I Lived In The Projects—Universe 25 Is Real and Middle America Is Next

I grew up in crime-infested, poverty-stricken public housing projects. You know, the type of places where wearing the wrong color could get you shot, and pizza delivery drivers—this was back before Uber Eats and DoorDash—would always come with two guys: one to carry the pizza and the other to carry the gun.

I used to think that kind of chaos was just a product of the projects. Then I found an old scientific report from 1968 that described my childhood down to the last detail—but it wasn’t about humans. It was about mice

A few years ago, I learned about a rather controversial experiment involving a colony of mice, and the more I read into it, the more familiar it sounded. Not because I’d ever run an experiment on mice, but the conditions, patterns, and outcomes of the experiment looked eerily similar to what I’d seen and knew about the hood.

The experiment was called Universe 25. It was designed to create paradise for mice—a world with unlimited food, unlimited water, no predators, and plenty of space. Instead, it ended in the colony’s collapse.

When I first learned about Universe 25, I didn’t think, “Those mice remind me of people.” I thought, “I’ve seen this neighborhood before.”

Before I tell you what happened in Universe 25, I want to clear up three objections that came up in my last video on the experiment and the looksmaxxing phenomenon. If you haven’t seen that one, there’s a link in the description.

First, I understand people aren’t mice. The point isn’t that humans and mice are identical.

But when two social mammals share enough biology, you can sometimes discover principles that apply to both.

Universe 25 doesn’t prove humans behave like mice. It asks a much more interesting question: if changing the environment radically changed one social mammal, why would we assume our environment doesn’t shape us in similar ways?

Second, I’m not saying the hood is literally Universe 25 or that every aspect of the experiment maps perfectly onto human society. That’s not how analogies work.

I’m saying that when you see two completely different systems produce strikingly similar patterns of behavior under similar pressures, it’s worth paying attention. Not because the analogy proves anything, but because it might reveal a deeper principle about how environments shape the people living in them.

Think of it this way. If I compare boxing to business, I’m not telling you that you should run an 8-week fight camp in the mountains before your next marketing campaign. It means fighters and CEOs face the same type of problem and thus have similar solutions. That solution is preparation, not punching out the competition.

Third—and this is probably the most important point—probability is not determinism. Said another way, just because it can happen doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed to happen.

Not everyone raised in these environments turns out the same way as the mice. Partly because of the first point. Partly because possibility doesn’t equal destiny.

I didn’t succumb to the expected fate of someone who grows up in a Universe 25-like hood. Millions of other people didn’t. But pointing to the exceptions doesn’t invalidate the rule any more than pointing to a lifelong smoker who lived to 95 proves cigarettes are harmless. I’m interested in understanding what environments do to populations, not proving what they do to every individual.

With all of that said, what’s particularly ominous—if not downright terrifying—isn’t that the hood looks like Universe 25. It’s that all of America is beginning to look like both.

Universe 25 illustrates something we’ve seen throughout human history: when the environment that gives people purpose, responsibility, and meaningful social roles begins to disappear, society doesn’t just become less prosperous.

It begins to change at a fundamental level, affecting everyone, even those who don’t think they’re beyond the reach of society’s fringe elements.

The hood isn’t just a separate subsection of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods and poorest residents. It has a culture that’s influenced entertainment for decades now.And if the conditions that created the hood spread into middle- or upper-class neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will begin to resemble the hood—not because the people changed overnight, but because the environment changed gradually.

And we are seeing it in real time, but most people don’t know what they’re looking at because they’ve never been to the fringes of society.

Those are the first places where many of these changes became impossible to ignore, and today, those same patterns are showing up far outside the projects.

To understand why, we have to go back to a colony of mice that was supposed to become paradise. But first, a word from today’s sponsor, Shortform.

How I used Shortform For This Essay

To write essays where I pull from my personal experience and research in psychology, sometimes I need to reference certain books to make sure how I present the facts is honest and accurate.

But as a father, a writer, and a boxing coach, I do not have the time to read through all the non-fiction books required not just to keep my mind sharp, but to make sure I know what I’m talking about in these videos.

That’s why I’m happy to use today’s sponsor, Shortform.

