2026-04-24 20:51:17
We talked about the spread of Islam in Arabia and Egypt in the previous article, but it didn’t stop there. Less than 100 years after Muhammad’s first conquests, Islam was well-established in Spain. How come?
As a reminder from the last article, the two regional superpowers, Byzantium (Romans) and the Sassanids (Persians), were uniquely wea…
2026-04-21 20:01:15
In the 600s AD, Mecca was a village of a few hundred people, off the beaten path, a backwater uninteresting to distant empires. Then along comes a guy—Muhammad—and somehow within five years he and his heirs went from ruling one oasis to controlling all of Arabia, and thirty years later everything from Morocco to Pakistan. HOW?!
My goal is to understand the mechanisms of Islam’s lightning-fast spread. I am sure I will get some facts wrong here. I know I can count on you to correct me as you find them.
To start, let’s look at a satellite map of the region.
For 1,000 years, the Middle East had been the battleground between two megapowers: one from the sea, the other from land.
Greece vs Persia
Rome vs Parthia
Byzantium vs Sassanids
In all three cases, we had a sea-based power built around the Mediterranean on the west.
While to the east ruled a land-based power.
In all these maps, you’ll see that the Arabian Peninsula is in the smack middle of both, yet was never a part of either empire. Why? Because it’s too remote:
Sea: The sea power couldn’t access it from the Mediterranean
Land: Both powers are separated from Arabia by a massive desert
Here, the only place you can live is in the mountains, which capture rain.
Clockwise starting with Ethiopia:
As we explain here, the Ethiopian Highlands catch the African monsoon rains.
They flow north through the Nile, giving birth to Egypt.
Water evaporated in the Red Sea rains down in the Sarawat Mountains, in western Arabia, creating the historical regions of Hejaz and Yemen.
Just north of that, the same phenomenon, but the water from the Mediterranean forms the Levant, with present-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.
Rains caught in Anatolia form present-day Turkey.
Rains caught in Persia form present-day Iran.
These rains flow down the two rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, forming the historic region of Mesopotamia (between two rivers), mostly present-day Iraq.
The mountains in eastern Arabia also catch some rain, forming what are today the eastern UAE / Oman
You can see this pattern reflected to this day in the population density map below:
If you notice, there are two very different types of regions here, the mountains that catch water, and the plains that emerge around their rivers. The mountains are hard to rule, but defensible. The plains are hyperfertile and easy to rule, but exposed to foreign invaders.
Early on, this was not problematic: People emerged where food was easiest to produce, on the riverbanks of the Nile and Mesopotamia, which would naturally flood the riverbanks, filling them with water and sediments. That’s why civilization emerged there. There was very little population and civilization in the mountains.
But as time passed, agricultural practices developed, were brought to more mountainous areas, and the population grew there too.
This exposed the river civilizations to the mountain people. This is why, for most of its history, Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia have been under the yoke of neighboring powers:
In the case of the Levant and Egypt, those that control the sea (the Mediterranean)
In the case of the Levant and Mesopotamia, those that control the land (Anatolia and Persia)
So what was in Arabia? As the northern empires grew for the previous 1000 years, they encroached more and more on Arabia, especially its north. But this influence was limited because of the geography. In most of Arabia, there were just secluded tribes in the mountains, and some people on some coasts, for the maritime trade with the Mediterranean.
So all of Arabia was mostly empty and arid, except for some northern border tribes that interacted with the empires, the western mountains, and especially their south, in Yemen, which caught some water from the Ethiopian monsoon rains and some sea trade.
Notice on the trade map above that there were no stops between Yemen and the Mediterranean on the Arabian coast. That’s how awfully dry that region is: not even port settlements could survive.
That’s why Mecca and Medina are inland: They’re away from the sea trade routes and isolated by mountains and desert, but they have some water caught by the mountains.
Not much water, mind you; probably enough for a few hundred people in Mecca. Hundreds? What about the claims that Mecca and Medina gathered thousands of soldiers?
The sources of these claims had an incentive to exaggerate: the bigger the forces, the more impressive their exploits.
The soldiers could have been sourced from herders from the surrounding valleys rather than just a specific town like Mecca or Medina.
The Quran says Mecca is a plantless valley.
Due to the lack of water: There’s very little rain here. It’s so hot that most of the rain evaporates. The little that remains is not enough for permanent rivers, only seasonal wadis. This makes trees and agriculture very hard to maintain.
So the most common type of vegetation is shrub, inedible by humans so they need animals to eat it (goats, camels), and then the humans consume the milk & meat of these animals, which means a loss in terms of calories from the grasses and shrubs to the animal products.
With these types of insights, you can approximate the carrying capacity of an area. In the case of Mecca, I asked ChatGPT Pro, and it estimated a few hundred.
An analysis of the genealogy of Muhammad’s Mecca suggests a population of ~550 people.
Mecca is not just distant from trade routes. It’s very desertic, which means little food produced, so the population had to be quite small. The lack of plant or animal resources also meant few goods to trade anyway. In fact, if it traded anything, it was probably to get food, as the region is so infertile that even a few thousand people at the time would have been hard to sustain. What did they trade in exchange for that food? Probably hides from their pastoral activities, very likely slaves.1 It had a shrine (an earlier version of the Kaaba) that the local population and maybe some regional tribes came to visit. Probably not much more.2
And yet Muhammad and his successors went from Mecca, a city of a few hundred people, to controlling Medina, to then all of Arabia in four years, from 629 to 633:
Four successors and 30 years later, this is what the Rashidun Caliphate looked like in 660:
This only thickens the plot. How on earth could a village off the beaten path, with a population of a few hundred people and weak trade, birth a religion shared by 25% of the world’s population today?
No source prior to the Qur’an makes any mention of Mecca, and the Qur’an itself mentions it only a single time (48:24)3. Despite the fact that we have detailed descriptions of western and southern Arabia from various Roman historians, including Procopius (ca. 500–570 CE) most notably, Mecca seems to have been completely unknown to the classical and late ancient worlds. This provides strong evidence that Mecca did not have any significant cultural, economic, or political ties to the broader world of the late ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Of course, once we recognize that Mecca was a small village with only a few hundreds or thousands of inhabitants and a subsistence economy, its omission becomes perfectly understandable.—The Hijaz in Late Antiquity, Social and Economic Conditions in the Cradle of the Qur’an, Stephen J. Shoemaker, 2022
This is the typical geography in the area of Mecca:
Lots of mountains, some valleys or oases that allow for a little bit of agriculture, mostly shrubs here and there that allow for camels and goats to browse. This is conducive to pastoral clans, who tend to use bloodlines as the unit of community to protect themselves, and tend to attack neighboring clans because it’s easy to steal livestock. So the clan structure looks like this:
But although this is a stable situation (a “local optimum”), it’s bad: It’s expensive, and will sometimes result in tribal wars that deplete everybody.
A much better and stabler situation (“global optimum”) is this:
So how do you vanquish the inertia to establish a more optimal situation?
A series of serendipitous situations meant Muhammad was the right person at the right place and the right time to do this across this whole region, and where once there were constant inter-clan wars, there was suddenly a formidable force.
Muhammad, born in 570 AD, was a member of the Quraysh, the predominant4 clan of the village of Mecca. He was part of a smaller branch of the clan, his father died before he was born, and his mother when he was 6. He was raised by his grandfather and later uncle, and was a trader. In 610 AD, he starts seeing visions of the Angel Gabriel. How did this have such a big impact?
One of the keys to unite people is trade. Unlike goat herding or local agriculture, which don’t need cooperation with foreigners and lead to storing wealth that can be stolen, trade needs cooperation. It’s win-win. So traders have a strong incentive to pacify regions, make clans respect each other and stop war. In exchange, the trade is taxed and clans receive some of the taxes. This is what we saw in Pax Mercatus: Whether it was the Roman Empire, China, rivers in Europe, the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Discovery, the Pax Mongolica, the Pax Americana… In all cases, trade begets military expansion to bring peace.
So it’s not a coincidence that Muhammad was a trader: He had an incentive to pacify all the clans in the region to allow for camel caravans to trade freely.
It’s not a coincidence either that he really started Islam not in Mecca, but in Medina.
Medina was a bigger town because there was an oasis there.
We can understand why when we look at the local topography:
Muhammad started preaching in Mecca and that got him into problems. At some point, other clan members wanted to kill him so he escaped to Medina.
But luckily for him, Medina was just emerging from a tribal war, and was thus especially open to a solution to their clan problem, especially from a trader who promoted trade, peace, mutual respect, and taxation, instead of inter-clan war.
Muhammad created the concept of Umma, or Muslim identity: We’re all the same, we’re all together, we should like each other and not fight each other. He created a meta-identity above that of clans, promoting their union.
By making apostasy strongly punishable, Islam increased the barriers to exit the community: You’re in, and you can’t get out.5
The exhaustion from internecine conflict in Medina made the townspeople open to these changes, and Muhammad became a local mediator, eventually reaching a position of power.
But there were lots of other social engineering innovations that allowed this to happen.
The date of all this is relevant too. We’re now in the 620s, and this is happening:
The region was on the border of Christian spread. Although Muhammad was illiterate, he knew about the Bible, Jesus, and the Angel Gabriel. But this belief was not predominant in the region at that time. The main reason why he was kicked out of Mecca was because he adopted the Judeo-Christian idea of monotheism, and that meant he was against the polytheism reigning in Mecca.
The bright side, though, is that once he convinced a group to become monotheistic, he took away one more reason to fight each other.
This also meant that an attack on one of the clans was an attack on all the clans, reducing inter-clan hostility.
Adopting the Judeo-Christian concept of omnipotency (which was not common of deities before monotheism) made the enforcement of rules much easier: Now you couldn’t hide in order to violate the norms, Allah would always see you.
