Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3: Name is Nol.
Speaker 4: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 4: super producer Paul Mission Control DECA. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 4: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 4: want you to know, coming to you live from a
Speaker 4: universe of our own, straight to yours. What if we
Speaker 4: could build a perfect society? Guys? What if we figure
Speaker 4: it out? Today?
Speaker 3: Are utopia?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like where scientists have full unregulated control.
Speaker 4: A technocracy. I'm so in Yeah, Like it's weird, right,
Speaker 4: because that's something pretty much all civilizations have aspired to.
Speaker 4: Nobody seems to get the concept of utopia right so far.
Speaker 4: And we'll also along the way tonight figure out why
Speaker 4: utopia is kind.
Speaker 3: Of a mean joke, right, Like, isn't you?
Speaker 5: I almost think utopia and dystopia are synonymous in a
Speaker 5: weird way, you know.
Speaker 4: You know, It's like a lot of things that are
Speaker 4: in theory utopian do end up being dystoping in practice,
Speaker 4: and that's so much film and fiction, right, They're essentially
Speaker 4: terribles about how trying to make a perfect society goes
Speaker 4: terribly wrong. Shout out soiling, green, clockwork, orange.
Speaker 5: Communism, mean, come on, you know, communism sounds great in theory,
Speaker 5: but it's just never quite worked out the way it
Speaker 5: seemed like it should on paper.
Speaker 4: Capitalism as well, you know, everybody's getting a little bit today.
Speaker 4: We've got to also shout out this chilling line, Matt,
Speaker 4: I always always defer to you a matrix knowledge. At
Speaker 4: the very end of the matrix. We're talking about this
Speaker 4: off air, the architect and Paul pointed out, there's a
Speaker 4: good way to do the voice, but the architect is
Speaker 4: speaking with Neo and says, you know, you're not in
Speaker 4: the first version of the Matrix. The first one I
Speaker 4: made was Paradise, and it was a monumental failure. I mean.
Speaker 4: And then of course the Fallout series, right, you got
Speaker 4: played the game to like that.
Speaker 5: Show, well, even like the whole idea of the Vault
Speaker 5: situation is in and of itself a utopia that is
Speaker 5: going to lead to a greater utopia on Earth, but
Speaker 5: only after complete and total annihilation. That's almost like a
Speaker 5: prerequisite sometimes for a proper utopia.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Well, in like today's episode, each one of those vaults
Speaker 2: is designed with some kind of experiment, like for utopia.
Speaker 2: Could this be a utopia if these parameters are set.
Speaker 4: If we tweak X, we change Y, we futsa Z,
Speaker 4: we will build a more perfect world.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: In tonight's episode, we're exploring the story of one man who,
Speaker 4: depending on whom you ask, who sought to apply the
Speaker 4: scientific method, just like you were saying, Matt to the
Speaker 4: construction of civilization is a reasonable dude, he said, instead
Speaker 4: of trying out rules on humans, instead of cooking live
Speaker 4: with empires, what if we start with rodents? Here are
Speaker 4: the facts. Let's start with a Tennessee boy named John
Speaker 4: Bumpah or Bumpus Calhoun. That is his middle name. And
Speaker 4: we had a discussion about being adults.
Speaker 2: What if we spell it ben?
Speaker 4: All right, Matt b U mp A s S. Let's
Speaker 4: go to Nola because Noel wasn't here where we talked
Speaker 4: about how would you pronounce this name?
Speaker 3: It's what you do at the club, y'all?
Speaker 2: You bump ass oh.
Speaker 4: Another legacy of his work, Perhaps.
Speaker 3: One can only imagine.
Speaker 4: So this guy is a behavioral researcher. The fancy name
Speaker 4: for his specific field is ethologist, not an ethnologist, not
Speaker 4: an ethicist, but instead someone who studies the behavior of
Speaker 4: non human animals.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, and this person is highly influential. Let's say
Speaker 2: we I think many, several of us, maybe all of us,
Speaker 2: learned about him when stuff he should know kind of
Speaker 2: like mentioned him way back in the day, almost ten
Speaker 2: years ago, on an episode called how zero Population Growth Works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, shout out, shout out to our pals Josh, Chuck
Speaker 4: and Jerry zero population growth. It's still it's really interesting,
Speaker 4: isn't it to go back and hear that episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I don't know, it just can't. Every once
Speaker 2: in a while, I listened to s YSK again and
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh man, I love this show.
Speaker 3: They're lovely dudes. I think that was before my time.
Speaker 5: But I'm assuming the zero population growth is some concept
Speaker 5: involving eugenics or something, is it, or is it something
Speaker 5: a little bit more less evil than that.
Speaker 4: Goes into things like enthusiasm or enthusian thoughts.
Speaker 5: The Georgia guidestones y type stuff, right, Yeah, yeah, to
Speaker 5: this number Yeah, shout out to the Population Bomb.
Speaker 4: That's a book that also changed the game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it goes back to an early observation by
Speaker 2: this the Malthusian originator Lord. Yeah, but the guy who said, hey, uh,
Speaker 2: population of humans, it kind of grows exponentially, but the
Speaker 2: amount of food that we're able to produce does say,
Speaker 2: grow exponentially. It's just got kind of this nice little
Speaker 2: line that does increase over time, but not at the
Speaker 2: same rate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he looked at he looked at that the dreaded
Speaker 4: X Y axis right, and said, there's an inflection point
Speaker 4: upon which the S hits the F. And he wasn't
Speaker 4: talking about San Francisco, but.
Speaker 2: He but he thought he thought the S was going
Speaker 2: to hit the F around the year like I don't know,
Speaker 2: like before the year two thousand.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Josh Josh in that episode mentions that he thought, what
Speaker 2: year two thousand is when London, like Britain for the
Speaker 2: most part, would no longer exist because he will have
Speaker 2: torn itself apart.
Speaker 5: So this guy's essentially like an academic doom profit that guy,
Speaker 5: Thomas Malthus, Yeah, yeah, and he's he's kind of more
Speaker 5: in the realm of economics. Yeah, yeah, but there is
Speaker 5: a underlying academic bent to his predictions. He's not just like, fully,
Speaker 5: you know, I've had a vision and.
Speaker 4: This is what Yeah, he didn't think God told him, gotcha. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he thought it was based on quantitative research and trends
Speaker 4: as he saw him at the time, tatas mouthus Uh,
Speaker 4: you know him, you know him.
Speaker 3: Enthusiastic about it too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're having a good day and the day's
Speaker 4: too good, check out some of his work.
Speaker 5: But back to use that as a term, right, if
Speaker 5: you're mouth Susian, then you're sort of like a naysayer
Speaker 5: kind of right or.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, well they wouldn't call themselves naysayers. They will
Speaker 4: call themselves realist, which is what most pessimistic people do.
