Real Estate & Fertility Collapse： Exploring the Post-Apocalyptic World Our Children Will Live In
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Summary
In this episode, Simone talks about the rapid decline of housing in the United States, and how this is going to affect us in the future. She also tells the story of what would happen to her childhood home if it were left unkept.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals, abandoned for fairly short times.
00:00:06.940
I am showing you abandoned schools and abandoned pools and abandoned stadiums.
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.
00:00:37.760
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.
00:00:48.820
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.
00:01:16.820
Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is cheap housing.
00:01:32.240
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.
00:02:00.560
So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration.
00:02:08.740
So I grew up part-time living on an island with my family that my family owns.
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.
00:02:41.120
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.
00:02:59.840
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.
00:03:16.300
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.
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This room is, I believe, my parents' bedroom right here.
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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.
00:04:10.080
And it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.
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Here is my childhood bathroom, completely smashed.
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I am now showing the inside of the bathroom to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place.
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.
00:04:52.800
It's more like, you know, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic.
00:04:59.460
This is not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble.
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.
00:06:01.880
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.
00:07:03.540
But two, we've actually seen a huge increase in the cost of house because of fertility collapse.
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?
00:07:35.020
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.
00:07:48.660
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.
00:08:02.720
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.
00:08:18.980
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.
00:09:07.420
It's not like, oh, you know, it needs to be abandoned for 40 years.
00:09:17.700
One of the houses has already had to be demolished.
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.
00:10:02.380
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.
00:10:13.120
They both had to be torn down, and you wouldn't even know that houses were there.
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.
00:10:36.020
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.
00:10:50.800
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.
00:11:05.540
Again, I am going to show just a few here for the listeners.
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,
00:11:29.920
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?
00:11:48.040
So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.
00:11:55.660
I am showing you abandoned schools and abandoned pools and abandoned stadiums.
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.
00:12:23.640
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.
00:13:20.000
These homes have valuable things inside of them, the copper in the wall, some parts of
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.
00:13:36.500
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?
00:13:47.520
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.
00:13:54.980
And this brings in an additional little hitch to the problem that is going to then be compounded
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
00:14:16.040
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?
00:14:25.560
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
00:15:13.220
They're like hurricane meets tornado that lasts really like five minutes.
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.
00:15:27.740
Not like you'll see like big swaths of trees all knocked over.
00:15:31.740
Like hurricane meets tornado, but just really fast.
00:15:35.900
And so there are going to be more states in the New York times podcast.
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.
00:16:06.680
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
00:16:32.980
The unsustainability of cities, I think should be fairly obvious to people in a world where
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?
00:17:01.740
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
00:17:21.540
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.
00:17:31.860
And it means that I think already cities are financially unviable.
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.
00:17:54.080
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,
00:18:09.860
Especially the stuff that makes it less safe to be there.
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
00:18:23.200
of businesses that utilize getting everyone together and working together in a city the
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
00:18:50.960
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
00:19:03.560
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
00:19:35.900
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
00:19:46.320
And a lot of it was built out in ways that weren't sustainable.
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.
00:20:17.540
Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.
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
00:20:33.440
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.
00:21:04.700
The more prohibitions your culture has against technology, the higher fertility rate you're
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
00:21:37.400
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
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.
00:22:21.340
They've got a little AI robot companion alongside them.
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
00:22:39.860
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
00:23:09.400
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
00:23:31.840
Now, this group might otherwise attack this traveler, but they know not to because they've
00:23:36.780
seen travelers like this before with these drones that they know are armed and could easily
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
00:24:02.540
And when they have become dangerous to technophilic explorers on the regular, they just end up getting
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
00:24:30.440
You wouldn't have more efficient forms of energy than they have access to.
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
00:24:51.320
And some might expect, well, you know, they might be, you know, marginal value as breeding partners for
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
00:26:02.940
The explorer is likely going to just keep going down that road for months because they are engaged in a coming-of-age
00:26:10.940
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,
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
00:30:22.680
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
00:30:45.140
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
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
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
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
00:32:23.120
When a place becomes that lawless, the lawlessness begets lawlessness as people migrate, like the
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
00:33:33.560
various AI or sorry, all of these various science fiction stories where there's like the underclass
00:33:40.220
and this overclass that lives in their beautiful city in the sky or whatever. Right. And I don't,
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
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
00:37:04.660
for two reasons. First, it would make them an enemy of all havens because all the network would now
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
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.
00:38:58.080
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
00:39:30.500
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
00:39:42.620
But also like the amount, you basically have to rebuild it every few years based on how much
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
00:40:27.260
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,
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
00:41:25.360
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
00:42:49.660
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.
00:43:12.840
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
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.