When Muhammad escaped from Mecca to Medina, he was starved for income. That’s the context in which we should interpret the importance of alms in Islam. He needed money!
By no means shall you attain righteousness unless you give freely of that which you love, and whatever you give, Allah knows it well.—Qur’an 3:92
Alms became taxation, and Muhammad even sold its ROI:
The example of those who spend their wealth in the way of Allah is like a seed [of grain] which grows seven spikes; in each spike is a hundred grains. And Allah multiplies [His reward] for whom He wills.—Qur’an 2:261
The most important tax is the zakāt, 2.5% of disposable income per year from wealthy-enough people. To me, this is a way for clan leaders to control more funds, as they could tax other wealthy clan members and control how that money would be used. A bit like a subscription: If you pay into this community, we’ll be able to afford more good things for you and your clan.6
A core aspect of this is that the more powerful individuals get more benefits from this tax (clan leaders), while their juniors in power are just compelled to pay up.
This is why, when Muhammad died, there was a war: The bedouins didn’t want to pay up7 so they left the agreement they had with Muhammad, but they were defeated and forced by the richer, more powerful clans to keep paying.
Another way to see the zakāt is pooling money for an investment: With more money, you can afford more warriors fighting for longer, which will then give you more booty to share with them and amongst yourselves.
As we said, when you eliminate so many internal boundaries, you can redeploy your forces to the external boundaries, so you end up with a much higher concentration of forces to attack neighbors.
The taxation enables funding for these attacks. The Quran is explicit about the mechanism here:
8:1 says the booty belongs to Allah, so no stealing
8:41 says 20% goes to the community (God, the Messenger, kin, orphans, the needy, and travelers. In practice, mostly leadership, dependents, political grants, and the emerging state), and 80% to the fighters.
59:6–7 says spoils without fighting go to the community.
This gives an institutionalized method for everybody to be happy: The fighters pool their strength, they invade, sack, get a bounty, and share some with the organizers, who can keep expanding.
The problem with this is that it can quickly become a scorched-earth strategy, where if you don’t conquer more, you don’t have income to finance your armies, which then turn against you, or can’t maintain peace. So early Islam made sure to keep the local population intact instead of trying to replace it, kept freedom of religion, eliminated and replaced the elites, and charged them the jizya, another tax dedicated to non-Muslims, to fund the entire operation.
These taxes could be hefty. When Muhammad conquered the Jewish settlement of Khaybar, north of Medina, the annual tax was 50% of what was produced.
Notice the pattern here: early on, Muhammad didn’t have power or money. He used his position as a respected external trader to broker peace in Medina, which gave him enough power to raid caravans, eventually taking Khaybar and its date production. He was converting military power into economic power, and every time he did, he could reuse the local resources to tax them, recruit new soldiers, or both.
In effect, this meant warriors went from potential raiding threats to subjects of a standing army, with a stipend they could lose if they left. This became obvious in the Ridda Wars: When Muhammad died, many tribes seceded from Islam, but his successor Abu Bakr was able to harness the existing ones to subdue the secessionists and reunite Arabia.
Arabia naturally breeds the type of warrior that thrives in all the regions from Morocco to Iraq. The cornerstone is the camel, which can eat the type of vegetation in this area and store water to sustain long trips in the desert. They are quick and don’t need roads.
On top of that, Arabs had become careful water and grazing managers. They knew where to go to refuel, how much to take, and when to move on. They could move quickly from oasis to wadi, to fertile valley, not depleting their resources in the process. Compare that with European and Persian armies, which had to bring some of their food with them, had to feed the horses fodder besides the grass they ate on the way, and had an entire logistics train to manage to make all this happen.
Another innovation in violence that came a few years after Muhammad’s death was the garrison towns, such as Basra and Kufa in Iraq, and Fustat in Egypt.
Most armies were raised specifically for a conquest and then returned. This made the control of occupied lands difficult.
So other empires had garrisons too, but they tended to be either in existing cities or become cities themselves, and soldiers and locals commingled, which could dilute the force of the conqueror. Indeed, all the invasions that took place in Europe at that time from eastern hordes ended up with these hordes adopting the mores of the locals (Latin language, Christianism…) rather than the other way around. Not for the Muslims.
Early on, the Muslims made sure to keep the conquerors and conquered separate. This allowed for less corruption, more control over the local population, and keeping the soldiers more in line and easier to redeploy. And since they stayed put in these garrisons rather than coming back, they could maintain control of the lands taken over.
Whereas in Byzantium marriages were monogamous (because of Christianity), this had not percolated into the region. Muhammad didn’t adopt it in Islam, which might have been quite clever for the religion’s spread. Instead, he regulated polygamy, which had been too extreme before (too many wives per man). It limited men to four wives at any given time (so more wives could be taken sequentially).
Keeping polygamy had a couple of advantages. First, a conqueror could marry the daughters of several conquered elites to pacify them. The more wives they could have, the better. Muhammad had 11-13 wives. This was crucial to unite Arabia, as many of these wives were taken to cement the adhere of new clans to Islam.
Second, polygamy created a surplus of single men with no access to sex. If, say, ~25% of men were polygamous and they married on average three women, and 25% had one wife, then 50% of men would not have access to a woman.
Banning access to sex to lots of young males is a recipe for raids—they’re hunting for wives—so it made much more sense to repurpose their desires to attack foreigners. So Muhammad continued the practice that part of a soldiers’ loot would include slaves, wives, and concubines.
The problem is if your soldiers fear dying in battle, they might not want to engage at all. So a great innovation of the Quran was to conceive beautiful, pure, virgin companions in heaven for true believers. A couple of centuries later, that would become the story of 72 virgins for religious martyrs.
By making allegiance to Allah and not just a person (himself), he made the new community outlast his own life.
But crucially, it wasn’t settled how the leadership of Islam would work, as Muhammad died suddenly.8 This led to internecine wars for power, which sometimes are bad because they lead to civil wars (plenty of these in Islam), but on another side, they allow competitive forces to play within Islam: The religion can’t settle and rot from inside from a series of bad leaders, because there’s always some competing reading of Islam to challenge the current one.
So these are some of the mechanisms that let Islam grow from a tiny settlement to taking over Arabia.
I’m not saying these mechanisms were purposefully designed. Whether they came from Allah via the Angel Gabriel, or Muhammad and his successors chose them (consciously or unconsciously), the fact is they were software ideal for fast spread.
I’m sure I got some of these mechanisms wrong, and that I’m missing a few more. If you have more, please share them! But these look like the most important parts of the software update that unleashed the potential of the Arab tribes.
At the right time.
This was the region when Muhammad arrived.
The Byzantines were weak: Half of their empire had disappeared under the arrival of the hordes from the north and east: Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Goths, Huns... It spent its time warring with them, and with the Sassanids to the east.
It had remained mainly a maritime power, as you can guess from the map above. This exposed it dearly to land-based threats.
The Sassanids were also threatened to the east by similar nomadic tribes.
Crucially, the Byzantines and the Sassanids fought a terrible war between 602 and 628, just as Muhammad was uniting Arabia. By the time Arabia it was completed in 633, the situation was:
Two exhausted rivals
The plains of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia fully exposed to a neighboring power
Egypt and the Levant were especially exposed because their patron (Byzantium) was a naval power
Mesopotamia was very exposed because it was directly connected to Arabia, and the Sassanid Empire, aside from its exhaustion from the war with Byzantium, was fighting on its eastern side
And this happened:
The Rashidun Caliphate (the first four descendants of Muhammad) reached:
In the north, the Levant and then Anatolia
In the east, Mesopotamia and then the Sassanid Empire
In the west, to Egypt, and then northern Africa
As they grew, they could simply take over existing elites and keep the economic production and tax it.
The expansion across all of north Africa looks especially incredible, until you realize a couple of things:
First, virtually all of it is desert, which means there’s not that much opposition. It’s focused in the three areas of Egypt, Cyrene, and Coastal Maghreb. All three were colonies of Byzantium (so not self-ruling), and all three were focused on sea threats rather than land threats.
Second, the Arabs were specialized in long treks across the desert. This didn’t fundamentally change their logistics.
So this is how I understand that the Arabs went from a few clans in the mountains of a peripheral region to conquering one of the biggest empires of the time in a mere 30 years:
Beyond Egypt, most of North Africa is a repeat of Arabia, so easy for Arabs to conquer, ad they’re naturally adapted to the terrain
Muhammad added new software to unite the clans and harness taxes, so that Islam had soldiers and money to fund wars
Three bordering lands (Egypt, Levant, Mesopotamia) were easy to conquer as they have few mountains to protect them and are close to Arabia: Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia
There was a moment of unique weakness of the two regional powers, so Muslims could take parts of the otherwise hard-to-conquer Anatolia and Persia
There are large swaths with no water and settlements. North Africa is just Egypt, Cyrene, and northern Maghreb.
How did Islam keep expanding? How did it invade Spain? Anatolia? Europe? How did it spread across east Africa? Southeast Asia? What’s the relation between Arab, Arabic, and Islam? How did they each spread in somewhat different places? That’s what we’re going to see next.
This is a highly scrutinized part of history, I welcome your feedback on what I got right or wrong!
Slaves were probably from Abyssinia, present-day Ethiopia, as it’s mentioned in the text of the period, and the successor to Muhammad freed slaves. There was frankincense and myrrh trade in the region, but it probably bypassed Mecca and Medina and was traded via sea routes. There were not metals (gold, silver, copper), despite their presence in the region, because all evidence points to them being mined after the time of Muhammad, not before.
