Thinking in Primitives: A mental model to dissect the foundations of Civilization, Humanity & Creativity

[00:00:00] Intergalactic Planetary Lasagna..?

​tomorrow I am making lasagna. As I was shopping for the ingredients, I was struck with a curious thought. eggs really get around. They're also in my pancake recipe and my quiche recipe, and I eat them for lunches. Sometimes breakfast.

I guess I'll buy two boxes.

This did make me wonder how many eggs are sold a day. 3.29 billion eggs are sold a day.

That feels like too many eggs. I sheepishly put back my second box and head to look at salt pink Himalayan Sea salt does look exotically. Fabulous. But the Himalayas are nowhere near the ocean. So when did Himalayan sea salt form? I wonder?

250 million years ago when ancient sea evaporated

The sea salt was trapped beneath the volcanic eruptions that marked the end of the Permian Age and the beginning of the thoracic period.

After standing aimlessly for a while, holding my dinosaur salt, I eventually walk off ber mutely to look at spinach. Spinach grows from carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight. That's very nice, wholesome, and fresh. But what about the ion 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.

[00:01:40] A mental models episode about building blocks

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 favorites. 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.

[00:03:10] 1 - THINKING IN PRIMITIVES: JEFF BEZOS, AMAZON and AWS

The 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.

By the early two thousands, Amazon had a problem. The company was growing so fast, it was suffocating under its own success despite the sprawling empire, teams couldn't move engineers who should have been inventing new features were instead rebuilding the same tools over and over storage systems, compute capacity authentication services.

They had no reliable way to share what they had already built. And so instead of building on each other's work, they were tripping over each other's feet.

[00:04:03] The API Memo

So in 2002, Bezos issued a memo that has since entered the mythology of Silicon Valley.

He stated that every single team must share their tools that they build through standardized interfaces, which are otherwise known as APIs. The final line of his memo reads that anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Thank you. Have a nice day.

this was Bezos way to stop Amazon choking on its own complexity and instead force his teams to break everything down into its most fundamental parts and make them reusable. He was teaching Amazon to think in primitives.

[00:04:39] What is a Primitive?

And a primitive, in case you were wondering, is a fundamental, reliable, reusable building block.

It does one thing very well. It does it boringly and it can be combined with other primitives to create something new.

A perfect example of a primitive is the Lego building block. When you have a set of them, you can unlock creativity, the same bricks that can be used to create a castle can also be used to make a boat or a giraffe.

[00:05:03] How Amaon launched AWS

Now, what did this mean for Amazon? Well, Amazon's engineers carved the technology into discreet services. There was a service called S3, which is the way that Amazon stored data and another service called EC2, for compute processing. Each one worked simply and reliably. So whether you wanted to build a new feature for adding product listings, or if you wanted to compute a new recommendation algorithm or store a user's purchase history you had the core fundamental building blocks., To build a highly scalable e-commerce website, or any web-based application.And this completely changed their business operations and made it radically easier to scale up quicklybut then someone had a remarkable idea. If these tools are good enough for us to build the world's largest e-commerce store, Why not just sell these tools to everyone else?

So in 2006, Amazon Web Services launched. It was infrastructure as a service

[00:06:00] The impact of AWS and cloud servers

This meant that the cost of launching a technology business collapsed overnight. , you didn't need to buy servers, lease data centers, or hire infrastructure engineers.

You just needed a credit card and idea, and you could get building

Netflix, Uber, Airbnb. They all built their services using AWS, which handled their explosive demand and grew with them

as a business. In 2024 AWS generated $39.8 billion in operating income and contributed to almost 60% of Amazon's operating profit.

Which shows us that thinking imp primitives is possibly a good idea and why Jeff Bezos wouldn't stop talking about it in his shareholder letters.

[00:06:42] When a primitive breaks [00:06:42] 2 - THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE

right. If Amazon is a complex organism built on compute primitives, it's only fair to ask what are we built on?

Well, your body contains about seven octillion atoms. That's a seven with 27 zeros after it, which is more atoms than there are grains of sand on earth.

But here's what's remarkable. 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 these 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 house plant.

This of course, leads to our next question.

[00:07:41] How are we built

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.

While 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.

[00:08:33] Mitochondria and energy production

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.

