1. Don’t Split the Space into Different Enclaves

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.

2. Don’t Build for Cars

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.

3. High Density

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.

4. Start with Cheap, Temporary Real Estate

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.

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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:

1. Having children is less useful

2. Childrearing is still a drag

3. Life has gotten better

A. Children Are Less Useful

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.

B. Childrearing Is Still Quite Painful

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.

C. Life Has Gotten Better

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.

1. Conceiving

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?

2. Pregnancy and Birth

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.

3. Early Childcare

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.

4. Later Childcare

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.

5. Education

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.

6. Family Coordination

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.

Why Have Kids Then?

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.

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How Many Children Will We Have in the Future Then?

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?

1. 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.

2. 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

3. Families with many more children than today might become more common in the future.

4. Families with dozens and dozens of children, practically unheard of today, will become something we hear about, and get to experience first hand.

5. Families with 100+ children will exist.

6. If it’s true, real estate might suffer a lull in the coming decades as fertility decline continues, but afterwards it might go stratospheric.

7. If that’s the case, urbanism will have to change. We’ll need more cities with taller buildings.

8. This is another reason to colonize Mars and build space habitats.

9. 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.

10. If you really care about the fertility collapse, go work in one of the industries I’m mentioning above.

11. If you’re a politician, or work in media, work to release the limits on research in artificial wombs and blastocyte development.

12. 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.

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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 20^th 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.

The Cold Start Problem of New Cites & States

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 Dubais & Singapores

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

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.

Singapore

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.

Port SEZs

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?

Customer Needs

Cities must attract customers—inhabitants. What do they need?

1. Nice, affordable housing

2. As little crime as possible

3. Good transportation infrastructure

4. Reliable utilities: energy, water, phone, Internet

5. Core services: education and healthcare

6. As many amenities as possible

7. A dating pool

8. 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.

The Advantages of Tiny Communities

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.

The Advantages of Small Towns

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.

The Killer Advantage of Big Cities

• 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.

The Cold Start Problem in Tech Marketplaces

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?

Customer Segments: Who Can Early Cities Cater To?

There are three obvious segments, but none are straightforward.

Young People

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.

Families

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

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

Demand: Attract & Settle Nomads

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.

Short Term: Events

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.

Medium Term

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:

1. It targets the most mobile people already, digital nomads who are very flexible on where to live.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Longer Term

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.

Crossing the Chasm

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.

Supply: 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.

Real Estate

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.

Finance

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

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.

Dating Pool

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?

Bypassing the Early Stages, Straight to 10,000+ Citizens

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?

Satellite Cities

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.

Anchor Tenants Near Existing Cities

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.

Tourism Settlements

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.

Cruise Cities

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.

Existing Industry with Low Quality of Life

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.

Putting Everything Together

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.

50% off Próspera’s Residency

And if this article helped you do your job a bit better, or meaningfully changed how you think about the world, consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

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.

Today, I’ll share some ideas I’d like to make real, in this order:

1. Real-life experiences

2. More content

3. Physical products

4. 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.

Apply or Invest

After many of you asked, I added an investment option.

1. Real-Life Experiences

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.

Museums

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.

Historical Site Visits

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?

Education

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?

More Content

Books

Uncharted Territories has lots of content that could already be packaged into books. Should we get them done?

YouTube

My 1^st serious video got 8,000 views. The 2^nd one got 2,000,000. There’s clearly potential in a YouTube channel!

Series

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?

Short-Form Video

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.

Podcast

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…

Courses

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?

Physical Products

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?

Digital Products

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.

Decision-Making

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?

Picking the Topic / Angle

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.

Writing

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.

Fact-Checking

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?

Cross-Posting

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?

Interactivity

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.

Community

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?

Political Impact

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.

Sequence

1. I plan to build all of this for Uncharted Territories, prioritizing the area that resonates the most with the audience: GeoHistory.

2. From there, I’ll expand to other topics: AI, Space, Relationships, Society…

3. 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.

Join Me!

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.

Join the Expedition

I want the second one, and we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make it happen, creating in the process a legendary media company. So I’m building Uncharted Territories into a media company designed from the ground up with AI. But I can’t do it alone. If you want to help me build the future of media with AI, join me in working at Uncharted Territories: I’m hiring people to work on software development, research, video, social media, merchandising, and more.

Work at Uncharted Territories

In today’s article, I’ll tell you how I think AI will change media, and what we need to do to navigate that.

The AI Content Avalanche

AI has already overwhelmed us. And it’s just starting.1

And Twitter just banned 800 million AI accounts!

Early on, it’s fun.

But it’s already getting stale. Imagine 10x more AI content. 100x. One million times more. As it submerges us and drowns us in an overload of information, fake news, morally bankrupt mass media, biased fact-checkers and shameless influencers, how will we know what is true? What to think? How can we make good decisions in a world like that?

Content Quality Before & After

This was the quality of media content before the Internet.

Good journalists—those we were most exposed to—were way more intelligent than the average human, and journalistic standards raised the bar further, so that most content was quite good.

But it wasn’t perfect. The newsroom was biased, the news served the interests of those who financed it, and it was limited in creativity to what had been done and what other journos did, among other shortcomings.

When the Internet appeared, it reduced many of its costs, but it obliterated that of distribution.

Suddenly, you could post your content on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter for nothing, and if it was good, it reached lots of people.

Production shrunk less, but it still came down:

• For written content, platforms like social media, blogging, or newsletters made it as easy as in newsrooms

• For pictures or video content, mobile phones with cameras and simple editing software made it easier than before, but still quite hard to get great content

The result was a massive increase in content:

Most of which has been crap.

But there’s so much of it that some was bound to be amazing. You can see it to the right in this graph, where there is a lot of great Internet-era content, and some even better than what we had before, because it allowed hundreds of millions of people to become creators, and some of them are amazing. They would never have been able to create but for the drop in distribution costs.

AI drops production costs even further.

The result is this:

Even more content.2 Most of it, crap.

Look at the right, though.

We’re approaching a golden era of content. Those who can best merge humans with AI will be able to create magical pieces. What will media companies need to make this amazing content?

What Is Quality Content in a World of AI?

The first key insight is that as supply explodes, attention is still limited so demand quantity won’t bulge. This means demand quality will go through the roof. The more content we see, the higher our expectations.

Anecdotally, I feel it every day in Uncharted Territories: When I compare old posts from five years ago from those of today, it seems to me like the quality jump is insane: So many more insights per article, illustrations, diversity of topics, depth of research… Mostly thanks to the help of AI. But the audience just gets used to it, it’s the new normal.

What will be the new bar? We can get a clue from the Streaming Wars.

The Quality of Shows in the Streaming Wars

When companies like Netflix, Disney, Apple, and Amazon started spending tens of billions in producing content for their platforms, they created a lot of TV shows.

The results in terms of customers have been amazing.

But how much did the quality of these shows increase? What are the best TV series since the Golden Era of prestige TV started? The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Office, Lost… Nearly all predate the Streaming Wars. You’d assume with the explosion of content, we’d have an explosion of amazing content. But that hasn’t happened.

Part of it is niching out: Now you might enjoy some TV show that few other people know, because content specialized in specific niches. But that doesn’t explain it all. There are hundreds of TV shows that look amazing, Hollywood-level production values, but they’re crap. Because the stories are crap.

This shows that the limiting factor in Hollywood has been great storytellers. This became extremely obvious for those who watched Game of Thrones: The showrunners were lauded as amazing storytellers… until they ran out of material from the author of the books, George R.R. Martin. After that, they still had the biggest budgets in the world, with the biggest teams, and yet their ratings started suffering, and the last season was dismal.

So:

• More quantity and quality of supply → the expectations of customers rise

• The limiting factor in fiction becomes great storytellers → they define the new equilibrium

What will happen to media with AI? Will AI become an amazing storyteller? It might happen in a few years, with the singularity, but I don’t think it will come immediately, because telling a good story is incredibly hard, as we just saw. It requires a deep understanding of humans, their emotions, their drives, the world, the structure of stories, the rules of dialogue, of character arcs… To give you an example, the makers of K-Pop Demon Hunters, a seemingly simple movie, spent seven years of their lives on the project, referring to hundreds of different experts, working for 500-1000 man-years to completion. They tweaked the eyes of their characters pixel by pixel to enhance their microexpessions. AIs are not there yet.

All of that applies to fiction. What about non-fiction? What is the equivalent of great storytellers in non-fiction in the AI era? What will become a commodity, and what will be the remaining limiting factor in a world of AI?

Quality Non-Fiction after AI

To truly answer this, we need to answer a more fundamental question.

Why Do People Consume Media?

What are you trying to achieve when you’re watching the news, scrolling Twitter, reading Substacks?

Make better decisions.

Humans are prediction machines. They try to understand how the world works so that they can make the most of it. That’s why we love stories: They help us understand how others have faced challenges. It’s why we’re fascinated about visions of the future, why we love uncovering new truths about the world.

The application can be professional, like how to communicate to advance at work; it can be personal, like how to shift behavior to become more attractive; it can determine where to live, to maximize the chances of a bright future; it can help us choose who to vote for… Whatever it is, the underlying, frequently subconscious goal is to make better decisions.

When you realize this, you realize how shitty the current media experience is: We consume hundreds of thousands of dull, stupid, vacuous, imperfect pieces of content to create an image of the world that matters to us. We then have to synthesize all this data to form an accurate representation of the world, to inform our decisions. You see the problem, right?

So how can we make this better? Here’s my take.

1. Insightful

The most important requirement is to help the audience understand the world better. The more new things you can share, the more they help the world understand, the more valuable your media company. This means pieces of content should not be vapid, irrelevant, rehashing known facts, limiting themselves to facts only, etc.

And insights shouldn’t come as completely independent tidbits. A single, coherent worldview is much more compelling, because it puts the insights in context, and pushes not just data points, but entire mental models to better understand the world.

2. Entertaining

If you’re boring, though, people won’t finish your content. If they do, they might forget. You must be entertaining to help people consume your content and remember its lessons. So being entertaining is at least as important as being insightful. Doing either is hard. Doing both is devilish.

3. Truthful

If a media outlet produces a million pieces of content and 5% are false, you’re quickly going to stop trusting everything. If an outlet barely gets anything wrong, the audience will learn to trust it and rely on it more and more.

4. Honest

But nobody is perfect. Every media outlet is bound to make mistakes. A company that tries to bury them will destroy its reputation. One that is honest about its truthfulness, that corrects itself when it makes a mistake, will be seen as more honest and therefore more trustworthy.

5. Unbiased

You can limit yourself to saying true facts and yet be unfaithful to the truth, by cherry-picking what you cover and choosing a narrative that fits your agenda.

You can make money with biased media, but that will never make you a quality source, because you’ll be pushing incorrect mental models into your audience’s mind.

6. Authentic

All other things being equal, everybody prefers artisanal objects to industrial ones. The experience might be very similar, but just knowing that a human was behind them makes them more valuable, more sacred. The same will happen with content.

But artisanal objects are not usually the same quality as industrial ones. They must be functionally the same, but an artisanal object benefits from tiny flaws. Having a true person behind the content, one that is true to herself, who shows herself as she is, with her virtues and her flaws, will be more likely to reach people’s hearts. Live performances are one way to show the authenticity of artisanal humanity.

One of the areas in which authenticity will shine is courage. It’s easy to say what’s right when it’s popular; it’s much harder when it’s right but unpopular. #MeToo in 2017 was much more courageous than in 2024; saying that women and men are biologically different, and therefore psychologically different, was harder in 2023 than in 2026. Courage is exceptionally useful because it presents insights in the topics that are most likely to have failed mental models of the world, as information on these topics is limited.

7. Personalized

If your first language is Japanese, maybe you’d rather read articles in Japanese instead of English. Maybe the illustrative examples are closer to who you are. Maybe the data presented includes your country, or your region. Or the mental models you have of the world, so that you are never bored by information you already know.

Before, it was too expensive to do that, but with AI it will become so cheap as to be possible in some cases. The future of content will be personalized.

8. At Scale

If you do all this as a single creator, you’ll have a great voice, but you will remain an artisan of the media. The media companies that maximize their impact will have to do all the above at scale.

Build with Me the Future of Media + AI

So if you want to build an amazing media company that incorporates AI from the ground up, it must deliver insights, entertainment, truth, honesty, authenticity, all without bias, and personalized at scale.

I envision a new Uncharted Territories that achieves all of that:

• More content, with more insights, and more formats. Imagine The New York Times, but without the bias. The Economist, but for the 21^st Century. Mr Beast, but with useful content.

• More video: long form and short form.

• More interactivity: What if articles became software?

• More audience participation: What would it look like if the audience worked articles together?

• And much more

But how specifically? What else should that company build? What type of content should it create? To answer this question, we must look into how media is produced today: What are all the tasks involved? Where is AI better than humans, and where are humans going to continue shining? Which tasks should be automated to make them more scalable and better than today? This gives you a strategy of what must be built. That’s what I’ll cover in the next article (paywalled).

Once you have that strategy, how do you make it a reality? By hiring the people to build it. If you’re the type of person who loves Uncharted Territories, loves AI, and wants to use both to take a shot at making a huge AI-first media company to make the world a better place, apply. I have positions as:

• Software developers

• Vibe coders

• Research/Writers

• Video creators

• Short form video creators

• Editors

• Cartographers

• Merchandise managers

• Chief of Staff

Apply

But I can’t do any of this if you, the readers, don’t back the mission. I’m taking a huge risk hiring all these people, which I can’t afford with the revenue I’m currently getting from you. So if you like Uncharted Territories and you want to see more of it in the world, if you want more articles, more topics, more formats (short articles, podcasts, videos, short videos), if you want to see great media in the world of AI (and not just slop), you should support us: Without your subscriptions, I won’t be able to do any of this.

Subscribe now

And if you really believe in UT and want to fund our growth, you can also consider investing.

Why Uncharted Territories? Why Me?

Over the last few years, I’ve been studying and narrating these changes from Uncharted Territories, but it’s not enough. I can’t remain a bystander while the biggest change in the history of humanity is unfolding before us. Luckily, I have a background in the two key skills required to succeed in this world:

1. Tech: I spent 15 years building online products and growing them, starting from product management and ending as the Chief Product Officer of a billion-dollar company, with ~100 people at my charge. In the process, I grew teams from 0 to >100, and helped raise $500M. I know how to build tech companies and products.

