The DemystifySci Podcast

Professor Bill Mitchell is an economist at the University of Newcastle. In addition to being one of the founding figures of Modern Monetary Theory, Mitchell has also been preoccupied by the interplay of culture and economics that led to the death of the left over the course of the last fifty years. We sit down with him to trace the economic transformations that gradually eroded class consciousness...

Dr. William Lazonick is an economist who studies innovation and competition in the global economy, who has recently been focusing on the corrosive role of stock buybacks. We invited him on to explain why this widespread financial practice is such a bad idea in his eyes, and in return were provided with a comprehensive model of what makes a successful economy. In short, Lazonick believes that no ec...

Kehlan Morgan is  @Formscapes  , a philosopher whose work is focused on esoteric science. He brings to the table a great depth of insights about how Goethian and Stienerian metaphysics have silently shaped our approach to understanding nature, and how our abandonment of those metaphysics has produced a kind of science that is both perplexed and incapable. As modern science studies the world, it lo...

Today we're sitting down for a second conversation with acclaimed science author John Horgan, to discuss the burning heart of natural inquiry where science, philosophy, and spirituality collide like waves crashing against the jagged rocks of the unknown. We examine the ache of human progress, the way it builds towers of steel but leaves people hungry for hope, connection, and meaning. Through the...

Today we're falling head first into the mind-bending chaos of quantum biology, piercing the veil between the microscopic world and the bizarre playground of quantum mechanics. Dr. Clarice Aiello of the newly founded Quantum Biology Institute, formerly of UCLA, guides us through the magnetic highways of nature, where cryptochromes and electron spins become the rogue navigators of life’s hidden mach...

Austin Abigt is a philosopher, writer, and one of the key members of the of the Renewal of Science movement, which seeks to chart a path for scientific rebirth. In this conversation, Abigt explains how modern science is the product of two distinct philosophical lineages - one founded by Newton and Descartes, the other by Goethe. The Newtonian paradigm, roughly summarized by "shut up and calculate"...

Yale's Steve Girvin is a pioneer of quantum computing, and our guide for our first foray into understanding how these systems do and don't work. Over the course of our conversation, we come to realize that quantum computers are not performing computations per se - they're more devices that an be used to answer a specific set of questions about reality. We dig into the details of why some questions...

Today we're back, for a third podcast, with long time friend of the pod, Dr. Michael Hughes - a biochemist at St. Jude's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. We plunge into the secret story of water, revealing its role as more than a silent spectator in the dance of cellular processes. Like a conductor in an unseen ballet, water’s dynamic and nuanced structures orchestrate communication across cells,...

Jeffrey Ladish is the director of Palisades research, and AI safety organization based in the San Francisco Bay. Our previous conversations about the dangers of AI left us insufficiently concerned. Ladish takes up the mantle of trying to convince us that there's something worth worrying about by detailing the various projects and experiments that Palisades has been undertaking with the goal of dem...

Ben Landau Taylor is a writer, historian, and one of the minds behind the Bismark Brief, whose research is focused on understanding the life cycle of civilizations. Much of his work has been informed by the work of Caroll Quigley, who in the 1970s put together a seven part framework for how civilizations are born, mature, and eventually go extinct. His model was one of an economic instrument of ex...

Today we're bouncing off our recent conversation with evolutionary biologist, Dr. Michael Lachmann from SFI, and unpacking why the modern definition of life sucks and why it matters. We attempt to construct a more scientific (i.e. less circular) definition of life and take it for a walk in the park. As a test case we examine an inadvertent hypothesis, which stems from Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker,...

In today's episode we chart the debate surrounding Gunung Padang, an enigmatic site in Indonesia, and its implications for the possibility of ice age civilization. Our guide, Dr. Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, an Indonesian geologist specializing in earthquake geology and geotectonics at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Research Center for Geotechnology, walks us through the difficulties of...

