The DemystifySci Podcast

At "Beyond the Big Bang" 2025, Dr. Patrick Vanraes, a plasma scientist at the University of Antwerp, delivers two quiet revolts against the reigning cosmological order. In the first talk, he develops Dr. Pierre Marie Robitaille's vision of the Sun not as a chaotic gas ball, but as a layered, liquid structure—dense enough to host fusion through lattice confinement, where matter itself...

The institutions are broken because their hearts are broken. In this conversation with Dr. Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, we explore whether substances used to great effect in the treatment of PTSD can become the scalpel and the flame for stuck culture—cutting delusion, sparking communion. Physics, like politics, stalls when minds forget how to...

What if one of modern cosmology’s greatest triumphs was built on a false story? In this talk from DemystiCon: Beyond the Big Bang, physicist and historian of science Dr. Andre Koch Torres Assis digs deep into the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the so-called “fingerprint” of the Big Bang, and uncovers a history that challenges the dominant narrative. Contrary to popular belief, George Gamow and...

Bob Greenyer is part of a dedicated crew of researchers who think they have cracked the holy grail of energy - sustainable fusion reactions that take place with ordinary elements at room temperature and pressure, with nothing but some copper wire and five volts of input. Greenyer is an active player in the emerging field of low energy nuclear reactions, has stewarded the Martin Fleischmann memoria...

What if inertia isn't a built-in property of matter? What if it’s an interaction with the fabric of the universe itself? So says Physicist Dr. Mike McCulloch of the University of Plymouth, whose Quantized Inertia theory is a radical challenge to our understanding of motion, mass, and the very structure of the cosmos. In this talk at DemystiCon ’25, McCulloch blends the Casimir effect, Unruh radiat...

For decades, fusion energy has been the promise that never arrives—always twenty years away. Despite billions poured into tokamaks, inertial confinement, and plasma reactors, the finish line keeps moving. But what if the answer was never in extreme heat... but in solid metal at room temperature? In this explosive episode, we sit down with NASA researcher Lawrence Forsley to explore lattice confine...

Physicist and fusion researcher Eric Lerner presents a sweeping critique of the Big Bang theory and the standard model of cosmology at Demysticon 25. He builds on the foundations of plasma physics and the work of Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén to outline an alternative cosmological framework rooted in known physical laws—gravity, nuclear fusion, and electromagnetic plasma behavior—rather than hypoth...

What if everything we think we know about stars is wrong? In this explosive conversation, mathematician Stephen Crothers dismantles the foundations of modern astrophysics, arguing that black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves are mathematical illusions built on misapplied thermodynamics and flawed logic. With the rigor of a forensic investigator, he exposes how simple errors in stellar...

DemystifySci presents Paradigm Drift, the show where theorists of all stripes present their ideas about how the world works. In this space it doesn’t matter where you came from, where you’re going, or what letters are after your name. The only thing that matters is that you’ve got a deep insight into the universe that you can explain in SIXTY SECONDS. This is our first live edition, recorded at De...

Till Holzafpel is an engineer, programmer, consciousness researcher, and hardware psychonaut who designs virtual reality systems that can evoke the transcendent components of psychedelics… without requiring the consumption any substances. Much of his work is based on fact that there appears to be a massive component of psychedelic experiences that comes from sensory feedback, like sounds, patterns...

The Demystify Duo goes to Delphi! This is the place that used to be at the center of the ancient world, a bustling hub of commerce, politics, and religion. At the center of the place was the Delphic Oracle, an event as much as it was a location. Young girls ordained as Pythias would be locked into a room where they would huff volatile gases that emerged from a crack in the floor. As they muttered...

We're back to it!!! DemystiCon 2025 was a smashing success, and we're thrilled to share it with you. The first talk we're posting is by Gareth Samuel, host of See the Pattern. His videos explore the frontier models of physics, where they break, and what that means for our understanding of the universe. At this year’s DemystiCon, Samuel gave an incredible talk about “What Would it Take”...

