In the previous article, we explored what good content will look like in a world of AI: insightful, entertaining, truthful, unbiased, honest, authentic, personalized, at scale. But how can we achieve that? What products should Uncharted Territories create?
Today, I’ll share some ideas I’d like to make real, in this order:
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Real-life experiences
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More content
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Physical products
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And the one that rides the AI wave the most, digital products.
And if you want to be part of the team that brings them to life, apply here.
After many of you asked, I added an investment option.
Media companies are well positioned to organize real life experiences, from conferences to dinners in different cities to trips to company visits… Which ones would you like to see? What would an Uncharted Territories conference look like?
Here are some of my more out-of-the box ideas.
I would love to create an Uncharted Territories museum. Imagine that you could shape sand to create landscapes like here:
But what if, as you created the sand, you saw civilizations emerge in valleys? Forests in the right climates, cut down for agricultural land, cities appearing at the confluence of rivers, trade posts at their mouths, nomadic tribes in pasture land… You wouldn’t just shape topography, you would understand the deep geographic mechanisms behind history in an intuitive way.
Have you ever visited a historical site, but failed to understand why it was built, why there, how it was used, what type of fascinating stories had unfolded there…?
I had never realized until recently that the Alcázar in the Spanish city of Segovia, near Madrid, was not built as a castle against the Moors during the Reconquista, but centuries later, for the king to protect himself during civil wars! I also didn’t realize one of the most important Spanish kings, Felipe II, got married here.
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?
What if you could play a role in history?
Many of you write to tell me how useful my articles have been for studying history and geography classes. I’m not surprised: I loved the topics at school, but I found them superficial and disconnected. I didn’t want to know the facts, I wanted to understand why.
We now have enough content to formalize this. What would new curricula look like if they were designed by Uncharted Territories?
Uncharted Territories has lots of content that could already be packaged into books. Should we get them done?
Two examples of many. GeoHistory would be a Big History book à la Gun, Germs and Steel, that explains all the ways in which geography influenced history. 100 Billion Humans is about how the Earth has capacity for many more people than we imagine. There are more, like History Moves to the Cloud, about how technology determines political structures, and how that suggests what will happen to nation-states in the coming decades.
My 1st serious video got 8,000 views. The 2nd one got 2,000,000. There’s clearly potential in a YouTube channel!
There’s actually very little amazing streaming content about geography. Look at what’s on Netflix for example:
Geography is either history or nature! Could we make a GeoHistory show for Netflix?
Along those lines, there’s a new XPRize for the best techno-optimistic near-term sci-fi video project. UT is all about that, and although I’ve never written fiction, I’ve studied it deeply. Should we present a candidate?
I’ve posted maybe a couple of dozen Instagram Reels, and without really trying, a couple of them went viral. My guess is I could have millions, or even billions of views per month, by creating many more short videos, making variants, using AI, and cross-posting them across social networks.
Right now, you can’t easily listen to my articles. You have to go to the Substack mobile app, where a canned voice reads them to you. What if they were better narrated? Available anywhere—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, etc? What if they were converted into an interesting conversation, like those made by NotebookLM?
What if I started interviewing interesting people? There are only very few deep interviewers, like Tyler Cowen or Dwarkesh Patel. Should I do this? It would need a production team: research, outreach, editing, posting…
If the goal is to help people make better decisions, courses become an obvious next step. They can be asynchronous or cohort-based. AI tools will help them scale tremendously, as the biggest challenge today is that the time of the creator is finite, but the value they provide is much higher than what their employees do (so you don’t want to be coached by one of their employees, but it might be good enough to be coached by their AI version). This is especially sensible for Uncharted Territories as I already have a successful course, which I just couldn’t push more because it was taking too much of my time, especially giving feedback to customers on their pieces of communication.
I also had a hard time organizing the study groups. But if I can automate the feedback and the group formation and facilitation, could this course be offered again, fully (or mostly) automated?
About 40% of the income of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt (with 25M followers) comes from its store.
What would an Uncharted Territories shop look like? What would you like to see there?
What other physical products could Uncharted Territories create? What would you like to see in the shop?
I love all the ideas above, but I’m especially keen on digital products, because these can truly reinvent media from the ground up with AI.
Human research and decision-making has hundreds of flaws, as I’ve outlined here: It’s slow, full of biases, lacks facts, makes wrong assumptions… AI is much better at all of this, yet it’s bad at other things: It’s not succinct, it gets lost, it doesn’t reason too well, it doesn’t know what matters…
What if we combined both? Imagine a mix of Twitter, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT, where people contributed their insights and facts to some topic, AIs broke down and reconfigured the arguments, and a mechanism incorporated the best comments and thoughts in one place so it’s easy to visualize?
