Can Humanity Survive AI Utopia? Lessons from Rodents and Rogan

Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In today’s episode, we dive headfirst into the heated debates and pressing questions shaping our future as artificial intelligence advances at breakneck speed. Drawing inspiration from a recent Joe Rogan conversation, we explore a provocative question: what happens to society, meaning, and individual purpose when AI makes work and basic survival obsolete? You’ll hear why the popular vision of a utopian, abundance-filled future—where robots do all the heavy lifting and humans are free from mundane labor—might not play out as optimistically as some hope. We unpack the evolutionary wiring that compels us toward meaningful work, the existential risks of losing our sense of purpose, and the sobering lessons of the infamous “Mouse Utopia” experiments. Alongside compelling analogies, cultural observations, and big questions about regulation, generational adaptation, and mental health, this episode offers guidance for finding purpose in an era of abundance—and warns of what might happen if we fail. Get ready to rethink assumptions about work, happiness, AI, and the future of human fulfillment. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Quo: Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Paleovalley: 30 for $36 https://bit.ly/PaleovalleyIT Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory https://netsuite.com/Theory See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. All of us are going to have to figure out what our prognostication is about where AI is going, partly because you're going to have to decide how you're going to raise your kids, when are you going to let them interface with it? Where is this all going? Part of it as an investor, part of it as a voter. What regulations do you want to see? How do you want to see this treated? As you saw, Ryan, Drew and I do not agree on how we should be treating things like AI creative videos and all that.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  So this is something that we're all going to have to think through. Now, one of the most profound things that we're all going to have to begin to create a mental map of is what is going to happen to society when AI is better than us at everything? Does it create a utopia where we all get universal high income? As Elon Musk has said, where we can have basically anything that we want? And that happens because energy costs go to zero and labor costs go to zero because of robots. And now you can just quite literally have virtually anything you want for free. And so what does society look like? That is going to be a heated debate because we're going to be thinking a lot about how do we tax AI? Like if somebody brings on a robot, are we going to tax that?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  If a robot in the form of a car replaces a driver, are we going to have similar medallion sales where, okay, you're an AI car, but if you want to be an AI taxi and drive people around, you still have to pay this fee? And that we're going to get a tax basically on every ride that you do? Like, how are we going to handle all that? So there are going to be huge consequences to the way that people answer this question. Now, Joe Rogan, who I think is amazing, and literally when you do the history of podcasting, you were going to have to put him on Mount Rushmore. I don't think he's alone on Mount Rushmore anymore, but man, for a long time, it was like Mount Rushmore was Joe Rogan. So this guy's incredible at what he does. But on this, I think he's way the fuck off.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  So let's play it, and then I'm going to give you a breakdown of precisely how off he is and how much it's going to matter. People can't be this far off.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  This is my position on work too. Because everybody in their head is like, what happens when AI takes all the jobs? And I'm like, do you have to have a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food. And like, most people are basically just working for that. Most people that are, most people that are struggling, check to check, basically, housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. Quite officially not. People would not figure out what to do with their time. So the thing that I think Joe is failing to understand is that from an evolutionary perspective, evolution has understood, I must compel you to want to go do work. Humans move towards pleasure and they move away from pain. Now, it also had to restrict our use of calories, meaning we are motivated, incentivized to go do something, but to not go do, to do too much. So we have these competing like impulses. I want to go work and contribute and do something, and I want to work hard and working hard actually feels good, but I also want to lay on the couch and do nothing and do bed rot, as the kids would say today.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  So you, you have to find some way to make those two things work. And what ends up happening to the person who lays in bed all the time? They end up getting massively depressed. Why? Because evolution needs you to get up. So whether you actually need to get up to create housing and food, you still have the evolutionary impulse, bro, you better be doing something, you better be working hard, you better be contributing to the group. You have an evolutionary algorithm in your brain that will punish you with a profound sense of depression if you don't do the following. If you don't work hard to gain a set of skills, so feel like a sense of progress in your life, you're getting better. If you're not doing that, you're going to be in trouble.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  So you're gaining a set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal that's what I call honorable, meaning that it doesn't just help you, it helps you, but it also helps other people. Because to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids, which is all that evolution cares about, it's got to give you those impulses. And all of us have that buried inside of us. So now AI comes along, you don't have to work to have a house, you don't have to work for food, you're going to lay in bed all day. Now, the, because you actually have that impulse, you have the impulse to lay in bed all day, and you now don't have anything that's forcing you to get out of bed. Because when you're forced to get out of bed and you've got to get your house secured and you've got to work hard to survive and you've got to be a part of a group in order

