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Distorted Maps and Storytelling with Tomas Pueyo
1.2k Plays1 year ago
Tomas Pueyo is the author of Uncharted Territories, a newsletter where he tries to deeply understand how the world works to understand where it's going and nudge it in the right direction. He became world viral with his COVID articles, notably The Hammer and the Dance. He has 75,000 readers, and 300,000 on Twitter. Before Uncharted Territories, he has worked in tech companies in Silicon Valley for 15 years.
Sponsor: Maryland Institute College of Art
MICA’s Master of Professional Studies degrees offer intensive, online education designed to develop both creative and professional skills. Now accepting applications for the spring, summer, and fall semesters.
Check out more links, notes, transcript, and more at the PolicyViz website.
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Transcript
Introduction to Data Literacy at MICA
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the Policyviz Podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. Virtually everything we interact with today is driven by or generates data. This data explosion has resulted in the need to take raw, unorganized data and not only process it, but also present it in meaningful ways so that it is insightful and actionable.
00:00:19
Speaker
To meet this need, the Maryland Institute College of Art offers an online Master of Professional Studies in Data Analytics and Visualization, a 15-month accelerated master's program designed for working professionals. The program will teach you to harness the power of data to tell stories, solve problems, and make informed decisions. Learn how to translate data and information into captivating graphics, images, and interactive designs that bring data to life.
00:00:43
Speaker
MICA takes a hands-on, real-world approach with an engaging curriculum. You'll develop career-ready skills while you build a compelling portfolio to impress potential employers. Join their vibrant community of creative professionals as you are mentored by passionate faculty leaders who have built successful careers in data visualization. Discover more at online.mica.edu. That's online.mica.edu. Now accepting applications for the spring, summer, and fall semesters.
Interview with Tomas Pueo
00:01:25
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. On this week's episode of the show, I talk to Tomas Pueo, who runs the Uncharted Territories newsletter on Substack. Tomas' content covers, well, basically everything from climate change to the war in Ukraine,
00:01:42
Speaker
to sex and romance and relationships, COVID, I mean, you name it, he is going deep into these various topics. And so what you'll hear in our conversation is how he goes about doing that. And more importantly, if you're listening to this because of data visualization, his thoughts on maps, he has a terrific Twitter thread that I will link to in the show notes on how maps distort our perceptions of the world. And so we talk
00:02:08
Speaker
at length about how maps do that and how AI and new technologies might help us make maps better. So before I let you go into this week's episode, I would just ask you if you could, if you could take a moment, rate or review this podcast on your favorite podcast provider, be it Apple, be it
00:02:25
Speaker
Spotify, be it Google Podcasts, whatever you listen to, please consider leaving a rating or review. And while you're heading over to the Uncharted Territories newsletter from Tomas, please consider signing up for my PolicyViz newsletter. It comes out every other week to correspond with the podcast. You get a draft blog post or other things that I'm working on.
00:02:46
Speaker
a list of things I'm reading and watching, a list of data visualizations that I think are particularly interesting, and in this week's newsletter, a little poll to ask you what you think I should be doing on my YouTube channel.
Transition from Tech to Writing
00:03:00
Speaker
So enough of that, let's get into the podcast episode. Here is my conversation with Tomas Pueo of Uncharted Territories. Hi, Tomas. Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Hi, John. Thanks for having me.
00:03:16
Speaker
Very excited to chat with you. We've got a lot to talk about because your sub-stack newsletter, Uncharted Territories, you cover a lot of ground. So I think we have a lot to chat about, but I thought we would just start with maybe you talk a little bit about your background and how you kind of got to the point now where on your, your sub-stack newsletters, like your, your thing, your gig.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I used to live in the Bay Area and I worked in tech. I did that for around 15 years, doing product and growth. And I started writing on the side. I never published anything. But after a few years, I decided, okay, I'll just start writing. I posted on Medium. And then at the beginning of COVID, I got a couple of articles that exploded virally.
