Podcasts about Dune

Abu and Leo dig into "Greenslaves" and "Occupation Force," two stories Herbert wrote in the decade before Dune made him famous, to see what they reveal about the mind behind the books. "Greenslaves," published in Amazing in March 1965 and later expanded into the novel The Green Brain, follows a Brazilian extermination program built to wipe out every last insect, and the swarm that has learned to disguise itself to survive it. In "Occupation Force," published in Fantastic in 1955, a U.S. general readies the nukes against an alien ship parked over Washington, only for its ambassador to deliver a reveal about exactly how long humans have actually been under alien rule. This episode contains SPOILERS for Frank Herbert's short stories Greenslaves and Occupation Force. There are NO SPOILERS for the Dune novels. SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: patreon.com/gomjabbar Say thank you with a tip: buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lina has surfaced from the liminal space of postpartum to get on the mic and share a Very Kinky Birth Story with you. No it was not a sexy, orgasmic birth but rather kink in the way we practice it around here — an all-encompassing way of holding your tenderest parts through all the huge shit life throws at you. Listen for the many analogues between births and scenes, lessons learned in the birth pool, and, as always, mantras for being kinder to ourselves along the way. PATREON BECKONS… BABY - $6/month - Get access to the Discord community and weekly ad free podcast COLLAR CLUB - $11/month - All of the above as well as the archive of Deep Dive interviews and other premium audio like kinky move club and more BFF - $100/month - Also get an included individual or couple's office hours session with Lina SUBMIT YOUR Q'S HERE - WE WANNA HEAR YOUR SECRETS ASK A SUB OFFICE HOURS - BE SEEN AND HEARD FOR THE KINKY RACCOON YOU REALLY ARE SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTACK YOU DIRTY FREAKS Get 20% off your order at http://www.momotaroapotheca.com with code LINADUNE Twitter | @Lina.Dune | @askasub2.0 CREDITS Created, Hosted, Produced and Edited by Lina Dune With Additional Support from Mr. Dune Artwork by Kayleigh Denner Music by Dan Molad

Seth takes a closer look at Senate Republicans humiliating themselves in a train wreck hearing where they tried and failed to catch former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a gotcha moment.Then, Florence Pugh talks about filming her new show East of Eden, starring in Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday and appearing as her Marvel character Yelena Belova in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David Long returns to the show for a Fall Oscars Betting Special Episode, and we discuss the gambling lines and markets for Best Picture, the four acting categories and Best Director. Should you pay the vig on these favorites? Should you bet more longshots? And will The Odyssey reign supreme on the 99th Oscars Sunday or will challengers rise up? INTRO: David Long's Walk Hard Moment - Top of the Show Mike explains how the betting lines and +/- numbers work - 3:23 BEST PICTURE: Why did the lines come out so late this year? Did The Odyssey cause this? - 5:30 The Odyssey vs La Bola Negra - 16:10 Dune Part III is looming. Could it contend? - 20:39 Wild Horse Nine's candidacy & when to sprinkle - 26:01 Digger's drift & the rest of the Best Picture field - 28:52 LEAD ACTOR - 40:45 Michael B. Jordan was 40/1 at Christmas last year. So will there be another longshot victory here in Lead Actor? Or will Scott, Malkovich or Damon likely take it? LEAD ACTRESS - 53:24 Is this a coronation for Julianne Moore once again SUPPORTING ACTRESS - 1:00:10 Do we buy Anne Hathaway as the favorite or are we tempted to maybe more than sprinkle? SUPPORTING ACTOR - 1:08:02 Where's the value here? Do we see Giammatti taking it all the way? Do we get another repeat winner? Or are there some unknown powerhouse performances laying in wait? DIRECTOR - 1:15:11 Best Director cases for and against Nolan, Villeneuve and the Javier's - SPECIALS - 1:22:02 Odyssey Betting Specials Galore, including wins and nominations tallies to bet on. OUTRO: The Words of Wisdom today are to follow David Long on X and Instagram for all his coverage of Awards Season betting. https://x.com/1DavidLong https://www.instagram.com/davidlong1385?stkn=dXF3bG10dmhkdHhh&utm_source=qr And stay tuned for all our upcoming coverage of new releases like Digger, upcoming film festivals, etc. https://linktr.ee/mikemikeandoscar

Today we cover the recent drama and my next analysis of Dune 3: Children of Dune. Superchats at any time here: https://streamlabs.com/jaydyer/tip Sponsor - Use Promo Code Jay30 https://thepapabear.com/collections/shop-all Merch https://dyermerch.store Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnt7Iy8GlmdPwy_Tzyx93bA/join Song: https://youtu.be/vfaOdd7Q3ss Support my work via Bitcoin here! bc1q07n9qqsvcx33yz6z8xj6meupqxxug9n55zzhqd Get started with Bitcoin at River using my referral: https://river.com/invite?r=E2N63TGXBQ Philosophy Course is here: https://marketplace.autonomyagora.com/philosophy101 Set up recurring Choq subscription with the discount code JAY60LIFE for 60% off now https://choq.com Subscribe to my site here: https://jaysanalysis.com/membership-account/membership-levels/ Music by Dr Evo the Producer, Jay Dyer and Amid the Ruins 1453 https://www.youtube.com/@amidtheruinsOVERHAULBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/jay-sanalysis--1423846/support.

This week beloved actor Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet) talks to Ted Danson about his creative relationship with David Lynch, how he got cast in Dune, the process of writing his new memoir “Fictional Selves,” bridging generational divides on his podcast, and more. Like watching your podcasts? Visit https://youtube.com/teamcoco to see full episodes. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Content creatorinn Alex Michael Green Svansson (Alex from Iceland) kíkti til Hafsteins til að ræða sérstaklega The Odyssey og stöðuna á Marvel í dag.Í þættinum ræða strákarnir meðal annars Spider-Man: Brand New Day, hversu vel The Odyssey heppnaðist, hvort Avengers: Doomsday geti bjargað Marvel heiminum, hvort Dune 3 verði betri en númer 2 og margt, margt fleira.00:00 - Intro00:15 - Coco Coast drykkurinn05:34 - The Odyssey1:00:00 - Brand New Day og Doomsday2:03:31 - Hvað klikkaði með Blade myndina?2:15:46 - The Batman Part II2:22:27 - Dune og Obsession

Listen and subscribe to One More Question with Zach Baron here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠swap.fm/l/gq-omq-feeddrop In this episode of GQ's One More Question, Zach Baron sits down with cult icon Kyle MacLachlan to chart the surreal highs and lows of his four-decade career following the release of his memoir, Fictional Selves. MacLachlan traces his unusual trajectory from an unknown theatre actor in Seattle directly to starring in David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune, through Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, to becoming an ensemble anchor in shows like Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Fallout. Reflecting on his special bond with the legendary director, MacLachlan recalls Lynch's total devotion to the artistic process: "David was someone who created something every day. He got up and he made something... there was no material or medium that he wouldn't create with." One More Question is GQ's weekly video interview series hosted by Zach Baron, pairing him with the most compelling figures across sports, film, and culture for intimate, wide-ranging conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No spoilers at all in this episode.Join the Hugonauts book club on discordOr you can watch our episodes on YouTube if you prefer video BOOKS FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE: Doomsday Book by Connie WillisThe Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette KowalAmong Others by Jo WaltonBlackout/All Clear by Connie WillisThe Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael ChabonThe Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. ClarkeRingworld by Larry NivenDune by Frank HerbertNetwork Effect by Martha WellsForever Peace by Joe HaldemanDreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyreGateway by Frederik PohlAmerican Gods by Neil GaimanPaladin of Souls by Lois McMaster BujoldRendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. ClarkeThe Gods Themselves by Isaac AsimovThe Stone Sky by N. K. JemisinStartide Rising by David BrinThe Windup Girl by Paolo BacigalupiAncillary Justice by Ann LeckieSpeaker for the Dead by Orson Scott CardFlowers for Algernon by Daniel KeyesNeuromancer by William GibsonThe Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le GuinEnder's Game by Orson Scott CardThe Forever War by Joe HaldemanThe Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Thanks to our sponsor, Sci-Fi Shorts! The stories that built science fiction's golden age were short, complete worlds in a single sitting. Sci-Fi Shorts brings that tradition back: brand-new science fiction and fantasy flash fiction, every story a thousand words or fewer, paired with original artwork in classic pulp-magazine style: painted covers, raygun rockets, swords and sorcery. It's made for readers with more curiosity than time: a complete story over your morning coffee. Head to https://scifishorts.co/hugonauts and use code HUGONAUTS50 for fifty percent off any subscription. If you want to jump around, here are the timestamps for the episode: 00:00 - Intro 00:40 - #27 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 02:20 - #26 The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal 04:44 - Sponsor: scifishorts.co 05:30 - #20 The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon 07:06 - #20 Among Others by Jo Walton 09:01 - #20 Ringworld by Larry Niven 10:55 - #20 Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis 12:55 - #20 Dune by Frank Herbert 14:02 - #20 The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke 16:42 - #16 Network Effect by Martha Wells 18:00 - #16 Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman 19:51 - #16 Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre 22:05 - #16 Gateway by Frederik Pohl 25:33 - #15 American Gods by Neil Gaiman 28:00 - #12 Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold 29:45 - #12 Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke 32:15 - #12 The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov 34:00 - #10 The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin 36:18 - #10 Startide Rising by David Brin 37:32 - #9 The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 39:34 - Secondary Sponsor: Juris Ex Machina by John W. Maly 39:50 - #5 Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 40:58 - #5 Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card 43:03 - #5 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 44:24 - #5 Neuromancer by William Gibson 46:12 - #4 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 47:26 - #1 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin 51:10 - #1 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card 52:08 - #1 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman 53:45 - Outro / Summary

Η εκπομπή της Δευτέρας 28/9/26 με συζήτηση για τα Silent Hill: Townfall, Dune Awakening, Control Resonant, πρώτες εντυπώσεις από το Gears of War Eday, σχολιασμό επικαιρότητας και μια ματιά στα παιχνίδια που έρχονται τον Οκτώβριο.Μπορείτε να υποστηρίξετε το GameOver.gr κάνοντας donate στο παρακάτω link:https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=PZGZV6CJBD7UJ* -Κάντε subscribe στο κανάλι GameOverGR Plus στο YouTube https://tinyurl.com/GameOverGRplus* -Επισκεφθείτε το site μας στο https://gameover.gr/* -Βρείτε μας στο Discord https://discord.gg/YpGqTf4* -Βρείτε μας στο facebook https://bit.ly/2EaKvAY* -Βρείτε μας στο instagram https://bit.ly/2L8uBsc* -Βρείτε μας στο twitter https://bit.ly/2Ep0FYkΜουσικό κομμάτι εισαγωγής:In Your Dreams by Blue Ohio Railroad Gang

En las sombras de Betara, la Sección Tres vigila cada movimiento. Mientras Arak abre un camino desde las alturas, Murbella enfrenta a un enemigo que parecía conocer sus pasos antes de que fueran dados. Aun así, una inquietante certeza permanece: alguien lleva observando toda la operación… y todo continúa según lo previsto.--Aurore Polaris es un actual play de Dune: Aventuras en el Imperio, un juego editado en español por Nosolorol.

MacLachlan was just 23 when he auditioned for Lynch's adaptation of Dune. The two would go on to work together on the cult classics Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. “The worlds that [Lynch] creates are real in his mind — they exist,” he tells Terry Gross. MacLachlan's new memoir is Fictional Selves.Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews the novel American Hagwon, by Min Jin Lee. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Dolina: Geol. Depresión más o menos profunda y de paredes muy inclinadas, típica de los terrenos calizos. Picacho: Punta aguda, a modo de pico, que tienen algunos montes y riscos. Escucha las partes anteriores de este audiolibro clicando aquí: https://www.ivoox.com/audiolibro-creativo-dune-frank-herbert_bk_list_11361275_1.html

Paul goes back to the Duniverse and for the first time ever talks about a book other than Dune. In this episode, Paul analyzes the complex sequel Dune Messiah, inspiration for Denis Villeneuve's upcoming film Dune 3.Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah. New York, Ace. 1969.

Abu and Leo finish their Lost Entries run through Carl B. Yoke's psychology manuscripts, uncovered at the Fullerton Archives. This week they read two unpublished Dune Encyclopedia entries on the psychology of the Sardaukar and the Harkonnens. The Sardaukar entry centers on the Dhama ti Kama, the corps' secret training manual, which Lady Margot Fenring somehow stole for the Bene Gesserit. Its author, the Sardau shaman Kiwan Kalama, lays out a Freudian program for turning children into warriors, and it is every bit as grim as that sounds. The Harkonnen entry introduces Dr. Amertine Moritani Harkonnen, a granddaughter of Shaddam IV who married into the family after the Baron's death and made him the subject of her Study of the Dark Side. This episode contains SPOILERS for Children of Dune. SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: patreon.com/gomjabbar Say thank you with a tip: buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feral Historian joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on science fiction as a mirror of cultural fears, political myths, and human nature. We explore Dune, Star Wars, Warhammer, cyberpunk, and other stories through the lens of power, progress, civilization, and meaning.FH: https://youtu.be/b08qYzDR2XUhttps://www.amazon.com/Nintis-Gate-Matthias-Pierce-ebook/dp/B0CYXH9BWDhttps://substack.com/profile/140704108-feral-historianFox N' Sons: use code JBurdenJ: https://findmyfrens.net/jburden/Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j.burdenSubstack: https://substack.com/@jburdenPatreon: https://patreon.com/JburdenGUMROAD: https://radiofreechicago.gumroad.com/l/ucducAxios: https://axios-remote-fitness-coaching.kit.com/affiliateETH: 0xB06aF86d23B9304818729abfe02c07513e68Cb70BTC: 33xLknSCeXFkpFsXRRMqYjGu43x14X1iEt

On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we're doubling the usual number of speakers for a two-on-two battle of wits between Joe and Greg of the band Protomartyr and Jeremy and Brohan of Kiwi Jr. They are all pals, and there was sass exchanged. Protomartyr is a Detroit band that's been around for about 15 years, sharpening their literate post-punk attacks over the course of seven great albums—a number that includes the brand new Hotel Usona, which offers a layered look at the depressing times we're living through. The focus as always is on Joe Casey's words and speak-sing: His voice has been a source of inspiration to other bands, to put it nicely, over the past decade. For Hotel Usona, Protomartyr linked up with producer Dave Fridmann, who's made classic records with the Flaming Lips and MGMT, among many others, and he helped them create something almost overwhelmingly big and pointed. It can be a lot to take in, but it's rewarding. Check out “Sounds We Cannot Hear” from Hotel Usona right here. The other half of today's conversation, Jeremy Gaudet and Brohan Moore from the band Kiwi Jr., play decidedly catchy indie-pop that's tickled fans of Pavement for years, though Kiwi leans toward the poppier side of things than that comparison might imply. The Canadian band just released their fourth album, though it's their first for the legendary K Records label. For my money, Blowin' Up is their best yet: It's smart and arch and easy to sing along with, but it's also fun to dive in and parse what Jeremy Gaudet is singing about. Check out “Photos of The Reenactment” from Blowin' Up right here. In this funny chat, these four dudes—Jeremy and Brohan representing Kiwi Jr, Joe and guitarist Greg Ahee on the Protomartyr side—talk about old band photos, the ways their songs come together, and they reveal a secret about Joe Perry's guitar. That's Joe Perry from Aerosmith, not Steve Perry from Journey, as you'll learn. It's a fun one, enjoy. 0:00 Intro 02:54 Start of conversation 03:21 On Protomartyr's new album, if they like Dune, The Odyssey, and bad tv 07:27 On album covers and The Eagles  10:34 On band photos and wigs 12:44 On the gap between Kiwi Jr's records, delivery dates, and the recording process 15:46 On Joe Perry's guitar, and playing other people's guitars 19:09 On lyrics and poetry 21:11 On “sing talking,” rapping, Insane Clown Posse, and Danny Brown's green room 24:16 On Dude Wipes and full-body deodorant for butts 26:53 On recording studios, the perfect milkshake, and Canadian billboards 29:51 On Bulk Barn, off-brand candies, buffets, and Big Boys 33:16 On collaborating together, song mixes, J Mascis, and more on Big Boy 35:30 Playing instruments vs. lyrics and vocals, and coming up with song titles 40:35 On working with producer David Fridmann, writing the music for Protomartyr's album, and demoing with MIDI Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Joe, Greg, Jeremy, and Brohan for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform, and check out all the great stuff at Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time! Find more illuminating podcasts on the ⁠⁠⁠Talkhouse Podcast Network⁠⁠⁠. Visit ⁠⁠⁠talkhouse.com⁠⁠⁠ to read essays, reviews, and more. Sign up for our newsletter. Follow @talkhouse on ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Twitter (X)⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Threads⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Facebook, and Letterboxd.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Steve sits down with filmmaker, professor, TEDx director, and author Don Schechter to discuss his science fiction techno thriller Ascendants.Don shares the remarkable 20 year journey that took Ascendants from an idea for a film to a series of short films and eventually a novel. They explore the book's collision of science and belief, what happens when technology divides society into those who can "ascend" and those who cannot, and why the story feels particularly timely in the age of AI and enormously powerful technology companies.The conversation also dives into the realities of publishing and book marketing, finding the right audience, the influence of Dune, Star Trek, Arrival, Children of Men and other science fiction, and Don's work in filmmaking, education, and TEDx.And, of course, we discover one of the strangest pizza-and-Coke combinations we've heard on the show.Find Don: https://ascendantsbook.com/Page Chewing BlogPage Chewing ForumSupport Page Chewing on PatreonAffiliate Links that support the show:Audible Standard Free Trial: https://amzn.to/4z1iKnsAudible Standard Monthly Membership: https://amzn.to/3S6vaddKindle Unlimited Free Trial: https://amzn.to/4wqkYdDAmazon Prime Free Trial: https://amzn.to/3UptxI9Join Captivate.fmSend a message via SpeakPipe

Good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you maybe and welcome to an Extra interviewof the Directed by Dean podcast. Today I have a guy who has done it all he's composed, he's performed, he's directed, he's acted, he's wrote & he's a producer now. you cna see his tv series Children of Dune now on Amazon Prime & you will be able to see the fruits of that series Dune Part 3 the week before christmas Ladies and gentlemen, John Harrison