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For example, while doing research for this essay, one book I kept coming back to was Bowling Alone. Robert Putnam documents how America’s social fabric has weakened over the last several decades. I didn’t rely on it for the biology of Universe 25—that came from Calhoun’s original papers—but it was incredibly helpful for understanding how weakening institutions change communities.

Reading the entire book would have taken far more time than I had, but Shortform helped me revisit the central ideas in about twenty minutes. That let me decide which parts of Putnam’s argument were actually relevant to this video before I spent hours digging into the primary sources. It’s become one of my favorite ways to quickly refresh my memory on books I’ve already read or figure out which ones deserve a deeper read.

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Now back to the mice, the projects, and the dark future of America that they predicted.

Universe 25 Explained

Universe 25 began with a simple question:

What happens when survival is no longer the problem?

Imagine waking up tomorrow and every practical problem in your life has already been solved.

You don’t have to worry about anything trying to kill you. There are no predators. No disease. And on the off chance you do get sick, your healthcare is free, immediate, and world-class.

You don’t have to worry about paying bills, going to work, growing food, or wondering where your next meal is coming from. Every need is met before you even realize you have it.

And just for good measure, let’s make the weather perfect, too. No harsh winters. No scorching summers. Just a comfortable environment every day of the year.

For the mice in Universe 25, survival had effectively been solved. Food was unlimited. Water was always available. Disease was tightly controlled. The temperature was ideal. And perhaps most importantly—despite what you’ve probably heard—there was plenty of space.

That’s worth emphasizing because one of the biggest misconceptions about Universe 25 is that it was an experiment about overcrowding.

It wasn’t.

The enclosure was designed to support nearly four thousand mice—far more than the population would ever reach. Running out of room wasn’t the problem. And that detail will become incredibly important later because the same misconception shows up when people try to explain what’s happening in human society.

So keep the real question in the back of your mind:

What happens to a society when survival is no longer the problem?

That was the question John Calhoun wanted to answer.

By the late 1960s, Calhoun had already spent years studying mice and rats as their populations grew. Universe 25 wasn’t his first attempt. In fact, the name comes from the fact that it was his twenty-fifth version of the experiment.

This time, he wanted to eliminate every excuse.

He built what many people have since described as a mouse utopia.

The enclosure was clean, climate-controlled, and protected from predators. Food dispensers ensured there was always more than enough to eat. Water never ran out. Nesting material was abundant. If a mouse became hungry, thirsty, cold, or unsafe, it wasn’t because the environment had failed it.

From a basic survival perspective, these mice had won the lottery.

And if you’ve ever looked into what happens to a surprising number of lottery winners, then you already know that getting everything you want isn’t always the same as living happily ever after.

If you believe violence, crime, and social dysfunction are simply the inevitable result of scarcity, then Universe 25 should have settled the debate before it even began.

There was no scarcity.

No hunger.

No predators.

No struggle to survive.

Think about that for a second.

Every problem evolution had prepared these mice to solve had disappeared.

The only thing left was each other.

And for a while, everything worked exactly as Calhoun had hoped.

Then something changed.

When It Was All Good In The Hood

But before we get into exactly what changed, we have to look at the brief history of public housing projects. Today, they are synonymous with poverty, crime, and violence, but this wasn’t always the case.

Although calling a neighborhood where human beings reside a “project” sounds like an experiment, unlike Universe 25, they did not start out as a trial for the limits of human suffering. In fact, they started out with almost the opposite purpose.

The first public housing developments were built during the Great Depression to replace overcrowded slums with clean, modern housing. They had indoor plumbing, reliable heat, electricity, and sanitation—things many poor families simply didn’t have.

The idea wasn’t to warehouse poor people. It was to give working families a stable place to live while they got back on their feet.

And for a time, that’s largely what happened.

Many early residents had jobs. Veterans returned from World War II and started families there. Factory workers, janitors, laborers, and young couples lived alongside retirees. Public housing wasn’t meant to be a permanent destination. It was supposed to be a stepping stone.

Then America began to change.

After World War II, millions of Americans left city centers for the suburbs. The new interstate highway system made commuting practical. Government-backed mortgages made homeownership possible for millions of families who could never have afforded it before. New subdivisions sprang up almost overnight, and people who had the means to leave increasingly did.

