Planned Episode 7/18/2026

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Uncovering the Truth Behind Utopia, AI, and Mouse Experiments
Date: July 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu and his co-hosts dive into the societal implications of artificial intelligence, abundance, and the fundamental human need for purpose. Using the famous "mouse utopia" experiments as a lens, they debate what happens when material needs are removed and AI can provide for all. They contrast these lessons with current debates in the culture around work, meaning, and the rise of AI. The episode features notable contributions from Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist), as well as co-hosts Ryan and Drew, as they work through themes of evolutionary psychology, collapse, and how individuals—and society—can thrive in a coming era of abundance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Coming Age of AI & Abundance

Timestamps: 01:00–03:28

• Tom opens with reflection on AI’s advance, societal disruptions, regulation, and how abundance might remove many traditional forms of work.
  • Tom: "All of us are going to have to figure out what our price prognostication is about, where AI is going... One of the most profound things we’re all going to have to begin to create a mental map of is what is going to happen to society when AI is better than us at everything." [01:00]
• Raises the possibilities: utopia (unlimited abundance, universal high income) vs. risks of meaninglessness and collapse.
• Discusses taxation and regulatory challenges ("How do we tax AI?").

2. The Evolutionary Impulse Toward Purpose

Timestamps: 03:28–08:18

• Ryan challenges the assumption that a job is necessary: "Do you have to have a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? ...Wouldn’t enough people figure out what to do with their time?" [02:56]
• Tom counters:
  • Humans are "evolutionarily compelled" to do meaningful work—even with material needs met, lack of purpose leads to depression and malaise.
  • Uses Joe Rogan as an example of someone who self-imposes hardship but warns "the vast majority of humanity will get hit by a bus of untold proportions."
  • Introduces the mouse utopia experiment as a parallel for what society faces.

3. Mouse Utopia: What Happens When Needs Are Met?

Timestamps: 08:18–21:10

• Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist) introduces the John Calhoun "Universe 25" mouse experiment—mice with abundant resources ultimately collapse.
  • "This was the era of the most rapid population growth ever. And people were really worried about what the implications for that might be..." [13:57]
  • The experiment: Mice placed in ideal conditions; population explodes, then social and biological dysfunction emerge.
• Tom ties mouse behavior to human evolution, especially the importance of hidden, non-obvious pressures and evolutionary algorithms.

4. The Breakdown of Social Structure

Timestamps: 21:10–29:36

• The emergence of “the beautiful ones” (mice focused only on self-grooming; lack of social function or sexual interest).
• Discussion of how, without challenge or necessity, behaviors become distorted.
  • Tom: “If AI or anything else makes all of [our needs] go away, then some other algorithm... begins encroaching into that time... your need to have an obsession ...begins getting filled with some bullshit...” [21:10]
• Parallels drawn to modern human trends: increased narcissism, shifting gender roles, and breakdown of traditional pressures.

5. Emotional Dysregulation & Generational Decline

Timestamps: 26:27–36:43

• Rudyard details how both male and female mice become dysfunctional; socialization breaks down; aggressive, withdrawn, or zombie-like mice emerge.
• Tom compares this to his own periods of emotional dysregulation and the importance of routine, purpose, and human connection.
• Drew interjects: “We have communities of other bedrotters who we can kind of group up together...” [29:03]
• Tom explains the protective role of the human prefrontal cortex, but warns: “kids are super vulnerable because their prefrontal cortex isn’t even finished developing...”

6. Collapse & Lessons for Humanity

Timestamps: 36:43–43:23

• Lynch summarizes collapse: distinct dysfunctional groups emerge, culminating in total social and reproductive collapse.
  • "There are groups obsessed with social approval... a second group just went numb… a third group became incredibly aggressive…” [36:43]
• Tom draws analogies to contemporary culture:
  • “Hey, trying to tear down social norms. That sounds familiar. People that want to see western civilization completely destroyed. Hopefully that is not an unfamiliar refrain.” [38:20]
• Lays out the biological basis for why abundance may not bring happiness, but instead new forms of dysfunction unless mitigated.

7. The Four Paths Forward in an Age of Abundance

Timestamps: 44:03–47:58

• Tom’s model of societal responses to AI-fueled abundance:
  • The New Amish: Opt out of technology, seek hard things intentionally.
  • The Numb/Bedrotters: Retreat, indulge, or drug themselves into passivity.
  • The Adventurers: Seek new literal or metaphorical frontiers (e.g., colonizing Mars).
  • The Creators: Use virtual worlds as arenas for meaningful, difficult creation.
• Emphasizes that meaning and fulfillment are only found through effort, progress, and contribution to self and others.

8. Practical Advice for Finding Meaning

Timestamps: 47:51–50:56

• Drew asks Tom for tips on finding purpose and meaning.
  • Tom: "You have to work really hard...work to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress—not necessarily achieve, but make progress—towards a goal that helps you and others.” [47:58]
• Warns against complacency and explains each evolutionary “beat” is non-negotiable for psychological health.