00:04:04
Speaker
So I started gathering an audience there and eventually moved to sub-stack. And for some reason that I have a hard time understanding, some people are willing to pay money to heal my opinions. And there's enough of them now that I can leave off of it. And so this year I dropped my product and tech career and I'm focusing full-time on this.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah. And you are covering, I mean, I was just scrolling through like the archives, which is great on sub-stack. You just kind of like look through everything, but like you cover attraction, you know, between people. You talk about Ukraine, climate change, maps, which we'll talk about in a second. Like what inspires you or.
00:04:51
Speaker
How do you find, I mean, there's plenty of content, but like, what drives you to write about the topic? There's too much of it. I think, in fact, in fact, as a creator, it's a it's a penalty, right?
The Importance of Interdisciplinary Understanding
00:05:03
Speaker
Because people
00:05:07
Speaker
they want to follow, for example, oh, an expert on COVID, right? Or an expert on economy or something like this. And they have a really hard time understanding a person who touches a lot of topics, especially because like by definition, if you have breadth, you cannot have depth, right? And so I think this has penalized me in terms of audience, but I find it so boring to just focus on one thing that I just don't want to do it. And I think that in my case,
00:05:37
Speaker
I just want to understand how the world works. And once we understand that, we can decide, okay, how should we nudge it in the future in the right direction? And I think for me, the biggest thing is everybody's very siloed. And when people are very siloed, it's very hard to make decisions that require being cross-disciplinary. I'll just give you an example, right?
00:06:00
Speaker
Some people talk about fertility. There's an issue about fertility today. There's not enough kids. People say there's too many people. Well, why? Some people say that, actually, there's too many people in the world because of climate change and the environment. You need to understand environmentalism if you want to understand this. Others say, actually, no, the cause of the fertility crisis is economic. There's not enough economic growth.
00:06:29
Speaker
Others say, no, it's urbanization. Others say, no, it's cultural. And so we actually need to understand the history of fertility. You need to understand economics. You need to understand urbanism. You need to understand all of these things to understand some of these topics. And this is one of the reasons why I talk about all these topics, right? You mentioned climate change. The climate change, the origin of that was fertility. And then you also mentioned maps and geography. And one of the keys there is
00:06:59
Speaker
we don't understand today how much our everyday lives are influenced by geography. And if we understand that, then we can understand so much more of how the world is today and then how we can influence it for the future. Right. And where does, because I do want to talk about maps because you have this great Twitter thread and that was the original instinct for me reaching out, but where does the data come into play in your, both in the workflow, like, you know, how do you start collecting data and then also
00:07:27
Speaker
in the final product, I mean, you are more or less making an argument, sort of telling stories, but you're everything sort of supported with data. So how are you thinking about, you know, I guess the first question is, where are you looking for data? How are you working with it processing it? And then how do you think about weaving that into an article where people are not going to just, you know, nod off and say, this is giving me a bunch of numbers.
Research Methodologies and Tools
00:07:51
Speaker
I mean, that's not easy. It is.
00:07:53
Speaker
You're right. I think this goes at the heart of how this is fascinating. There's two pieces that you need to do really well independently. You need to do the content well, and then you need to do the communication well. And most of the people do one or the other. You can see this, for example, in every scientific paper. There's a lot of content in there, but nobody reads them.
00:08:15
Speaker
and vice versa, most of the communication today feels shallow. And so the reason why this is the case is because the skill set for one or the other is completely different. And you really need to master them both, if you want, I think, to be really impactful. And so on the content side,
00:08:34
Speaker
Because there's so much communication that is very shallow and superficial, you need to go to the people who really have the content. And that means most of the time reading scientific papers. And so like, for example, lately, I'm
00:08:49
Speaker
talking a lot about sex, differences between sexes and how that shapes the human behavior. And I've probably read at this point about 200 papers, maybe 50 of them full, the rest skinned or abstract. But I go straight to the papers because that's really where the source information is.
00:09:10
Speaker
And for each topic that I take, I go deep into that. And so that requires a lot of time, of course. But that's one of the good sides of doing something that you're passionate about. It's like, I don't see the time. I can spend 60 hours a week reading papers, and I'm not going to be tired. So that's on the content side. I read a lot of these primary sources. And then the key becomes how you package them.