2. Media: I’ve spent the last 6 years working in Uncharted Territories, where I’ve gone viral on all platforms: Medium, Substack, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram… I know how to make compelling content.3

I’ve decided to merge my two careers into one: building Uncharted Territories into a full media company, where we’ll combine the best of AI and humans to produce more, better ideas that reach more people, to help the world make better decisions and nudge it in a better direction.

Apply to Join the Expedition

Now today’s article, which I had a lot of fun writing, full of crazy facts. Enjoy!

After 1300 years as the largest dome in the world, Rome’s Pantheon was replaced by Florence’s dome in Santa Maria del Fiore. To this day, it remains the biggest masonry dome ever built.1 What?!

In a span of 100 years, the same city would birth an endless list of history-making figures: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Raphael, the Medici, Machiavelli… What’s going on?!

What was in the water? I’d like to know, to brew it again. Florence or Silicon Valley can’t have been pure serendipity. How do we replicate them?

To answer that, the best place to start is a cathedral that had spent 100 years with a massive hole in the roof that nobody could plug, much before Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo, or Michelangelo were born.

Brunelleschi’s Duomo

The architect that originally designed the cathedral died, and he left no solution on how to build the dome.

After a century with that hole (!) came a goldsmith (!!), Brunelleschi, who built the biggest dome the world had ever seen! And he did it without the cement used for the Roman pantheon, as its recipe had been lost in time!

Even harder, since the rest of the cathedral was already built when he arrived, he couldn’t change the shape of its walls, reinforce them, buttress them, or anything like that. He had to work with what he had! And he did it without scaffolding! And he did it without ribs!2 This is crazy.

The key challenge was to prevent the dome from falling. The first thing there was to adopt the insight of Gothic architecture that taller arches are stronger than circular ones. So the dome is not a hemisphere, it’s a bit more vertical.

The second was to make it light by emptying it. The structural force is carried by the inner dome (red), and then there’s a space and an outer shell (green).

You can see the space between the roofs here:

Even then, it would have fallen.

Brunelleschi needed a way to pull the top outward and push the bottom inward. He solved it with stone and wood rings around the dome!

The other thing Brunelleschi had to figure out was how to build this thing without a wooden scaffolding inside (it would have required too much wood!). He solved that by building the entire structure ring by ring, using herringbone bricks, crossing the bricks so that they would support each other.

OK hold on. What’s going on here? Why, after 1300 years, out of nowhere, is a goldsmith that doesn’t even have the materials necessary for replicating the Ancient Rome Pantheon able to build a bigger one?! That we’ve never replicated?!

Leonardo’s Roman Proportions

Brunelleschi lived in Florence, a city with plenty of Ancient Rome ruins. I think it’s hard for us to understand what living among these vestiges of a better time felt like.

From Petrarch, a Tuscan from the neighboring city of Arezzo3 who visited Rome in the mid-1300s:

[Rome is a] broken city, the remnants of the ruins lay before our eyes. [...] Who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?

Every day, you’d be reminded that your civilization is inferior to the one that came before.

Brunelleschi, inspired by these ruins and by some people before him like Petrarch, who had visited Rome, decided to make a trip to Rome too. Ruins were everywhere. He spent two years there, studying its remaining architecture. He studied the Pantheon to replicate its dome in Florence, and got the idea for the herringbone bricks by observing brickwork there.

He didn’t go alone; he was accompanied by the famed sculptor, Donatello, who was inspired to sculpt a David, the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity. Together, they excavated buried structures and measured monuments like the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, Roman basilicas…

Around that same time, another Florentine, Bracciolini, rediscovered4 Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the only architectural treatise that has survived from antiquity to this day.

Other Florentines like Michelangelo, Raphael5, and Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Rome to form the ninja turtles squad study it.

Between De Architectura and visits to Rome, architects and artists started noticing that Roman buildings used modular, proportional systems and strict rules of geometry: harmonious numerical ratios (1:1, 1:2, 2:3, etc.), room height related to width, temple column spacing based on column diameter… These ideas gave Renaissance architects something medieval builders lacked: a theoretical mathematical framework for beauty.

Brunelleschi came back from the trip with a firm idea of what the dome should look like, and all the other Florentine visitors came back with specific ideas of proportions and classical elements.

So why did the Renaissance happen in Florence? Well, it couldn't have happened much farther from Rome. Think of the experience of these Florentines, growing up among substantial Florentine ruins from the Ancient Roman Empire, and close enough to visit Rome and witness the massive beauty that had been lost. The farther you were from Rome, the fewer the ruins, the harder it was to get to Rome, and the less inspiration Rome would have provided.

This probably explains why the Renaissance had to happen close to Rome, but not specifically in Florence. Why not Siena, Pisa, Naples, Milan, or even Rome? Why then, and not 200 or 300 years earlier or later?

Machiavellian City-States

In the Dark Ages, as the Roman Empire fell and law and order withdrew, cities decayed and many disappeared. But not so in Italy. Cities like Milan, Florence, Verona, Bologna, Ravenna, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, and Siena remained populated. By the 11th century, they had merchant classes, bishops, courts, guilds, militias… They were already institutionally capable of governing themselves. This independence of communities happened everywhere in the former Roman Empire, but it was especially true in the Holy Roman Empire, modern-day Germany and Italy.

This is Italy in 1500. Chaos!

I explored why this happened in Why Were Germany and Italy the Last European Countries to Unify? The short answer is that Italy was the battleground between two dimensions of power: the temporal and the spiritual.

This was Europe around 1200 AD:

For centuries since the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the 10th Century, the Emperor and the Pope fought for power and influence, like who would appoint the powerful bishops. Around 1200, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had just united the northern part from his father with the Kingdom of Sicily to the south from his mother. The Pope logically freaked out when he saw his Papal States surrounded, and stirred up revolts everywhere he could in Italy.

Crucially, Italy is separated from Germany by the mighty Alps, making it very hard for the Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) to have strong influence to the south.

And Italy is very mountainous, with lots of secluded valleys that birthed strong, independent cities. This meant that, in practice, local cities had been quite autonomous for a very long time, even if they were nominatively under the HRE.

So when the Pope stirred revolt all over Italy, different cities decided to support different sides. This is what’s called the war of the Guelphs and Ghibellines.

Notably, the closer you were to one of these big powers, the less likely you were to support it, because it’s better to have a distant lord than a neighboring one. This created a patchwork of alliances and counteralliances, of wars and betrayals. Over the centuries, the power of the HRE dwindled in the region, and the emperor became just a distant influence.

This is the context in which the Florentine Machiavelli thrives and writes his famous work The Prince in the early 1500s.6

So all this is why the Northern Italian region had many independent city-states:

• The cities there remained inhabited since Roman times.

• The area has many fertile valleys among mountains, allowing for many urban nuclei to sprout.

• The region was separated from its rulers by the Alps, which meant little oversight.

• This is at the border region between the HRE and the Papal States, so they became a proxy war battleground that exacerbated their differences and undermined the oversight of both on the region

Independent states were crucial to explore new styles locally and to push for their own architectural styles to differentiate from other competing city-states. But this doesn’t tell us why they were so rich, and you needed a lot of money to build such huge cathedrals.

Medici Wealth

At the time, Italy’s population was rebounding from the Black Death faster than in many other European countries.

And these people were rich! In the 1300s, Northern Italy was already the richest region in Europe.

One of the main reasons was urbanization. These were the main European cities in the early 1500s. Notice how many are in northern Italy!

We already explained why: They were already quite populated in Roman times, and they have some of the best plains in the Mediterranean, especially in the Po Valley.

A big population that could grow fast and was already urban meant a bigger share of the population lived in cities.

Of course, cities are more productive than rural areas due to their network effects. They become marketplaces, develop industries, invest in infrastructure, build industrial clusters…

Northern Italy also had another huge benefit: It was in the middle of global trade networks.

The richest regions at the time were Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire in general, the Byzantines, and the Muslims,7 and Northern Italy was in the middle of them all. This is why Venice and Genoa grew so rich as maritime trade republics.

And within Northern Italy, Florence was very well positioned.

If you wanted to move between the HRE and Rome, the best path went through Florence, which is a natural crossroads because Florence and Bologna flank the Apennine mountains.

So Florence, like only a handful of other Italian cities, had a unique confluence of assets:

• It was in a populated region, because it has a good climate and great agricultural plains

• This was in the richest region in the world, because it was at the crossroads connecting all the main kingdoms of the time

• The region also contained many cities that had remained inhabited since Roman times, and Florence was one of the big, urbanized cities in the region

• Situated between the two regional powers of the HRE and the Papal States, these cities had more independence than most

• It was at a crossroads for internal Italian trade, making it uniquely rich as a marketplace

• Close to Rome, to receive strong architectural influence from the Roman Empire

Still, it could have been Siena, Bologna, Parma, maybe Genoa or Venice. And sure enough, all of them have beautiful architecture. But something set Florence apart.

Money.

The Origins of Florentine Wealth

The best way to know who ruled back then is to look at who funded the biggest monuments. So who funded the cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore?

One tip is in the name: Santa Maria refers to Virgin Mary, and echoes the importance of religion. But fiore? These are flowers—like Firenze. This refers to the city: The cathedral was meant to represent both the church and the state. This was not a purely religious endeavor. In fact, it was anything but. It was the commune of Florence that financed it. And where did the money come from? The Wool Guild, Arte della Lana.

By the 1200s, the wool trade had become one of the city’s largest industries, among other things precisely because Florence was such a big city:8 Wool must be sheared, sorted, scoured, carded, drawn, spun, wound, warped, woven, fulled, sheared, pressed, dyed, sewn… There are many steps, but crucially, each step can be done by one single person or a few, with pretty basic machinery. So people across the city worked on different steps in their homes. The bigger the city, the more workers could be dedicated to each step, the more competition and learning between them, the more volume could be produced, and the bigger the industry. The bigger it is, the more it specializes, the better its products compared to the competition, the better the reputation, and you end up dominating a continent-wide market.

This industry became so big that local wool was not enough to feed it, so Florentines started buying wool abroad (in Spain, England, Flanders…), and finished it into high-quality cloth. They organized themselves into guilds, which helped them work together to promote the industry’s quality, its trade, its financing…

Financing! When you buy wool and sell cloth abroad, you need currency exchange. And when there are so many steps to the process, from so many workers, you must pay them a salary before you sell the cloth or garment, so you need a lot of working capital. So the Florentines also developed a very strong financial guild.

The financial guild minted the gold florin, which soon became a currency used across Europe thanks to its distribution through wool commerce and banking, and to its reliability, as ensured by the guild.

The power—and money—of the commune was concentrated in the hands of these guilds, and of course legislation favored them. Imagine what that did to the competition: Across most of Europe, industrialists, bankers, and merchants had to withstand the logic of Church and nobles. But Florence could do regulatory arbitrage, optimizing everything to support its trade; another advantage to pull forward.

Then the city had a lucky strike. Remember the Guelphs and Ghibellines? Florence supported the Guelphs (the pope), while its rival Siena supported the Ghibellines (HRE),9 and it turns out the pope won. Siena was stripped of its banking and tax collection monopolies, which went to Florentine families. Notably, the Medici created a bank that grew strongly throughout that time, was on the right side of the war, and was given the management of the Papal Treasury. Their good relationship also gave them a monopoly of alum mining, a product crucial for dyes that could only be sourced in mines near Rome.10 This is also the time when silver started flooding Europe, so banking became extremely profitable. Eventually, the Medici would take over the politics of Florence and convert it into a duchy.

Florence used this newly-found power to strengthen its position across Tuscany and conquered its neighbors one by one. When it took over Pisa, it acquired a port. When it took over Siena, it eliminated its main rival.

So we can add a few factors to our reasoning of how Florence became the cradle of Renaissance:

• Thanks to its sizable population and perfect position at a crossroads within Northern Italy, Florence became wealthy in the pretty typical network effect of cities we’ve already seen elsewhere: first an industry developed (wool), which begat new industries (wool processing into cloth, finance). This made the city rich.

• It was on the right side of a war, so it was showered with spoils, most notably lots of financial power and control over valuable commodities (alum was crucial for making colorful cloth).

But why push for a new art style? And why this one?

Florence Style

Power was conveyed through architecture. The Arte della Lana guild wanted to show its power in the city, and to other cities. Remember, there are dozens of city-states in Northern Italy, the competition was brutal! They had to stand out, establish themselves as the most successful, so they could have status and gain more business. That’s why they invested in Santa Maria del Fiore. But that cathedral is not yet Renaissance! It starts as a mix of Gothic and local Tuscan style. So what is the Renaissance style, and why does it appear here?

As we saw previously, the impetus behind Gothic was to go as high as possible, to reach the heavens. This pushed the boundaries of architectural technology of the time: verticality, pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, detailed decoration for mysticism, and stained glass were the methods, and I think the goal was clearly achieved.

In the Renaissance, the idea was to go back to the wisdom of the more powerful ancient Roman Empire. Studying it, architects realized they followed some rules, and they decided to decode them and apply them. They decided that space should be graspable, measured, balanced, and ordered as a coherent whole. They did that by going back to columns, round arch, domes, volumes, horizontality, visual legibility, proportions, and a return to hard-coded classicism.

The love for proportion and precision could also be seen in small details like these:

Lines, squares, circles, crosses, mathematical curves… These textures are beautiful.

Of course, Rome and the popes loved the new architectural style based on their own city, so they funded and promoted it. They realized that Rome was a pile of ruins, but if they could rebuild it and make it even more beautiful, their power would radiate across Christendom. This is why Vatican City’s St Peter’s Basilica is of the Renaissance style, for example, and why the Renaissance became huge in general.

A Change in the Reason behind Architectural Innovation

OK here’s my ignorant and probably unpopular opinion: Renaissance churches are beautiful but… underwhelming?

With Gothic, society had a clear goal: Convey their love of God by reaching upward and pushing the technological boundaries to make it happen.

The great thing that Renaissance does is rediscover domes, which are objectively awesome. It also recovered the pendentives (which were Eastern Roman, not from Rome…), and made proportions explicit. But does that mean you have to adopt all the other Roman stuff, too? Why go back to columns and rounded arches, when we’ve seen they’re objectively inferior, since they can only allow smaller spaces? Why go for horizontality, an architectural feeling that was already so pervasive in cities because houses were not tall? Why pretend an obsession with order that your predecessor didn’t have, when in fact Gothic architecture had a similar order that you just couldn’t read?

It feels like the Renaissance was trying too hard to define its path in opposition to what came before.