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Memorable Quotes

• Tom Bilyeu: “You have an evolutionary algorithm in your brain that will punish you with a profound sense of depression if you don’t… feel like a sense of progress in your life...” [03:28]
• Tom Bilyeu on Joe Rogan’s optimism: “Joe Rogan, who has a ton of money, never needs to go put himself in physical hardship, but he goes hunting and he puts himself out there doing difficult things…” [03:59]
• Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist): “After learning about what I know here, my life hasn’t been the same. I think about what I talk about in this video on a daily basis. If you don’t want to know this, turn back now...” [08:18]
• Tom Bilyeu on mouse utopia parallels: "That tells you that change says there is an evolutionary algorithm at work here that people don't understand.” [17:03]
• Tom Bilyeu: "Meaning and purpose are the things that are going to protect you from getting depressed when AI comes along.” [03:28]
• Drew: “We have communities of other bedrotters who we can kind of group up together and then, I guess, help undo a stress or at least find community in our bedrotting-ness.” [29:03]
• Tom Bilyeu on the four types of responses: “People that have a lucky draw on self discipline, self awareness and stuff like that, they're going to be fine. But there's a lot of people for whom, like, they're really going to have to start making this a conscious thing. It isn't going to come easily to them.” [44:03]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:00–03:28: AI, work, and the fundamental question of purpose
• 03:28–08:18: Evolutionary roots of meaningful work, Joe Rogan debate
• 13:57–21:10: Mouse Utopia explained, breakdown of social order
• 26:27–36:43: Emotional dysregulation in response to abundance, generational vulnerability
• 36:43–43:23: Details of mouse society collapse, implications for today's social norms
• 44:03–47:58: The four strategies for thriving in a world of abundance
• 47:51–50:56: Concrete advice: Building meaning and purpose

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Conclusion

This episode of Impact Theory is an urgent meditation on the human need for purpose, community, and struggle—especially as disruptive technologies threaten to make life materially easy but existentially perilous. Through the gripping mouse utopia case study, Tom and his guests wrestle with the evolutionary mechanisms shaping our well-being—urging listeners not to seek comfort alone, but to consciously design their lives around meaningful effort and connection.

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For deeper angles and continued debate, check out the full episode or follow up with the cited WhatIfAltHist content on mouse utopia.

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Mom, can you tell me a story?

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Was she brave?

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She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Did you have to fight a dragon?

[Carvana Ad Voice]

Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Was it scary?

[Carvana Ad Voice]

Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Did the car have a sunroof?

[Carvana Ad Voice]

It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on car finance. Delivery fees may apply.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All of us are going to have to figure out what our price prognostication is about, where AI is going. Partly because you're gonna have to decide how you're gonna raise your kids. When are you gonna let them interface with it? Where's this all going? Part of it as an investor, part of it as a voter. What do you. What regulations do you wanna see? How do you wanna see this treated as you saw? Ryan, Drew and I do not agree on how we should be treating things like AI created videos and all that. So this is something that we're all gonna have to think through now. One of the most profound things that we're all gonna have to begin to create a mental map of is what is going to happen to society when AI is better than us at everything. Does it create a utopia where we all get universal high income, as Elon Musk has said, where we can have basically anything that we want. And that happens because energy costs go to zero and labor costs go to zero because of robots. And now you can just quite literally have virtually anything you want for free. And so what does society look like? That is going to be a heated debate because we're going to be thinking a lot about how do we tax AI? Like, if somebody brings on a robot, are we going to tax that? If a robot in the form of a car replaces a driver, are we going to have similar medallion sales where, okay, you're an AI car, but if you want to be an AI taxi and drive people around, you still have to pay this fee and that we're going to get a Tax, basically, on every ride that you do. Like, how are we going to handle all that? So there are going to be huge consequences to the way that people answer this question. Now, Joe Rogan, who I think is amazing, and literally, when you do the history of podcasting, you are going to have to put him on Mount Rushmore. I don't think he's alone on Mount Rushmore anymore. But, man, for a long time, it was like Mount Rushmore was Joe Rogan. So this guy's incredible at what he does, but on this, I think he's way the fuck off. So let's play it. And then I'm going to give you a breakdown of precisely how off he is and how much is going to matter. People can't be this far off.

[Ryan (Guest or Co-host)]

