Scott Adams and Brian Romelli dissect John Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiment, arguing that unlimited resources without social structure lead to collapse, mirroring modern fears of AI creating a "useless class." They critique the post-1950s consumerist family model, warn against victimhood narratives, and propose decentralized guilds as the future leadership infrastructure. Ultimately, the discussion urges listeners to reject external salvation, embrace independent critical thinking, and proactively build resilient structures in an era transitioning from scarcity to abundance. [Automatically generated summary]
It's because when I was a kid, everybody used a journalist.
That's what Erica was saying.
No, I said Romelli.
Oh, Romelli.
It doesn't matter.
All right.
So it's official.
I like to call people what they want to be called.
Yeah.
And he said anything goes.
Anything goes.
I mess up people's names all the time.
All right.
Anything goes.
All right, Dad.
Oh, my gosh.
You guys, welcome in.
I think we had a chance for everybody to come running in.
So there's something we have to do or we just can't function.
So grab a vessel.
Here we go.
Hey, come on in here, everybody.
I see you gathering around, reaching for your vessels of which beverages will soon be contained, in which beverages will be contained.
Well, you're probably here for the simultaneous hip and for my analysis of Iran, because who better to analyze the Middle East than a cartoonist?
But first, you're here for the simultaneous hip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen jugger flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go shivers.
Total shivers.
Hey, come on in here, everybody.
Oh, Lordy.
That is, can you guys believe it?
That's twice in a row he brought up Iran.
And this is like a decade ago, that clip.
That's amazing.
Wow.
You guys, I'm Erica, and we have Brian Romel, Romeli Romilly.
He answers to all of those names.
We just asked him.
Well, all we're glad is that you answer when we call and you say that you'll come on because you are definitely a fan favorite and you're so interesting.
So we want to welcome you back as one of our most favorite guest professors.
And I put out the article we're going to talk about today from your, you have 5,000 days series.
And this one kind of freaked me out about population or depopulation control or not control and what might cause it.
So I am going to kind of hand it over to you to maybe you could brief us on what it is we're going to talk about today, and then we'll have questions for you.
Beautiful.
Thank you for having me again.
I love you guys.
Ms. Scott, that every time I see the simultaneous sip, it's beautiful.
John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia00:04:33
John Calhoun in the 1960s, primarily late 60s, conducted a number of psychological and sociological tests.
He primarily was under this particular story, worked with mice.
And he created what would be utopia for mice.
And he had different universes, he called them.
He did all the way up to 27 or 29.
But universe 25 was the one that really stuck with him.
And what does mice utopia look like?
Well, think of being a mouse.
And what would you want?
Food, endless food, endless ability to do what you want, water, temperature control, a place to hang out, everything you possibly could need.
And if you can imagine, there was a town square and all of these lairs, you know, multi-story lairs that are around the walls inside this massive room-size mouse contraption that he invented.
I think at one time there were 800 mice, maybe more.
More, I think.
Yeah, I forget exactly in that particular epoch, but ultimately what happened was abundance.
The mice were happy.
Their fur looked good.
They were doing really well.
And just about, I would say, three to five months in, he started to notice unusual behaviors.
In the town square, as every mouse had to cross to get to food and water, there would be interactions, and sometimes those interactions would start becoming violent as they interfaced with each other.
And then he started noticing a pecking order.
And that pecking order would be some males would refuse to leave their lair and would have other mice bring food back for them, you know, throughout the day.
Very much like, yeah, DoorDash, right?
And very much like the decline of the Greco Empire in Greece and Roman Empire to some degree.
That started to really become very profound.
Ultimately, in the town square, there would become more and more violent interactions and other mice would watch it, almost like a gladiator type of situation.
Mice would be cut up, they would have scars, other mice would join, there would be packs that form.
But the ones that were not interacting, he called them, Calhoun called them the beautiful ones, primarily male.
And in fact, I think all of them were male.
There was one female, but they got knocked out when you actually read the research paper.
I have to jump in and say the beautiful ones always smash the picture.
Always, every time.
I love your prince references.
I love it.
And it's interesting that this structure manifested pretty much early on in the experiment.
But it got worse.
As this situation developed, you started seeing more and more of the population become more fixated on the tribalism that took place in the town square and taking care of the beautiful ones, the rich ones, the ones that had everything, that knew everything.
There was less reproduction.
There was less care for each other in a sense that there was less grooming, there was less, even less eating of the food.
Some animals, some of the mice were starting to starve, even though there was an abundance amount of food.
And I'll shorten the story to the end point.
The end point was the entire colony collapsed.
They stopped reproducing entirely.
The beautiful ones dominated to the point where they got so obese and so unable to actually go out and get water and things of that nature, they died and the entire colony ended.
Wealthy Humans and Purpose Loss00:14:50
Pritzker didn't make it?
None of them made it.
Pritzker, I heard you.
So basically, we're at the end point of an experiment.
In that particular epoch in the late 1960s, there was a lot of interest in zero population growth, Malthusian things like that.
The great population bomb book was very popular.
Talked about this.
I think I brought it to his attention because at first he's like, nobody thinks we should have population or depopulation.
And I think a bunch of people jumped in and said, you know, there was this whole population bomb thing and it was a huge thing.
It still is.
It still is.
Unfortunately, there are people that are in positions of power that I've met.
And I can tell you they absolutely believe that.