Speaker 4: There you go, I'm shrugging everybody an audio podcast. Uh
Speaker 4: so this back to our guy dot Calhoun. The first
Speaker 4: thing we have to understand about his studies is they're
Speaker 4: often mischaracterized with the idea like you'll read about it
Speaker 4: in pop science or whatever, and the idea is presented
Speaker 4: as though Calhoun attempted to construct a perfect society for
Speaker 4: various rodents and from there figure out how to create
Speaker 4: a better society for humans. This isn't really the case.
Speaker 4: What he actually did is remove a lot of the
Speaker 4: usual population constraint variables or the mortality creators, because it
Speaker 4: wasn't because he wanted a paradise really for rodents. He
Speaker 4: was interested instead in the effects of proximity and population
Speaker 4: overpopulation in particular sout out in malthews. Maybe we learn
Speaker 4: a little bit about him because I didn't know this.
Speaker 4: He taught at Emory University, just up the road from US.
Speaker 5: Indeed, a graduate of Northwestern, he did teach at Emory
Speaker 5: as well as Ohio State, and then he moved with
Speaker 5: his wife to Maryland, where he settled down at Johns
Speaker 5: Hopkins in March of nineteen forty seven, where he began
Speaker 5: a twenty eight month study of a colony of Norwegian
Speaker 5: rats in a ten thousand square foot enclosure kind of
Speaker 5: sounds like a bit of a barn, you know, an
Speaker 5: out outbuilding kind of situation. There were five females in
Speaker 5: this cohort that, over the time span, were theoretically able
Speaker 5: to produce five thousand healthy offspring for this particular size enclosure,
Speaker 5: and Calhoun found that the population never exceeded two hundred
Speaker 5: individuals and eventually stabilized at one fifty.
Speaker 2: Just really quick brown Norway rats. If you want to
Speaker 2: buy them, a male at three weeks old costs one
Speaker 2: hundred and nine dollars and twenty nine cents. A female
Speaker 2: costs one one hundred and eleven dollars and three cents.
Speaker 3: Just a pricey rat.
Speaker 4: Shout out secret of nim isn't it?
Speaker 3: Wouldn't you say?
Speaker 5: That's I would think I would all have thought that
Speaker 5: rats would be typically less expensive than that.
Speaker 4: I mean, you can catch them for free, that's true.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's twenty four numbers. We're talking nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it was given rats away at that point.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, well it should be noted when we're thinking
Speaker 2: about these rats. These are like control rats, right. They
Speaker 2: are designed to be almost identical, so that when you
Speaker 2: test one like a variable with one and another as
Speaker 2: a control, you're actually going to be able to test
Speaker 2: that variable without any other intervening variables.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because they're bread to Like you said, they're bred
Speaker 4: to be relatively homogeneous, right, not to the point where
Speaker 4: they will become quickly incestuous. But they're also more importantly
Speaker 4: bred to not have prominent genetic defects or susceptibility to
Speaker 4: certain diseases, and they're kind of same, samey. I also
Speaker 4: want to shout out rat intelligence. There's a book that
Speaker 4: are pal Robert Lamb and I really love called Rats
Speaker 4: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City These
Speaker 4: most Unwanted Inhabitants, and it focuses on rats in New
Speaker 4: York and it's amazing. It's a really weird read. They
Speaker 4: have huge balls, by the way, rats huge balls literally
Speaker 4: and figured yeah.
Speaker 2: Speaking of and also not speaking of, just one one
Speaker 2: more statistic here with brown Norway rats from this specific
Speaker 2: catalog that I'm looking at, you can get a lactating
Speaker 2: rat with litter for six hundred and ninety three ten cents.
Speaker 2: That is it again, litter is that I don't know,
Speaker 2: but it's a Brown Norway rat.
Speaker 3: It's you try rat milk. Just wondering.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess what I'm saying is for these types
Speaker 2: of tests you can get very specific with the kind
Speaker 2: of rat, be like what state that rat is in,
Speaker 2: how many weeks all that rat is, if it's already
Speaker 2: no longer breeding, it's it's just crazy.
Speaker 4: So it's speaking weird stuff right. The technology is not
Speaker 4: here yet for Calhoun to scope in to this level,
Speaker 4: to twenty twenty four level of rat eugenics, for lack
Speaker 4: of a better term, But he finds something mysterious and
Speaker 4: it haunts the world today. Like you were saying, no,
Speaker 4: this enclosure could theoretically house safely five thousand rats in
Speaker 4: this population, but it stabilizes at one point fifty, just
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty rats, So we ask what gives.
Speaker 4: He also notices these rats are not forming a little
Speaker 4: rat nation state. Instead, they're splitting up into colonies the
Speaker 4: size into colonies of about a dozen, which is the
Speaker 4: size that would naturally occur in the wild before these
Speaker 4: different mortality variables kicked in predators, disease, lack of food,
Speaker 4: et cetera. And he's thinking, well, why I took away
Speaker 4: all the stresses. You know, literally they are living the
Speaker 4: best life. They're just in a cage despite all their rage,
Speaker 4: and later he stopped. Later he moves to Maine and
Speaker 4: he continues to study these Norway rats until about nineteen
Speaker 4: fifty one. Eventually the family goes back to Maryland. His
Speaker 4: studies continue. He moves into other rodents. We're going to
Speaker 4: mention an outfit called the National Institute of Mental Health.
Speaker 4: Pretty often it is indeed the secret of NIM. And indeed,
Speaker 4: what film It's true. I didn't get it when I just.
Speaker 3: Saw the film. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's exact.
Speaker 4: So he did. NIM gets some land outside of a
Speaker 4: town called Poolsville, Maryland, and he headed a couple of projects.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 4: He began his most famous series of experiments, not on
Speaker 4: the rats, but on mice. And he built these different
Speaker 4: fallout vaults for mice, and he called them, in a
Speaker 4: burst of humility universes, and it's a high fluted name,
Speaker 4: but besides is astonishing. He they wanted to see what
Speaker 4: happened when rodents lived without the stresses of life in
Speaker 4: the wild. Limitless food, limitless water, I kid you not
Speaker 4: little rat condos, little mouse condos.
Speaker 2: Well, imagine this is this enclosure. And remember the first
Speaker 2: one that when he was testing earlier, he had this
Speaker 2: huge ten thousand square foot area where he's watching all
Speaker 2: the different mice kind of grouping off like that. He
Speaker 2: wanted to see them in these much smaller little spaces, right,
Speaker 2: as you said, with limitless resources. But if you imagine
Speaker 2: the starter mice right, that began in that quote universe
Speaker 2: that he created. All of the preceding mice that are
Speaker 2: born from those original mice only know that thing, that
Speaker 2: enclosure that has the walls up that they can't climb over, right,
Speaker 2: So it really is the entirety of their universe.
Speaker 4: They've never been outside of Plato's cavern, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean. They're still plugged into the matrix from the
Speaker 4: cradle to the grave. That's the excellent observation. And these
Speaker 4: were all This was all again not because the guy
Speaker 4: loves happy rats and happy mice. He wants to learn
Speaker 4: about population density and how it affects behavior. So he says,
Speaker 4: I will build for the utopia. What could go wrong?