This is my position on work, too, because everybody in their head is like, what happens when AI takes all the jobs? And I'm like, do you have to have a fucking job? Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? It seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food. And, like, most people are basically just working for that. Most people that are. Most people that are struggling, check to check. Basically, housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I think so. Quite officially, not people would not figure out what to do with their time. So the thing that I think Joe is failing to understand is that from an evolutionary perspective, evolution has understood I must compel you to want to go do work. Humans move towards pleasure, and they move away from pain. Now, it also had to restrict our use of calories, meaning we are motivated and incentivized to go do something, but to not go do too much. So we have these competing, like, impulses. I want to go work and contribute and do something, and I want to work hard. And working hard actually feels good. But I also want to lay on the couch and do nothing and do bedrot, as the kids would say today. So you have to find some way to make those two things work. And what ends up happening to the person who lays in bed all the time? They end up getting massively depressed. Why? Because evolution needs you to get up. So whether you actually need to get up to create housing and food, you still have the evolutionary impulse, bro, you better be doing something. You better be working hard. You better be contributing to the group. You have an evolutionary algorithm in your brain that will punish you with a profound sense of depression if you don't do the following. If you don't work hard to gain a set of skills, so feel like a sense of progress in your life, you're getting better. If you're not doing that, you're going to be in trouble. So you're gaining a set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal. That's what I call honorable, meaning that it doesn't just help you, it helps you, but it also helps other people. Because to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids, which is all that evolution cares about, it's got to give you those impulses. And all of us have that buried inside of us. So now AI comes along, you don't have to work to have a house. You don't have to work for food. You're going to lay in bed all day now because you actually have that impulse. You have the impulse to lay in bed all day, and you now don't have anything that's forcing you to get out of bed. Because when you're forced to get out of bed and you've got to get your house secured and you've got to work hard to survive, and you've got to be a part of a group in order to make sure that you're protected by the group for survival purposes. When you do all of that, even though it's hard, even though you didn't want to get out of bed, when you do it, you feel good. What do people always say when they go to the gym or they work hard and they get a reward for it? They feel good. What does somebody think when they work at a job that they care about and they work hard and they see the fruits of their labor? They feel good. They have a sense of meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are the things that are going to protect you from getting depressed when AI comes along. If it really does erode people's meaning and purpose, because there's nothing that they must do and everything becomes voluntary, a huge portion of humanity is just going to opt out. Now, the reason that Joe, I think, is completely blind to this is he's mapping himself and then assuming everybody is like him, or at least the large majority of people. And the problem is Joe Rogan will get out of bed and ice plunge in the morning. How many people are going to do that? Virtually nobody. Joe Rogan, who has a ton of money, never needs to go put himself in physical hardship, but he goes hunting and he puts himself out there doing difficult things. The man has a T shirt that says Sad Face plus deer Hunting equals smiley face. So this is somebody that understands going out, putting yourself in a difficult environment, having to be quiet, having to be focused, doing something that required a ton of work, practice and discipline to get there. And now doing it and having a relationship with actually killing and taking something else's life. Like all of that stuff, all of the intellectual framework that he's built around that to make that suffering and difficulty, which was all discretionary, he didn't have to do any of it. All of that intellectual framework that he built around that to make that a rewarding experience, he thinks people just do. By default, the vast majority of humanity will get hit by a bus of untold proportions. Now, that's a pretty bold claim. How am I making that claim? If you guys have never heard of mouse utopia, then I'm sure what I'm saying seems ungrounded. If you know mouse utopia, then you know that this study has been run. And when you give a mouse colony, we can decide if this extrapolates. But when you give a mouse colony all the space they could ever want, all the resources that they could ever want, things go horrifically wrong. I actually think we're living through some of early stage mouse utopia right now. But let's take a closer look. So shout out to the friend of the pod. This is whatifalthist. Rudyard Lynch. Lynch. Thank you. He's a fascinating thinker and he was the person that put this on my radar. So check it out.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

After learning about what I know here, my life hasn't been the same. I think about what I talk about in this video on a daily basis. If you don't want to know this, turn back now. That being said, I know that by saying that this is gonna make all of you watch this video. I know this advertising tactic here is shameless, but it doesn't stop it from being true. To be honest, I want us all to know about this partly so that I can share the weight of this and also so that hopefully we can do something about it. You'll understand why I say this by the end of the video.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's talking about utopia about it.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Only a very small percentage of the people I talk to know about this. And I'm already talking to people who are much more aware, educated, intelligent than the general public. I love this painting. The way it works is that some people see an old lady, others see a young woman. Life is like, do you see old

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

lady or a young woman?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I was going to ask you the same. I see the young woman, I see

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

the young woman too.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I can force myself to see the old lady once you tell me that she's there. And for people looking, the necklace on the young woman's neck is the mouth of the old woman.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

There it is. That helped.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Okay, that where we all inhabit the same world, but we all make out different patterns to explain it in terms that are comprehensible to us. My goal for whatifalthist is to let people who are looking at this painting see both images at the same time and explain which one of these interpretations I believe to be the most correct. I try to share other ways of looking at it, even if I don't agree. That's why I explain the worldviews of each civilization and era of history. By the end of this video, you will start looking at the movie that is our lives in a completely different way. In my own personal life, this feels like a plot twist at the end of a movie which changes its entire meaning.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Part 1 Universe 25 as a side note, before we start, I gave my word in this poll that my next video would be about the CIA discovering the spirit world. I'm going to postpone that for one video since I feel as if I need to read these two books before I can do the topic justice. I always have an intuitive sense of when I can know enough about a topic to make a video about it, and I honestly just haven't hit it yet with that topic. But you have my word that it's going to be the next video coming out after this. This video pulls on the least source materials of almost any video I've done. One of the recent videos I've made is explaining modern Civilization. I pulled on 68 books, which is something like 25 for this video. The main source I'm using, although I referenced many others, very impressive, which you'll see in the description, is less than 10 pages. That being the Mouse Utopia study itself. There's so much to unpack in each page that it'll take me a second to go through all the interpretations possible. Mouse Utopia was a study in the late 60s and early 70s in Maryland. This was the era of the most rapid popular population growth ever. And people were really worried about what the implications for that might be. This was the era Soylent Green was made in. Thankfully, the 20th century has dodged all the crises it expected to have, whether nuclear war, overpopulation, oil depletion, and more. I wish our society was collectively more grateful that we dodged so many bullets.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think a big part of the reason that we as a society struggle is things have just been too good for too long. It is too hard for people to mentally project to how difficult other eras are. When we are kids and we're growing up, we don't realize that the world is changing incredibly fast. We just assume the world has always been this way. That's why we look at our parents and think they're crazy, because we don't realize that they were raised at a different time in a different way, that their parents were different, their friends were different. The things that mattered to the world were different. The economic situation was different. Everything was just different. And so we're all products of our time, but none of us, especially when we're young, even have a concept of how much things change over time.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

