Can Humanity Survive AI Utopia? Lessons from Rodents and Rogan

All of us are going to have to figure out what our prognostication is about where AI is going. Partly because you're gonna have to decide how you're going to raise your kids. When are you going to let them interface with it? Where's this all going? Part of it as an investor. Uh part of it as a voter. What do you what regulations do you want to see? How do you want to see this treated? As you saw, uh Ryan Drew and I do not agree on um how we should be treating things like AI created videos and all that. 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? Uh 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? If a robot um 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 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're 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. Uh, so this guy's incredible uh at what he does. But on this, I think he's way the [ __ ] off. Uh, so let's play it and then I'm going to uh 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. >> This is my position on work, too, cuz everybody in their head is like, "What happens when AI takes all the jobs?" And I'm like, "Do you have to have a [ __ ] 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 [snorts] 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? >> Yeah, I I think so. That >> quite officially not. People would not figure out what to do with their time. So the thing that I think Joe is um 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 and incentivized to go do something but to not go do to do do too much. So we have these competing like impulses. I want to go work and contribute and do something and I 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 bedrock as the kids would say today. 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. Uh, 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 re because you actually have that impulse. You have the impulse to lay in bed all day and you now don't have a 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 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. 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 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 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. Uh this is what if alt hist ruard um >> lynch >> lynch thank you. Um he's a fascinating thinker and he was the person that put this on my radar. So check it out. >> 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. 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, >> "Do you see old lady or 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 you tell me that she's there. And for people looking, uh, the necklace on the young woman's neck is the mouth of the old woman. >> There it is. That helped. Okay. 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 altist 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. [music] >> All right, brace yourselves. What happens? >> Tune everything out for a bit and listen to some good music. And today's sponsor, Raycon. >> So, just as a reminder, I am going to let when we do these reacts videos, I'm going to let their ads play. Uh, I want to honor them for um us being able to use the content that they work their ass off to get to. Obviously, it will help them with their advertisers. So, we're going to let this play. Uh, and bear with me. >> Raycon is a quality product that I use every day when I go on walks or just want to jam out for a little bit. They're half the price of the other premium audio brands for amazing audio quality. Raycon earbuds fit perfectly. I'll sometimes forget I have them in. And with 8 hours of play time and 32-hour battery life, I can use them whenever I want. >> Given my work, it's awesome to have high quality earbuds that allow me to focus on making quality content. Raycon is a great product at a great price. And for my viewers, Raycon is offering 15% off your next set of earbuds. So support the channel and click the link in the description or go to byracon.com/woodaltist to get 15% off your Raycon purchase plus free shipping. >> I can't guarantee that code still lives cuz this video uh is from a minute ago, but there you have it. All right, back >> 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 going to 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. I pulled on 68 books as sources, which is something like 25,000. For this video, the main source I'm using, although I reference many others, 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 Soilent Green was made in. Thankfully, the 20th century has dodged all the crises it expected to have, whether nuclear war, overpopulation, oil depletion, and more. I wish our society was collectively more grateful that we dodged so many bullets. >> 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 um 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. 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 in 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. 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. >> That's crazy. The the fact that it 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. Uh they still have um all the space that they need. They're not 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 it 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. So one thing if looking for the human parallels here if you educate women then birth rate falls off a cliff. Now is it positive because women are getting educated and they realize they have a lot more options. Is it tied to something else? Is it that um 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 um 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 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 going to get very, very strange. The mouse social structure started to break down in every single level. both mouse sexes converged. Male mice became a feminine. They started secretreting feminine hormones. >> This this is how I felt looking at what's going on with the um China buying oil. So the war predicts, hey, this thing is going to happen um when there's a supply constraint, assuming that demand is inelastic, then the price is necessarily going to go up. It does, but then it doesn't um rerise when the war comes back on. So it goes up, drops with theou, but doesn't come back up. China stops buying even when the price is down. And so you start seeing like wait that 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? Um 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 going to be a deflationary period. So they're betting on a lower cost of oil down. Is it just that the war is going to 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. That's my thesis is that there is a hidden force which is evolution needs you. It it 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 is sort of a depressionary impulse. Um, but you're trying to identify that hidden pressure as you watch this. 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 stopped doing anything 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-gruding. >> 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 um 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 um pushing you anymore to uh 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. So this is going to be a crazy parallel to draw. Um 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 um 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. Well, if AI or anything else makes all of that go away, then some other algorithm that's online begins encroaching uh 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 [ __ ] And so now all of a sudden, you're being one of the beautiful ones. You're grooming yourself. You're leaning into beauty. Um 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 [ __ ] there really are barbarians at the gate. I really have to train these kids to be masculine. [ __ ] it. I'm just going to be like, you're a boy. I need you to be tough." And so, you um inculcate them with that thinking, with that ideology, and now they're actually busy doing the manly [ __ ] 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 um intellectual way and from a yo somebody's got to go dig that ditch [ __ ] You were born with testies. That's you. And so you get in this like reinforce reinforce reinforce. 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. 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 was written about in Roman times, that there just becomes this effeminization of the culture. You had similar push back in Greece. Could really [ __ ] derail on that, but I'll I'll leave it at that for now. >> Greeted showed chemicals demonstrating intense stress. The thing is that they largely weren't in that they weren't under too many actual external pressures. The process of permanently being hormonally stressed was taxing on their bodies and thus they were unable to really do anything else. >> So think about that from an evolutionary standpoint. Evolution is like, "Oh damn, you're bedrotting. 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 bedrotting. 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 >> 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. This was in the 60s 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 de viva or joy of life or reason to live. We'll be right back to the show, but right now let's talk about one rule when traveling. Beef sticks go in the bag. Plain and simple. Always airports, [music] hotels, a day that runs long with no food options in sight. I do not leave that to chance. Paleo Valley beef sticks go in my bag before I go anywhere. I literally don't leave the house without them. When the day goes sideways and I need food right now, the right choice for me is always on me. I eat these because they're the real thing. 