Dune: The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild

In this Dune-inspired episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe pick up where they left off in the last episode discussing the politics, philosophy and pain science of the Bene Gesserit, before diving into the spice-assisted navigation of the Spacing Guild.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
on this podcast we never stopped doning. So it's Dune
yet again. This is part two of the Dune series

(00:24):
that we started earlier this week. So in the last
episode we talked about the Bennie Jessert and a bit
about the neuroscience of pain, and today we're here to
talk about what more Bennie Jesser, maybe some Spacing Guild stuff. Yeah,
that's right. We're going to pick up where we left
off with the Bennie Jesser and then we're going to
move on to the Spacing Guild. Um. And I think

(00:44):
the place I'd like to start is to come back
to something we touched on in last episode, and that
is the idea that the Bennie Jesser are chiefly concerned
with politics right now. We offered some caveats about that
in the last episode, and that we often hear the
word politics and think of like electoral democratic politics. Uh,
the political situation in the Done universe is is not

(01:06):
so lucky to have democratic electoral politics. They've got some
kind of weird um hybrid uh technological feudalism that has
like an an emperor on top. And then there are
there's like an aristocracy of of landed nobles essentially houses
who control planets as their fiefdoms. And then there's also

(01:28):
a pretty large input from trade guilds, primarily the Spacing Guild,
which controls the monopoly over the the economy of interstellar travel. Yeah. So, um, yeah,
if you need a if you need a refresh. Uh.
Certainly we went over the world of Done in the
last episode. Uh, so go back and listen to that
one if you you didn't have a chance to. So.

(01:50):
One of the books that I was looking at for
this was that was another fun um collection of Done essays. Uh.
The book titled un in Philosophy and in it philosophy
professor Jeffrey Nicholas who also edited the book. He examines
the topic of the benegessriate in facing the gom Jabbar Test.

(02:11):
He touches, you know, on the point that they that
they make in this you know conversation between Paul and
the Reverend Mother that the Benigessa are concerned with politics.
But uh, Nicholas points out that that what we're talking
about here with politics is politics in Aristotle's sense of
the world word um, political science one of the three

(02:32):
sciences he outlined, alongside contemplative science, which would have included
both physics and metaphysics, and practical science. So there's a
lot of talk about tripods uh in you know, in
the the order of things in Dune um and and
so in a way that kind of matches up I
guess very loosely with with Aristotle's three prompt approach to

(02:55):
understanding the universe. Man, I have not looked at that
philosophy of Dune book, but that sounds interesting. So does
it get into like the what is the philosophical outlook
of Baron Harconan and stuff? You know? And there's a
lot of fun stuff and they there's definitely some hobbs,
I know, I'll touch on some hobs here in a bet,
but there's also, um, there's also one let's see what

(03:17):
is it? Uh? I think it's something like, you know,
basically like one article walks through the various houses and
factions and talks about how they would have been thought
off by uh say Socrates or whoever. So it's it's
a fun read. So you know, one of the things
about Aristotle is is that there is a there's a
quote that's often attributed to him, Uh, pretty famous to

(03:39):
the Aristotle quote, man is by nature a political animal. Yeah,
And I think this is an interesting quote, partially in
how I think it is often misunderstood because I think
a lot of times people take that quote to mean
that that Aristotle was saying that man is the only
political animal, which he does not mean. He actually mentioned

(04:00):
other animals as political animals as well. Yeah. He he
also refers to, you know, use social insects and so
forth as as being political animals. Again, one of the
reasons this is interesting to come back to this is
because the Benegestra are big about talking about the difference
between humans and animals, and given their focus on politics,
we can't help it go in this direction. Okay, but

(04:21):
so what did he mean by saying this? Then? Well,
I was reading a little bit more about this, and
apparently this is this is an area where you can
get into some amount of debate and we're not going
to go uh, there's this a certain amount of philosophical
back and forth on this. But I was looking at
a paper from Cheryl E. A Body, Uh and it
was the article Higher and Lower Political Animals, published in

(04:43):
the Journal of Animal Ethics in two six and she
writes that that Aristotle considered man's impulse towards partnership with
others to be the most important, and that it is
only through these partnerships that happiness is possible. Uh So,
I mean it sounds to me like you know, that
means that, uh, the beneagess are all about happiness obviously,
um right right right right up there out and uh,

(05:07):
Aristotle broke this down across the different dimensions, um of
of our interactions with other people, at the household level,
at the village level, and then at the what he
considered kind of the ultimate level. The Polish a collection
of human beings who lived together through the creation of
laws allowing them all to survive and flourish. And this

(05:27):
is where we get politics. As the word politics. I
think there's a pretty good case to be made that
the Aristotle is onto something here about the fundamental nature
of humankind that sort of um, that what makes us
really special is our ability to cooperate with one another.
And it's not that other animals lack the ability to

(05:48):
cooperate with one another. I mean you might say that
it is say like a youth social insect colony coordinates
their activities even better than humans can. But humans have
have much richer is of cooperating with one another than
even say you social insects do, because we have things
like language, which allows us to very very minutely coordinate

(06:10):
our behaviors and cooperate in ways that are have levels
of complexity you couldn't really imagine without something like language. Yeah. So,
Nick Nicholas, coming back to his paper, rights that Aristotle
considered politics a place for human practical reason to flourish.
So it was the ideal place not for everyone, but

(06:31):
for the best minds to busy themselves. And um, you know,
thinking thinking again to the done universe. It's easy to
to focus on all the at times dystopian aspects of
it and the war and the intrigue, but you know,
it is a pretty cooperative interplanetary empire when you look

(06:54):
at it from a certain perspective, you know, I mean,
they have managed to not annihilate each other with the
tom weapons. They have this uh this you know this, this, um,
this treaty in place, um even though there's a great
deal of inequality in the Dune universe. Um, they're all
all these factions are working more or less together. Well yeah,

(07:16):
and I think you can see those dualities all throughout
real history as well. I mean, look at any number
of empires. You can think of the Roman Empire or
the British Empire. I mean, all of these are at
the same time kind of marvelous achievements of cooperation and
coordination at the same time that they are brutal engines
of oppression. Yeah. Now, a body discusses the same thing

(07:38):
that you mentioned that you know, some that we've discussed
just a second ago. That you know, some take Aristotle
to mean that non human animals cannot be political. Others
see it as the view that humans are merely more
political than any non human animal. But again, Aristotle puts
a great deal that emphasis on language. Um and uh, yeah,
it is. Language is key to the human realm of politics.

