early noughts, there was a miniseries.
TV spinoff, yeah. It was a sci-fi channel.
Yeah, TV miniseries.
It was bad. It was so bad.
What's bad about it? The Sandworms.
It's just B-level, C-level acting and filming, essentially.
Okay. It's like someone just like, how cheaply can we get through this?
Yeah. The Sandworm is just some centipede in the bottom of a jar or something.
It was just bad CGI. Yeah.
Horrible bad. Two guys in one of those...
Oh, the suits, yeah.
No, like one of those, like, oh gosh, that big slinky toy.
Yeah, yeah. Oh no, it's coming down the stairs.
There you go. Nice.
Make, like, the stairs out of, like, not sandpaper, but, like, sandstone.
Sandstone, that's right. You could probably get some Minecraft mod to do this.
That's right. They show you on a beach, and they've got the ocean in the background, but you still hear the roar of the waves.
Oh, yeah! Nice. Or you get the horses with the guy in the front and the back just covered in sand.
There you go. Brr! Right, nice.
Oh my gosh. It's a close-up of what are the penguins with the teeth?
The surprise teeth in the penguin's mouth?
Oh, the geese. Is it geese?
Surprise geese that you get in close-up of the goose and stuff like that?
We could probably recreate this with Magpie.
He was like hissing earlier today.
He's got some big teeth. I can bring it out of him.
Some curly straws up your nose.
Perfect. Oh my gosh.
All right. So listen, I appreciate everyone's time.
Is there anything anybody wanted to mention at the end here?
I'm going to rage at the environmentalism and Frank Herbert's hippy-dippiness.
Yeah. Yeah. Because that's, like, this is the stuff no one's going to talk about.
Like, it's going to be this big story that, you know, goes on.
It's impacting the world. And these are the kind of conversations that people aren't going to be talking about.
Well, he's not canceled for being a rampant child abuser.
Like, I'm canceled. Yeah.
Right? But he's not canceled for being a rampant child abuser.
Nobody cares. So, yes, he cares. I was saying, I think it's, what I was just realizing is it had this huge thing in like the, what was it, the 60s?
60s and 70s. The 60s and 70s, revived again in the 80s and, well, 90s and really early 2000s, right?
And it seems like every 20 years, this series just gets revived.
New generation. And now the new generation, Gen Z and Gen A, is being revived for, right?
But the two new movies coming out, one, I think the last one was like 2020 or something, it came out.
But I just think that's really interesting.
Something about this story fits the narrative so well that the companies keep providing it for each generation and making it a trademark.
And there is something interesting within it.
There's something interesting about it that it's a story that is so popular.
There's something about it compelling to people.
Now, you asked early on.
What's the purpose of the story?
Why does this exist? Why in this moment in history did, in a sense, Middle Eastern death cult murder fest stories come front and center and everyone's like, yeah, it's great.
Like, why did we lose our own stories and basically have this incursion?
Because he studied all of these foreign texts, foreign languages, Chinese, Middle Eastern.
Like, he went all out for this. He went, like, total outgroup preference regarding your own mix.
This is like the Atlas Shrugged of sci-fi.
Yeah, very much so. Ooh, yeah, that's a different line.
Like, just because she spent, like, 11 years on it doing research and stuff and became a whole architect just to make it.
That's the earlier book. But yeah, yeah, for sure.
She went all in. So, yeah, that's, to me, the big question.
What trauma was happening that people...
We'll get into this story rather than a story about healing, which is something like Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings is a story of healing.
Well, yeah, I think it was very divided.
Like, maybe the nicer people would go to Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings. Jared. No, I'm kidding.
Or not meaner exactly, but just people with different traumas and stuff like that would attach onto this.
Well, your trauma, Jared, was it coldness?
Was it... No, it was more like...
Overt aggression. Overt aggression.
Okay. So that would be in the story.
But very much like, oh, there's that in the story.
And also the, like, you know, control yourself.
Control your, like, don't get, don't attract the worm.
Be quiet. Walk on eggshells.
Get the rage of the old man.
Yeah, it is very much walk on eggshells.
That whole specified walk they have.
