Based Camp - Real Estate & Fertility Collapse： Exploring the Post-Apocalyptic World Our Children Will Live In

00:00:00.000 So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals, abandoned for fairly short times.

00:00:05.240 These are in Detroit, this stuff.

00:00:06.940 I am showing you abandoned schools and abandoned pools and abandoned stadiums.

00:00:16.240 It is genuinely nightmarish.

00:00:20.080 You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.

00:00:26.280 And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.

00:00:34.700 I'm just getting increasingly nervous.

00:00:37.760 Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous about one of our descendants 100 years from now.

00:00:45.960 This person is hiking.

00:00:48.820 They've got a drone companion flying alongside them.

00:00:51.440 And it's doing regular scans on the environment around them so they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that.

00:00:57.820 They are having a blast exploring the ruins of a dead world.

00:01:03.480 And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups, LARPing some version of 1950s life.

00:01:12.900 Would you like to know more?

00:01:14.180 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:01:15.160 I'm excited to be here with you today.

00:01:16.820 Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is cheap housing.

00:01:29.120 Oh, hooray, everyone always says.

00:01:32.240 They say, well, when the population is 5% of its current size, then housing will cost almost nothing.

00:01:40.640 And that will be fantastic because then all of the young people will be able to afford houses and everything will stabilize and go back to normal, except that isn't what's going to happen.

00:01:51.340 Talk about how quickly a house that is worth nothing begins to fall apart.

00:01:58.120 And this is something that we saw in Detroit.

00:02:00.560 So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration.

00:02:05.480 But I also want to start a bit closer to home.

00:02:08.740 So I grew up part-time living on an island with my family that my family owns.

00:02:17.900 Now, I don't inherit it or anything like that.

00:02:19.940 It goes to my sister.

00:02:21.120 So it's not like, again, I get nothing.

00:02:23.720 Don't worry about it, guys.

00:02:25.120 Still starting from scratch here.

00:02:26.420 I have to stop and say, though, when we were first dating, I was like, this is a caricature of life because no one actually has private islands.

00:02:39.680 But apparently they do.

00:02:41.120 But then, like, you and I learned that there's a reason why people don't have private islands.

00:02:46.820 Well, okay, so another thing that people know is that my family lost all its money and was unable to maintain things.

00:02:53.320 And it is hard to sell a private island.

00:02:55.660 Who wants that? 1.00

00:02:56.660 Like, how can you even buy one, you know?

00:02:58.700 And then...

00:02:59.840 I'm going to go over what ended up happening to the property.

00:03:03.240 Because I love when people are like, oh, island's so defensible.

00:03:05.560 So this is the living room of the house I grew up in.

00:03:08.800 For those who are listening on the podcast, it has trees growing inside of it now.

00:03:14.040 All of the walls have fallen out of it.

00:03:16.300 Well, it was plate glass windows overlooking the ocean.

00:03:18.380 But, like, it looks like there is a forest in it now.

00:03:21.160 And as I go through this, I encourage you, the listeners, to not think of this in the abstract.

00:03:25.820 But as what your own home is going to look like 10 years after you stop living in it.

00:03:32.200 Or you fail to sell it because your population is declining.

00:03:35.180 Because this is a picture that we see across rural Japan right now.

00:03:39.740 So much so that they're giving away free houses.

00:03:41.960 And I think that that is what we're going to see of the future of the U.S.

00:03:46.200 I've even heard of instances of some people paying for people to take their houses

00:03:49.900 so they don't become these horrible nightmares.

00:03:53.820 This room is, I believe, my parents' bedroom right here.

00:03:58.640 For people who are just listening, it's just debris everywhere.

00:04:01.820 People took the beds, the mattresses, everything.

00:04:04.400 Oh, this is my bedroom and my brother's bedroom.

00:04:07.360 This is where we slept as little kids.

00:04:10.080 And it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.

00:04:14.420 Here is my childhood bathroom, completely smashed.

00:04:18.340 It would literally be safer.

00:04:20.080 I am now showing the inside of the bathroom to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place.

00:04:24.860 This looks super dangerous.

00:04:26.800 This is the patio.

00:04:28.840 It looks like a forest.

00:04:30.320 Oh, and this is the play area.

00:04:32.160 Now, this, the ceiling has completely caved in.

00:04:34.020 It looks worse than any of the locations did in Jurassic Park for any on the podcast.

00:04:39.740 No, Jurassic Park does not play a very accurate tale of urban decay, right?

00:04:46.240 Because, like, you know, things just kind of, there's like a vine tastefully draped.

00:04:51.340 Oh, you know, over.

00:04:52.800 It's more like, you know, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic.

00:04:58.620 It's not.

00:04:59.460 This is not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble.

00:05:02.900 Everything's so nice.

00:05:03.580 And here is the forest spilling into our living room and patio here.

00:05:08.240 And I'll just throw up some other pictures so you can get an idea of what it used to look like.

00:05:11.720 Well, I guess in terms of the beach and stuff like that.

00:05:14.280 So people can get an idea of just how much, you know, even a decade of not caring for something costs.

00:05:20.020 And if you haven't owned a house, if you have only rented a house, you would be surprised at how much it costs to keep the house together.

00:05:29.980 You are spending a fairly large amount of money.

00:05:34.160 I'd actually say you're probably, over the course of 40 years, probably spending at least half the cost of the house on the modern market.

00:05:43.280 So, for example, this graph that I pulled up here estimates that right now, on average, you're paying somewhere between around $15,000 and $18,000 USD.

00:05:52.740 And here is a map of how that varies state by state in terms of maintenance fees.

00:05:57.800 And a lot of people-

00:05:59.060 Stuff breaks all the time.

00:05:59.980 It's awful.

