In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the grim reality of housing markets in a world facing demographic collapse. They delve into the rapid decay of abandoned properties, the unsustainability of cities and suburbs, and speculate on a future where technologically advanced "havens" emerge amidst the ruins of our current civilization. This video offers a stark look at the potential consequences of population decline and technological advancement on our living spaces and social structures.
Key topics covered:
The rapid deterioration of abandoned properties
The unsustainability of modern cities and suburbs
The impact of climate change on housing markets and insurance
Speculation on future "haven" communities and their characteristics
The potential divide between technophilic and technophobic societies
The role of AI and advanced technology in shaping future communities
Geopolitical implications of demographic collapse and technological advancement
Whether you're interested in urban planning, futurism, or the long-term consequences of current demographic trends, this video provides a thought-provoking look at the potential shape of our future world.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.
Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.
And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.
I'm just
Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.
about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.
This person. Is hiking. They've got a drone companion flying alongside them. 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. They are having a blast [00:01:00] exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Hello,
Malcolm Collins: Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is.
Cheap housing. Oh, hooray. Everyone always says, they say, well, when the population is 5 percent of its current size, then housing will cost almost nothing. 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. Talk about how quickly A house that is worth nothing begins to fall apart. And this is something that we saw [00:02:00] in Detroit. So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration, but I also want to start a bit closer to home. So I grew up part time living on an island with my family that my family owns and now I don't inherit it or anything like that.
It goes to my sister. So it's not like, again, I get nothing, don't worry about it guys still starting from scratch here, but,
Simone Collins: Hey, I have to stop and say though, when we were first dating,
Malcolm Collins: I
Simone Collins: was like, this is a caricature of life, because no one actually has private islands, but apparently they do. But then, like, you and I learned that there's a reason why people don't have private islands. Because it kind of sucks. Well, another thing
Malcolm Collins: that people know is that my family lost all its money and was unable to maintain things.
And it is hard to sell a private island. Who wants that? Like, how can you even buy one, you know? And then [00:03:00] I'm going to go over what ended up happening to the property. Because I love when people are like, oh, islands, so defensible. So this is the living room. Of the house I grew up in. For those who are listening on the podcast it has trees growing inside of it now, all of the walls have fallen out of it well it has plate glass windows overlooking the ocean, but like, it looks like there is a forest in it now.
And as I go through this, I encourage you the listeners to not think of this in the abstract, but as what your own home is going to look like. 10 years after you stopped. Living in it or you fail to sell it because of your population is declining. Because this is a picture that we see across rural Japan right now, so much so that they're giving away free houses.
And I think that that is. , what we're going to see the future of the U S.
, I've even heard of instances as some people paying for people to take their houses. So they don't become these horrible nightmares.
Malcolm Collins: This room is, I believe, my parents bedroom right here for people who are just [00:04:00] listening, it's just debris everywhere, people took the beds, the mattresses, everything. Oh, this is my bedroom! And my brother's bedroom. This is where we Slept as little kids and it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.
Here is my childhood bathroom. Completely smashed. It would literally be safer, I am now showing the inside of the bathroom, to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place. This looks super dangerous. Yes. This is the patio. It looks like a forest.
Oh, and this is the play area. Now this, the ceiling has completely caved in. It looks worse than any of the locations did in Jurassic Park for any on the podcast.
Simone Collins: No, Jurassic Park does not play a very accurate. tale of urban decay, right? Because like, you know, things just kind of, there's like a, a, a vine tastefully draped.
Oh, you know, over it. It's, it's more like, you know, the, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic. It's not, this is [00:05:00] not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble. Everything's so muddy. And here
Malcolm Collins: is the forest spilling into our living room and patio here. And I'll just throw up some other pictures.
You can get an idea of what it used to look like. I, well, I guess in terms of the beach and stuff like that, So people can get an idea of just how much, you know, even a decade of not caring for something costs.
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. You are spending a fairly large amount of money. I, 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.