• 5:44Speaker 00

  to make sure that you're protected by the group for survival purposes. When you do all of that, even though it's hard, even though you didn't want to get out of bed, when you do it, you feel good. What do people always say when they go to the gym or they work hard and they get a reward for it? They feel good. What does somebody think when they work at a job that they care about and they work hard and they see the fruits of their labor? They feel good. They have a sense of meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are the things that are going to protect you from getting depressed. When AI comes along, if it really does erode people's meaning and purpose because there's nothing that they must do, and everything becomes voluntary, a huge portion of humanity is just going to opt out.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Now, the reason that Joe, I think, is completely blind to this is he's mapping himself and then assuming everybody is like him, or at least the large majority of people. And the problem is Joe Rogan will get out of bed and ice plunge in the morning. How many people are going to do that? Virtually nobody. Joe Rogan, who has a ton of money, never needs to go put himself in physical hardship, but he goes hunting and he puts himself out there doing difficult things. The man has a T-shirt that says sad face plus deer hunting equals smiley face. So this is somebody that understands going out, putting yourself in a difficult environment, having to be quiet, having to be focused, doing something that required a ton of work, practice and discipline to get there, and now doing it and having a relationship with actually killing and taking something else's life, like all of that stuff, all of the

• 7:10Speaker 00

  intellectual framework that he's built around that to make that suffering and difficulty, which was all discretionary. He didn't have to do any of it. All of that intellectual framework that he built around that to make that a rewarding experience, he thinks people just do by default? The vast majority of humanity will get hit by a bus of untold proportions. Now, that's a pretty bold claim. How am I making that claim? If you guys have never heard of Mouse Utopia, then I'm sure what I'm saying seems ungrounded. If you know Mouse Utopia, then you know that this study has been run. And when you give a mouse colony, we can decide if this extrapolates, but when you

• 7:54Speaker 00

  give a mouse colony, all the space they could ever want, all the resources that they could ever want, things go horrifically wrong. I actually think we're living through some of early stage Mouse Utopia right now, but let's take a closer look. So shout out to the friend of the pod, this is What If Alt Hisst, Rudyard Lynch, thank you. He's a fascinating thinker, and he was the person that put this on my radar. So check it out.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  After learning about what I know here, my life hasn't been the same. I think about what I talk about in this video on a daily basis. If you don't want to know this, turn back now. That being said, I know that by saying that, this is going to make all of you watch this video. I know this advertising tactic here is shameless, but it doesn't stop it from being true. To be honest, I want us all to know about this, partly so that I can share the weight of this, and also so that hopefully we can do something about it. You'll understand why I say this by the end of the video.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  He's talking about Mouse Utopia, by the way.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  I'm already shocked that only a very small percentage of the people I talk to know about this, and I'm already talking to people who are much more aware, educated and intelligent than the general public. I love this painting. The way it works is that some people see an old lady, others see a young woman. Life is like-

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Did you see a lady or a young woman? I was going to ask you the same. I see the young woman. I see the young woman too. I can force myself to see the old lady when she tell me that she's there. And for people looking, the necklace on the young woman's neck is the mouth of the old woman. There it is. That helped. Okay.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  ... that, where we all inhabit the same world, but we all make out different patterns to explain it in terms that are comprehensible to us. My goal for What If Alt Hisst is to let people who are looking at this painting see both images at the same time and explain which one of these interpretations I believe to be the most correct. I try to share other ways of looking at it, even if I don't agree. That's why I explain the worldviews of each civilization and era of history. By the end of this video, you will start looking at the movie that is our lives in a completely different way. In my own personal life, this feels like a plot twist at the end of a movie, which changes its entire meaning.

• 10:11Speaker 00

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  That's incogni, I-N-C-O-G-N-I, dot com slash impact and use code IMPACT. Let's talk about your sales pipeline reviews. If your CRM is half-empty fields and notes nobody finished, every review turns into guesswork. I've seen it so many times in my own sales team, and that's where today's sponsor, PipeDrive, comes in. An intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM that is loved by growing sales teams. PipeDrive just launched Meeting Intelligence, built right into the CRM. Before the call, it pulls the deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After, it drafts the CRM updates for your rep to review and approve.

