Zeitgeist Report: The Best Economy in American History Is Killing Us

by | Sep 21, 2026 | Promotion | 0 comments

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American Economy Booms Despite Doom on TV - Record Income, 1 Million AI Jobs, and a Split Labor Market

According to an X post by Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) on September 17, 2026, "Real incomes at record highs. Poverty at record lows." He also wrote "GDP at 5.1%." Atlanta Fed GDPNow sat at 5.08% for Q3 2026 that morning. Official BEA real GDP for Q2 2026 was 1.5%.

The Income Print

The Census Bureau press release dated September 15, 2026 set real median household income at $87,460 in calendar year 2025, up 2.6% from $85,210, the high on a series that starts in 1967. Income in the United States: 2025 (P60-289) repeats those dollars. The P60-289 PDF puts the 90th percentile at $261,300 and the 10th percentile at $20,010. After taxes and credits, median income rose 3.1% to $76,060. Official poverty fell to 10.2% for 34.5 million people. Child poverty fell to 13.4%.

An X post by The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) the same day called the median gain the third straight annual increase, totaling $6,000, or 7.4%, from 2022. FRED's Census file in 2025 dollars prints $81,460 for 2022 and $87,460 for 2025. The median rose 2.6% in 2025. The top tenth rose 1.7%.

The AI Jobs Tally

According to an X post by David Sacks (@DavidSacks) on September 8, 2026, "According to the Economist, AI has created 1 million new jobs in the U.S." He quoted The Economist's September 5 post on the September 4 essay "The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here." That paper opened on the BLS August Employment Situation: payrolls up 162,000, unemployment at 4.1%. The magazine estimates about 1 million new American jobs from AI against roughly 200,000 AI-attributed layoffs since mid-2023. Hard-hat industries around the data-center build-out added about 320,000 jobs above trend since 2023. STEM professional roles added about 730,000 above trend since 2022. LinkedIn, as cited there, counts about 640,000 new AI-specific jobs between 2023 and 2025. Gad Levanon of Burning Glass, in the same essay, puts "AI jobs" near 1% of professional work, on the order of 1 million positions.

The Degree Split

According to Theo Francis and Ray A. Smith in The Wall Street Journal on September 6, 2026, Burning Glass finds unemployment for workers ages 22 to 34 without a college degree at some of the lowest readings since 2003. College-educated peers in that age band sit near their weakest marks in that window, aside from the pandemic and the 2008 rebound. Prime-age degree holders averaged 2.7% unemployment in the 12 months through July. Workers with some college averaged 3.6%. High-school-only workers averaged 4.7%. Levanon told the Journal the bachelor's supply wave is structural. Construction, manufacturing, security, nursing, restaurants, and retail sit at the strong end of each occupation's own history since 2003.

The Political Shift

Pew Research Center on September 16, 2026 found Democrats more likely than Republicans, for the first time, to say they are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life (56% to about 50%) and more likely to say AI will mean fewer jobs over the next 20 years (75% to 68%). The Washington Post on September 16 reported lawmakers in both parties discussing human extinction from AI. The Washington Post on September 17 reported Democratic presidential hopefuls racing to address voter AI fears.

Why Authors Care

Midlist demand tracks the $76,060 post-tax median. Price the $14.99 ebook against that number. The $261,300 tenth funds special editions and high-ticket offers. The $20,010 tenth lives in KU and libraries. A $6,000 three-year real raise off 2022 is a list-price test on the backlist this week. The Economist's 1 million figure is an estimate. Treat it as the week's claim. Writers who turn speed into more finished pages sit in the same productivity channel the paper describes for paralegals. Trades and service readers have hours and cash. Young degree holders, the junior-office cohort that used to fund first novels, face a slower on-ramp. Career guides, trades stories, and books about the first AI job have a buyer in this split.

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Commentary

Thomas: The American economy is booming despite all of the doom on TV from the mainstream media.

5% GDP is the highest GDP we have had in years. Maybe decades. That is really high GDP growth, and that is really encouraging.

Let me give some real context here, because we were having a debate back during Biden's presidency about whether it was a recession or not. The technical definition of a recession is negative GDP growth, gross domestic product going down two quarters in a row. It was hovering right around 1% or 0.5%, getting all the way up to 2%, which are not very encouraging GDP numbers. We were patting ourselves on the back because at least it was better than Canada, and beating Canada in GDP growth is no points. You do not get any points for that. But now we are at 5%, which is really high.

Pause.

Listen.

That is the highest median household income ever recorded. Since we have been tracking this number, it has never been this high for households.

That is also the lowest poverty rate ever recorded. So, total transformation of the economy, a lot of people being pulled out of poverty. It does not mean there is no one in poverty, but we are down to just 10% of people under the poverty line.

You all said I was crazy when I said AI will not destroy jobs.