There was a local oral tradition that claims regional trade pacts. Some have interpreted them as treaties between Mecca and kingdoms or empires like Byzantium, Persia, Yemen, or Ethiopia. But these are unlikely. First, there’s no document supporting this. Second, most trade in the region was by sea. Third, the overland trade was mostly by caravan, which meant that local protection and no taxes were much more important than treaties with distant powers.This doesn’t mean Mecca was a secondary hamlet in Arabia, because the rest of the region was equally unpopulated. Mecca had some regional connection through trade and pilgrimage, even if it was quite small compared to the standards of other regions at the time.
There’s also a Bakkah named, which could be Mecca. Medina is mentioned once in the Quran. To be fair though, the Quran doesn’t mention cities much at all. Medina appears in more places in sources from antiquity, although usually in lists of places, not as a place of special importance.
By predominant, here it means most people in the village were part of the clan one way or another.
The Quran says apostates should be seriously punished, especially in the afterlife, but it does not say the punishment for apostasy is death. This came later.
Whereas a tax nowadays is money that disappears from your pocket and you don’t have much of a say on how it’s spent aside from a vote every four years or so.
Some say due to poison from a Jewish lady from Khaybar.
2026-04-17 20:03:37
This article is a follow-up to The Cold Start Problem of New Cities & States. Today, I’m going to focus on specific initiatives that new communities, cities, states, and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) can undertake to grow faster. I’m going to use Próspera and the Network School as examples, as they’re the leading communities in this space, and I know them best.
Most of the value of a community comes from the serendipitous meeting of people. This is why Steve Jobs designed Apple’s HQ like he did:
A single space, completely connected, where you’d naturally meet people from other parts of the organization en route to the carpark, the restroom, the kitchen, the coffee shop…
For that reason, if you’re building a new community, it’s very important to keep everybody together. This is not what Próspera has done:
It has five enclaves: One in the continental port of Satuyé near La Ceiba, and four in Roatán (Beta District, Pristine Bay, areas in Port Royal, and a building in the main city).
The continental port makes sense, as it has a specific function connected to its geography.
But splitting the other ones is problematic, because each community ends up independent from the others and none benefit from network effects.
You feel it every time you have to take a car to go from Pristine Bay to the Beta District.
If you stay in Pristine Bay, you’ll stumble upon plenty of other residents of Pristine Bay, but few of the Beta District ones. You need events that are interesting enough to pull you from one to the other, so serendipity is limited.
The Network School in Malaysia has the same issue, but milder.
Most people stay in a hotel or in apartment buildings nearby, in the southeast. The coworking space is 20m away walking. One place would be better than two, but at least the walking is healthy, you can meet people on the way from one to the other, and everyone lives and works in the same areas. I’m sure the founders tried, and this is what they could get, so good for them for making it happen, even if it’s not ideal.
This is adjacent to what I just mentioned.
If you have a community that’s small enough to walk everywhere, people will see each other all the time and will all end up meeting each other. In a car, every time you encounter someone else, what you see is another car, not another person. The distance makes it hard to recognize each other, and impossible to talk.
It’s also much easier to go downstairs and walk five minutes than to use your car for every errand, so people with cars will go out less—and meet fewer people.
This is relevant for Próspera, because although its two main enclaves are near each other, the road is basically the only viable path between them today. I walked along the beach from one to the other, which had some nice spots:
But also some less nice ones. And at night… Well, I’m not used to walking in pitch dark jungle, with its weird noises and the mud and the insects…
A better walking path between the two enclaves would be extremely beneficial to Próspera. Unfortunately, it doesn't own that land, and I believe building a path there would be expensive, illegal, or both. Personally, if it was just expensive, I’d do it. The alternative I heard mentioned was a water taxi service. I think that’s the next best thing. Anything that can cut the commute from 20 minutes to 5.
These are Tokyo and Paris.
Aside from no cars, these streets feel good because they have plenty of people and shops. The shops are a consequence of the people (who can pay for their services), and the people are a consequence of population density (providing enough customers per square km). The density of people, in turn, is a consequence of the tall buildings, which can house many people. In these cities, apartments are relatively small, but taller buildings can accommodate bigger apartments.1
Here, both Próspera and Network School have had the right instincts.
NS houses people in a building originally designed as a hotel.
Próspera built the Duna building.
But one building is not enough. The next step would be to build more like this one, near each other, so that all residents can mingle and become customers of local shops.
There’s a chicken-and-egg issue with real estate: With few citizens, why would you invest in good real estate? But without real estate, why would you go live somewhere? The result is that either real estate developers take huge risks, or candidate citizens must choose between moving into terrible housing or not moving in at all.
The solution to this is starting with temporary real estate. You can get high-quality yurts and houses for $10,000 apiece. Once you get a group of people living together and they decide they want to stay, you can make the bigger investment of long-term real estate.
15 more ideas: incentives, investments, monuments, influencers, dating, sex, religion, and more.
2026-04-14 16:57:57
It’s Saturday, 10am, and Sheila wakes up to five little bodies crawling up into her bed:
JOHN: Good morning mama!
MUM: Good morning sweethearts. How did you sleep?
FELICITY: Veeery well! I love you mama!
MUM: Ah, I love you too…
The mum, Sheila, is 25.
MUM: Did you have breakfast already?
DARON: Yes Mum, the six youngest all got their bottles.
MUM: Thank you kiddo. What about you and your older siblings?
DARON: We all had our Saturday scrambled eggs with tuna. AR1 made Javier and Cooper their additional egg whites. Melissa, Svetlana, and Bosoma are still sleeping.
MUM: Thanks for keeping tabs on it. You’re the sweetest boy. I’m going to the gym, OK? We’re going to do something cool afterwards.
OLIVIA: Cool! The botanical hike?
MUM: Sure! AR2, AR3, can you make sure they’re all fed, clean, and dressed up by the time I come back? Also, please come up with a fun hike, 2 hours long, that can also teach the kids about plants.
AR2: Of course
MUM: OK bye!
Sheila grabs her gym bag from the floor, leaves the house and closes the door with peace of mind, knowing that AR1, AR2, and AR3 will take good care of her 17 children.
Fertility is dropping around the world.
Nobody is sure of exactly why. It must be something universal, that happens everywhere, but at different moments, and it’s not clear what fits the evidence.
My take is quite simple: Humans are pretty rational, we don’t have children like we used to because:
Having children is less useful
Childrearing is still a drag
Life has gotten better
Before, if you didn’t have children to take care of you when you aged, you died faster and poorer. They were your social security, your insurance, and your retirement income.
But as the above sentence highlights, all these roles have been replaced by the state now. Less need for children.
It’s certainly better than it was before: Women and children are much less likely to die in childbirth, there are epidurals, C-sections, universal schooling, etc. But it’s still not great:
Women still have to grow them in their belly and give birth
Parents still don’t sleep for a few months after birth
After that, parents must pay their kids lots of attention in the early years. Breastfeeding and/or preparing bottles, changing diapers, cleaning poop, putting to sleep, dressing, bathing… The moment-to-moment can be quite boring, and even soul-crushing.
Parents must then spend the rest of their lives worrying about their education, their grades, their clothes, their food, the money to finance it all…
On balance, I think it’s less beneficial to have children now: As hard as it was to have children before, there was little else to do, there was no contraception, and more importantly, if you didn’t have them you’d likely die much younger. When life is at stake, people have ways to make things happen.
And on top of this, we had the massive increase in the cost of opportunity.
Life is so much better now: better food, better shelter, more security, more education, more healthcare, more job opportunities, more entertainment, more travel… Life today is awesome compared to yesteryear.
The better life gets (especially for women) and the more alternatives they have, the less they want to have children.
So the cost and benefit of children have gone down, but the cost of opportunity has exploded. That means parents would rather enjoy life, and fertility craters.
But the high costs of having children are about to crash.
Right now, to conceive you need to have sex and be lucky enough to conceive. That’s enjoyable for many, but many people struggle and have to go through in-vitro fertilization. This means several rounds of injecting themselves with hormones for weeks at a time, until the woman undergoes surgery to extract the eggs. Often, that fails too.
When the egg retrieval works, many are of poor quality. Of those with high quality, many will not be fertilized by high-quality sperm, so they won’t be viable anyways. After 3+ rounds of IVF, only ~50% of couples have a successful pregnancy.
When conception works, it frequently comes with problems. 10% to 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. 3% of babies are born with birth defects. Of those that don’t, it’s a lottery of whether they are healthy, strong, intelligent, happy…
All of these problems will be resolved.
In-Vitro Gametogenesis will soon allow us to take any cell (eg, from the skin) and convert it into gametes, which we can then pair with high-quality gametes from the other sex to form millions of embryos.
After a few days of development, companies like Herasight will test which ones have the highest genetic quality (many times, quality genetic factors go together), and for the remaining embryos, parents will be able to calculate the tradeoffs: Would I rather 4 more IQ points, or a 70% lower probability of cardiovascular diseases?
Parents will thus be able to generate as many high-quality embryos as they want.1
Another thing that might be compelling about this is that it makes it much easier to be a single parent, as it’s trivial to get, say, skin cells from a consenting person. If a mother (or father) wants to bring up children alone, with friends, or with extended family, they can have children who have different sets of parents.
Eventually, genetic code might be enough to generate embryos, as we might be able to print DNA molecules from one person or another, or parts of the genetic code of several people, specific types of efficient mitochondria, etc. We’ll be able to take the best genetic code for our children, and mix as much of it as we want with those of the parent. Two gays (male or female) will be able to have children with 50% of the DNA of each. We can conceive families made of several parents, each one of which shares a fraction of the child’s DNA. What if ten people got together to have 20 children, each of which had a share of DNA of each adult?