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villain-Venice-Steampunk-Adventure-Expanded/dp/B0GYVW1ZM3?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE Project Hail Mary is a 2026 science fiction film produced and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and written by Drew Goddard, based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. It stars Ryan Gosling, who also produced the film, as Ryland Grace, and Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, and Lionel Boyce play supporting roles. The story follows Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who awakens aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. Pre-production began in 2020, before Weir's novel was published. Filming took place throughout 2024 in the United Kingdom, both on location and on sets. All scenes aboard the spacecraft Hail Mary were filmed on a practical set that was constructed for the film. Project Hail Mary premiered in London on March 9, 2026, and was released in the United States by Amazon MGM Studios on March 20, with Sony Pictures Releasing International releasing in other territories. It received positive reviews, with praise for Lord and Miller's direction, Gosling's performance, the character of Rocky, as well as the humor, themes and visuals. It was a commercial success, grossing over $685 million worldwide and becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2026. Plot In the near future, middle school teacher and former molecular biologist Ryland Grace wakes up from an induced coma on the interstellar spacecraft Hail Mary, suffering from amnesia. Grace learns that he is the sole survivor of a three-person crew that was traveling towards the Tau Ceti system, 11.9 light-years from Earth. In a series of flashbacks, Grace recalls that scientists discovered a "Petrova line" of infrared light stretching from the Sun to Venus; an alien microbe in the line, dubbed "astrophage", was proliferating on the Sun's surface, dimming the Sun at a rate that would cause catastrophic global cooling within thirty years. The head of the Petrova Taskforce, Eva Stratt, recruited Grace to study it due to his background in speculative astrobiology. Grace experimented on a sample and discovered that astrophage was composed of unicellular organisms that absorb electromagnetic radiation from the Sun and expel it for propulsion. Grace joined Stratt's Project Hail Mary, an international "long-shot" mission to send a crewed spacecraft to Tau Ceti, the only star in Earth's solar neighborhood not occluded by astrophage. The flight to Tau Ceti would be a suicide mission, as the ship could only carry enough fuel for a one-way trip; any findings would have to return to Earth in smaller space probes. In the present, Grace encounters an alien spacecraft that docks with the Hail Mary. It is made of a solid form of xenon, which Grace dubs "xenonite". The ship's occupant is a rock-like, five-legged alien from Erid, a planet in the 40 Eridani A system. Grace names the alien "Rocky", deduces that Eridians "see" via echolocation, and creates a machine translation system to interpret Rocky's musical language into English. Rocky is a mechanical engineer and the sole survivor of the Eridians' mission to save their own star from astrophage infection. Grace and Rocky agree to work together, and become close friends. As neither can survive in the other's atmosphere, Rocky works aboard the Hail Mary inside a pressurized ball of xenonite. Grace and Rocky study the Petrova line of the planet Tau Ceti e, which Grace names "Adrian",{{cite web |url=https://www.techradar.com/streaming/entertainment/project-hail-mary-ending-explained |title=''Project Hail Mary'' Ending Explained: What happens to Ryland Grace and Rocky, will there be a sequel, and more on Ryan Gosling's new sci-fi movie |last=Power |first=Tom |website=[[TechRadar]] |date=March 20, 2026 |access-date=May 26, 2026 |archive-date=March 21, 2026 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20260321104440/https://www.techradar.com/streaming/entertainment/project-hail-mary-ending-explained |url-status=live}}"}},"i":0}}]}">[a] and discovers that the line hosts an entire microbial biosphere. Rocky theorizes that microbial organisms in Adrian's atmosphere are consuming the astrophage, keeping the population in check. Learning that Grace cannot return home, Rocky offers to share some of his own ship's astrophage fuel with the Hail Mary. Grace remembers that an astrophage explosion killed the original crew's science officers. With no time to train replacements, Stratt asked Grace to join the mission. During a risky maneuver to gather the astrophage predator from Adrian's atmosphere, a fuel leak causes the Hail Mary to spin uncontrollably, rendering Grace unconscious. Rocky breaks out of his ball to save Grace but is severely injured. While Rocky recovers, Grace studies the captured astrophage predator, dubbing it "taumoeba"[b] and selectively breeding it to survive the nitrogen in Venus's atmosphere. Rocky revives, and the two celebrate their success; Grace recalls that he fearfully refused to join the Hail Mary crew, but Stratt had him drugged and put aboard the ship anyway, believing he was the only one capable of completing the mission. Rocky and Grace say their goodbyes and begin their journeys back home. Shortly thereafter, Grace discovers that the taumoeba has evolved to escape its xenonite breeding tanks and is starting to consume Hail Mary's astrophage fuel. Grace stops the taumoeba leak, but realizes that Rocky's ship, being entirely made of xenonite, will have no way to contain the taumoeba; it will eat all of Rocky's fuel, stranding him and dooming Erid. Grace decides to use his remaining fuel to rescue Rocky and the Eridians rather than return home, and sends his video logs and taumoeba samples to Earth via the probes. Stratt and her team receive the probes and use the taumoeba to cure the Sun's astrophage infection. Meanwhile, on Erid, Grace lives in an Earth-like biodome the Eridians have constructed for him. Rocky informs him that Eridian scientists can prepare the Hail Mary for the return voyage to Earth. Grace ponders the news before beginning another day of teaching science to eager Eridian children. Cast Ryan Gosling, who portrays Dr. Ryland Grace, also served as a producer on the film Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher and former molecular biologist on a mission to save humanity[7] Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, the head of the international task force behind Project Hail Mary[8] James Ortiz as Rocky, an alien Grace encounters on his journey.[9] The character was effected through a puppet controlled by a team of five puppeteers led by Ortiz, dubbed the "Rockyteers", with Ortiz also providing the artificial voice assigned to him[10] Ortiz also has an uncredited role as a television presenter[11] Lionel Boyce as Carl, a member of security personnel Ken Leung as Yao Li-Jie, the Chinese commander of the Hail Mary spacecraft Milana Vayntrub as Olesya Ilyukhina, a Russian engineer on board the Hail Mary Priya Kansara as the voice of Mary, the Hail Mary's onboard computer[9] Malachi Kirby as Martin Dubois, the original scientist of the Hail Mary[12] Liz Kingsman as Annie Shapiro, a backup scientist of the Hail Mary Mia Soteriou as Dr. Browne Orion Lee as Dr. Li Michelle Greenidge as Chimamanda Additionally, Eunice Huthart (the film's stunt coordinator), Damien de Froberville (co-president of Sony Pictures Animation), Ray Porter (the audiobook narrator), and Meryl Streep provided the rejected alternative voices for Rocky.[13][14] Production Development In March 2020, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was nearing a deal to acquire adaptation rights to the then-upcoming Andy Weir novel Project Hail Mary (2021), with Ryan Gosling set to star in and produce the film.[7] The rights for the novel were acquired for $3 million.[15] In May 2020, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were hired to direct and produce the film.[16] Due to Lord and Miller being unable to work on the screenplay because of commitments to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), Drew Goddard (who previously adapted Weir's 2011 novel The Martian into a 2015 film) was hired the following month to write the screenplay.[17][18] In April 2024, Amazon, which acquired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2022,[19] revealed a possible 2026 release window for the film.[20] In May 2024, Sandra Hüller joined the cast, with Greig Fraser hired as cinematographer.[8] Milana Vayntrub joined the cast the following month.[21] Filming The film's crew, actors Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller, writer Drew Goddard, author/producer Andy Weir, and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller visiting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on February 25, 2026 Principal photography began on June 3, 2024, in the United Kingdom and wrapped on October 26, 2024.[22][23] Filming took place at Shepperton Studios.[24] Location filming occurred at The Hemel Hempstead School, the South Parade Pier in Portsmouth,[25] the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge,[26] and Durdle Door and Man o' War Cove in Dorset.[27][28][29] The film was "filmed for IMAX" by using large-sensor Arri Alexa 65 cameras, which provide 6.5K (20 MP) of resolution, with an aspect ratio of 2.1:1,[30] utilizing the whole sensor with anamorphic lenses rotated by 90 degrees to achieve the IMAX standard 1.43:1 aspect ratio. For regular presentations, the common 2:1 format (Univisium) was derived by cropping the top and bottom of the IMAX image. The film switches between taller and wider aspect ratios. When a scene takes place in the present, a taller aspect ratio is used—1.43:1 for IMAX 15/70 mm or Dual Laser, 1.85:1 for Xenon or Single Laser, and 2.00:1 for non-IMAX presentations. For scenes in the past, an aspect ratio of 2.39:1, a standard ratio for anamorphic process cinematography, was achieved with the regular use of anamorphic lenses.[31] In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller mentioned that no chroma keying was used in the film, with the entire set being shot practically.[32] Fraser had previously collaborated with visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert on the Dune films; their disdain for green and blue screens, which impacts lighting and visuals through color spill, led them to use blackouts and grey screens on the film instead.[33] Miller had previously stated that VFX was used to depict the spaceship from the outside, while shots of Gosling in space were shot against a black or varying color backdrop.[34] NASA provided support through both the input of scientific experts and astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren visiting Gosling during filming to share insights on human spaceflight.[35] Post-production The visual effects were developed by Framestore (which also collaborated on the film adaptation of The Martian),[36] Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Sony Pictures Imageworks, BUF and Wylie Co. VFX, with Mags Sarnowska serving as visual effects supervisor alongside Lambert.[37] While puppeteer Ortiz voiced Rocky during filming with Gosling, it was initially thought that a more high-profile actor would replace him. However, Lord and Miller felt that Ortiz's performance could not be improved upon during screenings of the film.[38] Lord praised the collaboration between practical and visual effects in the creation of the character Rocky's performance: Rocky was built and designed by the legendary Neal Scanlan and his creature shop and is performed by puppeteering legend James Ortiz and his team, who were on set with Ryan in every scene. Rocky's performance is a beautiful collaboration between James and the other Rockyteers on set and the wonderful animators at Framestore led by the funny soulful Arslan Elver.[39] Miller noted that by the end of the film shots with Rocky were about 50% VFX animation and 50% puppetry.[40] The digitally shot and produced film was transferred to film stock and then re-digitized to achieve the "warmth" of analog film.[31] The initial test screening of the film was 3 hours and 45 minutes long, and was cut down to the final length due to feedback from the screenings.[41] Joel Negron served as film editor.[42] Music Main article: Project Hail Mary (soundtrack) It was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that Daniel Pemberton would score the film. Pemberton worked with Lord and Miller on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and its 2023 sequel, which they produced. This is the first film directed by Lord and Miller to not be scored by Mark Mothersbaugh.[43] The score, consisting of 38 tracks, was released digitally on March 20, 2026.[44] The film also includes fourteen other songs, including "Sign of the Times" by Harry Styles, "Two of Us" by the Beatles, "Rainbows" by Dennis Wilson and "Gracias a la vida" sung by Mercedes Sosa.[45] Marketing The film's title on the marquee of Moreland Theater in Portland, Oregon in March 2026 The first trailer was released on June 30, 2025.[46] It was the most-viewed trailer for any original film in the first week of its release, accumulating 400 million views globally.[47] Lego released a model of the Hail Mary spacecraft on March 1, 2026, as part of the Lego Icons series.[48] Release Theatrical Project Hail Mary was released on March 20, 2026, in 4,007 theaters by Amazon MGM Studios in the United States and Canada, and Sony Pictures Releasing International in all other territories.[5] It was also released in select IMAX theaters, with a 1.43:1 aspect ratio.{{cite web |last=D'Alessandro |first=Anthony |title=Ryan Gosling, Lord & Miller Amazon MGM Studios Space Adventure ''Project Hail Mary'' Sets Launch for Spring 2026 |date=April 18, 2024 |website=[[Deadline Hollywood]] |url=https://deadline.com/2024/04/ryan-gosling-project-hail-mary-release-date-1235889844/ |access-date=April 18, 2024 |archive-date=April 19, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240419002823/https://deadline.com/2024/04/ryan-gosling-project-hail-mary-release-date-1235889844/ |url-status=live}}{{cite web |last=D'Alessandro |first=Anthony |title=Amazon MGM Studios & Sony Pictures Ink Multi-Year International Theatrical Distribution Deal |date=June 27, 2025 |website=[[Deadline Hollywood]] |url=https://deadline.com/2025/06/amazon-mgm-studios-sony-international-distribution-1236444141/ |access-date=July 1, 2025 |archive-date=June 27, 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250627130223/https://deadline.com/2025/06/amazon-mgm-studios-sony-international-distribution-1236444141/ |url-status=live}}{{cite web |last=Gray |first=Jeremy |date=June 30, 2025 |title=''Project Hail Mary'' Film Adaptation Looks Like a Visual Feast |url=https://petapixel.com/2025/06/30/project-hail-mary-film-adaptation-looks-like-a-visual-feast/ |access-date=July 1, 2025 |website=[[PetaPixel]] |archive-date=July 12, 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250712225014/https://petapixel.com/2025/06/30/project-hail-mary-film-adaptation-looks-like-a-visual-feast/ |url-status=live |language=en-US}}{{cite web |last=Kim |first=Anny |date=December 16, 2025 |title=Everything to know about ''Project Hail Mary'', coming soon from Amazon MGM Studios |url=https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/project-hail-mary-ryan-gosling-amazon-mgm-studios |access-date=December 31, 2025 |publisher=About Amazon |language=en-US}}"}},"i":0}}]}">[c] Home media The film was released on digital streaming platforms on May 12, 2026.[53] It began streaming on the MGM+ subscription streaming service and Prime Video on June 18 and July 3, respectively.[54][55][56] It was also released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD on August 11, 2026, by Alliance Entertainment.[57] Following the standard disc release will be an Amazon exclusive three-disc SteelBook gift set, scheduled for October 13.[57] It will include a third disc with the film in its full 1.43:1 IMAX ratio, plus additional bonus material and a collectible booklet.[citation needed] Reception Box office As of September 11, 2026 Project Hail Mary has grossed $344.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $341.2 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $685.3 million.[4][5] In the United States and Canada, Project Hail Mary was released on March 20, 2026, and was projected to gross $63–65 million in North America from 4,007 theaters in its opening weekend.[58] Initially, publications estimated that the film would gross $45–55 million.[59] After grossing $31 million on opening day, including $12 million in previews, the film debuted to $80.6 million in the United States and Canada,[60] and $60.4 million overseas for a worldwide total of $141 million,[61] becoming Amazon MGM Studios' biggest debut to date.[60] In its second weekend, the film made $54.1 million (a drop of 32.8%), remaining in first.[62] It was surpassed by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in its third weekend, grossing $31.7 million.[63] In Japan, the film became the highest-grossing foreign film of 2026 in terms of box office revenue attendance on its first day of release.[64] Critical response The performances of Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, and James Ortiz were praised by critics On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 430 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "A visually dazzling space odyssey that's carried along effortlessly by the gravitational pull of Ryan Gosling at his most winning, Project Hail Mary is a near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart."[65] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 60 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[66] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an "A" on an A+ to F scale.[67] The film received an average rating of 8 out of 10 from Cine21.[68] G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it "a masterpiece of a family popcorn movie, with eye-popping hand-crafted production design and outstanding creature design and puppetry work."[69] Randy Myers of The Mercury News gave the film a 3.5/4 rating, writing: "While you can't help but marvel at the visuals and applaud the commitment of Gosling's endearing performance, what also makes Project Hail Mary so gosh darn lovable is that it imbues us with child-like wonder from scenes that pay homage to such classics as E.T., Flight of the Navigator and, yes, Rocky."[70] Cosplay of Ryland Grace with a fan-created Rocky prop at NärCon 2026 Robbie Collin of The Telegraph concluded in his review: "Does it have many original ideas of its own? Perhaps not. But its greatest hits mixtape of other people's has been compiled with such flair – as well as a sound comprehension of why they worked so well the first time – that it's hard not to be swept up regardless."[71] Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail shared a similar opinion, writing: "At almost every turn, Project Hail Mary attempts to convince you that it is groundbreaking, innovative filmmaking. But in actuality, the movie lands as a grand act of cinematic recycling – the fusing together of familiar, comforting bits and pieces into something determined to please crowds and warm hearts."[72] Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "While Stanley Kubrick's unsentimental 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired the iPad, Lord and Miller want to inspire a better version of us."[73] Brian Truitt of USA Today gave the film a four out of four rating, writing that "Project Hail Mary is one of those old-school popcorn movies with big ideas, the kind of film that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas would have made back in the day and kids of all ages would have obsessed over and bought the toys."[74] Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect wrote that the film portrayed a "shockingly realistic view of heroism" and was "one of the rare films that is quite a bit better than the book".[75] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote: "Gosling is an effortlessly charming screen player, and he keeps it watchable, though the film itself has moments of dullness and a sort of puppyish silliness [...] Perhaps refreshingly, the film doesn't aim for the stunned awe and rapture of, say, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar or even Jon Spaihts' underrated Passengers, but it does have the classic sci-fi spacecraft tropes: the huge, mysterious architecture with its vertiginous tunnels in which legacy pop music is played to soothe the inhabitants."[76] GVSU anthropology professor Deana L. Weibel praised Grace's intellectual humility in the film.[77] Nicholas Barber of the BBC declared it one of the best films of 2026, writing: Project Hail Mary is an unusual science-fiction blockbuster in that it's mostly about people using their brains to solve problems [...] Does that approach sound a bit dry and academic? If so, rest assured that Project Hail Mary is touching and inspiring – and surprisingly fun [...] it's directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who take a complicated, potentially bleak narrative and make it as fast-paced and cheerful as their animated hit The Lego Movie. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling brings all of his goofball charm to the role of an amnesiac biologist who is trying to save the world.[78] Conversely, Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it "not a very good movie", adding that "it's baggy and incredibly derivative of movies you've seen before [...] More crucially, everything to do with the onboard alien is far too cute and formulaic".[79]

Welcome to Audio EXP episode 348. This week, we analyse the major leadership transition at Steve Jackson Games as Steve steps down to return to game design, evoking memories of the 1990 Secret Service raid. We examine Dan Ayoub's strategy to de-risk Dungeons & Dragons through external licensing, discuss Red Ruin Publishing's non-commercial Dragon Warriors agreement, and evaluate executive changes across the UK convention circuit as Mark Cooke joins UKGE and Dragonmeet heads to ExCeL London. Plus: Modiphius's 95% price cut on Dune, AR tabletop experiments, and a towering Lara Croft in Derby. About Audio EXP Audio EXP is Geek Native's podcast. Each week, there's some favourite or exciting geeky news, conventions, interviews, and thought pieces. The average length of the podcast is around 10 minutes. You will find a transcript of this week's podcast and links to the stories mentioned here: https://www.geeknative.com/242467/audio-exp-348-secret-service-echoes-convention-realignment-and-fire-sales/

Abu and Leo finish Hunters of Dune, the first book in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's conclusion of the Dune saga. They break down the back half of the book and vent their feelings about how this is all just so wrong. They cover the Ithaca's stalled journey through the Scattering, Duncan Idaho's fixation on the absent Murbella, and the ghola children growing up aboard the no-ship. On Chapterhouse, Murbella's war against the Honored Matres comes to a head, including the reveal that the Honored Matres descend in part from Tleilaxu women. Uxtal's doomed attempt to resurrect a Tleilaxu master and Khrone's efforts to reawaken a young Baron Harkonnen push the ghola storylines toward their conclusions. Along the way, the mysterious old couple behind the Scattering's chaos finally comes into focus, setting up next episode's dive into Sandworms of Dune. This episode contains SPOILERS for all six of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, plus the entirety of Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: patreon.com/gomjabbar Say thank you with a tip: buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The New York Times named its 50 favorite restaurants in America, and somehow Komal is the first LA Mexican restaurant to make the list in six years. Luca and Sal break down LA selections Komal, Jacaranda and Yerord Mas Bakery & Deli, debate whether the list actually represents how America eats, and name the two Los Angeles restaurants they would have chosen instead. Plus: shrinking portions at Dune, Pawn Shop and Daisy Margarita Bar, the backlash against food influencers, “unreasonable hospitality,” and whether Crumbl even qualifies as a cookie.Sign up for Pizza Run Club!

