Joe Rogan Experience #2553 - Andrew Hubermsan · Aired Sep 14, 2026
Claim summary · not a verbatim quotation
Male mice will perform work to fight other mice that is comparable in difficulty to puzzles that 30% of the adult human population cannot solve.
The finding
What the evidence shows
The underlying finding is real. In work by Sam Golden, who does run a lab at the University of Washington, roughly 60 to 70 percent of adult male CD-1 mice will press a lever or nose poke for nothing but the chance to attack an intruder mouse, and a subset keep choosing aggression over food and through punishment. The comparison to puzzles that 30 percent of adults worldwide could not solve has no basis. The animals work on standard operant schedules, such as pressing a lever a fixed number of times, not complex puzzles, and there is no measure that puts mouse and human problem solving on the same scale.
Read the supporting source · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗Quick answer & review status
Quick answer
Is it true that Male mice will perform work to fight other mice that is comparable in difficulty to puzzles that 30% of the adult human population cannot solve?
Partly. The claim stretches what the evidence shows. The underlying finding is real. In work by Sam Golden, who does run a lab at the University of Washington, roughly 60 to 70 percent of adult male CD-1 mice will press a lever or nose poke for nothing but the chance to attack an intruder mouse, and a subset keep choosing aggression over food and through punishment. Andrew Hubermsan said it (matched by voice) on Joe Rogan Experience #2553 - Andrew Hubermsan, aired Sep 14, 2026, at 1:26:52. The supporting source is pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, linked below.
The context belongs here.
No separately verified on-air correction is recorded for this check. That is not a claim that nobody corrected it.
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