Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Nate. And I'm Mike. What are we smoking today, Nate? We are smoking
a Cohiba Macassar. It's the Cohiba with the silver label. Yes, Mike told me, hey, we're
smoking the Cohiba Silver. And I was frantically rummaging through my show humidor, well, both
of my show humidor's now because I think Mike has a cigar problem. And I didn't see when
that was the silver, but I did see this one that was silver. So here we are. I bought
more cigars today too. So there we go. Not a sweet cap. So a nice change from the backers.
I would call this a Toro size. Yeah, this one's a good size. Sometimes it says on the
outer wrapper. And we have Google the show going on. I decided I don't care. All right,
here we are. We're going to light this bad boy up. We are again, both in the same recording
space in Nate's studio, AKA his garage. We are, we are. So for the first time listeners,
this is a second time experience. Yes. The draw is significantly harder. Yeah. It's a
bigger and girthier though as well. Significantly bigger and significantly girthier. Also, I
can already tell this is going to be a better cigar from the light. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't
taste anything like a backer. So it's got to be good. Right. This is pleasant. Front
of the cigar. Very nice. I'm looking forward to it. It's the first good cigar we've had
on this show for at least a month. So, all right. So just when you thought, Hey, they
put out dune part two, these two fuckers can't be talking about any more dune. Can they?
Well guess again, we can and we will, and we shall. And we are, we're going to talk
about the dune prequel trilogy. Well, one of many prequel stories, let's say, oh, that
was referenced directly in the last two, maybe three dune books of the eight in the main
storyline, which is the Butlerian Jihad trilogy, the machine crusade and battle of Koran. We
are doing one episode per book. So we are just doing the Butlerian Jihad book. Yes.
And this is written by Brian Herbert and Kevin Spacey, I think. Oh geez. No, it is writing
partner. Okay. Kevin J. Anderson. Brian's writing partner. Brian is the son of Frank
and Brian and Kevin wrote the last two dune books in the eight book main dune storyline.
And I liked the last two books in the main dune storyline. Big spoiler alert. I did not
like this book. It took me a long time to read because in the middle of it, I got so
bored. I decided to read two or three other books and then come back to it. That's not
necessarily surprising. It is their first foray into writing a book that was not expressly
storylined by Frank Herbert, which both of these authors did have authored books outside
of the dune universe and they've even worked together on other collaborations. But this
was their first dune collaboration that they were writing alone and it shows. It's almost
700 pages long. Yes. I think my print edition capped out around 640 and then it had a little
bit of a preview of the next book, right? You know, it's the older print books. I don't
know if the new print books still do that where they give you the first chapter of the
following book or not. I haven't bought a new book in a long time. Who knows? I took
notes though. I took notes though. I actually took now, you know, in the dune books, they
before each chapter, they've got a little, little quote on the top of the chapter page
from someone in the dune universe. And so in the first dune book, they're all not all
of them, but a lot of them are from princess Irlen who you don't even meet till the very
end of the first dune book. Some are from people I don't know that even meet in the
first dune book. You know, people that are just kind of figures throughout the dune lore
and history. But this one towards the end of the butlerian jihad struck me as an succinct
way to describe this actual first book, the book that this thing is in. The butlerian
jihad arose from such from just such stupidity. An infant was killed. The bereaved mother
struck out at the non-human machinery that had caused the sentence of death. Soon the
violence was in the hands of the extended mob and became known as a jihad. Primero,
a faken butler, memoirs of the jihad. And this basically sums up my feelings of this
whole book that it was pretty much stupid. There's a lot of things that just fit together
a little too well. It reads like a fan fiction, not like a novel.
It reads like they're trying to rewrite the first dune, but make it a machine thing. So
I guess let's kind of sum up the plot line of this. And then we can, we'll go through
some of my notes and you can offer points and counterpoints and we can talk about other
things in the book. But this follows, I don't know, four or five different people. Serena
is one. Xavier Harkonnen is one. Vorian Atreides is one. There's Salim Fremen. Salim Wormwriter.
Soon to be a Fremen. And then there's the slave boss. I can't remember his name though.
Iblis? Yeah, Iblis Ginjo. Okay. And then also of course Erasmus, the counterpart to Omnius.
Yes. And then it follows some Titans, which are human brains in jars in mech suits. Yes.
And it has the sorceress of Rassac. Yep. And Tio Holtzman, Norman Senva, and Aurelius Venport.
Yes. And all of these people, spoiler. I got 12 people. This is a spoiler. Basically all
these people stirred all the things that are known in the, like somehow magically all these
people are alive at exactly the same time interacting with each other. Yeah, like a
thousand years before the events of dune. Like 10,000 years before. Is it 10,000? Yeah,
it's supposed to be 10,000 years before the events of dune. And they are all alive at
the same time interacting with each other. That doesn't even seem right. I mean, 10,000
years is a long time, even though I know that the main dune storyline jumped that far, but
things were quite drastically different. And the stuff in this one aren't that different
other than they don't have the Holtzman engines yet, which I'm sure they'll get to because
at the end of this book, they had just started to install the Holtzman shields and the personal
portable shields, which we know from dune that the slow knife can penetrate, but the
quick blade can't. Yes. But so anyway, I mean, that's about it, right? So Serena Butler ends
up getting herself captured by the machines and Erasmus for some reason, no reason other
really than the story needed to do something for plot purposes decides that he likes Serena
and wants to keep her as his special little house slave and likes her sass and feels like
she has vim and vinegar in her or something. And then you have Xavier, her lover, and you
have Voryna Trades, who is a trustee of the robots. And so he's actually working for the
robots. And you've got Salim, who's not connected to anybody. And he's on Arrakis, but because
it's a dune book, so you have to have somebody on Arrakis. Right. And you have Ishmael who's
again not related to any of them. No, and he's there, but he was like stolen from a
different planet. And yeah, Ishmael. And then there's one other one. And those two boys
were briefly working for Tier Holtzman, but then they got relegated to doing a giant mosaic
in a canyon for reasons. And then Iblis is a crew captain, slave captain, something or
other building these giant monuments and shit. Yeah, he's like a foreman. To the Titans.
Yeah, he's a foreman or a superintendent. Like why the fuck? Slave boss. Why does God
need a starship? Why do Titans need? It doesn't. Why does a thousand year old Titan need a
statue of himself on a planet that only has robots and slaves? No one knows. These things
will likely never be answered. Is that enough of a kind of a summation? I mean, there's
like more specifics about we'll get into later. I just by and large, the main thing is the
machines, the thinking machines have kind of routed the humans. They've taken control
of Earth. They've taken control of a lot of other planets in the synchronized worlds.
There's an update ship that travels around duplicating Omnius on all the different places
so that they're kind of more or less in sync. The humans are trying to strike back and not
be overrun by the machines because they know the machines are coming. Something to make
note of is that when the machines invade Gidi Prime, I don't know, it was Seleucus Secundus
when they hit it. The first time in 100 years that the machines had made an attack. There
was kind of a detente. There was a detente and the machines decided to, well, the exact
reason was that Omnius lost a bet against one of the Titans, which was great. I don't
know if it was a bet. They did those battles. They did those arena battles. It was an arena
battle. It was a prize for the Titan to be able to go and attack a planet or some shit.
Okay. So here are my notes. I don't know. In one of the first few chapters, Xavier Harkonnen
and Serena Butler go out on a pig hunt and they kill a pig who I dubbed Pumba and then
they make love because why wouldn't you? Like the corpse of the pig is still there.
And they're in a swamp.
And they're in a swamp. Maybe mosquitoes don't exist. I don't know. And then Serena's revealed
that you're pregnant when machines take her to earth. And I feel the only reason she was
pregnant is because Jessica was pregnant in the first Dune book and it's basically a longer
and more boring version of the first Dune book.
Yes. Well.
And of course I know now, because I wrote these notes as I was reading these chapters,
I know now that the inciting incident was throwing a baby off a roof, although Michael
Jackson or whatever, not that he threw it, but dangled it for sure. But it just seemed
very bizarre. Like, okay, I've gone hunting after I kill something. I don't really feel
like banging because there's just so much work to do after you kill it. You have to
like gut it and drag it and whatever.
I'm certainly not banging in the swamp next to the dead animal.
No, not even in the future when this is supposedly taking place.
Right. Swamps are still swamps. The animals are still dead animals.
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. So that was kind of bizarre to me. And then so Serena
basically goes outside. She's, what's her father's name? Mannion. Mannion Butler is
like the big chief diplomat on whatever the fuck planet.
Solusus Secundus.
Is it Solusus Secundus? And she's his daughter, obviously. And she is, I don't know, fancying
herself a student Senate candidate or something. And so she has made addresses to the governing
body and she decides that because she banged Xavier Harkonnen, who is like the leader of
the fleet, now who he went and defended some other planet against the thinking machines
and they use this gas and so he can't smell or taste things, which he only bitches about
for the first third of the book. And then later on they're like, oh, and he smelled
that or whatever the fuck. Like they don't, I don't know that that's even an important
thing. So why include it other than you need to have a 600 page book for fuck's sake. You
can't have a nice brisk 200, 300 page book. You have to have three 600 page books or whatever
they all end up being because I'm Frank's son, God damn it. I got something to live
up to even though Frank wrote some really short books. Oh yes. Which were great. Fantastic.
So she decides to not go through the official process and bring a band of rebels, all of
Rogue One into steal the planets or the Death Star. Now set up some shields or something
on this other planet. I can't remember now. Gidey Prime. Gidey Prime. All right. So it
doesn't fucking matter. All these planets that have names, they're all the same planets
that are in the original Dune and all the names are all the people that you have in
the same Dune. So they're. Which is weird because after 10,000 years. After 10,000 years.
It's not going to be the same thing. You would think that they wouldn't be the same people
on the exact same planets doing exactly the same things to an extent. Yeah. But anyways,
she goes there and she ends up getting herself captured. The rest of the crew on her ship,
surprise surprise, is killed. She's the only survivor on the little ship trying to get
out, but she bled a little bit on the ship, which is very important. Uh, cause we're going
to do some CSI bullshit. Actually, just kidding. Xavier doesn't give a fuck. He found blood
that matches her. So then seven months after Serena dies, he's married to her little sister
Okta. As you do. Which is fucking. Okay. As you do. I guess as you do. So, uh, but so she
is captured, but why take her to earth anyway? Because the capturing machines didn't know
who she was. They had no idea who she was. They could have just shot her and been like
done. She was conveniently the last rebel left and Omnius wanted one of the rebels.