“Gothic” litearlly means from the Goths—the Franks and the Germans on the other side of the Alps. That style was born in France and spread to Germany. It makes sense that Florence, allied to Rome and against the German HRE, would define itself in opposition to that by getting inspiration from ancient Roman architecture. Of course, a city that is managed by merchants wants to define itself in opposition to pure religious piety too. But when you define yourself by opposition to others, how strong are your values?

It’s a bit like how Swiss handwatches tried hard to become precise and thin, and once the Japanese figured out how to do that better, most Swiss watchmakers went bankrupt and the few that recovered (and soared) did so not because their watches were better (not more precise, nor thinner), but because their cost and elaborate shapes became symbols of status.

This is the first time in all the architectural styles we’ve observed that the innovations are not done to improve, but just to be different.

Renaissance Outside of Churches

Renaissance really shines outside of churches for me. Before, it seems like most architecture of beauty was concentrated into churches, but now it appears everywhere. Compare Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, built around 1300 just before the Renaissance, with the Medici-Riccardi, built around 1450, during the explosion of Renaissance in Florence:

The Palazzo Vecchio is basically a fortress!11 A small unassuming door without many indications that it is even the main door, small windows, stones of different colors, no texture between windows, the crenelated roof for defence, a single tower in one corner…

Now compare that to the Medici Riccardi. Still strong, but now the round arches with voussoirs on top make them taller and much more conspicuous. There are more, bigger windows,12 external decorated marks for each floor, the roof overhang is now beautifully decorated, dimensions feel harmonious…

And I think this becomes even stronger when you have several houses following this style, even when some of them mix with other styles.

So Why Did Florence Birth Michelangelo, Fibonacci & Galileo?

Although I am lukewarm about Renaissance church architecture, this doesn’t take away from the improvement in non-Church architecture, and more importantly the amazing intellectual movement that emerged in Florence.

The Renaissance precursor Dante Alighieri revolutionized literature; Luca Pacioli, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, became a ground-breaking figure of accounting; Piero della Francesca emphasized the divine proportions; Fibonacci13 discovered the Fibonacci sequence and popularized Indian numerals; Galileo the astronomer defended heliocentrism against the church; Botticelli, Boccaccio, and the aforementioned Michelangelo, the Medici, Da Vinci, Petrarch, Donatello, Raphael, Brunelleschi…

And now we know what the Renaissance is, and why it started in Florence:

• Because of the mountainous terrain, the Alps, and the length of the Italian Peninsula, Northern Italy was distant from foreign centers of power, which gave them autonomy, especially given the contest between the HRE and the Church.

• Northern Italy was rich because it was at the right spot in the Mediterranean, so it was the marketplace for Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

• It also has highly fertile valleys, so the population grew fast.

• A big share of that population was urban, which means network effects, more industry, trade, and money.

• Within this region, Florence was rich as a crossroads between Rome and Northern Italy. It developed a wool industry, and from there other industries, including finance.

• It was close enough from Rome to get its patronage, but not too close to be absorbed by it.

• It was lucky to be on the winning side of the war between the Church and the HRE, and got a massive boost when the Church won, with financial and mining monopolies.

• It was close enough to Rome to gain inspiration from Ancient Rome and be able to study it.

Once Florence had the money and the independence to go beyond the daily focus on war and survival, it could use the example of Rome to study it and replicate it. This meant massive investments in architecture, art, and all types of studies of Ancient Rome. This created a critical mass of thinkers who learned from each other, creating an explosion of knowledge across the disciplines.

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In many regards, this reminds me of what I witnessed in Silicon Valley in the nearly 15 years I spent there: an incredible concentration of intelligent, ambitious people, all focused on pushing the boundaries of one new technology—the Internet. It’s difficult to get these network effects set up. Can San Francisco survive its current downfall? Where will the next Florence emerge? What type of endeavor can justify the massive investments that are concentrated in one place, to attract geniuses from everywhere? Can Dubai do it, or does it not have enough of a mission? Shenzhen fits the definition. Is it limited to manufacturing, or will it bleed into other types of innovation? What do you think?

This type of article takes blood and sweat, and they don’t leave me much more time to do other things. But I want to do even better ones! And more of them! Across more media! I hope you saw the video at the top. I want to do more of that too! But I can’t do this alone. So I am going to hire a team to help me research, write, and publish more articles, convert this content into videos, audio, and podcasts, translate them, make tools to make them interactive, and much more. But I can only do that if you help me pay for it. If you like articles like this one and you want to see more, I need you to fund it.

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We’re going to answer this question today through a trip to the Roman Empire: What problems did the Romans try to solve? How did that influence the architecture that we know today?

In the next few articles, we’re going to explore successive architectural styles: Byzantine, Islamic, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revival, Modernist, Contemporary… In the process, we’re going to see how geography, culture, and technology have interacted to drive architecture.

The Architectural Problems the Romans Inherited

The Romans learned most of their architecture from the Greeks, and some from the local Etruscans. Here, the Hera II Paestum in southern Italy:

But this type of structure has two big problems that didn’t fit Roman goals:

1. The indoor part is too small to hold an event. The system of vertical columns with horizontal lintels was too heavy to allow for big indoor spaces.

1. They’re expensive to make. If you want to build many civic buildings (temples, forum, baths, basilica, market, theater, bridges, aqueducts, walls, gates…) across many cities in the empire, it’s hard to replicate this design: It requires too much stone that might be scarce, or skilled craftsmen to cut, carry, and assemble the stone.

There’s a third problem that Romans wanted to solve: comfort in private homes. They wanted the entire city, including many residences, to have running water, drainage, and heat.

The Key Roman Technologies for Architecture

Romans adopted a few technologies that allowed them to increase indoor spaces. One is the voussoir arch.

Voussoir

The voussoir arch transfers weight sideways, preventing collapse and allowing a much wider space between columns.

The Romans didn’t invent either of these arches; they took them from the Etruscans, who probably took them from around the Mediterranean (Mesopotamia and Egypt). But the Romans perfected them.

Barrel & Groin Vaults

If you take an arch and extend it along a corridor, you get the barrel vault. Again, this already existed around the Mediterranean, but not extensively, and the barrel vault is quite limited to single corridors anyway. The Romans learned to combine two of these into groin vaults.

You can see the type of result that arises from this as you scale it:

Dome

Instead of projecting the arch in a single direction, you can rotate it in a circle and create a dome.

Rome’s Pantheon, with a span of over 43m, was the largest dome in the world for 1,300 years! And you can see the transition from Greek to Roman style when you view it from outside:

Imagine that you come from a Greek world where virtually all social life happened outdoors, and suddenly you can create these huge indoor spaces that had never existed before. Big events and social life can now happen indoors!

Cement

Notice, though, that neither the dome nor the groin vaults from before are solely made of stone. They require a lot of cement.

Like the previous technological improvements, cement already existed before the Romans: It was made through a process that took limestone, changed its chemistry to reshape it, and then reconverted it into limestone.

Yes, cement used to be basically limestone: Both were calcium carbonate, CaCO₃. When heated, CO₂ is released and what is left is quicklime, CaO. Add water, it becomes slaked lime Ca(OH)₂. Now wait for long enough, and it will capture some CO₂ from the air and eject the water, creating CaCO₃ again. The problem with this is that it takes a long time, and you can’t have much water around or your slaked lime will not dry out.

If you add sand to the cement, you get mortar. Add stones to the mortar, and you get concrete. Previous civilizations used mortar and concrete, but not as much as the Romans, because their version was weaker for building, longer to set, and couldn’t be done around water.

The Romans were lucky to discover that mixing the lime with volcanic ash (pozzolana, very common around Naples, added silicon and aluminium to the mix) made a much stronger cement that could even set under water, and became stronger with time rather than weaker. The Romans mixed elements in such a way that cement could actually heal over time, something we’ve only recently understood.

There is a kind of powder which from natural causes produces astonishing results. It is found [...] about Mt. Vesuvius. This substance, when mixed with lime and rubble, not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.—Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book 21

Only with this superglue could the Romans make the dome and the other types of buildings we’ve seen.

This is all Roman concrete: Roman cement with sand and aggregate (e.g. sand, stone, pieces of brick…) that serves as a skeleton. The mix was lighter at the top, with pumice stone (volcanic stone with bubbles in it) and became heavier and heavier as it went down, closer to the walls. The dome width is also thicker towards the bottom.

Note the squares throughout: They are coffers, which enabled reduction of material (and hence weight). At the top, a hole further lightened the structure, while also allowing for a beautiful play of light and shadow.

Small holes in the floor allow for drainage.

You really see the progress when you compare it with what came before:

Wooden Formwork

But concrete is a bit liquid; you can’t just place it in a specific shape. It needs formwork: a frame to hold it until it hardens.

Romans used wooden molds, just as we do today, and poured the concrete inside. They used it for everything, from domes to walls to columns.

With the discoveries of voussoir arches, groin vaults, domes, and cement, building became much easier. Romans didn’t need to source good stone and even better craftsmen. They could simply crush and transport limestone and brick, mix them with sand, aggregate, and water, pour the result into wooden formwork, and erect their buildings.

This means construction became much cheaper and easier than in earlier days, giving Romans a solution to their second problem, which meant they could build many more buildings across the empire. Of course, these two things go together: It’s not like the Romans figured all this out and then started to build. Rather, all this building allowed them to iterate and figure out better and better construction techniques.

Civic Buildings

Romans built aqueducts to bring drinking water to their cities. Once they could build huge indoor spaces, they could bring water to indoor buildings, and baths became possible.

Indoor Architecture

Once you start bringing water indoors for baths, you might as well start bringing water to other buildings, including private ones. This requires channeling water through small tubes in walls. But with what type of material? As we saw in How Ancient Metals Started Civilization, Romans had way too much lead from their silver mining, and lead is easy to work with, so they built their plumbing with it. Plumbing comes from plumbum, Latin for lead.

Moving water requires pressure, so Romans built water towers to store the aqueduct water. Water is generally cold, though, so Romans had to warm it up. They didn’t just face the challenge of water management, but heat management, too. For that, they needed cauldrons, some fuel, chimneys, all incorporated into the building.

And once they did it for the communal baths, they began incorporating it into housing, starting with the rich.2

And this is how Roman architecture solved their problems:

• Huge enclosed spaces thanks to arches, vaults, domes, cement

• The ability to build them at scale thanks to the easier processing of limestone and clay, the standardization of shapes, and the use of wooden formwork for pouring concrete

• The ability to provide services like running water, drainage, and heating at scale, by applying the learnings from construction of many public buildings to that of private homes, and by taking advantage of the critically wide availability of lead.

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What’s striking about Roman architecture is that a lot of it was extremely practical: They had convenience problems and they wanted to solve them, so they developed the corresponding technology. I always heard that Rome was a civilization of engineers rather than philosophers, but this was the first time it gelled for me. They had the benefit of an empire that kept expanding, so more and more buildings to build meant much more experience through iteration, and more technological development.

Most other ancient architectures stemmed from a cultural desire that translated into the technological progress that enabled it. We’ll see those in the next few articles, where we cover the Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture. After that, we’ll examine Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revivalist, Modernist, Contemporary, etc. All, to understand how architecture got where it has, and how we can improve it.

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India

Whereas all of Egypt’s water comes from one single river, India’s water comes from one single season, the monsoon.

This has determined India’s architecture. A big chunk of its land (and most of its population) is in the Ganges Valley:

That valley is criss-crossed by the Ganges and its tributaries. When the monsoon floods the rivers, they bring sediment with them to fertilize the land. Water and sediment mean lots of people, and the rivers allow for cheaper trade. So many cities emerged on their riverbanks.

In the dry season, waters go down tremendously, though. So how do you make sure you can access the river at all times?

So water in India arrives dramatically, it leaves dramatically; it structures trade, it structures agriculture; it determines good years and bad years; it determines survival. Water cycles mean life and death. So they drive religion, pilgrimages, life and death rites.

In places where water is scarcer, it’s even more important. So people store it.

If you build storage for water, and water is holy, you end up building a decorated, inverted pyramid.

But you can only do that when it’s easy to carve into the ground.

There are also temples carved into stone from the ground. They are not built by adding material, but by subtracting. In the case above, it’s carved inside a mountain from the Deccan, a massive volcanic plateau made of basalt. It can be extremely hard, but here it has joints and planes that can be exploited for carving.

As with pyramids, one of the reasons to do this is that it makes the building very bulky, which means temperature will be stable and fresh—ideal in the scorching heat of India.

These structures still need to stand, but they’re heavy, so we see small indoor spaces and lots of columns again.

Have you seen this type of video? Same energy.

This video is from tropical Australia, where extreme weathering by constant rain and heat makes laterite, a certain type of soil that hardens with air. People can make bricks out of it.

West Bengal, which has lots of this laterite, uses bricks for its temples.

The result of these types of stone (laterite, sandstone, limestone, soapstone…) is that it’s not strong enough to create big indoor spaces without arches, but carving is easy, so decorations are extreme.

You combine these elements, and you get things like the inverted temple stepwell of Rani-ki-Vav:

However, not all India is like this. In some areas, it rains a lot more:

In Kerala, you need tiered slopes on your roofs that carry the water off, and since this is a mountainous area, timber is more available to make those. Since you don’t want this water to run on the walls, you’ll add cornices that eject the water out.

But in this area, the climate is very hot and humid, and you want air to circulate all the time to refresh you and to avoid mold, so houses have a central opening.

The Nalukettu was born.

It evolved into a system of courtyards surrounded by homes, so that extended families could live under one roof, each with their own space.

So you can see some of the elements that have driven Indian architecture:

• Water is sacred

• Access to fluctuating river water levels requires ghats

• In drier areas, people dug wells that could also capture monsoon water, and since they’re sacred, they became temples like inverted pyramids

• Carve structures into the ground to protect against temperature swings

• Where it rains the most, protect your head and your home with slanted roofs, especially with tiered slopes, so that the cascading water doesn’t accumulate too much energy and make holes in the ground

• Have an internal courtyard to make sure air circulates well

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China

We see similar patterns in China. In the Loess Plateau, where stone is easy to work, people would carve decorations and homes into the mountain.

This protected from the extreme temperature swings throughout the year and between day and night.

Kerala’s Nalukettus are mirrored in the Chinese siheyuan.

They also have homes around a central courtyard, made to optimize airflow and allow for a central common area.

Now take this concept and bring it to the mountains, where harder transportation means less communication and trade across valleys, more cultural distance with your neighbors, less political unity, and more conflict. You get the Tulous, semi-fortified community homes with a central courtyard.

The Forbidden City, in Beijing, uses the same logic, just on a bigger scale.