And they believe it even more as we go into the next 5,000 days.
If we have robotics serving humans, we all become the beautiful ones.
Maybe almost like Wally World, the Disney movie where we're all in wheelchairs and all we do is consume.
One of the reasons why I am writing this series, You Have 5,000 Days to the End of Work as We Know It, is to mentally condition us to what we need to face and how we need to be in this transition.
It is either going to be the end of world, meaning all technology goes and we go back to the Stone Age, or we're going to have this world.
And if you're cheering on the end of the world, fine, you can go and do that and hope that we're all, you know, Fred and Barney and Wilma, you know, running around in bedrock.
Or we're going to have robotics and AI do more and more work for us.
And I used Universe 25 and the population bomb and that Malthusian philosophy as a way for the reader and hopefully all of you folks at the school to understand that this agenda is going to be played out.
There are people that are going to be using this as a subtext of how the world should be.
And frankly, a lot of the people that do that, that will be doing that, are some of the beautiful ones.
These are the people who have already made it.
These are the people who already have the old world's money and the old world's fame and fortune.
And I say the old world because currency, if you read on, this series may never end, but if you read on, I'm going to be writing about how money will be completely transformed.
It will have a lot less value.
So the people who are extremely wealthy will not be as wealthy.
And that freaks them out.
And also, the idea has always been that there is overcrowding on planet Earth.
And anybody who's flown over the United States, or if you live in the former Soviet Union, if you go over that area, 80 to 90% of the areas are barren.
They're empty.
They're devoid of almost anybody.
In fact, most of the West is owned by the U.S. government.
It's just open land.
Bureau of Land Management acres are in billions in the United States.
Let me stop you for a minute.
You said you laid this out like a binary.
Like either we're going over back to the Stone Age or we're going to have this age of abundance.
But don't you think there is a spectrum in between where it could be something in between?
Yes.
Oh, and it's a great question.
That's a transitional state.
I always like to work from the end point backwards.
So the end point is anything you ever want will be able to be replicated in your home.
There will be no store in the proper sense.
Like you won't be going to Amazon to shop.
You're probably going to have it replicated and built in your home.
And now that's the ultimate endpoint, right?
That's a bit sci-fi.
That's no more than 100 years away.
This is called nanofabrication, the moving around of atoms.
And I'm not guessing about that.
We already have nanofabrication.
It's a replicator.
Yeah, essentially a replicator.
Now, this plays out different for biology and food.
I happen to believe that we're going to be growing our own food and we're going to be making bespoke food.
I really think that we're going to be forming guilds and humans are going to be doing things that are going to be absolutely phenomenal.
But we're not going to be doing the things that we used to do to take away 90% of our time and absolutely making it the meaning of our life.
For most of human existence, our work was not our meaning.
Our life was our meaning.
And we didn't have a separation between work and normal life.
We just had life.
The Industrial Revolution bifurcated our life, quote unquote, from our work.
And we had to be almost like a machine to fit into the cog of the production line of the Industrial Revolution.
When we are no longer part of that production line, we are rapidly being taken out of that.
The machine is going into that production line.
Our lives change.
And we're left with, where's the floor?
What happened?
What do I do now?
And that's what the series is about, is to try to understand it.
And Owen, to your question, when do we get to the point of the ultimate?
Well, we never do.
So it's always going to be a phase of arriving, right?
Even when we get to that phase of nanofabrication, there's always going to be something bigger and better.
So there is never any end point.
And it's never a utopia.
And that's the point I'm going to make, is that we are not going to have a utopia.
We're always going to have, hopefully, different frictions in human life that make us have to try to thrive.
Humans thrive by the unbalanced land that we're on because we have to struggle.
And that struggle is always going to be there.
I mean, I've often noticed that people, you know, like people think, oh, I would be so happy if everything was just perfect for me and everything was just provided for me.
But I think the exact opposite is true.
If you really look at how people behave when they have this abundance, because there certainly are people that have all the money they would ever need.
And they tend to be the most dysfunctional people around.
Yeah.
And I also noticed, you know, I mean, I don't want to get too political in this discussion, but you have this, you know, stereotype of an awful, like an affluent white liberal female.
I think it's, I might have it out of order, but, you know, those are the people that seem to be like complaining about things all the time.
And they're always like rich, privileged people.
And, you know, it's probably true for a lot of men too.
The people that are at these protests are people that don't need to work.
They don't have enough struggle in their own life.
So they focus on other things and they kind of invent problems.
They take on other people's struggles.
I've seen this throughout society where if someone doesn't have what I would consider enough struggles or enough challenges that they need to deal with personally, then they just like find other stuff to complain about and they find other problems that they basically invent problems.
These are really good points.
And if you study history, not just the Roman and Greek cultures, but a lot of the microcultures, there's an arc of their existence.
And when they get to the existence point of so much abundance and so much wealth, there is an ultimate decline.
And that decline is obviously taking place in most of the Western world.
It's actually rapidly taking place in the Eastern world.
China is a good example.
Japan is a really good example.
They reached a maximum and they dropped off quite rapidly.
So this is something we all have to start being mature about and dealing with.
And to try to depoliticize it, I get the political angle and we can say Karen.
I won't say that.
But I mean, the reason why this happens is humans need something to make them industrious.
They need to be able to have something to focus on.
And giving some credit to the people in power, they know that.
