100,000 Gifts

I’ll be in Dubai around New Year’s Eve. If you know anybody from the government or businesses who can speak of the past, the present, and the future of Dubai, and / or you can make an intro, please let me know in the comments or by replying to this email!

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So this happened a few weeks ago:

You are now among over 100,000 people who have chosen to belong to the Uncharted Territories community. Normally, the newsletter is typically read 80,000 to 100,000 times, showing that you are really engaged. Many of you also manifest this by leaving thousands of comments, participating in my polls, emailing me directly, taking my course, and in many other ways. That tells me we’ve created something special here.

Several of you have written to ask about giving Uncharted Territories as a Christmas gift. Here’s the link:

It’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve done this year, and what’s coming in 2025.

2024 Highlights

GeoHistory

As always, we’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about GeoHistory. In terms of countries, we learned:

• Poland is really two countries, because of how it was split by its neighbors, with ramifications that can be felt to this day. These are Poland’s priorities today.

• Why Hungary is so small, after a thousand years as a larger empire. Also, why it’s been so brilliant in history, with an inordinate amount of Nobel Prize and Olympic gold medal winners.

• Why Jamaica was a pirate capital, why its past is intertwined with rum, why most of the population is Black, why it has a unique culture of reggae and Rastafarianism, and how its past determines its future.

• Why Bangladesh is so dense and so threatened by sea level rise.

• Why Chile is so long

• We took a deep dive into Mexico, as one of the biggest countries in the world, with its close proximity to the world’s superpower, the US. We looked at why 80% of the country is empty, why it’s poorer than the US, 25 fascinating facts about the country, what’s the country’s future, what it was like before Europeans arrived, and how the Aztecs rose and fell so fast.

• Given the events in the Middle East, we looked at why Lebanon could be rich, but is and will continue to be a mess.

• And of course, we looked at what’s happening in Syria, and how that impacts the plans of different superpowers.

In terms of cities and regions, we explored:

• What makes Madrid a complete outlier among capitals: It’s a very recent city! Why this is the case is fascinating.

• How the Internet and Remote Work are blurring the limits of cities, and how this has enormous implications on how we will live in the future, with countries already starting to fight for remote workers.

• Why California is the way it is: Why SF is such an important city, why the capital is Sacramento, why LA surpassed both in terms of population…

• Why Atlanta is so big and located where it is.

• Why Texas is a triangle formed by Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston.

• Why Budapest is the way it is, and what you should visit if you go.

• How Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, and why it is the way it is today.

We also looked at some more fundamental factors that determine where humans live and thrive, like:

• The Rain Shadow Effect, which explains why there are deserts near lush forests in many places.

• How the disappearance of an ocean was fundamental to the birth of human civilization.

• Some of the other consequences of that ocean’s disappearance, like why Africa is poorer than Europe, why Southern Europe is poorer than Northern Europe, why Greece was the cradle of European civilization, how that ocean’s disappearance was crucial for the Industrial Revolution to start, and more.

• How humans have shaped rivers through history, and vice-versa: How rivers have shaped humans and their states. River behavior is so important that, at one point, a river’s behavior nearly got the presidents of the US and Mexico killed.

A Future of Abundance

Most of the public debate is about how there are too many people on Earth, how we’re destroying the environment, and how a world with fewer humans would be better. I disagree with that: I believe the Earth could easily hold 100 billion humans.

We’ve analyzed many of the obstacles we could face on that path:

• Water won’t be a limitation, because we can desalinate it at a reasonable price, nearly everywhere.

• Food won’t be a limitation, because we can produce food more efficiently in greenhouses and vertical farms than on land: Plants are surprisingly inefficient! Today vertical farms are not economically viable, but they will be eventually. And at some point, we’re going to bypass plants altogether.

• Energy won’t be a limitation (see Energy & Environment section below): We can produce as much as we want with solar and nuclear.

• The environment won’t be a limitation: Pollution shrinks with a wealthier population, and a wealthier population requires a growing population.