00:06:01.880 And it is no longer worth those maintenance fees if the house has reduced to zero in value.

00:06:08.960 The reason why people spend the money upkeeping their property is because said property has value.

00:06:18.720 The reason why properties historically had value was because the number of people who wanted that limited set of properties was growing exponentially.

00:06:27.880 Once that number evens off, property value is going to collapse.

00:06:32.860 And people might be like, well, if fertility has already collapsed, why hasn't property value collapsed?

00:06:39.380 And there are two reasons why property value has continued to go up.

00:06:43.420 One, fertility, like the effects of fertility collapse in the United States have not yet been felt by the working population, i.e. the age groups that are buying a house.

00:06:54.000 It's the younger people, the kids and stuff, where you're seeing these smaller class sizes, where you're seeing schools having to drop classes every year because they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

00:07:01.860 So, one, we haven't seen that yet.

00:07:03.540 But two, we've actually seen a huge increase in the cost of house because of fertility collapse. 0.81

00:07:09.540 And a lot of people can be like, what?

00:07:11.220 Why would that happen?

00:07:12.480 Well, it turns out that when you have an atomized society, when people aren't getting married anymore, when you don't have, you know, five people living together, the two parents and the kids, there is demand for a lot more houses.

00:07:25.880 Because two people, you ever seen one of those pictures where they show you how many fewer cars would be on the road if people were in buses instead of cars?

00:07:33.120 I'll put one on the screen here.

00:07:35.020 But that's basically what's happening to the housing market in this last death row of the housing market.

00:07:39.800 But real estate, more broadly right now, outside of, like, farm real estate, I'd say is not a good long-term investment.

00:07:47.160 And I should say here, long-term.

00:07:48.660 We're actually heavily invested in real estate short-term because I know about this trend of people needing these smaller houses so it makes sense to invest in multifamily housing.

00:07:58.100 Yeah, so this is, like, apartment complexes and stuff like that.

00:08:01.360 And it's done very well for us for a while.

00:08:02.720 But I want to take as a case study, because people are like, people wouldn't really just let houses next to what used to be, like, a major urban center rot away to dust.

00:08:14.240 Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

00:08:18.980 So I'm going to start putting some pictures on screen here of time lapses of places in Detroit.

00:08:26.080 Because this does a very good job of showing just how quickly parts of Detroit ended up having to be rolled back and then just given back to nature.

00:08:35.920 Because eventually they become hazards and the state then decides to plow them over.

00:08:40.680 So here, for podcast listeners, we have two what looked like fairly normal houses in 2009.

00:08:46.460 By just 2015, you can see it would probably cost about as much to restore them as it would cost to just rebuild new houses.

00:08:56.720 They are mostly retaken by nature.

00:08:59.680 So this is just-

00:09:00.240 They're tear downs.

00:09:00.680 They're tear downs.

00:09:01.220 They're complete tear downs.

00:09:01.860 Six years.

00:09:02.600 Six years of no one living there.

00:09:04.500 That happens.

00:09:05.380 Six years of no maintenance.

00:09:06.820 But it's like that.

00:09:07.420 It's not like, oh, you know, it needs to be abandoned for 40 years.

00:09:10.280 It needs to be abandoned for 20 years.

00:09:12.240 Six years.

00:09:13.360 Sorry, now look at 2019.

00:09:14.800 So here, we're looking at only 10 years.

00:09:17.700 One of the houses has already had to be demolished.

00:09:19.940 And the other house is completely unusable.

00:09:22.460 And then we go to 2022.

00:09:25.140 So 2022-

00:09:25.400 And honestly, I think, too, that these Detroit houses may even not be fully illustrating how quickly this will happen.

00:09:35.100 Because keep in mind that construction quality has changed significantly recently as well.

00:09:39.840 So more newly constructed houses, which in some cases, they're made like tissue paper, like you can punch through walls, are going to degrade very quickly.

00:09:51.180 And some more old buildings or even like industrial buildings may last a lot better.

00:09:55.800 And we're going to see shifts towards those in the housing market.

00:09:58.740 We'll see, though.

00:09:59.960 So I completely agree with you.

00:10:02.380 And that's definitely something that we need to discuss.

00:10:03.940 It's the old houses versus the new houses and how long they last.

00:10:06.040 But by 2022, so that is only 13 years after the houses were abandoned.

00:10:11.120 Nature has completely retaken the area.

00:10:13.120 They both had to be torn down, and you wouldn't even know that houses were there.

00:10:17.220 So let's keep going.

00:10:19.000 Here you have an abandoned group of three normal-looking houses in 2011.

00:10:24.260 By 2013, you can see one has already collapsed in on itself only two years after being abandoned.

00:10:31.860 2015, you see there's basically nothing left.

00:10:36.020 2022, you can see it's as if they were never there.

00:10:39.180 So keep in mind, 2015, that's only four years after these were abandoned.

00:10:42.460 That they are just rubble.

00:10:44.940 Here in 2009, you see two houses.

00:10:48.560 2013, they actually look okay.

00:10:50.800 These were slightly better construction than the others.

00:10:52.980 But by 2019, just 10 years later, completely unlivable.

00:10:57.040 2022, somehow a boat appeared, and otherwise nature has reclaimed.

00:11:01.620 Somehow.

00:11:03.360 Pokemon, a boat appeared.

00:11:05.540 Again, I am going to show just a few here for the listeners.

00:11:11.720 I don't want to go through them all.

00:11:12.800 They're all dealing with the same timelines.

00:11:14.540 So you're looking at a four-year jump.

00:11:16.640 Four-year jump, five-year jump.

00:11:18.060 And while I've been talking, I have been flashing these on screen for you guys.

