The UK Prime Minister is actively trying to display an image of toughness against immigration—and failing:

Across Europe, people support policies to stop and revert immigration.

The Danish socialist prime minister implemented a zero asylum policy and is toughening deportation laws. A Dutch party in the ruling coalition is pushing for sweeping anti-immigrant rules. But most governments are not acting as fast as public opinion is asking, so right-wing parties around Europe are gaining traction and are becoming front-runners

But the EU has had plenty of immigration for decades, since Schengen opened border movement, and despite some initial fear, it turned out quite well. What happened? A lot of the immigration came from within the EU, but now the vast majority is from outside. Of them, the biggest group is Muslims, at 40%.1 This is causing friction:

• Austria has banned headscarves for girls below 14.

• German Chancellor Merz vowed to expel 80% of the 1M Syrians currently living in Germany within three years.

• Even in the US, which doesn’t receive a particularly high amount of Muslim immigrants, President Trump called Somalian immigrants garbage and signed an expanded travel ban, applicable to many from the Middle East and Africa.

When you read the media, social media, and talk on the street, the main complaints you hear are the social and economic costs: Immigrants cause more crime and more terrorism, they destroy social cohesion, work less, and consume much more welfare. Are these claims true? For which immigrants?

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1. The Social Costs

As we discussed in the previous article, the social costs of immigration can be crime, terrorism, native flight, and the loss of social cohesion, so let’s look at each.

Crime

The most typical complaint I see people make is this:

Indeed, while the EU population increased by less than 2% between 2014 and 2024, sexual assaults increased by 72%, rapes by 150%, sexual exploitation by 89%, attempted intentional homicides by 47%, and serious assaults by 45%. Violent crime has decreased, though: robberies by 33%, burglaries 15%, and theft by 22%.

So what’s going on?

This chart combines data for five European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Italy.

Clearly, immigrants from Muslim countries are overrepresented across most of these host countries. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Germany

These crime statistics were just released for Germany in 2025. This is how much more likely foreigners are to commit crime vs locals:

Algerians in Germany are 26x more prone to crime than the average German. 13 other Muslim-majority nationalities are at least 5x more criminal than the average German. Only one non-Muslim majority meets that requirement (Georgia).

If you break the numbers down by pickpocketing, sex crimes, murder, and overall crime rate, this is what you get:

As you can see, green (Muslim) is at the top of all the rankings, with special mention for the winner, Algeria, with the brutal record of one crime for every three Algerians every year. Algerians are ~1500x times more likely to be a pickpocket than Germans, to murder at 35x the rate of Germans, to commit 23x more crime overall, and are 8x more likely to commit sex crimes.

Your first reaction might be: Yeah but that’s not because they’re Muslim; it’s because they’re poor. That’s a good thought to have:

Indeed immigrants from poor countries tend to commit more crime, but there’s plenty of confounders: human capital, culture, education, age, sex, labor-market access… Some poor countries don’t commit any crime (eg Madagascar), and other countries with the same GDP per capita commit dramatically more crime (eg, Central African Republic).

So is it more the money, or the human capital from the country? A recent Finnish study gave some random families $600/month for a couple of years and measured the impact on crime. It was 0%. This paper showed that the link between inequality and crime is basically zero. More inequality doesn’t mean more crime.

The trendlines on the graph suggest that immigrants from Muslim countries commit on average +50% crime vs those of other countries, but that might be because of more conflict in the origin countries (eg, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia), more asylum seekers vs economic workers, the fact that a majority of them are men… Conversely, Indonesian and Malay immigrants tend to be Muslim too, but their crime rate is extremely low.

So both income and religion probably are part of the picture, but they’re definitely not the entire picture.

Denmark

Here, they corrected for age and sex of the immigrants.:

As you can see, this does reduce the crime rate of immigrants vs the baseline, but doesn’t change the overall picture. This tells you that receiving young male immigrants, especially from crime-prone countries, is a way to dramatically increase the crime rate.

This Danish report showed that a few hundred Palestinians were accepted into Denmark in 1992 under a special law. Of them, about 64% had criminal records: 21% ended up in prison, and 43% got at least one large fine.2 About 59% were on welfare. Of their children, 34% have been convicted of a crime, 13% received a prison sentence.

Here’s a breakdown per type of crime:

The Danish Parliament looked at the share of men born in 1987 who had been penally convicted of a crime by the time they were 30, and this is what it found:

Sweden

Sweden doesn’t have much data, but I was able to find some from the official Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

Spain

Spain is interesting because, unlike most other European countries, it attracts a much more diverse mix of immigrants.

However, in Spain, four of the top five most crime-prone countries of origin are Muslim.3

Finland

Here’s what I found for Finland.

Italy

And for Italy:

Norway

In Norway:

UK

The UK doesn’t have much information, but a freedom of information request to the London Metropolitan Police delivered this data:

Another Freedom of Information request to English and Welsh police provided this data:

Netherlands

The Netherlands publishes crime data but not per country. There, non-EU immigrants are 4.5x more crime-prone than the Dutch:4 They are 15% of the population but commit ~40% of the crime.

Note that this problem does not seem to exist in the US. There, the share of Muslims is quite small, and most criminals are American (more likely to be criminal than the average immigrant). As you can see, wherever we look in Europe, there’s an overrepresentation of Muslim countries at the top of the crime lists. Controlling for age, sex, and income reduces this effect, but it remains strong. Immigrants in general commit much more crime than locals. Within immigrants, non-EU immigrants are much more crime prone. Within those, Muslim immigrants cause the most crime.

Terrorism

Terrorism data is harder to get because there’s less of it. But we do have some. Around the world, about 75% of terrorism deaths are caused by Islamism.

Here are terrorists in the US for the last 30 years, by type of terrorism.

Here are security threat prosecutions in Germany in 2025.

In the UK, Islamism accounts for 67% of attacks since 2018, 75% of terrorism investigation cases, and 90% of convictions.

So I think we can all agree that the biggest threat in worldwide and European terrorism is Islamism, and it’s so stark that the 2^nd most significant threat doesn’t even matter.

Social Cohesion

Several papers have found that ethnic diversity reduces neighborhood trust and social capital, including this meta-analysis, although the linchpin might not be diversity alone, but also segregation: If a certain ethnicity is concentrated in a small area, neighborhood trust and social capital will shrink.

Looking specifically at Muslims, this paper found that 2^nd generation Muslim immigrants had lower trust than their non-Muslim counterparts, and that this was due to cultural transmission rather than discrimination or exclusion.

This graph looked not at the crime, but the feeling of safety in different communes in Denmark. It then compared it to the share of people of MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey) origin.

There’s a real cost in social cohesion that is paid by immigration, whether that is due to Muslim immigration or that of others. In Europe, however, it’s more acute with Muslims.

Alright, let’s move to economics.

2. The Economics

Employment

Some Anglosphere countries manage to get immigrants to work more than natives, but that’s not the norm. In most countries, their unemployment is higher—in Sweden, foreign unemployment is an astonishing 2.5x the native level!

This immigration has many different origins, but when we zoom in to Muslims, the data holds (here, employment rate rather than unemployment rate).

