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Dec. 4, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:46
The Truth About Mouse Utopia!
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Good evening, everybody.
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All right, the Mouse Utopia Experiment.
We have talked, well, we've heard about this a lot.
We've talked about it a little bit, and we're going to dig into it so that you can understand what it means philosophically and what it's all about.
The Mouse Utopia Experiment, Lessons from a Coercive Rodent World.
Who expected me to say that today?
Well, so we're going to discuss the Mouse Utopia Experiment, also known as the Universe 25.
We'll cover the experiment's basics, its creator, its goal, his goals, whether it's been replicated, criticisms, funding, and how it ties, or doesn't tie into sort of human society as a whole.
First thing, of course, to understand, there was no natural mouse habitat.
It was an artificial forced confinement that studied how rodents react under coercion, not just their natural in the wild innate behaviors.
So it's sort of like taking people and putting them in prison or a zoo or under some oppressive government rather than in the wild.
So John B. Calhoun, do not, I refuse to have you confuse him with John C. Calhoun, who was like the beta, the 18th, 19th century statesman from South Carolina.
So he was born in 19, okay, John B., born in 1917 in Tennessee.
Calhoun was an American scientist who specialized in ethology, the study of animal behavior in natural or controlled settings.
He earned degrees in biology, went on to work for the U.S. government, particularly at the National Institute of Mental Health, NIMHA, the secret of NIMHA, from the 1950s onwards.
There he focused on how population density, obviously the number of individuals crammed into a limited space, affects social interactions and mental health in animals.
It doesn't appear that Calhoun was much of an activist, but his work was used by Senator Robert Packwood, that's a great porn name, to advocate in 1971 to advocate for government action on population growth.
Calhoun's work is also associated with works such as Paul Ehrlich, Earwigs, The Population Bomb, 1968, where he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s.
Of course, his predictions did not come true.
Now, for those of you who weren't around in the 70s, boy, weren't you lucky.
It was a hellscape of a key party environmental terror, nuclear bombs, and terrorism kind of decade.
It was hell on wheels.
And if you are not that old, then the absolutely sinister pivot from there are too many people in the world, there are too many people in your country, to there aren't enough people in your country.
We need to import everyone from the whole planet just to prop up your economy is about as sinister thing as I've ever seen in my lifetime.
Telling people, don't have kids.
There's too many people.
Ooh, sorry, you didn't have enough kids.
We need to import everyone from Somalia.
That is not the most rational or moral pivot in the known universe.
So as far as Calhoun's political leanings, we don't really know.
He did coin the term RX revolutionist to describe himself, meaning revolutionary evolutionist, using the RX symbol to indicate he was seeking to prescribe solutions to societal issues via better design and technology.
So if you're using the term revolutionary to describe yourself, could be a smidge of a tell.
It's of course associated with various violent communist coups and so on.
The Love Illution.
So Calhoun's work was mostly funded by the U.S. government, i.e. the taxpayers, under threat of force, through NIM as part of the National Institute of Health.
As a federal employee from the 1954 onwards, his salary and lab resources came from taxpayer dollars via annual budgets.
He did apply for and receive specific grants.
For example, early outdoor experiments in the 1940s were self-funded or low budget.
But by the 1960s, NIH grants supported his rodent universes.
Given that the majority of his career was in government-funded academia, he was not subject to market forces that would have informed him of the necessity and utility of his work.
So why do you hear of him?
Because there was a radical Western, largely white depopulation agenda that was going on from the 1960s onwards because all of the communists, to whom white Christian males in particular are their natural antagonists or enemies, the communists were absolutely horrified by the baby boom of the post-Second World War period, where you had birth rates of 3, 4, 5 per family.
It was absolutely horrifying to them.
Their enemies were breeding, and therefore they had to freak people out by talking about overpopulation until the women's legs froze shut like a pair of rusty scissors you find in a tool shed from 1920.
So that's the larger thing.
So nothing's accidental, right, in this kind of propagandistic universe.
So why have you even heard about these things?
Because too many people leads to societal collapse.
So stop having babies.
Oh, not enough people.
Okay.
So the mouse utopia refers to a series of experiments that Calhoun ran from the 1940s to the 1970s.
But the most famous was Universe 25, conducted from 68 through 73.
When I was two through seven.
That's very important.
You know, this is how we should measure things.
So the setup was this.
Calhoun built a large enclosure about nine feet square and 4.5 feet tall, divided into 16 pens connected by ramps and tunnels.
It was designed to house up to 3,840 mice comfortably, but the key to this whole enclosure was unlimited resources, which was endless food from feeders, constant water from drinking fountains, nesting materials everywhere, and no predators or diseases.
The temperature was kept ideal at around 68 degrees Fahrenheit with clean air and bedding.
So Calhoun started with four pairs of healthy young mice and let them breed freely.
In this particular iteration of a whole series of experiments, the population grew rapidly at first.
It doubled every 55 days or so, peaking at around 2,200 mice by day 560.
It's worth noting that mice experience estropause.
The cessation of female fertility around 560 days might just be a coincidence.
But then things went wrong.
I've got a bad feeling about the mice, Jim.
Social order broke down.
Dominant males fought viciously over territory.
Females became aggressive toward their young, and many mice withdrew into isolation.
Infants were abandoned or attacked.
Breeding stopped and the population plummeted to zero by day 1,584, total extinction, even though resources remained plentiful.
This collapse was what Calhoun called a behavioral sink, a term for when overcrowding leads to abnormal self-destructive behaviors that drag the whole group down like water swirling into a drain.
