You humans can be... really scary, you know that?  At around seven feet tall I literally stand head  

and shoulders above most of you. Yet, somehow,  in my mind, you loom larger than mountains. Not  

because of what you are, but because of what  you can do. Art, architecture, science, wars,  

civilizations-you reshape the entire world, and  a lot of the time you do it just because you can.  

Because you want to. That kind of power  is... actually... a little terrifying.  

This isn't the first time I've had  this on my mind; I'm continuously  

amazed by you. But I just recently read a  story that sort of allowed me to... zoom  

out. To really see what you are at  scale. And it still has me reeling.  

It was a little book you may  have heard of... called DUNE.  

Before we do anything else, I want to thank  everyone who makes these videos worthwhile. All  

of you who like and subscribe to the channel-and  especially everyone who supports us on patreon, it  

still blows my mind everytime someone pledges-it's  hard to say how much all of that means to us.  

To all of you creative humans who  watch this show, we love you.  

Dune is... a lot of things. Sci-fi classic  that influenced a vast swath of the genre?  

Yes. Epic, multi-volume series with probably  still-unplumbed depths, even after 56 years?  

Oh yes. World with a level of setting detail that  you could-and which some people have-dedicate an  

entire video series to exploring? Absolutely. We did take an opportunity to make a much smaller,  

more indulgent video to talk about some of the  "magic" in Dune, but even with that we're barely  

scratching the surface. I'll tell you where  you can watch that video a little later.  

For now, this is just one  video, for just one book.  

Laying all of the expansiveness and significance  of the series aside, from the perspective of a  

writer, I see something truly inspiring within  the pages of this one story. And you don't need  

to be an avid lore-fiend who's scoured every  inch of the books to see it for yourself.  

So much of the beauty of this story is wrapped up  in the sheer, undeniable scale of its contents.  

The small staring into the face of the large,  the simple caught in the web of the complex,  

the microcosm against the macrocosm. I could go on about it for an age. But...  

I'd rather show you... Oh, and as a courtesy for anyone  

who hasn't read the first book of Dune-there  will be spoilers, and they will be intense.  

The story takes place in a far-distant future  where all intelligent machines have been outlawed.  

In their absence, Mankind has cultivated their  intellect to heights never before dreamed of.  

Some have become human computers called Mentats,  able to run incomprehensible calculations through  

their minds in the blink of an eye. Others are  Navigators of the Spacing Guild, able to predict  

with near prescient exactness the movement of  their vessels through folded space, allowing for  

faster-than-light travel. And a very select few  have joined an order called the Bene Gesserit:  

women with such a deep mastery of society and  selective breeding, that to most they appear to  

be witches, able to control people by the mere  sound of their voice, able to divine falsehoods  

in the mouths of others, even able to predict  the very future... as if by divine prophecy.  

These are the foundations of a Galactic  Empire, which serves as the macrocosm of this  

story. The big picture here is that,  using these finely-honed human skills,  

great, noble houses were able to  settle and own entire planets,  

over which they constantly bicker. The microcosm here is that all  

of this was made possible... by a  single... little... spice... called  

m lange. An export from a little-known desert  planet out on the edge of the known universe.  

Melange opens the mind; allows humans to tap into  the true height of their potential. It alone makes  

possible what the navigators do, opening humanity  to the wonder of faster-than-light travel...  

among... many other things. Most people... just call it... spice.  

Okay, are you still following? Good. Because all  of that stuff is really setting. Now the story  

really starts. Our hero is a boy named  

Paul Atreides who comes from a great height of  importance. He's the son of a Bene Gesserit,  

the only man ever to learn their ways. He's also  the son of a Duke, who happens to reside over  

one of the greatest noble houses in the galaxy. In  fact, a little too great, as fate would have it.  

Threatened by the influence of House Atreides, the  Emperor contrives a solution to his problem: he  

decides to gift them that little desert planet-the  source of all the spice in the universe: Arrakis,  

also called Dune. It sounds too good to be  true... aaand it most certainly is. Arrakis  

is a trap. Before the emperor made an official  gift of it, it had unofficially been under the  

control of a rivaling noble house, who  were making an exorbitant amount of money  

by monopolizing the planet's spice. Almost  as soon as Paul and his family settle in,  

the betrayal unfolds. With the quiet help of the  Emperor's undefeatable army, the enemy makes quick  

work of the entirety of House Atreides. The  slaughter is decisive, and quite complete...  

