The DemystifySci Podcast

Steve Bryant is an author, researcher and futurist who studies the innovative application of emerging technologies, who has long been curious about the gaps and inconsistencies of general relativity. Armed with Chat GPT with a Wolfram Alpha plugin, Bryant combed through Einstein’s papers, where he discovered key mathematical inconsistencies that invalidate the mathematical basis of Einstein’s most...

Albert Nerenberg is a Canadian independent filmmaker, actor, journalist, hypnotist, and laughologist. Our conversation explores the murky science of hypnotism, the role of fantasy in action, dreaming, and all things subconscious. Additionally, we bring in a hypnotic subject and watch as Albert guides him on an out of body experience. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below! 00:00:00 Go! 00:00:...

Dr. Richard Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University and was appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the MIT. Dr. Lindzen has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and cr...

Dr. Adam Mastroianni is a Harvard and Oxford educated psychologist who loves the idea of science, but not so much it's modern practice. After being told one too many times that his academic writing was "too fun" for academic journals, he decided to devote his time to what science should actually look like - which is passionate people being free to explore the ideas that keep them up...

Curtis Yarvin is a blogger from the Dark Enlightenment movement, who advocates for the position that democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced with an accountable monarchy that mirrors the structure at the top of corporations. One of the main points of evidence for how democracy has failed is the emergence of science as a phenomenon of trust and power, where consensus is used as a c...

Dr. Inna Vishik is a professor of Physics at UC Davis, where her lab studies the spectroscopic properties of exotic condensed matter. We dig down into how she sees the atomic landscapes she studies, the significance of mathematical descriptions that show up all over the place, harmonic oscillators at the scale of an electron, and why physics is perfectly happy to deal in abstractions, even when be...

Dr. Bruce Damer is an astrobiologist, computer scientist, and director of the BIOTA Institute at UC Santa Cruz with a compelling theory for the origin of life on Earth. Damer and his colleagues have proposed that life didn't begin at the bottom of the ocean, or at a hydrothermal vent, or in the irradiated clouds of the early Earth. They propose the formation of the earliest cells out in the op...

Sid Chhabra is a computer scientist and scholar of Vedic cosmology. His research has revealed startling quantitative similarities between the predictions of ancient works and modern mathematical physics. Fundamentally, however, Sid approaches cosmology as an integrative art that requires one to put themselves into a cosmic context on a daily basis. He argues that cosmology is a study rich with mea...

Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication focuses on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. We discuss the limitations of certainty in science, the pitfalls of reliance upon consensus, and the benefits and dangers of supernatural beliefs, and the a...

Bernie Taylor is a Naturalist, Archaeoastronomer and Author who has written extensively about the true stories of human evolution, as told through the mythological portrayals in rock art found across Europe and Africa. Through a comparative examination of the rock art found in Spain’s El Castillo cave, at the Rock of Gibraltar, and in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave, Taylor paints a picture of a h...

Dr. Li Min is a professor of prehistoric and Bronze Age Chinese archaeology at UCLA, who focuses on state formation, social memory, and story telling. He is also a key player in the excavation of Shimao, a site on the Yellow River in Northwest China that displays iconography from four thousand years ago that looks strikingly Mesoamerican. We discuss the context in which Shimao rose to become a maj...

Samo Burja is a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation, the founder of Bismarck Analysis, and originator of the Great Founder theory, who is driven by a simple question. Why have all prior civilizations failed, and how can ours escape the same fate? Our conversation focuses on the ways in which getting good data is almost impossible. Civilizations rise, fall, and their skeletons get scavenged...

Dr. Ogi Ogas is a computational neuroscientist, former Harvard scholar, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contestant. He’s the author of two published books - "This is What it Sounds Like," about the cognitive signatures of individual music preferences, and "A Billion Wicked Thoughts," an analysis of human sexuality through the impartial lens of web searches. who has previously...

This week our friend, and one of our favorite people in the Universe, Mr. Douglas Lee, joins us LIVE in the studio for a conversation about the future of our country and the world. In particular, we explore solutions for the aging bureaucracies, bridges, and financial institutions. Doug is a civil engineer who designs railway systems for major government projects on the West Coast. He has a brilli...

Jon White is the creator behind the Crecganford channel on YouTube, which explores ancient Indo-European mythology with a keen eye for how these stories converge upon a picture of some of civilization's most embryonic moments. Our conversation considers the roots of language, poetry, music, myth, and all things essential to our modern conception of humanity in all its riches and rags. Check ou...

Creon Levit is an R&D director at Planet Labs, where he mines satellite imagery data to find answers to myriad questions about the changing landscape, climate, and behaviors of humanity here on Earth. Our conversation explores our society's, and perhaps humanity's, persistent struggle to update our knowledge base and construct newer, more functional narratives about the world. Creon&#3...

Gregg Braden is an author and independent researcher who has spent a lifetime working to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. Our discussion centers upon the inevitable institutional corruptions that appear in any aging system but moreover imagines what a more functional structure might look like. Along the way we discuss the origins of humanity, the tech revolution, and our bifurcatin...

Dr. Michael Hudson is a professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. His career has focused on the study of debt, both external and internal, with an eye on what happens when the exponentially growing debts of a society outstrip the profits from the real economy. In the second part of our conversation we talk about modern mone...

Dr. Michael Hudson is a professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, a political consultant, commentator, and journalist. His career has focused on the study of debt, both external and internal, with an eye on what happens when the exponentially growing debts of a society outstrip the profits from the real economy. We talk about GDP is a false marker of prosperity, the growing...

DemystifySci goes solo. We talk about placebo mechanisms in psychedelic research, why no one can put together a good protest any more, and most importantly, Shilo lays out his structured water hypothesis for why spores stay asleep, in context of his recent Nature paper about hydration solids, a new kind of biomaterial: https://rdcu.be/ddZgd Evaporation Machines from the Sahin Lab @columbia   (set...

Dr. James Tour is a Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University who comes to defend a bold claim: that origin of life researchers are completely clueless about the mechanisms by which life arose on Earth. We start out with talking about Tour’s chemistry work, which includes a method of producing no cost hydrogen fuel and graphene too cheap to meter, the foundat...

Dr. Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical psychologist, neuroscientists and mathematician who, with Gail Carpenter, is the originator of Adaptive Resonance Theory - an explanation of how we learn without catastrophic forgetting. It also happens to be a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. We discuss the problem of catastrophic forgetting, the ways that resonant states l...

Dr. Alexander Unzicker is a neuroscientist, theoretical physicst, and award-winning non-fiction author who has just published a new book on Dr. Pierre Marie Robitaille’s liquid metallic hydrogen model of the sun. We speak to him about the theory, why Kirchhoff’s Law of Thermal Emission is so important, evidence for chemistry in the photosphere, and much more. Check out his book, The Liquid Sun: ht...

Dr. Shane Simonsen is a an experimental farmer and speculative biologist who breeds crops that can thrive under zero-input conditions in a post-industrial future. We talk about his vision for the lumbering collapse of the petroleum-fueled present, the rise of the biopunks, and the limitations of our imagination when it comes to military tech, psychological weapons, and the dark art of crowd contro...

Stephen Crothers is a mathematician, physicist, and scholar of relativity who believes there are fundamental mistakes in the mathematics that have created an impenetrable confusion at the heart of physics for more than a hundred years. We talk to him about how errors in equations get propagated from mind to paper to pen, the ways in which relativity has created impossible features that defy explan...