This is the best argument for why this won't happen, that we've had so many crises before that just didn't occur. The guy who ran this experiment, Calhoun, did this thing in a bunch of cases. The test which became famous was Universe 25. This universe was the biggest and lasted for years. However, all the previous experiments had similar end results to this. On a smaller scale. What they did in universe 25 was put 9 mice into a cage with infinite food and no disease. It was cleaned regularly, had no predators, in a perfectly temperate climate. These are ideal conditions for population growth. The test was designed to create the most perfect optimal conditions for increasing numbers. What happened initially was exactly what you would expect, that the population grew incredibly rapidly. The population doubled every 55 days. The mouse population plateaued around 315 days.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

Days.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's crazy. The. The fact that it, it blows up, nobody would question, but why would it hit any sort of Plateau, Given that it's still, they still have access to resources, they still have all the space that they need. They're not, they're not bumping up against that. The reason that I think this kind of thing is important to note is you're now in the zone of. There is an algorithm running in my brain that I'm unaware of. So it's. We, I think, would all assume, well, each individual mouse or person would just be making the decision that's rational for them. I've fallen in love, I want to get married, I want to have kids. And all of a sudden you realize, actually, no, there's something else running in the background that starts making those choices. When put into a larger context, they start changing. So one thing if looking for the human parallels here, if you educate women, then birth rate falls off a cliff. Now, is it causative because women are getting educated and they realize they have a lot more options. Is it tied to something else? Is it that as a country gets wealthier, they have access, they are necessarily more liberal and they have access to birth control. And it's the not having kids early that you know by accident that allows them to then pursue other things. And so it seems like that it's because they're getting educated, but it's really not. So. But that tells you that change says there is an evolutionary algorithm at work here that people don't understand.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Thousand where the cage was designed to hold something around 6,000, so not even close to total capacity. Upon that point, birth rates went down and stabilized. After this, things are going to get very, very strange. The mouse social structure started to break down on every single level. Both mouse sexes converged. Male mice became effeminate. They started secreting feminine hormones.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is how I felt looking at what's going on with the China buying oil. So the war predicts, hey, this thing is going to happen when there's a supply constraint. Assuming that demand is inelastic, then the price is necessarily going to go up. It does, but then it doesn't re rise when the war comes back on. So it goes up, drops with MoU, but doesn't come back up. China stops buying even when the price is down. And so you start seeing like, wait, that this is not what is predicted by the model. The model says that if these guys have food and they have space, then given that we saw that early population explosion, why does it start slowing down here? That's where this kind of thing becomes very fascinating. Because what it points out is your model of the world is not yet complete and that there is a pressure that you're not yet aware of. And so when I was trying to identify, okay, what's really going on in China, you start looking for what is the economic pressure that makes traders believe that there's going to be a deflationary period. So they're betting on a lower cost of oil down. Is it just that the war is going to end? And then you try to square it with, okay, well, wait a second, we've also got China not having a buying pattern that matches the cost. So there's a hidden force. And when you look at mouse utopia, through what is that hidden force? Tie it back to what Rogan was talking about. That's my thesis, is that there is a hidden force, which is evolution needs you. It has to assume that there's no AI. We didn't evolve in that world. So if you're going to have food and shelter, you're going to need to get out of that comfy warm bed and go do a thing. So there is a hidden pressure inside of all of us that will manifest as depression, essentially just around it. But it's going to. It's actually, as you'll see in mouse utopia plays out in way weirder ways. So the oversimplification is sort of a depressionary impulse. But you're trying to identify that hidden pressure as you watch this.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Mice who showed no interest in mating, but would groom themselves daily. The scientists called these the beautiful Ones. Male mice lost any masculinity and kind of stopped doing anything to maintain the mouse social structure. The beautiful ones don't really exist inside mouse social relationships. Rather, their entire lives were in what amounted to isolation and just self grooming.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The whole idea of the beautiful ones is very interesting if you're looking at this through an evolutionary lens. Evolution has all these different games that it's running, but it only has two levers, pleasure and pain. And so part of the mating strategy is you need to create signals that a woman would pick up on. Okay, so a guy is going to go do those strategies. Now the problem becomes, if you are in a situation where you have all the free time in the world and there's nothing that is pushing you anymore to compete and try to mate. And there's that sense of like, okay, I really need to get this forward momentum going. The thing initially that was getting you to do the things that would attract a female become, they take up more and more time. So this is going to be a crazy parallel to draw. There is a hypothesis that the reason you dream is that your visual system cannot go offline for a full eight hours or whatever while you're sleeping. Because the brain is wired in such a way that one area, if it's not getting used, it immediately gets taken over by another sense. So if you blindfold yourself, you notice that your ears begin to come online. Now it will actually begin to wire. The wiring will begin eating in. It's not just that you're paying attention to your hearing more. The wiring of the auditory system will begin leveraging the physical space of the visual part of your brain. So, same idea here. So part of your energy, your focus, your attention is like, I need to go make sure I secure housing. I need to make sure that I'm contributing to the group. I need to make sure that I'm raising my family properly. Well, if AI or anything else makes all of that go away, then some other algorithm that's