00:09:36
Speaker
in an interesting way. And there I studied storytelling, a lot of storytelling. When I went to Stanford, I took script writing classes. I wrote a book about storytelling. I gave a TEDx about storytelling. All of that was to force myself to understand storytelling better. And then I use those structures in all of the articles that I make. I see. I see. So I wonder if you could give folks
00:10:07
Speaker
Maybe some advice on how to read scientific papers because that is also a skill and a lot of people are not, you know, they're not academics. They don't have higher degrees. And like, I think the idea of reading an academic paper is daunting for a lot of people. But like you said, that's where the source material is from.
00:10:25
Speaker
I mean, let's just take one that like your background may not be in sex and fertility, right? Like, right. So like, where do you start? How do you start? How do you start reading those papers so that you feel like you can be common expert, at least for the, the, the goal of writing, you know, three, four, six, 10, you know, newsletter articles.
00:10:44
Speaker
Yeah. So there's a few ways to do that. One is, first you need to find them, right? And there's a couple of ways to do this. Like there's a few search engines, such as Consensus, I think that's called. Or they're just going straight to Google. You put your question, you write your question, and then you add paper and then file type.
00:11:07
Speaker
And so that usually is going to get either the search engines of this that's going to give you a lot of these papers.
00:11:16
Speaker
The papers are always going to have an abstract, which is a summary. It's usually 10 lines. It takes you like three minutes to read. They are usually written with a lot of jargon, but because it's just 10 lines, even with jargon, you can make an effort and try to understand. And in most cases, you just need to read the abstract to give a sense to understand what the article is saying. If you need to go into the detail,
00:11:40
Speaker
I think a couple of keys there is the structure of the article itself. Usually there's an introduction, then there's maybe a methodology, then there's results, and then there's the discussion. The introduction is
00:11:56
Speaker
puts the study in context with all the other studies. It's actually very good to start in a field by reading one or two papers on the field because it's going to point you to all the other relevant people and relevant papers. You very quickly can understand who are the most relevant people here and who are the most relevant papers. There you can just follow the thread and get to the top papers.
00:12:23
Speaker
Many of these papers are going to be meta-analysis, and the meta-analysis are the best to start, to really have a good sense of what's happening. So the introduction here there is valuable, especially for the first papers in a field that you're reading. Then methodology, usually I jump because it's only relevant insofar as the results.
00:12:46
Speaker
are weird, right? It's like, or you have questions about it, like, oh, they found this thing. That's weird. Like, why? How many people did they research? Is it to buy a sample? Things like this. And so you need to write methodology, but usually you don't need to go to the methodology. I usually browse also to see if there's a graph, because graphs usually are going to show you many of the insights, easily summarized.
00:13:08
Speaker
And then if I really want to understand the details of what happened, I read the results. The results aren't going to give you details. OK, this was the result of this thing, and this was the result of this thing.
00:13:19
Speaker
And then finally, the discussion usually is a bit like the abstract, but in detail. So bottom line, how to look at the paper, usually just the abstract. If you want to go more details, if you're new in the field, look at the intro to understand all the other papers in the field. If not, just go to the discussion. And then if you want to go deeper, you can go to the results. And if you want to go deeper, you can go to the methodology. Right. Good. Is there a tool that you use to manage your, like,
00:13:47
Speaker
references and citations and all those PDFs. It's not. I'm so bad. I'm so bad. I have to write. I have to write. I read this somewhere. I'm sorry. I heard people use Zotero. Yeah. I never used it. Yeah. I haven't used it either, but a colleague of mine swears by it. Like I saw him yesterday and he was giving me a hard time because I'm not using Zotero. So I have to.
00:14:15
Speaker
But I think it's a big startup cost when you have a whole library that you just want to move in. It's not like you could go to, I don't think, you can go to Google Scholar, copy the citations, drop it into Zotero. I think it's a little bit more manual than that. Yeah. In my case, I have no system. My system is really linking the articles, the papers in my articles.
