May 10, 2024 • 61 mins
What would happen if you built an almost-perfect world, limited in terms only of space? How would people react -- could you create a utopian society? These are the questions John Bumpass Calhoun asked himself during his career as an ethologist, which led him to create tiny 'universes' for rodents... only to find that, time and time again, these perfect civilizations collapsed. Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they delve into the parable of Universe 25 and behavioral sinks.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Name is Nol.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission Control DECA. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know, coming to you live from a
universe of our own, straight to yours. What if we
could build a perfect society? Guys? What if we figure
(00:48):
it out? Today?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Are utopia?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, like where scientists have full unregulated control.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
A technocracy. I'm so in Yeah, Like it's weird, right,
because that's something pretty much all civilizations have aspired to.
Nobody seems to get the concept of utopia right so far.
And we'll also along the way tonight figure out why
utopia is kind.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Of a mean joke, right, Like, isn't you?
Speaker 5 (01:14):
I almost think utopia and dystopia are synonymous in a
weird way, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
You know, It's like a lot of things that are
in theory utopian do end up being dystoping in practice,
and that's so much film and fiction, right, They're essentially
terribles about how trying to make a perfect society goes
terribly wrong. Shout out soiling, green, clockwork, orange.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Communism, mean, come on, you know, communism sounds great in theory,
but it's just never quite worked out the way it
seemed like it should on paper.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Capitalism as well, you know, everybody's getting a little bit today.
We've got to also shout out this chilling line, Matt,
I always always defer to you a matrix knowledge. At
the very end of the matrix. We're talking about this
off air, the architect and Paul pointed out, there's a
good way to do the voice, but the architect is
(02:09):
speaking with Neo and says, you know, you're not in
the first version of the Matrix. The first one I
made was Paradise, and it was a monumental failure. I mean.
And then of course the Fallout series, right, you got
played the game to like that.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Show, well, even like the whole idea of the Vault
situation is in and of itself a utopia that is
going to lead to a greater utopia on Earth, but
only after complete and total annihilation. That's almost like a
prerequisite sometimes for a proper utopia.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Well, in like today's episode, each one of those vaults
is designed with some kind of experiment, like for utopia.
Could this be a utopia if these parameters are set.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
If we tweak X, we change Y, we futsa Z,
we will build a more perfect world.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
In tonight's episode, we're exploring the story of one man who,
depending on whom you ask, who sought to apply the
scientific method, just like you were saying, Matt to the
construction of civilization is a reasonable dude, he said, instead
of trying out rules on humans, instead of cooking live
with empires, what if we start with rodents? Here are
(03:35):
the facts. Let's start with a Tennessee boy named John
Bumpah or Bumpus Calhoun. That is his middle name. And
we had a discussion about being adults.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
What if we spell it ben?
Speaker 4 (03:53):
All right, Matt b U mp A s S. Let's
go to Nola because Noel wasn't here where we talked
about how would you pronounce this name?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
It's what you do at the club, y'all?
Speaker 2 (04:03):
You bump ass oh.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Another legacy of his work, Perhaps.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
One can only imagine.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
So this guy is a behavioral researcher. The fancy name
for his specific field is ethologist, not an ethnologist, not
an ethicist, but instead someone who studies the behavior of
non human animals.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Oh yes, and this person is highly influential. Let's say
we I think many, several of us, maybe all of us,
learned about him when stuff he should know kind of
like mentioned him way back in the day, almost ten
years ago, on an episode called how zero Population Growth Works.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Yeah, shout out, shout out to our pals Josh, Chuck
and Jerry zero population growth. It's still it's really interesting,
isn't it to go back and hear that episode.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, well I don't know, it just can't. Every once
in a while, I listened to s YSK again and
I'm like, oh man, I love this show.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
They're lovely dudes. I think that was before my time.
Speaker 5 (05:11):
But I'm assuming the zero population growth is some concept
involving eugenics or something, is it, or is it something
a little bit more less evil than that.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Goes into things like enthusiasm or enthusian thoughts.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
The Georgia guidestones y type stuff, right, Yeah, yeah, to
this number Yeah, shout out to the Population Bomb.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
That's a book that also changed the game.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, because it goes back to an early observation by
this the Malthusian originator Lord. Yeah, but the guy who said, hey, uh,
population of humans, it kind of grows exponentially, but the
amount of food that we're able to produce does say,
grow exponentially. It's just got kind of this nice little
(06:03):
line that does increase over time, but not at the
same rate.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Yeah, he looked at he looked at that the dreaded
X Y axis right, and said, there's an inflection point
upon which the S hits the F. And he wasn't
talking about San Francisco, but.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
He but he thought he thought the S was going
to hit the F around the year like I don't know,
like before the year two thousand.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Josh Josh in that episode mentions that he thought, what
year two thousand is when London, like Britain for the
most part, would no longer exist because he will have
torn itself apart.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
So this guy's essentially like an academic doom profit that guy,
Thomas Malthus, Yeah, yeah, and he's he's kind of more
in the realm of economics. Yeah, yeah, but there is
a underlying academic bent to his predictions. He's not just like, fully,
you know, I've had a vision and.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
This is what Yeah, he didn't think God told him, gotcha. Yeah,
he thought it was based on quantitative research and trends
as he saw him at the time, tatas mouthus Uh,
you know him, you know him.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Enthusiastic about it too.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, if you're having a good day and the day's
too good, check out some of his work.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
But back to use that as a term, right, if
you're mouth Susian, then you're sort of like a naysayer
kind of right or.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yes, yeah, well they wouldn't call themselves naysayers. They will
call themselves realist, which is what most pessimistic people do.
There you go, I'm shrugging everybody an audio podcast. Uh
so this back to our guy dot Calhoun. The first
thing we have to understand about his studies is they're
often mischaracterized with the idea like you'll read about it
(07:51):
in pop science or whatever, and the idea is presented
as though Calhoun attempted to construct a perfect society for
various rodents and from there figure out how to create
a better society for humans. This isn't really the case.
What he actually did is remove a lot of the
(08:12):
usual population constraint variables or the mortality creators, because it
wasn't because he wanted a paradise really for rodents. He
was interested instead in the effects of proximity and population
overpopulation in particular sout out in malthews. Maybe we learn
(08:34):
a little bit about him because I didn't know this.
He taught at Emory University, just up the road from US.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Indeed, a graduate of Northwestern, he did teach at Emory
as well as Ohio State, and then he moved with
his wife to Maryland, where he settled down at Johns
Hopkins in March of nineteen forty seven, where he began
a twenty eight month study of a colony of Norwegian
(09:01):
rats in a ten thousand square foot enclosure kind of
sounds like a bit of a barn, you know, an
out outbuilding kind of situation. There were five females in
this cohort that, over the time span, were theoretically able
to produce five thousand healthy offspring for this particular size enclosure,
(09:23):
and Calhoun found that the population never exceeded two hundred
individuals and eventually stabilized at one fifty.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Just really quick brown Norway rats. If you want to
buy them, a male at three weeks old costs one
hundred and nine dollars and twenty nine cents. A female
costs one one hundred and eleven dollars and three cents.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Just a pricey rat.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Shout out secret of nim isn't it?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Wouldn't you say?
Speaker 5 (09:49):
That's I would think I would all have thought that
rats would be typically less expensive than that.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
I mean, you can catch them for free, that's true.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Well, and that's twenty four numbers. We're talking nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
So yeah, it was given rats away at that point.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Right, Well, well it should be noted when we're thinking
about these rats. These are like control rats, right. They
are designed to be almost identical, so that when you
test one like a variable with one and another as
a control, you're actually going to be able to test
that variable without any other intervening variables.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, because they're bread to Like you said, they're bred
to be relatively homogeneous, right, not to the point where
they will become quickly incestuous. But they're also more importantly
bred to not have prominent genetic defects or susceptibility to
certain diseases, and they're kind of same, samey. I also
(10:48):
want to shout out rat intelligence. There's a book that
are pal Robert Lamb and I really love called Rats
Observations on the History and Habitat of the City These
most Unwanted Inhabitants, and it focuses on rats in New
York and it's amazing. It's a really weird read. They
have huge balls, by the way, rats huge balls literally
(11:11):
and figured yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Speaking of and also not speaking of, just one one
more statistic here with brown Norway rats from this specific
catalog that I'm looking at, you can get a lactating
rat with litter for six hundred and ninety three ten cents.
That is it again, litter is that I don't know,
but it's a Brown Norway rat.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
It's you try rat milk. Just wondering.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Well, I guess what I'm saying is for these types
of tests you can get very specific with the kind
of rat, be like what state that rat is in,
how many weeks all that rat is, if it's already
no longer breeding, it's it's just crazy.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
So it's speaking weird stuff right. The technology is not
here yet for Calhoun to scope in to this level,
to twenty twenty four level of rat eugenics, for lack
of a better term, But he finds something mysterious and
it haunts the world today. Like you were saying, no,
(12:14):
this enclosure could theoretically house safely five thousand rats in
this population, but it stabilizes at one point fifty, just
one hundred and fifty rats, So we ask what gives.
He also notices these rats are not forming a little
rat nation state. Instead, they're splitting up into colonies the
(12:37):
size into colonies of about a dozen, which is the
size that would naturally occur in the wild before these
different mortality variables kicked in predators, disease, lack of food,
et cetera. And he's thinking, well, why I took away
all the stresses. You know, literally they are living the
(12:58):
best life. They're just in a cage despite all their rage,
and later he stopped. Later he moves to Maine and
he continues to study these Norway rats until about nineteen
fifty one. Eventually the family goes back to Maryland. His
studies continue. He moves into other rodents. We're going to
(13:20):
mention an outfit called the National Institute of Mental Health.
Pretty often it is indeed the secret of NIM. And indeed,
what film It's true. I didn't get it when I just.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Saw the film. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's exact.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
So he did. NIM gets some land outside of a
town called Poolsville, Maryland, and he headed a couple of projects.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
There.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
He began his most famous series of experiments, not on
the rats, but on mice. And he built these different
fallout vaults for mice, and he called them, in a
burst of humility universes, and it's a high fluted name,
but besides is astonishing. He they wanted to see what
(14:10):
happened when rodents lived without the stresses of life in
the wild. Limitless food, limitless water, I kid you not
little rat condos, little mouse condos.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Well, imagine this is this enclosure. And remember the first
one that when he was testing earlier, he had this
huge ten thousand square foot area where he's watching all
the different mice kind of grouping off like that. He
wanted to see them in these much smaller little spaces, right,
as you said, with limitless resources. But if you imagine
(14:44):
the starter mice right, that began in that quote universe
that he created. All of the preceding mice that are
born from those original mice only know that thing, that
enclosure that has the walls up that they can't climb over, right,
So it really is the entirety of their universe.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
They've never been outside of Plato's cavern, you know what
I mean. They're still plugged into the matrix from the
cradle to the grave. That's the excellent observation. And these
were all This was all again not because the guy
loves happy rats and happy mice. He wants to learn
about population density and how it affects behavior. So he says,
(15:26):
I will build for the utopia. What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything. This is the story of Universe twenty five.