Today, after day 8 or so, embryos are implanted into a woman’s womb, where they grow until at least week 24 or so—ideally, full term, after which the mother has to give birth.
This is dangerous: For many women, pregnancy is uncomfortable and risky, and it can neutralize them for up to nine months, after which they go through a traumatic event (birth), which can kill them (~0.2% of pregnancies). Those who survive might have vaginal tearing, anal tearing, incontinence, prolapses… Many women then have postnatal depression (“baby blues”).
The reason we must implant into a human uterus is regulatory and scientific. Today, we have the technology to keep growing embryos until Day 13, and we haven’t done more because it’s illegal.2 Foetuses can survive after Week 24 and until Week 40+, so we just need to extend the artificial womb capabilities between Weeks 2 and 24 (the remaining 55% of pregnancy), which requires the ability to grow embryos beyond Day 13.
Scientists have been able to push into both ends of this cycle with mammals: implanting a fetus after the 14 day equivalent for humans and extracting it into an artificial womb before the 24 week equivalent.
It’s a challenge to create artificial wombs, but it’s not an impossible one. If we try, we’ll be able to do it in the coming decades.
Parenting a young child is brutal. You don’t sleep more than 4 hours straight. The little monster wakes up every couple of hours screaming. You don't know whether he cries because he’s hungry, tired, bored, scared, thirsty, dirty… You do whatever you can to figure it out. If he doesn’t cry, you’re even MORE concerned: Is he dead of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome)? All this while you still must do the groceries, get the baby’s paperwork done, prep the formula, cook for yourself, wash the clothes, clean the house, buy the gear you’re missing…
Rich families employ humans to do all this, starting with the night nanny that helps them get sleep. But none of this is impossibly mysterious work. It’s pretty straightforward, just tiring. Humanoid robots and AIs will be perfect for it. It looks like we’re going to have them in less than a decade, so starting then, early childcare will be a matter of how many robots you can afford and how efficiently they work. The more robots we buy, the more their cost will drop, and the more we will be able to automate this.
As they grow up, you need to cook for them, buy them clothes, watch out for them, push them to study, clean up their rooms, pack up, get dressed, undressed, brush their teeth, go to bed, take them to school, to their extracurriculars…
Currently, the solutions for childcare are either nannies or school. But they’re both expensive, and neither is perfect.
Humanoid robots will never tire, you will be able to have many, you will be able to combine them with other robots like self-driving cars to take children to school, and all these time-consuming tasks will disappear.
When I first thought about this, I wondered: Is this dystopic? I conclude it’s not. Many families who can afford it have employees who help them with all these chores. As a parent, you’ll be able to decide which ones you want to keep doing and which ones you’d like to outsource to robots. For example, I wouldn’t want to outsource the bedtime routine, but picking up from school, changing clothes, doing the laundry, cooking, serving dinner, cleaning afterwards, and many similar tasks are much better outsourced for me. If I had 10 children instead of 4, I might need a robot to help, but I’d be managing it.
Education is the other massive time sink for parents. School is not enough to push people to their maximum potential, which is why parents also get involved. Even a single child might be overwhelming, though, because children learn best with one-on-one tutoring, as we’ll see in a future article. Robots and AI tutors will be able to tutor children much better than parents and teachers, giving parents peace of mind about their children’s education.
Conceiving and coordinating all the activities of a small family is a nightmare, imagine if you have 10 children instead of 2. From my article on this topic:
Do the children have enough food to eat? Does the fridge have the ingredients? Are their vaccines in order? Do they have the flu or something worse? Are their documents in order? Who will they have playdates with? AIs are already becoming personal assistants. It’s trivial to imagine them as family assistants, which will further reduce the cost of having children.
If we take out all this work, you might wonder: What’s even the point of having children? If you take out all this work, do you even really want to have these children? Do you care about them?
I actually think these chores are not the main source of happiness and connection with your children. Sure, telling them to clean up again and again contributes a little bit to connection, but also, if you eliminate all these moments, that gives parents much more time to focus on the moments that matter: dinner, reading a bedtime story, holidays, travel, conversations about the world… These are the most pleasurable and fulfilling moments for both children and parents.
Here’s a fact you might have noticed if you’ve had a nanny: Children quickly forget most of them. Even if they spent years with them, they become a distant memory after a few years. They don’t care if they stop seeing them altogether.
Conversely, a child who was abandoned by their mother or father will dwell on it all their lives.
This tells you that chores are not that important, and that the figure of the parent is intrinsically important for the child. And the child is one of the biggest conceivable sources of fulfillment for the parent, so it’s a win-win.
Another important fact: Children appear much needier than they actually are. Humans are evolved to appear super needy to their parents as children, because that way the parents overinvest in them, and they don’t have time for any more children. This was crucial for survival in the past, because fewer children meant more food per child. What this means is it’s OK not to give your children all the attention they demand. They won’t turn bad.
Having more children will dilute a little bit the intensity of the relationship with each, but the additional love more than counterbalances it.
You can see there are actually many variables at play here:
Benefits to having children might go down a very tiny bit because more help at home reduces slightly the attachment to each. Still, the benefits will remain huge because there’s little that’s more fulfilling than the love of a child.
Costs to having children are going to plummet at each stage though, from conception to education. This means the ROI of having children will go through the roof.
Most notably, this will free so much time for parents that they won’t have to choose between children and enjoying life.
In some ways, this will simply bring to the masses the fertility that only rich people can comfortably afford.
So how many children will we have? It depends.
Some people will still think the hassle of children won’t be worth it, either because they don’t value children, because they don’t want to do it alone and can’t find a partner, or any other reason.
Many people who love children now, but can’t commit to parenthood because of the toll on their health and quality of life, will be able to have (many?) more than none.
At the extreme, some people who truly love children and want to have as many as they can will now be unbridled. Families of 10, 20, 50, 100 children might become possible.
The distribution of children per woman might look like this:
Some people might still decide to have no children because they simply don’t want to.
But many of those who remain childless today might decide to have children: With a much lower cost of parenthood, they might jump in even if they’re not partnered, or just to try.
Families with one or two children today because it’s so much work might decide to have one or two more.
Families who have three or more children today really do love children, and have fewer than they wish they had. They might go for four, five, six, seven…
The type of family who is already having eight or ten children will be completely unbridled.
This last group is interesting, because what stopped many of these families from having more children before was probably the cost: on the mother’s body, the parents’ attention, or simply the economics of paying for school, clothes, food, and shelter.
But as we said, most of these constraints will be released in the future.
School will become near-free AI school. Childcare will be done by robots. Clothes are already quite cheap, and will be cheaper. Children of the same approximate ages can share them. Food costs will shrink in the coming decades, as we’ll have energy and robotic abundance, which will allow for vertical farms to produce lots of good, cheap food.3
So what will become the new constraint to having children? The one thing we’re not going to be making more of is land. A family with 100 children doesn’t need a home with 100 rooms though, children could share rooms four at a time, or there can be dormitories. But they still need physical space. Today, we think in terms of housing in cities, where it’s expensive because:
The land is in high demand
Construction costs are high due to high regulatory requirements
But a family with 100 children would probably prefer living in a rural area, or with similar families, so real estate will be cheaper than we assume today.
The other thing we’re not making more of is attention. So maybe the new limiting factor won’t be economic, but how many children we just want to have and create a connection with. Most people might stop at 2-10 children for that reason, but I’m sure some families will love having many more. As an interesting real-world proxy, it’s interesting to know that a Russian woman had 69 children. My thesis here is that we’re anchored on what was possible until now, so families of more than 10 children sound like an aberration to us. But the Dunbar number (a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships) gives us a good sense of the actual limit of a community. I bet there will be families with 150 children.
If the points above are true, it would only take very few couples having a lot of children for the fertility crisis to completely evaporate, and in fact become a radical fertility boom.
What are the consequences of this?
I am skeptical of the fertility collapse narrative. It will take decades for it to really hit, and lots of things can happen in decades.
People who mourn never having children will practically disappear. This is dear to my heart, as having children is one of the most fulfilling things people can experience.4
Families with many more children than today might become more common in the future.
Families with dozens and dozens of children, practically unheard of today, will become something we hear about, and get to experience first hand.
Families with 100+ children will exist.
If it’s true, real estate might suffer a lull in the coming decades as fertility decline continues, but afterwards it might go stratospheric.
If that’s the case, urbanism will have to change. We’ll need more cities with taller buildings.
This is another reason to colonize Mars and build space habitats.
We might be able to select human embryos / engineer them to make life on Mars more feasible. For example, bodies that can withstand a lower gravity, a few more unprotected solar rays, or an ultracold environment.
If you really care about the fertility collapse, go work in one of the industries I’m mentioning above.
If you’re a politician, or work in media, work to release the limits on research in artificial wombs and blastocyte development.
All of this assumes AI won’t change fertility dramatically.
Yes, Sheila, from the beginning of the article, is possible. She might become one of many women—or men—who simply go along with their lives in a new type of happy family.
And in case this makes you uncomfortable, just know that at that point the cells are undifferentiated, meaning they’re just a handful of identical cells, not very different from the original skin cells that might have been extracted for the process.
The two main costs of vertical farms are labor and energy. If you shrink these, they will have a tremendous advantage over traditional farms, as vertical farms waste much less fertilizer, water, and use less land.
If you don’t want to have children, good for you! But if you do, what a horrible thing to not be able to have them.
2026-04-09 22:46:07
There are not enough countries.
There are not enough jurisdictions.
There are not enough new cities.
This is terrible, because entrenched interests freeze governments over time. They make change impossible; you can’t easily update regulation. We end up with the sclerotic democracies and enshittified cities we suffer in the West.
But this is new! Just a century ago, regulations were light, and vast swaths of continents, including America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, barely had any. The growth of the 20th century was in part because of this freedom. No more.