I think the true reason is, uh, the plot has to advance and you can't kill Serena then
because the other stuff has happened later. That might be true. Okay. And then, so the
next thing is why, why even keep humans as slave labor? They have watch eyes just floating
around and you can't tell me that all the watch eyes are sentient thinking machines.
So this is the wild part. They tried to address that right away in the book. Okay. And they
just let it go. Yeah. Just gone. Yeah. It like came in and why do you have slaves that
are humans when machines can do everything and they let it go. Yep. And then, uh, well
I've read that I've read the future. So I can't say too much. We're trying just to talk
about this one. So yeah. So like why keep them as slavery as labor? Like the machines
can do all that stuff. Erasmus wants to experiment on the humans to understand the humans, you
know, and his big thing is he wants to do it in order to understand the humans so that
they can more thoroughly defeat them in the future, I guess. But Erasmus is also cartoon
villain, like tearing people apart and using their blood to make paintings. Yes. But then
also he's like the nice one. Yes. He's also the nice one. So it's kind of, you know, if
they would have just picked, and I think in the main storyline Erasmus is very much different
than he is here. Yes. And I'm sure there's things that lead to that, but you know, it's
not like it's like either make him the moody teenager or moody, like early twenties, something
person who's experimenting, trying to find their way and then don't make him patient
with Serena's backtalk and shit and giving in to her demands. Like you should throw a
big banquet for all the slaves and they will totally love you for that. And then he's like,
that sounds like a good idea. Let me just not invite the ones I'm tearing limb from
limb in my lab and we'll do these other ones and we'll feed them real good. And then I'm
going to go watch them fucking the mudpens and separate twins and do experiments on them.
You know, I don't know. I just didn't seem consistent. But anyway, but so the other thing
I wrote is like, there's no reason to keep such a large number alive on other planets.
Like you don't need to have large like slave populations to run experiments. You simply
don't need that number. No. And this was good. They mentioned the Omnius that took over Gidea
prime died before it could be updated. So the other Omnius machine didn't know what
the Gidea prime Omnius did, but that Omnius is the one that sent out 5,000 ships into
deep space to seed Omnius on planets explicitly that cannot inhabit human life. Yeah. And
that is how Omnius shows back up in the regular Dune universe. Yeah. The regular Dune timeline.
The problem is, is that if it's true, there's no reason for, well, I know there's 27 Dune
books. So it, yeah, I understand that. I'm just, I haven't read all the other ones. Yeah.
I'm just trying to talk about this one, but yeah, you know, there's reasons.
And the thing is, is that, so if the machines don't need worlds that have humans,
then why wouldn't they just hang out on planets that don't have humans? Or, you know, kill all
the humans and go on or not even worry about what the humans are doing. Like who gives a fuck?
Why would they give a fuck? That's what I mean. There's no reason for them to care.
Yeah. Okay. And then the next one was, you know, seven months after Serena dies,
Xavier Mary's Octa, who he was never even attracted to to begin with, according to the book. And she
was like the awkward like 10 year old or, I don't know, I'm sure she's older than that.
17. I think she was 17. Okay. I am 16 going on 17.
She was psychologically damaged. Let's put it that way.
Yeah. So was their mom. Anyway, and then this other one, I don't even remember who was playing
this fucking thing. I put our ballast. That's the only instrument in the Dune universe. Cause
somebody else is playing a ballast. Yes. Yes. Like you don't have a piano. You don't have a harp.
You don't have like a trumpet. I thought the same thing. You're in future space. You have a new
instrument, but it's 10,000 years old by the time that we, it's a ballast. That's a ballast.
Like surprise. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even, it's not even in the way like in the Star Trek
movies, like the original ones with the Chantner where, you know, uh, McCoy is like, Oh yeah,
I know you like antiques. Like here's an antique from 200 years ago or something. It's a pair of
reading glasses. Cause I know you won't get the surgery, you know, like that's explainable. That's
200 years. This is like 10,000 years. It's a ballast set. I mean, I guess we're still playing
violins and stuff, but that's not 10,000 years in the past. They had like, I don't even know what
they had 10,000 years ago for instruments, rocks and sticks, cave drums. The hurdy-gurdy is a great
example because there's a handful of people that play the hurdy-gurdy on the earth. And that used
to be the most popular instrument around and, uh, everybody's heard hurdy-gurdy music. Yeah. That
wasn't 10,000 years ago though. No, that was like 500 years ago or whatever the heck. So
another brief thing. Uh, okay. So then it, then the other thing was, now we're going to talk about
Tio Holtzman a little bit. Had a lot of issues with Tio and I just want to get through my notes and
then we'll get into some of the other, other bigger issues or these are just kind of the things I was
reading. I'm like, what the actual fuck? He's supposed to be Thomas Edison. Like what the fuck?
Like I get that. I mean, you know, but, but some of the stuff I was just kind of reading, I'm like,
what? Okay. So if Tio Holtzman can quickly double check the work of the slaves, cause he won't use
thinking machines, but he'll use slaves to do all of his mathematics for him, like run all of his
formulas, like just use a, just use a calculator man, but he won't do it. But if he can easily
go back and check the work, cause he actually brought the in a Ishmael and the other, the other
boy and was like, are you trying to purposely like sabotage? Like you put this comma here? Well,
if you can easily pick out one misplaced comma in stacks of paperwork of. Mathematic equations.
Why don't you just, why have the slaves even do the labor? Just do it yourself. Like, and I understand
why, cause he's like a playboy, flamboyant, like Elon Musk kind of person. Like he likes to make
disparaging remarks on Twitter and the internet and then take the credit for all the good things.
But like, why even do that? Why even have them? Like he's, he's, he's seen to be so egotistical.
He wants to have the next big thing, the next big invention, because he had one invention and
everybody was like, oh, he's the hero of the savior of humanity. And then he wants another one. He
wants the next one, but he won't do any of the work, you know? And it's like, why, why even have
the slaves then if they're going to sabotage things and make you look like a dummy? Yeah.
For the same reason that he has Norma there, he wants his harem of workers to create things
so he can take the credit. Yeah. But Norma actually knows what she's doing. So why not just find more
Norma's and not have slaves? Cause you have the reputation. So you could get any math whiz anywhere
and you wouldn't have to have slaves at all. Slaves who can't read maybe. I mean, the one guy was
at Ishmael, the one that was like floating around the swamp, trying to catch fish and his grand
pappy was telling stories or something. Like why even bring that person, somebody like that? Like
what you have to teach them to read and you have to teach them how to do math. And then you have to
just trust that they like you enough because they're not working in the rice fields or wherever the
they were working before the oyster flats or whatever they were planting clams or something.
They were like oyster rice field, rice paddy things. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, why even, why even have
that? You know, there was so much like the first dune book, there's so much not said, but it didn't
detract from the story at all. You know what I mean? Like he didn't, he didn't bother to explain.
Oh, okay. So you know what, uh, Paul and Chani, they were fighting for 10 years. Uh, and then this
happened and let's keep going. He didn't write out the full 10 years that happened. I don't need to
know that Ishmael was planting clams in a mud flat or something. Right. It doesn't really matter.
It was next scene. Now this child who was one year old is now. Yeah. I can make that leap with
you, Frank. Let's do this. Our leap is, oh yeah. Now this character is older. Wait people age.
What the fuck? Uh, okay. And then the, and that's, uh, this was after this is after Xavier
is fucking married to Octa. There's chapter upon chapter of Xavier pining for Serena. It's just,
it's just terrible, terrible writing and boring. It's terrible. It's like high school. Like she was
the one. I know they're trying to make it more drastic when they reunite them later, but we know
that they're not fucking dead. We know she's not dead. This was written in 2002 and it was a trope
of that era that you had to have some love story involvement. All the media, including movies,
everything had to have love story involvement for the ladies. Oh yeah. Like there's lots of ladies
reading. So speaking about ladies, it leads right into my next point. My next note here from the
book, the Serena birth stuff, especially sounds exactly like two men writing about what they think
the female perspective on birth is. Like it sounded exactly like two dudes sitting there like, bro,
bro, I'm Brian, you know, I'm Frank's son, Kevin. We wrote a lot of books together.
What do you think women think about birth? Should we ask one? No, Brian. No, come on.
We gotta give another writing credit out. No, no, we can figure this stuff out. Let's just pretend
we're trying to take a big old poop. So I I'm looking it up right now. Both of these guys are,
were married at the time of writing this one for 13 years and the other one for, I'm gonna have to
do some math here. He was, he was married in 1967. So a long time and he had multiple children.
Why do math when you can get a bunch of slaves to do the math for you? That's right. That's right.
So 35 years, they could have asked, they could have had the ladies to get involved and give
them a writing credit. Yeah. Well, if they did, they ignored all of that and just wrote what they
felt because it was, it was cringe worthy. Straight from the heart, Nate. Okay. Maybe.
It was terrible. I will say it again. It does read a lot like a fan fiction. A lot like a fan
fiction. It does. It does. When I was reading that chat about her giving birth, I was like,
are these two incels that have decided they want to have a woman character give birth
and they're trying to describe it now and they're like, well, let me go ask my waifu pillow or my
my little pony fuck doll. Like if I impregnated you pony, a pony princess, what would that be like?
Listen, Nate, secretly in the background, Snape and Hermione were banging. Hell yeah. Hermione,
what's that feel like? Oh, it's, uh, there's some pressured stuff, but then like, I don't like
Erasmus has all of his watch eyes here and oh, I don't know. Okay. So this is a big, a big criticism
for me that, I don't know if that chapter is even worse than like the Xavier, like I'm married to
like the hot younger sister who's younger and I can like, she'll be younger longer than Serena would
be. And I only gave Serena seven months because that's plenty of time. Like even if she was
captured by machines and transported who knows where in the fucking galaxy and it takes months
and months to get from one place to another place. Cause we don't have Tio Holtzman's fold space
engines yet, but, uh, seven months should be good. Should be good. That should be plenty of time.
There was some blood from Serena. There's totally blood from Serena on the ship. So she's got to be
dead. Uh, blood always equals death. Uh, you know, um, uh, but fuck, I love Serena, but I don't know.
I guess like here's her younger sister and you know what I mean? It is kind of like that. I hate
to say it. I know it's like dumb and I'm the dummy that's read all 27 dune books. Well, and you know,
you telling me that this is the first one they did like not on autopilot, you know, like that storyboard
and storyline, whatever that makes sense. Hopefully this next one's better. I'm still going to read
the next two, at least the next one. If the next one is the same level as this one, I'm probably
not going to read the third one, but I have both the next two. So we'll come back to it. But yeah,
this one was not impressive. Uh, okay. So the next one here is basically of the 640 page book,
even if you call it, let's be generous and call it a 700 page book, nothing fucking happens with
the first 500 pages. Like there's, you know, I mean, there's some backstory stuff, but nothing
that's 500 pages worthy. I could have one chapter on each of the main characters and then make the
stuff happen. And then stuff happens. It starts to get exciting after 500 pages. And then they're
like, Hey, instead of building on this excitement we've just created, let's have them all go back to
Segunda, Solosis or wherever the fuck salsa is made in New York city. And let's have them go debate
things in front of fucking Congress. And it's like, just, just sign the, I don't do the Frank Herbert.