I have hundreds of years of economic history supporting me on this. Every single labor-saving invention creates more net jobs than it destroys. Yes, the tractor destroyed farm jobs, but for every job it destroyed in the fields, it created two jobs in the cities. This is true for all of the other labor-saving devices. We have more labor-saving devices than we have ever had before in human history, and we have more jobs than ever before in human history.

This was not a surprise if you understand basic economics, and it is why we are seeing the Democrats, who need a crisis, so desperate for one. Climate change is not working as well. People are not concerned about the ozone layer as well. COVID is no longer a crisis either.

 Their crisis was going to be that AI takes your jobs away, but that is not working, because AI is actually creating jobs. And so now it is that AI is going to kill you. It is not going to kill you any more than the ozone layer or global cooling or global warming or climate change are going to kill you. All of those crises were fake crises.

Jonathan: A lot of people are measuring how well the economy is doing by their experience of it. Gas prices and grocery prices are the most common way people measure how well the economy is doing. Probably the more accurate way is, do you have the money to pay that? Has your paycheck increased to the point where you can handle those kinds of increases in gas and groceries?

Gas prices are not really an economic issue anyway. It is a refinery problem, and the US only has one running right now.

Thomas: We are confusing gas and diesel here. There is another economic factor happening, and we have more than one refinery, but the Democrats have been shutting down fuel refineries. Many states have shut down their refineries.

Diesel specifically is so high compared to gas because a lot of the diesel refining that happens in the world happens Russia, which invaded its little neighbor, Ukraine. Ukraine is a poor little country, but they learned how to make drones that could go hundreds of kilometers with a 100-pound bomb. From a military perspective a 100-pound bomb is not a very big bomb. There is not a lot of damage you can do with it unless you are targeting a diesel refinery.

Russia has been having a really hard time in the last few months with their diesel refineries blowing up, because a 100-pound bomb inside a diesel refinery sets the diesel on fire, and then suddenly everything is on fire.

It has gotten to the point where Trump has asked the Ukrainians to lay off the Russians. Because it is making diesel prices around the world go up really high. There is only so much refining capacity.

Oil itself is not actually very expensive. It has been hovering around $100.00 a barrel, but in general it has been staying below $100.00 a barrel. I think we have had so far this year only 21 days of oil itself being over $100.00 a barrel.

In some states gasoline is real expensive, but that is because those states have constrained refining capacity. It is not easy to make gasoline there, because they have been shutting down the refineries to make gasoline expensive and encourage people toward renewables. In places like Texas, gas is more or less the same price it was under Biden many years ago, and we all have bigger paychecks now, so it does not hurt nearly as bad. But in places like California it is $6.00 or $7.00 a gallon. It is really expensive, and it is because they have constrained refining and higher gas taxes.

Jonathan: What makes this matter for authors is that more money for people to spend means your ebook now looks way better to them. They have more disposable income. They can buy more books. They can enjoy more entertainment and more leisure, provided of course that other things are not eating up the increases in the paychecks.

And when you have increased production ability, particularly from AI, I am seeing this in my own business. Me and Thomas have been texting back and forth about the things we are able to do by using AI to take over a lot of the grunt work we were doing before.

I am seeing incredible things with audio editing right now. It is cutting hours and days from my production process. I am going to put out a commercial for you guys. If you want a fully produced audiobook, I can do one in about two days now if you already have the narration. It is insane how fast I can do it.

Thomas: And this is not AI narrated. This is voice narrated, with the sound effects and all the rest of it.

Jonathan: It is the editing portion, the grunt work, that can be 90% alleviated just by the proper use of AI.

With that increase in productivity, I am now looking at whether I want to hire someone to help me with this, because my potential for profit has gone sky high. If that is me at my little tiny business level, what do you think about everyone else who has giant businesses and giant corporations? They are going to hire people who have the skill sets, because they want the productivity to continue with the proper use of AI, and they are going to pay those people properly for their skills to get to those sky-high profit margins. This is the time to produce.

Thomas: This is part of the reason why the stock market has been doing so well. The stock market is off its all-time highs, which it hit a month and a half ago, but it is still really high, and part of the reason is that corporate earnings have been high. Jonathan's experience in his one-man business is happening to a lot of companies, where they are increasing their profitability and their efficiency.

Part of the reason America outproduces the rest of the world is that we have the most efficient workers in the world. By this I do not mean that our workers work harder than people in other countries, because that is not true. I think there are a lot of other countries whose workers work harder than Americans. But Americans have the most money invested into equipment and technology so that they can get more done.

Jonathan: Which amplifies the effect of work.

Thomas: Right. Part of that is because we have a tax structure that really incentivizes investing in equipment and manufacturing. It is part of the reason why we outproduce Canada. Canada culturally is not that different from America, but they do not invest nearly as much in equipment and manufacturing and research and development and technology. They are much more hesitant toward AI. Your typical Canadian is very suspicious of AI compared to your typical American.

Because of that suspicious attitude toward technology and investment in technology, Canadians make about 60 cents on the dollar for what an American makes in the same job doing the same work. If you are digging with a shovel, you are working harder, but you are digging less dirt than somebody with a backhoe. But the backhoe costs a lot of money.