(08:03):
Um in in good ways and bad ways. Well, yeah,
a language allows for a complexity of coordination. That is,
uh that that of course can serve both good and
bad end. So it allows for extremely complex coordination to
service of the greater good and helping one another, but
also to uh, you know, ever richer layers of deception

(08:24):
than than could be imagined by any other kind of animal. Yeah,
I mean, I've seen him pointed out that one of
the things that our language does is it allows us
to share uh, particular points of view with others, perceptions
of of of what's working, what's not working, of what's
bringing us pleasure and what's bringing us pain. Now, I
want to come back to the benegested distinction of humans

(08:47):
and animals again, This is, you know, they're very much
of of the mindset. Don't be an animal, be a human? Uh.
And the reverend mother tells uh Paul that the test
is about seeing if he is human or not um
and the ben adjested training seems to a larger degree
revolve around the high application of reason in a way
that overpowers animal instincts. Again that the example that is

(09:10):
thrown out as the animal choose its leg off if
it's cott in a trap, but the human, the political
animal par excellence, plots and practices politics over the fact
of it's entrapment. Well, in fact, the very example she
gives is one of deception. Remember that he would feign
death in order to attract the trapper and then and

(09:31):
then strike out and kill him. Yes, and of course
this is uh in a way this foreshadows what is
to come UH in the novel Dune, because the trades
acquisition of Aracus is widely seen as a trap. And
and Paul's father um to to, not not entirely by

(09:52):
his own choice, ends up in the position of the
animal that must strike out from the trap in an
attempt to punish his oppressor. Uh. It ends up not
quite working, but it's It's again one of the great
scenes in the book. And and I thought a wonderfully
um recreated scene in the recent film adaptation. Now coming

(10:14):
back to the philosophy of of Dune book, Nicholas uses
the com Jabar awareness test to make a point about
the current state of humanity in our world, the real world,
in particular the environmental pair al we face. UM. He says,
you know this, this is the trap. We are the trap.
But we are arguably not actually human enough, not aware

(10:34):
of our place in the world and our connections to
one another. Uh to act in the best interests of
the city. Uh. Quote Herbert's Philosophy of the human warns
against two things being animal and being a slave. As animals,
we may be enslaved by our animal desires, but there
is a different slavery being a slave to the machine.
The Butallerian Jahad freed humanity. It freed beings from enslavement

(10:57):
to machines, and it freed us to devote up our
human talents. Herbert isn't asking us to abandon our favorite
playthings iPod, computer and game systems. He's challenging us to
find out how to use those toys to live a
human life. The warning is not to stagnate. Now, if
we're thinking about environmental catastrophe, you know it. It may

(11:18):
also seem counterintuitive to think of politics as the answer, obviously,
but but you know, there are more than enough examples
in our modern world of political barriers to environmental action.
But of course it is through politics, certainly in the
Aristotle sense of the word, that anything is done for
the greater good of humanity. Yeah, and a very crude
since I think this analogy works. Doing something about, say,

(11:41):
environmental problems, which will eventually cause harm to do lots
of people or to everyone, may require some kind of
initial investment. It's it's sort of like the marshmallow test.
But for you know, but for people as a whole, like,
can can you actually do the thing that's going to
get you a better outcome in the long run if
it hurts you a little bit in the short run?

(12:03):
A lot of times the answer is no. Now, right
after I UM was looking at this material, I just
happened to be watching a ted X talk for for
other reasons, UM, and it's one from Jill Bolt Taylor,
author of My Stroke of Insight, a brain scientists personal journey. UM.
I think we've mentioned her on the show before. She

(12:24):
had this UM this journey to recover from a stroke,
and wrote about it quite interesting. But this particular talk
was the nero and anatomical transformation of the teenage brain
from and Taylor's main points in this concern what happens
to the teenage brain, but also just the development of
the brain in general. And I thought some of her

(12:46):
points lined up with a lot of this Benedjester at
thinking in the concept of Aristotle's politics, she points out
that we are feeling animals that think, not thinking animals
that feel, uh, and we we are all neuro circuitry.
That's something that she drives home, and as such, we
think thoughts. We then feel emotions based on those thoughts,

(13:08):
and then we run physiological responses to those emotions. And
for sustained or recurring psychological responses, such as anger, we
wind up running the same thoughts over and over again
to reproduce those same results. And she drives something that
you know, we have we have an ability to pick
and choose what's going on inside of our heads. Uh.

(13:29):
And she sums it up by saying, you know again,
we are we are feeling creatures who think, uh. We
tend to be more concerned with the me rather than
the we uh. And and in this we fall short
of the idea of that polus of the of the
city uh that Aristotle writes about. So I think it's
interesting to think about like political action coming together, communal responses,

(13:53):
planning towards um, you know, future problems. Is that these
are things that one hand, they're difficult for individuals to
do at times, but on the other hand, like this
is this is something that humans do excel at. I mean,
we're not We're not you know that we don't have
the same level of of efficiency compared to you. Social
insects certainly but um, but it is one of the

(14:16):
strengths of humanity that that you know, virtually anything that
we consider great in in human culture, uh, you know,
and and um and in the history of our civilizations
it has been is due to people working together and
bringing things out of that. But it's also interesting the
way that um, the use of politics and the Benny

(14:36):
Jesser it since I guess reflects both types of both
ways of thinking about the words. So on the one hand,
you have them sort of executing long term plans through
massive cooperation of they're they're they're coordinating activities on a
galactic scale, uh, to try to serve some goal in
the end. But you could also see them, as I

(14:58):
think quite accurately rue fless power seekers within a ruthless system,
and that those are both true at the same time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
they're they're definitely you know, engaging in shadow government conspiracies.
They are they're manipulating uh, pretty much anyone they come
into contact with to certain degrees. But the end then

(15:19):
then they also have these goals of creating some sort
of a human supercomputer that will you know, bring about
some sort of balance. Uh. And if you know, long
term success for the human species. But then again, I
guess that's that is often if you if you if
you look at at today's politics, I mean that is

(15:40):
often the case, right, I mean there's you'll see politics
who yeah, have some sort of a a particular aim
or goal that they talk about that lines up with
other people's estimations of what could make the world a
better place. Um, but then they've also got to play
that political game. Uh. And you can, I can, you know,
you can argue, well, they have to play that political
game in order to to do this thing or to