Speaker 4: Pretty much everything. This is the story of Universe twenty five.
Speaker 4: We'll get into it after a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 4: Here's where it gets crazy. Let's go back to this
Speaker 4: really interesting thing that you said at the top, Noll,
Speaker 4: the concept of utopia. You said, well, it always feels
Speaker 4: like it becomes a dystopia. It's so weird because back
Speaker 4: in fifteen sixteen, the word was coined as a kind
Speaker 4: of like snarky, mean.
Speaker 5: Joke, like a thing that's not attainable almost right, like
Speaker 5: it's it's impossible. It was coined by Sir Thomas Moore
Speaker 5: in fifteen sixty. He created the word from the Greek
Speaker 5: words for not and place, u for not and topos
Speaker 5: for place, so it meant nowhere. It's a liminal space.
Speaker 5: It's a non existent thing. So before the dawn of
Speaker 5: monern science, the guy who coined the word that we
Speaker 5: use to describe a perfect society was literally thumbing his
Speaker 5: nose at the concept in its entirety. But pretty funny, guys,
Speaker 5: You guys, what if he's.
Speaker 2: Really talking about that infinite nothingness that we all experience
Speaker 2: upon the moment of death, before the light of everything
Speaker 2: comes to gather us.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. It all ends into infinity.
Speaker 4: When you write an email into the void here and
Speaker 4: sometimes the void writes back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean sometimes you get a subsystem undeliverable.
Speaker 3: Message back as well. Maybe he really is a good thing,
Speaker 3: as what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Guys, welcome to the emptiness. Charlco's experiments seemed in a
Speaker 4: weird way to bear out Moore's joke, and we don't
Speaker 4: know what he thought about the work of Sir Thomas Moore.
Speaker 4: But from these rats he moved on. He couldn't always
Speaker 4: call him Universes, so that was very fun, and we'll
Speaker 4: see he loves fun language. He originally called the The
Speaker 4: Mice Experiments Mortality Inhibiting Environment for mice. And like you
Speaker 4: were saying, it's July of nineteen sixty eight when he
Speaker 4: introduces a breeding group such that it could avoid inbreeding
Speaker 4: into a new habitat called Universe twenty five. And you know,
Speaker 4: again we're saying Universe is a little bit ambitious for
Speaker 4: this one because it's not super big.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I'm sure I Fallt was inspired by a
Speaker 5: lot of things, Like there's there's so many examples of
Speaker 5: these types of isolated communities and experiments, whether they be
Speaker 5: with animals or you know, prison experiments or whatever. But
Speaker 5: I can't help but think Universe twenty five vault one
Speaker 5: to eleven, you know what I mean, Like it really
Speaker 5: does have a nice connective tissue.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, again, as we said before, he went from ten
Speaker 2: thousand square feet in nineteen forty seven to nine square
Speaker 2: feet of metal.
Speaker 4: Makes yeah, it is much smaller. But again, as you
Speaker 4: pointed out, so astuteley, the mice evolved don't know this.
Speaker 4: Their kids, their progenies certainly will never know this nine
Speaker 4: foot square it's a metal pan. The sides are about
Speaker 4: four point five feet high, which is not really a
Speaker 4: huge problem for rats depending on the surface, but it's
Speaker 4: pretty difficult for mice yes, to summit that well.
Speaker 2: And I think it's the top seventeen inches if you've
Speaker 2: imagined from the height top of this thing down seventeen
Speaker 2: inches is like just bare wall that is very difficult
Speaker 2: to scale.
Speaker 4: So you can climb up a little bit right to
Speaker 4: get to your mouse condo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's designed that way right to go up to
Speaker 2: the condos, which is weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah, nesting boxes, food hoppers, water dispensers. It is like
Speaker 4: it is like a mouse episode of Cribs. To date
Speaker 4: ourselves with MTV references, and there were no predators obviously.
Speaker 4: There's just this benevolent yet distant human thing that functions
Speaker 4: as God for these guys. Every four to eight weeks
Speaker 4: they get hit with their equivalent of you know, a
Speaker 4: natural disaster, a climate this event, because that's when the
Speaker 4: enclosure is cleaned, you know what I mean. So maybe
Speaker 4: and we don't know, if we don't know enough about
Speaker 4: their cognition to know whether this became a story they
Speaker 4: told each other about.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: We also don't know whether they could predict the coming
Speaker 4: of the cleaning.
Speaker 3: Oh, plow the.
Speaker 2: Plow because it did have to be cleaned out on
Speaker 2: a regular basis, right, I mean that was one of
Speaker 2: the things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's still I mean they're like the top tier
Speaker 4: lap mice, but they still poop. We haven't figured out
Speaker 4: how to make mice not poop.
Speaker 5: Do you think that like mice in this kind of
Speaker 5: situation have a sense of what's going on outside, you know,
Speaker 5: or like do they do they look at I know,
Speaker 5: I know we couldn't possibly you know, get inside the
Speaker 5: head or try to simulate the cognition of rats, but
Speaker 5: like these these forces that come in and remove them
Speaker 5: and clean them and then put them back, you think
Speaker 5: they look at them as like godlike forces, you know,
Speaker 5: I don't know, alien abductions.
Speaker 2: It'd be, yeah, some kind of weird part of just
Speaker 2: aspect of the universe that happens. But there's no human.
Speaker 2: You're not actually interacting with the human at any time
Speaker 2: whose arms are coming down and cleaning things, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just these disembodied limbs that descend into your world
Speaker 2: and then you know, wipe off the surfaces or whatever.
Speaker 4: They probably recognize smells, I'm thinking, but to your point,
Speaker 4: it's probably just a thing in their environment. I do
Speaker 4: imagine they are intelligent enough to envision something past the wall, right,
Speaker 4: because they are naturally exploring creatures, right, so they without
Speaker 4: knowing what is out there. They many of them attempted
Speaker 4: to escape at some point, especially if stuff did not
Speaker 4: work out as mouse society collapsed, which is exactly what happened.
Speaker 4: The only obstacle in Universe twenty five and the preceding
Speaker 4: experiments was space. So you got these eight mice in
Speaker 4: this enclosure. At first, their vault is huge. It's designed
Speaker 4: to hold as many as people round up to four thousand.
Speaker 4: But I think of the original research it was something
Speaker 4: like three and forty mice, which is a lot of mice.
Speaker 2: Well, and it took them a long time to get
Speaker 2: acclimated to that space too, right, those original eight mice,
Speaker 2: the four breeding pairs, they like, didn't breed for a
Speaker 2: long time. They were just kind of like, what the
Speaker 2: heck is this place? I don't understand this, this is wrong,
Speaker 2: why are we here? And then eventually they just gave
Speaker 2: in and or you know whatever, they whatever change occurred
Speaker 2: cognitively that they went, okay, we will begin nesting, we
Speaker 2: will begin breeding.