Helena Norberg-Hodge, from Local Futures, joins us to discuss a brighter future than that which is most commonly advertised. Her particular wisdom is drawn from her experiences in pre-globalized Ladakh, highlighting the corrosive effects of 'West envy' and the accelerating race toward techno-utopia. Together, we challenge inherited narratives about progress, exploring the complexities of global tr...

Today we're digging into the deep and often overlooked connections between neodarwinian evolution, life’s origins, and the evolution of non-living systems. We're guided by Dr. Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute, who investigates how life may have begun as a more generalized cosmic selection process, with planetary conditions shaping its emergence and survival. Through discussions of thermo...

Dr. Norman Fenton and Dr. Martin Neil are mathematicians from Queen Mary University of London who are experts in the unreasonable power of mathematics. For example - it is possible to produce an algorithm that will predict the likelihood that a piece of hardware or software will fail - and then to use that information to predict the stability of much larger systems - military vehicles, fly-by-wire...

Dr. Andreas Schlatter is a classically trained physicist (EPFL, Princeton) with a decidedly heretical approach to physics. Though deeply mathematical in his approach, he dispenses with the purely field-based approach to understanding the building blocks of nature, and asks far deeper question about what the mathematics is telling us about the hidden structures of nature. Rather than take the posit...

Today we're back for round 2 of 3 with Jeff Snider from Eurodollar University. This round we're digging into the hidden meaning of the 2008 financial crisis, focusing on the often-overlooked Eurodollar system. Jeff Snider is an economic outsider who has subtle but unique perspectives on mainstream economics, modern monetary theory (MMT), and the role of central banking in global finance. We attemp...

Today we are introduced to the world of Eurodollars and their critical role in shaping the global financial system. Our guide is Jeff Snider, of Eurodollar University - a street smart scholar and former investment manager. We begin by dispelling myths about the evolution of money from the gold standard to ledger-based systems, and discover how Eurodollars emerged as a dominant force in internation...

Is the arrow of history one of progress, where things just keep getting more bureaucratic and more complex, or is there another story that we could tell about the past? This week we’re cracking open David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which argues that the arrow of progress is flat out WRONG. Instead of there being a single story of history that requires us to live these enfeeble...

Katja Grace is an AI Impacts researcher who has written extensively on the possible future where we design intelligent machines that destroy the human race. We have always been somewhat skeptical of AI doom arguments - mostly because the machines we interact with tend to be terribly, irredeemably dumb in a way that seems incompatible with intelligence, but we also don’t spend a lot of time staring...

Dr. A.V. Bendebury and Dr. M.S. DeLay examine the strange role that religious faith plays in a secular society. Rather than disappearing, religion is subsumed in an atheistic society to do the work of creed-based state crafting. To aid us in this discussion we’re reading from Carl Jung’s 1957 work “The Undiscovered Self,” where he makes the case that a strong individualism is the only thing that c...

L. Randall Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute who is a long-term proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox macroeconomic theory that teaches the government should not worry about accruing debt, because it is always able to print more money to service that debt. This is one of those theories that sounds too good to be true - ho...

We bring you a discussion about the secrets of ancient astronomy with Dr. Duane Hamacher, an Associate Professor of Cultural Astronomy in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. Our conversation explores the importance of astronomical observation to ancient people around the world, but particularly those of aboriginal Australia. We ask why so many cultures, geographically isolated, p...

We sit down, in-person, with the unorthodox mathematical theorist and actor, Terrence Howard. Terrence joins us to discuss his geometric model of physical reality, which resurrects the luminiferous aether...sort of. Instead of taking the aether to be a formless fluid, Terrence proposes a subunit structure for the fabric of reality, which is based on a fractal system of three dimensional shapes. We...

Dr. Shamani Jain is a scientist, clinical psychologist, musician, and founder of the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, who wants to bring about a world where our health doesn’t stop and start with a managed care system dominated by the bottom line of pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies. Her focus is on psychoneuroimmunology and biofield therapies, a catch-all term introduced by...