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IrelandHello Future Me explains how trade shortcuts leave cities behind
Tim Hickson connects Panama, Skyrim and One Piece in a worldbuilding lesson about who gains power when commerce changes course.
Hello Future Me
Story of Why this story? One of the most watched videos since yesterday, with 32,481 views.
How Trade Routes Really Work: Chokepoints
Things we can learn from the video
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- 0:11Punta Arenas shows how a new shortcut can diminish an established port's strategic importance.
- 9:15Shipping containers demonstrate how infrastructure changes trade and the work surrounding it.
- 13:22Shards of Earth's rare navigators make people, rather than places, into trade bottlenecks.
- 22:12One Piece's World Government uses control of the Red Line bottleneck to enforce its dominance.
- 25:42Hickson argues that economic dependence can discourage war while creating dangerous complacency.
- 27:52A fictional scenario uses canals, land routes and giant Striders to demonstrate shifting power.
Windhelm's faded importance in Skyrim isn't just atmosphere. For Hello Future Me's Tim Hickson, a city losing trade to Solitude offers a way to make an invented world feel as though it has a past, and something to fear about its future.
His new essay, "How Trade Routes Really Work: Chokepoints", has drawn roughly 32,000 views in its first seven hours. Following August's broader trade-route tutorial, this instalment asks what happens to the places, institutions and people that control the narrow passages everyone else needs.
Hickson starts with Punta Arenas in Chile, explaining how the Panama Canal diminished its strategic importance. The lesson for writers isn't simply to put a prosperous port on a map. It's to imagine what happens when somebody finds a way around it. "So much of worldbuilding is about the feeling of a place, not the detail," he says.
That takes him back to a familiar preoccupation: "Oh God, I have to talk about The Phantom Menace again." He reads its taxed hyperspace routes and corporate monopolies as signs of political stagnation. Viewers are making the connection to his earlier Star Wars book marathon, while others recommend Spice & Wolf or offer their own One Piece explanations.
The examples get stranger, and more useful for fantasy. In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, rare navigators make hyperspace paths possible, putting the bottleneck in people rather than geography. Shipping containers supply the real-world counterpart: infrastructure can transform commerce and undermine the livelihoods built around its old arrangements.
Later, Hickson argues that economic dependence can discourage conflict but also encourage complacency. He then builds a fictional scenario involving canals, overland routes and giant automaton "Striders", showing how a transport innovation can rearrange power and society. The episode includes a paid shaving-product segment; the closing summary returns to the worldbuilding lessons.
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- Channel
- Hello Future Me
- Subscribers
- 1,240,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 322,704
- Channel views, pace per day
- 34,957 (on a normal day: 61,230)
- Video published
- October 30, 2026
The numbers
The viewing total covers the video's opening hours, not a full day.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which game contains the cities of Windhelm and Solitude?
Hickson uses Skyrim's Windhelm and Solitude to illustrate how changing trade routes can reshape cities.