So for a visual, we got an image here.
So here's the image of universe 25 setup showing Calhoun inside the enclosure.
There he is, our RX revolutionary creating propaganda for anti-European population growth.
So to track the rise and fall, here's a population graph from the experiment.
Days after colonization, 500,1500, and the fall down, the last born first.
March 1970.
So of course, it's artificial, right?
These mice were forcefully confined in a metal box with no escape.
They didn't face any natural challenges.
So this wasn't studying the nature of mice, how they behave in forests or fields, but how they respond to coercion like being trapped in a cage.
Calhoun himself noted the enclosures limits mimics human cities or institutions where people are boxed in by rules of force.
So that's really jamming a whole bunch of stuff together.
This is like Desmond Morris's The Human Zoo.
That was a big book in the 70s as well.
The naked ape and the human zoo.
A human city is not like a totalitarian concentration camp mouse prison because you can come and go, you can live in the city, you can live out in the outskirts of the city, so that's not the way it is.
It's actually closer to something like a prison or a government school or perhaps even Calhoun's own trapped by government money career.
So what was he trying to establish?
He aimed to show that overcrowding alone, even in this utopia with no shortages, could cause social and psychological breakdowns.
He believed population density triggered pathologies like violence, apathy, and reproductive failure.
His early rat experiments in the 1940s, located in outdoor pens behind his house, showed similar patterns, but universe 25 was his most refined test.
He hoped to warn humans about urban overcrowding, suggesting we needed better conceptual space, mental room for roles and creativity to avoid similar fates.
In essence, he was testing if too many bodies in one place erode normal behaviors leading to societal collapse.
A big, big problem, of course, is the largely peaceful century between the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the start of the First World War in 1914.
Well, there was a huge amount of overcrowding in the Industrial Revolution, but it did not lead to this kind of pathology.
So anyway, so were his observations replicated?
Well, not much and not extensively.
That's kind of a key weakness.
Calhoun ran over 100 similar setups himself with varying results.
Some populations stabilized, others collapsed faster due to factors like disease or design tweaks.
But independent replication by other researchers are scarce.
One partial echo was a 1966, also known as Year Zero, study by Kessler, where two mouse groups showed differences, but it didn't fully match Calhoun's scale or findings.
Modern scientists haven't revisited this setup much, partly due to ethical concerns, particularly around intentionally harming animals and doubts about its relevance.
Without robust replications, his observations remain intriguing, but unconfirmed anecdotes, not solid science.
So he ran over 100 setups.
This is the one that was most famous because it had a big peak and then led to complete collapse, which gives people goosebumps of doom and disaster, which is quite a heady drug for a lot of people.
So what are the criticisms?
Well, there's been a lot of pushback on the mouse utopia experiment.
Methodological flaws.
The enclosures were artificial and coercive, forcing unnatural proximity.
So mice, of course, are territorial by nature.
Males fight intruders, so cramming them together predictably sparked chaos, not just because of density, but because of poor design.
Critics noted Calhoun ignored variables like inbreeding and the lack of stimulation.
There were no wheels, no toys, or varied environments leading to boredom-induced madness.
And of course, the inbreeding would increase behavioral and physical issues.
I mean, ethically, it was pretty ugly.
The setups caused suffering with cannibalism, infanticide, and self-mutilation.
I mean, if you tried that today, animal welfare rules would block such studies.
You know, mice aren't great for human standards.
I mean, people like them because they have, I mean, obviously they're mammals with a high tone over rate of breeding.
Their social dynamics differ wildly.
Overinterpretation is common.
Calhoun's dramatic language fueled doomsday myths, but data shows various variants across his own trial suggesting the results weren't inevitable.
Finally, some argue he projected human fears onto rodents, seeing utopia where it really was a dystopian prison.
I mean, it's UBI, but you've got to stay in the apartment building, right?
So, which conclusions are applicable to humans and which are not?
Calhoun intended his findings to apply to humans.
Warning of urban behavioral sinks like rising violence or isolation in crowded cities.
Some parts ring true.
High density and coercive settings like prisons or slums can amplify stress, aggression, and mental health issues, but most aren't directly applicable.
Humans have culture, we have technology, we have choice, we build cities, emigrate, innovate, negotiate out of problems.
Mice don't, obviously.
Invalid parts include the extinction prediction.
Human populations aren't collapsing in this way.
Calhoun's behavioral sink theory hasn't produced empirically testable outcomes in people.
No large-scale human studies mimic it ethically.
Per our guidelines, without tests yielding results, these conclusions must be judged invalid as science, more like speculative analogies.
They were meant as prophecies but lack proof.
So how do mice and humans compare in their social hierarchies?
Well, mice form small groups centered on one dominant male who defends a territory with scent marks and aggression.
This is sort of like my marriage with my wife, but if you ever meet her, you don't I mean, you don't really have to talk to her about how dominant I am.
Don't, you know, it's obviously very difficult for her.
You don't have to bring it up with her.
I mean, otherwise she might just laugh historically.
So you've got a dominant male paired with several females and they're young.
Females cooperate in raising babies like shared nursing and are less competitive.
Males fight fiercely for mates, creating a clear pecking order.
In the wild, groups are similar and more spread out due to varying resources, leading to higher aggression and exploration.
Young males often disperse to new areas.
Labs provide constant food and safety, allowing denser groups with quicker forming but sometimes unstable hierarchies.
Lab mice from selective breeding are tamer and less bold than wild ones with bigger changes in female behavior.
