Welcome to the Premium Corner of Uncharted Territories!
Welcome to the premium version of Uncharted Territories! If you’re completely new to the community, please continue reading. If you’ve been part of it for some time, feel free to jump to the section “ What Are Some Great Uncharted Territories Articles?”
If you are unsure what you just signed up for, no worries. I have all the details below. But before we get to that, here are a few things you should do.
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Ok, time to discuss: What the hell did you just sign up for?
The Future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”— William Gibson
Have you noticed how it feels like the world is mutating faster and faster? Like we can’t keep up with what’s happening.
I believe this is just the beginning.
I believe that some of us alive today will live forever. Maybe you, reading this.
I believe AI will make our lives unrecognizably better. It will also push many into poverty.
I believe wealth will keep concentrating in the hands of a few, especially the hands of builders of aggregators.
I believe nation-states will drift into irrelevance.
I believe geography will matter less and less.
I believe remote work will do to white collar workers what it has done to blue collar workers over the last 50 years.
I believe Bitcoin will replace gold, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currencies, and smart contracts will upend how we deal with each other.
I believe tech corporations scientifically enslave us into unhappiness.
I believe we don’t fathom yet the consequences of fertility collapse, and are utterly unprepared for it.
I believe most people are not developing the crucial skills they will need to surf these trends. Instead, these trends will overwhelm and crush them.
I believe all these themes are interconnected.
We’re entering a world of change, full of unknowns that will challenge everything about how we live and work. We’re entering
uncharted territories
.
How to Win in the World of Tomorrow
The world is changing ever faster. Those who can keep up will have opportunities beyond their dreams and will be able to shape the future. The rest will fall by the roadside.
To navigate these trends, we need two things: Predict the future and adapt to it. This is what I want to do with you: Explore these uncharted territories to know how we can prepare for them.
What Should You Expect as a Subscriber?
Some of my articles will be about understanding the current trends that determine the future, so we can predict what happens next. They will touch on themes such as automation, remote work, cryptocurrencies, the end of nation-states, aging, inequality…
These articles should help you understand the news in a way that you didn’t before. Better, they will help you shut down the noise and focus on the few things that matter, the trends that will overwhelm the world, not the daily churn of useless clickbait.
Other articles will be about the decisions we need to make and the skills we need to develop to prepare for that future. They will touch themes like problem-solving, persuasion, storytelling, versatility, productive conversations, negotiation…
Most weeks, you will receive a free article and a premium article. Both will cover the same general themes.
What Are You Getting as a Premium Subscriber?
This is what you’re getting as a premium sub:
Some weeks, your premium articles will dive one layer deeper than the free one, cover a different angle, add context, connect the dots, share what happens behind the scenes, uncover the underlying patterns.
Other times, you will read the edgiest, more radical, and more exploratory ideas.
You will have access to all my past articles.
As a premium subscriber, I want you to form a community where we think together about these ideas.
We will have monthly conversations. In some cases, one on one.
You will also be the first ones to try new things, such as launching a social currency or an NFT together.
You will help me pick the next topics to explore.
And more importantly, you will help support me to make sure I can keep this up. This is taking over my life but I can’t afford to stop working. The more you support me, the more I can focus on this
What Are Some Great Uncharted Territories Articles?
One of my most popular series of articles is History Moves to the Cloud:
How Geography Drives History
Geography Is the Chessboard of History
The Global Chessboard
A Space-Crafted Chessboard
(premium)
The Takeover of Technology
History’s Network Effects
The Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Internet and Blockchain Will Kill Nation States
Country Deep Dives
Spain, France, and Germany
(premium)
Switzerland
(premium)
A Brief History of the Caribbean
A Brief History of the Caribbean, Part 2
(premium)
India and the Indian Subcontinent
(premium)
China
Russia’s Dilemma
(free) and
Russia’s Future
(premium)
Egypt
East Africa
(free) and
Ethiopia
(premium)
My COVID articles are always well-received. I try to keep as much of it as I can for free.