Jonathan: A viewer asks, “So should we negotiate for a lower per hour rate on audiobook production?”

This is something I am investigating right now, because I actually do not know how to price it. So much of the work has been taken away, so much of the labor has been taken away, that I can do this a lot less expensively than it took before.

If I was going to fully produce an audiobook for someone before, it would take me a month of editing minimum. That is all day, every day, combing through all my sound effects libraries to produce that final, really tight, edited piece. Now I can do it in two days.

Thomas: Which means you can charge half the rate and make twice the money.

Jonathan: Exactly. So much less of my time, but my profit margins have gone through the roof. So now I can drop the price drastically and make it available to more people. People who could not have a product that nice before can now have that product, because my cost in time has gone down.

So yes, what that means is your audiobook will be cheaper. I am reluctant to say this because I feel like it is giving away competitive advantage, but this is probably going to happen to the audiobook market when audiobook narrators realize that AI is such a help in the editing and the production phase.

Again, I do not think AI narration is good. It is not good enough for me, and I have a pretty high bar in performance. I expect things to be nice. AI is not there for me. But in the editing and the production phase, holy cow, it has just sent me through the roof in what I am able to do.

If you guys want to know more, join my Author Arsenal Discord. You can ask me questions there and I can figure it out. I am still figuring out a pricing structure. It is probably going to be based on number of words.

Thomas: You need some initial clients to do as a dry run. You will find that this piece of it may have gotten way easier. The actual digging of the hole is way easier now that you have a backhoe, but you still have to get rid of the dirt, and there are other pieces of it that may not be as efficient.

And there are surprises, like, “Oh, I still have to review it.”

AI is not going to take work away. You are all still going to have a job. In fact, people who are using AI the most are often the busiest, because their ability to do things is so exceedingly bigger than it used to be. They are now doing things they never thought they would be able to do, and they just get really busy.

Some of you are kind of befuddled with this whole segment, because you are thinking, I do not feel this optimism at all. You are letting the doom settle on you.

Jonathan: I was thinking about this before. Money moves. Where money gets made moves around, and if you are staying in the same place and hoping to make money there, it is probably a lot harder.

For me, this is incredible because of how much grunt work it has taken away. It is incredible how much more I can do. I feel like I am looking at a boom. I am actually looking at probably the most money I could make just in terms of productivity right now, right before everyone else jumps onto the bus.

Thomas: I think this is why the Democrats are so desperate to shut down AI, because if there is a boom, they do not get back into power. They need the economy to crash in order for there to be an electoral win to sweep them back into power.

I think it is why any little bit of bad news gets the focus. I was listening to NPR today on my way to work, and they were not talking about any of these numbers that are the best it has ever been. Poverty is the lowest it has ever been. Median household income is the highest it has ever been. All these numbers are really good. They had an entire segment about gas prices.

Jonathan: Again, that is what people are experiencing. Every time I go to the gas pump, it hurts, man. It hurts. And I am thinking, dude, can we finish this Iran thing at some point? Even though I know that is wrong, I am just saying, can we make this stop?

Thomas: I am just glad eggs are cheaper. A couple years ago eggs were like $2.50.

Jonathan: I have five kids, man, and they love eggs.

Thomas: Everyone was blaming the president, both presidents, for the egg prices, and I was saying, this is bird flu. We killed all the chickens because of bird flu. We will grow new chickens. The egg prices will fix themselves.

Part 1. Universe 25

According to New Scientist, John B. Calhoun of the National Institute of Mental Health put 4 male and 4 female mice into Universe 25 on July 9, 1968. The habitat had apartments, feeders, water, nesting paper, climate control, and no cats. Calhoun designed a paradise for population growth.

The colony did what a well-fed mammal colony does. According to Calhoun's own paper, "Death Squared," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January 1973, numbers doubled every 55 days in the early run. Growth then slowed. The population peaked near 2,200, short of the nesting room built for thousands more. The last surviving birth landed around day 600. By June 22, 1972 he counted 122 mice still alive. He projected the last male dead in May 1973.

The food never ran out. The social software did.

Males who lost a place in the hierarchy withdrew into eating, sleeping, and grooming. Calhoun named them the beautiful ones. They looked sleek. They carried no fight scars. They also carried no future. Some females stopped nursing, shoved pups out early, or attacked their own litters. Infant death in the worst pockets of his earlier rat work ran as high as 96 percent, according to his February 1962 Scientific American essay, the piece that gave the world the phrase behavioral sink.

Three other types showed up as the structure failed. Clusterers piled onto a few feeders and left full hoppers untouched. They ate when the crowd ate. Numb mice came out at night and absorbed hits. Aggressive packs wandered, bit for sport, and went after the households still trying to raise young. Lynch adds a fourth survivor class from Calhoun's later notes: tunneler mice, the ones who kept a hobby. Digging bought them time. It did not buy the colony a sequel.

