The DemystifySci Podcast

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 meet. What if the revolution isn’t...

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 the Big Bang camp never predic...

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 memorial project for many years, and is wo...

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 radiation, and boundary conditions of the...

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 confined fusion—a revolutionary approach th...

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 hypothetical concepts like dark matter, d...

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 models went unchecked for a century...

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 Demysticon 2025 with live music from ...

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 in the visual field, and the tacti...

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 the details of their psychedelic vi...

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” to restructure our understanding o...

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 for the online version again in July:...

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 reality as being made of bodies wit...

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 inhabit.

His computational princip...

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 neutron stars - will have to be rew...

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 the point that this is an incompre...

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, evaluate different strategies for e...

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 literature on parapsychology that sugges...

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 psychotechnologies — psychedelics and meditation — ...