Right? That you have to keep it.
You can't be the same all the time.
Like, very rhythmic kind of...
And it's funny because tiptoeing is because you're prey, but the actual tiptoeing that he learned from the native guy was because you're the predator.
It was a kind of flip on that because you've got to not be...
Animals can't notice that you're hunting them, whereas in the sandworms they're hunting and so were the parents with this aggression, right?
Yeah, and to rephrase what I said earlier, I think I said nice, but I don't think that was quite the right word.
Like I said, the nicer people were into the Lord of the Rings.
I don't think that's it. I think the better way to describe it or say it would be like...
Maybe people who were looking more for a way to hide from, like, their trauma and stuff like that would go more to the Lord of the Rings.
Or not hide, but, like, find an escape from it, whereas I think Dune more embraces it.
I think. I was seemingly conscious aware that, like, part of what appealed to me about Dune was this, like, you know, wrap up your trauma kind of world, or justify, or explore your trauma kind of world.
No, this is a world where it's not trauma.
I personally created a world where, this is Roman's argument again from the future, he created a world where brutalizing your children is not trauma.
It is the only way they survive.
It is good parenting to traumatize your children.
And the only guy who doesn't traumatize his child gets killed.
So, he's the bad guy and his child is abandoned to the desert and then has to become a murderer in order to survive by joining the...
well, then the guy to join the Fremen.
So, Frank Herbert created an entire world where his brutal parenting was entirely right and justified.
And he fled from his real parenting into this world to justify what his father did to him, what his father's father did to his father, and what he did to his children.
That's the whole point. And that's spreading the world wherein it's not child abuse.
It's like child abuse in the same way that not letting your children lay on the couch and eat sugar all day.
That's not child abuse.
You don't want your kids to do that.
It's not healthy for them, right?
So he's creating a world where if you brutalize your children, you're a good parent.
Yeah. And all right, you guys know me.
We've gotten to know each other and chatted about a lot of stuff.
I've always said I have a conflicted relationship with the art that I grew up with because I appreciate it for what it was at the time or I liked it for some reason at the time.
But as I would get older, I'd look back at it and be like, this isn't good stuff.
There's something going on here.
There's a reason I like this.
There's not a message in here that's moral, objective, ethics, that kind of stuff that really appeals to me.
It doesn't warm your heart. This does not warm your heart.
Psychosis and violence is the only solution.
The appeal to Dune, in retrospect, I'm trying to get his back into the head of my 15-year-old self and what I felt at the time and what was intriguing about it.
It was the proposition that My trauma makes me better.
I can survive this trauma.
I will be the Quisatz. I will be the universal super being.
I will survive this. It'll make me this greater person.
Right. But he has, in order to become a super being, Paul has to reject any possibility of empathy.
He has to kick his girlfriend to the curb.
He has to kill indiscriminately.
He has to embrace a holy war.
He has to accept the death of billions of people through starvation and violence.
He has to murder empathy within himself, and then he transcends to godhood, right?
Which is basically...
Basically, he has to become evil. Yeah, he has to become evil, and evil is all-powerful in this universe.
Yeah, because power corrupts and powers...
Like the Harkonnen just wants spice.
He's going to do a whole holy war.
The Harkonnen, in a sense, are less evil because they just want spice.
They'll just kill people to get some spice, but they're not out there causing the death of billions of people in a holy war.
Yeah. Now, there's a famous quote from Frank Herbert, and it was something that was appealing
to me as a kid too, is that it's not that power corrupts, it's that power is magnetic to the
corruptible, which is a great quote about governments and politicians. And he grew up,
there's interviews where he's skeptical of government and things like, man, it's bad that
we get away from that. And even oddly enough, didn't he talk about like we're getting away
from the founding of our country and our tradition and some of those things, to be someone who drew
the culture so far away from it. He was very interested in abstract topics that didn't require
him to change his own abusive behavior. Yeah.
Government, nature, ecology, the natives, blah, blah, blah, right?
All the natives is being so badly mistreated.
It's like, you've got kids.
Starving to death outside and you put in like half starving to death because they can't eat.