online begins encroaching into that. That time, if you will. And so now your need. I'll use that word lightly, but your need to have an obsession, to have a focus begins getting filled with some bullshit. And so now, all of a sudden, you're being one of the beautiful ones, you're grooming yourself, you're leaning into beauty. All of that stuff starts to distort. Now, I actually want to go back to something he said a second ago, which very much speaks to the rise in transgenderism that we're seeing now, I think, which is that when you're not not having to focus on like, oh, shit, there really are barbarians at the gate. I really have to train these kids to be masculine. Fuck it, I'm just going to be like, you're a boy. I need you to be tough. And so you inculcate them with that thinking, with that ideology. And now they're actually busy doing the manly shit. There's all this cultural pressure for them to be manly. And so now it's just they slot into that and they go do the things that are expected of the men. And there are very few people that start sort of peeling off of that and going elsewhere. There's just too many demands, both from just a pure intellectual way and from a, yo, somebody's got to go dig that ditch, motherfucker. You were born with testes. That's you. And so you get in this, like, reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. But when that breaks away, because there is, in this case, the robots are just digging all the ditches, and you don't have to think about it. You don't have to be tough. And there's so much prosperity. And there are no barbarians at the gate because we're the biggest, strongest country in the world. And it's like all of a sudden you start seeing this feminization. You have a pull towards those things as well. And so that interesting idea that both of those energies live inside of one human, but now you get this imbalance that evolution wasn't expecting, and one begins to take off. And you see, and this is written about in Roman times, that there just becomes this effeminization of the culture. You had similar pushback in Greece. Similar. Could really fucking derail on that. But I'll. I'll leave it at that for now.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Read. It showed chemicals demonstrating intense stress. The thing is that they largely weren't in. That they weren't under too many actual external pressures. The process of permanently being hormonally stressed was taxing on their bodies, and thus they were unable to really do anything else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So think about that from an evolutionary standpoint, evolution is like, oh, damn, you're bed rotting. You're just grooming yourself. You're not doing the things. And so it's going to create this sense of disease to get you moving again. Now, in a world where you need to get moving, great. It all works out perfectly in a world where you're like, I don't need to do anything, so I'm just going to keep bedrotting. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And so something that isn't under any stress externally is getting a stress impulse from the internal evolutionary algorithm through urine and scent.

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

Thus, through this, they were demonstrating their immense inner pain and stress to the other mice around them. Them female mice became very aggressive and very masculine. They started raising the baby mice incorrectly, kicking them out of the nest too early. They became incredibly aggressive to their young, even attacking them. This created generations of numb mice who were not properly socialized. They were completely unable to interact with the world or socially. The female mice lost interest in breeding and raising families, just like the male. Many female mice started living in isolation from the rest of the mouse community, hiding away in far off parts of the pen, showing no interest in family or mating. Calhoun liked to say that the mice became autistic. This was in the 60s, before autism was a buzzword either, and autism was much less common back then. So if he said it, it really meant something. Back then, they lost the ability to interact socially. He called this the first death or a spiritual death. He saw that the mice had no joie de vivre. Or joy of life or reason to live.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I have a hypothesis on this. So I had a period in my life at the basically the beginning of getting into game development where I was working 120 hours a week. I did it for eight months and for the first time in my life, I was what I would call emotionally dysregulated. And there was one week where I did. I didn't even want to sit on a couch. I wanted to sit on the floor. And I was like, I can't make this make sense. This isn't logical. So I'm sitting on the floor because I don't want to be on the couch, but I don't know why I don't want to be on the couch. And so I was like, oh, wow, I'm emotionally dysregulated. Meaning I cannot make sense of my internal state. My internal state is in such disarray that all of the things that I just completely take for granted, that I would seek comfort. So I'd want to sit on a couch, that I would want to eat, that I would eat at certain times. And so my hunger was all over the map. I would go from not wanting to eat at all to being like, I'm starving. Sitting on the floor. Like it was just. Thankfully I was like, hold on, this is so weird. This behavior is bizarre. And so I could fall back on. I need to get into a routine and so I need to re. Isolate. I wake up at this time, I go to bed at this time. And so after the eight month period, I realized, okay, this was a failed experiment. I just can't work this many hours. I was getting vertigo. So I was having these physical like negative externalities where I would feel dizzy and like I was going to fall over. I thought I had a brain tumor at one point. It was really crazy. And so I was like, wow, like there is just a limit where even though there's not necessarily an external thing that's causing me a problem, I'm getting all these problems from the inside. And if I didn't have the ability to identify this is emotional dysregulation, that it is caused by this thing. So forget that. In my case it was just working too many hours. Here it's caused by everything is just going too well, it's too easy, I don't have any meaning and purpose. There's no hard thing that I'm focused on I have to go do. So you get what starts as a specific, this thing is broken and it gets this response, response and it becomes generalized. It was the same thing that happened with my anxiety. I never dealt with it when it was concrete. Like, oh, I'm in a stressful situation, I feel anxiety. That made sense once it became generalized and turning left instead of right gave me anxiety. Then I was like, huh, we have a problem here. And if you don't know what to do at that point, it's like your brain is just sort of giving up on trying to parse cause and effect. So you're just like all over the place. And that's, I think what we're seeing here.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