00:11:22.240 And so you can see that typically, by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance,

00:11:27.700 you are looking at rubble.

00:11:29.920 And then people can be like, well, you know, okay, that's individual houses, right?

00:11:37.340 What about the big public works projects and stuff like that, right?

00:11:41.280 Like that stuff, of course, will stay working.

00:11:45.200 And it's like, well, no, not even a little.

00:11:48.040 So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.

00:11:52.220 Abandoned for fairly short times.

00:11:53.600 These are in Detroit, this stuff.

00:11:55.660 I am showing you abandoned schools and abandoned pools and abandoned stadiums.

00:12:04.900 It is genuinely nightmarish.

00:12:08.440 You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.

00:12:14.620 And what's interesting is, you know, we live in a house from the 1700s.

00:12:18.060 And if you walk around our area, you can see, sadly, some of the old homes also falling apart.

00:12:22.640 But they take much longer.

00:12:23.640 They take 60, 70 years to fall apart, these old stone houses.

00:12:27.000 And it's worth trying to recover them because they act as a much more sturdy foundation

00:12:31.660 than these that are falling apart with only four years without maintenance.

00:12:34.900 And also keep in mind, one of the things that hastens the speed that houses fall apart

00:12:40.460 is when you can't live in a house and protect a house,

00:12:43.300 especially as police in various regions of the U.S. start to collapse.

00:12:47.600 And people wonder why police funds are going to collapse.

00:12:49.680 Well, they were meant for larger populations than will exist in the future.

00:12:53.360 And they will be paying the pensions of police for larger populations than exist in the future.

00:12:57.880 And so either those pensions will fall apart, which is very hard for a government to do.

00:13:02.000 We didn't even end the pensions for Nazi soldiers after World War II.

00:13:07.980 I think now there's still a few SS soldiers that are receiving pensions.

00:13:11.220 Like, that is wild, but it is very hard to claw back pensions.

00:13:18.100 And so you'll have smaller police forces.

00:13:20.000 These homes have valuable things inside of them, the copper in the wall, some parts of

00:13:24.480 the various appliances.

00:13:26.660 And so they go and they rip those out.

00:13:29.120 Here I'll put the kitchen that I grew up using.

00:13:31.900 And you can see every bit of it has been ripped apart.

00:13:34.420 And that's what we're headed to.

00:13:36.500 So, Simone, do you have any thoughts before I go further?

00:13:38.360 Are we going to discuss the insurance issue that's going to accelerate this?

00:13:44.100 Or should I bring that up now?

00:13:45.680 Because I'm not sure if you remember that.

00:13:47.200 Yeah.

00:13:47.520 So there's a great podcast on this issue done by the New York Times podcast called The

00:13:52.500 Bombshell Case that Will Transform the Housing Market. 0.93

00:13:54.980 And this brings in an additional little hitch to the problem that is going to then be compounded

00:14:03.460 by demographic collapse.

00:14:04.620 So already, Malcolm, you've alluded to in some of our podcasts how it's kind of ridiculous

00:14:08.600 that you can buy a home in Florida because, you know, there's so many regions of it that

00:14:13.080 are just going to be underwater.

00:14:13.720 With a 30-year loan.

00:14:16.040 With a 30-year home loan, yes, because your home is going to be underwater.

00:14:19.760 Like, how on earth can you get a home loan on these things?

00:14:23.500 I think it is getting a little bit harder now.

00:14:25.560 But what's getting extra hard already because of climate change is just getting home insurance

00:14:33.220 in Florida and in some other states that are now more subject to severe weather.

00:14:38.560 Just getting homeowner's insurance is almost impossible.

00:14:42.580 Now, in the United States, in many cases, you cannot get a mortgage.

00:14:47.020 You cannot get debt to finance the purchase of your home unless you have home insurance.

00:14:52.180 Meaning that as we experience more extreme climate, meaning as more insurance companies

00:14:57.760 go underwater, because honestly, they just can't pay for all these wildfires and for all

00:15:01.760 the tornadoes and for all the hurricanes and the floods and the derechos, which we have

00:15:06.840 here, which you didn't even know existed.

00:15:08.700 We didn't know existed before we came here.

00:15:10.420 And they're terrifying.

00:15:11.580 They're like miniature.

00:15:13.220 They're like hurricane meets tornado that lasts really like five minutes.

00:15:17.280 It's like a very short.

00:15:18.520 It's not like a spiral like a hurricane or tornado.

00:15:21.760 It's just really strong wind that comes out of nowhere and like knocks over trees.

00:15:26.460 Yeah.

00:15:26.700 Like lots of trees.

00:15:27.740 Not like you'll see like big swaths of trees all knocked over.

00:15:31.600 Yeah.

00:15:31.740 Like hurricane meets tornado, but just really fast.

00:15:35.000 You don't know what's coming.

00:15:35.900 And so there are going to be more states in the New York times podcast.

00:15:39.920 They, they discuss this.

00:15:41.320 It's, it's quite interesting.

00:15:42.500 They go into some detail on how this is not just happening in the states that you think

00:15:47.520 are obvious, meaning that we're, we may hit this point at which a lot of homes sit empty

00:15:54.240 because people literally can't buy them because people don't have enough money to buy a house

00:15:59.560 outright, but they can't get a mortgage because they can't get homeowner's insurance.

00:16:04.400 Well, hold on.

00:16:05.100 That's not exactly what will happen.

00:16:06.680 I mean, market forces to try homes were selling for like 50 cents in some instances, you know,

00:16:12.120 like it's not that they won't be able to get money to buy them.

00:16:15.520 It's that they won't be able to get money to build sustainably on that plot.

00:16:20.120 IE it won't be worth it to tear them down and then build something new.