I wanted to point this out that there's a lot of anarchists and libertarians who would find like a good like anti-state narrative in their book.
And it's like, no, no, the state begins at home with the childhood.
And this is a story apologizing, apologetics for bad parenting, which is just going to propagate the state.
Justification and saying that good parenting is bad parenting and bad parenting is good parenting.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And all you need is magic, spice, and psychosis, and his worldview becomes perfect.
It's some cinnamon. It's some cinnamon.
And has anyone ever met a libertarian that embraces a drug or two here or there?
That would be crazy.
And Lord knows libertarians totally warmed to peaceful parenting because that's something you can actually affect and do for the better.
So, yeah. Just don't talk.
So, I think for me, my mother certainly was violent, but not sadistic.
Never got that scent. That's what I've heard.
I don't think so. Yeah, she erupted in anger.
She had no control over her own emotions, but she would never in a billion years have hooked me up to a lie detector.
This wouldn't even have crossed her mind as a thing to do.
So I think in the chaos, I was repelled by the sadism of Dune.
Because that was not my experience.
Interesting. Because there were no morals in my mother's anger.
She was just angry. She'd just get full of rage, blow up, calm down, let me know for dessert.
So it was random eruptions.
There was nothing moral in my mother's aggression.
She'd never painted like, you know, you're a bad kid.
She was just like, you know, she would see something, she'd rage, she'd be violent.
But there was never some big moral message.
Mysticism in a way. No, even the mysticism, it wasn't like you're offending the universe.
It wasn't like you're a bad person.
It was the violence that you would get from a scratching cat.
There's no moral lesson in it.
Were you morally instructed by Izzy's Ducks?
No, I mean, Malin gave me some stress.
There was some pretty direct communication.
No, you're just dealing with natural – I got no more moral lessons from my mother's violence than from a bad storm that destroys some property of mine.
Yeah, yeah. Right? So for me, the conscious sadism and control and I can't comprehend that.
I got that.
And so I said, we got that you're a bad kid.
I'm educating you.
I'm making you better.
I'm I'm disciplining you.
I'm teaching you how to live.
I'm helping you survive whatever not this is for your own good implicitly.
I got not now a little bit in boarding school.
That was that kind of stuff.
The boarding school was just Nietzsche and will to power stuff.
We can do this.
So we're going to hit you with a cane.
I didn't grow up with anybody who I believed had any moral lessons for me,
which is where you be becomes from a blank slate because I didn't have
anybody I believed in the church, the teachers, the headmasters, my
mother, my father.
None of them had any moral lessons that meant anything to me.
And here's a similarity I had with Frank Herbert in that sense, which like, you know, he's reproducing his trauma through his stories, which appealed to me.
Okay, so I didn't believe my dad's moral castigating and I didn't embrace like, yeah, you're right, I am.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was the subject of it, but also incredibly conflicted and confused with it and lots of… And this Lord of the Flies child… I was out there crossing train bridges at night, 300 feet off the ground because I didn't want to be home that badly.
Yeah. And that's what my friends wanted to do, and the alternative was to go home.
Let's go. And violence was very much part of a regular topic of conversation.
But were your parents' punishments cold and sadistic in this kind of way, like with the lie detector?
Not that bad. No, no, but in that vein.
There could be proximal stuff of sadistic torture where stand in that corner for a good sight.
I don't know if you've ever been forced to stand in a corner, but at a certain point, and it's humiliating.
Of course. The status cap that they used to have in school.
Because that didn't happen when I was a toddler, but when I'd be like 13, 14, 15, those ages, stand in a corner, it's humiliating.
Yeah. Yeah. And at some point, you're standing there so long.
I don't know if any of you guys have ever.
Back hurts. Your knees hurt. It's a stress disorder.
The blood pools in your legs and it just itches.
It hurts. It's like, and as you're getting your face from the corner.
And if your nose isn't touching the corner.
Oh, is that still?
Yeah. Yeah, my mother would never have done that.
You're like, you're just breathing your own breath back and recycling your own stuff.
But that's like the dune, like the suit.
Yep. You're breathing your own waste.
Yeah. You're not just a poison container.