Within each one of your cells lies several .

Mitochondrion, which handle this energy wizardry for you. They are not strictly you.

They are an ancient bacterium with their own DNA.

They were absorbed by a larger cell some 1.5 billion years ago, and they have been quietly replicating ever since. mitochondria is so good that their confusing energy job that every single animal on earth besides one, there is strange fish parasite that looks like an alien, but every single other animal on earth depends upon mitochondria.

Completely

evolution. Having found a solution that worked, never saw fit to replace it.

when we start looking across our body, we see the same copy paste, logic applying everywhere. Cells need walls. They need ways to communicate and divide, Then consider key animal components like skin, bones, hair, teeth, heart, lungs, veins. They're all incredibly similar stuff.

You can literally transplant a pig heart into a human. Ultimately nature is an engineer that works out these fundamental building blocks and then reuses them at will.

[00:10:03] HOX genes and the animal building instruction manual

Now my last point here is possibly the weirdest and most magical of them all. How the hell does a single blind cell

divide billions of times , into a creature with a head at one end, feet at the other, and organs arranged in precisely the right order. Like, why didn't I get a bladder where my stomach is, or a toe instead of a thumb like. this miracle relies on things called hawks genes and they govern the body plan of almost every animal on earth.

If you mess with the fruit flies, hawks, jeans, it will grow legs where its Santa. It should be not functional legs, just legs 'cause that's what you told it to do.

But what's remarkable here is if you take the eye building gene, say from a fly, and you put it in a mouse, well, the mouse will now grow in eye wherever that gene told it to.

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.

[00:11:30] How primitives become essential foundations

So another primitive thinking lesson we can gather from looking at biology is that once a component truly works 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 a 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.

[00:12:59] 3 - CIVILIZATION AND HIDDEN INVENTIONS

If biological evolution builds complexity on ancient building blocks, human civilization does exactly the same thing. This show after all, is quite literally mapping the creation of each fundamental primitive in society looking at how they emerged and were later built on. So whilst we're looking at this topic, let's explore history a little bit.

Once upon a time, there were no alphabets.

we could speak. We had words in grammar, but we couldn't accurately record our thoughts in writing Today, every single word that you have ever read in English is built from just 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Shakespeare plays 26 letters. Scientific papers about DNA 26 letters, a drunken text to your ex 26 letters.

They all use the same building blocks, but there's infinite combinations that once discovered, unlocked a huge wave of human creativity. And it's interesting to think that before you learn to read each letter that you had to remember was a hard one. Achievement B was different from D. Slowly you could combine them to form words like cat, dog, and gradually these building blocks fell into place and then faded from your consciousness altogether, and suddenly you were reading novels,

Which shows another interesting aspect of how quickly humanity takes these building blocks and forgets about them.

[00:14:25] The Essential Ingredients of Early empires

So let's zoom out for a while and consider early empires. The Persians, the Greeks, the Han in China, the Maria in India, , each empire needed a shared language ideology and a way to decide who was the leader.

They needed a writing system, a legal system, a unit of money, a system for tax and a military. They had to have a road system for trade and communication across the empire to hold it together and a spy system to ensure that you knew what people were really up to

This ingredient list are the proto building blocks of an empire and each one is as important as the rice or wheat with which to feed it.

you Might notice we have an opportunity to do some systems thinking because we can see how each of these individual systems have their own subsystems at a lower level,

Taxes need record keeping irregularity with which they're collected, a way to decide how much is collected, et cetera. But then these systems also play off each other. If a tax system gets out of hand, it can break down the whole rest of the empire systems.

Or if there is a split in the ideology systems that can lead to conflicts on how to lead. And again, the whole empire could fall over.

Now, just as the Empress and Kings chose different types of stone to build their walls and castles. They might choose different flavors of systems to build their empires. A different God or a different language, a different unit of money, et cetera.

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.

[00:16:06] Standardisations that make the world work

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 era 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

, and that's completely natural. As humans, if something works, we stop thinking about it and take it for granted a bit like gravity or the sun rising.

But it is wise to remember that every primitive that we ignore today was once a radical innovation that somebody somewhere fought to establish

a fact that we can rely on is that many future breakthroughs

will depend on the primitives we build today.