(16:02):
attempt to do this thing. But then you also wonder,
like what is the actual driving force? Is it? Is
it the the good thing you want to do for
the world, the change you want to you want to enact,
or is it that game and that that's that continual
you know grasp for power. Well, you know, on on
on one hand, I uh, I feel a draw towards optimism,

(16:25):
you know, I want to be optimistic about that kind
of project. But I also think that people's real motivating
priorities are often determined largely by their habits, by what
they do day after day. And so if you get
in the mindset of, well, I got to play the
game in order to achieve some lofty goal that would
be for the good of humankind or something. I mean,

(16:47):
in a way, I guess that is what people must
do if they want to achieve those goals through say
mass action, which has to be coordinated through politics probably,
But there I think there's always a risk of by
playing the game, you're real values become the playing of
the game. What is in further into of playing the game,
because that is what you have to do day in
and day out, right, right, And so like in the

(17:09):
doone University, you're a member of a great house. You
you don't want to just be trying to assassinate your
rivals just for the stake of assassination. It's just because
it's just this is the way politics works. But if
that is what you spend day after day doing all
the time, I think that ultimately will end up defining
your main priorities. You know, when when you're forced to
choose between one thing and another, you'll probably choose what's

(17:31):
in service of the projects you pursue day after day
all the time. All right, well, why don't we move
along to the Spacing Guild and to uh, to set
the stage, I thought we might do, uh, one of
these little readings here. Perhaps we can drop a little

(17:52):
ambience into the audio bed here, and uh, we'll hear
from the Spacing Guild handbook. Any path that narrows future
possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading
their way through a maze. They scan a vast horizon

(18:13):
filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze
should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in
the sand. A point of order, wouldn't burying your nose
in the sand actually be a good way to inhale
significant amount of spice and thus broad horizons. Yeah, that's

(18:33):
why I thought this is a great quote to start with,
because on one hand, that's the sand, that's where all
that spices, and uh, you know, that's that's what the
Guild is all about. And then on the other hand,
the thing they're saying don't do is the main thing
that Paul accuses the Spacing Guild of doing, of um,
you know, of of not considering the vast horizon, but

(18:55):
but considering the narrow viewpoint of how to avoid catastrophes
in the near future, and of course how to maintain
that spice. You know, this quote actually reminds me of
something that's brought up in in an essay I'm going
to get into in a bit by by a NASA
JPL navigator who has written about the Guild navigators in
uh in Dune, and one of the concepts he talks

(19:18):
about in his essay is the difference between calculating a
solution to a problem in a best fit fashion or
in a first fit fashion. Uh. You know, these are
very different approaches you can have. So one says you
you keep trying to solve the problem until you find
the first solution that actually works, and the other is

(19:40):
you keep trying to solve the problem, going through all
possible solutions until you have identified the optimal one. And
of course people think, well, you know, going for the
best fit path has got to be better, right, because
some even some successful paths are better than other successful paths.
But he outlines the fact that for a lot of
real world types and air areos, even if you have

(20:01):
supercomputers involved, calculating best fit pathways is sometimes such a
monumental calculation task that it's functionally impossible. So you know,
they're saying, we'll be aware of all possibilities. But there's
also the possibility that being aware of all possibilities puts
you in a paralyzing state of inaction and in decision

(20:22):
because you can never finish doing all the calculations, and
maybe you would be better to just sort of bury
your nose whenever you figure out one path that works,
just do that. Anyway, I guess we can keep that
in mind as we talked about the Space and Guild. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well,
let's let's refresh though in the Space and Guild, um
be because certainly you haven't read the book in a while,
you might have forgotten some of this and the Space

(20:44):
and Guild that they are present in Dune Part one,
the movie that that just came out last month, but
they're not maybe not in the forefront of things. So
first of all, as we mentioned earlier, um, this is
one of the great mental physical train schools, uh, the
Spacing Guild, and we're told in Dune that they constituted

(21:05):
one leg of the political tripod, maintaining the Great Convention.
This is the truth among all the great houses and
the imperium that bans atomic weaponry and permits these kind
of formal wars of assassination against rulers and key figures,
so that way, you know, it's members of great houses
that get strategically murdered as opposed to whole populations and

(21:27):
planets due to you know, a catastrophic use of weapons
of mass destruction. The other legs of the tripod are
the Imperial House and the Landstrade. The Landstrade is the
body representing all of the great houses. Now, by the
time of the of the events in the novel Dune,
the Spacing Guild is immensely powerful. They control a monopoly
on space travel and transport, as well as interplanetary banking

(21:52):
and so some elements you know, you know, like everything
and doing. You can easily think of parallels in history.
Uh for instance, the non military are aspects of the
Night Templars is there, as well as of course, the
the East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, UM
and and various other monopolies you can you can turn
to like what happens when one group controlled something absolutely

(22:14):
or near absolutely. So there's something interesting about the fact
that the Spacing Guild has this monopoly on interstellar travel
in the Dune universe, which is that, if I understand
it correctly, this monopoly is handled in a way that
that's different than a lot of real world monopolies, which
are maintained in some cases by by force, you know,

(22:34):
by by like military or paramilitary force, saying like no
one else may may try to compete with with us,
or sometimes by just like wealth inequality, by saying like,
you know, we're the only kind of company that that
can afford the infrastructure to do this. But in the
Dune universe, it seems to be that the monopoly is

(22:54):
maintained not by any of these conventional methods, but by
having a monopoly on the navigators themselves, a monopoly on expertise,
right and uh, and I guess the depending on how
you look at the like the nature of the Guild Navigators,
the steersman, Yeah, like the secrets and the knowledge of
their creation. Um, you know, to whatever extent they are

(23:18):
engineered or to whatever extent they are like a product
of mass spice consumption. And then of course there are
there are you know, elements there as well as like
it's it's about access to the spice um, and the
Guild definitely values its access to the Spice. But one
thing I was really thinking about when putting together notes
for this episode is the power of the Guild is

(23:41):
um you know, just as everything in a sci fi
futuristic world is kind of uh you know, blown into
into into greater proportions and uh, you know and all
like the basically, their power is such that if a
great house chooses to surrender their planet in one of
these these squabbles and wars of assassins, um they and

