Mike Brenner

[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."

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

Great idea!! Lots of “friction” to remove!

[quibble @quibbleUK]

Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice.
We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff.
Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year.
And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon.
Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket?
An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small.
We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail.
Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: https://t.co/gZiqqHbhIL

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

Proper Ad 👏⚽️

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

Brazilian beer Brahma have just dropped their World Cup advert featuring Ronaldo and it's NEXT LEVEL advertising. 🇧🇷👏🍻

Easily one of the best we'll see.

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

A glimpse of the very near future …

[John Collison @collision]

At Stripe Sessions, we showed how we think agentic commerce will often happen behind the scenes in the course of producing other final products. Here, we show our Claude Code using MPP and @tempo to buy a dataset from @alpha_vantage in the process of generating a research report for me on AI energy usage.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre.

The stream of air from a handheld leaf blower comes out between 180 and 200 miles per hour. That's enough to shred caterpillars, strip butterfly eggs off leaves, and fling overwintering bees, fireflies, ladybugs, and moths into the street.

A chickadee needs 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one brood. They overwinter in the leaf litter that falls ever autumn. The leaf litter your neighbor is blowing to the curb is next summer's songbird food.

And on top of it, leaf blower emissions are their own category of bad. Running a two-stroke gas leaf blower for 30 minutes produces roughly the same hydrocarbon pollution as driving a car 1,100 miles.

California and a growing list of cities have banned them outright. Germany's environment ministry told citizens not to use them unless "indispensable."

Is it time for a total ban?

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

@SamaHoole @davi326 Combined they are nearly 12 times larger than the UK, are a pastoral economy and aren’t all desert (huge grasslands & wetlands) … your point not quite as impactful per km!. Yes I agree we should have less (concentration per km the issue impacting all flora and fauna)

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

@Robin25461631 … and then the next day a 73 to keep things exciting!!!

[Philip Steele @agile_phil]

With the weekend being so sunny I thought I’d take a deep dive into why January solar generation is so low. https://t.co/kZzCos88F0

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

📽️THE TANKER
There's an extraordinary race underway on the high seas, as nations vie to secure increasingly scarce shipments of fuel.
In our latest on the economics of this conflict we track one such ship & ask: why is Britain so exposed?
The answer is not v reassuring.
Watch👇

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Anyone who thought creating the largest internal security force in the country, answering only to the president, was for anything else hasn’t been paying attention.

[Rahm Emanuel @RahmEmanuel]

Russia is providing Iran with satellite intelligence on U.S. military targets and American service members — helping Tehran strike Americans in the Middle East.

At the same time, President Zelensky and Ukraine are offering their battle-tested expertise to help the U.S. and its allies defend against Iranian drones.

It’s not complicated. Russia is helping Iran target and kill American service men and women. Ukraine is offering to help defend Americans risking their lives.

Somebody needs to walk into the Oval Office and tell the President what he needs to hear — the difference between friends and foes. When your back is against the wall and the chips are down, you find out who shows up to help and who stabs you in the back.

https://t.co/pebbr82A4u

https://t.co/NkVyROZAo8

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

Let’s not forget that as Donald Trump passes judgement on the head of State of Iran there is another one, in the Kremlin, whose signature started the invasion of Ukraine and has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. If the US is not to be seen as hypocritical in its claim that it is re-asserting moral authority then the White House should take a much harder line on Russia.

[Roger Harrabin @RHarrabin]

Promoting #Biofuels was a dodgy policy from the start for many reasons. If you still doubt that, read @_HannahRitchie 's devastating assessment that we could meet global electricity demand on the land used for biofuels.
https://t.co/ACsdi9dnaR

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: The family of Alex Pretti releases a powerful statement about his senseless murder at the hands of Trump's masked fascist goons.

Please share this far and wide...

"We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital," the family said in a statement provided to CNN.

"Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However his last thought and act was to protect a woman."

"The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed."

"Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you."

It is our responsibility as Americans to get the truth out there. Petti was not attempting to harm anyone. He was swarmed, beaten, and disarmed by vicious federal agents who were looking for someone to hurt. Once they had removed his gun — which he had a legal permit to carry — they executed him in cold blood by firing numerous bullets into him. Then, the Trump administration proceeded to immediately falsely smear him as a "terrorist" who wanted to carry out a mass shooting against law enforcement. They're utterly shameless.

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” said Pretti's father Alex. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong, so he did participate in protests.”

Rest in power Alex. The rest of us will carry on the fight.

Please like and share.

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

@Wrexham_AFC Unbelievable Jeff!!

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

@patrick_oshag Fresh water!!

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

Amazing fact!!

[Jonathan Pie @JonathanPieNews]

Hand's down Fact of the day winner.

[Jonathan Pie @JonathanPieNews]

Hand's down Fact of the day winner.

[Mike Brenner @MikeWBrenner]

Beware ICE and Trump

[Bruce Anderson @bruceanderson]

In 1936, the Gestapo was placed outside judicial review, meaning courts were barred from reviewing their actions. Arrests could occur without warrants, trials or appeals.

10 yrs later Nuremberg Trials Gestapo was declared a criminal organisation & officers were prosecuted.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Carole Cadwalladr, "The United States and it's Silicon Valley allies are not our friends, they are clearly not serving the interest of peace, harmony and democracy"

"It's a small group of individuals with a bunch of vested interests who have grasped control of the US executive, and Donald Trump who is the front guy, he is now breaking rule of law on a daily basis"

"There is still this hesitancy amongst mainstream news organisation, politicians, to name these things clearly"

"It's important that we are clear about what we are seeing and naming it"

Zack Polanski, "I think that's really well put.. And I'm worried that Keir Starmer has tied his foreign policy to the US and to Donald Trump, and that's been problematic for lots of reasons"

"We saw someone murdered on the streets - Renee Good - and Keir Starmer has not condemned that"

Carole Cadwalladr, "You can understand the reasons how they got themselves into this bind of sucking up to Trump and not p*ssing him off"

"But at the same time it is deeply dangerous to have a Prime Minister who cannot say black is black and white is white, and international law is international law, and this is clearly in breach of it"

"Labour is in a state of denial, it will not say those words, that I do find it really alarming"