Introduction to How to Change the World - Dissecting the History & Future of Innovation

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Introduction: The Dawn of Human Influence

For billions of years, the earth turned slowly tides rose and fell. Stars wheeled overhead, and life moved with nature's will. Then we arrived, ta-da, and we had our own opinions about this whole nature thing, We are the species that bends rivers, splits atoms and turns grains of sand into intelligent machines. Some of our breakthroughs start as just a ripple and gather into a tsunami reshaping the world

in ways that no one could have predicted. This podcast is about those ripples in time.

[00:01:00] So hello and welcome to How to Change the World,

The podcast on a quest to journey through the entire history of innovation in chronological order.

One leap at a time in the process will be plotting how the modern world was made in collecting the frameworks and levers that we can apply today to shape our future.

I am Sam Webster Harris, your curious companion as we set sail on this odyssey

in this introduction episode here for you right now, I'm going to be setting the tone for the show, defining specifically what the show is and isn't about, and explaining the goals and principles that will be guiding our adventure.

When we look at the world today, we are witnessing tectonic shifts. There are new powers rising, new currencies emerging and new intelligences awakening. It does feel now like the pace of change is no longer human [00:02:00] as if history itself has come and sat on our fast forward button.

If we try and look towards the future, we see a big. Mist hanging over it, where the only certainty is that it will be radically different even in 10 years time.

But first, I'd like you to journey with me for just a second as we travel into the past.

A Journey Through Time: 10 years ago

Just 10 years ago with our shiny iPhone six s in hand, we marveled at how cutting edge we were. Artificial intelligence was thought of as a powerful toy for playing chess or maybe tagging your friends on Facebook.

and the idea of a global pandemic or a future war in Europe would sound like a sci-fi game plot.

A Century Back: The 1920s

Well, let's wind back the clock 100 years to the 1920s. Suddenly, we are surrounded by the rumbling of early automobiles and the crackling excitement of radio waves.

People then couldn't possibly imagine the second world war or [00:03:00] nuclear technologies, or the fact that humans would one day carry entire libraries in their pockets. The audacity of human imagination was just beginning to stretch its legs

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A Millennium Ago: Medieval Times

how about a thousand years earlier?

Now we are amid medieval monks, painstakingly copying manuscripts by candlelight. Completely unaware that their careful preservation would one day lead to global information networks. They were building the first bridges of human knowledge, one quite laboriously copied page at a time.

10,000 Years Ago: The Agricultural Revolution

Going back 10,000 years. Suddenly we are watching the first agricultural revolutionaries. People who looked at wild grasses and thought, you know what? I bet I could make that grow where I want it to. it is said that our ancestors did not domesticate wheat, but wheat domesticated us creating complex societal structures, the first ideas of property, and eventually entire civilizations, but we are not done yet.

100,000 Years Ago: Early Human Innovation

[00:04:00] 100,000 years ago, you could imagine a small group of early humans huddled around a flickering fire, crafting stone tools, weaving the first close, carving sticks into the first weapons

Finally

A Million Years Ago: The First Pioneers

a million years ago? Our hominid ancestors, the real pioneers, the first curious souls in known history of biological life, to look at their environment and think about how to control it, how to manipulate it,

these inventors of fire are who we owe our entire concept of what our existence is.

They, of course didn't know they were laying the groundwork for space exploration, quantum computing, or stock markets. They were just getting through one day at a time,

Well, what connects these moments? A relentless and almost comically optimistic human curiosity. We are the species that looks at the impossible and says, hold my beer.

The Epic of Human Potential

In my humble opinion, the thundering epic of human potential is [00:05:00] one of the most fascinating stories there is. And the history of innovation hasn't been told in chronological order on a podcast, and it's about time. It was

The Plan for the Podcast

So on that you might have the relevant question of how am I going to deconstruct the entire history of innovation? Well, I. I have a fairly simple approach, but a, a weighty task.

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The plan is to trace the thread of innovation from the first main real recorded histories, to the present day and date.

on this journey, we'll be swimming through oceans of scientific and technological discoveries, but there's also economics, law, politics, religion, psychology, philosophy, and oodles more.

I really want to take a polymathic approach that appreciates the interconnected reality of occurrences.

to pull apart the lives, mental models and civilizations that change the world so we can create our own playbook for progress.

Or at least more [00:06:00] humbly, simply better understand the nature of change and appreciate the changes going on around us.

