Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 324 - The Mouse Utopia Experiments

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Strange and thought provoking episode today! In the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, animal behavior researcher John B Calhoun ran a number of experiments on rodents regarding how their behavior would be affected by increased urbanization if all their basic needs were made. The results were terrifying. Crowded rats and mice became increasingly violent and lost their reproductive instincts to the point that eventually, the utopia went extinct after enduring a final phase full of random violent attacks, apathy, cannibalism and more. Could the increased urbanization of humanity also lead to our species' extinction as Calhoun warned?  Or are we humans too different from rodents to presume that what happens to mice and rat would also happen to humans? I found today's episode one of the most thought provoking we've done in quite  some time. Hope you do too! Bad Magic Productions Monthly Patreon Donation: We donated $15,228 to the United Heroes League, who provide free sports equipment, game tickets, cash grants, skill development camps, and special experiences to military families across the US & Canada. To find out more, please visit unitedheroesleague.orgGet tour tickets at dancummins.tv Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0bX8VraVxP4Merch: https://www.badmagicmerch.comDiscord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard?  Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

I look at Gotham, my friends, and what do I see? Gangs roam the streets attacking it will. Stress-related illness, crime, murder. Their society is collapsing around them just like Universe 133. These words spoken by the supervillain, the rat catcher, to an audience of rats in a 1995 Batman comic embody a popular suspicion of the metropolis. Of the city gone bad, riddled with crime,

overpopulation, and interpersonal violence. They also reflect the influence of one John B. Calhoun, an animal ecologist who studied the effects of crowding on social animals, specifically rats and mice, at the National Institute of Mental Health. Calhoun's early research was published in 1962 and went on to become some of the most widely referenced in psychology for a time. But odds are like me, you've likely never heard of Calhoun in his weird experiments. The universe 133 mentioned in the Batman comic is a direct reference to one of Calhoun's specifically constructed rodent universes.

Inclosures, where the animals were provided with plenty of food, bedding, and shelter and allowed to breed. The enclosure was designed to be a veritable rat or mouse, Kalhoun ran experiments on both rodents, paradise. All their needs were taken care of. No predators, they were screened for sickness, so no illness, no shortage of potential mates, no food concerns, climate control,

kept the temperature perfect. Those rodents should have thrived, right? Not exactly. Just like the fabled Garden of Eden, the utopia was not to last. Unable to control the frequency of their social contacts, the rats became increasingly stressed. Many males became atypically aggressive in some form gangs attacking females in the young. Stressed mothers neglected their infants failing to construct proper nests and even abandoning

or attacking their pups. One group of beta males isolated themselves from the overall community around them and became exclusively homosexual, something to concern Calhoun deeply as he had never seen rodents behave like that in the wild. Cannibalism began, first of the abandoned young, then of the victims of violence. Calhoun commented that the natural behaviors of his rats were so disturbed that the animals had basically stopped being rats and the change was permanent, even as an infant mortality rate as high as 96% sent population numbers plummeting. The rodents had lost the ability to live harmoniously together. He called this phenomenon a behavioral

sink. His utopia had failed. Despite being removed from natural predators and given everything, they needed to theoretically thrive. The rodents were dying. Eventually, the entire population of the utopia, which had become so dystopian, all died. They completely stopped breeding by the end. It's like they forgot to know how. Calhoun wondered or implied really that the same behavioral sink could and likely would apply to humans and cities, prisons or dorm rooms, perhaps in your own neighborhood, perhaps worldwide, and there goes our species. Calhoun warned that if we removed ourselves too far from the natural competitive environment of this planet, if we urbanized too much, removed ourselves through medical and tech and crop production advances from the risks of illness and predators and food scarities that have always accompanied life

on this planet, we would not thrive, we would die. Could that be true? Would life lose enough meaning to no longer be worth living if we always had everything we needed? John B. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments and subsequent scientific papers would go down in cultural history as a morbid prediction of what humanity could soon look like the stuff of dystopian science fiction brought to real life. It was considered scientific evidence of inevitable social decay. If we didn't do something about increased urbanization and overpopulation, but can behavioral studies on rodents really be applied to creatures vastly more complex in innumerable ways to humanity. Kahun was influenced by a number of things and the way he interpreted his data and designed his experiments certainly reflected that.

Obsessed with the biblical book of revelations, the theories of Thomas Malthus and the apocalyptic attitude of Cold War America, Kahun drew a gloomy conclusion for humanity. But not necessarily an accurate one. After all, we humans are not mice or rats. We have technology, not to mention societal rules, brilliant minds, continually rise to meet challenges financial infrastructure wise

etc that faces But perhaps because they were so dramatic and pessimistic and because they stoked already burning cold war fires Don B. Calhoun's ideas caught like wildfire in the cultural imagination Reflecting everything from fears about communism and big cities to anxiety about changing gender roles in the second half of the 20th century. Commentator Juice Calhoun to try to explain the serious urban riots in the 60s and the problems of the big housing projects in the US. These fears, these beliefs that Calhoun helped, quote, prove, live on today for many. But are they valid? So who was John B. Calhoun? And how did he come up with his mouse utopian experiments? What was series of bizarre experiments on rats and mice funded by the US government?

Have to do with the very fate of humanity. All of this and more right now on a bizarre of mice and men edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck. Well happy Monday, Meat Tax. Welcome to the Cult of the Curious. Hope you had a great thanksgiving last week. I'm recording this the day before Thanksgiving. Hope you have something to be thankful for. I'm sure thankful that you listened to this show. I'm Dan Cummins, a suck master, San Marino, honorary citizen,

official Marinera Island head historian, so much fighting, so much delicious spaghetti sauce, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, Hail Luciferina, you beautiful temptress, praise good boy, both jangles, and keep on rockin' in the free world, triple M, Michael motherfucker McDonald. Yeah, definitely messed up,

and started to say Marinera, instead instead of Mariana last week. Whoops, put some fun visuals in a lot of your heads. How about no real announcements this week? Usually, you know, got quite a few things to announce right now. I just want to say thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to whoever is going to help and has helped already with our annual giving tree this year. Congrats to the 50 plus recipients of the giving tree demand overwhelming. Over 400 people tried to sign up to receive help in the first 60 seconds of the form being live on BadMagicMersh.com. Sorry, we can't help everybody.

Glad we can't help those who are going to receive it. Also thanks to Raymond Rol, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm wearing the t-shirt of Aussie Time Sucker Raymond Rol, who designs designs our Time Suck collectible cards. I went to his website, grabbed this Hunter S. Thompson tri blend, love what you do, Raymond, and so thankful that you designed cards for us. You can go to HarleyWorrin.com to check out his stuff. I also got to wear my man Will XX, his new shirt here soon. The artist who has now done almost all the ink on my left

arm just added some more a few weeks ago. Ward on the scared to death November bonus patron episode need to wear it here such a cool shirt such cool dude. He's got two great studios one in Salt Lake City one outside of Bernie Texas. You can find him on Instagram at will underscore XX and talk to him about Yellowstone when you get your ink done, because he is fucking obsessed with that uh, the world of Yellowstone. And now for a topic that brings us back to the world of shady 1960 science experiments. Much like former sucks object, uh, John C. Lilly's dolphin point experiments. You remember, do you remember that uh, fucking weirdo with his uh, with his dolphin sex. All that insanity. Remember how you're not supposed to fuck dolphins for a variety of reasons? The main one being that they'll fall in love with you,

and then probably kill themselves when the relationship is over. Not kidding. As a quick refresher, John C. Lilly was a neuroscientist, psychoanalysis, psycho-knock, philosopher, philosopher, writer, and fucking wackadoodle, who developed the isolation tank in order to explore the nature of human consciousness, and then soon thought to dolphins, we're probably the key to speaking with alien masters. He developed the isolation tank

while working for the National Institute of Mental Health, 1954, back when they were funded some weird shit. Around the same time that John be John be Calhoun was started up with his mouse utopia experiments also funded by the NIMH. A great time to be a strange researcher. Well, he studied how bottlenose dolphins vocalize and establish centers in the US Virgin Islands later San Francisco to study these fascinating creatures. During the early 1960s, Lillian co-workers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns, then lead purchase to property in St. Thomas in 1960. The seaside lab was converted into a dolphin human cohabitation house by

purposefully flooding part of the building. It was at this facility that Lily assistant Margaret Howe. Oh, who could forget her? Where she worked with a dolphin named Peter, horny Peter, in attempts at complex interspecies communication. And man did she ever work Peter? Bunch of interspecies fucking went down. Meanwhile, he'll at least started experimenting with psychedelics, as one does, while they're overseeing a dolphin fucking experiment, often while floating in isolation,

leading him to come up with ideas like the Earth coincidence control office a Hyarquoal group of cosmic entities that guide people on earth through events that humans perceive as coincidences Sounds like the kind of shit you think about when you're really high He helped a communicating with dolphins, but somehow bring us closer to echo Though dolphin communication actually getting dolphins to speak, you know, English or ways to translate to English has not been successful yet. Neither have attempts at contacting cosmic entities, despite what a variety of wacky deals with slicklick and websites and expensive seminars may try and lead you to believe.

Though John B. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments unfortunately would not have anything to do with human consciousness or with interspersion sex, psychedelics. It's worth mentioning John C. Lilley to get us back into this era. An era that saw a generation of counter-cultural scientists and thinkers, like Timothy Leary, Ram Doss, Werner Erhardt, working on some pretty far-out shit. I love it. All these scientists combine the counter-culture of the 1960s, revolutions, and thinking about human consciousness, drugs, societal relationships, more with some serious research, or somewhat serious research, but maybe also completely insane research, as in the case of John C. Lily. He's scientists looked at the natural world as a place of infinite possibility, psychedelics

and science colliding. Let's get back to more of that, please. If we don't discover anything cool, at least we'll get a bunch more entertaining stories for me to talk about. Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University,

Leary founded the Harvard Silicivin Project of Fuck Yeah. After a revealing experience with magic mushrooms in Mexico. Sweet, sweet, sweet, rooms. How I miss the mysterious webs you weave. I don't know if you want to know, maybe I don't know, maybe just two. Since I handed my brain over to the Shroom Guides,

looking forward immensely to getting some time over the holidays to find day or two to get myself the gift of psychedelic exploration. Time for me to check out. Larry led the psilocybin project from 1960 to 1962, testing the therapeutic effects of both LSD and psilocybin, which were both then legal in the US before Nixon fucked that up for everybody. He conducted the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate whether the experiences

produced by the psychoactive drug psilocybin. Derived from psilocybin mushrooms combined with psychotherapy could inspire prisoners to leave their antisocial lifestyles behind once they were released. And the results were positive. To add more follow up research wasn't able to be done. The Mars Chapel experiment, aka the Good Friday experiment was a 1962 experiment conducted on Good Friday at Boston University's Marsh Chapel.

Walter Pankey, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Liri, Richard Albert and the Harvard Siliciba project. Pankey's experiment investigated whether a Siliciba could act as a reliable enthugin, a religiously predisposed subjects. And in, Nthian is, hopefully I'm saying that right, so word I'm not familiar with, enthugin uh... and the gen or religiously uh... in religiously predisposed subjects and in and then is something i'm saying that right so we're not familiar with and the gen is a chemical substance typically of plant origin that is ingested to produce a

non-ordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes basically do shrooms make you think you can contact the divine and the answer was a resounding oh fuck yeah. There was control group of 10 people who did not ingest shrooms and an experimental group of 10 people who did. Almost all the members of the experimental group reported

experiencing quote profound religious experiences, providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences. One of the participants in the experiment was religious scholar Houston Smith, who would become an author of several textbooks on comparative religion. He later described his experience as, The most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced. Love it!

I get it, Houston. I really do. For me, the real question is, does still a sibon, or even more powerful psychedelics, like five MEODMT make you think you contact the divine, or do they help you actually contact the divine? Show me the way, Nimrod. Show me the way. Not all of Larry's research methods were strictly scientific, other Harvard faculty, questioned his researches, scientific legitimacy legitimacy and ethics, because he did things like taking psychedelics along with the subjects and allegedly pressuring students to join

in, getting high on his own supply. Want to share the good shit? Open minds. Good for Larry. While not illegal to time, the research of Larry and Richard Albert must have a dick in every suck. Was controversial and led to Larry's and outputs dismissal from harbor to 1963 Though obviously not accepted by much mainstream America including president Nixon who would call liry the most dangerous man in America

Of course nixon thought that dude was about as enlightened as a pile horseshit. I did it so much long lasting damage to our society Richard Nixon my least favorite dick He's scientists. He hated had the resources and academic background to seriously challenge the drugs or bad, the universe is exactly what the government tells you. It is notions of the establishment. And that is why Nixon hated them. He wanted control, the population that was easily controllable. He hated those who refused to be mindless, sheep, happy to swallow, and he propaganda,

he sold them. But for every lily, leery, and outpert, there were also those on the other side of the equation. Those who used their research not to expand human consciousness, but to promote a gloomier view of humanity in society, supposedly based on scientific fact. And John Beekahoon, one of these scientists, next and probably love Calhoun. While Lily, Lerie and Albert clearly thought that human society had the potential to be revolutionized, that humanity had the potential to expand their consciousness to infinitude. Don B. Calhoun was in a different camp. He looked at the tumultuousness in the 1950s and 60s, the growing industry, booming world

population, global conflicts, and changing societal roles of men and women and predicted something far darker than his countercultural peers. Instead of a revolutionized world where animals and humans would freely and magically communicate with one another or where people could use LSD and other hallucinogens to truly access higher levels of spirituality and perhaps be able to directly commune with the infinite. John B. Calhoun thought that the world's growing and interconnected population and all the advancements coming with it was inevitably going to lead to chaos, violence and turbulence. Doom! Doom is coming! The world is going to hell on a hand-basket.

It's one of those guys. For Calhoun, there was an infinite area to be expanded into, only finite resources that would get used up and eventually cause mad max levels of conflict. And to prove this, he would look not to humans, but to rats and mice. Worth noting that Calhoun was highly influenced by the atmosphere of the Cold War. An atmosphere in which being anything but heterosexual and a typical alpha male or a subservient female was considered totally threatening

to the dominant social order, right? The dominant paradigm of society, society would crumble into anarchy if these traditional norms were not upheld. If we deviated too far from traditional roles, complete fucking chaos wouldn't sue. Not embracing traditional gender roles, being anything other than heterosexual. That was a sure road to communism and from communism, a complete dystopian breakdown of our species, ultimately ending in our demise, right? Would surely follow. But jangles just nodded in agreement.

Not a fan of communism myself. Not sure at least to a complete dystopian breakdown of our species, though. I think we're too strong, too adaptable for that. It's worth noting that John B. Calhoun was also highly Christian, much like the man he would base his research on Thomas Malthus, and that he was obsessed with the book of revelations, which he would quote many times in his scientific articles, which is, you know, an unusual thing to do. John worked during an age when it seemed like humanity could be wiped out by nuclear war at any second.

He was concerned, very concerned about the end times. And that, of course, had a big influence on how Calhoun would go on to design and interpret his experiments. Then in the years that followed, his experiments would have a strange cultural afterlife as we continue to grapple with how society is changing. And what if anything can be said about humans' relationship to animal societies? So let's explore this complicated and fascinating tale now.

One full of so many moments to have some comedic fun with, of course. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ INTRO MUSIC and the mouse utopia experiments, important to have some background on what schools of thought Calhoun belonged to before we get into our timeline. Like we said, he was pretty much the anti-John C. Lilly, a hardline conservative who looked at human beings not in terms of their infinite potential for consciousness growth, but in terms of resources, availability, and competition. Practical concerns. And you know what? Nothing wrong with that.

I like the different perspective. Resources, availability of resources, ease of access to them, right? Competition, all very important practical shit that does affect our lives greatly. If we don't have enough food and water, who gives a fuck about consciousness exploration, right? There's no time or space for that. If you're starving or stressed, over not having a place to stay, enough food to eat. But as we'll come to find out,

human beings are much harder to quantify than other animal populations. For one, we don't know what technological advances will push human society in different directions. We don't know how different the directions will be. Calhoun thought he could predict how humanity would be impacted by certain conditions based on how mice are affected, but his critics point out that, you know, we meet sacks are pretty different kinds of critters than mice.