We see:

• Axial distribution, to wow visitors

• North-south orientation

• Walls and a moat, to protect against intruders

• The closer to the center, the more intimate the dwelling

• Social courtyards

The nesting from outside to inside is continued through the Imperial City and the Inner City.

Unlike in India, however, Chinese architecture stands out for its use of wood:

Why so much more wood?

India’s civilization emerged across the Indus and Ganges River Valleys, which have access to sandstone (e.g. in Rajasthan). It also spread quickly across the Deccan Plateau—the mountains in the center—where stone is available, which is very useful to avoid rot and insulate against the heat.

China originates in the North China Plain, an alluvial plain made by the sediments brought by the Yellow River. This means rock is under a deep layer of soil, hard to reach. But there was a lot of timber here.

This region is much farther north, so it’s colder, and timber is better at trapping and storing heat. Also, stone can trap water and break with too many cycles of freezing and thawing (because water takes up more space as ice, and pushes against the stone), but timber is flexible, so it doesn’t break as easily with these cycles.

Also, the North China Plain has many more earthquakes than India, and stone is bad for earthquakes since it can’t flex at all. Stone buildings tend to crumble during earthquakes, while timber ones survive.

For all these reasons, China used much more timber in its architecture. And that has its own sets of challenges.

For example, when you’re making your walls in stone, they can carry the weight of the entire structure. It would be expensive to do the same with timber, so instead, timber architecture tended to have strong wooden columns to carry the weight and light timber for the walls.

Look at the beams, columns, and wooden roof of the Shanhua Temple:

One of the positive things about wood, of course, is that it’s lighter, so indoor spaces could be bigger.

But you don’t want your wooden walls to rot, so they should avoid contact with monsoon rains. The answer is a roof with long eaves that allow for a deep overhang:

That way, water is ejected far from the wall and doesn’t touch it. It’s also why the Chinese roofs are curved, as you can see in the background in this pic. This allows water to run out fast and be projected outwards, farther from the wall.

Curbing the wood had another advantage: Over long periods of time, gravity makes wood sag downward. So to avoid that, the Chinese curbed wood upward. Once you start doing that, it makes sense to push it for aesthetic purposes, to make the roof “reach for the sky”.

Notice what’s below the roof? That’s called a dougong, and is very typical of Chinese architecture. It’s to support the weight of the roof. Why?

• With big indoor spaces, roofs are heavy.

• But they can’t rest on walls like in Europe, because they’re made of light timber instead of stone. So they must rest on the timber columns.

• They must support the eaves, which have a deep overhang as we just mentioned.

• Architects needed a system made of interlocking timber that could be flexible during earthquakes.

The dougong was the solution—nested brackets that could reach far into the eave to support it.

Of course, once you have this type of structure, you might as well decorate it:

And it’s not just for dougongs. Anything, really. Columns? Roofs? All of it. Because timber is super easy to carve, so it’s easy to decorate.

And roof tiles are all mass-produced, so the casting mold can make them pretty.

You might have noticed that there’s a lot of red in here. That’s because, after all we’ve done to protect our wood, it still needs protection from the Sun and rain, so it must be coated. Some of the coats don’t have much color, but those that did were frequently red, as it’s the most common dye color that exists. Imperial buildings used the less common cinnabar, which you might associate with opulent traditional Chinese buildings.

Of course, there are a million other specificities of Chinese architecture, but what I find fascinating about all of this is that so many of these specificities are the result of simple geographic differences—in the case of China, the widespread use of timber instead of stone.

Japan

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Towers of concrete, steel and glass. We mourn for the traditional architectures of yesteryear, without realizing why.

Why are these buildings the same everywhere?

And why were they so different before? Is it just a matter of globalization, or is there something more?

Here’s a little known fact: A lot of the world’s architecture was the consequence of geography.

In some cases, it’s easy to see, such as steep roofs in places with heavy snowfall.

But the depth of the influence of geography is hard to grasp. So today, we’re going to take a trip across different world architectures to see how geography influenced them: Egypt, Ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, and Britain. As we do, we’re not just going to learn why things are the way they are, we’re also going to understand what elements we could bring back to our architectural styles today.

British Stone

Here’s a map of Britain’s soils, along with some of its most notable architecture.

The island’s geology changes strikingly, from oldest in the north to youngest in the south. Every type of stone gave birth to a different type of architecture.

Aberdeen is famous for its dark granite. We can also find granite in southwest England around Dartmoor, and sure enough, there, homes tend to be made of granite. Edinburgh has sandstone, evident in its sand-colored buildings. Golden limestone is common around Bristol, and old country houses are golden as a result. The soil in the surroundings of London is the result of sediment accumulation, so there’s much less stone to go around. But there’s clay, which can be made into bricks. Sure enough, London is full of brick buildings. The chalk in South and East England is too brittle for walls, but use timber frames, fill the wall with twigs, wet soil and straw, and then whitewash it with a solution made with chalk, and these homes can last centuries if well maintained. For the roof, use thatch.

Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, the cheapness of canal and train transportation meant bricks for walls and Welsh slate for roofs could be used everywhere, so they were.1

So stone is important. But it’s not all-encompassing. What else matters? Let’s travel far back in time to Ancient Egypt to figure this out.

Ancient Egypt

What do these have in common?

1. Big monuments

2. Bold geometric lines

3. Light brown color

4. Lots of rows of things, notably columns

5. For temples and tombs

Why?

The Egyptian government always had massive power because it controlled the Nile and knew how much food it would grow, so it could tax it precisely. The farmers couldn’t escape because the country is surrounded by desert and sea. So the government was extremely powerful and had lots of resources at its disposal.

If you want to project power, the best way to do that is to build big things.

But building technology is not very advanced. If you make a big column of stuff, it falls. How do you build a huge thing so that it doesn’t break and fall apart? You pile matter into a mountain.

Stacked mass is the simplest way to create stable height. That’s why we find it across the world, not just in Egypt.

Stacked mass has another benefit: If you can make an indoor space inside, It protects you from temperature swings because of the thermal mass stored in the stone/dirt.

But these spaces must be small: All that mass risks collapsing on you. As a result, no grand indoor halls, only small rooms.

With flat roofs, because why would you slant them? It’s difficult and expensive, and unnecessary in places with little rain like in Egypt.

The rooms you do have need plenty of columns to support them.

But you want to make lots of big columns, so everybody knows you’re such a powerful ruler! So you’re going to use your millions of minions to build many rows of these columns. Except how do you coordinate these minions? You need to standardize. Most columns, or rows of stuff, need to be as similar as possible.

You haven’t learned yet how to do arches well, so the moment your windows are too big, your walls fall. So small windows.

Notice how it’s also very axial: Lots of these buildings are constructed along a main line (axis).

Axial architecture is meant to wow you as you arrive and follow the line towards the entrance. These structures tend to be organized along cosmic lines, like cardinal directions, solstices, etc.

If you’re aligned with the stars, your architecture is cosmic, it has meaning tied to the sun, the moon and the stars, so you as a ruler surely must be cosmically ordained.

Since you have constructed lots of big buildings and columns, you now have all these surfaces. What can you do with them? Maybe depict your grandiosity and how cozy you are with the gods. And since you have plenty of money and workers available, you can arrange this:

Notice how there’s plenty of carving? Stone is normally hard to carve. But not all stone. Most Egyptian architecture is made of limestone and sandstone, which is relatively soft.

Why? It’s what Egypt had available. Carrying big blocks of stone is not easy, so Egyptians mostly quarried them close to the Nile and used the river to transport them.

And Egypt used to be a shallow ocean—Tethys. This is why today it has some of the biggest depressions on Earth, enough to make them into seas again.

As a shallow seabed, it teemed with life, so its floor got covered by those sediments: shells. As they compressed, they became limestone. As sand compressed, it became sandstone. They are both a similar white-brownish color.2

Both are easy to work with copper tools, and hold up well when compressed, so they’re ideal to cut and stack as blocks to form shapes. Which is why Egyptian blocks are so geometrically accurate, unlike those in Mycenae:

The grandiosity, the connection with the seasons and the cosmos… all of this fits well with the Ancient Egyptian mindset—a civilization that lasted thousands of years with very little change, because the geography is so stable:

• The Nile’s annual flooding, which was measurable, cyclical, drove all work, and generated the most wealth (and the food needed to survive!)

• Isolated from other civilizations through desert and sea

• Strong governmental control because it’s so easy to tax the Nile’s production, so state stability

And that’s how you get the Egyptian Aesthetic:

• Mostly limestone and sandstone, and their ochre colors

• Their tech was ideal for compression, not spanning, so no windows, no big indoor spaces

• But lots of resources, so just pile up stuff and create many of the same thing

• Focus it all on your grandiosity: big piles of stuff, long lines of columns/decorations, all along a strong, impressive line, aligned with the cosmos to create a sense of godlike legitimacy

• Flat roofs: just protect against the Sun and its heat, not rain

• Market yourself through messaging on the walls, mostly through carving, adding color when possible

• It all fits the philosophy of the place: not dynamism, progress, or experimentation, but permanence, continuity, and repetition.

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Ancient Greece

While Egypt is flat and desertic, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greece is extremely mountainous.

This is because Africa subsided for a long time below Eurasia, and pushed the mountains up on the European and Asian side.

With so many mountains, Greece has abundant workable stone, including limestone, but also another type that was uncommon in Egypt—marble.

Marble starts as limestone: shells and tiny marine organisms that are compressed together, with other particles that cement them and some void that forms between them. That makes it easy to carve, but you can’t use too much detail or your edges will round or chip.

When limestone goes deeper down inside the Earth, it gets more compressed and heated. These particles fuse into interlocked crystals. These are much harder to separate, so the stone is harder and breaks more cleanly, as crystals remain together. You can polish these crystals into a very smooth surface, and their varying angles will scatter light in different directions, making the stone shiny and luminous.3

Naturally, the Greeks played with the ability to finely shape the marble and with its light. For example, notice the vertical lines on these columns? They’re called flutes.

In hard Mediterranean light, small changes in depth create strong shadows. Since the flutes surround the columns, the sun will hit different flutes differently, creating different shadows. Together, all these alternating lights and shadow lights give a sense of vertical elegance to the temples, multiplying the effect of the columns themselves.

Marble allows you to play with light and shadow much more than other types of stone.

Columns shouldn’t be perfectly straight, though, because the base carries more weight than the top, and the center tends to bulge because it’s not as supported as the top of the bottom, so the Greeks used entasis:

Notice the pediment, the triangular shape on top of the columns three pictures back? Why triangular? Because it had to hold a slanted roof to evacuate rain—something that was not needed in Egypt because it basically never rains there, given the difference in latitudes.

Thankfully, Greece also has access to plenty of clay that could be fired for roof tiles, something that temples had at the time, which many people don’t realize because roofs crumble more than columns, so most Greek architecture doesn’t show them anymore.

You need something to support that roof and pediment—the lintel, that horizontal beam that spans across columns.

And since we’re in the mountains here in Greece, the ground is uneven, so you need to place your temple on top of a platform to even it out, the stepped platform.4

We have now rebuilt from first principles the most iconic aspects of Greek architecture.

Notice another detail about this type of architecture:

Marble can be cut with extreme precision. When two marble blocks are perfectly dressed, the contact surface is large, the friction is high, and compression loads transfer cleanly, preventing blocks from sliding.

Stonemasons realized they could make do without cement, which added a paste that was less elegant, uneven, and was actually bad for earthquakes—of which there are a fair amount in the region, if you recall the tectonics. With sufficient precision, dry contact is stronger than cement.

You can’t just pile blocks and hope they don’t move at all, though, especially during earthquakes, so masons carved a hole in the blocks and placed iron clamps to hold them together.

The post-and-lintel structure (columns with a beam on top of them) doesn’t allow for big indoor spaces, so these temples were not designed to hold lots of people, just the statue of the temple’s god and a few other artifacts.

As a result, congregations happened outdoors. Altars were in front of the temples, and that’s where animal sacrifices were held.

Why have a temple at all then? First, because it provided shade on hot days and cover on rainy days. Second, it was a way to convey wealth and success. This meant that the external appearance of the temple was more important than the inside. Hence the flutes and the entasis, and also all other kinds of decorations.

Early on, the style of column tops was pretty basic (Doric), but as time went by, the Greeks explored ways to decorate them further without jeopardizing temple integrity. With the Ionic, and later Corinthian styles, they achieved thinner columns and added more flutes and decorations. The same was true of the friezes above the columns.

These styles evolved relatively fast, because architecture was one of the ways to compete with other Greek city-states, and there were many.

With so many mountains, Greece couldn’t connect overland easily, and ended up with lots of small valleys developing semi-independent cities in each.

You can see some of them if you zoom in on the region:

I assume that most architecture at the time was trial and error, but errors in architecture are bad, so when builders found new, better shapes, others would adopt the same recipe without questioning it too much, and this resulted in pretty standardized sizes for any architectural element: column height, width, spacing, size of pediments, of friezes… everything.

We can see how so many aspects of Ancient Greek architecture are direct results of the region’s geography (and the technology they had at the time): mountains, sunlight, and infrequent rains:

• Mountains provided lots of stone, including marble, which promoted the development of precision masonry

• Mountains are also uneven ground for construction, so Greeks developed bases (crepidoma) of one or more levels for their buildings

• The harsh sun necessitated shade, which required columns to support a roof

• The harsh sun, together with precision masonry, pushed the aesthetic limits: flutes, capitals, friezes, perfect stone blocks, waiving cement

• But since there’s also rain in the region, roofs had to be sloped, with tiles, which begat the triangular pediment

• The technology was not advanced enough to allow for big indoor spaces though, so most ceremonies still happened outdoors.

In other words: Although Greece is just across the Mediterranean from Egypt, its slightly different geography (more mountains, more rain)5 brought a different architectural language.

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This is enough for today. We’ve seen how geology determines the stone available, and how that drives the type of architecture that is possible and unfolds. In the next article, we’re going to move to Asia, and cover India, China, and Japan, and then we’re going to bring it home: Why are all buildings the same now, and how can we do them differently, if we wanted?

Iran is in the midst of a civil war between different factions of the IRGC and the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Kurds, and the Azeris.

In the northwest, the Kurds have established an independent state. They are de facto ruling the Kurdish parts of Syria and Iraq too, and are in a low-intensity conflict with Turkey.

Azerbaijan enlarged its surface area by taking parts of northwestern Iran, but now is engulfed in a civil war itself.

Iraq is split between the northeastern Kurdistan, western ISIS, and Sunni and Shia militias and mujahideen.