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. , and here is a map of how that varies state by state.
Malcolm Collins: In terms of maintenance fees and a lot of people all the time. [00:06:00]
Simone Collins: It's awful.
Malcolm Collins: And it is no longer worth those maintenance fees. If the house has reduced to zero in value, the reason why people. Spend the money upkeeping their property is because said property has value. The reason why properties historically had value was because the number of people who wanted that limited set of properties was growing exponentially.
Once that number evens off, property value is going to collapse and people might be like, well, if fertility has already collapsed, why hasn't property value collapsed? And there are. Two reasons why property value has continued to go up. 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.
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 [00:07:00] year because they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So one, we haven't seen that yet, but two, we've actually seen a huge increase. In the cost of house because of fertility class, and a lot of people can be like, what, why would that happen?
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. 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?
I'll put one on the screen here. But that's basically what's happening to the housing market in this last death throw of the housing market, real estate more broadly right now, outside of like farm real estate, I'd say is. Not a good long term investment. And I, I should say here, long term, 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 embossed in
multifamily housing. Yes. So this is like apartment [00:08:00] complexes and stuff like that. And it's done very well for us for a while. 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.
So I'm going to start putting some pictures on screen here of time lapses of places in Detroit. 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 because eventually they become hazards and the state then decides to plow them over.
So here for podcast listeners, we have two, what looked like fairly normal houses in 2009 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. They are mostly retaken by nature. They're [00:09:00] teardowns. They're teardowns. They're complete teardowns.
Six years. Six years of no one living there. That happens. Six years of no maintenance. It is like that. It's not like, oh you know, it needs to be abandoned for 40 years. It needs to be abandoned for 20 years, six years. Sorry. Now look at 2019. So here we're looking at only 10 years.
One of the houses has already had to be demolished and the other house is completely unusable. And then we go to 2022. So 2022. Honestly, I
Simone Collins: think, I think too that these Detroit houses may even not be fully. Illustrating how quickly this will happen because keep in mind that construction quality has changed significantly recently as well.
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 and some more old buildings or even like industrial buildings may last a lot better. And we're going to see shifts towards those in the housing market.
We'll see though.
Malcolm Collins: [00:10:00] So, so I, I completely agree with you. And that's definitely something that we need to discuss. It's the old houses versus the new houses and how long it lasts. But by 2022, so that is only, 13 years after the houses were abandoned nature has completely retaken the area. They both had to be torn down and you wouldn't even know that houses were there. So let's keep going. Here you have an abandoned group of three normal looking houses in 2011. By 2013, you can see one has already collapsed in on itself, only two years after being abandoned.
2015 you see there's basically nothing left. 2022, you can see it's as if they were never there. So keep in mind, 2015, that's only four years after these were abandoned. That they are just rubble. Here in 2009, you see two houses. 2013, they actually look okay. These were slightly better construction than the others, but by 2019, just 10 years later, completely unlivable.
2022, somehow a boat appeared [00:11:00] and otherwise nature has reclaimed. Pokemon, a boat appeared. Again, I am going to show, uh, just a few here for the, the listeners that I don't want to go through them all. They're all dealing with the same timelines. You're looking at a four year jump, , four year jump, five year jump. And, and while I've been talking, I have been flashing these on screen for you guys. And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.
And so, And then people can be like, well, you know, okay, that's individual houses, right? What about the big public works projects and stuff like that, right? Like that stuff, of course, will, will stay working. And it's like, well, no, not, you know, So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.
Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And [00:12:00] abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become. And what's interesting is, you know, we live in a house from the 1700s.
And if you walk around our area, you can see, sadly, some of the old homes also falling apart, but they take much longer. They take 60, 70 years to fall apart, these old stone houses. And it's worth trying to recover them because they act as a much more sturdy foundation than these that are falling apart with only four years without maintenance.