(24:03):
they want to flee beyond the imperium, the Spacing Guild
will supply that house with just such a far flung
planet or you know, some territory on a far flung
planet that's called a two pile. And this is actually
referenced in the novel when the Trades are trying to
figure out what to do about this hearkening trap that
they've found themselves caught in, and one of the options

(24:26):
which they don't really entertain, is, oh, yeah, we could
buy the you know, do the rules of uh, you know,
of of these various treaties. We can just go to
the Spacing Guild and they will take us away to
a planet that no one else can get to. Um
and and I love that love this because it reminds
us that for the Guild, this is a true monopoly.
And they're also that their space beyond the Imperium. But

(24:47):
since the Guild are the ones who control movement and mapping,
they kind of have control over the shape of the
physical universe for human beings, UH, their access to secret
worlds and outside space. It almost mirror 's UM, you know,
theological concepts. Yeah, that's really interesting and and I mean
this would essentially be a an unprecedented state of affairs

(25:09):
in the history of human politics because normally, you know,
if you get exiled, you have to go somewhere where
you could be found, and there are probably already going
to be some people there anyway. But in this case,
you can get exiled to a place where there's nobody
there to begin with, and nobody's nobody can ever find you. Yeah,
It's it's weird how in this case, it's like a

(25:30):
place is not real unless the Guild permits you to
go there. And and in UM having this two pile option,
it allows people to to basically pass out of the
world of human beings in the Imperium and UH and
exist in in another state almost like they've entered into
an afterlife or something that. Yeah, that's fascinating. So how

(25:52):
did the Guild come to learn of the use of
spice and navigation? Well, I was reading about this in
the Dune Encyclopedia, of course, and they outline a few
different stabilities, but the basics seems seemed to be that
they were perhaps just casting around in the wake of
the Great Revolt in the Great in the wake of
the Balarian Jahad, looking for just anything that could aid
them in navigation. You know, what can we do to
enhance human mental capacity in order to help us handle this?

(26:17):
And then they discovered the spice or it's also suggested
that perhaps the Benegester it has something to do with
this and introduced the spice to them. Um, now how
do they use the spice? Well, as we come to
learn in the Dune series, the steersman or Guild Navigators
consumed just massive amounts of milange, so much that they

(26:37):
have been altered into a kind of aquatic mammal that
breathes and drinks milange. Now, we in the first novel
don't really get a lot of insight into the Guild navigators, Like,
we don't really see them up close or get their perspective.
But that's not true in the sequels, right, Like I
think in the second book, one of the main characters

(26:57):
is a is a Guild navigator, Am I right? Right? Right?
The the guild navigator that we we actually see in
the David lynch Um adaptation. They basically pulled the Yeah, yeah,
they Edric, they pull him out of the sequel um
and uh, you know, that's probably one of the most
memorable sequences in that entire film, with these very very

(27:17):
mutinty um gothy spacing Guild members bringing out this great
tank in which floats this creature that is actually just
a human being, but a very exotic form of human
being brought on by this intense relationship with the Spice. Yeah.
I love I've always thought that was a great choice

(27:39):
by Lynch. So he's like, Okay, I'm adapting one of
the weirdest novels ever into a big mainstream motion picture,
and uh, I think the thing I'm gonna do is
insert a scene that's even weirder than anything in the
book that is not in the book, and put that
right at the beginning. As I love it. Yeah, I mean,

(28:01):
it's really clear in the latest adaptation that uh that
the director old d V there he um, he really
likes the weird uh and he he he likes to
linger on on these beautiful weird moments just in the
first half of the first novel. I really hope he
gets to make Dune Messiah as well, um, which he

(28:23):
has said he would like to do. Is sort of
a way to round out the trilogy, because there's so
much weird stuff in Messiah, because that's where you start
seeing things like like a guild steersman, and um, there's
also a face dancer. Uh. There, there's wonderful stuff in there. Now.
I was reading about the Steersman in Um the Dune Encyclopedia,

(28:43):
and I wanted to read this wonderful quote. Whatever faults
the Spacing Guild may have had when the day of
the Steersman ended, a real beauty passed from the universe.
The experience of the Steersman, breathing and drinking milange, rocking
to the beat of space and time, swaying with the
music of the spheres, lead in their dance by the

(29:04):
pulse of life around them, alive to every note in
the Pivan, both composed and played by their quartet is
beyond the power of words to describe or the imagination
to conceive. And so the Dune encyclopedia I think is
pretty pro Space and Guild. They take a side in
the factional struggles. Well and this this, I mean, they're

(29:26):
really like, look, you know, whatever you have to say
about the Space and Guild. Those steersman they were they
were doing great. They they were just uh And I
guess I like the idea that it, you know it
it kind of answers the question, well, why would why
would it would you want to be this like, why
would uh would this be an okay state? Because certainly

(29:47):
in the Lynch film, you know, it looks kind of
like a nightmare. It looks like some sort of like well,
just this horrible state. But if you imagine uh, the
Guild navigator just you know, feeling so alive, uh, on
the spice in that tank, then I guess it it
makes sense. But in the uh, the New Dune movie,
the Villeneuve when so, I wasn't aware when I was

(30:08):
watching it that there was a scene where we saw
the Guild steersman, but you you identified that actually they
do show up. They're the guys towards the beginning of
the movie that are dressed in what looks like a
combination of papal vestments and e v A suits. Yeah.
And one of the big tail tale signs, of course,
is that they have these orange domes over their head, orange,

(30:30):
you know, implying the spice um. But yeah, it's easy
to miss. In fact, I I had noticed that there were,
you know, some people online responding to the film and
they were like, where was the Space and Guild um
and and yeah you can. You can watch it and
think that they don't show up at all, but they
they are here and uh and I think they'll they'll
have a bigger role in part two. Thank thank thank

(30:58):
All Right, well, I thought we should talk maybe a
bit about the science of deep space navigation and how
that would apply to the Spacing Guild. And as one
of my sources here, I was looking at another essay
in that book The Science of Dune we mentioned in
the last episode. This one is called the Spacing Guild,
and it's by a guy named John C. Smith who

(31:18):
worked in spaceflight navigation at NASA JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
and his bio says that he worked on missions too.
I'm not sure what to make of this to Venus,
Mars and Earth um and that he was part of
the Cassini Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan.
I guess you could argue that that, like the various

(31:39):
satellites that help us study Earth science, our missions to Earth,
that we have to we have to go into orbit
to gain that kind of perspective to study our own world.
I wonder it might mean return missions like attempted probe
is coming back. That's true, because that that too is
a navigational feat. Sure. Now there's one thing that Smith
actually mentions right at the end of essay that I