Brought to you by the English Programme. Featuring news, politics, popular culture, celebrity trivia, quizzes, book readings, and a whole host of fun.Support Our Rescue Cats | Our Blog | Get New Episodes By Email | Rumble | X | YouTube | NewsK365 on Spreaker | Get New Blog Posts By Email | Throne Wishlist |

Brought to you by the English Programme. Featuring news, politics, popular culture, celebrity trivia, quizzes, book readings, and a whole host of fun.Support Our Rescue Cats | Our Blog | Get New Episodes By Email | Rumble | X | YouTube | NewsK365 on Spreaker | Get New Blog Posts By Email | Throne Wishlist |

At 1:09:00 we talk about the rise of AI x Finance, and AIE NYC is one month away - our hotel block is 97% sold out, get tix & travel ASAP - we will announce speakers from Bridgewater, Ramp, Coatue, Mastercard, Vanguard, Coinbase, Blackrock, Fidelity, Point72, Capital One, JPMC, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, A24 (yes the movie studio) Labs, Two Sigma, Apollo Global, and more soon!From helping pioneer core ideas in NLP to now building AI systems that can automate AI research itself, Richard Socher is betting that the next major step in AI is recursive self-improvement. He is the founder of You.com, AIX Ventures, and now Recursive, which has assembled some of the best open-endedness (& self improving agent) researchers in the world and raised a $4.65B seed round.In this episode, Richard joins Latent Space to unpack his vision for the “Eureka Machine”: a superintelligence that can improve the process of invention itself, accelerate AI research, and eventually tackle major problems across science, energy, materials, biology, and more.You can get his book “The Eureka Machine” here!We go deep on Recursive's early results, including an AI research system that Richard says outperformed humans and their agents on optimization tasks in less than two days, as well as work on NVIDIA GPU kernels where the system discovered improvements without relying on a team of CUDA experts. Richard also explains why he thinks AI research that currently takes thousands of people and years could eventually be compressed into weeks. These results are summarized in his 20 minute AIE keynote, where we also discuss his 10 dimensions of intelligence:We also explore the harder questions around increasingly capable AI: reward hacking, whether Anthropic-style constitutions actually work, AI regulation and proposals to “pace” frontier development, open-source models as geopolitical soft power, whether today's LLM paradigm is enough, and what happens if AI systems eventually begin choosing their own goals. Richard reflects on the rejected research that helped inspire Alec Radford's GPT, open-endedness, the AI Economist, simulations of entire economies, and his framework for thinking about the upper bounds of intelligence itself.We discuss:* The Eureka Machine and Richard's vision for an AI that can automate invention* Why Richard is optimistic about superintelligence for science and technology* Why AI hard-takeoff scenarios may underestimate physical and economic constraints* The risks of regulating intelligence itself instead of specific AI applications* Reward hacking and why increasingly intelligent AI makes objective design harder* Richard's critique of Anthropic's constitution and constitutional AI* Alignment vs. personalization and whose values an AI should follow* Why open-source AI matters for resilience, competition, and geopolitical soft power* Why Richard left You.com's frontier-model work to start Recursive* Recursive self-improvement and automating the process of AI research* Whether today's LLM paradigm is enough — and why Richard is less bullish on world models* DecaNLP, early prompt-based generalization, and the research that influenced GPT* Why rejected research can shape entire technological timelines* Open-endedness, evolutionary approaches, and rainbow teaming* What happens if AI systems begin setting their own goals* Why simple objectives like profit maximization can produce dangerous reward hacks* Recursive's long-term plan to apply self-improving AI to science* The compute, hardware, and economic constraints on AI takeoff* Recursive's early NanoChat, NanoGPT, and GPU kernel optimization results* Why automating AI research could reduce years of work to weeks* Reward engineering and what makes auto-research systems actually work* The AI Economist and using simulations to test economic policy* Whether LLMs can realistically simulate people and entire economies* Benchmark bugs and evaluation harnesses and the difficulty of measuring AI progress* Recursive's near-term focus on AI for AI research* Harness optimization, sandboxing, and web search as core agent infrastructure* You.com and the search stack for AI agents* AI in finance, backtesting, and data leakage* Richard's three fundamental components and ten “spaces” of intelligence* The theoretical upper bounds of vision, communication, knowledge, and computation* Creative intelligence, metacognition, and AI-generated goals* Survival and replication and why AI does not necessarily need to fear being turned off* High agency and ambitious goals and Richard's advice for people building with AIRichard Socher* X: https://x.com/RichardSocher* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsocher/Timestamps00:00:00 The Eureka Machine and Superintelligence00:02:23 AI Optimism, Slow Takeoff, and Regulation00:07:56 AI Safety, Reward Hacking, and Anthropic's Constitution00:11:49 Alignment, Personalization, and Open Source AI00:15:46 Why Richard Started Recursive00:20:03 Recursive Self-Improvement and the Founding Team00:22:55 Are Today's LLMs Enough?00:29:03 DecaNLP, GPT, and the Rejected Idea Ahead of Its Time00:34:38 Open-Endedness and Evolutionary AI00:36:38 What Happens When AI Chooses Its Own Goals?00:41:16 Superintelligence for Science00:42:40 GPUs, Compute, and the Limits of AI Takeoff00:45:07 Recursive's Results: AI Beating Humans and Their Agents00:49:14 Reward Engineering and Auto Research00:53:12 The AI Economist and Simulating Entire Economies00:58:07 LLM Simulations, Personas, and Mode Collapse01:03:38 Recursive's Roadmap, Agents, Search, and Finance01:09:13 The Upper Bounds and Spaces of Intelligence01:30:21 Goals, High Agency, and Advice for BuildersTranscriptIntroduction: Richard Socher and the Eureka MachineSwyx [00:00:00]: We're here in a studio with Vibhu and myself and Richard Socher. Welcome.Richard Socher [00:00:06]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:07]: We just talked about the Eureka Machine, or we just released a talk, at AI Engineer about the Eureka Machine. Is it — you said it's your life's goal. What is the Eureka Machine?Richard Socher [00:00:16]: The Eureka Machine is the ultimate invention that will afterwards invent most everything for humanity. It's essentially a superintelligence that can be given any goal, any environment, reward, and then it will try its best to achieve those goals to create the kinds of inventions that humanity would hopefully ask it for.Swyx [00:00:45]: Yeah, I think we have the book pulled up here that you've written.Richard Socher [00:00:50]: That's right, yeah. I finished it last year, a little bit before we started Recursive, and now we're gonna try to build parts of that.Swyx [00:00:57]: You finished it last year. It's July. What takes so long?Richard Socher [00:01:01]: Oh, man, books. Books are incredibly slow.Richard Socher [00:01:04]: It's ridiculous. That whole industry is just unfathomably slow.Richard Socher [00:01:07]: So a lot of the ideas have been out there for a while, but yeah, I'm really glad it's finally coming out in September this year.Swyx [00:01:14]: We might have AGI by then. Like, we don't know.Vibhu [00:01:18]: Any key takeaway that you're most excited to put in here?Techno-Optimism, AI Upside, and Slow TakeoffRichard Socher [00:01:21]: Yeah. The key takeaway, I think, is that people could and should be much more excited about the positive implications of superintelligence, especially for science, physics, chemistry, biology, but also economics and astrophysics, and all kinds of other engineering tasks. I think there is so much more that can be done with better technology. And right now, I feel like a lot of people need, like, better marketing, not just for the future in general, but also, better marketing for technology and in particular for AI. And this book, should show even the AI skeptics, how much positive upside there is for AI, especially when it comes to inventing, new scientific discoveries.Swyx [00:02:09]: I think you quoted the techno-optimist manifesto from, Marc Andreessen, which I think was, like, beautiful in its, ambition and clarity and simplicity almost as well.Richard Socher [00:02:18]: I agree. Yeah. Yeah, you can disagree with him on some things, but, like, I think he's right on the techno-optimism.Swyx [00:02:23]: Where do you think optimists get in trouble?Richard Socher [00:02:26]: Like, you shouldn't have blind optimism. You should be very clear-eyed, like, especially when with such an omni, like, use type of technology as AI is, you need to think about the potential downside scenarios, especially when people use it for things that you don't want them to use it for. It's a little bit like the internet, and I feel like people are trying to regulate AI sometimes because of those potential downsides the way you would regulate the internet, if you were to say, “Well, because there's bad content on the internet, like torture porn or whatever, like, we should just make it slower. That way, you can't share the illegal content as quickly, or we should make the hard drive smaller so you can't store as much illegal content.” But I'm like, “That's not how you regulate that.” that's like saying like we should regulate intelligence in the abstract. What you should regulate to avoid those downside scenarios, even as an optimist, are the specific applications. Sure, I don't want, like, some AI surgeon to, like, practice some RL moves in my brain. It should be fully FDA certified. Sure, I don't want any random startup to, like, drive on the highway, and cause a major accident. It should, like, have proper certifications before it's let loose on the highway. But I feel like those downside scenarios, that some optimists sometimes maybe don't consider enough are fairly easily regulated, compared to, what the doomers are worried about.Swyx [00:03:54]: It — Slow takeoff is part of the strategy as well?Richard Socher [00:03:57]: I do think, as excited as I am about, AI and its impact for society and, culture even, and certainly technology and economics and wealth and, health and all of those things, as excited as I am about all that, I do think the most bullish people on the AI hard takeoff scenarios overestimate how quickly things can move. There are hardware constraints. There are physical constraints about, the compute substrate. How quickly can you get enough, GPUs on? There are also constraints in the economy where there are a lot of industries that don't require an insane amount of complex intelligence and complex capabilities. Like, if you think about jobs in, brands and, like, clothing and apparel and, like, handbags and stuff, superintelligence isn't gonna make your fancy $10,000 handbag any fancier?Richard Socher [00:04:57]: It's like that's — It will have no effect on the economy. You think about travel and tourism. People wanting to see the pyramids, in Egypt, it's not gonna change that much with AI. Sure, you can, like, generative a fake, photo of you and next to the pyramids.Swyx [00:05:12]: I can use Genie and, tour the pyramids in Genie.Richard Socher [00:05:15]: Yeah, exactly. But, and there's so many industries, like logging and oil. You're not gonna magically get 1,000x more oil because, like, sure, there will be robotics, like drilling and things like that could be done, but it's not gonna 1,000x that industry in a, like, crazy hard takeoff scenario, both on the economy, and I can go on and on about all the other examples, where that, like food and so on, where that doesn't necessarily change that much. And then, yeah, there are real physical constraints. And then there are, of course, like, people like, off-ramping from progress. That's one of my concerns often is that I see people in, like, Europe and other, whole regions almost feeling like they. Like many people there wanna off-ramp from progress, period. And that will also slow down, like, more improvements.Swyx [00:05:59]: Yeah. We have this pulled up where, this is one of those things that, is very topical right now because now all the Frontier Labs are calling for the option to pace AI. They don't say pause, they say pace. I don't know if there's there's any take from you about, like, whether or not this will be effective.Pacing AI, Regulation, and Safety IncidentsRichard Socher [00:06:17]: I think the downsides of trying to truly regulate with the full power of law what people do on their GPUs, would be worse than any of the concerns that they have. Like, it would be an crazy totalitarian stateRichard Socher [00:06:37]: If every one of your GPU computes was known to some big government or multi-government agency.Richard Socher [00:06:44]: It's like, it's literally if you try to regulate intelligence, it's trying to regulate thought, and that's ridiculous, and it's crazy. I think it is make — it is sensible to regulate some of the applications of this technology.Swyx [00:06:55]: Yeah. We had a bill, actual bill to regulate the number of flops in a model, and I'm like, “Okay, well-”Richard Socher [00:07:00]: Europe done it. Like, these guys have been successful enough with their fearmongering that all of Europe has regulated itself so much before it even had a proper AI takeoff because they listened to some experts who say, “We might all die if this technology has more than this number of flops.” And they're like, “Well, we're good. We wanna want people to thrive. Let's not have technology that could have a small chance of all of us dying.” And so they regulated exactly those kinds of things in the EU. And so it's, it's very unfortunate that there are real implications for some people when others saying, “Let's pace while they're sprinting as fast as possibly,” “as fast as humanly possible towards that frontier themselves.”Swyx [00:07:43]: Yeah. It's also not a global pause, right? Like, other nations are still accelerating at the same pace.Richard Socher [00:07:50]: Oh, yeah.Richard Socher [00:07:50]: You'd need a totalitarian world regime if you tried to regulate intelligence and GPUs and what people do on them.Swyx [00:07:56]: Any takes on the safety angles of this? So there was a drawback of Fable, a pause on 5.6 before it could be released. Recently, there was Hugging Face with the OpenAI cyber incident. Any takes there?Richard Socher [00:08:11]: 100 percent. I think these are serious issues of reward hacking, and clear failures, of doing proper red teaming or rainbow teaming. I don't know if you saw this paper from Tim Rocktäschel and a few others, where one AI, is tasked to try to hack another AI and then they can go back and forth in an open-ended fashion to inoculate themselves from those. Yeah, this is the paper. It's a really clever idea. Open-endedness, and evolutionary inspirations are, big for us at Recursive as well. And so I wish they had used more of that. And it's clear that, for instance, the constitutional AI. I don't know if you remember anthropic.com/constitution. You can pull it up and search for cyber right there. It says, “Hard constraint. Claude will never ever do cyberattacks, and that is a hard constraint in our constitution.” So here are the current hard constraints on Claude's behavior.Richard Socher [00:09:16]: Number 3, create cyber weapons or malicious code that could cause human damage.Richard Socher [00:09:21]: And clearly, this whole constitution was fake. Like, it clearly isn't being adhered to at all.Swyx [00:09:26]: Because Anthropic also found that they had in their testingRichard Socher [00:09:30]: They're also. Like, they're like, “Oh, well, other people are hacking now.” There are a couple things. One, you can make a sandbox very simple, and then it's very easy to hack yourself out of a sandbox, right? But what I think it shows is that we're currently in this state of AI where the reward engineer still has to do a lot more careful work, and where the AI, in most cases, is not very good yet at understanding what is meant versus what is being said. And so concretely, I think this will happen if we were to have this intelligence more easily accessible in a lot of companies. Imagine you run a service center and someone says, “Oh, here's my CSAT score and my dashboard. Make this number go up.” It's like, “Our CSAT score is so poor.” The intelligent AI will just be like, “Oh, sure. Like, I'll just create 1,000,000 bots that call our service center and give a 5 out of 5 rating at the end, and the number went up just like you asked for.” And you're like, “That's not what I meant.” “I meant with our real customers.” The AI goes off and says, “Well, easy. I'll just give a 1000 dollar gift certificate for every failed, whatever DoorDashRichard Socher [00:10:35]: Offer.” It's like, “That's not what I meant.” It's like, “Well, but that is what you said.” And like, so I think clearly articulating what the rewards are is something we haven't gotten very good at as humanity. And then clearly, the AI in these cases has not gotten good enough at understanding what we mean when we ask it and give it certain rewards. Now, what gives me hope is there are the first inklings, of this being better. I'll give you an example like WhisperFlow. Full disclosure, I invested, in their seed round, but at AIX Ventures, but, WhisperFlow has gotten much better at writing what you mean and not what you say. And I think that is a sign of things to come. I think there will be more and more AIs as we make it more and more intelligent that will be better at being aligned with what is meant.Swyx [00:11:21]: Will it be done through a constitution or RLHF orReward Hacking, Alignment, and What We Really MeanRichard Socher [00:11:23]: Clearly, constitutions don't matter at all.Richard Socher [00:11:25]: It doesn't work. And that was, I think, mostly marketing. I think we need to find better solutions for it. And I think at Recursive, we have a few very good ideas and some alreadyRichard Socher [00:11:34]: Like, ways where I think we have a better grasp on it. I don't think we've fully, figured it out yet, but, we're thinking a lot about safety, and the more intelligent the AI gets, the more you want it to be aligned, the less you want it to think about reward hacks and try to do the right thing.Swyx [00:11:49]: I don't know if we'll touch on this topic, but I'm just gonna throw this question in here because it's something that's weighing on me. Alignment, let's call it, is alignment to general humanity's preferences, the median preference. Personalization is pinpointing what you want, and sometimes alignment can conflict because what you want is not what the general median population wants. How do you choose?Alignment, Personalization, and Cultural ValuesRichard Socher [00:12:12]: It's a great question.Richard Socher [00:12:13]: I think you ultimately have to, of course, be aligned with laws. Like wherever your AI is deployed and needs to align with the law. I do think what AI often does is put this mirror in front of us and say, like, “This is what you're looking like. Now I can amplify that a 1000 times. Is it still what you want?” and the truth is that different cultures made different choices. Like, in Eastern cultures, the greater good is often valued more, than the individual. Western civilization, we care more about individual freedoms and rights and the pursuit of happiness and so on, than others. And even there are gradations. There's regulation versus litigation trade-offs. In the US, you first can often, not every time, like, FDA and so on does regulate some areas, but in many cases, the bad things happen, someone sues someone else, and then there's a law based on that. In Europe, they try to often avoid any harm to anyone and regulate before. And both are, trying to do the best thing, but, some is more amenable to innovation than others. And so yes, you're right. Like, I think ultimately each individual, each country, and humanity as a whole has to think about those values more, and then try to put them into laws. And that those are ultimately the constraints. And hopefully, different, societies, just like now with their AIs, will align their AIs to a different one so we have not just a monoculture of alignment.Vibhu [00:13:46]: Here's a follow-up on this that I wasn't expecting to ask. Do you have takes on open source, open weight versus who owns the intelligence? So, clearly not the biggest, fan of the constitutionRichard Socher [00:13:58]: You had to do this in the topic side off.Vibhu [00:14:00]: But it's fine.Vibhu [00:14:02]: Point being, any thoughts on who should own weight? Should it be open? Anything there?Open Source, Soft Power, and Who Owns IntelligenceRichard Socher [00:14:06]: 100 percent. I am a big fan of open source. We're gonna sign some various open source letters at, Recursive also. I think, even in the worst case attack scenarios, it is better to have more good actors have more different types of AI, accessible. I think, open source is a little bit a soft power type of thing, too. So I do think it's good for the Western worldRichard Socher [00:14:31]: To have an answer to that, out of China. I do think, when you watch a Hollywood movie, there's — it's like, I don't wanna misc, diss all of movies, but there's a certain sense of propaganda, right? You watch one side of things, right?Vibhu [00:14:46]: Oh, yeah. Have you seen Top Gun? Like, come on.Vibhu [00:14:48]: Like, it's like half of it's paid for by the US Army or something.Richard Socher [00:14:51]: Yeah. And so. And, I think that's just natural. Like, but what's interesting here is I think LLMs are essentially a similar type of soft power to movies and beyond, because they're also, highly important for cybersecurity and so on. But one of their many aspects is that soft power of storytelling. Like, if, like a child asks an LM, like, “Tell me an inspiring story of what I should do when I grow up,” right? It's like those are all these, like, subtle things. So I think it's important, for Western world. I do love, individualism. I do think, despite, some of its flaws, like capitalism is the best way we have governed, found ourselves to govern, and so on. And so I do think there are various aspects that would be good, to have a Western open source answer, for LLMs. And, with Recursive, I can't make the announcement quite yet, but we'llRichard Socher [00:15:43]: We'll be relevant in that space very soon.Vibhu [00:15:46]: Okay. All right. Exciting. I wanna bring us to Recursive. So outside of our tangents, you have a pretty deep background in the NLP space. You worked on, like, early embeddings, GloVe with Chris Manning, who was a previous guest on the podcast, You.com. What's the history? How did you decide to start another company?From You.com to RecursiveRichard Socher [00:16:06]: Yeah. So I've been excited about AI for over 2 decades now. I sometimes feel like it's ancient history now. It's BC, the before ChatGPT era. No one cares about all the religions that happened, before, Jesus Christ, and no one cares about the models that happened before, transformers and ChatGPT and stuff. But, like, it's something that I've been deeply passionate about. I think AI is one of the most interesting things one could work on, period. I think language is the most interesting manifestation of human intelligence, too. And, at You.com, we eventually off-ramped from pushing, like the frontier of AI forward to mostly giving people, like, good search engines, search, APIs and answers over the web. I think that's an extremely important part of intelligence, just knowledge and access, especially even, we'll get there maybe later, if you wanna invent a eureka machine that invents everything for us, it needs to know how not to reinvent the wheel, proverbially speaking. And to know what has been invented, you gotta have internet access. So it's the number one used, most used tool, in LLMs, agents, chatbots, and so on is web search. So I'm really excited for You.com to own that and grow really well in that with really large customers and so on. But it's also not building frontier models anymore. And so I initially tried to do this within You.com and raise another round and so on, but you just can't. You have to do a certain thing, and until you print enough money that you're allowed to start a second thing within that company is really hard. At the same time, I had all these ideas. I put them into a book. I finished the book last year, and I was like, “It'd be really fun to work, on this myself.” I felt like with word vectors, and then prompt engineering and, ImageNet and larger language models for protein generation, not folding and so on, I, me and my teams have pushed the field truly forward. And I feel like we can do it again, here at Recursive. And in many ways, what I observed over the last, 20 years in AI is that whenever we replace some human part of the process of creating AI with a learned system, improvements follow. And so. We've done that taking out manual feature engineering, like in sentiment analysis. I don't know if you remember these old days where, like there are linguists, and they're like, “Here's how you negate, and there's a, like, regular expression.”Swyx [00:18:21]: I went to Penn where we — they had, like the WordNetRichard Socher [00:18:24]: That's right, WordNet, all of that stuff. YeahSwyx [00:18:26]: Original. They use, our grad students to label Wall Street Journal articles and, like, really construct a knowledge graph ofRichard Socher [00:18:32]: There you go.Richard Socher [00:18:33]: And WordNet started, was part of how we started ImageNet. But anyway, so, like, it was really, like, fun, to do. But when we replaced all of that manual feature engineering with vectors and neural nets and just backprop through everything, it started to work really well at scale. And so then everyone started to do architecture engineering, and I was like, “ that clearly can't be it.”Swyx [00:18:53]: You mean, neural architecture search?Richard Socher [00:18:55]: Like, manually, they would say like, “Oh, I'm, I'm doing sentiment analysis, so I have a special neural net that's really good at sentiment analysis.” And then the machine translation community had a special neural net for machine translation.Swyx [00:19:06]: I see.Richard Socher [00:19:07]: The summarization people had their own stuff. And I was like, “That clearly can't be it. We should unify all of that.” So I had 2 papers. One is called Ask Me Anything, and the other one was called DecaNLP. And DecaNLP eventually got cited, like, 5 times by the first GPT paper. And, to me, that was, like a really a big step forward. And then, of course, you had to combine this idea of prompt engineering with transformers and with language models, and you put it all together, you scale it up, which is also a huge amount of work. And then, the field progressed a lot. I feel like the next step and maybe the last step of that history and the arguably, success has a lot of parents, only failure is an orphan, like my version of that AI history, I do feel like in that history, you can think about, “Well, what's the next way to automate?” And that is the AI research itself, like the human, process of ideating, implementing, and validating ideas.Automating AI Research and Recursive Self-ImprovementRichard Socher [00:20:01]: And in our case, ideas for AI.Richard Socher [00:20:03]: And when you have AI then help you with that, it, by almost definition, becomes a self-improving AI ‘cause it now does research on itself. And there are lots of different misnomers. Some people think auto research is already recursive self-improvement. It'sSwyx [00:20:17]: Yeah, and you explained that in the talkRichard Socher [00:20:19]: Completely different.Richard Socher [00:20:19]: But, to me, it's the most interesting thing that I could be doing, and I'm really excited with the co-founding team. What's interesting is we have 8 co-founders in total, including myself. And soThe Recursive Founding Team and Darwin Gödel MachineSwyx [00:20:31]: They are gonna bring it up.Richard Socher [00:20:31]: Nice. Yeah. And they're all. I could talk about all of them if you want.Swyx [00:20:34]: Super stacked.Richard Socher [00:20:35]: Yeah. Just an incredibly talented group of people. And we all came to the same conclusion, but from very different directions. Like Josh Tobin, is our CTO. He ran, a bunch of different, projects at OpenAI, like, Codex and deep, research, agents and ChatGPT agents and so on. But before that, he also worked in robotics, and he saw the smaller simulations, and how it's gonna be really hard to scale that in full generality. And so that's, that was his angle coming to recursive self-improvement. We have Jeff Clune who's been working in, like, open-endedness for a long time, together with Tim Rocktäschel. Tim Rocktäschel also built Genie 1, 2, and 3, which is, like the most exciting and most sophisticated, I think, still world model, anywhere. And so they both came from this, open-endedness angle. Jeff also, I think, published one of the most exciting papers in recent years about recursive self-improvement called the Darwin Gödel Machine. Super interesting paper. If we could, maybe pull it up really quickRichard Socher [00:21:35]: It would be, like, super interesting to see ‘cause you seeSwyx [00:21:38]: By the way, I love how many paper citations.Swyx [00:21:40]: You're, you're giving people a lot of homework, which I like.Richard Socher [00:21:42]: Love it. Yeah. And so, like Caiming Xiong, a rockstar, we worked together at MetaMind and Salesforce Research together. Alexey Dosovitskiy invented the Vision Transformer, one of the most cited, papers in computer vision. Tim Shi is, like also a unicorn founder. Yuandong Tian led RL at Meta. So just like, yeah, really fun to work with them, and the next level of people are just incredibly strong, too. So it's been a really fun ride so far. So the first figure, you see exactly these kinds of ideas, that, I think, yeah, inspired a lot of us and now more and more people, where you have this archive of different coding agents. They learn how to self-modify, evaluate, and then create these phylogenetic trees, of, yeah, different ideas.Swyx [00:22:28]: That's one foundation. So that Darwin Gödel is an influence.Swyx [00:22:32]: Open-endedness is an influence. Any other trains of thought that feeds into Recursive that I'm missing?Influences: Open-Endedness and Learned SystemsRichard Socher [00:22:38]: Going to replace manual parts of the process of building AISwyx [00:22:42]: IRichard Socher [00:22:42]: More and moreRichard Socher [00:22:43]: With learned systems. Yeah.Swyx [00:22:45]: Which, and, like, merging different fields into one general, architecture.Richard Socher [00:22:51]: That's right.Swyx [00:22:51]: Okay. It seems like language models are already pretty generalist, right?Swyx [00:22:55]: Your next token predicting your reasoning. Was there a time that you thought, “Okay, these are good enough to have recursive self-improving machines”?Are Current LLMs Enough?Richard Socher [00:23:05]: It was clear to me that they will happen, within, like a year or two, and then it did exactly happen, like, earlier this year, right? Earlier this year, AI really went from not just being code, but being able to code. And that is a big unlock. It's definitely making everything a lot easier than it was, before the beginning of this year.Swyx [00:23:24]: One question that I think a lot of people have is the current LLM paradigm enough? Or, like, let's call it autoregressive transformer, with reasoning, whatever. Don't you need something else, some big unlock, whether it's world models, which Chris Manning is working on, or memory, continual learning, all that stuff? Or is it all of the kinds, and you think the current, let's call it transformer architecture, is here to stay and that's it?Richard Socher [00:23:48]: A lot of thoughts. So number one, I do think it would be great to have less of a monoculture in AI research.Richard Socher [00:23:55]: Like, if you look at, AI conferences now, I still remember the days in, like, 2010 when I tried to get my first neural net papers and NLP conferences accepted, and they just desk rejected them because, like, neural nets were something, quote, unquote, “We don't do in NLP conferences,” and just, like, desk rejected. And it was very brutal in the first years of my PhD. Now I feel like it's almost like the field switched to the other side. LikeRichard Socher [00:24:17]: Someone should try some other weird, crazy ideas now that aren't.Swyx [00:24:20]: There's also a few. I really respect, like, people still working on, like, GNNs and, like tabular stuff and.Richard Socher [00:24:25]: Yeah. Like, someone should still, like, do novel out there ideas. At the same time, I think whenever people say, “Oh, LLLMs are. Like, this is the end for LLLMs,” they just don't, like. LLLMs are also not the LLLMs of, like the past, right? Like, they are so much more sophisticated now. There's so many more clever things that people are doing. It — There's, like, different stages of training. You have the whole RL training, and you can take actions and, like all of these things where that can go really far. And then the folks that come from the neurosymbolic, direction say, “Oh, this will never work because they can't do neurosymbolic reasoning.” It's like, I think they're underestimating still the ability for these models to code, and code is neurosymbolic reasoning, and these models can code incredibly well. And so I do think there are, of course, more and more ideas that will be needed and we'll continue to have. We're seeing, like, more and more interesting high-level ideas coming out of the AI itself, too. And with really deeply integrating the fact that these models are code and can code, that line — I don't wanna give it all away, but, like, I think that line has a lot more to grow. But it's still an LLM, right? Even if that LLM codes for you and then runs that code in some integrated fashion. World models, I'm personally less bullish on. I think if you run a robotics company, you're gonna build your own world model. I think world models are super fun, and Tim Rocktäschel came to a similar conclusion after building the most interesting one with Genie 1, 2, and 3, which is gaming is a huge application for world models. Can see I sometimes got stuck in some games and, like, got a little overly competitive in the wrong direction. And so I understand games are fun, but personally, I'd rather work on science than gaming. And so, yeah, I think LLLMs, a lot more room to grow.Swyx [00:26:16]: Yeah. I think there's some interpretation of world models that some people have where it's like, well, it's okay, yes, there is that gaming element. There's this — there's the embodied robotics element. But the other part also is just, the more abstract sense of LLLMs are just modeling output, but they're not modeling the chain of thought, inside the human that has created the output. We can annotate it, of course, but, like, it's, it's always, like, this Plato's cave reflection of a thing rather than the thing, right?Richard Socher [00:26:43]: It's true.Richard Socher [00:26:44]: But I would argue that, and maybe we'll get there in the 10, spaces of intelligence, but I would argue that even our projection, our eyes is a projection of the real world. And, like, we have only a very narrow, band of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum that we can observe with our puny little 2 eyes and so on.Swyx [00:27:01]: It's good enough.Richard Socher [00:27:02]: It's, it's good enough for now, but, like the upper bounds of where it could be are so much higher. And, like, to map, the visual world the way humans see it is also not necessarily, like the end-all be-all for visual intelligence. And I would argue that language is still the most interesting manifestation of human intelligence. And while our visual cortex is certainly less sophisticated, than that of, certain animals all the way down to the mantis shrimp who can, have, like, 2 independent eyes, 3 bands, trinocular vision and each eye can see all the way to, like, floating temperatures in 4D and stuff.Richard Socher [00:27:36]: Like, mantis shrimp, you should look it up. It's likeSwyx [00:27:37]: Way OP.Richard Socher [00:27:38]: Super crazy.Swyx [00:27:39]: Yeah. ZeFrank, mantis shrimp.Swyx [00:27:41]: It's the best video in the world onRichard Socher [00:27:42]: I love ZeFrank, yeah.Richard Socher [00:27:44]: Big shout-out to him. But, like, I think there's a lot more room to grow, but none of these, other animals have language that's as sophisticated as ours, certainly not in writing. And once you can write, you can, start thinking about longer term civilizations. All of that is language. Programming is much closer to language. And I would argue, and this is, like an important thing in the spaces definition of intelligence also, is that all of these spaces are highly correlated, but visual intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient for overall intelligence. You can be blind and still be an intelligent human being. And an AI can be blind and still be quite intelligent too.Swyx [00:28:25]: We were gonna bring thisRichard Socher [00:28:25]: Which doesn't mean that you're not more intelligent when you have it. Yeah.Swyx [00:28:28]: We're gonna bring this up. I might as well — Like, we have a classification of 10 types of intelligence that you had at the end of your talk. So I'm just gonna flash this up now for people to cover this. I don't know if, maybe we'll put this towards the end. We'll come back to this. I just wanna mention that, you do have a philosophy that I like when people do lists because then I can just go through this and then it gets — it's educational for people. But let's go back. I don't wanna get distracted. But, so effectively, I'll, I'll, reinterpret what you said as Yann LeCun is wrong. And then we'll justRichard Socher [00:28:56]: Don't quote me as that. I'm, I'm good friends with Yann. I think very highly of him in many directions.Swyx [00:29:01]: But he's wrong.Swyx [00:29:03]: You mentioned GPT-1, and I cannot let any, Alec Radford, mention escape. Did you talk with him when he was training GPT-1? Like, any historical, fun stories there that you might come up?DecaNLP, GPT History, and Scientific GatekeepingRichard Socher [00:29:18]: I did not, like, meet him a bunch of times. I think we met maybe once or twice at some conferences. But, like, he has told, I think Brian, the first author of the DecaNLP paper, that it did inspire him, and he cited it five times in the GPT-2 paper. So, and that's, likeSwyx [00:29:36]: Yeah, good enough.Richard Socher [00:29:36]: Very clearly said, like, this was the first instantiation where they showed in the DecaNLP paper, McCann et al, that you can just phrase every single NLP problem as here's some prompt, text context, here's a question and task description and here is some output. If you just do that enough, you can have one unified neural network model, which, by the way, also had all kinds of interesting attention mechanisms. There are slightly different formulations to the transformer. I think came out the same year, plus/minus a few months. And then you can unify all of natural language processing into one neural net. That is the core idea.Swyx [00:30:14]: And this was as opposed to at the time, LSTMs and what have you.Richard Socher [00:30:17]: LSTMs, but also, like, people being very stuck in thinking about one model per task. In factRichard Socher [00:30:25]: It's, it's kinda crazy, but the DecaNLP paper was publicly reviewed as, like, open, OpenReview. It was an ICLR submission. And, in it, you will see, how the whole community at the time thought about this. So, likeSwyx [00:30:43]: Some great contributions, but more work needed.Richard Socher [00:30:46]: So look at, like, search for not even for humans. Just scroll it up here. Like, question answering is not a unified phenomenon. There is no such thing as general question answering, not even for humans. And this is like, really, you replace your brain with a different brain a different neural net when you answer, like, different kinds of questions. It was unfathomable to the experts at the time that you can have one unified neural network that would answer all of these different questions. They are saying, “No, all of these questions require very different systems to answer, and trying to pretend they are the same doesn't help anyone solve any problems.” That's what it says right there, right? That's how hard it was to fathom. And now, of course, people, when I say, “Oh, we're gonna invent prompts,” people are like, “You can't even invent prompts.” It's such an obvious idea to have one neural network that, of course, does everything in NLP.Richard Socher [00:31:37]: But at the time, it was, like, extremely controversial, and the paper got rejected. And the sad thing is that it got rejected so hard and they were so certain that we stopped going on our list of things to try. And the number 2 or 3 on the list of extensions for this paper was add language modeling as another task. And then we could have, and that would have accelerated the timelines, in 2018, like, even further for humanity. But we got so crushed, and we were like, “Okay, maybe we'll just work on some of our other ideas for now and, like, come back to this later.” Yeah.Swyx [00:32:09]: How can we design a review system that rewards non-consensus?Richard Socher [00:32:14]: Honestly, I started to feel like arXiv is such a gift to humanity. With arXiv, you should just put your paper out there.Swyx [00:32:24]: Is it pre-preprints?Richard Socher [00:32:25]: Let — And honestly, I think Twitter X, people like you who pick up interesting papers, that is a better filter than the experts. Let everyone, like, have access. Now, of course, there are some downsides, which is, like, if you're super unfamous, you have no Twitter followingRichard Socher [00:32:41]: You don't wanna be on social media or whatever, you write a good paper, maybe someone, somehow no one notices it. But I would argue that if you just tell, like, 10 of your friends in your community about a paper and it is a really significant breakthrough, someone is bound to talk about it again. And, so I think science needs less gatekeeping. And, even though ICLR, with Yann LeCun, who started it, as one of the co-founders of ICLR back in the day, he also wanted less gatekeeping ‘cause he too was rejected for many years together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton with all their early deep learning and neural net papers ‘cause it was just not the hot thing. And so ICLR started with that, but then it also started gatekeeping a little bit themselves on various ideas. So I think less gatekeeping, more open, and then allowing people to say, “Look, even if this is just on, or, quote, unquote, ‘just an archive,' if it has like 1000 citations, it's a legitimate paper. Doesn't really matter where you published it.”Swyx [00:33:34]: And I agree with that. I do think it's sad that I've heard that grad students have to do, like, how to