For example, unlike mice and most other animals, we disobey our natural, quote, animal urges all the time. I mean, think about any time you've given someone something years that actually goes we disobey our natural quote animal urges all the time. I mean, think about any time you've given someone something years that actually goes against the animal principle of resource hoarding, right, that's not a common thing in the animal kingdom. Think about that time you're horny and public

and chose not to drop your pants and just, you know, fucking beat off or go full DJ on that clip. Even though it would've felt really good, it's nice, a lot of fun nerve endings. You denied that natural impulse. We're the only species on the planet that denies our natural urges constantly, actually. Most of us anyway. And we've covered a ton of serial killers who are not as good at impulse control as the rest of us, but even they just don't run around in the

fucking street with an axe hacking anyone they don't care for. Even they consistently deny dark impulses far more often than the indulge in them in order to avoid being arrested. For the most part, we don't actually just do whatever we feel like doing, whenever we feel like doing it. We don't just loudly rip a fart in a crowded elevator if we're gassy, you know, hopefully, not most of us. We don't just try and fuck whoever looks good

when we're horny, whether or not they're into it. We don't always clean our plates, even though there's so much delicious food that we can still eat if we wanted to, because maybe we don't want to pull it on extra weight, have a indigestion, etc. In fact, you can say that human society with all its rules is strongly intended, mostly intended, to regulate humans' most animal instincts, or aggression, or selfishness, or tribalism. Though it does seem like a lot of the time, tribalism still wins out. Such a frustratingly powerful instinct.

A cow-hoon would try to prove, though, that humanity's future could be seen to the behavior of mice. Essentially, that a population of mice was similar enough to a population of human beings to predict that our species would be affected negatively by the same conditions that affect mice negatively. That just like mice, when humans are put under certain stressful conditions, our population will implode and wipe us out. This idea was not new.

They go back to one specific person riding in the 18th century, whose ideas lived on in the uncertain decades after World War II. In the years following, the terrible Second War that we just covered in our two-parter, a group known as the environmentalists began pushing to prevent environmental degradation and the over-explo exploitation of the planet's resources. This was new. Warning us that not protecting our planet's animals and ecosystems would end in our species survival being threat.

Within this group was a small core of intellectuals known as the neo-malthusians, named after the philosopher Thomas Malthus. In a 1798 paper titled an essay on the Princi of population, the mouth of theorized that population growth is exponential, while growth of the food supply is linear. And this meant to hint that the population could end wood outpaced the production of food and natural resources, which would then lead inevitably to a massive starvation or conflict that would kill off a portion of the population,

bringing the total population down to a level in pace with the world's resources. I think I was a neo-malthusian thinker for years without realizing it. I definitely was very concerned about population growth for quite some time. I for sure wrote and recorded several stand-up bits about how we were going to need to start thinning the herd pretty quick or we'd have to pay the overpopulation piper. But now that I've studied population trends more and done a lot more scientific greeting over the past several years I'm actually no longer worried. I was wrong. Gosh dang, oh my heck. Hey, that happens Let me explain and then we'll get back to Thomas Malthus more and more people now are not having kids despite all the ones

The do and now the world's population is expected to peak at around 11.2 billion in 2100 and then start declining according to recent U.N. estimates. Other groups estimates actually have it peaking much sooner and at a smaller total population, like peaking at 8 billion in 2040. Right now we're at 7.87 billion. Back in 1960 though, we were only at 3 billion. So why would that level of rapid growth suddenly decelerate, plateau, and then reverse. In a sentence, anime porn and underground jerk off clubs.

Yep, the rise anime porn and the rise of jerk off clubs, both of which really took off in the 90s, correlate directly to humanity's lower reproductive rates. Starting around 1990, more and more dudes became sexually fixated on obsessed really with pornographic cartoons featuring women with impossible to achieve in real life Waste bust and hip ratios women who's genitalia could handle truly an endless amount of filling and drilling Women who could be bent into positions that are literally impossible to achieve by actual vertebrates Women who never have any blemishes of any kind who are always in the mood inexhaustible very hot women who seem to always be dying to fuck not hot at all dudes. The perfect fantasy.

As more guys got into this fantasy, chat rooms developed as the internet proliferated focused on anime porn, right? Then the guys frequent in these chat rooms started to want to meet in real life, talk about their obsessions. So they did. Talking about it, led to watching it together, which led to a lot of bon banners which led to a lot of jerking off first in private Dude running into bathrooms sneaking off elsewhere going in the bushes But then they all soon realized what they were doing So now they started forming these underground jerk off clubs kind of like a fight club But instead of fighting they would all gather around a large TV featuring anime porn in a dark room and you know

Just just jerk off a whole bunch while the only rule of fight club is to not talk about fight club, these clubs had and have a lot more rules. No eye contact, no sword fighting, no shooting fellow club members. Gotta know how to handle your weapon. And the most important rule, everyone brings their own towels to jerk off onto and everyone takes their own towel home with them when they leave. And these guys started having so much fun doing this that they lost all interests in real women. Now they're waiting for more advancements with robot sex dolls.

Dolls will look more like anime fantasies than any real woman ever could. And once those dolls are reality, shit. Humanity will probably cease to exist. Is anyone at all? Still thinking I've been serious about why overpopulation is no longer a real concern. Gotta hope so. No, anime porn is not to blame, at least not entirely. I did watch a little

bit to understand it. It's not for me, but I think I get the appeal. I don't think underground jerk off clubs are real thing, but who knows, this is a weird world. No, birth control and cultural changes are the reason, mostly population growth projections have changed dramatically. Since the times of Thomas, Malthus and John Calhoun, reliable birth control actually hadn't has not been around very long. It wasn't around at all when Malthus was alive, not like we have today, and it still wasn't around when the neo-Malthusians showed up. The first birth control pills not developed until the 1950s, not widely distributed until the 1960s. And even then, they weren't utilized nearly as much as they are now, primarily because more people listen to religious leaders at the time tell them not to use birth control,

right? And they're still not widely distributed in many third world countries, but as more and more of the world industrializes, they likely will be, which will affect population growth even further. Urbanization and the rapid cost of living expenses compared to wage increases on top of birth control and cultural priority shifts has already reversed the growth curve in some places. Japan's population began to reverse over a decade ago. It's been shrinking since 2010. The Japanese population is projected to shrink well into

the middle of the century, dropping to an estimated 88 million in 2065, which would be a 30% decrease in 45 years. Why? Well, with Japan specifically, this is mostly due to them no longer sending rapies soldiers all over Asia. Everybody now that near constant rape has become more taboo. Most Japanese men are just, you know, not interested in sex anymore. If I can't rape, why fuck it all has become a popular Japanese saying in recent years,

uttered frequently by all Japanese men. I'm kidding, of course, that's nonsense. Come on, where's my little slide whistle, but that makes everything better? I just a little throwback last week. No Japanese men, of course, no more prone to rapes than anyone else. For real, now, Japan's population is shrinking

because in a largely industrialized population with no taboo around birth control in a very work driven nation. Full of men and women working very long hours to afford to live in increasingly expensive urban areas and enjoying more and more of the entertainment urban areas provide less and less people are just interested in having kids or can afford to have kids

if they are interested. And a lot of people studying population trends think a lot more of the world is going to eventually follow Japan's lead. But no one had seen the trend reverse yet back when all mouthballs, all mouthless. Mine behind the later, Neo-Malthusianism movement was around and thinking his thoughts. Malthus saw overpopulation as being part of an inevitable cycle. He thought the population would increase and increase until it put an unbearable strain on the world's resources, which would then definitely lead to an event that killed off the population in a large amount of it. And then the population would rebound later and then another catastrophe would happen and

so on and so on. Shitty cycle doesn't sound fun. Also not not backed by history, not really backed by anything other than it just sounds possible. Malthus did think about birth control. He worried about the effect of contraceptive use. How can become too powerful in curbing growth, conflicting with the common 18th century perspective to which Malthus himself adhered that a steadily growing population remained a necessary factor in the continuing progress of society. Interesting. So don't use birth control. Just keep fucking and fucking until the human population becomes unsustainable and then a new disease or widespread famine or something.

We'll knock us back down to a manageable population level. That sounds like a very dumb way to go about living. Kind of sounds like what happens with a, like a herd of deer. Except humans aren't deer. We're a lot smarter than deer and we don't have to live that way. Mouthless' thoughts have largely been discredited by many people today. Like those who often cite advances in agricultural techniques that allow us to continue to feed a growing population. The green revolution, for example, was a great increase in production of food grains, especially wheat and rice, that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new high yielding varieties beginning in the mid 20th century.

And of course, we've just gone farther from there. Hello GMOs. With the Neomalthusians, we're still worried about things following World War II. Unlike Malthus, Neomalthusians would embrace birth control, they advocated for population control through the use of contraception, arguing that it was essential for the survival of Earth's human population, that we should try and prevent our population becoming too large to sustain, that we should try and prevent some horrific mass of herd cooling. A revival of Malthus' thoughts last from the mid-1940s all the way until the 2010s after

the publication of two influential books in 1948, Fairfield Osborne's are plundered planet and William Vott's road to survival. During that time, the population of the world rose dramatically. The world's population rose roughly a billion in 1800 to 1.65 billion to 1900. But then between 1900 and 1950, it rose almost a billion more to over 2.5 billion. Then in 20 years, it increased over a billion to over 3.6 billion by 1970. Then in 15 years, grew by over another billion to 4.8 billion in 1985. And then in just 10 more years, it grew almost another billion to 5.7 billion in 1995.

Then almost another 10 billion in the next 10 years. 6.5 billion in 2005. And then it did that again over 7.3 billion by 2015. So you can see why people were getting worried. What if that trend just kept continuing and continuing and continuing? Many in environmental movements began to sound the alarm regarding the potential dangers of population growth back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin published an influential essay in Science magazine that drew heavily from Malthus'

theory or Malthusian theory, his essay, the tragedy of the comments argued that a finite world can support only a finite population, and that freedom to breed will bring ruin to us all. I have had the same concern. Why I wrote those stand-ups? For many including head mouse cateer, Sean Cowhoun, overpopulation wasn't only concerned about resources. There was also an emotional and social component to it. head mouse, cateer, chan cow, hoon, overpopulation, wasn't only concerned about resources.

There was also an emotional and social component to it. What would happen to us as human beings when the world became overpopulated and resources became scarce? What would happen to society, our values and morals when there was no longer vast preserves of uninhabited land? Large expanses of virgin, undeveloped land that so many of us see as heaven on earth.

What had been suing pattern of catastrophe after catastrophe? Not just lead to a population reset, like mouth is originally predicted, but lead to the collapse, the complete collapse of human society as we know it, the end of our species. John B. Calhoun's research would fuel that fear. Calhoun believed that his experiments on mice would show not only how mice behaved under certain conditions, but demonstrate how humans might behave under the same conditions. Most of the criticism of Calhoun's work, as I mentioned, would center on the fact that humans are not mice,

mice are not humans. We behave in different ways. Not to mention the fact that we have access to bigger brains. With the capacity for language, building, technology, forming, complex societies with gods and laws and concepts like government and artificial intelligence and the possibility of alien life Let's go on But there are yet other social scientists who say the humans aren't that far off from other creatures that we may have come up with

Laws and tools, but they were also still governed mostly by animal instincts Like the instinct to feed ourselves fight if we're under attack and reproduce Sure most of us follow laws and act civilized now What if resources got scarce? Right, how long will long order hold out if parents can't feed their kids? Right, how long before we humans with our powerful drives for self-preservation above all else? Just go, you know, full fucking purge. For a very long time, there have been two main camps on how overall animal behavior and animal

cognition relates to human behavior and human cognition. Exclusivists who focus on the differences between animals and humans and inclusiveness, who concentrate on similarities between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. This long-running debate goes back millenniaia with philosophers like Aristotle and Descartes arguing that humans are the only animals capable of higher order cognition such as rational thought and language. These guys would be considered exclusivists,

meaning they thought humans were exclusively unique when it came to the animal kingdom. I feel like I fall into that camp with an asterisk. I hope someday we can prove that some other species have much higher thought processes than we currently think they do. Mostly I want dogs to be for little people. Might be fantasy, but I want Gigi and Penny Pooper, Penny and DD, so how much I love those stupid little monkeys, and selfishly to know that they love me back the same way. Sometimes they see my idiots. You know, like when they bark, like an intruder is then at the home when it's actually me,

when they can fucking plainly see me. On the same day, when they didn't even notice a fucking deer across the street looking directly at them. But sometimes it seemed pretty smart. Like when they never get up to get on the table, until one time, when we leave a block of cheese on it and leave the house, and then ginger eats the entire fucking thing, and then she seems stupid again though when she shits blood. And we have to take her to the vet, she has to stay overnight and have her stomach pumped. And then the very next day, still with an achy belly,

sneaks on to get another table and needs an entire bowl of Hershey's kisses. And then shits aluminum for the next few days. Hmm, I don't know, Jerry's still out on smarter stupid with those two. On the other side of the our other animals as smart as humans, the bait, you have inclusive this, inclusiveists like Voltaire, Charles Darwin, David Hume, arguing that it is self-evident that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as man. The field of animal psychology would see its first inclusiveist in Pierre Florence, a student of Charles Darwin, and George Romain's when he became a Romance,

when he became the first to use the term in his book, Comparative Psychology, which was published in 1864. In 1882, romance published, maybe remains, published his book, Animal Intelligence, in which he proposed a science and system of comparing animal and human behaviors. Inclusive this would go into study animal psychology for years, which makes sense, seen as it makes your research seem a lot more important if what you're looking at not only has to do with the, you know, animal and question of mice, turtles, fish, whatever, but also with humans. For example, one such experiment took place during the 1950s. When psychologists Harry Harlow conducted a series of disturbing and frankly heartbreaking experiments on maternal deprivation.

And these experiments, infants, Reese's monkeys were separated from their mothers in some variations of the experiments. The young monkeys would be reared by wire mothers, just like a little block that kind of looks like a monkey head and a body made up of primarily chicken wire. Another mother quote unquote would be covered in soft cloth and looked more monkey like, kind of like a stuffed animal. And the wire mother was the only one that provided nourishment. Well, Harlow found that the monkeys would primarily seek the comfort of the cloth mother versus the nourishment

of the wire mother. In other words, the infant monkeys went to the wire mother, only for food, but preferred to spend their time with soft, comforting cloth mothers when they were not eating. Harlow concluded that affection was the primary force behind their need for closeness. That the little baby monkeys sought out needed affection from their mothers just like they sought out food

from the wire monkey. Right, basically monkeys need more than food and shelter. They need love. Research demonstrated that young monkeys would turn to their cloth surrogate mothers for comfort and security. In this series of experiments, young monkeys were allowed to explore room

either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence. Monkeys who were with their cloth mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room. When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. And super fucking sad. Young monkeys no longer had their secure base for exploration and would often freeze up, crouch, rock back and forth with a distant look in their eye, scream and cry. Saddest of all, eventually in every single case, when left alone in the room with no surrogate mother long enough, the young monkeys would get so worked up and disheartened

that they would literally claw out their own fucking eyeballs and die. Sorry, I, that's not true. That was a horrible thought that just floated in my head for reasons I don't even think I want to full understand. And I'm too selfish to want to keep that horror to myself. I felt compelled to share it with you. I didn't want to carry the load of baby monkeys clawing their fucking eyes out and dying of sadness alone.

The results of Harlow's experiments indicated that early maternal deprivation led to serious and irreversible emotional damage. The deprived monkeys became unable to integrate socially, unable to form attachments and were severely emotionally disturbed following this experiment. That's sad, it's actually true. Bection deprivation fucked those old baby monkeys brains up. And that led to them climb their eyes out and dying, or not that eyeball part.

That's too much. Harlow's work has been used to suggest that human children also have a critical window in which to form attachments. Right when these attachments are not formed during early years of childhood, psychologists suggest long-term emotional damage can and very likely will result. Don't hug your kid enough, right?