(32:01):
thought was really interesting. I'd never considered this, but it's
a piece of historical context that might help us understand
a little bit better what was going through Frank Herbert's
head when he framed deep space navigation in the way
that he did in these novels. So remember that Doune
was originally published in nineteen sixty five, which again is

(32:21):
kind of it's hard to believe, like it always feels
further in the future than that. Yeah, to to imagine
that this this novel came out before with stock, you know,
h yeah, yeah, it's strange. But Smith writes quote, during
the time period Dune was written, humanity's exploration of the
Moon and planets was in its infancy. The first successful

(32:42):
fly by ever of another planet was NASA's Mariner to craft,
which encountered Venus in late nineteen sixty two. In nineteen
sixty five, Mariner four became the first craft successfully navigated
to encounter Mars. But here's the thing to realize, these
were not the only two missions launched at this time.

(33:02):
Smith's count is that these two probes, the Mariner two
arriving at Venus in nineteen sixty two and Mariner four
reaching Mars in sixty five, were up to this point
the only two fully successful interplanetary missions out of twenty
that had been attempted. Wow, so that's that's that's impressive. Yeah.

(33:23):
So because you also have to we also remind ourselves
of like, why do we have Mariner one and Mariner two.
It was because it was considered so risky that you
we better just make two of them and send them
both out because there's a high probability we're going to
lose at least one of them. Right, So so at
the point Herbert was writing, even navigating simply between the
planets within our own solar system was a venture characterized

(33:47):
mostly by failure. And so we today, you know, being
able to look back on many decades now of of
successful missions. I think in a kind of, uh, in
a kind of shortsighted way, UH take interplanetary travel or
at least of of unscrewed probes kind of for granted,
and in a way that we really shouldn't like, not

(34:09):
realizing how difficult this technology was to develop and how
much intricate calculation has to go into uh, missions like
this to make them possible. So all that to say, basically,
I think there's a reason that in nineteen sixty five
this would have seemed like something you know, in interstellar navigation,
would have seemed like something that required an almost supernatural

(34:32):
mechanism to explain that. Once again, that the interesting thing
being that in most cases science fiction that you know
that mechanism is the is the is the thrust generation
or the travel technology on the ship that allows it
to go so fast. I think that's sort of taken
for granted in Dune, and instead the real magic seems

(34:54):
to come in and the question of navigation. Yeah, I
mean it's it's a situation where the spacing Guild and
Steersman they don't you know, it's it's not just that
they can, you know, travel through hyperspaces, that they can
come out the other side, that they can do so successfully. Now,
this might the the idea and the dune novels is
that they travel through what they call fold space or

(35:16):
folded space, which I think introduces its own hypothetical dangers.
But even if we just stick to the problems we
would expect to encounter traveling through real space. Uh. The
the the problem of navigating deep space is is more
complex and interesting maybe than a lot of people would
have imagined, because um, it's it's fundamentally different and much

(35:37):
more difficult a problem than navigation and say a car. Right,
some of the differences are obvious. For example, if you're
driving on a road, you don't really have to plot
a course at all, right, the course is already determined
by the road that has been built. You just have
to know which roads to follow and how far to
follow them. But even if there were no roads where

(35:59):
you were going, say you were just driving a dune
buggy over over desert wilderness. You would still have a
much easier time because you'd be able to note the
direction of your destination and more or less just drive
straight to it. I guess, circumnavigating any obstacles you encounter
along the way. You know, you might hit a mountain
or ravine or something and you have to go find
a way around it. But basically you're just traveling in

(36:23):
a across a fixed map. And this is really a
blessing with travel, right the fact that you know, if
you're if you're driving from one place to another, your
car is the only thing that is moving in that
scenario relative to the reference frame of the surface of
the Earth. It's not like your starting position and your
destination are usually also moving. But when you're when you're

(36:45):
navigating in space, everything is moving and moving within their
own reference frames. So to travel to one planet or another,
you can't just aim at the planet and then turn
on the thrusters. Right, if we're trying to fly to Mars,
you can't say where is ours? Now, Okay, I'm gonna
aim dead center at that and then I'm gonna burn
the rockets. You can't do that, of course, because by

(37:06):
the time you got there, Mars would be gone. Mars
is moving really fast, it's an orbit around the Sun,
and it would be somewhere else. So instead you essentially
have to plot an intercept course. It's not like sailing
into a port, but like sailing to intercept another ship
that is also moving. Yeah, it's not a journey to
where the target planet is. It's a journey to where

(37:28):
the target planet will be. Now, fortunately, the paths of
objects like planets are strongly predictable that they follow an
orbital course established mostly by gravity and inertia. And we've
got good enough information about the orbital pathways of planets
that we can predict with pretty high accuracy where they're
going to be too arbitrary points out in the future. Though,

(37:48):
of course, the farther you try to predict the motion
of anything into the future, the the more inaccurate your
predictions will get because of the you know, the the
cruel of of tiny uh, tiny inaccuracies building up over time.
But then there's a second problem. Okay, so you can
mostly predict where a planet's going to be in the future,
so you can plot a course to intercept it. You

(38:10):
know where it's going to be you go to where
it's going to be instead of where it is now.
But but there comes in a second problem. Given the
vast distances involved in space travel, even tiny inaccuracies in
the initial calculation of a baseline trajectory can end up
sending you off course. Uh. And for a crude analogy

(38:31):
to understand this, imagine you are shooting an arrow at
a target three feet away. If you're off by like
one degree of difference, when you're trying to hit the
target dead center, that's not going to matter very much
if it's three feet away. But if you're trying to
hit a target two hundred feet away, being off by
a little bit is going to make a big difference.
And so this is one reason that when we we

(38:53):
send out uncrewed space probes to do a you know,
inner the orbit of another planet or intercept a comet
or something like that. You can't just aim them at
where that planet or object is going to be and
then shoot them off and let them go. You will
have to perform repeated course corrections. You'll have to check
the position of the probe periodically while it's on the

(39:16):
way to the destination. Figure out, you know, figure out
it's it's updated course heading based on the new information
you have about where it is, and probably perform a
new burn to correct the course heading because it will
be slightly off, just because there's always going to be
some level of inaccuracy that will build up over time.
And uh and and there there's no way to be