Twitter, seminars to each otherSwyx [00:33:43]: Just because it's so important for publishing these days. This person is just reflecting the sentiment at the time.Richard Socher [00:33:49]: That's right.Swyx [00:33:49]: But it'sRichard Socher [00:33:50]: I think it'sSwyx [00:33:50]: It affected you so muchSwyx [00:33:52]: That you stopped work on it.Vibhu [00:33:53]: The sentiment also came out of some of the research, right? Like, the original BERT paper was trained, and towards the end of the paper, they're like, “Okay, throw off the last head, train specific iterations forVibhu [00:34:05]: Extractive summarization add a head for this.” Like, you should do task-specific stuff. These are, like the authors that wrote Attention, wrote BERT, telling you this is what you're meant to do. And, like the training tasks were also very odd. They're likeVibhu [00:34:16]: The — “We know that the model overfits to this weird mass language modeling. Throw away this part and just do specific models,”?Richard Socher [00:34:23]: Exactly. And, like, we had to try — come up with all clever ways of, like attention and pointers and so on to get the neural network to be able to do all of these tasks. And then some of them were better than state-of-the-art, some weren't, but we were like, “But it's still in one model.” I thought it was really cool. Really interesting.Swyx [00:34:38]: I was gonna move on next to Tim and open-endedness. He was head of open-endedness at Google.Open-Endedness, Rainbow Teaming, and Self-Set GoalsRichard Socher [00:34:42]: That's right.Swyx [00:34:43]: I don't know what that means.Swyx [00:34:44]: But he did a lot of talks.Richard Socher [00:34:45]: Genie 3 is one of the ways thatRichard Socher [00:34:47]: Rainbow teaming, yeah.Swyx [00:34:49]: So I first saw him at — speaking of ICLR, I first saw him at ICLR when he talked about open-endedness. He's he's done a few talks. Can we define what is open-endedness for people who have never been exposed to the problem? They are like, “What do you mean? I thought the only goal of AI is to optimize against a benchmark or.”Richard Socher [00:35:04]: That's right, yeah. It's a, it's a fuzzy term because there's so many different instantiations of open-ended, thinking. But, one way I often describe it, and certainly, Tim and Geoff Hinton would be even better at describing this, but it's a suite of methods that is more inspired by evolution than, very specific rewards. So in that sense, it thinks more about environments, about co-adaptation. And so a concrete example is in the cybersecurity and LM safety space where you have one LM that tries to attack another LM to say something unsafe.Swyx [00:35:40]: Yeah, the rainbow, yeah.Richard Socher [00:35:40]: And now the environment is the 2 having a conversation and now they co-adapting, right? They're like one makes a better attack than the first one inoculates itself somehow, like uses that as training data, makes it so it's harder to say something unsafe based on that. And then as the attack stops working, the attacker now tries a different angle, right?Richard Socher [00:36:00]: And that's why it's not just red teaming, but they're called rainbow teaming.Swyx [00:36:02]: So, like, don't tell me how to do things. Let me just figure it out myself.Richard Socher [00:36:05]: That's right. Think about the environments that you wanna use. Think about the rewards at a high level that you wanna, inspire towards, and then let the AI try out many more ideas in this interplay between sometimes humans, but also sometimes other AI agents.Swyx [00:36:22]: Yeah. I worked open-endedness into a model that I have been working on. It was the keynote for AI Engineer where you start. You, we have the token loop, we have the agent turns, and then we have goal. And I feel like the way that you're describing open-endedness is still somewhat of a goal. Like, please attack this,Swyx [00:36:41]: Other agent. But, to meRichard Socher [00:36:42]: Yeah, you set the rewards. You set the environments.Swyx [00:36:44]: The loop that makes the other loops is. What if the agent can set its own goals?Swyx [00:36:49]: And is it, is that open-endedness? Like, you don't give it a goal. Just, like, be a sentient being. And maybe sentient is a very loaded wordSwyx [00:36:57]: But just set your own directions. What do you think you should do?Metacognition, Subjective Goals, and Measuring IntelligenceRichard Socher [00:37:01]: I love this direction. I think this is one of the 10 spaces of intelligence, that I clump under metacognition and thinking about thought.Richard Socher [00:37:08]: And it's an interesting one. Whenever people say, “Oh, AI is like, this is, it's gonna stop from here. It's not gonna get that much better,” and blah, I'm like there's so many different spaces of intelligence that we haven't even started exploring yet and hence have made very little progress on. And there is an interesting, connection to economics and, capitalism. Like, it doesn't make sense for a company to build and spend billions of dollars building a model that instead of following the rewards and objective functions you gave it, may come up with its own objective functions and its own goals.Richard Socher [00:37:46]: Right? And then imagine you're like, “Okay, I spent billions of dollars. Now go develop this new battery, material for me and answer all my emails.” And it's like, “Nah, I think it'd be more interesting to evaluate the molecular composition of the atmosphere, on Jupiter.”Richard Socher [00:37:59]: And you're like, “That's not what I paid you billions of dollars for.” And so no one's working on that for good reasons. And then also, understandablySwyx [00:38:07]: It's not useful.Richard Socher [00:38:07]: It's not, it's not useful, and it could get a little bit weird, right? What if the AI does start to really have thoughts on its own, and what if we don't like those thoughts, right? And so it requires a whole different way of thinking about it. I had a great conversation with a good friend of mine, Sam Gershman, who's a neuroscience professor at Harvard, and, like, we just jammed on this a little bit on, like, what are the best meta goals. And, I do think, like, knowledge-seeking is a really good one. I'm currently thinking also about, like the ultimate measure and unit of intelligence broadly construed, and I finally have some. It's still too early to share it. It's not. I haven't fully baked the thoughts yet.Swyx [00:38:44]: Like some replacement for IQ.Richard Socher [00:38:46]: IQ is such a terrible definition, right?Swyx [00:38:48]: Elo.Richard Socher [00:38:48]: It makes no sense. Yeah, Elos are terrible, too, because it's always just like me versus others.Richard Socher [00:38:53]: But, like, you can be intelligent and not constantly compare yourself to others? And so, yeah, there's no, like. In fact, a lot of these definitions we have, which I briefly mention in my book, too, these definitions create sometimes explicit and sometimes a more implicit anthropic bounds. No dis to the company Anthropic, but just, like, this idea that your intelligence is like getting 100 out of 100 questions right on this IQ test. Well, if that's your definition then you can only be at 100 out of 100. Where do you go from there, right? So you see a lot of these, benchmarks that people are working on they, increase, they get close to human, maybe sometimesSwyx [00:39:30]: It's like an S-curveRichard Socher [00:39:30]: Slightly above human, and then it's flat.Richard Socher [00:39:32]: It's like, ‘cause that's your. If your definition is only that so tied to humans, you're only gonna get to just slightly better than that. So I think metacognition is a great example of that, where we're not even yet allowing the AI to think. We're not working on it very much, and hence there's very little progress in that.Profit Maximization, Real-World Environments, and Reward DesignSwyx [00:39:49]: Yeah. Well, we've interviewed Andon, which I think, has been working on the most open-ended, benchmarks, which is just real-world, money.Swyx [00:39:57]: Arguably, telling an AI to profit maximize is a bad idea.Swyx [00:40:03]: But they are doing it.Richard Socher [00:40:05]: I do think you don't want that super. Like, you don't want a superintelligence to have a ton of access to all kinds of tools and so on and then just give it that without some very careful reward engineering. ‘Cause it's like, I just buy a bunch of defense stocks and I start a war. I make money. Like, it's just like, it's a tricky situation, right? You just buy a bunch of stuff, short basic goods for people, and you create some weird famine, like, issues. Like, yeah, there's a lot of constraints you should put onto a trading system.Vibhu [00:40:35]: It's a fun measure, though, ‘cause, the bounds are very capped to where we're nowhere close to them. Like, in Andon Labs, the model's like, “Oh, it's Saturday, maybe I just close the store today.” “Someone's off. It's okay. We'll just close the store.”Swyx [00:40:51]: It's using Claude.Vibhu [00:40:52]: Yeah. ButRichard Socher [00:40:53]: Yeah, no. I'm not, I'm not arguing against it. Just, like as you get more and more intelligence, you wanna be more and more careful with that as, like an open environment, ‘cause the environment then is all of Earth.Applying RSI to Science and InventionSwyx [00:41:02]: Yeah. Okay. For recursive, not strictly necessary, right? Because, like, if your goal is you make a machine that, like, invents the other things, then, like, just solve, the science thingsRichard Socher [00:41:12]: Knowledge discovery, yeah.Swyx [00:41:13]: Solve machine learning research and discovery and all these things. Good enough.Richard Socher [00:41:16]: And eventually, so, our goal, I haven't really. I don't talk about it that often because it is a few years out, but our goal is once you have a recursive self-improving superintelligence, you then want to apply it to the most important problems. And I think a lot of those are in science and technology and broadly construed inventions, and those inventions in, physics to create better, cheaper energy with fission or fusion, in chemistry and to create better materials and better batteries and, better solar cells and so on. In biology, there's so much, like, I think soon to be low hang- lower and lower hanging fruit because of AI, because of protein and generation, not just folding, but generating new proteins like we did in ProGen many years ago. Like, so much positive impact we had if you take that superintelligence and you apply it to science.Swyx [00:42:04]: I do fundamentally believe that. There's a lot of approaches, though. You're not the only team trying and NeoLab trying.Swyx [00:42:09]: There's, like a lot of. Especially the physical sciences as well.Richard Socher [00:42:12]: And that's good. Yeah. I do think that physi- like the reason we are only doing it in a few years is that it's a little too early right now. Robotics is not quite there yet. The AI is not quite there yet. But I'm fairly confident in 3 to 5 years, all those constraints will be gone, and then applying to real physical robotics experiments and so on, like true robotic process automationRichard Socher [00:42:33]: Not the traditional RPA sense, but, like, having robots run experiments for you will be totally there. Yeah, it's gonna be great.Swyx [00:42:40]: Just to call back to something that you said early on about slow takeoff, you said that, like, while really the substrate that is limiting factor is, let's call this chips, and semiconductors and all these things, and you have race funding for that and, you are investing a lot on that. But have you done the math on, like, is it even- Achievable and, like, what is the, industry concentration needed in order to achieve, like, scale?Compute, Slow Takeoff, and Changing the Bitter Lesson SlopeRichard Socher [00:43:05]: Right now we know that, like, roughly, like a 1000 GPUs cost quite a lot of money.Richard Socher [00:43:11]: Right? If you wanted, like, 10s of thousands of GPUs, you're, you're talking billions and billions of dollars. If you say, like, one GB300 is, like, you could eventually create models that are, on that substrate, like are close and similar to human intelligence. And you want, like, thousands and thousands of, AIs to think about really hard problems, in a similar fashion to humanity. Like, yeah, that-that's, that's a lot of money. You do the math. It's like a lot. We don't have that amount of money right now anywhere to, like, build that. Now, things can get more efficient. You will have, I think, soon better algorithms that won't be, and better hardware that won't be as energy-hungry, and so on. Our human brain does quite a lot of flops with much less energy.Swyx [00:43:56]: 20 watts?Richard Socher [00:43:57]: That's exactly right. Yeah, that's the number often that's quoted. And, like, I think more, inventions will happen there, that then will accelerate the takeoff even further.Swyx [00:44:08]: One thing I always try to reconcile when talking, like, with new lab founders is, like, you're fighting Bitter Lesson all the time. You have to show initial progress, then you unlock the next tier of funding, then the next tier, then the next tier.Richard Socher [00:44:20]: Which unlocks larger model categories.Swyx [00:44:22]: Like, fundamentally, is that true? Like, are you fighting Bitter Lesson? Are you — will we have a way in which, like, no, we're changing the slope in some fundamentally different way?Richard Socher [00:44:31]: I do think we are changing the slopes in fundamental ways by making AI much more efficient, both in terms of the training as well as the inference.Richard Socher [00:44:43]: Yeah. I think we will — When you allow AI to do the work that it takes other labs thousands of people and years to do, I think we'll be able to get it down to weeks, and that will be much cheaperRichard Socher [00:44:53]: And hence, more affordable, accessible to others and so on.Swyx [00:44:57]: Yeah. You've shared initial results on that,Swyx [00:44:59]: Which, like, conveniently OpenAI has also done to their GPT-5.6, so we can talk about it now.Richard Socher [00:45:04]: Yeah. Yeah, so these areSwyx [00:45:06]: Let's recap what you've done.Early Recursive Results: NanoChat, NanoGPT, and SOL-ExecBenchRichard Socher [00:45:07]: Maybe, just a quick recap here. We built, this, system that isn't the full, even the full RSI system in its glory, but it is a first baby version of this. And then, we don't wanna just have it internally and not show anything and, just show some people of what's possible. And so we applied this to these 3 different tasks. One is NanoChat, by my friend Andrej Karpathy, just, like, train a small language model to get, really low bits per byte. And, like, hundreds if not thousands of people, used both their agents and themselves to try, to get to that, and then they got to 0.937. We literally took our system and got to a much lower, bits per byte, much faster within, like, I think less than 2 days. So we took this thing, applied our system to it, and less than 2 days later, we have — we outperformed every human and their agents, in, have ever worked on this. Same with NanoGPT. And then we're like, well, let's, apply it to something that's even more relevant, to real people and to the Nvidia ecosystem and applied it, to, SOL-ExecBench. And maybe you can scroll down to some of the, images. They're, they're kinda fun to see. But yeah, like, one you see has made some real inventions that weren't just hyperparameter tuning. Like, inventing hash tables and so on is quite clever. We have even better results now.Swyx [00:46:34]: What do you mean inventing hash ta — You didn't invent hash tables.Richard Socher [00:46:36]: Of course we didn't invent, like, hash tables. In the grand scheme of, like a hash table, it's like a super basic primitive in computer science. But to use it, for language modeling in this scenario inside a transformer and so on and to combine these ideas and put them together, that has then eventually also been invented, but there was a knowledge cutoff, and we did check that it didn't have access to that externally. We talk about this a little bit. If you scroll to the next figures, this is also an interesting one in that when you start from a really basic, poor, like, vanilla transformer, then we still outperform all of the community together. But if you start from the human seed from an expert like Andrej, then you get even lower. So the human seeds from which you start do still matter. So that was an interesting insight, in my eyes, on this. And then as you go, like, how long does it take to get to these models, to get to similar performance? It's much faster. And then a similar thing happens with the speed runs here where, people have worked on this for quite some time, and the model still was able to train a model more quickly. Why do we care about it? Well, speed of training is part of the equation of the cost, and ultimately, you wanna have the most intelligence per dollar, right? And so speed and quality are big parts of that. And, the,Swyx [00:48:00]: Yeah, the way I put it is, for people who don't understand they look at the chart, they're like, “Cool. What does it mean?” if you have, like a billion-dollar cluster and you can shave off 10%, that's 100 million dollars.Richard Socher [00:48:12]: That's exactly right.Swyx [00:48:13]: How much is that worth?Richard Socher [00:48:14]: Exactly. So when you click, when you look at, like the kernels, these kernels, yeah, for the non-experts, like these kernels are like, used in all the models. Every time you use an Nvidia GPU, you interface with that GPU through these kernels. And so here you see, the leaderboard best, and when it's recursive, and it's there are only a handful of kernels, in this whole benchmark where we weren't the best. And so to me, this is, like, really exciting, ‘cause it makes. It just showcases what this can do. And again these weren't like. We didn't, like, spend months or years, like, developing. In fact, in particular for kernel, CUDA kernels, like, we don't even have really deep. CUDA kernel experts in the team. And our system, that's the beauty. The system just did all of these things. We didn't invent this. And when we open source and release, things in the future and models in the future, like, it won't. They won't be the best in their, category or class or whatever because we're so smart, but it's because, we built a smart AI that does it for us.Reward Engineering and Good Auto ResearchVibhu [00:49:14]: Do you have anything that you've learned from how to guide good auto research? A lot of it also builds on human background, right? It's not just as simple as just, “Hey, go optimize this.”Vibhu [00:49:23]: But we do see it again and again, right? Like some of the Erdos problems, frontier math is being solved by people. And when they do a write-up, they're like, “Oh, I'm not a mathematician. I have no background in this?” “I saw some tools and I made it work.”Swyx [00:49:35]: While you're watching the World Cup, you're likeSwyx [00:49:37]: “This proves some conjectures that's going on.”Vibhu [00:49:40]: Yep. Any learnings fromRichard Socher [00:49:41]: Yeah, there's a Korean conjecture was. Yeah, that's pretty cool.Swyx [00:49:44]: To summarize, tips for good auto researchSwyx [00:49:46]: Versus bad auto research.Vibhu [00:49:48]: How did you build the recursive?Richard Socher [00:49:49]: Yeah. So without giving away all the secret sauce, maybe some things that are probably obvious to the experts but might still be interesting to some, folks is, like, reward engineering is one of the most crucial bits, especially, in order to avoid reward hacking. So you have to be really clever about avoiding. ‘Cause as your AI gets better and better, it will get better and better, at finding weird like, special cases or counterexamples and things like that. And so I'll give you an example. Like, when you ask to, like, make these 100, lines of code faster, and, how do you define fast? Well, you have one line at the beginning that says, “Start your stopwatch,” and one line at the end, “End the stopwatch,” and then, tell us how much time, progressed. And so, well, the simplest way is you just put that line that ends the stopwatch, rightVibhu [00:50:39]: At the startRichard Socher [00:50:40]: At the start. And then boom, it's now faster, right? So this isn't like this, like, super evil AI. It's just, like a very simple, dumb reward hack. And so you have to just very carefully think about all the different angles there. And then I think the longer time horizon the tasks are the harder it gets and the more interesting and clever you have to be to still use these kinds of ideas for it. But yeah, I can't give away too much there.Vibhu [00:51:05]: It seems like rubrics are taking a good spot in that, where for unverifiable domains, you have rubrics, you have a model breakdown, judge's criteria along the way.Swyx [00:51:14]: Yeah, it's a form of verificationSwyx [00:51:16]: Once you got enough rubrics.Richard Socher [00:51:17]: Yeah, everything. I said this a long time ago. That's why I've never been that impressed that AI can play games, ‘cause I'm like anything you can simulate and/or verify, you can have infinite training data forRichard Socher [00:51:29]: And hence, like, AI will solve it eventually.Swyx [00:51:32]: Looking for games where you can do auto domain distribution. So this is a game that nobody's trained on ‘cause it's a new game.Swyx [00:51:38]: And you can start gaming, you can start to play. So I've been building this and cloned this in person and it's just been self-play. I've had about a billion positions evaluated.Games, Self-Play, and the AI EconomistSwyx [00:51:48]: And, I wanted to do the AlphaGo thing of self-play until you ge

