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
They're not seven octillion unique different things.
They're combinations of just 118 elements from the periodic table,
And in reality, 99% of your body is built from just six different compounds.
And if you want to know what they are, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus.
What's interesting is the same six compounds that make you also make most of a tree or a mushroom or a bacteria.
If you just rearrange them slightly, you might get a human or a houseplant.
This of course leads to our next question.
How are these building blocks put together?
How are we built?
Well, you've probably heard that you share 98% of your DNA with a chimpanzee.
What you might not have heard is that we also share 60% of our genetic code with a common fruit fly.
You, with your mortgage, your opinions about coffee, and your curious suspicion that you're fundamentally very different from insects, well, you are more than half identical to something that you would casually murder with a newspaper.
But if we've learned to think in primitives, this is much less surprising.
Building complex life is one of the hardest problems the universe has ever solved.
So evolution, being remarkably efficient or lazy if you will, prefers to just copy-paste anything that works.
So let's take energy production at the cellular level.
It's a complex piece of biological chemistry.
Electron transport chains and phosphate stuff that no one actually wants to hear on a podcast.
And the fun fact here is even your body doesn't want to deal with it.
Yes.
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