Don't stick around long enough, they become richer Ramirez or Ted Bundy or some shit. Maybe not quite that, but you know, it's bad for them. Harlow's work as well as important research by psychologist John Bolby and Mary Ainsworth helped influence key changes in how orphanages adopt adoption agencies, social services groups and childcare providers approach the care of children. Looking at this example, it seems natural and almost obvious to fall in line with the

inclusivist camp. What is true for monkeys in a sense is true for us, somewhat at least. There's been a lot of attachment research that is shown now. But does that mean that the same is true for humans and rodents? Well, we're a lot more closely related to primates and rodents, right? Easy to see how we're governed by similar instincts to some animals, especially close evolutionary relatives like apes and chimps. Looking at a video of a mother, chimp breastfeeding her baby, alongside a video of a human woman breastfeeding her baby,

planning to see that there are similar biological mechanisms as well as social relationships at work. and be careful when you're doing that, do that enough, and you might become sexually attracted to female monkeys. Maybe. I'm just throwing that out there as a possibility to be, you know, wary of. On the other hand, saying that humans are governed primarily by animal instinct, and will behave like these animals are provided with the proper stimulus, well, that can be a troublesome slippery slope. It's like people use theology to defend

sometimes interesting notions and behaviors. People can also use science to do the same, right? To argue that evil stuff that they're doing is natural quote unquote and therefore expected or good even, you know, because it's seen in the animal kingdom. Arguing that something is good, just because it occurs in the animal kingdom

is something philosophers call the appeal to nature. And this can lead to some bad shit. An example of this being done to justify something horrific is when rape apologists try to point to nature to justify non-consensual sex. And that does actually happen sometimes publicly. Mike Surnovich, huge piece of shit in my opinion, who began a co-host in his show on InfoWords with Alex Jones in 2017. Once said, next time, don't settle for the make-outs

when he's giving some dating advice. If possible, at least pull out your dick. If you can get her to touch you even better. If not, just let her know that your cock is too swollen to go back into your jeans and that either you're taking care of this or I am. Master rating will set your anchor near the desired destination, pushy sport.

And he explained it to 2013 tweet, do a Google image search for lions mating That's basically rape and it's also the natural form of sex. So real real cool dude He also publicly identifies frequently as anti-feminist Also not sure that's how that's how lion sex works. Not sure Mike Sternovich is an expert on lion consent Pretty sure he doesn't speak lion. We rational people see a lot of stuff in nature that isn't necessarily good for us to do, right?

Murder, rape, incest, et cetera. We have human society explicitly to avoid such things and problems they cause. So we can see that science and the way that scientists interpret their research can be tricky to interpret when it comes to us humans. This is not just true for people like John B. Calhoun and all of the scientists we've mentioned so far, but also true for everyone who's argued that certain things are innate about human

beings. True on a natural and biological level. For instance, generals or any other stereotypes, stereotypes about which kind of people are good, which things, which kind of people are bad, which things, more predisposed, certain things and so on. We're all familiar with random stereotypes. You know, alpha male behavior, beta male behavior. Is alpha and beta male behavior

in certain animals, species like lions, actually mirror in any real way, how human males behave? Or is that just some shit that guys like in the alt right, for example, want us to believe? Some stuff that helps them sell t-shirts and supplements.

I don't know. Okay, now that I've gone over the two main schools of thought regarding how we humans are behavior-specifically relates or does not relate to other animals, let's get mousey. In today's time sign, time, what do I say, time sign? In today's timeline, we'll first look

at the mouse utopia experiments in greater detail. Then we'll look at how the legacy of the mouse utopia experiments has lived on. And at least one niche internet community and also share some thoughts on what we can learn from the rodent experiments about how we assign meaning to our own lives, did not expect this episode to send me spiral out for a second in some kind of

existential crisis, but it for sure did. Really made me think philosophically in some ways. I did not expect heading into this week's suck meat sacks. Loving that happens. Hope this episode's first some meaning of life discussions amongst you as well. Time suck timeline. Engage. But first of course, time for our mid show sponsor break.

Thank you for listening meat sacks. Now let's see what we can learn about mice, about John Calhoun, about men, our own crazy-ass species. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sug timeline. ["Sugtime Line"] ["Sugtime Line"] Starting off today in the early decades of the 20th century.

John Bumpus Calhoun. Yes, his middle name was really fucking Bumpus. Born on May 11th, 1917 in Elkton, Tennessee, third child of James Calhoun in Furn Calhoun. Don't come across a lot of Furns in these episodes. I had a great, great aunt named Furn, and she was a bitch. It's really was. Not a good person. Hope Furn Calhoun is better than Furn Berman. Not a good person. Hope for in California is better than Fernberman.

Not a lot going on in Elkton, sleep a little town of about 500, a lot like where I grew up. Good chance. John is the most notable person who have ever been born there. Town's most note worthy attraction according to the internet is a very big statue of a chicken wearing a chef's hat and holding a fork. Not kidding. It's in front of a shell gas station near the interstate. Part of the shady lawn travel center. Why is the chicken there? You ask? Well, probably because you can

buy fried chicken at the travel center. That's the best guess the internet has to offer. Any who John had three siblings and older sister Polly and two younger brothers, Billy and Danny. Not sure how they felt about chicken or if they ever saw that statue. John's father James, hope you went by Jimmy. I was a high school principal who would rise to a position in administration in the Tennessee Department of Education. John's mother, Fern was an artist. Cal Hoon's family moved from Elkton to Brownsville, Tennessee,

and finally to Nashville, where Cal Hoon, excuse me, was in junior high school. So they probably sadly did not see that chicken statue. And let's say traveled back to Elkton later, which I doubt, because you know, what the fuck would you ever do that if you don't live there? Apologies, that was the listeners. Probably shouldn't rob you up while I'm still dealing with a lot of San Marino anger from a few weeks ago. By the time you was in high school, how who had been attending meetings of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, an organization dedicated to the study

and conservation of birds since 1915. Since since 1930 about the time John became a member they have published a quarterly journal called the migrant Not sure how many people read the migrants, but I am positive that every single one of them is a fucking dork Sorry Harry Riley Harry's a fellow comic I work with sometimes listens to time suck in addition to be a great guy in a very funny comic also a bird watching dork While getting into birds, come on. A cow who was heavily influenced by a woman named Mrs. Amelia Lasky, who was influential in those circles for her study of the chimney swift. And the chimney swift is a little smudge colored kind of smudge gray colored bird that,

uh, I don't care about, doesn't look cool to me. But Mrs. Lasky, Vary Induom. And I was gonna make a joke about how John was Vary Induom Amelia, but I looked her up, but I'm gonna say hard-known. She was a lot older than he was, and didn't seem super sexual. Looks like someone who would pass on sex

100 out of 100 times in favor of watching some chimney swifts. Cahoon spent a junior high in high school years banding birds, recording the habits of birds, and obviously not having sex. He first published an article with the migrant, that was his first published article, the Journal of Tennessee, the Tennessee Archaeological,

one of the logical society, you know, when he's 15. I would read this article for you, but I don't wanna lose a massive amount of listeners to suicide. It's very boring. Despite his father James refusal to help him attend an out-of-state university, fucking Jimmy! Calhoun made his way to the University of Virginia

where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology, focusing on ethylogy, the science of animal behavior and the study of human behavior and social organization from a biological perspective in 1939. During the summers, he worked for Alexander Wetmore, head of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., doing ornithology work. Calhoun then went on to earn his master's of science

and PhD in duology from Northwestern University in 1942. And 1943, master's PhD. Calhoun met his future wife, Edith Gressley, at Northwestern, where she was a biology major and a student in one of his classes. The subject of his thesis was the 24 hour rhythms of the Norway Ratt. Oh, fuck yeah.

Men, I'd love to get it into a time machine and go back and have a beer or 10 with John and have him go over that thesis with me, word by word, or might be equally fun to go into my garage and grab one of my hammers and smash my fingers up I've graduated from Northwestern John Todd at Emory University in Ohio State University Guess in some of the students were in thrall with his lectures and others wanted to grab hammers and smash his fingers or teeth Well, whatever they could smash that would have been him from teaching any further

In 1946. Sorry. I know a lot of you probably fucking love. I don't know bird studies 1946 teen is wife Edith. Not surprised, a guy named Mary into birds and rats would marry in Edith for some reason. Move to Towson, Maryland, suburb of Baltimore. Duh-Hoon worked on the Rodent Ecology Project. John Hopkins University with fellow Rodent lovers. But his real research would take place closer to home. Working with rats in the lab, not enough for this rat lover motherfucker.

In 1947, shortly after arriving, he approached his neighbor about using some of their neglected property for more experiments. His neighbor agreed, he couldn't get enough of rats. Even though Calhoun would later admit to not being completely honest, about the true scope of his project with this guy. March 1947, John began a 28 month study

on top of his research at work on a colony of Norway rats and a 10,000 square foot outdoor pen he built. Let's do built a massive habitat pen that took up over a quarter of an acre, complete with food, water, ample shelter and protection from predators. The only limiting condition with space and Calhoun named this site rat city. Wonder what he told his neighbor he was up to. I was, you know, I'm just going to, uh, I'm going to see, I just want to build, uh, a bird mating refuge where I can, uh, watch and help, uh, birds

mate for bird preservation purposes. I mean, that'd be a weird thing to tell somebody, but that would be way better than, uh, what am I going to do with that large part of your land that you're not using neighbor? Why, of course, I'm going to build a weird thing to tell somebody but that would be way better than what am I gonna do with that large part of your land You're not using neighbor why of course I'm gonna build a city of rats And I John bump is Calhoun will be the rat god Lord bump us God of thousands of rats Pray friend to never break free and take over your home for it will spell certain doom for you and your family Not even Lord bump us God of rats can save you break free and take over your home for it will spell certain doom for you and your family.

Not even Lord bumpers. God of rats can save you. Also real quick, as I was putting the notes together for this exact section, bullet with butterfly wings by the smashing pumpkin started to play. And I was not listening to a smashing pumpkin's playlist, right? Despite all my rage, I'm still just to rat in a cage. Fucking weird timing. Cal who estimated the rat city could comfortably sustain

about 5,000 rats. Though that size, population density would be tight. It began by placing just five pregnant female rats in the enclosure. Five fucking sexiest, hottest rats he could find. I don't know if he did that. Which would provide enough genetic diversity for the population to grow.

Soon like Malthus' theory, the population increased exponentially. But then abruptly, the population quickly leveled off at around 150 rats. Nowhere near the 5,000 that could theoretically live in rat city. Sounds like the fucking worst city of all time. Now it's disappointing. But what was not disappointing to John was the way his rats behaved. It was fascinating. Now who noticed that the rats were behaving

in ways he hadn't seen before. Surprising considering he'd been studying Norway rats for years by this point. No one loved to fucking Norway rat more than John to bump his Calhoun. For example, as the experiment progressed and the population increased, the mother suddenly stopped caring for their young properly,

leading almost all the babies dying before reaching maturity. Not good. Calhoun had some theories, why but would need a bigger experiment to prove them. You need more fucking rats. almost all the babies dying before reaching maturity. Not good. Calhoun had some theories why, but it would need a bigger experiment to prove them. You need more fucking rats. There's never enough rats.

That initial experiment concluded in 1951 that same year his daughter, Kat Calhoun was born. Hmm, Kat, real close to rat, isn't it? One of that son of a bitch actually tried to name his daughter, Rat, and then he just talked him out of it. No, John! Absolutely not.

We are not naming our baby girl Rat. Come on, eat this! Rat's a great name for a girl. Rat Calhoun. That's a fine girl's name. Rat will be a fighter, a fierce independent woman. Someone not above scurrying and scratching for what they want out of this life. No, John!

It'll make her out hideous. Now, it's poppycock. No, our adorable little rat will be beautiful. Our rat will be a real heartbreaker, a pointy headed large eyed pestilence carry in a sharp cloud road and got us. 1951, Calhouni's family moved back to Maryland, still were spring. The DC side of Baltimore, he now worked for the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the division of neuropsychiatry for gaining a position at the National Institute of Health in 1954

Where he will then work for the next 33 years 1954 also the year his second daughter Doent Calhoun was born Doent Sounds a lot like rodent Feels like he tried to name his second daughter rodent Now he didn't do that. He named her Cheshire. I just like the idea of a guy constantly trying to name his daughters, you know, names based

on rodents. These are my daughters, Jerval, Miles, Squirrel and Muscat. Careful around them. They bite. Some of them carry plague. Uh, Cheshire, so that's kind of weird too, considering his first daughter's name is Cat, right? Fucking Cheshire Cat from Alice One to Land.

He only had two daughters. What was his third daughter? It had been named. Tavvy, Banks, Fucking Cheshire Kat from Alice Wonderland. You only had two daughters. What was the third daughter? It'd been named. Tabby, Manks, Garfield. It's got the weirdo. Now let's take a look at the National Institute of Mental Health. Often abbreviated as NIMH,

Funder of John's Bigger Rat Project. Prior to World War II, mental health care in the US had traditionally been a state responsibility, but after World War II, there was increased lobbying for a federal initiative. Robert H. Felix then head of what was called the US Public Health Division, sorry, it's longer term. He was head of what was called the US Public Health Services Division of Mental Hygiene. The orchestrated movement to include mental health policy is an integral part of federal biomedical policy. Before going forward, mental hygiene, weird phrasing.

Fuck is mental hygiene. In order to stay sane, you must keep your mind clean. And how do we keep our minds clean? Why, just like you keep your hands clean, you wash it. With my patented brain scrubber, you're able to push up through your nostril and really give the thinking muscle a thorough scrubbing. Wash, wash, wash that mind.

It'll help keep filthy filthy impure thoughts away. Upon the urgent Felix and other mental health experts on July 3rd, 1946, President Harry Truman, I've heard of him, signed the National Mental Health Act. It's called for the establishment of a national institute of mental health. The first meeting of the National Advisory Mental Health Council was held on August 15th, because no federal funds had been yet appropriated for the new institute. A nonprofit called the Green Tree Foundation Finance Act meeting. On April 15th, 1949, NIMH was formally established. It was one of the first four institutes of the National Institutes

of Health NIH. The National Cancer Institute was the very first one. As of 2017, 153 scientists receiving financial support from the NIH have been awarded Nobel prizes Pretty fucking cool group the mental health study act of 1955 would call for an objective thorough nationwide analysis and Re-evaluation of the human and economic problems of mental health I feel like the word economic as opposed to the word human was the government's primary motivation and funding the NIMH, right? Fuck mental health. Our people need to just so drop. Be strong, be tough and keep plowing ahead.

Yes, Mr. President, but if they get depressed, they're gonna get fired from their jobs and the unemployment rate will rise and the GDP will fall and that combination will spell a certain doom for your reelection chances. I see. Forget what I said earlier, mental health, mental hygiene is a very important priority to me, a very important priority of my administration, fun, the NIMH at once.

The resulting joint commission on mental illness and health issued a report action for mental health that was researched and published under the sponsorship of 36 organizations, making up the commission. During the mid 1960s, NIMH launched an extensive attack on special mental health problems. Part of this was a response to President Lyndon Jumbo Johnson's campaign pledge to apply scientific research to social problems Institute established centers for research on schizophrenia child and family mental health and suicide as well as crime and delinquency Minority group mental health problems urban problems and later rape aging tech and finally technical assistance to the victims of natural disasters.

I feel like that last one, the technical assistance of the victims natural disasters, it doesn't really fit with the other mental health problems. Right? Do you really need to research that? According to our research, people who've just had their homes completely destroyed by tornado are very stressed out about that. And again, according to our extensive research, they would for sure appreciate some technical assistance, i.e. getting into a new home that is not destroyed.

You need to research, you're like that? I'm sure it's more complicated. I hope it was. One of the areas of urban problems, the Institute research was how overcrowding population density and the resulting behaviors would create societal problems and that's where John fucking rat man, Calhoun came in that's where Lord bump us, Rackodd, Pied Piper of Elkton comes in.

Now working for a large and well-funded institution, Calhoun had all the resources he needed to pursue a bigger version of his original rat city project. No more neighbors, unused land backwoods rat city. Uh-uh. These new rats, then we're going to be living in some kind of road and shanty town. They're going to be living in the four seasons of rat cities. Each rat would have access to spa services like massages, facials, private saunas, hot tubs, silk robes, embroidered with their initials, Egyptian cotton sheet with Italian stitching. Private whiskey bar membership. Cigar club access, 24 hour concierge service.