They signed the war declaration and now they're flying through space. I don't need to have them
questioning for tradies and the slave leader guy. And like, we don't need the whole backstory. We
just read 500 pages of that shit. Like, I don't need them winning over other people. Like it should
be enough. Hey, we're here. We got a story to tell you next chapter. The fleet leaves and is going
to go obliterate the machines. Yeah. The pacing, the pacing was like a Disney, a modern Disney.
Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, we have to keep them in their seats for a little bit longer to sell two
more Coca-Cola's at the movie theater. Yeah. Except it's a book. You want to get your,
except it's a book. Okay. So the, they come back and they do their, Mr. Smith goes to Washington
and they get everybody to sign off on using these atomics that are ancient. Now, I guess they have
these ancient atomics, half-lives, am I right? And they're going to go and just nuke the shit out of
earth. And they're like, well, we shouldn't really do that. Cause that's where we're all came from.
And blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, Serena's like, well, there's nobody there. Like the machines
wiped out everything because Erasmus threw an 11 month old baby manion from Serena off of a roof
because he let it live 11 months, even though he was insanely jealous of it. First day it was born,
basically. Like there was a chapter where he's like, well, I can't believe I've let Serena keep
this baby for two months. Now this thing is taking, taking, you know, her attention off of me and what
I want to accomplish with my stuff. And then he's like, nine months later, I'm just going to,
you know what? I'm just going to grab it right now. 11 months later or nine months later,
it's 11, it's 11 months old and I'm just going to go. Now I'm just going to fling it off their
fucking roof because I also have this crazy bet. And I've been trying to get the slaves to revolt
against Omnius because I told him I need to keep the humans, but cause Omnius wants to kill the
humans. But if I prove to him that the humans can't be trusted, then he's going to want to kill all
the humans. And it's like, dude, I don't care about your catch 22. Like it's fabricated. Like
it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. And then like, why just, oh, oh, she went
into the forbidden thing and saw the humans being torn apart that she had to have known. She's been
there for at least a year, you know, because she's been pregnant. The, let's say eight, nine month
gestation 11 months after that. So she's been there, I don't know, let's just say two years,
year and a half, year and a half, year and a half, whatever, you know, you can't tell me you're a
house slave. You don't know there's a secret wing of the, of the house where he's tearing people
asunder. Yeah. Nobody, nobody, uh, nobody told her. You would just know eventually you'd have to,
you would find enough things like you like as smart as they make Serena out to be in the beginning,
400 pages of the book, right? She's going to find out or going to assume that it's some pretty
gnarly shit going on. You would think so. He's not just keeping them in their slave pens to watch
them frolic around the maypole. Right. Like Jesus. So then that happens. And then she physically
overpowers a thinking machine and pushes it off the roof and beats her fists against Erasmus.
And that causes him great fear and he flees. And the Iblis slave leader guy sees that.
We haven't even talked about cognit or alco or whatever the fuck the bubbling brain in the jar.
Yeah. The God, there's like brain jar people. Yeah. Uh, they injected Voryan Atreides with some kind
of, uh, Borg synthetic nanobots or something to extend his life and make him healthy. Yes.
Right. And that was like, that was like the next step. And then he was going to
eventually become a Titan, I guess, like his father age, man, a gun, a man who, who,
nahana. Yes. I read it. You listened. Similar to the Agamemnon in the Iliad.
I know him well. Yes. Even if I read the Iliad, which I haven't, I would still pronounce it the
same way because I'm reading and not listening to somebody else pronounce it for me. If I would have
read it, I would have known only because I've read the Iliad. So all of the, all of these names are
throwbacks to like mythology too. So Ajax and, uh, Juno, Juco, Barbarossa, Zertzis. Yeah. Jack Sparrow
was there too. And, uh, so there, I mean, there's a lot of things and there's so many characters.
And I think that's maybe the biggest failing point is there's so many characters that it took
me at least half of the book to, there was a, there was a chapter where I don't know if it was
Ajax or Agamemnon, my egg on your face or whatever was like tearing apart one of the other like slave
bosses. And it, I had to flip back in the book to be like, wait, is this the same one that we've
been following? And it was a completely different one, but it had a similar ish name, the similar
like length name and stuff. And I was like, I can't fucking remember. Like we're following
these little boys that were stolen from their planets and this worm rider guy. And we're
following, you know, five or six different like nobles. And then we've got Tio and Norma and
we've got the Rosac witches and, and, uh, what's his name? Who gets the drugs from the jungle?
This is why it is a fan fiction because unlike in Dune, there's a lot of people and a lot of
characters is very complex, but it's a slow build. You don't start getting this massive complexity
until 2000, 3000 pages in you're on the third or fourth book. And now it's, now it's making sense.
Makes sense. The first book is standalone fine as it is, you know, you don't need to know really
princess Irlyn. No, you don't need to know her whole backstory. You don't need to know,
you kind of know the houses and there's more great houses than the Harkonnens and the Atreides,
but you know, those are the two that are feuding and fighting. And you know, there's also the
emperor, right. And that, and then his faction, and those are kind of really the factions you're
concerned about. And you've got the, the spacing guild and you've got some of these other players
where they're not as prevalent as these three main factions. So it's a lot easier to keep track of
because you can say, Hey, we've got Lado Atreides, the Duke, we've got Paul Atreides, and we've got
Jessica and those are the Atreides. And then you've got, you know, Baron, the Baron Harkonnen,
and you've got, you know, so it's very easy to keep track of because they only give you three,
you know, two or three names from each of these houses, even though there's more people and they
kind of come in and out. But then as soon as they say, Hey, we've got, you know, Fade Harkonnens
coming in, like, Oh shit, a Harkonnen. Like you don't need to know exactly Fade's backstory. You
don't need to know all of that stuff. You can keep it in your mind. And in this one, there's 27
different characters you're kind of following and the chapters are very short. So you're not even
with them in a big stretch long enough for their names to even endear themselves on your memory.
Like reading this book. So in the original Dune, you're aware that there's the great and minor
houses that tells you there's a lot. That's all you really need to know. That's all you need to know
at that time. You don't learn about these individual characters until they're necessary to be focused
on. Yes. And then the last thing I wrote down was because they decided to grab all these
atomics and they didn't even make, they're just from the past. So they have, they stockpile all
these atomics and it said in there that they had threatened the machines that they were going to
use atomics and the machines somehow knew that they would never use atomics. So they were kind
of like, uh, let's just use the atomics then they'll never see that coming. And sure as shit,
they fucking didn't. But here's my question. The thinking machines were made by humans.
Humans know how to make atomics. Would the robots just not make a bunch of atomics themselves?
And they could launch them from even further away and fucking just blurt it all humans. Like it
doesn't even make any sense. That's the problem. That's the real problem is that we all know that
the machines can live on planets that humans cannot. So why wouldn't they just make every human
inhabited planet uninhabitable or better yet, just stop interacting with the humans and go about
their business and inhabit planets that humans can't go on. Yeah. Cause they fucking will live
forever provided they go in for their tuneups and regular software updates and stuff. So they could
travel to some part of space that humans would never even get to. And if they're not in the
picture, the humans have no reason to invent a Holtzman fold space engine. Basically, you know,
and so they would never, the humans would never get there unless they wanted to say,
okay, we're into the math. And so that we don't have any inbreeding. We're going to put X number
of people on here that are not related. They can have kids and those kids can marry those kids and
it can marry those kids. So we can have a 10,000 year space voyage and still have, you know,
functioning humans on the, on the other end of it. And that would be the only way for that to happen.
But then those humans would be so far removed from the machine stuff, thinking machine revolt
or whatever it was that it wouldn't even matter. You know, they would land there and they go,
oh my goodness, look, these machines are sentient and they must be their own thing. And that's so
cool. And the machines wouldn't even have to fill them in on the history. They could just say, hey,
cool. Uh, this is our place. Uh, why don't you go over there? We're just going to pump up the
carbon dioxide in this atmosphere here. So go fuck off. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't even
have to come down to a fight. No, it's completely unnecessary. Yeah. And as a machine, I'm thinking
machine programmed by a human, you know, even the desire for conquest. Okay. Yeah. Didn't they,
didn't they read any Isaac Asimov, like the three laws of robotics? I mean, put, build those into
your programming. You don't have a thinking machine revolt, even though Isaac Asimov wrote
plenty of thinking machine revolt books. Right. And then the other thing, and I didn't write this
down, but I'm just thinking of it now is Iblis fondled, uh, Cognitor Alco's brain folds. Let's
suck his hand right in the jar there so that the brain could like communicate with him.
Cause that's totally how brain communication works, I guess. And the brain thing told him that he
needed to make this into some kind of religious thing. So he was the first one to bandy about the
term jihad. Like, Oh my goodness. Uh, Serena pushed a robot off the roof after her baby was
dropped off the roof and, uh, it's a jihad. And he was like, Oh yeah, great. I was able to work in
that religious bit. You know, it was almost like a, like a snarky aside to the reader. Like I was
able to work in that religious bit. Why not have the fucking sorceress of Rosach put that spin on
it since she's obviously the start of the Benedicess. Yes and no. Yes. Well, I mean,
you know, just the way this book is written, it might be different, but she's doing the weird
shit and the truth sayer stuff, right? She's doing truth. They have magic powers and nowhere,
maybe this trilogy is different, but nowhere else in the new universe as a man outside of Paul have
like Benedicess or powers. You know what I mean? Yes. So why would Iblis the slave leader guy want
to put a spin on it other than he just wants to overthrow the machines because he's been a slave
of theirs for a long time. Like thematically would make more sense to me if the Rosach sorceress
that was married to the jungle juice guy. And I kind of wish that there was more Aurelius,
Venport and Norma stuff because that I actually enjoyed that stuff because the mom hated Norma
because she's diminutive in stature, not like a Greek goddess, I guess. So she's like, Oh,
all your math stuff is dumb because I got the mind powers, you know, like I've got the mind powers
and you look terrible. And then, you know, Aurelius, Venport was very intelligent. Yeah.