And also keep in mind, one of the things that hastens the Speed that houses fall apart is when you can't live in a house and protect a house, especially as police in various regions of the U S start to collapse. And people wonder why police funds are going to collapse. Well, they were meant for larger populations than will exist in the future, and they will be paying the pensions of police for larger populations that exist in the future.
And so either those pensions will fall [00:13:00] apart, which is very hard for a government to do. We didn't even in the pensions for Nazi. soldiers. When, after World War II, I think now there's still a few SS soldiers that are receiving pensions. Like that is wild, but it is very hard to claw back pensions.
And so you'll have smaller police forces. These homes have valuable things inside of them, the copper in the wall, some parts of the various appliances. And so they go and they rip those out. Here I'll put the kitchen that I grew up in. Using and you can see every bit of it has been ripped apart. And and that's what we're headed to.
So, Simone, do you have any thoughts before I go further?
Simone Collins: Are we going to discuss the insurance issue that's going to accelerate this or should I bring that up now? Because I'm not sure if you remember that. Yeah. So there's a great podcast on this issue done by the New York Times podcast called the bombshell case that will transform the housing market.
And this brings in an additional little hitch to the [00:14:00] problem that, that, that is going to then be compounded by demographic collapse. So already Malcolm, you've alluded to in some of our podcasts, how it's kind of ridiculous that you can buy a home in Florida because, you know, there's so many regions of it.
I haven't heard of
Malcolm Collins: it with a 30 year. The loan
Simone Collins: with a 30 year home loan. Yes. Because your home is going to be underwater. Like how on earth, like, can, can you get a home loan on these things? I think it is getting a little bit harder now, but what's getting extra hard already because of climate change is just getting home insurance in Florida and in some other states that are now more subject to severe weather.
Just getting homeowner's insurance is almost impossible now in the United States. In many cases, you cannot get a mortgage. You cannot get debt to finance the purchase of your home unless you have home insurance. Meaning that as we experience more extreme climate, meaning as more insurance companies go underwater, because honestly, they just can't [00:15:00] pay for all these wildfires and for all the tornadoes and for all the hurricanes and the floods and the derechos, which we have here, which you didn't even know existed.
We didn't know existed before we came here and they're terrifying. They're like, miniature, they're like hurricane meets tornado that lasts really like five minutes,
Malcolm Collins: a very short, it's not a, it's not like a spiral, like a hurricane or tornado. It's just really strong wind that comes out of nowhere and like knocks over trees.
Yeah. Like lots of trees. Not like, like you'll see like big swaths of trees all knocked over.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, yeah. Like hurricane meets tornado, but just really fast. You don't know it's coming. And So there are going to be more states in the New York Times podcast, they, they discuss this. It's, it's quite interesting that they go into some detail on how this is not just happening in the states that you think are obvious.
Meaning that we're, we may hit this point at which a lot of homes sit empty because people literally can't buy them because people don't have enough money to buy a house outright. [00:16:00] Right. But they can't get a mortgage because they can't get homeowners insurance.
Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. That's not exactly what will happen.
I mean, market forces, Detroit homes were selling for like 50 cents in some instances, you know, like it's not that they won't be able to get money to buy them. It's that they won't be able to get money to build sustainably on that plot. I E it won't be worth it to tear them down and then build something new.
Yeah.
And I think that you're, you're absolutely right about that. Now we need to talk about the plight of both cities and suburbs and why both are pretty screwed. The unsustainability of cities, I think should be fairly obvious to people in a world where work from home is the norm. If you go to a lot of these major cities and you start looking around, like we do this in New York, you will just see empty, empty, empty, empty, empty everywhere you look.
It is so scary that like these markets are sort of stable. The, the core reason people are like, well, then why don't, why doesn't New York convert the commercial properties to residential [00:17:00] properties? There's two problems, giant government bureaucracies that make zoning changes, very expensive and difficult.
But other is that in a place like Manhattan, for example, it's often easier to tear down and completely rebuild than it is to do a conversion. Because Commercial buildings are built with the assumption that the restrooms are going to be in the center of the building all around a central shaft, whereas residentials have, like, multiple towers of plumbing going in different parts of the building.