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• 13:34Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Part one, Universe 25. As a side note, before we start, I gave my word in this poll that my next video would be about the CIA discovering the spirit world. I'm going to postpone that for one video since I feel as if I need to read these two books before I can do the topic justice. I always have an intuitive sense of when I can know enough about a topic to make a video about it. And I honestly just haven't hit it yet with that topic. But you have my word that it's gonna be the next video coming out after this. This video pulls on the least source materials of almost any video I've done. One of the recent videos I've made is explaining modern civilization.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I pulled on 68 books as sources, which is something like 25,000 pages. For this video, the main source I'm using, although I referenced many other books, which you'll see in the description, is less than 10 pages. That being the Mouse Utopia study itself. There's so much to unpack in each page that it'll take me a second to go through all the interpretations possible. Mouse Utopia was a study in the late 60s and early 70s in Maryland. This was the era of the most rapid population growth ever, and people were really worried about what the implications for that might be. This was the era Soylent Green was made in. Thankfully, the 20th century has dodged all the crises that expected to have, whether nuclear war, overpopulation, oil depletion, and more.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I wish our society was collectively more grateful that we dodged so many bullets.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  I think a big part of the reason that we, as a society, struggle is things have just been too good for too long. It is too hard for people to mentally project to how difficult other eras are. When we are kids and we're growing up, we don't realize that the world is changing incredibly fast. We just assume the world has always been this way. That's why we look at our parents and think they're crazy, because we don't realize that they were raised at a different time, in a different way, that their parents were different, their friends were different, the things that mattered to the world were different, the economic situation was different, everything was just different. And so we're all products of our time, but none of us, especially when we're young, even have a concept of how much things change over time.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  This is the best argument for why this won't happen, that we've had so many crises before that just didn't occur. The guy who ran this experiment, Calhoun, did this thing in a bunch of cases. The test, which became famous, was Universe 25. This universe was the biggest and lasted for years. However, all the previous experiments had similar end results to this on a smaller scale. What they did in Universe 25 was put nine mice into a cage with infinite food and no disease. It was cleaned regularly, had no predators, and a perfectly temperate climate. These are ideal conditions for population growth. The test was designed to create the most perfect, optimal conditions for increasing numbers.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  What happened initially was exactly what you would expect, that the population grew incredibly rapidly. The population doubled every 55 days. The mouse population plateaued around 315 days.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  That's crazy. The fact that it blows up, nobody would question, but why would it hit any sort of plateau, given that it's still, they still have access to resources? They still have all the space that they need. They're not bumping up against that. The reason that I think this kind of thing is important to note is you're now in the zone of, there is an algorithm running in my brain that I'm unaware of. So we, I think, would all assume, well, each individual mouse or person would just be making the decision that's rational for them. I've fallen in love, I want to get married, I want to have kids. And all of a sudden, you realize, actually, no, there's something else running in the background that starts making those choices. When put into a larger context, they start changing.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  So one thing, if, looking for the human parallels here, if you educate women, then birth rate falls off a cliff. Now, is it causative because women are getting educated and they realize they have a lot more options? Is it tied to something else? Is it that as a country gets wealthier, they have access, they are necessarily more liberal and they have access to birth control? And it's the not having kids early that, you know, by accident, that allows them to then pursue other things? And so it seems like that it's because they're getting educated, but it's really not. So, but that tells you, that change says, there is an evolutionary algorithm at work here that people don't understand.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  1,000. Where the cage was designed to hold something around 6,000, so not even close to total capacity. Upon that point, birth rates went down and stabilized. After this, things are gonna get very, very strange. The mouse social structure started to break down on every single level. Both mouse sexes converged. Male mice became a feminine. They started secreting feminine hormones.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  This is how I felt looking at what's going on with the China buying oil. So the war predicts, hey, this thing is going to happen when there's a supply constraint. Assuming that demand is inelastic, then the price is necessarily gonna go up. It does, but then it doesn't re-rise when the war comes back on. So it goes up, drops with the MOU, but doesn't come back up. China stops buying even when the price is down. And so you start seeing like, wait, this is not what is predicted by the model. The model says that if these guys have food and they have space, then, given that we saw that early population explosion, why does it start slowing down here?