Valet parking, Michelin star stay houses, jazz clubs, yoga retreats, 24 hour access to all you can eat, self-serve froyo machines, mini bars, room service, free access to pay-per-view movies. And if they pick adult movies, those movie titles, don't appear in their accounts for privacy reasons. What are these fucking rats wanted? They were gonna get, maybe not quite that grand of yours,

but close, all right? They got a lot of stuff. With the team to help help him now, Lord Bumpus, begins designing habitats, smaller and scaled in rat city, but with more detailed designs. Used domesticated albino Norway rats because he was a white supremacist, obviously.

He only wanted the widest, purest rats. I have no idea why he picked albinos actually. This would all take place at his lab on the second floor of a huge barn on the Casey farm in the country outside of Rockville, Maryland. This area is now a suburban center, but the original barn still stands renovated for a suburban usage. And the days of Calhoun's occupancy, there was a small cluttered office at the top of the stairs. Not everyone was cut out to work in that office because it fucking stunk. Seriously, apparently it really, really smelled bad. The rodent odor was described as overpowering and it took some time before one could acclimate and breathe normally.

I thought my job was weird. This guy deep into the rat game, paid by the government to do so. You know that some people were not happy about his rat funding. Right. We just gave Calhoun how much for doing what? For building a rat city. Are you shitty me Edgar? That is where our tax money is going.

Oh, a Vey. All in all, John would spend eight years perfecting his rat enclosures. The research area was divided into three parts. In a center section, there was a box-like room with a hallway on each side and stairs that led to the top of the box room. The box was divided into four rooms, or habitats, 10 by 14 by nine feet. Each room had a door for a researcher or caretaker to enter through, and the ceiling of each room was a glass window. The activity room could be observed by the researchers through

these windows. Lord, bump us would Would often stand above his rats, right? Looking down upon his minions and their enclosures and piss on them. I have no proof of that. I do know that each room was also divided into quarters by two feet high partitions. V shaped ramps connected. Pens one and two, two and three and three and four. Pens one and four not connected. Basically, each habitat had a U-shaped structure

with the different chambers being separated by electric fences, except for bridges, they made traveling from one quadrant to the fourth quadrant possible if you went through quadrants two and three. Each chamber was equipped similarly with food hopper, water, nesting areas, accessible by spiral staircases, and like in his original rat city,

the rats would want for nothing. There was food, water, climate control and ample nasty material. Y'all who made special changes to encourage specific behaviors though. He enticed the rats to use the living spaces and one of the central chambers by making that chamber spiral staircase shorter, three feet instead of six. Also changed how food was delivered in half of the experiments he supplied powdered food, but in the other half he designed his own feeders that distributed hard pellets. Half of the experiments began with 32 mice, other half began with 56, split was always 50-50 male female. He assumed

the four chambers could accommodate about 40 mice total, after loading his initial rats, things quickly would go awry, and ways Lord Bumpus did not expect. The females spread themselves out evenly throughout the chambers, but the males began to distribute themselves strangely. Less dominant male rats will typically awaken earlier and begin to wander and forge for food, but due to the design of the pen, this meant that they would usually wind up

in the center chambers to eat. All right, during this time, though the dominant males of the outer pens would also wake up and begin guarding their respective territories since there was only one entrance to each pen. The dominant males would guard the ramps forcing less dominant male populations to clump into the two central chambers. Meanwhile, the dominant males protected what came to be their harems. And in the center chambers, the less dominant males were trapped with the food supply and some females, which

meant that they would naturally try to mate with those females, right? Oh, fuck that, bro, hell is the fena. But no, these less dominant males naturally try to mate with those females, right? Oh, fuck that, bro. Hell is the fena. But no, these less dominant males never tried to mate with the females as John Calhoun expected. Instead, they would try to mate with the dominant males. And even more confusingly, these dominant males would not resist their attempts. And that was not what Calhoun had ever observed in nature or other experiments. Beta male mice really pulling an unexpected left turn here, right?

I mean, come on. If I can't fuck the hottest chicks, I guess, you know, naturally, I'm gonna have to fuck the toughest dudes. Ha ha, I mean, right guys, come on, you get it. Meanwhile, the experiments with the hard pellet food, another strange thing was happening. Since procuring food at the hard food feeders was a lengthy process, the rats would have to worm the pellets

out from between gaps in wire mesh. It was common for one rat to join another during the process of feeding. And the rats slowly became conditioned now to eat in the company of other rats. To the point that the rats then refused to eat when other rats were no longer present, not normal. These rats soon came to think that the only way to eat rat pellets was to lady in the trumpet, which is cute when you can do it. But to only want to do that was pretty weird. This meant that over time more and more rats made their way to the center chambers, where most of the rats ate further condensing the already cramped areas. These variations in environment led to wild differences in normal behavior patterns and

ultimately to the concept of what Calhoun would call behavioral sinks. Calhoun defined a behavioral sink as an increase in pathological activity in the rats due to the unnatural stress involved in living in such a high population density? This is what's going to freak people out who hear about this study. People seeing so many cities grow larger and more density populated. People hearing more about crime than in previous years. They're freaking out of all this. For the females, the behavioral sink manifested and reduced capacity for nest building and failing

to take care of their young offspring. Infant rats are extremely dependent on their mothers, but when the mothers were interrupted by other rats to engage in a social activity while building their nests, the mother rats would forget about the building the nests and leave their young exposed. And if the mothers moved the babies and got interrupted, she would often only move a couple of them and then forget the rest or Scatter babies throughout the chamber and forget to care about you know random babies and Holy shit rats are fucking dumb. I'm sorry if you're a rat who listens to the show This can't be the first time you've been called stupid. I mean we humans do a lot of dumb shit on a regular basis, but not that dumb

I mean we do shit more evil than that But we don't do shit like that because our brains are so fucking small that if our social routine gets disrupted, we literally just forget to take care of our babies. We forget that we have some babies, and then they die. And imagine the constant tragedies if we did shit like that. Oh man, Bob, fuck a gon' craze over here.

Some of us been bobbing me for months. I can't figure it out! F*** I keep forgetting something! Do you remember to brush your teeth? Oh yeah, always! Do you remember to wipe your bottom? Oh yeah, almost always! Do you remember to take your kids to school?

What is? The three kids you have for years! You have a picture of them on your desk! Picture of them? Oh, no! That's it! When I moved my place a few months ago, I took the last of my stuff to new place. Didn't have room for free kids. Told them to stay inside. I get back then. Jehovah's Witness knocks on my new door, throws off my routine. And by the time we're done talking, I guess I told her to have kids to take care of.

So I gotta go. But you're not done with work for two more hours. Okay, I'll get them after work. They're probably fine. But we're going to do Jennifer Lopez concert after work. Oh, yeah, I love her. She's so beautiful. Now for the concert, we should get some drinks.

Yeah, we should. And did after that, I should, um, wait, what were we talking about? Jennifer Lopez? Yeah, she's so beautiful. How she still looks so young. Also, given the enclosed spaces, thank God we're not that dumb. At least not most of us, not yet.

Also, given the enclosed space, the female rats couldn't avoid the male rats, who would follow them into their spaces when they were ready to make trampoline infant rats, fucking savages. This would lead to an infant mortality rate of 96%. And again, thank God we are not rats. Dude, you just fucking trample my kids to death. Sorry, not my fault man, you're living rooms too small.

What I supposed to do, not trample them. Oh, for the males, the behavioral sink manifested in different ways. The dominant males would occasionally lash out in violence against other male rats in their chamber, including infants, is fucking randomly attacked babies. Among the less dominant males, there were three groups or there became three groups. The first cowhoon described as pansexuals. These were male rats who couldn't compete for status, couldn't get the females.

So now they just started to mate with fucking whatever they could get their hands on, regardless of gender or age. Second group were some nambulists, some nambulists who move slowly without interacting with any of the rats. Some nambulists is basically a fancy word for sleep walker. These rats looked fat, sleek, and healthy, but they were also just mentally vacant, not

doing real well up top, just kind of robots. Strangest group was the probers, a group of less dominant males who would constantly use the hard food pellets to probe the butt-s, butt, butt, the butt hells. They got to deep on those butt hells. Now, they would probe the buttholes of all the rats, constantly probing shoving pellets in and out of other rats buttholes relentlessly. Or maybe they didn't probe like that. Now, they probed in other ways that weren't really any better.

They were vicious, they were hyperactive, hypersexual, aggressively pursued females in heat, abandoning any kind of courtship rituals and favor of just following the females around all the time, always trying to fuck them. And they also began to cannibalize, improperly cared for young, even though they had other food deed. One of Calhoun's assistants would describe the pens that these rats lived in as hell. Proper sounds like too nice of a term for these rats. The more like fucking purge rats. Proper sounds like two nights of a term for these rats. The more like fucking purge rats.

The research carried on in the lab on Casey's farm, uh, the beginning of 1958, lasted until about 1962, not until about. It did last until 1962, when Calhoun was invited to spend a year at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. The end of the experiments predicting that the pathological changes would have eventually led to the complete deaths of the colonies. After ending the experiments, he took the four healthiest males and females, allowed them to breed in another enclosure, but their behavior had been so altered that none of their babies

would ever survive beyond weaning. They had evolved into a seemingly irreversible level of dysfunction, how creepy and concerning, easy to see how many will read a lot of shit into this when it comes to human overcrowding and be terrified. And now for the first time in human history that I'm aware of, we are seeing humans living in crowded urban areas stop breeding in numbers we've never seen before. For reasons we've never seen before. Evidence that urban environments are creating behavioral sinks in our species.

Some people think so. Take Singapore, for example, the city state of Singapore is a third most densely populated area in the world. Over 5.6 million people crammed into 283 square miles. Might sound like a lot of miles, but that's over 20,000 people per square mile. Much of the city, much more densely populated than that. Massive skyscrapers, numerous of them, over 900 feet tall, right, dot the skyline. The population is now shrinking. More and more Singaporeans just don't feel like breeding. Mental readiness was cited as one of the main reasons for Singaporeans

not having kids, according to a recent study. And there's been several studies done recently to try and figure out what's going on. Mr. Chua, a software developer whose wife is an accountant told an Asia one.com journalist that the cost of living, high population density and competition in Singapore put him off I have him wanting to put him off of wanting to have a child. He said, I worry about the future, whether it will be a good environment to have a child, it's getting more and more fast paced and crowded everywhere. My child may not have a chance of surviving in this competitiveness.

What if he or she can't do well? So, what if Calhoun's, Calhoun's, rad models can actually predict human behavior in some ways. We might not start trampling our young or forgetting about our young and eat each other and start fucking alpha males when our spaces get too crowded, but we might stop having kids. We might start behaving in new ways, not consistent with how our species has always behaved, and those ways might be detrimental to the future of our species. February of 1962, an article of Calhouns appears in the Scientific American entitled Population, Density, and Social Pathology. Opening paragraph, pretty ominous.

Especially when you read it with some dark, horror synth behind it like I'm going to. In the celebrated thesis of Thomas Malthus, vice and misery impose the natural limit on the growth of populations. Students of the subject have given most of their attention to misery. That is, to predation, to zeens, and food to plie, as forces that operate to adjust the size of a population should's environment. But what a vice.

Setting aside the moral burden of this word. What are the effects of the social behavior of a species on population growth and population density on social behavior. To answer the question, he cited six of his studies, and the cultural response was immediate. People began to relate his experiments to modern city life just as I did with Singapore, and in an era where fear of social deviance was at an extreme high, the experiments seemed like prediction of an apocalyptic society that would happen sooner rather than later.

As it was egged on by Calhoun's allegorical language in the article and the attached pictures of his experiment, which were clearly designed to look like a human city, a human city like Ratsity. Famous American psychologist Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanistic client-centered approach of modern psychology, a titan in the world of modern mental health, would be clearly influenced by Calhoun's studies. As evident in the following excerpt from his essay, Some Social Issues,

with which concern me? Some social issues which concern me? Where he stated that, and let's play that music again, to ramp up the drama. The resemblance to human behavior is frightening. In humans we see poor family relationships, the lack of caring, the complete alienation, the magnetic attraction of overcrowding, the lack of involvement which is so great that it permits people to watch a long drawn out murder without so much as calling the police.

Perhaps all city dwellers are inhabitants of a behavioral sink. Doom, doom and fear. Beat the drums of doom and fear if you want to work folks out. Student Ad for Calhoun's article was published in the Science of the American. Numerous studies were conducted to examine the effects of dense urban environments on humans.

What they found was not certain doom. What they found was inconclusive. Instead of the reaction of Calhoun's rats, humans reacted in a multitude of different ways, depending on the location. There was simply no evidence of a widespread behavioral sink. But this did not make Calhoun think his studies did not predict humanity, not boating well if pushed into too much overcrowding or too much urbanization. The media also not dissuaded from dystopian concerns either.

Period following the publication of the rat research saw Russia popular books and films with an apocalyptic view of a future crippled by overpopulation. Anthony Burgess's popular novel, The Wanting Seed, for example, dealt with massive overpopulation, resulting in ultraviolence, compulsory homosexuality, excuse me, an isolation. And now let's take a moment to discuss a single tragic incident that would perhaps go the furthest to cement the veracity of Calhoun's claims in the minds of many. One incident that proved to many that urban society was terribly dysfunctional and pushing our species into certain moral decay.

Two years after his rat studies became the talk of the scientific world and also entered pop culture on a chilly night in Queens, New York, 28 year old Kitty Genovies was returning home from work bartending at around 2 30 AM March 13th 1964. Catherine Susan Kitty Genovies was born in Brooklyn July 7th 1935, the parents Vincent and Rachel Genovies. The oldest five children Genovies was a was a graduate of prospect Heights High School and remembered as a very good student and voted class cut up for senior year. Following her high school graduation, 1953, Genovese's mother witnessed a murder on the street, which motivated her family to move to New Canaan, Connecticut. Kitty, however, remained in New York City, working as a secretary as an insurance company

during the day and working nights at Eves 11th hour, a bar and the Hollis neighborhood of Queens first as a bartender than as a manager, prompting her to move to Queens. Decade later, Genevieve's met her girlfriend Mary Ann Zalonco in a Greenwich Village nightclub, two found a second floor apartment together in Q Gardens and Queens, considered a very peaceful safe area to live. in Q Gardens and Queens considered a very peaceful, safe, area to live. And it was most of time, but not on the night of March 13th, 1964. As she approached her apartment that night, she saw him, a man with a knife. Genevieve's ran towards the apartment building front door, which wasn't fast enough.

This piece of shit grabbed her, stabbed her while she screamed. Then a neighbor, Robert Moser, saw this, yelled out his window, let that girl alone. Causing the attacker to flee. But then for reasons I will never fully fucking understand it all. This dude who just saw a young woman get stabbed, a woman who did not then make it into the building does not go down to check on her and make sure she is okay. Doesn't call the police either.

Fourteen year old Michael Hoffman now who lived in the same building as Moser also heard the commotion. Looked out his window told his father Samuel what he saw Samuel called the police after three or four minutes unhold reached a police dispatcher told the dispatcher that a woman got beat up and was staggering around and gave them her location, but Samuel also does not go fucking check on her. I would like to think that shit would not happen around here. I'd say what you want about it's out in Northern Idaho.

We don't always get the best press regarding meat sacks, taking care of other meat sacks, but I would like to think that if you didn't help someone in a situation like this around here, holy shit, would you be socially shunned? I certainly would hate you. Think you were a fucking coward, right? This is terrible.

I remember hearing about this for the first time in a psychology class when I was, I don't know, probably 1920 and getting so angry, right? I blew my mind. I remember asking my professor, just incredulous. Just like seriously, no one helped her. Genovies seriously injured, now crawled bleeding and moaning to the rear of her apartment building out of the view of any more possible witnesses. Then 10 minutes later, 10 minutes. Her attacker returns stabs her again several times, then rapes her, then takes your money and flees. Few minutes later, she's found by neighbor Sophia Farar Sophia tiny four foot 11 inch petite build woman heard about the attack because word was spread through her apartment building

then runs out alone in unarmed to find kitty not knowing if the attacker is still in the area. She was the only one who did the right thing. Hail Sophia, fuck Samuel Hoffman, fuck Robert Moser, and who knows how many others saw the attack, didn't do shit. Sophia now scream for someone to call the police because they did not respond to Samuel Hoffman's original call, but police now respond, arrive several minutes later. Kitty Genovies dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. This becomes a huge story nationally.