00:14:40
Speaker
And that becomes my index because I remember my articles and so I can go back, oh, what was this paper? So that's now like, which is shitty. It's terrible. But I think the point there is you can go pretty far without any system. And so I'm the kind of person to say, if you're not a pro and you're thinking about your system for citations, you're doing something wrong. You're procrastinating into actually just starting and working on this.
00:15:07
Speaker
Right, right. So let's go to maps because this was the reason I reached out in the first place because you have this amazing Twitter thread about geography and about maps, which which tags back to what you were talking about earlier and how you sort of think about this.
The Distorted Perceptions of Maps
00:15:21
Speaker
broad landscape of content. And so one of the things I was looking back, and I think you have a thread that sort of pulls all of your maps together. It is this tremendously long, great thread. But you talk about how maps distort the world. And I was hoping you could talk more about that and how it distorts countries, governments, people, how policy works. Yeah, for sure. So there's this, the biggest way in which they're distorted
00:15:51
Speaker
is the fact that you need to put a sphere on a plane, right? So the equator is the biggest part of the world. The poles are just a point. And if you need to put them into a rectangle, you need to expand the poles a lot and you keep the equator straight, right? And so the same. And so the result of doing this is the farther up you go, the north or south you go away from the equator, the bigger the space is gonna look like.
00:16:21
Speaker
And it happens that the closer you are to the equator, the poorer the countries usually are. And we can talk about it in a second because it's fascinating why. And the farther away you go, the wealthier the countries. And so it ends up being that the richer the country, the bigger it looks like on a map as opposed to reality. So for example,
00:16:47
Speaker
If you look on a normal map, which is America in projection, Greenland and Africa, they look kind of the same size when in fact, it's massively bigger than the other. And for me, I think two or three of the examples that are the most shocking here is the width of Africa is about the same as the width of Russia.
00:17:11
Speaker
It looks like it's so much smaller, but it's probably the same width. And then another one that really shocked me is Indonesia, the country of Indonesia, is about the same extension as Europe. In fact, all of Europe. In fact, one of the things that is an interesting shortcut to use is
00:17:35
Speaker
There's a lot of big areas in the world that are quite similar inside. So the U.S. is similar to Canada, Australia, India, China, Europe. You have all these big areas that are actually quite similar in size and it definitely does not look like it.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think the one that I always come back to is that Greenland, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are all about the same size. That's right. I mean, Greenland is such the outlier there, in the way it's portrayed. Exactly. And the crazy piece is that DRC is not even the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's not even the biggest country in Africa. Right. It's in Australia. And so it's not even. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
So, so maybe talk a little bit about the so people understand the correlation between the distance from the equator and income because you had mentioned that the yeah so.
00:18:36
Speaker
About two, three centuries ago, people started noticing this, right, like the colonialist European colonialists coming from the north, they're going close to the equator in Africa, in America, in Asia and seeing that they're poorer, and they're making, starting making this hypothesis, and the hypothesis, of course,
00:18:54
Speaker
is going to be, oh they're lazier, right, and they work. And so this race has pervaded through centuries and usually I find these kinds of explanations of the world that are based on culture or morality
00:19:17
Speaker
be very poor to actually explain the world. Usually things are more connected to systems. And so people are, one of the reasons why you're saying is like,
00:19:27
Speaker
Yes, when you're closer to the equator, it's warmer. And so because it's so warm, you cannot really work as much. Meanwhile, as Protestants in Northern Europe, we work so much, and we're so hard worker, right? It's like, really? It is true that when temperatures increase, productivity decreases. But it doesn't mean that being just warmer means you work less.
00:19:54
Speaker
So I'm looking into this a lot. There's actually less written about this than you would imagine. And my current hypothesis is the following. When you're closer to the equator, because it's so hot, the places that get inhabited are different than closer to the poles.
