From Argentina to Zanzibar

Filling you in on what's been happening

Hi Lab,

I owe you an apology for the long silence. This past year has been a whirlwind for me—though a good one. My wife, Stephanie (who’s now sharing her insights on cultural evolution and family life over at Evolving Together), has a reasonable rule given that we have three young children: I shouldn’t travel more than a few days for one trip per month. But there’s been so much interest in applications of A Theory of Everyone that I’ve repeatedly been breaking that rule. Thanks to her support, I’ve given talks from Argentina to Zanzibar. In the last 4 weeks alone, I flew back and forth between Malaysia, Sydney, and South Africa.

I’ll post the transcripts and summaries from each of these talks soon. But in this post, I want to catch you up on what’s been happening. Let me start by previewing what I’ll be writing about on Substack in my next few posts, followed by a rundown of my 5 favorite talks from this year. I’ll also mention some new ventures—exciting companies, new papers, and a startup city in Zanzibar. Finally, for paid readers, I’ll reveal the tentative title and description for my next book.

Upcoming posts

1. The Clash of Cognitive Cultures: The relationship between autism, geek culture, and tech startups. Or how Elon Musk seems to avoid a cognitive cultural shift that usually happens when companies expand.

2. How Fish Discos and Other Overburdening Regulation Have Held Back British Growth: Some wild stories on why building in the UK is such a hassle—featuring some of the reasons behind the long delayed Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor. By the way, I'm thrilled with the nuclear renaissance we seem to be going through. I also highly recommend this report on why Britain has stagnated from the Works in Progress guys.

3. The Path to Land Value Taxes: This one is taking me longer to flesh out.

4. What AI Needs to Learn about Human Intelligence: Including why the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) is a WEIRD benchmark.

5. A bunch of articles from the cutting room floor that expand on parts of my last book—stay tuned.

5 of my favorite talks this year

1. First up, Malaysia’s Khazanah Megatrends Forum (KMF). Khazanah, the sovereign wealth fund, steers Malaysia’s strategic future, and KMF is where they present that vision and invite policitians, policy makers, CEOs, and in Malaysia, Asia Pacific, and around the world to discuss elements of that vision. This year’s vision was informed by “A Theory of Everyone”, so I was the keynote speaker. It was probably my favorite talk of the year, just because it was gratifying to see my research directly put into practice. I met the Prime Minister, Finance Minister, and head of the sovereign fund.
   
   The theme this year was “Pursuit of Potatoes”, inspired by how the introduction of sweet potatoes cut China’s peasant revolts by 2/3. Malaysia’s goal is to find similar adjacent possibilities today to satisfy modern people’s hunger, which is no longer just about food. As I said, I’ll write more about this soon, but in the meantime, you can read their concept paper here and watch the talk here.

   

   As much as possible, I’ve given up wearing ties - a ridiculous strip of material hanging around our necks. This has only caused me problems once, when I was denied entry to parliament chambers (they lent me a tie to avoid breaching protocol).

2. My second favorite event was again policy focused at the Global Solutions Summit (GSS), where I spoke on “Paradigm Shift: Reorienting Economics and Economic Policy”. The GSS is the Global Solutions Initiative’s (GSI) annual meeting. The GSI is a Berlin-based think tank network established in 2017 under Germany’s G20 presidency. It pulls in academics, think talks, and policy makers to develop policy responses to major global problems addressed by the G20, the G7 and other global governance fora. Bill Gates keynoted this year—you can watch his talk here.

   GSI’s founding and current president is Dennis Snower. One of the things I’m most excited about for 2025, is that Dennis and I are planning on establishing a “Human Flourishing Institute” at the LSE. Again, I’ll write more on this later, but it’s basically applying cultural evolution as a framework to understand human progress and propose policies and interventions to ensure progress continues. Here’s a sneak peak from the current version of our proposal:

   

   We’re looking at funding for various activies, so if you’re into progress studies or know people who are, please reach out!

3. My third favorite event was at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences where I was on a panel and part of various discussions on AI, religion, and the future of humanity as part of Humanity 2.0. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is the pope’s advisory committee on science whose members have included Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking (you don’t need to be Catholic). It was honestly a bit surreal to present cultural evolution to the cardinals! Here’s a short clip of what I had to say (while maintaining my tie-less commitment):

4. My fourth favorite event was in Zanzibar, where I spoke at Zanzalu, hosted in the new city of Fumba. As you may know from reading my book or following my work, I’ve long been an advocate of startup cities as a path to economic growth. Most new cities fail or end up as tax havens. I believe Fumba has a real shot at being the Hong Kong of East Africa - an engine of development for the whole region and an example of how to successfully build a startup city. Why do I have faith in Fumba? There are several reasons:
   (a) the involvement of the Charter Cities Insitute (CCI) (where I’m a Fellow)—home of the New Cities Map (and dataset on what works and doesn’t) and authors of the Governance Handbook. Kurtis Lockhart, Director of CCI, has stepped down to get more involved in building Fumba.
   (b) educational investment to create a Harvard-MIT combo. IIT Madras have set up the first IIT international campus there—IIT is the MIT / Stanford of India, supplying much of the US tech sector with high quality engineers. The African School of Economics (ASE) has also set up a campus. ASE was founded by Princeton economist, Leonard Wantchekon, who himself has an utterly fascinating life history. And the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), which Kurtis will direct. That ticks the education box, attracting foreign students and ensuring sufficiently high skills for the new city. But as I know from my work on education in Namibia, skills without a market aren’t all that useful, so I’m glad about:
   (c) presence of large tech businesses like Wasoko (who I consider the real Amazon of Africa), which alongside historic links to Oman, ticks the ability to attract investment and high skilled industries; and
   (d) several other reasons that deserve a more full throated follow up post. But I’ll summarize it the way I summarized it to Hon. Mudrik Soraga, Zanzibar’s minister in charge of investment:
   (1) create the conditions for people to make money,
   (2) make sure that the money splashes around and helps local people and the surrounding region and we don’t just have a gated community that locals resent and have no buy-in, and then
   (3) get out of the way and let the magic happen.
   