At the same time, many manufacturing jobs that had anchored urban neighborhoods began moving to the suburbs, to other states, and eventually overseas. Cities that had once depended on factories lost not only jobs, but also many of the families those jobs supported.

Over time, public housing changed, too.

As more working- and middle-income families left, the projects became increasingly occupied by the poorest households. Instead of being neighborhoods with a mix of incomes, they became neighborhoods where nearly everyone was struggling at the same time.

Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, a series of social, economic, and policy changes further reshaped many of these communities. Family structures became less stable in many neighborhoods. Local institutions weakened.

Crime rose dramatically across numerous American cities. The crack epidemic of the 1980s poured gasoline on problems that were already developing, and some of the country’s largest housing projects became synonymous with violence.

None of this happened because of any one law, politician, or economic trend.

It happened because a lot of different changes all pointed in the same direction.

A neighborhood that had once been a temporary stop for working families gradually became a place where poverty was concentrated, opportunity was harder to find, and destructive behaviors became more common—not because everyone living there made the same choices, but because the environment itself had changed.

Because that’s exactly the question John Calhoun was observing with Universe 25.

He wanted to know what happens when you change the environment enough that the social fabric begins to change with it.

All Your Basic Needs Are Met—Now What?

When Calhoun introduced the first eight mice into Universe 25—four males and four females—the experiment unfolded almost exactly as he had hoped.

The mice explored their new environment.

They paired off, built nests, and raised their young.

The population doubled roughly every fifty-five days.

From every measurable standpoint, the experiment looked like a complete success.

If Calhoun had stopped the experiment after the first year, Universe 25 probably would not be something worth talking about.

But he didn’t stop.

As the colony continued to grow, something unexpected happened to the mice.

The strongest males established territories around the food dispensers and nesting areas. Now, that’s perfectly normal mouse behavior in the wild. Territory isn’t just about having a place to live. It’s how males compete for mates, protect their offspring, and establish a role within the colony.

But as more mice were born, not every male could establish a territory of his own.

A growing number became what Calhoun called “dropouts.”

They wandered the enclosure without a clear place in the social order.

They weren’t sick or starving.

They simply no longer had a role in mouse society.

Those wandering males became easy targets. Dominant males attacked them repeatedly, often for no obvious reason. And instead of retreating to establish territory somewhere else—as they would in the wild—they had nowhere to go. They remained inside the colony, absorbing more attacks, becoming increasingly withdrawn or increasingly violent themselves.

The new challenge for these wasn’t survival. It was finding purpose and a place in society.

And that’s a very different problem.

Because once a society solves the problem of survival, the need for status, purpose, and social hierarchy doesn’t disappear.

But without any reason to seek those things or methods to obtain them, society began to break down. As the colony grew, it only got worse.

The Mice Are Down Bad

The dominant males became less interested in defending territory and more interested in attacking anything that entered it. Violence became increasingly disconnected from its original purpose. Instead of protecting mates or offspring, aggression often seemed random and indiscriminate.

It wasn’t just the males that changed.

In a healthy mouse colony, mothers fiercely protect their young. In Universe 25, many stopped.

Some abandoned their nests. Others became unusually aggressive toward their own pups.

As infant mortality increased, fewer young mice survived long enough to learn the normal behaviors that every generation inherits from the one before it.

This is important—and perhaps you’re starting to see the punchline before it lands—because behavior isn’t just genetic. Much of it is learned.

We understand this in humans, but there is an idea that animal behavior is entirely genetic.

Anyone who has ever dealt with dogs rescued from abusive owners or even cats who were taken away from their mothers before they learned how to wean already knows this, though. For everyone else, just look at how pigeons in a dense city environment react when you try to shoo them away versus other birds, who won’t even let you get close.

Young mice learn how to socialize, compete, mate, establish territory, and care for offspring by watching older mice.

When that chain is broken, the next generation doesn’t simply lose parents—It loses guides and teachers.

And Calhoun noticed something else, perhaps even more disturbing.

The younger mice increasingly struggled to establish themselves socially. Many never learned how to court mates successfully. Others avoided conflict altogether. Some reacted to even minor encounters with extreme violence.

The mice were crashing out over minor infractions, which should also sound quite familiar to anyone who’s lived in the hood.

The normal rhythms of colony life were disappearing.