And it's quite different construction techniques, so it's hard to switch between the 2. And it means that I, I think already cities are financially unviable, just the world hasn't realized it yet. As cities are going further and further left, right? And because of their progressive tax policies, when I say progressive, I don't mean like lefty.
I just mean there is a financial term called a progressive tax policy. It means wealthy people pay more in New York. 4 percent of the population is paying over 50 percent of taxes. So what that means is [00:18:00] that 4 percent is who the city's customers are, and that 4 percent of the ones that are being scared away with a lot of their new rules and regulations, right?
Especially the, the stuff that makes it less safe to be there. You know, these people want their kids around. And now there's just not the same reason to be in a city as there was historically.
Here I am, of course, referring to the work from home revolution, which has hit the types of businesses that utilize getting everyone together and working together in a city the most, um, And it's also the, the highest paid professions, which are most hit by the work from home revolution, because these are the professions where the individuals in them can demand the most from their employer. I E the opportunity to work from home.
You know, if you're a top. Player at like a finance firm or something. Like that you basically get a name, your terms. AI also is a big player here because the type of white collar work that was in cities is one of the first categories that gets automated.
Malcolm Collins: And so, with all of [00:19:00] this expansion, They have to maintain, they're likely going to begin to fall apart, but we'll likely see a similar thing in the suburbs.
We've mentioned this before, so I'm going to go quick. But for those who haven't heard our spiel on this suburbs really got subsidized during white flight when you had a bunch of people moving to suburbs all at once. And this was about, I want to say like 60, 70 years ago, 60 years ago at this point and when suburbs were first being charted out what they would do is the developer would front roll the cost for the paving, for the sewer system, for the electrical system, for basically all of the infrastructure but then going forwards, it was cared for by the tax base.
Well, now a lot of that stuff needs to be rebuilt but the tax base was never really optimized to pay for its rebuilding. And a lot of it was built out in ways that weren't sustainable. So suburbs are kind of screwed as well. Now, suburbs can just raise taxes, especially in the more rural or ex urban areas like where we live, and they're probably going to be fine.
And I think [00:20:00] that's where culture is going to re coalesce in terms of like where people actually want to be, whereas the cities are going to turn into quite a bit of a hellscape. Do you have any thoughts on this, Simone? I'm just
Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.
So this story, because this was, this was framed for somebody else when they, when they thought about all of the rotting cities in the future, all of the rotting infrastructure in the future. Somebody was telling somebody else a version of the story. And I just decided to flush it out about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.
And this person. Is hiking. They've got a little AI robot companion alongside them. The little, it's a drone companion flying alongside them. And they're, they're out exploring the old ruins an old city. [00:21:00] They've got, you know, special shoes and stuff. So they don't have to worry about stepping on anything.
It would be quite easy to, to have a protection in the AI companion. It's likely doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.
But of course. They don't have access to many of the things that you need larger technical networks to gain access to. So while they're LARPing a 1950s lifestyle, they are doing it without cell phones. They are doing it with maybe electricity during the day, but it gets shut off at night because it's coming from generators that are expensive to run and you need to buy the fuel.
And ship the fuel over long, dangerous roads because a lot of the state law has broken down. Now this group might otherwise attack [00:22:00] this traveler but they know not to because they've seen travelers like this before with these drones that they know are armed and could easily mow down their entire settlement.
And so, the community would have nothing to of value to this person because in a world where you can produce more than enough food on the land you already have
and they don't have access to tech that you don't have, they are quite literally irrelevant except for any potential threat they might pose to your community. And when they have become dangerous to, you know, technophilic explorers on the regular they just end up getting wiped out by a drone swarm.
I also, I'm always surprised when the naturalist people think that the tech acceleration is, or if I've heard them call them, the cyborgs are the ones who pose a threat to them because they really don't, this, you would have nothing that the cyborgs want. You, you, you don't have any tech that they want.