Calhoun wrote, "I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man." Lynch's claim is that the thoughts landed.

Part 2. The Human Cage

According to the CDC's provisional 2025 birth report, America recorded 3,606,400 births, down 1% from 2024. The general fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, another series low. Teen births hit 11.7 per 1,000, another floor. According to the Census IPHI release dated Sept 15, 2026, real median household income for 2025 reached $87,460, up 2.6% from $85,210, the high point since the series began in 1967. Official poverty fell to 10.2%. Child poverty hit a historic low of 13.4%.

That pairing is the experiment in plain English. Material life improved. The next generation still shrank.

Lynch's sequence matches the room we already occupy. A technical boom makes a people feel unprecedented. They cut the rope to the past. Once grandparents stop being a referee, the later craziness has no scorekeeper. External threats fade. Morality flips. In a hungry world, virtue is responsibility: have children, toughen sons, keep rules that make young men useful. In a padded world, those rules look cruel. Kindness becomes the only legal virtue. Permissiveness becomes the state church. The old code reads as hate.

People then invent language for a feeling that started in the body. Isolation, screens, delayed pairing, and a mating market where a man brings less scarce food than he used to. Women need a provider less. Masculinity pays less. Desire between the two cools. Resentment heats up. Each year of that loop mints more beautiful ones and fewer households.

The institutional piece is the part polite rooms skip. In Universe 25 the violent mice organized. They hunted the mice still having litters. Lynch says a human version puts chaos in the ministries, the universities, the nonprofits, the prestige feed. The modern institutional left talks degrowth, treats extra children as a carbon problem, imports a replacement public while scolding the native one for existing, and calls the natal remnant the threat. That is a suicide program with a diversity statement. The older left wanted more people, more machines, more future. This one wants a veto on tomorrow and a staff job while the veto runs.

Japan already finished a draft of the last chapters. Births near the floor. Herbivore men at home with games. A dating culture that treats a public approach as an incident. Other rich countries are walking the same hallway at different speeds. The poorest corners of Africa still replace themselves. Wealth is the variable that turns the experiment on.

The culture that follows is an aquarium with a riot in the corner. Status moves from building a house to tending a self. Family becomes a lifestyle choice other people made. Competence fantasies move onto the page because competence in the town square stopped paying. Zombie stories stay popular because the audience already recognizes the walk.

Lynch's warning for anyone raising children, or writing books for people who might: the pack that hates goodness will want the microphone. Goodness is a standard they can still fail. They will call the standard violence.

Part 3. What the Cage Buys

The trade already sorted the types. According to Circana via Publishers Weekly, print units in the first half of 2026 slipped 0.3%. Adult fiction rose 5.7%. Adult nonfiction fell 5.8%. Young adult fiction fell 25.6%. Juvenile fiction rose 5.3%. According to the AAP StatShot for the same half, adult fiction revenue rose 8.2% and adult nonfiction fell 3.5%. Circana's own 2026 category read names the live piles: escapist fiction, manga, hobby and craft and puzzle nonfiction. Theo of Golden moved about 1.2 million print copies. The Let Them Theory sat on the same top-five list. Kindness and withdrawal sharing a register is the tell.

Beautiful Ones Want

Romance and romantasy where being chosen is the entire state. No farm. No dynasty. The relationship is the civilization. Soft-exit self-help. Let Them is Mouse Utopia as a trademark. Stop negotiating with the other mice. Kindness novels. Aquarium warmth. Humanity is still good. The reader owes the story a feeling, then goes back to the hopper. Progression fantasy and LitRPG. Rank without a town. A ladder that fits in a chair. Lifestyle and lookmaxxing. The body as the last project they control. Manga and webtoon. Circana clocked manga +45% in Q1 2026 print. Japan already manufactures the inner life of the enclosure and ships it.

Beautiful Ones Refuse

Obligation. Lineage. A future tense that costs them a weekend. Lectures about duty. Midlist "fix the system" nonfiction. Homework from a species they have left.

Clusterers Want

The book the crowd is already eating. Sprayed edges. Ranked lists. "Book 3 of the thing." Calhoun's mice stacked onto a few feeders and left full hoppers alone. That is also how a hit works in 2026.

The Sink and the Barbarian Packs Want

Domestic thriller, bad-mother crime, revenge, horror. The only YA pocket up in that Circana half was supernatural and horror. Enemy content. A name to bite. This prints heat. It rarely prints a backlist.

Denial Normies Want

Familiar shapes with the danger sanded off. Book-club loneliness that tucks itself in by page 320. Celebrity novels. Franchise comfort. They will pay to stay at the hopper. They will not pay for the diagnosis.

Tunnelers and the Remnant Want

Faith. Religion kept growing in print nonfiction while the rest of that category sagged. Dirt skills. Craft, homestead, trade, health that assumes a body you will still have in 20 years. Children's books for children who exist. Juvenile fiction rose while YA fell off a cliff. The remnant buys down. The enclosure ages into adult romantasy. Posterity fiction. A vow that costs. A town that has to last. A child who lives. Household as the quest, not the furniture.