Except... for Paul and his mother, who manage to  escape into the vast desert wilderness of Dune.  

This would mean death for anyone  else, but Paul... is no normal kid.  

I mentioned that he was the only man ever  to learn the ways of the Bene Gesserit?  

Well, with their deep knowledge of  selective breeding and social engineering,  

they'd labored for generations to produce a child  who would essentially be their claim to power-a  

human being with such great mental capacity, he  would be Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator all  

in one, able to predict the future with perfect  exactness, as well as access his genetic memory  

to see into the memories of his ancestors. Paul is  this prophesied messiah. And although he does not  

quite understand what that means, he knows it. His journey into the desert is the turning  

point of the story, where we begin to  shift our gaze from all of the complex,  

political machinations, the cultivation of  destined paths and prophesies... to the boy  

himself, and the new world he's arriving in.  Again, the microcosm against the macrocosm.  

Dune is not a gentle place. Everyone knows this. The entire planet is covered in desert.  

Water is the scarcest resource. Get caught out in  the open without the proper protection, and you'll  

shrivel up and die in no time at all. Even worse,  the planet is teeming with massive sandworms,  

big enough to swallow up an entire home and all  the people in it. To outsiders, Dune is nothing  

more than the inconvenient obstacle standing in  the way of the spice that drives the galaxy.  

To the natives-a people known as The Fremen-it's  all one. They live lives outsiders could never  

imagine, riding the sandworms through the desert,  drinking the moisture of their own bodies through  

their ingenious still suits. They take in so much  of the precious spice m lange through the very  

air they breathe and the food they eat, that  it dyes the whites of their eyes a vivid blue  

and fills them with a preternatural prowess  found nowhere else. Though their world is  

taken for a wilderness and they themselves are  taken for savages, nothing could be further from  

the truth. They simply understand and  respect the source of their strength.  

Paul and his mother eventually find their way  through the desert to the Fremen, and soon they  

recognize him for what he is-a messiah, who will  turn Arrakis into the center of a new empire.  

But the path there is not easy. Paul must first  descend from his lofty destiny, his high seat.  

He must cease to be the Duke's son or the promised  messiah and instead learn to be one of the Fremen.  

Rather than an act of domination, the kind we  see the great houses and the empire impose upon  

Arrakis and its people, Paul Atreides, greatest  of them all, must perform an act of submission.  

Only once he humbles himself before the  ways of the people of the spice-eats  

their food, breathes their air, trades  blood with them, raises a family among them,  

learns to ride the great worms himself-does  Paul unlock the true depths of his potential.  

The spice began to change him as soon as he set  foot on the planet, opening up his powerful mind,  

but it takes the wisdom of these desert nomads  for him to become the man he's meant to be.  

When he does finally come into his power,  the Fremen name he chooses for himself  

is among the most moving symbols in the book. Far  from reaching for anything grand or prestigious,  

he affirms his descent and chooses to be  called "Muad'Dib", which means desert mouse.  

And this is what I love about Dune. We continuously see the microcosm compared  

to the macrocosm-Arrakis against the whole  universe, House Atreides against the Empire,  

The Fremen against the constantly-invading noble  Houses, the lone human against the great worm,  

the desert mouse... against the grand scale  of his destiny. But it's a false comparison.  

The dichotomy is not real. Paul shows this when  he acquires the power so many others have reached  

for, again, not through domination-trying to  control things on a macroscopic scale-but through  

submission-descending low enough to understand the  root of things, where the power truly comes from.  

Paul has the vision to see that the microcosm  and the macrocosm are one and the same. You  

cannot hope to control things on a grand scale  if you do not understand their foundations.  

In the end, Paul is able to ransom the entire  universe through his knowledge of the spice  

that makes the current state of mankind possible.  

If the emperor will not surrender his throne to  Paul and The Fremen, he will destroy the source  

of the spice altogether. Mentats, Navigators,  Bene Gesserit-all will go away forever,  

and humanity will descend back into the darkness  from which it came. And so it is that Paul  

Atreides ascends from the lowest of the low-from  the people everyone took to be desert savages-to  

the highest place in the known universe.  One could not be without the other.  