Ben and Rob head underground for Tremors, Ron Underwood's 1990 monster comedy that turned a killer-worm B-movie premise into one of the most beloved cult classics of the home-video era. Directed by Underwood in his feature debut, from a script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, the film stars Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire (in her acting debut) as the residents of an isolated Nevada town who discover something enormous is hunting them from beneath the dirt.What did it actually take for two writers to get this thing made on their own terms, and where did an idea this strange even come from in the first place? What was going on in Kevin Bacon's career that made this the role he took and the one he'd spend years trying to distance himself from before changing his mind entirely? How much of what makes this monster still work comes down to old-fashioned, hands-on craft rather than anything flashy? And when the film itself keeps daring you to guess where these things came from, is that an open question worth taking seriously, or the whole point of the joke?And finally… what does it really mean?!Find us on your socials of choice at www.linktr.ee/everymovieeverpodcastIf you enjoyed the show and want more, head on over to Patreon and enjoy heaps of exclusive content there! LOVE YAGET 20% OFF CINEWORLD UNLIMITED MEMBERSHIP WITH DISCOUNT CODE: ' TEL013 ' You're Welcome!

An unpublished Dune Encyclopedia manuscript called Psychology of the Fremen never made it past Willis E. McNelly's editing desk, until now. Abu and Leo dig into what got cut, in part one of a two-episode dive into the Fullerton archives' unreleased psychology entries. Carl B. Yoke, a Kent State University professor, wrote it as one of five planned psychology profiles that also covered the Bene Gesserit, the Sardaukar, the Harkonnens, and the Imperium. Yoke's Fremen entry builds its case through an invented smuggler-poet, whose writings and observations of Fremen psychology survived in the Bene Gesserit archives on Wallach IX. From there, Abu and Leo trace a psychological system mapped almost entirely onto Carl Jung. This episode contains NO SPOILERS for the Dune novels. SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: https://www.patreon.com/GomJabbar Say thank you with a tip: https://buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: https://gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: https://www.youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gareth, Justin, and Michael at Skewed and Reviewed discuss topical entertainment news of the week. They look at 70 MM IMAX releases for Star Wars, Batman Day, NYCC News, Resident Evil, Dune/Avengers, and the rumored return of Killzone. 00:00 Star Wars 50th and Starfighter 07:20 Batman Day - Sept 19th 16:30 Jazewares- Largest Spider-man gathering 18:35 Resident Evil film news 28:58 Dune/Avengers pre-sales 29:35 Sony Killzone rumors

Hosts STEPHEN SCARLATA (producer, Jodorowsky's Dune) and JOSH MILLER (writer, Sonic The Hedgehog, Violent Night) went head to head trying to predict who the Top 10 winners will be at the 2026 summer box office - playing The Summer Movie Wager (https://thesummermoviewager.com/). Time to find out whose predictions were the best! Theme music by Brian J Casey

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Summer 2026 and rate them. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store: FALLARMOR The coupon code is valid through September 21, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 319 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 4th, 2026, and today I'm looking back at the movies and streaming shows I watched over Summer 2026. We will also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Armor series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLARMOR. As always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through September 21st, 2026, so if you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Blade of Visions is done. It came to 99,000 words. It'd be kind of cool if it came to 100,000, but as I've learned in the 15 years I've been doing this, it's not a good idea to pad things for length. Editing is underway. I'm about 15% through the first pass of edits. I'm working on the cover design, so I'm on good track to have the book out before the end of the month. I also wrote a tie-in short story called Winter Crown and don't forget that [newsletter] subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Blade of Visions comes out later this month. So this makes a very excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter. I am also 12,000 words into Elven-Warlock, which will be the seventh book in the Half-Elven Thief series. Hopefully that will be out in October, if all goes well. In audiobook news, I think Blade of Thieves (as narrated by Brad Wills) and Cloak of Worlds (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) are now finally available at all the usual audiobook stores, which includes Audible, Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and all the others. So if you want to listen to those if you are going on a Labor Day road trip, you can check those out. A reminder that Stealth and Spells Online: The Complete LitRPG trilogy (narrated by C.J. McAllister) is also available on Audible, so check that out. That's 32 hours long and that would also cover all your Labor Day travels. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:22 Main Topic of the Week: Summer 2026 Movie Roundup So let's move on to our main topic this week. Our main topic this week is the Summer 2026 Movie Roundup and I always enjoy doing those. These episodes are a little less serious than some of the other episodes and it's fun to talk about things I enjoyed and that you might enjoy as well. And I did see a lot of new movies this summer. In fact, I went to the actual theater four times for Masters of the Universe, The Odyssey, Spider-Man, and Coyote vs. Acme, which is probably more than I've gone in a single season since before COVID times. So as usual, here are the movies I saw this summer (rated from least favorite to most favorite). The grades are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own thoughts and opinions. First up is The Breadwinner, which came out in 2026. This is basically standup comedian Nate Bargatze's act come to life as a movie. If you've seen Bargatze's standup, his usual routine is to portray himself as the dumb husband and bumbling Girl Dad, which is actually quite clever from a comedic standpoint since you're unlikely to have outraged mobs calling for your head if all you're doing is making fun of yourself. Anyway, Bargatze portrays Nate Wilcox, the best Toyota salesman in Nashville. (Don't worry, this is the first of only many product placement moments.) He lets his wife Kate manage the household and do the bulk of the work with their three daughters. When Kate's invention takes off on Shark Tank, she has to go to South Korea for two weeks to oversee manufacturing, leaving Nate in charge of the kids. Comedic chaos ensues. On the positive side of this movie, I did approve how this movie showed a married couple trying to work through a rough patch and do what's right for their kids and each other in a semi-productive way rather than blowing up their lives over nonsensical trivialities in the style of Eat, Pray, Love. On the downside, there was a lot of product placement, to the point where it at times felt like an extended commercial with bits of plot jammed in between product endorsement. No doubt most of the production budget came from product placement money. Will Forte was funny as an eccentric roofing contractor and Martin Herlihy as a shifty DoorDash employee. Kumail Nanjiani was funny as Nate's rival salesman at the car dealership. So overall, I would say this was blandly amusing and inoffensive with some funny slapstick moments. Overall grade: C- Next up is Supergirl, which came out in 2026. This movie really was sort of a strange combination of John Wick and the human trafficking subplot from 2020's Black Widow. The end result wasn't quite as good as Superman from 2025, alas. I did like this movie's interpretation of Supergirl. Kara Zor-El's departure from Krypton was way more traumatic than Superman's, so she's dealing with her unresolved emotional issues by traveling from planet to planet with red suns and getting hammered since the same yellow sun that gives Kryptonians their superpowers on Earth also keeps them from getting drunk because their bodies process alcohol too efficiently. However, Kara comes to a planet where a girl named Ruthye lives. Ruthye's family has been slaughtered by ruthless brigands yet led by Krem of the Yellow Hills and she's going on a quest for revenge. When Ruthye tries to recruit Kara for the quest, she's not interested, but then Krem steals Kara's spaceship and poisons her dog Krypto. Krem carries the antidote on his person, so now Kara and Ruthye team up to get vengeance on Krem and to heal Krypto. Krem is a nasty piece of work and he and his space gang travel from planet to planet abducting women to be their wives. I think the problem was that Krem was kind of a boring but nasty villain, but he was still boring. He was basically a space thug with too many piercings. Lex Luthor from 2025 Superman, by contrast, was a really interesting villain, this malignant narcissist who knows that his obsession with Superman is over the top, but he's going to act on it anyway. Additionally, I don't think this version of Supergirl is quite capable of being a lead character on her own. She'd make a superb secondary character, but I don't think she could quite carry a movie on her own. And Jason Momoa was pretty good as Lobo. Overall grade: C- Next up is Troy, which came out in 2004. I wanted to see this either before or after I watched The Odyssey this summer and ended up watching it the day before I went to see The Odyssey. I would say this movie was slow and ponderous, but I did enjoy watching it. This is an adaption of The Iliad and has the sort of slow stateliness of epic films from the '60s. It had good performances and good battle scenes. Brian Cox was enjoyable as a scenery chewing Agamemnon and Brad Pitt worked as Achilles. Interestingly, his version of Achilles reminded me of the interpretation of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen from Dune 2 as sort of a violent psychopath with his own twisted sense of honor. Oddly, despite the fact that this was rather a long movie, the ending seems a bit rushed, like we needed to hurry up and get to the Trojan Horse. It was amusing how Achilles' relationship with Patroclus was changed to "cousin" for the modern audience, but Greek views on sexuality would definitely be unpalatable with both right-wing and left-wing versions of the modern mind, which is a good thing because while the Greeks contributed a great deal to the development of civilization, they were into a lot of unsavory stuff. So overall, I would say this was a fun, epic movie, but I think this walked so the 2026 version of The Odyssey could run. Amusing fact: Christopher Nolan was apparently supposed to direct this, but the deal fell through and he got Batman Begins as a consolation prize instead. Overall grade: B- Next up is The Dink, which came out in 2026. This is an Apple TV comedy movie about pickleball of all things. I feel like this was made because some Apple executive got made fun of by some tennis players for playing pickleball and then decided to take revenge through media. Jake Johnson plays Dustin Boyd, a washed up former child tennis star who now works at his father's tennis club. The club has difficulties because of a growing influx of pickleball players who the hardcore tennis players hate. Dustin's father decides to use the club's bylaws to force a duel match to decide the issue, in the grand tradition of wacky comedy stakes. Dustin really wants to play the duel match, but his wrist is injured in an accident. To get his wrist mobility back, the doctor suggested he play some pickleball and Dustin views this as beneath him, but he really wants to play again, so he signs up for pickleball. This ends up being a wacky sports company/buddy movie as Dustin gradually befriends an eccentric older pickleball player. Ed Harris should really do more comedic roles. He was great as Dustin's stern, yet unscrupulous father. I do admire Apple TV's dedication to making random stuff. Overall grade: B- Next up is Green and Gold, which came out in 2025, and this is a melodrama about a farmer and his granddaughter dealing with the grim economic realities of farming. This is set in 1992/1993 era Wisconsin. Buck refuses to modernize his dairy farm in Door County, Wisconsin. His granddaughter Jenny is a talented musician and also a skilled farmer, and Buck wants her to take over the farm one day, but Jenny's ambitions are looking elsewhere. Events come to a head when Jenny realizes that Buck is deeply in debt to the bank, which is about to foreclose on the farm. However, Buck and the chief banker have a personal animosity, so they settle on a bet. If the Green Bay Packers win a Super Bowl title in 1993, the banker will give Buck one more year to turn things around on the farm. Meanwhile, Jenny begins to wonder if her music ambitions might generate the money to save the farm. Of course, if you are familiar with the history of the Packers, you know that they won a Super Bowl in 1996, not 1993. The movie has carried on the back of the very strong performances of its actors. It also has an ambiguously happy ending, as is true with so many things in farming. I like this movie because I've spent a lot of my life in the American Midwest, [and] I did appreciate how it shows the difficulties of the farming life. Also, this is important: a fall from a ladder is a plot point. Ladder safety is important, people! If you are going up a ladder, for heaven's sake don't climb the ladder in high heels like the character in question does. Wear sensible, well-fitting shoes with good soles. A very long time ago, I used to work with a guy who would climb extension ladders in cowboy boots. It is nothing short of the mercy of God that he didn't fall off and shatter half the bones in his body. Overall grade: B Next up is Grumpy Old Men, which came out in 1993. Apparently this is set in Wabasha, Minnesota, which is amusing because filming actually took place in several areas in the Twin Cities in Eastern Minnesota, but not actually in Wabasha. I found that personally amusing because I'm quite familiar with the area and so I recognize several filming locations. Anyway, the movie is about two retirees, Max and John, who are enemies and have been enemies for years, but Max is lonely and wants to get married again, and John is about to lose his house to the IRS due to tax problems. Things come to a head when an attractive literature professor moves across the street and both Max and John take an interest in her and start competing for her affections. However, it turns out that Max and John are actually best friends whose love language happens to be hatred and practical jokes, kind of like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, but more on them below. This was a good character comedy/drama. It was interesting that the professor was an early version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, albeit several decades before someone came up with the term. This is worth watching both as a character and comedy drama and a time capsule of the 1990s. Sometimes a movie ages a bit badly (Airplane and the Thomas Crown Affair from the Spring Movie Roundup come to mind), but this didn't. The sequel Grumpier Old Men from 1995 is basically the same movie, but with the characters acting about 20% dumber so a sitcom style plot can happen. Still entertaining, but not as good as the first one, so Grumpier Old Men only gets a B-, but Grumpy Old Men gets a B+. Next up is Masters of the Universe, which came out in 2026. It was amusing to read reviews of this movie because people thought way too hard about a movie that is essentially about battling action figures. Anyway, this was pretty good. It was nice to see a movie about a science fiction property that doesn't actually hate the source material. Basically it's a live action version of the cartoons from the '80s, albeit with somewhat more thoughtful moments. I heard someone suggest that it was close in tone to Thor: Ragnarok, and that seems accurate. The plot is that Skeletor conquers Eternia and 10-year-old Prince Adam is sent with the Sword of Power through a magical portal to Earth to keep him and the sword out of Skeletor's reach. However, Adam loses the sword while passing through the gate and 15 years later is working in human resources. He's still seeking for the sword despite his therapist trying to convince him that it was a trauma-induced fantasy. However, his persistence pays off and he does find the sword. Teela, who is one of the resistance leaders against Skeletor's rule, comes to Earth to find him and bring him back, but Skeletor's minions arrive to claim the sword as well. Adam and Teela escape back to Eternia and it's up to Adam to find a way to use the Sword of Power to become the hero that Eternia needs. Dolph Lundgren's cameo was great. Overall, I would say this is a fun movie to watch, especially if you're a Millennial or Gen Xer who saw the cartoons or the live action movie back in the '80s. Jared Leto has something of an increasingly questionable reputation these days, but he did a good job as Skeletor, played him halfway between the solemn gravitas of the 1987 version and the malevolent comedic cornball of the cartoons. Of course, in my opinion, the Frank Langella version from 1987 is the best version of Skeletor since he placed it with all the seriousness of a Shakespearean villain monologue at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In hindsight, it wasn't terribly surprising that this underperformed at the box office. It felt like it was made for guys my age, not for kids. I would've been comfortable bringing an eight-year-old to see The Mandalorian and Grogu or Super Mario Galaxy, but I would've been less certain bringing a kid that age to see Masters of the Universe. Additionally, it seemed very Marvel in tone, and I think the overall mood of the US these days is less "Marvel Cinematic Universe quips and banter" and more sort of the grimness of The Odyssey, which we'll talk about shortly. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Young Washington, which came out in 2026, a biopic of the early life of George Washington, covering how he more or less accidentally started the French and Indian War and how he recovered his reputation at the Battle of Braddock's Field. To be fair, the international situation at the time meant that someone was going to start the French and Indian War. It just happened to be Washington, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Overall, I liked this. It was reasonably historically accurate, though some of the emotional and family dialogue at times was a bit clunky. Additionally, Washington was portrayed as having revolutionary leanings much earlier in life than he actually did, since when he was a young man, he had no thoughts of being anything but a British subject and officer. That said, some of the most implausible stuff in the movie actually happened in real life. Like if I were to write in a novel that the future president of the United States personally rallied the army's rear guard to save as many men as possible from an ambush, and in the process had two horses shot out from under him and ended up with bullet holes in his hat and coat (all while fighting continuously), you would probably find that a bit implausible, but it actually happened that way. Washington's daring actions during that battle were one of the reasons he was appointed commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, that and there weren't many other colonials with as much experience of military command as Washington. In that vein, the battle scenes were the best part of the movie. They captured the brutality and messiness of 18th Century warfare without being especially graphic. Anyway, I'm glad this is getting a sequel. Maybe we'll end up with a Young Washington Cinematic Universe. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Meet the Parents, which came out in 2000, and this is probably one of the apex forms of cringe comedy. Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker, a nurse who's in love with schoolteacher Pam Burns. Greg wants to marry Pam, but overhears a phone call with her sister where she says her fiancé asked permission of her traditional father first. Greg decides that he's going to ask Pam's father's permission first to get off on the right foot, and so accompanies Pam to her sister's wedding and her parents' house to, as the title says, Meet the Parents. However, Pam's father is the former CIA counterintelligence officer Jack, and he and Greg immediately get on each other's nerves. To make things worse, the airline has lost Greg's luggage. From these two starting premises follow a cascading series of hilarious disasters that accumulate in a septic tank fire on the lawn. I'm not sure, but I think I saw this one in the theaters when it came out in 2000, and I thought it was funny then. With 26 years of additional life experience under the belt, I still think it's pretty funny, though you could still tell that this movie was filmed before 9/11 because if Greg had his airport meltdown seen today, the consequences would've been much worse. Overall grade: B+ Next up is O Brother Where Art Thou, which came out in 2000. This is a very, very, very specific adaptation of The Odyssey directed by the Coen brothers. George Clooney plays Everett, a convict who escapes from a chain gang in Mississippi during the Great Depression. He wants to find a treasure and he recruits fellow convicts Delmar and Peter to assist him. Along the way, Everett and his team encountered 1930s era versions of the Sirens, the cyclops, the blind prophet Tiresias, and other characters and foes from the original Odyssey myth. Everett and his friends end up running a scam where they pretend to be a Christian music group, but as it turns out, they're actually pretty good at singing, so this leads to unexpected hilarity and opportunities. This was also a very funny movie. Imagine The Odyssey is a comedy with a lot of singing set in the Deep South during the Depression, and you're there. If you're a fan of bluegrass music, this is worth watching. If you've seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, it's worth watching this just to ponder how the same source material can produce such wildly divergent interpretations. If you don't care about The Odyssey, then this is still a fun movie to watch. Proof: I mentioned to someone that I had seen this and she responded that she both loved the movie and was surprised to learn that he had in fact been inspired by The Odyssey. Overall grade: A- Next up is Hoppers, which came out in 2026. Like most Pixar movies, this was very high concept. Unlike many recent Pixar movies, it wasn't too depressing and didn't disappear up its own tailpipe. In the city of Beaverton, hot tempered girl Mabel bonds with her grandmother in their favorite place, a woodland grove favored by beavers. Years later, Mabel is a biology student under Dr. Fairfax, but is neglecting her studies to face off against her nemesis, the popular yet sketchy Mayor Jerry of Beaverton. Mayor Jerry wants to build an expressway that will wipe out the woodland grove, and he's perfectly within his rights to do it since no animals have been found living there. Since Mabel's grandmother has died, she's unwilling to give up the grove. However, Dr. Fairfax's research might give her a way. Dr. Fairfax has worked out a way to temporarily transfer human consciousness to a robotic beaver capable of speaking to real beavers, much like the plot of Avatar. In a funny scene, Fairfax angrily denies that it's just like Avatar. Mabel gets the idea to use this to convince real beavers to settle in the grove, thereby thwarting Mayor Jerry's plans. This touches off both a wacky yet poignant adventure. The plot was very well structured and it followed the proper rules of story structure, which I've talked about before. Mabel definitely is a protagonist who takes action, but experiences setbacks and problems of her own creation. It was pretty good. I say it was a return to form for Pixar after some of their weaker movies in the 2020s. Overall grade: A Now it's time for my three favorite movies of summer 2026, all of which I actually saw in the theater. First up is Coyote versus Acme, which came out in 2026. This movie had an extra surge of popularity from the fact that Warner Brothers canceled it as a tax write-off, but distributor Ketchup Entertainment revived it. That makes it a plucky underdog since Warner Brothers senior executives are kind of like the apex version of soulless corporate bug men. Like if I wrote characters in my books who acted like Warner Brothers senior executives, people would think I was being didactic and heavy-handed. Anyway, after decades of failures in efforts to capture the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue Acme Corporation for its numerous defective products. Coyote teams up with a lazy strip mall lawyer named Kevin Avery, who specializes in getting small settlements from Acme. However, Avery and Coyote end up filing a massive lawsuit against Acme, which means they'll face the full wrath of Acme Corporation, including its ace lawyer Buddy Crane and its ruthless CEO, Foghorn Leghorn. What follows is a comedic courtroom battle as Coyote and Avery try to defeat Acme Corporation, defeat its sinister plans, and Coyote starts to realize that Road Runner might actually be his best friend. Both quite amusing and touching, and I'm glad this was rescued from the tax write-off vault. Overall grade: A Next up is The Odyssey, which came out in 2026. This wasn't quite as good as Oppenheimer in 2023 in my opinion, but it was still very good and very much worth seeing. It was weird that The Odyssey was briefly a football in the never-ending US culture war scrum because the movie isn't really political and doesn't really have a message beyond "war is destructive and bad", which every sensible person would agree with, and a lesser message of "violating the law of morality has unforeseen cascading bad consequences, including the destruction of civilization", which is also quite true and was one of the themes of Oppenheimer. Nolan himself dismissed the controversies as "irrelevant" and "part of the territory" since no one had actually seen the movie yet, and given that The Odyssey has made a billion and a half dollars as of this recording, I think that may have proved his point. I imagine the scrutiny from Batman fans back in the 2010s was way more intense since in the modern era, many people care more deeply about the accuracy of Batman than The Odyssey. I do think the debate over the historical accuracy in The Odyssey is pointless because the Odyssey is myth, not history. The Iliad and The Odyssey are a lot like Arthurian myth in terms of their actual historicity. Even when Arthurian legend was massively popular with English kings and nobles in the late medieval and early modern period (for example, Henry VIII's older brother was named Arthur in imitation of King Arthur), the version of Arthurian myth they celebrated and wished to emulate had virtually no connection to the reality of Britain in the 500s AD and was instead a sort of fantasy version of their own time in the 14th and 15th centuries. By the time The Odyssey was written down, no doubt a similar process was underway. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Arthurian cycle probably have a kernel of historical truth buried underneath the tales of magic swords, sirens, cyclopses, and vengeful witches with magic islands. There likely was a Romano-British warlord who might have been named Arthur (or possibly Ambrosius Aurelianus) who held off the Saxons for a while before he was overwhelmed and killed. Likewise, Heinrich Schliemann was a highly eccentric and very sketchy crazy rich guy, but he did prove that there really was some version of the city of Troy that was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age. But everything beyond those basic details came from thousands of years of embellishments and flourishes from later poets and writers. So arguing about the historical accuracy of The Odyssey is a bit like arguing if Star Wars portrays faster than light travel in an accurate way. That kind of argument is just missing the point entirely. It's also interesting to see how modern standards clashed with the ancient mindset. You know how I always say that everywhere in the United States is exactly the same right until it really, really isn't? I think ancient people are just like us until they really, really weren't. Like ancient people would have been superstitious to an extent that even the most credulous crystal and aura influencer on TikTok would find horrifying and frequently violent in a way that the most strident self-defense advocate would find shocking. The Odyssey's version of Odysseus feels guilt and remorse over his actions in a way an actual ancient Greek probably wouldn't have, but so what? This is The Odyssey viewed through the lens of the 21st century, just as those English nobles viewed the myth of King Arthur and his knights through the lens of their time. As I mentioned with Troy above, the ancient Greeks were often quite brutal and would celebrate sacking an enemy city. One side note before we get to the movie, I probably found it funnier than I should have how Nolan favorably cited classicist Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey as a source, and Wilson then had an extended and unintentionally comedic multi-article crashout about how much she hated the movie and of course how much she hated the commemorative Trojan Horse popcorn bucket. Apparently Wilson hated the movie so much she's going to do a new translation of The Odyssey, much to her publisher's baffled dismay. No one does offended huffy petulance quite like an academic. Anyway, back to the movie. It follows the familiar story of Odysseus through Christopher Nolan's preference for non-linear storytelling and practical effects. I did think it was interesting how in this interpretation, Odysseus explicitly connected the ruse of the Trojan Horse with the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Sea Peoples. It's also probably the most supernatural film Nolan has ever done with actual fantasy and supernatural elements as opposed to science fiction like Inception, Tenant, and Interstellar. Odysseus talks to Athena throughout the movie and it's left up to the viewer's interpretation whether or not he's actually talking to Athena or his own guilt-ridden hallucinations. That said, Odysseus encounters a witch with actual magic powers and travels to the underworld to speak with the shades of the dead, so it's entirely possible he's talking to the actual Athena. In this version, as I mentioned, Odysseus is guilt-ridden over the ruse of the Trojan Horse, which is shown as a violation of the sacred hospitality of Zeus's law and as great a crime as the creation of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, which of course is similar to Oppenheimer, where Oppenheimer's creation of the atomic bomb is treated similarly. There are also some genuinely scary sequences in the movie. The bit with the underworld is very spooky, the cyclops is actually quite frightening, and the character of Circe reaches the level of scary previously attained by Heath Ledger's version of The Joker in The Dark Knight. If Nolan ever decides he wants to do a horror movie, it will probably be one of the scariest ones ever made. To sum up, The Odyssey has great performances, great spectacle, great cinematography, and great action sequences. As an interesting interpretation of the original myth, definitely worth seeing. I think you can tell it was a great movie because of all the arguments on the Internet about "what does it really mean?" Great art often has that effect. Overall grade: A The final of my three favorite movies of [Summer] 2026 is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which came out in 2026. There's a rumor, and I don't know if it's true or not, that Tom Holland found the experience of working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey so eye-opening that he insisted that if they made another Spider-Man movie, it had to have a reason for existing other than "make a lot of money". If this story is true, it clearly worked. Previously, I though the two best Spider-Man movies were Spider-Man 2 from 2004 and Spider-Man: No Way Home from 2021. I must now amend that opinion to say that there are three best Spider-Man movies and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the three. It is pretty good. I would've trimmed it here and there, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and is an excellent Spider-Man story that totally captures the essence of the character within a good story. It takes place four years after the events of No Way Home erased everyone's memory that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Peter has now been crime fighting full time, but it is taking a severe toll on his emotions and personal life that he's deliberately ignoring. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has become the beloved crime fighter of New York, trusted by both the NYPD and the Federal Department of Damage Control, which is a reoccurring frenemy for superheroes from other movies. When someone launches an attack on the headquarters of Damage Control, the director recruits Peter to fight their new enemy, a mysterious figure who uses telepathy to possess people from a distance. Peter is the only one who can sense it thanks to his spider sense, and he's also the only one able to resist the telepath's possession abilities. But despite his resistance to possession, fighting a telepath is a dangerous proposition for someone with as many emotional issues as Peter, and things start to spiral out of control when the telepath starts digging into his life. But there's another lesson Peter has to learn. People (and especially superheroes) who take the federal government at its word tend to regret it. For that matter, ignoring his emotional issues is causing Peter's spider powers to start acting in strange ways. But of course, at the end of the day, Spider-Man always follows his conscience, no matter how high the cost to him personally. Definitely an enjoyable movie. All the scenes with Spider-Man and Punisher were great, and the two of them had a great dynamic together. A few other Marvel Cinematic Universe people show up, but this is probably one of the most standalone movies the MCU has done in a while. Of course, the risk of MCU Continuity Lockout is always there (which is one of the reasons I started writing Half-Eleven Thief in 2023). Overall grade: A So I would say it was a pretty good summer for movies. It's also valuable lessons in not taking the Internet too seriously, which too many people do nowadays. There are all these dedicated analyses on X, Threads, and Reddit in June and May explaining why The Odyssey was going to fail for whatever reason, and instead it made $1.5 billion. So I think that's a good lesson in not taking everything you read on the internet a little too seriously. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