00:16:24.520 And I think that you're, you're absolutely right about that.

00:16:26.740 Now we need to talk about the plight of both cities and suburbs and why both are pretty 0.61

00:16:32.040 screwed.

00:16:32.980 The unsustainability of cities, I think should be fairly obvious to people in a world where 0.76

00:16:37.960 work from home is the norm.

00:16:39.460 If you go to a lot of these major cities and you start looking around, like we do this

00:16:43.700 in New York, you will just see empty, empty, empty, empty, empty everywhere you look.

00:16:48.880 It is so scary that like these markets are sort of stable.

00:16:53.240 The core reason people are like, well, then why don't, why doesn't New York convert the

00:16:57.940 commercial properties to residential properties?

00:17:00.420 There's two problems.

00:17:01.740 Giant government bureaucracies that make zoning changes very expensive and difficult.

00:17:05.560 But other is that in a place like Manhattan, for example, it's often easier to tear down

00:17:10.300 and completely rebuild than it is to do a conversion because commercial buildings are built with

00:17:15.800 the assumption that the restrooms are going to be in the center of the building all around

00:17:20.040 a central shaft.

00:17:21.540 Whereas residentials have like multiple towers of plumbing going in different parts of the

00:17:27.260 building, but it's quite different construction techniques.

00:17:30.040 So it's hard to switch between the two.

00:17:31.860 And it means that I think already cities are financially unviable.

00:17:36.840 Just the world hasn't realized it yet.

00:17:40.400 And cities are going further and further left, right?

00:17:43.900 And because of their progressive tax policies, when I say progressive, I don't mean like lefty.

00:17:49.300 I just mean there is a financial term called a progressive tax policy.

00:17:52.780 It means wealthy people pay more.

00:17:54.080 In New York, 4% of the population is paying over 50% of taxes.

00:17:57.640 So what that means is that 4% is who the city's customers are.

00:18:03.020 And that 4% is the ones that are being scared away with a lot of their new rules and regulations,

00:18:08.380 right?

00:18:09.860 Especially the stuff that makes it less safe to be there.

00:18:12.460 You know, these people want their kids around.

00:18:14.500 But now there's just not the same reason to be in a city as there was historically.

00:18:17.620 Here I am, of course, referring to the work from home revolution, which has hit the types 0.85

00:18:23.200 of businesses that utilize getting everyone together and working together in a city the

00:18:28.460 most.

00:18:29.780 And it's also the highest paid professions which are most hit by the work from home revolution,

00:18:34.680 because these are the professions where the individuals in them can demand the most from

00:18:40.120 their employer, i.e. the opportunity to work from home.

00:18:43.420 You know, if you're a top player at like a finance firm or something like that, you basically

00:18:48.560 get to name your terms.

00:18:50.960 AI also is a big player here because the type of white collar work that was in cities is

00:18:55.320 one of the first categories that gets automated.

00:18:58.700 And so with all of this expensive infrastructure they have to maintain, they're likely going

00:19:02.720 to begin to fall apart.

00:19:03.560 But we'll likely see a similar thing to the suburbs.

00:19:05.400 We've mentioned this before, so I'm going to go quick.

00:19:07.460 But for those who haven't heard our spiel on this, suburbs really got subsidized during

00:19:12.220 white flight when you had a bunch of people moving to suburbs all at once.

00:19:16.820 And this was about, I'm going to say like 60, 70 years ago, 60 years ago at this point.

00:19:21.080 And when suburbs were first being charted out, what they would do is the developer would

00:19:27.620 front roll the cost for the paving, for the sewer system, for the electrical system, for

00:19:33.120 basically all of the infrastructure.

00:19:35.900 But then going forwards, it was cared for by the tax base.

00:19:38.440 Well, now a lot of that stuff needs to be rebuilt, but the tax base was never really

00:19:43.040 optimized to pay for its rebuilding.

00:19:46.320 And a lot of it was built out in ways that weren't sustainable.

00:19:49.400 So suburbs are kind of screwed as well.

00:19:52.420 Now, suburbs can just raise taxes, especially in the more rural or ex-urban areas like where

00:19:57.200 we live, and they're probably going to be fine.

00:19:59.400 And I think that's where culture is going to re-coalesce in terms of like where people

00:20:05.080 actually want to be, whereas the cities are going to turn into quite a bit of a hellscape.

00:20:10.500 Do you have any thoughts on this, Simone?

00:20:14.460 I'm just getting increasingly nervous.

00:20:17.540 Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.

00:20:22.600 Okay.

00:20:25.220 Before I go into this little story, I realize that some of the watchers of the show may

00:20:28.820 not be regular watchers of the channel and thus may not know the statistics that we're

00:20:32.440 operating off of here.

00:20:33.440 If you look at fertility rates in the United States right now, and we project the decline

00:20:38.760 we have seen in the last 10 years forwards, and we assume one generation every 30 years,

00:20:43.720 for every 100 Americans alive today, there's going to be around 4.3 great-grandchildren.

00:20:48.540 Most of those great-grandchildren are going to be in technophobic and xenophobic populations,

00:20:54.060 as those are the populations that make up the vast majority of the existing fertility rate.

00:20:58.820 Generally, the more you disengage with technology, the higher your fertility rate is going to be. 0.97

00:21:04.700 The more prohibitions your culture has against technology, the higher fertility rate you're 0.99

00:21:08.380 going to have.

00:21:09.500 And the more you are xenophobic, the better your culture can move between generations with

00:21:15.760 high fidelity because you won't interact with outsiders.