You are, like, living.
Recycling. And, yeah, so my mother would never have done that.
And I never experienced any punishments like that.
So that's really conscious.
And you're staying there. Here's the thing!
That was painted as, like, a good thing.
Like, that was the gentler parenting.
Yeah. It's just a time out.
Yeah. Right? It's not your spleen out.
Yeah. At least you're not getting a weapon.
And did you get that kind of controlled, like where it's a whole ritual?
Yeah. Like the take off the belt?
Oh, absolutely. Okay, so my mother would never do anything like that.
She'd lash out, but it was no ritual involved.
It's interesting because, you know, you had a revulsion to it, Steph.
Jared, you had a real draw to it.
Oh, yes. And for me, it sort of kind of glanced off.
I was in my 20s, of course. I wasn't a kid when I came across it.
But for me, it was kind of in between the two.
And also, the other thing is that I'm in a much more of a limited category or a much smaller category of parents who had a divorce where the kids stay with the father.
I have a different perspective on divorce and all this other stuff.
Where my mom, I've mentioned this before, lived a mile away, barely saw her.
As far as punishment, abuse, verbal, emotional, physical, when I was very young, and by the time my parents started fighting more with each other, it kind of got ignored.
I didn't have very many peers that I bonded with at all.
So I was very isolated in that way.
What abuse? That's isolated because you can't have people over.
Yeah, well, I can't have people over.
We never had people over at our house.
Never had kids. Adult friends with your parents?
Are you dead? I would say rarely.
Okay. Rarely did that. I mean, maybe when I was very, very young, when they would have the parties and then, you know, those things with my father where they...
My father made certain changes around his life.
They used to be substance abusers, at least alcohol, I know for sure.
My father said, I think I'm an alcoholic and...
I think it was Chuck Colson was the fellow that he identified with or read about back in the 80s.
Born again, Billy Graham type.
So, started there and then he later became born again.
So, with him, I would say with both my parents, it was much more in the moment of wack ya.
Now, they didn't go to the point of like with your mom's stuff where you describe later on, oh, we'll just get some ice cream.
So it was much more...
You're grounded. Let's go to a movie.
Yeah, it wasn't like that for me.
It was much more, you get punished, and home is just sucks.
There's no fun. There's no play.
Even after the punishment's over?
It was just never fun out.
Okay. Never, never. I mean, okay, I'm not saying it was never, like, it was all dark, but it was, like, maybe a few points here and there.
But it wasn't, like, this flip of, like...
I believed I was bad.
I also knew that my father was a liar.
So you had that double think, right?
I am bad, and he's a liar.
I don't trust my parents for anything, but yeah, I can't do anything without them.
So then Doom would have been too consistent for you?
No, because Dune is consistently sadistic.
Everything is violence.
Everything is resolved through violence or manipulation, mysticism, bullying.
Yeah, I kind of had that split, you know?
So Dune would have tried to win one case or the other, and you had to have that ambivalence to survive, right?
Sure. I mean, you've known me for a long time.
I've been probably pretty consistent with, you know, because you've known me.
Interesting. Okay, good, good.
Well, I'm curious how many people we're going to help, annoy, enrage, as usual.
Yeah. But I really do appreciate everyone's time and the work that we did into getting all this information was great.
And of course, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Like, share, subscribe. Yeah.
Absolutely. Share the ideas.
You better. If we're too spicy to share directly, just share the ideas.
That would be great. And I look forward to It can't be too spicy.
We all have the spice. That's right.
It would be interesting to see what people think of with regards to this analysis because if we really want to grit our teeth, we'll do Isaac Asimov or Marion Zimmerman or all these other Greeks.
What would also be interesting is at some point if we wanted to do like a Lord of the Rings review.
The Tolkien one, right? Yeah, looking into Tolkien in his life because I think I remember in the last time we were in the car reading the biography, it was pretty interesting and fun.
Is this just revenge?
Like we ruined Dune for you and now you want to...
Fair. Very fair.
All right. Well, thanks, everyone. I think you understand.
I'm just being sadistic.
Have a great afternoon.
Look forward to your feedback.
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