And then came the strangest group of all.

Calhoun called them the Beautiful Ones.

These mice were physically healthy and had no visible injuries. Their fur was immaculate because they spent much of their time grooming themselves.

They rarely fought or explored, and they were not interested in courting, let alone mating with other mice.

They just ate, slept, groomed themselves, and avoided the rest of the colony.

If you only looked at them from the outside, they appeared to be the healthiest mice in the enclosure.

But they had quietly given up participating in the very behaviors that allow a society to continue.

Calhoun believed the colony had entered what he called a behavioral sink—a state where normal social organization had broken down so thoroughly that the population continued collapsing even though food, water, and shelter remained abundant.

Eventually, births stopped altogether.

The remaining mice grew old.

One by one, they died.

Universe 25 ended exactly where it began.

With an empty paradise.

Inbreeding Debunked

At this point, something important has to be addressed.

I’ve already said thatt that mice aren’t humans, and we’re drawing an analogy rather than making a direct comparison. That’s obvious, but there’s another critique that gets tossed out about this experiment, and that’s inbreeding.

Inbreeding likely reduced the colony’s robustness, making the mice more vulnerable to chronic social stress. But the distinctive behavioral changes associated with Universe 25 are broadly consistent with what is known about rodents under crowded, socially destabilizing conditions, and cannot be attributed to inbreeding alone.

After all, most laboratory mice are already inbred because scientists are looking to test their hypotheses and drugs on subjects with as little variance as possible.

If inbreeding alone caused mothers to abandon their young, males to stop mating, and societies to collapse, every laboratory mouse colony in the world would look like Universe 25, but they don’t.

Inbreeding likely reduced the mice’s ability to cope with an environment that had already become socially dysfunctional. The genetics may have loaded the gun; the environment pulled the trigger.”

With that out of the way, let’s go back to where I grew up. Because once you understand what happened inside Universe 25, the hood starts looking a lot less mysterious, and the future of America starts looking a lot more obvious.

What Comes First? Crime and Lack of Purpose

When people think about the hood, they usually think about crime.

Now they’re not wrong, because talking about the hood without mentioning violence is like mentioning omelets and never bringing up eggs.

Violence is one of—if not the defining—characteristics of life in the projects. There are poor communities all over the country. Trailer parks and Appalachia have poverty, drugs, and single mothers as well, but the violence is unique to life in the hood.

But I think that’s where most people stop thinking.

Violent crime isn’t the disease. Rather, it’s one symptom of something much deeper.

The question isn’t why violence is so common. It is why an environment emerged where violence became one of the most effective ways for a young man to establish status in the first place.

Inside Universe 25, the mice didn’t become violent because they were starving. Their basic needs had already been solved.

They became violent because the social order broke down. Some mice could no longer establish a meaningful place within the colony.

The normal path to becoming a successful adult mouse was gone.

The projects produced something surprisingly similar, granted, the resource scarcity is a big problem in the hood. However, many people who live there do so under government subsidies and welfare programs, which effectively eliminate survival pressure. I’ll leave it up to the viewer to decide how well that works.

As for the models of successful adulthood, for most of human history, a young man had countless legitimate ways to earn status.

He could become skilled at a trade.

Work hard.

Support a family.

Protect his community.

Build a business.

Become respected by his neighbors.

Teach younger men.

The exact details vary across cultures, but the general principle is remarkably consistent.

Status came from contributing something that other people valued.

Now imagine growing up in a neighborhood where many of those paths barely exist.

Factories have disappeared. Schools are failing. Businesses leave. Churches lose influence. Fathers are absent because they’ve already gone through this cycle and, as a result, didn’t learn how to be examples, creating a vicious cycle.

The adults who remain often spend most of their energy simply trying to survive.

The opportunities haven’t disappeared entirely, but they have become much rarer.

Human beings don’t stop seeking status simply because the legitimate paths become more difficult. They just find new ones.

If education earns ridicule instead of respect, if steady employment offers little hope of upward mobility, and if there are few successful men close enough to imitate…

Then reputation replaces contribution, fear replaces respect, materialism replaces character, and violence replaces achievement.

The markers of success have changed, and thus the incentives have followed suit. Because incentives don’t just shape individual behavior. They shape the entire culture.