Humans, of course, create layered social orders shaped by culture, rules, and institutions, from families with defined roles to large systems like governments or economies.
Hierarchies divide people by wealth, power, or status, like a pyramid with leaders at the top.
They blend competition and teamwork can be formal, as in job ladders, or informal, as in social influence and change over time through ideas, laws, or technology.
We can negotiate their cut.
We can specialize they can't.
Comparison and contrast.
So both species use structures to organize groups, reduce fights and aid survival.
Higher status brings better resources and crowding tightens hierarchies.
Males compete more in both, though humans add cultural twists.
The major differences are that mice are instinct-driven, simple, and physical, focused on small families.
Labs amplify control.
The wild adds adaptability.
Humans are complex, cultural, and scalable, using cooperation, norms, and innovation to handle challenges like density, unlike mice's breakdown in experiments.
So people often link this sort of mouse utopia to modern issues.
But of course, remember, the experiment's core was coercion, forced confinement, breeding, unnatural behaviors.
In humans, equivalents involve violence or force, like abusive parenting or government mandates disrupting natural choices.
Here's an outline in a table for clarity.
Ooh, that's a, let me see if I can zoom in on that, Obese Midge.
Yeah, probably.
Can we?
Who?
Let's see.
No, not really.
Okay, it's about the same.
All right.
So the human phenomenon, declining birth rates in developed countries.
Low fertility in wealthy nations such as Japan and Europe despite abundance.
So the comparison to the mouse utopia, like mice stopping breeding amid chaos, the beautiful ones withdrew from mating.
These are the male mice usually that would withdraw from mating and just groom themselves endlessly and so on.
So birth rate decline among humans is complex.
Birth rates have declined worldwide, though much more so in high IQ populations where they've fallen below replacement rates.
Common to many, if not most, of the factors contributing to birth rate decline is coercion.
Just to name a few, employers are forced to hire women through policies that enforce equality of outcomes.
Governments run up massive national debts and unfunded liabilities, which destroy the currency and make it more difficult for young people to succeed.
Governments create mass migration policies which hack off the bottom of the ladder for the native population to enter the job market.
Government, quote, education is anything but producing adults not fit for anything decent after having charge of children for 12 years or more.
Intermixed with this is a constant stream of ever-shifting propaganda, including condemnation for being white, the devaluation of family life, and media scare stories about the imminent destruction of all life on earth.
Overcrowding is a relic of the mid-20th century scare stories on overpopulation, which itself was a holder from 19th century Malthusian doomsays saying that humanity would continue increasing until collapse.
So the Malthusian doctrine is that human beings increase exponentially, right?
It's a curve that goes from horizontal to almost vertical, whereas food production increases in a linear fashion, right?
X plus one.
So because you can't get food production to increase at the rate of human population, starvation is always inevitable.
It is not true, proven to be the case, of course, as we know.
So human phenomenon, social isolation and hikimori, hickey mori, hiccomori, hicamori.
I'm not sure how to pronounce that.
People withdrawing from society like Japan's shut-ins or global, or the global loneliness epidemics.
This mirrors the beautiful ones groomed but asocial mice avoiding contact.
Social isolation is also complex and has its roots in many of the same elements as declining birth rates.
The increase of daycare and the fracturing of high trust societies through mass migration serve to increase this isolation as well.
So the human phenomenon is urban violence in gang culture.
And of course, this is rising crime in dense cities.
This echoes the aggressive behavioral sink fights over space in the mouse utopia.
But the mouse were homogenous and again confined.
Urban violence in gang culture is not an effect of overcrowding, but of the removal of incentives against it.
Welfare, mass migration, and reduced reinforcement, sorry, reduced enforcement of existing law all contribute to rising crime.
Crime correlates with IQ, not with poverty.
And the sweet spot is around IQ 85.
The human phenomenon is welfare state dependency.
People on long-term aid losing motivation leading to family breakdown.
In the mouse utopia, it's similar to mice with unlimited food but no purpose breeding and leading to breeding apathy.
So on welfare, of course, children are converted from liabilities into assets.
This leads to wildly distorted incentives where women can get money, more money from the government for having children and are disincentivized to having and keeping a man in the house.
Again, we come back to coercion as the common threat.
So in this situation, the mouse utopia is not society.
It's not cities.
It is when the government provides the resources.
Like literally in the mouse utopia, because he was getting his funding from the government, the government was directly providing the resources, not just to Calhoun, but government money was being used to buy the enclosures.
It was being used to buy the food and the water and all of that.
So when the government provides resources rather than the family, then you get just this kinds of mess and chaos.
So theories on human behavior developed and were they tested?
What were the results?
So from mouse utopia, as I mentioned, Calhoun developed the behavioral sink theory.
Overcrowding in limited spaces causes roll last leading to deviance and collapse.
He extended humans proposing a compassionate revolution or redesigning cities for more mental space.
Were these tested?
A little bit, a little bit.
I mean, no ethical human equivalence exists.
We can't confine people like mice.
And of course, where we do confine people in prisons, reproduction is not an issue.
Some urban studies, the 1970s housing project, showed density correlating with crime, but causation is fairly unclear.
Poverty or design flaws mattered more.
Results, kind of inconclusive.
High-rises sometimes bred isolation.
Those are the very tall apartment buildings, the kind of stuff.
Well, actually, I didn't grow up in super tall ones.
I think the tallest I lived in was about 12 or 13 stories.
But high-rises sometimes bred isolation, but interventions like green spaces fixed it, unlike mouse extinction.