00:20:13
Speaker
In Europe, the Alps, for example, the Pyrenees, or in the US, the Appalachians, those are not populated. It's too cold, and then you have the plains that are populated. It is the reverse as you get closer to the equator. For example, if you look at the map of Colombia,
00:20:33
Speaker
all the people are on the mountains. They're not in the jungles, they're not in the, in fact, the Inca Empire was on the mountains. The Aztecs were on the mountains and Mexico is the highest, it's very, very high in elevation. La Patim in Bolivia is one of the highest elevation capitals of the world. And so you have this pattern of the mountains are the ones that are populated when you're closer to the square.
00:21:02
Speaker
And it so happens that mountains are very bad for economic development because it makes trade so much harder. And so there's much less. And so you need to consume everything locally, which means that you have a big local population, but you don't have a lot of trade. So you don't make a lot of money. So you're really poor. Right. Not to mention the colonialism that you mentioned earlier that. That's right. And then we get into a complete different topic. Right, right. One day we can debate it.
00:21:31
Speaker
I don't know if people are going to listen to an eight hour podcast, so we'll move on. So you have this understanding or background of think about how maps distort our perception of the world.
Educating Through Maps
00:21:43
Speaker
And so when you write about
00:21:45
Speaker
uh the various pieces of content that you write about do you try to educate your readers on some of these aspects of distortion so when you write about economics or you write about you know fertility rates i mean i mean any climate change any of these things that you're talking about and the way that people think about the world is not necessarily true like you just said these distortions that we see in the size of countries and how they're arranged and how they're aligned are not necessarily true so do you try to
00:22:16
Speaker
you know, kind of break that thought process of how many of your readers have. Yeah, I think I try to do that with every topic that I touch. I'm trying to take examples. I think one of them illustrates a bit to your point is why the island of Java in Indonesia has more population than all of Russia, which is the biggest country in the world, right?
00:22:44
Speaker
And you can show the sizes. It's ridiculous how different. And then you can go into the detail. You use that as a hook, right? And then you can go into the detail, and it turns out that...
00:23:00
Speaker
One of the main reasons why Java is so populated is because of volcanism. Because it's a volcanic island. It's east-west. There's volcanic eruptions. And then all the ash falls on the land. And the ash is amazing for the fertility of the ground. And so the growth of rice there is also made to better than in neighboring
00:23:29
Speaker
Sumatra, for example. That's an example. I think if you generalize it, this is what I tried to do with each one of the topics. Let's try to go deep and understand which ones of our preconceived opinions were right and which ones were wrong. I'll give you another example. I was looking into climate change.
00:23:51
Speaker
And I come at every topic without a bias. I just want to understand it, what's going on. And so for climate change, my prior there was the Earth is going to be, the survival of Earth is going to be challenged in this event that has never ever happened before. And so when I looked into the details, it turns out that, well, the temperature of the Earth was higher.
00:24:20
Speaker
three million years ago and earlier, there was more CO2 at that point. The previous events of mass animal destruction were probably worse than they're going to be here. You start seeing these claims that, okay, I thought these were true, they're not.
00:24:43
Speaker
And then you can narrow zeroing into the ones that are, right? And so what is true, like the speed of the change is the fastest that it's ever been. That's one. And then the economic displacement is going to be very, very, very bad. Humans are not going to disappear. Nature is not going to disappear. Most animals are not going to disappear.
00:25:04
Speaker
but it's going to be really bad for a bunch of animals and economically for a lot of people, which might cause, uh, immigrations and wars and things like this. Right. And so, but narrowing down what specifically the issue is, then allows us to, to better understand the problems and then, and then to better solve it.
00:25:22
Speaker
Right. And so it sounds like a lot of your work is in a lot of ways sort of fighting the misinformation and disinformation that's out there because you're trying to go deep and not necessarily refuting some claim that someone's made, but to educate people on some topic, you know, really based in the literature. Do you feel that responsibility when you're writing that you're trying to resolve, you know, trying to fight against that a little bit?