We'll get into it after a word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy. Let's go back to this
(15:48):
really interesting thing that you said at the top, Noll,
the concept of utopia. You said, well, it always feels
like it becomes a dystopia. It's so weird because back
in fifteen sixteen, the word was coined as a kind
of like snarky, mean.
Speaker 5 (16:06):
Joke, like a thing that's not attainable almost right, like
it's it's impossible. It was coined by Sir Thomas Moore
in fifteen sixty. He created the word from the Greek
words for not and place, u for not and topos
for place, so it meant nowhere. It's a liminal space.
(16:31):
It's a non existent thing. So before the dawn of
monern science, the guy who coined the word that we
use to describe a perfect society was literally thumbing his
nose at the concept in its entirety. But pretty funny, guys,
You guys, what if he's.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Really talking about that infinite nothingness that we all experience
upon the moment of death, before the light of everything
comes to gather us.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
You know what I'm saying. It all ends into infinity.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
When you write an email into the void here and
sometimes the void writes back.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Yeah, I mean sometimes you get a subsystem undeliverable.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Message back as well. Maybe he really is a good thing,
as what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Guys, welcome to the emptiness. Charlco's experiments seemed in a
weird way to bear out Moore's joke, and we don't
know what he thought about the work of Sir Thomas Moore.
But from these rats he moved on. He couldn't always
call him Universes, so that was very fun, and we'll
(17:30):
see he loves fun language. He originally called the The
Mice Experiments Mortality Inhibiting Environment for mice. And like you
were saying, it's July of nineteen sixty eight when he
introduces a breeding group such that it could avoid inbreeding
(17:54):
into a new habitat called Universe twenty five. And you know,
again we're saying Universe is a little bit ambitious for
this one because it's not super big.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
Yeah, and I'm sure I Fallt was inspired by a
lot of things, Like there's there's so many examples of
these types of isolated communities and experiments, whether they be
with animals or you know, prison experiments or whatever. But
I can't help but think Universe twenty five vault one
to eleven, you know what I mean, Like it really
does have a nice connective tissue.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Well, again, as we said before, he went from ten
thousand square feet in nineteen forty seven to nine square
feet of metal.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Makes yeah, it is much smaller. But again, as you
pointed out, so astuteley, the mice evolved don't know this.
Their kids, their progenies certainly will never know this nine
foot square it's a metal pan. The sides are about
four point five feet high, which is not really a
(19:00):
huge problem for rats depending on the surface, but it's
pretty difficult for mice yes, to summit that well.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And I think it's the top seventeen inches if you've
imagined from the height top of this thing down seventeen
inches is like just bare wall that is very difficult
to scale.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
So you can climb up a little bit right to
get to your mouse condo.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, it's designed that way right to go up to
the condos, which is weird.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, nesting boxes, food hoppers, water dispensers. It is like
it is like a mouse episode of Cribs. To date
ourselves with MTV references, and there were no predators obviously.
There's just this benevolent yet distant human thing that functions
(19:51):
as God for these guys. Every four to eight weeks
they get hit with their equivalent of you know, a
natural disaster, a climate this event, because that's when the
enclosure is cleaned, you know what I mean. So maybe
and we don't know, if we don't know enough about
their cognition to know whether this became a story they
(20:12):
told each other about.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
We also don't know whether they could predict the coming
of the cleaning.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Oh, plow the.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Plow because it did have to be cleaned out on
a regular basis, right, I mean that was one of
the things.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
Yeah, there's still I mean they're like the top tier
lap mice, but they still poop. We haven't figured out
how to make mice not poop.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Do you think that like mice in this kind of
situation have a sense of what's going on outside, you know,
or like do they do they look at I know,
I know we couldn't possibly you know, get inside the
head or try to simulate the cognition of rats, but
like these these forces that come in and remove them
(20:58):
and clean them and then put them back, you think
they look at them as like godlike forces, you know,
I don't know, alien abductions.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It'd be, yeah, some kind of weird part of just
aspect of the universe that happens. But there's no human.
You're not actually interacting with the human at any time
whose arms are coming down and cleaning things, right, Yeah,
it's just these disembodied limbs that descend into your world
and then you know, wipe off the surfaces or whatever.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
They probably recognize smells, I'm thinking, but to your point,
it's probably just a thing in their environment. I do
imagine they are intelligent enough to envision something past the wall, right,
because they are naturally exploring creatures, right, so they without
knowing what is out there. They many of them attempted
(21:52):
to escape at some point, especially if stuff did not
work out as mouse society collapsed, which is exactly what happened.
The only obstacle in Universe twenty five and the preceding
experiments was space. So you got these eight mice in
this enclosure. At first, their vault is huge. It's designed
(22:12):
to hold as many as people round up to four thousand.
But I think of the original research it was something
like three and forty mice, which is a lot of mice.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Well, and it took them a long time to get
acclimated to that space too, right, those original eight mice,
the four breeding pairs, they like, didn't breed for a
long time. They were just kind of like, what the
heck is this place? I don't understand this, this is wrong,
why are we here? And then eventually they just gave
in and or you know whatever, they whatever change occurred
(22:45):
cognitively that they went, okay, we will begin nesting, we
will begin breeding.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
It was better than the breeding pens from which they originated.
I can only imagine it's definitely a lot more room
because they weren't caught in the wild.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Right exactly, But it did take one hundred and four
days before they actually settled down to reproduce.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
And when the population began reproducing, they were doubling every
fifty five days. So this j curve growth for a while.
And by day three fifteen, so we're not quite a
year in the population has reached six hundred and twenty mice, gangbusters,
(23:24):
tickety boo. Everything's going well. Until around day three fifteen.
It was like some invisible switch just clicked and the
population growth, the rate of growth, not the actual population.
Yet the rate of growth declined and now it was
only doubling every one hundred and forty five days instead
of every fifty five days. And with that, in step,
(23:48):
the social structure broke down. There's a great article by
writer Esther inglis Arcu for Io nine or Gizmoto now
that sums it up and it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
Yeah, to read from that piece. At the peak population,
most mice spent every living second in the company of
hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares,
waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few
females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did
seem to simply forget about their babies. They'd move half
(24:21):
their litter away from danger and forget the rest.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Huh.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Sometimes they'd drop and abandon a baby while they were
carrying it. Guy, guys, are you familiar with the concept
of nesting behavior? Yes, this is this kind of figure
into that in a way like I mean, I don't know,
like this is maybe anomalous nesting behavior, or I guess
it's a situation that once it kind of balloons beyond
(24:47):
a certain point like that that I guess, uh, motherly
drive kind of gets weaker.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Or something like what is this? What's what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I would point people to Population Density and Social Pathology,
which was written by mister John Calhoun, and he actually
has in this you can find it online, by the way,
as in PDA form. He's got illustrations basically of what
you're talking about nol like the typical nesting behavior of
(25:21):
mice in a population like this, how they build their nest,
what they do, you know, when they're in an enclosed
space and they've got the family in there, and they
you know, get all of the materials and arrange it
in such a way that the mice can kind of gather.
But then what was happening then where it was completely different.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Well, and a lot of nesting behavior too, involves protecting
the offspring from predators. So when you're in a situation
where you don't have any natural enemies, you know, I
wonder if that kind of freaks it out a little
better and it causes a little bit of the change
in the way these processes happen.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
It gets even creepier and at a precipitous rate. And
we'll get to we'll get to the paper that kind
of changed popular science. Really we should also mention just
an example of what I think is a little bit creepy.
Calhoun was also particularly interested in a subgroup of rodents
(26:19):
that appeared inevitably in these universes. He called them, tell
me if you think this is creepy, folks. He called
them the beautiful ones. They're like the eloy in H. G.
Wells is the time machine, remember the time machine? Like
the surface dwelling vegetarians. It's not a perfect comparison because
(26:42):
the eloi obviously reproduce, but the beautiful ones do not.
They got like they post one male, one male rodent
outside and then the rest retreat into a secluded nesting
spot in the habitat, usually elevated, I think, and they
(27:04):
just eat, groom themselves and sleep. They don't fight, they
don't care for they're young. They don't reproduce their immune
in a way to the social collapse that occurs, which
is so weird.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
So way they would do that.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Yeah, they just checked out. It reminds me a little
bit of was it in Japan, Hikiko Mori or there's
some other country. I think it's China, where there's a
group of people who have done what they call the
lay down movement. They just check out a society. I
think it's too stressful. I'll do the bare minimum. But
(27:43):
is that better than what's happening to the rest of
the road in population wherein there's cannibalism, there's hyper non
consensual pan sexualism, and there's random violence.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, in a roughly ninety six percent mortality rate or
newly born mice.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Yes, yeah, The last surviving mouse in Universe twenty five
is born on A six hundred right, and the population
then has reached two two d and twenty mice. The
experiment again set up for four thousand, but they just
as a society, they stopped. They stopped mousing. And how
(28:25):
do we explain this strange, deeply disturbing trend? What made
this perfect world so intolerably terrible that the test group
failed to reach full capacity even once? Not even once?
We could dive into it after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 5 (28:46):
Danan another line, they're surge pricing in the shoe store.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Now, sorry, Bud. You know out is there are more
and more people in the one shoe store, and most
of them also have two feet.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
I just can't take this. I've had it.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
It's enough to make you go. Of course, Going Bonkers
is available on the premium app version. Also, I know
what you mean. Every day I wake up and I.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Think is today? The day?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Is today? The day I bring the bomb to work?
And in this pointless sissaphy and charade.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Something troubling you friends. Shoes are just hats for feet.
You know, you could also go to a haberdashery.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
It's not even the shoes, it's just look around. It's
all gotten out of hand. Wherever I go, there's a crowd,
a line, an app. I can't remember the last time
I was able to just be alone.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Well, if this civilization is too crowded, which we all understand,
then why not try a universe?
Speaker 3 (29:40):
All your Oh is that another app? Oh?
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Much more than that, gentlemen, what if I told you
right now you could have a universe to yourself, the universe?
Why oh you neverse?
Speaker 5 (29:56):
Why?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (29:56):
Universe?
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Yes, the universe. Think of it as a planned community,
the most exclusive sort, with a population of one. You
gone are the days of competing for resources, ideology, or
the ability to feel seen in society. The universe provides
you with an all encompassing, self contained reality. You simply
agree to a small bit of blood harvesting and DNA sampling,
(30:19):
undergo a small procedure for the helmet, and voila gay
blood helmet procedure, I said, and voila. Imagine a world
in which you never feel rushed, in which other people
only exist. Should you allow them to do so a world,
a universe with no dissenting opinions, no uncomfortable truths. Every
social media comment agrees with you, Every email is a
(30:41):
yes and right on. Everything you want is provided, sustaining
your base needs.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Every sam in.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
You don't want to hear the rest.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Not really, it sounds great.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
Can I have a shoe store in my yo universe?