Speaker 4: It was better than the breeding pens from which they originated.
Speaker 4: I can only imagine it's definitely a lot more room
Speaker 4: because they weren't caught in the wild.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, But it did take one hundred and four
Speaker 2: days before they actually settled down to reproduce.
Speaker 4: And when the population began reproducing, they were doubling every
Speaker 4: fifty five days. So this j curve growth for a while.
Speaker 4: And by day three fifteen, so we're not quite a
Speaker 4: year in the population has reached six hundred and twenty mice, gangbusters,
Speaker 4: tickety boo. Everything's going well. Until around day three fifteen.
Speaker 4: It was like some invisible switch just clicked and the
Speaker 4: population growth, the rate of growth, not the actual population.
Speaker 4: Yet the rate of growth declined and now it was
Speaker 4: only doubling every one hundred and forty five days instead
Speaker 4: of every fifty five days. And with that, in step,
Speaker 4: the social structure broke down. There's a great article by
Speaker 4: writer Esther inglis Arcu for Io nine or Gizmoto now
Speaker 4: that sums it up and it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, to read from that piece. At the peak population,
Speaker 5: most mice spent every living second in the company of
Speaker 5: hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares,
Speaker 5: waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few
Speaker 5: females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did
Speaker 5: seem to simply forget about their babies. They'd move half
Speaker 5: their litter away from danger and forget the rest.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 5: Sometimes they'd drop and abandon a baby while they were
Speaker 5: carrying it. Guy, guys, are you familiar with the concept
Speaker 5: of nesting behavior? Yes, this is this kind of figure
Speaker 5: into that in a way like I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 5: like this is maybe anomalous nesting behavior, or I guess
Speaker 5: it's a situation that once it kind of balloons beyond
Speaker 5: a certain point like that that I guess, uh, motherly
Speaker 5: drive kind of gets weaker.
Speaker 3: Or something like what is this? What's what's going on here?
Speaker 2: I would point people to Population Density and Social Pathology,
Speaker 2: which was written by mister John Calhoun, and he actually
Speaker 2: has in this you can find it online, by the way,
Speaker 2: as in PDA form. He's got illustrations basically of what
Speaker 2: you're talking about nol like the typical nesting behavior of
Speaker 2: mice in a population like this, how they build their nest,
Speaker 2: what they do, you know, when they're in an enclosed
Speaker 2: space and they've got the family in there, and they
Speaker 2: you know, get all of the materials and arrange it
Speaker 2: in such a way that the mice can kind of gather.
Speaker 2: But then what was happening then where it was completely different.
Speaker 5: Well, and a lot of nesting behavior too, involves protecting
Speaker 5: the offspring from predators. So when you're in a situation
Speaker 5: where you don't have any natural enemies, you know, I
Speaker 5: wonder if that kind of freaks it out a little
Speaker 5: better and it causes a little bit of the change
Speaker 5: in the way these processes happen.
Speaker 4: It gets even creepier and at a precipitous rate. And
Speaker 4: we'll get to we'll get to the paper that kind
Speaker 4: of changed popular science. Really we should also mention just
Speaker 4: an example of what I think is a little bit creepy.
Speaker 4: Calhoun was also particularly interested in a subgroup of rodents
Speaker 4: that appeared inevitably in these universes. He called them, tell
Speaker 4: me if you think this is creepy, folks. He called
Speaker 4: them the beautiful ones. They're like the eloy in H. G.
Speaker 4: Wells is the time machine, remember the time machine? Like
Speaker 4: the surface dwelling vegetarians. It's not a perfect comparison because
Speaker 4: the eloi obviously reproduce, but the beautiful ones do not.
Speaker 4: They got like they post one male, one male rodent
Speaker 4: outside and then the rest retreat into a secluded nesting
Speaker 4: spot in the habitat, usually elevated, I think, and they
Speaker 4: just eat, groom themselves and sleep. They don't fight, they
Speaker 4: don't care for they're young. They don't reproduce their immune
Speaker 4: in a way to the social collapse that occurs, which
Speaker 4: is so weird.
Speaker 2: So way they would do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they just checked out. It reminds me a little
Speaker 4: bit of was it in Japan, Hikiko Mori or there's
Speaker 4: some other country. I think it's China, where there's a
Speaker 4: group of people who have done what they call the
Speaker 4: lay down movement. They just check out a society. I
Speaker 4: think it's too stressful. I'll do the bare minimum. But
Speaker 4: is that better than what's happening to the rest of
Speaker 4: the road in population wherein there's cannibalism, there's hyper non
Speaker 4: consensual pan sexualism, and there's random violence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a roughly ninety six percent mortality rate or
Speaker 2: newly born mice.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, The last surviving mouse in Universe twenty five
Speaker 4: is born on A six hundred right, and the population
Speaker 4: then has reached two two d and twenty mice. The
Speaker 4: experiment again set up for four thousand, but they just
Speaker 4: as a society, they stopped. They stopped mousing. And how
Speaker 4: do we explain this strange, deeply disturbing trend? What made
Speaker 4: this perfect world so intolerably terrible that the test group
Speaker 4: failed to reach full capacity even once? Not even once?
Speaker 4: We could dive into it after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 5: Danan another line, they're surge pricing in the shoe store.
Speaker 2: Now, sorry, Bud. You know out is there are more
Speaker 2: and more people in the one shoe store, and most
Speaker 2: of them also have two feet.
Speaker 4: I just can't take this. I've had it.
Speaker 2: It's enough to make you go. Of course, Going Bonkers
Speaker 2: is available on the premium app version. Also, I know
Speaker 2: what you mean. Every day I wake up and I.
Speaker 3: Think is today? The day?
Speaker 2: Is today? The day I bring the bomb to work?
Speaker 2: And in this pointless sissaphy and charade.
Speaker 4: Something troubling you friends. Shoes are just hats for feet.
Speaker 4: You know, you could also go to a haberdashery.
Speaker 5: It's not even the shoes, it's just look around. It's
Speaker 5: all gotten out of hand. Wherever I go, there's a crowd,
Speaker 5: a line, an app. I can't remember the last time
Speaker 5: I was able to just be alone.
Speaker 4: Well, if this civilization is too crowded, which we all understand,
Speaker 4: then why not try a universe?
Speaker 3: All your Oh is that another app? Oh?
Speaker 4: Much more than that, gentlemen, what if I told you
Speaker 4: right now you could have a universe to yourself, the universe?
Speaker 4: Why oh you neverse?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Universe?