But some people are not satisfied with the status quo. Across the world, visionary founders are building new cities and jurisdictions near Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, on the Honduran island of Roatán, on islands off the African shore, near Nairobi… They dream of a better world where the government doesn’t impose all its answers on its citizens, where they’re treated not as subjects but as customers, where regulatory exploration is welcome.
I’ve traveled the world to talk with dozens of them over the last year and a half. In every conversation, the atmosphere has been electric. I feel like I’m witnessing history in the making, like when the founding fathers were crafting the US Constitution.
But when their vision meets the reality on the ground, these leaders share one problem: How do we grow a new city or jurisdiction from scratch?
Today, I’m putting everything I know in one piece, to help them—and you—think about this problem. Hopefully, this will accelerate the process and we’ll have hundreds of new jurisdictions in the coming decades. Maybe it will inspire you to move to one.
How do you compete against New York, Madrid, Singapore, or Tokyo?
When you have millions of creative professionals, good schools, shops, museums, airports, highways, buses, gyms, IKEAs, cinemas, theaters, restaurants, sports facilities, parks, swimming pools… It’s easy to attract thousands of ambitious young people to participate in civic life and add their value. But what if you’re the president of Liberland?1
The average person doesn’t want to go to an empty piece of land between two countries, devoid of schools, shops, restaurants, or even houses! It’s much easier to grow a city from 1,000,000 people to 1,000,100, than from 0 to 100, because of network effects.
This is the resulting value of cities:
This is why the bigger a city, the fewer such cities exist: The bigger ones suck in all the population from their surroundings. The bigger they are, the more they attract.
This suggests that it’s hard to go from 1 citizen to 10, which is as hard as going from 10 to 100, from 100 to 1000, and so on, because bigger and bigger cities are rarer and rarer, in an exponential way. Every order of magnitude of growth is as hard as the previous one.
Going from 1 to a small city of 10,000 means 4 orders of magnitude of difficulty. This is the cold start problem: When something is worthless when it’s small but very valuable when it’s big, how do you get from small to big? It’s hard to start a city from scratch! How do you solve it?
The sacred blueprints that all new cities want to emulate are Singapore and Dubai, two city-states that grew from early 1900s backwaters to some of the richest places on Earth. How?
Dubai doesn’t seem as amazing today as it was a few months ago, given the Iranian attacks, but I would argue that it doesn’t change anything: Dubai is as exposed as other capitals in the region like Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, or Doha. If anything, it’s a target because it’s so successful.
I covered the city here: In the early 1900s, it enlarged its creek, provided free warehouse space for goods, eliminated trade taxes, and guaranteed security for all trading ships. This is the result people know:
But this inflection point hides the true reality:
It took two centuries of growth, including over a century of constant support for these policies, for Dubai to win. We can see our rule at play here: Every order of magnitude of growth took the same amount of time as the previous one.
Dubai solved its cold-start problem through a century-long commitment to cater to tradesmen. First came the shipping companies, followed by the merchants of the goods transported by the shippers. Merchants need loans and currency exchange and insurance, so a finance industry emerged. They need a strong administration with an efficient police force that keeps the peace and prevents theft, a working judicial system to adjudicate conflicts, a bureaucracy that can keep norms nimble, good schools and healthcare systems to serve all these people.
I’ll write a deeper article on Singapore at some point, but here’s a short summary of its growth.
Everybody thinks Singapore was a backwater when it got its independence from Malaysia in 1965, but this is not the case. Why did it become independent? Because it had a majority of ethnic Chinese citizens. Any why is that, given that Singapore is 2,500 km away from China? Because it had been the major British port in the region for centuries. When Lee Kuan Yew assumed leadership in 1965, he did an amazing job in developing the nearly 2M people who already lived there and the logistics hub he inherited.
Dubai, Singapore, but also Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai… They all followed the same pattern: convert a village into a port via SEZs (Special Economic Zones) with low taxes and administrative burden, services for shipping and trade, and safety. From there, growing investment in infrastructure to make operations easier and easier. From there to finance, other industries, and a growing population thanks to network effects.
Many cities try to emulate this today.
Which parts of the world are most promising for locating new cities or city-states? I’ll cover this in another article, but the short answer is that there aren’t that many ideal spots, and we only need so many ports. We need another model for growing new cities. How do you most successfully go from 1 to 10,000 inhabitants?
Cities must attract customers—inhabitants. What do they need?
Nice, affordable housing
As little crime as possible
Good transportation infrastructure
Reliable utilities: energy, water, phone, Internet
Core services: education and healthcare
As many amenities as possible
A dating pool
Jobs
Some of these are better in small cities, others in big cities. However, some matter more than others. How does that translate into competitive advantages?
This is probably the most important graph of this article. If you understand it, you’ll get the challenges for small cities to grow into big ones.
Tiny communities (tens to low hundreds of people) can get affordable housing, good utilities, and low crime:
Utilities (water, electricity, Internet, phone) are now as easy to get in small cities as big ones, so there’s no competitive advantage: Get Internet and phone with Starlink, electricity with solar panels and batteries, and water from a local well or source, with a water treatment system if needed.
Crime is less in smaller communities, since everybody knows each other, and the communities can easily vet newcomers. A few guards can solve any problem from external communities.
Housing tends to be much cheaper in small areas because land is cheaper.
It’s easy to shape a small community’s culture: You can hand-pick the people, hand-craft the events, hand-build the environment to nudge people’s behaviors, and it’s small enough that virtually everybody knows everybody else, creating a tight feeling of belonging. This is the exact opposite of a megapolis, where people can be alone in the midst of multitudes, and loneliness is rampant.
Small towns, with high hundreds to a few thousand people, retain most of the benefits of tiny communities, and add new benefits as they grow:
You need a few hundred citizens to warrant a school. Before that, you’re basically blocked from attracting families. When solutions like AI education and humanoid robot caretakers become widespread, this will change.
With a few hundred citizens, you also get amenities like a gym, restaurant, bar, or supermarket.
A clinic needs a few thousand citizens.
Competition between schools starts with tens of thousands of citizens.
Hospitals and universities require several tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people.
If citizens are like-minded, a few hundred to a few thousand people is enough to start finding partners: After all, we lived in small villages forever and were still able to couple up. If you’ve ever lived on a college campus or in a small town, you might have felt the fishbowl effect: As time passes, the few options available become more and more attractive. That said, I fear the fishbowl effect is weakened with the current access to world standards of attractiveness via Instagram and the like. It makes it harder to settle for whoever is available.
Amenities grow dramatically with population size. You get a variety of restaurants, shops, gyms, doctors, dentists, lawyers, repairs…
Transportation can get congested as cities grow, but at least they get airports, train stations, highways, and the like. If you need to travel the world, you need an international airport within 1-2h.
Dating pools become super deep in big cities. Anybody can find someone they like. However, choice can become overwhelming, so I don’t think dating gets exponentially better with bigger populations.
But the most important factor, by far, is jobs.
Jobs pay for everything else. They are the main reason why people move to big cities, for economic opportunity. And the network effects are massive:2
The more businesses, the more likely a person can find a position that suits their unique skills. And vice-versa: The more workers, the more businesses can find the right employee for them.
Workers and businesses can both specialize more.
With more job opportunities, the time needed to find a good job is shorter, so there’s less unemployment.
As companies develop specialized knowledge, it spreads to other companies through observation, informal conversations, and job hopping.
Industry clusters can appear as suppliers start colocating with vendors to reduce costs. Cities integrate vertically.
Because of all this, people are more productive in cities, which earns them higher wages, so there are more amenities and more companies and more jobs, which attract more people.
Knowing this, how can a new city go from 1 person to 10, 100, then 1,000, and 10,000 and beyond? This is a problem tech companies have been facing for over a quarter century now to get their digital communities to grow. We can learn a lot from them.
Imagine that Uber has just arrived in your city. You download the app, open it and see no drivers available, so you close it and never open it again. If you’re a potential driver, the same thing happens: You open the app, get barely one or two rides per week, realize this isn’t worth your time and close the app forever.
Uber is a marketplace where supply (drivers) and demand (riders) meet, but they need a critical mass to be viable: Enough drivers must know there will be riders available, and vice-versa. Without critical mass, there are no network effects, and the marketplace dies.
So instead, Uber doesn’t start by operating everywhere. It specifically launches in every city, one by one. But the launch isn’t limited to a simple announcement. If it was, Uber would get a few drivers and riders on launch day, but not enough to make it profitable for drivers and valuable for riders, and it would die out.
That’s why an Uber launch in a new city is a much bigger deal: For weeks or months in advance, it recruits drivers and pays them, whether they get rides or not, just for being available. That way, there will be enough drivers on launch day for an amazing experience and riders will come back again in the future. Meanwhile, drivers need enough riders on launch day to know this will be a viable business for them, so Uber creates a big launch campaign to raise rider awareness, including discounts to lure riders to try the service.
This model is effective in all network effects businesses. When Bank of America launched credit cards, it didn’t do it nationally, because not enough people would have them, and not enough businesses would accept them. So instead they launched in Fresno, California, because 45% of families already banked with them. It provided the devices to read the credit cards to businesses, and it mailed 60,000 unrequested cards at once to its customers.
Tinder launched at the University of Southern California and then repeated its playbook campus by campus. Facebook launched at Harvard. Once everybody used it there, people in other Ivy League universities wanted in. Once the Ivy League was conquered, students from other universities wanted in, too. Then, high school students wanted access. Once they had it, their parents wanted it, too.
You can see the logic here: Take one vertical and saturate it, before moving on to the next. Because a network is never completely homogeneous: It has subnetworks that are much more tightly connected than others. Tackle these, and the subnetwork (“vertical”) will join, see plenty of value, and then move on to adjacent verticals.