COVID Articles
The Fail West
The Top 25 Mistakes of COVID Mismanagement
The Mental Pitfalls of COVID
Delta Variant
COVID FAQ, Summer 2021, part 1
COVID FAQ, Summer 2021, part 2
(premium)
Long COVID and ME/CFS
(free) and
Other Long COVID
(premium)
The Omicron Question
Omicron and Simpson’s Paradox
(premium)
Should You Vaccinate Your Kids?
Anti-Vaxxing, Conspiracy Theories, and Confirmation Bias
(premium)
Coronavirus: Game Over
and
COVID: End(emic) Game
(premium)
And then there’s a mixed bag of self-improvement and big future trends:
Self-Improvement
How to Make Your Conversations Hyperproductive
How to Consume the News
(premium)
How to Invest: The Few Key Things You Need to Know
(free)
14 More Tips from a Financial Advice Industry Insider
(premium)
How to Become the Best in the World at Something
How to Pick Your Skill Stack
Big Trends and How to Read the Future
Remote Work Is Inexorable
S-Curves
Should Everybody Read English?
Remote Work & S-Curves Deep Dive
(premium)
Playing Catch Up with the US
(free) and
Non-Plus Ultra
(premium)
Past, Present and Future of Energy
The Future of Governance and Progress
How to Fight the Retail Apocalypse
AI Does It Best
How to Handle Knowledge
Distribute the Future
Merchants of Risk
(premium)
You’re a Neuron
Society Is a Brain
The Tree of Knowledge
How to Change Beliefs
Feedback Series:
How to Get Feedback
(free),
How to Give Effective Feedback
(premium), and
How to Give Feedback Tactfully
(premium)
How to Handle Concentration of Force over the Internet
(premium)
Debate Is Broken. How to Improve It.
What Else Are You Cooking, Tomas?
At any given time, I’m working on about 50 articles in parallel. In this article , I share the main themes and articles I’m thinking of working on in 2022. They cover topics like the future of nation-states, education, violence, energy, fertility, knowledge industries, atoms, humans, automation, corporations, and blockchain. I also explore how to engineer society, and how to engineer ourselves: how to navigate the future.
But Who Are You, Tomas?
I’ve spent over a decade career building tech products in Silicon Valley, where I created products used by hundreds of millions of people. There, I learned about applied psychology, designed thousands of user experiences, tested them on real customers—maybe you—and got exposed to the world of tomorrow.
Before that, I got an MBA from Stanford and two MSc in Engineering—from Ecole Centrale Paris and ICAI Madrid. Throughout all this time, I’ve been creating content on the side.
You might already know me through my COVID articles, such as:
Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now
(40M views, most read Medium article of 2020)
Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance
(20M views, 4th most read Medium article of 2020)
The Fence
(data visualization article with the New York Times)
Out of Many, One
(>500k views)
Learning How to Dance
(>600k views)
Should We Aim for Herd Immunity like Sweden?
(>250k views)
The Swiss Cheese Strategy
And
other
COVID
articles
.
But COVID is just one of many topics I’ve covered.
Before the pandemic, I wrote articles that went viral about how to improve your skills, such as how to become the best in the world at something , or how to write and how to deliver a funny speech .
I’ve written a book and a series of articles on storytelling structure , and then gave a TEDX Talk on the topic.
My over 500 pages of unpublished content, written over the last 10 years, correspond to ~200 pages of blog posts drafts (from which you saw a sample earlier), and the rest is from a book I started on automation, AI, inequality, and the impact of such issues on politics.
After all this time and content, I realized it was time to go all in on this. That’s why I’m jumping in and launching Uncharted Territories . I hope this is as exciting for you as it is for me. If it is, help me make this a reality and become a premium subscriber. I look forward to living this adventure together!
This should be fun.
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