The DemystifySci Podcast

Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, who takes an unconventional approach to studying the origin of Christianity. What if, she asks, instead of using one dictionary for biblical texts, and a different one for all other contemporaneous Greek literature, we read the gospels as if they were the same as any other classical text? It turns out...

DemystifySci is on the road again, still thinking hard about the nature of the universe. In this episode, recorded on a tropical island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, we dive into the noble tradition of mystical physics, with a little help from Walter Russel, a painter, sculptor, and mystic from the turn of the 20th century. Our goal is twofold. First, to lay the groundwork for why we thi...

Simon Michaux is an associate professor at the Geological Survey of Finland who is obsessed with ensuring humanity survives the transition away from fossil fuels that he and many others see looming on the horizon. We’ve previously spoken with him about his “purple transition,” his thorium reactor, ammonia engine, and alternative battery chemistry vision for a resource balanced future (Ep 259) and...

Rex Riepe is a philosopher who created the Eristics Test as a tool for helping people understand how they process emotions. In his view, emotions are a deeply rational aspect of our personalities that argue for us to take specific actions in three spheres - the self, the world, and society. We discuss the structure that he has developed for understanding the relationship between emotions, how he i...

Dr. Ruth Kastner is a historian of Physics and philosopher of Science who is preoccupied with rational interpretations of quantum mechanics. She serves as the third pole of the transactional quantum mechanics big tent where she, alongside John Cramer and Carver Mead, argue that the apparent mysteries of quantum mechanics can be rationalized by modeling everything from light to gravity as an exchan...

We sit down for a discussion about the futility of rationalism, by way of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. We start with the question of utopias, and try to diagnose why, if they're doomed to fail, it's still worth trying to create them, and then move on to the question of the scientific project - which seems to be an attempt to create a rationalist utopia. James'...

Dr. Dean Radin is an investigator of parapsychological phenomena whose career has spanned Bell Labs, Stanford Research Institute as part of the Stargate Project, Princeton, and who is now the Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Radin approaches his search for evidence of psychokinesis and extrasensory perception as an engineer, and has spent his career building devices that can be...

Kevin Fedarko is a writer, journalist and river guide explores the interface between wilderness and industrialization, most recently through the lens of the Grand Canyon. Fedarko recently published "A Walk In the Park," the story of his somewhat ill-conceived but ultimately successful quest to walk the trail-less expanse of desert wilderness that hides beneath the canyon's rims. We t...

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist who studies consciousness, and is best known for integrated information theory. IIT is a consciousness-first theory, which states that the experience of being someone (or something) is directly related to the causal powers of the underlying system. Up until relatively recently, Koch was something of a materialist - he believed that it would be possible to find the...

The Venus Project was started in the 1980s by Jacques Fresco and Roxanne Meadows with the aim of showing that it was possible to lead a more human centered existence… as long as you built outside of the capitalist market system. Over the decades, the fortunes of the project have fluctuated - from an initial burst of enthusiasm and action (Meadows and Fresco built almost all the structures on the p...

Dr Luca Turin is a biophysicist, writer, and perfume connoisseur whose work on fragrances seems to suggest that we don’t smell molecules, per se - we smell the complex vibrations of an atomic structure. Turin came to be convinced of this model for olfaction at the expense of the standard model of receptors binding smell molecules just on the basis of their shape due to a prediction he made about t...

Today we're examining the impact of bureaucracy and financialization on modern society through the lens of David Graeber's "Utopia of Rules," with reference to another of his works, "Bullshit Jobs." We explore how these forces shape political ideologies, wealth extraction, and everyday life. Starting with the alienation caused by bureaucratic systems, the discussion mov...

Today we're looking at how atoms talk to one another using light. This transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, was developed by today's guest, Dr. John Cramer and former guest, Dr. Carver Mead back in the 1980s. We cover key concepts such as the double atom, handshake process, and the roles of Schrödinger and Heisenberg's approaches. The conversation explores wave function c...

Dr. Emily Casanova is a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Loyola University in New Orleans who studies autism, human/neanderthal hybridization, and sundry soft tissue disorders that are often co-inherited with autism. Her research has shown that autism spectrum disorders are underpinned by a complex network of genetic interactions whose first emergence can be traced back to human/neander...

Dr. Yeva Nersisyan is a professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College whose research focus includes Modern Monetary Theory, Post-Keynesianism, and the Institutionalist traditions. She has published widely on the subject of banking and financial instability, which is why we invited her on to talk about how the economy *actually* works. MMT theorists argue that Neo-classical economists hav...

Dr. Tom Cheetham is a naturalist, poet, and author who has spent the last few decades of his life engrossed in the work of Henry Corbin, who inspired a century of studies of the unconscious mind. Corbin’s aim was to understand the line that cut across the mystic traditions of the world, in the hopes of finding something that was the universal ground of being. To that end, he searched for answers i...

Dr. Jeremi Suri is a professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas, Austin whose recent work explores the idea that the American civil war never ended. Suri argues that the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse at the end of the Civil War was just a superficial conclusion of outright hostilities, not a true end to the massive division that ran across America during colonial times...

The last few weeks we've had some really explosive theories on the show, which have caused a stir in the comments and beyond. We sit down to talk about the philosophy behind why we believe exploring far out theories is so important, and use Paul Feyerabend's Against Method as the backbone for our discussion. We introduce the idea of scientific anarchy, which encourages us to lean into the...

Forrest Maready is an author, filmmaker, and radio show host who is driven by trying to understand alternate versions of the history of religion, culture, and disease. He's written a number of books on the subject of environmental toxins and disease, which include radical revisions to the story of polio and autism. In this conversation we explore his somewhat radical perspective - that the vas...

Prof. Gabriele Carcassi is a University of Michigan Physicists who became obsessed with a simple question during his training. Where do the mathematics of physics actually come from? They are handed down to us as students as if they were immutable laws of nature… but are they? Or are they simply mathematical transformations that have long ago left the realm of reality and made their home in the sp...

Simon Shack is an amateur astronomer, independent researcher, and author. He is the modern champion of an old idea, last held in Tycho Brahe’s time, that the sun is not at the center of the solar system. At first blush, this sounds preposterous, for we have hundreds of years of data that supports the heliocentric Copernican model. But the more you listen, the more your mind melts, because not only...

Today's episode features Jason Padgett, a physicist and artist whose path to a mathematical conception of reality began with a violent attack in his early 30s. We discuss this transformation after brain injury. How with zero mathematical background he found himself reinventing calculus. We discuss his attempts to bring himself into line with peers who had a very different formal training. Then...

Jim Keller is a microprocessor engineer who has run the gauntlet of today’s leading tech companies during their peak performance years. He’s designed for Intel, AMD, Apple, and Tesla, he’s worked for Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he’s survived the boom and bust cycle of the tech world, and is still surfing a wave of progress at least partially of his making. He’s currently CEO of Tenstorrent,  an AI c...

Today on the show we are meeting up with Kehlan Morgan, from  @Formscapes  on YouTube. Kehlan is a master of the past and helps wrestle with a wide range of favorite philosophical dilemmas. We question whether matter can produce consciousness or if it's a separate phenomenon. We discuss intergenerational memory and Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields, proposing a collective memory beyond...

Devon Eriksen is the author of the ongoing Space Orbital trilogy, which opened up with Theft of Fire, described as a "Shoot-em-up space opera, [of] mysterious alien artifacts, freedom-minded Belters versus corporate oligarchs..." In his work, Devon explores many of the themes we tinker with on the show - particularly the ethics of space exploration. A steadfast exploration of space-colon...