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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement · How To Solve Complex Problems · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

Wrong species, wrong location, doesn't matter, here's an eye.

What this shows us is that Hox genes are primitives.

They don't specify fly eye or mouse eye, they just say, build an eye here.

Each hox gene has one job and it makes them reusable in any animal.

So we see that genes are a giant set of Lego bricks.

Each one can be relied on to do one thing well, and they were crafted over billions of years.

And the nice thought here is that nature, playing with its expanding Lego set, eventually saw fit to create you.

So another primitive thinking lesson we can gather from looking at biology is that once a component truly works, it can become an irreplaceable foundation.

Nature can't mess with mitochondria, for example, because the animal relying on it will die instantly.

However, nature can experiment with slightly longer teeth or wider hips, or on a silly day, an extra stomach or two, because why not?

I do think this is fascinating when we consider ourselves.

Compared to all the other creatures on Earth, we have our language, our cities, our pathological need to argue on the internet.

But we aren't special because we're divinely different.

We're special because we run a few genes, a little differently, in a few places, and somehow that's enough to build you, build me, and even Shakespeare.

It really is worth stopping to consider the choreography required at the molecular level to turn random dirt, water and air in the environment and transform these things into a complex breathing, thinking organism.

This engineering magic is as mind-boggling to try and grasp as the scale of stars, galaxies and the universe.

Here we are, humanity with our unrivaled intelligence, yet we haven't been able to build anything nearly as complex, self-sustaining or intelligent as you.

However, it is just a question of creating the right Lego set and then we will be on our way.

Before I felt comfortable going full-time in on a podcast and following just my interests, I had some money goals that I could write out a few years of.

The unreliable nature of working for myself, you might have some money goals yourself.

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