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Why did the Industrial Revolution ignite an era of sustained economic growth when the great civilizations of the past had repeatedly risen, flourished, and declined? The answer may have less to do with coal and steam engines than with a revolution in how human beings create, share, and apply knowledge. In this episode of Context, Brad Harris explores the groundbreaking work of economic historian Joel Mokyr, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, and his explanation for one of history's greatest mysteries: why modern technological progress became self-sustaining. From Francis Bacon and the Scientific Revolution to Europe's Republic of Letters, James Watt's steam engine, and the birth of modern industry, we trace the emergence of a powerful feedback loop between scientific discovery and practical invention that transformed human civilization. But progress is not inevitable. What happens when the cultural habits and institutions that sustain innovation begin to erode? And can artificial intelligence help keep the engine of human progress running? A story about the Industrial Revolution, the history of science, economic growth, and the fragile foundations of modern prosperity. Support Context and access exclusive bonus episodes: https://patreon.com/bradcoleharris

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 on Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, we explore how status anxiety breeds resentment, how resentment disguises itself as compassion, and how institutions captured by this cycle begin to reward narrative over competence, with consequences that can be lethal. This episode builds on my previous episodes Which Humanity Survives and Layers of Meaning in Human History to ask: do we still have the civilizational courage to revere greatness? Follow me on X @bradcoleharris To listen ad-free and access lots of additional bonus episodes, join me on Patreon or subscribe directly through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

This one has been building for a while. If you listened to my previous episodes "Which Humanity Survives" and "Layers of Meaning in Human History," you'll see how these threads come together here. I think this might be the most important episode I've done in a long time, and I'd love to hear what you think. The central question is: why do civilizations turn against their own greatness, and what happens when they do? Here, 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 on Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, we explore how status anxiety breeds resentment, how resentment disguises itself as compassion, and how institutions captured by this cycle begin to reward narrative over competence, with consequences that can be lethal. Thank you so much for your support. I hope you love the episode. ~Brad

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 continent, to scientists devoting their entire lives to understanding how the universe works, we'll consider how human beings have sought more than mere comfort. The result is a long-view reflection on what intelligence is for. And why, in the age of artificial intelligence, remembering these layers of meaning may matter more than ever. If you'd like to hear over a dozen additional bonus episodes of Context and listen to the entire show ad-free, please consider signing up to support me on Patreon, or subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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 books I love: 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 continent, to scientists devoting their entire lives to understanding how the universe works, we'll consider how human beings have sought more than mere comfort. The result is a long-view reflection on what intelligence is for. And why, in the age of artificial intelligence, remembering these layers of meaning may matter more than ever. Thank you so much for your support. ~Brad

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 culture, we consider how bottlenecks reshape not just populations, but meaning itself, filtering which values, commitments, and forms of responsibility can survive across generations. The question before us is not whether humanity survives the age of AI, but which version of humanity does. To help support the show, access bonus episodes, and listen ad-free, join me on Patreon or subscribe directly through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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 culture, we consider how bottlenecks reshape not just populations, but meaning itself, filtering which values, commitments, and forms of responsibility can survive across generations. The question before us is not whether humanity survives the age of AI, but which version of humanity does. Thank you so much for your support. ~Brad