But jumping in for a second, isn't that what separates us from like mice in this scenario? So where they are just kind of now stressed and internal, so they just peed and pooped everywhere. We would have those friends in cells on the other side of the world through our gaming monitor, we would have the next door neighbor who's emo, who understands. Like, we would have that ability to either one, internally diagnose it, or two, we have communities of other bedrotters who we can kind of group up together and then I guess help undo a stress or at least find community in our bedrotting ness. You know what I mean?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. So to put it into biological language, we have a prefrontal cortex, which the mice do not. We have the ability to assess, hey, I'm having a problem. Let me go find like minded people. Let me reconnect with a group, Let me do the things that I know I need to do. And there will be some people that will do that and it will be a scale. And so you'll lose some people really early. I mean, we're already losing people. The jobs market speaks to that. Our labor force participation numbers are abysmal. But still the vast majority of people still work. It's like over 60%. So it's like, yeah, we, most people are able to in the early stages, find a way to avoid some of the, you know, problems that arise from this. But especially kids are super vulnerable because their prefrontal cortex isn't even finished developing. So now what happens when you raise a generation where their brain just legitimately doesn't develop correctly? Because evolution was expecting one impulse and it didn't get it. And so now it's like those kids are fucked. So the first generation that was raised sort of with the normal expected evolutionary pressures, they'll be the most resilient, but the weak ones among them will be the first to fall. Then the generation behind them, remember, I forget how many generations they were going through, but they doubled like every 15, 55 days or whatever. So this is partly a generational problem where the first generation is probably the most resilient, second, a little less, third, even less, fourth. And it starts getting like really unhinged and deranged because, and I think they cover this, or maybe they, they just did with the mom doesn't groom their pups properly. But you start getting a breakdown of parenting which then creates even more problematic kids who will then be even worse parents. And so you like get this effect where all of the evolutionary environmental inputs that are expected end up not arriving. And so the brain ends up developing poorly. So for instance, if you. I still can't believe this is true, but it's true. If you don't hug and cuddle a baby, it will die. It goes through what they call failure to thrive. So there's something in the brain that says I can expect my mom at a minimum to give me skin to skin contact, to feed me, to nurture me, to love me, to cuddle me. And my brain is so expecting that, that it cues its development off that. And if it doesn't get that, it just, it, it never needed to have a workaround and so it just breaks and it, it maybe the, even the better way to think of it, it just doesn't develop. And so that kid that was sort of a ball of mush that most parents watch grow up and light up and you see them sort of come online and, and they like coup and want your attention and they get it. And so it's like, it's this incredible symbiotic relationship that just never develops. And so the kid just dies. And that shit is crazy. So when you think about, okay, we've got emotional dysregulation, there will be some that are able to fend that off and they'll be fine. This is why Joe Rogan is confused, because he's like, well, if everything is easy, go force yourself to do something hard. You work out really hard, you cold plunge, you go on austere hunting trips. Yeah, obviously, but that's like on a spectrum that's gonna be way pegged over here on the right. And so you're gonna lose a ton of people even in generation one that aren't able to do that. And then, oh my God, the kids. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. I wanna talk about your customers expectations and why. Today's episode is brought to you by Quo. Your Customers do not care that it's after hours. They need an answer now. And if you can't give them one, someone else will. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses. 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[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