You can imagine anything you want here?
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Don't you mean there?
Speaker 5 (31:00):
No?
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Don't you see friends? You're here right now. The universe
is in practice responsible for, but legally intimified, and that's
not liable for the following possib side effects isolation, madness,
the condition Mega two portpoise complaint, social media fatigue, echo chambers,
bio spheres of mind, grandamact of violence, loss of sexual
apetite loss and general appetite loss, perpective, lost memory, loss
of precognitive ability, inability to pare for others, sociopathy, psychopathy,
hyperflaglens self for a be self healthy is great of
(31:21):
bleed necktang due to alleged coment effect. Currently not approved
in the following states Georgia, Hawaii, Idahos, state of happiness,
and peaceful state of mind.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
The universe is a subsidiary of Illumination Global Unlimited.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
So let's return to something you mentioned just a bit earlier, map,
which is the revolutionary nineteen sixty two paper issued in
Scientific American wherein wherein he this is still pre Universe
twenty five, this is still Norway rat era. He introduces
(32:01):
the lay public to the idea of what are called
behavioral sinks.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
So here's an excerpt.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
Many female rats are unable to carry the pregnancy to
full term or to survive delivery of their litters if
they did. An even greater number after successfully giving birth
fell short in their maternal functions. So yeah, I mean again,
we're seeing this weird erosion of what are typically the
strongest of biological drives. You know what, I just I'm
(32:32):
sorry I keep saying about what what gives this is wild.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Let's actually jump through the article really quickly, because this
is kind of what I wanted to mention when we
were talking about nesting behavior. If you go down, I
think it's page one forty six in the original like
Scientific American, you can find it with those illustrations of
the nesting behavior. I just want to read the normal one.
And then one of you guys read the read the
what was happening what we're describing here, So normal maternal
(33:00):
behavior among these rat populations would include building a fluffy,
well shaped nest for the young in an enclosed space,
in one of those little condos that we were describing earlier,
and it would be flattened by the weight of the
animal's bodies, but it still offers ample protection and warmth
for their tiny young, you know, little rat bodies. And
(33:20):
when they've got this kind of environment, the offspring are
generally what's termed here weaned, right, and they are able
to leave the nest after a certain amount of time.
But what was happening right, Yeah, about two weeks? So
what was happening during these experiments with these behavioral sinks.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Yeah, this is where Calhoun introduces abnormal behavior, which is look,
he anthropomorphizes a lot. And when you see this, especially
if you have kids, it's kind of heartbreaking because the
abnormal behavior quote shown by females exposed to the pressures
of population density, includes failure to build adequate nest. And
(34:02):
you can see the drawing on the left of the
diagram of a quote unquote disturbed female not like a
bad mouse or not a bad rat, but instead, pressured
by this increasingly surreal environment, she start quote she started
to make a nest, but never finished it. The drawing
(34:22):
on the right shows her young About two weeks later,
they're leaving the nest, as we use the old cliche appropriately,
but they are not old enough to survive alone. And
this is where the ninety six percent infant mortality rate
statistic comes from. You can also see when says starting
(34:43):
to make a nest, the bedding they're provided with, it's
like these rectangular strips, and in the normal nesting behavior,
it's a hoarder's house. You know.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
It literally becomes what you would imagine a nest would
look like if you've ever seen a bird's nest or something,
but with these strips of fabric.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
And in the abnormal behavior we're looking at like it's terrible.
It makes me think of neglected children because that's what happened. Yeah,
i'manthropomorphizing anyway. Yeah, it's terrible. And the world that these
young mice who can't survive on their own are entering
is a very violent, chaotic places is hit in the
(35:24):
f in Universe twenty five, a lot of the largely
male population has disturbing behavior at a rate that far
exceeds what would happen in the wild. Rats can practice
cannibalism if they have to. These rats don't have to
practice cannibalism, but they're doing it. They're super into it.
(35:45):
They're also banging literally everything, sexually, sang everything, without regard
to the normal constraints of reproduction or the normal goals.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I think maybe that's a big thing. It seems like
the goal is gone now, right, so now it's just Oh,
I was going to say, do what thou wilst? But
that's not But that's not even it. It's like it's
frenetic behavior. It's like it's agitated.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
Ain't always right, And it's not like there's some sort
of hedonistic drive. You know, mice don't understand, you know,
Satanism or the idea of do what thou wilst per se.
It's a a biological imperative that's kind of been flipped
in a weird and disturbing way. It's not like they're, hey,
(36:34):
let's just just go ham and like living like a
weird cannibalistic hippie commune to get you know whatever.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I think, Ben, you put it really well, like the
goal the original I don't know, I was gonna, I
was gonna. I think you said it right, Like just
the goals, the things that you have as as mouse,
those are no longer applicable because of the pressures you're
existing in.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Yeah, and we're using rat and mouse here interchangeably, because
because the trends are consistent across the universes. That's the
scary thing. They're rat in the mouse. They're close enough
that the stories are beat for beat, very similar. And
this like what do you call it? This impetus that
(37:19):
we're talking about when when you're an environment where that
impetus is somehow curtailed or interfered with, we see the
over and over again. We see the population generally goes
into behavioral directions. A lot of people, like we're saying,
see now I'm competing it, they go, they go ham
(37:40):
you know, they're almost like the Reavers in Serenity and yeah,
and the other folks are the ones where the packs
virus works spoilers.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
Yeah, it's so easy to anthropomorphize this and like say
something like they became evil, right, but that's that's not right,
you know. There there's just something in their coating that
no longer applied, and they just kind of went berserk
because like the normal like society, sociological and biological things
(38:11):
that kind of kept them acting like what they are
rats and mice no longer applied, and therefore they're they're programming,
for lack of a better term, didn't know how to
operate anymore. So it just kind of like it's like
they short circuited almost right, well, man.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And you're it's so it's so confusing to me because
you're not necessarily competing for the food when the food
comes out, right, there's ample food. They're always been dead.
Speaker 5 (38:35):
Though, right there, it's cannibalizing the dead. It's not like
they're are they killing each other and then eating too?
Oh yeah, sorry, Matt, I just had to please continue.
That's wild.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
But what I'm saying is like they could have just
eaten the food, but there's so many of them it
is almost I don't know. I think maybe that's why
it's so confusing to me. You could always go and
get water, but you got to now like either wait
in line or fight to go get the water. But
is this there? It'll always be there, you just got
to get to it now.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Is this the kind of study that would probably be
looked at a bit of scance today, like this is
a little on the immoral sides or on the on
ethical side.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
You can still do stuff like this. It's because they're rodents.
You can still do stuff like this depending on the country.
But also this research, as we'll see, gets weaponized and
used as a metaphor for all kinds of things, perhaps incorrectly.
We do know there's scholarship suggesting maybe this is not
(39:37):
a problem of population density so much as a problem
of distribution of that population.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Right.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
So, and we see things like this happening in the world.
There are parts of the world that are struggling to
maintain a population. At the same time, there are parts
of the world where the population is exploding in a
way that that civilization is not prepared for.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
So there's I mean, it gets into this really weird, controversial,
possibly evil math. But we know that we know that
what would happen is think of it like a gen pop. Right,
You're in a jail. You can choose to go into
your own cell, right, you can be by yourself in
(40:21):
that cell, or you can go down to gen pop. Right,
where everything is where's party time, but not excellent and
the rats, Calhoun hypothesizes, they began to associate feeding with
being around a big crowd of rats. They didn't understand
(40:41):
that they could eat on their own, which is fascinating
from a very ethics aside, that is fascinating and chilling.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
So these and then it becomes a learned behavior because
let's imagine you are a successful rat or mouse that
made it into the general population after me madgusting, you
watch all of the rats gathered together in this huge
mass when it's time to eat. So you go, well,
I guess that's that's what happens when it's time for
(41:11):
me to eat now, and then that behavioral pattern then
passes down as like, well, that's what this is what
society does, so this is what I do. So yeah,
this is this is what I'm supposed to do.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Listen here, mouse, son, you'll eat like I ate and
your father and my father before you in a crowd,
ready to fight and maybe eat another animal.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't a group of older mice
hanging on the corner. So I remember when we used
to eat.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
I remember that just eight of us in the beginning.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Uphill both ways, uphill both ways, dead all the way.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
So he also we should note, as he said, he
had a lot of anthropomorphizing, and you can see it
in the language he uses, which is purposely chosen to
communicate with the public because it occurs in a larger context.
He calls the dwelling places tower blocks basically apartments. He
calls them walk up apartments.
Speaker 5 (42:14):
He was sort of a British parlance, right, tower blocks
like flat blocks. Yeah, we're referring to what we might
over here call projects or like you know, government.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Yeah, that's kind of how he's talking you. And he's
doing that to draw draw out this comparison to human
society in the time of which he's writing and conducting science.
He also calls some groups juvenile, delinquents and dropouts. He's
actively inviting us to think in this manner. So it
should be no surprise that human civilization, not just scientists
(42:50):
and academics and ethologists, human civilization in general, learns about
this stuff, primarily through the Scientific American article, and they
immediately say, well, what does this tell us about ourselves?
And what does this tell us about Thomas Malthus. While
this is occurring, there has been a bevy of academics
(43:13):
who might as well be wearing sandwich boards that say
the end is nigh, you know, ecologist, economists, philosophers, tycoons.
Tycoons love Malthusian thought, and we.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Do have some good examples.
Speaker 5 (43:30):
First off, William Vote and Fairfield Osborne were two ecologists
who warned against the growing population putting pressure on natural resources,
on food, and that was as early as nineteen forty eight.
So people have been like sounding the alarms for the
(43:51):
stuff for a long time and it ain't getting.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
A whole heck of a lot better.
Speaker 5 (43:56):
We're being completely honest, and it does feel like, you know,
if we're being dire about our situation that we find
ourselves in or think about what's going to be the
tipping point in like a big, you know, high water
mark moment in humanity, it's kind of.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Be a war over resources.
Speaker 5 (44:13):
I mean, it's pretty clear that's that's the one thing
that we can't really make more of, and people who
have control and have power is going to start hoarding them,
leaving you know, the lesser of us out in the cold.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Well, yeah, fear filled Osborne. This dude, this is a
eugenesis is born in the eighteen hundreds, like died in
nineteen thirty five, and he was talking about it back then,
and as eugenicist he had some ideas. I bet he did,
had it takes takes, So you know, it's weird. It's
a weird thing because it is a cautionary subject where
if you start looking at this too much and you're
(44:49):
applying whatever, I don't know what, we would even call them,
your own biases that you've got from growing up wherever
you grew up, and with people you're around, it is dangerous.