They look at Universe 25 and they look at us unwashed masses because we're the unwashed masses.
We're the useless eaters, all of us here, you know.
And they go, what are we going to do with those people?
You know, we don't need them anymore.
And yes, some of them are going to go to the Malthusian and depopulation sort of playbook.
And not that they ever left it.
There's always been a desire to control certain populations and to utilize them because that's what happens, like you said, Owen, when you get very wealthy, you get bored.
And so your chess game used to be, I got to feed my family.
Now it's like, I can buy and sell anything.
And let's see if I can play games with this population versus that population.
Then aren't they the ones that die first?
No, they, well, yes.
From gluttony?
The gluttony does happen, but we get seduced into believing that we want their life, right?
I've been around very wealthy people.
You do not want their life.
I'm sorry.
You do not want their life.
So if you're struggling to try to be that person, honestly look at it and ask, is that really who I want to be?
But I'll be different.
No, you won't.
Look at lottery winners.
Look at NFL, you know, NBA stars.
Look at anybody who's run into a lot of wealth.
And I'm not saying that they didn't work for it.
And there's also the phenomenon of men that typically seem to, I mean, not everybody, but there's a lot of men that once they retire, they just decline and die within a few years.
And I think a lot of that has to do with their loss of purpose.
They stop engaging with the world.
They're just sort of sitting around watching TV or whatever, but they're not really stimulating or growing anymore.
And I think they just lose their purpose and then their body follows.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You know, you come to a really good point.
Men are not as social as a creature as women.
And I'm not trying to be sexist.
It just is the way the factory programming generally comes, right?
So when you hit your factory programming, there's a social nature and a not social nature.
So most men will garner their social connections most of their life through their work.
If you take away their work, you take away their social connections.
You can only go to the golf course so often, and then it's the usual suspects there, more men like you that have been retired and you don't have any purpose, and it tends to go down very quickly.
I can say the same thing about women, where they have an afternoon wine and then all of a sudden it's wine all day long, and then they sink into this, I don't have any meaning or purpose in my life.
And so, again, one of the reasons I'm trying to write this, some of the themes in the series, is to help prepare what does it look like when I don't define myself by my job.
You know, what does it look like?
You know, it's only been about 200 years, 300 years that we've totally cemented our identity to our job.
Now, throughout history, we had guilds within our families.
In fact, our names were even tied to Goldsmiths, Cooper, things like that, the jobs that our family did.
But they were so intricated into our lives that there was no separation between the job and what you did.
It was so kind of wrapped up.
We don't have that same sort of thing, although some people bring their work home.
We have a separation between what we do and what we do at home, but we define ourselves by how we produce in our life.
Am I making enough money?
Who am I comparing myself with?
A lot of folks get on the life bandwagon after coming out of the university comparing themselves to their peer group.
Like, you know, am I making as much money as this person?
Am I doing that?
That's the quote-unquote rat race.
And that pretty much established itself in the early 1950s.
It was right after World War II when we started to develop this sort of American dream.
And it's funny because in the last two of the series, because Universe 25 is a couple of articles ago, I really am exploring what that looks like.
How did we get the American dream?
Who built that?
It started with a guy named Edward Bernays, and it worked its way through other folks.
The soap opera, I wrote about how the soap opera was manufactured to, in a sense, weaponize the stay-at-home mom during the afternoon, to create that social connection that they were not having in a suburb, right?
Because we're designed to live in a communal structure, a family extended communal structure.
That's our way.
It's not socialism.
It's actually the opposite of that.
But a lot of people equate it to that.
We have these layers of voluntary and forced, family is forced, and then voluntary coagulations that we call our local community.
And it's designed to form different safety nets mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially, because we do need those things.
I mean, we can all be lone wolves out in the forest, you know, certainly.
But we decided voluntarily to organize.
That's how humanity existed for most of its existence.
And then when we organized, we had to create a pecking order, and then we created what we call today democracies.
Analyzing Our Local Communities00:10:48
You know, we live in a republic, not a democracy.
But, you know, later on, a more mature form of governance is, you know, you have established rights.
That's what a republic is.
And then where are they ordained by a human note?
They are ordained by God, right?
They're given to us, you know, these rights.
So coming back to the organizational structure, you have a force structure that comes from your family.
So that gives you the idea of responsibility.
Why do I have honor to my family?
Why do I have an honor to my local community?
And so when you break that up into suburbia in the 1950s, what happened was a lot of women felt isolated.
They were locked up.
It's like, how do I interact?
Well, I can go down the street.
And after that, you just couldn't form the right structures.
So the soap opera was designed to become that local community where they would check in and it became quite addictive.
And so it would create a form of emptiness in a lot of women that would be fulfilled by the instant foods and the instant detergents, soaps, that would allow them to get their day moved along quicker after they took three hours out of their day to watch the various daytime dramas.
And so what happened is psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts analyzed this emptiness that people felt in that form of the American dream, and they gave them back a commercialized version of it by feeding them the things that they needed to fulfill their life.
Even questioning their existence.
Oh, look at that doctor has the best life and look at all the women that want him.
Maybe I need to be one of those women and it questioned whether or not their husband as a plumber was just some lunk that they fell into and that somebody else has a more beautiful life.
So that's part of the conditioning that we all have gone through.