One reason for these differences is regulatory. The US makes it easy for foreigners to start working immediately—they even penalize them if they don’t. Others make it very hard, and might even support not working by giving welfare—in some cases, at higher levels than to locals. This is important in the short term, but also the very long term, because the first months after arrival are crucial. If you establish yourself in a system where you have to work and you must meet and socialize with locals to do so, you’re more likely to be integrated and continue working. But if you can’t work, you’ll stay more with family and other compatriots, and you’ll get used to a lifestyle where you don’t have to work.

Another reason might be education. US Muslims are more educated than the average American.

In part, this is because the US attracts high-education Muslim immigrants.

So that’s the destination effect. But the origin effect also matters.

We see similar data whenever we zoom in to specific countries.

Norway

We can see a breakdown of the problem from some data from Spain.

Spain

In Spain, where the vast majority of African immigrants are Muslim, their employment rate is substantially lower than that of locals or Latin American immigrants.

This is driven basically by the fact that Muslim women generally stay at home

This is the activity rate, which counts those with a job or looking for one. What if we look at actual work rates?

The type of work also matters. The education rate of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) immigrants in Spain is substantially lower than that of locals or other immigrants.

UK

In the UK, Muslims are 2.2x less employed than the average of the population.

And unemployed actually hides the true impact, because many who don’t work don’t appear in these statistics, if they’re not actively looking for a job.

Muslims also tend to have lower-paying jobs:

Among other reasons, because they have less education:

We see the same impact of lower female participation:

And this data shows this is not an effect of age. In the UK, Arabs and Pakistanis are substantially less employed than any other ethnicity, and the gap for women is astonishing.

Germany

Germany is interesting because the data is slightly different. We again see female Muslims with a very low employment rate. But men are slightly more likely to work than immigrants of other nationalities.

On balance, it looks like the two big contributors to lower work participation rate are immigration and, within that, Islam.

France

In France, the unemployment rate of African immigrants is more than twice that of locals, and it gets worse in the 2^nd generation.

The shares of social housing (so, welfare) remain extremely high for the children of immigrants, and poverty rates remain quite high, too.

US

In the US, Muslim immigrants are more educated than the average American. However, they tend to be somewhat underemployed compared to Americans. The difference is not massive though.

OK so what we’re seeing for Muslim immigrants is that those in Europe tend to have lower education than natives, and they also work less. About 50-70% of the men of working age work, and the number for women is usually about half of that. For the US, I don’t have more granular data, but it doesn’t look like these hold.5

Now, let’s look at state contributions: net costs vs benefits in terms of taxes contributed vs spent.

Fiscal Cost-Benefit

Denmark

Denmark has some of the best data on this topic, so let’s look at it. I shared this before:

Because of this, every year Denmark spends 1.3% of its GDP in supporting MENAPT immigrants—about half the public budget spent on education. This is just to support these immigrants fiscally. This graph from The Economist shows the breakdown per age, compared to other types of Danish people:

At no age do MENAPT immigrants contribute positively to the state. If you break that down per country of origin:

MENAPT are not the only immigrants to cost the state, but they cost the most. Every Somalian6 costs $27k per year!

Netherlands

This is the most massive study I’ve seen for any country on earth on the fiscal impact of immigrants. In it, the Netherlands shows fiscal contribution per country of origin (like in Denmark), but over their lifetime instead of per year, and for 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Here it is, shown on a map of the world:

And here’s a detail per country/small region:

An average native-born Dutch family pays five thousand euros in taxes per year that end up being spent on immigrants.

A surprising fact: For the 2^nd generation of immigrants, only those of Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Chinese background were net positive. Every other origin drained state coffers rather than contributing to them.

Why? Here’s the share of benefit recipients vs the likelihood of them leaving within 10 years of arriving:

The most likely to ask for welfare support are the least likely to leave.

Finland

This is for Finland:

Here’s a breakdown per country:

Portugal

The data that we have for Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands isn’t as readily available for other countries. Portugal has data per person per country, but only tax contributions, not welfare costs.

Here, we can’t see Muslims, because only 0.4% of the Portuguese population is Muslim. They don’t tend to immigrate to Portugal.

So if we summarize the economic side, Muslim immigrants to Europe, compared to locals, tend to:

• Work less

• Have lower levels of skill

• Consume much more welfare

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Takeaways: What Should the EU Do?

The takeaway so far is that in Europe, immigrants:

• Work less than the average native.

• After locals, the next most productive are EU citizens. The least productive tend to be Muslims

  • This is in a big part because of women not working, but not entirely.

• Immigrants are nearly always fiscally expensive.

  • Muslim immigrants cost in general more money to the state.

  • This cost isn’t erased at the 2^nd generation.

• Immigrants commit substantially more crime than any other group.

  • Across destination countries, Muslims commit the most crime.

• Islamists are behind most of the terrorism.

• Immigration reduces local trust and social capital, probably more due to segregation than other factors, but also because of cultural transmission.

  • Again, it seems like this is more true of Muslim immigrants than others.

Does that mean that massive waves of deportations should take place in Europe? No:

1. Europe needs immigrants.

2. Many countries are quite good at taking in immigrants.

3. Many immigrants take several generations to converge to local performance.

4. The numbers above are not complete. They’re missing some other factors.

5. A large part of the problem is caused not by the immigrants, but by European legislation.

6. Not all immigrants are the same. They should be treated differently.

These are the things we’re going to look at in the next article.

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1. The Fear

Maybe you’ve seen a graph like this one:

If we look at a few European countries individually, it looks like this:

When seeking a culprit, immigration springs to many people’s minds:

This leads to fears of replacement. And viral videos like this one appear, to make the stats feel more visceral and associate immigration with disease:

They think maybe the increase in sexual violence in Europe is due to immigrants. Then they stumble on data like this:

They conclude that immigrants drive a majority of crime in the West.

In parallel, they might come across data like this:

And see the two types of data from above—economics and sexual crime—combined into one:

I assume most people, when presented with these graphs, either become uncomfortable, or say: Let’s stop immigration immediately. And that’s one of the main reasons why right-wing parties are growing across Europe:

But that is flawed thinking:

Read more

• Why Did Islam Spread So Fast in North Africa & Spain?

• The Ruthless Liquidity of Modern Love

• 50 Learnings from the War in Iran

The last one, from this Tuesday, is What Do Muslims Believe? It’s the first in the current series, and is about Muslim beliefs in Muslim countries.

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Today, we focus on the beliefs of Muslims when they move to the West. This is becoming crucially important, as Muslim immigration is one of the strongest factors in European voting today. So I looked at over a dozen surveys across six countries (US, UK, France, Denmark, Germany, Austria) and condensed the insights into dozens of the most relevant charts.1

1. Muslims in the US

The best data I could find for this group is this Pew Research survey from 2017. What can we tell about their religiosity, morals, appreciation for democracy, feelings of belonging, and concerns about extremism?

Religiosity

Muslims in the US are slightly more religious than Christians.

This religiosity can be seen in the share of Muslims who pray every day (65%) and visit the Mosque once a week (47%). What does religiosity mean for Muslims? A key aspect is how to interpret the Quran.