The Remnant Refuses

Irony as a worldview. "Let them" as a moral system. Stories that treat a functioning family as the problem the plot must punish.

Two catalogs now share one industry. Enclosure money this year sits in romantasy, soothing, ranking, and substitute packs. Remnant money sits in faith, skill, children, and stories that still believe tomorrow has a name. Riot money sits in blame and then eats its authors.

Prestige rooms will treat the remnant catalog as the danger. That is the aggressive-mouse move in trade dress. Direct-to-reader channels, churches, homeschool tables, and patron lists become the hopper the natal public still controls.

Why Authors Care

Write the enclosure on purpose or write the remnant on purpose. Mixing them by accident produces a book nobody defends. If you want volume, courtship becomes cosmos, rank becomes meaning, audio becomes the default mouth. If you want a book that still exists in 2046, smuggle a future onto the page: a child, a craft, a town, a God with enough weight to overrule a mood. The audience that still wants lineage is smaller and louder. Price for loyalty. Speak to a table, not a feed. Japan already ran the preview. Healing novels and manga ate the young indoor public. Children's books became a specialist good. Plan for that funnel.

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Commentary

Thomas: There is a study that was done years ago that is actually really relevant to where we are culturally, and many of you are probably familiar with it. It is the Mouse Utopia study, and once you look deeply at this study, it will tell you what readers are going to want to read in the future.

As a society we have been very closely following the Mouse Utopia experiment. We have just been doing it slower than the mice did, because we live longer.

Jonathan: Universe 25 was just a habitat for mice, and Calhoun designed a paradise that was supposed to incentivize population growth. He just wanted to see how big it would get.

According to his paper, "Death Squared," the numbers doubled every 55 days in the early run. Then growth slowed. The habitat could handle many thousands, and the population only made it to about 2,000.

The food never ran out. There was no problem with the food. What happened was that society collapsed.

Thomas: The one interesting thing is that this utopia was constrained. If this utopia had existed in the real world, the tunneler mice would have potentially escaped to restart mouse civilization somewhere else. But they eventually found the edges of their little artificial universe.

Let us now go to part two, about the human parallels in American society to Mouse Utopia.

Jonathan: Material life improved, but the next generation still shrank. Normally you would assume that as things get wealthier and things get better, population could grow. It is not.

Thomas: That belief, that the reason people are not having kids is because they do not have money, is entirely unsupportable with any actual evidence.

In fact, it is often inversely supported. The poorer a place is, the poorer a country is, the poorer a family is, the more children they are likely to have. The children did not cause their poverty. It is almost that affluence makes a couple resistant to having children.

This is not a new phenomenon. Augustus was bemoaning this very problem in Rome, and he was trying to tweak the laws to encourage Roman families to have more children. It is a sign of societal decadence where families do not have very many children, and it is a sign that Mouse Utopia, that this behavioral sink, is kicking in.

It is not that having children solves Mouse Utopia. It is a symptom of a deeper societal rot, where the beautiful ones are more interested in looking pretty than in serving their function of perpetuating the species to the next generation.

Jonathan: When you look at that one phrase, “they had no fight scars,” that speaks something to me. Humans need stringency. Life needs to be a little hard to make a better human.

I am not talking full-on Marine Corps boot camp. You do not need to torture somebody to create a positive citizen. But we do find that when your life is a little hard, you get a little better, and your priorities line up more.

When you do not have as much money, you learn how to budget, which teaches you how to organize. It teaches you how to live within your means. It teaches you how to live with restraint, which is a great skill to apply across the board to everything. It has made you a better human being.

When I have a child, I now have to think about someone besides myself. I have to think, did this kid have lunch? Did this kid have breakfast? Has this kid done school?

It is hard. I have five kids, and sometimes they drive my wife crazy. They make her life hard. But they make her life better. They make our lives better. That stringency adds value to our lives. It adds organization to everything.

If I was 40 years old and I had no kids and all I did was come home and turn on my computer and flip on my video game, what am I adding to society? What am I adding to myself? What value is being produced anywhere by me going and working my 9:00 to 5:00 and then coming home? I do not have a wife that I have to negotiate with. You want to get along with your wife. There are benefits to having a happy wife. I want to get along with my kids. I want to be loved by my kids, and I want to love my kids. So you learn social mesh. You learn how to make a society come together.

Thomas: There is a lot to be said about embracing suffering. People who have noticed my weight loss ask me what I am doing, because they want to know whether I am taking the pill or the shot or whatever. My answer is, I am embracing suffering. I often see a look of revulsion on their face. They do not want that to be the answer. They do not want suffering to be seen as this good thing.

But it is not just a matter of forsaking suffering and seeking the easy life. That is part of this behavioral sink. Another part of the behavioral sink is isolation. Mice are social creatures, and because they had no suffering and the food was free and there was no challenge, you would think they would create a really healthy society of interaction. That is not what happened.