And it's very hard for a lot of people listening because we've all formed, I'm guilty, we are all guilty of forming our life around that narrative.
And it's very hard to get out of it.
I mean, we have, look at me, I got a lot of junk behind me.
We collect junk.
We want to have stuff and we want to, you know, we want to do things.
It's hard to imagine what abundance looks like on the other side when you don't have to work really hard to get certain things.
And what do you become?
And like Owen said, without the pressures of forming, you know, something meaningful in your life, you could actually go the other way and just kind of give up and want to die.
That's kind of what happened in Universe 25.
If you couldn't be a beautiful one and only so many had these penthouse apartments, because they're all the highest places, by the way, all the beautiful ones were up in the penthouses.
And this pecking order developed naturally to try to take care of the beautiful ones.
One of the things I don't want to delve too far into is the perversions that took place within that culture.
I mean, all sorts of perversions, certainly sexual.
The beautiful ones lost their sexual identity.
They became pansexual.
The ones right below them became pansexual.
They didn't understand what they were there for any longer.
And now you can imagine how dangerous of a thought this is in today's society.
And I'm just asking you to look around and say, are we seeing any of this today?
Are any of these things manifesting?
And what do they look like as we move forward?
Right.
So let's do that.
So let's apply this to what we're seeing around us today.
And I think a lot of times I hear people saying that this is, you know, being done on purpose.
I think some people in the chat have mentioned that on different platforms here.
So is that maybe what's happening like with a push of transgender ideology?
We do see people not having children like they used to and families.
There's a big decline.
Is that intentional then?
So, you know, you're saying that maybe the beautiful ones are pushing this?
Ah, let me see the best way I can say this.
As you know, I tend not to drive into the political realm because it makes it very hard for people wanting to understand because they get bifurcated into their teams.
I happen to think that us organizing into teams in this way is futile and quite dangerous.
I don't agree with anybody 100%.
I've never met anybody.
I don't agree with myself 100%.
Therefore, it's very difficult to want to constantly define myself behind one organized label.
Generally, I'm sure you can conclude where my leanings are, but that's not who we are and it shouldn't be the way we move forward.
We need to organize around ideas and concepts, right?
And not labels.
Labeling makes you a victim.
The moment you label anything, you become victimized by the opposite of that label.
So I'm very much against trying to label things.
But would it make a lot of sense if you're in a position of power to keep the masses not reproducing?
And that question has certainly been around.
Well, there was a guy in Germany in the 1930s and 40s that thought that too.
There was a guy in Russia that thought that too.
There was a guy in China that thought that too, to the point where people were throwing babies in the river, right?
This is not a theory.
It is an absolute fact of life, and people are deploying certain philosophies.
And it's important to identify it as a scientist.
Take a couple of steps back, remove the emotion so that you can actually analyze it.
And it's a very emotional thing.
I'm not saying don't be emotional about it.
I'm saying take a couple of steps back and look at it and say, hmm, what am I observing here?
And take your notes.
I'm observing that there are people that believe there are too many people on the planet.
Now, I've flown over the planet.
There's a lot of empty spaces.
People are tending to coagulate too much in universe 25 and they're fighting in the town square.
That can be X, it can be TikTok, or it can be literally in the town square.
Today, that place of interaction, of anger and hot takes, is on virtual environments like X and Facebook, you know, and next door.
Go and look at next door and see how people like to be over the head.
Oh my God.
Your car, your dog, the little things you were saying about how you run out of the big things and you start fighting over the little things.
You know, the one thing I love about Jordan Peterson, you know, I got to know him very well after the interview.
Let's pray for Jordan Peterson, by the way.
I hope he's going to make it through this.
One of the things I learned in his lectures is that you need to be able to clean your room first before you can fix the world.
And if you are out there protesting in the street, what does your room look like?
Did you make your bed?
I mean, what does that mean?
It's not to try to knock that person down.
It's actually to lift that person up, right?
You can take any comment from somebody who's very wise and you can form it into a weapon.
You can burn somebody with fire.
You can light their life.
It can become a torch.
It's up to you.
It's up to you how you want to take that.
So if your life is not in order, that does not mean you don't have an opinion.
It doesn't mean you don't want to state your opinion.
It's before you start trying to bang somebody over the head.
Self-filter.
Yeah, let's look at what your life looks like.
I take my advice from people.
And like I said, I don't find one person that I agree with 100% of the time.
But my mentors, the people that I've taken my advice from, have found certain things in their life that they've become incredibly good at.
And I look at it and I say, that is absolutely beautiful.
What can I learn from that?
Now, I don't sit there and say, oh, I'm not good enough.
I can't do what they do.
If one person can do it, another person can do it.
There's nothing that I do that nobody here can do.
I've never met anybody, anybody that can do something that another person can't do unless they're physically disabled from being able to do it.
And so, yes, sometimes mentally disabled in a sense that they have not applied themselves.
Unfortunately, there is a time factor to that too.
Some people are going to do it faster than others, but if you apply yourself, you can get to that point.
And it's not just positive thinking.
It's the reality of it.
So, but like what I, one of the main takeaways I took away from Jordan Peterson's lectures was he advised people to take on responsibility.
And I think it was right in line with that saying you need to have purpose, you need to have meaning in your life.
And the way you get meaning is by taking on responsibility, increasing levels of responsibility, and bringing order to those things.