Without rigorous tests yielding clear outcomes, the theories are invalid as empirical science, maybe speculative tools, but not proven.
So we have to talk about how it doesn't scale to human beings.
Major differences between humans and mice or rats.
So even these obvious differences matter as they do undermine direct comparison.
Mice typically live three to six months in the wild in captivity.
They can live up to three years, rarely living to post-fertility, much less beyond it.
They are, of course, a prey species.
Humans live 70 to 80 years or more, decades beyond reproductive windows.
There's also no comparison to intergenerational care between humans and mice.
Reproduction.
Mice reach sexual maturity at six to eight weeks, can produce litters of six to eight pups every three weeks.
Really, they're just blind photocopiers.
Humans reach sexual maturity in the early to mid-teens, though nowadays do not typically have children until their 20s and typically have only one child at a time.
A single mouse, of course, can have dozens of offspring, though with a high mortality rate, while humans have an average of 3.3 children in the mid-20th century in the first world with an average of 1.5 now.
Of course, mice are prey species, always vigilant, fleeing threats.
Humans are apex predators, shaping environments aggressively.
This flips behaviors.
Mice huddle in fear.
Humans conquer space.
Intelligence and adaptation.
Humans have high IQ variability.
Low IQ strongly correlates with crime, whereas high IQ enables complex societies.
Mice lack culture, tools, or language.
There are no laws, therapy, or innovation to fix these sort of sinks.
And I don't know that there are genius mice compared to not genius mice, but there certainly are with humans.
Mice are polygamous and territorial.
Humans form monogamous pair bonding, families and governments.
We migrate or innovate.
The mice, of course, were trapped in this hellscape.
Response to coercion.
Of course, both humans and mice suffer under force, but humans rebel or reform even to the point of revolutions against tyranny, while mice just deteriorate, right?
The mice couldn't exactly gang up and free themselves from Dr. Calhoun.
So in some mouse utopia spotlights, coercions harms artificial environments breeding unnatural woes.
For humans, it's a caution against forceful policies, not a doom prophecy.
It doesn't have anything to do with human nature.
It only has to do with the problem of getting your resources from the state rather than from individuals.
So I hope that makes some kind of decent skince.
And if you want to get back to your comments and questions, I would love to hear them.
What do we got here?
How much of our current society in the West would you say are the beautiful ones?
I consider a lot of the left to be caught in this, programmed to not reproduce.
Is it the left?
See, the left has a culture of ugliness.
The right-wing, young, the sort of young, right-wing males in the gym culture, the ab culture, the, you know, the sort of narcissistic vanity selfie with the iPhone and the mirror culture, that to me is a beautiful one.
And there's nothing wrong with having a nice physique.
There's nothing, of course, wrong with exercise.
I'm a big fan and praise exercise a lot.
But when exercise becomes about the vanity of how you look or sex appeal rather than trying to get a good person to make a family with, that would be the beautiful ones.
The women, it's always in cars.
They're just saying the most outlandish things with the most astonishing filters and makeup on.
And it is just a mating display called Give Me Attention.
But it's the attention because they want to have children, right?
It's sexual attention because people want to have children or just because they enjoy the attention.
Attention without children is a crack.
It's a kind of heroin.
It's a kind of drug.
So how much of our current society would I say are the beautiful ones?
The beautiful ones are not quite the same as the ones who are purely isolated.
But it's hard to say.
I mean, it's hard to say because social media is not the real world, but I would say probably at least 10%.
Oh, yes, Ehrlich, Ehrlich, it's such a Randian villain name.
Ehrlich also made a bet with Julian Simon about how resources would run out.
Simon figured out that resources are virtually infinite and just need human time to extract.
Simon was correct, and commodities were relatively cheaper and more abundant 10 and 20 years after the bet with Ehrlich.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember I read a book called The Under Recover Economist, which has a great analogy about the room full of peanuts.
The room full of peanuts.
So if you're put in a big room full of peanuts and they're all in the shell, right?
Peanuts all in the shell, you'll never run out of peanuts because you'll eat the peanuts, but then you'll throw away the shells.
Let's say you can't get rid of the shells.
And eventually there'll still be shells.
There'll still be peanuts in there, but they're just, it's all shells and it's too hard.
It's too hard to find.
You ever have that where you're eating like some nuts and shells or whatever, you're kind of opening them and then some of them are too hard to open, just kind of throw them back and you know, that kind of thing.
So I remember when I was telling people about this that, you know, we can't run out of oil.
We can't run out of oil because at some point oil will just get too tough to get a hold of.
And of course, there's, I mean, virtually an infinity of oil under the earth.
And one of the things that's happened, of course, is that as oil, as the easy oil got more scarce, the technology improved to get more oil that was harder to get at, right?
So they used to just drill straight down, you know, they sort of drill straight down.
And then if there was maybe there was oil on the other side of some big shelf of rock, but you couldn't drill through it, it was too hard work and it would break the drills.
But now what they've got is they've got flexible drills, right?
They can go in and can go around.
They can do all the sonar stuff to figure out what the oil is.
And then they can go around the rocks and they can suck up the oil like a bendy straw and all of this kind of stuff, right?
So we're not going to run out of oil.
And of course, when oil, let's say that oil was sort of wearing down, you'd have like decades and decades of warning about it.
And then what you would have is an alternative.
You know, it really, really bothers me that we don't have more nuclear power.
I think it's just terrible.
Because a bunch of stupid ass communists couldn't do anything right, which they can't.
Now we don't get any of this.
nuclear power.
And we should.
We should be running stuff through nuclear power.