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much the aim of what I'm trying to do, right? Really deeply understand the world so you can actually in the right direction. And it's what we were saying, right? Those who are good at communicating are usually bad at understanding the content and vice versa. And so bridging that gap, I think is important. And there are a few people doing it, but not enough. And I think at the end of the day, most of the decisions that we take as a society
00:26:18
Speaker
either culturally or politically, are based on the analysis of these problems. And so if you don't understand these problems, you will make poor decisions. I think the best example of this is what I did in COVID, right? My first articles became very viral. The first one was
00:26:43
Speaker
alerting the world, hey, this is coming. And you don't understand what's going on. You need to close your country as fast as possible. That got around 50 million views. And then the next one after that, the hammer and the dance was a proposal on how actually to manage the pandemic. And the idea of it is, look, you have no idea what's going on.
00:27:07
Speaker
And so the only thing you can do is you need to stop everything right now to understand better and to build sub-stop cap solutions. And once you understand that, then you need to do a very rational, like ROI-based analysis on what measures you should have at any given point. The simple idea then,
00:27:28
Speaker
lots of countries actually follow that strategy at the beginning and that makes sense. But then they started misunderstanding it and we had lockdowns for more than two years, which I think makes sense because the economic impact that this has is way above the benefit that it gives. And so you end up in a position where because you misunderstand the problem,
00:27:53
Speaker
you don't know what are the right solutions, and then society suffers. And so what I did for COVID is very much what I tried to do for each one of these other things. Right. I want to blend your
00:28:07
Speaker
uh early career work with your current career work so we've seen uh because you've written a bit about blockchain you've written a bit about about ai and i'm curious about the dataviz piece of particularly of maps since that's a focal point in ai like how do you see those two interacting in the next you know few years yeah like is is ai gonna make
00:28:28
Speaker
the challenge of making maps and doing geographic analysis easier, or is it gonna be, you know, are our misperceptions of geography gonna feed into the AI and exacerbate the perceptual problems? I think the current map representations are so much worse than they can be.
Dynamic Maps vs. Traditional Maps
00:28:54
Speaker
I'll give you an example. When you see a normal map,
00:28:59
Speaker
But first, usually these are political maps, right? So they look, they show states, nation states. But nation states are very recent.
00:29:09
Speaker
I think we have close to 200 countries now in the world, but 70 years ago, we had something like 53. Then if you go 200 years ago, there were only 12 nation states. Super recent, super new, and yet this is what we show. That tells you another example of how map distorts a perception. For me, one of the even better examples is mountains.
00:29:39
Speaker
relief topography maps show you a little bit where there's planes and where there's mountains, but they don't tell you the key insight about planes and mountains, which is mountains are very fucking hard to climb.
00:29:57
Speaker
And so, for example, what is easier? To walk 100 kilometers or to climb one kilometer? Hands down, walking 100 kilometers is easier, right? But if you show to scale, it's going to look like, oh, this mountain is this tiny thing. It doesn't matter. And so you need to show extremely exaggerated altitude maps
00:30:22
Speaker
for a map to convey the key insight, which is not the altitude, it is the difficulty for humans. And so this is an example of exaggerated topography maps are relatively recent. And now, like there's been an explosion over the last few years,
00:30:41
Speaker
And this is an example where if you have an AI tool that can take a data point and display it more easily, then you can have substantial more creativity on how you can show them. So displaying existing data is one of the big, big, big areas for improvement. And the other one is
00:31:03
Speaker
joining data. 90% of the work of geographers is just finding the right data and putting it clearly. But this is trivial for an AI. And so sites and AI that can put all this information in one place, is it accessible? And without knowing ArcGIS or any coding thing, any person can map anything. There's going to be an explosion on maps and the insights that come with it. There's going to be a lot of shit.
00:31:32
Speaker
that the 2% that are amazing are going so much better than anything that we've seen before, that I think map making is going to see a massive, massive results. Yeah, that is an optimist. I like the optimistic take on it. Do you have a favorite map of any topic? Is there like a map that you
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think those exaggerated topography maps are my favorite. I think just showing the mountains exaggerated really, really gives you a core insight. So that's one. There's another one. In technology,
00:32:15
Speaker
There's always this thing where when a new technology arrives, people just transpose the previous technology to the new one. For example, if you have cinema, for 30 years after cinema, movies were mostly theater but recorded. Then movies like Citizen Kane come around and completely reinvent storytelling based on the media. Something similar, I think, is happening with maps.