Speaker 4 (45:02):
Yeah, And again we have this oh gosh, you know what,
I'm just realizing, I'm thinking through Osborne was alive when
the Great Depression hit, so he probably died thinking called it. Yeah.
And then in nineteen sixty eight, in the same sort
(45:23):
of social milieu or context, Paul Erlick publishes the population Bomb.
It is polemical, it is an alarmist work. It is
meant to shake you when you read it. And he
says it's common famine, resource wars, the end of days.
So the public is primed to think in these terms.
(45:46):
You know, they witnessed horrific wars, they've seen what happens
when the economic regimes collapse. So when Calhoun comes out
in Scientific American, which is legit publication, they are totally
vibing with it. He says, look overpopulation means social collapse
(46:07):
followed by extinction. The rodents are not so different from
the primates. And the more I repeat this experiment, the
more predictable and inevitable the outcome seems. By the time
he got to Universe twenty five, the most popular or
most well known one, he had a formula, a death
(46:28):
squared formula, which we have to go into. But basically
he was thinking of the concept of second death. So
first death being the physical death of an individual, second
death being the larger death of a society. Very fun
at parties, I imagine, But I don't know. That's the question.
(46:49):
Let's a pickle we're still working with. Can we apply
this to humans? Calhoun was certain this could also be
a warning call for human society, no matter how smart
we think we are, he reasoned, because he did count
himself as human. You know, he's like, I'm in this
universe too, he said, No matter what happens, once the
(47:11):
number of individuals capable of fulfilling certain roles. Once that
exceeds the number of roles available, basically, once there are
too many cars for the parking lot of a civilization,
chaos reigns.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Oh yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Mean, like students graduating from elite colleges don't have jobs
to fill, students graduating from non elite colleges don't have
jobs to fill anymore, and something like AI comes along
and fills all those roles.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Yeah, Or like the fact that Star Trek sort of
glosses over the fact how they went from a post
work economy after living through a post worker economy.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, they don't put.
Speaker 4 (47:56):
A lot of that on the air.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
But it's just worked, doubt, you know.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Just worked out. Let's go to the Holo deck, he writes.
He writes beautifully about this, and I don't think he's
trying to be a jerk. I think he is trying
to present what he sees as the science, like we've
got again. You can read the full paper or the
full article online today and it is worth your time.
(48:24):
But he concludes that when you get to that too
many cars for the parking spot situation, the only result
is violence and disruption of social organization. And he's not
arguing ideology here very important to note because it does
get weaponized by people with different ideologies. He's just saying
(48:50):
when he says social organization, he's talking about the way
rodents usually work, the way they usually self organize, And
now they're doing stuff that is not normal. Social pessimist, Malfusians,
whatever we want to call them, they loved this stuff.
This was to them an inarguable rule of the world
(49:14):
of reality. This was like the law of gravity for
living things. Trippy stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
So I got lost in this article from Cabinet Magazine.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
They've got the great illustrations too.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
It's pictures of the actual structure that does resemble some
kind of prison to me when you just look at
this tiny, little nine foot squired thing, I don't know,
a great picture of John Calhoun, and he looks troubled too.
In his face. He's just like, oh God, just drop
outnice Haggard.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
Also, do you guys remember a while back when I
was living I was living in that place right next
to our old office, and the courtyard of that looked
very universe twenty five to me.
Speaker 5 (50:00):
Oh yeah, with the weird like aatrium, the plants and stuff.
It kind of felt like like pretend outside.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
Yeah, yeah, we have outside at home. That's what it was.
So look, he is he is perhaps mischaracterized pretty often
because he argued that there were good guys, and that
part of his research I think gets glossed over. He
was very interested in something he called the high social
velocity mice. These were individual mice who responded to these
(50:33):
new overpopulation pressures by switching things up by doing interesting,
very varied behaviors, like they would alter, you know, if
there's a big gen pop crowd at feeding time, they
would move. In the night, they would move when the
other mice were less active or whatever their version of
night was. They would team up and create alliances that
(50:56):
ordinarily would not exist. So he found great hope in that,
and he says, look, humanity is a positive animal, creative,
capable of design. Maybe we can out teck this damning
doomsday prediction for society.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I don't know, but it's weird. There's another article from
Oh gosh, that's not the Vox article I was looking at.
I'm sorry, guys, The Smithsonian. The appendix. The appendix has
an interesting article on this, specifically on John Calhoun, and
they discuss or this article, at least in cite it
(51:37):
so you can look it up. It's titled Space Cadets
and rat Utopias by Laura Jane Martin. So this concept
of space cadets is something that John Calhoun was really
into because, at least according to the article, according to
other writings about him, he wanted this to be a
positive thing. He wanted humans to look at it and go, hey,
we can fix these major problems we've got going on.
(51:58):
Even if population seems to be this doomsday you know,
on the horizon somewhere, if we're aware of it, we
can fix all the things that lead to it. And
why not as one of those fixes, let's focus on
getting the heck off Earth.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
Shout out to his partner in that letter, Dull Duhl,
I love you mentioning that because he has the analogy that,
as far as we know, the analogy he did not
make but would be apparent to those of us in
the cage today is that he's like a climate change person. Right,
(52:36):
He's like a climatologist but for society, and he say, look,
we're reaching this behavioral sink point, but we're not at
the past. We're not past the point of no return, right,
we can still mitigate and perhaps even repair the tendencies
we don't like. And Space Cadets is really interesting. It's
(52:56):
one of those technocratic, very optimistic think tanks, you know, like,
if we want to get to space, it's going to
take all of the experts we can possibly think of.
You know, let's get the architects, but let's also make
sure we have the psychiatrist, you know what I mean.
I think it's fascinating. I don't know too much about
(53:18):
the Space Cadets to be candid, but I do know
that I do know that he had great faith in humanity.
And he said, you know, maybe the rats are breaking
down because they don't know what to do. The mice
are breaking down because they don't know what to do.
But the history of humanity is a history of innovation,
(53:41):
of deviation from tradition.
Speaker 6 (53:43):
And norm Yeah, man, so far, he paused and said,
so far, guys.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
We should point out the what do they call them?
Some of those guys. They refer to them as neo Malthusian,
like the new generation, you know. And I didn't know
until I listen to that stuff. You should know episode
that there there are things I want to shout out.
They did in their episode. They shouted out a thing
called Population Connection that I had never heard of before,
(54:17):
which is a website you can go to right now
that is basically a spin off from well it was.
It was formerly known as ZPG or Zero Population Growth,
and it's this fairly large organization that focuses specifically on
eliminating all non planned births because theoretically you could bring
(54:44):
the numbers of like human replacement, you know that, like
what two point one berths per couple or whatever that
you know, old thing is that was based on, like
how to replace human beings.
Speaker 5 (54:57):
Well, that's downright on American The accidental pregnancy is a
foundation of our society.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
Holder. Well, well it's one am you go home? I'm
in love with her?
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah. Well again, I don't mean to speak for Population
Connection because I don't know that much about them. Sure,
going off of what their website says, yeah, population connection
dot org and what was spoken about on that episode,
But it does seem like they were focused heavily on
empowering people to know about pregnancy, how it occurs, how
to prevent it, and like providing resources basically to people
(55:33):
across the planet. We're not talking about one place. We're
talking like make sure everybody knows exactly what to do
and how to prevent pregnancy until they are ready for it.
Speaker 5 (55:41):
Because isn't it interesting how sex said is still in
a lot of ways controversial, Like you know, it doesn't
feel like it's uniformly applied where it seems like, you know,
at that age, it's probably the perfect time to empower
young people with that kind of information. But it's like
it's cringe for some reason, or like parents freaks them out,
But it really is probably smartling, just like we don't
(56:03):
teach kids about how to manage their money, and you know,
it's weird.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
Also, yet numerous studies prove a political, non ideological objective.
Studies prove that when you empower, when you empower women
or people who are able to carry a child with
UH with sexual education, objective sexual education and that fire
and brimstone stuff, then you will you will see positive,
(56:32):
substantial benefits to the society in which those people exist
and their quality of life, access to education, all of
it improves. It's better for everyone. I do want to
and I'm saying that to make up for my crass
last call at the bar joke and you find love
where you find it.
Speaker 5 (56:50):
I would like to walk back now, walk back, but
I said it's down right on an American to cut
down on unplanned pregnancies. I say that as a dig
on myself. I was in a committed relationship, but our
pregnancy was absolutely not planned, and I wouldn't have it
any other way. I couldn't be happier being the father
of my amazing kid of fifteen now. But it certainly
(57:14):
wasn't at the time something that we, you know, intended.
But also I very much knew about all the things,
and I was just still kind of a dumb dumb
or we just weren't being careful because maybe it wasn't
like the worst thing that could happen, but we definitely
didn't do it on purpose.
Speaker 4 (57:29):
I have a distinct memory now going to personally or
I have a distinct memory. I'm going to shout out
Coach C where I was at the time. Our sex
ad program in a relatively conservative part of the world
was the extra side work assigned to the football coach,
(57:51):
and it had a football voice, and so he knew
he took us all in his history segregated by sex
I'm sure he had to do social studies at some point,
but he's said they segregated the cohort by the biological
sex or whatever. And so he came out and he
had like one of those old pull down posters. It
(58:11):
was a diagram and he had like a little, you know,
a pointer thingy, and he goes, we all adults, and
someone's like, we're in seventh grade, and he goes, shut up,
this is a penis. But he dropped trou No, no,
he was only playing to the diagram guy. But but
(58:34):
we're saying, you know, again to your original point, Matt,
education and powers, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (58:40):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (58:41):
And that's why knowledge his power is a cliche and
Calhoun is onto something when he is just trying to
inform people, and he's been mischaracterized as a pessimist. A
lot of people on very extreme spectrums of social thinking
have weaponized his research in a way that he probably
(59:02):
would not agree with were he alive today. But also
on the way, man, if the afterlife is real, and
if you're listening, doctor Calhoun, thank you so much for
all the fiction you created too, and step with you know,
the crazy real world plans and with that Thank you
so much for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (59:22):
We think there's a lot here, a lot more to
dig into, and we touched on a lot of things
that mayrove you may have personal experience with in your
own life, in your own neck of these global woods.
So let us know. Would be very interested to hear
your favorite pieces of fiction inspired by Universe twenty five,
and we also love to hear, love to read your
(59:45):
take on what this does or does not apply about
human civilization. We try to be easy to find.