These things are connected. Muhammad claimed that the Angel Gabriel dictated to him the Quran, and was the literal word of God. This is why so many Muslims believe it, and why about a third think there’s only one way to interpret Islam and it shouldn’t be reinterpreted.

This is problematic because all ancient religious texts have some pretty illiberal positions, and that includes the Quran:

• Fight those who do not believe in Allah (9:29)

• Disbelievers are the worst creatures (98:6)

• Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies (5:51)

• Men have the authority in the marriage and can strike women (4:34)

• Adultery and fornication deserve 100 lashes (24:2)

• Slavery is permitted (90:13 and 2:177 assume slavery exist)

• Sex with slaves and captives is permitted (4:24, 23:5-6, 70:29-30)

• Fighting is prescribed in certain cases, even if disliked (2:216)

• Muslims should fight until religion is entirely for Allah (8:39)

Again, this is not exclusive to Islam: 20% of US Christians also believe the Bible is the literal word of God, and that includes the Old Testament, with some nice pearls such as the punishment for homosexuality or adultery should be death. So the difference is not in nature, but in degree: The more literal and radical interpretations of old books is just more common among Muslims than in Christians in the US. And maybe this difference comes from the fact that Muslims have been in the US less than Christians on average?

Another important aspect of this is that non-Muslims miss a key point about the interpretability of the Quran. For example, although the Quran says men can strike women, what does strike mean? This requires interpretation. Some Muslims think it means a beating that leaves no marks. Others think it should not be violent or severe, like a flicker of a finger for example. Others think it should just be symbolic.

So although these data points suggest Muslims are more conservative and pious than the average American, they don’t directly imply that their morality is starkly different. For that, we need to look into morality data.

Morality

Muslims track with the rest of society in the evolution of attitudes towards homosexuality:

I’m sure that if we had the data for Christians, we’d see something similar. What I think is most telling here is how the acceptance of homosexuals among Muslims almost doubled in just 10 years. We can probably assume it’s even higher now.

Religion vs Democracy

A full third of US Muslims believe Islam is incompatible with democracy!

This is similar to the numbers in Muslim countries. When we looked at these numbers across the Muslim world, we saw that this went hand in hand with authoritarianism and a desire to have religion supersede the state.

However, again, this data point is not enough. For example, we could imagine here that the majority of Muslims think democracy and Islam are compatible, and that the more moderate Muslims fear that it’s not, because they fear the more radical interpretations of Islam (which they don’t share), are incompatible with democracy. That’s exactly why we see 44% of the general public thinking Islam and democracy are incompatible. So we need to go deeper.

Belonging

In the US, Muslims are proud to be American, they’re pretty happy, and they think the system works for them.

Concerns about Extremism

US Muslims are more concerned than the average American about extremism in the name of Islam:

Even as they believe support for extremists within Islam is low:

Muslims in the US think targeting civilians for political purposes is never justified (much less than the average American!).

In other words, US Muslims are mostly moderate, most don’t support extremism, but they realize some Muslims do, and that worries the moderates.

In summary, the picture in the US is encouraging. Although Muslims seem to be pious, their beliefs seem reasonably well integrated with those of the broader public. They believe in democracy and don’t believe in extremism. But a sizable minority believes Islam should be interpreted traditionally and that it has a natural conflict with democracy, while Muslims suspect there’s a sizable share of extremists among them, and that worries them.

Alas, the picture in Europe is not as good.

2. Muslims in Europe

Across Europe, most Muslims identify either only with the host country or with both the host and the origin countries.

Muslims are more religious than the rest of the population.

A survey across six European countries2 on immigrant integration produced several interesting papers. This one looked at how religiosity was connected to out-group hostility. Muslim immigrants and their children were substantially more fundamentalist than their Christian counterparts.

Now, religious fundamentalism is not a problem by itself. Everybody can choose their own way of life. It’s only problematic if it has consequences for others, and unfortunately here there are, as Muslim fundamentalism includes respecting religious laws before secular ones, among other things. So what are Muslims’ attitudes on homosexuality, Judaism, and the conflict between the West and Islam?

I found the next graph quite interesting.

Fundamentalist Christians were as hostile to Jews and homosexuals as non-religious Muslims!3 This means that, in Europe, the hostility towards non-Muslim groups is not just a result of religiousness and piety.

UK

People tend to blur the immigrants of all European countries, but the immigrant populations don’t typically have the same origin:

• Spain has mostly Moroccans

• France has Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians

• In Germany, Turks and Syrians prevail

• In the UK, 80% of Muslims are South Asians (54% Pakistani, 18% Bangladeshi, 9% Indian)

This means that survey results will differ.

This UK survey from 20164 showed that over 90% of Muslims felt they belonged to Britain either very (55%) or fairly (38%) strongly. However, when asked in this more recent survey (2025) whether they feel more Muslim than British, a majority said Muslim.

What do Muslims think about the compatibility of Western values and Islam? Channel 4 commissioned a survey of 1000 British Muslims in 2016 (comparing them to non-Muslims).5 It found that 66% of Muslims thought Islam and Western democracy were compatible, but 22% of Muslims didn’t think so.

A bigger share of Muslims thought Islamic values are not compatible with British values (the previous graph was for democracy).

38% of British Muslims would support introducing some elements of Sharia law.

This is broadly aligned with the findings of the other survey I mentioned above, where 42% support the introduction of some aspects of Sharia law in the UK.

As we said, Sharia means a lot of things. One is finance:

Another is education:

I have mixed feelings about this one. I think Muslims should be able to teach their children about Islam, and although I personally dislike gender-segregated education, I understand why they might prefer it (like some Christians have gender-segregated schools, too). Some Western schools have gendered dress codes—including differences for boys and girls, even in non-religious schools—so I don’t mind that Muslims would like this for their children.

I am more concerned about these:

These are not about a community that has its own customs and traditions, but about imposing their values on everyone else.

By far the most worrisome to me here is the illegality of publishing a picture of Prophet Muhammad. I get that this is anathema to Muslims (as is Satanism worship for Christians), but maybe the single most important value of the West is the freedom of speech, which by definition means you should be OK with others saying things you disagree with. Especially things you dislike.

British Muslims Attitudes towards Violence

I think what matters most is the relationship to violence. 13% of Muslims think that Islam poses a threat to British national security.

And 23% think criticism of Islam is justified.

I find these data points interesting. The numbers are not so different from those of the general public, which I think means several things:

• Some Muslims see a threat, and think it should be addressed.

• Others prefer to see the bright side of Islam and don’t see a problem.

• Some might prefer to believe that Muslims are problematic, but that is justified, as a reaction from a racist UK. They don’t want to overblame Muslims for any conflict.

This is consistent with the British Muslim condemnation of violence, which is higher than for natives.

Nearly half of Muslims think we should do more to combat extremism.

A sizable share of Muslims think Muslims should be the ones to tackle their own radicalization.