And Aurelius, Venport was very sweet with her and nice. And I wish there was more of that in the
five, in the 600, 700 pages or whatever. There is, there is, okay. Yeah, there isn't a future. So,
you know, I just, I feel like, and then to call this one the Butlerian Jihad, I shit you not.
I thought there was going to be more than like 20 pages of Jihading in, in this book. Right. You
know, I don't know what to tell you. It's the origin story to the Jihad, man. I know, but the next one's not even called,
you know, Jihad part two, Jihad harder. Jiharder? Yeah. I don't know. The next one's called the
Machine Crusade. So it is related to the theme. Well, understandable. Understandable. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It is a trilogy. So I would hope. I would hope so. Okay. Say the first one is kind of like
a fan fiction. Now I'm going through it again. It is, it is, it's a bad fan fiction. It's, you know,
secretly Snape and Hermione. I know. It's, you know what? There were certainly a few books in the,
in the main eight that I liked less than the other ones. I wouldn't say that any of the other ones
provoked the same like irritation in me as this one has. This is my least favorite Dune book I've
ever read. Number seven, best seller. Yeah. It's, I mean, you know, the pacing, I think there's way too
many characters. Way too many characters. They did not need to have the Salim Worm Rider story could
have been brought in never. Yeah. Or much shorter. Like they're just trying to tie it back in because
he's the one that's discovering now worm riding. And then what? 10,000 years later, it's like,
it's still secret somehow 10,000 years later and Spice and where Spice comes from, which is fine,
I guess. But then he's like, oh, oh, oh, oh. And then there's that fucking bounty hunter guy who
takes all the slaves and he gets like high off of Spice. And then he goes and finds Aurelius
Venport for some reason, because of course they know each other and they have to because the
book's got a plot, move the storyline along. And so he brings a bunch of Spice to Aurelius Venport.
Who's like, this shit's tasty as fuck. And it does really good things. I don't have to go
into the jungle for it. I can go get like the local population to give me a bunch of this stuff.
And so he's going to start like the big Malay production stuff so that, because you need that,
you have to, you have to do that plot reasons, right? Because Tio Holtzman is going to
invent, well Tio's not, but he's going to take care of it for inventing the Foldspace engines.
But you can't navigate Foldspace unless you're high off your ass on Spice. So you also have to
have the Spice people figure out the Spice stuff. And that's the only reason that you have these
other things going on in this book. It's almost like every major institution of the Dune world
somehow magically was all involved in this war. In these like two years of this, like what's going
on. Yeah. Every major faction all knew each other 10,000 years before they knew each other.
Yep. And the only reason Sorino was taken back to earth is so that she could meet Vorian Atreides,
because there's no other way for an Atreides to meet a Harkonnen, I guess, in those times.
And have her baby thrown off a roof so that she can wail upon a robot and have some other dude
that's not an Atreides or a Harkonnen see that and put the label Jihad on it to get the Atreides and
Harkonnens to work together so that they can later become sworn mortal enemies. Yes. For reasons.
Yes. For reasons. And the Korinos are in there too. We just don't know yet. So the emperor's
family, like you say, every major player. Well, the last book is called The Battle for Korin,
and I have to imagine that's where the Korinos are from. I'm no linguist,
but I know what Korino is. It's quite a coincidence.
It is. And an even bigger coincidence than the whole of this book, the Korinos live on Korin.
Something like that. Yeah, it's weird that, you know, the machines attacked Gidi Prime,
the homeland of the Harkonnens. Yeah. Weird. They throw out planet names like Kaladan and all these
Arrakis. Yeah. They got to throw it in. They got to throw a lot of techno, techno babble. Yeah.
Well, it wasn't. So remind me, and I can't remember now because it's been a while since I've
read the first original Dune book and the last, you know, Dune movies aren't book accurate,
let's say. So was Dune used to be called Dune and is now called Arrakis or was then,
was used to be called Arrakis and now called Dune in the Dune, in like the main, like Paul Dune.
In the main books, it was called Arrakis by the Empire, but it was called Dune by the Fremen.
Okay. And then later on in the main Dune timeline, it's just called Arrakis and they drop the A.
So it's just Arrakis. Right. Well, unlike in the Balerian Jihad.
Where everything maintains the same name for 10,000 years in the main Dune timeline,
they actually show the verbal shift. Yeah. Everything is shifted over time. It changes
over time. And they even forget about the characters by the end of the original Dune timeline.
They have largely forgotten about the characters in the original storyline.
Yes. Until like the last two books where they bring a lot of those people back through Tlaxu
tanks. Yes. Yeah. There's an excuse for the OGs to come back. Yeah. To whoop some ass.
Yep. To rehash their differences. Yes. And to close out, close the loop on some of those family
feuds, let's say. Kind of. I mean, a lot of it's, I liked that in the original Dune timeline.
It made sense. They brought them back. It kind of made sense. They're like, one of them has to have
information or if we can restore their Golan memories, one of them has to know how we can
defeat Omnius basically. And it made sense. And it was kind of rewarding for the reader who's
read through all eight books. Because you're like, oh, I wonder if this character and that
character would have lived, how would they have reconciled, like the Jessica and the Sukh doctor.
How would they have reconciled the events of what happened and this and that? So. Yes. And Yui. Yui.
Yep. Yeah. Yui repeats himself. Yes. Some things are nature, not nurture, I guess. Whoa.
Whoa. Mind blown like I'm on space, bro. We have a lot of cigar left and it is, we're about half
through, halfway through, and it is significantly better. I am so happy, I have no idea how this has
been a long time coming. Yes. Quite tasty, quite tasty so far. We're going to keep going. I know
we have to talk about Tio and Norma. Who's that fucker? Blood? Blewd? Bard? Blood. Yeah. Okay.
It's Count Blood. Captain Blood. Yeah. Again, it's almost fan fictiony, right? It's like
Count Blood or Duke Blood is Duke Blood. Yep. Who happens to be having slaves make a gigantic
mosaic of himself on the side of a moat. Yeah, just like the fucking machine titans making giant
statues on earth where they only have human slaves. There's not like free humans wandering around like,
I wonder who Titan Ajax. Oh, there's a giant statue. Must be somebody of importance.
No, they all know those titans because they're all getting fucking killed by them. Yes. You don't
need a statue. He's right there behind you. Pretty heavy-handed with the, oh, humans are just as bad
as the machines. They're kind of exactly the same because they are. But thank goodness, only the
humans on make atomics and machines who can perform mathematical calculations without slave labor.
I have no idea how to do it. Wizard magic. Man, I tell you what. They don't have any wizards
where they do have sorceresses. Yep. Yep. Poor Norma when she put the sorting head on,
didn't get to go to Hufflepuff. Yep. I'm going to guess that Norma is going to take some spice.
I fucking would if I had to put up with Tio all day long. I'd take anything I could. Yeah,
so Tio and Norma. A gallon of engine coolant. It is the classic tale of a guy invented something
good, couldn't follow it up. Got into a slump. Got into a slump. And then found a writing partner
named Kevin and put out this book. Oh, sorry. Yes. Sorry, Brian, if you're listening, but also not
sorry. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully you've grown from here. I'm sure Brian Herbert is going to be listening.
Multi-time bestselling author, Brian Herbert. I'm sure he doesn't care. Yeah, he's not going to care
that we criticize him. I am certain he's going to cry all the way to the bank. Yeah. Wiping his
tears with Benny's. Yeah, a hundred dollar bills. So yeah, it's. Yeah, so Tio finds, I don't even
remember how he fucking found Norma, but like a letter shows up and then evil mom sorceress tries
to hide the letter. Classic tale, classic tale. And then he Disney Hallmark movie, you know, like,
oh yeah, your letter to Hogwarts. No, that never showed up. Oh, I will stew tonight, by the way.
Here's the here's something that I don't appreciate. So Van Port's the one that sent the
letter because he runs a big industrial corporation and Tio Holtzman's like, oh, this is some pretty
fancy math. So he sends a letter back and then the evil mother hides it. And then Van Port finds the
letter and then lets Norma know. And then she leaves. Thing is that this mother who's a magic
user of some variety. Yeah, she just shits on her daughter because she's also not magical. However,
it's obvious to everyone and it should be pretty obvious to her because she's not stupid.
She's magical in her own way. Yeah, no, she's like clearly very intelligent and maybe should be
doing that and not what she's doing and not doing like naked jungle seances with magical women.
Yeah, not not not not creating kamikaze pilots. Yeah, I mean, I'm down for whatever if it's like
naked jungle women, but yeah, the long story short on the sorceress is that they are kamikaze pilots.
Yeah, they they they had and I kind of criticized Mlink 182 and they came out with a song called
edging and they're all, you know, 40, 50 years old. I'm like, I don't really need to hear
songs by people of that age talking about edging or, you know, teenage sexual things. But basically
this jungle sorceress woman is teaching her jungle sorceress followers to edge their pent up mental
energy so they don't obliterate themselves every night, but they can do a big one when it counts.
Yes, they set up psychic energy and kill the cymax, which are brain canister, gel circuitry
things. Yeah. Yes. Because there's certain things in this book that will fry the gel circuitry,
which works against the thinking machines. And then there's other things that will kill
the brain canisters, which also have gel circuitry, which is why I guess in that first one,
uh, they had shields that would kill gel circuitry, but they dropped the brain canisters in with the
gel circuitry powered off or something. And then they could, once they were through the shield,
they could reactivate or boot up. I don't know. Something like that. Um, run the command prompt.
I don't know. And then destroy or they send in something that wasn't gel circuitry to disable
the shields and then they could drop in the rest of it. Like it's all so confusing. Like
there's a lot of techno babble. I mean, there's a lot of stuff and there's a lot of characters
and it just makes for a not very concise story. And you're out. I mean, I didn't spend too much
time worrying about this technology can stop this part of the thinking machines, but it won't stop
that other part. And then this one can or can't because that's really kind of supliferous. It
doesn't matter, you know, right. And I don't need to know, but the original dune story, the whole of
Paul's jihad is summed up in a couple of words. It's not, it's not super detailed. There's detailed
elements of it, but it's not. Yeah. No babble. And there's, and there's, it's more detail when
the Furman come back and they're kind of have their wartime PTSD. And they're talking about,
I saw planets entirely covered in water and it was magical. And I wept and you know, and we're
obliterating, obliterating these people and this and that and the other thing, but it wasn't so much
like, okay, well we got to this planet and this planet had these kinds of shields and we had to
figure out how to get these kinds of shields. And so we just decided to do this with their shields.