Speaker 5 (59:50):
Online conspiracy stuff on Facebook, on x FK, Twitter, and
on YouTube. Check out the latest stalin of George Washington's
time travel adventures on Instagram and TikTok. We're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
We have a phone number. You can call it. It's
one eight three three st d WYTK. When you call in,
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Speaker 4 (01:00:27):
We are the folks who read every single email we get.
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Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
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Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Name is Nol.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission Control DECA. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know, coming to you live from a
universe of our own, straight to yours. What if we
could build a perfect society? Guys? What if we figure
(00:48):
it out? Today?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Are utopia?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, like where scientists have full unregulated control.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
A technocracy. I'm so in Yeah, Like it's weird, right,
because that's something pretty much all civilizations have aspired to.
Nobody seems to get the concept of utopia right so far.
And we'll also along the way tonight figure out why
utopia is kind.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Of a mean joke, right, Like, isn't you?
Speaker 5 (01:14):
I almost think utopia and dystopia are synonymous in a
weird way, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
You know, It's like a lot of things that are
in theory utopian do end up being dystoping in practice,
and that's so much film and fiction, right, They're essentially
terribles about how trying to make a perfect society goes
terribly wrong. Shout out soiling, green, clockwork, orange.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Communism, mean, come on, you know, communism sounds great in theory,
but it's just never quite worked out the way it
seemed like it should on paper.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Capitalism as well, you know, everybody's getting a little bit today.
We've got to also shout out this chilling line, Matt,
I always always defer to you a matrix knowledge. At
the very end of the matrix. We're talking about this
off air, the architect and Paul pointed out, there's a
good way to do the voice, but the architect is
(02:09):
speaking with Neo and says, you know, you're not in
the first version of the Matrix. The first one I
made was Paradise, and it was a monumental failure. I mean.
And then of course the Fallout series, right, you got
played the game to like that.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Show, well, even like the whole idea of the Vault
situation is in and of itself a utopia that is
going to lead to a greater utopia on Earth, but
only after complete and total annihilation. That's almost like a
prerequisite sometimes for a proper utopia.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Well, in like today's episode, each one of those vaults
is designed with some kind of experiment, like for utopia.
Could this be a utopia if these parameters are set.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
If we tweak X, we change Y, we futsa Z,
we will build a more perfect world.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
In tonight's episode, we're exploring the story of one man who,
depending on whom you ask, who sought to apply the
scientific method, just like you were saying, Matt to the
construction of civilization is a reasonable dude, he said, instead
of trying out rules on humans, instead of cooking live
with empires, what if we start with rodents? Here are
(03:35):
the facts. Let's start with a Tennessee boy named John
Bumpah or Bumpus Calhoun. That is his middle name. And
we had a discussion about being adults.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
What if we spell it ben?
Speaker 4 (03:53):
All right, Matt b U mp A s S. Let's
go to Nola because Noel wasn't here where we talked
about how would you pronounce this name?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
It's what you do at the club, y'all?
Speaker 2 (04:03):
You bump ass oh.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Another legacy of his work, Perhaps.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
One can only imagine.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
So this guy is a behavioral researcher. The fancy name
for his specific field is ethologist, not an ethnologist, not
an ethicist, but instead someone who studies the behavior of
non human animals.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Oh yes, and this person is highly influential. Let's say
we I think many, several of us, maybe all of us,
learned about him when stuff he should know kind of
like mentioned him way back in the day, almost ten
years ago, on an episode called how zero Population Growth Works.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Yeah, shout out, shout out to our pals Josh, Chuck
and Jerry zero population growth. It's still it's really interesting,
isn't it to go back and hear that episode.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, well I don't know, it just can't. Every once
in a while, I listened to s YSK again and
I'm like, oh man, I love this show.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
They're lovely dudes. I think that was before my time.
Speaker 5 (05:11):
But I'm assuming the zero population growth is some concept
involving eugenics or something, is it, or is it something
a little bit more less evil than that.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Goes into things like enthusiasm or enthusian thoughts.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
The Georgia guidestones y type stuff, right, Yeah, yeah, to
this number Yeah, shout out to the Population Bomb.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
That's a book that also changed the game.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, because it goes back to an early observation by
this the Malthusian originator Lord. Yeah, but the guy who said, hey, uh,
population of humans, it kind of grows exponentially, but the
amount of food that we're able to produce does say,
grow exponentially. It's just got kind of this nice little
(06:03):
line that does increase over time, but not at the
same rate.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Yeah, he looked at he looked at that the dreaded
X Y axis right, and said, there's an inflection point
upon which the S hits the F. And he wasn't
talking about San Francisco, but.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
He but he thought he thought the S was going
to hit the F around the year like I don't know,
like before the year two thousand.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Josh Josh in that episode mentions that he thought, what
year two thousand is when London, like Britain for the
most part, would no longer exist because he will have
torn itself apart.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
So this guy's essentially like an academic doom profit that guy,
Thomas Malthus, Yeah, yeah, and he's he's kind of more
in the realm of economics. Yeah, yeah, but there is
a underlying academic bent to his predictions. He's not just like, fully,
you know, I've had a vision and.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
This is what Yeah, he didn't think God told him, gotcha. Yeah,
he thought it was based on quantitative research and trends
as he saw him at the time, tatas mouthus Uh,
you know him, you know him.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Enthusiastic about it too.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, if you're having a good day and the day's
too good, check out some of his work.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
But back to use that as a term, right, if
you're mouth Susian, then you're sort of like a naysayer
kind of right or.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yes, yeah, well they wouldn't call themselves naysayers. They will
call themselves realist, which is what most pessimistic people do.
There you go, I'm shrugging everybody an audio podcast. Uh
so this back to our guy dot Calhoun. The first
thing we have to understand about his studies is they're
often mischaracterized with the idea like you'll read about it
(07:51):
in pop science or whatever, and the idea is presented
as though Calhoun attempted to construct a perfect society for
various rodents and from there figure out how to create
a better society for humans. This isn't really the case.
What he actually did is remove a lot of the
(08:12):
usual population constraint variables or the mortality creators, because it
wasn't because he wanted a paradise really for rodents. He
was interested instead in the effects of proximity and population
overpopulation in particular sout out in malthews. Maybe we learn
(08:34):
a little bit about him because I didn't know this.
He taught at Emory University, just up the road from US.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Indeed, a graduate of Northwestern, he did teach at Emory
as well as Ohio State, and then he moved with
his wife to Maryland, where he settled down at Johns
Hopkins in March of nineteen forty seven, where he began
a twenty eight month study of a colony of Norwegian
(09:01):
rats in a ten thousand square foot enclosure kind of
sounds like a bit of a barn, you know, an
out outbuilding kind of situation. There were five females in
this cohort that, over the time span, were theoretically able
to produce five thousand healthy offspring for this particular size enclosure,
(09:23):
and Calhoun found that the population never exceeded two hundred
individuals and eventually stabilized at one fifty.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Just really quick brown Norway rats. If you want to
buy them, a male at three weeks old costs one
hundred and nine dollars and twenty nine cents. A female
costs one one hundred and eleven dollars and three cents.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Just a pricey rat.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Shout out secret of nim isn't it?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Wouldn't you say?
Speaker 5 (09:49):
That's I would think I would all have thought that
rats would be typically less expensive than that.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
I mean, you can catch them for free, that's true.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Well, and that's twenty four numbers. We're talking nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
So yeah, it was given rats away at that point.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Right, Well, well it should be noted when we're thinking
about these rats. These are like control rats, right. They
are designed to be almost identical, so that when you
test one like a variable with one and another as
a control, you're actually going to be able to test
that variable without any other intervening variables.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, because they're bread to Like you said, they're bred
to be relatively homogeneous, right, not to the point where
they will become quickly incestuous. But they're also more importantly
bred to not have prominent genetic defects or susceptibility to
certain diseases, and they're kind of same, samey. I also
(10:48):
want to shout out rat intelligence. There's a book that
are pal Robert Lamb and I really love called Rats
Observations on the History and Habitat of the City These
most Unwanted Inhabitants, and it focuses on rats in New
York and it's amazing. It's a really weird read. They
have huge balls, by the way, rats huge balls literally
(11:11):
and figured yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Speaking of and also not speaking of, just one one
more statistic here with brown Norway rats from this specific
catalog that I'm looking at, you can get a lactating
rat with litter for six hundred and ninety three ten cents.
That is it again, litter is that I don't know,
but it's a Brown Norway rat.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
It's you try rat milk. Just wondering.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Well, I guess what I'm saying is for these types
of tests you can get very specific with the kind
of rat, be like what state that rat is in,
how many weeks all that rat is, if it's already
no longer breeding, it's it's just crazy.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
So it's speaking weird stuff right. The technology is not
here yet for Calhoun to scope in to this level,
to twenty twenty four level of rat eugenics, for lack
of a better term, But he finds something mysterious and
it haunts the world today. Like you were saying, no,
(12:14):
this enclosure could theoretically house safely five thousand rats in
this population, but it stabilizes at one point fifty, just
one hundred and fifty rats, So we ask what gives.
He also notices these rats are not forming a little
rat nation state. Instead, they're splitting up into colonies the
(12:37):
size into colonies of about a dozen, which is the
size that would naturally occur in the wild before these
different mortality variables kicked in predators, disease, lack of food,
et cetera. And he's thinking, well, why I took away
all the stresses. You know, literally they are living the
(12:58):
best life. They're just in a cage despite all their rage,
and later he stopped. Later he moves to Maine and
he continues to study these Norway rats until about nineteen
fifty one. Eventually the family goes back to Maryland. His
studies continue. He moves into other rodents. We're going to
(13:20):
mention an outfit called the National Institute of Mental Health.
Pretty often it is indeed the secret of NIM. And indeed,
what film It's true. I didn't get it when I just.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Saw the film. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's exact.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
So he did. NIM gets some land outside of a
town called Poolsville, Maryland, and he headed a couple of projects.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
There.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
He began his most famous series of experiments, not on
the rats, but on mice. And he built these different
fallout vaults for mice, and he called them, in a
burst of humility universes, and it's a high fluted name,
but besides is astonishing. He they wanted to see what
(14:10):
happened when rodents lived without the stresses of life in
the wild. Limitless food, limitless water, I kid you not
little rat condos, little mouse condos.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Well, imagine this is this enclosure. And remember the first
one that when he was testing earlier, he had this
huge ten thousand square foot area where he's watching all
the different mice kind of grouping off like that. He
wanted to see them in these much smaller little spaces, right,
as you said, with limitless resources. But if you imagine
(14:44):
the starter mice right, that began in that quote universe
that he created. All of the preceding mice that are
born from those original mice only know that thing, that
enclosure that has the walls up that they can't climb over, right,
So it really is the entirety of their universe.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
They've never been outside of Plato's cavern, you know what
I mean. They're still plugged into the matrix from the
cradle to the grave. That's the excellent observation. And these
were all This was all again not because the guy
loves happy rats and happy mice. He wants to learn
about population density and how it affects behavior. So he says,
(15:26):
I will build for the utopia. What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything. This is the story of Universe twenty five.