The following data point is one of the most concerning: only 4% of British Muslims think Al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks:

This reminds me of positions on Jews, Israel, and October 7^th 2023. According to this 2024 survey,6 Muslims are 2-3x more likely than the general public to think Jews have too much power in finance, media, foreign policy, pharma—across the UK and the US. Also:

Two recent surveys from 2026 have shown data that is also concerning.

All the authoritarian regimes opposed to Western values (China, Russia, Iran) are highly supported by British Muslims: between 44 and 64 points of difference from the general public!

What about beliefs?

This is where Muslims and the general British public differ the most:

To note, these positions tend to be shared by both men and women in Islam—except for what directly affects wives:

Overall, the picture of Muslims in the UK seems to be one where most think the West and Islam are perfectly compatible, because they mostly just want to live their lives. But a sizable share of British Muslims seem to want to impose some aspects of their customs on the rest of society. Some Muslims are radical: 10% to 25% of UK Muslims have quite radical views on violence and terrorism, and 30% to 60% want to impose some of their beliefs on the rest of society. Bleak. Many moderates agree Muslims should do more to fight them.

France

One of the most recent, in-depth surveys of Muslim attitudes in Western countries is the 2025 survey from the non-partisan7 IFOP. It found that Islam is growing in France, now comprising 7% of the population.

Source

Of all French Muslims, 80% feel religious (87% for young people), and 24% are very or extremely religious.

These numbers don’t change much based on origin, job, sex, and many other variables. Surprisingly, French Muslims whose father was also French (so most likely 3^rd generation) are more likely to be religious…

Over time, and as the share of Muslims grows, their religiosity increases:

• French-born Muslims are more likely to be very or extremely religious (23%) than Maghreb-born Muslims (21%).

• The young are 150% more likely to be very or extremely religious vs those over 50 years old.

• Over time French Muslims tend to pray more (100% more in the last 30 years), and go more frequently to the mosque (120%).

• The share of French Muslim women who wear the hijab has nearly tripled, from 16% in 2003 to 45% in 2025. 59% of them wear it because of pressure or risk of not wearing it.

• In 1998, only 19% of French Muslims thought religion was more right than science on the story of the creation of the world. Now, 65% think religion is right. For young Muslims, it’s 81%.

• In 1998, 48% of French Muslims wanted Islam to modernize. Now, only 21% do.

Now, as we said, religion by itself doesn’t tell us anything. People should be free to follow any religion they want, as long as it doesn’t impinge on others’ rights. So what does the survey say about that?

Each one of these are problematic:

• It’s fine for you and your community to follow Sharia, as long as it doesn’t supplant the law that applies to all. But a large share of French Muslims (including a majority of youngsters) would prefer the entire country to follow Sharia.

• Islamism is incompatible with the West, as it believes it’s superior and should supplant it. Over a third of French Muslims support it in some form or another. 24% support the Muslim Brotherhood. 8% support all Islamist positions!

• Freedom of religion is at the heart of the West, but 20% of Muslims disagree! As a reminder, in Islam, the punishment for apostasy is death.

• The equality of all people is another cornerstone of the West, but several French Muslim positions are incompatible with it, as over 10% of Muslims don’t want to shake hands with people from the other sex, or share swimming pools with them.

Denmark

This 2015 survey from the non-partisan Wilke company asked Danish Muslims what they thought about different topics:

This data again supports the idea that Muslims there are pretty conservative, but these beliefs don’t impinge on others’ rights. This should be acceptable.

As we’ve seen previously, most think Islam and democracy are compatible.

Again, we find that Muslims think the Quran should be interpreted pretty literally.

This is concerning: Not only do ¾ of Muslims think this, but that share grew since 2006. And they believe instructions should be followed so fully that 11% of Muslims think the Quran should be the foundation of all legislation in Denmark.

And the majority of Muslims don’t think Islam has to modernize.

The vast majority of Muslims want their children to eat halal food at school.

If that’s what you want for yourself, I think it’s fair. If you’re benefiting from the facilities, institutions, and habits of society, it might be too expensive to provide halal food everywhere, so Danish Muslims should not demand it, but they can certainly ask for it. And if there’s a big contingent of Muslims in a certain area and it’s easy to cater to both Muslims and non-Muslims, why not?

But also, let’s not assume this comes at no cost. Halal food reduces diversity, as it eliminates all pork and alcohol from food, including all its derivatives (lard, bacon, gelatin, marshmallows, cooking with alcohol, some desserts) and makes it more expensive.8

Now let’s dive into the radicalization side.

The vast majority of Danish Muslims don’t sympathize with them. 2-3% of them do, however (and 10% don’t respond…).

When asking a more nuanced question, the numbers change a bit.

So nearly 7% of Danish Muslims think drawing Muhammad merits death…

This is very concerning to me. It’s one thing to say you don’t support political violence in the abstract, but then 44% of Danish Muslims believe society is in part to blame for political violence. What exactly did society do wrong? Why doesn’t this happen with other cultures and religions? Is the thought behind this that: “You can draw Muhammad, but then don’t complain when you get shot”?9

This to me is the perfect illustration, because it shows how common this opinion is. On one side, I understand the Muslim position: There is racism in Western countries—like in all societies. And racism towards Muslim is especially prevalent in Europe. But that doesn’t justify violence, as many Muslims think. This attitude only breeds further racism. If a group wants to integrate, it must police itself, in thought and in actions. It must understand that they are entering a host country, and they need to make an effort to adjust to local norms.

Austria

An Austrian survey of young Muslims in Vienna in 201910 shows similar data, so I’ll just paste the relevant graphs here11 (note the comparison with the non-migrant background, which is Viennese youth with both parents born in Austria).

Another interesting fact: the more religious the person, the less they believe in democracy and individual rights, and the more they believe in prejudice and violence.

The capital city of Austria, Vienna, released a report just this week on this topic,12 and apparently it shares the same type of data as what we’ve already seen, so I won’t go into much more detail.

Germany

In Germany, the MOTRA-Monitor 2024/25 is a monster 600-page report on the state of the country, and the picture is one of radicalization in all directions. I asked Claude to translate it for me and extract the right data, which I checked with my less-than-perfect German.

Islamism is rampant in Germany.

How did they assess that? They looked at the answer to these eight questions and blended them:

So the silver lining is that more than half of German Muslims don’t think this way. This is so bleak, though. Nearly half of German Muslims think only Islam can solve the problems of our time. A quarter think the rules of the Quran matter more than German law, and that an Islamic theocracy is the best form of government…

This is not an artifact of men vs women,13 nor of education levels, nor age:14 women and educated (high school and above) German Muslims are nearly as Islamist or open to it as male or low-education Muslims. Young Muslims are over 4x more radical than older ones.15

Takeaways

From all this data, a picture emerges about Muslims in Western countries.

First, the US is different from Europe. American Muslims seem much better integrated, and hold less radical views, than their counterparts in Europe.

Second, Muslims in general like the countries they’re in, and appreciate democracy. They identify with their host countries, although their allegiance tends to be to Islam first.

It looks like 20-50% of Muslims are extremely well assimilated into their host countries and hold views quite similar to those of the average native.16 These people are so important! They’re the bridge between natives and more conservative or even radical immigrants, and we should support them.