Speaker 4: Yes, the universe. Think of it as a planned community,
Speaker 4: the most exclusive sort, with a population of one. You
Speaker 4: gone are the days of competing for resources, ideology, or
Speaker 4: the ability to feel seen in society. The universe provides
Speaker 4: you with an all encompassing, self contained reality. You simply
Speaker 4: agree to a small bit of blood harvesting and DNA sampling,
Speaker 4: undergo a small procedure for the helmet, and voila gay
Speaker 4: blood helmet procedure, I said, and voila. Imagine a world
Speaker 4: in which you never feel rushed, in which other people
Speaker 4: only exist. Should you allow them to do so a world,
Speaker 4: a universe with no dissenting opinions, no uncomfortable truths. Every
Speaker 4: social media comment agrees with you, Every email is a
Speaker 4: yes and right on. Everything you want is provided, sustaining
Speaker 4: your base needs.
Speaker 2: Every sam in.
Speaker 4: You don't want to hear the rest.
Speaker 3: Not really, it sounds great.
Speaker 4: Can I have a shoe store in my yo universe?
Speaker 4: You can imagine anything you want here?
Speaker 2: Don't you mean there?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: Don't you see friends? You're here right now. The universe
Speaker 4: is in practice responsible for, but legally intimified, and that's
Speaker 4: not liable for the following possib side effects isolation, madness,
Speaker 4: the condition Mega two portpoise complaint, social media fatigue, echo chambers,
Speaker 4: bio spheres of mind, grandamact of violence, loss of sexual
Speaker 4: apetite loss and general appetite loss, perpective, lost memory, loss
Speaker 4: of precognitive ability, inability to pare for others, sociopathy, psychopathy,
Speaker 4: hyperflaglens self for a be self healthy is great of
Speaker 4: bleed necktang due to alleged coment effect. Currently not approved
Speaker 4: in the following states Georgia, Hawaii, Idahos, state of happiness,
Speaker 4: and peaceful state of mind.
Speaker 5: The universe is a subsidiary of Illumination Global Unlimited.
Speaker 4: So let's return to something you mentioned just a bit earlier, map,
Speaker 4: which is the revolutionary nineteen sixty two paper issued in
Speaker 4: Scientific American wherein wherein he this is still pre Universe
Speaker 4: twenty five, this is still Norway rat era. He introduces
Speaker 4: the lay public to the idea of what are called
Speaker 4: behavioral sinks.
Speaker 3: So here's an excerpt.
Speaker 5: Many female rats are unable to carry the pregnancy to
Speaker 5: full term or to survive delivery of their litters if
Speaker 5: they did. An even greater number after successfully giving birth
Speaker 5: fell short in their maternal functions. So yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 5: we're seeing this weird erosion of what are typically the
Speaker 5: strongest of biological drives. You know what, I just I'm
Speaker 5: sorry I keep saying about what what gives this is wild.
Speaker 2: Let's actually jump through the article really quickly, because this
Speaker 2: is kind of what I wanted to mention when we
Speaker 2: were talking about nesting behavior. If you go down, I
Speaker 2: think it's page one forty six in the original like
Speaker 2: Scientific American, you can find it with those illustrations of
Speaker 2: the nesting behavior. I just want to read the normal one.
Speaker 2: And then one of you guys read the read the
Speaker 2: what was happening what we're describing here, So normal maternal
Speaker 2: behavior among these rat populations would include building a fluffy,
Speaker 2: well shaped nest for the young in an enclosed space,
Speaker 2: in one of those little condos that we were describing earlier,
Speaker 2: and it would be flattened by the weight of the
Speaker 2: animal's bodies, but it still offers ample protection and warmth
Speaker 2: for their tiny young, you know, little rat bodies. And
Speaker 2: when they've got this kind of environment, the offspring are
Speaker 2: generally what's termed here weaned, right, and they are able
Speaker 2: to leave the nest after a certain amount of time.
Speaker 2: But what was happening right, Yeah, about two weeks? So
Speaker 2: what was happening during these experiments with these behavioral sinks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is where Calhoun introduces abnormal behavior, which is look,
Speaker 4: he anthropomorphizes a lot. And when you see this, especially
Speaker 4: if you have kids, it's kind of heartbreaking because the
Speaker 4: abnormal behavior quote shown by females exposed to the pressures
Speaker 4: of population density, includes failure to build adequate nest. And
Speaker 4: you can see the drawing on the left of the
Speaker 4: diagram of a quote unquote disturbed female not like a
Speaker 4: bad mouse or not a bad rat, but instead, pressured
Speaker 4: by this increasingly surreal environment, she start quote she started
Speaker 4: to make a nest, but never finished it. The drawing
Speaker 4: on the right shows her young About two weeks later,
Speaker 4: they're leaving the nest, as we use the old cliche appropriately,
Speaker 4: but they are not old enough to survive alone. And
Speaker 4: this is where the ninety six percent infant mortality rate
Speaker 4: statistic comes from. You can also see when says starting
Speaker 4: to make a nest, the bedding they're provided with, it's
Speaker 4: like these rectangular strips, and in the normal nesting behavior,
Speaker 4: it's a hoarder's house. You know.
Speaker 2: It literally becomes what you would imagine a nest would
Speaker 2: look like if you've ever seen a bird's nest or something,
Speaker 2: but with these strips of fabric.
Speaker 4: And in the abnormal behavior we're looking at like it's terrible.
Speaker 4: It makes me think of neglected children because that's what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 4: i'manthropomorphizing anyway. Yeah, it's terrible. And the world that these
Speaker 4: young mice who can't survive on their own are entering
Speaker 4: is a very violent, chaotic places is hit in the
Speaker 4: f in Universe twenty five, a lot of the largely
Speaker 4: male population has disturbing behavior at a rate that far
Speaker 4: exceeds what would happen in the wild. Rats can practice
Speaker 4: cannibalism if they have to. These rats don't have to
Speaker 4: practice cannibalism, but they're doing it. They're super into it.
Speaker 4: They're also banging literally everything, sexually, sang everything, without regard
Speaker 4: to the normal constraints of reproduction or the normal goals.
Speaker 2: I think maybe that's a big thing. It seems like
Speaker 2: the goal is gone now, right, so now it's just Oh,
Speaker 2: I was going to say, do what thou wilst? But
Speaker 2: that's not But that's not even it. It's like it's
Speaker 2: frenetic behavior. It's like it's agitated.
Speaker 5: Ain't always right, And it's not like there's some sort
Speaker 5: of hedonistic drive. You know, mice don't understand, you know,
Speaker 5: Satanism or the idea of do what thou wilst per se.
Speaker 5: It's a a biological imperative that's kind of been flipped
Speaker 5: in a weird and disturbing way. It's not like they're, hey,
Speaker 5: let's just just go ham and like living like a
Speaker 5: weird cannibalistic hippie commune to get you know whatever.