Hejaz has split from Saudi Arabia, and there’s a three-way war waging between them and the Houthis to the south, in Yemen.

Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are in a defense pact under Israel, trying to suppress Palestinian guerrilla warfare together.

The former rulers of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Equatorial Guinea all live in Dubai: They escaped from the coups in their countries. They financially support Dubai’s army in its fight to secede from Abu Dhabi, which has dramatically increased national taxes to make up for the loss of oil income.

Elsewhere in the world, Russia is now a failed state ruled by oligarchs fighting it out in Moscow neighborhoods. The Stans have moved closer to China, which is ruling de facto Russia’s easternmost Siberian regions. Belarus is now a neutral state, and is working to join the EU. Its strongest supporter is EU member Ukraine.

Venezuela and Cuba are now firmly under the US’s grasp. Iran and Russia can’t afford to prop them up anymore.

Nigeria, Congo, Chad, and Angola are failed states in constant civil war.

Nobody cares about any of these.

This might happen as oil demand peaks in a few years and then drops. How could we get there? How can we avoid it? This is what we’ll discuss today.

We saw in the previous article that peak oil might come in the 2030s, and within a couple of decades, demand might have plummeted due to renewables and batteries.

This is how dependent many countries are on oil and gas income:

The average oil-rich government is 2x to 3x larger than the average non-oil government, even at the same income level. As a fraction of the economy, the governments tower over the private sector and all other actors.

Also, all this wealth is concentrated in a few physical points of extraction, so if you control them, and the transit routes to transport the oil and gas to international markets, you control all the wealth. This is why virtually all the rulers of oil countries are authoritarian: The resource curse is especially salient in oil & gas countries.

The Oil Curse

We showed how bad oil has been for democracy in Venezuela, but this is true across the world.

As countries decolonized, the more oil they had, the less democratic they became.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the more democratic countries have more accountable governments, more freedom of the press, and more freedom of association: Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey… The countries with lots of oil—Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran… have more authoritarian governments.

When a resource is easy to control and extract, whoever does the controlling also does the ruling, and they don’t need to share it with anybody. Well, just enough to keep people quiet and content. So corruption is rampant, inflation destroys other industries, citizens live off of government handouts, and these countries develop little else to offer to the world.

Countries where revenue comes from taxes rather than oil and gas are much more transparent, and spend their money on many more services than O&G countries: Taxpayers demand accountability. They want to know where their hard-earned money is going, and they want to see the results. Meanwhile, in a resource-based government, citizens are just happy to get a share of the loot. They don’t complain too much, so they can keep suckling mama government’s tit.

The lack of transparency in O&G countries leads to corruption and entrenched interests, because a lot of the revenue is hidden, so it can be diverted. Those who do the diverting accumulate the money and buy out allies, who keep them in power.

Since it’s bad optics to have much more income than spend, most of these countries update their spending in bonanza years. When commodity prices drop, their economies crash.

To avoid fiscal troughs that bring them down, they focus their spend on short-term initiatives, which means long-term infrastructure is not prioritized. When it is, revenue shortfalls means they might not be maintained, or even worse, they might be abandoned halfway through.

When the resource is exhausted, they have no fallback, and the country goes to ruin, as we saw in the previous article The Resource Cliff. Governments, without the money to finance their security apparatus, fall. This provides an opening to those who own the weapons to do the only thing they know to do—fight to capture what little power remains… and the country descends into civil war, like in Yemen.

Which countries are most exposed?

Now, imagine you’re the ruler of one of these countries. You know these things. What do you do?

Petrostate Transition

1. Deny

Many of these countries will deny this is happening. The OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) projections show an increase in overall demand for fossil fuels from now to 2045. Wishful thinking. Most of these countries won’t be properly prepared when this hits.

2. Postpone

Oil and gas countries and companies try to postpone the end of oil. The US under Trump is actually a great example—remember, the US is the world’s largest oil producer. In 2025, Trump increased subsidies for fossil fuel producers, weakened environmental laws, gutted Biden-era support for clean energy and moved to block clean energy projects, even some that were near completion. The US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January this year.

Academics split the strategies to fight the transition to renewable energies into two types:

• Pre-shift strategies, founded on explicit climate denial: spread doubt, question science, lobby, revolving doors1.

• Post-shift strategies: subtler forms of climate action delay through the readaptation of lobbying and revolving doors, the conviction that fossil fuels are irreplaceable (necessitarianism), the adoption of a green façade (greenwashing), and blame placement towards their consumers (strategic blame placement).

I think these worked in the past, but not anymore: The engine of the transition is now economic; solar, wind, and batteries are just cheaper.

Personally, if I were a Middle Eastern government, the one thing I’d do to postpone the transition is to flood the market: The more oil I produce and sell, the lower the price, and the less competitive renewables become. I think this could postpone the twilight of fossil fuels by a few years or even decades, but I don’t think they would do it: This would drop the price of barrels, on which their finances depend. Also, at this point, it might be too late, as China has firmly decided to push this transition.

3. Squeeze

If you know your oil sales are about to vanish, you have two options:

• Agree with other oil providers to limit supply over demand, so that prices remain high for as long as you can.

• Pump like there’s no tomorrow, so that you can extract as much value while you still can.

According to this paper, what will happen is the 2^nd scenario. And it makes sense: It’s hard to keep dozens of countries limiting their production when they know their wealth is devaluing by the day. Also, if they kept prices up, that would only accelerate the transition to renewables.

So if I were a ruler of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the UAE and didn’t care about the environment, right now I would be investing to extract as much oil as possible, as fast as possible. Oil that remains now in the ground will remain in the ground.

4. Try to Diversify

This is the biggest way oil countries will fight the oil transition: If you know your golden goose is sick, you’ll try to find another one. They’re going to do it by buying foreign assets, investing in local projects, opening up to the world, and improving the productivity of their population.

a. Diversify by Buying Foreign Assets

The best example of this is Norway, which instead of spending its oil wealth, invests it all, and only spends 3% of the fund every year. The money is invested in assets across the world, mainly in the stock market.2

But it’s not the only one. There are equivalents for Oman, Qatar3, Azerbaijan4, Kazakhstan, Kuwait5, Saudi Arabia… They invest across geographies and industries, from Chinese petrochemicals to French luxury to Silicon Valley startups to Indonesian mining. For example:

Saudi Arabia’s PIF [Public Investment Fund] has pumped $45bn into SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2016 and $20bn into a Blackstone infrastructure fund the following year. In the years since, it has splashed the cash in a diverse range of sectors from electric-car maker Lucid to its controversial LIV Golf venture, a cruise liner group, mining, sports assets and gaming firms. It also poured tens of billions into US and European equity markets and injected $2bn into a private equity venture set up by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The more these funds own a bit of everything, the less likely they are to lose all their money, and the more they will be able to rely on their returns for a steady future income.

Of course, they know the future of the world is in tech, so they focus on that a lot.

In March 2024, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) created MGX, a tech-investment company with a target size of $100bn, which will invest in AI infrastructure, such as data centres and chips. It has also set up a $10bn AI venture-capital fund. In Saudi Arabia a number of different funds with a combined firepower of $240bn will splurge on AI, data centres and advanced manufacturing.

E&, an Emirati telecoms company, will help to build part of a 45,000km-long subsea cable that makes its way around south Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean and Britain. A data-centre construction boom is under way, too, with the likes of Khazna, a unit of G42, and Damac, an Emirati property developer, building facilities.

Gulf companies are building data centres abroad, too. Damac is a longstanding business partner of Donald Trump, helping him manage golf courses in the Middle East (Hussain Sajwani, its boss, is known as the “Donald of Dubai”). On January 8th Mr Trump said that Damac would invest at least $20bn in data centres in America.

The Gulf recorded almost $8bn of foreign direct investment in tech infrastructure and another $2bn in software in 2024, up three-fold from 2017, according to fDi Markets, a data firm. Talent is moving, too. BCG, a consultancy, says that the AI talent pool in the UAE and Saudi Arabia has grown by over one-third and almost a fifth, respectively, since 2022.—The Economist

b. Diversify through Local Projects

These countries realize they’ll need jobs for their citizens, too. They might also be wary of their foreign assets being seized. So they’re investing in national projects. The best example of this is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with about one trillion USD to invest. Half of that is invested in Saudi assets, on projects summarized in its Vision 2030. We’ll talk about this when we cover the special case of Saudi Arabia’s future in an upcoming article.

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c. Diversify by Developing Their Citizens’ Productivity

But if these countries develop their citizens’ abilities and make them more productive, maybe they can create as much wealth as what’s pumped from the ground today?

So these countries invest a lot in education and healthcare. Why do you think Saudi Arabia has started allowing women to work?6

This is a great start, but it’s not enough. Take Kuwait for example, with over 90% of government income from oil. They’d need the tax base of the rest of the economy to grow by 1000% to make up for the loss of oil. Normal productivity gains are 2% per year, and that’s in a dynamic economy like the US’s. How are these oil countries supposed to get their unproductive citizens, who have never had to fight in a hypercompetitive labor market, to suddenly become superproductive? It would take more than a generation to get there!

d. Diversify by Opening to the World

So one way to make up for it is to learn from the best: Welcome foreigners who can bring their know-how. This is the context in which many of these countries now allow alcohol consumption, despite being haram7. But why would foreigners go to countries like Saudi, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, or Kuwait, knowing they prioritize their own citizens? Wouldn’t they prefer going to Dubai, which has a track-record of openness, tolerance, and low taxes?

But foreigners don’t need to move for work to add value. They can also visit as tourists, and that’s why so many of these countries invest in this industry. Why do you think Abu Dhabi has a Louvre Museum?

It’s amazing, by the way. And so is teamLab’s installation there.

Abu Dhabi wants a full cultural district with facilities like these in Saadiyat Island.

It has also recently built the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Presidential Palace, Yas Island Attractions (Ferrari World, Warner Bros World, Yas Waterworld, Seaworld Abu Dhabi)... Abu Dhabi is among the most aggressive in this direction, but there are only so many trips people can take. Other countries will be competing for the same visitors.

What are the results of these efforts so far? There’s some progress, but in most countries, not near enough to escape the black hole of the future fossil fuel crash,8 so despite their diversification efforts, many will have to take more drastic measures, like selling assets and reducing costs.

5. Sell Assets

Oil prices have already shrunk by 40% since their peak in 2022.9 As a result, many O&G countries are already facing financial problems, and some have been forced to sell assets.10 For example:

• Kuwait is planning to sell a $7B pipeline stake in February of this year.

• Saudi Aramco plans to raise $64B through privatizations in the next five years, including a $4B power plant sale within weeks.

• Oman is aiming at divesting from 30 companies.

• Nigeria is selling at least a 25% stake in some oil and gas fields.

• Angola plans to privatize over 70 companies, including the sale of 30% of the state oil company Sonangol in an IPO.

• Kazakhstan’s sovereign fund plans to divest from several state-run companies to privatize them.

This is good not just because it raises money for their states, but also because it professionalizes the management of the assets (making them more productive), reduces corruption and vested interests, and if it works well, it encourages foreigners to invest further in the countries.

The more prices fall, the more assets these countries will have to sell. Unfortunately, one-off sales might not be enough to cover ongoing spending.

6. Reduce Costs

So after trying to deny, and then postpone the reality of dwindling oil demand, they will try to squeeze oil sales, diversify their economy, and sell some assets. After all of that, most will still be short, so they will have to reduce their recurring costs pretty dramatically.

The first step is to shrink the share of citizens receiving benefits. This is what the new Kuwaiti emir has done: He has stripped tens of thousands of Kuwaitis from their citizenship, to:

…deliver Kuwait to its original people clean and free from impurities.

The following step? Reducing benefits to natives, including as education, healthcare, subsidies, civil servant jobs, and at some point, direct transfers.

That’s when people will revolt.

What will happen then?

The Breakdown of the Current Order

1. More democracy

Countries will have one of these options:

1. Transition to democracy.

2. Keep an iron grip on their countries’ politics. Become more authoritarian. Strengthen the secret police.

It does look like countries tend to move towards democracy after they reach their peak oil production:

If I had to guess, this will be more common than people think:

• The Arab Spring showed that many people in the Middle East and North Africa want more democracy.

• It’s not surprising, since many citizens from these countries have experienced the freedom and democracy of neighboring Europe.

• Since then, mobile phones and social media have become widely accessible, increasing the flow of information from free countries towards more authoritarian ones.

Inshallah.

2. More Repression

But in many countries, this transition won’t happen. So far, no country with as much oil wealth as Libya or Iraq, or even with half as much oil wealth as those, has ever made a successful transition to democracy.

Even if democratic elections are held, and the results are respected, those might well be the last meaningful elections, as whoever gains control of the central government is able to establish a kind of monopoly on power that precludes future challenges.

That’s if elections are held and if they’re respected.

3. Failed states

In many cases, internal conflict might prevail, people won’t agree on leadership, and they’ll fall into civil wars and states of anarchy.

Russia (the USSR) invaded Afghanistan when oil prices were high, it became a failed state when prices shrank, Putin could only consolidate power when oil prices started growing again, and he went to war with Georgia and annexed Crimea when they were highest.

We saw something similar in Yemen, where revenue grew after unification and when it shrank, civil war exploded. Libya has been in a civil war ever since Gaddafi was deposed in 2011.

4. Less Global Islamic Influence

Whether they become democracies or not, their revenue will dry up, and with it their influence initiatives.

Muslim-majority countries constitute only about 23% of all countries,11 but by sheer coincidence, they control ~51% of oil exports. Not just in the Middle East. In sub-Saharan Africa (Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, which has a plurality of Muslims), South East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan)...

Some of this revenue has been dedicated to projecting Islam around the world:

• Promotion of the practice and teaching of Islam, especially Salafi / Wahhabi:

  • Mosque construction, including monumental ones

  • Religious schools

  • Islamic universities

  • Imam salaries

  • Religious materials

• International Islamic organizations, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim World League, or the Islamic Development Bank

• Islamist parties, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood

• International media such as Al Jazeera

• Disaster relief and refugee aid

As these countries’ incomes shrink, their international influence initiatives will shrink too—especially from the countries that become failed states.

What about changes elsewhere in the world?

5. Russia Loses Superpower Status

Russia is the one big superpower whose influence relies mainly on energy, as 30% of the government’s revenue comes from it. Lose the energy, and the country becomes fiscally insolvent. No more military incursions into neighboring countries, no more use of force to bully satellite countries like Belarus or Kazakhstan. Russia will have to withdraw from Central Asia, and won’t be able to maintain its support of governments like those in Cuba or Venezuela.