• 19:09Speaker 00

  That's where this kind of thing becomes very fascinating, because what it points out is your model of the world is not yet complete and that there is a pressure that you're not yet aware of. And so when I was trying to identify, okay, what's really going on in China? You start looking for what is the economic pressure that makes traders believe that there's gonna be a deflationary period? So they're betting on a lower cost of oil down. Is it just that the war is gonna end? And then you try to square it with, okay, well, wait a second. We've also got China not having a buying pattern that matches the cost. So there's a hidden force. And when you look at Mouse Utopia through what is that hidden force? Tie it back to what Rogan was talking about.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  That's my thesis, is that there is a hidden force, which is evolution needs you. It has to assume that there's no AI. We didn't evolve in that world. So if you're going to have food and shelter, you're going to need to get out of that comfy, warm bed and go do a thing. So there is a hidden pressure inside of all of us that will manifest as depression, essentially, just to round it. But it's gonna, it's actually, as you'll see, in Mouse Utopia, plays out in way weirder ways. So the oversimplification is sort of a depressionary impulse. But you're trying to identify that hidden pressure as you watch this.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Mice who showed no interest in mating, but would groom themselves daily. The scientists called these the beautiful ones. Male mice lost any masculinity and kind of stops doing anything.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Sound familiar?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  To maintain the mouse social structure. The beautiful ones don't really exist inside mouse social relationships. Rather, their entire lives were in what amounted to isolation and just self grooming.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  The, the whole idea of the beautiful ones is very interesting. If you're looking at this through an evolutionary lens, evolution has all these different games that it's running, but it only has two levers, pleasure and pain. And so part of the mating strategy is you need to create signals that a woman would pick up on. Okay, so a guy is going to go do those strategies. Now, the problem becomes if you are in a situation where you have all the free time in the world and there's nothing that is pushing you anymore to compete and try to mate. And there's that sense of like, okay, I really need to get this forward momentum going. The thing initially that was getting you to do the things that would attract a female become, they take up more and more time.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  So this is going to be a crazy parallel to draw. There is a hypothesis that the reason you dream is that your visual system cannot go offline for a full eight hours or whatever while you're sleeping. Because the brain is wired in such a way that one area, if it's not getting used, it immediately gets taken over by another sense. So if you blindfold yourself, you notice that your ears begin to come online. Now, it will actually begin to wire. The wiring will begin eating in. It's not just that you're paying attention to your hearing more. The wiring of the auditory system will begin leveraging the physical space of the visual part of your brain. So same idea here. So part of your energy, your focus, your attention is like, I need to go make sure I secure housing. I need to make sure that I'm contributing to the group. I need to make sure that I'm raising my family properly.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Well, if AI or anything else makes all of that go away, then some other algorithm that's online begins encroaching into that, that time, if you will. And so now your need, I'll use that word lightly, but your need to have an obsession, to have a focus, begins getting filled with some bullshit. And so now all of a sudden, you're being one of the beautiful ones, you're grooming yourself, you're leaning into beauty. All of that stuff starts to distort. Now, I actually want to go back to something he said a second ago, which very much speaks to the rise in transgenderism that we're seeing now, I think, which is that when you're not having to focus on like, oh shit, there really are barbarians at the gate. I really have to train these kids to be masculine.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Fuck it, I'm just going to be like, you're a boy, I need you to be tough. And so you inculcate them with that thinking, with that ideology. And now they're actually busy doing the manly shit. There's all this cultural pressure for them to be manly. And so now it's just, they slot into that and they go do the things that are expected of the men. And there are very few people that start sort of peeling off of that and going elsewhere. There's just too many demands, both from just a pure intellectual way and from a, yo, somebody's got to go dig that ditch, motherfucker. You were born with testes, that's you. And so you get in this like reinforced, reinforced, reinforced. But when that breaks away, because there is in this case, the robots are just digging all the ditches and you don't have to think about it.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  You don't have to be tough and there's so much prosperity and there are no barbarians at the gate because we're the biggest, strongest country in the world. And it's like, all of a sudden you start seeing this feminization. You have a pull towards those things as well. And so that interesting idea that both of those energies live inside of one human, but now you, you get this imbalance that evolution wasn't expecting and one begins to take off. And you see, and this is written about in Roman times, that there just becomes this effeminization of the culture. You had similar pushback in Greece. Could really fucking derail on that, but I'll, I'll leave it at that for now.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Breeded, showed chemicals demonstrating intense stress. The thing is that they largely weren't in that they weren't under too many actual external pressures.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  But evolution is pressuring.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Being hormonally stressed was taxing on their bodies and thus they were unable to really do anything else.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  So think about that from an evolutionary standpoint. Evolution is like, oh damn, you're bed rotting, you're just grooming yourself, you're not doing the things. And so it's going to create this sense of disease to get you moving again. Now, in a world where you need to get moving, great, it all works out perfectly. In a world where you're like, I don't need to do anything, so I'm just going to keep bed rotting. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And so something that isn't under any stress externally is getting a stress impulse from the internal evolutionary algorithm.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Through urine and scent. Thus through this, they were demonstrating their immense inner pain and stress to the other mice around them. Female mice became very aggressive and very masculine. They started raising the baby mice incorrectly, kicking them out of the nest too early. They became incredibly aggressive to their young, even attacking them. This created generations of numb mice who were not properly socialized. They were completely unable to interact with the world or socially. The female mice lost interest in breeding and raising families, just like the males. Many female mice started living in isolation from the rest of the mouse community, hiding away in far off parts of the pen, showing no interest in family or mating. Calhoun liked to say that the mice became autistic.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  This was in the sixties before autism was a buzzword either. And autism was much less common back then. So if he said it, it really meant something back then. They lost the ability to interact socially. He called this the first death or a spiritual death. He saw that the mice had no joie de vivre or joy of life or reason to live.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  And I have a hypothesis on this. So I had a period in my life at the, basically the beginning of getting into game development, where I was working 120 hours a week, I did it for eight months. And for the first time in my life, I was what I would call emotionally dysregulated. And there was one week where I didn't even want to sit on a couch. I wanted to sit on the floor. And I was like, I can't make this make sense. This isn't logical. So I'm sitting on the floor because I don't want to be on the couch, but I don't know why I don't want to be on the couch. And so I was like, oh wow, I'm emotionally dysregulated, meaning I cannot make sense of my internal state. My internal state is in such disarray that all of the things that I just completely take for granted,