• Specifically, we can stop global warming whenever we want: Our emissions are about to start falling thanks to solar (and wind) energy, we can grind stones to capture CO₂, and in the meantime, we can inject sulfates in the stratosphere with very little downside.

• We won’t run out of any element, as this has never happened before, their amount doesn’t shrink (they stay on Earth’s crust), and humans are very good at finding what they need.

So it’s clear we can do it. Not only that, but we should want to do it, because humanity gets better with more people, and it’s morally sound to want a more populated Earth.

Energy & Environment

Why are some environmentalists so against this idea? Because there are two types of environmentalists. One is the group who believes in technology and knows we can use it to solve all our problems. I call the other group Watermelons: green outside, but red inside. For them, environmentalism is just a cover for anti-capitalism. They just want the world to deindustrialize. We should ignore this group.

In reality, we’re at a critical moment in history: We are moving away from fossil fuels, but there’s a question of how fast the move is going to happen.

We’ve realized that solar power is one of the best sources of energy (better than wind), it’s already the cheapest, and it will keep getting cheaper.

Solar only has three issues at this point:

1. It doesn’t produce electricity on demand

2. Its generation is spread over vast areas, and the grid and laws are not designed with this in mind

3. It takes up a fair amount of land

The first issue is partially solved by the combination of wind and solar, which is a match made in heaven. Whatever we can’t solve this way might be solved by batteries. That is the next article I’ll write about energy.

Laws and the structure of electricity distribution will have to adapt to distributed generation. The combination of these two issues is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for entrepreneurs who can rethink how to produce energy-intensive products such as fuels or cement.

The third issue won’t be a problem any time soon. It might be one in a few decades or centuries, but for now we have more than enough land to fuel humanity with solar energy. If and when supply of land starts becoming a problem, nuclear will be the solution, as it’s one of the best sources of energy: It’s the densest source of energy (little land and fuel give you a lot of energy), and is even more environmentally friendly than solar. It’s just too expensive today.

AI

I’ve been updating you about the progress on AI, and how I fear a deep impact on labor. This will have real consequences for tech workers and investors, especially VCs.

This is why I created an AI-based app that you got to try. You guys loved it! Alas, I didn’t have much time to work on it.

But the impact of AI on jobs is a very short-term thing. In the long term, it might not matter, because it looks like AIs will become superintelligent within 8 years, and that might be the end of the world. How would you change your life if that were true?

As you know, people barely talk about this AI risk, and that’s because they don’t have a good way of thinking of long-term issues. In this article, I explored why AI matters much more than the threat of nuclear war, the fertility crisis, or even the environment.

Given the risk, it’s important that the people with power over AI be morally impeccable, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is not, so he should go.

Spirituality

I have had this huge draft for five years now: How to Design a Religion. It’s daunting! So I started tackling sides of it instead:

• How we’ve lost rites of passage, like coming of age, and how we could reclaim them for the 21st century.

• Same thing for birth, hazing, marriage, and death.

• How we used to build beautiful buildings like cathedrals, how present-day “cathedrals” are completely different, and what 21st century cathedrals could look like, especially in the Age of Internet.

Evolutionary Psychology

• Why charisma is the same thing as being sexually attractive, fun, and a leader, and how to develop these characteristics.

• How different sexual kinks have evolved.

• Why evolutionary psychology predicts family conflicts such as conflicts between mothers and their foetuses, sibling rivalry, parental conflict with children’s partners, and children’s conflict with stepparents.

• And more.

Medicine

It’s an industry that’s moving really fast, finding more and more cures for different ailments. One of the worst is cancer, and we discussed how a virologist likely cured her own cancer. Connecting these two trends: Shouldn’t we be permitted to take more risks and experiment on our own cancers (or diseases in general)?

Investments

I already mentioned a couple of articles on AI investing, and on solar investing. But the biggest investment articles I wrote this year are on real estate, why it is no longer a good investment, and what real estate investments are more likely to be safe.