They wouldn't care about land. You wouldn't have more efficient forms of energy than they [00:23:00] have access to. What like. What do you think you have that they want? You only matter in so far as you decide to become a threat to them, in which case you aren't even that much of a threat, and they won't let you become that much of a threat, even if you can get your hands on old aging nuclear tech or something like that.
And some might expect, well, you know, they might be you know, marginal value is breeding partners for genetic diversity, but at that point, I actually don't think they would. I suspect that while they might sometimes be accepted into the technophilic communities outbreeding outside of the technophilic communities would never be allowed because you wouldn't want that.
You know, intelligent, modified genes to get into these communities that are naturally going to be more xenophobic towards outsiders and could end up doing very dangerous things as they ever developed a degree of industrial productivity. In fact, I actually suspect. Hundreds of years, a hundred years from now or so, our descendants, once we gain a bit more [00:24:00] understanding of human genetics will likely have developed prohibitions around sex more generally making it taboo and editing out arousal pathways in the human mind, while likely fine tuning some other pathways during an individual's use, like the ones that give us emotional rewards for exploration, gen.
Learning and productivity to allow an individual to gain even more satisfaction from productive tasks while out was out being distracted by unproductive tasks. The Explorer is likely going to just keep going down that road for months. Because they are engaged in a coming of age ritual. That's why they have been out on this exploratory thing where they voluntarily agree to live in the hardships of the fallen world for a year to better appreciate what they have at the haven.
And because rejoining the haven must be done voluntarily. So, when they join as an adult to the community and and they agree to the sacrifices that are coming with the Haven community because I expect all the [00:25:00] Havens would have fairly strict rules around austerity and other things like that to ensure a virtuous life and a life of productivity, very different from, you know, the classic what I think the communists want, you know, while it will be a post scarcity world to gain access to one of these post scarcity communities, it'll be quite discerning in who they let in.
And I think that it would be useful to have a ritual like this where you go and explore the world and then come back and rejoin voluntarily. The the drone traveling with the explorer in this scenario is meanwhile building up it, it leads into food and water. It purifies the food and water. And it's been building a profile on the individual for the marriage pool that they are now accessible for after the coming of age ritual, they are now qualified for a, a marriage pool.
And then the marriage pool is a meeting of all of the various havens within a network. So this is how you'd likely get more outbreeding is instead of just dating was in your community, you would [00:26:00] hold like a season once a year All of the eligible people along with their psychological profiles would be paired off.
And I'll go to one haven which would host it and which haven hosted it would be a cycling phenomenon. And I suspect In the far future, about 100 years from now, the global economy will be somewhat differentiated based on what level of technology you decided to engage with or stay with. So, for example, I don't think that there will be much trading between.
Networks like the Haven Network, as I call it, of the ultra technophilic individuals, and the individuals who decided to LARP living in the 1920s. I expect those individuals will likely have a series of communities that range LARPing like they're living in the 1990s, to LARPing like they're living in, like, the 20s.
the 1920s and they will roughly trade with each other. And then I suspect there'll be a third lowest tier of sort of human group that is basically [00:27:00] feral. And is the ultra, ultra, ultra you know, like barely working, you know, I think that this is what's going to happen to, like, the types of people who tried to start ISIS and stuff like that.
But then there are also, you'll have remnants of them in the developed world, likely descending from criminal organizations which attack caravans and stuff like that, but never really able to build any sort of sustainable civilization. What are your thoughts on this speculative fiction? Our descendants get it quite well in this, in this world.
They get to explore pretty much what is impunity, ruins of the old world. Wouldn't you have found that a joy when you were younger?
Simone Collins: Well, now I know. A friend of the pod had said something to us at a dinner party we were hosting recently. Something along the lines of You know, someone was telling me that actually my descendants will probably love wandering around the abandoned cities, you know, like, I'm the kind of person who would be better off in that world.
