Context with Brad Harris

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.
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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?
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"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?
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My earlier podcast, How It Began: A History of the Modern World, is now available as a complete 20-episode collection at howitbegan.com.

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?
 
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