David Mint

Creator of The Mint, presenting fresh ideas on Monetary Theory

Nebraskan, Coloradan, Spaniard, Bolivian, and Oregonian

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@missing99082 @theparthrastogi 👆

[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."

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@kniborg @KirkLubimov The worst rise to the top in these systems, it's natural law

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

I always thought the dynamic of Japanese autism and discipline in contrast with American schizophrenia and exuberance is such an interesting juxtaposition.

Just imagine Japan's focus on ritualized excellence and the refusal to half-ass anything fused with American schizomaxxing with occasional retardation and manic bursts of invention.

The world is your oyster

[Seth Davis @SethDavisHoops]

Nebraska might have the best fans in all of sports

[Riley @Ri_S_OB]

LeBron never did that

[Alberto Pugilato @Albertopugilat]

Mientras vivíamos el peak del metal previo a la hispanchización de la música comercial por culpa del reguetón, echabas diesel a 0,70 el litro, llenabas el carro del Mercadona por 30€ y cualquier joven podía aspirar a comprarse un piso y formar una familia

Nos lo han robado todo

[Xans | Hypnotist + High Performance Hypnosis @xansnds]

How physically active are you?

I’ve exerted myself many times over the years in many different forms. Long distance running, MMA, weightlifting. Just overall pushing my body to its limits consistently.

What impresses me and stands out about her performance is the level of refinement and sophistication she displays.

Everything has a place and a purpose.

All of her movements are efficient yet beautiful.

And she ties it all together under a carefree, feminine, joyous poise that we’re sorely lacking in mainstream culture.

There’s a level of purity and authenticity to her performance that can’t be faked, only embodied.

Her message is “You can be excellent and have fun. Be joyous and free.” Not the typical “You have to eat blood, sweat, sh*t, p*ss, and tears for years if you want to be a fraction as dedicated as me.”

She throws all of that in their face with her effortless style.

Anyone can suffer. But it takes someone truly courageous and free to say “I’ll find a way to enjoy the strain. Not only enjoy it but have fun doing it. Be happy, joyous, and free.” And she did. That’s what makes her performance so powerful.

She didn’t let other people false programming break her spirit. She found a way to get her fighting spirit back. She didn’t settle for a life full of suffering like most people do. And she was elegant and graceful doing it.

That’s why this performance has people speaking imo. Even if they can’t put their finger on why, this is it. Every other performance I’ve seen is barely a blip on the radar in comparison.

The mentality she displayed in physical form can be embodied in anything you do.

Suffering is optional. Suffering is easy.

But can you challenge yourself to enjoy everything you do? To have fun with it and still be great?

[NBC Olympics & Paralympics @NBCOlympics]

ALYSA LIU'S GOLD-WINNING FREE SKATE ROUTINE! ⭐️ #WinterOlympics

[James Thomas @JamesThomasMN]

@enbyslayer @MrMaitra Didn't know she was based like that.

[Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 @cmclymer]

It annoys me that so many people are under the impression that this guy, Steven Bradbury, is some subpar goober who lucked his way into gold.

That could not be further from the truth.

This is one of the most satisfying victories in the history of the Olympics if you know the full backstory.

This medal final was during his fourth Olympics, in Salt Lake City in 2002.

Earlier in his career, he was among the best athletes in the world in this specific event, the 1000 meter short-track men's speed skate.

But despite his talent, he just had some of the shittiest luck in the sport. We're talking a decade of shit luck.

In the '94 Winter Olympics, he was considered the odds-on favorite to take gold, but he fell in his heat after getting illegally pushed by an opponent (who was later disqualified). He didn't get a re-do. That was it. He got shoved by some asshole, and his Olympics was over.

Then in the '98 Winter Olympics, he was a favorite to at least medal in the same event but got caught up in a collision that wasn't his fault and failed to advance.

In 1994, he got his thigh sliced open by a competitor's skate during a race, which required 111 stitches and 18 months of recovery time.

In 2000, he broke his neck during training because a skater in front of him fell and tripped him up. That required a bunch of screws and plates being inserted into his skull and back and chest.

And doctors told him that he should stop skating. But he didn't wanna give up. It meant too much to him.

So, there he was in Salt Lake City in 2002, past his prime, a walking erector set, going up against opponents who were faster and younger and in their prime.

He manages to win his heat and advance to the quarterfinal but then has the shit luck (yet again) of having to go up against the best two athletes in the quarterfinal and only the top two advance.

He finishes third and thinks: "Damn, I gave it my best shot." But then, the second place finisher is disqualified, so Bradbury gets to advance to the semifinal.

Now, at this point, he's thinking: Well, shit, I'm not as fast as these younger guys, and I got a bad habit of getting taken out by crashes that aren't my fault.

So, he consults with the Australian national coach, Ann Zhang, and they decide that he should hang back from the pack and hope the pack crashes.

That is a perfectly valid strategy. If you crash, you lose, but speed skaters risk crashing to gain an advantage in order to win.

It may not feel exciting, but it is a valid strategy and just as risky: avoid crashes entirely and hope that pays off.

It paid off in the semifinal: the pack, including the defending Olympic champion, jostled too much and crashed. Bradbury wins and advances.

So, he's improbably in the final and takes the same approach, and it works: the entire pack jostles too much and crashes, and Bradbury's risk of hanging back pays off.

This victory was not some un-athletic schlub lucking his way into gold.

It was a journeyman athlete who never gave up and played smart after a career of shitty luck and finally got his due after it being snatched away from him so many times.

Hands down, one of my favorite Olympics stories.

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@zerohedge It's good to "want" to cut rates, but reality is something quite different from fantasy

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@jamescoder12 FREE

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@zulkarnaimx YouTube

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@Aiden_Tech_Ai @aurexcoder0 Send

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

There's a much more than remote likelihood that we'll see tax rates 1950s style as AI begins to supercharge production and the national debt becomes as large as World War II relative to GDP

Tale income now, tax policy is the great equalizer and soon politicians will have no choice but to use it

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

Nobody's talking about how 91% marginal tax rates might have made the 1950s the golden age for American perceived income equality during the time

Auto workers were the tech workers of the time

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@Aiden_Tech_Ai Faceless

[David Mint @davidmintecon]

@andreamacdcpa Some AI does not do decimals well

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If you invented a machine that:

- Runs on grass
- Produces high-quality protein
- Fertilises soil while operating
- Builds topsoil
- Requires zero electricity
- Self-replicates
- Provides 100+ byproducts (leather, tallow, gelatin, etc.)

You'd win every environmental award.

We call it a cow and want to ban it.

Genius.