A large majority of Muslim immigrants tend to be more religious, pious, and conservative than natives or moderate Muslims. This is neither good nor bad per se; I respect how people want to live, and I enjoy the diversity of lifestyles, although diversity of values brings challenges and costs in politics. I respect their common desire to pray, have a mosque to do it in, eat halal, wear traditional clothes, and provide a separate education to girls and boys. These are things many Christians or Jews desire for their children, too, so we should respect and welcome them.

I am less comfortable with the 20-50% who seem more fundamentalist, who think Islam should return to its roots, be interpreted literally, or that religious rules are more important than secular ones. These beliefs are incompatible with Western values and institutions. That’s 9 to 20 million Muslims in Europe, and these beliefs should be acively pushed back on.17

The intolerance is worse. I am even less comfortable with the fairly common position that homosexuality should be banned, that Jews have too much power and can’t be trusted, or that women should have fewer rights than men. 10-50% of Muslims wanting to make drawings of Muhammad illegal is an unacceptably high number, and 7-24% who think making these drawings or burning a sacred book justifies killing the person who did it is really bad.

20-50% Muslims are concerned about extremism. This is good news, and as we said, we need them to act on it.

Because extremism is real and way too common. Depending on their Western host country, you can find numbers like ~25% who think Islam is incompatible with Western values, ~15% who support full Sharia law, ~30% who support some Islamist positions and institutions, ~10%-25% who support Hamas or Jihad, and the support for terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda ranges from 2% to 16%. If we assume this group is ~15% of European Muslims, that’s about 8M European Muslims.

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All of this comes with the other side of the coin, which is racism and Islamophobia. These feed into each other. But there are also other factors in place, such a asylum seekers vs economic migrants, policies for work and welfare, and much more. So what does all this mean? What actions should we take to address all of this? For that, we can’t just look at beliefs, because many times people say one thing and do another. Beliefs only inform us on what people are more likely to say and do, but not on what they actually do. We must look at actions, too: What is the net contribution of Muslim immigrants to Western society? How can we improve it? That’s where we’re going in the next article.

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This is an extraordinarily sensitive topic. It’s not easy to do it justice. I tried and am guaranteed to have failed—hopefully less than most writing on this topic. So please, share your thoughts and knowledge on the topic, but keep your comments constructive and civil.

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Here’s a crazy fact I read: 80% to 90% of women reproduce, but only about 40% of men do. What?!

It made me think of this:

This represents the idea that, nowadays, women can easily have sex, so they gravitate towards attractive men, which is bad for unattractive men (no access to sex), and bad for all women (heightened competition for a few men only), while attractive men get all the access to sex they want and end up not partnering up.

Are these things true? Do men really reproduce less than women? Is it because historically, the more attractive men could hoard the women, leaving the least attractive men out of luck? If that’s the case, how frequent was it? How did different societies deal with this problem? Did it lead to violence? And what about today? Do more women than men still reproduce? How has technology like Tinder or contraception changed this? What can we predict about the future of sex, reproduction, and violence?

1. Men Don’t Reproduce as Much

Let’s start with the initial claim: If 80% of women reproduce and only 40% of men, that means women have been 2x more likely to reproduce than men in history. Is this true? This is an estimate of how many women1 reproduced in a studied population throughout history:

Notice how the human population starts exploding about 70,000 years ago, around the time of the 2^nd move out of Africa. Then, there’s a new explosion around 10,000-12,000 years ago, around the time of the end of the last ice age.

But this is for females. How did males reproduce in comparison?

Assuming that 80% of women reproduced at any given time, what does this tell us about the share of men who reproduced?

This is bonkers!! It means historically only about a quarter of men reproduced!?2

This maps tells you where:

How is this possible?

Homosexuality

About 3% of men consider themselves fully homosexual, so it can explain only a tiny part of this gap.

Polygyny

The most logical explanation for this would be polygamy (one person marrying several people of the other sex), which generally means polygyny (one man, several women).3 If the average man who marries has 3 wives, it means about ⅔ of men won’t have a wife.

The Sexual Violence Problem

This causes a lot of conflict. Because you get a lot of men who can’t access sex and reproduction. So societies had three options.

One was to just be violent, with men killing other men and kidnapping and raping women. That is not very stable at all, so such societies quickly learn to focus the violence outwards: They organize in clans and tribes where you’re not supposed to kill each other, and should raid your neighbor instead.

The societies that managed to do this at scale were able to spread extremely fast. Examples include the Vikings and the Arab Muslims: In both cases, they had serious polygyny, and men were recruited to go raid foreigners and take their women as partners, concubines, or slaves. The Muslims had the added brilliant idea of telling recruits: “Even if you die fighting, don’t worry, you’ll get your women in heaven.”

For example, we know from DNA analysis that 80% of the Icelandic male DNA was originally from Scandinavia, whereas 60% of women’s is Gaelic.4 So the most common way that Iceland was settled was with Scandinavian men taking Gaelic women in the British Isles and settling in Iceland. Something similar happened in Arab territories:

So very certainly part of the difference between male and female reproduction is that some men hoarded women, so other men either didn’t have access to women and didn’t reproduce, or had to go to war or raid neighbors to get women. They would either die trying, or succeed and extinguish the male line of the conquered.

It doesn’t always need to be violent though. For example, the Swahili Coast in Africa has in some places up to 80-90% of male ancestors from Persia, India and Arabia, with nearly 100% local female ancestors, from Africa.

This was from trade: Rich Muslim traders would come and marry local women. But slaves were part of the traded goods, and so some of the partnerships would have been coerced rather than free.

Conversely, some Arabic ancestry comes from African women, but not men. Given that Arabs traded African slaves, the most logical explanation is that they didn’t let African men reproduce in Arabia,5 but some of the African women slaves did reproduce with the men.6

Age

This one blew my mind. There’s a second way a polygynous society can manage the sex imbalance: Growth plus age differences. This explains why old men marry young women in Muslim countries.7

If you have 100 men, and they each have on average two wives, you need 200 women. How can you get them? You can solve that if the men are 40 years old and the women are 20 years old.

The women have four children each, for a total of eight children per father—approximately four boys and four girls. That means that our total population of 100 men and 200 women becomes, 20 years later, 800 men and 800 women.

The women marry immediately and have children,8 but not the men! The 800 men have to wait 20 more years. By the time they do, there’s been a new generation. Now there are 1600 men and 1600 women aged 20: Enough women so there’s two of them per man!

Another way to think about this: If every generation is twice as big as the previous one, every man can simply marry, when he is older, two younger women of the next generation.

So by marrying women young enough, remaining fertile, and having lots of children, you can actually maintain a highly polygynous society while all men still have women!

Something like that has happened in high-growth polygynous societies across the world. It’s one of the reasons I believe old men marry young girls in some Muslim countries. I don’t like it (and with children it’s abhorrent), but that’s the logic.

This wouldn’t explain why men have had more children than women though—in fact, it increases the mystery, because it could explain away polygyny without the need for women reproducing more than men.

Monogamy

The other way to handle this problem is by forbidding polygamy. If everybody is monogamous, everybody can pair up and have children. Yay!