But it was mainly about taking on challenges and conquering things and having some sort of challenge that you're conquering to have that purpose.
And I think Scott mentioned that his formula for happiness was something like 80% meaning and 20% personal pleasure, you know, like the things that might just be what you think of as pleasurable activities.
And he said it should be maybe 20% that, but 80% needs to be like helping other people or doing some meaningful work.
And I think, you know, I find both of those things to be true, generally speaking, in terms of human nature.
And it sounds to me like what you're saying is we have to somehow adapt to a world where it's flipped to the opposite.
Yes.
And yes, Scott has left us with a lot of wisdom and a lot of what we can do is try to apply this in the new world that we're entering.
Stop Waiting to Be Led00:15:00
Everybody listening to me is going to face job loss around them or to them directly, most definitely over this next decade.
They're going to come into work just like Scott did one day, and they're going to realize that their job is no longer what they thought it was.
And there are going to be all sorts of Dilbert type of scenarios that are going to play out.
And he left us with the comic strip that actually it really applies to what we're going to see, the comedy that's taking place.
It's going to be very, I mean, since post-COVID, there aren't very many offices left anyway.
I mean, they're falling apart rapidly.
That's already this, this whole, you know, decay has already started even before COVID, but COVID allowed it to be turbocharged.
One could theorize, man, if I wanted to do this in a movie script to accelerate this process where I know AI and robots are taking over, what could I do to make it really accelerate?
What can I just hit really hard to make it happen?
I don't know, 2020.
Let's see what we can do.
You can do that and you can literally get yourself caught up.
You know, what is a conspiracy?
Conspiracy is a manufactured term made by the CIA to deal with the Kennedy assassination.
That's all it is.
So when you use the term conspiracy, you are aiding and abetting a mind control programming.
So coincidence theory, maybe I'd rather hear that.
I like that.
Yeah.
What is really going on?
What's going on is there are systems that are taking place all around us that we don't know, and we see little puzzle pieces.
And then we put those puzzles together and we call them, you know, coincidences or conspiracies.
People who don't want their daily life photocopy existence upset, they will dismiss everything as a conspiracy.
And a lot of people will do this because they are beyond their noise level.
If we were in the 1600s, what would be in an average newspaper today would be what somebody takes in in an entire year in the 1600s, information-wise.
Now, the information type is different.
It's like, oh, my plants are failing.
Oh, the bugs are coming.
But the density of information.
So we're beyond information overload already.
And then now we're adding AI and we're adding all the manipulations and the hypnotism of the populace, right?
The movement of general directions of people.
And if you're on the mouse wheel, on the rat reel, the rat race, you don't have enough time to discern what's going on around you.
So everything is a punch in the dark.
Imagine yourself in a dark.
This is where we are, all of us.
We're in a dark room.
And every time we're getting punched, and we don't know what it is, and we feel it, and it's the standard elephant in the room.
I'll give you the thing.
It's a snake.
No, honey, it's a big tree hitting us.
No, honey, it's a whip, the tail.
No, it's, you know, all these different things.
It is one thing, right?
And you can kind of go into biblical stuff, you know, evil.
There is a lot of this going on.
There are demonic forces.
There's no doubt about it.
We're going to hear a lot about it towards the end of this year within the Alien Agenda program.
Alien Agenda.
I like that.
Yeah, I don't want to get into it.
Maybe another show will go into that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, we're definitely not going to be able to do that.
I don't want to go too far into revealing what we're all going to hear in July, or maybe earlier.
I don't know.
Brian will be back July 1st.
But there are things that we don't know.
And we only have tools that are good enough for us to understand it.
I use this analogy a lot.
You don't see anything on my hand, but there's a trillion creatures on my hand.
We invent a new tool called the microscope.
We now see what we didn't see before.
So if I was driving along and said, hey, Joe, there's a whole world on my hand.
Shut up, you conspiracy theorists.
I heard that story.
I need to go and do my life here.
Don't bother me with that because we're so mind-controlled into getting on the rat race on the wheel to get our food and our shelter and to get our beer, to sit on the couch, to watch the game, to do it all over again, that we don't want to get out of our lane.
And that's too much thought because then I have to open my mind and go down this new path.
Scott was doing that for us.
People like Jordan Peterson are doing that.
Other people that we can't even name are doing that.
I knew another guy named Jordan Jordan Maxwell, who was the grandfather of all this.
That will open up a can of worms.
But there are people that get to see things way before us, and they're the crazy ones.
And unfortunately, it's a burden.
It's a burden.
How do we prevent the misuse of the universe 25 by the government?
You were talking about that in your article.
Oh, yeah.
Is there a way to prevent it from them misusing it?
Yes.
We have to identify it first.
Like any multi-step program, like let's call us all alcoholics.
The multi-step programs do work, right?
But you have to de-victimize yourself at the end.
That's the problem with all multi-step programs is you're a victim for life.
No, you are not a victim for life.
You get to exit at some point.
That doesn't mean you need to be able to overcome things.
So the very first thing is you have to accept the fact that this is going to happen, right?
And that's part one of my series.
And the only way you can truly accept this fact is you have to deal with your own traumas.
That's an ongoing thing, but you have to face it.
All the walking wounded that you've gone in your life, it is not going to serve you over this next 20-year period.
And if you want to just check out, that's fine.
I'm not going to, nobody's going to bother you with that.
