Naval uses hunter-gatherers to decode humanity’s deepest programming error. We run stone-age software on quantum hardware.
“You couldn’t have wealth before the farming age because you couldn’t store things. Hunter-gatherers carried everything on their backs”. No storage, no compound interest. “Hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status-based societies”. Tribal reputation was the only currency. Social ranking predicted survival better than any skill or tool.
This explains our broken incentives. “On an evolutionary basis, if you go back thousands of years, status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is”. Our brains optimized for zero-sum thinking where resources were finite. One person’s gain meant another’s loss. Pure scarcity physics.
The agricultural revolution rewrote the rules. “Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. The modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies”. Storage unlocked exponential returns. Surplus enabled positive-sum games. But our anxious minds never upgraded.
Naval sees the mismatch in every broken feedback loop. Our brains “aren’t really well-evolved to comprehend how much leverage is possible in modern society”. We default to tribal competition instead of systematic creation. We chase ancient hierarchies instead of building digital tools.
The hunter-gatherer model reveals something profound about individual sovereignty. “If you go back to hunter gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer, stood on their own”. No middle managers. No industrial hierarchies. Pure personal accountability within cooperative frameworks.
Each hunter possessed unique knowledge but couldn’t scale it. No written wisdom to preserve insights across generations. No endless multiplication through tools. Just individual skill meeting immediate need.
This ancient programming corrupts modern judgment. Our survival instincts mistake every opportunity for a threat. We think like tribal members competing for finite resources while living in an age of infinite leverage and digital abundance. The fundamental mathematics shifted completely. Our emotional circuits didn’t.