This happened far before their actual numbers started to collapse. Mice live much like Andrew Tate, with alpha males keeping harems of females who raise children. Thus, with all these factors going on, what you're effectively seeing was a breakdown of the ability for mice to coordinate on a group level or breed at any level. This chart creates a useful breakdown of the different kinds of mice you saw emerge as society fell apart. You saw a group of mice which were obsessed with social approval. They wouldn't eat unless they saw other mice eat. They would all cluster together in the center of the cage, even though there was lots of space on the outside. Outside, their gender roles collapsed and they were constantly driven by stimulation from other mice. They basically became adrenaline junkies through social approval. A second group just went numb. They stopped interacting with the society. They only went out at night. They lost interest in interacting with other mice socially. These mice basically became zombies. They wandered around like the homeless. They let themselves get casually beaten up and hurt by other mice since they just lost any will to live. The third group of mice became incredibly aggressive. They would wander around in packs and randomly attack and target other mice for what they didn't really see as any reason. They would torture and bite up other mice for fun. They would attack any mice that were still having children and trying to maintain the mouse social structure. They were sexually hyperactive, but not for any reasons of actual procreation. As the birth rate collapsed. This group were really the ones which destroyed the mouse colony, killing any who tried to maintain social norms or continue the species.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So hey, trying to tear down social norms. That sounds familiar. People that want to see western civilization completely destroyed. Hopefully that is not an unfamiliar refrain. So as I look at the swing now to socialism and communism, this is exactly the kind of thing that I think about is this is people that have had a situation where everything has gone so well for so long. They become overproduced elites. They feel completely entitled and they just have this impulse to want to burn everything down. And also by the way, birth rates dropping through the floor. And I am not the irony is not lost on me that I don't have kids. So it is. This is precisely what I see when I look at the DSA each of

[WhatIfAltHist (Rudyard Lynch)]

the 30 experiments, the mouse colony completely collapsed. The mice just stopped having children and this crashed their numbers. The mice who did try to keep going were killed by mobs of evil mice. After day 1700, there were absolutely no mice left. A couple outtakes before we move on to the next section. First, I'm surprised at how advanced the mouse social structure was. As I read this, I'm frankly surprised that mice have a society at all. When you see these things scurrying around your house, you don't really think about them having a cultural system with different expectations that can experience social collapse in the same manner we saw with the fall of Rome or the Mayans. Authors like Joseph Heinrich or E.O. wilson talk about how culture is fundamentally genetic and dates back deep into our animal roots. That's very clear to see here. Mice aren't particularly smart, but except for one thing, their neurological structures aren't fundamentally that different than ours, except ours are much, much larger.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What we're going to learn from Mouseutopia. There's more, and I definitely encourage you guys to go watch the whole video. It is utterly mind blowing. But the core thesis that I'm putting forward right now and the reason that when I saw Rogan responding the way that he did, I thought, oh, and by the way, shout out to man. I wish I could remember who sent that to me, but somebody sent me that video on X, which I highly, highly, highly encourage people to do. If you want to see me react to something, please send me the video. I don't know if anybody has quick access to my.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

Is Zagross askin?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. Is this the one?

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. So Zagrosskinasonwill win. Shout out to you. Thank you so much for sending this in. More of that, please. I'm always looking for more videos to do AS reacts. So I'm just so grateful to people taking the time to send that in. Okay, so when I saw that Rogan video, it immediately got me thinking about this idea that people do not understand the biological component of this. They do not understand that evolution has imbued us with all of these deeply ingrained algorithms in our brain that create these pressures on us to act and behave in certain ways. And that when we don't do that, then because evolution only has the pleasure and pain principle, it uses pain. But when we aren't forced by the realities of I need shelter, I need food. When there's nothing that forces us out to face those things, to meet the challenges that evolution is expecting us to have. We begin getting dysregulated and everything just sort of goes haywire because we're not getting the things that we expect. And it is, that is when I think about AI, that is one of the things that I'm like, yo, if we ever get to artificial super intelligence. Because I don't think we end up here from just AI continuing to grow and becoming a thing. But I do think we get there with artificial superintelligence where energy costs drop to zero and labor drops to zero and anybody can have anything they want. I think at that stage, people really are going to have to force themselves to encounter hardship, to have structure, to do things that are all about progress in their own life, that they remain wanting to help the group. If they don't do that, we're going to see the kind of derangement in our own culture that we saw in mouse utopia. And remember, the reason that I think that you can extrapolate from mouse utopia is that they have the same kind of societal structures. They are also so the output of evolution. So it's like they may not have the exact same brain structures and stuff, though they are similar, but it's the same forces that developed them and made them a coherent species that can thrive in the world are the same forces that made us a coherent species that's accomplished what we have. So I really think when you look at even this moment in time, when you look at the push towards socialism, when you understand that socialism is driven by resentment, when you think about where AI is taking us all, you've got to take all of this into consideration because I think it actually explains some of what we see today. And I think it's certainly a worthwhile warning. Nobody should panic or freak out, but it's a worthwhile warning that we will need to be thoughtful about how we move forward in adopting AI in our own lives.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

And like, as we enter like the age of abundance and things like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that it's not going to be a free, free ride. No way.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

I was joking with some people in the chat that, you know, if everybody becomes a simp, I'll take all, you know, I'll start having more sex. Hahaha. So there were people in that society that rose up and became the harem. They had more women, there were some that became more aggressive, there's some that became more grooming, and there were some that became, I'll call them emo. They were Bedrotting and things like that. Right. When we approach this age of abundance, do you think that's where kind of like what we were talking about earlier with the prefrontal cortex, we will be able to kind of gamify or do something that allows us to bounce off of those as opposed to going to those segments and kind of staying there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It'll be very easy.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