You're just going to be on a different plane of existence.
You may not see me show up one day and I'm going to be organic farming somewhere and not caring.
That might not be a checkout.
That might be a check-in.
I'm not putting anybody down on that.
But as long as you're doing it with a clear sense of your mind, where do you want to go?
What do you want to be?
Because you don't have a boss anymore.
That's kind of what I'm really saying.
The boss is you.
So first identify.
Are we in a mouse utopia?
Yes.
We have more abundance.
The poorest person on this planet has more abundance than most of the wealthiest of 500 years ago.
It's a very, very hard thing to conceptualize that.
And we have no idea the shoulders that we stand on.
The people who have sacrificed and died for us all to be here at this moment, right?
You have, oh, woe is me.
And I'm sorry, a lot of young people need guidance because they didn't have it in their life.
And people like Scott and Jordan Peterson were doing this.
We're trying to kind of wake up.
Don't you realize, oh, I didn't ask to be here.
None of us did.
None of us did.
But people have come before us and they've shown us a way and a path forward.
So stop inner reflection and start looking at how we can move forward.
I mean, so another thing I would say about most people is that most people want to be led.
They want to have a leader to follow and they don't necessarily want to be the boss.
I mean, and I think some people find out when they do try to go off on their own that being their own boss is not a very good experience, that they're not a really good boss for themselves.
And they're actually better off having a boss or having someone tell them what to do.
And do you see a new type of leader emerging in this new world that's going to be ready to sort of tell people what to do and give people a good path to follow?
Yes, Owen, you make a great point.
It's a complicated thing, but I'll try to simplify it.
We've been conditioned in a lot of ways to dilute our creativity and our ability to see and discern through our own eyes.
So that's why we need to go back and heal that.
We need to go back and say, no, we are a magical child.
We still have this capability.
It is not gone.
It has just been sanctioned off.
I think I mentioned last time, it's a garden that you need to go back to and you need to deweed it and you need to start planting ideas and thoughts in that garden because now is the time to grow that garden.
And it doesn't matter what you plant there, as long as it's going to nurture you and serve you.
As far as leadership, you are going to have to be your own leader.
And if you're in a family, you're going to have to lead your family.
And you have a role, whether, again, throughout history, there has been a role of a husband and wife within a family.
That role is defined not because somebody ordained it, it's because that's how God made it, if you want to say it, or the universe made it, or some protoplasm that, you know, evolved, made it, whatever your thing is.
It worked that way.
And that structure is the best structure.
So you have to become a leader at some point within your life.
You can't advocate that.
So what I will say to somebody who does not believe in themselves, believe in yourself because you've already gotten here.
And you already are smarter than your boss.
Good chance you are.
I have many clients.
I go to companies all the time.
And I don't, I go to the C-suite and I talk to CEOs.
But where I find out what's really going on in the company is at the lower echelons within that company, even the janitor.
I find in some companies, one company I'm dealing with right now, I'm setting up their AI system.
I talked to the maintenance staff more than anybody else in that company.
They know where all the bodies are buried.
They know how people operate.
They understand the pecking order far better because they're on the outside.
They're the invisible ones.
And I'm like, hey, what's really going on in this office?
Because I don't understand.
This is the hierarchy.
Oh my gosh.
Now I understand.
So now I know who to talk to.
Now, I'm giving away a secret here.
If some of these companies, I hope they're not watching, knew what I'm doing, they'd be kind of freaked out because they think it's top down.
It's bottom up.
It always has been.
See, we have been diluted into believing that we need to be led around.
We actually don't.
Do we need leadership?
Yes, but we don't need to be led around.
We know.
We know what is good and we know what is bad inherently.
And if we are left to our own devices, we actually don't do bad things.
I think you need to drive that home harder because, you know, even examples from the pandemic, okay?
And your gut told you something different.
And not you, but the collective, we like, you know, our gut told us something different than what we were being told.
And we collectively gave up power and control because we were like, oh, well, you know, these are our leaders.
But I feel like, I feel like a lot of people will never let that happen to them again.
Like they are going to trust their gut and they will behave differently.
I really hope and pray because the next time that they pull something like this, like who knows what it's going to be and how much more detrimental it can get.
But I think a good takeaway is to really trust yourselves, you guys.
Like you have good, you have good instincts just for being here because you appreciated Scott.
So you're ahead of the game and you have to really hone in sometimes and trust those feelings that you have.
And then just like kind of follow the path.
Like, why do they want me to do this?
Like, who says what sense does it make before you get led astray again?
So I want to drive that home.
Erica, that's beautiful.
That's absolutely.
Let me just make this point.
I absolutely think that that was the best dress rehearsal for almost all of us.
And now that we're in the post-period, we need forgiveness.
I know this is hard, but you need to look at the people around you that made the wrong decisions and understand that they were only capable of knowing what they knew when they knew it.
This includes your parents, right?
Everybody here is a leader.
The fact that you self-selected to say, you know what I'm going to do?
This morning, California time at seven o'clock, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to listen to what Scott Adams School is going to say or what Scott Adams was going to tell me.
And he was a leader in and of himself, but you became a leader by listening.
And you didn't take your pecking orders from him.
He didn't tell you what to say.
He didn't tell you what to think.
He showed you how to think.
This is the tool.
This is the reframe.
This is how you do it.
And whenever you see a leader giving you the tool, you know they're truly a leader.
