Sam Webster-Harris
speaker
698 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Sam Webster-Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
26 letters.
Scientific papers about DNA?
26 letters.
A drunken text to your ex?
26 letters.
They all use the same building blocks, but there's infinite combinations that once discovered unlocked a huge wave of human creativity.
And it's interesting to think that before you learn to read, each letter that you had to remember was a hard one achievement.
B was different from D. Slowly you could combine them to form words like cat, dog, and gradually these building blocks fell into place and then faded from your consciousness altogether and suddenly you were reading novels.
which shows another interesting aspect of how quickly humanity takes these building blocks and forgets about them.
So let's zoom out for a while and consider early empires.
The Persians, the Greeks, the Han in China, the Maurya in India.
Each empire needed a shared language, ideology and a way to decide who was the leader.
They needed a writing system, a legal system, a unit of money, a system for tax and a military.
They had to have a road system for trade and communication across the empire to hold it together and a spy system to ensure that you knew what people were really up to.
This ingredient list are the proto-building blocks of an empire and each one is as important as the rice or wheat with which to feed it.
You might notice we have an opportunity to do some systems thinking because we can see how each of these individual systems have their own subsystems at a lower level.
Taxes need record-keeping, a regularity with which they're collected, a way to decide how much is collected, etc.
But then these systems also play off each other.
If a tax system gets out of hand, it can break down the whole rest of the empire systems.
Or if there is a split in the ideology systems, that can lead to conflicts on how to lead, and again the whole empire could fall over.
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