All right, it's 4 a.m. The police now knock on the apartment door and form her roommate, her girlfriend, Mary Anne Zalenko, about the stabbing in Genevieve's death. And it wasn't until 7 a.m. the detective Mitchell saying would arrive to questions, Lanko, who was being consoled with liquor by a neighbor, Carl Ross. detective saying found Ross to be intrusive to the questioning arrested him for disorderly conduct, saying also knew that Genevieve's body was discovered lying at the bottom of the stairs leading to Ross's apartment. So the detective thought that the man might be a suspect.

Later homicide detectives John Carroll and Jerry Burns arrived and grills the Lenko, not on the fucking murder, but on her relationship with Genevieve's. The question quickly took a very inappropriate turn, focusing mostly on their sex life and it lasted for six hours. Fuck is going on here. These dipshets just building up images to jerk off to later or something.

Later, much of the police questioning of neighbors reveal a preoccupation with the couples, lesbian lifestyle, idiots. Mary ends the linko oh, consider to suspect. Neither the people from the apartment building are the killer. Later that week, the police get a call about a suspected robbery. When police show up, they find a television in the trunk of the suspect's car. The man, Winston Mosley, is arrested taking to the station where he confesses to stealing

appliances dozens of times. Mosley drove a white corveyor in this truck, Detective John to Taglia, who remembered that some witnesses to Genevieve's murder at reportencing a white corveyor in this truck detective John to taglia who remember that some witnesses to Genevieve's murder at report us in a white car. This is mentioned to Mozie first says nothing. They're taglia calls in detective John Carroll Mitchell saying they noticed scabs on Mozie's hands accused some of killing Genevieve's and then Mozie breaks down and confesses. He has information only the murder would know. Mozie said he spotted Genevieve's at a traffic light while he sat in a parked car and then followed her home.

He'd been driving around Queens looking for a victim but gave no motive for the attack. Mozie was married with three kids, had no prior record. But later interrogations would show he did have a motive, a sexual motive, Mozie confessed to several other rapes and to two other murders. Those of Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Crowley. So this dude was a fucking serial killer.

Mosey was sentenced to death on June 15th, 1964. That would be reduced to a life sentence in 1967. He would die in prison to age 81, March 28th, 2016. Reported details around Kitty's murder set off a national panic about urban crime. Many of the general public wondered, and many still wondered, were the people living in and around her apartment complex with a sad way that they behaved evidence of a human behavioral sink. This is what was suspected by many parts because of some sensationalistic reporting though. March 27th 1964 the New York Times ran an article titled 37 who saw murder didn't call the police. A legend that multiple neighbors

heard her witness Genevieve says murder but did nothing to help her and that report was prompted by a conversation between times editor a. M. Rosenthal and police commissioner Michael Murphy during which Michael Murphy made the claim that was the basis for the article. The newspaper followed up the next day with some analysis, speaking to several experts on the psychology of why people would choose not to get involved. Later that year, Rosenthal adapted that information into a book called 38 Witnesses, the Kitty Genovies case. And the year since the New York Times coverage has been heavily criticized for numerous factual errors and accused of contriving a social phenomenon for sensationalistic journalism purposes.

In fact, only two neighbors have been shown to behave at the time of the murder and the way the Times were claimed 38 people eventually would. One of them was Robert Moser, other was Carl Ross. I would argue that Samuel Hoffman also did, but at least he called the police, I guess. What Carl Ross did was pathetic and toxicated that night. Ross heard noises after deliberation, cracked open his door to investigate. Saw Genives laying on the ground, still alive, attempting to speak and saw mostly stabbing her.

Instead of doing fucking anything at all to help her, shuts his door, locks it, calls a friend to ask what the friend thinks he should do, as Moezy begins to rape her. The friend says, I don't get involved. And he doesn't. Ross eventually climbed out of his window, went to a neighbor's apartment. There he did call the police after hearing Sophie for a rar call for someone to do so. Ross's explanation, I just didn't want to get involved became the famous rejoinder of the bystander effect

So fuck Carl Ross man, what a coward the bystander effect became a huge popular term in the aftermath of kiddie's murder The phenomenon sometimes called the Genevieve syndrome Attempt to explain why someone wouldn't see crime would not help the victim Further research would show that even in an emergency a bystander is less likely to extend help when he or she is in the real or imagined presence of others than when he or she is alone. They often tell themselves that somebody else will get it, someone else will help. The bystander effect used by the press as a parable of a morally bankrupt modern society, losing its compassion for others, particularly in cities, right?

The type of behavioral sink behavior that John B. Calhoun would claim his rat experiences, rat experiments pointed directly towards. Later, researchers looking to the legacy of the mouse utopia experiments would examine his connection to the Kitty Gen of E's murder, Dr. John Adams. Working for the London School of Economics and Political Science would say, it's not so much that Calhoun provides a comprehensive explanation of what happened, but people were very happy to make those connections. They turned to his research to help explain this otherwise inexplicable and terrible event. I don't know. I would argue that the apathy around Kitty's murder was at least partially the result of overcrowding, right?

Can't prove it, but I think for sure played a huge part. I grew up in a very small town for most of my childhood, less than 500 people, less than 400 now, an isolated small town with many long time residents who really do know most of the other people in town on some low. And when you know everybody, or you at least assume that they know you, there is strong social pressure to interact

with them in positive ways, right? You can't just tell them to fuck off and assume that you'll never see them again, because you will see them again. And they will want to know why you said that as well many other people in town, right? You can't just tell them to fuck off and assume that you'll never see them again, because you will see them again. And they will want to know why you said that as well, many other people in town, right? The town's too small to avoid them, which provides strong incentive to avoid conflict or to engage in conflict, I guess, sorry, or to employ good conflict resolution, right? Not the same in big cities. I've also lived in a variety of major cities like Los Angeles for six years, spent four months in London, toured for over two decades and lots of other big cities,

traveled to many small college towns as well for years doing university shows. And I like to get out in the towns that I'm in, work, do some computer work at a local coffee shop and set up my room or something, get a vibe for the place. And it definitely seems like large cities breed more apathy than small towns, which only makes sense. Right? In a big city, there are just so many more strangers. People you don't know, people you'll likely never see again. And overall, there are also more criminals. People you should be wary of, right? More hustlers. If you're a hustler looking to scan people on the street, well, you need foot traffic, right? You want a lot of potential marks. And because of all this, cities do foster an atmosphere of, you know, just worry about yourself more than small towns do. Like in my hometown, if I saw somebody

laying down on the side of the road, struggling, I would check in with them, right? See if they need help. I would figure they were local. And then I'd be able to track down someone who could help them, someone who knows him. Also wouldn't want word getting back to my family that I just, you know, ignored somebody struggling. But if I saw someone like that in L.A., honestly, I'd probably keep on moving. When I first moved L. But if I saw someone like that in LA, honestly, I'd probably keep on moving. When I first moved to LA, I did often stop and check on people,

but then after over and over realizing that they were either high, drunk, hungover, suffering some kind of mental illness, every time I did check on them, and learning that outside of offering them a few bucks there was usually nothing I could do for them, I started ignoring them. I didn't like it,

but soon I got pretty comfortable ignoring them. If I stopped to check on everybody, you know, I would have been constantly late to any meeting I tried to go to. I would have never had any cash on me. I would have given it all away. There were just so many people struggling. I acclimated to that by becoming pretty apathetic. As did everyone I saw around me.

Is that apathy of behavioral sink. Maybe it is. Is there so much more of that than there used to be in the world? Yeah, prior to the industrial revolution, way more people lived in rural areas than urban areas. Way more people lived in small towns like I grew up in as opposed to cities. In 1800 in the US, 94% of the population lived in rural areas. Now over 75% live in urban areas. It is shifted dramatically.

And it's been like that for much of the world. I don't have data to back up the speculation, but I bet a, you know, people did a lot more to help one another to look after the neighbors in years past, more than now on average. So as a species, are we moving more and more towards living like rats in a cage? And is that going to kill our reproductive instincts?

Eventually, or interest, I guess it'd be a better word, like Singapore is beginning to experience. Is it going to increase the apathy we saw with Kitty's murder? Maybe, maybe well. Back to John Calhoun's experiments now. In the early 1960s, the National Institute of Mental Health acquired property in a rural area outside

of Poolsville, Maryland. It was here that John's most famous experiment, the MOUTH UNIVERSE, will be created. Oh, fuck yeah, bro! Now a celebrated successful researcher. He is able to perform rodent research on an even larger scale. Lord Bumpus, more powerful than ever! Lord Bumpus, God of all rats, God of the rack universe. Calhoun wanted to continue to perfect his enclosures and experiments. This time he used

albino house mice, taken from a breeder specifically intended to prevent these spread of communicable diseases. Calhoun's new experimental setup was much more vertical involving a tower of habitats. He called walk-up apartments. At the bottom of each was a virtually unlimited supply of food, water, and nasty material. Tunnels gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. Again, there was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. Only adversity was a limit on space.

He named this enclosure universe 25. In July of 1968, four pairs of mice were introduced into this universe. There would be four distinct phases to the experiment. Phase A was the adjustment period, uh, constituting the time period before the first new mice were born, which ended up being a day 104. These days were marked by what John described as considerable social turmoil. After the new mice were born, phase B began, which Calhoun nicknamed the exploitation phase. During this phase, the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days as new young grew to maturity

and had their own young. The population reached 620 by day 315. Much more than the initial rat city ever achieved, at which the population growth dropped markedly, doubling only every 145 days, nearly three times as long. By this time, the different breads had clumped to one side of the pan exhibiting the same behavior as the Norway rats, but this time without any coaxing from the design of the food distribution. This began phase C, which Calhoun called the stagnation phase, lasting from day 315 to day 600. This was when the most notable events occurred. In a natural setting, mice that didn't find a social niche would be able to leave the colony You know, maybe try and find a new one, but in this setting the outcast mice had nowhere to go

So those forced to remain withdrew from society Forming a large creepy pool of dejected males in the center of the colony Right, but you fucking angry in sell mice out the center. They would occasionally grow agitated and attack one another Giving many of them scars and open wounds, but for the most part their existence was sedentary, was nowhere to retreat to attack mice with simply lace still and just casually endure attacks eventually. Even when the attacks almost killed them, just extreme, super sad apathy, right? Like when you fucking mice ee orce. right? Like what you fucking mice ee ors? Well, guess I'm being chewed on now. I could run, but my bother probably just get chewed

on somewhere else. Might as well just sit here and take it. How fucking sad. Now Cass females retreated to the highest apartments and lived quietly. Now a bigger behavioral sink manifests with the majority of the mice gathend around the central food distributors. While other food distributors remain nearly untouched, like with the Norway rats, the need for social interaction became so entwined with the need for food that the former had overtaken the latter. The males would want the initial fights were also placed under extreme stress as more and

more mice reach maturity. The males continually had to patrol their territories, leading to exhaustion and an eventual inability to protect the females in their areas. Right, there was too much competition, too many other males to fight. Reminds me of Singapore's, Mr. Chua commenting on why he didn't have kids, right?

It's getting more and more fast paced and crowded everywhere. My child may not have a chance of surviving this competitiveness. Right. What if he or she can't do well? I'll protect the females. We're now forced to defend the nest themselves, even when nursing their young leading to generalized aggressive behavior, becoming a real shit show. Their aggression would eventually be misdirected onto their young, right? Randomly attacking their babies. Mothers would often wound their own babies or forced them to leave the nest before they're ready due Due to the added stress of females, also constantly defending their territories,

sometimes the mothers would reabsorb their young into their wombs, leading to a further reduction in fertility. How the fuck is that even possible? Reminds me of female quakas, from that Steve Irwin suck, right? Just ejecting the young from their pouches, sacrificing them to enemies to save themselves.

And Calhoun's increasingly dystopian mouse universe, phase D, the death phase would begin when healthy babies started to be more and less and less often day 600. The last surviving birth would be on day 920. The total population of mice would peak to 2,200, far short of the 3,040 mice, the experiments that up allowed for in terms of nesting space. Now that was an entire generation of young who have been rejected by their mothers early in this death phase. And they became hyper aggressive and hypersexual.

They had seemingly no ability to exhibit normal mice, social behavior. The females that did have young during the beginning of the death phase now didn't have the maternal instincts to raise them. And the males that didn't attempt to reproduce were dubbed the beautiful ones. They never fought with one another.

They only ate, drank, and slept, lived a good life, and then died without reproducing. Again, I think of Singapore. Similar to his other experiments, the period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and a normal social behavior, young mice were abandoned before their reach maturity, leading to infant mortality.

There were more pansexual mice, dominant males couldn't defend their territory as well. Female mice, more aggressive, non-dominant male vice, male mice, Jesus, increasingly passive, not even defending themselves against attacks, right, the fucking e-ores. Well, this sure isn't fun, just got my eye poked out. Oh well, not much fun to see around here anyway. Oh man, get my arm bit off. Oh well, no reason to walk around anyway. Already seen everything. Might as well just sit here and die. After day 600, the population declined towards extinction. Female stopped reproducing entirely,

right? Breeding ever resumed, behavior patterns permanently changed. The remaining mice died, the population of mouse universe 25, honest way to being reduced to zero when Calhoun pulled the plug. The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles are filled competition

and the stress experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown and complex social behavior, ultimately resulting in the complete demise of the population. Calhoun saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man, achieving a sort of societal second death, like the one mentioned in the book of Revelation, chapter 21, verse 8, he wrote, but as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolatrous, all and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. Do be afraid. One interpretation of this verse states that when people are

saved, they are not subject to the second death and only die of the earthly first death, whereas an unsafe population will experience two deaths. The first at the end of this life and the second after the resurrection. Some understand the second death to be primarily a spiritual one, i.e. separation from God, but it is usually thought to entail torment or destruction. Calhoun tides societal collapse to the second death, meaning that the mice experience both physical death and a death of their identities or souls. In January of 1923, Calhoun publishes his mouse universe 25 study findings in an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine entitled Death Squared, the Explosive

Growth and Demise of a Moused Population. And it would begin like this, and again I would like to add some, you know, dramatic music to set the right tone. Clash of largely speaking mice, but my thoughts are wrong now. Uh, on healing, on life and it's evolution. I got a lot of thoughts about things. No, sorry. I just never get tired of doing that.

Uh, I look forward to it every time. Never get, uh, the real sound bed now for what he actually said. I shall largely speak of mites, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution. Threatening life and evolution are the two deaths, death of the spirits and death of the body. Evolution in terms of ancient wisdom,

in the acquisition of access to the Tree of Life, it takes us back to the white first horse of the apocalypse, with which its riders set out to conquer the forces that threaten the spirit with death. Further in Revelation we note, to him who conquers I will grant to eat the Tree of Life, which is in the paradise of God and further on, the leaves of the tree or for the healing of nations. Uh, fuck him, uh, what? This is a scientific article, and he's quote-un-the-book of revelations by the four cents.

That's weird, right? It feels weird. I don't know. He continues. It takes us to the fourth horse on the apocalypse. I saw a pale horse, and its writer's name was Death, and Hades followed him, and they were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill the sword and the famine and the pestulence and by wild beasts of the earth.

This second death has gradually become the predominant concern of modern medicine, and that there is nothing in the earlier history of medicine or in the precepts embodied in the Hippocratic oath that precludes medicine from being equally concerned with healing the spirit and healing nations as with healing the body. Perhaps we might do well to reflect upon another of John's transcriptions from revelations. He who conquered shall not be hurt By the second death Dude is really selling the drama with this fucking mouse study. It's going big It's going big on this my study continued urbanization and population increases will spell doom here this

Tisai Lord bumpis And unless you want roving rape gangs and mothers reabsorbing their young You will heed my words. He continues. Let us first consider the second death. Table 1. The four mortality factors listed in Revelation have direct counterparts, with the division of one of them to form a total of five, in the ecology of animals and nature.

I shall briefly treat each of these five mortality factors and then discuss the steps taken to eliminate or drastically reduce the impact of each utopian environment constructed for mice. A calendar would then go on to discuss immigration, resource shortage, inclement weather, disease, predation, how he'd eliminated these issues with his experiments, you know, with his mice creating the mice utopia, he would go over the results of the four phases I've already summarized. You'll explain that by day 920, no mice are being conceived. By March 1st, 1972, the average age of survivors is 776 days.