Speaker 2: I think, Ben, you put it really well, like the
Speaker 2: goal the original I don't know, I was gonna, I
Speaker 2: was gonna. I think you said it right, Like just
Speaker 2: the goals, the things that you have as as mouse,
Speaker 2: those are no longer applicable because of the pressures you're
Speaker 2: existing in.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're using rat and mouse here interchangeably, because
Speaker 4: because the trends are consistent across the universes. That's the
Speaker 4: scary thing. They're rat in the mouse. They're close enough
Speaker 4: that the stories are beat for beat, very similar. And
Speaker 4: this like what do you call it? This impetus that
Speaker 4: we're talking about when when you're an environment where that
Speaker 4: impetus is somehow curtailed or interfered with, we see the
Speaker 4: over and over again. We see the population generally goes
Speaker 4: into behavioral directions. A lot of people, like we're saying,
Speaker 4: see now I'm competing it, they go, they go ham
Speaker 4: you know, they're almost like the Reavers in Serenity and yeah,
Speaker 4: and the other folks are the ones where the packs
Speaker 4: virus works spoilers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's so easy to anthropomorphize this and like say
Speaker 5: something like they became evil, right, but that's that's not right,
Speaker 5: you know. There there's just something in their coating that
Speaker 5: no longer applied, and they just kind of went berserk
Speaker 5: because like the normal like society, sociological and biological things
Speaker 5: that kind of kept them acting like what they are
Speaker 5: rats and mice no longer applied, and therefore they're they're programming,
Speaker 5: for lack of a better term, didn't know how to
Speaker 5: operate anymore. So it just kind of like it's like
Speaker 5: they short circuited almost right, well, man.
Speaker 2: And you're it's so it's so confusing to me because
Speaker 2: you're not necessarily competing for the food when the food
Speaker 2: comes out, right, there's ample food. They're always been dead.
Speaker 5: Though, right there, it's cannibalizing the dead. It's not like
Speaker 5: they're are they killing each other and then eating too?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, sorry, Matt, I just had to please continue.
Speaker 5: That's wild.
Speaker 2: But what I'm saying is like they could have just
Speaker 2: eaten the food, but there's so many of them it
Speaker 2: is almost I don't know. I think maybe that's why
Speaker 2: it's so confusing to me. You could always go and
Speaker 2: get water, but you got to now like either wait
Speaker 2: in line or fight to go get the water. But
Speaker 2: is this there? It'll always be there, you just got
Speaker 2: to get to it now.
Speaker 5: Is this the kind of study that would probably be
Speaker 5: looked at a bit of scance today, like this is
Speaker 5: a little on the immoral sides or on the on
Speaker 5: ethical side.
Speaker 4: You can still do stuff like this. It's because they're rodents.
Speaker 4: You can still do stuff like this depending on the country.
Speaker 4: But also this research, as we'll see, gets weaponized and
Speaker 4: used as a metaphor for all kinds of things, perhaps incorrectly.
Speaker 4: We do know there's scholarship suggesting maybe this is not
Speaker 4: a problem of population density so much as a problem
Speaker 4: of distribution of that population.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So, and we see things like this happening in the world.
Speaker 4: There are parts of the world that are struggling to
Speaker 4: maintain a population. At the same time, there are parts
Speaker 4: of the world where the population is exploding in a
Speaker 4: way that that civilization is not prepared for.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So there's I mean, it gets into this really weird, controversial,
Speaker 4: possibly evil math. But we know that we know that
Speaker 4: what would happen is think of it like a gen pop. Right,
Speaker 4: You're in a jail. You can choose to go into
Speaker 4: your own cell, right, you can be by yourself in
Speaker 4: that cell, or you can go down to gen pop. Right,
Speaker 4: where everything is where's party time, but not excellent and
Speaker 4: the rats, Calhoun hypothesizes, they began to associate feeding with
Speaker 4: being around a big crowd of rats. They didn't understand
Speaker 4: that they could eat on their own, which is fascinating
Speaker 4: from a very ethics aside, that is fascinating and chilling.
Speaker 2: So these and then it becomes a learned behavior because
Speaker 2: let's imagine you are a successful rat or mouse that
Speaker 2: made it into the general population after me madgusting, you
Speaker 2: watch all of the rats gathered together in this huge
Speaker 2: mass when it's time to eat. So you go, well,
Speaker 2: I guess that's that's what happens when it's time for
Speaker 2: me to eat now, and then that behavioral pattern then
Speaker 2: passes down as like, well, that's what this is what
Speaker 2: society does, so this is what I do. So yeah,
Speaker 2: this is this is what I'm supposed to do.
Speaker 4: Listen here, mouse, son, you'll eat like I ate and
Speaker 4: your father and my father before you in a crowd,
Speaker 4: ready to fight and maybe eat another animal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't a group of older mice
Speaker 2: hanging on the corner. So I remember when we used
Speaker 2: to eat.
Speaker 4: I remember that just eight of us in the beginning.
Speaker 5: Uphill both ways, uphill both ways, dead all the way.
Speaker 4: So he also we should note, as he said, he
Speaker 4: had a lot of anthropomorphizing, and you can see it
Speaker 4: in the language he uses, which is purposely chosen to
Speaker 4: communicate with the public because it occurs in a larger context.
Speaker 4: He calls the dwelling places tower blocks basically apartments. He
Speaker 4: calls them walk up apartments.
Speaker 5: He was sort of a British parlance, right, tower blocks
Speaker 5: like flat blocks. Yeah, we're referring to what we might
Speaker 5: over here call projects or like you know, government.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's kind of how he's talking you. And he's
Speaker 4: doing that to draw draw out this comparison to human
Speaker 4: society in the time of which he's writing and conducting science.
Speaker 4: He also calls some groups juvenile, delinquents and dropouts. He's
Speaker 4: actively inviting us to think in this manner. So it
Speaker 4: should be no surprise that human civilization, not just scientists
Speaker 4: and academics and ethologists, human civilization in general, learns about
Speaker 4: this stuff, primarily through the Scientific American article, and they
Speaker 4: immediately say, well, what does this tell us about ourselves?
Speaker 4: And what does this tell us about Thomas Malthus. While
Speaker 4: this is occurring, there has been a bevy of academics
Speaker 4: who might as well be wearing sandwich boards that say
Speaker 4: the end is nigh, you know, ecologist, economists, philosophers, tycoons.
Speaker 4: Tycoons love Malthusian thought, and we.
Speaker 3: Do have some good examples.
Speaker 5: First off, William Vote and Fairfield Osborne were two ecologists
Speaker 5: who warned against the growing population putting pressure on natural resources,
Speaker 5: on food, and that was as early as nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 5: So people have been like sounding the alarms for the
Speaker 5: stuff for a long time and it ain't getting.
Speaker 3: A whole heck of a lot better.
Speaker 5: We're being completely honest, and it does feel like, you know,
Speaker 5: if we're being dire about our situation that we find
Speaker 5: ourselves in or think about what's going to be the
Speaker 5: tipping point in like a big, you know, high water
Speaker 5: mark moment in humanity, it's kind of.
