byronwarwick

....and natural yoghurt also.

[Aria Radnia 🇮🇷 @ariaradnia]

Whoever made this video is a comedic genius

[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."

[Suppressed News. @SuppressedNws1]

WOW

A website is DOCUMENTING Israel’s crimes with GEOLOCATION, dates, categories of crimes, and footage of the incidents themselves.

One click and you can see EXACTLY what Israel did.

An enormous digital archive built for ACCOUNTABILITY.

Link: https://t.co/TWKgXJ41NC

Direct Link: https://t.co/qWkrhx1FT7

[Steve Sweeney @SweeneySteve]

Today I$rael tried to kill me in a targeted airstrike in southern Lebanon as I was reporting on was the targeting of bridges and the forced displacement of 1 million people, an ethnic cleansing operation on a larger scale than the Nakba

I have absolutely no doubt that this was deliberate. Despite claims there were no warnings ahead of the strike and no notifications sent to the Lebanese Army who allowed us to film

As we have seen in Gaza they want to silence journalists who document and report their war crimes

It is the western powers who provide political and military support for I$rael, arming it to the teeth to carry out genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing here in Lebanon. They are not simply complicit, but active participants and should be held accountable for their actions.

But if I$rael thinks today’s strike will silence us and keep us out of the field they are very, very mistaken

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

The UK is considering an American style global tax regime. If you move to zero tax havens like Dubai, you will still be forced to pay British income tax for the privilege of holding a UK passport and getting embassy protection. The tax loopholes might finally close.

[Elisa Mosini 🇪🇺🇮🇹 @MosiniElisa]

Looks like they deleted the clip from X, so here’s the new one. Thanks to @TheRealJamieKay for recovering the clip.
This gem needs to stay on every platform, hahah.

[The News Agents @TheNewsAgents]

“The BBC continues to be really stupid, I think, and there’s no cure for stupidity.”

@SalmanRushdie criticises the BBC’s self-censorship in a Reith lecture, saying it hands ammunition to those who want to take down public broadcasting.

@jonsopel | @lewis_goodall

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, "Why is the sale of ITV worrying for public service broadcasting?"

Dorothy Byrne, "It's deeply concerning when our main commercial news provider in the UK looks like its going to be taken over by a massive US company"

"We will now have the situation where ITV News is going to be owned by Comcast. They already own Sky"

"Paramount Skydance own Channel 5"

"And we mustn't forget that ITV owns 40% of ITN which makes Channel 4 News, this program"

"We can't just say it's inevitable that the big global US players take us over"

"We should be controlling the narrative about our country from our own country"

"We have seen this big American TV players come under a lot of pressure from Donald Trump, and that's a particular worry"

"MPs should be moving to make sure there are strong controls in place to protect our political democracy"

"Channel 4 News is something very very special in our society

[Aysha @AyshaSusmaz]

I can’t believe I just read this, I feel sick with anger.

Two Palestinian kids were tied up and buried alive by Israeli soldiers at Nasir Hospital their cries literally covered by dirt. A Jewish-American doctor who was there shared it.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Nathan Gill. Nathan Gill. Nathan Gill. Nathan Gill. Nathan Gill. Nathan Gill. A politician of any kind who takes bribes from Russia, but especially a friend and colleague of the man we keep being told will be next PM, should be as well known to this generation as Philby was to mine. Thanks to a media blackout to help Nige Nathan can walk down any street in the land unrecognised and unbothered by journalists. What weird times we live in

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

If you want to see Michelle Mone kicked out of the House of Lords and arrested until she pays the £232,000,000 she owes give this a RT.

If you want Rishi Sunak's involvement in the £14,900,000,000 PPE Fraud he covered up investigated, LIKE.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

When Israel is not removing donkeys from Gaza under animal rescue cover, it is blowing them up

The objective is clear: to deprive Gaza residents of their last reliable means of transportation and eliminate the means of life

Welcome to genocide

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

This will be MASSIVE on the news … because they really go big on high profile politicians and tax arrangements.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

More of this from 🇬🇧 politicians please. Why does it take an 🇺🇸 politician to do this? Though doubtless most of our media will focus with “Nigel Farage spoke out against the blah blah in DC today … and now we ask another talking head about the rise and rise of Reform …

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

I am sickened by the relentless demonisation of refugees.

No refugee underfunded a school.

No refugee closed a hospital.

No refugee took away support from the sick and disabled.

We need solutions not scapegoats. Stop blaming refugees and tax the rich instead!

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

If you want to see Michelle Mone kicked out of the House of Lords and arrested until she pays the £232,000,000 she owes give this a RT.

If you want Rishi Sunak's involvement in the £14,900,000,000 PPE Fraud he covered up investigated, LIKE.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Your US tax dollars at work

[byronwarwick @byronwarwick]

@carlmoon Awesome!