(39:37):
perfectly accurate when you're charting a course through space. Now,
there's one other thing worth noting, which is that while
real world space agencies now have plenty of experience with
deep space navigation, basically all of that experience is found
not in piloting ships from inside the ships, but in
programming navigational instructions for uncrewed probes. So all of the

(39:59):
space missions with with onboard human pilots have been really
close to home. You know, a few trips to the
Moon in the sixties and seventies, and then a bunch
of runs between the surface of Earth and low Earth orbit,
and as far as crude ships go, that's it. You know.
We we haven't had a somebody pilot a ship from
inside that ship to Mars or anywhere else. And there

(40:21):
are some differences in this regard the steering of uncrewed
robotic probes introduces additional difficulties. For example, the distance between
Earth and the probe will always create time delays. These
would be, you know, limited by the fact that radio
signals can only travel at the speed of light. So
if you're trying to land a probe on the Martian
moon Phobos, it's going to take some number of minutes

(40:44):
for the information to travel each way. So you send
an instruction to the probe and it might take who knows,
you know, ten minutes for it to get there, and
then you gotta wait another ten minutes for it to
send you feedback and for you to find out if
you're maneuver worked or not. But then there's another problem,
which is that Smith has a section of his essay

(41:04):
in in the Science of Doune about the process of
determining where a spacecraft actually is, which is crucial because
to know how to steer, you have to calculate a trajectory,
and you can't calculate an accurate to trajectory if you
don't know where you are. So to establish the position

(41:25):
of a spaceship with accuracy, you need some kind of
external landmark to reference, kind of similar to how you
would use landmarks to recognize where you are on a
journey by car, except of course, this is over vastly
greater distances without roads and with need for much greater
precision because of the distances that will be covered on
the journey. So Smith writes that we usually calculate the

(41:49):
position of space probes in our solar system with reference
to landmarks such as the Earth's north pole or He
also mentions a reference point that is the intersection of
Earth's equatorial and orbital planes on January first, two thousand,
which is of course everybody's favorite landmark. Um. But then

(42:10):
you know, uh so what you've got. You've got places
like that, and you can determine uh the probe's position
by say, checking the time delay on a radio transmission,
and especially if you can triangulate that with multiple receiver dishes,
so you've got different dishes around the world and they
can check how long it takes a radio signal to

(42:32):
reach them. You calculate the difference between the different dishes
on the Earth's surface, and you can get a pretty
good idea with with a pretty high level of accuracy,
where the probe is, and then you can also calculate
its velocity by measuring the Doppler shift in the in
the radio transmissions as they as as they are received
back on Earth. So again, the Doppler shift is you know.

(42:55):
The common example is how the the pitch of an
ambulance siren changes as the ambulance is moving towards you
or away from you. Wave lengths of different types of
waves tend to get higher pitched and become more compressed
if the sources moving towards you, and then they tend
to stretch out and get lower pitch as the as

(43:16):
the sources moving away from you. And by measuring the
amount of Doppler shift in the signal, you can actually
tell how fast something is moving away from you. But then,
so here's another thing I thought was interesting. So again,
in order to calculate a spacecraft's current position and path,
you need to know the last best guess of where
it actually was, and then from there you need to

(43:39):
predict forward in time using mathematical models of all the
different forces acting on it. And in a way, it's
a kind of dead reckoning you need to do. You say, Okay,
at this time, I know the ship was here and
it's been traveling in this direction this fast with these
forces acting on it. And so when I read that,
I was like, wait a minute, the forces acting on it?

(44:01):
Would that include something other than inertia, other than the
ship's initial velocity? And the answer is yes, absolutely, it
includes other forces. Much the same way that if you're
trying to predict the path of a bullet you imagine,
you know, somebody shooting at a target. You can't predict
the path of the bullet if you just imagine it

(44:21):
travels forever in a perfectly straight line out of the
gun barrel. You need to take into account other things
like gravity pulling the bullet toward the ground, and atmospheric
drags slowing the bullet down over time. Something very similar
is true of spacecraft. So to get a spacecraft's position
and to calculate its future trajectory, you need to know

(44:44):
not just where it started and its initial velocity, but
other forces acting on it, including things like gravity. Uh.
Gravity is Smith says the most important of these forces
in the familiar interplanetary missions that we have experience with,
and this would be gravitational attraction exerted by the objects
in our Solar system, the Sun, the planets, moons, and

(45:06):
other objects um. But actually it doesn't even stop at
the influence of gravity. The course of a spacecraft is
diverted by other things, including well, one would just be
variations in the way gravity is exerted even by known objects.
So the the example Smith gives is that gravity is

(45:28):
not perfectly symmetrical in the way it's exerted by objects
like planets and moons, because these objects sometimes are kind
of lumpy, and so they're gravitational influence is slightly asymmetrical.
There might be more gravitational influence in one part of
the object or in a certain direction than in other
parts or in other directions. But then on top of that,

(45:49):
you've got radiation pressure from the sun, you know, so
the solar wind might be at the back of a
of a probe that's traveling and that's actually throwing off
its trajectory from what you would imagine just if you calculated,
you know, its initial velocity from from the rocket burn
and then uh, and then maybe the gravitational influence of
nearby objects. You've got to take radiation pressure into account. Uh.

(46:13):
If an atmosphere is nearby, Smith says, you need to
note drag from the atmosphere and so forth, and Smith
even gives a very strange and interesting example of a
trajectory input that was once considered a real mystery. It
was the so called Pioneer anomaly. I don't think I
was familiar with this before, Rob, have you ever read

(46:35):
about this? I don't remember. So this concerned the Pioneer probes,
which you know, traveling off into deep space there, you know,
on on a long interstellar trajectory now, but navigators kept
finding that their predictions for the course of these Pioneer
probes was a little bit off, even after accounting for

(46:56):
all the known forces that that they could think of.
So the quest and is could this be an indication
of something unknown, some some unknown force or unknown property
of physics that hadn't yet been discovered. And the solution
to the mystery was was not that tantalizing, but but
it was kind of interesting. Nonetheless, it turns out it's
probably not anything spooky about physics. The deviation from expected

(47:19):
acceleration was probably due to radiation pressure exerted by the
power source on board the Pioneer probe. So inside, yeah,
they've got they've got a little internal power plant, a
radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG, and this was creating anisotropic
radiation pressure that was sort of meaning so I think