Is it only individualistic?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I guess just it's only individualistic. That's the unfortunate answer. Otherwise, the only other way to solve that would be government denies you and says, no, you can't have those things and good luck with that when they're readily available and the government is forcing you not to do it. I don't want to live in a world where the government is forcing me to do a cold plunge or whatever. Like, at that point you're just somebody else's slave. I'm not interested. So this is where it's at the individual level. People have to take responsibility for their own life and say, I've got to optimize my life in a way that makes sense. And people often will ask me why I work as hard as I work now when I, you know, I've made a just absolutely ton of money and I obviously never need to work again. And I think people were very surprised that I left Quest on a Monday and started Impact theory literally the next day on Tuesday. And I said, no, no, no. I learned a very long time ago that meaning and purpose is the only thing that will give you what I'll call fulfillment, which is the only, like, psychological. It's a combination of a psychological and emotional state that can survive even grief, that's positive. And so I was like, I must pursue meaning and purpose all the time. And so that's why I did it. And so I'll. People that have a lucky draw on self discipline, self awareness and stuff like that, they're going to be fine. But there's a lot of people for whom, like, they're really going to have to start making this a conscious thing. It isn't going to come easily to them. And if they don't do it, then they're going to spiral. And that's why I think that there's four paths that people will take as we go into the age of abundance. And some people are going to become the new Amish. So that might be Rogan, where it's like, okay, I'm just going to go do hard things all the time. I don't interface with AI, period, Full stop. End of story and they revert to technology that's something like the 1990s. Then they're going to be people who just numb the out and they bedrot and they do drugs and. And that's that there are going to be people that want to play life on hard mode. They're literally going to go to the moon or to Mars. And it's like to me that one is always like, life really is a survival crafting game, an open world survival crafting game where you need to go get resources to do the things you want to do and you be self directed and it's like, what do you want to build, what do you want to create? You can do it, but you've got to go get the resources in order to be able to do it. That really is life. Those games trade on the dopamine loops that evolution gave us. That's why I think it's ultimately the perfect game type anyway. And so the people going to Mars and the moon, they're saying, I want to start a new save file on like hard mode and so send me to Mars. I don't want to be in the middle of all the abundance and choosing to do hard things. I literally want to be in a place where it's just fucking hard and you've got to tame Mars. Like that's going to be some hard shit. And then the fourth quarter group are the people that are like, I want to maximize my creative experiences and my creative output, but in a way that is just absolutely drenched in meaning and purpose. And those are the people like myself that will live in virtual worlds, but where those virtual worlds have goals. Difficult things you're trying to achieve that you're doing even if it's with AI characters, but that are so believable that you feel a true sense of kinship and connection. And there you'll be able to build and create in ways that are completely unbound by physics. And so, but I've tried and I'm open man if there's like a fifth or sixth way. But those feel like they're the blunt force trauma. Obviously people move back and forth between them and it's like, oh, I'm going to take a weekend and I'm going to go fucking do drugs and just space out. Sure. But I'm saying those will be sort of the four bands of people trying to deal with the evolutionary realities of how their brain is wired.

[Drew (Guest or Co-host)]

I have to ask you, if somebody's struggling to find meaning, purpose in their life, what are some tips or advice you would give them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, the first thing is you have to know what your goal is. And your goal needs to be in alignment with evolution. So evolution wants you to work really hard. Like everything that I'm about to give you as a recipe, each beat is a non negotiable because of evolution. It's going to sound like moralizing, but I'm literally just trying to map what the average human brain has running when you're sort of in the default mode. And that's going to be you have to work really hard. Which is why I always rebel against people that want a three day week. They want it to get easier and easier and easier. You'll derange. So work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress. Not necessarily achieve, but make progress towards a goal that helps you and others. Each one of those beats is important. If you do something only for others, you neglect yourself, you're gonna have a problem. If you only do something for yourself and neglect others, you're gonna have a problem. If things come easily, you're gonna have a problem. If you're deploying your skills but you're not getting any better, you're gonna have a problem. Like you need to make progress, you need to be making yourself better. Like, part of why I think people really have a hard time at the end of their life is as you get older, it becomes just physically and intellectually more difficult to gain skills, to make progress, to actually meaningfully contribute. And so you start getting pushed to the margins. Like they say, the first death a man feels is when a woman looks at him and considers him harmless. And that really resonates. Like, I get it. And you want to feel physically potent, sexually potent, like you want to matter. Like people are going to need to contend with you and your ideas that you're a contributor, that the world is different and better because of your presence. Now, by the way, if you can't make it different and better, people will make it different and worse. There's that old adage that says if you shun a child from the village, if you shun a child, they will burn the village down merely to feel its warmth. And I thought, damn, so that all feels true. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do? You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break, and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop 8 ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.comimpact to claim this offer.

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