Paradigm Drift is the show where we celebrate theories, theorists, and freedom of thought. Each theorist gets 60 seconds to present their idea of the world, followed by an interview with us an our panelist. This week’s episode was taped in Columbus, Ohio with Chris Ranney as panelist, Jay Smith on guitar, and Megan Ranney as supporting cast. Next one will be live in Portugal but you can sign up fo...

Dr. Jacob Barandes is a professor of Physics at Harvard University who studies the foundations of physics. He has emerged as a leading skeptic of the idea that our universe is somehow fundamentally mathematical in nature, marking a full cycle of more than two thousand years of ink spilled about the nature of the universe. Barandes has found that there is a way of modeling the basement membrane of...

Stephen Wolfram is a physicists, mathematician, and programmer who believes he has discovered the computational rules that organize the universe at the finest grain. These rules are not physical rules like the equations of state or Maxwell’s equations. According to Wolfram, these are rules that govern how the universe evolves and operates at a level at least one step down below the reality that we...

What if we’re wrong about the sun? Current consensus in the astrophysics community suggests that our planet orbits a burning ball of gaseous plasma - but there’s compelling evidence that suggests the sun is actually made out of liquid metallic hydrogen. If this is true, it isn’t just that we have a new model of the sun. All of astrophysics, from the Big Bang to the nature of white dwarf stars and...

Patrick Vanraes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp whose research into liquid plasmas has led him to believe that we have radically, completely, totally misunderstood what it means for something to be “plasma.” All presentations on the subject begin with a rote recitation of the fact that plasma is a fourth state of matter - solid, liquid, gas, then plasma. But Patrick makes...

We found some strange, and extensively networked, piles of rocks in the Southern Oregon woods. We take you into the woods with us as we try to figure out if there’s some natural explanation for what we’ve found, or if we have stumbled on some man-made structures that predate the presence of Western settlers. Along the way we try to read how the landscape relates to the river that runs through it,...

Tiffeny Todd is a physics professor and filmmaker who became obsessed with the nature of consciousness after having an out of body experience and discovering that her field had absolutely no way of explaining the experience of mind separate from body that she had. This set her on a quest to discover the theoretical basis for what had happened to her. Along the way, she discovered a wealth of liter...

Andrés Gomez Emilsson is the director of the San Francisco–based Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a nonprofit developing formal models of consciousness and emotional valence. QRI’s research aims to untangle the harmonic, computational, and symmetry-driven mechanisms underlying phenomenological experience. They approach the optimization of subjective experience through two powerful psychotechnologi...

Michael Hughes is a postdoctoral researcher at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital who studies the overlooked role of water in living systems. His work builds on a growing body of research suggesting that water is not just a passive solvent, but a highly structured, information-rich medium. Hughes proposes that under normal biological conditions, water’s ability to form liquid crystalline phases, hydra...

Eric Lerner is a popular science writer, plasma physicist, and long-time collaborator of the late Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén. He’s also one of the featured speakers at our Beyond the Big Bang event this summer in Sesimbra, Portugal. For over thirty years, Lerner has been a leading voice in plasma cosmology and a critic of Big Bang cosmology, who argued for a non-expanding, steady state universe...

Matt Beall is the host of the Limitless Podcast, where he explores everything from the impossibly precise predynastic vases, to ancient civilizations, planetary catastrophes, nuclear explosions on Mars and, most recently, the suspicious circumstances of Kurt Cobain’s death. Our conversation spans the meta of the weird space we all find ourselves in as people who are willing to play with ideas that...

Gareth Samuel is host of the  @SeethePattern  YouTube channel, where he explores theories of physics that have been neglected by the mainstream. He’s one of the speakers at our BEYOND THE BIG BANG meeting this summer in Sesimbra, Portugal, and joins us now for a conversation about what it’s going to take to unseat the Big Bang, why no one’s managed to do it yet, the incredible theories he’s uncove...

George Howard is a weaver of ideas who runs the Cosmic Tusk blog and organizes the Cosmic Summit annual gathering. He’s also one of the longest-lived players in the Comet Research Group, a heterodox collection of theorists and scientists that has been working on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis since the 1990s. We talk with Howard about bone beds, Carolina Bays, mass extinction, catastrophic hi...