May 13, 2026
"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...
May 5, 2026
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...
Apr 9, 2026
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...
Mar 12, 2026
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...
Feb 24, 2026
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...