Context with Brad Harris

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Can fractured societies pull themselves back from the brink? Is America doomed to slide into another civil war? Or, are we already engaged in a kind of Cold Civil War? In this episode of Context, we examine three...

My thoughts on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and what his martyrdom reveals about truth versus lies, good versus evil, and the West's spiritual fight for its life.

For fifty years, we've been told that nature is fragile — a porcelain Eden, easily shattered by the slightest human pressure. But history tells a different story. From the fall of Rome to the Black Death, from Chernobyl...

History is full of phantom worlds—alternative technological paradigms that could have made everything turn out radically differently. Airships instead of airplanes. Rail instead of cars. Direct current instead of...

Modern life runs on hidden engine rooms—vast, intricate systems most of us never see. The Haber-Bosch process, which turns air into fertilizer, is one of them. It feeds billions, yet almost no one outside of science or...

The modern world is defined by acceleration. But what if the most stable—and perhaps most human—version of ourselves existed long before civilization? In this episode, we explore the world of the Cro-Magnon...

Why did we stop believing in utopia? By the late 19th century, many Americans had come to believe that the future would be defined by peace, prosperity, and moral progress. But over the next century, optimism gave way...

Is it possible that war, for all its horror, once played a vital role in human flourishing—and that its disappearance has left a cultural and spiritual void? In this episode, we explore the provocative thesis that war...

A century ago, Oswald Spengler warned that Western civilization was entering its final phase—not from war or catastrophe, but from cultural exhaustion. In The Decline of the West , he argued that every great society...