And then we got there and then we tried to launch all this gas within this gas causes person to lose
their sense of sight or smell and taste, but he could still breathe. Okay. And they did some kind
of like lung transplant with the Tlaxu because the Tlaxu are also there in this book for some
reason, because why wouldn't they be, why wouldn't you have the Tlaxu, the starting of the, uh,
men of Jesuit, you have the Furman worm rider guy who is kind of fucking around on his own. And
you've got Norma and Teo and the Harkonnens and the Atreides and none of these names have changed.
And you go back 200 years, 300 years, and, uh, my family's last name was not what it is now,
because we changed it when we came over to America. And, but by God, 10,000 years in the
Dune universe and nobody changed anything. Right. But it's somehow magically in the future,
shit changes. Well, yeah. And the main Dune storyline. So it would have been better to be
like, oh yeah, we've got the, um, the Atreides and the Harks or something. And then whatever,
you know, I don't know where you could make up any name, the Johnsons and the Johnsons later
became the Harkonnens. I, whatever. Who cares? It could be anything. Atreus and, uh, yeah. If
you're going to, if you're going to be goofy about things, why not make it make sense? I guess.
Right. You would think so. I was a little surprised that the one, um, what's the one, uh,
the female Titan Jade? Juno. Juno. She was the one played by Elliot Page, right? Yes. Yeah. When
the Cog, is it Cognitor? Cognitor? Elko? Cogitor. The Elko guy? I think it was Cogitor. The Elko
brain in a jar, the canned brain in a jar, but the good one, the Elko one. Yeah. The good ones.
But then also he had his like monk guy who was supposed to take over the slave rebellion and
then just fucking died because they invited Juno to come and fondle Elko's brain. And instead of
doing that, she just squished him. So I don't like it. Like you can be so brief about that kind of
stuff, but then you can write 400 pages about how Xavier is really butthurt that he had to marry a
16 year old instead of a 20 year old. Right. And he's a 20 year old who's in charge of an entire
battle fleet, which. Yeah. Why wouldn't he marry the 16 year old? That happens in anime. That's not.
Yeah. Like I said, this is like two incels sat down and then like, okay, I guess we have to do
this chapter on Serena giving birth. What's that going to be like? And it's terrible. Yeah. Yeah.
And why are the, why are family politics that far in the future still the way they were in like
medieval Europe? That's the, that's the real question because the whole Dune premise, these
families and it's kind of a medieval or feudal society was that they had degenerated in many
ways. That was dangerous to their survival. Yeah. But so these people should be probably more
advanced than the original Dune storyline, not less advanced or the same. That's the kind of the
concept was that that people had stagnated and had degenerated through their stagnation. And that
was the golden path was to get them out of this degenerative negative cycle. Yeah. Warring with
each other and the petty little things. And now you're presenting like a unified human front. And
I thought for sure, I thought for sure, and I was, I was a little glad that this didn't happen,
but I thought for sure that when Serena was brought to earth and then Erasus was like,
I should introduce Serena Butler to Voryan Atreides for literally no reason other than the plot of the
book needs to do this for reasons. Of course, I thought for sure the start of the Harkonnen Atreides
feud was going to be that Voryan like did something terrible to Serena and Xavier got mad. And then
that was like the start of their beef. Of course, there's still two books where that could happen.
So I don't know. I'm not going to ruin it for you. But Xavier's married to the teenager now. Oh,
and also, also seven months after Serena disappears, he marries Octa. Serena has Xavier's
baby, whom she names Mannion after her father, who's then thrown off the roof. She goes back to
Segunda Seleucis Salsatown and Mike's just glaring at me like this fucking guy. I am not glaring.
This fucking guy. I think it's fucking great. It goes back and Octa brings out their new daughter,
who's itty bitty. So it's like not only and then but then it's like, so okay, so you've got all
these chapters of Xavier like, oh, Serena, my Serena. He goes back to the fucking swamp where
they killed Pumba. And he's like, oh, the best night of my life. She's gone, but I have to go
home and bang Octa. I can't believe my luck. Fuck. And he makes a baby with her. Right.
And then he's like, oh, Serena's back. And how am I going to tell her? And oh, here's my little
Mannion who I didn't even bother to wait for Serena to show me. Her fucking dad took me out
here and here's my little baby boy dad. And then I'm not even going to fucking warn Serena at all.
And Octa's just going to come down with my offspring. Not even going to warn her. Who gives a
fuck? Like what? You've been pining for her for 500 pages. You're not even going to give her the
common decency of like, okay, now look. And he was there and he got back to the same town she was in
and he waited like a whole day. And then it's like, ah, I'm going to bother. I'll just bother her
tomorrow, Mannion. Like I don't need to go bother her now. She's been through enough. You don't
think she needs a heads up? Like, Hey, I'm married to your sister and I have a baby with her. You
don't think she deserves like a heads up? One of the major themes, and they did this fairly well,
was that the machines are not that much different than the people ruling that society. They're
pretty much the same exact group. Just one's machine and one's not. They're, there's neither
one are better than the other. Yeah, I guess. There's more than two bad people in the world.
I understand that. I understand. There's more than one bad person in the world.
Whoever you may think that is. I want some taco chip ice cream. Yeah. If you want to hear about
two bad people, check out this year's election for president. Anyway, I don't know. I feel though that
even if you can have everybody being bad, you have to have somebody being kind of good. And I know
they want that to be Serena, but then she kind of went all introspective in the city of introspection
where they have, I don't know, Starbucks on every corner and they've got a boots and they've got a
Coles right there. A city introspection. It's not a bad place to be, you know, at least not in the
doing universe. Yeah. Yeah. It's very bizarre. I, yeah, I, I don't know. And they didn't, I wanted
them to explain more and maybe they will because there's some kind of weird story with Mannion and
Serena's mom. Serena's mom is just like, I just live at the city of introspection. The brother,
the brother died or the son died of a disease. And then, you know, his sister became
psychologically deranged and the other one was, yes, Okta. And then Serena was somehow not affected.
Yeah, but Okta's got that mad psych ward pussy grip, you know. I know, right? That's why Xavier's all like,
hell yeah. It's intense. Yeah. He cries all day long about how much he loves Serena and then bangs Okta
all night long. Yeah. Yeah. Busy man. Busy, busy man. Also, well leading the entirety of humanity's
resistance to the thinking machines. At 24 or whatever it is. But he's got time for that,
all this stuff. Right. Well, they promoted him straight up from Lieutenant to General. So. Yeah.
But they don't use Lieutenant in general. It's like DeSero and Segundo. It's, it's full of
techno babble. It's, it's the worst kind of, gosh, I can't believe I'm saying this about Dune. It's
the worst kind of sci-fi and I've read a lot of sci-fi folks. Man, I read, I read a heavy sci-fi
and it was very complex with the sciency stuff. There was some kind of like, I don't know,
hive mind or some kind of like thing. And it was very complex and confusing to read about. But the
underlying story of the actors and the characters and things within this story, it all made sense.
And it was very good. A Fire Upon the Deep by Victor Verne. Verne. It's a trilogy. I've got the
other two books. I haven't, I have to read them all again, but I really enjoyed it. It was very,
a lot of the stuff was like over my head and I'd have to read it again and probably again to kind
of get a grasp on what it means by some of these concepts that it put forth. So I'm not opposed to
heavy sci-fi, but like you said, the techno babble and it's almost for the sake of techno babble.
It reminds me of-
You know, just call it general then.
A slow episode of Star Trek, next gen.
Yeah.
Where they'll, somebody will come in, Jordy will come in and he'll say a sentence and it'll all be
all techno babble. And everybody will be like, oh yes.
Yeah. Make it, shoot the protons faster.
Yep.
Makes sense. Let's do it.
Yeah. It'll be like that, but it'll, that's only a sentence and then they move on.
Yeah.
And then they'll talk about some drama with the teenagers.
Yeah. And this is, and this one is probably, I feel, and did they do the wrap up to the main
Dune storyline and then immediately do this one or did they do some of the house books?
They went immediately to this one.
Okay. So I feel like this one was, hey, we successfully wrapped up that big thing
that Frank started. I really liked it. And now we've got a fucking blank check
and we're just going to do techno babble for 500 pages. And then the main like stuff that
actually happens is going to take up 200 pages of our book. It could just be a 200 page book
or we could just do the entirety and just call the book, but later in Jihad, but put the other
next two all in one book and not have three books. I know three books makes you more money in the
long run than one book, but the Dune Messiah was like 50 pages long or something. And it
made Frank plenty of money. You know, so.
It was very short. It was very short.
It was like, I call that one the prologue to Dune or the, not the prologue, but the.
Epilogue.
The epilogue to Dune. Like it could have just been in Dune, in the Dune book.
Like there wouldn't have been a problem.
It easily could have been in Children of Dune.
Well, yeah, or that, or it could have been the first bit of Children of Dune. Like there
doesn't have to be that book. Like it's short enough. It could easily go on either way. It
could either go in Dune or Children of Dune. And that's what they did with the mini series anyway
on, was it Sci-Fi Channel?
I have yet to watch it. I have it in my possession, but I've yet to watch it.
I've seen the Dune mini series, which is fantastic, I think. I have to watch it again now that I've
seen all this other Dune stuff and read all the Dune, but you know, that's what they did.
They, they bumped in Dune Messiah into Children of Dune and did it all in one.
So there's, I mean, there's a precedent within the Dune book verse where they could have not
made a 700 page book with 500 pages of fluff.
Right. And I've read other, I've read Frank Herbert books that are not in the Dune universe.
And a lot of them are kind of almost alternative stories that could have happened earlier than
this, like early exploration of space type books. They'll have some of the same terminology and
they'll do kind of the similar things. So.
I feel like he was very well informed on the things he's interested in. You know what I mean?
Well, he's a reporter by trade. He was a reporter.
Yeah. That's how he fed his family until Dune came on.
Yeah. And the automotive book company published it.
And an automotive book company published it. Yeah.
One of the greatest publishing stories ever.
J.K. Rowling had a similar story. She got denied by a bunch of book companies.
I think a lot of big authors got denied. I think that's the thing. And maybe that's societal now
because we've got all the social media and everybody's famous all the time or, you know,
the people that have a lot of followers, but nobody ever goes back to be like, what were they
like when they were, didn't have followers struggling and what were they thinking? And
you only see the good stuff. Right.
You only see the successes. You don't see the struggles.
Yeah. The never ending failure, which if you're, let's say Harry Potter or Dune,
it was radically different enough to where a publisher that was going to be conservative
about their money was not going to make the investment.
Yeah. Not going to take a chance.
So it took a certain amount of vision and risk taking to put it out there and it succeeded.