Speaker 3: Be a war over resources.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's pretty clear that's that's the one thing
Speaker 5: that we can't really make more of, and people who
Speaker 5: have control and have power is going to start hoarding them,
Speaker 5: leaving you know, the lesser of us out in the cold.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, fear filled Osborne. This dude, this is a
Speaker 2: eugenesis is born in the eighteen hundreds, like died in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty five, and he was talking about it back then,
Speaker 2: and as eugenicist he had some ideas. I bet he did,
Speaker 2: had it takes takes, So you know, it's weird. It's
Speaker 2: a weird thing because it is a cautionary subject where
Speaker 2: if you start looking at this too much and you're
Speaker 2: applying whatever, I don't know what, we would even call them,
Speaker 2: your own biases that you've got from growing up wherever
Speaker 2: you grew up, and with people you're around, it is dangerous.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And again we have this oh gosh, you know what,
Speaker 4: I'm just realizing, I'm thinking through Osborne was alive when
Speaker 4: the Great Depression hit, so he probably died thinking called it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then in nineteen sixty eight, in the same sort
Speaker 4: of social milieu or context, Paul Erlick publishes the population Bomb.
Speaker 4: It is polemical, it is an alarmist work. It is
Speaker 4: meant to shake you when you read it. And he
Speaker 4: says it's common famine, resource wars, the end of days.
Speaker 4: So the public is primed to think in these terms.
Speaker 4: You know, they witnessed horrific wars, they've seen what happens
Speaker 4: when the economic regimes collapse. So when Calhoun comes out
Speaker 4: in Scientific American, which is legit publication, they are totally
Speaker 4: vibing with it. He says, look overpopulation means social collapse
Speaker 4: followed by extinction. The rodents are not so different from
Speaker 4: the primates. And the more I repeat this experiment, the
Speaker 4: more predictable and inevitable the outcome seems. By the time
Speaker 4: he got to Universe twenty five, the most popular or
Speaker 4: most well known one, he had a formula, a death
Speaker 4: squared formula, which we have to go into. But basically
Speaker 4: he was thinking of the concept of second death. So
Speaker 4: first death being the physical death of an individual, second
Speaker 4: death being the larger death of a society. Very fun
Speaker 4: at parties, I imagine, But I don't know. That's the question.
Speaker 4: Let's a pickle we're still working with. Can we apply
Speaker 4: this to humans? Calhoun was certain this could also be
Speaker 4: a warning call for human society, no matter how smart
Speaker 4: we think we are, he reasoned, because he did count
Speaker 4: himself as human. You know, he's like, I'm in this
Speaker 4: universe too, he said, No matter what happens, once the
Speaker 4: number of individuals capable of fulfilling certain roles. Once that
Speaker 4: exceeds the number of roles available, basically, once there are
Speaker 4: too many cars for the parking lot of a civilization,
Speaker 4: chaos reigns.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, like students graduating from elite colleges don't have jobs
Speaker 2: to fill, students graduating from non elite colleges don't have
Speaker 2: jobs to fill anymore, and something like AI comes along
Speaker 2: and fills all those roles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Or like the fact that Star Trek sort of
Speaker 4: glosses over the fact how they went from a post
Speaker 4: work economy after living through a post worker economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't put.
Speaker 4: A lot of that on the air.
Speaker 2: But it's just worked, doubt, you know.
Speaker 4: Just worked out. Let's go to the Holo deck, he writes.
Speaker 4: He writes beautifully about this, and I don't think he's
Speaker 4: trying to be a jerk. I think he is trying
Speaker 4: to present what he sees as the science, like we've
Speaker 4: got again. You can read the full paper or the
Speaker 4: full article online today and it is worth your time.
Speaker 4: But he concludes that when you get to that too
Speaker 4: many cars for the parking spot situation, the only result
Speaker 4: is violence and disruption of social organization. And he's not
Speaker 4: arguing ideology here very important to note because it does
Speaker 4: get weaponized by people with different ideologies. He's just saying
Speaker 4: when he says social organization, he's talking about the way
Speaker 4: rodents usually work, the way they usually self organize, And
Speaker 4: now they're doing stuff that is not normal. Social pessimist, Malfusians,
Speaker 4: whatever we want to call them, they loved this stuff.
Speaker 4: This was to them an inarguable rule of the world
Speaker 4: of reality. This was like the law of gravity for
Speaker 4: living things. Trippy stuff.
Speaker 2: So I got lost in this article from Cabinet Magazine.
Speaker 4: They've got the great illustrations too.
Speaker 2: It's pictures of the actual structure that does resemble some
Speaker 2: kind of prison to me when you just look at
Speaker 2: this tiny, little nine foot squired thing, I don't know,
Speaker 2: a great picture of John Calhoun, and he looks troubled too.
Speaker 2: In his face. He's just like, oh God, just drop
Speaker 2: outnice Haggard.
Speaker 4: Also, do you guys remember a while back when I
Speaker 4: was living I was living in that place right next
Speaker 4: to our old office, and the courtyard of that looked
Speaker 4: very universe twenty five to me.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, with the weird like aatrium, the plants and stuff.
Speaker 5: It kind of felt like like pretend outside.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we have outside at home. That's what it was.
Speaker 4: So look, he is he is perhaps mischaracterized pretty often
Speaker 4: because he argued that there were good guys, and that
Speaker 4: part of his research I think gets glossed over. He
Speaker 4: was very interested in something he called the high social
Speaker 4: velocity mice. These were individual mice who responded to these
Speaker 4: new overpopulation pressures by switching things up by doing interesting,
Speaker 4: very varied behaviors, like they would alter, you know, if
Speaker 4: there's a big gen pop crowd at feeding time, they
Speaker 4: would move. In the night, they would move when the
Speaker 4: other mice were less active or whatever their version of
Speaker 4: night was. They would team up and create alliances that
Speaker 4: ordinarily would not exist. So he found great hope in that,
Speaker 4: and he says, look, humanity is a positive animal, creative,
Speaker 4: capable of design. Maybe we can out teck this damning
Speaker 4: doomsday prediction for society.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but it's weird. There's another article from
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, that's not the Vox article I was looking at.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, guys, The Smithsonian. The appendix. The appendix has
Speaker 2: an interesting article on this, specifically on John Calhoun, and
Speaker 2: they discuss or this article, at least in cite it
Speaker 2: so you can look it up. It's titled Space Cadets
Speaker 2: and rat Utopias by Laura Jane Martin. So this concept
Speaker 2: of space cadets is something that John Calhoun was really
Speaker 2: into because, at least according to the article, according to
Speaker 2: other writings about him, he wanted this to be a
Speaker 2: positive thing. He wanted humans to look at it and go, hey,
Speaker 2: we can fix these major problems we've got going on.