Depending on the industry, you might have to focus on the supply side, the demand side, or both. Uber focuses on getting supply (drivers) ready for when demand hits on launch day. OpenTable also focused on the supply side by making software for restaurants to manage their tables and reservations. Once they had lots of restaurant tables on their platform, they opened up to diner reservations over the Internet. LinkedIn did the opposite: By gathering online resumes, they had lots of demand for jobs that became very valuable for recruiters (suppliers of jobs), who joined later.
What are the equivalents for new communities and cities? What are the verticals, the supply and demand? What tactics from tech marketplaces can we apply to cities?
There are three obvious segments, but none are straightforward.
Trying to attract young people sounds like a great idea: They don’t have dependents, can travel solo, they take more risks… If you target the rugged, adventurous, idealistic type, they might be willing to make do with minimal housing options and few amenities. But what, exactly, do you give them that they can’t find elsewhere? What’s the benefit of moving?
Because the costs are clear: Young people need jobs, and to progress they need to learn from experts who work alongside them. Neither are available in small towns.
Also, young people tend to not have a romantic partner—especially the more adventurous types who might be willing to move. Unfortunately, early cities don’t have many people, so their dating pools are shallow.
On top of that, these people are not the richest, so you have to keep your costs as small as possible, including your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). You can’t spend that much on marketing.
The parents in a family no longer need a deep dating pool, and they tend to be more professionally settled. They might have a remote job that pays well, but still, a good job opportunity would definitely be welcome for most.
But children need schools, which require many families to be viable. Children also need doctors, and a hospital not too far away. And both parents need a remote job, which is much less common than a single one.
Retirees don’t need a job, a school, or (usually) a dating pool. But they care a lot about healthcare, an airport to see the family and travel, and a community and amenities so as not to be bored to death. Examples of this include Florida in the US or Portugal and the Spanish Mediterranean coast.
Based on this, to create your city you need (depending on the segments you focus on):
For all: a strong reason to come (something that’s unavailable to you where you live), and some basics (utilities, a nearby airport, etc.)
For workers of all ages:
Some way to attract jobs
A dating pool
For families: school options
For retirees and families: great healthcare
The first people you attract must be digital nomads, people who can easily work remotely and already have a job, because as we’ve seen, it’s near impossible to get jobs upfront: They require network effects, and there aren’t any when there’s nobody in a new city.
Thanks to the Internet and AI, remote work is now common. Many take advantage of that to move around the world, from Lisbon to Bali, Buenos Aires, Dubai, or Bangkok. That gets lonely fast, though: They often don’t stay in one place long enough to form local bonds, and other digital nomads are moving constantly, too, so they don’t form dependable friendships. On average, people are nomads for a couple of years before they settle. This is where new cities can help: By settling nomads, they can facilitate long-lasting friendships that are rare elsewhere.
But few people decide to join a community they don’t know, in a place they’ve never been.3 They visit a place for a weekend maybe, meet a lot of people, get to know some and really hit it off with a few. They then come back again and maybe this time they stay for a longer period of time—maybe a few weeks or months. Finally, once they feel comfortable with the place and the people there, they move in for a few years. In other words, there’s a funnel:
Each step in the funnel must be optimized.
One idea city founders float is to start cities from festivals: Get 5,000 people to come to your, say, music festival, and some of them will stay. Year over year, more and more people will stay, until a city is born.
I don’t buy this. Who goes to a festival and wants to stay there forever, once the music, the people, and the vibe is gone, and all that’s left is to clean up the mess with a thin crew?
Also, people know festivals are not the real world. You don’t go live in a place where you just have fun.
A festival can provide a taste of a place, though. If the infrastructure is solid, nomads might want more. And that’s the point of events.
If you don’t know about a new city, but you want to go to a special festival, you might discover the city in passing, and realize “This is not bad at all!” In marketing, that’s what’s called the awareness stage.
If you already know about the place, you might be thinking of an excuse to go there, and an event might be the perfect excuse.
It doesn’t need to be only festivals. Conferences gather like-minded people around a topic of common interest. But what do you make conferences about? The concept of new cities and states is one topic (which Network School uses for its annual Network States conference), but not every new city can do that. At some point, you have to do industry-specific conferences, but what legitimacy do you have for that? This goes back to the problem of jobs, which we’ll cover later.
Whether you do festivals, conferences, or other events, making the entire experience amazing is important, but the most important moments are the first one, the last one, and a peak experience. So the arrival at the airport, the ride in, the entrance to the venue, are all important. Same thing when leaving. And throughout the event, some magical moment(s) must be designed so that when the person goes back and reminisces about the trip, an indelible image remains.
Popup cities try to solve this: For a few months at a time, organizers propose that digital nomads live in an off-season resort with hackathons, speeches, workshops, and other social events, which help people get to know each other, form friendships, social groups… The first one, Zuzalu, was in 2023, and since then, the idea has expanded. Edge City has organized eight villages across four continents with over 12,000 participants in total.
As participants get to know each other better and better, some will want to live together. Once your group of people who want to live together is big enough, the logical next step is for all to settle somewhere specific.
This strategy has at least four benefits:
It targets the most mobile people already, digital nomads who are very flexible on where to live.
It’s much easier to attract a person to a conference or short-term event than to make them commit long-term to a specific spot.
With each new popup city, people make new connections, their circle of friends increases, and they’re more likely to want to live with them somewhere long term.
It’s also much easier for organizers: There’s much less work and commitment in terms of real estate, regulatory rights, paperwork, utilities, etc.
When I last talked with Edge City co-founder Timour Kosters, he was wondering if the next step could be buying out an abandoned university campus to provide a full-time base for the community.
There are other ways to get people to explore a new city for a few weeks. For example, Daniel Thompson and his Numa Collective is organizing a month-long summer camp and event for families in the Honduran city of Próspera.
One of the most successful new communities is Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School. I’ll write a full article on this, but here’s the short version. In 2024, he took over an entire hotel in a Chinese development in Malaysia, 45 minutes away from Singapore, and presented it as a fixed place for nomads to spend a few months at a time. The price includes a room, cleaning, food, coworking space, Internet, community events, workshops, gym... All in a safe, tropical, walkable space.
In other words, what you’re getting in a place like this is the college experience after college. This is clever: College years are some of the most fun for most people. Extending them or reviving them is very cool.
Thanks to Balaji’s popularity, enough people came and formed friendships that there was demand for long-term stays (one year or more). Now, Network School has had thousands of visitors, some of whom have become full-time residents.
Balaji’s huge audience, drawn to his leadership in investment, cryptocurrencies, and the future of nation-states, was crucial to get there.
His popularity still helps raise awareness of his Network School and convert doubters, but the bigger NS is, the more his personal popularity will have been tapped, and the less it will influence people to move. NS has already transcended him, it doesn’t rely on him anymore, and is growing. Good for them, because that requires a transformation: What works early on doesn’t as a city grows, because the early adopters are unlike those coming after.
In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore explains how early products don’t cut it for most people. If you’re an innovator or an early adopter, you love new stuff and are willing to try it. But for the vast majority of people, that’s not true.
Pragmatists are less moved by a vision or adventure, and much more interested in cold pros and cons. This is true for all products: Early adopters will tinker with things that are broken but show potential, but for the vast majority to adopt them, their kinks need to be ironed out until they’re easy to use.
So even if it’s hard to get a community to a few hundred people, the step after is equally hard, just for different reasons! Now, some of the biggest advantages of the early community (cheap real estate, strong community) get diluted, while the network effects of amenities, jobs, and microcommunities are not yet kicking in.
I think the answer is that these cities/jurisdictions need to make sure crime remains zero, while investing heavily in amenities, healthcare and education. These are a matter of money, and although you might not be able to make them profitable early on, they will make pragmatists cross the chasm.
OK we’re done looking at the demand side. You can see it’s very hard to get it off the ground without the other side of the marketplace: the supply of jobs.
Nomads (single and coupled) can only get a new city so far, and even they want their industries to be represented where they live. So there’s just no way around needing to attract businesses to your city.
But companies are usually happy where they already are. They have employees, and they tend to be in big cities where they enjoy network effects. What kind of industry (vertical) would be willing to relinquish the value of its current location to move to an empty one where they can’t hire anybody? What kind of unique asset can a new city provide?
Regulatory arbitrage.
What’s the one human decision that frequently prevents companies from growing to their full potential? Overregulation. Don’t get me wrong: Some regulation is good. But the entire reason we want new cities in the first place is because the existing regulatory burden is way too high, supported by entrenched interests, and nearly impossible to eliminate. New jurisdictions’ raison d’être to form is to fight overregulation.
So which industries suffer the most from regulation?
Real estate, finance, and healthcare.
We talked about real estate: Overregulation is what makes it expensive in many cities; killing regulation is one of the biggest assets of any new jurisdiction.
Overregulated finance is the very reason for the existence of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, DeFi (decentralized finance), blockchain, and all these new financial technologies. It wants a libertarian world where big states and financial institutions can’t dictate who has access to money and who doesn’t, where banks can’t profiteer from their power, where they’re too big to fail, where states overtax their citizens. This is why the crypto movement is extremely aligned with the development of new jurisdictions: All the people who believe this and make a living off of it want new places where they can be free. When you travel to these places, there’s always a strong community of people working in crypto, payments can always be made in cryptocurrencies, whether international ones like Bitcoin, or the local one.
But finance has two problems. First, finance is not just regulated at the national level, but at the global level. Anti-money-laundering institutions and regulations are active enemies of decentralized finance, because they see its anonymity as the shadow criminals yearn. Any banking service that is tied to the global financial system must abide by its rules, so innovating on rules is not as beneficial.