It succeeded. So you want to fix your Ford F-150, we got you covered. You want to read
this crazy thing about this dude taking copious amounts of drugs in space. Guess what? We got you
covered. It was literally, it's like a hillbilly. Well, it was like Chilton, Chilton, the Chilton
manuals. It's one of the big, the big publishers of automotive repair. Like if you want to know
how to fix your car, you buy a Chilton manual. They happened to get to the head of this company
who's like a manual producer, very nuts and bolts. He read, he's like, this is a good story.
I don't care if it makes money or not. We're going to make tons of money on the Ford manual
next year. It's fine. Yeah. Ford's coming out with a new car next year. Surprise, surprise.
The 83. They're coming out with the 83. I'll publish Dune too. Why not? Let's do it.
Yep. No matter. I like it. We already got the print, the printing thing. It makes the pages
in the book. It makes it right back there. You want to come take a look at it? Worst case
scenario, we'll give it free to the Dodge owners because you know they're going to buy it. Yeah.
They got to have something to read while they're waiting for the tow truck. It's kind of like that.
Yeah. We'll just put it in the, uh, the farm and fleet store right next to the truck manuals.
That way they have something to read. Yeah.
It basically was that. And it worked. Take drags and fix your car. We don't care what you do.
It's free country. Oh, I love that argument too. I've had that argument so many times with,
especially the rah rah America people like if anybody doesn't stand up and hold their hand to
their heart and say the pledge of allegiance or blah blah blah, I'm going to kick their ass. It's
like America's free country. Suck my dick. You can't tell me what to do. Yes. Like I don't know.
And my favorite thing is those people that tell you, you need to stand up, hold your hand on
your heart when they're singing the national anthem are generally wearing an American flag
t-shirt. Now kneeling or sitting during the national anthem is not against the United States
flag code. Wearing the United States flag is an article of clothing or on a sticker looking at
you. United States postal service with your American flag stamps is explicitly against the
United States flag code. So you've got flag code violators getting upset that non-flag code violators
are violating what they think is the United States flag code when they themselves are the
violators. That's what gets you off and what sets me off. They're wearing some American flag shirt
with made in China. My son's a soldier. And they're wearing a t-shirt made in communist China by a
fucking slave. You know what I mean? It's like, come on now. It's an eight year old child. If it
wasn't for that corporation, that eight year old child would not have a job and they'd be hungry
on the streets. They would not be forced into labor. They could be playing in the street and
get in the way of your escalade. I saw driving down the road the other day. Somebody had a Trump
sticker and then the fascist flag and some other conservative talking point type things. And it was
on a communist made Buick. One of the imports. Nice. All right. So you love America so much.
You imported a Buick from communist China. Have you seen the new, I just saw one the other day
and I thought, man, if I wasn't driving, I would take a picture of this for Mike. This is the,
how to announce that you can taste the actual nutsack of the authoritarian regime in America.
It was the black and white American flag. You know, some of you might be thinking, oh yeah,
the thin blue line one, the one with the blue line. This one twice ups that it has a thin blue line,
a red line and a green line. Well, it didn't have the army green line. Didn't have the yellow.
No. So they have the conservative pride. I call it the conservative pride. And instead of the white,
it'll have red, green, blue, yellow, and some other. I remember all the colors, but it's
certainly not pink. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, it's not pink. It's a first responders, firemen, police
and military, whatever, you know, all this other stuff, which in and of itself I'm okay with.
Totally against the flag code though. Totally against the flag code though. And I think a lot
of times it's a dog whistle for other political movements. Well, it's all virtue signaling is
what it is. It is virtue signaling. And it's the same with the Black Lives Matter yard signs.
And the, I don't know, even the George Orwell was right yard signs, you know, like any of those
kinds of political yard signs. I mean, there's a reason I don't have yard signs. I don't want
to be associated with anything. I don't want people, especially where I live, you know,
in one of the suburbs, I don't want people to be like, Oh, that house is a Trump supporter or a
Biden supporter or a Black Lives Matter supporter or a, you know, free Israel supporter or any,
you know, like I don't need people to know what my thing is. Right? Like if people want to know
what my beliefs are, I want them to come and just talk to me. Like I'll tell you, I don't have a
problem telling you, I don't need to advertise it for the sake of sticking in people's gah or
whatever, whatever. Oh, sure. I mean, like it's signaling. I, the other day being yesterday, I
believe I drove through the old neighborhood where the rioters destroyed all the buildings.
Man, I was going to talk to you about that. So I drove through, it is so roped off. I may have a massive,
massive, like, used Carlott sale size Black Lives Matter flag flying directly next to the
rubble pile of all the buildings that were burned. I drove, I drove right by Cup Foods. Oh sure.
So I was doing this thing. It was independent bookstore day, a couple weeks ago, and there was
a book passport. And if you visited, there's 28 bookstores, if you visited all 28, you would
be entered into a grand prize drawing. If you visited 15 of them, you'd be entered into a minor
prize. I managed to hit all 28, didn't win, but I have 28, 20% off coupons at 28 different bookstores
now until the end of August, which is great. And some of these bookstores are great. And some of
them are, you know, your standard bookstore where it's like, you're marginally better, the same as
the Barnes and Noble. Sure. You know, some, some, some specialize in different things. So it was
really cool. I went to one that was really awesome, the Birchwood, and it's a Native American
bookstore. It's owned by Native Americans and they have a huge Native American author section,
which is great because I was looking for one called Never Whistle at Night, which is a compendium or
they're not called compendiums, a collection of short, dark fiction stories written by Native
American authors. And so I'm very excited to read that one. I bought that one. I didn't buy too many
books because at 28 bookstores, if you buy a book at each one, that's, I don't know, $280. Right.
You know, if you're just averaging $10 a book, which you wouldn't necessarily be. Anyway,
on my expedition, I drove right by Cup Foods where George Floyd was unalived by members of the police
force or whatever story you choose to believe about that. There were two big like iron,
sheet metal thing, sculptures of the fist, like the Black Lives Matter fist in the middle of the
fucking street. And they had like plywood signs with arrows, like go around these. And I'm like,
I don't, I don't know how these are here. Like I understand that people are upset. I understand
whatever this is a fucking road though. And you're making kind of like quasi roundabouts
with these big giant sculptures and the actual area of the road where the thing happened,
regardless of what side it's on. It was all like, there's a huge shrine, like a huge shrine,
like the entire block. And it was like relegated to almost like one lane traffic to go that way.
I didn't go that way because I was just driving through, but I was like, I haven't been down here
since before it happened, you know, before that stuff happened. And I, I don't want to say it was
like shocking that everything was still there, you know, three, four years later now, but it was kind
of shocking that everything was kind of still there. And it was, I have been past there twice.
Okay. Since the incident, both times in winter. And one of those two times there was a significant
amount of snow. Yes. And that little shrine basically made a barrier of, you would have to
do the Austin powers turn and turn around. There's no way to go through. Like there's just too much
snow with all this stuff. It's a public nuisance. If you are a delivery truck driver or a tradesman
or somebody trying to just go from A to B, it's impossible. You might as well not have a fucking
road. You might as well just cord off the whole road and not have a road there anymore. Yeah.
Well, that's the day with Nicolette, right? They made that into a walking path and bus route. And
so you can't drive on Nicolette in certain sections of downtown Minneapolis now. So I guess, you know,
I understand people are still upset about it, potentially rightfully so. I don't know why
they're allowed to drastically alter the roadway that we all pay taxes for, but that's not my place.
That's neither here nor there. What I want to know is in the original eight dune books,
Theo Holtzman is seen as almost a Messiah, like a savior of humankind. Yes. And in this book,
they seem to be going to great lengths to undermine that. Now this kind of comes back to
the whole 10,000 years thing. And we're sure it's 10,000 years between but Larry and Jehan.
10,000 years. Nice round number, isn't it? Winky dink, I'm sure. Yes. Oh, hey, I remember there's
a 10,000 year jump in the original dune series. Hey, Kevin, write this down 10,000 years before.
Why would anyone even remember Theo's name? Because the name of the engines, the Holtzman engine.
Yeah. But do you think in 10,000 years, everybody's gonna be like, oh yeah, I remember when Henry Ford
like pioneered the assembly line. Wow. 10,000 years Ford Motor Corporation. So we're making the F-150
going thunder. Thunder. Yeah. It runs on Brando. Why? Why? It's got electrolytes. It's got
electrolytes. It runs on gasoline. It's what Ford's craves. Yeah. Gasoline. Electrolytes.
We're gonna be burning gasoline in 10,000 years, boys. Woo. You know, and I get it. They said that
part of the golden path is humans have kind of stagnated. They haven't innovated. They haven't
done anything of note really. And maybe that's partly because of the spice and they could just
do the spice and see things and they wouldn't have to invent things because they could just
see all the possibilities and then just pick which one they wanted. But it's curious to me,
Tio Holtzman seemed to be fairly revered. And that's not to say that's not true because there
are definitely Elon Musk fan people out there that think he's the greatest thing to ever happen. And
oh, he's so cheeky for a multi-billionaire and whatever, whatever. And yeah, maybe he's a little
more outspoken than Jeff Bezos, but I don't know that you'd say either one of them are a good human
being, you know? And so, but maybe that's the point. I don't know. The book is not written well
enough for me to think that they're actually trying to make a critique on that. I want to make it
clear. Lord's Bezos and Musk. I personally do not think that you are, I think that you are the best
ever. Lord's Musk and Bezos. Please give me money, Lord. Not a sponsor. You contact me about
sponsoring our podcast and I will tell you some choice words that are probably not allowed on X
because of hate speech. Please. But I can tell you is that if my dad owned a thousand slaves and
diamond mines of South Africa during apartheid, pretty sure I'd have a good shot at not being
poor. Yeah. Would you buy some founder titles from people? Exactly. Hey Norma, I love those engines
you designed. Here's five bucks. You tell everyone I invented that. Yeah, kind of.
I mean, like I understand it, but I don't know that I want to give, and not necessarily a slight
on Brian and Kevin, because I did enjoy the two they finished of the main Dune timeline. And I
know they've written other stuff, but this book is not written that well for me to really get behind
the thing of they're trying to make some kind of societal critique with all of the other stuff that
they put into that book. Right. You know, like what they did enough cocaine to do like an accurate
critique on wealthy people, but then everything else, they kind of flubbed. They ran out of coke
that day or I don't know. It's not quite. I don't know. I'm not, it's not, you know what I mean?
It's not the part. It should have been edited heavily. Yes. There's a good book in that. Yeah.