[00:18:18] 4 - PRIMITIVE LESSONS

We've now established a healthy understanding of primitive thinking. As a framework, it really compliments the technology rich to scale, which was the first mental model we introduced on the show for ranking innovations. Combining these two ideas, we see that a level eight or nine innovation are the most important primitive building blocks for society to then build new creative ideas upon them that creates progress. But you're probably noticing a pattern. Cloud servers, mitochondria, units of measurement, these powerful innovations, they're not exactly flashy gadgets like the latest iPhone.

Many of them are hidden away, like perhaps a new battery cathode that makes batteries lighter,

It allows smartphones, electric cars and drones to become more commercial.

We don't always have to search for the giant big idea when actually small, reliable components that can be combined. These can be used to make countless new products possible.

Ikea is a brilliant example. They can sell you a bookshelf, a sofa, a kitchen, because their factories create modular building blocks of furniture, they have standardized draw sliders, shelf brackets, locking screws, panels that can flat pack efficiently and then snap together. It is literally like human humanized Lego sets for your house that create efficiencies that allow them to be a huge billion dollar empire.

So if this has made you excited to hack away at an idea that could spawn a thousand more ideas, I am very happy to hear it and I hope you consider it

at this point, we are ready to explore how ideas get created. And firstly, we can look into some of the mistakes we make if we haven't got our thinking in primitive hats on,

[00:20:01] Market timing and innovation mistakes

They often say that the biggest determinant of success isn't how clever your idea is. It is the timing. Let's say you invented Uber 10 years early before smartphone adoption, GPS and cloud servers. Well, that's a very nice idea that you have, but it's not going to happen conversely, if you tried to build Uber 10 years after the smartphone, then you've completely missed the boat.

It is a question of noticing when your new Lego blocks become available. Remember, AWS it worked because Jeff Bezos felt the pain of the problem at scale, at exactly the moment. The technology to solve it was also becoming available. So he had perfect timing.

now let's consider a case of bad timing. Google Glass. In 2013, they promised augmented reality in a stylish package, and they failed spectacularly. Why? the foundations weren't there. The displays were too heavy, the batteries couldn't last, and the idea of someone wearing a camera all day recording everything was not in the slightest bit. Cool.

A decade later. Though the display processing and battery technology is all better. And as a society we are much more used to cameras being everywhere. So perhaps the stars are aligned for a second attempt, which might well unlock a whole new world of apps and ways that we communicate and work.

If augmented reality is a success, it might become a building block for plenty of new ideas that could be used as a component in different industries.

And that's a great way to be innovative, to notice when new building blocks come out and thinking about how to use them in new places. Drones started out as cool toys and ways to film and bomb stuff, but then you can also turn a drone into surveillance technology for your farmlands or a distribution technology for medical supplies in Africa.

This is why I'm such a big fan of interdisciplinary thinking that looks across different fields.

[00:21:55] Just do stuff

looking forwards, there are quant of brilliant ideas out there waiting for their time to shine. Of course, trying to invent the next internet is a pretty tall order, but if you're working in an industry and you try breaking a process down into its most fundamental parts, and improving one of those, I think you have a high chance of coming up with some good ideas.

You could be a nurse or a lawyer, a teacher or a taxi driver or a soldier on the front lines. If you want to spot opportunities, it is much easier when you're doing things and feeling the problems firsthand.

Back in the days of the Gold Rush, you've probably heard it was the people selling picks and shovels that made all the money. But the real innovator was Levi Strauss. He started selling denim pants to miners because their clothes kept ripping.

By investigating how these rips happened, he found a single problem he could solve. He decided to put rivets in to reinforce the seams where they kept breaking. In doing so, he invented the most durable workwear available, and he stumbled into an entire new industry,

which is such a cool example of breaking things down to the smallest unit of problem to solve.

now there's many other ways to make a change in the world. Not everything needs to be a product a service or infrastructure. Ideas and knowledge are of course just as important.

Explorers who made maps for others to navigate with scientists with discoveries that help others make new discoveries.

Newton said, if I have seen further than others, it's only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

[00:23:24] 5 - FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

As humans inevitably push forward into new domains, we can think about the pick shovels, denim pants or simply ideas of tomorrow

following the themes that we've already touched on. I would like to look at two industries where a whole new set of primitives , will certainly be created over the next decades.