This won’t happen immediately, though, as a big share of Russia’s income comes from gas, which will take longer to be replaced than oil.

6. Small Countries Suffer Too

So far, we’ve talked mostly about the Middle East and North Africa, but there are other oil producers in the world.

Venezuela will be particularly affected by the transition, as most of its government’s income comes from oil, but it’s expensive to extract, so this will be among the first countries where oil companies will stop investing. The country will be forced to diversify, and some options it has include mining and agriculture, like its neighbor Brazil.

Congo, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Ecuador, and Nigeria are other countries that will see their coffers empty and will suffer tremendously. Expect some to become stronger democracies, and most to fall into civil war or into failed state status.

And as some players weaken, others strengthen.

7. Energy Security for Consumers

Structurally, oil suppliers and demanders were at odds:

• Democracies tend to develop faster, so they demand more oil

• As we have seen, oil supply tends to produce authoritarian regimes

• Democracies and authoritarian regimes tend to be at odds, because democracies challenge the monopoly on power of authoritarian regimes

So the world evolved into authoritarian suppliers of oil and democratic demanders. For decades, these global politics have hit consumers:

This will happen less and less, as wind and sunlight are much better distributed around the world.

Not only will energy be more reliable, but it will also be cheaper! Yay!

8. The Weakening of the US – Middle East Alliance

Before the US was a net exporter of oil and gas, it depended on the Middle East’s fuels. Knowing this, the US developed a long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and other oil producers in the region: They provided the oil, and the US provided the security.

Once the oil becomes less important, so will that alliance.

Middle Eastern countries will have to find new alliances. The obvious one is China—to whom Saudi Arabia sells more oil than to the US, for example. India is another partner these countries have been getting closer to. And, as the region becomes less relevant internationally, regional politics will become more important, with Israel as the biggest emerging power in the region (and maybe Iran if it frees itself from the current regime).

9. China’s Power Rise

China was one of the countries most weakened by the importance of oil and gas. Releasing the importance of these resources is a boon for the country.

Also, the US is the world’s maritime superpower, so it could control the chokepoints of oil and gas distribution.

But if oil doesn’t flow through these straits anymore, the US can’t threaten China with energy famine anymore.

China is also the biggest provider of solar panels and batteries, and one of the biggest producers of the rare-earth metals they require. It will gain a commensurate amount of power.

Now, solar panels and batteries aren’t as critical as oil and gas, because solar panels and batteries are a fixed cost that lasts decades, while O&G are difficult and expensive to store, and are depleted with use, so they require ongoing purchases.

However, even if China excels at manufacturing, it’s not easy to keep these secrets under lock and key. Other countries could manufacture these products, even if not as cheaply. This reduces the leverage that China would have on other countries compared to what oil countries have today.

10. Importance of Rare Earth Minerals?

Today, China produces most of the world’s rare earth minerals, necessary for solar panels and batteries, among other things. But I don’t think that’s a long-term advantage: It’s not like these minerals only exist in China; it’s simply that China has been the most diligent in finding and mining them. The more China weaponizes their trade, the more other countries will look for these minerals—and find them.

11. EU Energy Independence

The EU is the other big importer of energy. It also produces solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, albeit less than China. So it will gain the same benefits from the elimination of energy supply constraints as China.12

Another benefit of this transition for Europe will be the fact that it has been hobbled by the internal push to transition to green energy, which has brought it astronomical energy prices, and with those, industry has withered. As energy prices shrink and become similar to those in other countries, this disadvantage will fade.

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Takeaways

We are likely to reach Peak Oil in the next few years, and fossil fuel consumption will drop in the following decades, replaced by wind, solar, batteries, and electrification. When that happens, there will be big shifts in the world:

For oil and gas countries:

• They will try to fight this as much as possible, by pumping more oil, buying foreign assets, diversifying their economies, and attracting international talent and visitors.

• This won’t be enough, and they’ll have to sell assets and reduce their costs, which will cause regime change:

  • Democracy is likely to increase

  • Many will try to become more authoritarian

  • Some will become failed states

• The international influence of them all will dwindle. Since Islam is overrepresented in oil and gas countries, its influence will be particularly affected.

• But the impact will not be limited to countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It will also affect others around the world, including Gabon, Angola, Nigeria, Brunei…

• Russia’s superpower status will be challenged. It’s unlikely it will be able to maintain its sphere of influence.

For the rest:

• Every consumer around the world will have more energy security. This is great for consumers.

• The Middle East will shift its alliances, probably towards countries like China, India, and Israel.

• China becomes the biggest winner, mainly because today it’s the country most weakened by this system and is working hard to position itself as a frontrunner of renewable energy technology.

• Europe will be the other big winner, as it’s been hindered by its huge energy consumption, and the resulting high energy prices.

Overall, I think these changes are good for freedom, for consumers, and for the world in general. This is exciting!

I wrote about this specific topic almost a year ago. I also wrote about Iran’s geopolitics, why Iran’s current government hates Israel and the US so much, and whether Iran was going to continue pursuing the nuclear bomb. Today’s article continues the series.

The War so Far

Israel and the US are bombing military and political leaders and assets throughout Iran, killing most notably its leader, Khamenei. Iran has retaliated with over 1,000 missiles and drones targeting Israel, US bases in the region, and even tourist areas like iconic hotels and the airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi (UAE), Doha (Qatar), and Kuwait.

The next few days are going to be decisive: They’re a race between Iran’s missiles and drones, US and Israeli bombings of Iran to eliminate them, missile and interceptor stockpile depletion, and the patience of all parties. Neither the Iranian nor Israeli governments are likely to blink: They are fighting a war of survival. But the US and Gulf Countries might, depending on how stockpiles and losses evolve.

How did we get here?

Why Israel & the US Attacked Iran Again

Two reasons:

1. Iran’s regime can never become friendly, because a big part of its legitimacy comes from vilifying the US and Israel. These countries decided to attack now because they still can.

2. The US is systematically working to dismantle China’s international sources of power, and Iran is a bastion of that power.

Iran’s Hatred Towards the US and Israel

This section is a quick summary of this article.

Persia’s Shah used to be aligned with the West: He modernized the country, invited foreign investments, built a lot of infrastructure, improved literacy and healthcare…

The radical Islamists didn’t like this modernization, so they allied with the local Left to gain power, and succeeded in 1979.1 This means the entire legitimacy of the regime is based on opposing the US, its allies, and its values.

The Regime Change Israel & the US Want

This would not have been a problem if Iran had limited itself to hating the US and Israel. Instead, they’ve threatened to attack and eliminate them for the last 47 years, and they haven’t limited themselves to empty threats. They’ve developed ballistic missile and nuclear weapon programs to be able to obliterate Israel, and maybe attack the US too.

For the last few decades, the US and Israel have tried to manage the situation, but the closer Iran is to getting nuclear weapons, the less they can tolerate it. Until recently, they were forced to because Iran was quite strong, with proxies in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. But after October 7^th 2023, Israel has systematically eliminated most of them, so it and the US saw an opening last year to weaken Iran and its nuclear program, and took it. But that was just a delay. The truth is they will only be safe when this regime falls.

The problem is that achieving regime change is going to be very difficult.

The Difficulty of Regime Change in Iran

Even if the US and Israel suppress Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, that won’t be enough to topple the government. No air-only attack has ever achieved that, and you can’t put boots on the ground in Iran. It’s a mountain fortress. Think Afghanistan in 2001, but with nearly 5x the population and much richer.

The recent strikes have killed the existing Supreme Leader, but there’s a long chain of command to replace him and any other leader killed through strikes. Then, there’s Khamenei’s Bayt, a group of 4,000 close employees who manage Khamenei’s affairs and power, and work as a shadow government mirroring the official one.

The organization is structured in an opaque way to prevent the entire chain of command from being wiped out, and was controlled by Khamenei and his four sons.

Through this body, Khamenei controlled the BMEE and AQR2, huge conglomerates of over 200 companies with interests in real estate, construction, industry, mining, energy, power, food, agriculture, tourism, transportation, IT, media…

Khamenei’s Bayt was also able to infiltrate the military and the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), a kind of Praetorian Guard with over 125,000 members sourced from the Basij militia, a bigger group of ~400,000 poor, Shia radical volunteers (and 25 million members!!) who police the country on behalf of the government.

All these groups have been groomed for decades to respond to the Khameneis and to instrumentalize radical Shia Islam ideas against Israel and the US. They’ve also been structured to withstand several layers of decapitation, so that they can work in a semi-autonomous structure. This is why Iran attacked Oman, for example. It wasn’t an order from the top.

That said, the military is different from the religious leaders. A very possible scenario would see IRGC military leaders taking power, either as a group like in Egypt, or with one general or faction prevailing after an internal struggle. If they do, however, the policy towards the US and Israel is likely to stay the same. So how are the US and Israel supposed to eliminate (or navigate) the web of clerics and IRGC military members through aerial bombs?!

By weakening these sources of power and empowering others.

Bombs

If it’s true that the US and Israel are fighting for regime change, they will keep bombing the IRGC, Basij, and police, prioritizing their leaders. This is not something that can be achieved quickly. It will take a very long time, probably weeks or months of bombing.

Economy

45% of the Iranian government’s income comes from oil.3 If the US and Israel prevent Iran from selling its oil, its income will dry up, and it won’t be able to pay salaries. My guess is the Iranian regime will prioritize IRGC, Basij, and military salaries, but even then, losing 50% of your income can’t be easy. Unfortunately, this takes some time to bite, as the government will use other resources to pay its forces for as long as possible, and people can sometimes withstand some time without a salary.

Civil Society

That said, in the past, small business owners and professionals have coordinated to strike against the government. They are not organized—the Islamists took care of any leader or organization that could threaten their monopoly on power—but they can coordinate in times of need. If they feel a power vacuum, they might push for regime change.

The People

The vast majority of Iranians are tired of their government.

They are now celebrating the bombings on the streets.

Confirmed popular celebrations of the bombing against the Iranian regime

Iranians know there are alternatives to the government they’ve suffered over the last few decades—especially now with social media access to the lifestyles of modern societies. But the people have already fought in the past, and have been decimated. Most recently, in the Crimson Winter of 2025-2026, tens of thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed.

Not only that: They fear their government, but even more they fear a civil war. Which might come with an internecine fight in the IRGC, or for example with the military. So the people might protest and pressure the government, but they won’t be enough to topple it.

The Military

As we discussed, the military is managed independently from the IRGC, precisely to split the power and prevent a coup.

But this protection from the military by distancing it works in everyday situations, not when there’s a power vacuum. The military might see an opportunity to benefit from the situation and fight the IRGC. I’ve already read reports of the military sitting out repression actions against the people.

Minorities

Less than half of Iran’s population is ethnic Persian!

The strongest minorities are the Azeris and Kurds.

• Neighboring Azerbaijan would enjoy seeing its co-ethnics gain more autonomy or even independence from Tehran.

• Kurds have carved out autonomous regions in Iraq and Syria, and this would be another opportunity to gain further autonomy or even statehood—something that was promised to them by the US in the Iraq war but couldn’t be fulfilled would be much easier to fulfill here, as it would benefit the US to split Iran up.

• Baluchis are a smaller population, but they’re in a much more remote, desertic region, with some on the other side of the border with Afghanistan.

Imagine this then: Hundreds of thousands of armed IRGC, Basij, and military members, trained to operate independently, splintering into factions, with no senior leadership because most of them are dead; Azeris, Kurds, Balochis, Arabs Lurs, Mazanis, Gilak, all clamoring for autonomy and even independence; a faction of the population that hates the regime, others who are pro-democracy groups, anti-Muslims, pro-Zoroastrians, pro-Muslims but anti-regime, pro-Shah; in the middle of an economic crisis, a food crisis, a hyperinflation crisis, a water crisis; all buying the weapons that have suddenly appeared in the black market from looted armories and bases.

And everybody knows this, and everybody knows that everybody knows it. Everybody has seen Syria’s fall into civil war and subsequent destruction. They all fear the putrid smell of the cadavers that pile up in civil wars. Some will try to avoid it, but others will take advantage of it. We’re reaching a point of no return.

A New Kingmaker

The US and Israel won’t be in a position to put boots on the ground because of Iran’s sheer size and geography, but they can still play kingmakers. They can bomb whichever enemy faction is prevailing, or simply decapitate it—basically a continuation of what they’re doing right now, except against whoever emerges as a hostile regime.

This makes them kingmakers, and makes it much less likely that any new regime that emerges picks up the hostility of the Islamic revolution. If the current regime falls, we don’t know what will come after, but we can make a pretty educated guess that it will be nicer to Western powers.

International Ramifications

But the cataclysmic changes are not limited to Iran’s borders. The entire world is reorganizing.

Oil

The first consequence is oil. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, many oil pumping stations and refineries have been hit in the area, and oil has stopped flowing. This will put pressure across the world too as oil prices increase.

This is not a problem for the US, though, as it produces its own oil.

Saudi Arabia can ramp up supply, and employ an east-west pipeline that should be able to bypass the strait. It won’t be enough to counter the entire drop in supply, but it might end up benefiting Saudi Arabia through higher oil prices.

Meanwhile, the biggest consumer of Iranian oil is China, but it has historically high oil and gas reserves, so it might be able to withstand the war if it’s short enough.

Regional Politics

Maybe Iran’s stupidest move in the last few years has been its direct attack on so many Arab neighbors: the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan…

I get it: Maybe a barrage of attacks will teach them a lesson and they’ll withdraw any support to the US. But even if they do that, they will now do everything they can to undermine Iran. A neighbor who can send hundreds of missiles your way is not one you want to see survive. Nearly the entire Arabian Peninsula is now united against Iran.

Israel

Which pushes them towards Israel. Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE were already at peace with it. Why wouldn't others join, especially Saudi Arabia?

The case of Qatar is the most surprising. It has frequently supported Iran over the decades. And yet it received a barrage of attacks from Iran, including striking the biggest natural gas facility in the world. How is it going to remain an ally of the Iranian regime after this?

Arabs will have to choose between an outdated and aggressive Islamic Regime and an Israel (and by extension, the West) that offers might, wealth, and doesn't threaten them with violence as long as they don’t threaten it back. Who are they going to choose?

Russia

When Trump was voted in, it seemed like the US would withdraw its help to Ukraine and Russia could prevail. Trump did exactly that, but the EU stepped in and replaced all its support.

Then, Russia lost the client states of Venezuela and Cuba. Musk withdrew the ability of Russia’s forces to use Starlink in the battlefront, and now it might lose Iran’s support, including its Shahed drones.