• 26:53Speaker 00

  that I would seek comfort, so I'd want to sit on a couch, that I would want to eat, that I would eat at certain times. And so my hunger was all over the map. I would go from not wanting to eat at all to being like, I'm starving, sitting on the floor. Like it was just, thankfully, I was like, hold on, this is so weird. This behavior is bizarre. And so I could fall back on, I need to get into a routine. And so I need to re-isolate, I wake up at this time, I go to bed at this time. And so after the eight month period, I realized, okay, this was a failed experiment. I just can't work this many hours, I was getting vertigo. So I was having these physical, like negative externalities where I would feel dizzy and like I was going to fall over. I thought I had a brain tumor at one point and it was really crazy.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  And so I was like, wow, like there is just a limit where even though there's not necessarily an external thing that's causing me a problem, I'm getting all these problems from the inside. And if I didn't have the ability to identify, this is emotional dysregulation, that it is caused by this thing. So forget that in my case, it was just working too many hours. Here it's, it's caused by, everything is just going too well, it's too easy. I don't have any meaning and purposes, no hard thing that I'm focused on, I have to go do. So you get what starts as a specific, this thing is broken and it gets this response and it becomes generalized. It was the same thing that happened with my anxiety.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  I didn't, never dealt with it when it was concrete, like, oh, I'm in a stressful situation, I feel anxiety, that made sense. Once it became generalized and turning left instead of right gave me anxiety, then I was like, huh, we have a problem here. And if you don't know what to do at that point, it's like your brain is just sort of giving up on trying to parse cause and effect. So you're just like all over the place. And that's, I think, what we're seeing here.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  But jumping in for a second, isn't that what separates us from like mice in this scenario? So where they are just kind of now stressed and internal, so they just peed and pooped everywhere. We would have those friends in cells on the other side of the world through our gaming monitor. We would have the next door neighbor who's emo, who understands, like we would have that ability to either one, internally diagnose it, or two, we have communities of other bed rotters who we can kind of group up together and then. I guess, help undo a stress, or at least find community in our bed rottingness.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Yes, so to put it into biological language, we have a prefrontal cortex, which the mice do not. We have the ability to assess, hey, I'm having a problem. Let me go find like minded people, let me reconnect with a group, let me do the things that I know I need to do. And there will be some people that will do that, and it will be a scale. And so you'll lose some people really early, and we were already losing people. The jobs market speaks to that, our labor force participation numbers are abysmal. But still, the vast majority of people still work, it's like over 60%. So it's like, yeah, we, most people are able to, in their early stages, find a way to avoid some of the, you know, problems that arise from this.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  But especially kids are super vulnerable, because their prefrontal cortex isn't even finished developing. So now what happens when you raise a generation where their brain just legitimately doesn't develop correctly? Because evolution was expecting one impulse and it didn't get it. And so now it's like, those kids are fucked. So the first generation that was raised sort of with the normal expected evolutionary pressures, they'll be the most resilient, but the weak ones among them will be the first to fall. Then the generation behind them, remember, I forget how many generations they were going through, but they doubled like every 55 days or whatever. So this is partly a generational problem, where the first generation is probably the most resilient, second a little, last third, even last fourth, and it starts getting like really unhinged and deranged.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Because, and I think they cover this, or maybe they just did with the mom doesn't groom their pups properly. But you start getting a breakdown of parenting, which then creates even more problematic kids, who will then be even worse parents. And so you like get this effect where all of the evolutionary environmental inputs that are expected end up not arriving. And so the brain ends up developing poorly. So for instance, if you, I still can't believe this is true, but it's true. If you don't hug and cuddle a baby, it will die. It goes through what they call failure to thrive. So there's something in the brain that says, I can expect my mom at a minimum to give me skin to skin contact, to feed me, to nurture me, to love me, to cuddle me.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  And my brain is so expecting that, that it cues its development off that. And if it doesn't get that, it just, it never needed to have a workaround. And so it just breaks. And it, maybe even the better way to think of it, it just doesn't develop. And so that kid that was sort of a ball of mush, that most parents watch grow up and light up, and you see them sort of come online, and they like coo and want your attention, and they get it. And so it's like, it's this incredible symbiotic relationship, that just never develops. And so the kid just dies. And that shit is crazy. So when you think about, okay, we've got emotional dysregulation, there will be some that are able to fend that off, and they'll be fine.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  This is why Joe Rogan is confused, because he's like, well, if everything is easy, go force yourself to do something hard. You work out really hard, you cold plunge, you go on austere hunting trips. Yeah, obviously. But that's like on a spectrum, that's going to be way pegged over here on the right. And so you're going to lose a ton of people, even in generation one, that aren't able to do that. And then, oh my God, the kids.