00:21:18.080 One of the things that the pronatalist movement is really trying to do is to draw connections

00:21:22.740 between the few technophilic, pluralistic, high-fertility cultural groups, because they are very rare,

00:21:30.780 and to enable new groups like that to come to exist, groups that believe that humanity can

00:21:36.360 continue to develop. 0.95

00:21:37.400 And for those of you particularly in the dark who think something silly like immigrants will

00:21:41.020 replace us, fertility rates are falling extremely rapidly in Latin America now, much more rapidly 0.81

00:21:46.680 than they are in the United States.

00:21:48.320 Latin America fell below repopulation rate all the way back in 2019.

00:21:51.880 If you want more information on this, check out the America's Quarterly piece,

00:21:55.060 Latin Americans' fertility rate decline is accelerating and no one is certain why.

00:21:59.420 So this story, I mean, this was framed for somebody else when they thought about all of the

00:22:05.060 rotting cities in the future, all of the rotting infrastructure in the future.

00:22:08.960 Somebody was telling somebody else a version of the story, and I just decided to flush it out

00:22:13.360 about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.

00:22:17.300 And this person is hiking.

00:22:21.340 They've got a little AI robot companion alongside them.

00:22:26.940 It's a drone companion flying alongside them.

00:22:29.920 Good.

00:22:30.480 And they're out exploring the old ruins, an old city.

00:22:33.320 They've got, you know, special shoes and stuff, so they don't have to worry about stepping

00:22:36.680 on anything.

00:22:37.340 It would be quite easy to have protection.

00:22:39.860 And the AI companion is likely doing regular scans on the environment around them, so they

00:22:43.860 don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that.

00:22:47.260 They are having a blast exploring the ruins of a dead world.

00:22:53.240 And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups, LARPing some version of

00:23:00.200 1950s life, but of course, they don't have access to many of the things that you need larger

00:23:07.020 technical networks to gain access to.

00:23:09.400 So while they're LARPing a 1950s lifestyle, they are doing it without cell phones.

00:23:15.060 They are doing it with maybe electricity during the day, but it gets shut off at night because

00:23:19.800 it's coming from generators that are expensive to run.

00:23:22.440 You need to buy the fuel and ship the fuel over long, dangerous roads because a lot of

00:23:29.540 the state law has broken down.

00:23:31.840 Now, this group might otherwise attack this traveler, but they know not to because they've 0.88

00:23:36.780 seen travelers like this before with these drones that they know are armed and could easily

00:23:41.560 mow down their entire settlement.

00:23:42.980 And so the community would have nothing of value to this person because in a world where

00:23:50.520 you can produce more than enough food on the land you already have, and they don't have

00:23:54.860 access to tech that you don't have, they are quite literally irrelevant except for any potential

00:24:00.020 threat they might pose to your community.

00:24:02.540 And when they have become dangerous to technophilic explorers on the regular, they just end up getting

00:24:09.800 wiped out by a drone swarm.

00:24:11.380 Also, I'm always surprised when the naturalist people think that the tech accelerationists

00:24:15.880 or if I've heard them call them the cyborgs are the ones who pose a threat to them because

00:24:21.320 they really don't.

00:24:22.520 You would have nothing that the cyborgs want.

00:24:25.860 You don't have any tech that they want.

00:24:28.280 They wouldn't care about land.

00:24:30.440 You wouldn't have more efficient forms of energy than they have access to.

00:24:35.440 What do you think you have that they want?

00:24:37.800 You only matter insofar as you decide to become a threat to them.

00:24:41.380 In which case you aren't even that much of a threat and they won't let you become that

00:24:46.780 much of a threat even if you can get your hands on old aging nuclear tech or something

00:24:50.760 like that.

00:24:51.320 And some might expect, well, you know, they might be, you know, marginal value as breeding partners for

00:24:58.560 genetic diversity.

00:24:59.560 But at that point, I actually don't think they would.

00:25:02.260 I suspect that while they might sometimes be accepted into the technophilic communities, outbreeding outside of the

00:25:09.000 technophilic communities would never be allowed because you wouldn't want, you know, intelligent, modified

00:25:14.540 genes to get into these communities that are naturally going to be more xenophobic towards outsiders and could end up doing very

00:25:21.780 dangerous things as they ever developed a degree of industrial productivity.

00:25:26.920 In fact, I actually suspect a hundred years from now or so, our descendants, once we gain a bit more

00:25:33.560 understanding of human genetics, will likely have developed prohibitions around sex more generally, making it

00:25:40.240 taboo and editing out arousal pathways in the human mind, while likely fine tuning some other pathways during an

00:25:47.240 individual's use, like the ones that give us emotional rewards for exploration, learning, and productivity, to

00:25:54.920 allow an individual to gain even more satisfaction from productive tasks while out being distracted by

00:26:01.580 unproductive tasks.

00:26:02.940 The explorer is likely going to just keep going down that road for months because they are engaged in a coming-of-age

00:26:10.600 ritual.

00:26:10.940 That's why they have been out on this exploratory thing where they voluntarily agree to live in the

00:26:17.140 hardships of the fallen world for a year to better appreciate what they have at the Haven.

00:26:22.180 And because rejoining the Haven must be done voluntarily.

00:26:26.200 So when they join as an adult to the community and they agree to the sacrifices that are coming with the

00:26:32.560 Haven community, because I expect all the Havens would have fairly strict rules around austerity and other

00:26:37.320 things like that to ensure a virtuous life and a life of productivity, very different from, you know, the

00:26:44.360 classic, what I think the communists want, you know, while it will be a post-scarcity world to gain access

00:26:48.740 to one of these post-scarcity communities, it'll be quite discerning in who they let in. And I think

00:26:53.620 that it would be useful to have a ritual like this, where you go and explore the world and then come back

00:26:58.380 and rejoin voluntarily. The drone traveling with the explorer in this scenario is meanwhile building up,

00:27:05.620 it leads them to food and water. It purifies the food and water. And it's been building a profile

00:27:12.060 on the individual for the marriage pool that they are now accessible for after the coming of age ritual.