In the short term, the Iranian situation might benefit Russia through higher oil prices, giving its economy a much needed boost. Unless the US and Saudi Arabia are able to make up for the supply shortage by increasing the oil they’re pumping and sending to the world.

The Balance of Power of Cold War II

Four years ago, China had collected anti-US friends in Russia, Iran and its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Hamas and the Houthis, Venezuela, Cuba, and a host of satellites considering whether to join them or not. Israel took care of Iran’s acolytes. The US neutralized Venezuela, Cuba is isolated and cut off from oil, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and Iran is at risk of falling. Virtually every friend that China has cultivated over the last few years is crumbling.

Not only that, but China’s standing as a provider of technology and military power is completely exposed. If China won’t come to the rescue of its allies, and its weapons can’t stop the US, who will want to side with them?

Then there’s the oil. Venezuela and Iran together accounted for 17% of China’s oil imports.

This is a bad day for China.

But its leaders are not stupid. It’s not a coincidence that it’s investing heavily in solar panels, batteries, drones, AI, and robots. In a few years, it might have eliminated its dependence on foreign oil the way the US did over a decade ago by investing in its homegrown sources of energy. With AI, drones, robots, and its industrial might, it’s becoming a formidable economic and industrial powerhouse, and normally these are the ones that win wars.

So the US might have won this battle, but it’s far from winning the war.

A New Global Order

Trump is rewriting the rules of war, too. Instead of assuming that regime change requires invasions, he succeeded at it in Venezuela with just a strategy of decapitation. Cuba may be the next candidate in line. If the US succeeds in Iran, it will have proven this is a viable geopolitical and military strategy. Even if it doesn’t, leaders from other countries might become more pliable if they know that too much hostility sends them into a coffin.

The Day After in Iran

It’s unclear what will happen in the coming days, but if we dream a bit, what would happen if the regime were replaced by one focused on progress and development without a civil war?

The first few days would be critical. Sanctions would have to be released immediately, foreign assets should be unfrozen, and oil would have to flow again, but this is unlikely to raise money fast enough to secure the transition. Iran would need about $2 billion/month of funding to pay civil servants and military salaries, fund essential services, finance reconstruction, import food and medicine, and stabilize the currency.

If all that is done correctly, Iran has a shot at becoming a success story like South Korea.

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Iran has 90M people, nearly twice South Korea’s population. 42% of them are under 25, and they have a 98% literacy rate. The country birthed one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, the first empire, and has seen a succession of successful ones through the ages. Its diaspora in the world—especially in the US—is educated, rich, and powerful. It could fund and provide the leadership for a renaissance in the country.

But only if the current regime falls.

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He has to transition the biggest conservative petrostate in the world into a modern, diversified economy. The odds are stacked impossibly against him. To understand why, and how likely he is to succeed, we need to understand the three words that encapsulate his predicament: Saudi, Arabia, and Oil.

Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a big country.

It’s big, and it sits in the middle of an otherwise pretty divided region:

Why is the region so divided? Because it’s in the middle of everything.

Virtually everything that moves between Europe, Asia, and Africa moves along the border seas of Arabia, pretty close to the coast because the passages are narrow:

That has been true for millennia.

This means that trading posts appeared along its coasts for millennia, and cosmopolitan kingdoms emerged:

That’s one of the main reasons Saudi Arabia is surrounded by so many smaller countries along the coasts, including Jordan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrein, and Kuwait.

Before Saudi Arabia, the peninsula had only been united for about 200 years, between 650 and 860 AD, through the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates. Why not longer?

It’s nearly all desert. Why? Like the Sahara, it’s smack in the middle of the horse latitudes, with dry air coming down from the upper atmosphere preventing humid air from coming in from elsewhere and raining on the region.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers! It only has wadis, ephemeral river beds that only occasionally carry water after rain. You can actually tell how dry it is simply by looking at the satellite image—there’s a bit of rocks and water, and the rest is just infinite amounts of sand.

Dune

The sand is so sandy that there are dunes up to 250 m high!

Although to my ignorant eye, it all looks like desert, the locals can distinguish the nuances and have different names for each. The three big sand-dune deserts are Nafud, Dahna, and Rub’al Khali (the Empty Quarter in English).

The Empty Quarter is so vast that, to this day, no road crosses it!

Why is the west rockier?

The Red Sea and the Sarawat Mountains

You can see here the relative elevation of the west:

Where does that come from?

The Arabian-Nubian Shield was a big rocky mountain formation that was then split by the Red Sea. Now the mountains remain on both sides of the sea, and the east part (the Arabian Shield) has some pretty tall mountains!

These mountains are so high that sometimes it snows in Yemen, and even in Saudi Arabia!

You can get a sense of the coastal escarpment here.

This coastal range is called the Sarawat Mountains.

Thanks to its altitude, it catches the rainwater coming from Africa and the Red Sea.

Fun fact: It mostly catches water from the African monsoon!

That rain is necessary for the population to grow:

That’s why the historic kingdoms on the west coast, on the Red Sea, were traditionally the more powerful ones: They had the access to trade and they had the population. This is where you find the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, and Taif, and the birth of Islam.

These coastal regions are also the most exposed to foreign powers: Trade moves in very narrow corridors, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, which can be easily controlled through three choke points.

This is why most regional empires controlled only parts of the coasts—especially those of the Red Sea, crucial for Europe-Asian trade—but not the interior:

But the capital of Saudi Arabia is not in this richer, populous region! It’s in Riyadh, nearer the center, in a more desertic region called the Nadj. Why?

The Najd

The Najd is basically the Arabian Shield outside of the coast.1

Thanks to the mountains, it still catches some rain and humidity. This water follows gravity, so it usually concentrated around wadis—riverbeds that dry up during parts of the year but are generally more humid than the surrounding areas, and can sustain vegetation.

Where water accumulates it can form oases, or if the water table is close to the surface, it can be pumped. This is what formed settlements in the region.

Since water is so precious, these settlements needed protection:

Some of these wadi-fed settlements are cities in Najd today:

You can easily see them in satellite pictures:

And since each wadi is independent from the others, the region ended up with several independent settlements—which, naturally, fought each other for these resources.

Along these wadis, where agriculture couldn’t survive, grazing could, so pastoral societies emerged shepherding goats, sheep, and especially camels.

Pastoralists are very mobile and can carry their wealth with them, so they can easily attack settlements when the need arises. Combine this with independent settlements and scarce water, and you have a recipe for intense tribal warfare.

Saudi

This is the context in which we should understand the other part of Saudi Arabia—the House of Saud.

The Al Saud family comes from Riyadh and fought other tribes to prevail in the Najd, especially the Rashidi, whose wadi system was on one of the main pilgrimage paths from Mesopotamia to Mecca:

Religious Zeal

One of the keys to defeating the Rashidi was the Al Saud alliance in 1744 with the Wahhab tribe, promoters of Wahhabism. Their religious zeal brought the Al Saud family the manpower they needed to contest the region, and eventually prevail in the early 1900s after over 150 years of conflict.

We saw how the geography of the Najd gave birth to a certain type of politics. Now imagine the type of religion that can emerge there: One very centered in Arabia, Arabs, and original Muslims, that repudiates anything foreign—as there was virtually no contact with foreigners in the Najd, and when there was, they were Muslim pilgrims. The result is one of the most radically Islamist versions of Islam. To this day, Wahhabis are concentrated in the Najd.

The House of Saud brought the secular force, the Wahhabis brought the religious zeal. This alliance can be seen on the flag of Saudi Arabia:

Green represents Islam. The writing at the top is the Shahada: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” It represents the religious aspect of Saudi Arabia brought by the Wahhabis. The sword represents the secular force, the other tribe that controls power in Saudi Arabia—the Al Saud.

Note that the previous flag of Saudi Arabia was more blatant about the scimitars being the same as those of the Al Saud:

The Wahhabi were among the first to fight foreign empires in Arabia, fighting the Ottomans in the early 1800s. The Rashidis allied with them and used their power to prevail. But then the Al Saud / Wahhabis partnered with the British Empire, and as it overpowered the Ottomans, so did the Al Saud / Wahhabis. This is how the Al Saud/Wahhab alliance took over what would become Saudi Arabia, and that’s why the country is a hyperreligious monarchy to this day: It’s the result of the central Najd religious-inspired fighters taking over the rest of the peninsula from the center, just at the right moment.

Believe it or not, this entire conquest—going from nothing to retaking Riyadh to conquering all of what would become Saudi Arabia—was done under one single Al Saud ruler, Ibn Saud, AKA Abdulaziz. He then proceeded to marry over 20 women—many of them from different Arabian tribes, to cement their alliances—who gave him around 100 children. Today, the family has 15,000 people, of whom 2,000 are close to power.2

Hejaz’s Hashemites

Of course, not all of the other families are very happy about this. Most notably, the Hashemites (a family that had ruled over Mecca continuously since the 10^th Century) ruled the Kingdom of Hejaz on the west coast when the Al Saud took it. Both families had allied with the Brits during WW1, so after the Al Saud conquered Hejaz, Britain compensated the Hashemites with the kingdoms of Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq. Of those, today they only control Jordan.

The Shia

In the spirit of “making friends”… you know who the Al Saud have not married into? Many Shia.

Of course, the Wahhabis, as Sunni zealots, don’t tolerate the Shia well. Among other nice things, they attacked and sacked the Shia Mesopotamian city of Karbala in 1802 (Ottoman at the time), killing thousands, including children and women. Unfortunately for the social cohesion of the newly-formed country in the 1930s, some parts of Saudi Arabia are inhabited by Shia Muslims.

As luck would have it, the Shia region on the Persian Gulf coast in the east is where the oil is.

Oil

Just as Ibn Saud was unifying Arabia with his family and the Wahhabis, Western companies found oil in Persia (modern-day Iran), and then in Bahrain. The Saudis searched for oil and found it in 1938.

The east coast of Saudi Arabia has the biggest onshore and the biggest offshore oil fields in the world.

This is why Saudi Arabia is the 2^nd largest producer of oil in the world and the largest exporter.

But Saudi Arabia makes much more money from its oil than any other country, because its oil is much cheaper to produce.

That’s because Saudi Arabia’s oil is in huge fields, mostly onshore, near the surface, easy to access, a lot of it spurts out of the ground without much effort, and the fields are close to the coast, so it’s cheap to get it there.

As a result, oil represents about 42% of GDP… but 95% of the country’s exports.

Scarily, oil accounts for ~80% of government income!3

It’s so cheap for Saudi Arabia to pump this oil that it has built a lot of spare capacity. This is a tremendous geopolitical asset, because it can threaten other oil-producing countries with crashing oil prices by dumping millions of additional barrels of oil per day. This leverage frequently pushes them to reduce their own production to keep prices up.

How does Saudi Arabia use this oil?

The Geopolitics of Oil

Saudi Arabia spends on its military a bigger share of its income than the US. It spends more than Russia!

How come?!

Part of it is in the alliance with the US: The deal is that the US gets Saudi oil in exchange for protection, but that oil is not free, and neither is the protection. Saudi Arabia needs to pay for it.

Part of it is because the government has no legitimacy beyond that of the sword and religious radicalism, so it must make sure people are not scheming against it. This requires a big security apparatus. That’s the stick.

The carrot is to have plenty of government jobs in the military, as well as procurement budgets that can benefit important families.

But the most important factor is geopolitics, going back to this map:

The main opponent is Iran:

• It’s right next to Saudi Arabia (SA), about 150 km (~100 mi) away

• Iran is Shia, SA is Sunni.

• Yet Iran has Sunni populations and SA has Shia populations, both of which can be propped up by the opponent as internal enemies.

• Iran is an Islamic republic that took down its monarchy to replace it. Since then, it’s been trying to take down monarchies across the Muslim world, and the biggest one is Saudi Arabia’s.

• Both are the big regional players, so both vie for influence.

• Iran as a rule of thumb is pretty hostile and violent to its enemies.

• Iran has directly attacked SA in the past: It destroyed Saudi refineries with drones in 2019.

That threat has been multiplying. Iran has taken indirect control of Iraq, which has a huge border with SA that is hard to defend, as it’s in the middle of the desert.

And of course, Iran backs the Houthis—Shias in Yemen—in their civil war against the Sunnis. That war is on the border with Saudi Arabia, and SA has some Shia in that region.

Iran is the biggest threat, but it’s not the only one. Until a century ago, large parts of Arabia were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and the Turks still eye the region as they build back their strength. Both compete for the global Sunni leadership. Turkey has supported the Muslim Brotherhood while the Saudis condemn the group—and even facilitated a coup in Egypt to oust them.

Jordan and Saudi Arabia have a cordial relationship, but Jordan is still ruled by the Hashemite family, who have a strong claim to the throne of western Arabia, Hejaz. If Saudi Arabia were to weaken, and the Hashemites saw an opening to retake Hejaz, wouldn’t they take it?

Finally, we still have the issue that all the trading lanes around Saudi Arabia are narrow and have choke points. If Saudi Arabia loses them—as it has partially with the Red Sea near Bab El-Mandem with the Houthis—its entire budget is at risk. They are one blockade away from financial ruin.

This is why Saudi Arabia had to be so close with the US, and why they signed an alliance of oil-for-protection around the end of WW2. But that’s not the only balancing act that Saudi Arabia needs to maintain. It also needs to keep oil prices up, which is why it was a founding member of OPEC and raised oil prices against the US. It’s why, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it agreed with Russia (2^nd largest exporter of oil in the world) to reduce their oil output to keep prices up. It’s why it must keep China happy, as the main customer for Saudi oil. These very interests are why the US decided to invest so heavily in its own oil, and why it has become the world’s #1 producer. Thanks to that, and the rise of solar and batteries, the US’s interest in the region will continue waning. Saudi Arabia knows this. And it’s not prepared for a crash in oil demand.

The Military Bind

Saudi Arabia has 260k military personnel and spends over $60B on military gear every year, but even with the help of the other half of Yemen, it hasn’t been able to beat the Houthis.4 So the Saudi military is not that good.

This is by design. Maintaining any military force poses the risk that it will topple the government and take power, as happened in Egypt. It’s especially true in Saudi Arabia, where the government has no more legitimacy than having taken power by force. So the Al Saud systematically undermine the power of the military.

Half of the Saudi force is in the National Guard, the personal protection force of the Al Saud! The remaining forces are split between the Armed Forces, the Border Guard, the Royal Guard, and state security and intelligence services, all of which report to different princes. Personnel is recruited and promoted based on allegiance, not ability.