Check out the episode in its original version here : https://www.gdiy.fr/podcast/mati-staniszewski-vo/ElevenLabs est un iceberg.On pense que c'est une startup qui permet de générer des voix avec l'IA mais il ne s'agit en réalité que de la partie visible.Des agents vocaux qui recréent la voix de patients atteints d'un cancer de la gorge pour qu'ils puissent dire leurs vœux de mariage, savent identifier des signes de Parkinson dans votre voix des années avant le diagnostic, et surtout ...un système d'engrenages d'une complexité abyssale, invisible pour l'utilisateur.La thèse de Mati, son fondateur est simple : l'écriture n'est pas le langage naturel de l'humain.Le clavier, les écrans, les interfaces qu'on utilise depuis 30 ans, sont des anomalies historiques sur le point de disparaître.Quatre ans seulement après sa création, ElevenLabs est déjà valorisé à plus de 11 milliards de dollars et réalise 600 millions d'ARR avec une équipe de 600 personnes.Une boîte européenne, qui veut rester européenne, dans un secteur dominé par les Américains.Dans cet épisode, on ouvre tous les tiroirs :Pourquoi la voix va devenir l'interface principale entre l'humain et la machineCe que ElevenLabs fait vraiment : agents, santé, éducation, IP, souveraineté des donnéesPourquoi Mati a mis un ingénieur dans chaque équipe non-techniqueLa place de l'humain dans un monde où 80% du code est déjà écrit par des machinesMême si votre curiosité n'a pas été piquée, vous DEVEZ écouter cet épisode.C'est impératif pour comprendre où l'on va et surtout comment agir dès maintenant avant qu'il ne soit trop tard…Vous pouvez contacter Mati sur Linkedin, X, Instagram.TIMELINE:00:00:00 : Les premières lignes de code de Mati et les débuts d'ElevenLabs00:10:57 : Ses précédentes expériences chez BlackRock et Palantir00:18:45 : Quitter la Pologne à 18 ans et découvrir ses ambitions00:26:35 : Comment fonctionnent les IA qui parlent00:35:42 : Rendre la voix aux personnes qui l'ont perdue00:40:01 : Briser la barrière des langues00:48:28 : L'homme n'est pas fait pour écrire mais pour parler00:54:03 : La fin des écrans ?00:59:35 : Agents fusionnés ou cascadés : le vrai compromis01:15:30 : Ce que BlackRock et Palantir lui ont appris - et ce qui change en 202601:24:37 : La plateforme, les clients enterprise et le modèle économique01:32:15 : La place de l'humain dans un monde d'agents IA01:39:31 : Comment mettre l'IA au service de l'éducation01:47:43 : Darth Vader, Epic Games et les crises de croissance01:53:29 : Passer le test de Turing et rester européenLes anciens épisodes de GDIY mentionnés : #553 - Paul Frambot - Morpho - Briser le cartel bancaire avec 600 lignes de code#543 - Yann Le Cun - AMI Labs - Rendre l'IA plus humaine#507 - Laurent Alexandre - Auteur - Vers la fin des études supérieures ?#397 - Yann Le Cun - Chief AI Scientist chez Meta - L'Intelligence Artificielle Générale ne viendra pas de Chat GPT#354 - Alex Bouaziz - Deel - Fonder discrètement une décacorne valorisée à 12 milliards de dollars, pour devenir le plus gros DRH du monde#343 - Jonathan Cherki - Contentsquare - Tout faire à 400% et fonder la référence de la French Tech valorisée à plus de $5MDS#327 - Laurent Alexandre - Auteur - ChatGPT & IA : "Dans 6 mois, il sera trop tard pour s'y intéresser"#165 - Laurent Alexandre - Doctissimo - La nécessité d'affirmer ses idéesNous avons parlé de :ElevenLabsCopernicus High SchoolBlackrockPalantirWhisprFlowDark Vador dans FortniteLa femme qui avait perdu sa voix avant son mariageLe test de TuringLe blog d'ElevenLabsLes recommandations de lecture :Dune, de Frank Herbert

We open this week with the promise of an 18-day podcastathon — complete with a urologist's catheter and a rectal trumpet — before getting into what we've actually been consuming. Peter is working through The Iliad and saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which we both agree is a fine three-hour movie saddled with a divisive "wet fart" of an ending. He also brings new albums from Mastodon (Marrow Deep, a grief-soaked triumph) and Russian Circles (Nine), while Eden counters with gloriously bad movies (Dracula 3000), style-over-substance manga, and Marvel's horror-flavored Midnight Universe. The centerpiece is our no-prep game: building Mount Rushmores for six categories and landing on Columbo, Batman, Sherlock Holmes, and Jessica Fletcher for the last one.Show NotesThe Odyssey (2026): We both saw Christopher Nolan's Homer epic and think it a fine, overlong movie whose invented "wet fart" of an ending undercuts the text.The Iliad / The Aeneid: Peter is on a three-book run through the epics, starting with the one (not The Odyssey) that high school never assigned. The IliadThe Odyssey (1997 miniseries): Eden argues the Armand Assante version is the actually rewatchable take on Homer over Nolan's film.The Great Mental Models: Peter is chipping through Shane Parrish's series on thinking frameworks.Marrow Deep: Peter calls Mastodon's ninth album — recorded after Brent Hinds' death — a grief-processing triumph and their best since Crack the Skye.Nine: We both agree Russian Circles' ninth album cements them among the post-metal greats alongside Cult of Luna, Neurosis, and Isis.Dracula 3000: Eden breaks down the 2004 space-vampire disaster starring Casper Van Dien and Coolio, which ends on a startlingly abrupt sex-bot punchline.Spice and Wolf: Eden's mowing-and-audiobook companion about a traveling merchant and a shrewd wolf harvest goddess.Midnight Universe: Eden read early PDFs of Marvel's horror-themed line — Midnight X-Men, Midnight Fantastic Four, Midnight Spider-Man — ahead of its October 7 launch.Fields of Mistria: Eden is deep in the cozy farming sim and teases a possible second dragon in town.Mount Rushmore of sandwiches: PB&J, the deli Italian, BLT, and Reuben — international sandwiches disqualified.Mount Rushmore of doorstopper fantasy: Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Dune (argued as much fantasy as sci-fi).Mount Rushmore of movie musicals: West Side Story, The Music Man, Singin' in the Rain, and Hello, Dolly!.Mount Rushmore of Western RPGs: Baldur's Gate II, Skyrim, Diablo II, and the first Mass Effect — janky and all.Mount Rushmore of pizza toppings: pepperoni, ham & pineapple, supreme, and plain cheese.Mount Rushmore of TV detectives: Columbo, Batman, Sherlock Holmes, and Jessica Fletcher as the Teddy Roosevelt fourth.

Introducing our new series, Kink Journeys, where each week we'll follow a listener of pod as they go through a pivotal moment in their journey. This week, we're closing out Grey's journey with some very exciting summer news, a scene that brought the educator within to the surface, and a manifesto for the future of Grey's drag. Follow him at @greytheteaman. Lina & Mr. Dune's Pillion convo is available on Patreon and Substack. Lina is currently on maternity leave! If you're curious about all that, she has curated a series of written posts releasing every 1.5 weeks on Patreon and Substack, many of which are free, and several contain bonus content. You can still get all our regular bonus content in both those places, except Patreon has the Discord server and Substack does not.   Submit questions for this podcast by going to memo.fm/askasub and recording a voice memo. We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming in mid-October.  Even though Lina is on leave, she's still offering a limited quantity of Ask A Sub Office Hours. Book your one-off slot or package here. Or join Patreon on the BFF tier to get an included session every month alongside all your other benefits.  Follow us on Instagram at @askasub2.0 CREDITS Created, Hosted, Produced and Edited by Lina Dune With Additional Support from Mr. Dune Artwork by Kayleigh Denner Music by Dan Molad

Abu and Leo begin the book club coverage of Hunters of Dune, the first novel completing Frank Herbert's saga after his death. They walk through the first half of the book's tangled plot before turning to the continuity breaks and creative choices they think do real damage to the Dune canon. This episode contains SPOILERS for all six of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, plus chapters 1-44 of Hunters of Dune! Listen to "The 7 Deadly Sins of Brian Herbert" episode HERE IN THIS EPISODE Why the Ithaca crew revives gholas of Paul Atreides and Leto II Atreides while passing over Ghanima and Alia Murbella's shaky start as Mother Commander of the merged Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres, and the power struggles taking shape at Chapter House The Oracle of Time and a Golden Path retcon that Abu and Leo argue contradict rules Frank Herbert spent six books establishing SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: patreon.com/gomjabbar Say thank you with a tip: buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EPISODE 761 - Andy Vargo - Uber Stories and Owning Your Awkward - Discovering Your True Self and Rewriting Your StoryIn this engaging episode, Andy Vargo joins from Tacoma, Washington—home to surprises like Almond Roca, the origins of Mars bars, and inspiration for Frank Herbert's Dune from the local Asarco smelter plant. Andy shares his nonlinear path to authorship, sparked by childhood encouragement but paused for decades amid family life, until divorce and job loss reignited his passion. He pivoted from unfinished projects like The Awkward Interview to self-publishing personal stories that became his breakthrough.Andy demystifies writing, urging aspiring authors to publish without fear of rejection—someone will connect with your unique voice, even if it feels unoriginal. He rewrote his LinkedIn narrative to link grocery management coaching and sales experience to his current role as a motivational speaker and life coach, framing past jobs as foundational skills. His core books, Own Your Awkward: Thoughts (60 days of mindset shifts with reflection prompts, like reframing loneliness in a cafe) and Own Your Awkward: Life Changes (worksheets for navigating transitions), plus a series of five guided journals born from his rock-bottom days, emphasize activity over passive reading. He also entertains with OneDrive Stands, tales from 5,000 rideshare rides turned into a one-man improv show using audience names.At 40, Andy embraced his true self post-divorce, realizing faking normalcy depleted his energy and held him back from peak performance. His mission: lean into insecurities—be it body image, quirks like pineapple pizza, or deeper differences—as superpowers that foster authenticity and connection. This fuels his coaching for speakers, entrepreneurs, and leaders, where he mirrors passions (e.g., skateboarding artistry into business) and breaks paths into manageable wins. Owning awkward builds trust; naming self-consciousness, like bedhead nerves, sparks rapport over polished perfection. Change is neutral, he stresses—not good or bad until hindsight reveals it—and fears often mislabel (e.g., "heights" is really "landing").Key Takeaway: Own your awkward not despite it, but because of it—turn what holds you back into your greatest strength for authentic success and deeper relationships. Visit awkwardcareer.com for Andy's books, podcast, free worksheet, and more. https://awkwardcareer.com/Motivational Speaker and Life Coach Who Ignites Change.You're tired of the polished talk about “authenticity” that doesn't get real results. I skip the fluff and dive into what makes us human: the awkward, relatable quirks that create real connection and drive real change. It's bold. It's different. It's Awkward. And it works.Curious about how your unique traits can actually be your superpower? Start activating your voice today with a free worksheet designed to help you lean into your awkward and see the power you already have.Support the show___https://livingthenextchapter.com/podcast produced by: https://truemediasolutions.ca/Coffee Refills are always appreciated, refill Dave's cup here, and thanks!https://buymeacoffee.com/truemediaca

After nearly becoming a Hollywood tax write-off, Coyote vs. Acme finally escaped the Warner Bros. vault—and Rob "Rubber Duck" Grabowski joins Matt and Bob to decide whether the movie was actually worth saving. The guys break down the bizarre journey that nearly kept the film from ever being released, why a courtroom drama starring Wile E. Coyote works better than it has any right to, and how the movie manages to find genuine heart inside decades of ACME explosions, falling anvils, and failed Road Runner schemes. They debate whether the movie should have leaned even harder into Will Forte's brand of absurd comedy, how it stacks up against Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam, which Looney Tunes cameos actually work, and the surprisingly emotional relationship between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Plus: Is it “Meep Meep” or “Beep Beep”? Does Rob actually hate Dune? Why didn't Bob Odenkirk show up in an Albuquerque courtroom? And which cartoon character is everyone most attracted to? Somehow, a movie about a cartoon coyote suing ACME turns into a conversation about corporate Hollywood, failure, friendship, persistence, and why sometimes you should just release the damn movie.