This has a big advantage: Instead of pouring resources (men) into violence against each other to fight for women, who are then raped and / or kidnapped, you can focus all the energy on building stuff and accumulating wealth.

This might be one of the reasons why the Greeks (and later, Romans), who were uniquely monogamous, were so successful. They imbued this into Christianity9, which then spread the concept around the world.

Islam and China were not technically monogamous, but in practice the vast majority of marriages have been, I assume for the same reason.

A study looked at the ratio of men to women in several societies, and assuming 80% of women have had surviving descendants, then in East Asian societies about 72% of men had surviving descendants; in Europe it’s 62%, and in Nigeria (Yoruba) it’s 57%. So we can see in the data that monogamy might have indeed had a strong impact in balancing reproduction and descendants—which gives credence to the idea that polygyny was originally one of the causes of this imbalance.

But if monogamy has been so widespread, why do we see such an imbalance in male-female reproduction across the world until so recently?

2. Patriarchy against Men

The most common structure for clans has usually been patrilineal: All the men in a family stay together, and the daughters leave to pair up with men in other clans. This means all men in a clan are related by blood, but not all women.10 So if a clan disappears—whether it’s wiped out, it starves, or it slowly shrinks because it doesn’t have access to resources or status—then the entire male line goes extinct. But not the female line, which is much more mixed! So, in effect, patriarchy is genetically much riskier for men than for women.

Meanwhile, this effect was compounded by the fact that successful clans would wipe out many other clans, further reducing genetic diversity.

And then, these successful clans would grow too much and would need to split. When they did, they tended to do so along lines of close relatives. So for example each successful son would move out with his male descendants. The result is that every split would increase male line genetic concentration.

One paper tried to figure out how much the effects described in this section could explain the gap between male and female reproduction, and it found that it could theoretically explain it all. In other words, you don’t theoretically need polygyny or violence between men to explain this gap. The clan structure could be enough.

My guess is that it’s something in between:

1. Polygyny meant that many men could not get wives and never reproduced.

2. Many men killed other men and took the women, further reducing the share of men who would ever reproduce (or killing off their offspring). This was more common in polygynous societies than in monogamous ones.

3. Even if some males reproduced, clan structure could eliminate their entire male line, if the entire clan was wiped out.

What does all this tell us about today? Here are the consequences we can draw for dating apps, incels, polygamy in the West, immigrant profiles, Ukraine and Russia, and AI and robots.

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Byzantine Ashes

As a reminder from the last article, the two regional superpowers, Byzantium (Romans) and the Sassanids (Persians), were uniquely wea…

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My goal is to understand the mechanisms of Islam’s lightning-fast spread. I am sure I will get some facts wrong here. I know I can count on you to correct me as you find them.

To start, let’s look at a satellite map of the region.

1. The Middle East at the Eve of Islam

For 1,000 years, the Middle East had been the battleground between two megapowers: one from the sea, the other from land.

Sea vs Land

Greece vs Persia
Rome vs Parthia
Byzantium vs Sassanids

In all three cases, we had a sea-based power built around the Mediterranean on the west.

While to the east ruled a land-based power.

In all these maps, you’ll see that the Arabian Peninsula is in the smack middle of both, yet was never a part of either empire. Why? Because it’s too remote:

• Sea: The sea power couldn’t access it from the Mediterranean

• Land: Both powers are separated from Arabia by a massive desert

Here, the only place you can live is in the mountains, which capture rain.

Clockwise starting with Ethiopia:

• As we explain here, the Ethiopian Highlands catch the African monsoon rains.

• They flow north through the Nile, giving birth to Egypt.

• Water evaporated in the Red Sea rains down in the Sarawat Mountains, in western Arabia, creating the historical regions of Hejaz and Yemen.

• Just north of that, the same phenomenon, but the water from the Mediterranean forms the Levant, with present-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.

• Rains caught in Anatolia form present-day Turkey.

• Rains caught in Persia form present-day Iran.

• These rains flow down the two rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, forming the historic region of Mesopotamia (between two rivers), mostly present-day Iraq.

• The mountains in eastern Arabia also catch some rain, forming what are today the eastern UAE / Oman

You can see this pattern reflected to this day in the population density map below:

If you notice, there are two very different types of regions here, the mountains that catch water, and the plains that emerge around their rivers. The mountains are hard to rule, but defensible. The plains are hyperfertile and easy to rule, but exposed to foreign invaders.

Early on, this was not problematic: People emerged where food was easiest to produce, on the riverbanks of the Nile and Mesopotamia, which would naturally flood the riverbanks, filling them with water and sediments. That’s why civilization emerged there. There was very little population and civilization in the mountains.

But as time passed, agricultural practices developed, were brought to more mountainous areas, and the population grew there too.

This exposed the river civilizations to the mountain people. This is why, for most of its history, Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia have been under the yoke of neighboring powers:

• In the case of the Levant and Egypt, those that control the sea (the Mediterranean)

• In the case of the Levant and Mesopotamia, those that control the land (Anatolia and Persia)

The Arabian Desert

So what was in Arabia? As the northern empires grew for the previous 1000 years, they encroached more and more on Arabia, especially its north. But this influence was limited because of the geography. In most of Arabia, there were just secluded tribes in the mountains, and some people on some coasts, for the maritime trade with the Mediterranean.

So all of Arabia was mostly empty and arid, except for some northern border tribes that interacted with the empires, the western mountains, and especially their south, in Yemen, which caught some water from the Ethiopian monsoon rains and some sea trade.

Notice on the trade map above that there were no stops between Yemen and the Mediterranean on the Arabian coast. That’s how awfully dry that region is: not even port settlements could survive.

That’s why Mecca and Medina are inland: They’re away from the sea trade routes and isolated by mountains and desert, but they have some water caught by the mountains.

Not much water, mind you; probably enough for a few hundred people in Mecca. Hundreds? What about the claims that Mecca and Medina gathered thousands of soldiers?

1. The sources of these claims had an incentive to exaggerate: the bigger the forces, the more impressive their exploits.

2. The soldiers could have been sourced from herders from the surrounding valleys rather than just a specific town like Mecca or Medina.

3. The Quran says Mecca is a plantless valley.

4. Due to the lack of water: There’s very little rain here. It’s so hot that most of the rain evaporates. The little that remains is not enough for permanent rivers, only seasonal wadis. This makes trees and agriculture very hard to maintain.

5. So the most common type of vegetation is shrub, inedible by humans so they need animals to eat it (goats, camels), and then the humans consume the milk & meat of these animals, which means a loss in terms of calories from the grasses and shrubs to the animal products.

6. With these types of insights, you can approximate the carrying capacity of an area. In the case of Mecca, I asked ChatGPT Pro, and it estimated a few hundred.

