Context with Brad Harris

Brad Harris

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 of contemporary issues, Context with Brad Harris offers a thoughtful journey through the narratives that define us.

CONTEXT WITH BRAD HARRIS+

Listen ad-free & unlock bonus episodes.

月額¥1,000

  1. 7月20日

    Why History Never Felt Like History

    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 and remembered history. Why has Louis XVI's famous journal entry—"Nothing"—been misunderstood for more than two centuries? Why did most Americans experience the Roaring Twenties very differently from the version we remember today? And why do even civilization-changing events quickly become part of everyday life? Drawing on the work of historian Fernand Braudel, eyewitness accounts from 1914, and examples ranging from the French Revolution to artificial intelligence, this episode argues that history is shaped by two powerful forces: hindsight compresses the past into memorable stories, while human beings rapidly normalize even the most extraordinary changes. If you've ever wondered how future generations will remember the 2020s, or whether we're overlooking the real turning points of our own era, this episode is for you. Topics: French Revolution, Louis XVI, Fernand Braudel, Annales School, World War I, Roaring Twenties, history, historical memory, hindsight, artificial intelligence, civilization, culture, philosophy of history. Access bonus episodes and support the show on Patreon. Learn more at https://www.bradharris.com/ Purchase the full series, How It Began: A History of the Modern World.

  2. 7月6日

    Who Wrote the Laws of Nature?

    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, from Aristotle's purposeful cosmos through the Scientific Revolution to Laplace, Einstein, and the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" — and confronts a question physics still can't answer: if nothing governs the universe, why is it so perfectly well-behaved? Support the show and unlock supporter-only episodes, including the companion to this one, "The Questions AI Might Ask": https://www.patreon.com/bradcoleharris

  3. 6月8日 • サブスクリプション登録者限定

    The Questions AI Might Ask: What Einstein, Lord Kelvin, and the history of scientific revolutions can teach us about artificial intelligence

    What if the most important thing about artificial intelligence is not how much it knows, but what it might notice that we cannot? In this bonus episode, I look back to the strange confidence of physics around 1900, when some of the greatest scientists in the world believed the basic structure of reality had essentially been solved. There were only a few small problems left — Lord Kelvin’s famous “two clouds” on the horizon. But those clouds became relativity and quantum mechanics, and within a generation they overturned the settled picture of the universe. That history, I think, has something important to teach us about AI. Most conversations about artificial intelligence are framed as a race: America vs. China, human intelligence vs. machine intelligence, models climbing higher and higher on the ladder of cognition. But the deepest breakthroughs in human understanding have rarely come from simply knowing more. They have come from seeing differently, and from questioning assumptions so deeply embedded in a worldview that almost no one realizes they are assumptions at all. So perhaps the real question is not whether AI will become smarter than we are. Perhaps the real question is whether it will help us ask questions no human being would ever think to ask. This episode is about Lord Kelvin, Albert Michelson, Einstein, Thomas Kuhn, continental drift, plate tectonics, scientific revolutions, artificial intelligence, and the possibility that the next great truth is already sitting in front of us, waiting to be recognized. Thank you so much for your support, Brad

  4. 5月13日

    Take Nobody's Word For It: How Science Lost Its Founding Virtue

    "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 over questions of belief no available method could settle. The founding insight of the Scientific Revolution was that the moment a body of knowledge becomes a body of authority, it stops functioning as science and starts functioning as a priesthood. That founding discipline made the modern world possible. And we are losing it. In this episode, Brad Harris argues that the credentialing bodies, the prestigious journals, the medical associations, and the public-health apparatus the public now calls "the science" have, over the last decade, stopped functioning as the institution the Royal Society built and started functioning as the institution it was founded to replace. He walks through four cases that make the inversion impossible to ignore — the lab leak, pediatric gender medicine, the replication crisis, and climate communication — and names the mechanism: an ideological autoimmune disease that has done more damage to public trust in science in five years than industry-funded "merchants of doubt" managed in fifty. Context with Brad Harris traces the intellectual lineage of the modern world. Support the show and get ad-free episodes plus bonus content at patreon.com/bradcoleharris. Brad's earlier series How It Began: A History of the Modern World is available at howitbegan.com and on Gumroad.