What we saw in Universe 25 was an exceeding amount of isolation, where they were just off doing their own thing. The tunnelers are heading away. The beautiful ones are just grooming themselves all the time. That is what we are seeing with people, where they are isolating themselves on screens.

I saw a chart of how much people are going out, and it was on a slow decline, and then 2020 happened and it kind of fell off a cliff, and we have never recovered back to the 2019 levels, which were already low. People are not going out. They are not going to bars. They are not going to church. They are just staying home alone with their screen.

They think of it as an individual problem, or not a problem. They just say, “I am introverted, I do not want to go out.” Really, it is a societal problem that is being made worse by their individual actions. It is a collective action issue.

Once you understand that we are in this behavioral sink, you understand that we are living in Mouse Utopia. Hopefully it will not end the way that Mouse Utopia ended, because we have reason, and we have great men who can lead to great change. Mice are not great. There is no such thing as a great mouse, a mouse that rises up and leads all the other mice into a time of repentance and reformation and restoration.

That is what we saw with Augustus. While his reform for fertility was unsuccessful, many of his other reforms were incredibly successful, and he brought back the virtue of the Roman Republic. He was not able to restore the Roman Republic. He was the beginning of the principate. It was emperors forever after him. Some of the forms of the republic were maintained. They still had elections for consul and stuff, but the consuls did not have power like they used to under the republic. So he did not restore it back to its defaults, but he was able to restore the heart of the Roman people, which then breathed another 1,400 years of life into Rome, depending on how you count. In this household, the Byzantine Empire is Rome.

You may not agree with everything we are saying about Mouse Utopia, but once you understand it, it actually predicts what genres are working and which ones are not, and it gives you some really interesting insights.

What genres do people living in “Mouse Utopia” want to read?

Jonathan: This is kind of our read and our analysis on what different kinds of people want.

Beautiful Ones

Beautiful ones want romance and romantasy, where being chosen is the entire state. There is no farming, there is no dynasty. You were born the chosen one, and you are going to win, because you are the chosen one.

There is soft exit self-help. Let Them is Mouse Utopia as a trademark. You just soft exit. You are quitting and you are leaving.

We get kindness novels, aquarium warmth, humanity is still good. The reader owes the story a feeling and then goes back to the hopper for more.

Progression fantasy and LitRPG. This is rank without a town. You go and you level up and you feel good about leveling up, and then you get out.

Lifestyle and looksmaxxing. The body is the last project that you control.

There is manga and webtoon. This is coming from Japan, which is pretty much in the last stages of Mouse Utopia at this point, because their birth numbers have collapsed entirely. They are desperate. There are actually breeder visas now, where they want you to go to Japan to have kids so that they fix their population problem.

What do beautiful ones not want? They do not want obligation and they do not want lineage. They do not want lectures about duty. They do not want to be told, this is what you should do as a productive member of society. They just want to enjoy their lives.

Clusterers

Clusterers want the book that the crowd is already eating. If you see this book on TikTok, if you see this book on YouTube, and everybody is talking about it, this is cluster feeding. Everyone wants to read the book that everyone else is reading. This is something we try to market to. You are trying to market to clusterers so you can get sales. This is cluster behavior, and we saw it in Mouse Utopia.

Books with sprayed edges, ranked lists. It is book 3 of the super popular series. Anything by Sarah J. Maas, this is cluster feeding when people read it. Calhoun's mice stacked onto a few feeders and left full hoppers alone. So while everyone is reading Rebecca Yarros over here, you are saying, wait, I have good fantasy over here, and all of you would like it. It does not matter. That is not how a cluster feeder works. They all go to the one hopper that is emptying out, and then they are sad, because there is no more for them to read until the hopper is refilled.

Barbarians

What do the sink and the barbarian packs want? They want domestic thrillers and bad mother crime. They want revenge and horror. The only YA pocket that went up in this last Circana half was supernatural and horror. They want enemy content. They want a name to go after. They want to feel hatred. They want to pursue something and see it destroyed.

Denial Normies

What do denial normies want? They want familiar shapes with the danger sanded off. Book club loneliness that tucks itself in by page 320. Celebrity novels, franchise comfort.

When was the last time you watched a Marvel movie and you were actually okay with it? It was Spider-Man: Brand New Day, because it was not a comfortable movie. We go into this in our analysis, but that movie is hard to watch, because you feel his despair, and I am frankly astonished they had the bravery to put that up there. That is not a denial normie movie. That is not the Marvel slop they have been putting out, the feel-good that wraps itself up in two hours. That was not that movie.

Tunnelers  and Remnant

Tunnelers and the remnant want faith. Religion kept growing in print nonfiction while the rest of the category sagged. What about dirt skills, survival skills? We are talking about craft, homesteading, trade, health, sourdough.

Thomas: The mice kind of saw the collapse and they tried to escape, but they could not, because they were in this contained zone. Some people are doing the same thing.