So I, I know, I know where you're going with this. [00:28:00] That's hopeful. I think we're going to end up in more of a South Africa style situation. Where. It is not, not necessarily like, just because it's a little lawless and unsafe, not really okay to wander around the non gated zones, but also from a climate and safety and survival standpoint, just a lot more difficult in many parts of the world to, to wander through them.
So. I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you.
Malcolm Collins: Why don't you think that the technophilic group, because I think that the technophilic group with AI is going to be astoundingly more productive than humans are today. They will be astoundingly smaller portion of the population than humans today.
Simone Collins: Yeah. It's just that I think that the world is going to be just because larger swaths of people are going to not have any tech and be like [00:29:00] lower tech and probably a lot more xenophobic, you know, they can, they can still pack a punch. They can still be pretty harmful, you know, and there can still be a lot of
Malcolm Collins: them.
This is actually an interesting point here that's, that's worth talking about a little bit where some people are like sometimes lower tech groups. End up taking control of governments and then the higher tech groups and here they would choose an environment like South Africa. The, the reason that happened in South Africa was international pressure.
The reason that happened was caving to woke ideas.
And I should clarify here. I don't mean ending apartheid. It was bad. I mean, the way a government was set up in a post apartheid world was bad. And I think patently, so we can see from the suffering that the south African people are undergoing right now.
Malcolm Collins: Like that is what caused South Africa to fall to the state that it's fallen to today. And I'd also point out that most of the competent group left both the [00:30:00] competent tribes that wasn't just, you know, white versus black. There were some tribes that were much more productive than the other tribes and many of their members just immigrated to America.
And I want to make clear, this isn't a white versus black thing, or a some tribes good, some tribes bad thing. It's that across communities, those individuals who had the means to get out and start life anew somewhere else, when they were choosing between having to start over and the risk that their daughter would be kidnapped and gang graped and murdered, they chose the former because most civilized people would do that.
And intergenerationally, that causes a cultural shift in all the groups that are having pretty much everyone from them that's either not involved in the government bureaucracy or has an opportunity to get out to leave.
Malcolm Collins: When a place becomes that lawless, the lawlessness begets lawlessness as people migrate, like the productive individuals migrate to non lawless areas.[00:31:00]
And the key to maintaining a, a non lawless area is just to never give an inch in terms of a group being like, well, I understand that I'm contributing a lot less, but I deserve something from you. Yeah. Like I,
Simone Collins: I basically, I see, I think that they're going to be much larger city states where you have like.
Very advanced, very like genuine, like cities, clusters of cities. But the borders are hermetic, you know, there are drones, there are walls, there are everything's, you know, there's no tunneling. They are hermetically sealed and then there's going to be the rest of the world and there will absolutely be a lot of people in the rest of the world.
But it is just going to be. A lot less fun to be there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of sci fi that, that describes this. And I always found it kind of arbitrary and stupid. Like why are, why is, why is there this class system in all these various [00:32:00] AI. Or sorry, all of these various science fiction stories where there's like the underclass and this overclass that lives in their beautiful city in the sky or whatever.
Right. And I don't, I don't think things play out the way that a lot of these stories have it. I think it's more that there's this portion of society that's willing to be technophilic and pluralistic. And then there's this portion of society that's not, it's not a story about. Keeping people down.
It's not a story about some evil capitalistic overlords creating this hierarchy. In fact, the, the, the, the gated community that's so nice and wonderful is, is going to be technically communist, but, and, and the outside world is going to be. The height of pure capitalism.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I don't think it'll be pure communist either.
I am sure it will to some degree because there is no such thing as pure communism. And we'll do a separate episode on this. We've got to do that. When you [00:33:00] live in a post scarcity environment, you just mean post scarcity of like goods. You don't mean genuine post scarcity because in a communist system, whatever.