• 32:39Speaker 00

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• 34:45Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around, let's get right back into the action.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  He said this happened far before their actual numbers started to collapse. Mice live much like Andrew Tate, with alpha males keeping harems of females who raise children. Thus, with all these factors going on, what you're effectively seeing was a breakdown of the ability for mice to coordinate on a group level or breed at any level. This chart creates a useful breakdown of the different kinds of mice you saw emerge as society fell apart. You saw a group of mice which were obsessed with social approval. They wouldn't eat unless they saw other mice eat. They would all cluster together in the center of the cage, even though there was lots of space on the outside. Their gender roles collapsed, and they were constantly driven by stimulation from other mice.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  They basically became adrenaline junkies through social approval. A second group just went numb, they stopped interacting with the society, they only went out at night. They lost interest in interacting with other mice socially. These mice basically became zombies, they wandered around like the homeless. They let themselves get casually beaten up and hurt by other mice, because they just lost any will to live. The third group of mice became incredibly aggressive. They would wander around in packs and randomly attack and target other mice for what they didn't really see as any reason. They would torture and bite up other mice for fun. They would attack any mice that were still having children, and trying to maintain the mouse's social structure. They were sexually hyperactive, but not for any reasons of actual procreation.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  As the birth rate collapsed, this group were really the ones which destroyed the mouse colony, killing any who tried to maintain social norms or continue the species.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  So hey, trying to tear down social norms, that sounds familiar. People that want to see Western civilization completely destroyed. Hopefully, that is not an unfamiliar frame. So as I look at the swing now to socialism and communism, this is exactly the kind of thing that I think about, is this is people that have had a situation where everything has gone so well for so long, they become overproduced elites, they feel completely entitled, and they just have this impulse to want to burn everything down. And also, by the way, birth rates dropping through the floor. And I am not, the irony is not lost on me that I don't have kids. So it is, this is precisely what I see when I look at the DSA.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Each of the 30 experiments, the mouse colony completely collapsed. The mice just stopped having children, and this crashed their numbers. The mice who did try to keep going were killed by mobs of evil mice. After day 1,700, there were absolutely no mice left. A couple outtakes, I'll only move on to the next section. First, I'm surprised at how advanced the mouse's social structure was, as I read this. I'm frankly surprised that mice have a society at all. When you see these things scurrying around your house, you don't really think about them having a cultural system with different expectations that can experience social collapse in the same manner we saw with the fall of Rome or the Mayans. Authors like Joseph Heinrich or E.O. Wilson