I mean, nobody died in Three Mile Island.
And what you want to do is get rid of communism, not nuclear power, because communism doesn't handle it well.
And, you know, the story was there's a meme about it, which is like, imagine if we couldn't ever use fire because some idiot burned his house down or his hut or his whatever, right?
I mean, that wouldn't make any sense, right?
So, yeah, nuclear is the obvious choice.
The problem in nuclear, it needs to be government funded because insurance companies don't really know how to deal with it.
I remember doing a show many years ago about that.
All right.
One of the criticisms against Calhoun was how much he anthropomorphized the mice as well.
Yeah, feel free to jump in, James, if you wanted to tell us more about that.
That would be great.
But again, it's like this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere.
Like, think of all of the millions of human experiments that don't ever make it to the public consciousness.
There's a reason why this one did make it to public consciousness, right?
And it's because it serves a particular agenda.
Yeah, smaller nuclear reactors would be great.
NUGs, NUGs, non-utility generators, like local stuff.
That would be pretty great.
But again, we have migration, not progress in science for the most part.
All right.
What do I have for you?
This guy says, net worth hit 14 million and I'm bored.
WTF to do now.
This guy wrote, I have 14 million and I don't do shit with it.
It's all invested, but even making or losing 500K in a day has no thrill left.
My job is, meh, already have a hot wife, two good kids, both in private school.
Nice houses, nice cars.
Health is okay, but could be better.
Shit diet, not fit, not enough friends, but don't really know how to make them at my age of 34.
I'm just fucking bored now, though.
I feel like I've already gotten all the things I was supposed to, but I'm bored and just, meh, I'm not unhappy per se.
So what the hell do I do now?
How should I spend this money?
Anytime you feel bored in this life, would you like the cure to boredom?
The cure.
Okay, from one to 10, how bored are you in your life?
One to 10.
One, no, how bad is the boredom in your life?
10 is maximum boredom.
One is not.
I would probably be a two or two, two and a half or whatever.
Occasionally there's like, oh, I have an hour and a half to my show.
What shall I do or whatever it is?
But for the most part, my days are pretty full.
But do you deal with or do you have the issue or challenge or pressure of boredom?
And I really have felt bored in my life outside of being stuck in government schools.
We got a zero, a three, a two.
Cooking two to three, sometimes four.
A two.
Okay, that's good to know.
So I will give you the cure to boredom.
Oh, Chris says eight.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
So if you're bored, it's a simple way to eliminate your boredom.
With this one easy trick, doctors are baffled.
All you have to do is go out there and do good in the world.
If you go out and do good in the world, like really effective good, which means promoting the interests of virtue and interfering with the goals of evil people, then if you do good in the world, your life will never be boring.
There may be times where you would like it to be a little bit more boring.
But the reason this guy is bored is he's not doing anything with his virtue.
He's not doing anything with his resources.
Something I held in front of my wife for quite a long time today.
Scientists say household mess isn't laziness.
It's a sign of high intelligence.
Messy people are simply looking for the most convenient way to keep things easy to find and use.
Psychologists at Berkeley tested this theory on children.
They found that when a toddler dumps out a bag and scatters everything around, they're not being naughty.
They're looking for the fastest and most efficient way to solve a problem.
So if your home is a disaster again, you might just be raising a tiny algorithmic genius.
My wife mentioned that there was something tiny about it, but it was my argument.
oddly i'd say pay for less things Don't pay a landscaper.
Do it yourself.
As you do more, more things become fun.
But that's just make work, right?
Right?
It's like, don't get a bike, just walk places.
It'll take up time.
It's like, but that's just make work, right?
Yeah, I have a, you know, I have a saving money and doing more things seems pretty good.
But you run out of things.
I mean, the meaning is in the promotion of virtue and the combat with evil.
And that's where you'll never be bored if you're fighting evil, because it's not like you run out of evil to fight.
Certainly not in our current iteration of life as a whole.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I don't know if you have a relationship with luck.
I have a retarded relationship with luck.
I still remember the dice I rolled for my DD character when I was like 14.
I got to roll 2d8.
I went up third level to third level, which is very hard.
We have a very strict DM, Dungeon Master, and I rolled a one and I rolled a three.
So I had eight hit points.
So I could have gone all the way up to 24 hit points.
Yeah, 8, 16, 24.
I could have had up to 24 hit points.
But instead, I had 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
I had 12 hit points.
Half the hit points I could have.
I still remember the dice roll.
And I still remember feeling, oh, just my luck.
You know, that kind of stuff.
And I remember when my daughter was playing some very sanitized Dungeons and Dragons when she was younger.
She took a run to jump over a flaming pit and rolls like a natural 20 on a 20-sided dice.
And I just remember, oh, she's so lucky.
It's completely dumb.
It's completely dumb.
I have a tough time shaking it.
I mean, I feel both the luckiest and the less luckiest person in the world.
I mean, I'm very lucky in terms of health and love and family and wife and daughter and friends and career.
It's very meaningful and so on.
So I do feel enormously lucky.
But at the same time, it's hard not to feel cursed at times when the world just takes a giant, you know, deli belly dump on your career, fortunes, and future.
So luck is a complicated thing.
And it's also completely meaningless.
I understand that.
Like luck means nothing.
The fact that the dice happened to land on a one and a three, You know, 45 years ago is irrelevant and unimportant, and it means absolutely nothing.
Stefan, you never get bored because you are the most prolific streamer on the internet.
Ooh, am I?
Aren't there some people who do like 24 hours straight or something like that?
Let's see here.