It ends up being a thing of artificial scarcity as in what the status hierarchy around, but
Simone Collins: from a, like, we'll say Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it gets all the bottom portions of that fricking triangle. Okay, like, as
Malcolm Collins: long as you're contributing. And I think that what we would likely see. So when you say her medically sealed, I agree with you, but I don't know if it's literally her at medically sealed, probably gun drones, Patrolling a perimeter, but, but very strict about who comes in and out.
I think we, as we move to the systems where you have a high degree of social services within a Haven, you can not allow low skilled migrants to come in. That's always been true of social services. You cannot have social services that go to all members of a community. and porous borders. [00:34:00] Yeah. You, you, you get one or the other.
You also can't have social services that go to all members of the community and guaranteed membership in the community. Unless that guaranteed membership is only going to a very small class. And I just don't think it's useful to have that anyway. I think that people should have to prove their utility to the community and people should be able to come into the community.
If they can prove that utility. So I don't think that they're going to be that hard separated from the outside. If somebody can prove their utility to the community.
Simone Collins: Oh, for sure. Like, I'm sure there might be some kind of program for immigration. But that, that doesn't change the fact that these are going to be totally different worlds and the odds of.
over time people actually qualifying to get in, you know, being capable of integrating with that society may go down. I don't know. So,
Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I think that the people here will be like, well, what about, you know, like something like the a large state military trying to attack one of these, right.[00:35:00]
I just don't think you'd have that either because I think we're entering a world. We're the small havens or like clusters of incredibly technologically engaged people. So today this is like the type of people who run big AI companies and stuff like that are going to have access to better weaponry than state governments that have to acquire them through a very slow procurement bureaucracy.
And two, even though the governments are much larger if they attack any one government attacks, any one haven, that would be incredibly stupid of them for two reasons. First it would make them an enemy of all havens because network would now see them as an eventual threat. But two, they wouldn't be able to get access to the tech that the havens were
Simone Collins: producing.
So it's kind of like a Taiwan situation. Duplicated a bunch of times, copy and paste Taiwan all over the world and make it for all the stuff that we need. And then you've got,
Malcolm Collins: Well, I think we basically already have the emergence of three haven states. I think Taiwan is one of them. It's a proto [00:36:00] haven state that the world basically needs to protect because of its ability to produce something that no one else can produce, the chips.
Israel, I see is another one of the initial haven states. And Singapore is another one of the initial haven states. And I suspect we will see What does Singapore
Simone Collins: produce of value for the world that's so necessary?
Malcolm Collins: Singapore produces in, in a big way Exchange between the West and the East, financially speaking, if Singapore was to disappear, Americans ability to invest or work with the Chinese economic system would decrease substantially, as would China's ability to interface with the West, especially now that Hong Kong is gone, which used to be one of the haven states.
And I also think that this is partially why China is struggling so much. They showed that they were a danger to one of the, the, the Haven network. And now they sort of made themselves enemies of it through the integration and destruction of Hong Kong as a separate entity before Hong Kong really had the ability to defend [00:37:00] itself due to differential technology, which it didn't have back then.
I also think as technology develops and as AI develops, we're going to enter a world in which attacking becomes much harder than defending, which makes havens much easier to build out. However, I think that the best place to build one is in the tundra, as I've always said, which is what I really want to do somewhere in the fairly far north.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: but I
Simone Collins: also feel like on so many of these fronts, the tundra has a lot going for it. The reason why we have extra dramatic photos to show from your childhood home is because it is on an island. It is by the ocean is in the heat. It is under the sun, the hot beating sun and the corrosive salt air. And so of course, like it, it degraded extra fast.
If we were talking about an old stone hut, In, like, Norway. Yeah, islands
Malcolm Collins: are the worst place, like, [00:38:00] like, except for large islands, I will say small islands are the worst place you can build a haven state. They are incredibly undefendable. People think that they're really defendable. Well, but also, like,
Simone Collins: the amount, you basically have to rebuild it.
every few years based on how much things are corroding and degrading. I need
Malcolm Collins: to talk about why they're so undefeatable. People who have never lived on an island don't know how much a problem pirates are. Even in today's world, like on our island, you know, you had to have guns and everything. You had to have defense plans because pirates will come and they can land on any beach anywhere around the island.