00:27:18.640 They are now qualified for a marriage pool. And then the marriage pool is a meeting of all of the

00:27:26.340 various Havens within a network. So this is how you'd likely get more outbreeding is instead of just

00:27:31.800 dating was in your community, you would hold like a season once a year where all of the eligible people

00:27:38.120 along with their psychological profiles would be paired off and all go to one Haven, which would

00:27:44.720 host it and which Haven hosted it would be a cycling phenomenon. And I suspect in the far future,

00:27:50.820 about a hundred years from now, the global economy will be somewhat differentiated based on what level

00:27:57.200 of technology you decided to engage with or stay with. So for example, I don't think that there will

00:28:03.980 be much trading between networks like the Haven network, as I call it, of the ultra technophilic

00:28:10.060 individuals and the individuals who decided to LARP living in the 1920s. I expect those individuals will

00:28:16.500 likely have a series of communities that range LARPing like they're living in the 1990s to LARPing like

00:28:22.500 they're living in like the 1920s and they will roughly trade with each other. And then I suspect

00:28:28.140 there'll be a third lowest tier of sort of human group that is basically feral and is the ultra, 0.93

00:28:36.820 ultra, ultra, you know, like barely working. I think that this is what's going to happen to

00:28:42.440 like the types of people who tried to start ISIS and stuff like that. But then they're also,

00:28:47.060 you'll have remnants of them in the developed world, likely descending from criminal organizations.

00:28:52.080 which attack caravans and stuff like that, but never were really able to build any sort of

00:28:57.220 sustainable civilization. What are your thoughts on this speculative fiction? Our descendants get it

00:29:04.760 quite well in this, in this world. They get to explore pretty much was impunity ruins of the old

00:29:11.080 world. Wouldn't you have found that a joy when you were younger? Well, now I know, I know a friend of

00:29:16.320 the pod had said something to us at a dinner party we were hosting recently, something along the lines of,

00:29:21.820 you know, someone was telling me that actually my descendants will probably love wandering around

00:29:25.640 the abandoned cities. You know, like I'm the kind of person who would be better off in that world.

00:29:30.760 So I, I know, I know where you're going with this. That's hopeful. I think we're going to end up in

00:29:36.420 more of a South Africa style situation where it is not, not necessarily like just because it's a little

00:29:46.860 lawless and unsafe, not really okay to wander around the non-gated zones, but also from a climate and

00:29:56.940 safety and survival standpoint, just a lot more difficult in many parts of the world to, to wander

00:30:03.560 through them. So I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you.

00:30:07.740 Why don't you think that the technophilic group, because I think that the technophilic group with AI

00:30:12.360 is going to be astoundingly more productive than humans are today. They will be astoundingly smaller

00:30:18.900 portion of the population than humans today.

00:30:22.680 Yeah. It's just that I think that the world is going to be just because larger swaths of people

00:30:31.500 are going to not have any tech and be like lower tech and probably a lot more xenophobic, you know,

00:30:37.800 they can still pack a punch. They can still be pretty harmful, you know, and there could still

00:30:43.900 be a lot of them.

00:30:45.140 This is actually an interesting point here. That's, that's worth talking about a little bit

00:30:48.420 where some people are like, sometimes lower tech groups end up taking control of governments

00:30:53.020 than the higher tech group. And here they would choose an environment like South Africa.

00:30:56.940 Africa. The, the reason that happened in South Africa was international pressure. The reason

00:31:04.340 that happened was caving to woke ideas. And I should clarify here, I don't mean ending apartheid

00:31:11.240 was bad. I mean, the way a government was set up in a post apartheid world was bad. And I think 0.68

00:31:17.580 patently so we can see from the suffering that South African people are undergoing right now.

00:31:22.560 Like that is what caused South Africa to fall to the state that it's fallen to today.

00:31:28.340 And I'd also point out that most of the competent group left both the competent tribes. It wasn't

00:31:35.100 just, you know, white versus black. There were some tribes that were much more productive than the 0.52

00:31:39.760 other tribes and many of their members just immigrated to America.

00:31:43.060 And I want to make clear here, this isn't a white versus black thing or a some tribes good,

00:31:47.280 some tribes bad thing. It's that across communities, those individuals who had the means to get out

00:31:54.480 and start life anew somewhere else, when they were choosing between having to start over and the risk

00:32:00.920 that their daughter would be kidnapped and gang raped and murdered, they chose the former because most 0.99

00:32:08.780 civilized people would do that. And intergenerationally, that causes a cultural shift in all the groups that

00:32:15.640 are having pretty much everyone from them that's either not involved in the government bureaucracy or

00:32:20.460 has an opportunity to get out to leave.

00:32:23.120 When a place becomes that lawless, the lawlessness begets lawlessness as people migrate, like the 1.00

00:32:29.940 productive individuals migrate to non-lawless areas. And the key to maintaining a non-lawless area

00:32:38.940 is just to never give an inch in terms of a group being like, well, I understand that I'm

00:32:45.740 contributing a lot less, but I deserve something from you.

00:32:49.900 Yeah. Like I basically, I see, I think that they're going to be much larger city states where you have

00:32:55.680 like very advanced, very like genuine, like cities, clusters of cities, but the borders are hermetic.