The second problem is that it’s hard to keep the crypto tribe in one place. Crypto doesn’t want boundaries. By definition crypto workers are mobile, international. And since they’re so aligned with the concept of new cities, many new jurisdictions try to cater to them, so there’s lots of competition for these highly mobile people. Hard to rely on finance as an industry to jump-start the supply side.
Healthcare is different, though. Drug companies and hospitals are not especially libertarian or excited about new jurisdictions. They just want regulation to be reasonable, and they can’t get that where they are. This adds billions of dollars to their business costs—so much so that it’s simply financially impossible to develop new drugs.
As a result, other countries like China, with much better regulation, are taking over in drug production.
This is why Niklas Azinger formed Infinita in the new jurisdiction of Próspera, a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in the Honduran island of Roatán, on the Caribbean.
Niklas realized that the US’s healthcare regulations are irrationally tight, so he figured out a much more reasonable set of regulations that allows Western drug companies and hospitals to do things there that they can’t do back at home.
To give you a couple of examples, an easy one to understand is drug repurposing: Many drugs are already approved, which means we know they’re safe to take. And sometimes, we discover new uses (“indications”) for them. Eg, GLP-1s were diabetes drugs that became weight loss drugs. But it’s hard and expensive to repurpose drugs for new indications. This makes no sense! We already know they’re safe (from the previous clinical trials), and we have data on their performance in real life, since we track their side-effects. Do we really need the hundreds of millions it would take for a perfect new clinical trial? Every time?
Another example: Aging is not a disease in the US, so you can’t test drugs to treat it, or make anti-aging claims about medications. You can test drugs against aging in Próspera.
Real Estate, Finance, and Healthcare are three examples, but any industry that has too much regulation is a good target for SEZs like Próspera. The more money that is at stake, the bigger the regulation arbitrage, and the easier it is to exploit it abroad, the more likely an SEZ is to attract companies from a new industry, kicking off the supply side of city marketplaces (jobs), attracting workers to take these jobs, and kick-starting the flywheel of a new city.
Of course, the other relevant marketplace early on in these places is dating. This is not relevant for married couples, but hyper relevant for single nomads.
Early on, the biggest issue is that these new cities, being new and riskier than established cities, tend to attract a higher share of men than women. From my conversations, this ranges between 60% and 80% of men when these cities have just a few hundred people.
This is bad for most people:
There are not enough women, so many men remain single.
Most women prefer not to be in such a minority. They prefer a stronger female community for friendship and support.
As such, early cities would benefit from programs targeted specifically to attracting women. This should be easy.
Another asset is that, in my experience, many men in these places are young, ambitious, adventurous, hard-working, fit, and intelligent. Women who might be looking for a life adventure and might also be interested in such men would benefit from visiting these places.
If you think this is secondary, you should read this article:
In it, I explain that this gender imbalance is the reason North America speaks English and not French. The French side in Canada attracted male nomads, because fur trading was amenable to this type of worker since trappers had to travel a lot, hunt, deal with natives, fight… The English side had a good climate for agriculture, which is settled, and more conducive to forming families. This meant there was a population explosion in the British Colonies in Canada while the French side remained underpopulated, and when they went to war, the British outnumbered the French.
I’ve talked with several leaders in the field and they’re understandably wary of intentionally attracting women to their cities, but personally, I think it’s quite natural, logical, and moral. They should do it!
OK, so far we’ve discussed how to accelerate the progress from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 people. But wouldn’t it be cool to bypass all this work and shoot straight to 10,000 people?
The best way to short-circuit the chicken-and-egg issue of no people → no jobs → no people is to artificially get 10,000+ people or 10,000+ jobs. How can we do this?
I discussed this model in this article.
A great example is what Jan Sramek is doing in California Forever, a new city between San Francisco and Sacramento, in California. Instead of starting from scratch, Satellite Cities co-opt the people and amenities of a big city nearby. No need for thousands to relocate dramatically across the world, just get them to move a short distance from where they live today. They can keep the same friends, the same family, use the same airport, use the bigger cities’ amenities when need be…
In the case of California Forever, they’re aiming to build a huge industrial park, but with regulations that make it much easier to build industry in California (a state famous for its anti-industrial policies). With its proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, the hope is that many hardware startups will be inclined to move there, providing the jobs that will attract more people.
You can combine the idea of a satellite city with that of an anchor tenant. A Texan developer told me it’s actually not that hard to get companies to commit to bringing their operations to a new satellite city within the US. These are also perfect ways to kick-start cities, because they concurrently bring hundreds or thousands of jobs, along with the workers, who then need to live in the place. They beget lots of services, sometimes supported by the company (shops, schools, clinics, etc.). You can shortcut the first few orders of magnitude of growth (from 1→10→100→1000 and even →10,000) with an anchor tenant. You just need a few things:
A city in its close proximity, for amenities and workers
Utilities: electricity, water, etc.
Legal certainty
This last point turns out to be the hardest. Having the mayor, the board, the opposition, the judges, the state legislature, the country government all aligned to help a new city be born is the scarcest resource. But it’s doable. This is for example how Celebration, Florida was born: It was Walt Disney’s city.
In the 1970s, the Yucatán Peninsula was mostly jungle and sand. Then, the government chose a tourism spot there, built infrastructure, and called on hotel chains to establish themselves there. Now, we know the destinations of Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, the Riviera Maya…
The Mexican government was visionary in making this area into a tourism destination, but the vision didn’t extend to governance, so the area suffered from crime, overbuilding, and overdependence on tourism. Maybe a city founder could add regulatory vision, and find a spot that has amazing, underdeveloped beaches that could house great resorts, within a country and region that is open to giving enough governance freedom to an SEZ.
In other words, the cold start problem can be solved through tourism funding the growth from 1 to 10,000 citizens via hotel resorts: The citizens would be the workers. Once you have that, you can expand to other verticals.
If you think about it, this is not far from what Forest City was (where Network School lives): A Chinese developer agreed with the Malaysian government to allow a Special Financial Zone and built dozens of beachfront buildings there. The city was meant to host hundreds of thousands of people, but is currently mostly empty, with only around 9,000 residents. Maybe this was too big, too fast, too exposed to the national risk of both Malaysia and China,4 and not visionary enough on the governance side, but the thinking was directionally correct. We’ll talk about it more another time.
Remember the idea of birthing cities out of festivals? I don’t think it can work because one festival a year is not enough to anchor a settlement. But what if there were dozens of festivals per year in the same place? That’s what cruise companies can do.
Cruises carry thousands of people from place to place, reliably, week after week, providing customers to local economies. But after some time, these cruise companies have thought: Why would we give up all this reliable business to outside entities? So they’ve started buying islands (now over a dozen) and creating their own resorts, events and festivals. Vertical integration.
What if they organized ongoing festivals, so that each one of their cruises could benefit from one? This would increase the revenue per customer. And once they have recurring festivals on land they own, they would need settlements there. From there to cities, there’s a very small jump. In fact, some cruises already operate as small sea settlements. Maybe some could move into land-based settlements. But they’re not in the business of city founding, they need either visionary leaders or to partner with visionary city founders.
This reminds me of the early growth of Airbnb: Its founders noticed that during conventions, all hotels were booked and prices were through the roof. Demand was guaranteed, so they focused on events like the Democratic National Convention or Oktoberfest, sending employees to review listings. Each time there was a new event, they added more listings, and more people started using them.
While the Honduran SEZ of Próspera focuses on real estate, finance, and especially healthcare, the other Honduran SEZ of Ciudad Morazán tackled the problem differently.
The region already has local industry, tied to the neighboring city of Choloma. But nobody wanted to live there because of the low quality of life, especially due to crime and corruption. So Ciudad Morazán took over an area, made a gated community for the workers, took over the local governance and law enforcement, and that was enough to make it a favorite for workers.
When new cities and jurisdictions are putting together their offering, they’re basically trying to weigh their competitive advantages between real estate quality & affordability, crime, the feeling of community, jobs, education, healthcare, transportation, utilities, amenities, and dating. They’re trying to do something like this:
Their goal is that the teal assets outperform the red liabilities, so that the city is such a no-brainer that many people want to go.
Every new jurisdiction is different. In the example above, the value proposition is not strong enough, so people will only trickle in. Conversely, a satellite city with an anchor tenant might look like this:
Based on their own estimations, cities can decide to invest more or less on a given thing.
The more remote and novel the city is, the more these assets or liabilities will stand out from existing cities, creating a starkly differentiated product. But the big thing they’ll be fighting is the lack of network effects. The best way to solve this problem is bypassing the early stage (e.g., satellite cities, anchor tenants). If they can’t do that, though, the best strategy is to invest heavily in the other aspects: cheap, great housing, less crime, a community feeling, jobs in some vertical, and compensation for early residents, while they try to mitigate the other issues as much as possible, with schools, sites with good nearby airports, clinics, and the like.
When I was last in Próspera in March 2026, one of the founders, Erick Brimen, closed with this video of a Mos Def concert in which Mos Def never appeared.
A video of a guy dancing alone in front of a crowd for over 40 minutes until some people join in. Erick didn’t play it for 10 seconds. He played it for what might have been two minutes, and felt like one hour. Torture.5
His message: If you want to create something big, something few have dared to do before, something breaking so much with conventional wisdom, you have to endure dancing alone for a long time before the first few join. But eventually, they do, and it becomes a party.
May the party come to new cities and jurisdictions. I hope this article will help the current founders and workers to accelerate their growth, and people like you to move there.
If it does, and you decide to visit Próspera or move there, let them know you came from me and you’ll get 50% off their residency or e-residency program by using this link.