We'll get into it after a word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy. Let's go back to this
(15:48):
really interesting thing that you said at the top, Noll,
the concept of utopia. You said, well, it always feels
like it becomes a dystopia. It's so weird because back
in fifteen sixteen, the word was coined as a kind
of like snarky, mean.
Speaker 5 (16:06):
Joke, like a thing that's not attainable almost right, like
it's it's impossible. It was coined by Sir Thomas Moore
in fifteen sixty. He created the word from the Greek
words for not and place, u for not and topos
for place, so it meant nowhere. It's a liminal space.
(16:31):
It's a non existent thing. So before the dawn of
monern science, the guy who coined the word that we
use to describe a perfect society was literally thumbing his
nose at the concept in its entirety. But pretty funny, guys,
You guys, what if he's.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Really talking about that infinite nothingness that we all experience
upon the moment of death, before the light of everything
comes to gather us.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
You know what I'm saying. It all ends into infinity.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
When you write an email into the void here and
sometimes the void writes back.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Yeah, I mean sometimes you get a subsystem undeliverable.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Message back as well. Maybe he really is a good thing,
as what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
Guys, welcome to the emptiness. Charlco's experiments seemed in a
weird way to bear out Moore's joke, and we don't
know what he thought about the work of Sir Thomas Moore.
But from these rats he moved on. He couldn't always
call him Universes, so that was very fun, and we'll
(17:30):
see he loves fun language. He originally called the The
Mice Experiments Mortality Inhibiting Environment for mice. And like you
were saying, it's July of nineteen sixty eight when he
introduces a breeding group such that it could avoid inbreeding
(17:54):
into a new habitat called Universe twenty five. And you know,
again we're saying Universe is a little bit ambitious for
this one because it's not super big.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
Yeah, and I'm sure I Fallt was inspired by a
lot of things, Like there's there's so many examples of
these types of isolated communities and experiments, whether they be
with animals or you know, prison experiments or whatever. But
I can't help but think Universe twenty five vault one
to eleven, you know what I mean, Like it really
does have a nice connective tissue.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Well, again, as we said before, he went from ten
thousand square feet in nineteen forty seven to nine square
feet of metal.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Makes yeah, it is much smaller. But again, as you
pointed out, so astuteley, the mice evolved don't know this.
Their kids, their progenies certainly will never know this nine
foot square it's a metal pan. The sides are about
four point five feet high, which is not really a
(19:00):
huge problem for rats depending on the surface, but it's
pretty difficult for mice yes, to summit that well.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And I think it's the top seventeen inches if you've
imagined from the height top of this thing down seventeen
inches is like just bare wall that is very difficult
to scale.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
So you can climb up a little bit right to
get to your mouse condo.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, it's designed that way right to go up to
the condos, which is weird.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, nesting boxes, food hoppers, water dispensers. It is like
it is like a mouse episode of Cribs. To date
ourselves with MTV references, and there were no predators obviously.
There's just this benevolent yet distant human thing that functions
(19:51):
as God for these guys. Every four to eight weeks
they get hit with their equivalent of you know, a
natural disaster, a climate this event, because that's when the
enclosure is cleaned, you know what I mean. So maybe
and we don't know, if we don't know enough about
their cognition to know whether this became a story they
(20:12):
told each other about.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
We also don't know whether they could predict the coming
of the cleaning.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Oh, plow the.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Plow because it did have to be cleaned out on
a regular basis, right, I mean that was one of
the things.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
Yeah, there's still I mean they're like the top tier
lap mice, but they still poop. We haven't figured out
how to make mice not poop.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Do you think that like mice in this kind of
situation have a sense of what's going on outside, you know,
or like do they do they look at I know,
I know we couldn't possibly you know, get inside the
head or try to simulate the cognition of rats, but
like these these forces that come in and remove them
(20:58):
and clean them and then put them back, you think
they look at them as like godlike forces, you know,
I don't know, alien abductions.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It'd be, yeah, some kind of weird part of just
aspect of the universe that happens. But there's no human.
You're not actually interacting with the human at any time
whose arms are coming down and cleaning things, right, Yeah,
it's just these disembodied limbs that descend into your world
and then you know, wipe off the surfaces or whatever.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
They probably recognize smells, I'm thinking, but to your point,
it's probably just a thing in their environment. I do
imagine they are intelligent enough to envision something past the wall, right,
because they are naturally exploring creatures, right, so they without
knowing what is out there. They many of them attempted
(21:52):
to escape at some point, especially if stuff did not
work out as mouse society collapsed, which is exactly what happened.
The only obstacle in Universe twenty five and the preceding
experiments was space. So you got these eight mice in
this enclosure. At first, their vault is huge. It's designed
(22:12):
to hold as many as people round up to four thousand.
But I think of the original research it was something
like three and forty mice, which is a lot of mice.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Well, and it took them a long time to get
acclimated to that space too, right, those original eight mice,
the four breeding pairs, they like, didn't breed for a
long time. They were just kind of like, what the
heck is this place? I don't understand this, this is wrong,
why are we here? And then eventually they just gave
in and or you know whatever, they whatever change occurred
(22:45):
cognitively that they went, okay, we will begin nesting, we
will begin breeding.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
It was better than the breeding pens from which they originated.
I can only imagine it's definitely a lot more room
because they weren't caught in the wild.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Right exactly, But it did take one hundred and four
days before they actually settled down to reproduce.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
And when the population began reproducing, they were doubling every
fifty five days. So this j curve growth for a while.
And by day three fifteen, so we're not quite a
year in the population has reached six hundred and twenty mice, gangbusters,
(23:24):
tickety boo. Everything's going well. Until around day three fifteen.
It was like some invisible switch just clicked and the
population growth, the rate of growth, not the actual population.
Yet the rate of growth declined and now it was
only doubling every one hundred and forty five days instead
of every fifty five days. And with that, in step,
(23:48):
the social structure broke down. There's a great article by
writer Esther inglis Arcu for Io nine or Gizmoto now
that sums it up and it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
Yeah, to read from that piece. At the peak population,
most mice spent every living second in the company of
hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares,
waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few
females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did
seem to simply forget about their babies. They'd move half
(24:21):
their litter away from danger and forget the rest.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Huh.
Speaker 5 (24:26):
Sometimes they'd drop and abandon a baby while they were
carrying it. Guy, guys, are you familiar with the concept
of nesting behavior? Yes, this is this kind of figure
into that in a way like I mean, I don't know,
like this is maybe anomalous nesting behavior, or I guess
it's a situation that once it kind of balloons beyond
(24:47):
a certain point like that that I guess, uh, motherly
drive kind of gets weaker.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Or something like what is this? What's what's going on here?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I would point people to Population Density and Social Pathology,
which was written by mister John Calhoun, and he actually
has in this you can find it online, by the way,
as in PDA form. He's got illustrations basically of what
you're talking about nol like the typical nesting behavior of
(25:21):
mice in a population like this, how they build their nest,
what they do, you know, when they're in an enclosed
space and they've got the family in there, and they
you know, get all of the materials and arrange it
in such a way that the mice can kind of gather.
But then what was happening then where it was completely different.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Well, and a lot of nesting behavior too, involves protecting
the offspring from predators. So when you're in a situation
where you don't have any natural enemies, you know, I
wonder if that kind of freaks it out a little
better and it causes a little bit of the change
in the way these processes happen.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
It gets even creepier and at a precipitous rate. And
we'll get to we'll get to the paper that kind
of changed popular science. Really we should also mention just
an example of what I think is a little bit creepy.
Calhoun was also particularly interested in a subgroup of rodents
(26:19):
that appeared inevitably in these universes. He called them, tell
me if you think this is creepy, folks. He called
them the beautiful ones. They're like the eloy in H. G.
Wells is the time machine, remember the time machine? Like
the surface dwelling vegetarians. It's not a perfect comparison because
(26:42):
the eloi obviously reproduce, but the beautiful ones do not.
They got like they post one male, one male rodent
outside and then the rest retreat into a secluded nesting
spot in the habitat, usually elevated, I think, and they
(27:04):
just eat, groom themselves and sleep. They don't fight, they
don't care for they're young. They don't reproduce their immune
in a way to the social collapse that occurs, which
is so weird.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
So way they would do that.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Yeah, they just checked out. It reminds me a little
bit of was it in Japan, Hikiko Mori or there's
some other country. I think it's China, where there's a
group of people who have done what they call the
lay down movement. They just check out a society. I
think it's too stressful. I'll do the bare minimum. But
(27:43):
is that better than what's happening to the rest of
the road in population wherein there's cannibalism, there's hyper non
consensual pan sexualism, and there's random violence.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, in a roughly ninety six percent mortality rate or
newly born mice.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Yes, yeah, The last surviving mouse in Universe twenty five
is born on A six hundred right, and the population
then has reached two two d and twenty mice. The
experiment again set up for four thousand, but they just
as a society, they stopped. They stopped mousing. And how
(28:25):
do we explain this strange, deeply disturbing trend? What made
this perfect world so intolerably terrible that the test group
failed to reach full capacity even once? Not even once?
We could dive into it after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 5 (28:46):
Danan another line, they're surge pricing in the shoe store.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Now, sorry, Bud. You know out is there are more
and more people in the one shoe store, and most
of them also have two feet.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
I just can't take this. I've had it.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
It's enough to make you go. Of course, Going Bonkers
is available on the premium app version. Also, I know
what you mean. Every day I wake up and I.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Think is today? The day?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Is today? The day I bring the bomb to work?
And in this pointless sissaphy and charade.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
Something troubling you friends. Shoes are just hats for feet.
You know, you could also go to a haberdashery.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
It's not even the shoes, it's just look around. It's
all gotten out of hand. Wherever I go, there's a crowd,
a line, an app. I can't remember the last time
I was able to just be alone.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Well, if this civilization is too crowded, which we all understand,
then why not try a universe?
Speaker 3 (29:40):
All your Oh is that another app? Oh?
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Much more than that, gentlemen, what if I told you
right now you could have a universe to yourself, the universe?
Why oh you neverse?
Speaker 5 (29:56):
Why?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (29:56):
Universe?
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Yes, the universe. Think of it as a planned community,
the most exclusive sort, with a population of one. You
gone are the days of competing for resources, ideology, or
the ability to feel seen in society. The universe provides
you with an all encompassing, self contained reality. You simply
agree to a small bit of blood harvesting and DNA sampling,
(30:19):
undergo a small procedure for the helmet, and voila gay
blood helmet procedure, I said, and voila. Imagine a world
in which you never feel rushed, in which other people
only exist. Should you allow them to do so a world,
a universe with no dissenting opinions, no uncomfortable truths. Every
social media comment agrees with you, Every email is a
(30:41):
yes and right on. Everything you want is provided, sustaining
your base needs.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Every sam in.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
You don't want to hear the rest.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Not really, it sounds great.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
Can I have a shoe store in my yo universe?
