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
Now, just as the emperors and kings chose different types of stone to build their walls and castles, they might choose different flavours of systems to build their empires, a different god or a different language, a different unit of money, etc.
Just like a child playing with Legos, they were able to put them together to build their own version of their own empire.
and just like you, stumbling over how to learn your letters.
It's funny to watch humanity stumbling over how to put these building blocks into place and learn them, and then how quickly we took them for granted and started building new ideas on top of them.
Right, let's fast forward to today.
Every invention you touch, your smartphone, coffee machine, car, credit card, they run on dozens of primitive building blocks you probably never think about.
Let's start with something absurdly simple, standardized measurement.
Before the metric system, every region had its own foot, pound, and gallon, a relic of empires deciding their own ways to do things.
This meant that trade was a nightmare, engineering across borders didn't work because if parts of your car were made in China and other parts in Germany, nothing could be screwed together.
I'm honestly not even exaggerating.
The Soviet Union and NATO couldn't even agree on which way screws should thread, and this meant that the Soviet cosmonauts couldn't use American tools in space.
Another famous story from space is Lockheed Martin managed to confuse both metric and imperial units of measurement in a Mars orbiter that they built for $125 million.
Now this complete fail on standardization led to this orbiter to crash into the Martian atmosphere in 1999.
So the lesson here is that before anyone can reach for the stars, they need to agree on standardized units of measurements and simple things like screw threads.
I know it might not sound sexy, but it's what makes every cool thing possible.
In our modern world, we are swimming in primitives that combine to allow unparalleled creativity.
And of course, we mostly take them for granted.
The CEO of Netflix doesn't praise the existence of AWS every single morning because the servers ran all night long.
When he gets into his car and the door doesn't fall off, he doesn't dance for joy because the screw standards are holding his car together.
He drives off expecting them to keep working.
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