7. An analysis of the genealogy of Muhammad’s Mecca suggests a population of ~550 people.

Mecca is not just distant from trade routes. It’s very desertic, which means little food produced, so the population had to be quite small. The lack of plant or animal resources also meant few goods to trade anyway. In fact, if it traded anything, it was probably to get food, as the region is so infertile that even a few thousand people at the time would have been hard to sustain. What did they trade in exchange for that food? Probably hides from their pastoral activities, very likely slaves.1 It had a shrine (an earlier version of the Kaaba) that the local population and maybe some regional tribes came to visit. Probably not much more.2

And yet Muhammad and his successors went from Mecca, a city of a few hundred people, to controlling Medina, to then all of Arabia in four years, from 629 to 633:

Four successors and 30 years later, this is what the Rashidun Caliphate looked like in 660:

This only thickens the plot. How on earth could a village off the beaten path, with a population of a few hundred people and weak trade, birth a religion shared by 25% of the world’s population today?

No source prior to the Qur’an makes any mention of Mecca, and the Qur’an itself mentions it only a single time (48:24)3. Despite the fact that we have detailed descriptions of western and southern Arabia from various Roman historians, including Procopius (ca. 500–570 CE) most notably, Mecca seems to have been completely unknown to the classical and late ancient worlds. This provides strong evidence that Mecca did not have any significant cultural, economic, or political ties to the broader world of the late ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Of course, once we recognize that Mecca was a small village with only a few hundreds or thousands of inhabitants and a subsistence economy, its omission becomes perfectly understandable.—The Hijaz in Late Antiquity, Social and Economic Conditions in the Cradle of the Qur’an, Stephen J. Shoemaker, 2022

2. The Software Update of Islam

This is the typical geography in the area of Mecca:

Lots of mountains, some valleys or oases that allow for a little bit of agriculture, mostly shrubs here and there that allow for camels and goats to browse. This is conducive to pastoral clans, who tend to use bloodlines as the unit of community to protect themselves, and tend to attack neighboring clans because it’s easy to steal livestock. So the clan structure looks like this:

But although this is a stable situation (a “local optimum”), it’s bad: It’s expensive, and will sometimes result in tribal wars that deplete everybody.

A much better and stabler situation (“global optimum”) is this:

So how do you vanquish the inertia to establish a more optimal situation?

A series of serendipitous situations meant Muhammad was the right person at the right place and the right time to do this across this whole region, and where once there were constant inter-clan wars, there was suddenly a formidable force.

Muhammad, born in 570 AD, was a member of the Quraysh, the predominant4 clan of the village of Mecca. He was part of a smaller branch of the clan, his father died before he was born, and his mother when he was 6. He was raised by his grandfather and later uncle, and was a trader. In 610 AD, he starts seeing visions of the Angel Gabriel. How did this have such a big impact?

Trade

One of the keys to unite people is trade. Unlike goat herding or local agriculture, which don’t need cooperation with foreigners and lead to storing wealth that can be stolen, trade needs cooperation. It’s win-win. So traders have a strong incentive to pacify regions, make clans respect each other and stop war. In exchange, the trade is taxed and clans receive some of the taxes. This is what we saw in Pax Mercatus: Whether it was the Roman Empire, China, rivers in Europe, the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Discovery, the Pax Mongolica, the Pax Americana… In all cases, trade begets military expansion to bring peace.

So it’s not a coincidence that Muhammad was a trader: He had an incentive to pacify all the clans in the region to allow for camel caravans to trade freely.

It’s not a coincidence either that he really started Islam not in Mecca, but in Medina.

Medina was a bigger town because there was an oasis there.

We can understand why when we look at the local topography:

Muhammad started preaching in Mecca and that got him into problems. At some point, other clan members wanted to kill him so he escaped to Medina.

But luckily for him, Medina was just emerging from a tribal war, and was thus especially open to a solution to their clan problem, especially from a trader who promoted trade, peace, mutual respect, and taxation, instead of inter-clan war.

Muhammad created the concept of Umma, or Muslim identity: We’re all the same, we’re all together, we should like each other and not fight each other. He created a meta-identity above that of clans, promoting their union.

By making apostasy strongly punishable, Islam increased the barriers to exit the community: You’re in, and you can’t get out.5

The exhaustion from internecine conflict in Medina made the townspeople open to these changes, and Muhammad became a local mediator, eventually reaching a position of power.

But there were lots of other social engineering innovations that allowed this to happen.

Monotheism

The date of all this is relevant too. We’re now in the 620s, and this is happening:

The region was on the border of Christian spread. Although Muhammad was illiterate, he knew about the Bible, Jesus, and the Angel Gabriel. But this belief was not predominant in the region at that time. The main reason why he was kicked out of Mecca was because he adopted the Judeo-Christian idea of monotheism, and that meant he was against the polytheism reigning in Mecca.

The bright side, though, is that once he convinced a group to become monotheistic, he took away one more reason to fight each other.

This also meant that an attack on one of the clans was an attack on all the clans, reducing inter-clan hostility.

Adopting the Judeo-Christian concept of omnipotency (which was not common of deities before monotheism) made the enforcement of rules much easier: Now you couldn’t hide in order to violate the norms, Allah would always see you.

Taxation

When Muhammad escaped from Mecca to Medina, he was starved for income. That’s the context in which we should interpret the importance of alms in Islam. He needed money!

By no means shall you attain righteousness unless you give freely of that which you love, and whatever you give, Allah knows it well.—Qur’an 3:92

Alms became taxation, and Muhammad even sold its ROI:

The example of those who spend their wealth in the way of Allah is like a seed [of grain] which grows seven spikes; in each spike is a hundred grains. And Allah multiplies [His reward] for whom He wills.—Qur’an 2:261

The most important tax is the zakāt, 2.5% of disposable income per year from wealthy-enough people. To me, this is a way for clan leaders to control more funds, as they could tax other wealthy clan members and control how that money would be used. A bit like a subscription: If you pay into this community, we’ll be able to afford more good things for you and your clan.6

A core aspect of this is that the more powerful individuals get more benefits from this tax (clan leaders), while their juniors in power are just compelled to pay up.

This is why, when Muhammad died, there was a war: The bedouins didn’t want to pay up7 so they left the agreement they had with Muhammad, but they were defeated and forced by the richer, more powerful clans to keep paying.

Another way to see the zakāt is pooling money for an investment: With more money, you can afford more warriors fighting for longer, which will then give you more booty to share with them and amongst yourselves.

Violence

As we said, when you eliminate so many internal boundaries, you can redeploy your forces to the external boundaries, so you end up with a much higher concentration of forces to attack neighbors.

The taxation enables funding for these attacks. The Quran is explicit about the mechanism here:

• 8:1 says the booty belongs to Allah, so no stealing

• 8:41 says 20% goes to the community (God, the Messenger, kin, orphans, the needy, and travelers. In practice, mostly leadership, dependents, political grants, and the emerging state), and 80% to the fighters.

• 59:6–7 says spoils without fighting go to the community.

This gives an institutionalized method for everybody to be happy: The fighters pool their strength, they invade, sack, get a bounty, and share some with the organizers, who can keep expanding.

The problem with this is that it can quickly become a scorched-earth strategy, where if you don’t conquer more, you don’t have income to finance your armies, which then turn against you, or can’t maintain peace. So early Islam made sure to keep the local population intact instead of trying to replace it, kept freedom of religion, eliminated and replaced the elites, and charged them the jizya, another tax dedicated to non-Muslims, to fund the entire operation.