I was in uni about 10 years ago, Marxist Prof was pushing overpopulation theory.
Yeah, yeah.
Of course, if you're really worried about overpopulation, the last thing you do is send trillions of dollars of aid to the third world.
But you have to swell the population of the third world in order to have the spillover into Western countries, right?
Then I can help my old neighbor mow the lawn, use the experience to actually help people around me.
Fixing my car makes me more able to help others fix theirs.
I mean, it's nice, but not virtuous.
It's nice to help people with mowing the lawn, but it's not particularly virtuous because, like, nobody's going to get bothered or upset by that, which means that bad people just take over the world while you're doing the same semi-inconsequential nice things.
Oh, politics.
Yeah, our confessions.
My reaction to my dad's cancer diagnosis could have been better.
Recently, my dad shared that he was diagnosed with lymphoma.
He relies on the VA for healthcare and was complaining about a few issues with the VA, such as how long it took to get diagnosed, a lack of confidence with the doctor, etc.
I replied, I'm sorry that you're getting what you voted for, which went over about as well as you'd expect.
You can probably guess who he voted for all three times.
Yeah, like Trump is able to deal with the VA issues, an entrenched bureaucracy that was around for decades.
Hmm.
Ba, ba, ba.
Let me just sort of check for your questions and comments.
And of course, if you want to chat on X, I am happy to hear what you have to say.
C.S. Lewis wrote: Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind.
In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking.
It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a byproduct, a sensation I call thought.
But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?
It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that way that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London.
But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism and therefore have no reason to be an atheist or anything else.
Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought.
So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
That is working your way back from a conclusion that you want with great effort and avidness.
Nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking.
Well, it was a consciousness came out of mutations, right?
Consciousness came out of mutations.
Like I'm engaged in a sort of minor battle on X when I'm talking about how people who are bald, particularly if you go bald earlier in life, you have up to 25% more of the male hormones that drive masculinity.
And so bald guys tend to be more assertive, tend to be a little bit more courageous, sometimes to the foolhardy side.
So I'm not saying it's all virtues or anything like that, but there's a real positive aspect to being bald.
And I would rather be more assertive slash aggressive and more resistant to criticism than have a full head of hair.
And that is not always, but that is sometimes the trade-off.
And it's kind of funny because, you know, pointing out that there are positive aspects to going bald is a good thing.
It's not hate on people, guys who have hair, but it is simply pointing out that you're more likely to be assertive, you're more likely to be more traditionally masculine if you are bald.
And of course, we know the bald guys, we tend to think of them as sort of a bit stone-faced and callous-hearted and maybe assertive slash aggressive.
So what happened was the testosterone, the DHT, the androgens, and so on, they got cranked up to the max, right?
So everything in evolution is just before it kills me, you know, like that old Jerry Seinfeld joke about maximum strength Tylenol.
It's like, okay, give me the dose that would absolutely kill me, then just back it up a little bit from there.
And that's evolution, right?
So evolution cranks up the male hormones until the man becomes too aggressive and gets killed.
Like sociopathy and other things that may have a genetic basis are all sort of, well, we're going to crank up being cold-hearted and aggressive until you just piss everyone off and get killed.
Then we'll back it up from there.
We're going to crank up the aggression until you get so aggressive that you're a family annihilator and kill your wife and kids because they looked at you funny.
Well, back it away from there.
We'll back it away from there, right?
And in the challenge between being more attractive, like I understand that hair in general is more attractive to women, but also so is confidence and assertiveness.
And being bald is something that gives you confidence and assertiveness, unless you judge yourself by being a hair guy, right?
And so the more aggressive males would displace the less aggressive males.
However, the males with nice hair would also be more attractive to women.
So it's a really complex balance, but that's there.
There are positive things about being bald.
And some women definitely prefer the look of being bald.
And it is a hyper-masculine thing.
Whereas, you know, having very pretty hair, you know, those Fabio locks is kind of feminine, right?
And there's nothing wrong with it.
Again, I mean, it's just the way that people's bodies are.
And there's pluses and minuses to both.
But boy, it's kind of funny.
Like when you talk about anything that's positive about being bald, oh, seethe and cope.
It's like, hey, man, it's just a fact.
We just, bald guys have much more of the most essential male hormones and not by a little bit, but by a lot.
And these are just facts.
And so when you look at something like this, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking, well, there was a mutation that led to the ability to form and hold concepts in the mind, right?
Because more intelligent is better.
More intelligent is better.
Except if you're too intelligent, then you have trouble mating within your own tribe because they view you as suspicious.
Oh, you think you're so much better than us, right?
It's got to be a slow step up.
So more intelligent is better, except if you're the more intelligent you are, the more you'll be looked at with suspicion.
If you grow up smart, sorry, if you grew up smart in a dumb neighborhood, which was kind of my experience growing up smart in a dumb neighborhood, the girls don't like you that much because you're baffling, you're confusing, they view you as arrogant and so on, right?
So the girls don't like you that much because you're doing all these things that they don't understand and that are vaguely alarming to them.
And so if you grow up smart among dumb people, you have a very tough time mating.
So it's got to be kind of incremental.
But of course, as the smarter you get, then the more you get language and the more you can maintain your knowledge base intergenerationally, the more you can pass down particular skills like hunting and war strategy and things like that, the more that you can create songs, right?
So you need a certain amount of singers, good singers in a society, so that they can rouse everyone with war songs and pride songs and have the social bond.
But if you have too many good singers, then the good singers don't want to do any fighting because, you know, they're singers, not fighters.