00:33:04.160 Like, you know, there are drones, there are walls, there are everything's, you know, there's no

00:33:09.060 tunneling. They are permanently sealed. And then there's going to be the rest of the world and there

00:33:14.260 will absolutely be a lot of people in the rest of the world, but it is just going to be a lot less

00:33:20.720 fun to be there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of sci-fi that, that describes this. And I always found

00:33:26.980 it kind of arbitrary and stupid. Like why are, why are, why is there this class system in all these 0.99

00:33:33.560 various AI or sorry, all of these various science fiction stories where there's like the underclass 1.00

00:33:40.220 and this overclass that lives in their beautiful city in the sky or whatever. Right. And I don't, 0.99

00:33:45.480 I don't think things play out the way that a lot of these stories have it. I think it's more that

00:33:49.900 there's this portion of society that's willing to be technophilic and pluralistic. And then there's

00:33:55.120 this portion of society that's not, it's not a story about keeping people down. It's not a story

00:34:01.780 about some evil capitalistic overlords creating this hierarchy. In fact, the, the, the, the gated

00:34:11.080 community that's so nice and wonderful is, is going to be technically communist, but, and, and the

00:34:18.800 outside world is going to be the height of pure capitalism. Yeah. Well, and I don't think it'll be

00:34:25.000 pure communist either. I am sure it will to some degree because there is no such thing as pure

00:34:30.740 communism and we'll do a separate episode on this. We've got to do that. Even when you live in a post

00:34:34.660 scarcity environment, you just mean post scarcity of like goods. Yeah. You don't mean genuine post

00:34:40.820 scarcity because in a communist system, whatever ends up being a thing of artificial scarcity is in

00:34:48.020 what the status hierarchy build around, but from a, like, we'll say Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

00:34:54.400 it gets all the bottom portions of that fricking triangle. Okay. So long as you're contributing.

00:35:00.200 And I think that the, what we would likely see. So when you say her medically sealed, I agree with you,

00:35:04.900 but I don't know if it's literally her medically sealed, probably gun drones, you know, patrolling a

00:35:12.080 perimeter, but, but very strict about who comes in and out. I think as we move to the systems where

00:35:19.060 you have a high degree of social services within a haven, you cannot allow low skilled migrants to 1.00

00:35:24.940 come in. That's always been true of social services. You cannot have social services that go to all

00:35:31.520 members of a community and porous borders. Yeah. You, you, you get one or the other. You also can't

00:35:37.600 have social services that go to all members of the community and guaranteed membership in the

00:35:42.040 community, unless that guaranteed membership is only going to a very small class. And I just don't

00:35:46.380 think it's useful to have that anyway. I think that people should have to prove their utility to the

00:35:50.540 community and people should be able to come into the community if they can prove that utility. So I

00:35:55.580 don't think that they're going to be that hard separated from the outside. If somebody can prove

00:35:59.500 their utility to the community. Oh, for sure. Like I'm sure there might be some kind of program for

00:36:06.700 immigration, but that, that doesn't change the fact that these are going to be totally different

00:36:11.740 worlds and the odds of over time, people actually qualifying to get in, you know, being capable of

00:36:20.220 integrating with that society may go down. I don't know. So, well, I mean, I think that people here

00:36:26.120 will be like, well, what about, you know, like something like the, a large state military trying to

00:36:31.940 attack one of these. Right. I just don't think you'd have that either, because I think we're

00:36:36.340 entering a world where the small havens or like clusters of incredibly technologically engaged

00:36:42.240 people. So today, this is like the type of people who run big AI companies and stuff like that

00:36:46.260 are going to have access to better weaponry than state governments that have to acquire them through

00:36:53.140 a very slow procurement bureaucracy. And two, even though the governments are much larger,

00:36:59.080 if they attack any one government attacks, any one haven, that would be incredibly stupid of them 0.99

00:37:04.660 for two reasons. First, it would make them an enemy of all havens because all the network would now 0.94

00:37:10.660 see them as an eventual threat. But two, they wouldn't be able to get access to the tech that

00:37:15.660 the havens were producing. So it's kind of like a Taiwan situation, duplicated a bunch of times,

00:37:21.480 copy and paste Taiwan all over the world and make it for all the stuff that we need. And then you've

00:37:25.740 got. Well, I think we basically already have the emergence of three haven states. I think Taiwan

00:37:32.380 is one of them. It's a proto haven state that the world basically needs to protect because of its

00:37:36.980 ability to produce something that no one else can produce, the chips. Israel, I see, is another one of

00:37:41.920 the initial haven states. And Singapore is another one of the initial haven states. And I suspect we will

00:37:48.380 see more. What does Singapore produce of value for the world that's so necessary?

00:37:51.780 Singapore produces in a big way exchange between the West and the East, financially speaking.

00:38:00.060 If Singapore was to disappear, Americans' ability to invest or work with the Chinese economic system

00:38:07.000 would decrease substantially, as would China's ability to interface with the West, especially now

00:38:13.500 that Hong Kong is gone, which used to be one of the haven states. And I also think that this is partially

00:38:18.720 why China is struggling so much. They showed that they were a danger to the haven network and now they sort of 1.00

00:38:25.020 made themselves enemies of it through the integration and destruction of Hong Kong as a separate entity

00:38:30.240 before Hong Kong really had the ability to defend itself due to differential technology, which it didn't have

00:38:36.680 back then. I also think as technology develops and as AI develops, we're going to enter a world in which

00:38:42.000 attacking becomes much harder than defending, which makes havens much easier to build out.

00:38:48.640 However, I think that the best place to build one is in the tundra, as I've always said,

00:38:53.160 which is what I really want to do somewhere in the fairly far north.

00:38:56.260 Yeah.

00:38:58.080 But I also feel like on so many of these fronts, the tundra has a lot going for it.

00:39:04.540 But the reason why we have extra dramatic photos to show from your childhood home is because it is

00:39:12.100 on an island. It is by the ocean. It is in the heat. It is under the sun, the hot beating sun and

00:39:17.940 the corrosive salt air. And so, of course, like it degraded extra fast. If we were talking about

00:39:24.660 an old stone hut in like Norway.