That's their job.
They give you the seed and they say, go plant the seed.
Now grow your own tree.
Farm it.
When you see a leader saying, I'm going to come and save you, right?
Again, I'm not getting into politics, but Bernie put out a video yesterday saying, I'm going to shut down all the data centers.
I'm going to do it right now.
I'm going to shut down the data center.
And AI is going to take away the jobs.
I'm going to turn it off.
Okay, Ned Ludd.
Let's get the Luddite movement.
Yeah, there's some real problems with AI.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not a utopian like let's AI is going to fix everything.
It's not.
It's going to make it worse for a lot of people.
But it's coming.
Robots are going to make it worse, but you are not going to stop it.
So the wave is coming at us, all of us here.
Now do we get on our surfboard and ride it?
Or do we just say, oh, no, I'm going to go in the sand, stick my head there, and take my odds if I drown.
I'm telling you to get up on your surfboard and ride this wave.
Ride the Coming Wave00:04:18
You are not a victim.
You are able to do this.
I don't care how old you are or how much you think you don't know.
You know more than most people that are building this AI.
The fact that you have dedicated your life to actually making yourself better by being here, you're better than most of the 24-year-olds that drifted into this and are building these AI models and know not what it does.
I spend a lot of time helping those guys figure out, this is what your model does.
It's not really what you think.
Hey, this is why you don't put this constitution in there to make it say good things when it really should say honest things.
If AI is not honest, it is being trained to lie.
If your robot is not honest with you, it is being trained to lie.
If you're not honest to your child, you're training it to lie.
So how do you become a leader?
Well, one of the first things I would tell anybody young is to become a parent.
Become a parent.
Once you have a child, and if you don't have, if you can't reproduce, build a family.
Build it.
Find people.
There are a lot of kids that need mentors.
Be a real mentor.
There are a lot of old people willowing away in senior homes.
Go and visit them.
Do the reverse.
Take their wisdom.
Do you know how much wisdom that this gets left on the cutting room floor of some of humanity?
Because we don't even care about old folks.
Oh, they're old.
They're not vital and young.
Like, you know, they're not moving fast and breaking things like, you know, internet stars and stuff like that.
They have a lot to say.
Yes.
And they say it in ways that may have old words and they might say it in ways that doesn't make sense, but that is wisdom.
It's a life-earned wisdom.
And when we lived in that organized structure of culture where we had multi-generations around us, we would have the old folks say, oh, cut it out.
What are you doing?
What are you doing now?
You need that.
You need that pressure.
Such a good point.
Yeah, we were taught things by people who knew better.
And although, you know, when you're younger, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'll, you know, you have to find out for yourself.
But then there comes a point where you realize, oh, you know what?
The things that they told me were actually great.
And then you just start remembering them and adopting them at a certain age.
You're like, I'm going to adopt that wisdom because now I know better.
And they were right.
And I love that idea.
And I also was, I'm just like reading the comments at the same time.
But, you know, so a lot of us miss Scott and, you know, we miss what he would be saying about things.
But also, did Scott actually assign your opinions to you?
Or did he give an opinion and talk about things?
And then you took from it what you wanted to hear and know and fill in some gaps.
Because I would say to Scott, like, what am I going to do?
Like, if you're not here, like, I won't know how to feel.
And he's like, yes, you do.
And think of all the times you disagreed with me.
And, you know, and sometimes you were right and, you know, and I was wrong.
And it's true.
And it's like, you don't have to have your opinion assigned to you.
So like, but, but just remember that Scott really did show us like a breakdown of thought.
And without him being here, you just have to work harder at it and try to remember what this like older, maybe older, wiser person may have instilled in you like a family member would.
And just decide, like, yeah, let me think what Scott would say and take that because you guys, he gave us so much.
And you can go back and watch his stuff also.
And then, you know, we're doing the best we can by bringing guests and trying to talk things out.
And, you know, we all have different opinions and that's totally fine too.
But just try to fill in the gaps where you can because we're going to have to in the future more than ever before.
Erica, you make such a great point.
And I'm doing a lot of coalescing with Scott's work using AI.
I'm not building any models yet.
And there's no phony Scott Adams.
One of the most repeated concepts is: I'm not telling you what to think.
I'm just saying, I want you to figure this out.
Those are the concepts he's always instilled.
Understanding Human Differences00:03:33
And again, that's how you know you've dealt with a real leader.
Now, in a family environment, you're going to have somebody, you go to family gatherings, and it's horrible for most people because there's going to be the critic, but you need that critic.
You need that reality.
You know how many people are running around entitled because there's nobody that can tell them what to do?
You need your family structure to tell you what to do, but you need to build that structure.
And it starts with you.
No matter where you are in life, if you're already past family building or you're about ready to start, you need to do it now because this is the only infrastructure.
They are not going to come to save us.
You are going to save us.
Everybody here is that leader.
So what Owen was saying is true.
Are you the ultimate leader that's going to be a president?
No.
Nor do I want very many people to have that.
It takes a certain maniacal individual to rise to that level.
That is a fact.
You have to be maniacal to some level.
That is a prerequisite for being a leader in this current modern world.
As we move into the world of abundance, maniacal-ness is not going to be a characteristic of leadership.
But when you are in a world of scarcity where people are struggling over resources, you need somebody who is going to be able to stick the elbow in somebody else.