  5. 5月5日

    The Last Generation To Die?

    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 the deeper question: what happens to a civilization built on the assumption that we die… if we stop dying? If you'd like to support the show, you can subscribe at patreon.com/bradcoleharris or directly through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Supporters get every episode ad-free, plus bonus episodes. My earlier podcast, How It Began: A History of the Modern World, is now available as a complete 20-episode collection at howitbegan.com.

  6. 4月21日 • サブスクリプション登録者限定

    The Scent of a Civilization

    Western Civilization is almost always discussed in terms of ideas—the Enlightenment, constitutional government, individual rights, the Scientific Revolution, colonialism, slavery—as though it were merely a thesis to be argued. But a civilization is not just an argument. At its deepest level, it is a way of life: a culture comprised of smells, seasons, rituals, and rhythms that shape the emotional life of a people and connect them, across centuries, to their ancestors and their homeland. In this bonus episode, I walk through the year as it has been lived by people of northwestern European descent for centuries, and as I experienced it growing up on the coast of Maine as a descendant of English settlers who arrived in New England over four hundred years ago. Dickens in December. Pagan ritual blended with Christian charity in Spring. Midsummer bonfires on the edge of the Atlantic. The harvest and the first frost. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the fragrance of sage filling the kitchen. All of it tracing back through a beautiful and deeply rooted cultural legacy to that cold, green, rain-soaked corner of the world where Western Civilization first took shape. This is not a political episode. It is an attempt to describe, with sympathy and reverence, a way of life that's increasingly marginalized, and to say without apology that it has earned the right to be cherished. Thank you so much for your support, Brad

  7. 4月9日

    Why Modern Civilization Runs on Trust — And Why It's Breaking

    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 merchant networks, the rise of banking and modern finance, and finally to blockchain and cryptocurrencies that propose to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries altogether. We explore why Bitcoin proved trustless exchange was possible, why newer digital assets like XRP are designed to make it practical, and what the "Internet of Value" could mean for a future dominated by AI agents. But we also confront an uncomfortable question: can any technology, no matter how elegant, replace the social trust that holds civilizations together?   To help keep Context with Brad Harris going and access bonus episodes, join me on Patreon or subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

  8. 3月12日

    The Invention of Uncertainty: How Probability Led to Artificial Intelligence

    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 1654, two French mathematicians—Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat—began exchanging letters about a gambling problem. From that correspondence emerged one of the most powerful ideas in human history: probability. Once uncertainty could be quantified, the consequences were enormous. Insurance markets became possible. Medical treatments could be tested through clinical trials. Governments began measuring populations statistically. Engineers could calculate risk and safety margins. Modern science itself increasingly relied on statistical reasoning. But the story doesn't end there. Today, the same probabilistic thinking underlies the most powerful technology ever created: artificial intelligence. Large language models like ChatGPT are fundamentally prediction engines—systems trained to calculate what words are most likely to come next. From ancient gambling games to modern AI, this episode explores how the invention of probability transformed the modern world—and why we are now living inside the most powerful prediction machines ever built. If you like Context with Brad Harris, you can help keep the show going and access bonus episodes through Patreon or by subscribing through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.  Find Brad Harris on X @bradcoleharris

すべて見る（76）

ホストとゲスト

評価とレビュー

4.8
5段階評価中
5件の評価

番組について

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 of contemporary issues, Context with Brad Harris offers a thoughtful journey through the narratives that define us.

情報

  • クリエイター
    Brad Harris
  • 配信期間
    18年 - 26年
  • エピソード
    76
  • 制限指定
    不適切な内容を含まない
  • 番組のWebサイト
    Context with Brad Harris
  • プロバイダ
    Bradford Harris

その他のおすすめ