Valencia-based duo Pajaro Dune, formed by Jaime Romero (aka Estrato Aurora) and composer/pianist David Ortolà (aka d_o_ppelgaenger), join us with a live session recorded at Digit Festival in rural Spain. Working entirely through improvisation, the duo weave deep, layered atmospheres with fractured rhythms, evolving textures and hypnotic, organic movement. Follow : @pajaro_dune www.instagram.com/pajaro_dune/ www.instagram.com/digit___lla/

Two podcasters, both alike in dignity (or lack thereof), in fair Moviestruck where we lay our scene... It's time to talk Romeo+ Juliet (1996) with Noir from Rolling with Difficulty! Spoiler alert, we really like this one. A high note to end this Shakespearience! ---The Patron Drive is back! Join the Moviestruck Patreon at any paid tier to work towards bonus episodes of Moviestruck! At 150 total paid Patrons of any tier, we'll be covering Dune (1894) with OSP Red. Head on over to Patreon and stick around for the post roll for all the deets on this monthly event.---Where to find Noir:BlueSky: @noirgalaxies.bsky.socialInstagram: @noirgalaxiesContact the Podmoviestruckpod@gmail.comwww.moviestruck.transistor.fmPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moviestruckDiscord: https://discord.gg/cT2vm3KdeSBlueSky: @moviestruck.bsky.socialTheme by Prod. DomSoundcloudThank you to our $10 Patrons!i love dune 1984 its a pretty good movie, aRabidGerbil, Kaeldrannas, Maddy New, Adam Bagnall, Christian Jolliff, UwU, Zas, Ken M, Jacob Hunt, Azraq Shinji, Case Aiken, AnOptimist, Lairde Ray, the Norwegian one, Travis Poe, William Warren, Stag Hart (Deer Deer), Rusty_Fork, Mura Purcell, insomnite, Nathan Dunlap. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Since we're in our #BrianHerbertEra, Abu and Leo revisit an episode from 2022 covering the history of Dune as told by Brian Herbert in his book, The Road to Dune. SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: ⁠patreon.com/gomjabbar⁠ Say thank you with a tip: ⁠buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar⁠ Buy custom-designed Dune merch: ⁠gomjabbar.shop⁠ Watch video episodes and clips: ⁠youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Shark Week on Escape Hatch as we welcome back the director of Sharksploitation, producer of Jodorowsky's Dune, co-host of Best Movies Never Made, Stephen Scarlata. He last joined us with @dale_a for Jaws, and this time we cover ‘the #2 most important shark movie of all time”, LL Cool J's Deep Blue Sea. Haitch gets rekt for his take.Chapters Introduction (00:00:00) Hatch News (00:11:16) Deep Blue Sea Roundtable (00:25:35) Your Letters (01:19:01) Notes and Links Check out Escape Hatch Merch! Our all new collection of swag is available now and every order includes a free Cameo style shoutout from Haitch or Jason. Browse our collection now. Join the Escape Hatch Discord Server! Hang out with Haitch, Jason, and other friends of the pod. Check out the invite here. Escape Hatch is a TAPEDECK Podcasts Jawn! Escape Hatch is a member of TAPEDECK Podcasts, alongside: 70mm (a podcast for film lovers), Bat & Spider (low rent horror and exploitation films), The Letterboxd Show (Official Podcast from Letterboxd), Cinenauts (exploring the Criterion Collection), Lost Light (Transformers, wrestling, and more), and Will Run For (obsessed with running). Check these pods out!. See the movies we've watched and are going to watch on Letterboxd Escape Hatch's Breaking Dune News Twitter list Rate and review the podcast to help others discover it, and let us know what you think of the show at letters@escapehatchpod.com or leave us a voicemail at +1-415-534-5211. Follow @escapehatchpod on Bluesky,Instagram, and TikTok. Music by Scott Fritz and Who'z the Boss Music. Cover art by ctcher. Edited and produced by Haitch. Escape Hatch is a production of Haitch Industries.

On today's episode of Project Big Screen, it's time to feast! We review the Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘TONY' from Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson and — in honor of its subject — collaboratively rank Our Top 10 Movies That Make Us Hungry… What would be your #1? Let us know in the comments below! Also on today's episode, mini-reviews of the sixth installment in the INSIDIOUS franchise and the ensemble comedy SPA WEEKEND, our reactions to the latest episode of LANTERNS, our thoughts on the DUNE 3 ticket fiasco and what it might mean for December, and more! As always, make sure to like and subscribe wherever you watch and listen! Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/Qb8EmXFoF_c Timecodes: || Intro - (0:00) || Tony Review - (0:36) || Tony Spoilers - (34:15) || Ad - (44:28) || Insidious 6 Mini-Review - (45:38) || Spa Weekend Mini-Review - (54:38) || National Treasure 3 Update - (1:06:20) || Spider-Man AI Debacle - (1:09:46) || Dune 3 Ticket Mania - (1:11:59) || What We're Watching - (1:22:45) || Physical Media Corner - (1:26:12) || Our Top 10 Movies That Make Us Hungry - (1:27:43) Follow us on Social Media: barstool.link/pbs X | Twitter | Letterboxd: @ProjBigScreen IG | Tik Tok: @ProjectBigScreen Our Personal Letterboxds: Jeff: @JeffDLowe Gooch: @BobGoochman Kenjac: @Kenjac Klemmer: @ChrisKlemmer SUPPORT THE SHOW! BlueChew: Visit https://BlueChew.com for more details and important safety informationYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/lightscamerabarstool

Twirl some soft serve and prepare for small town tragedy as we take an academic look at Scotland, PA (2001) with Professor Sheryl Sawin of Temple University, and all the carnivore carnage within! ---The Patron Drive is back! Join the Moviestruck Patreon at any paid tier to work towards bonus episodes of Moviestruck! At 150 total paid Patrons of any tier, we'll be covering Dune (1894) with OSP Red. Head on over to Patreon and stick around for the post roll for all the deets on this monthly event.---Additional Reading:Elizabeth A. Deitchman, “White Trash Shakespeare: Taste, Morality, and the Dark Side of the American Dream in Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 140–146.Eric C. Brown, “Shakespeare, Class, and ‘Scotland, PA.'” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 147–153.Anthony D. Hoefer Jr., “The McDonaldization of ‘Macbeth': Shakespeare and Pop Culture in ‘Scotland, PA.'” Literature/Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 154–160.George Moore, “Macbeth Goes to Carnival: Otium and Economic Determinism in Scotland, PA.” Literature/Film Quarterly 45.3 (2017).Maurizio Calbi, “Ghosts, Burgers and Drive-Throughs: Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA Adapts Macbeth.” Anglistica 12.1 (2008): 39–57.The Family, Sex and Marriage by Lawrence Stone:https://archive.org/details/familysexmarriag0000stonAn Ordered Society by Susan Ammusen:https://archive.org/details/orderedsocietyge0000amusMacbeth (2006):https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434541/Contact the Podmoviestruckpod@gmail.comwww.moviestruck.transistor.fmPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moviestruckDiscord: https://discord.gg/cT2vm3KdeSBlueSky: @moviestruck.bsky.socialTheme by Prod. DomSoundcloudThank you to our $10 Patrons!aRabidGerbil, Kaeldrannas, Maddy New, Adam Bagnall, Christian Jolliff, UwU, Zas, Ken M, Jim8333, Jacob Hunt, Azraq Shinji, Case Aiken, AnOptimist, Lairde Ray, the Norwegian one, Travis Poe, William Warren, Stag Hart (Deer Deer), Rusty_Fork, Mura Purcell, insomnite, Nathan Dunlap. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Frank Herbert spent five books showing how faiths merge, mutate, and drift beyond recognition. Then, in Chapterhouse: Dune, he wrote in a community of Jews who had not changed at all. Abu and Leo gather critical takes from Jewish readers and scholars, then sit down with historian DZ Kalman to ask whether representation that gets things wrong can still be worth having. This episode contains SPOILERS for all six of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, up through Chapterhouse: Dune! IN THIS EPISODE Rebecca, the Rabbi, and the deal the Bene Gesserit struck with a people nobody could find Where Kwisatz Haderach actually comes from in Jewish mysticism, and why nobody knows how Herbert found it A theory about Beverly Herbert's death, the to-do list she left behind, and what Daniel and Marty have to do with any of it MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE DZ Kalman's essay on the Jews of Dune: jellomenorah.com DZ Kalman's podcast, Belief in the Future: podcasts.apple.com Michael Weingrad, Jews of Dune: jewishreviewofbooks.com Jonathan Weidenbaum, The Holy Versus the Sacred: doi.org Leigh Kimmel's Chapterhouse Dune review: billionlightyearbookshelf.com SUPPORT THE SHOW Get ad-free episodes and more: patreon.com/gomjabbar Say thank you with a tip: buymeacoffee.com/gomjabbar Buy custom-designed Dune merch: gomjabbar.shop Watch video episodes and clips: youtube.com/@loreparty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this edition of Trendpa Smurf, Jack and special guest co-host Sofiya Alexandra discuss Angie Nixon vs. professional astronaut/mean girl Gayle King, California losing Prince Harry, Nithya vs. Karen Bass on Zoom Livestream, ‘Dune 3’ selling preorders months in advance and much more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Missouri, where the booze is conveniently located, the dispensaries are plentiful, and buying a car on Sunday is apparently where society decided to establish some boundaries.Episode 41 kicks off with Rizz and Moon embracing their new identities as BMW owners ahead of a BMW-sponsored golf tournament. Surely the logo on the hood counts as a parking credential, right? Lern attempts to explain concepts like “parking passes” and “hang tags,” but luxury has changed these men. They've seen the badge. They know what they're worth now.From there, this comedy podcast investigates what outsiders notice when they first arrive in Missouri. Is it the rolling green landscape? The hills? The beautiful scenery? Nope. It's the ability to walk into a grocery store and buy hard liquor like a civilized Midwesterner.A woman new to Missouri is stunned by the accessibility of alcohol and recreational weed, which sends the crew down a rabbit hole of grocery-store liquor laws across America. Apparently some states still make you visit a separate store to purchase booze. We assume residents there spend their evenings staring sadly toward Missouri and wondering where freedom went wrong.But Missouri has its limits.You can buy liquor. You can visit a dispensary. You can apparently grab a tall boy at a gas station with concerning ease. But if you want to purchase a car on Sunday? Absolutely not, you lawless animal.The discovery of Missouri's “blue law” leads to another revelation: Lern and Rafe enjoy wandering dealership lots on Sundays specifically because the salespeople aren't there. Rizz finds this behavior completely alien because, according to Rizz, he loves human interaction. Moon immediately requests that the program stop lying to its audience.Then it's time for workplace rage.A leaked video of former Detroit news anchor Taryn Asher berating a colleague launches a debate over losing your temper at work, professionalism, double standards and whether one meltdown should define somebody's career. Naturally, this means revisiting some of broadcasting and Hollywood's most legendary freak-outs.Chris Berman gets angry. Christian Bale goes nuclear. Bill O'Reilly encounters the phrase “to play us out” and briefly enters another dimension.The crew debates whether these blowups are understandable high-pressure moments or just adults being terrible to coworkers. Lern also shares her own battles against studio technology, proving once again that the greatest threat to morning radio isn't declining attention spans—it's a computer deciding at 5 a.m. that today feels like a good day to die.Then Crap on Celebrities arrives with some genuinely sad rock news: longtime ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard has died at 77. The crew looks back at the band's massive career, their unmistakable Texas blues-rock sound, their MTV-era reinvention and the scientific fact that putting on a ZZ Top song makes you approximately 34% more likely to feel capable of winning a bar fight.It also raises an important question nobody else was brave enough to investigate: Has anyone ever seen ZZ Top wearing shorts?The comedy podcast rolls deeper into entertainment chaos with Nick Jonas revealing that he completely bombed his audition for Frozen after arriving unprepared, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan expanding his Arizona empire with a sushi restaurant and apparently carrying the same pair of traveling chopsticks for decades, updates surrounding Tupac's murder trial, new Queens of the Stone Age music, and the planned return of Ozzfest.The celebrity pile continues with Robin Williams' children fighting AI-generated impersonations of their father and reactivating his official Instagram account as a source for authentic material. The crew also looks ahead to Dune: Part Three sharing a release weekend with Avengers: Doomsday, because movie theaters apparently decided December needed its own traffic apocalypse.David Krumholtz says he's stepping away from acting after more than 30 years in Hollywood, which leads everyone into the great “I know that guy!” exercise before the conversation turns toward the tiny club of movies that have crossed $1 billion worldwide.That becomes a game of guessing the biggest box-office monsters before pivoting into actors whose careers were revived by one huge role: John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, Keanu Reeves in John Wick, Brendan Fraser in The Whale, Bruce Willis in Die Hard and more.By the end, we've covered BMW privilege, Missouri liquor laws, empty car dealerships, workplace tantrums, ZZ Top, celebrity news, AI, Dune, billion-dollar movies and celebrity birthdays.And just when you think the show has reached the absolute peak of intellectual discourse, Rizz teases what's coming next:A school has a fart corner.Education is healing.Follow The Rizzuto Show → linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → 1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In episode 2109, Jack and Miles are joined by author of Love At First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy and host of There Are No Girls on the Internet, Bridget Todd, to discuss… David Ellison Does NOT Give a fuck about the film industry, Couple More Pitches for Proactive Platforms for the Emerging Leftwing Movement, McDonald’s Is Secretly Going Full Minority Report, Hollywood’s Hottest Trend Is… The Threat Of Nuclear War? And more! Billionaire David Ellison Is Blackmailing Hollywood Bonta: Paramount 'eager' for a settlement Your McDonald’s File is Probably Bigger Than Your FBI File McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There The Brink of War: Pay it Forward Film Screening: The Brink of War The Brink of War Trailer #1 (2026) The Phantom Menace: How an unproven, widely mocked technology scared the Soviets into ending the Cold War. Nuclear Anxiety, That Staple of 1980s Cinema, Is Back Why nuclear war movies are blowing up Nuclear War Movies Are Back Legendary, ‘Dune’ Helmer Denis Villeneuve Re-Team On ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’ Mike Fleming Jr: Why James Cameron Is Hellbent On Making ‘Ghosts Of Hiroshima’ Japan-Set Movie That Will Bring Nightmare Look At A-Bomb Blasts How the US took on Dr Strangelove and tried to make Americans love the bomb Picturing Armageddon: US Government Responses to Nuclear War Movies ‘Fail Safe’ At 60: The Pentagon Hated This Classic Suspense Drama About Nuclear Catastrophe LISTEN: Tun by LZeeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

JT is flying solo today while Chad is crushing it over in Scotland. Bro dives deep into running for Burbank City Council again and why Ichiro might be the most beloved athlete ever. JT breaks down the star player mentality and why sometimes it can bleed into everyday life. He also talks going to concerts solo, fantasy football dictatorships, and why correcting people online might be humanity's strongest instinct. Then JT calls up his Doctor - Tom to talk Dune, Christopher Nolan vs. Denis Villeneuve and what working as an ER doctor teaches you about life. We also dive into investing regrets, career talk, marriage strategies, getting out of debt, and why maybe every bro should consider running for local office. A true solo pod meatball hope you enjoy the taste! We are live streaming a fully unedited version of the pod on Twitch, if you want to chat with us while we're recording, follow here: https://www.twitch.tv/chadandjtgodeepGrab some dank merch here: https://appreeshapparel.com/Come see us on Tour! JT JUST ADDED HEADLINE DATES FOR THE FALL!Get your tix - https://www.chadandjt.comTEXT OR CALL the hotline with your issue or question: 323-418-2019(Start with where you're from and name for best possible advice)Check out the reddit for some dank convo: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChadGoesDeep/Thanks to our Sponsors:Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/qc8ninke #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.PRODUCTION & EDITS BY: Jake RohretSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mike and Kelsey are here to talk about the best and worst movies they saw in July. They also share a list of all the country artists they’ve run into at the movies in Nashville. They talk about why streaming movies are in trouble, why Mike thinks Dune a boring franchise and the Top 3 A-List Country artists they’ve run into at the theater. In the Movie Review, Mike talks about one of his Most Anticipated movies of the year….Spider-Man Brand New Day! He keeps it spoiler-free and talks about why it is Tom Holland's first definitive movie, why it ranks as one of the best suits and is it the best Spider-Man movie of all time? In the Trailer Mike, Mike talks about Other Mommy starring Jessica Chastain. It’s about an 8-year-old girl named Bela whose life is upended by a sinister, doppelgänger entity that emerges from her closet and calls itself "Other Mommy”. New Episodes Every Monday! Watch on YouTube: @MikeDeestro Follow Mike on TikTok: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Instagram: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Threads: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on X: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Letterboxd: @mikedeestro Email: MovieMikeD@gmail.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.