Once enough people adapt to the same incentives, the culture begins teaching the next generation to do the same.

That was another striking feature of Universe 25.

As mothers abandoned their young and normal social behavior disappeared, the next generation stopped learning how to be mice.

Not because their genes changed, but because their teachers disappeared. The hood experienced something remarkably similar.

People often talk about fatherlessness, and they should.

Fathers matter, but fathers weren’t the only teachers that disappeared.

Older brothers. Grandfathers. Coaches. Tradesmen. Business owners. Church elders.

Stable married couples.

Neighbors who have lived on the same block for thirty years, who could set an example, either leave for safer environments with more opportunity or stay because they are caught in the cycle and likely aren’t the greatest examples.

A village can raise a child, but it can also mess one up, too.

The only two things you really give your children are their genes and their zip code.

Communities don’t teach children in classrooms. They teach them by example.

When enough functioning adults disappear, children don’t simply lose parents. They lose a picture of who they’re supposed to become.

And once that chain of learning breaks, every generation begins a little farther behind than the last. That’s why dysfunction compounds.

It’s also why the hood wasn’t created in a single decade and why it couldn’t be fixed in one either, and we are starting to see the same pattern take place at all levels of society. Not just the bottom.

Status Games Continue Even When You Can’t Attain Status

If all of these patterns were confined to the projects, this would just be a history lesson. Fascinating, if I do say so myself, but just a history lesson. But this is a warning.

The hood isn’t unique because the people are fundamentally different. They want the same thing as every other person in not just America, but the world

The hood is unique because the environment changed first, then violence and social breakdown follow. Many people get this order mixed, and in doing so, they miss the canary in the coal mine.

In fact, the violence and social breakdown were the end result. Not the catalyst. Now we see it in broader, previously more stable parts of society.

The first thing that changed was the status game.

For thousands of years, nearly every society rewarded roughly the same milestones. Go to school, learn a skill, or go to college, get married, have some kids, and ride off into the sunset with the respect you’ve earned by contributing to society while enjoying the American Dream.

But today, more and more Americans can’t even imagine reaching those milestones.

Home ownership feels impossible, marriage happens later, if it happens at all, and birth rates have fallen to levels never seen before.

Young adults stay with their parents longer. College has effectively become a scam, getting more expensive while losing the job security and prestige it once carried.

Church attendance continues to fall and rust in nearly every major institution—including the government, and supposedly impartial media responsible for reporting on that government—has collapsed.

People have fewer close friends than they used to. Young men are having less sex, dating less, marrying less, and participating less in civic life than previous generations. I’ve made videos on all of these trends, by the way.

None of these trends, by themselves, means America is becoming the hood. But they all point in the same direction and can be grouped under the same general idea.

The traditional paths to status, purpose, and adulthood are becoming harder to reach, so many people are no longer playing that game.

Human beings don’t stop seeking status just because the traditional status ladder breaks down.

They just build another one, which is exactly what happened in the hood.

When stable work no longer offered a path upward, schools stopped producing opportunity, homeownership drifted out of reach, and fathers, churches, and neighborhood institutions grew weaker. People didn’t stop competing—they changed the game.

Status shifted from long-term achievement to immediate visibility. Reputation replaced character, and looking successful became easier than becoming successful.

I talked about this in my video on luxury poverty: people don’t buy expensive shoes, phones, jewelry, and designer clothes because they’re bad at math. They buy them because status it’s the best way to feel like they matter in a world where the usual ways to do so are scant to non-existent.

The same thing is happening across America. The symbols are different, but the psychology is the same.

If buying a home feels impossible, at least you can buy the newest phone. If building wealth takes decades, at least you can go viral today. If respect takes twenty years to earn, attention can be bought this afternoon.

When people can’t win the long game, they naturally begin optimizing for games they can actually win.

That’s exactly what John Calhoun was observing. Universe 25 wasn’t a story about mice making bad decisions; it was a story about normal animals adapting to an abnormal environment. I think we’re watching something similar happen now.

As America’s environment has changed—one institution, one neighborhood, one family, and one incentive at a time—people have adapted to it.

Because people don’t simply adapt to their environment, they eventually become the kind of people the environment rewards. That’s why the hood matters. It wasn’t America’s exception. It was America’s early warning system.