   You can watch one of the three talks I gave while I was there:

   As a costly signal of my belief in the future of Fumba and Zanzibar, I’ll be AUL’s Research Lead for Cities, Culture, and Technology.

   

5. Number 5 was much harder to pick as there were several candidates. I hope it wasn’t a recency bias or how nice it was to return to Australia after so long, but it was probably my Wallace Wurth lecture at UNSW to help the university celebrate it’s 75th anniversary. Rather than a traditional lecture, it was a free-ranging, fireside chat that courted controversy, hosted by evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks. The chat and transcript are available here or on Spotify. I’ll post a cleaned up transcript soon - we tackled diversity, immigration, degrowth, and more.

   

New Projects

Besides the groundwork for the Human Flourishing Institute and Africa Urban Lab, I’ve been busy with a few other projects:

1. I founded the London School of Artificial Intelligence (LSAI). AI is reshaping education and the workplace, and while companies, governments, and universities are adapting, kids are being left behind. At the LSE, I’ve helped set the AI in education policy (devolved to departments - in case you’re curious, it’s highly permissive - we’re training people for the world as it is, not as it was), have been involved in discussions with large tech companies on behalf of LSE, and talk to companies about AI, behavioral science, and culture through my consultancy work. All of these sectors have solid plans for exploring and integrating AI. The missing piece is children’s education. There’s a lot of work in this space from AI tutors like Khan Academy’s Khanmigo to an explosion of GPT wrappers for education (TeachmateAI is a popular one in the UK) to thoughtful frameworks for integrating LLMs in education (for example, this thoughtful paper from Google “Towards Responsible Development of Generative AI for Education”). LSAI’s approach is different.
   
   We put the power of AI directly in children’s hands (or via their teachers), teaching them to safely and effectively use AI with our child-safe guardrailed models and then showing them how to use these skills to prompt their own personalized tutor that behaves exactly how they prefer to learn - faster, slower, more detailed, funnier, more emojis, or with examples from cars, kittens, football, or whatever they’re interested in. Our pilot data has been astonishing in terms of the speed children learn once they use their personalized AI tutors. We’ve signed a contract to get it into schools with the goal of running an RCT on curriculum and non-curriculum (e.g. critical thinking, epistemic vigilance) outcomes and are looking for an African site to run the same RCT in a developing context. We have some candidates for Africa, but feel free to reach out if you’re interested in collaborating.
   
   From my book, you know my concerns about the ability of education systems to keep pace with social and technological change or even help studens achieve their full potential. A teacher teaching a class of 25-30 students or more can’t give sufficient attention to the top to let them go as fast and far as they can or the bottom who need a lot more support. Instead, either the middle, bottom or top are prioritized depending on the incentives of the country, constraints of the curriculum, amount of funding, and proclivities of the teacher. Imagine if all kids had a personal AI tutor who got to know them and could support them at their level? I’m excited about the possibilities.

2. Also in the AI sphere, I joined Electric Twin as scientific advisor. Electric Twin is founded by Ben Warner and Alex Cooper. Ben was the Chief Advisor to the British Prime Minister on Digital and Data and founded the Prime Minister’s office data science team. He’s a bit like the Nate Silver you’ve never heard of with a better track record, most recently predicting in October last year that if Trump ran against Harris, the most likely outcome was a 311-227. He was off by 1. Alex was a commanding officer of the SAS (UK special forces) and government advisor with a background in simulation for conflict and crisis. We’re combining their approaches with cultural evolution and behavioral science, powered by AI, with the goal of creating a more predictive model of human behavior.
   
   Some of the most exciting research is now outside of academia and this particular collaboration means doing science with applications always in mind. I wrote more about what AI offers cultural evolution and behavioural science here (I’ll repost on substack soon).

3. I joined Besample as an advisor and investor. Besample is an online platform that lets you easily sample beyond Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries. My role is more mentorship than massive involvement - the field needs a platform that makes cross-cultural research easier and I want to help them succeed.

4. At the LSE, from 2017-2022, I was part of an initially 3 person team that launched the BSc undergraduate program (read more here). It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. The degree is now #1 in the UK. I still teach on the program, but have now turned my eye to the PhD program as the new PhD Director.

5. I’m working with the UNDP on a couple of different projects, including helping establish a new human development index and researching how AI is changing education.

6. Finally, BBC Radio 4 greenlit a new series that I’ll be hosting on the rise of “big theory, big idea books” and what they can really tell us, bringing them into discussion with one another. A bit like this article on TOTTEE books. Some of you may recall an episode of analysis that I hosted on BBC Radio 4 in 2021.

7. Finally, here are my papers this year, which for all the above reasons I’ve been kept busy, I also haven’t publicized on social media yet!

As usual, I’ve run out of space… follow up email incoming.

Best wishes,

Michael