Over 200 days beyond menopause. On June 26, 1972, there were only 122 mice total, 22 male, 100 female, the remaining survivors, she projected that the last surviving male would be dead, May 23rd, 1973, 1,780 days after the experiment began. The actual demise of the population, Calhoun emphasized contradicted prior knowledge that indicated that the population would research once they'd reached a smaller level, right, essentially invalidating a mouthfuls his idea of infinite cycles of growth and death,

to Calhoun, there was only death. Once a species behavior deviated too far away from its traditional norms, it seemed that the species was now completely unable to ever return to its previous life-sustaining behavior. An extinction became inevitable, could the same occur with humanity. Calhoun was particularly worried about the behaviors of the males and he wrote,

male counterparts, these non-reproducing females, we soon dubbed the beautiful ones. They never engage in sexual approaches towards females and they never engage in fighting. And so they had no wound or scarred issue. Thus their pellets remained in excellent condition. Their behavioral repertoire became largely confined to eating, drinking, sleeping, and grooming. None of which carried any social implications beyond that represented by contiguity of bodies. Most of the last half of the population born in the 16th cell universe were fully or largely like these non-reproducing females and these beautiful ones. As their

formally more competent predecessors gradually became a senescent, they're already disrupted capacity for reproduction terminated. At this time, only the beautiful one category of males and their counterpart females remained at an age normally compatible with reproduction, but they had long since failed to develop this capacity. Basically, the male mice who didn't kill each other off were complacent, sexless, and only lived to eat, sleep, and relax.

He wrote even placing them with adequate sex partners of the opposite sex that had matured and uncrowded conditions, also gave very little indication of retention of any adequate reproductive behavior. They forgot how to fuck. They lost the will to fuck. All of them. Obviously, if that happened to our humanity, to our species overall, well, there goes, you know, our species. Unless we go real heavy on artificial insemination,

but if our behavior has gone so awry on such a large scale, if men just don't care to fuck anymore, well, I highly doubt women will care at that point to become pregnant. Civilization would then devolve into anarchy, right? With no more young joining the workforce, there would soon be no more young at all. Only the old, the old with no one coming behind them to care for them. Progress stops, construction, repair stops, medical care stops, infrastructure crumbles, chaos ensues. Unless the final humans have robots to keep them comfortable for our final years, robots that soon won't have non-robots to maintain and repair them. Humanity is left to experience a terrible, unstable, probably extremely horrific and panicked last few decades, and then we are no more.

Not fun to think about. So what did Calhoun conclude from his last big rodent study? He concluded that reduction from bodily death, death from famine, natural disaster, etc. culminated in the survival of too many individuals. With too many individuals surviving, there weren't enough activities to go around so they would compete with older members of the community which would lead to a total breakdown of social behavior in every respect and he would close his article with a biblical reference and a call to

action. Happy is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her, all her paths lead to peace from Proverbs. For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short

of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectancies to do so. Only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented, acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial, cultural, conceptual, technological society will have been blocked.

Just as biological, generativity in the mouse involves this species' most complex behavior, so does ideational, generativity for man loss of these respective complex behaviors means Death of the species doom doom and gloom Dude do not think his rodent studies pointed to a good future for humanity at all Right, we're gonna lose our purpose. We're gonna lose our will to live our insane to live and be done with Count whom believe that if the world got too crowded of technology Even if technology managed to keep up with human's physical demands, like providing enough food,

there wouldn't be enough roles for people to fill, right? And without that as social incentive, our behaviors would turn towards aggression, vice, apathy, lethargy, and antagonism. Numbers other research scientists got busy applying his theories to humans, right? Look into crowded spaces like colleges, college dormitories in prisons. Paul Paulus from the University of Texas wrote the prisons were now the perfect place to

see how Calhoun's rodent findings applied to humans, describing the social interaction between inmates as intense, prolonged, inescapable and realistic. Prisons offer the closest analog to universe 25 since prisoners couldn't escape the company of their fellow inmates, even in their own cells. And some prison studies did link over specialization to stress suicide violence and psychopathy. Scary, right? But environmental psychologists would soon identify the real problem in how to avoid it in non-prison crowded urban areas.

They identified two kinds of density, physical density and social density. Physical density was the amount of space per person, while social density was the number of individuals occupying a space. They found that social density was the much more important factor, as individuals in high social density environments were not able to mitigate or control their interactions with others. Based on their subsequent research, human environments could be designed to at least partially resolve issues found in the rodent and prison studies

Allowing people the privacy they will need to have healthy social lives and that makes total sense to me Might not have thought of it on my own though, right? The rodent studies Presented in environment that we will likely never replicate in human society Unlike in Calhoun's rodent studies humans living in dense urban environments and say the apartment buildings of Manhattan Don't live in buildings with no fucking doors on individual units. Young fathers living in these buildings don't have to continually fight off other dudes, defend their wives and children from young dudes trying to fuck their wives and trample their kids.

Mothers with young children are not also forced to continually defend themselves from being raped or their kids from being trampled. Very different for us, right? We have locking doors, we have security guards and law enforcement. Even in a very crowded environment with living units stacked side by side and on top one another, thanks to sound deadening technology, thanks to amazing sound systems and incredibly lifelike, flat screen TVs, the ability to grow plants and doors, et cetera, you can create a real oasis, almost anywhere if you have the money and put the thought into it.

You can be living in a hundred story high, Verizon with thousands of other people directly above and below you, thousands more all around you, but once you're in your space, you can feel like you're all alone. You can get away from everybody else, have some peace, be able to think your thoughts, pursue your interests, and not be bothered. The rodents in Calhouns, supposed utopias, didn't have everything they needed actually. They didn't have fucking privacy, and they didn't have everything they needed actually. They didn't have fucking privacy and they didn't have protection Huge differences

Most people now at sea do not think human beings will fall prey to the same kind of social or societal degradation as the rats and rat city or the mice in universe 25 Mice have very different social dynamics and humans Another thing to think about is that there's been a fairly logical progression in our evolution towards settlement and towns and cities. That progression missing with mice, Calhoun threw them into a completely foreign environment. Best case, Calhoun's rodents exhibited some behaviors which would mirror human interactions. Worst case, Calhoun just needlessly stressed out and tortured a bunch of rice and mice and rats. There are so many problems with extrapolating human behavior predictions

from Lord Bumpus' experiments. Mice have neither the intelligence nor technological capacity to solve their problems in the way that humans do. How Hoons mice also had zero stimulus except social interaction. Nothing to play with. No wheels to run on. Nothing. Seems reasonable that their behaviors would degrade over time given that they had literally nothing to do except continually interact with one another over and over again, driving their stress levels further and further up. In the human world, we have a lot of stuff to do that is not interacting with other people. Though that does present an interesting thought about social media, could we be driven crazy by over socialization through continually being in touch with one another as a form of

entertainment or passive activity via social media. Time will tell. Some modern thinkers think that accounts experiments do point toward socialism not being the way to go for humanity. The experiments seem to imply to some that social welfare welfare programs, if too lavish, would lead to a breakdown in the social fabric of society as occurred in the experiment among the mice. One article from 2020 analyzing the mouse utopian experiments would write, take away the motivation to overcome obstacles, notably the challenge of providing

for oneself and family. And you deprive individuals of an important stimulus that would otherwise encourage learning what works and what doesn't, and possibly even pride in accomplishment if mice are able of such a sentiment, capable of such a sentiment. Maybe just maybe personal growth in each mouse was inhibited by the socialistic welfare state conditions in which they lived. Compare that to a speech that Franks and Roosevelt, President Roosevelt made in 1935, and we can see that these ideas have been long ingrained

into American society. He said, the lessons of history confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole that relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. I have no empirical data to prove that FDR is right or wrong here, but the sentiment he shares there does resonate with me. Right, this is the existential crisis I referred to earlier

in the episode, right, the unexpected philosophical waters. I waited into this week. It's really got me thinking, what fundamentally gives our lives meaning, makes our lives worth living? Isn't a lot of it our struggles? Right? Our struggles give such important context and drive to our lives, right? Our struggles shape our lives to find our lives. Don't they? Think about it. If everything always worked out, if everyone

got whatever they wanted, regardless of working for it or not, what then would be special? What incentive would we have to strive for anything? I've offered her parents' talk of working hard to provide more for their children than they had. And the pride they feel when they've done that is palpable. I've seen with my own kids that initially not get something they really wanted, like a spot on a team, but then double down, practice more work harder and get a similar spot on another team later and beam with pride, right? Have so much meaning and accomplishment. What if everyone got on the team, regardless of ability, regardless of how hard they work to do so.

Would that not rob everyone of the importance of the struggle? What honestly is the point of life? If not to try and accomplish various things, to hit various goals, to perhaps learn a new job skill or Land a better job or to do something that helps others in some way, help them learn, help them with medical problems, help them with family struggles What if they really weren't any problems or struggles anymore because everything was taken care of Would anything really matter in that unrealistic societal situation? Would we all be bored out of our fucking minds?

The point that we would lose the will to live what if everyone was able to fuck whoever they wanted and Fuckin every way they wanted whenever they wanted What if we all got to eat whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it, every fantasy all came true? Would that actually take away from the joy of fantasizing, right? How long in that reality until we just don't care about anything anymore? It doesn't the challenge of attaining something goes such a long ways towards making it special. It doesn't work for a reward, make the reward so much sweeter.

What if we perfected everything, a limited disease, a limited competition, a limited struggle, a limited people being eliminated? Wouldn't life lose so much meaning? Would we then just stop being interested in life? I mean, I think it's pretty good food for thought. Right, to ponder how much of the meaning of our lives is defined by struggle, by challenge,

by shit not being too easy, by things not always being taken care of. Now, obviously, or at least obviously to me, to go a little farther than FDR started in that brief excerpt when not enough is taking care of that is also a huge problem, right? Insurmountable medical bills, prescription costs, education costs, soren real estate and rental market costs. I think life can lose meaning in a different way if the challenges are insurmountable. Insurmountable challenges, another good way to lead to apathy and no longer wanting to play the game.

And doesn't it feel like this is a game sometimes? And if the game is rigged so that you always win, just like if the game is rigged so that you always lose, what's the point in playing? Are you going to want to keep playing? So what did Calhoun come to the conclusions he did, right? The extreme conclusions, right? So just doom and gloom. Well put this in the context of when Calhoun's experiment was taking place the height of

the Cold War and its conclusions actually make a lot of sense, right? His emphasis on Christianity, well that served in direct contrast to the atheist Soviet Union. Remember it was the year that the mouse utopia experiments began in 1954 that under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. And as for the destructive powers of socialism and cities, that seems to give a scientific basis to the fight against communism. Not the same as socialism, exactly, but whatever, literally preventing an apocalypse.

And remember, Calhoun's experiments were all funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, a wing of the U.S. government. This also makes sense when you consider the heavy emphasis that the mouse utopia experiment put on homosexuality. According to Emory Professor Howard H. Chang, simply put under the ages of McCarthyism in its aftermath, any forms of gender and sexual expression that did not fit the Cold War ideal of heterosexual nuclear familial lifestyle were treated as domestic subversions that threatened the moral fiber and national security of mid-20th century America. Cultural authorities participated in myriad ways to reinforce and promote this cold war ideology

of normative gender and sexuality. So was Calhoun's mice utopian experiments a scientifically designed piece of cold war propaganda? Were the things he chose to emphasize, the mice behaving not in line with their gender roles, societal collapse collapse with everything provided for them specifically based on cold war fears about the Soviet Union Hmm, perhaps Following the end of Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments a lot of different people would continue to be fascinated by its themes of masculinity power and societal degradation The writers of judge dread the flagship character of the British comic book is Dread, the flagship character of the British comic book, 2018, recalled being aware of Calhoun's work, right? Dread brutally polices massively overcrowded megacities,

urban environments, which had exceeded what Calhoun called the mega crisis, the point at which the problems of overcrowding became irresolvable. All right, in 1982, the popular animated film, The Secret of Nym, now a cult classic of sorts. Hopefully I'm saying Nym, right? I think Tyler, you familiar with that movie? Yeah, I've only heard it called NIM, now a cult classic of sorts. Hopefully I'm saying NIM, right? I think Tyler, you familiar with that movie? You have only heard it called...

NIM, right? Yeah. A staple in favor to many people's childhoods would be released. NIM as in NIM, the National Institute of Mental Health. Did you know that this movie was inspired directly by Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments? Movies based on Robert C. O'Brien's 1971 children's novel,

Mrs. Frisbee and the rats of Nimm. In the late 60s, O'Brien allegedly visited Calhoun's lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rodent paradise, and took note of things like a Frisbee on the door. According to him, the scientist owned a attempt to help when things got too stressful. Soon after O'Brien wrote,

Ms. Frisbee and the rats of NIM, a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Calhoun will die September 7, 1995 with the age of 78. Many of his research papers were indonated to the National Library of Medicine by Edith Calhoun and the American Heritage Center. His death would not mark the end of his legacy. In the year since Calhoun's rhetoric has maintained its strength with different groups of all political persuasions, bending their, his results to confirm their ideas about societal degradation, rather than the fight against communism, these new interpretations have tended

to focus on masculinity. Let me share one shitty example. All these examples are in, in my opinion, pretty ill informed. But here we go. July 8, 2014, the website Return of Kings published an article called What Humans Can Learn from the Mice Utopia Experiments. It focused mainly on fertility and gender roles. This was the article's analysis of the Mice Utopia Experiments. If, excuse me, in the male mice, a limited space and a boom in population caused the males to fight more to be accepted.

Since not all mice can be alpha males, the losers withdrew. With excess males fighting for dominance, older males gave up, leaving the females to fend for the family. These would then become increasingly aggressive and some even began attacking their own offspring. Now, who noted that his time progressed, mothers fell short of maternal expectations. In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of cases of child neglect and abuse by human mothers that have made national headlines. It is not hard to speculate that there are many more we have not heard. In Australia, police have released data that attribute half of the nations in

infants in, oh my god, in fantasides to their mothers. Since these are the more notorious cases which the media publishes, the less extreme cases go unnoticed, underreported in the media. In the last few decades, there have been a string of stories in the media, which Winxam and as a whole tell us that women are starting to lose their natural instincts for nurture. We know that women in developed nations are suppressing maternal instincts, either intrinsically or extrinsically. It is also becoming more common for women to seek a sex-fueled lifestyle, something that was also observed in the mouse utopia. Gender roles are vital in a social species. Without that, the breakdown of these lead to sub-replacement fertility, depopulation, and finally extinction. Ah, I don't know. A lot of bullshit being

presented as established fact by these shitheads. We know that women in developed nations are suppressing maternal instincts. Did you know that? No citation there, just someone presenting, you know, wanton speculation as, you know, indisputed fact. Also has child abuse increased in recent decades. I fucking doubt it. I would argue it's decreased substantially.

The definition of child abuse has changed, which could affect the stats, and I really couldn't find the stats I was wanting to find that was a comprehensive look at child abuse reporting over the years, but hitting the kid with the belt until their ass is bruised, right? That could get you in a lot of trouble with child protective services today, but a hundred years ago, I'm not going to be reported because it's now fucking child abuse, right, parenting 101. So actually, I would argue strongly that the child abuse has fallen greatly.

The Return of Kings article even claimed to draw parallels between the beautiful ones, the mice who were not injured, right, and men who wear makeup, saying in the Republic of Korea, 10% of men wear makeup. In other developed nations, the beautiful ones are the vapid and shallow celebrity and beautifully obsessed youth.

Okay, so what is this media source that claims to be analyzing this? Is it an objective, well-researched publication? No, it's not. Return of kings describes itself this way. Return of kings is a blog for heterosexual masculine men. It's meant for a small but vocal collection of men in America today who believe men should be masculine and women should be feminine. Return of kings aims to usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favor of creating an

Androgynous and politically correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men. Sadly, yesterday's masculinity is today's misogyny. The site intends to be a safe space on the web for those men who don't agree with the direction that Western culture is headed. Women and homosexuals are strongly discouraged from commenting here. Yeah, holy shit.