We see this cycle of cities growing and growing and growing, and then you see a population collapse in the city. There is not a single city on the planet right now that has its own positive population growth at the moment. So this Mouse Utopia is a planetary-wide situation currently. There may be one or two cities that have positive population growth. I think Tel Aviv actually has positive population growth, and no one is studying what the Jews are doing to escape Mouse Utopia. Israel has positive population growth. It is like the only modern nation that is still growing its population.

Jonathan: There is a societal incentive towards reproduction, because the old are annoying or nagging or whatever, but there is an incentive to move towards that positive family state. I think there is some resilience in that societal structure.

Tunnelers and the remnant also want Children's books for children who actually exist. Juvenile fiction has been growing while YA is falling off of a cliff, because they are buying books for kids that are real instead of writing YA for women who want to pretend that they are in YA.

Thomas: There is also this reversion of older people who are buying toys and things for children. I saw a report that Toys "R" Us is opening up a whole bunch of new locations because adults are going to Toys "R" Us to buy toys.

Has anybody seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? There is a king, there is this whole very disordered society that has made children illegal, and yet the king of this disordered society is very much into toys. It is almost like we are starting to live in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang life, where you have adults that are acting like children, and simultaneously are not valuing children, are not valuing families, are not having children.

It is like we need the throne room battle scene that is at the end of that film.

That scene was the sky beam of the 1960s. There is a shocking number of movies that end with a throne room battle scene. Both The Black Arrow and the old Robin Hood end with a battle scene like that. The Court Jester ends with that throne room battle scene. There are like a dozen movies that all end with a throne room battle scene where the current government is overthrown by the little people. And in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the little people are actually children.

Jonathan: You know what is really interesting about that story too, is that a lot of the excuses people make for not having kids is that they want to focus on their love for each other. But in that movie, the king is always trying to kill the queen.

Thomas: Their love is a disordered love. There is something to be said about a fruitful love as opposed to a sterile love.

So, understanding where we are, you will notice that what the tunnelers are wanting is very different than what the beautiful ones are wanting.

As an author, you can try to fight against Mouse Utopia. You can help your reader embrace having kids and embrace fulfilling the ancestral roles of husband and wife. Or you can say, “Society is going to fall, there is nothing I can do to stop it, but at least I am going to make some money along the way.”

What is wonderful about understanding the zeitgeist is that you can be successful with both of those strategies if you understand. What does not work is being ignorant of what is going on and thinking that it is still the 1990s, where we had a higher birth rate.

I do not know if we had a replacement rate back then. I think you have to go back to the '80s or '70s. Somebody can fact-check me on this, but I think the United States has not had a replacement birth rate for a really long time. But we never saw the collapse that Japan and Europe had, or not to the degree that Japan and Europe had. A lot of those countries fell off in the '70s and '80s, and the reasons are different for them.

Part of the problem, and we saw this with Mouse Utopia, was that the courtship system broke down. This is something that older people do not understand. There is a certain kind of animal that does not breed in captivity, and what that means is that that species has some kind of courtship ritual that they cannot do in captivity. If you break the courtship rituals, you get the same result.

I am using courtship here not in terms of some specific conservative subculture courtship, but a capital C courtship ritual, where going on Tinder and swiping right is a courtship ritual in this definition. Historical societies all have functional courtship rituals, because if they did not, they would not be a functional society.

The Shakers do not exist anymore because they were a religious sect in the 1800s that did not believe in marriage. They are all dead now, and they did not have any kids, because they did not believe in marriage, and so there are no more Shakers. There is a great documentary about them by Ken Burns.

But successful cultures reproduce themselves, and they reproduce themselves by reproducing children and then bringing those children up in the culture. One of the things that has happened is that we have changed our courtship rituals throughout the world.

Japan suffered the worst. They had a really good system of arranged marriage. We came in and we smashed it, and we replaced it with something that was incompatible with their culture, and they just stopped getting married, and they stopped having babies. It is really unfortunate, but we did the same thing to ourselves. We had a form of dating that worked really well. We changed it to a form that does not work, and now it is not working.

I actually wrote a whole book about this called Courtship in Crisis.

Are there any other takeaways we should cover in terms of what to write and how to write the culture, given that it is Mouse Utopia?

Jonathan: There is some structural sense to writing for legacy, to writing for heritage, to writing for family, because they last.

Guys, the Marine Corps has been in place for over 200 years, and most of my boot camp was them yelling at me about how Marines before me did it. It is like, John Basilone would have done this, and you can do nothing. We were constantly inculcated and indoctrinated with what the Marines before us had done and to celebrate them, but then there is also this sense that they considered us their equals.

This was reinforced when you would go to a bar, or a place where other veterans would be, and you would see other Marines. I would meet Vietnam Marines and say, man, the jungle sounds like it sucked. And they would say, well, we thought the desert sounded like it sucked. We do not want to do what you did. And I would say, I do not want to do what you did. We are all talking to each other, and we consider each other equivalents. Not necessarily equals, but equivalents. Marines can always do what Marines before us did, because we have this doctrine of do the Marine thing.