00:32:46
Speaker
Because maps were on paper, they were mostly fixed, right? And I don't think a fixed map, a static map, conveys most information. And I'll give you an example. For me, one of my favorite maps is an animated map that contrasts plains and mountains with population density.
00:33:16
Speaker
And so if instead of having one or the other, right, so imagine the height, like the height on one side, planes, mountains, and the other one is where people live. And so if you put them side by side, you're not gonna really be able to see the patterns easily because your eyes needs to go from one to the other and it's easy, it's hard to compare. But if you put them on top of the other and you show and you take it off, you can very easily see, oh, interesting.
00:33:44
Speaker
in temperate areas, there's a perfect overlap between planes and people. Right. And vice versa, in more equatorial areas, the overlap is on the mountainside. So what I like about that, the way you describe that is
00:34:03
Speaker
moving away, I guess, from your traditional geographic map or Mercator projection or Robinson projection, but just rethinking how the geography is presented, just layering mountains and plains on top of each other and not worrying about what projection we use. I don't know, it's just a different way of thinking about presenting geographic data rather than just our traditional map. Yeah, and I think you're making two points that are valuable.
00:34:31
Speaker
One of them is accuracy, and I think accuracy is very important. And I think we're going to get even more accuracy in the future. There's a reason why Mercator is being used now too.
00:34:45
Speaker
It's the one that makes the least, how to say, this portion at the zoom in, zoom out level, right? So Google Maps, use Mechator, or use to, because you zoom in, you zoom out, it looks the same locally, globally, and there's no problem.
00:35:04
Speaker
Now, I don't know if you noticed, but if you zoom out enough from Google Maps, then it starts becoming a globe. There's a moment, if you zoom in, it's plain, but it becomes a globe. And so I think it's kind of this type of distortions we're solving now, and it's going to be even easier to solve through AI in the future.
00:35:27
Speaker
And then once you, so that's kind of the first layer, but I think the second year that makes me even more excited is just the insights. By copying the information in different ways, we're going to be able to see, to understand geography in a way that we didn't before.
00:35:41
Speaker
Right. So before we wrap up, so on your sub-stack, uncharted territories, what do you have in the, what do you have in the works? Like what, what can people expect in the, in the next few weeks, months, years as you do this? Yeah. So I have, I have at any given point, I have around a hundred to 150 drafts that I'm working on. Um, so, so it's pretty brutal. Um, right now I'm still working on, uh,
00:36:09
Speaker
this series around the game theory of sex, right? So there's a lot of things that come from it, like, for example, understanding slut-shaming and body counts. Why are we seeing problems there and what can we do about that? There's topic about, there's an area around real estate, for example, I have this hypothesis that real estate as an investment class is going to be substantially worse in the coming decades than it was in the previous ones.
00:36:35
Speaker
There's a question around future of education. I think education is not at all what we think it is. And the future is going to be massively changed through AI. Questions around climate change. I think climate change could already be solved right now if the people who claim, who care about
00:36:59
Speaker
really did what they have to do about it. And so understanding what are the incentives there, how we can solve it, how we can change the incentives. How many people should we have on earth? Do we have too many? Can we have more?
00:37:16
Speaker
How is that linked to progress and economic development? These are some of these like 50 to 100 topics. Just a few small topics. Small questions. Small questions. Well, Tomas, thanks so much for coming on the show. I will put links to your TED Talk into the sub-stack that everybody should check out. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Johnny, I had a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your work.
00:37:47
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you'll check out the list of links that I put in the show notes, including some previous episodes of this podcast that I think are related to the conversation Tomas and I just had around inequality, around maps, and a variety of other topics. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:38:11
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the policy of this podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs, audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs, design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:38:33
Speaker
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