The DemystifySci Podcast

Dr. Simon Michaux is a professor of geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland. After having spent several years in private industry, he was laid off during one of the regular busts that inevitably accompany booms in the mining sector. In that period, Simon found a new appreciation for the material basis of civilization while taking temporary work as an organic farmer. When he returned to i...

Dr. Barbara Corkey is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Boston University. Over her prolific and outstanding academic career she went deep into the mechanics of metabolic disease. Along the way, she stumbled upon some shocking insight about the nature of obesity as she watched the epidemic unfold in real time. Despite the popular wisdom that weight gain is a simple matter of ca...

Dr. Gopi Vijaya began his scientific career in solar physics but quickly branched out into fields as diverse as projective geometry, Goethean Science, foundations of astronomy, calculus, and the Reciprocal System of physics. Our conversation begins with the relationship between science and technology and moves into the philosophical realm asking seemingly bizarre questions like - can we do science...

Dr. Miklos Lukacs is a Research Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the University of San Martin de Porres in Lima, Peru. He also happens to be one of the leading critics of transhumanism, which he defines as the technologically-driven push for super longevity, super intelligence, and super wellbeing. Lukacs argues that this campaign threatens the historical relationship between humans a...

Anastasia has been reading Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization, so we decided to sit down for a meta conversation about petroleum, prime movers, and geopolitics. This solo chat ties together a bunch of the conversations we've had on the show in the last year about climate, technology and the energy transition. Historically, we've been pretty skeptical when people start banging on abo...

Dr. C.S. Unnikrishnan is a professor at the School of Quantum Technology at the Defense Institute of Advanced Technology. Unnikrishnan is also a key member of the LIGO-India project and a member of the global LIGO Scientific Collaboration. His work has led him to some revolutionary conclusions about the nature of gravity, light, and the missing medium for these invisible actions. Our conversation...

This is Dr. Hughes second appearance on the podcast. His background is in biochemistry and biophysics of protein folding, and water hydration structures. But today we're digging under the floorboards of science itself. Is it possible to have a science that isn't built on some set of assumed values? To tackle this issue, we dig into esoteric mysticism - particularly the work of Rudolph Stei...

Kate Raworth is an Economist best known for “donut economics,” a model that attempts to map the balance between essential human needs and planetary boundaries. She proposes that the last few hundred years of economic theories were created with a monomaniacal focus on growth that was only possible on a planet with relatively untapped natural resources. After more than two hundred years of industria...

Warren Mosler is an economist, hedge fund manager, and proponent of modern monetary theory, an economic model that posits fiscal crises are caused by governments not spending enough money. From Mosler’s perspective, the reversal of any recession starts with getting very comfortable with deficit spending. Opponents argue that unchecked spending eventually leads to inflation of the currency and econ...

Scott Zimmerman is a mechanical engineer whose life took a sharp turn when he started to think about the relationship indoor lighting, biology, and solar radiation. He believes that near-infrared light, an invisible component of sunlight from ~800 to 3,000 micrometer wavelengths, is vital for human health. Unfortunately, these are the exact frequencies that our indoor lights and digital devices ar...

Dr. Rajendra Gupta is a physics professor at the University of Ottawa who was in the headlines a few months ago for his assertion that the universe might be at least twice as old as we realize. He’s back at the radical reshaping of physics with his latest paper, which proposes that we can do away with dark matter and dark energy. Currently, these invisible substances are thought to make up somethi...

Another talk from our recent April conference in Austin, TX, with Thad Roberts from The Physics Monastery. Thad speaks about his institute's recent progress in an ongoing struggle to comprehend the secrets of the constants of nature. These are the steady quantities that scale all the behaviors of the natural world, from electricity and magnetism, to gravity, or even elasticity. It seems strang...

Humans have long encountered experiences that challenge their rational ideas about the world. Encounters with angels, demons, fairies, gnomes, or other spirits have been the standards of folklore since time immemorial. We agree with Jung that these revelations are scientifically valuable, though best explored though any lens but materialism; i.e. physics. When we learn about common bizarre experie...

Today we are sitting down with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, an MIT researcher, who has spent more than a decade obsessively investigating the role that industrial herbicides play in the modern health-scape. This is our second conversation with Dr. Seneff, following up on our detailed discussion of the myriad ways that the herbicide, glyphosate, interferes with cellular processes throughout the body. This...

Today we're proud to share another talk from DemystiCon '24 with legendary history of physics, Dr. Alberto Martinez from the University of Texas, Austin. This is our second podcast with Dr. Martinez, unpacking the hidden history of the physicists that brought us to the strange quantum foundation for reality where reality stops making sense. In his talk, Dr. Martinez explores a few key mome...

It's our final solo conversation from the tour and we're breaking down an issue that we have held different perspectives on for quite some time: the limits & importance of free speech. In part, we are responding the documentary "This Place Rules" by Channel 5 creator, Andrew Callaghan, which tracks the absurdity, hipocracy, and more than anything, the profiteering surrounding...

This presentation was recorded on April 7th, 2024 at the first DemystifySci conference in Austin TX. Dr. Pierre-Marie Robitaille presents an overview of his multi-decadal quest to understand the material basis of the stars. He also reveals a new theory to explain Mercury's anomalous precession - one that doesn't revert to warped spacetime or mathematical acrobatics. In the process, a cleve...

It’s week 5 on the road, and we’re deep in the weeds about the question of what we, as scientists, owe the world. Technological progress alone seems like a weak orienting principle, as does abandoning the pursuit of knowledge completely. So how do we hew a path that makes sense, when it seems like the institutions and organizations around us have gone astray? To help us make sense of the interface...

Marcell Fóti is an ancient mysteries researcher who is trying to figure out how the ancient Egyptians and other cultures were able to carve stones with sub-millimeter precision with relatively primitive bronze tools. Fóti’s experiments with geopolymers - ceramic polymers that can easily be mistaken for natural stone - have led him to the conclusion that the inexplicable stonework of the ancient wo...

On the road between Austin and Santa Fe we make a pit stop in Roswell, New Mexico and sit down to make heads or tails of the UAP phenomena. Both of us are skeptics who want to believe, but are cursed by a nature that prevents us from committing to a single perspective. Instead, we dive into the mythological signifiers that surround the phenomenon, the deep yearning for someone who can take care of...

Dr. Steven Koonin is a theoretical physicist, former Chief Scientist at BP, former Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, and is currently a professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU. He is also the author of Unsettled, a book about the abilities and limits of climate science. We talk with him about the great distance between the scientific repor...

Get your DEMYSTICON 2024 tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/demysticon-2024-tickets-727054969987 Sign up for a yearly Patreon membership for discounted conference tickets: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAto...

Get your DEMYSTICON 2024 tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/demysticon-2024-tickets-727054969987 This is our second week on the road and we're broadcasting from uber-sunny Joshua Tree, California. Today we start out with the observation that a dominant faction of the techno-futurist community seems to believe that if our civilization maximizes intelligence, everything will be just fine...

Get your DEMYSTICON 2024 tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/demysticon-2024-tickets-727054969987 Today we are hanging out with our friend Dr. Michael Hughes, a post-doctoral fellow at St. Jude's Research Hospital in Memphis. Michael has a long history of trying to understand the role that water plays in fundamental biological operations from structural assembly to diseases like Alzheim...

Get your DEMYSTICON 2024 tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/demysticon-2024-tickets-727054969987 We are finally en route to DEMYSTICON 2024! While we're on the road we've decided to take a moment each week to review and articulate our own insights the past year's podcast conversations. In our first On Tour Solo Edition we're examining how a theorist's metaphysics shape...