Notice what’s at the heart of the emblem of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces? That ain’t the Saudi Arabia flag…

But the military is not the only dubious beneficiary of oil money.

Rentier Citizens

Saudis make more money than Canadians5 but read worse than the Gabonese.

A big chunk of that money comes from oil, as 50% of Saudi nationals are employed in the public sector.6 The OECD average is 18% and the highest in the OECD, the petrostate of Norway, only employs 30% of the country’s workers… Saudis working in the public sector make 30-50% more than their counterparts in the private sector, so these jobs are more prized—not even accounting for all the job benefits they get in the public sector.

The result is that 40%–50% of government spending is in wages, compared to 8% in the US, 18% in bloated France, and 15% in Norway!

Wages are not the only way Saudis are supported by the state. For example, Saudi Arabia provides huge fuel subsidies to its citizens:

$7k in subsidies per person for a family of four, that’s $28k per year…

In other words, Saudi Arabia is burning a huge share of its revenue in subsidizing its population, either directly, or indirectly via unproductive public jobs.

All this work performed by millions of people… You can’t tax that. You’re using your government revenue to pay for them! How is Saudi Arabia supposed to maintain this level of spending if oil revenue drops?

Rivers of Oil, Wadis of Water

Of course, that’s not the only way Saudi Arabia has been wasting its oil money. In the country, rivers of oil have become rivers of water, as it has developed the world’s highest capacity for water desalination:7 60% of the water the country consumes is desalinated! Of course, the energy for this desalination comes from oil, so oil is subsidizing the country’s water. Until recently, a sizable amount of this water was dedicated to agriculture—literally watering the desert!

Apparently, another 30% of water consumption in the country is from non-renewable groundwater, so 90% of the country’s water is basically at risk, as oil revenue shrinks.8

MbS: Between the Sandworm and the Quicksand

In Homer’s Odyssey, as Odysseus crosses the Strait of Messina, he must decide which monster his ship will pass closer to: the six-headed Scylla or the whirlpool formed by Charybdis. He won’t be able to avoid danger and loss.

As I think about Mohammed bin Salman’s predicament, I can’t help but think he’s in a similar position, but in the sand—like in Dune, between a sandworm and quicksand:

• The foundation of the Al Saud reign is force, underpinned by oil—but oil is waning.

• Their power comes from the central Najd, which is culturally and religiously very local and conservative. But the peripheries of Saudi Arabia have a very different history and culture.

• Hejaz, to the west, is traditionally much more cosmopolitan, centered on the Red Sea and its trade. It was a kingdom until very recently, and the previous ruling family still reigns in Jordan.

• To the east, the population is majority Shia, at odds with the Wahhabi religious interpretation.

• Iran, the regional Shia power, is extremely at odds with Saudi Arabia, as Iran replaced its Western-allied king with an Islamist republic, and it hopes to do the same in Saudi Arabia.

• Iraq is now aligned with Iran, creating a huge pro-Shia border with Saudi Arabia.

• The biggest protector, the US, is losing interest in Saudi Arabia as its own oil production increases and the surge of renewables and batteries limits the importance of oil.

• Meanwhile, the other regional hegemon, Turkey, is becoming increasingly assertive.

• The Saudis can barely trust their own military to fend off these threats, as the ruling family’s legitimacy is based only on strength and oil. If one goes, the other goes with it, and a coup is likely.

• That is, if there isn’t an internal coup first within the Al Saud family—entirely possible since there are 15,000 of them.

• As oil income continues shrinking, the Saudis will also have to diversify the economy from oil pretty dramatically.

• This is difficult, as the entire economy revolves around oil, from the massive number of civil servants to water, agriculture, and energy subsidies.

• A key to achieving this economic turnaround is to thrust Saudi Arabia into the future, but how can you do that when its culture is anchored in Wahhabism? The very modernization it needs economically is radically at odds with its traditional religion, going back over 250 years to the first alliance of the Al Saud with the Wahhabs.

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If MbS succeeds, the transformation might be as impressive as the one carried out by a trader in the region 1,400 years ago. But will he? In the next (premium) article on Saudi Arabia, we will explore what he has tried, how it has gone so far, how likely he is to succeed, and how that helps understand the recent changes in policies in the kingdom. Subscribe to read it!

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Elon Musk is betting his companies SpaceX and xAI on space datacenters.

He believes that, in three years’ time, AI companies won’t have access to enough electricity to power their data centers, so only those who move the data centers to space will be able to continue growing their AIs.

The question becomes: Can you build working datacenters in space at a reasonable price?

As I ran the numbers, I realized that Musk is on to something: Datacenters in space are already in the ballpark of costs of land-based ones, and might soon be cheaper! This article will explain why.

In the process of writing it, I studied dozens of sources, including many space datacenter reports. I also wrote a tweet to gather feedback from the community—which Musk responded to. That said, as it’s my first foray into space datacenters, I’m still guaranteed to have made mistakes; I just don’t know which ones. However, it doesn’t look like they would change the conclusions. Please point out mistakes if you find them.

What Does a Space Datacenter Look Like?

At its core, a datacenter on land is pretty simple:

1. The GPUs1

2. Some other IT stuff, like memory, radiators to cool the system, connectors, etc.

3. A source of electricity. If you want your data center to be independent from the grid, you’ll want:

   1. Solar panels to convert light into electricity

   2. Batteries to store the excess electricity from the solar panels during the day and power the datacenters at night

If you want to put this in space, you need to fit that stuff into a rocket.

But that’s a lot of stuff, especially the three bulkiest elements: solar panels, batteries, and radiators. SpaceX is building Starship, a rocket that can carry 150-200 tons to space at a cost that should reach ~$100/kg. That’s ~15x cheaper than what they can do today (and 45x cheaper than the competition), but it’s still quite expensive. So you want to strip as much of that weight as you can. How do you do that?

1. 5x Solar Power

Solar panels produce about 25% of the electricity they could theoretically generate because of the day-night cycle, the seasons, and atmospheric conditions like clouds or storms. But in space, the Sun is always shining. If you have the right orbit, you can keep your solar panels lit all the time, and that provides two benefits.

First, you get ~4x more direct sunlight, because the Sun will be perpendicular to the panels all the time, and there will be no night.

Second, when solar rays cross the atmosphere, they lose about ~30% of their energy.2 Eliminate the atmosphere, and you eliminate this loss.

Add these factors together, and you get ~5x (and up to 9x) more energy from your solar panels than you would on Earth—or, in other words, you need 5x fewer solar panels (and their mass) in space than on Earth.3

2. No Batteries

If your solar panels are perfectly illuminated, you don’t need to buy and transport the very heavy batteries, which represent over half4 of the total weight. Massive win.

But how do you get your solar panels to always face the Sun?

3. The Right Orbit

One way to achieve that is by orbiting the Earth around the poles, in what’s called a sun-synchronous orbit:

The problem with this is that it’s quite expensive to get satellites into these orbits. Normally, rockets are launched from as close to the equator as possible, in order to use the rotation of the Earth to move faster.

But if you send them into a polar orbit, you can’t use that inertia, so it’s much less fuel-efficient. It’s easier if your satellite follows an orbit that isn’t too distant from the equator’s plane.

The problem here is that the satellite ends up in the shadow of the Earth… Another solution is to send the satellite far enough from Earth,5 and not quite on the same plane as the equator, so that it won’t pass through the Earth’s shadow.

The exact orbit will need to optimize for:

• 100% sunlight

• Closest proximity to Earth (to reduce fuel costs of the rocket to reach a distant orbit)

• Efficiency for rockets from Starbase to reach

But if the satellites are far from Earth, isn’t this going to create some latency? Won’t signal take too long to come back to Earth? Yes, but it doesn’t matter:

• Even if the satellites were far away, say at 5,000 km, the time for the signal to go back and forth from Earth would be 30 ms.

• For most AI uses, a few milliseconds (or even seconds) of delay doesn’t matter that much. Think about how long some AI tasks take today, from seconds to minutes, and even hours!6

OK we got rid of more than half of the weight from batteries and 5xed the efficiency of our solar panels. What else can we eliminate?

4. Lighter Solar Panels

Once you’ve disposed of the batteries, the solar array is the biggest source of weight of Starlink satellites today,7 about a third of the total.

But in space, solar panels are much lighter than on Earth. A solar panel on Earth weighs8 about 10 kg/m² or more9, while in space it can weigh as little as 1 kg/m² or less.

That’s because, in space, there’s no gravity, atmosphere, rain, hail, dust… The panels only need to be lightly structured; they don’t need glass to protect them, aluminum frames, stiff backsheets, sturdy mounting, rails, clamps, grounding…

They do need some coating to protect against the intense solar radiation and flares, but if the satellites are close enough to Earth, they’re protected by its magnetic field, so with minimal coating, they can withstand failure rates of less than 1% per year.

Musk’s SpaceX (and Tesla!) design and participate in the supply chain of solar panels, so I assume they’ll adapt them as much as possible to their needs.

This is already quite optimized, though, so I assume there’s not too much more to do here.

5. GPUs

Now we need to optimize the weight of GPUs, but these are actually not very heavy relative to their cost. To get a sense of this, an NVIDIA GPU today costs ~$25k and weighs from 1.2 – 2 kg, while a fully-loaded system (if you add all the other costs, like memory, cooling, etc) costs as much as $56k and weighs 16 kg.

Sending 16 kg to space today is expensive ($24k), but it won’t be with Starship ($3.2k when it costs $200/kg, half that when it costs $100/kg). And that assumes all the weight of what we use on Earth would be carried to space, which is unlikely. These systems will be streamlined for weight, so that the cost of shipping the GPUs to orbit will be a tiny fraction of the cost of the GPUs. We’ll see in a moment why.

6. GPU Shielding

But besides their weight, GPUs face another problem in space: radiation. On Earth, we’re protected from solar electromagnetic rays by the atmosphere and our magnetic field, but these protections are much weaker in space—when they exist. This is a serious problem for computers in space today, because these rays cause mayhem in computers. As a result, they need shielding, which is expensive and heavy.

One of the issues is that electromagnetic rays flip bits and cause havoc in existing systems. For example, imagine that a computer has the following number: 1000001000001, which in decimal is 4161. If that first bit receives a solar ray and flips to 0, that number is now 0000001000001, which in decimal is 65. Imagine that you’re calculating 4161*10 and instead of getting 41,610, you get 650. Every downstream calculation will be monumentally off. Catastrophe! As a result, computers in space today require electromagnetic shields that add to their weight.

But this is not how AI works. AIs are not deterministic, they’re probabilistic. AIs have massive files with billions of parameters that each add a tiny amount to the final value. Querying a GPU is kind of like taking a poll to millions of people. Another way to think about it: In your brain, connections between neurons are constantly dying and forming. Any single one of them is not important at all. They can be severed, and everything will continue as normal.

The result is that GPUs don’t need as much electromagnetic shields as traditional computers, so this added weight can be avoided.

The rest of the software can also be adapted to this situation, tolerating random errors instead of assuming perfect calculations all the time.

Some systems, like the memory, will still need shielding, but if you’re limiting the shielding to only a few small parts of the satellite, the cost in weight will be tiny.

With this type of treatment, Google believes their chips can last 5 years in space—about the lifetime of a datacenter:10

We tested Trillium, Google’s TPU, in a proton beam to test for impact from total ionizing dose (TID) and single event effects (SEEs).

The results were promising. While the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) subsystems were the most sensitive component, they only began showing irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2,000 rad(Si) — nearly three times the expected (shielded) five year mission dose of 750 rad(Si). No hard failures were attributable to TID up to the maximum tested dose of 15 krad(Si) on a single chip, indicating that Trillium TPUs are surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications.—Google

7. GPU Maintenance and Replacement

GPUs have a high failure rate, but you can’t swap them in space. So what are you supposed to do?

One of the measures will be to make them more tolerant to heat (we’ll talk about this next). This should reduce failure rates, especially in space.

But aside from that, most failures happen at the beginning of a GPU’s life, so if you test the GPUs on land first, you should be able to reduce the failure rate dramatically, so that your average GPUs lasts ~5 years.

8. Radiators

And now we get to radiators.

Before I started this article, this was my main concern. Radiators on Earth are very heavy, because you have the radiator, the fans, the cooling liquids… And in space, it’s even worse, because you can’t use the environment to cool off your machines! So I expected these systems to be huge, cumbersome, and prohibitively heavy.

But here’s the insight that blew my mind: Just using the front and back of the solar panels as radiators is enough to cool off the entire system! How is that possible? Here is the breakdown.

There are three ways of cooling something:

1. Conduction: Heat is transferred through a material, from a hot point to a cooler one. But in space your satellites are not connected to anything, so they can’t dissipate any heat out this way.

2. Convection: That’s like wind or water in contact with your surface, extracting heat from it. Same issue as before, there’s no wind or water in space.

3. Radiation: Like the heat from a lightbulb, a toaster, or the Sun: When something is hot, it radiates heat out. This is the only method you can use in space.

But it turns out that radiation is extremely powerful, because it transfers heat to the 4th power of temperature: T⁴!

The actual formula is ε*σ*A*T⁴, but it’s pretty simple. The first variable (ε) is how good your surface is at emitting heat. A good radiator will be close to 1. The second (σ) is just a constant. The third (A) is the area, but we’re going to look at this per square meter of solar panels, so it’s 1, too. The last item, Temperature, is the one that matters. For a given area that is efficient at emitting heat, it’s the only component that has a massive impact.

To give you a sense of how powerful this is, if you move from emitting radiation from 20ºC to 100ºC (68ºF to 212ºF), the heat emitted through radiation is going to increase by 2.6x.11

Why is it raised to the power of four? It was never explained to me in engineering school, but according to ChatGPT, it’s because the energy of the photons being emitted grows in proportion to the temperature (one T), and these photons are emitted throughout all three dimensions (three more Ts), for a total of four Ts.

Anyway, the point is that you can emit a lot of energy through radiation, and your solar panels are enough to cool the entire thing.

The way the datacenters work is that the solar panels get the energy from the Sun—about 1,361 W/m². They reflect a bit less than 10% of that, so let’s say they absorb 1,225 W/m². They convert about 20% into electricity (so ~272 W/m²) and the rest becomes heat. The electricity is sent to the GPUs, and in the process, that electricity becomes heat, too. The heat of the solar panels and GPUs must then be dissipated through radiators.

For the system to maintain a certain temperature, it must lose as much energy as it takes in, so the 1,225 Watts it absorbs per square meter must be radiated out. This happens through both the front and the back surface of the solar panels. So you have:12