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef, organic spices, naturally fermented. There's no soy, no gluten, no junk, 6 g of real protein per stick, and they actually [music] taste incredible. 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And when customers find you, Shopify checkout, the best converting checkout on the planet, make sure that they actually buy. All you need is the idea and then Shopify will help you with the rest. Start your free trial at shopify.com/impact. [music] All right, now let's get back to the show. And I have a hypothesis on this. Um, 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 disregulated. 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 disregulated." Meaning, I cannot make sense of my internal state. My internal state is in such disarray that um all of the things that I just completely take for granted that I would seek comfort. Um 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. Uh sitting on the floor like it was just thankfully [clears throat] 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 reisolate. I wake up at this time. I go to bed at this time. And so after the 8-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 um 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. It was really crazy. 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 purpose. There's 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. I 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 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. >> 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 email who like we would have that ability to either one internally diagnose it or two we have communities of other bed rodders who we can kind of group up together and then I guess help undo a stress or at least find community in our bedroddingness. You know what I mean? >> Yes. So to put it into um 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. I mean, we're already losing people. The um 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 the early stages find a way to avoid some of the you know problems that arise from this 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 [ __ ] 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 the 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 less, third even less, fourth and it starts getting like really unhinged and deranged because and I think they cover this or maybe they 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 um 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." And my brain is so expecting that that it cues its development off that. And if it doesn't get that, it just it it never needed to have a workaround. And so, it just breaks. And it it maybe the 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 coup 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 [ __ ] 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. This is why Joe Rogan is confused cuz he's like, "Well, if everything is easy, go force yourself to do something hard. You work out really hard. You cold plunge. You um 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. >> He said this happened far before their actual numbers started to collapse. Mice live much like Andrew Tate with alpha males keeping harums 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. 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 as 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 social structure. They were sexually hyperactive, but not for any reasons of actual procreation. 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. >> 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 refrain. So, as I look at the swing now to um 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. Um 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. Uh, so it is um this is precisely what I see when I look at the DSA. >> 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 before we move on to the next section. First, I'm surprised at how advanced the mouse social structure was. As I read this, I'm frankly surprised that mice of 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 Io Wilson 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. 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 uh 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, um I thought, uh-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 >> ZOS. >> Uh, yes. [snorts] Is this the one? Yes. Yes. So, Zegros Oscinrez_will_WIN, shout out to you. Thank you so much for sending this in. Um, more of that, please. I'm always looking for um 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, um 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 um deeply ingrained algorithms in our brain that create these um pressures on us to act and behave in certain ways. 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, um 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 disregulated and everything just sort of goes haywire because we're not getting the things that we expect. And it 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 super intelligence, because I don't think we end up here from just AI continuing to grow uh and becoming a thing, but I do think we get there with artificial super intelligence where energy cost drops to zero and um labor drops to zero and anybody can have anything they want. I think at that stage people really are gonna 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 um our own culture that we saw in mouse utopia. Uh 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 um the output of evolution. And so it's like they may not have the exact same brain structures and stuff, though they are similar. Um, but it's the same forces that developed them and made them 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, um, 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, um, 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. Uh 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 >> and like as we enter like the age of abundance and things like that. >> Yeah. That it's not going to be a free ride. No way. >> 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. Haha. So there were people in that society that rose up and became the herum. They had more women. There were some that became more aggressive. There were some that became more grooming. And there were some that became I'll call them emo. they were bedrotting and things like that. >> Um, >> 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'll be able to kind of [snorts] gify or do something that allows us to bounce off of those as opposed to going to those segments and kind of staying there. >> It'll be very easy. >> Is it only individualistic? I guess just >> it's only individualistic is 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." Um, and people often will ask me why I work as hard as I work now when I, you know, I've made 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 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 psycholog 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. Um, and so I'll people that have a um, lucky draw on self-discipline, self-awareness, and stuff like that, they're going to be fine. But there's a lot of people for whom like they're really going to have to start making this a conscious thing. It isn't going to come easily to them. Um, 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, um, 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. Um, then there are going to be people who just numb the [ __ ] out and they bedrock and they do drugs and that's that. There 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 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 uh game type anyway. And so the people going to Mars and the moon, they're saying I want to start a new uh 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 [ __ ] hard. And you've got to tame Mars. Like that's going to be some hard [ __ ] 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 um 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 to take a a weekend and I'm going to go [ __ ] 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. I have to ask you um if somebody's struggling to find meaning and purpose in their life, what are some tips or advice you would give them? >> 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 as 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. um 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 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 um you want to feel uh physically potent, sexually potent, like you want to matter, like people are going to need to contend with you and your ideas. Um 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. Uh there's that old adage that says um uh if you shun a child uh from the village, if you shun a child, they will burn the village down merely to feel its warmth. >> And I thought, damn. Uh so that all feels true. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. This guy's about to destroy everything you think you know about investing in this economy. Let's take a look. >> Advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages? don't own US stocks. That's a simple strategy that you can act on.