And why am I doing this in date order Well, I think to understand step change, it's really important to have the context and the best way to do that is to start at the start and build from the ground up without skipping about.

You can think about it like this, if you take a plane 10,000 miles from London to Tokyo, it's incredible to learn about the different culture in Japan.

But it's also a bit like you take a portal. To visit these random aliens on the other side of the world, that apparently live on the same planet as you. However, if you walk or cycle the whole way from London to Tokyo, you start to understand the real concept of distances between the places. You get to see all the slight cultural changes, country by country,

and the evolutions along the way. If we simply jump about through history, you don't understand how it evolves, how one thing leads to another. and [00:07:00] navigating from one era to the next.

But the point of the podcast and learning how to change the world is literally about learning how to navigate from one era to the next.

I

What counts as an innovation

Okay on that, how do I decide what will make the cut as a world changing innovation or not? And who am I to decide it?

Well, good question. There are nearly endless numbers of fascinating stories and, tinkerers from history. So my razor for deciding what to include will be if the innovation had a meaningful impact on at least 50% of humanity

or if it ranks as at least an eight on the technological Innovation Richter scale, which you might not have heard of, but it's a concept I'll talk about in a future episode. Don't worry. Essentially this means I'll only discuss innovations that were at least as impactful on society and individual human lives as the mobile phone or the internet.

Doing that will help avoid politics or decision fatigue of why I've included one thing and not something [00:08:00] else.

So let's just curiously observe the facts, note down important lessons to take with us and continue our quest.

Release Schedule

Right. What sort of schedule will I release on?

Wow. Um, we'll see, I'm gonna try and do one big history episode once a month. , I might even try and release on the Luna calendar because . I like the idea of having a big warning light in the night sky that I can't avoid and I don't actually look at my calendar that much, to be honest.

I expect to read between two and four books per episode, and for many episodes there isn't a complete resource telling the stories that I'm telling from the angle that I'm telling them. So it takes some time to piece things together in the best way that makes sense.

So I will do my utmost to go as fast as possible, but no faster than that.

Which does beg the question, how long will this all take?

While calculating on the premise that we have eight to 12 innovations an era [00:09:00] and about 12 ish eras. And if we are covering about one era a year,

That does mean the whole project will take me 10 to 12, maybe 15 years.

So I have a lot of reading to do and can't hang about. So let's go on to the next question.

Beyond a history podcast

Is this just a history podcast? No.

In between the historic exploration episodes, I plan to release shorter episodes covering different mental models or ideas on the topic of innovation. In these episodes, I want to tease out patterns and themes that repeat across the ages and that would really serve us as important lessons for being world changes and for understanding the things we're reading about.

for any of the curious questions

amongst this, they're going to add a lot of value.

These might be specific frameworks in science or theories presented in different books. One example of these sorts of episodes would, of course be explaining the innovation rip to scale that I mentioned earlier.

[00:10:00] Another might be a deep dive on first principles thinking or systems thinking and practical ideas on how we can apply it. Have an episode lined up on the three laws of biology introduced by Will and Ariel Durand in their book. The Lessons of History

essentially the mission for the whole show is to create the ultimate manual for world changes

to help you both think bigger and act bigger, to understand the few rules that don't change and work with them to change everything and anything else that should be changed.

Why this point in history

final question. Why am I focusing on recorded history from 5,000 bc? ,

well, if I tried to cover everything, we would be here for a millennia. As a biologist myself, the 3.7 billion year history of life on Earth is fascinating.

It's a tale that spans vast eons compared to our mindbogglingly short existence as a species.

I think it's worth putting these timelines into a reference point for you. So let's say the timeline of life on Earth was compressed into a single 24 hours [00:11:00] day. That means the 2 million year history of our genus, the hominids is merely the final 47 seconds, not even a minute. Then if we look at just our species homosapiens, we've been around for 300,000 years and that's about the last seven seconds.

Finally, we get to recorded history and the last six or 7,000 years, well, that's just N 0.14 seconds of the 24 hour history of life on earth, , so yes, in perspective doesn't sound like a lot, but this is when exciting events like Writing Wheels, metals appeared and it unlocked the great proliferation of innovation

and the stories we're going to focus on.

I won't completely ignore the rest of history. , I will briefly cover fire language and agriculture as they did completely change human civilization as well. But as there are no real records from these times, it's

hard to truly say what we know happened. And a lot of it is just theoretical guessing, [00:12:00] hopefully with some accuracy.