And if this article helped you do your job a bit better, or meaningfully changed how you think about the world, consider subscribing.
Thanks to Niklas Anzinger (Infinita), Trey Goff, Erick Brimen, Gabriel Delgado (Próspera), Balaji Srinivasan, Jackson Steger (Network School), Patri Friedman (Pronomos), Daniel Thompson (Noma Collective), Mark Lutter (Charter Cities Institute), Timour Kosters (Edge City), and the many other city / jurisdiction founders or early workers who have talked with me over the last couple of years and / or have read this article to make it better. Of course, thank you Heidi and Shoni for your edits, as always.
It turns out no country claims Liberland, a tiny corner between Croatia and Serbia, because of obscure laws about rivers defining country borders. The Danube riverbank has shifted since the boundary was set in the 19th Century, and both countries claim the bigger pieces of land.
If you have W workers and F firms, the potential matches ≈ W×F. If both scale with city size N, then matches scale roughly like N2.
Although I’ve been told this has happened in Network School. Crazy! These are true trailblazers. It reminds me of the 1848 Gold Rush, people reading in newspapers of the gold discovered, and booking tickets to go there from across the ocean.
Or maybe the developer is just thinking on a different timeline than most others and is okay with an empty city for a while. Some could argue that Forest City was never a ghost city but rather a city that just hasn't grown into itself yet.
The music is still stuck in my head two weeks later.
2026-04-07 19:21:17
In the previous article, we explored what good content will look like in a world of AI: insightful, entertaining, truthful, unbiased, honest, authentic, personalized, at scale. But how can we achieve that? What products should Uncharted Territories create?
Today, I’ll share some ideas I’d like to make real, in this order:
Real-life experiences
More content
Physical products
And the one that rides the AI wave the most, digital products.
And if you want to be part of the team that brings them to life, apply here.
After many of you asked, I added an investment option.
Media companies are well positioned to organize real life experiences, from conferences to dinners in different cities to trips to company visits… Which ones would you like to see? What would an Uncharted Territories conference look like?
Here are some of my more out-of-the box ideas.
I would love to create an Uncharted Territories museum. Imagine that you could shape sand to create landscapes like here:
But what if, as you created the sand, you saw civilizations emerge in valleys? Forests in the right climates, cut down for agricultural land, cities appearing at the confluence of rivers, trade posts at their mouths, nomadic tribes in pasture land… You wouldn’t just shape topography, you would understand the deep geographic mechanisms behind history in an intuitive way.
Have you ever visited a historical site, but failed to understand why it was built, why there, how it was used, what type of fascinating stories had unfolded there…?
Imagine that, instead of being dropped in these sites clueless, you put some AR glasses on and you could witness first hand some of the most interesting historical moments of the sites—some that explained not just the history, but also why the sites were the way they were? Imagine if you could influence these events like a videogame player?
Many of you write to tell me how useful my articles have been for studying history and geography classes. I’m not surprised: I loved the topics at school, but I found them superficial and disconnected. I didn’t want to know the facts, I wanted to understand why.
We now have enough content to formalize this. What would new curricula look like if they were designed by Uncharted Territories?
Uncharted Territories has lots of content that could already be packaged into books. Should we get them done?
My 1st serious video got 8,000 views. The 2nd one got 2,000,000. There’s clearly potential in a YouTube channel!
There’s actually very little amazing streaming content about geography. Look at what’s on Netflix for example:
Geography is either history or nature! Could we make a GeoHistory show for Netflix?
Along those lines, there’s a new XPRize for the best techno-optimistic near-term sci-fi video project. UT is all about that, and although I’ve never written fiction, I’ve studied it deeply. Should we present a candidate?
I’ve posted maybe a couple of dozen Instagram Reels, and without really trying, a couple of them went viral. My guess is I could have millions, or even billions of views per month, by creating many more short videos, making variants, using AI, and cross-posting them across social networks.
Right now, you can’t easily listen to my articles. You have to go to the Substack mobile app, where a canned voice reads them to you. What if they were better narrated? Available anywhere—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, etc? What if they were converted into an interesting conversation, like those made by NotebookLM?
What if I started interviewing interesting people? There are only very few deep interviewers, like Tyler Cowen or Dwarkesh Patel. Should I do this? It would need a production team: research, outreach, editing, posting…
If the goal is to help people make better decisions, courses become an obvious next step. They can be asynchronous or cohort-based. AI tools will help them scale tremendously, as the biggest challenge today is that the time of the creator is finite, but the value they provide is much higher than what their employees do (so you don’t want to be coached by one of their employees, but it might be good enough to be coached by their AI version). This is especially sensible for Uncharted Territories as I already have a successful course, which I just couldn’t push more because it was taking too much of my time, especially giving feedback to customers on their pieces of communication.
I also had a hard time organizing the study groups. But if I can automate the feedback and the group formation and facilitation, could this course be offered again, fully (or mostly) automated?
About 40% of the income of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt (with 25M followers) comes from its store.
What would an Uncharted Territories shop look like? What would you like to see there?
What other physical products could Uncharted Territories create? What would you like to see in the shop?
I love all the ideas above, but I’m especially keen on digital products, because these can truly reinvent media from the ground up with AI.
Human research and decision-making has hundreds of flaws, as I’ve outlined here: It’s slow, full of biases, lacks facts, makes wrong assumptions… AI is much better at all of this, yet it’s bad at other things: It’s not succinct, it gets lost, it doesn’t reason too well, it doesn’t know what matters…
What if we combined both? Imagine a mix of Twitter, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT, where people contributed their insights and facts to some topic, AIs broke down and reconfigured the arguments, and a mechanism incorporated the best comments and thoughts in one place so it’s easy to visualize?
What if we had a tool that scours the Internet to figure out what’s the most relevant topic right now, and the most interesting angles about it?
What if the Uncharted Territories audience could choose from that what they want to hear about? What if readers could pay for the articles they want to read? Imagine for example a map of the world, and if you want UT to write about a specific country, you can pledge money towards it. The more money is pledged, the more likely the article will be picked next. This allows two things: Satisfy the people who are most interested in a topic, and finance the production of content for all.
Humans already can’t tell if writing comes from an AI, but they tend to prefer AI writing! And AIs can copy author styles better than expert human copiers! So, I think AI writing is underused right now, and it will only grow from here. I don’t use it myself, yet, but should I?
What if there were some articles that are always written by me (or other humans) but others were written by AI first? For example, should an AI generate a daily summary of the news, based on all the insights and worldview of Uncharted Territories, which I’d then review, correct, and update before publishing?
Google made a hybrid between Google Search and social media, called Google Discover.
They gather your interests from your searches and serve you articles accordingly. Google does the same thing with the YouTube home page, of course. This product is quite successful, but I think it’s just an intermediary step to what’s coming.
With much more supply of content and a fixed amount of attention, we’ll need better mechanisms to digest information, like for example LLMs looking at what’s going on right now in the world and giving you a summary. This is what OpenAI is trying to do with Pulse:
Can we build something better? A mix of daily news with the ability to dive deeper into any specific area in which AIs and other people collaborate to make sense of the news? Yet another product we could build.
Although AIs make mistakes, these mistake are shrinking.
Moreover, I believe agent swarms could already do a better job than humans. Today, some can already drastically reduce mistakes, down to near zero.
What if we could highlight any fact and an AI agent swarm could properly fact-check it?
Wouldn’t it be cool to write an article, and automatically a tool would create versions adapted to all sorts of social media, be it images, carousels, long-form or short-form videos? Some tools already do some of this. Could we have them all in one place?
The same way content started with text, and then moved to pictures, from there to video, then short vertical video, and now AI-generated content, there will be many other types of content to distribute your ideas. One example is interactivity: If it’s easy to code new software, why not accompany your pieces of content with custom software that makes you interact with the ideas instead of just consuming them? That would definitely deliver on the personalization we discussed earlier, and if you know you can get interactive content by going directly to a media source, it’s much more likely to be a go-to source.
Decisions are not something we make in a vacuum. Humans discuss ideas, look for allies, coordinate… We see it in the comments sections of articles, in the way we debate the news at a bar or at the dinner table: Media, and especially the news, are a community thing. But today, the community around the news is crap! Here at Uncharted Territories, it’s limited to the comments section. Other Substacks have a chat. Other outlets do Slack, a few do meet-ups and conferences… Is this really the best we can do?
As AI takes over more parts of our lives, we’ll increasingly crave hanging out with humans. Media is a natural way to connect. What can we do as media companies to facilitate it?
So far, the media has limited itself to informing people to help them make decisions. But what if the audience is already convinced and wants to act? The media offers very little support there. It doesn’t coordinate its audiences to take action. What a missed opportunity! Can you imagine the force they would be if, instead of just frustrating their audiences with insights they can’t really act on, it gave them the tools to coordinate with other members of the audience to build? To get people elected? To push specific pieces of legislation through?
Before, this was impossible for the same reason as software in articles was impossible: It took too many people, it was too expensive. But I don’t think that’s true anymore: Media companies could have a substantially bigger impact by building the tools to help their audience coordinate between themselves to effect change in the world.
I plan to build all of this for Uncharted Territories, prioritizing the area that resonates the most with the audience: GeoHistory.
From there, I’ll expand to other topics: AI, Space, Relationships, Society…
Finally, once we’ve proven that the strategy works for Uncharted Territories and it’s growing faster than COVID in 2020, we’ll expand to other creators who have similar goals as ours by helping them succeed like UT.
If you know anybody who’d be excited to work on this, please share this article with them, the previous one, and more importantly, the careers page! And if you’re an investor, I added an option for you here.
Want to take ownership of one of these initiatives, but I don’t have a position outlined for you? Apply (under the position “other”) and explain your project.
