Context is a podcast that explores the historical forces shaping our modern world. Hosted by Brad Harris, who earned his PhD from Stanford in the History of Science & Technology, each episode delves into pivotal ideas, events, and figures that have influenced civilization's trajectory. From the rise of scientific thought to the challenges of globalization, Brad provides insightful analysis that connects the past to our present. Whether you're a history enthusiast or seeking deeper understanding…
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Why doesn't history feel like history while we're living through it? The French Revolution. The outbreak of World War I. The Roaring Twenties. Looking back, these moments seem obvious, dramatic, and inevitable. But for most of the people who lived through them, they felt surprisingly ordinary. In this episode of Context with Brad Harris, historian Brad Harris explores the gap between lived history…
Why do we say a stone "obeys the law" of gravity? What is a "law" of nature, anyway? The idea that nature has laws — universal, mathematical, binding — was born in the seventeenth century, when Descartes and Newton assumed a divine lawmaker had legislated the cosmos. Modern science dismissed the lawmaker but kept the laws. This episode traces the history of science's deepest unexamined assumption,…
"Trust the science" is a phrase Robert Boyle would have found horrifying. The Royal Society he co-founded in 1660 inscribed exactly the opposite principle on its coat of arms: Nullius in verba — take nobody's word for it. Modern science was built as an anti-authority institution, forged in the wreckage of two decades of religious civil war that had killed roughly two hundred thousand Englishmen…
Human civilization has been trying to defeat death forever. For the first time, we may be beginning to succeed. In labs from California to Cambridge, the biology of aging is being treated as an engineering problem, and the pace of progress is no longer science fiction. This episode traces the long human war against mortality, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to today's life extension science, and asks…
What makes it possible for billions of strangers to cooperate every day? Trust. Not the kind you have with friends and family. But an elaborate, invisible scaffolding of norms, institutions, laws, and technologies that took thousands of years to build and that most of us never think about. In this episode, we trace the full arc: from ancient legal codes and religious enforcement, to medieval…
Where did probability come from? In this episode, Brad Harris explores how the invention of probability reshaped humanity's relationship with uncertainty—and why artificial intelligence (AI) ultimately runs on the same mathematics of prediction. For most of human history, the future was not something people tried to calculate. It was fate, providence, or the will of the gods. Then in the summer of…
Why do civilizations turn against their own greatness, and what happens when they do? In this episode of Context with Brad Harris, we trace the psychology of civilizational decline, from the Great Wall of China and the Apollo program to the Department of Justice's 2026 lawsuit against UCLA Medical School, asking why modern Western culture increasingly treats excellence as a moral threat. Drawing…
Once survival is secured, a different question emerges: what is life for? In this episode of Context, we trace three enduring sources of human purpose—endurance, exploration, and understanding—through three excellent books: The Wager , Undaunted Courage , and A Short History of Nearly Everything . From shipwrecked sailors struggling to preserve dignity, to Lewis and Clark crossing an unmapped…
Human history is not a smooth story of progress. It is a story of bottlenecks—moments when pressure narrows the field, and when only certain ways of living can carry themselves forward. In this episode of Context, we explore the idea that AI is creating the next great bottleneck in human evolution. Drawing on evolutionary biology, deep prehistory, the Black Death, World War I, and modern digital…
In this episode of Context , we explore the historical, philosophical, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, drawing on examples from world history, literature, and modern AI research. We examine pivotal moments in the history of technology—from Ming China's abandonment of oceanic exploration 600 years ago to the Cold War's embrace of nuclear power 60 years ago—to frame the…