I'm a lover, not a fighter.
And so you have to kind of scale that back.
So you try and find some sort of healthy balance about these kinds of things.
It's the same thing with consciousness.
You've got to step it up, not too fast that you get too much blowback, right?
You think of sort of the scientific revolution versus some aspects of the church.
If you go too fast, then people there's too much blowback and it gets scooped back.
But in general, the smarter, the better as a whole.
And then what happens is there's a switch that gets flipped or a tipping point where the women only want to date the smart people after a while.
So he says, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking.
It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me as a byproduct a sensation I call thought.
Well, so he's saying that it's just a sort of swirling bunch of random stuff that's happening when you think.
But of course, it's not.
That's very much a straw man argument.
I don't know how thinking works.
Nobody knows how thinking works.
And that's fine.
It's okay to say, I mean, it seems to me very important to say, I don't know.
But this idea that without God having designed you, there is no efficacy in what you do, that really doesn't make any sense at all.
All right.
So Palantir has tried, you know, I know it's a bit of a gray case company, but Palantir has tried something interesting.
It's told high school students skip college, walk past the gatekeepers and start working on real-world national security and tech problems at age 18.
500 teens applied, 22 got in.
Some turned down places at Ivy League schools.
One even walked away from a full-ride scholarship backed by the Department of Defense.
Why?
Because the message hit a nerve.
This is from Culture Explorer X.
The belief that college has stopped rewarding merit and started rewarding compliance.
Of course it has, because you've got any difference in ethnicity or sex in college outcomes is the result of sexism and racism.
And so you've got to even it out.
And you've widened the net so much.
You've got four times, four or five times the number of people going to college now as in the post-war periods.
You just doesn't make them smarter.
You've just got to lower your standards and so on.
So these, so yeah, college has become largely terrible and not any kind of replacement for real world experience.
So these fellows were thrown into seminars on Western civilization and leadership in U.S. history.
They took notes for the first time in their lives.
They visited Gettysburg.
They debated whether the West is still worth defending.
Then they were dropped into live product teams handling hospitals, defense clients, government agencies, real stakes, real pressure.
And something happened that no university can replicate.
They saw what it feels like when a company trusts them on day three more than a college would trust them in year three.
Parents panicked.
Counselors discouraged them.
Friends told them they were insane.
But every generation has a moment where the ground shifts.
This might be one of those moments.
So here's the real question behind the question.
If elite companies start grooming talent straight out of high school and young people start choosing mastery over lectures, how long until the traditional college path starts being the default and becomes the backup plan?
Yeah, it should be.
It should be.
It very much should be.
So, let's see here.
College also, a lot of it started out at military academies and religious academies.
And you have to have people study war before going to war because it's life and death, right?
It's life and death.
All right.
Bold is just the genetic roadmap.
I don't know what that means.
As a guy with a full head of hair after 30, I can say my biggest regrets are when I wasn't assertive enough.
Also, time seemed to pass slower.
Yeah, so bald reminds you, going bald reminds you that time is passing and you've got to do stuff.
Whereas, because, you know, we don't have any particular, we don't have the metronome of periods and so on, and we don't get menopause.
And so for men, it's tough to notice the passage of time.
And one of the things that really does it is going bald.
Chris says, I know a number of guys who have a full head of hair and are aggressive and some foolhardy.
Most of the most aggressive men I've known have had lots of hair.
Right.
So that's, I mean, I don't want to create a theory that proves itself, but in general, a lack of testosterone or androgen or DHD, so a lack of male hormones has people overcompensate, right?
So they're aggressive because they suffer from additional levels of feminine anxiety and doubt.
And so they overcompensate with significant aggression.
Male hormones will give you a sort of calm and assertive aggression.
I mean, I've been roundly provoked in the public eye.
I've never yelled at anyone in particular.
So you want to have a kind of calm and present assertiveness.
The most aggressive stuff comes from people.
I mean, just like saying women can never be aggressive.
Like, you know, the sort of traditional thing of the moms like screaming at the top of the lungs at their children.
That is very much aggressive.
It's too aggressive, right?
So when you have more male hormones, you tend to be more assertive and aggressive when necessary, but you don't get kind of hysterical and super aggressive.
So I would assume that that's an overcompensation for a lack of male hormones.
Intelligent people seem to have higher doubts and anxieties.
Very true.
Very true.
It seems like society has pushed the feminine.
As we sought to equalize, we actually.
I wish it wouldn't.
It's a really bad interface that when somebody posts something new, which is fine, when somebody posts something new, I lose where I am because it slips down to the bottom.
As we sought to equalize, says this person, we actually vastly overcorrected.
The topic of abortion seems to demonstrate this point, from necessary to encouraged rights.
And of course, it takes a leftist to believe that a fetus or an unborn baby has no rights to life, but has perfect rights to citizenship in America.
Public schools were for factory workers.
Yeah, that's very true.
That's the Prussian school, right?
So push, yeah, society has pushed the feminine because feminine women tend to comply more with authority, right?
Simply cannot thank you enough for every show, Steph.
Thank you very much.
I really, really appreciate that.
I really appreciate that.
Neuroticism is associated with low intelligence.
Is that right?
Neuroticism is associated with low intelligence.
How interesting.
I'm going to throw that into the Gronky Gronk.
Oh, you know what?
Let's do this.
Our advice.
Let's do a couple more.
I've done a lot of work today, so I'm not going to do a super long show, but I really appreciate everyone.
Coming by tonight.
This guy writes, my girlfriend hates me.