[00:23:43] CRISPR and Casgevy

Let's start with the case of Victoria Gray. Not long ago, she was dying from sickle cell disease. It is a genetic disorder where your red blood cells contort into sharp crescent shapes that basically shred your organs from the inside. She compared it to broken glass, flowing through her veins.

In 2019, Victoria became the first American to ever receive. A crisper gene editing therapy. It wasn't to manage her symptoms, but to literally fix the code in her DNA. Six months later, she was pain free, and today, six years later, she is alive and healthy

Following some more medical trials. The FDA approved cast giv in 2023, making it the first CRISPR therapy available in the United States.

If you haven't heard much about crispr, they are molecular scissors that cut DNA at precise locations and you can use them to replace genes. It's a process that once required PhD teams five years, maybe more, and millions of dollars, and it can now be done by high school students in a few months using standardized biological parts called bio bricks.

But there is so much innovation yet to happen in this area. CRISPR is being tested on cancers, HIV, cardiovascular disease, diabetes,

Instead of solving one disease, , we're trying to build a toolkit for creatively solving all sorts of things. Companies like Colossal Biosciences have even resurrected diols using crispr, and one day they hope to bring back the wooly mammoth.

As an industry, we are still incredibly early. There's huge volumes of work mapping what every gene does and how proteins fold and interact essentially learning the programming language of life along with making standard toolkits with how to speak it

in the future, a budding scientist might cure a new disease on a Monday and on a Tuesday decide to build a new life form. In the same way that IKEA designers can build a new piece of furniture. And if that doesn't sound like playing God, well, let's talk about space.

[00:25:43] Space and Orbital Refuelling

The push to build giant rockets isn't sexy because humans like big things.

What's revolutionary about ideas like Starship or New Glen is that they are attempting to bring reusability and very low cost to send large amounts of mass into space, and most importantly, establish the concept of refueling in space.

Even the fastest car was completely useless for a long journey without the humble gas station. While getting to Mars requires an enormous amount of fuel, one option is to build an impossibly huge rocket on Earth that will eventually get something incredibly tiny. All the way to Mars or a much better option, is to launch with lots more of the stuff you actually want inside the rocket to take with you, and then pick up extra fuel along the way.

For orbital refueling to work, you need standardized docking protocols, fuel transfer systems, , depots stationed at key orbital positions for your space trip.

It's a bit like learning to cross your T's and dot your i's. It's kind of dull logistics and infrastructure that feels a lot like homework, but it's these powerful basics that turn science fiction into reality.

And as they say, today's homework is tomorrow's achievement.

So as you probably guessed, I could talk about fun future things endlessly, but I'll stick with just those two fun ideas . For this episode, considering the future of life itself on earth and how it possibly spreads across the solar system is pretty cool.

Perhaps even in 100 years. These ideas will be taken completely for granted. A bit like our billions of eggs a day that show up in your breakfast omelet or your burger mayonnaise in your cakes, muffins and ches. And yes, even in your death star lasagna,

what a time it is to be alive.

[00:27:38] Wrap up

Alrightyy. I hope I didn't overcook the concept there as it is pretty simple to grasp. But I felt it was really worth exploring from a few different angles across history, science, and domains that might give you some ideas to really think about how to use the concept.

If you found the episode interesting, do please subscribe and follow the whole journey as we talk through the entire history of innovation in chronological order. And if you could do me a favor, please tell all your clever friends about it or drop a like and comment on your podcast, player of choice

On my side, I am aiming to quit all my other work life commitments and go full time on this project. And if you want to help me with that from next week onwards, there will be a premium layer to support me every single public episode that I have will have an accompanying premium episode, which will offer some behind the scenes info on my notes, extra stories of fun facts, and of course, any listener questions on the topics of that episode.

So if you do have any questions for me relating to this episode, please stick them in the comments and the answers will eventually one day appear in premium.

on the subject of my infallible optimism for things that may one day appear in the future. It's nice to remind ourselves that in the future

where we are now might just feel like the beginning, as Charles Darwin said, from so simple, the beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful are being evolved. With that, remember what we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean, so please stay curious.