00:39:30.500 Yeah. Islands are the worst place, like, like, except for large islands, I will say small islands

00:39:36.660 are the worst place you can build a haven state. They are incredibly undefendable. People think 0.58

00:39:41.220 that they're really defendable.

00:39:42.620 But also like the amount, you basically have to rebuild it every few years based on how much

00:39:47.320 things are corroding and degrading.

00:39:49.180 But I need to talk about why they're so undefendable. People who have never lived on an island don't know

00:39:53.800 how much a problem pirates are. Even in today's world, like on our island, you know, you had to

00:39:58.240 have guns and everything. You had to have defense plans because pirates will come and they can land

00:40:02.920 on any beach anywhere around the island and quickly make it without us knowing because, you know,

00:40:09.080 to to like if they come on at night or something like that. So you would need a big security network,

00:40:14.680 which would need electricity, which is very hard to keep running. One of the things about the island is we

00:40:19.400 always had to replace the generator because it would corrode, you know, so those only last like five

00:40:23.700 to 10 years often. It's just terrible idea.

00:40:27.260 I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about island defense in a historic

00:40:32.100 context rather than in a modern context. They're not thinking about a few families needing to defend

00:40:38.140 an island against speed boats that can run quietly and a group of men with AK-47s and grenades.

00:40:47.360 They're thinking about having to defend against a big fleet of triremes, medium populated, you know, 1.00

00:40:56.980 historic maybe offshoot of Athens or, you know, something around Byzantium. The logistics are

00:41:05.720 totally different. It used to take a long time and it would be very loud and visible to get a boat to

00:41:12.140 an island. But now with speed boats and modern weaponry, it's almost as if you're living in an area

00:41:18.520 where a small army can teleport to any one of your immediate borders. It is incredibly hard to defend an

00:41:24.580 island.

00:41:25.360 Now, large islands are fine, especially when they are very like they don't have many beaches or landing

00:41:31.080 areas. Taiwan is a great example of this. It's very, very hard to invade Taiwan. But even still, I think the

00:41:37.680 corrosion is just not worth it. You are better being in a coastal tundra area is what I'd say. Because that allows

00:41:45.400 you to likely next to a large river somewhere. So you have access to the water. The cold helps cool your data

00:41:52.320 centers, allowing you to run more calculations faster. You can convert the land around you into farmland using

00:42:00.340 your technology. But raider groups have no utility to the land. And other governments, you can tell when

00:42:06.960 they're coming towards you for a long time beforehand. With future technology, when you're

00:42:11.720 talking about like radar technology and stuff like that, an island, you don't know if it's a merchant

00:42:15.280 vessel or something that's coming specifically to see you. If you are, you know, until it like veers off

00:42:20.940 course to come right at you. Even when you're dealing with government actors, if you are in somewhere in

00:42:26.400 the fairly far north, they would have no reason to be going that way. And so when you see something

00:42:31.580 beginning to head in your direction, you know, oh, okay, this is something I need to get clearance

00:42:36.900 for and everything like that long before it gets to me. It allows you to have much larger perimeters.

00:42:41.900 But that is my thought on that. And I think that the Haven Network will be a natural transition

00:42:47.720 for humanity to get to the stars.

00:42:49.660 Yeah, which is kind of an inevitable next step. And then things just feel a lot more weirdly controllable

00:42:58.800 once you get to space. Because things are on a colony-based level, on a ship-based level. And it's, because

00:43:04.860 things are more circumscribed, it just feels, I don't know, easier.

00:43:08.620 I feel like the Havens are going to function very much like spaceships on Earth.

00:43:12.600 Yeah.

00:43:12.840 They are likely going to be smaller communities than we are used to. Likely, I suspect like 50,000

00:43:18.840 people per community. Except for the Mega Havens, which are the descendants of modern states like 1.00

00:43:23.820 potentially Israel, Taiwan, and Singapore. But yeah, and I think they'll function very much like

00:43:29.020 spaceships, sort of, where you have a lot of controlled systems. Because I just think it's

00:43:33.200 going to be more cost-efficient to sort of run the entire network with all of your VR stuff

00:43:39.000 built into your environment. Or perhaps even, I expect the cities themselves will be combinations

00:43:46.020 of VR and real life. Which might also make interactions with other Havens much easier.

00:43:52.020 As you may be able to go out and meet with someone from another Haven's virtual avatar pretty easily.

00:43:58.300 Well, yeah. But also, like, you know, we'll have to, I guess we'll have to ask, what will cities

00:44:04.180 actually need? Or what's the purpose of cities if it's not, you know, interfacing with people?

00:44:08.840 What physically do people have to do in close proximity to each other? And how are systems

00:44:13.860 best set up there? But that's for a different conversation. It's still, it's interesting to

00:44:18.980 think how things are going to play out. And I would say my favorite piece of real estate philosophy

00:44:24.020 from you that I just not heard from anywhere before that might be kind of relevant to this

00:44:28.460 conversation is that you alluded to this earlier. Old houses are more desirable, not just because

00:44:35.920 they degrade more slowly, but because they're like collectibles on a market. They are a thing of

00:44:43.720 limited quantity that is differentiated and unique. Whereas in a world of a housing glut,

00:44:51.940 you're going to need something where the supply is not so elastic and abundant. So if you are looking

00:45:00.400 to buy a house, consider buying a collectible one in some way.

00:45:05.120 I love you to death, Simone.

00:45:06.840 I love you too, Malcolm.

Based Camp - July 31, 2024

Real Estate & Fertility Collapse： Exploring the Post-Apocalyptic World Our Children Will Live In

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