And. Quickly make it without us knowing because you know, to, to like, if they come on at night or something like that so you would need a big security network, which would need electricity, which is very hard to keep running. One of the things about the island is we always had to replace the generator because it would corrode.
You know, so those only last like 5 to 10 years often. It's, it's just terrible idea.
I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about island defense in a historic context. Rather than in a modern [00:39:00] context, they're not thinking about a few families needing to depend an island against speed boats that can run quietly and a group of men with,
aK 40 sevens. , and grenades, they're thinking about having to defend against a big fleet of triremes of. , medium. Populated. , you know, historic, maybe offshoot of Athens or, you know, something around busy and Tim, uh, The the. Logistics are totally different. It used to take a long time and. It would be very loud and.
visible to get a boat to an island.
But now with speed boats and modern weaponry, , It's almost as if you're living in an area where a small army can teleport to any one of your immediate borders. it is incredibly hard to defend an island.
Malcolm Collins: Now, large islands are fine, especially when they are, very like they don't have many beaches or landing areas. Taiwan is a great example of this. It's very, very [00:40:00] hard to invade Taiwan. But even still, I think the corrosion is just not worth it.
You are better being in a coastal tundra area is what I'd say. Because that allows you to likely next to a large river somewhere. So you have access to the, the water. The cold helps cool your data centers, allowing you to run more calculations faster. You can convert the land around you into farmland using your technology, but radar groups have no utility to the land and other governments you can tell when they're coming towards you for a long time beforehand with future technology.
When you're talking about like radar technology and stuff like that. An island. You don't know if it's a merchant vessel or something that's coming specifically to see you, if you are, you know, until it like veers off course to come right at you. Even when you're dealing with government actors, if you are in somewhere in the fairly far North, they would have no reason to be going that way.
And so when you see something beginning to head in your direction, you know, Oh, [00:41:00] okay, this is something I need to get clearance for and everything like that long before it gets to me, it allows you to have much larger perimeters. But that is, is my thought on that. And I think that the Haven network will be a natural transition for humanity to get to the stars.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is kind of a, an inevitable next step. And then things just feel a lot more weirdly controllable once you get to space, because things are in a colony based level on a ship based level. And it's because things are more circumscribed, it just feels, I don't
Malcolm Collins: know. I feel like havens are going to function very much like spaceships on earth.
They are likely going to be with smaller communities than we are used to. Likely, I suspect like 50, 000 people per community. Except for the mega havens, which are the descendants of modern states, like potentially Israel, Taiwan. In Singapore but yeah, and I think they'll function very much like, like spaceships, sort of, where you have a lot of controlled systems, because I just think it's going to be more cost [00:42:00] efficient to sort of run the entire network with all of your AR stuff built into your environment, or perhaps even I expect the cities themselves will be combinations of VR and real life and Which might also make interactions with other Havens much easier as you may be able to go out and meet with someone from another Havens virtual avatar pretty easily.
Simone Collins: Well, yeah, well, but also like, you know, we'll have to, I guess we'll have to ask what will cities actually need or what's the purpose of cities if it's not you know, interfacing with people like what physically do people have to do in close proximity to each other. How are systems best set up there, but that's for a different conversation.
It's still, it's interesting to think how things are going to play out. And I would say my favorite piece of, of real estate philosophy from you that I just not heard from anywhere before that might be kind of relevant to this conversation is that you alluded to this earlier, old houses are [00:43:00] more desirable, not just because they degrade more slowly, but because they're like collectibles on a market, they are a.
A thing of limited quantity that is differentiated and unique, whereas in a world of, of a housing glut, you're going to need something where the supply is not so elastic and abundant. So if you are looking to buy a house, consider buying a collectible one in some way. I love you to death Simone.
I love you too, Malcolm.
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