The DemystifySci Podcast

The future of human evolution will not be decided by genes alone, but by meaning, choice, and culture itself. In this Part 2 of our conversation, Dr. Liane Gabora (University of British Columbia) explores how ideas evolve through creativity, cooperation, and intentional change rather than blind copying. We examine why cultures fracture, recombine, and sometimes collapse. And how concepts behave more like dynamic systems than fixed ...

Biology explains how life evolves ... but culture follows different rules. Today we're looking at why human culture requires a separate evolutionary framework. Dr. Liane Gabora (University of British Columbia) traces how culture emerges through self-organizing minds, not genes, unfolding like a long riff that finds its meaning only while being played. Language, memory, and creativity arise through a sudden inner shift, where sy...

Today we sit with the old questions and let them breathe again, tracing the places where life begins to feel like a presence rather than a computer. Turner walks through the fault lines of modern biology, pointing to the quiet mind-like shimmer in organisms shaping their worlds. The conversation moves slowly, deliberately, as if the universe itself were leaning in to listen. By the end, the idea of agency feels less like a taboo an...

Economists Bob Murphy & Steve Keen come from very different camps. Today they sit together and pull back the curtain on how money really comes into being, piece by piece. Their exchange moves with a quiet intensity, uncovering the places where theory drifts from the world we live in. They trace the fault lines between stability and collapse, each from his own hard-won perspective. By the end, the familiar landscape of banking f...

Blockchain currency unfurls here like a hidden root system, threading through the cracks of the old order with a quiet, stubborn intelligence. Brandon Quittem walks us into that underground, where mycelial networks and decentralized ledgers start to align in unexpected ways. In his telling, money is something that grows, adapts, and remembers, shaped by the hands and hopes of the people who hold it. Ultimately, the boundary between...

The Darwin-Wallace framework stands tall, but there are places where the seams show, where life presses back with its own kind of intention. Scott Turner guides us through those overlooked corners, tracing the ideas that slipped between theory and experience. We find organisms not as passive machines, but as players in a deeper, older rhythm. And in that recognition, the story of evolution widens into something more awake, more ali...

There is a quiet tremor beneath the floorboards of physics, a search for the hidden substance that carries every wave and whisper of the universe. We walk with James Ellias, @Inductica , through the fog of equations and theories, brushing his hands against the grain of the world, asking what material truth lies beneath our symbols. The conversation stirs old ghosts. Discarded mediums, forgotten experiments, the half-remembered lang...

Today's episode opens with a quiet charge, Murphy & Keen circling the walls of money to see what’s solid and what’s only painted there. Our two very different economists argue over whether banks summon credit from nothing or simply pass along what was saved, each holding a different candle to the same dark machinery. As the conversation rolls, the familiar ghosts of failed forecasts and brittle theories drift about, remindi...

In this episode of DemystifySci, we peer into the very separate roots of banking and blockchain finance to find what’s alive beneath the myth. Bitcoin guru and amateur mycologist, Brandon Quittem, joins us to trace the fall of old empires and the rise of a new code-born freedom. The conversation drifts between history and possibility, where gold becomes data and control slips through the fingers of the elite. What remains is a ques...

Dr. C.S. Unnikrishnan is a professor of physics at the TATA Institute of Fundamental Research, member of the India LIGO collaboration, and is a devoted skeptic of the standard story that we tell about the cosmological history of the universe. In this talk, presented at the 2025 Demysticon, Professor Unnikrishnan takes on the standard model in the best way he knows how - by walking through the conventional model, showing the places ...

James Ellias is a mathematician, philosopher, and the host of the YouTube channel @Inductica where he explores new approaches to old problems in fundamental physics. Our conversation moves like a late-night reflection, looking for the quiet engine beneath light, charge, and everything that flickers through the invisible world of quantum physics. James questions the habits of modern thought, peeling things back to the core to ask wh...

The universe hums a low, steady note...or so we were told. Dr. Patrick Vanraes, a plasma physicist from the University of Antwerp, joins us in that quiet static, where light and truth blur at the edges. We talk of cosmic beginnings, instrument design, of warmth beneath the skies, of radio echoes mistaken for the birth of everything. In that hum, between curiosity and doubt, the cosmos seems to ask who’s really paying attention.

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DemystifySci is the place where we bring people together in search of the theories that will change the world, and Paradigm Drift is your chance to have a hand in that future. Theorists, randomly chosen, get 60 seconds to present their revolutionary idea... and then we see if it's gonna stand the test of time or if it's back into the tank for a little while longer. This video is a compilation of champions from the most rece...

In the quiet corridors where healing was once holy, something cold now slithers. In today's pod, two ER physicians step forward, voices steady, to reveal how the laws meant to protect truth have become tools of silence. Dr. Patricia Robitaille & Dr. Coleen Rickabaugh speak of hospitals that trade compassion for control, of doctors punished for refusing to look away. It’s a reckoning - part confession, part hymn - for a syst...

If we treat the universe as being filled with some kind of elastic solid, can we get any closer to understanding the nature of light and gravity as the product of physical processes, or is there still some deeper principle that needs to be uncovered before we can develop a unified theory of the universe? We dig into mass, light, electricity, and magnetism in context of the elastic Ether with Dr. Chantal Roth.

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What if the key to solving the mysteries of modern physics lies not in new mathematics, but in a physical interpretation of the mathematics we already have?

This week, we begin a deep, two-part conversation with Dr. Chantal Roth about the Elastic Aether Theory—one of the first serious contenders we've found for a material interpretation of fundamental physics. Dr. Roth's quest for a deeper understanding of the universe b...

The Demystify Duo sits down for a conversation about the hidden variable that decides how successful someone’s ideas will be. Normally, you hear that intelligence, the “g-factor” that Richard Haier and other intelligence reasearchers point to, is the decisive factor for worldly success. And while that might be true in some purely quantitative sense that’s measured in terms of salary or stock options or whatever, that seems to not b...

Dr. Emily Adlam is a philosopher of quantum physics who has just finished a book about the strangest feature of fundamental physics - the perennial confusion over what it means to make a measurement. We all know that quantum physics tells us that there’s this strange thing, called wavefunction collapse, which transitions a system from being in a quantum state into being in a classical state. But what does it mean to make a measurem...

Taylor Northcutt, the mind behind the Prosopa Youtube channel, dives into the forbidden science of physiognomy: the belief that the face is a map of the soul. From ancient mystics to modern algorithms, we trace how civilizations tried to read truth, sin, and destiny in bone and flesh. What if your features aren’t random? What if your face is the interface between body, mind, and fate?

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