There's a great quote about history that says it is like the planks of a shipwreck. More of the past has been lost than can be saved,

A map is not a blueprint

Which makes the point that it's worth remembering in general that a map is not a blueprint. There's a classic tale from a kingdom that was so obsessed with map making that to get a truly accurate map, they created a map so large, it covered the entire kingdom with a perfect point to point scale.

Of course, the map was completely unusable.

If we tried to tell all of history exactly as it was, that would leave us no time in the present. So we must have shortcuts or different lenses to be able to appreciate the things that we are trying to learn from history. If you ever look at Google Maps, you'll see it has many different filters that you can use.

Satellite imagery or the transit map or a cycling map. Let's say you wanted to go hiking, you might prefer to use an OS map

of topology. Well, you can think of different historians as [00:13:00] creating different types of maps of history. The Durant, who I mentioned, spent their lives creating a comprehensive history series called The Story of Civilization.

They created an entire weighty book per era trying to cover everything. Slightly important, and you could think of this a bit like a satellite image that tries to cover everything.

Now their series is a brilliant piece of work, but it only has a brief page or paragraph about each important innovation. 'cause there's so much history they're trying to cover and compress into these books.

Now there are many other books out there or podcasts on the history of wars. Power economics, medicine. In fact, there's plenty of work on the history of innovation, but there simply isn't a detailed map of the entire history of innovation at the scale, that I wish to cover it.

Now, accordingly, as I am creating a map of history, many things will be missing,

However, my goal is that the lines of innovation will be much clearer than on any other map that you could [00:14:00] use.

Why am i doing this?

So as this is an introduction episode, I thought I'd answer a few whys.

firstly, why am I doing this?

Well, as a generic millennial raise on a diet of David Attenborough, the Matrix and age of empires, who, who wouldn't ask this question of how to change the world.

To be fair, it is a question that's persisted in the human race our entire existence. So it hardly makes me special.

But as far as my relationship goes with this question, I studied science at university with all the ideas for inventions and so full of beans. I was off starting my first world changing revolutionary business. With no idea what I was doing. sorry, I certainly didn't achieve the extent of my grandiose vision, but one mistake after another. It somehow ended up going a lot better than anyone anticipated, myself included. [00:15:00] So I stayed in the world of startups and investing, which allowed me to explore more industries than we have time to talk about. Then eight years ago, I started a mindset podcast interviewing hundreds of top entrepreneurs until.

One day I felt like I'd spoken to enough of them. So I rebranded into a psychology podcast where I analyze human behavior, the existential point of why we do things, and how to close the gap between our expectations and our achievements.

As Steve Jobs, once wisely stated, you can only connect the dots looking backwards, and all of my different activities were.

Pulling on the thread of the question, how to change the world, which brings us here.

I became obsessed with formats and tossed around ideas for something like this show for the last five years

Until I stumbled into the formula for the show that I explained earlier,

and when I had the idea, it hit me like a red hot poker up the bum.

I immediately stopped hiding under my desk and jumped right into my notes and worked like a demon to make this a reality. And that is what brought me into [00:16:00] your ears today.

Now, I also know that some people might have the question of, isn't there a famous Sam Harris podcaster out there already? I.

Well, yes, there is a certain Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist atheist. He's a legendary meditator and expert at running into the fire of any political hot topic and telling everybody how wrong they are.

I am not him. I am Samuel Webster Harris, the accident prone English biologist, entrepreneur, and all round bad emailer. I'm very happy reminding people not to worry too much about what other people think. That advice does also get extended to myself whenever I feel the irrational pull to compare myself to the success of the other Sam Harris, just because we have the same name, but that's Psychology for You, which I cover on my other show, and we will move on.

Why should you listen? - understanding civilization

All righty. Now, why should you listen? What is in it [00:17:00] for you?

Well, if you want to change the world, first, you have to understand how it works.

Engineers take gadgets apart to see how they're built. , and so we need to do the same with civilization if we want to engineer new civilizations.

So Isaac Newton once said, if I have seen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants. But that's. That saying isn't just about reverence, it's also about leverage.

Every leap that we make builds on the leaps. Before it,

Alexander the Great, he didn't just march into history with a sword in his hand, destiny, in his veins. He studied with Aristotle, no less on the one hand, he was reading the campaigns of Cyrus and the Heroism of Achilles. But behind his shoulder, he had the greatest philosopher of his time

teaching him to ask why everything is the way it is, and then to even question that too. And I think that's the magic of pairing history with philosophy. You [00:18:00] don't just learn what's happened. You start seeing how things change and why.