Last week, I had my first date with my online girlfriend.
We've been dating for nine months and finally met up.
Our date was perfect.
I took her to a nice Italian restaurant and we ate dessert back at my place.
When I walked her to the door, I pulled her in for a kiss on the tip of her nose.
Since we've been dating online for nine months with several video calls, I thought this was normal and okay to do.
She jumped up and said I was moving way too fast.
She didn't like it.
Ever since then, she's been drier online and I don't know what to do.
Any advice would be appreciated.
You know, it's a tough balance, obviously.
It's a tough balance as a whole because you don't ever want to do things that women don't like.
But one of the things that women don't like is tentativeness.
Is tentativeness.
Oh, Richard Lynn said neuroticism is associated with low intelligence.
And last one, let's do one last one, right?
Oh, this woman, Jennifer Greenberg.
Ladies, avoid men who obsess over female fertility, especially married men who obsess over the reproductive systems of women in their 20s.
I'll put this in the nicest way possible.
They're weird and gross and creepy as heck.
Uh, men who obsess over female fertility.
Well, we want to be fathers.
We want to have kids.
So this is just every piece of sophist bullshit that you could possibly stuff together, right?
Because I remember with my famous tweet on Taylor Swift that you're creepy.
It's weird.
It's obsessing over Taylor Swift's eggs.
It's like, no, it's not obsession.
I mean, that's like saying it's weird for women to obsess over how much money a man might make.
It's like, no, if she wants to stay home and raise kids, it's important to know what kind of lifestyle she can expect, right?
So it's weird and gross and creepy.
It's like, no, no, no, it's really not, Jennifer.
It's really not.
It's just men.
And it's so funny, you know, because of course women are encouraged to have all the preferences in the known universe, right?
You've seen this list of things that give women the ick and it just goes on and on and on, right?
But if a man has a preference, like, hey, if I want to have three kids, I don't want a woman who's 35, because I'm probably almost certainly not going to get three kids from a woman who's 35.
You're obsessing about eggs.
It's like, I have a preference.
What the fuck is wrong with men having preferences?
It seems to be entirely a bridge too far for society to survive.
Men having preferences.
God forbid.
God forbid men have preferences.
It's funny, right?
And a preference as basic as, well, if I want to have a bunch of kids, I need a young and fertile woman.
It's weird.
It's creepy.
It's gross.
Blah, That's just weird.
All right.
This guy writes, Am I overreacting for not wanting to talk to this girl anymore?
So I went on two dates with this girl I liked, or used to like.
On the first date, she demanded I bring her a gift.
I thought, that was strange.
Actually, I remember I asked a girl out once.
She was from China and she brought me a potted plant on the first date, which I thought was quite interesting.
He said, I thought this was strange, but I like buying flowers for girls, so I got her some.
She really liked it.
We went to dinner and went out for drinks.
I paid for all of it, but I didn't mind because I planned it.
The date was going well.
The date was going so well, we went to the movies after.
Paid for that too.
The second date was very spontaneous.
We went to a Mexican restaurant.
We had a great time.
Although we were talking about love languages, and she said hers is receiving gifts.
Nothing wrong with liking to receive gifts, but that set another alarm in my head.
After that date, we said we would go on a third one.
Yesterday, I was texting her, and she said she's experiencing tough times and said, I would really appreciate your support.
Here's my cash app.
Thank you for again for helping me out.
In my head, I was like, what the fuck?
We've been on two dates and you're already asking for money?
I feel like that's a huge red flag.
And she only wants my money.
Is this just how dating goes now?
Or am I overreacting?
Oh, dear.
Herald of Purity writes, by the time she's 30, she's gained more life, experience, and wisdom, which gives her a maturity advantage over women in their early 20s.
She's typically more stable and confident as a person and has a better understanding of herself.
All this is attractive.
She's also seen the mistakes her friends have made when they hastily married the wrong man five or even ten years earlier.
Because of that, she's less likely to be deceived or end up with someone who's immature, controlling, or secretly online brain rotted.
So unmarried women in their 30s have some pretty neat strategical advantages.
Strategical?
I think it just means strategic.
But they don't always think about it from that angle.
And for the record, I would never take any advice from Joel Webb and co. in these matters.
That's like taking cooking advice from someone who burns cereal.
So.
Yeah.
I mean, that's just all the pluses, right?
That's just all the pluses.
And this, I mean, yeah, when you get older, there are pluses.
But that also can be minuses.
And I never trust people who only talk about one side of the equation.
Oh, you don't want to rent an apartment that's just throwing your money away.
You don't end up with any assets.
It's like, well, you end up with all the assets you didn't pour into the house.
Anyway.
All right.
Any other questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems?
All right.
From ex-posts, is there a correlation between shorter men and aggression that's testosterone-related, or is it all mental?
I think the short man syndrome thing is a bit of an urban myth.
Checking that out.
Sounds like both cases are women who don't want a companion.
They want an ATM.
Yeah.
Hey, Steph, have you seen the movie Eddington?
Had some interesting stuff like throwing, showing boys becoming leftists just to get girls and showing how pointless the COVID rules were.
I think the movie went off the rails at the end, so beware.
All right.
I appreciate that.
Eddington.
Eddington.
Is that the bear, right?
I'm just kidding.
All right.
Well, thank you everyone so much.
Really appreciate your time tonight.
I will talk to you Friday night and have yourselves a lovely and wonderful evening.
Freedomaine.com slash donate to help out the show, shop.freedomain.com and peaceful parenting.
You can get the book from there.
Bye, everyone.
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