This is something I am actually exploring in the Marine novel I am writing right now, called Ragnarok Squad, where a young Marine does not know that he cannot do everything the Marines before him did, like all the heroes and all the superhero stuff. He does not know he cannot do that, so he just does it, and so it is wrecking the war, because this Marine does not know that he cannot do these things.

When you have that sense, going back 250 years, and it has the structure to move forward, you sell more books that way, because now I have Marines who want to go read the Marine stuff, stuff that is celebrating the Marine Corps legacy, stuff that is celebrating Marine Corps culture, celebrating them. Because we all consider each other equivalent, they are able to put themselves into these books and be the hero in the book. That is the effect of heritage and legacy.

If you are writing for the Appalachians, if you are writing for Texas, Texas is really good at this, because Texas celebrates its culture. Other places celebrate theirs. Portland celebrates its culture. I think its culture sucks, but they celebrate it.

Thomas: Well, they celebrate a form of it, but the culture itself is not a fertile culture. The version of Portland culture is very focused around adults. It is not an integrated culture.

A good example: I would encourage all of you to go to a rodeo. You will have to drive outside of your urban center, out to rural Stan, which you are all within two hours of. Just drive out into the country, and go to a rodeo, not a city rodeo, a country rodeo. You will find a culture that is reproducing itself, because rodeo culture is shockingly age integrated.

They have got small children riding on sheep. They have got young men trying to impress the young ladies riding on horses. They have got slightly older young men who are still alive riding on actual bulls and getting actually hurt. It is a very violent sport. There is an ambulance parked right there ready to take people away.

You will find lots of young people, and the young people may or may not be actually watching the rodeo. They may be off to the corner flirting with each other, which is good, because you need those young people to fall in love and make more rodeo babies. And you will find old people in the stands and everything.

There are little pieces that still exist, but where you tend to find those age integrated fertile bits of culture is away from the urban centers. The closer into the urban center you get, the more sterile the culture gets, and I mean this in many ways. It is not a fertile culture, it is a sterile culture. The love is not a fertile love, it is a sterile love. The community is not a fertile community.

Jonathan: Hookup culture is not a sustainable culture. It is sterile, because you are just hooking up, and then you are taking the pill, and there are no children, and there are no emotional entanglements, and that is considered ideal. Which is not sustainable, and it did a lot of damage throughout the '90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, where people were finally saying, you know what, this is kind of not okay.

Now, in the chat here, people have been talking about dating in the church. In my church, we have taken steps to make sure that families are not excluded.

What used to happen when I was a kid was that children were frowned on in church. If your child made noise, there would be old ladies who would be glaring at you, and there was societal pressure on mothers to keep their children silent and in their place. A lot of the old folks in the church, what we would call boomers, were very disapproving of child culture. You need to be in children's church. You need to be in the nursery. You need to be in the place for loud children.

It has shifted now, because families are not going to church anymore, because they are tired of having that happen to them. In my church, my dad is the pastor, and my dad will say all the time, do you hear children crying? That is called life. That means that our church is going to live, that it is going to persist, because they will grow up being loved.

You should be looking at families and smiling at them. You should be offering to help them, not sneering at them that they have dared to noise pollute your area. There is this death culture where they just hate children, and they hate the noise, they hate the fact that they draw on the walls, that they are running around, that they are having a good time being kids. They hate it. They cannot stand it, because it is not ordered. It is not predictable. It is not safe.

Thomas: It is not sterile. There is a kind of person who prefers that sterile environment. They want the sterile book. They want the sterile story, because there is a safety in sterility. They prefer the sterile hospital room to the messy playpen.

Somebody was saying I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Joshua Harris read my book and then recanted I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and then had me on his documentary where he recanted I Kissed Dating Goodbye. If those of you complaining about dating in the church, you should read my book, Courtship in Crisis. I have never promoted it on this show, I do not think ever, and I was not planning on promoting it here, but it just is connected.

Jonathan: It is organic.

Thomas: It is organic. I never talk about my book. Many of you may not even know I have a book, because I never talk about it. My authority as the host of the Novel Marketing podcast does not come from the book that I wrote. It comes from all the authors that I have helped and the success that they have. Frankly, it does not matter how successful I have been. It only matters how successful I help people be, because there are lots of successful people who were lucky or whatever, and they cannot reproduce it. So I do not rely on my own book.

In fact, when I met with Joshua Harris, when he interviewed me for his documentary, he showed me his copy of my book, because he had written an essay on it for his seminary, and he had underlined sections. Anyway, y'all, read my book. The audiobook has a bonus chapter in it that I recommend.

So understand that we are in Mouse Utopia. If you want to learn more about Mouse Utopia, there is another YouTube channel called WhatifAltHist that has a whole video on societal decadence and Mouse Utopia. It is really good. Rudyard Lynch. He is a great thinker, and he has really good analysis.

He is into history even more than I am, and I say that as a pure compliment.

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