Psychology and Innovation

This leads us nicely into psychology. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in human minds with all their brilliance, their biases, their fears, and their fire. And when you think about the question of what's in it for you. You are the result of your decisions and how you think.

when we consider things like the past or the future, it's easy to fall into devious thinking traps. So I have three goals for how I want to gently nurture your thinking and awareness.

Bias and Hindsight

The first issue that I see here is bias. When we peer back into the past, ideas seem obvious and events seem inevitable. The hindsight bias really blinds people to how confusing the whole process of progress is

these days. We are certain that illnesses come from tiny bacteria and viruses. , yet we know that now with the [00:19:00] same certainty that people used to know that illness came from being cursed by a wizard in the valley next door.

If we treat past discoveries as obvious, we completely miss how unobvious the future will be.

Illusion of obviousness

The second big curse of our psychology

is the insidious feeling that we expect ideas are getting harder to find. all the mountains have been climbed. The different lands have been found. The main ideas of science have been discovered. Most PhDs now are merely in exercise in adding another decimal point in the accuracy to some long known model.

Well, this idea leaves us lost in the illusion of obviousness that we can't uncover great step changes in knowledge or invent new systems that transform the meaning and experience of being a human. I will definitely be going into this topic in more depth, but for now, remember that people have written about this exact same problem for thousands of years.

We've always thought that everything important was known and there is probably just a [00:20:00] few more details of accuracy to fill in, and this has never been true, and it hasn't suddenly become true this year either.

Gratitude - Understanding - Curiosity

and that brings us to our final illusion.

The Myth of Stability

The myth of stability.

As humans, we clinging to an idea that someday everything will be in its place. This makes us feel like our real life has not yet begun. Once we've cleared the problems,

or we've got things in order, then we'll do the things that we are meant to do. That's when we'll create our ideas. That is when we'll live fully.

Every innovator you've ever admired lived through uncertain times. Newton faced the plague. Darwin was terrified to publish his heretical ideas. The Wright brothers were mocked for messing around with silly planes.

When we look at them now with hindsight, it's a mistake to read about them as characters in a play whose ending We already know. They were just like you and me swimming in the stream of time, not knowing which way the current could take them, [00:21:00] but still they acted anyway.

Those of us who wait for the perfect moment miss their chance entirely. If you wish to change the world, , no one will give you permission or announce when the time is right.

You must simply begin

7 Core Principles of the Show

okay. Last section. I would like to briefly lay out seven core principles for the show and how to think about innovation.

1 - Interdisciplinary Thinking

The first guiding principle is interdisciplinary thinking. Innovation doesn't live in a lab or a boardroom. It happens in the messy collision of different fields where law meets technology. Philosophy shapes economics, and religion drives politics.

Ham, Robbie's legal code changed the shape of civilization.

The Christian faiths rewired human behavior, central banking, stock markets didn't just fund industries. They built empires. true innovation, isn't [00:22:00] just simply inventions.

It's something that shifts a whole system. And if you want to do that, you need to understand how the whole machine works, not just a single cog.

2 - Systems Thinking

Number two, the related cousin of interdisciplinary thinking is systems thinking.

Just as you need to use different lenses to understand the whole, you should also appreciate the interdependencies of a whole system and how the knock on effects of one element balances or unbalances the whole.

When we look at traffic management, for example, we'll often see that adding more lanes to a highway results in more cars using it, spending just as much time stuck in traffic. Now, if you don't understand the whole system we often get confused when seemingly obvious answers don't work.

The more complex a system becomes, the more important it is to understand the weak points, the different dependencies, the levers and controls that create positive and negative feedback loops. The

3 - Understanding of knowledge

Which leads us directly into principle number three, which is [00:23:00] gaining understanding over knowledge.

Richard Feynman is famous for saying that there is a huge difference between knowing a thing and understanding a thing.

You can know the names of all the muscles in the human body and still have no idea how to throw a punch.

There really wouldn't be much addition to the world if I merely threw a lot of facts at you. What's important is seeing how these ideas tie together, how innovation flows, how revolutions happen, and hopefully this will nurture your own ability to spot patterns and synthesize ideas yourself.

After all, history belongs to those who connect dots and so will our future

I have a small but important subpoint here. We live our lives floating on this vast ocean of technological wizardry. It's so deep that we stopped seeing the bottom long ago. People don't marvel in childlike wonder at the speed of a plane, whisking them to the other side of the world.