Yesterday's masculinity is today's misogy. Yeah, that's a stretch. Some of yesterday's misogyny is today's misogyny. You know, like fucking slapping your wife or speaking in a turn. And that should be considered misogyny, right? These fuckers sound like the guys from the handmaids tale. I'm sure they would love to take away women's rights to vote and own land, you know, for sure, take away reproductive rights, you know, just to let women be women again, subservient and do what they're fucking told. You know what, if you want to live

and traditionally, male ways to be the provider to hunt, to be good with the gun, etc. I fucking do it. I like that. Lindsay and I are actually very traditional in a lot of ways because that works for us. She is very traditional always. She loves being a homemaker, truly. No pressure from me at all. Zero. And she hates it, hates it when women give her shit for wanting that. She's like, well, you can want to climb the career ladder. I don't and that's also okay, but it doesn't have to work for everyone, right? There's no evidence that society is going to fucking collapse if everyone doesn't live

the same way they've always lived. Man, so many people just see what they want to see. Don't they? And interpret things in the way that fits their already solidified rigid worldview. And then take that weird extra step of expecting everyone else to live the way they do because that's the right way. And that should have driven me crazy for years. It's not that you're not hurting anyone,

not in danger of your kids, not in fringe, not in my right to live the way I want to live as long as I'm not hurting anyone in danger of kids. Let's live and let live. But also maybe not just peek out the window and not to fuck all else if one of us is getting stabbed, robbed, or raped. Bear on people, but also help each other when needed the window and not to fuck all else if one of us is getting stabbed robbed and raped Bear on people, but also help each other when needed that sounds good to me

And now let's hop on out of this time suck timeline Good job soldier you made it back John Bumpus Cahoon! And the mouse utopia experiments, before I share some final thoughts. First, how I am very excited to present a new sponsor to our show. Have you played Lord Bumpus's Rats of War? Rats of War is the most brutal war simulation game ever released by anyone. When you order Lord Bumpus' Rats of War, a freight truck will show up at your address within 10 business days carrying literally 3 tons of fun. Over the next 48 to 72 hours,

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You can just buy and watch some rats live through it. Despite all the rage, they are still rats in a cage. The horror, the horror! Lord Bumpus' rats of war is a subsidiary of bare evil and corporate, play at your own risk. Holy shit, that sounds intense. Sounds pretty fucked up for the rats, but I can't still want to play it. So anyway, what did, you know, John Bumpus Cowhoon's ideas resonate with? Or why did John Bumpus Cowhoon's ideas resonate with the Or why did John Bumpas-Kallhoun's ideas resonate with concern many like they did?

Well, perhaps one of the reasons why Kallhoun's ideas are still so prominent is because people are obsessed with the idea of societal collapse. Many believe that great civilizations don't just simply disappear, right? Instead, they cannibalize themselves. This was the opinion of notice British professor, professor, author, and historian Arnold Tainby in his 12 volume magnum opus, a study of history. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilizations. And the conclusions came to it, conclusions, it came to only partially true, right? Usually there are outside effects in addition to some kind of cannibalization. Like the Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many eels, including over expansion, climate change, environmental degradation, and poor leadership. And then the empire was brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths and 410 CE, and then the Vandals and 455.

Looking at science history or any other measurement, is it possible to quantify societal collapse at all. Or do we just look for ways that society has collapsed and project our own assumptions and biases? Do we assume that changing gender roles or greater sexual permissiveness, et cetera, has collapsed societies because of our own cultural hangups and preoccupations? Even though these things aren't actually proven to lead to a genuine collapse, i.e. destruction of society at all. At least for mice, many scientists studying Calhoun's experiments have identified the problem as not being overcrowding, but over, or excuse me, not being overcrowding, ie over population, but excessive and unavoidable socialization, lack of privacy, lack of security. Maybe if the mice had had

that and also had something to do, a toy to play with, something to run on, said it continually hanging out with just each other, they would have been just fine. I learned a lot today. I learned that the world is not in fact going to collapse from overpopulation. Also learned that we're not gonna start eating each other attacking each other constantly, trampling babies and engaging other horrors

if we live on top one another. But we might stop having kids, at least not at the same rate. And we might not take care of each other like we have historically. Or maybe we haven't done a lot of that in the past either, right? Kitty was just one person. Don't want to read too much of the behavior of everyone living in cities based on literally one example and some of my armchair speculation. For me, I think it's crazy how some of my past

stand-up bits, my thoughts and worries expressed in comedic form were formed over fears of overpopulation. Fears that might be traced back to John Calhoun in his weird rodent experiments. That damn butterfly effect. We're always being swayed by it, right, for better for worse. It makes me wonder where so many of my other thoughts and opinions can be traced back to. John Bump is Calhoun.

Interesting dude, interesting topic. It really got me thinking about something I did not expect to think about head into this week, right, the meaning of life, or meaning in life. Sometimes when I feel overworked when I'm tired and stressed, right? I've daydreamed, you know, like most people about not working. I just not have shit to do. But would that really make me happy? Day after day efficient and hanging out with friends and family? I mean, it sounds great, right? I quit glance. But what if I was just doing that? Would I be

happy? Would I be fulfilled? Would I have enough meaning to my life to feel satisfied? I honestly think pretty quick, I get pretty depressed. I would like more of that a lot of the time, but not all that. What do I talk about when I'm with my friends and family? Definitely work is a large part of the discussion, right? Because it fills me with purpose doing this, fills me with meaning. Not only pays my bills, it gives me financial comfort, but it fills me with purpose doing this, fills me with meaning. Not only pays my bills, it gives me financial comfort, but it fills me with pride.

Pride didn't know that this is all affected a lot of lives in positive ways, that I've helped others to start chasing their dreams, for example, or to continue doing so, or to not be depressed, right? Or to not end their lives, or to find a community built around a podcast enriching their lives greatly. I'm so proud of how much money we've been able to raise for charities, how many kids we've now helped

with, you know, have some kick ass holidays. I'm proud of my voice in a lot of years, every week, usually sounding better than it does this week with the stupid fucking cold won't go away, has to give it another friend to those who need it. My work gives me so much meaning. And this job didn't come easy, right? It had to struggle a lot for a long time to get here.

A lot of years filled with a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty, long hours, getting older in a competitive landscape that favors youth. Still feels me with worry some days, right? Worry's not being able to keep this all going and keep good people employed in good jobs, worry's a fucking it up somehow, mismanaging money, and then a broke,

worry's eventually disappointing everyone who loves this. But those worries, the struggle, also where all the beauty in all this comes from. For me, right? I don't wanna live in some fucking utopia where everything is always awesome because then nothing would be awesome. Moments of thinking, you know, you fucking,

you did it, you worked and risked and struggled and failed but you kept going. You kept going when close family thought you should quit. You kept going when peers were saying you were done. You kept going past talk, or being a husband or never was, kept going when no one would take a meeting with you and people told you kept going past talk of being a husband or never was, kept going when known with taking meeting with you

when people told you that your ideas, this idea, wasn't good enough to do anything with, not giving up, continuing to struggle, gave me a shit ton of meaning. kept me feeling so alive, even when I didn't know if it was gonna work. Right, when it paid off, whenever anything I've done is paid off,

when I didn't think it would, when I found Lindsey, you have to think that I might not find someone who would take a chance on me and two kids, when I didn't think it would, when I found Lindsey, after thinking I might not find someone who would take a chance on me and two kids when I drove a beat up fucking Honda with busted window and didn't have much money or career prospects in my mid-30s, and it felt good to get a win.

Where I knew there was a good chance to get into loss, right, so much meaning. And even if none of this would have paid off, continuing to push and try, that struggle itself would have continued to give my life meaning. So proud of the relationship, I have with my kids. That struggle itself would have continued to give my life meaning, so proud of the relationship I have with my kids. I've been having to work so much harder to keep that

relationship going after my first wife left me, right? That was painful, but it led to so much reflection and growth and meaning led to so much more appreciation for life. Now when things are going better, I appreciate it more, right, I keep pushing myself because I love the challenge and struggle of keeping this all going, of trying to grow it further,

of not having to go away, right? Why not? Live life when you can live it, right? I love wondering where all this can lead. If I had a massive pile of money and never had to worry about finance, I used to tell myself I would do things very differently. Maybe take a break from working all together.

What I really, I have to think a lot about meaning in life this week. Fuck no. Now I fucking love this. This shit is my life, right? So are my kids. So is my wife, Lindsey. No, I would rather be tired sometimes, stress sometimes, to struggle and have to fight for this sometimes. Then not have to worry about shit and just I don't know, float around on a fucking pool floaty and just have drinks. Some of that sounds good, but all of that, ah man, that sounds so vapid and shallow and just fucking pathetic. Some of that sounds good, but all of that, ah, man, that sounds so vapid and shallow and just fucking pathetic to me.

To contribute nothing, no, I want to be able to continue to inspire my kids to push themselves, right, to give their lives means. I don't fucking know. I don't know, one source I came across that, of course, I then couldn't find if you're shutting down Oso many internet tabs said that Calhoun's mouse utopian experiments are like a Rorschach inkblot test. You probably heard of that test, right?

The Rorschach inkblot test inkblot test is a type of projective assessment in which subjects you know, you look at 10 ambiguous inkblot images and then you describe what you see in each one. You see a scary monster, two happy bears, your grandma's face, your grandpa's butthole, I don't know. This test can be thought of as a psychometric examination of peridolia. The tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

Basically, your interpretation of the image says a lot more about you and your thought processes than it does about the actual image. I do think the mouse utopia experiments are a Rorschach test of sorts. For me, studying them, thinking about their interpretations, made me look at the meaning of life in a way that helped me articulate and crystallize feelings and thoughts and beliefs. I wasn't even aware I had. Not completely.

I highly doubt Calhoun ever intended that. And you know what? I love that it did. I hope it does the same for you. Or at least I hope you found listing about all this to be a worthwhile way to pass a few hours. Also, hope you're not worried about humanity following the path of Calhoun's rodents. I hope you're worried less about overpopulation now than you were before.

If you were worried. I think Lord Bump has got it real wrong. We're all that was concerned. And of course he did. I mean, can you really trust a guy whose middle name was fucking Bumpus? Now let's wrap this up. You meaningful mother fuckers. Maybe thanksgiving. I recorded this a day before again. Totally affected my interpretation of all this. I don't know. I'm just in a meaningful and grateful and reflective state of mind. He'll never out for that. Now let's head to those takeaways. Time, suck, tough, right takeaway. Number one, the mouse utopia experiments first began with rats in rat city run by scientists,

John Bumpus, Calhoun, with later support from the National Foundation of Mental Health. What the studies purported to reveal was that overpopulation, overcrowding will spell humanity's doom when all available space is taken. All social roles are filled, competition and stress experienced by individuals result in a total breakdown and complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in our extinction. Number two, despite what happened in the mice and rats and cowhounds experiments, there hasn't been conclusive research to show that human experience Would be the same as what the rats or mice experience that we would not experience the same behavioral sink Instead many researchers have interpreted Kalhoon's experiments as showing the dangers of over socialization as well not overcrowding

The mice and rats couldn't escape from the other roads and that they didn't have anything to do that wasn't hanging out with each other. No toys or play structures like every pet co-employ will tell you you need to make a good habitat. So they quickly were driven to extreme behavior by the constant socialization. Number three, Calhoun paid extensive attention to his mice and rats reproductivabilities, particularly the behavior of the dominant and non-dominant males arguing that overcrowding leads to less and less masculine behavior. In the context of 1950s America where these experiments began, non-heterosexual behavior

was seen as a threat to the social order. And part of Collehoot's experiment was uncovering, and perhaps eliminating, the roots of that threat. But through the days of the Cold War, but though the days of the Cold War has passed, myths about masculinity have persisted. On websites like Return to Kings, which argue that the mice utopia experiments show how gender roles are important

and their absence leads to species extinction. But to be clear, there is no proof of that whatsoever. Number four, how upsetting was the terrible case of kiddie genavis? If you see somebody being harmed, never assume that someone else will step up and harm them if you won't. Don't fall prey to the bystander effect.

If you can help somebody, help them. Kitty would not have been raped or killed if Robert Moser, Samuel Hoffman, or Carl Ross would have actually done something when they first witnessed the attack. Number five, new info. Starting in the 1990s, excuse me, researchers began to notice a concerning trend in humanity, even when controlling for many of the known risk factors. Male fertility appeared to have been declining for decades. In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that

initial finding, including the 2017 paper showing a 50 to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 and men from around the world. An influential analysis in 2017 by Dr. Shayna Swan and others found that sperm counts in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand had plummeted by nearly 60% in 1973. The authors looked at 7,500 sperm count studies from around the world, we did out most of them ultimately analyzed 185 studies on 43,000 men. And they called to decline a canary in the coal mine for waning male productive health worldwide. These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. In 2009, a team of researchers

decided to focus on the more powerful total modal sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total modal sperm count had also declined though by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years. The science is consistent. Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past and the sperm we produce is less healthy. The question now is, you know, what is causing this decline in fertility and will it continue? Some have referenced Calhoun's rodent utopian experiments for the answer, oven over urbanization. Too much overcrowding, too much urban living, too much strain from traditional living.

It's causing not just to behavioral sink, but a biological one. Too many men no longer having to work for food and fight for resources like we used to. It's making us soft and soon we're gonna be like Calhoun's beautiful ones. Dudes, we'll forget how to be dudes, we'll stop fucking and humanity will go away. Is there any credence to these fears? Probably not, but scientists currently have no fucking idea what's causing this decrease or how to stop it.

Doom! Should we be worried about more doom? I hope not. Time shut. Top 5 Take Away. The mouse utopia experiments has been sucked. What a strange thought provoking episode, huh? Good discussion, Father, I hope. Recording this day before Thanksgiving again, and thankful for so much.

From my thank you this week, first I want to thank our Facebook and Discord admins and moderators. I need to get better about thanking. We wait to see if the Colt the Curious two private Facebook page will be reinstated. Fucking real boy Tiago pull his real boy head out of his real boy ass. The Colt the Curious three to five stars is now active and the name will change soon here though. Thanks to Bodhi Sunyata for starting this group and handing it over to us. Post here will no longer need admin approval.

This is so we don't get in more trouble with Tiago, right, with Facebook for getting shut down for things that we approve. It's going to be what you post now and if people post the wrong things, my understanding, our understanding is that they'll get in trouble, not us. So we should be able to keep this group just going perpetually, hopefully, unless the rules change again. We will still need our helpers to keep it from becoming a shit show, right? And big thanks to the following helpers who hopefully will continue to help keep our online Facebook communities fun and active. Kathleen Smith, Adam Gustafson, Sarah Peterson, Elizabeth Heygar, Danny Reign, Jeffrey Pastran, James Weber,

Julie and Christine, Mylin Wolski, Mendoza, Bodysignata, Michael Graham, Deja Arnold, Minnie McIntyre, PJs, Tuniga, and Brittany Lynn Whitehouse. And also a big thanks to Jess and Kelly over on Discord, keeping it running smooth. And thanks to everyone running the time sucks subreddits and the bad magic subreddit. And you took it upon yourself to start those and they keep growing. Thanks also to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsey Cummins. My reason to be thankful for a decade now. Thanks to the suck Ranger Tyler C for directing and producing today. While Logan is out of the office for some family stuff, thanks to Bill Lixer for upkeep on the time suck app, the art war lock Logan Keith creating the merch at badmagicmerch.com,

helping one of our socials along with the suck Ranger, and a team managed by our social media strategist, Ryan Handelman, thanks to producer Sophie Evans for coming up with this topic. She was the one who suggested, all of the men I was on the fence initially, but then I was like, okay, and then wondered if I actually do it

and then wanted to do it right away. So good call, Sophie, and great job with initial research. Thanks to everyone who listens to this show. So we have such an awesome community and we are lucky to have it. Next week on Time, Zuck, we are covering IHOP, so many pancakes, Belgian waffles,

thick and fluffy French toast, but no more cheese, blinces. Those are just continued. Gosh dang. We will not be covering that IHOP. We will be covering the International House of Prayer. And Tyler, I have to check in with you about that. Right?

Tyler C was a member. Am I correct for the law? I went there. Went there. It went there. Okay, so I'll have to lease consult you. Since September 19th, 1999, IHOP KC has offered people access to a 24-7 prayer room.