You can imagine anything you want here?
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Don't you mean there?
Speaker 5 (31:00):
No?
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Don't you see friends? You're here right now. The universe
is in practice responsible for, but legally intimified, and that's
not liable for the following possib side effects isolation, madness,
the condition Mega two portpoise complaint, social media fatigue, echo chambers,
bio spheres of mind, grandamact of violence, loss of sexual
apetite loss and general appetite loss, perpective, lost memory, loss
of precognitive ability, inability to pare for others, sociopathy, psychopathy,
hyperflaglens self for a be self healthy is great of
(31:21):
bleed necktang due to alleged coment effect. Currently not approved
in the following states Georgia, Hawaii, Idahos, state of happiness,
and peaceful state of mind.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
The universe is a subsidiary of Illumination Global Unlimited.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
So let's return to something you mentioned just a bit earlier, map,
which is the revolutionary nineteen sixty two paper issued in
Scientific American wherein wherein he this is still pre Universe
twenty five, this is still Norway rat era. He introduces
(32:01):
the lay public to the idea of what are called
behavioral sinks.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
So here's an excerpt.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
Many female rats are unable to carry the pregnancy to
full term or to survive delivery of their litters if
they did. An even greater number after successfully giving birth
fell short in their maternal functions. So yeah, I mean again,
we're seeing this weird erosion of what are typically the
strongest of biological drives. You know what, I just I'm
(32:32):
sorry I keep saying about what what gives this is wild.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Let's actually jump through the article really quickly, because this
is kind of what I wanted to mention when we
were talking about nesting behavior. If you go down, I
think it's page one forty six in the original like
Scientific American, you can find it with those illustrations of
the nesting behavior. I just want to read the normal one.
And then one of you guys read the read the
what was happening what we're describing here, So normal maternal
(33:00):
behavior among these rat populations would include building a fluffy,
well shaped nest for the young in an enclosed space,
in one of those little condos that we were describing earlier,
and it would be flattened by the weight of the
animal's bodies, but it still offers ample protection and warmth
for their tiny young, you know, little rat bodies. And
(33:20):
when they've got this kind of environment, the offspring are
generally what's termed here weaned, right, and they are able
to leave the nest after a certain amount of time.
But what was happening right, Yeah, about two weeks? So
what was happening during these experiments with these behavioral sinks.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Yeah, this is where Calhoun introduces abnormal behavior, which is look,
he anthropomorphizes a lot. And when you see this, especially
if you have kids, it's kind of heartbreaking because the
abnormal behavior quote shown by females exposed to the pressures
of population density, includes failure to build adequate nest. And
(34:02):
you can see the drawing on the left of the
diagram of a quote unquote disturbed female not like a
bad mouse or not a bad rat, but instead, pressured
by this increasingly surreal environment, she start quote she started
to make a nest, but never finished it. The drawing
(34:22):
on the right shows her young About two weeks later,
they're leaving the nest, as we use the old cliche appropriately,
but they are not old enough to survive alone. And
this is where the ninety six percent infant mortality rate
statistic comes from. You can also see when says starting
(34:43):
to make a nest, the bedding they're provided with, it's
like these rectangular strips, and in the normal nesting behavior,
it's a hoarder's house. You know.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
It literally becomes what you would imagine a nest would
look like if you've ever seen a bird's nest or something,
but with these strips of fabric.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
And in the abnormal behavior we're looking at like it's terrible.
It makes me think of neglected children because that's what happened. Yeah,
i'manthropomorphizing anyway. Yeah, it's terrible. And the world that these
young mice who can't survive on their own are entering
is a very violent, chaotic places is hit in the
(35:24):
f in Universe twenty five, a lot of the largely
male population has disturbing behavior at a rate that far
exceeds what would happen in the wild. Rats can practice
cannibalism if they have to. These rats don't have to
practice cannibalism, but they're doing it. They're super into it.
(35:45):
They're also banging literally everything, sexually, sang everything, without regard
to the normal constraints of reproduction or the normal goals.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I think maybe that's a big thing. It seems like
the goal is gone now, right, so now it's just Oh,
I was going to say, do what thou wilst? But
that's not But that's not even it. It's like it's
frenetic behavior. It's like it's agitated.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
Ain't always right, And it's not like there's some sort
of hedonistic drive. You know, mice don't understand, you know,
Satanism or the idea of do what thou wilst per se.
It's a a biological imperative that's kind of been flipped
in a weird and disturbing way. It's not like they're, hey,
(36:34):
let's just just go ham and like living like a
weird cannibalistic hippie commune to get you know whatever.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I think, Ben, you put it really well, like the
goal the original I don't know, I was gonna, I
was gonna. I think you said it right, Like just
the goals, the things that you have as as mouse,
those are no longer applicable because of the pressures you're
existing in.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Yeah, and we're using rat and mouse here interchangeably, because
because the trends are consistent across the universes. That's the
scary thing. They're rat in the mouse. They're close enough
that the stories are beat for beat, very similar. And
this like what do you call it? This impetus that
(37:19):
we're talking about when when you're an environment where that
impetus is somehow curtailed or interfered with, we see the
over and over again. We see the population generally goes
into behavioral directions. A lot of people, like we're saying,
see now I'm competing it, they go, they go ham
(37:40):
you know, they're almost like the Reavers in Serenity and yeah,
and the other folks are the ones where the packs
virus works spoilers.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
Yeah, it's so easy to anthropomorphize this and like say
something like they became evil, right, but that's that's not right,
you know. There there's just something in their coating that
no longer applied, and they just kind of went berserk
because like the normal like society, sociological and biological things
(38:11):
that kind of kept them acting like what they are
rats and mice no longer applied, and therefore they're they're programming,
for lack of a better term, didn't know how to
operate anymore. So it just kind of like it's like
they short circuited almost right, well, man.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
And you're it's so it's so confusing to me because
you're not necessarily competing for the food when the food
comes out, right, there's ample food. They're always been dead.
Speaker 5 (38:35):
Though, right there, it's cannibalizing the dead. It's not like
they're are they killing each other and then eating too?
Oh yeah, sorry, Matt, I just had to please continue.
That's wild.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
But what I'm saying is like they could have just
eaten the food, but there's so many of them it
is almost I don't know. I think maybe that's why
it's so confusing to me. You could always go and
get water, but you got to now like either wait
in line or fight to go get the water. But
is this there? It'll always be there, you just got
to get to it now.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Is this the kind of study that would probably be
looked at a bit of scance today, like this is
a little on the immoral sides or on the on
ethical side.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
You can still do stuff like this. It's because they're rodents.
You can still do stuff like this depending on the country.
But also this research, as we'll see, gets weaponized and
used as a metaphor for all kinds of things, perhaps incorrectly.
We do know there's scholarship suggesting maybe this is not
(39:37):
a problem of population density so much as a problem
of distribution of that population.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Right.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
So, and we see things like this happening in the world.
There are parts of the world that are struggling to
maintain a population. At the same time, there are parts
of the world where the population is exploding in a
way that that civilization is not prepared for.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Right.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
So there's I mean, it gets into this really weird, controversial,
possibly evil math. But we know that we know that
what would happen is think of it like a gen pop. Right,
You're in a jail. You can choose to go into
your own cell, right, you can be by yourself in
(40:21):
that cell, or you can go down to gen pop. Right,
where everything is where's party time, but not excellent and
the rats, Calhoun hypothesizes, they began to associate feeding with
being around a big crowd of rats. They didn't understand
(40:41):
that they could eat on their own, which is fascinating
from a very ethics aside, that is fascinating and chilling.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
So these and then it becomes a learned behavior because
let's imagine you are a successful rat or mouse that
made it into the general population after me madgusting, you
watch all of the rats gathered together in this huge
mass when it's time to eat. So you go, well,
I guess that's that's what happens when it's time for
(41:11):
me to eat now, and then that behavioral pattern then
passes down as like, well, that's what this is what
society does, so this is what I do. So yeah,
this is this is what I'm supposed to do.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Listen here, mouse, son, you'll eat like I ate and
your father and my father before you in a crowd,
ready to fight and maybe eat another animal.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't a group of older mice
hanging on the corner. So I remember when we used
to eat.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
I remember that just eight of us in the beginning.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Uphill both ways, uphill both ways, dead all the way.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
So he also we should note, as he said, he
had a lot of anthropomorphizing, and you can see it
in the language he uses, which is purposely chosen to
communicate with the public because it occurs in a larger context.
He calls the dwelling places tower blocks basically apartments. He
calls them walk up apartments.
Speaker 5 (42:14):
He was sort of a British parlance, right, tower blocks
like flat blocks. Yeah, we're referring to what we might
over here call projects or like you know, government.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Yeah, that's kind of how he's talking you. And he's
doing that to draw draw out this comparison to human
society in the time of which he's writing and conducting science.
He also calls some groups juvenile, delinquents and dropouts. He's
actively inviting us to think in this manner. So it
should be no surprise that human civilization, not just scientists
(42:50):
and academics and ethologists, human civilization in general, learns about
this stuff, primarily through the Scientific American article, and they
immediately say, well, what does this tell us about ourselves?
And what does this tell us about Thomas Malthus. While
this is occurring, there has been a bevy of academics
(43:13):
who might as well be wearing sandwich boards that say
the end is nigh, you know, ecologist, economists, philosophers, tycoons.
Tycoons love Malthusian thought, and we.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Do have some good examples.
Speaker 5 (43:30):
First off, William Vote and Fairfield Osborne were two ecologists
who warned against the growing population putting pressure on natural resources,
on food, and that was as early as nineteen forty eight.
So people have been like sounding the alarms for the
(43:51):
stuff for a long time and it ain't getting.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
A whole heck of a lot better.
Speaker 5 (43:56):
We're being completely honest, and it does feel like, you know,
if we're being dire about our situation that we find
ourselves in or think about what's going to be the
tipping point in like a big, you know, high water
mark moment in humanity, it's kind of.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Be a war over resources.
Speaker 5 (44:13):
I mean, it's pretty clear that's that's the one thing
that we can't really make more of, and people who
have control and have power is going to start hoarding them,
leaving you know, the lesser of us out in the cold.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Well, yeah, fear filled Osborne. This dude, this is a
eugenesis is born in the eighteen hundreds, like died in
nineteen thirty five, and he was talking about it back then,
and as eugenicist he had some ideas. I bet he did,
had it takes takes, So you know, it's weird. It's
a weird thing because it is a cautionary subject where
if you start looking at this too much and you're
(44:49):
applying whatever, I don't know what, we would even call them,
your own biases that you've got from growing up wherever
you grew up, and with people you're around, it is dangerous.
