Rob Wilcocks

I help people with investments, and talk a bit about football and golf.

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Incred.

[Max Karpis @maxkarpis]

Earliest Revolut Crowdfunding Multimillionaires🚀

In 2016, 433 Crowdcube investors maxed out at £5,000 each at a £42M pre-money valuation.

With Revolut's latest secondary share sale targeting a $115B valuation, those £5k bets will be worth about $6M on paper - nearly 1,000x returns.

Here's the original pitch video.

One of the greatest crowdfunding wins ever🤯

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Congrats, David. Do you think your work could help people who have bone fusion/damage, from for example Ankylosing spondylitis (AS)?

Its a chronic inflammatory arthritis that primarily affects the spine and sacroiliac joints (where the spine meets the pelvis). Over time, chronic inflammation can cause the vertebrae to fuse together, leading to a rigid, less flexible spine and chronic pain).

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Very interesting

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is biblical.

A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.

Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.

She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

@DivockOrigi Best of luck Amigo

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Great driver awareness doesn’t translate well to social-economic self awareness.

Interviewer seems equally as brain dead.

[Jack @Jackkk]

Lewis Hamilton says there should be a limit to how much wealth one person can have

"One of the things that I struggle with every day is that there is such a disparity between the wealthy and the poor”

"When you drive around LA there's still so many people living on the streets. You shouldn't be able to have billions"

"I think there should be a limit to how much you can have because there's enough to go around for everyone”

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

@TheBorisBecker @rolandgarros Brilliant

[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."

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

❤️❤️❤️how times change. Yet some things stay the same.

[The Anfield Wrap @TheAnfieldWrap]

🎥 Behind the scenes at Anfield where Liverpool and the likes of Kevin Keegan prepared for crucial league & FA Cup final matches against Manchester United in 1977

👌Brilliant footage on BBC Sportsnight, well worth a watch…

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Imagine, last game season, I’m at Anfield - and hear Villa go 2-0 up away to city…whilst S.Gerrard is manager of Villa. Then Liverpool go 1-0 up in first half. Unbelievable. Could it be possible?! Sadly, I knew as soon as I heard Martinez was injured in the warm up of that game for Villa we were doomed. But wow. What seasons. The prem will miss Pep. I will too. Klopp and Pep are two gods of football for me. Icons.

Aside, KDB was always the ultimate difference in those seasons. D Silva too. Truly world class players. They always seemed to have more than us, just. Until they didn’t. But didn’t make those two final days any easier to bear.

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

I said to my mate when watching it, this is like one
Of those daft football sayings that has a semblance of weird logic:

“If anything, they’ve scored too early” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.

It’s ridiculous to say it, but In a way has a grain of truth! Maybe that played out psychologically w/Arsenal sat back to protect. You started so well.

PSG so good, to watch their football. Let’s see what Arteta does next year. 20 odd year wait for a League title is hard to get over line. We know those nerves well. To lose league by one point with otherwise record points twice 🤯 can you imagine that head Feck?!

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Congrats on winning...I just think the football Arsenal have played has been relatively dull (not as bad/boring as Slot). That's all. I also don't personally like the way Arteta acts. Like a spoilt child. Then there is the Partay issue. Handling of that in hindsight could look v bad.

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Passionate. Humble. Smart. He will fit right in.

Klopp was our new Shankley. I have a sneaking suspicion Iraola could be our new Paisley.

@iamediam

[Killi 🧉 @KM_243_]

Andoni Iraola: the first interview 🇪🇸🤩 https://t.co/nvw4VCFzk2

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Something every adult should learn to protect a child

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Unreal. I think all Croatian maybe apart from SM?

[The Extreme Football Enthusiast @ExtremeFootbal4]

Davor Šuker, Robert Prosinečki, Zvonimir Boban, & Siniša Mihajlović, 1987 U-20 World Champions

[Ben Lang @benln]

Cursor team runs virtual workshops, open to anyone

June schedule is now up

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

@tonymc39 @ZAGKAG1811 I still believe it brushed @Carra23 ‘s leg hair and that’s why it just missed. It was going in!

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

Are yu kidding me?! Aeteta is a very poor mans Pep. Spent billons yet
Plays terrible football (24% possesion CL final
Is pathetic and weak); and won a very poor PL - with no Klopp and a pep mentall checked out YET still boring football.
Emery’s villa are exciting and play much better football
For me. 😉

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

Boostrapped Ahrefs crossed $100M in ARR without these things:

No Google Analytics
No conversion tracking/optimisation
No retargeting
No A/B testing
No discounts
No bidding on competitors’ keywords

+ discontinued midway:
Affiliate program
Free trial

1/2

[Rob Wilcocks @RobWilcocks]

@DistanceCovered @FPLP14 Back on twitter, good to see!