There's a good book in there. I mean, it's fine if you can get through it and then you're kind of
like my brain can kind of condense it down to the important bits. This is a book that could be turned
into a movie and have the movie be better than the book for sure. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um, the, the one,
the one book movie combo that I know for sure the movie is better is the prestige. The prestige movie
is fantastic and phenomenal. And I read the book it was based off of, and the book is told through
a series of journal entries. So it's all past tense stuff. So there's nothing exciting that happens
because it's all written in past tense. You know what I mean? Like it just, right. It, it, it's
after the fact. So you're just kind of like, then this happened, then that happened, and then this
happened. And I felt this way and then that happened, but nothing's happening as you're reading it. So
it's not really an exciting book. It still has the same stuff. It's just told from a different
perspective of a look back instead of it's happening right now in front of us. Was that book written?
I know there was a phrase of novels that were written specifically to be adapted to film.
I'm not sure about that. Yeah. There was quite a few novels that were written with films in mind.
So they could have based on the book that was big for a while. Yeah. I'm not sure because I feel like
the book came out well before the movie. Oh, maybe not then. Because I didn't the prestige come out
like 2006 or something around then. Yeah. Maybe somewhere in there somewhere in the, I don't
remember when the book came out. Never read it. Never had the desire to read it. Don't worry about it.
No, I'm telling you it's boring. Boring. You lose something when you're not active. You know what I
mean? Oh yes. Like reading, I think reading true journals are interesting, right? You mean like the
Lewis and Clark Expedition? Uncensored version of Anne Frank. I have not read that. I haven't either,
but I've heard what's in the uncensored version that was censored out. Okay. Pretty spicy. Okay.
They could make a movie about it in not Hollywood, wink wink. Yeah. And not 2024, double wink, double
wink. Yeah. Yeah. In 1974, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, I spit on your grave came out,
the original one. If you haven't seen that one, it's very uncomfortable, but very good. Yes. Could
have Pam Greer in it. Let's put it that way. Could have Pam Greer. So, you know, I mean, I understand
that you want to, I don't know, and maybe, and maybe, and maybe, maybe the whole Norma Teo thing
is bothering me. And I like Norma. I like Norma's character. I don't like Teo's character. And maybe
it has a little bit different vibe to it now that we've had the Star Wars sequel trilogy. We've had
Indiana Jones four and five. We've had the Terminator 16 and 17. We've had these things where
they're kind of going back and tearing down the heroes of the 80s and 90s to supplant it with
something new and fresh and more acceptable to modern audiences, heavy quotes. So maybe that's
why I'm just not digging it as much because in the original Dune storyline, Teo Holtzman is held up.
And I get the whole Edison thing and how he fucked over Tesla and everybody else and was more a
business person, let's say, than an actual inventor or great mind. And I get that. But part of me,
I guess, is also a little wary about tearing down heroes and things. And I don't know if Teo was
really a hero. He was just briefly mentioned, you know, like the Holtzman engines. I don't know if
anyone ever mentioned his first name, probably once or twice throughout the eight main books,
you know what I mean? But it's not like he was a character. He was dead for 10,000 years or something.
Right. You've met Norma in the original Dune timeline.
Yeah.
Yeah. Which was awesome.
Yeah. Yeah. She was in the original Dune timeline for the listener.
For reasons.
For reasons. Yeah. We're not going to get into it. I'm sure you picked that up right away.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She's in there.
Yeah. Yeah.
So we all, like you say, all the factions are in there.
I'm with you. I'm with you.
But that goes back to your point where it's like they just all happened to be here in the two years.
Yeah, magically.
Time span of this book.
Yeah. Oh, they all know each other and work together, magically.
Yeah. They were all there at the beginning, which really was the beginning because they
like, so what? They, I don't know. I guess I kind of thought that it was going to include
the actual thinking machines overthrowing humanity.
But that happened hundreds of years ago in this book or a thousand years ago, whatever it was.
So it's weird. I don't know. As somebody just kind of reading it now for the first time
and not having read the rest of the stuff and then coming back and talking about it on a podcast,
just reading this first one, like if you're going to spend 500 pages of setup with 16 different main
characters and 37 different factions and techno babble and killing the pig thing and banging in
the swamp, which Shrek loves, like that's how he do. But you could, I mean, why not? Why not
start with the actual, hey, we invented the first thinking machine and it's fucking AI and it's
great and it's awesome. And what, what do you mean? Where are you putting that probe? Stop it.
No, no, now I'm dead. Blah. Hey, thinking machine revolt. And then Frank Herbert covered some of
that in his other novels, but they were, they were not due novels. So, you know, I, I guess I feel
like there was kind of a big missed opportunity and calling it the Butlerian jihad. There wasn't
a whole lot of jihadi going on. I thought it was going to be, I thought it was going to be a lot
more, I don't know, when I got about halfway through the book, I was like, we're not even close to
having any kind of jihad thing happening or any kind of battles happening or any kind of anything
happening. There was a lot of politics, but it wasn't the good dune kind, the wheels within
wheels politics. And there wasn't a lot of action. There was a lot of techno babble and, uh, oh,
imagine this, that all the, oh, you know, all the people that are starting all these organizations
that become important later are all alive together right now. They all know each other.
Yeah. Crazy. Which does happen from time to time. Like American Bloomsbury, where you've got,
you know, and all the other people and Hawthorne and, but that would happen for a reason, but it
happened in real life. Like it was happening for real life, but it also had a catalyst. Yeah. And
it spawned all the stuff that is like American authors. Yeah. Like the height of American
literature, the quintessential like bam, here's all the shit. Yep. Melville, everybody. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not saying it won't happen or it doesn't happen,
but in a fictional universe with fictional people and fictional things, it seems a little
too convenient to be true. Right. At least at least in the, at least how they wrote it,
at least in the American Bloomsbury situation and Concord, the reason why those hippies were there
was because there was one rich guy, Emerson paying for everybody. Yeah. Because he married a rich
woman and she died. And so he had money. A bully for him. Yep. And he had to go marry the 16 year old.
Curse my luck. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It is like, it's a high end fan fiction. Yeah.
I understand. It's an American going to Hogwarts is what it is. Yeah. They want to tie everything in,
which is fine. Not super satisfied with how they chose to go about doing it because as far as I
know, I feel like Norma is younger than Teo, but they don't really talk about ages too much other
than Okta is younger than Serena and Mannion is older than Xavier. You know, they don't talk a
whole lot about the ages. So if it was like Teo Holtzman is 97 years old and suffering from
dementia and Norma is there pumping out sweet, sweet ideas and he's trying to play things off
and everybody's like, okay, he did the one thing right. And he's a great guy. He found air quotes,
found Norma and he's still pumping out sweet stuff, which we know kind of is Norma,
but he's got the dementia, you know, and he tried to eat some toilet paper the other day, but we,
we sorted him out and he's fine now again. Like that'd be understandable, but it seems like Teo
is kind of in the prime of his life and, and, and trying to follow up his one good thing and, and.
Not really working on it. Not working on it, you know, and, and if, if he were older and it was like,
yeah, he had his breakthrough when he was 70 and now he's 90 and, and he's struggling and he wants
to still be relevant, but you know, he's not willing to let go of the reins and maybe we could
sympathize with him a little bit. Right. Yeah. You know, it could be, oh yeah, this big breakthrough
50, you know, he's 70, he's still with it, but he's losing energy. But things are slipping. Yeah,
things are slipping. You can't do all the math anymore. You know what I mean? Like I get it. And,
and then it would make it make a little more sense. Like we've, wait, we've got all these people,
the 27 main characters of Butler and Jihad are all of the same age within 10 years of each other.
And they're out there kicking ass and taking names. Don't worry about the coincidence. It's just
happening. Just go with it. You know, but if, but you know, like if some of them were like on the
decline, like yeah, okay. You know, Hey, I'm, uh, I'm Ridley Scott and I'm going to make a four hour
long movie. That's terrible, but you're going to like it because I'm Ridley Scott. It's terrible
movie. We don't like it. Get it out of here. Stop it. Knock it off. You know, but if Ridley Scott
was like, you know what, I'm just going to produce the movie and then we'll just produce by Ridley
Scott directed by somebody you've never heard of. Yeah. I mean, that happens all the time in
Hollywood. Like that's more believable. Like, Hey, we've got some people on the way out and we've got
some people that are up and coming. Then they can all still be there. You know what I mean? Right.
And it makes more sense, uh, to the reader. It makes it, it makes it seem a little more real
because there's an actual motivation. Like what? Tio just wants to go to the next party and get
drunk again. I mean, I guess, but he's supposedly in the prime of his life. Yeah. He's not even a sex
maniac. That's the weird part. He doesn't, he's like, wants to go to parties and have a good time,
but he's not, he goes back to his lab. Yeah. He's not like a junkie or, you know, he doesn't have
like some sort of defining negative trait that would explain his borderline bizarre behavior.
Yeah. Whereas if you were old and, uh, you know, slipping in certain aspects, like he showed up to
the lab without pants again. Oh, let's get him, let's get him back to bed. Here's your tapioca
pudding. You know, like that would make sense. Like, okay, we can kind of relate to that because
we all have that older family member or friend's family member or something. You know, I don't know.
I just, that would make it a little bit better and a little bit more like, Oh, all these people
happen to be here, you know, and Xavier and Vore are the same age and vying after the same woman kind
of thing. Like, right. And fine. That's fine. That's fine. But I don't understand why Xavier
is the head of the army. I get an MBA and a poster boy. I understand them getting a promotion,
but you don't jump the whole hierarchy. There has to be other military leaders who have more
experience. You would think. You would think. You would think. But that's what I mean. If they, if
they would have spent a little bit more time on that kind of thing, which would be, I guess,
Frank's attention to detail. And maybe, I don't know, maybe it's because Frank had that kind of
attention to detail. He took a long time to write. And he could skip things that he knew weren't
important. Maybe not necessarily important, but that you could fill in the gap. Right. You know,
I don't need, I don't need a thousand pages on the 10 years they were fighting on, on Arrakis,
you know, Paul and Chani. I don't need the full 10 years. Give me a couple of highlights or give me
a summation or what have you. Right. And the way, well, and he did it really well, which was, now
it's five years away. Five years in the future, they don't talk about the battles. They talk about
the reaction to what's going on from his enemies. Yeah. And then we're jumping more time, more time
jumping. Now we're on his side and there's like some craziness going on and we jump again. And
now there's, you know, and it all works and it all worked out just fine. Yep. Cause you don't need
to get bogged down in the details. And I know that the way that George R.R. Martin writes is that he
can't reconcile time jumps, which is why there was one book that was supposed to be set five years
after one of the other books in the game of Thrones. And I quit reading game of Thrones
because he killed everybody. And then he was introducing completely new people. And it was
like, I'm not going to learn new people. I'm like, we're, you know, three, four books in all the
people that I cared about are all now dead finally. And the story is still going and I don't want to
learn new people. Like I don't, I don't have the time. I don't care. I don't, you know, and he
doesn't look like he really takes care of himself health-wise and it's still unfinished. And I'm not
going to get sucked into that where it's like an unfinished work now and blah, blah, blah. Have you
ever seen the George R.R. Martin camp? No. He like jumps on his trampoline and like parties and has
a good time and he's doing everything other than writing. Yeah. Literally anything, anything other
than writing, which is fine. Like that's what you want to do with your life. And you get success.
