Eric Olson

[NotKennyRogers @NotKennyRogers]

Just a bunch of toxically masculine Christian Nationalists walking directly into Nazi machine gun fire to help save the world.

This is yet another reason why I will always be proud to be an American.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

One of the greatest speeches of the late 20th century, given on the 40th anniversary of one of the most spectacular days in human history.

[Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth]

June 6, 1944

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@PaulCharchian As it should always BE. In all positions. Compete.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@WilliamShatner Easy to argue the most iconic character ever created.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

My Suicidal Empathy video posted 11 days ago and produced by @pragerU is at around 2.1 million views so far on YouTube.

https://t.co/d4TNQG27ox

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@RetroMoviesDB Bill was perfect.

[Ben Shapiro @benshapiro]

It's always fun to see Bernie spout about the evils of oligarchy while preaching that he and his friends should steal private property and then run everything themselves.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@Osint613 What’s your point? Full on attack? Boots on ground and fight it out? Because that’s your alternative. Sitting there waxing smart about how Iran is a master of strategy. It’s simple. We don’t want to kill all the murderers if we don’t have to.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@GadSaad @BernieSanders Bernie is free to say all the silly things he can think of. I’d argue he’s an evil fool. That said? The issue is those who support him. Those people are simply pure evil.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

All accessories to the murder must go to prison for a long time

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@ChadHartmanShow @mngop @KendallQuallsMN Your distain is understandable. When imperfect, failed people who make mistakes and do horrible things….when they are celebrated or recognized in the public square, it’s very off putting.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@CWMadel It suck’s when imperfect people are celebrated.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The only thing that stops violent men from raping you and your society are other men who are equally willing to be violent in stopping the rapists. The West has decided that the highest virtue is to quietly comply with the destruction of your civilization because to do otherwise is bigoted toward the rapists. It really is that simple.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@GadSaad Facts are facts. The issue is why people won’t believe them

[Enes Kanter FREEDOM @EnesFreedom]

Help me understand America.

Why is it that liberal athletes are celebrated for speaking out politically, while conservative athletes are criticized for doing the same thing?

When athletes supported Obama, they were praised by the media, corporations, sports leagues, and Hollywood. Nobody called it “dangerous” or “polarizing.”

The same thing happened in 2016, when many athletes attended Hillary Clinton rallies, publicly supported her, and openly campaigned for her.

But when conservative athletes express their opinions, they are told to stay quiet, while liberal athletes are applauded for doing the exact same thing.

Americans can see the double standard.

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@robbystarbuck @LeeMZeldin As much as a good conspiracy is, on this front using nature to remove disease carrying mosquitoes from population areas seems to be an idea worth considering. Also worth reviewing and full transparency

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Jordan Peterson went straight to the point:

“I’m not a fan of collectivists. I don’t care if they’re on the left or the right. The right level of analysis is the individual, and that’s what the West got right.”

He called out Marxists, group-first identity politics, and professors turning impressionable 18-year-olds into activists before they’re properly educated.

Building a society that truly respects the individual is one of the hardest things humans have ever tried. It requires constant vigilance. Collectivism always comes back wearing new clothes, as justice, community, equity, or compassion.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” - Ayn Rand

[Eric Olson @EricOlson90]

@Fat_Electrician We used encyclopedias for years. About time they got better.