• 37:54Speaker 02

  talk about how culture is fundamentally genetic and dates back deep into our animal roots. That's very clear to see here. Mice aren't particularly smart, but except for one thing, their neurological structures aren't fundamentally that different than ours, except ours are much, much larger.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  What we're going to learn from Mouse Utopia, there's more, and I definitely encourage you guys to go watch the whole video. It is utterly mind blowing. But the core thesis that I'm putting forward right now, and the reason that when I saw Rogan responding the way that he did, I thought, oh, and by the way, shout out, man, I wish I could remember who sent that to me, but somebody sent me that video on X, which I highly, highly, highly encourage people to do. If you want to see me react to something, please send me the video. I don't know if anybody has quick access to my X.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Zagros Oskin?

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, is this the one? Yes, yes. So Zagros Oskin, at Reason underscore Will, at underscore Win. Shout out to you, thank you so much for sending this in. More of that, please, I'm always looking for more videos to do as reacts. So I'm just so grateful to people taking the time to send that in. Okay, so when I saw that Rogan video, it immediately got me thinking about this idea that people do not understand the biological component of this. They do not understand that evolution has imbued us with all of these deeply ingrained algorithms in our brain that create these pressures on us to act and behave in certain ways.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  And that when we don't do that, then because evolution only has the pleasure and pain principle. It uses pain, but when we aren't forced by the realities of I need shelter, I need food, when there's nothing that forces us out to face those things, to meet the challenges that evolution is expecting us to have, we begin getting dysregulated. And everything just sort of goes haywire because we're not getting the things that we expect. And it is, that is, when I think about AI, that is one of the things that I'm like, yo, if we ever get to artificial superintelligence, because I don't think we end up here from just AI continuing to grow and becoming a thing, but I do think we get there with artificial

• 40:06Speaker 00

  superintelligence where energy costs drop to zero and labor drops to zero and anybody can have anything they want. I think at that stage, people really are going to have to force themselves to encounter hardship, to have structure, to do things that are all about progress in their own life, that they remain wanting to help the group. If they don't do that, we're going to see the kind of derangement in our own culture that we saw in Mouse Utopia. And remember, the reason, the reason that I think that you can extrapolate from Mouse Utopia is that they have the same kind of societal structures. They are also the output of evolution. So it's like, they may not have the exact same brain structures and stuff, though they are similar, but it's the same forces that developed them and made them

• 40:50Speaker 00

  a coherent species that can thrive in the world are the same forces that made us a coherent species that's accomplished what we have. So I really think when you look at even this moment in time, when you look at the push towards socialism, when you understand that socialism is driven by resentment, when you think about where AI is taking us all, you've got to take all of this into consideration, because I think it actually explains some of what we see today. And I think it's certainly a worthwhile warning. Nobody should panic or freak out, but it's a worthwhile warning that we will need to be thoughtful about how we move forward in adopting AI in our own lives.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  And like as we enter like the age of abundance and things like that?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that it's not going to be a free ride. No way.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  I was joking with some people in the chat that, you know, if everybody becomes a simp, I'll take all, you know, I'll start having more sex. Ha, ha, ha. So there were people in that society that rose up and became the harem. They had more women. There were some that became more aggressive. There's some that became more grooming and there were some that became, I'll call them emo. They were bed rotting and things like that.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  When we approach this age of abundance, do you think that's where, kind of like what we were talking about earlier with the prefrontal cortex, we will be able to kind of gamify or do something that allows us to bounce off of those as opposed to going to those segments and kind of staying there?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  It'll be very easy.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Is it only individualistic? I guess just a?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  It's only individualistic. It's the unfortunate answer. Otherwise, the only other way to solve that would be government denies you and says, no, you can't have those things. And good luck with that. When they're readily available and the government is forcing you not to do it. I don't want to live in a world where the government is forcing me to do a cold plunge or whatever. Like, at that point, you're just somebody else's slave. I'm not interested. So this is where it's at the individual level. People have to take responsibility for their own life and say, I've got to optimize my life in a way that makes sense. And people often will ask me why I work as hard as I work now, when I, you know, I've made a just absolutely ton of money and I obviously never need to work again. And I think people were very surprised that I left Quest on a Monday and started Impact Theory literally the next