Speaker 2: Even if population seems to be this doomsday you know,
Speaker 2: on the horizon somewhere, if we're aware of it, we
Speaker 2: can fix all the things that lead to it. And
Speaker 2: why not as one of those fixes, let's focus on
Speaker 2: getting the heck off Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Shout out to his partner in that letter, Dull Duhl,
Speaker 4: I love you mentioning that because he has the analogy that,
Speaker 4: as far as we know, the analogy he did not
Speaker 4: make but would be apparent to those of us in
Speaker 4: the cage today is that he's like a climate change person. Right,
Speaker 4: He's like a climatologist but for society, and he say, look,
Speaker 4: we're reaching this behavioral sink point, but we're not at
Speaker 4: the past. We're not past the point of no return, right,
Speaker 4: we can still mitigate and perhaps even repair the tendencies
Speaker 4: we don't like. And Space Cadets is really interesting. It's
Speaker 4: one of those technocratic, very optimistic think tanks, you know, like,
Speaker 4: if we want to get to space, it's going to
Speaker 4: take all of the experts we can possibly think of.
Speaker 4: You know, let's get the architects, but let's also make
Speaker 4: sure we have the psychiatrist, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: I think it's fascinating. I don't know too much about
Speaker 4: the Space Cadets to be candid, but I do know
Speaker 4: that I do know that he had great faith in humanity.
Speaker 4: And he said, you know, maybe the rats are breaking
Speaker 4: down because they don't know what to do. The mice
Speaker 4: are breaking down because they don't know what to do.
Speaker 4: But the history of humanity is a history of innovation,
Speaker 4: of deviation from tradition.
Speaker 6: And norm Yeah, man, so far, he paused and said,
Speaker 6: so far, guys.
Speaker 2: We should point out the what do they call them?
Speaker 2: Some of those guys. They refer to them as neo Malthusian,
Speaker 2: like the new generation, you know. And I didn't know
Speaker 2: until I listen to that stuff. You should know episode
Speaker 2: that there there are things I want to shout out.
Speaker 2: They did in their episode. They shouted out a thing
Speaker 2: called Population Connection that I had never heard of before,
Speaker 2: which is a website you can go to right now
Speaker 2: that is basically a spin off from well it was.
Speaker 2: It was formerly known as ZPG or Zero Population Growth,
Speaker 2: and it's this fairly large organization that focuses specifically on
Speaker 2: eliminating all non planned births because theoretically you could bring
Speaker 2: the numbers of like human replacement, you know that, like
Speaker 2: what two point one berths per couple or whatever that
Speaker 2: you know, old thing is that was based on, like
Speaker 2: how to replace human beings.
Speaker 5: Well, that's downright on American The accidental pregnancy is a
Speaker 5: foundation of our society.
Speaker 4: Holder. Well, well it's one am you go home? I'm
Speaker 4: in love with her?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well again, I don't mean to speak for Population
Speaker 2: Connection because I don't know that much about them. Sure,
Speaker 2: going off of what their website says, yeah, population connection
Speaker 2: dot org and what was spoken about on that episode,
Speaker 2: But it does seem like they were focused heavily on
Speaker 2: empowering people to know about pregnancy, how it occurs, how
Speaker 2: to prevent it, and like providing resources basically to people
Speaker 2: across the planet. We're not talking about one place. We're
Speaker 2: talking like make sure everybody knows exactly what to do
Speaker 2: and how to prevent pregnancy until they are ready for it.
Speaker 5: Because isn't it interesting how sex said is still in
Speaker 5: a lot of ways controversial, Like you know, it doesn't
Speaker 5: feel like it's uniformly applied where it seems like, you know,
Speaker 5: at that age, it's probably the perfect time to empower
Speaker 5: young people with that kind of information. But it's like
Speaker 5: it's cringe for some reason, or like parents freaks them out,
Speaker 5: But it really is probably smartling, just like we don't
Speaker 5: teach kids about how to manage their money, and you know,
Speaker 5: it's weird.
Speaker 4: Also, yet numerous studies prove a political, non ideological objective.
Speaker 4: Studies prove that when you empower, when you empower women
Speaker 4: or people who are able to carry a child with
Speaker 4: UH with sexual education, objective sexual education and that fire
Speaker 4: and brimstone stuff, then you will you will see positive,
Speaker 4: substantial benefits to the society in which those people exist
Speaker 4: and their quality of life, access to education, all of
Speaker 4: it improves. It's better for everyone. I do want to
Speaker 4: and I'm saying that to make up for my crass
Speaker 4: last call at the bar joke and you find love
Speaker 4: where you find it.
Speaker 5: I would like to walk back now, walk back, but
Speaker 5: I said it's down right on an American to cut
Speaker 5: down on unplanned pregnancies. I say that as a dig
Speaker 5: on myself. I was in a committed relationship, but our
Speaker 5: pregnancy was absolutely not planned, and I wouldn't have it
Speaker 5: any other way. I couldn't be happier being the father
Speaker 5: of my amazing kid of fifteen now. But it certainly
Speaker 5: wasn't at the time something that we, you know, intended.
Speaker 5: But also I very much knew about all the things,
Speaker 5: and I was just still kind of a dumb dumb
Speaker 5: or we just weren't being careful because maybe it wasn't
Speaker 5: like the worst thing that could happen, but we definitely
Speaker 5: didn't do it on purpose.
Speaker 4: I have a distinct memory now going to personally or
Speaker 4: I have a distinct memory. I'm going to shout out
Speaker 4: Coach C where I was at the time. Our sex
Speaker 4: ad program in a relatively conservative part of the world
Speaker 4: was the extra side work assigned to the football coach,
Speaker 4: and it had a football voice, and so he knew
Speaker 4: he took us all in his history segregated by sex
Speaker 4: I'm sure he had to do social studies at some point,
Speaker 4: but he's said they segregated the cohort by the biological
Speaker 4: sex or whatever. And so he came out and he
Speaker 4: had like one of those old pull down posters. It
Speaker 4: was a diagram and he had like a little, you know,
Speaker 4: a pointer thingy, and he goes, we all adults, and
Speaker 4: someone's like, we're in seventh grade, and he goes, shut up,
Speaker 4: this is a penis. But he dropped trou No, no,
Speaker 4: he was only playing to the diagram guy. But but
Speaker 4: we're saying, you know, again to your original point, Matt,
Speaker 4: education and powers, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 4: And that's why knowledge his power is a cliche and
Speaker 4: Calhoun is onto something when he is just trying to
Speaker 4: inform people, and he's been mischaracterized as a pessimist. A
Speaker 4: lot of people on very extreme spectrums of social thinking
Speaker 4: have weaponized his research in a way that he probably
Speaker 4: would not agree with were he alive today. But also
Speaker 4: on the way, man, if the afterlife is real, and
Speaker 4: if you're listening, doctor Calhoun, thank you so much for
Speaker 4: all the fiction you created too, and step with you know,
Speaker 4: the crazy real world plans and with that Thank you
Speaker 4: so much for tuning in.
Speaker 1: Folks.
Speaker 4: We think there's a lot here, a lot more to
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Speaker 4: take on what this does or does not apply about
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