No. [00:24:00] They moan about the cues. They complain about the baggage and they get furious when God forbid there is a delay

And so we've lost the curiosity for the magic around this. It's taken for granted when you go to the supermarket, you pick up some chunks of animal or edible plant

and you have no idea how it got there or the systems that make it happen. We just see things as simply being the way they are. And this blocks our understanding, I'll say again. History belongs to those who connect the dots, as will our future.

4 - Context

The next principle is context. Every invention lives inside a time and a culture. Without the right context, innovation just looks like magic or madness.

I did speak about context briefly earlier, so now I'll tell you a story.

My great-grandfather was a train driver. Today that sounds kind of ordinary, meaningful, but a quiet, steady job [00:25:00] back in 1900, it was actually the peak of adventure.

A career is daring and dangerous as a fighter pilot. 16,000 railway workers died in the year 1900. By 1913, it was 30,000.

Things like boiler explosions, train derailments, long-term exposure to coal dust, jets of boiling steam, hitting you in or just falling off the stupid thing. Being a train driver meant speed, travel, and danger. It was the bleeding edge of technology,

and that's why context matters. Without it, we can miss the wild, radical nature of innovation that today might feel more mundane and ordinary.

5 - No current afafirs and politics

Right. Principle number five, no current affairs or political opinions. History is a timeless resource that doesn't need to be muddied by passing trends.

I don't want to get caught up with a specific feature of a current version of chat, GBT or a recent news item affecting the stock price of Tesla.

[00:26:00] The world is political enough as it is and I believe that a good podcast that isn't about politics, doesn't need to ruin itself by the host, shoving their opinions all over you.

That said, I will stick to science when it comes to things like religion, evolution, whether the world is flat or not. So if that annoys you, hey, you're listening to an innovation show. I dunno what you're expecting.

This is an expedition that will probably take me a decade or so to complete. And I'd really like the first episode to be as relevant today as it could be in 10 years, which is certainly an ambitious goal when we are looking at the the idea that possibly we have artificial general intelligence in 10 years time.

But I think it's worth trying to achieve

Nasim Taleb has a great lens that if you want people in 20 years to read your work, you should write. So people 20 years ago would understand it. So I'll try to do that.

6 - Side Quests

Principle six, side quests. I shall embrace the occasional side quest because some of [00:27:00] history's best ideas weren't on someone's to-do list. Newton took a break from physics to be the master of the royal mint and accidentally triggered the gold standard.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in some mold, on an old Petri disc, darwin even had swirling thoughts of evolution spring into focus with his Galapagos finches that he collected for general observation purposes rather than building world, changing new theories.

Thus, if it feels relevant to me, we shall double down on some interesting side stories for the joy of it. Why not? Every series that I'll do, there'll probably be at least one wild card episode on an interesting person or event that might not fit the main thread on completely world changing metrics.

But perhaps it'll help deepen the picture for us. As they say, innovation doesn't always walk a straight line. Sometimes it stumbles sideways into greatness.

7 - Optimism

And the final seventh [00:28:00] principle optimism. I think there's a lot to be optimistic about. It is so much easier to look smart, pointing out future disaster and complaining about things, but history favors the optimists

Shane Par has an awesome quote. Optimism is a performance enhancing drug that is both legal and free. While experts predicted failure, Sam Walton opened discounts doors in small towns that became Walmart when critics said It's too risky. FedEx launched overnight delivery whilst pessimists write reports, optimists write history.

Oof. Nice one. Progress is messy. It stumbles, it stalls, it gets lost, but it moves. And that's why this podcast will stand for optimism. I'm not saying blind faith that everything will be perfect.

Humans are great at stumbling backwards and messing things up, but we're also pretty good at getting ourselves back together.

And I think it's very rational to believe [00:29:00] in progress.

Mission and sign off

Okay. Whew. We have covered what the show is and what it isn't. We know where we're going, so it is time to wrap it up

as we live our lives. It is easy to get wrapped up in the noise of today. Yesterday's failures, tomorrow's fears, but history teaches us that noise fades. What matters is what endures. Right now. We are not just living through history. We are writing it

The mission of the podcast is to untangle the stories of innovation, extract the patterns of change, and build a manual for world changes. If you came here because you want to spark something new or ride the waves of transformation or simply understand the strange river of progress that we're floating down while you are in the right place. Welcome to How to Change the World, the Lessons from the History of Innovation.

Let's begin.

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