• 42:58Speaker 00

  day on Tuesday. And I said, no, no, no. I learned a very long time ago that meaning and purpose is the only thing that will give you what I'll call fulfillment, which is the only like psychological, it's a combination of a psychological and emotional state that can survive even grief. That's positive. And so I was like, I must pursue meaning and purpose all the time. And so that's why I did it. And so I'll, people that have a lucky draw on self-discipline, self-awareness and stuff like that, they're gonna be fine. But there's a lot of people for whom like they're really going to have to start making this

• 43:37Speaker 00

  a conscious thing. It isn't going to come easily to them. And if they don't do it, then they're going to spiral. And that's why I think that there's four paths that people will take as we go into the age of abundance. And some people are going to become the new Amish. So that might be Rogan, where it's like, okay, I'm just going to go do hard things all the time. I don't interface with AI period, full stop, end of story. And they revert to technology that's something like the 1990s. Then there are going to be people who just numb the fuck out and they bed rot and they do drugs and that's that. There are going to be people that want to play life on hard mode. They're literally going to go to the moon or to Mars. And it's, it's like, to me, that one is always like, life really is a

• 44:20Speaker 00

  survival crafting game, an open world survival crafting game where you need to go get resources to do the things you want to do and you be self-directed. And it's like, what do you want to build? What do you want to create? You can do it, but you've got to go get the resources in order to be able to do it. That really is life. Those games trade on the dopamine loops that evolution gave us. It's why I think it's ultimately the perfect game type, anyway. And so the people going to Mars and the moon, they're saying, I want to start a new save file on like hard mode. And so send me to Mars. I don't want to be in the middle of all the abundance and choosing to do hard things. I literally want to be in a place where it's just fucking hard. And you've got to tame Mars. Like, that's going to be some

• 45:00Speaker 00

  hard shit. And then the fourth group are the people that are like, I want to maximize my creative experiences and my creative output, but in a way that is just absolutely drenched in meaning and purpose. And those are the people like myself that will live in virtual worlds, but where those virtual worlds have goals, difficult things you're trying to achieve that you're doing, even if it's with AI characters, but that are so believable that you feel a true sense of kinship and connection. And there you'll be able to build and create in ways that are completely unbound by physics. And so, but I've tried and I'm open, man. If there's like a fifth or sixth way, but those feel like, they're the blunt force trauma. Obviously, people move back and forth between them. And it's like, oh, I'm going

• 45:45Speaker 00

  to take a weekend and I'm going to go fucking do drugs and just space out. Sure. But I'm saying those will be sort of the four bands of people trying to deal with the evolutionary realities of how their brain is wired.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  I have to ask you, if somebody's struggling to find meaning and purpose in their life, what are some tips or advice you would give them?

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing is you have to know what your goal is and your goal needs to be in alignment with evolution. So evolution wants you to work really hard. Like everything that I'm about to give you is a recipe. Each beat is a non-negotiable because of evolution. It's going to sound like moralizing, but I'm literally just trying to map what the average human brain has running when you're sort of in the default mode. And that's going to be, you have to work really hard, which is why I always rebel against people that want a three-day week. They want it to get easier and easier and easier. You'll derange. So work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress, not necessarily achieve, but make progress towards a goal that helps you and others. Each one of those

• 46:49Speaker 00

  beats is important. If you do something only for others, you neglect yourself, you're going to have a problem. If you only do something for yourself and neglect others, you're going to have a problem. If things come easily, you're going to have a problem. If you're deploying your skills, but you're not getting any better, you're going to have a problem. Like, you need to make progress. You need to be making yourself better. Like, part of why I think people really have a hard time at the end of their life is as you get older, it becomes just physically and intellectually more difficult to gain skills, to make progress, to actually meaningfully contribute. And so you start getting pushed to the margins. Like they say, the first death a man feels is when a woman looks at him and considers him harmless. And that, that really resonates. Like, I get it. And you want to feel physically

• 47:32Speaker 00

  potent, sexually potent, like you want to matter, like people are going to need to contend with you and your ideas, that you're a contributor, that the world is different and better because of your presence. Now, by the way, if you can't make it different and better, people will make it different and worse. There's that old adage that says, if you shun a child from the village, if you shun a child, they will burn the village down merely to feel its warmth. And I thought, damn. So that all feels true. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic,

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