That's good for you. Yeah. Good for you. I'm not going to get sucked into it though. That's a goal.
I'm not going to get sucked into it. No, you know, and so, but it was supposed to be a five year
jump in between two books, but he couldn't reconcile what the characters did during that time. So he
figured he had to write what they did during that time. And then that was the next book. And then
he had to start after that book. And so he has to write everything, like everything that happens to
these characters, he has to write out or else you can't reconcile his brain, like how it happens.
Because he like, there's a style of writing where you create the characters and then you put the
characters in situations and then you have to write how they respond to those situations.
So you can't really take a five year jump because they have to respond to every little thing
because that's what builds the character. And then you've got people that can
have the main gist of the story down and then write the things to make the gist. Maybe make
a couple background notes. You know what I mean? Yeah. Make a sketch. Yeah. So it's just,
it's a writing style thing and I'm not really faulting him for that, but sometimes we don't
need the full five years. We don't need the full 10 years, which Frank understood. Yeah. I don't
need the, I don't need 200 pages about the back and forth of shield technology to understand
what's going on. Yeah. I mean, we're familiar with the shield technology. Nobody's starting
the Dune universe with the Butler energy. No, no. Starting with Dune. Yes. If you start with Dune,
you understand the shields. Yeah. The shields are a thing. You know, like Norma telling Tio,
Hey man, maybe don't shoot a last gun at the fucking shields because my math says so. And then
you've got three or four more chapters of her going around him to Lord blood or count blood or
whatever. And then him saying like, no, no, it's fine. Just like put me in the thing and let's do
it or put a slave in that thing. I don't give a shit, whatever. Let's just do it. And they
obliterate a moon or something. You don't, you can go from one. Yeah. You don't have to tell me that
two sentences and then the explosion. You can jump. Yeah, you can jump that. I don't need to know.
We all know what's going to happen. We all know. We don't need the,
and they made a huge point too of, uh, and this is really weird because they were like,
they kind of like broke character and they were like, what Norma didn't realize was that she just
went around the back of Tio Holtzman and went to Lord blood directly. And that was a huge thing
in like political science and she just didn't understand that stuff and, and blah, blah, blah.
And then they kind of abandoned that. It's not, I don't know if it's coming back in the next two books,
but they made like a huge thing of her, like breaking like protocol so much that they kind
of broke character of being authors of the book to like blatantly point out that Norma went around
the general like hierarchy of how you do this kind of thing and went to, you know, Tio Holtzman's
benefactor and said, I don't think Tio knows what the fuck he's doing. But they made a whole chapter
on that of like how, like several pages worth of how Norma did a bad thing by going around Tio.
And then they kind of didn't worry about it the rest of the book and explained in detail why it
was going to fail. Well, yeah, but, but they focused more so on like her, what is it? Fapa
or something like her misstep in dealing with people of this stature level. And it was almost
the whole chapter on that. And they were just like, Norma just didn't understand this and blah,
blah, blah. And they, they kind of like took themselves out of the book to drive home that
point that she went outside of what was socially acceptable. It was not breaking the fourth wall
good. It was like a half ass attempt at it though. Yeah. They were just like, we just want you,
the reader to understand that there's a bad thing she did. I did not know until this episode that
Brian Herbert invented Disney Star Wars. The what now? Brian Herbert invented Disney Star Wars. Why?
He must be writing all of it because it's exactly the same shit we could write.
They must have read this book and been like, yes, this is what people want. This is my jammy jam.
This is what people want. Yeah. They need this. We need it. We need it so bad right now. Gotta
have it. This cigar is so good and so long. It is so good, but we're close. It is getting ashy. I
have about an inch left, maybe an inch and a quarter left. It's starting to taste a little ashy. Not
sure if it's my mouth or if it's the cigar. Yeah. Hard to say. Hard to say. I'm not in your mouth.
Could be, but- It's also getting hot. That's the OnlyFans, nice ashes.
Soon to be on our Patreon. Maybe. Maybe. If we get enough backers, likes, shares, comments,
the whole nine, we can do some saucy stuff.
I would need to be able to retire to do some saucy stuff. I'm moderately sure.
Well, we could do one naked episode a year or something. I don't know.
As long as we're each at home and there's no cameras on, I'll go naked every time.
Who says we're not? We could be naked right now. Yeah, it's also a possibility.
You and I are the only two that know the truth. That is true. That is true.
Brian, write this down. The nice ashes fan fiction.
Yes. Oh my God. Nate and Mike were high on spice.
High on spice. That's going to be the fireball episode.
Yes. Yes. What Mike didn't know was that the reach around was common courtesy. It's not gay,
just common courtesy. It ain't gay if it's a three-way.
There's more than three of us here. If it's three dudes, I'm pretty sure it's Greek
or is it Roman? I don't know which one. Which one invited the women to the orgies again?
I don't remember. It doesn't matter.
So Tio was there. Next time everybody listening,
you know, when some weird shit goes on at work and it's appropriate to say, not in, you know,
the company that would not appreciate it, just say, hey, it ain't gay if it's a three-way.
It's three of us here. There you go.
I think we tapped out the butlerian jihad. Yeah.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention about that?
No. I feel like
Vor saving Serat twice is going to come back to bite him in the butt.
There might've been some foreshadowing there. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. He couldn't bring himself to kill old metal mind.
No, he could not. Twice now.
Again, there's so many characters in this book. We mentioned Serat for the first time now.
Yeah. An hour and 45 minutes in. This far in. And it's like, it's because there's
too many people. There's too many people. Way too many.
Way too many. There doesn't need to be that many in one book.
No. You got a trilogy.
In the trilogy, you could have, again, why do they have the Wyrm Writer stuff? That's not necessary.
You could bring that in two books from now. And it's so short in the chapters.
It's irrelevant. It's nonsense. Just cut it out.
Yeah. Write it and cut it out.
Yeah. Cause you don't even need it because speaking about Disney Star Wars,
it's the same complaint I have against Solo, a Star Wars story. Never watched it.
I don't need to know if Han Solo did the Kessel Run in what he said he did. It doesn't matter.
Han Solo is a rogue character. In the original.
He doesn't need to be telling the truth or lying. We don't, we're not supposed to know.
In the original version, he was a scoundrel. He wasn't a rogue.
Well, scoundrel, yes. He was a scoundrel. He shot first.
Yes, he did. He shot first.
Yes, he did. But that's what I mean. Like he's one of those kind of people that you don't know
if he's telling the truth or not. And more importantly, it doesn't matter if you know
if he's telling the truth or not, because of course he's going to exaggerate some things
and be true on other things. You know what I mean? Like you've seen what he,
if you just watch the original trilogy, the theatrical versions, not the stuff,
the special editions, blah, blah, blah, what he says he can do, he can do.
But he also says things that maybe nobody could do, but it doesn't matter because that's his charm
and sort of make us make a movie showing that he does everything that he ever says he does,
makes him not a scoundrel, not a rogue, but just some truth telling guy, you know,
and it takes away the charm and the mystique of the character.
Yeah, like Lando Calrissian is supposed to be a scoundrel.
Yes. He's buddies with the other scoundrel.
Yes. Of course, they're scoundrel buddies.
And you don't need to know if they're acting honorably or dishonorably.
No. That's no matter. All he wanted was his money so he could go home. Han Solo did.
Yeah, that's the point. He gave me my credits and I can leave.
That's what he wants to do. That's all he wanted.
And then he came back at the very end for whatever reason. You don't need to know what the reason is.
It doesn't matter. He came back and saved the day.
Really not important. Almost more important to be not known.
Yeah. More important to be in the dark about it. I don't need to know that. I don't need to know how
the Fremen discovered how to ride worms. No.
It's not important to the whole thing. The whole thing of doing is the Fremen are a lot
more complex than anybody ever gave them credit for.
And there's more of them than they knew. Yes. And you don't need to know how or why.
On purpose. It was on purpose.
Oh, it's all on purpose. But you don't need to know more than that. You don't need to know
that there's some Salim guy that got cast out and discovered how to ride a worm through happenstance
who he thought was Budala or whatever the fuck. And you don't need to know all that stuff.
And then what the fuck is all this? There's been abandoned environmental stations all across Dune
that you can just go and get water and everything and candy bars from. And the vending machines
still work after hundreds of years. The same ones that are in Dune 10,000 years later and
they were already 1,000 years old. Yeah. Or 10,000 years old or whatever the fuck they were.
Yeah. Like who knows? I mean, but it's not important. I don't need to know how they
discovered that. I don't need to know how they discovered how to slip shod through the fucking
desert and not be detected by worms. Like I can fill in the gaps myself. I don't need a history of
here's how the Fremen learned to ride worms. Right. It's a fake universe. You don't need
the real detail. You know what? You can put out an encyclopedia. The Dune encyclopedia. I remember
I had the Star Trek encyclopedia and you could go and look up anything, any starship, any captain,
any character in any of the movies and TV shows. And it would tell you everything all the way up
to Voyager. And, uh, and that's cool, but it's not like a novel. You just go and look up the stuff
you want to know about. I don't care how the Fremen learned to ride worms. No, it's not important.
Not important at all. So I put mine out finally. Final thoughts on the Cohiba Macassar. M-A-C-A-S-S-A-R.
I quite liked it. I thought it was lovely. I am not typically a Cohiba fan. I think the Cohiba
Blues are good. I'm not sure if we've had those on the show yet. We are. I don't know that I
dislike Cohibas. I don't know that I seek them out. They're a famous brand for a reason. I guess in
my mind, I just have kind of a generally favorable opinion of them. It was good. I would recommend it.
I would recommend it. Yes, indeed. Anyway, thanks for listening and check out, I don't know, maybe
this season, maybe next season, the remaining two books in this trilogy of Dune books to see if you
want to read them or not. This first one is, I would say, Labor of Love for the Original Dune
series, if you want to get through it. I would agree with that assessment and be safe. Have fun.
Thanks for listening.