The DemystifySci Podcast

Dr. Diana Pasulka is a writer and professor of religious studies. Her most recent book, American Cosmos, is a plain-clothes investigation into the way beliefs are constructed, maintained, and exchanged at a cultural level. In it, Pasulka catalogues her journey through the highest echelon of the UAP world, and the surprising identities of the monastic mystics she found there. We talk about disclosu...

Dr. John G. Williamson is a well-known researcher and author whose work on particle physics, nano electronics, and on the physical foundations of atomic phenomena has been cited nearly 14,000 times. During his time at the advanced theoretical and experimental group at Philips Research, Williamson was part of the project that designed the first solid-state single electron device, and was able to ta...

Dr. Anthony Aveni has been writing about the relationship between humans and our astronomical habitat for more than fifty years. His latest work is inspired by a renewed interest in a more... biological aspect of the cosmos: Aliens. In his new book, Aliens Like Us, he explores why our stories about extraterrestrial visitation are just so, so boring. Rather than imagining a true “other” reaching ou...

Erik Zirnstein is a researcher at Princeton's Space Physics Group who is studying the outermost reaches of our solar system - the place where the heliosphere meets the interstellar medium. But how do you study something so large when you’re so very, very small? We explore the science behind the heliosphere and the interstellar medium, and the cutting-edge technologies that enable us to explore thi...

Charles Mann is a historian, journalist, and author known for groundbreaking non-fiction books. He was the first to challenge the traditional view of Americas before European contact, arguing that indigenous populations were much more advanced and populous than previously believed. Mann suggests that when colonists arrived, they encountered a native population that was already in decline due to va...

Dennis McCarthy is a writer, historian, and independent researcher who, in the process of tracing Hamlet’s origin, ended up unwinding the entire legend of Shakespeare. Digging deeper into the history of Shakespeare's plays alongside collaborators June Schlueter and Michael Blanding, McCarthy uncovered evidence that all but two of Shakespeare’s plays were written by Sir Thomas North, an English tra...

Dr. Marc Zender and Dr. Marcello Canuto are researchers at Tulane University's Middle American Research Institute who specialize in the history of the Mayan peoples. We talk about the similarities between the bronze-age collapse and the emptying-out of the Mayan homelands, discovery of more than 1,000 settlements long-hidden beneath the teeming canopy around Guatemala’s El Mirador, the difficult w...

Steve Keen is an economist, critic, and author who believes our current economic theories fail to properly deal with private debt, the role of banks in money creation, and more generally fail to take into account real-world contradictions to theoretical predictions at the margins. We talk about the creation of money, deflationary crises, speculation vs innovation, how to distribute public vs priva...

Alexander Unzicker is a theoretical physicist, historian, and author whose award-winning work focuses on the great unanswered questions of physics. He’s also the host of Unzicker’s Real Physics ( @TheMachian ) where he explores the path forward after a century of particle madness. We talk variable speed of light, the veil of differential geometry, why unification is so difficult, the bright line b...

Dr. John G. Williamson and Arnie Benn are core members of the Quantum Bicycle Society, a collaborative group scientists who aims to build better models for everything from quantum mechanics to the cosmos. Williamson began the project with his colleague Dr. Martin van der Mark after a disillusioning stint at CERN, where he was confronted by the massive discrepancies between experimental results and...

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake believes that memory is inherent to nature, and has spent the last forty years of his career investigating slippery, esoteric phenomena at the very edges of empiricism. Some of the results are intriguing - dogs that know when their owners have started the long journey home, crosswords that become easier to solve a few days after they’ve been published in the papers, IQ scores...

Jason Collins is the Behavioral Economics Program Director at University of Technology Sydney who thinks our current models for the interior life of humans aren’t very good. We talk about the promises and failures of economics, the overlap between human life and economic policy, the art of nudges, how AI is going to change the economic landscape, and the role of teachers in a time of hyper-functio...