(These articles are not investment advice, just informational.)

Other

• We will start discussing Mars settlements in depth in 2025, because the window to launch rockets to Mars opens in 2026. With that in mind, we explored what the ride to Mars will look like.

• We disagreed with the pessimists that fear geniuses are disappearing. They’re here, we’re just not looking in the right places.

• We should aim for creating more wealth and reducing inequality, but these two goals are structurally at odds, and the best way we know to achieve the best of both worlds is a regulated capitalism.

• Freedom of speech can’t be understood without freedom of speech distribution. Who owns the megaphones is a crucial question for the future of humankind.

• Back in August, I observed that the Woke pendulum was swinging back, and that we were entering a new phase in this discussion, where the debate would be more nuanced.

• I also called into question an accepted myth: that diversity is good. It’s good in some situations. In other cases, it isn’t.

• We pushed back on the notion that most of what happens in the world is due to specific humans doing specific things. That is not the case. History is driven by systems, not stories.

• I also led two cohorts of my course on how to become a world-class communicator!

2025: What’s Coming?

Uncharted Territories is about understanding the world of today to navigate the world of tomorrow. And we’re in a great position to do just that in 2025:

1. AI

This is the biggest topic in the world today, so I will lean more into it. I will start building more AI apps and will share what I learn in the process. Along the way, I’ll share new insights about the singularity, how AI impacts jobs, how it changes the power balances in the economy, and how it affects the power relations between countries.

2. Energy & Environment

• We’re going to look at batteries to understand how much they will enable wind and solar to take over the world’s energy generation.

• If indeed we’re near peak fossil fuel use, a critical geostrategic question emerges: What will happen to all the countries whose finances depend on fossil fuels, like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Iran?

• More generally, we’ll explore what a world with cheap, ubiquitous energy will look like.

• Of course, I’ll keep writing on ways to fight climate change, including sulfate injection in the stratosphere.

3. GeoHistory

We will continue with GeoHistory, especially when connected to global news. For example:

• Why is Argentina not a superpower? Can the current president Milei achieve that?

• Why is Iran the way it is, and what will happen with it? What about Saudi Arabia?

• Germany’s elections are coming. Why is Germany the way it is, and how does that impact current elections? How are they linked to energy?

• Other geographic areas I’ve been considering: Canada, Japan, South Korea, Peru, Australia, African regions… And of course, China. If you share details about a country you want me to look into, I’m more likely to tackle it!

• More fundamentally, how has geography impacted humans? Why are people poorer nearer the equator? How has geography influenced institutions? Architecture?

4. Other

I have some key pieces I’d like to tackle, but they’re so big they’re daunting. Every year I take on a few. Let’s see what I might get to this year:

• Are we naturally monogamous?

• The future of healthcare

• The future of education

• How to design a religion

• The future of war

• The settlement of Mars

• The future of fertility

This is my full time job, which I can only do because you support me. If you want to continue that, or if you want to read everything that I write (50% is behind a paywall), subscribe!

And since it’s Christmas, why not give a friend or loved one a year’s subscription? What could be better than helping people better understand and navigate the world?

Thank You

Thank you for being part of Uncharted Territories. So many of you trust me to help you see the world in a different light, and support me to keep doing it. Thank you for leaving so many comments and sending me emails, always engaging thoughtfully so we can improve together. I feel honored. You are my 100,000 gifts.

Thank you also to Shoni and Heidi, your loyal editors, who jump on your articles sometimes weeks in advance, sometimes at the last minute, because they are dedicated to always giving you clean and readable articles—despite my many typos and sometimes tortured writing.

From now to the end of the year, I will write 2-3 more articles and will take the rest of time to refill my energy for everything that’s coming in 2025.¹

I might try writing shorter articles though during that time. Let’s see what inspiration begets. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

1. I take 4 weeks of holidays a year, and I’ve taken 2 this year so far. These are my final two weeks!