Speaker 4 (45:02):
Yeah, And again we have this oh gosh, you know what,
I'm just realizing, I'm thinking through Osborne was alive when
the Great Depression hit, so he probably died thinking called it. Yeah.
And then in nineteen sixty eight, in the same sort
(45:23):
of social milieu or context, Paul Erlick publishes the population Bomb.
It is polemical, it is an alarmist work. It is
meant to shake you when you read it. And he
says it's common famine, resource wars, the end of days.
So the public is primed to think in these terms.
(45:46):
You know, they witnessed horrific wars, they've seen what happens
when the economic regimes collapse. So when Calhoun comes out
in Scientific American, which is legit publication, they are totally
vibing with it. He says, look overpopulation means social collapse
(46:07):
followed by extinction. The rodents are not so different from
the primates. And the more I repeat this experiment, the
more predictable and inevitable the outcome seems. By the time
he got to Universe twenty five, the most popular or
most well known one, he had a formula, a death
(46:28):
squared formula, which we have to go into. But basically
he was thinking of the concept of second death. So
first death being the physical death of an individual, second
death being the larger death of a society. Very fun
at parties, I imagine, But I don't know. That's the question.
(46:49):
Let's a pickle we're still working with. Can we apply
this to humans? Calhoun was certain this could also be
a warning call for human society, no matter how smart
we think we are, he reasoned, because he did count
himself as human. You know, he's like, I'm in this
universe too, he said, No matter what happens, once the
(47:11):
number of individuals capable of fulfilling certain roles. Once that
exceeds the number of roles available, basically, once there are
too many cars for the parking lot of a civilization,
chaos reigns.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
Oh yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Mean, like students graduating from elite colleges don't have jobs
to fill, students graduating from non elite colleges don't have
jobs to fill anymore, and something like AI comes along
and fills all those roles.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Yeah, Or like the fact that Star Trek sort of
glosses over the fact how they went from a post
work economy after living through a post worker economy.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, they don't put.
Speaker 4 (47:56):
A lot of that on the air.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
But it's just worked, doubt, you know.
Speaker 4 (48:01):
Just worked out. Let's go to the Holo deck, he writes.
He writes beautifully about this, and I don't think he's
trying to be a jerk. I think he is trying
to present what he sees as the science, like we've
got again. You can read the full paper or the
full article online today and it is worth your time.
(48:24):
But he concludes that when you get to that too
many cars for the parking spot situation, the only result
is violence and disruption of social organization. And he's not
arguing ideology here very important to note because it does
get weaponized by people with different ideologies. He's just saying
(48:50):
when he says social organization, he's talking about the way
rodents usually work, the way they usually self organize, And
now they're doing stuff that is not normal. Social pessimist, Malfusians,
whatever we want to call them, they loved this stuff.
This was to them an inarguable rule of the world
(49:14):
of reality. This was like the law of gravity for
living things. Trippy stuff.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
So I got lost in this article from Cabinet Magazine.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
They've got the great illustrations too.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
It's pictures of the actual structure that does resemble some
kind of prison to me when you just look at
this tiny, little nine foot squired thing, I don't know,
a great picture of John Calhoun, and he looks troubled too.
In his face. He's just like, oh God, just drop
outnice Haggard.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
Also, do you guys remember a while back when I
was living I was living in that place right next
to our old office, and the courtyard of that looked
very universe twenty five to me.
Speaker 5 (50:00):
Oh yeah, with the weird like aatrium, the plants and stuff.
It kind of felt like like pretend outside.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
Yeah, yeah, we have outside at home. That's what it was.
So look, he is he is perhaps mischaracterized pretty often
because he argued that there were good guys, and that
part of his research I think gets glossed over. He
was very interested in something he called the high social
velocity mice. These were individual mice who responded to these
(50:33):
new overpopulation pressures by switching things up by doing interesting,
very varied behaviors, like they would alter, you know, if
there's a big gen pop crowd at feeding time, they
would move. In the night, they would move when the
other mice were less active or whatever their version of
night was. They would team up and create alliances that
(50:56):
ordinarily would not exist. So he found great hope in that,
and he says, look, humanity is a positive animal, creative,
capable of design. Maybe we can out teck this damning
doomsday prediction for society.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I don't know, but it's weird. There's another article from
Oh gosh, that's not the Vox article I was looking at.
I'm sorry, guys, The Smithsonian. The appendix. The appendix has
an interesting article on this, specifically on John Calhoun, and
they discuss or this article, at least in cite it
(51:37):
so you can look it up. It's titled Space Cadets
and rat Utopias by Laura Jane Martin. So this concept
of space cadets is something that John Calhoun was really
into because, at least according to the article, according to
other writings about him, he wanted this to be a
positive thing. He wanted humans to look at it and go, hey,
we can fix these major problems we've got going on.
(51:58):
Even if population seems to be this doomsday you know,
on the horizon somewhere, if we're aware of it, we
can fix all the things that lead to it. And
why not as one of those fixes, let's focus on
getting the heck off Earth.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:15):
Shout out to his partner in that letter, Dull Duhl,
I love you mentioning that because he has the analogy that,
as far as we know, the analogy he did not
make but would be apparent to those of us in
the cage today is that he's like a climate change person. Right,
(52:36):
He's like a climatologist but for society, and he say, look,
we're reaching this behavioral sink point, but we're not at
the past. We're not past the point of no return, right,
we can still mitigate and perhaps even repair the tendencies
we don't like. And Space Cadets is really interesting. It's
(52:56):
one of those technocratic, very optimistic think tanks, you know, like,
if we want to get to space, it's going to
take all of the experts we can possibly think of.
You know, let's get the architects, but let's also make
sure we have the psychiatrist, you know what I mean.
I think it's fascinating. I don't know too much about
(53:18):
the Space Cadets to be candid, but I do know
that I do know that he had great faith in humanity.
And he said, you know, maybe the rats are breaking
down because they don't know what to do. The mice
are breaking down because they don't know what to do.
But the history of humanity is a history of innovation,
(53:41):
of deviation from tradition.
Speaker 6 (53:43):
And norm Yeah, man, so far, he paused and said,
so far, guys.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
We should point out the what do they call them?
Some of those guys. They refer to them as neo Malthusian,
like the new generation, you know. And I didn't know
until I listen to that stuff. You should know episode
that there there are things I want to shout out.
They did in their episode. They shouted out a thing
called Population Connection that I had never heard of before,
(54:17):
which is a website you can go to right now
that is basically a spin off from well it was.
It was formerly known as ZPG or Zero Population Growth,
and it's this fairly large organization that focuses specifically on
eliminating all non planned births because theoretically you could bring
(54:44):
the numbers of like human replacement, you know that, like
what two point one berths per couple or whatever that
you know, old thing is that was based on, like
how to replace human beings.
Speaker 5 (54:57):
Well, that's downright on American The accidental pregnancy is a
foundation of our society.
Speaker 4 (55:03):
Holder. Well, well it's one am you go home? I'm
in love with her?
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah. Well again, I don't mean to speak for Population
Connection because I don't know that much about them. Sure,
going off of what their website says, yeah, population connection
dot org and what was spoken about on that episode,
But it does seem like they were focused heavily on
empowering people to know about pregnancy, how it occurs, how
to prevent it, and like providing resources basically to people
(55:33):
across the planet. We're not talking about one place. We're
talking like make sure everybody knows exactly what to do
and how to prevent pregnancy until they are ready for it.
Speaker 5 (55:41):
Because isn't it interesting how sex said is still in
a lot of ways controversial, Like you know, it doesn't
feel like it's uniformly applied where it seems like, you know,
at that age, it's probably the perfect time to empower
young people with that kind of information. But it's like
it's cringe for some reason, or like parents freaks them out,
But it really is probably smartling, just like we don't
(56:03):
teach kids about how to manage their money, and you know,
it's weird.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
Also, yet numerous studies prove a political, non ideological objective.
Studies prove that when you empower, when you empower women
or people who are able to carry a child with
UH with sexual education, objective sexual education and that fire
and brimstone stuff, then you will you will see positive,
(56:32):
substantial benefits to the society in which those people exist
and their quality of life, access to education, all of
it improves. It's better for everyone. I do want to
and I'm saying that to make up for my crass
last call at the bar joke and you find love
where you find it.
Speaker 5 (56:50):
I would like to walk back now, walk back, but
I said it's down right on an American to cut
down on unplanned pregnancies. I say that as a dig
on myself. I was in a committed relationship, but our
pregnancy was absolutely not planned, and I wouldn't have it
any other way. I couldn't be happier being the father
of my amazing kid of fifteen now. But it certainly
(57:14):
wasn't at the time something that we, you know, intended.
But also I very much knew about all the things,
and I was just still kind of a dumb dumb
or we just weren't being careful because maybe it wasn't
like the worst thing that could happen, but we definitely
didn't do it on purpose.
Speaker 4 (57:29):
I have a distinct memory now going to personally or
I have a distinct memory. I'm going to shout out
Coach C where I was at the time. Our sex
ad program in a relatively conservative part of the world
was the extra side work assigned to the football coach,
(57:51):
and it had a football voice, and so he knew
he took us all in his history segregated by sex
I'm sure he had to do social studies at some point,
but he's said they segregated the cohort by the biological
sex or whatever. And so he came out and he
had like one of those old pull down posters. It
(58:11):
was a diagram and he had like a little, you know,
a pointer thingy, and he goes, we all adults, and
someone's like, we're in seventh grade, and he goes, shut up,
this is a penis. But he dropped trou No, no,
he was only playing to the diagram guy. But but
(58:34):
we're saying, you know, again to your original point, Matt,
education and powers, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (58:40):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (58:41):
And that's why knowledge his power is a cliche and
Calhoun is onto something when he is just trying to
inform people, and he's been mischaracterized as a pessimist. A
lot of people on very extreme spectrums of social thinking
have weaponized his research in a way that he probably
(59:02):
would not agree with were he alive today. But also
on the way, man, if the afterlife is real, and
if you're listening, doctor Calhoun, thank you so much for
all the fiction you created too, and step with you know,
the crazy real world plans and with that Thank you
so much for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (59:22):
We think there's a lot here, a lot more to
dig into, and we touched on a lot of things
that mayrove you may have personal experience with in your
own life, in your own neck of these global woods.
So let us know. Would be very interested to hear
your favorite pieces of fiction inspired by Universe twenty five,
and we also love to hear, love to read your
(59:45):
take on what this does or does not apply about
human civilization. We try to be easy to find.
Speaker 5 (59:50):
Online conspiracy stuff on Facebook, on x FK, Twitter, and
on YouTube. Check out the latest stalin of George Washington's
time travel adventures on Instagram and TikTok. We're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
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