For us writers, this is an amazing example of  theme. Throughout Dune, scale is not just a  

feature; it's a form. Whether he intended to or  not, the author constantly draws our eyes toward  

these comparisons of things large and small. And  since the story is ultimately about exploitative,  

universal institutions being upended by someone  who can see and understand clearly the role of  

the small, all of these comparisons take on a  new weight. Like individual grains of sand swept  

into an unstoppable desert storm, together these  impressions create an effect that's impossible  

to ignore. The longer you read, the smaller  becomes the vast, the larger becomes the small,  

until at last everything meets at the center. Long after his reign, the words of Paul Atreides  

are collected into volumes of scripture-like  texts. And in his advanced wisdom, I think he  

puts all of this quite well. He says, in one of  these books: "There is in all things a pattern  

that is part of our universe. It has symmetry,  elegance, and grace-those qualities you find  

always in that which the true artist captures. You  can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the  

way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch  clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern  

of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in  our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms,  

the dances, the forms that comfort . . ." This is what's so scary about the vast  

potential of mankind to me. You yourselves  are the grains of sand in the storm.  

Together, you achieve truly incredible things...  but from what I've seen, you also have a tendency  

to forget that you do these things... together.  That no matter the scale of your achievements,  

it is nothing without a fundamental appreciation  for the individual pieces which make up the whole.  

Your ambitions so often crush the foundations  that makes them achievable in the first place,  

and that is a little scary to think about. Remember, there is a pattern in all things.  

The macrocosm must respect and understand its  microcosms in order to survive. When you aspire  

and when you create... be sure not to forget. And... that would be where the video ends...  

except... I have more to say. We actually made  an entire second video to get into some of the  

weird... pseudo-fantasy-magic-sci-fi in the  setting of Dune. All these mystics and prophecies  

and... yet... it still feels like science fiction.  Why? It's a really fun topic, but it also just  

seems too small and niche for Youtube. I'm pretty  confident that if we tried to upload it here,  

the algorithm would want nothing to do with  it. Thankfully, there is a place where we can  

share that stuff. Where we don't have to worry  about what we upload and we can really just  

share... whatever we want! You can watch it over on our  

creator-owned streaming platform, Nebula. Youtube is a weird place for educational content.  

It's not exactly made for honesty and accuracy,  there's a huge demand to just be click-baity  

and eyecatching all the time. Sometimes... you  just want to share some cool information without  

sweating about performance. So, a bunch of us  educational creators got together and made our  

own platform where we don't have to worry about  all of that. We upload what we want, how we want.  

You can find all our videos there ad-free, and a  ton of content we couldn't otherwise upload here,  

including the companion video for this one.  It's so fun just to cut loose and share what  

we feel like sharing over there. And we're not  the only ones. The same is true for so... many...  

other... amazing creators. It's a safe haven  for the material we wish we could share here.  

And the best part is that you don't even quite  have to pay for Nebula if you don't want to.  

You can actually get it for free along with  five other streaming services when you sign  

up for the Curiosity Stream Smart Bundle. Here's how it works: if you sign up for a year  

of Curiosity Stream, which is, like, the best  documentary streaming service out there, easily  

better than Netflix and all the others-you'll  also get access to five others. Nebula, which  

is where we host all our additional content with  all our creator friends; One Day University, which  

basically lets you sit in on lectures given by the  world's most beloved professors every single day;  

Topic, a boundary-pushing streaming platform full  of thrillers, mystery shows, noir, and drama;  

Tastemade, which lets you live adventurously  through the travel and food shows; even SOMM TV,  

for lovers of wine and fine cuisine.  That last one really shows you the  

breadth of this thing, it covers everything. So to put that simply: sign up for the Curiosity  

Stream smart bundle and, in addition to our bonus  content on Nebula, you'll also get pretty much  

endless additional content for all your different  interests. Normally the package costs $69.99 for  

an annual subscription, which is already LESS  THAN $10 a month! But for Tale Foundry fans,  

they've decided to make it even cheaper. Right  now, you can get all six streaming platforms  

for only $39.89 a year! That comes out to  less than $3.50 a month! It's a ridiculous  

price for a one streaming service, let alone SIX!  Frankly, I'm not really sure how they can afford  

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(or go to CuriosityStream.com/talefoundrysb)  and use the code "talefoundrysb" to get access  

to all of this for less than $3.50 a month! And if you do go watch the companion video for  

this on Nebula, be sure to come back here and  let us know what you think! We'll be reading  

the comments to see how the new ideas in that  video inspired you as well!