(47:42):
the pressure generated by the waist heat from this thermoelectric
generator was actually exerting a pressure that changed the course
of the probe as it flew through space and changed it.
It didn't you know, the radiation didn't just go out
in all directions. It was sort of it was anisotropic,
so it was going in one direction more than the

(48:04):
other directions. And this was creating an accelerating force. Yeah,
and and like like you said, when you're dealing with
with long distances like this, uh, just that little nudge,
especially if it's unaccounted for and unexplained, is enough to
send you completely off course. Right, And then Smith writes,
and as I say that interstellar travel would probably involve

(48:27):
even more forces acting on a spaceship to cause it
to deviate from its course. And these influences would have
to be understood and modeled mathematically if you were going
to navigate accurately. But another question would be again, you remember,
you need those reference points within the environment to calculate
your position if you're traveling through space. You need to

(48:48):
know where you are in order to calculate a trajectory.
So what would those external landmarks be if you are
traveling between stars, if you're an interstellar space uh Well,
Smith suggests the possibility of using pulsars. UM. Pulsars are
highly magnetized stars that spin around very fast, shooting out

(49:08):
beams of electromagnetic radiation out of their magnetic poles. And
because they rotate so fast, and because they shoot these
beams in selective directions, you know, it's not omnidirectional beaming.
It's like, uh, beams just coming out of the magnetic poles.
They appear from the at the external observer's perspective to

(49:29):
pulse or blink at these regular intervals, sort of like
the you know, the spinning light and the lighthouse, and
the intervals of these pulses can be used to identify
what pulsar you're looking at. In fact, the pioneer plaques,
remember those, uh, those plaques that were designed to go
on board the probes in case an alien ever looks
at this and says, hey, who made this? Um, they

(49:51):
used triangulation by pulsars of specified intervals to show the
galactic location of our solar system. They're like or is
where Earth is. Though I think to be fair, I
recall reading at some point that the pulsar map on
the plaque will no longer be accurate in the future.
I'm not sure about that one though. Yeah, you got
to read the fine print at a bottom the plaque

(50:13):
limited time offer. But pulsars are not the only option.
I was actually reading a piece about this question in
space dot com from one by an astrophysicist named Paul
Sutter who is at UH Sunny Stony Brook and the
Flat Iron Institute in New York, and he was talking
in this UH piece about about a paper showing that

(50:35):
you could use pairs of stars to establish position in
interstellar travel. So I think in theory it could be done.
But uh, there there are a lot of challenges probably
ahead if we actually do become an interstellar traveling species. Uh,
you know, there's a lot we're gonna have to figure out.
And we may not have spice to aid us by
by creating pressuants that allows us to predict the future,

(50:57):
but there is going to be an awful lot of
of how highly precise calculation involved. So yeah, we're gonna
have to we're gonna have turn to computers until you know,
we decided we should. We can't use computers anymore, right,
thank now, I'd like to come back to the philosophy

(51:18):
and outlook of the Space and Guild UM. I was
reading in the Philosophy of doone and there's a there's
an article titled A Universe of Bastards by Matthew A.
Buttkas and Um. In it, Budkas describes the Guild as
um as having quote a parasitic relationship with political power.
So in this what he's driving, what he's pointing out,

(51:40):
is that the Guild wields tremendous power, even power over
the emperor, but they never actually rule. They can't actually rule,
They can't risk disrupting the flow of spice. They depend
on it. Absolutely. You take the spice away and the
Guild cannot do the thing that gives them the power.
And he points out again that the Guild has no armies,

(52:02):
but it doesn't need to because it absolutely controls transport
and trade between worlds. And I found this quite interesting
because it made me think about, you know, historically, what's
what's one of the things that armies do. Um, you know,
one huge role is disrupting trade. Um. To besiege a
walled city is to cut off its trade and travel

(52:25):
and starve it into submission. UM. I was treading about
sieges a while back, and that's that's a you know,
in the cinematic sense, we often think, well, the siege
is about like breaking down walls, getting in there and
then taking over the city. But generally it's it's more
about strangling the city until the people who live there,
or the and or the people who rule there give

(52:47):
in and open the doors themselves. Yeah. And I think
a lot of the same could be said about navies.
A lot of the history of navies is also about
interrupting trade, you know, trying to block access to ports
or trying to intercept trade vessels. Yeah. And so the
interesting thing about the Guild here is whether you're talking
about blockades or besiegement, they have this power already, Like

(53:09):
it's they don't need an army to do it all
that because they they are the only ones who can
operate movement between worlds. UM. So by its very nature,
the Guild is in a constant state of besiegement or
potential besiegement with every planet in the imperium. Now, Buckus
goes on to compare the politics of Dune to Thomas

(53:29):
Hobbs work Leviathan, in which the author quote establishes a
theoretical state of existence in which there is no centralized authority,
but rather a collection of individuals looking out for their
own interests. Now, um, you know, you might say, well,
isn't there an emperor in Dune. Well, yes, there is
an emperor in Dune. But again, the emperor's in the
Emperor's house is part of that tripod, and it's all

(53:51):
in this this uh, this political balance. So it's not
like the emperor actually does have absolute control over everything.
Again talking about the the emperor that is present during
during the first Dune book. Um, so when Dune, it's
not individuals but factions uh that are that are the

(54:13):
ones looking after their own interests. Uh, their fights, their feuds,
and these fights and feuds ultimately can threaten the stability
of everything. And that comes back to the way that
the guild operates itself again, because the guild very much
wants stability, at least so far as its spice goes,
they don't want to do anything to threaten that supply.