Listen, everybody here is a product of a conqueror.
We stepped on somebody to get here in the past.
I don't care who you are.
I don't care who you think you've been abused 200 years ago, 500 years ago.
Let me tell you, 10,000 years ago, you were a conqueror.
You cut somebody's neck to be here.
That is a fact of life, of human existence.
And well, I didn't do it.
No, somebody in your family line is.
And that's why when you go into this victimhood, I always ask a victim, how far back do you want to go?
Oh, we don't own this land.
I see.
What?
Well, this native, well, do you realize that there were many Native American tribes that fought here?
And that the one that was left here just before the conquerors from Europe came here just happened to be the ones that smited out a race of people that you don't even know their names because they completely erase them.
Go down to South America and look at different areas.
We think there's, you know, the Aztecs and the Incas.
No, there were thousands of different cultures that have been erased that we've merged together to think as one culture.
You go to Egypt, we think, oh, the Egyptian culture.
No, there were hundreds and hundreds.
And if you go back in time, you start seeing these layers.
And then I go, okay, we're all muts.
It's like, oh, this is a whole thing about racism.
It's like, I've never met a pure breed.
We're all mutts.
That is a fact.
And if you keep on wanting to play games with that, fine.
Do we have different tendencies?
You know, to an ant, we all look alike.
To us, all ants look alike now.
There are some are bigger that sting, but generally to an alien, we all look alike.
So now this isn't a kumbaya.
We're all the same.
We need to understand our differences and we need to preserve the things that create our cultures.
Our cultures create our direction that we go in.
And it's sort of a struggle of does this idea outweigh that idea?
The Western world won because certain organized principles actually make sense.
The New Guild Structure00:04:54
So do you think your guild is basically the new form where you might be able to find a leader in this new world?
Because I tend to think like I totally agree that everyone who can should become a leader.
I mean, throughout my life, I've always noticed a lack of leadership more than anything that it's needed everywhere in almost any organization or any structure you look at.
More leadership would be better.
And I've probably had more leadership training than most people.
And I still, you know, look for good leadership.
But is the guild concept that you're talking about kind of the new structure for finding leaders in this new world that you're describing?
And we only have a few minutes left.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
The guild is the structure.
I don't remember what number it was in my series.
It was about five back.
I present the idea of the guild.
The guild is an organized structure that you build of people of like interests and like work product.
And it self-organizes.
And there is always going to be a leadership that forms.
Every one of us know that when we form a group of five or more, a leader automatically comes up.
And if that leader is not a proper leader, the group disperses and they're alone, right?
So the leader needs to know how to create a structure where people want to be involved.
They know how to balance things.
So it's a self-organizing sort of structure.
And that is almost like how Bitcoin works.
It's a decentralized structure that is going to take over the entire planet.
There's going to be a lot less centralization.
As much as Bernie would love everybody to be centralized with one plan, it isn't going to work that way because we're all going to have our own manufacturing.
I can 3D print anything I want right now in my garage.
I do it all day long.
You're going to be able to do that yourself in five years.
You're never going to go to stores to buy stuff at some point.
Most people listening will live through that period.
Just like if you were at the 1800s, I told you someday you're going to fly to the other side of the planet and you're going to be able to, you wouldn't believe it.
The same is going to be true here.
It's not utopia.
It's not universe 25.
We are not victims.
We will have this.
And you folks are the leaders.
Aw, I love that, Brian.
Oh, my God.
You guys, how much do we love?
I want to be like when Uncle Brian comes.
We love you.
We love Uncle Brian.
As long as I'm not in an ice cream trunk truck.
No, no truck or trunk.
You guys, wow.
So we, I mean, the chat loves you.
They're thanking you.
And we love you so much.
You bring so much wisdom.
I can't wait to have you back to talk about the alien stuff.
And I cannot wait.
It's far away.
I know.
I know.
That'll be in July.
Just be ready.
Be ready for.
I'm just telling everybody, be ready to hear stuff.
And don't think it's all a psyop and don't think all of it's real.
You need to discern.
Stop always pushing things away and debunking.
That is making you a victim too.
I want to leave you with that.
If you are an endless debunker, you've debilitated yourself from novelty.
Your life purpose is to find novelty.
Don't always throw everything away because sometimes things are unique.
And that's part of the programming is to throw all the novelty in with the junk so that you get so disturbed by it that you turn everything off.
Don't turn off.
That's why people try to put a stigma on you by saying, oh, it's a conspiracy theory to make you feel like you're some kind of crazy person.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories that have now proven out.
So, you know, seek them out, search them.
And like we said, trust your gut and follow the trail like Scott would have taught us what to follow and what to look for.
You guys, thank you so, so much.
And tomorrow we get another thinker.
We have Stefan Molyneux coming back tomorrow.
Right.
How fun is that going to be?
So I love ending the week right now with just some great, brilliant thinking and a break from all of the news because Owen's going to get to the news on Saturday again anyway.
But you guys, thank you so much.
We really appreciate you for being here.
I hope you smashed the like button and the hearts and shared this with friends.
It really helps us keep going.
Brian, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
I love you guys.
Owen and Marcella love you so much.
And we will be back tomorrow.
You guys, let's have a closing sip to Scott.
And as always, we miss him.
And let's all be useful today and start retraining our brains for what's coming ahead because it's coming either way.