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
250 million years ago, when ancient seas evaporated, the sea salt was trapped beneath the volcanic eruptions that marked the end of the Permian Age and the beginning of the Triassic period.
After standing aimlessly for a while, holding my dinosaur salt, I eventually walk off bemusedly to look at spinach.
Spinach grows from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.
That's very nice, wholesome and fresh.
But what about the iron in my spinach?
Well, that comes from a supernova explosion long before Earth ever even existed.
Keeping hold of my kabillion-year-old spinach, I go back to the egg section and pick up my second box of eggs.
Life is too incredibly short.
After all, tomorrow night my lasagna will be made from the death of stars.
Welcome to How to Change the World, the podcast where we explore the entire history of the world's most important innovations in the order that they happened, to understand how civilization was built and where it's going next.
In between our history episodes, we look at timeless frameworks and mental models, which is what we're doing in this episode.
I am Sam Webster-Harris, your curious host, and today's topic is one of my favourites.
It's called thinking in primitives.
And besides creating weird feelings like my epic lasagna revelations, the idea itself of thinking in primitives helped spark this entire show because it really demonstrates the nature of how ideas serve to build on each other.
which if you haven't noticed is a topic we are a little focused on.
So this episode will tour through different ways to understand and use this concept from notable lessons from history to the building blocks of life.
At the end we'll gather our lessons to look at some future infrastructural revolutions that could rewrite human existence as we know it and we'll do this whole thing in less than half an hour.
So if you're not subscribed do please hit that button to join the journey and on that let's get exploring.
concept of thinking in primitives is incredibly timeless but it has been most popularized in recent years by none other than mr jeff bezos who would not stop talking about it in his shareholder letters
The story behind his obsession is actually a really good introduction to the idea, so I will tell it to you now.
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