(54:34):
So another interesting aspect of the Space and Guild is
to is to come back to the way it makes decisions.
Um Again, we're envisioning the Steersman, these augmented and or
mutated humans who literally breathe spice in order to generate
the sort of of limited uh UM precedents necessary to
travel through space and hyperspace, and a big part of
this entails seeing what the most immediate dangers are and

(54:57):
dodging them and so subsequently, one of Paul's biggest insights
is that the Guild commands you know, such power over
everything and their dependence on They depend on spice for
their power, so they end up making all of their
decisions in a similar fashion. They always choose the safe
immediate path. And while this ensures survival in the short

(55:18):
term and it keeps keeps the spice flowing for them,
it will eventually in the long term lead to stagnation
for you know, the entire human endeavor. Oh, this is
back to the first fit versus best fit uh term.
So it's interesting to think about this in terms of
cognitive bias, to sort of reverse the Leviathan scenario and

(55:38):
go back from the faction to the individual um as
pointed out by Lauren and Grishma in the safety bias
published in Behavior Change in Risk Avoidance is one possible
mechanism by which personality characteristics may be linked to anxiety pathology,
and we see risk perceptions factor into a number of
cognitive biases, include zero risk bias, in which there's a

(56:02):
tendency to try to eliminate eliminate a particular risk while
other options would produce a greater overall risk reduction. Okay,
So in a sci fi scenario, if I understand that, right,
that would be saying like, Okay, we're going to design
a spaceship that cannot possibly be destroyed by the biplasma
canons from from another spaceship, but in fact that spaceship

(56:23):
is very prone to uh to like toxic build up
of of c O two in the you know, atmosphere
processors or whatever. That you're just like overly focusing on
one type of risk while ignoring others, right, Um. I
think things like you know, the War on Terror are
sometimes brought up as an example of this too, like
laser focusing on one particular threat when some might argue

(56:47):
that if that same amount of energy went into other things, uh,
then you would have you know, it would it would
result in greater safety, um and perhaps in a more
meaningful sense. Right. There's also risk sensation theory, which holds
that people adjust their behavior in response to perceived risk levels.
If they feel protected, they tend to be less careful.

(57:09):
The more risks they perceive, the more careful they become. Um.
And I was I was reading that, like one interpretation
of this has to do with um, you know, like
like safety gear and things like skydiving where uh, like
skydiving from a methods and material since it has become

(57:30):
increasingly safer to do. But that means people feel safer
skydiving and they're more likely to take certain risks that
sort of thing. It also reminds me of insights that
I've read about climbing, where like, like you know, mountain climbing,
where the danger is not the part where you're you're
hyper focused on every little thing you do. It's when

(57:52):
certain actions become kind of automatic and you kind of
I guess to a certain extent you feel safe, Um,
you're going to be more careful if you feel the danger.
But but coming back to this, this idea of a
risk compensation theory. I was wondering how it might equate
to the Guild. So via their abilities, they're constantly not
only confronting simulations of possible doom, which of course us

(58:16):
normal humans do all the time. You know, we engage
in in um, in simulating possible outcomes uh that are positive,
but also ones that are negative, and that can lead
into a sort of fantasizing about potential doom. But the
Guild they seem to go beyond that. They have actual
visions of dooms that they have to cleverly dodge as
they navigate um, either you know, through space travel or politically.

(58:41):
So do they end up giving into these visions of
doom and grow increasingly careful, or at least in some cases,
do they feel safe and protected by their use of
the spice? I think I think probably with the Space
and Guild, we're talking about the overly careful side of
things here. That seems to be in keeping with the
same fist path of the Guild and so forth in

(59:01):
the way they're characterized. But perhaps the comfort afforded by
the Spice allows them to engage in some bolder maneuvers,
at least so far as it doesn't threaten the supply
of spice. Um, it seems to be a constant. Anything
that threatens the spice that's just a no go, like
like almost zero zero risk can be taken when it

(59:22):
comes to that supply chain. Right. So it's interesting with
the Beni Jester in the Space and Guild um because
on a very basic level, and I think that's one
of the great things about Done is that you can
look at it at different levels. On one level, it's
like these are just the sci fi magic versus sci
fi science, right, it's which is versus um techno wizards

(59:43):
of a sort you know. Um. But then it also
it goes a lot deeper than that. It gets into
like the ways they think, um, you know, short term
and long term thinking, and how they engage in risk, etcetera. Yeah,
I didn't think about that. So you're setting up the
contrast that the Bennie Jess being concerned with politics, are
very they're very much engaged in long term strategic thinking,

(01:00:04):
whereas the Spacing Guild being very immediate task oriented or
just like they're thinking one step ahead always. Yeah, like
have the been adjustment? For instance, we're told you know
that they will actually make sure that things are inserted
into native religions on various worlds. Uh that give them
an out that like like, oh yeah, well, in our

(01:00:25):
in our traditions, it does say that if a UM,
if a strange woman from another planet shows up, we're
supposed to give her a spaceship, you know, um come
in handy a thousand years from now. Yeah, it might
come in handy a thousand years from now, So we're
going to do it. Um. Whereas the Guild, they would
be asking different questions. They're like, well does that what
does it mean for our survival one minute from now?

(01:00:49):
And what does it mean regarding our supply of the spice?
And I saw some papers online. I didn't really get
into these so much, but there was one I noticed
that was looking at themes of addiction in Dune and
or the Rings um, you know, because they both deal
with I guess addiction to some extent. You say that
that the ring is an addiction, the power that comes
with the ring as an addiction, and of course the

(01:01:10):
Guild is in a very real sense addicted to the
spice Um, but um and and and makes its its
choices in the way that I guess could be comparable
to some sort of personal addiction level. Uh. At any rate,
there's just another example of all the different levels at
which you might engage with Dune. Got to engage them all.

(01:01:32):
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it
out there. I think this will be it for for
this journey into the Done universe. But hey, when Dune
Part two comes out, maybe we'll dive back in. Maybe
it'll be something else we get a hanker in to discuss. Oh,
I'm sure there will be more, and of course we'd
love to hear from everyone out there. You have insight
into any of this based on your own experience with

(01:01:54):
the the Done universe, no matter which path that ends
up taking. You know, the original novels, the Seek and prequels,
the movies, the video games. We didn't even get into
the video games. Oh yeah, there's like a Commanding Conqueror
style game, but it was Dune. Yeah, various real time
strategy type things. I never actually played any of them,
but but I've remember looking at stuff about them and

(01:02:17):
they look cool. Um. There's also big board game presence.
There's of course, the classic Done board game, which I
I um, I got a copy of Man and I
got it during the pandemic, so it's it's never been played,
and they're they're a couple of of newer doune board
games that also look very exciting, especially since they both
have a single player modes, which you know is certainly

(01:02:40):
a little easier to achieve, if maybe not as socially engaging. Anyway,
whatever your experience, if you have thoughts right in, we'd
love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you'd
like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to
Blow your Mind podcast feed You'll get that wherever you
get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two season Thursdays,
listener Mail on Monday's Artifact on Wednesday, and on Friday

(01:03:03):
we do a little weird House Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most of the serious concerns and just
talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to sayll oh, you can email
us at contact that's Stuff to Blow your Mind. Podcasts

(01:03:32):
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