They have since expanded to a 24-7 live stream as well as international prayer rooms. IHOP KC seems like any other church on the surface with the exception of 24-7 prayer, but they have faced criticism for their stances on controversial issues and unique theology. A church founder, Mike Bickle, claims to have had an intense religious experience while on a mission trip in Egypt in 1982. Said, you heard the voice of God telling me he would change the understanding and expression of Christianity in one generation. Said, God spoke to him about four values, intercession, night and day prayer, holiness of heart,

offerings to the poor, and prophetic ministry. If you haven't figured that out already, those formed the acronym IHOP. Mike Bickel would experience more prophetic visions, meet other prophets who predicted the future of IHOP KC. Bickle founded the International House of Prayer in May 1999 and September that year made a commitment to offering 24-7 prayer. IHOP KC started off as a small church, is now a church music studio, coffee shop, university.

IHOP KC preaches that his members are part of God's army. They believe in praying until the second coming of Christ and believe that anyone can have a prophetic experience and a close relationship with God. Young man named Tyler Deaton was inspired by IHOP KC so much so he started his own religious group over a period of several years. A small group became supposedly a very toxic environment. Bethany Deaton, his wife tragically died a suicide in 2012.

There was a string of news stories about Deaton's alleged role as a leader of a sex cult, who may have played a role in a cover-up link to his wife's death. We'll be covering the history of IHOP KC in their beliefs, the controversial bridegroom message, the tragic death of Bethany Deeden, a pancake lawsuit, and a lot more next week on what may be another cult, cult, cult episode. Or maybe not. You have to listen to see. And now let's head on over to this week's time sucker updates.

Updates, get your time sucker updates. Our first updates come from lawn forcing sack, top shelf meat sack, space, those are dumb. Right, hello Dan. First and foremost, thanks for what we do. And those are dumb. Right, hello, Dan. First and foremost, thanks for what you do, and this is gonna be an MMIW update. Time's like force me to look at polarizing issues from a different perspective,

and that's something I truly appreciate. It's also reinvigorating my love of learning, enough that I went back to school from my master's, oh fuck yeah, I've been at a school for about a dozen years. I should graduate next month. Good job! You're more educated than I am. Now on to why I'm writing and I work for a police department the board is an avahonation So what I'm about to tell you is that things I've learned from the people I've interacted with through work and also friends outside of work

When you were talking about things you think may help them Police themselves most of what you suggested is already in place here But I know every tribe is different the tribal council the chief. Their police department has an insane training budget. That's good. Their cars are generally better than what my department can provide. This is the biggest, you know, tribulation. Their buildings are at least the ones I've seen extremely modern and updated and they generally have high quality equipment. Most of this is done through federal grants. They also have courts and jails. And for what I've heard, they have begun being cross commission so that they can at least write traffic tickets on the state roadways to go through their lands to non-native drivers. I can tell you

their last police chief was a good man trying his best now to the negatives. And now a donation police are extremely undermaned and there is a huge distrust of the department on the part of the citizen stemming from corruption in the past. And the fact that so many calls go unanswered. They have a ton of good officers who are truly trying to make their community better place, but they're handcuffed by not being able to do so, right? By not being able to do much on major felonies and a culture of silence surrounding some of the crimes. The FBI is understaffed in this area. The ship rock district is often seen multiple murders a month and the FBI can barely keep their

heads above water with these cases. And this doesn't take into account the sexual assaults, shooting, stabbing, robberies, home invasions, and more that are happening. Add to this that so many crimes go unreported, up to and including murders, I know that sounds strange, but often the victim's family will not report it and will just have a funeral and no one ever knows about it. That's fucking crazy. There are a lot more stories and stuff I've seen with my own eyes and so many horrible stories

I've heard of happening out here, but you'd be reading for a week if I tried to write them all down. Now for what I think is one of the worst parts, Navajo Nation Privacy Act. I learned about this from an officer I met while helping them search for a suspect who is part of a ring committing home invasions and auto thefts and had just shot at their officers during a pursuit. I thought it was weird, we hadn't heard anything about it since it's been going on for quite a while and our city being just a few miles from where this occurred.

That's when she explained the Navajo Nation privacy act to me. Basically any crime committed on the reservation cannot be reported to the news unless the victim does it. The fact that these crimes are happening constantly and no one ever hears about it is absolutely insane to me. The rapes, murder, shootings, all of it and no one outside the Navajo Nation can ever understand the gravity of it because it's never reported on by any media outlets. Are said he literally shares a border with the Navajo Nation and we never hear anything in the paper on the news or online about what's

happening so close. Luckily, the Navajo Nation has people like Becky Johnson. She's out here, out there, telling her story, advocating for her people, helping victims like herself and trying to bring attention to something that needs so much more attention than it ever gets. I've attached a link to her story and a quick internet search will bring up so much more of what she does for her people. She's a true warrior. And the fact that she's out that and the fact that she's still out fighting after what

she's been through, her family's been through and her people are going through his proof of it. She's one of the strongest people I've ever met and what she does to shed light on what's going on is something the Navajo Nation needs more of. Please give her a shout out. The world needs more people willing to stand up and fight to be heard. If you give one more shout out to Danny, the guy who introduced me to the suck. He's one of the most mediocre people I've ever met.

Ha! He shows up to work every day and he works harder than anyone just to not be the absolute worth it is job That's funny. Sorry not not sorry for the length three out of five stars all that stuff Keep doing what you're doing you're helping makes a better place by getting these issues out there dumb Oh, thank you, Dom and thanks for shining the light on Becky Johnson Yeah, and just what's going on? You know even when a very funded with a lot of modern equipment, you know Well, you know the law enforcement force, the Navajo nation is still handicapped by various laws and by not being able to punish people like they

should. And it's so fucking sad. And this is the, you know, the biggest, probably most well-funded, you know, tribulation in the US by leaps and bounds. Yeah, there's something definitely needs to be done. So thanks for for shedding more light on this issue. And fucking Danny, sorry, you have to spend time with that dirt bag. Oh man, why is he listening to this show? I'm gonna fucking average it best fucking dingleberry.

So I hope you find better co-workers than Danny and I hope life gets better for you, Dom. No, seriously, thanks Danny for spreading the message to Dom and Dom, congratulations on your upcoming graduation. And now let's go on to another fine sucker. Ethan Powell, fucking scientific sucker, sharing some silliness. Ethan writes, major general mishmouth, we're going to quiet laboratory and I listen to time suck and scare to death religiously during my days.

Hail, Nimrod. During last week's World War II part two episode, I embarrassed myself by literally laughing out loud when you got to Operation Forger and you said, Guam and the rest of the Marin Air, Guam and the rest of the Marin Air Islands couldn't help but laugh when I immediately pictured Japanese soldiers camouflage and rivers of delicious red sauce like Stallone and that seemed from Rambo to obviously this drew a lot of looks from about a dozen other people around by my sudden outbursts can't thank you enough for the years of last and interesting facts keep on sucking Ethan Powell. Sounds I like the phonetic it's POW and you said sounds like

Powell I can come back but PS it's Mariana now I'm Aaron era insert a stereotypical Italian finger gesture here, Americana is Americana. I don't fight in the notice Americana. Look at our spaghetti sauce. We gotta get these soups over there. Linguine mouren and fight down on lasagna. Nah, I didn't even fucking notice I did it. I love how many messages we've gotten.

Thank you for sending that in. Very, very different scene. Right? Just fucking Mario Brothers time out there in the South Pacific. Let's go. It's about time, Marla. We fight at either soldiers. Right? Just fucking Mario Brothers time out there in the South Pacific. Let's, let's go. It's about time, model. We fight to neither soldier. That we got to flee to the people.

All right. Another, another, uh, a local sack now, concerned meat sack. Hannah Monson writes about something that numerous people have written in. So I should address Hannah writes, hi guys, I'm sure you've heard about the recent murders in Moscow that happened on Sunday. I live in the area and work in Moscow and the feeling is very eerie here. People are terrified and upset. I'm writing just to let you know that there has been a GoFundMe setup

for all three of the female victims to support their families. I thought it'd be a good idea just to mention it in this next episode. I know that as I and I to Hoen, this must have hit you guys hard as well. Thanks for reading. Reading.

Yeah, thank you, Hannah. Yes, if you haven't heard, it's been, you know, major news. And I'm not reading from anything as I say this, but yeah, there was a quadruple homicide in Moscow, Idaho recently, four college kids, all live, all staying in the same house, all killed by a knife when they were killed, all friends. And it's been over a week and there has been no suspect identified. And so it has a community on edge, it's a community where there hasn't been a single murder in many, many years.

And now there's four brutal murders of these college and no one has a fucking clue that we know of as I record this, what happened. And yes, here in Corde of Lane, we're only an hour and a half from Moscow and a lot of the kids in this area, a lot of the kids I grew up with would go to U of I, a lot of vandals in this area.

And we know people who know the victims. So we're like one step removed. And from what we hear, you know, obviously, it's just, yeah, it's just terrible. Obviously the families are frustrated, they don't know what's going on, why this happened, who did it, they want answers. And the community is very, very afraid. It's a small community, about 25,000

people, about a 10,000 person student body. And it's a place where, you know, people know each other's combination security codes for party houses and a lot of like turnover in places where the locks are not always changed. And people are fucking scared. And I wonder what kind of person could have killed four people with knife and not got caught, especially when there's two other people in the home. And yeah, so I'm glad to know if you want to like search the Moscow, homicides, go fund me, victims, you will find this go fund me,

that has been set up for the FEMA victims to support the families. Okay, after all of that in intensity, let's now lighten up again with a little bit of comedy the FEMA victims to support the families. Okay, after all of that in intensity, let's now lighten up again with a little bit of comedy from a funny sucker, Jenna, whose last name will remain anonymous, right? And about an interesting common law situation. General Wright, Tay Dan, Queer the suck dungeon,

Lindsey and the bad magic team, a work as a government contractor at a facility, filled with engineers and software geniuses, which are predominantly Caucasian. In the cafeteria, I get breakfast. I decided to continue listening to this week's talk about Europe's darkest hour, thinking my earbuds were still connected to my Bluetooth. I hit play and immediately very loudly. And clearly you say he owned and ran a temp agency called honkies for hire.

I hit it positively and glanced out for my phone to see not just a predominantly Caucasian staff looking at me, but the cafeteria cook look at me as well. Some chuckled, which was a relief, but I backed away slowly with an awkward smile, being Latina. I can say, as awkward as being Cummins Laud was at that moment, it definitely made my day. Never stop sucking the good suck. You can't imagine how your views and mindset I love it. I help keep an open forum for ideas, open communication, and common ground, which society needs more of.

This makes it on the air. Please don't use my last name. And also if you can pretty please give a shout out to my, what is it? Smithsmar SMIZ M-A-Mr, SMIC, M-A-R. That's gotta be a made up word. Smithsmr, and main squeeze Patrick. Without him, I wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have come to have known the awesome

bad magic production and never come to be Cummins Law. That's awesome. So much love, respect you guys, thank you. Oh, well, thank you so much for listening to the show, for sharing that message. And yeah, the kind words, Jenna. I love just imagining that scene. Just a bunch of like,

can I picture a lot of these engineer types, maybe not having the most irreversible sense of humor? And just hearing loudly, honkies for hire me like, fuck, excuse me. Sorry, what was that? What was that, Jenna? That's great. Okay. And now let's get to another Cummins Law message.

Let's keep the comedy going. With another funny sucker, Top Shelf Meat Sack, Joshua Childers, writes, Hey, O Lord sucker, fuck nugget. Hear this fucking goddamn Cummins Law. I would like to share this, it may be a long message, but I don't give a fuck. I hate you right now, so much.

But at the same time, I fucking love you. But anyway, I generally pair my sock to a Bluetooth speaker. But on this particular day, I paired my phone to TV and went about my happy business, unaware that our new neighbors were moving in. And my window was open. Today is November 18th, the time is 1240, just thought you should know that.

And see if you can't connect the fucking dots and figure out what episode came out today, you son of a bitch. I went outside to take the trash, to which I came across a group of six people kind of huddled around my window. I started, I started walking up, introduced myself before I could do so I heard your voice come out of a window loud and audible as you vividly enlightened my new neighbors about how much the allied powers beat up on Hitler's pussy. I still they're trying to figure out how to possibly explain to them what I'm listening

to and why without looking like a complete and total psychopath. And then one of them turned around and looked at me and said, man, what the fuck are you listening to? I can say what's time suck. I turned around to say that walk back in the house, closed the window and proceeded to laugh. I'm sure I'm going gonna chance to explain to them later what I was actually listening to

or they'll decide to break their lease and find somewhere else to live. So yeah, fuck you Dan, you glorious mother sucker. Peace and love, it's nearly an embarrassed meat sack. I'll have to keep you updated. Ah, I hope you, I hope they move out. I'd be the funniest. I hope they are just disgusted.

I hope you come and love them again with something worse and they're afraid for their family safety. And they move out, Josh. Thank you comments a lot of them again with something worse and they're afraid for their family safety and they move out Josh. Thank you for sharing that. Those are always good to hear. I love the comments a lot of messages. Okay, let's end now on a shout out, an important shout out. Send in by grieving meat sacker.

Meet sacker, always saying grieving meat sack, Brian Forbes who writes, just wanted to see if I'm maybe able to get a shout out, Hell yes, you can't get a shout out. To my dad, Dan Forbes. He passed away in November 22, 2022. It's weird to think of living in a world that he is not in anymore,

and honestly, I'm not sure how to move forward. I have my amazing wife beside me the whole way, and that helps, but this is the man that taught me everything that was worth knowing. He taught me that if I did not believe in me, it was very unlikely anyone else would either But if I could not learn to love me that most likely no one else would He lived a hard life, but how to heart bigger than anyone could imagine

It has only been one night since he left us, but it just feels like a vacuum Anyway, I don't want to make this too long. I just wanted to say I love you dad and thank you for everything You not giving up on me made it where I never gave up on My me either. I love you and we'll see you again one day. Maybe hail Nimrod. Oh Man, I think you will for sure, but that's just my opinion. You know, I think I think Dan's out there somewhere Brian I don't know where none of us do. I don't think but I think somewhere There's just been so many stories so many People experience events that seem really

hard to rationalize, you know, scientifically. I think there's a lot more to the universe than we see. And I think your dad's a part of that somewhere. And man, what a great legacy he's passed on to you to, for the you to then pass that on to others. Yeah, you got to care about yourself. If you want other people to care about you, you got to love yourself if you want to be able to love other people. a what a beautiful lesson and what a great man he was and now you get to inspire others Maybe someone just hear this message Here's to think about that and maybe someone will you know hug their own dad a little closer Not knowing when they will be taken from them because of your message and I

Hope I hope you grieve you know a I hope you grieve a lot over a death that's very important. That's an important thing to do, an important part of the healing process. And then of course also, I hope you get past it and I hope you live a life that your dad will be proud of. And I imagine you for sure will. Hail Nevermind everybody. Hug the ones you love and be thankful for what you have. Let's get out of these updates.

Thanks, time suckers. I need a net. We all did. Another bad magic productions podcast is complete. Please this week, do not stand by and just not help someone getting fucking stabbed. It's not cool. If you didn't know that, if you were raised not to know that.

I don't know, maybe called a fucking police and then try and help them. And then indoctrinate them into our cults so they can also keep on sucking. And magic productions. It is I, Lord Bumpus, God of Rats, hoping that you have the glorious thanks-givings. I hope you scurrying and clawed and pestilenced your way into gravy and cranberry sauce, the can kind, but not the fancy kind with orange slices, because Lord Bobbist knows that kind fucking sucks. I hope you had delicious gravy, and I hope you're little whiskers, got a bunch of stuffing all over in there, but like real stuffing, not the dry, stovetop shit, but the good-time stuffed in a dead turkey

spot hole and set into a stove for an undetermined amount of time, because I've never had to make Thanksgiving for myself. I hope you had olives, maybe put some on your fingers and ate them off, because that's feels good sometimes to tactily. And I, Lord Bumpets, hope that also you and didn't eat a lot of the darker meat because there has a lot of gristle on it sometimes which can kick off one's gaggy reflex unless that is of course what you like for your harvest of plenty. Feast my rats, feast upon upon your delicious or left overs at this point because this came out after Thanksgiving. Not a lot of thought was put into this. As you

can see, I just hope that I can speak in a strange voice. It can have some entertainment value for you and your... Rack people, thanks. Lord, I'll stop. And this is clearly gone on too long already.