What if we had a tool that scours the Internet to figure out what’s the most relevant topic right now, and the most interesting angles about it?
What if the Uncharted Territories audience could choose from that what they want to hear about? What if readers could pay for the articles they want to read? Imagine for example a map of the world, and if you want UT to write about a specific country, you can pledge money towards it. The more money is pledged, the more likely the article will be picked next. This allows two things: Satisfy the people who are most interested in a topic, and finance the production of content for all.
Humans already can’t tell if writing comes from an AI, but they tend to prefer AI writing! And AIs can copy author styles better than expert human copiers! So, I think AI writing is underused right now, and it will only grow from here. I don’t use it myself, yet, but should I?
What if there were some articles that are always written by me (or other humans) but others were written by AI first? For example, should an AI generate a daily summary of the news, based on all the insights and worldview of Uncharted Territories, which I’d then review, correct, and update before publishing?
Google made a hybrid between Google Search and social media, called Google Discover.
They gather your interests from your searches and serve you articles accordingly. Google does the same thing with the YouTube home page, of course. This product is quite successful, but I think it’s just an intermediary step to what’s coming.
With much more supply of content and a fixed amount of attention, we’ll need better mechanisms to digest information, like for example LLMs looking at what’s going on right now in the world and giving you a summary. This is what OpenAI is trying to do with Pulse:
It used to just give you three topics of interest every day. For each, it crafted a dedicated article for you. Now, it asks you what you’re interested in first, and then in the next step it asks to connect to your email (!!) for more info on you. After this, you wait for 30 minutes to get a list of tailored articles. I think this is flawed for many reasons.
Can we build something better? A mix of daily news with the ability to dive deeper into any specific area in which AIs and other people collaborate to make sense of the news? Yet another product we could build.
Although AIs make mistakes, these mistake are shrinking.
Moreover, I believe agent swarms could already do a better job than humans. Today, some can already drastically reduce mistakes, down to near zero.
What if we could highlight any fact and an AI agent swarm could properly fact-check it?
Wouldn’t it be cool to write an article, and automatically a tool would create versions adapted to all sorts of social media, be it images, carousels, long-form or short-form videos? Some tools already do some of this. Could we have them all in one place?
The same way content started with text, and then moved to pictures, from there to video, then short vertical video, and now AI-generated content, there will be many other types of content to distribute your ideas. One example is interactivity: If it’s easy to code new software, why not accompany your pieces of content with custom software that makes you interact with the ideas instead of just consuming them? That would definitely deliver on the personalization we discussed earlier, and if you know you can get interactive content by going directly to a media source, it’s much more likely to be a go-to source.
Bartosz Ciechanowski makes amazing interactive articles, but they’re very long to make. What if each article had companion software? What would that look like?
Decisions are not something we make in a vacuum. Humans discuss ideas, look for allies, coordinate… We see it in the comments sections of articles, in the way we debate the news at a bar or at the dinner table: Media, and especially the news, are a community thing. But today, the community around the news is crap! Here at Uncharted Territories, it’s limited to the comments section. Other Substacks have a chat. Other outlets do Slack, a few do meet-ups and conferences… Is this really the best we can do?
As AI takes over more parts of our lives, we’ll increasingly crave hanging out with humans. Media is a natural way to connect. What can we do as media companies to facilitate it?
So far, the media has limited itself to informing people to help them make decisions. But what if the audience is already convinced and wants to act? The media offers very little support there. It doesn’t coordinate its audiences to take action. What a missed opportunity! Can you imagine the force they would be if, instead of just frustrating their audiences with insights they can’t really act on, it gave them the tools to coordinate with other members of the audience to build? To get people elected? To push specific pieces of legislation through?
Before, this was impossible for the same reason as software in articles was impossible: It took too many people, it was too expensive. But I don’t think that’s true anymore: Media companies could have a substantially bigger impact by building the tools to help their audience coordinate between themselves to effect change in the world.
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I plan to build all of this for Uncharted Territories, prioritizing the area that resonates the most with the audience: GeoHistory.
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From there, I’ll expand to other topics: AI, Space, Relationships, Society…
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Finally, once we’ve proven that the strategy works for Uncharted Territories and it’s growing faster than COVID in 2020, we’ll expand to other creators who have similar goals as ours by helping them succeed like UT.
If you know anybody who’d be excited to work on this, please share this article with them, the previous one, and more importantly, the careers page! And if you’re an investor, I added an option for you here.
Want to take ownership of one of these initiatives, but I don’t have a position outlined for you? Apply (under the position “other”) and explain your project.