Curt Jaimungal is a Toronto-based filmmaker and the host of the  @TheoriesofEverything podcast, where he explores consciousness, free will, and God, through the lens of mathematical physics. We talk about what it’s like to be obsessed with figuring out the answers to the universe’s biggest questions, the rewards of inquiry, approaches to growing a more fruitful future for science, and mu...

Dr. Massimo Teodorani is an astrophysicist, musician, and UAP skeptic. He has recently signed onto Avi Loeb's Galileo project, where he is in charge of an effort to take high-resolution images of UAP's from around the world. Using pan-tilt camers with precision spectroscopic tools, Teodorani and colleagues are hoping to create an incontrovertible dataset that gets us closer to understanding what p...

Dr. Shane Simonsen is an author, plant breeder, bet-hedger, who left the academic world to start a zero-input agriculture farm that he writes about for his blog, zeroinputagriculture.wordpress.com. We talk peak oil, signs of impending collapse, the systems that will replace of globalism, breeding crops, how not everyone’s gonna be a farmer, and what it means to prepare for an uncertain future with...

David de Hilster is the creator of the Dissident Science YT channel and president of the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, and he's got a bone to pick with fundamental physics. Fields as the foundational organizing principle don't make any sense. In his view "push" is the only force that makes sense and is produced by four fundamental motions. We talk expanding earth, why Einstein was wron...

Bernardo Kastrup has a PhD in philosophy and another in computer science, and is interested in a theory of consciousness that by necessity emerges from quantum physics. Which, in short, suggests that reality isn't real. What we interact with is just a dashboard,  a simulacrum of what's actually going on. We try to understand limits of what matters, try on alternative interpretations for quant...

Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals. Dr. David Healy joins us to discuss his numerous ideas and books on topics like pharmageddon, antidepressive loops, and mental health of children in the post-modern age.   Steer the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB    Or buy Dr. Healy's books: https://amzn.to/3kb1I4h As al...

Dr. Thomas Metzinger is a renowned philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He also serves as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. Our eye-opening conversation with Dr. Metzinger explored a range of favorite topics all centered on the question: what does it mean to be a human in the post-...

What happens when the FDA approves a drug that doesn't work? Say it gets accelerated approval from the regulatory body, but further clinical trials demonstrate a lack of efficacy. Normally, the agency requests that the company take their drug off the market, the company does so, and so the wheel turns. But when post-approval clinical trials showed that Genentech's blockbuster breast cancer drug Av...

UCLA's Erik Petigura comes with the insights! We talk about all things planetary science - stories of solar system formation, the birth and death of theories, new visions for old processes, and the myth of a stable universe.    Support the scientific revolution with a monthly donation: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB    #astronomy #physics #planet       &nb...

What happens when corrupt incentive structures and incorrect ecological assumptions crash into each other? A billion crabs vanish, and everyone blames it on the nebulous effects of a changing climate. Everyone, that is, except for Spencer Roberts - freelance journalist with bylines at the Intercept, Jacobin, Nautlius, and The New Republic. Roberts started looking into the hyperbolic headlines and...

Could the universe be shaped by consciousness, rather than the other way around? Most researchers working under the classical paradigm would say no - awareness is something that emerges from space time. But a new generation of cognitive neuroscientists, philosophers, and physicists has rebelled against the stalemate at the heart of consciousness research by asserting that clearly, obviously, inexo...

Dr. David Carballo is back for another round with DemystifySci, this time all about the timeline of the peopling of the Americas. We talk about the timeline for human habitation of the Americas, where those people might have come from, and how it was that they came to organize themselves into villages, cities, and eventually empires. The first half of the conversation deals extensively with the ea...

Is it possible to view the future before it happens? A buttoned-up academy scientist would probably say no, but Julia Mossbridge, founding executive director of the Institute for Love and Time, would say yes. She comes from a line of scientists who have been willing to dive into the very edges of what can be studied with empirical science, and has come back from the front with stories to tell. We...