These taxes could be hefty. When Muhammad conquered the Jewish settlement of Khaybar, north of Medina, the annual tax was 50% of what was produced.

Notice the pattern here: early on, Muhammad didn’t have power or money. He used his position as a respected external trader to broker peace in Medina, which gave him enough power to raid caravans, eventually taking Khaybar and its date production. He was converting military power into economic power, and every time he did, he could reuse the local resources to tax them, recruit new soldiers, or both.

In effect, this meant warriors went from potential raiding threats to subjects of a standing army, with a stipend they could lose if they left. This became obvious in the Ridda Wars: When Muhammad died, many tribes seceded from Islam, but his successor Abu Bakr was able to harness the existing ones to subdue the secessionists and reunite Arabia.

Desert Nomad Logistics

Arabia naturally breeds the type of warrior that thrives in all the regions from Morocco to Iraq. The cornerstone is the camel, which can eat the type of vegetation in this area and store water to sustain long trips in the desert. They are quick and don’t need roads.

On top of that, Arabs had become careful water and grazing managers. They knew where to go to refuel, how much to take, and when to move on. They could move quickly from oasis to wadi, to fertile valley, not depleting their resources in the process. Compare that with European and Persian armies, which had to bring some of their food with them, had to feed the horses fodder besides the grass they ate on the way, and had an entire logistics train to manage to make all this happen.

Garrison Towns

Another innovation in violence that came a few years after Muhammad’s death was the garrison towns, such as Basra and Kufa in Iraq, and Fustat in Egypt.

Most armies were raised specifically for a conquest and then returned. This made the control of occupied lands difficult.

So other empires had garrisons too, but they tended to be either in existing cities or become cities themselves, and soldiers and locals commingled, which could dilute the force of the conqueror. Indeed, all the invasions that took place in Europe at that time from eastern hordes ended up with these hordes adopting the mores of the locals (Latin language, Christianism…) rather than the other way around. Not for the Muslims.

Early on, the Muslims made sure to keep the conquerors and conquered separate. This allowed for less corruption, more control over the local population, and keeping the soldiers more in line and easier to redeploy. And since they stayed put in these garrisons rather than coming back, they could maintain control of the lands taken over.

Polygamy

Whereas in Byzantium marriages were monogamous (because of Christianity), this had not percolated into the region. Muhammad didn’t adopt it in Islam, which might have been quite clever for the religion’s spread. Instead, he regulated polygamy, which had been too extreme before (too many wives per man). It limited men to four wives at any given time (so more wives could be taken sequentially).

Keeping polygamy had a couple of advantages. First, a conqueror could marry the daughters of several conquered elites to pacify them. The more wives they could have, the better. Muhammad had 11-13 wives. This was crucial to unite Arabia, as many of these wives were taken to cement the adhere of new clans to Islam.

Second, polygamy created a surplus of single men with no access to sex. If, say, ~25% of men were polygamous and they married on average three women, and 25% had one wife, then 50% of men would not have access to a woman.

Banning access to sex to lots of young males is a recipe for raids—they’re hunting for wives—so it made much more sense to repurpose their desires to attack foreigners. So Muhammad continued the practice that part of a soldiers’ loot would include slaves, wives, and concubines.

The problem is if your soldiers fear dying in battle, they might not want to engage at all. So a great innovation of the Quran was to conceive beautiful, pure, virgin companions in heaven for true believers. A couple of centuries later, that would become the story of 72 virgins for religious martyrs.

Succession

By making allegiance to Allah and not just a person (himself), he made the new community outlast his own life.

But crucially, it wasn’t settled how the leadership of Islam would work, as Muhammad died suddenly.8 This led to internecine wars for power, which sometimes are bad because they lead to civil wars (plenty of these in Islam), but on another side, they allow competitive forces to play within Islam: The religion can’t settle and rot from inside from a series of bad leaders, because there’s always some competing reading of Islam to challenge the current one.

From Software to Hardware

So these are some of the mechanisms that let Islam grow from a tiny settlement to taking over Arabia.

I’m not saying these mechanisms were purposefully designed. Whether they came from Allah via the Angel Gabriel, or Muhammad and his successors chose them (consciously or unconsciously), the fact is they were software ideal for fast spread.

I’m sure I got some of these mechanisms wrong, and that I’m missing a few more. If you have more, please share them! But these look like the most important parts of the software update that unleashed the potential of the Arab tribes.

At the right time.

3. The Fall of Empires

This was the region when Muhammad arrived.

The Byzantines were weak: Half of their empire had disappeared under the arrival of the hordes from the north and east: Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Goths, Huns... It spent its time warring with them, and with the Sassanids to the east.

It had remained mainly a maritime power, as you can guess from the map above. This exposed it dearly to land-based threats.

The Sassanids were also threatened to the east by similar nomadic tribes.

Crucially, the Byzantines and the Sassanids fought a terrible war between 602 and 628, just as Muhammad was uniting Arabia. By the time Arabia it was completed in 633, the situation was:

• Two exhausted rivals

• The plains of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia fully exposed to a neighboring power

• Egypt and the Levant were especially exposed because their patron (Byzantium) was a naval power

• Mesopotamia was very exposed because it was directly connected to Arabia, and the Sassanid Empire, aside from its exhaustion from the war with Byzantium, was fighting on its eastern side

And this happened:

The Rashidun Caliphate (the first four descendants of Muhammad) reached:

• In the north, the Levant and then Anatolia

• In the east, Mesopotamia and then the Sassanid Empire

• In the west, to Egypt, and then northern Africa

As they grew, they could simply take over existing elites and keep the economic production and tax it.

The expansion across all of north Africa looks especially incredible, until you realize a couple of things:

First, virtually all of it is desert, which means there’s not that much opposition. It’s focused in the three areas of Egypt, Cyrene, and Coastal Maghreb. All three were colonies of Byzantium (so not self-ruling), and all three were focused on sea threats rather than land threats.

Second, the Arabs were specialized in long treks across the desert. This didn’t fundamentally change their logistics.

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So this is how I understand that the Arabs went from a few clans in the mountains of a peripheral region to conquering one of the biggest empires of the time in a mere 30 years:

• Beyond Egypt, most of North Africa is a repeat of Arabia, so easy for Arabs to conquer, ad they’re naturally adapted to the terrain

• Muhammad added new software to unite the clans and harness taxes, so that Islam had soldiers and money to fund wars

• Three bordering lands (Egypt, Levant, Mesopotamia) were easy to conquer as they have few mountains to protect them and are close to Arabia: Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia

• There was a moment of unique weakness of the two regional powers, so Muslims could take parts of the otherwise hard-to-conquer Anatolia and Persia

• There are large swaths with no water and settlements. North Africa is just Egypt, Cyrene, and northern Maghreb.

How did Islam keep expanding? How did it invade Spain? Anatolia? Europe? How did it spread across east Africa? Southeast Asia? What’s the relation between Arab, Arabic, and Islam? How did they each spread in somewhat different places? That’s what we’re going to see next.

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This is a highly scrutinized part of history, I welcome your feedback on what I got right or wrong!

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.